The Company She Kept (17 page)

‘I wouldn't say that, just sometimes, with the doctor. Even though Kitty didn't really care for her. Couldn't be doing with her myself. She must've been thick-skinned, for she used to come, all the same, invited or not, and Kitty would never turn anybody away. Liberty Hall here it was, in them days.' There was going to be no stopping her, once her memories had been released. ‘Oh, Flowerdew was different then,' she went on, ‘you should've seen it – should've seen Kitty! She was old then, mind, but lively. It set her up, having all them youngsters around her. It's never having had children of her own, I reckon.'

‘Can you remember the exact date when Mrs Wilbraham went back to Tunisia?' Mayo asked. ‘And why d'you think she did?'

There was a pause while Mrs Crowther did some calculating. ‘1979. Middle of August,' she said eventually. ‘And why? I don't know, but I expect she felt she'd been away too long. It had a kind of pull, d'you see? That was her life, really, it was what she loved, what'd made her and her husband famous. I do know she had some daft idea about being near him, she's never really got over him dying out there. It's forever Alfred this, Alfred that.'

‘What brought her back here, then?'

‘Better medical care, for one thing, her arthritis gets no better. I was glad to get back here, I can tell you! I used to wonder sometimes what we were doing out there. Too hot for one thing, and all that funny food – and the flies!'

‘Nowhere like home, is there, Mrs Crowther? But before you went away ... was there anyone else besides yourself and Mrs Wilbraham living in the house? Can you remember?'

"Course I can. Nothing wrong with my memory when it comes to folks – and there's been some right funniosities here from time to time, I can tell you!' Giving him a sideways glance, she added, ‘That Irena, for one.'

‘Irena? Who was she?'

‘Bron, that was her name, Irena Bron. Czech, she was. I'd have checked her!' She chuckled grimly at what was obviously an old joke. ‘Moody. And talk about a temper! Once threw a box of eggs from one end of my kitchen to t'other. Something I'd said upset her, about them nasty foreign sausages she used to cook, and dumplings I'd have been ashamed to give to the cat!'

Irena Bron. Yet another name to add to the growing list. Another who had been present that night when the spirits were conjured up? ‘Tell me what you knew about her, Mrs Crowther, about Irena Bron,' Mayo asked, and knew it was a question she'd been waiting for by the readiness of her answer.

‘Well, she wasn't as young as the rest of them, that's for sure. She'd never see thirty-five again, nearer forty, if you ask me. Dark, had a moustache. Some of these foreign women do, you know. Her father had worked before the war with Kitty and Dr Wilbraham – he was Kitty's husband that died – and when
he
died, this Bron chap, Irena came here and Kitty took her in out of the goodness of her heart. Wished she hadn't many a time, I dare say, for she was nothing but trouble, what with that nasty temper of hers and all.'

‘What happened to her?'

‘Went to work down south and good riddance!'

‘When did she leave?'

But at this point Mrs Crowther's deafness suddenly began to trouble her again. She didn't answer, busy gathering together the plates and mugs.

The light was switched on in the kitchen, though the central pendant with its single harsh bulb didn't achieve much in the way of illumination, except to throw the old woman's face into shadow as she moved from table to sink. Mayo thought she was older even than he'd thought, possibly nearer eighty than seventy, and he felt a reluctance to press her to remember things possibly painful to her. Then she turned round and smiled, and he knew that, in a way, she was welcoming his questions. Indeed, he was ready to hazard a guess that Jessie had probably never known for sure exactly what had happened, though maybe she had suspected, and would dearly like to have her suspicions confirmed now and her curiosity at last satisfied.

‘Who else used to visit about that time?' asked Abigail, pencil poised above the still almost blank page.

There'd been Sophie Amhurst, who came every day to work for Kitty, and Dr Freeman, who came three times a week regular as clockwork, and sometimes more on a social visit, bringing Angie, her shadow, with her. And that young lad that lived here for a while. Felix whatsisname?'

‘Darbell?'

‘That's it! Can't tell you much about him, mind. You want to ask Tommo, he used to help him in the garden.' Her face softened as she spoke the man's name. ‘Tommo would know more about him.'

I'm damn sure he would, thought Mayo. And about Irena Bron. But whether he'd tell what he knew was another matter. He pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘Thanks for the hot chocolate, Mrs Crowther, very welcome, and the parkin. It's a long time since I had any as good as that. You've as light a hand at baking as my mother, and that's saying something.'

The old woman was delighted. ‘Bless you, I could make it with my eyes shut! Would you like the recipe? It's no trouble.' Reluctant to admit them at first, she was now unwilling to let go of her unexpected visitors.

‘Save it for the next time we come, Mrs Crowther, I'd be delighted to have it,' Abigail replied, earning herself a beaming smile. Seemingly, Jessie accepted that there would be a next time without the idea bothering her.

‘You can go out by the front door,' she said, when at last she ran out of excuses to detain them. ‘Save you going all the way round the back. I'll come down to the gate with you and open it.'

Donning a large woven cloak-like garment reminiscent of a Berber rug, she hooked down a key from behind the door and motioned them to follow.

A baize-lined door with the baize hanging off it led at the end of a corridor into the hall, panelled in time-darkened oak, with a magnificent, though badly flaking, plaster ceiling. A wide, dog-leg staircase with carved newel-posts led upwards into impenetrable shadow. On the staircase walls gloomy ancestors gave each other unfriendly stares. The fungoid smell was even more pervasive here, with even stronger overtones of mice. A slight film of moisture overlaid the flagstones: there was unlikely to be a damp course and the deep wainscots were probably full of wet or dry rot. It was dismayingly cold.

All the charm of this house, Mayo decided as they came thankfully out into the clean, cold air, resided in its exterior.

As Jessie Crowther pulled the heavy door to behind them, Mayo stood looking at the lake. With its sapling-crowned island in the centre, banked by willows now dipping golden wands to the water, it ran almost up to the foundations of the house, with only a narrow flagged path separating the two. It was full of rank weeds, muddy and swollen, no doubt, from the recent heavy rains. The old boathouse at the far end seemed to be in total disrepair.

He remarked on the stuccoed extension tacked on to the end of the house, inquiring as to its function.

‘Oh, that's just Kitty's old workroom, full of old junk.'

Mrs Crowther pulled her cloak closer round her and toddled off down the drive at a brisk pace, leaving them to follow.

‘I've just thought on,' she said unexpectedly after she had unlocked the almost seized-up iron gates, allowing them to be pushed open enough to squeeze through. ‘It's always been in my mind how funny it was, the way Kitty upped and left here, just as soon as she'd got rid of that Irena. You'd have thought she'd have been thankful to stay here nice and quiet without her, wouldn't you? But no, the day after she'd gone she says to me, “Jessie, it's time to go back,” and within a week there we were in Tunis.' Her bright eyes were fixed unwaveringly on Mayo's face as she spoke. ‘Come again, when I've had time for another think. I might have remembered a bit more.'

What she remembered would depend on Kitty, her mistress, that was what she meant.

And Mayo said sternly that yes, they'd be back.

And what
he
meant was that it wouldn't be long before they were, and the next time it would be Kitty Wilbraham they'd see. He was beginning to feel that only then would he be able to accept the fact that she really was alive. Only this time, he'd come with another murder victim in mind. For if Kitty Wilbraham hadn't been killed, who had, other than Irena Bron? Unless they happened to discover that she too, like Kitty, was still alive.

‘It would fit,' Abigail said, ‘depending on how you read the last part of that letter.
“She would not have died if she had stayed away from England”
doesn't necessarily mean if Mrs Wilbraham had stayed in Tunisia. It could mean if Irena Bron had never left Czechoslovakia.'

‘It could,' said Mayo.

‘I don't mind having lies told to me, Abigail – well, not much, it's what I expect – but what I do object to is when they expect me to believe 'em.'

Abigail made sympathetic noises, though the predictability of the Great British Public's willingness to think that anyone who joined the police force was so thick they were asking to be lied to was almost monotonous.

Madeleine Freeman, when questioned again on the subject of the evening at Flowerdew, had coolly asserted that she'd completely forgotten that the woman Irena Bron had also been there the night they tried the table-tapping. She couldn't remember which firm in the City she had gone to work for.

Sophie Lawrence in her turn admitted that she hadn't wanted to talk about the evening at all, simply because it had seemed so childish and stupid in retrospect. Grownups, you know, behaving like schoolchildren.

Thomas, when pressed, also reluctantly admitted to being present, at least for part of the time. He'd walked out before they even started the bloody game, he said, and he was the only one Mayo believed to be telling the truth, on that point at any rate. As to the rest of it, he looked on the whole thing with a very jaundiced eye. ‘They're all lying their heads off, for some reason I haven't yet discovered – but don't let them think they can keep that up for ever! One of them will crack, sooner or later.'

Felix Darbell? None of them admitted to knowing what Felix had been doing with the rest of his life.

And then at last Dr Freeman had found her memory sufficiently revived to recall the name of the firm that Irena Bron had gone to work for in the City – which turned out to have gone into liquidation years ago. What, he wondered, had made her change her mind? It was a question which irritated him, like a piece of grit in an oyster shell, but producing no pearls.

The job of tracing the erstwhile company secretary fell to Farrar, who was happy to throw himself into it and who soon came up with the news that the secretary was an old fellow, now retired and living with his daughter near Warwick. ‘Handy,' Mayo said. ‘Get yourself over there, Keith, and see what you can learn from the old chap, if he's not too far gone to remember.'

But Norman Kington was very much in the here and now. He'd taken early retirement when his firm went bust and was even now only just on seventy, a sprightly, soldierly type possessing all his faculties, including an excellent memory, a taste for malt whisky and a willingness to share it. Farrar, alarmed by the size of the first slug he poured, reluctantly declined one for himself and confined his acceptance of refreshment to a cup of coffee made by Kington's daughter, while Kington himself told him that he remembered Irena Bron very clearly: first because she'd been the best candidate by far for the job and secondly because she'd never turned up for it.

‘She wrote us a letter, two days later, making apologies. Decided to go back to Czechoslovakia, so she said, and I confess I wasn't altogether sorry. Hadn't liked the look of her much at the interview, but she had damn good qualifications, better than anyone else, I'll say that for her. She made the right choice in not coming to us as it turned out – couple of years later the firm winked up.'

Farrar thanked him for his cooperation, left him to his whisky, and drove back to Lavenstock where, his mission accomplished, he was put on to what he saw as the menial task of ringing round the universities and persuading them to look up the name of Felix Darbell in their student admissions lists for 1979.

While he was still occupied with this, the object of his search was sitting in his office chair, which he had occupied without moving since his customary arrival time of eight-fifteen. A full workload was spread on the desk in front of him and he hadn't even started on it by ten, but sat unoccupied, doing nothing, staring into the distance, an unheard-of occurrence. To see a pile of papers he must get through, a list of meetings he must attend, were things which never in the normal course of events daunted or depressed Felix. It gave him a sense of importance, an identity without which he would have been nothing. His work was the only thing that had come to matter to him, that and the power it brought. Not the wealth, or the prestige, but the work itself. Not even Lorna came within miles of that sort of satisfaction. Especially not Lorna.

But this Monday morning was different from the rest. Some time during the sleepless hours of the previous night he had been forced to admit to himself that the situation had reached crunch point. It was borne in on him, more clearly than ever before, how miserably the events of fourteen years ago had blighted his life. He at last admitted that he had been reduced to an automaton, a zombie. He had lived under the shadow of those events and would do so until the day he breathed his last. Up to now, he had found it possible to live with himself by the simple expedient of believing he had expunged Kitty and all that had happened at Flowerdew from his thoughts, in the same way that Sophie vowed she had done. Unlike Sophie, he had not simply left it at that. He had a strongly self-protective streak that told him one day chickens might come home to roost and he had planned his life and his escape routes accordingly. It was the reason he lived as he did, kept his money in secret places, his affairs tied up tight as a drum,