A Well Kept Secret (36 page)

“Well, I cannot say that you haven’t well and truly shocked me,” he said at last. “It is going to take me a while to get my head round all of this. I’m sure there must be some explanation other than the one you fear. Even so, I cannot thank you enough for telling me all this, for you have helped me to understand much of what has been bothering me since I learned of my uncle’s death.”

“Then I’m glad I’ve told you,” she sighed wearily. “It has been on my conscience for too long. At least I can die in peace now, knowing that somebody else will carry the responsibility that I have shouldered all these years.”

Martin looked again at the spent bullet in his hand. He was no expert in such things, yet to him it looked as if it was something that had been fired from a comparatively small handgun. Was it possible that something that small had really killed someone? Was the old housekeeper’s theory just that, and nothing more? Or was it all a grim reality?

“Thank you for coming,” she said, breaking into his train of thought at last. “I’m glad that I have seen you again. I really do hope that you will prove me wrong, but promise me one thing?”

“I will try.”

“If it turns out that I was right all along, please do not think ill of your uncle, he really
was
a good man.”

As Martin drove slowly back to the sea front he mulled over what he had learned from the old housekeeper. There had been quite a few unanswered questions he had wanted to put to her yet it was all too obvious that the old housekeeper was so terribly exhausted after telling him her story it would have been cruel to have taxed her further. He had thanked her, asked her if there was anything he could do to make matters easier for her, only of course there was nothing. He had spoken briefly to Mollie and asked her to advise him when the inevitable happened, and at the same time asking for her to pass on June’s best wishes, which he had neglected to do when he had been talking to her. In a way he felt humbled by the matter-of-fact way in which the two women were facing the inevitable.

As he drove back to the seafront he tried to put together the various bits and pieces of information he had been gathering since coming to Springwater House, and the more he thought about matters, the more he feared that Mrs Jefferson may have shrewdly guessed at least part of the truth.
 
He recalled her telling him that his uncle had said to his sister; ‘It is for your safety and the safety of the boy’. What on earth could have caused him to say such a thing? It was a statement that could have meant anything from a discussion about a life insurance policy to a warning about an assassin that could have been stalking her! Mrs Jefferson had also told him that from the time that the man Burton had appeared the doctor and his wife had become worried; what were they worried about? Was the police officer blackmailing his uncle? There had been nothing in the bank statements he had looked at to suggest that such a thing had occurred, yet that didn’t make the idea impossible because there may have been other bank accounts he knew nothing of, or the blackmailer may have wanted something other than money. Could the situation really have been so serious as to actually cause the doctor to deliberately contemplate murder? Was the doctor’s warning to his mother and his possible strong dislike of Sgt. Burton connected?

It was a somewhat unlikely scenario yet the circumstances were certainly capable of such an interpretation. The question he simply couldn’t answer was simple; was it really conceivable that a much loved and respected family doctor would actually murder a police officer and bury him in the grounds? Surely there would have been an almighty uproar if a police officer had gone missing, and he had heard nothing about such a thing. On the other hand if, as he believed, the doctor
hadn’t
done away with anyone, how could one explain the bullet? Was it possible that Mrs Jefferson had missed its presence when she had cleaned the area prior to going to Scotland? Somehow he doubted it. Had it dropped from someone’s pocket? Not impossible, but who on earth wandered around with spent bullets in their pocket just to drop them in the hallway of a doctor’s house? And how did any of this tie in with the mad butterfly hunter, the mysterious would be purchaser of the house, Peter Buxted who claimed to have been such a friend of his uncle, or the disappearance of June’s father. In fact; did
any
of it tie together, or was it all just a long string of unconnected coincidences? The more he thought about it, the more confused he became, and by the time he reached the car park by the pier he was no nearer a solution and resolutely thrust the whole business from his mind until he had time later to really sit down and think it all out.

Having stepped out of the car and locked it he realised that there were more people about than when he had dropped June and the girls off earlier, and initially he had some difficulty in locating them. After scanning the throngs moving around on the beach he suddenly he caught sight of June waving to him only a matter of a dozen or so yards away. He waved back to let her know that he had seen her, and within a minute or so he reached her little spot on the beach where she had laid out covers on the sand, erected a large beach brolly she had acquired from somewhere to provide some protection from the sun and placed the food hamper ready for use.

“Hello, June,” he called out as he approached. “Where are the girls?”

“Over there playing some sort of ball game with some youngsters they’ve met,” June answered, waving her hand vaguely off to her left. “Don’t worry; I’ve kept my eye on them. How was your visit?”

“To be honest, not quite as I expected,” he admitted as he dropped down beside her a she sat down under the shade of the umbrella.

He couldn’t help noticing how trim and attractive she looked. Since he had abandoned her earlier she had shed her outer clothes and was now relaxing in a very fetching white bikini. It was the first time he had seen her in anything like such revealing garb and it served to confirm his earlier suspicions that she was in fact built in a very proportionate, graceful and feminine manner. She had a really tiny waist, beautifully shaped legs and arms, a flat tummy with small and nicely rounded buttocks, and although her bust was perhaps small by the standards common on page three of some of the more basic tabloid papers, it was naturally as high and pert as he had previously suspected, and obviously not just the effect created by a wired bra! All in all, she presented a most definitely attractive and appealing sight!

“Oh?” she exclaimed interrogatively, rolling over onto her stomach and supporting her upper body on her elbows as she looked across at him.

“I’ll give you all the details tonight if you don’t mind; it’s a bit too public here.”

“If you wish,” she agreed unhesitatingly. “So, if there are no dark secrets to reveal right now; how about a swim?”

“I didn’t bring any trunks”

She laughed mischievously. “I could say, well, come as you are, only before you take me at my word, allow me to add hastily that I already have some ready for you.”

“You
what
?”

“After you had left for your appointment I wandered up to the shops with the girls to get a few things, and I spotted some on display and I thought; why not? So I bought a pair on the off-chance you could be persuaded!”

“Well, I’ll be-”

“I shouldn’t” she interrupted laughing, “it could be very embarrassing on a public beach! Come on, we just have time for a quick dip before the hungry monsters descend upon us demanding yet more food!”

She lobbed a bath towel at him as she was speaking, and then turned round to rummage in her bag. As she turned, Martin was able to glimpse her back, and immediately he saw the many criss-crossed scars of the old beatings she had told him of across the lower part of her back, disappearing beneath the material of the bikini bottom and even visible on the top parts of the back of her legs. Just seeing those scars, the mute evidence of the pain and degradation she had suffered in the past filled him with an overpowering desire to find and beat the hell out of the man who had done it to her. If ever he caught up with her husband he promised himself that he would demonstrate what a real beating felt like, and to hell with the consequences!

June turned and passed the swimming trunks to him, and wriggling in an exaggerated manner he divested himself of his clothes and pulled them on. He hadn’t been swimming since Alicia had passed away and it gave him an odd feeling to think that he was returning to it in company with another woman! He thrust that thought aside, and keeping up the banter he finally threw off the towel and challenged her to reach the water before he did. In the event it was a dead heat.
 
They waded in and eventually swam out a few yards before disporting themselves in close proximity to each other.

They had been swimming and diving for maybe ten or twelve minutes when Martin dived down, and on surfacing realised that he had come back to the surface right in front of June. She was laughing and enjoying herself in a way he had never seen her do throughout their brief acquaintance, and she looked so appealing that he had to fight really hard to stop himself seizing her in his arms and crushing her slender body to his own hungry one. At that moment he wanted her as fiercely as he had ever wanted a woman in his life, and the realisation shocked him. For a split second she looked at him, and the laughter faded as she read what was in his heart.

“Don’t spoil it,” she whispered. “Just give me a little more time; please?”

He knew he had to back-pedal, and fast.

“I was just thinking,” he quipped to cover his confusion, “that you look good enough to eat and it remind me that I have had no lunch!”

“Then I suppose I had better feed you, you brute,” she joked, the laughter returning at once to her features. “Come on, with any luck we should get back before the human locusts descend in our absence and scoff the lot!”

Together they swam back to the shore, ran up to where they had left their things, and seizing towels they proceeded to vigorously dry themselves off.

“Right,” said June, dropping her towel. “Before we do anything else you had better let me put some sun-screen lotion on you; I can see from the colour of your skin that you don’t do this sort of thing that often!”

“Only with the right sort of girl,” he joked.

“Get down and lie still,” she ordered. “I’ll do your back, and then you can do mine, and then you can finish off while I get a meal ready.”

He did as he was told, and lying there on his belly, he discovered that her hands working the lotion into his back was something that was astonishingly pleasant. When at last she had finished, he said plaintively; “I’m sure I need more?”

“Any more and you would drown in the stuff,” she retorted happily. “My turn now.”

She lay on her towel, and he squatted down beside her, and seconds later he was gently rubbing the lotion into her back. The feel of her skin beneath his fingers felt even more pleasant than the sensation of her fingers had been on his. He massaged it in gently and liberally; slowly working is way down from her shoulders and towards her lower back as far as the waistband of the bikini bottom. He did it as leisurely and as tenderly as he could and wishing all the while it was something that could go on for a long time. He only desisted when he detected signs of her getting restless.

“You finish off while I get the food out,” she said, sitting up at last. “Guess I will have to be quick about it too, here comes the starving mob!”

Martin tore his eyes away from her, and saw Beverley and her friend Georgie bearing down on them

“Hi dad,” Beverley called, flopping down beside him, with Georgie collapsing alongside June, “It’s really great here, we’ve had lots of fun, haven’t we Georgie? I can’t wait to tell all my other friends about it. We must come again. Can we?”

“I expect it could be arranged,” he agreed a little dubiously. “I will have to think about it of course. I hope you two have been behaving yourself while I was away?”

“Depends what you call behaving?” she said archly, and turned over onto her back

It suddenly struck him that he had never really looked at his daughter before, not really looked at her as a person that is. Seeing her there that day on the beach he realised what June had already commented on; she really wasn’t a child any more, she was a young woman on the threshold of life. She looked so like her mother; slim, graceful, even elegant in a way, and seen on that beach in the smallest bikini he had ever set eyes on it was patently obvious that she was fast developing a woman’s figure as well! If he was honest, the brevity of that swimsuit rather shook him, although neither June nor anybody else appeared to think it was anything out of the ordinary. As Georgie’s was equally minuscule, he said nothing; accepting that perhaps his ideas of what was proper or otherwise were getting outdated. Although the girls were much the same age, physically Beverley was already leaving her friend behind in the development stakes!

It was a pleasant meal, and they stayed quite a while on the beach, with June and Martin soon being talked into joining in on various ball games with the girls and other people. When at last Martin suggested that it really was time that they set off home there was a chorus of disapproval from the girls which was only quelled when Martin finally promised that they could make another visit during the next official school holidays.

The return journey passed without incident, and they reached Springwater House just as George was setting off home. He stopped for a word with Martin, assuring him that everything was ok, and that Hugh Edwards had been, and had left about half an hour previously, saying that he would return on the morrow if the weather held. As Martin and June unloaded the car, the girls promptly vanished with the avowed intention of doing more to their tree house.