Sins Out of School (5 page)

Jemima'd been a shy, miserable child once, too, but she'd gotten over it. She beamed when she saw someone her age. The children moved in entirely different circles and had never met, but Jemima immediately went over to talk. Miriam shrank back, but her manners held. She allowed Jemima to talk in her rather toneless voice, and if Miriam whispered her replies, it didn't make any difference to Jemima.

I escaped to the kitchen to take care of last-minute preparations, leaving Alan to explain Miriam's presence. I knew he would be tactful and say no more than anyone needed to know. One of the reasons Alan rose to the highest ranks of the police force was his talent for diplomacy.

The afternoon went better than I had dared hope. Miriam said little and ate less, but Jemima chattered happily, with mouth and hands. We all caught up on everyone's doings, and Inga did not, thank heaven, go into labor. When Alan excused himself for a few minutes, everyone but me supposed it was for the usual reason, and I deliberately refused to catch his eye when he returned.

The children were excused as soon as they had finished eating and played together happily. Miriam had apparently adapted to Jemima's deafness. The cats, who dislike noisy children, had always put up well with Jemima, and Miriam was also quiet, so after a time Sam approached her with a typical Siamese yowl and asked to be petted. I happened to be watching. Miriam, startled by the almost-human cry, cringed back, but Sam persisted, coming up to her ankle and sniffing delicately. She looked at the cat then with interest and, I thought, some longing, but in the end put her hands behind her back. “I can't,” she whispered, and then looked around as if ashamed to be seen even talking to a cat.

The adults were still lingering around the table when the doorbell rang. I hoped it would be Miriam's mother coming herself to pick up the little girl, but it was Mrs. Beecham. I stepped out onto my little front porch and closed the door behind me.

“Any news?” I asked softly.

“Quite a lot, actually, and none of it good. They're keeping Amanda in custody overnight. I'm going to ring up our solicitor as soon as I get home, see if we can't winkle her out somehow. It's absurd! Amanda no more killed anyone than I did! How's Miriam?”

“Doing pretty well, considering. But what are you going to do with her? She can't go home—to her house, I mean, with no one there.”

“No, she's coming home with me. She's stayed with us once or twice before, so she'll be comfortable, and we'll work out something for tomorrow. It was really good of you to take her in today.”

“A pleasure,” I said, only somewhat insincerely. “But she'll be happier with someone she knows, I'm sure. Come in.”

We got Miriam bundled back into her coat, and I insisted that Mrs. Beecham take a package of turkey and several pieces of pie. “I have way too much, and you have an extra mouth to feed.”

“But not for long.”

I said nothing. It seemed to me it might be for very long, but I didn't know the facts, and an unpleasant truth can wait.

Miriam was polite to the end. “Thank you very much for my dinner, Mrs. Martin. And I'm sorry I didn't play with the cats, but Daddy wouldn't like it—wouldn't have liked it.” I thought that would bring fresh tears, but her voice remained steady. “And please say good-bye to Jemima, and tell her I'm sorry she was so wicked that God punished her by making her deaf. I'll pray for her to repent. Good-bye.”

And as I stood there with my mouth open, she walked sedately to the car, her hand in Mrs. Beecham's.

A
T
least neither Meg nor Richard had been close enough to hear. Both of them had tempers, and I hated to think of their reaction to Miriam's twisted little bit of theology. Shaking my head, I went back inside and assumed a cordial attitude toward my remaining guests.

Unfortunately I've never been much good at hiding my feelings, no matter how hard I try. Somehow my friends got the idea that I'd love to be rid of them. They began to make the usual excuses and preparations for leaving. Nigel and Inga promised to let me know the instant anything started happening. Meg and Richard were profuse in their thanks, and hinted that they might also have some news soon in the baby department. Jemima thanked me in sign language and taught me a new sign, apparently the digital equivalent of “s'aright, mate.” Tom and Lynn were the last to leave. Tom enveloped me in his usual bear hug, and then held me at arm's length and looked at me critically. “You're up to something, D. I can always tell.”

“If I am, I'll tell you when the time's right.”

“And not
one
moment before,” said Lynn, giving Tom a poke in his well-rounded stomach. “Come on, nosy. The traffic getting back to London is going to be
horrendous
.”

Jane stayed behind.

“Right,” she said when everyone had left. “So?”

The question was addressed to Alan. He replied with a sigh. “Not good. Not good at all. Dorothy, my love, why don't you make us a fresh pot of coffee? I think we could use a little stimulant.”

I made it extra strong to counteract the amount of food we'd consumed, and the champagne we'd had with it. When we had heavy white mugs of restorative in front of us, he gave us the worst.

“I talked to Morrison; it's his case.” Chief Detective Inspector Derek Morrison, who had been Alan's right-hand man when he was chief constable, was still a pillar of the force. “It's about as bad as it can be. Doyle died at home, sometime last night. They can't get closer to the time until they've done the postmortem. Mrs. Doyle is no help with the time. She says she came downstairs this morning and found him on the kitchen floor. He was lying facedown, a kitchen knife in his back.”

I made an involuntary noise. Alan looked up. “Nothing,” I said. “It's all right. Go on.”

“The knife was not in the body when the police came. Mrs. Doyle says she couldn't leave it there, could she, not all messy. John liked the kitchen to be tidy. She told Morrison that as though it were a complete explanation for why she took the knife, washed it well in soapy water, dried it carefully, and put it back in the drawer. She took it out of the drawer and gave it to the SOCOs when they asked—sorry, Scene of Crime Officers.”

I nodded.

“Of course, they'll find the blood on the knife. It's almost impossible to wash all of it away. But the only fingerprints, now, will be hers. Not only that, she had, for good measure, moved the body—‘Well, it was lying in the middle of the floor, wasn't it?'—covered it with a sheet, and scrubbed the floor.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head.

“And to put the absolute lid on it, both doors to the house were locked when the police arrived. Mrs. Doyle insists they were that way when she came downstairs, or at least she hadn't touched them, and there are no keys except hers and her husband's. His was in his pocket; hers in her handbag.”

“Spring locks?” I asked in a last-ditch effort.

“The back door is. The front door is a dead bolt that locks only with a key from either side. So yes, a murderer could have left by the back door and it would have locked behind him, or her. But Mrs. Doyle says the house was always kept locked up, and that Mr. Doyle was not in last night by the time she went to bed, around midnight. He was at a church meeting of some sort. She helped Miriam with her homework and then, after the little girl went to bed, stayed up late grading papers. She says she was very tired when she went to bed and didn't hear her husband come home.”

“She didn't even know that he didn't come to bed?”

“They have separate rooms, it seems. One of the bedrooms is divided to make tiny rooms for Amanda and Miriam, and Doyle had the other one. She was quite shy, talking about that, Derek said. A married woman in this day and age; it's almost beyond belief. At any rate, if she's telling the truth about that meeting, and it'll be easy enough to check, we can find out when he came home last night, or near enough. But as for the rest of her story, it's so thin as to be nonexistent.”

“She hasn't admitted to killing him, has she?”

“No. She keeps on denying everything and sticking to what she said at first. She's asking us to believe that someone came home with her husband, someone he trusted enough to let him—or her—into the house very late at night, and this person then stabbed him in the back—making so little noise, mind you, that neither Mrs. Doyle nor the little girl, who the mother says is a light sleeper, heard a thing.”

We drank our coffee and considered the matter. Finally Jane said, “Motive?”

“Oh, she freely admits that she hated her husband and isn't sorry he's dead.”

Jane nodded thoughtfully. I gathered she was somewhat familiar with the Doyle ménage.

Alan went on. “She says, and I quote what Derek told me, ‘Perhaps now Miriam and I can have a life.'”

I took a deep breath and let it out in a gusty sigh. “It doesn't seem very likely, does it? For either of them.”

We washed the dishes rather silently. There didn't seem to be much more to say about the Doyle family tragedy.

I slept badly that night, though I was very tired. I couldn't stop thinking about that repressed, unhappy woman, and that oddly sweet little girl with the warped religious views. What was going to happen to her if her mother went to prison for murdering her father? Surely there must be some family somewhere, grandparents or aunts and uncles or someone. She needed to be looked after, loved, weaned away from the bleak credo in which she had been raised.

No, I had no right to say that. Her beliefs were her own business, repellent as I found them. What on earth had she meant by that “vanity” remark when she was setting the table? That pretty things were evil? I certainly didn't agree with that. Trivial, frivolous perhaps, but not evil. And the idea that God would punish a child with deafness was not just misguided, but positively diabolical. No, darn it all, she needed to be set straight.

Maybe her mother didn't believe all this guff. Mrs. Beecham had seemed to think the heavy-handed religious training was all the father's doing, and now he was gone. Maybe her mother could guide her into a gentler sort of creed.

Maybe her mother killed her father. Very possibly she did. Gentle?

Despite the comforting warmth of my husband and two cats, I tossed and turned in the bed and fell asleep only toward morning.

I was restless when I finally made myself get out of bed. The day after Thanksgiving, back in Indiana, was always a big Christmas-shopping day. There was no such tradition here, of course, and I didn't feel much like shopping, anyway. The house was clean and there were leftovers to last us several days; no need to cook. Alan, absorbed in the book of memoirs he'd begun to write, didn't need or particularly want my company. I'd given up my volunteer job at the Cathedral gift shop, but I felt at loose ends. Maybe I'd go over there and see if they needed any help. Even tidying up or restocking the shelves would help with the restlessness that possessed me.

The truth, of course, was that I didn't want to think about the Doyles, and I couldn't seem to think about anything else. That poor child. That poor woman. I wished I could help, somehow, but I barely knew either of them, and it would be foolish for me to become involved. Alan and I were too old to look after Miriam, and as for any other sort of help—well, the police were thoroughly competent to investigate a case that seemed all too simple. I refused even to think, this time, about poking my nose into the matter.

I changed from slacks into a sweater and skirt, to fit in with the Englishwomen at the Cathedral. Women in England still don't wear slacks much for any except the most informal occasions, a habit I find uncomfortable. But I conform, most of the time. I told Alan where I was going (I doubted he heard a word I said), put on my hat, and stepped out the door.

It was a beautiful day, more like October than nearly December. I'd do a little gardening when I came back from the Cathedral, I decided. My gardener, Bob Finch, had for the last couple of weeks been on one of his periodic alcoholic binges. I knew when he sobered up and came back to work he'd cluck over the state of my garden as if it were all my fault. Pulling a few weeds would make the place look better and me feel better. It is, I've found, very hard to be depressed when your knees and back are aching and there's dirt under your fingernails and sweat is dripping into your eyes.

My house is the last on my street, right up against the wall of the Cathedral Close, and it's by far the oldest in the neighborhood. It was built in the early 1600s, after the Cathedral (then the Abbey church) fell into private hands upon Henry VII's dissolution of the monasteries. The house was meant to be a gatehouse for the manor house that had been built on the Abbey grounds. As the wheel of history turned and the Abbey property came back into the possession of the church, the new Close was laid out, the new wall built, and the house that centuries later was to be mine was divorced once and for all from the Cathedral. But it is the nearest house in all the town to the great church, and the bells, sounding overhead at frequent intervals, have become so much a part of my life that I scarcely hear them unless I'm listening for them.