She didn’t ask me to visit but I’m sure that was what she wanted. Why else would she write? I let her down again. I’m not quite sure what I expected. Some nightmare image of bedlam perhaps. Howling lunatics and chains and straitjackets. I knew rationally it wouldn’t be like that but still, I couldn’t bring myself to go. I did write to her but it wasn’t a warm letter. Not very encouraging. I’m not surprised she didn’t get in touch when she was released.”
She stopped abruptly. A bell rang in the distance. In the school yard playtime was over. “You said she was married. Was she happy?”
“Very,” Rachael answered. “She must have met Dougie soon after she left hospital. He employed her to look after his elderly mother.”
“Is that what she worked as? Some sort of care assistant? After the way she’d felt about looking after her father?”
“I don’t suppose she had much choice,” Edie said dryly. “There’d hardly be a queue of schools waiting to take her on as a teacher. She had no friends or family to turn to. What else did she know?”
“Anyway, it worked out well.” Rachael thought Edie was being too hard on Miss. Davison. She understood her reluctance to get involved.
“Dougie was a farmer. She loved the hills, loved him. A few years ago he had a stroke but that didn’t make any difference to the way she felt about him.” “What happened then?” Miss. Davison demanded.
“What do you mean?”
“Something must have happened. Why else would she kill herself?” “I don’t know,” Rachael said. “That was why we arranged to see you. I needed a reason. We were close friends.” “Yet she never told you about the conviction.”
“Nothing.” “Would she have told her husband?”
“Probably not.” If Bella hadn’t felt able to confide in her, Rachael thought, she wouldn’t have told anyone else.
“So perhaps the past came back to haunt her. Or someone from it.”
At first Rachael didn’t understand what she meant and it was Edie who said, “She was threatened with exposure, you mean?” She considered the idea. “She’d created a new identity. Perhaps she’d even come to believe it. Then she met someone who recognized her. Someone who threatened to tell Dougie; even worse, to tell the authorities. She’d killed one elderly dependent man. Could they take the chance of allowing her to look after another? She couldn’t face the questions, the publicity.” Edie looked at Rachael. “It’s certainly one explanation.”
Rachael agreed that it was. But Bella had been a fighter. She still believed there was more to her suicide than that. And if Bella had this secret in her life, perhaps there had been others.
Chapter Thirty-Three.
As Anne drove to Kimmerston she told herself she was being a bloody fool. At this of all times, she should keep her distance from Godfrey Waugh. The relationship was complicated enough, and now, if Godfrey were to become a suspect in the murder investigation… She had never been into Godfrey’s office. His secretary wouldn’t recognize her and it occurred to Anne that she could breeze in and demand to see him.
Today, though, she wouldn’t have the nerve to carry it off.
These thoughts, and others, had kept her awake for most of the night and when she parked by his office she still wasn’t sure what she would do.
It was mid morning. The mist had cleared and it was already very hot.
Godfrey had his offices in a functional concrete block which had been built in the 1970s, close to the river on the outskirts of the town, an attempt by the council to attract employment. Anne waited, and watched the cormorants standing on the staithes in the river.
At twelve o’clock a stream of women came out of the building to eat their sandwiches by the river. The Borders Building Society had their headquarters there and the women wore identical navy skirts and patterned polyester blouses. They lay on the grass and pulled up their skirts as far as was decent to expose their legs to the sun.
Still Anne waited. She had parked so she could watch the main entrance, and though the car was like a greenhouse she didn’t go outside to sit with the others on the grass. Here she felt hidden. She hadn’t committed herself to anything. She could still pull back from confronting him, from saying, “Tell me, Godfrey, what did happen out there on the hill between you and Grace Fulwell?”
Then he was there, standing on the step just outside the big swing doors as if the bright sunlight was a surprise. He walked, head bowed, hands clasped behind his back, along the road towards the town centre.
She slid out of the car and followed, not stopping even to lock the door. He would be going into Kimmerston to buy lunch. There would be a cafe or sandwich shop which he used regularly. She would go in after him, as if by chance, and she’d say, “I didn’t know you came here too.”
Instead he stopped before he reached the shopping area. In the angle formed by two main streets was the parish church, St. Bartholomew’s.
The churchyard was separated from the roads by low stone walls and where they met at the corner was a wooden lych-gate; sheltered by its wooden roof was a drift of pink confetti. Godfrey went through the gate, scuffing the confetti with his feet.
Even then Anne assumed he was looking for food because that was still in her mind. The church at Langholme occasionally held open house, provided soup, bread and cheese and sent the proceeds to a third world charity. She thought something like that was happening here, though there were no posters inviting passers-by to lunch and nobody else was about. The sun and the chase down the noisy road had confused her.
But she followed him in, expecting to find bosomy ladies in flowery aprons, stalls set out at the back of the church with a tea urn and thick white china cups. The buzz of parish gossip. Instead there was silence.
She had hesitated for a moment in the deep shadow of the porch. It was cool there. In the corners more confetti had been blown. A big wedding had apparently taken place the weekend before. Then she pushed open the studded door. Sunlight streamed through the stained glass above the altar, down the aisle into her eyes. The church was still decorated by the wedding flowers huge white and gold blooms on each window in crystal vases, and the crystal reflected the coloured light too.
At first she stood, embarrassed, thinking that she’d interrupted a service and that people were staring at her as they’d all stared at Vera Stanhope when she crashed into the crem chapel in the middle of Bella’s funeral. Then her eyes adjusted to the light. She saw that she and Godfrey were the only people in the building and Godfrey hadn’t even noticed her coming in.
He was sitting near the front of the church in a pew close to the aisle but he didn’t seem to be praying. They had never discussed religion.
She wondered if perhaps that was an explanation for his jumpiness, his change of moods towards her he had moral qualms about adultery. But now he looked more like someone waiting for a bus than facing a spiritual crisis. He glanced nervously at his watch. Perhaps he had arranged to meet someone but then surely he would have turned occasionally to check the door and still he hadn’t seen her. Even when she walked down the aisle towards him and her shoes must have made a sound on the stone floor he kept his eyes firmly fixed on the front of the church.
She slipped into the pew behind him and said conversationally, “I never took you for the religious type, Godfrey.”
“Anne.” He spoke before turning to face her and when he did, she couldn’t tell whether or not he was pleased to see her.
“Or perhaps you’ve got something to confess.”
“What do you mean?” “Four days,” she said lightly. “And you’ve not been in touch. Don’t tell me. Let me guess. You’ve been busy.”
He didn’t reply.
“Why did you rush off like that when you’d been on the hill?” She couldn’t keep up this jokey tone any longer. “Why didn’t you come into Baikie’s to say goodbye?”