The Trouble with Harriet (28 page)

“How extremely kind of her.” This was no time to think about what I would like to do to Freddy’s mumsie.

“An understatement, if I may say so, Giselle. However, Lulu said she now saw that the powder box would make the perfect receptacle for Harriet’s ashes, and she was sure you would agree without a question. Her generosity moved me deeply. As did that of Frau Grundman when she said that the task of transferring the mortal remains from the urn might be more than my fragile emotions would bear. And she would be honored to perform the task for me.”

“But, Morley, don’t you see that the bad guys could still have won? It may not have been the urn they wanted, but the contents.” Ben’s brows came down in a black bar as he studied my father’s face. “No, of course you don’t; you’ve been hit on the head.”

Before I could say a word, Mrs. Blum entered the room with a tray of coffee cups and a plate of biscuits that even from a distance looked stale.

“I see you’re looking better, Mr. Simons.” She imparted all the cheer of Death come calling. “I just saw Mr. Hopper, and he asked if perhaps you had telephoned. When I told him you were here, he said he would fetch his sisters and join you in this room. That’s if you’re up to it, of course.” She didn’t add that she wouldn’t want to interrupt his hangover, but there was condemnation in every rustle of her skirt as she handed him his coffee cup.

“I think my father-in-law should go to hospital to be checked over,” Ben told her. “He’s got a bad bump on his head.”

“My uncle George used to fall down when he’d had one too many. The wages of sin, Mr. Haskell, are not an extra five pounds in the pay packet.”

Leaving Ben and me to pick up our own cups of coffee, which was every bit as weak as he had anticipated, Mrs. Blum departed. Daddy was just saying he was glad we hadn’t mentioned he had been attacked, because there was no point in raising questions he wouldn’t have wished to answer, when in came the Hoppers. Today they wore matching red sweaters. Cyril wore black trousers, and Edith and Doris had on black skirts. Three roly-poly figures that didn’t look as though they had a brain to divide between them. But what did I know about anything? I had taken an immediate liking to Ursel Grundman, and where had that got me or, I should say, Daddy?

The Hoppers sat down on a wooden bench,  placed their plump hands on their knees, and peered at us with black eyes that looked as though they had been painted and varnished to match their slicked-down hair.

“Did you bring the urn?” Cyril asked in his wooden voice.

“Yes, the urn,” said Doris.

“Harriet’s urn,” said Edith.

“Mr. Simons did bring it.” Ben spoke before Daddy opened his mouth. “But unfortunately for him and all of you, he was attacked and robbed before he could reach the door. We want to know why. In other words, what are you prepared to tell us about the urn, because what we do know for damn sure is that Harriet isn’t in it.”

All three Russian dolls blinked. They looked at each other. They inhaled and exhaled in unison, and again Cyril spoke first.

“We don’t know anything.”

“All Harriet told us was that we were to collect the urn,” said Doris.

“And not talk too much in case we let something slip,” said Edith.

“But you just said you don’t know anything,” I pointed out.

“Not about what is really in the urn or who it’s for.” The merest flicker of intelligence strayed across Cyril’s features. “Harriet didn’t want us to say anything personal that might be different from what she’d told Mr. Simons or that might help him track her down if he ever realized he’d been scammed.”

“She said she knew how to mix the truth with the made-up stuff to be convincing.” Edith lowered her head. “But she said it took lots of practice. And she was right. We shouldn’t have let slip that she’d worked at Oaklands because that’s where, after listening to the patients talk about how well crime paid, she decided to go into business for herself.”

“It was after her husband left her.” Doris raised her chin. “She needed money to look after us. We’ve always needed a lot of taking care of. We didn’t always look like this. It’s been one operation after the other for each of us. That’s why Cyril was beaten up as a kid. Edith and me didn’t have it quite so rough. We only got laughed at and called names.”

“So Harriet really is your cousin?” I sat on the floor and held Daddy’s trailing hand.

“Of course,” said Cyril.

“This was going to be her last job,” said Edith. “It was going to give us the rest of the money we needed to buy a house in Dawlish. That’s in Devon. We went there on a caravan holiday once when we were kiddies and always dreamed about going to live there.”

“What about the Voelkels? Where do they fit into the picture?” Ben asked. Daddy sat looking only semiconscious.

“Who?” Doris’s face went blank. The other two black heads bent toward hers, and she sat nodding as if it would take the tug of a switch to make her stop. “Now I know who you mean. That’s not their real name. It changes with every job. They sometimes worked together. The man and the woman and his old mother and Harriet. But it got that Harriet didn’t like them so much. He kept pushing her to get into the big time when all she wanted was what she called honest pay for a dishonest job. And this time, she told us, he didn’t like it because she started to have feelings for Mr. Simons.”

“Harriet fell in love with you.” Cyril looked with eyes that had lost their varnished look at Daddy.

“She didn’t mean to,” said Edith.

“It broke her heart,” said Doris.

“Why are you saying all this?” Daddy finally spoke as if from somewhere far away.

“Because it doesn’t matter anymore.” Cyril’s voice cracked like a piece of dry wood. “We thought there had to be something wrong last night when she didn’t show up to collect the urn like she had written and told us she would. Then, when we heard about the accident, we knew that had to be why. It didn’t take hearing from Mrs. Blum that it was a brown Vauxhaul that went over the cliff or for her to tell us the license-plate number. We already knew deep inside us that our Harriet was dead.”

“Dead! Do I not already know that?” My father rose up like a wounded lion roused from fitful slumber by someone treading on his tail. “Have I not already faced the unassailable truth that sweet Harriet’s mortal being is gone, never to return?”

“Daddy, I don’t think you can have been listening to what the Hoppers have been saying.” I hurried forward to place a soothing hand on his arm but stepped smartly backward when he snarled at me, showing more teeth than I had thought he possessed.

“It has to be hard for you to accept.” Ben wisely kept at a safe distance. “You’ve been cruelly tricked, Morley. Not too many people are ever likely to find themselves in your position—having to deal with the death of a loved one twice over. But that’s how it is. There was no car crash in Germany. Ingo Voelkel lied to you. His meeting with you was staged. The entire, unhappy Harriet episode was a ruse to get you to bring that urn into England. Only now she is dead and—”

“A terrible fear smites me, Bentwick.” Daddy’s roar shook the timbers of the old inn. “It is that you and my daughter are in league with these paltry specimens of humanity.” He swiveled around one of the Hoppers, who squeaked piteously before ducking behind a table. “Perhaps, God knows, you believe yourselves to be acting in my best interests,” he roared, clasping a hand to his heaving chest. “Defame my Harriet and I may the more quickly rebound from her loss. Yes, I can see that may be your thinking. But I tell you, nothing anyone says will weaken my faith in her goodness or tarnish my memories of our days together.”

“We did say she loved you,” whispered Edith.

“That’s right,” Cyril agreed.

“Indeed we did,” said Doris.

Something in their unblinking black eyes must have gotten through to him because Daddy covered his face with his hands and began to sob. In great gulping gasps, as if he no longer believed in hope or comfort from this world or the next. I was thinking that my own heart would break when Mrs. Blum thrust open the door and informed us that we were disturbing the other residents.

“I think you’d best leave, Mr. and Mrs. Haskell, and take the old man with you. Cliffside House is a respectable establishment. A woman came looking for a room yesterday morning. A shabby, unkempt sort of person. Not at all our usual sort of clientele. And I was put to the trouble of getting rid of her.”

“No need to worry about us,” Ben said coldly, taking Daddy’s arm. After murmuring some sort of good-bye to the Hoppers, I followed my two men through the maze that led us back to the depressing hall and outside, where the air didn’t smell as if it were two hundred years old and the wind hopefully would put a little color into Daddy’s cheeks.

Moving woodenly across the parking area my father insisted, with a pitiful disregard for common sense, that he didn’t need medical treatment for the bump on his head. So we agreed that Ben would drive him home and telephone our wonderful family doctor to request a house call. Meanwhile, I would go on to the Old Abbey, return the Honda Prelude, and come home by taxi.

It made my heart ache to see the misery in Daddy’s eyes as Ben helped him into the passenger seat, where he sat looking vacantly out the window. This was a different kind of grief than we had seen before, quieter, less close to the surface from which tears flow. His devastation was such that I feared it would be a while before he could rouse himself to again parade his grief in public. Was this how he had been after the immediate shock of my mother’s death had worn off? Had he thus wandered in the desert of his soul until he met Harriet? I found myself wishing sadly, as I drove to the Old Abbey, that things might have been different, that they could have met as two people with no hidden agendas, eager to embrace the autumn of their lives, safe in the assurance of a steadfast love.

I had to make myself think of something else. So I settled on Mr. Price’s gun. I hadn’t been serious when I suggested to Ben that we take it with us to Cliffside House. Neither of us would have known how to fire the thing without the instruction manual. I also suspected that we would have been the ones getting into big trouble for being caught in possession of a stolen weapon. The judge would be vexed that we hadn’t turned it into the police station after Aunt Lulu showed us what she lamentably viewed as sort of a door prize.

   Had the children been home, Ben or I would have immediately locked it away in a safe place while we were wondering how to turn it over to the authorities without landing Aunt Lulu in hot water. Now I couldn’t remember where in the drawing room the gun had ended up. If it had been left on the coffee table, it hadn’t been there this morning. I would have noticed a gun nestled between the marmalade pot and the toast rack. Our carelessness was really inexcusable; I got panicky thinking about Daddy’s present state of mind. I really didn’t think he would try to kill himself. But tragedies occur when people don’t take the time and trouble to assume the worst.

I kept picturing the car accident as I drove alongside the wall enclosing the Old Abbey. And when I turned in at the gates and glanced toward the ruins of St. Ethelwort’s monastery, stark and secret in the gloom of the day, I thought about the wages of sin, so dear to Mrs. Blum’s heart. What a bitter irony that Harriet’s manner of death had so closely mimicked her feigned demise in Germany. Was it possible that driving this winding road above the coast had impaired her concentration because the similarity of settings had reminded her of the story she and Herr Voelkel had concocted for my father’s benefit? Or had she simply been driving too fast in her haste to get the urn, which the Hoppers would have collected as arranged but for Mr. Ambleforth’s unwitting intervention?

And if she were hurrying, was that because she had a second appointment to keep, one in which she was to complete her business deal with a purchaser who did not allow moral or legal nitpicking to stand in the way of achieving a heart’s desire? Who was this villain lurking offstage? Had Mr. Price and his cohort hired her and the Voelkels to commit the robbery and then decided to cut out the middleman, or in this case, woman? Or was there some other shadowy figure standing in the wings? Someone every bit as wicked as Malicia Stillwaters in
Murder Most Fowl?

I continued on down the drive and was struck again by the beauty of the Georgian house, so pure in its lines, so mellowed by time that it seemed as much an act of God as the sky above. Parking the car close to the old stables that now served as the garage, I slipped the keys in my jacket pocket, climbed out, and found old Ned the gardener standing a few feet away with a bunch of bronze and yellow chrysanthemums in his hands.

“Morning, missus!” He gave one of his funny little hops, and his face broke into more wrinkles as his mouth formed a smile.

“You’ve brought her ladyship’s carriage back all of a piece, save that the horse is missing.” He cackled a laugh and beckoned to me with a gnarled finger. “Come along inside. I’m on my way to take these flowers to the chapel. It used to be that the lady of the house took care of filling a vase for the altar one or two days a week. But the present her ladyship would rather have me do it. And Miss Finchpeck can’t go there on account of the damp getting into her chest. She’ll have told you how the fog got into her lungs the night she were born and how it’s left her a poor dab of a creature.”

Miss Finchpeck hadn’t put it exactly like that. But I nodded and told Ned I had only come to return the car. If Lady Grizwolde was busy, I would leave the keys with him along with an apology for not having returned it yesterday.

“She ain’t busy. She’s come up poorly.”

“Oh, dear!” I said, shivering as a gust of wind attempted to scalp me. “I hope it’s nothing serious.”

“It be her ankle.” Ned had the advantage of hopping about to keep warm. “She went and sprained it last night. I wasn’t there when it happened, not sleeping in at the house, but Cook says to me this morning, when she gives me my cup of cocoa, that Lady Grizwolde done it when she was trying to get Sir Casper upstairs after him having one of his spells. And Mr. Jarrow for some reason not being around to help her with him. Though he come along quick enough after her ladyship started hollering. Cook said she heard her yell out and went to see what was up. And it was Mr. Jarrow that got Sir Casper up to bed and Cook that helped her ladyship back down to the settee in the library.”