Grave Matters (6 page)

‘The Burmanns are special, aren’t they?’ Patrick said.

‘Yes, indeed. Published in Holland in the 18th century and never been reprinted – I see there’s a set of Ovid here in four volumes, and the
Satyricon
of Petronius – get these for me, I beseech you, Patrick.’ Bernard Wilson read eagerly on down the list, his eyes alight behind his thick pebble glasses, and his bushy black beard twitching.

‘The owner hasn’t decided yet whether to break up the collection or deposit it with some bookseller complete,’ Patrick said.

‘It would be more profitable to sell off individual items through us and our colleagues, and then dispose of the rest
in to to,’
Bernard said. ‘We could pay a fair price – Thornton’s would advise.’

‘True enough. I’ll do my best,’ Patrick said.

‘These Loebs and Teubners aren’t of much value – but it’s a chance to replace missing items. I should think the whole library would be worth quite a lot of money,’ said Bernard.

‘I’ll tell the owner,’ Patrick promised. ‘Leave it to me.’

He went happily back to his rooms and had time to write telling Ellen of this reaction and put the letter out in the box for the messenger to mail before his first pupil of the day arrived.

After lunch his telephone rang. It was Jane.

‘You’re not teaching, are you, Patrick?’ she asked at once.

‘No. It’s all right. What’s up? You sound fussed.’

‘I am. Two things, one good, one bad.’

‘Let’s have the bad one first,’ said Patrick. It couldn’t be Michael or Andrew; she’d be frantic and unable to see good in anything.

‘It’s Mildred Forrest. The one you met, the little one, Amelia’s friend.’

‘What’s happened to her? Is she ill?’

‘She’s dead, Patrick. It’s in the paper today, a tiny paragraph. I noticed it by chance.’

‘You mean in the obituary column?’

‘No. In the home news section, tucked away, just a few lines. She had an accident. Patrick, she fell down the stairs of the British Museum.’

There was silence on the line.

‘Patrick? Did you hear me?’ Jane demanded.

‘Yes, I heard. I was just rendered speechless,’ Patrick said.

‘It shocked me too,’ said Jane.

‘Which stairs? That entrance flight? Surely that wouldn’t kill her?’

‘It might, at her age. But it wasn’t there, it was inside. I think it must have been that imposing staircase that rises up out of the entrance hall on the left, you know. I suppose she had a heart attack. You said she’d got a weak heart, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, she had.’ He remembered how breathless she had been, tripping along beside him in the garden of Mulberry Cottage. ‘I suppose that must have been what happened. How dreadful, though.’ Patrick paused. ‘Jane?’

‘Well?’

‘It seems to me that too many people have been falling about the place lately.’

‘I thought you might think that. But it’s sheer coincidence. Two elderly ladies, who happened to be friends.’

Jane did not know about Carol Bruce’s minor tumble.

‘She lived somewhere near the Cromwell Road, she told me so,’ Patrick mused. ‘Her address might be in the telephone directory.’

‘I doubt it. Didn’t she have just a bed-sitter? Try Ellen, if you want to know more. She’ll be sure to have heard what happened, won’t she?’

‘You mean you actually want me to stick my nose in?’ Patrick asked, unable to believe the evidence of his ears.

‘Well, she was a nice old thing. I’d like to know what happened. I don’t suppose there’ll be any more about it in the paper.’

‘There’ll have to be an inquest,’ Patrick said.

‘One of those policemen friends of yours would tell you about that,’ Jane said. ‘If Ellen can’t, I mean.’

‘True enough. I’ll see what I can discover,’ Patrick said. ‘Now, what’s the other news, the good bit?’

‘I’m pregnant, Patrick. I really am, this time. It’s all set,’ Jane said, and her whole voice changed. ‘I didn’t tell anyone except Michael until it was quite safe. Isn’t it wonderful?’

‘How marvellous, Jane. I am glad. Take care. Don’t get all in a fuss about poor Miss Forrest and upset yourself.’

‘I won’t. In fact I was resting, feet up, you know, all relaxed, when I read it in the paper. Otherwise I’d have missed it.’

Jane, longing to provide Andrew with a brother or sister, had had two miscarriages and begun to lose hope.

‘So you knew that day when you came to the dentist. I thought you looked rather smug.’

‘Don’t be wise with hindsight. I’ve been being very careful, no dashing about, but everything’s all right now.’

‘I’m so glad, Jane dear.’

‘I thought you would be, but you needn’t start clucking like a broody hen yourself. You get on with ringing up Ellen. Do you know where to find her?’

‘Of course I do. We’ve been in touch about Miss Brinton’s books.’

‘Oh, have you, indeed? That’s nice. Keep it up. And tell me what happens – some of it, I mean. The part about poor Miss Forrest.’

‘I will. Old ladies do have heart attacks, Jane. She did seem fragile. Probably she just chanced to have hers in rather an unusual spot.’ Patrick decided to ignore Jane’s oblique reference to any dealings he might have with Ellen.

‘I wonder what she was doing in the British Museum,’ Jane said.

‘People do go there, dear. I sometimes do myself,’ said Patrick.

Ellen supplied the answer to this question.

‘She often went there in cold weather. It’s warm, and you can sit comfortably for ages gazing at things and no one disturbs you,’ she said. ‘And there’s food and a loo and all that, laid on. It saved her heating bills. She lived in a rather grim little bed-sitter. That’s why she loved going down to Meldsmead and particularly for as much as a whole week, like she’d just spent there. It was free, there was food in tins already there to eat up, and she felt by listing the books that she was earning her keep.’

‘Was she as hard up as all that?’ Patrick asked.

‘Mm. I don’t suppose she’d taken out any insurance scheme of her own while she was working, so she had to dip into her savings. And until this year she’d always gone abroad – I expect she had to economise pretty rigidly to find the cash for that.’

After Jane’s telephone call, Patrick had rung up Ellen and arranged to meet her for dinner the following evening. He had a tutorial and a lecture during the day and could not go up any earlier; in any case, she would have been free only in her lunch hour. Now they were dining in rather a pleasant small restaurant not far from Covent Garden; the atmosphere was tranquil and the tables were far enough apart to allow some degree of insulation from the conversation of others.

‘Poor Milly. Of course it was a heart attack,’ said Ellen, toying with her smoked trout. ‘She was flaked out after sorting all those books. I was afraid it might be too much for her. Some of them were pretty heavy tomes, and she dusted them all while she listed them. She should have spent longer doing it.’

Patrick had already discovered through his friend Detective-Inspector Colin Smithers that there would be no inquest on Miss Forrest. The autopsy had shown heart failure and multiple fractures. Her little bones must have been as frail as those of a sparrow.

‘The awful thing was,’ Ellen went on, ‘that I was there.’

‘What do you mean? In the British Museum with her?’

‘In it, but not with her. I was late, and she was dead when I got there. They were carting her out to the ambulance. I didn’t realise who it was at first.’

‘Do you mean you were meeting her?’

‘Yes. She’d asked me to. We were going to have lunch together, just a snack, you know, in that subterranean place. I was to meet her in the hall at the foot of those stairs she fell down. I suppose she’d spent the morning upstairs somewhere among the drawings or something.’

‘Did you often meet her there?’

‘No. We’d never done it before. I knew she spent hours in museums and galleries and things because Amelia used to meet her in them. That’s how I knew about her being hard up and all that. Amelia used to stay in a private hotel in the Cromwell Road, when she came up to London – Milly hadn’t got room for her, but it was always called “staying with Mildred.” I didn’t know her all that well; we’d met a few times of course. She missed Amelia dreadfully. I think she felt her last link with her own generation had gone. I suppose she was still suffering from the shock of it.’

‘I expect she was.’ Patrick looked across the table at Ellen. She was looking very pale tonight and there were shadows under her eyes. ‘Did she have any particular reason for wanting to meet you?’

‘She had something to tell me. She said I was right about Abbot’s Lodge. That’s all she’d say on the phone.’

‘What could she have meant? Do you think it was about its reputation, or what you said about feeling the atmosphere there to be hostile? You told me that when we were alone in the garden but I suppose you’d mentioned it to her too?’

‘Yes, I had. I – the firm, that is – had been trying to find a house for the Bruces for ages, and I was very keen to get something that would be just right for them. I told Valerie and Mildred I wasn’t altogether happy about Abbot’s Lodge.’

‘What do the Bruces think about the house’s reputation?’ Patrick asked.

‘They just laughed about it,’ Ellen said.

‘You told them?’

‘I had to. I couldn’t let them buy it without knowing about it. I’d got to know them quite well during their search. My boss would probably slay me if he knew I’d tried to put them off it. It’s not the way to sell houses.’

‘Well, the Bruces have been all right so far, haven’t they?’ Patrick asked.

‘I suppose so.’ Ellen sounded doubtful. ‘Carol twisted her ankle that afternoon we were there, do you remember? And she’d put her foot through the floorboard earlier. And David said she’d scratched her arm on a rusty nail in the cellar.’

David had said so, had he? And when had he told Ellen that?

‘Maybe she’s just accident-prone,’ he said lightly. ‘You’ve been down again, have you?’

‘Yes. I collected Milly the weekend before last, while Val was away in Denmark on some job. She lets me use her car if she’s out of the country. Then I met her at Heathrow last weekend and we both went down to Meldsmead.’ Ellen took a sip of the excellent claret they were drinking with their pheasant. ‘We went out to drinks in the village on Saturday evening – people had heard the Bruces had moved in and wanted to be friendly. When we all left, their car – the Bruces’, I mean – had a puncture.’

‘That smooth BMW? What a pity,’ Patrick said.

‘It wasn’t David’s car. It was Carol’s Lancia. It’s rather unusual, isn’t it, to have complete flats like that? When you’re parked? More often tyres go down gently, don’t they?’

‘Well, yes. But nails and things do lie around,’ said Patrick. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean that a ghost from Abbot’s Lodge followed the Bruces down the road and slashed the tyre. Where was the party?’

‘At the Bradshaws’. He’s a market gardener who lives down the lane near the church.’

Patrick’s chatty friend from the pub.

‘Was it a good party?’

‘Yes, I suppose so, as these things go,’ said Ellen. ‘It was prompt of the Bradshaws to ask them so soon.’

‘Meldsmead must be a friendly place.’

‘It is, fairly. Of course, it’s so small that any newcomer is an object of curiosity. And Abbot’s Lodge has been empty so long that I should think everyone was extra eager to inspect the Bruces.’

‘What’s Mrs. Bradshaw like?’ Patrick asked. ‘I’ve met him.’ He had already told Ellen about his visit to the Meldsmead Arms, the day they met.

‘Very efficient,’ said Ellen. ‘She must be a great blessing to Mrs. Merry – the vicar’s wife. She helps with things in the village, bazaars and so on. Denis was in the Army, he took up market gardening when he retired. I suppose Madge got used to running things when they were in the Army, organising the soldiers’ families and so on. I imagine that still goes on.’

Patrick felt sure it did.

‘What do you do at weekends if you’re not at Mulberry Cottage?’ he asked her.

‘Sometimes I stay in London. Sometimes I go home. I’ve already told you I get on well with my family,’ she said.

‘You seem to expect me to be surprised,’ said Patrick mildly. ‘Even some undergraduates like their parents, oddly enough. In any case, I should think you have few foes.’

For some extraordinary reason, as he looked at her, he longed to quote Byron and tell her that she walked in beauty. There was some magic, ethereal quality about her tonight. No female had ever had this effect on him before. He took a stern grip on himself, lest his lunatic emotions be reflected in his face.

‘The next time someone’s down at Mulberry Cottage I’d like to come over and talk about the books,’ he said. ‘Our librarian is very interested in a lot of them.’

‘You could come almost any time,’ Ellen said. ‘I’ve got a key now, and Valerie says I can go there whenever I like for the moment. She’s going to do it up, but it’ll take ages to arrange about a grant and all that.’

‘Would your aunt part with the books individually? She could sell the whole lot to some bookseller, but it might pay her to dispose of them separately, and some of my colleagues would be very anxious to get hold of certain ones.’

‘You told me in your letter,’ Ellen reminded him. ‘I’m sure Valerie would let any of your colleagues take their pick before selling the rest. There hasn’t been time to ask her, since you wrote. But I think you can take it she’d agree.’

Patrick knew that Bernard would be eager to grab the plums from Miss Brinton’s library at the first opportunity. The difficulty would be to avoid having to bring him on the expedition to collect them.

‘May I come and pick out a few fairly soon?’ he asked. ‘Is there a chance that you’ll be going down there before long?’ He did not want to discuss the books with Valerie; he wanted to inspect them with Ellen.

She shrugged.

‘I’ve no plans for next weekend. And the garden should be cleared up before the winter,’ she said.

Patrick would get a few titles out of Bernard instantly. Then he could take some stalling action. It would be very pleasant to prolong negotiations through the winter weekends; Homer by firelight, with Ellen: what could be more alluring?