The Death of Lucy Kyte (9 page)

When the panic subsided, she realised that the banging, at least, was real, and was coming from the boxroom next to hers: a dull, regular thud where the window, freed by her efforts with the rose, had swung loose and was knocking against the cottage wall. She fumbled for the torch on her bedside table and pushed the sheets aside, glad to feel the cool night air on her skin. It was hardly the moment she would have chosen to face the chaos of that room for the first time, but she could not leave without securing it. She pushed some boxes to one side and stepped past them, the light from her torch picking out random objects that seemed as disconnected and surreal as the dream she had just left. The small bed was buried under mounds and mounds of clothes, all smelling of mothballs, cigarette smoke and a heavy, sickly perfume, and she had to fight a wave of claustrophobia as she crawled over them to get to the window. The catch had broken, and when she pulled it gently to she noticed that the hinges moved precariously in rotten wood – something else to add to the list of repairs when she was next here. For now, she wound an old piece of material around the handle and stared out into the blackness, hoping to see just one light that would connect her to another human being. There was nothing. Only memory led her gaze in the direction of the road.

Wide awake now, she went downstairs and lit the oil lamp in the study, using its reflection in the window as a comforting shield against the darkness outside. A pile of scrapbooks had toppled over onto the floor, and she opened the nearest one, delighted by the photographs of Hester in a series of contrasting roles. The year was 1901, the theatre a very different place from the modern stage, but it was a world that she could just about remember, and it was captured perfectly here: soft gas lamps, so like natural light; backcloths painted in a slapdash style and tattered around the edges; fumes from the warm, yellow footlights, creating a veil in front of the actors, and making them remote and mysterious to the audience. The scrapbook finished with a pantomime,
Babes in the Wood
, and she caught her breath when she reached the final picture, taken backstage and labelled simply ‘Christmas, Inverness'. Hester was dressed as Robin Hood, but she had removed the feathered hat and given it to the little girl in her lap, and Josephine did not need to see the reflection in the dressing-room mirror to know that her mother had taken the photograph. The memory that had nagged at her in John MacDonald's office began to take shape: the house lights fading to a glimmer as the leader of the orchestra drew soft, shivering music from his men; the curtain rolling up to reveal the actors' feet, then their knees, then their faces, and finally the whole scene – all so magical to a five-year-old. Afterwards, her mother had taken her hand and led her round to the stage door, and she could still recall the bustle and laughter of the dressing room, the excitement of being allowed into a world that was out of bounds to ordinary people. She felt it to this day, even though she had earned her right to be backstage in any theatre, and she realised now that Hester's legacy to her was more than bricks and mortar.

Gently, she removed the photograph from the page and turned it over. Sure enough, there was her mother's handwriting, a mild admonishment to a friend to come home more often. She looked again at the happiness on Hester's face and the loving way in which she held her goddaughter, and knew her for the first time as more than a ghost. In her mind, she could hear Hester's laughter, the sweetness of her voice, but it was impossible to know after so many years if it was a genuine memory or an obliging trick of the imagination, conjured up to soften the longing for all she had missed – all those years when she could have got to know Hester properly, perhaps even shared the grief of her mother's death. She tucked the picture in Curtis's book, which she had found and packed for the train, saddened by the knowledge of moments gone – precious moments, and she not there to see them.

6

Glancing through the window of Stewart, Rule & Co., Josephine marvelled at the deception practised by any decent secretary. The ability to go unnoticed was an essential requirement amongst a certain type of professional woman, and Jane Peck – small, quiet, faded Jane Peck – had excellent credentials: very few people would have given her a second glance, but in the tidy, unambitious world of Stewart, Rule & Co. she was a giant, and Josephine's experience of the firm over the years had shown very clearly who kept it going.

The secretary looked up as she heard the door, and smiled at her visitor across a modest, organised desk. ‘How lovely to see you, Miss Tey – and congratulations. I hear your new book is to be made into a film. Your father told me all about it while I was shopping the other day.'

Of course he did, Josephine thought, picturing the pride on her father's face as he piled fruit into the basket of a captive audience. Normally she would have been embarrassed, but Miss Peck loved theatre and had shown a genuine interest in her work over the years, and she was one of the few people in Inverness whose good wishes could be taken at face value. ‘Thank you,' she said, ‘although I've no idea if I'll still be pleased when I've seen it. My meeting with Mr Hitchcock wasn't without its surprises.' That was an understatement, but she saw little point in disturbing the calm routine of the office with anything more. ‘I've brought some papers for Mr MacDonald to look through.'

Miss Peck took the envelope from her and placed it on the desk with the rest of the morning's post. ‘He's busy with a client at the moment, but I'll give them to him as soon as he's free.'

‘They're not urgent – just some bank books and financial bits and pieces from Miss Larkspur's cottage. He asked me to look out for them while I was there.'

In a rare display of curiosity, Miss Peck seized her moment. ‘We've been longing to know how you got on,' she admitted. ‘Do you mind if I ask how you found the cottage?'

‘It's winning me over gradually,' Josephine said, happy to indulge a glimmer of human curiosity from someone whose discretion she had always believed to be flawless to the point of indecent. ‘It's in need of some love and it's far more isolated than I expected, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I've only met a few of the locals, but I think we'll take a while to get used to each other.'

Miss Peck nodded, apparently knowing exactly what she meant. ‘The best way to deal with any village is to go about your business and keep your head down,' she said. In Josephine's opinion, it was a strategy that needn't be confined to village life, but she kept her thoughts to herself. ‘And what sort of state is the house in?' Miss Peck asked. ‘Were you able to stay there?'

‘Yes, although I was tempted to flee to something on your list for comfort. Let's just say I got through an awful lot of bleach and I've taken out shares in ant powder.'

The secretary laughed, and gestured to the envelope that Josephine had brought with her. ‘Well, at least you've made good progress in sorting through Miss Larkspur's papers. That must be a great weight off your mind.'

‘To be honest, I've barely scratched the surface. I swear there's enough material there for three lifetimes, not one.'

‘It's a very kind thing that you do,' Miss Peck said, and her sudden seriousness took Josephine by surprise. ‘A decent thing. Sorting through someone's effects after a death can be distressing. We all do it as a duty, but not many of us would volunteer.'

She spoke from the heart, and Josephine remembered that she had had her own bereavement in recent months, a brother to whom she had been devoted and whose care throughout a long illness had fallen to her, the unmarried daughter of the family. ‘I was sorry to hear about your loss,' she said.

‘Thank you, but it was expected.'

It was the standard response from someone whose grief was still too raw to cope with kindness; Josephine had used it herself for months after her mother's death. In Miss Peck's case, she suspected that the sorrow of the loss itself was beginning to blur with a more complex mourning for sacrifices that had been asked of her own life. Josephine could only imagine the pain of acknowledging those lost, unreclaimable years, no matter how freely they had been given – although in time there was a chance she would know exactly how that felt. ‘It must be difficult,' she said gently. ‘When you've cared for someone for a long time, it's hard to find yourself again.'

She wondered if she had overstepped the mark with someone she barely knew, but Jane Peck seemed grateful for the understanding. ‘I was certainly glad to come back to work,' she admitted. ‘Giving this job up during those final months, when Cameron needed me all the time, was like losing my last hold on a normal life. It was good of Mr MacDonald to let me come back.' She glanced affectionately at the closed office door. ‘It certainly keeps me occupied.'

Josephine allowed Miss Peck her pride, and wished that she did not know from gossip in the town that the secretary needed more than something to do. A woman of her age – late fifties, Josephine guessed, although she could not remember a time when Jane Peck had looked any different – should not
have
to work, but financial security was just one of the casualties of illness. ‘I'm sure the firm was only too pleased to have you back,' she said, hoping not to sound as patronising as she felt.

‘It does feel as though we've never been apart, I must say, and that makes things easier. And I was pleased to see your father looking so well.'

There was an implied solidarity in the comment, a comparison of their respective situations that Josephine resented but could not entirely dismiss. The knowledge of how her life would change if her father's health deteriorated was something she tried to push from her mind, although it often visited her late at night, when sleep was elusive. Was that how people would look at her? she wondered. With the same well-intentioned pity she felt for Miss Peck? ‘Yes, he's very well,' she said firmly, as if she could will it to continue indefinitely.

Her defensiveness was obvious and Miss Peck respected it by turning back to business. ‘Anyway, what I was going to say was that if you change your mind and decide you've taken on too much after all, just let Mr MacDonald know and he'll pay someone out of the estate to clear the cottage.'

Josephine nodded. ‘That's kind of you, but I'm afraid I'm already hooked. Apart from anything else, I've started to come across things that my mother sent to Hester, and I couldn't possibly let a stranger dispose of those.'

‘No, of course not. I understand.' She thought for a moment, then added: ‘An unlikely friendship, I always thought. They were so different. Sometimes that helps, though, doesn't it?'

‘I suppose so,' Josephine said. One of the things she hated most about living in a small town was this shared history amongst families: in Inverness, people always seemed to know each other well enough to have an opinion, but never well enough for it to be accurate. As far as she could tell, her mother and Hester had shared a sense of fun and independence, a love for those closest to them, which made them obvious companions.

‘Your mother must have missed her dreadfully when she left,' Miss Peck continued. ‘Still, it was the right thing for Miss Larkspur, no doubt. It left her free to have a life of her own, and she certainly made the most of it.' The words were positive enough, but they carried a note of resentment that Josephine had often heard in the voices of women whose lives bound them to Inverness; she herself was a peculiar hybrid of captive and deserter, fitting comfortably into neither camp, and she was glad when the telephone gave her an excuse not to respond. She waited patiently while Miss Peck dealt with the call, thinking about the expectations that her mother and Hester must have had placed on them when they were young. Her own family had once entertained the notion that she might enter into an understanding with the local gunsmith's son, and she had had to disillusion them with a phrase that contained the words ‘dead' and ‘body'; it must have been so much worse for an earlier generation of women, who had not had the barbed encouragement of war to persuade them of their own worth. Hester had rebelled, but, as far as she knew, her mother had always been happy with the quieter life she had chosen in her home town. Perhaps Miss Peck had been right after all: it was their differences that made them close.

‘Has Lucy Kyte turned up yet?' she asked as the secretary replaced the receiver.

Miss Peck hesitated. ‘Not to my knowledge, no,' she said, and her tone implied that Josephine was putting her in a difficult position by asking about a part of Hester's will that did not concern her.

‘I'm surprised she didn't make herself known at the funeral. Actually, there's something I've been meaning to ask you about that. Mr MacDonald said that you spoke to Tod Slaughter?'

‘That's right. He was charming once I'd got used to how tall he is.'

Josephine smiled. ‘Did he say anything about why Hester pulled out of the Maria Marten film?'

‘No, but to be fair I didn't ask him. He made a very gracious speech about working with Miss Larkspur and Mr Paget at the Elephant and Castle, but when I spoke to him afterwards he spent most of the time telling me about his garden. Do you know him?' Josephine shook her head. ‘Well, I rather got the impression he prefers plants to actors these days.'

‘There are times when I'm inclined to agree with him.' She looked at Miss Peck, who seemed not to have heard the last comment. ‘Is something wrong?'

‘No, it's just that you've got me thinking now – about Lucy Kyte and the funeral.'

‘Oh?'

‘There
was
a woman at the church. Let me see – it was after the service, and I was in a group of people listening to Sybil Thorndike. She was saying what a versatile actress Miss Larkspur was, and how impressive she was when they were in
The Old Women
together in the early twenties. Did you see it?'