‘Thank you.’
‘You could still spend a bit more. I mean you’re a public figure, people know you, look at you.’
‘Don’t tell me I’m a role model.’
‘For some girls, yes.’ Baby was serious. ‘Not for me, of course. There’s no way you and I could ever be like each other.’
‘I should think not.’
Our eyes met over the washbasin into which my hair was about to be plunged backwards and we giggled. Baby was about the only person left in the world I could giggle with now. I used to be able to giggle with my sister, but once she got married she seemed to give it up. I suppose I got more serious too, life made me that way. So many dead bodies, so many lost and abused children, so many victims, and the store of laughter inside you gets eaten away.
‘The trouble with you is, you need a man.’ She was hovering over my dripping head with her scissors, still muttering about the need to lighten it a bit. ‘You always attract such weak men, ones that want a shoulder to lean on.’
‘You don’t know anything about my life.’
‘I can guess, can’t I? And you can tell a lot from a person’s roots. And I can tell right here and now that yours need nourishment.’
‘And how’s your life, Baby?’
She put down her scissors while her face went pink with pleasure. ‘I’ve met such a gorgeous bloke.’
I had a passing anxiety that he might be called Billy Damiani, in many ways they were made for each other, but no, he was called Jack. He was tall, dark haired, and handsome. He was, as happened regretfully often lately, Baby admitted, younger than she was.
‘But these days that’s all right, isn’t it? I’m in the fashion.’
‘Is he a great deal younger than you?’
She was shifty about admitting how much, one decade, two decades. ‘ I don’t dwell on it,’ she said.
I was too tactful to ask what his trade, profession, or chosen villainy was. But she told me: he drove lorries across the Continent, he was one of the new Europeans, born in Hackney, brought up in Bromley, Kent, and now he had a farm in Normandy and a house in London. He belonged to the Conservative Party but never bothered to use his vote. He sounded just right for Baby.
‘I do his hair,’ she said. ‘ That’s how we met, his last hairdresser had left it in a shocking state, he could see the care I took. I gave him a lovely little perm, just a crop of curls, you know, all cut away, hardly there but beautiful to see, like a Botticelli angel.’
‘What do you know about Botticelli?’ Rudely, perhaps. I shouldn’t have said it. Baby had her pride.
‘I go to exhibitions,’ she said, hurt. ‘He’s quite keen on pictures and he’s teaching me.’
She had taken off a fair amount of my hair and I was beginning to get worried.
She saw my face. ‘You’ll be able to look after this yourself, easy for you now you live in the country.’
‘How do you know I do?’
‘Saw your picture in the Windsor Evening News. You’re noticed, you know. You looked as though you had a black eye, but I don’t suppose you had. Newspaper photographs never do you justice. Nasty murder,’ she added conversationally. ‘That poor girl.’ She shook her head. ‘ Still, she had an accident coming to her.’
‘You didn’t know her?’
‘I can tell you just what sort of girl she was. You learn to read looks in my business … Clever, sharp. She’d look out for the main chance.’ A judicious note crept into her voice. ‘ Not real class. I feel sorry for her. I’d call her a game little bird but she’d run risks.’ She looked over my head to her own face in the glass above the basin. ‘Like me really. I think I’d have liked her, poor little cow.’
I could see there was a resemblance between the two if you looked at it the right way and it was like Baby to have seen it.
‘How’s the murder hunt going?’
I shrugged.
‘Oh, it’s all right, I know you won’t tell me.’
‘Can’t, not won’t.’
‘And now there’s been another murder.’
I was surprised. ‘How do you know that?’
‘On the news. Radio Reading. You don’t think you’re a secret, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Lively village you’ve got yourself too. I’ve got a customer from there already. I tint his hair. Lovely looking lad, dear David.’
I was interested and amused that David was vain enough to tint his hair. And trust Baby to be so admiring.
‘All right, if you won’t talk about the murders, let’s talk about something interesting … The new man you’ve got.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You did. Or more or less. I’m good at guessing. What’s he like?’
‘I don’t know. I’m only just discovering him. When you first meet him, you think there’s nothing there at all. Later … you learn.’
One of the last days I had heard him talked about in the canteen over coffee. I had listened in.
‘He seems so married,’ someone had said. And someone else said: ‘No. Not married at all. His wife topped herself.’
A man whose wife has killed herself is not a nothing. He is either a very good man or a monster. I wanted to find out which.
‘I can read you like a book,’ said Baby.
This was not true, I could think of many occasions, most of them professional ones, when she had certainly not read my mind, but on the other hand Baby had an uncanny knack of getting me right in personal matters.
She laughed. ‘ You’re fishing. I can tell. One thing I do know about is women and men, and women and women for that matter.
It’s all the same.’ She put her head on one side. ‘ You’ve never thought of that for yourself?’
‘No.’
‘Perhaps you’re right.’ She beckoned to an assistant. ‘Here’s Maidie, who will do your nails.’ She watched me put my hand on a pink cushion. ‘And that’s how I know you’re fishing: the manicure. You only ask for that when you are.’
Thoroughly unsettled by Baby, which she had intended as I well knew, she was punishing me for being an absent friend, but with clean hair and bright shining nails, I drove home.
Back in Brideswell, I fed Muff, and said a thankful prayer that Benjy was back at the Midden and that Winifred and Birdie would be back in a day or two, and then followed the road to where Thomas Dryden had lived.
It was not so far away from the Midden, I found myself walking down Ruddles Lane in the twilight. The Midden was a long low grey-stone house which faced straight on to the lane. The curtains were drawn but there were lights behind. No one looked out but Ellen Bean could probably see me in her crystal ball. There were no other houses close by, the Bean house stood on its own on the edge of a farm.
The lane rose slightly up a gentle slope at the top of which I had to take a turning to the left. A thick hedgerow lined the road on one side and a belt of old elms on the other. Beyond the trees I could see fields, a soft brown earth, turned and ready to its crops. Another field was grass with two horses standing side by side. I could smell the earth and the growing things, a green, damp smell.
There was a house standing alone in the fields; this had to be the Dryden house. The surface of the road was muddy and bore the tracks of many cars. Now it was quiet, with just one solitary police car on guard at the gate. They knew me or had been alerted by Clive Barney, so they saluted and let me go past.
One man got out of the car. ‘Shall I walk across with you, ma’am?’ He eyed me curiously. ‘Or drive you, it’s sloshy walking up there.’
‘No, I’ll manage, thank you.’
He didn’t ask if I had a key to the house so he certainly knew that I had. ‘Been crossed all day,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Two TV crews before breakfast. They’ve all peeled off now. A siege in a factory in Wapping. Not our affair, that’s the Met, and they’re welcome.’
He watched me through the gate, holding it open for me before returning to the car.
I had changed into boots for the walk but I still wore the clothes I had worn to the hairdresser’s. I felt conscious of what I was wearing. Not smart enough for Baby, too smart for a walk in the country. In my life it was hard to get the clothes right.
The house was red-brick, square and ugly. Planted down like a stranger in the English countryside about eighty years ago, I reckoned by the style and look of it, but it could last another hundred and eighty.
Why was I visiting the Dryden house? Just curiosity? A sense of possessiveness about this murder in my own backyard? Both of those things, but also the feeling that I owed a debt to Thomas Dryden, because he had tried to tell me about a murder.
One of them was murdered.
He had not had time to tell who was murdered but perhaps his house would.
I let myself in to stand in the middle of the hall. I pressed the light switch. Signs of a police team having gone over it were everywhere. Furniture had been moved, carpets rolled back and inspected for blood stains, curtains the same.
This was a shame because I could see that Dryden had kept it tidy, I liked him for that. A nice, ordinary home with clean bright paint, rugs on polished wood, and a new kitchen.
I walked up the stairs. The bathroom was new, a pale pink bath and matching everything, even the lavatory paper. Part of a fashion that had passed, but the Drydens had stayed with it. The police had been less active up here so it was tidier. A room with a small double bed and an empty feel to it. One big room with twin beds, scent and make-up still on the dressing table so this had been their room.
Probably her clothes were still there in the cupboard. I opened a door and yes, there they were. Tweed suits, jersey dresses, a bit of denim in skirts and jeans, a solid, professional woman’s wardrobe. Size fourteen.
A pile of neatly folded nightgowns in the top drawer of the dresser, and one still tucked away under a pillow on the bed. I didn’t like that.
On a table in the window were a pile of books: a word-processing manual, a dictionary of scientific words and phrases, a German dictionary, and a black folder of papers.
I opened the folder, seeing at once that it contained copies of letters and reports that she had worked on for the Institute. By the names scribbled on the top she had processed reports for more than one person. Dr Fraser, Dr James, Miss Larner. I turned them over, noting that they were dated and numbered as if they represented work in progress that might be altered. Presumably these were copies she kept for her own reference.
They were in no sort of order and some of the pages had got detached from the originals and were stuck in at random.
The clothes in the wardrobe were in order which had made me think Mrs Dryden a neat, methodical woman. But her working papers were in a muddle.
It seemed to me that someone had been looking through them. Well, I could blame that on the police. But I thought they would have left things as they found them.
Thomas Dryden, then.
I looked at the report that sat on the top of the pile. It appeared to have been heavily studied somehow. It was a report on the death of a man and his rabbit from the methyl bromide which had issued from a leading refrigerator.
This was the case Rosie had talked about.
Methyl Bromide.
Bromomethane Monobromomethane.
A colourless non-inflammable gas with a burning taste, odourless in low concentrations.
Methyl bromide is a vesicant. Toxic effects after inhalation include dizziness, headache, anorexia, vomiting.
I raised my head. It was clearly nasty stuff. Death could occur,
and there was a period of latency.
There was more detail. ‘Methyl bromide has been used as an
insecticide fumigant and as a gaseous disinfectant.’
Lovely stuff, I thought.
I turned the page over. On the back there was a pencilled scribble.
Could this be how they died? I would be so relieved if they did not die from any infection that I brought back to them. I told them to get rid of that refrigerator. I did warn them. If I’d been home and not at that conference then I might have picked up what was going on earlier.
But this passage was crossed with black letters.
NOT SO. JUST MY FANTASY. GOD KNOWS
WHAT KILLED THEM, I AM GRABBING AT
STRAWS.
Right at the bottom of the page was a note: Take the cat for his injection.
I was standing there holding the page in my hands and looking out of the bedroom window when I saw the headlights of a car approaching.
The car stopped on the gravel drive and Clive Barney got out. He saw me at the window and waved.
‘I guessed you’d be here.’
You knew, I thought, you enquired and they said: ‘Yes, we opened the gate and she’s still there.’
‘Did you get what you wanted?’
‘I don’t know what I wanted.’ I looked round the bedroom. ‘ I found this, though.’ I handed it to him.
He read it through slowly and then again. While he was doing so I looked at Mrs Dryden’s dressing table. A blonde, judging by her lipstick and powder, with a liking for sweetish scent. She had a bottle of Chanel Number 12. An old favourite of my own.
‘It relates to the death of her brother and his wife?’
‘It relates to her state of mind and her death. I think she was clinically depressed and her husband knew it. He’d read it more than once judging by the look of it. Meant something to him, I think.’
‘Or perhaps it was the last bit of writing he had of his wife’s.’
‘Yes, it could be that.’ I took the page away from him. ‘I’d like to keep it for a while. May I? Thank you.’ He was being decent. I could think of more than one reason why his investigating team might say no, but decided not to mention them. ‘I’ll take care of it and see you get it back. I just want to think about it.’
‘The house has been swept over to see what it offers. I don’t know the result yet but nothing obvious turned up. He wasn’t killed here.’
‘Any more blood traces on the route he might have walked?’
Barney shook his head. ‘No, and it’s been raining so if there was a little blood it will have been washed away … Nothing more as yet on your cellar. It’s still sealed off.’
‘Too much blood around altogether,’ I said.
He knew the cellar worried me. ‘If it’s any comfort to you I don’t believe that Chloe Devon or any part of her was in the cellar while you were in the house.’
‘That’s just guessing.’ He was trying to be comforting.
‘It’s all guessing. Except for the bite marks on Dryden, which may not amount to much, we don’t even know that there is any connection between Dryden’s death and Chloe Devon’s. The lab boys can’t really suggest any particular animal for the bites beyond it being small.’
He was still trying to be helpful. ‘The pathologist could be wrong and I’m not putting much weight on it, but there were leaves and vegetable traces on Devon’s head and shoulders, and what look like similar leaves on Dryden’s clothes. The first report said geranium leaves. It does suggest that they had both been in the same spot.’
‘There are geraniums all round here,’ I said gloomily. ‘Some in my garden.’
‘Look on the bright side; it could turn out to be a rare form of the plant.’
‘Is that guessing too?’
‘Call it hoping.’ He hesitated. He was talking to a boss figure, a powerful boss too. I was making him nervous. ‘I was hoping … I wanted to talk things over, thought we might have a drink, or a meal … but you’re already on your way somewhere.’
I looked at him in surprise. ‘ No.’
‘Sorry.’ He was awkward. ‘But your nails. Lovely colour and you don’t usually … Sorry, I shouldn’t have said. But they look good.’
I laughed. ‘ Just an attempt to tidy myself up.’ Damn Baby, I thought, she knew her arrow would fly.
‘So? There’s a lo
t we ought to talk about.’
‘Yes, I’d like to … I’ve got to feed the cat first.’
He smiled. The smile was definitely crooked. An injury, I thought, you weren’t born that way. ‘I’ve got a dog, she’s in the car as a matter of fact.’
We walked down the stairs, turning off the lights as we went. The house was quiet and dead as the two people who had lived here. A house without owners soon dies.
‘Wonder what happens to this place?’
‘No idea. Dryden owned the fields round here. Or had them on lease from the Cremornes. Used to farm them. Set-aside land now.’
‘Quite an estate.’
‘Small but valuable.’ He sounded as if he knew. I had heard that his background was farming. ‘No children. Next of kin is a sister in Australia.’
On the table was a box of papers. I had missed this box.
‘The team went through those,’ he said, seeing my glance. ‘Household papers, bills, a few letters, nothing much.’ He picked out a letter still in its envelope. ‘I think he was planning to sell, this is from a house agent.’
I looked. ‘Astley Green. I’ve heard that name before. Chloe Devon worked for them.’ The envelope had no stamp. ‘ Delivered by hand.’
‘I expect someone came over with it.’
‘It could have been the girl herself.’
‘I’ll check.’
And so will I, I thought.
He locked the door and held out his hand for the key to the house, which I handed over. I wouldn’t be going back.
From inside his car, a dark massive form stood up. His dog.
‘What breed?’
He was thoughtful. ‘She’s a kind of a boxer.’ He opened the car door, carefully, I thought, as a heavy body thudded against it making low-throated excited noises. ‘ She’s very gentle.’ He cleared the front seat. ‘Get back, Emily.’
I always like men who bring their dog out on a date: it shows a nice need to be chaperoned. If this was a date.
I must stop having such flip thoughts. It was all those years with Humphrey who was so correct, so distinguished, and so bloody attractive with it. The only defence a woman had left against all those solid masculine virtues was a kind of irony.
Whoever Has the Heart Page 14
