An Open Window Read online

  Due to a bend in the river, the rear faced directly south, and later I came to realise that this must have been the reason for its location. The front certainly wasn’t inspiring, but all the care and attention was at the rear. Visible to me now was a plain, almost square building, three storeys high, with an insignificant porch, rather dim because it faced north, and two sets of plain windows each side. These rooms would be forever dark and depressing, I thought. A wisteria, planted at the east corner, had been allowed to grow rampant, and had spread itself halfway across the front, where it met with, and embattled, an ivy from the west corner, between them managing further to obscure any light trying to penetrate the windows. But it was a large house. Room for better things. I was not discouraged, and walked on round the side.

  Here the drive terminated in a wide stretch of gravel fronting three wooden garages, all their doors shut. A high hedge at their end marked the boundary of the property. There was a gap between the garages and the side of the house, so I walked on through to the rear.

  Here the house came into its own. It became alive. The day had turned dull, but as though to welcome me the clouds now drew aside and the sun shone on my right cheek. The ground fell away steeply to the river, which was thrusting itself round the bend below, the sun caught in it, almost blinding with its sparkles and flashes. The slope had been terraced, not evenly, but with a cunning plan, allowing a winding progress gently down through flowered and shrubbed gardens, at this time of year a blaze of colour. Along the back of the house there was a wide terrace, which curtsied aside to skirt a large conservatory, some twenty feet by fifteen, which thrust itself out from the house.

  It was, presumably, through the roof of this that Walter Mann had fallen to his death. I walked towards it, and saw that it was wooden framed, and glazed to within three feet of the ground. It had an outside door. I tried it, and it was unlocked. I walked inside.

  There was shelving all around the sides, lined with pots of flowering plants. Some of them looked exotic. Large containers on the floor sprouted vines and sub-tropical plants, and amongst it all were scattered white-painted metal chairs and two round tables. I believed I spotted orchids, to my unspecialised eye. If that were so, then the large hole in the arched roof, close to the house, was doing no good at all.

  The broken glass was still there, scattered on the floor. Part of the wooden frame lay to one side. It was possible to detect where Walter had fallen and lain, as the glass had followed after him. Put your fist through a window, and it’s not the passage of your flesh that causes the wounds. The bruise, perhaps, but not the cuts. Those come from the rest of the glass that showers on to you. So it had been with Walter. The hole in the roof was larger than a human being. Most of the glass had fallen on and around him. I could have almost traced his outline.

  Looking upwards through the gap I could see the two windows, one above the other, vertically above me. It looked a long way down from the top one.

  I went outside, closed the door, and turned. A woman was standing outside an open door towards the far end of the house, a boxer dog beside her. As the dog had only a stump I could see nothing wagging, so I wasn’t sure of my welcome. The same with the woman. She was small and thin, with a sour face and a wide, expressive mouth. At that time it expressed disapproval. Her arms were folded across what would have been her bosom, had she possessed one, and her head was nodding in tiny jerks, in an I-told-you-so gesture, congratulating herself about something.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have rung a bell or something. My name’s Richard Patton.’

  ‘Mr Carne said to expect you.’ Her voice was younger than her appearance, but any warmth was firmly held in reserve. ‘The residual legatee.’ She said those words with a wry and contemptuous twist to her lips, though whether aimed at the ponderous legal phrasing or the expected value of ‘residual’ I couldn’t tell. It might even have been aimed at me, as the ‘legatee’ part of it.

  But my impression of the situation was that Mary Pinson, as this clearly was, although knowing there was a new will, could not know the exact contents of it. It meant I had to be careful, so that I had to find some reasonable explanation of my presence. As a residual legatee, or representing one, I must have appeared in indecent haste to view the goodies.

  ‘I’m Mary Pinson,’ she said. ‘Miss. You’d better come in. I’ve got the kettle on.’ She made a beckoning jerk with her head. ‘Sheba won’t hurt you. Providing you don’t attack me, of course.’ Then she gave a short snap of laughter, dismissing the possibility. It was like cracking a nut.

  Yet Sheba was eyeing me with uncertainty, her face as bleakly unwelcoming as Mary Pinson’s. Her jowls vibrated gently, and a quiet growl throbbed past them.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Not really,’ she admitted. ‘She was Mr Mann’s dog. Raise a hand to him, and she’d have had it off at the wrist. Mind you, I have wondered…try it, shall we? You raise your hand—’

  ‘Thank you, no. I’ll take it as read. Good dog,’ I said.

  Sheba glared at me, and trotted in so close to my heels that I feared for my ankles.

  Facing the doorway was a flight of wooden stairs, uncarpeted. No doubt, in Victorian times, there would have been a squad of servants. Perhaps the cottages at Knightsford had supplied them. Now there was Mary Pinson. She turned right, through a door into her kitchen. It was her kitchen, you could tell that by her possessive gesture of welcome.

  She was dressed, for a woman of her age—I guessed the 60s—rather younger than one would expect, rather more smartly too, in green slacks and a Fair Isle jumper, with the points of a jade shirt showing at the neck. No apron. Her method of making tea involved a lot of noise, the banging of the kettle on the stove, the rattle of the lid on the pottery pot, the clatter of cups on saucers. I guessed that this in no way indicated her mood. Noise, to her, was equated with meaningful performance.

  She looked round and caught my eye on her.

  ‘You’re wondering,’ she stated, ‘why I’m showing no signs of mourning, the funeral being yesterday. I didn’t go to that. Not welcome—but that wouldn’t have stopped me.’

  ‘I’m sure it wouldn’t.’

  ‘St Stephen’s. They cremated him. He put that in his will.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘But I’ve no time for all this outward show. They go with their black veils, and weep. They have to be seen weeping. Not me. If I want to weep, it’s my affair. I can remember Walter without a black arm-band to remind me. I remember him in here.’ She prodded her hard chest. In spite of her rejection of outward display, her voice was unsteady.

  ‘Help yourself to sugar,’ she said, banging down the sugar bowl. It was steady enough now.

  I sat at the plain wood table, and helped myself. ‘You were with him for long?’

  ‘Thirty years. I’ll be sorry to leave.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’ I asked, surprised because I’d assumed otherwise.

  She was now seated opposite to me, her hands completely round her cup and saucer, hugging them to her. ‘I’d not be staying with that Clare Tolchard. She wouldn’t have it, anyway. We never got on. She’s made it plain, how things stand. Been round here and made it very clear…I wouldn’t be wanted. That was after she’d been from top to bottom of the place, checking I hadn’t sold anything.’ She said that in a flat voice. ‘But of course, it was always going to be hers. The others wouldn’t want it—Paul and Donald. They were all born here, but she was the only one who really loved the place.’

  Oh dear, I thought.

  Her eyes wandered away from me, her gaze now from the window, to the woods on the rise beyond the river. ‘It’s only to be expected,’ she murmured.

  And yet, I thought, Walter’s daughter, Clare, must surely have known. Wouldn’t Walter have told all three that he’d changed his will?

  ‘It’ll be the cars,’ she said suddenly, swinging her eyes back to me. There was a brisk triumph in this statement. She’d solved the meani
ng of ‘residual’.

  ‘Cars?’

  ‘Mr Mann’s Granada, and that sports thing of his he’s always made such a fuss of, though how he expected to drive it at his age, and him locking himself away for the past two months in his room, I’ll never know.’ She took a breath, and I managed to get in:

  ‘What sports thing?’ I’d noted she’d slipped and called him Walter, but he was now back to Mr Mann.

  ‘Oh, something he reproduced—no, restored, that was it. A funny name for a car, if you ask me. Something with horns on. Deer or the like.’

  ‘Stag?’ I whispered.

  ‘That was it.’

  ‘Triumph Stag?’

  ‘I said that.’

  I was silent. How fate bounces you about! I only hoped that fate wasn’t dangling it, only to snatch it away again. Eventually: ‘No, it wasn’t the cars.’ I’d thought of a valid reason for my presence. ‘Mr Carne suggested that I ought to come and look at the situation, the inquest being on Monday. I’m an ex-police officer, and it seems necessary to make certain it was an accident.’

  ‘Of course it was!’

  ‘The coincidence,’ I suggested gently.

  ‘Ridiculous.’

  ‘Would you show me? The room. The one you say he’s been locking himself away in for the past two months. Please.’

  Her eyes were like shiny, dark pebbles, holding mine. ‘You’re up to something.’

  I nodded. ‘And I can’t tell you what.’

  I’d offended her. ‘You’d better go, before I set the dog on you.’

  Sheba’s head was on my knee, and I was fondling her ear. I said: ‘But you’re not sure, are you? Wouldn’t you like an expert opinion?’

  ‘Some expert, you.’

  ‘The police were here?’

  ‘You can guess. Here for hours. That was after I got back, of course. It was me found him. Saturday, it was. Usually, Saturdays, I go out and do the shopping and the like. Sort of pop in and see my sister, in town.’

  ‘You mean Boreton?’

  ‘It’s all the town we’ve got. That’s where they came from, the police. You can’t get past it. Accident they said, and accident it was.’

  I nodded. Of course it was, I had to hope. ‘It’s for the inquest to decide.’

  ‘Oh…them!’

  ‘But all the same, you don’t mind if I have a look at the room?’

  She stood up, her face set suddenly in firm rejection. It was all very well to indulge in idle chatter, but behind it she had been realising that she was the present custodian.

  ‘And have Clare carping and griping? Oh no. The house’ll surely be hers, and she won’t want any old Tom, Dick or Harry prowling round. No, Mr Patton. I’m sorry, but I can’t allow that…whatever Mr Carne says.’

  My luck had run out. Before the will was read 1 could hardly tell her the truth. The way things were looking, I felt that the truth was best left for Philip Carne to reveal.

  There were a few moments of silence, and in the interval I heard a car drawing up on the gravel, followed by the clack of hard heels on the terrace surface outside. Mary Pinson’s eyes met mine as I rose to my feet. She nodded, lips pursed.

  ‘And she’ll tell you the same. It’s Clare herself.’

  I turned to the door as Walter Mann’s daughter swept in with a flurry of anger. ‘Whose damn car’s that in the drive?’ She saw me and stopped. We stood looking at each other.

  Walter’s second child would have been about thirty, and would perhaps have been a very good looking woman ten or so years before. Maybe a little sturdy, perhaps now wearing too much make-up, but unlike Mary Pinson, Clare was showing evidence of mourning. Her skirt was pleated and black, the jacket was grey, over a blue blouse. Her handbag was black and her shoes were black. But strangely none of these accessories seemed new; her mourning was worn with an air of acceptance, of confidence. Her face, too, was shadowed with a suffering that had been there much longer than a week. The lines round her mouth and the wrinkles in her neck had taken time to mature. As had the sharpness of her tongue.

  ‘I take it that’s your car,’ she said to me, her eyes assessing me and not pleased with what they saw. ‘You’ve got no business here, so you’d better go.’

  Although she had not enquired about what my business might have been, I would have complied, but she took it too far, her anger spilling over on to Mary Pinson. To tell you the truth, I was anxious to get out of there. It was all right with Mary Pinson to be flinging round words like ‘residual legatee’, because she could hardly have failed to know that Walter had drawn a new will. Philip Carne had said her position was unchanged in it. But I couldn’t declare any personal interest in it to Clare, who was showing every sign of being ignorant of any new will. My position would have been embarrassing at the least.

  But Clare now turned her bitter tongue on Mary Pinson. ‘You had no right to let him past the step, Mary. Anyway, I’m surprised you’re still here yourself.’

  ‘The will’s to be read on Sunday, Clare.’

  ‘I hardly think it will affect your position.’

  The corners of Mary Pinson’s tight mouth twitched. It occurred to me that she could have known rather more than she had revealed. ‘I’m prepared to wait and see.’

  Clare, angry, turned away from her, and faced me. ‘Are you still here?’

  ‘He’s from the police,’ said Mary, her voice so gentle it barely stirred the air. But it had been a subtle attack, disturbing Clare’s peace of mind with no more than a suggestion of doubt.

  I was caught. I couldn’t deny it, and dared not admit it. I stared at Clare, impassive and I hoped expressionless.

  ‘He wishes to see the room,’ Mary continued placidly. ‘Your father’s room. I can’t think why.’

  She had been speaking to Clare’s back, as Clare hadn’t taken her eyes from me. They were a matching grey to her jacket, mourning eyes, tragic eyes. Her lips were quivering, and for one moment I thought we were in for a display of the tears Mary had scorned. But if so, they’d not have been from grief. All I could detect in her face was despair, and a desperate weariness.

  ‘I can’t stand any more of this!’ she cried abruptly. ‘I just can’t!’

  Then she pushed past me and through the doorway, and I heard the clatter of her heels in close to a run along the terrace.

  Mary put the back of one hand against her lips and thumped the table with her other fist. ‘Oh damn!’ she said bitterly. ‘Why do I let her do it?’

  ‘What does she do?’ I was casual, filling my pipe, going for a peep at the gardens from her window.

  I could hear that she’d begun clearing up the cups. ‘I came here when she was born,’ she said quietly. ‘Came to look after her really, but when Donald came, their mother died.’ Her voice was equally dead. It had happened; it had to be lived with. ‘From then on, it was me running the house. Virtually. Walter wanted it like that. Didn’t want the trouble. Three children. Paul—he was five, and Clare was two, then along came Donald, and I had him from a baby. But as Clare grew up she resented me. It was her home, and she tried to make that very clear. In her immature way. I’m not to be bossed, Mr Patton, you can take that as you like. Clare tried it, and she failed. That’s how she is. She has to be able to order people around. Dominate. And she can’t always do it. It makes her furious, as you saw. That husband of hers, Aleric Tolchard…she tried it with him, but it was due to fail from the first moment. Anybody could have seen that, but she was blind, blind.’

  Her voice had drifted into a chatty tone. I felt free to turn around. ‘A forceful type,’ I guessed, ‘this Tolchard?’

  ‘Too high and mighty for anybody around here, him and his highfalutin degree. He only had to stare her down, and she flopped. Just flopped.’

  I’d noticed the past tense. ‘He doesn’t now?’

  ‘Poor Clare,’ she said softly, her eyes on her hands, which were resting on the edge of the table. ‘Two funerals in three months. But does she come to me? No.
Only to throw out her orders.’

  ‘He died, three months ago?’

  ‘He fell down an iron staircase at the factory. She’s barely out of mourning for that one,’ she murmured.

  I could understand now why she found Clare’s attitude annoying. Clare had not come to Mary for sympathy and advice. ‘You realise what you’ve done?’ I asked her.

  ‘Upset her again.’

  ‘No, not that. But you’ve made it impossible, now, to refuse to show me the room.’

  ‘Yes.’ She lifted her face, a hint of humour in her eyes. ‘Haven’t I!’

  So there and then, before she changed her mind, she took me up the wooden staircase to a landing, which ran right across the house. Perhaps it gave her time to control her emotions.

  ‘Further along is the main staircase,’ she explained, her voice now casual. ‘Down to the hall.’ She had produced a key from her pocket.

  ‘That, too, was an accident?’ I asked, taking the key from her fingers because I wanted to feel the action of the lock.

  She knew what I was talking about: Aleric Tolchard’s death. I was trying the key in the lock, feeling the smooth movement of the wards, while she decided how to answer.

  When she spoke, it was an indirect answer, though her meaning was clear. ‘It was just after that when Walter had that lock fitted and came to live up here. For over two months he’s locked himself away.’

  The lock was new. The key, though small, was sufficiently complex to indicate it was virtually un-pickable. It was a safe deadlock. I opened the door.

  ‘What you’re saying,’ I told her, ‘is that Walter didn’t think Tolchard’s death was an accident.’

  She made a clicking noise with her tongue. ‘Shall we say that it was an accident that Walter thought had been intended for himself.’ Her voice was daintily precise. ‘He thought,’ she amplified, ‘that one of his children was trying to kill him.’

  4

  I continued to walk into the room, partly to keep my back to her. They kept on flinging themselves at me, these coincidences. Another death. Another accident. There had been a gap of three months between Aleric Tolchard’s death and Walter’s, but during the whole of that period Walter had feared for his life. It would be extraordinary if his death, when it came, had also been accidental.