by Rebecca Tope
But the dogs were barking again, which seemed peculiar. Thea knew we were meant to take Kenneth’s car back. Twelve minutes was too long to readily explain. I went to my door and looked across the street.
You can’t tell what’s going on inside a house just by looking at it from outside, especially when there’s no electricity and no lamps had been lit inside. So I went over and tried to open the front door. It wouldn’t budge. Why on earth would she lock it? What were the dogs barking at?
I went around the back, my mind paralysed by the strangeness. There were no answers to my questions and I wasn’t in any state to make inspired guesses. The dogs had gone quiet, at least, which seemed like a good sign.
The back door was locked as well. ‘Thea!’ I called out. ‘Where are you?’ That started the dogs off again. I banged hard on the door. ‘What’s going on?’ My head filled with a picture of Phil bending over the lifeless body of his beloved, blaming me even more than he was going to blame me about his dog.
I couldn’t let it happen. I remembered the ladder and the wonky bathroom window, and got myself up there in seconds. The window came open quite easily, but I was almost too big to squeeze through it. I had to dive in head first, which was awkward and undignified, and left me in a tangle on the floor, my legs practically in the loo. I hoped I’d been quiet enough to avoid notice, even by the dogs. I stayed in a heap, not daring to move until I was sure of what was going on.
Somewhere I heard voices. ‘Lucky we locked the doors. Has she gone?’ a man hissed.
‘Probably,’ said Thea. ‘But she’ll know something’s wrong. She’ll call the police.’
Too late, I realised I should have done just that. Much more useful than sprawling on the bathroom floor.
‘Why did you come here?’ she asked, her voice sounding impressively steady.
‘We needed to fetch something. I thought you were out.’
‘Oh. What about the dogs? They wouldn’t have let you in.’
‘Shut up. I’m not explaining it all now. It doesn’t matter. You’re just stalling for time.’
I assumed he’d got that right. Thinking about it, the most likely explanation was that he’d crept in the back and quickly shut the dogs in one of the rooms downstairs. Then the dogs must have started barking when they realised they’d been tricked.
A woman’s voice joined in. ‘We thought you’d gone,’ she said.
My heart was thundering so drastically by then that I could hardly hear what they were saying. The voices were familiar, but the identity of the speakers seemed to matter to me less than the fact of their intrusion and the idea that Thea was in danger. The rooms were unlit, but it was less dark than I’d expected. Half of me wanted to get to my feet and simply march right into the room and demand an explanation. I think the locked front door was the strongest reason preventing me from acting on the instinct to rescue my new friend. Instead I crawled very quietly and carefully out of the bathroom and onto the landing, where I could hear everything more clearly. Having made myself consider the situation logically, I was forced to admit to myself that Thea and I were trapped with these people and although I certainly hadn’t thought through precisely what could happen if I charged in and made a lot of fuss, I had enough remaining wits to understand that it would almost certainly make things worse.
‘We came here to get something,’ said the man again, with laborious significance. ‘Something we left in the attic.’
So I had been right all along! The Masonic trinkets belonged to Eddie Yeo – whose voice I was now sure I recognised, despite not having heard him speak for nearly a year. He had a high voice, with careful vowels where he’d eradicated his Gloucestershire accent.
‘They’re not there any more,’ said Thea sturdily. ‘Phil took them away for examination. He found your fingerprints on them.’
The woman made a little moan and I realised Thea was addressing her, not Eddie.
‘There! See what you’ve done, you silly bitch,’ snarled Eddie.
The woman gave a choked sound, and I tried desperately to fill in the gaps caused by not being able to see their faces.
‘You killed Gaynor and Verona, didn’t you?’ said Thea, with what seemed to me appalling recklessness. ‘For some stupid reason to do with Freemasonry.’
I was so eager to know whether she was talking to one or both of them that I almost gave myself away.
The woman spluttered again. ‘What?’ she gasped. ‘What are you talking about? Eddie didn’t kill anybody. It was Ariadne who killed them.’
‘You genuinely think that, do you?’ Thea sounded almost sorry. I was totally sandbagged by Caroline’s firm assertion, as if it was plain fact. ‘What a fool you must be,’ Thea added calmly.
Eddie laughed nastily. ‘You’ve got that right,’ he said.
‘Eddie!’ Caroline’s voice was shocked, confused, but still a long way from revising her opinion about me, I feared.
Thea seemed to have thrown every scrap of caution out of the window. ‘It wasn’t Ariadne, you idiot, it was Eddie. I think he brought you here to kill you as well. He wants to wipe out that whole group of women Masons. Isn’t that right, Eddie?’
This time it was Caroline who laughed, though with no hint of mirth. ‘He wouldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘That’s stupid.’
‘So why has he brought you here? What did he tell you was going to happen?’
‘Actually, I brought him,’ said Caroline. ‘I’d already decided I couldn’t keep the new Lodge going without Gaynor or Verona. I was going to let him have the regalia and so forth.’
‘You really did meet here, then, you three women? In Helen’s attic? But why?’
‘It had good vibes,’ she said simply. ‘And it fitted all the criteria. It was Gaynor’s idea, funnily enough.’
‘But weren’t you worried that Ariadne would see you? She lives right across the street.’
Caroline gave a loud sigh. ‘We met on the nights she did her evening class. But the truth is, I was still hoping she’d join us,’ she said. ‘That was another reason why it seemed such a good place.’ She made a soft little whimpering noise, for some unknown reason.
Eddie made a noise rather like a snarl. My stunned brain slowly came to the conclusion that if I had joined Caroline’s Lodge, I might be lying in the Barrow’s long grass as well as the other two.
Thea’s voice suddenly sounded closer and I realised she was edging towards the door. ‘He made it look as if Ariadne had killed them,’ she said. ‘With the knitting needles. And you fell for it. But surely Phil must have told you it couldn’t have been her?’
‘I haven’t spoken to Phil,’ she muttered.
‘So you let this wretched little man talk you into suspecting your friend?’
‘Mary stopped being my friend nearly three years ago,’ she said harshly.
‘Well, you’ve got it wrong,’ Thea repeated. ‘The murderer is right here in front of you.’
It still felt like wild fantasy to me. How could the irritating, pompous, self-satisfied Eddie Yeo possibly have committed two murders?
‘But why would he? What would he have against those two girls?’
‘Ask him,’ Thea invited.
A short silence followed. It was getting much darker with every minute that passed. Then Caroline said quietly, ‘You’re my friend, Eddie – aren’t you?’
He replied with a loud tirade that suggested his control was cracking. ‘You think I could be a friend to someone as sick as you? Friends with a woman intent on perverting the Craft – polluting it in that disgusting way. Wearing our symbols, defiling our rituals. All I did was clean them out of the way, your revolting little Sisters. They had to go, it was obvious.’
Another stunned silence, and then, ‘You executed them,’ whispered Caroline. Thea spoke next. ‘That’s right! He stabbed them through the heart with the closest thing he could find to the ritual knife the Freemasons use. Because he saw them as traitors.’
‘Really an ex
ecution, then,’ said Caroline, sounding terrible.
‘They were in her bag,’ said Eddie. ‘It made it seem right, somehow. I saw the points, sticking out.’
This was too much for Caroline. ‘You’re a monster!’ she suddenly shouted. ‘A stupid, bigoted, crazy monster.’
The slap was so explosive I almost felt it on my own skin. Both women shrieked, so I wasn’t sure which had received the blow, although Caroline was the obvious choice.
Then Caroline spoke rather thickly. ‘You can’t hope to get away with it,’ she said. ‘Although maybe you think you will. You seem to have some kind of power complex.’
It did me good to hear her. It made up my mind for me. I’d never manage to get out of the house without them hearing me, not by window or door, and by the time the police could respond to any call I made, things might have moved on to a point where someone got killed.
‘She’s right, Eddie,’ I said, showing myself in the doorway. ‘Now have some sense and stop behaving like a lunatic.’
Eddie Yeo was a bureaucrat, for all his silly yellow car and ideas about the sanctity of male bonding. He was not particularly fit and neither was he very quick-witted. It seemed almost banal that he could have slaughtered two healthy young women out of some obsessive notion that not even his most rabid fellow Mason could have approved.
He had a knife in his hand, however, which I had not anticipated at all. In the gloom it had taken me a few seconds to register just what it was. Slowly I focused on a long pointed thing, with a blade that looked extremely sharp. I cocked my head at it, aiming for the less-than-impressed gaze that women throughout the ages have used to wither the male ego. ‘Makes a change from knitting needles,’ I said calmly.
‘You…you…!’ he said thickly, and the hatred on his face came as a serious shock. I forced myself to think.
‘You hoped the police would suspect me of killing two women who were my friends,’ I accused him.
‘You flatter me,’ he said, avoiding my eye. He opened his mouth to say more, but then closed it again. I took him to mean there had been no real plan behind the murders. He had simply wanted to annihilate Caroline’s Lodge. And there was quite enough Masonic mumbo-jumbo to make him think he was justified. Reams of quotations from so-called ancient texts babbling about Betrayal and people being stabbed through the heart if they revealed secrets of the Craft. It was all part of the initiation rituals, with the knife pressed against the bare breast of the new recruit to warn him of what would happen if he transgressed.
The mystery of his involvement with Caroline still nagged at me. If I had understood things right up to then, she was his next potential victim. And he had just slapped her face. I examined her cheek in the poor light. It looked red from the blow.
‘You truly didn’t realise it was him?’ I asked her.
‘I had no idea,’ she said with evident sincerity. ‘I was totally convinced it must have been you – or just possibly somebody else from your pagan group. I hated that group, you see. They seduced you away from where you truly belonged – with me and my new Lodge.’
‘Huh?’ I choked, remembering what she’d said a few minutes earlier about hoping I’d still agree to join her. ‘But I’ve never given you reason to think I might.’
‘Verona thought you would. She could see how it was the obvious next step from paganism.’
‘So why tell Eddie about what you were doing?’
‘I didn’t. Nobody did. We struggled to keep it a secret from anybody in the area. Gaynor especially was adamant that nobody should know about it – least of all you. But despite what people think, Freemasonry isn’t really a secret society at all. I had to register my Lodge, list the members —’
‘How many members are there?’ I demanded. ‘Only the three of you?’
‘Three new initiates applied to join us this month, as it happens,’ she said with dignity. ‘By this time next year we’d have reached double figures.’
‘And were you going to execute all of them, one by one?’ I asked Eddie, aggressively. I found that despite his knife, I was not afraid of him.
Slowly, as he listened to us, his wrist had relaxed, until the point was directed more and more towards the floor. There was little risk, I judged, that he would try to use it, now there were three of us. But its very presence suggested that he had indeed been intending to kill Caroline, there in Greenhaven’s attic. The idea was horrible.
And then, with a sense of everything coming into sharp focus, I allowed myself to remember how much I had hurt her when she had begged me to join with her in forming a new female Masonic Lodge. She had appealed to our friendship, reminding me how close we’d been, what fun we’d had when her children were small and life was fresh and good. And I had refused, not so much from a distaste for Freemasonry, as a refusal to become so permanently bonded to her. I couldn’t face a friendship as all-consuming as that threatened to become. And between us, working as some dreadful emotional glue, was the lost Emily, the dead daughter who was an integral part of those happy memories. She had only been dead a few months when Caroline approached me with her proposal. I rejected the suggestion with unnecessary violence. And in so doing, I might have saved my own life. This last thought made the whole thing infinitely worse.
It could only have been ten or fifteen minutes since I had climbed through the bathroom window. The dogs were still quiet, and nothing seemed to stir in the street outside. Cold Aston was coldly ignoring us as we enacted a surreal climax to a horrible story. I don’t think any one of us had the slightest idea of what might happen next.
Eddie was becoming more and more agitated, and he started to wave his knife with fresh vigour. ‘I could slaughter the lot of you,’ he said, in an obvious attempt to convince himself.
I almost laughed in his face. ‘The Cold Aston massacre,’ I said. ‘You’d be famous for centuries.’
‘That’s enough,’ said Thea. ‘There’s no need to say any more.’ She seemed to be more upset than any of us. The room was very dark, lit only by the street lamp outside. Our eyes had adjusted, but suddenly I realised I could not see any expressions clearly.
Eddie made an angry snort, as if thwarted. ‘Stay here,’ he ordered us, brandishing the knife again. ‘I’m going. You’ll never see me again, any of you.’ He pushed his face close to Thea’s. ‘You lied about Ariadne calling the police,’ he accused.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I truly thought that’s what she would do.’
It didn’t seem to matter. I felt limp and dirty and very very unhappy. ‘Let him go,’ I said.
He went, and for a few moments all we heard was footsteps, a yap from one of the dogs and the front door opening. Then there were bright lights and shouts and more barking, as if Eddie had triggered some bizarre new reality.
They arrested him without much of a struggle, and Phil came up the stairs with a bright torch. He shone it on our faces, one by one, and then took Thea into his arms.
CHAPTER TWENTY
We couldn’t have a proper conversation by torchlight. There were too many pools of darkness, too many shadowed faces and unbearable emotions. Inevitably we all trooped over to my house, including Caroline, with the dogs somehow bringing up the rear.
We made Phil explain himself first. ‘It was Ursula Ferguson,’ he said. ‘She had a call from Pamela at the hospital, when she couldn’t get hold of Ariadne, and she came over here to see if she could find you. There was nobody here, and only the dogs in Greenhaven, the whole place dark. So she drove Pamela home, and then came back here. She found Ariadne’s car, but still no sign of you two.’
‘She ought to have guessed we were in Greenhaven,’ I said.
‘Well, she did, at it happens.’
‘Why didn’t she just knock on the door?’
‘Because the house was in total darkness. And she didn’t want to set the dogs barking like she had the first time.’
‘What on earth did she think was going on?’ Thea demanded.
‘The
mind boggles,’ I said, with a bitter laugh.
‘But she didn’t give up,’ Phil continued. ‘She went round the back, and saw the ladder. She actually climbed up as far as the window, and heard voices. Enough to know there was something highly unpleasant happening. So she contacted the police.’
‘And you just sat outside waiting for something to happen,’ I accused. ‘He might have killed us all.’
‘It was a calculated risk,’ he said. ‘We had no reason to think he had a weapon, for a start. We couldn’t storm the house without alarming him, which was likely to be much more dangerous than just letting him walk away.’
‘And,’ said Thea thoughtfully, ‘unless Ursula heard everything, you couldn’t be entirely sure who exactly was the criminal. It might yet have been Caroline.’
‘Precisely,’ he said, with a fond smile at her, and a rueful grimace at his ex-wife.
It was late in the evening when we dispersed. Caroline had stayed on much longer than I had expected. She had phoned Xavier, her new husband, who promised to come and collect her.
The aftermath of Eddie Yeo’s arrest was threaded with all kinds of extraneous considerations. The two damaged hips could not be ignored – Phil’s distress at his injured dog never quite left him, and I was weighed down even further by Sally’s accident.
But the main obstacle to a full and frank debriefing was embarrassment. Thea seemed to be aware that she had missed something between Caroline and me, but didn’t like to ask directly what it was. Instead we stuck firmly to Eddie Yeo’s extraordinary attitude to female Freemasons. Caroline managed not to look at Phil throughout the whole conversation, but she did give an account that would probably satisfy a criminal court, when it came to it.
She had always admired the Freemason brotherhood, as Phil well knew. Her father had been a Grand Master, and she had grown up quite familiar with much of the symbolism. It had seemed almost inevitable when the idea eventually dawned on her that she might establish a Lodge of her own. The procedures already existed and she had little difficulty in gaining the acquiescence of the authorities in the Grand Lodge. Then she had set about discreetly recruiting her members.
