Written in Blood (51 page)

When she did not reply he began to speak, keeping his tone carefully prosaic, as if anything could reduce the impact of what he had to say.

‘Honoria Lyddiard, until last Monday, had no idea that Gerald Hadleigh and her brother had ever met. But in Laura Hutton’s kitchen she discovered a photograph of them both, together with some other people at a restaurant. Very excited by this, and eager to discover the whys and wherefores, she went straight round to Plover’s Rest, but Hadleigh was out, calling on Rex St John. She tried twice more during the course of the day, but without success. Eventually, no doubt unable to wait until the morning, she returned late that same night.

‘But the visitor was still there, so she stayed concealed in the trees behind the house, until she saw him drive away. Then, I suppose after knocking and getting no response, she went in. Knowing Miss Lyddiard’s passion for correct behaviour we can only guess at the driving curiosity which got her, when she couldn’t find Hadleigh downstairs, upstairs and into his bedroom. Then, and I don’t quite understand how, I feel there must have been some sort of hiatus before they actually spoke. Enough time anyway for her to take in the photographs, some of which we now know were pretty explicit, and the clothes—Yes?’

‘He . . . Gerald . . . was in . . .’

‘The bathroom?’ Amy nodded. ‘She told you?’

‘Yes.’

She told me everything. And spared me nothing. The vile words gathered again, infesting Amy’s mind and fouling the calm, quiet room.

If you’d loved him enough he wouldn’t have died. She knew now what Honoria meant. It seemed that years ago, when Ralph was in the navy, he had been unfaithful. Because she hadn’t loved him enough he had loved someone else, who had given him the terrible disease that was to kill him. And Honoria knew this because the Spanish doctors had told her. But she had naturally thought it was a woman.

Gerald had been terribly drunk. When he came out of the bathroom and found her holding up the photograph of the group at the club at Marrakesh he had jeered and laughed. Then he had given her all the sordid details. How he and Ralph, who had never met before that night, had gone outside into the back yard and had sex, turn and turn about, up against the wall. How Ralph had loved it. Gone out again later with someone else. No wonder he’d ended up with Aids.

That was the moment when Honoria had struck. Seized the nearest heavy object and smashed it into Gerald’s head, not just once but again and again until there was nothing of him left. Then she had stuffed the clothes and photographs into a suitcase and taken it away so that no connection between the obscene mess on the floor and her beloved brother could ever be made and because she was a law unto herself.

‘It certainly wasn’t Hadleigh who infected your husband, Mrs Lyddiard,’ said Barnaby. He had asked for a blood test directly after speaking to Laura Hutton and received a negative result. ‘You had no idea what was wrong with him?’

‘No . . .’

Honoria didn’t tell me because she hoped I’d got it. Hoped and prayed that Ralph, before he died, had passed the sickness on. Watched and waited for the signs. Didn’t tell me in case I sought help or, worse, was tested and found fit and well. In which case she would have killed me herself. Because that was the faithful promise she had made before God.

Weak tears started from Amy’s eyes and WPC Brierley pulled some tissues out of a box on the locker. Barnaby decided to leave it there. By the time he had got his overcoat buttoned up and put his scarf and gloves on Amy seemed once more to be on the verge of sleep. He switched off the bedside lamp, leaving only the glow of a blue night light.

As they walked off down the corridor Audrey said, ‘When will you tell her the rest, sir?’

‘When she’s up to it. I’d say she’d had enough for one night.’ As they passed through reception he looked at the hospital clock. It was almost one thirty. ‘And I think that goes for all of us.’

Nearly always, even when a case has, on paper, been solved there will be ramifications that remain forever unexplained. Characters on the fringe of the investigation for instance whose precise involvement remains mysteriously undefined. A tangle of snippets and loose ends that are fated never to be unravelled or neatly tied.

Accepting this, Barnaby had assumed the actual identity of the woman in Gerald Hadleigh’s ‘wedding’ photograph would remain undiscovered and had dismissed the matter from his mind. Then one evening Troy, ringing up in great excitement, said that he had found her.

The sergeant had been re-running, not for the first time and to his wife’s increasing annoyance, his video of
The Crucible
, in which the chief’s daughter had so radiantly performed. In the court scene, when various women were racing all over the place and screaming their heads off, Troy had spotted a face in the background that looked vaguely familiar. He had pressed the freeze-frame and there she was. Mrs H. to the life.

They had traced her easily, first through BBC casting then via Equity. She was a registered film extra and, at the time of the photograph, had also been on the books of an escort agency. She certainly remembered the business with Mr Hadleigh, for it had been the easiest hundred pounds she had earned in her life and all strictly Kosher. She had even been allowed to keep the hat and veil, but he had been quite short with her when she had tried to find out what lay behind it all. The church had been in the country not far from Burnham Beeches. It had all been pretty much as Max Jennings surmised.

All that was nearly a month ago. Barnaby, due for some leave, was now taking it, for Cully and Nicholas were about to fly home and he did not want to miss even a moment of their company. They would be staying a couple of days before returning to London.

As he sat now, engrossed in a relatively unclawed section of the
Independent
, he thought how very nice it would be to see them again and hear all about the on- and off-stage dramas that seemed to be permanently simmering in their closed and over-heated world. So different, thank God, from his own.

His left leg was going to sleep. He stretched it out, flexed his toes, then crossed the other leg over it with some vigour. The kitten, who had been playing with his shoe lace, went flying through the air to land on a cushion in the opposite armchair.

‘Tom!’

‘What?’ He lowered the paper. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Try and be more careful.’ She was running across the room and picking up Kilmowski, who immediately struggled to be put down.

‘What have I done?’

‘You could have really hurt him.’ The kitten was already plodding back to the settee, where it started to make its way determinedly up Barnaby’s trousers.

‘Do you want your drink now or with your meal?’

‘Now, please, love.’

A glass of Santa Carolina Grand Reserve was poured and very toothsome it turned out to be. Barnaby forced himself to sip rather than glug. Tomorrow, when the children were here, they would have champagne. A lovely smell was wafting from the direction of the oven. Rabbit casserole baked with lemon grass, capers and celeriac. Comice pears were in there too. He had made a sauce of half-fat cream cheese pushed twice through a sieve then flavoured with a dash of Madeira and some toasted amaretti crumbs.

Barnaby drank a little more and lay back, content. This, even with pins and needles being systematically pushed and pulled about one’s upper arm, was definitely the life.

The phone rang. Joyce took it in the kitchen. She cried out with pleasure. ‘Oh, hello darling - how lovely to talk to you.’

Barnaby’s happiness went on hold. Something had gone wrong. They weren’t coming. Or, if they were, they couldn’t stay. If they could stay it was only overnight. Perhaps they were bringing people and he and Joyce would never have a chance to talk to their daughter or Nicholas properly.

‘Tom?’ There was the sound of the receiver being laid down and Joyce’s face appeared in the serving hatch. ‘Do you want a quick word? She’s just ringing to check we’ve got the time right for Heathrow.’

‘Might as well.’

‘Don’t come round. I’ll pass it through.’

Cully sounded as if she was in the next room. It was going to be great to see him and Ma again. She had bought a super carved wooden rack in Poland for all his spices. What was he cooking tomorrow night? Had he remembered to video
The Crucible
? Tour had been terrific. Director an absolute toad. Nicholas utterly brilliant as Don John. She had never really got Beatrice right.

Barnaby listened to all this with a glad heart but, as she was about to ring off, thought it wise to inject a cautionary note.

‘We may have a bit of a problem this end, Cully.’ As he spoke his hand rested gently on Kilmowski, asleep on his shoulder and gradually slipping off. ‘Regarding the kitten. I’m afraid your mother’s getting terribly fond of it.’

 

‘You don’t have to go in, Amy.’

‘I do, I do have to go in.’ But she could not turn the handle.

They were on the landing outside Ralph’s room. It was the first time Amy had entered Gresham House since the terrible night when she had so nearly died.

Walking through the kitchen, crossing the clammy, weed-infested flagstones of the hall, climbing the stairs, had been bad. But nothing like as bad as this.

‘Shall I open it?’

‘If you like.’ But when Sue stretched out her hand Amy cried, ‘Wait a minute!’

She was having second thoughts. Or rather twentieth, thirtieth and even fiftieth thoughts, for she had imagined this moment at least as many times. Now she asked herself why she was so determined. What sensible reason could there possibly be?

After all, he wouldn’t be there. She would see the dappled horse with the worn leather saddle and scarlet reins that he had picked her up and put her on the first time he had brought her home. And the fire guard with narrow brass trim. Books and models and the beautiful scientific drawings at which he had excelled. But Ralph, or ‘the remains’ as the police had insisted on referring to him, was resting with his sister beneath the yew trees in St Chad’s churchyard.

Sue had tried to understand what she viewed as Amy’s amazing benevolence in permitting this, but without success. In her friend’s place she would have arranged for Honoria to be cremated then flushed the ashes down the loo. Eventually Sue came to the conclusion that Amy, after the discovery that her husband was not only bisexual but occasionally unfaithful, had had a change of heart about him, but she was mistaken. Amy merely felt that if someone was prepared to kill, however madly or wrongly, to avenge the only person they had ever loved, the least you could do was let them rest in the same grave.

Sue now shuffled her feet, coughed to draw attention to the fact that time was passing and glanced sideways. Amy’s face had become tight and expressionless and she was screwing up her eyes as if braced for some scene of visual devastation. A second later she flung open the door.

The candelabra were still there. The room was full of them. The whole place had been blazing with light apparently, like an altar in some great Romanesque cathedral. Hundreds of candles. Their congealed drippings sticking to the floor and all over the furniture.

Ralph’s likeness gazed and smiled and laughed from every aspect of the room. As a baby, toddler and young boy. Many of the photographs were propped up, unframed, against the candle holders. It was a miracle the place hadn’t burned down.

Amy had been afraid the room would smell, but there was only the ever-present fragrance of mildew. Someone, perhaps the police, must have opened the windows. They had been very kind, as had everyone, especially Dennis Rainbird, the funeral director. He it was, after the first coffin had been raised, who had tactfully disposed of the load of heavy books it contained. He had also made a point, when Amy had refused to visit his premises to view the dear departed, of assuring her that Mr Lyddiard had been most beautifully embalmed. He appeared to be under the impression that this would be a comfort.

‘This is where he was lying.’ Amy went across to a large refectory table in the centre of the room. ‘Under a white silk bedspread.’

Sue didn’t know how to respond. The whole story had struck her as so completely revolting that she had nearly passed out when Amy first told her. To think of Honoria up here talking to a corpse, perhaps even holding it - God. It didn’t bear thinking of.

‘Did I tell you he asked for me, in Spain, just before he died? She said I’d gone away.’

‘Amy - that’s terrible. But surely he’d know it wasn’t true.’

‘Oh yes. He knew her very well. It’s just . . . it would have been nice to say goodbye.’

Amy picked up a school report. One of many draped over the fire guard like little printed paper towels.

‘Bright but mischievous.’ ‘Distracts other pupils.’ ‘A definite gift for languages.’ ‘Needs to concentrate more.’ ‘A popular boy.’

‘Everyone liked him,’ said Amy. ‘It’s all down here.’

Sue’s feelings of intrusion and inadequacy deepened. Standing helplessly by she made a clumsy indefinite movement demonstrating a wish to comfort, then let her arms fall once more to her sides.

‘I thought he didn’t want children, but he knew, you see, what was wrong with him.’

That was why he had always taken the responsibility for contraception. Not, as he had told his wife, because he was worried about the side effects of the pill, but for her own safety.

He should have told her though. That was the hardest thing to bear. Not unfaithfulness or the fact that he had sexual inclinations of which she had known nothing, but this decision to carry alone the dark knowledge that their days of happiness were numbered. Perhaps he was afraid she would reject him.

‘I’m sure that wasn’t it,’ interrupted Sue as Amy showed signs of increasing distress. ‘He wanted to save you pain. We do when we love someone.’