‘Where’s the handblocked silk headscarf, Rose?’
I removed one hand from the driving wheel of my Allegro to jerk a thumb at the sling-bag on the back seat. It was a long time since I had been so angry; when very angry I tried to avoid speech.
‘Take five,’ he said, as if I’d spoken. ‘I told you what the insurance bloke said.’
‘Just another example of faulty British workmanship?’
‘She was French.’
‘I’d forgotten that.’
‘The insurance bloke said it would teach me to buy British in future, then ruined his plug by listing the new jobs he’d seen go the same way in the last few years. When I explained she’d drunk oil, he reckoned I was better off without her. Engines, he reckons, are like women; get a good ’un and she’ll never let you down. Get a bad ’un and she’ll never do anything else. Dead lucky, I am, he says.’
‘Mention bathrooms?’
‘No. His company don’t cover me for personal accidents.’
‘Are you covered?’
‘Yes, of course. By BCC. I told you ‒’
‘You didn’t.’
‘Yes, before lunch ‒ no ‒ you’re right. It was when you were getting tarted up, Johnnie was blowing more fuses, and his lovely wife having her second go of hysterics, and I was knocking back doubles on the house.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘That BCC looks after its own, is generous on genuine claims but goes through the evidence with an electronic microscope before parting with sixpence. I said if I’d not got clear the car-insurance bloke wouldn’t have been the only bugger sifting through the cold ashes tomorrow and it had to be said that BCC wouldn’t be too happy to hear about last night.’
I breathed a little more easily. Only a very little. ‘What did Johnnie say?’
‘That I was bloody lucky to work for such a good firm.’
‘Just call you Lucky Lofthouse?’
‘Seeing I’ve turned accident-prone, more apt than Nanook of the North.’
I said nothing and thought of the scars he would carry on his back and chest for life. Burn scars. In the year before we first met he had spent months in a burns unit after an explosion at work had blown him through the plateglass skylight of his office with his clothes on fire. When he left hospital he had been given six months on full pay and told to find a quiet place by the sea. An advertisement in a Sunday newspaper had resulted in his taking for those months the cottage by Endel’s main gate that my late cousin regularly rented to holiday visitors. David had only once talked to me about that explosion; he had never yet talked of his time in the burns unit. I hadn’t mentioned it to him and I wasn’t doing so now. Only those with no experience of hell suffer from the illusion that there is any therapeutic value in reliving the experience off a psychiatric couch. I knew it was in his mind now. I had seen the old nightmares in his eyes when I raced ahead of the others and reached him as he got to his feet and stared at his blazing car. It was then I had stopped feeling vaguely uneasy and telling myself I was being neurotic and turned very, very angry.
I slowed for the final twist out of Harbour village. The narrow built-up road ahead was the only straight stretch of the route to Cliffhill. I glanced sideways at his calm, unyielding face.
‘At least, that’s the third.’
He smiled slightly. ‘Only thing that finally stopped the poor old girl’s hysterics.’
The afternoon was colder, greyer, and on either side and behind us the flat land opened up to the sea on the indented, semicircular horizon. Far ahead the low green hills of the mainland were just visible.
‘What did Hot Pants want?’
We both needed a placebo and I knew he could keep his mouth shut. I told him the truth.
‘Why bother to cover for her?’
‘It’s something that’s sort of happened. At first I didn’t realize it was happening. When I did, I played along, mainly as I like her father and ‒ yes, I like Francis ‒ and though she drives me nuts, I quite like Sue. She is so stupid and so is her mother, but neither can really help that as their men love them being stupid.’
‘More than a few do.’ He paused. ‘What do you know about this Gordon?’
‘Very little. I only met him for a few minutes at last year’s show. He spent all those minutes leering at Sue and being rude to everyone else. I know he’s got digs somewhere in Cliffhill but not why, when he came south, or if he’s left a wife and kids behind in Glasgow. He’s about thirty and I think working class, so I’d have thought by now he’d have been long married.’
‘Working class? He has my sympathy,’ he said dryly. ‘If Hot Pants fancies herself as Lady Chatterley she rates all she’s got coming.’
‘You working-class lads have to stick together?’ I queried as dryly.
‘Why not? What do we owe you toffee-nosed upper-class bastards?’
‘For starters, darling,’ I drawled, ‘the grants that paid for his art school, you at Cambridge and backed your grammar school. It’s not the working classes who pay the largest proportion of our taxes and rates, is it? And I’m an ex-grammar bug ‒’
I glanced at him again and smiled sweetly. ‘Up yours, mate.’
He laughed. ‘That’s why I love you, Rosie.’
‘Because I’m an ex-grammar bug?’
‘Because behind the cut-glass accent and beautiful, fragile aristo’s face, you’re the toughest little bitch this side of hell. So he wants to wed her. Doesn’t sound as if he’s got a wife back home.’
‘She says he does.’
‘Believe her?’
I hesitated. ‘Normally, I never believe anything she says, but on this occasion I think I do. I’ve never heard her in such a state. It may even do some good. I think it’s forced her to realize how fond she is of Francis.’
‘And how fond is he of her?’
‘Very. If not he wouldn’t let her push him around. He’s not a genuine push-over.’
‘No. I’d not have said he was.’ He needed more thought. ‘How much money has she got?’
‘Not a lot yet. She’ll have quite a bit when her parents die. Mrs Smith has some of her own and Mr Smith, as he would say, is a man of substance. I’ve always understood Francis earns good money and I think that must be right as Mr Smith would’ve gone into that side before they married. Especially as Francis is an incomer and as devoid of relatives as myself. He was raised by an uncle who died when he was in his second year at some northern redbrick. Forget where.’
‘How’d they meet?’
‘On holiday in Majorca just over four years ago. He moved down here after they married.’
‘Why no kids? Pill?’
‘Yes.’
We were closer to the mainland and at their southern end the hills had risen and turned into wooded cliffs crowned by the old Norman watchtower and roofs of Cliffhill. It was from that tower that medieval men had watched for the first sign of enemy sails on the sea that had then lapped the foot of those cliffs. Now the flat green land below belonged to the farmers and the birds and lay quiet and drowsy in the soft grey light. The woods climbing the cliffs were alight with autumn; the oaks, golden; chestnuts, crimson; the evergreens, dark emerald shadows; only the elms still wore the green that spilled over on to the slopes beneath the woods and swept on down to the thick ferns and rushes lining the banks of the Marsh Ditch. I slowed almost to a stop before taking the sharp turn off the main marsh road just before it ran on over Coxden bridge. The turn led into the narrower side road that ran parallel with the Ditch north and south of Coxden. In the north the road eventually meandered over another bridge to end at the crossroads beyond Astead woods. The southern arm we were taking ran into Cliffhill.
David twisted round to look at the square Norman tower of Coxden church. ‘Looks just as I remember.’ He sighed to himself. ‘Think Hot Pants has beat it for home now?’
‘Expect so. What time is it ‒ oh, no ‒ nearly three. It opened at two. The first bottles of s
weet sherry will have long gone.’
‘Not sweet?’
‘Sorry. Yes. At least, only sweet last year.’
‘I shall close my eyes and think of England. It’ll make a change,’ he said slowly, ‘from thinking over your remark last night.’
I stiffened. ‘Which one?’
‘You know damn well which one. The one that’s been in your mind since my car went up. Last night you had Johnnie lined up for the morgue. Now you’ve swapped names.’ He grabbed the wheel. ‘Christ, woman, don’t have us in the bloody Ditch to prove your point!’
‘Sorry ‒ thanks.’ I checked the driving mirror fearfully. Luckily, there was nothing behind. I took a deep breath. ‘Why ‒ why should anyone be out to get you?’
‘I’m thankful to say not even my nasty suspicious mind can come up with that answer. I’m no cop to anyone dead. I’ve not invented the ultimate deterrent. I don’t know anyone who has or any trade secrets that aren’t known to everyone in my grade on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Yep, I earn good money ‒ as long as I keep earning. Yep, I’ve a bit stashed away but no more than’ll pay for’ ‒ he hesitated ‒ ‘that unmentionable car ‒ my next holiday or two and go towards the down payment on the semi-detached I’ll have to think of getting when I sell my flat. The lot and my life insurance are tied up to go first to my parents, then my married sister and her four kids. Kids are still in primary school. I can’t see any of my family nipping down from Wakefield to do me in for what they may have to come, if they knew it might come their way, which they don’t. Apart from my solicitor, you’re the only person I’ve told. Not that the total figure would’ve put the new roof on Endel. Consequently, I can’t come up with one sensible reason why anyone should want me dead. Can you?’
The only reason I could think of made no sense at all while I was alive, nor, from what he had just said, after. ‘No,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘I can’t give you one.’
‘That’s a relief,’ he said.
I said nothing.
Chapter Five
The eighteenth-century town hall stood halfway up Cliffhill’s cobbled high street. The Art Society had taken over the largest assembly hall and by the time we arrived it was packed. The overwhelming number of the Art Soc.’s members were amateurs who made no pretence that their annual exhibition of paintings, etchings, collages, ceramics, pebble jewellery and mobiles was other than a social occasion. It was always a popular occasion on opening afternoon. Attendance by invitation only included ‘and guests’, free sherry and cheese biscuits.
David impassively surveyed the many middle-aged women with blue hair, too bright lipstick, jersey outfits in muted shades of mud, the few young women in cashmere and tweeds, and the hordes of women of all ages with long straight hair, blackened eyelids, floral smocks or long hand- woven peasant skirts and enough beads and chains strung round their necks to transform Mrs Evans-Williams’s seven rows into a model of restraint. The only men visible were resigned, retired husbands or fathers with sherry-flushed faces who knew they were a bit out of touch, what, but couldn’t understand what the damned thing was meant to be.
‘Australia, all is forgiven. Tell me, love, stands the church clock at ten to three and where the hell’s the sherry?’
‘If it’s the same as last year, up in one of those rooms off the gallery up there.’ I looked round. ‘I can’t see Gordon or any of the handful of professionals who belong to the Soc. On last year’s showing, they’ve shut themselves up in an upper room with all the bottles and biscuits they can carry and won’t emerge till they’ve run out. But we must find Mrs Smith first ‒ yes ‒ there!’
Mrs Smith’s impressive charcoal felt sombrero was outlined against one of the pillars near the ceramics. She spotted me and beckoned authoritatively. ‘Rose, have you brought Sue? She’s missed the opening!’
‘Yes, she’s terribly sorry ‒’ I launched into my set piece. Fortunately, as Sue had forecast, her mother was too preoccupied by, and too much enjoying, her role as a chairman who knew the Member’s wife by her first name to be more than superficially concerned. Mrs Smith was a tall, stout woman with the vapid, puffy face of an English rose gone to seed and impeccable dress sense. Her elegant charcoal-and-stone jersey two-piece and exquisite diamond brooch that was her sole ornament diminished in every way the younger, quite pretty and very untidy Member’s wife with long strands of black hair floating out from beneath a regrettable purple velvet beret.
‘Dear Rose, so thoughtful ‒ poor darling Sue ‒ such a disappointment ‒ she must get her eyes tested. And you’ve brought Mr Lofthouse!’ She had kissed me perfunctorily. She held on to David’s hand while she introduced us to her guest of honour. ‘We’re all simply delighted to have this clever young man amongst us. Simply brilliant, Laura. Splits atoms, and that sort of thing ‒ but you’ll know all about that!’
The Member’s wife looked suitably knowledgeable on nuclear fission and drew David aside. Mrs Smith returned some of her attention to me. ‘Talk to Sue about seeing that new eye man at Astead General. They say he’s really quite good even though he’s on the Health Service ‒ and she’s so fond of you, you’ll be able to persuade her. She shouldn’t have all these headaches. She was so thrilled last night when she rang to say your friend was back and had driven straight over to Harbour. Now, do tell me ‒ no, I’m not going to ask any indiscreet questions ‒ I merely want to know if you like the inn. Gerald’s been quite worried about you as he hadn’t time to go over and see for himself. He’s been so busy what with all his junior’s work and the wretched young man isn’t back yet as now his wife and both children have gone down with it. So trying for poor Gerald. I do hope you like the inn as Sue’ll be so upset if you don’t as it was really her idea.’
‘Sue?’ I managed to get in. ‘But I thought Mr Smith ‒’
‘Of course it was Gerald who made all the arrangements, but at first he wasn’t too sure. You know how he likes to take his time thinking things over ‒ but for once he hadn’t time. It so happened that, just after having a word with Bill Carmody about you, he had to see one of his junior’s clients ‒ I think the client was some friend of Francis or it could be someone he and Sue met at a party ‒ in any event, the client told Gerald he had booked at the inn for his wife and himself but had unexpectedly to go abroad on business and asked Gerald to cancel for him. Gerald immediately thought of your taking it and rang Sue as you young people always know far better than we do what’s happening around the marsh. Sue was all for it. She had a word with Francis and he said he’d been quite taken with it when he dropped in occasionally for a drink.’ She turned to the others. ‘Laura, my dear, I’ve just been hearing all about Harbour Inn. Rose is having a little rest there. Delightful, she tells me.’
David caught my eye. ‘And the food’s good.’
The Member’s wife said it sounded a real find and she must make a note of the name. ‘I’m so sorry to hear your daughter’s car ‒’
‘Let her down again and another of her headaches! The poor darling, she’ll be so upset as she was so looking forward to seeing you ‒ ah, here comes Nigel Wenden! How nice ‒ you know him, of course? My dear, you must meet him ‒’
David and I removed ourselves to make room for General Wenden’s towering figure. The old man sketched a salute my way. ‘Rosser’s gal, h’mmm? Glad you’re off the sick-list.’ He marched on.
David took my arm. ‘Sherry?’
‘Why not? Still can’t see Gordon.’
A potter leapt upon us before we were on the gallery stairs. He was about twenty and looked like an ageing pop singer, but he worked in a local arts and crafts shop and knew his public. He had on his old best school suit, a cleanish shirt and tie. The suit was as shiny as his reddened face. He insisted we saw his exhibits, then dismissed his rather good tiles and pots with a shrug. ‘One must live, don’t ask one why, but one must. What really signifies is one’s Future. There! Well?’
His Future was a spindly wooden mobile gallows surroun
ded by badly made plasticine figures of children, sheep, cows and a few old lead toy soldiers. I hadn’t seen anything like it since I left kindergarten.
David and I avoided each other’s eyes. ‘Very thought-provoking,’ he said.
‘Precisely my impression, David.’
The potter breathed importantly and half closed his eyes. ‘One sensed you two had the inner vision required to appreciate one’s intentions. So few, alas, so few.’ We all shook our heads sadly. ‘What more, one wonders, should one show you?’
I said, ‘I found Gordon’s pictures very interesting last year. Is he showing today?’
‘Gordon? But for Gordon what would this show be? A total in place of semi-travesty. Gordon is the one real creative talent in Cliffhill ‒ all talent ‒ all dedication ‒ he doesn’t paint to live, he lives to paint. Starves for it. One can only marvel in humility.’
‘National Assistance shut up shop in my absence?’ queried David mildly.
I kicked him. ‘Where is Gordon?’
‘Where, indeed?’ Suddenly the potter was near tears. ‘One waited in the Fisherman from twenty to one till five to two. He always comes down at one ‒ alas, no sign. One waited outside till the opening was over ‒ one just went on waiting ‒ one sought every inch of this hall ‒ then one just had to retreat for sustenance but one kept popping out ‒ constantly ‒’ He stood on tiptoe, pirouetted in a circle, then leapt for joy. ‘At last! Over there!’ He waved both arms ecstatically and charged off.
Marsh Blood (The Endel Mysteries Book 2) Page 7
