would only start worrying about how tired she’d be the next morning, and she loved her mornings.’
‘So…’
‘So, there was no downstairs entertainments on that evening as there would be at weekends — we bring in singers and such, the residents love it — nor did she come down to watch any television with the others, despite there being a documentary on that I’d thought would be right up her street. Indeed, I believe my sighting of her coming back from her walk at eight is still the last time anyone saw her that night.’
‘It is.’
‘So, I know from times I’ve called on her by evening, that if she knew she was staying in and wasn’t expecting any visitors then you could find her relaxing in her nightclothes at any time after her walk.’
‘So she could have been dressed like that from eight?’
‘Yes; and with it being a dull night, most likely closed the curtains at the same time. But…’ and an air or expectation hung over the pause, ‘…on such a lazy evening she wouldn’t be in bed any later than half-nine.’
‘She’d go to sleep so early?’
‘Maybe not to sleep, but by that time she’d be reading in bed or listening to the radio there.’
‘So to be caught dressed like that, but with her bed still undisturbed…’
‘What time to you think… it occurred?’
‘The doctor can’t say for certain yet.’
‘But you’re thinking later rather than earlier?’
Grey nodded, wondered momentarily who was running this investigation; as she continued,
‘In which case, why had Stella gone up to spend the evening in her room, put on her pyjamas to relax, but then not gone to bed? What was keeping her up till, well, who knows how late? And that’s not all.’
Grey hoped this wasn’t going to get complicated.
‘Now the documentary almost everyone was watching downstairs finished at ten, and so for the next while the place would have been alive with people going up to bed, and with the orderlies checking on people after that. That would push us toward eleven o’clock before anyone could have hoped to have gotten up and down those stairs without being seen.’
There was another option, which Grey resisted offering but knew he had to,
‘Forgive me, but you’re assuming the person on the stairs was someone a person wouldn’t expect to see there…’
‘One of us? Do such a thing? Unthinkable.’ Rachel bridled on the bench, Grey fearing she was about to get up and end their talk.
‘Is it so unthinkable?’ He trod gently, ‘She appears to have let them in… you saw for yourself that her door and windows had not been damaged the night before…’
She answered calmly, ‘Inspector, you want me to countenance the possibility that one of our residents or staff, one of my friends, performed this act? Accept that community spirit has broken down to that degree even in such a building as ours? And you think that that’s a world I can bear to imagine living in?’
She summarised, ‘Now, something had kept Stella in her room last night, had kept her up later than usual; someone — even if someone she knew — got into her room and out again without being seen at the busiest time of the night, as I cannot believe she wouldn’t have at least been in bed by the time the building would have quietened down. Something earlier that evening — possibly involving her student who Derek saw on the stairs a little before — must have already disturbed her enough to keep her up at least a good hour later than she would have expected. And that’s what we need you to find out, Inspector; and I can’t help you.’
‘Why?’ he asked; to her bewilderment,
‘Because I wasn’t there.’
Once again it was brought home to Grey how out of the loop he was with this case, when he hadn’t even seen people’s statements of where they were the previous night.
‘You’ve told all this to one of the officers in the dayroom?’
‘Some of it.’
‘So tell me too.’
‘I get three evenings off a week — the orderlies are there, and I keep my mobile on.’
The spare nature of that answer left Grey awash with new questions for her; but he also knew he had much to get back to the Cedars to sort out,
‘Ms Sowton, I need to ask one last big question: you say she wouldn’t have changed into her nightclothes had she been expecting visitors…’
‘Ah, but you’re wondering if there aren’t certain visitors for whom it’s a positive advantage to have changed into your nightclothes for?’
Her candour relieved the tension from the question.
‘It’s good of you to grant our residents the possibility of a sex life, Inspector. So few do, especially the families. The old are as entitled to romance as anyone else in the world — in my time we’ve had four marriages and who knows how many affairs.’
‘And Ms Dunbar?’
‘Stella was not one of them.’
‘Never?’
She paused before answering, ‘I’m not going to claim to be the one who knew her best, though I’ve as good a claim as any for the years I’ve worked here; but we’re in and out of their rooms every day, and so there’s no way that if something was going on that we wouldn’t know about it.’
‘So, to the best of your knowledge…’
‘To the best of my knowledge. Now, before they start to miss me…’
The pair rose for the short walk back, Grey looking to the trees,
‘I can see why she’d want to be up early, waking to a view like that.’
‘She was early to bed and early to rise, always down for breakfast by eight.’
‘Hence Mr Prove’s concern at her tardiness?’
‘Yes. She hadn’t had a job to get up for for years, but had never got into the habit of lying in. Some people can’t, even when they’ve earned the right. She always called morning the best part of the day, when the light was brightest and her mind the clearest and she could get the most done. She did like a nap in the afternoons though, before her students came.’
‘So what did she spend her mornings doing?’
‘I’m not sure; she would be in her room though mostly — reading, writing perhaps? Preparing for lessons, maybe just thinking. Some of our residents can spend a happy half-day in their heads, you know, Inspector: they think about their children when they were young, the jobs they had, family holidays; like in that poem.’
‘ The Old Fools.’
‘Yes, although I wouldn’t go with the title. They have their breakfast, lodge themselves in a wicker chair in the dayroom, and then they’re off to Weston forty years ago.’
‘Was Stella… I mean Ms Dunbar…’
‘It’s okay,’ she smiled, ‘I heard Charlie ask you to call her by her first name. I agree, you need to be her friend, you need to earn her trust.’
‘I’ll try and remember,’ he smiled. ‘So, you were saying?’
‘Of course. Well, Stella wasn’t a dreamer in the absent-minded sense, she was still too keen-witted for that; but I bet she had a lot of history to dip into when she wanted to… if she wanted to.’
They had reached the front of the Cedars, Rachel Sowton looking up to the top floor and saying,
‘That was her window. In the summer she’ll… she’d keep her curtains open all evening watching it go dark.’
‘You get to know a lot about your residents?’
‘More than some of my lovers. But then who ever really knows anyone when then love them?’
‘And what did you know of Stella?’
She looked back down to the Inspector, ‘Even those who knew her didn’t know her. There are decades unaccounted for. Come on.’
She led him along the service road to the doors at the back at the building.
‘You know, I don’t know who’ll run this place now,’ she smiled, already able to remember her dead
