‘I didn’t even look,’ Mr Joyce was saying. ‘I’d only just been able to persuade Mother to take a look at Angel’s kiddy stuff, you see, and I knew it would be too much for us to look at whatever Hen was sending of hers. So I phoned, like I did. Spoke to you. I’m sorry again for being so angry.’
‘Hen didn’t send these things,’ Peter said again, louder this time. Peering over the trunk and around the garment bags, he could see it was a pretty room, without a sniff of death in it. There were toys on the white bedspread, pale pink walls and a smell of pot pourri. It felt as if the door to the room had never been opened in the whole six months since Angel had died there. Aged approximately thirty years and still a precocious child. Mr Joyce had stopped at the door.
‘What do you mean, Hen didn’t send this stuff? She must have done, it says so. Probably didn’t want it messing up her place.’
‘The labels aren’t entirely clear, are they?’ Peter said pleasantly. ‘Perhaps we should take a look.’
Mr Joyce choked and shook his head.
‘Or perhaps I should take a look, while you and Mrs Joyce make us another cup of coffee? And then we can decide what to do with it all.’
Mr Joyce nodded gratefully and went back towards the stairs. His dread of the mysterious delivery had already imparted itself to Peter, who could feel his fingers tingling, and felt his own reluctance making him cautious, as if he were a bomb disposal expert without the necessary training. Or as if opening the old trunk would release a cloud of germs. He was back in Thomas Noble’s office, unpacking that skirt. It was as if unpacking stuff was his new role in life and becoming an uncomfortable habit.
He took the trunk first, because it looked more dangerous than the garment bags lying harmlessly on the floor. The trunk had three hasps securing the lid; it was like an old seagoing trunk, reinforced canvas banded with wood, heavy in its own right and not padlocked. The hasps moved easily, although the metal was pitted with rust. There was no ominous creak from the hinges of the lid as he opened it to the sweet smell of lavender far stronger than the bowl of pot pourri by the bed. It was almost overpowering, so that Peter edged round it and went to open the window. A draught of wonderful damp air and the smell of sea cleared his head; if he had his way, he would throw open every window in this house, however cold it was, and let the draught at least begin to clear the shadows. He could see Mrs Joyce doing that, soon. He went back to the trunk, plunged his hands into tissue paper.
Clothes, exquisite clothes, carefully, recently packed in a state of pristine cleanliness. How would he describe this if he was compiling a list of contents for a jury to consider, and this was exhibit A? Female apparel, of an old kind, in unusual fabrics. Some items requiring repair. A consignment of ladies’ garments of a kind not currently worn. Vintage unknown. Value not easily determined. Label stuck inside lid of trunk says, ‘My mother’s clothes.’ That was as accurate as he could make it on examination of the first three layers, and that was as far as he cared to go. His hand closed round an object that he pulled to the surface and found he was holding a bar of soap. Female apparel interlayered with wrapped tablets of soap, then, with something heavier at the bottom. Shoes? Documents? That was the general idea. Peter knelt by the garment bags and unzipped the first. Coats, made of velvet, cotton, silk, trimmed with fur and beaded collars, not everyday coats. In the second bag, he found what he could only describe as costumes, suits, but frivolous suits, all made to fit a slim body. He zipped up the bags and closed the lid of the trunk. Then he examined the outside surface of it, wishing he had the detective’s magnifying glass. He was perfectly sure that it was not his place or his task to examine everything in detail. To do so felt entirely wrong; it was not his and he might do damage. Someone else had to be present when all this was unpacked, whatever there was inside the pockets and down at the bottom of the trunk. Peter sat on a dead woman’s bed and regarded the clothes of another woman, who was also, undoubtedly, dead, and briefly mourned them both.
The first priority was to get this stuff out of here. He went down the stairs, rehearsing his lines. The Joyces were waiting for him.
‘I think it’s all been a bit of a mistake,’ he said. ‘Looks like a misdelivery of a whole lot of theatrical costumes, nothing to do with you at all. No personal effects, nothing dangerous.’ He knew he was lying. ‘I wonder how that could have happened?’
They looked puzzled and relieved. They needed someone else to take charge; they would do whatever he suggested as if it were an order and he was the merciful official for whom they had been waiting.
‘Best thing to do is get it all out of here and into a storage place until I can get FedEx to sort out the problem,’ Peter went on. ‘And you’ll know how we should do that, Mr Joyce. You have a company, don’t you? It’ll be my expense.’
Mr Joyce clapped a hand to his forehead.
‘That’s what I should have done in the first place.’
‘You’re always saying that,’ his wife said, shaking her head.
‘And, perhaps while we wait, you won’t mind my picking your brains about storage… Hen says you know all about it.’
It was midday before the white van arrived at the command of the master of the house. In the meantime, Peter had eaten sandwiches, admired the tapestries on the walls and learned plenty about the benefits of living where they did and running a business like theirs. Peter wanted to go, but he knew he could not until he had seen the trunk and the garment bags safely stowed anywhere else but here. Part of him also wanted to hang around the parents and listen to whatever else they might tell him about their adopted daughters, but the moment for that had somehow passed and the talk was easily neutral. They chatted like starlings about storage, the place where they lived and the price of eggs, albeit without the same spontaneity, until a man with the WJ logo on his sweater turned up with the van and Peter helped him load. Then Mr Joyce drove Peter, himself and all the misdirected baggage away. This time, Peter knew they were carrying the equivalent of high explosives. The mushroom cloud of a fanciful explanation that had tickled his fancy in the train was forming itself into newer, outrageous shapes, like the clouds in the multicoloured sky long after the threat of snow had gone away. What a beautiful day it was. Mr Joyce was listless and thoughtful in the face of it, dabbing at a smeared windscreen, until encouraged to talk about business.
‘Storage is magic,’ he said. ‘You can’t do anyone harm, you see. You give them their own space, a unit however big or small they want, and they keep their own key on their own peg. You keep it clean and tidy and cool, give them peace of mind. I just look after it. They can come and visit stuff whenever they want, and we never interfere. If they stop paying and don’t make contact, we have to threaten to use the duplicate key in the safe and send the stuff to auction. It doesn’t usually happen, unless someone gets ill or… dies and I can afford to give them a bit of time to sort things. The only people we have to let in are the police, with a warrant. Bit awkward when folk get divorced and we don’t know who should have the damn key, and oh, the stories. That’s what I like, quarrels over stuff nobody needs, because that’s what it mainly is, like the stuff in the back. Rubbish, eh?’