La's Orchestra Saves the World (7 page)

She rehearsed the possibilities in her mind. If she had locked up, the only other person who could have been in the house was Mrs. Agg. She still had the key that she had used when she had been looking after the house, and La had suggested that she keep it. “I’ll need somebody to have a key in case I lock myself out,” she had said. “Will you hold on to it?”

Mrs. Agg had agreed, but had not used it, as far as La knew. In fact, after their first encounter, when Mrs. Agg had come into the house unannounced, she had only come to the house once or twice, and on each occasion had made a point of knocking. It was possible, she supposed, that the farmer’s wife had taken it upon herself to come into the house, but it seemed unlikely.

La decided to speak to her. She left the house, locking the back door carefully this time, and walked down the lane to Ingoldsby Farm. Mrs. Agg was in the yard, gathering washing from the line, and waved to La as she saw her approaching.

“I saw your new car,” she called as La crossed the yard towards her. “It’s a very nice little car.”

“Thank you. Mr. Granger …”

“He knows his cars,” said Mrs. Agg. “If Agg bought a car it would be from Mr. Granger. But he hasn’t.”

“I’ll run you anywhere in mine,” said La. “Just let me know.”

La was standing before her now, watching the other woman wiping her hands on her apron. “Mrs. Agg,” she began. “Thank you for keeping an eye on the house.”

Mrs. Agg looked up in surprise. “Don’t do much,” she mumbled; she had wooden washing pegs in her mouth. She removed the pegs before continuing, tucking them into the pocket of her apron. “When I walk past, of course, I cast an eye to make sure you‘re not on fire, or something awful like that. Apart from that, don’t do anything as I can see.”

La caught her breath. “But I thought that you dropped in today.”

Mrs. Agg shook her head. “No. I’ve been busy here all the time. I didn’t drop in.”

La could tell that she was telling the truth. “Oh well …”

Mrs. Agg looked at her expectantly, and then changed the subject. Would La fancy a couple of duck eggs? Not everyone liked duck eggs, of course; one of Mrs. Agg’s relatives was sick if she ate anything with duck egg in it. Just the yolks, though; the whites did not have that effect.

She went to fetch the duck eggs from the kitchen and handed them over to La; pale blue things, larger than hen’s eggs, fragile, warm to the touch. La carried them back to the
house, one in each hand, gingerly. But her mind was on other things. When she got back, she laid the duck eggs down on a clump of grass outside the kitchen and reached into her pocket for the key to the door.

She would not need it. The door had been forced, from the inside, the split wood of the frame sticking up in splinters, like small pieces of straw.

T
HE POLICEMAN LIVED
in a neighbouring village, in a house behind a small sign saying
Police House
. He heard La out on the doorstep, raising an eyebrow when she explained that it looked as if the door had been forced from within.

“Very unlikely,” he said. “Don’t you think? People break into houses, not out of them, at least in my experience.”

La looked at the man standing in front of her, a tall, well-built man with sandy-coloured hair and a bemused expression. She wondered whether she had misinterpreted the evidence. But the wood had been splintered on the outside; if you pushed on the door from the outside, it would have broken on the inner part of the jamb.

The policeman frowned. “Which way does the door swing? Out or in?”

La thought for a moment. She could not answer, and the
policeman’s frown became a tolerant smile. “You see? Sometimes things look black and they’re really white. And the other way round.” He paused, watching the effect of his remark on her. He was one of those men who treated women with well-meaning condescension, thought La. She had encountered them first in Cambridge, amongst the undergraduates who were the products of all-boys schools, whose only contact with women had been with their mothers or domestic staff. And there had been college fellows and professors, too, who had taken the same approach, and appeared vaguely irritated that the times required of them to engage intellectually with women.

There was a silence. It made more sense for the door to have been forced from outside; otherwise … the thought appalled her. If it had been forced from inside that would have been because she had locked somebody up in the house when she had gone to see Mrs. Agg. So the intruder, the person who had moved the tea caddy, would have been hiding in the house and then, finding himself locked in, would have had to force the door to get out.

“I shall come and take a look,” said the policeman. “I’d be obliged if you would take me in your car. Otherwise I should have to ride my bike and that would take a little while.”

“Of course.”

In the car, La asked him whether there had been burglaries in the district. “I can count on the fingers of this
hand,” he said, raising his right hand, “the number of burglaries we’ve had in the last eight years, since I came to this job. And most of those were carried out by Ed Stanton over at Stradishall.” He gazed out of the window and laughed; he was relaxed now in her company, and La was warming to him.

“Ed left the district after the last one,” the policeman went on. “He was roughed up by the victim’s son, who happened to be a boxer. That sorted him out. That, and his missus giving him his marching orders. Burglars are usually cowards, in my experience. Say ‘boo’ to them and they turn and run. That’s where women go wrong, in my view.”

La was puzzled. “How do women go wrong?”

The policeman looked straight ahead at the road. They were almost there, and perhaps, thought La, it was the wrong time to get involved in a debate about what women did or did not do; men thought they knew, but how strange that their view of what women did was often so different from the view held by women, who did it. He continued, “Burglars are scared of people who aren’t scared of them. That’s human nature, isn’t it? But if you’re scared of burglars, then they sense it, like animals do. You know how a dog will push its luck if it can tell that a person is frightened of it? Have you seen that?”

La nodded. They were on the edge of her village now, and she slowed the Austin down.

“Well,” said the policeman, “if women stood up to burglars, then they’d back down. Scarper. Burglars have mothers, you see. No burglar likes getting a tongue-lashing from his mum.”

She had to laugh, and he laughed, too. Then, in a few moments, they arrived, and La pulled the car off the road onto the drive. The gravel was vocal underneath the tyres of the car, a crunching sound, like waves breaking, thought La.

“So this is where you live,” said the policeman. “Some people by the name of Stone own this place, I understand.”

“My husband’s parents,” La began. She could tell, as she spoke, what he was thinking. “He lives in France now, my husband. It’s just me here. I’m Mrs. Stone, too.”

“Ah,” said the policeman. Then, as the car stopped, “By the way, I never even told you my name. It’s Brown, but everybody around here calls me by my Christian name and my surname together, Percy Brown. You can, too, if you like.”

“Everybody calls me La,” said La, although nobody in the village, she realised, called her anything. Mrs. Agg knew her name, but had not used it, as far as she could recall. If anybody else referred to her—and they must have said something among themselves, even if only to note her arrival—then they must have called her something else.
That woman
, perhaps, or
that woman who lives by herself
. That, she thought, was what she was to them anyway.

La showed Percy Brown the door, which she had shut and locked before fetching him. He opened it, and as she did so, more splinters came away.

“You see,” she said. “It looks as if it’s been pushed from the inside.” She was less sure, though, and the doubt showed in her voice.

Percy Brown made a non-committal noise and bent down to examine the door. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and La noticed sweat-stained patches under his arms; it had been a hot afternoon and they were now damp. There was something very masculine about him, she thought; he was beefy; he was like a bull.

He straightened up and ran his finger down the inside of the jamb. “Yes,” he said. “Here, and … and here.”

La peered at the place where his fingers had stopped.

“You see?” he said. “Can you see the marks? That’s where they’ve prised at the door. A screwdriver, maybe. Something of the sort.”

“From the inside?”

Percy Brown sniffed. “Looks like it.”

SHE MADE HIM A CUP OF TEA
, and they sat together at the kitchen table. He drummed his fingers lightly on the surface, which irritated her. He noticed the direction of her gaze and checked himself.

“Sorry,” he said. “Mrs. Brown says that’s my worst habit. But it helps me to think.”

“I don’t mind,” said La. She did. “And I don’t want to stop you thinking.” She did not.

He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his stomach. “Let’s go over this again. You went to Bury and may or may not have left one of your doors unlocked. Correct?”

“Yes. I think I locked up, but maybe I didn’t. I don’t know.” She was aware that she was worrying away at the edge of a table napkin that she had left on the table, pulling at the threads. “My neighbour says that nobody locks their doors round here.”

Percy Brown nodded. “No, they don’t. And most of the time that’s fine. But let’s assume that you didn’t lock up. If somebody came in, then he would have had to do so while you was … you were in Bury. Then you came back and noticed that somebody had interfered with things in the kitchen. The business with the tea caddy.”

La, who was sitting facing the window, looked beyond Percy Brown’s shoulder into the garden outside. She had left a long-sleeved blouse on the line, and its arms were flapping in the breeze. One of the wind-filled arms came into view at the edge of the window performing a frantic piece of semaphore that caught her eye and held it for a moment while Percy Brown drew breath. He had more to say.

“So,” he continued. “That means that the intruder was probably in the house when you searched. You must have walked right past him. Not a nice thought, Mrs….”

“Stone. La.”

“Not a nice thought, Mrs. Stone, is it? That worries me, you know.”

La was silent. She had wanted reassurance; she had even hoped that he might come up with some explanation, but instead she was receiving what amounted to a warning. She waited for him to say something. He looked at her, and unfolded his hands.

“Sometimes we get gypsies,” he said. “They camp down by Foster’s Fields, a few miles away. They can be trouble, as you’ll know. Stealing. Even theft of livestock. Sheep aren’t safe when they’re around. They end up inside a gypsy belly pretty smartly.” He paused. “But they don’t go in for house-breaking. That’s not really their style. They’re outside thieves, that bunch.”

She felt that she had to say something. “Not gypsies?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So?”

“I think I’ll just have to report this as an unknown intruder. We get cases like that. Somebody sees a door left open and goes into a house to take a look round, to see if there’s anything that can be easily taken. We call them opportunistic thieves. But what I don’t like about this is the fact that he was fiddling. Fiddling with the tea, of all things. That tells me something.”

She waited. He was looking at her now, with an eyebrow
slightly raised; the look of an avuncular older man about to issue a warning.

“What does it tell you, Mr. Brown?”

He looked away for a moment—to examine his fingernails. Then he folded his hands again. “It tells me that he might be interested in you. If people are snooping around a house and nothing’s stolen, then it sometimes means that somebody has too close an interest in another person. Watching them, so to speak.”

T
HAT NIGHT
, or at least the earlier part of that night, was difficult. La left it as late as possible before she went upstairs to bed. She switched on all the lights downstairs, and turned the wireless up as high as she could. She chose Radio Normandie, which was playing dance music. There was a cheerfulness about that, an optimism, which was what she wanted. When she went from the sitting room into the kitchen, the sound of the radio followed her. From the kitchen it sounded almost as if somebody was having a party at the other end of the house; all that was missing was the hum of voices. Perhaps she would have a party some time; but where, she suddenly thought, would the guests come from? Dr. Price might be invited over from Cambridge—it was not too far away. But then she did not like men to be at parties, whereas La did; so that would not work. Perhaps Mr. Thorn, the author of the book on roses.
If he lived in Ipswich, he might be able to motor over. She stopped herself; there could be no party for a long time yet.

There was no curtain in the kitchen, and so when she stood by the sink, filling the kettle, she was looking out upon darkness. Suddenly she noticed a shape a few feet into the dark, at the limits of the light that came from the window. She gave a start, putting the kettle down quickly, spilling water from the spout. But then she realised what it was, and her heart, which had raced, resumed its proper rhythm. The long-sleeved blouse she had seen earlier in the day was still hanging on the line; she had meant to retrieve it, but had forgotten to do so.

She leaned forward towards the glass pane of the window and looked out again. There was the shape of the elder edge and the trees black against the night sky. There was very little moon—just a sliver—and no other illumination. The Aggs’ farmhouse could not be seen from that vantage point so there was not even a light from that. They would have switched everything off by now, anyway. Farming people went to bed early, to be able to rise at dawn, when there was work to be done.

La took a deep breath. If I am to live here, she thought, then I cannot let myself be frightened by emptiness and isolation. I shall have to confront my fear.