A Dangerous Deceit (11 page)

Inspector Waterhouse had returned from his daughter's wedding, not pleased to find Folbury police station buzzing with excitement and its formerly leisurely pace revved up several notches, a murder having occurred and the enquiry being well underway, a detective inspector previously unknown to him installed as the investigating officer, and all without his permission. On the small side for a policeman, with a toothbrush moustache, Waterhouse liked the sound of his own voice, but this time he had to listen, inwardly fuming, while Reardon brought him up to date. But Waterhouse was a conscientious police officer with long years of service behind him, and he was smart enough to realize that it was in his interests to be cooperative in the present circumstances. At that moment, the investigation hadn't warranted much more than a couple of his uniforms to do the house-to-house canvassing on Henrietta Street and so on, and if it could be kept that way, without Reardon calling for a team of detectives from Dudley, that was all right by him. With as good grace as he could muster, he put what resources Folbury had to offer at Reardon's disposal and decided to make the best of it. Afterwards, he made up for it by chivvying everyone around. And that included sending Joe Gilmour out to interview Lily Aston for the second time.

Lily wasn't in mourning black that day, though she had on her best dress, a dark red marocain with a biscuit-coloured, self-embroidered modesty vest pinned into the vee neck. No apron or dust-cap, never mind that it was Tuesday morning, her day for doing upstairs. When they first moved here, up-and-coming as they were, Arthur had insisted they employ a maid-of-all-work, but after so many had packed their bags and left, Lily had taken on the housework herself. She preferred it that way; she wasn't used to servants and in fact she enjoyed keeping her own house sparkling and polished. And besides, such a routine filled days that otherwise dragged on forever. On this Tuesday, however, the bedrooms remained unswept and undusted, while she sat defiantly downstairs in the front parlour in an easy chair with a pot of coffee and two chocolate biscuits on the table next to her. She wasn't altogether sure whether she liked coffee, not even with plenty of milk and sugar. Arthur would never allow it, said he hated the smell. He liked a strong brew of Lipton's Indian tea, so they had always drunk that. But Arthur wasn't here now.

She nibbled on a biscuit and sat back, contemplating her crossed feet raised up in front of her on a pouffe. Her shoes were round-toed black leather, low-heeled and roomy, with a single bar across the instep, and she regarded them with loathing. They'd never been fashionable and now they were showing their wear. They seemed to sum up everything about her life. They were why she was going to buy new ones this afternoon – the smart, lizard-skin pair with Louis heels and a T-bar she'd coveted in Rayne's shop window for weeks – and risk what they might do to her bunions. She would buy them after her visit to the hairdresser's, where she'd booked for a marcel wave, expensive and daring though it had seemed when that girl from the newspaper had first suggested it to her. She'd warned Lily it would require frequent visits to keep up with it, but she must have guessed that anything would be worth not having to screw her hair up every night into uncomfortable metal curling pins which, no matter how she tried, made it tight and frizzy. She wouldn't have thought of it herself, but it was true what Judy had said: it was time she looked after her own interests.

She took another determined sip of coffee, pulled a face at the unaccustomed bitter taste, then leant back luxuriously in the chair. She was no longer a drudge, a skivvy. Free at last!

Then – oh, drat it, there she went again, overcome by that feeling of guilt. Her new-found confidence wavered. Free … for what? Why was she doing all this – or more rightly, who for? Who was going to care, now, what she looked like?

Unaccountably, the tears began to roll. She had never imagined freedom would feel like this. She kept hearing things: Arthur's heavy tread on the stairs, his snores during the night. She saw him in his long combinations doing the morning exercises he'd never failed to do since leaving the army, folding his trousers at night and putting them under the mattress (an old army trick) before she was allowed to get into bed – though she'd often had to press them again to his exacting standards next morning.

He'd made her life a misery with his hectoring and bullying, his long, moody silences. Although they were married, they shared nothing except a bed, and that she preferred not to think about. She'd longed to be rid of him, prayed for it every single night. She'd thought of leaving him, only for so long she'd had nothing to make that possible, no money and nowhere to go. And now I have money to spare but … oh, drat this – blubbing again!

One thing I do know, though, I don't miss
you
, you old devil, she thought robustly, blowing her nose. But something, some glimmer of hope that had entered her life not so long ago was gone, gone for ever. For perhaps five minutes, she had glimpsed a future where even the previously unimaginable might be possible—

A knock on the front door startled her and nearly made her spill the coffee. Visitors were rare at seven, Cherry Avenue. She sprang up and peered through the lace curtains. The police! That Sergeant Gilmour again. Hastily mopping her face with her handkerchief, she went to answer the summons.

The first thing Joe noticed when she let him in was that she'd been crying, poor woman. He'd met her before, when they came to break the news, and she hadn't shown much emotion then. Probably delayed reaction. She stood aside to let him pass her awkwardly in the narrow hall, crowded with unnecessary furniture and dominated by a coat-and-umbrella stand laden with a selection of coats and hats of various kinds – except, of course, for the bowler Aston had been wearing when he was killed; that was still being held by the police. She went before him into the front parlour, just as overfurnished as the hallway, where everything was polished and maintained to such a high degree of cleanliness it made Joe feel as though he ought to have been disinfected himself before setting a foot inside. It was a dull room with varnished brown paintwork and faded, leaf-patterned wallpaper, but there were a lot of cushion covers and chair-backs in startlingly bright crochet-work. A basket sat on the floor next to a chair, filled with a rainbow medley of wools.

After they entered, she stood in the centre of the room; nor did she invite him to sit.

‘What do you want?' she asked ungraciously. ‘I already told you everything I could last time you were here.'

He trotted out the usual response to that. ‘We're following a new line of enquiry, Mrs Aston.'

She put a hand to her scrawny chest. ‘What do you mean, enquiry? There's nothing else to enquire about as I see it. You don't have to enquire about an accident, do you?'

‘Well, yes, we do. We have to know how it happened. To make certain,' he added carefully, ‘that it
was
an accident.'

‘Of course it was! What else could it have been?'

‘I'm afraid it looks now as though foul play was involved.'

‘
Foul play?
' For a moment he thought she didn't understand what that meant, but then he saw that she did. She had gone deathly pale.

‘Please sit down, Mrs Aston.' She sank clumsily into a chair, knocking into a small table and causing the cup and saucer on it to rattle against the coffee pot. ‘I'm sorry, this has been a shock – would you like me to pour you some more coffee?'

She shuddered. ‘No. But you can get me a glass of water.'

He found the kitchen, small and old-fashioned but as spotless as the rest of the house, looked for a glass, and while he left the tap on for the water to run cold, took stock. It was a soulless place, a table covered with oilcloth, in places worn to its backing by much scrubbing, a copper in one corner, a mangle in the other, one single wooden chair painted a dismal green, an ancient stove and an overall smell of carbolic, unpleasantly reminiscent of public conveniences. He remembered what Maisie had said about her cooking. Joe's aunt, with whom he lodged, wasn't much of a cook either, and it wasn't hard to visualize unappealing meals of grey mince, lumpy potatoes and overcooked cabbage.

When he went back into the other room she was sitting down and had composed herself again, looking much as she had when he had first broken the news of her husband's death – stoical and unyielding, her lips pressed together, as if such a catastrophe was just more of life's slings and arrows thrown at her which she had no choice but to accept. ‘Should've told you to get yourself a cup if you want some coffee,' she remarked as he handed her the water and sat himself down opposite.

‘That's all right, Mrs Aston.'

She drank thirstily. ‘What's all this, then? What's this foul play you're on about?'

‘I'm afraid it looks as though your husband was attacked, and died as a result.'

She took another gulp of water. ‘Killed, you mean? What makes you think that, then?'

He explained as gently as he could what they thought might have happened. ‘Had he any enemies that you know of, or friends he might have quarrelled with recently?'

‘He didn't have any friends,' she said spitefully.

Joe raised his eyebrows.

‘It's true. He never went out, never went anywhere – well, hardly, except down to the Rotary Club or the Punch Bowl sometimes, or to see the major.' The major, thought Joe, making a mental note to pursue this later, as she went on, ‘Anyway, he stayed late at the works most nights.' Her lips pursed even tighter.

And then came home and ate an unappetizing supper, sat down and maybe read his newspaper – there was not a book in sight – while Lily crocheted yet more cushion covers? What a prospect: domestic boredom personified.

‘But there must have been people he knew. Did he never mention any names … business contacts, some customer from overseas, maybe?'

Her expression didn't alter but something alerted him. He'd touched a nerve there. He debated whether to press the point, but decided against it at the moment, knowing full well it would only elicit another negative response.

‘It's like I told that girl,' she said. ‘He kept his home life and his business separate.'

‘What girl was that?'

‘Her that writes for the
Herald
.'

Judy Cash again, snooping around. She gave him an itch, that girl, like winter chilblains, and like them, you couldn't get rid of her. He knew he should ignore her, but she exasperated him; she was capable of doing a lot of damage, insinuating herself to get information, getting under people's skin. ‘You want to be careful with her. What you say will go straight into the paper.'

‘Oh, I know that, I wasn't born yesterday,' Lily replied, scornful of his estimation of her. ‘But she's promised it won't, you know. She understands.'

Not
understood
, but
understands
, as if they were in the habit of meeting. He didn't much like that. ‘All the same, if you see her again, watch what you say to her.'

She shrugged and drank some more water, and when she'd put the glass down, Joe said, ‘He had a graze on his temple, your husband. The doctors don't believe it was recent – or at any rate not received at the time he died. How did he get it, Mrs Aston?'

She blinked rapidly, her work-reddened hands twisting together, then looked down at her feet without saying anything. Her shoes were old and shapeless. Lily Aston was not a woman you took to, but the sight of those shoes, contrasting with a dress much smarter than the one she'd worn when he had seen her previously – a sort of bravado, that seemed to him – somehow filled Joe with pity.

‘Did you have a quarrel?' he asked more gently.

She looked up at that and gave a short laugh. ‘I suppose that means you think I hit him? Me? Look at me! He weighed thirteen stone!'

‘You don't look as though you weigh much more than half of that,' Joe agreed. She also looked tough and wiry, but he forbore to comment on that. ‘Was it an accident, or a fall, then?'

‘Not that I know of.'

‘OK, if it wasn't either, and you didn't have a fight with him, do you know how he got that graze?'

‘No.'

After a moment or two, Joe said, ‘Mrs Aston, I think maybe you do.'

She went silent, her mouth set in a mulish line. He saw calculation pass over her face as he waited, and then suddenly she said, ‘All right. It was that Rees-Talbot.'

She waved a hand towards a framed sepia photograph over the mantel, a group of half a dozen uniformed officers, obviously taken some time ago, somewhere under a hot sun: a bare landscape with a tin-roofed building to one side, two or three stunted trees and what looked like native kraals in the background. ‘Him on the right,' she said. ‘That's Major Rees-Talbot.' Joe looked and saw a young man with nothing in particular to distinguish him from the others. They were all wearing khaki tunics, slouch hats, riding breeches and boots, holding whips and sporting the same type of luxuriant moustache that had been popular at the turn of the century.

‘Thought highly of the major, Arthur did. He was his batman during the war in South Africa, they went through a lot together, he used to say, and the major helped him out a bit when he started his business here. He was cut up when he died.'

Joe adjusted his perceptions. ‘Then it wasn't the major he had the fight with?'

‘Of course not, I told you, he's dead. Months since. It was his son, that Felix.'

The name Rees-Talbot had caused Joe's ears to prick up. It was a familiar enough one in Folbury, but also the name of the people Maisie worked for. The major, of course, was the late father of Margaret and Felix Rees-Talbot, whom Maisie said Aston had been in the habit of visiting. What else had she said about Aston, apart from the fact that he couldn't keep his hands to himself? Something about a nasty atmosphere he'd left behind him when he visited Alma House, wasn't it? ‘What was the fight about?'