Who Saw Him Die? (5 page)

‘I say, Mum,' he croaked from the top of the stairs, ignoring his father. ‘Where're my new jeans?'

Molly, who had reached the hall, turned back instantly to face her favourite child. Peter was her hope, her sun, even though he had lately been growing increasingly uncommunicative and unresponsive. He had been such a nice boy when he was younger; not as clever or as interested in school work as his sisters had been, but bright and open and affectionate.

It was inevitable, Molly supposed, that he should have changed as he grew towards manhood. He was bound to lose his boyish hobbies. But unlike most of her friends'sons, he seemed to have found no other interests to take their place. He had become secretive and moody, and his mother was extremely worried about him. She would have liked to discuss the problem with Douglas, but she knew that he would only tell her to stop fussing over the boy.

Meanwhile, any communication with Peter was better than none: ‘I haven't seen your jeans since you brought them home, dear. Aren't they where you put them?'

‘I can't find them anywhere …'

‘All right, I'll come and look.'

‘Oh no you won't!' said her husband, barring her way. ‘You do too much for him, Molly. Let him learn to take care of his own clothes.' He raised his voice: ‘Look a bit harder,' he instructed his son sarcastically. ‘Try moving things with your hands.'

Peter scowled, muttered something inaudible, and began to mooch back to his room.

‘Did you hear the news?' Molly cried after him. ‘Jennifer's going to have a baby!'

The boy returned to the top of the stairs, scratching his hair. ‘A what?' he said, bemused.

‘A
baby
. Isn't it wonderful?'

Peter blinked and knuckled his eyes. ‘Jennifer and
Nigel
? Sounds like a miracle …' Then, newly awake, he let out a sudden guffaw and raised his voice as though in the hope of conveying a message across the ether to his brother-in-law in Streatham. ‘Well done, Nige … you finally managed to get it up, then!'

Quantrill took exception to the expression, on his wife's behalf. Nice girls of Molly's generation weren't accustomed to verbal crudity. ‘Don't you speak like that in front of your mother!'

‘Why not?' asked Peter, seizing the opportunity to return his father's sarcasm. ‘Can't she remember how you used to do it?'

‘Why, you young devil –' Intolerably galled, Quantrill charged the stairs two at a time.

‘Joke!' Peter pleaded, back-pedalling. ‘
Joke
, Dad.' But he took the precaution of nipping smartly into the bathroom and shooting the bolt.

While her husband thumped the bathroom door and shouted to Peter to come out and apologise to his mother, Molly hovered wretchedly on the stairs not knowing whether to go up or come down. She'd been embarrassed, as Douglas knew she would be, by the vulgar expression her son had used, and it had sorrowed her to hear him use it. But the simplest and most dignified response would have been for her to pretend she hadn't heard it and to walk away.

Douglas had been unusually considerate in speaking up on her behalf, but she wished he hadn't. The apology that he was now demanding was solely on account of his own hurt pride. It must be very hard for him, Molly acknowledged, to have his non-existent sex life commented on by his son. Not that Peter really meant anything by it, his mother was sure; his father was always grumbling at him and making pointed remarks, and the boy had just been trying to get his own back.

Keeping her head down, busying herself by picking fluff off the stair carpet, Molly reflected that it was perfectly true that Douggie hadn't made love to her for a long time. But that was largely her own fault – she'd made so many excuses, for so long, that he'd finally given up trying. She had been glad, of course. She'd never really enjoyed sex. All she'd wanted was the closeness, the affection, the cuddles that usually went with it. And now she had nothing from him at all.

She really must give this stair carpet a good hoovering, as soon as he'd gone off to work.

Outside the bathroom door, Quantrill was about to issue an ultimatum. ‘Peter! I'll give you just ten seconds to come out of your own accord –'

He paused, recognising the counter productivity of breaking down his own door and thereby putting himself in the even more vexatious situation of having to buy a new one. Fortunately, the door began to edge open. Peter's hand appeared, flapping a white towel.

‘Don't wave it,' snarled his father, ‘wear it! I won't have you wandering about the house half-naked, at your age.'

The door opened wider. Peter sidled out, modestly kilted. ‘Sorry, Dad,' he muttered.

‘All right. Now apologise to your mother.'

Peter shuffled to the head of the stairs, clutching the towel round his waist and looking contrite. Molly, of course, had forgiven him already. She'd been quite amused and relieved by the way he'd waved the white flag, acting up in the lovably naughty way the old Peter used to do. She might have smiled, except that that would have made Douglas even crosser.

‘Sorry, Mum,' said Peter. And then, knowing exactly how to get round her, be beamed and added meaningfully, ‘Or should I say –
Granny
?'

The effect on Molly was instantaneous. She'd been so embarrassed, so depressed by the whole incident that for a minute or two she had quite forgotten the wonderful news about Jennifer's baby. Her cheeks coloured again, but this time with the pink of pleasure.

‘Oh, go on with you,' she said, and bustled, exulting, to the kitchen to grill some bacon for her son's breakfast.

Pleased with himself, Peter turned to his father and gave the old man a wink. ‘OK, Grandad?' he said.

It had been a mild autumn. With no frosts to sharpen their colours and no gales to blow them from the trees, the leaves had hung on, limp and pale, until early November. Now they were coming off all at once. As the overnight fog began to lift, the morning seemed to be dripping with yellow leaves.

Eunice Bell stood in the window of her gloomy drawing room at Tower House, Breckham Market, watching the last of the sodden foliage detach itself from the pollarded lime trees that lined the short gravelled drive leading from her front door to Victoria Road. The road itself, and much of the daylight, was blocked from the window by the dark spines of a monkey puzzle tree that dominated the front garden.

Miss Bell was breakfasting as she stood, saucer in one hand, cup in the other, drinking rich black coffee from Coalport china. Her appetite was small, her tastes fastidious.

She was a small stiff woman whose severely drawn-back hair, still dark except for a few threads of grey, emphasised her bony features. She wore a discreetly expensive navy blue dress, touched with white; not because the muted colour was an appropriate acknowledgement of her brother's death, but because she invariably wore navy blue, in cotton lawn or fine wool or silk according to the season and the occasion. She was not greatly interested in clothes, but she liked to know that she was always impeccably dressed.

Her expression, as she waited for the arrival of a senior detective from the county CID to discuss Cuthbert's alleged accident, was impassive. She was quite alone, in the seven-bedroomed mid-Victorian house – built by her great-grandfather in the Italianate style, complete with shallow-roofed campanile – but she had long ago trained herself never to betray her emotions either in public or in private. In fact, she was excited. She felt an eager anticipation such as she had not experienced since she was a child.

As she stood, uncompromisingly erect, sipping her coffee, she knew again the
frisson
of pleasure with which she had approached all her childhood birthdays; a pleasure intensified by the necessity of pretending not to feel it, for fear of her parents'displeasure. She had learned at an early age that she must never mention her forthcoming birthday, or her present would be withheld. She must never draw attention to herself in any way, or she would be punished.

But that parental tyranny had never prevented her from feeling a natural excitement as each birthday drew near.
I'm going to be nine
, (or ten or eleven or twelve) she had whispered to herself, inwardly exulting.
Next week
(not-the-day-after-tomorrow-but-thenext-day; the-day-after-tomorrow;
tomorrow!) I shall be in my teens
.

It was this secret anticipation that, in those childhood days, had been her major source of pleasure. Her birthday itself had always been an ordeal. First there had been the opening of her present – one only, because she had no near relatives, though some among the succession of cook-housekeepers had occasionally made her a surreptitious gift of a bar of forbidden chocolate.

She had been required to receive and open the plainly wrapped parcel in a tense little ceremony in her mother's sitting room. This was a room that she had not been allowed – had never wanted – to enter without a specific summons. Her mother, who had not married until she was nearing forty, had been a cool, withdrawn woman, apparently indifferent to her children except in the matter of their good behaviour and obedience.

Eunice, summoned on the morning of each birthday, had unwrapped her annual parcel in the knowledge that its contents, though probably expensive, were certain to be more useful than interesting. She could particularly recall the year of the new school overcoat, in good dark grey melton cloth cut long to allow for growth. She had already had two fittings for the coat, without realising that it was going to be her birthday present. But as soon as she saw what the box contained she had performed the required ritual: expressed her surprise and pleasure, kissed her mother's cool cheek, and then, bracing herself to hide her fear of her irascible father, had gone to his study to give her dutiful thanks to him …

But that had been a very long time ago. Now she could savour the pleasure of anticipation, secure in the knowledge that there would be no anti-climax. With Cuthbert unexpectedly dead she was, for the first time in fifty-four years, completely free.

Free to leave Tower House: she had always hated it for its ugliness, its coldness, its gloom, above all for the unhappiness it had contained.

Free to leave Breckham Market: she had never liked the town because of the weight of all the family associations, the long memories of the older inhabitants. She would have moved to Saintsbury years ago, after her widowed mother's death, but for the duty of looking after her brother. As a child she had given all her love to the small boy she had called Cub, and he to her. Cub had never learned to protect himself from their parents, and so she had done her best to shield him. At times she had even taken the blame, and the punishment, for his misdemeanours. When he grew into difficult, unstable manhood her love had waned, but her sense of duty had remained strong. To remove him from his familiar surroundings would, she knew, have disoriented him completely.

It would also, of course, have spoiled what she had of a life of her own. Eunice had no close friends, but many valued acquaintances living in and near Saintsbury; and she had her absorbing voluntary work there as a vice president of the county branch of the Red Cross society and the organiser of its local centre. She intended to keep her social life immaculate, and this would have been impossible with Cuthbert wandering drunkenly in her vicinity, physically as well as mentally lost. And in the larger, busier town, the police would have been less tolerant than they were in Breckham Market. Better, she had concluded, to go on living with her brother at Tower House, but to put herself at a discreet distance by spending most of her time well out of his way in Saintsbury.

But now, suddenly, she was free to leave. She had thought at first that she might simply pack a trunk, lock the house up, and take a room at the Angel Hotel in Saintsbury while she settled her affairs. But Victoria Road was no longer the most select part of Breckham Market, and her solicitor had advised her against leaving Tower House empty and at the mercy of vandals. Both he and her estate agent – she had instructed the senior partner of the most reputable firm of auctioneers and valuers in the town to handle the sale for her – had advised her not to expect the property to sell quickly.

Eunice Bell was neither surprised nor disappointed by their advice. The estate agent had of course been positive, using the tactful adjective ‘substantial' to describe the unattractive property and asserting that it would be eminently suitable for conversion to flats, or offices, or an old people's home, subject to planning approval. But Eunice, hating every aspect of the house, found it difficult to imagine that anyone would be prepared to buy it at the price she was determined to ask. She had investments that provided her with a comfortable private income, but she knew that the type of property she proposed to buy (one of Saintsbury's Georgian town houses that she could set about modernising with taste and discretion) would take all the capital she could raise from the sale.

And so she prepared herself for a long wait. There was, anyway, a good deal to do before Tower House could be sold: the unused rooms to be opened, the heavy furniture to be unswathed from its dustsheets and sent for auction, the family effects to be sorted. It was not a task that she relished. In fact she had been avoiding it – but then, everything had happened so quickly and so recently that she had not, until now, had a moment to stand still and think. Once Cuthbert was buried, on Friday afternoon, she must set to work in earnest.

The clock in the hall, mid-Victorian mahogany and brass, undistinguished except for its excessive size, struck the half-hour.

Eunice Bell looked at her watch. Half past nine, high time the detective arrived.

She began a restless walk through the house. Her greatgrandfather, who had been more concerned with ostentation than with comfort, had sited it so that its principal rooms faced towards the town, regardless of the fact that this was due north. After her mother's death, Eunice had established herself in two small first-floor rooms that caught the sun, and had shut up most of the others. She would have liked to use her mother's former sitting room, the only agreeable ground-floor room in the house, but its associations were too unpleasant. Fortunately it had been possible for her to avoid even walking past the door, because the room was on its own in a passage that led only to the stairway to the tower where her father had had his study … and nothing would have induced her to re-visit
that
.