The Gropes (11 page)

‘But how were we to know he’d got an armour-plated bungalow? The old bird, his sister, said her son was in there to protect the lad from his father and that she’d heard gunshots. We had to get in.’

The superintendent looked insanely round.

‘Are you telling me she was married to her brother? That’s incest, that is.’

‘No, she’s married to a bank manager in Croydon who’s gone off his rocker and tried to kill his son with a carving knife. She said we had to get him out of his uncle’s house.’

‘What? Before he killed him too?’ asked the superintendent.

‘That’s right, sir.’

‘Instead of which he left you to do it for him by bringing the place down. And where is this Mrs Ponson now?’

‘Well, inside too, I suppose.’

‘You mean she heard gunshots and her son being killed and –’

‘No, sir. Her name is Mrs Wiley. She’s down at Accident and Emergency.’

‘Reverse that order of words, Chief Inspector. Emergency and Accident. In fact, cut out the Accident altogether. This was deliberate and you’re responsible. Wait till we’ve an inquest and after that the trial and see what the verdict is.’

He turned and was about to get as far away as quickly as possible when the chief inspector stopped him.

‘Hadn’t you better question Mrs Wiley first, sir?’

The superintendent turned and tried vainly to remember who Mrs Wiley was. He was feeling even madder now.

‘Is she still alive? I thought you said her husband tried to kill her with a carving knife.’

‘Not her. Her son. Mr Wiley is a bank manager. He took a carving knife and –’

‘Oh yes, I remember now. She brought him up to this wrecked bungalow to have him shot by the bigamist husband she’d married before the bank manager. All right, we’ll go and see her. I don’t believe I’ve ever met a bigamist before.’

The chief inspector kept his mouth shut. He was wondering if the superintendent had been drinking, and he was wishing he could have a stiff whisky himself.

Waking in London following yet another self-indulgent evening, Horace wasn’t feeling too well, not least because he’d woken to discover that he’d overslept and the tramp steamer had long since left on its voyage.

After a minimal lunch he finally felt able to leave the hotel and, realising that buying another ticket at the same travel agency might make even the dozy clerk there suspicious, he took a taxi to the most lawless part of London, near Docklands.

Deciding that he needed to better cover his tracks, he chose the nastiest second-hand clothing shop he could find and bought a shabby raincoat and a pair of thoroughly disreputable boots several sizes too big for him. Using the cover of a public lavatory to change,
he stuffed the bottom of some old and grubby trousers he’d had the foresight to bring from his gardener’s shed into them. By the time he emerged Horace was even more unrecognisable as a fugitive bank manager.

He then made his way by bus to Docklands itself. After a tortuous journey the bus stopped and, cursing his aching head, Horace walked up and down until he found a shipping office, where he paid – with considerable difficulty – for another ticket to Latvia.

‘Going back to your own country, are you?’ asked the clerk, who looked like an immigrant himself, when he’d read the printed request Horace presented him asking him for a boat ticket for Riga. ‘Can’t say I blame you.’

Horace nodded, and clutching the ticket and his suitcase, went in search of another public lavatory to change back into his suit.

Back at the hotel he wrote to his Swiss bank and told the manager he’d always dealt with that he wanted to withdraw three hundred thousand pounds in cash – he had a business deal in Australia, the story went, and would be over personally to collect it before the end of the month. That still left him with well over a million pounds on deposit.

The next morning, dressed once again in his grubby clothes – which earned him a very funny look at the front desk – he paid his hotel bill, picked up his suitcase and left, tipping the porter very handsomely as he went. The porter, obviously thinking Horace needed
the money more than he did, not only returned the tip but doubled it.

Not quite satisfied that he’d be impossible to follow, Horace spent the next night sleeping rough on Blackheath, an experience he determined never to repeat after being twice moved on by the local police force and once taken for a urinal by a local tramp.

By mid-morning the following day he was back at the shipping office, where he tipped the clerk one hundred pounds and flashed his passport very briefly in front of him. Not that it was necessary. The man was so pleased to have been so well tipped that he let Horace through without bothering to note his name down. Delighted at his tactics, Mr Ludwig Jansens went up the gangway determined never to set foot in England again.

At Grope Hall, Belinda had opened the gate and driven the Ford down to the house, ignoring the two bulls by the side of the track and the sound of the barking dogs round the back. Driving right up to the kitchen door, she got out and knocked. A very old woman peered out of a bedroom window.

‘What do you want?’ she demanded.

‘I’m your niece, Belinda. My mother was Eudora, your sister. Eliza was my grandmother.’

‘Eudora? Eudora?’ called the old woman, clearly puzzled. ‘Where’s your mother, Eudora?’

‘No, I’m Belinda. Eudora’s dead. She died two years ago. She had pneumonia. I thought you knew. I wrote to you at the time.’

‘I don’t read letters. Can’t because my glasses don’t work. And don’t want to anyway. Always bad news.’ The old woman paused and appeared to be thinking. ‘Why have you come here? If you are Eudora’s daughter, as you say you are, she surely told you how the family has always lived.’

‘Oh, yes, she did. At least the most important facts. The head of the family must be a woman. When Eliza died you succeeded her. We used to come and visit when I was little, don’t you remember?’

‘My mind’s not what it was. Not that it was ever much in the first place. I remember Eudora going down south to look for a man but I don’t know anything since then. How do I know you are who you say you are?’

‘I’m a Grope to the core and I can prove it if you let me.’

The old woman nodded, and then asked, ‘When was your mother’s birthday?’

‘Twentieth of June. She was born in 1940.’

‘That’s true. Well, you’d better come in. The door is unlocked. I’m not up and dressed yet but I’ll be down in a while and you can tell me why you’ve come here.’

Belinda checked to make sure that Esmond was still asleep before letting herself into the house. She went through the scullery and stood looking at the kitchen. It was just as she remembered it as a child. The same deal table in the middle and the same pots and pans
on the shelves or hanging from hooks on the wall opposite the ancient coal stove. Everything was as it had been when she’d seen the place on her last visit with her mother all those years before. Even the smell of bacon was the same, and … She couldn’t identify them individually. They were simply the mingled smells she had known over a period of six years as a child. Best of all, they had none of the qualities that she had escaped from in her kitchen at Ponson Place. Nothing shone or gleamed white like her washing machine and the various gadgets she had amassed over the years. At the time she had found some comfort in that awful modern kitchen. Or forced herself to believe she had. But now she had really come to her proper home where she had spent the happiest times of her childhood.

Oddly enough, in spite of the hours and hours she had driven along country roads, always keeping within the speed limit to avoid the police cameras, she had no feeling of fatigue. The dawn breaking over the hills, the vast fields and distant woods had given her fresh energy. And arriving here at Grope Hall and seeing that nothing had changed was the biggest boost of all.

Belinda returned to the car where Esmond was still out for the count on the back seat under the blanket. She would need help to get him into the house. Back in the kitchen she made some coffee and waited for someone to arrive who might help carry Esmond to
a bedroom. Strangely, now that she was here, nothing seemed very urgent any more.

Presently she saw a middle-aged man come out of a barn with a bucket, and called him over. He obviously worked on the Grope estate.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘They call me Old Samuel.’

‘Old Samuel? You’re not that old, Samuel.’

‘No, but there’s always been an Old Samuel in the Grope household, so when the previous Old Samuel died and I came here, that was when I was twenty-seven like, I got called Old. My name’s not Samuel either – it’s Jeremy – but old Mrs Grope wouldn’t stand for it and Old Samuel I became and Old Samuel I stay. I run the farm and do odd jobs around the place now that there’s only the old lady left.’

‘I wonder if you would help me get someone out of my car? He’s sleeping off too much alcohol.’

They crossed to the Ford.

‘I should say he is,’ said Old Samuel when he opened the rear door and breathed in the fumes from the back of the car. He reached in and pulled Esmond out from under the blanket.

‘It will take him a good few days to work whatever he’s drunk off. That it will. Smells to me like whisky. Where do you want him put?’

‘In the bedroom over the kitchen.’

Old Samuel looked at her with interest. She obviously knew the Hall very well. In fact, by the look
of her, and the fact that she had an unconscious young bloke in the back of her car, she might well be a Grope herself. She was certainly looking pretty happy with life.

The same could not be said of Esmond. He’d slept on for hours in an alcoholic haze and after being moved to the bedroom above the kitchen had only struggled out of bed to have a pee. The trouble was that the room had no bathroom, and the only pisspot was against the wall under the bed. In trying to reach it he’d fallen out of bed and couldn’t get back in. So instead he’d pulled the blankets off the bed and simply wet the carpet before falling asleep once again.

Belinda had drawn the dark curtains across when Samuel had brought Esmond upstairs with her help and locked the bedroom door before she had gone to bed herself, finally exhausted by her long slow drive in the old Ford. She woke late in the afternoon and
went through to check on Esmond. He was sitting on the side of the bed gazing down at the wet patch on the floor and looking awful.

‘What you need is a good meal.’

‘Where am I, Auntie Belinda?’ he asked, staring out the window at the fells rolling away to the horizon.

‘You’ve come home. This is where you belong.’

‘Home? This isn’t my home. Home’s in South Croydon.’

‘And I’m not your auntie, I’m your fiancée. We’re going to get married, remember?’

‘Married? We can’t. You’re married already and you’re my aunt. You’re Mrs Ponson, the wife of that horrible crook, Uncle Albert.’

‘Oh my poor boy. You’ve been ill for a very long time, dear. We were married but we got a divorce. Don’t you remember, you made me run away with you?’ Belinda hesitated for a moment. ‘And another thing, you must never use the name Ponson. I insist on that. Your family name is Grope, same as mine, and your Christian name is Joe. When anyone asks you, you’re to say you are Joe Grope. Say it.’

‘Joe Grope.’

‘And you come from Lyle Road, Ealing. Have you got that?’

Esmond nodded. ‘I’m Joe Grope from Lyle Road, Ealing. Where’s that?’

‘In London. Now you’re to repeat your new name over and over again. Do you understand?’

‘Yes. I’m Joe Grope from Ealing. But why do I have to be Joe Grope from Ealing?’

‘Never mind that right now. Come along with me and you can have a nice big breakfast. You obviously need one.’

They went downstairs to the kitchen and while Esmond sat at the scrubbed and ancient deal table, Belinda fried eggs and bacon and made strong coffee. The bewildered Esmond repeated his new name again and again. By the end of the meal he was feeling better, a bit better but not well enough to notice Belinda slip a small tablet into his coffee.

By the time Esmond had drunk it he was drifting off to sleep again and Belinda had to help him up to the bedroom where she remade the bed and pulled the chamber pot out so he could reach it easily. After that she undressed him and put him to bed. By that time he was really deeply asleep and the sleeping pill in his coffee ensured he wouldn’t wake until the following morning.

Downstairs, Belinda explained her plan to her aunt who had waited long enough to find out why her niece had turned up and with a strange young lad in tow. Belinda let a few tears escape as she described her miserable marriage and her dreadful sister-in-law.

‘I’ve left that awful man and his horrid modern bungalow,’ she sobbed. ‘You have no idea how beastly it was down there. And for years he drank himself stupid. With any luck it will kill him. And he insisted
on having stupid parties and going off to get thieves to steal cars. Oh, he paid them well enough. Worst of all he was sterile and he’d never have produced daughters anyway. All he was interested in was money. Well, I’ve put paid to that. I brought with me every penny he’d hidden under the floor in my room to help you out.’

‘You didn’t kill him, did you, Belinda?’ Myrtle asked, curious rather than shocked.

‘No, I didn’t. Though maybe I should have.’

‘But who is that boy you’ve bought with you and why does he keep calling himself Esmond?’

‘I’ve changed the boy’s name. He’s now Joe Grope and if anyone asks, not that they will up here, he comes from Ealing in west London, not Croydon.’

‘But why did you bring him at all?’

‘Because I wanted to rescue him. His mother is Albert’s sister and just as dreadful in a different way. She’s as sentimental as a sponge soaked in treacle. Calls her son “darling” every time she speaks about him. That or “my little love child”, and he’s six foot tall. It’s utterly sickening.’

‘What’s his father say?’

‘Tried to kill the boy with a knife. That’s why his awful mother brought him up to our place for protection. Of course Albert had to agree. She’s as formidable as he is, in a different kind of way. Don’t ask me why. Anyway, my wretched husband got him blind drunk and passed out himself. That’s when I decided to bring
him up to Grope Hall. He’s at least going to remain sober here and I thought that he could make himself useful on the farm.’