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Authors: Marjorie Eccles

BOOK: Killing a Unicorn
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He snorted. ‘Bibi was never on anybody's side but her own, whatever they tell you! No, she hated Membery, found it dark and depressing. Reason she was manipulating Alyssa into leaving was so that Chip and the boys could sell up.'
‘Would they do that?'
He shrugged. ‘Hard to say. Bound to have caused dissension. Though maybe Mark wouldn't have been averse. And Jonathan, too, perhaps. I'm not sure about him. He's not there enough for it to matter, but he's very attached to the place. She'd have had a hard job with Chip, but she had a lever there …'
‘Is that what you meant by saying Chip's drinking is understandable? She was holding her favours out as a carrot on the end of a stick, so to speak?'
‘Something like that,' he muttered, making her think she'd gone a little too far beyond what he'd be prepared to answer. She should have remembered that men of his age - men of his type, anyway — didn't think such topics suitable for women to discuss, but after a moment he growled, ‘Bibi … supposed to be his “partner” but — well, egging the poor devil on to think … let's say it wouldn't have done for me when I was his age! Used to have a word for her sort when I was younger.' He looked down into the empty bowl of his pipe. ‘Forget I said that. Rotten bad taste. How about another cuppa tea, eh?'
 
 
Reaching the flower-filled roundabout at the bottom of the hill, Fran turned in the direction of the station, where she could take advantage of its car park and walk up into the town. Free of commuters' cars today, it was relatively empty, since most people would rather jostle for a space in the town centre than walk the half mile or so from the station.
The question of whether to go in to work on Monday
morning resolved itself as she walked across the river bridge and then up into the town. There were certain tasks on her agenda that she needed to deal with personally, she told herself, knowing it was a specious argument, more to do with the fact that she was experiencing a guilty longing to remove herself from what was happening here. The lurch of the heart whenever she remembered Jasie. The silence of the forest she loved that was beginning to feel threatening. Maybe this was partly what Mark had meant, when he'd talked about her vulnerability, living in this house without any gates that could be locked to keep out intruders. She suddenly had a yen for the big city, people, even one of those mad shopping sprees with Claire — like buying expensive shoes she didn't really need. For people who hadn't been overtaken by a tragedy happening in their midst. Gossip. A little fun. O.S.O.T., in fact. Yes, she'd definitely go in on Monday, she'd be contributing nothing by staying at home.
She hurried through her errands as quickly as possible, ending up at the market. No one wanted to eat heavy meals in this sultry, oppressive heat, and she queued impatiently at a greengrocer's stall, in search of salad like every other shopper today, smothering thoughts of what Alyssa would say if she knew she was actually buying things she could have had for free from the kitchen garden at Membery. But Alyssa had enough on her plate at the moment, without being bothered with requests for tomatoes and stuff.
When it came to her turn, Fran bought tiny, locally grown new potatoes, some misshapen, non-supermarket-graded tomatoes, guaranteed delicious. She asked for a pound of juicy purple plums, a couple of ripe Cornice pears, and looked at the big pile of oranges at the front of the stall. She picked one up, feeling its gravid weight in her hand. Oranges? What did she need with more oranges? There were still five big Jaffas in the fridge. The remaining ones from those she'd removed from the glass-topped
table on Thursday evening, when she'd arrived home from work …
‘You gonna buy that orange, love?' asked the stallholder.
‘What? Oh no, sorry, I was miles away.' She put the orange back on top of its pile. ‘I'll have one of those cos lettuces, please.'
‘Wish I was. Miles away,' said the stallholder, wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist. ‘Iceland for preference, eh? Good downpour and we'd all feel better, clear the air. That all? Four pound twenty pee to you then, my lover.'
 
 
She drove unchallenged through the gates at Membery and left her car by the front door, the idea being to make her way on foot down to The Watersplash. That way she'd avoid coming across any of the inquisitive reporters Alyssa had rung and warned her to beware of. It seemed her fears in that direction might have been unwarranted. She'd approached the house cautiously, half expecting to be stopped, but everywhere was quiet, with no sign of the press — or, for that matter, police. The number of their vehicles had diminished to only two, parked to one side, under the shade thrown by the big Cedar of Lebanon in the front lawn. Perhaps the reporters had got tired of waiting for any activity.
Her ideas of the place being guarded suffered a distinct jolt when she found that even the front door was unlocked, so that anyone could have walked straight in, as she did herself. Inside, apart from the ever present, distant sound of Jonathan on his cello, silence reigned. She peered into several rooms, and for a moment stood in the centre of the big hall, undecided. Jane had most likely bullied Alyssa into going over into the garden to do some work, and quite rightly too. Nothing ever perked her up quite as much as poking about among her plants when she was worried, or upset.
She was about to wander across there when the distant
cello notes caught her attention again. Any time that Jonathan was known to be practising, it was an unwritten rule that he should not be interrupted, but the difference in this particular music indicated he wasn't alone. Intrigued, she went outside and round the side of the house, to where she could see the french windows of the music room wide open.
They were so preoccupied, even the sounds of her footsteps scrunching on the gravel went unnoticed. She stood outside, reluctant to interrupt the scene within. Rehearsals for Jonathan's concert in London were to start tomorrow, but this wasn't the Schubert Quintet he was practising.
The room was in semi-darkness, with the dark green rep curtains on the opposite window fully drawn, and those on the french doors pulled half-way across. Through the gap in the open doors, Fran could see the sun streaming in a shaft and lying along the polished wood floorboards, dust motes dancing in the air. At the piano was Jilly, looking amazingly different without her glasses, presumably wearing contact lenses, tanned and smiling in an ankle-length dark blue sundress, patterned in turquoise. Jonathan in white T-shirt and jeans, one finger plucking a sophisticated, syncopated rhythm that Fran half recognized. She stood, rooted to the spot, as Jilly sang softly to the music, not in the sparrow's chirp that might have been expected from her but in a sweet, husky, seductive voice.
‘Tell me the truth about …' she sang in a minor key, her eyes all the time on Jonathan. ‘Tell me the truth about … love.' The last notes hung on the air as the song came to an end on a dying fall. In the silence, the smile they gave each other was one whose meaning would not be mistaken by anyone in the world. And then, quite suddenly, Jilly burst into tears. Jonathan put his cello aside and in one stride was by her side. ‘Oh, Jonathan, what are we going to do?'
‘We can't do anything, my love, except go on as we have done.' He was kneeling on the floor, her hands in his. ‘If
we keep on sitting tight, no one's going to have any reason to suspect.'
‘It's all going to come out now, anyway.'
‘Not now it isn't,' he said sharply. ‘Seeing she was the only one who knew.'
‘Oh, how can you be sure of that?'
‘Because I was the bloody fool who told her, wasn't I? And I've never said a word to anyone else.'
There was a silence.
‘You know you can't go on like this, Jon. Make an end of it.'
The silence lengthened. At length he said, in a quietly desperate voice, totally unlike his normally controlled tones, almost pleading, ‘Let me have the concert, Jilly, and then I promise. I can at least ask that much.'
Fran fled, regardless of the sound of her footsteps on the gravel.
She wouldn't have cared now whether she met a dozen reporters, if she'd given it a thought. She grabbed from the car the tote bag into which she'd packed her shopping, her fruit and vegetables, now grown unaccountably heavy, slung it over her shoulder, and hardly noticing its weight, slithered and scrambled her way back down to The Watersplash, ignoring the grazes on the palms of her hands she received when she slipped on the rough path and tried to save herself.
Crouch would much have preferred to go haring off up the motorway to Leeds in person, looking for Armstrong, he could scarcely restrain himself from doing so, but Vincent had said no, leave it to the locals until there was something concrete, until they'd gone further along the road towards locating him, so it was Sergeant Nick Hingley up in Yorkshire who responded to the call from Mrs Mavis Brayshaw on Sunday morning. She was Graham Armstrong's maternal aunt, and attempts had been made to contact her previously, but she and her husband, veterans in the international army of globe-trotting pensioners, had been abroad for the last fortnight. They arrived home late on Saturday evening and she rang the police station at ten o'clock on Sunday morning.
Hingley, who was a large, placid young man who rarely hurried but had all his chairs at home, arranged to meet her at the house which had previously belonged to Armstrong's father, and where he had been living, prior to his disappearance. She was waiting for him when he got there, her car parked on the drive of a neat, brick-built semi just off the Leeds-Halifax road, in a street of similarly neat houses. It was a small, well-kept house, and unlike the one next door, which was dirty and neglected, with a number of grubby children playing about and a lopsided For Sale sign stuck in the weeds that comprised the front garden, the garden of number twelve showed signs of recent attention. The grass had been cut and the edges trimmed, though the tubs of busy-lizzies either side of the front door
appeared to be dying from lack of water. The path was swept, the windows were polished, the net curtains clean. There was a quick response to Hingley's ring on the doorbell.
‘Come in, sit you down.' Mrs Brayshaw was knocking seventy but going strong. Short, well-cut grey hair, dark eyes and a rather dried-up tan from over-exposure to the sun on her recent holiday. Neatly dressed in white trousers and a blue overshirt. No flies on her, no airs and graces, a sensible Yorkshire grandmother.
‘This is Eric, my husband.' She introduced a stocky, truculent-looking man with a crest of white hair and a mighty case of sunburn, clearly reluctant to dispense with his holiday garb of shorts and open-necked shirt. He responded with an unsmiling nod and a curt how-do.
‘We've just been on a lovely Saga holiday to Greece,' Mrs Brayshaw told Hingley over the cup of coffee that had been ready and waiting. ‘We only got home yesterday, but as soon as I opened the papers this morning, I knew, didn't I, Eric? “That'll be our Graham,” I said. “In trouble again.” I knew it were too good to be true, he'd been that quiet, ever since he came out. It weren't like him.'
‘Talkative sort, is he?'
Eric Brayshaw snorted.
‘No, that's not what I mean, love, he doesn't go in for chatting much, never did. I meant he never said a word about
her
, or the little lad neither, so I knew he were brooding about it. He won't give up, you know, once he's set his mind on something, never. Stubborn? We've seen mules this holiday less obstinate than him! Our Marion spoiled him, and that's the truth. My own sister, but it has to be said. Mind you, it were something in his nature, in the first place. Born like that, our Graham.'
‘Imagines everybody's agin him, that's his trouble,' Eric interposed bluntly. ‘That flamin' sensitive, you've to mind every damn word you say in case you hurt his feelings.'
His wife nodded agreement. ‘We used to try and tease him out of it when he were a kiddie, but it only made him
worse. You couldn't get mad at him, it were like scolding a wounded puppy … but I don't want to give you the wrong impression, he were a grand little lad most of the time. It's just that he couldn't ever forgive anybody if he thought they'd slighted him. I bet all that time he spent in
there
— in prison — he were just biding his time until he could get his own back.' She sighed gustily. ‘It's a thousand pities it's all happened, I thought it had all come out right for him when he married her and took that hotel over - just up his street! He did right well on that hotel management course … I'm sorry, I'm talking too much, that's always been my problem.'
‘No, no,' Hingley said, thanking God for a garrulous witness, steering her back on course. ‘So you think it's likely him that took the boy away?'
‘It'd be a miracle if it was anybody else!' said Eric. ‘That one never forgets, never forgives.'
‘Oh come on, Eric, I'm not saying it's right, what he did that time, but she led him a right dance, by all accounts, that Bibi.'
‘Aye, according to him!'
‘When was the last time you saw him?' asked Hingley.
‘Just before we went on holiday. I brought him two or three meals I'd cooked, for his freezer, and a few buns. He liked sweet stuff. I think he waited till we were away, like, before he pushed off.'
‘Maybe I'd better take a look around,' suggested Hingley, having finished his coffee.
Mrs Brayshaw seemed to feel it necessary to apologize in advance for what he might find. ‘Me and my husband's looked after the place as best we could. Kept it decent like, while he's been in there, but it wants decorating top to bottom, it's never been touched since our Marion died — I tried to get him to do it, thought it'd give him something to occupy him till he got another job, but he'd no interest. He just sat there, in front of the telly, didn't matter what were on, he'd watch it.'
‘
Teletubbies
,
Neighbours
, Open University, game shows,
you name it,' said Eric disgustedly. ‘All he did, watch telly.'
‘Well, what could you expect, being in that place all this time? It's like you've always said, Eric, they get institutionalized, don't they? Wouldn't even cook for himself,' she told Hingley, ‘though he always used to love his food. I brought him some decent meals in every now and then, I couldn't stand to see him living off all them pizzas and curries.'
‘And Joe Soap here went on, daft as a brush, cutting the grass for him like I'd done all the time he was inside, and what's more, he bloody let me — never raised a finger! Never even stirred hisself to water the tubs, idle sod! You wouldn't catch me doing that, I tell you, for nobody but Mavis.'
‘Well, you couldn't let the place get into a slum like next door,' his wife said placatingly — ‘what would folks have thought?'
‘What they already think — that we'll be letting the bloody Pakis in next!'
‘
Eric
!!'
‘Bad enough having a jailbird here. I've heard that said, an' all, down at the Red Lion.'
‘He'd paid his debt, Eric.'
Brayshaw's face had turned from sunburnt to puce, and Hingley hastily stood up, sensing signs of marital dissent, and not anxious to ignite any more of Mr Brayshaw's smouldering prejudices, but his wife hadn't finished with Hingley. ‘If it turns out he
has
killed her — well, we'll just have to accept it. But I'll just say this. Taking James like that's just the sort of thing he would do, but he fair worships that little lad. He wouldn't harm a hair of his head.' Suddenly she burst into tears. ‘It's all my fault — I told him, when I was visiting him once, she'd gone to live down south with that chap that was a witness at the trial.'
‘Now then, Mavis. He'd have found out where she was, choose how.'
‘That's right, Mrs Brayshaw. He knew his name, it wouldn't be hard to find out where he lived.' She looked relieved and Hingley said, ‘Well, the first priority is finding 'em both, your nephew and the little lad. Let me have a mosey round.'
The search didn't take long. The house was shabby, the carpets threadbare, the kitchen units were an old DIY job, circa 1950, that needed replacing, but everywhere was spotless, due, no doubt, to Mrs Brayshaw's ministrations. He soon returned to the front room.
‘I can't find anything to suggest a child's been in the house.'
‘Oh aye? So that's what you've been looking for, Sherlock, eh? Flamin' hell,' said Brayshaw, ‘even I can see he wouldn't hardly've brought him here — he's not that daft!'
‘Maybe you can suggest somewhere else he's likely to have taken him, then?' Hingley asked sharply, nettled.
Husband and wife looked at one another. Some sort of agreement seemed to have taken place in Hingley's absence. ‘As a matter of fact, there is one place he might likely be,' Mavis Brayshaw said.
 
 
The congregation at the family service in the church of St Michael and All Angels in Middleton Thorpe on Sunday morning was very nearly as big as even the vicar, whose three-weekly turn it was to preach there, could wish for. Regular churchgoers or not, an unusually satisfactory number of people from the village filled the pews this morning.
Dr Paul Anderson, who lived in Middleton but whose practice was in Felsborough and who, it just so happened, was the police medical examiner who first saw Bibi's body, led the choir with his fine baritone, struggling against the organist, old Roger Capstick, who invariably pitched the hymn tunes too high and too slow. There was just one other man in the choir, a newcomer to the village who
worked in computers and had been persuaded to make up the numbers. His voice wasn't up to much, he was the first to admit, but he was enthusiastic. The rest of the choir were women, mostly middle-aged or elderly. None of the youngsters of the village, boys or girls, could be persuaded into joining, although a fair sprinkling of children had been lugged along to church this morning by their parents, since prayers were to be said for their schoolmate. A television camera crew was hanging about outside, hoping to catch some of the children weeping for Jasie.
Humphrey stands next to Alyssa, barking out the words of the hymn in the tuneless manner he invariably falls back on, since he can't hope to reach the high notes and has never been able to carry a tune, anyway. ‘On!-ward! Chris!-tian! So!-oldiers! …' What was good enough for Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins is good enough for him. When it comes to the responses, he gives the familiar ones he's learned as a child from the Book of Common Prayer and has continued to use, regardless of whether anyone else is using Rite A or Rite B or any other new-fangled rite. He refuses to shake hands at the Peace. No one around him is unduly surprised by this eccentricity. They're used to Humphrey.
Alyssa is amused at his stiff stubbornness, but all the same, she herself can't help sighing for the loss of the beautiful prose of the old Prayer Book, such a comfort. She can never comprehend why those who are said not to understand it cannot be taught to do so. Despite the loss of the old familiar words, however, she feels comforted by the service, and immensely supported by all the family being here today, though none of her sons are regular attenders any longer. She hasn't slept properly for two nights, being very troubled in herself by having remembered something which she hasn't told the police. Is it important enough for them to need to know? Even if it is, she's not sure whether she'll tell them. It probably has no significance, she thinks, willing herself to believe it. The
hymn creaks to its end and she watches Jane Arrow, in the choir, lead the ‘Amen' in a high, reedy soprano.
Jane settles herself back while the vicar mounts the pulpit to begin his sermon. She hopes the Reverend Treece, who is a terrible old windbag, will restrict himself to the prayers said for Jasie and not make mawkish appeals in his sermon. As it is, it's going to be enough of an ordeal for Alyssa, who looks ready to weep. She notices that Humphrey has closed his eyes, as he usually does during the sermon, and purses her lips, waiting for his head to jerk up to the amusement of all. She's pleased to see that Chip has turned up, looking resolute. And Jonathan, too — even though she knows this so-called music is hard for him to endure.
She's quite right about that. The choir is abysmal, Jonathan is thinking, and no boys in it, but what's new? He'd been dragooned into swelling the numbers before he went away to school and occasionally after that, when he was home, but even then it had been a painful experience, quite unlike the occasional near-ecstasy of being part of the choir at school, which happened to have a music master who was passionate about boys' voices and church music generally: his mentor, who had eventually persuaded him to consider seriously the idea of music as a career. He exchanges a wry smile with Jilly It's not realistic to expect much more than that from a tiny village choir. But he did wish they had a better organist.
As the vicar begins to speak, he looks at his watch. He has half an hour exactly before he must set off in his mother's car for London, and his first rehearsal. The vicar has been asking their prayers for Jasie's safety, and though prayers haven't featured much in Jonathan's life lately, he prayed then. For Jasie, and for himself. Perhaps he should have done that long ago. He shuts off the vicar's words.
 
 
Kate heard the sound of hymn singing coming from the church as she drove past on her way to Membery. A
nostalgic sound, inescapably associated with Miss Marple films, where church bells rang for Matins, you could almost smell the roasting beef, and little girls wore their Sunday shoes and straw hats. Alas, this was Middleton Thorpe, similar sort of name but a different story. In St Mary Mead they'd never heard of men in vests washing cars on Sunday mornings to the accompaniment of headbanging music. Large, uncontrolled mongrel dogs didn't run out into the road and bark at traffic. Neither did godless little boys on roller blades flirt with death almost under the wheels of cars. She narrowly avoided hitting one of them and momentarily regretted she hadn't when he gave her the old one two.

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