The Shape of Sand

by Marjorie Eccles

  At present, he was spending some time in London, delighted to find there were still historic sites and ancient, tucked-away churches which had survived not only the Blitz, but the Fire of London four centuries earlier. Yesterday, he’d visited St Paul’s and seen the damage done when a bomb had crashed through the roof into the choir, bringing several tons of the fabric with it. He’d stood gazing at it, trying and failing as usual to comprehend the futile destruction and misery of war, then he’d left, putting several pounds more than he could afford into the collecting box for the repair fund which had already been started. And then, this morning, over breakfast in the small hotel on the Gloucester Road where he was staying, he’d picked up the newspaper …

  Charnley House. The name had leaped out at him. Good God! Who ever said there were no coincidences? Charnley had been a must on the list of places he’d intended to visit before he finally left England. He’d had no notion who owned the house now, whether he’d even be allowed inside, or if the frescoes his mother had painted would still be extant (though she’d always stoutly averred they would last for centuries, given the right conditions), but he’d been determined to find out. Then he read the rest of the report in the newspaper and discovered that the police were anxious to trace a woman named Rose Jessamy, who had once been employed to do some wall paintings at Charnley His stomach did a roll. Not much liking the ominous sound of that – a body being found behind a wall that his mother had been working on – he nevertheless immediately went to the police. They were as cagey as he’d anticipated. They asked him a lot of questions and parried more of his own. He suspected that they’d very little to go on. They had, however, been willing to tell him how he could get in touch with the Jardine family. A telephone call, and here he was.

  Nina struggled on with the horrible sandwich. She began to feed bits surreptitiously to the old dog, and the bits got bigger. When it was finished, she reached out to pour herself more coffee (which was, to tell the truth, not much better) and saw her stepmother’s eyes on her. “Sorry, Daisy, not terribly hungry,” she murmured apologetically.

  “That’s all right. Never been partial to mutton myself since Mrs Heslop sent up a roast saddle for lunch, that day–” She broke off abruptly. “Well, we have to be grateful for what we can get, nowadays. And what is Rose doing now?” she asked, turning to Tom. “Is she still working in Egypt?”

  “My mother? No, she died when I was just a boy.”

  Daisy was sorry, remembering her first impressions of that small, vital person with her unconventional clothes and behaviour. In the short time they’d known her, how she’d electrified them all! Shaken them out of their complacent lifestyle, awakened them to other possibilities. Even Mama, who’d astonished Daisy when she’d suddenly agreed to the bizarre notion of using an Egyptian theme when decorating the guest rooms. (Though perhaps it hadn’t been so bizarre, after all. Later, after the first war, when more tombs were being excavated, the style had become all the rage.) And as for poor Marcus …

  “Forgive me. I didn’t mean–”

  Tom waved away any possible embarrassment. “That’s all right,” he said easily, “it was a long time ago. She was killed in a rock fall in a newly discovered tomb she was working on, when I was very young – too young to remember all that much about her. Except the way she used to talk about those paintings she did at Charnley, I’ve never forgotten that. Working on them was apparently what first inspired her to go to Egypt, and once there, she’d no desire ever to return to England. She vowed, according to my father, that she’d found her spiritual home.”

  Daisy gave him a sharp look. “Hmm. So that’s what she said? She said that was why she went to Egypt?”

  It must have been something in her tone that brought a wariness into Tom’s voice. “Well, I gather it wasn’t the main object of her visit, but it was why she stayed. As you probably know, she originally went there with your brother, Marcus, in search of Valery Iskander.”

  Daisy had not known until that moment that Rose had accompanied Marcus on his abortive trip to Egypt, none of the family had, and her quick flush betrayed this, but she merely nodded. He went on carefully, “I suppose there must have been some compelling reason why they went all that way to search him out, but I never learned why – until today. My mother never talked much about her previous life, apart from various aspects of her work, and my father taught me to respect that need, as he did. Perhaps that was why they had such a successful marriage. A partnership in every sense of the word.”

  Had he said something he shouldn’t? Daisy was looking resolutely at her sensibly clad feet. He couldn’t have known that in a sudden piercing shaft of memory, she was recalling a hot, bright June morning in the rose garden at Charnley, when she had come round the corner from the hothouse with a basket of peaches, and Marcus had been standing looking down at Rose, holding her hands, smiling and talking nonsense about ‘Rosa Perfecta’. It wouldn’t do, she’d known it even then, at that young age. Looking outside one’s own circle – for a wife, at least – was social disaster. Evidently, Rose had been of the same mind. Poor Marcus, whose intentions had been nothing if not honourable.

  “They worked and lived together, you see, my parents,” Tom was going on gamely, “hardly ever spent a day apart in the whole of the rest of her life. She adored him, and my father … he isn’t a demonstrative man, but he was devastated when she was killed.”

  There was a short British silence after this, while Tom, sensing undertones and deciding not to say what he’d come to say, after all, picked up his cup of weak grey coffee and found only the dregs, for which he was immensely thankful. It had apparently been made with some extract out of a bottle and boiling milk, so that a skin had formed on top almost immediately, and had been served with some rather pointless biscuits which were called ‘rich tea’, for what reason he could not fathom.

  Wondering how to continue, he stared through the window. The rain had begun again and he could just see to the end of the garden, a broken down fence and the back of what had once been the garden of the house in the next street, now given over to willow-herb and a tribe of feral cats, the scourge of the dog Phoebe’s life, he’d been told. The house itself was no longer there, it had left a gap like a missing tooth. Few houses around here could have escaped, entirely. Here, in this very room, was a crack in the wall, running diagonally from floor to ceiling. He thought perhaps they didn’t notice it any more. It seemed to have been subsumed into the unremarkable, shabby comfort of the room, along with the threadbare rugs on the scuffed, polished boards, the faded watercolours against wallpaper weathered to the colour of wheaten biscuits, and the worn covers on the chairs with their washed-out roses and frilly skirts, against which the old terrier bitch was now snoring at her master’s feet.

  He saw Nina looking at him, got a glimpse of that sweet, fleeting smile. He made a conscious effort to keep his hand from straying to his facial scar, which itched unbearably at times as it healed.

  He was nonchalant about his wound, in the best tradition of war heroes; and had never asked himself how much he really minded. He hadn’t been any oil painting to begin with, and since his face had never frightened the horses or put the girls off, he reckoned he’d be all right again, given time. What did worry him was other folks. The shrinking from his scars (or even worse, the bright, determined acceptance of his damaged face, the tendency to smile at him more often than was necessary). He’d developed a tendency to judge people by how they reacted and all three here had stood up to the litmus test well. Equanimity was to be expected of the old man – he was a doctor, after all – but not necessarily of Daisy Tempest or, more surprisingly, of Nina. By now, he’d come to expect an initial shrinking away by most attractive young women, but she’d neither pretended not to notice, nor had her eyes been drawn back to his face again and again. Nice brown eyes, a sense of fun behind them. Mouth that curved up, even when she wasn’t smiling.

  The old man, tamping down tobacco in his pipe, sudde
nly said, “So in what way can we help you, Commander Verrier?”

  “Oh, Tom, please.” More suited to directness than tact, he had to think carefully before answering the question. “Not quite certain. I’m sorry to have intruded, at a time like this, but I have to say this, though it’s not something any of us want to think about, I imagine – I can’t believe that my mother could in any way have been mixed up with your mother’s death, Mrs Tempest. But whether she was or not, I intend to find out. If there’s anything you can tell me about her at that time, it would help. I guess she wasn’t perhaps an easy person, in many ways, but there was no one quite like her.” His eyes crinkled with amusement. “Even allowing for the fact that I’m prejudiced.”

  “I knew her for only a short time,” Daisy said drily, “but I was convinced she was unique.”

  Glancing at Guy as she finished speaking, she bit her lip. Tom, however, chose not to see this as a two-edged remark, since he didn’t think she’d meant it to come out like that. He guessed, from the half-amused looks on the faces of the other two, that Daisy Tempest might be given to saying the wrong things at the wrong time. He could understand that. Tactfulness wasn’t something he’d been born with, either.

  “Of course I’ll tell you what little I can remember about Rose,” she was saying now, more gently. “But first, tell me something: have you any idea why they – my brother Marcus and your mother – went to Egypt and sought out Iskander?”

  Tom did know now, from his earlier meeting with the police, but he was reluctant to put it into words.

  “Well, I’ll tell you. They went to find my mother,” said Daisy bluntly. “It was generally thought, when she disappeared and couldn’t be found, that she’d absconded, possibly to Egypt, with Iskander. But as it turns out, that couldn’t have been the case, the body they’ve just found at Charnley being hers.”

  “Yes. The police inspector told me that. I’m so very sorry.”

  “Ah,” said Guy. “Inspector Grigsby. What did you think of him?”

  “He’s O.K, I guess. For a policeman.”

  They’d met that morning at New Scotland Yard. Direct by nature, Grigsby was not one to shilly-shally. But despite the man’s stated intention to find the solution to such a bizarre and interesting case, he gave the distinct impression that he didn’t intend it to feature largely in his schedule. Tom hadn’t initially been able to prevent the feeling that at higher levels it was not being regarded with the utmost urgency. Grigsby was obviously hard-pressed with other concerns, doing his best to keep several balls in the air at once. He’d spared time to see Tom, and reluctantly made him privy to the few facts which he thought it necessary for him to know, but the constant interruptions about more immediate matters, the telephone calls, people popping in to remind Grigsby of this and that, all seemed to indicate pretty conclusively that this particular case was unlikely to receive his undivided attention. He suspected the discovery of the body was an embarrassment rather than a task demanding instant action, and that the police would doubtless go through the motions, and that would be that. From the sergeant, too, had emanated a sense of boredom – boredom and impatience at being landed with a case whose origins were so far back that he’d decided it hadn’t the remotest chance of success. Tom had begun to feel he was wasting their time. Despite this, there was one pressing question to which he needed an answer: were the police regarding his mother as a likely suspect for the murder? The response had been equivocal. No motive for the murder had yet turned up. On the other hand, they were bound to say that there had been a certain disagreement between Rose Jessamy and the murdered woman over the form the decorations of the guest rooms were to take.

  “A slight disagreement? And you suggest that’s a motive for murder?”

  The inspector lifted his big shoulders. He had small, intelligent eyes, very shrewd. “Mrs Jardine was reportedly delighted with the way the work was turning out – so we have to assume they’d reached some sort of amicable conclusion. However …”

  Tom was trying to keep on an even keel, not showing how this business had shaken him. Here he was, on a simple visit to London, intending to visit Charnley merely to see something of his mother’s work – and then he’d walked into this! The idea that his mother – his mother – had murdered this woman, scarcely known to her, was just plain bloody silly. It would be convenient for them to pin it on her – someone now dead. But he was damned if he’d wear that, he thought with one of those rare, incandescent flashes of rage that sometimes beset his otherwise moderate nature. Yet someone had committed that murder, and what was more, someone competent enough, and with enough knowledge of the nature of his mother’s work, to have plastered up the wall afterwards.

  “We have to hold all the options open, you know, though to be frank with you – which maybe I shouldn’t be, but I will – at this point your mother seems an unlikely suspect,” Grigsby said, relenting. “Don’t mean, though, that murder isn’t done, more times than you’d think, for motives that you and me wouldn’t waste a minute’s thought on.”

  He held Tom’s gaze with his own. You didn’t have to be long in his presence to sense that underneath the casual exterior, there lay a fierce energy, and an exceedingly sharp mind. A pity he wasn’t going to apply it to this case. Grigsby had said ‘at this point’ with a barely discernible emphasis, and it stung Tom into an immediate decision. “Well,” he said shortly, “forgive me if I’m not too sanguine about that. I give you warning that I for one don’t intend to let the matter rest.”

  The sergeant cut in, before he could be stopped, “I shouldn’t worry too much about your mother’s part in it. It’s really fairly cut and dried.” He ignored his inspector, who looked as though he could swat him like a fly on the wall with one of his enormous hands, and would doubtless do so once they were alone. “Amory Jardine discovered his wife was having an affair with the wo – the Egyptian.” (He had been going to say wog, Tom knew it, and if he had he might have got more than he bargained for, and not from Grigsby. Lucky for him, he managed to bite it off in time.) “Jardine killed his wife, and most likely the – gentleman, too.”

  “Professor Iskander, you mean? That’s unlikely,” Tom said shortly, “since he’s alive and well and living in Cairo.”

  That made Grigsby sit up, and took the heat off the sergeant. “Tell me more, Mr Verrier.”

  So Tom had told them what he knew of Iskander, that he was now a respected academic, an eminent Egyptologist. “And you’re wasting your time if you think he could commit murder – he’s the gentlest soul imaginable – and he’s certainly not capable of bricking up and plastering a wall! You should hear my father on the subject of his ‘help’ on one or two digs!”

  Grigsby said, “That’s as maybe, Mr Verrier, but what you’ve told us is a very helpful piece of information. We need to confirm the story of his being taken to the station in the trap, and in the event of not being able to trace any servants of the time … well, we may have to get the police in Cairo to talk to him. Just to corroborate, you understand.” Tom didn’t think he was going to get much more out of them and there hadn’t seemed to be any point in wasting their time further, so he’d made his departure, with a final pessimistic word from Grigsby: “I promise we’ll do what we can, Mr Verrier – but don’t expect miracles.”

  That had been this morning. It seemed a long time since. He saw now that Nina was looking at her watch, standing up. “I must be making tracks.”

  “I’ll see if I can get you a taxi,” her father said doubtfully.

  Tom asked, “Where are you bound?”

  “Paddington station, to pick up my typewriter and things, and then to Garvingden, my aunt’s cottage.”

  They all knew it was easier to get a sack of sugar off-ration than a London cab. “I know all about trying to get taxis in London. Let me drive you to the station,” he offered. “Better still, while we’re at it, why don’t I drive you right down to – where did you say? Garvingden? How far is it? Thirty miles,
thirty-five?”

  “Twenty-three. But what about your petrol?”

  “Let me worry about where that comes from.”

  She had the sort of face you could read easily. He could see her trying to suppress guilt feelings at the suspicion of black market petrol, and weighing that up with having to try her luck with a taxi. If he would simply be kind enough to drive her to Paddington, she said, it would only be a matter then of catching the main line train to Oxford, and afterwards getting herself across town for the bus to Garvingden. It wouldn’t take long, and it had stopped raining.

  “With all your baggage? It wouldn’t be any trouble.” He was determined not to let her escape. He was already far gone.

  “Well, if you’re sure, it would be kind.”

  “On the contrary, it would be a pleasure,” said Tom, his eyes lingering on that smile.

  Some hours later, just before supper, Daisy sat with her feet up, knitting one of her shapeless jerseys from another which had been unravelled, while Guy occupied himself with The Times crossword. Nowadays he did most of the cooking, now that he didn’t have a practice to look after, and he’d become skilled at eking out the rations. The last of the mutton had been rescued from the fate of ending up as one of Daisy’s sandwiches by being minced with onions, carrots and celery and would presently appear as a very acceptable shepherd’s pie. A fragrant smell issued from the kitchen. Guy’s pipe was going well. The lamps were lit.

  Daisy was glad enough to sit quietly, even though she hadn’t been into Hope House today, since Athene had threatened to send her straight back home if she appeared. She was still unsettled by that visit to Vita the night before, which had upset her so much she hadn’t slept properly, an unheard of occurrence with Daisy. Vita, after listening to what Daisy had gently told her, had insisted on being left alone, though one knew it was the worst possible thing, remembering what had happened … once before. But Vita was well again now, wasn’t she? And even this couldn’t be as terrible a shock as that awful, tragic misfortune she’d suffered. And it had been a misfortune, an act of God that no one could have prevented, though Vita had always held herself responsible for it, which was ridiculous. The boys had been at school when the epidemic started – but she’d blamed herself for sending them there, though what else could she have done? Boys went away to school, and that was that. But the way mothers reasoned was something unaccountable, as Daisy knew, suddenly recalling Lorna and her baby.