The Devil`s Feather (6 page)

She didn’t seem surprised. “You’ll need your car keys then.”

I nodded.

She fished them out of her pocket and held them up. “I took them from your bag when I was looking for an inhaler. It was close to where you dropped your mobile.”

“I’m not asthmatic.”

“I guessed.” She curled her fingers round the keys. “I’m going to hang on to them to stop you driving. You can’t leave yet…not behind a wheel, anyway. If you want them back, you’ll have to come into the house and get them.”

Her assumption that I would tamely do as she said annoyed me. I still thought of her as younger than she was, but there was a rigidity about her slight frame that suggested a strength of purpose I didn’t have. “Are you a policeman?”

“No. Just playing safe. You’ll damage yourself as well as other people if I let you go now.” She searched my face again. “Was it the dogs?”

I recalled how long it had taken me to drive through the entrance. “No.”

She gave a satisfied nod before tucking the keys back into her pocket. “The doctor who’s coming—Peter Coleman—knows nothing about panic attacks,” she said bluntly. “He’ll probably tell you to take tranquillizers and write out a shopping list of anti-depressants to lift your mood. I only phoned him to cover my arse in case you tried to sue. You’d do better to put your faith in paper bags and break the cycle.”

A small laugh floated round my head. “Are you a psychiatrist?”

“No, but I had a few panic attacks when I was twenty.”

“What were you afraid of?”

She thought for a moment. “Not being able to cope, I suppose. I was left with a farm to run, and I didn’t know how to do it. What are
you
afraid of?”

Suffocation…drowning…dying…

“Not being able to cope,” I echoed flatly.

It was a truth of sorts but she didn’t believe it. Either my tone was wrong or my face was telling her something else. I wondered if she was offended that I hadn’t confided in her, because she pushed herself to her feet and disappeared back into the house again. Some while afterwards, the doctor arrived.

He drew up alongside Jess’s Land Rover and I watched him ease himself out of the driver’s door. He was a tall, dark-haired man, dressed in a linen jacket and cavalry twills, and I could see a golf bag propped on the front seat of his BMW. He stooped to check his tie in the driver’s window before walking past me and into Barton House. I heard him call, “Where the hell are you, Jess? What’s this all about?” before his voice was swallowed by the walls.

If anything was guaranteed to set me panicking again it was the thought of all the fuss that was going to follow. Ambulances…psychiatrists…hospitals…the press. I could predict the tabloid headlines:
“Distressed Connie Has Breakdown.”
It was the stimulus I needed to get out of the car because I knew I couldn’t face the shame of disclosure again. I should have been as brave as Adelina.

Did you try to resist? No.

Did you ask the men who they were? No.

Did you ask them why they were doing it? No.

Did you talk to them at all? No.

Can you tell us anything, Ms. Burns? No.

I eased my fingers out of a fist to reach for the door handle, and found I’d been gripping the paper bag so hard that it had begun to disintegrate in the sweat of my palm. It’s the little things that frighten. I had a sudden, terrible fear that this was my last bag.

It wasn’t. My stash was still in the pocket to my right, a heap of folded brown paper that represented a lifeline. It’s a trick I discovered on the Internet. If you inhale your own carbon dioxide, the symptoms of panic begin to lessen. The brain understands that the body isn’t going to die of asphyxiation, and the vicious cycle of terror is temporarily broken. As I learnt later, the means of managing her attacks had been Jess’s key to stopping them, but, for me, paper bags were merely a last resort before I died of suffocation.

I wiped my hands fiercely against each other to rid myself of the shreds. It was Lady Macbeth stuff. “Out, damned spot! Out, I say! Hell is murky!” But how did Shakespeare know that troubled women need to clean themselves obsessively? Is it something we’ve done for centuries to purge ourselves of filth?

I remembered reading in the web description of Barton House that there was a fishpond in the garden. It wasn’t visible from my car, so logic said it was round the back. It doesn’t matter what drove me there to wash my hands, but I’ve often wondered since if the reason I became interested in Lily Wright’s story was because I knelt to wash my hands where Jess Derbyshire had found her dying.

5

F
ROM WHAT
I learnt later, I don’t believe Lily and I would have been friends. She had old-fashioned views about a woman’s place, and would certainly have frowned on an unmarried war correspondent who put job before family. Her position in life was to play “grande dame” to Winterbourne Barton because Barton House was the oldest and largest in the valley and her family had lived in it for three generations. While her husband was alive, and before the demography of the village changed with an influx of outsiders, she took an active part in community life, but after his death she became increasingly detached from it.

It was a slow process that went largely unnoticed, and most people assumed that her regular mentioning of close connections with Dorset’s aristocracy meant she preferred her old associates to Winterbourne Barton’s newcomers. Her daughter, Madeleine, who visited irregularly from London, reinforced this view by talking about her mother’s social standing; and, since Lily glossed over her deceased husband’s squandering of her fortune on the stock market and made a pretence of being wealthier than she was, it was generally accepted that her friends were outside the community.

She survived on a state pension and some small dividends that she’d managed to keep from her husband, Robert, but poverty was always lurking round the corner. It meant that Barton House was in a terrible state of repair—something I discovered as soon as I moved in—with bowed ceilings and damp walls, but as few visitors were allowed beyond the hall and drawing-room this wasn’t generally known. Stains on carpets and walls were hidden beneath rugs and pictures, and wisteria was coaxed across the peeling paintwork on the windowsills outside. She dressed elegantly in tweed skirts and jackets, with her white hair twisted into a loose chignon at the back of her neck; and she remained a handsome woman until Alzheimer’s stopped her caring.

Her garden was her passion and, though it was running wild by the time I arrived, the care she’d lavished on it was still obvious. The house remained much as it had been in her grandfather’s time. There was no central heating and any warmth came from the Aga in the kitchen or had to be provided by log fires. Upstairs, the damp made the bedrooms cold, even in summer, and there was never enough hot water to fill the big, old-fashioned bath. Showers were non-existent. There was an antiquated twin-tub washing-machine, a small fridge-freezer, a cheap microwave and a television in the back room where Lily spent most of her time. During the winters she wrapped herself in a great coat and blankets, which she discarded if anyone came to the front door in order to pretend she’d been sitting in front of an unlit fire in the draughty drawing-room.

Like much of Dorset, Winterbourne Barton had changed radically over the previous twenty years with house prices soaring and local people selling up in order to realize their most valuable asset. Two or three of the properties became second homes and remained empty for large parts of the year, but most of the newcomers were city retirees on good pension schemes who bought into Winterbourne Barton for its picture-postcard quality and proximity to the sea.

The village began life in the eighteenth century when a previous owner of Barton House used some unproductive land to erect three cottages for his workers. Built in Purbeck stone with thatched roofs and casement windows, these picturesque houses set the pattern for the hundred or so that followed until West Dorset council designated Winterbourne Barton a conservation area and further development was banned. It was this restriction on new building, as much as the roses and honeysuckle climbing up the pretty stone façades, that attracted pensioners. It seemed there was a cachet to exclusivity, particularly when a village was among the most photographed (and envied) in the county.

The explanation for Lily’s continued isolation was her own refusal to socialize. She invited anyone in who called, but the reception was as cool as her drawing-room, and the conversation was invariably about her “chums”—the great and good of the West Country—and never about the newcomers in front of her. According to Jess, she was too proud to admit she’d fallen on hard times, which would have become obvious if she’d developed close friendships with her neighbours, but I think it more likely she shared Jess’s indifference to people.

Her only regular visitor was Jess, whose grandmother had been a maid at Barton House during and after the war years. This servant/mistress relationship appeared to have been handed down through the Derbyshire family, first to Jess’s father, and on his death to Jess herself. Although neither was paid for what they did, it seemed they were at Lily’s beck and call whenever anything went wrong, and even supplied her with free food from the farm to eke out her pension.

It was a state of affairs that Lily’s daughter, Madeleine, apparently took for granted. Busy in London with a husband and an eleven-year-old son, she relied on Jess to perform a service that she couldn’t do herself. Yet she made no secret of her dislike of Jess; nor did Jess hide hers in return. The reasons for the rift were unknown, but Winterbourne Barton’s sympathies were definitely with Lily’s daughter. Madeleine was an attractive forty-year-old who, unlike her mother and Jess, had an open, friendly personality and was popular in the village. There was also a general suspicion that Jess’s motives in making herself indispensable to a wealthy woman were questionable.

Lily was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in June of 2003. She was seventy years old, which made her comparatively young for the disease, but it was still in its early stages and, barring brief bouts of forgetfulness, there was no reason why she shouldn’t remain independent for some time to come. Confusion led her to stray during the autumn, and several of her neighbours found her wandering in Winterbourne Barton. As no one had been told she had Alzheimer’s, and she spoke quite sensibly when they pointed her in the direction of where she lived, they assumed it was mild eccentricity—only bad when the wind was north-northwest.

Her condition deteriorated markedly over Christmas and the New Year. On four occasions in January she let herself in through unlocked back doors while householders were watching television in the evening, and tiptoed upstairs. She used their towels and toothbrushes to wash her face and hands and clean her teeth at their basins, then climbed, fully clothed, between their sheets and fell asleep. She reacted aggressively when she was discovered, but was quickly calmed by a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Still claiming to be unaware that Lily was seriously ill—despite her dishevelled appearance and bizarre behaviour—the four householders drove her home each time and took it no further. They described her as rude and unpleasant, and said she insisted on being returned immediately to Barton House, claiming the only help she wanted was Jess Derbyshire’s or Dr. Peter Coleman’s. She dismissed her rescuers as soon she reached her back door.

The incidents were discussed in the village, but the consensus appeared to be that it was better not to interfere. If they didn’t get the rough edge of Lily’s tongue, they’d certainly get the rough edge of Jess Derbyshire’s. Had Peter Coleman been around, they’d have raised the matter with him, but he was on holiday and wasn’t expected back till the end of January. A message was left on Madeleine’s answerphone, but she, too, was away, and no one felt confident about suggesting to Peter Coleman’s locum that Mrs. Wright was behaving oddly.

Afterwards, the finger of blame was pointed firmly at Jess. How could Winterbourne Barton know that she hadn’t been near Lily since November? She’d fawned over the woman for years, knew better than anyone that Lily’s mental condition was fragile, then abandoned her without a word when the consequences of Alzheimer’s became too demanding. Why hadn’t she told anyone?

Yet it was Jess who saved Lily’s life. At eleven o’clock at night on the third Friday in January, she found her barely alive and dressed only in a nightdress beside the Barton House fishpond. Not strong enough to carry Lily to the back door, and with no mobile signal to call for help, she reversed her Land Rover across the lawn, hoisted Lily into the back and drove her back to Barton Farm, where she phoned for a doctor.

There were no plaudits, only more suspicion. What was Jess doing in Lily’s garden at that time of night? Why didn’t she use the landline in the house? Why had she driven Lily to Barton Farm instead of the hospital? Why call in social services so quickly? Why accuse everyone else of neglect when it was she who’d neglected Lily the most shamefully? Conspiracy theories abounded, particularly when it became clear that Lily had secretly reassigned enduring power of attorney from her daughter to her solicitor. Jess was assumed to have been behind the decision.

In Madeleine’s absence, Lily was sectioned for her own safety and placed in care over the weekend while efforts were made to contact her solicitor. Madeleine rushed down the following week on her return from holiday, only to discover that her mother’s fate was out of her hands. Lily’s solicitor had wasted no time in moving her to an expensive nursing-home, nor of announcing his intention to sell Barton House and the family heirlooms to cover the fees.