As they walked off down the corridor Audrey said, ‘When will you tell her the rest, sir?’
‘When she’s up to it. I’d say she’d had enough for one night.’ As they passed through reception he looked at the hospital clock. It was almost one thirty. ‘And I think that goes for all of us.’
Coda
Nearly always, even when a case has, on paper, been solved there will be ramifications that remain forever unexplained. Characters on the fringe of the investigation for instance whose precise involvement remains mysteriously undefined. A tangle of snippets and loose ends that are fated never to be unravelled or neatly tied.
Accepting this, Barnaby had assumed the actual identity of the woman in Gerald Hadleigh’s ‘wedding’ photograph would remain undiscovered and had dismissed the matter from his mind. Then one evening Troy, ringing up in great excitement, said that he had found her.
The sergeant had been re-running, not for the first time and to his wife’s increasing annoyance, his video of The Crucible, in which the chief’s daughter had so radiantly performed. In the court scene, when various women were racing all over the place and screaming their heads off, Troy had spotted a face in the background that looked vaguely familiar. He had pressed the freeze-frame and there she was. Mrs H. to the life.
They had traced her easily, first through BBC casting then via Equity. She was a registered film extra and, at the time of the photograph, had also been on the books of an escort agency. She certainly remembered the business with Mr Hadleigh, for it had been the easiest hundred pounds she had earned in her life and all strictly Kosher. She had even been allowed to keep the hat and veil, but he had been quite short with her when she had tried to find out what lay behind it all. The church had been in the country not far from Burnham Beeches. It had all been pretty much as Max Jennings surmised.
All that was nearly a month ago. Barnaby, due for some leave, was now taking it, for Cully and Nicholas were about to fly home and he did not want to miss even a moment of their company. They would be staying a couple of days before returning to London.
As he sat now, engrossed in a relatively unclawed section of the Independent, he thought how very nice it would be to see them again and hear all about the on- and off-stage dramas that seemed to be permanently simmering in their closed and over-heated world. So different, thank God, from his own.
His left leg was going to sleep. He stretched it out, flexed his toes, then crossed the other leg over it with some vigour. The kitten, who had been playing with his shoe lace, went flying through the air to land on a cushion in the opposite armchair.
‘Tom!’
‘What?’ He lowered the paper. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Try and be more careful.’ She was running across the room and picking up Kilmowski, who immediately struggled to be put down.
‘What have I done?’
‘You could have really hurt him.’ The kitten was already plodding back to the settee, where it started to make its way determinedly up Barnaby’s trousers.
‘Do you want your drink now or with your meal?’
‘Now, please, love.’
A glass of Santa Carolina Grand Reserve was poured and very toothsome it turned out to be. Barnaby forced himself to sip rather than glug. Tomorrow, when the children were here, they would have champagne. A lovely smell was wafting from the direction of the oven. Rabbit casserole baked with lemon grass, capers and celeriac. Comice pears were in there too. He had made a sauce of half-fat cream cheese pushed twice through a sieve then flavoured with a dash of Madeira and some toasted amaretti crumbs.
Barnaby drank a little more and lay back, content. This, even with pins and needles being systematically pushed and pulled about one’s upper arm, was definitely the life.
The phone rang. Joyce took it in the kitchen. She cried out with pleasure. ‘Oh, hello darling - how lovely to talk to you.’
Barnaby’s happiness went on hold. Something had gone wrong. They weren’t coming. Or, if they were, they couldn’t stay. If they could stay it was only overnight. Perhaps they were bringing people and he and Joyce would never have a chance to talk to their daughter or Nicholas properly.
‘Tom?’ There was the sound of the receiver being laid down and Joyce’s face appeared in the serving hatch. ‘Do you want a quick word? She’s just ringing to check we’ve got the time right for Heathrow.’
‘Might as well.’
‘Don’t come round. I’ll pass it through.’
Cully sounded as if she was in the next room. It was going to be great to see him and Ma again. She had bought a super carved wooden rack in Poland for all his spices. What was he cooking tomorrow night? Had he remembered to video The Crucible? Tour had been terrific. Director an absolute toad. Nicholas utterly brilliant as Don John. She had never really got Beatrice right.
Barnaby listened to all this with a glad heart but, as she was about to ring off, thought it wise to inject a cautionary note.
‘We may have a bit of a problem this end, Cully.’ As he spoke his hand rested gently on Kilmowski, asleep on his shoulder and gradually slipping off. ‘Regarding the kitten. I’m afraid your mother’s getting terribly fond of it.’
‘You don’t have to go in, Amy.’
‘I do, I do have to go in.’ But she could not turn the handle.
They were on the landing outside Ralph’s room. It was the first time Amy had entered Gresham House since the terrible night when she had so nearly died.
Walking through the kitchen, crossing the clammy, weed-infested flagstones of the hall, climbing the stairs, had been bad. But nothing like as bad as this.
‘Shall I open it?’
‘If you like.’ But when Sue stretched out her hand Amy cried, ‘Wait a minute!’
She was having second thoughts. Or rather twentieth, thirtieth and even fiftieth thoughts, for she had imagined this moment at least as many times. Now she asked herself why she was so determined. What sensible reason could there possibly be?
After all, he wouldn’t be there. She would see the dappled horse with the worn leather saddle and scarlet reins that he had picked her up and put her on the first time he had brought her home. And the fire guard with narrow brass trim. Books and models and the beautiful scientific drawings at which he had excelled. But Ralph, or ‘the remains’ as the police had insisted on referring to him, was resting with his sister beneath the yew trees in St Chad’s churchyard.
Sue had tried to understand what she viewed as Amy’s amazing benevolence in permitting this, but without success. In her friend’s place she would have arranged for Honoria to be cremated then flushed the ashes down the loo. Eventually Sue came to the conclusion that Amy, after the discovery that her husband was not only bisexual but occasionally unfaithful, had had a change of heart about him, but she was mistaken. Amy merely felt that if someone was prepared to kill, however madly or wrongly, to avenge the only person they had ever loved, the least you could do was let them rest in the same grave.
Sue now shuffled her feet, coughed to draw attention to the fact that time was passing and glanced sideways. Amy’s face had become tight and expressionless and she was screwing up her eyes as if braced for some scene of visual devastation. A second later she flung open the door.
The candelabra were still there. The room was full of them. The whole place had been blazing with light apparently, like an altar in some great Romanesque cathedral. Hundreds of candles. Their congealed drippings sticking to the floor and all over the furniture.