The Widow's Club (49 page)

“Ellie,” whispered Ben.

I smiled seraphically. Heaven was every bit as wonderful as the prospectus claims. I was lying on a pillow cloud, and my beloved was present with me in spirit and coincidentally in the flesh, too. I blinked because the light had a sparkling brilliance, then weakly stroked Ben’s hand. It felt almost real.

“Ellie, darling. You can’t die. I don’t care what your religion teaches, but I have it on the highest authority that there is no chocolate in heaven.” He was kneeling beside me.

I struggled to sit up. “Ben, I think we are having a joint hallucination. I’m really in the cake and you are in the dungeon at Merlin’s Court.”

“No.” He was rubbing my hands. “I got you out, thanks to Sweetie, who kept whining and chewing at the cake. And Poppa and I escaped the dungeons by means of a secret tunnel which exits under one of the beds. Poppa got the idea from reading about a similar arrangement in one of Edwin Digby’s books. And, interestingly enough, our tunnel ended at the cellar of Digby’s house. Highly convenient for old Wilfred Grantham and his assignations
with the two sisters at The Aviary. Wonder if it dates back to smuggling days?”

Ben was talking as though he had been away for the weekend and wanted to share the details. I shuddered and hung my head. “That cake was hell, but I wasn’t in it long and I don’t have claustrophobia.… What I am trying to say, Ben, is that I don’t expect you to forgive me for the misery I have inflicted on you, locking you up, forcing you to crawl through that blackness, not knowing where, or whether it would end.”

He leaned backward so that I had to look at him. “Hell was feeling the hall floor disintegrate under my feet. I was livid with you. I planned to murder you the minute I got out, but when I read that green notebook and realised that someone else was in all likelihood making the same plans, I didn’t have time for claustrophobia.”

I touched his face, so handsome, so concerned. “It was the same for me, in a way. When I became caught up in worrying about you, I stopped being frightened of food; I didn’t have time to concentrate on not eating.”

His arms entwined about me. “Ellie, don’t be afraid now. We’re going to the police; this monster—The Founder—will be stopped.” His lips brushed my throat. “We’ve made a lot of mistakes, but what can we expect, we are only beginners. I don’t suppose I’ll ever understand you completely. I don’t need to understand you to love you. All that matters is that I would have crawled through the centre of the earth to get to you and that I wasn’t too late.”

The moment was so fragile that I was afraid to say anything of what I felt, in case it broke. I cleared my throat and asked if Poppa was all right.

“Yes and no. Physically he’s fine, but he’s worried about how Mum’s feeling and consumed by guilt because in the shock of being plunged into the dungeon he accidentally spoke to me.”

“What made you look for me here?” I asked as Ben helped me to my feet.

“When we were racing up to the gates of Merlin’s Court, Poppa and I saw Miss Primrose Tramwell; she was in a flap about everyone being missing.” He touched his fingers to my lips. “It’s all right, darling. Everyone is found.
Poppa is with them. I didn’t know where to look for you until we saw Sweetie coming along Cliff Road, and I clutched at the possibility you might have gone looking for her in the churchyard. When I turned that way, she ran back ahead of me and eventually in here to the cake.”

I shivered, as much at owing Sweetie a lifetime of gratitude as the memory of what I had been through. She had probably only come in here to ‘go’; so Roxie would claim anyway; but I would buy Sweetie a lifetime subscription to
How to Train Your Owner
. My mind began to whirl with questions. Had Ben and Poppa seen Edwin Digby when they exited in his cellar? What had befallen my comrades-in-arms? And … where was The Founder now?

Ben guided me to the door. “You have to get some fresh air, darling.”

As we stepped onto the grass, my legs went pulpy, and the noonday sky seemed to tilt. The Founder could be behind any one of a hundred tombstones. I gripped Ben’s hand tighter.

Mr. Digby was standing on the sun-dappled path, a gun in his hand, and my surprise was that I was surprised. Everything had pointed to him, but in his drunkenness he may have thought himself invincible. Mother was waddling around him in narrowing circles. I felt sorry for the goose. Mr. Digby’s purplish fingers were pointing the gun, not at Ben and me, but at someone standing in front of an angel monument.

“Mrs. Haskell.” His head moved an inch in my direction. “My abject apologies on behalf of my daughter Wren.”

Ben and I turned in slow motion.

“No!” I exclaimed. “She can’t be, she isn’t … this is Jenny! Jenny Spender.” I had suspected Bunty might be his daughter; she was the right age and admitted she used a nickname. Digby had said Wren was living with a man; gossip said Bunty and Lionel weren’t really married. But, Jenny! Ridiculous! On second thought, maybe not …

Her eyes, those eyes which I had always thought too old for a child’s face, drifted over me and fixed with the most chilling hatred on Mr. Digby’s face.

“Jenny Wren.” Ben stroked my hair back from my face. “Hyacinth Tramwell recorded all the clues in her little green book. That farthing, as well as the photograph in the pocket of the pin-striped suit you borrowed from Mr. Digby, suggested
to yours truly that Jenny was the one. The farthing was the smallest coin in the realm and carried the symbol, on one of its sides, of the smallest British bird, the wren.”

“She was such a tiny baby,” Mr. Digby mused, “and she had given me that farthing in the happy days for a good-luck charm. It was easier to believe I had gone mad than to think of her grown evil. These past five years I have cowered in the bottle. But when you, Mr. Haskell, with parent in tow, burst into my house ranting about a widows club, I knew I had to pull the stopper, on myself, on my child.” The gun wavered but he steadied it with his free hand.

Ben stared into the wedge-shaped face framed by the childish plaits. “The Founder had to be someone who could observe and listen unnoticed. A hairdresser? A solicitor? A secretary? A charwoman? All good possibilities, but what better cover than that of a child?”

Jenny smiled, her fingers gripping the angel’s marble wings as if she would snap them.

“You were at Abigail’s the night of Charles Delacorte’s death,” Ben continued, addressing her, “carrying a white plastic raincoat. How convenient! I suppose you walked into the office, smothered him, and wore the murder weapon off the premises.” He paused. “Did you inherit your stage presence from your mother, along with your father’s macabre imagination? Was she eternally youthful, like you?”

“I can’t sing like Mummy,” said Jenny in that dreadful childish voice, “but I do have her ear, as well as her great sense of timing.” Her laughter went right through me. “I was able to phone all the ladies in the aerobics class—pretending to be Bunty Wiseman—and I cancelled the rehearsal. Then I rang her up, claiming to be Miss Thorn, saying the church hall wasn’t available. A clever ploy, wasn’t it, Mrs. Haskell,” she twiddled with a plait, “to get us alone?”

Ben continued remorselessly, his hand tightening around mine. “Ann Delacorte recognised your mother as Sylvania, the singer on whom she had an almost schoolgirl crush, when she went to the Dower House that day with Ellie. That idea sneaked up on me when I read that the nanny called your mother Vania. And I’ll wager the record being played was one of hers, from her heyday. The excitement
caused Ann to turn faint—two thrills in one day, Lionel Wiseman and now the discovery of her idol.” Ben shook his head. “Foolish Ann. She made a big mistake. She thought The Founder was pretending to be an invalid, not a child. And she was gripped by the sort of groupie closeness that gave her the confidence to go and ask a favour. That green car that slashed past you, Ellie, when you made your pregnant visit to The Peerless, I wonder if it was Ann’s Morris Minor?”

“I really enjoyed killing her.” Jenny’s voice wasn’t a child’s anymore. It seemed especially evil that she should make such a pronouncement in this little place of consecrated ground. “I became quite expert at archery when Daddy here was doing research for his book,
Robin of Nottinghill Gate
. Simon tried to talk me out of retiring Mrs. Delacorte. He said it might stir up a panic among the widows, but Simon always comes around to my way of thinking. That’s what love does—it turns people into fools. I rather enjoy watching the good doctor squirm for me the way my mother used to squirm for Daddy.”

“Not true, Wren,” said Edwin Digby.

“Yes, she did. She, the sparkling, glittering Sylvania, who had men reaching for her every time she stepped on stage and lit it up with her voice. She was ageless and she
loved
you, God only knows why, you ugly man, only to discover that you were trying to relive some adolescent passion with your secretary, the washed up, washed out Lady Peerless.” Jenny took on Teddy’s toothiness. “And because of you and your unfaithfulness, my mother, my exquisite mother, stuck her head in the oven and wasn’t lucky enough to die. She became a husk. I can look in her eyes and call, but she isn’t there.”

Edwin Digby took a step toward his daughter and then retreated, the gun dangling in his hand. “Wrong, Wren! Your mother never really loved me. Her one passion was her career; she would never acknowledge she was married, even after you were born. She was obsessed with keeping up the aura of being unattainable. She insisted that I use the pseudonym Edwin Digby—in private life, to tighten the veil of secrecy, and you were kept hidden away with her childhood nanny.”

He was a figure out of a vampire skit, with his twirled
eyebrows and beard forked by the wind. “Teddy and I had been youthful sweethearts, but Sylvania demanded that I sever all ties with the past. Think what you will of me, all of you!” His eyes glared at Ben and me as well as his daughter. “Teddy is guiltless!” The words might sound as if they came from one of his books, but I felt drops of water on my face, that weren’t rain. “She did not realise she would be working for me when she applied for the post of my secretary, ten long years ago. She had known me under my real name of Robert Burns, which—” his rheumy eyes were turned fully on Ben and me now, “I never used professionally, for obvious reasons.”

“And you fell in love.” Jenny (she would always be that to me) made the words sound like gutter ones.

“I swear there was no unfaithfulness. What drove your mother mad”—Mr. Digby’s lips twisted—“was the idea of so unworthy a rival.”

Jenny smiled mockingly. “You did not think it unfaithful to ask Mumma for a divorce.”

I said, to be saying something, “The parrot in Teddy’s office talks like one of your characters, Mr. Digby.”

“A farewell present, Mrs. Haskell. Teddy was ever a bird fancier. I settled in Chitterton Fells to be near her, even though we had assured each other that all was over between us. I came to the Haskell wedding reception,” the wind lifted his crinkly hair from his high forehead, “but too late, too drunk, to catch a glimpse. The first time I saw Teddy in all the years, other than to pass on the street, was at the restaurant soiree, the night Charles Delacorte died.”

“Teddy saw your daughter there.” I wrenched my eyes away from Jenny’s smile. “Maybe she wasn’t sure at first, but then the full horror must have hit her—that this was Wren,” I inched closer to Ben, “grown frighteningly younger than when last seen. No wonder Teddy blundered into the office to escape and, instead, found a body. No wonder she wouldn’t talk about that night. I don’t suppose she suspected—do you Mr. Digby?—that Wren had anything to do with Charles’s death, but I don’t doubt she blamed herself, all over again, for the old tragedy and … the results to Mother and now …”

Jenny was still smiling. “I’m not mad and I do not consider myself a criminal.”

Mr. Digby steadied the gun again. Mother trod over his feet, as he said, “I have not seen Teddy since that night.”

“I imagine,” Ben said to Wren, “that it was your father’s latest pseudonym, that of Felicity Friend, that embarked you on your voyage of revenge?”

“It wasn’t only revenge.” Jenny’s voice was wistful, a child’s again. “I wanted to help other women whose husbands were betraying them. And when Daddy became Felicity Friend and I remembered that book,
The Merry Widows
—that sold three copies, it all became clear. I had expert medical advice from Simon, who yearned to suffer at my hands. I could kill off Daddy a little bit at a time with every other man whose death I staged and bide my time until I decided to bury him.” Her eyes were on Mother, who was standing motionless with her wings spread. “You didn’t like to refuse me, did you, Daddy, when I asked you to put the occasional message in your confidential column? I told you it was a little game I was playing. But you worried nicely about what it all meant—the dickybird brooches … the deaths, but Daddy’s little girl was too big to go in the corner. And what you didn’t see couldn’t happen. What a weakling you are! Not even man enough to fight for your Teddy bear. I wish I could think she had read
The Merry Widows
and suffered accordingly, but even if she had—which isn’t likely—I don’t think her capable of taking the leap from fiction to fact. And such was your downfall, Daddy. You were ever so grateful (weren’t you?) that I was looking after Mumma, and came to see you sometimes.”

Jenny gave a childish giggle and addressed me. “I was at The Aviary the day you came, and he got the wind up, first that I might do something to tease you, and then that your charwoman had recognised him as Felicity Friend. I was so tempted to cheer him up by telling him I would kill her for him.”

I drew closer to Ben. The rustling of the trees and Mother’s feathers were for a moment the only sounds. “I should have guessed, with so much typing on his desk, when supposedly he hadn’t written in years, that Mr. Digby was a prime candidate for the role of Dear Felicity. And I should have realised that the only reason to wear plaits that make you look too young for your age is because you are
too old for them. I suppose that makes me rather stupid, but I really prefer that to being diabolically clever.”