A Lovely Day to Die (10 page)

All the same, there was one bad moment.

“Mummy, why hasn’t Grandma packed any of her summer dresses? Why has she only ..?”

Emmy’s heart very nearly stopped. Naturally, knowing that she would be happily unpacking everything again tomorrow, she’d just shoved in any old thing, just to make the case look full. But now …

“Mummy, come and look! Grandma’s forgotten to put in her …”

Gasping for breath, Emmy raced upstairs faster than she’d done for years, slammed down the lids of her cases and locked them.

“And don’t you dare touch them!” she cried to the attentive Angie. “Just you leave them alone …”

“Mummy, why is Grandma being so cross ..?”

But it was all right. It blew over. Vivien was far too busy, far too distraught, to follow it up.

“I’ll just have to ring the police again,” she said, pushing the hair back from her damp forehead. “Maybe someone’s—No—” she drew her hand back from the telephone—“No, I think I’d better go round … talk to them in person …”

And off she went, leaving Emmy victorious, but nevertheless somehow uneasy. The
Police
! The documents
wouldn’t
have been handed in, obviously, they couldn’t have been; and surely no one would ever think of digging up the garden?

But all the same … the Police ..!

*

Her unease was justified. It was less than two hours later—barely nine o’clock—when Vivien rang up, and Emmy knew at once, from her ecstatic tone, that something terrible had happened.

“It’s all right!” Vivien exulted. “No—they haven’t found anything, but they’ve been
so
kind! People talk about ‘Faceless bureaucrats’ and all that, but they’re not like that at all, not when you talk to them personally. I told them all about your sad bereavement, and how you’d been looking forward so much to this special holiday, and they were
so
sympathetic, all of them. The police—the Airline—the Passport people—everybody! They’ve rushed through an Emergency Passport for you—a duplicate air
ticket—everything! All you’ve got to do is come along and sign a few things—I’m coming to fetch you right away.”

*

They had indeed been kind, all these officials. The thought of this poor lonely widow missing her longed-for holiday had really touched their hearts, and between them they’d fixed everything. Emmy felt awful, in a way, that all this kindness was going to be wasted; for she knew already what she was going to do.

*

Vivien drove her home, watched while she put the new documents into her handbag, and the handbag into the top left bureau drawer, watched while she locked it.

“And don’t
touch
them, Mother, don’t touch them
at
all
until we come for you tomorrow morning,” was her parting injunction; and Emmy nodded meekly, submissive as a little child.

This new lot she buried under the lilac, stamping down the soil well and thoroughly as before. And then, when it was midnight, she set to work to make the house ready.

She had always heard that burglars are in the habit of turning the place upside-down in their search for valuables, pulling books out of shelves, dragging furniture about, tipping drawers out all over the floor. She didn’t want to make
too
much mess, of course, because who but she would have the job of clearing it up again? So she set about her task circumspectly, up-ending only those drawers which were in a mess anyway and could do with a good tidy, and pushing around only such articles of furniture as she could shift easily, such as the standard lamp, the cane-bottomed chairs, and the spindly little telephone table on the upstairs landing, which she laid neatly on its side.

She took special care with the books—she had heard that burglars always go for these first, in case there are banknotes hidden between the pages. One by one she took them off the shelves and laid them gently, not to damage the bindings, all over the sitting-room floor, some open, some shut, to look as if they might have been thrown there.

It was past two when she dragged herself, exhausted but
triumphant, up to bed. Tired though she was, she didn’t fall asleep at once, but lay, tense and jubilant, savouring the triumph that awaited her tomorrow morning. They
couldn’t
make her go now, not with this second lot of papers lost, and the house freshly burgled.

A vast contentment and joy filled her consciousness; but just as she was falling into a blissful sleep, a sudden thought struck her, jerking her wide awake …

Nothing had been stolen, except the papers! So preoccupied had she been with making the house
look
burgled, that she’d quite forgotten that
real
burglars would take all the valuables they could lay hands on. That’s what they’d have come for.

Only small things, of course, that could be easily buried. The silver teaspoons? Money from her handbag? Jewellery from her inlaid sandal-wood box ..? Scrambling out of bed—and
remembering
just in time not to switch on the light lest a neighbour might notice—she hurried across the room and out onto the dark landing, where she tripped over that spindly little telephone-table lying on its side in the middle of the floor, and pitched headlong down the stairs.

*

It was the murder-hunt of the century. Naturally, the police recognised within seconds that the burglary had been faked, and suspicion fell, briefly, on Vivien, who had spent the whole of the previous afternoon alone with her mother-in-law. But the times didn’t fit, the motive was negligible (a few hundred pounds of insurance money), and so this theory was soon dropped.

It was when the first of the buried passports was found that the excitement began; and when the second, duplicate one also came to light, the excitement became a furore, making front-page headlines in all the newspapers and receiving star treatment on television. Clearly, this was no ordinary domestic fracas, there must be large-scale ramifications. Russian spies? An international drug-ring? Some sinister terrorist organisation? Something, anyway, that demanded a false identity, a stolen passport, for someone crossing a frontier for some nefarious purpose. Some
deceptively innocent-looking middle-aged woman, vaguely
resembling
Emmy, would have to be sought. No doubt it was this unlucky resemblance that had led to poor Emmy’s death—or maybe the poor lady had stumbled in all innocence on some piece of information that was a danger to the malefactors? Anyway,
some
kind of international criminal network it must be. Interpol was called in, and the C.I.D.; even M.I.5; but with all their combined expertise, they seemed quite unable to come up with any plausible theory as to what lay behind it all.

Angie, of course, could have told them. Indeed she did.

“Grandma lost her passport on purpose,” she bossily
announced.
“She was only pretend-looking for it, I know she was. I watched her. And she’d only pretend-packed, too. I looked. You see, Grandma hated holidays. And”—she appended, just for the devilment of it, “
I
hate holidays, too. They’re boring.”

“Hush, dear, don’t be silly,” Vivien reproved absently, and returned to the serious matter of being interviewed by the C.I.D. Naturally, no one took any notice of this little bit of family bickering, why should they? How could they be expected to guess that a cheeky little seven-year-old show-off might have come up with the correct solution to a mystery which for weeks now had been baffling the best brains of the best Crime Detection squads in all the Western World?

E
DITH FOUND HERSELF
almost the first one on board. Well, after nearly forty cruising holidays—two a year regularly, spring and autumn, ever since her husband died—she, if anyone, should know the ropes. Not for her the shuffling, uneven progress of the anxious novices, zigzagging uncertainly from one queue to another with their passports, boarding cards, and the rest, asking advice from one another, the blind leading the blind—“Excuse me, do you happen to know ..?”—“But it says here ..?”

Once, Edith had been one of them, but not now. Now she knew exactly where to go in the big departure shed, exactly which papers to have ready for which uniformed official. And so here she was, in the pale autumn sunshine, leaning smugly and contentedly over the rail of the Promenade Deck, surveying the tight-packed mass of blue-rinsed perms and bright daring headscarves swaying up the gangway below, listening to the chatter and twitter of the massed excitement rising as from a flock of birds.

From up here, from the vantage point of her two decades of cruising experience and of her seventy-odd years, Edith could only smile pityingly at all this excitement, all this hope, all this anticipation of adventure and of new beginnings.

It wouldn’t happen. She could have told them. Yes, she could have told them straight away, before they’d even booked, that their chances of finding a Man on this trip were absolutely nil. Well, you had only to look down from up here, and with your own eyes you could assess the odds. Such male heads as could be discerned at all, bobbing about here and there amid the surging female sea, were mostly bald; some wore hearing aids; and all were unmistakably in the possession of some attendant female whose determination that it should stay that way was absolute.

It was always like this on these cruises. Once aboard, you felt
that you had entered a world in which the human male was some sort of endangered species, so rarely did you encounter a specimen, and so carefully protected was it. And, of course, as is commonly the case with rare and endangered species, the ban on hunting and trapping was total.

Not that any of this mattered to Edith any more. For her, the hunt for a Man was long over—and in a way this was a great freedom. It was like the laying down of some burden you have been carrying all your life—and now, suddenly, you are without it, free. Deprived as well, of course—just as a mountaineer is deprived if he loses his rucksack over the edge of a precipice; but how agile the disaster renders him for the remainder of his climb! How swift, and unencumbered, and strong!

Looking around at her fellow passengers, now surging all over the deck, with their careful, expensive makeup, and their brave, brand new cruising outfits, Edith could feel nothing but pity, and a deep thankfulness to be out of it all.

She’d had her day. Several days, if you could put it that way. But now it was over, and she was content—content to be old and unnoticed, and with only herself to please. Not to want a man is assuredly the next best thing to having one, and infinitely less trouble.

All the same, Edith found herself scanning the people coming on board with lively interest. Although she was not looking for a Man, she was looking for
someone
to be a companion during the coming two weeks. Some woman around her own age, a widow preferably, with whom to chat, and pass remarks about the other passengers. Together they would sit on deck, out of the wind, showing photographs of grandchildren and consulting one another about knitting patterns.

Among all the lonely, aging women who frequented these cruises it wasn’t usually hard to find someone to fill this undemanding role that Edith had in mind for her.

On this occasion it was even easier than usual, for, as luck would have it, the cabin mate allotted to her turned out to be just the sort of person Edith would have chosen had she been given her pick
from the whole passenger list. Lorna Carruthers was sixty-nine years old, a grandmother, complete with photographs (but not too many), and was likewise a widow. She also possessed one other quality that especially appealed to Edith, though admittedly it would not have had this effect on everyone: she suffered from depression. Apparently she had been chivvied into this trip by a very fed-up married daughter for this very reason.

Edith was good with depressives—it was a skill she had learned over the years. Her genuine, not to say eager, interest in all their concerns was just what they needed—or thought they needed, anyway. Having once discovered Edith, they would cling to her as to a lifeline throughout the voyage; and this, of course, was nice for Edith, too. Everyone enjoys being needed, particularly if it is only for a fortnight; and Edith was no exception.

“You see, Edith,” Lorna Carruthers explained (already they were on Christian-name terms, before the vessel was well out of harbour), “You see, the real trouble is, I feel so
useless
these days. There seems to be no
point
in anything any more.”

The two of them were changing for dinner, as best they could in the tiny cabin, and Lorna’s pink, puckered little face looked sadder than ever peering into the mirror while with unsteady hand she sought to apply pale pink lipstick to her pale, downturned lips.

“You see,” she continued, “since Dear Harold died” (four years ago, Edith had already ascertained) “and since Rosemary got married, and since Michael got this job in Hong Kong …”

Edith had heard it all before, of course, in all its painful permutations and combinations, from her many and various travelling companions over the past twenty years, but somehow it never palled; she never showed the least impatience. Partly, this was because she knew, by now, exactly the right things to say.

But my dear,
of
course
they still need you! What would those lovely kiddies do without their Granny? Oh. Oh, I see, well, that’s a pity; but you know, the youngsters just
are
like that nowadays—it doesn’t mean they don’t love you
really.
And yes, your Rosemary
should
visit more often, I agree, but I expect she’s got her hands full, what with one thing and another … Oh, but my dear,
no,
you
mustn’t take it like that! These things are always flaring up between mothers and daughters, it’s well known. She’ll get over it, you’ll see … Ah, my dear, but that’s just being silly, talking like that! Of course he still loves his Mum! But after all, Hong Kong
is
a long way off, and you know what the young fellows are
like
when it comes to letter writing. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love you
really
…

If she’d repeated that last sentence once, she’d repeated it a dozen times; but Lorna, though seeming to listen hungrily, enjoying the sympathy, was evidently not yet ready to be consoled.

“They make me feel so
old,
Edith, so cast aside and done for!” she wailed, tearfully patting her exquisitely tinted curls into place behind her ears. “Sometimes, you know, when the phone hasn’t rung for days, and no one’s been to see me, sometimes I just sit there in my empty house, staring into space, and I ask myself: what’s the point of it all? Why am I here? Sometimes I just can’t think what I’m
for
!”

If the truth were told, Edith couldn’t have said what
she
was for, either; but somehow it never bothered her. Indeed it often seemed to her that it was this very feeling of not being
for
anything any longer, of no longer being anyone’s mainstay, or the centre of anyone’s life, or the object of anyone’s devotion—that was one of the most wonderful things about getting old. Such a sense of freedom it brought with it! Such a miraculous falling away of Life’s duties and obligations! It didn’t matter
what
you did once you were old and unwanted; you could get away with just about anything.

But this was not a point of view likely to appeal to these depressed widows, or even to be comprehended by them; so Edith left the thought unspoken, and resumed the safe and well-tried routine.

Useless and done for? What nonsense! And as for being old, why, sixty-nine is no age at all these days, and anyway, no one would take Lorna for a day over fifty, truly they wouldn’t. And, my goodness, what lovely earrings! They
do
suit you, dear—bring out the green in your eyes.

It was unfortunate (and in no way Edith’s fault, she couldn’t possibly have known) that the earrings in question should turn out to have been an anniversary present—the last anniversary present
—from poor Darling Harold.
Real
emeralds,
Lorna was at pains to point out through her tears—so like Dear Harold. Such lovely presents he always gave her, such a darling, generous man.

What with one thing and another they were late for dinner; but there seemed to be no really humane way of getting Lorna to speed up the process of drying her tears and re-doing her face; and so Edith gave up trying. Her eyes resting thoughtfully on the
well-stocked
jewel box from which the earrings had emerged, Edith found herself, as so often in the past, filled with wonder at the reckless abandon with which these grief-stricken widows would bring thousands of pounds’ worth of jewellery with them on these trips. Anything—
anything
—to catch a Man. It was amazing. What a price to set on one of those balding, mottled heads!

Though it must be admitted that this Lorna Carruthers wasn’t quite so silly as some Edith had known. She did at least lock up the jewel box before leaving the cabin, and hide it beneath some underwear at the back of a drawer. And if she failed to see Edith noticing just where in her handbag she slipped the key—well, you could hardly blame her for that, could you? After all, they were going to be bosom friends, weren’t they, for the duration of the voyage—for two whole weeks, in fact, before parting forever with a passionate exchange of addresses, and empty, reiterated promises to write to each other. Such is the nature of shipboard intimacy; and it often occurred to Edith that she could even have given her real address, and it wouldn’t have mattered. Still, it would have been a silly risk to take, and quite pointless. Better, by far, to stick to the old and well-tried methods, especially at her age.

The scenario was so familiar now, so predictable. The anxious, flurried morning of disembarkation, with people rushing here and there all over the ship looking for mislaid bits of property; everything at sixes and sevens, and in the midst of all the chaos Edith, calm and supportive, helping her current bosom friend to pack, to fill in her Landing Card, to sort out her English and foreign coins, to decide how large a tip to leave for which of the stewards. Oh, Edith was invaluable, and sooner or later the bosom friend would be bound to have her back turned for a few seconds,
searching for something at the back of a locker or saying goodbye to someone in the doorway. And a few seconds was all it needed, so much research having already gone into the subject’s little habits, the whereabouts of her valuables, her keys …

Watching her new friend zip up the inner compartment of her handbag this first evening, Edith could justly congratulate herself on having got the Lorna Carruthers Research Project off to a good start.

*

Naturally, by the time they reached the dining room, all the best tables were gone—the tables, that is, where one or another of the ship’s officers—the Purser it might be, or the Chief Engineer—was making it his business to be handsome and jolly, and to flatter all the ladies in his vicinity, no matter how old or ugly.

No such luck for Edith and Lorna. They found themselves, instead, at a table with three other women as elderly as
themselves
, and an even more elderly man whose proud owner,
conscious
of her good fortune, beamed indefatigably under the
non-stop
snubs and put-downs to which he treated her throughout the meal.

Still, it turned out in the end to be quite a good evening. The food, as always on these cruises, was delicious, though there was far too much of it. And afterwards, bundled into their warmest woollies and tweeds atop their sleeveless dinner gowns, the two friends went up on deck, braving the wind whipping in out of the darkness, in order to watch the lights of Newcastle grow faint and yet fainter across the black racing sea.

“This is the best part, I sometimes think,” mused Edith, leaning heavily on the starboard rail (for it had been a tiring day), “seeing England disappearing in the distance, and knowing that you are
away
!
Away into the open sea—off into the unknown—the feeling that just
anything
may be going to happen …”

She stopped. No point in putting Lorna on her guard against unexpected happenings. Quickly she changed the subject: “Have you seen the midnight sun ever? Of course, it’s too late in the year this time, but …”

Another mistake. Because—wouldn’t you know it?—Lorna
had
seen the midnight sun, but in the company of poor Darling Harold … their very last trip together, actually, before … before …

Her tears fell fast, but dried almost as swiftly in the black icy wind against her cheeks. Somewhere, deep in the heart of the ship, dance music had started up, a faint, insistent throbbing against the noise of the sea. Time was—and not so very long ago, either—when the sound would have drawn Edith like a magnet, out of the windy darkness into the lighted ballroom. She had been a beautiful dancer once. Five years ago—even four—she would have been on the floor with the best of them, and even now it was only this wretched arthritis in her knee that held her back. It had been worsening gradually for some time now, and she’d had to recognize that her dancing days were over. Pride, and the memory of her one-time prowess, would not allow her to go limping gamely round the floor, as so many of the oldsters seemed happy to do.

The lights of Newcastle had quite vanished.

They were alone with the sea, and the dark curve of the earth. Her ears were beginning to ache with the cold.

“Let’s go in,” she said, with a little shiver. “I’m beginning to feel chilly. Let’s have an early night.”