by Nicola Slade
She nodded. ‘It’s on Friday night, there’s going to be a sort of comedy brass band, I think. Matron fixed it up, she knows the bandleader or something.’ She looked pleased as he pricked up his ears and asked: ‘Will they all be going to it? Nobody upstairs or ill in bed?’
‘Oh yes.’ She nodded, delighted at his approval. ‘They’re all looking forward to it.’
‘That’s nice,’ he said, pleasing her even more, glad that she had done something right. ‘What time does it kick off?’
‘The band’s booked for half-past seven and there’ll be mince pies and sherry and things,’ she told him. ‘They’re all inviting their families too. It’s more like a hotel, not an ordinary old people’s place at all.’
He nodded. ‘Like I said,’ he repeated, ‘that’s nice.’ He laughed again but this time his laughter made her uneasy.
After the boys had gone Gemma checked all the doors, straightened up the scullery, then slipped upstairs to her room. On tiptoe along the landing, she jumped out of her skin as a voice spoke softly from a door held ajar.
‘Oh dear, what have we here? A naughty, naughty Gemma, I’m afraid.’ Christiane Marchant smiled sweetly as Gemma’s hands flew to her mouth. ‘I saw you, Gemma,’ the soft voice cooed, and she smiled at the shocked girl. ‘You were very careless, you know. Didn’t you notice the skylight in the old wash-house roof? I had to go to the bathroom and as I wheeled past the back window I just happened to look down. Dear, oh dear, whatever would Matron say? She’s such a religious woman too, very strict on proper behaviour, isn’t she? I’m sure you wouldn’t want to lose your job, would you dear?’
Harriet wasn’t dozing, of course she wasn’t, but the drawing-room fire was very inviting so she lay back in the comfortable armchair and rested her eyes. A tall figure loomed in front of her.
‘Afternoon, Harriet.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! I might have known. How did you track me down, Sam?’
Canon Sam Hathaway grinned down at his cousin, her reaction exactly what he had expected and hoped for though he wondered for a moment at the fleeting look of relief on her face.
‘Doreen Buchan,’ he explained. ‘I bumped into her in Marks & Spencer in Winchester and she mentioned she’d seen you. Wanted to know what you could possibly be doing in an old folks’ home – and so do I, Harriet, so come clean.’
‘Oh honestly, Sam,’ Harriet snapped, her automatic response with Sam, but she was secretly delighted to see him and even more glad that she’d dabbed on a spot of make-up today and that her roots were now impeccable. ‘This is a terribly upmarket convalescent hotel, the guests might be on the elderly side but believe me, there’s nobody drooling or dribbling here.’
She gave him a brief rundown of her health then turned to the much more interesting topic of Doreen Buchan. ‘You say she spotted me? I’m surprised she was in any condition to notice anything.’
‘Why? What’s wrong with the woman?’
Sam was intrigued, Harriet could tell. She knew the signs and knew, too, that he would treat her ideas with respect – at least until he demolished them with logic. Sixty years of squabbling, closer than brother and sister, best of friends and enemies, closer now more than ever since the death of Avril, Sam’s beloved wife, Harriet’s dearest friend. Sam was the person she needed to talk to.
‘I don’t know.’ She frowned as she stared past him into the garden. ‘There’s a feeling of unease about this place, it’s almost tangible and it all stems from one woman.’ She turned a grave face to her cousin. ‘There’s something very wrong here, Sam, something very wrong indeed.’
Chapter Five
* * *
Brushing aside Sam’s protest Harriet frowned and tried to explain. ‘I’m serious, Sam. There are at least three people here, if you count Doreen Buchan, who are terrified of what Christiane Marchant knows about them. I’m sure she has some kind of hold on them, God knows what or how. I’m not kidding, Sam, they cringe when they see her.’ She frowned again. ‘What gets me most of all is the pleasure the damned woman displays, she revels in their fear. Oh, she disguises it well, she’s an expert actually; I suspect she’s had years of practice at being nicey-nasty. She strikes me as a very unpleasant piece of work.’
Sam contemplated his old playmate. ‘You’d better get it off your chest,’ he said, without further comment, casting a wary look round. ‘Here, let’s go into that little sun parlour, there’s nobody in there.’ Once they were settled, he gestured to her to let it all out.
‘Doreen’s father-in-law, Fred Buchan,’ she said, after she’d described Ellen Ransom’s reaction to the other woman. ‘He never speaks to anyone and the story is that he was in a concentration camp during the war. Of course nobody would dream of trying to probe in any case, but Christiane Marchant delights in chipping away at him. I heard her the other day, telling him about her home in Brittany. She said, ‘My home village was at the end of a funny little neck of land sticking out into the Atlantic,’ and when she said that Fred Buchan jerked his head up and stared at her and she went on, ‘It was a bleak little place to grow up in, grey stone and Atlantic gales, but even though it was at the back of beyond it became quite well known for what happened there.’
Harriet shrugged. ‘Fred just got up without a word and stomped out and she sat there gloating. It was horrible, I don’t like the man particularly, he goes out of his way to avoid being pleasant, but.…’
Sam waited in silence and she sighed. ‘Then there’s Doreen Buchan, she’s the proverbial frightened rabbit whenever Mrs Marchant smiles and greets her, all sickly sweet. And the care assistant, Gemma, she’s afraid too. I’ve seen her shudder when the Marchant woman speaks to her.’ She fiddled with the ring on her right hand, her mother’s engagement diamond. ‘The stupid thing is’ – she faltered – ‘it’s downright silly but … I almost feel anxious about two or three other people as well.’
‘What?’ Sam had listened in attentive silence but now he sat up and stared at her. ‘That’s a bit strong, isn’t it? You’ve got four victims already, how many more do you want? And what exactly are you talking about? Do you think this woman is blackmailing them?
She bridled a little then subsided with a slight laugh. ‘Oh I know, it sounds crazy, do you think I don’t realize that? I’ve been turning it over and over for the last day or two, since I realized there’s a pattern. I just don’t know what to—’
‘Look,’ he settled his long frame more comfortably into the wicker chair, taking her seriously, good old Sam, as she had known he would. ‘To start with, who are these other people you think she might have put the screws on? Let’s see what you’ve got.’
Shaken out of herself she reached out and gave his hand a grateful squeeze then, as they both recoiled at such an excess of emotion, she composed herself.
‘Well, there’s Tim Armstrong, for one.’ As Sam raised an eyebrow she explained. ‘You do know him, Sam, he used to be the manager at Lloyds Bank, a lot older, years older, than us. His wife died the day he retired, very tragic it was, a cerebral haemorrhage, I think.’ He nodded and she went on. ‘I don’t know what she, Christiane Marchant, what she says to him, she’s too fly to let me catch her in the act but I know she whispers away at him and he gets upset.’ Harriet looked down at her hands. ‘He’s a little … oh, I don’t know, I wouldn’t say it was Alzheimer’s, or maybe it’s just the onset, I don’t know enough about dementia, but there are times when he’s … a long way away and she worries him, makes him angry and miserable. But,’ she shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea what it is that she says to him.’
‘It couldn’t be just that he gets, well, bad patches?’ Sam ventured. ‘Maybe she just jars on him, personality clash kind of thing?’
Harriet’s shake of her head was decisive. ‘No, it’s more than that, I definitely sense mischief. And it’s not just Tim, I’ve spotted that she takes a great delight in upsetting her own daughter, Alice. A pleasant sort of girl – woman, I should say; bit of a do
wn-trodden slavey type but I suspect she’s beginning to enjoy her freedom, she’s started to look different, more alive, younger. I notice Mother’s been skilfully putting the boot in whenever Alice visits, though whether that’s par for the course or something over and above the usual I’ve no way of telling.’
She did a mental totting up of the people she believed to be Christiane’s victims, coming to the final one with a rueful grin. ‘The last one sounds even dafter than the others, but I think she’s really getting right up Matron’s nose.’ At Sam’s snort of disbelief she shrugged and laughed again. ‘I told you it sounded mad and maybe I’m clutching at straws here, it’s just that Matron is one of those rather terrifyingly single-minded souls; you know, she has a vision, tunnel vision in fact, and nothing, and no one, is allowed to interfere with it.’
She had his attention now.
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ he spoke eagerly. ‘That sort can be quite lethal in pursuit of their vision. I had a curate like that once. I remember he decided we needed a crèche during morning service and rock bands in the evening. He went at it like a bull at a gate and offended all the regulars of course. I wasn’t too bothered about the crèche idea but nobody had actually asked us to provide one and we already had a Sunday school and children’s services, but I was dead against the heavy metal and the rock band, or at least having them in the church. Apart from anything else I was worried the spire might fall! I suggested we should invite them in the summer and hold an outdoor service but there were some pretty heated clashes. If you weren’t for him, you were agin him, kind of thing; at one time I honestly thought he was slightly deranged.’
He gave a reminiscent nod, a wicked twinkle in his blue eyes, Harriet noted, that was a large part of the charm that worked on his parishioners and colleagues. ‘It was all sorted out in the end,’ he continued. ‘An Act of God we all decided. He fell madly in love with the barmaid at the local pub and she told him, in no uncertain terms, that motorbikes and babies were as inappropriate in a church as a bishop in a brothel. Lord only knows what the attraction was; she was boot-faced but a buxom wench. The general consensus was that he must have been bottle-fed as an infant and was working on overcoming the deprivation.’
‘Sounds like something from Trollope.’ Harriet sniffed sarcastically as Sam gave a lewd chuckle. ‘However, I do wonder just how far she’d go – Matron, I mean – to protect this place. Sometimes she comes across as almost unhinged about it, so the moot point is whether her passionate regard for her treasured creation would be strong enough to contemplate actual bodily harm to something, or someone, who offered a threat.’
Jolted out of his amusement Sam Hathaway gave his cousin a stern look. ‘Oh, come on, Harriet; stop being such a drama queen. I appreciate you’re worried and it certainly looks as though there are some unpleasant undercurrents, but actual bodily harm?’ He rose to his feet, gathering up his long limbs and his long black overcoat, then a bulge in one of the pockets attracted his attention. With an exclamation of pleasure he drew out a slightly battered book with a gilt and pictorial cover, showing a vapid Edwardian teenager applying a lace-edged handkerchief to her brimming eye.
‘Here, something to take your over-heated mind off playing at Miss Marple. I spotted this in the Oxfam bookshop yesterday. Have you already got it?’
‘Oh, you’re a sweetheart, Sam, let me see?’ She flicked through the pages and beamed at him. ‘Nope, I’ve never seen it before, Madcap Mabel and the Maypole, and I’ve never even heard of Zamora Pridhoe. What a find. I wonder why she’s crying – if she’s a madcap, I mean?’ She examined the distraught damsel’s dainty lace hanky. ‘Madcaps are usually cheerful. I expect she’s been falsely accused of something, that’s usually the problem.’
Sam smiled as she riffled eagerly through the gilt-edged pages. Harriet’s collection of school stories and his own model railway layout were non-negotiable areas, not to be laughed at and they both stuck scrupulously to the rules. He prepared to take his leave then looked down at her again.
‘I hear there’s a party here tomorrow night? Neil and his Oompah Band mates, isn’t it? I thought it sounded rather fun.’
Their eyes met and she pouted. ‘Oh all right, no need to look so hopeful, of course you can come. We’re allowed guests anyway and I know you’ll do anything for a free sherry, especially with a mince pie or two thrown in.’
He grinned and waved goodbye, taking careful note of the woman in the wheelchair as he made his way though the drawing-room to the entrance hall. As he said goodbye to Matron, Sam noticed, out of the corner of his eye, the woman propel herself over to an elderly bald man sitting alone. She said something, only a word or two, and the man lifted his head and stared at her, the bleakness in his gaze sending a chill through Sam.
Ellen Ransom was in her room, her face grey against the pale gold pattern of the Laura Ashley wallpaper, cold despair emanating from her hunched body in spite of the cosy warmth in the square, sunny room with its generous Edwardian proportions and large efficient radiator.
Carol had looked concerned during yesterday’s visit. ‘Are you sure you’re all right, Mum?’ she had kept asking. ‘You seem to have lost some of your pep. You’re surely not pining for us, are you?’
Ellen couldn’t blame her for asking. I’ve never been the doting kind of mother, she thought, in a rare moment of self-knowledge; too busy poking my nose into other people’s business and out earning a crust, until Douglas.… Until Douglas had won all that money on the football pools then gone and died a couple of months later. Typical. She made a face, pushing aside the memory of meek, careworn Douglas and his hangdog face whenever he glanced at her.
Still, the money was a kind of compensation for everything she’d missed out on, all the good times she had never known. Pity it had to come so late. And a pity that woman had turned up here. Nobody else ever found out about that and I’m not letting anyone spoil things now, she vowed.
While his mother toiled away at her ironing downstairs, Ryan relaxed in the bath, planning. This concert at the old folks’ place was a gift: loud music, everyone downstairs, deserted bedrooms with unattended jewellery and money. Perfect.
Kieran had turned chicken, though. Kieran liked old people, starting with his own granny and including everyone else’s grannies, it seemed sometimes. He’d even told Ryan off, after that quickie with Gemma the other night. ‘You didn’t ought to treat her like that,’ he’d complained, and he was angry and suspicious about Ryan’s plans for the residents of Firstone Grange.
But Kieran was just fat and stupid. I can handle him, Ryan frowned. It was the text he’d received from Gemma, followed by a frantic, hysterical call that was giving him grief now. Some old bag had seen them the other night and was threatening to tell the matron. He really wanted Gemma to keep that job and now, as he soaked in the cooling water, inspiration struck. Instead of the one-off big job he had planned, it would be more fun and probably more profitable in the long run, to nick odds and ends, a bit at a time, starting during the concert when he could do a recce upstairs. A few quid here, a ring there, enough to keep him ticking over but not enough to ring alarm bells. If he did it really carefully, cat and mouse, take something then put it back a few days later, the old gits would keep quiet. Which of them would want to risk looking stupid? Going mad?
And why not…? He sat up, pleased with himself. Why not offer to do a few odd jobs round the place, for free maybe? He could spin a sob story about his old gran and be like Kieran. His good deed for the day; that was it, that’s what he’d tell them. That way he’d have the run of the place.
As he dried himself he suddenly remembered the old woman who had threatened Gemma. In a wheelchair, Gem had told him, so it wasn’t the one who had been looking out of the window of the sun parlour yesterday afternoon. She’d spotted him skulking, talking to Gemma at the kitchen door. Remembering her suddenly alert, cool stare as she had eyed him up and down, he felt uncomfortable, but she could walk all right and
anyway, Gem said she was all right, that one. But the one in the wheelchair, she was the one Gem was afraid of. He chewed at his thumbnail. If she was going to cause trouble he might have to – do something about her. His face darkened.
Back at Firstone Grange Christiane Marchant sat in the sun parlour and narrowly scrutinized her daughter. Yes, she definitely looked better, the risk of a breakdown pushed into the background. It had been worth giving in for once and letting Alice think she was making the decisions. But … she frowned slightly, was that all it was? An improvement in her mental and physical health? She had noticed the smartening up of Alice’s wardrobe but accepted without question the explanation that they were charity shop bargains. Alice didn’t know how to tell lies.
‘It’s nice here, isn’t it, Mother?’ Alice moved over to the window, perhaps to escape the gimlet scrutiny. ‘Like a hotel, not with chairs all round the walls like an old people’s home.’ She gestured to the printed paper on the polished mahogany coffee table. ‘This newsletter is good too, with all these interesting activities. Have you been to any of the talks, or … or tried the aromatherapy?’
Her voice tailed away as Christiane shot her a darkling look. ‘It’s all right here, but I think I’ll—’ Whatever she had meant to say remained unsaid as Doreen Buchan thrust her head into the room, spotted Christiane and withdrew, grey-faced.
‘Well, well.’ Christiane wore her gloating smile. ‘I’ll have a rest now, Alice; you might as well go home.’ As Alice picked up her bag and coat, Christiane fired her farewell salvo. ‘Make sure you turn up good and early for this concert tomorrow, I want to talk to you. About something important.’
