The Thin Woman (32 page)

“We’re not talking about the money.” Ben set the tray down again and reached for a cheese straw. “We’re celebrating our having survived the last six months. That hasn’t always been easy.”

No one choked on his food, dropped his wine-glass, or began to twitch. I was disappointed. A crashing boom from the gong in the hall announced that dinner was served.

This meal promptly struck a false note when Ben discovered that Jonas had heated the jellied madrilene intended to be served over ice. Unruffled by his boss’s baleful glare, the old man elbowed his way round the table, pouring the wine. “Cold soup,” he chortled, wheezing down the back of Aunt Astrid’s neck as he stooped to fill her glass, “on purpose! Hrumph!”

No complaints, however, could be justly levelled against the rolled roast stuffed with layers of smoked ham and oyster dressing. Uncle Maurice never laid his fork down, but Aunt Astrid whispered audibly to Vanessa, “All this prissy foreign cooking! I told you there was something very peculiar about that young man. No wonder he hasn’t rushed to marry her.”

Dessert came and went. The remainder of the evening proved uneventful. Uncle Maurice, who had sat on his dignity until the brandy was poured, mellowed with each glass. So much so that when we all parted for the night, he clapped Ben on the shoulder, saying, “Shocking disappointment, that will, but the time comes when wounded feelings have to be set aside. If you would like any investment advice, dear boy, I am your man—for a very reasonable percentage.”

As agreed, Dorcas stayed in my room, and we took turns sleeping, but morning found us alive and well. I took the last
watch; to while away the hour before dawn, I read through Abigail’s two journals again. The household ledger told me she had been a thrifty but generous woman, often buying items of clothing for the village children. Perhaps to cover these expenditures she had purchased little meat but large amounts of dairy products for several months. The recipe listing showed that she had been Ben’s type of cook—an artist.

As Ben had informed me when he first looked at the journals, a couple of pages were missing from the recipe collection. I had surmised that Abigail had found them unsatisfactory and had removed them but … I suddenly shot away from my pillows into a sitting position. Abigail was not like that. She would not have made the entries in her neat round hand without previous experimentation with each dish. Besides, those entries had not been neatly clipped out with scissors, they had been ripped off leaving a ragged edge. Again, not Abigail’s way. Those missing entries had to mean something. Were they the final clue? I could have strangled myself with my bare hands. All those weeks and months wasted, and Ben—a fat lot of help he had been. Where, where could those pages be hidden? Calm down, think. They came from the S section, therefore to be found filed under stove, sofa, soup tureen—damn, what I needed was a dictionary, an encyclopedia or … a telephone directory.

A bell buzzed inside my head. Ben and I had always used the lazy expedient of asking the operator for information. The house had owned a phone book, outdated and falling to shreds, but … the secret drawer. I could see myself in instant replay the morning I went looking for photographs of Uncle Arthur, and mentally writing off the old bills, the travel brochures, and the obsolete phone book as more of Aunt Sybil’s stuff to be sent down to the cottage. Aunt Sybil had the directory! Could I justify breaking in and searching the premises? Dear Aunt Sybil, bless that wonderful Victorian virtue that never permitted her to throw anything away. The phone book was most likely a futile last-ditch grab at straws, but as soon as I could get out of the house Dorcas and I would go and retrieve
it. I went down to tackle the kitchen, which had been left to Jonas’s ministrations last night. The best that could be said was that he had done better than Aunt Sybil. I reached for a damp cloth to wipe off the sticky counter top, picked up a dish of butter left out to attract any mice who might come back now Tobias was gone on his holidays, turned and saw the refrigerator. The door was smeared all over in sticky red streaks. What now? Jonas writing reminders to himself? I’d strangle him. Wringing out my cloth I turned to wipe off the mess and stopped.

At close range the letters separated and cleared; I found I was squeezing that cloth so hard water spattered onto my bare feet.
“Who is Dorcas? What is she?”

I was standing immobile when she came in.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Dorcas said, “thought you might …”

“Look.” The accusation screamed at us in angry red blotches from the refrigerator. Dorcas dragged out a chair and sat down, hands riffling through her already untidy hair.

“What does it mean?” I asked, and was afraid for her to answer. Unwillingly I was remembering Rowland Foxworth’s words. Six months ago Dorcas was a stranger. And even now there were a lot of gaps in what I knew of her. What was I doing? Friends trusted each other. “Tell me,” I said.

Dorcas squared her shoulders and looked me straight in the eye. “Obvious, someone knows who I am.”

“A Russian spy?” I joked feebly. Perhaps this was a nightmare brought on by emotional stress and I would soon wake up.

“Sorry, Ellie. Haven’t been quite straight with you from the beginning. That business about wanting a change from teaching for a while was true, but had my own reasons for coming here. You might say I have a connection with this house.”

“Dorcas, this doesn’t mean …” I couldn’t continue, my throat was closing. For the first time I realized that it was rather odd Dorcas had never spoken about her past. On
the day of her arrival and on one or two other occasions she had started to say something about one of her grandparents but had cut herself short, saying she didn’t want to bore me. Not a word about mother, father, brother, or sister.

“Mustn’t believe I’m engaged in this murderous, heinous plot against you, Ellie. You’re like a sister to me. Think the world of you and Ben.”

Ben had said that criminals often had the nicest faces. “Then tell me,” I begged, “what’s the big dark secret?”

“Can’t. Sorry, Ellie, other factors involved. Have to play the game by the rules up to the end.”

Whose end? “Dorcas,” I said quietly, “we’re not on the hockey field now, murder isn’t a sporting proposition. If your secret, the secret the enemy has discovered, has any bearing on whether or not I will stay alive, I need to hear it.”

“No connection at all. You have my word, Ellie, that in due course I will tell all. Have a feeling you will be more pleased than not. What we mustn’t do is fall into the enemy’s trap. Plain as the nose on your face, trying to foist a quarrel on us with this poison pen business. But undervalued our friendship. We are still friends, aren’t we, Ellie?”

I said yes, and I meant it. If I couldn’t trust Dorcas, who was left?

Vanessa came yawning into the kitchen, demanding a cup of coffee, and without another word Dorcas left. She didn’t come down for breakfast in answer to the gong and I understood. Neither of us would be completely comfortable in each other’s presence until those questions
Who is Dorcas? What is she?
were answered. “Where’s Dorcas,” Ben muttered out of the corner of his mouth as he passed me the marmalade. He thought she was slacking off on her guard duty.

“Are you enquiring about the housekeeper?” sniffed Aunt Astrid. “I saw the woman walking in the garden about fifteen minutes ago. The help these days! Out admiring the
flowers when she should be dusting the furniture or making beds.”

Ben might be irritated with Dorcas, but he wasn’t about to let someone else take swipes at her. “Dorcas is more friend than housekeeper,” he said.

As matters progressed I had no opportunity of speaking with Ben alone that morning, and I saw nothing of Dorcas. The ladies autocratically demanded a tour of the house, and Ben’s security system necessitated that the men tag along. Aunt Astrid nosily opened Dorcas’s door when we reached her bedroom, but it was empty. “Perhaps she went into the village,” I said, and tried to concentrate on Uncle Maurice’s suggestions for further improvements to the house.

“Well, Ellie, you have made a passable job of this house,” huffed Aunt Astrid, “but you should have used more mauve.”

After elevenses the men and Aunt Lulu settled down at the card table for a game of bridge; Aunt Astrid sat with her embroidery hoop in a corner by the window and Vanessa said she would do something meaningful—varnish her nails. Jonas could have the dubious honour of watching her while I crept off to the cottage. So much for my plan of taking Dorcas with me. Where the hell was she? Who was she?

Aunt Sybil’s sitting room looked worse than I remembered—the fireside rug dragged out at a slippery angle, the coffee table still littered with dirty crockery, and an overturned teacup by a chair. Looked like Chief Inspector, New Scotland Yard, had already searched the premises. I really would have to come and give this place a clean whether Aunt Sybil was offended or not. The mantelpiece was edge-to-edge rubble, newspaper clippings, tangled balls of string, and stacks of magazines. I searched through these just on the off chance that the phone book had been inserted somewhere. Forward and onwards. Gingerly I removed a greasy paper bag from my path across the room. All four corners of the sitting room were stacked
with boxes and spilt contents, but these turned up nothing useful. The kitchen was an impossibility, my stomach could not face more than a cursory glance through cupboards. I did check the fridge; Aunt Sybil might have used the phone book to drain the lettuce. Passing the cellar door I found it locked, but it was unlikely she would have taken one box down there when all the others had been incorporated into her decorating scheme. I hesitated at her bedroom door (snooping through this most personal room bothered me), but I reminded myself that I had already been in here the morning I found her note. Nothing could have changed, and nothing had; crossing the floor was like tiptoeing through a mine field. But, miraculously, on the dressing table sat a box,
the
box. Right on top I spied a travel brochure and immediately underneath sat the phone directory. Instantly I got cold feet. This was a wild goose chase—how likely was it that my mind and Uncle Merlin’s ran on parallel lines? With fingers trembling, I opened up to the S section; sure enough, neatly taped down were the missing pages to Abigail’s recipe journal. I scanned them rapidly. That was it! I could not wait to show Ben this find. Knowing him, he would very likely conclude that our search was completed, that these pages contained not just another clue, but the stuff of which treasures are made. Somehow, I didn’t think so, not because this wasn’t very special, but I could not perceive Uncle Merlin ripping those pages out of his mother’s book—even in the interests of mystery. So many pieces of the puzzle were still missing.

The clock in the hall struck noon as I returned to the house, just before a storm broke loose. I found Uncle Maurice and Aunt Lulu at the card table. None of them had seen Vanessa, Aunt Astrid was upstairs putting away her embroidery, and Ben had gone to make lunch. Saying I would check up on that meal I went to the kitchen, eager to tell Ben my news and show him … but he was not at his usual place of business. On the table lay a note from Dorcas saying she was leaving for a while, and would be in touch when she had thought matters over. How could she? Had Ben seen this?

I found him in the dining room. Vanessa was with him. They were sitting very cosily together. The vamp was fingering one of his shirt buttons and I caught the throaty gurgle of her laughter. And I thought I had ceased being a joke.…

I left the door hanging open and backed into the hall. This day was turning into a crash course in betrayal. Where did I go from here? Six months earlier I would have dived straight for the refrigerator. If ever a girl needed half a dozen chocolate éclairs and a hunk of Gorgonzola, this was it. Why bother telling Ben about my discovery of what must be the final clue? My only hope of retaining my sanity was to get out of this house. Unfortunately my paralysed limbs refused to heed the call to action; I was still standing in the hall when Vanessa burst out of the dining room, almost knocking me over. “Horrible!” she screamed.

What had Ben tried?

“A man’s face pressed against the window, all contorted and flattened, squishy eyes, no nose, ugh!” Shuddering wildly she fled upstairs.

Why wasn’t the gallant lover galloping in hot pursuit? Not waiting for an answer, I charged out into the rain. Like Vanessa, I wasn’t watching and went sprawling into Jonas. Slouched hat pulled over his eyes, water spouting off his bushy eyebrows, he was a sight to unnerve even the undistraught.

“You!” I accused. “You were the face at the window.”

“Only doing me job.” Jonas tried to look guileless but the unholy glee dancing, behind his eyes betrayed him. “Thought them window frames might warp in all this damp, best check ’em out, I says.” He sobered suddenly, “Hey, lass. Nowt’s tha’ bad. Thought you had a mite more pluck than to bolt the burrow over some dippy female making fish eyes at …”

I made to brush past him. “Please, Jonas. I no longer believe in Father Christmas. Ben is a monumental rat. Heaven only knows who Dorcas is, or where she is. The way this day is going, I’ll find you’ve posted a notice in the personal
column of the local newspaper announcing you’re the son of Jack the Ripper.”

Jonas caught hold of my arm. “Dorcas gone? I think you’d best come inside, girl.”

“And do what, drink a cup of Ovaltine?” I yelled. “To hell with Ovaltine. To hell with the lot of you. And Jonas”—I wrenched my arm away from him—“if you are thinking of leaving my employment, I hope you will have the decency to give notice, not leave a bread and butter note.”

The going wasn’t easy, Like the small child who runs away from home, I had no clear destination in mind. My feet slipped, sloshing through mud puddles as I crossed the grass to reach the driveway. I never paused to wonder if anyone was watching me. The rain was pelting down. I passed the mound of cement by the gates, which was beginning to look like a permanent monument. Where could I go? To the vicar? He had promised to be in touch—another man who had failed me. I had reached Jonas’s refuse heap, the iron wheels of his wooden cart still tilted up against the mound of soaked mattresses and worm-eaten wooden chests, and I knew that I could not face a trip through the churchyard even to sit in Rowland’s warm study. Staring miserably down at that pile of discarded junk, my life in abstract, one rain-darkened scrap of pink and yellow stripe caught my eye. Flashback, Jonas poking this into place on the heap the last time I saw him here, and that vague, ticklish feeling of something wrong, something where it should not be. Bending now, I pulled the striped rubber thing out with my hands, and with strangely thudding heart looked down at the false cheer of its bright colours. “Loud” was the term Aunt Sybil had used, but she had been fond of her water wings, too fond to have tossed them away, unless they had acquired a puncture. Testing. I blew, and they ballooned into gaudy shape. I moved the stopper on its rubber string and plugged it into place. So? what had I proved? Aunt Sybil could have tired of them, thought they made her look too young. But she had said she could not imagine why anyone would swim without them. Calm
down, I ordered my jangling nerves. Nothing has happened to Aunt Sybil. What reason would anyone have to harm her? We’d had that postcard from her. Sure, and we had also had that phone call. No, no! I was taking something perfectly ordinary—water wings owned by an elderly woman—and turning them into a murder clue. I was sick of clues, I was sick of my own hysteria. Staring down at the surging waves below me, I decided to go home, if I didn’t get blown over the cliff first. What if …? But no, if someone had wanted to be rid of Aunt Sybil they would simply have removed her wings and … I had to stop these gruesome thoughts.