I walked through the house to find the Colonel and to tell him that his lunch was ready and then I followed a trail of policemen up the stairs. I’d never been in the Captain’s room before. It was neat and orderly and quietly papered in soft greens and blues, so that the affected grandeur that made his brother’s room oppressive was eased here. It made me realise that, in a way, these rooms did reflect the tastes of their occupants after all. But I wasn’t here to pry. I was doing my job and seeking anything that Abbey might have left awry.
In John’s room, I found that Phyllis had completed her mission to expunge that man’s ownership of this place and had, slightly foolishly, hung my few rather grubby clothes alongside hers in that vast wardrobe. I reached to pull them out and found John’s jacket in the way. It was filthy, like my slacks had been after last night’s excursion, and possibly the source of the faintly sickly smell that had met me on my first visit to this room. Because the jacket’s collar and left sleeve were rancid with dried blood.
It was the light summer coat Abbey had worn during his encounter with Mr Winstone. It explained precisely how the man’s wife had been inspired to tell me that I must have met John’s angry shade on the garden path. It surprised me that she hadn’t simply chosen to destroy this piece of proof that her husband was in the habit of borrowing clothes, just as he thieved other people’s food, but perhaps they’d hoped that the myth of John’s wrath would be a useful disguise.
With the knowledge of how she had spoken of John that night in my cousin’s kitchen, I thought that Abbey must have come here to shed his borrowed clothes after he had left me on Mr Winstone’s path. He might have been lurking up here while I had been speaking to Richard on the telephone. This was what had kept Mrs Abbey from her home so late that night. She’d come here herself for the purpose of consulting with the man about what might be done about me. Then she’d come knocking on my cousin’s door, eager to get me, the only witness to her husband’s crime, to walk her home to Eddington.
I remembered her sudden change of heart when she had spied my suitcase on the stairs and informed me that I was planning to continue my holiday elsewhere. There must have been a moment before that, when she’d intended to take me out there into the darkened woods between her house and mine, and introduce me properly to her husband.
But she hadn’t done it. And the return of this jacket to its hanger represented the time when the plan had still been merely to escape the consequences of the assault on Mr Winstone. But yesterday Abbey had come again for something else. He’d been drawn here for the sake of something that must have grown from their inspiration to use Richard and to think of him as the surviving replica of John. And Abbey had run from me because he hadn’t yet had time to tell his wife about the discovery of the Colonel’s gun.
I found his secret concealed in the jacket’s sleeve. The left sleeve – the one coated in blood – was stuffed with green silk. It was a skirt of mine and it hadn’t been given to the squatter woman with the frock after all.
The skirt the squatter woman had listed had been merely an old rough skirt for menial work and was a different kind of green. This skirt was the other portion of my mother’s old evening gown and it was soft and pliable beneath my fingers. Mine and yet alien to me and hated now too because they’d corrupted it, adulterated it with splatters of blood so that it pretended to belong to the attack on Mr Winstone.
Well, this at least was the harmless part – apart from my natural recoil that slung both jacket and skirt hastily back onto their hanger and into the wardrobe, and the dubious worry about where Paul Abbey had sourced the blood. Because this was all Abbey had been doing here yesterday. He’d been secreting this trace of me, which was part and parcel of their plan to leave the scorched remains of my other clothes in the turbine house. He had meant to ensure that Duckett really could be tied to the attack on Mr Winstone as well as all the fires. Unless Mrs Abbey had lied earlier about that part too and this had all been meant as a warning to Richard. But even if it was, it was still harmless because that particular threat was obsolete.
Footsteps tramped along the gallery and drew me to the door. And a silken whisper drew me back again as the skirt slid a little on its hanger.
I was reaching to draw the wardrobe door open as the front door slammed downstairs. A car engine was idling in the drive. Then it crawled away again and after that brief flurry of thinking I ought to gather the policemen in here, I was glad that my private search had found peace again. There was a paper in the skirt and it rustled and tumbled as I fumbled for it. I reached gingerly between bloodied fabrics to retrieve it.
The sheet was written on both sides and the first was penned in that same neat style that had lately been working late into the night filling out the new records for the Manor accounts. It was a letter from Richard dated September 1946 and written to his brother from his London hospital bed in a rather dry humour. It said:
Thank you for your sympathetic note. It is such a relief to know that your long train journey home was improved by the chance to read that particularly saccharine article published in a certain women’s magazine. I’m glad you enjoyed Lady Sarah’s account of her tragic cares for the crippled war hero. I had no idea she’d been so much on hand to assist my first faltering steps out of bed. Nor did I know it was vital that she should tell the world in such syrupy terms about the bittersweet honour of being loved by a man who’d been ‘damaged in the cause of the national interest’. It’s alarming how many people have read the thing. Even the man who mops the floors in this benighted place, would you believe?
I suppose I should be glad to have been able to lend a bit of cheer to all my fellow invalids, but you know … well, I won’t call it betrayal because I know she saw this story as an act of leadership for all the real women whose husbands have come home damaged from war. She also thought she’d found the ideal means of fixing herself firmly in the public eye if I might shortly be pensioned out of the army. But I’m like you. Lamed or not, I won’t slide into meek complacency and I certainly won’t buy a new career by seeing my recent deeds dressed up as the stuff of glory.
Truly, I can’t help wondering what glory she imagined would be found anyway, in trading on the actions of an angry youth from Battersea who will now have to spend a portion of his life behind bars?
I’m sorry about this mess, though, for Father’s sake. I won’t mention wealth or social standing because I know that for all the lectures he and Uncle William have given us over the years, that won’t be the part he’ll be disappointed about. He liked her, I know.
I found that I was sitting on the edge of the bed, clutching the disgusting skirt – which I dropped just as soon as I realised – and staring at the letter. I was thinking that I understood now why the Colonel should have believed that his encounter with a journalist would hurt Richard more than him. And I was thinking that I shouldn’t be surprised any more that Richard had always seemed faintly uncertain as he accepted each quiet proof of my care from me.
This Lady Sarah, who was like Mrs Abbey and the dead brother and sometimes even the father, despite his better intentions; they all tried to claim whatever Richard had to give, as if it were debt he should pay purely because he was strong enough to bear it.
But not me. I wanted to burn this letter. Ruin it, so that it couldn’t hurt him again. This ought to have been his own past and his own story to tell if he had wished to, not a weapon for Mrs Abbey to use in a fresh assault in a bad battle. I didn’t burn the letter, though. I read the part that came afterwards that was like an introduction to the real, living John Langton and proved his core to be possessed by a horrible, selfish man.
The last of the paragraphs that had been penned by Richard indicated the true purpose of his letter. It revealed that a request had been made in the course of John’s visit – and forgotten until a note from John had prompted him. Now Richard detailed, as promised, the name of a local family contact who had helped to source some of their mother’s choice artworks. There was a hope this person would prove useful to John in the disposal of a painting. I thought for a moment this was going to turn into an astounding declaration that the myth about a missing treasure was true after all, but it didn’t.
The scrawl on the reverse was the part that was written by John and it told the reader that he was forwarding the long-awaited details now that Richard had ‘finally recovered his wits enough after that ruinous conquest to remember to send the name’. It also offered his services if the reader wanted some support during the ensuing negotiations over the sale of their particularly foul and muddy painting and that was that. It didn’t even bear John’s name.
I could identify the man’s hand by his flamboyant way of handling his Fs. That initial, taking the form of a ‘Dear F’, was all there was on this note to indicate that this had been addressed to Mrs Florence Abbey. It occurred to me to wonder if this letter was supposed to incriminate Duckett – based solely on the fact that it had been Duckett himself who had given me Mrs Abbey’s full name. But a simple handwriting test would eliminate that theory and on that same principle, I barely spared even a moment to worry that Abbey might have thought the untidiness of the scrawl would allow the ‘Dear F’ to be mistaken for a ‘Dear E’. No one would believe I’d ever met John. And no one would imagine I would stain my own clothes with blood and then thrust them here with an old letter, as if to hide them.
The alternative was that this note had been placed here as a final attempt to add weight to the rumour of a love affair between John Langton and his neighbour Florence Abbey, but even that wasn’t particularly successful. John’s cruel, unsympathetic handling of Richard’s letter wasn’t lightened by expressions of undying love for the reader, or mild affection or even dignified friendship. The abbreviation of her name to an F as an introduction was as intimate as it came. And there were certainly no messages from a doting father to his beloved little boy.
It was a very peculiar piece of the bribe. It left me tense, trapped. Particularly when the whole experience evaporated into a sudden and horrible sensation of being watched again.
I twisted sharply to the door. There was no one there. Of course there wasn’t. The house was muted and empty. In a way, that was probably why this place was feeling quietly hostile again, as it had on that very first walk through to the telephone. Because it made me very aware of the distant whisper of conversation that was drifting up the stairs from the front door. I believe there were two or three bored policemen outside by the cars who were acting as a kind of guard. They were probably smoking because after these past few days of worrying about fire, my nose was sensitive enough to detect the faint tinge of sulphur from a match.
Disputing my idea of quiet isolation, their voices were rivalled by the equally distant rumble of the Colonel’s interview with Detective Fleece. The brief rattle of temper that drifted along the gallery from the other direction seemed to me to belong to the bullying squire that the old man might have been had John not died. Presumably they had got to the part where the Colonel was learning precisely how Richard had come by his injury at the pump house.
It wasn’t the most encouraging note on which to turn my footsteps to the door that concealed the servants’ stairs. But the discovery of this letter had to be shared, whether I loathed the idea of Richard knowing how his brother had handled his private cares or not, so I eased my way through into the landing with all the bathrooms and downwards into the gloom. I knocked lightly on the servants’ door into the kitchen for the sake of politeness, and put my hand on the panel.
And then stopped because something about the pitch of the Colonel’s voice in that room had me turning on the spot and hurrying back up the steps again.
Instinct had me thinking very clearly about those idle policemen standing on the front step. It also had me thinking about how the Colonel’s temper was strangely constrained when he had never thought to moderate his tone before.
I was already running back up through the gloom – already thinking of raising the alarm – when the door was snatched open behind. Comprehension had come too late for me. A sweaty hand reached. It claimed my right arm at the elbow. It wrenched me off the stairs and into daylight. Excruciatingly. Vision was confused, but I heard the clatter and felt the collision when I met the dresser. It was used as a prison and I was jammed there without a thought for the pain of it. My left side must have struck because it was agony, but at least it was the opposite side from the hip that had met the sun-baked ground above the pump house. The paper in my hand met the smooth wood of the dresser with a crisp clack. It all occurred at the same moment that I saw that the Colonel was on his feet by the table near the policeman. Duckett stood quite a long way beyond them. He threw out a lazy order. ‘Don’t let her scream.’
And then, while the hand took a better hold to keep me from getting into a position where I might fight him and in the process rattled my teeth, a breathy instruction was hissed into my ear. This was a voice I barely recognised from the single time I had it heard before and he didn’t issue a curse or a threat or anything to match the grip he had on my upper arm.
Abbey said in a desperate undertone while he shut the door, ‘Help me.’