Shades of Murder (2 page)

There was no reply and yet, her ear pressed to the door panel, she thought she heard movement, a rushing sound, a strange rasping breath. Then, quite clearly, a strangled gurgle and another squeal, cut off midway as if the air supply to it had been interrupted.

Not knowing what she would see, and filled now with sheer panic, Mrs Button seized the knob and threw the door open.

‘Oh, my God, my God!’ The housekeeper clasped her throat with her free hand.

An infernal scene met her eyes, a medieval hell in which a figure lying on the carpet twisted and turned surrounded by flames and a dancing red and yellow light. The air was foul with a pungent stench, making Mrs Button retch and cough. It was compounded of burning wool, lamp oil, scorched flesh and an overpowering odour which struck her as familiar though for the moment, she didn’t identify it. The bedside lamp lay in broken fragments on the blackened and smouldering carpet.
Amongst the shards was something which struck her as odd but all this was noticed in the split second before her whole attention focused on
it
.

The creature, that burning thing, jerked and twitched on the floor uttering sobbing breaths as if it would scream but could not. The housekeeper tremblingly set down her candlestick and took a step forward and then, seized with terror and revulsion, stepped back again. To her horrified gaze, the creature raised itself by some superhuman effort amid the bonfire and reached out one blackened, peeling talon in mute supplication. As it did so, its long hair caught the flame and burst into a dreadful halo. The creature squealed on a high, thin inhuman note which died away as if the lungs had been squeezed empty of air and then fell back.

Mrs Button gasped, ‘Mrs Oakley! Oh, Mrs Oakley!’

‘Mr Gladstone,’ said Damans Oakley as firmly as she could, ‘we’ve been through all this before. Neither my sister nor I have the slightest desire to have a water feature in the garden.’

‘Why not?’ he asked.

They stared hard at one another, presenting an incongruous contrast of styles. Damaris wore a very old tweed shirt, the lining drooping below the hem. This was teamed with an even older hand-knitted jumper in a strange bobbly pattern and a cardigan. In front, the cardigan’s ribbing, to which the buttons were sewn, had stretched to hang below the waist. At the back, the cardigan had shrunk and ridden halfway up the wearer’s spine. On her head Miss Oakley wore a venerable soft tweed hat which had belonged to her father and even had the remains of one of his fishing flies stuck in it.

Ron Gladstone, on the other hand, was a picture of respectable neatness even in his gardening attire. His cardigan was clean, buttoned up and covered a shirt and tie. His fading ginger hair was trimmed to military shortness. His small bristling moustache had kept its red hue and made him look like a combative cockerel. As a concession to being outdoors he wore stout footwear, but even that had clearly been polished before he left home and the few smears of mud and a smattering of grass clippings didn’t really spoil the effect.

Damaris reflected, not for the first time, that helpful arrangements were all very well but they often carried hidden disadvantages with them. There was no way they could afford a gardener or even pay for regular visits from one of those garden maintenance firms. She and Florence had got quite beyond being able to cope themselves with rampant greenery and in despair they’d sought help.

Ron Gladstone hadn’t been the first attempt to solve the problem. There had been a young man sent to them by Social Services. Damaris
recalled him with a shudder. He’d worn an earring and had a spider’s web tattooed on his shaven skull. He’d addressed both her and her sister as ‘darling’. Being his darling hadn’t prevented him from disappearing from their garden and their lives without warning, but with what remained of the family silver, including matching frames containing the only photographs they’d had of their brother Arthur in his RAF uniform. One of the photographs had been taken on his last visit home, just before the fatal sortie on which his plane had plunged into the Kent countryside.

Damaris had tried to explain what this had meant to the pretty young policewoman who’d come to take the details. ‘We shouldn’t have minded so much if he’d just taken the frames and left us the contents. After all, Arthur’s picture couldn’t possibly be of any interest to him, could it?’

She’d then fallen silent, embarrassed at finding herself speaking in this way to a stranger.

‘Really rotten luck,’ the policewoman had sympathised.

Yes, thought Damaris. Really rotten luck. Just what the Oakleys had always had. Her parents had never recovered from the loss of Arthur. She, in the old-fashioned way, had stayed at home to care for them as they aged and grew infirm until they’d died, by which time she was no longer of any interest to anyone else.

There had been a young man who’d wanted to marry Florence, but their parents had thought him unsuitable and in the end, Florence had bowed to their joint disapproval. The rejected young man had taken himself off to South Africa where he’d set up a winery in the Cape and done, they’d heard, rather well. Why didn’t Florence fight for him? wondered Damaris. Why didn’t she fight for herself? Easy to say now. So difficult to do then. Too late now, anyway.

‘All dead and gone,’ murmured Damaris to herself.

‘What’s that, Miss Oakley?’ asked Ron, twitching his moustache.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Gladstone. I was drifting.’

It was the vicar, James Holland, who’d suggested the present arrangement. At first, after their experience with the shaven-headed thief, it had appeared to be ideal. Ron had retired. He was living in a small neat flat with no garden. It left him nothing to do but walk down to the library every morning to read the newspapers and gardening magazines, and complain to the librarian about the noise made by visiting schoolchildren. The librarian then complained about
him
to Father Holland, who’d dropped in for a chat. That’s when the vicar had his good idea and how Ron had finished up here, at Fourways, five days a week. On Saturdays he did his weekly shop and on Sundays he didn’t
work in the garden because it said in the Bible that you shouldn’t, as he’d explained to Father Holland.

‘But you’d know about that, Vicar!’

At first the arrangement had appeared ideal. The long grass was cut, the misshapen hedges trimmed. But gradually, Ron Gladstone began to get more grandiose ideas. The fact was, he’d begun to look upon the garden as ‘his’. It was causing problems. They hadn’t minded when he’d restored some of the overgrown flowerbeds near the house. The bright array of bedding plants had been cheerful. Doubt had set in when he’d cut the yew hedge along the drive to resemble castle battlements. Since then he’d had a host of other ideas, most of which the Oakleys found incomprehensible.

‘I suspect, Mr Gladstone,’ said Damaris, ‘that you’ve been watching those gardening programmes on television again.’

‘Never miss!’ said Ron proudly. ‘Get a lot of good ideas from them.’

‘I dare say, but that doesn’t mean my sister and I want an alpine garden, or a bog garden, or a patio with bar – bar-bee – oh, whatever it is. And we
don’t
want a water feature!’

‘I was thinking,’ Ron told her, just, she thought crossly, as if she hadn’t said a word, ‘I was thinking of a small pond. Of course, if you’d agree to a pipe running from the house, I could make a little fountain.’ He looked hopeful.

‘We’ve got a fountain already,’ she said promptly.

‘You mean that chipped old stone basin stuck in the middle of the front drive? It don’t work,’ said Mr Gladstone.

‘Does that natter?’ asked Damaris. It hadn’t worked, as far as she could remember, since she’d been a small child. The fat winged baby standing in the middle of the basin – no one knew whether he was a cherub or a Cupid who’d lost his bow – had long been covered in yellow and grey lichen which made him look as if he was suffering from some unpleasant skin disease.

‘How can it be a fountain without any water? I’ll fix you up one which does work.’

‘We don’t want a fountain, Mr Gladstone!’ Damaris knew she sounded exasperated.

Some of her exasperation percolated through to Ron. ‘Just a small pond, then, without a fountain – not but what it seems a pity to me, to only do half the job.’

Damaris was struck by a bright idea. ‘We couldn’t have a pond, Mr Gladstone. They encourage frogs.’

‘What’s wrong with frogs?’ He looked surprised. ‘They eat insects. They clean up your garden.’

‘They croak,’ said Damaris. ‘They get under your feet and car wheels and get squashed. No pond, Mr Gladstone! Can we leave the subject for the moment? I wanted to have a word with you. You do know, don’t you, that we’re contemplating selling the house?’

Ron looked glum. ‘I did hear it. What do you want to do that for?’

‘We can’t manage it, it’s as simple as that. Mrs Daley comes in and puts a duster round three times a week but she’s getting on and her legs are bad. She would have to give up at Christmas, she’s told us. So that rather settled matters. Florence and I mean to look for a convenient flat with a modern kitchen.’

An image of the antiquated kitchen fixtures at Fourways swam before Damaris’s inner eye, particularly the cold stone floor.

‘Proper central heating,’ she added wistfully.

Ron’s moustache bristled. ‘I have a flat!’ he announced, as Martin Luther King once declared he had a dream. ‘And very convenient I dare say it is. But it’s – not – like – this!’ He accompanied the last words by stabbing around him in various directions with the trowel he held.

‘No,’ said Damaris in a bleak voice. ‘No. We shall naturally be sorry to leave. This was our childhood home. All our memories . . . But Florence and I have decided we’re entitled to a little comfort at the end of our lives. And we mean to have it!’ she concluded briskly.

‘Then my advice to you,’ said Ron earnestly, ‘is to let me put in a small ornamental pond. Just over there, by the magnolia tree.’

This seemed such a complete non-sequitur that she could only gaze at him.

‘You’ve got to make a place look a bit special if you want to sell,’ he explained, seeing her bewilderment. ‘A garden with a nice little water feature, that could tip the balance. People often buy a house because they’ve fallen for the garden.’

It was with great relief that Damaris saw her sister approach from the direction of the house.

She abandoned the fray with, ‘You’ll have to excuse me, Mr Gladstone!’ and hastened away to meet Florence.

As she got closer, her feeling of relief faded. Florence’s slight form, dressed in much the same sort of clothes as Damaris wore, looked as if a breath of wind would blow it away. She is younger than I am, thought Damaris, but she’ll go first, I suppose, and I shall be left quite alone. We must get away from here. We mustn’t spend another winter without proper
central heating . . . we must get that flat!

She looked beyond Florence towards the house with its Victorian Gothic features which, set in the mould of the local stone, did make Fourways look like a castle or at least a baronial hall. I wasn’t honest with Ron Gladstone just now, thought Damaris. I wasn’t being honest with myself. It’s true I’ve lived here all my life, and I ought to be deeply attached to the place. Yet really, I do believe I hate it. I feel as though, somehow, it’s eaten me up. Even when I was young and had my job in Bamford, I cycled back home here directly work was finished because my parents expected to see me on the dot, for dinner. Others went off to parties and dances and met young men and got married. But not me, oh no! I was needed here. I shan’t be a bit sorry to leave. I don’t care who buys it. I don’t care if they knock the whole wretched pile down. It never brought any Oakley any luck.

To Florence she said, ‘Mr Gladstone is still going on about a water feature. I’ve done my best to dissuade him. We’re fortunate to have him, I suppose. The garden was such a wilderness before he took it on. Do you remember Evans who was gardener when we were children?’

‘Yes,’ said Florence. ‘He showed us how to plant runner beans in pots. We put them on the shelf in the old potting shed, labelled with our names. Your beans always grew better than mine and Arthur’s grew best of all.’

Despite this happy reminiscence, it struck Damaris that there was tension in her sister’s manner. Concerned, she asked, ‘What is it, dear?’

‘The post has come,’ said Florence Oakley. The wind caught at her silver hair and tugged strands from the rolled sausage at the nape of her neck.

There was a silence. Damaris looked at her, waiting, her heart heavy. She didn’t ask what the post had brought. She knew what it would be and she didn’t want to hear it. Every few seconds gained before the words were spoken were precious, because after they were spoken, nothing would ever be the same again.

Florence straightened up slightly with an effort, preparing herself to break unwelcome news.

‘There is a letter,’ she said. ‘It’s definite. He’s coming.’

‘Poison,’ said Geoffrey Painter, ‘was once a great deal more popular as a weapon than it is today. Ah, sausage rolls! Have you had one of these, Meredith?’

‘Watch out!’ whispered Alan Markby in her ear. ‘It may be spiked.’

‘Is Geoff bending your ear about poisons again?’ asked the bearer of the sausage-roll tray, Pam Painter. ‘Honestly, he’s obsessed.’

Markby smiled at her. ‘Speaking as a humble copper, I for one have often had reason to be thankful for Geoff’s knowledge of poisons. It’s been a great help to us.’

‘That’s no reason to encourage him to go on about them now,’ said Pam briskly. ‘Geoff! It’s an off-limits topic, right?’

‘You can imagine what she’s like at county council meetings, can’t you?’ said Geoff, unperturbed at receiving this order. ‘Alan and Meredith are interested, Pam.’

‘It’s a house-warming party,’ argued his wife. ‘The atmosphere’s supposed to be cheerful!’

She bore her sausage-roll tray onwards to other guests packed in the rather small drawing room of the Painters’ brand-new house. Meredith thought it was useless asking Geoff not to talk about poisons. He was one of those people who have managed to make a profession match a hobby. He loved his work and he loved talking about it. Standing in the middle of a packed room, his balding head flushed with the heat and his own enthusiasm, he had at his command a whole new audience. How could he ignore it?