A Presumption of Death (6 page)

‘Quite right, Mrs Trapp. But that didn’t get rid of her?’

‘Not her!’ said Mrs Trapp with emphasis. ‘She sat right in there till I more or less had to make a cup of tea. Sugar, indeed! It was gossip she came for!’

‘Talking of sugar,’ said Harriet tentatively, ‘how hard would it be to rustle up a cake? I need to get on the right side of those land-girls.’

‘A fruit cake, Lady Peter?’

‘Just the thing. Can we do it?’

‘I’ll eke the sugar out with grated carrot. You’ll not know the difference.’

‘Mrs Trapp,’ said Harriet with feeling, ‘you are a wonderful woman, and I don’t know what we would do without you.’

‘Go along with you, my lady,’ said Mrs Trapp.

With Mrs Trapp’s cake in a tartan shortbread tin, Harriet presented herself at five o’clock in the afternoon at the barns where Farmer Bateson had housed his team of land-girls. It was getting dark, and she reckoned they would be home and making a meal. She found a group of eight of them, sitting round an old table, in what had been the tack room, and preparing a supper of potatoes and beans. The room had the rough and ready look of a Girl Guides camp. There were storm lanterns hanging from the roof beams, and clothes drying on a web of lines rigged round the little pot-bellied stove that had kept the stable boys from freezing in winter. A Ministry poster, showing a laughing, healthy young woman tossing a corn-sheaf on to a bright green lorry, and saying ‘Lend a hand on the land’, had been pasted on the wall opposite the door, and beside it a home-made one said: ‘God speed the plough, and the woman that drives it.’

‘Can I come in for a moment?’ Harriet asked.

A tough-looking red-head responded. ‘Cor, look what the cat’s brought in!’

But a blonde girl reading a newspaper at the table put it down, and said, ‘Don’t be rude, Rita. It’s Lady Peter, isn’t it? Take a seat.’

Harriet pulled out a chair and sat down. She glanced, willy-nilly, at the newspaper headline: NEW SOVIET ATTACK FORCES FINNS BACK.

‘Oh, gosh, how posh!’ Rita was saying. ‘Lady Petaaa! We are honoured.’

‘I’m not posh,’ said Harriet crisply. ‘I married above myself. I’m the local doctor’s daughter. I’ve brought you a cake.’ She took the lid off the tin. The cake was still warm, and a wonderful fruity fragrance began to disperse from it. Harriet caught herself hoping that Mrs Trapp had baked another for home consumption as well as this one.

‘Now, look here, Rita,’ said a third young woman, with a distinct upper cut to her voice, ‘don’t you say anything –
anything!
– that imperils our chances of getting at that cake. Understand?’

Harriet laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘The cake is an unconditional gift in appreciation of your hard work in the fields.’

‘You just won me over, heart and body,’ said Rita. ‘Did you hear that clunk? That was the sound of the chip falling off my shoulder.’

‘Just the same,
timeo Danaos
, and all that,’ said the blonde girl. ‘You must want something.’

‘You do brown me off, Muriel,’ said Rita. ‘What was that about tim something or other?’

‘Beware of the Greeks when they bring gifts,’ said Muriel. ‘The cake is a Trojan Horse. It’s not hard to work out. Lady Peter’s husband is a famous detective. A friend of ours has just been murdered. Result – cake.’

‘I don’t know how you can be so flippant, both of you,’ said a dark girl from the other end of the table.

An uneasy silence fell. ‘You’re right. Sorry,’ said Rita.

‘Murder is always a serious matter,’ said Harriet quietly. ‘A life is lost; here we have a young life lost, and others are then at risk.’

‘I’m truly sorry,’ said Muriel. ‘But the fact is, with all that mayhem across the Channel, and all the young men we know, and all the citizens of southern England in danger of violent death, it seems less outrageous than it would in peace-time.’

‘Not that that’s logical,’ observed Rita. ‘The truth is, it hasn’t sunk in yet, Lady what’s-your-name.’

‘Call me Harriet. I’ve come to ask you, semi-officially, whether any of you know any reason why it was Wendy who was attacked.’

‘What difference does it make, now she’s dead?’ someone asked – a stringy-looking girl sitting at the far end of the table.

‘That’s our barrack-room lawyer,’ said Rita. ‘Always has a question.’

‘It might make a very great difference,’ said Harriet. ‘If it was a private quarrel of some sort, then most likely, having settled his score – or her score, of course – the murderer will not act against anyone else. Or, alternatively, he might be a threat to any and every one of us. So, the simplest question is, do any of you know of anyone who had a grudge against Wendy? Did she have enemies?’

‘She annoyed people,’ said Rita, ‘but . . .’

‘How?’ asked Harriet.

‘Well, she was a devil of a tease,’ said Rita. ‘She loved having fun. She would flirt with anybody.’

‘And once or twice people thought she was serious,’ said Muriel, ‘and got very put out when she just laughed it off. I was always telling her it wasn’t kind.’

‘And she just laughed at you, I suppose?’ said Rita. ‘We’re a mixed bunch here, Lady . . . Harriet, I mean. We’ve got all sorts of background; up and down the country, rich and poor. You can tell a lot from our voices – that Muriel and me are out of different boxes: she is nicely brought up – we’re all different. But Wendy didn’t fit with any of us. Don’t get me wrong; we rub along all right. We have a good laugh together over it. But . . .’

‘Wendy didn’t laugh?’ prompted Harriet.

‘She was quick enough to laugh
at
us,’ said Rita.

‘About what sort of thing?’ asked Harriet.

‘Well, she thought of herself as a cut above her company,’ said Rita, who seemed to have dropped her hostility and decided to co-operate. ‘Not because she was posh – she wasn’t as posh as Muriel here, as far as I can tell. Not that I know about that sort of thing. But she was clever; she was better educated than anyone else here. She’d been to university.’

‘Only Reading University,’ offered the stringy young woman from the far end of the table. ‘It wasn’t Oxford. Besides, surely people don’t get murdered for having a degree in Modern Languages.’

‘Well, I could have murdered her for carrying on about the English being narrow and insular,’ said Muriel. ‘And name-dropping. Place-name-dropping, that is. Nice, and Grenoble and Madrid, and Zurich.’

‘No, you couldn’t, Muriel, don’t be silly,’ said Rita. ‘If you were capable of killing anyone, you would have murdered me. Several times. We do get ratty with each other when we’re tired and hungry,’ she added, turning to Harriet.

‘Of course you do,’ said Harriet. ‘But have I got this right: none of you got on easily with Wendy; none of you liked her?’

‘Oh, no, wrong,’ said a rather older woman. ‘We’re giving the wrong impression. Wendy was lovely; she was lots of fun. She could be a bit outrageous, but it was only fooling around. She never
meant
to be unkind. People could take it wrong, that’s all.’

‘What about boyfriends? Did you say she flirted?’

‘All the time. But that was as far as it went. We’re all sleeping in a hay-loft here, Lady Peter. We would know if anyone wasn’t in their bed.’

‘We sleep soundly, though,’ said Rita.

‘And of course, wickedness is possible in the forenoon, and the tea-break,’ said Muriel, ‘as well as by night.’

‘We work all day except Sundays,’ said the older woman. ‘And I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m too dog-tired for wickedness any time of day from the lunch-break onwards.’

This remark was greeted with rueful laughter.

‘Do you know who was upset? Who had taken her more seriously than she meant? Could you give me names?’ Harriet was met with an embarrassed silence. ‘I know it feels like sneaking to the teacher. But Wendy was killed by someone who could do it with his bare hands, very quickly. He didn’t need a weapon. He could strike again any time. So let’s start with that dance.’

‘She didn’t go,’ said Rita at once. ‘She said she had a headache, ho, ho.’

‘You didn’t believe her?’

‘Well, I thought her headache might have been called Roger.’

‘You had better explain that, Rita,’ said Muriel.

‘Wendy had gone out a couple of times with one or two local fellows: Archie Lugg, for one, and Jake Datchett. They were offering to fight each other over her, and she thought that was positively hilarious. She called them the bumpkins. She had promised both of them a dance on Saturday. But a month ago she met Roger Birdlap – he’s an RAF officer over at Steen Manor – and she fell head over heels for him. Really deep stuff. So I rather think the dance was a good opportunity to meet him somewhere quiet; here, for example. We were all going to the dance; he would come over in the vans from the base with all the others, and slip away quietly to meet her. Then when the dance was over the air-raid practice would give them plenty of warning, because you can hear the sirens from here. He would rejoin his mates, and she would scamper along to the shelter.’

‘She was dressed for the dance,’ remarked Harriet.

‘If she hadn’t dressed up, we’d all have noticed,’ said Rita. ‘That was a very nice frock to put on for him, and take off for him.’

‘But surely she wouldn’t have liked to be quite alone with a man . . .’ said a young rather pallid-looking girl, with an Alice band holding back mousy hair.

‘Mistake,’ said Rita tartly. ‘
You
wouldn’t like to be quite alone with a man. Most of us would grab the chance if we fancied the fellow in question.’

‘But . . .’

‘It isn’t entirely respectable? Your mother wouldn’t like it? Gentlemen prefer virgins? For lord’s sake, there’s a war on.’

‘I don’t see what the war’s got to do with things like that,’ said the girl, who was blushing crimson under Rita’s assault.

‘You don’t see what difference it makes that those airmen are about to be slaughtered by the enemy? That none of us may live to see our next birthday? You really don’t?’

Rita turned her back on the company and took to stirring a pan of soup on the primus stove. Harriet thanked them all, including Rita’s back, for helpful information, and took her leave. She was followed across the yard by Muriel. ‘Lady Peter, could you, I mean if you can, would you keep us abreast with things? With the investigation? Even if we can’t help any further?’

‘Yes, of course I will,’ said Harriet. There was a just perceptible glint of tears in Muriel’s pallid blue eyes. Wicked Wendy had had a friend after all.

Returning to her house, Harriet found her nephew Charlie Parker and Lord St George, heads bent, absorbed in a task which had covered the sofa table in the drawing-room with bits and pieces. Charlie looked up with shining eyes.

‘Aunt Harriet, guess what!’ he cried. ‘Uncle Jerry has bought me a crystal set kit and we’re just putting it together now! Wait till I show Sam Bateson – he’ll be green with envy!’

‘Don’t gloat over your friends, young Charles,’ said Jerry firmly. ‘The best people don’t do that. Besides, you might need his help. I’m not putting it together for you, I’m just showing you how it goes and how to work it. You’ll have to assemble it yourself.’

‘But you’ll help me?’

‘Sorry, chum, I have to be off in a mo. As soon as I’ve said goodbye to your aunt here.’

‘Oh, Uncle Jerry,’ groaned Charlie. ‘Can’t you stay till tomorrow?’

‘Wish I could, old man, but duty calls,’ said Jerry. ‘You just clear all this stuff off the table back into the box, and take it upstairs and get going on it.’

When the boy had departed, arms full, and shunted the door closed behind him with his left foot, Jerry said to Harriet, ‘Are you getting involved with this murder, Aunt Harriet?’

‘Somewhat, Jerry. Do you think I shouldn’t?’

‘Well, if Uncle Peter were here . . .’

‘Precisely.’

‘You don’t think it might be dangerous?’

‘A village mystery? Hardly . . . Compared to the general danger . . .’

‘It might not be unrelated.’

‘Well, the victim wouldn’t have been here apart from the war. The land would have been worked by Peter Gurney, Harry Hawk, Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all, and Wicked Wendy would have been – I wonder what she would have been? Working as a school-teacher perhaps?’

‘Hardly. She wasn’t the type. She was drinking in the Crown last time I was here on leave, and vamping all the chaps, Aunt Harriet,’ he said. ‘If I weren’t hopelessly infatuated with my aunt by marriage, I would have been taken for a ride myself.’

‘But it’s funny how often, when the murder victim is a woman, it turns out to have been mostly her fault. She was too cold, or too enticing, or flirtatious or chilly, but somehow . . .’

‘She is made out to deserve her fate. I see what you mean. It’s very unfair to the fairer sex. And the dead can’t defend themselves. Just the same, take care.’

‘I might rather say the same to you. If fighter pilots can take care.’

‘I can take care that if I go down I’ll take one of the bastards with me. You can be sure of that.’

‘Come back alive. Or you’ll break your father’s heart.’

‘Not really. It’s not me he’s so sold on, it’s an heir. Now if I would break
your
heart, that would be an inducement.’

‘Jerry, don’t you ever stop fooling? Of course I would grieve for you, deeply; but I’d rather have you living, and giving me cheek.’

‘Alive or dead, I’m breaking my father’s heart, you know,’ he said, suddenly sombre. ‘If I inherit the title and the land and all that, I shall sell it all at once, and set myself up in a nice bachelor flat in West One.’

‘So you think now. You might surprise yourself.’

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, flushing slightly, and looking at his watch. ‘Kiss me goodbye?’

Harriet kissed him on both cheeks, and watched him run away, swinging his case into the passenger seat of his sports car, and roaring off down the drive.