Broken Music (22 page)

‘Of marriage? From Greville Foley?'

She looked at him sharply. How could he possibly know about Grev? ‘No. It was from a man called Gervase Hatherley.'

‘Who is he?'

‘He lives not far away, the other side of the Hill. He's rather rich, and as a family, we've never had much money, I'm afraid, so it would have been a good match from that point of view. But she refused him. He's quite a bit older, and to be truthful not exactly anyone's idea of a romantic hero, but he wouldn't take no for an answer, and I'm sorry to say she let him think she might change her mind and say yes. I knew there was simply
no
chance of that, but when I said it was too bad of her to let him think there was, she told me not to be too sure she wouldn't decide to accept him after all. I-I felt as though I was talking to a stranger. That was bad enough, but I had no idea, until I read the notebooks, that she'd actually been meeting him in secret – at least, once or twice she had.' Her voice choked with the misery of the horrible conclusions the thought led to…

He said gently, ‘Your sister was…innocent.'

She was grateful for his quick understanding, and suddenly found herself liking this man, respecting the integrity which had propelled him to come here and pursue the truth about Marianne dying, in the first place. And he
had
found it. Before he left the village, he had made a point of coming to the rectory and telling them how Danny Boswell had seen Marianne fall –
fall
, not jump – into the lake, and the weight of four years' wondering if she just
might
have committed suicide had been lifted from all of their shoulders. Suddenly, it seemed easier to talk to him. ‘All this makes her sound very foolish, but I think it just filled the need for some sort of drama. You can't think how dull our lives were before the war. And I suppose he agreed to the secrecy because…well, I think he would have done anything to get her to marry him, and the idea must have touched his vanity as well. But Gervase Hatherley is a very proper man, and wouldn't abide being made to look a fool if it had come out.'

‘A fool, or worse? Putting her in a compromising situation like that? Meeting her in such a secluded spot, a young girl, unchaperoned?'

‘I…suppose so.'

‘Do you think Miss Huckaby got to know of their meetings?'

‘I don't know whether she did or not, but in view of what other things Marianne told her, it's possible, isn't it?' Despite herself, she could not keep a trace of bitterness from her voice. It was painful to know that Marianne had confided things to Edith Huckaby that she had kept from her own sister.

‘Are you suggesting that she went out to meet Hatherley the night she died – and perhaps Edith Huckaby knew about it, and has held it over Hatherley ever since, until he finally snapped and killed her?'

‘That would be nearly as fanciful as Marianne's stories, wouldn't it?'

‘Yet you've always wondered if he had something to do with your sister's death, haven't you?' he hazarded.

‘Have I? I don't
know
! I was very cross with her about keeping him dangling, like that, but I never even dreamt she'd be so silly as to meet him secretly. Until last night, that is, when I read those notebooks.'

‘I can see how difficult you would find that to believe.'

That, too, hurt. But she had to say, honestly, ‘No. No. Of course it was a shock to find out what had been going on, but I don't, not really, at the bottom of me, find it so difficult to believe. You never knew Marianne. She sometimes lived in another world. But I wish there had been something more in those books. The last entry I read ended right at the end of the last page and was written two days before she died. She never missed a
day
writing in those books. One of them must still be missing.'

The gamekeeper's cottage stood alone on the edge of the woods, a one-storey brick-built house with a pump, a rainwater butt, an outside privy and a picket fence surrounding a garden of sorts, which Ben Naylor didn't have much patience in maintaining. A few sunflowers and etiolated Michaelmas daisies, plus a few rampant herbs, defied the weeds and came up every year, progeny of the ones his wife, Mary, had planted in an attempt to brighten the place up the first year she and Ben had married, just after his old dad had died. Apart from that there was nothing but a grey old apple tree, with one great leaning limb propped up, and a poultry run surrounded by stout wire netting. It was enough for Ben. That was how he liked to live, surrounded by silence, and the noises of the woods, and the animals who, like him, made their home there.

He opened his door to another bright morning and immediately his eyes lit on the ground outside the hen run. A fox, dammit, had had another one of the chickens in the night. Decapitated it, then left it where it was, adding insult to injury. Looking with rage at the carnage of blood and feathers, he swore again at the senseless waste. He counted the rest of the chickens, one gone and the one left dead, then put Fern's food bowl and her water dish outside her kennel before leaving her chained up while he disposed of the mangled corpse – he knew he should have left the bitch outside last night, but she'd been better company than his thoughts – and went to investigate how the fox had managed to get in. With the cessation of hunting over the last years, the vermin had increased. Stop one earth up and there were twenty more.

He turned to go back indoors and saw two men walking up the path from the village, one of them the policeman he'd met before and an older, bigger man. The inspector's scars were obviously due to the war which Ben had been too old to fight in; when he saw men like that, he knew now how lucky he was to have escaped. Too old, and needed here anyway, to shoulder the management of what was left of the estate, as well as covering his own duties. It hadn't been easy, just himself and old Scuddy Thomas, but he'd done what he could. If Lady Sybil started up the shoots again, which Ben was confident she would, he was determined there would be some good sport, eventually as good as in the old earl's day.

 

Reardon saw the gamekeeper waiting for them, arms akimbo, as he and Wheelan approached. His glance skirted queasily past the array of foxes' brushes, decaying grey squirrels, magpies and rooks nailed to the fence, like heads on turnpikes, presumably
pour encourager les autres
. He introduced Wheelan. Ben nodded. ‘Didn't expect you chaps to be about so bright and early.'

‘Best part of the day, first thing in the morning,' the sergeant replied heartily.

‘Pot of tea on the go, want some?'

Reardon accepted the offer. ‘Wouldn't say no, while we have a word or two.' They followed the gamekeeper inside. The living room was low-ceilinged, dark and sparsely furnished, with heavy old furniture and a bare brick floor on which a rag rug offered scant comfort, though it was warm enough from the stove, where a fire glowed through the open doors to give some illusion of homeliness. A harmonium stood in one corner, with an open book of Moody and Sankey's Gospel hymns on the music rest. On a bench under the small window were piled onions, carrots and potatoes, some raw meat and what might have been the skin of a rabbit or a hare, all sitting alongside a big, black pot, soot-encrusted from the fire. Reardon found himself in some sympathy with the desire that the fastidious Edith Huckaby – she of the aspirational nature and the pretty clothes – had expressed for a different life, should she have hitched herself to Ben Naylor, who appeared as deeply entrenched here as one of the centuries-old oaks growing outside in the wood, his roots as deep into the earth as theirs.

They addressed themselves to the mugs of thick, stewed, heavily sugared tea they were given from the big teapot keeping hot on the hob, minor pleasantries being exchanged while Naylor tidied away the remains of his breakfast from the bare, scrubbed table.

‘Nice job you've got here,' Reardon remarked when the gamekeeper pulled out a stool and joined them. ‘Pretty much your own master, I reckon?'

‘Lady Sybil lets me get on with it. She knows me well enough to know I wouldn't let her down.'

‘You've worked for the estate a long time?'

‘Soon as I were old enough to work at all. Started with my father.'

‘So you know her well?'

‘None better. We grew up together, so to speak. No airs and graces when she were a girl – and none now, come to that. I've no grumbles about working for her. Born here in this cottage and I hope to die in it.'

‘What did Miss Huckaby think to that?' Wheelan asked.

‘As I told the inspector here yesterday, not much. We could've been married and stayed quite content here, only that wasn't what she wanted. I could understand, mind,' he added fairly, ‘she'd grown used to fine ways and this would've been a comedown.'

Reardon recalled the crucifix, the rosary. ‘And she was a Roman Catholic as well, wasn't she?'

Naylor raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘Well, she didn't go to Mass, being as there's no RC church near enough. But once a Catholic, always a Catholic, that's what they say, don't they? And I'm a Methodist, so you see how it was.'

‘You said she wanted you to leave Oaklands. Did you quarrel over it?' Reardon asked.

‘I'm not a quarrelling man. There's few things worth losing your temper over. Only gets you into trouble. I told her straight I wasn't going, and that was that.'

He was a difficult man to read, one who obviously kept a tight rein on his emotions. Obstinate as a mule, slow to anger, but maybe, like anger in many who kept their feelings bottled up, it could explode, given the right trigger to detonate it, Reardon thought once again. ‘The night before last, when she was killed. You're sure you saw nobody that night?'

‘Not even Mr Hatherley, night like that.'

‘Hatherley? Who's he?' Reardon asked, as if the name was new to them.

‘Mr Gervase Hatherley, his lands march with ours. He exercises his dog along here most nights.'

‘Aren't there walks on his own land?'

Naylor shrugged. ‘Nobody's going to stop a friend and neighbour walking along here, if that's what they want to do. He's doing no harm. He only goes as far as the lake. Sits on one of the rocks for a while, then turns back.'

‘Oh, an old man like, needing to rest?' Wheelan asked ingenuously.

Naylor picked up the teapot to replenish the mugs, found it empty and put it back on the table. ‘It's not that. He's a younger man than me, but see – he were attached to Miss Marianne, the one you mentioned,' he said, with a nod to Reardon. ‘Hit him pretty bad, when she died, I hear.'

‘What do you mean by attached? Was she his young lady?'

‘Not that I know of. And I shouldn't think it likely. He's what they call a confirmed bachelor, very well respected, not short of a bob or two. Big shot around here, JP and all that. And she was only a girl, but by all accounts he thought a lot of her. Likely he thought of her as a daughter.'

‘And that's why he comes down here to look at the place where she died, every night?' asked Reardon, unable to conceal the scepticism he felt.

‘Can't think of any other reason he'd come this way so regular, apart from exercising his dog. But I said
most
nights, not every, and as to Monday night, I wouldn't know. I didn't go out and you can't see the lake from here. Anyways, 'tain't likely he'd be out a night like that, in that rain, much less sitting looking at the lake, is it?'

Reardon couldn't think of any other questions at the moment. Their tea was finished, and he stood up. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Naylor – and for the tea. You say this Mr Hatherley's land adjoins this estate?' he asked as they went out. ‘We might as well walk on to see him while we're out this way. You never know, he might have chanced the rain. How far is it, then, to his house?'

‘Follow the lake, then take a right turning where the path branches. You'll see the Gypsies' caravans on t'other side and you'll find the path skirts the base of the hill and into the next valley.' He cast a weather eye on the sky. ‘Best get a move on. We're in for some more rain, and it's rough going in parts,' he added, taking a dubious look at their feet. ‘Haven't you got any transport?'

The police contingent had arrived in Broughton squashed into a canvas-sided motor van, which had also transported Reardon's motorcycle, but the men had now departed in the van, leaving only the motorcycle parked behind the Greville Arms. Wheelan's deadpan jokes about it, and the size of him, led Reardon to feel it wouldn't be a good idea to suggest the sergeant should ride pillion.

‘That's all right,' he said. ‘The sergeant here enjoys a good walk.'

When the two detectives had left him alone, Ben Naylor finished preparing the meat and vegetables for his supper, threw them all into the pot with a handful of pearl barley and a sprig or two of thyme, and set the stew on the stove where it would stay on a slow simmer all day. He put the innards aside for Fern later, and threw the head and skin onto the fire. He whistled for the dog and set off in the direction opposite to that taken by the two policemen, up to Peddy Covert, the nearest thicket of woodland that provided shelter for game. His head was thick after sitting up late, his mind troubled in fear that he'd given something away in his conversation with the police. Neither of them were fools and he believed that neither had been entirely convinced by what he had seen fit to tell them.

Following his daily routine left his thoughts free to wander without the need for too much concentration, and with Fern running ahead of him he plodded on, planting his feet firmly on the familiar path, gun over his shoulder. What he'd told the police about his association with Lady Sybil was true but it left out most of what he felt about her. She was far more than an employer to him: he could say she was a friend without fear of contradiction from her, and one he had known for most of his life. They'd grown up together as children, running wild, in the unusual circumstances of Lady Sybil's neglected childhood, not yet of an age to care about the differences of their stations in life. She was a high-spirited girl, fearless as a boy. She dared do anything. He had seen her put a dying squirrel, that had been attacked by a magpie, out of its misery with a stone on the head, and getting a bite for her pains. Ben had taught her how to look for birds' nests and take but one egg; to climb trees. Shown her where the badgers' setts were, how to imitate a bird's call, or to skim a pebble so that it bounced seven times across the lake; he had taught her to swim in it. It had been an anarchic childhood, untroubled by authority. It could not have lasted. When she began to grow up she was sent to London to her father's sister to be coached and primped and dressed and altogether be made into a young lady fit to take her place in polite society.

Just in time. By then Ben had reached the age when he was becoming susceptible to girls, and was beginning, painfully, to imagine himself passionately in love with her, to suffer all the pangs of unrequited first love, and a boy's unrealistic fascination with the unattainable. After she left, he went on with his life, and after a while he met and eventually married his Mary, a village girl who was his true and only love. Nevertheless, those childhood years were never to be forgotten. There wasn't much Ben wouldn't do for his Lady Sybil.

Mary had died in childbirth, and their longed-for child with her, ten years after they were married, and Ben had retreated into himself, with no intention of ever marrying again. Since then, he had lived alone in the house where he had been born, following the same uneventful existence which had always been his. He had no problems with that but, contrary to everything he had previously believed, now that Mary had been dead so long, he had begun to feel the need of a wife. He had been brought up in a strait-laced household, where the teachings of the Bible were paramount, and anything else but married respectability was not acceptable.

Then Edith came along. What he had told the police was not strictly true. He had wrestled with his conscience over her, about marrying her and making an honest woman of her, but when he compared her with Mary, something stuck in his throat. Yet Edith, walking fearlessly through the woods to his house at night, when everyone else was in bed…how could any red-blooded man resist what was so patently on offer?

It was she herself who had begun to suggest marriage. But ambitious as she was, how long would she be content with life in a gamekeeper's cottage, on a gamekeeper's wages? Never, he thought, and was proved right when she began urging him to leave, to ‘better himself' as she put it. Garbutt, the chauffeur, earned more than he did, she said, and had an easier life. If they were to go as a married pair, lady's maid and chauffeur, they could find better-paid work than here at Oaklands. But she was not, Ben thought, what any man wanted for a wife, much less himself.