Authors: Margaret Mayhew
Dry Bones
Table of Contents
Recent Titles by Margaret Mayhew from Severn House
A FOREIGN FIELD
DRY BONES
I'LL BE SEEING YOU
THE LAST WOLF
THE LITTLE SHIP
OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE
OUR YANKS
THE PATHFINDER
QUADRILLE
ROSEBUDS
THOSE IN PERIL
THREE SILENT THINGS
A Village Mystery
Margaret Mayhew
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First world edition published 2012
in Great Britain and in the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9â15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.
Copyright © 2012 by Margaret Mayhew.
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Mayhew, Margaret, 1936-
Dry bones.
1. Dorset (England)âFiction. 2. Detective and mystery
stories.
I. Title
823.9'14-dc23
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-291-7 (Epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8180-9 (cased)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
For Philip
I
n early spring, the Colonel went down with a bad attack of flu. Apart from a bout of malaria when he'd been serving out in the tropics, his health had always been remarkably good. There had been the usual childhood diseases â measles, chickenpox, mumps, and so on â but he could not remember any of them being as unpleasant as this, not even the malaria.
He lay aching and miserable in his bed at Pond Cottage â the only consolation being that the bedroom window overlooked Frog End village green and he could see the occasional passer-by to cheer his day. Major Cuthbertson, for instance, purposefully striding out in the direction of the Dog and Duck; Mrs Cuthbertson crouched balefully over the wheel of their Escort, bound for her ladies' bridge afternoon; Miss Butler emerging like a timid mouse from Lupin Cottage on the other side of the green; the nice young vicar chugging along in his battered saloon to make his calls; the organist, Miss Hartshorne, on her sit-up-and-beg bicycle, weaving her way towards the church; Philippa Rankin cantering one of her riding school ponies over the grass; Mrs Bentley out with her four dachshunds, their tangled leads encircling her stout legs like ribbons round a maypole.
Life was going on, just as normal, for everyone else while he had been summarily removed from its orbit. He was an outsider: a germ-ridden pariah. Banished beyond the pale.
He turned his head towards the photograph of Laura on the bedside table beside him. There was another much grander studio portrait of her in the sitting room below, as well as the large silver-framed one taken at their wedding, but this simple snapshot was the image that he carried in his heart. He had taken it himself when they had been on honeymoon, many years ago. Laura was wearing a cotton frock, her hair blowing in the breeze and she was smiling at him. No glamorous gown, no studio artifice, no clever lighting, no tricks of the trade. Just Laura, as she had been and how he would always remember her.
If he felt low now with his dose of flu, how much worse must she have felt when she had been fighting her battle against cancer? He had seen her physical suffering plainly enough, but she had kept the rest hidden from him. He had never quite known whether she knew the truth. They had played a game of make-believe, encouraged by the jolly hospital nurses and the friendly young doctors, and it had been played to the very end when she had finally given up the unequal struggle. Let go of her frail grasp on life in the middle of one night when he had been at home in bed asleep and she had been alone.
He shifted his aching legs again and Thursday see-sawed up and down at the end of the bed, clinging on to the eiderdown with his claws. The old cat had given up waiting for the sitting room fire to be lit so that he could take up his usual place at the warm end of the sofa. He had finally made his arthritic way upstairs to the bedroom to settle firmly, instead, on the Colonel's feet. For a bony old moggy, long past his prime, he was surprisingly heavy but no amount of shifting and kicking would dislodge him. Nothing had dislodged him from Pond Cottage either.
He had been named by the former occupant of the cottage, an ancient pensioner, simply because he had first turned up on a Thursday. The stray cat had disappeared when the old man had died, only to reappear on the very day that the Colonel had moved in. Also, on a Thursday. It had seemed pointless to change it â as pointless as it had proved to try to persuade the battle-scarred, flea-ridden, torn-eared creature, to move on elsewhere. Thursday had graciously favoured the Colonel with his permanent presence and that had been that. There were times, he had to admit, when it was not entirely unwelcome; in fact, sometimes he was glad of it.
When Laura had died eleven years ago, he had found living on his own almost unbearable. The loneliness, the terrible silence, the long and empty days had come as a severe shock to him after a lifetime spent always with others. Family, boarding school, the army . . . always plenty of company and plenty of useful activity. Retirement and widowhood were uncharted and alien waters, something he had never even thought about or prepared for. There was still his daughter and his son, of course: Alison in her high-powered City job, Marcus with Susan and his two children resettled in Norfolk. They had both wanted him to live close by â either in a service flat in London near Alison, or in an easy-to-run bungalow down the road from Marcus and Susan. Instead, he had gone in stubborn search of a cottage that he and Laura had once seen many years ago when they had been touring on home leave in the West Country. They had stopped at a village pub and sat out on a bench in the sun. Laura had noticed the rose-covered cottage on the other side of the green and said that one day, when he had retired from the army and they had finally come back to live in England, they must find a home just like that. He had forgotten the name of the village but he had driven round and round Dorset lanes in pouring rain until, finally, he had come across the pub and the green and Laura's dream cottage. The roses were not in bloom and either distance had led enchantment to their eyes, or the intervening years had taken a severe toll on the house because it looked in bad shape. But, by a remarkable coincidence, it was for sale. Ignoring rising damp, rotting thatch, death-watch beetle, dirt and decay throughout, he had bought it, together with the half acre of surrounding jungle. He had bought it because of Laura and because he knew that she would have thoroughly approved.
His children, naturally, had not approved. Alison had thought he was making a bad financial mistake and Marcus that he was losing his mind. They were probably both right. It had cost a small fortune to make the cottage habitable â to rethatch the roof, strip out hideous modern additions, uncover the ancient inglenook fireplace, expose beams, repair, replaster, repaint, rewire, re-plumb, put in central heating and equip the kitchen.
And when it was finally ready and he had moved in, he had found the demons of loneliness lying in wait for him. It was easier to keep them at bay during the day, when he could get out and about, but when he sat alone in his wing-back tapestry chair by the fireside in the evening, whisky in hand, they came sidling forth to mock him.
He had been lucky, though, because help was at hand. The inhabitants of Frog End had gradually co-opted him into their lives. He had been made treasurer of the summer garden fête committee â a job passed on with alacrity by Major Cuthbertson, and which, naturally, nobody else had wanted. He had begun to meet people and to be asked to help out in other ways â cutting the churchyard grass, collecting for worthy charities, driving patients to and from hospital appointments in Dorchester, manning stalls at jumble sales, and so on.
The village might look about as lively as a stagnant pond, but beneath the surface there was plenty going on. For instance, there had been two murders within the space of a year which was somewhat unusual, to say the least. The much-disliked Lady Swynford of Frog End Manor, had been smothered with a pillow right in the middle of the summer fête, and a famous, if ageing, actress who had come to live in one of the new luxury flats at The Hall had been electrocuted in her bath on New Year's Eve. The Colonel had been caught up unwittingly in both cases, carried out his own private investigations and reached the truth.
fn1
And, of course, nobody who lived next door to Naomi Grimshaw could ever feel completely alone. He remembered the first evening when she had appeared in his sitting room doorway, dressed in a purple tracksuit and white running shoes, her short grey hair bluntly trimmed like the new thatch on his roof. A self-styled widow, she had in reality been divorced from her husband many years before he had died. But, as she had shrewdly pointed out, widows and widowers were awarded far more sympathy and status points than divorcees. Especially widowers, like himself, who were always useful to make up the numbers.
Naomi had introduced him to gardening.
Something
, she had quite rightly said, must be done about the jungle surrounding his cottage. He had seen and admired the garden of her Pear Tree Cottage beyond the old stone wall that divided their properties. A place of natural beauty where plants seemed to have planted themselves, cascading and drifting as in some soft-focused Impressionist painting. No regimented beds, no garish hues, no sharp edges. He knew even less about gardening than he did about art, but he knew what he liked.
Encouraged and inspired, the Colonel had rolled up his shirt sleeves and Done Something. Jacob, the strong and simple-minded labourer from the Manor had been persuaded to help during his time off and, under Naomi's stick-waving, enthusiastic direction, the jungle had gradually been cleared. The stinging nettles and the weeds, the tangled brambles and the overgrown shrubs had been carted away, together with hundreds of rusty tin cans.
To start him off, Naomi had given him a lavender cutting and plants that she'd raised from seeds germinating on her cottage windowsills and in the lean-to greenhouse. She had also lent him several well-thumbed gardening books and told him to choose the rest himself so that it would be
his
garden â his own creation. He had never so much as lifted a trowel in his life and could scarcely tell a daisy from a daffodil, but he began to learn. He could never hope to emulate Naomi's enchanted plot but, by the end of the first year, his garden was making quiet progress and the pond which had been rediscovered in the great clear-out had attracted all kinds of residents and passing visitors â snails, newts, dragonflies, water beetles and boatmen, a grass snake, thirsty hedgehogs and birds and even Thursday, who much preferred the pond or puddles to his nice clean water bowl in the kitchen. Most satisfactorily of all, given the name of the village, it had become home to a frog.