The Herring Seller's Apprentice (12 page)

‘All right,’ I sighed. ‘I got married there. So what?’

‘You got married there because Geraldine’s parents lived there and had done so for many years. Geraldine grew up there. Her sister still lives there. Come on, Ethelred. Of all the joints in all the world, the only Hamilton-Boswell in England shows up in this one. That is not a coincidence. That is deeply, deeply suspicious. It needs following up.’

‘You are not going to visit the Hamilton-Boswells.’

‘I agree that that might be inadvisable. But we can visit Geraldine’s sister, Miss Charlotte Turner.’

‘I am not going off on a wild-goose chase to the depths of Essex.’

‘Fine, I’ll go on my own, then.’

‘You don’t know where Charlotte lives.’

‘I didn’t know where the Hamilton-Boswells lived.’ I sighed again. ‘OK, I’ll come. But only to stop you making a total fool of yourself.’

‘Thought you might,’ said Elsie.

God, she can be smug at times.

It was a long drive through low, unambitious countryside. The road wound over gentle rises and falls in the ground that could make up their minds neither to be proper hills nor satisfactory valleys. Occasionally a new vista would slyly suggest that more might be on offer, only to fail to deliver anything that we had not seen before. We passed through tacky, strung-out settlements with no pretensions to be any more than that. Only billboards and breakers’ yards added a touch of class to the scene. As we approached the coast, you could taste the salt and decay of the marshlands. The old white weather-board houses and meagre flint churches seemed to crouch and huddle together against a wind that blew across the North Sea straight from the steppes. This was a flat land, merely on loan from the ocean, and prevented only by the snaking dykes and sea walls from returning at the next high tide to the salt water from which it came.

St Peter’s church is a modest brick-and-flint building with a stumpy wooden steeple and a large green churchyard full of mossy and largely unreadable gravestones. As Feldingham has grown, piety has declined proportionately; the need has never arisen to enhance what Fairfax would have approved as a perfectly good Norman building.

I succeeded in convincing Elsie that I had no wish to revisit the scene of my wedding and we passed on to the far side of the village where Charlotte’s substantial, boxy, modern house lay in well-tended grounds.

I was of course well aware that Charlotte had never liked me, but her dislike had taken the form of a certain aloofness rather than actual antagonism. As with others who had featured, either as major players or in walk-on parts, during my divorce, I had good reason to feel sorry for her now rather than harbour any ill feeling. For her part, Charlotte greeted us with her usual indifference.

Charlotte was some three or four years older than her sister. Old enough certainly to give her a lifelong sense of superiority and to regard Geraldine, rightly, as an irresponsible child forever having to be pulled out of life’s muddy puddles. They resembled each other only superficially in appearance and not at all in character. While there was some facial similarity, Charlotte was taller, more solidly built than Geraldine: one of nature’s hockey players. She had inherited at birth the mantle of the sensible one. Even in photographs of her as quite a small child there was a seriousness about her: more showed her frowning than smiling and in all there was a firmness in her gaze that suggested that here was a kid who wouldn’t stand for any nonsense. But even she must have been briefly susceptible to Geraldine’s charms, because she had, after all, also invested a sizeable sum of money in the last failed project. Unlike Rupert or (in a different way) Smith-the-Bank, she could afford to lose the money. She had inherited a house from her parents. She had a good job and no family dependent on her. In this last respect she had always struck me as rather lonely. I don’t believe that she had actually been jilted at the altar, but there had, in the distant past, been some disappointments – a broken engagement possibly, an unrequited passion for some rugby-playing merchant banker. Or then again, perhaps not. How was I to tell? She never was the sort of person to share intimate details of that nature with a brother-in-law, unlike Geraldine, who would share anyone’s secrets at the drop of a hat with a total stranger. She was also the exact reverse of Geraldine in one other important respect: she was essentially a very unhappy person.

‘I’ve made you tea,’ she said. ‘I believe that’s what one is supposed to do under these circumstances. The grieving family assembles for cucumber sandwiches and a little hypocrisy.’

It was remarkable that she could inject such a note of bitterness into the offer of a cup of tea.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Ta,’ said Elsie, on what passed for her best behaviour for the moment. I watched her juggle a cup of tea and a plate ornamented by a single, impossibly thin cucumber sandwich.

Charlotte put down the teapot and placed a tea cosy over it. (I tried to remember when I had last had tea that had not been made with a tea bag in a mug.) ‘So, what really brings you here?’

‘Oh, a chance to drive out into the country and revisit the happy scene of my wedding day. You’re lucky: it’s so peaceful round here.’

‘Don’t you believe it. They broke into the church early this year and did all sorts of damage – they even stole the parish registers, if you’ll believe that. So, that’s the record of your marriage lost and gone. I know why you’ve come here. It’s the money, isn’t it? And I assume that the cash, like everything else, is also lost and gone for ever?’ Charlotte was not the sort of person to waste a great deal of time on small talk.

‘Probably.’

‘Pretty much what I expected. God, what a cow my sister was. I suppose you’ve been lumbered with clearing up her mess?’

I nodded, thinking as I did so that these were probably the most sympathetic words that Charlotte had ever addressed to me.

‘Have you fixed a date for the funeral?’ she continued.

I took a sip of my tea. ‘I’d like to get on with it, but I don’t yet know when they’ll release the body.’

‘I suppose I’ll have to go, but don’t expect me to weep over the coffin or anything. I’m not saying that I would have strangled her myself, but I can understand how somebody might decide it was a sound plan. Did the police question you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Me too,’ she said with a certain relish. ‘I was here in good old Feldingham, God rot it, on the relevant date – at a meeting of the WI, as it happened. Deadly boring but an impeccable alibi. And no mere police sergeant is going to be able to browbeat the chairwoman of the WI into saying something that she doesn’t want to say. Tough job for the police all round. If they need to talk to everyone who wanted Geraldine dead, they’ll have to interview half the Home Counties.’

‘Not quite. She had her good points too,’ I said.

‘Sorry,’ said Charlotte. ‘I keep forgetting that you alone never saw through her. And you had to identify the body. That can’t have been much fun.’

‘It was all surprisingly matter-of-fact.’

‘Still, it can’t have been pleasant seeing somebody you were once fond of stretched out cold on a slab like a pound of cod. I assume that’s what she looked like? You used to show her a dog-like devotion that I never quite understood, so you have my sympathy now, for what it’s worth …’

‘Does the name Pamela Hamilton-Boswell mean anything to you?’ demanded Elsie, apparently finding this polite chitchat a bit off the point.

Charlotte frowned. ‘Yes, definitely,’ she said. ‘What is this? A trivia quiz?’ She tapped her fingers on the table for a moment. ‘Didn’t she present
Blue Peter
back in the sixties? Something like that. The name is really familiar anyway.’

‘She’d be about your age – maybe a bit younger,’ said Elsie.

‘My age? Wait a minute. I remember now!’ Then she chanted in an eery voice, ‘
“Pamela Hamilton-Boswell, she’s pushing back the stone. Pamela Hamilton-Boswell, she glides the road alone. Pamela Hamilton-Boswell, she’s creeping up your stair. Pamela Hamilton-Boswell is there, there, there!”
’ Charlotte laughed. ‘It’s years since I thought of that. It’s a rhyme that Geraldine and I made up to frighten each other. Chanted in the dark at about midnight it can be quite effective.’

‘But who
was
she?’ demanded Elsie.

‘Oh, she was the little girl who died,’ said Charlotte. ‘You’re right. She was roughly Geraldine’s age, but she was only … oh, just one or two when she died. If we ever met her when she was alive, I don’t remember it, though I do think I recall being told at the time about her being ill. Leukaemia, I think it was: they couldn’t treat it as well in those days, so I guess it was a death sentence from the moment they diagnosed it. Horrible for the parents. She’s buried at St Peter’s. We used to walk past her gravestone every Sunday. It was the first hint we had that it wasn’t only old people who died: it could happen to children like us as well. The fact that she was almost exactly our age reinforced the message, I suppose. Her parents must still live in the village: Colonel and Mrs Hamilton-Boswell.’

‘Major and Mrs,’ said Elsie.

‘That’s right. Major and Mrs. Gosh, you are well informed on our little village. So what has she got to do with anything?’

‘Would she have ever had a bank account in Switzerland?’ asked Elsie.

Charlotte threw back her head and guffawed. ‘What an extraordinary idea!’

‘Then somebody opened one in her name.’

‘Geraldine, you mean?’ said Charlotte, raising an eyebrow.

‘Possibly. But if so, she drew the money out the day after she died,’ said Elsie.

Charlotte looked at me, then back at Elsie. ‘I’m not sure what you are suggesting?’

‘An accomplice. Another woman of about the same age, and not totally dissimilar appearance, with access to Geraldine’s papers.’

‘I hope you are not suggesting that that was me.’

‘It could have been.’ If I had been prepared to forgive and forget, Elsie clearly was not. She had been waiting for a chance to have a dig at Charlotte, and this appeared to be it.

‘I have already accounted to the police for my movements. I don’t think I need to account to you as well.’

‘You have to admit there wouldn’t have been many people in a better position than you to do it.’

Charlotte got to her feet. For a moment I thought that she might be about to pick Elsie up bodily and throw her out. But she merely removed the cosy from the teapot and said: ‘But I didn’t, did I? Now, more tea anyone?’

‘You don’t have a bar of Fruit & Nut by any chance?’ enquired Elsie. ‘Ouch,’ she added as I kicked her.

As we passed the church for the second time, on our way out of the village, I could not avoid stopping the car and walking, in the fast-fading light, along the church path to a gravestone not far from the lych-gate.

Muttering, ‘They’ll never miss one,’ Elsie took a rose from a large bunch on a nearby grave and propped it against Pamela Hamilton-Boswell’s gravestone. ‘Poor little sod,’ she added. ‘Where’s the divine purpose in that, eh?’

As we walked back she rubbed her eyes a couple of times and sniffed.

‘Must be getting a cold,’ she said quickly, before I could enquire further.

We drove home slowly in a mist that had crept in silently and insidiously from the sea, enveloping the dark fields and trees and throwing back the beam from my headlights.

‘Well, I think we can rule her out,’ Elsie conceded.

‘I’m glad you admit that it was all a waste of time,’ I said.

‘Oh, not a waste of time,’ she said. ‘Far from it. We know who Pamela Hamilton-Boswell is now, and we can be absolutely certain that it was Geraldine who came up with the name for the account. It confirms that Geraldine’s disappearance was long planned: she’d set up a bank account in a false name to transfer funds into. And, since Geraldine could not have withdrawn the money herself, we know that somebody else was sufficiently aware of her plans to withdraw the cash after she died. An accomplice had always seemed likely, but I had assumed that it must be a man. I think we are looking for a woman, who knew Geraldine well and who possibly lives in Essex.’ She paused for a moment, then: ‘That’s it!’ she said. ‘Stop the car!’

‘Stop? Here?’ There was no sign, on the narrow lane along which we were driving, of any safe stopping place, above all in this mist. I slowed down, my eyes searching right and left for any piece of verge wide enough to take a medium-sized saloon car.

‘Ethelred, you silly tart. What are you doing? You’ll kill us stopping here. Clearly when I say stop the car, I am speaking figuratively. What I mean is …’ Elsie consulted my map, ‘… turn left in about two and a half miles.’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘Elizabeth.’

‘But surely not—’

‘We must leave no stone unturned.’

I put my foot on the accelerator too late. In my rear-view mirror I saw headlights approach with horrible rapidity and swerve to the right. A large dark object passed us at speed, sounding its horn in annoyance. I allowed the car to slowly build up speed as we set off again along the lane, watching carefully for a left turning.

Elizabeth’s house was in complete contrast to Charlotte’s modern, safe, oddly suburban home. A short stretch of gravel drive led us to the front of one of the large half-timbered farmhouses in which that part of Essex abounds. Once the homes of yeoman farmers, they are now usually the country residences of prosperous scrap dealers or upmarket pornographers. I could not remember which, if either, of these professions Elizabeth’s second husband, Dennis, followed – though whatever it was made him a great deal of money, as Elizabeth often reminded me. I had met him once or twice because Elizabeth, in the wake of Rupert’s desertion, had seen me as some sort of ally. We had offered each other (purely verbal) consolation and I had been invited to her wedding a year or two after the divorce from Rupert. We had exchanged Christmas cards subsequently (hers large and with a customized message printed inside) but I had never visited her new house. Elsie did not explain from where she had obtained Elizabeth’s address, though it was quite possibly from a surreptitious reading of my address book.