wardrobe she selected a grey knitted frock with clear, pale blue buttons and a heavy coat, a dark navy blue that was almost black. She turned to the chest of drawers and dug out three pairs of woollen combinations and a knitted camisole. She needed stockings too, and stays. She studied the jumpers available, debating the merits of fawn cashmere or a tawny yellow silk, but decided in the end to squeeze in both of them. It was a struggle to close the lid of the suitcase.
She smoothed the coverlet where the suitcase had been and left the bedroom, locking the door behind her. It was possible that no one would know she had been here, not unless her maid went through her clothes. Lydia’s mind ran ahead to what she would do next: leave the suitcase in the cupboard under the stairs; collect the key to the study; look for the necklace and search Marcus’s desk in case there was anything that linked him to the attack on Mr Wentwood.
On the final flight of stairs to the hall, just as she was deciding that she should also look in Marcus’s bedroom, she heard the familiar sound of a key turning in the front door and the faint screech as the tumblers turned and the bolt withdrew into the lock.
There was no time to think. Burdened with the suitcase, she ran back to the first-floor landing. She staggered past the doors to the study and the drawing room to the lavatory at the end. This door was never locked when the house was empty. She put down the suitcase and slid the bolt across as quietly as she could. A familiar thud came from downstairs. Someone had closed the front door.
Lydia pressed her ear against the lavatory door and listened. All she heard was the uneven rhythm of her own breathing. The window was small and barred. Nothing much larger than a monkey could climb out of it. She was safe in the short term — unless somebody tried the door — but she was trapped.
Her mind jumped from one possibility to another: it was unlikely to be Mrs Eggling — she used the basement door; even less likely to be a burglar, by broad daylight and at the front door; so that meant it was almost certainly Marcus. On the whole she would have preferred it to be a burglar.
Time passed — less than twenty minutes according to her watch but far longer by any other standard. She was forced to use the lavatory, and the flow of urine into the pan seemed as deafening as a waterfall. She dared not pull the chain.
Then, somewhere beneath her, she heard another muffled thump.
Relief poured over her. The front door again — so whoever it was had gone. But her confidence had been badly shaken. She waited for another five minutes, just to make sure, and eased back the bolt. When the lavatory door was open, she waited, listening, for thirty seconds. The house around her was silent.
She picked up the suitcase and walked slowly towards the stairs, making sure she kept to the carpets rather than the bare boards on either side. The hallway widened at the head of the stairs. She tiptoed across the carpet. Suddenly she stopped. The door of Marcus’s study was now ajar.
Her brain refused to acknowledge what her eyes saw. She stared through the gap between door and jamb. Something was moving very quietly in the room beyond. It sounded for all the world as though someone were eating a sandwich with a good deal of relish and no regard for table manners.
Fear held her in a trance. She inclined her body gradually to the left so she could see more of the room. Details reached her in fragments, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle scattered on a tray, their meaning temporarily lost. A pair of man’s shoes, black and well polished. A pair of lady’s shoes, maroon suede, with peep-toes: very pretty, though impractical and perhaps a little fast — and definitely not suitable for church. Dark blue trousers. A rather daring pink day dress with a very tight skirt split up the side revealing nude stockings.
Lydia raised her eyes and suddenly most of the pieces in the jigsaw rearranged themselves on the tray and there was an almost complete picture, as plain and easy to understand as anything could be. Marcus was standing, but leaning against the back of an armchair. He was wearing his Old Marlburian tie and his dark blue suit. He was breathing through his mouth, which hung inelegantly open in an O. His head was thrown back and he was staring down his nose straight at Lydia in the doorway; or he would have been staring if his eyes had been open.
Oh you bastard, Lydia thought, oh you damned brute.
Kneeling in front of him with her back to the door was a woman, thin and graceful in the pink dress. Her dark head with its carefully set curls was bent. The head bobbed up and down with tiny movements like a bird pecking at a tasty morsel. Marcus’s hands rested on her shoulders.
The head stopped moving.
Still with his eyes closed and still with his blind face turned towards the door, Marcus whispered hoarsely, ‘Don’t stop. For Christ’s sake, don’t stop now.’
At that moment the last piece of the jigsaw dropped into place and there was no room for any ambiguity or misunderstanding, much as Lydia would have liked there to be. At that moment she snapped out of her trance. She ran down the stairs and along to the dusty hall. The suitcase banged against her leg. Her arm caught the vase and sent it flying against a radiator, whereupon it shattered into a shower of crystal. She wrenched open the front door and tumbled into the stuccoed respectability of Frogmore Place.
On Sunday morning Herbert Narton left the room he rented in Lambeth, locking the door behind him. He walked over the Thames and across London to Liverpool Street, where he bought a return ticket to Mavering. The journey took even longer on a Sunday afternoon than during the week. It was gone half past three before he reached the little station.
Nobody else left the train. He took the footpath by the church and plodded towards Rawling. At the fork he paused. He chose the right-hand path, though it was the longer way to the cottage. Outside the village he glanced incuriously at the Hall. Going to rack and ruin now the Alfordes were no longer there. His wife said the new people were a bunch of loonies — Theosophists or something, whatever that might mean, all physical jerks and higher thoughts — but she didn’t think they’d stay, which was just as well because their morals were no better than they should be.
The village itself came in sight. He wandered into the churchyard. It was horribly cold and no one was around. There were lights downstairs in the Vicarage and smoke curling up from its chimneys. Most of the inhabitants of Rawling, from the Vicar to Robbie Proctor, who was the next best thing to the village idiot, were having cups of tea in front of the fire.
Narton lingered at the lych gate. Ahead of him a flagged path stretched to the south door of the church. He had been married inside that church and come out of it with Margaret on his arm and his colleagues in their best blue uniforms lined up to greet them. It had been spring and he remembered vividly the fresh green leaves on the pleached limes on either side of the path. Now the limes were leafless, and their intertwined branches and twigs showed black against the grey tones of the grass, the stone walls and the sky. The trees were like opposing ranks of ghostly dancers about to sweep him into their midst and bear him away to a sinister end he could not begin to perceive.
Something nudged his memory — a conversation overheard between Malcolm Fimberry and Father Bertram at the chapel — something about a party in Bleeding Heart Square and a woman who danced with the devil. Narton had no truck with these old wives’ tales, but he knew who and where the devil was. The devil was alive and well and dividing his time between Morthams Farm and 7 Bleeding Heart Square. And now, according to young Wentwood, just to complicate matters that were already unbearably complicated, someone was sending parcels to him.
Narton left the path and zigzagged among the gravestones. The grass was long and wet and the damp seeped through his trousers. At the bottom of the churchyard was the area reserved for newer graves. He hesitated. Amy’s stone was near the yew in the corner.
It was bloody raining now, and the light was failing fast. Narton walked faster and faster, trying to put the cold and damp behind him, though God knew there was nothing at the other end worth hurrying to. Morthams Farm was half a mile to the left, screened by a ragged belt of trees, including three tall pines. He passed the opening of the rutted track up to the house and yard. The mailbox stood askew like a drunken sentinel on the corner. Aping the gentry, Serridge called the track a drive.
The road swung to the right. Around the bend was the dark oblong of his own house, with a light in the kitchen window. The cottage had two rooms upstairs and two rooms down, plus a scullery tacked on to the end. Narton’s father-in-law had spent all his working life on the Hall’s home farm, and the cottage had come with the job. After he retired, the Alfordes had let him stay there. His daughter Margaret worked at the Hall, and they had let
