Death in Summer

  ‘No.’

  The young policewoman silently condoles, her gaze lowered to her plain black shoes, then moving over the polished boards of the floor, then raised again. She cannot offer pity in a smile; it would not do to smile. WPC Denise Flynn she was introduced as.

  ‘When you dozed, madam -’

  ‘I slept for longer than I thought. When I woke up I thought maybe a minute or two. But it was half an hour, perhaps three-quarters even. I didn’t know that until Zenobia brought me in from the garden, until I asked what time it was.’

  ‘And there was nothing unusual when you looked about the garden, madam? Nothing that struck you?’

  ‘Only that Georgina wasn’t there any more.’

  ‘Is it a regular thing for you to sit out in that particular place in the afternoon? With the baby?’

  ‘Yes, it has been.’

  ‘Every day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You show me, madam? If you would.’

  They stand at the french windows. She points at the deckchair and the rug beneath the catalpa tree. WPC Denise Flynn steps out on to the paving outside, then hurries on the upper lawn. Bounding about around her, Rosie drops her ball, then picks it up and drops it again.

  ‘That dog all right, sir?’ the man in uniform asks sharply, the first time he has spoken, and Thaddeus says Rosie’s all right.

  ‘He wasn’t here, did you say, sir?’ the other man inquires. ‘The dog was out with you?’

  ‘Yes, she was.’

  ‘And you were gone, how long, sir?’

  ‘A couple of hours.’

  ‘Out for a walk, sir?’

  ‘No. We were in the car.’

  Something stirs in Mrs. Iveson’s consciousness, a sense of experiencing, not long ago, questioning like this. Having pointed at the deckchair in which she fell asleep, she hasn’t sat down again. She stands between the two french windows, the fingertips of her left hand lightly touching the surface of the table with Letitia’s photograph on it. She doesn’t feel groggy any more, but that support is there if she needs it. Inspector Ogle, it suddenly comes to her: Inspector Henry Ogle asked questions like the ones the present man is asking, and there was something he wasn’t satisfied about with Miss Amble’s replies. That was happening when she dropped off.

  ‘The gentleman who let us in, sir. Is he — he would look after things here, sir?’

  ‘Maidment and his wife are employed in the house.’

  ‘And did the Maidments look for the child, madam, when they heard your distress?’

  ‘Maidment did. I told him to. We knew then Georgina couldn’t possibly have crawled away, but he looked all the same. He even went down the drive.’

  ‘And before that you were aware, Mrs. Iveson, of no vehicle drawing away from the drive? Nothing like that?’

  ‘No.’

  The policewoman returns. She doesn’t shake her head, or comment. The man who isn’t asking the questions glances at her but there is no exchange, not even of a look.

  ‘I came here,’ Mrs. Iveson says, ‘to look after Georgina. We were going to have a nanny, but we changed our minds.’

  It isn’t relevant. She doesn’t know why she volunteered information not prompted by a question. She sees herself for a moment, dropping off in her deckchair, old and stupid, not up to a simple task. No matter what their shortcomings, the girls they interviewed would not have fallen asleep.

  ‘We have an alert out, of course,’ the man says. ‘That was relayed at once. May I ask, sir, if it is a usual practice for you to take the dog with you in the car at that time of day? Are you normally away, sir, of an afternoon?’

  ‘I’m almost always here.’

  The man nods, with what seems like satisfaction. By the look of things, he concludes aloud, today was chosen specially.

  ‘Notice anyone about the place, sir? Hanging about, even a while back, madam?’

  They both say no, are asked to think for a moment, and then say no again.

  ‘My wife was well off,’ Thaddeus adds.

  ‘And that is generally known, sir? Locally?’

  ‘I think it probably is.’

  ‘If we might question your couple now, sir?’

  The room goes silent when Thaddeus leads them from it. She gazes across mallows and garish cosmos at the empty deckchair, her book on the grass beside it. Her reading glasses are there too, although she cannot see them.

  ‘A telephone call may come,’ Thaddeus says, returning. ‘We are not to answer it until there’s been time for one of them to get to an extension.’

  ‘They think Georgina’s been kidnapped?’ The word, so often encountered in the novels she reads, so often heard on the radio and the television, and come across in newspapers, feels alien on her lips. ‘A ransom demand?’ she says, and it sounds absurd.

  ‘Yes, that’s what they mean.’

  ‘We must pay, Thaddeus.’

  ‘They say we mustn’t.’

  She moves across the room, to sit again on the sofa.

  ‘We have the money. What does it matter, parting with it?’

  ‘More likely, they say, tomorrow’s post will bring a note. More likely than a phone call. But they say you never know.’

  Did the two who were so silent in the drawing-room contribute something to the conversation on the way to the kitchen, or is this just Thaddeus’s way of putting it? She wonders, caught up with an unimportant detail, unable for a moment to shake it off, and then it goes.

  ‘I should at least have heard a car.’

  ‘I doubt it would have driven up. The Maidments heard nothing either.’

  ‘Negligent is what they’ll say.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  He says something else, she does not listen.

  ‘My God, how could I have?’ she whispers, and there is silence in the room again.

  ‘From a window,’ Maidment says. ‘I happened to be passing. I happened to look out.’

  ‘And when was this, sir?’

  ‘The day the knives came back.’ Maidment turns to his wife. ‘Thursday week, was it?’

  ‘It was Thursday week the knives came back.’ And Zenobia adds for the policeman’s benefit: ‘The kitchen knives resharpened.’

  ‘And what exactly did you see, sir?’

  ‘Nothing, to tell the truth. It was the dog drew my attention.’

  ‘And why was that, Mr. Maidment?’

  ‘The dog was interested, but I couldn’t ascertain why. Her tail was going.’

  ‘Your view was obscured, sir?’

  ‘It’s a long way off. You have to see through trees.’

  ‘And we’re to presume Mr. Davenant himself was elsewhere at the time? And the lady also?’

  ‘They were in the house.’

  ‘But although you didn’t actually see anyone you formed the impression that there was someone there because the dog was wagging her tail?’

  ‘He thought he noticed a movement,’ Zenobia answers for her husband. ‘He said it later. No more than some disturbance, he said.’

  ‘And this is where in the garden?’

  ‘There’s a door in the wall. An archway with wistaria, beyond the plum trees.’

  Hearing this, the two uniformed officers leave the kitchen. ‘Nothing like that today?’ their superior pursues his questioning when they have gone. ‘Nothing out of the way?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Maidment responds at once, Zenobia after a moment’s thought. ‘Nothing,’ she says too.

  ‘Did you report the Thursday sighting in the garden, sir?’

  ‘How d’you mean, report?’

  ‘Did you mention it to Mr. Davenant?’

  ‘There wasn’t much to report. In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘He said he would mention it,’ Zenobia intervenes, ‘if he had a suspicion that anyone came in by that door another time.’

  ‘It’s unusual, is it, for people to come into the garden this way?’

  Unusual fo
r an outsider, Zenobia agrees, and Maidment adds:

  ‘Mr. Davenant slips in and out on the odd occasion, and Mrs. Davenant did in her time. Taking the dog down to the stream.’

  ‘This door leads to the stream?’

  ‘There’s a path by the edge of the fields, going by the spinney to the lane. Or you can go on straight down to the stream.’

  ‘And people use this path?’

  ‘Not much.’

  It was a short-cut from the house in days gone by, Zenobia says. ‘It seems they went to church that way if they wanted to walk in summer.’

  ‘So it’s not your experience, sir, that a passer-by might open that door and come into the garden, maybe making a mistake?’

  ‘Never.’

  Zenobia points out that a passer-by would have no right. Sometimes a cat comes into the garden. Or a dog, not on a leash, is called back from the drive. Now and again a car comes up the drive, and goes away when it is realized that this is the wrong house. That’s not often, probably less than once a year.

  ‘Mr. Davenant’s a widower, I understand?’

  Surprised, Zenobia wonders why this is mentioned. The way he puts it, the man knows already. Everything like that would have been established in the drawing-room. Maidment says:

  ‘There was a road accident. Not long ago.’

  The policeman nods. A flicker of interest passes through his expression, a frown gathers and then is gone. The news was broken by the police, Maidment says. The news about that accident.

  Listening to her husband giving the details, Zenobia is aware of the same sense of connection that Mrs. Iveson has experienced in the drawing-room, and it feels like mockery to her that there should be this second cruelty, drifting out of the summer blue, as the first did. Maidment’s thoughts are similar, then are invaded by a famous episode in the past — the taking of the Lindbergh baby. It was before his time; what he recalls is hearsay, supplied to him by an elderly butler of the old school who enjoyed such titbits. If that’s what this is there’ll be a message in the morning, the words cut out of a newspaper and pasted up: used banknotes to be secreted in a rubbish bin or a telephone-box or the cistern of a public lavatory, a specified place, a specified time.

  ‘If contact is made after we’re gone,’ the policeman says, ’I’ve told Mr. Davenant and the lady we’ll need to know at once. While we’re still here don’t answer the phone until we’re in a position to monitor the call.’

  ‘You think they’re after money?’ Zenobia inquires, and hears that at this stage it’s important to keep an open mind.

  ‘It’s equally possible we could be looking for a local woman. Is there anyone at all you can think of, a woman who got to know the routine of the house through observation? A frustrated would-be mother, an older woman it often is, though by no means always. Someone who saw the opportunity and took her chance?’

  There’s no one they can think of, but for Zenobia the thought of a woman taking her chance is preferable to brutish men. Years ago at Oakham Manor a gang got in. They silenced the alarm and poked a kitchen grab through a fanlight, drawing back the bolts with it, even lifting the key from the lock. Every scrap of silver gone, and never established how it was they knew where to look for it. Zenobia still shivers with apprehension at the thought of men with shaved heads roaming about a house at night. It was she who found the back door swinging the next morning, she confides to the bulky policeman, and had to break the news on the telephone to the Hadleighs, in Austria at the time.

  ‘Yes, it’s unpleasant, Mrs. Maidment. But I’m afraid what we have here is more unpleasant still, no matter who’s responsible. So no local person comes to mind?’

  ‘No one at all.’

  ‘I’d hardly say it was local,’ Maidment contributes. ‘I’d lay my bones down there’s money in this somewhere.’

  Zenobia notices a moment of surprise in the policeman’s features, occasioned by the expression used, but when he speaks he is impassive again.

  ‘As I say, sir, we have to keep an open mind. But of recent times it’s been women who’ve been helping themselves to babies.’ A while back, they may remember, a baby born only a few hours was taken from a hospital ward. Another time, a baby-minder who ran off in Camden came to light in County Limerick. In this day and age, if a woman has a fancy for a baby she takes what’s going.

  ‘Even so,’ Maidment persists, ‘I’d say we’re talking ransom money.’

  ‘That’s not discounted, sir.’

  ‘We had those phone calls,’ Zenobia says, suddenly remembering.

  ‘And what were they, Mrs. Maidment?’

  ‘Someone ringing up and not saying anything.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘They began a couple of weeks back. You’d answer and the receiver’d be put down.’

  ‘I see.’

  WPC Denise Flynn and her colleague return. The door in the wall was open, Denise Flynn reports, not wide, but a little. The ground’s too hard to carry footprints, her colleague says.

  ‘Usually open, that door, Mr. Maidment?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Most likely that’s the way they came and went. A couple it could be.’

  The rooks swirl above the oaks and the house. Climbing or diving, they caw and screech, observed by two silent buzzards, motionless in the air. Below them, another police car arrives.

  The garden is searched for a sign left behind by an intruder or intruders, but there is nothing. Local houses are visited. Increasingly favoured is the theory that a motherless baby has become the prey of a woman with an obsession about her own maternal needs. In low voices the likelihood is repeated in the police cars as evening settles over lanes and fields, and the inmates of farmhouses and cottages are disturbed.

  ‘Yes, it may be that,’ Thaddeus agrees when the notion about a woman of the neighbourhood is put to him. There is nothing he can add. He has known the women of the neighbourhood all his life. Some he has known as children, seen them becoming girls, those same girls marrying and having children of their own. When asked about the peculiar or the unusual among them, he mentions Mrs. Parch, who claims to possess the power of healing, who has been making a profit from the exercise of her skill for sixty years. Visitors still come to her cottage to receive the benefit of her gifted hands and to hear her daughter, Hilda, read a report in a local paper when the phenomenon was contemporaneously recorded. Hilda herself has chalked up a success or two with herbal remedies: a decoction of grasses and the juice extracted from comfrey for gastric ailments and arthritic joints. But neither Mrs. Parch nor her daughter interests WPC Denise Flynn, who has been assigned the task of gathering information about the women of the locality.

  ‘There’s Abbie Mates,’ Thaddeus remembers also. A younger woman, a fortune-teller at summer fêtes, reader of the Tarot cards. And there’s Melanie, who lives alone by an old railway crossing and regularly bears the children of a man who visits her. But they, too, fail to arouse the policewoman’s suspicions.

  Further questioning reveals that among the house’s usual visitors two charity women came recently for Letitia’s clothes, and Jehovah’s Witnesses have been, and a girl to search for a ring she dropped. Hoping to get rid of a load of tar, a man called in, offering to resurface the drive at a bargain price. Burly, black-haired, a stutter coming on when his sales pitch became excited: every detail remembered is of interest and is recorded. ‘They showed you literature and that?’ WPC Denise Flynn prompts. ‘The Witnesses?’ And bleaklv Thaddeus nods.

  The white police cars go eventually, with fresh instructions left about a possible telephone communication. ‘Someone knew,’ Zenobia concludes in the kitchen. ‘Someone knew we have an afternoon rest ourselves, and saw the car drive off.’ She blames herself, as Mrs. Iveson does, but Maidment is dismissive of any misdemeanour on his wife’s part or on his. Half an hour only they lie down for, he reminds Zenobia, and in the half-hour today he didn’t close an eyelid. The newspaper dropped to the floor, he grants h
er that, but he did not sleep. Anything untoward he would have heard.

  11

  It is dark in the bathroom that once was Mr. and Mrs. Hoates’s. The window is boarded; outside it is almost night. She has fed Georgina Belle and Georgina Belle is now asleep. It is quiet except, somewhere and occasionally, there is a scrabbling of mice.

  Pettie herself will not sleep tonight, although she is tired and feels she wouldn’t mind a whole week of sleeping, just lying there. It wasn’t like the taking of the ballpoint, the stool pulled out for the man to stand on, the reaching down of the chocolate box. It wasn’t like the taking of the make-up tubes the time she almost dropped one, or the little black clocks, or taking the scarf with the horses’ heads on it, or the earrings and the brooch a week ago. Excitement made her shiver when she crossed the grass and could be seen from the windows, when she lifted Georgina Belle and the woman didn’t move, when Georgina Belle didn’t wake up either. And when she hurried on the way through the fields, and by the houses and there was still no one about, her breath was heavy with relief. But then the children were there, playing some kind of game on the towpath, and when she tried to put the dummy in it was too late.

  She wonders what’s happening now in the house where she has so longed to be with him. No way he won’t be remembering what she said about a grandmother, no way he won’t be regretting he didn’t listen at the time. All that is perfectly as she planned, and taking things into her possession has always been what she can do, what she is good at and still was today, her skill, as the man she sells stuff to says. If the children hadn’t stopped and stared when their noise woke up Georgina Belle she’d have gone by and they wouldn’t have known. Never before were there children playing on the towpath.

  She should have taken her glasses off, she should have kept her head turned away. She should have put the dummy in before ever there was a need for it. The children would be asked. No way they wouldn’t say they heard a whimpering.

  In the car park where the towpath came out she walked by the phone-box from which she’d planned to dial 999, every syllable of what she had to say practised and perfect: a woman acting underhand with a baby, a grey-haired, thin-faced woman with a lazy eye, who put the baby by the basins in the car-park toilets, who hurried off when she realized she was followed by someone who’d been suspicious. ‘I come back to look for my finger-ring in the lane. I was by the pillars either side of the drive and saw her. I followed her because it was a baby she was trying to hide. I knew it was Georgina Belle.’ But the children would say there never was a woman with a lazy eye.