Bleeding Heart Square (17 page)

By the middle of Tuesday morning Rory had already smoked the third of the three cigarettes which were, in theory, his ration for that day. He was typing yet another letter of application on the Royal Portable and trying to resist the temptation to light a fourth.

He had spent the weekend in Hereford with his parents and his sisters. Here the familiar rituals of his childhood continued to be observed, except all the participants were older than they had been. Despite the comforts of home--despite the freshly laundered sheets, the excellent leg of lamb for Sunday lunch, his father's Navy Cut cigarettes--there had been something unreal, even stultifying, about the weekend. He had been glad to get away, even though it was only to return to the uncertainties of an independent life with a failed engagement, dwindling savings and no prospect of ever earning a decent income.

He heard the muffled sound of the postman's knock, and movement in the house below. Then came footsteps on his own stairs and a tap on his door. When he opened it, Lydia Langstone was waiting outside on the landing. She was carrying a parcel and her face was slightly flushed from the exertion of climbing the stairs.

She held out the parcel. "It was for you. I thought I might as well bring it up."

"Thank you."

She turned to go, and then looked back at him. "Do you remember when you showed me that cufflink the other day? When we had lunch."

He nodded. "Of course."

"I happened to hear at the weekend that the Fascists have hired the chapel undercroft for another meeting."

"Really? When?"

"Saturday week. The first of December, I think. Apparently it's part of a big push to attract businessmen to the movement."

"By telling them the Fascists will shoot all the reds under the beds and make sure there will always be a market for British goods?"

"Something like that. Do you think it was Fascists who attacked you?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. I couldn't find anything else that supported the idea. The most likely explanation is that somebody just happened to lose a cufflink there and it had nothing to do with me whatsoever."

He thanked her again and said goodbye. He stood for a moment watching her as she clattered down the stairs. A strange, nervy woman, he thought, all bones and breeding like a racehorse. He went back into his sitting room, pushed the typewriter aside and put the parcel on the table. It was addressed to him at Bleeding Heart Square but he didn't recognize the writing. He cut the string with his penknife and pulled the brown paper apart. The paper was creased and with jagged edges, part of a larger sheet that had been used before.

There was another layer of darker brown paper underneath. The second layer wasn't secured in any way. He saw material inside, some sort of tweed. He pulled it from its wrapping and held it up.

It was a skirt made of blue-green Irish tweed, rather worn in places. Part of the hem had come down. A sheet of lined paper fluttered from the folds of the skirt and down to the floor. He picked it up. The enclosure looked as if it had been torn from an exercise book. It was a letter, without date or address at the head, written in round, unformed writing.

Dear Sir,

This was in Narton's cupboard. I reckon it belongs to Miss Penhow. I don't know how to find her or the lady it's addressed to, so maybe her niece had better have it for her. It's no good to me. I don't want it.

Yours faithfully,
M. Narton

Rory dropped the note on the table and picked up the inner packaging. Nothing was written on it apart from Mrs. Renton's name in neat, familiar handwriting.

Mrs. Renton?

Something blue protruded from the waistband of the skirt, an un-sealed envelope also with Mrs. Renton's name on it in the same handwriting. Rory removed the single sheet of notepaper it contained.

Morthams Farm
Rawling
Saffron Walden
Essex

April 22nd 1930

Dear Mrs. Renton,

As we arranged, I enclose my winter skirt for alteration. I think it has at least another year in it, perhaps two. Please take in the waist by three quarters of an inch. Would you redo the hem as well--as you will see, it is coming down. If the blouses are ready, please put them in with the skirt and give them to my husband when you see him.

Yours sincerely,
P. M. Serridge (Mrs.)

Rory took out his writing case and compared the letter with the sample of Miss Penhow's handwriting that he had found in the chest of drawers. There was no reason to doubt that they had been written by the same person.

He sat down at the table and lit a fourth and unlicensed cigarette. Mrs. Renton--what on earth had she to do with this? Leaving that aside, nothing in the letter suggested that Miss Penhow was planning to leave Morthams Farm and Serridge. Nothing suggested that there was any strain between the two of them, either. On the other hand, if Miss Penhow had been devious, the letter might have been designed to throw Serridge off the scent. Rory's mind followed the tortuous logic of this: but perhaps that implied that Miss Penhow expected Serridge to read the letter, and the further implication of that was that she had reason to believe that Serridge no longer trusted her. And then there was the question of how Narton had come to have the parcel. Rory could only assume that it had been taken as evidence when the police were investigating the disappearance of Miss Penhow, and that Narton had removed it for his own purposes after he had lost his job.

He smoked the rest of the cigarette. He folded the skirt and its accompanying letter in the brown paper and carried it downstairs to the first floor, where he knocked on the door of Ingleby-Lewis's sitting room. Lydia opened the door.

"Sorry to disturb you, but I wonder if you could advise me about this parcel." He shifted his position in order to get a better view, trying to establish whether or not Ingleby-Lewis was inside. "That is, if you've got a moment."

"Yes, of course." She stood back, holding the door open.

To Rory's relief, there was no one else in the room. It looked as if Lydia had been writing a letter. "Are you busy?"

"Nothing that can't wait." She moved swiftly past him, slipped her letter under the blotter and capped her fountain pen.

"What is it?" she said, looking at the parcel.

"It's a skirt. It's all rather odd." At that moment it occurred to him that he and Lydia had not talked properly for days and even then, at their lunch at the Blue Dahlia, he had said nothing about Narton. Lydia was looking at him with close attention, as if she found what she saw very interesting. He went on in a rush, "When we had lunch the other week, I told you something about Miss Penhow."

"I remember."

Still standing, they faced each other across the table.

"I didn't tell you everything." He paused, and wished that she would say something. "In particular, I didn't mention that I had been approached by a man called Narton, who's been watching this house for some time. He said he was a plain-clothes police officer and he wanted my help. Like me, he was interested in the Penhow case. He said the police hadn't been able to find any evidence that Serridge had done away with her, but they weren't satisfied."

"A little man, middle-aged, in an old tweed coat and a hard collar?"

"How did you know that?"

"I saw you together once in the Blue Dahlia."

"You're observant. You think there's any chance that Serridge might have seen us too?"

Lydia shrugged. "Not that I know of. Anyway, what happened?"

"He persuaded me to go to Rawling and talk to the Vicar. He said he couldn't go himself, or one of his colleagues, because the Vicar was a chum of Serridge's, and he didn't want to run the risk of Serridge finding out that the police were still interested. But then I happened to discover that Narton himself lived in Rawling, which was something he hadn't seen fit to tell me. The next thing was that I found a copy of the local newspaper in the dustbin downstairs when I was throwing out my rubbish." He wondered whether to mention the goat's skull but decided to leave that until later. "It must have been Serridge's. There was a stop-press item about a man who had died at a cottage in Rawling at the beginning of the week. It was Narton."

The silence in the big, cold room lay heavily over everything. He watched Lydia swallow. He wished he hadn't been such a fool as to mention this. She would blurt it all out to her father, who would tell Serridge. Or she would even tell Serridge herself, Serridge who might well be sweet on her.

"I think we'd better sit down," Lydia said. "Don't you?"

She sat down and waved him to the seat opposite hers. He laid the parcel on the table, dislodging the blotter in the process. Rory felt the muscles in his shoulders relax. He had been tense for a long time, he realized, though he had not been aware of it. The reason for the slackening of tension arrived in his mind a split second afterward: it was a relief to have told someone about Narton at last, even Lydia Langstone, a woman whom he didn't really know.

Shifting the blotter had exposed part of the letter that Lydia had been writing. Rory had just time to read the address, the date and the salutation of the letter:
Dear Mrs. Alforde
. Lydia pushed the blotter to the other side of the table, covering the letter as she did so.

Once again his muscles tensed. He hadn't been open with her, so why should he expect her to be open with him?

She was looking at him, her lips slightly parted. "How did he die?"

"While cleaning a shotgun."

"Which means it was probably suicide?"

"Yes. And there was something else," Rory went on. "Mrs. Narton said that her husband had been forced to leave the police force three years ago."

"Then why was he still so interested in Serridge?"

"I'm coming to that. I thought I'd go and see the Vicar again, see if he could help. It was lunchtime so I had to kick my heels for a time. I was in the churchyard and I saw a gravestone for Amy Narton, who died in 1931. She was the daughter. Then I talked to the Vicar, who more or less came out and said that Narton had been unbalanced by his daughter's death. She died in childbirth and nobody knew who the baby's father was. She had worked at Morthams Farm, but the Vicar saw no reason to believe that it was Serridge. But later I talked to the maid, and she told a rather different story. She had no doubt Serridge was responsible." He hesitated and then plunged on. "She'd found a photograph of Amy in the nude on a bicycle. Apparently that was part of his courting technique."

Lydia snorted with laughter. "Surely that's a joke? Please tell me it is."

"I don't think so. Serridge persuaded the village maidens that it was how smart ladies up in London learned to ride their bikes."

"Imagine it. Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon."

He smiled at her. "Rebecca thought he was keeping Miss Penhow a virtual prisoner at the farm, and that he had another mistress in London as well. A strange girl was seen at the farm just before Miss Penhow disappeared. And there were two other things which were even stranger. The first was that Serridge used to come to Rawling Hall--that's the big house near the village--before the war. So he knew the place already. And the second thing was even stranger, and I don't pretend to understand it. There were--some skulls, the skulls of animals, in the place where the maid was talking to me. Her nephew was with us, and they were his pride and joy. And it seemed one of them had gone missing. The skull of a billy goat."

Lydia stiffened. "With very long horns? Sort of swept back?"

"So you saw it too?"

"Yes. Or something very like it. It came in the post for Mr. Serridge. He opened it in here." She caught up with the implication of the word
too
. "But when did you see it? And where?"

"Last week. It was in one of the dustbins downstairs. Along with the Mavering newspaper that mentioned Narton's death."

"None of it makes sense, does it? Not if you try to put it all together. What will you do?"

Rory ran his fingers through his hair. "I don't know."

"And now Mrs. Renton? How does she come into it?"

"No idea. Have a look at the parcel. I suppose I should give it to Miss Kensley."

He watched Lydia reading the letters and examining the skirt. She looked at him.

"Why don't you show this to Mrs. Renton first? After all, it's addressed to her. See what she says--it can't do any harm. So when you give it to Miss Kensley, you can say you've done everything that you possibly could."

"All right. I'll ask her now. Thanks awfully. You've been very helpful."

She glanced sideways at him. "Not at all."

He picked up the skirt and the letters and went downstairs, leaving her folding the wrapping paper at the table. He knocked on the door of Mrs. Renton's room. There was no answer. He knocked again with the same result. He went back upstairs. As he reached the first-floor landing, Lydia came out from the little kitchen.

"No luck?" she said.

"She's not in." Rory's mind ran ahead to the rest of the day: he himself would have to go out, back to combing through the Situations Vacant boards in the public library. "It will have to wait. I need to go out."

"Would you like me to ask her about it?" Lydia said. "As it happens, I'll be in for most of the day."

"Would you? That's very decent. If you're sure it's no trouble?"

"Not at all. I want to see Mrs. Renton about some mending."

Rory handed over the parcel and Miss Penhow's letter. He continued upstairs, with Mrs. Narton's note in his hand. Lydia Langstone was really quite a good sort, he thought, despite the airs and graces and the cut-glass accent. Almost pretty too. She had, he thought, a trustworthy face. But perhaps that was wishful thinking, and what the devil was her connection with Mrs. Alforde?