Whoever Has the Heart Page 16

  ‘The old one is selling in a modest way. But I am well into my new one. Lord Curzon. I’ve mentioned it, haven’t I? I talk about it a lot. A marvellous man and much underrated. All that circle: A. J. Balfour, Lady Elcho, the Grenvilles, the group of friends who called themselves the Souls, fascinating. And both his wives, his daughters, all so vital and interesting. Oh, yes, I know I can make something of it.’

  He sounded keen, happy.

  ‘But what I shall live on while I’m doing it, I don’t know. I think I shall apply to the Society of Authors for a grant.’

  ‘At least you’ve got that lovely house to live in,’ said Nora. ‘Often fancied it myself, but it always goes to one of the family.’

  ‘Yes, aren’t we lucky?’

  Carrying my purchases, I turned back to my own house, it was in my mind to drop in at the Red Dragon, take another look at the sandy-haired man, and ask a few questions about Chloe Devon and Thomas Dryden.

  But a glance towards my house changed my mind.

  The two journalists had gone but there was a small, battered Ford Cortina outside my gate. I knew this to be Lady Mary’s, but when she got out of the car to hail me, I had never seen her dressed more elegantly and more expensively.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘ Thought I’d just drop in.’

  ‘Come in.’ I walked up the path ahead of her. ‘Not sure if my house is grand enough for those clothes.’ I ran my eyes over her: Caroline Charles suit, Ferragamo shoes, and the bag looked genuine Hermes. It all added up to several thousand pounds’ worth. Lady Mary always had charming clothes, usually unpressed, but this was above her usual standard. Her hair too, cut and set by a master. ‘You look lovely.’

  ‘Oh, I know where to shop when I’ve got the money.’

  ‘And have you got the money?’

  ‘Not yet.’ She smiled. ‘ But my credit is good.’

  I surveyed her. Clothes, hair, scent, perfection. ‘What are they in aid of?’

  ‘Going to see Billy’s mother,’ she said, stroking Muff.

  ‘Never imagined he had one.’

  ‘Oh, he has. Coming over from Paris. That’s where she lives. And then I’m taking him to meet my grandmother. He’s looking forward to meeting a countess.’

  ‘He’s out of the Nelson Clinic then?’

  She looked surprised. ‘Yes, how did you know about that?’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘You must be keeping an eye on him.’

  ‘Just interested.’ I studied her face. ‘Ill, was he?’

  ‘No.’ She looked embarrassed. ‘He’s one of those people who thought you ought to have a check-up when you’re getting married. I expect he’ll want me to go for one too.’

  Terrified of AIDS, I decided sardonically.

  ‘Are you serious about this marriage, Mary?’

  ‘I’m serious about his money,’ said Mary grimly.

  ‘Oh, Mary.’

  ‘Don’t pretend to be shocked. You’re not really. I’m twenty-eight and I want a household and children.’ She said it in that order and meant it that way. Husband came last. It had not always been so, she had loved her soldier boy.

  Muff leapt down from her lap. ‘After all, you’re not above a bit of jilting yourself.’

  I didn’t answer. But I presumed she was making a sharp comment on the Barney versus Humphrey contest, if she wasn’t just guessing, and I wondered how she knew.

  ‘Of course, if you’d like to swap me Humphrey,’ she said, ‘I might do a trade.’

  I felt a bit sorry for Billy Damiani. I also wondered what she meant and if she was indeed hinting at Clive Barney.

  But no, it was just one of her flip remarks, she couldn’t know about him, there was nothing to know. She always fancied Humphrey and he liked her. They might have made a thing of it if I hadn’t come barging along. He was more out of her social drawer than I was. I wouldn’t use the word class but its principles still operated in the world they moved in.

  Mary was not a hard nor a mercenary person so that there had to be a reason for her behaviour. I supposed I would learn why and how in the end.

  ‘Anyway, I came to see you.’ She sat down in the chair by the window. ‘ This room will look good when you’ve got a bit more furniture,’ she said absently. ‘It’s changed since you took over. For the better, really, much as I loved Bea she wasn’t a home maker.’

  She paused. ‘I’m trying to think how to put it: I am Bea’s executrix. You know that. She didn’t have a lot of money but over the last year she seems to have had a lot less. It’s been melting away.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘About sixty thousand. Not a fortune.’ Lady Mary had rather grand ideas about what constituted a fortune. ‘But it was more or less all she had.’

  ‘So what did she do with it?’

  ‘No idea. It was liquid cash, in Courts bank. She drew it out in three instalments.’

  ‘And nothing to show for it? Jewellery, pictures?’

  Mary shook her head. ‘No, but a conversation I had with her gives me the idea that she might have lent it. She said to me once that the best way you could show friendship to anyone was to help them out when they needed it. I think that’s what she did.’ She paused. ‘But I believe she wanted it back. She was realizing that she might need full-time nursing care and that costs. Bea needed her money for herself.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said thoughtfully.

  She saw my face. ‘She didn’t lend it to me.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Well, it crossed your mind.’

  ‘I suppose I wondered why you came here to tell me this.’

  ‘If you’re going to be like this, I shall wonder myself.’

  ‘Mary, come on.’

  ‘Bea’s last years, her last months, were very circumscribed. Narrowed. I think all her close friends were here, in Brideswell.’

  I was thinking. ‘Any names?’

  ‘Nora Garden, Crick and David, and Dr Harlow.’

  ‘Harlow?’

  ‘Yes, she got very close to him, as she and her cat got older. She relied on him a lot.’

  ‘But it was a professional relationship.’

  Mary said softly, ‘ She was old and had always liked attractive men … he’s that …’

  ‘I thought you liked all these people,’ I said.

  ‘I do, each and every one, but this loss of Bea’s money is worrying and I want to know where it is.’

  ‘She didn’t give it to Billy Damiani to invest?’

  ‘She did not,’ said Mary forcefully. ‘That remark is beneath you. Billy’s no angel, goodness knows, and I’m not sure how he made his money, although I expect I shall find out, but he did not take Bea’s thousands.’

  He might be a murderer but his money was real, that’s what Mary was saying.

  ‘And he didn’t kill Chloe Devon,’ said Mary, reading my thoughts.

  ‘He might have done.’

  ‘I won’t ask if you have any evidence or if it’s just prejudice, but I guess you don’t have anything real against him.’

  I didn’t argue with her. ‘ So what are you doing about Mrs Armitage’s missing money?’

  ‘Well, I’m going to be looking. There’s no record, letter or receipt. I think Bea would have had one, she might have been generous, but she wasn’t stupid.’

  ‘Did you ever hear Chloe Devon saying anything about having interesting information about an inhabitant of Brideswell?’

  ‘Can’t say I did, but I hardly spoke to the girl. Bea said something on those lines once. But she laughed when she did. She liked whoever it was and whatever she meant.’

  ‘The person she lent her money to?’

  ‘Could be.’ She frowned. ‘ Chloe saw me with you once and asked who you were. I told her. I think she knew but wanted it confirmed.’

  ‘Did you give her my address?’

  ‘No.’

  But she could have found out easily enough that I was interested in the house in Bridesw
ell, she knew the house agency game.

  ‘She had my name and address on her,’ I said.

  ‘I thought at the time she might have wanted to talk to you. Perhaps she did know something.’

  We sat for a moment in silence, then Mary removed Muff from her lap and Benjy from her feet and stood up. ‘ Well, that’s it. I wanted to tell you about Bea’s money.’

  I waited. More was coming.

  ‘I thought you might be able to recommend a private detective that I could use.’

  ‘I expect I could. But I should think your solicitor might be able to help there.’

  The telephone rang. For a moment I thought of ignoring it.

  Lady Mary moved towards the door. ‘I’m just going. Take your call.’

  ‘No, wait a minute, just in case.’

  Mary nodded, her face alight with curiosity.

  It was Rewley. ‘Briefly, the answer is yes.’

  ‘So, while Chloe Devon worked for Astley Green she did meet Thomas Dryden about his house,’ I said.

  ‘I could have told you that,’ said Mary from the door.

  ‘But you didn’t … nothing, Rewley, talking to someone else.’

  ‘After Bea died I put the house here in Astley Green’s hands. I used to go to dancing classes with young Astley … Before I thought about you.’

  I gave her a little push. ‘Be quiet, Mary, I can’t hear what I’m being told.’

  ‘What you’re being told,’ said Rewley, ‘ is that she continued to do odd work for them even after she’d started working on Damiani’s art magazine. And she did come out to Brideswell to view a house that the owner was considering selling.’

  ‘Dryden?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So they met, and we shall never know what they said to each other. But it’s a link, isn’t it, a connection, between the two murder victims.’ I looked at Mary, standing half in and half out, letting the door swing. ‘ Do you know anything about it, Mary? Anything at all?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, but if I think of anything, of course, I’ll say.’

  I could hear Rewley murmuring something. ‘I’ve just seen a first forensic report on the blood and remains in your cellar.’

  ‘Remains?’

  ‘It seems there was something of that too … The plaster was scraped off and traces of skin and bone were found in it as well as blood.’ So Chloe Devon had been there.

  Mary was trying to read my face. She was staring at me intently.

  ‘They can’t tell if the girl was killed in your cellar, cut up there, or the corpse just stored there before getting distributed around the place.’

  ‘What a horrible, blunt way you have of putting things.’

  Mary must have been able to hear what he had said, or else she could read my face, because I saw the colour drain from her cheeks and she swayed.

  ‘I must go now, Rewley, no more details just yet.’ And I banged the receiver down. And I rushed to put my arms round her. Distantly, I had just heard his voice talking about animal blood and something.

  I knew it was important, but I knew I could not listen now. He seemed to be saying something about disinfectant.

  ‘So what’s it all about?’

  I had her lying back in the chair, with the colour coming into her face. ‘You nearly fainted just now.’

  ‘I never faint.’

  ‘You came pretty close to it … Could you hear what Rewley was saying.’

  ‘Bits. Enough.’ She sat up. ‘Sorry, it was stupid of me. I used to play down there as a child when I stayed with Bea. It seemed a kind of magical place. I suppose there were rats?’

  ‘Not rats,’ I said.

  ‘And it made me sick to think about it at that moment. No, I would have known if there were rats. I remember David and I made a sort of house down there.’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew David as a boy.’ I should not have been surprised because I knew well that people in Mary’s social class seemed to know each other from babyhood onwards. All related by generations of intermarriage. They formed a closed and golden circle.

  ‘Child, he was quite little, he’s younger than me. He was with his mother then. It was just that one summer. I’d almost forgotten it … But it came back with a rush. And I remembered …’ She stopped speaking.

  ‘Remembered what?’

  ‘I remembered that we played a game we called Prisoners, about people being shut up down there, like a dungeon.’ She swallowed. ‘Surely nothing we did, nothing we played …’

  Could their child’s play presage the future, she was trying to say.

  ‘I’ll get you some water.’

  I stood thinking by the old stone sink, no one could accuse Bea Armitage of having the modern touch, the sink was an archeological relic, while I waited for the water to run really cold. We had good sweet water in Brideswell.

  ‘Here you are,’ I said, handing her the glass. ‘Nothing that children do carries on into the future.’

  A soothing lie: the other side of that coin was that the child is father to the man. Or so the saying goes.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Whatever I may have said to Mary (and she had gone away happier, but there was still something there that I did not like), I thought the past could weigh on the present and pretty heavily at that.

  I had no doubt what I was going to do. This wasn’t my affair, officially I was on leave, out of it all, but life had dragged me back in. Or death itself, if you preferred to put it that way. Thomas Dryden himself had engaged my attention. I owed him something.

  ‘One of them was murdered,’ he had said.

  Or that was what it had sounded like, and I was still thinking about it. Then he had muttered odd words in the ambulance: I did not understand what he had meant by those either. But they were there in the back of my mind all the time.

  I closed the door behind me and walked through the village street. I realized that I had barely known Brideswell under normal conditions. Murder had marked it out for its own all the time I had been there. All the same, a number of ordinary villagers, who perhaps felt untouched by the deaths, were walking the streets on their way to shop or post a letter or buy a newspaper. I already knew that many of the villagers commuted to work in London, Reading, or Oxford, so they were away but they had left their spouses at home. Not as many as there would have been once because most of the couples worked. You had to have a good income to afford to live in Brideswell and for many people that meant two incomes were needed. So there were not as many women about with shopping baskets as there might have been once and not many children. But Brideswell had several excellent schools so I had to imagine that the children were safely tucked away within the walls of the Abbey School, Fountains, and Mrs Berkeley’s Playgroup, 7 Church Passage. There were usually shouts and music coming from Church Passage so I knew her group was flourishing.

  I wondered how Ellen Bean was getting on at the Midden. She had never asked me inside, obviously you had to be either an animal or a witch to get hospitality. I must ask Birdie and Winifred about her, they would give me an honest view of her character. They were sharp-eyed ladies with few illusions.

  But I wasn’t visiting Ellen today, she could wait, although I remained interested in those ferrets with their sharp teeth.

  The Red Dragon was open, but empty of customers. It smelt of brass polish and beer which, oddly enough, made a not unpleasing combination. The barman was rubbing a glass with a white linen cloth.

  I approached him. ‘You know who I am?’

  He nodded silently. Certainly he knew. It was part of his job to know who was who and it was a part he enjoyed.

  ‘So you also know what I am.’ This was a statement and not a question. ‘I want to ask you a few questions.’

  He stopped rubbing the glass. ‘Is this official?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Not exactly …’ He savoured that. ‘Boss doesn’t like us talking to the police.’
/>   ‘You remember the girl Chloe Devon?’ He nodded. ‘And you knew Thomas Dryden … Did you ever see them talking?’

  ‘He bought her a drink once. Not a come on, or anything. I got the idea he’d met her before … might have been over selling his house. They seemed to be talking about it. Sounded like that.’

  ‘Yes, it might have been about a house,’ I said. ‘Sounded quite harmless.’ His eyes challenged me: ‘Go on,’ he was saying, ‘tell me it wasn’t so harmless as all that. Tell me I’ve handed you a gobbet.’

  The sandy-haired man appeared from behind a door as I left. He had been waiting for me. He touched me on the arm.

  ‘You don’t remember me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You ought to. You put me away.’

  ‘I did?’ I was searching my memories. ‘What for?’

  ‘Murder. I did life.’

  ‘Who did you kill?’

  ‘My wife. It was a domestic murder. Almost justified, the judge said.’

  I was remembering him now, my first murder case, and I had got a conviction. Not a nice murder at all, in spite of what he had said. I could see the sneaky little ratface of the young man he had been.

  ‘How long have you been out?’

  ‘Good time now. Put it all behind me,’ he said virtuously. ‘Wouldn’t talk about it now but for seeing you. The guv’nor here knows all about it, of course.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I’ve married again.’

  I wasn’t surprised, of course he would marry again, might even murder again. I wondered if he’d told her about her predecessor and what had become of her, and what his present wife thought about it.

  ‘Sharp, you were then,’ he said breaking into my thoughts, his voice admiring. ‘I only made one slip, and you were on to it at once.’

  Clever young me, I thought. I was remembering it myself now. Money came into it, naturally.

  ‘Yeah,’ he went on. ‘I told you I wasn’t short of money and didn’t need her insurance money, but I’d got a garage half-built and hadn’t got the money to finish it. You caught on to it, straight away.’

  ‘Got a car now, have you?’ I said thoughtfully. ‘No, my wife doesn’t like them, says they aren’t safe.’