It's Raining Men (30 page)

Lara turned in a slow circle to really take in the vista of Ren Dullem: the heart-shaped harbour, the sandy beach below, dotted with stripy deckchairs. She saw the main village with its
miscellany of old cottage designs, sweet little shops and tiny intriguing roads twisting up the hillsides. She saw the pretty church with its large brass bell waiting to summon attention, to call
the people to prayer on Sundays, and to weddings. And she saw the village square with an ancient maypole at its centre, bustling with market traders selling proper wares not tat. Lastly she saw
Gene Hathersage’s bum, and the unconscious smile dropped from her face as she found herself unwittingly appraising it. From the back he looked normal: jeans, shirt, nothing to intimate he was
the most impolite, sullen creature on the planet. Artistic temperament, she supposed. She had to give him credit for the talent he obviously had with wood, not that that should excuse him for being
a boorish bastard.
Stop looking at his bum, Lara.
She’d had quite enough of men’s bums for a while. James had a slim bum that looked good in suit trousers. James had a slim
white bum that she had last seen whilst he was lying on top of Tianne Lee.

That thought of James blindsided her and brought with it a sharp pain that struck her between the ribs. She wasn’t looking forward to next week when she would have to see him again to
retrieve her things from Manor Gardens. There would be a heap of anger and pain waiting to drop on her head when she was within his airspace, she knew.

May nudged her.

‘Shall we go to Jenny’s? I’m a bit peckish. You up for that too, Clare?’

‘I’m always up for food,’ Clare answered, adding to herself,
unless it’s fatty beef sandwiches in a plastic package washed down with Nitromors wine.

‘Good idea,’ said Lara, just hoping they didn’t bump into Daisy Unwin. Seeing one village prat was enough for today.

Before going over to the main house, Joan wiped off her makeup, scraped back her hair, stripped off her jewellery and reacquired her ‘poorly’ look. Then she wrapped
herself in a shawl as if chilled to the bone and went off to enquire how Lord Carlton was faring.

Gladys was in the kitchen, her apron off and jacket on, when Joan entered, as meekly as she could.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you, Gladys.’

Gladys noted how pale and plain Joan looked today. It brought her kind instincts to the fore and completely disarmed her.

‘Sit down, Joan, before you fall. Are you still not feeling well?’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt this ill,’ said Joan. ‘I came to see how Lord Carlton was before I go back to bed. I couldn’t settle. It’s all my
fault.’

‘I’m just taking him some tea and soup. I’ve managed to get him into his bed. I must admit, Joan, I thought he was hungover, but seeing as you are in the same
boat—’

‘I would put my life on it being those prawns,’ Joan interrupted eagerly, then held her head as if the effort to talk was a little too much.

‘Can I get you a sandwich?’ asked Gladys.

‘That’s very kind, Gladys, but I don’t want to trouble you. I was going to go shopping today but . . .’ Joan cut off her sentence and rubbed her stomach.

‘Look, if you’ve got nothing in your cupboards, there’s plenty of food here to tide you over,’ said Gladys, who always prided herself on keeping the kitchen well stocked.
Edwin Carlton liked his food. ‘Please help yourself whilst I take this upstairs before it gets cold.’

‘Are you going home, Gladys?’ Oh please say yes, thought Joan.

‘I’m taking the afternoon off, yes. I’m going to the dentist,’ replied Gladys. ‘I do hope you are feeling better in the morning, Joan.’

‘Thank you, Gladys.’ Joan gave her sweetest smile. ‘Please give him my very best regards.’ She leapt to open the door for Gladys as she lifted the tray.

‘You get what you want from the fridge and the cupboards and I’ll help you carry it to your cottage if you like,’ said Gladys.

‘Don’t you worry; I’ll lock up on my way out.’

Gladys looked suddenly stunned. ‘You have a key?’ She didn’t know that.

‘Yes, Lord Carlton gave me a key,’ replied Joan, playing it down as if it was no big deal. ‘Just for emergencies. I can’t say I’ve had occasion to use it but maybe,
if you’re not coming back today, I should pop in later to make sure all is well.’

‘Well, Lord Carlton has his panic button,’ said Gladys, her feathers slightly ruffled.

Joan stepped in quickly to smooth them. ‘It’s entirely up to you, Gladys. If you would rather I didn’t check to see that all was well, I perfectly understand.’

Put like that, with Joan so meek she almost baaed like a lamb, Gladys could barely refuse. ‘That would be very good of you,’ she said, before turning and exiting through the
door.

As soon as it shut on her back, Joan dropped her facade and had to stifle a giggle. God, she was good. Five more minutes and Gladys would have been handing over her life savings.

She waited impatiently for Gladys to leave, killing time by having a look in the fridge for something to eat. There were some slices of cold ham which she folded up and popped into her mouth,
then she cut off a large slice of oozing Brie and washed it down with some freshly squeezed orange juice. She arranged herself limply by the kettle when she heard Gladys’s footsteps outside
the kitchen.

‘I’ll be off now,’ called the housekeeper through the door. ‘See you in the morning. You take care of yourself and I hope you feel better soon.’

‘Thank you, Gladys. Hope the trip to the dentist goes well.’

Joan heard the mighty front door shut and waited a few minutes just in case Gladys doubled back to check on her. She didn’t. Then Joan strode off in the direction of the study, her long
slim legs powered with nervous energy.

Despite it being market day, Jenny’s café was empty except for May, Clare and Lara. They had a spicy chicken and rice dish, which was delicious, and pecan pie to
follow. Clare told them all about her morning – well, the visiting-Raine part of the morning at least.

Jenny wasn’t very chatty today and Lara was convinced she had been warned off from being too friendly to the offcumdens.

God, this place was odd. But it was still preferable to what was waiting for her back home.

Clare insisted on showing them Seymour’s grave in the churchyard, after they had eaten.

‘
Illis quos amo deserviam
. For those I love I shall sacrifice,’ Lara translated the words carved into the stone.

‘Ah, that’s what it means,’ said Clare. ‘It makes sense now. He knew that he was going to be buried on unhallowed ground and he didn’t give a stuff.’

‘That’s quite a powerful love story, isn’t it?’ sighed May. ‘If I were a writer, I’d use that as a plot.’

‘It’s like something out of the Middle Ages, though, don’t you think?’ said Lara, wrinkling up her nose. ‘Mind you, why should that be a surprise here?’

They found the elaborate grave of Jeremiah Unwin.

‘“My duties done, I shall rest in Thy house, o Lord
.
” Sounds a bit cocky to me,’ May said with disdain. ‘I’m staying in Your house, God, so lump it,
whether You like it or not. And notice the “I” and not the “we”.’

Clare nodded. ‘He probably had it designed well in advance. It wouldn’t have crossed his mind that his wife would have died on the same day.’

She gave the grandiose statue a sly kick and hoped that Jeremiah felt the reverberations all the way down in his box, which she had no doubt would be very grand and black and lined in velvet.
Bloody Unwins.

They took a leisurely walk back up the hill until Gene Hathersage came around the corner like Nigel Mansell on drugs and blasted his horn to make them move.

Lara extricated herself from the prickly bush which she had just had to press herself into. ‘I really didn’t think I could dislike that man any more, but, surprise, surprise,
I’ve just found I can.’

May tried not to smile as she picked a twig out of her friend’s blonde mop of hair. Gene Hathersage and Lara reminded her of one of those old Doris Day films in which the hero and heroine
are constantly at each other’s throat, not knowing they are really in love. Then she looked at Lara’s thunderous expression and decided that maybe that wasn’t the case here,
though.

Joan pored over the ledgers again looking for evidence – of what, she didn’t know. The estate had begun to pay a stipend to those twelve men in 1928:
SEA &
R, JB
,
GC
,
PJD
,
FAH
,
WWH
,
ASL, HRM
,
BAS
,
HAWS, JU
,
JGW
as well as into a central account marked
Village
Fund.

SEA & R? Joan checked against her notes. SEA must refer to Seymour Elias Acaster, but who or what was R? She scribbled the initial in her notepad. Joan checked forward to the first death:
Jack Unwin. Payments were no longer paid directly to JU a month after his death, but the monies he would have received, had he been still alive, were paid instead into the Village Fund. That
pattern was repeated in the record of the second death, Albert Landers, when the monies again joined those in the Village Fund. And so it was with them all – except for Seymour Elias Acaster.
After his death his allowance or wage or whatever it could be was paid directly to R. Joan flicked forward to the 1990s to find that monies were still being paid to R. Indeed, as she heaved the
great long pages over to the present-day accounts, she found R was still receiving a direct allowance from the estate.

Joan felt a prickle of excitement in her hands. She was onto something here, though she didn’t know what, but she had the unshakable feeling it was going to be on a par with the
Brink’s-Mat robbery. Those robbers had gone for a mere three million pounds and discovered, by chance, three tons of gold bullion instead. There was something much bigger and much more
lucrative than the depleted fortunes of an old man waiting to be uncovered in Ren Dullem. But, then again, why not have both?

Now, where would he keep his will?

Joan looked around the room for a small portrait that might cover a wall safe, but there was none – the paintings on the wall were far too big to be moved for access. She took a deep
breath and concentrated, trying to get into the mind of someone like Edwin Carlton. He was a trusting soul, uncomplicated and didn’t have the greatest memory. Surely he wouldn’t keep a
copy document of something so important in an obvious place such as his desk?

Joan pulled out the top drawer and had to stifle the astonished laughter that wanted to erupt from her. At the back of it, in a long slim yellowing envelope, was the Last Will and Testament of
Edwin Charles Richard Gravois Carlton. Her fingers were shaking with amused glee as she teased the papers out and straightened them.

The will was ten years old. She skipped through all the boring bits until she reached the nitty-gritty. He was leaving Gladys fifteen thousand pounds. But here was the interesting part: the rest
of his estate he was bequeathing to R Acaster
To do with as is fit
.
And in the event of the demise of the aforesaid R Acaster
,
the estate will pass to the Village Fund for the
future development and rejuvenation of Ren Dullem.

R Acaster? SEA & R? Was R Acaster the wife of Seymour? Why would Edwin leave his fortune to her if she was? Joan took her camera out of her pocket and snapped the document before placing it
back in the drawer. Every answer she found was dredging up more questions. But she was on a mission now – she wasn’t going to stop until she knew everything.

Joan found an Internet café in Wellem, a grubby little place with ripped seats and keyboards dirty from hundreds of fingers. She typed
Ren Dullem
, but there
wasn’t even a Wikipedia entry for it, only a mention of it in a long list of place names in North Yorkshire. There was a host of non-relevant answers informing her that Ren was a computing
term, that in Japanese the name Ren meant popularity, and that it was the Confucian virtue of treating each other in the right way.

Joan deleted the words in the search box with angry presses of the keys. It was unheard of in this day and age that there wasn’t any information about a whole stupid village.
Precisely
, another part of her brain came back at her. There
must
be something here, and she would find it.

She typed
Lord Gilbert Carlton
. Bingo. There wasn’t exactly a mother lode of information about him, merely that he lived from 1902 to 1974 in Carlton Hall, North Yorkshire,
married Elizabeth Dudley in 1937 and had a son, the present Lord Carlton, in 1941. There was a picture of the old family crest and motto, and that was it. In short, there was nothing that pushed
the mystery any further forward. She then typed in all of the twelve names, but there was not one single name that brought up the relevant dates or place. However, on the list of entries she noted
the words:
Parish records for Glasgow
. Parish records, that’s what she needed. Of course. Her next stop was the church.

The rest of the day for May, Lara and Clare was quiet and lazy. Clare went for a swim, Lara read her Kindle and May did a giant crossword puzzle sitting outside in the
clouded-over sunshine. They cooked the chicken fillets and steak which Frank had given them on a disposable barbecue that Lara bought at Hubbard’s Cupboard. Then they settled down with big
mugs of tea and watched a
Columbo
on the ancient box of a television. A gentle, easy day – and not one of them was bored or wished she had packed a laptop.

They were all in bed by ten thirty, tired out by doing nothing. The beds were the most comfortable any of them had ever slept in. Lara drifted off within minutes of her head resting on the
pillow. But she snapped her eyes open a few hours later, dragged back from a deep sleep by a persistent tap-tap-tapping.

She lay perfectly still, wondering if it had followed from her dream and wasn’t a real noise at all. Silence. Then, just as she closed her eyes, it began again.
Tap-tap-BANG-BANG-BANG-tap-tap. Even under the weight of the quilt, she felt suddenly chilled. She wasn’t imagining it; it was a real noise and something was happening outside her window.