11

MR FURZEY’S REVELATION that Miss Edith would soon have her DNA tested precipitated a change of tack on our part. Instead of daily visits to Miss Edith, Polly decided to further our enquiries by making Beth and I stake out the Gatehouse during daylight hours. Her idea was that we should photograph Detective Inspector Roberts entering the house with his team, and then carrying Miss Edith away, screaming and kicking, in handcuffs.

The next day, Beth and I spent the whole afternoon hiding behind the yew trees in front of the Gatehouse, the Bradshaw Polaroid at the ready. Nobody came and Beth, bored by hours of prolonged inactivity, decided that being a detective was crap if it meant hanging around doing nothing. I tried to explain that persistence, the Third Principle of Detection, requires discipline and patience, and that good detective work always takes time. But when she said that she thought that Malone and Leboeuf were crap as well, I suggested that she go home. Nevertheless, I appreciated her unhappiness at us doing all the spade work in our joint endeavour, while Polly stayed at home thinking and planning what we should do next. I decided that I wasn’t going to do any more stake-outs unless Polly was with us as well. I needn’t have worried, because a few days after Theo had gone, Peter returned and Polly wanted to be with him.

Peter’s visit began inauspiciously. He spent the morning holed up in his study while Polly ran to and fro, lavishing attention on him. She made him cups of tea and toast, she offered him a golden apple, a mint; her endless concern for his well-being was in marked contrast to her indifference towards her mother. Polly seemed to believe that whatever was happening between her parents was her mother’s fault. I suspect Peter enjoyed being the favoured parent, for instead of having to talk to Isobel, Polly gave him someone to hide behind.

While Polly ran in and out, pampering Peter, I helped her mother in the kitchen. I remember my confusion that morning, the sense of foreboding I struggled to define. I didn’t have the words to explain what was happening, but I remember the feelings and the atmosphere. The air bristled with static and I found that whenever I touched Isobel, a jolt of electricity ran through my fingers. So I stopped touching her.

Isobel was as tense as a leopard stalking its prey in her hunger for Peter. Every nerve in her body seemed alert to him: to the sounds coming from his study, the food and drinks being taken in and out. She was cooking an elaborate meal for the evening, which would culminate with his favourite pudding of chocolate mousse flavoured with orange peel. Her movements were quick and skilful, and as she beat eggs into a stiff white froth then stirred it into a pool of chocolate, I sensed her stealth, her patience, her willingness to suppress her anger to achieve her aim.

I was nervous; although Isobel seemed in control, the atmosphere in the house weighed down on me. I remember my growing apprehension as I set the table for lunch. Unwittingly, we were being dragged towards the eye of a whirlpool. I didn’t understand what was going on, but I could feel its current, strong and menacing.

Lunch was a humble affair: bread, goat’s cheese and fruit. Isobel had made a green salad and served some to her husband. They weren’t speaking. Peter helped himself to some wine. Unlike other occasions, when we had sat down to similar lunches of bread and cheese with salami and olives, the atmosphere that afternoon was so oppressive that I had difficulty swallowing. Polly, caressing Peter, was leaning against him while she toyed with her food.

Isobel chose to ignore her, instead asking me: ‘More cheese?’

‘She doesn’t like it,’ Polly retorted. ‘Nobody likes goat’s cheese but you, Isobel.’

‘Ajuba can speak for herself,’ her mother replied. But Polly, indignant, refused to be silenced.

‘I don’t like it, Theo doesn’t like it, and he’s swimming in cheese in France. So why do you buy it, Isobel?’

To Polly’s fury, her mother pushed the cheese platter towards me, even though I still had some left on my plate.

‘Isobel, she doesn’t want it!’

Her mother stared at her coldly. ‘Either you sit up properly, young lady, or you leave the table.’

Cutting a slab of chevre, she put it on my plate. ‘Don’t let her bully you, pet.’

‘Look who’s talking! Aj, don’t eat it. You don’t have to eat it,’ Polly yelled.

Peter took a sip of wine. He appeared bored by the fracas, but addressing his daughter in a quiet voice, he said: ‘There’s really no need to shout, you know, Polly.’

I didn’t know what to do; whatever I did, I would displease one of them. It seems odd that I didn’t ask to leave the table, which was what I wanted. Instead, I allowed Polly to speak for me, in a manner I found offensive. I fumbled with the food on my plate. Isobel urged me to eat.

‘Leave her alone!’ Polly screamed. By now she was trembling.

I nibbled at the bread and cheese. I felt my mouth go dry, my throat tighten. I put the food down again. ‘I’m not hungry any more.’

‘Happy now?’ Polly asked her mother. Then, her eyes filling with tears, she bellowed: ‘You make me want to puke!’ In a gesture of utter frustration, she picked up the bread from her plate and flung it at Isobel, hitting her on the head. At last, Peter was stirred into action.

‘Polly! Don’t ever do that again!’

Unused to him raising his voice to anyone but Isobel, Polly froze, her tears falling silently. I’d never seen her crying before, and as she struggled to retain control, sitting upright in her chair, she seemed angrier at her own fragility than at Isobel. Under the table, I inched my hand toward Polly’s, clasping her fingers.

‘You know, when I was your age,’ Peter said, his voice calm again, ‘your grandfather told me something I’ve never forgotten. He caught me fighting with a friend over a comic. I had given the boy a bloody nose by the time he pulled us apart, so he tore the comic up and sent me to my room. That evening, he sat me down and said: always remember, Peter, it’s people that matter in life, not things.’

‘Sure,’ Polly sobbed. ‘It wasn’t his comic, was it? He had no right to tear it up.’

‘He was my father,’ Peter stressed. ‘He had every right to stop me hurting myself and other people. You see, kitten, what you think about goat’s cheese is irrelevant. What matters is that you listen to your mother and that Ajuba feels at home with us.’

At the mention of my name, Polly reciprocated my touch with a squeeze as Peter, warming to his theme, continued: ‘And you should try and be kind to Isobel as well. To everybody, in fact. But to your mother especially.’

With a clarity that was unnerving, Polly replied: ‘Why should I be kind to her, if you’re not?’

‘Well, she’s your mother for a start. And she’s going through a tough time. We both are.’

‘So? What’s new?’

‘Don’t be a smart-arse with me, Polly. I want you to behave yourself. I don’t want you making a martyr of your mother when I’m gone. Promise me you won’t?’

I wasn’t aware that Peter was saying anything out of the ordinary. He was always going away; he was usually absent. Though I believed that I knew them well, I was an outsider in the Venus family, a favoured guest unable to decipher the secret code and signals family members sometimes use. Whether it was the severity of Peter’s tone, or the words themselves which alerted Polly to a change in the family’s circumstances, I shall never know. What I remember is my friend staring at Peter with a scrutiny that seemed to tear open his heart. After what seemed a long time, she whispered in a small voice untypical of her: ‘Daddy, are you going to leave me?’

‘No, kitten. I’m never going to leave you. I’m separating from your mother.’

‘No!’ Polly wailed, dropping my hand and any pretence of adult composure. ‘No! You can’t. I can’t live here without you, Daddy. I can’t stand her!’ she screamed. ‘It’s your fault, Isobel! You’ve made him run away.’

‘Now you see what happens when you’re not around,’ Isobel said icily. ‘Now you see what I have to put up with. If it’s not bed-wetting it’s those bloody babies in the attic. We need you at home, Peter! Polly needs a full-time father.’

‘Don’t do this to me, Mommy! Please don’t do this to me!’

As his women started yelling abuse at each other, Peter grabbed Polly by the arm and dragged her, kicking and screaming, from the room.

After clearing up the wreckage of lunch, I followed Isobel into the rose garden. I hadn’t fully grasped the repercussions of all that had been said over lunch. As far as I could see, Isobel and Peter led separate lives already. Unaware that separation is often a precursor of divorce, I believed that even if they were living apart, they still might come together again.

The walled garden was a pleasant sanctuary on cool evenings, when the scent of roses filled the air. Polly and I sometimes played Scrabble on one of the benches after supper. But on a hot, humid afternoon with the sun beating down, it was not a place for the faint-hearted. I think that after the debacle of lunch, Isobel wanted to vent her anger on something, and, unlike her daughter, the plants couldn’t talk back. Armed with a pair of secateurs and wearing a sun hat, she attacked the rose bushes with the ruthlessness of a house-frau gutting fish. I carried a basket for the cut flowers, their delicate heads bleeding over the edge.

Isobel struggled with a blossom, severed it and threw it on top of the others: ‘She shouldn’t take advantage of you,’ she kept saying of her daughter. ‘You ought to stand up to her more, Ajuba. We can’t have her getting her way all the time, can we?’

I didn’t reply, so she turned from the task in hand to me. The secateurs looked vicious. ‘She’s my best friend,’ I explained.

‘Yes,’ she said, her impatience forcing her to stress the word, transforming what was meant to be acquiescence into a hiss of denial. ‘I know Polly’s your best friend, dear, but that doesn’t make you her slave.’

‘I’m not her slave. I’m her best friend.’

She decided to change tack, and, severing a rose the colour of her hair, she held it seductively beneath my chin. ‘You’re better than butter, you are,’ she whispered. ‘You deserve better than Polly.’

She held me with those brown eyes of hers in a lingering, complicit gaze. I was out of my depth, drowning in the sensuous warmth of her eyes, when a pebble landed at my feet. I tore myself free and saw Polly, half hidden behind a shrub, beckoning. I handed the basket of roses to Isobel. ‘I’m sorry. I’m supposed to . . . we’re . . .’ Polly and I were meeting Beth to stake out the Gatehouse that afternoon. However, Isobel had left me dazed, tongue-tied. There was a maggot in my mango and I didn’t like the taste of it. As if sensing my unease, Polly’s mother smiled at me.

‘You’re on holiday, pet,’ she murmured. ‘You can do whatever you want.’

I took a backward step, then I ran to Polly. As soon as we were out of the walled garden and out of hearing range, Polly asked, ‘What was she saying?’ Red-eyed and deflated, she was holding a carrier bag.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked, as we walked past Peter’s Renault.

‘I’m waiting for you to tell me what Isobel was saying.’

‘She wasn’t saying anything.’

‘She sure as hell was saying something.’

‘It was nothing much.’

‘Bullshit!’

‘Bullshit to you!’ I shouted.

Polly threw down the carrier bag and, grabbing me by the shoulders, shoved me against the garage door. In a single movement she had me pinned by the throat, depriving me of air.

‘Out with it. Tell me what she said.’ She slackened her arm to give me air enough to speak. ‘Are you my best friend or not?’ She was crying, and the absurdity of such a question when she was squeezing the breath out of me gave me the strength to kick her on the shins. Polly fell to the ground, weeping.

‘What’s the matter with you, Polly?’

‘You’ve got to tell me what Isobel was saying. If you were my best friend, you’d tell me. I know you’d tell me.’

So I lied to her. My excuse is that I was trying to protect my friend. I was trying to placate both mother and daughter by lying to one about the other. ‘She said . . . she said she’s always thinking of you. And she said that she loves you. Then, she begged me to be your friend, for ever and ever. Amen.’

Polly, however, was still suspicious. Experience had taught her that Isobel was adept at manipulation and capable of making mincemeat of the gullible. ‘Isobel said that?’

I crossed my heart, and, licking my forefinger, stuck it in the warm afternoon air. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ I said, expecting to be struck dead in an instant. Nothing happened and although suspicion still lingered on Polly’s face she didn’t say anything. She couldn’t, because just then Beth appeared on her bicycle, peddling furiously. When she was almost on top of us, she squeezed the hand brakes, dropping her legs to the side.

‘I haven’t missed anything have I?’

Polly and I shook our heads at the same time.

‘Well,’ she chuckled, unable to contain her glee, ‘you’ve missed something absolutely stupendous! I was outside the Gatehouse waiting for you guys when Detective Inspector Roberts, of all people, turns up. He goes into the Gatehouse and – hey presto! – I take his photograph.’

Getting down from her bike, Beth opened the satchel in which she kept her mother’s camera and brought out two photographs. The first was of a tall, lanky man in civilian clothes entering the Gatehouse with a uniformed policewoman beside him. The second was of the same pair leaving through the side door. Miss Edith was nowhere to be seen.

‘Didn’t they take her with them? You mean she’s still there?’ Polly protested.

‘Of course. She’s only a suspect at this stage,’ I replied.

‘Yeah,’ Beth confirmed. ‘And they won’t get the results of her test for yonks. Mummy says the final inquest won’t happen until around February at the earliest, and we’re only in August, you know.’

Our instinct to investigate quickening, Polly and I followed Beth on her bicycle towards the Gatehouse and the Bag Lady.

Our absorption with Miss Edith was not entirely ghoulish. Even when Beth and I realised that Polly was right in supposing Miss Edith knew more about the contents of Miss Fielding’s trunk than she was telling us, when I browse through the pages of our True Murder scrapbook, what stands out above everything else is what excellent friends we were back then. And in the end, Miss Edith became our friend as well. In addition to newspaper cuttings from the Gazette and the Guardian, a carefully drawn map of Graylings with the names of the rooms and where the staff and Miss Fielding slept; along with photographs of Miss Edith at the Co-Op, Mr Furzey in the garden, and Detective Inspector Roberts at the Gatehouse, the book contains more or less anything that caught our attention that summer: a crow’s feather picked up on the drive, a leaf from the copper beech at Ford Abbey, a mass of dog hairs brushed off Candy and Fudge, and a series of portraits of ourselves. There are pictures of Polly dressed in fluorescent t-shirt and a tight black skirt, attempting to bump and grind to our favourite song that summer, Shaggy’s ‘O Carolina’. There’s a photo of us wearing our Crimebuster badges and then the three of us draped in Miss Fielding’s clothes. Beth is in her riding jacket, I am in her shawl and Polly, her face half-hidden by a pink silk hat, smiles coquettishly at the camera.

‘It was your Summer of Love,’ Belinda Bradshaw told me years later. ‘While the Venuses were breaking up, you girls were completely absorbed in each other’s lives. I’d never seen anything like it. You seemed oblivious to what was going on.’

To this day, I don’t think Belinda is aware of how deeply involved we became with Miss Edith. She assumed, as did the other adults around us, that we were only interested in walking Candy and Fudge. They didn’t realise what our interrogation was doing to Miss Edith and to what extent our persistent extraction of details of her past life, compounded by the police investigation, was beginning to upset her.

That afternoon we found Miss Edith still in her dressing-gown. She was outside, sitting in a garden chair, sorting boxes of photographs on a table. The day was humid, the air prickly with the promise of rain. The garden needed water, as did the potted plants on the patio, but Miss Edith, immersed in the past, seemed unaware of the weather.

‘You’re not ill, are you?’ Beth asked. Miss Edith must have been still undressed when the police came to call, I thought. I noticed a half-eaten digestive biscuit and a glass of water beside a stack of photographs. Her face was flushed, and her deeply wrinkled skin looked like the skeleton of a leaf, the sun shining behind it.

‘I’m fit as a fiddle,’ she snarled.

I stared at her while Polly, dipping into the carrier bag, produced the remainder of the goat’s cheese she’d fought over at lunch. ‘Shall I put this in the kitchen?’

‘You realise you don’t have to keep on bringing me things, don’t you? You can come visiting without bearing gifts, you know.’

‘I know that.’

Avid to learn more about Miss Edith’s former life from her photographs, Polly and I inched closer to her. We both thought, with the absurd optimism of the very young, that by the end of the afternoon, we’d have all our questions answered.

As if understanding our interest in her affairs, Miss Edith said: ‘Come along, girls, I want to show you something.’

We clustered around her, Beth and I leaning over an arm of the rattan chair, Polly on the other arm, as Miss Edith turned the pages of her album.

She pointed out a photograph of Medea to Beth, who was immediately smitten: ‘I’d die for a horse like that!’

Then she showed us Miss Fielding’s photographs of summer parties at Graylings and holidays in Europe: Miss Fielding with her Brownie Pack, Miss Fielding dressed as Brown Owl, in the uniform of a Queen’s Guide, in a bathing costume diving into a Norwegian fjord. There were snowcapped mountains in the background, so I asked Miss Edith if Norway was cold.

She shivered, remembering just how chilly it had been: ‘The water was freezing, my dear, like a knife slicing my skin.’

She brought out photographs of a holiday in Orkney and then another taken in the Highlands of Scotland.

‘Where’s a whiff of the Mediterranean?’ I wanted to know. ‘The Promenade des Anglais and that piazza in Florence?’

Surprised that I had remembered our first conversation, Miss Edith smiled wistfully: a nursery-pudding smile, which darkened her eyes with a sprinkling of nutmeg. ‘Olivia wasn’t like you and me, Ajuba. She insisted on travelling north, never south, because she loathed the heat. She thought the Latin temperament vulgar; excessive. And, oh, how she hated garlic!’

‘Mummy doesn’t like garlic either,’ said Beth. ‘She says it makes your breath stink.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Miss Edith. ‘We weren’t allowed to have it in the house in case I was tempted to use it.’

‘Weren’t you allowed to use it to frighten off vampires and werewolves?’ I asked.

‘Not even for that, my dear.’

Rummaging through a cardboard box at Miss Edith’s feet, Beth discovered a photograph in an envelope and brought it out. It was of a man leaning against a gate, an arm around a bashful Miss Edith. ‘Who’s he?’ she asked.

‘Yes, who is he?’ Polly reiterated. ‘He’s kinda cute, ain’t he?’

The man was of medium height and stocky build with black hair and a warm smile. Miss Edith gazed at him. ‘The Lake District,’ she said slowly. ‘It must have been the Lake District. I can’t remember when it was, but I remember we walked for miles that summer.’

‘You mean you took him on holiday with you?’

‘No, we met him up there.’

I stared at the old woman intently. ‘What’s his name?’

We were full of questions about the man’s name and his age, where he came from and what he did. With our inquisitive eyes appraising her past life, our questions tumbling out one after the other, Miss Edith soon protested. She claimed she was exhausted.

‘Look, if you girls want to be helpful, take the dogs out for me, will you? Candy, Fudge. Walkies!’ The dogs started barking, eager to be running outside.

‘But we want to help you with this.’

‘You’ll find their leashes in the hall,’ Miss Edith called as Beth and I slipped back inside with the dogs. Polly, of course, hung back.

‘I don’t want to go. I want to help you sort out your photographs.’

‘Well, I don’t need your help! I’m old and decrepit and I need my afternoon zizz. So go on, off with you.’

Polly left the house with us.

Within the hour, the humidity in the air had swelled into a summer squall that brought us running back to the Gatehouse. We found Miss Edith still on the patio, crying in the rain, with several photographs at her feet. The silk-covered album, now sodden, had stained her fingers a putrid green.

We didn’t know what to do. We had never seen her like this before. While the dogs whined, nuzzling against her knees, we glanced at one another, unsure of ourselves. Eventually, Beth took her by the hand. ‘You can’t cry in the rain,’ she said firmly. ‘You’ll catch your death.’

Miss Edith moaned. She allowed us to help her out of the chair and into the house. I got her a towel. She told us to go; she didn’t want us around; at least not for the time being.

‘What’s wrong?’ Polly asked. ‘What’s bothering you?’

The tears started again. All the questions we’d been planning to ask about the man in the photograph were forgotten in the face of her distress. Suddenly Miss Edith looked very old: small and shrivelled up like a tiger nut someone had forgotten to eat.

‘I’m going to run you a bath,’ I told her, speaking louder than was necessary. Baths seemed to help Isobel, so perhaps a hot bath would help Miss Edith as well. We only called her the Bag Lady in our fantasies. She was strange, yet we liked her. And when she wasn’t overly distracted, she seemed to enjoy our company. So why was she crying? Had we asked too many questions? Had the Inspector’s visit unnerved her?

Polly recovered the last of the photographs from the patio and handed them to Miss Edith, who let them fall on her lap. She didn’t want to look at them again. Beth had made a cup of sweet tea, and, sipping it, Miss Edith recovered somewhat. She had painted such an idyllic picture of life at Graylings during Miss Fielding’s time that we assumed her tears were shed for the past: her life with Miss Fielding. The three of us believed that Miss Edith was simply missing her friend. We had no idea how wrong we were.