The Death of Lucy Kyte (6 page)

The scullery was dark, even with the back door ajar. Over the years, the climbing rose had been allowed to cover the window, making it impossible to open the casement or to see anyone approaching the cottage from the track to the road. Josephine rejected several lamps before finding one with some oil left in it, but she persevered in her search because the gloom was depressing. It would have to be used sparingly, because there were only stub ends in the candlesticks and she could not rely on being able to find replacements, but she did not intend to spend long in this part of the house and it would see her through a cursory investigation of the cupboards and, if she was lucky, the makings of some sort of meal; after that, she could retreat to the study with a fire for company and worry about everything else in the morning. As soon as the lamp was lit, she wondered if ignorance had perhaps not been better after all. She had not expected the floor to be clean – the stickiness and crunch of sugar underfoot had told her as much – but she was unprepared for the volume of ants and other insects that it seemed possible to squeeze into a Polstead square inch. In the absence of any other interest, nature had set about taking the cottage back, and nowhere more vigorously than in a damp patch on the outside wall, where a family of slugs seemed so at home that Josephine was tempted to ask them where they kept the tea. Shuddering, she forced herself to open the nearest cupboard door and was surprised to find it piled high with tins and packets. There was no order to the arrangement, and nor were the supplies limited to food items: tomato soup sat alongside weedkiller, corned beef next to furniture polish, and she eventually found the tea caddy hiding behind a tub of ant powder. She checked to make sure the tea was what she thought it was, and emptied the ant powder onto the floor.

The cups and plates from the dresser were dirty and stained, and she knew as soon as she looked at them that the first kettle of hot water would not be wasted on tea. As she piled the crockery into the sink ready to wash, she noticed the marks of age and use and smiled when she remembered what John MacDonald had said: if the kitchen sink
was
what Lucy Kyte wanted from the cottage, she was welcome to it. She chose an unambitious meal from the newer-looking tins, and allowed herself to be lured back out into the garden. It amazed her, as it did every year, that summer passed so quickly, slipping through her fingers into August long before she felt she had made the most of its beauty. The dense canopy of woodland was reassuring, though, its leaves still tightly stitched together, its green a youthful contrast to the hedgeless acres of corn. The persistent call of a wood pigeon seemed to deepen the silence as she opened the garden gate and walked out into the field to look back at the cottage from a distance. A thin pencil line of smoke rose leisurely from one of the chimneys now, and Josephine wondered why that small gesture of something restored should hearten her so. She had a long night in a strange house ahead of her; no bed to speak of, tinned ham for supper and a whole house to clean before she could even begin to make sense of Hester's past. If she had known the extent of what awaited her, she might never have got on the train; now she was here, she had rarely felt more content.

3

Josephine woke early to a morning full of sunshine, a bright, no-nonsense day that matched her mood. She had slept like the dead, despite the inadequacies of her makeshift bed, but the crick in her back and neck soon brought her to her senses: however reasonable her reservations about the bedrooms, she could not continue to behave like a nervous guest in her own home. While the kettle began its leisurely journey towards boiling, she went upstairs and stripped both beds, not allowing herself to look too closely at anything, then took the bundle of laundry outside. The washhouse was at the back of the cottage next to the lavatory, and the path to both was marked by a rope at waist height – a practical gesture for which Josephine had been grateful when she ventured out reluctantly the night before. She loaded the sheets into the copper and made several trips to the pump, vowing to be more lenient with Mrs McPherson the next time her laundry came back with something missing or damaged.

The water would take some time to heat – a country life, it seemed, involved a lot of waiting when you were new to it – and she took her tea out to the garden to see what had been missed the day before. The state of the land belied the years of work that had gone into making it beautiful, and she wondered if Hester had had any help, or if it had simply been a labour of love. On closer inspection, the vegetable patch was not as redundant as it had seemed: the potato plants had flowered and withered, signalling the time to dig, and there were good crops of both peas and beetroot – never her favourite food, but she supposed she would find a use for it. Most of the soft fruits had been lost to the birds but, from the various birdbaths and seed trays that she had seen dotted around, Josephine guessed that they would not have been grudged their victory. In the far corner, where the nettles were advancing from the shade of the woodland, she found a couple of collapsed henhouses and an old well, reclaimed by ivy and scrambling bindweed, its handsome flowers covering the brickwork with hundreds of small white parasols. For something so crucial to most of her daily comforts, the well was in a woeful state. She lifted the lid gingerly, afraid that the rotting wood might disintegrate in her hand, and peered inside; the rope was frayed and the bucket long gone, so she threw a stone down and hoped for the best; the splash came quickly and Josephine replaced the lid, confident that the water was plentiful for now and grateful to an unseen network of underground streams. There was a certain magic in the idea of cool, clear water running silently below the earth, rewarding the faith of generations even when the grass was brown and the soil dry and cracked from the sun; all the same, as she walked back to the cottage, she found herself calculating the cost of a new drainage system.

By the time the sheets were hung on the line, Josephine felt as though she had already done a full day's work and it was only half past ten. She used the rest of the hot water to sluice down the flagstones in the scullery, then made herself respectable and set off into the village, wondering how accurate Bert's half-mile would prove to be. Her path made its way between the wood and a fragrant hay meadow, still to be cut and rich in buttercups, scabious and thistles. The day was warm for its hour, and Josephine was content to walk in the shade of the trees and marvel at the beauty of the English countryside, a scene as carefully shaped by generations of craftsmen as any line of buildings or architectural triumph. She found it impossible to say why England moved her so – whether it was her roots here on her mother's side or the places she had been happy in, or some far less tangible emotion – but it had always been this way. Scotland was in her blood and she would defend it to her very last breath, but England gave her a sense of peace and belonging that needed no defence – and for that she blessed it.

Everything was still as the route led her past another pond and into a woodland thicket: there was no scurrying in the bushes, no flapping of wings from branch to branch, and the birds seemed too hot even to sing. Before very long, she caught sight of some chimneys through the trees and the path brought her out onto the village green, opposite Bert's garage. There was no sign of him, but two young girls – identical except for their clothes – were playing in the small yard at the front. ‘Is your father about?' she asked, walking over to them.

‘He's up at the Hall, fixing the Bentley again,' one of them said, and something in the exaggerated way she gestured with her arm told Josephine that this was the Lizzie of theatrical ambition. ‘He won't be back until dinner-time.'

‘Then perhaps you could give him a message for me?'

Lizzie nodded, but before Josephine could tell her what it was, a woman came out from the house. ‘Can I help you?' she asked.

The voice was an octave higher, but the tone matched Bert's first words to her exactly. Josephine smiled and introduced herself. ‘You must be Mrs Willis?'

The woman – an older version of her daughters and the source of their red hair and freckled skin – shook the hand that was offered to her but made no other show of friendship, and Josephine acknowledged the foolishness of assuming that affability ran in families; she had reckoned without the natural suspicions of the female sex. ‘I wanted to thank your husband for his help yesterday,' she said. ‘He gave me a lift to Red Barn Cottage.'

‘Yes, he mentioned it.'

‘He also said I should come and see you if I needed anything, and there's a broken window at the cottage. I wondered . . .'

‘Bert's very busy at the moment.'

‘Oh I didn't mean I wanted
him
to mend it. I just wondered if he could tell me who might. Or perhaps you know someone?' Josephine looked at the woman's stony face and felt herself begin to ramble. ‘I'm still finding my feet and I have no idea who does what in the village, but I'd like to get the basics done while I'm here.'

‘Are you selling it, then?'

She was tempted to remind Mrs Willis whose business that was, but stuck to the simple truth. ‘I haven't decided.'

‘Well, Deaves will sort you out. He's over in Stoke. Odd jobs aren't really Bert's sort of thing. He did enough of those for Miss Larkspur and precious little thanks he got for it.' To Josephine, a car seemed a reasonable acknowledgement of kindness; Bert's wife seemed to know what she was thinking. ‘Oh I don't mean the car. What use is that to us? I mean her attitude to him and the kids before she died. Friendly with them for years and then nothing. It was as if they didn't exist. I don't mind people keeping themselves to themselves – the world might be a better place if a few more of us did that. But you can't give friendship and then take it back for no reason. They worshipped her, all three of them.'

‘I'm sorry,' Josephine said, resenting the apology but feeling obliged to make it. ‘I had no idea there was a problem. Your husband didn't say anything.'

‘He wouldn't. Too soft by halves, my Bert.' There was a slight emphasis on the ‘my', and Josephine wondered how much of Mrs Willis's anger on behalf of her family was actually a more personal resentment. She pulled the twins close to her, as though afraid of history repeating itself, then said again: ‘It's Tom Deaves you want. He'll sort out anything that needs doing around the cottage.'

Josephine thanked her and walked back across the green, bewildered by such an unexpected confrontation and wondering – almost as a challenge to herself – whom she could offend now with a simple request for groceries. There was a small sweet shop on the corner, but nothing more substantial so she set off down the hill, wary of asking directions. She found what she was looking for at the top of a lane leading off the main street, but stopped before she got to it, distracted by a striking sixteenth-century farmhouse – the only building that fitted Bert's description of William Corder's house. It dominated the hill, looking out across the village pond and distant countryside, and it occurred to Josephine that such a commanding position would not have been quite so enviable once news of the murder got out. There was a small boy playing under an old cherry tree, but no other signs of modern life and the house must have changed very little in the last hundred years. She looked up at the dark windows, trying to imagine what they had seen: the pain of Corder's family – if he had had a family – the simmering resentments of class within the village which must have been intensified by the murder. She knew next to nothing about it, but what interested her was what interested her about any crime: how ordinary people had felt, caught up in the violence through no fault of their own, their lives changed for ever by a few minutes. Somehow, she didn't think she would find the answers in Hester's melodrama.

Sounds from the shop brought her back to the present day – the clang of a bell and soft murmur of voices; the hiss of rice poured onto scales and chime of coins in the till. Bracing herself as she went in, she found herself in a queue of three and the object of a barely disguised curiosity. The shop was, she was pleased to see, very well stocked, although it seemed to be arranged according to the same principles as Hester's cupboards. ‘Won't keep you a moment, Miss Tey,' said the woman behind the counter, her familiarity suggesting that Josephine had been shopping there for years. The speed with which news had travelled unsettled her but she, of all people, shouldn't have been surprised: everything there was to know about Inverness passed through her father's high-street shop and she swore sometimes that he knew other people's business better than they did; there was no reason to think it would be any different here.

‘Right – what can I get you?'

The other women had finished their shopping but showed no sign of leaving, so Josephine handed over her list. ‘There's rather a lot, I'm afraid.'

‘And you'd like it delivered?'

‘Yes please, except for the fresh food. I'll take that now. When will the oil arrive? I ran out last night.'

‘You spent the night in that cottage?'

Josephine looked at her. ‘Of course,' she said, as though the thought of going elsewhere had never entered her head. ‘Why ever not?'

The bystanders exchanged a glance and Josephine thought she saw one of them shudder, but the proprietress recovered quickly. ‘Oh, just that you must be used to your home comforts,' she said, so convincingly that Josephine almost believed it was what she had meant. ‘You'll be selling it, I expect.'

The determination to get her out of the village before she had even settled in was, she supposed, a natural reaction to outsiders and not reserved especially for her, but it was beginning to grate on Josephine and she said, a little waspishly, ‘Not at the moment, no. There's a lot to sort out and I want to spend some time there.'