The Devil`s Feather (39 page)

“How can I?” she asked. “The minute I admit I’m a Wright, the Derbyshires cease to exist.”

I don’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing that I couldn’t identify with this view. I certainly wasn’t as sensitive towards her turmoil as I might have been, but I’ve never viewed labels as much of a guide to what’s in a package. “If you want to be pedantic, Jess, they ceased to exist when your father was born. The last surviving member was your great-grandfather, an alcoholic blackmailer who saw an opportunity to grab some land and took it. It was probably the single most effective thing a Derbyshire ever did, but I guarantee the farm would be a wasteland today if your father hadn’t come as part of the deal.”

She stared unhappily at her hands. “That’s worse than anything Madeleine’s ever said.”

“Except the Wrights are no better,” I went on. “The only one who had any get-up-and-go was the old boy who bought the house and the valley, but his successors were a useless bunch—lazy…mercenary…self-obsessed. By some fluke, probably because your grandmother’s genes were so strong, your father didn’t inherit those traits—and neither have you—but Madeleine has them in spades.”

“So? It still doesn’t make me a Derbyshire.”

“But it’s a good name, Jess. Your grandmother, father and mother were happy with it…your brother and sister, too, presumably. I don’t understand why you’re so unwilling to fight for it.”

She rubbed her head in confusion. “I am. That’s why I don’t want any of this to get out.”

“It won’t,” I said, “not if you keep it between you and Madeleine.”

Her unhappiness grew. “You mean blackmail her?”

“Why not? It worked for the Derbyshires last time.”

21

I
HAD TO
admire Madeleine’s flair for duplicity. She appeared with a concerned smile at eleven o’clock the next morning and said she’d just come from Peter, who’d been telling her about the awful events of the previous weekend. She looked cool and pretty in a white cotton shirtwaist, and I thought how well she confirmed my mother’s advice that no one should judge a book by its cover.

“I had no idea you and Barton House were involved until I spoke to Peter,” she said with convincing sincerity. “The papers talked about Dorset, but didn’t specify where. You must have been terrified, Connie. This man sounds appallingly violent.”

She used my name with casual ease, even though it was only a few days since she’d left a message calling me Marianne. “Come in,” I invited, pulling the door open. “How nice to see you.” She had no monopoly on duplicity.

Her eyes darted about, looking for anything unusual, and she found it immediately. Despite the efforts of a professional cleaner, brought in by the police, and further attempts by me and Jess the previous evening, the bloodstains on the unsealed flagstones and porous fifties wallpaper refused to come out. They were more the colour of mud than freshly spilt haemoglobin, but it didn’t take much imagination to work out what they were.

Madeleine clapped her hands to her mouth and gave a little cry. “Oh, my goodness!” she squeaked. “Whatever’s happened here?”

It was a girly response—the sort of thing clichéd actresses do—but it was genuine enough to persuade me that Peter hadn’t told her much. If anything at all. Jess had been certain the previous evening that, when it came to taking sides, he’d pick me and her over Madeleine, but I wasn’t so easily convinced. In my experience he had verbal diarrhoea where Madeleine was concerned.

I led her towards the green baize door. “Didn’t Peter tell you?” I asked in surprise. “How very strange of him.”

“Is it blood?” she demanded, her heels pecking across the flagstones behind me. “Did someone die?”

I shook my head, pushing open the door and ushering her through. “Nothing so dramatic. Jess’s dogs had a fight and one of them was wounded. It looks worse than it is.” I shepherded her down the corridor. “Would you like a coffee?” I asked, pulling out a chair for her. “Or are you caffeined out on Peter’s espressos?”

She ignored me to wave her hand rather wildly towards the hall. “It can’t stay like that,” she protested. “What will prospective tenants think?”

I retreated to the worktop. “I’m told the flagstones will come up good as new if the top layer is sanded off,” I said, ostentatiously lighting a cigarette. “I’ll have it done before I leave.”

“What about the walls?”

“Those, too.”

She looked suspiciously around the kitchen and I wondered if she’d noticed the faint hum that was coming from the scullery, or the two loops of fabric tape at either end of the Aga rail. “What were the dogs fighting about?”

I shrugged. “Whatever dogs usually fight about. I’m not much of an expert, I’m afraid. Should I stick to the same colour scheme, or would your mother’s solicitor prefer something different?”

“I don’t—” she stopped abruptly. “Did it happen while this man was here?”

“Didn’t Peter tell you?”

She folded herself on to the chair, placing her bag on the floor beside her feet. “Not every detail. I think he wanted to shield me from the worst.”

“Why?”

“Presumably because he didn’t want to worry me.”

“I see.”

She had trouble with short answers. In her world everyone played the game and readily divulged their scrubby little pieces of gossip. She forced a smile. “Peter’s so sweet. He kept it as low-key as possible to avoid upsetting me but the truth is, I’d rather have had the details. It is my house, after all.”

“Oh dear,” I murmured, tapping ash into the sink, which brought an immediate scowl to her face, “that means I’ve given the wrong information to the police. I told them it belonged to your mother. I believe Peter did as well. He even supplied them with the solicitor’s address…the one who has power of attorney.”

She kept the smile in place. Just. “It’s the family home.”

I nodded. “You told me last time.”

She opened her mouth as if to say, “Well then,” but seemed to think better of it. “The papers said this man—MacKenzie—held three people captive then escaped before the police arrived. Was Jess one of the three? You said her dogs were here.”

“I said they had a fight,” I corrected mildly.

“While MacKenzie was here?”

“Jess’s mastiffs are better guard dogs than that.”

Her impatience got the better of her. “Then who
was
here? You must see how worrying it is for me to know that a man broke in so easily with three people on the premises. Did one of them let him in? What did he want? Was he after something in the house?”

“Why don’t you ask your mother’s solicitor?” I suggested. “I’m sure he’ll be able to set your mind at rest. Or even the police. I can give you the name of the detective leading the inquiry.”

“I already know it,” she snapped. “I’ve asked to see him this afternoon.”

“Then there isn’t a problem,” I pointed out reasonably. “He’ll tell you as much as he can.”

She stared at me for a moment, trying to assess if there was any mileage in continuing, then with a shrug reached for her bag. “You’d think the crown jewels had been stolen the way everyone’s behaving.”

“Well, you can be reassured on that front at least,” I said with a small laugh. “MacKenzie didn’t think there was anything worth stealing…so your husband’s paintings are still here.”

She threw me a look of dislike. “Perhaps he was targeting my mother’s antiques. Perhaps he didn’t know she’d left.”

“That was Inspector Bagley’s first idea,” I agreed, “which is why he wanted a list of anything that had struck me as unusual since I took over the tenancy. I said there were several things…but I didn’t think they were connected with Saturday’s events.”

Madeleine froze. Only briefly, but enough for me to notice. “Like what?”

I blew a ring of smoke towards the ceiling. “The water had been turned off.”

It was a guess, much like the guesses I’d made about MacKenzie’s mother, but as I’d said to Jess the previous evening, why stop at turning off the Aga? Why not the water? I couldn’t get it out of my head that Jess had found Lily beside the fishpond. Or that memory might have told her there was a well under the logs in the woodshed. What was she doing outside at eleven o’clock at night? And why did she go to other people’s houses to clean her teeth and have a cup of tea?

“That wasn’t me,” Madeleine said abruptly, searching through her bag so that she wouldn’t have to look at me. “It must have been the agent. The stopcock’s under the sink. All you had to do was turn it back on again.”

“I didn’t mean it was off when I arrived,” I told her. “The taps in the kitchen were fine. The problem was upstairs. There was so much air in the water pipes to the bathroom taps that they all started banging. It scared the living daylights out of me.”

“It’s an old house,” she said carefully. “Mummy was always complaining about the pipes.”

“I called in a plumber because I was so worried, and the first thing he did was check the stopcock. According to him, air gets into a system when the main supply is interrupted and people keep trying the taps because they don’t understand why nothing’s coming out. Water runs out downstairs and air fills the void upstairs. He said it could only have happened while someone was living here…and that must have been your mother because the house was empty till I took it on.”

She took a tissue from her bag and touched it to the end of her nose. “I don’t know anything about the water system. All I know is that Mummy said the pipes were always banging.”

I was relying very heavily on the fact that she knew nothing about the water system. Or any other system. My “oddities” were courtesy of Jess. “Try Madeleine with the electricity as well,” she had said. “The night I found Lily, the house was in darkness and I couldn’t get the outside lights to work. That’s the main reason I took her back to the farm. I didn’t want to waste time trying to find out which of her fuses had blown. Everything was working fine the next day, and I rather forgot about it.”

“Something else that was unusual,” I went on, “was that several of the fuse cartridges had been removed from the electricity box. If Jess hadn’t been here, I’d have spent my first night in darkness because none of the lights in the bedrooms worked. It was only when she checked the box that we discovered why. They were laid in a row on the top of the case…and as soon as they were plugged back in the lights came on.”

Madeleine played with her tissue.

“Do you know who might have done that? The police are wondering if an electrician did some work. If so, how did he get in? They’re very keen to find anyone who’s had access to the house in the last six to nine months. They’re wondering if your mother let him in…but why would he leave her in darkness?”

She shook her head.

“The
really
strange thing,” I said, reaching into the sink to turn on the tap and drown my fag end, “is that the valve on the oil tank was turned off but the gauge was reading full. And that doesn’t make any sense, because Burton’s last delivery was at the end of November…and your mother didn’t go into a nursing-home until the third week in January. It meant she had no hot water or cooking facilities for the last two months she was here.” I paused. “But how could that have happened without you knowing? Did you not visit her during that time?”

Madeleine found her voice at last. “I couldn’t,” she said rather curtly as if it was a criticism she’d faced before. “My son was ill and I was helping Nathaniel prepare for an exhibition. In any case, Peter came in regularly so I would have expected to hear from him if anything was wrong.”

“But not from Jess,” I said matter-of-factly. “She’d already written to tell you that she’d withdrawn her support from Lily.”

“I don’t recall that.”

“I’m sure you do,” I said, taking a copy of Jess’s letter from my pocket. “Do you want to remind yourself of what she said. No? Then I’ll do the honours.” I isolated a passage. “ ‘Whatever’s gone before, your mother needs your help now, Madeleine. Please do not go on ignoring her. For a number of reasons, I can no longer visit, but it’s in your interests to come down and organize some care for her. Without support, she cannot stay at Barton House alone. She’s more confused than Peter realizes but if you allow him or anyone else to decide on her competence you might regret it.’ ” I looked up. “All of which was true, wasn’t it?”

She abandoned denial in favour of protest. “And why should I believe it when Mummy’s GP was saying the opposite? If you knew Jess better, you’d know that stirring up trouble is her favourite pastime…particularly between me and my mother. I wasn’t going to take her word against Peter’s.”

I showed surprise. “But you and Nathaniel drove down as soon as you received this letter…so you must have given it some credence.”

There was a brief hesitation. “That’s not true.”

I went on as if she hadn’t spoken: “You sent Nathaniel to find out from Jess what ‘regret’ meant while you stayed here and tried to prise it out of your mother. Did she tell you? Or did you have to wait for Nathaniel to come back with the bad news about the power of attorney?”

I watched her mouth thin to a narrow line. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. The first I heard about the solicitor being in charge was when Mummy was taken into care.”