After Clare Read online

  Whether that was true or not, this un-English-looking detective inspector – he had given his name as Adam Novak, though he had a London accent – was now in charge and had asked to see them all; those who lived at Steadings as well as those here at Leysmorton. The only one missing was her father, who had already left for Clerkenwell before Novak arrived. So here they were, her mother and her grandfather, as well as herself and Lady Fitzallan, and of course Dirk and Marta – Dirk wearing those bottle-bottomed specs he was supposed to wear all the time, but didn’t. Because of course, looking like a goggle-eyed insect wouldn’t suit the handsome, romantic Dirk Stronglove image.

  He might have been forced to wear them today because he had one of his bad headaches. Marta, sitting on the edge of her seat as though she couldn’t wait to get back to her potions and jams, kept throwing anxious glances at him. She did this all the time nowadays, which Rosie thought must be very irritating. But then, most people found poor, well-meaning Marta Heeren irritating. Like now, when she had on a bilious green cardigan that she hugged around herself as though she was cold, on a day so hot even the breeze coming through the open French windows hardly made a stir of difference to the room’s stuffiness.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to come here all together,’ Novak had begun. ‘It will save time initially, though I may want to see you individually afterwards. I won’t keep you long.’

  And indeed, his questions were brisk and to the point. Perhaps he wanted to get it over with as much as they did. Firstly, Leysmorton House and its occupancy over the last few years. ‘I understand there have been quite a few changes, one way and another. You are the house’s owner, Lady Fitzallan?’

  ‘Yes, although I’ve lived abroad for many years.’

  ‘But as I understand it, the house hasn’t been left empty – it was always occupied during that time?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘We shall need details of anyone who has lived here.’

  ‘Which means me and my sister – for most of that time,’ Dirk put in impatiently. ‘We were brought up here, and my cousin – Lady Fitzallan – allowed us to stay on until we moved to London.’

  ‘It was then leased to a Mr and Mrs Beresford for a short time,’ Emily said, ‘while they looked around for a permanent home of their own, or so I believe. I can’t tell you anything more about them, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I got to know them a little while they lived here,’ Hugh offered. ‘Mrs Beresford had been recommended country air because she’d been very ill, with lung trouble. They weren’t here long, six months or so. Rupert – her husband – was a captain in the volunteer reserve and was called up. Tried to get exemption, because of his wife’s illness, but it didn’t wash. He was one of the first casualties, poor fellow. His wife gave up the lease immediately afterwards and left, and I’m afraid she too died shortly after.’

  ‘You didn’t decide to come back here to live when they left, Mr Heeren?’

  ‘Since I’d moved to London in the first place for convenience, there would have been no reason to return,’ Stronglove answered shortly. ‘In any case, by then I was in the army, too, and my sister was driving an ambulance.’ The spectacles he constantly fiddled with went on again. A nervous tic, or when the conversation became difficult? ‘By the way, I prefer to be known by the name I gave you, my professional name, Stronglove.’

  ‘As you wish – Mr Stronglove,’ Novak replied, after a slight pause. His own mixed Middle European and French ancestry, though by now far back enough to have been almost forgotten, made him well aware of this sensitivity about foreign names. It was not one he had much patience with. ‘So – after the departure of Mrs – er –’ He consulted his notes. ‘– of Mrs Beresford, the house was left unoccupied?’

  ‘No. It became a convalescent home. The number of casualties was making the need for hospital accommodation urgent and the army moved in immediately,’ Emily said. ‘I suppose I could find the exact dates, if you need them.’

  Novak waved a hand. ‘No need to trouble yourself. There’ll be official records.’ He paused. ‘Before we go any further, I think you should know the results of the initial examination the experts have carried out on the body. He appears to have been there for some time – we can’t be certain yet how long, but for the moment we’re going along with the probability of eight years or less.’

  ‘He?’ repeated Hugh.

  ‘Yes, Mr Markham. It was the body of a man.’ He turned to look at Lady Fitzallan as a small, almost imperceptible sound escaped her.

  Emily closed her eyes for a moment as the room swam. Well, said Clare’s voice mockingly in her head, you didn’t really think that skeleton was mine, did you?

  No, of course she hadn’t thought it was Clare. Or rather, she hadn’t allowed herself to think at all since that moment when Rosie had unearthed the skull. Her mind had been blank with shock and dread. Otherwise, she might indeed have had to admit the unthinkable . . . that the skeleton lying there might be Clare’s. And if so, that she had not suffered a natural death. Because what other reason could there have been for concealing a body under a pile of debris, and weighting it with bricks from the wall?

  But now . . .

  Now it seemed that dreadful thing had happened to some other person, some as yet unidentified man. Somewhere there would be a brother or sister, mother or father, someone who had loved him and would have to cope with the horror. But despite her pity for the suffering of this unknown person or persons, the knot of fear that had twisted itself up inside Emily ever since that macabre revelation began to unravel. Grief was still there, that raw pain which had never completely healed. But it was pain she had learned to live with for most of her life, alongside the unanswered question of how Clare could possibly have been so cruel as to condemn her family to a lifetime of wondering what had happened to cause her to disappear without trace.

  She raised her eyes and saw Hugh watching her. He gave her a small, reassuring nod. He alone knew what she had been afraid of, as none of the others could have known – unless Dirk and his sister, too, had heard and remembered that old family mystery. She thought this unlikely. No one spoke of Clare’s unhappy story, by now just another legend in Leysmorton’s long history.

  ‘Eight years, Inspector?’ Hugh said at last, breaking the silence that had fallen on them. ‘That seems surprisingly specific, especially in the circumstances.’

  ‘Takes us back to 1914. The beginning of the war,’ Novak added, in case anyone should be in any doubt about that. ‘Eight years – or less – was suggested as a working hypothesis because of the condition of the skeleton, but also because the victim seems to have been a soldier. Though of course there’s always the chance he was a regular, a peacetime soldier, and that he was there even before the war.’

  ‘A soldier?’ Marta repeated on a high note.

  ‘There are still traces of his uniform, and his army issue boots.’

  The little dog Mrs Markham was clutching under one arm gave a sharp yelp as, slipping her hand into her pocket, she squeezed him too hard. She brought out an enamelled cigarette case, which she fingered nervously but didn’t attempt to open, and Novak saw her glance resting on Stronglove. He sensed her resentment at being summoned here. She had so far said not a word.

  He watched the others. The girl, Rosie, was looking miserably at her feet, and her grandfather reached out and gently took her hand. Lady Fitzallan, who had lost colour for a moment or two after that little gasp, had regained it and was now sitting with her hands folded quietly on her lap. After the one exclamation, Marta Heeren had resumed the dull, dogged expression typical of a repressed spinster, he thought, surprised by a stab of pity.

  Novak had taken an instant dislike to Stronglove, sitting at ease in his chair, for no other reason than his arrogant profile and patronizing manner. And maybe the artlessly careless cravat tucked into the open shirt neck, the flannel bags, the knitted Fair Isle slipover. It was difficult to interpret what he might be thinking behind thos
e magnifying lenses, but Novak suspected he was the only one who had immediately taken in the precise import of the word ‘traces’, who had realized the improbability of either the leather boots or the skeleton being entirely complete, as over time the insects, beetles and maggots had done their work, and hungry foxes, rats and other predators had found their way to the corpse, leaving only what bones they had not been able to drag away, the heavy debris piled above it having protected the remains of the skeleton.

  At last Stronglove said, ‘He must have been one of the patients here. The hospital was a convalescent unit – mostly for nervous cases, men suffering from shell shock, that sort of thing, though I believe a few had physical injuries as well. Probably one of them wandered off and met with an accident.’

  ‘If that’s so, the hospital records and reports will tell. But I’ll say right away it’s unlikely. For one thing, if a patient went missing there would have been a thorough search; for another, the traces of uniform were khaki, not hospital blue, which doesn’t suggest he was a patient.’ He paused again, watching his audience for reactions. ‘Moreover, it was no accident. The pathologist reports that the back of his skull was caved in.’

  The Peke gave another spoiled little whimper as Stella Markham clutched him too hard. Into the silence that followed this remark she said sharply, ‘But it could still have been an accident, surely? Maybe he just fell onto those stones and hit his head—’

  ‘And then someone obligingly covered him up? No, Mrs Markham. He was covered up deliberately. Someone had good reason to hide the body.’

  She raised her eyebrows at the rebuke, cuddled Chu closer to her. She looked again at Stronglove and this time their eyes held, but after the merest nod he avoided her glance. ‘So, stating the obvious, someone killed him,’ he said. His jawline was tense. He massaged what seemed to be a knot of pain between his brows. ‘Then who was he? What was he doing here?’

  ‘A visitor for one of you who didn’t know you’d left Leysmorton House, maybe?’

  Marta, who had flushed to a dull, unbecoming red, spoke up sharply. ‘Are you suggesting that I or my brother had anything to do with killing this unknown soldier?’

  ‘Now why should I think anything of the sort, Miss Heeren? But the body being found in the garden of this house does indicate that he came here of his own accord, and was therefore unlikely to have been a stranger, so we have to ask why he was here. It’s not feasible to believe he could have been killed elsewhere and then brought here. There’d be a problem with that, wouldn’t there?’

  Novak’s men had had difficulty getting to the spot, the photographers with their cumbrous equipment – tripod cameras, magnesium flashes and whatever else they’d needed – trundling it across the garden, along that awkward little path through the copse and into the clearing. And when the body, although now nothing more than a heap of bones, had been loaded into a coffin shell and then onto a stretcher, a hefty constable had been needed at either end to manoeuvre it back to the waiting transport. The possibility of approaching the clearing from the other direction – via the lane from the village and then the stepping stones across the river, and next the meadow before you reached the breach in the wall – had been discounted from the start.

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ Hugh said thoughtfully, ‘there’s no easy access to that spot.’

  Lady Fitzallan asked, ‘Is there any way of finding out who he is – or was, this man?’

  ‘We hope to get an identification from regimental buttons and so on. We haven’t found his cap, though, or any badges.’ He gathered his papers. ‘I don’t think there’s much more I need to ask you at the moment, until we do get an identification. There will be an inquest, of course.’

  Stronglove said suddenly, ‘You’re wrong. About the body being here before the war, I mean. I can tell you it wasn’t there before I left. One of the last things I did before leaving was to go down to the village shop for cigarettes. You can save a good ten minutes if you go to Netherley across the field and the stepping stones. It cuts a big corner off – and that was the way I always went. The rubble from the wall was still scattered all over the place. I was in a hurry, didn’t look where I was going and damn near broke my ankle.’

  ‘And when you came back to live here?’

  ‘Well, it was easier underfoot, the bricks were no longer such a hazard, and that old tree house that used to be in the big yew had blown down by then. Everything was chucked into a pile, ready for a bonfire, I supposed.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Stronglove, that’s helpful. It should help to establish that the date the body was put there was in 1914 or after. Eight years – or less.’

  ‘It will help if that’s the case, if he is telling the truth – about the state that clearing was in before the war,’ Novak remarked as he climbed into the back seat of the waiting motor, while the ponderous Sergeant Chinnery wedged his bulk in beside him. He gave the constable at the wheel the signal to drive off. ‘But how reliable is he, our Mr Stronglove? Stronglove!’ he repeated with a grimace. ‘Must remember to get that right.’

  ‘He writes these adventure yarns, doesn’t he, sir? You know, ones with a bit of crime and mystery.’ Chinnery would never let it be known to this cocky young spark from London – young to Chinnery, anyway – who he felt regarded him as a backwoods yokel, that each new Dirk Stronglove book was something he looked forward to with pleasure. ‘He’ll know the advantage of getting the facts straight in a case like this.’

  ‘And the value of prevarication. A seemingly truthful lie.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do that,’ Chinnery answered, faintly reproving.

  ‘No?’ Novak’s eyebrows rose. Perhaps not, but there had been an atmosphere in that room, a distinct impression that one person at least was not being entirely open. And the equal certainty that nobody was going to tell him who it was. They would all stick together, as people like them always did. He felt again the sense of hostility he had experienced as he entered the house, as he looked around that library, redolent of money and privilege, faded and shabby as it was, furniture so old the Salvation Army might have thought twice about accepting it as a gift. And those ratty old chair covers – even his thrifty mother, who had been known to put patches on patches, would have given up on them years ago.

  ‘No,’ Chinnery repeated more firmly. ‘I’ve known them all my life, and none of them would lie about a thing like that.’

  Novak had not chosen to work on this case, but his was not to reason why. Wheels had turned. Strings had been pulled. Pressure had been brought to bear. And here he was, where he’d been sent, far from his usual haunts, the patch he worked and the lawless and unstructured lives lived within it, a seething immigrant population, of the foreign and home-grown variety, every man for himself, nothing to lose. Events moved fast there and that was pretty much how Novak liked it. It was like wine in the veins. He found this country air enervating, and this place at the back of nowhere even more so, where even the police seemed to think they had all day to do the simplest task – and needed help from outside when it extended any further than that. He wasn’t optimistic about his power to achieve a quick result in this case, but failure on his part wouldn’t do his reputation any good, so he didn’t have much choice.

  Nor did he like dealing with folks like Stronglove. He, Adam Novak, had fought in the war, risen through the ranks to captain and rubbed shoulders with men like him. Most of them had been good sorts, but that had been in a different situation, when they’d all been in it together. Now they were back in Civvy Street and some had forgotten that the war had supposedly levelled out distinctions.

  He looked at his watch again. There was an arrest he hoped to make that night. If that fellow who was driving the motor stirred his stumps, he could get to the Blue Anchor in time. Unless the tip passed on to him had been an attempt to make a monkey out of him, his latest quarry should be drinking there, unsuspecting.

  Emily dreamt vividly that night, of things she had not dreamt of f
or many years. The dramatic discovery beneath the Hecate tree had in a strange way brought back a past she had tried resolutely not to dwell on for most of her life, so painful had the comparison been with what her life had turned out to be.

  But dreams are of a different order to one’s waking, sentient life. Perhaps she had dreamed of the past because that day, for the first time, she had asked herself why she had never really attempted to confront it properly.

  Eight

  Then, 1875

  Mama – Leila – was not a beauty, though she had piles of shining black hair, a clear, pale complexion, soft dark eyes and a mouth designed for smiling. Emily never remembered her losing her temper. She was gay and loved company and things happening, quite the opposite of Papa, that big, often taciturn man who smelt of pipe tobacco and had horny hands with dirt so ingrained under the fingernails it was impossible to remove entirely, making Mama say she was ashamed to be escorted out to dinner by someone who looked like the undergardener. But she laughed when she said it, and straightened his tie and tried to smooth his hair and said he was still the handsomest man this side of Mount Olympus, and who minded a little grime when he brought her armfuls of roses he had grown himself?

  ‘Roses for my girls, my three roses,’ said Anthony once, memorably, and then reddened to the roots of his hair, having astonished himself as much as them.