by Gwen Moffat
‘I see.’ Miss Pink drew it out. ‘So Bob Fawcett at Orrdale House isn’t Harald’s son; he changed his name by deed —’
‘No, no. Bob is Harald’s son, but the son by Anne’s first marriage is in California.’
‘Oh.’ She absorbed this, staring sightlessly at the shimmering foliage outside the open window. Pigeons were crooning in the church tower. From the walk immediately below the window came the murmur of people pausing at the bookshop.
‘So you see,’ Rick was saying, ‘Edith is going to dig her heels in when Anne tells her she has to leave her flat, even if it’s to go to a modern bungalow. It’s a matter of principle — and she hasn’t got a good word to say... The fact is, I think she actually hates Anne. She can be venomous when she mentions her.’
‘Well, if they have the same background... And Anne married the squire.’
‘It goes deeper than that. Edith calls her a slut.’
‘Really?’ Miss Pink sighed. ‘I suppose it’s understandable: a remote dale, not many eligible young men. Land. The worst quarrels in the countryside are over land.’
‘Love comes a close second; well, sex. Edith is plain and heavy and almost certainly short of money.’
‘And Anne is a beautiful woman.’
‘There’s no comparison.’
‘But what you’re saying is that Edith draws comparisons.’
*
Perry wandered among the tombstones trying to read the names, but this was the town’s old graveyard and the headstones were mostly of soft red sandstone, the lettering eroded and indecipherable. She made for the entrance to Plumtree Yard then, and was nearly run down by a young girl on a mountain bike. They swore at each other simultaneously.
Perry stared after the other as she skidded to a stop outside Nichol House, dropped her bike on the flags and rang the bell. Perry remembered Rick’s saying that Harald had a son at Orrdale House, so this could be a granddaughter: another person to make a ridiculous fuss of Bags. Oh God, thought Perry, not another to swell the party exercising the dog this afternoon! She crossed the walk fuming, looking for trouble, for someone to vent her resentment on.
Edith Bland was shaking a mat at her front door, which was on the ground floor but at the side of the building. She eyed Perry maliciously.
‘I’m Mrs Bland,’ she announced. ‘You here to stay?’
Perry hesitated, not sure how to respond to hostility in a strange country. ‘What’s it to you?’ she countered, feeling her way.
‘How old are you?’ Edith’s voice was even higher than usual. She didn’t like strangers, least of all kids, and impertinence was something she would not tolerate.
‘I’m eighteen,’ Perry said. ‘How about you?’
‘If you’re eighteen so’m I.’ It wasn’t often Edith found someone she could quarrel with openly; she had been raised in a village where bad blood festered in the dark places of the soul.
‘Right, you’re nearer eighty.’ Perry was cheerful. ‘So what’s your problem? You fancy Rick?’
This was no neighbourly quarrel, this kid was evil. ‘You’re out for what you can get.’ Edith’s voice climbed. ‘I know what you’re up to. I heard you come in last night, I hear —’
‘Bollocks. You don’t hear nothing. It’s us hear you.’ Perry grinned, remembering what Rick had told her. ‘You got the phone in your bedroom and you got a carrying voice; we can hear every word you say — why, we can hear you turn over in bed!’ She was carried away, triumphant.
Edith was beyond rational thought. ‘You stole off of Jonty Robson there: his sun-glasses, his money — now you’re after what you can get from Mr Harlow. You’re a trollop, that’s what you are.’
Perry laughed. She was enjoying this; she always went up as an antagonist went down. ‘I’m young,’ she said calmly. ‘And Rick’s fun; he’s not a dirty old man what comes creeping in here in the middle of the night. What is it with old folk? You think people will jeer at you if they know you still try to screw?’
The blood had drained from Edith’s cheeks. She held to the door jamb for support. Christ, Perry thought, she’s going to throw a fit on me.
‘He’s my brother!’ Edith hissed. ‘You — you —’ Her mouth opened and closed like a fish’s, there were bubbles of spit at the corners.
‘OK, OK.’ Perry tried to soothe but she had to laugh all the same. ‘It’s not going to do any harm.’
‘No harm?’ It was weak, uncomprehending.
‘You aren’t going to get pregnant at your age,’ Perry said. ‘And I won’t tell on you, honest. I promise.’
Edith turned blindly, closed the door and sat down on the stairs. She thought she could hear laughter. She swallowed, staring at the line of light round the letter box, waiting for the flap to lift and something else, something worse, called through it. They poured petrol through letter boxes and followed it with a match. She visualised a milk bottle being inserted — no, too big, a watering can then: one of those long-spouted sort like she was going to buy when she got the hanging baskets.
Something clicked in Edith’s brain: the pieces of a picture shifting to reassemble themselves. Not her front door but Rick’s, with that slut inside. A watering can filled with petrol from Isaac’s Land Rover, a match. It would be like hell: the flames, the stench of roasting flesh, the agony... She stood up shakily and started to climb the stairs.
She changed into her Crimplene trouser suit and was applying lipstick when someone called from below. Her hand shook and then she froze. The bitch had dared come back?
‘Are you in, Edith? It’s me: Anne.’
She descended slowly. Anne Fawcett stood on the step. She said carelessly, staring at Edith’s smudged lipstick, ‘I’ve been knocking for ever. When are you going to get that hearing aid?’
‘I’m on my way out,’ Edith said. ‘Can’t it wait?’
‘No.’ Anne moved impatiently, poised to enter. They had never liked each other, they had nothing in common except the old days. They eyed each other and the air crackled. After a moment Edith turned and went back up the stairs.
‘I won’t keep you long,’ Anne said, entering the front room that was monopolised by a huge round table covered with brown chenille. ‘We’re worried about you,’ she said bluntly, sitting down without being asked. Her lips stretched but her eyes stayed sharp. ‘We’re none of us getting any younger, and those stairs are a trial, aren’t they?’
Edith sat on the other side of the table, the hostility no longer apparent, her face expressionless. ‘And?’
‘And what?’ Anne was affronted. When Edith continued to stare, she went on, ‘It’s not as if you were a stranger — and you’re a tenant in one of my — one of our properties. We feel responsible. This place is old and...’ She glanced round disparagingly. ‘It’s tacky. Not your fault,’ she added quickly: ‘ours. It needs new doors fitted, draught-proofing, new windows — double-glazed, central heating. In fact,’ she said brightly, into her stride now, ‘we’re considering making the two flats into one unit again; like it was before my father-in-law split it up.’
‘I’d have to think about it,’ Edith said slowly. ‘I don’t know as I’d want a house on two levels.’
‘We’re going to sell.’ Anne was harsh, seeing how it was going. ‘It’ll make a nice little town house for a young couple. Have you seen those new flats being built at the back of Kwiksave? Be ideal for you.’
‘I’m well suited here. I got glaucoma. You didn’t know that, did you? I’m going blind.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Anne paused, deflated, then saw her opportunity. ‘All the more reason to move into a modern flat: no stairs, all-electric —’
‘I know where everything is here! I been here twelve years. You sprung this on me, why couldn’t you give me warning?’
‘Actually we’ve been considering it for some time —’
‘We? Who’s we?’
‘The family.’
‘The family,’ Edith mimicked, and Anne’s eyes wi
dened. Edith said conversationally, ‘So what did happen to little Joannie?’
Anne gasped. After a long pause in which she tried to control her breathing, she said coldly, ‘I have no idea.’
‘And Walter Thornthwaite?’ Edith’s plump face had softened. She was smiling, gently curious. ‘No one wants to be put away when they’re old,’ she said. ‘Least of all folk who can’t look after theirselves; they just pine away and die like old dogs. They don’t get treated too good neither, not always.’ Anne hugged her breasts, mesmerised. ‘You’re thinking of Mr Fawcett there,’ Edith said kindly, ‘so imagine how I’d feel: blind, being forced to leave my own home...’ She looked round the cluttered living-room. ‘You see how it is?’
*
By the time Rick left Miss Pink knew it was too late to go on the hill. There would be a breeze on the summits but at her age and always, alas, more than a few pounds overweight, it was unwise to climb two thousand feet-plus on a cloudless July day. She decided instead on a visit to Orrdale House where rooms would be shaded and cool.
She kept her car in an old coach house in Doomgate, a narrow lane off Botchergate where the tar was softening in the sun. She wondered how you removed tar from dogs’ feet, and had a sudden image of Perry in the churchyard, without the collie. So she’d left him with Harald. A nice gesture.
The roads shimmered as she drove out of town. The trees drooped heavily but the air wafting through open windows was sweetened with honeysuckle and she regretted the mountain tops, now soft dove shapes beyond the heat haze. It would be crazy to climb in the sun but maybe a short walk — just a mile or so — to a north-facing crag where she might doze in the shade?
She passed Orrdale House with its elegant Georgian façade, its lawns scorched by the heat, black ponies somnolent under sycamores this side of a ha-ha.
She passed the dam and now the lake was on her left, the ugly tide-line obtrusive on the far shore, glimpsed only occasionally below the road. Here there were trees with little crags, and set back from the verge was an old wall, not always continuous. Where trees had fallen in winter storms the gaps had been repaired with fencing.
After a few miles the road ran out on the flat and there was no more water, only dried mud and the remains of the village.
There were not many sightseers as yet, hardly enough to warrant the presence of a police car, Miss Pink thought, slipping into the last slot in the small car-park. The heat was oppressive as soon as the car stopped. She sighed and got out, looking south to find some shadow below a north face, but the sun was too high and the only shade would be under trees. She considered the hanging woods beyond the old Corpse Road and knew there would be flies.
She started to apply insect repellent, idly surveying the scene, noting that there were figures on the knoll where the church had stood and they had an air of purpose about them. Two could be in uniform and all were quartering the ground like dogs. She reached for the binoculars.
*
‘We should have brought a dog,’ the constable muttered to his sergeant. ‘I mean, it’s not here, is it? There’s no disturbance.’
‘It could have been lying on the top: been worked out of the ground by the water, then the heat. Something like frost heave.’ The sergeant, drenched with sweat, was suffering. ‘Wild-goose chase,’ he growled, glowering at the two detectives who were conferring at the far corner of what had been the graveyard. ‘If Dent was here he could tell us where he picked it up,’ he continued.
‘I thought it was his dogs found it.’
‘Aye, that’s more like. The doctor said something about a dog. Where is the fellow?’
‘Here come the tourists,’ the constable announced with relish: anything for a distraction. ‘One any road. An old girl. Bird watcher.’
The detectives had noticed her too and observed her approach with resignation untinged by interest: a powerful figure with large binoculars and a white cotton sun hat, wearing jeans and dusty boots. They knew the type: unfazed by authority and bloody inquisitive. Predictably she climbed the knoll towards the men in plainclothes and stopped, panting.
‘Too hot,’ she breathed, looking past them to the uniformed men in shirt-sleeves. ‘What are the police doing here?’ Evidently she had mistaken these two for fellow tourists.
The older detective hesitated. ‘Making sure everything’s secure,’ he ventured, ‘now the water level’s dropped. This was the old graveyard.’
‘The graves are giving up their dead?’ She was going to be chatty. ‘Have they found anything?’
The older man moved towards the others. The younger mumbled something. ‘What was that?’ she asked sharply.
‘We’re together.’ The youngster was flustered. Miss Pink had that effect on some people. ‘We’re all police,’ he blurted.
She accepted it as an introduction of sorts. ‘Melinda Pink,’ she stated. ‘And you are?’
‘DS Mounsey, ma’am.’
Her eyes shifted to his companion. ‘And?’
‘Detective Inspector Tyndale.’
‘Why detectives?’
‘I — really couldn’t say.’ He remembered the boss’s words. ‘It’s to make sure everything’s intact like.’ He nodded and tried a smile — a ghost of the one with which he’d charm the girls — and walked away. Behind her dark glasses Miss Pink’s eyes were shrewd, the heat forgotten. She looked back at the cars. More vehicles were arriving at the dale head, finding spaces along the verge, disgorging tourists.
‘Were you here yesterday?’ someone asked. It was the DI, who’d approached as quietly as a cat walking in dust.
‘Yesterday. Let me think.’ She could switch moods with ease and it didn’t matter that she’d been authoritative before; that was with the other one. ‘Yesterday,’ she repeated, willing him to elaborate. ‘Did something happen yesterday?’
He said nothing, stone-walling.
‘Yes,’ she said brightly, ‘I was at Hadrian’s Wall, so I wasn’t here, no.’ She beamed at him.
‘Thank you, ma’am.’ He moved away.
Keeping the inane smile in place she drifted down from the knoll, pondering who might have been here yesterday, what could have happened then to interest the police, suddenly remembering Rick and Perry. Her jaw dropped. Not Perry, surely they couldn’t be looking for the child? No, they were looking on the ground, searching for something: a weapon, some smallish artefact, not a person. In any event Rick had seen nothing. He’d have said.
A man approached from the direction of the cars. He greeted her politely and she responded automatically, then looked after him. He was middle-aged but he moved like a youngster and with total assurance, as if he owned the land. Bare-headed and blond, he wore old faded jeans, a blue shirt dark with sweat, and mountain boots. He carried no pack. Not a tourist, hardly a policeman — too fit. She blinked, trying to place him. He swung up the knoll and walked deliberately to the police who were now grouped together. Miss Pink returned to her car and headed for Orrdale House.
*
‘How nice to meet you,’ Marina Fawcett exclaimed. ‘We’ve heard so much about you from my father-in-law and I was reading one of your books only recently. I’m afraid I can’t remember the title... Look, why don’t you come round the house with this party and then we’ll have some tea? There’s no one else about at the moment; my daughter’s with her grandparents and goodness knows where James is. And my husband’s with the —’ She threw a glance at the visitors who were waiting for the guided tour to start and pretending not to listen. ‘Bob’s away somewhere. You haven’t been here before? You’ll enjoy it, and the rooms are cool.’
Having guessed that the blond man could be Bob Fawcett Miss Pink had to restrain her curiosity and join the group, not listening so much as absorbing images. Marina Fawcett was a strapping figure of a woman; it appeared that Fawcett men chose their wives with deliberation: wide-hipped north country types, matronly women who would produce worthy heirs. Marina was fresh and pleasant, not a beauty like her mothe
r-in-law but attractive and with a good speaking voice, no doubt in demand as president or chairman on local committees. To complete the picture she was accompanied by a yellow Labrador.
Miss Pink trailed the party past fine furniture, meticulously polished, past faded Chinese wallpaper below a fretwork ceiling. They trooped through rooms panelled in oiled oak to a medieval kitchen floored with stone flags. Like many Border mansions Orrdale had evolved rather than been built all of a piece. It went back a long time although not as long as man had lived in the dale. In her casual digest of local history Marina told them that ancient Britons were here before the Romans invaded, that there was a hill-fort at the head of the dale. She caught Miss Pink’s unfocused gaze. ‘And now we head back to the main entrance,’ she said, with a hint of relief. Everyone was dying for tea.
The visitors were despatched to the café and Miss Pink was carried off to the private wing of the house. She sat by a window where she could feel a current of air while Marina retreated to make the tea. In contrast to the splendour of the rest of the mansion this was a homely room, a trifle shabby. A fine gate-legged table carried a film of dust, pages from The Times were scattered on a sofa and a coffee mug with dregs in the bottom had been left on a walnut sideboard. A Burmese cat was stretched like a dog on a threadbare prayer rug.
‘I realise now that I spoke to your husband in the old village,’ Miss Pink said as Marina appeared with the tea tray.
‘Oh, so you know all about it.’
‘I’m not sure — we merely said good afternoon. We didn’t know each other, you see, didn’t identify, as it were. How intriguing. I saw him join the police. They’d been very cagey with me. Is something going on?’
‘They found a bone.’
‘A bone. Human? Of course.’
Marina nodded, passing shortbread. ‘A child’s femur.’
‘So they’re looking for the rest of the skeleton. In the graveyard? That’s where you’d expect to find bodies. But why detectives? Why an inspector? That’s a high rank if a grave’s been disturbed.’
