Blood on the Wood (19 page)

‘It's all very unfortunate, but in the circumstances we can't press the subject of the picture without risking unwanted publicity,' she said. ‘We'll have to wait until the police have finished investigating, then take it up through the lawyers.'

Just what I'd suggested in the first place and it would have saved me a lot of trouble, although I had the sense not to point that out. I didn't mention my burglary attempt, let alone that I'd allowed Lady Fieldfare's daughter to get involved in it, because I was sure Oliver Venn wouldn't dare let the police prosecute me.

With that interview over, all there was left for me to do was get on with my work and wait for the next few days, so that's what I did. I spent a couple of blameless days at home. Finished the bicycle catalogue translations and sent them off with an invoice saying prompt payment would oblige. I was down to my last ten pounds or so in the bank. Shopped, answered mail, cleaned the house up to a point, found the lid of the cheese dish. Considered seriously an offer from a neighbour of two pretty kittens to deal with the mice. On Friday I went back to Clement's Inn, did some proof reading for our newspaper, wrote letters to supporters and was even driven to using the telephone twice – I hate not being able to see people when I talk to them – in connection with a conference of the Women's Trade Union League due to take place in Bath the following week. During one of the proofreading spells, Bobbie Fieldfare arrived suddenly at my shoulder.

‘Hello, Miss Bray. What's happening?'

‘Work's happening.' I handed her a damp galley proof. ‘Read that to me. Out loud and not too fast.'

It was about the work of women sanitary inspectors. She got through a couple of paragraphs, while I checked from the manuscript copy.

‘It's not very interesting, is it? What I wanted to ask you is whether the police—'

‘Don't interrupt. Start again from “Statistics for the last five years in Burnley…”'

Another few paragraphs, then, ‘My mother was awfully curious about where I'd been. I didn't tell her anything.'

‘Good, but keep reading. We'll be locking the page up in a few minutes.'

‘Talking of locking up, I wondered if—'

‘Bobbie, are you in there?' Lady Fieldfare's voice from the corridor.

‘Oh dash it. I'd better go.' She let the proof slide to the floor. ‘Only I do want to talk to you. I'll see you soon.'

Not if I can help it, I thought as she whisked out of the door. Already, with her instinct for doing the wrong thing, she'd wrenched my mind back to where I didn't want to be. I'd tried hard over the last few days not to think about Daisy, avoided the parts of newspapers that might have carried a paragraph about the death by shooting of a young woman in the Cotswolds, but probably wouldn't because it wasn't significant. Only after Bobbie had gone and we'd got the page locked up did I start wondering why I'd been trying so hard not to think. I said I needed some fresh air, went outside and walked round the streets under dusty and tattered plane trees, dodging children playing hopscotch. Once I let myself think, the answer was clear. I felt guilty.

*   *   *

It took another few turns of the streets to decide what I felt guilty about. Certainly not trying to take the picture. My conscience was as clear about that as it always had been and it was just a pity I'd failed. Lying to the police, then? Well, it wasn't the first time I'd had to do that, unfortunately. Anyway, I hadn't lied in so many words, just left out a few things. All right, more than a few things. Daniel's engagement. Felicia with the revolver. ‘
I had a gun, didn't I?
' Daniel with the revolver. Bobbie. An impressive list, and yet that wasn't at the heart of my trouble. In the end it came to just one word – Daisy. We'd all of us pulled and pushed her around as it suited us. By Daniel's account her uncle had been prepared to sell her with less care than most men would sell a horse. Even Daniel had started out wanting her for the tunes and dances in her head then cast her as the rescued damsel in his own personal drama. The rest of the Venn family saw her as an embarrassment. True, they'd intended to deal with her honourably enough, a little room of her own in some distant college, a folk-dance teacher's certificate as her stock in trade. But what it amounted to was getting her out of their civilised, socialist, nicely ordered lives. Harry Hawthorne had been right to be angry, but then wasn't he using her for his own purposes just the same? Manoeuvring Daniel into announcing his engagement to her was a way for Harry to embarrass the bourgeoisie, like his noisy grief for Daisy dead. They'd all used her as it suited them, tried to tidy her away when it didn't and now they were trying to tidy away her death. Correction, now
we
were trying to tidy away her death. I didn't like it, but I was as guilty of that as any of the rest of them. So the question was, why was I conspiring with them?

*   *   *

Once I started being honest about it, the answer wasn't complicated. Protecting Bobbie was only a part of it. Naturally I was glad to get her out of the way, but that wouldn't justify keeping things from the police and helping to conceal evidence of murder. The truth was that I was almost sure I knew who had killed Daisy and that the Venns knew it too. The name had been thumping like a terrified heart in the background of that talk in the early hours before Adam could bring himself to go to the police. Fe-lic-i-a, Fe-lic-i-a. As if vibrating through the timbers of the house from the room where she was sleeping a drugged sleep upstairs. She had the motive to kill Daisy Smith. With Philomena's revolver accessible to anybody in the household, she had the means. And I'd almost caught her doing it red-handed, taken the gun from her when it was still warm.

The more I thought about that, the more horribly neatly it fitted. The shot Bobbie and I heard was the one that had killed Daisy. When I found Felicia with the gun, Daisy's body might have been only yards away at the back of the summerhouse or even tumbled into one of the overgrown borders. Perhaps I hadn't been so wrong in thinking that Felicia intended to kill herself: murder, then suicide. (Perhaps she'd even tried. Daniel thought two rounds had been fired from the revolver, although in my memory there'd been only one.) I'd got there in time to stop her and, in taking the gun, unintentionally confused the evidence. She'd recovered enough to talk to Carol more or less normally then pleaded illness and gone upstairs to her room. Late at night, she went down to the garden, picked up Daisy's stiffening body from where it had fallen or been hidden and propped it in the cabinet. Not impossible physically. Daisy was small and thin and Felicia from the look of her a normal healthy young woman. The question why she'd do that could only be answered from a place most of us never go to – the mind of a person who has taken the life of another human being. Outside that, I could only guess. Perhaps it had been remorse – giving Daisy a kind of entombment. Perhaps it was a message to Daniel, blaming him for driving her to it. The strain of carrying the body through the garden into the studio would explain her state when Carol and I found her. If the police knew even a part of what we knew, Felicia would come in for some hard questioning and in that case, I was certain, she'd break down and confess. If she were lucky enough to escape hanging – with a good barrister and a jury sympathetic to her youth, unhappiness and provocation – she'd wither slowly away in a prison cell. Even if that was what she deserved, should I be the one to put her there? On the other hand, by not telling the police what I'd seen and heard I was behaving as if Daisy didn't matter.

I sat on a bench under a tree, watching a pigeon chasing another pigeon in the dust, trying to think a way out of where I'd put myself. Now, if Daisy had been my friend or my sister, Felicia's fate wouldn't have mattered a jot. I'd have wanted justice for Daisy, revenge even. But she hadn't been a friend or, even in the comradely sense, a sister because I hadn't tried to make her one. Apart from comforting her after the nightmare, I'd been content for the Scipian girls to look after her. Now like all the rest of them all I wanted was to keep her out of my life because to do otherwise would mean grief and pain.

‘And you know it would, Daisy,' I said to her in my head. ‘A lot of grief and pain for everybody. Is that what you'd want?'

The answer was that I had no idea what she'd have wanted because I didn't know her. None of us knew her.

*   *   *

I took the unanswered question home with me, tried to smother it in work over the weekend. A postcard arrived on Saturday about a meeting in Holborn the following evening, protesting about the French military action in Morocco. Still out of sorts and angry with myself I thought there was no point in pretending to worry about whole countries if I couldn't even help one person and decided not to go. Then on Sunday it occurred to me that Max Blume would certainly be there and he was the only person I knew in London who'd actually met Daisy Smith. So I was there at the meeting, noting and deploring along with the rest. Afterwards, I got Max on his own at the back of the hall.

‘Have you recovered from all that country air, Nell?'

He was waiting for me to make the first move.

‘When did you leave?' I said.

‘Wednesday, the day after you. Not before I'd been questioned by the police.'

‘You!'

‘No personal distinction about it. They questioned everybody left in the Scipian camp – although there were no more than a couple of dozen of us left by then. The main thing they seemed interested in was whether Hawthorne might have been inciting us to tear down the Venns' house.'

‘Not about Daisy?'

‘Oh, they wanted to know when anybody had last seen her, but they didn't get far.'

There it was again. Even among the Scipians – who were kindly disposed to her – she'd hardly existed in her own right, made no more lasting impression than a shadow on a brick wall.

He gave me a sideways look. ‘What's wrong, Nell?'

‘I don't know. A lot, I think.'

Somebody came round with a petition. Max read it at a glance, then signed. I broke my own rule by signing without reading for once.

‘Let me get us something to drink and we'll talk properly,' Max said. ‘Coffee or cocoa?'

He collected two mugs from the table by the urn and we settled in two seats in a far corner. The coffee was vile, as it normally is with good causes. Max took a gulp, winced. ‘So what do you want to know?' he asked.

‘Did the police ask you about Daniel and Daisy?'

‘The engagement? No.'

‘Did you have the impression they knew about it?'

‘I don't see how they could fail to. After all, it was the talk of the camp so I'm sure one of the women will have mentioned it to them. Does that matter?'

‘Probably, yes.'

He looked worried. ‘Is all this for the sake of Daniel Venn's
beaux yeux?
'

‘Not exactly, no.'

‘Then what is it?'

‘I was the one who found her – found Daisy's body.'

I desperately needed someone to discuss it with and when a friend was really in trouble Max could be relied on to put aside his journalist's instincts. So I told him about the attempt at art theft and how it ended but couldn't tell even him about Felicia. That left a hole in the middle of the story and Max, of course, spotted it.

‘Yes, I can see it was bad for you and I'm sorry, but I don't see why you have to stay involved.'

‘There'll be an inquest and so on and the police will want to speak to me again.'

‘And you'll simply tell them everything you know – won't you?'

I just looked at him.

‘Like that, is it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Nell, if you'll accept some advice from me, don't get too close to the Venns.'

‘I'm not close to them. I don't want to be close to them. It's only…'

‘So it is Daniel?'

‘No, of course it isn't. If it's anything, it's Daisy. I hate the way the world's closing over her already as if she never existed. Even when she was alive, she never existed much. None of us can even remember properly when we last saw her.'

‘One of the things the police wanted to know was whether anybody had seen her with a stranger from outside the camp.'

‘Had anybody?'

‘No, but there again, would they have noticed? After all, we were most of us strangers to each other. The camp had only been going for three days and if somebody saw a woman talking to Daisy, they'd simply assume it was a Scipian they didn't happen to recognise.'

‘Why a woman?'

‘Because she spent most of her time with the women. She was such a timid little thing I think somebody would have noticed if she'd been talking to a man.'

Another point against Felicia. One of the things that had puzzled me was how Daisy came to be on her own in the garden of the Venns' house. Suppose Felicia had gone down to the Scipian camp at some time in the day, found Daisy and delivered a message – a message, say, that Daniel wanted her to come and meet him. If she'd done that and it could be proved against her, at least then I could forget the picture of her spending the rest of her life in prison. That cold premeditation would be enough to hang her. I tried to get that out of my mind and concentrate on what Max was saying.

‘Of course, I don't know what Harry Hawthorne said to the police. Most of us were questioned by constables, but they sent an inspector down to see Harry. They were more than an hour together and neither of them looked very happy at the end of it.'

‘Inspector Bull, big man with cold grey eyes?'

‘That's the one.'

‘Do you think Harry Hawthorne might have met Daisy somewhere before? He was up at the Venns' house playing a lament for her soon after the police got there. It was grotesque and yet I'd have sworn he was really mourning Daisy.'