The Property of Lies Page 19

  ‘You don’t need to come with us.’ Gilmour looked bland.

  Shefford paused, on the point of refusing, then gave in, remembering they were the police, after all. ‘All right,’ he said grudgingly, ‘as it happens I do have a spare key. But I want it back, I’ve already lost the others, haven’t I, and I don’t want to lose any more.’ Reluctantly, he rummaged in a drawer and handed it over.

  Jocasta Keith slapped paint viciously on to the canvas and stood back, biting her lip, scowling ferociously at what she’d just accomplished – or not. Drat the thing! It was no good, she was all over the place lately, her concentration nil, and it showed. And now that the light was going it was too late to start again. The few free periods she had during the day, and the short time after lessons were finished, were the only times she had to get on with what she considered her real work.

  She cleaned her brushes furiously. It shouldn’t have happened like this. None of it should have happened at all, in fact. Nobody had ever intended that, had they? But he had been persuasive, knowing instinctively which nerve to press, in a way that made it impossible to refuse. Or it had seemed so, then.

  It still shouldn’t have happened. It was all due to what they called coincidence anyway. Coincidence, or Fate? She didn’t believe in either, or only in the Fate that dealt you a rotten deal in life – which might have been exactly why they’d bumped into each other in a London street, of all places, at a dark time for her, another black spot in what was beginning to look like an increasingly bleak future. Or, more precisely, she had bumped into him, not looking where she was going, to be honest, colliding with him because it was pouring with rain and she had her umbrella up and her mind elsewhere. Torn between going back to the café she’d just passed for a reckless splurge on sausage, mash and onion gravy, plus pudding, for one-and-eleven all in, or settling for beans on toast again in her bedsit. Her stomach was rumbling. Her waistband had felt even slacker that morning. With the grand total of seven shillings left in her purse, no prospect of any more to come and still less of anyone buying any of her work, either, not even any of the odd potboilers she was reduced to doing to keep body and soul together.

  She had been an easy target.

  ‘Joan!’

  Even in her bemused state she’d turned round at that blast from the past, one she needed as little as yet another rent demand from her landlord. When she’d finally found the will and had shaken the dust off, she’d never wanted even to think about her home town, much less meet anyone who’d been part of it. But there he was and, knowing him, he would not be got rid of easily, and she herself did not want him to go, to tell the truth. Not when he was offering to buy her lunch and asking where the nearest place was.

  ‘I’m not Joan any more. It’s Jocasta now,’ she’d told him while they waited for apple pie with custard, already feeling better and more confident after the sausage and mash.

  He had been amused. ‘Jocasta? I like it. Jocasta Keith, famous artist.’

  The annoying blush she always found it hard to contain rose from her neck. ‘There’s no call to be sarcastic.’

  ‘No sarcasm intended. You were always good.’ He smiled, reached out and pressed her hand, and, despite herself, she’d smiled.

  And that was how it had started. Soothed by a full belly, seduced by images of more meals whenever she needed them. New silk stockings. That pair of lizard-skin shoes she’d briefly coveted. But more than anything else, the prospect of time in which to devote herself to what really mattered, what she burned to do. She had done what he asked, and in the end she hadn’t had any regrets. Not really. Coming here had meant that at least there was no need to worry about where her next meal was coming from, even if it was of the school dinner variety. Money in her purse and decent clothes. She could even afford to go up to London from time to time to have her hair cut and waved properly. It meant the open door to freedom. Time to focus on her real work, with no imperative to try and sell rubbishy crowd-pleasers in order to live, the joy of being free to tell the philistines to take a running jump if she wanted to. And the price? Truth to tell, when she thought about that she’d had qualms, right from the beginning, but they’d been easily suppressed. Especially when she thought of what she’d left behind, and just how near the brink of the abyss she had been when he’d found her, gripped with the black despair that took hold of her sometimes, always when she least expected it, like it was doing now. What her father used to call the black dog, threatening to savage her with its fangs bared.

  Her father, a worker in the Potteries. When she mentioned where she came from, most people seemed to regard it as distant as the North Pole, if they’d ever heard of the region at all. Nobody seemed to know exactly where it was, a sort of hole in the middle of England; so she usually compromised by saying ‘the Midlands’.

  Sometimes she thought briefly that she ought to have stayed there. But she had fumed at not only being unable to use her real talents, but also at not making money. Not real money, anyway. She wasn’t going to satisfy either need by devoting her life to painting chinaware. By local standards she’d been earning good money, but the foot-treadle she used to operate her work-table came to feel more and more like a treadmill. Even when she graduated from that to hand-painting designs, she was bored and frustrated beyond belief.

  For a time it hadn’t been so bad, living in London, trying to establish herself and lose all traces of her provincial past. She wanted to make money, yes, and plenty of it, because she knew herself and that she wasn’t cut out for a life of scrimping and scraping. Success had to mean artistic fulfilment, but must also mean more. The arty, floaty, precious world typical of the Bloomsbury set she had once so admired from afar had not made itself available to her, and living the so-called romantic life in a garret she had found was distinctly overrated. Her ambition was boundless, but not enough to make that bearable.

  And in the end, in a contradictory sort of way, that ambition was what had made up her mind. It was a self-defeating decision, had she but known it then, and she had taken the plunge and left.

  FOURTEEN

  A nasty smell greeted them when Gilmour unlocked the door at 43 Melia Street. The hairs on his arms stood on end as he stepped inside, Gravy following, hoping to God it just betokened an old, damp house and not another corpse.

  But it wasn’t that sort of smell. It was the sour odour of unaired rooms, past fry-ups, air that was used up. Yet, despite that, and whether Liptrott had left in a hurry or not, an initial quick glance around suggested he might have done a half-hearted tidy-up before he went. The place wasn’t cluttered, the carpets looked more or less swept and there was only a thin layer of dust and grime on the surfaces.

  This house was a repeat of the one next door – the familiar layout of front room, a kitchen/living room at the back and two bedrooms. There was no bathroom and the privy was outside in the yard. Gilmour started a systematic search with the parlour at the front. Unlike Miss Ainsworth’s, which at least served as her workroom, this room had probably remained unused for years. Shefford’s assertion that the house was furnished didn’t agree with his own estimation, but maybe it was, if that was how you regarded one with no more than a few sticks of tired old furniture, and without a single book, picture or ornament of any kind to make it welcome and homely. Not even a cushion graced the old-fashioned horsehair-stuffed, tabby-cat-patterned plush sofa and chairs. Shefford wouldn’t have needed any inventory to check with one glance that all his furnishings were still intact.

  The drawers in the one chest were empty, except for a little trail of detritus that had accumulated in corners, been missed or left behind. An exploration down the sides of the dusty plush chairs unearthed a little cache of small denomination coins, a pencil stub and a betting slip dated three years earlier, but all in all, this room at least turned out to be nothing more than the bare bones, scraped clean, of what had been the life of the old man who had previously lived there.

  The state of the kitchen-living r
oom, however – always a give-away – seemed to say Liptrott hadn’t been a complete slob. The sink in the corner was clean and a tea towel hung neatly over a wire stretched across the cold kitchen range. Was it Gilmour’s imagination that it was ever so slightly damp? He decided it was. Here, too, the cupboards had been cleared, except for a few tins, a packet of tea and some sugar that he’d seemingly not thought worth taking.

  It was becoming depressingly obvious that Liptrott might indeed have done a runner, as Shefford had said, and most likely for good. But there were still the rooms upstairs to look over, accessed by a narrow staircase steep enough to make the north face of the Eiger look like a nursery slope. Gilmour wasn’t hopeful of finding anything there, though, and he was right. The brass bed in the front room had been stripped to its flocked mattress and striped ticking pillows, and in the only other piece of furniture, a chest of drawers, was nothing but a cheap Californian Poppy scent bottle, its contents evaporated, and a dried-up lipstick of an improbable orange colour. Unlikely property, either of them, for a fastidious and fashionable woman who wore custom-made underclothes. If Isabelle Blanchard had ever been here, she had left no more traces of herself than Newman Liptrott had.

  Yet the nasty premonition persisted, and when they came to the firmly closed door of the other small bedroom – it could be no more than a box-room as it was partly over the stairs – the feeling intensified. Houses like these didn’t aspire to have locks on their inside doors, the other bedroom didn’t have one, and neither did this. But nothing came of it when Gilmour tried the knob and, even when he leaned on it, the door refused to budge. He put his eye to the keyhole. He could see nothing. He rattled the knob and shouted. There was no response.

  The door itself looked flimsy enough. ‘Go on then, Gravy.’

  The hefty DC gave it a summing up, grinned, then stepped back the few paces the tiny landing allowed, charged forward and put his shoulder to the door. It gave way with a tremendous crash as the chest of drawers which had been pushed against it was overturned, and Gravy was catapulted into the room under the terrified gaze of a woman sitting on the edge of the bed.

  The downstairs parlour seemed too full, what with three large policemen – Gilmour, Gargrave and now Reardon – as well as the weeping woman now hunched up in a chair. When she stood, she was almost as tall as any of the men in the room.

  It must be hard for a woman to be so woefully plain, Reardon couldn’t help thinking. On the other hand, she wasn’t helping herself with the heavy, horn-rimmed glasses, centre-parted hair and earphone plaits, none of which enhanced a long, thin face. Wearing, what was more, frumpy clothes that even he could see were years out of fashion, as was that hairstyle, one most modern young women wouldn’t be seen dead with. Yet when she took her glasses off to wipe away the tears – which she had to do every minute or so – her eyes were large and slate grey and, he thought, intelligent.

  At present she was hunched on one of the hard-stuffed plush chairs, a sodden hankie clutched in her fist. She looked as though she might never stop crying.

  ‘Are you – you’re not going to arrest me, are you?’ she asked tremulously.

  ‘I don’t think so, Miss Catherall. Not yet, not unless what you have to tell me says you’ve done something wrong.’ Something about this woman bade him speak gently, as if to a child.

  ‘I haven’t! I swear I’ve done nothing wrong.’ Her voice rose, panic-stricken. The slow tears continued to trickle down from behind her glasses.

  ‘Who did you think it was downstairs, that made you barricade yourself in that bedroom?’

  ‘I thought it was … There was a man here, yesterday. I – I thought he’d come back.’

  At first he imagined she must mean Liptrott, then he remembered that Shefford had been there the previous day, or that was what he’d told Gilmour. In which case, he must have known Miss Catherall was there, but had chosen to say nothing about her, most probably having ordered her to leave, terrifying her so much in the process he had confidently expected she would be gone when he’d handed the front door key over to the police?

  ‘Take it easy,’ Reardon told the sobbing woman gently. ‘You don’t have to rush this. In fact, you don’t have to tell me anything at all just yet,’ he decided, resigning himself to the fact that a witness in this incoherent state wasn’t likely to be much use. ‘It’ll keep. We’ll find somewhere else for you to stay tonight and you’ll feel more up to it tomorrow.’

  ‘No, no, I won’t!’ she cried urgently. ‘Not until I’ve told you. But I …’ She looked nervously from one to the other of her audience and Reardon sensed it was the presence of so many of them that was bewildering, if not actually intimidating, her. How deeply she was implicated in all this, he didn’t yet have any idea, though he suspected it might be less than she herself imagined, given her overreaction to the possibility of being arrested. He somehow didn’t see her playing a major part. She appeared altogether too timid, and though guilt at something or other hung over her like a pall, he was prepared to go easy on her. Not, however, to the extent of letting her get away with anything.

  ‘All right.’ He inclined his head to Gilmour, who took the point. Happy to leave Reardon to it, he at once made a move to the door, nudging Gargrave along with him.

  When he heard the outer door close behind them Reardon said, ‘Well now, maybe a good place to start, Miss Catherall, would be by explaining to me how you came to be living here, and how you know Newman Liptrott?’

  ‘Nol, you mean?’ Her face closed. So the improbable nickname did belong to Liptrott. ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘And I want to hear the whole of it, but there’s no rush. Take your time; I’m not anxious to leave before I’ve heard what you have to say.’

  They sat facing, on those unforgiving chairs, one each side of a cheerless grate filled with yellowing, almost crumbling newspaper, pitted with spots of soot the rain had brought down. She was sitting with her shoulders hunched, arms across her chest and her feet splayed, pigeon-toed, an awkward, graceless and curiously immature pose.

  ‘I don’t know him,’ she said after several minutes. ‘Not what you’d call know. In fact, the first time I ever saw him was a few months ago, when he came to see me at … where I was living at the time.’

  ‘In Moseley, with Mrs Cooper.’

  Her eyes widened, but she didn’t ask how he knew that. ‘I suppose she’s told you all about me?’

  All Mrs Cooper had known, which hadn’t been enough, he thought. He said, ‘She’s been very worried about you, not hearing anything, you know.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that. She’s nice, her husband too, but I had no choice. Oh, it’s all such a mess, I don’t know where to begin.’ Her eyes filled with tears again.

  He wondered if she knew just how much of a mess. ‘How about starting from how you came to be living there, in Moseley?’ he tried again, patiently.

  ‘I came to see England. I’m half French. My mother was French, but my father was English, and the stories he told me about this country made me want to see it. I’d lived in France all my life, and he always said I must visit here one day – that I should be missing out if I didn’t, but somehow he never wanted to come back himself. He was trained as a historian and he was writing a book about Napoleon, you see, so his work was centred there. But after he died and I was left alone, I plucked up courage and came.’

  She made it sound as though crossing the Channel on her own, and taking a train to Birmingham, was akin to undertaking a lone expedition to the Antarctic.

  ‘Why pick Birmingham?’ One has no great hopes of Birmingham. Perhaps Jane Austen’s Emma might have had a point. The Second City, that great hub of industry in the smoky Midlands, was not the obvious place of choice for visiting tourists.

  ‘Oh, Father was born in Edgbaston, though he never left France after he married my mother, and was quite content to stay in France, even before she became an invalid and died, when I was young. But I’d always wanted to see w
here he’d come from and, when I did come eventually, I just stayed. I like England. Or I did until, until …’ She couldn’t go on.

  Until she had heard about Isabelle Blanchard’s death? When they first began to speak, he had told her why they were here and that it was in connection with her murder, but of course she had known. It had been no news to her.

  ‘How did you get yourself mixed up in all this, with Liptrott?’ he asked again, in an effort to get her back on track and prevent more tears.

  ‘It was Isabelle,’ she managed at last. ‘I was all set to start teaching at Maxstead, so happy about it after all the time I’d spent working at that awful picture house – and then, and then … Oh, maybe if I hadn’t done as she wanted, it would be me who was dead! I wish it was,’ she finished with something like a wail. And more tears.

  Well, they were real enough, but who were they for, Isabelle or herself? He would have put her in her mid-thirties, yet here she was, a grown woman sounding more juvenile than the adolescent schoolgirls he’d recently been talking to. Or was the display of ingenuousness, as well as the emotion, overdone? He wasn’t sure. His initial impression of her was fading fast and he was beginning to think Phoebe Catherall maybe wasn’t the sharpest pin in the pincushion. He could see, despite what he’d said, that it was going to take more time than he wanted to spend in getting to the nub of the question if he allowed her to tell the story in her own way.

  ‘So tell me how you came to get that teaching position at Maxstead.’

  ‘Well, Edith knew I was bilingual because of my father and mother. So when she told me about Maxstead and needing someone to teach French, I asked if I could have the job. I’m not a qualified teacher, but she was delighted, and told me I didn’t need qualifications.’

  Hold it. This was now going too fast. ‘You knew Edith Hillyard before you began to teach at her school?

  ‘Oh, yes, we’ve known each other for years. We met in France during the war, when she and her friend Eve were ambulance drivers, working from the British military hospital near Boulogne, where I lived. I never could imagine how she, how anyone could bring themselves to do that. Some of those poor men had the most horrific wounds and she had to help lift them into her ambulance, you cannot believe …’