Dying in the Wool (45 page)

‘I need to be up. I’ve to give a statement to the police.’

Plumping up my pillows, she said, ‘Let them wait. And I’m sending for the doctor.’

‘That’s quite unnecessary.’

‘Mr Sykes agrees with me on that. He says that a medical report might be required by the court.’

Then she told me I had a visitor. Only royalty and prime ministers give audiences from their beds. And when Mrs Sugden named my visitor, I felt like crawling under the sheets, but thought it best to get the interview over with.

Evelyn came in, carrying bright tulips from her garden. She placed them on the washstand and said that Mrs Sugden was bringing a vase.

‘How are you?’ she asked, with a sad, solicitous smile, as if I were recovering from a cold.

Mrs Sugden brought the vase, her face like thunder. ‘Shall I get rid of her?’ she mouthed from behind Evelyn’s back.

With my eyes, I said no to that. I would hear what Evelyn had to say.

Evelyn took over and arranged the flowers. She took a penny from her purse and dropped it into the vase. ‘The copper, you know. Tulips like it. It extends their life.’

She drew up a chair and sat by the bed. ‘Have you given a statement yet?’

‘Not yet.’

Mrs Sugden breathed heavy disapproval then left. I did not hear her footsteps retreat across the landing.

Evelyn leaned towards me. ‘They’re not sure that Neville will pull through.’

I was meant to be concerned?

‘Evelyn, he tried to kill me.’

‘You’re mistaken, my dear. I spoke to a lawyer last night. It was a tussle between you. You were going to fall. Neville caught you.’

I closed my eyes, not bothering to reply.

‘I’m sorry you had to step into this mess, Kate. I wish Tabitha hadn’t asked you. I wish … all sorts of things.’

She spoke as though I had been invited into an untidy drawing room and really it should have been swept and the ornaments dusted.

‘Evelyn, Neville Stoddard killed Kellett, and he tried to kill me.’

‘The lawyer said they wouldn’t be able to touch him for Kellett’s death – especially since they have Wilson and he’s confessed to it.’

‘Stoddard is a killer.’

‘No! It wasn’t meant to be like that. Neville was just trying to give Kellett a fright. He didn’t intend Kellett to die. The man had enough money to retire and live in style. Yet he wanted more, more and more. Neville thought that if he experienced a minor accident, that would give him a jolt. He’d realise it was time to give up blackmailing Neville about the bastard child. Neville was trying to
protect me.’ She spoke brightly, without an ounce of guilt.

‘When did you know, Evelyn, that he killed Kellett?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes, if you were an accessory.’ I was glad to have the support of the pillows, and shut my eyes. Go away. Go away. She did not.

‘Don’t go all legal on me, Kate. Accessories to me are gloves and a handbag.’

She leaned forward, the perfect visitor, her eyes brimming with concern. ‘You tripped. That mill can be a dangerous place.’

‘Go away, Evelyn. He tried to kill me.’

I expected her to leave. She stayed put, sitting like a demure schoolgirl, ankles crossed, hands resting on her thighs.

Perhaps I dropped off, hoping she would have vanished by the time I woke. It may have been for a few seconds, or half an hour, but when I woke, it all fell into place. I jerked forward, suddenly alert, knowing. My dream of Braithwaite with the scraps of ragged hospital blue uniform stuck to charred and bruised flesh came back to me. His skull was not grinning, but trying to speak.

‘It was you.’

Her mouth hardened. ‘What are you talking about? What was me?’

I reached for my glass of water. She handed it to me. I took a sip, and immediately wished I hadn’t, expecting she may have poisoned me.

I should have been speaking in a drawing room, surrounded by suspects, CID officers listening behind a velvet curtain, constables in an anteroom, ready to pounce. Instead, it was just the two of us, she so self-possessed, me with only the strength that comes from anger.

I propelled myself from the bed and stood over her.

‘You knew your husband planned to leave you, leave the mill. You wouldn’t speak to him, so he went to his cousin. Stoddard gave him something, for his neuralgia? For courage? He beat him up, told him not to be so stupid. He put him in the sidecar to fetch him home. Joshua escaped. That’s when the boy scouts found him.’

She gave a light mirthless laugh and looked beyond me towards the drawn curtains. ‘You have a vivid imagination.’

I held the back of her chair, and closed my eyes, seeing it all so clearly. That was why she was so concerned that Dr Grainger had come to my aunt’s party. She feared for what he might say. ‘You were at Milton House when your husband went missing from there. You saw him running across the fell and asked Dr Grainger to give you time to search. You went after him on horseback.’

‘And what if I did? What of it?’

The description of Joshua Braithwaite’s injuries had burned into my brain when I read the pathologist’s report. I moved away from the chair, better to see her face as I recited the litany: broken ribs, collapsed lung, fractured collar bone, broken arm, gash on the head.

‘Injuries inflicted by you, Evelyn. You trampled him.’

She gasped and a shudder went through her. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘What was it like?’

‘He’d turned mad. He drove his son away, poor Edmund, cornered into enlisting in the army. Then Joshua could be the young suitor, starting his life all over.’

‘It’s an old old tale, Evelyn. In most families adultery and loss of love doesn’t lead to murder.’

She clutched her arms around herself for a moment and hung her head. I thought she had finished. To make her start again, I said, ‘If I could interpret the injuries from the post mortem report, then a coroner could do the same. The evidence will be reviewed.’

I paced the length of the room, refusing to give in to the exhaustion that threatened to overwhelm me. ‘His right arm was broken. He’d raised his arm to stop you.’ The image came unbidden. Joshua Braithwaite, exhausted, turning to Evelyn, his arm raised in a supplicating gesture.

She looked up at me. ‘If I confide in you, you’ll understand. But you must say that what happened at the mill was an accident. Neville didn’t push you. You fell.’

‘Just tell me. I deserve to know.’

Evelyn spoke so quietly, I had to strain to hear.

‘When I caught up with Joshua on the fells, in that moment, it was just me and him, as if everything bad had slipped away. He was tired out from running, beads of sweat on his face, and great wet patches of sweat under his arms and on his chest. He gave his smile, his special smile. We looked at each other and I wanted to help him, I truly did. And then he said, “There’s been an explosion. I have to get to Agnes. I have to get to Low Moor, love.” I don’t know what did it. It might even have been that he still called me love when I wasn’t his love. It might have been the way he said her name. I struck out with the whip. He fell. The horse reared. There was no avoiding what happened next. I tried to rein back, but Rowan almost threw me. Some rocks scattered under his hooves and after he reared, he came down, trampling Joshua. I tried to control him. Joshua managed to move. The horse kicked him. When I dismounted, Joshua was lying there, in great pain. I told him I’d come back with help.’

I felt sick. After everything, I did not want to vomit and have her fussing over me. It would be too humiliating. ‘Don’t tell me any more, Evelyn. Talk to your lawyer.’

She raised her hands, palms towards me, as if she were an opera singer who wanted to stop the applause in order to make an announcement. ‘If I tell you, you’ll understand. You wouldn’t want to destroy Tabby, not after all the poor girl’s been through. Everything I did, I did for
the best. By the time I got back with Neville, and with Kellett, Joshua was dead.’

‘How long did you wait before going back?’

‘No time at all. I swear it was as fast as I could.’

‘And then?’

‘It was me who told Neville what to do with the body. Joshua had wanted to go to Low Moor. “Take him to Low Moor,” I said. I think I was hysterical by then. Kellett said nothing, waiting for Neville to make the decision. I just kept on and on – take him away, get rid of him. I don’t want to know any more.’

I sat on the bed. We faced each other, Evelyn white and tense. After a moment, she began again.

‘Kellett wouldn’t have anything to do with it, except for fetching the motorbike and sidecar, which he said he’d agreed to do for Joshua. Neville and I carried Josh down to the lane and put him in the sidecar. We did it together. Joshua got his last wish – to be taken to Low Moor, only not in the way he’d wanted. And it made a clean end, an unidentified body in the burning rubble of the explosion.’

I felt sick with revulsion. She wouldn’t look at me.

‘That doesn’t explain why Stoddard tried to kill me yesterday.’

‘He thought you’d work it out.’

‘You mean about your husband’s injuries?’

‘Yes.’

‘That I would think over the injuries in the post mortem report and know that they were caused by him being trampled to death. Stoddard thought I would ask why all the lining – bloodied from Joshua – had been cut from the motorbike sidecar.’

‘He only ever wanted to help me, and for the mill to prosper. If you give evidence against Neville, and he’s convicted – or even if he’s charged – the mill will collapse. Oh we say the looms are down because we’re waiting for yarn, or there’s a fault with the power, but the workers
know. They know that we prefer not to call it short time. We don’t want word to get around that we’re suffering hard times, like everyone else in textiles. You’ve come into a world you don’t understand, Kate. Neville is the mill. The mill is Neville. If he goes down, two hundred workers go with him – lose their livelihoods. Between them they have five, six, seven hundred children. Who will feed those children, Kate? Will you?’

She stood up and walked to the door, turning back to face me.

This was the moment when eavesdroppers should have sprung into action and arrested her.

‘I appeal to you, Kate. Say you were taking a photograph and stepped back too far. That you fell.’

The door opened. Sykes stood there, Mrs Sugden beside him.

Mrs Sugden hurried across to me and said, ‘Your mother’s just arriving. Please, get back into bed.’

‘The doctor’s here,’ Sykes said.

I waited until Mrs Sugden had taken Evelyn downstairs.

Sykes sat in the chair vacated by Evelyn.

‘What are you doing here, Mr Sykes?’

‘I stayed last night. Slept downstairs, just in case someone came calling.’

‘I hope you were listening at the door just now?’

He shook his head.

Evil sometimes wears a smiling face. Most people, me included, prefer to look only at the smile. The smile of evil would forever be that look of Stoddard’s as he tried to kill me. With a heavy heart, feeling like an agent of destruction, I told the truth in my statement to the police. Before Stoddard could be charged with attempted murder, he died in hospital from his injuries, escaping justice.

Before he died, he confessed to killing his cousin Joshua Braithwaite. He had acted alone, he said, and dumped the
body at the site of the Low Moor explosion.

I told the police the truth, but not the whole truth. What was it that kept me silent about Evelyn Braithwaite’s admission? Perhaps it was for Tabitha’s sake, or because of the lengths to which Stoddard had gone to protect Evelyn. Maybe it was because I wondered, if I’d been sitting in that saddle on that day, how I would have acted when the man I loved told me he wanted to be elsewhere. I believed her when she said it was an accident. Later, I wondered.

Did I do the right thing? Dad and Sykes and I talked it over. There would have been no evidence to link Evelyn to her husband’s murder. She had told me in the belief that I would not betray her, and in an attempt to make me exonerate Stoddard.

Along with the horror of what she’d done, a grudging part of me admired her for her sheer bare-faced fury.

In the second week of June I received a cheque for my services in searching for the whereabouts of Joshua Braithwaite, Esquire. The cheque came not directly from Tabitha but through her solicitor. She could not bring herself to speak to me, or write to me, and I didn’t blame her. The solicitor wrote that the cheque was from Mrs Hector Gawthorpe. So that answered one question. The wedding had taken place. The solicitor enclosed a handwritten note, which made me think that Mr Murgatroyd had not entirely given up on the idea of enticing me to be his client and writing my will. He said that the previously unmarked grave in Scholemoor Cemetery now bore a headstone commemorating Joshua Braithwaite.

He also said that Mr and Mrs Gawthorpe had sold the mill as a going concern. It was from Sykes that I learned Hector Gawthorpe had opened a car salesroom, and that Evelyn, her husband finally declared dead, was on an extended visit to the West Indies.