‘What are you doing at Christmas?’ Dorothy asked.
‘I don’t know. I might go to my sister,’ Jo said without enthusiasm. ‘And Alec’s family have invited me.’
To be normal, she had to pretend she had friends or family to go to, which she didn’t, looking like this. She had dropped everyone when she dropped the public Marigold, and nobody knew where she was.
Nobody cared, presumably. Marigold’s family was only two aunts and a few cousins who had never been close. After Rex weeded out her teaching colleagues, who bored him, most of her friends had been people she had known with him and not wanted to see after he had murdered her life, even if they were on her side.
Presently, she invented a letter from Alec’s mother, saying that they were all going to Canada after all, to spend Christmas with Frances and Don.
‘Why don’t you go?’
‘Winnipeg? Too cold. And they haven’t asked me. I’d rather stay here anyway.’
Dorothy was touched. ‘You must have Christmas dinner with us.’
Keith, back at Cambridge, was much better. ‘Another bloody clan gathering,’ he groaned, but he was glad to be back at The Sanctuary, and glad that the family was together at Christmas. They all were.
Make the most of it, Marigold gloated, while Jo was saying to everyone, ‘How lovely to see you!’ Marigold was going to ensure that none of them would ever enjoy Christmas again.
Harriet had brought her bull terrier, roughly the same shape as she was. Jill and Rodney had brought the spaniels. The house was full of dogs, getting underfoot, jostling for best place at the fire.
‘I can still see my poor little Charlotte everywhere,’ Tessa said dolefully to Jo. ‘Bossing the other dogs, barking at the ducks, dashing into the kitchen every time someone lifts the lid of the biscuit jar.’
‘You must miss her dreadfully.’ Jo made the right kind of face. ‘Will you ever get another?’
‘I’d never find a dog like Charlotte. And the hurt’s too great when they – if something happens.’
‘Poor Tessa. I am sorry,’ Jo said sincerely, while Marigold sniggered to herself over the bowl of turkey stuffing.
In the evening there were presents for everyone, including Jo. William and Dorothy had bought her a picture for her cottage. Rob gave her a lop-sided bowl he had made with Chris. Tessa gave her a charm for her bracelet.
‘A little silver teapot. That’s lovely.’ Shows me where I belong.
After Christmas dinner and William’s traditional toast of ‘All’s well’, repeated by everyone with more or less conviction, Lee joined Keith at the piano.
‘Time gone by … played a game …’ they sang, then some of Keith’s music, and other songs they both knew. Lee tried to make Matthew join her in a love song. His voice was terrible. He struggled, then laughed and retreated. ‘You two get on with it.’
Softly and sweetly, they sang an old Christmas love song.
‘They are wonderful together.’ Jo tried that on Matthew to see if he minded. He agreed with amiable enthusiasm. To him, Keith was only a pale, skinny boy. He did not see that the boy was on fire.
They were still singing when Jo said she must go home, and went upstairs to the bathroom on the nursery floor.
Annabel was tucked up, neat, plump, still smug when asleep. The baby wallowed in an old-fashioned cot. Rob, with the blankets flung off the cabin bunk, breathed heavily through his mouth, flushed, his tousled hair damp. He often looked feverish when he was asleep.
Marigold covered him up. How was it done? The bedclothes pulled up and held down? The smothering pillow? A towel stuffed into the open mouth? It was almost too easy, with a child.
I’m sorry, Rob. To her amazement, tears welled up in Marigold’s eyes and the great lashes blinked to catch them.
The drawing-room door had opened, and she could hear the piano. Feet were on the staircase. Jo left the room, opened and shut the door of the nursery bathroom, and started down the stairs.
Later that night, she came back to The Sanctuary.
Although the frieze was finished, they had not been able to use the library after all, because the radiators were tepid and the chimney had not been swept.
Keith took Lee into the library in the morning to show her Sylvia’s secret cupboard. He was drawn to this grandmother who had died when he was little, the memory of her eccentric and romantically macabre.
They went in by the door from the dining-room. Lee stopped to look at the books. She was wearing slick American trousers and a massive soft sweater whose rolled collar flopped round the base of her long slender neck. She put on big owlish glasses and stood on the library step-ladder to read titles higher up. Her feet in soft red ballet slippers were small for her height and very narrow.
Leaning sideways, she lost her balance and reached out to Keith. Her hand on his shoulder sent a charge through him powerful enough to electrocute a fifteen-stone murderer. He pulled her down and lunged at her, grabbing handfuls of her and the voluminous sweater, mashing his face against hers, because she turned her mouth away.
‘Listen.’ He held her, breathing hard. ‘I know I’m too young, and I’m sick and funny-looking …’
‘Keith.’ Lee looked at him with stern compassion. ‘Your Uncle Matthew and I are going to be married.’
‘I didn’t know that.’ He dropped his hands. He felt himself gaping.
She picked up her glasses. ‘I thought everyone knew.’
‘I’ve been so out of life, I guess its finer points have passed me by.’
‘“Time gone by”,’ Lee quoted, with a smile. ‘We’ll still sing our songs though, huh?’
‘Don’t patronize me. The song ends,’ he reminded her bitterly, ‘“Life? It’s hollow.”’
He was devastated. After she left the room, he fell into a leather chair with high sides. He thought he might be ill again. What would happen to him now?’
He stayed there until he was freezing cold. Then he went out by the door at the end of the room. Between the double doors, the secret panel had been torn open. It hung on one wrenched hinge, the wood splintered. Still shivering, Keith went to fetch his Uncle William.
*
It was not only the little cupboard. Looking round the library, William found between the sofa and the window a scattering of smashed china, recognizable as some of the pieces Jo had repaired and put on an alcove shelf.
‘Call the police,’ Harriet ordered.
‘Nothing’s stolen. No one’s broken in.’
‘Grill the children then.’ Harriet was ready to do it herself. ‘Who’s been playing tricks?’
‘A poltergeist,’ Keith said glumly. The shock of the discovery had steadied him somewhat, and drained away feeling. With passion knocked out of him, he felt light-headed, as if he had taken pain-killers. ‘Ask Nina.’
‘Don’t start on her.’ Lee always defended Nina, although she was difficult, given to aggressive sulks, and often rude to her.
‘What do you mean, a poltergeist?’ Nina faced Keith angrily.
‘It’s the age, ducky. It happens to young girls. Things break. Pictures fly off walls. Watches stop.’ He looked at his, and raised his eyebrows.
‘I’ll kill you!’ Nina shouted.
Lee said, ‘Lay off her, Keith,’ and everybody was against him. But what did they want? Would they rather think that one of this stupid family had made this stupid mess deliberately?
When they had all gone, Jo could congratulate herself that she had indeed spoiled Christmas for them, although in a much less spectacular fashion than she had planned. The denouement could wait. There was time. Now that she knew she was capable of it, she could wait for exactly the right moment, and the delay had given her the chance to complete the little drama she had initiated when she put the torn scrap of Jock’s nose-rag into what she had thus designated Sylvia’s secret hiding place.
When she came back to The Sanctuary in the small hours after Christmas, she had left the car on the farm track off the road, walked up the drive carrying a rug, and climbed over the roof of the tea-room toilets, just as thrustful Jock used to do, and entered the library through the window she had unlatched before she went home earlier. Sounds of tearing wood and breaking china were muffled by the rug. The dogs were all at the other end of the house in various bedrooms. William’s young outside labrador was in with his mother Corrie, because of a cut paw. Thus even dogs conspire to accommodate you if your heart is pure.
Next morning, although it was a holiday, Jo was in the kitchen in an apron quite early, having slipped into the library to fasten the window latch.
‘Thanks for Christmas.’ William said that to Dottie every year.
‘Not one of our best. Who could possibly have done such a senseless thing? I can’t believe any of the children … Nina is a bit upset about her father and Lee, but – oh, I don’t want to think about it any more. Keith and that silly poltergeist stuff. I didn’t like the look of him this morning.’
‘Lucky it didn’t occur to him,’ William said heavily, ‘that it might be my mother wreaking vengeance because I took her keepsake out of its hiding place.’
‘Sylvia walks again?’ Dottie thought he was joking, then realized. ‘Oh no, for God’s sake, Will, is that what you think?’
‘Well, if Geraldine could come back … It was you smelled the lilies, Dottie, not me.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Nor do I, but what else would we prefer to believe?’
*
Two weeks in Italy settled them down, although they drove through storms and lashing rain, and did not find anything stylish enough to replace Bastet. They were both glad to get back to work, both hopeful that The Sanctuary and their life in it would recover the balance it had before things started to slip oddly sideways.
The house smelled warm and clean. Jo had brought flowering plants in from the greenhouse, and a little cushion of riotous pink Alpine splendour was on William’s desk. His secretary had lined up letters and bills and magazines in neat, digestible piles on the dining-room table. Ruth had got in plenty of food.
Her son had got a caretaker’s job and had moved out with his girl-friend and the baby. Ruth was regularly at the house, Jo was there less, and the two of them were spring-cleaning the tea-room in what seemed to be their old matey style.
The mild winter was anticipating spring with carpets of yellow aconite stars and dense drifts of snowdrops, the famous tall Sanctuary green-tips that Beatrice and Walter had first planted, brilliant white with clusters of green-edged petals within.
William spent contented hours with the new head gardener, familiarizing him with the gardens and planning the spring and summer campaign. He still spent time with Jo, to add to her notes for the history of The Sanctuary. She carried round a thick looseleaf binder, but was not ready to let him look at it yet.
She wanted to know more about the mausoleum, so William got the key to open the heavy doors, and took her inside. It was a dank and wretched place, a small cave inside the outer mound. On either side were thick stone tombs with slab lids, big enough to enclose coffins.
‘What’s in there?’ Jo whispered, glancing back to the open door to reassure herself that light and water and greenery were still outside.
‘Nothing.’ William slapped the vault where the Reverend Hardcastle had once rested. ‘I told you. After Beatrice died, the bodies of her husband and her lover went with her to the churchyard.’
Jo read the carving over the door: ‘“Love is Eternal”… It’s thrilling,’ she shivered. ‘But I think I’ve had enough.’
It was Dottie’s turn to put spring flowers into the church for Sunday service. That weekend, she and William were in London, so Jo had offered to arrange primroses and daffodils.
Coming out of the church as it was getting dark, on her way to return the keys to the vicarage, Jo saw two large young men with flat heads trying to prise an old headstone out of the ground with a crowbar.
‘What are you doing?’ she enquired mildly.
They stood their ground. One of them menaced her with the crowbar. ‘Piss off,’ he said.
‘All right I just wondered if you needed any help.’
‘Piss off.’
She walked down the path, wanting to run, and gave them an inane grin as she passed, for self-protection. They had smashed the lock on the gate too. Before she reached it, she saw a chance to use this mindless force against the enemy. She turned. ‘I just thought.’ They were watching her. ‘You fellows like old gravestones?’
‘Yer.’
‘Why?’
‘Sell ’em.’
‘Do you know about the tomb, over there at the big house, the one they call The Sanctuary?’
‘What tomb?’ one of them asked suspiciously.
‘It’s by the lake. There’s some good old stone there, I heard, in a vault above ground.’
‘So what?’
‘So nothing.’ She was still a chirpy, harmless lady, a bit barmy. ‘I found it interesting, and I thought you might too.’
‘Heard the latest, Faye?’
Frank came home from the shops and found his wife in from her afternoon’s digging in the cold lumpy soil, lying on the floor because of her back.
‘You’re the one who gets out to hear all the news,’ she said in the gruff, blunt voice that meant she was in a good mood.
‘Those poor Taylors. They’ve had enough this year, I should have thought. Now it’s the mausoleum.’
‘Someone buried alive?’
‘Somebody broke in there last night when they were away. Smashed in those thick doors with an iron bar or something, and prised the lids off the tombs.’
‘Body snatchers,’ Faye said sagely, on her back, chin tucked in, big breasts flopped out sideways.
‘No bodies in there, so the vandals left a few messages in spray paint.’
‘And I suppose the Taylors will think you did that too,’ Faye said throatily, because her bronchial tubes were at the wrong angle.
‘I thought I’d slip up there next week when the gardens open and let you know how much damage has been done.’
‘Not to mention having a look to see what the birds and waterfowl are up to.’
‘Does that annoy you?’
‘I’m glad you have a hobby. Keeps you off the street.’
‘You’re good to me.’ He smiled down at her.
‘It’s because I’m on my back. You’re easier to take from this angle.’
As it was opening day, Frank paid to go in to The Sanctuary. He crossed the marsh boardwalk and went straight through the copse and over to the other side of the hill. Most of the trees and bushes were bare, but the undergrowth where the birds had nested was still an impenetrable tangle. He would have to wait until there was a chance of seeing one of them in flight before he would know whether they had come back again this year. In a month, three weeks perhaps, in this early spring … soon, soon he would know.
Down by the lake the mausoleum was roped off, with a warning notice. One of the doors had been forced open outwards. It hung crookedly, the metal smashed and buckled, as if by an angry giant. The violence of the damage was a brutal, incongruous scar on the peace and beauty of the gardens.
The Taylors’ grandson was running about with a chubby friend, scrapping and tumbling each other, rolling in combat down the sloping lawn.
‘Steady on,’ Frank said as he passed near them to take a closer look at the mausoleum.
The fatter boy stared. The boy called Rob scrambled up and said bossily, ‘If you go near the mouse-o-leum, they’ll get you.’
‘Who will?’
‘The dead people. The skeleton of Hardcastle. He broke down the door and came bursting out. I knew he would.’
‘I’m not afraid.’ Frank liked this funny little boy who flung himself so eagerly into fear or excitement.
Rob screamed and ran off shouting, the slower boy tagging along behind.
Coming from the cypress walk after exchanging spring greetings with Mr Archer in the ticket hut, Jo saw Rob talking to the birdwatcher.
When he screamed and plunged away, she wanted to run after him, chase him through the shrubbery, and finish him off like a hare.
The fat boy panted up to her. ‘Which way did he go?’
‘That way.’ Jo pointed in the wrong direction, but Rob pranced out of the bushes and yelled, ‘Silly bugger – wait till I get you!’
Yes, Rob, wait. My poor little Rob. Soon now. Soon.
It was to be sooner than she thought.
In the village where Jo lived she had been pleasant to everybody, so as not to arouse comment, but she had not made friends, beyond knowing a few people to speak to in the shop.
When she went in for bread, Priscilla Smythe was there, with a round-shouldered man in a hat like a tweed basin whose back was turned.
‘Hul-lo, Jo.’ Priscilla was always gracious to second-class citizens like widows. ‘Larry, this is Jo Kennedy who lives in one of those enchanting little cottages by the stream.’
Larry turned round from the shelves with a mean moon face, and Jo wanted to run. Those rolled disgruntled lips, the little seeking eyes. It was Lawrence Pratt, who used to come to the pink house in Holland Park, before he tried to make trouble for Rex over a dodgy project, and was jettisoned.
‘Morning.’ Lawrence nodded without interest, then his eyes sharpened and he frowned under the silly hat. ‘I know you, don’t I?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Jo stretched her smile to be even more Jo and less Marigold, and kept her voice high and theatrical. ‘Excuse me, I’ve got to run.’
Damn Lawrence. Jo walked away fast, without her bread. Could he really suspect dim, colourless Marigold behind the make-up and the flashy manner and the black hair with the dramatic frosted streaks? Oh, God – to have everything blown apart now by a cunning fool like Lawrence Pratt!
Out of sight of the shop, she began to run. She scurried across her bridge and through the cottage door like a field animal, then sat down with her coat on to slow her agitated heart and get her breath.
Steady, Josephine. Alec called her that when he was taking charge.
I’m afraid.
Don’t panic. Alec never panicked or wavered. Lawrence couldn’t have recognized you in that moment. He’s not psychic.
But Lawrence Pratt came with his stooped walk along the lane past Bramble Bank, and stopped to look quite intrusively over the bridge and the gate, straight at the downstairs window where Jo stood back out of sight, and wished him dead.
Rob was to go to his father at Easter. His grandmother would drive him to High Wycombe on Good Friday.
Dorothy was tired. Patients, meetings, reports to write, and hours of free clinic time for the agency in London had been building up to an uncharacteristic tension and weariness.
‘Let me do this … let me do that for you,’ Jo would urge.
‘Don’t indulge me. I’ll fall apart.’
The tea-room was to open at the weekend, with Ruth’s hot-cross buns and Jo’s simnel cake. Although she was still agitated and full of an indecisive fear that was more Marigold than Jo, she stayed up late on Thursday to bake the simnel cakes. Jo was like that, even in a crisis. Thoughtful for the pleasure of others.
As a reward, the inspiration came to her, in a flash of pure clear light as she was washing cake tins at the sink. Doubt fled. Anxiety was gone. This was it, then.
Go to bed. Alec suggested, as she paced about in a state of charged excitement. She took his picture outside and flung it far over the back hedge into the darkness of the impenetrable brambles.
On Friday morning, Jo went up to the house early with the cakes and offered to drive Rob to High Wycombe. Dorothy was not even up and dressed. She talked to Jo out of her bedroom window.
‘You’re a treasure,’ she said. ‘I won’t forget this, Jo.’
No, Dottie, I don’t think you will.
Jo went to the bank and drew out all the money from the Josephine Kennedy account that she had obtained by giving her real name of Marigold Renshaw as a reference. Then she went back to Bramble Bank for her bags, and took from the top of the wardrobe her father’s old service revolver, the Webley Scott 45 that she had found at the house after her mother died. She put the two bags in the boot of the car and locked it, so that Dorothy could not open it to put Rob’s stuff in there.
‘Can I climb through to the front seat now that Granny can’t see?’ Rob was delighted to be driving with Jo, because she drove faster than his grandmother.
‘No, Rob. It’s against the law.’
‘You don’t care about that.’
‘I have to.’ To be stopped by the police for having a small child in the front seat would be one of those ironically stupid mistakes that foiled the most inspired schemes of people in books.
‘This isn’t the road we take to go to Dad’s.’
‘We’re going a new way. This will be more fun, you’ll see.’
Jo was heading west. Short of sleep and light-headed, she imagined Wales, perhaps, or up to Birmingham, and on to Scotland. Could you go to the Isle of Man without a passport? Dorothy had said that Rob was not expected at any particular time. How long would it be safe to stay on the road in this car? How long before a nation-wide search of hotels and bed-and-breakfasts began? It was one thing to disappear by herself and have her hair bleached out and be Marigold again; quite another to disappear with a child for whom everyone was looking.
Infirm of purpose! She was fully awake. This morning’s sloppy, euphoric idea that she could somehow kidnap Rob and vanish would not stand up against what she knew in her heart was the only possible ending to the saga of her revenge. Give me the daggers.
She stopped to buy something to eat and drink, and she and Rob sat with it in the back seat, and she told him a story about a boy and his travels. Stories either put Rob over the top with excitement, or made him sleepy. He leaned against her, his dark tousled hair against her breast.
She propped him against the window and quickly took off the padded bra with its hard twin cones that were the hallmark of Jo’s shirts and sweaters, then drew him to her again and put her arms round him and sat for a long time, hidden from the road on the track into a wood, his head against the smaller, softer breast of Marigold.
Do it here? Here? Now? She would lead him deep into the wood and lie him down and put the gun to his head while he was sleeping, then throw it far into the trees and walk back to the car alone.
To what? Her hard and ruthless campaign was against Tessa and her family, not against Rob. Could the real Marigold really snuff out his life and walk away?
No wonder she had never looked realistically beyond the deed when she was brewing her plans. There was no beyond for her, that was the truth of it. If killing Rob was her final revenge on Tessa, then the last act of her life’s drama was done, and her own death the final curtain.
She left Rob, and with shaking hands, took from her bag the sleeping pills she had brought in case he was excitable and difficult.
‘Wake up for a minute, Rob.’
‘No.’ He pushed her away and snuggled into the corner of the back seat.
‘Here. I’ve got a pill for you. Mummy says you’re to take it like a good boy. Look, there’s some Coke left.’
When he was half awake, she fumbled the pill into his mouth and tipped in the remains of the Coca-Cola. He coughed and spluttered, but the pill stayed down. He cried a little when she laid him down on the seat, but was soon asleep again.
Jo drove on slowly, because her mind was a turmoil of thoughts and panicky visions. She saw herself finding a disused garage, driving in, and with the door shut and the engine running, holding Rob down by the exhaust, then lying down herself to breathe in its deadly fumes. They said it paralysed you very quickly, so that even if you tried to move away, you couldn’t.
She saw a car crash at a hundred miles an hour, the bodies unrecognizable within the concertina of distorted metal. Trees near the road, telegraph poles, the abutment of a bridge – was this the one? Was this?
Too late, she had gone past, too slowly. On a straight road she speeded up and watched each car that came towards her. It would be so simple to turn the wheel and swerve across the road into a head-on collision. Why didn’t she do it?
Because this wasn’t it. In a crackling explosion of light, like fireworks over the lake, she understood. The door into the mausoleum was open. With her own mischievous words in the churchyard, she had set the stage for the ultimate assault: her final inspired legacy to all the Taylors.
‘Love is Eternal’ Beatrice had declared in stone. For ever and ever, eternally, William and Dorothy and their descendants would see the mausoleum from the windows of the house, and they would never forget.
Jo turned the car and drove back fast towards The Sanctuary.
At this time of year, the Sanctuary gardens were closed at twilight, the bell in the tall cypress ringing a little later each day as the evenings lightened.
Avoiding the village, Jo drove by a back road to the side of the estate near the church. Would there be a service on Good Friday evening? The church was dark, the small car park empty. She drove down the narrow lane to where gardeners and grave-diggers left their trucks, and stopped her car out of sight behind a hedge.
With the loaded gun in the pocket of her jacket, she carried Rob into the churchyard. He did not weigh much, poor skinny baby, although he was heavily asleep. She laid him down behind the wall and waited with him until the visitors would have left the gardens.
She wanted dusk, and dreaded it. Give me a little more time. Don’t let it be dusk! But although she stretched her eyes to prolong the day, inexorably the light faded, and in the distance, she heard the tolling of the Closing Bell.
Up in the copse, sitting on a dead tree with his feet on a crumbling mat of dry bracken, Frank heard the bell and abandoned his fruitless watch. After this weekend, he would use his old route over the broken wall, but at Easter, and especially on Good Friday, it had not seemed right to cheat.
He extricated himself from the undergrowth and tangled grass, and dropped easily down the slope in his heavy boots. Looking all about him in the gathering twilight, to enjoy the leafing out of the tall trees and the blossom and the patches of bright colour still holding the light, Frank saw a figure move out from the shadows of the laurels that lined the pathway to the church. The figure was carrying something quite large and moving with a sideways gait along the upper bank of the lake. As he got nearer he saw that it was a woman, carrying a child.
Someone hurt? Frank hurried down to see if he could help.
Rob’s sleeping body grew heavier and heavier. To get under the double rope barrier, Jo had to put him down, crawl through and pull him after her.
He woke, without opening his eyes, on the marble step of the tomb, and wailed, feebly.
‘It’s all right, darling. Jo’s here. Come on.’ Her arms were too tired to pick him up again, so she half carried him, dragging his feet, through the smashed door.
Inside the tomb Jo could dimly see that the stone slabs had been replaced on the vaults. She lifted Rob and laid him gently down on one of them. She would put the gun to his head, then lie down on the other side at once, a triumphant Juliet, and shoot herself.
Asleep again, the child lay quite peacefully on his side on the cold stone. After she had brought out the gun, Jo laid it down and took off her jacket. She bundled it up and put it carefully under Rob’s head.
A shout. A scrabble and thudding of feet down from the top of the mound. Jo picked up the gun and held it behind her back as a man with a torch pushed through the gap between the doors.
‘What’s wrong?’ His breath was quick and harsh. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Get out!’
‘No, the child shouldn’t be in there. Get his death of cold. Here – wake up, Rob!’ he said loudly.
He pulled the limp boy outside. Jo followed and he turned back, holding Rob, his torch full on her face.
What he saw there made him grab at her. She raised the gun and shot wildly at Rob, then turned the gun against herself.
Up at the house, they were lighting a fire and drawing curtains. Dorothy was clearing away the tea things. Tessa, who had come with Chris, was thinking that she would soon ring Rex’s house to say goodnight to Rob.
They all heard a double shot
By the lake they found Jo dead, her shattered head hanging half into the water. Frank was dead, or dying. Rob was on the overgrown steps above the mausoleum, moaning feebly, his arms flung out over the stone mastiff that crouched there: ‘Faithful unto Death.’