The Judgement of Strangers (22 page)

‘What will you do?’ she asked.

‘Just say a prayer.’

‘OK.’

I fancied that she looked disappointed, as if she had been hoping for something more dramatic. She bowed her head and I prayed for the room to be filled with God’s peace. Then I invited Joanna to join me in the Lord’s Prayer. Her voice stumbled softly after mine, like a distant echo.

When it was over, she said, ‘Is that all?’

‘Yes. Shall we go upstairs?’

She nodded, and without a word slipped out of the room. I followed her up the spiral staircase. Our footsteps thudded on the bare wood. I kept my eyes on Joanna’s ankles, pale and flickering before me. At the top was a tiny landing, barely large enough for one person, and a closed door. It seemed colder to me here than it had been on the floor below.

Joanna twisted the handle and pushed open the door. The room was a copy of hers – the same dimensions, the same round-headed sash windows, the same cast-iron fireplace. One of the windows was slightly open – the one overlooking the canopy and the fountain; and I had the foolish thought that this must have been the one from which Francis Youlgreave jumped into the arms of his angel. The wallpaper was modern – flowers once more, but psychedelic daisies in turquoise and orange.

I moved slowly into the centre of the room. It was empty – no furniture, no carpet, no dust on the bare boards. Francis Youlgreave had left behind him a vacuum, waiting to be filled.

‘Well?’ Joanna was standing by the fireplace, the fingers of her right hand kneading the flesh of her left forearm. ‘What do you think? Can you feel anything?’

‘No.’ The room was merely a room, somehow incomplete like all unused rooms, but nothing more than that. ‘Can you?’

‘I don’t know what I feel any more.’

Suddenly I wanted to be gone – away from this house and away from Joanna. In a brisk voice, I repeated the prayer asking for God’s peace. Once again I said the Lord’s Prayer, galloping through the familiar words with Joanna’s voice stumbling after mine. I wondered whether to say another prayer, one specifically for Francis Youlgreave. I glanced at Joanna. She was still clutching her arm, but the fingers were still. Her eyes met mine. She stared at me as if I were a stranger – or, for that matter, a ghost.

‘Did you hear that?’ she asked.

‘What?’

She took a step towards me, stopped and looked over her shoulder. ‘I thought I heard someone crying. A child.’ She held up a hand, and for thirty seconds we listened to the silence. Then she shook her head. ‘It’s stopped.’ She took a step towards me, and then another, and another; her feet faltered; as if each footstep required a separate decision, and as if sometimes the decisions were unwelcome. She stopped a few feet away from me and raised her face to mine. ‘Do you think I imagined it?’

‘I don’t know.’ I wished she would look away from me. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Do you think I’m mad?’

‘Of course you’re not.’ I took a step backwards. ‘Now –’

‘David,’ she interrupted.

I looked at her. Once, years ago, driving late on a winter night across the Fens to Rosington, I almost ran over a young badger who was playing in the middle of the road. The car went into a skid but stopped in time. For a long moment the badger did not move: he stared into the beam of my headlights.

‘It’s so strange …’ Joanna whispered.

Another silence grew between us, and I did not know how long it went on for. What was so strange? This house? The crying child? Francis Youlgreave? Or even the two of us alone in this room?

We did not move. There was a hair on Joanna’s cheek, and I wanted desperately to brush it away. Then I heard, or thought I heard, the beating of distant wings on the edge of my hearing. In my mind I saw the badger abruptly recollecting himself and stumbling into the darkness of the verge.

‘I must go. Goodbye.’

Without another word, I scuttled out of the room and almost ran down the stairs.

The inquest was at 2.30 p.m. on Wednesday the 19th August. I myself was not called as a witness, but I drove Doris Potter there.

The proceedings did not take long. The coroner was an elderly doctor named Chilbert, a sharp man who kept glancing at his watch as if impatient to be gone. There was a jury of seven men and three women – two in their twenties, two in their sixties, and the remainder scattered between; the only thing they had in common was an expression of wary self-consciousness, but even that wore off as the proceedings continued.

Dr Vintner was the first witness to be called. He gave evidence of Lady Youlgreave’s identity. Then Chilbert took him through her recent medical history. James had seen a good deal of her because she had a terminal malignancy – breast cancer. It was clear that he thought she could have died at any time in the last few months. He described how he had tried and failed to persuade her to move into a nursing home. Her mind had been increasingly confused, he said, because of the morphine. It was true that osteoarthritis of the shoulders had made it impossible for her to raise her arms. But she had been quite capable of forgetting that she could not reach the bottle on the mantelpiece.

Beside me, Doris sucked in her breath.

The pathologist’s report confirmed what James had said. He said that Lady Youlgreave had fractured her skull when she fell, probably on the corner of the hearth. There was a laceration with swelling and bruising around it. Her injuries were entirely consistent with her having tripped on the hearthrug. Finally, he briefly described the postmortem damage inflicted by Beauty and Beast – but in technically obscure vocabulary designed, I suspected, to confuse the two journalists in the public gallery.

The coroner nodded with monotonous regularity while James and the pathologist were speaking. But he stopped nodding when he questioned Doris, the next witness to be called. She was trembling and her voice shook. But she insisted that Lady Youlgreave, however confused about other matters, knew that she could not reach her medicine. She also mentioned her employer’s dislike of using the phone.

Chilbert screwed up his lips and then said, ‘In general, no doubt you’re right, Mrs Potter. But we have just heard from Dr Vintner how muddled Lady Youlgreave had become.’ He glanced at James as if drawing support from a colleague. ‘It’s a sad truth, but people in her condition do deteriorate. So I find it hard to believe that her behaviour was still predictable by normal standards. In fact –’

‘But, sir, I –’

‘This is a medical question, Mrs Potter, and we should leave it to those competent to answer it.’ Chilbert raised a heavy eyebrow. ‘You’re not a doctor of medicine, I take it?’

‘But why would she want to say her cousins were coming?’

‘Who knows? She may have dreamed that they were. But we’re not here to speculate. Now, perhaps you would like to tell us why you moved Lady Youlgreave’s body and tidied the room before the police arrived?’

She shrugged. ‘I just did it. It seemed right. She would have liked to be decent.’

‘You should have left everything as it was.’

‘Left the dogs in there with her, do you mean? Left her all uncovered for all those men to see? She wouldn’t have wanted them to see her like that.’

Chilbert looked at Doris’s flushed face and – showing more wisdom than I had credited him with – told her she could stand down. Next he talked to the teenager who had taken Lady Youlgreave’s call cancelling the nurse. The teenager’s mother ran the Fishguard Agency, but she had been away. The boy, younger than Rosemary, was quite definite about the time of the call.

‘What did the caller sound like?’ Chilbert asked.

‘I don’t know. An old lady, I suppose. She said she was Lady Youlgreave.’

‘What exactly did she say to you?’

‘Her cousins had come down for the weekend. Out of the blue, like. And they were going to look after her so she didn’t need the nurse to call until the weekend afterwards.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I phoned the nurse and cancelled her.’ Stolid as a suet pudding, the boy stared up at Chilbert. ‘I knew what to do. I often look after the phone when Mum’s out, and there’s always people ringing up to change things.’

Sergeant Clough confirmed that there had been a call from the Old Manor House to the agency number at that time on Friday evening. His bald scalp gleaming in the striplight above his head, he emphasized that there had been no sign of a break-in.

The coroner reminded the jury that the probable time of death was Friday evening: the agency nurse had been due at 7.45 a.m. on Saturday morning so, even if she had come, she could not have prevented Lady Youlgreave’s death. The jury, suitably instructed, returned a verdict of accidental death.

Afterwards, Doris and I walked back to the car.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘She wouldn’t have phoned the agency.’

‘But she must have done. They traced the call.’

‘Anyone could have got in. Everyone knew where the key was.’

‘I know it’s hard to accept,’ I said, ‘but I have to say that I think the verdict is probably right. People do odd things. Especially when they’re old and confused. And there was nothing to suggest otherwise, was there?’

She screwed up her mouth like an obstinate child, but said nothing.

‘I know it was ghastly,’ I went on, unlocking the door of the car, ‘and the fact you found her like that was even worse.’ I held open the door for her. ‘Wretched animals.’

Doris scrambled inelegantly into the passenger seat. ‘What’s going to happen to them?’

‘The dogs? I imagine they’ll be put down.’

‘No.’ Doris’s head snapped up, and she looked at me, her face outraged as though I had hit her. ‘They mustn’t be put down. Can’t I have them?’

‘But, Doris – look, they should have been put down years ago.’

‘I’d like them. They’d be all right with me.’

‘I’m sure they would. But have you considered –?’

‘They know me. I remember Beaut when she was a puppy.’

‘They need a great deal of care. Then there’s vets’ bills as well. And really, wouldn’t it be kinder to them if they were put down?’

‘How do you know? Most people don’t want to die, even when they’re old and ill. Why should animals be any different?’

I looked down at her and remembered the high moral tone I had taken when Audrey was a little less than charitable about old people. ‘You must do what you think best. And let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.’

‘How do I set about getting them?’

‘Lady Youlgreave’s solicitor is the person to ask about that.’

‘Mr Deakin.’

‘He’ll know. In theory I suppose the dogs now belong to Lady Youlgreave’s heirs. But I can’t believe they’d object to your having them.’

Doris nodded. ‘Thank you.’

We drove back to Roth. I turned into Manor Farm Lane and drew up outside the little house she shared with her husband, and with Charlene and Charlene’s two younger brothers. I tried and failed to imagine what effect the addition of Beauty and Beast to their ménage would have. Doris did not get out. I fumbled for my own door handle, intending to walk round and open the passenger door for her.

‘Vicar?’

‘Yes?’

Doris was sitting upright in the seat, her fingers gripping the strap of her handbag. ‘There’s something I maybe should have told them.’

‘Told whom?’

‘The police. That coroner.’

I stared at her, alarm creeping over me. ‘What do you mean? Something to do with Lady Youlgreave?’

‘On Friday – as I was going – she wanted me to put some stuff in the dustbin. I always move the dustbin just before I go, you see, put it by the gate. It’s not something the nurse would want to do, and sometimes the dustmen come early on Monday, before I get there.’

‘So why was this any different?’

She turned to look at me. ‘It was some stuff from the tin box. You know, the one Mrs Byfield’s been looking at. Not all of it – just a few of them notebooks and letters and things.’

‘But they were family papers, Doris. They might have been important.’

She shook her head. ‘Lady Youlgreave said this was stuff no one wanted.’

‘I don’t think she was necessarily the best judge.’

‘But she wanted me to throw them away so badly. Said it was nasty.’ Doris’s face was miserable. ‘She was crying, Vicar. Like a child. And when all’s said and done, what did they matter? She was all upset, and they were only papers.’

‘You could have taken them away,’ I suggested, trying to speak gently. ‘And then perhaps discussed what to do with –’

‘She made me promise I’d do it. It was the only way to stop her crying.’ Doris stared defiantly at me. ‘I don’t break promises.’

There was a silence in the car. I bowed my head.

‘No,’ I said at last. ‘Of course you don’t.’

‘But should I have told the police? Or should I tell them now?’

I thought for a moment. ‘I don’t think so.’ It would only complicate matters. The information would not have affected the verdict: it merely confirmed Lady Youlgreave’s confused mental state. ‘Perhaps I should have a word with my wife. She may be able to tell if anything significant is missing. If necessary we can mention what happened to the solicitor.’

‘All right.’ Doris opened the car door. ‘Thanks for the lift.’ Before she shut the door she turned back to me and added, ‘She did it for the best, you know. It wouldn’t have been nice for the Youlgreaves, she said, and she didn’t want your wife to see. Not
suitable
. That’s what she said, Vicar. Not
suitable
.’

Doris slammed the door. I watched her walking with a suggestion of a waddle up the concrete path to her front door. I wondered which of Francis’s shabby little scandals Lady Youlgreave had wanted to conceal.

I drove home. As I had expected, there was no one at the Vicarage. Vanessa was still at work. Michael was out with Brian Vintner. Rosemary had announced at breakfast that she was going up to London again, with the same schoolfriend. I was relieved. I was not used to sharing a house with three people, and the longer the summer went on, the more the attractions of solitude increased.

I took off my jacket and tie and dropped them on a chair in the study. I put the kettle on and went to the lavatory. In mid-performance, the doorbell rang. I swore. Hastily buttoning myself up, I rinsed my hands and went to answer the door. It was Audrey. Some people have a talent for arriving inconveniently which amounts to genius.

Pink and quivering, she advanced towards me, forcing me to step back. A moment later, she was in the hall beside me. She was wearing a dress of some synthetic, shiny material – a loud check in turquoise and yellow. The dress clung to her like a second skin. I noticed smears of mud on her stockings. Her jowls trembled.

‘I’m sorry, David. I’ve come to complain.’

I blinked. ‘What about?’

‘That boy. Michael. I know he’s your godson. I know his parents are great friends of yours. But I just can’t put up with it.’

‘But what’s he been doing?’

‘Spying on me. I was walking in the park yesterday afternoon and there he was. I kept seeing his face peering at me round trees or through bushes.’ She hesitated, her jaws moving as though she were chewing over the insult. ‘And this afternoon he’s been doing the same thing.’

‘In Roth Park?’

She flushed. ‘I’d been taking a little exercise after lunch. I’ve not been sleeping well lately.’

I wondered if the unaccustomed exercise had something to do with her detective work. ‘The footpaths are public rights of way, Audrey. Perhaps Michael was playing there. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t have been there as well as you.’

‘He was snooping. Him and that nasty Brian Vintner. I won’t put up with it.’

I felt a rush of anger. ‘I don’t think Michael’s the sort of boy who would snoop.’

She glared up at me. ‘Are you saying I’m a liar?’

‘Of course not.’ I stared at her, realizing how close I had come to losing my temper and realizing how inappropriate my behaviour was. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken like that.’