The Death of Lucy Kyte (11 page)

‘Is that what you think happened?'

‘I don't know what happened, Miss Tey. All I know is that she changed. She never needed much company – just the house and her memories. She lived in the past, and those of us who were still living and breathing never seemed quite as real to her somehow. But it was different towards the end. She stopped seeing anyone, even the few friends she did have, and she got rid of the girl who used to help her out round the house.'

‘What girl?'

‘Someone came in from Stoke to do a couple of mornings a week for her.'

‘I don't suppose she was called Lucy?'

He shrugged. ‘I can't remember what her name was. But Miss Lark spur didn't trust anyone by then, not even me. There were times when she wouldn't let me in. I'd hear her talking to herself, but she wouldn't come to the door. And the ornament was the last straw. After that, I stopped trying to help. I wish I hadn't, but I did. Jenny and I had made light of the row over the pottery with the girls, told them that Miss Larkspur had made a mistake, and I went round to the cottage to set her straight. That was the last time I saw her.'

Josephine remembered what Hilary had said about things disappearing from the front room; only Bert was here to testify to his own honesty and an elderly woman in Hester's position would have been very easy to exploit – but somehow she believed him. ‘The last time you saw her alive, you mean.' He looked at her in surprise. ‘You found her body, Bert. You never said.'

‘It's not something I like to think about.'

There seemed more to his reluctance than a simple sorrow at Hester's death, or even guilt at having withdrawn his support when she needed help more than ever. Josephine stared at him, a man of an age to have fought, old enough certainly to have known grief in his own family, and wondered what was too painful to think about in the death of an elderly woman who had, by his own admission, found life too wretched to cope with. ‘My solicitor told me she died in her bed. He implied it was peaceful. Is there something I don't know?'

‘She wasn't in her bed. I put her there, but it's not where I found her.'

For a moment, Josephine was too surprised to speak. ‘Why on earth did you move her?' she asked, trying to keep any note of judgement out of her voice.

‘No woman would have wanted to be seen like that, especially not Miss Larkspur.'

‘Like what?'

‘You don't want to know.'

Whenever anyone said that to her, it was Josephine's instinct to dis agree. In this case, she thought more carefully, knowing that – once she had pursued it – she would have to live in the cottage with whatever she discovered. On the other hand, she also knew that her imagination would readily supply anything she chose not to hear, and that seemed the greater evil. ‘Please tell me, Bert. How did Hester die?'

He leaned against the car and looked back at the cottage, reliving the day in his mind. ‘She was upstairs, in that tiny room at the end of the house, burrowed under a pile of old clothes.' Josephine closed her eyes and fought back a wave of nausea when she remembered her only visit to that room – the touch of those clothes against her skin, the heavy, cloying smell of them in the darkness. ‘God knows how long she'd been there – a few days, I'd say. She was right in the corner of the mattress, curled up. It looked as if she'd pulled a load of stuff on top of her – clothes, newspapers, anything she could find.'

‘To keep warm?'

‘More like she was hiding from something. As if she'd crawled away to die, like an animal rather than a human being. I wouldn't have known she was there if it hadn't been for the . . . well, you know.'

He tailed off to spare her feelings, but his meaning was obvious; Josephine did not have to guess at how a body that had lain in a cottage for days in early summer might reveal itself. ‘Why were you there?'

In her shock, it was the only thing she could think of to ask, and it sounded more accusatory than she had intended. Bert didn't answer straight away, and she wondered if she had offended him. ‘The kids fetched me,' he said at last, his voice unnaturally even.

‘Good God, please don't tell me they found her first?'

‘No, not exactly. They just knew something was wrong when they went to the cottage. It was the anniversary of the murder, you see – the eighteenth of May.' Josephine didn't see at all, and Bert had to explain. ‘Every year, the girls would go to the church with Miss Larkspur and put some roses from her garden on Maria Marten's grave. There's no stone there now – the last of it was chipped away in the 1890s, but Miss Larkspur remembered where it was from when she first came to the village. It put everyone's back up, seeing those flowers there every May as a reminder of what had happened, but Miss Larkspur didn't give a damn about that and there was no harm in it. Lizzie and Vicky couldn't get enough of the story the way she told it, and there's nothing wrong with learning a bit of respect as a kid, is there?' Josephine shook her head. ‘So they went round like they'd normally do, not knowing things had changed. It wasn't their fault. Jenny and I had made light of the business with the pottery because we didn't want to upset them, and we hadn't really explained why they didn't see Miss Larkspur any more. We should have been more honest with them, but it was hard to know what to say. They knocked on the door and let themselves in like they always used to, but there was no one downstairs so they went up to the bedrooms.'

‘But they didn't look round?'

‘No, thank God. They swore to me that they'd only gone to the top of the stairs. But like I say, they knew something was wrong. There were flies everywhere, and places have an atmosphere when something like that happens – kids pick up on it as much as any of us. That was enough to stop them going any further. They ran straight home. They were both in tears when they got to me.'

‘So you went to see what had happened?'

He nodded. ‘It didn't take me long to find her. I knew I couldn't leave her there like that for anyone else to see. She never had any time for the local doctor and word soon would have got round. She'd have hated being humiliated like that with everyone talking about her, saying she'd gone soft in the head. No, I couldn't just leave her.' His voice was firm and definite, suggesting that he was still trying to convince himself that he had done the right thing; when he continued, Josephine noticed that he spoke matter-of-factly about what he had done, almost as if he were giving a statement, and never once hinted at his own feelings. She didn't blame him: the emotional impact of the experience was hard to imagine, and not something to be discussed with a stranger. ‘There was nothing of her,' he said. ‘She'd lost so much weight – I hadn't realised. I got her out as gently as I could and put her in her bed. She was in her night things anyway, so it looked right enough. Then I tidied up a bit and went for the doctor.' Josephine wondered why he hadn't done that straight away. It must have been obvious from what his children said that Hester had died, and it would have been more natural to fetch some proper help – or perhaps that was simply her own cowardice talking. Privately, she could not decide if what Bert had done had been an act of extraordinary humanity or something rather less heroic. He was still talking, but she had been too wrapped up in her own thoughts to listen. ‘I was just saying that I'd never have forgiven myself if the kids had seen everything,' he repeated. ‘That's why Jenny's so angry. She's cross with herself, really, for allowing them to go there at all. We both are.'

‘Does
she
know how you found Hester?' Josephine asked. The more Bert had talked, the more relieved he had seemed, and she sensed that this was a burden he had carried alone.

‘No, not exactly.' He looked uncomfortable at having shared something with Josephine that had been withheld from his wife. ‘I shouldn't have said as much to you, either. I'm sorry.'

‘Don't apologise. I asked you to tell me.'

‘Even so. You probably wish you hadn't.'

‘It's not that. If I'm wishing anything, it's that someone had been here to help.' She thought about all the people that Hester had known in her life, the names in her address book, the people who had come to remember her in Covent Garden. ‘Did she really have no one?' she asked. ‘No visitors from London? No old friends who came to see her?'

‘If she did, she never said anything to me. Before she lost her sight, she'd go down to London for a few days now and again, but I never saw anybody here. I think that all stopped when Walter died.' He looked at his watch and gave the car one last polish. ‘I should go, unless you need some help moving that stuff in the garage?'

‘No, thank you. The car can stay out here for now.' He seemed eager to leave and Josephine was in no mood to delay him. It was impossible to return to normal conversation after what had passed between them, and under different circumstances their hurried goodbyes might have amused her, like the embarrassment of lovers who regret their intimacy and can't wait to part. As he reached the gate, she remembered the fresh flowers in the guest room and wondered if Bert had been keeping them there as a mark of respect. ‘Have you been inside the cottage since then?' she called after him.

‘No,' he said, turning back to her. ‘I fixed the window from the outside. And nothing personal, Miss Tey, but I'm not sure I'd want to go in again.'

She watched until he was out of sight, then went reluctantly back into the house and poured herself a drink. For a long time, she sat by the fire in the study, instinctively retreating to the part of the cottage that was furthest from where Hester had died. Surrounded by the evidence of her godmother's vitality, she found Bert's testimony of the last few months almost impossible to conceive – and all the more heartbreaking because of it. ‘Soft in the head.' She remembered the phrase from her childhood; later, the reality of it in her grandmother's final years. Then, as now, the label did so little justice to the truth. Her grandmother had been much older than Hester – nearly ninety when she died – but she, too, had outlived her husband by several years. During that time, she had buried two daughters, the only girls in a family of seven children: Mary, her eldest, who had died of heart failure when she was little more than Josephine's age, leaving behind six children; and Josephine's own mother, killed by cancer just thirteen years later. Josephine remembered how frail and confused her grandmother had been at the funeral, destroyed by her grief for one daughter, sheltered from the death of another by a mind that could no longer cope.

But she had never been alone. When her own time came, she was living with her youngest son in Crown Street, next door to the house where she had raised her family, in touch with the children who remained. Josephine had visited occasionally during the last years of her grandmother's life, when she was back in Inverness and finding her feet again in the town she thought she had left for good. The small parlour at the front of the house was as cluttered in its way as this study of Hester's, although the memories were of a very different life: Jane Horne's audience had been her family, her stage a domestic one where she was loved rather than adored. It was diminished eventually to a single room which she never left, except in her mind; a small world, assembled in every sense from bits of the past, but it had been safe and she had been cared for. And she had never been alone. How must it have been for Hester, isolated not only from the life of the village but – through her loss of sight – from everything that had once been familiar, clinging to a house she loved but an old, contrary house that must have conspired with her blindness to make each day more difficult? How desperate was she to end her life in such a way, and how long had it taken her to die? Nothing left of her, Bert had said. Days without food and drink until she would have been too weak to change her mind, even if she had wanted to. Had she cried out towards the end, knowing there was no one to hear, or had the prospect of a reconciliation with Walter brought her comfort? Peace or fear in those last terrible hours, that was what Josephine would never know; she had been too afraid herself to ask Bert if the answer lay in the expression on Hester's face.

His revelations nagged at her conscience like a personal rebuke, although she knew in her heart that the one person from whom Hester might have accepted help was gone, another charge to lay at the feet of her mother's early death. It was Hester who had had to stand at her friend's grave, wishing that she could have done something. Once again, Josephine tried to picture her among the mourners, but she would not come when summoned, except as the pitiful wretch of Bert's testimony. Plenty of other images did, though. The coffin waiting in Crown Cottage, a house that Josephine had never lived in and didn't really know. She had left home by the time her parents bought it and she loved it now, but then it had been alien to her and she had longed for the small, ordinary house in Greenhill Terrace where she had grown up, and where she would not have felt like a guest at her own mother's bedside. Her father in a new suit which he would never wear again, fiddling constantly with his tie and worrying about the dress he had chosen to bury his wife in. Neighbours standing by the gate, kept at a distance by a request for privacy but stubbornly determined to pay their respects, pity and curiosity mingled on their faces. Her parents' friends telling her that she looked well, that England obviously suited her. It had been all she could do not to scream at them to stop, because she did not want to look well, or to be reminded of her absence.

The study was too quiet, the tears too close and too insistent to risk. Josephine stood up and made the fire safe, then took her glass upstairs. She had so looked forward to her first night back in this room, warm and welcoming now in the lamplight; she had imagined herself falling asleep over one of Hester's books, then waking in the morning to the sun on the fields and the soft smell of freshly cut hay. The door to the boxroom was firmly closed, just as she had left it, but it taunted her with the sadness it concealed and the nausea came again with the memory of crawling over clothes that had so recently covered Hester's body. Unable to be near it any longer, Josephine swallowed the rest of the whisky, ripped the sheets off the bed and went next door.