A Lesson in Dying (5 page)

‘Come on, love,’ Hunter said, smiling, showing no indication that he had spent the night drinking. ‘You knew Harold Medburn. Tell us about him. Anything would be useful.’

She had hesitated and glanced towards Ramsay who nodded in encouragement. Later her father was to ask her what she saw in Ramsay and she did not know what to say. He was middle-aged, dark, so tall he seemed to have an habitual stoop. Yet she felt from the beginning that his approval was worth having. He was a man of judgement. If he showed that he had confidence in her she would have confidence in herself. So, quite quietly, with none of her usual melodrama, she told the policemen about Medburn’s affair with Angela Brayshaw. She was rewarded by Ramsay’s smile.

She only learned later, from her father, that Kitty Medburn had been taken into custody.

Jack Robson was beside himself with fury.

In the afternoon he walked with Patty on the empty sandy beach at the end of the valley. Jim had taken the children to his mother’s and Patty had insisted that she needed fresh air.

‘I want to talk to you,’ Jack said angrily. As soon as he heard of Kitty’s arrest he had stormed to her house and banged on the door, ignoring the enjoyment of the neighbours.

‘You can talk just as well outside.’

She had not slept and her eyes felt tight with tiredness. The sea was grey despite the sunshine, and a strong east wind blew sand around their ankles and flattened the marram grass against the dunes. They walked from the car park through the dunes to the flat hard shore.

‘What did you do it for?’ he demanded. ‘Why did you have to tell the police?’

‘Why not?’ she said defensively. ‘They would have found out anyway.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘ They needn’t have done. Who was going to tell them? Not me. I’d not tell them anything. Not Angela Brayshaw. She’s too sly to get herself involved with the police.’

‘But if Kitty killed her husband,’ Patty said, stung to anger, ‘the police had to find out.’

They walked in silence. Patty had a hangover and the waves breaking on the beach echoed her thumping head. She pulled her thick padded jacket around her. She felt drained and ill.

‘You never told me,’ she said at last, sulky as a schoolgirl. ‘You never told me to keep quiet about it.’

‘You shouldn’t need telling!’ Jack said. His anger and unhappiness floated undirected over the sea. He could not really blame Patty.

He was wearing a long grey macintosh, exactly the same as the one he had bought after leaving the army, and his Sunday black shoes. He looked out of place: a Raymond Chandler detective on a Northumberland beach. All he needed was a hat. He had never enjoyed the beach. He had come there a lot with his dad when he was a boy, not playing like Patty’s children in the summer with buckets and spades, but for the fishing and to see what they could find washed up on the tide line. The water was beginning to seep into his shoes and he felt cold, though he would never admit it to her.

‘If Kitty Medburn had killed her husband,’ he said more quietly, ‘she would have told me so last night.’

‘You went to see her last night?’

He nodded. ‘I went to find out why they weren’t at the party.’

‘What did she say?’ Patty was fascinated. She still thought Kitty Medburn was a murderess. There was a ghoulish curiosity about the meeting.

‘She’d had a row with Harold. He said he was going to leave her for another woman. Then he had a phone call and he went out.’

‘What time?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Early in the evening. When she came in from work, I suppose.’

‘So she could have killed him,’ Patty said. ‘The school was empty between five o’clock and seven. The noose was made from bandages. She was a district nurse, she would have had bandages at home. The police said that. They think it was a dreadful sick joke, a way of paying him back for his infidelity.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘She might have killed him in a temper, but she would never have gone through all that charade. She would have told me when I went there that evening.’

‘How do you know?’ she demanded. ‘Why are you such an expert on Kitty Medburn’s state of mind?’

‘I used to know her.’ It was his turn to be defensive. ‘She was a friend. Before I met your mother.’

She could tell that there was little point in asking more questions about this mysterious friendship. He turned to face the sea and they watched the white shape of the Norway Line’s
Jupiter
move out of the mouth of the Tyne on its way to Scandinavia, the white gulls hovering over her.

‘Did the police tell you how he died?’ Jack asked. ‘They would tell me nothing.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘They say they’re waiting for the results of the post mortem.’

‘You seem to have got on very well with them,’ he said.

‘And why not? They’re not some kind of enemy.’ But as she spoke she thought she couldn’t be sure about that. There was something dangerous about the policeman who sat in the corner. It was hard to forget him.

Jack turned again towards the sea.

‘Medburn mightn’t have been a big man,’ he said. She knew he was trying to persuade himself, not her, of Kitty’s innocence. ‘But she would never have been able to carry him from the house to the playground.’

‘She could have killed him in the school,’ Patty said. She felt spiteful because of his hurtful comments. ‘That’s what the police said. Or they think she could have moved him in a wheelchair. She had one at home because of her work.’

‘He
was
dead when he was strung up like that?’ Jack asked sharply. ‘Did your friends from the police tell you that?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. She began to sob quietly. ‘I don’t want to think about it any more. It’s too horrible.’

He put his arm around her and pulled her head onto his shoulder.

‘Now pet,’ he said, as he had when she was a baby. ‘ Don’t cry!’

They walked back to the car. He bought coffee from a van parked by the side of the road and they sat in the car looking over the dunes down to the beach.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘ I shouldn’t have shouted at you. I was worried about Kitty.’ He hesitated. ‘I was very fond of her.’

She had mopped up her tears and was looking with horror at her red, blotchy face in the car mirror. She was determined to be sensible. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing we can do to help her: We’ll have to leave it to the police now.’

‘But she’s no friends!’ he cried. ‘ No one to speak up for her.’

‘The police will get her a solicitor.’

‘It won’t be the same,’ he said. ‘ He won’t know her. I feel responsible. I should have stayed with her last night.’

‘What good would that have done?’ Patty said. ‘Medburn was already dead then.’

‘I can help her now,’ Jack said with an outrageous gallantry which left her breathless. ‘I can find out who killed Medburn.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Dad!’ she said. ‘That’s a job for the police. What could we do?’

He was encouraged by the ‘we’. Joan had always supported him, even when she thought he was wrong. Independence had come hard to him and he needed Patty now.

‘We could talk to people,’ he said. ‘We know them. Where do the police come from? Otterbridge? They know nothing about Heppleburn. We know what a bastard Harold Medburn was, and we know how many people hated him.’ He looked at his daughter. ‘You could talk to Angela Brayshaw,’ he said. ‘ She’s a neighbour of yours. That would be a start. Find out what she was getting from that relationship with Medburn. She wasn’t doing it for love.’

‘Oh Dad!’ she said. ‘I don’t even like her. I wouldn’t know what to say.’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ He shouted so loud that a woman walking past the car turned and stared at them. ‘You’re always telling me there’s no purpose to your life and you’re sick with boredom. Well, I’m giving you a purpose. We’re going to prove that Kitty Medburn was innocent.’

He knew that she would agree to do as he said. She would agree to anything that was different, a bit of excitement, an excuse to let the housework slide for a few days. She turned to him.

‘Are you sure,’ she said, ‘that Kitty is innocent?’

‘Of course,’ he said uncomfortably, but they both knew that there was no certainty and that the thing would probably end in embarrassment and disaster.

As she stood on Angela Brayshaw’s doorstep, dishevelled from the wind, with sand still on her boots, Patty realized that she should have gone home and changed first. Then perhaps she would not have felt at such a disadvantage. Angela was as calm and immaculate as ever. She opened the door only wide enough to see who was there.

‘Yes?’ she said distantly. ‘What can I do for you?’

Patty might have been there to borrow sugar or sell insurance. There was no recognition in Angela’s face, no indication that they had shared an experience of such horror as the discovery of Medburn’s body.

‘Can I come in?’ Patty said, stamping her feet on the path in a vain attempt to shift the sand from her boots. ‘I’d like to talk to you.’

It was already growing dark and lights were coming on in the other houses in the street. Angela could see the flickering images of colour television sets, the peering faces as neighbours, who had seen policemen call at the house earlier in the day, hoped for further excitement.

Reluctantly Angela moved aside to let Patty into the room. She was wearing a black skirt which reached to the middle of her calves and a black and white blouse. Her face was smooth, discreetly made up. She stood quite still and waited for Patty to speak.

‘Where’s Claire?’ Patty asked. The children were something they had in common. Angela’s daughter and Jennifer were friends.

‘She’s at my mother’s,’ Angela said. ‘She stayed there last night so I could be at the school. She’s better off there today. I don’t want her troubled by this unpleasantness.’

She spoke as if murder were a trivial inconvenience. Patty stood awkwardly, unsure how to go on. The room was hot and she felt suddenly flushed. Perhaps she should make some excuse about having called to see how Angela was, then leave. But she thought of her father, waiting at her home, desperate for some information which would dramatically prove the innocence of the woman Patty realized, now, she knew little about. She sat resolutely on the small grey sofa.

‘Have the police been to see you?’ she asked.

Angela looked at her, unoffended but disapproving. She wished Patty would go away. She did not want to be reminded of the police or Harold Medburn. She wanted to forget about that now. And how big and clumsy Patty was, with that shapeless old coat and long scarf! She seemed to take up all the space in the room. Yet it was impossible for Angela to cause a scene, to tell Patty that it was none of her business. She sat, tense and upright, on a chair with her back to the window.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They were here this morning.’

It had been a surprise when Ramsay and Hunter arrived and began, almost at once, to ask about her relationship with Harold Medburn. She had thought she had managed to keep the thing secret. The knowledge that the village was discussing her, grinning, as the young policeman had grinned at the thought of the two of them together, she young and beautiful, Medburn unpopular and unattractive, was worse almost than the indignity of having to answer the policeman’s questions. She had got rid of them as quickly as she could and given away as little as possible.

‘I saw you with Harold Medburn on the evening of the committee meeting,’ Patty said. ‘I told the police.’

Angela stared at Patty with expressionless blue eyes.

‘I thought it might be you,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ Patty said. ‘ It seemed important. I didn’t think until later how awkward it might be for you.’

‘No,’ Angela said bitterly, showing emotion for the first time. ‘You never
do
think, do you? It’s easy for you with your husband and your family and your friends in the village. That’s all you want.

You’ve got everything you need. You never think of people like me. I hate it in Heppleburn.’

It’s not all I want, Patty thought, but it was not the time to explain her problem. She had been shocked by Angela’s outburst. She felt that the woman hated her and she wanted to make things better between them. She was accustomed to being liked.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘It must have been a dreadful shock when Harold Medburn died. Especially when you were so close to him.’

Angela did not reply immediately. She stared, and for a moment Patty wondered if she had said the wrong thing again. Angela thought at first that Patty might be sneering at her, laughing at her liaison with Medburn, but Patty seemed so earnest and confused that it was impossible after all to doubt her sincerity.

‘Yes,’ Angela said. ‘It was a shock.’

There was another silence. The gas fire hissed and outside the street lamps came on with a sudden orange light. In a moment of weakness, caused by her tiredness and the other woman’s sympathy, Angela felt she wanted to talk about Harold Medburn. She wanted Patty to understand about him, in a way that the police with their intimate, tasteless questions had been unable to. Since she had left school she had been without friends. Patty, with her intrusive good will, was the best she had.

‘I thought Harold could give me something different,’ she said. ‘I want more than this.’

Patty followed her gaze around the square little room. The house was smaller than her own home, but Angela had made it stylish. It seemed more spacious than it was.

‘It’s fine,’ she said encouragingly. ‘It’s big enough for the two of you.’

‘No,’ said Angela crossly, frustrated because she could not find the words to explain. ‘ I don’t just mean the house …’

She wanted to tell Patty that she aspired to a certain dignity, to a lifestyle that did not involve struggling for every penny, making do with second best.

‘I’ve not got any skills,’ she said at last. ‘I can’t go out and earn a good living. All I’ve got is the way I look and the fact that men find me attractive.’

There was a pause.

‘You mean you went with Harold Medburn for money?’ Patty asked. She could think of no tactful way of putting it. She was shocked, not by Angela’s confession, but because she had never guessed. Everyone on the estate thought that Angela led a life of great respectability.