‘And she couldn’t, could she?’
‘No. In her own right, she didn’t have two ha’pennies to rub together, so she was forced to miss her big chance. Perhaps Tony hoped that with more free time on her hands she’d devote a little of it to her son, but if he did he must have been sadly disappointed. As far as Jane was concerned, Philip was a part of her life which was over. She’d carried him in her body for nine months, she’d fed him and changed him for a year, and now he was on his own. Your uncle Tony did his best to fill the gap; it was a rare day indeed when he wasn’t seen pushing the expensive pram around the village – but it just wasn’t the same. Well, things went on like that for several years, then—’
‘I know what happened next,’ I said.
‘Do you, indeed?’ my grandmother asked. ‘But you were only a child at the time.’
Yes, I was only a child, but I’d been old enough to both witness and understand the last dramatic act in the Jane-Tony saga.
****
I think I must have been around five-and-a-half when it was played out.
Uncle Tony and Aunt Jane had been invited round to our house for drinks – an invitation which, I suppose, was one of my father’s guilt-ridden attempts to get on better terms with a brother he had very little in common with.
My mother – who was not a well woman, even then – had by an almost superhuman effort spent most of the day helping our housekeeper to produce a dazzling array of canapés which were now spread out sumptuously on the coffee tables in the living room.
My uncle and aunt were due to arrive at seven-thirty, and John and I had been informed that we could stay up to greet them, but then we would have to go straight to bed. So we sat around in our dressing gowns and pyjamas and waited.
And waited.
Time passed. My mother glanced anxiously at my father. ‘I think it’s time the children were climbing the wooden hills to Bedfordshire,’ she said.
‘A few more minutes,’ my father pleaded. ‘After all, it is family.’
I was drowsy by the time the front door bell finally rang, but I heard my mother say, ‘Well, better late than never, I suppose. I just hope the snacks haven’t all dried out.’
Rubbing my eyes, I accompanied my father and older brother to the door. We were half way up the hall when the bell rang again, as if my uncle and aunt, having kept us waiting so long, were now impatient to be admitted.
When my father opened the door, I saw that only Uncle Tony was standing there. He had one arm resting on the wall, and there was a glazed look in his eyes.
‘Are you alone?’ my father asked.
‘Damned right,’ my uncle slurred in response.
‘Is Jane not well?’
‘I’ve absolutely no idea.’
I became aware of my mother standing behind us in the hall.
‘It’s time you boys went up to bed,’ she said.
‘But we haven’t said hello to Uncle Tony yet,’ I protested.
‘Now!’ my mother insisted.
John turned and headed for the stairs, and I reluctantly followed. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t listening to everything which was going on behind me.
‘Is anything wrong?’ my father asked my uncle.
‘Wrong?’ Uncle Tony repeated. ‘Far from it. That woman’s been a cross I’ve had to carry for more years than I care to remember. And now she’s been lifted off my back.’
‘Meaning what?’ my father asked.
‘Meaning she’s gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Yes! Gone! Absconded! Disappeared into thin air!’
My brother and I had climbed the stairs and reached the landing. Though we were now invisible to those below us, we could still clearly hear what was going on.
I stopped.
‘We should go to bed,’ John whispered. ‘That’s what mummy said.’
‘Well, I want to listen,’ I hissed back.
‘We could get into trouble.’
‘I don’t care!’
‘Well, I do.’
‘So go to bed.’
‘I will!’
With one ear, I listened to the sound of my brother’s carpet-slippered feet walking along the landing, the click of his bedroom door, and the sigh of his bedsprings as he lay down. But the other ear was directed firmly towards the hallway.
‘When did this happen?’ my mother was asking with evident concern in her voice.
‘This morning,’ my uncle Tony told her. ‘Jane and I haven’t had sex for over a year—’
‘Really, Tony,’ my mother said, with obvious embarrassment.
‘Not for over a year,’ my uncle said emphatically. ‘So there didn’t seem much point in sharing the same bed anymore.’
‘I don’t think this is helping,’ my mother told him.
‘The point is that when I woke up this morning, she wasn’t anywhere around the house,’ my uncle continued. ‘I didn’t think anything of it at first – the idle bitch rarely emerges before lunchtime anyway. But when I got home from the office, she still wasn’t in evidence, so I went up to her room to see if she was all right. Her wardrobe and dressing table were empty. There was no sign of the suitcases she’d bought for that ridiculous tour that I refused to let her go on. She’d clearly done a moonlight flit.’
‘Did she leave a note?’ my mother asked.
My uncle laughed bitterly. ‘A note? Her? Oh, that would have been far too considerate.’
‘I’m so sorry, Tony,’ my father said.
‘Are you?’ Uncle Tony asked belligerently. ‘Well, I’m not. I’m well shut of her, if the truth be told. Christ, she’s made my life a misery – and she’s been no good for the boy. Well, now she’s gone, he and I will finally be able to get on with our lives.’
‘Why don’t you come inside and have a little something to eat, Tony?’ my mother suggested.
‘No thanks. Now I’ve broken the good news, I think I’ll be going.’
‘There are loads of snacks on the table, and you need something to line your stomach with,’ my mother insisted. ‘Besides, I’m not sure you should be alone tonight.’
My uncle sighed. ‘All right, maybe I’ll come in for a few minutes,’ he conceded.
There was the sound of footsteps and the voices began to grow fainted.
‘I expect you’ll find someone else in time,’ I heard my mother say.
‘Never!’ Uncle Tony replied emphatically. ‘Once bitten, twice shy. That’s going to be my motto from now on.’
****
To a child as I was then, it seemed an impossibly long time before I saw Uncle Tony with a woman again, but looking back, I don’t suppose it could have been more than a few months. She was a busty blonde, and though I can’t remember her name, I do know she was introduced to me as “Auntie Something-or-other.” If I thought she was going to replace Aunt Jane, I was wrong. She was soon replaced by “Auntie Something-else”, then by a third, and a fourth, until it was plain even to John, Philip and me what was going on.
‘You’re thinking of all your uncle’s women, aren’t you?’ my grandmother said, surprising me again.
‘Yes, I am,’ I admitted.
‘Well, think about this as well,’ Grandmother instructed me. ‘Philip might have had all those big expensive toys you were never given, and he might have been allowed to stay up long after you went to bed – but he never had a mother like you did.’
‘You’re right,’ I said humbly.
Grandmother narrowed her watery old eyes and gave me a look which seemed to pierce right through to my soul. ‘If you tried being easier on other people,’ she said, ‘you might just find yourself able to go easier on yourself.’
****
On my way back to the house which had been my parents’ home but now, I supposed, belonged to me, I found myself thinking about Aunt Jane again.
Where had she gone, and what had she done?
As a child – knowing of her ambitions – I’d kept expecting to see h
er suddenly pop up on some television show or other, but she never did.
Uncle Tony said had said she’d disappeared into thin air, and that was exactly what had happened. There were no phone calls. No letters. Not even a postcard from some provincial rep, or a greeting card at Christmas. Tony and Philip never spoke of her, and so, in their company, neither did we. After a few years it was almost possible to believe that she had never existed – that Philip was some obnoxious fairy child who had landed up, miraculously, on Uncle Tony’s doorstep.
But people rarely vanish so completely. Though I never saw Aunt Jane again, the spectre of her existence did visit the village shortly after the car crash, while I was still lying in my hospital bed – but even if I’d been there at the time, I doubt I would have recognised it for what it was.
Chapter Fourteen
The Middleton Health Spa – the place where my sister-in-law Lydia claimed to have spent the night before her husband died – was, Sergeant Matthews discovered, a spacious late Georgian building, surrounded by extensive landscaped grounds and located in an almost ideal rural setting. High railings surrounded the property, but the big double gates at the edge of the driveway were open, and the gap they revealed was wide enough to drive a couple of tanks through.
The person he had gone there to talk to was called Ellen Bannister. She was an attractive woman in her late 20s, and as Matthews studied her across the table of the small conference room which had been allocated for his use, he decided that she had intelligent eyes and would probably be a good witness.
He switched on his tape recorder. ‘What’s the security like in this place, Miss Bannister?’ he asked.
‘What exactly do you mean by that?’
‘How easy is it for people to come and go?’
‘In the daytime, it’s very easy indeed. You see, Middleton’s not so much a spa as a luxury hotel which offers top-class spa facilities. And the health club has dozens of associate members who aren’t even staying at the hotel. So there’s loads of people arriving and leaving at all times during the day.’
‘What happens at night, when the spa has closed down?’
‘At night, things are controlled much more tightly. For a start, all entrances and exits are locked – except for the fire doors, of course.’
‘So it would still be possible to get out through one of the fire doors?'
Miss Bannister shook her head. ‘Not without setting off the alarms, and I don’t remember that ever happening in the three years I’ve worked here.’
‘Could anybody get out of one of the windows?’
‘Why would they want to do that?’
Well, for example, they might want to slip out and commit a murder, Matthews thought.
But aloud, all he said was, ‘I don’t know – but let’s just say they did.’
‘None of the windows open,’ Miss Bannister said. She pointed to a grille, near the top of the wall. ‘The entire spa is air-conditioned.’
‘What other security is there?’
‘There’s always a man patrolling the grounds. We’ve had some trouble with vandals, you see. And, of course, the main gate is locked.’
‘What happens if one of the guests decides that he or she would like to go off for a night on the town?’
Miss Bannister grinned. ‘Not many of them do. It’s too many nights on the town that have brought them to Middleton in the first place.’
‘But if they do?’ Matthews persisted.
‘They come and see me – or whoever else is on duty at the main desk – and I buzz to let them out.’
So it looked as if there would have been no way for Lydia Conroy to get to Bristol the night before the crash, he thought.
Unless, of course, she had already left before the security measures were put in place!
‘Let’s get on to Mrs Conroy, now,’ Matthews said. ‘Do you remember her?’ Miss Bannister nodded emphatically. ‘Oh yes, I remember her all right. I’d have remembered her even if the police hadn’t turned up.’
‘The police?’
‘We normally only do a single shift, but sometimes things go wrong – staff get sick, et cetera, et cetera – and we have to double up, which is why I was still here when the uniformed sergeant and a woman PC came to the front desk and asked to see Mrs Conroy, because they had some bad news to break to her,’ Miss Bannister explained.
Yes, it made sense they would have been there, Matthews thought. The South Wales police would have contacted the Cheshire police, who would have spoken to someone in the Conroy family. Then the Cheshire police would have contacted the Somerset police.
‘You told me you’d have remembered her even if the police hadn’t appeared on the scene,’ he said. ‘Was there any particular reason for that?’
‘Yes, there was,’ Miss Bannister replied. ‘She was one of those people who really go out of their way to make themselves unpleasant to the staff. You know the sort. If everything isn’t just as they want it, precisely when they want it, they’re screaming that the hotel is nothing but a disgrace.’
‘She was the same with the mechanics at Mid-Cheshire Maintenance,’ Flint would tell Matthews later. ‘She seems to have the gift of spreading sunshine wherever she goes.’
‘People like her expect you to be at their beck and call 24 hours a day,’ Miss Bannister continued. ‘Of course,’ she conceded, ‘we do offer that service in our brochure, but most of our clients have more consideration than to take advantage of it.’
‘But Mrs Conroy wasn’t like most of your clients?’
‘Indeed she wasn’t,’ Miss Bannister agreed. ‘There wasn’t a night when she didn’t call up room service. Coffee was what she always wanted. Usually at about three o’clock in the morning. She said she couldn’t sleep. Well, there’s no wonder she couldn’t sleep if she was drinking coffee at three o’clock in the morning, now is there?’
‘And who took it to her?’
‘Me. You see, there’s only a skeleton staff on at night – just the receptionist and the security guard. So if anybody calls down for anything, I’m the one who has to fix it.’
‘Do you remember serving her coffee the night before she left?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘You seem pretty sure of yourself.’
‘As I said, I served her every single night of her stay,’ Miss Bannister said. ‘Besides, with the police coming to see her the next day, it sort of stuck in my mind.’
‘Can you remember exactly what happened?’
Miss Bannister closed her eyes. ‘I was sitting at my desk. I glanced at the clock and I saw it was nearly three o’clock, and I thought to myself it was about time the Witch Lady from Room 37 rang. And I’d no sooner thought it than the phone did ring.’
‘And what did she say?’
‘What she always said. “I can’t sleep. I want a pot of coffee right away.” No please or thank you, mind you, just an order – and me with a diploma in hotel management!’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Made the coffee, and took it up to her.’
‘Did you see her?’
Miss Bannister shook her head. ‘When I knocked on the door, she said, “Come in.” She was in the bathroom. She usually was. She probably considered she would be lowering herself to be in the same room as the hired help.’
Matthews chuckled.
‘It’s no joke,’ Miss Bannister said. ‘You haven’t met her – she really is like that.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Matthews said. ‘Carry on.’
‘I put the tray down on the table, and I said, “I’ve brought your coffee, Mrs Conroy,” and she said, “All right, you can go now.” So I went.’
‘And you’re sure it was her?’
‘Oh yes. I’d recognise that voice of hers anywhere. I’ve always found it grating.’
Well, even if she hadn’t actually been seen, that seemed about as tight an alibi as anyone could hope for, Matthews thought.
****
I walked slowly down Church Street, giving my injured leg the regular exercise which the doctor had advised.
I’d been a coward to think of staying away from Oxford, I thought, because however things turned out between Marie and me, I should at least have the guts to handle them face-to-face.
I reached the church, and saw Owen Flint. The skinny Welshman was standing with one foot on the stocks and gazing pensively down the High Street. When he saw me, he smiled – but I knew him well enough to detect the underlying level of worry below that smile.
‘Is something the matter?’ I asked.
‘I was hoping they’d keep you in hospital a while longer,’ Owen admitted.
‘And why should you hope that?’
‘Because you’d be safe in hospital. Even the most determined killer would be unlikely to risk committing a murder with so many potential witnesses around.
‘Why should I be his target?’ I asked.
‘Why should your father or your brother have been his target?’ Owen countered. ‘How long are you going to be here in the village?’
‘I’m planning to leave this afternoon, as soon as the will’s been read,’ I told him.
Owen gave me a quizzical look. ‘That would be your grandfather’s will, would it?’
‘Yes.’
‘You sounded surprised I asked the question.’
‘I was,’ I admitted.
‘Yet there are two other wills to be read – your father’s will and your uncle Tony’s.’
Despite myself, I grinned ruefully. ‘That’s the kind of family I was brought up in,’ I said. ‘If you talked about the dog, you meant Grandfather’s red setter. If it was any other dog, you said Tony’s bull terrier or Edward’s Labrador.’
‘What do you expect the will to say?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘And aren’t you even curious?’
The Vital Chain Page 12
