The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (24 page)

‘The police are here again. They want to see us. All of us.’

They passed Mrs Hill in the passage.

‘Here they are again,’ she said. ‘Might as well make them up a bedroom.’

When the three of them entered the study, the new man was standing by the fireplace with Julian across from him. William was already in the room, with Eleanor behind him.

‘This is Inspector Thomas, from Devizes,’ Julian said.

Laurence found himself trying to read the inspector’s expression. Was it the look of a man who had solved a mystery, who might, even, be about to say he’d arrested somebody? He knew he was watching for him to play a part from one of Mrs Christie’s novels, but what he saw was not a genius of detection but an alert public servant: tidy, upright, conscientious. He could have been a senior NCO, a man with work to do, who would do it thoroughly. He seemed neither suspicious nor eager.

The inspector stepped forward slightly. To Laurence, it seemed more a gesture than a requirement, or perhaps he too had read a detective novel in his time.

‘I’m very sorry to hear of Mrs Easton’s health,’ the man said to Julian. ‘But I have some news. The deceased was not, as we first assumed, Margaret Petch.’

He made no pretence of doing anything other than watching their faces.

Eleanor looked sharply at Laurence.

‘What?’ Patrick said. ‘How many vanishing girls can one house and a few cottages sustain?’

Julian frowned at him. ‘Who is it?’ he said slowly.

‘At this time we have absolutely no idea who she is. A woman rather than a girl.’ He regarded Patrick steadily, then read from his notebook: ‘Aged between thirty and forty. Medium height. And she had borne children. She had also consumed a very large amount of alcohol shortly before death.’ He looked up.

‘No wedding ring,’ the sergeant said, and just for a second Laurence thought the inspector’s lips twitched.

‘Indeed, a mother with no wedding ring. No possessions at all, in fact, bar the clothes she wore and a patterned hair ribbon found near the body. It may not have been hers, of course.’

Eleanor caught Laurence’s eye again and he looked away immediately.

‘Maggie had a ribbon,’ Frances said. ‘She didn’t usually but she’d dressed up specially...’

Laurence sensed, as much as observed, their glances fall away from Patrick.

Patrick said, slightly flushed, ‘I gave her the ribbon, you might as well know this, given it’s causing moral agonies for everyone else not to reveal the fact. Even though this body is not her.’

‘Yes, sir. So I gather from Mr Petch.’

This obviously caught Patrick by surprise.

‘Mr Petch said you were in the habit of giving his granddaughter small gifts.’

‘I was trying to be kind.’ Patrick voice went up slightly as it always did when he was upset. ‘I saw a lonely child. When I came home I gave her some magazines and the wretched ribbon. I gave her a small piece of carving on a little stone I’d found in my work in Greece. I gave her cigarette cards of Hollywood stars. I didn’t know she’d vanish and these paltry things would become sinister.’

‘Not to us, sir. We just want to find Margaret.’

Patrick fumbled for his cigarettes and looked fixedly away from them all.

‘But my priority is identifying this dead woman and bringing the killer to justice,’ the inspector went on.

‘She was definitely murdered?’ Julian asked.

Before the inspector had time to reply, Patrick retorted tetchily, ‘Well, it’s hardly likely she’d stuff herself in the cellar and block the entrance, is it?’

‘She had an injury to her head,’ the inspector said, and Laurence felt he was gauging their reaction. ‘It might have been an accident, but for the concealment of the body.’

Julian shook his head and looked down.

From the window seat, Patrick asked, ‘Are you sure? I mean, from what Mr Bartram said, the body was pretty far gone.’ Laurence threw him an angry look, both for the cavalier tone of his voice and for implying Laurence had found the discovery worthy of gossip.

‘I’m afraid so, sir. The post-mortem confirmed it. Quicklime was thrown on her body. There’s lime in the village, we noticed.’

‘I had it left there,’ William said, ‘for the building works. There’s a small quantity in the stables too for repairs at the Hall.’

Laurence looked away. William hadn’t mentioned the residual lime at the house before.

Inspector Thomas again studied his notebook. ‘What about Mrs Petch, Margaret Petch’s mother? She left the family home when her daughter was quite young, didn’t she?’

Julian seemed to draw himself up as if personally responsible for the burden of Easton history.

‘She went off with a showman from the Mop Fair, the year before the war. The child was five.’

‘Her father is dead?’

‘Yes. In 1917. He was one of our NCOs in the war. A good man and a fine soldier. We lost him at Bapaume.’ Julian spoke as if he had been personally careless.

The inspector nodded. ‘Of course.’

He seemed to allow a silence to fall on the room. Patrick coughed a few times. Eleanor had pulled her chair closer to William but he gave no sign he was aware of her, except, if anything, to lean his body minutely away from her.

‘Before I go,’ the inspector said. ‘I want to ask you all one question. Later I may need to talk to you individually.’

Laurence watched Julian. His hand, holding his unlit pipe, moved in and out of a pocket, as if he had forgotten where he usually kept it. Then he caught Laurence’s eye, gave him a look of regret and shrugged, perhaps because, of the people in the room, they were the only two who had seen the body. A body the police obviously now believed was Maggie’s mother.

‘Did any of you know there was a room under the church?’

Patrick was already shaking his head.

‘Do you mean a vault?’ Frances said.

The inspector moved back to the fireplace.

‘Rather more than a vault, as it turns out. It appears to be a small chapel. I am told it is possibly a chantry. In Roman Catholic practices it is a place,’ he cleared his throat, ‘for remembering the dead. To pray for their immortal souls.’

‘Good Lord,’ Patrick said. ‘I mean, us not knowing it was there.’

‘It’s not particularly odd in itself,’ Laurence said. ‘All our old churches were Catholic once, but it is odd that its existence should have been forgotten.’

Julian spoke slowly. ‘My mother was a Roman Catholic, although my father was very much against her practising her faith.’

‘That’s interesting. Because certainly somebody had lit candles down there at some point. There were two candlesticks—not so very old, I’m told, and an altar with a cloth on it. There was also a picture of the Virgin Mary and ... a...’ He looked down again. ‘Missal.’

Julian was pale and it was to him that the inspector addressed himself.

‘Did you know of this place, sir?’

‘No. I had no idea. We had no idea.’ He appeared to be thinking. ‘We searched the house before—’

Patrick broke in briskly. ‘I think my brother is trying to say that when our niece, Katherine, vanished, every nook and cranny was explored. If we had known about this vault, if it could have been found easily, we would have found it then.’

‘So none of you knew of the chapel?’

‘No.’

‘No,’ Frances echoed.

Eleanor was shaking her head. ‘I don’t really know the house that well,’ she said. ‘I’ve been in the church only a couple of times and I probably wouldn’t have noticed if there was an entrance to a vault. I mean, it’s the sort of thing you expect in churches.’

The inspector wrote briefly.

‘Mr Bolitho, you are an architect, I gather from my sergeant? You were restoring parts of the house and church. Did you not suspect such a place existed?’

William was slower than the others, who had seemed almost impatient to answer, but then, Laurence reflected, the question had been slightly different.

‘If anything, I was surprised there was
not
a vault. The family seem to have been buried outside the church.’ He looked at Julian, who nodded.

The inspector turned to Laurence. He felt a strange mixture of nervousness and eagerness. He wanted to say his bit and have it over with.

‘Were you surprised, sir? Given your knowledge of churches?’

‘There are usually some interments—burials—below the floor in churches like this. Most often, of the family and their priests, perhaps under a monument—sometimes quite elaborate ones, even in country churches. But not always by any means.’

But as he said it, he wondered whether the person or—he realised with a shock, given the weight of the entrance door—persons who had put the body in that dark place, knew what it was. Was that why they chose it: to give the unknown woman’s burial some dignity?

He had missed the inspector’s next question and Eleanor was looking anxiously at him.

‘I’m sorry?’ he said. ‘I was just thinking that I wasn’t really looking hard for a vault because all our energies were going into some changes above ground. I suppose I might have wondered if there were old burials near the altar and access had been lost in the last renovation. There’d been some work on the church floor.’

‘My mother,’ Patrick said. ‘It will have been my mother’s so-called improvements.’

‘Captain Bartram,’ the inspector said as if Patrick hadn’t spoken, ‘how was it that you didn’t notice this cellar entrance all the time you were working in the church and yet you found it last Tuesday?’

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ he said, surprising himself with the degree of relief he felt. ‘All the time I’d been working, there was a small secondary altar under the west window. A large table, really, covered in a damask cloth and standing on a carpet. It had a small wooden cross on it.’ His voice was steady. ‘We weren’t working in that bit of the church—and you don’t think of moving that sort of thing unless you need to.’

The inspector appeared to be puzzling over this. Laurence looked up and caught Patrick’s eye. There was something embarrassing about being questioned in front of the others, even only about practical details, but presumably that was why the inspector had organised it that way.

‘But you did move it. You and the handyman.’

Laurence glanced at William.

‘We needed to clear the area. The window above is being replaced. Mr Bolitho had heard the stained-glass window craftsman was coming soon and they’d need space to put up ladders and a trestle.’ He knew he was speaking too fast.

‘Had David Eddings seen the entrance before?’

‘No. Why would he? I doubt he was ever in the church before we started work on it. It’s more or less unused.’

‘Was there anything else remarkable about the entrance you found?’

‘No, nothing. We were just surprised to find it at all.’

He thought for a minute.

‘With hindsight, I suppose it was very clean, and there were no bolts, but the hinges weren’t rusted or anything, given at that point we presumed the vault had been under there unopened for decades.’

The inspector wrote slowly. He turned over a page. Laurence found his fists were clenched. He pushed them into his pockets.

‘Thank you, sir. We’ll have a few more questions for you but that’s been most helpful.’ Inspector Thomas gave a polite nod. ‘Mr Easton, thank you for your time. The doctor says there’s nothing to be gained by us speaking to Mrs Easton?’

‘She’s not conscious,’ Frances said.

‘I’ll show you to the door,’ Julian said wearily. He gave Frances a warm smile as he moved to do so, but his face was still creased with worry. Eleanor leaned across to Frances and murmured something Laurence didn’t catch.

‘One thing, sir.’ It wasn’t clear whom the inspector was addressing. ‘Regarding Miss Katherine. I am told Mrs Easton never sought to have her declared dead. That she believed,
believes,
that the girl is still alive.’

Julian looked infinitely sad. ‘A mother’s instinct, she says.’

Patrick was still gazing out of the window again as if trying to disconnect himself from the scene but Laurence observed he was coiled like a spring.

‘Of course. Not unusual, I’m told.’ Inspector Thomas cleared his throat. ‘Thank you for your time. We shall leave you in peace for now, unless you have any questions.’

‘I had intended to go to London tomorrow,’ Laurence said, ‘would that be all right?’ Just for a couple of days.’ He knew he was as much motivated now by the need to escape as to do research.

‘Just leave your address, please sir.’

‘May we go back in the church?’ Patrick said as they were leaving the room. ‘It would be helpful as things stand, with Mrs Easton and everything.’

Julian shot him an angry look.

‘Yes. We might want a further look, of course, but we’re not seeking any further evidence there.’

Finally, Patrick and Laurence were left alone.

‘I didn’t mean to take Lydia’s name in vain,’ Patrick said, ‘nor to make Julian cross.’

‘I was more surprised you wanted to find solace in the church.’

Despite himself Laurence still found Patrick’s quick wits engaging. In his heart of hearts, he knew that, were he Eleanor, with Eleanor’s choices, he might have succumbed as she had.

‘There’s solace and there’s solace. Anyway, when I said helpful, I didn’t mean to my immortal soul.’ Patrick looked wryly at Laurence. ‘Which you think is compromised to all hell, anyway.’

He held Laurence’s gaze and it was he who eventually broke away.

‘It’s not my affair,’ Laurence said.

Patrick walked over and shut the door.

‘You don’t mean that. Of course you think it’s your affair. There’s your friend William, who did his bit in the war, horribly injured. There’s little Nicholas, the light of their life, and there’s Eleanor, the linchpin of that happy family.’

His words were bitter but his tone was not.

‘Eleanor, your confidante, who helped you unravel that sad business with your friend after the war. Eleanor, whom you opened up to but who also rewarded you with secrets.’

Laurence snapped back, ‘I’m not jealous, you know.
I
wasn’t her lover.’

‘And I was. But do you mind because of poor William, which leaves you camped on the moral high ground, or because Eleanor’s not quite the woman you thought she was and wanted her to be, in which case you’ve got at least one foot in some decidedly boggy territory?’