In a Dry Season (12 page)

Annie inhaled the sweet scent of the flowers. Bees droned around her, gathering pollen. She opened her eyes again and saw gulls circling over Harksmere Reservoir.

“Here we are, dear,” said Mrs Kettering, coming back out with a tray. First she offered a tall glass to Annie, then
she took the other for herself, set the tray aside and sat down. The deck-chairs faced each other at an angle so it was easy to talk without straining one's neck.

“Hobb's End,” Mrs Kettering said. “That takes me back. I can't say I've really given the place much thought in years, though I can see it from the bottom of the garden now, of course. What do you want to know?”

“As much as you can tell me,” Annie said. Then she told Mrs Kettering about the skeleton.

“Yes, I saw something about that on the news. I'd been wondering who all the people were, coming and going.” Mrs Kettering thought for a moment. Annie watched her and sipped lemonade. A robin lit down on the lawn for a few seconds, cocked an eye at them, shat on the grass and took off again.

“A young woman, about five foot two, with a baby?” Mrs Kettering repeated, brow knotted in concentration. “Well, there was the McSorley lass, but that was when we arrived. I mean, she'd have been well over thirty by the time we left, and she had three children by then. No, dear, I can't honestly say anyone comes to mind. The far cottage, you say, the one by the fairy bridge?”

“Fairy bridge?”

“That's what we used to call it. Because it was so small only fairies could cross over it.”

“I see. That's right. Under the outbuilding.”

Mrs Kettering pulled a face. “Reg and me lived at the far end, just down from the mill. Still, I must have passed the place a hundred times or more. Sorry, love, it's a blank. I certainly don't remember any young woman living there.”

“Never mind,” said Annie. “What can you tell me about the village itself?”

“Well, however close to Harkside it was, it had its own distinct identity, I can tell you that for a start. Harksiders looked down on the Hobb's End people because it was a mill village. Thought they were a cut above us.” She shrugged. “Still, I suppose everyone's got to have someone to look down on, don't they?”

“Do you remember any doctors and dentists who used to practise there?”

“Oh, yes. Dr Granville was the village dentist. Terrible man. He drank. And if I remember correctly there were two doctors. Ours was Dr Nuttall. Very gentle touch.”

“Do you know what happened to his practice? I'm assuming he's dead now?”

“Oh, long since, I should imagine. And Granville was probably pushing sixty when the war started, too. You'll be after medical and dental records, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“I doubt you'll have much luck there, love, not after all this time.”

“Probably not. What other sorts of people lived in the village?”

“All sorts, really. Let me see. We had shopkeepers, milkmen, publicans—we had three village pubs—farm labourers, drystone wallers, van drivers, travelling salesmen of one sort or another, a number of retired people, colonels and the like. Teachers, of course. A proper Agatha Christie sort of village it was. We even had our very own famous artist. Well, not exactly Constable or Turner, you understand, and he's not very fashionable these days. Come with me a minute.”

She struggled out of her deck-chair and Annie followed her into the house. It was hot inside and Annie felt the
sweat trickle down the tendons at the backs of her ears. It itched. She was glad she wasn't wearing tights.

Because of the sudden contrast between bright sunlight and dim interior, she couldn't make out the furnishings at first, except that they seemed old-fashioned: a rocking-chair, a grandfather clock, a glass-fronted china cabinet full of crystalware. The room into which Mrs Kettering led her smelled of lemon-scented furniture polish.

They came to a halt in front of the dark wood mantelpiece, and Mrs Kettering pointed to the large water-colour that hung over it. “That's one of his,” she said. “He gave it me as a going-away present. Don't ask me why, but he took a bit of a shine to me. Maybe because I wasn't a bad-looking lass in my time. Bit of a rogue, our Mr Stanhope, if truth be told. Most artists are. But a fine painter. You can see for yourself.”

Annie's eyes had adjusted to the light, and she was able to take in Stanhope's painting. She had a passion for art, inherited from her father. She smiled to herself at Mrs Kettering's remark. “Bit of a rogue.” Yes, she supposed that fit her father, too. Annie also painted as a hobby, so she was intrigued to look upon the work of Hobb's End's neglected genius.

“Is that Hobb's End before the war?”

“Yes,” said Mrs Kettering. “Just after war broke out, actually. It was painted from the fairy bridge, looking towards the mill.”

Annie stood back and examined the work carefully. The first thing she noticed was Stanhope's peculiar use of colour. The season was autumn, and he seemed to take the hues and tones hidden deep in stone, fields, hillsides and water and force them out into the open, creating such a
pattern of purples, blues, browns and greens as you never saw in a real Yorkshire village. But it made perfect sense to the eye. Nothing seemed to be its true colour, yet everything seemed right somehow. It was uncanny, almost surreal in its effect.

Next, she noticed the subtly distorted perspective, probably a result of cubist influences. The mill was there, perched on the rise in the top left corner, and though it looked as if it
should
dominate the scene, somehow, by some trick of perspective over size, it didn't. It was just there. The church, to the right of the river, managed much more prominence through its dark and subtly menacing square tower and the rooks or ravens that seemed to be circling it.

The rest of the composition appeared simple and realistic enough: a village High Street scene whose people reminded her of Brueghel's. There was a lot of detail; an art teacher might even describe the work as
too
busy.

The villagers were doing the normal things: shopping, gossiping, pushing prams. Someone was painting a front door; a man straddled a roof repairing a chimney, shirt-sleeves rolled up; a tall girl stood arranging newspapers in a rack outside the newsagent's shop; a butcher's boy was cycling down the High Street beside the river with his basket full of brown-paper packages, blood-streaked apron flapping in the wind.

The rows of houses on each side differed in size and design. Some were semis or terraces, front doors opening directly onto the pavement, while some of the larger, detached houses stood back behind low stone walls enclosing well-kept gardens. Here and there, on the High Street side, a row of shops broke up the line of houses. There was also a pub, the Shoulder of Mutton, and its
sign looked crooked, as if it were swinging in the wind.

Normal life. But there was something sinister about it. Partly it was the facial expressions. Annie could detect either the smug, supercilious smiles of moral rectitude or the malicious grins of sadism on the faces of so many people. And Stanhope had included so much detail that the effect had to be deliberate. How he must have hated them.

If you looked long enough, you could almost believe that the man on the roof was about to drop a flagstone on some passer-by, and that the butcher's boy was wielding a cleaver ready to chop off someone's head.

The only characters who looked in any way attractive were the children. The River Rowan was neither very wide nor very deep where it ran through the village. Children were playing in the shallows, splashing one another, paddling, the girls with their skirts gathered around their thighs, boys in short trousers. Some of them looked angelic; all of them looked innocent.

The more Annie looked, the more she recognized that there was something religious, ecstatic, in their aspects, and the link with the water also brought to mind baptism. It was a sort of religious symbolism reminiscent of Stanley Spencer, though not quite so blatant. Over it all, the church brooded with its sense of menace and evil. The mill was nothing but a husk.

Annie looked away. When she turned back, the scene appeared more normal, and she noticed the strange colours the most again. It was a powerful work. Why had she not heard of Stanhope before?

In the bottom right, just above the artist's signature, stood the outbuilding where the skeleton had been found, next to a small, semi-detached cottage. Beside the door, a
wooden sign announced the name:
BRIDGE COTTAGE.
“What do you think?” Mrs Kettering asked.

“Have you noticed the way everyone looks? As if—” “As if they were all either hypocrites or sadists? Yes, I have. That's Stanhope's vision. I must say I didn't see Hobb's End like that at all. We had our share of unpleasant characters, of course, but I'd hardly say they dominated the place. Michael Stanhope was, in some ways, a very disturbed individual. Would you like to go back out to the garden?”

Annie looked at the painting once more, seeing nothing that she had missed, then she followed Mrs Kettering outside.

The sunlight came as a shock. Annie shielded her eyes until she got to the chair and sat down again. There was still an inch or so of lemonade in the bottom of her glass. She drank it down in one. Warm and sweet. For some reason, the painting had unsettled her in the same way some of her father's more disturbed works did; she wanted to know more about it, more about Michael Stanhope's vision of Hobb's End.

“How old was Stanhope at that time?”

“He'd be in his late forties when I knew him.”

“What became of him?”

“I think he stayed in the village until the bitter end, and then I heard he moved to a small studio in London. But he didn't do much after that. Didn't
achieve
much, I should say. I saw his name in the papers once or twice, but I think he was like a fish out of water when he left Hobb's End. I don't think he managed to find a foothold in the big-city art world. I heard he was in and out of mental institutions during the fifties, and the last I saw was his obituary in
1968
. He died of lung cancer. The poor man always seemed to have a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. It made him squeeze his eyes almost shut against the drifting smoke when he painted. I was convinced that must have affected his perspective.”

“Probably,” said Annie. “What happened to his paintings?”

“I wouldn't know, dear. All over the place, I suppose. Private collectors. Small galleries.”

Annie sat quietly for a moment, taking it all in. “Bridge Cottage,” she said, “where we found the skeleton. It looked neglected in the painting.”

“I noticed that, too,” said Mrs Kettering, “and it made me remember something. Now, I can't be certain of this, not after so much time, but I think an old lady lived there. Bit of a recluse.”

“An
old
lady, you said?”

“Yes, I think so. Though I can't tell you anything about her. I just remembered, looking at the painting, that some of the children thought she was a witch. She had a long, hooked nose. She used to scare them away. I think it was her, anyway. I'm sorry I can't be of much help.”

Annie leaned forward and touched Mrs Kettering's arm. “You
have
been helpful. Believe me.”

“Is there anything else you want to know?”

Annie stood up. “Not that I can think of. Not right now.”

“Please call again if you do think of anything. It's so nice to have a visitor.”

Annie smiled. “I will. Thank you.”

Back in her car, Annie sat drumming on the steering-wheel and watching the gulls' reflections on the water's
surface. She had learned that the place was called Bridge Cottage and an old woman may have been living there in the autumn of
1939
. Of course, she still had no idea
how long
the body had lain under the outbuilding floor, so she didn't know whether this new information helped or not.

Perhaps more important, though, she had got her first real
feel
for Hobb's End from the Stanhope painting, and that might come in useful further down the road. Annie had always thought it important to develop a feel for a case, though she had never expounded her philosophy to any of her male colleagues. Why was it that
feminine intuition
sounded as insulting to her as
hysterical
and
time of the month
?

She turned around and headed back down towards the station, a long day on the telephone looming ahead of her.

When Matthew met Gloria that first time, I could feel their immediate attraction like that eerie, electric sensation you get before a storm, when you feel jumpy and ill at ease for no apparent reason. It scared me; I don't know why.

Something about Gloria changed when a man entered the room. It was as if she were suddenly
on
, the way I feel when the curtain goes up on one of our amateur dramatic productions and the real audience is there to watch us at last. I don't mean to indicate that there was anything deliberate about this, just that a change came over her and she moved and spoke in a subtly different way when there was a man around. I even noticed it with Michael Stanhope. He must have sensed something, too, or he wouldn't have given her those cigarettes.