A Well Kept Secret (44 page)

She looked away as if slightly alarmed by his words.

“It’s all right, June,” he added softly, “it’s not a back-door method of putting pressure on you. I only wanted you to know that you have shown me that there is light at the end of the long dark tunnel of my life.”

“Well, I’m glad you think I’ve been of some small help,” she said, flashing a quick nervous smile at him, “and I know you are not trying to force things. Believe me, the lion’s share of help seems to be coming from you to me. You are doing so much more for me than I can ever possibly do for you, even though it is my greatest wish to be all that you now desire. I truly feel that you have saved my life; I keep thinking that I am deluding myself, and that everything between us will vanish like a dream. It is taking me a long time to accept that everything you are saying is real; that there is indeed a future, if only I can find the courage to accept it. I could never have got this far on my own, but with your help-”

She looked as if she was about to say something else, but at that point they heard the telephone ringing.
 
She bit off what she had been about to say; yet in a way her eyes said it all. Martin could read in her expression the need to be loved, and the fear that she would never be able to give or receive that love.

“I’ll get it,” she said abruptly, and without waiting for a reply she rose from her chair and went back into the building, leaving Martin alone with his thoughts.

There was no denying that June had implanted a new viewpoint within him by her words. That he was actually grieving for himself and not for Alicia was something that initially he had violently rejected, yet even before she had finished speaking to him he reluctantly came to accept that it was all too true. He was grieving because he had lost the love of his life, that he was the one that was left; that he was the one that was suffering. Now that she had brought it into focus by her words he could not deny that she was right. It was time to accept that all the tears in the world would never bring Alicia back, nor could they do her any good. Not until June had raised the point had he realised that if, as some believed, there was a hereafter, then his grief would only cause Alicia pain because there was nothing that either of them could do about the situation, and if death was the end of everything, then she would never know whether he missed her or not. All that his grief was doing was destroying his own life and perhaps the lives of those closest to him.

Whether he liked it or not, there was no denying that his continuing grief was an expression of personal selfishness!

Accepting that, it also made him look with fresh eyes at the question of guilt that underlay the grief. For what logical reason should he feel guilty by ceasing to mourn one who had meant so much to him? It came as a mild shock to realise that mourning for a lost loved one was something that one was
supposed
to do; in other words, he was unconsciously following out convention! Logically, there was nothing to feel guilty about. He felt sure that if Alicia had been able to communicate with him, she would agree that neither grief nor guilt served any purpose. On the contrary, he owed it to her and to himself to ensure that he now devoted his life to giving Beverley the best start in her own.

Thinking of how he had come to rely upon June right from the time that Beverley had come into the house demonstrated most clearly that raising his daughter on his own was likely to pose insurmountable problems. The answer to that situation was already there in the offing; Beverley had demonstrated that she really liked June, and the feeling was undoubtedly reciprocated. If he was honest, he also needed another soul mate he could rely on, and who better to fulfil that role than June? Although she was so different from Alicia, he had no doubt of his feelings for her, and for the first time he felt no guilt about it, any more than he doubted what her feelings were for him. Yes, he would wait; he would wait for as long as it took for her to finally accept him in every sense. Mentally, he blessed the uncle he scarcely knew for bringing about the situation where he and June would meet, for he doubted that he would ever have found another for whom he could ever have felt as he did about her.

He was determined that between them they would beat the demons that beset her, and in the process he would reshape his own life in a positive way. He could never forget Alicia, but that was now another part of his life. Come Monday morning he was determined that he would initiate divorce-proceedings on June’s behalf, and when the time was right? He smiled at the thought. Suddenly, the world seemed good again, and even the fact that they suspected that the murdered body of June’s father lay somewhere in the grounds of Springwater House did nothing to deflate that feeling.

His reverie was interrupted as June came back onto the terrace.

“It was the school secretary,” she said, “just to advise you that the school is re-opening on Monday morning. I said that you would return the girls by then.”

“Oh, right,” he responded, standing up and stretching, “I’ll break the news to them when they come back. I’ve a feeling we shall see some long faces when I do!”

The rest of the afternoon passed without incident and was rounded off by a pleasant family style meal carefully prepared by June. During the course of this Martin relayed to the youngsters the fact that school was being re-opened, and that they would be returning there in time for Monday classes. As anticipated this news was greeted with rather long faces, but when he went on to explain that meanwhile they could help him by doing a sort of ‘treasure hunt’ their faces lit up again. He told them that there could be something highly valuable concealed by his late uncle somewhere in the garden, and it would help him enormously if they could discover where it might be hidden. He was deliberately vague about what it was, merely suggesting that it could be a large box, and buried somewhere in the grounds. They immediately declared that they would not rest until they had scoured every inch of the gardens in an effort to discover this secret cache during what little time remained to them. Martin made them promise not to disturb anything that seemed in the slightest degree suspicious, and to plot on a sketch map the location of anything at all that might need ‘specialist’ investigation. The result was that as soon as they could decently do so they abandoned the house and sped off out into the grounds on their quest.

Leaving June to get on with a series of mysterious domestic tasks best dealt with without the dubious assistance of his inept hands, Martin returned to the study, and here he made a few phone calls, mostly to assure himself that business was running smoothly in his absence. It was whilst he was engaged on the last of these calls that his eyes alighted on his late uncle’s presentation stethoscope that he had placed on his desk shortly after coming across it amongst all the bric-a-brac he had been sorting through. Having completed the call, he sat the case in front of him, and gazed at it thoughtfully. Presently he opened it, and took the instrument out to examine it in greater detail.

As he had thought the first time that he had examined the stethoscope in any detail. The instrument appeared to be of good quality, and as far as he could tell had seen little if any use. He read the inscription once more, and again he wondered how something that so obviously was of value to the doctor had been found in with a miscellany of unwanted items in a box room. It didn’t seem to make sense, unless hands other than his uncle’s were responsible. He wondered if it had come to be in such a place by chance or by design. It went without saying that June hadn’t put it there. She was a meticulous housekeeper, as well as being an intelligent and scrupulous person. Even if she had found it abandoned somewhere in the living quarters of the house after the doctor’s demise, almost certainly she would have returned it to the study, or passed it direct to the solicitors. If she hadn’t put it up in the box room, who did? He suddenly recalled that when he had found it, unlike other things that surrounded it, it wasn’t coated in a fine layer of dust, nor did it betray any other signs of having been there for any great length of time. This suggested to him that it had been put there comparatively recently. But to his way of thinking anything deposited in that room recently would have been at the front of the room, and this most definitely had not been, and the box he had found it in was one that in contrast had obviously been there for some time. It was almost as if it had been deliberately concealed there.

It suddenly occurred to him that it could very well have been put up there deliberately by the doctor himself, yet why on earth would he do such a thing? He tried to fathom out the mental processes of a man he scarcely remembered and only knew through the eyes of others. He was by all accounts a logical, practical man, and on the face of it the action made no sense. There was other memorabilia lying around in the study; photographs, cups, shields and he like, so why was this particular item selected and effectively concealed? If he really didn’t want to keep it for any reason he could more easily have disposed of it than conceal it in a box-room.

Having opened the case and studied the stethoscope for a minute or so hoping for inspiration to strike, and then he eased it out of the case and looked at it closer. As far as he could tell it was exactly what it purported to be, a good quality medical instrument. There was nothing he could detect that gave him any clue as to why the doctor, if it was indeed him, had put it up in the box room where it became, intentionally or otherwise, concealed amidst a whole pile of miscellaneous bric-a-brac. But maybe that seemingly illogical act
was
the purpose? Perhaps he had wished it to be hidden from casual gaze, yet bound to come to light and excite interest if the property should be cleared? He had willed the property to his only nephew, so perhaps it had seemed highly likely to his uncle that sooner or later his heir would need to sort through the contents of that room? Did he hope that on eventually discovering the instrument, natural curiosity would make him examine the stethoscope with view to perhaps retaining it as a personal memento? Unlikely as it seemed, it was a possibility.

But what if he hadn’t found it? He ruminated on that, and then came to the conclusion that June, being the sort of person she was, would inevitably have found it sooner or later. The doctor knew that she had security of tenure of her flat, and he knew and trusted that she would continue to care for the house after his death until it was disposed of. Even if he had never gone to the house in person, she would almost certainly have supervised any clearance of the property, and sooner or later it would have come to light, and she would undoubtedly have ensured that it would have been passed on to him via the solicitors. It was all theory, yet he could think of nothing else to explain the situation. Even if his reasoning was sound, it still begged the question why?

There was absolutely nothing about the stethoscope that appeared to carry any particular significance, and he was reluctantly coming to the conclusion that he was yet again building a mystery out of nothing as he returned it to its case when he noticed that the lining of the box was uneven in the centre. He absent-mindedly prodded this, and his fingers felt something lying beneath the lining that was causing the unevenness. His interest aroused, he teased the silk up, and to his surprise he found inside a small key and a scrap of paper lying beneath.

Intrigued, he picked the key and the paper out of the box and laid them on the desk in front of him. The latter item was just half a sheet of cheap notepaper measuring about two and a half inches by one and a half in old imperial measurements. On this scrap, in neat tiny writing that he recognised as being his late uncle’s he read the following enigmatic words.

The answers sought for since you came

of how I lived and brought to die

of blood and sin and craven shame

beyond the leaves of Autumn lie

( Rhodes [WO 1] 5791)

He read the words again, and sat there looking at them in puzzlement. His first thought was that it was some sort of joke, yet it was so obviously his uncle’s writing, and nothing he had learned about the man had indicated that he was prone to practical jokes or even flights of fantasy. If it wasn’t a joke, was it some sort of message? Could it even be confirmation that what he had been feeling ever since he came to Springwater House was not imagination, but cold fact? Why just a few lines of doggerel that hinted vaguely at something unpleasant, and why hidden away in a garret along with a key that might relate to anything? Without question it had to be more than coincidence that the writing was concealed with a key. What on earth was it a key to? He picked it up and examined it closely. It was a small, flat, Yale-type key, and as far as he could judge, very close to being in pristine condition, which in turn implied a lock that had been rarely used. Most certainly it was not a key to any of the furniture or cupboards that he had seen anywhere in the house, and yet there was something vaguely familiar about it. Suddenly it struck him that he had once seen a key very much like it in the home of a friend; it was almost certainly the key to a small, inexpensive document-safe!

For reasons known only to himself his uncle had apparently concealed what was probably a safe-key along with a cryptic message inside the lining of the presentation stethoscope, and then hidden it away in the box room. The only reason Martin could think of to explain why his uncle would do such a thing was that he suspected that if or when he died, somebody he did not trust might come searching for something, and he didn’t want whatever it was found by the wrong person. In the event of his death the property came to his only flesh and blood heir, his nephew. It suggested that his uncle had worked on the assumption that his effects would be examined before being disposed of, and was gambling that the stethoscope would be discovered, scrutinised, and the cryptic message understood.

He looked at the writing again. The first line appeared to indicate that his uncle knew that the reader of the verse would almost certainly be looking for something, and the second could only be of interest to a few people, because as far as he was aware, it was only himself that had queried how he had died. His own investigations had already uncovered a strong suspicion that his uncle had been somehow involved in the old double murder, and to his mind there could be little doubt that the third line could well be a reference to this now largely forgotten crime, but what on earth was meant by the final words?

He looked at the subscription, ‘Rhodes [WO 1] 5791’. Was this a reference he needed to check out? He had the uncomfortable feeling that the answer was literally staring him in the face, and yet he was too blind to see it. One by one he ran the things through his mind that he had discovered and deduced since coming to Springwater House, and the more he thought about them, the more convinced he became that his uncle had been the unwilling accomplice in a terrible crime. It had preyed on his mind to the end. Even with his death, it appeared that he was seeking absolution by the only means he knew. From the time he had willed his estate to his nephew he had obviously hoped and planned that his heir should learn his secret and allow him at last to rest in peace.

A discrete tap on the door interrupted his train of thought, and moments later June came in. She had shed her apron, and was now dressed very attractively in the summer skirt and blouse he had seen earlier.

“I came to see if you would like a break for a cup of tea?” she announced tentatively, seeing that he was completely engrossed in something.

“Come on in, June,” he said as he glanced up. “You have appeared at exactly the right moment because I need your help. Come and tell me what do you make of this?”

He pushed the tiny scrap of paper over the desk towards her as she crossed the room and sat in the chair on the far side. He watched her as she studied it, and it dawned on him that their fates could be even more intertwined than he had first supposed. He felt instinctively that he was on the verge of discovering the secret of Springwater House and its late owner, and in so doing, the connection between his uncle, his housekeeper, her missing father, and thus himself. If he was right in the majority of his theorising, all they needed to do now was to resolve the riddle of the few lines of doggerel, match the key that accompanied it with a lock, and the answers they were both seeking would be revealed.

“Where did you find this?” she asked, looking up.

He showed her the stethoscope and its case.

“It was concealed in the lining,” he explained, “and to my mind there is no doubt it is my uncle’s writing, and this scrap of paper and the key may well provide us with what we both seek, if only we have the wit to figure out what the words mean.”

She looked at the paper again. “If it isn’t just a piece of nonsense,” she said at last, “I suppose the first line could equally apply to me as to you?”

“It’s possible,” he agreed “Only I’m more inclined to think it is aimed at me; it was to me that he bequeathed his property, remember?”

“And the second line, why ‘brought’? It’s an odd choice of word? I would have thought, ‘come’ would have been better?”

“I’ve wondered about that too. I know that as far as everyone else is concerned my uncle died of natural causes, but I confess I’ve had my suspicions almost from the beginning. We have already surmised that he was connected in some way with the double murder that happened all those years ago, we have even theorised about your father’s death, and who may have committed the crime. Perhaps he feared dying by the same hand?”

“I’ve an uncomfortable feeling you could be right,” she agreed thoughtfully as she gazed again at those enigmatic lines. “And if he was connected with that terrible crime, then I suppose it explains the third line, but what on earth are we to make of the last one?”

“Perhaps it means that your father lies buried somewhere in the spinney?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” she said dubiously, “but autumn leaves only lie there at the end of the year. It doesn’t make much sense in the middle of summer, does it?”