A Species of Revenge (10 page)

Because of the ethics of showing a photograph of a dead face – nonproductive, too, given the state of Ensor's face when he'd been found – it had been a reconstruction involving facial enhancement by an artist. The result hadn't been bad, but the recent photograph of her husband which Judith Ensor had handed over and was shortly to be used revealed all the reconstruction's inadequacies. It was hoped this one might better bring forth recollections on someone's part.

‘Early days yet, isn't it?'

‘Long enough – nearly a week. We haven't given up yet, though.'

The case wasn't anywhere near being closed. Never would be, though the inquiry was growing sluggish and Philip Ensor was nearly as much of an enigma as he had been at first. Abigail was worrying like a terrier at the idea that Judith Ensor knew more about the circumstances than she was saying, but was getting nowhere with it.

The elder Voss child, Lucy, her job of handing round canapés over, and the attention she'd basked in at first now fading, was starting to whinge a little, fidgeting beside her aunt, bored in this grown-up gathering. He couldn't see Allie, who'd taken herself out into the garden. Francis Kendrick hadn't returned, either. Mayo decided perhaps he, too, might take a stroll around the garden.

He took another cautious sip of the diabolical wine and a glance at his watch, and thought of the pleasant, relaxed evening he and Alex could be having together at home.

The covert glance hadn't been lost on Ison, nor the fact that other people were beginning to leave. ‘Tell you what, why don't you and Alex join us for supper?'

‘Good idea. Where shall we go? Somewhere where there's no need to book?'

‘Oh, join us at home's what I meant.'

‘We'd enjoy that – thanks. But would Viv welcome guests at such short notice?' Mayo had no wish to be the cause of marital dissension.

‘Rubbish! I believe it's only cold meat and salad. Anyway, Viv will cope. She'll be delighted.'

Mayo had no doubt about Vivien Ison's ability to cope. She was an energetic, practical woman with short grey hair, who took most things in her stride, including her husband's demanding, and sometimes macabre, job. Ison added, as further incentive, ‘I have that new John Eliot Gardiner recording I know you're dying to hear.'

That clinched it. ‘Well, if you're sure.'

‘Sure I'm sure. Let's make tracks, then.'

The Isons departed to walk the short distance home, leaving Mayo and Alex to follow in their car. They made their round of farewells and were thanking Imogen and her sister at the door when, from somewhere in the back of the house, came a faint and gentle sound, the slow, sweetly measured musical-box notes of ‘Alice Where Art Thou?'

‘Oh, do listen!' Alex exclaimed, enchanted.

‘That's Francis's Victorian Polyphon,' Imogen smiled. ‘You put an old penny in it and it plays the tune you choose. Allie's very favoured to be allowed a demonstration.'

For a moment, they stood in the shadowed hall, lit only by gloomy stained-glass windows, the dark staircase with its tall carved newel posts winding upwards into infinity. What was it that held them all still? Those poignant echoes of the old house's past ... musical soirees, drawing-room ballads, young ladies in ringlets and crinolines? Or some moment of precognizance? Mayo shook himself and moved to the door.

But in the weeks that followed, he was to remember time and again that haunting tune, the overpowering smell of roses from the garden, and the look on Hope Kendrick's face.

‘Nice kids,' remarked Vic Baverstock over Monday-morning breakfast at Edwina Lodge. From the window of their downstairs flat, he watched Lucy and Allie trotting between their father's car and the house, importantly helping him to stow photographic paraphernalia into the boot of his car, plus a grip for what looked like an overnight stay away from home, encouraged by Dermot, who knew the value of volunteer labour and wanted to get off as soon as possible.

‘They're noisy,' replied Tina, without any reference to truth.

She'd been born with an argumentative and contrary nature, and disagreed with her husband on principle, contradicting him almost every time he opened his mouth to speak. He constantly reminded himself that, being thin and colourless, and of no great significance as far as looks went, this was her way of getting attention. If so, it wasn't a very successful ploy. People still did their best to avoid her. And Vic himself continued to air opinionated views, even on subjects he didn't much care about, simply to keep his end up, so that their conversation resembled an acrimonious game of pat-ball.

‘All kids are noisy,' he said, although it had been only the elder child, when he'd met them in the garden the previous day, who'd seemed uninhibited and full of high spirits. The younger one had played with the ends of her hair, seeming too shy to open her mouth. They jigged about on the front doorstep now, waving as their father finally drove off, shouting goodbyes in their shrill childish voices before going indoors.

‘Not all children make their presence felt so obviously, by any means, if they're well brought up,' Tina continued her complaint, punctuating it with a sniff.

Vic gave up the unequal struggle and poked without enthusiasm at his bowl of yoghurt and muesli, thinking it resembled sweepings from a stable floor, while his mouth watered for bacon, sausage, eggs, the works. Vegetarian food was all right in its way, but it needed imagination to give it a kick, you had to be committed enough to food to make such a regime palatable, and Tina was basically not interested in eating, regarding it as a necessary evil, nibbling minute quantities while barely giving herself time to sit down and consume them. Now there was a thing, he reflected, the manager of a wholefood shop who wasn't interested in food! No wonder the customers didn't actually roll in – or quickly made some excuse to leave if they found themselves there by mistake. If you'd been born in Lavenstock and grown up with a centuries' old tradition of consuming the products of pork butchers' shops in the form of pigs' trotters and tripe, black pudding, pork pies, faggots and peas, you didn't take kindly to being lectured on the virtues of a healthy diet by someone who was patently no advert for her own products. Being skinny and intense wasn't admired around here. They thought her advice a bit of a cheek. Vic considered it a pretence.

Like this pretence that she found children a nuisance, when she pursued motherhood as determinedly as she pursued every other craze in her life – he couldn't think of it as anything else but a craze: Tina as a parent hardly conjured up visions of dewy-eyed madonnas or fruitful earth mothers. He switched off the subject, which he preferred to ignore – not the idea of having a family, for he was extremely fond of children, but the processes entailed in getting one. All these charts and temperature-taking and other things which he'd rather not think about, too damned clinical, by half. Not to mention sex at the approved time, whether one felt like it or not. Off-putting, to say the least. Especially since Tina didn't inspire him to feel much like it at all these days.

‘That wretched paper girl's left her bike inside the gate again!' she declared suddenly, assuming her on-the-warpath expression as she spied Patti Ryman's bicycle in the bushes, and Patti talking to Henry Pitt.

‘If she didn't hide it, it'd get nicked. You can't expect her to push it around while she's delivering that load of papers.'

‘She shouldn't be delivering papers at all.'

Vic was inclined to agree – the bag for them was very near as big as the girl herself – but he couldn't be bothered to argue. He was going to have indigestion all day as it was from that bloody muesli.

‘You don't need to go yet – and you haven't finished your breakfast,' she accused him, as he pushed his chair back from the table. ‘It's only quarter to eight.'

‘Not really hungry,' he lied, thinking of the hot sausage sandwich he'd have time to pick up if he left now. ‘And I want to be in early this morning. There's old Pitt – I can offer him a lift.'

‘He likes to walk to work.'

‘Well, he's only got to refuse, then,' Vic retorted, making his escape before he said more than he ought. He had his own reasons for keeping Tina sweet at the moment, apart from the fact that he was sorry for her over the way Mrs Burgoyne had let her down over her promise to let them have first refusal to buy Edwina Lodge.

He was just in time to catch Henry Pitt, from the upstairs flat, a plump, white-haired old man who was looking flustered, mumbling something Vic didn't catch, touching Patti's sleeve then edging away from her, his face growing even more pink as he spotted Vic.

‘Well, thanks, Mr Pitt,' Patti said, giving Vic a bright smile as she hurried off to complete the rest of her deliveries. ‘Don't forget to be there. It's really important.'

‘Assignations?' Vic asked Henry jokingly, his gaze appreciatively following Patti's neat little back view. Even the hideous school uniform couldn't hide that Patti Ryman was growing up, fast. Her legs, when she'd worn those miniskirts during the holidays, were worth more than a second look.

Henry flushed even more deeply as he answered Vic's flippant remark. ‘Oh, it's something and nothing.'

He didn't refuse Vic's offer of a lift, although it would mean abandoning his walk to work. He would arrive far too early at the town library, where he stamped books and put them back on the shelves contentedly all day long, where he made his way every day with his doddery-looking walk that must surely be deceptive, since he had no car and rarely took the bus, and sent for a taxi only on odd occasions. Couldn't be as old as he appeared, not yet retired and on the pension, Vic reflected, though he wasn't looking as benevolently smiling today as he normally did.

‘How's things, then?' Vic asked when they'd joined the traffic flow and were bowling down the hill.

‘Oh, coping you know, coping.' Henry paused. ‘Well, to tell the truth, not happy with the way things are going at the library, Vic, not happy at all.' He had a gentle, cultivated voice, he wore knitted waistcoats and, in winter, a fur hat with ear-flaps. He'd lived with his brother, Charles, until Charles died and their house had become too much for Henry to cope with alone. Harmless old boy, a big soft Nellie, really, but basically OK.

‘Oh, you mean the cuts and that.'

‘Yes, that's just what I do mean.' Henry was silent for a while, then burst forth, growing more and more agitated as he elaborated on his theme. They were being forced to close down another branch library, due to spending limits set by central government ... ‘Closing down
libraries,
imagine! We're becoming a nation of Philistines!' he cried. ‘Not to mention the short-sightedness of it! How can we grumble about children doing nothing but sit in front of the telly, if we don't encourage them to read?' He went on in this vein for some time. ‘It's hardly surprising they're growing up illiterate, can scarcely even write their own names!'

‘I suppose not,' answered Vic, who rarely read anything other than
Exchange and Mart
and hadn't given the subject much consideration one way or another, although, working as a clerk in the council treasurer's department, he could hardly be unaware of the swingeing cuts in local government spending. He was rather taken aback at the gentle Henry's vehemence.

‘Well, that's how it seems to me,' said Henry with an apologetic smile. ‘I'm sorry, I can be a bit of a bore on the subject. It shouldn't matter to me, I'll be retiring shortly, but it does. I'm afraid, it still does.'

‘Think nothing of it,' replied Vic, who'd been listening with half an ear anyway, thinking that if he got a move on, he'd still be in time to nip round the corner to the sandwich bar where the lovely Mandy would slip three sausages in his bap, rather than the stipulated two, at no extra charge. It wasn't only the sausages that made his mouth water again. ‘What are you going to do with yourself, then, when you retire? Got all your plans made?' he asked Henry heartily.

Henry looked bleak. ‘I'm not sure. My brother and I – we used to spend our holidays in Greece, the country fascinated him, and we'd intended to go there more often when I retired – but I don't somehow feel inclined to go alone. To tell you the truth, I can't imagine what I shall find to do without my work,' he added, in a forlorn burst of honesty. ‘I've worked in the library for forty-eight years.'

Forty-eight years! Jesus. Vic tried to think up something useful to say, but could only dredge up a cliché he was himself sick of hearing. ‘Oh, I don't know. You wait. When I meet blokes that used to be in our office, they tell me they don't know how they found time to go to work. You've got plenty hobbies, I suppose?' Vic was a great believer in hobbies. His was singing in a male-voice choir. Very therapeutic, letting off steam by belting it out – and useful, too, if you needed an excuse.

‘I like cooking. I read a lot.'

‘You want to get yourself an allotment, keep you more fit than reading.'

‘An allotment? Good heavens, I don't know the first thing about gardening!' Henry laughed gently. ‘I am happy to say I have never
seen a
spade.'

Poor bugger, thought Vic, not realizing Henry was quoting, he's going a bit gaga already, even before they shove him out on to the scrapheap. Get worse if he wasn't watched. You could never tell with these old blokes when they got to that age, up to all sorts, they were. He thought with sudden unease of the empty sherry bottles he'd noticed recently in the shared dustbin, of lonely old men sitting on park benches, loitering outside school gates, of the two small girls at Edwina Lodge, and wondered what Henry could have been talking to little Patti Ryman about.

After those who went out to work had left, and the children been packed off to schools and playgroups, Ellington Close took on its usual peaceful daytime languor. Mothers thankfully made themselves a quiet cup of coffee and looked for their horoscopes on the telly, the postman came and went, the three retired couples rose and had breakfast, and Stanley Loates put his mother's soiled bed linen into the washing machine.