Faithful unto Death Read online

  “It’s very beautiful.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You must have more work than you know what to do with.”

  “Not really. There are a lot of arty-crafty people in this part of the world. And some of them are very good.”

  “Do you ever do puppies or kittens, Miss Lawson?” asked Sergeant Troy. It was Maureen’s birthday soon and she loved a nice ornament. Be cheaper, he reckoned, to buy direct, especially from an amateur. Cut out the middle man.

  “I’m afraid not.” There was a shred of colour in her voice for the first time—a faint shadow perhaps of indignation.

  “Mrs. Hollingsworth’s was an afternoon class, I take it?” asked Barnaby.

  “Oh yes. I don’t think she was allowed out in the evening.”

  “Her husband kept her on a pretty short leash, it seems.”

  “A choke chain, I’d call it.” For the first time her voice and expression became animated. As she turned away, her high cheekbones flushed, a soft dusky rose. She shook her head, it seemed to Barnaby, with irritation. The loose knot of hair loosened further, tumbling over her thin shoulders and concealing her long silver and carnelian earrings. Her pale gold hair, coarse and very thick, had several silver threads which glittered in the sunlight.

  The Chief Inspector wondered how old she was. Somewhere, he surmised, between thirty and forty, probably nearer the latter. He got up and walked about with the air of a man needing to stretch his legs, thus bringing himself into a position where he could once more see her profile which was gravely intense. Noticing him, she gave a disturbed, nervous cough and again turned away.

  “Could you give me the dates that Mrs. Hollingsworth attended your course, Miss Lawson?”

  “Roughly, the last half of February. Part of March. The college will have an accurate register.”

  “And do you know why she dropped out?”

  “Apparently she hadn’t informed Alan what she was up to. I discovered later that it was his habit to ring up during the day to see if she was ‘all right,’ though what on earth could happen to her in a fast-asleep place like this . . . Anyway, after the first class she told him she had been at Elfrida’s when he’d rung. The next week that she’d been having tea with Avis Jennings. The third that she’d just popped up to the shop. The following Wednesday he decided to be persistent. Rang several times during the four hours we were out and demanded to know just exactly where she had been when he came home.

  “She told him. God, you’d think it was innocent enough. He said of course he couldn’t stop her but if she persisted he wouldn’t have a minute’s peace. He asked if she really wanted to load all this extra worry on to his shoulders. What about the fumes? he said. Weren’t there chemicals involved in that sort of thing? Simone rang up that same evening and said she wouldn’t be coming again. I think she’d been crying. She certainly sounded very subdued. I got the impression Alan was standing over her.”

  “You didn’t attempt to persuade her differently?”

  “Good heavens, no. What would have been the point?”

  She was quite right, of course. No doubt any such approach would merely have made matters worse. “It’s some distance to High Wycombe, Miss Lawson.”

  “About forty minutes.”

  “So, adding up the sessions, that’s several hours you must have spent in Mrs. Hollingsworth’s company.”

  “I suppose. Though, if you’re driving, most of your attention’s on the road.

  “Did she tell you anything about her past life at all?” asked Barnaby. “Or discuss her marriage?”

  “No to your first question. And all I know about the marriage is that she was bored. But then, I think Simone would be bored anywhere. Except perhaps in Harrods.”

  “What did she talk about?”

  “Oh, rubbishy articles she’d read in magazines. Her stars. What was happening in Brookside or EastEnders. All Greek to me as I don’t have a set.”

  “No TV?” Troy gaped in astonishment. He had noticed the absence but assumed it was in her bedroom. He had never in his life met anyone who did not own a television.

  “That’s right.” She turned to face them then, almost smiling. “I’m part of the one per cent.”

  “So, what with one thing and another, you must have been quite relieved when she gave up?” Barnaby said.

  “Well, I certainly had no objection. And there’s always a waiting list.”

  He saw her loosen up. Her shoulders slackened, the planes of her face became less tautly defined. Barnaby got the impression that some precarious corner in the conversation had been safely turned. Or a minefield successfully negotiated. Was he being overly dramatic? It could be that she was simply getting accustomed to their presence.

  “Was there anyone in the class that Mrs. Hollingsworth was especially friendly with?”

  “They were mainly pensioners,” said Sarah. She added drily, “Not at all Simone’s cup of tea. She was pleasant enough to them, I suppose. But no, no real friends.” She sat down on one of the armchairs, her narrow, brown hands banded with many brilliant turquoise rings, loosely clasped.

  Barnaby didn’t like this new composure at all though he found it hard to understand his resentment. After all, if there was no reason for her to feel guilty, why should she not appear calm? Perhaps it was simply that such a state of mind was not conducive to further revelations. He ought to ruffle things up again. Cast around for a remark or question that would really strike home. Difficult when you know next to nothing about your target. So, a shot in the dark it would have to be.

  “Did you know he was violent, Hollingsworth?”

  “What? To . . . ?”

  “To her, yes.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Her fingers flew, touching her breast, as if to soothe a thudding heart. Her mouth shook. “I hate that sort of thing. Why women put up with . . . God, how can . . .”

  Sergeant Troy, never averse to seeing others all of a twitch, especially when they so plainly regarded themselves as his superior, bit his lip to keep back a grin. Personally he had never hit a woman though it couldn’t be denied that they spent half their lives begging for it. Especially Maureen. He regarded this restraint as worthy of a medal.

  Barnaby, pushing now, asked Sarah when she had last seen Alan Hollingsworth.

  “One never ‘sees’ Alan. Just the car zooming in and out.”

  “What about last Monday?”

  “No. That was the night he . . . ?”

  “Died, yes. Were you at home?”

  Sarah shook her head. “Not in the evening. I went to a film. Farinelli Il Castrato”

  “Good, was it?” asked Sergeant Troy, thinking, bloody hell, we’ve got a right one here.

  “The music was wonderful. Which was the reason I went.”

  “Alone?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where was it showing, Miss Lawson?” A page in the notebook rustled loose and was flipped over.

  “The Curzon at Slough.” She looked at Sergeant Troy and then across to the Chief Inspector. “All these questions—you make it sound very serious.”

  “An unexplained or suspicious death is always serious,” said Barnaby.

  And there and then it happened. There had, after all, been a single undefused mine. Now, as they watched, she stepped on it. And fell apart. She uttered a sort of moan and clutched at her face savagely with her hands. Then keeled over, dropping first to her knees and then, face forward, on to the wooden boards.

  “Get some water!”

  As Troy ran to the kitchen, Barnaby knelt by the unconscious figure on the rug. But even as he attempted to take her pulse, Sarah Lawson started to come round.

  “Sorry . . .” Already she was struggling to get up. There were deep half-moon nail marks on her cheekbones.

  “That’s all right, Miss Lawson. Take your time.” He gripped her left hand then, putting his other arm round her waist, helped her back into the chair. She felt very thin and light.

/>   “Drink some of this.” Barnaby took the none too clean glass from Troy but she pushed it away, slopping the water over her faded blue skirt. Little crystal droplets settled on the velvet surface and rolled about.

  “I don’t know what happened. I don’t usually . . .”

  “When did you last have something to eat?”

  “I don’t remember. Thursday perhaps.”

  Three days ago. “No wonder you’re fainting on us.”

  Troy watched the old man bring, in every sense of the word, the woman round. Barnaby had many personas that he drew upon when conducting an interview and this one, everybody’s pet uncle, was the sergeant’s favourite. Listening to the soft, concerned comments, the suggestion that a friend or doctor should be contacted, Troy was lost in admiration. He acknowledged that it was not a technique he would ever be able to employ. He could not bear to be thought gullible. Or less intelligent than the person he was in conversation with, no matter how much of a simpleton that man or woman might be. It was a matter of pride. The chief, on the other hand, couldn’t care less. Whatever means were needed to winkle people out of their protective shells, those means would be brought into play.

  Now he had stopped speaking and an atmosphere of persuasive calm took over the room. Into this pool of silence, as Barnaby had known she would, Sarah Lawson eventually voiced the real reason for her nervous collapse.

  “I was surprised to hear you say that, about Alan. People in the village . . . we all thought he had committed suicide. I mean, wasn’t there a note?”

  “Not really,” said the Chief Inspector.

  “I see.” She took a deep breath. You could see her, gathering both energy and wits together, as if for an affray. “Was it an accident then?”

  “We’re in the middle of our investigations, Miss Lawson. I’m afraid I’m not able to discuss the matter in any sort of detail.” He wondered if she would be able to bring herself to take the next step and speak the unspeakable. The M word. So much more appalling, to the Chief Inspector’s way of thinking, than what is coyly called the F word, and yet bandied hither and yon in polite society, heard daily on Radio Four without a single squeak of complaint from Outraged, Tunbridge Wells, and printed on the spines of books in respectable libraries everywhere. Miss Lawson chickened out.

  “Of course. I understand.”

  He decided to leave it there. For now. A day or two to recover, to settle into the reassuring belief that she had seen the last of them, and he would have her brought into the station and find out precisely why she had fainted from emotion on discovering that Alan Hollingsworth had not died a natural death.

  “That woman’s a dyke,” said Sergeant Troy as they made their way towards the car.

  “Oh, yes?” Barnaby laughed. “How do you make that out?”

  “Going out of her way to watch a movie where men’s todgers are chopped off.”

  “Balls, not todgers.”

  “Oh well,” said Sergeant Troy, attempting a little low-key irony of his own for once, “that’s all right then.”

  Several hours later Barnaby, his face by now grey with fatigue though lightening by the minute, was in the kitchen at Arbury Crescent shaving thin curls of Parmesan from a large knobbly lump, holding the cheese steady with the palm of his hand and using a potato peeler.

  He had a little grater described by his daughter as a “piss elegant Italian job”; a souvenir from Padua. However, though extremely smart in matt black and chrome, the top kept falling off and Barnaby had soon reverted to his old familiar ways.

  In a square wooden bowl he had placed some young globe artichoke hearts, black olives, strips of red pepper and chunks of his neighbour’s home-grown Ailsa Craig tomatoes. Now he tore up the heart of a cos lettuce, cut some anchovies in half and added garlicky croissants, kept hot in an iron pan. Unwinding slowly, feeling his joints loosen, the tightness across his shoulders ease, little by little, he put Fawcett Green, the Hollingsworths, Penstemon et al from his mind. Gradually, over the years, he had become quite good at this. One had to survive.

  Joyce had already prepared a vinaigrette with herbs from the garden, lemon juice and olive oil. She made salad dressing, toast and cups of tea and that, unless she was on her own and had only herself to please, was that.

  Barnaby’s wife was a dreadful cook. Not dull or unadventurous; on the contrary, she had quite a bold, if rather haphazard, way with a chopping knife and an egg whisk. No, she simply had no gift for it. This in itself, of course, might not have mattered. Plenty of people with no talent for cooking manage to turn out perfectly edible meals. Some of them even earn a living at it. But Joyce was further handicapped in that her taste-buds seemed to have had some sort of bypass surgery early in their career. Her palate was, as you might say, tone deaf. She had once been memorably described, though not by him, as the Florence Foster Jenkins of the chafing dish.

  He took a couple of glasses from the fridge, filled them with Montana McDonald Chardonnay and wandered into the conservatory. There, surrounded by ferns, grasses, orange and lemon trees and fluorescent blossoms the size of frisbees, Joyce reclined, like Titania, on a flowery bed.

  “Oohh, lovely.” The Independent slid to the floor.

  “Budge up then.” Barnaby gave his wife her drink and sat beside her on the bamboo sofa. He took a long, deep swallow of the wine which was truly marvellous: silky soft and smelling of melons and peaches.

  “This is a bit of all right,” said Joyce.

  Barnaby put down his glass, took hold of one of Joyce’s slender brown feet and started to stroke it gently. She watched him for a moment then sighed.

  “They’re always the last to go, feet.”

  “Don’t talk such rubbish. Nothing’s ‘gone,’ as you put it.”

  This was only partly true. Her ankles were still slender, the skin on her burnished calves and plump upper arms remained unwrinkled, her curly mop of hair was still more brown than not. But the blurred line of her bottom jaw would soon become a double chin. Nose to mouth lines, barely sketched in a few years ago, were now engraved. Her eyelids drooped. She would be fifty in two weeks’ time. Where had the years gone?

  “Will you still love me when I’m old and grey?”

  “Good lord, no. I’m already planning a new life with Audrey.”

  “Is that why you bought those polka-dot boxers?”

  “We’re thinking of New South Wales.”

  “Supposed to be very nice there.”

  “Great grazing land. And a mighty fine place to raise youngsters.”

  “Oh, Tom.” She caught his hand, pressed it to her cheek, against her lips. “Do I still look forty?”

  “You’ve never looked forty, sweetheart.”

  Barnaby sympathised with his wife’s gloomy apprehensions. Time was when birthdays had a proper sense of the order of things, strolling along at more or less regular yearly intervals. Now they turned up every other Thursday. Importuning, leering, tapping you on the shoulder. Best not look round.

  “Come on, I’m starving. Let’s eat.”

  He was starting to wonder whether new perfume was a good idea after all. Barnaby was keenly aware that, even after buying gifts for nearly thirty years for someone he knew better than anyone else in the world, he didn’t always get it right. Lack of time and, though he didn’t like to admit it, defective artistic vision were largely responsible.

  Cully was something else. Even as a young child with very little money, his daughter had had the knack. She would scour charity and junk shops and, later, auction rooms, dress agencies and the posh sales, always coming up with the one thing that the grateful recipient vowed they could never live without.

  One Christmas, aged eight, Cully had been with her father rootling through what he described as “a box of old rubbish” when she had found a soft leather bag, dark blue in the shape of a lotus. It had a broken zip and a long, frayed strap. Unable to dissuade her from spending twenty-five pence, he had then seen the rest of her money go on thre
e brilliantly coloured feathered birds and some vivid crimson tissue which she had then made into paper roses. Nestling the birds inside the flowers, she had tucked the whole lot inside the lotus.

  Joyce’s cries of delight had to be heard to be believed. The birds were still perched on a house plant in the spare bedroom. The lotus eventually disintegrated after years of constant use as a peg bag. Her husband’s gift of an expensive cardigan with a snowflake design had hardly seen the light of day.

  As they wandered into the dining room she said, “Will you be here on Tuesday evening, Tom? Cully’s coming over to pick up the movie we taped.”

  “I thought she’d changed her mind about watching it.”

  “She’s still not sure.”

  Their daughter was about to start rehearsals for a revival of Pam Gem’s play The Blue Angel at the Haymarket. The 1930s film had recently been on television and, the Bradleys’ video being on the blink, Joyce had done the honours.

  “So, will you?”

  “I shouldn’t bank on it.”

  “But you’ll try?”

  They sat down, talking about their only child. About her career; flourishing. And her marriage; still in existence but, according to her father, hanging by a thread.

  Joyce was more optimistic, believing that outsiders—and especially parents—never really know exactly what’s going on. It was true there had been plenty of friction. The last splendid display ended with a Coupe Jacques whizzing across a table at La Caprice and a month’s trial parting.

  The reconciliation, just as melodramatically staged and verbally inventive, took place on the roof garden of their Ladbroke Grove flat. It brought out half of Oxford Gardens who, when the champagne was finally broached, spontaneously broke into loud applause.

  “Actors,” murmured Joyce, and turned her attention to the meal.

  Cold lemon and tarragon chicken with Jersey mids. Followed by the salad, a fruity piece of Mimolette and a dish of golden Mirabelles. Barnaby was reaching out for some more potatoes.

  “You can’t have those and French bread. And cheese.”

  “I’m having second thoughts about all this dieting.”