Dying in the Wool (43 page)

‘She didn’t speak out because she thought he’d deserted her.’

It was a poor choice of word.

‘Deserted her? Deserted her? What about us?’

She was crying now. A carter crossed the bridge, very deliberately not looking our way. I cast about for something,
anything, to say that might help. ‘At least you know he never intended to take his life.’

‘I knew that already! And you’re wrong. You can’t go by somebody’s teeth and know it’s them. We’ve all got the same bloody gnashers.’

I took Gerald’s silver hip flask from my satchel, unscrewed the top and handed it to her. ‘It didn’t mean he’d stopped caring for you. He would have been in touch, you know that.’

‘How do I know it?’

‘Because of the way you needed to find him. He would have needed to see you.’

The snow wasn’t sticking. It fell on the bank and disappeared, as if it only came to play a trick, and remind us that there can be snow in April. Only in Yorkshire could you eat an ice cream in the park and an hour later turn into a snowman.

‘He cared enough about you all to make sure the mill was in good hands, that you were all provided for. He was taking very little – his artist’s materials and a few clothes.’ I thought it best not to mention the bucket and spade that Hector had seen him packing. ‘We don’t even know for sure that the arrangement would have been permanent. Perhaps he just wanted to have a quiet holiday.’

‘Mother would have known if there was another woman.’ She took a sip from the brandy flask. ‘Where was Dad supposed to be going?’

‘Robin Hood’s Bay.’

She looked at me blankly.

‘It’s a popular resort for artists. Near Whitby.’

‘We didn’t go over that way. We went to Morecambe and Grange.’

She turned away from me, and it may be that hearing he would go to the opposite coast struck some chord of truth. She looked at my silver flask, engraved with Gerald’s initials.

‘He might have been coming back in September or October,’ I said.

‘Or never.’ Without looking at me, she asked, ‘Who’s going to tell this nonsense to Mother?’

‘Mr Mitchell wants to take advice from his sergeant. He thinks your Uncle Neville should be there.’

‘Then you tell Uncle Neville.’

This time her foot found the stirrup and she mounted, urging on the horse as if she couldn’t wait to get away from me, and the harsh truth that she would not yet own up to believing. ‘He’ll look into it. Uncle Neville will find out there’s been a mistake.’ Turning back, she called over shoulder, ‘You keep saying “I believe”, so you’re not sure. You’ve just got tired of looking and now you’re guessing. It’s all guesswork.’

The hooves on the cobbles hammered out her shock and disbelief, the sound thumping through my body. Tabitha flung out her arm. Something whizzed through the air. I turned to see the brandy flask hit the beck, clattering onto the stepping stones. I wanted to retrieve it but was shaking too hard.

How is it that the minute you do or say something, you know you’ve got it wrong? All that treading carefully and piecing together of scraps of information and then I had to blurt out the bad news when she’s not even sitting down to hear.
You better sit down.
That’s what people always say before the stake goes through your heart. Not I.
March up and down on this bridge. Struggle down the bank and up again. Let the snow settle on your eyelashes. Now here’s the bullet.

The least I could do was to alert her Uncle Neville, as she asked. Clambering down the bank to retrieve my flask I slipped, falling on my backside before getting my feet wet in the beck.

Mill workers were already heading home, joshing each other, lighting cigarettes. A few children had come from the village to meet parents.

Walking against the tide, I reached the mill gates. On one side of the yard, some clearing up of the dyehouse had begun, with bricks stacked on one side, stones on another and metal in a pile that could have been no use except as scrap.

On the other side of the yard, the door to the outhouse used as a garage stood slightly ajar. I caught sight of a motorbike and a neglected, detached sidecar. That was where I had hidden away my cameras on the day Tabitha and I wandered across the moor and I caught my first sight of Milton House. Something had struck me as odd at the time, and now I remembered.

I opened the door wider and went into the garage. As well as the motorbike, it held a pre-war Austin and a couple of push-bikes. As I approached the sidecar, the feeling that a tiny piece of the jigsaw would be found here made my fingers itch. I opened the top of the sidecar. You would expect it to be lined with that chequered material, one of those mock tartans that designers believe look jolly.

The lining had been stripped away. It was neatly done, as if someone had taken a sharp knife to it. Only at the very inner part of the sidecar where a person’s feet would stretch had a scrap of material been missed. It was the texture as much as the faded pattern that told me this was as near as damn it to the scrap of material that had attached to Braithwaite’s watch chain and been carefully preserved by Hector among his boy scout chattels.

Braithwaite’s plan had been that Kellett would meet him with the motorbike and he would flee the hospital before his appearance at the magistrates’ court. If Braithwaite
had
escaped on the bike, it would not be here now. Kellett would not have given himself away by bringing the bike back.

If only I’d had five minutes with Kellett, to ask the poor man the right questions, then everything may have been
solved. Of course that’s presuming he would have answered me.

Leaving the garage behind, I walked to the mill house door, raised the knocker and let it fall.

Slow footsteps trudged along the tiled hall. An old woman in a long black dress and white apron gazed up at me through misty cataracts.

‘Is Mr Stoddard at home?’

‘He’s still in’t mill, madam.’

I hesitated, just a moment too long. She opened the door wider. ‘Step inside won’t you?’

Perhaps I could use the house telephone and just tell him what I had to say – that Evelyn and Tabitha needed him.

No. I should watch his face.

‘Will he be back shortly?’

‘Are you all right, madam? You look a little shaky. Will you have a glass of water?’

It amazes me that people whose vision should resemble life seen through a net curtain can be so observant.

‘I will have a glass of water. Thank you.’

‘Go in there. I’ll fetch it.’

The parlour she showed me into doubled as a dining room. An elaborate candelabra gas lamp hung from the ceiling. With the shutters partially closed, the room breathed gloom. Its walls were papered in a deep maroon. A huge oak sideboard held two oval glass cases. One trapped a glass-eyed green parrot and a preening cockatoo who ignored each other and gazed reproachfully at me. In the other case, a sad-eyed owl seemed not to notice the crouching vole by its claws.

I guessed that some previous mill manager had used these creatures to give natural history lessons to his children.

The piano lid was firmly shut, with no music in sight. Eight chairs sat around a large oval dining table, designed
for a big family. I pictured Neville Stoddard eating there alone each evening.

Listening for the housekeeper’s return, I edged my way between the table and the sideboard.

On an impulse, I opened the sideboard drawers, then the cupboards, not knowing what I was looking for. There was nothing unusual: Sheffield cutlery, Derbyshire pottery, a cut-glass bowl.

The old woman came back, bringing a glass of water.

I took a drink.

‘It’s a lovely room,’ I lied, playing for time, wondering what I might discover here. ‘Do you keep anything I could take for a headache?’

She shook her head. ‘The master doesn’t get headaches.’

‘I see.’

‘There might be something in the mistress’ cabinet. None of us go in there though.’

What was it Tabitha had told me when I asked was her father taking any medication? Yes, now I remembered. ‘Ah yes, Miss Braithwaite told me that Aunt Catherine was the family treasure trove of medicines.’

The housekeeper opened her mouth to answer. The telephone began to ring. She shuffled into the hall.

If she would disappear into the kitchen, I might risk going up the stairs and looking at the medicine cabinet for myself.

No such luck. The housekeeper returned.

‘That was Mr Stoddard on the telephone. He asks you to go over to the office. I told him you have a headache. He says I’m to get something for you.’

‘Thank you.’

She hesitated. ‘Will an aspirin satisfy?’

‘Do you mind if I come up with you?’ For a person with a headache, I was beside her at the door too quickly, too eagerly. ‘Then I can look myself.’

She hesitated.

‘I’m sure Mr Stoddard won’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen round a mill house.’

A massive portrait, far too big for the house, hung in the stairwell. A whiskered patriarch stared disapprovingly as we climbed the stairs, the housekeeper leading the way.

There were three bedrooms. The door to one was slightly ajar. On the opposite side of the landing, the housekeeper led the way into a light airy room, with faded pink wallpaper, white nets and brocade curtains. I looked for something that resembled a medicine chest but saw only a washstand.

‘It’s all in here, madam.’ She opened the cupboard door, peered closely, then stood aside while I looked.

I wanted her to leave. She did not leave. The washstand cupboard was packed with medicines in plain, blue and brown bottles. I sniffed at one that had no label – a kind of liniment; the second, some sweet-smelling tincture; and the third, unmistakeably, morphia. There were liver powders, Epsoms salts, and a packet labelled
gel sem
.
Gelseminum sempervirens
– the substance found in Kellett’s gut along with morphia.

‘Medicines fascinate me,’ I said, by way of explanation. ‘Don’t they you?’

‘No, madam. The aspirins is there, in that little bottle.’

‘Ah yes, thank you.’

I opened the bottle and swallowed an aspirin, hoping that it was indeed an aspirin.

Why had I never suspected Stoddard, not even for a moment? Who, on that Saturday when Braithwaite tried to go to Agnes, would have stopped him? His cousin Neville Stoddard. If Braithwaite had set off on his bike with the sidecar, the one person he would have had to explain to was Stoddard.
The mill’s in your hands now, Neville.

Evelyn had refused to listen to her husband. What was
it she had said? On the landing, he had asked her to talk to him. He had something to say. She refused to hear what he had to say. Stoddard would have listened. Fought with him even. Packed him into the sidecar and tried to take him home. Perhaps Braithwaite had escaped and gone running, running down the bank. Mrs Kellett could have seen him. Then Kellett promised to help. They both knew too much, Paul and Lizzie Kellett. Until I came, he could rely on their secrecy, buy their silence. But when I began to ask questions, he sensed danger and acted. Kellett’s death was meant to look like an accident. I shuddered to think that if Arthur Wilson hadn’t got to her first, Stoddard might have killed Lizzie.

But Wilson had simmered with resentment for far too long. The Kelletts prospered, first from the selling of the German dyewares in war time and then from Mrs Kellett’s too-heavy pay packet. It wasn’t fair. Wilson had received what he considered a paltry sum for his invention, and his name not even honoured when the picker was manufactured. He knew there was money to be had and he went to the Kelletts for his fair share of the booty. Mrs Kellett must have told him to sling his hook. He lost his temper and killed her.

But as far as Stoddard knew, I was ignorant of everything still – except of course I had just told Tabitha that the unknown male casualty at Low Moor was her father. And if Tabitha had told Evelyn already, then …

I held my head high, gripped my satchel too tightly, and strode towards the mill. Keep it simple, I told myself. Tabitha and Evelyn need him. When he hears that, Stoddard will go to them.

It reassured me to see that the caretaker, a skeletal man with a high boot resting on his sweeping brush, was waiting by the door for me, practically bouncing in his attempt to draw my attention.

‘Mrs Shackleton?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m to show you up. Mr Stoddard has a surprise for you, though I’m not supposed to say.’

‘What is it?’

He puffed out his cheeks, shook his head and tapped the side of his nose.

I relaxed a little. If Stoddard had a surprise for me, then he could not be expecting me to have become suspicious of him.
Don’t let it show
, I told myself.
Stay calm.

‘This way, madam.’

I followed the old man up two flights of stairs, a third, and a fourth to the top floor.

‘It’s lightest up here.’

And it was lightest. As well as the great windows that extended to the ceiling, there was light from glass panels in the roof, and from the open goods door in the wall. The snow had stopped, leaving dots of moisture on the high windows.