The Saint Zita Society (12 page)

She went back to sleep, but first she thought that one good thing to come out of this was that now she wouldn’t have to explain Rad’s visits to Ciaran. Preston was in her room again at six thirty, fully dressed in his weekend go-to-the-countryside clothes, sports jacket, grey flannels, brown brogues. For God’s sake, she thought, he can’t be more than forty. She had nothing on under the bedclothes.

‘Go away, will you, while I get up? You can make yourself some coffee while I have a shower,’ she said. ‘Meanwhile, listen to me. We do nothing till Lucy’s gone out. She’ll go early, she always does when it’s workout time, and she’ll take the girls with her. Never too soon to train them to be toned-up ladies.’ She saw him wince and crease up his mouth. ‘My car’s in that garage block in St Barnabas Mews, number 12. Your garden more or less backs on to it. We can carry the roof-rack box out into the mews and attach it to the roof rack
inside the garage
. If anyone sees they’ll just think you’re helping me do it in advance of my holidays. We tell them it’s skis. Right?’

The morning, when he was going to call the police, had come. He seemed to have forgotten all about it. ‘Right,’ he said.

‘How long does it take to get to your country place?’

‘About an hour or less.’

‘Is it really country?
Essex?
’

He didn’t answer, just looked sullen.

‘I do Lucy’s breakfast at the weekends,’ she said, ‘so I’d better get on with it. You’ll just have to be patient.’

‘W
here’s my daddy?’ Hero peered behind the sofa on the gallery as if she was likely to find him there.

‘He came in very late,’ said Lucy in a tone of extravagant boredom. ‘I expect he left again very early. It’s what he does.’

‘I’m never going to work as hard as him,’ said Matilda. ‘I don’t see the point.’

Montserrat thought, but of course didn’t say, that Matilda would marry a rich man and probably wouldn’t have to work at all. She watched them prance downstairs, all dressed to match in scarlet jackets over white leotards and black leggings with yellow-and-silver Chanel trainers. The girls were pushed out first, Lucy following and slamming the front door. Rabia had already departed with Thomas.

The garden at number 7 Hexam Place was seldom used. When the Stills first moved in, Montserrat had heard, it had been neat with a lawn and flower beds but in the four years since then the trees and shrubs and weeds had taken over and now it was a wilderness. All the better for their enterprise, though it really mattered very little whether they were seen by the Wallaces and Cavendishes at number 9 or the Neville-Smiths at number 5. The body in the case was heavier than Montserrat had expected, Rad Sothern being such a thin little
shrimp of a man, but she and Preston Still managed. No one was about in the mews. Montserrat unlocked the garage door. She thought she saw a glance of contempt on Preston’s face when he saw her blue VW, grey with dirt and pigeon droppings, but maybe she imagined it. Heaving the case up onto the roof rack was a much harder job than carting it up the basement stairs and through the garden. A pair of steps at the back of the garage she had never noticed before came in handy – indeed were indispensable – and after fifteen minutes of struggling the case was at last bolted into place. When he had finished Preston’s hands were trembling.

‘I shall drive,’ said Montserrat.

He didn’t argue.

‘We’ll make a detour to avoid passing along Hexam Place. It doesn’t matter about people seeing me but they mustn’t see you with me. It would look strange.’ Preston nodded. ‘To be on the safe side, though, you’d better get on the floor in the back.’

‘Now, look, wait a minute. Surely that’s not necessary –’

‘Of course it’s necessary. You should have thought of that before you pushed a TV star down the stairs.’

‘I’ll give you my postcode for the satnav.’

‘Useful if I had satnav but I don’t. You’ll have to direct me.’

He said he would. Montserrat got into the car and Preston into the back, struggling to squeeze himself into the space between the back of her seat and the rear seat. Once they were well on the way to the North Circular she stopped for him to climb out and get into the passenger seat beside her. Fear and perhaps guilt made him bad-tempered.

‘It goes against the grain with me to have a woman drive me.’

‘Too bad,’ said Montserrat. ‘Tell you what, when we’ve disposed of Mr Fortescue, I’ll let you drive us back.’

T
he magazine section of a quality newspaper always carried an interview with a media celebrity on Saturdays and it was Thea’s habit to read it while eating her breakfast. She shared the paper with Damian and Roland, they interested only in politics and business, she keeping the magazine, media and arts sections, though she would have liked the news too. Today the interview happened to be with Rad Sothern and the cover was a full-page colour photograph of him in his guise as Mr Fortescue, but Thea who would not long ago have been enthralled by revelations about Rad’s past love life, the fact that June was his aunt or great-aunt and that he had once been the guitarist in a pop group, found it impossible to keep her attention on the article. Her thoughts were dominated by Jimmy, but they were not perhaps the thoughts he would have liked her to have. Today she must begin teaching herself to love him. There were so many things she had taught herself to do to please other people that surely she could do this. She and he were going out for the day in Simon Jefferson’s car and she expected Jimmy to call for her at ten. Awake since six and up since seven, she had dressed with the greatest care in her new jeans, pristine white shirt and rose-pink heavy-knit cardigan. Her hair was newly washed, her eye make-up taking a quarter of an hour to get right, although she somehow knew, with no real experience in this area, that what she looked like no longer mattered much to Jimmy. What has mascara to do with love?

At a quarter to ten she took the three sections of the paper down to Damian and Roland. ‘You may as well have them. I’m going out for the day.’

‘You know, I think I’ve seen this guy coming out of next door,’ said Roland. ‘Someone said he was the Princess’s grandson.’

‘According to this he’s June’s nephew.’

‘Wonders will never cease.’ Damian took the magazine and shook his head over the portrait of Rad. ‘Leave the arts
and media bits with us. Even if we don’t read them, which is most probable, we’ll put them in the recycling. By the way, we’re thinking of getting married.’

‘Oh, cool,’ said Thea. Had they taught themselves to love each other or had it come naturally?

‘Roly proposed over breakfast. He said, “Will you civil-partner with me?” Don’t you think that was neat?’

‘Oh, I do. Can I come?’

‘I expect so.’ Roland’s tone was cool in the old-fashioned sense of the word.

From the window where she had stationed herself Thea saw Simon Jefferson’s custard-coloured Lexus pull up at the kerb. This was her own dream scenario come true! Learning enthusiasm, she ran off to the front door without saying goodbye.

T
idying the drawing room, June found an object which might have been something designed to play music or speak into, or both, down the back of the sofa cushions. The inadvertent pressure of her thumb stimulated it to chant the first line of ‘God Save the Queen’, and display a dozen little brightly coloured pictures.

‘It must be Rad’s,’ she said, showing it to the Princess when she took up her breakfast.

‘It’s what they call a Raspberry. You’d better phone him. But not on that thing, even supposing you know how. Do it on the real phone.’

June tried the landline but got no reply. The alternative number she had for him which she had never used before set off the national anthem again on the thing she held in her hand, making her jump. It asked her to leave a message but she saw no point in that. ‘He’ll turn up when he wants it,’ she said to herself.

T
hey passed through the village of Theydon Wold, Montserrat noticing that the pub called the Devereux Arms did three-course lunches. Maybe she could persuade Preston to take her there once they had unloaded Rad Sothern’s body. It amazed her that he had scarcely known how to find Gallowmill Hall, in spite of owning the place. His directions had gone wrong three times and once they had nearly found themselves on the M25, heading for the Dartford Crossing. It turned out that when he drove he had to use the satnav because he knew the postcode but not the rest of the address.

Montserrat had been nearly but not quite as impressed by the place as Rabia. She, after all, had seen such houses before, in reality and in pictures. How must it be to own a house like this? Not only to have number 7 Hexam Place but this Gallowmill Hall as well.

‘Why’s it called that?’

‘There’s a watermill on the river and there used to be a gallows somewhere near here.’

She noticed he winced when mentioning this instrument of punishment for capital crimes. ‘You can take the car through the archway. There shouldn’t be any callers but you can’t be sure and it’s best if no one sees us.’

There went her chance of a good lunch in the Devereux Arms. ‘Now we’ve got him here what are we going to do with him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We don’t take the case off the car till we’re sure. It’s too heavy to keep lugging about.’ She noticed how pale he looked. ‘Not carsick, are you?’

He shook his head. ‘Let’s get some fresh air.’

The archway led into a kind of courtyard. They left the car and walked back through the arch to where lawns sloped
away from the broad gravel expanse. Everywhere was carpeted in fallen leaves, red, brown and yellow, and the trees from which they had come had almost returned to their state of bare skeletal branches. Above the shallow wooded hills the sky was a pale milky blue, streaked with strips of pale grey cloud.

‘Has this place been in your family for hundreds and hundreds of years?’

‘About two centuries,’ he said.

‘Why don’t you live here?’

He didn’t answer the question. ‘My parents did and my grandparents and ancestors all the way back to the beginning of the nineteenth century when my great-great-great-grandfather built this place.’

The view enlarged as they rounded the house and came to what Preston called the garden front, opening up to show all sorts of details in the landscape, a biggish house on the crest of a shallow hill, village roofs, ugly barns around a farmhouse, a church spire. It brought back to Montserrat recollections of period dramas on television, women in bonnets setting forth from houses like this one, Regency bucks on horseback, doffing hats to the ladies.

‘Did those ancestors go to that church?’

‘St Michael and All Angels,’ said Preston as if that was what she had asked him. ‘I suppose they did. Hardly anyone goes there now, I’m told. Ancestors of mine are buried in a kind of family mausoleum in the churchyard.’

What a lot of keys a man of property like him had to have or mislay or leave behind. He hadn’t mislaid the key to this front door. He unlocked it and they went in. Once she had got used to the idea of the kind of house Preston owned, the interior was just what she expected: oil paintings framed in curlicued gilt, oriental rugs, dark polished furniture, Chinese
porcelain, pink and green and black with birds and flowers on. It surprised her that the interior was so warm.

‘We keep the heating on low from October to April.’

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘The caretaker and his wife. Oh, don’t worry. They won’t be here.’

She hadn’t been worried, only amazed that a man of no more than forty would still talk in terms of a man and his wife.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Is there anything to eat?’

The kitchen was enormous and quite modern – well, if you called twenty years old modern. There was sliced bread in the freezer and cans in a cupboard. ‘We could have beans on toast.’

Maybe he didn’t know what that was. ‘I couldn’t eat a thing,’ he said. ‘If you feel up to driving back I’d like a drink.’

‘You said you didn’t like being driven by a woman.’

He said with unbelievable ungraciousness, ‘I can put up with it.’

A derisive laugh was her answer. ‘We have to put our celebrity somewhere before we think about that.’

She thawed out two slices of bread by toasting them, opened a can of salmon and made herself a sandwich. He was sitting at the table with his head in his hands. Opening cupboards, she found a half-bottle of brandy, a half-used bottle of Cointreau and some dregs of red wine. The measure of brandy she poured for him was a generous one and she was about to add water when he covered the glass with his hand. He drank half and colour came back into his face, a dark red flush. ‘I’ve decided,’ he said. ‘We should never have done that, put him in that box. We should never have come here – or anywhere. When you’ve finished that we’ll go back to London and take his body to the nearest police station.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’ll be dark in two or three hours and then we can hide him somewhere and no one will see. Take a dead body to a police station? They’ll get you to a psychiatrist and have you sectioned. It’ll be worse than charging you with murder, putting you in a bin will, and that’s what they’ll do.’ She rinsed the glass and the plate under the tap and put them away. ‘You said it’s best if no one knows we’ve been here, so we have to be careful not to be seen. Now I’d like to look round the place, find somewhere to put him.’

More keys. He picked three bunches off hooks on the wall and stuffed them into his pockets. There were all kinds of outbuildings, there were stables. He showed her a summer house and something that looked like a temple with a dome and pillars that he called a folly. At the end of a long drive was a small house built in what she recognised as the Gothic style but now abandoned, its windows boarded up.

‘That’s the lodge,’ he said. ‘Caretakers used to live there but the present ones have a flat we had made for them in the house.’

The place looked forlorn, in need of painting, several tiles fallen off the roof. One of the doors to the garage sagged off its hinges.