Grave Matters (12 page)

He brightened. She had not, then, got an assignation in the meadows with David.

She was wearing her blackberry-coloured trouser suit and her hair was freed from its usual clasp, so that it hung loose on her shoulders. It made her look very young. As they drove off Patrick was silent. Having successfully banished all thought of David Bruce from his mind for hours, now he could not get rid of it; old-fashioned sentiments on the lines of how dare he trifle with her rushed through his head, and were followed by the notion that it might not be just trifling. Ellen sensed the tension in him, and could only think of trite remarks to make about the landscape as they passed. The easy feeling there had been between them had disappeared and she began to regret that they were committed to spending a good part of the day together.

There were a number of cars parked outside the Meldsmead Arms.

‘Shall I nip in and get us some beer? Or would you like to have a drink here?’ Patrick asked.

‘Let’s take some back with us,’ Ellen said.

‘Right.’ Patrick stopped the car and got out. ‘Won’t be long,’ he said.

Both bars were busy but Fred Brown had time to greet him at once. He bought four pints of light ale. That should do for today and for some future occasion when Ellen entertained David Bruce, he thought bitterly. Perhaps this evening, after he had gone, David would come to visit her.

He pulled himself together as he went back to the car; what had happened to his obedient mind that it was wandering along such profitless paths?

Ellen picked up various letters from just inside the front door before they stepped inside. Patrick’s sharp eye noticed the electricity bill and what looked like a rates demand. There was one letter without a stamp which she stuffed quickly into her pocket; the rest she laid on the table in the sitting-room. One large envelope was addressed to Miss Amelia and came from some classical society to which she had belonged.

‘Their computer doesn’t seem to have caught up with things,’ said Ellen. She opened the window. ‘It smells stuffy, doesn’t it, yet it’s cold.’

‘Shall I light the fire?’ said Patrick. It would give him some occupation while Ellen foraged for lunch, and take his mind off his churning thoughts.

‘Oh, what a good idea. There are sticks and things in the shed.’

Patrick went off on his errand. In the shed, which was at the rear of the cottage, he found kindling and some logs. There didn’t seem to be any coal. There was a tin of paraffin and another of creosote, various garden tools, and a pile of old papers and magazines which he thought would be too damp to ignite with any ease. He collected up a load of twigs and logs, found some dry newspaper in the kitchen, and soon had a promising fire going in the big hearth. It smoked a little at first, but as the wood caught and the chill left the chimney it drew better. He piled on logs and went in search of Ellen, who had disappeared.

He saw her from the kitchen window. She was at the far end of the garden near the fence by the field, reading a letter, the one she had so swiftly pocketed when they arrived, no doubt. She had taken off her jacket, and with her hair loose she looked almost like a boy as she came back towards the cottage, walking slowly, looking at the ground.

As soon as she came indoors the illusion was dispelled; she was utterly feminine. She produced a large tin of curry and cooked some rice. With this, and fresh apples from the garden, and the beer, they had an excellent meal. Then they found the Cicero
Letters
for Bernard; Ellen said the
Orations
must wait until the missing one was found. Finally Patrick felt obliged to leave, and Ellen did not press him to stay. She had a date, he thought in fury.

But she thanked him with every appearance of sincerity for the evening at Mark’s, and for bringing her back to Meldsmead.

‘How will you get back to London?’ he could not resist enquiring, rubbing salt into his already smarting wound.

‘Oh, I’ll get the early train tomorrow. George Kent commutes. ‘He’ll take me to the station,’ she said. She did not mention David, who probably went up each day on the motorway in his BMW.

Patrick drove off, moving rapidly up through the gears to get away quickly, since it had to happen. Watching him out of sight, Ellen felt suddenly forlorn; it came to her that she was letting go something of great value that might never come her way again.

Jane was definitely plumper. She had acquired a placid look, and was knitting.

‘You do look cow-like,’ Patrick said.

‘Thanks very much.’

‘Must be strange,’ he mused.

‘It’s quite often rather uncomfortable, but it’s gratifying. I feel smug and docile,’ Jane said.

They sat in silence for a while, while Patrick meditated and Jane knitted calmly on. Michael was away at a conference and he had come to spend the evening. At last Jane said, after casting several shrewd glances at him: ‘Patrick, something’s eating you. What is it? Wasn’t the weekend a success?’ For she had known that Ellen was coming to Oxford.

‘It was wonderful. She’s a marvellous girl with a good brain – she doesn’t realise herself how good it is – and she’s pretty and gentle . . .’ his voice trailed off and he looked somewhat embarrassed.

Jane was amazed at this extravagant speech.

‘Well then, why don’t you bring her over here some time?’ she said, pretending to count her stitches.

‘She’s messing about with David Bruce. That’s the chap with the haunted house and the dead dog.’

‘How do you know she is?’

‘I’ve seen them together,’ he said. He recounted his experience in the British Museum. ‘I’d meant to ask her out to lunch,’ he said. ‘But there wasn’t any point. There was no doubt about the situation between them – if you’d seen how they looked at one another—’

‘Why were you prowling round among the marbles?’ Jane asked.

‘I was casing the joint. I wanted to see if someone could push an old lady down the stairs and vanish upwards,’ Patrick said.

‘And could it be done?’

‘Easily.’

‘But that didn’t happen. It would have been seen. You can’t go pushing people down stairs and running off. A witness would collar you.’

‘Someone you knew, if you were an old lady, could take your arm and then suddenly shove you, when no one seemed to be looking,’ Patrick said.

‘Not Ellen! Why should she want to get rid of poor Mildred Forrest?’ Jane exclaimed.

‘No. Why should she? But someone else might.’

‘Who?’

‘I can’t think. She must have been utterly harmless,’ Patrick said. ‘I’m imagining things again.’

Could Miss Forrest have stumbled on the truth of the relationship between Ellen and David, and bidden her to the museum to chide her? She might have felt it her duty, as Miss Amelia’s friend. Or if not to chide, to advise?

‘Jane – all that stuff about the Slade House motto – virtue is my breastplate or whatever you said it was – what would Miss Amelia have thought about goings-on by any of her girls?’

‘Do you mean what would she have thought about adulterous associations?’ asked Jane firmly.

‘Well—yes.’

‘She would have been slow to accept that any of her girls could indulge in such acts,’ Jane said. ‘But once convinced, or if she should learn that any of her girls had done anything else she deplored, she’d do her best to expunge them from her memory. It would be as if they’d never existed.’

‘Now? In the nineteen-seventies?’

‘Very much so. She’d go on till the very last moment believing the best of everyone, and she’d admit that her own code was strict, but if someone she’d had influence over didn’t live up to her standards she’d think it her own failure.’

‘You’re sure of all this? She left before you went there, remember.’

‘Thank goodness she did. She must have been a tartar,’ Jane said. ‘But it was part of the Slade House legend, handed down as the lore of the past.’

‘Hm,’ Patrick grunted.

‘I don’t see what you’re getting at.’

‘I don’t see it myself. I’m thinking aloud, really.’ Patrick rootled in his pocket and pulled out a dried seed pod; he ferreted about in the depths near the seam and found some actual seeds, small and black. ‘Do you know what these are?’ he asked.

Jane looked at them.

‘Laburnum seeds, aren’t they?’

‘Yes. Very poisonous. I got them from the Bruces’ garden.’

‘And?’

‘The dog died. Carol Bruce was sick.’

‘You’re not suggesting someone fed them both laburnum seeds?’

‘There’s a yew hedge, too, round the house. That’s also poisonous,’ Patrick said.

‘Patrick, no. People don’t go round murdering their wives just because they fancy someone else. They get divorced, or have affairs,’ said Jane.

‘David Bruce may not have wanted a divorce,’ Patrick said. ‘His wife may have a lot of money. She’s certainly got expensive tastes. And Ellen isn’t the sort of girl to be happy just being someone’s mistress indefinitely.’

He could not now ask Ellen whether it was Carol who had bought the house; he knew that it was she who had wanted it, much more than David. But then again, he had only Ellen’s word for that. What if it were David who had decided on the house?

‘Leave it, leave it, Patrick,’ Jane urged him. ‘Wait a year. Keep away from Ellen and find someone else, or if you can’t do that, at least stop looking for mysteries. Ellen will get over David in a year, if she’s as you say she is. Then, if you still find her special, try again.’

The thought that this wretched girl preferred anyone to her brother was anathema to Jane.

‘Oh, I’m not smitten,’ Patrick said lightly. ‘She’s just different – one on her own.’

Jane was not deceived.

‘And I can’t leave it alone. Something’s wrong, but I don’t know what it is. A dog has died. An innocent woman keeps having accidents, and two old ladies have fallen to their deaths.’

‘We’ll accept that Ellen and David are having an affair,’ said Jane. ‘What possible link can that have with Amelia?’

‘She wouldn’t have approved.’

‘She didn’t know about it. She was dead before the Bruces came to Meldsmead. And if she’s doing a haunt, it would be David she’d be badgering, or Ellen, not Carol.’ Jane had abandoned her knitting now and was gazing at him earnestly. ‘Patrick dear, do leave it. This time it’s you that will get hurt,’ she said.

‘I’m afraid I’m hurt already,’ Patrick admitted. ‘I can’t leave it. I’m so sure something else dreadful is going to happen. You can’t just walk away from things because they’re unpleasant. That doesn’t make them vanish.’

Jane had often heard Patrick hold forth about the sin of indifference.

‘What’s this David like?’ she asked.

‘Oh – all right, I suppose. I’d dislike him whatever he was like in fact,’ said Patrick. ‘He was a bit hopeless about the dog – the burying of it, and all that. I was surprised he didn’t want a post-mortem, to know why it had died.’ If he’d poisoned it, of course he wouldn’t want the fact disclosed. ‘The wife’s the stronger character.’

‘Why are you so sure of that? You’ve only met her once, haven’t you?’

It was true.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps I felt that David was weak, and two weak people don’t get married to each other.’

‘Oh Patrick, yes they do. They flutter happily together in perfect harmony,’ said Jane, laughing at him. ‘I think you’re biased against David. He may be perfectly delightful.’

‘Maybe he’s loaded to the gills with sex appeal,’ said Patrick gloomily.

‘Well, so are you, so you should worry,’ Jane declared, and saw him turn a deep crimson shade. ‘I know. I’ve seen the effect you have on women,’ she declared. ‘Otherwise I couldn’t tell you so – it’s not an aspect of their brothers that sisters take much heed of and can judge.’

‘Michael sometimes cooks the supper, doesn’t he?’ he said, abruptly changing the subject.

‘Yes. When he’s in the mood. Why?’

‘Does he make things like pies? Blackberry and apple, that sort of thing?’

Jane stared.

‘Good heavens, no. He makes jolly good meat dishes but never a pud – and before we were married, when he was busy seducing girls in his flat, he used to buy ready-made pavlovas and what-not from a patisserie nearby. Lots of people buy ready-made puddings.’

‘Oh. That’s a useful bit of information you’ve given me,’ Patrick said.

‘Any time,’ said Jane, picking up her knitting once again.

The next Wednesday night Patrick went down to Meldsmead once more. He drove through the village, fortunately meeting no one, and parked where he had left the car before his previous walk across the fields. Then, on foot, as on that other occasion, he climbed the stile, but this time he went to Mulberry Cottage. No lights showed: a quick look round revealed no car outside, and the windows were blank, the curtains still drawn back; no one was there. He had no real plan, just the feeling that some key to what was troubling him lay here, if he could only find it.

The front and back doors were both securely locked, and all the windows were tightly closed. He could not get in. He did not know what he expected to find, just something to trigger his mind in a new direction. He went into the shed where he had found the kindling wood on Sunday. There was the pile of papers and magazines, stacked on a shelf. He could use his torch freely in here without fear of being seen, and he took them down, careful not to disturb the dust and bird droppings from the top copy of
The Times.
It was, he saw, three years old. He lifted it carefully off. Below were copies of
Punch, The Illustrated London News,
and then, wrapped between two venerable copies of the
Sunday Times,
he found a photograph album. It was old and spotted with damp; some of the photographs were yellow and some had stuck together. It seemed to consist wholly of groups of schoolgirls. He wrapped it up again, separated it from its pile, and then replaced the other papers where he had found them.

‘If I were a policeman, it would be so easy to find out all the things I want to know,’ said Patrick.

It was the following afternoon, and he was back with Jane. Andrew had gone out to tea with a small boy who lived nearby.