Robin’s younger brother James would be best man. My sister Clem and her eight-year-old daughter, Ruth, the bridesmaids. The plans for our wedding seemed to just present themselves. Most of the decisions were made for me, even down to the food and drink which should be served at the wedding breakfast — dressed Cornish crab, smoked bacon with the local seaweed dish laver, Torridge salmon, and Devon cider as well as the more traditional champagne.
I took an afternoon off and drove over to Northgate to talk things over with Maude and James. It was a pleasantly warm March day and Maude, wearing something lacy and flowing and completely impractical which looked quite sensational, was collecting eggs from the free-range hens which wandered aimlessly about the yard.
‘I’ve baked some scones,’ she said. ‘James is coming over. Let’s have tea.’
The scones were mouth-watering. Another of Maude’s many talents, it appeared. She and James continued to display the same ease of manner which had made my first visit to Northgate so relaxed.
Maude had the knack of organising you without appearing to do so. In spite of her size there was nothing remotely domineering about her. She just carried you along in her wake. And James, so laid back he might fall over, continued to give the impression that he’d rather be in his barn with his paints, but joined in the wedding talk with decent enthusiasm.
The guest list, which I thought was a terrifyingly long one, seemed to comprise about 200 or so Davey family and friends — plus, of course, all the Abri islanders — and about fifty of mine. There was quite an extended Davey family it seemed, of distant cousins and aged aunts and uncles, who must not be left out.
My dress had already been ordered from an old art school friend of James who had gone on to be a top designer. Maude was to travel to London with me for the final fitting.
‘Bloody good excuse,’ she said, her vowels even more flatly Yorkshire than usual. ‘I’ve not had lunch at the Savoy for donkey’s years.’
I had never had lunch at the Savoy. But I was willing to give it a try.
As the days passed I began to get used to being swept along with the Davey tide, and even grew rather to like it. Certainly there were far fewer demands on my time than you would expect with a wedding on this scale to plan, which continued to make it possible for me to give my job first priority.
Eventually there was a development in the Stephen Jeffries case, although not a very conclusive one. Elizabeth Jeffries suddenly walked out on her husband, taking their daughter with her. Their so-solid marriage, which had in a way hindered even our initial inquiries into the abuse allegation, had collapsed.
‘She must know something,’ I told Peter Mellor impulsively. ‘I reckon she knows Richard Jeffries killed their son.’
Mellor shrugged. Ever reasonable. Ever rational. ‘Marriages often break down under this kind of strain, boss. You know that. It doesn’t necessarily indicate guilt.’
‘Well then, let’s do our best to find out whether it does or not,’ I countered.
We switched the thrust of our investigation on to Elizabeth Jeffries. We interviewed her all over again at her mother’s home where she was now living with her daughter, and then more formally at Kingswood. We gave her a thorough going over, but we got nowhere. There was none of the old cool arrogance about her. In fact she didn’t seem to be functioning properly at all. She was almost zombie-like. But if she had cause to believe that her husband was guilty of murder, she still wasn’t telling. All she said was that she had moved out because she could not cope with the deep depression into which Richard Jeffries had descended since Stephen’s disappearance, and that by taking her daughter to her granny she had hoped to reintroduce some semblance of normality into little Anna’s life.
It was hard to believe that the most obsessive middle-class dedication to keeping up appearances could lead a mother to go as far as protecting a man she knew had killed her child — even if that man was her husband. The truth was that I didn’t know what to do next. The case was fast turning into one of the unhappiest I had ever been involved with, and I feared we were never to get to the bottom of the mystery. About the only way I could imagine moving constructively forward was to find the boy’s body, and God knows I didn’t want that.
I remained unhappily preoccupied, and it was really rather wonderful to at least know that I was about to enjoy a dream wedding to a man I was madly in love with and that I barely had to lift a finger. Our wedding day would be just two months after the island had been leased, by which time Robin hoped that the islanders would be becoming a little more used to the new order of things.
I thought that might be a bit optimistic, but things did seem to be going better than may have been expected. The plans for the new luxury hotel complex, which was hopefully to change the fortunes of Abri, had been proven to be surprisingly sensitive to the spirit of the place and in sympathy with the surroundings. Even those among the islanders determined to find fault with everything had, to Robin’s delight and relief, been grudgingly approving. But, of course, although they would have liked things to carry on just as they were for ever, they must have realised that could not be possible. Abri had to earn its living, to prosper in order to survive, just like any business and any community. Robin was right about that. Planning permission had gone through swiftly, work had already begun on the site, and AKEKO, true to its word, had hired a number of islanders to help with the building.
We had taken over all the existing holiday accommodation for the weekend of the wedding and were to be given the run of the place. Robin was well pleased.
Meanwhile, our relationship seemed to go from strength to strength. And I had been around long enough to experience, in spite of my physical euphoria, a certain sense of relief when I began to realise that we really did get on every bit as well out of bed as in. That one dreadful row on Pencil Beach had yet to be repeated, and I hoped it never would be.
I even eventually faced up to the inevitable and invited my mother to meet Robin. I warned him thoroughly about the horrors of the Hyacinth Bucket of Weston-super-Mare, but he seemed completely untroubled by the prospect of meeting her. I had been dreading it and had put it off for an almost indecently long period after having reluctantly confided to her that I was remarrying — which I had also put off for as long as possible. It wasn’t that I feared her reaction. Predictably she had been absolutely delighted. I was after all marrying a Davey, and in North Devon the family really were regarded as being close to royalty. Indeed this was probably the first time in my entire life I had done anything that pleased her. My mother had the sensitivity of a Rottweiler — nay less, Rottweilers can be quite endearing. She had no problems at all with Robin’s past, indeed if she knew about the mysterious death of his former fiancée she did not seem even to consider it worth a mention. And it certainly did not worry her that I was remarrying fairly hastily after a divorce. Mother had never liked Simon, and I had always considered it a tribute to my first husband’s judgement of character that he had been unable to spend more than an hour or so in the same room as her and remain civil.
My mother had been christened Harriet and had always been known as Hat until a few years ago when she had suddenly announced that she would henceforth be known as Harrie. God knows what silly magazine she had been reading. It really was hard to imagine anything much more ridiculous than a short middle-aged woman, running slightly to fat, hairdo like the Queen’s, with a penchant for flowing multi-coloured polyester, calling herself Harrie.