Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves

by Rachel Malik

  She sat, apparently content, with her broad back to all the noise and excitement behind her, seemingly oblivious.

  ‘Margaret? Could we go back upstairs to our rooms now? I’m feeling very tired.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m tired too. It’s been a long day.’

  There was no reason to delay. They had finished their tea and Margaret had promised to telephone Belinda.

  They both stood up. Margaret was ready to go in a moment, but Elsie took an age to gather her things. She got the bulky room key and a voluminous hanky into her trouser pockets after a fashion, but there was nothing she could do with her purse but carry it awkwardly in both hands – she was quite at a loss without a jacket and had never carried a woman’s bag. Margaret felt sure that at least one of those noisy men would notice them, would notice Elsie’s trousers or how long she stood at the table, trying to fill her pockets, her awkward hands clasped around the purse. They were just a nudge from looks, from an ill-concealed remark. For all the drink, the men looked pretty sharp-eyed.

  Finally Elsie was ready and they were on their way – Margaret in front, Elsie behind – moving among the white tables. None of the ‘ordinary’ diners looked up for more than a moment, and Margaret’s spirits lightened: the ordeal would soon be over. Her own shoes didn’t seem too noisy this time, but Elsie wasn’t easy in her boots and skittered a bit behind her. Margaret glanced again at the group, they were just ahead: the men were more settled now, most of them seemed to be listening to a joke one of them was telling. She hoped it was a long one. Taking a deep breath, Margaret walked past the tables with the broad shadow of Elsie in her wake. Despite herself, she glanced briefly at them as she went by, noticing, to her surprise, that there was a woman in the group, very striking, with bright, blonde hair and a hard, lined face. None of the men looked up, they were still absorbed in the story, but the woman did. She looked up at Margaret, clocked eyes with her for the briefest moment, before her eyes passed on, swift and shrewd, to Elsie, where they stayed.

  * * *

  A couple of hundred yards away from the Eagle, two men in early middle age sat quietly in the lounge of another hotel. The Musgrave was the smartest and most comfortable hotel in the town; a couple of the rugs were threadbare, and the sporting portraits were not of the best, but the furniture was good and, better still, comfortable, and the roaring fire kept the worst of the weather at bay. Thomas Walker and Marcus Quillet were old friends from Oxford with a war in common. They were now meeting in a professional capacity to prosecute the only murder trial of the Winchester Assizes. They had enjoyed a good dinner, a brisk catch-up about the relative states of wives and children, and some restrained reminiscences about ‘old times’, but now it was time for business and they had turned their attention to the case that started tomorrow: Regina versus Miss Irene Hargreaves for the murder of Mr Ernest Massey. Both men were reading from the files. QC Marcus Quillet was a slight man with a sharp face, his greying hair cut short like smooth fur. He had put down his glass of whisky and was fully absorbed in what he was reading. Something about the set of his nose and pointed chin suggested the muzzle of a fox. Solicitor Thomas Walker sat opposite him. He was big and broad, and most of his clients thought he didn’t look like a solicitor at all – this was nearly always a compliment. He too was reading, but hadn’t forgotten his whisky. The case appeared straightforward in many of its aspects, but both men felt a certain unease. This didn’t centre on the murder so much as on the life of the accused and her long-established friendship with another woman. The manners and behaviour of the victim presented other difficulties; the state of the cottage where the three of them had lived likewise – there was some pretty unsavoury detail. Still, they were preparing carefully and had decided on their general approach.

  The only other occupant of the lounge was the defence counsel for the same trial: Patrick Clifford. Quillet, who knew Clifford from the circuit, had asked him to join them for dinner, but Clifford had politely declined. He was fighting a heavy cold, he said, and would make poor company. He sat at a desk, close to the fire, immersed in his papers.

  The fire wheezed and crackled cosily enough in the lounge, but the sound of the river outside was relentless; so was the thud, thud of the rain. The Musgrave promised riverside views.

  * * *

  At Wheal Rock the rain fell lightly. Nib slept peacefully in her usual place: curled in a perfect circle in the cleft between Elsie’s and Rene’s pillows – nothing would break her routine. The absence of two familiar humans did not interest her particularly, given that another (unfamiliar) human had brought her food that very evening. She had accepted it and a saucer of milk from Belinda, who had cycled over to see to the animals and check that everything was all right. Jugger had been delighted to see her, thumping his tail and jumping up. She had put on his leash and taken him for a walk in the lane, but soon – far too soon, in his eyes – she had gone. And Jugger, confined to the kitchen, was left more fretful than before. True, there were periods when he sat beside the outside door, listening quite sensibly, with his head cocked to one side and an occasional hopeful thump of the tail. But as the night progressed his confidence diminished. Any little noise could raise his hopes – a squeak or squeal in the dark outside, all manner of cottage creaks – and had him scratching desperately at the door. In between, in the silence, he knew that he was really and truly alone and he howled and howled.

  Belinda had offered to keep him with her at the Cuffs’, but Elsie had said no. It was better Jugger was at Wheal Rock, she said: it was his home, the place he knew. That was what she told Belinda and she was persuaded it was true; but it wasn’t only that. The truth was that she didn’t want Wheal Rock to be without a dog at night. She thought it very likely that he would fret and that was a pity, but it didn’t alter her thinking. She didn’t like to think of him upset, she was not hard-hearted, but she also thought that if he did howl, at least it might keep the foxes away.

  14.

  The Green Hat

  In the morning the rain had stopped and there was a passage of blinding sunshine. There was some optimistic talk that the weather was on the turn. This was what the receptionist at the Musgrave ventured to say to solicitor Thomas Walker when he handed in his key. The receptionist asked if she could arrange a taxi, but he refused: the courts were only a ten-minute walk, most of it along the river.

  The Winchester Crown Court buildings were in Market Street. They were plain stone buildings and unadorned except for a rather grand fan of shallow steps that led up to the main entrance and a line of statues that were niched along the second-floor facade. The statues had been cleaned recently, but the rest of the building had not, and this made the statues appear more than ordinarily interested in the goings-on below. As Walker and Quillet came through the gates, the large courtyard was full of puddles and bright blue sky but virtually empty of people. At the bottom of the steps, there was a prolix, handwritten sign: Please watch your step, both the stairs and lobby are very slippery. Disregarding the message, Quillet quickened his pace, but it was the more careful Walker who nearly lost his footing as they entered the lobby. The marble floor was an ice rink of footprints and brown splash.

  The lobby was large and busy, with people standing about, waiting: witnesses and would-be jurors, nervous and self-important.

  At the desk, a clerk was having an agitated, whispered conversation with a caretaker. The clerk had clearly had enough of the man with his mop and metal bucket, and seeing Quillet and Walker approach, he turned to them with relief.

  ‘Morning, gentlemen, and how may I be of help?’

  Formalities concluded, the clerk pointed out the cloakroom, gave them a lengthy set of directions and gestured them towards the marble staircase.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Quillet and Walker passed a loose knot of a dozen or so men. They were noticeably at ease, milling, chatting. It was the same group that had disconcerted Margaret so much in the hotel dining room the night before, but they
were quieter now. Some of them looked the worse for wear. Their jacket pockets stuffed with notebooks and pencils, these were the ‘gentlemen’ of the press: assorted reporters from London, Birmingham, Bristol and a couple of locals. The woman with the hard face and bright, dyed hair was there too.

  The lobby began to thin out as people were called upstairs, and after a few minutes the press followed.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said the blonde woman sardonically, ‘shall I lead the way?’

  ‘You can lead me anywhere, Babs, you know that,’ said the man who had nearly fallen over the night before.

  And they followed her up the stairs to the courtroom.

  The lobby was nearly empty now, and the caretaker finally settled down to work, squeezing out the mop with feeling and wiping at the slippery brown floor. Outside it had started to rain again.

  A young man dashed through the door, tripped on the metal bucket and nearly went tumbling on to the hard marble. He was quite young enough for the caretaker to give him what for. It was the youthful Colin of the night before. He had been delayed by a nosebleed and he was furious: this was his first murder case and he was very likely going to be late. He rushed through the lobby and on up the stairs, hoping to reach the courtroom before the doors closed.

  * * *

  The courtroom was high-ceilinged and chilly. There were no windows and the panelling extended fully around the chamber and halfway up the walls, with the doors in the same dark wood. In some lights the doors could not be seen at all. There were faint gleams of jewelled colour in the crest above the bench, and a glint of gold in the inevitable faded Latin – no other colour. In the press gallery, the reporters sat quietly, notebooks at the ready, waiting. The room was nearly full; Colin Mackenzie, cub reporter for the Western Herald, had just squeezed into the public gallery. He shouldered himself carefully out of his raincoat, wrapped it in a ball and stuffed it under the seat. He looked across at the press gallery but didn’t catch anyone’s eye, then he got out his notebook and pencil and waited too. At least he was close to the dock: he’d get a good view of the accused if nothing else.

  She came in soon after, with a sour-faced WPO. She was wearing a grey sweater with a blouse underneath: the wings of the collar were just visible. The sweater was pulled up high, as if she wanted to hide the blouse, or at least the collar. Standing, her hands rested on the dock and the sleeves of the sweater were pulled right down and almost completely hid her hands. Young Colin Mackenzie observed her intently from his vantage point. Was he disappointed by how ordinary she looked? Did he think her features ‘sharp’, as some of the papers later suggested?

  Her hair had been recently cut. Elsie would have worried that she was thinner; Margaret would have admired her poise. Thomas Walker, solicitor for the prosecution, who had been somewhat concerned about the appearance of the accused, was relieved. You never knew with women of her kind. She was certainly conspicuous, he thought, with her short, grey Eton crop, but not exactly masculine. She was far too slight for that, though there was something about the way she held herself, the clothes, or at least the way she wore them; perhaps from a distance?

  Walker cast a careful eye over the jurors as they entered. The seven women and five men looked solemn and uncomfortable as they edged into their seats. There were a couple of likely spokesmen: the obvious contender was a man in his later fifties, alert, smartly dressed, a rigid bearing; the other was a young man, some way off thirty – he looked like a grammar-school boy but there was something steely about him. One of the women jurors was, he thought, strikingly pretty. There was no obvious troublemaker. Walker turned back to see that Clifford’s solicitor was making his own assessment of the jurors, and the two men smiled briefly at each other. Did the number of women constitute an advantage to Clifford, Walker wondered, or the Crown? It all depended on the accused.

  Rene watched as the jurors began to make their promises to the judge, one after the other, earnest and prim, hands flat on the Bible. Not one cast a look in her direction. Keeping her head high, she made a careful survey of the courtroom, trying to get her bearings, picking the doors out of the panelling; the walls above were so white and bleak. In the gap between two jurors promising, she heard hard shoes echoing in a corridor. And outside now it started to rain again, for somewhere close by was an overflow pipe: she could hear the water gushing down and hitting the ground with a hard, fast spat, spat. It was the only sound now. The jurors had finished with their promising. It was time to begin.

  Marcus Quillet, a little less foxy in his wig and gown, rose to outline the prosecution case of Regina versus:

  ‘Hargreaves.’

  No one was happy about the ‘Hargreaves’ – it was irregular. Legally of course she was Mrs Phillips – Irene Roberta Phillips, widow of Alan Phillips – but hardly anyone who was relevant here knew her by that name. Rene Hargreaves was the name she had gone by for more than twenty years. Both judge and prosecution had acceded to Clifford’s proposal that Hargreaves was the best option in a difficult situation, but it didn’t stop Quillet feeling awkward the first time he spoke the name aloud.

  ‘Miss Hargreaves is a woman of powerful loyalties who felt her obligations very keenly, perhaps too keenly.’

  He would show that Miss Hargreaves’s divided loyalties were the heart of the matter, the heart of the murder.

  ‘For murder,’ he said, pausing for effect and looking directly at the jury for the first time, ‘is what is being talked about here.

  ‘Murder by poison.’

  Quillet’s eyes remained on the jury.

  ‘As the prosecution will demonstrate.’

  Rene stood up straighter, pressing her fingers down hard on the ledge of the dock. She had known the word was coming, and wondered what it would be like to hear it, spoken out loud in front of so many people. Hearing it now, she didn’t wilt, but it was a shock to hear it three times in quick succession. It seemed to linger, not quite an echo, long after Quillet had moved on.

  ‘Miss Hargreaves’s connection with Mr and Mrs Massey stretched back over most of her life. Mrs Bertha Massey was a close friend and help to Miss Hargreaves’s mother, whose own health was fragile. Miss Hargreaves, her brother and her mother all lived in Mrs Massey’s house after Miss Hargreaves’s father died. Miss Hargreaves lived there till she married; her mother lived there until her death. When Miss Hargreaves’s marriage to Alan Phillips broke down, she left her youngest son in Mrs Massey’s care when she left Manchester. Mrs Massey reared him as her own. Miss Hargreaves was indebted to Mrs Massey for this, and there was an agreement between the two women that Miss Hargreaves would care for Mrs Massey in her old age, if and when the need arose.’

  After his opening statement, Quillet kept his manner mild. Thoughtful and grave, he turned frequently to look at Rene; his eyes were not without sympathy. Miss Hargreaves had left the family home because she was overwhelmed, he said. Alan Phillips was a charming and affectionate man, but he was a gambler first and foremost, and serious gamblers do not make good husbands and fathers. Miss Hargreaves did her best, but with three very young children, her mother dead and no sister … He trod lightly over the matter of the children.

  But there was no going lightly for Rene. Mr Quillet seemed far too kind. He said she had been overwhelmed, as if a great wave had come and washed her away down the street, all the way to Lambourn. She looked up at the crack on the ceiling, unwilling to trust her eyes anywhere else. The truth was that she had abandoned the children: she had set two of them on a train and waved them goodbye, she had handed the other one, the youngest one, over to Bertha. Her throat was thick and tight. Abandoned was not a word she ever spoke out loud, but it was the word. Mr Quillet made everything sound far too sensible. Once she had thought it was the war, the war and Elsie, dear Elsie: everyone had ended up so far from where they started. But that wasn’t good enough. There were women who ran from their husbands with their children, there were women who fled and returned, women who wrote letter after letter askin
g, begging, for forgiveness – she wasn’t any one of these.

  When Rene finally looked round the room again, she could see the press with their notebooks, busily writing, a group of men and one woman. Bright blonde and with the lines running hard down her face, she seemed the busiest of all with her pencil. Rene looked away; she didn’t want to think about what they might be writing. She needed to listen carefully to what Mr Quillet was saying. The jurors were all watching him, enthralled by the scene, but the usher looked bored – he yawned and hastily tried to cover his mouth. Rene tried again to catch Quillet’s thread: she made herself stop looking round and fixed her eyes ahead of her, trying to settle herself. Straight ahead was a plump woman in a green hat who appeared to be looking at her, though it was difficult to tell. Her hat was quite a thing: close-fitting but such a bright shade of sheeny silk, and there were roses – in the same green – wound round the side of the hat. Yes, the woman was looking at her, Rene thought, but the attention didn’t seem hostile.

  ‘Mrs Phillips reverted to her maiden name, Miss Hargreaves, and decided to make a new life for herself on the land. The exigencies of wartime assisted her. It was as a land girl that she first made the acquaintance of Miss Elsie Boston, the woman with whom she now shares the remote cottage in Cornwall, known as Wheal Rock. Theirs is an unusual friendship; the two women have lived together for the past twenty years. Miss Hargreaves is exceptionally protective towards Miss Boston, who is ten years older than herself and vulnerable. Miss Boston is very reliant on her friend.’

  Quillet slipped over the matter of the ‘friendship’ lightly – no one wanted to get too entangled there – but it could not be ignored. Indeed, it formed a central plank of his case. The press continued writing busily.

  ‘Mrs Bertha Massey’s death must have come as a shock to Miss Hargreaves. Mrs Massey was ten years younger than her husband and no one had really expected him to survive her. Nevertheless, Miss Hargreaves felt obliged to take Mr Massey in because of a promise she had made long ago to his wife … Mr Massey came to live with the two women at Wheal Rock. No one would deny that he was a difficult man to care for, and he certainly required a great deal of supervision …’