The Death of Lucy Kyte (22 page)

The Underground would be crowded by now, and Josephine was reluctant to take something so precious onto a packed train. She wasn't in the mood to fight for a taxi and the Embankment was in easy walking distance, so she cut through Fetter Lane and headed down the Strand, too preoccupied with her thoughts to delight in a London evening as she would normally have done. In no time at all, the redbrick splendour of New Scotland Yard was in front of her, dominating the river with its baronial architecture until it was outshone by Parliament a little further west. She had been here on numerous occasions to see Archie, and usually felt intimidated by the businesslike efficiency that ran throughout the building; today, though, her purpose was more than a social call and she felt less guilty about approaching the front desk to ask if Detective Chief Inspector Archie Penrose might be available to speak to her.

‘I'm sorry, Ma'am, but the Chief Inspector is away on a job at the moment. Is it a personal call, or could someone else help?'

‘Will he be back tomorrow?'

‘I couldn't say, Ma'am. I'm sorry.'

There was a real art to being so obligingly unhelpful, Josephine thought; whoever had assigned this charming young constable to the enquiries desk had chosen well. ‘Is Sergeant Fallowfield away as well?' she asked, disappointed not to see Archie but willing to settle for his colleague.

The constable perked up at the chance to offer something more positive. ‘No, Ma'am. He's on duty upstairs. Who shall I say is here?'

Josephine gave her name and waited for Bill to come down. When he arrived, she was touched by how pleased he seemed to see her, and the feeling was mutual. She had known Bill Fallowfield for nearly twenty years, ever since Archie had joined the police. In all that time, they had rarely spent more than an hour in each other's company, but had settled into an easy if unlikely friendship, based on shared interests – Bill was an avid reader of detective fiction – and their affection for Archie. There were not many people whom Josephine liked to impress, but Bill's good opinion mattered greatly to her. He ushered her into a side room, somehow managing to open the door for her while carrying two cups of tea. ‘Arriving or leaving, Miss?' he asked with a twinkle, nodding towards the suitcase.

‘Neither, Bill. It's rather a long story. I was hoping to talk to Archie about it, but I understand he's away.'

‘That's right, Miss.' He paused, and she wondered why he looked so shifty. ‘Actually, he's in Suffolk.'

‘In Suffolk? Why on earth didn't he tell me? I had a letter from him last week, but he didn't mention it.'

‘No. It was all a bit last-minute. He's been gone a few days.'

‘Whereabouts in Suffolk? He might at least have called in.'

‘I'm not sure, exactly.'

She laughed at his pained expression. Deception did not sit well with Archie's sergeant, even when it was a professional obligation. ‘You're a terrible liar, Bill, but I won't push my luck. Can you at least tell me if it's worth my while to hang on in London for a day or two?'

‘Nothing's really been decided yet, Miss.' He brightened a little. ‘I could give him a message, though. Only if he telephones in, obviously.'

‘Obviously.' Josephine scribbled a note and handed it to Bill with a wry smile. ‘Perhaps you could pass that on to him if he happens to let his address slip when he calls.'

‘Of course, Miss.' He tucked the note into his inside pocket, and Josephine knew that it would be with Archie within twenty-four hours, whether he ‘telephoned in' or not. ‘How are you finding life in my neck of the woods, anyway?' he asked.

She had forgotten that Bill came from Suffolk; in her eyes, he was more of a Londoner than most people born to the city would ever be. ‘I'm getting used to it,' she said.

‘Polstead, isn't it?'

‘That's right.'

‘Nice place. Shame about the murder, though. They haven't really got over it, have they?'

Josephine could not have put it better herself. ‘To be honest, I haven't really seen much of the village. The cottage is a little way out, and I've spent most of my time there. It needs a lot of work.'

‘Those cottages always do. Takes me back a bit. Five of us in a bedroom, and my mum and dad and the baby in the next. All the houses were like that.'

‘How old were you when you left?'

‘Fifteen, but I spent five years before that wondering how to get away.'

‘You weren't happy there?'

‘It wasn't so much a question of happy or unhappy. I loved my family, but my father worked on the land and there was a war between farmers and their men in those days. The farmers took all they could, all the life and strength those men had, and there was no arguing if you wanted to keep your home. I never heard my father complain once – it's just the way it was.' He smiled. ‘My mother was a different story, mind you. She was the one who knew how bad the wages were because it was her job to make them last.'

‘It must have been hard for her when you left.'

‘Yes, that's why I stuck it for a bit. My father got eight shillings a week for me in the fields, long days and four hours off on a Sunday. I didn't mind the work, but there was no respect. Village people in my day were worked to death, Miss Tey. My dad wasn't much older than I am now when he died. That's no age, is it? But the life made him ancient. I can see his face now, the lines on it from working under that fierce sun. I wanted something different, and deep down my parents wanted that too. They never once grudged me a better life, and I'm grateful to them for that. And I was damned glad to get away.'

It was a far cry from the idyllic country life that most people believed in if they didn't know better. Josephine pictured the countryside around her cottage, the gentle farmland and golden fields, and marvelled at how easy it was to be deceived by its beauty. ‘Where did you go?' she asked.

‘I walked to Ipswich and got a train to Colchester, kissed the bible at the barracks there and took my shilling. Do you know, Miss, I put on a stone in my first month with the regiment? That's how hard that farm work was. An army training was easy by comparison.'

‘Do you ever go back, Bill?'

‘Not much. Not after my mother died, anyway. I've got a sister and a couple of brothers there still and we keep in touch, but I don't think of it as home.'

‘Promise me you'll let me know if you do, though. Or, of course, if you happen to be there in the next few days . . .'

She gave him a meaningful look, which he acknowledged with a grin. ‘I'll let the Chief know you're after him, Miss.'

‘Good. Thank you, Bill.' She said goodbye and walked out into the early evening sunset. London's personality was as affected by the seasons as the countryside around the cottage, she thought. Her favourite time of year in the city had always been spring; it arrived with a thrilling softness, a lightness and gaiety that contrasted with the age of the buildings – and it was a London springtime that had brought her Marta, and would now be for ever precious. But an autumn evening by the river had its own charms. The waning sun blended beautifully with the man-made colours of Scotland Yard, and Josephine wondered if the architect had had an evening such as this in mind when the building was conceived.

She took a taxi back to her club in Cavendish Square and asked the receptionist to put the precious suitcase in the safe overnight. Her failure to find Archie had left her restless and unsure of what to do next. She telephoned Marta at her home in Holly Place, but her mood was not improved by finding Lydia there instead and learning that Marta was ‘still at Shamley Green with the bloody Hitchcocks'. She excused herself from Lydia's dinner invitation, checked again with reception that by some miracle Archie had not left a message for her there, and went to bed early, ready to take the first train back to Suffolk in the morning.

15

It was half past four when Josephine arrived back at the cottage, relieved that Hester's car – or Chummy, as she was now known – had got her to Hadleigh station and back in one piece; it was hardly the most ambitious of maiden voyages, but at least if she bumped into Bert she could tell him truthfully that his gift had been used. She set the precious suitcase down in the porch while she looked for her key, feeling very strongly that she was returning something to Red Barn Cottage that belonged there, something that was part of its history years before Hester. With the door ajar, her hand still resting on the latch, she turned to look back at the space where the barn had been, barely fifty yards from where she stood. The slope was covered with grass and thistles now, an ordinary square of an ordinary English field; no one would guess the violence of its past, or that its secrets continued to define the atmosphere of the village, even to this day. The horizon was peculiarly empty, the air deathly still, as if the peace of the late afternoon were daring her to prove the lie. Even the house seemed to be waiting to see what she would do next.

While it was still light, she busied herself with the chores that would allow her to read the diary uninterrupted later: building fires and making dinner; filling the oil lamps and making sure there was enough water for the night ahead. When she was ready, she found her glasses and emptied the suitcase carefully out onto the floor of the study. Hester's manuscript, which had seemed so fresh and so exciting when she first discovered it, looked bland and featureless next to its inspiration. The booklets were made up of individual sheets of paper, folded and cut into four, and small enough to tuck into the pocket of an apron. She found the earliest one and looked through it, scarcely able to believe she was holding something that had been created by Maria Marten's closest friend and written in the Corder house, as excited by the physical reality of the diary as she was by the testimony it contained. The diarist – whoever she was – had initially used her books to record the weather and a list of daily duties. At first, her phrases were stilted, the language self-conscious, as if she had been embarrassed to keep a diary at all; then, as she grew in confidence, the entries began to adopt the voice that Josephine had come to know through Hester's transcript, and the diary became fuller and less formulaic – something to which its author could trust the ordinary and extraordinary events of her life, where she could share the secrets of her heart.

Josephine found the book for 1826 and placed the two versions of the diary side by side to see what sort of editing Hester had done. Much of the domestic work had been cut out, she noticed, and Hester had standardised some of the spelling for a modern reader whilst remaining faithful to the language and speech rhythms of the original. More often than not, the diarist wrote things down phonetically, a habit that told Josephine almost as much about how she must have spoken as a recording of her voice would have done. She had her own shortened version of words, too – not a code exactly, but a means of writing quickly at the end of a long day. What struck Josephine most, though, was the scale of the undertaking: there were hundreds of pages, often scrambled out of order, and as well as the challenge of the writing itself, some of the leaves were faded or discoloured and blotched with ink. Hester must have spent years on this, finishing – thank God – before her eyes let her down. In fact, such close work, done in the sort of light that Josephine was struggling with now, had probably played a significant part in Hester's loss of sight.

For speed and the pace of the story, Josephine decided to continue with Hester's transcript in the first instance and refer back to the original if there was anything she wanted to check. The only sounds to break the stillness were the gentle ticking of the clock from next door and the occasional cracking of a beam as the house settled – a strange, brittle sound, she always thought; a sigh of relief, almost, that another day had been safely negotiated. Otherwise, the cottage was silent, offering her every possible encouragement to get on with a story that was in part its own.

Josephine guessed that work had got the better of such good intentions: the next few entries were sparse, and many days missed out altogether. When they picked up again, she noticed that there was a change in the writing as the crisis of William and Maria built; now the writer hardly ever mentioned her work, even in the original, but used the diary to record the atmosphere in the Corder house and her anxiety for her friend.