Fate Worse Than Death (7 page)

This
is
my song,
My
Saviour
‘s love to me-e:
How great
Thou
art,
How
great
Thou art!
This is my
song
, my
Saviour
‘s love to me-he,
How-great-Thou-art, how
great Thou art
!

This
is
my song –

Still singing it, Beryl appeared in the doorway, homely but radiant. Her broad face and bare, fleshy arms were red and damp from working in the heat, but her eyes were as full of happiness as her voice.

Religious enthusiasm was rare in Fodderstone. Any other woman who exhibited it – and expressed it so frequently, and so off-key – would have been shunned. But Beryl was valued as a very hard worker, and a lifeline for the old and disabled. The cleaning she did on Saturdays at the Flintknappers Arms was incidental to her local authority job as a home help. On the left side of her sleeveless nylon overall were embroidered the words
Home Help Service
; on the right she wore a large badge proclaiming
Jesus my joy
.

‘Hallo, Constance dear,' she cried cheerily. ‘I've just given poor old Joey Wigg a good turn-out, and now I'm off to the post office for his pension and groceries, so I popped in to see if there's anything you need while I'm there. Good morning, Marjorie,' she added, beaming. ‘Lovely to see you.'

Marjorie didn't acknowledge the greeting. She was the kind of woman who made a point of addressing all the villagers by their first names while expecting to be called Mrs Braithwaite in return.

She very much disliked being treated as Beryl Websdell's sister in Christ, and she lingered only to satisfy her curiosity.

‘Have you heard from that daughter of yours yet?' she demanded.

‘Not yet,' said Beryl, without a waver in her confidence or a diminution of her smile. ‘Sandra will get in touch with us when she's ready. But thank you for asking about her. God bless you, Marjorie.'

‘Bah!' said Marjorie, stamping off to bully the pensioners of the Ashthorpe Evergreen Club into eating bran for the sake of their bowels.

She was slightly mollified, on her way down Constance's garden path, by having the front gate held open for her with proper deference by another of the villagers, the woodman, who had just arrived in his old pick-up truck. ‘Good morning, Christopher,' she said graciously; but it took him so long to burst out with ‘Good morning, Mrs Braithwaite,' in reply, that she couldn't wait to hear what else he was trying to say to her.

Con was more patient with Christopher Thorold, and consequently he found her easier to talk to. She listened to his offer of winter firewood at special summer prices, and told him that she wouldn't be needing any because she would soon be leaving Fodderstone.

‘I'm wholly sorry to hear that,' he said sincerely. ‘Pa will be sorry, an'all.'

Christopher's father had regularly trimmed Con's garden hedge for her in her early years in Fodderstone Green. She enquired after his health.

‘Fairly, thank you,' answered Christopher, a reply that Con, knowing her East Anglian comparatives, found satisfactory. ‘Nicely' would have been preferable, ‘poorly'would have been worse, and ‘sadly'would have meant at death's door.

Beryl, who had been standing out of his sight, moved forward and greeted him affectionately. She would be only too glad, she reminded him, to come and give him and his father a good turn-out whenever they needed her.

Taken aback by the unexpected encounter with her, Christopher began to blink. His boots trod up and down and he burst out, ‘'Tweren't me, Beryl! 'Tweren't me who threw your gnome in a ditch.'

‘Bless you, boy,' she said warmly, ‘I never thought it was.'

‘They say so at the Knappers. They've found him damaged, and they say I did it. But
'tweren't
me.'

Beryl was visibly shaken. Her red cheeks lost some of their colour and her voice wavered. ‘'Course it wasn't you, Chris dear,' she said, trying to reassure him. ‘They were only teasing … Just ignore them. God bless you – and your Pa.'

But she gave the blessing mechanically. The disappearance of her daughter and the disappearance of her gnome were inextricably linked in her mind. There was no logic, she knew, in thinking that because Willum had been damaged, Sandra had also been harmed; but for a few moments her faith in her Saviour's loving care deserted her, and she felt as concerned as any other mother for the safety of her missing daughter.

She would give him one more chance to let her go. She would make one more attempt to persuade him to free her. It will save his pride, she told herself, thinking of the indignity he would suffer by having food thrown in his face; but in fact she was terrified by the prospect of having to put her plan into action. She knew that she was too shaky to aim straight, too weak at the knees to run far.

She began to plead with him as soon as he brought her midday sandwich. ‘You must let me go,' she said. ‘I can't bear to be shut up in this heat. Can't you see that you're making me ill?'

He said that she would feel better if she ate her food.

‘How can I eat, when you're keeping me prisoner? It's dreadful in here. You
must
let me go.'

He said that he needed her. If he let her go he would lose her.

‘But you can't keep me here indefinitely!'

He said that he had too much need of her to let her go.

‘If you don't, I shall die,' she sobbed.

He said that if only she would do as he asked, he would always take care of her.

He put the sandwich on the table. Then he went, securely fastening the door behind him.

Martin Tait arrived at his aunt's cottage on Fodderstone Green just in time for afternoon tea.

‘I'm so glad you could come,' said Con. ‘Gosh, you're looking awfully well.'

He didn't feel well, after the way Alison had treated him. Healthy, certainly; but baffled, frustrated, angry. However, he had no intention of revealing any of that to his aunt. He kissed her with affection, noticing that she was wearing the scent that she had once admitted to having liked when she was young, the Worth
Je Reviens
that he had, as usual, given her for Christmas.

‘I'm delighted to be here at last,' he said. ‘And you're looking well, too.'

It wasn't true. He was quite shocked by the change in her since his pre-Christmas visit. Con shared with him the characteristically sharp Tait profile, but her mouth was entirely her own. Dragged down at one corner by a muscular weakness, it had always given her what Martin remembered best about her, an engagingly lop-sided smile. But when her face was in repose her mouth gave her a melancholy appearance, and that was what predominated now. She looked as though she slept badly, and her hands were shaky. Instead of being the active, amusing woman he had always known, she seemed unfamiliar, depressed and elderly.

The ritual of afternoon tea seemed to revive her a little. They sat on the back lawn in the shade of an apple tree, drinking Darjeeling tea and eating cucumber sandwiches. Presently Con enquired after her sister-in-law, Martin's mother, a strong-minded widow who ran a secondhand bookshop in a village near Lavenham.

‘Indefatigable, as always.' Martin sighed. ‘She's into yoga now … I'm all for her keeping fit, but I do wish that at fifty she'd be a bit more dignified. Whenever I go to see her she's wearing a leotard and contorting herself on the sitting-room carpet.'

He had in fact been acutely embarrassed at the prospect of taking Alison to meet his mother. The way the leotard clung to her lean body, tracing every fold of her pudenda, was he thought positively indecent. It would be so much easier and pleasanter to introduce Alison to Aunt Con – or, rather, it would have been. He fell silent, yearning angrily for the girl.

‘Scones and honey?' offered Con. ‘Don't worry,
I
didn't make the scones. I bought them from the Horkey baker, so they're guaranteed edible.'

‘But the honey's most definitely yours,' said Martin, helping himself. It was distinctively pale and scented, made by her bees from the nectar of the blossom of the lime trees that surrounded Fodderstone Green. ‘And I'm not sharing it with
you
,' he added, swatting away a hovering wasp. He licked a smear of honey from his finger. ‘This is much too good to waste. How many pounds did you take this year, Aunt Con?'

‘None at all. Didn't I mention it in a letter? I was sure I'd told you … I sold my hives in the spring.'

He looked at her in surprise. ‘No, I'd no idea. You've always been so fond of your bees.'

‘Yes. But they're an awful lot of work, you know. And when I had to have Emma put down in March, I somehow lost the heart for it.'

Emma, a golden labrador, had been Con's companion throughout her retirement. Even to Martin, an infrequent visitor, the cottage seemed empty without the dog; as soon as he entered he had missed the click of her nails on the floorboards. And now, at tea-time, he recalled the way she used to come and lean against his legs, gazing up at him soulfully in the hope that he would give her a lick of honey.

‘She was a beautiful creature,' he said.

Con nodded. ‘That was a very kind and understanding note you sent me at the time. Jolly nice of you, Martin. I did appreciate it.'

‘Well, I remember how I felt when my poor old beagle had to be put down, not long after Dad died. I wanted to have another dog, but I couldn't because of being away at school. What about you, though – are you planning to buy a pup? A different breed, perhaps?'

‘No.' Con poured him another cup of tea, absent-mindedly adding both milk and sugar. Martin never took sugar (or ate honey, except to please his aunt) but he drank it without complaint.

‘No,' she continued, ‘I did think about getting a puppy, but I won't. The fact is, Martin, I've decided not to stay here another winter. I'm fond of the old cottage, but it's frightfully draughty and inconvenient. And the garden's much too big for me to cope with now. I've been happy here, but I feel I've had enough.'

From the look of her, he thought, that was obvious. She usually liked hot weather but now she seemed distressed by the heat. Was she ill, he wondered? But it wasn't a question he could ever put to her. If she wanted him to know, she would tell him in her own way and her own time.

‘I should jolly well think you have had enough of Fodderstone,' he said heartily. Con's idiom was catching. ‘I've always enjoyed coming here to see you, but there's something – I don't know what –
odd
about the place. And it's so isolated. It'll be much better for you to move into a small town, somewhere near the shops and a library and, er, dentists and so on. Have you decided yet where you want to live?'

Con lifted the lid of the teapot and peered vaguely at its contents. ‘Oh … Woodbridge, perhaps. Or Aldeburgh …'

‘Good idea. There's plenty of property on the market, so you should have no problem in finding somewhere suitable. All the same, you'll need to start viewing right away if you want to be out of here before the winter. Look, why don't we go on a house-hunting expedition together, one day this week?'

‘Oh, no. Jolly nice of you, Martin, but you've come here to fly your aeroplane. No, I can house-hunt by myself, after your holiday.'

‘Well, the offer's there if you change your mind. And we can at least look at the
East Anglian Daily Press
and see what's advertised. What are you thinking of buying – a modern house? Or a bungalow? Or a flat?'

‘Somewhere very small,' said Con. ‘And that's a thing I wanted to talk to you about while you're here. I've an awful lot of furniture, you see. Some of it's modern, but there are quite a few antiques and some of them are really good pieces. I'll have to get rid of most of it, and I want you to have first choice. Look it over during the week, and take whatever you want. Make sure you have the best antiques, and enough of the rest to furnish your house when you get married.'

She spoke so urgently that Martin was completely taken aback. It seemed such a strange offer. As his aunt knew, he lived at present in a furnished flat; and now that Alison had turned down his suggestion that they should live together – had turned him down for good, as far as he could tell – he saw no point in moving to a larger place. So what would he do with a houseful of furniture? He had no intention of paying for it to be kept in store. He rather liked some of his aunt's antiques, but in general her taste in furniture was not his. By the time he was ready to marry, Con might not be alive; and in that event he'd be able to afford to go out and buy whatever he wanted.

He thanked her with all his charm. ‘That's very generous of you, Aunt Con. Don't think me ungrateful, will you – but quite honestly I can't see myself needing to furnish a house. Detective work and marriage don't mix, and I'm a career detective. A confirmed bachelor.'

For the first time that afternoon, Con smiled her delightfully lop-sided smile. ‘Phooey!' she retorted. ‘D'you want to bet on it?'

Martin had the grace to laugh. ‘Well, that's how I feel at the moment, anyway. I may change my mind, I suppose, but not until I'm established in senior rank. Really, it's very sweet of you, but I'm reluctant to accept your offer. Even if your new house isn't very big, you're still going to need to furnish it. You can't give everything away.'

‘But there's the furniture from my property in the Horkey road, too,' said Con. ‘Don't you remember that pretty, derelict cottage I bought a few years ago? I've been letting it to summer holidaymakers since I restored it. It's empty at the moment, because I agreed that a local couple could rent it cheaply for a few weeks when they married, only the marriage never took place. The girl – my neighbour Beryl's daughter – disappeared.'