The Silent Killer

by Hazel Holt

  The first course was a game terrine, which was all right since Christine had obviously bought it in from our splendid deli. The main course was my real source of worry since Christine liked to think of herself as an innovative cook. I’m sure that in the hands of an expert chef squid cooked in its own ink is a rare delicacy. Christine’s version gave me nightmares for days after. This time I was relieved to see that although the rack of lamb was fashionably pink (not to my taste) and the broccoli and fennel were, as usual, underdone, they were at least edible.

  “I’m sure you agree?” Desmond was saying.

  “Oh yes, absolutely,” I replied vigorously.

  “So, of course,” Desmond said triumphantly, “I referred them to the EC 1999 order, sub-section 23 and that settled the matter.”

  “How splendid.”

  Finally, after what seemed like an age, Christine turned to Jack on her other side, poor Rosemary was lumbered with Desmond, and I finally got to talk to David.

  After a few commonplaces about the weather and so on, I said, “I did so love that painting of yours of the moor in winter. I don’t think I’ve seen anything that sums up the place and the season so perfectly.”

  He gave me a shy (shy, David Middleton!) smile and said, “That’s really kind of you – it’s the time I love the best and I did so want to try and capture it.”

  “You certainly did that,” I said warmly. “As you may know, Rosemary bought it and she felt the same way as I did. I had no idea that you were an artist.”

  “Oh I wouldn’t say that,” he said modestly (David Middleton, modest!). “I just enjoy messing about with paints – only watercolours, I’ve never attempted oils! I’m very much an amateur. Audrey Fisher persuaded me to put it in the exhibition, so I did, just to make up the numbers really.”

  “I was wondering,” I said, “if by any chance you have any other painting you might be willing to sell? Only my cousin Hilda, who loves Exmoor, has a birthday coming up soon – it’s her eightieth so I wanted something really special for her and one of your paintings would be absolutely perfect!”

  “Well, I don’t know…” He spoke hesitantly. “I’m not sure if there’s anything good enough.”

  “I’m sure there must be.”

  “If you’d like to come and have a look?”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  We arranged a day and a time and I began to feel that the evening was not being such a dead loss after all.

  “Did you talk to the new David?” I asked Rosemary when she came round the next morning to compare notes.

  “I know – a completely different person! Isn’t it extraordinary? And Bridget too, she looked positively glamorous. It’s almost as if Sidney dying released them from some sort of spell, like in a fairy tale. I long to know what’s happened.”

  “It really is very odd,” I said. “I wasn’t able to do more than exchange a few pleasantries yesterday, but on Saturday I’m going over there to choose a picture to give to Hilda for her birthday.”

  “Oh good. If anyone can find out what’s been going on you can!”

  The house, about ten miles out on the Taunton side of Taviscombe, was handsome and substantial, built in the 1930s. What estate agents call ‘a family home’, though they do not specify what sort of family. There was a large garden, leading to a paddock with stabling for the statutory children’s pony. The whole thing looked like an illustration for a book by Enid Blyton.

  David answered the door. “Hello, Sheila, do come in. I’m afraid Bridget and the boys aren’t here,” he said, leading me through into the drawing-room. “James has a music lesson and Tony’s got a rugby practice.”

  “Oh I know, parents are simply chauffeurs nowadays, ferrying the children from A to B.”

  He laughed. “Do let me get you a coffee, anyway.”

  “That would be lovely.”

  The drawing room was handsomely if conventionally furnished. There was a piano in one corner (for James’s music presumably) and large-screen television (for Tony to watch the rugby?) in another. There were several photographs of the boys and one of Bridget, though none of David – or, indeed, of his father. There were a few watercolours and mezzotints on the walls, though none of David’s. I was just studying a particularly fine Birkett Foster rural scene when David came back into the room with a tray.

  “This is beautiful,” I said. “How lovely to have a Birkett Foster of your very own.”

  He smiled. “A wicked indulgence,” he said. “As was the David Cox.” He indicated a small picture beside the fireplace, a river scene, with a wonderfully dramatic stormy sky.

  “Goodness! That is a treasure,” I exclaimed as I went over to look at it more closely.

  “I pretended to myself that they were investments,” David said laughing. “But I knew that I’d never bring myself to sell them!”

  “They’re wonderful,” I said. “Does Bridget share your enthusiasm?”

  “No, music’s her line, that’s where James gets it from. But she’s very understanding.”

  The coffee was in a cafetiere and the cups were elegant bone china. I was impressed.

  “None of your pictures here,” I said.

  “Good heavens no – not in the same room as those two masters! No, I have a sort of studio upstairs. I keep them there.”

  While we drank our coffee we talked for a while about the English school of watercolour painting, about which David was very knowledgeable. Fortunately my father had also been a keen amateur collector so I was able to keep my end up, more or less. After a while David stood up and said, “Well, if you’d really like to see my stuff we’ll go up then.”

  The studio was right at the top of the house and I was a little out of breath by the time we got there. It was a large room, the attic really, running the full length of the house. There were two skylights in the roof that gave excellent light, an easel, a large trestle table and a cabinet containing a variety of paints, papers and other artistic impedimenta. A very professional room, but neat and well-ordered with the scrupulous tidiness of an amateur artist. There were a few pictures on the walls but mostly they were propped up on the floor with their faces turned to the wall.

  “What a marvellous room,” I said.

  “Another indulgence,” he said. “I’m very lucky to be able to pursue my hobby like this.”

  “How do you work? Do you make rough sketches out on the moor and then work them up when you get home?”

  “Sometimes. But sometimes, when the weather’s right, I like to do the whole thing out there. I love the moor.”

  “Yes,” I said, looking at some of the paintings hanging on the wall, “I can see that.”

  We stood in silence for a moment, and I think we were both startled by the ringing of a mobile phone. He muttered an apology and held it to his ear.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’ll take it downstairs. Make yourself at home – have a look round.”

  The pictures on the walls were all of the moor in Winter, all as fine and evocative as the first one we had seen at the exhibition. There was a spareness and simplicity about them all, and he had captured the feeling of the place, the bare bones of the landscape, and the season. I turned my attention to the ones on the floor. Some of these showed the moor in Spring, the delicate, pale green tips of the whortleberries, the first hint of growth on the ling, the slow unfurling of the bracken, all done with great sensitivity of observation. One picture showed the spot I always think of as ‘my’ bit of the moor – down in the combe of Weirwater where the stream runs clear and fast, overhung with small rowan trees, where the stone-chat’s call is the only sound. It would have been fatally easy to have made it a conventionally ‘pretty’ scene, but David had reduced it to a minimum in such a way that he had captured the very essence of the place without a hint of sentimentality. It was a really impressive piece of work and the picture I knew I must have to keep for myself.

  Almost any of the others would have delighted Hilda, it
was hard to choose. But as I continued to turn over the pictures I came upon one that was not a landscape. It was the portrait of an elderly woman. David wasn’t as good at catching a likeness and the general style was more stiff, less fluid, than his landscapes. Nevertheless I still recognised the sitter. It was his mother, Joan Middleton.

  It was a picture that was painful to look at. Not because of the quality of the work, but because of the emotion on the subject’s face and, by association, the emotion of the person who painted it. There was pain there, and fear, and a sort of hopelessness that almost made me turn away, since I felt I was looking at something I should not have seen. But I couldn’t help looking, trying to relate this portrait to the Joan I had known – quiet, unobtrusive, placid, even. But apparently, like everything else I had thought I knew about the Middletons, totally wrong.

  “I’m sorry, I thought I’d put that away.” David was standing in the doorway.

  I turned quickly, flustered. “I’m so sorry – it was with the others…”

  His face closed down and for a moment he was the David I used to know, then he recovered himself and said lightly, “It was just an experiment. I’m not any good at portraits.”

  “On the contrary,” I said. “It seems to me that you’ve caught your subject very well.” I moved towards him. “David, I’m so sorry, I’d no idea…”

  He shook his head, without saying anything, but I went on, “Since Sidney died, it’s become perfectly obvious that we never really knew him – or you, or (now I’ve seen this) poor Joan. How can we have been so blind?”

  He gave a short laugh. “He was clever, devious and – well, people see what they expect to see. Sidney Middleton was a good man, generous, he gave to charity, he supported good causes. He was friendly and easy with people. People liked him, of course they did when he put himself out to charm them. All the time. But not at home. Not to us. He was selfish, arrogant, domineering, ruled our lives, so that we were too frightened to rebel. My mother gave up almost immediately. He married her for her money and treated her like dirt. Bullied her, struck her sometimes. I tried to stand up for her, I tried to speak out, but who would believe me when all the world knew what a wonderful person he was? And, as I got older, he’d built up this persona for me – the bossy son, who tried to bully a poor old man – and everyone believed that. I got a job down here, while he was still in London, and I thought I was free. But he retired here, back to his roots, he said and everyone said how nice. But it was so that he could go on controlling me and my family.”

  He closed his eyes as if to shut out a painful memory. “When he died, it was wonderful, though even now sometimes I can’t be sure the old devil is really dead.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  * * *

  “That’s more or less what Brian said at the funeral,” I said.

  He looked startled. “Brian? You know about Brian?”

  “It’s a long story, but yes, I know about Brian.”

  “It was just about the last straw,” he said. “Finding out about that after he died. It more or less destroyed me. To think that he’d ruined other people’s lives like he’d ruined ours. Thank God he’d had to make provision for them – at least they’ve got the cottage and some money, but nothing can ever make up for what he did to them. That’s why I had to go and see him. That poor woman!”

  “Brian told me how wonderful you were with her.”

  “All those years,” he said, “trying to support my own mother. I knew how fragile she must be. I need to go back and have a proper talk with him – try and make him understand that I had no idea – try to make some sort of amends.”

  “Is that why you went to see Bill Goddard?” I asked.

  “Yes. I heard what had happened there and I was horrified! The way that man’s evil spread, like throwing a stone into a pond – so many terrible effects.”

  “How awful.”

  He was silent for a moment, then he said, “One thing that was really frightening. I told you how he created this persona for me – the bossy, domineering son – he built it up so cleverly that I almost found myself becoming that person. Can you imagine that! My poor Bridget, in the end she never knew where she stood with me. I had these mood swings; it must have been dreadful for her. And having the boys sent away to school, it upset her so much. But I had to, you see.”

  “Had to?”

  “I had to get them away. They were just at the age when they were beginning to be influenced by him. He gave them things, expensive presents, money. He was trying to turn them against me. I couldn’t have that. I sent them away to school and I made sure that he never saw them in the holidays, just as I tried to keep Bridget away as well.”

  “Didn’t she know how things were?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “In the beginning I just couldn’t. It seemed a shameful thing – and there was my mother, too. Somehow I didn’t want her to know about that, it was too painful. And, as time went on it became more and more difficult to say anything.”

  “But she knows now?”

  “Oh yes. When he died I told her everything. She was very upset, we both were, it was a really traumatic time for both of us.”

  I remembered how they were at the funeral. “Yes,” I said. “I can imagine.”

  “My poor girl. I don’t know if I can ever make it up to her.”

  “She loves you,” I said. “She’s so happy now, you can see that just by looking at her. Not just because you’re back to your real self, but because you’ve told her – you’ve shared it with her.”

  “I wanted to keep it all from her,” he said, “to spare her the knowledge…”

  I smiled. “Women would rather know,” I said, “believe me. They don’t want to be spared, they’re hurt when you shut them out.”

  “You’re probably right. As I said, she was very upset at first, especially about Brian and Bill Goddard. She felt people were talking about us and she couldn’t face them, but gradually she’s realised that it’s OK. And now, she’s a different person. We both are. It’s as if some terrible thing has been lifted from our lives and we can be ourselves again.”

  He looked round the studio. “This was the only escape I had, the only place where I could be myself. That’s the great thing about painting, you can lose yourself completely in what you’re doing.”

  “You have a remarkable gift,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No, I’m just an average amateur, but it’s been my lifeline.”

  “It’s not just the technical ability you have,” I said, “it’s the observation behind the pictures that make them special. You really seem to be in tune with nature, if that doesn’t sound too banal.”

  “The moor is a wonderful place. That feeling of space, being able to step outside the world, the way it cleanses you – that was so important to me. I suppose that’s why I like it best in Winter, when it’s stripped down to bare essentials and the wind scours away all the bad things and you’re left with what is real.” He stopped abruptly and gave a self-conscious laugh. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go on like that. But I think you understand.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ve drawn comfort from it in my time.”

  “I want to try and do something to put right some of the things he did. I know I can never undo those things, but I feel I’ve got to do what I can for Brian and his mother and for Bill Goddard and God knows how many other people he’s injured in ways I may never know about.”

  “But none of it is your fault,” I said. “You mustn’t think that. You are even more of a victim than any of them.”

  “But that’s why I must try to make some sort of amends, because I understand how hurt they’ve been and how their lives have been affected.”

  “What can you do?”

  “The very least I can do is talk to them, tell them how it was for me and how I know what they must have gone through and how sorry I am.” He looked at me earnestly. “I can, I suppose, simply apologise. Do you think that’s
silly?”

  I shook my head. “No. An apology, given as you would give it, would mean a lot.”

  I turned back to the picture of his mother. “I think she would be proud of you,” I said, “and so happy that you’re free at last.”

  He smiled sadly. “Too late for her.”

  “But all those years, you must have been her lifeline, remember that.”

  I chose my picture of Weirwater and a lovely painting of Molland Common in Winter for Hilda.

  “It’s very like the one Rosemary bought,” I said, holding it up to admire it. “It was a Christmas present for her son-in-law, Roger Eliot, you know, the…” I broke off, embarrassed.

  “The policeman who’s investigating my father’s death,” David said. “Yes, he mentioned it when he came to see me. Apparently he liked it very much.”

  “Roger is very civilised,” I said, flustered by the turn the conversation had taken. “He reads the Victorian novelists.”

  David smiled. “Really,” he said. “A man of many parts.”

  “Did he,” I enquired tentatively, “give you any idea how the investigation was going?”

  “No. I didn’t ask. He just asked me the sort of questions you’d expect – where was I on the night in question, that sort of thing. Not that I was any help. I was here, at home all evening with Bridget, but I don’t expect that would count as an alibi.”

  “Oh well,” I said hastily, “I don’t imagine he thought you needed one.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I’m a suspect,” David said, “and why not? I hated my father and I’m delighted he’s dead. My only regret is that it didn’t happen years ago.”

  When I got home, after I’d let the animals out, I spent a long time deciding where to hang my picture. Eventually I hung it above my desk so that I could see it when I looked up, seeking inspiration. Only then did I allow myself to think about my extraordinary conversation with David. It was very disconcerting. Just when I thought I’d finally reached the truth about the real Sidney Middleton some new strata of horribleness was revealed. I had no doubt that what David had told me was the truth, but the enormity of what he’d suggested was difficult to grasp. I could just about accept that Sidney had been a monstrous hypocrite who’d deceived us all these years – the revelations after his death made that only too obvious – but what David had suggested about his father’s dealings with him were almost beyond my comprehension. But his whole manner and the obvious pain it had cost him to tell me his story made it impossible for me not to believe him.