Broken Music Page 21

  ‘Stone, maybe, but wood? Unlikely.’ He shook his head. ‘No fragments or wood splinters in the wound. No evidence of a struggle, either, so the end must have been quick. But close contact like that, you should be looking for a good deal of blood on her assailant. These scalp wounds, they bleed a lot. And sorry,’ he finished, anxious to be off, ‘that’s the best I can do. I’ll leave the rest to you.’

  ‘What about other possibilities? Other than anyone known to her, I mean,’ Kelly asked when he’d gone, rubbing the side of his nose. ‘It was a lonely spot. And there are enough tramps, homeless, workless around nowadays, God help ’em, who might have attacked her for what they might get – just for the contents of her handbag, say.’

  ‘She was still wearing her jewellery, and she didn’t have a handbag with her. But she was on her way to visit Naylor, so I don’t suppose she needed one,’ Reardon answered slowly, his mind on something else. Kelly was right, of course, about the growing number of itinerants, that band of bitter and disillusioned ex-servicemen forced on to the roads by the impossibility of finding any sort of employment. But there were other types of itinerants…

  ‘Women carry handbags whether they need them or not, ask my wife,’ Kelly was remarking dryly. He looked very sharply at Reardon. ‘There’s something else?’

  With some reluctance, Reardon told him about the Boswell tribe and their encampment in the village, and felt Kelly’s ears prick up as he added, ‘…the same family who’ve been coming back to Broughton for years, except for the war.’

  He had no wish to involve the Boswells again, he thought as he watched Kelly add to his notes, but he knew there was no possible way they could be left out of the questioning that the whole village would be subjected to, until Edith Huckaby’s killer was found.

  The meeting with Kelly over, he was once more on his bike, heading back to Broughton. Blow this for a game of marbles, he thought, but at least henceforth he would be staying at the Greville Arms. And since Kelly had seemed satisfied with how things were going so far, he hoped it meant that he would allow him to have his head without keeping such a tight rein in future.

  The police were still questioning the hospital staff about the murder but hadn’t yet asked for Nella, and as soon as she had the chance, she escaped for a while across the garden to the old summerhouse, the only place she imagined no one was likely to find her. It was known to everyone as the summerhouse, though it was really not much more than a wooden shed with a shingled roof which had always been devoted to the children’s use, built beyond the tennis court by the big cedar in the corner before the wild garden began, a little hidden place shaded by trees, where the ground rose in a slight slope above a small, deep, reed-fringed pond.

  She hadn’t visited it since before the war. Was it possible, she wondered, ducking under the low branches of the dripping trees, that they had grown so much since she was last here? The shade was deeper, the silence more intense as she approached. How gloomy it was, though it had never seemed so before. Or was that only because it wasn’t now seen from the perspective of childhood, when this corner had seemed deliciously secret and hidden? Certainly the only colour now was the greenish yellow of the emerging daffodils under the beeches, and a smoulder of purple showing here and there between them where the prima donna chequered fritillaries had condescended this year to put in an appearance. Among the reeds fringing the pool’s edges, the yellow flags had spread to take up most of what had only been a small pool in the first place, and were already showing dozens of fat buds among the long spears of their leaves. Fish had once swum there, but the predatory heron which was always on the lookout had no doubt long since despatched them all.

  The door wasn’t locked. Inside was the same old clutter of cricket bats and warped tennis racquets, sundry odd chairs and a wooden table. The air was dry and dusty, the windows had spandrels of spiders’ webs in the corners, the sills were littered with dead lacewings and the corpses of wasps. It smelt of dry wood and the resiny scent of the old cedar whose branches overhung the roof; a smell redolent of all those childhood afternoons passed here, playing games on wet days, with the rain pattering on the shingles.

  The old wind-up gramophone still sat on the floor in the corner. Gently, she rubbed the dust off the name painted on the lid in schoolboy characters: GCR Foley. Grev, who’d had it at school with him. Who had soon, in France, been listening to a very different kind of music. Infinite sadness touched her, and despite the dry warmth of the summer house, she shivered.

  It seemed her flight across the lawn had not been unobserved, after all. The door opened and the scarfaced man Reardon stood there, one foot in the doorway. ‘Inspector Reardon,’ he said, in case she needed reminding. Inspector now – so he had, after all, gone back into the police. ‘I don’t wish to intrude, but I did wish to see you before you went home, Miss Wentworth.’

  She looked at him warily, then sat down on the nearest chair and gestured to another. The ancient cushions on the seat gave off puffs of dust as they sat. After being told that she had last seen Edith several days ago, and ascertaining that she had been at home with all her family the previous evening, he said, unexpectedly, ‘I’m sorry, this business must have brought it all back to you, about your sister.’ She simply nodded. ‘Did you know her well?’

  ‘Who, Edith? Hardly at all, really.’

  ‘I’m told your sister knew her better?’

  She looked startled. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to have been a secret that they had interests in common.’

  ‘Reading, you mean? Yes, there was that. But nothing else.’

  ‘How did you find Miss Huckaby? As a person, I mean?’

  She tried to keep her voice even. ‘I’m sorry she’s dead but…to be honest, no, I didn’t care for her much. She was sly. She listened to private conversations and then repeated them. That was the only reason she made herself friendly with Marianne, I’m sure – to find out anything she could. Marianne was naive enough to believe it was all because of those books.’

  ‘Do you have any evidence for this?’

  She looked at him steadily, wondering if she could trust him, for such a long time that he must think she wasn’t going to respond at all. Then she took a deep breath and said, ‘Only my sister’s notebooks. We thought they were lost but they’ve…turned up, after all this time. Only last night, in fact. She never allowed anyone to see what she’d written and she’d hidden them, though it seems…well, it appears she let Edith read her notebooks.’

  Another long drawn-out silence followed, broken only by the soft scratch and patter of a bird’s feet on the shingled roof. Eventually, she said, ‘Well, anyway, that’s beside the point. It’s Edith you want to talk about now, isn’t it, not Marianne?’

  ‘Miss Wentworth,’ he said gently, ‘maybe this is as much about your sister as Edith Huckaby. I suspect there was something in those notebooks you think you ought to tell me about, was there not? Otherwise you wouldn’t have mentioned them.’

  She looked down at her shoes, the sensible black shoes she was forced to wear day after day, and after a moment or two, she said, ‘She wanted to be a writer, you know…Marianne, I mean. She wrote down everything in those exercise books – ideas for stories as well as completed stories, descriptions of people and the things she knew about them, sometimes not very complimentary. Secrets, sometimes, I’m afraid. She wouldn’t let anyone see them, but last night I sat up reading right through them…she can’t mind now. Most of the stories were, well, embroideries, though sometimes not.’

  ‘Isn’t all fiction a form of embroidery?’

  ‘Lies, you mean?’ She managed a pale smile. ‘I meant embroideries on real life. She would, you know, take something that had actually happened, or was happening, and write it down as though it was fiction. I recognised all sorts of situations, people too. She was careless about disguising names, and sometimes she didn’t even bother. I suppose you’d call them diaries as much as notebook
s.’

  ‘So what was it you learnt from them?’

  ‘Nothing that I didn’t…suspect…before.’

  She was starting to regret that she had begun this conversation, but now that she had, she saw there was no alternative but to go on, and maybe he was right, perhaps confronting the past was the only way to deal with the present. ‘We were very close, and I loved her so much, but she was a funny mixture, Marianne. She was hopelessly dreamy, but at the same time she was very determined, and she always had a streak of practicality…shrewdness, I suppose.’ She swallowed. ‘Well…a few months before she died, she had…a proposal.’

  ‘Of marriage? From Greville Foley?’

  She looked at him sharply. How could he possibly know about Grev? ‘No. It was from a man called Gervase Hatherley.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He lives not far away, the other side of the Hill. He’s rather rich, and as a family, we’ve never had much money, I’m afraid, so it would have been a good match from that point of view. But she refused him. He’s quite a bit older, and to be truthful not exactly anyone’s idea of a romantic hero, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I’m sorry to say she let him think she might change her mind and say yes. I knew there was simply no chance of that, but when I said it was too bad of her to let him think there was, she told me not to be too sure she wouldn’t decide to accept him after all. I-I felt as though I was talking to a stranger. That was bad enough, but I had no idea, until I read the notebooks, that she’d actually been meeting him in secret – at least, once or twice she had.’ Her voice choked with the misery of the horrible conclusions the thought led to…

  He said gently, ‘Your sister was…innocent.’

  She was grateful for his quick understanding, and suddenly found herself liking this man, respecting the integrity which had propelled him to come here and pursue the truth about Marianne dying, in the first place. And he had found it. Before he left the village, he had made a point of coming to the rectory and telling them how Danny Boswell had seen Marianne fall – fall, not jump – into the lake, and the weight of four years’ wondering if she just might have committed suicide had been lifted from all of their shoulders. Suddenly, it seemed easier to talk to him. ‘All this makes her sound very foolish, but I think it just filled the need for some sort of drama. You can’t think how dull our lives were before the war. And I suppose he agreed to the secrecy because…well, I think he would have done anything to get her to marry him, and the idea must have touched his vanity as well. But Gervase Hatherley is a very proper man, and wouldn’t abide being made to look a fool if it had come out.’

  ‘A fool, or worse? Putting her in a compromising situation like that? Meeting her in such a secluded spot, a young girl, unchaperoned?’

  ‘I…suppose so.’

  ‘Do you think Miss Huckaby got to know of their meetings?’

  ‘I don’t know whether she did or not, but in view of what other things Marianne told her, it’s possible, isn’t it?’ Despite herself, she could not keep a trace of bitterness from her voice. It was painful to know that Marianne had confided things to Edith Huckaby that she had kept from her own sister.

  ‘Are you suggesting that she went out to meet Hatherley the night she died – and perhaps Edith Huckaby knew about it, and has held it over Hatherley ever since, until he finally snapped and killed her?’

  ‘That would be nearly as fanciful as Marianne’s stories, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yet you’ve always wondered if he had something to do with your sister’s death, haven’t you?’ he hazarded.

  ‘Have I? I don’t know! I was very cross with her about keeping him dangling, like that, but I never even dreamt she’d be so silly as to meet him secretly. Until last night, that is, when I read those notebooks.’

  ‘I can see how difficult you would find that to believe.’

  That, too, hurt. But she had to say, honestly, ‘No. No. Of course it was a shock to find out what had been going on, but I don’t, not really, at the bottom of me, find it so difficult to believe. You never knew Marianne. She sometimes lived in another world. But I wish there had been something more in those books. The last entry I read ended right at the end of the last page and was written two days before she died. She never missed a day writing in those books. One of them must still be missing.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The gamekeeper’s cottage stood alone on the edge of the woods, a one-storey brick-built house with a pump, a rainwater butt, an outside privy and a picket fence surrounding a garden of sorts, which Ben Naylor didn’t have much patience in maintaining. A few sunflowers and etiolated Michaelmas daisies, plus a few rampant herbs, defied the weeds and came up every year, progeny of the ones his wife, Mary, had planted in an attempt to brighten the place up the first year she and Ben had married, just after his old dad had died. Apart from that there was nothing but a grey old apple tree, with one great leaning limb propped up, and a poultry run surrounded by stout wire netting. It was enough for Ben. That was how he liked to live, surrounded by silence, and the noises of the woods, and the animals who, like him, made their home there.

  He opened his door to another bright morning and immediately his eyes lit on the ground outside the hen run. A fox, dammit, had had another one of the chickens in the night. Decapitated it, then left it where it was, adding insult to injury. Looking with rage at the carnage of blood and feathers, he swore again at the senseless waste. He counted the rest of the chickens, one gone and the one left dead, then put Fern’s food bowl and her water dish outside her kennel before leaving her chained up while he disposed of the mangled corpse – he knew he should have left the bitch outside last night, but she’d been better company than his thoughts – and went to investigate how the fox had managed to get in. With the cessation of hunting over the last years, the vermin had increased. Stop one earth up and there were twenty more.

  He turned to go back indoors and saw two men walking up the path from the village, one of them the policeman he’d met before and an older, bigger man. The inspector’s scars were obviously due to the war which Ben had been too old to fight in; when he saw men like that, he knew now how lucky he was to have escaped. Too old, and needed here anyway, to shoulder the management of what was left of the estate, as well as covering his own duties. It hadn’t been easy, just himself and old Scuddy Thomas, but he’d done what he could. If Lady Sybil started up the shoots again, which Ben was confident she would, he was determined there would be some good sport, eventually as good as in the old earl’s day.

  Reardon saw the gamekeeper waiting for them, arms akimbo, as he and Wheelan approached. His glance skirted queasily past the array of foxes’ brushes, decaying grey squirrels, magpies and rooks nailed to the fence, like heads on turnpikes, presumably pour encourager les autres. He introduced Wheelan. Ben nodded. ‘Didn’t expect you chaps to be about so bright and early.’

  ‘Best part of the day, first thing in the morning,’ the sergeant replied heartily.

  ‘Pot of tea on the go, want some?’

  Reardon accepted the offer. ‘Wouldn’t say no, while we have a word or two.’ They followed the gamekeeper inside. The living room was low-ceilinged, dark and sparsely furnished, with heavy old furniture and a bare brick floor on which a rag rug offered scant comfort, though it was warm enough from the stove, where a fire glowed through the open doors to give some illusion of homeliness. A harmonium stood in one corner, with an open book of Moody and Sankey’s Gospel hymns on the music rest. On a bench under the small window were piled onions, carrots and potatoes, some raw meat and what might have been the skin of a rabbit or a hare, all sitting alongside a big, black pot, soot-encrusted from the fire. Reardon found himself in some sympathy with the desire that the fastidious Edith Huckaby – she of the aspirational nature and the pretty clothes – had expressed for a different life, should she have hitched herself to Ben Naylor, who appeared as deeply entrenched here as one of the centuries-old oaks growing outsid
e in the wood, his roots as deep into the earth as theirs.

  They addressed themselves to the mugs of thick, stewed, heavily sugared tea they were given from the big teapot keeping hot on the hob, minor pleasantries being exchanged while Naylor tidied away the remains of his breakfast from the bare, scrubbed table.

  ‘Nice job you’ve got here,’ Reardon remarked when the gamekeeper pulled out a stool and joined them. ‘Pretty much your own master, I reckon?’

  ‘Lady Sybil lets me get on with it. She knows me well enough to know I wouldn’t let her down.’

  ‘You’ve worked for the estate a long time?’

  ‘Soon as I were old enough to work at all. Started with my father.’

  ‘So you know her well?’

  ‘None better. We grew up together, so to speak. No airs and graces when she were a girl – and none now, come to that. I’ve no grumbles about working for her. Born here in this cottage and I hope to die in it.’

  ‘What did Miss Huckaby think to that?’ Wheelan asked.

  ‘As I told the inspector here yesterday, not much. We could’ve been married and stayed quite content here, only that wasn’t what she wanted. I could understand, mind,’ he added fairly, ‘she’d grown used to fine ways and this would’ve been a comedown.’

  Reardon recalled the crucifix, the rosary. ‘And she was a Roman Catholic as well, wasn’t she?’

  Naylor raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘Well, she didn’t go to Mass, being as there’s no RC church near enough. But once a Catholic, always a Catholic, that’s what they say, don’t they? And I’m a Methodist, so you see how it was.’

  ‘You said she wanted you to leave Oaklands. Did you quarrel over it?’ Reardon asked.

  ‘I’m not a quarrelling man. There’s few things worth losing your temper over. Only gets you into trouble. I told her straight I wasn’t going, and that was that.’

  He was a difficult man to read, one who obviously kept a tight rein on his emotions. Obstinate as a mule, slow to anger, but maybe, like anger in many who kept their feelings bottled up, it could explode, given the right trigger to detonate it, Reardon thought once again. ‘The night before last, when she was killed. You’re sure you saw nobody that night?’