The Death of Lucy Kyte (41 page)

‘I'm sure Hester didn't mean to humiliate your brother. She told my mother that . . .'

‘Oh, I'm not saying she
meant
to humiliate him; I'm saying she was too selfish to care whether she did or not, or even to notice.' Hand on heart, from what she knew of Hester, Josephine would have found it hard to disagree. ‘Let me tell you what Cameron said to me one day . . . well, not said exactly; slurred would be more accurate. His speech never really came back, thank God, but you know what I mean. He said that Hester had had a lucky escape, that she would never have wanted to be burdened with him, not a woman like her. It was fine for a woman like me, though. How do you think that made me feel, Josephine? Did I deserve that? Could he not understand that it was he who had turned me into that sort of woman?'

For the first time, Jane Peck seemed to be genuinely seeking some sort of reassurance from Josephine, rather than using their common situation as a weapon. ‘I'm not surprised you were angry,' she said cautiously.

‘Angry doesn't even begin to describe it. It's funny, isn't it, but not even a writer like you can find a word for what I was.' The scorn was already back in her voice. ‘Cameron kept a photograph of Hester Larkspur by his bed until the day he died. I would have let it go then, you know – that's the truth. But when I was clearing out his things, ready to sell the house, I found a newspaper that he'd kept. It was just a small piece, but it said that Hester was about to star in a film. That was more than I could bear, I'm afraid. I suppose I'd felt better about it all since Walter died and she gave up what she loved. It seemed like justice of a sort. When things were bad with Cameron, I'd think of Hester growing old in that cottage and what utter loneliness would do to someone like her, someone who'd always been adored; how she'd cope when the fan letters began to dwindle and fewer people came to call, when she looked in the mirror and realised it was ridiculous to suppose that she would ever know passion again, that she would ever be needed. I knew how bitter she would become, and one of the worst things about bitterness is that it makes you paranoid. You stop trusting, and you see something tainted in even the purest friendship. You turn against everyone, and you end up being your own worst enemy.'

She had described Hester's gradual isolation so perfectly that it took Josephine's breath away. ‘I thought she might finally have learned that she couldn't just take what she wanted. But no. Hester was making a comeback, the centre of attention all over again, because Hester had to be loved, damn it. Hester's God-given right on this planet was to be loved.' Her anger had got the better of her at last, and Josephine noticed how tightly she gripped the arm of her chair, how the colour had drained from her face; for the first time, she was afraid of more than what she might hear. ‘And the casualty of that was never Cameron – he fooled himself right to the end. It was
my
life that Hester destroyed – my dreams, my independence, my right to love. I even had to give up my job in the end. Oh, I know you don't think it's much – I can see that in your face when you come into the office. But it's been everything to me – sanity, respite, money, and most important of all, self-respect. You see, I've never had much of that, Josephine. I've never turned heads. When Cameron was alive, I'd undress every night and look at my body in the mirror, touch myself just to imagine what it would be like to be loved. And in the end, I accepted that was all I would ever know.'

She ran her fingers over her breast, and Josephine could stand it no longer. ‘This is sick,' she said, getting up to go. ‘I don't have to listen to it.'

‘Of course you don't – but you will, because you want to find out what I've done.' She was right, of course, and Josephine returned to her chair, despising her own meekness. ‘I'll never forget that first visit to
your
cottage,' she said sarcastically. ‘I'd gone for some money, that's all. A one-off payment for everything I'd given up. When I knocked on the door, I expected to be greeted by the same old Hester, the one who thought she had me eating out of her hand whenever she came to the office; the one who so generously forgave me for my little outburst at the theatre. I suppose you know about that?'

Josephine nodded. ‘I went to see Tod Slaughter. He told me he recognised you at the funeral.'

‘Quite the little sleuth. Good practice for your books, I suppose. But anyway, this Hester was very different – frail, and all but blind. It shocked me, I have to say. She didn't know who I was until I opened my mouth, and then she tried to bluff her way through it, but I could see how vulnerable she was. There was no fight when I asked her for money, you know. I took it and left, never imagining I'd see her again – but then I thought about how easy it had been, and how little I'd actually got for all those years, so I went back, supposedly to apologise and to make sure that we parted on good terms. I knew by then that the money wasn't enough, though. I wanted Hester to suffer like I had. I wanted to make her life a misery.'

‘What did you do?' Josephine asked, dreading the answer but needing to know.

‘Oh, made her home a little less comfortable. Moved things around so that she fell over them – furniture in the house, statues on the paths in her precious garden, the rope to the outhouse. I took the lid from the kettle so that the steam would burn her. Small things, really – all easy and quick to do while I was using her toilet or making her a cup of tea. It's not as though she was watching me.'

‘Small things like taking the lid off the hotplate?' Josephine asked, remembering Rose's testimony to the burns on Hester's arms and allowing herself to imagine the agony they must have caused.

‘Exactly. And changing things round in the cupboard so that her food would be disgusting – salt for sugar, that sort of thing. It never occurred to me that she'd stop eating because of it.'

Josephine recalled the chaos of those cupboards when she had first moved in, the bleach and the ant powder next to the food. ‘It's a wonder she didn't poison herself.'

‘Isn't it? And it was such a shame about the dog.' She smiled, and Josephine longed to wipe it from her face. ‘But they were all things that could be put down to an old woman on her own, unable to cope. Hester needed someone to look after her, really, but I'd had enough of that.'

‘How long
were
you there, for God's sake?'

‘I came and went a few times – after all, Hester was effectively paying my rail fare and I had no responsibilities up here any more. It was nice to get out and see the countryside. But she went downhill so quickly. Too quickly, really.'

‘Did she know what you were doing?'

‘No, of course not. She blamed the girl who charred for her, or some children from the village. And this is going to sound ridiculous, perhaps, but she was convinced that the cottage was haunted.'

‘So you started on her mind, as well. She'd hear you moving about the cottage and it terrified her. Were you there the day Rose went round to see her?'

‘Yes, I was. She did me a favour, really, that girl. I was shocked when she just walked in. It made me realise that I'd been pushing my luck, that Hester wasn't quite as isolated as I thought. She was half out of her mind by then anyway, so I stepped things up a bit.' Josephine had no doubt that Jane Peck would be only too happy to be more specific, but she couldn't bear to hear the details. ‘In the end, the mighty Miss Larkspur was so frightened that she crawled into a hole like an animal. All I had to do was wait to make sure that she never came out. I didn't lay a finger on her.'

She wore it almost as a badge of pride, a mark of her own achievement, and Josephine hated her for it. ‘You didn't have to,' she said scathingly. ‘You frightened her to death.'

‘Yes, I suppose I did. It all goes back to that night at the theatre, now I think about it. There was a character called Daisy in one of the plays. She was an arrogant, insensitive little bitch, just like Hester, and she died of fright. Hester played the charwoman who found her body – not very convincingly, I must say – but I suppose that sowed the seed. Funny how those little things get stored away. It was called
The Person Unknown
, and I remember thinking at the time how appropriate a description that was for women like me.'

‘Jesus, you disgust me.' Josephine stood up and walked across to the window, torn between her urge to get away from the house and her need to retaliate somehow on Hester's behalf.

‘Do I, Josephine? I'm not sure I care. What matters to me is that Hester knew real fear before she died, the sort of fear that's been with me my whole life. You understand that, surely?'

She came over to join Josephine and stood quietly at her shoulder, their reflections side by side in the glass. The shadows of the room made each face pale and insubstantial, one a mirror image of the other, and the illusion of similarity gave Josephine a new strength, a determination to destroy once and for all the idea that there might be any sort of common ground between them. ‘Don't even begin to suggest that I understand what you've done,' she said, her voice low and steady. ‘You have no idea what real fear is. Anger, yes, and bitterness and regret, but we all have those. You're not the only person who's screamed against the unfairness of it all, who's longed to hurt the thing that's hurting them. But we don't do it – that's the difference. And neither of us has ever truly understood the fear that Hester felt in those last few hours, when she knew that her life was over.'

‘Don't we?' She searched Josephine's eyes, and it was all Josephine could do not to flinch and look away. ‘I do, and I'll admit that even if you won't. I understood it from the moment that Cameron had his stroke and they told me how serious it was, from that first night when I sat by his bed and watched him breathe my life away.'

Josephine could not speak for a moment. She remembered how she had felt as she sat by her mother's bedside during the final days of her illness, willing her to live, even though her face was contorted with pain and the morphia had ceased to make a difference. She had looked like a ghost under the sheets, a spirit who might drift away at any moment, and yet her hand had gripped Josephine's with a strength that would not have been possible but for her reluctance to leave her daughter. Josephine had clung to her – from love, yes, but also from a selfish fear of what this would mean to her own life, and she tried now to be honest with herself in the face of Jane Peck's accusation. She thought about the years that had passed since her mother's death, about her father's kindness and about the resentment that had faded, while the loss and the grief still had the power to engulf her, and she knew she had her answer. ‘There's nothing to admit,' she said, ‘because duty for me has
always
been about love. That's the difference between you and I.' For once, Jane Peck seemed silenced. Josephine had no appetite to continue the conversation any longer, but she needed to know everything. ‘After Hester died, you took her things and sold them,' she said, although this hardly seemed to matter now.

‘So what if I did? All that pious nonsense in the will about the important things in life not being of monetary value . . . that's easy enough to say when you've
got
money. What do you think it's like to pay rent for the house you grew up in, the house your father worked hard all his life to own?' She looked scornfully at Josephine. ‘You can afford to be your mother's daughter when your father owns half of Castle Street, taking money off tenants like me, and you sit there in a fine house at the head of the town, looking down on the rest of us like God on His cloud. What makes you so special? I've worked whenever I could, just like you, and this house should be mine now. Shouldn't I be allowed a little pride in this town after what I've done for my family? But no. Everyone talks, I know they do. Sometimes people don't see you quite quickly enough, do they? They open their mouths and the poison's out there, and it eats away at you. You know what that's like.'

‘Yes I do. So did Hester.'

‘But Hester could run away. What choice did I have?' She looked round the room, as if involving the house in a conspiracy to hold her prisoner. ‘You're right, though. I should have been more like her. Hester was the sort of woman who took whatever she wanted and was rewarded for it. Well, I thought I'd have a go at being
that
sort of woman for a change.'

‘And where has it got you? You might scoff about Hester and her ghosts, but it's Lucy Kyte who'll make you pay. What a stupid mistake to make, selling that diary. Did you honestly think you'd get away with it?'

Miss Peck stared at her as though she were stupid. ‘Of course I've got away with it. Do you really think I'd be standing here talking to you like this if I thought there was something you could do about it? If you repeat this, I'll deny it and no one will believe you. No one saw me at that cottage, and there's nothing to link me with any of those things, not even the diary. I was always paid in cash, and I never used my real name. Even if anyone were to identify me as having sold them something, they couldn't prove it was stolen.' They were Archie's words all over again, and Josephine's heart sank. ‘I'll just say that Hester gave them to me to make up for what happened between us. They weren't listed in her will, so who can say what her intentions were regarding them? I'll say they were a thank you for taking her place, for fulfilling her responsibilities.' She laughed, sensing that the upper hand was hers again. ‘Thank yous are important, Josephine. Cameron
never
thanked me. Does your father thank you?'

‘He doesn't need to.'

‘That's a no, then.' She pulled the curtains across the window and turned to face Josephine. ‘Twenty-five years I cared for that man. I washed him and fed him and emptied his bedpan, things that only a wife should do, and not once did he even look grateful. You don't know what that's like yet, of course – your father can still fend for himself. But how old
is
he, Josephine? In his seventies?' Josephine walked over to the chair and picked up her bag, but Miss Peck caught her wrist and held it. ‘Let me tell you how it was for me. It might help you understand what you've got to look forward to. There's a moment when the hatred takes over and you start to fight back. I got a little rougher when I moved Cameron, and sometimes I didn't hear him when he needed a bedpan. I ate my dinner in front of him, and put his down just a little too far out of reach. I found ways to humiliate him. I knew he was embarrassed when I washed him, so rather than chatting away to take his mind off it like I used to, I let him see me looking at him and I enjoyed his shame.'