The Anathema Stone

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘I expect they keep things in reserve, sometimes, for when the news of the day’s a bit dull.’

  ‘My God! I hope they never do it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I couldn’t bear to see it.’

  ‘But you did it so well.’

  ‘You can hardly describe it as being in the best of taste, can you?’

  Mrs Scadbolt on the stairs, her pail clanking, her broom punishing the treads. Kenworthy stretched out his arm so that it ran along the back of the sofa behind Christine’s head.

  ‘You won’t mind if I go a quarter of an hour early, sir? My husband was going to the dentist this morning, so he’ll be home to an early dinner.’

  Kenworthy stood up, took money out of his wallet to pay her. There was a shortage of small change between them, so he told her to keep the balance. When she left, Christine was laughing.

  ‘What a ghastly woman!’

  He went on with their talk as if uninterrupted.

  ‘But now, surely, that you’ve got the thing over, you know you can go on to higher things?’

  ‘I hope so. My God, how I hope so! For John’s sake.’

  ‘He hadn’t thought of conscripting you into The Anathema Stone at an earlier stage?’

  ‘I wouldn’t do it. Half of me badly wanted to be Gertrude. The other half shied away. Besides, I knew how badly he wanted Davina in the part – because of its therapeutic value to her. That let me conveniently out.’

  ‘Didn’t you sometimes feel just a little bit jealous of her?’

  ‘Oh, God, Mr Kenworthy – what are you suggesting?’

  And Kenworthy laughed, as if he had suddenly seen the joke of the century.

  ‘That would be a turn-up: replacing someone in amateur dramatics as a motive for murder. I expect it’s been done: in paperback.’

  ‘I still don’t really get it. What is it you want me to do?’

  ‘Just come and be seen around with me. Be with me when I pay a few calls. Come for a few country walks – taking care we are seen by the right people. Especially a certain bunch of ghastly women.’

  ‘What good is that going to do?’

  ‘I’m hoping it will get them up to some of their old tricks again.’

  She nodded thoughtfully as if, in spite of her own reasoning, she was trying to see his point of view.

  ‘Do you really think that this hideous crew were at the bottom of all this?’

  ‘Somebody was. And they were about.’

  ‘Then surely they’ll take good care to remain above suspicion?’

  ‘That depends how strongly we can tempt them. And how weak is the weakest link. One or two of them are sentimental souls. I propose to get them pretty horribly confused.’

  ‘Is this the sort of way in which you usually tackle a case?’

  ‘When I can get the right sort of help.’

  He put his hand over hers.

  ‘I’ve got a feeling we might even enjoy it.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  When Mrs Scadbolt came round to the back door the next morning, the Kenworthys were hammer-and-tonging it.

  ‘I suppose it’s your age, and a woman ought to be prepared for it. But this is the second time in three weeks.’

  ‘I just happened to pass the time of day with the girl.’

  ‘Fiddlesticks!’

  ‘You sound like something out of a nineteenth-century novel.’

  ‘I don’t care what century a woman lives in. She ought to be free from this kind of humiliation.’

  ‘If you’re going to feel humiliated every time I speak to a pretty girl –’

  ‘Pretty!’

  Then Mrs Scadbolt was in the room, tying the tapes of her apron – and the Kenworthys were talking amicably about getting seats for a West End play the week after next.

  ‘Oh – Mrs Scadbolt – I knew there was something I wanted to ask you. You’re a close friend of Alice Brightmore’s, aren’t you? Has she ever said anything to you about finding a copy of the play script lying about in the lane, perhaps on the Stotts’ bungalow wall, when she was on her way to or from the Colonel’s cottage?’

  Mrs Scadbolt looked at him with unusual intensity.

  ‘No, Mr Kenworthy. Nothing like that. The only copy of the play I know anything about is one that Doreen Malkin happened to mention. When we went to clear up in the Hall, after the play was cancelled, she found it on a corner of the stage, and passed it on to Mr Dunderdale.’

  ‘Ah!’

  The weather had hit one of those anti-cyclonic phases that create belated autumnal summers with fanciful names. Elspeth having said (within earshot of Mrs Scadbolt) that she had done enough walking for a lifetime, Kenworthy went out that afternoon alone, following a fieldtrack that skirted one of Jesse Allsop’s walls.

  Christine was waiting for him by one of the lower corners of the Grange grounds: jeans and an old beige sweater now, with her hair swept back from her forehead and secured in a pony-tail by a tortoiseshell clip. They followed a path down through a neck of woodland, along a shallow declivity scattered with mossy stones. He started a conversation about the effect on an actress’s personality of a long run in a part inimical to her true self. Christine was of the opinion that some women could weather it, but she couldn’t.

  Once, they came within sight of a labourer forking manure from a trailer. Then Kenworthy took Christine’s hand and they walked for some fifty yards along an exposed skyline, gently swinging their arms. But the moment they were out of the stranger’s line of vision, Kenworthy dropped her hand again.

  ‘I thought you were just beginning to enjoy yourself,’ she said.

  ‘The most important thing in part-playing is to remember that it is only a part.’

  ‘Some actors do better when they sink themselves wholeheartedly into it.’

  ‘Like Davina with Gertrude?’

  ‘That child couldn’t act. A shaft of marvellous intuition now and then; but no discipline.’

  At another point, where Kenworthy had let her get a few yards ahead of him along a narrow ridge, Christine turned round to find he had lagged a considerable way behind her, stooping over a hollow pock-marked with the denudations of a rabbit warren.

  ‘Found something?’

  He had obviously just slipped something into his pocket, but dissimulated shamelessly.

  ‘I thought I had. False alarm.’

  ‘Never off-duty, are you?’

  ‘I am always fascinated by any tract of country where something untoward has happened. A man has passed by. There are traces as clear as a cinematograph film; if only you can damned well see them.’

  ‘And what happened here?’

  ‘For the last twenty minutes we have been following the route along which Davina’s body was carried.’

  She gave a little shudder; perhaps theatrical.

  ‘I didn’t know that. I never gave it much thought.’

  ‘The spot where I stopped just now was one of the places where they rested the body.’

  ‘How can you possibly know that?’

  ‘They would, in such a spot, wouldn’t they – so naturally?’

  ‘Can’t you ever take your mind off that horrible business?’

  ‘About my only hope of that would be if it had never happened.’

  But a little while later she came back to it herself.

  ‘What makes you so certain that it was up at our place that it happened?’

  ‘Something I found on the muck-heap in your shrubbery.’

  ‘There’s all manner of stuff there. From generations of squatters and campers.’

  ‘Not camping out with the last few pages of Davina’s script.’

  ‘But what was she doing up there?’ she asked after a long interval.

  ‘Locked out of home. Wanted a night’s lodging. She’d had one before. Many times. Hadn’t she?’

  ‘Not since that business with Kevin O’Shea and the nettles. She’d kept strictly away.’

  ‘But o
n this particular night, she was in desperate straits. Those women were after her again. As I’m hoping, within a few days, they’ll be after us too.’

  ‘I don’t see that. Surely, if they’re the guilty parties, they’ll give us a wide berth.’

  ‘Maybe. But if murderers were all reasonable people, I doubt if I’d ever have broken a case.’

  They were coming now to the edges of the Dogtooth yard, though she did not seem to recognize the place. When Kenworthy pointed it out to her, she said that she had no first-hand knowledge of this part of the village – and registered another moment of revulsion.

  ‘But you must recognize it from the stage set?’

  ‘I do now. Those painters did a marvellous job. But we’re not going in, are we?’

  ‘I thought perhaps you’d be interested in seeing.’

  ‘I’m not interested in anything so horrible. How any man can do a job like yours –’

  ‘Mainly because I do find it so horrible, I think. Would you like to stay here, then? There’s a brief piece of business I want to do with Jesse Allsop.’

  She did go with him, making appropriate gestures of distaste as crucial angles caught her eye. The gap left by the Anathema Stone had now been tidied up. The block and tackle had been removed. There was a concrete-mixer standing in the yard, and boards had been put in position for the laying of a new step.

  ‘At least Jesse Allsop is determined to alter the image.’

  Allsop was putting paper away after another afternoon of semi-laborious officework: still the same figure in worn, sober suiting, with ashen cheeks and immaculately groomed hair. But there was a certain vacancy of vision about him, as if he took Kenworthy for granted without really acknowledging who he was. And he barely seemed to notice Christine at all.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is,’ Kenworthy said. ‘I’ve been trying desperately to get a holiday up here, and wherever I turn it all comes unglued. I thought that maybe the spring would be the time to come – in May, perhaps, when the buds are breaking on the ash, and the hayfields are a-shimmer with lady-smocks.’

  If Jesse Allsop had any spirit of poetry in him it was untouched by Kenworthy’s moment of transport.

  ‘So I thought that maybe one of your caravans – if you’d be so kind as to lend me a key, so I can just have a look at one.’

  Allsop went unenthusiastically to a cash-box and detached a key from a ring.

  ‘Number sixty-nine would suit you as well as any. But you’d better lose no time in letting me have a deposit. There’s not much left begging for May.’

  ‘Thank you, Jesse. You won’t mind if I hang on to this for a day or two? My wife will have to see it, too.’

  Kenworthy took Christine to look at the caravan. It was modern, by Jesse’s standards; even had a built-in shower, heated by Calor gas. Christine showed a suitably feminine interest in the amenities.

  ‘This really would be rather nice – hayfields and May-time and all.’

  ‘I had in mind a night out for us two. That ought to rouse the local moralists.’

  ‘You don’t believe in half-measures, do you?’

  ‘I see no difficulty. Elspeth trusts me. She knows the nature of the enquiry. Your John has been marvellously co-operative up to now. In the interests, of course, purely of investigation –’

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I don’t understand you. Sometimes I think you’re a slow worker. Then you take me by storm.’

  He put his arm about her shoulders, though there were no spectators on hand to impress.

  ‘We shan’t hobble Mrs Scadbolt unless we really give her something to talk about.’

  There was another lingering hand-hold, just out of sight of his cottage, as they were saying goodbye – and Mrs Geraldine Cartwright was cramming herself into her Mini outside the grocery.

  Then Kenworthy made a suggestion for the next day at which Christine demurred.

  ‘Oh, no! Please excuse me from that, I implore you.’

  ‘I must go there. And I must have a chaperon.’

  ‘Then take a woman police officer, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I can’t do that. I’m not even supposed to be meddling in the case.’

  ‘Then take your wife.’

  ‘Things are reaching the stage where she doesn’t want to know about this case any more.’

  ‘Then take Mrs Scadbolt! Take anyone you like. But please spare me!’

  ‘You ought to learn to be objective.’

  ‘Why should I? I’m not training to be a policeman.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re getting so worried about.’

  ‘I just can’t bear to see human suffering.’

  ‘Isn’t that just what an actress does need to see?’

  Chapter Twenty

  Christine came. For the second time in three days she was late for their date – so late that Kenworthy could scarcely have been expected to wait for her – and in a public place at that.

  He did wait, on a wooden bench on the Green that had been installed in memory of some village benefactor or other. Normally it was occupied by pipe-smoking old men who sat and passed three or four comments to the hour. But the presence of Kenworthy had somehow caused this passive committee to absent itself this morning. So Kenworthy sat smoking, picking his way through an elementary newspaper crossword, and enjoying what might well be the last of the season’s sunshine.

  When Christine did come down the hill from the Grange, she came at a fast stride, with her body leaning forward, as if it would assuage her conscience for her eyebrows and chin to arrive a fraction of time before the rest of her.

  Before she saw him, Kenworthy got up off the bench and slipped unobtrusively into the shadow of one of the trees on the Green. He was thus able to observe the anxiety with which she scanned the corner on which they had arranged to meet. He slipped out obliquely behind her, was able to startle her with his hand under her elbow.

  ‘I was beginning to think you had had second thoughts.’

  ‘I all but did. I am sorry. I was awake half the night, dreading it. But you were right in what you said yesterday. I must learn to face up to things like this. However I feel about it, it’s fifty times worse for that poor woman.’

  Kenworthy led her past fields of vacant caravans and dispirited store cattle to the Stotts’home. From the state of the lawn it looked as if someone had been making an effort to infuse new order into the place. But not with signal success: everything seemed to have been started, nothing finished. A pile of sere leaves had been swept up to the edge of the untrimmed lawn, but nothing had so far been done to dispose of them. When Kenworthy rang the bell, there was the clumsy manipulation of a chain in its socket before the latch was turned. Something had been done to dust and tidy up in the hall. There was a smell of fresh furniture polish, and the webs had been cleaned from about the Pre-Raphaelite lantern.

  It was Donald Stott who opened the door to them – a man of about Kenworthy’s age, though looking younger at first sight, because grey hair had so far spared him, and he affected the hairstyle and casual wear of a man fifteen years younger than himself. That was at first sight; at second sight he was a tired and disabused man, who tried with his executive smile and vigorous handshake to belie his fundamental unrest.

  He took them into the front room where, again, the motions of putting things to rights had been gone through: dust had been taken off picture frames; the hockey stick and broken-stringed guitar had been removed. But the plug had still not been replaced on the bar fire, though the bits and pieces lay in the hearth.

  ‘Diana will be with us in a minute or two. I’ll fix this in a jiffy.’

  ‘No – please let me do it. It will amuse me no end.’

  So, while Stott went back to his wife, Kenworthy squatted on the floor and began screwing in screws and tucking in loose ends of wire with the blunt end of his smoker’s knife.

  ‘Pathetic, isn’t it?’ he said to Christine, who was sitting with no effort at comfort on the
edge of a fireside chair. ‘It makes you want to do something more for the bourgeoisie than just liquidate their building societies, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Pathetic’s the word for it. This was all that poor girl had to come home to?’

  ‘No. Her bedroom was surely her spiritual centre. That’s something I still have to see – and I’m longing to –’

  It was an overspilled ten minutes before Stott came back with the coffee and his wife. By then Kenworthy had the electric fire going, with a decade of dust scorching out of its element.

  Diana Stott had put make-up on thick and fast, in a manner that somehow accentuated the very ravages that it was meant to hide. There was a distinct smell of gin as she came forward to shake hands. Stott had either postponed talk of a new drying-out or was tapering her off with a generous margin.

  ‘Mrs Horrocks – how can I thank you enough for all that you and your husband tried to do for Davina?’

  And, ‘I’m sorry I was so inarticulate, the day that you called, Mr Kenworthy. I just couldn’t make myself plainer. I can only blame myself for all that has happened.’

  ‘Mrs Stott, you must not do that. You were not to foresee –’

  ‘But I did foresee. Didn’t I try to tell you?’

  She started to cry, and Stott came forward, busily and uselessly, to try to comfort her. He looked round apologetically at Kenworthy and Christine, and at last managed to get his wife on her feet and out of the room. Kenworthy beckoned to Christine and stepped quietly out into the hall, pushing open first the door of a lavatory, then of a broom-cupboard, and finally of the room that had been Davina’s retreat.

  There were faded rectangles of wallpaper where posters had been unpinned: pop idols and a Toulouse-Lautrec, now lying in tattered rolls on the threadbare coverlet of a divan bed. Books and long-playing records had been stacked on a window-sill. Kenworthy picked up one or two casually, but made no attempt at exhaustive inspection: an early Beatles sleeve, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, a school prize Shakespeare, a well-thumbed anthology of lyric verse from an earlier school.

  ‘Pretty well any girl, anywhere –’ Kenworthy said. ‘Give or take the odd pop star – at any time in modern history.’