The Spring Cleaning Murders (11 page)

“It was about the Hearthside Guild meeting, or rather what happened at the meeting.” My lips quivered but I looked steadily at him. “Vienna Miller was showing me the study and we walked in on an overturned stepladder and Mrs. Large lying dead on the floor.”

“My God, Ellie!” Ben drew me to him and stroked my hair. “What a shock! What happened?”

“I don’t know.” I lifted my face, drawing immense comfort from the look in his eyes. “There’ll be a postmortem and I suppose an inquest if it turns out that she did die from the fall, rather than some medical problem like a thrombosis or something similarly quick.”

“Didn’t anyone hear the crash?” Ben raised a questioning eyebrow. “Tall Chimneys isn’t all that big a house.”

“The Millers’ dogs barked quite a lot,” I told him, “or it could have happened, I suppose, when Jonas was using the electric saw. He had gone with me, you see, to take a look at a tree that needed pruning and ended up taking off a dead branch or two. We couldn’t hear ourselves talk, let alone anything else when that was going on.”

“But the thinking is that it happened during the Hearthside Guild meeting?”

“Well, that’s what I’ve been assuming,” I said, “although I suppose it could have been before. But not much, because Mrs. Large’s starting time was nine o’clock. Someone—a policeman or one of the paramedics—did ask Jonas if he had seen anything, since he was out in the garden a good part of the time and the study has French windows. But he said he never went near them.”

"I think what you need”—Ben cupped my face in his hands—”is something to eat and drink in peaceful surroundings. You don’t have to rush home, do you?”

“No, Abbey and Tam are with Frizzy.”

“Good,” Ben propelled me down the hall. “You go and freshen up while I prepare a meal fit even for you, my Greek goddess. Lamb and rice deliciously seasoned with anise and turmeric, wrapped into little grape-leaf bundles and sautéed in a delectable persimmon sauce.”

How, I wondered, looking after him as he disappeared into the kitchen, did I get so lucky? He was quite right, I was hungry, having barely nibbled my sandwich at Bellingham’s. Even the thought of a meal revived me.

While in the pretty powder room off the hall, I pondered what suggestions I could make about restoring Abigail’s reputation. But when I went into the elegant dining room and saw the white linen-clad table Ben had prepared for us—one small inhabited island among a sea of deserted ones—I decided to bide my time. There would be plenty of opportunities to talk about all that when we got home. Now I sensed that both us needed to let the unpleasantness of the day float beyond the horizon.

Ben had prepared a truly superb meal in what to me seemed an impossibly short time. We allowed ourselves just one glass of champagne, because we would both be driving. The stuffed grape leaves were preceded by a fresh fruit salad and followed by a dark, dense, and delicious chocolate torte. And neither of us allowed grim thoughts to intrude.

My mother had told me something about love. She’d said that it was like a river and that sometimes after you have been married for a while it settles into a gentle flow, very pleasant and safe. And lovely in its way. But suddenly, just when it is least expected, the river makes a sharp bend and there is a new sense of wonder, so that the middle becomes the beginning again—only better, because now there is a shared past to buoy the husband and wife up when they go over the rapids.

Mrs. Large’s funeral took place on an afternoon turned grey and rainy after a sunny morning. That was spring, I thought. Like a young girl on the brink of womanhood, bursting with smiles one minute and all teary the next.

Ben came with me and it was nice to see that the front pews of St. Anselm’s were full. A good number of Hearthside Guild members had turned out, including all who had been at the fateful coffee morning. Sir Robert and Lady Pomeroy, Brigadier Lester-Smith, Tom Tingle, and Clarice Whitcombe were all seated two rows in front of us. The Miller sisters sat directly in front of them. The one person conspicuous by her absence was Mrs. Malloy.

I had telephoned the London flat as soon as Ben and I returned home that night, but got only George, who explained in an agitated voice that his mother was busy with the baby. So I asked that Mrs. Malloy ring me back. Not having heard from her by the next morning, I tried again. I thought George might have forgotten to relay the message. My cousin Vanessa answered this time and demanded to know, in a voice verging on hysteria, what I could be thinking to call at such an ungodly hour. (It was eleven o’clock.) Didn’t I realize how little sleep new mothers got, lying awake half the night worrying if they would ever get their figures back and whether the baby would ever learn to give itself a bottle? Or maybe—voice spiraling into a yell—I wouldn’t know, never having been a sex symbol and seeming to enjoy the grind of being a mother. By the time Vanessa wound down, I was wrung out, but I still managed to stress that a friend of Mrs. Malloy’s had died and would she please phone me back. Unfortunately, as so often happens, when Mrs. Malloy finally rang I was out—picking up the twins from play school. But Jonas, who begrudgingly took the call (not holding with telephones), reported that he had given her the time and date of the funeral, and she had assured him she’d be there.

So why, I thought, turning my head to peer at the empty pews behind me, hadn’t she come? Was she having such a grand old time in London that she couldn’t tear herself away even for a few hours? Or had Vanessa gone into a major snit? Saying she shouldn’t be expected to look after baby Rose all by herself and that if Mrs. Malloy were any kind of grandmother at all she would know where her duty lay. Very probably. I knew just how ruthless my cousin could be in pursuit of getting her way, but I also knew Mrs. Malloy. Making it hard to picture her lightly setting aside loyalty to an old friend.

The vicar—a visiting one, because our regular was away on holiday—concluded the eulogy, the usual sort of thing when not knowing the deceased from Adam or Eve. He praised Mrs. Large as a good Christian woman and wished her good speed and all the best, rather as if she were toddling off for a fortnight at the seaside. Mrs. Barrow played the final hymn at full gallop; probably, I thought nastily, because she couldn’t wait to rush off and picket to her heart’s content. Her troops hadn’t paraded outside Abigail’s for the past several days. Ben thought they would be back after enjoying a change of scene in front of the Odeon, currently showing
Jane Eyre
—which Mrs. Barrow staunchly believed should have included a caption warning against the dangers of living in antiquated houses not equipped with smoke detectors.

The coffin was borne from the church, followed at a stately remove by the clergyman and, a few steps behind, by two women whom I concluded to be Mrs. Large’s daughters. They were both six-footers and solidly built. As they drew level with my pew, I heard one complain that the hymns had given her a headache. And the other said she hoped they would not have to stand too long at the grave.

It was still drizzling when Ben and I fell in line behind Brigadier Lester-Smith. He was wearing a bottle-green raincoat, which reminded me that I still had to return the one Ben had taken home by mistake. We made our way along the moss-grown path to the graveside to huddle with the other mourners under a gnarled old tree that looked as though it had been ordered to stand there indefinitely as penance for a lifetime of sin. While the vicar fumbled in his vestment pockets for his prayer book and produced everything but (including a couple of dog biscuits, a set of keys, and a black sock), I looked around for the Miller sisters.

They stood only a few feet to my left, sandwiched in between Tom Tingle and the brigadier. Vienna looked composed and tweedy in an old-fashioned suit and a felt hat with a wisp of feather tucked in the side. It could have been there by design or the result of a molting pigeon flying overhead. Madrid wore one of her trailing Flower Child outfits, but I couldn’t see her face. Her head was bowed, her long hair falling forward, so she looked rather like a weeping willow, shivering a little in the wind. I had thought about the Millers a good deal, wondering how they were doing. Would it have been easier for them had it turned out that Mrs. Large had succumbed to some dire ailment? Rather than dying as a result of the fall—as had proven the case? Did Vienna and Madrid lie awake at night questioning whether the stepladder had been sufficiently sturdy, or the floor uneven?

The vicar had now found his little book and was rustling through its pages for the appropriate passage while the little black marker ribbon flapped in the breeze. My thoughts returned to Mrs. Malloy. How could she have failed to attend? Surely her fellow members of the C.F.C.W.A. would feel she had let them and the organization down.

My gaze shifted to where Mrs. Smalley stood, looking more than ever like a workhouse waif in a black coat that was clearly borrowed, being three or four sizes too big for her. Her nose was reddened either from crying or the cold. Alongside her stood a stringy woman with heavy eyebrows, a beaky nose, and dark hair liberally streaked with grey, bound around her head in a double row of tightly woven plaits. Mrs. Nettle, I wondered? She certainly looked prickly enough to fit the name. Standing just behind her was a curly-haired youngish woman, arm in arm with a man of similar age in a black leather jacket. From the scowl on his face and the restless shifting of his feet, I suspected he thought only dead people should go to funerals. Trina McKinnley, I presumed? I drew back so she wouldn’t catch me staring.

Ben squeezed my hand. I shifted closer within the circle of his arm as the vicar recited the burial prayers in a voice almost as brisk as the wind. His cassock flapped against his legs and his hair fell forward in a monk’s fringe. Mrs. Large’s daughters stepped forward to toss handfuls of earth onto the coffin and others straggled forward to do likewise. I tried to read the faces as they went by. Brigadier Lester-Smith leaped forward, at the risk of getting mud on his shoes, to offer a steadying hand when Clarice Whitcombe moved within a few feet of the grave’s edge. The man in the black leather jacket wore the pained expression of someone having several body parts pierced at once. Mrs. Smalley was sobbing hard and being lectured on being dignified by the woman I took to be Mrs. Nettle. Lady Pomeroy looked truly grief-stricken as she bent to lay a small posy of flowers on the sod-strewn grass. But mostly people looked more moved by the cold and damp than anything else.

It was time to go. And as we wended our way between the tombstones, many of them dating back to the seventeenth century, I caught the eye of one of Mrs. Large’s daughters and stopped to introduce myself and Ben before offering our condolences.

“Haskell!” She chewed on the name with a good-sized set of dentures, while looking more at Ben than at me. “Oh, I get it! You’re one of the ladies that found Mum. Must have been a nasty shock. Life pulls some funny tricks, don’t it! But it’s good she went quick. She wouldn’t have wanted to linger and be a burden to me and Roberta.” She jerked a gigantic thumb in her sister’s direction. “And I doubt Mum would have been an easy patient, tending as she did to look on the dark side at the best of times. Not what you could call a cheerful Charlie, if you get me.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll miss her” was all I could think to say, and Ben added a few words about it always being hard to lose a parent.

“I guess it’ll take some getting used to,” the woman agreed without much conviction, “not hearing Mum’s voice on the phone every few months or bumping into her in the high street of a now and then. But as they say”—looking around and beckoning to her sister—”life goes on, and right now me and Rob need to be getting down to see Mr. Wiseman, the solicitor, about the will. Doesn’t do to be late for that sort of appointment, does it?"

A few moments after she strode away, I heard a mocking voice say, “She’s in for a surprise, her and that oaf of a sister. Gertrude won’t have left them a tea towel apiece. Selfish, rotten cows!”

The speaker was the curly-haired woman. I saw Mrs. Smalley give her arm a squeeze before guiding her towards us, while the man in the black leather jacket slouched along behind.

“Trina, love,” said the elderly waif, “I want you to meet Mrs. Haskell, that I was talking to you about, and this must be her hubby.” She peeked at Ben. “Glad to meet you, sir, I’m sure. Ever such nice things I’ve heard about you from Roxie Malloy. Can’t think why she hasn’t turned up, it’s not like her one bit.”

Standing within the shadow of a very large monument to the deceased members of the Pomeroy family, Ben murmured polite somethings to Mrs. Smalley while Trina said she understood I needed someone to come in and clean.

“I realize, Mrs. Haskell, that Roxie gave you a full day once a week, but I can’t manage but four hours of a morning every other week, and it’ll have to be a Monday.” She had snapping black eyes and a determined chin, along with a crisp way of talking that had me feeling beholden before I had agreed to anything. “You see, Tuesdays I go to Tall Chimneys. Perhaps you know Gertrude was only filling in for me because I was on my holidays, and . . .” She rattled off the names of other people she worked for, including all of Mrs. Large’s former clients, whom she was taking on.

“You couldn’t possibly give me a full day on alternate Mondays?” I asked hesitantly, aware that I was being scrutinized from head to toe without winning much favor by the man in the black leather jacket.

“Can’t do.” Trina shook her curly head.  “Monday afternoon’s kept for Joe here”—tossing him a glance— “and we don’t get near enough time together as it is.”

“You know how life goes on.” He gave me a man-to-woman wink. “Got a wife at home that keeps me on a short lead.”

“Pesky of her,” I said.

“So you going to take these Monday mornings?” He reached into the pockets of his tight jeans and pulled out a flattened packet of cigarettes. “You won’t find no one better than Trina. A real hard worker and very particular. She’s got one of them—what do you call it? Photogenic memories.”