Asking For Trouble (22 page)
The best-laid plans of mice and men are apt to gang awry. My plan didn’t go wrong but it did get unexpectedly delayed.
I was down promptly for breakfast the next morning, meaning to make an early visit to the farm. Alastair was already there, reading his newspaper, and after a few minutes Jamie walked in. This meant that at least he wasn’t searching the room again and messing up my few possessions. We said ‘good morning’ to one another and exchanged frosty looks, just so that each of us knew nothing had changed.
‘What are you planning today, Francesca?’ Alastair asked, emerging from behind his newspaper. Jamie looked up from his chipolata sausages, mushrooms and tomato.
‘I’ll walk into the village,’ I said casually. ‘Just to take a look around.’ I saw no reason to tell them I’d visited Terry’s grave the previous evening.
‘You’ll need some different footwear,’ Jamie said with a grin. He was remembering how I’d hobbled along the verge at our first meeting.
‘Pair of wellies around somewhere, I dare say,’ Alastair said. ‘All kinds of odd pairs in the back porch. One of them should fit you.’
It was a good idea. I said I’d take it up. Jamie was still watching and listening and I wasn’t sure whether he’d guessed I meant to go to the farm. He couldn’t stop me, even if he did, but I didn’t want him to know my plans, even so.
I went down to the kitchen after breakfast and dried up the breakfast dishes for Ruby before asking her about the boots.
‘That shouldn’t be a problem,’ she said. ‘Now, let’s see—’
A bell above the door jangled. She glanced up. ‘That’ll be Mr Watkins, come to see Mrs Cameron. He said he’d be early but it’s a little bit too early, I fancy. She mightn’t be ready yet. Just wait a moment, will you, dear?’
She bustled out into the hall, heading for the front door.
Watkins was the name of the solicitor mentioned in the letter. It might be a coincidence, but I fancied not. I sneaked out after Ruby and lurked in a dark corner of the hall, behind a hat stand.
‘Perhaps you’d just like to wait a moment, sir,’ Ruby was saying. ‘I’ll run up and see if she’s ready. Or Mr Alastair is about somewhere.’
‘That’s quite all right,’ said a dry, gloomy voice. ‘I’ll just wait in the sitting room here, and if Mrs Cameron isn’t ready to see me yet, I’ll go and take a look round the stableyard.’
Ruby’s feet pounded up the stairs. Faint shuffling and breathing told me Watkins was moving towards the room into which Jamie had shown me when I’d first arrived.
I peered out. The hall was empty, but the door to the sitting room was open. I crept out cautiously and peeked round it.
He was standing by the fireplace, his back to me, rearranging the photographs in the mantelshelf in a pernickety and, I thought, interfering way. Even from that angle he was clearly recognisable as the pallid man who’d been lunching with Jamie.
As bad luck would have it, he glanced up, having got everything neatly set out, and looked in the mirror above the mantelshelf. I jumped back behind the door jamb, but too late. His pale features froze and he turned.
‘Who is that? Come!’
I trotted into the room as nonchalantly as I could. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you. I was coming in here to read the paper.’
He glanced round, sparse eyebrows lifted. ‘I don’t see any newspaper.’
‘Alastair must still have it. He had it at breakfast.’
Watkins was still eyeing me with deep disapproval. Perhaps it was his normal expression. ‘Are you the young woman who has come down from London?’
Jamie must have told him about me. I confirmed it.
He said, ‘I see!’ but looked puzzled. ‘Have we by any chance met before?’
I told him I didn’t think so, but I was cursing. Jamie may have been too intent on his lunch and his argument yesterday to notice me, creeping out of the wine bar. But Watkins was the sort of person who missed very little and no doubt owned a mental filing system. Lodged somewhere in his subconscious was a little card with my face on it and sooner or later, he’d connect it with a location.
‘You seem, forgive me, familiar.’
‘A lot of people look like me,’ I said feebly.
‘Indeed?’ He had doubts about that. He took a watch from his waistcoat pocket and consulted it. His time was money.
‘I am rather glad to have the opportunity of a word with you.’ He tucked the watch away. ‘You’re not in a hurry?’
I began to explain that I was, actually, just on my way out. But there was something about his dry pale face and professional manner which overruled objections. I told him I had a few minutes to spare.
‘Good, perhaps you’d be so good as to close the door.’
I closed it and perched on the edge of a chair. He had the kind of presence which made it impossible to sit back and relax.
He took his own seat in a cautious way, as if not sure the chair mightn’t buckle beneath him, and hitching up the knees of his shiny trousers to reveal wash-shrunk wool socks and an expanse of dead white shin. He placed the tips of his bony fingers together. ‘I understand that you were one of the young people who shared a house in London with Miss Monkton?’
‘With Terry, yes, I did.’
‘The police have spoken to you, of course.’ His manner suggested I’d be the first one they’d haul in for questioning.
‘Several times,’ I assured him.
His features twitched. ‘The police are aware that you are here?’
Thanks to my phone call to Janice, I was able to assure him heartily that Inspector Morgan was fully aware of my movements.
He tapped the tips of his fingers together and looked at me without speaking for so long that I began fidgeting.
‘Were you a very close friend of Miss Monkton’s?’
‘I was one of the people closest to her in London,’ I told him and had a fair idea it was true.
He didn’t like that answer. The tapping hands were stilled. He pressed his thin lips and pinched his nostrils. ‘Did she talk to you about her home? Her family?’
Fully aware he couldn’t check on anything I told him, I said, ‘Quite often.’
I wondered whether he played chess. He was watching me as if contemplating his next move and assessing my likely counter-move. I got the impression he’d be a good chess-player. He said delicately, ‘However, I gather you told the police that you knew very little about Theresa.’
Yes, he’d be a good player, good at finding the opponent’s weakness, while giving nothing away himself.
‘Nothing relevant to her death, no. We thought she was out of the house, when in fact she—’ I gestured at the ceiling. ‘To think that we sat there while she – she was hanging there. To find her like that.’
‘Yes, yes!’ he said curtly. ‘Quite. The whole affair is most distressing. She didn’t, at any time, speak of the future? She didn’t, for example, speak of the Astara Stud itself?’
‘In the vaguest terms,’ I said.
He wasn’t sure what to make of that and sat staring at me with his gimlet eyes sunken in bags of unhealthy white skin like badly cooked poached eggs. ‘And your own personal interest in this matter?’
I was spared having to find an answer which would satisfy this modern Torquemada by a welcome tap at the door, followed immediately by the appearance of Ruby.
‘Mrs Cameron’s ready to see you now, Mr Watkins. Would you like to go up?’
Watkins rose to his feet – I swear his knees creaked – and gathered up an ancient scuffed leather briefcase which he must have bought when he first joined the firm as junior clerk. He gave the barest nod and walked out.
‘Right,’ said Ruby, expressing no surprise at having found me there, tête-à-tête with the solicitor, when she’d left me in the kitchen. ‘Let’s see about those boots, shall we?’
Since she hadn’t asked any explanation, I didn’t offer one. I followed her back to the kitchen, feeling that I hadn’t handled the interview very well. Watkins was suspicious of me. When he succeeded in placing me, as he surely would, he’d tell Jamie immediately.
Jamie would be furious to think I’d been spying on him. But he might not, I thought, be in a position to do much about it. It all depended on what he’d been discussing with Watkins. Watkins, too, might have something on his conscience. He wouldn’t be the first solicitor to bend the rules and I had a funny feeling that’s what had been happening in that wine bar yesterday.
I inspected the collection of ageing gumboots in the back porch to which Ruby directed me and found a smallish pair which I suspected had belonged to Terry. Ruby joined me as I was putting my foot alongside one of them, to check the size. I didn’t put my foot inside it because of the cobwebs festooning it. If there’s one thing I cannot stand, it’s putting my foot into a shoe of any sort and encountering some kind of beastie. In the squat it happened fairly frequently. Woodlice mostly, and spiders with the occasional silverfish, my particular phobia because they slithered around so quickly. I’d got into the habit of tapping my shoes to see what fell out before I put them on.
Ruby was bearing a dreadful-looking waxed jacket ‘in case it rained’. I accepted it gratefully, hoping that between the elderly Barbour and the wellies, I’d at least look more the part than I had yesterday.
I took the boots outside and bashed them against the wall to dislodge the creepie-crawlies. As I suspected, they were full of dust and dead spiders. When I was sure they were uninhabited, I tugged them on. They were on the tight side, I discovered, as I clumped round the front of the house. A blue Mercedes was parked there. Watkins’s clients must pay well. Then, as I paused to admire it, another car drew into the drive and pulled up by me. The door opened and a blonde got out.
She was in her forties and wore an outfit even more out of place than mine had been when I’d first arrived here. It consisted of a short black skirt and sheer black tights, both a mistake because although the pins were shapely, the knees were on the knobbly side. Her fitted jacket was tangerine in colour with large ornate gold buttons and looked expensive. On her feet she had slip-on flatties, presumably for driving. The rest of the outfit called for stiletto heels. Her thick shoulder-length hair had faded slightly but she wore it brushed back and secured with an alice band. I guessed she dieted as a way of life. Her face was good-looking, but had that pared-down look. Her expression was sharp. In every way she so resembled Terry that I knew this must be Marcia Monkton.
She was giving me equally close scrutiny. ‘Who are you?’ she asked without preamble.
Since it was the second time I’d faced interrogation by a stranger that morning, I was quicker with my reply.
‘Fran Varady,’ I told her, adding, ‘You’re Terry’s mother.’
She blinked. ‘Theresa’s mother!’ she corrected icily.
‘Sorry. We called her Terry because we never knew her as anything else.’
‘Who are
we
?’ Without pausing for breath she answered her own question. ‘You’re one of those awful drop-outs from that ghastly house!’
Even making allowances for her distress, I felt that was gratuitously rude. I tried to explain I, at least, had always struggled to hold on to some kind of a job, and the house had been our home and we’d liked it.
She shrugged. ‘Perhaps it suited you and your friends. From what the police told us, it wasn’t the sort of place I like to think my daughter lived in.’
I thought it was time to express some form of condolence. But it didn’t go down well.
‘Sorry? So you bloody well should be, all of you! God knows what went on there—’
There was a crunch on the gravel behind us and I turned. Jamie had appeared. ‘Marcie?’ He started forward. ‘We didn’t expect you!’
‘Hullo, Jamie.’ She walked past me and they exchanged a chaste kiss. ‘I’m on my way down to the coast to catch the ferry. I thought I’d better call in on my way. Make my peace with the old chap. We had a bit of a barney when I was here for – for the funeral.’
‘He understood, Marcie. Don’t worry about it. He knows you were upset.’
Jamie looked from the Mercedes to Marcia and back again. Her arrival had complicated things. He was no longer worried about me. Marcia was a bigger threat to upsetting whatever little applecart he and Watkins had been stacking in the wine bar. But he was putting a good face on it.
‘You’re staying for lunch, Marcie?’
The tangerine shoulders twitched. ‘Can’t, I’m afraid. I’m already pushed for time. All the same, I thought I ought to see him.’ She glanced at me. ‘What’s she doing here?’
‘Wouldn’t we all like to know that,’ Jamie sneered.
Suspicion, probably her natural expression, increased on her narrow features. ‘Isn’t that Sammy Watkins’s Merc?’
‘He’s come to see Aunt Ariadne.’ Jamie was looking uncomfortable.
‘Are you pulling one of your stunts, Jamie?’ She wasn’t one to mess around. She was asking the question I’d have liked to put.
Jamie wasn’t going to answer it in front of me. ‘Family business, Marcie!’ He jerked his head angrily in my direction.
‘You carry on without me,’ I said. ‘I’m just going for a walk.’
It was working out rather well. If Jamie was busy with Marcia, he wouldn’t have time to follow me. But Marcia had her own ideas.
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ she said unpleasantly, ‘until I’ve had a word with you!’
I was about to decline this pleasure when I recollected that a detective wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to talk to her. I wouldn’t get another. Jamie mumbled that he’d go and tell Alastair of Marcia’s arrival. He set off indoors with such alacrity that I wondered whether he also meant to try and get the message to Watkins. It left Marcia and me facing each other like a couple of wary cats about to squabble over ownership of a stretch of pavement.
‘What happened?’ she demanded.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t give me that crap!’ she retorted. ‘You must know. You were there!’
‘Not when—’ I broke off just in time. This was, after all, a woman whose daughter had been murdered. ‘Not when it happened,’ I finished.
Her features had become even more pinched with anger and the resemblance to Terry had increased. It gave me a strange feeling. It was like seeing Terry there, before me.
