by Lorna Gray
I didn’t reply. I moved my hands on the handlebars and allowed the bicycle to roll forwards a fraction. He put out a hand, not to touch me but as a restraining gesture and said swiftly, ‘I wanted to talk to you anyway, Miss Sutton. About how you happened to come by this work for Colonel Langton? Might I ask—?’
I shot him a look that might freeze. I said stiffly, ‘I don’t work for Colonel Langton. This shopping trip was done in the spirit of friendship. And I’m sorry, but who do you report to exactly?’
I stopped there. A door had opened behind me just uphill from the shop and both of us turned to see. It was the doctor’s house and Mrs Abbey was emerging, blinking in the sunlight with her children at her heels and bearing a bruise on her jaw that was now reduced to an awful mottled sepia. The improvement, if that was what it should be called, was owing to a heavy application of face powder. And the expression on her face, when she saw me today with this man, was different from the way she had looked yesterday as I’d left her at the tithe barn for the sake of climbing into Richard’s car. This time there was no triumph and there was no requirement to choose sides. Her children were smiling shyly again, whereas she looked, in fact, just as she had that day when she’d found me on the doorstep at Eddington after she’d thought I’d gone away. Beneath the crisp styling of a coordinated skirt and blouse and jacket that conveyed a gritty readiness to meet any difficulty alone, she looked exhausted.
Mrs Abbey barely mustered a good morning before she had stepped out of the door, shut it and was hurrying her children away up the short rise to the junction at the top. She opted for the alternative route home along the rough trackway that I had used earlier. To get to it, she first had to turn left around the curve of a house and pass out of sight along the lane through the village.
I took advantage of the silence she left behind to say shortly to the man near my side without turning my head, ‘Actually, never mind about your newspaper. I don’t have anything to say to you.’
Then I dodged his automatic exclamation and pushed off with my foot and let the momentum of the bicycle carry me onwards down the hill and around the turn.
That part was easy. It was a far harder push up the next hill to rejoin the lane and find Mrs Abbey. When I reached the junction, she was nowhere in sight. I traced the lane back through the village and found her about halfway along in the process of making her children climb through one of those footpath stiles that form a narrow ‘v’ between slabs of upright stone. It was a shortcut on the route homewards that was closed to me due to the handicap of my bicycle. She must have been very nervous because instinct carried her just as soon as she heard my approach in one leap through the stile onto the other side. The reaction was a touch extreme, but it fuelled me as I launched into the first of the frustrations and accusations left from last night. ‘Mrs Abbey. Why did you set the fire in the turbine house?’
She wasn’t afraid of me. She also wasn’t concerned by anything I had to say. She turned there behind her stile and smiled one of those disbelieving smiles made by a person who had been braced for a shock and reacted accordingly, only to find the threat had only been me. I wasn’t even sure she was listening. She was blinking at me and the space around us and it was then that it occurred to me that she too was taking the route home that avoided exposed lengths of road accessible by car.
It was in the following second that I noticed the fresh strapping about her wrist.
With my gaze inescapably fixed on the bandage, I persisted somewhat more distractedly, ‘Please, Mrs Abbey, I found some of my clothes there and don’t pretend it isn’t you who has had custody of them for the past day or so because I met one of my frocks in the shop just now and I wasn’t the person wearing it.’
I looked up and found the colour had ebbed back into her cheeks. Her children weren’t worried at all. They were hunting crawling things further along the hedgerow and she didn’t think to call them back. She wasn’t behaving remotely as I thought she should. She was, in fact, making me increasingly convinced that I’d made a mistake by beginning this confrontation because the more I said, the more I was frightening myself. I mean to say that I was suddenly discovering that I was frightened of her; actually physically afraid and I didn’t fully know why. I just know that I kept back, just out of arm’s reach.
I heard myself add, ‘We know it wasn’t Duckett who set the fire in the turbine house. Because the arsonist burnt some of my clothes and I understand at last that Duckett was being perfectly honest when he said that he didn’t have my suitcase. I didn’t realise what he meant at the time but now I know. He was telling me that he’d given you the accounts books and my bag. And,’ I finished on a colder note as I suddenly grasped the full implication of what I had learned, ‘I believe that two days ago, when I came visiting with Captain Langton and you very seriously offered me the loan of some clothes, you had my suitcase in your house all along. Didn’t you?’
Now her stare really was frightening me. She was watching me with the sort of ambivalence that belongs to a person who is so emotionally removed from a scene that all empathy is dead. Whereas, for me, the whole truth was sliding, reluctantly, step by step into concern. I felt the moment I recalled just how hard Duckett had worked to find her. And the memory burned when I realised that, for an old friend, she had been awfully quick to use my name to send him away again. It wasn’t fear for myself any more that made my voice tight when I asked quickly, ‘Duckett is setting the fires in the outhouses, isn’t he?’
I’d leaned closer while my hands remained secure on my handlebars. I expected her to shake free of this stupor and ridicule me. I certainly expected her to demur, based on the way she’d evaded every other opportunity she’d had to share the truth. But something had changed. I have never seen a woman so close to breaking. A vital and urgent eagerness transformed her features and she confessed in a voice made shrill by the race to speak, ‘He’s flushing out my husband. He’s all that stands between me and Paul. He’s here. Close by. It’s a nightmare born out of that disaster at the warehouse. Neither of them will let it rest. And it’s—’ A swift glance behind to assure herself that her children were still safely close at hand in a way that was at last painfully authentic. Then she confided in a whisper, ‘It’s unbearable.’
The hand she lifted was the one with the bandage. If I’d wondered what had changed to loosen her controls enough to speak to me now, this new injury was the clue.
It made me ask urgently, ‘Who did that? Your husband or Duckett?’
She didn’t think of the bandage. She thought of the bruise on her face. Fingers lightly reached to cover the mark, as if she’d forgotten it was there. She admitted, ‘Paul took Mrs Cooke’s keys from me.’
‘You had them?’
‘Of course I did. And yesterday I gave them back after the Colonel’s little speech to his tenants in the farmyard. Mrs Cooke was my friend and she gave them to me for safekeeping. But Paul wanted the food she’d left behind, so he took them. Then your Captain pitched up on my doorstep with the news that the squire had come home, so I went in the daytime to retrieve them before anyone could think to ask for them back. This was my reward. A nice return for a bit of kindness for that foolish Colonel when I could have quite easily feigned complete ignorance.’ The hand dropped from her cheek.
‘Why?’
I saw Mrs Abbey’s face cloud into puzzlement. She asked blankly, ‘Why did she give the keys to me? Because when she left, she left quickly, of course. She packed her bags almost as soon as she got the old man’s note telling her to get a bed ready just in case he came. She’d dedicated her life to tending to that man’s wishes and I think she was a little bit in love with him, for all that he and his son both always treated her like a fussy, servile fool. But she couldn’t bear to stay when she heard the old man was thinking of coming back. Sometimes I think Mrs Cooke and I have rather too much in common. We neither of us can forgive the old man for what he did to John.’
Her mouth twisted. And
so did my mind. It was a jolt to suddenly pass from concern about Abbey and Duckett into hearing about John Langton. It was with a considerably cooler tone that I remarked, ‘Actually, I’m still trying to establish who is frightening you. In my question just now I meant to ask why was your husband in a position to ask you for the keys in the first place? I thought he was hunting you – taking his revenge because you ran away after he was sentenced or because he’s trying to claim his share of the money from the sale of your house in Gloucester, or something. I didn’t expect to hear he has been pitching up on your doorstep in time for tea. Do you mean to say he’s been sleeping at Eddington?’
Then I realised. ‘The light that shines from the back of your house at night isn’t coming from a window as I’d thought. It can’t be, because there aren’t any on the side that forms the high boundary wall. It’s a signal put out by your children to tell their father that the way is clear. And he was waiting that evening when he collided with Mr Winstone, who was hurrying home for his tea. Are you trying to tell me that you want to shelter Paul Abbey in your house?’
Wide eyes jerked upwards to mine. I was thinking that all this detection might have been made so much easier had Richard only taken his last night-time walk a little earlier on his first night here. If he had come at dusk to assure himself that I’d made it safely home after leaving him and his father to their dinner, he might have been in time to see Abbey moving around in the company of his children in the lamplight of Eddington.
Her voice was hollow as she admitted, ‘Selling my house in Gloucester was a mistake. I thought I’d never get the chance to go back. I was safe here and I could manage the rent. But last winter my husband had the chance of a new legal case. He needed money. He needed it to get out. He’s my husband. I didn’t have a choice.’
There was a bitter edge to her voice as she leaned over her stone stile again to confide in a last whisper, ‘He’s out, but I’m still trapped by everyone. We all lost money in that warehouse fire and now we’re poor when I want to be free to live again.’
She straightened once more, but left behind that crucial word. Free. It was a word that might mean everything to a person hedged in by threats and violence. From the way her eyes were still searching the vacant lane to left and right from her place behind the barrier of the stone stile, I believed it meant everything to her.
And yet, in the back of my mind was the impossibility of believing her at all. Because this simple justification of all her actions was all too much like freedom for me too. I asked doubtfully while my pulse beat strongly, ‘That’s what this is about? This really is about reclaiming your house because you sold it and now John Langton’s dead, you knew the estate would be made bankrupt and you wouldn’t be able to stay here for much longer. So you want his brother’s help, after all, to return there? Is that all?’
She wouldn’t hear me. She was already saying, ‘Everyone has a hold on my soul. Do you know Paul never even stayed at that squatters’ camp? I had to give away the clothes as an apology. I knew he might go there and I couldn’t even tell Brian he’d made a mistake, because if I had, Brian would have known that I’d lied when I’d said I didn’t know where Paul was.’
‘Brian is the man I call Duckett?’
‘Yes.’
‘And this is why you told Duckett I was helping your husband and engineered all the rest. Because you don’t dare to be caught out on that single lie? Is the truth really so dangerous?’
She was saying quietly, ‘They mustn’t meet. If they do, Paul will try to stop him. But he’s deranged. Quite deranged. He wants revenge for the money he lost in the business. We’re so afraid.’
My heart slowed to a hard, clear rhythm. It was heavy with the burden of realising that she’d told no one this and yet here she was telling me now and I mustn’t break this chance by a clumsy misstep. Mrs Abbey was putting out that hand towards me again. In supplication, I thought, hesitantly, doubtfully because she was aware the shift of power here was oddly in my favour and for the first time since meeting me I thought she perceived my resolve. My own eyes were drawn inescapably to that bandage and this time I was torn between feeling the cruelty of it and a repulsive suspicion it was merely a burn from last night’s fire.
‘Who helped you to set the fire at the turbine house last night? Duckett or Abbey?’
‘My husband. Paul thought it would leave irrefutable evidence for the police that the fires were being set by Brian. That’s why we used your clothes and the books. To tie him to it.’
‘Really? Just that? You had no other purpose?’
She nodded a confirmation blankly, as if my sudden eagerness to clarify that single point was impossibly strange because there was nothing else it could be.
Relief swept over me. And guilt. We’d been wrong. This woman really was trapped. Relief nearly made me rush to offer my help. Only I heard myself ask instead, ‘Why are you letting him get so close? Now that your husband is out, why don’t you simply pack your bags and leave? Couldn’t your brother help?’
‘Why I—’ I saw it hit her that we’d uncovered the lie about the photograph on her mantelpiece.
A movement dragged my attention from her face. It wasn’t the children who were shredding seed-heads from tall grasses beside the footpath. It was the man from the shop, approaching around the bend in the lane and not bothering to hide the fact that he was watching us. Then Mrs Abbey gave her reply and it snatched my mind with almost painful swiftness back to her face.
Her voice was raw with strain, but still defiant. She told me with a brave little lift of her jaw, ‘My brother doesn’t even know Paul’s out. He isn’t well and if he learned any of the deeper details here, he’d be dragged in too and that would be worse. I can’t go anywhere because wherever I go, my husband goes and Brian will always follow. And my children—’
She checked, then eyed me with cold determination. ‘This is the only way to prove it was him all along. He just … he just can’t know I’m betraying him until it’s over.’
I knew we couldn’t stay here, not with that newspaperman sidling closer. I said quickly, ‘We should tell Richard this. Now. He and Danny Hannis have gone looking for your husband, I think.’
‘Now?’ she repeated blankly.
‘Paul Abbey’s at the pump house, isn’t he? By day, I mean? Richard was asking the man at the wireless station about huts and where they get their water. And that means he was asking about places that are like the turbine house, doesn’t it?’
She was staring again.
I rushed on. ‘So I think it’s fair to guess that this wireless station’s pump house is where the Captain and Danny will be. You know where it is, presumably, so we’ll go now and find them, and then we can help your husband to explain all this.’
I thought she was angry that I meant to get her husband to confirm her story. I thought I’d just caught her out on another lie after all. But the transformation in her face wasn’t anger or pride or defiance. It was a repulsively urgent version of the way Duckett had driven me away from his warehouse yesterday.
She shrieked out, ‘Stop him, Emily. For heaven’s sake, stop him. He’ll kill him. You’ll get him hurt.’
I was practically forced backwards by the power of her conviction. Before I really knew it, she had flung out instructions on how to find this pump house and then, without any thought for the suggestion that we ought to go there together, she had me turning the bicycle around and astride it. And then I was racing away with pounding pedals through the quick serpentine bends of the village, as if every wasted second was yet another act of betrayal.
The lane passed a line of dirty cottages and a smithy and then onwards past the rough trackway that had carried me here and onto a route that I had formerly only loosely pieced together in my head. This lane coursed its way down yet another steep hillside to meet the bottom-most limit of the gated lane from the Manor. It ran from there into the trees beyond my cousin’s house and rose again to the ridgetop and Edd
ington.
Trees lined this lane too. Dense broadleaf woodland that turned the air thick and still as I spotted Richard’s car standing empty in a passing place. It was the only feature I noticed. There was no room for anything else in my head. I’d been so convinced that she’d been exposing her fear of Duckett as she explained her husband’s plans to betray him. Now it was utterly contradicted by a recurring echo of the core details of what she had really said. Her bruise was the reward … he wants revenge … he’s deranged …
She’d been speaking about Paul Abbey. And I’d said that Richard would find him.
Chapter 25
He’s quite deranged. Those few devastating minutes after that frantic discussion with Mrs Abbey were summarised in a few hateful words.
I left the lane for a track that led into the woodland from the spot where Richard had parked his car. I crossed the footpath that Danny had promised would lead to the shop and rattled down many twists and turns before engaging in a brief battle with a hawthorn, where the smothering trees gave way to grass. I was at the foot of a long field occupied by a couple of horses and three goats and marked out at one end for the villagers to use as potato plots. The rest was meadow. I rolled through long grasses that clutched at my pedals onto a sunlit bank and found myself on a short rise above the pump house. But this is the simplified version of that frantic bicycle ride.
In truth, this dry description of trees and trackways belongs to the run of events that I assembled later, once logic could place everything that came after my interview with Mrs Abbey in their correct order. In the interests of accuracy it seems honest and fair to record what happened after I left that woman in the manner in which I truly remember it.
My first memory is that I knew quite clearly that I was confused. Touch was present and so was sight, in a particularly restricted form where the peripheries might not have existed for all the attention my senses were paying them.
