by Rebecca Tope
I blinked at this. Verona and I had never been on particularly friendly terms. We skirted around each other, playing a convoluted game where she patronised me and I pretended not to notice. Verona was a natural competitor. Once it was made clear that she was not to be challenged, everything was all right. Until then she could be nasty. I could already see that she resented Thea’s good looks. Verona’s nose was too thin and too hooked, her eyes too close together for beauty. Her skin wasn’t wonderful, either.
I brought her a cup of peppermint tea without asking and waited for what came next. It was unlikely that she would stay long, the pressures of business permanently weighing her down.
It quickly became obvious that Verona was more interested in quizzing Thea than in assuring herself of my wellbeing. ‘You’ll have been left to amuse yourself, I suppose,’ she said, ‘with your friend being called away.’
I tried to remember what, if anything, I’d told the group about Phil on Saturday evening. I could not recall a single mention of him. Presumably word had spread that he was Helen’s nephew as well as a Detective Superintendent. I had a sense of phone calls and pavement encounters and emails all passing on information and gossip. Ursula had recognised him on Saturday evening, and could have told the group who he was as they milled around their cars.
‘I’ve got plenty to do,’ Thea smiled. ‘Exercising the dogs, trying to sort some of Helen’s things.’
‘Waiting for the fingerprint man,’ I added, amazed at Thea’s sudden flash of alarm at my words. Too late – Verona had pounced.
‘What? Why?’ She looked at the mug I’d given her as if it had bitten her.
Thea’s thoughts were lightning fast. ‘Oh, nothing to do with the Gaynor case,’ she said easily. ‘It’s all to do with Phil’s car. It was broken into last week, and they just want to take my prints for elimination purposes. It’s all rather boring.’
‘Did they take anything?’ Verona seemed less than half inclined to believe her. She turned sideways and stared out of my front window at the house opposite, with a strange expression that looked like curiosity mixed with agitation, as she waited for Thea’s reply.
‘CD player. He’d forgotten to do the security palaver. He was ever so cross about it.’
I was well out of my depth, stunned by the quality of Thea’s lies and at a loss as to why Verona shouldn’t know about the discoveries in the attic. But at least I’d learned to keep my lips buttoned.
‘More tea?’ I asked them both. Two heads were shaken. We seemed to have run out of things to talk about and I felt restless.
‘I ought to be getting on,’ I said. ‘I might have to go and deal with Gaynor’s things. Paperwork and so forth.’
‘Already?’ Verona said. ‘You can’t register the death, can you? Not until the Coroner’s Officer tells you.’
‘You sound very clued up,’ Thea remarked. ‘Not everybody knows about Coroner’s Officers.’
‘Least of all me,’ I said, with a feeble laugh.
‘My brother died last year in an accident at work,’ Verona said. ‘I had to deal with the funeral and everything.’
‘Ah, I see,’ said Thea. ‘That must have been grim.’ I could hear her thinking, Here’s another one for the club. I had completely forgotten about Verona’s brother. It had happened in Birmingham and she hadn’t talked about it much, except to Ursula who had only then revealed the death of her own brother, several years before. I remembered shivering superstitiously with fear for my three brothers, who had suddenly seemed to fall into a high-risk category.
‘We weren’t very close, actually. But it taught me a lot about the procedure.’
Another ragged silence followed and then Verona got up. ‘Thanks for the tea, Ari,’ she said. ‘Call me, won’t you, if you need to talk to someone. You must be feeling pretty shaky, still.’
I didn’t get up to follow her to the door. ‘I’m trying to carry on as normal. I’ve got the evening class tonight to distract me.’
‘It’s still on, is it?’
‘Of course. Even a murder can’t stop an evening class, you should know that.’
Thea waited until the front door closed before demanding, ‘Evening class? What evening class?’
I explained about the dyeing and spinning instruction I gave in one of the Gloucester Institute’s smaller satellite colleges. ‘Pamela from the pagan group comes along.’
‘But not Verona?’ Thea laughed.
‘No. I don’t think it’s quite her thing.’
‘She’s a very odd woman,’ said Thea.
‘Do you think so? I’ve got used to her, I suppose. She’s tremendously ambitious. I think her family must have been very hard up. She’s one of those people who thinks money solves everything.’
‘Strange for a pagan,’ said Thea.
I shook my head. ‘Not really. Quite a few of them think they can learn special ways to generate wealth and get what they want. Verona will try anything.’
‘She sounds rather scary.’
I thought about this. ‘Right,’ I agreed. ‘I think we are all a bit scared of her.’
Then there was a flurry of activity, with a car pulling up outside Greenhaven and the dogs setting up a racket when a man walked up the front path.
‘Oops! There’s the fingerprint chap,’ said Thea. As she opened my front door, she turned back, ‘And for God’s sake,’ she hissed, ‘don’t tell anybody about the Greenhaven attic.’ She gave me a fierce look. ‘Have some sense – okay?’
She was gone before I could defend myself, and I was left feeling I’d been a real fool.
CHAPTER TEN
It was still only quarter past ten. I could pick up my normal Monday routines – or so I hoped. There was every chance that the day had been wrecked by what had already taken place.
Usually I felt there was something specific about Monday mornings. A fresh start, a sense of the week lying clear ahead, to shape as I liked. On Mondays I seldom failed to quietly rejoice in my status as a self-employed person. Most people I knew dreaded the start of the working week, another dreary turn of the treadmill, selling their time and their souls to some ungrateful capitalist. Even some of my fellow pagans had got themselves trapped in the system.
There was Ursula, of course, with her geography lessons, and Kenneth, who worked for the Council in some dusty little admin job that made him miserable. Leslie, on the other hand, had found a workable compromise for himself with the National Trust. At least he didn’t have to spend all day sitting in an airless office next to somebody he despised. Pamela was almost as admirable an exception as I was myself. She had landed a dream job as chaperone to young film actors during the filming, whether of TV commercials, blockbuster movies or one of a score of drama series. All she had to do was spend whole days drinking coffee and chatting while her small charge got under people’s feet on and off the set, waiting for the twenty minutes or so of actual acting that was often the sum total of the day’s work. Pamela had to prevent the child from being molested or run over or lost. Mostly they were aged ten or twelve and had a reasonable amount of good sense. To be paid quite respectable money for doing this seemed sheer madness, as Pam herself would say. The job said so much about contemporary western life that we would sometimes spend half a moot talking about it. Riddled with symbolism, looked at from a certain angle, it also led us to frequent acerbic comments about a society that worried so much about the safety of its young, whilst at the same time exploiting them mercilessly.
Daphne worked hardest of all, thanks to Eddie’s departure. She was almost at the end of a long tedious course learning to be an actuary, which was so out of character I’m sorry to say I laughed aloud when I first heard about it. ‘How does that square with paganism?’ I demanded. ‘Arguing about piddling details on insurance claims?’
She’d given me a disgusted look and wondered what gave me the right to pass judgement on her profession. At the same time as pursuing the studies, she was working for an insurance comp
any, where she hoped to leap up several rungs of the ladder once qualified. We would seldom permit her to talk about it – not that she seemed to want to. Tedium was not the word for it.
But I did have plenty to think about. First on the list was the visit from Verona and her startled reaction to my mention of the fingerprinting. Thea’s hurried diversionary tactics had alerted me to possibilities I had not considered, and the suspicion that I had perhaps told Verona what she had come to find out. From the way she’d looked at her mug, she had apparently become aware of her own prints being left for easy analysis. A wonder, then, that she hadn’t insisted on washing up before she left. Except that would have been too obvious a giveaway. She must hope that I hadn’t noticed anything, and would routinely wash the mugs myself.
Well, I thought – I won’t. I would put the object carefully to one side, just in case.
Just in case what, though? Did Verona know Gaynor other than very distantly? Had my careless blabber about Oliver woken some jealousy in her breast? Would Verona risk murdering Gaynor for some secret passion? It seemed highly unlikely. The only passion Verona ever manifested was for her business.
Thea had been right: I was already viewing each of my friends and acquaintances – apart from Stella – as a possible killer. Not only Verona, but all the members of the group suddenly seemed a very credible bunch of suspects. Not one of them had particularly liked Gaynor, for one thing. Obviously it had never occurred to me that anybody might dislike her enough to kill her, but given that she presented some sort of threat to one of them, it wasn’t beyond imagining that they might. The way her body had been so carefully placed in the Barrow, which we had talked about only hours before, firmly indicated a pagan connection. Anything else was too coincidental to be plausible.
It was hopeless trying to concentrate on ordinary daily matters. Gaynor’s cold flesh and empty features followed me around, so I would find myself just standing, halfway from one room to another, and once out in the garden, numbed by the images and sensations that would not go away. By midday I understood that I was the one in need of debriefing. I was desperate to talk to somebody about it, to tell the story of how I found her, over and over again.
It must have been this need that drove me to go to Stow, perhaps hoping I’d meet somebody who would let me talk.
I had almost forgotten the Gypsy Horse Fair, due on the Thursday of that week. I was to have a stall, and should, by rights, have been working on labelling, pressing, displaying the things I intended to sell. Gradually I had become more skilful at presentation, pinning the jumpers onto boards with the sleeves at funny angles, draping scarves artfully around the neck of a wicker woman’s head and shoulders. It all took a lot of time, and I often grew impatient with the whole business. My inclination was to throw everything into a glorious muddle like a jumble sale, and let people sort through it for themselves. I’d done that the first time or two to a very mixed reception. The other stallholders disapproved violently and the customers were confused. But the things had sold, just the same.
Now, after what had happened, I couldn’t even be sure I’d go through with the stall. It seemed impossible that I could get the work done and stand there smiling for a whole day. Especially as Gaynor would have been my chief assistant. She would have taken a turn at the selling, as well as preparing the stuff beforehand.
Stow was empty, the American tourists somewhere else. October was quieter than the high summer months, but there was never a time of year when they disappeared completely. I’ve seen six or eight coaches parked in the middle of town in late November. I left my car in one of several empty spaces and got out and went into one of my fugues, there on the pavement. Gaynor had worked for a while in a shoe shop in Stow, several years ago. We’d met often during her lunch breaks, because I was working – bizarrely it seemed to me afterwards – as a herdswoman on a nearby farm. I had to milk cows morning and evening, and feed calves and see to mountains of paperwork. The middle of every day was my down time. I officially had three hours off, which was not always an easy interlude to fill. Lunch in Stow with Gaynor became a dependable means of passing the time. I had not been prepared for the tidal wave of memories that standing in the town square brought back.
It was too much. I shook myself and climbed back into the car and sat there wondering what I might do next. The police might still be ransacking Gaynor’s flat, and I definitely did not want to get involved with that. I could make speculative calls on one or two of my outlets, taking commissions for new items or simply dropping in for a bit of PR. But I knew I would do myself no favours with shadows under my eyes and a lot of difficulty in even smiling convincingly. I scanned the square, thinking how pleasant the town could look if you ignored the traffic and the rather annoying Union Jacks everywhere. And it got even better once you got into the smaller streets. It had alleyways and streets that veered at awkward angles, reminding you of its medieval past. It had no less than four bookshops, though I seldom patronised any of them. I’d never been a great reader, but I sometimes browsed the smaller of the secondhand ones, where the woman always had time for a friendly chat and had her eclectic stock sensibly arranged. I had found a few pleasing surprises in there over the years. None of the others ever struck me as being particularly interested in actually selling anything, even to the tourists.
As I had half expected would happen, if I sat there long enough, a familiar figure came into view. Oliver Grover was walking briskly towards me, carrying a briefcase. He was crossing the wide street beside the library, which at first glance looked like a church or a flamboyant town hall. Before engaging my brain, I was out of the car and waving at him, instantly catching his eye. Only then did I wonder what I would say to him.
‘Ariadne,’ he said, with a nod. ‘Good to see you.’
Oliver was one of three gay men I knew. One of the others was my brother John and the third was a man who ran a boutique in Derby, buying knitwear from me now and then. They had little in common other than a relaxed manner when in the company of women, and an air of not taking life very seriously in any context.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Not at work?’
‘On my way,’ he assured me, waggling the briefcase as evidence. ‘The auditors will have started without me, which is no bad thing.’
I had to say it. ‘You heard about Gaynor, did you?’
‘Gaynor? My little Welsh friend who plays bridge so extraordinarily well. No – what about her?’ He was very casual, his glance wandering along the High Street, where the morning sun was sparkling on the shop windows. He seemed to have something on his mind.
Suddenly it was much more difficult than I’d anticipated. ‘She was your friend?’
He shrugged. ‘I like her, if that’s what you mean. How could anybody not like her?’ He frowned at me. ‘Did you say was?’
‘Yes, I did.’ I partly wanted to shock him into paying due attention, and partly to dodge having to utter the awful words.
‘What? Come on, Ari, get on with it. I’m supposed to be somewhere.’
I almost said, Gaynor asked me to cast a spell to make you fall in love with her. For a few seconds I badly wanted to say exactly that, instead of the facts that I was already committed to imparting.
‘She’s dead. Somebody killed her yesterday.’
‘No!’ His squeal was high and girlish and utterly irritating. ‘Who? Where?’
‘In Notgrove. At the Barrow. I found her. They don’t know who, if you mean by that who killed her. It’s a murder enquiry.’ Until that moment, I had completely forgotten that I’d revealed his name during my interview with DI Baldwin. I should tell him, warn him to expect a visit. Although, on reflection, it seemed odd that nothing had yet happened. Perhaps they’d done some sort of background check on him and decided he wasn’t worth the trouble.
‘Good God! You poor thing! What a ghastly shock that must have been.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘She was my friend, too.’
‘Oh, yes, I remembe
r now. She does – did – your knitting, didn’t she?’
I merely nodded, suddenly too choked to say any more. Oliver noticed and patted me clumsily on the arm, looking rather green himself. ‘Poor old you,’ he said again. ‘No wonder you look so zonked.’
I tried to take him at face value, to avoid suspecting him of being a killer. The whole thing between Gaynor and him embarrassed me. Except there was no ‘thing’, I told myself. It had all been in my friend’s imagination, a fantasy that would mean nothing to Oliver, the gay accountant and junior Freemason. It was obvious that he was itching to go, and I was just turning away when I remembered our connection. ‘Oh, hang on – did you get anything for your gran? She said you’d do her shopping this week.’
He nodded quickly, almost eagerly. ‘Everything on the list. I took it round last night. She’s on fine form, isn’t she? All thanks to your ministrations, I’m sure.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ I said feelingly. ‘I don’t do much.’
‘You undersell yourself,’ he said, with his gaze once more wandering across the square.
My flurry of emotion had passed without trace. Now all I felt was irritation. ‘Anyway, that’s the news,’ I said briskly. ‘There’ll be a vacancy at the bridge club now.’
He winced. ‘Don’t be like that, Ariadne.’
‘I’m not being like anything. I’ve got no beef about bridge. I might even join up myself.’
‘Can you play?’ His eagerness was unnerving.
‘Not really, no. I have played whist a couple of times.’
‘Pooh – whist!’ he snorted. ‘Fit for old ladies and nobody else.’
‘I think that’s what most people say about bridge,’ I commented. The craze for the game had been a sudden inexplicable tide through the area, attracting people well under forty, and raising suspicions that it could only be a cover for some more sensual activities. Gaynor had assured me that this was groundless on a rare occasion when we talked about it. All they did was play cards, drink coffee and eat iced biscuits. ‘There’s no need for anything else,’ she said. ‘The cards are so exciting.’
