Asking For Trouble (15 page)
I guessed I had time to look around. James would want to find out from Alastair as much as he could before he let the old chap anywhere near me. He was probably trying to persuade Alastair to let him, James, send me off back to London forthwith.
There was a big marble fireplace and, over it, a shelf crowded with photos and knick-knacks. I got up and went to have a look. I didn’t know most of the people in the photos. I recognised one of Alastair in tweeds at some sort of gymkhana or show. He looked as if he were judging. He had a rosette pinned on his jacket. There were a couple of women standing with him. They had weather-beaten faces and were grinning away at the camera with teeth which wouldn’t have disgraced a respectable horse.
In one large silver frame was a studio portrait of a remarkably beautiful girl, all done up in a party dress and looking like a million dollars. It was with shock that I suddenly realised I was looking at a picture of Terry. For a moment, I doubted it and thought, perhaps a relative looking a bit like her? I took it off the shelf for a closer look and it was Terry. I was holding it in my hand still staring at it when I heard a footstep behind me. I just had time to put it back before Alastair came into the room. James was just behind him. I knew that he meant to hear for himself what I had to say, how I’d explain my being there.
But old Alastair forestalled us both. He came straight over to me, took my hand and said, ‘Francesca! My dear, why didn’t you let us know you were coming? I’m really so pleased to see you. What a good thing Jamie passed you on the road. This house isn’t the easiest place to find.’
I could see James looking a bit miffed at all this. It made me feel quite cheerful to think his nose had been put out of joint. I apologised to Alastair for turning up unannounced and so late.
He asked where I was staying. That embarrassed me, and I mumbled that I’d have to go back to Basingstoke, unless there was anywhere in Abbotsfield which offered rooms, perhaps one of the pubs?
‘Nonsense, you must stay here!’ he said at once, ignoring negative signals from James. ‘Stay as long as you like, my dear! I’ll get Ruby to make up a bed for you. I dare say you could do with a cup of tea. Jamie, why don’t you go along to the kitchen and see if you can rustle one up?’
James didn’t like being dismissed, certainly not to fetch the tea, but he went. I think the phrase for it would be ‘in high dudgeon’. It occurred to me he’d chalk it up against me as a score to settle. That stopped me feeling so chirpy about it. He was the sort who made sure he always got his own back on anyone who crossed him.
When the door had closed, Alastair leaned forward.
‘Have you something to report, Francesca?’ He looked anxious, but hopeful too.
I explained to him that to be honest, I’d discovered nothing in London and even worse, had found myself following the police around. ‘They’re doing a good job,’ I said. ‘If you want your money back, I’ve brought it, less my bus fare. But I’ve been thinking – and maybe you won’t agree with this . . .’ I waited but he said nothing, forcing me to plunge on. ‘I haven’t had much luck following her backtrail in London, so perhaps I ought to start here, where she lived before she came to London. Or just seeing where she came from might give me some ideas. You see, I know she shared the house in Jubilee Street with us, but that doesn’t mean any of us knew Terry well. To tell you the truth, we found her a bit of a pain and we tended to ignore her. I’m sorry.’
Alastair didn’t seem to find that rude. He nodded. ‘I quite understand. Frankly, Francesca, if you’d said you and Theresa were bosom pals I’d be sceptical. I know my granddaughter had difficulty in forming relationships. She didn’t make friends. Or at least, not what I would have called real friends.’
‘But I do want to know what happened,’ I insisted. ‘I wish I had talked to her more. I wish I’d been a better friend to her, someone she could have confided in. I promise, I mean to do my best by her now and by you. I don’t want more money. That’s not why I’m here. James thinks that’s why I’ve come, but he’s wrong.’
Alastair frowned. ‘My dear, Jamie is not the arbiter of who may visit here and who not! Incidentally, although he knows I called on you in London, he doesn’t know about our little arrangement and I see no reason to tell him. The money I gave you on account is yours to keep and, as I promised, I’ll pay an equal amount upon result.’
‘I may not get any results,’ I pointed out.
‘I feel sure you will!’ he retorted optimistically. ‘Now you’re here, we’ll put our heads together, eh? Work it out!’
He sounded quite enthusiastic and I began to feel a lot better. He was such a nice old boy. If there was a fly in the ointment now, it was Jamie Monkton who clearly thought I was up to no good.
Suddenly Alastair said, ‘As for getting to know poor Theresa, I wonder if any of us ever did that?’
Before I could answer that one, the door opened and a middle-aged woman came in carrying a tray with teacups.
‘There you are, my dear!’ she said, putting it down on a little table. ‘So you’re Theresa’s friend! Really nice to have you here. I’ll make up her old room for you. I think you’ll be comfortable there!’
Alastair said, ‘Thank you, Ruby!’
I hadn’t really expected to find a family retainer and I certainly hadn’t reckoned on being given Terry’s room. But if it still had some of her stuff in it, there might be a clue amongst it all.
Jamie had come back and looked more miffed than ever. He said sharply, ‘Theresa’s room? Isn’t that a bit – a bit depressing for Fran?’
‘No, it’ll be fine, thanks!’ I said quickly, which earned me a dirty look.
I decided to take the initiative and asked, ‘Are you a cousin?’ because that seemed the most likely.
‘Sort of!’ he said shortly. Or, at least, I think that’s what he said.
‘Jamie is actually the son of a cousin of mine,’ Alastair said. ‘Rather a complicated relationship. But cousin’s a fair enough description. Theresa always called you a cousin, didn’t she?’
Jamie grunted and began to hunt through his pockets. A tingle ran up my spine. He’d produced a familiar-looking gold packet of cigarettes. Relax! I ordered myself. It’s a popular brand. It doesn’t have to mean anything.
He’d looked up and saw how I stared. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
‘No,’ I told him, honestly. I wanted to see if he also used a book of matches. But he didn’t. He had a lighter, one of those disposal ones in coloured plastic. I resolved, at the earliest opportunity, to hunt through any waste-paper baskets in the house.
We drank our tea and made small-talk about the countryside and then Ruby appeared to take me up to my room.
As I passed by Jamie’s chair he murmured so that only I could hear him, ‘Don’t make yourself too comfortable!’
I tried, as I followed Ruby upstairs, to get some idea of the layout of the house. Living in an old house, the squat, had given me an eye for the architectural features of yesteryear. They liked a lot of plaster moulding then, picture rails, arches, that sort of thing.
Even a quick glance round here told me that serious alteration had been made to this house, probably a century ago. To begin with, no one would be allowed to mess with the interior of a building as old as this one nowadays. Even the alterations had a permanent look. The tell-tale clues were the arches which began and never finished, chopped off by a partition wall. The rectangular uneven tracks across the plastering of walls marked where once doors had been blocked up. Other doors, and windows, were the wrong proportions, added later where they were never meant to be. There were hazardous drops in the level of the corridor, so that one suddenly had to step down a pair of flights, just to continue in the same direction. All this in the main part of the house, not the additional newer wing I’d noticed from outside. I mentioned it to Ruby.
‘The house seems very old. Has it been much altered?’
‘Not in my time,’ she said, without turning her head, her broad rump plodding on ahead of me. ‘But I do believe that originally it was two houses, back to back, as you might say. This corridor,’ here she paused and pointed vaguely up and down the dusky passageway. ‘This was where one house met the other, do you see? These doors were knocked through to make the two into one. Doesn’t make it an easy place to clean, I can tell you!’
We’d reached our destination. She pressed down a polished brass doorhandle and light streamed into the corridor. ‘Little Theresa’s room,’ she said. ‘Can’t seem to believe she’ll never use it again. You’ll be all right, then, will you, dear? Let me know if there’s anything you need. The family usually eats at seven, but I’ll hold up everything till seven-thirty to give you a chance to settle yourself. There’s plenty of hot water if you want a bath.’
I understood immediately why Ruby couldn’t believe that Terry wasn’t ever coming back. The fact was, she had never left. I knew, as soon as I walked into the room, that Terry was there with me. I even glanced at the white-painted Lloyd Loom chair as though I would see her sitting there, in her grubby knitted jacket, peering at me through spaniel’s ears of tangled blonde hair.
But there was one difference. Before, in life, she’d always appeared to resent me. But this had changed. This time, she didn’t mind my being there. I had the even stranger feeling that she was pleased, that she knew why I’d come and approved. She expected me to do something. I hoped I didn’t let her down again.
Alastair and Terry both pinning their hopes on me. Ganesh was right. I’d bitten off more than I could chew.
The room itself was pretty, an adored little girl’s room. A collection of stuffed toys, all rather worn and damaged, huddled together on the top of a white-painted chest of drawers. All the paintwork was white. There was a floral-patterned duvet and a kidney-shaped dressing table with a matching flounce round it. The curtains matched, too. Someone had taken a lot of trouble with this room. It was very feminine, just a bit twee, and definitely not my sort of scene. In fact it made me feel a tad uneasy. There was an obstinate clinging to childhood innocence in it. Terry, whatever else she’d been, couldn’t have been described as innocent.
But that was my view of her. Alastair, in our talk over the Indian meal, had clearly clung to the view that his granddaughter had no idea of the wicked ways of this world. She’d been his little girl, she’d always be that. Death had done him a favour, did he but know it. It had preserved his image of her, always young, always beautiful. Not a human being with failings and the right to make her mistakes, but a doll, preserved in Cellophane so that her clothes would never get dirty and her hair never mussed. My unease increased.
I went to the window. I was at the back of the house here, which meant that, at some point, Ruby and I had stepped through what had once been the dividing wall between two dwellings, and I’d passed from the front one to the back one. It would be quieter here, away from the stableyard which would be a noisy, busy place from early in the day till last thing at night. The view from here was down the garden behind the house, a tangled, unkempt affair of grassy paths, overgrown shrubs, unpruned trees and uncut lawns. Attractive, though. A place to wander in. Kids would like that garden. A great place for hide-and-seek, cops and robbers, all the rest of it. Cops and murderers, even.
Someone could stand out there and watch the house from the shrubbery and no one here be any the wiser. He could stand only some fifteen or twenty feet away, invisible. He might be there now, looking up at this window, watching me.
I moved away. I did feel like a bath and, looking at my watch, I saw that it was already ten to seven. The bathroom had been pointed out to me, just along the corridor. I didn’t have much time. A faded quilted dressing gown hung behind the door. I took it down.
There was a Cash’s woven nametape sewn in the neckband.
T E Monkton
. It took me back to when I was eleven years old and just starting at the private school my father hoped would educate me into a success. Grandma Varady had sat sewing nametapes just like that into all my new school uniform, even on my socks. They were sticklers at that school for that sort of thing. I wondered who had sewn in Terry’s nametapes. From what Alastair had told me of her mother, she hadn’t sounded the type to do that, even if she was in the fashion business and ought to be able to manage a few stitches. This old dressing gown reminded me Terry had been at boarding school. Mine had been a day school. I was glad I hadn’t been sent away to school. I’d hated the school I was at, but at least I got to come home at the end of each day.
I pulled the robe on and hurried along to the bathroom. I nearly fell headlong when I opened the door, because the bathroom marked one of those unexpected drops in level. I stepped in and plummeted down two steps, saving myself only by grabbing the door jamb and swinging on it, like a chimp. Ruby might have warned me.
The bathroom was the size of a bedroom and probably had once been one. Modern plumbing had come by degrees into this house. I ran three inches of water in a massive old-fashioned cast-iron tub standing on lion’s paws. I hadn’t time to run more. I’d taken my skirt with me and I hung it up so that the steam would help the creases fall out. Then I clambered up the side of the tub and down inside it into the water. I felt lost in depths of it, and began to wonder just how many people it was designed to accommodate at one go. I hadn’t imagined the Victorians going in for merry jinks altogether in one bath. I wished I’d run more water. When I lay back, bits of me stuck up above the tide-line, knees pointed up like twin atolls, my stomach a low flat island which would be submerged at high tide and nipples lurking like coral reefs. I was splashing water over these dry-land bits of me, when I heard a curious noise outside the bathroom door.
It was a low whine accompanied by a faint rumbling. It sounded as though a very small milkfloat was going past. That was unlikely, but that’s how it sounded. Then I heard a clang like a metal gate and – and there was no doubt about this – the noise of a lift.