by Hazel Holt
“Well, I couldn’t believe it. I asked if there were signs of it having been taken out or dislodged in some way by the accident, but he said no, there was no sign that there’d ever been one.”
“That is extraordinary. You’re sure she had one?”
“Well, of course I am,” Alan said shortly. “I remember her telling me about it in one of the very first letters she wrote to me, after she got in touch again. She’d just had it fitted and I wrote back to say wasn’t it wonderful the way things had improved because our aunt had had her first bad heart attack when she was just about the same age as Susan and, of course, there wasn’t anything like a pacemaker then.”
“Did you actually see it?”
“Well, no, I don’t suppose I did. As I said, Susan was sensitive about it, and, anyway, it’s implanted under the skin.”
“Have you asked Fiona?”
“She’s back at work, I think I told you. But I was so upset – it’s all so extraordinary – I felt I had to talk to someone about it, and you’ve always been such a good friend to us both…”
“Of course. I just wish I could help but, honestly, I can’t think of any sort of explanation.”
“I’ll just have to wait then,” he said looking downcast, “until Fiona gets back.”
I looked at my watch. “It’s almost 12.30,” I said. “Let’s go out and have lunch – you have to eat something. Why don’t we go down to Porlock Weir to the pub there; the drive will do us both good.”
He brightened up a little. “That’s a good idea. Then we could have a little walk by the sea, perhaps the breezes will clear my head and help me make sense of all this.”
We had our lunch at The Ship and went for a walk by the sea. As we stood by the little harbour I looked up at the hillside at Nora and John’s houses and thought about them and about Susan. And about the dagger in its glass case.
“What time will Fiona be back?” I asked.
“About five,” Alan said. “It’s usually later, but they said she could work a shorter day in the circumstances.”
“Well look,” I said, “it’s a lovely day, let’s go for a little drive along the coast. We might go as far as Lynmouth.”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
So we drove over the moor land, skirting the sea, neither of us saying much, but comforted somehow by the timeless contours of the countryside with the gorse and heather in full bloom. It was nearly five o’clock when we got back to Alan’s and I offered to make a cup of tea for us all. While I was in the kitchen I heard Fiona come in and Alan call out to her. I took as long as I could with the tea to give them time to talk and then I carried the tray into the drawing room.
“Can you think of any explanation?” Alan was saying. “It’s beyond me.”
Fiona was sitting in a chair with her back to the window and when I first came in I couldn’t see her face, but as I moved to a chair beside her I saw that she was dreadfully pale and obviously in great distress.
“Fiona, what is it!”
I hadn’t meant to say anything, merely to pour the tea and leave them alone together, but she looked so terrible I couldn’t help myself. She’d been looking at her uncle, but she turned to me, I thought almost gratefully.
“I have to explain,” she said dully. “It’s time it all came out. I wanted to before, but she wouldn’t let me, but now…” She made a vague gesture, apparently of despair.
“What on earth do you mean?” Alan cried, “Who wouldn’t let you?”
“I’ll leave you to talk,” I said, moving to the door.
“No!” Fiona almost shouted. “No, please, Sheila, please stay.”
“Yes,” Alan echoed, “please stay.”
I sat down and waited for Fiona to continue. She sat silently for a while, her hands grasping the arms of her chair and then she burst out “It’s all been a sham – I feel awful about it. You’ve been so wonderful to us and now…” She paused and shook her head as if to clear it and went on. “I suppose I’d better start at the beginning.” She turned to Alan. “My mother wasn’t your sister and I’m not your niece.”
“I don’t understand,” Alan said, “what do you mean?”
“Susan Campbell was a lovely person,” Fiona said. “Mother and I owe her so much.”
She paused again. “This is so difficult, I don’t know how to put it. Mother’s name was Phyllis Lucas – I’m Felicity Lucas – my father left us when I was a baby so she took what jobs she could where she could keep me with her. That’s how she ended up as housekeeper to Susan Campbell. She was delighted that Mother had a little girl because she had a daughter the same age and she thought it would be nice for her to have a companion. Her husband had died fairly recently and she wasn’t very well – she had a heart condition – and she wanted someone to look after the house and – well, things in general. She soon came to rely on Mother – they got on really well together, just as Fiona and I did. Fiona and Fi (I was always known as Fi) just like sisters, Susan used to say.”
She got up and began to walk about the room.
“One of the things Susan used to like to do was to talk to Mother about the old days in Taviscombe, she’d get out photos and talk about the family, the house where she was brought up, old friends, things like that. It was obvious she missed them very much. Mother used to say ‘Why don’t you go over there to see them?’ But Susan was terrified of flying, and then there was her heart… So Mother got her to write to you, to make contact again, and then you wrote back and she was so happy about it all. It was about then that she saw a specialist about her heart and they fitted her with a pacemaker. That improved her health no end, but she still relied on Mother, said she could never manage without her. But she did start to do things again, like driving and going to the cinema, things like that.”
She stood for a moment by the window, looking out, then she turned and went on
“One of the things Susan had always wanted to do was to live in Montreal. Her husband had always lived in Toronto, that’s where his work had been and his friends – he had no family – so she’d never been able to. But one day she saw an advertisement in a Montreal newspaper for this house and, without even seeing it, she made an offer for it and it was accepted. Mother made all the arrangements, of course, and saw to the move. She was very efficient about things like that, as you know. Well, we’d only been in Montreal for a week when it happened.” She came and sat down in chair beside me, “It was the handbags that were responsible for what happened.”
I looked at her in astonishment. “The handbags?” I echoed.
She nodded. “Susan had a very nice brown leather handbag that Mother always admired, so for her birthday Susan bought her one just like it. Sometimes they used to get them mixed up – they always made a joke about it – and that’s what happened that day. Susan and Fiona had gone shopping – the house in Montreal was a little way out of town and you had to take a rather busy road to get to the shops. There was an accident, a truck ran into their car.”
She sat silently for a moment and then went on. “The policeman who came said ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news. Mrs Phyllis Lucas and her daughter have been both been killed in an accident.’ Susan had taken Mother’s handbag by mistake and that led to the confusion. Mother started to correct him, then, suddenly, on an impulse, she didn’t. She let him think that she was Susan.”
“Good God!” Alan said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m truly sorry. Anyway,” she went on, “it was unbelievably simple. No one in Montreal knew who we were. Fiona and I hadn’t started school. Mother had made all the arrangements. Susan had arthritis in her hands so she typed her letters on an electric typewriter.” She turned to Alan. “She typed those to you. Her signature was easy to copy. So we went on for a bit. Then Mother began to get nervous, she thought someone might turn up from Toronto and recognise her. Then when she heard that your wife had died, she decided that it would be safer to come to England. To help look after you, s
he said in her letters, because she’d kept up the correspondence. There were no pictures because Susan always hated having her photo taken and she never got around to having one done of Fiona. It wasn’t too much of a gamble. You hadn’t seen her since she was a child and she and Susan were much the same age and had the same colouring. You were expecting Susan, so you didn’t suspect anything.”
Alan shook his head but didn’t say anything.
“So that’s how it was. We came to live with you and you were so good to us. I’m so sorry…”
Her voice broke and she was crying. No sobs, just silent tears. She looked pale and exhausted. Alan was still silent, he looked as if he hadn’t taken in half of what Fiona – Felicity – had been saying.
“You and your mother were very close, especially after all you’ve…all you’ve been through.” I said gently. “Her death must have been a dreadful shock to you.”
She shook her head. “It’s so awful. I said I couldn’t forgive her for what she’d done. It was too much. She died while I was still angry with her and now she’ll never know how much I loved her.”
“What couldn’t you forgive her for?” I asked quietly. “Killing John Morrison?”
She turned towards me, a look of shock and disbelief on her face. “How did you know?” she asked.
“I worked it out,” I said. “About the dagger. I didn’t know why, though, until today. John Morrison found out somehow, I suppose.”
She nodded. “Uncle Alan…” she paused and corrected herself. “Alan had told him about the pacemaker but she didn’t know that and when she went to see him about her bronchitis and he sounded her chest, he mentioned the conversation and asked her about it. She made some excuse, about having had it removed, but he was obviously suspicious. That’s when she decided to kill him – she said she couldn’t risk him talking to Alan about it.”
“But surely,” I said, “there’s patient confidentiality…”
“She wouldn’t risk it. She was in a panic; she wasn’t thinking properly, she just thought that everything would blow up in her face. She said she took the dagger from the case and put it in her shopping bag. There was no one on duty at the alternative medicine entrance, so she simply walked round the quadrangle to his room. There’s a treatment room next door so she hid in there until she heard a patient leaving, then she went in and…and killed him. Then went out the same way and walked into the waiting room and sat down beside you, Sheila.”
I remembered Susan – Phyllis – sitting chatting with the shopping bag at her feet, the shopping bag that had presumably contained the dagger covered in John Morrison’s blood, and I shuddered.
“When did you find out – about the murder, I mean?” I asked.
“Just a few weeks ago. I had no idea…I don’t really know why she told me then. I suppose bottling it up for so long; she felt she had to tell somebody. I was the only person she could tell.”
“It must have been a terrible moment for you,” I said.
“I couldn’t believe it – I said why did you have to do that! We could just have gone away, started somewhere else. She said she did it for me, that she’d done everything – the whole deception – for me. But how could she think I’d want that? When she heard from you about your friend, the one who killed herself, that shook her very much. I think it was the first time it really came home to her what she’d done.”
“You don’t think,” I said, “that her own death wasn’t an accident, that she stepped out in front of that car deliberately?”
She covered her face with her hands for a moment, then she looked up and said, “It’s been going round and round in my head – I honestly don’t know. Anyway, what does it matter now? She’s gone…” The tears came again, silent, hopeless tears.
“You’ll have to go to the police,” I said.
“I know. It’ll all come out now, the whole miserable business. Everyone will know how we’ve lied and cheated. That will be the end of it for me and Phil – he’ll never speak to me again. How could he?” She turned and faced Alan. “I’ve got some money saved up, enough for Mother’s funeral. If you could just let me stay here a couple of days until I can find somewhere else – I’ll keep out of your way. I know how you must hate me.”
“No!” Alan burst out. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you can stay here, how could you think otherwise. I don’t deny,” he went on more quietly, “that it’s all been a bit of a shock. But the deception, as you call it, that was nothing to do with you, you were just a child. It was wrong, of course, but if only she’d told me we could have worked something out. You’ve been like family to me, even if you weren’t. I’ve come to rely on you both, become fond of you. When I was ill you both looked after me so wonderfully well, I wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for you.”
“And Dr Morrison,” she said quietly.
“Yes, well, that was a terrible thing, but, poor soul, she paid the price for it in the end. Sheila’s right, we have to go and see the police. I’ll come with you.”
“No, no,” she said through her tears, “it’s too much; I don’t deserve it.”
“Come on now,” Alan said, “let’s see what’s to be done. First thing, we’ll have a cup of that tea Sheila made before it gets stone cold.” He smiled at me and I got up and poured the tea.
“Roger Eliot is very discreet,” I said. “I’m sure he won’t reveal more than he has to about the situation. After all, it’s an open and shut case now.”
“Exactly,” Alan said. “People will gossip for a while, but if you’re still here and you still call me Uncle Alan – and I hope you will, Fi – then they won’t have anything much to gossip about, will they?”
On my way home I thought a lot about how Alan had taken what was, after all, an appalling situation. His reaction to it and what appeared to be his easy acceptance once again of what had been the status quo seemed vaguely shocking. After all, Susan – Phyllis – had murdered someone, a distinguished and valuable member of the community, and, although Alan had made the right conventional noises, he didn’t show any personal expressions of condemnation. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that, at his age, the important thing was the status quo, and that, although he’d been shaken and distressed at the deception and the murder, what he really wanted was for things to go on as they had been and that his way of life, given a few interruptions, a court case, an inquest, would continue that way until the end, and, if that meant ignoring certain unpleasant facts, so be it.
The raven was back. I saw him moving slowly across the lawn, the other, lesser birds making room for him, like courtiers falling back to ease the progress of their sovereign. He stood there, looking about him and his confidence, self-assurance and assumption of effortless superiority reminded me somehow of John Morrison. On an impulse I opened the back door and went out to have a closer look. To my surprise he didn’t move but stood looking at me, eye to eye. The raven, harbinger of death, said the legend; nevermore, said the poet. I took another step forward and slowly he rose in the air and flew majestically away.
About the Author
HAZEL HOLT was born in Birmingham and was educated at King Edward VI High School and Newnham College, Cambridge. She worked as an editor, reviewer and feature writer before turning to fiction in an attempt to keep up with her son, the novelist Tom Holt. Her life is divided between writing, cooking and trying to cope with the demands of her Siamese cat, Flip.
By Hazel Holt
Death in Practice
The Silent Killer
No Cure for Death
A Death in the Family
A Time to Die
Any Man’s Death
A Necessary End
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
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First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2005.
This ebook edition first published in 2012.
Copyright © 2005 by HAZEL HOLT
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.
ISBN 978-0–7490–1365–3
