Requiem for a Wren (6 page)

The thought of murder crossed my mind, of course, and I put it out of my head. We read too many detective stories, which set one off upon the most unlikely trains of thought. Nothing suggested any conceivable motive for murder in this instance, nor any possibility of it in Coombargana House.

Annie might know something that she had not told my parents, and it was time that I saw Annie anyway. Annie had been at Coombargana before I was born. She came from some village near Peterhead in Scotland, and as a young girl she had worked in the fisheries, gutting and packing herrings on the quays. I think my grandfather knew her father, old

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McConchie, as a boy, or perhaps he met him when he went home in 1895. In any case, Annie came out with her brother James to work for my grandfather in 1908 or 1910, when she was probably about twenty years of age. James was still working as a stockman with us when I was a child and Annie was the kitchen maid, but James left us in 1920 and took up a property near Mortlake, helped by a bank guarantee from my grandfather. He and Annie, being Scots, lived frugally and saved every penny that came into their hands, with the result that in the Depression of the thirties, when everyone was going broke and all the properties were coming under the hammer at a knockdown price, the McConchies were prudently buying land. Jim McConchie has a property of two thousand acres over by Mortlake now where he runs Merinoes and a stud of Angus cattle; he makes a trip back home every two or three years to buy stud beasts and last year he paid three thousand five hundred pounds for an Angus bull at the Royal Agricultural Show. Annie still works for us in Coombargana House; she never married and would scorn to live on James, though she is very proud of his success.

I wondered if Annie was still up. I left the drawing-room and went through the dining-room; the light was still on in the kitchen. I opened the swing door and there she was, standing by the table.

'Evening, Annie' I said. 'How are you today?' She was not much changed, a little smaller perhaps, and the grey hair a little thinner.

'I'm fine,' she said. 'How have you been keeping? It's good to see you home again, Mr. Alan.'

'I'm very well' I said. 'Very glad to be home'

'Aye' she said. 'There's no doubt about it, your own place is the best. How do you find your father and mother, Mr. Alan?'

'Not too good' I said. 'It's time I came home. I didn't realise that they were getting so old'

'Ah well' she said, 'we none of us get any younger.'

'You haven't changed a lot' I said.

'I keep pretty fair' she said. 'I get the rheumatism now and then, but I keep pretty fair.'

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'I think this trouble today may have upset my mother' I remarked.

'Aye' she said. 'It's a great shock to the lady when a thing like that happens in the house.'

I leaned back against the bright steel sink. 'I don't understand why she did it' I remarked. 'Was she unhappy, do you think?'

'I would not say so' she replied. 'Very quiet she was, these last two or three days. But then, she was always quiet.'

I cast about for some clue. 'Was she sulky?'

She shook her head. 'She was not. She was very even-tempered, very easy to get on with, but she never talked about herself. We got on fine, because maybe I'm a bit that way. I never sought to pry into her business, nor she into mine.'

'Do you know if she was in the habit of taking things to make her sleep?' I asked. 'Was she a girl who took a lot of medicines?'

She shook her head. 'There's a bottle of Eno's Fruit Salts on her washstand, and a tube of Veganin. Then there was the bottle by her bedside, that the doctor took away'

'You don't know what those sleeping tablets were?'

'I do not, Mr. Alan'

'And there were no letters or papers in her room?'

'Not a scrap. There was nothing written at all, saving one or two books from the house'

I glanced at her. That's very extraordinary, because she must have had some papers. She must have had a passport to come from England. What's happened to that?'

She shrugged her shoulders. 'Maybe she got rid of everything when she decided to make an end to herself'

'You think she did decide to do it, Annie? You don't think it was an accident?'

'It's not for me to say, Mr. Alan. But if it was an accident there would be some papers or letters of some kind, I would think'

I thought for a minute. 'Where could she have burnt things?'

'In the coke boiler, out behind' she said. She meant the central-heating boiler. 'She could have burned them there'

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Without anybody knowing?'

'Oh, aye. It gets made up in the morning, and at midday, and at night, but in between times nobody goes there.'

I glanced at the slow-burning cooking stove. 'Not here?'

She shook her head. 'I tend this myself, and I would soon have known if there was any paper. I would not think that she burned anything here.'

I stood in silence for a time, thinking over this conundrum. Then I looked at her. 'Is there really nothing, nothing at all amongst her things, to tell us who she was? No ornaments, or lockets... anything?'

She shook her head. 'Would you like to have a look inside her room, Mr. Alan?'

I hesitated, reluctant. It seemed an invasion of the dead girl's privacy to go into her room to try to find out things she evidently preferred to keep from us. Yet other people had already done so; my father had certainly been there, and perhaps my mother. The police had been there, turning over with unaccustomed hands the underclothing and the dresses. It was doubtful if I could add anything to what had already been done and I didn't want to go, yet to refuse had something of an element of cowardice attached to it.

'She's up there, is she?' I asked.

'Aye, she's lying there,' she said. 'Covered over with the sheet.' She glanced at me, remembering perhaps the little boy that had been running about Coombargana House when she was a young woman. 'There's nothing to be feared of, Mr. Alan.'

'I know,' I said. 'It's a bad thing to intrude unless you've got some very good reason. But I think perhaps I ought to have a look.'

'I'll come up with you,' she said.

She motioned me to go before her, but I told her to lead the way and we went out to the back lobby and up the bare, scrubbed back stairs to the servants' bedrooms. There was a short corridor ending in the swing door to the main house near my own bedroom, and there were two rooms on each side of this short corridor. I was not very familiar with this part of the house, though I had been in it as a child.

Annie led the way to the second door on the left. I

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checked her before she opened the door. 'This is her room?'

She nodded.

'Which room do you sleep in?' I asked.

'In there, Mr. Alan.' She indicated the next room on the same side. The mistress, she said to use these rooms because they have the better light and -view. The others are a wee bit dark.' I nodded; the two rooms they occupied looked out in the same direction as my own, and shared the same view over the property towards the Grampians. In the house Bill's room and the bathroom lay between my own room and that of the dead girl.

I asked, 'Did you hear anything unusual last night, Annie?'

She shook her head. 'Nothing at all.'

She paused for a moment, and then opened the door and switched the light on, and we went into the bedroom. It was a bare room, with white paint on the woodwork and cream water paint upon the walls. It was furnished adequately but simply with a cheap bedroom suite of Australian hardwood, consisting of a bed, a chest-of-drawers with a mirror on it, and a wardrobe. In addition there was a table and a chair. On the bed a sheet was stretched over the dead girl.

On the table was a small, folding, travelling alarm clock of an American make, and a bottle of fountain-pen ink. With letters and documents in the forefront of my mind I unscrewed the top of this bottle; the top came off readily, the bottle was half full. I turned to Annie. 'Had she got a pen?' Instinctively I spoke in a low tone, as if in a church.

'Aye,' she said. 'I saw a pen in her bag.' She opened the left-hand small drawer of the chest-of-drawers and took out rather a worn, fairly large bag of dark-blue leather. She opened it, and picked out the pen. It was a Parker 51, dark blue in colour, in good condition; the ink was still fresh in the nib. It had been used for writing very recently.

I put it back in the bag and examined the remainder of the contents. There was a compact, a purse with a little money in it but no papers, and the usual things that a woman carries round with her, a comb, a lipstick, three keys on a ring, a clean handkerchief that had evidently been there for

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some time. There was nothing to be learned from these. I glanced at the contents of the drawer, mostly handkerchiefs and stockings; they conveyed nothing to me. I came back to the purse and opened it again. 'What did she do with her money?' I asked in the same low tone. 'This isn't all she had?'

'She had a savings-bank account in the post office, Mr. Alan. She'd go to Forfar once in a while and pay her money in.'

'Where's the book for that?' I asked. 'Is that here?'

She shook her head. 'I would say no. I have not seen it, Mr. Alan, and I was here when the police made the search'

'Do you know how much money she had in the bank?'

She shook her head. 'I do not.'

There were three books on the chest-of-drawers, but they told me nothing except that her tastes were catholic; The Last Days of Hitler was sandwiched between Anne of Green Gables and Hocus Pocus. I looked for a Bible or a prayer book, and found neither. Annie asked, 'Do you want to see the clothes, Mr. Alan?' and put her hand on the first drawer.

I shrank instinctively from the intrusion. There's nothing there, is there? You've turned them over?'

'Aye,' she said. 'The police, they went through everything very carefully.'

'Leave them be' I said. I turned from the chest-of-drawers and looked around the room. Two suitcases lay one on top of the other in a corner. I moved over and examined them. Both were old and one was in an unfamiliar style, probably foreign, but both were empty and without labels. 'Is this all the luggage she had?' I asked.

Annie hesitated. 'I think it is,' she said. 'I've been wondering, perhaps there should have been another. I mind she had to make several journeys when she came here first, carrying her luggage from the outside door up to this room. She wouldn't want to carry more than one of these up the stairs, one at a time. Maybe she went up and down twice only. It's a while ago since she came, and I was cooking at the time and didn't notice her particularly.'

'You didn't come in here much?'

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She shook her head. 'I never went into her room, Mr. Alan, nor she into mine. The mistress, she conies round once in a while and looks in at the rooms, to see that everything is tidy and kept nice.'

I stood looking round the room; there was little more to examine. The room was fitted with a wash basin with running water, and here the soap and the toothpaste were of normal brands. The Eno's and the Veganin were on a shelf nearby, but there were no medicines in evidence, and practically no cosmetics or lotions, which seemed to me unusual for a woman's room.

There was nothing to stay for, nothing to be learned. I moved towards the door. Annie paused by the bed, and said in a low tone, 'Would you want to look at her?' Her hand moved towards the sheet.

I shook my head; there was nothing to be gained by that, and we had done enough intruding. 'Leave her be. There wasn't any locket, or anything under the pillow?'

She shook her head. 'Nothing of that, Mr. Alan. We looked carefully, when the police were here.'

I went out into the corridor and she followed me. 'Well, thanks, Annie,' I said. 'It'll be a good thing when all this is over and we can get back to having things normal.'

She nodded. 'Aye. It's been upsetting for everybody. Your parents must be very glad to see you home again.'

I nodded. I'm glad I came in time to help them out with this.' I paused. 'Well, goodnight, Annie. Thank you for showing me.'

'Oh, that's nothing,' she said. 'Goodnight, Mr. Alan.'

I went through the swing door to the main house and my own bedroom. The fire was low; I threw on two or three logs and went downstairs at my slow pace, to get a whisky and to look around the house a little before going up to bed.

I poured myself a drink and went and stood in front of the dying embers of the drawing-room fire, in the silence of the house. I was still glad to be home again, glad to be taking up the work that was my proper job, that I had spurned five years ago, but my pleasure was swamped and tempered by this matter of the dead parlourmaid, so that I could think of nothing else. In this comfortable, homely atmosphere there

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had been a deep and secret trouble that nobody had known anything about, so deep that it had led a girl who seemed to have been normal and balanced in her mind to take her own life. It was incongruous at Coombargana. In a great city such things happen now and then, where people are too strained and hurried to pay much attention to the griefs of others, but in a small rural community like ours, led by wise and tolerant people such as my father and mother, staffed by good types culled and weeded out over the years, such secret, catastrophic griefs do not occur. Troubles at Coombargana had always been small troubles in my lifetime. Nothing like this had ever happened there before, and it was disturbing that it should have happened now. Was something very wrong in all these easy, comfortable surroundings, something that nobody suspected, something that we none of us knew anything about? I felt that I would very much like to know the answer to that one. In fact, it was my duty to find out.'