Whoever Has the Heart

by Jennie Melville

  ‘Did when she felt like it.’

  So Beatrice Armitage called herself what she fancied, as she fancied. I thought she might have done it as a joke and guessed I would have liked her.

  ‘Thinking of taking her house?’

  Was nothing secret here?

  ‘Saw you going into it.’

  ‘I have looked at it.’

  He touched his cap and started to move away. ‘Shouldn’t come here, if I were you. Like you said: high death rate.’

  I stood where I was till he had gone, and then I walked across the path to the grave with the flowers where a spring posy of jonquils and daffodils rested. I had to ask the question: Who? Who was buried there? Once a detective, always a detective.

  Beneath the grey stone lay Katherine Dryden, beloved wife of Harry Dryden, twin sister of the late Arthur Beasley.

  She too had died recently within a few weeks of her brother. I went back to Mrs Armitage’s memorial: she too had died not long after in that dangerous period last year. If the man with the flowers was Harry Dryden then I began to see what he meant.

  I walked back towards the church, meaning to look around it, but when I tried the door it was locked. The glass in the windows looked old, with soft delicate colours. I must ask Mary about the church, she was good about dates and origins.

  A soft sleet was beginning to fall as I turned towards the pub and to lunch with Bill Damiani. I had always meant to go back.

  The barman greeted me as I arrived at the Red Dragon. ‘Let me take your wet coat, madam.’ Clearly the magic cast upon me by Mary was still hanging over me. ‘ They’ve gone through,’ he said. ‘Waiting at the table for you. Mr Damiani has just arrived.’

  I thought he might have done: a dark blue Bentley was parked outside. Nothing can make a Bentley look flashy but Billy Damiani had done his best by having the car registration number BBD 1 (he must have paid a lot for that number) and leaving a crocodile briefcase on the front seat with his initials on it in gold. Next to it was a cashmere overcoat, initials here too on the silk lining. He deserved to have it stolen. I made up my mind that Billy Damiani certainly needed looking into. Anyone who scattered their initials around so prodigally must have something to hide. It was interesting too that he had taken the trouble to be more than punctual, he arrived early.

  The dining room was small and fairly crowded. The scent of money floated upwards mingling with the freesias from the bowls on the tables.

  I walked in with something of defiance, aware that although my jeans and tweed jacket were perfectly in order, the mud on my shoes was not, and my hair was the wrong length.

  The woman at the table nearest the door was wearing jeans too but she had a pair of Gucci shoes on with them (well-polished chestnut) and a matching sack bag slung over her shoulder. She looked impossibly chic.

  Mary and Damiani were seated at a table in the window overlooking the river. Bill stood up when he saw me.

  ‘Such politeness,’ I said under my breath.

  He took my hand. ‘Charmian, lovely to see you again.’ Billy Damiani was tall, with slightly curly dark brown hair, and bright blue eyes. He had a gentle, beautiful voice which he knew how to use, and he was loaded with charm up to his eyeballs. I didn’t trust him an inch.

  But it was uncouth to appear sour, so I smiled back and sat down. I thought Lady Mary seemed relieved. Walked off your paddy, then? her look said. I gave her a look in return which said: Not as much as you think.

  ‘The church seems interesting,’ I said as I unfolded my napkin of stiff linen and a fair indicator of the size of the bill to come. ‘But it was locked so I couldn’t get in.’ I watched as Billy filled my glass with the pale wine they were already drinking.

  ‘Yes, it would be,’ said Mary. ‘They’ve had a bit of trouble in the village lately with robberies.’ She let Billy refill her glass. Which of us was going to be driving home, I thought, watching Mary. We had come in her car. It had better be me. I noticed Billy was drinking abstemiously. That was certainly his style too; let the others do the drinking, he would do the watching.

  ‘The church looks old.’

  ‘Not as old as the village, that’s been here for ever, but the first church was Saxon and there’s a bit of it left in the crypt, the present building is Norman.’ Mary had taken in architectural styles and a certain amount of history with her mother’s milk.

  ‘Who was St Edwin the Martyr?’

  Mary looked vague. ‘I think he was a Saxon king and someone in his court did him in.’

  ‘And I found Mrs Armitage’s grave. She must have had quite a history.’

  ‘The Duke was very genuine, no money but a real title, the earldom was a bit suspect, and gave the family pause for thought. Not quite out of Debrett,’ said Mary with the detachment of one whose family title is authentic if not very ancient or distinguished, ‘but you can call yourself anything, I suppose. He claimed it was an old Scots earldom, Bea knew the score, of course, but she didn’t mind. I believe he was madly attractive, not that I ever knew him, he was dead before I was born, and Bea couldn’t resist.’

  Like aunt, like niece, I thought.

  ‘Lot of deaths about the same time as your aunt’s,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, well, you know what villages are like,’ said Mary vaguely.

  I didn’t, but I supposed I would learn.

  ‘Things go about,’ she said, as if death was like gossip and could be transmitted with the post and the groceries. Perhaps it could.

  ‘Was it an epidemic of some sort?’

  Mary didn’t seem to want to talk about it. ‘ No, not in Bea’s case, she took ill and died. I suppose it was the same with the others.’

  An epidemic of death then?

  ‘A man was laying flowers on the grave of a Mrs Dryden, she was a sister of the other three, Beasley, they were called.’

  ‘Local names,’ said Mary. She shifted uneasily in her seat. ‘Of course, I don’t know the village that well.’

  ‘So you’re thinking of moving to Brideswell?’ Billy Damiani was giving me the full dose of charm. I was being targeted by a first-class performer who wanted me to know it. Perplexing.

  ‘Yes.’ I found I had made up my mind. ‘I’ll be putting an offer in for the house, Mary.’ It would be my bolt-hole, my charming, desirable eighteenth-century retreat. I would be like some character in a Jane Austen novel. It was my fantasy.

  Billy was ordering smoked salmon for us. ‘I hear you are getting married. My friend Humphrey Kent.’

  Humphrey would be interested in that description, I thought. I didn’t answer, just smiled. Maybe yes, maybe no, we’re still negotiating and nothing to do with you. Billy was making me angry.

  But Mary had been right about the food, which was delicious. A kind of chicken roulade succeeded the salmon, and then a sorbet. I ate with appreciation. I had had a difficult year, one in which good food had not played much of a part. I had got used to grabbing a hamburger or a toasted sandwich before rushing on to the next crisis, the next meeting. Crime had been increasing in my region. I had been involved personally in at least two cases, and been approached by a multiple wife-murderer and swindler who had thought I looked a promising prospect but who had underestimated me. He was now in prison. Through all these months I had driven myself hard. The savage death yesterday of a man under arrest had not helped. I was conscious of too many rough edges.

  Good food was a great emollient, though. Mary and Billy chattered away about friends they had in common, politely including me when they could. Some of the time, I sat quietly listening, letting my own thoughts roam.

  I could see the blood on the face of the man who had died, still see his disintegrating features. I had not killed him but certainly he had died because of what I had discovered about him. Over my thoughts I could hear Billy speaking.

  ‘I need your help, Charmian.’ I had never liked my own name and I liked it that bit less for it being on his tongue.

  Billy ran his finger arou
nd the rim of his coffee cup, and lowered his blue gaze.

  I stiffened; I felt myself do it, and Billy looked up and saw. He didn’t miss much, I thought, as he looked down again.

  ‘Go on.’ There is no such thing as a free lunch.

  He still did not meet my eye, but let his gaze roam around the room. ‘I was here to dinner last week. Brought a girl.’

  Surprise me, I thought. Mary’s expression did not change, not for one moment had she thought she represented anything important in Billy’s life.

  ‘Started the meal, we had a bit of a discussion, she got up and went off. Of course, I thought she’d come back, so I waited. She didn’t come back. Never has. Not that night nor the next day. I haven’t seen her since. No one has, she’s missing.’

  I sat thinking. ‘When you say discussion, do you mean quarrel?’

  ‘I didn’t quarrel, her voice got a bit loud.’ He looked round the room. ‘You can ask the waiters, they heard. They saw her go.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘As I said I waited, then went out to ask, the doorman said she had taken her wrap, a scrap of chiffon, and gone through into the street and started walking. So I looked for her in the village as much as I could. It was dark and wet. In the end I gave it up, left a message with the porter, and drove back to London.’

  ‘Leaving her there?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘And next day what did you do?’

  ‘I rang her flat, no luck. Then I tried to find out if she’d gone into work but her colleagues hadn’t seen her. She has never been back.’

  ‘What about her family?’

  ‘I don’t know them.’

  ‘Oh, that’s it then, she’s gone to them.’

  ‘Perhaps. But I don’t think so.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘One of the girls in her flat went to the police. They said she was an adult, not a child, and would probably turn up.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘No. A detective constable came to question me. I don’t think he took it seriously.’

  I thought that the London police had taken it quite seriously if a detective had called and Billy Damiani knew it. It was this that was what was worrying him. He confirmed this with his next remark.

  ‘Apparently her bank card and chequebook are still in the flat. He told me that. This was something they did not like.’

  I wondered what he most worried about: the fate of his girlfriend, or what would be turned up in his own life if an investigation was launched.

  ‘I don’t know what I can do, it’s out of my area.’

  ‘The village is in it.’ Just, I thought, and how well informed you are.

  ‘What’s the girl’s name?’

  ‘Chloe Devon.’

  I finished my wine. ‘ Right. If the name comes up, if I hear anything, then I’ll let you know.’

  Billy was brave enough to articulate one of his worries. ‘If anything has happened to Chloe, if she’s dead, where would I be?’

  ‘In trouble,’ I said readily.

  I drove Mary back to Windsor. I was safer at the wheel. By this time the big blue Bentley was speeding its way to London to where Billy Damiani had his home and his office. I would be interested to know what went on in that office. I could consult some of my City friends.

  ‘You can move in when you like,’ Mary said as she settled herself in to her seat next to me. ‘I’m Bea’s executor. I would be her heir if she’d had anything to leave but debts. I’ll fix it with the solicitors. You can have a nominal lease before buying.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Humphrey won’t like it, but that’s up to you.’

  ‘He won’t mind.’ I knew he would, but he must learn to bear things like that if he wanted me.

  ‘You’re quite ruthless.’ Mary closed her eyes comfortably.

  ‘So are you. You fed me, alive, to Billy Damiani.’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘And I may not be much use to him.’

  What had happened to Chloe Devon? Had she been abducted? Was she dead? Or had the girl just taken off for purposes of her own?

  She might be dead, but if her body did not turn up in my patch – and praise be it would not – then I would know as much or as little about her death as colleagues in another Force might transmit. They were supposed to inform me, but knew how to be economical with the truth, having invented the process long before any high-ranking civil servant.

  And what did Billy Damiani know about Chloe’s disappearance? Rather more than he was telling me, I was sure.

  Mary and I had established a wary relationship after the initial trauma of her efforts to get me into professional trouble. We were friends, but careful friends. She was a lot younger than me, so I found myself able to forgive her a good deal. Some residual maternal instinct, I suppose. She had been jealous of my relationship with Humphrey Kent, and probably was still if she admitted it.

  ‘Your trouble,’ I said, ‘is that you are always dreaming of a Fairy Prince.’

  ‘I’d settle for a real one. Or a royal duke, but they are in short supply.’

  She had not heard what Damiani had said to me as he held my car door; he was shivering slightly in the cold wind, the cashmere overcoat still locked in his Bentley. ‘I’d take it friendly if you’d help me.’ And when I did not answer, he added: ‘After all, we all need friends. You might yourself.’

  It was nicely said, as mild and sweet as good butter, but I knew a threat when I heard one. A threat mingled with a warning.

  As I drove, I asked myself what help, what warning, was he offering?

  I ran over what was happening in my life. I had come close to alarms in the past in my work, most police officers do if they aren’t pasteboard figures, but there was nothing at the moment. Professionally and privately my conscience was clear, there was no bubble floating over my head saying Watch it.

  Several days passed, but the name of Chloe Devon did not figure in any reports. Billy Damiani telephoned once to say he had heard nothing from her, and again to say he thought the Met were now taking it seriously. I learnt that this was so, but they had nothing.

  I paid a deposit on the house in Brideswell and arranged for a survey to be done; I knew the result would be bad, the roof was certainly in trouble, but I needed to know the worst.

  I saw Humphrey several times and told him about the house, and as predicted he was not pleased, but he didn’t say much. He was a man of property himself and approved of property owners but I suppose, at heart, he wanted to be the one who chose my property.

  He pointed out that he had a house in Windsor and a place in the country so why, when married, did we need another?

  Very reasonable and hard to answer. I agreed that I might give up my house in Maid of Honour Row, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to live in his house. I’d think about it. Meanwhile, I took him to Brideswell to see the house and he admitted it had charm. We left the car by the Red Dragon and walked through the village together.

  I had visited often enough by now to name a few of my neighbours. Next door, in one of the larger grander houses, lived Crick Leicester and David Cremorne. David was the young cousin of the Earl, still living but in a warmer clime. The estate was kept up but he never came to it. David lived in a Grace and Favour house belonging to the estate. For which, as he told me himself, he paid no rent, but coped with all the maintenance. It was a lovely house, he said, but they did have a problem with rats. He had just written a prize-winning biography of Stanley Baldwin, and was now about to embark on Lord Curzon. He had had a lot of publicity on the television and was modestly famous.

  Crick was his stepfather. The two men were both tall and moved beautifully; the stepfather had influenced the style of the son. But Crick was thin, with a wispy grey moustache, and almost bald, with just a few strands of blackish hair, while David was handsome with the famous fire-red Cremorne hair.

  David’s mother had been the daughter of ‘the old Lord’, bu
t owing to the law of primogeniture had inherited little money and had been a spender rather than a maker. She had died in Italy where they had lived near Lucca. The estate had been inherited by the son of the younger brother of the ‘old Lord’ who never came to England and whom no one knew.

  Mary had told me about them. ‘Aunt Bea liked them but she seemed to think they were a bit of a joke, she always smiled when she spoke of them.’ Mary had added reflectively: ‘Of course, that may have been due to David’s lovely blue eyes and curly hair, Aunt Bea did like a good-looking man. She knew most of the Cremorne men in the old days, and I have thought she might have had a bit of a fling with the old Earl.’ An amused look had appeared on Mary’s own face then. ‘And I have a sneaking idea that she knew Crick in his bohemian days … he’s an artist who doesn’t paint.’ A definite grin appeared on her face, and I was predisposed to like the two men.

  Further down the road lived Nora Garden, an elderly actress. She lived alone, more or less, give or take the odd lover, for she had by no means given up the pleasures of life. A few doors along lived a husband and wife who had not lived here long and who, in the village phrase, ‘ kept themselves to themselves’, and were, accordingly, regarded as mysteries. He was a lawyer and she was a civil servant, thus much the village had discovered about Brenda and William Letts. Down one attractive alley was a charming thatched cottage where, so I was told, Dr Harlow lived. He had no surgery in the village, but was a member of a group practice with a health centre on the outskirts of Reading. If you were very sick, the doctor came out to you, otherwise you took yourself and your ailments in on the bus or got a friend to drive you in. I saw Dr Harlow one day, a tall, quiet-looking man who was walking his Jack Russell terriers with the patient air that owners of dogs soon learn. After that, I saw him several times with his dogs, walking under the trees beyond the church.

  The vet, a handsome young man called Tim Abbey and known locally as ‘ our Tim’, came regularly in his white van because this was a farming village. In addition the same white van set up its hospital once a week near the church for small pets. It was well patronized. In fact it was easier to be a sick animal than a sick person.