Withering Heights (29 page)

“He could have mummified.” I brought up the rear. “This is like being in a lift. Ben would have the most awful claustrophobia even with the door open.” It was the wrong thing to have said. I had just finished squeezing my elbow into Mrs. M’s middle when, as if in response to “Close sesame,” we heard a creak, followed by a groan, and found ourselves swaddled in utter darkness.

“Nobody panic!” The words squeezed their way out of my throat. “It must have swung to, but it won’t have shut completely. No door could possibly be that wicked.”

Apparently this one was. No amount of pushing, shoving, frantic banging, or nasty name-calling would persuade it to relent.

M
rs. Malloy, Betty, and I took turns exhausting ourselves, despite knowing it was absolutely the worst thing we could do, given that air was severely rationed. A national shortage, I supposed. I forgot about Mr. Gallagher. Indeed, it seemed to me that all the memories of my life till this moment were seeping from me. I struggled to think about Ben and our children, but they were fading. I sagged against Betty, but she wasn’t there. She had crumpled to the floor. I could feel her grasping my calves, her hands clutching . . . then letting go. How sad for her, how anguishing for Tom that he was to lose another wife in an accident, how terrible for dear Ariel. Would she ever recover from this further devastation of her childhood? Would it be any comfort for her to know that there were now three more faces looking down at her from heaven? I tried to come up with a prayer, but all I could manage were
some starts and stops of Mrs. Malloy’s poems. There was life left in her. I could feel her gyrations. A funny time to be doing her daily exercise routine, I thought with woolly affection. It was now, as the windows of my life were fogging up, that it came to me in a sort of vision why the man who handed Betty the egg and spoon had seemed familiar. He was the walker I had seen with the black-and-white sheepdog. I had a further revelation about his voice and his mismatched ears. A mosaic of scattered pieces of information floated together. I could be wrong, but I didn’t think so. How to prove it, though; that was as ever the question. And the difficulties would increase monumentally when I was dead.

“You’re not going to die.” The clouds parted as Mrs. Malloy’s voice boomed down on me from the sky. “None of us is. Now, move aside, there’s a good girl. I had a bit of a tussle getting that underwire out of me bra. But it’ll do the trick, see if it don’t. Ed the locksmith’s got nothing on me when the situation’s desperate.”

“That priest couldn’t get out, the one Lady Fiona told me suffocated in here,” I croaked, by way of encouragement.

“That’s a man for you; they don’t have our stamina. He’d probably never got locked out of the house after sneaking off at night as a teenager. Virtue isn’t its own reward; it’s a bloody handicap. Make yourself useful, Mrs. H.” She was barely panting. “See what Betty’s up to.”

“I can’t see, but I think she’s passed out on the floor.”

“I’m hurrying. There! I’m pushing the wire down a crack. It’s hit something; it must be the catch. Careful, I mustn’t lose me concentration.”

“Please don’t.”

I waited, desperately hoping to hear a productive click, but I couldn’t. Suddenly there was noise outside. Voices raised in panic, footsteps stumbling around. We were going to be rescued . . .
if anyone out there knew how to open the panel. The fog returned, I felt my legs buckle, and then that same unearthly voice, the one that had spoken through the clouds, echoed through my head.

“That’s it! The click! The bleeding pearly gates is opening.”

Oh, dear! I thought, while falling forward. How many hours would Mrs. Malloy get in the heavenly slammer for swearing in front of St. Peter?

Obviously, there was a mistaken notion that I had led a blameless life. I was adrift in sunlight. There were no scolding voices, only one that was as gentle as a lullaby. I knew who was talking; it was Ben. How lovely of him to come after me, I reflected drowsily. But really he shouldn’t have left the children! They needed him and I was quite safe here. I opened my eyes to find myself lying on a sofa in the drawing room at Cragstone.

“Are you back, sweetheart?” Ben asked, with a catch in his voice. He was seated in a chair beside me.

“Have I been laid out?”

“You fainted.”

“How are—?”

“Tom fetched the doctor for Betty. She’s going to be fine. At the moment she’s as badly shocked as you are.”

“No, I’m not.” I sat up and kissed him absently. “What about Mrs. Malloy?”

“Right here.” She came out of nowhere to stand over me. “A rare fright you’ve given us, Mrs. H! I thought you was gone and I’d never get to tell you I broke that pink vase you searched high and low after.”

“That hideous thing?”

“The one my mother gave you?” Ben was laughing at me. I could feel the relieved exhilaration through his touch.

“The reason I kept quiet,” said Mrs. M, “is that I did it on purpose.”

“Thank you for that.” I squeezed her hand. “As well as for saving my life and Betty’s.”

“Now don’t go getting all soppy! If I hadn’t managed, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. The troops were already there.”

“What troops?”

“Tom, Ariel, myself.” Ben kissed my forehead. “Along with Mavis and Eddie.”

“Her son?”

“I’ll explain,” said Mrs. Malloy, sitting down in a chair across from us. “That’ll speed things, since it’s me that had a proper talk with Mavis. Not that I’m blaming you for being out cold for over an hour. It’s like this, Mrs. H; she’s been bringing the boy to work on the q.t., seeing as how Betty had said she couldn’t. It’s been easy for her to slip him into the house unnoticed, because she comes in her car and parks close to the passageway outside the door that’s left unlocked, there being no key. What she does is take Eddie up the back stairs to the west wing. She’s drilled it into him to keep out of sight should anyone go up there. Today, when he heard us coming, he got in that big wardrobe.”

“Go on,” I urged.

“Seems he was peeking out and saw you, me, and Betty go into the priest hole.”

“He must have been startled.”

“ ’Course he was, being only seven. Scared him, it did, when he heard us pounding on that door to try and get it open. But he kept his head on straight. Quite the little hero, our Eddie. He raced downstairs to tell his mum. Being Mavis, she didn’t waste time asking a lot of questions. She found Tom, who was with Ariel and Mr. H, and they all came up on the double.”

“That little boy deserves a medal,” I said.

“Not quite the way Mavis sees it. She says he’s a real scamp.
He’d get bored playing with Mr. Gallagher’s old toys in Nanny Pierce’s room and sneak downstairs. She caught him there a few times.”

“It must have been him who took your toffees.”

“And a snuffbox.” Ben smiled. “Children love small containers. The poor little chap, he was bored out of his mind most of the time. But it wasn’t Eddie who let the bathroom basin overflow. He and Mavis had left the house by that time.” He shifted sideways, as I put my feet to the floor.

“Ariel told me Nanny Pierce thought Tom and Betty had a wild lifestyle because she’d seen car lights going down the drive in the middle of the night. Would that have been Mavis?”

“Mrs. Cake got her to fess up. Seems she had a set-to with her husband, Ed, one night.” Mrs. Malloy displayed the air of importance that comes from being in the know. “They’ve been going through a difficult patch, what with him starting up his own business from home and not being quite as cooperative with Eddie as Mavis thinks he could be. One night, she told him she was walking out and taking the boy with her. Having said it, she had to follow through, and Cragstone was the only place she could think to come. Between us, I’d be surprised if it was just the one time. So easy to get in, with that door always unlocked.”

“I suppose everything would have gone off without a hitch if Mrs. Cake hadn’t heard them moving about on the night of her accident.”

“It was one of Mr. Gallagher’s old toys left on the stairs that caused her to fall when she come down to make her and Mavis a cup of tea. Put Mrs. Cake in a difficult position.” Here Mrs. Malloy resorted to royal magnanimity. “She’s fond of Mavis and didn’t think Betty was treating her fair, not letting her bring Eddie to work when it was a case of needs must. So the next morning, when she was thinking clearer, she said she’d only imagined hearing someone. It was Betty’s thinking it
might have been Mr. Gallagher’s ghost roaming about that made her press for details.”

Ben put an arm around me, and I stood up to find the floor satisfactorily solid under my feet. “I expect Betty thinks it was her ladyship who crept after us into the house and closed the priest-hole door. It
is
possible, I suppose. She knew it was there and quite likely how to open it.”

“Then she’s barking up the wrong tree.” Mrs. Malloy made a noble attempt at not preening. “Milk Jugg phoned while you was out of it, Mrs. H, to report he’d found evidence that her ladyship was married before she became Mrs. Gallagher, but there was an annulment. As for Mr. G not knowing about it at the time and only finding out right before he disappeared, that’s a wash, seeing as the groom’s cousin was one of the witnesses that signed the registry at the first wedding. So there goes Betty’s theory that Lady Fiona murdered her husband because he found out she was a bigamist and then killed Mr. Tribble and Pierce because they might have exposed her secret.”

“Something came to me before I passed out,” I said.

“What was that?” Ben still had his arm around me.

“I think I know what’s really been going on here. We have several villains and overlapping crimes. First up is Mr. Scrimshank who embezzled the Gallagher’s money. Mr. Gallagher finally realized what was going on. We know from Melody and Mrs. Cake that on the day before his disappearance he repeatedly tried to reach Mr. Scrimshank on the phone.”

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Malloy. “It’s as clear as glass Mr. Scrimshank turned up at Cragstone that evening, after her ladyship had gone to bed. Probably the miserable bugger hoped to bluff his way out of the situation, but Mr. Gallagher didn’t buy it. An argument followed and Mr. Scrimshank attacked him.”

“Good so far.” Ben handed me a glass of brandy.

“There’s a quibble.” I took a reviving sip. “A Mrs. Johnson saw a man race out of this house. Let us assume that man was Mr. Scrimshank. If so, where was Mr. Gallagher when the police arrived? Which they did fairly speedily, according to Mrs. Cake. No sign of him dying or dead on the floor, with a bloody blunt instrument lying beside him. But if he did recover sufficiently to get out of the house and try to reach help, why hasn’t he been heard of since? He wouldn’t have left Lady Fiona to Mr. Scrimshank’s mercy.”

“He may have crawled into a ditch and died.” Ben gave Mrs. Malloy a glass of brandy.

“Go on! Keep talking this through, Mrs. H,” she prodded. She’d had her moment of glory and was prepared to let me try for mine.

“This is the overlapping part. Someone unconnected with Mr. Gallagher’s disappearance decided to use Betty’s belief that he had been murdered to facilitate her death.”

“Who’d want to kill her?” Ben asked sharply.

“I hate to say it,” said Mrs. Malloy, “but the name that pops up in my mind is Ariel. And there was me getting so fond of her.” Ducking her black-and-white head, she searched her dress pocket for a hanky.

“It was she who arranged the séance. And Ben”—I took a deeper sip of brandy—“there is something I haven’t told you about that. The Madam LaGrange we saw was an imposter.” I explained how Mrs. Malloy had failed to recognize the woman getting into the taxi.

“Ellie, I understand why you didn’t tell me.” He stood up, took a couple of paces, and sat back down. “We were at odds with each other. But why the switch?”

“To manipulate Betty into going into that priest hole when the time came. The garden party was the perfect opportunity.
People milling about in the grounds, general confusion: what were the chances of her being missed until it was too late?”

Mrs. Malloy produced the hanky again.

“Not Ariel,” I reassured her. “We’re not dealing with the Bad Seed here.”

“Tom?” Ben’s expression was grim.

“His first wife died in a car accident,” said Mrs. Malloy, “and that can’t be that hard to arrange, especially for someone as handy with tools as Tom. Ariel said he had recently been working in the west wing.”

“Not him either.” I shook my head. “None of the Hopkinses has a good way of showing it, but deep down I believe they’re fond of one another. This could be just the wake-up call Tom has needed ever since Val showed up at Cragstone House. I’m wondering if he’s had his suspicions.”

“About her really being in love with Mr. H here all the time?” Mrs. Malloy was making matters worse for her face with the hanky.

“What?” Ben was shocked into shouting out the word.

“Don’t worry, darling,” I said, “I’m not going to let her get you. My supposition is that was a smoke screen. Val, as you’re aware, turned up here shortly after the Hopkinses moved into Cragstone. She must have read about their winning the lottery in the newspapers. And whatever it took, she was going to get her hands on that lovely money. I think she was speaking the truth when she told me she wasn’t devastated when Tom broke off their engagement. She probably has a knack for mixing fact with fiction. It makes what she says sound credible, although I could kick myself now for so gullibly accepting her misty-eyed performance. Her main problem in getting her hands on Tom and the lottery winnings is that he takes his Catholicism seriously. He’d never marry her while Betty lived.”