A Dangerous Deceit Read online

  ‘Yes.’

  It appeared that Felix had agreed to Vinnie Henderson’s suggestion of a walk as far as The Beacon. It was well worth the effort to walk up the long hill, beyond the cemetery and where Emscott’s houses left off and the road gave way to a mere track across several miles of undulating land. The view on the other side was stunning: a panorama of pretty villages such as Maxstead, its forest and its big house, scattered farms and the land gradually increasing in height towards the distant Beacon, where fires had been lit since time immemorial, whether to warn of danger, as in the panic of the threatened Spanish Armada invasion, or to celebrate, in more recent times, the end of the Great War and the signing of the Armistice.

  Felix had warned Vinnie it was a twelve-mile tramp there and back, but she hadn’t wanted to waste her day off from the job she had as secretary to the headmaster at the King’s School. She’d arrived after breakfast, pulled stout boots on to her rather large feet, laughed as if twelve miles was nothing, which no doubt it wasn’t to her, and strode out after him, an Amazon goddess with corn-coloured hair and eyes almost as blue as Felix’s own.

  ‘It’s a long walk but she wanted to see the view.’

  ‘My, he must be smitten if he’s taken time off from revolutionary duties merely for that.’

  Kay had always had a big-sisterly affection for both her younger cousins, a sense of responsibility, but she didn’t trouble to conceal her scorn at Felix making so much of those left-wingers he kept company with, feeling they went too far and that they would sooner or later draw him too deep into their would-be revolutionary plots. Socialist principles were all very well – she leaned to the left herself and passionately believed that the working classes she mostly worked amongst deserved better lives – but this group of his was pathetic. They had half-baked plans about overthrowing the government, put out seditious literature and encouraged strikes among the workers. In fact, they were very much on the periphery of the present struggle going on between the workers’ unions and the government. Though goodness knows the plight of many workers, especially that of the miners, was appalling enough – even worse after the debacle of the General Strike last year, a nine-day wonder which in the end had solved nothing. The country, retorted Felix, was in a financial mess, the working man was suffering more than ever and the government seemed powerless – or unwilling – to do anything about it. Should the rest just stand by?

  ‘Smitten? With Vinnie?’ Margaret was saying. ‘Well, yes, that’s fairly obvious, and would it be a bad thing?’ A jolly, breezy girl whom Felix had met at the tennis club, he had very soon introduced her to his family in a way that had left no doubt that he was serious about her. Margaret liked her and thought she was good for Felix, challenging some of his more outrageous opinions with a good-humoured laugh and offering a sturdy common sense that didn’t seem to have been given to Felix. She liked the idea of her brother and Vinnie together. And she hadn’t lost sight of the fact that if Felix was to marry her and bring her to live here at Alma House, it would solve a lot of problems when she herself was married.

  On the contrary, Kay answered, she thought Vinnie would be a very good thing. ‘And how much better than Judy Cash!’

  Margaret smiled, but she did not want to think about Judy Cash. Quite violently, she did not want to think of Judy Cash – and Felix – in the same breath.

  Good relations restored, they were still smiling when they reached the house where Maisie, who had just put the telephone back on its rest, announced there had been a message for Dr Dysart from the surgery.

  ‘There’s been an accident. Henrietta Street.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. Aston’s Engineering again?’ Kay rolled her eyes.

  ‘I’m afraid so. They said Dr Rowlands wasn’t available – he’d just left to attend an emergency up at the hospital.’

  Kay was in partnership with William Rowlands, an elderly doctor who, despite his age, did not have the prejudices that many of his contemporaries still had – not to mention a large proportion of their male patients – regarding lady doctors working in general practice. She sighed, wishing the calls had been received in reverse order; she would much rather the hospital emergency had fallen to her.

  ‘OK, I’m on my way.’ She was already half out of the door, clutching the doctor’s bag that went everywhere with her.

  As her Baby Austin chugged the familiar route towards Arms Green, the less salubrious part of Folbury, Kay’s thoughts wandered back to the exchange with Margaret. Her well-meant intervention had emerged more like interference, and perhaps that was what it was. You couldn’t just barge into people’s private feelings and expect to be greeted with delight, especially with Margaret, who was too independent to take advice easily. But it had cleared the air. After all, Margaret was grown up, and had gone into this engagement with her eyes open.

  And she hadn’t exactly condemned herself to poverty by marrying a hard-up clergyman – or in fact one who in any way conformed to the usual, preconceived idea of what the clergy were. In fact, it seemed a point of honour with Symon not to appear weedy, ineffectual, effete, or any other of the misconceived adjectives applied to curates. He was vigorous and determined – he could beat Kay at tennis any day, in fact frequently did – he was very competitive and liked to win. She understood this all too well.

  From what she had gathered he worked exceedingly hard in the parish. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, but people had, after their initial caution, come to like him and respect his honesty. He’d no ‘side’ to him, despite his background. In fact, he’d fitted surprisingly well into a working-class parish, placed here with the best of intentions, no doubt, to learn about how the other half lives. She suspected his sights had initially been set higher, and almost certainly still were, and who could blame him? Ordination as a priest didn’t preclude ambition – or did it?

  Kay might not know much about the priesthood, but she knew all about ambition. She had known that she wanted to be a doctor from the age of twelve, and had been aided and abetted in achieving this by darling Aunt Deb, who had loved and looked after her when she’d been left an orphan as a young child. Margaret, on the other hand, had never settled on a career, which had at one time exasperated Kay, who thought women, especially competent women like Margaret, had a duty to make the most of the opportunities now open to them. But Margaret had seemed perfectly content to forgo a career in order to look after her father, who had become increasingly dependent on her as he grew more frail. She might have been doomed to join the legion of spinsters left adrift because of the war, which had taken a generation of young men into its maw, had she not met Symon. And no doubt about it, she would make a splendid wife for an ambitious cleric, and a wonderful mother to his children. Yet Kay wondered if Margaret had seriously taken into account the other side of the coin – being the daughter-in-law of the formidable Lady Maude, despite the airy dismissal of any pitfalls.

  She pulled her thoughts back to the present as she reached Arms Green, a far cry from the attractive town centre, and no longer green. This was Folbury’s other face – clamorous, unlovely, a hugger-mugger of industrial and domestic premises, factories and workshops jammed between houses and corner shops, wherever space could be found. Here on Henrietta Street, a row of two-bedroomed Victorian terraced houses faced a large motor repair garage that constantly belched out fumes, set between a small nail-making shop at one end and Aston’s two workshops at the other. For the moment everywhere was quiet on the street. No neighbours gossiped on doorsteps, no little girls played on hopscotch squares chalked on to the pavement, and no boys kicked a football in the road. At this time of day, the mothers would be getting the midday dinner and the children would still be penned up inside the gloomy brick-built edifice of Arms Green Mixed Junior and Infants, which loomed up behind Henrietta Street.

  The only activity was centred on a towed motor van that was blocking the road as it was being manoeuvred into the repair garage, while a horse and cart, laden with coal sac
ks, waited to pass. Kay left her car where it was and made her way on foot to the place where she was headed, right at the far end.

  Just her luck to be called out to Aston’s again! As a small engineering workshop, Aston Engineering employed no more than a dozen or so workers. But no less than its two-man foundry next door – where its products were cast, where the heat was sometimes almost insupportable and the smallest drop of molten metal could burn through to the bone – the machine shop, with work that involved the drilling, machining and finishing of the rough metal castings, was also fraught with potential danger. Flying bits of metal, splinters in the hands or even the eye were commonplace, and familiarity caused carelessness or inattention, but as elsewhere, faulty machines were often to blame, too. Which would it be this time? Kay wondered. Arthur Aston cut corners and maintenance was not all it should be. She had crossed swords with him more than once over this and was not going to let him get away with it much longer.

  Was she in danger of letting her dislike of the man get the better of her? she asked herself as she approached the premises. Quite possibly, she admitted grimly, but that wouldn’t stop her.

  ‘Well, Stanley, what is it now?’ she asked briskly, pushing open the small door set into the large double ones that opened for loading and unloading. Her nose was immediately assailed by the usual metallic taint in the air, the acrid smell of machine oil, but at the same time she became aware of an unnatural silence. None of the machines was in operation, and the only man visible was the normally unflappable foreman, who now looked extremely agitated.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Stanley stubbed his Woodbine out on the floor and shoved his hands into the pockets of his brown smock. ‘We’ve sent everybody home. You’d best talk to Eileen, I reckon. She’s in the office.’ He jerked his head towards the ten-foot square, glassed-in cubicle built into a corner of the shop floor.

  Eileen Gerrity, known to all simply as Eileen, the middle-aged woman who ran the office and knew everything there was to know about what went on at Aston’s, sat at one of the two desks which, with a big cupboard, a safe and a small table bearing an ancient Remington, a telephone and a spare chair, comprised the only furniture. She was a bossy redhead with a loud voice and a slash of scarlet lipstick, but today her shoulders slumped, her eyes were red-rimmed and her lipstick was smudged. She was smoking furiously and the pint mug of tea in front of her had grown a milky skin on top.

  ‘It’s Arthur,’ she said. ‘He’s dead.’

  Utterly taken aback, Kay repeated, ‘Dead? Mr Aston? Eileen, are you sure?’ Stupidly, she looked around, half-expecting to see Arthur Aston prone on the brown lino. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Next door, and of course I’m sure.’ Her voice shook. ‘I reckon he’s had a stroke. Always had that look, didn’t he?’

  Kay pictured his face, red above a tight collar, redder as he grew older and stouter. Perhaps …

  ‘Next door – in the foundry?’ Kay asked. Eileen nodded. ‘You’d better come with me then.’

  ‘Ask Stanley, I don’t think I can – not again.’ Her face had grown slack. What remained of her lipstick looked like a wound against her pallor. Kay gave her a clinical glance but she didn’t appear to be about to pass out. Kay recalled the rumours she’d heard about Aston and the woman who’d worked for him ever since he’d set up his business. She closed the office door behind her and went to ask Stanley to let her into the foundry.

  Corporal Arthur Aston had been Osbert Rees-Talbot’s batman during the Boer War. Though born and raised in Wolverhampton, when he had served his time and left the army he had appeared in Folbury and presented himself to his former officer, reminding him of what they’d gone through together. ‘Never had a better gentleman than you, sir,’ he said, and went on to announce that he had saved a bit of money during his years in the army – never having been a drinking man, and not married, like – and was looking for some little business in which he could set himself up, preferably in Folbury. Eventually, he found a modest machine shop, given over to the production of small valves, with an adjacent foundry, a set-up not dissimilar to the one Huw Rees-Talbot had started all those years ago. He had been apprenticed to the trade before joining the army and so had a basic knowledge, and he confidently asserted that he only needed an experienced foreman, some skilled workmen and a little more capital to be off to a running start.

  Osbert shook his head, but lent him the money he needed and, contrary to expectations, the firm did prosper, not unhelped by the war, when his ‘war effort’ had consisted of contributing to the constant supply of engineering components needed to support the fighting forces. The profits of Aston Engineering shot up, and had so far enabled the firm to ride the growing economic slump.

  After so long in Folbury, Aston had dug himself into the business community, married and bought himself a house off Emscott Hill. There were no children of the marriage and he had continued to be a fairly regular, though not popular, caller at Alma House. Felix damned him as a profiteering capitalist, while Margaret confessed she hated the freckles on his pale soft hands, his heavy, jowly face with its pendulous lower lip and his colourless eyelashes, and couldn’t for the life of her see why the fact that they had once served together in South Africa should make her not-easily-persuadable father able to tolerate him. Maisie Henshall, who had worked as maid-of-all-work for his wispy little wife when she had first left school, would open the door of Alma House to him with tightened lips: that previous acquaintance hadn’t endeared the man to her.

  Popular or not, it seemed Arthur Aston would no longer be a bother to anyone.

  The same eerie silence hung in the little foundry as in the machine shop. The coal-fired furnace, whose heat usually hit you in the face, was unlit and cold, and the dark gloom of the cavernous space had taken on a creeping chill. Aston lay on his back in front of a bin of foundry sand, a gash on his temple and sand all over his face.

  ‘It was me as found him,’ Stanley said, looking distinctly green. ‘The furnace hasn’t been fired up for two days so the lads haven’t been coming in – we’ve a stockpile of castings and not enough orders to justify making more just now, see. Short time, like everybody else. The gaffer was sure it’d come all right, though.’ He looked sicker than ever, obviously struck by the fact that it was highly probable it was not going to come all right now, that he and Aston’s other employees looked fair to be joining the thousands already in the dole queues. ‘Any road, about a half hour ago, I had to come round here to check …’ He waved in a vague direction towards the organized chaos of moulding boxes, wooden patterns, rough castings and other foundry impedimenta as if he couldn’t remember what it was he had come in for. ‘Well, that don’t matter now. Got the shock of me life when I unlocked the door and found him lying there. I didn’t even know he’d arrived.’

  ‘He was just like this?’

  ‘Not exactly. He’d fallen face down into the bin.’ He indicated the big bin of damp-looking sand into which wooden patterns for the castings were pressed to make a mould for the hot metal, in front of which Aston’s body lay. ‘I thought, bloody hell, and first thing I did, I turned him over and shook him a bit to see if he was all right, but it was no good, he was gone.’

  Although head wounds bled copiously, there was no blood to be seen from the wound on the side of his head, though it would admittedly have been difficult to discern any in such a place, when grime and dust from the coal that fired the furnace was thick over everything.

  ‘Well, let’s have a better look at him.’

  ‘Half a mo, Doctor.’ Stanley glanced at the light coat she’d slipped on over the tennis dress she hadn’t had time to change. ‘You’ll want summat to kneel on.’

  He disappeared, and while he was gone Kay looked down at Aston. He was dressed with his usual military precision, in a smart grey business suit, perfectly laundered white shirt with a stiff collar, and a discreetly patterned tie. His shoes shone with spit and polish. His bowler hat had fallen
off and rolled some distance. His fist was clenched around a pencil with a broken point and a small, thick ledger with dirty pages was lying open on the floor. He appeared to have fallen on to the brick floor with only his upper half in the bin. Nevertheless, he was a heavy man and the dent in the dense, damp sand where his head and shoulders had landed was considerable.

  Stanley was back a moment later with some folded newspapers which he placed on the filthy floor.

  Thanking him, Kay knelt, and with cotton wool and a square of gauze began carefully wiping away the sand which had collected around the dead man’s light eyelashes, eyes, his thick, nearly white eyebrows, his nostrils and the heavy, slack mouth. Though the dead could feel no pain – and she had not liked Aston – she worked gently, with respect as well as by ingrained habit. She noted the marks round his mouth and his bloodshot eyes, and eased down the lower lids with her finger. She decided the gash on his temple didn’t look either serious or new. There were no other abrasions or contusions on his nearly bald head. Finally, having completed her examination, she stood up. ‘This will have to be reported to the coroner.’

  Stanley was a small man with greasy hair and a habit of adjusting his glasses by scrunching up his face. They stayed slipped down his nose now, unheeded, while his eyes bulged. ‘Coroner? How’s that?’

  ‘I can’t sign the death certificate without being sure how he died, and that’s not immediately obvious. He’ll probably order a post-mortem.’

  ‘Eileen thinks he had a stroke and fell against the side of the bin.’

  ‘Well, it’s just possible,’ Kay said drily, ‘that for once Eileen might be wrong.’