Bridesmaids Revisited (24 page)

“What phone call?”

“The one from Edna, letting her know Ted was being measured for his last suit. Before that Gwen had talked me ears off. One brag after another about those bloody whiz-brain stepkids of hers. And asking me cheeky personal questions, like how much money I have to live on each year. I had to give meself two increases in the wages you pay me, but I won’t hold you to them, Mrs. H. Worse was when she presumed to ask how much I weigh these days, with that kind little smile on her face when she followed it up with saying I’d never looked better. And that it’s so much easier to find clothes in the larger sizes. Bloody cheek!”

“Could we speed this up, Mrs. Malloy? I’d like to get back to enjoying my own problems.”

“If you’re going to take that tone!” She heaved a sigh that threatened to send her black taffeta bosom into orbit. “Like I said, Gwen wasn’t herself from when she got that phone call; or I should say, she went back to being more like her old self. The one that was under her parents’ thumbs at age thirty-five and afraid to say ‘boo’ to her own shadow. I don’t know that Barney noticed. He was too busy making sure I was comfortable, as he called it. Making sheep eyes and trying to put his hands where he shouldn’t is more my take. But like I said, if you was listening, Mrs. H., he finally took himself off to watch the telly and Gwen and me got to be on our own.”

“Aren’t you afraid she’ll come into the dining room?” I stared over her head at the velvet-draped archway. “And hear what you’re saying?”

“I haven’t got to the juicy bits yet. And anyway she’d come in through this door. She doesn’t use the other one, because it means stepping on a strip of two-hundred-year-old carpeting. Time it went is what I’d say.”

Mrs. Malloy, who replaced the front-room carpet in her terraced house on Herring Street once a year, looked momentarily smug. “Well, there we was around nine last night, sitting just like the two of us is now, Mrs. H., and Gwen trying to look chirpy as a robin. Only her face kept creasing up like she was going to need another face-lift before morning. She was trying not to tear up and she was fidgeting like one of them windup toys, so I says to her that maybe we could both do with a stiff gin. It was as plain as the redesigned nose on her face that she was up to her eyebrows in some sort of trouble.”

“Perhaps she was upset over the way Barney had been making up to you.”

“Could have been that, Mrs. H.” She paused to consider this point. “Only I knew it wasn’t. Gwen had that same look on her face that she used to get when she knew her classwork was about to be checked and the teacher was going to find out she’d been cribbing off the girl sitting next to her. And after we’d had a couple of gins, she sort of broke down and blurted out all this stuff about Barney’s first wife.”

“What sort of stuff?”

“Oh, about how much the poor woman had suffered and how at times it seemed it would be a kindness to put her out of her misery. It was just like Gwen was a kid again and needed me to do her sums for her. Only this time she needed me to add things up so that she wouldn’t feel so bad about herself. So I told her that most people have thought about killing someone at one time or another. And how I’d once been tempted to shove Leonard down the stairs when I found out he’d been with another woman.”

“Please!” I said.

Mrs. Malloy looked unusually abashed. “Sorry, Mrs. H., I’d forgotten for the moment about your mum. But I couldn’t skip that part, because Gwen seemed all relieved for a moment, like she wasn’t a six-year-old kiddie all alone in the world no more. Then she told me how she used to hide the first Mrs. Fiddler’s glasses, hoping she’d take a tumble down the staircase when she was up fumbling her way to the loo. Remember how Barney said yesterday that she was always losing her specs? Well, now we know why, don’t we, Mrs. H?”

“But the woman didn’t die from a fall.” I also had a memory for what had been said. “She had a bad heart. And it gave out.”

“That’s how it was made to look.”

“That’s what Gwen said?”

“She got to rambling, after her third gin. Her voice got all slurred and she stumbled over words but the gist was clear. She talked about how she’d heard that some plant or herb would cause the wife to have a massive heart attack, that’d look like it had happened natural. Better than trying an overdose of tablets.”

“Thora, one of the bridesmaids, has an herb garden.”

“Is that so?”

“What else did Gwen tell you?” I asked, no longer feeling impatient or resentful of her hogging stage front. There had to be a connection between the melodrama that had been enacted here and the one that was still being staged at the Old Rectory.

“Not much else.” Mrs. M. frowned judiciously. “She’d got to snuffling by then. All I could halfway make out was that someone had been blackmailing her for years.”

“Gwen must have meant Ted. For some reason she must have exploded yesterday and killed him, after bottling up her rage for years. Although my guess is she’d taken some of it out on her cousin in the interim.” I was now pacing the floor heedless of wearing out the pattern on the antique carpet. “One of the bridesmaids said Edna always came back to the Old Rectory all upset after seeing Gwen.”

“Thanks for filling me in, Mrs. H., right before Gwen’s about to serve me lunch.” Mrs. Malloy looked genuinely worried. Then her face brightened. “We’re both thinking daft, Mrs. H., it couldn’t have been her. She was with me the whole afternoon.”

“Ted was injured right after I arrived at the Old Rectory.” I sat back down. “Are you sure she didn’t sneak out of the house soon after I left? I was a bit delayed getting there because my car ended up in a ditch.”

Mrs. Malloy pursed her butterfly lips. “Gwen and Barney did leave me to have a bit of a nap before lunch. And I think I dozed off, although it couldn’t have been for more than a few minutes, because I remember looking at the clock and thinking it hadn’t budged much. And then Gwen came in and said the first course, some kind of thin brown soup with one of them highfalutin foreign names, was on the table. So there’s no way it could have been her. My guess, and it’s only that, is that it was Edna that killed him because she found out he’d been blackmailing her very own cousin! That’s not the sort of thing any decent woman could overlook. Makes Leonard’s disappearing act pale in comparison. But don’t get to worrying, with everything else that’s going on, that I’m going to weaken and take him back. Barney getting into bed with me like he did last night reminded me that Leonard also had the most wickedly cold feet. It was the one thing I didn’t find attractive about him.”

Before she could continue on that subject, Gwen came into the room to announce that she was ready to get lunch on the table. Mrs. Malloy said she would see me out and scooted after me to the front door.

“You can’t leave me here. Not if you’ve a feeling bone in your body.” She drew the door behind her and stood with me on the front step. “What if Gwen wasn’t as drunk as I thought she was and she remembers what she told me? Do you want to come back here to find she’s murdered me just like she did the first Mrs. Fiddler? We both need to get into your car and drive as fast as we can back to Merlin’s Court.”

“I didn’t come here in the car.”

“Then we’ll take Gwen’s bicycle and you can ride with me on the handlebars!”

“Mrs. Malloy”—I laid a hand on her arm—“I’ve got to go back to the Old Rectory. What happened to Ted, and I’m sure that he was murdered even if Gwen didn’t do it, well, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I can’t take you back there. Pack up your things and leave. Get a taxi to a pub and see if it provides overnight accommodation. If it doesn’t, ask for suggestions where you can stay.”

It was hard to walk away and leave her to go back into that house, but I made myself do it and began the long walk back to Knells.

As I entered the Old Rectory around the back way through the conservatory door, I was hoping that the bridesmaids would be in the sitting room and I would have some time to regroup before facing them. It was important that I not show that anything had dramatically changed since my visit to the photography studio. I was in luck. There was no sign of Rosemary, Thora, or Jane, and even Polly the appalling parrot refrained from making any rude remarks as I sidestepped the plants on my way to the kitchen, where I found Edna stirring something in a saucepan on the cooker.

“There you are, Miss Ellie.” She looked round and smiled at me. She appeared much better today. Her cheeks were pink and her pretty hair neatly combed. Her foot was bandaged and she still limped as she came over and pulled out a chair for me at the kitchen table, but her voice was steady and there were no signs of tears. “You look tired,” she said.

“It was quite a walk, but I enjoyed it. How are you, Edna? That’s what’s important.”

“Not so bad, thanks for asking.” She wiped her hands on her apron front. “I got a good night’s sleep at my cousin Gwen’s. She had me with her in bed. But we didn’t do much talking. She was down in the dumps herself, not really to do with Ted; she gets that way sometimes, as if there’s something always on her mind. It could be her husband. He fancies himself as God’s gift to women. Has to be trying for Gwen. But I shouldn’t be saying anything. Not with the woman that does your housework staying there. Anyway I’d rather talk about your mother.”

Edna sat down in the chair across from the one which I had taken. “She was a lovely girl was Miss Mina, quiet, and preferred her own company, but that was her upbringing. It quite broke me up when I heard she’d died. But I can see”—she closed a hand over mine—“that you’d rather not talk about it.”

“It’s been a long time,” I managed to say calmly, “and I have a wonderful husband and healthy children. And I think my father’s finally going to marry again. What I’d like is for you to tell me about my grandmother. What sort of a girl would you say Sophia was? You must have seen something of her.” I had to be careful not to give away anything Richard Barttle had told me about her possible role as a messenger when Sophia was confined to her room.

“She looked very much like you do, Miss Ellie, but the ladies must already have told you that. She was a happy girl and kind with it, but you could say she was strong-willed. And that wasn’t how young ladies were supposed to be in our young days.” Edna sat looking reflective. “I’ve got to be honest. I never could quite see what she fancied so much about Hawthorn Lane, for all he was handsome. I suppose he just wasn’t my type. I saw a cruel streak in him that’s come out now. Well, you know how’s he’s been hounding Miss Maywood to get her to sell.” She again smoothed her hands on her apron. “But I had to have been one of the few female heads he didn’t manage to turn hereabouts. Not that I’m naming any names,” she added quickly, “I’m just trying to say that Miss Sophia wasn’t the only one that was ready to follow him to the ends of the earth. And even though I didn’t much like him, I could understand ...” Edna’s voice faltered.

“Because you were in love yourself at the time,” I prodded gently.

“That... and because most people couldn’t understand what I saw in Ted.” She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “It made us kind of close—Miss Sophia and me—us both being in the same sort of boat. I wasn’t working here regular at the time. My mother did that. But I was in and out quite a bit helping her when she was under the weather. If you haven’t heard already, she had a problem with drink and wasn’t always up to getting the jobs done. And I’d left school at fifteen and was already cleaning other places, but not enough to keep me busy every day, so I quite looked forward to coming here.

“The year before Miss Sophia left school, Miss Maywood was staying here and quite often the other two girls—Miss Dobson and Mrs. Pettinger, as she now is— would come down for the afternoon or the day and there’d be a bit of life about the place. It was fun listening to them talk about young men and what ones they found attractive.”

Edna got up and went over to the cooker to stir her saucepan. “And about their tennis parties and such. But I’m talking too much, Miss Ellie; it’s to keep my mind off Ted. You should be upstairs on your bed having a rest before the séance business that’s going to take place tonight. That’s what the ladies are doing. They’re all taking naps. Even Miss Dobson, who never sleeps in the day. But I don’t suppose she got a good night’s rest.”

“It was terrible what happened to your husband.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever get over it, not properly, but as of this moment I’m kind of numb. It doesn’t seem real. Not like it did yesterday. And I can tell myself that at least I got to wed the man I loved. Not like poor Miss Sophia being forced into a marriage with a man she couldn’t stand. It was terrible what her parents did to her, locking her in her room until she gave in. They wouldn’t let her have any books to read or any writing paper for fear she’d somehow manage to smuggle out notes to Hawthorn Lane. I was the one that knew what she was going through, more than anyone, because I was the one that took her meals up to her on the days that I was here.”

“Really?” I said, hoping I sounded as if this were the first I had heard of this.

“And I did more than carry trays up and down.” Edna kept stirring whatever was in the saucepan. “I’m not ashamed to say it; I did pass notes between the two of them. I think the reason Reverend and Mrs. McNair never suspected was because they didn’t think I would risk costing me or my mother our jobs. People were surprised she was kept on when it was known she drank. And I could never figure that out, either. But I do know that my helping out Miss Sophia would have been the final straw.”

I could have told Edna why Reverend McNair hadn’t given her mother the sack after she was found passed-out on the sofa, but I prudently kept my mouth shut. “Did you take Sophia the writing paper?” I asked her.

“No.” She turned around, wooden spoon in hand, to give me a puzzled look. “Why do you ask, Miss Ellie?”

“Because you said that she wasn’t allowed any in her room, which leaves the question—where did she get it?”

“That’s a good point.” Edna sat back down. “Silly of me, but it never occurred to me before. But I don’t see how it matters much, not after all this time. It can’t do, can it?”