Past Tense E-Book

Catherine Aird

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Sloan and Crosby
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 340

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Janet Wakefield is shocked by a call from the Berebury Nursing Home, informing her that her husband's estranged great-aunt, Josephine Short, has passed away. Janet is sure that her husband Bill was the last of Josephine's close family, so she is taken aback when a handsome young man introduces himself at the funeral as Josephine's grandson. Meanwhile Detectives Sloan and Crosby find themselves assigned two rather puzzling cases. First, there's the young woman's body which has been discovered in the River Alm. And then there's the mysterious break-in at Berebury Nursing Home. To be precise, it's Josephine Short's room at the Nursing Home that's been entered, although nothing seems to be missing. What could the intruder have been after? It becomes apparent to Sloan and Crosby that the two cases are connected ...but who can the killer be?

Leseprobe

Past Tense

CATHERINE AIRD

For Rosie, Andrew, Joseph and Tristram with love

Table Of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

About the Author

By Catherine Aird

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘Certainly, madam,’ said the man in the black jacket and striped trousers, pen and notepad at the ready. ‘Now, how many would that be for?’

‘I don’t know exactly,’ muttered Janet, ‘so I can’t tell you.’ She hated being addressed as ‘madam’. What she liked to be called by all and sundry was the friendly, familiar-sounding ‘Jan’ or even her proper Christian name of ‘Janet’, and after that – if the worst came to the worst – ‘Mrs Wakefield’: certainly not by anything as formal as ‘madam’.

This man was definitely not ‘all and sundry’. He was, in fact, the manager of the very grand hotel in whose lobby they were now sitting. His pen was still hovering above the paper while he waited politely for her to continue.

‘It’s for after a funeral, you see,’ Janet said awkwardly. She had already felt quite intimidated enough by the splendour of the Almstone Towers Hotel without having to explain that she didn’t even know who – let alone how many people – would be coming.

‘I quite understand, madam,’ he said as a uniformed hotel minion approached their table with a tray of coffee. ‘A wake.’

It wasn’t a word she liked. Actually it was one she had been avoiding ever since Bill’s Great-Aunt Josephine had died, preferring instead ‘bereavement reception’ or, even better, just ‘a gathering’.

‘That’s right,’ she said.

‘And would that be after a burial or a cremation?’ he enquired.

‘What difference does that make?’ she asked curiously.

‘Timing,’ replied the manager promptly. ‘Cremations tend to run to time and, of course, we know exactly how long it takes for the mourners to get here from the Calleford crematorium. It’s a little different with a church service and burial.’

The word ‘mourners’ was another one that Janet Wakefield didn’t really like using. After all, she could scarcely be described as a mourner for some old lady whom she had never even seen, let alone known. Her husband, Bill, had just described his Great-Aunt Josephine Short vaguely as one of his late mother’s many aunts whom he hadn’t known either. He’d rather thought that his Great-Aunt Josephine had fallen out with the rest of her family years ago, but he wasn’t really sure. And, of course, his own mother – Janet’s mother-in-law, that is – had died before Bill and Janet had been married and so wasn’t around any more to ask.

‘A church service is more difficult, then, is it?’ she asked, searching around in her mind for something neutral to say.

‘Oh, no, madam, but the actual burial afterwards, as opposed to cremation, takes longer and can sometimes delay the arrival of the … er … family here.’

‘The funeral is at the church at Damory Regis,’ she said, reaching for the coffee pot, and adding firmly, ‘to be followed by interment in the churchyard there.’ Why ‘interment’ was a less emotive word than ‘burial’ she didn’t know but it was.

‘Allow me, madam,’ said the manager, deftly picking up the coffee pot ahead of her with one hand and arranging the cups with the other. ‘Black or white?’

‘White, please.’ Janet subsided back in her chair – an elegant affair in the French Empire style but more comfortable than it looked – and determinedly carried on speaking while he poured. ‘I’ve just made the arrangements with the vicar there.’

‘That would be Reverend Mr Tompkinson,’ said the major-domo smoothly.

‘That’s right,’ she agreed, adding the vicar’s Christian name in an attempt at introducing a little informality into the proceedings. ‘Derek Tompkinson.’

‘Just so,’ said the manager.

Janet decided that this man was pretty nearly as formal as the registrar of deaths had been and that had been bad enough. Especially when it transpired that she hadn’t brought with her all the documents that the registrar had wanted. Her stammered explanation that they – she – hadn’t visited the deceased’s room at the nursing home yet and so didn’t have what was wanted to hand was accepted with the proviso that she would do so and go back to the registrar with them as speedily as possible.

Bill and Janet Wakefield hadn’t even known that Miss Josephine Eleanor Short was a resident in the Berebury Nursing Home in the town, let alone ill and dying in the place, until the matron there had rung to say that a Mr William Wakefield of Bill and Janet’s address was down in their records as their late resident’s next of kin, and what did he want doing about the funeral?

Actually Mr William Wakefield wasn’t there and therefore wasn’t able to do anything at all about the funeral of the late Miss Josephine Short anyway; moreover Mr William Wakefield’s employers, having sent him out to South America on their behalf only a few months earlier, were unlikely to countenance his return to England until the job in hand had been completed – and there was no gainsaying them. Not with the Wakefields’ mortgage. This was why Bill’s wife Janet had found herself for the first time in her short life having to make all the necessary arrangements for a funeral.

And she wasn’t sure that she was making a very good job of it even though Mrs Linda Luxton, the matron of the Berebury Nursing Home, had helped a lot by indicating that Messrs Morton & Son, Funeral Directors, had already been selected by the deceased for the job. Janet knew even less about undertakers than she did about wakes, her connection with them until now being limited to something about them that used to be chanted in the school playground – ‘First they take you under and then they take’ – and to children’s autograph books signed ‘Yours until the undertaker undertakes to take you under’.

Fortunately Tod Morton, that young sprig of the firm of Morton & Son, Funeral Directors Ltd, of Berebury, had been even more helpful than the matron of the home.

‘Josephine Eleanor Short, did you say?’ he had asked. ‘Ah, yes. I think you’ll find she had a funeral plan with us. That helps a lot.’

Janet Wakefield hadn’t liked to admit that she hadn’t known what a funeral plan was. ‘The hymns and things she wanted, you mean?’ she had asked vaguely.

‘No, no,’ Tod Morton had said. ‘I mean that Miss Short had already paid for her funeral and instructed us in what she had wanted carrying out. What, when and where, you might say.’

That had completely confounded Janet Wakefield.

‘Service at St Nicholas Church at Damory Regis and burial in the churchyard there, followed by a decent send-off at the Almstone Towers Hotel,’ explained Tod cheerfully. ‘Oh, and no flowers.’

‘No flowers?’ she had echoed weakly. Sending a wreath was the one thing she had thought would be easy.

‘No flowers,’ said the young undertaker. ‘Donations instead.’

‘Who to?’ Janet Wakefield had her own pet charity and if …

‘The Rowlettian Society.’

‘I’ve never heard of them.’

‘Nor me,’ said Tod Morton frankly, ‘but I’ve got their address filed with her funeral plan. All you have to do is to add their name to the notice for the newspapers, together with our name and address, and the donations can come to us in the first instance. Then I’ll list them for you and send the money on to the Rowlettian Society, whoever they are. That is what is usual.’

This had served to remind her that the newspapers were something else she had to worry about. Or, rather, what to say in the obituary notice to be published in them.

‘Just put the name of the deceased and her age and where she died,’ advised Tod easily. ‘Unless you know what she did before she retired …’

‘We don’t,’ she said with absolute truth. ‘That’s the trouble. We don’t know anything about her at all.’

‘Then you can go straight to putting in the bit about the date of the funeral and saying where it will be.’ Tod Morton paused and then added, ‘If I were you, Mrs Wakefield, I shouldn’t say in the paper that there’s a bunfight afterwards at the Almstone Towers. You never know who’ll turn up just because of that – they do you very well there, you know.’

‘We don’t know who’ll turn up – full stop,’ she had said rather tartly. ‘Maybe nobody at all.’

‘You never can tell,’ said the young undertaker wisely. ‘Funerals are funny things. There are always people who haven’t visited the deceased in years who’ll come to his or her funeral.’

‘Adding hypocrisy to neglect,’ said Janet crisply.

‘Could be,’ he said pacifically.

‘And there will always be those who should be there and aren’t, I suppose,’ suggested Janet, even though she had no idea at all who should be at Bill’s Great-Aunt Josephine’s funeral but weren’t going to be there. Surely there must be some of them, too …

Tod Morton shook his head. ‘They usually come as well. In our experience, Mrs Wakefield, apologies for absence aren’t often the order of the day.’

‘So what about hymns and things, then?’ Janet had asked, leaving this thorny subject alone.

‘That’s Reverend Tompkinson’s department, not mine,’ said Tod Morton. ‘You’ll have to ask him.’

So Janet Wakefield had duly made her way to the vicarage at Damory Regis.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Derek Tompkinson, the clergyman there. ‘I’ve had a note of the date and time of the service from the undertaker’s but I needed to see you, Mrs Wakefield, about what to say about your … er … late aunt.’

‘My husband’s great-aunt,’ she corrected him, adding shortly, ‘and he’s upcountry in Brazil without mobile reception. Not that he knows any more about her than I do. That’s for sure.’

‘I see,’ said the vicar pensively. ‘So there’s no one you know of at all who would like to give the address at the service?’

She shook her head. ‘No one.’

‘Tell me, did she not have any favourite visitors at the nursing home?’

‘I asked,’ said Janet. ‘According to the matron there she didn’t have any visitors at all in the time that she had been in there bar one – an old gentleman – whom she wouldn’t see anyway. Apparently she wasn’t much of a letter writer and had no correspondence to speak of either but did do some telephoning until she got too deaf. Bad eyesight, too, they thought.’

‘Strange,’ mused Derek Tompkinson, ‘very strange. By the way, do you happen to know why the burial is to be here in Damory Regis?’ He frowned. ‘You see, Short is not a familiar name in this village and nobody at all in the parish seems to have known anyone called Josephine Short.’

‘I don’t know anything about anything,’ said Janet flatly. ‘That’s the whole trouble.’

‘I did take the liberty of consulting my fellow cleric on the matter.’ The vicar gave a little cough. ‘He’s the one in whose parish the Berebury Nursing Home is and who visits there regularly. That was to see if he had any suggestions on the matter, but it turns out that he had never seen her there.’ He amended this. ‘Or rather, that Miss Short had never asked to see him. Nursing homes have to be very tactful about that sort of thing, you know.’

Janet Wakefield had said that she could see that they would have to be. ‘It would be a bit of a reminder of the Grim Reaper, wouldn’t it?’

‘Quite so,’ said the vicar of Damory Regis, leaving Janet not entirely sure whether he liked her use of the expression.

‘So we’re back to hymns and things,’ she said a trifle ungraciously. ‘I suppose we ought to have “Abide with Me”.’

‘A lot of people do,’ said Derek Tompkinson.

‘And “The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, is Ended”,’ she said. This suggestion had come from her best friend, Dawn, enrolled to give advice over a cup of coffee.

‘Very popular,’ said the vicar.

‘Well, if we don’t know anything about her,’ said Janet astringently, ‘we can hardly have “For All the Saints”, can we?’

The vicar had smiled gently at this. ‘There is no reason why you shouldn’t, if you want to. We are all equal in death, you know. The trappings of this world fall away. All is forgiven.’

Janet had flushed, unsure of her ground at that point. ‘Anyway, there’s no way we can have that one about promising to serve thee to the end if we don’t know what she believed in.’

‘You may have whatever you wish, Mrs Wakefield.’

‘What about “All Things Bright and Beautiful”?’ she said suddenly, watching his face. It was one hymn she and Dawn had both remembered from their childhood.

‘You may have whatever you wish,’ the vicar repeated.

‘At least,’ she said, feeling somehow defeated, ‘we can’t have that one that begins “O Love that will not let me go”, because she wasn’t married.’

Derek Tompkinson, at first tempted to go into the theology of this, said instead, ‘Might I suggest you have “Father, Hear the Prayer We Offer”?’

In the end Janet settled for that and ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’.

‘And the readings, Mrs Wakefield?’

Janet gave in and said she would leave these to the vicar.

‘And as for the address,’ he said, ‘might I suggest you have a word with her solicitor? He may well know more about her than we do. He might even be prevailed upon to say a few words himself.’

‘Her solicitors are Puckle, Puckle & Nunnery in Berebury High Street.’ Janet knew that because she had been told it was they who had been seeing to the fees at the nursing home. ‘I understand that Simon Puckle’s the member of the firm who looked after her affairs.’

The vicar had nodded at that. ‘Try him,’ he had advised. ‘He’s a helpful sort of chap.’

So Janet had dutifully made an appointment with Simon Puckle at the firm’s offices in Berebury High Street.

‘Give the funeral address?’ said Simon Puckle. ‘I’m very sorry, Mrs Wakefield, but I really don’t know a great deal about the late Miss Short. Certainly not enough to deliver the eulogy.’

‘I see,’ said Janet, mentally chalking up someone else who wasn’t ever going to call her Jan.

Simon Puckle hastened on. ‘She was indeed a client of ours but only since she came as a resident near here in the Berebury Nursing Home. I was given to understand that she used to live over Calleford way before she went into the home, so she wasn’t exactly local to Berebury and I don’t know her past history at all.’

‘Would there be any clues in her will?’ asked Janet. She hadn’t herself come across any will of Great-Aunt Josephine’s so far. ‘That’s if you’ve got it here?’

‘We have indeed got her will here, Mrs Wakefield, but there is a caveat attached to it that it isn’t to be read until after the funeral.’

The images of a last will and testament solemnly being read by an elderly solicitor to the assembled family in the library came, as far as Janet was concerned, straight from Hollywood.

‘Uncommon but not unknown,’ added Simon Puckle.

‘Is that because it’s got something in it saying that if someone didn’t turn up for the funeral they mightn’t get anything?’ suggested Janet. She wasn’t sure if that came from Hollywood, too, or from fiction borrowed from the library shelves labelled ‘Romance’.

‘That could be one reason, although,’ the solicitor paused and went on carefully, ‘I would expect any professional adviser to have counselled against making any such … er … unusual provision.’ He hesitated before adding, ‘Especially one that could conceivably lead to difficulties. So, Mrs Wakefield, I must remind you, would be the … er … premature disposition of any of the possessions in her room.’

‘There’s not many of them, I can tell you,’ responded Janet smartly.

‘The very old don’t need a lot,’ murmured the solicitor, a veteran in these matters.

‘So we won’t know anything at all, then, until after the funeral,’ concluded Janet, aware that he hadn’t said whether or not the firm of Puckle, Puckle & Nunnery had actually drawn up the aforementioned will. She sighed. ‘There’s so much we don’t know about Bill’s Great-Aunt Josephine.’

It was only at the funeral itself, though, that she began to realise quite how much that lack of knowledge amounted to. Resolutely heading for her place in the front pew as the chief mourner, Janet, who had dressed carefully in an ambiguous mixture of mauve, black, green and cream, had dutifully followed Tod Morton and the coffin into the church at Damory Regis.

The first thing of which she was aware was the odd assortment of people in the congregation. This was something she hadn’t expected. Certainly the notice of the death of Josephine Short and the time and place of the funeral had been well published to the wider world but no one had been in touch with her. Firmly occupying the pew behind the one reserved for the family was a cohort from the Berebury Nursing Home led by the matron, Mrs Linda Luxton, and on the other side of the church she spotted Simon Puckle, the solicitor.

Further back were a couple of women obviously so familiar with the church and its ritual that they exuded the feeling of being regular members of the congregation. And on the opposite side of the aisle were two men and some women, who might or might not have come from the Rowlettian Society. Scattered about the church were several other men, mostly oldish, and some more women – only one young, her auburn hair standing out in a sea of grey heads. At the back, handing out service books, hovered a churchwarden and a sidesman.

Ahead of her now and after the organ voluntary had come to a stop, the vicar, robed in full canonicals, was pronouncing the words ‘“We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out …”’

Janet Wakefield had no quarrel with these sentiments as far as the late Josephine Short was concerned. Detailed examination of the bedroom in the nursing home had been singularly unrevealing, her possessions there few and far between. Certainly there was everything present in the room that one bedridden old lady could or would possibly need, but nothing whatsoever to shed light on the personality of that same old lady – not even anything about the Rowlettian Society. There were some rather worn black and white photographs in a torn brown envelope in a bottom drawer but they had had no names on them that had meant anything to her and Janet had left them where they were.

As the vicar began the Sentences ‘“I know that my Redeemer liveth …”’ and while the coffin was being set upon the waiting trestles, Janet Wakefield sat herself down in the right-hand front pew and picked up the prayer book there.

Her solitary splendour in that pew, though, was not destined to last long. Seconds after she was seated, a tall youngish man wearing a dark suit and a black tie slid into the pew in which she was sitting. He sat down beside her, bowed his head, and gave every appearance of entering into silent prayer. ‘“Whom I shall see for myself and shall mine eyes behold, and not another”,’ finished the Reverend Derek Tompkinson, reaching his stall after first reverencing the altar and turning to face the congregation. Janet cast a covert glance in the direction of the newcomer but was little the wiser after that beyond being aware that the man’s suit was of a light wool and had been cut in a slightly un-English way.

‘The first hymn,’ announced the vicar, ‘is “Father, Hear the Prayer We Offer” which is number 172 in the green book …’ Under cover of the general rustling of activity, caused by the taking up of hymn books and the searching for the right page and the starting up of the organ again, the newcomer leant over towards Janet and whispered in her ear, ‘Phew! That was a near thing. Just made it in time, thank goodness. Mother always said I’d be late for my own funeral but if I was late for Granny’s there’d be big trouble. Well, I’m not, am I?’

CHAPTER TWO

Sheila, Mrs Linda Luxton’s deputy at the Berebury Nursing Home, in St Clement’s Row, took a deep breath and carefully counted to three before she spoke. They had learnt the hard way at the Home that, while people who wanted to become resident there queued up for a bed in the place, good care staff were very much more difficult to come by and keep.

Ellen Steele was good care staff in the sense that she had an idle, no-good husband, a heavy drinker to boot, and an even more ne’er-do-well son, who was forever in trouble, and thus she could not easily afford to leave the employment there.

‘Smashed, you say?’ said the deputy matron, playing for time.

‘Smashed into little pieces,’ said Ellen Steele energetically, ‘dozens of them and it wasn’t me, Sheila. Honest. And I just can’t work out what happened to it.’

‘Are we talking about that vase that stood on her shelf?’ Shelves were few and far between in the less-than-ample residents’ rooms at the Berebury Nursing Home. ‘The pretty red and green china one?’

Ellen nodded. ‘That’s right. Beautiful isn’t … wasn’t it? It was the only thing that old Josephine would have there. She was really fussy about it.’

‘I must say it looked valuable,’ said Sheila, wondering what they would have to say about the breakage to the family.

‘But if you ask me it was the only thing of hers that was, ’cepting those rings that she always wore. Lovely, they were.’

‘Biggest diamond I’ve ever seen,’ agreed Sheila, momentarily diverted. ‘The other one was a sapphire … a Sri Lankan sapphire, I think she once told me it was.’

‘Matched her blue eyes lovely, it did,’ said Ellen. ‘Like ice, they were.’

‘But as to the vase being valuable, I couldn’t say for sure,’ said Sheila.

‘Most of them stand their photographs along that shelf,’ continued Ellen, ‘but Josephine wouldn’t never have nothing there but that vase. Ever.’

‘I’ve an idea that she’d lost people in an accident and couldn’t bear to look at their photographs,’ said the deputy matron absently. Strictly speaking, care in the home only related to the here and now, but in every care home the past always cast its long shadows towards the present.

‘Kept all of them tucked away in a drawer, she did,’ said Ellen, from whom no secrets of Josephine Short’s room could very well have been hidden in the circumstances. ‘Loose in a brown envelope. Didn’t look at ’em much, though, I can tell you. Couldn’t get to the drawer herself, not lately anyway.’

‘Josephine wasn’t ever one for talking about the past, either,’ said Sheila, who took her share of the caring when someone else on the staff didn’t come in.

‘Unlike some,’ groaned Ellen feelingly. ‘I tell you, Sheila, if I have to hear about that Kathleen in number 11’s safari trip one more time I shall scream. I’ve begun to wish those lions she saw had eaten her. Or, come to that, Lady Alice’s tale about crossing the Bay of Biscay in the war with U-boats about when she was in the Wrens …’

‘I hope, though, that that vase wasn’t as valuable as it looked,’ said the deputy matron, sticking to the point. She sighed. ‘I don’t know what Linda will say when she gets back from the church, I’m sure. I don’t know when the family’ll be coming back here either but we’ll have to tell them then about its being broken.’

‘But that’s not it …’ insisted Ellen with vigour.

‘No?’ said Sheila, puzzled.

‘What you don’t understand, Sheila, is that that room has been kep’ locked ever since Josephine died.’

‘Someone must have knocked it over,’ pointed out Sheila mildly, careful not to cast aspersions. ‘It can’t have fallen on its own. Not short of an earthquake.’

‘So they must,’ agreed Ellen, ‘but if it wasn’t me – and I tell you it wasn’t – then who was it? That’s what I want to know.’

‘And what were they doing in there, anyway?’ asked the deputy matron, catching on. ‘Nobody had any business to be in that room after the old lady died, never mind that it was kept locked and the key hung on the board on the wall in Linda’s office here.’

‘Exactly. That niece of hers – if that’s what she is – Jan somebody …’

‘Wakefield,’ supplied the deputy matron. ‘Wife of Josephine’s next of kin. It should have been him taking care of things, only he’s away somewhere on business.’

‘Her, then. Linda was with her all the time she was here when she came up to get the old lady’s papers for the registrar and that vase will have been all right then or we’d have heard all about it and no mistake.’

‘We would,’ sighed Sheila, on whose shoulders much of the minutiae of running the place fell. Mrs Luxton, the matron, dealt with the paperwork and the ever-burgeoning requirements of the regulatory authorities.

‘So,’ said Ellen ineluctably, ‘short of that earthquake you mentioned, how come that vase fell off the shelf and broke if the room has been kept locked ever since? Or, at least, until I went in this morning to give the room a bit of a tidy before the family come?’

Sheila frowned. ‘Think carefully. Is there anything actually missing from the room that you can see?’

Ellen Steele shook her head. ‘Not that I noticed. Mind you, there wasn’t a lot left in it to start with – not since them lovely rings went with the body to the undertaker’s, like Morton’s said Josephine had asked.’ She sniffed. ‘Not, I must say, that that stopped that young woman who come having a good hunt for anything valuable. Never been near the place before, either.’

‘She did say that neither she nor her husband knew anything about his great-aunt being in here or they would have visited.’

Ellen sniffed again, not mollified by this. ‘Didn’t stop the old lady naming him as her next of kin, did it? Funny that, if you was to ask me. Mind you, Sheila, that wife of his got here pretty quickly after she’d died. People always do.’

The deputy matron did not attempt to dispute this. Instead she stood up and said she’d go and look at the room herself, and then perhaps Ellen would go ahead and sweep up the pieces before Linda and the other staff came back from the church at Damory Regis, and certainly before the relatives got to the Home. She halted suddenly on her way out and said, ‘On second thoughts, perhaps not, Ellen. Just leave the broken pieces on the floor where they are. It might be better.’

She had hardly got to the door before the cook appeared, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows. ‘’Scuse me interrupting, Sheila, but you’d better come and take a look at the pantry. Someone’s taken the window out.’

While Janet Wakefield struggled to sing the words of the hymn, her mind now in a complete whirl, her neighbour beside her in the front pew appeared quite at home with them, joining in the singing with ease.

‘I nearly didn’t make it,’ he bent down and hissed into Janet’s ear as they settled down and prepared to listen to the reading. ‘I got lost on the way down.’

‘Where from?’ was all Janet could manage in the way of speech before the vicar welcomed the congregation and announced that the sentences of scripture would be from Ecclesiastes: ‘“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven …’”

The Reverend Derek Tompkinson had reached ‘“A time to be born, and a time to die” …’ before she got an answer.

‘The airport. I hired a car there,’ he said, sotto voce, under cover of the vicar’s walking back from the lectern. ‘I stayed there last night on my way here. My plane was too late in, yesterday evening, to come on here.’

‘Where from?’ she asked again.

‘Lasserta,’ he whispered. ‘The sheikhdom thereof.’

Janet Wakefield settled herself back in the pew, trying to place Lasserta in her school atlas. Somewhere out East was all that came to her mind, it being the mysterious East in more senses than one as far as she was concerned since she couldn’t think exactly where Lasserta was. With an enormous effort of will she turned her mind back to the matter in hand – the funeral service.

The vicar was talking about the late Josephine Eleanor Short. ‘There will be those of you present here today who will have known she whose death we are gathered together to mark. I am not numbered among you but I join with you in bidding farewell to an old lady who chose to spend her last years here in our county of Calleshire and who had especially asked to be laid to rest among the villagers of this ancient settlement. She had asked, too, that you all be invited back to the Almstone Towers Hotel after this service for suitable refreshment.’

The Reverend Derek Tompkinson then gave his gentle smile and went on with practised fluency, ‘In medieval times a candle would be lit in the church porch when a parishioner died to guide them to church. It was called a “fetch-candle” and while we do not know what it is that fetched Josephine Eleanor Short to our church and churchyard we assure those who mourn of our welcome here and of our love.’

Janet let her glance slide towards the man at her side, and wondered if he knew what there was about Damory Regis that had drawn Josephine Short – his grandmother, that is – here in death. She would ask him as soon as she could but not before she found out how it came to be that the deceased, apparently always known as Miss Short, had had a grandchild whom nobody – well not her Bill, anyway – had known anything about.

Janet’s own husband was certain he had never heard of his great-aunt having had any children, that was for sure or he would have said so. As far as Bill Wakefield had been concerned, his Great-Aunt Josephine had always been called Short, which had been his own mother’s maiden name, too.

‘What’s your name?’ she hissed suddenly in the direction of the man sitting at her side.

‘Joe Short, short for Joseph.’ He bent his head down towards her again and said out of the corner of his mouth, ‘What’s yours?’

‘Jan Wakefield,’ she answered.

‘Bill’s wife?’ he said, surprising her.

Before she could do more than nod, the vicar had started to speak again. ‘I am going to read to you a piece by Bishop Brent called “What is Dying?”.’ The Reverend Derek Tompkinson cleared his throat and began:

‘A ship sails and I stand watching till she fades on the horizon and someone at my side says, “She is gone.” Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all; she is just as large as when Isaw her. The diminished size and the total loss of sight is in me, not in her, and just at the moment when someone at my side says, “She is gone”, there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout, “There she comes!” and that is dying.’

Quite unexpectedly and much to her own surprise Janet became aware of the trickle of a tear down her face. She told herself that this was utterly ridiculous – she hadn’t ever set eyes on Josephine Short and she wasn’t even a relation of the woman, let alone a close one. She was very conscious, though, that in some indefinable way the vicar had skilfully introduced into the ceremony an atmosphere of real devotion.

She gave a covert glance along the pew in the direction of her neighbour but his head was bowed and his face hidden from view. It was only when the final hymn began and Joe Short unfolded himself and stood up beside her that she could see his face again. His expression was suitably composed as he once again turned his attention to the singing.

As the last hymn drew to a close, Janet was aware of a rustle of movement at the back of the church as the undertaker’s men prepared themselves to come forward. That was when the vicar and congregation began to sing the ‘Nunc Dimittis’. This was something that Janet did know and she hastened to join in the familiar words: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace …’ while the undertaker’s men lifted the coffin, swung it round with practised ease under the watchful eye of Tod Morton, and set off down the aisle.

Janet stepped out of the front pew behind the bearers and, with Joe Short now by her side, followed the cortège down the aisle and out through the open west door of the church. ‘I didn’t know Great-Aunt Josephine had had any children,’ she said as soon as they were outside in the open air, speech then seeming somehow less constrained.

‘One,’ said Joe Short. ‘My father.’

‘Ah,’ said Janet alertly. ‘She had been married, then.’

‘No,’ said Joe Short. ‘At least, not that I ever knew about.’

‘Ah,’ said Janet again. She searched about in her mind for something to say that sounded suitably broad-minded. ‘Never mind … it was a long time ago.’

‘She did mind,’ said Joe Short flatly.

‘Perhaps in those days—’

‘Especially in those days,’ he said bitterly. ‘She was thrown out of the parental home and told never to darken the door again. Talk about Victorian melodrama …’

‘We forget how much times have changed …’ Janet began but fell silent as the undertaker’s men reached the open grave with the coffin and the rest of the congregation gathered round as the vicar began to pronounce the committal.

It was after that when Janet nearly lost her composure altogether. It was as Joe Short stooped and cast some earth down on the coffin. Shakily she followed suit – it was something she had never done before – and then the vicar brought the proceedings to an end.

As soon as Janet had raised her head and straightened up again she turned to Joe Short and said, ‘Your parents aren’t here, though, are they?’

A spasm of pain crossed his face. ‘Didn’t you know? Mum and Dad were killed in that air crash coming back to England from Lasserta nearly three years ago now. That’s why Granny had to go into that nursing home in Berebury. She couldn’t cope alone – not without Mum and Dad, anyway.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she stumbled contritely. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘No, I suppose you won’t have done.’ His expression was set now in a controlled way that made him look suddenly older. ‘They’d come out to visit me, you see, and were on their way back home afterwards.’

‘I can see how that would make it worse,’ she said sympathetically.

‘Nothing could have made it any worse, believe you me,’ he said grimly, ‘especially for poor Granny. Losing my father and mother, and with my working so far away, she was very alone. All I could do was telephone …’

‘That must have been a help,’ she said, at a loss for the right thing to say since redeeming features in the situation seemed very few and far between.

‘Oh, it was all right until Granny began to get so deaf that she couldn’t hear me properly.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Janet helplessly.

But Joe Short’s attention had been diverted. ‘Do you know who all these people are?’ he asked, looking round as the congregation started to leave the graveside.

Janet pointed out the solicitor and the matron and two care assistants from the nursing home. ‘Who the others are, I’m sorry, I just don’t know myself.’

He thanked her and dutifully peeled off to shake hands with the vicar.

Very slowly the group round the open grave broke up as first one and then another of those present began to move away towards the church gate and the waiting cars, some making themselves known to Janet or Joe. Then Janet looked round to see her erstwhile companion punctiliously taking leave of the matron before moving over to talk to Simon Puckle, while just at the right moment Tod Morton appeared at her elbow again and steered her to the funeral car.

‘What about …?’ she began and then relaxed when she saw a hire car – presumably Joe Short’s – parked behind several others alongside the church wall.

Tod Morton handed her into his firm’s large black limousine, waved a gloved hand at the driver and sent her off to the Almstone Towers in solitary splendour. There she was welcomed by the black-coated manager who escorted her in his stately way to a reception room.

‘If madam would like to receive the mourners here,’ suggested the manager, ‘they can then go straight on into the dining room …’

Obediently Janet took up a stance just where he had indicated. As she explained at length to her friend Dawn afterwards, she wasn’t usually so biddable but he wasn’t the sort of man to argue with. The manager clicked his fingers just once and a waiter appeared with a tray of glasses of sherry and took up his stance slightly to one side and a little behind her, advancing with his tray as other members of the congregation arrived one by one.

The thought that she would have to receive people had not occurred to Janet. She began involuntarily, ‘But her grandson’ll be getting here in a minute …’

‘Very well, madam. I’ll see that as soon as he arrives he is told where you are,’ murmured the manager, melting away.

But it was quite a while before Joe Short turned up at the hotel and when he did arrive he was with Simon Puckle. The solicitor was suggesting to Joe Short that he came to his office at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning for the reading of the will, adding, ‘I take it that this will be all right with you?’

‘Sure,’ said Joe Short politely.

Janet, joining them, said, ‘Will you be staying here?’

The young man looked round at the Edwardian amplitude of the Almstone Towers. ‘What? Not on my salary. I’m only a lowly mining engineer, you know.’ He grinned. ‘Actually I’ve booked myself in at the Bellingham in Market Street. Granny said she’d heard it was all right.’

Janet nodded, relieved that he’d found himself somewhere to stay, and thus that she had been saved the worry of whether she should have offered him hospitality. ‘You should be very comfortable there.’

She turned as Mrs Linda Luxton, the matron of the nursing home, approached her and when she looked back Joe Short had gone.

CHAPTER THREE

‘Ah, there you are, Sloan. I wanted to see you. Come in and sit down.’ Police Superintendent Leeyes waved at a chair in his office. ‘Something very funny’s cropped up at the Berebury Nursing Home. That upper-crust one down the road in St Clement’s Row.’

‘I know the place,’ said Sloan cautiously. ‘The Earl of Ornum’s eccentric aunt’s in there. Lady Alice. I met her when they had an outbreak of food poisoning there once.’ It hadn’t been food poisoning but murder, though this didn’t seem the moment to remind his superior officer of this.

‘Said to be top of the shop as such places go,’ said Leeyes. ‘Expensive.’