The birthday bash for Olivia Fulwell’s youngest child was a cross between a church fête and an old-fashioned street party. As Jeremy had suspected, everyone and his dog was there. Anne wasn’t sure of the age of the child or even whether it was a boy or a girl. Whenever she’d seen it, it had been wrapped up in androgynous jumpsuits.
As they prepared to set off for the party Jeremy worked himself into quite a state. Through his antique dealer friend in Morpeth he thought he had found the perfect gift – a jack-in-the-box with a grotesque carved head which sprang out of the box with a squeal. ‘Not terribly expensive,’ he told Anne, looking up from the floor where he squatted amidst wrapping paper, ribbon and sellotape. ‘But classy, don’t you think? Better than the modern tat kids get given. Something that’ll stand out. But what’ll I put on the label? Are you sure you can’t remember the brat’s name?’
‘Positive.’ As if she cared anyway. The last thing she wanted to do was to put on a frock and make small talk to the in-bred representatives of the local aristocracy. And it had occurred to her that Barbara and Godrey might have been invited. She wasn’t sure how she’d handle that. ‘Just put from Jeremy and Anne.’
‘I suppose I’ll have to,’ he said. Then, wistfully, ‘Do you think love from Jeremy and Anne would be a bit OTT?’ He loved dressing up on occasions like these. His clothes, immaculately pressed, had been laid out on his bed hours before.
The whole event was set up outside. Even the toilets – discreetly signposted – were in the stable block so none of the local riff-raff would actually have to set foot in the house. Anne thought that Olivia had been lucky with the weather. Soon it would break. Pale, sulphurous clouds drifted occasionally across the sun. It was very hot and humid. The forecast had mentioned thunder.
The children sat at a long trestle-table covered with a paper cloth. They wore party hats. There must have been crackers because they all had blowers and whistles which made a noise. All the playgroup were there which seemed terribly democratic, though as far as Anne could tell only two of the parents had been invited. One was a teacher and the other the wife of a tenant farmer. The children ate sausages, crisps and vivid orange jellies made in waxed paper dishes. The parent who was a teacher, a dowdy woman with hair already grey and flat shoes, hovered behind her offspring, muttering occasionally to no one in particular about BSE and E numbers. The child, apparently unused to such unlimited amounts of chemicals and sugar, ate ravenously, oblivious to her mother and the friends who tried to talk to her.
In the middle of the table was the cake, made in the shape of a character from the latest children’s cult TV show and covered in violet icing. The name LIZZY had been picked out in Smarties. So, Anne thought, that solved the mystery of the child’s gender.
For the adults there were other trestles with a buffet and a bar. The food was standard catering fare – no doubt Jeremy would be sniffy about it later. Around the park were dotted sideshows which would keep the children entertained so the adults could continue to chat and drink in peace – an inflatable bouncy castle, a roundabout of galloping horses powered by its own generator, a man who swallowed swords and ate fire.
Despite the food Jeremy was enjoying himself enormously. He seemed to know instinctively which guests had money or titles. He homed in on them and camped up shamelessly for their benefit. The jack-in-the-box had been a great success. Lizzy, it was true, had burst into tears when the lid sprang open, but then she had seemed overwrought by the whole proceedings. Olivia had loved it. She had even taken him inside to ask his opinion of a painting which had recently taken her fancy at an auction. He seemed in seventh heaven.
When Olivia was inside with Jeremy, Anne found herself standing next to Robert Fulwell. He was a big man in his fifties. Broken veins in his cheeks gave him a florid appearance as if he spent most of the time in the open air or habitually drank too much. He could have stepped out of a nineteenth-century hunting print. Now though, he stood sipping orange juice, watching the proceedings with a baffled detachment.
‘What a lovely party,’ Anne said.
He looked her up and down. It was as if he were making up his mind whether she was worth expending words on. It seemed she was, but not many. ‘Livvy’s idea.’
He wasn’t bad looking in a muscular, heavy sort of way. Perhaps he sensed her appreciation and reciprocated it, because he added, in a more friendly fashion, ‘I’d have been happy just to have the family. Livvy brought the boys home from school for the weekend again.’
‘That must be nice.’
‘Mmm.’ He seemed unsure.
‘What about the rest of the family?’
He set down his glass and picked up a chicken leg from the paper plate he was holding awkwardly in his other hand. When he bit into it Anne saw that his teeth were surprisingly small and sharp, like a fox’s.
‘What family?’
‘Doesn’t Livvy have any aunts or uncles?’
‘No one lives locally.’
‘What about Edmund?’ She wasn’t sure, even then, why she provoked the confrontation. Out of boredom perhaps. To make mischief. To spite Jeremy who seemed to find nothing demeaning in playing court jester to a load of nobs.
He returned the chicken to the plate, set it deliberately on the table. For a moment she thought he intended to throw her out physically. He said calmly, ‘Who are you?’
‘Anne Preece. I live at the Priory. We have met a few times.’
‘Do you know Edmund?’
‘I knew his daughter.’
‘Ah, you’re one of the Environmental Impact Assessment team. I remember Livvy mentioned it.’
‘You’ve nothing to worry about,’ Anne said. ‘We didn’t find anything of any significance.’
‘I never for a moment thought you would.’ He stared out across the park, beyond the chasing children, to the hills. ‘I don’t care for the idea of the quarry myself, but needs must.’ He looked back at her. ‘What was she like, the girl?’
‘Hardly a girl.’
He shrugged impatiently. ‘Time passes, one forgets.’
‘She was screwed up,’ Anne said. ‘She needed help.’
‘Like her father then.’
‘Did he need help?’
‘All the time, but not the sort, I think, that we could give him.’
‘Has he come to you for help recently?’
‘We’d be the last people he’d come to.’
But Anne heard the note of regret in Robert’s voice and she wasn’t so sure. Livvy wouldn’t have stood for it of course but perhaps Livvy hadn’t known. After the violent death of Edmund’s daughter, would Robert have been able to turn his brother away?
‘The police are looking for him.’
‘I know. They’ve been here. Some woman with a face like a sow. Turning up whenever she feels like it. In the middle of dinner once. As if a man would harm his own daughter. Edmund might have had problems but he’d never do that.’
He was distracted by Arabella, the nanny. She walked past wearing a white silk dress with a lace trim. It looked like a petticoat. There seemed to be no purpose in her movement apart from attracting his attention.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I ought to go. Must circulate.’
Bloody fool, Anne thought.
To entertain herself, as a sort of game, she began to wonder where Robert might have Edmund holed up. Not in the house. It was big enough to hide an army of younger brothers fleeing from justice, but Robert was frightened of Livvy and wouldn’t want her finding out. He could have paid for his brother to stay in a guest house or hotel but recently Vera had gone public about looking for Edmund. His face had appeared on the television news and the front page of national newspapers. Wouldn’t one of the other residents have recognized him? Where then?
She considered the accommodation on the estate, discounting immediately the mill house at the mine. Despite the fuss Vera had made Anne couldn’t really imagine Edmund camping out there. So far as she knew all the farmers were struggling to maintain their tenancies, so it was unlikely that there was an isolated and empty farmhouse where Edmund was lying low. Perhaps Robert had chosen somewhere closer to home?
At the end of the Avenue was a pair of semidetached houses. Anne had first realized Grace was loopy when she’d caught her staring at one of them. In one of the houses lived the keeper and his family. Janet, the keeper’s wife, was a keen gardener and Anne knew her well enough to exchange a few words in the post office, to borrow the odd seed catalogue. There were two teenage children, the bane of Janet’s life, with their loud music and unpleasant friends. But Anne thought the other semi had been empty since Neville Furness’s departure. The new agent was rather grand and had his own place. The houses were ugly but solidly built and there was no reason why Janet and her husband would hear a new neighbour, especially over the perpetual background noise generated in their own place.
Jeremy was in the middle of a circle of elaborately dressed elderly women. They were listening, entranced, to his stories. Occasionally one of them gave a peel of genteel laughter. Anne ignored them.
‘Jem, I’m going back. I’m knackered.’ The women tittered as if she were part of a double act.
‘But you’ll miss the fireworks. You don’t want me to come?’
‘No, of course not. Stay as long as you like.’
‘Have you said goodbye to Olivia?’
‘She’s busy. I thought you could do that for me.’
‘Sure.’ He was delighted to have the excuse to speak to Livvy again. ‘Sure.’
Anne slipped away from the crowd without being noticed. The children had finished tea and were running from one stall to another with a purposeless frenzy. They had become fractious and overexcited. On the bouncy castle boys were fighting, entangled together in a rolling ball of arms and legs, the smallest in tears. Still the adults took no notice, only shouting to make themselves heard above the noise.
Anne walked down the Avenue between the line of trees. The voices and the fairground organ faded. It was very still. Tiny thunderflies settled on her shoulders and her hair.
For once the keeper’s house was quiet. Presumably the family had been invited to the party. Anne looked both ways down the Avenue. There were no cars, no people. She opened the gate of the empty house and went into the garden. There were drawn curtains at the windows so she couldn’t see in. She tried to remember if they’d been like that when she’d been standing here with Grace. She knocked on the front door. There was no answer and when she pushed it, it was locked. She walked round to the back of the house, to the kitchen door.
There were blinds at the kitchen window. Outside the kitchen door was a black plastic dustbin. She lifted the lid and saw empty cans of soup and beans, squashed cartons of orange and milk, beer tins. They smelled, but not as if they’d been there for months.
At the Hall they had started to let off fireworks. A rocket cracked and exploded above her head. She turned the handle of the door and pushed. It opened and she went in.