A Dangerous Deceit Read online

  We had a visit the other day from the police, a Sergeant Gilmour, she wrote that night in her firm, black handwriting. Sitting stolidly at the desk in her boudoir, her greying hair in a tidy night-time plait down her back, an old brown woollen dressing gown that had belonged to Scroope wrapped around her plump form, she was penning the latest instalment of a letter to her dearest friend, Adelaide Dunstable. They have kept to their promise that they would let us know the outcome of their investigations into the body of that man found when the snow began to melt in February. Of course, as Giles Frith, who happened to be with me at the time, was quick to point out, we would expect nothing less than to be kept informed, since the body was, after all, discovered on Maxstead land. Now, this Sergeant Gilmour informs us that enquiries have been suspended, since nothing further has turned up to identify the man, and resources are needed in other directions (principally, one assumes, to help in all the unrest that seems to be bedevilling the workforce of this country). I supposed the dead man was one of those down-and-outs one sees everywhere – some unemployed person tramping the countryside to look for work – but the sergeant said no, he didn’t think so. He gave no reasons for this. He was quite a young man, but he had watchful eyes. I have a strong suspicion he was not happy about the decision of his superiors to suspend enquiries.

  However, neither I nor Giles Frith pursued the matter. I believe he was as relieved as I was to know it had been put to rest. I have been finding this unresolved affair rather unsettling. You know what I am like, Addie, I do not care to have anything at Maxstead beyond my control.

  That was all flimflam, of course; the business had troubled her far more than that, and with good reason, but it was certainly true that it had outraged her sense of the fitness of things, that any man, whoever he was, could have been murdered, his head brutally stove in, so they said, brought here on to the estate by his unknown assailant, and buried, not long before the first of last winter’s heavy snow.

  ‘I was almost convinced that he thought we were holding something back, Giles,’ she had said to Frith when the policeman had gone. He’d replied very briskly that he was sure he hadn’t – why should he have thought the dead man had anything to do with us? You must put such a thought right out of your mind, Lady Maude …

  Henry, at her feet as usual, gave a sudden snore in his sleep. She laid down her pen and took off her spectacles to rub her eyes. She was tired, she needed her rest, but these letters to her dearest friend were a kind of therapy for Maude. They had known each other since they were pushed in their perambulators around Hyde Park by their nurses; they had shared music and dancing lessons, she and Addie Fordingham, as she was then, and had come out together. Addie, who had married the eldest son of a duke and was now a duchess herself, had been one of Maude’s bridesmaids, and they were godmothers to each other’s children. Sometimes they spoke on the telephone, but the general inconvenience of long distance and Adelaide’s increasing deafness made this something of an obstacle race for both of them, so they mainly resorted to the correspondence they had kept up all their lives. Maude wrote a page or two each day and when there were enough, she posted them off. Until now, there had scarcely been an aspect of her life which was not an open book to Addie Dunstable.

  The lamp on her desk flickered – as the lights throughout the house were prone to do at any time – and finally went out. She sighed impatiently. She still regarded electricity as a newfangled invention, dangerous and unreliable, along with the faintly menacing gas engine which ran it, housed in its own purposely constructed building by the greenhouses. But before there was any need to seek matches and grope for the candles always kept at the ready, the lamp came on again. She picked up her pen, read through what she had written, then continued.

  Symon and his fiancée will be motoring over in her family’s car for luncheon tomorrow, I am pleased to say. I have to confess, though I had other plans for him, I am not totally disappointed with Margaret, though disappointingly, she does not want to be married at Maxstead, but in Symon’s church, with the reception in her own home. I have of course been obliged to accept this. She is not easily biddable – but then, I was never biddable, either, and I don’t believe it has done me any harm! I have come to believe that perhaps she will be a good wife for Symon in the life he has chosen.

  She paused, then crossed out ‘perhaps’.

  There is intelligence in her eyes and a firmness in her mouth that I like, she seems sensible and not easily discomposed, an agreeable young woman who will fit in with the family, despite not being brought up to it. What is even better, she will be more than capable, I am sure, of coping with the Opals of this world! I don’t know why this should have surprised me. She is the daughter of Osbert Rees-Talbot when all is said and done. Poor child, I think she still suffers from the loss of her father. How little we all knew, that day when she and Symon brought him to Maxstead, that he would be dead within such a short time! Although I was struck, even then, as I told you, by how ill he looked, older than his years – and oh dear, the loss of his arm! In some skirmish after Mafeking, I understand, but he made it very clear he did not wish to talk about that – nor indeed to talk at all about those old times in Cape Town. His manner was as stiff as if we had never before had any previous acquaintance, and in spite of my efforts, the conversation was stilted and difficult.

  She sat with her pen poised for several minutes, then quickly finished the letter off, signing it ‘Yrs affectly, Maude’, and sealing it in its envelope, ready to take down for the post, in case she should be tempted to add the part of that conversation she had never told anyone about – not even Addie.

  Six

  ‘I hope you didn’t get me here just to talk about that old Arthur Aston,’ Maisie Henshall told Joe Gilmour.

  Since there was more than a grain of truth in this, Joe was flummoxed for moment. He was experiencing what it would be like to be a full-blown detective – basically not all that different from uniformed duties, in that it could be plodding, repetitive work that didn’t yield spectacular results, especially in the first stages of an investigation, before it really got under way. It was becoming clear that he needed to cultivate patience, something he wasn’t naturally possessed of.

  The murder of Arthur Aston wasn’t sensational enough to have made headlines, except for a small piece in the Folbury Herald, though it might become so if it turned out to be connected with the Snowman case. So far, the resources at Folbury police station, previously never unduly stretched, had coped, though Reardon had managed to requisition from the powers-that-be at regional level an official car and a constable as driver for the duration of the murder enquiry, bicycles not being considered up to what might be required. At present, it was all down to steady, routine police work, though Joe was learning that even this, as far as Reardon was concerned, meant giving it all you’d got. Even so, it was Reardon himself who’d remarked drily that Joe didn’t need to feel his evenings, at least at this stage, weren’t free.

  Joe had taken the hint and used the time off to take Maisie to the Roxy to see Sparrows, a heart-wrenching tale about orphans and a kidnapped baby. Mary Pickford had been oversweet – she couldn’t hold a candle to lovely Lillian Gish in Joe’s opinion – and he hadn’t really enjoyed the film much, except for when the lady pianist, employing the loud pedal overenthusiastically at one of the most melodramatic parts, had nearly fallen off her stool, to general merriment. But he reckoned it had been worth the two shillings for the seats and the box of liquorice allsorts, her favourites, he’d bought for Maisie. Besides, she had let him put his hand on her thigh in the darkness.

  Remembering this, when they were sitting on a riverside bench in the park, he didn’t take umbrage at what she’d just said. ‘You know me better than that, Maisie. But we are in the middle of a murder investigation, love, so anything we can find out about Aston is important – and I know you used to work for them.’

  She gave him an old-fashioned look, then sighed. ‘All right. W
hat do you want to know?’

  ‘Anything you can tell me.’

  ‘It was a long time ago, straight after I left school, when I was fourteen. I only stuck it for a month or two before I left.’

  ‘Was the work that hard?’

  ‘Heavens, no. It’s not a big house, there’s only the two of them, and Lily Aston did her share.’

  ‘Why then?’

  ‘That old goat, Aston, what do you think? Couldn’t keep his hands to himself. He once …’ She looked at him sideways. ‘He came up to the attic where I slept one night, opened the door without knocking and came straight in – but I kicked him where it hurt, shoved him out and wedged a chair under the door knob.’

  Joe grinned. Maisie was no Lillian Gish, but she was a pretty girl when she allowed it, when she laughed or could be persuaded to let her hair down, and he liked her spirit. ‘What did you do? Tell his wife?’

  ‘Lily? No use complaining to her. She’d no say over him. Anyway, I reckon she was too miserable on her own account to notice whether anyone else was all right or not. He treated her as if she was another servant. Hardly spoke to her except to ask her to pass the salt, order her about, or complain his dinner wasn’t tasty enough.’ She pulled a face. ‘He might have had a point there, she wasn’t much of a cook – though it didn’t help that he was so tight-fisted with the housekeeping money. And he made her starch and iron all those stiff collars, two a day sometimes if the weather was hot and they went limp. Very fussy about his appearance he was. She had to clean his shoes!’

  Joe could see that to a woman like Maisie that would be the ultimate indignity. It seemed like that to him, too. He couldn’t envisage ordering Maisie to clean his shoes – or Maisie, sharp as a tack, obeying him even if he did.

  ‘If she didn’t do everything just so, he’d give her the silent treatment, say nothing at all, sometimes for days, though she’d try to wheedle him out of it. He was a right bully.’

  ‘Knocked her about, did he?’

  ‘I don’t know about that. I wasn’t there that long, after all,’ she said slowly, ‘but I don’t think so.’ Joe, who had seen enough domestic violence not to be surprised at what could go on between the four walls of a marriage, and knew one type of bullying led as often as not to another, wondered. ‘I know one thing,’ Maisie went on, ‘she won’t be sorry he’s gone.’

  ‘So Aston was why you left?’

  ‘Yes. I’d have packed it in straight away but my mum needed the money, so I stayed until I’d looked around for somewhere else. Besides, I was sorry for Lily. She was all right with me. Then I heard they wanted somebody at Alma House and I was lucky enough to get the job. And it was all right after that,’ she added simply.

  Fresh from the hatefulness of working for Aston and his wife, she had stayed for eleven years, first as a housemaid, then as someone who helped Margaret to run the house. She’d used her common sense and been willing to put her hand to anything, made herself indispensable almost from the word go, and it had paid off.

  Osbert Rees-Talbot had always been a rather distant presence, but otherwise it was an easy-going household, social distinctions tended to become blurred, and though it took some time to persuade her to leave off calling the girls ‘Miss’, it wasn’t long before she came to be regarded as part of the natural order of things. Aunt Deborah, a daily visitor to the house, had soon discovered that Maisie was a would-be reader, intelligent but starved of education, and did what she could to remedy this. Most days, her cousin Kay walked home with Margaret from the small private school they both attended, and Deborah had encouraged Maisie to join them in their prep and pick up what she could, and to borrow their books. She still wasn’t well-schooled but it had stimulated her to join the new public library and save up and buy books of her own.

  And now she had Joe Gilmour, this ambitious young police sergeant, and though he hadn’t actually popped the question yet, they all kept wondering what they were going to do without her.

  She said suddenly, ‘He used to come to Alma House sometimes, you know, Aston I mean. To see Margaret’s father. I think they knew each other from way back, and …’ She stopped.

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing really. Just that it was a funny how d’you do, set everyone on edge when he came. Margaret said he gave her the creeps and her father was always ratty with everybody after he’d gone.’ She paused. ‘No, that couldn’t have anything to do with it.’

  ‘With what?’

  But she pressed her lips together in an end of conversation way that Joe was learning to recognize. He sighed and then she went on, ‘I sometimes pop in and see Lily, just for a few minutes. And you know, it’s funny, but I’ve had a feeling she looked a bit happier lately, for Lily anyway. Nothing you could put your finger on, though. Maybe old Arthur had changed his ways.’

  ‘That’s nice of you to say, considering.’

  ‘Considering what?’

  ‘Considering old Arthur had made a pass at you.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t succeed, and I took care to go and see Lily when he wasn’t there. And he’s not there now, anyway, is he?’ She went quiet. ‘Here,’ she said at last, ‘have this last sweet – it’s a liquorice twist and I know they’re your favourites.’

  From The Folbury and District Herald:

  Following the inquest into the sudden death of Mr Arthur Aston at his business premises last week, further developments have led the police to confirm that they are to continue enquiries into his death. Residents in the area are being questioned and Detective Inspector Herbert Reardon, in charge of the case, is calling for anyone who saw or heard anything unusual in the vicinity of Henrietta Street, Arms Green, on Tuesday morning, the tenth of April, between approximately eight thirty and eleven thirty, when Mr Aston’s body was discovered.

  Mr Aston’s death is the second mysterious death to occur in Folbury. Readers will recall the Snowman, the murdered man whose body was found buried under the snow near Maxstead in February, and for whom an identification has still not been established more than six weeks later, though the police say that any connection between the two is unfounded, and that they are confident that the mystery of Mr Aston’s death will soon be resolved.

  Dearest Plum,

  I spent most of yesterday trying to gather more information about how Arthur Aston died, but without much luck. Kay Dysart – the doctor – must know, but she wasn’t giving anything away. I hung about and waited for her outside her surgery, and when she arrived I asked her if she had anything new to tell me but she was very brusque and said she had no intention of providing me with anything sensational for my paper, even if she knew anything, which she didn’t. It was out of her hands now. She added she had patients to see to and would I please leave her to get on.

  Her rudeness didn’t worry me unduly. I’ve developed a thick skin where things like this are concerned and I don’t intend to let a small snub put me off.

  Sergeant Gilmour was no better. He told me to go away – very nearly pushed me away, and probably would have done if he’d dared, or if he hadn’t been so much bigger than me – and wouldn’t say another word.

  I was luckier with Lily, Aston’s wife. At first she was almost as bad as the others at trying to ward off questions, but I could see she really wanted someone to talk to, so I persisted, as sweetly as I knew how, and after a while she began to latch on to the idea of being presented in the local paper as a grieving widow. ‘No photos, though,’ she stipulated. Over a cup of tea and a few expressions of sympathy, she began to open up.

  Her life with that man must have been nothing short of torture. He got what he deserved, and she is already beginning to buck up a bit and see the advantages of him not being around. She was in fact planning to buy herself some expensive new shoes, she told me, though she was very defensive about it, and seemed quite relieved when I didn’t look shocked that she should be thinking about such frivolous things so soon after the loss of her husband. In fact, I managed to persuade
her to have her hair done as well. If ever anyone needs a bit of pampering, Lily Aston does.

  I know what you’ll be thinking, so let me just say here that it’s all too easy to feel a little bit ashamed of oneself in these sorts of circumstances. Too simple, like taking candy from a baby. But I won’t allow thoughts like that to deflect me, and anyway, there’s more to Lily Aston than you might think at first. She’s tougher than she appears, and she’s deep. I’m jolly sure she’s hiding something. Lending a sympathetic ear, showing I’m on her side, had its results. I’m invited to drop in for a cup of tea any time. Next time, perhaps I might learn something useful.

  Seven

  When Kay arrived home that evening after a busy day, her Aunt Deborah had already set the small round table in front of the open French windows for their supper, and the sherry glasses and decanter were waiting for their usual aperitif. Deborah did not share the modern craze for fancy cocktails, but she did enjoy a glass of sherry, and looked forward to this time of day when she and her niece gossiped a little and mulled over the events happening in their very different lives.

  ‘What a day!’ Kay said, subsiding into an armchair. ‘Haven’t been able to stir an inch without falling over the police. They’re all over Aston’s and Arms Green.’

  Deborah’s gentle face puckered. ‘The police are still there? Why?’

  ‘It’s not quite straightforward, Aunt Deb. It seems Arthur Aston was almost certainly attacked.’