‘I suppose it is someone local?’
He groaned. ‘ When I said you cleared my mind, I didn’t mean I wanted you to blow it wide open … I hope it is a local, because if not, then we shall never find who. There are no arrows pointing anywhere else.’
He had something else to say. ‘ I hear you’ve been in the Dragon asking questions.’
I didn’t ask him how he knew, but he told me. ‘The barman, Alf Tintern, was at school with one of my sergeants.’
‘And he just happened to say?’
‘That’s right,’ said Barney apologetically.
‘He didn’t give much,’ I said.
‘There isn’t much to give. That’s the trouble with Brideswell: all determined to know nothing.’
‘He did see Dryden and Chloe Devon talking to each other and picked up a bit of the conversation … It confirmed what I was thinking that they were both killed because of what they knew or had seen.’
I was suddenly hungry. I had been offered coffee by Crick and David, that seemed far too long ago. ‘What time is it? Have you eaten? Let’s go to the Dragon and get a meal.’
The Red Dragon restaurant was almost deserted except for a few late eaters. The barman gave me a friendly smile, then when he saw who I was with, he changed it to an assessing stare, and finally, when he saw us talking over our meal, he offered me a long, conspirational look that was almost a wink. ‘ I know what’s going on,’ he was saying. ‘A man like me always does. Recognize the look, seen it all before.’
He had seen me here with Mary Erskine and Billy Damiani, and also with Humphrey. He could smell emotions. It was part of his job, but he enjoyed it. He was one of the biggest disseminators of gossip in the village. I had already guessed that much. The others were Mrs Beasley in the baker’s shop and probably the Postmaster. But I guessed that Ellen Bean ran them a hard third.
Without a word being passed between us, we split the bill. I liked him for that. Humphrey usually made a small fuss. I could see that if I accepted the sapphire ring I would never pay another bill again.
The manager, who had been watching us through an inner glass window, was so anxious at the sight of two police officers lunching together in his hotel that I think he would have given us the lunch free.
As it was, he saw us to the door. He was anxious to let us know that business had been bad since the killings.
‘You must have made something while the press and TV teams were here,’ said Clive Barney without a lot of sympathy.
‘They’ve all gone now.’
It was true. The assembled media teams had first shrunk and then disappeared altogether. Even violent death got less newsworthy after a time.
‘Are you near making an arrest?’
‘Evidence is coming in all the time,’ said Barney.
‘Ah.’ The manager nodded. He knew a non-answer when he heard one. ‘You didn’t mind me asking? I thought you being in charge …’ He was an Italian, not quite at ease with English officialdom.
‘It’s teamwork,’ said Barney. ‘Teamwork, you know how it is.’
As we walked away. I said: ‘He didn’t like that.’
‘No, he wanted more. He’s all right. I’ve checked him, which he probably knows. I thought he might have some connection with Damiani. Both Italians.’
‘Goodness knows what Damiani is.’
‘It’s an Italian name. But there’s no connection between the two men. Not to be traced. I still think Damiani is in there somehow.’
‘You just don’t like him.’
‘Neither do you. We’ve already said this to each other.’ He stood at the gate, watching while I got my keys out. Muff was waiting for me on the door step. ‘He’s got a man working there whom you helped put away for murder … but you know it.’ He sounded mildly reproachful.
‘I should have mentioned it.’
‘Yes.’
A little sharpness there, I thought. A touch of the knife. I respected him for it. But I didn’t say so.
‘I see you’ve had the seal off the cellar,’ he said.
‘Oh, you noticed that, did you?’
‘Saw it on my way in.’
‘How did you know it was me?’
He didn’t answer, but gave me that crooked smile. It had to be the result of a wound, I must look up his record. He’d certainly studied mine, so it was fair.
‘What did you make of it? Did it give you any ideas?’
‘I’m still thinking it over. It’s a puzzle why my cellar should have been used.’
‘One of the many puzzles. Let me know if you think of anything.’
He stood at the gate, and I waved to him from the door.
The rest of the day went quickly. I had a message from the builder to say the house was in order and I could move back in whenever I liked, but to bring a duster as it would need a good dust. A joker, that man. A happy conversation with Kate followed, including an invitation from Kate and Rewley to take dinner with them. The telephone had rung again and I had not answered but I listened to a message from Mary Erskine to say she would like to see me because life was difficult at the moment.
Later still, I had a short talk with Humphrey, who was still busy saving NATO, to say he was held up in Brussels. He sounded warm and friendly. He was a nice man and I did miss him.
It seemed a long day. You can always eat to pass the time but I wasn’t hungry. I had eaten melon, grilled lobster, and salad at that late lunch with Barney, and nothing tempted me.
So I took Benjy for a walk. It was on this walk that I met Ellen Bean for the second time that day. She reprimanded me for my behaviour to Crick and David. ‘ I thought you liked them.’
‘I do like them, but I don’t like what they did.’ And I’m not sure I like you, I said inside myself. You may be good but you are powerful. I have restored your name to my list of suspects.
There she stood, tall, with big hands and a determined witch face, there was a slight cast in her left eye which came and went and which I took to be a sign. It was there now.
This was when she told me that the haunting in the village came from Katherine Dryden, no phantom or anything like that, just her troubled spirit stirring things up.
Chapter Nineteen
Sleep was hard to come by after such a day. In the middle of the night I woke up and realized what Mary Erskine and I had in common: we were both clever women who had their emotional lives in a muddle. Not only clever, we were well educated and sophisticated as well. Lady Mary had the additional advantage of inherited skills from generations of women who had organized large households, important husbands and lovers. I was working class; she ought to have managed better.
I couldn’t go back to sleep so I went downstairs to make some tea. The house felt cold but in the kitchen the ancient stove always burned. I wrapped myself in a blanket while I stared into the dark. Black sky outside with no early dawn. It matched my mood, I decided sourly.
Waiting for the sky to lighten, thoughts went racing round my mind. One of them was murdered, so Thomas Dryden had said. I found myself thinking about the death of Beatrice Armitage. Her name seemed to present itself as the hidden victim. She had been old and sick so her death had been deemed due to the inevitable progression of old age. Dr Barlow had said so.
But if it was not a natural death then it must have appeared so. No overt sign of violence.
Poison then? Poison was the obvious answer. If it was not something Ellen Bean had handed out, then what?
Of course, doctors know their way about poisons and can give death certificates.
But my mind went back to the passage on poison that Katherine Dryden had chosen and which her husband had kept by him.
She had speculated that her brother and his family had died from a poison seeping from their refrigerator. Had the killer got to know of this and used the idea? I leaned back in the chair. I was sitting in the same room as Bea Armitage’s old refrigerator but I was not ill. Muff, it was true, had been ill.
>
Bea had no other pieces of kitchen equipment, and what else there was, I had brought with me, and that was precious little.
The refrigerator was old enough, Heaven knows, but it seemed harmless. Some poisons were heavier than air, of course, so perhaps you had to be lower down on the floor to suffer ill effects. No, that couldn’t be so unless Bea Armitage had regularly gone to sleep on the kitchen carpet. Her cat had died first; I recalled wondering if that was a pointer to anything. Perhaps Muff had gone down into the cellar and had a breath or two of poison so that she fell ill?
I looked across the room to where Muff was draped across a chair. She hadn’t died, she seemed comfortable and fit. As I watched she opened her eyes, looked at me, yawned and stood up. Then she stalked across to the kitchen door, asking to be let out. Day had come.
I stood at the door smelling the soft sweet damp air. I felt light and empty, as if I hadn’t slept or eaten enough for days. It seemed the time to get dressed, prepare and eat a breakfast. And to make it what my mother called a proper breakfast: porridge, bacon, toast and marmalade. Tea or coffee was optional.
I decided to skip the porridge. I might have to leave out the bacon as there was none in the refrigerator. Probably not an egg either. I had bread for toast and there might be some marmalade left, but I seemed to remember Humphrey making complaining noises about the lack of it at our last breakfast.
I suddenly missed him, his complaining, demanding physical presence; I thought with a mixture of sad embarrassment of the sapphire ring still in its box upstairs.
I dressed slowly and carefully, putting on a favourite tweed skirt with a silk shirt and a cashmere jacket. Old, but you wore old things in the country, that was one thing that Mary had taught me. Shoes also old but well polished. Expensive shoes, everything must have cost. Old and cheap would not do, cheap and new would be worse. You had to know the rules in the country, Mary said.
The skirtband felt loose, I had lost weight, something I usually welcomed but not today. It seemed a sign of approaching dissolution.
Change, anyway, I might be dissolving and turning into someone different.
Someone thinner, less positive, more open to love.
I wasn’t sure if I liked that concept, it felt dangerous. I hadn’t been too lucky in love in the past. I went over to the drawer where the ring in its box was hidden under a pile of tights. Still there, safe. How terrible if it had been stolen.
When I put it on the ring slipped easily up and down on my finger. Now that was dangerous, I might lose it, so I put it back in the box, arranged the tights over it again, and closed the drawer.
It would be a good idea to eat the breakfast I had fancied, right to the last piece of toast, and I knew where to go. I would walk across to the Red Dragon and take a meal there.
Before I left I telephoned Rewley with a question. I could have asked Clive Barney to find out, but I preferred to ask Rewley. It seemed less disloyal to Humphrey.
Rewley sounded brisk and alert early as it was. He said he’d do what he could but scientists were not really his beat.
I knew this was an excuse. ‘But you knew whom to ask?’
‘Sure, but why not do it yourself?’
He disapproved of the way I was hiding in Brideswell. Didn’t like its influence on me. Or was that what Kate said?
‘Let me know,’ I replied, not answering his question. ‘See you at your dinner party. Who else is coming?’
But he didn’t answer, that was his revenge.
The Red Dragon, in the person of the head waiter, received me with polite caution. I could see he wondered what I was up to now arriving for breakfast. He looked around as if he expected me to join someone.
‘On your own, Miss Daniels?’
‘On my own.’
But he gave me a good table in the window where I was quickly served. The room was empty except for two middle-aged ladies who were eating while studying a road map. I heard one of them say: ‘We’ve done Windsor and I think we ought to do Oxford before Stratford, it’s kind of on the way, and I do want to see Magdalen College where C. S. Lewis taught. I’m such an admirer. I love the hobbits.’ Her companion said: ‘Oh, Dotty,’ in a depressed tone, as if she had heard this before. ‘Tolkien, Tolkien,’ I heard her mutter dolefully, like the tolling of a bell.
‘Bacon or kipper, miss? I can recommend the kippers. We buy them specially from the Isle of Man.’
‘Bacon, please.’
Through the window I saw several couples going through the village carrying trowels and spades.
‘What’s that about?’ I asked the waiter as he brought my coffee.
He barely looked out. ‘It’s the Best Kept Village week. The judges will be coming round tomorrow. Someone will probably be calling and asking why you haven’t weeded out the dandelions in your front garden.’
I didn’t even know if I had dandelions, but there was a fair chance that I had and more besides. At once I decided to let them stay there, determined not to be bullied into good behaviour, even with dandelions.
Somehow the richness of my breakfast seemed to be weighing me down, dragging me into a pit of self-pity. I turned towards the churchyard. It felt the natural place to go to in my present mood. The sun was shining today but it was not raising my mood.
The churchyard appeared empty at first until I saw two figures on their knees in the distance. No, not praying but weeding, which perhaps was the equivalent exercise in Brideswell today. One figure stood up to stretch which gave me the chance to recognize Ellen Bean. I had to guess that the other figure, who remained kneeling and wore a dark brown deerstalker hat, was her husband. I was not surprised to see Ellen doing her duty by the church because she had told me how hallowed this spot was, having been the site of a Roman temple and before that dedicated to a pagan earth goddess. For Ellen the goddess was the one that counted.
I did not want to speak to Ellen, so I turned away to sit in the church porch. The church door was open so that the smell all churches seem to have, of old stone and wood faintly tinged with candle wax and incense, floated out, but it was a peaceful smell. I hesitated for a moment, then went inside. I sat down in one of the old-fashioned wooden pews and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to speak to either god or goddess but perhaps one of them would speak to me. A few words of advice would be welcome.
I had plenty to think about. Foremost in my mind was the idea that the murderer of Chloe Devon, Thomas Dryden, and possibly Bea Armitage would never be caught.
His or her identity might become clear to the police: the police often know the name of a killer, but proof of guilt did not always follow.
A wily, clever, slippery killer. One who acted spontaneously as the opportunity offered, always the hardest sort of killer to catch.
The great ally of the investigator, chance or luck, might not operate here.
From underneath this surface preoccupation my own personal anxieties rumbled out like an underground train coming out of a tunnel into the daylight.
I was in the awkward position of being strongly attracted to two men. Not in love, I no longer had much heart for that state of mind. I had outgrown it or it had outgrown me, couldn’t be sure which. But what was happening to me might be worse. Painful, because I valued loyalty. I looked for it in my friends and colleagues.
Suddenly I wanted to walk away from both men.
Then a voice said: ‘Are you all right?’
I opened my eyes. It was the rector, Thomas Baxter. Wordlessly, I stared into his gentle, concerned face.
‘Yes. I’m sorry. I am fine.’
He was doubtful. ‘You don’t look it … It’s Charmian Daniels, isn’t it? I heard you give a talk once in Oxford on criminous women.’
‘I remember that. Don’t remember you.’
‘We didn’t speak … I didn’t ask a question.’
‘No one did. I remember thinking it was a bit like a university sermon.’
He laughed, but said: ‘ You are in trouble.�
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‘Troubled.’
‘Many of us are at this time in Brideswell,’ he said with some sadness. ‘Can I help?’
He couldn’t help, I thought. He was a scholar and churchman, too good, too gentle.
‘Come into the vestry and have some coffee.’
I shook my head. ‘Thank you but no. I’ve had too much coffee already.’
‘I don’t think there is anything else,’ he said doubtfully. ‘ Except for the communion wine … there might be some lemonade but it may not be very nice.’
The lemonade was quite as nasty as he had predicted. He said he thought it was left over from the last Boy Scouts’ meeting.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ I was watching the bubbles in the glass.
‘Not in connection with murder,’ he said at once.
‘No, they don’t kill, do they? Except by proxy.’
‘Is that what you believe?’
‘It’s been suggested.’
‘Disbelieve it,’ he said, his voice stern. ‘And I can guess who told you.’
‘Yes.’ I let the bubbles subside in the lemonade. ‘I expect you can.’
He said nothing more, leaving it to me. I think the Scouts may have spiked that lemonade because I found myself talking to him, pouring it all out. The murder, my own problems. His face gave nothing away.
‘You don’t love either of them,’ he said at the end. ‘Perhaps you never can.’
Why had I thought he was soft, easy? He was diamond-hard. He let that sink in, then said: ‘And you think you know the killer
but aren’t sure.’
I muttered something about this person being a healer.
‘My dear girl, you are an innocent. If that is the way your mind
is working you will never see further into the wood.’
‘What do you mean?’
He got up. ‘That’s all I’m saying.’
I walked back into the village, shoulders hunched, head down, reflecting on our conversation. The Rector of Brideswell was handsome and somewhat dramatic, and could handle a good bit of dialogue. I wondered if he’d ever been on the stage.
Whoever Has the Heart Page 19
