The Death of Lucy Kyte (10 page)

‘No. I was working away at the time, and I didn't get to see much theatre.'

Miss Peck shuddered. ‘It was a horrible little play – a whole evening of horrible little plays, if I remember rightly. There was a scene in it where a young girl had her eyes gouged out with a needle. Not my cup of tea, at all.'

‘And the woman?' Josephine prompted.

‘Oh yes. She came up to us and I thought it was Miss Thorndike she wanted to speak to, but then she started asking me about the cottage.'

‘What did she want to know?'

‘Oh, what was going to happen to it, who was going to live there now.' She saw the look on Josephine's face and was quick to reassure her. ‘I didn't mention you, of course. I thought at the time that she was just one of Miss Larkspur's fans, come to pay her respects, but I suppose there could have been more to it.'

‘What was she like?'

‘Quite ordinary, really. About my age, perhaps a bit younger; dark haired and slim, smartly dressed, but not extravagant. I wish I could remember her name, but I'm not sure that she even introduced herself.'

‘It's probably not important,' Josephine said, getting up to go. ‘I'm sure Lucy Kyte would have made herself known if she'd been there. This woman is far more likely to be a fan, as you say, or even someone from the village who was curious about her new neighbour.'

‘Yes, I suppose so.' She smiled. ‘Anyway, I'll tell Mr MacDonald your news and let him have these right away.'

‘Thank you. I'm going back to Suffolk in a few days' time, so if there's anything else I think he should see, I'll bring it back with me.'

‘Excellent. Enjoy it, and do get in touch if there's anything we can help with.'

Josephine thought about the long days of tidying and sorting that still lay ahead of her at Red Barn Cottage. ‘Be careful what you offer,' she warned. ‘I might just take you up on it.'

7

The first thing Josephine noticed when she arrived back at Red Barn Cottage was that someone had repaired the study window. She looked at the new pane of glass, unsettled by the idea of strangers coming and going in her absence, and wondered if it was churlish of her to feel that all Bert's acts of kindness were a little ‘off '. It had to be Bert – his wife was the only person who knew it needed fixing – and she should have been grateful, but that in itself irritated. Perhaps the row with Hester had stemmed from the same thing: feeling ever more beholden to someone for unsolicited favours might easily have exasperated her godmother sufficiently to break off all contact. She would probably never find out, but whatever had gone on in the past, Josephine knew that if Bert's wife was aware of his latest good deed, her name would be mud in the Willis household.

She got the fire under way in the range and laid out some good intentions of her own on the table: a few carefully selected research books for the biography of Claverhouse. Set against old photo albums and boxes of Hester's correspondence,
The Scots Peerage, The Despot's Champion
, and learned volumes by Barrington, Morris and Sanford Terry looked even less inviting than they had at home, and she wondered how long it would be before one of them was opened. Hours of travelling had made her too restless to read, so she left the cottage and set out over the fields, eager to see how the countryside had changed without her.

It was one of those soft September evenings, where the distinction between summer and autumn is lost. The dark green of the woodland was broken by the first telltale threads of gold, and the harvest was almost complete: sheaves of corn stood abandoned, like the forgotten tents of a retreating army, and the industry of the day – an industry to which the whole cycle of the year was geared – had been replaced by stillness. Chance rather than purpose led Josephine towards Maria Marten's cottage, but, when she realised where she was, she lingered by an obliging gap in the trees, her interest in the case intensified by the somewhat lurid account she had read while back in Inverness. James Curtis had used all the tricks of his profession to lift the story to the status of legend, but neither the sensationalism nor the moralising could completely obscure what was, essentially, a very human tragedy, and Josephine looked in fascination at the house Maria had left one midday in May to walk to her death. The cottage was shabby and neglected, and it occurred to Josephine that the handful of pristine houses around the village green was hardly typical of Polstead or of the area in general; Suffolk was an agricultural county whose fortunes had declined with the industry, and she had noticed from the train today how few of its farm buildings looked prosperous or even well kept. Like Red Barn Cottage, the house stood as it was built, a typical labourer's dwelling with nothing to distinguish it except the woman who had once lived there; it was modest in size, four rooms or five at the most, and Josephine could imagine how claustrophobic it must have been for Maria, living not only with her parents, siblings and a son of her own, but with the weight of her family's disapproval and the shame of her situation. No wonder she had aimed high, to use Hilary's phrase.

The cottage was surrounded by an orchard and large gardens, which – according to Curtis – Maria had loved and tended. Feeling a little like one of the crowds who had flocked there after her body was discovered, hoping for a glimpse of her family or leaving money for her orphaned son, Josephine turned away and left the house to its past. She had been out longer than she had intended, and when she reached the brow of the hill and looked down on Red Barn Cottage it was bathed in evening sunlight. The scene reminded her that the murder site had got its name from a trick of the Suffolk light, a strange red glow that often fell on the barn at sunset. Needless to say, on that night in 1827 the effect was said to have been particularly intense, as if the violence inside the barn had stained the very fabric of the landscape; cloud and a light drizzle would hardly have done justice to the folklore. All the same, as Josephine looked in awe at the scorching sun, setting the fields on fire with a blaze of colour, she could easily believe that Nature had seen to the destruction of the Red Barn herself.

She walked on, absorbed in the beauty of the evening, and only when she was within a few yards of the cottage did she notice a familiar figure leaning nonchalantly against the gate, smoking a cigarette. ‘You chose the right day to come back, Miss Tey. Lovely, isn't it?'

‘Bert,' Josephine said, hoping for a tone that was neither too welcoming nor too hostile. ‘How did you know I was here?'

‘Your chimney. Elsie saw the smoke and happened to mention it.' She looked up at the undeniable signs of life from the range and realised that she might as well buy a flagpole and raise the standard as soon as she arrived. ‘I've brought you these,' he explained, holding out a set of keys. ‘There wasn't room in the garage, so I've tucked her just behind for now.'

Josephine opened the gate and walked over to her gift. It was an old Austin Chummy – open-topped, bright turquoise and very much a ‘ladies' car', as Bert had said. Her heart sank. She would be conspicuous enough in any vehicle – at most, there could only be three or four cars in the village – but no one would miss her in this. ‘I don't know what to say,' she murmured truthfully. ‘It's really too kind of you.'

‘I'm glad you're pleased. I wouldn't try getting back to Scotland in her, but she'll run you about all right down here.' He grinned. ‘Most of the time, anyway.'

Josephine was touched by the genuine pleasure on his face at being able to give her something precious of Hester's. She looked again at the highly polished car, which had obviously received hours of attention, and entertained the thought that the problem lay with her. If she were honest, much of her antipathy towards Bert stemmed from that uncomfortable exchange with his wife, and he wasn't the only one who came and went as he pleased; it seemed to be the country way, and she shouldn't blame other people for her own cynicism, or expect them to behave differently because of it. ‘Thank you,' she said, more sincerely this time. ‘I appreciate it. The window, too. It's good of you to take the trouble.'

‘Oh, don't worry about that. It only took me five minutes and it was the least I could do. Jenny told me she gave you a bit of grief over it.'

‘Something like that, yes.'

‘She didn't mean anything by it. She's just a bit overprotective about me and the kids.'

Josephine couldn't quite see why she posed such a threat to the Willis family, but she let it drop in favour of what she really wanted to know. ‘Your wife seemed very resentful of Hester and the things you did for her.'

‘She thought Miss Larkspur took it for granted.'

‘And did she?' Thinking about what Hilary had said, Josephine would not have been surprised to hear that Hester had made the most of Bert's loyalty, or that she had relished the ability to create a spark of jealousy in another woman, even in her later years.

‘It never seemed like that. I only ever did what I was happy to do.'

He spoke defensively, as if wary of reliving an old argument with a new adversary. Josephine hesitated before pushing him, but in the end her curiosity got the better of her. ‘What did you and Hester fall out about, Bert?'

‘Jenny told you that?' Josephine nodded. ‘It was something and nothing, really – the sort of thing you look back on later and wonder why you let it happen. Miss Larkspur accused Lizzie and Vicky of stealing something from the cottage. She said she heard them downstairs in the house one morning, and later that day she discovered that an ornament was missing.'

‘And they denied taking it?'

‘Of course they did. They don't lie.' Josephine's face must have expressed a doubt in the absolute honesty of children, because he added: ‘I know they were telling the truth.'

‘What was it?'

‘One of those pottery figures of William and Maria. Miss Larkspur loved all that stuff. She collected anything to do with the Red Barn. Beats me why people will pay a fortune to remember a murder. I could think of much better things to spend that sort of money on if I had it.'

Josephine was inclined to agree with him. ‘I suppose it's a piece of history,' she said unconvincingly. ‘And it meant a lot to Hester personally. She'd devoted so much of her life to the story.'

‘I suppose so.'

His resentment of the item that had caused so much trouble was only natural, Josephine thought; such an accusation would have hurt more than his pride. ‘I don't understand why Hester would say something like that, though.'

Bert shrugged. ‘Oh, I don't know. She wasn't herself those last few months. Everything had got on top of her. The business with her eyes came from nowhere, and she wasn't coping with it as well as she thought she could.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘She made me promise not to tell anyone, but I don't suppose it matters now.' Bert took a handkerchief from his pocket and busied himself with a mark on the car's paintwork that was invisible to Josephine. ‘Miss Larkspur was losing her sight.'

The admission came as a surprise to Josephine. ‘She told you that?'

‘Only because she had to. There were a few signs early on, I suppose – she'd put salt in my tea instead of sugar, and one day she insisted I stop and have a bit of dinner with her and there was a bar of soap in the bottom of the soup bowl.' He smiled, and Josephine was struck by the warmth that seemed to have existed between the two of them; never in a million years would she have imagined a friendship between an actress and a garage mechanic, but that probably just showed how little she knew about either. ‘They were easy mistakes to make and I didn't think anything of it,' Bert continued. ‘Then last Christmas I took her a photograph of Lizzie in her school nativity. She was thrilled to have it, but she kept talking about the wrong girl, pretending she could see the picture when she obviously couldn't. It's not as though Lizzie was hard to spot – she was the Virgin bloody Mary.'

Josephine smiled. ‘That
is
about as big as roles come.'

‘Anyway, I challenged her about it and she admitted that she'd been having trouble with her eyes, but she swore me to secrecy. She'd been to a doctor in London, apparently, and there was nothing they could do.'

‘Nothing at all?'

‘That's what she said.'

‘So that's why she gave you the car.'

‘Yes. She knew she wouldn't be able to drive it any more.' He patted the bonnet affectionately. ‘They made quite a pair, those two.'

‘I can imagine.' Things made more sense to Josephine now: Hester's withdrawal from the film, the piles of unopened post, the chaos of the scullery, and the clock with no glass, time gauged by touch rather than by sight. ‘That's why she was thinking of leaving,' she said, more to herself than to Bert. ‘She knew she wouldn't be able to cope.'

‘Leaving the cottage? I didn't know that.'

It surprised Josephine that Hilary had known this and Bert had not. ‘It makes sense, surely?'

‘It seemed to me that she clung to it more than ever. She always told me that when she and Walter first moved here, they vowed they'd be carried out and I don't think that changed. She was obsessed by the place, and the more frail she became, the more she wanted what she knew.' That made sense, too; certainly, a great deal of Hester's will had been about the cottage, and that did not smack of someone who was ready to leave it. Perhaps Hilary had been mistaken, or had automatically assigned to Hester the intentions that she herself thought sensible. ‘It might have been better if she
had
left,' Bert said quietly.

‘Why?'

‘It didn't do her any good being here on her own, while everything she loved faded. She couldn't read or write any more, and the beauty of the countryside – well, it was a memory to her by the end, not a reality, and memories fade, too, don't they? Whenever I came to visit her, she'd ask me to tell her what I could see, how the year was changing. You wouldn't think you could find two people more different, would you?' he asked, taking the words out of Josephine's mouth. ‘But we shared that, at least – every inch of this place was precious. It was the cruellest thing that could have happened to her, losing her sight. I think she could have coped with anything else.' He looked directly at Josephine for the first time and she was moved by his sadness. ‘In the end, she lost the will to live. I've said that so many times over the years, but I didn't really know what it meant until I saw it in Miss Larkspur. She stopped eating properly or taking any care in how she looked. She let the house go, and herself along with it. All the joy had gone out of life.' It was what Josephine had sensed the first time she had walked into the cottage, and she knew exactly what he meant. ‘It's enough to drive anyone out of their mind.'