Till We Meet Again (25 page)

‘A bit old-fashioned, and cruel in this case as Suzie had lived there for so long,’ Beth retorted.

‘A fool I’d call him.’ Stan grinned at Beth. ‘I used to go shooting with him at one time, nice enough bloke but he always got things all arse up. His boy was born during the war and by the time Charley got home he’d been spoilt by his mum and gran. He were the soft, bookish kind, a real disappointment to Charley. Don’t reckon they ever got on. Then Suzie came along and she were the apple of Charley’s eye. He taught her to shoot, y’know! She were good at it too, for a girl. Many’s the time I went out rabbiting with Charley and she came tagging along too.’

‘Really!’ Beth exclaimed. ‘But how strange, if he idolized her, that he wasn’t kinder to her later on.’

‘Well, like I said, he always got things arse upwards,’ Stan retorted. ‘When his wife had the stroke he seemed to change towards Suzie right away. Never said a word about what a little brick she were, just kept going on about how smart his son was, how well he’d done fer himself in the city. It made some of us mad, we all knew Martin was a snotty little bastard, who didn’t give a toss about his folks.’

‘So are you saying he left everything to Martin to kind of make up for not having much time for him when he was little?’ Beth said, trying to clarify what the man meant.

Stan shrugged. ‘Sommat like that, I guess. Some said he did it to spite Susan because she got shirty with him when she suspected him of knocking off another woman. Some said it were Martin forced his hand. But whichever, it were a right shame. Suzie would have stayed here I reckon, married a local bloke, maybe had a couple of kids. She were a dyed-in-the-wool country girl.’

‘What a sad story.’ Beth sighed. She wondered what would happen in this pub when Susan’s trial began and they all discovered what else had befallen her. ‘To think we only wanted to find Liam to do our garden! Do any of you know other friends of his we could try? Or people he worked for?’

Stan looked thoughtful. ‘I could give you a dozen names of people he worked for, but like I said when we first got chatting, there’s lots of people wanted his help when he moved on, and they couldn’t find him. Don’t know where ‘is folks are, or if he had any, he never said. Only place you might find out is down the police station.’

‘Police!’ Roy exclaimed, his eyes widening in surprise.

‘Well, it’s a long shot, but they towed his van away. It had stuff of his in it.’

‘When was this?’ Beth asked.

Stan scratched his head. ‘Years ago now. He left it parked up the lane from the Wrights’ house. Rusty old Volkswagen camper it were, he used to live in it. It were there for months, then someone nicked the wheels. No one had seen Liam for a while, so someone called the police to take it away.’

Chapter thirteen

‘It’s very strange that Liam didn’t return to this area,’ Roy mused over dinner that night. ‘I could understand him scooting off for a while if he thought he was going to get a lot of flak about abandoning Susan in her moment of need. But you’d think he’d miss all those people he worked for.’

They were in the restaurant of the Welcombe Hotel, a gracious country house hotel with its own golf-course, about a mile outside Stratford-upon-Avon, which Roy had booked them into. Beth had expected something small and quite ordinary, but it was very grand; it had a vast drawing room with a huge log fire, comfortable couches and armchairs, and sumptuous bedrooms. Beyond the windows of the restaurant were floodlit formal gardens and a splendid view of the golf-course and surrounding countryside. It was the sort of place which would be fully booked most of the year with golfers and tourists, but so soon after the New Year there were only a handful of guests and the other people in the restaurant that night were mainly locals.

Stan had directed Roy and Beth to two other people in nearby villages who had employed Liam, so they had called on both of them after leaving the pub. Fortunately these people knew nothing about Susan Wright, so they didn’t have to listen to repeats of the saga about her dastardly brother.

They had a far better picture of Liam now: reliable, hardworking, honest, well-educated and considered a real gentleman, despite his unorthodox appearance and lifestyle. He sounded a remarkable man, judging by the affectionate manner in which people spoke of him, even after several years’ absence.

The first house they called at had several acres of garden and a swimming pool. Mrs Jackson, the wife of the surgeon who owned it, said Liam used to come to her every spring, and again in October for two weeks. He did the pruning, heavy digging and any tree or shrub planting. She said her husband had asked him dozens of times if he would be their full-time gardener, but he always refused. Apparently he found ordinary garden maintenance, mowing lawns and weeding too dull and he didn’t like to be stuck in one place for too long. Mrs Jackson said they were disappointed when he didn’t turn up as usual in the autumn of 1986. She thought he might have gone to Scotland as she knew he often spent the winter working for the Forestry Commission there.

The second house they called at was just a cottage, but it had an equally large garden, most of which was woodland. The couple who owned it were in their eighties, both a little deaf and wandering slightly in their minds, so they couldn’t say with any accuracy what year it was when they last saw Liam. But they did say he’d come to them every November for more than twelve years. They had always put him up too, as the weather was usually bad and he got so dirty cutting back the brambles and burning them. They were both touchingly wistful about him. They said they had always looked forward to him coming because he would also do little jobs around the house they could no longer manage, and they liked his company.

‘Why would he leave his van behind?’ Roy said as he poured Beth another glass of wine.

‘Maybe it had broken down?’ she suggested. ‘He might have known it wasn’t going to be worth having it mended. Could you check with the police here?’

‘I doubt they even have a record of it now. It would have been scrapped soon after it was towed away,’ he said. ‘Besides, I’ll get myself in hot water if it gets out I’ve been going around asking questions when I’m not on official police business.’

‘But you only stumbled on something curious while you were a civilian,’ she said. ‘You haven’t been a policeman today, just my friend.’

‘I don’t think it would be seen in that light.’ He grinned. ‘For one thing, we got Mrs Unsworthy to talk about Susan without revealing the true nature of our interest. I was her arresting officer, for goodness’ sake! Then in a nearby village we pretended we were looking for a gardener. If Stan and Mrs Unsworthy put their heads together, they might very well be ringing the local police themselves to complain about us.’

Beth could see what he meant. ‘I wonder if I should tell Susan that I’ve been up here?’

‘I wouldn’t, not yet anyway. Let’s just see what unfolds.’

Beth woke early the next morning, and for a brief moment was confused about where she was. But she reached out for the bedside light, and as soon as she saw the quaintly old-fashioned room with its chintz curtains, her confusion vanished.

She got out of bed to make a cup of tea, but it was cold because the heating hadn’t come on yet. As she waited for the small kettle to boil, she pulled back the curtains and looked out.

Her room overlooked the front drive and the fields and woodland beyond. It was just on dawn, and a thick frost covered everything so thickly it looked like snow. She thought that almost anyone would put such a view on top of their wish list, yet Susan, who had lived with an even more outstanding one than this for most of her life, hadn’t once remarked on missing it since she was arrested.

The sound of the kettle boiling stopped Beth’s reverie, and she hastily made a cup of tea and went back to her warm bed. She wondered if Roy was awake yet, and if he was, was he thinking that she must be frigid?

After the meal last night they had moved into the drawing room and had several more drinks by the fire. Had they been alone, Beth felt she might have been able to really talk to him, hold his hand, and that a few kisses might have encouraged her to invite him into her room later. But another couple on a golfing weekend had come and joined them by the fire, and kept talking to them, so by the time the bar closed Beth was too sleepy even to consider anything more. Roy had kissed her at the door of her room, and she’d come in alone.

This could-she, couldn’t-she stuff was almost worse than jumping in with both feet and finding things were as awful as ever. At least that way she always lost her romantic ideas about the man immediately. She knew now she didn’t want to lose Roy, yesterday had been so lovely. He was such a good companion, relaxed, amusing, thoughtful and stimulating. He didn’t try too hard either, the way most men did. None of that trying to impress her that she always found so tedious.

Yet he did impress her. He had a natural charm that made everyone open up to him, a clever way of wording questions to get at the truth. Part of this of course was influenced by his job, just as it was with her, but he had a real interest in people. By the time they’d left the old couple in the late afternoon, he really knew them well. As they were driving back to the hotel he’d made some remark about them being yet another old couple whose children didn’t bother with them. She asked him how he knew this.

‘The photographs of their grandchildren were all baby ones. But they are obviously all grown up now,’ he said, looking surprised she hadn’t picked up on this. ‘The old girl said, “There isn’t much for young people right out here in the country,” that’s her excuse for no one coming to visit.’

Beth thought he was probably right. That was probably the reason why they had befriended Liam too. But she wouldn’t have thought of it herself.

She wondered though how many more times Roy would ask her out before he lost his patience with her. Most of her previous promising relationships had fizzled out that way. Over the years she had been called everything from a prick-tease to a cold-hearted bitch, and though she hadn’t lost any sleep over that most of the time, thinking about Roy reminded her of how she’d felt about James Macutcheon.

James was a solicitor too, in a firm in Chancery Lane. Like Roy, he was strong, charming, affectionate and good fun.

She was thirty-four then. James was a year younger, tall, blond, with the kind of poise that came from a loving, comfortable, upper-middle-class family. She had fallen in love with him by their third date, and by the fifth she was afraid he would lose interest if she didn’t go to bed with him. When he invited her over to supper one evening at his place, a smart flat in Chelsea, she was ready to take the plunge.

Everything seemed so perfect – soft music, candlelight, and the Chinese meal he’d got delivered was one of the best she’d ever eaten. They lay on a couch cuddling later, and she wanted him, really wanted him in a way she’d never known with a man before.

But all at once his kisses became too forced, he was sticking his tongue half-way down her throat, and his hand was going up her skirt. She wanted him to arouse her gently, but he thrust his fingers inside her so hard it hurt, and all her desire vanished. She tried to make a joke of it, asked if he could just slow down a bit, but he muttered something about how he knew she was the kind to want it rough, and yanked her knickers down.

Just remembering it brought tears to her eyes. She didn’t let him force her, she wriggled away.

‘I don’t like it rough,’ she said, crying by then as she pulled her knickers back up. ‘I wanted to be loved, not raped.’

If he’d looked shocked or apologetic, or got up to embrace her, it might have ended differently. But he just lay there on the couch, his trousers unzipped, his hair all tousled, and looked at her with cold disdain.

‘Grow up, Beth,’ he said in a cold voice. ‘What did you come here for, if not for a fuck?’

She was out of the door before he could even get up, running down King’s Road with her shoes in her hands, looking frantically for a taxi.

In the months that followed, she went over and over that evening again in her mind, asking herself what gave him the idea she liked it rough. It seemed logical to her that any man would guess when a woman didn’t leap into bed on the first date that she was the kind who wanted to be seduced with tenderness.

The worst thing about it was she had fallen for James, believed he felt the same, and that he sensed there was a good reason for her hesitancy. Clearly she was wrong on both counts as he hadn’t run after her to apologize. He never contacted her again. All he did for her was to take her right back to being seventeen again, feeling dirty and humiliated.

After that experience she’d lost trust in all men. She only accepted a date now and again, and got a taxi home alone. She never went out with anyone more than twice. She felt she was safer leading a celibate life, she couldn’t be hurt that way.

As she snuggled back under the covers, she decided that Roy was very different to James in his outlook. He’d known deep sorrow, he was sensitive and kind, and she knew she must try to talk to him about her problems.

After a huge breakfast they put their bags back in Roy’s car and went for a walk. Beth put on a woolly red hat, gloves and matching scarf, and Roy laughingly said her nose was turning red to match them, and kissed it.

‘I love walking on frost,’ she said gleefully as they took a footpath from the hotel up over the fields to Stratford. ‘There’s nothing quite like that scrunch.’

‘Cracking ice is even better,’ he said, thumping his heel into a frozen puddle and grinning like a schoolboy.

All at once Beth felt the need to say something. She slid her arms around his middle in a hug, and rubbed her cold nose against his.

‘You’re doing a good job on cracking this ice maiden,’ she said. ‘I can feel myself thawing. Don’t lose patience with me yet, Roy, there are reasons why I’m like I am.’

She held her breath, expecting either questions she couldn’t answer, or silence because he was mystified. But instead he put a hand on either side of her face and looked right into her eyes with understanding. ‘I guessed as much,’ he said. ‘But patience is something I have by the cartload, and I’m a good listener too. When you want to tell me about it, just say.’

‘How did you guess?’ she said a little later as they walked on hand-in-hand through the fields. Their breath was like smoke in the cold air, and the sky was leaden as if snow was on the way.

‘You are extraordinarily defensive,’ he said. ‘When I first met you in the courts I noticed then how everything was tight about you, the way you moved, the way you talked. Even though we had a very stimulating chat, you gave absolutely nothing away about yourself.’

Beth frowned. ‘Well, surely no one does on a first meeting?’

‘Most of us do,’ he said, and grinned. ‘Whether we mean to or not. Anyway, that evening when we went for a drink after Susan’s arrest, you had a go at me for asking if you had a man. That isn’t a normal reaction for a woman as lovely as you, Beth! Most women, when asked such a thing, laugh and then give you the whole nine yards as to why they haven’t.’

‘Do they?’ she said with some surprise.

He nodded. ‘Perhaps they wouldn’t if they thought the man was an arsehole, or on the make. They might not always tell the truth either. But moving conversation on to a slightly more personal note is the way we make friends.’

‘So that’s why I don’t have many friends,’ she said, and smiled ruefully. ‘So why did you bother with me then?’

‘Because I was intrigued, especially when it turned out Susan was a childhood friend, and I saw how it affected you,’ he said, his eyes twinkling with amusement. ‘I saw a glimmer of the girl you once were, the woman you could be if you stepped out from behind your professionalism. I wondered what made you so defensive, and afraid.’

Beth took a deep breath. ‘I will tell you soon,’ she said. ‘But not today, I don’t want to spoil things.’

Steven drove along Acacia Avenue slowly, looking for number 27. It was a miserable grey day, very cold with intermittent showers of sleet, but fortunately the M4 had been surprisingly traffic-free, and he’d enjoyed the drive up from Bristol.

He had of course expected that Martin Wright would live in a smart house. Windsor was a good area, and he knew the man had got a great deal of money from the sale of The Rookery. But he hadn’t really expected anything quite as grand as this road. It was tree-lined, with neat grass verges and wide drives leading up to detached houses that had to be worth half a million at least. They were the sort of homes that came with swimming pools in the back garden, domestic help and children at private schools.

He stopped the car when he saw Wright’s house, a Thirties mini-mansion with a green tiled roof and Art Deco stained glass on a central round staircase window. It was painted white, with a portico over the front door and three lots of windows on either side. The drive itself was the expensive kind Steven had seen advertised in glossy magazines, laid with shiny cobbles which were sealed so that no weed could ever lift its ugly head. It was a far cry from Steven’s semi-detached with its scrubby lawn and the children’s artwork stuck up in the windows.