The Old Wine Shades (23 page)

‘Absolutely.’

‘When I saw her I was driving along this road, the one running by the Swan and the houses farther along. I’d come from Lark Rise, been doing a spot of shopping. When I was just coming up on Winterhaus, I saw her car and her standing beside it, reading a map. I stopped and asked her if I could help with directions and she said no, she was fine. So I drove on. The car was just opposite the Winterhaus driveway.’

‘What time was this?’ Jury had taken out his small leather notebook.

‘Oh ... I’d say threeish, some time between three and four, in any case. Whether she was going to visit the house or had already done that and left, I couldn’t say.’ Myra took a sip of her whiskey and looked doubtful.

‘What is it?’

‘It seemed an odd thing to be doing, stopping there to read a map. It just struck me later as strange. It’s such a small point, though, I shrugged it off.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, there was the driveway to the house—I mean you could hardly not see it from where she was standing. If she wanted to take out a map, why not stop in the driveway? She’d either be going
into
it or coming
out
of it, the same thing would apply, wouldn’t it? Why not, in either case, stop somewhere along the driveway instead of leaving the driveway and pulling up across the road and getting out.’ She waved her own words away, as if their triviality embarrassed her. ‘It’s such a small thing.’

Jury smiled and raised his glass as if in a toast. ‘It’s just such small things that could mean success or failure in solving a case. You’d make one hell of a witness.’ It’s the same thing he’d said to Maeve Shoesmith.

She looked quite pleased by that compliment.

Jury asked, ‘And what did you think about her stopping where she did?’ He saw her glass was nearly empty and signaled to Clive.

‘Perhaps that she’d stopped to let the dog—or even the boy for that matter—out to, you know, relieve himself. But that presented the same problem. I suppose the boy might have said, just at the moment of leaving the drive, ‘Mum, I’ve got to go!’ But that seems most unlikely, doesn’t it? Why leave the privacy of the property— there are so many trees and hedges there—to do something you don’t want to be seen doing?’ Again she seemed to wave the words away. ‘I do wish I’d been nosier and pulled my car up behind hers and seen—well, hindsight would save us all. Most of us, that is.’ She looked up at Clive, who stood with the bar towel draped over his shoulder.

‘What’s it to be, Myra, me old girl?’ He smiled broadly.

‘Two more,’ said Jury.

‘Better watch your step there, Inspector; she’ll have you for breakfast.’ Clive whistled his way off with the empties.

‘Daft,’ said Myra.

‘Let me ask you, if the car had been on the drive, would you have seen it?’

‘I might have glimpsed it. The thing is, there’s a heavy screen of hedge and tree there, so I’d only have caught a glimpse if I’d seen it at all.’ She sat back and studied Jury’s face. ‘Are you saying she
wanted
to be seen?’

‘It does look like it.’

Myra just looked at him, frowning slightly. ‘The way it all happened, you’d think she wanted a witness.’

Jury nodded. ‘But witness to what?’

The woman who came to the door was angular, but still nice-looking in her way, if her way hadn’t been a surliness of expression, as if she were always gearing up for distasteful news.

‘Mrs. Hastings? Brenda Hastings?’ Jury showed her his ID. ‘My name is Jury; I’m with Scotland Yard CID.’

Brenda Hastings’s expression turned fearful. ‘What? What about? Has something happened to Caroline?’

‘No, nothing at all like that.’

She breathed a sigh of relief, and Jury waited a beat for her to ask about Mathilda. She didn’t, at least not until Jury’s prompt. ‘You have a niece, Tilda?’

‘Oh. Oh, yes. Mathilda. We call her Tilda. Why? Is she in trouble?’

Interesting, Jury thought, that whereas Caroline might be in danger, Mathilda could only be in trouble. That was as far as her concern could take her.

‘No, but she might—’ Jury stopped. Why give away the little girl’s secret. He had almost said she might be in danger, going to those woods, endangered possibly by some person who had come to Winterhaus. Endangered by a lack of supervision. Lack of interest; lack of love. He wondered what had happened to her parents. Why was he always running into motherless children? He knew what it felt like; he knew it went on forever. He knew it colored his responses to people. Look at him: barely in the door and he was already prepared to dislike Brenda Hastings. ‘It’s not either of the children I’ve come about.’

She brushed a pile of yellow hair back from her face—not blond, but yellow, harsh and yet faded, whatever shine had been there long since gone.

‘It’s really just information I’m after.’

‘Oh.’

Jury nodded toward the uninviting parlor of this fussy little house. ‘May I sit down?’

‘Yes. Just go through.’ She gave him a disconcerted smile.

Jury took an armchair covered in a cheap-looking material, rough feeling, with a pattern of monstrous sunflowers. The ruffled curtains at the two windows opposite were also printed with sunflowers.

Mathilda’s aunt sat on the edge of the sofa, a dark, depressing gray. ‘Well, then—’

‘You know Winterhaus?’

‘That big place with all the woods? I’ve never been in it but yes, I know where you mean. Nobody lives there. I think they’re trying to let it.’

‘You’re about the closest neighbor, other than the Shoesmiths in Lark Cottage.’

‘Well, but I’ve hardly spoken half a dozen words to them over the years.’

‘It’s not the Shoesmiths I’m interested in. It’s Winterhaus.’

‘Oh? But I don’t know anything about it. The family who owned it or maybe still owns it had a kind of Italian name—’

‘Della Torres. Italian. The father of the present owner, that is. His wife was English, though. I assume that’s the reason they bought that house. It’s not about the Della Torreses that I’ve come. It’s about the disappearance of a woman nine months ago—’

‘Disappearance? Why, no, I don’t know anything about that. Why? What happened?’

‘A woman named Gault was last seen in this area. That was about nine months ago. The last people we know to have seen her are the Shoesmiths. Police would have been round asking questions—’
 

She sat up stiffly. ‘Not of me, they weren’t. I don’t know anything.’

She was so adamant about her ignorance. Jury had to wonder. ‘Anyway,’ Brenda Hastings went on, ‘it’s been a long time, hasn’t it, since it happened?’ She raised her eyebrows as if wondering why Jury was so tardy.

‘It might have been a kidnapping, Mrs. Hastings, but any information you might conceivably have—Do you recall seeing anyone back then? She would have been with a little boy and a dog.’

She was shaking her head before the question was out of his mouth. ‘No, I never did.’ And she was handing back the picture he had brought out almost without looking up at it.

As he took the picture back he heard a door open and a little voice fluting, ‘Mum-my!’

The little girl’s hair was nearly as yellow as her mother’s, only brighter and lighter. The child crowded up to her side and gave Jury a wide blue-eyed look. Pleased as could be. Like the curtains, Caroline was ruffled. Even her play clothes: pink overalls and bright pink shirt had ruffles on the sleeves and at the bottom of the legs.

‘This gentleman is a police officer, Caroline, so you’d better be good.’ The ‘good’ was trilled around and the child wrinkled her button nose and giggled. Then she commenced giving Jury flirty glances. It was one characteristic of coming adolescence that he was always sorry to see already attaching its sticky self to childhood.

Jury asked, in a friendly way, in response to the charge of being good, ‘What do you do when you’re bad?’

This threw both mother and daughter. Brenda Hastings looked suspicious and Caroline rather nasty, as if Jury had blown her cover. ‘I’m
not!’

‘No, not all the time, of course.’

Caroline didn’t know how to take this, so she turned on her flirty look again. ‘Tilda’s the one that’s bad.’ She said this with a measure of passion that rather surprised Jury.

‘Tilda’s your cousin?’

She did not verify this, eager as she was to get to Tilda’s misbehavior. ‘She goes into the woods all the time’—here she pointed in that direction—’and she’s not supposed to. Mum told her never to go there.’

Her mother stepped in. ‘Oh, now, love, she doesn’t do that anymore.’

‘Oh, yes, she does! She’s there now.’ This declaration was brought out with a measure of triumph.

‘How do you know?’ Jury asked.

‘What?’

‘How do you know?’ It was doubly irritating to her that he simply repeated the question rather than explaining it.

Then Caroline came away from her mother’s side. ‘I-I-I knew she wasn’t supposed to, so I followed her!’

‘Never mind, Caroline,’ said the mother, giving her an indulgent smile, which she then turned on Jury. Kids will be kids, won’t they? the smile said.

‘Caroline,’ said Jury, ‘do you remember seeing a woman, a stranger, at Winterhaus last year?’

Caroline rose to the challenge, ‘Maybe I did.’ Simpering, she went back and stood beside Brenda Hastings.

‘Now you be careful what you say, my girl,’ said her mother. ‘No fibbing, now.’ But she said it with such indulgence. Jury thought she could look forward to many, many years of fibbing.

Caroline said nothing. She wound a yellow curl round her finger.

Jury laughed. ‘Come on now, Caroline. You didn’t really see her, did you?’

With her arms crossed over the bib of her jeans, and her chin raised and that furrowed brow, she looked like a little old lady. This saddened Jury.

‘Do you and Tilda play together, then?’

Violently, she shook her head. ‘No. She’s stupid.’

Her mother said, ‘Caroline! You oughtn’t to talk about your cousin that way.’

The reprimand was delivered in such a lilting tone—Brenda all but sang it-—that it had no conviction or force. It was possible that Caroline was getting so many mixed signals, she did not know how or what to be.

Caroline went on; ‘All she wants to do is play with those stupid dolls and that bear, all by herself.’

Jury said, ‘I expect Tilda doesn’t mind being alone.’

Definitely jealous of what she didn’t understand.

Jury said, ‘One of those times you followed Tilda (and he bet she had done this many times), did you see a strange woman?’

She nodded, looking unsure of her ground now.

Brenda Hastings said, indignantly, ‘Well, if she did it was probably only somebody come to look at the property.’

Jury ignored her. ‘Did she have a boy with her?’

Caroline crept a little closer, as if divulging confidences. ‘There was a dog. One of those
floppy-eared
ones. He was with that boy. He didn’t pay any attention to him, though.’

‘The boy didn’t?’

‘No, the dog. He wouldn’t come when you called or anything. He had to be on a lead or he might run away forever.’

Meaning, Jury thought, that Caroline was also on a lead and suffering a similar fate. He imagined her there, hiding behind a tree or kneeling in the undergrowth, not daring to come out for that would mean an admission she wanted to be in Tilda’s world of plainer clothes and fewer words and more imagination.

‘Anyway, he didn’t want to leave.’

‘No?’

‘They had to practically pick him up and carry him. He was nice.’

Her ordinarily heated vocabulary had cooled as she thought about this.

‘Caroline,’ said her mother, ‘you know you’re not to go over there! Neither one of you’s allowed!’

Both Jury and Caroline ignored Mum. Jury asked, ‘Did you ever go into the house?’

Silence and then a small nod, avoiding Mum’s eyes.

‘What?’ This nearly brought Brenda to her feet. ‘I’ve told you never to go—’

Jury’s upraised palm shut her up. ‘What do you do there?’

Her answer was another shrug.

Brenda’s mouth opened and shut when Jury looked at her.

‘Did you follow Tilda into the house?’

Another nod, a bit stronger. ‘There’s one of those glass doors that goes to the outside that doesn’t lock properly. It was easy to get into.’

‘It was Tilda who set out the tea things, wasn’t it?’ He smiled about this.

His approval met with freely offered information. ‘She took them out of that cupboard, the teapot and cups and took spoons and napkins from a drawer.’

Jury felt sad. There had been two cups, two spoons and two little plates for pastry. There should have been two little girls having a tea party. ‘But she wouldn’t let you have tea, would she?’

Caroline said, frowning, ‘She didn’t know I was there.’

‘You hid? Outside? Inside?’

‘Behind the door or in that little closet with brooms. It was easy. Anyway, she sat that stupid doll on the sofa and she had a cup.’