Blood on the Wood (23 page)

‘What was that you said?' I couldn't help it coming out sharply. She looked at me, surprised.

‘Just what he was saying. Not to worry, the other man wouldn't know.'

‘No, the name he called her.'

‘I said, Flissie. That was part of the joke, it was such a silly sort of name.'

From inside the hall the piano thumped out a few emphatic dancing bars. The cry went up, ‘Sally. Where's Sally?'

She stood up, stamped out the cigarette butt with her silver-buckled dancing shoe.

‘Got to go. Nice meeting you. Sorry I haven't been able to help.'

I stayed sitting on the step for quite a while, hearing the music and jingle of bells through the half-open door.

Chapter Fourteen

I
N THE END I WALKED ALL
the way home, through Chalk Farm and up Haverstock Hill back to Hampstead. There was an edge of autumn in the air, with a sharp breeze skittering the first leaves off the plane trees and dusk coming early. I could have caught a tram most of the way but my mind works best when I'm walking. Sally was speaking the truth as she saw and heard it, I'd have bet money on that. After all, what reason did she have for lying? And yet what she'd said made nonsense of what I thought I knew.

The toff in the barn, assumed quite reasonably to be Daniel Venn, had called a woman Flissie. A diminutive, a family pet name. I'd even heard some of the Venns calling Felicia by it. All this had happened on Saturday afternoon before suppertime at the Scipian camp, hours before the dancing by the bonfire and Daniel's impulsive engagement to Daisy. I'd met Felicia that afternoon up at the house and she'd been impatient because Daniel wasn't back. Then later I'd met Daniel in the camp, supposedly newly returned from Wiltshire with Daisy in tow, and when I mentioned Felicia he'd asked after her in a way that suggested he hadn't seen her since he got back. Which meant that they couldn't have been the couple Sally and her friend heard in the barn – unless they'd both been lying to me by implication. And why not, come to think of it? They didn't owe any duty of truth to me and if the two of them had a secret tryst in a cart shed, they wouldn't want the world to know. But if that was what had happened on Saturday evening it made Daniel's decision a few hours later to betray Felicia even worse.

When I got home there were scuttlings of mice diving for their holes as soon as I opened the door and a letter from the bicycle manufacturers saying they'd forgotten to ask me to translate another page about patent battery lamps, enclosed, and could I please do it as soon as possible? No mention of an extra fee, naturally. I sat up half the night to do it, on cups of strong coffee, because in my financial state I couldn't afford to lose customers, even annoying ones. But while most of my mind was on switches and batteries another part of it must have been thinking about Daisy, because in the early hours of the morning there was a nagging question that wouldn't let me sleep until I'd dealt with it. So I went upstairs and rooted around for the few of my father's medical books that I'd kept out of sentiment. One of them had quite a long and comprehensible section on rigor mortis. I read and re-read it.

The feel of Daisy's body as Adam and I lifted her out of the cabinet had been at the back of my mind all the time and wouldn't go away. Now I dropped the mental defences and let it come back to me without resisting – her arms and legs thin and stiff like dry sticks, as if a little pressure would snap them, her neck slewed sideways. She'd bent a little at the waist when we'd lifted her out but that was all. Daniel had noticed it too some time later, appalled by the stiffness of her quick violinist's hands. The book, dating back fifty years or so, was cautious about the time rigor mortis would take to set in after death. This would be affected by various factors like air temperature or body weight. The first onset of it in hands and feet might be noticed as early as two hours after death. It could take anything between six and twelve hours for stiffness to spread to the whole body. So Daisy was six hours dead at least when we found her. I hadn't checked the exact time, but thought it was probably around an hour past midnight. In that case, it would fit well enough with the shot Bobbie and I heard around seven o'clock, just before it got dark.

Almost beyond doubt, Daniel hadn't killed her and neither had Hawthorne. For several hours from around seven o'clock the gun had been in my possession. About ten o'clock, probably, I'd given it to Daniel. Some time after that he'd shown it to Hawthorne then mislaid it. But if Daisy had been shot after ten o'clock, her body wouldn't have been almost completely stiff a mere three hours or so later. I wondered briefly if there were two guns involved and decided against it. The inspector would know more about guns than I did and he was obviously concentrating on Philomena's revolver. Besides, this was the Cotswolds not the American West – hardly bristling with revolvers. Except there was something I was missing. It was late, my mind was muzzy. I looked again at the passage in the book – between six and twelve hours for rigor to spread to the entire body. Forget the shortest time for a while and look at the longest. Assuming twelve hours, Daisy might have been shot as early as one o'clock in the afternoon – but I knew she hadn't been, for she'd been scraping carrots at the Scipian camp as late as three or even four. It might have been at any time after that. Which meant …

My mind was creaking like the timbers of an old ship in a gale, both from tiredness and from having to go where it didn't want to go. Daniel had told the police that he'd taken his aunt's revolver, had it with him all afternoon. I'd assumed it was a lie to save Felicia but suppose it had happened? And it had been Daniel after all who left the blanket in the summerhouse for me, as I'd asked him. Was I intended to find the gun under it much later and add another layer of confusion to the evidence? If so, Daniel had been the cold and calculating one and Felicia's unlikely story of happening to find it under the blanket might even be true.

Up to that point I'd still believed in Felicia's guilt. Now the picture had shifted and I liked what I saw even less. Daniel and Felicia were lovers, they'd been together in the cart shed. Daisy was a regrettable mistake and must be disposed of. And I was the worst fool in the world for thinking that a person I'd instinctively liked couldn't be guilty of murder. Inspector Bull, without that emotional disadvantage, must have got there before me. For all I knew, knowledge of rigor mortis might have improved since my father's student days so that the police could judge the time of death more precisely. But come to think of it, in that respect at least Inspector Bull was at a disadvantage. It was daylight by the time he arrived on the Tuesday morning, around five o'clock, say. Four hours for the body to stiffen completely, with no way of telling how long it had been like that. It would annoy him when he thought about it, and he'd had time to think by now. Why hadn't we called the police earlier? Why hadn't we done the normal thing and sent somebody running down to the village policeman? The decision not to had been Adam's. A questionable decision by an intelligent man – unless he'd known more than he admitted about when Daisy died. I put the book back on the shelf and got to bed at last for a few hours' sleep.

*   *   *

In the morning I packed a carpet bag with a change of clothes, put a note through my neighbour's door saying yes please to the kittens when I got back and went to Clement's Inn to break the news that I'd be away for a couple of days. It wasn't as easy as that, of course, because there were half a dozen things that had to be settled before I went. I was sitting in the main office, working through a series of memoranda about speakers' out-of-town expenses (‘
Is it too much to expect that the hosts should provide a meat tea?
') and being distracted by a friend at the other end of the table who was trying to talk to me while dealing with incoming telephone calls.

‘… so I told her, if all they could do was quarrel about who was going to ride the horse they might as well give up there and then. The trouble with processions … Hello, yes, this is Holborn 2724. No, should she be? No, I don't think so. If you'll hold on a minute I'll go and look.' She left the phone off its hook and disappeared, leaving me in peace for a while. ‘No, I'm sorry Lady Fieldfare, nobody here's seen her today. Well, of course we will. I hope you find her.'

She hooked the phone back. ‘Lady Fieldfare, worrying about her daughter.'

‘Why worrying?'

‘She was supposed to be somewhere or other this morning and she hasn't turned up. From what I've seen of that young woman, that's not unusual.'

Probably not. I scrawled a hasty memorandum of my own to add to the out-of-town expenses saga, put on my hat and picked up my bag.

‘Off already, Nell? Are you coming back for the meeting this afternoon?'

I told her no and please give them my apologies. I was already heading for the door. At Paddington I sprinted for a train, caught it as the guard's whistle was blowing and by mid-afternoon was getting out at the all too familiar halt.

*   *   *

Somewhere to stay the night was a priority. I didn't intend to live under the Venns' roof. I enquired at the village store and post office and was told that Mrs Penny sometimes took in hikers, opposite the Crown with geranium pots outside. Her cottage was a sliver of honey-coloured limestone wedged between two taller houses and looked approximately one and a half storeys high, with the overhang of the ragged thatch coming halfway down the small upstairs windows. Mrs Penny herself was in proportion to her cottage, less than five feet tall from her black boots to her grey topknot. She looked me down and up on her doorstep, tilting her head right back as a protest at my height.

‘You a hiker then, miss?'

‘Yes.' I quieted my conscience with the thought that I'd probably do plenty of walking.

‘I only take hikers in the summer.'

‘But it's only just September. Couldn't you stretch a point?'

‘Hiking on your own?' She made it sound like a suspicious act in itself. Why did I have to work so hard round here to persuade my way into an uncomfortable bed? ‘I usually have gentlemen.'

I assured her my habits were civilised. She still looked doubtful.

‘I had a lady here for her health once. A teacher, she was. The doctor said if she stayed in Birmingham with her chest he wouldn't be answerable.'

The meaning was clear. Ill health was acceptable. Lone females gadding around for selfish pleasure were not.

‘I'm sure the country air would do my chest a world of good too,' I said.

Her eyes gleamed, bright as a robin's sighting a worm. ‘So it's for your health, then?'

‘I hope so.'

I doubted it, but it was enough to get me over the threshold and up the stairs to a wedge-shaped room with a slanting ceiling. Even in the high part of the room I couldn't have stood upright, and anyway that was taken up with the brass bedstead. In the lower part all I could do was crouch by the window with a view of the village street and the yard of the public house.

‘Tea's at six o'clock,' she said. ‘Cold beef and pickles.'

‘Could you possibly make it later? I've got a call to make first.'

The look in her eyes told me she'd never have let me in if she'd known I was going to be a nuisance, but the thing was done now.

‘You don't want to be out late, not with your chest. But no later than nine o'clock, because some of us need our sleep.'

I washed dust and train smuts off my face in the cracked basin on the toilet table, was shown the hiding place of the key – under a pot of geraniums by the front doorstep – and turned up the street towards the open road, aware of Mrs Penny's eyes on me as I went. I'd almost certainly taken up lodgings with the village gossip, but nothing to be done about that. The road between the fields to the Venns' house was empty of people or carts, and shining in watery sun after a shower. By five o'clock I was walking up the steps to the front door.

Annie answered it, a scared look on her face, eyes puffy and red-rimmed. Before she could say anything, Carol appeared on the stairs.

‘Daniel said you'd be coming.'

Her pale skin was drum-tight over her cheekbones, her eyes hot and bright. She led the way through to the room where we'd had our meeting.

‘Adam's gone to the junction to collect Mr Galway.'

‘Galway?'

‘He's a friend of Adam's, another solicitor. Adam asked him to come down in case…'

‘In case they arrest Daniel?'

She bit her lip, then nodded. ‘You see what he's doing, trying to protect her?'

‘Has he told you so?'

‘I guessed. Daniel's an open book.'

‘Did you try to talk him out of it?'

‘Yes, but it was a waste of breath. Daniel may act like a madcap some of the time, but there's so much determination there, even as a boy. He was only ten when I got engaged to Adam and … oh, I'm sorry, I'm rambling. I don't know what to do.'

I said, ‘If it comes to it, I may have to take the choice away from you. You realise I couldn't let Daniel stand trial for murder without telling the police what I saw.'

‘Felicia?'

‘Yes. How is she?'

‘She's hardly been out of bed since she spoke to the police. The inspector was quite gentle with her, all things considered, but it didn't help. The doctor's seen her twice. Nervous prostration, he says. Keep her quiet and give her time.'

‘From what Daniel said to me, he's trying to buy us all time,' I said. ‘Time to find out who killed her.'

‘Yes.'

‘He believes somebody left her body in the cabinet to put the blame on the family.' I didn't mention Hawthorne's name, not sure how much Daniel had discussed with her.