The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (35 page)

Weve had a bad run of it. Fred got hit by a Jerry sniper and Dennis Ames the new miller from West Overton was hit by shrapnel. Them two brothers up at Vale Farm are both gone too. One got hit and the other went back for him the silly b****** and they got him too. Its always raining.

Cpt E’s wound up something rotten since we got stuck here. He and Mr Julian are hardly speaking. The Cpt takes a drink at night and Mr Julian he doesnt like it not a bit. Were stuck in this hell-hole it stinks and you have to sleep sitting up. Theres a mist youd think had glue in it it sticks to you so. We couldnt see much anyway but daylights daylight.

Mr Julian says dont be a fool Digby and we hear and Cpt E pushes him away and he falls in the mud. Bert says the lads too young and they should take one of the older men but Cpt E says no Bert can take Peter if he wants to be his nursemaid and then things youd never believe and Id never tell. Anyway cant say more here. But it turns out bad for Bert and Peter like I said. All us lads that once were friends and enemies but always talking are sitting around quiet as the grave not even looking at each other now. Easton will never be the same place we left. Dad if things go bad for us you will tell Mags I love her wont you and take care of her forever. Ill write more after but Ive got to go now. Business to do as they say.

The letter ended abruptly. Only as he finished it did Laurence remember that Mrs Kilminster had told him that Walter Petch couldn’t read and she would read Joe’s letters to him. It wasn’t hard to imagine her feelings if she’d read this terse account of events leading to her husband’s death. But had Maggie read it, he wondered? The first letter had conveyed some resentment at Albert Kilminster’s higher rank, which Joe Petch might not have included if he had realised Ellen Kilminster would see it, but in this account Kilminster had clearly tried to protect the men—and from their own officer. None of it had saved them.

He was still mentally with the 6th Wilts as he picked up the next letter, the one he had hoped might be from Maggie’s mother. Now that he saw it again, he found that it was indeed hers. Her writing was tidier and more fluent than Joe’s.

Dear Joe,

You always thought I would be off. Used to say you could never believe your luck. Now you’ll think your luck’s run out. But you were always good to me and I loved little Mags. See I am crying as I write that. You are a good man and I know you will look after our little girl. I don’t want to go but I have to. Please try and understand. Well how can you when I am not telling you anything. You were too good and loyal a man for me and you will always have Easton which never took to me. I don’t know where I’ll be.

On the move I expect.

Your wife. The last time I’ll write that.

Rosaline

There was no address. He almost banged his fist on the chest of drawers. The next thing that struck him was that both letters carried the shadow of unexpressed knowledge. Both were from individuals who knew that everything about their lives was about to change.

He had been in Maggie’s room too long—he was only supposed to be looking at a postcard—and he put the tin away as quickly and quietly as he could. When he went down, Walter was in the garden, digging apparently randomly in a patch of weeds, perhaps to discourage any further conversation. Laurence called out his thanks and Walter raised a hand as if in salute. Laurence did not look back but felt the man was watching him to make sure he was well away.

As he walked back to the Hall he reconsidered what Walter had told him and whether it changed things. It was not Colonel Easton but Mrs Easton who had had the maze blocked off. More importantly, Walter, at least, knew of both the cave end of the maze and the vault. But had he told anybody else? On balance, Laurence believed him when he said not, but that made Walter a suspect for leaving the body. And if the body should turn out to be Maggie’s mother, Rosaline, he had a motive. However, he was an old man and the door was heavy, needing two men to lift it, not to mention the physical force needed to subdue and kill a much younger woman.

As he came in sight of the Hall he reflected that although it was extremely unlikely that Walter was involved, he felt uneasy nonetheless about colluding in Petch’s withholding of information. He decided that if the body was identified as Rosaline Petch, then he would urge Walter to speak out. He knew too that soon he must hand the bag he’d found in the cistern in to the authorities.

The rain had held off and he veered left to the church. The door shut behind him. The hatch was closed but the table was still to one side, presumably awaiting the delayed installation of the new window. He paused for a minute, looking up at the glass where Lydia Easton’s vision would soon be turned into William’s explosion of light. She would never see it now.

He ran his hands over the nearest walls by the west window. The whitewash was a consistent colour, repainted reasonably recently, although, under the paint and close to the bell rope, he could see the shadow where the pulley Walter Petch had set up might once have been screwed to the wall. He made a careful check of all three walls. They were rough but he felt no irregularities. He stood back and examined them closely, up and down, higher than his reach, but of the one thing he had expected to find, there was not a trace.

Chapter Eighteen

David was out in the yard. As well as taking Laurence to Marlborough station he was fetching the London doctor off the down train.

‘Could you drop me off in Marlborough a little early? I need to do a couple of things,’ Laurence said.

‘Mrs Bolitho’s coming too,’ David said. Since the discovery of the body he wouldn’t meet Laurence’s eyes.

Eleanor had tried to persuade Laurence her journey was prearranged. She was so wrapped up in herself, so silent for once, that she never even asked him why he wasn’t going straight to the railway station. He was relieved not to be travelling all the way to London with her.

The officer on the desk at the Marlborough police station evidently thought Laurence was mad. He took the bag gingerly but politely and promised to hand it on. A part of Laurence hoped it might never reach the inspector. They couldn’t have much experience of murder in Wiltshire.

Most men who came up from the underground station at the Oval were probably thinking about cricket but Laurence was considering churches. For him, London’s history and geography were arranged around them. He had never seen the supposedly fine church of St John the Divine. The great spire was unmistakable but when he reached it he felt no urge to enter the building, however beautiful its interior and windows were supposed to be. Although it was only half a century old, there was something over-insistent about St John’s. Was it possible to feel a sense of wonder, even if uncertain about God, in such a place?

For some reason he thought again of the hundreds of planned small streets he had seen at the exhibition, spilling out across the acreage to the north-west of London. In those intersecting lines and plots, had they left a place for a church? A church, even more obediently built than St Johns, unequivocally facing east, with nothing to surprise in its vaults or on its floors, and all its shadows falling evenly? Or was modern living about tobacconists and butchers, factories, public houses and infant schools? Despite his own beliefs or lack of them, he hoped there would be a church.

It would be a dull place to start with, testing even the ardently devout. When the houses had been lived in for a century or so, and their gardens and trees had grown, and been cropped and redug according to fashion, and some of the houses had fallen, and some factories had failed and been turned into studios for moving films or dance halls, and the place had gone up and down in the world a few times, then the church might be interesting. When it had seen a thousand men, women and children come from their small, neat homes to pray or weep or give thanks in the dark, then this as yet unbuilt church would speak for the place around it. He hoped the area would have no need for a memorial as St John’s now had, carrying the names of so many of its sons. In Metroland—he remembered now that was the development company’s name—he felt lives should have a guarantee of safety in return for the settlers’ courage and enthusiasm for this new world they were creating.

It was the events of the last few days that had flung him into such melancholy reflection, but at least it had brought him closer to Jane Rivers in Holland Road. He passed some meagre but tidy shops. Men and women, respectable but shabby, walked and spoke quietly. A coalman’s horse ate peacefully from its nose bag. Were Mrs Kilminster to come and visit her sister, he thought she would be reassured.

He found Holland Road easily but, judging by the numbering, Jane Rivers lived at the far end. His journey had reminded him of traversing London in early-winter snow nearly three years ago, on a similar, slightly quixotic mission. The result of those enquiries, when they bore fruit, merely revealed that his instincts had been wrong all along. But at least that time he had been asked to act and, through a combination of love, boredom and loyalty, he had almost accidentally come upon a resolution, rather than a solution. This time, only finding out what had happened to Kitty could be said to be any kind of result. At the Hall they still talked more about the child than about the newly murdered woman. Had he become infected by their obsession?

He thought some more about the woman he’d come to see. All he’d heard of the nanny, Jane Rivers, was that she loved Kitty as if she were her own and that she had never stopped protesting her innocence. It didn’t take a great brain to see that she would come under suspicion, despite being unwell before the abduction. Lydia had not been well either. Now as he approached Jane Rivers’ house, he realised what a fool’s errand this was. If she was there, all well and good; he might ask her some questions
if
she let him in. If she answered the door, then obviously the dead woman was not her. If she did not, it proved nothing.

He checked the number again. This end of the street was darker than the other. Three-storey buildings in dirty brick crowded in on both sides. Flights of steps, once white, went mostly unscrubbed, with weeds growing in the cracks. An old man with a white beard nearly to his waist sat on a step, smoking a pipe, a contented look on his face. He nodded to Laurence. A battered perambulator stood outside another house.

Seventy-seven was at the end of one of these tall terraces. Clearly the whole building couldn’t all be hers. A washing line with men’s clothing hung below the open second-floor windows, dripping on the pavement beneath. The first-floor windows were shut, even on this warmish day, and discoloured lace curtains obscured any view. If she were as poor as her sister said, she’d be on the top floor or in the basement.

There were no names on any of the bells. He rang what he hoped was the second-floor bell but heard no sound. He rang another at random and then another. Above his head a window went up. A woman’s face, round and red with a scarf over her hair, appeared, almost comically framed in the arch of a man’s wet long johns.

‘Who’re you wanting?’ she said, apparently not bothered at being disturbed.

‘Miss Rivers, Miss Jane Rivers,’ he said.

‘Wait a tick. I’m coming down.’ Was she going to tell him Jane Rivers had gone?

The door opened.

‘You could’ve come in. It’s not locked.’

She had a washing basket under her arm as she led him through a passage with three or four doors, each belonging presumably to a different habitation.

‘Church outing,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘For the kiddies. St John Div. Taking them to the exhibition, Gawd help them. They said, did I want to go. I said, no, it’ll be more of a holiday for me back here without them all.’

He thought she was quite young, but she waddled as he followed behind her, only just squeezing herself and the basket through the narrow space.

‘Miss Rivers is out the back,’ she said. ‘Lovely lady but lives on her nerves. Hasn’t been well lately.’

‘She’s been around recently?’

She turned and looked back at him as if suddenly suspicious.

‘Well, of course she has. Where else’d she be?’ She had stopped completely now and put down the basket. ‘Why d’you want her, anyway? You’re not some sort of copper, are you?’

He almost laughed at the idea but could see she needed persuading. Her eyes appraised him carefully.

‘No. Absolutely not.’

‘See, she had a hard time before I knew her. A bad business at the place she worked.’

He nodded.

‘She had trouble with men,’ she said. ‘Her sweetheart broke his promise and there was some trouble with one of the men in the family where she was in service.’ The woman had lowered her voice. ‘Then things went missing—something really valuable, diamonds or some such—and some people thought it was her. Coppers on to her night and day. The family let her go of course.’ She looked outraged on Jane Rivers’ behalf. As if she would. Kind to her heart. And anyway if she’d got hold of diamonds or rubies or something, she’d live in a darn sight better place than this. Mind you, she’d probably give it all to St John’s. She’s a bit...’ She put her hands together, closed her eyes and moved her lips in a mock prayer, then her eyes flew open. ‘She wasn’t so much when she came, but she is now.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Can hardly blame her, though.’

He was relieved she was such a talker that she’d forgotten to clear up the issue of who he was or why he was there.

Right at the back, the house had been extended into what might once have been a garden. Now a narrow alley ran alongside the one-storey, slate-roofed building with ground elder growing through the dividing wall. At the end of the alley he could see and smell the wash-house. Beside him was a faded front door.

She tipped her head towards it. ‘I’ll be off then.’ She continued down the path to the copper, from which steam was rising in a fragrant column.