‘I never shot anyone.’
‘So you said.’
‘I need it back, Mam. I can’t rest till it’s in the sea or buried under a ton of concrete. I can’t get on with me life while they hold that thing, can I? If I go to my house, if I try to see my kids, if I drop me aitches – how can I start again when she has all my cash and she’s sitting in my house? You have to help me, Mam.’
She leaned forward. ‘If I could make you straight, Jimmy, I would lay down and die. Just to see you in a proper job with a wage and no stealing, I’d climb in my coffin here and now. But I know you, love. I can’t help you. You’ll not alter. I grieve for you, honest, I do. You were such a lovely baby.’
Jimmy stared down at her. She’d been a looker, had Mam. She’d worked damned hard all her life, and he had turned out to be her biggest disappointment. Something akin to guilt invaded his chest and he could scarcely breathe or swallow.
He would never be able to explain what he did next, not in a month of Sundays. Jimmy Nuttall bent and kissed his mother’s grey, frizzled hair. ‘Ta-ra, Mam,’ he managed before leaving the house.
Freda sat still for a long time after her son had gone. She finally stirred herself to make a cup of tea before her soaps started. ‘He’s in a right state,’ she told herself. And she wasn’t referring to the oil smeared on clothes and face, the dirt edging his fingernails. Jimmy was desperate. Should she phone Annie and warn her? Warn her about what, tell her what? That Jimmy was wearing dirty clothes, that he had kissed his mother as if saying goodbye for the last time?
The Emmerdale music was playing when she switched on her TV. Freda took a mouthful of tepid tea and stared at the screen. But if anyone were to ask her, later, what had happened in the Dales that night, she could not have answered.
At least twice a year, Sheila Barton made the trip to Tonge Cemetery in order to lay flowers on her parents’ grave and on the final resting place of her husband. It was all she could do for them now, and, as a dutiful daughter and widow, she felt she had to go out of her way to mark the lives of the people who had created her. She also needed to leave a token on the monument of the man who had left her two houses and complete freedom from children.
There was a dilemma, however. Space in the family grave would feel more welcoming than that in her husband’s. She hadn’t wanted to lie down with him in life, so she would prefer not to spend eternity in his company. The problem reared its head on every visit and, as she grew older, the difficulty became more pressing. Dead was dead, yet she cared about where her bones would rest after life had deserted her. It wasn’t right, and she knew it. A wife should join her husband from altar to grave and beyond, but she felt she simply could not be at peace with Sid.
She stood over him, read the wording etched in stone, remembered choosing the text – MUCH LOVED HUSBAND OF SHEILA. ‘I never loved you,’ she said dolefully. ‘I’m sorry, Sid, but I’m going in with Mam and Dad. I knew them better, you see. Thirty-odd years is a long time, and I still miss them. You were good to me, I know that. But I couldn’t rest, not here, not with you. Please, please forgive me.’
With moisture in her eyes, she crossed the cemetery and stood by the grave of Enid and Alan Armstrong. They had been the best mam and dad a person could ever have. She remembered Dad giving her the yolk of his egg, Mam brushing her hair and making her pretty. Sheila had never been pretty, but her parents had viewed her through rose-tinted lenses. She had owned a dolls’ house with working lights, a beautiful dolls’ pram, the best tricycle.
Perhaps those things were nothing compared to property, yet Sheila knew that Mam and Dad had denied themselves in order to furnish her with all she needed and much of what she wanted. This would be her last place on earth, then. People could talk all they liked, because she would not be around to hear the gossip.
As she rose, after placing a bunch of flowers in the pot, she noticed a man two rows away from her. She knew that figure. Even with his back turned towards her, he remained recognizable. What was he doing here? And why were his shoulders shaking? He hadn’t said a word about anyone dying. She stood completely still and watched him for several seconds. It was plain that he was heartbroken. Professor Gustav Compton-Milne weeping? That cool, calm, brilliant man standing by a grave and allowing emotion to spill? Impossible.
Sheila bent down behind her parents’ headstone and waited for him to leave the graveyard. She squatted for so long that cramp began to set in, but she didn’t want him to see her. It was important that she should remain invisible, because she had seldom encroached on his private life and had merely been an ear when he had dropped snippets of information. He was a disappointed man, that was plain. Yet there he stood, head bent, shoulders moving, back shaking as he cried. Even from this distance, she could see that the plot over which he stood was not newly dug, so the deceased had not made his or her exit recently.
It occurred to her that she was some female version of a peeping Tom, as this was a personal moment to which she ought never have been privy. She stayed. She stayed until he had turned away and walked out through the main gates, then, after pulling herself up into a standing position and waiting for the cramp to subside, she walked over to the place where he had stood.
There were lilies on the grave. Just pure, white lilies from whose centres orange tongues reached as if in search of sunshine. Behind the flowers, a wreath of dark green leaves made a bed fit to support such simple, beautiful blooms. Sheila felt privileged, because she was now standing right at the centre of Gus’s heart.
The words were simple, the message brief. In marble, the headstone stated: ‘KATHERINA LOUISA BARFORD DIED 1 JUNE 1983.’ Underneath, in lower case, the legend read: ‘Greatly loved and sadly missed.’ Sheila scratched her head. Sadly missed by whom? By him and only him? Where were her parents, sisters, brothers? Who had buried this woman? I don’t know who you are, Sheila thought, but you’ve a grand man visiting you. There was grief in him, she’d already known that. Sometimes, at the table, he would pause between mouthfuls and stare into the near distance – was the occupant of this grave the cause of his occasional absence from actuality?
Sheila shivered. It was a warm enough day, yet she suddenly felt chilled to the backbone. She wished that he would open up to her. Should she say that she had seen him here today? Or did he want to continue holding his unhappiness inside? He was a very private man – who seemed cold at times, who dealt with practicalities, who played with trains and got excited about cures for disease. But here, today, he had sobbed his heart out. Here, he had felt something very real and deeper than the grave.
Sheila left the cemetery without reaching a decision, but the sadness she felt for him remained with her for a very long time.
Hermione half-listened as Eileen prattled on. In the middle of a crossword, the old woman would have preferred to have been left to herself, but Eileen Eckersley was on her high horse, and nothing would bring her down until she fell at some impossible fence.
‘Slow down,’ ordered Hermione, putting down the newspaper with the air of one finally succumbing to divine intervention.
‘She didn’t see me. I was doing the creeping about like a mouse looking for cheese. And I saw her. I did. With my own two eyes, I saw her plain as day.’
Hermione bit back a quip about the impossibility of using any other eyes. ‘Mrs Potter, I take it?’
‘Right up the chimbley, she was.’
‘What?’
‘She was right up the chimbley, with just her hindquarters sticking out. She looked like a cow tethered ready for the visiting bull, so she did.’
Hermione ordered herself not to laugh. ‘Did she see you?’
‘Only if she has eyes in her nether areas. I mean, what is a woman doing with her head stuck up there?’
Hermione shrugged. ‘Looking for Father Christmas?’
‘It’s near July!’
Hermione gritted her teeth. Eileen had got it into her head that the new woman was up to no good. This w
as probably because the cleaner had been hired to do all the jobs Eileen had been doing downstairs. Perhaps Eileen was feeling usurped, feeling her age, getting paranoid, even.
‘You’ll have to talk to her,’ announced the carer. ‘Because it’s not my place to ask why she’s emptying cupboards and pulling the kitchen to bits and poking about up chimbleys. She’s had the contents of sideboards spread from here to Rivington Pike, and I even found her trying to take up the carpet.’
Hermione sighed. ‘Everybody approaches cleaning differently. She goes into too much detail, takes the job too seriously.’
‘Is she a chimbley sweep on top of all else? Because she’s brought no special brushes along with her, I can tell you that for no money. Normal people don’t go prodding around in grates, do they? And you don’t pick up fitted carpets to clean underneath. There’s something very wrong about that woman, may the good Lord forgive me for saying so.’
Hermione, whose patience was thinning, tapped her pen on the table. ‘Four down,’ she said. ‘Something used to strangle an Irishwoman.’ She looked up. ‘Any ideas? Because garrotte doesn’t fit.’
Eileen folded her arms. ‘When all the silver’s gone and—’
‘But there’s nothing missing. Eileen, if this carries on, I shall need a double dose of the pain pills. If I could walk, I’d be out of here in two shakes of that cow’s tail – the one you have waiting for the bull. You’ve not a shred of evidence against Mrs Potter. Just because she does things differently – that doesn’t mean she’s a thief or a murderer. Does it?’
‘No, but—’
‘No, but nothing. I’ve had enough. Just find something to do and leave me in peace, woman.’
Eileen bustled off, words still emerging from beneath her breath. ‘It’ll be my fault when it all goes wrong,’ she whispered to Hermione’s kitchen sink. ‘It’ll be me who should have noticed, should have said something, should have—’
‘Eileen? Come here.’
The Irishwoman entered, a tea towel twisting in her hands. ‘What now?’
Hermione was standing at a window, a Zimmer frame keeping her steady. ‘Look,’ she ordered.
Eileen obeyed. In the garden below, Sal Potter was spreading soot between plants. ‘Why is she doing that?’
‘Because soot is good for the garden. Now, what do you have to say?’
‘She must have heard me. With her head in the fireplace, she must still have known I was there. Prodding about among people’s things – she’s got no right.’
Hermione sighed wearily. ‘If she’s a thief and a chancer, what was she doing up a chimney? Did she think we had treasure up there? You’re making no sense at all, woman. If she’d her hands in a till at the shop, I’d understand your attitude.’
‘But I only wanted to draw your attention to—’
‘She’s doing a good job, and you don’t like that. You thought you’d carry on for ever being in charge, didn’t you? Well, you’re getting no younger, and neither am I. So shut up about Sally Potter, for heaven’s sake. And straighten your face.’
Eileen flounced out and carried on with the washing-up. She didn’t care what Madam said. There was something wrong with Sal Potter, and time would prove it.
Hermione continued to stare through her dormer window. One thing she had learned over the years was that Eileen Eckersley was a person of strong instinct. She had a nose for things that were not quite right, was capable of summing up with a degree of accuracy most situations. She talked a lot of nonsense, got her words wrong, but she knew people. This was a gift bequeathed to but a few, and Hermione began to wonder, albeit reluctantly, about Mrs Sally Potter. The woman was too good. She stayed beyond her allotted hours and, according to Lisa, never claimed overtime. So what was she doing in the shed? Stanley Eckersley did the gardens. There was no need for a Sal Potter to potter about in the potting shed. Hermione grinned. Eileen always called that place the ‘pottering’ shed. She was right again, wasn’t she?
‘Why are you watching her?’
The older woman jumped. ‘Good God, Eileen, you’ll give me a stroke if you carry on like that. A person of my age can’t take too many shocks.’
‘Well, it’s sorry I am about that, but you have to admit that Mrs Potter is not acting like a cleaner. She’s been a plumber, a chimbley sweep, a carpet fitter and a gardener – and they’re the jobs we know about. The good Lord alone knows what she gets up to when I am not looking. She’ll be fetching one of those pewmatic drills if we don’t shape up.’
Hermione turned and gazed into the unlovely face of her companion. ‘And when, pray, are you not watching? It’s like living with a hawk.’
‘It’s just my way, madam.’
Hermione allowed a deep breath to escape from deep in her lungs. ‘I’ve told you to call me Iona. All my friends call me Iona.’
‘I’m an employee. I know my place.’
The employer sat down and faced her single member of staff. ‘Listen, birdbrain. That’s not an insult, because you are a watchful hawk and, sometimes, you are right. Fetch out my best Cooper coffee set and make up a trolley for two. Some scones would be nice. Then get yourself downstairs and invite Mrs Sally Potter to join me for coffee.’
Eileen folded her arms. ‘So Lisa’s servant sits with you and I don’t?’
‘You’ll be in the hall listening. For once in your life, will you simply do as you are told without question. Can you manage that for half an hour?’
‘Of course I can, and well you know it.’
Downstairs, Sally Potter was at her wits’ end. She couldn’t find a safe anywhere, had searched cupboards, shelves and drawers, had even had a root round in the garden shed. It was a good job she’d heard the Irishwoman creeping about. With her head up a wide chimney and wearing a Sainsbury’s bag to save her hair, she had been lucky to hear anything at all. Eileen Eckersley was suspicious, but Sal hadn’t dared tell Jimmy about that. She was here to find a gun and, beyond that, there was—
‘Mrs Potter?’
Sal turned from her current task of preparing vegetables. ‘Yes?’
‘Madam says would you care to come up and take coffee with her?’
‘Why?’
Even Eileen was perplexed by that question. ‘Oh . . . it’s the way she is. She sits alone a lot, you see, so you’re someone for her to talk to.’ She sniffed. ‘And it’s fortunate, you are, because she doesn’t invite many for morning coffee. Or afternoon tea, come to that.’
Sal fiddled with the potato peeler. She didn’t want to go up into what Jimmy described as the gods or the dress circle. She was quite happy peeling carrots and washing broccoli. ‘I’ve a fair few things to do.’ She had stuff to remember as well. There must be no mention of Jimmy, she was a widow, she was here to work and not to search – oh, God. ‘Can we make it another day?’ she asked.
‘I think it’s best you come when invited. She suffers from MS, so she sees people only on the good days. And we don’t get many of those just lately.’ That, at least, was the truth.
With a heart even heavier than her very tired feet, Sal followed Eileen up the stairs. She glanced at the lifts and wished that she could use them, but they were there for one person only, and Sal was not that person. She was quite winded when they finally reached the top storey, and she stopped for a few seconds, pretending to tie a shoelace while Eileen waited.
‘Have you done?’
‘Yes.’ She entered Mrs Hermione Compton-Milne’s apartment. It was beautifully furnished, understated and quite modern for a woman of such an age.
‘How do you do?’ said Hermione.
‘Nicely, thanks.’
The handshake was limp, and the skin felt damp with fear. Hermione cleaned her own right hand on wipes kept for that purpose, as she was always spilling food and drink. By the time Sal had turned to place herself in a chair, the wipes and Sal’s sweat had been disposed of discreetly.
Eileen poured the coffee.
‘Lovely cups,’ commente
d the guest.
‘Wedding gift,’ replied Hermione. ‘Susie Cooper. It has, so far, survived the ministrations of Eileen, but I don’t hold out a great deal of hope in the long-term.’
Eileen glared at her employer, then left the scene.
Sal munched on a scone, though she didn’t feel like eating. Both these women had X-ray eyes, of that she felt certain. Well, the Irish one had gone, but the person who held all the top trump cards was sitting opposite Sal and staring right through her.
‘Have you done this type of work for a long time?’ asked the hostess.
Sal nodded, noticing that a few crumbs fell down the front of her blouse. She wished she had worn something nicer, but it was too late to worry about that now. And what had Jimmy said? ‘Dowdy but clean,’ that was it.
‘My carer says you are doing a very thorough job. I understand that you have even lifted carpets and moved boards in the kitchen in order to do a good clean.’
‘Mice,’ Sal managed after swallowing the last of her scone. ‘I always look for them. We’ve been plagued in the past, me and my dad. Farm cottage, you see. Sometimes, there were rats, too.’
Hermione shook her head. ‘Oh, dear. And is your father dead now?’
Sal nodded. ‘Yes. I nursed him for a long time. I do like your glass tables.’
‘Safety glass. I fall a lot.’
‘Well, that’s a shame. And the metal trees on the wall – very modern.’
‘Linda Barker. I like to keep up with the times, don’t you?’
Sal smiled weakly. ‘Never got much of a chance, Mrs Compton-Milne. Always too busy to know what the trends are. Before I came here, I worked in six different houses. Then, of course, there were the years I spent looking after Dad. He wasn’t an easy man to please.’
Hermione allowed a few beats of time to pass. ‘So you’re alone now?’
‘No . . . I mean yes. Except for Barney. He’s my cat.’ She had no cat. Now she had to remember the name of a feline that didn’t even exist. Barney. She had to remember Barney. ‘I called him after Barney Rubble in The Flintstones. It’s a cartoon.’
Parallel Life Page 15
