Chapter Twenty-Four

I know that I cannot put it off any longer. We have eaten an excellent lunch in the buffet car – tomato soup, sea bass with fennel and chocolate torte – and drunk a bottle of claret. Peter has drunk much less than usual – normally he would have been quite capable of downing a whole bottle of wine on his own, as well as a couple of gin-and-tonics – and it is clear that he wishes to remain sober. I understand that this is because he wants to be entirely alert when he is listening to my story; also that he will insist on hearing it now. I can tell by the businesslike way in which he is paying the bill that he will brook no further delays. We return to our seats. I note with relief that we seem to have almost the whole carriage to ourselves. The elderly lady and the woman with two small children have vanished, presumably absorbed back into their communities in the Scottish borders. The only other occupant of the carriage is a middle-aged man who is lying sprawled in one of the airline seats, his mouth open, his snores prodigious.

Peter hands me in to my seat as solicitously as if I were a girl on her first date, then settles in beside me. I have never really felt intimidated by him before – on the face of it, his slight figure and damson-fly personality hardly inspire fear, even when he is being spiteful – but now I find him threatening. There is a sternness about him, an implacable determination to be told all of the truth without nonsense, that I find very alarming. He takes my hand and I flinch.

“Do stop being so jumpy, Hedley,” he says, still unsmilingly. “There is no need to be afraid. It is just an anecdote that I want – well, perhaps something a little longer – but nothing that should cause you distress. I’m sure that you recollect the events of that day and I want to hear you recite your memories. Nothing more nor less than that. No embroideries, no false amnesia. If you have genuinely forgotten some of the details, of course, you must say so. And rest assured that this is between you and me: no-one else will hear any version of your account, at least not from me.”

I nod miserably.

“Let’s start then, shall we? A bit of background first, I think. You got up that morning. Were you sleeping at the house in Westlode Street, or did you go there later on?”

“We were all sleeping there. I can’t altogether remember why. I think that my father had been staying there off and on for some time, helping to look after my great-grandmother as she became more frail. Also Uncle Colin was not in the best of health. He had always had a hunchback, and the long pale face that seems to go with it. He had been born with his deformity and as far as I know no doctor had ever been asked to diagnose the cause of it. I suspect that he had a weak heart – perhaps had always had one. He had fallen in his room a couple of times, and my grandmother – Doris – no longer had the strength to get him into bed. Colin wasn’t very tall, but he was quite solid and very unco-operative, I seem to remember.”

“So why did your father want the rest of the family to stay there as well?”

“I honestly can’t remember. More to the point, I can’t remember why Tirzah agreed to it. As I’ve said, my father had been sleeping there for some weeks before we joined him. It wasn’t like Tirzah to do what he wanted, especially when it involved her having to take on extra work. There was probably a reason for her having given in. A financial one, I’d say.”

“You mean, your father bribed her?”

“Not necessarily my father. Colin was quite close to Tirzah. He may have offered to pay her to help with his mother.”

“You were already working at the time, weren’t you? Yet still living at home. Why was that?”

“I hadn’t been working for very long. I didn’t want to live with them. I was actually quite desperate to get away, although the terrible rows that they’d had in my childhood weren’t happening as often by then. I just didn’t have the funds to be able to move out.”

I feel defensive about this. Peter nods, conciliatory.

“And Bryony? She was there, too?”

I have almost forgotten that he knows about Bryony.

“Yes. It was the summer before she was due to go to university.”

“Tell me about the sleeping arrangements.”

“Doris had the room that had until recently been her mother’s – the master bedroom, I suppose you would call it. My great-grandmother could no longer climb the stairs. She now had a single bed in a tiny room off the kitchen which everyone still called the scullery. Colin’s room was the same one that he had occupied as a child, next door to Doris’s, I suppose because as a boy he had been cosseted by his mother, so she had put him in a room next to hers. It was a bleak little room. It didn’t contain much more than a narrow single bed, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe. Tirzah and Bryony had the room that my grandmother called the ‘guest room’ – like her own, the bed had a deep homemade feather mattress – and my father was sleeping on the sofa in the upstairs sitting room that was never used for sitting in. It was a real Victorian ‘best parlour’, and much of the furniture in it was swathed in dust-sheets.”

“What about you?”

“I had a camp-bed made up on the landing.”

“Rather a curious set of arrangements, wasn’t it? I could think of more congenial ways of exploiting the facilities. For example, why didn’t your parents occupy the guest room together and Bryony share a bed with your grandmother, thus leaving the sitting-room sofa free for you and removing the need for makeshift billets on the landing? Bedding outside the bedroom is always quite sordid, don’t you think?” He wrinkles his nose.

I shrug. The sleeping arrangements had not bothered me then, and I have no intention of exercising myself over them now. I imagine that my father and Tirzah had been quite happy to sleep apart. They will have just made me fit in with whatever they preferred.

“So,” continues Peter, “you all got up at the usual time?”

“I suppose so.”

“When was that?”

“My father will have been up first. He was obsessive about his bathroom routine. He will have made sure that he got his fifteen minutes in before anyone else. I don’t know exactly when he got up on that day; when we were at home it was at 6.45 a.m. on the dot.”

Peter nods again.

“Let us assume that this day was no different. Who was next? You, presumably, if you were working?”

“I honestly can’t remember, but I doubt it. Uncle Colin opened the shop every day at 8 a.m. My guess is that he will have claimed the bathroom after my father, and my grandmother will have got up with him. She still had a basin and ewer in her room from the days before the fourth bedroom was converted into a bathroom. She normally bathed the night before, then washed quickly in her room in the morning.”

“So your father and his uncle and mother were almost certainly up before the rest of you. That left you, your mother and Bryony, and the old lady, of course, of whom only you and your father had to leave the house by a certain time because you each had a job to go to. Is that correct?”

“I’m not sure. Tirzah did have a job at that time, as a school secretary, but she didn’t work in the school holidays. Bryony was about to go to university. She certainly worked that summer, in the canning factory, but I think she may have given the job up by then.”

“What was your job? The same as it is now?”

“No. It was the same company, but I’ve changed jobs several times since. I was the shipping clerk for Maschler’s, where I still work. Now, as you know, we produce precision implements of all kinds; but then it was just farming equipment. And I’m a director now.”

“So you don’t remember getting up on that day, or going to work?”

“No. I remember coming home for lunch. We were all there for lunch. I remember what we ate: it was chipolatas and mash, which was probably cooked by my grandmother, and for dessert we had treacle tart and custard, which was one of my mother’s stock puddings. My grandmother and my mother seemed to be doing the work between them. I can’t remember there being any friction. Uncle Colin wasn’t there: he had decided to eat with my great-grandmother, and had taken his own lunch as well as hers into her room to be with her.”

“What about Bryony?”

“I suppose that she must have been there, though I don’t remember it specifically. I can’t remember what she was wearing, or what she said. I don’t think that any of us said very much, because there was a Test match on the television, and cricket was my father’s passion. He won’t have taken kindly to having the commentary interrupted by conversation.”

“What sort of relationship did he have with your grandmother?”

“I think that it was OK. Doris was a very pragmatic person: she didn’t expect too much of anyone. I suppose that the way her life had turned out had taught her to be tolerant. She always seemed pleased to see him – but she was always pleased to see any of us – and they shared similar tastes in books. She would get the Sergeanne Golon Angelique books from the library and let him read them on her ticket before she took them back. She talked about her garden to him. She liked gardening.”

“So your mother said, rather memorably.”

I shrug. Peter is looking at me beadily again. My defences are raised, which he notices.

“So – then what?” he continues, “you and your father returned to work?”

“I suppose so – I really can’t remember.”

“Well, let us suppose that is what happened. So that lunchtime will have been the last time that you saw your grandmother alive. She was dead by the time you returned to the house. Is that correct?”

“Yes.” I look down at my hands, resting on the train’s table. My fingers are interlinked. I am clenching them until my knuckles are pale blue.

“Did you come home especially?”

“What?”

“Did you come home because you were summoned – did someone tell you that Doris was dead, or did you receive a message of some kind that you should return home because something had happened?”

“No. I just left work as usual. When I arrived at the house, the police were already there. My mother and father were in separate rooms. She was taken away by the police just after I arrived. They didn’t let me speak to her. My father was giving a statement of some kind. My grandmother’s body was lying in the corridor that ran the length of the shop, which Uncle Colin used as a storeroom. I wasn’t allowed to look at it. It was covered over with a blanket.”

“Did you ask to see it?”

“ I – No. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious. People often do pay their respects to the dead by taking a last look at them, don’t they? But not necessarily when they are murder victims, I should imagine.” He looks reflective for a minute, and then shoots out swiftly:

“And Bryony – where was she?”

“I – don’t know. I don’t remember either seeing her or talking to her.”

“But she was there? She must have been there, somewhere.”

“I really don’t know. She could have been out visiting a friend.”

“Oh, come now, Hedley, that’s hardly likely, is it?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because, my dear sweet disingenuous Hedley with the suddenly very faulty memory, an announcement about the murder had gone out on Radio Lincolnshire, on the four o’clock news. If Bryony had been out visiting someone, she would almost certainly have heard or been told about it after that; but as you know, the police are usually quite – I was going to say sensitive, but circumspect is probably a better word – when it comes to making sure that the relatives of suddenly deceased people don’t get a nasty shock from the wrong quarter. And the Lincolnshire police were no exception, even then. They had rounded up all the members of the family and got them back at Westlode Street before any details were released to the media. Which leaves a few loose ends to be tied up in the story that you tell, as well as the many omissions that you claim not to be able to fill, doesn’t it?”

I bridle.

“What exactly are you trying to say?”

“I’m not trying to say anything, dear boy. I am saying it. What I say is this: that the, by your own admission imperfect, story that you have just told me is actually just a load of fabricated bullshit. Now, would you care to sit quietly and work your way through this?” He hands me his folder of news clippings.