I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was not a very agreeable person. My work ironed out some of the softer sides of a woman. But I knew I could be tender. It was still there, that capacity, it just didn’t show so often.
My house was empty. I fed Muff and left a note for Humphrey. I took the opportunity as he stood by the fire in the living room to run upstairs to smooth my hair (but Baby had done a good job and the line had survived the wind and the rain) and to abandon my tailored jacket and grab a soft leather blouson.
‘A drink, yes,’ I said as I came back. ‘A meal, perhaps. But not the Red Dragon.’
‘We agree on that. I know somewhere.’
It turned out to be half a working session while we talked over the two deaths and half a quiet exploration of each other. I did not mention his wife and he did not mention my career, although both undoubtedly lurked in the undergrowth of our minds. The undergrowth in mine was sprouting fiercely, putting down strong roots and sending out feelers.
Chloe Devon and Thomas Dryden saw us through drink and the meal.
‘Dryden was trying to tell me something. He knew his killer, but he was talking about another murder. “One of them was murdered,” that was what it sounded like.’
‘He can’t have been easy to understand, poor devil.’
‘No, he wasn’t … Do you know Ellen Bean?’
‘I’ve met the lady,’ he said tersely.
‘She said there was a ghost in the village. I wonder if she meant him?’
‘You ask her.’
‘She wouldn’t give a straight answer.’ Witches never did. ‘ I only saw Dryden three times. Once in the churchyard before I came to live in Brideswell, once again in the Red Dragon, he was very drunk, and then last night.’
I was trying to construct a person out of those three meetings.
‘I wonder if he knew Chloe Devon?’
‘No evidence, but if he drank in the Red Dragon he may have seen her there.’
‘That’s worth following up.’
‘Perhaps he killed her then killed himself.’ A Gothic thought.
‘He didn’t give himself the blow on the head,’ said Barney seriously. ‘But I’ll consider him for Devon, I’m considering all the men in the village, and all the men in her life. Damiani is top of that list, but there’s nothing to fix it on him.’
‘Still top of my list. But he would never have done it himself. He would have paid someone.’
‘Don’t think I’ve overlooked that either.’
‘And don’t think I’ve forgotten the plodding police hours that involves.’
‘Not my feet these days, thank goodness, but I have to account for them in terms of overtime and extra duties.’ And, in the end, to succeed or fail.
When we came to coffee, there was first silence and then we talked to each other.
Humphrey wasn’t there when I got home, not there that night at all. In the morning a weary voice sounded on the telephone.
‘I’m sorry, I had to see the PM and it went on for ever.’
‘Oh, sure.’
‘Yes, really.’
‘So what was it all about?’
‘I would have told you last night, but you weren’t around yourself.’
I didn’t answer, no decent reply coming readily to my lips.
‘I’m off to Washington and might have to drop in on Brussels on the way back, not sure for how long, but I’ll telephone.’
We didn’t say much after this statement, just the usual this and that of two people who are keeping something back from each other. I knew what I was keeping back, so what was Humphrey’s share?
After we’d finished talking, I unwound the bandage from my ankle. It was bruised and swollen, sore to touch and to walk upon. I would have to stay home today and think.
It was Achilles, wasn’t it, who was vulnerable only through his heel?
Chapter Fifteen
Brideswell was as haunted as a village could be that night as I had slept. Later I learnt of two groups of people who were haunted.
One set because they were hiding what was not there.
The other two because they were hiding guilt that was there. At that time I had not got them identified.
And then there were some little furry creatures who were only doing what furred, toothed creatures do. Some of them were already dead because they might have been evidence. If they had spirits perhaps those little ghosts would have roamed around.
But as Ellen Bean said there was no ectoplasmic ghost, visible if voiceless, just an atmosphere of the past being too heavy to hold itself in. Persons were trying to push the weight back but it was proving too heavy a burden.
Ellen Bean said to me when we later had a private conversation (after telling me once again that she had wormed Benjy), that she now knew whose spirit was fuelling the haunting.
‘At first I did not know. I sensed the feeling but I could not tell precisely where it was coming from. There is always one strong source, you know. Now I know who it was.’
Chloe Devon? Thomas Dryden?
‘No,’ said Ellen Bean, ‘it is Katherine Dryden. She is the one doing the haunting. That surprises you, doesn’t it?’
Not as much as you might suppose, I said to myself. Ellen always thought she had the answer to everything. But it is not as simple as that: she had help.
‘And it is not much good asking the Rector for a service of exorcism,’ she said regretfully. ‘ He is so modern. I’m not sure he believes in God so he is even less likely to believe in the devil.’
I am not sure I do myself, although I certainly believe in evil and have seen it sprouting out of the walls in some houses in some places.
‘I think we have an infestation here,’ said Ellen briskly. ‘I might deal with it myself.’
Or you could call it a case of bad conscience. A communal bad conscience.
Chapter Sixteen
I had remembered to buy some coffee beans in Windsor market so I ground two big handfuls for my breakfast coffee. The smell encouraged me sufficiently to put some bread under the grill to toast. I knew I ought to stay around and watch it or it would burn, but as usual, I forgot and was drinking orange juice when I smelt that familiar smell of carbonized bread. It looked like charcoal. I took the bread out and started again. I would need some more bread soon, but I enjoyed going to the baker’s shop.
Then I might go and see Crick and David, pick up the local village gossip and be amused by the entertaining pair. Idle the day away. I could call this break from work a holiday. Make a holiday, do the sort of thing that hardworking professional Charmain Daniels never did. Or hadn’t done for a very long time.
While I was watching the second toasting, Benjy was returned to me. The doorbell rang, I answered it and a hand thrust Benjy through the gap. All I saw was Ellen Bean’s retreating back. ‘ He’s been a good boy, I’ve wormed him. I’m off to Reading for the day. Marketing. Tomorrow is a day on which I will not eat nor sleep.’ And she was gone, leaving me with a freshly wormed Benjy and the smell of burning toast.
‘Is she going marketing, boy?’ I asked him. ‘Or is it some witch’s ploy?’ There had been something about the toss of her tweed cloak that had looked determined and stylish as if she knew what she was about. ‘And what’s this about not eating nor sleeping?’
What I had learned from my contacts with Birdie and Winifred in Windsor was that you should never take a witch’s word at face value. I wish I had the chance to call her back because I would like to have talked to her. She knew Brideswell thoroughly, and Ruddles Lane and the Midden were not so far away from the Dryden house, so the chances were that she knew more about the Drydens than some in the village and if she didn’t then she could take a look in her crystal ball and get some news.
I made yet more toast standing over it this time while it browned under the grill. I ate it with honey in the kitchen while Benjy watched me. He had come back from the Beans’ with several new tricks: he could sit up and beg,
he could bark a thank you (I presumed it was thank you) when a piece of buttered toast was offered, and he had also, as I discovered later, learnt to walk to heel, something he had resolutely refused to master before. The only drawback was that he did not always choose to make it my heel.
I drank some strong coffee while I thought about myself. There probably was a life outside my professional world but I wasn’t too sure about it. I was beginning to take the two deaths in Brideswell personally. I’ve often had very strong feelings about murders I have investigated, don’t think I have not, police officers do, especially if a child is involved, but these feelings were different, scary.
The newspaper, the post, and the pile of notes and papers from Rewley and other sources that I had assembled on the two murders were on the kitchen table. Muff was sitting on them, purring gently. Her illness, from whatever source, was in the past. I moved her aside to look at what I had.
Two things interested me: the account of the poison, methyl bromide, preserved by Katherine Dryden and her messages, comments, call them what you will, on the back.
She had been fascinated by the article on methyl bromide and played with the idea that it had killed the Beasley family. She might have talked about it. She herself had died in a motorway accident about which no suspicion of anything contrived appeared to hold. She had not killed herself nor been killed. Just one of those nasty things that happen.
But Thomas Dryden had kept this paper and, judging from the beer and coffee stains on it, had read it more than once. Who had he talked to about it? I found that worth thinking about, but I could not put a shape to my thoughts. They were swirling around. Inchoate.
And then, new fact to consider, he was going to sell the house. Well, he was unhappy, he wanted to get away. I could understand what moved him.
At this point, I could put a more positive slant on my thoughts. Chloe Devon had worked, briefly, for an estate agent. I thought it was the same one that Dryden had used.
It was a possible connection between the two murdered people, the only one I had discovered so far.
Except for the village. The place came into this somehow, I would swear. I telephoned George Rewley who was not answering but whose office answering machine was.
‘Find out if Chloe Devon worked for Astley Green when Dryden put his house on their books and if they could have met. Or if she could have had any contact with Thomas Dryden.’ I knew that Chloe Devon had been in this very house while working for an estate agent, but I myself had dealt directly with Mary Erskine and had not used an agent. I suppose I could ask Mary myself. ‘I’d like to know if the two victims ever spoke.’
This last point was asking for magic, I thought, but I had known Rewley perform alchemy before now.
Then I went to my bedroom to dress before going out. It was a long while since I had kept my own house tidy. In Windsor I had regular daily help (for which I was still paying, only the lady was on permanent leave till my roof on the house in Maid of Honour Row was safe and leakproof) but here in Brideswell it was up to me again. I made the bed and dusted the room, reverting without conscious thought to the way of doing it of my younger self. My life was winding backwards.
I was dressed and ready to go out into the village when Rewley rang back. Not with any news but to find out what it was all about. He would ask Astley Green but he wanted to know why.
‘What’s on your mind?’
‘I wish I could answer that. I’m just digging around, trying to see what connects.’
Only connect, that’s what E. M. Forster said, didn’t he? But he didn’t have quite what I had in mind: the digging out of a killer.
‘There is a connection: they were both killed in Brideswell.’ He might have made a black joke about Charmian Daniels being a connection, some would, but not Rewley.
‘That’s a start.’
‘And both seemed to have suffered similar injuries. I’ve heard about the bites on Dryden.’
I think everyone had, it had even leaked out to the newspapers.
Through the window I could see a young woman, presumably a journalist, since she had a photographer with her, camped beneath an umbrella outside my own door.
‘Yes, all of that is known, but I’m looking for something more. I want to find out if there was contact. If there was some moment when Chloe Devon and Thomas Dryden met face to face.’
‘There’s the Red Dragon.’
‘Yes, I’ve thought about that and I’m on my way to ask.’
He didn’t answer at once. ‘I’ve nothing new on Damiani. But I can give you something on Devon.’
‘Come on then.’
‘I had to go back to one of the girls she worked with on Damiani’s magazine, Sarah Henry, because it turned out she was at college with Kate and we’re asking her to dinner. Sarah relaxed a bit this time round and she said that Chloe joked that it was a good job she was a discreet sort of girl because she had something on someone in Brideswell that could blow them out of the water.’
Perhaps not such a discreet sort of girl, I thought. ‘Did she say whom?’
‘Not by name. But Sarah thought she’d met this person when she was working abroad.’
Could be anyone from Bea Armitage to Damiani himself, I thought. Even Nora Garden travelled. And I mustn’t forget Crick and David here.
‘How is Kate?’
‘Fine, considering.’
‘Considering what? She’s all right, isn’t she?’ I asked with some anxiety.
‘Kate is well, but Annie is turning into a professional grandmother: she has already recommended an obstetrician, a monthly nurse, and a vegetarian diet.’
‘But Annie isn’t a vegetarian.’ Kate’s mother and my dear friend, Annie Cooper, was many things but not vegetarian.
‘Agreed, but she seems to think her grandchild should be.’
‘Keep in touch,’ I said.
The press had disappeared from outside my house when I left and the rain had stopped. I thought about what Rewley had reported of Chloe Devon as I walked towards the baker’s shop. The usual crowd was there which was why I had chosen to go there first. I walked past the Red Dragon and saw a man watering the window boxes but he had the surly, withdrawn look of someone not about to answer questions willingly. I’d go in myself later, have a drink and sandwich and see what answers I could flush up. I was on holiday, not working, out of it all, but that wouldn’t count.
I could feel the man looking at me as I walked away. Knows me, I thought. Wonder if I ought to know him? Since I had a large criminous acquaintance the idea aroused thought. Hotels were usually careful about the honesty of those they employed.
Might be a murderer done his time, of course. Murderers could be very honest.
Short, sandy hair, going bald on top. Spectacles. Scrawny but with the beginnings of a pot belly. I had trained to remember faces, but no, I didn’t know him.
If he knew me, then he was a face from the past. I had trained in Scotland, worked there for a very limited time, then moved south to Deerham Hills in Hertfordshire, then briefly to London, to the Met, and at last to a unit in Windsor. I had moved a lot and in this professional progress I had run across plenty of unpleasant people.
Nora Garden was there before me in the baker’s, choosing her loaf. She must get up early, so she was probably not working. I hadn’t seen her on the television screens lately. I wondered how she made out. As she had said herself once: there wasn’t much work around for actresses of her age. ‘Get to be ninety and a Dame of the British Empire,’ she had said, ‘and I’ll be working all the time.’
Today she was sorting over the wholemeal rolls looking for the ones that were slightly burnt, which she said improved the flavour. The baker’s wife, born a Beasley, married to a Beasley and there must be a good deal of inbreeding in the village, looked on patiently.
‘We could always burn a batch specially for you, Miss Garden,’ she said. ‘But you’d have to take the whole lot.’
‘No, thank
you, dear, just go on burning a few as usual,’ said Nora equally straightfaced. ‘I’ll take four.’
She turned round and saw me. ‘Hello, and good morning. How are you?’ She looked down at my ankle. ‘ How’s it doing?’
‘Healing.’
She waited while I bought a loaf, selected some brioches, and picked out some iced biscuits, before saying: ‘Bad day. I know about Thomas Dryden.’
It was all over the village by now I supposed. If she only just knew, then she was one of the last to hear.
‘I was learning a script yesterday, didn’t go out. Used to walk the churchyard sometimes, learning my lines. Not yesterday, though. Glad I didn’t now.’
All right, I thought, no need to explain yourself. No one is suspecting you.
‘He was a nice man,’ said Mrs Beasley. ‘Till he took to drink. And that wasn’t his fault, he was upset about his wife. And even then he was a gentleman.’
‘Agreed,’ said Nora.
‘This used to be a nice village once,’ said Mrs Beasley. ‘Now I don’t know what to make of it, nothing but terrible deaths.’ She looked at me as if it was my fault.
I paid her and left the shop with Nora. David Cremorne was outside with his shopping bag. I couldn’t help giving a quick look at his hair which I now knew to be tinted. It looked natural, with a beautiful cut. Baby and her minions had done a good job.
‘Nora, Charmian, lovely to see you both,’ he said. ‘Crick’s on his cooking stint today, so I’m on the marketing shift. I’m better than he is at both, but he has to have his turn or he sulks.’
‘He can come and cook for me any day he likes,’ said Nora.
David turned his attention to me. ‘You’ve lost weight.’
‘Oh, good.’
He was scrutinizing me. ‘Or is it just your expression … thoughtful, anxious. You look haunted.’
Haunted, that word again. I was looking for a murderer, that’s what my look was. ‘How’s work?’ Shift the subject away from me and my look and haunting. ‘The book?’
Whoever Has the Heart Page 15
