Seventeen

“DI Yates!”

Tim had taken a detour to Laurieston House to call in briefly on Patti Gardner, but she’d arrived only just before him and made it clear that it would be some time before she could produce constructive results. Tim took the dismissal good-naturedly; in any case, he needed to get to Spalding while it was still early. He’d reached his car when he turned to see Jackie Briggs standing in front of him.

“The lady policeman said that you were interested in knowing more about Laurieston House. My grandmother was housekeeper to the old lady who owned it before it was sold to Mr Kevan’s grandfather. She gave my grandmother her diary. I thought you might like to see it.”

Tim took the notebook from Jackie Briggs and turned it over in his hand. Viewed as a tome likely to yield up the secrets of a modern forger, let alone a murderer, it wasn’t encouraging. He was holding a thick-paged volume bound in heavy crinkled yellow leather, tied together with a pale pink bow. Towards the bottom of the front cover was a small oblong picture. It was an idealised domestic scene, the study of a tea-table adorned with floor-length napery, pink china and a vase of blue flowers. One of the flowers in the vase had been painted larger than the others and highlighted with a kind of line-drawn halo. Tim looked at the small picture more closely and decided that the book’s owner had probably embellished the cover by pasting on to it a cigarette card.

There was no other writing on the cover. Tim opened the book carefully. It was not bound, but consisted of loose sheets and the front and back covers, held together with the ribbon. They creaked when he prised them apart. The first page proclaimed that the volume was My Ladye’s At Home Booke, this printed in a pseudo-archaic font. Underneath it someone had written in copperplate script Lucinda Jacobs, 1888. The ink had faded to a dull brown. The inscription had been crossed out, and beneath it inscribed in a much more childish, unformed hand Florence Hoyle: her booke. This writer had aimed to copy the other’s copperplate, but had not practised the dexterity needed to make the letters slope uniformly. The ‘e’s in Florence had been badly blotted and the ‘y’ of Hoyle was a deformed squiggle. Tim smiled wryly as he noted the mis-spelling of the word ‘book’, no doubt copied from the title page by a naive girl unable to recognise that it represented a rather twee marketing ploy on the part of the late Victorian manufacturer.

Tim turned another page. This and all the subsequent pages were set out like the guest books still in use at some small hotels. Each contained three columns, headed respectively ‘Date’, ‘Observations’ and ‘Signature’. The ‘Observations’ column was twice the width of the others.

There were two blank pages before the journal itself began. It had been composed in the same messy handwriting and was therefore almost certainly the work of Florence Hoyle. The writing traversed all three columns, ignoring them and the guiding feint lines as if they had not existed. All of the entries were in the same faded ink.

Jackie Briggs was looking at him expectantly, hoping perhaps to be praised for having contributed something useful to the investigation. Tim smiled at her encouragingly before turning his attention back to the journal. His misgivings redoubled. The first pages seemed simply to be the semi-literate musings of an immature young girl.

Madam give me this book. She says she now has a better. Shes been learning me to read and rite better and wants me to try ard. I said I went to the bord school but she said I could do better. I will try to rite in it every day.

Madam ad visiters this evening. Cook and I was very bizy. Cook said that Madam as no bizness encurridging me to rite, that I’m a growing girl and need to get my rest when works finished. Ive stayed up to do it. I promist Madam.

My day off. Jenny Wilson and I begged a ride to Spalding on Mr Shearers cart. He was going to markit. I’ve not been to markit before as Madam needs me when Cook goes. But Cook said there was so much left from the visiters that she didn’t need to go this week. Jenny and me bought ribbons. I went to see Ma in Gas Lane. Madam gave me wool for er and soop. Only Milly left with er now. Madam paid my half-years wage. I give it Ma.

Tim skipped a few pages. Although there was no evidence that someone had been correcting Florence’s work, the spelling and style improved as she became a more practised diarist. The intellectual quality of the prose remained the same. Florence was concerned mostly with the trivia of her own life, and remarkably unobservant about the people whom she encountered. There were numerous references to ‘visiters’ in the first half-dozen pages, but Florence did not try to identify or describe them or say whether they appeared to have enjoyed themselves or what Madam’s reaction to them had been. He supposed that she must have been the ideal servant: hard-working, unquestioning, completely on-side and extremely incurious. But, for a diarist, these traits could hardly have been worse. He’d read diary accounts from the past by other uneducated people, some of which had been enthralling or full of insight: their authors’ shortcomings in learning had been more than compensated for by the perspicacity and the freshness of their observations. Florence’s prose, on the contrary, was lumpish and dull. He doubted that even the best education could have made her fascinating.

Jackie Briggs was still hovering.

“Did your grandmother ever describe Mrs Jacobs to you? Tell you what it was like to work for her, what she made of her character, and so on?”

“She used to moan about the old girl quite a bit. She always called her that: ‘the old girl’. My grandmother was very quick-witted. She’d started work as a nanny and was later trained as a proper nursery nurse at Guy’s Hospital. It gave her a taste for what she’d missed. She was the eldest of a large family and often kept off school to help her mother with the babies. I suppose she was fond of Mrs Jacobs in a way, but she despised her for not making the most of her opportunities. I think that she found the long winter’s evenings in the old girl’s company very boring.”

“Florence was a maidservant before she married her employer?”

“Yes. Frederick Jacobs was much older than her – probably more than twenty years older. And she was at least fifteen years older than my grandmother. My grandmother was born in 1892, so Frederick must have been born in the 1850s or 60s.”

“Did you know him?”

Jackie Briggs laughed. Tim realised that it was an absurd question.

“No, of course not. Florence was a very old lady when I was a child. Frederick must have been dead for many years. I was taken to see her a couple of times, but she was practically witless by then. Sometimes, though, she knew what was going on. She gave me a brooch from her jewellery box once. I’ve still got it.”

“Curious that Frederick married out of his class, wasn’t it, especially as Florence didn’t dazzle with her wit?”

“I suppose it was; although by all accounts she was very attractive as a young girl. He wouldn’t be the first man to have fallen for a pretty face.”

“No, indeed.”

“Do you know whether there were children?”

“One son. My grandmother always called him ‘Mr Gordon’. He didn’t want to keep Laurieston House after Mrs Jacobs became too ill to stay there. It was him who sold it to Mr Kevan’s grandfather.”

“Do you know what happened to him? Where he lived?” Jackie shook her head. “Is that book useful?” she continued, eagerly.

Tim frowned. He didn’t want to disillusion her, and not just out of empathy. He suspected that there would yet have to be a lot more delving into Harry Briggs’ doings, and that Harry’s wife would be a much more co-operative source of information than Harry himself. Besides, she was so pathetically keen to know that she’d helped. Juliet could take a look at the diary. It wouldn’t do any harm. She might even be able to spot something cryptic in its primitive style. If there was anything to be gained from it, she would find it.

“It’s difficult to say,” he said. “This throws some interesting light on what life was like in that house at the time. I’ve only read a few pages. There may be some more concrete information when I get further into it. Would you allow me to borrow it for a few days? I’ll give you a receipt, of course.”

Jackie Briggs beamed gratification.