After Clare (24 page)

He broke a biscuit and threw the bits to a passing swan, who inspected it, found it not to its liking and glided disdainfully away. ‘Please yourself,' he said to the retreating back. Wrapping the rest of the cheese in its greaseproof paper, and screwing up the top of the biscuit packet, he went back to the Drum and Monkey to collect Willard and receive a reproachful look from the landlady. The woman had two children and, like so many other women whose husbands hadn't returned from the war, she was making the best of a difficult situation on her own. He felt sorry for the barely touched plate of food he'd left, and gave one of her children sixpence to run along to Leysmorton with a note, informing Lady Fitzallan that he and Willard would be along within the hour.

After telling her the conclusions he'd reached, he left her in no doubt that the police would never consent to reopen any enquiry, certainly not on the flimsy evidence of that letter – which was no evidence of anything, if it came to that. And that any further private enquiry would almost certainly be unproductive.

‘Yes, I know,' she replied, almost absently.

He exchanged a look with Willard, the same thought occurring to both. If she'd anticipated the outcome, why had she brought the letter to his attention? He couldn't make out what she wanted him to say.

‘Where did you find the letter?' Willard asked.

She explained that it had been among some old drawings of Clare's, and Novak asked if they could see the place.

Showing no surprise at the request, she led the way upstairs, along a corridor and down some steps into a small, airless room tucked away between floors, set up as an artist's studio. She waved towards a large chest of drawers, a heavy piece of old furniture in dark oak. ‘This was where Clare kept her work. I'd been looking through some drawings and after I put them back, I found the letter on the floor and thought it had probably fallen out of one of the sketchbooks where she'd put it.'

There were four small drawers, two each side, surmounting two larger, deeper drawers. Willard lifted out the smaller ones. They were all tidily stacked with sketchbooks, but it wasn't their contents that interested Novak. After emptying each of them in turn, he upended them, while Lady Fitzallan looked on without speaking. It wasn't until the fourth and last of the smaller drawers that he came upon what he had expected to find. He nodded and pointed to the small dab of hardened, resinous substance on its undersurface, and then took out the folded letter from his wallet, with the yellow smear that appeared to correspond with it.

‘Looks as though someone glued the letter underneath the drawer, and the glue eventually became brittle and perished, so that when it was opened, the letter shook loose and fell into the one beneath.'

For a time she didn't say anything. ‘Yes. It does look like that,' she agreed. ‘All the drawers were heavy and I had to jerk them to open them. But why should Clare have wanted to hide it there?'

He didn't reply, waiting until she put forward the suggestion he was waiting for, the one he thought she had wanted him to make. ‘Though perhaps Clare didn't, perhaps it was someone else,' she said at last.

‘Why should anyone else be in possession of your sister's letter?'

‘Well, they say Peter Sholto used to poke around. Maybe he found it.'

‘And why should he want to hide it, if he did?'

‘That's the question, of course, isn't it?'

She had been a step ahead of him. She had known all along the police would never agree to concern themselves with the long ago disappearance of her sister – but if it should appear in any way to be concerned with Peter Sholto's murder, that might put a different complexion on things. He mentally saluted her. But at the same time, he was grateful that the letter and the presence of the glue had been brought to his notice. Because he was asking himself the same question she had asked. He scraped the blob of hardened glue from the drawer and put it into the envelope he'd brought with him, asking if they might keep the letter a little longer.

Willard took the envelope from him and left. If this was cabinet-makers' glue, it wouldn't exactly prove that young Sholto had put it there, but it would go a long way towards it.

The day had grown steadily hotter and even the short walk from the claustrophobic room that had been Clare Vavasour's studio had caused Novak to break out in a sweat. He looked forward to another night in his room at the Drum and Monkey without enthusiasm. No need to return just yet, he told himself, not unwilling to take a moment off on one of the seats below the terrace, while he thought over the last half hour and got things straight in his mind. Automatically feeling in his pocket for his cigarettes, tapping one out of the packet, the scent of roses wafted deliciously towards him just as he was about to light it. For a moment he breathed in the perfume and for some reason the urge to smoke left him. He looked at the cigarette, speculated, but finally abandoned it.

Flinging an arm along the back of the seat and leaning back, he saw the house there in front of him, its red-brick outlines limned against the strange, almost lurid light of the afternoon, its low eaves and sloping roofs, its twisted chimneys, the walls clothed with that invasive creeper which had turned scarlet over the last few days, giving it a picture-book appearance. This old house, everything in it dating from the year dot . . . funny how it got a hold of you.

He had grown used to it, for all it was a house of ghosts: those of the soldiers who had lived here, wounded in mind if not in body, of the sad daughter of the house who had mysteriously disappeared, and not least of the victim, that boy for whose death he hadn't yet found a reason. But old ghosts should not be allowed to inhabit the present. Nor to cloud his thinking. He closed his eyes and a low rumble of thunder was followed almost immediately by the first heavy drops of rain beginning to fall on his face.

As he grabbed his jacket, he looked up at the livid sky. This was not going to be a sharp shower, soon over. Making a run for it to the village was out of the question. He had covered the first few yards back to the house when he heard a whistle. Looking round, he saw young Drummond, with Rosie Markham a little in front of him, beckoning him and pointing in the direction of the stables towards which they themselves were running. He sprinted and they all reached the stable yard together, and were inside the door, only slightly damp, just in time to avoid being soaked as the downpour began in earnest.

The only natural light inside came from the upper half of the stable door which had been left open, and through a murky skylight set into the roof, and Val now busied himself lighting a Tilley lamp sitting on a rough workbench set up against one of the walls. As the lamp threw more illumination into the shadowy interior, Novak saw the stable was now used as a garage. He made out the shapes of a showy automobile, cream with black coachwork, and behind it a motorcycle combination.

Rosie sat on the running board of the Lanchester, shaking drops from her hair and rubbing her face with a handkerchief. Val propped himself against the motorcycle, while Novak, by default, leaned against the workbench. ‘We'd only just left here when the rain began,' Val explained. ‘We were actually on our way to find you, so it was lucky we saw you.'

A streak of lightning lit the stable, followed by another roll of thunder. Novak waited for one of them to say what it was that had caused them to shout for him: he didn't think it was simply to offer him shelter. And finally, it was Rosie who spoke.

‘I don't wish to overdramatize a situation that may not mean anything,' she began stiltedly, as if she had prepared this approach in her mind, then bit her lip and after a minute went on more naturally. ‘The thing is . . . well, the thing is, I think there's something you might like to know – but please, before I begin, I have to say that I won't say anything at all unless you
promise
my father won't hear anything about it. Not ever.'

He looked at her with raised eyebrows. So what had
she
been up to, this fresh-faced, wholesome young lady? ‘I can't promise anything. But if it has nothing to do with this investigation, then of course I won't mention it.'

She looked only slightly relieved. ‘Well, I'm not sure if it has.' She glanced towards Val, who had his arms folded across his chest. It seemed as if he had no intentions of taking part in this conversation, but he nodded and she went on, ‘I was only about eleven or twelve, you see. I may not have remembered it properly.'

‘I find children often remember things very clearly indeed, Miss Markham. Things they would rather not recall, sometimes,' he added encouragingly.

‘You're right, I have tried to forget, but I haven't been very successful.' The light was not good, but that didn't prevent him seeing how pale she was. Her hands were twisting the damp handkerchief into a ball. Suddenly she went on in a rush, ‘I overheard a conversation, you see. They were in the library and I was outside on the terrace. It was Peter Sholto and – and Val's sister, Poppy,' she hurried on, carefully not looking at Val. ‘She was staying with us at the time and he was asking her to do something for him. It was a private conversation and I should have gone away, but when I heard who they were talking about – I'm afraid I stayed where I was and listened.'

‘So who was it they were talking about?'

She was silent for so long he thought she'd taken fright at having begun this, but he'd underestimated her. She took a deep breath. ‘They were talking about my mother, that's why I stayed. And maybe,' she added, in a burst of shamefaced honesty, ‘maybe because I was a bit jealous of Poppy at the time. He was awfully good-looking, you know, and to be truthful, I had a bit of a crush on him, although he was so much older than me.' She had flushed to the roots of her hair, but she went on bravely, ‘They were quarrelling – well no, not really quarrelling, I suppose, but he was pressing her to do something she didn't want to do and she was getting frightfully worked up about it.' She began to tear at the handkerchief. ‘He was asking her to look in my mother's desk, to see if she could find any letters from—' She faltered.

‘From Mr Stronglove, perhaps?' he prompted.

‘Actually . . . yes. But how could you know that?'

‘Surmised,' he replied diplomatically, and was relieved that, after a moment's hesitation, she didn't pursue it.

‘Oh well, it doesn't matter. Yes, from him. He was always sending notes across from Leysmorton, to my father, as well as my mother – Peregrine Press publish him, you know – but the ones Peter wanted were the ones he said Dirk had sent to my mother. Poppy used to help her with her letters and he was ever so insistent, pressing her to look in her desk. She said no, not possibly, she couldn't do that, and then he said something about there being other ways . . . I think he meant spying on my mother, watching where she went,' she finished. ‘He told her if she did this, they'd soon have enough money to get married. I'm afraid, in the end, she gave in and said she would.'

‘I see. I assume by that they were engaged, then? Was it her photograph he kept with him, all through the war?'

‘Poppy's photo? I don't know, I suppose it might have been—'

Val, unable to stay silent any longer, interrupted violently. ‘If it was, she certainly hadn't given it to him! He was really spoony on her, but he wouldn't accept that she wasn't in the least interested in
him
. The truth is that he wouldn't leave her alone, pestering her and following her around and generally making a perfect nuisance of himself.'

‘And yet – according to what you heard, Miss Markham, she agreed to do what he asked?'

Another lightning flash was followed by a deafening thunderclap, while the rain fell in a seemingly unstoppable grey curtain into the yard and drummed onto the skylight. Val stood up and began to pace about unnervingly. He stopped at last and said, ‘You have to understand, Inspector. Neither of us, my sister and I, had any money. We'd been left near penniless, we had nothing!'

Novak's enquiries about Poppy after his visit to her shop had revealed a little of the extent of the brother and sister's penniless state. Which wouldn't have seemed penniless to most people of his acquaintance, but it was all relative, he supposed. If you'd been brought up to expect certain standards, perhaps what they had to go on with seemed paltry to them – but was that reason enough for Poppy to agree, against all her inclinations, and probably her upbringing, to do what Sholto had asked?

‘But that isn't what happened,' Val went on. ‘She might have agreed – I don't say she did, but she
might
have done – simply to get rid of him, but I happen to know she never did what he asked, or any such thing. They had been very good to her, Rosie's family. We're very distantly related, you know, and although I myself had never met any of them until Dee's wedding, Poppy had stayed with them often. She wrote and told me what had happened and that she'd have to find some acceptable excuse to leave Steadings, because she didn't want to seem ungrateful. It was the year she left school and she had absolutely no idea what she was going to do with the rest of her life, except that she didn't want to spend it with Peter Sholto. Besides—' He stopped abruptly. ‘Besides, she was in love with someone else.'

‘My brother, David,' Rosie said quietly. ‘Only I don't actually think David was in love with her. He liked her, terrifically, but—'

‘—but he wasn't ready to marry anybody,' Val said. ‘Or that's what I gathered from what Poppy said in her letters. She wrote to me a lot, that last summer. She was very miserable.'

They stared out at the rain. ‘Has – has this helped, Inspector?' Rosie asked, at last.

‘In the end, it always helps to know as much as we can find out about a murder victim. Thank you for telling me this, Miss Markham.'