A Species of Revenge Read online

  A SPECIES OF

  REVENGE

  Marjorie Eccles

  CHIVERS

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

  This eBook published by AudioGO Ltd, Bath, 2012.

  Published by arrangement with the Author

  Epub ISBN 9781471310607

  Copyright © 1996 by Marjorie Eccles

  The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental

  Jacket illustration © iStockphoto.com

  Contents

  PART I

  The house had a bad feeling again.

  It was an atmosphere hard to describe. It hung on the air in spider’s webs, invisible until you felt it clinging to your face; or it waited for you behind closed doors, and as you entered a room it curled to the ceiling, thick as smoke. It was unclean, like a fog seeping in around the edges of the windowpanes ...

  But no, it didn’t come from outside.

  It came from the unspoken tensions of the occupants, from within, from emotions and resentments bottled up for years and about to erupt again like some evil genie. It was there in the silences and the covert glances, in the sum of what was known, and remembered.

  Patti Ryman is whistling as she pushes her bike to the summit of the hill, ready to deliver her newspapers on Saturday morning.

  ‘A whistling woman and a crowing hen, Will bring the devil from his den,’ her granddad used to say. Patti grins. She isn’t scared of the devil because she knows he doesn’t exist. It isn’t that which makes her hurry to get the deliveries to the two old houses over and done with. First, to Edwina Lodge, with its familiar ‘For Sale’ notice still in the garden but now with a red ‘SOLD’ sticker plastered across it, and the Guardian ordered to start on Monday. Having delivered the other papers there, she leaves her bike against the wall near the shrubbery inside the gates, and goes on to the next house, Simla, with the Independent for Miss Kendrick and The Times for her brother, being careful not to tear these as they’re pushed through the letter-box: Miss Kendrick teaches maths at Patti’s school, she’ll be her form tutor when the new school year starts in a few days’ time, and Patti is more afraid of her than any old devil who may be hanging around. The brother, she’s never seen, only heard of, so he doesn’t bother her.

  No, it’s something more than either Miss Kendrick or the devil which causes her to hurry through the dark shrubs and trees surrounding both houses, that makes her want to look back over her shoulder, as if something nasty is lurking in the undergrowth, that starts her heart jumping into her mouth.

  She has every cause to be uneasy, though not just now.

  She turns with relief into Ellington Close, the cul-de-sac of modern houses separating the two bigger ones, although, for a different reason, she never feels entirely comfortable there, either.

  1

  It could have been a surprise to nobody, thought Sarah Wilmot, a few hours later, gazing round the kitchen with disbelief, that the house had remained unsold for so long, and it was typical of her brother-in-law’s state of mind that he should have been the sucker to buy it. Though ‘sucker’ wasn’t a word that normally sprang to mind to describe Dermot.

  Bought it he had, however. As if by taking a new job in a new place, by leaving the bright, modern new-town house and saddling himself with this Victorian monstrosity, by burying himself here in this backwater on the edge of the Black Country, he could make himself sufficiently miserable to forget what had happened. But it was barely three months since Lisa had died, and no one had yet got over the shock, least of all Dermot.

  Except, to some extent, the children. Children were resilient. They couldn’t sustain misery and grief forever – and who would want them to? Bereft and bewildered at first, they were gradually learning to come to terms with the situation. Playing outside now, oblivious of the sultry heat, discovering the new garden, two brown-haired little girls, Lucy leading as usual, red-cheeked in her excitement, Allie quieter, stopping occasionally to stand and stare, to take it all in. Lucy was all Dermot’s daughter, in looks, charm and temperament, at nearly ten, an energetic and confident child. But Allie?

  Younger than Lucy by eighteen months, she was a different matter altogether. She’d accepted news of the move meekly, unlike Lucy, who’d kicked up a fuss about leaving her school-friends and Granny and Grandpa, but had soon changed her mind when the idea of a new school and new friends was presented to her, and had then hardly been able to wait until they moved in. With Allie, it was hard to tell.

  Now, in some indefinable way, she already looked more at home in the garden than Lucy did, as if she belonged there, standing underneath the pear tree, with the hot breeze of a threatening thunderstorm blowing her cotton dress against her thin, tense body.

  The garden was decidedly the nicest thing about Edwina Lodge. Secluded and large, running down into thick, long grass at its end, spiked with foxgloves and overhung with big trees from the small wood beyond. The trees were heavy-leafed and lax with the heat of late summer, the garden overgrown, apart from a small tended area adjacent to the house, but all of a piece: a pear tree simply asking for a swing to hang from it, a broken-down pergola burdened with a rampant rose, tile-edged, blue-brick paths, a vegetable garden. Large enough to grow their own vegetables, said Dermot, airily optimistic, he who’d never done more than push a reluctant lawn mower on Sunday mornings – when he was there – in Milton Keynes. Sarah visualized tidy rows of peas and beans. Courgettes, herbs, lettuces and salad onions. Maybe some rocket...

  No chance! The arrangement was that she wouldn’t be here any longer than it took to do her duty. Then back to her job in London, and concerts, exhibitions, theatres, shops, sophisticated dinners à deux. Simon. Dark-haired, guardsman-tall, immaculate, urbane. More than comfortably off. Everything a girl could want, in fact. She was very lucky, it went without saying.

  She ran a hand through the short swing of thick, sun-streaked brown hair and went back with determination to her lists.

  Ominously long, those lists, but it was a matter of principle that she should do as much as she could in the couple of weeks or so she was scheduled to stay: just until the girls had settled into school, getting the house shipshape, and finding for Dermot a housekeeper who would be willing to face up to the horrors of the house and, more specifically, the kitchen. The Aga was the most up-to-date piece of equipment there and was unquestionably prewar, second if not first. Sarah made a face at it, refused to contemplate the geyser over the sink and the pipe-festooned corners, abandoned it and took herself to the drawing room, via the dark and echoing hall which, with its cold, Minton-tiled floor and depressing stained glass, was no better.

  Given time, money, know-how – none of which Dermot had – something might be done with the drawing room. The pièce de résistance of ‘this valuable part-investment property’ as the house agents’ blurb had it – the investment being that part of the house already split up into three self-contained flats and which was, theoretically, to finance the whole. Huge and high-ceilinged, with elaborate plasterwork and a heavy, ornate black marble fireplace, the drawing room was solid and handsome, needing little more than a lick of paint and new wallpaper – but Dermot would need to think seriously about new furniture. Lisa’s light, pretty things would fit in here no better than Lisa herself would have done. Only too easily could Sarah imagine her sister’s reactions to the very idea of living here at all: turning her eyes up comically at the notion o
f such a place as home, at its size, at the cavernous kitchen and the dark, narrow staircases, of which there were two, plus the ones to the attics and cellars. Death traps, all of them.

  And yet, heavily pregnant, tripping over the loose belt of her dressing gown, Lisa had lost her footing on the upper treads of the wide, well-lit, open staircase in their modern house in Milton Keynes, fallen from top to bottom and broken her neck.

  Another of those swift, futile moments of pain and anger at the unnecessary waste, the misery of it, touched Sarah with a cold finger. She hugged herself, despite the heat.

  A clock somewhere chimed a distant, silvery four. Dermot had been gone three-quarters of an hour, inspecting the flats with Mrs Burgoyne, receiving last-minute instructions. Dermot, a landlord!

  ‘Don’t be spiky, Sarah,’ he’d said, not appreciative of opposition at any time, particularly not now. ‘Mrs Burgoyne’s convinced me the flats are a worthwhile proposition, and very little trouble.’

  It had seemed to Sarah, and her parents too, that the whole enterprise was fraught with trouble, and this was one of the reasons why she’d volunteered to help Dermot over the settling-in period – although he might have cause to rethink his good luck, she thought, a quick bubble of laughter sending the shivers packing, given that housekeeping wasn’t exactly one of her more conspicuous talents. But if she hadn’t volunteered, her mother would certainly have felt compelled to do so, foregoing the cruise which Sarah’s father had booked to mark his retirement, and to which they’d looked forward for years. A holiday which her mother so desperately needed, after the shock and heartbreak and subsequent upheaval of Lisa’s death.

  Sarah’s whole warm, generous nature had rebelled at such needless sacrifice, and she’d said, impulsively, ‘I’ll go,’ earning both Dermot’s and her father’s gratitude. And, unfortunately, Simon’s disapproval.

  ‘The whole scheme’s preposterous – and what am I going to do without you? In the office, not to mention otherwise?’

  Sarah told herself that this apparent self-interest hid his real concern, and the ‘otherwise’ pleased her, but she stuck to her guns, reminding him that Devora Vine had supposedly been trained to take over in an emergency – and had been breathlessly waiting for just such an opportunity to prove she could – though she thought this last better not said, unwise to put thoughts into his head about the crush the Divine Devora had on him.

  Simon owned and ran a glossy art and antiques magazine, a rather chichi, expensive quarterly with a small but steady, even growing, circulation. Its success wasn’t surprising; he worked hard and was extremely knowledgeable in the field, having grown up with a silver spoon in his mouth, surrounded by the sort of things he wrote about.

  She promised to stay no more than a few weeks, until the children were settled into school. They’d only be apart for two or three weekends, four at most.

  ‘Or you could come up here and stay,’ she’d suggested.

  ‘I could.’ His tone implied that the possibility was remote. As if Lavenstock were Alaska or Australia, and not barely an hour and a half from London by Intercity. ‘Well, maybe,’ he added after some consideration, and she’d chalked up a small victory, seeing the smile he allowed himself. ‘You know I can deny you nothing, my lovely.’

  An exaggeration, on both counts, that she let pass. She’d been his personal assistant on the magazine for four years, and the possibility of a directorship was in the air, though an association of a different kind was more what he had in mind. Sarah suspected he was using the one as a carrot for the other, to try and make her see the sense of becoming Mrs Simon Asshe. Well, it was time she settled down, everyone thought so, including Sarah. Thirty-five was on the horizon. So why the hesitation?

  ‘I can see you’re set on going,’ Simon had finally admitted, seeing the predicament and reluctantly conceding the reasons for her offer, ‘so it’s no use my trying to dissuade you. You must do what you have to – only don’t make it too long, out there in the sticks. I fear Dermot could only too easily become used to you as an unpaid housekeeper.’

  Sarah might have feared this, too, had she not already been well-armed against Dermot’s admitted tendency to make use of people, especially his womenfolk: first, of his pretty Irish mother who, being as adept as he was at withdrawing from an unsatisfactory situation and with no intention of being burdened with motherless grandchildren, had circumspectly taken herself off to live permanently in Marbella; and thereafter of Mrs Wilmot, his mother-in-law. He was on the surface easy-going and optimistic, full of good ideas, which other people unfortunately tended to get landed with – though he was generally thought well-meaning and was therefore forgiven, until patience wore thin. He had reason to be grateful to a great many people, though in the end, underneath the lazy, blue-eyed, inherited Celtic charm, Dermot was quite capable of looking after his own affairs. The Voss side of his nature, from his German father, perhaps. When you thought about that, it wasn’t really all that astonishing that he’d taken this unprecedented step, made the decision to do it off his own bat, and carried it through all of a rush, against all the opposition. And surely understandable that he should be so devastated by Lisa’s untimely end that he could no longer bear to stay in the place where they’d been so happy together.

  She could hear the children’s voices, clear on the heavy air as they played, blissfully unaware of the changes that lay ahead of them. Nothing would ever be the same for them again. Life with a daddy whom they’d hitherto only infrequently seen, apart from flying visits home, one who wasn’t going to find such a drastic change in his lifestyle easy, either. And, in between, being looked after by a strange housekeeper.

  Dermot had been a TV cameraman, our man in whatever trouble spots of the world demanded his presence, alighting in England only long enough to spoil the girls outrageously before leaving on yet another assignment. It had been an unsatisfactory sort of family life, though Lisa, loyal and good, had never complained. Well, Dermot had now been thrust into the realities and responsibilities of parenthood with a vengeance and, to do him justice, he’d faced up squarely to what had to be done, wangled himself out of his contract with the BBC and found himself a job working with a corporate film and video company. But how long would this satisfy him, after the excitements and dangers of his previous job?

  Footsteps at last sounded on the stairs, Dermot with Mrs Burgoyne. The erstwhile owner of the house, she was a tiny, white-haired old lady with a soft pink and white, powdery skin and eyes like an electric drill. ‘No trouble at all, the tenants,’ she was repeating her assurances as they came into the drawing room with even Dermot, who was only just above middle height, appearing to tower over her. ‘Because, of course, I’ve always made sure, as you must, I warn you, Mr Voss, to take only the right sort of person in to Edwina Lodge.’ And she went on to detail, for Sarah’s information, what Dermot already knew about his tenants.

  The house was split more or less right down the middle, one half for the owners, one for the tenants. Upstairs, on the first floor, lived Mr Pitt, a librarian. Below him was the Baverstocks’ flat – he was employed in the borough accounts department, and she ran a wholefood shop in Folgate Street. Unexceptionable, all of them.

  And the attic-floor flat, inquired Sarah, the one where the huge window had been built out over the roof? The eyesore, she added to herself, the incongruity stuck like a blister to the side of the property, doing its bit to add to the ugliness of the house. There was a slight pause. Oh, that was Mr Fitzallan’s furnished flat. The window had been added many years ago, by a previous owner of Edwina Lodge, simply for the view, which was magnificent. On a clear day you could see the Rotunda in Birmingham.

  ‘And that reminds me, Mr Voss,’ Mrs Burgoyne went on swiftly, ‘did you pull that door smartly to, as I told you? I didn’t hear you, come to think of it, and if you didn’t, it won’t have closed properly. Mr Fitzallan won’t be pleased to come home and find his front door wide open, I can tell you. It’s these little
things that count.’

  Dermot, restless, chafing under the weight of all this instruction, running his hand through his black curls, smiled disarmingly and admitted ruefully that he couldn’t remember.

  ‘I’ll go up and check,’ Sarah offered, looking at her watch. ‘You’d better get off, hadn’t you, if you want to get Mrs Burgoyne to the station to catch her train?’

  Dermot flashed her a relieved smile. ‘I’ll be about half an hour, then I’ll take you and the children straight to the hotel – we’re staying at the Saracen’s Head for a couple of nights, Mrs Burgoyne. An early night for all of us seems indicated in view of what we’ve to face in the next few days.’

  ‘Monday’s when your furniture arrives, isn’t it?’ Mrs Burgoyne asked, eyeing Sarah, clearly not equating a short skirt and bare legs with someone capable of dealing with the removal, as though she would dearly have loved to superintend it personally to prevent anything going wrong. But finally, with a last sharp look round, though with what seemed to Sarah an ultimately unregretful eye, she departed with Dermot for the train which was to carry her to retirement in her south-coast bungalow.

  Sarah checked that the children were still safely and happily occupied – Allie, for one, was dreamily accident prone, seeming destined to go through life permanently sticking-plastered somewhere about her person; a recently broken collar bone and a small chip off one of her permanent front teeth from a fall off her bicycle was present testimony to this.

  She ran up the two flights of stairs to the attic flat, to find its front door was, after all, closed. But when she leaned her hand against it, it gave against her weight, and swung open. Before giving it the required slam, natural curiosity made her step forward a few paces and take a look round the room. Mrs Burgoyne certainly hadn’t spread herself here with regard to the furniture. The few cheap and unmistakably second-hand, unrelated pieces added nothing to the room’s character, nondescript with all-over, porridge-coloured paint and a curtainless window. This wasn’t, however, the big, ugly protruding window at the side, with its vaunted view. Evidently, this room in which she was standing was the first of two rooms, and the window in question was in the second one, through the opposite door. She felt a sudden urge to see it for herself, curious to know whether you really could see as far as the Birmingham Bull Ring ... She walked across and tried the door handle.