Echoes of Silence Read online

  Freya herself had always passed a good proportion of her time here in her bedroom, and lately more so, either spending the whole day in the heavy, dark oak bed, for which she’d embroidered a sumptuous silk coverlet, giving audience from there. Or from the high orthopaedic chair, somewhat reminiscent of a throne, where she sat sewing. As in the yellow room downstairs, there was a large standing tapestry frame where some needlepoint or other was always stretched. And it was here, too, where she’d worked at that wretched book with Wyn Austwick, at the long oak table that had served as a desk, extending along one wall.

  Freya had never been a tidy person, only so far as her clothes were concerned, and Polly knew she could leave the disposal of the immaculate contents of the drawers and cupboards containing them to Dot. It was the range of cupboards flanking the chimney breast on either side which compelled her attention. Here she knew Freya had kept the scrapbooks, the untidy pile of newspaper clippings, the albums of photographs, tattered old fan letters, all the memorabilia connected with her cherished past. Polly expected to find what she sought there – the files and cardboard boxes, their contents sorted into some kind of order by Wyn Austwick, the raw material for the proposed book, even perhaps a rough draft. But as she flung open the cupboards one by one, she found them quite empty – nothing remained in them but a bulging cardboard box, the lid secured by an elastic band. She pulled it out roughly and the perished rubber of the band snapped. Hundreds of old photographs cascaded to the carpet. There was absolutely nothing else in any of the cupboards.

  For a moment, she was nonplussed. Had Wyn Austwick taken them all away? She turned to the dressing-table drawers, the shelves of the wardrobe, but found nothing except exquisite silk underwear, immaculately kept dresses, rows of shoes, suits and coats. It was only when she looked in the deep drawer of the night table that she found anything, and it wasn’t what she was seeking. Right at the back, hidden behind a pile of folded handkerchiefs, her hand touched a brown glass bottle with a child-proof cap. Full of the sleeping pills which Freya had occasionally needed. She’d had a prescription for years, there was a bottle of them beside her bed now, alongside the foil packs of pills for her arthritis and her blood pressure. That bottle was half empty. The full bottle, concealed behind the hankies, told its own story.

  Oh, Mother.

  Tears which she still couldn’t shed gathered in a hard lump in Polly’s throat. Regrets, an indulgence she normally forbade herself, flowed over her. She sat on the edge of the bed and grieved at the waste, the separateness of Freya’s life, and tried to remember if there were times when she and her mother had ever been close, as a mother and daughter should be. But she found only that cool, untouchable centre she’d never been able to reach. What hurt more than anything was the fact that she had not had an inkling of what had been going on in her mother’s mind, that she was finding life unbearable. But Freya was Freya. Ordinary standards didn’t apply. She would always be what she had made herself into, what the public remembered her as: Freya Cass. Her inner life was her own secret.

  But even Freya – how could she, how could she, have kept silent about that little girl’s death for so long?

  Polly shivered in the still cold room, suddenly wanting an end to this, aching to hold her own child in her arms, to feel an affirmation of life.

  It was then she heard the footsteps approaching. Slow, dragging steps, barely noticeable if it hadn’t been for the give-away creak of the ancient floorboards. Goose pimples lifted the hairs on her arms. Not for the first time in her life, she was afraid in this old house.

  Slowly, the door opened, and Dot Nagle came in. For a moment, as taken aback at seeing Polly as Polly was to see her, she stood in the doorway with her shoulders sagging, naked emotion on her face. Then, taking command of herself with a visible effort, she straightened her spine, wiped the sadness from her face and moved forward with almost her usual briskness, the highish heels she always wore to give her more height clipping on the polished boards between the old rugs in the familiar way, until she came to the photographs on the floor. She took in at a glance the open cupboard doors, the empty interiors. She looked at Polly, sitting on the embroidered counterpane.

  ‘I burned them,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ For a moment, Polly was disorientated, not understanding what she meant.

  ‘The papers. She told me to, yesterday. Before I left to catch my train, she told me to clear it all out – everything, all that old rubbish. Everything except those family photos, we agreed it wouldn’t be right to destroy those – and the professional ones, she gave them to me. I put everything else in the boiler.’

  Only then did her eyes light on the bottle, still clutched in Polly’s hand. She stared, searched for and found the other one on the night table. Her breath caught in her throat with a harsh, rasping sound. ‘She – she didn’t – she couldn’t have …?’

  ‘No, look, the bottle’s full. It was hidden away and I think she might have meant to use it sometime, when the pain grew too bad, but it wasn’t necessary. It was a stroke, Dr Simmons saw her …’

  She couldn’t help feeling pity for the other woman, sensing how deep her loss was. If anyone had ever understood Freya, it was Dot. They’d been inseparable for over forty years, their lives had intermeshed in a way that had made them closer than blood relations. To Dot, losing Freya would be like losing half of herself. Polly wished she could help her in some way, but even a warm hug was unthinkable. Dot was as resistant to emotional contact as ever Freya had been.

  ‘If only I’d been here!’ Dot said fiercely, as though her very presence would have forced death to back off. ‘I’ve never stayed away overnight for years, I knew I shouldn’t have gone, she wasn’t herself and it was just a funeral, after all. And the old bugger only left me a cracked jug,’ she added with a spurt of grim humour. She half bent to pick up the photos, then straightened. ‘What brought it on? Eddie says he only drove her up to the top of Holme Moss, it couldn’t have been that.’

  ‘No, it couldn’t. Her blood pressure was so high a stroke could have happened any time, the doctor said. But walking down to post that letter didn’t help.’

  ‘What?’ Dot asked sharply, drawing in her breath. ‘What letter was that?’

  Polly spread her hands. ‘No idea, but no doubt we shall find out, from whoever it was sent to. Leave those photos, Dot, I’ll see to them.’

  ‘All right.’ She was staring at her shoes, her hands clasped so tightly the knuckles showed white, for the moment miles away. Then she blinked and nodded her newly permed tight grey curls. ‘What about supper? Could you eat any?’

  ‘I’m staying with Ginny tonight.’

  Suddenly, the warmth and ease, the soft comfort and affection in Ginny’s house seemed like the best and most desirable thing in the world. Low Rigg, full of draughts that blew old miseries around, was insupportable. And then, tumbling into her mind for no reason at all, came the question Ginny had been asking recently. To which Polly’s answer was that she’d never felt the need for another man, not since she’d finally sent Tony Winslow packing. Tony had been more than enough for a very long time. Just at this moment, however, she’d have given a lot for a broad chest to lean on, arms around her belonging to a big man with thick, greyish fair hair, a strong face, an awkward manner and haunted eyes. She felt a rush of heat, and something like a frisson of fear, then sighed and deliberately shut the picture of Tom Richmond from her mind.

  When Dot had gone, she looked helplessly at the mess on the floor, then knelt down and began to gather the photos together.

  Family photos, Dot had said, but they were mostly of people Polly didn’t know. Ancient sepia ones of ladies in shirtwaists and their hair in buns, men in homburg hats and suits with waistcoats, narrow trousers stopping short an inch above their shoes. One she did recognise was of her elegant grandmother, in a head and shoulders pose, her dark hair shingled, with the front in a dip held back with a slide, a beaded blouse and a long rope of pearls arou
nd her neck. Laurence, serious and unsmiling in wartime uniform, and someone with a daredevil grin and his RAF hat at a jaunty angle whom it took her several moments to identify as Philip. A few early childhood ones of herself and Ginny and Peter …

  The group photograph was unusual among all this, an informal snap taken on a seaside holiday, which must have been the last one they ever took together – regular holidays were not part of Polly’s childhood memories. She didn’t remember Filey at all, but ‘Filey, 1972’ was written on the back. 1972, the year after their father had died. The family and a young, pert-faced, dark-haired Dot. Freya lounging in a deck chair, looking glamorous in designer beachwear. Philip, in shorts! Elf as a baby, sitting between Ginny’s legs with a furious, scarlet face, wielding a tiny wooden spade, all ready to demolish the sandcastle she herself, a chubby-cheeked four-year-old crouched down beside it, had evidently just painstakingly constructed. Peter, ten years old, even then wary, sitting self-consciously to one side and scowling at the camera. No one looked particularly happy. How they’d all changed physically since then! Even Freya, whose life had been dedicated to keeping herself looking young. Polly studied the faces carefully; knowing that it was telling her something she had realised, subconsciously, for years.

  She looked at it for a long time before slipping it into her bag.

  When he left Low Rigg Hall, Richmond had no intention of going to seek out Eddie Nagle. But Beth had been very near to him in the big house, and now he felt emotionally wrung out and in need of a drink. With Mrs Nagle’s tirade against Wyn Austwick still ringing in his ears as he drove slowly down the few hundred yards of unmade-up road to where the swinging sign of the Moorcock hove in sight, he suddenly changed his mind and drew up outside.

  The pub, occupying a corner where the road curved sharply, was squeezed in at right angles to a row of old cottages with low sweeping roofs, which he guessed was where the Nagles lived. Once inside, he discovered it with pleasure to be one of the dwindling number of old inns which had escaped the depredations of relentless modernisation. It boasted a small but spotlessly shining bar, a bare, stone-flagged floor, unplastered stone walls, not a horse brass in sight, the ceiling between the old beams pickled to a rich, tobacco brown, and the only ornament an undistinguished stuffed bird in a glass case on a shelf. The ubiquitous heaped-up, scorching fire, cratch-back chairs, benches and strong oak tables, and that was that. One single drinker and no landlord in evidence.

  ‘You’ll have to shout,’ the customer informed Richmond, then did it for him. ‘Shop, Susan!’ His hand went out to gentle the trembling his raised voice had aroused in the elegant greyhound quivering against his leg.

  Richmond’s half-pint having been pulled by a young woman who came in drying her hands on a tea towel, who accepted his order and his payment with a nod and nothing more than the usual civilities before departing, he moved to one of the benches by the fire, near the shelf with the stuffed bird. ‘Moorcock. Male of the red grouse, Lagopus scoticus,’ he read, settling himself and stretching his long legs to the fire.

  ‘Chatty piece, that Susan,’ his fellow customer commented. ‘Like all the natives, you’d fink they was charged for every bloody word.’

  ‘Not from these parts yourself, are you, Mr Nagle? I take it that’s who you are?’ The nasal tones, the glottal stops, would have dubbed the man a stranger, even if Richmond hadn’t expected him to be there.

  ‘And you’re up here about that woman found at Rumsden Garf quarry,’ retorted Eddie, whose powers of deduction – or possibly his experience of the police – evidently equalled Richmond’s own.

  Richmond showed his warrant card. Watched the other man carefully store up the name, the rank. ‘You knew Mrs Austwick?’ he asked.

  Nagle pulled on his pint, smacking thick, blubbery lips. Richmond had met bruisers, chuckers-out at night-clubs, punch-drunk boxers more prepossessing. Not over-tall – Richmond could have given him half a head – but his tight jeans showed impressively muscled thighs, the sweatshirt was stretched across well-developed pectorals under a leather bomber jacket. He was sporting a wonderful black eye, just turning from purple to greenish-yellow. ‘Depends what you mean by know. Only met her when she come up here to do that book. Fixed her starter motor for her once, used to turn her car round for her. Not a lot of room to manoeuvre up there and the ladies never seem to get the ’ang of it, know what I mean? But we wasn’t hardly what you’d call mates.’

  ‘How long have you worked for Mrs Denshaw?’ Since the beer - not his first and probably not his second – appeared to have loosened the other man’s tongue, there seemed no point in not taking advantage of it.

  ‘Since I married Dot, so that must be over twenty years, Gawd ’elp us.’ He grinned to indicate a joke but all the same, Richmond wondered. The Nagles did seem an oddly assorted pair, and he must be a good ten years younger than she was, possibly a lot more.

  ‘How d’you find the life up here? Bit quiet, isn’t it?’

  ‘Say that again, but it suits me OK. I had enough racketing round the world when I was in the Marines. I got me job down the ’ealth club, plus general ’andyman at the big ’ouse, used to drive Mrs D around. All keeps me occupied.’

  With plenty of spare time, Richmond assumed, deducing from what he’d seen at Low Rigg that Nagle’s handyman duties couldn’t exactly weigh him down. ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Dunno, rightly. No chance to talk about it yet, me and the wife. She’s took it real bad, see. Her and the old girl was like that.’ He extended one thick finger on top of another, to indicate closeness. ‘I’ve always wanted to breed dogs,’ he added thoughtfully.

  ‘What’s stopped you?’

  ‘Capital, mate,’ was the reply, indicating a train of thought that led directly from Freya Denshaw’s death to expectations of benefiting from her will. He rose and called into the back for another pint. The silent Susan came in, and watched Richmond as she pulled it. She was dark-haired and brown-eyed, and would have been pretty if she’d allowed herself to smile. Too young to have been here at the time of Beth’s disappearance, he noted automatically.

  ‘You need capital to do it right professionally, know what I mean?’ Nagle continued, coming back with a brimming tankard. ‘There’s big money in the right sort of dogs, but you need to lay it out first. Go on, she’s all right – ’ as Richmond reached out to stroke the greyhound ‘wouldn’t hurt a fly, Lady wouldn’t, soft as a boiled turnip.’

  Richmond felt the small bony skull beneath the velvet skin. The dog lifted a paw and laid it, light as a feather, on his knee. ‘She used to be a champ,’ Nagle said, ‘but she’s no bloody use to nobody now. Greyhounds have a pretty short working life. Don’t know why I keep her, that’s the trufe. You’d never believe how much she eats. Bloody useless, aincher, dog?’

  The dog turned from Richmond and looked up at her master with liquid eyes. Nagle ignored her, then cuffed the side of her head gently, with obvious affection. “Armless, though. Funny, that, being Wyn was dead scared of her – and she didn’t like Wyn, neiver.’

  Richmond noted the familiar use of the Christian name. ‘When did you last see Mrs Austwick?’

  ‘Last week, I reckon. She said she was off on ’er ’olidays to Spain and wouldn’t be up here for a couple of weeks.’ He swilled down his beer in one last draught. ‘What’s she been up to, then, getting herself topped?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out.’

  The irony was lost on Nagle. ‘Sad. But say lah vee, as the Frogs say.’ He stood up. ‘I’m off now. All that beer. Anyfink else you want to know, you won’t have far to go to find me. Only live next door.’

  ‘That’s a rare old shiner you have there. You want to take care of it.’

  ‘You should see the other feller,’ Nagle said automatically, winking his good eye.

  As the pub door closed behind him, the landlady entered again, and came from behind the bar to collect the empty glasses. A rich, savoury smell of cookin
g issued from the kitchen.

  ‘Any chance of some food?’ Richmond asked.

  ‘Soup all right?’

  ‘If that’s what I can smell, yes.’

  ‘Five minutes,’ she answered, smiling. He’d assumed correctly. She was pretty. Plump and pink-cheeked, a right bonny lass, in local parlance.

  In less than five minutes, she was back with a steaming bowl of soup, so thick with meat and vegetables it was a hearty meal in itself, plus crusty brown bread and a generous pot of butter. She set the food carefully before him. ‘That’ll stick to your ribs. Get it down while it’s still hot, nothing worse than lukewarm soup.’

  She watched him while he tasted it and found it lived up to every bit of its promise. ‘This is excellent.’

  ‘All right, is it?’ She nodded, satisfied, and went to wash the empty glasses. When they were dried, she busied herself with polishing the bar counter, rearranging the bottles behind it, while Richmond savoured the delectably blended flavours of smoky ham, haricot beans, carrots, celery and onions. After a while, she spoke up: ‘You want to watch that there Nagle. I heard what he said about not knowing that woman, and it’s a barefaced lie. They were in here a lot, dinner times, and sometimes in the evenings as well. Never mind what he said, they were thick as thieves.’

  Richmond swallowed the last spoonful of his soup and sat back, replete. ‘Did you ever hear what they talked about?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know.’ She was uncertain, aware that she’d laid herself open to that. ‘They just seemed – well, matey. You know, laughing and joking and that. Except for Friday – no, Thursday night, it’d be.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Having a few words, if I’m any judge. We get crowded in here of a night, especially in winter. There’s a bit of a garden at the back, but only for summer. We do bar meals and that and we’re usually pretty busy, gets a bit noisy, like. So I didn’t actually hear what they were talking about. They just seemed – not all that friendly.’