False Step (16 page)

‘Good morning, Mrs Abbot,' she said, removing the cover of the computer on the dining table. ‘Good morning, Mr Max.' Of course she'd known him since he was a small boy.

He muttered, ‘Good morning,' back.

Miss Brook ran her finger along the table, and pinched in her lips. ‘Dust is very bad for computers.'

The phone rang again, and Bea said, ‘Good morning, Miss Brook. I'm delighted to see you. I'm sorry about the dust. Maggie will deal with it when she gets back. Can you take over for a bit? I've got a list of people here, queries … can you access our records from there? You can? Oh, bless you. If you can sort some of this out, I'd be eternally grateful. Max; a word in your ear.'

He was huffing and puffing, going red. Max wasn't getting the attention he felt he deserved as a Member of Parliament and head of the family. Max needed a kick in the pants and Bea felt she was just the person to give it to him. She took his arm and led him over to the window overlooking the garden. Her patience game had long since disappeared, of course. She hoped Max had bothered to put the cards away properly, because if he hadn't and had lost one she was going to make him go to Harrods and buy another double pack. So there!

‘Now what?' Arms akimbo.

Bea raised her eyebrows. ‘So how are you today, Mother? Thank you, Max. I'm not too bad, even if I did spend half the night worrying about you, and the morning with Nicole, trying to make out that you aren't quite as stupid as you've made yourself out to be. Nicole would like you to do your own dirty work. Her words, not mine. She might be disposed to listen to you if you talk to her yourself, but flowers, tickets to the theatre, whatever, would probably be helpful.'

‘Yes, but—'

‘And get yourself a new secretary. No, better still, ask Nicole to get you a new secretary. I can provide you with the names of various secretarial agencies. Nicole should vet your staff in future. Miss Townend has, I'm sure, been a wonder in the past, but that's it. She is the past. You must take the poor woman, out for a meal, butter her up with compliments, make sure she has whatever she is due by way of pension, and send her home to look after her dear mama. It's time for you to move on.'

‘Mother, my understanding, when I moved in here, was that—'

‘I don't know what you imagined you'd get here, apart from a bed for a couple of nights while you sorted things out with Nicole. You cannot run your office from this room. That phone is mine, and cannot be co-opted for your use. Understood?'

He'd gone purple in the face. Oh dear. Had she gone too far? No. It had to be said. If she relented now, he'd take full advantage of her weakness and she'd be back to square one.

She put her hand on his arm, and went on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. ‘There's a good boy. Now, you go out and get the biggest bunch of flowers you can, and a huge box of chocolates—'

‘Nicole doesn't eat chocolates.'

She shook his arm. ‘No, but I do, silly. The flowers are for Nicole, and the chocolates are for me. Right?'

Was he going to cry?

Big boys don't cry. Or, they'd better not. She was running out of patience.

‘Now, I'd better get back to work. Oliver's got a problem to discuss with me.'

He put his hand over hers, on his arm. ‘Mother, where did I go wrong?'

When you married Nicole, was the right answer. But not the right answer for him. ‘These things happen, dear. Chin up. We just have to muddle through as best we can.'

Lily Cunningham gulped down the whisky and shuddered. The events of the morning had taken more out of her than she'd expected.

Well, it was done and the future looked a lot brighter than it had when she got up this morning.

She stood in the centre of the living room, looking around her. How many memories this room held for her! She couldn't have been more than two years old when Uncle Matthew first sat her on his knee in the big chair, and sang her a nursery rhyme. How well she remembered playing him her first piano pieces; aged five.

Damaris used to try to scare her by jumping out at her from behind the coat rack in the hall. Well, Damaris hadn't lived in this house all that long, had she? A couple of years at most. Whereas she, Lily, had been coming here all her life.

One of the photographs on the mantelpiece was missing. That was alarming. Where had that gone?

Also the little shepherdess. And the silver jug.

She could guess who'd taken them. How dare she!

They belonged to the house and must be returned, straight away. The agency had been responsible for everything in the house, so the agency must get them back.

She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece but it had stopped. The house lay quietly around her. Accepting her as the new and rightful owner.

Lily Cunningham ran her fingertips across the dusty lid of the piano, and grimaced. Houses needed to be looked after.

Now it was hers, she'd have to see to it. What was that Polish cleaner's number? She must look it up in Uncle Matthew's address book.

Bea went to find Oliver in the kitchen, but stopped short in the doorway. Three very large men were sitting around the table, eating sandwiches and drinking from her teapot. Also, her biscuit tin had been opened and the contents depleted.

‘Hope you don't mind, missus,' said the largest and baldest one. ‘Maggie said to help ourselves.'

‘Care to join us?' asked a curly-headed young man, whom Bea guessed was Maggie's latest heart-throb.

Bea looked at her watch. Maggie had hoped to be back by lunchtime, but had obviously been delayed. ‘How are you getting on? Is there anyone down there at the moment? I thought I'd better see what's happening.'

The large man lumbered to his feet and escorted her down the stairs. The sheet which had been hung over the staircase in an attempt to keep the dust from rising all over the house, had been hitched to one side and secured that way with a manky floorboard. No wonder the house was dusty. Bea twitched the sheet free so that it hung over the stairwell again.

‘Sorry about that. The lads are up and down the stairs all the time, carrying stuff, and the sheet gets in the way.'

The chaos downstairs was unbelievable. Floorboards were up, plaster was down, wiring hung in bunches from bare brick walls. In what had been her own office, two of the panes in the French windows had been broken.

‘Looks worse than it is,' said the large man, with a cheerfulness that Bea found appalling. A technical disquisition followed, which Bea only half understood. What she did understand was that old buildings needed to be watched all the time, or they'd disintegrate and make work for bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, glaziers and decorators. Stunned by science, she agreed to everything he was suggesting, and retreated to the kitchen in need of a restorative … and of Maggie, who might not be much cop on a computer keyboard, but understood the large man's terminology. And what was that about replacing the carpet? Her dear husband Hamilton had chosen that carpet, and she'd always liked it.

In the kitchen she found Oliver doing something about lunch. From being completely helpless in that area, Oliver was now, amazingly, beginning to learn basic catering. He lifted a couple of mugs out of the microwave. ‘Cup of soup do you, Mrs Abbot? I thought we might have taken it into the garden, but it's raining again.'

‘Let's try my bedroom,' said Bea, gratefully clutching her mug.

Oliver followed her up the stairs and took a seat on her dressing-table stool while she perched on a small armchair in the window. She rather wished he hadn't chosen tomato soup, because if it spilled it would stain everything in sight. She told herself to be grateful for whatever it was he'd given her.

The soup was hot. Good. ‘How did it go this morning?'

He was looking down into his soup, up at the ceiling, out at the sodden garden. Why wasn't he meeting her eye? ‘All right, I suppose. Miss Brook is out of this world. She'd brought a digital camera with her, and a dictation machine. It was her idea to photograph everything. She seems to know by osmosis whether a piece of furniture is worth something or nothing. When we reached the basement I got each costume out and photographed it while she dictated a description. It didn't take us that long.'

‘You did a good job. Then you gave the keys to Mrs Frasier's friend and came away?'

He examined the few drops of soup left in his mug. ‘She wasn't there when we arrived. She didn't come till we were nearly through. She let herself in with her own set of keys and then … you've told me enough times that we don't have to like our clients, but that we can pick and choose whether to take them on.' A long pause. ‘I don't think – no, I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't have taken Ms Cunningham on as a client.'

‘Really? Why not?'

He fidgeted. Put the empty mug down on the dressing table, where it nearly toppled off. Rescued it. Put it back more securely. ‘She's nothing to look at. I know that isn't what counts and of course it isn't. You could see she knew the house well. She knew about the loose board making the piano sing. She knew how to switch the central heating on, and she was out on the patio in two ticks, dead-heading the geraniums. She thought Miss Brook was you and she said, right out loud, that Miss Brook wasn't what she'd expected.'

Bea was amused. ‘Because I dressed down when I saw her friend, I suppose.'

Oliver was still not meeting her eye. ‘She acted as if she owned the place, touching things, shifting ornaments. I know she was all shaken up, but she, ugh! She
tittered
. That sounds awful. I know it's no excuse, but she forgot to ask me for the keys and I did mean to give them to her, but when I got halfway back down the hill, I put my hand into my pocket and realized I'd still got them. I'm sorry.' He took the keys out of his pocket and laid them on the dressing table.

‘Oh. Well, no great harm done.'

Oliver was trying to justify himself. ‘Something as important as keys to an empty house, Mrs Frasier ought to have put it in writing. It might have been anyone at all who rang up asking for us to hand the keys over to a third person. It might even have been Ms Cunningham herself.'

‘That's true.' Bea reflected that if she hadn't been distracted by Max and the builders, she'd have taken the phone call herself. To put it bluntly, the agency was not functioning as it should. Ought she to close it down till they could get back to normal, or try to struggle on? ‘I'll let Mrs Frasier know that we've still got them. You can deliver them with the inventory and the photographs tomorrow. All right?'

He tried to laugh. ‘Blame it on me. My head's like a sieve.'

Ah, yes. He was still waiting for a copy of his birth certificate, wasn't he? Would it prove that Mrs Ingram, who'd brought him up, really was his mother? Bea was pretty sure that nasty, viewing-porn-on-his-laptop Mr Ingram had not been his father. But she wouldn't raise the matter if Oliver didn't. ‘No problem. The Kent house is a bit creepy. I felt it myself.'

‘Miss Brook didn't like Ms Cunningham, either. You know how her nostrils twitch when something annoys her? As if they'd registered a nasty smell? She was doing that all the time Ms Cunningham was in the room with us.'

‘Really?'

Oliver shrugged. ‘I'll dump the mugs back in the kitchen, shall I? Then get back to work.'

Bea said, ‘Would you ask Miss Brook to come up for a moment? I'm worried about the computers and the dust downstairs. Perhaps she could work up here for a while, if I cleared my dressing table.' She had another idea. ‘How would it be if you took over the guest bedroom for your office, just for the time being?'

A slow grin was the answer. Oliver hadn't liked Max taking over downstairs, either. ‘Will do. I'll check what she'll need in here. May have to bring up a typing chair for her.'

He took both mugs and went out, while Bea went to stand by the window overlooking the garden, pushing back the floor-length curtain, leaning against it. Yes, it was still raining. Drip, drip, thud, thud. That ‘thud, thud' meant that the guttering above wasn't coping too well with the downpour, and that water was pouring over the top of it. More expense. Getting at the guttering would mean putting up scaffolding.

The sycamore at the bottom of the garden was losing its leaves, the ‘keys' swirling round and round in the air, the leaves following. The spire of the church had retreated into the distance, the curtain of rain sheeting down between.

Miss Brook tapped on the door, and came in. Bea wondered if Miss Brook would say, ‘You rang, madam?' but of course she didn't. Miss Brook didn't believe in what she called ‘feudal' ceremonies.

Bea gestured Miss Brook to the comfortable chair. ‘I appreciate your helping us out, Miss Brook, and I do take your point about the dust downstairs. I've asked Oliver if he'd like to work in the guest bedroom next door for the time being, and I wondered if you'd like to take over in here?'

A comprehensive survey of the room. A nod. ‘Young Oliver will have to bring up a proper typing chair for me. And the printer, of course. Is there a phone here?'

‘An extension beside the bed.'

‘Not a perfect arrangement, but under the circumstances, I can probably manage.'

‘Miss Brook, about this morning. I'd not put Oliver down as an imaginative boy, but …'

Yes, definitely Miss Brook's nose was signalling displeasure. ‘I cannot say that I was impressed, either, but I suppose we must make allowances as Ms Cunningham had been greatly distressed by an incident on the Tube which made her late. Being a Londoner, you'd think she'd be used to it by now.'

Bea sank on to the bed. ‘By incident, you mean …?'