After Clare Page 13

  ‘Why do you think he deserted and came back to Leysmorton, Miss Drummond?’

  ‘How should I know that? And as I said, Dee knew him better than I did.’

  But Dee Erskine had said just the opposite. She had implied that Poppy Drummond knew Peter Sholto very well. And what might that have meant – not now that he’s dead?

  Fourteen

  Jogging home peacefully along the village street, Rosie’s morning ride was interrupted when from the direction of Kingsworth came the distant sound of a motor car. After the closure of the hospital at Leysmorton, a motor was once again an event in peaceful Netherley, interesting enough to cause two little boys to abandon their game of marbles and run to watch. A woman washing her windows turned to stare, and Rosie prudently reined Dandy in and turned him aside into Cat Lane.

  She held him still as the open-topped motor approached the village at a great rate, but although the driver, whom Rosie recognized as Archie Elphinstone, the best man at Dee’s wedding, slowed down considerably, he didn’t stop. Poppy was in the passenger seat, a long voile scarf wound around her head and streaming out behind her, and when she saw Rosie, she leant out and waved. ‘Sorry, can’t stop, darling!’ she called, and blew a kiss. ‘On our way to Leysmorton.’

  Rosie decided she wouldn’t go over there then, not this morning. Lady F would be too absorbed in other matters to want her around – and besides, Rosie, who had once adored Poppy, wasn’t sure that she liked the smart, brittle person she had become.

  It was after the horrible death of her father that Poppy had been invited to spend holidays at Steadings. Rosie, who had never before met this distant relative, who happened to be at the same school as Dee, had been afraid on that first visit that she would turn out to be a miserable creature, constantly in tears about her father and putting a damper on everything, but she turned out to be fun. She was very obliging and would even help Stella with her diary and correspondence, something no one else would do – Stella was lazy about answering letters and hopeless at fixing and remembering dates. Everyone liked Poppy. It had been a wonderful summer, until everything fell apart – until the Awful Thing with her mother had happened, and then the war, and dearest David going away to fight for his country and being killed. And though nowadays Poppy was very bright and amusing when you met her, she wasn’t fun any more.

  ‘What beautiful pearls!’

  ‘Yes, lovely, aren’t they?’

  ‘I expect they’re yours now,’ Poppy went on speculatively.

  Emily lifted her eyes from an inspection of the samples Poppy had brought and spoke to the men who were positioning stepladders to lift down her mother’s portrait in its heavy gilt frame. ‘You can take it down now. But please go carefully.’

  She sank onto the old sofa, happy enough to just watch. There had been a lot to do in preparation for the redecoration of the library, even with these two men Hugh had insisted on sending round from Steadings to help with the heavy work: shifting weighty furniture, rolling the carpet, taking down the moth-eaten tapestry curtains that weighed a ton-and-a-half and had descended to the floor releasing clouds of decades-old dust. The books, thank goodness, could be left as they were, in their glass-fronted cases, while the decorating went on.

  There were hundreds of books – enough for the room to be called a library, covering two walls floor to ceiling as they did – and huge sagging chairs where you could curl up to read in front of the enormous stone fireplace, but it had never been just a library. It was more of a general living room, the place where people naturally gravitated – for teatime, or just to chat, for playing cards in the evenings, for gathering round the old walnut piano with its brass candle-sconces, where the girls had practised their scales and listened to Mama playing Chopin or the latest songs.

  It must never be changed too much. It smelt of happiness still, of Mama’s lily-of-the-valley scent, the resinous fragrance of Christmas fir needles, toast, Papa’s roses in the summer, their scent floating in from the Rose Walk, or from where they were massed in big silver bowls on the tables. Of the lost days and years.

  While Poppy darted about, leaving written instructions for the painters and making notes for herself, Emily kept her eye on the portrait as the men cautiously manoeuvred the frame down from where it had hung ever since it had been commissioned. It was said to be an act of courage to have oneself painted by G. H. Watts, who was not interested in surface prettiness or even beauty, was not merciful and would only paint people he liked – for a very large fee. Still, it was an acceptable, if not flattering, depiction of Leila. She wore no jewels, apart from the rope of pearls, their milky lustre glowing against the rose-coloured silk of the gown she wore. Emily found herself unable to take her eyes off them. The pearls, yes!

  Marta stood by the doorway as the men manoeuvred through with their bulky burden. She looked flustered, not liking her routine to be disturbed. She had thought Hugh’s offer to send men to help was unnecessary and her cooperation had been grudging. Now she began to follow Poppy around the room, adjusting dust covers, moving this and that.

  Emily watched with half her mind still on the pearls. What had happened to them? It was suddenly an urgent question. They were a family heirloom, passed on to Clare as the eldest daughter when she became eighteen, but she had never had occasion – and certainly no wish – to wear them. The only jewellery Clare ever consented to wear was the tiny gold crucifix round her neck. Anthony had kept the pearls safe in a secret drawer in his desk. Yet there had been no mention of them in his will. Emily herself had forgotten their existence completely until Poppy’s remarks a few minutes ago had forced them to her attention.

  How could she not have remembered something so important? And what had become of them?

  It was warm enough for an informal lunch on the terrace, the company including Val, as well as Poppy and Archie Elphinstone, the large, agreeable young man with a shock of blond hair and a rugby player’s shoulders who had driven her down from London and then cheerfully pitched in to help. As it was Nellie Dobson’s day off, Marta had seen to the lunch herself. Cold cuts of yesterday’s mutton joint, boiled potatoes and beetroot were a disheartening experience, Marta’s cooking skills stopping short at her jam and cordial-making, or a few cakes, but the meal was saved by a crisp fruit tart made the previous day by Mrs Dobson from redcurrants grown by Marta, which elicited approval from Archie, who availed himself of three slices.

  He was an easy and amusing chap, and the conversation flowed. Poppy, though bright and animated, seemed a trifle less so than usual. When the subject of the murdered man found in the grounds was casually mentioned, she shuddered and said ‘Please!’ and the subject was dropped by mutual consent. A darkness had come into the lives of all of them with the death of Peter Sholto. It had touched them, whether they liked it or not. Everyone in Britain had grown familiar with death – the obscenity that had resulted in the eclipse of a whole generation of young men – but this was different, and no one wanted to think what it might mean.

  Novak still couldn’t think why he had been put on to this case. It was a double-edged sword: a feather in his cap if he solved it; a black mark if he didn’t. It would have been nice to think somebody had their eye on him for promotion, but he thought it was more likely that no one else had been available. Though there could be no particular urgency associated with a case that had lain undetected for so long, and he had other miscreants in plenty to occupy him, he had been left in no doubt that this investigation must not be allowed to stagnate through lack of drive and initiative on his part, which did much to stiffen his resolve to figure it out as fast as he could. Today, he had left Willard behind in London to follow up enquiries into anyone with whom Peter Sholto might have had connections in his army days, while he drove himself down to Netherley with the intention of speaking to Marta Heeren.

  He wasn’t looking forward to the meeting. His brief encounter with her had made him sure it would not be easy. So when he had found himself walking along
the village street and passing the house belonging to Nellie Dobson, the woman who worked in the kitchen at Leysmorton, he’d decided to put her off a little while longer. In any case, he always preferred to employ the methods he usually found enlightening, going the back way first, getting impressions about the situation, in the long run as important as facts, from those who worked below stairs. As often as not, they knew more than their employers ever dreamt about what went on above.

  He’d been given a mug of strong, sweet tea and a slice of fruit cake, and they were now sitting in the sun on a bench outside the door of one of the black-and-white timbered cottages with their cheerfully jumbled gardens clustered along the winding road that ran through Netherley – cottages which outsiders found so picturesque, while those who lived in them suffered from rheumatics, smoking chimneys and the necessity of sharing an outdoor convenience.

  ‘Oh, she’s all right, Miss Heeren is,’ Mrs Dobson was saying. ‘A bit touchy sometimes. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Touchy about what?’

  She stretched out her arm to push to and fro along the brick path a huge, ungainly perambulator containing the angry-faced, restless baby she was minding. ‘You never know,’ she said, leaning forward to adjust the child’s rumpled covers. ‘Like treading on eggs, sometimes. Fussy. She enjoyed being mistress at Leysmorton before the war, or as good as. Still does.’

  ‘Was the house empty for long after the hospital closed?’

  ‘Nigh on a couple of months. We had to see everything put back just as it was before she’d consent to move herself and her brother back, me and half a dozen more from the village. You know what some folks are like.’

  She settled down for a gossip, a comfortably built, nice-looking woman with hair that might once have been red but was now an indeterminate sandy-grey.

  ‘You don’t like Miss Heeren?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that! You speak as you find, and she’s very good to me. Fond of kiddies, she is, doesn’t mind if I take any of the little ones with me when I go to work along there. It’s one way I can help my daughter out . . . that’s my Ivy, worn out with four under six, God help her, and working half-time at Sankey’s, poor duck.’ She nodded in the direction of the sprawling shed further along the road, the only village industry, once a place where straw had been split before being sent in bundles to the hat factories in Luton, Novak had learnt, now a pop-bottling factory. ‘Not that he’d care.’

  Sensing that a delinquent husband featured largely in this tale of woe, and that Mrs Dobson might be prepared to go on in the same vein for some time, Novak nodded sympathetically and quickly remarked, ‘I expect things have changed at the house, now Lady Fitzallan’s back?’

  ‘Miss Emily? Well, I expect she’ll be going back to that place of hers abroad – Madeira, isn’t it? Leysmorton has unhappy memories for her. Seems to me she’s never got over that business of her sister.’

  ‘What business was that?’

  ‘Oh, donkey’s years back. I’d just left school and I was only an underhousemaid there, so I never knew much about it. Servants only know what they’re told – or what they pick up. Miss Emily got married very young, not much more than a girl. It happened all of a nonce, the house was in an uproar, preparing for a wedding at such short notice – and not two days after, when we were looking to get over it, her older sister, Clare, disappeared. Neither hide nor hair of her ever seen after that! We reckoned she must have been kidnapped and murdered, but they never found out. It upset the master, Mr Vavasour, I can tell you. Never the same after that, both daughters gone, and Miss Emily living abroad and never coming back till now. I reckon it was a good thing his sister and her children came to live with him. It’s not good for a man to be on his own.’

  ‘Those children would be Mr Stronglove and Miss Heeren?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m told Peter Sholto was a favourite of Miss Heeren.’

  A guarded expression crossed her face. She rocked the pram harder. ‘Like I said, she likes children.’

  ‘He was hardly a child.’

  ‘He was when she first knew him, when he and his dad came from St Albans – and I reckon he always seemed like one to her, as they do. Fairly doted on him, in fact.’ She added reflectively, ‘I’m sorry about Peter – that it had to end that way. He was a lovely kiddie, a real charmer.’ The baby, waving angry fists, suddenly began to howl. ‘There then, lovey, there there,’ she soothed, plugging its mouth with a dummy. ‘Well, he still was, when he grew up – when he wanted to be. He could say he was sorry with a smile that could whistle the birds off the trees.’ She smiled herself. Marta Heeren hadn’t been the only one who’d been charmed.

  ‘And what did Peter think of Miss Heeren?’

  She considered that for a moment. ‘You know, I don’t reckon anybody ever really knew what Peter was thinking.’ Which pretty much confirmed what Poppy Drummond had said of him, and Stronglove, too. ‘But he was nice to her, I’ll give him that.’

  ‘And Mr Stronglove? He’s never married?’

  ‘Not he! I reckon his sister looks after him too well.’

  ‘Hardly the same as a wife – but maybe he’s not interested in marriage?’

  Her face averted, she stared out across the cabbages and dahlias, the bean sticks and the hollyhocks. A bee from one of the hives at the end of the garden droned past. She either did not know what might be implied by that, or didn’t want to acknowledge that she did. Novak in fact knew by now that Stronglove had been a colourful and sought-after figure on the pre-war social scene in London, something of a literary lion, with his name linked to several women in the more salacious gossip columns.

  ‘Well, maybe he isn’t interested, maybe he is,’ she said at last. ‘But we can’t all have what we want, can we?’

  ‘They went to live in London before the war because it was more convenient for his literary connections. Why do you think he came back afterwards?’

  She looked sideways at him. For a moment he thought she might be going to tell him something he wanted to hear. Then she shrugged. ‘Well, you can’t have missed noticing that he’s having trouble with his eyesight.’ He didn’t think that was what she had intended to say. He also thought she didn’t like Stronglove much.

  ‘It’s pretty bad, I gather.’

  ‘She wants him to go into hospital for an operation, his sister does. I don’t blame him for not wanting to. You never know whether you’ll come out of them places or not.’

  ‘My sentiments entirely.’

  The baby had spit out its dummy and its cries for attention were fast becoming a roar. ‘I reckon he needs changing, don’t you, lovey? Come to your nan, then.’ She plucked the squalling child, hot and red, from the nest of tangled blankets and rocked him. ‘If you want to carry on talking, Inspector, you’ll have to come inside with me while I see to him.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ Novak said hastily. ‘You’ve been very helpful, thank you, Mrs Dobson.’

  She gave him a long look. ‘If I’ve said too much, I’m sorry for it. We were always told in no uncertain terms when we went to work for the gentry that you kept your mouth shut about what you saw, whatever they did – and believe me, what they got up to, some of ’em, it’d make your hair curl! – or you could say goodbye to your job, without a reference . . . but I can’t get over that poor boy.’

  He waited for what else she might be about to say, but she put the baby to her shoulder and went indoors.

  He walked down the village street, thinking over the conversation. Nellie Dobson knew more about Stronglove than she had been willing to divulge, and he had to wonder why. Did she know why he had been unwilling to dismiss Peter? Sholto had apparently not been the ideal secretary, yet Novak did not think Stronglove at all the man to have baulked at dismissing him. In fact, he had openly said he had toyed with the idea. But he had kept him on.

  It also seemed there was a question hanging over Stronglove’s decision to return to Leysmorton to
live. It was true that his failing sight could have provided a good reason – or excuse – for quitting the London scene and burying himself out here, but intuition told Novak that was unlikely to be the case.

  Fifteen

  At Steadings, they had finished lunch on the terrace. Poppy, finally satisfied that she had left instructions that could not possibly be misinterpreted by the decorators, looked at her watch and gave a little scream. ‘Heavens, the time! Darlings, I must scoot.’

  ‘Always rushing about, nowadays,’ Hugh grumbled, but he smiled at her. He’d always had a soft spot for Poppy, had once hoped she might become a granddaughter-in-law. He would have liked her even better had she allowed herself to be still for a minute. Her youth and energy made him feel like an old buffer, but he admired the way she was trying to make something of her life – she and that brother of hers, whom Rosie seemed so taken with. He looked across the table at Val and saw something he’d learned to recognize with the years: honesty, and a steadfastness of purpose that time would prove. Rosie could do worse. But his glance as it passed on to his granddaughter was worried. Had her mother not noticed anything amiss with her lately? Nothing outward – she looked just as blooming with health as ever – but to Hugh, it was obvious something was troubling her. She was listless and seemed far away. He told himself it was merely being in love for the first time that had taken hold of her; something that could afflict anyone, no matter what one’s age, he reflected with a grim humour. But he hoped she was not still having nightmares about finding the remains of Peter Sholto.

  At last Emily, who had been on tenterhooks all through lunch, was free to escape upstairs.

  Reaching the landing, she turned in the opposite direction to her own room and carried on beyond the turn of the corridor, then several steps down, until she stood outside the small room tucked in halfway between flights.

  Since her arrival back at Leysmorton, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to set foot across the threshold of this place that Clare had insisted on calling her studio, feeling an almost superstitious aversion to opening the door and stepping back into the past. What sleeping devils might she disturb? But now she didn’t hesitate for a second before pushing open the door.