“How about a cushion for her back?” Barney plucked one off the sofa and settled it behind Mrs. Malloy while continuing to address his wife. “She’s had a long drive. So why don’t you bring her lunch in here, darling? I’ll pull up that little table for her, and after she’s eaten every tasty morsel you can fetch a nice soft blanket and settle her down for the afternoon. Perhaps it might even be an idea to light the fire, as it looks as though it may rain on and off all afternoon.”
“A good idea, Fiddler.”
“Yes, it sounds just the ticket.” The person being talked about in cosseting tones swung her legs off the footstool and heaved herself upright. “But first I need to go and say goodbye to Mrs. H.”
“You’re sure you won’t stay for lunch?” Barney pumped my hand.
“I expect they’ll have a meal waiting for her at the Old Rectory.” Gwen eased him aside to make her own farewells and on her way out the door returned the photo to the piano. Her eyes lingered on it fondly before she picked up another and held it out for my inspection.
“This here’s my cousin Edna and the man’s her husband. It was taken when she and Ted got engaged.”
“She looks in love.” This time I wasn’t being polite. The girl in the black-and-white photo radiated a dreamy-eyed passion. She was also pretty in a dairymaid sort of way. The man, on the other hand, wasn’t good-looking and seemed as though he had been ordered to smile.
“Well, what romance there was didn’t last. Ted made her life hell all their married life.” With this Gwen offered me directions to my destination and asked me to say hello to Edna for her, then gave Mrs. Malloy a hug before shushing us gaily from the room into the hall. I stood at the front door, eyeing Mrs. M. sternly.
“You were awful in there about that Cambridge stuff.”
“I spoke me mind.”
“After just telling me that you thought Gwen was troubled and needed your support?”
“That’s not the same thing as sitting there listening to her brag.” Mrs. Malloy drew herself up on her high heels. “If I hadn’t nipped that in the bud it would have gone on as long as I’m here. And where would that lead to but a blazing row? That’s what happens to a lot of friendships. Little things escalate into big things until there’s no turning back. Hatred is unleashed, murder stirs in the heart, and ...”
“Mrs. Malloy, you are being overly dramatic.” I glowered at her.
“Just talking sense.” She opened the front door for me. “It might be nice if you was to say something about how glad you are that you brought me to Gwen and Barney’s because you’ve found out things about your mother and her family you didn’t know. Now you drive carefully, Mrs. H.! And remember, you’ve got enough to think about with your dead grandmother wanting you there, without going and stirring up any wasp nests at the Old Rectory. Don’t worry about me”—loftily spoken—“I’ll have Gwen and Barney eating out of my hand in no time. Oh, and one more thing,” she called after me as I headed off into the drizzle, “talk to Edna. I’ll bet she’s a fount of information on your mum and perhaps your gran, too.”
Of all the irritating people, I thought as I got into the car. But all the same, now that the meeting with the bridesmaids was close at hand, I wished she were going with me, which was silly. Rosemary Maywood had sounded perfectly sane on the phone and no doubt the other two—Thora Dobson and Jane Pettinger—were also nice, respectable women who just happened to have an interest in the occult. The rain was making me nervous about driving and I was wishing it would stop long before I turned off the road from Lower Thaxstead at the signpost to Knells. Fields now lay on both sides of me—spreading out to the occasional distant house like green counterpanes fringed with hedges. Several miles farther on I saw the beginnings of the village. I passed the post office and turned onto Vicarage Lane. Almost there, I was thinking, seconds before swerving to avoid the long, gray form of a dog that materialized without a shadow’s warning in front of me. With sickening dread I felt the car do a short slither and a long slide through a hedge and into a ditch that I knew, with ominous certainty, had been waiting all day to swallow me up.
The great thing about not being a size six, as I could sourly have reminded Gwen Fiddler, is that you have that nice bit of extra cushioning when being bounced around like a frog in a coffee can. But I didn’t sit dwelling on my good fortune. I undid my seat belt with shaky fingers and reached for the bag of peppermint humbugs Mrs. Malloy had left on her seat. Now on life support, I was able to plot my next move, which was to step out into the ditch and climb through its long, hairy grass back onto the lane.
If Ben had been with me he would have just shot the car into reverse and with a soft bump or two had us facing in the right direction. But I like to take things in stages, weigh up all the possibilities, one of which was that a helpful man from the local garage might suddenly pop up beside me and insist on helping a matron in distress by getting behind the wheel and setting my world to rights.
I spotted a man—youngish, with a square face, closely cropped brown hair, and a boxer’s broken nose. He was leaning over the garden wall of the first of a row of four attached cottages. Roses climbed the trellis that framed his front door. Lace curtains hung at the windows. It was all very charming, except that the man looked far from helpful. His expression was pugnacious and he was yelling at the long, shaggy gray dog that was slinking in circles around a tree by his gate.
I had no reason to feel kindly towards the beast that had caused me to lose control of the car. But I couldn’t see that at the moment it was doing any particular harm, other than cocking its leg every third step in a desultory fashion. I’m not one of those animal people who want to adopt every stray that comes along and am perhaps more of a cat than a dog person. Even so, when the man lifted a weighty hand and shouted: “Bugger off! We don’t need your sort creeping around here!” I felt compelled to take a moral stand.
“Why can’t you just say, shoo.” I stood straightening my hair, which had unleashed itself from its neat coil during my excursion into the ditch.
“Give me a frigging break, lady! Your type don’t get the point when spoken to in a civilized way.” The fellow had now come out from his garden gate and was glowering at me through pinpricks of eyes in a scrunched-up face.
“Me?” My chin dropped in a series of thuds, or maybe it was my heart that was doing the thumping. I had rarely been so confused in my life. “Why should you be angry with me?”
“Barging in here, all set to destroy an entire way of life.” He was now shaking his fist, balled up to the size of a boxer’s glove, within inches of my face. “I went and left a good job in London ‘cos me and the wife wanted the peace and quiet of country living. Think I’m going to let the likes of you force us to pack up and move?”
“How does it harm you that my car is in a ditch on the other side of the road? I can’t see that your property values are likely to plummet all that much in the time it takes me to get it out.” I’ll admit to raising my voice. An upstairs window of the cottage next door flew open and a female voice screeched down at us.
“What’s going on out there, Tom?”
The man unfurled his boxer’s mitt and jabbed a finger at me. “It’s the buggering woman.”
“You mean her that’s expected at the Old Rectory?” Revulsion throbbed through every syllable. The woman at the window was young and rather pretty but I decided, perhaps impetuously, that I had no wish to meet her alone on a dark night. Her hands presently gripped the sill but it did not take much imagination to picture them inching their way around my throat.
“You’ve got it, Irene,” the man shouted up. “Miss Maywood said they was expecting her this afternoon.”
“Just like I pictured she’d be. Looks the sort, doesn’t she?” The woman was warming up nicely, even though it was beginning to rain again. “Nasty hard-faced bitch. I bet she’d turn her own mother in for cash.”
“Look.” I was floundering amid the injustice of the situation. “I don’t have a mother and ...”
“What, pushed her down the stairs, did you?”
This, given the way my mother had died, hit too close to home.
“How dare you!” I charged over to the wall bordering all four cottages and kicked it. Unfortunately it didn’t collapse in a shower of bricks and I was tempted to administer another blow. But common sense, the eternal spoilsport, prevailed. So instead I just said, “Those three women at the Old Rectory know next to nothing about me. I’ve seen them once in my entire life.”
“And, let me tell you, they were far from impressed.” Tom came alongside me. “Miss Sneaky Pants is their name for you!”
I went rigid with wrath. What a way to talk about a young child, which is all I had been when my mother took me to visit Rosemary Maywood, Thora Dobson, and Jane Pettinger!
“Barging in on them uninvited!” Irene’s words came slamming down like hailstones, making the scattering of raindrops seem positively benign.
“It wasn’t like that.” I choked out the denial. But, truth be told, I wasn’t sure what had occurred to initiate that first visit to the Old Rectory. My mother could have taken me there unannounced. Had the day ended in a row? Was that why it had been, in the years that followed, a closed subject? But then again Mother had been reticent about everything connected with her past. Now, before I could say anything further, the door of the third cottage opened and a stooped elderly man came feeling his way down his garden path with a walking stick.
“Trouble, Tom?” He inquired in a surprisingly vigorous voice. “Is she the one? Has the devil’s handmaiden arrived in Knells?”
“On her way to see the old ladies, Frank.”
“Viper!” The walking stick wagged in my direction. “Get back to the swamp where you belong and leave those three good women alone. They’re all that stands between us and the folly of human nature, now that everyone in the village sees what should have stood out a mile.”
He had lost me completely.
“You’re right, Frank.” Irene waved at him from her window. “But there’s no good in raking over what’s been done. We’ve all got to come together. I’m surprised that Number Four isn’t out having her say.”
“Here she comes,” Tom informed her. And out the door of the last of the cottages appeared a large woman in a floral apron with her head in pink plastic rollers big enough for a child to roll in down a hill. She moved at a fast pace, with her cheeks blowing in and out like a pair of bellows, and the glint in her eyes would have been enough to make a pit bull whimper.
“This is her?” The latest arrival corralled her neighbors with a voice flung out like a whip and, amidst their shouts of agreement, she came storming out her gate. For one awful moment, I was sure she was going to pick me up with a giant hand (she made Tom’s look as though they belonged on a baby) and hurl me into the ditch. On second thought, perhaps that wouldn’t have been such a bad thing. I might have been able to crawl into the car, thus affording myself the luxury of being able to huddle behind locked doors and wonder what I had done to deserve finding myself in this awkward, not to say baffling, situation.
I suddenly felt extremely cross with Ben that he was off at Memory Lanes, a place with nothing more awful to bear than having to play a few hands of whist to an accompaniment of songs from
The Merry Widow
performed by a group of women with hairstyles dating back to the days of all-frizz no-curl perms.
Rousing myself back to the moment at hand, I decided to mention the salient fact that I was not thrusting my obnoxious self upon the three occupants of the Old Rectory.
“Miss Maywood wrote to me ...”
“We’ve all written,” Tom interrupted.
“And never so much as a one-line reply.” Frank was back to brandishing his walking stick.
“Not a phone call,” stormed Irene from her window. “Isn’t that right, Susan?”
I was hopelessly befuddled. However topsy-turvy the world, Number Four could not in a million years, by any stretch of the imagination, be named Susan. A woman who looked as though she ate three blood-red steaks for breakfast needed a name with more meat on its bones. Something like Bertha or Hildegarde. Anything but—Susan! Even the pink hair rollers and floral pinny couldn’t make her Susan-ish. The mind recoiled. As did the rest of me when she positioned herself in my path and ordered me in a voice that rumbled into a growl to come with her.
“I’ll do nothing of the sort.”
“Yes, you will, Miss Smarty Pants.”
“I thought it was Sneaky Pants.”
“You don’t get to think.” She had me in a vise-like grip now and was dragging me across the road under the appreciative glances of her hateful cohorts. “You’re going to stand where I put you while I get that car out of the ditch. Then you’re going to get the hell out of here and not come back. Anything you have to say needs to be directed to the Village Hall. There’ll be no picking on three defenseless old women. Not while I have breath left in this body. Do I make myself clear, you sorry excuse for a secretary or whatever fancy title you like to give yourself?”
“I’m an interior designer,” I retorted, sounding ever more idiotic. We were now down in the ditch and Susan had the passenger-side door of the car open. Rain was settling under my raincoat collar. Stupidly I had left the keys in the little pocket of leather surrounding the stick shift and she grabbed them up before giving me a shove onto the seat. At which moment my head cleared. Again I reminded myself that there are advantages in not being a size six. I might not be all muscle like Susan but I was damned if I was going to be booted out of Knells without putting up some resistance.
When she went to slam the door I kicked it open, gave her a shove with both hands, causing her to shift just enough for me to duck under her arm. Lumbering out of the ditch I ran smack bang into a human wall made up of Tom, Frank, and Irene—who had either shinnied down a drainpipe or exited her cottage by the more prosaic means of the stairs and the front door.
“Get out of my way!” I shouted.
“Try making us!” Tom’s square face was set. His short hair bristled.