To Fear a Painted Devil (16 page)

‘There you are, Mrs. Smith-King. Three pounds, seven and ten, and two and two is ten, and ten and a pound is five pounds. Sure you can manage? What can we do for you, Mr. Marvell?’

‘Just a packet of labels, please,’ said Marvell who was next in the queue. ‘I’m going to start extracting honey in a day or two.’ He pocketed the envelope and they left the shop together. Outside, Greenleaf’s car was parked against the kerb and the doctor was emerging from the newsagent’s with the local paper.

‘Have you seen it?’ Joan Smith-King asked him. ‘On the property page. You have a look.’

Greenleaf did as he was told, struggling with the pages in the breeze. The display box among the agents’ advertisements wasn’t hard to find: Luxury, architect-designed modern house on the favoured Linchester estate at Chantflower in the heart of rural Notts yet only ten miles from city centre. Large lounge, dining room with patio, superb kitchen, three bedrooms, two bathrooms.

‘She doesn’t let the grass grow under her feet,’ said Joan. ‘I’ll be glad to see the back of that dog, that Queenie thing. My children are scared stiff of dogs.’ Jeremy listened, learning terror at his mother’s knee. ‘You might not believe it but Patrick Selby was all set to ruin Den’s business just because he once hit that dog. I mean, really! Imagine trying to take away someone’s livelihood just because he took a stick to an animal.’

Marvell said softly:

‘The dog recovered from the bite, the man it was that died.’

‘Now look, I didn’t mean …’ A deep flush spread unbecomingly across her lantern jaws. She stepped back. ‘I’m sorry I can’t give you a lift. I’ve got a car full of kids.’

‘Come on,’ Greenleaf said. He tossed the paper into the back of the car. Marvell got in beside him.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I can see you don’t like my detective methods. But it’s bloody funny, nobody loved him. His wife was bored with him, he got in the way of his wife’s lover—Oh, I’ve found out about that—his girl friend’s brother was afraid of him. Even I was annoyed with him because he cut down my father’s trees. Edith disliked him because he played God with her children and now you have Smith-King. I wonder what he was up to there, Max. He told me he was trying to get a Stock Exchange quotation for his shares and expand a bit. Do you suppose he had his old fishy eye on Smith-King’s little lot?’

‘I’m not listening.’

‘Do you happen to know what Smith-King’s line is?’

‘Chemicals.’ Greenleaf said.

‘Drugs mainly. And you realise what that means. He must have access to all kinds of lethal stuff. Or there’s Linda. She works for Waller and I don’t suppose she’s above “borrowing” a nip of something for her mother. And what about that Vesprid stuff?’

Bernice had suggested insecticides. Doubt stirred until Greenleaf remembered how he had answered her. ‘You’ll have to stop all this, you know,’ he said.
‘Nobody could have got into the house because Tamsin was there’

‘Not all the time. After you’d gone she went out.’

‘What?’ Greenleaf signalled right and turned into Long Lane. ‘How do you know?’

‘Because she came to see me,’ Marvell said.

G
reenleaf had intended to drop Marvell at the almshouse and drive straight home. But Marvell’s statement had suddenly put a different complexion on things. He slammed the car doors and they went up to the house.

‘She came,’ Marvell said, ‘to bring me the currants. You remember the currants? She picked them before the party and put them in a trug.’

‘A what?’

‘Sorry. I keep forgetting you’re not a countryman. It’s a kind of wooden basket, a gardener’s basket. In all the fuss I forgot them and Tamsin brought them up to me. It must have been all of midnight.’

Midnight, Greenleaf thought, and she walked through the woods alone. She came down here while Patrick—if not, as far as anyone then knew, dying—was at least ill and in pain. She came to bring a basket of currants! It was no good, he would never understand the habits of the English countryside. But Tamsin was accustomed to them. She had learnt in these two years as much from Marvell as she would have from a childhood spent among the fields and hedgerows.

‘I was sitting at the window reading through my stuff and I saw her in the orchard.’ Marvell knelt down to tie up a hollyhock that the wind had blown
adrift from the porch wall. Greenleaf watched him smooth the stem and press back the torn green skin. ‘She looked like a moth or a ghost in that dress. Patrick didn’t like bright colours. She was carrying the trug and that straw handbag Edith Gaveston gave her for a birthday present. I was—well, somewhat surprised to see her.’ He straightened up and stepped into the porch. Greenleaf fancied that he was embarrassed, for, as he lifted the can and began watering the pot plants that stood on the shelves, he kept his face turned away.

‘She came all this way to give you some currants?’

Marvell didn’t answer him. Instead he said:

‘It means, of course, that anyone could have got into the house. Nobody around here bothers to lock their doors except you and Bernice. I walked back with her as far as her gate.’ He stroked a long spear-shaped leaf and, wheeling round suddenly, said fiercely: ‘My God, Max, don’t you think I realise? If I’d gone in I might have been able to do something.’

‘You couldn’t know.’

‘And Tamsin …?’

‘Thought he was asleep,’ he said, voicing a confidence he didn’t feel. ‘Why did she really come?’

Marvell was touching with the tips of his fingers a dark green succulent plant on the borders of whose leaves tiny leaflets grew.

‘The Pregnant Frau,’ he said. ‘You see, she grows her children all around the edges of her leaves and each one will grow into another plant. They remind me of the leaves in Jacobean embroidery. And this one …’ He fingered the spear-shaped plant, ‘… is the Mother-in-law’s tongue. You see I keep a harem in my porch.’

‘Why did she come?’

‘That,’ Marvell said, ‘is something I can’t really tell you,’ Greenleaf looked at him, puzzled as to whether he meant he refused to tell him or was unable to do so. But Marvell said no more and presently the doctor left him.

He hadn’t meant to go back to the village and into Waller’s shop. He
meant
to turn off at the Manor gates, but something impelled him on down the hill, unease perhaps, or the knowledge that Tamsin had left Patrick alone on the night he died.

‘I want a tin of Vesprid,’ he said, cutting short Waller’s obsequious greeting. Instead of calling for Linda, Waller got it down himself.

‘I suppose I shall have to wear gloves and a mask,’ Greenleaf said innocently.

‘Absolutely harmless to warm-blooded …’ Waller’s voice trailed away. In this company, and only then, was his confidence shaken. A small voice within his heart told him that to Greenleaf, Howard and their partners, he could never be more than the village medicine man. ‘At least … well, I don’t have to tell
you
, Doctor.’

When he got home Greenleaf transferred some of the liquid into a small bottle and wrapped it up. It was far-fetched, incredibly far-fetched, to imagine Edward Carnaby going back to Hallows after the party, to wonder if Freda’s story of Gage and the white packet was a cover-up for her brother’s own trip with a tin of insecticide. Or was it? He went back to the car, drove to the post office and sent the package away to be analysed.

12

T
he Chantflower Rural Council dustmen hadn’t bargained on the extra load of rubbish that awaited them outside the Hallows back door. They grumbled loudly, muttering about slipped discs and no overtime. Queenie stood on the steps and roared at them.

‘Now, if you’ll just take these over to Mrs. Greenleaf I’ll give you a shilling,’ said Tamsin to Peter Smith-King. He was only ten and he looked dubiously at the two suitcases. ‘The money’ll be useful for your holiday. Come on, they’re not really heavy and you can make two journeys. Tell her they’re from Oxfam.’

The little boy hesitated. Then he went home and fetched his box barrow. He trundled the cases across the Green, dawdling to throw a stone at the swans, and found Bernice on the lawn giving coffee to Nancy Gage and Edith Gaveston.

‘Can we have a peep?’ Nancy asked. Without waiting for permission she undid the clasps of the larger case. The lid fell back to reveal, on top of a pile of clothes, a straw handbag embroidered with raffia.

‘Oh, dear!’ Nancy said.

Edith blushed.

‘Of course, I could see she didn’t like it,’ she said. ‘She barely said two words to me when I gave it to her, but really!’

Edith snatched the bag and opened it.

‘She hasn’t even bothered to take the tissue paper out.’

‘Goodness,’ Nancy giggled, ‘I don’t know what use she thinks a handbag is to a starving Asian.’ And her eyes goggled as she imagined an emaciated peasant clutching Edith’s present against her rags.

‘The clothes will be useful though,’ Bernice said pacifically.

Nancy stared in horrified wonder as the doctor’s wife lifted from the case the slacks and tee-shirt Patrick had worn on the evening of his death. For all their careful laundering they suggested a shroud.

Nancy was on her knees now, unashamedly burrowing.

‘Two suits, shoes, goodness knows how many shirts.’ She unfastened the other case. ‘All Patrick’s clothes!’

‘Now if it were Paul …’ Edith began to describe minutely exactly how she would dispose of her husband’s effects in the event of his death. While she was talking Bernice quietly sealed the cases and refilled the coffee pot.

Returning after a few moments, she was aware from Nancy’s expression that the conversation had
taken a different and more exciting turn. The two women under the cedar tree wore ghoulish lugubrious looks. As she approached she caught the words ‘very unstable’ and ‘a most peculiar family altogether.’

How difficult it was to close one’s ears to gossip, how impossible to reprimand friends! Bernice sat down again, listening but not participating.

‘Of course I don’t know the details,’ Nancy was saying.

‘Black, please, Bernice,’ Edith said. ‘Well, that Mrs. Selby—I mean Patrick’s mother—it gets so confusing, doesn’t it? That Mrs. Selby ran away with another man. We used to call it bolting when I was a girl.’ She pronounced it ‘gel’, snapping her tongue wetly from the roof of her mouth. ‘Apparently they’d always been most happily married, married for years. Patrick was grown up when she went off. She must have been all of fifty, my dear, and the man was older. Anyway, she persuaded Patrick’s father to divorce her and he did, but …’

‘Yes?’ Nancy’s forlorn, ghoulish face would have deceived no one. Her mouth was turned down but her bright eyes flickered.

‘But on the day she got her decree Patrick’s father gassed himself!’

‘No!’

‘My dear, it was a terrible scandal. And that wasn’t all. Old Mrs. Selby, the grandmother, too. Dreadful this in-breeding. Look what it does to dogs! She made a terrible scene at the inquest and shouted that her son would still be alive but for the divorce.’

Bernice moved her chair into the shade. ‘You’re romanticising, Edith. You can’t possibly know all this.’

‘On the contrary. I know it for certain.’ Edith drew herself up, the lady of the manor making her morning calls. ‘It so happens I read the account of the inquest in
The Times
. It stuck in my mind and when Nancy mentioned the suicide it all came back to me. Selby, a glass factory. There’s no doubt about it being the same one.’

‘It’s all very sad.’ Bernice looked so repressive that Nancy jumped up, scattering biscuit crumbs.

‘I must love you and leave you. Oh, Bernice, I nearly forgot to ask you. Have you got the name of that man who put up your summer house?’

‘I can’t remember. Max would know.’

Nancy waited for her to ask why. When she didn’t she said proudly:

‘We’re going to have that extension done at last, but Oliver says Henry Glide’s a bit too pricey. A sun loggia …’ She paused. ‘And a pram park!’

‘Nancy, you’re not …? How lovely!’

Nancy pulled in her waist and laughed.

‘No, not yet,’ she said, ‘but Oliver says we can go in for a baby any time I like.’