The Thin Woman

by Dorothy Cannell

  “Anything you say,” whispered Ben. “Oh, Ellie darling, I do love you so,” and he kissed me again, and this time all the shadows were gone. When I opened my eyes I found the rain had definitely stopped and the sun was doing its pale watery best to shine on our happiness. I had forgotten the menace waiting at the house and even Dorcas’s departure had become a vague worry to be dealt with later.

  “You haven’t raised my hopes for nothing. You are going to marry me, aren’t you?” asked Ben with the appropriate blend of hope and quiet desperation.

  “Only after you formally jilt your mysterious fiancée, poor Susan, unless of course you invented her to keep me in line.”

  “Not quite,” said Ben, “I invented her to keep me in line.”

  “Then as a reward for your chivalry I will marry you. But I must confess I am doing so for your body—not your mind. Wild unadulterated passion is going to be my new addiction, low in calories, good for the waistline. Although”—I paused—“as a connoisseur of sexiness yourself, you don’t look so great in that outfit.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” Ben looked down at the coat trailing low on the ground, its tails flapping spastically about his legs. “Jonas insisted on lending me this coat when he told me you had run off. I don’t think he wanted me catching pneumonia before I caught up with you.”

  “He was right, bless him.” I put my hands in Ben’s. Jonas must not have told him about Dorcas, and I couldn’t. Nothing must spoil this moment—not the enemy, not Aunt Sybil, not even Dorcas.

  We stood quietly like that. I was wishing that no one was waiting for us back at the house. If we could have been on our own I would have taken a bath, put on my green velvet dressing gown, and come down to the fire and Ben. We could have shared a glass of brandy and then … after all, we were engaged.

  “I know what you are thinking,” Ben smiled. “Aunt Astrid would definitely not approve. A pity—that sheepskin hearthrug was really one of your more practical purchases. Never mind, darling, we have all the time in the world, as soon as we can send the relatives packing.”

  “All the time in the world,” I agreed, kissing him again to make sure we weren’t getting out of practice. My mother had always warned me not to tempt fate and Ben and I had wilfully gone and done it again. I think in that instant I had a premonition, but it was too late. We never saw what hit us—literally. A staggering pain ripped through my thighs, buckling my knees. The world tilted at a crazy lopsided angle. In slow motion my life flashed before me. I was reliving the horror of the dumb-waiter. But this was not to be an instant replay watched from the security of an armchair. This was life, or more accurately, death. I was going over the edge of the cliff and I was taking my beloved with me.

  “Ben!” I screamed. This could not happen. We had been so happy, I couldn’t lose him so soon.

  Only the wind and rain and the waiting, pulsing sea answered. “Ben,” I screamed again, and far above a seagull mockingly echoed my cry.

  “I’m right below you,” he answered tersely. “No, don’t look down, don’t even breathe.” A small scurry of stones dislodged by our scrabbling feet placed a compelling emphasis upon his advice. Spread-eagled, I clung to the face of the cuff, my fingers grappling for a firmer hold on the gnarled shrubbery which, with a precarious foothold on a narrow ledge, was all that kept me from slithering down that jagged incline into the foaming mouth of the sea.

  Ben was on a similar ridge, his head a yard or so below my feet. If I went so would he. That knowledge kept me frozen. The muscles in my arms began to bunch and spasm, but I held on. We were doomed, of course; if we yelled for help the killer might hear and toss a boulder down to shut us up, and if we did nothing our pitiful grip upon life would slacken.

  My foot slipped and another ominous shower of stones ricocheted down the cliff.

  “We have to risk it,” Ben said. “We have to call for help.”

  I tried. I opened my mouth but no sound came. Ben meanwhile made enough noise for both of us. I screwed my eyes shut, and braced myself against the impending avalanche.

  “Is anyone down there?” came a voice from above. “My word, Ellie, Ben. What has happened? What are you doing down there?”

  “Trust a parson to be a complete fool,” Ben snarled. “What the hell do you think we’re doing? Playing hide-and-seek? Fetch a rope, Foxworth, and hurry—unless you want to start digging up your churchyard for two more.”

  He saved us. Until my dying day, which through his good offices has been postponed indefinitely, I will owe Rowland Foxworth a debt I can never repay.

  “Don’t go overboard on the gratitude bit,” Ben whispered in my ear when Rowland left us in his study while he requested the dour Mrs. Wood to make us some hot cocoa. “No need to develop a martyr complex, or you’ll find yourself marrying the fellow as a reward for services rendered.”

  “Nonsense,” I chattered, still shivering. “Our troth is plighted in granite, a bit loose and crumbly, but …”

  “All this consorting with clergymen is very bad for me,” sighed Ben. He adjusted the wool travelling rug that was wrapped around my knees. For a man who had narrowly escaped death, he looked very dashing in Rowland’s rubbed silk dressing gown. The same could not be said for me in Mrs. Wood’s washerwoman-style print dress.

  “Yes, if I don’t watch it,” Ben continued, “I’ll be catching religion. Foxworth appearing on the scene in the nick of time almost makes a believer out of me. His timing was nothing short of miraculous.”

  “Good,” I replied, “because I insist on a church wedding. Which reminds me, I will have to sit down and write a letter to your parents, telling them you have mended your ways and if they want to be around when the grandchildren start arriving, they had better bury the hatchet.”

  Rowland’s explanation for being on the coast road was simple. He had been on his way to pay us a visit. “I had news for you that seemed too good to be passed over the phone.” He handed us our cocoa. “One mystery at least is solved. I have discovered what became of Abigail Grantham. In the light of what has happened, this now seems trivial, but I promised to inform you the moment I discovered anything.”

  Ben took a proprietary seat on the arm of my chair. “Let me guess. She was pushed over a cliff?”

  Rowland shook his head. He was looking for his pipe. I removed the small lumpy object I had been sitting on and handed it to him. “Speaking of cliffs,” he said, “I think you are committing a dangerous error in not notifying the police that an attempt has been made on your lives, and not the first either.”

  “And tell them what?” asked Ben. “That Ellie fell through a dumb-waiter? That we moved too close to the edge of the cliff?”

  “The weapon?” suggested Rowland.

  “Jonas’s wooden cart. Sunk to the bottom of the sea without a trace, no doubt. But even if we could produce it, what would that prove? That it ran loose from its moorings and in the process sent us flying? A starry-eyed couple so wrapped up in each other they forgot the warnings posted up and down the coast road: ‘Danger, Sharp Drop-Off’? The detective-inspector would wink at the chief constable and they’d fold up their notebooks and go home.”

  “Very likely,” Rowland agreed reluctantly, as he struck a match to his pipe, “but calling in the police might provide some measure of safety for you and Ellie. The killer might back off if he felt the eyes of the law upon him.”

  “You’re right,” said Ben, “which is why I intend to inform our guests that we have telephoned the police from this house and they have promised to mount guard in the grounds throughout the night, and at the first sign of trouble will beat the doors down.”

  Rowland looked unconvinced. “How will that help, when you and Ellie are inside with this maniac?”

  “I think it might.” I slipped my hand into Ben’s and felt secure enough to face an army of would-be assassins. Rather haltingly I told them about Dorcas, starting with the red scrawl on the refrigerator to my conversation with her and my discove
ry of her note. And then, almost as though both matters were related, I mentioned finding Aunt Sybil’s abandoned water wings.

  A curl of smoke crept up from the bowl of Rowland’s pipe. “I don’t like any of this,” he said.

  “The trouble is”—Ben rubbed his forehead—“grown women can come and go as they please. This plethora of farewell notes does have me rather worried but, again, would the police even be willing to check and confirm that Sybil and Dorcas are all right? We can’t even tell them where to look.”

  “They must have taken public transportation.” The vicar leaned forward and tapped his pipe into the ashtray. “Right. I know people at the train and bus stations; I will make some immediate enquiries. With that red hair I would think Miss Dorcas quite easy to spot, and the same goes for Miss Grantham, who rarely travels. This place is so small—I am sure I can come up with some information.”

  “Thank you,” said Ben and I together. I didn’t care what secrets Dorcas had kept from me. I did not care who or what she was. She was my friend and I wanted her back so I could tell her what she meant to me.

  “And please, Ben, whatever you do, don’t let Ellie sleep alone tonight,” urged Rowland.

  Ben raised one of his eloquent black brows. “Vicar, you shock me!” He grinned. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. This tension is making us all slightly daffy. If we are not reacting appropriately it is because we cannot absorb what is happening. Will you rest easier if we promise to sit up all night and keep each other company? Tomorrow the guests go home and within a few days the six months will be up.”

  “And what happens then”—I looked eagerly at Rowland—“may depend largely on what you have discovered about Abigail. Please tell us. How did she die?”

  “She didn’t.”

  Ben and I stared at him.

  “Not at least when she is supposed to have done. For all I know Abigail Grantham lived to a ripe old age, but not in the company of her husband and son.”

  “But the funeral?” I couldn’t assimilate this new idea. “Remember Uncle Merlin’s request that his funeral be a repeat performance of the one given his mother? We thought it eerie at the time: gothic, that outmoded horse and carriage swaying along the coast road through the mist.”

  “Yes.” Ben’s eyes narrowed, and I felt a tremor of excitement run through his fingers into mine. The room was very still, apart from the rain strumming against the windowpanes and the curtains, stirred by a draught of air, billowing and falling. Rowland was warming to his role of master story-teller.

  “There was a funeral,” he agreed, savouring our patent expectancy. “But no body. Ellie, you were right about Arthur Grantham in one sense. He was the worst kind of Christian: sanctimonious, hypocritical, vengeful. But he was not a murderer. The burial ceremony was a symbolic expulsion of evil. Abigail was not dead, not literally, but he had already consigned her to the flames of hell. He had discovered her in what he considered a compromising situation with the young artist who had been painting her portrait, Miles Biddle was his name, I think. To Arthur, Abigail was dead. To prove this, he buried her in spirit, if not in fact. I imagine the gesture did much to soothe his wounded pride.”

  “How well did his pride survive if all the neighbours knew his wife preferred another man?” I asked.

  “They didn’t,” said Rowland. “Arthur kept the scandal under wraps. The funeral served a secondary purpose. Instead of living out his days an object of sympathy and perhaps ridicule, he became a widower. There were rumours, of course, but he bribed the doctor and the undertaker to support his story that his wife had passed away unexpectedly.”

  “In a sense he wasn’t lying about that,” answered Ben. “I suppose an underpaid doctor and undertaker wouldn’t be too hard to silence if the price was right. They probably clammed up so tight on the subject of Abigail that their very silence fuelled rumours that there was something funny about the business.”

  “The vicar.” I pulled the travelling rug up to warm me. “Was he in on Arthur’s little fraud?”

  “Oh yes.” Rowland struck another match to his pipe. “The Reverend Geoffrey Hempstead was bought with a stained-glass window for the south wall of the church—you’ll have seen it, quite exceptional. At the time I imagine he felt justified in supporting Arthur Grantham in casting out his wife. Ellie, I think I told you I had found some of Mr. Hempstead’s sermons, one condemning a child for ‘stealing’ flowers and another castigating a woman caught in adultery. Whether he was referring to Abigail I don’t know, but the harshness of his views was clear. He must have applauded the ruthlessness of Arthur’s action, relished the zeal with which a sinner was purged from the lives of her husband and son. The difference between the two men was, I think, that Hempstead was not a hypocrite. His conscience flayed his own soul as mercilessly as it did those of his parishioners. He couldn’t bring himself to falsify the parish register by recording her death. He wrote a letter confessing his worldly greed to his bishop. Along with it I found the reply, objurgating him for being party to a false funeral. The details are all there. The bishop dwelt on them at length.”

  “Strange.” I shivered slightly. “We began with a funeral—Uncle Merlin’s—and we end with one. For this is the end of the trail, isn’t it?” I looked up at the two men. “If Abigail isn’t inside that coffin, I think we can guess what is. The term buried treasure is quite literal in this case.”

  CHAPTER

  Seventeen

  We found Abigail’s treasure. Rowland felt some qualms about not contacting his bishop for permission to open up the tomb, but his curiosity was as strong as ours, and he was no more anxious for delay than Ben or I. He came with us to the vault. At the bottom of the coffin we found, neatly arranged, Abigail’s personal possessions, her clothes—not grand or many in number—a kite, a sewing box, hairbrushes and combs and a monstrous relic of Arthur Grantham’s punitive tactics, the remains of a pitifully small skeleton and a brown leather collar.

  “He killed her dog—that fierce little pug in the portrait.” My hands gripped the side of the coffin. “Small wonder Merlin never had a pet about the house.”

  “We now know why he grew up shunning the human race.” Ben lifted out an envelope which had been tucked down under the clothes. “What a scene for a boy of nine to witness—his mother’s banishment and mock interment and her dog killed.”

  “I would like to hope that his father at least shielded Merlin from the truth,” said Rowland, still looking down at the fragile heap of bones.

  “Some hope.” Ben’s expression was dour. “Good old Art must have relished giving his son the news that Abigail had reaped her just deserts. Let’s just be thankful that somehow Merlin managed to save the portrait and the journals.”

  “Gracious,” I said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you about those, but, oh never mind—first things first, what’s in that envelope? Open it up, please.”

  “Sounds like a night at the Oscars,” quipped Ben, but I noticed his hands were not quite steady as he pulled out a single sheet of paper and started reading aloud:

  “Dear Mrs. Grantham, you had to break a lot of eggs to perfect your infallible receipe. My chef is ecstatic. He tells me our house has a new treasure, so I hope you will accept one of our old ones, a trinket given to Elizabeth by Philip of Spain. H.M. gave it to my ancestress, another lady-in-waiting, because she was peeved at P. when his gift arrived. Thank you for tea and cosy chat.

  Laura Wallingford-Chase’ ”

  “Oh,”

  I sighed, “how simple everything is when properly explained.”

  “Precisely what I was thinking.” Ben nodded at Rowland. “Don’t tell me, dear chap, that you don’t grasp the situation at a glance. Tell him, Ellie dearest, put the man out of his misery.”

  “Are you sure I won’t bore either of you? Well, first the recipe in question is for an unsinkable soufflé. Don’t swoon from ecstasy, Ben.…”

  “The word is panic. Is this universally important discovery still
in existence, is it …?”

  “Safe? Naturally. I only found it today, but it is safely hidden from all prying eyes. You shall have it, my boy, never fear. Next question. Who is Laura Wallingford-Chase? Again my computer brain has the answer stored away. And in knowing who she is, I think I also know what the treasure is.”

  “But, my dear Ellie, where is the treasure?” asked Rowland and Ben like twin parrots.

  “In the sewing box, I would think. It looks about the right size. Why don’t you open it up and have a peek?” He did as he was told and sure enough let out a whistle of disbelief.

  “Stop gawking and hand it over.” I made a grab for the box, looked inside, and tightened my grip. What if I sneezed and dropped the sewing box with this inside? “It is so exquisitely fragile I’m afraid to touch it. If I breathe too hard it may shatter like …”

  “An egg,” supplied Ben, “like all the eggs Abigail had to shatter to perfect her recipe. But this egg is solid gold, less a few emeralds here and there. Laura What’s-her-face must have been related to Midas if she considered this a trinket. You say you know who she was, computer brain, tell.”

  “Rose, Abigail’s former maid, was the one who told me. At the time, being a bit slow on the uptake, I didn’t quite put two and two together but now … Rose told me that once upon a time, a wealthy, aristocratic lady got stuck outside Merlin’s Court during a storm and that Abigail entertained her in the kitchen very simply but hospitably and that she gave her ladyship one of her recipes. For which kind favour Abigail later received a warm thank-you letter and an Easter egg. Rose thought it was for the little boy, but she must never have seen it.”

  “Being a man of simple tastes,” said Ben, “I must say I would have preferred chocolate but … this ornithological offering must be priceless, though not as valuable to me as the soufflé, should I ever open my restaurant.” He looked down at the egg glowing in golden oval splendour like a sun sprinkled with tiny emerald stars. “I’m sorry the secret is not ours alone. Her ladyship’s descendants must have been in the know for sixty years. I wonder if they are the kind of people who can be bought off.”