Chapter Eighteen
On Monday morning I waited for Mrs. Billings in vain, standing by the kettle, teabags at the ready, expecting to hear the crunch of Mr. B’s van on the gravel at any moment.
When she was more than half an hour late, I went up to the top floor, looking out of the windows for any sign of her.
There was none, but what I did see was a bright pink head bobbing around in the fields: Emma Beddoe, no doubt looking for something scandalous to put in her article.
I didn’t care, she wouldn’t find anything there.
Those fields were part of the east farm, tenanted by the Tate family, and I hadn’t been near them for years.
She was wearing a purple T-shirt, and it was as dire as all her other outfits.
Just as I was starting to worry about Mrs. B, my phone rang and I learned that there was, indeed, something to be worried about.
“Lady Langley, it’s Eric Billings,” the voice at the other end said. “Brenda and I won’t be in today. I’m afraid there’s been a bit of trouble.”
“Is Mrs. B alright?” I asked.
“Oh yes. Well, she’s not been taken poorly, if that’s what you mean. The thing is, we had the police here this morning, wanting to ask her a few things. She’s gone down to the station. I’m going to go down and wait for her.”
The phone! They’d tracked it back to her. To us. Then I remembered all the kleptomania; maybe it had caught up with her. Decades of stealing must have racked up quite a long list of crimes. But the phone seemed more likely.
“I’ll get James to get her a solicitor,” I said, remembering her own advice to me. “Tell her not to say anything until they get there.” It may well be an untrustworthy solicitor that he sent, but this affected both of us, so James would probably tell him to do a decent job.
“Well, she’s there now. I can’t really tell her anything,” Mr. B said.
“I’ll tell him it’s urgent.”
The news had put me into such a dither, my fingers fumbled as I tried to call James; we needed a solicitor fast, before that chatterbox overcame her nerves and started talking. I wondered again if I should have polished Mrs. B off when I had the chance. Had I hesitated too long and sealed my fate?
“What now?” James said, as he answered the phone.
The solicitor was soon sorted after that, and I made myself a cup of tea.
***
Mrs. B was back at work on Thursday.
“Lord James got me a state-of-the-art solicitor,” she said proudly, dunking her custard cream into her tea. “I’ll have to thank him for that.”
“What did they ask you?”
Mrs. B looked pensive. She took another biscuit and dunked for so long that some of it broke off and sank to the bottom of the cup, and I gagged slightly.
“I’m not allowed to divulge information about an ongoing inquiry,” she said in the end.
“You told them that?”
“No, of course not. That’s what I’m telling you. I’m not allowed to talk about it.” She took a long slurp of her tea, then she asked me, “Where did you find that bag? That brown bag that I found downstairs? You said it was Lord James’s, but I don’t think it was.”
I took a custard cream myself and dunked it for as long as I dared, but not for as long as Mrs. B because, when biscuits break off into my tea, the memory of the sludge it creates at the bottom stays with me for hours.
“I thought it was James’s bag,” I said in the end. “He has one just like it, but you probably haven’t seen it because he takes it with him to work.”
I waited to see if she was going to tell me anything else.
“Have you still got it?” she asked, and it took me three gulps of tea to decide whether to say yes or no.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I haven’t seen it since.”
Mrs. B picked up her duster and polish and headed for the stairs.
Did she know about Lennie or not? Did she know it was his bag?
I thought so. But did she know I knew it was his bag?
I didn’t know. And what about the phone?
Had she taken the phone? What had she done with it?
Had she told the police? Again, I didn’t know.
I wanted to scream. The one thing I did know was that there was probably no point in killing her now; presumably she had already done her worst. I found that was quite a weight off my mind.
My next question was, who was that knocking on the door? My first guess turned out to be correct: It was Parker and Khan again.
This time, they wanted to ask me all about my fragile mental health.
There was no need for us to go to the station this time, so presumably they wanted to poke their noses around the house.
I offered to give them the tour, but they said they didn’t need the tour.
All they needed to know at that moment was, did I want my solicitor present?
I phoned Tarquin, and he arrived half an hour later.
“James told us you’ve had some psychological issues,” DS Khan said, leaning forward and speaking quietly to try to make herself sound sympathetic.
“Not really,” I said, and when Tarquin gave me the side-eye, I wondered why I’d said that. I corrected myself. “Not at all.”
“He said you were in quite a state when he first met you.”
“My mother had recently died. I was upset. Isn’t that normal?”
“It is normal, yes, but he said you’d had a complete breakdown.”
“I hadn’t.”
“He said the house was in a state of chaos. Most of the appliances were broken, the housework was never done. There had been a fire; he thinks you may have set it yourself.”
“No, I didn’t!”
“He said you were clearly not coping and wondered if he should phone social services.”
I had to take a minute at that. He was going to phone social services? I wasn’t a child.
“I didn’t have the money to replace things and I was working long hours, trying to make ends meet, so I got behind with the housework. It was a long time ago. What’s it got to do with now?”
“James says he decided not to get outside agencies involved because you seemed to turn a corner when you met him, but you never quite recovered and you’ve deteriorated since. He says you shut yourself away in the house, never seeing anyone except him.”
“I see Mrs. Billings.”
“The cleaner?”
“Some weeks I see Mr. Billings.”
“He says that you’re keeping some kind of tally on the bedroom wall and that lately you have been wearing increasingly bizarre outfits…”
Everyone took a moment to appreciate the dungarees I was wearing that day, handmade from a selection of old jackets. Their silent appraisal and the withering description James must have given them stung.
“I don’t shut myself in the house,” I said. “I go into the village sometimes. I went to the Bone Bonanza.”
“Wearing those clothes.”
“It was just a T-shirt I’d modified slightly on that day. And a skirt.”
“What does this have to do with your investigation?” Tarquin asked, speaking up for the first time. “I assume that’s why you’re here.”
“We’re wondering if Daisy is really in a fit state to drive these days, and if she was in a fit state to drive on the night of the accident,” DS Khan said. “These things can be taken into account at sentencing.” For better or for worse, I suspected.
“I’m fit to drive and I’m fit to be left in charge of a sewing machine,” I said.
“I did not run Lennie Green over. If you think anyone in this house is mad, think of James.” And I told them about the family tree—ten children—and the cheap coat of arms, made in Nevada, and the titles he had bought. I told them all about it.
DC Parker smiled. “It’s nice to set up a family heirloom.”
“Ten children!” I repeated, but he ignored me.
“That is a lot,” Tarquin agreed. “I’m exhausted with three.” But Parker ignored him as well.
They wrapped the interview up there, but as they got ready to leave, Khan said, “Is it OK if I use the toilet? Do you have one downstairs?”
Of course we did. I pointed her in the right direction and a minute later she returned, her hands in gloves, asking Parker for an evidence bag. She was carrying Lennie’s wallet! It was wrapped in plastic, which was dripping wet.
She looked at me. “Do you know whose this is?” she asked. I shook my head. “When we check this for fingerprints, we’re not going to find yours, are we?”
I stared back. Of course they were going to find my fingerprints.
“Yes,” I said. “You will. I found it when I was walking out in the fields. I didn’t look inside.
I just brought it back here and James said he’d drop it into the SPAR on his way to work and they could put it in their lost property locker.
” Lost property was an unofficial service offered by most of the local businesses in the village.
“He must have forgotten. Where did you find it?”
“In the cistern in your downstairs toilet. James said he’d been having some trouble flushing it and when he looked in the cistern, he found out why. He didn’t say anything about you finding it in a field.”
James never used that bathroom. I stared at the wallet.
Yes, they were going to find my fingerprints, but they were also going to find James’s.
He been through everything in it. Then I remembered the wine I had drunk and the times I had been out of the room that night.
And at the end of the evening, he got me to put the wallet and address book in the case with the keys for the classic cars.
Had he been planning this even back then?
I shrugged. “Nothing to do with me,” I said.
And she said, “Nothing to worry about then.” She smiled. Then she arranged for me to nip into Tippington police station to have my fingerprints taken, for comparison.
I thought I’d held my nerve, but as they left, I felt very shaken.
I looked at Tarquin, but his expression wasn’t giving anything away.
Had my husband and my solicitor cooked this up between them, I wondered?
Tarquin hadn’t said much during the interview and now that I thought about it, the side-eye he gave me might have been a look of victory at my mistake.
I wished his face would move to give me an idea of what he was thinking.
It’s hard knowing who to trust when you don’t know whether or not your solicitor is corrupt.
I watched him walking to his car with a sign on his back saying “kick me.” It must have been there all day because I hadn’t stuck it on him, and for all their faults, I didn’t think Parker or Khan had either. It was hard to reconcile a hapless father with a corrupt solicitor.
Then I went to the key case and unlocked it.
One good thing about the accident and following incident was that, in the aftermath, James seemed to have forgotten about his plan to install cameras in the house to monitor me, so I still had unfettered access to the priest hole.
The address book was still in the key case.
I took it and hid it in the priest hole.