Four Thousand Days, page 22
‘No.’ Marjy shook her head. ‘I painted what was there in front of me. The picture of innocence. Actually, it has been a bit of a dud. I was hoping that I could sell it as an advertisement piece – Pears, you know, something like that. But those days are gone. I think Leighton and Millais rather queered that pitch for us. Advertisers now use black and white pen and ink scrawls in newspapers and on hoardings. It’s a shame.’ She reached down behind her chair. ‘I’ve got a frame here that would fit it. Would you like it?’
‘Goodness me, no,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m afraid my salary doesn’t run to art.’
‘A gift. Now I know she was murdered … well, I wouldn’t like to sell it to anyone, knowing that. It’s somehow … well, it’s not right. It will just take me a minute to put it in the frame. I’ve got some paper here as well.’
Reid nudged Margaret. ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘You might not want it now, but when this is all over, you might be grateful to have a memento. Make a change from bones and owls.’
Marjy didn’t understand where owls came into it, but sat there waiting.
‘Oh, all right, then.’ Margaret allowed her arm to be twisted. ‘I can’t take it now, though. Can you get it delivered to me at University College? It’s in—’
‘Gower Street. Of course, no problem. I’m sorry; this has taken us off the subject, hasn’t it? You wanted to know about Emma.’
Margaret and Reid looked at each other. In a way, they had learned far more than they could have hoped. And time was getting on.
‘I just wanted to see where she lived,’ Margaret extemporized. ‘And we have to go. We’re horribly late already.’
‘And we were aiming for fashionably,’ Reid added, getting up. ‘No, don’t come down. We can see ourselves out.’
Andrew Rose had almost reached Anthea Crossley when there was a noise outside. It was a little confused at first, the wheels of a hansom coming to a halt, footsteps, voices. All heads turned. There was a rap on the knocker and the butler, sent up by train with the lilies from the country house, flung open the door. He was getting rather tired of opening the door to a ragbag of assorted students, so he was glad to see a rather more sedate couple standing on the step. The age gap was a little larger than he liked to see, but they seemed content enough with each other. He ushered them in, only to see another couple standing behind them. The man was a stunner, the butler would be the first to admit, tall, golden-haired and with shoulders like tallboys. The woman at his side was attractive enough, but clearly not out of the top drawer. This confused him; he had looked down the guest list and no couple seemed to meet these criteria. He braced himself, shoulders or no shoulders, to chuck them out bodily.
But no. The Young Master was bearing down on them, hands outstretched. Reaching them, he positioned himself between them and displayed them like prizes at a cattle show. ‘Look, everyone,’ he called. ‘It’s Angela and Constable Crawford!’ He had done better introductions in his time, but he had no time for regrets. The guests surged forward, engulfing the happy pair, and Margaret Murray and Edmund Reid only stepped aside in the nick of time, avoiding being crushed by a whisker.
Eventually, the hubbub died down and the edges of the crowd began to peel off towards the supper room. Those in the know walked a little faster than the others, hoping that Ben Crouch had left at least a little for everyone else. Finally, Angela caught Margaret’s eye.
‘Dr Murray,’ she gasped, straightening the comb at the back of her hair which somehow had been dragged askew. ‘Did you know about this?’
Margaret chuckled. ‘I would be lying if I said no,’ she said, ‘because, as you see, I am here. I was sworn to secrecy, though. I knew you wouldn’t mind.’
Reid and Crawford had gravitated towards one another, like iron filings to a magnet.
Margaret nodded towards them. ‘I knew they would be happy enough, talking shop.’
Angela looked at her erstwhile lecturer with a knowing look. ‘Are you and Inspector Reid …?’
‘Good heavens, no,’ Margaret said. ‘He’s a lovely chap, of course, but recently widowed, apart from anything else. As you surely know by now, Angela, my life is too full for romantic fripperies.’
Angela looked at her again, peering closely. ‘And yet, you know …’ she said. ‘You do have a twinkle in your eye.’
‘I admit I enjoy the man’s company,’ Margaret said, bristling a little. ‘But it is just because we have a lot in common at the moment. The hunt for the killer of Helen, Emma and Norman. And now, of course, getting poor Walter Inkester exonerated and reinstated.’
‘I wish you would,’ a passing student said. ‘I’m in his department and if someone doesn’t do something with that wildebeest soon, we’ll all be sorry. As it is, you can hardly breathe for the smell on our corridor.’
‘My dear boy!’ Margaret was horrified. ‘It’s been there now … how long?’
‘A week, more or less,’ the student said. ‘I had a peep in the crate yesterday and the gases have blown it up so it looks like a whale. The slightest touch and …’ – the boy threw his arms in the air – ‘chunks of wildebeest as far as the eye can see. I’ve witnessed it with a goat that got left over the Easter vac. A wildebeest would be much, much worse.’ He took an unconcerned bite out of a chicken leg he was holding and wandered off.
Margaret and Angela watched him go. ‘They are a strange lot, the zoologists,’ Angela remarked, in something of an understatement.
‘Indeed. Just off the subject for a moment, I saw Elspeth Inkester the other day, coming out of a stationery cupboard with a physicist.’
‘My goodness.’ Andrew Rose poked his head over Angela’s shoulder. ‘That sounds like that game, you know the one. Did you play it? My Aunt Went to Market.’
Margaret smiled. ‘My aunt went to market and she bought an anteater.’
‘Yes, that’s the one.’ Rose planted a champagny kiss on Angela’s cheek, one arm draped nonchalantly around her neck. ‘I must say, Piers knows how to throw a party.’
Angela screwed her head round to look at him. ‘And you live here, do you? You and Ben?’
‘We do, yes.’ Rose threw out an expansive arm. ‘Not in quite all of it. The salon’ – he jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the gigantic room where the food was laid out – ‘isn’t very homey, if you see what I mean. Generally, we stay in the yellow drawing room, which is over there.’ He pointed again. ‘My bedroom is about as large as the entire ground floor of our house, and we do all right, or so I always thought.’ He smiled. ‘As student digs go, I have known much, much worse.’ And with another kiss in the direction of Angela’s ear, he was gone into the crowd.
Margaret watched him go. ‘He’s very charming, Andrew, isn’t he?’ she said.
Angela turned as well. ‘A tad oily for my taste,’ she said. ‘Notice he didn’t comment on my house.’
‘Has he been there?’ Margaret asked.
‘He has, though he doesn’t know that I know he has. He is one of the midnight inamorati that Anthea drags home from time to time. She thinks we don’t notice, but the addition of various gentleman’s folderols in the laundry basket rather gives the game away.’
‘Oh dear. It’s such a shame. She has a very brilliant mind.’
‘Of course she has,’ Angela said, in the bland tones of someone who knows what she wants and also knows that she already has it. ‘But I don’t think that’s why they come home with her, somehow. I’m moving out when Adam and I are married and heaven knows what she will turn the place into.’
‘I know!’ An outraged voice was at Margaret’s elbow. ‘I don’t want to spoil your party, Angela.’ It was Janet Bairnsfather in full Presbyterian spate. ‘I’m very happy for you and Constable Crawford. But by the time you are back from your honeymoon, she will have turned it into a house of ill repute.’
‘Oh, I don’t think it will be quite that bad,’ Angela murmured. ‘It was just a figure of speech, you know.’
‘Yes, she will.’ Janet’s voice was now a shriek and people were beginning to sidle away. ‘But I don’t care. I’m going home. Back to my parents. I don’t need to be here, you know. I know you all look down on me.’ She stamped her foot. ‘Just because I don’t understand your jokes.’
‘Or any archaeology,’ Ben Crouch muttered to his companion, a rather big-boned girl holding a loaded plate of canapés.
‘I heard that, Ben Crouch!’ the girl screamed, her accent becoming more impenetrable as her distress mounted. ‘Just because I don’t know my Greek from … from …’ and she burst into tears.
‘A hole in the ground?’ Crouch suggested and wandered away.
Angela tried to pat the girl’s arm but was shrugged off.
‘Come along, Janet.’ Andrew Rose, oily or not, had his uses. ‘There’s no need to get so upset. I’m sure Anthea will rise to the occasion, be a real little mother to you all.’ He glanced over to where the woman in question lounged on a flimsy-looking chaise longue in the shadow of the staircase. It wasn’t clear quite what the languid young man leaning over her was saying, but the odds were that it wasn’t a question on archaeology. ‘Or if not, you could move in here. There is, as you see, plenty of room.’ His light-hearted suggestion did not go down well.
‘Here?’ Janet shrieked. ‘With men? Don’t be absurd. There are murderers about as well.’ She suddenly changed tack, as if her previous subject were exhausted. ‘Murderers, wherever you look.’
Reid and Crawford, standing in the salon doorway with policemen’s portions of delicate crustless sandwiches balanced on Mrs Gibbs’s best Spode, looked up like two startled horses.
‘No, no.’ Andrew Rose patted her and was not shrugged off. He was getting somewhere at least, though not far. The girl was taking huge shuddering breaths and was on the verge of hysteria. What Rose said next would decide which side of the fence she fell. ‘I know that people talk a lot about murder, but why would it worry you? One was a girl who was no better than she should be and she lived nowhere near you. All right, you may have seen her once, at a lecture, but I bet you can’t even remember her name. Hmm?’
Janet scrubbed at her nose with a scrap of lace-trimmed linen.
‘Well, it was Helen, as it happens. The other one – Emmeline, wasn’t it? – well, you didn’t even see her once. She died miles from here. And as for poor old Norman – well, I suppose you haven’t been going around making husbands jealous, have you?’
There was no answer. Janet stood there looking at her feet.
‘Well?’ He put a finger under her chin and lifted her face to his.
‘No,’ she whispered.
‘So, no more silly talk of going home?’
‘No.’
‘Right. Go and find one of the two dozen bathrooms, or however many we have here, and mop your eyes. Then get a plate of food before Crouch eats it all and the next thing I want to see is you dancing. The music is starting any minute.’ Unexpectedly, he kissed the tip of her nose and she scurried away.
Angela was impressed, and Margaret impressed but also not surprised; she had had Mr Rose down for a bit of a rogue since the day he had arrived, fresh from Manchester Grammar. ‘Andrew, that was very sweet of you,’ Angela said. ‘Thank you.’
‘Well,’ he said, with mock humility. ‘Didn’t want her to spoil your party.’
His voice was all but drowned out by Ben Crouch banging the side of a seventeenth-century chased silver punch bowl with a ladle. ‘Pray silence,’ he roared, ‘for the groom-to-be.’
And everyone took up the cry.
‘Speech! Speech! Speech!’
Piers Gibbs woke that Sunday morning with a hangover the size of the Coliseum. Someone, somewhere not a million miles away, appeared to be banging a gong, very slowly but very, very loudly. There was also a nagging voice at the back of his head, telling him in indistinct words that he had done something really rather stupid.
He chose not to open his eyes for a while. The voice had suggested in all kinds of subtle ways that when he did, the real pain would begin. He started to take stock, to see if there was any part of his body which didn’t hurt. He wiggled his toes. They seemed all right, if a little further away than he was used to. He flexed his knees. All present and correct. Fingers, ditto. He moved his head, just a little. Oh, no; too soon, too soon by far. He finally narrowed down the problem areas – excluding the head, which was not going to be working for the rest of the day, he knew – to his back, which was unusually hot and slightly sweaty and his impedimenta, as his house master at school had always chosen to call it. The latter seemed to be in some kind of vice. Opening his eyes to look was not on the cards, so he gingerly felt down there with his free arm. His blood froze. Something very odd was going on; it felt for all the world as if …
‘Good morning, Piers,’ a voice breathed in his ear and the grip on his impedimenta grew tighter. ‘So, we’re awake, are we?’
He grunted, with the grunt of a small, shy woodland creature facing the predator of its nightmares. Everything was flooding back and not all of it was good.
‘Ready to go again?’ Anthea breathed.
Piers couldn’t shake his head because of the flashing lights. And that would be his excuse, until his dying day.
Ben Crouch also had a headache, a monster sitting with its scaly arms and legs wrapped tightly around his neck and shoulders. But he had never met a hangover that could stop him eating a breakfast of champions. He was pretty sure his grandmother had once told him, ‘Feed a cold, feed a fever, feed a hangover’ – or something along those lines.
‘How’re you feeling, Rose?’ he asked his only other ambulant housemate.
‘Not too bad, all things considered,’ the Manchester Grammar man said. ‘I may have overdone it a bit with Janet Bairnsfather, though.’
‘We were all quite impressed at first,’ Crouch conceded.
‘It was all going spiffingly until she started on the punch. What happened to the punch, by the way?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Crouch looked modest. ‘It may have been the brandy that got accidentally spilled into it. Or the gin. One of those.’
‘Janet certainly had a taste for it, before the night was over,’ Rose said. ‘She was all over me like a rash before she went home.’
‘At least she did go home,’ Crouch observed. ‘Unlike some.’
‘Oh?’ Rose’s eyebrows went up. ‘I noticed you had made … friends with that rather buxom lass from the Biology department.’
Crouch chuckled. ‘Biology is right,’ he said with a knowing smirk. ‘But I was talking about Anthea.’
Rose laughed. ‘Anthea didn’t stay with me last night,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t have been able to dislodge Janet for long enough.’
‘Not you,’ Crouch said. ‘Old Gibbsy-boy was the lucky man last night. I’m surprised you couldn’t hear them. You’d think in a house of this quality that noise wouldn’t travel so far. At one point, I thought they were in the room with me.’
Rose looked mutinous. ‘No,’ he muttered. ‘I didn’t hear that, no. My room is along the corridor, if you remember.’
Crouch chuckled and stood up to get some more bacon from the sideboard chafing dish. ‘Distance no object, old son,’ he said. ‘I’d be surprised if they couldn’t hear them out in the street. Still, it won’t last; Anthea isn’t what you’d call a one-man-gal, is she?’ He peered at Rose, squinting to try and beat the thump of the monster on his back. ‘Oh, I see. I’d forgotten you and she had … well, never mind. She’s a bit out of your league, wouldn’t you say? A bit of an expensive prospect, our Anthea. Never mind,’ and he gave a hungover chuckle. ‘There’s always Janet.’
Breakfast at Angela Friend’s was always quite a decorous affair. There was no bacon, sausage or any of the things that made Ben Crouch’s life worth living. But there were preserves, warm rolls, toast and coffee. It was going further than usual this Sunday morning because only Angela and Veronica were present, both as fresh as paint.
‘So,’ Veronica said, buttering some toast, ‘did you enjoy your party?’
Angela smiled. ‘As a matter of fact, I did. It was so good of you to arrange it all. I wouldn’t have said yes, if I had known in advance.’
‘I know. That’s why we did it in secret. I must say, Piers did us all proud. Or perhaps I should say, his parents did.’
‘I couldn’t believe how wonderful that house is. Those lilies!’
‘And a butler, for heaven’s sake.’ Veronica had been a little bowled over by the butler.
‘I don’t think he’s a permanent feature,’ Angela said. ‘He lives in the country house, as a rule. They just have a cook and some housemaids.’
‘Just?’ Veronica laughed and sprayed crumbs. ‘Gosh, sorry. Behaving a bit like Ben Crouch there.’
Angela smiled. ‘I know. But Mrs Gibbs worries about her little boy away from home. She doesn’t want him to rough it.’
She and Veronica looked at the empty, Anthea-shaped space at the table. Neither spoke, though they were thinking the same thing.
‘And Janet. That was a bit of a revelation,’ Veronica continued.
‘Give a teetotal Presbyterian a pint of spiked punch and stand back,’ Angela said. ‘I doubt we’ll see her before tomorrow lunchtime.’
‘Did she and Andrew Rose …?’
Angela laughed. ‘No, I don’t think so. But it wasn’t for want of trying.’
‘And you and Adam … when are the nuptials?’
‘If you’re asking whether we have been practising, then the answer is no. But to answer your literal question, we are marrying as soon as term ends. I want to stay until then. It seems … well, to be honest, I want to see if Margaret and Inspector Reid can solve these murders. It seems rude to leave before they have.’
‘Yes,’ said Veronica, leaning across the table, avid eyes shining. ‘Is there anything there, do you think? They seem …’
Angela glanced from right to left and then leaned in as well. ‘I have heard a few things, actually …’
And they whispered and giggled until the toast and the coffee were cold and forgotten.
