The Witch of Exmoor (25 page)

Daniel shrugged. He was eating, unaccountably, a slice of pizza, and drinking an apple juice.

Daniel was of the opinion that Frieda had broken her leg in the woods, and would, by the time they arrived, have been discovered in a state of maximum distress and inconvenience–either dead, or dying. Rosemary agreed that something horrible must have happened, but favoured a death by drowning. ‘I think she may have fallen into the sea. It's right on the edge, and a steep cliff. And she was always a walker.'

All three of them contemplated the tiresomeness of a missing body. How long did it take for a missing person to turn into a missing body? How long would it be before they could prove the will? And where was the will, and what would be in it?

All three were united in a suspicion that whatever she had done, she had done it to annoy them. They did not state this baldly, but many of their asides, as they dried their hands in the jetstream in the Ladies, as they discussed which motorway exit to take from the M5, as they gazed at the willows bending over the Somerset Levels, might have been taken in that sense. Had she not for two or more years now been pursuing a policy of irritation, of aggression? They supposed that policy to be directed largely or wholly against themselves: it did not often occur to them that they did not loom as large in her life as she in theirs. They were unwilling to admit other, non-dynastic, non-familial motivations. They were understandably unable and unwilling to think of the tracts of Frieda's life which lay before and beyond their knowing. They feared these tracts–the dull ploughed furrows of her childhood, the swelling adolescent foothills of her career, the hidden and mysterious folds and valleys of her marriage to their father, the thickets of her scandalous romances, the public peaks and craggy coastlines of her ambition. She had been writing her memoirs: on what scrapheap, in what vault, on what agent's desk lay those incriminating documents today? Had she mapped the past, and if so, to what end?

Daniel and Rosemary assumed a deathwish, for what else, they argued, could the dead-end Ashcombe represent? And if death had come her way it was no more than she had asked for. She had gone to meet him halfway. Only Gogo dissented, and she with half her heart. Gogo was the last to have seen Frieda alive, and she described now the apparition of Frieda in her blue dress, shining like starlight. She had seemed–well, said Gogo carefully, she had seemed quite
well.

But it must be remembered that Gogo, professionally, saw the ill, lived amongst the ill. Frieda had not trembled, Frieda had not stumbled or jerked her head or spilt her tea or fumbled for words. Her hand had been steady, her speech clear. No palsy, no paralysis had possessed her. And to Benjamin, she reminded her brother and her sister, to Benjamin Frieda had been very kind.

The name of Benjamin was not welcome in the car. It fell coldly, and Rosemary shivered, while Daniel turned up the heater. Neither of them wanted to hear of Benjamin's reception at Ashcombe. They feared the worst. Jealousies, exclusions, favours, competitions. Betrayals, thefts and alienations.

Darkness fell early even in the west, and Daniel turned on the headlights. They had agreed to pick up the keys to the house from the police station in Minehead, an unnecessary formality as the police had conceded that the house seemed to have been standing open to intruders and the elements for days, if not for weeks. They approached the neat brick suburban thirties building with apprehension, wondering what news could await them there: a discovery, a trail of clues? But the officer, apologetic, told them that no trace of Mrs Haxby had been found. They had searched the wooded areas, but had found nothing. ‘It's very dense, very steep,' said PC Wainwright. ‘It could take days.' The coastguard had been out, but no bodies had been reported. There were no signs of forced entry at the house, no evidence of foul play. They'd taken away one or two items for examination, but there'd been nothing suspicious. (He did not like to mention the cannabis to these three disconcerting Londoners: it had looked to him and to his boss as though the old lady had been smoking it herself, but this seemed so unlikely that he didn't like even to raise the matter. He'd let someone else deal with that one. If she had been having a puff, who cared? If they found outhouses full of the stuff, that would be another matter.)

The boss had thought of shutting the house off and refusing the keys, but had decided not to bother. No point in over-reacting. There might be all sorts of innocent explanations. Mrs Haxby might have had a sudden call to go to London. She might have had a visitor and gone off with her to town. She might have gone on holiday. He gathered she was a professional lady. She wouldn't be pleased to come back and find her absence had been treated as a crime. Nor, it had occurred to him, would she necessarily be very pleased to find her keys had been handed over to her avenging family. But that wasn't his problem, was it? Next of kin is next of kin, in the eyes of the law. And Mr Palmer said he was a lawyer.

Mrs Haxby was a professional and an eccentric. Exmoor was full of eccentrics. Would a normal person want to live alone at a place like Ashcombe? Ashcombe had a bad reputation. Nobody normal had ever lived at Ashcombe. In its hotel days, it might have had one or two normal guests, but they hadn't stayed long. And the manager had been barking mad. So had the proprietor, and so had the retired admiral who had built the place. It stood to reason that anybody who lived alone at Ashcombe might well wander off alone. Nothing illegal in that.

So PC Wainwright and his boss Sergeant Wiggins had reasoned, as they washed their hands of responsibility, and handed over to Daniel Palmer, Grace D'Anger and Rosemary Herz.

The trio drove on, with Gogo now at the wheel, and Daniel by her side. Daniel had been further downcast by the news that Ashcombe lay right on the county boundary, and that if Frieda had wandered from Somerset into Devon, if her corpse was washed from Somerset to Devon, her case would be at the mercy of two police forces, the subject of two files of paperwork. How characteristically inconvenient of her to live on a boundary, he remarked, as he peered into the gathering gloom. She always liked margins, said Gogo sharply, as she swung off the main road and down the steep descent.

Daniel was deeply shocked by the house. Neither Rosemary's warnings nor Gogo's emendations of those warnings had prepared him for this Victorian Gothic asylum. It offended all his instincts for comfort, for order, for maintenance. The degree of decay and dilapidation appalled. The smell stopped his nostrils. How could this ever have been kept up, how could it ever be restored? What impulse of folly had built this folly here and abandoned it here, at the sea's edge? Its very position clamoured with offence.

Gogo and Rosemary were almost amused by his horror, but they too were overwhelmed. The abandoned house had grown yet more sinister, it loomed darkly above them into the lowering afternoon night. Was Frieda in there somewhere, trapped in a closet, imprisoned in an oak chest? The police said they had searched the house, but had they? Frieda's last supper still stood upon the table: the winkle shells, the glistening oily yellow rind, her open book. (Unlike Terry Zealley, they register the tide of the book, and register it with surprise: Frieda seemed to have been reading a Mills & Boon romance called
The Sweet South
by Amantha Knight.) And there were objects familiar to them from Mausoleum days–the skull, the skeleton clock, the alabaster egg, the vase of red Bristol glass. They were instinct with foreboding. So Frieda had moved from one folly to another, from one mausoleum to another. From the grave to the grave. What life had she had, and where were its joys now? Where was she now? WHY HAD SHE COME HERE? Had all come to this? Or was this some endgame prank?

Their flesh crawled, shrivelled and listened. Rosemary sat heavily on an old basket chair and dropped her head into her hands. Her heart was beating loudly, for she too was marked for death. She was worn out, defeated. Gogo crossed to the window and stared out across the darkened garden towards the sea, the indecipherable scrabble of the interminable sighing of the water. She stood transfixed, like a dead person, like a statue frozen. She could hear her own blood. And Daniel, thinly, leanly pacing, came to a halt before the backgammon board, so neatly laid, before the game of patience. So she had wasted time, so she had eked away the dull long hours.

The skeleton clock had died when they were small children, in the heavy stifled fatherless shame of Romley. It never struck the hour. Time had stood still. They had lived in a house without a man, and Frieda had worked like a man. Frieda had taught Daniel to play backgammon. Night after night, during his lonely, freakish boyhood, he had played backgammon with his mother for an hour before bed. He had forgotten this. In turn he had taught his sisters, and they too had played. Did they remember? Did they now, like him, recall?

Daniel had tried to make for himself a rich light life without these grim shadows, yet here he stood, trapped. All three of them were motionless, silent, exhausted. The air was heavy. They could not move. She had brought them to this cave and turned them to stone.

 

Rosemary, the youngest, was the first to break the spell. She groaned, tightened her fingers in her red-gold hair, clasped at her skull, rocked back and forth as though to wind herself up into motion, and made a gurgling sound in her throat, as though she were a sybil about to speak after long silence.

‘Shit,' said Rosemary. ‘Jesus fucking Christ. I can't fucking
take
this. Do you think there's a
drink
in the house?'

Daniel, who found, to his surprise, to my surprise, to your surprise, that his eyes were prickling with tears, was the next to move. He laid his hand upon the pack of cards, turned one up. It was the three of hearts. ‘I gave her these,' he said, perplexed. ‘I bought her a couple of packs when I was killing time in Luxembourg. I can't think why. Look, they're the kings and queens of France.'

‘Well done, Danny boy,' said Gogo bravely, turning back from the window, attempting the normality of sister scorn. ‘Clever lad.'

But her voice shook a little, as though she did not trust it to find its register. She picked up at random black Marie-Antoinette, La Dame de Pique, and stared at her blue and silver dress, her blue and silver hair, her white aigrette.

‘A
drink,'
repeated Rosemary. ‘She was never short of a drink.'

And they jerked into action, opening cupboards, sniffing the dregs in the half-empty bottle (a perfectly good 1995 Chablis, noted Daniel, gone to waste), tripping over piles of papers, turning on switches to lamps. Some of them worked, and some did not. They found glasses, and, in the bottom shelf of the mock-Jacobean sideboard, a fine array of bottles–gin, whisky, sherry, vermouth, Marsala, cherry brandy.

‘She'd stocked up for Christmas,' said Rosemary, her spirits rising as she poured herself a large Scotch. ‘Gogo, whisky for you?'

‘Who's driving?' asked Gogo, as she accepted a tumbler.

‘Who cares?' said Daniel. ‘Cheers, Cheers, Rosie. Cheers, Gogo. Cheers, Frieda. Can you hear us, Frieda? Are you out there listening?'

And the three of them stared defiantly at the dark windows, at the glimmer of sea and distant shoreline beyond, and they raised their glasses and they drank.

There had been a crime, but this had not been the scene of it.

 

Gogo knocks at Rosemary's bedroom door, hears a tap running, hears her sister call, ‘Hang on a minute, I'm coming.' Rosemary appears, in a shining white satin night-dress and a sage-green silk kimono, smelling of aloes. She is ready for bed. Gogo sits on the bed. There is nowhere else to sit, for Rosemary's hotel room is small and cramped, and the only chair is covered with Rosemary's discarded clothing. Gogo's room is bigger, a double overlooking the sea. The sisters had thought of sharing, but had not been able to face it. ‘I snore,' Gogo had said dourly, to discourage Rosemary, who had herself been trying to think of good reasons to sleep alone. Gogo, the elder, had claimed the best room.

The hotel is an old coaching inn, perched on the cliff above the coast path. It boasts Fine Sea Views, but it is too dark to see them. It has known better days. Gogo, David and Benjamin had lunched there in the summer, eating scampi and chips from a basket. And Frieda Haxby too, it appeared, had lunched there. The elderly barman remembered her. He brought the subject up himself, as the three Palmers sat in the dark brown bar at a small round oak table, looking at the menu and eating Bacon Twirls. News of Frieda's disappearance had spread along the coast, from headland to headland, from beacon to beacon, from pub to pub. For a recluse, she had aroused a fair amount of interest. Nor, it now seemed, had she been as reclusive as they had thought, for the barman, a grey-haired, moustached, melancholy, gentlemanly figure, who smoked perpetually, even while pulling pints, claimed that she had been in for lunch with another lady. They came in once or twice, for pensioner's lunches, on a Thursday. A good value lunch–roast and two vegetables, or fish and chips, for £3.50. They'd seemed to enjoy it. Of course the weather had been a bit better, last month. They'd sat out, on one occasion as he recalled.

He took a morbid interest in Frieda's disappearance, probing for more details. He volunteered that he could tell they were family, there was a likeness. (Gogo's expression of stony refusal at this suggestion was a wonder to see, and Rosemary got out her pocket powder compact to effect an instant cosmetic alteration.) Yes, they all knew she lived alone at Ashcombe, and had heard she was writing a book. About the Vikings, he'd been told, but he wouldn't know about that.

Daniel ignored the Vikings and ordered a baked trout, then asked if the barman knew the name of the other lady. No, he didn't. He thought she came from inland, from Exford way, but he couldn't say for sure. About the same age as Mrs Haxby, she would be. This, he had added, was a popular part of the world for retired people.