Hidden Depths (27 page)

‘I’m not sure who started it.’ Diane was looking through the glass at the trimmed lawn. ‘Someone in the street probably. Everyone here was very fond of Tom. I don’t think it was organized. At first there was one bunch of flowers. Then everybody joined in.’

‘Did anyone blame Luke Armstrong for Tom’s death?’

The woman looked up. ‘You’re thinking of Brian? After revenge?’

‘Your little brother drowns, you’d want someone to blame. Like you said, we all want that.’

She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t Brian. I’d have heard.’

Vera thought that was probably true. Besides, Brian Sharp would have kicked the Armstrong door down, battered Luke with fists and boots. He wouldn’t have charmed his way in with flowers.

‘Tell me about the Stringers,’ she said. ‘Your neighbours.’

Diane seemed surprised by the sudden change of subject. ‘Why do you want to know about them?’

‘Clive’s a witness in another enquiry. I’m just curious.’

‘Mary Stringer was like a mother to me when we moved here,’ Diane said. ‘Davy wasn’t around much and I was pregnant with Tom. She was on her own apart from Clive. She lost her husband in an accident. Clive wasn’t like either of my boys. He was very quiet. Always had his head in a book. No trouble. Not really. He was teased a bit as a kid, but Brian soon put a stop to that. We were almost like one family. Mary looked after Tom for me most days until he started nursery. I had my hands full with Brian and she was only on a widow’s pension. She needed the money and I was happy enough to slip her a few pounds. Clive loved having Tom around. Most lads wouldn’t have been interested, but for a few years they were like brothers.’

‘Did Clive ever meet Luke Armstrong?’

‘He might have done. Tom never said.’

Vera couldn’t think of anything else to ask and stood to go. Diane shut the door firmly behind her. Outside, Clive Stringer was standing next to her car. He must have left work as soon as his mother phoned him about Vera’s intended visit. He was wearing black jeans, a black polo shirt, black trainers. He had the sort of complexion which easily burns and his face was red, greasy with sweat. Vera could tell he’d stood there, fuming, getting hotter and crosser, waiting for her to return to her car.

‘You had no right bothering my mother.’

‘She didn’t seem to mind, pet. We had a nice pot of tea.’

‘Anything you want to ask, you can come straight to me.’

‘You look as if you could do with a cup yourself. Is there anywhere round here we could get a drink? Save bothering your mam again. Stand here any longer and we’ll start gathering a crowd.’

A gang of teenagers were slouching down the road on their way home from school and they’d already begun to stare. Clive shrugged. ‘There’s a caff on the corner’ He set off along the pavement leaving Vera to follow.

The cafe had set a garden table and chairs outside on the pavement. Any attempt to create a continental atmosphere was ruined by the smell of greasy burgers and stale cigarettes coming through the open door, but the pavement was in the shade now and they sat there anyway. Vera drank instant coffee, Clive a bottle of bright-orange fizzy pop. She thought again that he’d never grown up.

‘It can’t have been easy,’ she said, ‘growing up without a dad.’ As soon as the words were out she thought that was a patronizing thing to say, but in the short walk Clive seemed to have become calmer.

‘My mother’s never been easy,’ he said. He looked up with a sudden grin as if he’d made a joke.

‘She depends on you?’ Vera was feeling her way with him. One wrong word and she knew he’d clam up again.

‘There’s nobody else. No relatives. She’s not very good with friends. She makes demands on them, but won’t make any effort in return.’

‘She made an effort with Diane Sharp.’

‘Diane paid her. Besides Mam liked Tom when he was a baby. She could make believe he was hers. She didn’t like him so much when he was old enough to answer back.’

‘You never answered back?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I never got the hang of it.’ She expected him to smile again, but he seemed quite serious.

‘How did you get on with the Sharps?’

‘At one point they were like family,’ he said and Vera thought that Diane had said almost the same thing. ‘It would have been easy to get sucked into all that. You know, the stuff they were into. But the bird-watching came along and that was a way out for me.’

‘And another sort of family.’

‘Aye,’ he said, grateful that she seemed to understand.

‘Do you have any idea what lies behind these murders? The flowers. The water.’ Of all the people, she thought he might have. He had the sort of mind which could see the patterns in things. The question came out before she’d considered whether it would be sensible to ask.

He sat for a moment, his eyelids blinking wildly behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’

Felicity had assumed Vera Stanhope would collect Lily Marsh’s ring and was a little confused to find a young man standing at the door. He introduced himself as Joe Ashworth and, when she still seemed unsure, he showed her his identity card and explained, ‘DI Stanhope’s my boss.’ He could have been the junior partner in a small business. He was well mannered and engaging and she took to him at once. She realized then that she’d been foolish to expect an inspector to turn out on such a trivial matter.

Almost immediately afterwards, James arrived from the school bus. They were still on the doorstep and he ran past them into the house and into the kitchen, shirt untucked, trainers unlaced, ravenous as he always was when he got in from school. Even when they followed, he took no notice of the stranger and continued pulling biscuits out of the tin, talking with his mouth full about sports day. She wished he had given a better impression, been more polite. But Ashworth seemed to understand children and smiled at her over the boy’s head. He sat and made small talk as if he had all the time in the world.

‘Your husband says you’re the gardener in the family.’

‘I suppose I am. He’s very busy. And though he’s a botanist by profession, his real passion is birds. He’d much rather be out on the coast.’

‘We live on a new estate,’ Ashworth said. ‘There’s not much of a garden at all. My wife makes it pretty, though. She watches the makeover programmes on the telly.’

While he was chatting about his wife and daughter and the new baby on the way, Felicity thought what a
nice
young man he was and how she wished Joanna had married someone like that, instead of Oliver, who worked in television and hardly seemed to notice that he had a child at all.

‘Recently wor lass has got into making home-made cards,’ Ashworth was saying. ‘They had someone to speak at the WI about pressing flowers. Sarah’s started growing plants she can pick for pressing. She sells them round the village. She’ll do a one-off if someone wants a card for a special occasion. There’s not much profit in it, but she covers the costs and she loves doing it.’

‘Goodness! I wish we could attract some younger women to the Institute here. The average age must be about seventy-five and I’m the youngest by miles.’

‘Maybe you had the same woman as a speaker?’

‘I don’t think so. But all those talks on craft become a bit of a blur. I’m not really interested. Two left hands. Any spare time and I’d rather be in the garden. I’ll show you round later, if you like.’

James ran outside to play with the girls from the farm, but Felicity and Ashworth stayed in the kitchen to talk. She set the ring on the table between them. ‘Such a pretty thing.’ She smiled, confessed, ‘I was almost tempted to keep it.’

‘You’re sure it belonged to Lily Marsh?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘As soon as I saw it I knew it was familiar. It was only when I got back to the house that I remembered where I’d seen it.’

‘You didn’t notice Lily drop it?’

‘If I had,’ she said primly, ‘I’d have returned it to her.’

‘Of course.’ He paused. She thought he was more deliberate than Vera Stanhope, slower in his thought and speech. ‘I’m not clear how she might have lost it. Did she use the bathroom there? Take it off, perhaps, to wash her hands?’

She played back in her head the young woman’s appearance at Fox Mill. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, she went to the bathroom here in the house, before we went across to the cottage. Perhaps it had just come loose. If she’d lost weight since it was bought. . .’

‘Yes.’ He gave a doubtful little smile. ‘Wouldn’t you have heard it drop, then? Unless the cottage is carpeted?’

She was starting to lose patience. She wondered if she had been wrong about this young man. Had he taken her in with his stories of his wife and daughter? Was he trying to trick her? ‘There’s no carpet,’ she said more sharply. ‘Flags downstairs and wooden floorboards in the bedroom. Does it really matter? She must have dropped it. I’m handing it back.’

‘It might matter. If she was still wearing the ring when she left, it would suggest that she returned. We still don’t know where Miss Marsh was killed. You do see how important these details are now?’

Felicity felt suddenly sick. She couldn’t quite get to grips with what the detective was saying. ‘Do you mean she was killed in our cottage? That’s ridiculous. Impossible.’

‘I don’t think it’s impossible,’ he said calmly. He could still be talking about pressing flowers and the WI. ‘It’s not that far from here to where her body was found. We know it was her ring. We know it meant a lot to her. It was a present from someone very close to her. If we can find evidence that it was still in her possession when she left you, that would be significant, wouldn’t it? It would mean she came back. Probably on the day she was killed.’

There was a silence. Felicity realized she was staring at him, that she was expected to speak. ‘I really can’t remember if she was wearing the ring when she left me. But she was a stranger. Why would she come back? Do you think she’d changed her mind about renting the cottage?’

Ashworth ignored the last question. ‘Are you sure your husband had never met her?’

‘Of course. He told you.’ But while she was saying the words she was wondering if that was true. Peter knew nothing of
her
affair with Samuel. It was perfectly reasonable that he might have a life which was hidden from her. The idea was horrifying. How hypocritical is that? she thought. What right do I have to be jealous or hurt? But Lily had been so young and pretty. Of course there could be no question of her having an affair with Peter, who must have seemed an old man to her. This anxiety was ridiculous. Then she realized the detective was speaking again and she tried to concentrate on his words.

‘I’d like our crime scene investigators to look at the cottage,’ he said. ‘Just in case. You said you found the ring there this morning. Will anyone else have been in since you showed Lily round?’

‘I took Inspector Stanhope in at the weekend.’

He gave a sudden broad grin. ‘Her footprints’ll be distinctive enough,’ he said. ‘Those sandals she wears. The size of elephants’ feet. The CSI won’t confuse them.’

‘They won’t find any footprints!’ She didn’t mean to be defiant, but realized that was how she sounded and she couldn’t stop. ‘That’s what I was doing when I found the ring. I was cleaning. I brushed and mopped all the floors, scrubbed the work surfaces. It’s not worth bringing in your experts.’

He stayed very calm and looked straight at her.

‘What about bedding?’ he said.

‘I washed the sheets this morning. They’re on the line. I told you, you’re wasting your time. You won’t find anything.’

‘Oh you’d be surprised,’ he said, ‘just what we can find. You give us permission, I take it, for us to have a look?’

‘Of course.’ She knew it was too late to retrieve the situation. He must be convinced now that she’d cleaned the cottage to destroy any evidence that Lily had been killed there. ‘We’ll help in whatever way we can. We have nothing to hide.’

From the kitchen window she watched the drama unfold. He stood at the front of the house to make his phone call. He had his back to her and she had no idea what response he was getting. From his car he took a roll of blue-and-white tape. Had he been expecting this outcome? Had he brought it with him specially? He walked across the meadow and stretched it across the cottage door. She wanted to rebuild the rapport they’d had when he first arrived. Should she go out to him, offer him more tea? But she could tell he would consider it an intrusion. They might own the house, but this was his territory now.

He walked back to the drive, sat on the bank where the crocuses and snowdrops grew in spring and waited. He brushed the pollen and grass seed he’d picked up in the meadow from his trousers. His phone rang. She couldn’t hear it from the house, but she could see him answer. A sudden grin. Triumphant. More scary than when he’d been so cool in conversation with her. She thought she should phone Peter at work, warn him what was going on, but when she dialled his direct number at the university there was no reply. The raucous call of a cuckoo came from the kitchen clock. It was six o’clock. He would already have left. She struggled to remember what she had planned for supper, but the thought slipped from her mind and she returned to look out of the window.