stairs. A strange, nervy woman, he thought, all bones and breeding like a racehorse. He went back into his sitting room, pushed the typewriter aside and put the parcel on the table. It was addressed to him at Bleeding Heart Square but he didn’t recognize the writing. He cut the string with his penknife and pulled the brown paper apart. The paper was creased and with jagged edges, part of a larger sheet that had been used before.
There was another layer of darker brown paper underneath. The second layer wasn’t secured in any way. He saw material inside, some sort of tweed. He pulled it from its wrapping and held it up.
It was a skirt made of blue-green Irish tweed, rather worn in places. Part of the hem had come down. A sheet of lined paper fluttered from the folds of the skirt and down to the floor. He picked it up. The enclosure looked as if it had been torn from an exercise book. It was a letter, without date or address at the head, written in round, unformed writing.
Rory dropped the note on the table and picked up the inner packaging. Nothing was written on it apart from Mrs Renton’s name in neat, familiar handwriting.
Something blue protruded from the waistband of the skirt, an unsealed envelope also with Mrs Renton’s name on it in the same handwriting. Rory removed the single sheet of notepaper it contained.
Rory took out his writing case and compared the letter with the sample of Miss Penhow’s handwriting that he had found in the chest of drawers. There was no reason to doubt that they had been written by the same person.
He sat down at the table and lit a fourth and unlicensed cigarette. Mrs Renton — what on earth had she to do with this? Leaving that aside, nothing in the letter suggested that Miss Penhow was planning to leave Morthams Farm and Serridge. Nothing suggested that there was any strain between the two of them, either. On the other hand, if Miss Penhow had been devious, the letter might have been designed to throw Serridge off the scent. Rory’s mind followed the tortuous logic of this: but perhaps that implied that Miss Penhow expected Serridge to read the letter, and the further implication of that was that she had reason to believe that Serridge no longer trusted her. And then there was the question of how Narton had come to have the parcel. Rory could only assume that it had been taken as evidence when the police were investigating the disappearance of Miss Penhow, and that Narton had removed it for his own purposes after he had lost his job.
He smoked the rest of the cigarette. He folded the skirt and its accompanying letter in the brown paper and carried it downstairs to the first floor, where he knocked on the door of Ingleby-Lewis’s sitting room. Lydia opened the door.
‘Sorry to disturb you, but I wonder if you could advise me about this parcel.’ He shifted his position in order to get a better view, trying to establish whether or not Ingleby-Lewis was inside. ‘That is, if you’ve got a moment.’
‘Yes, of course.’ She stood back, holding the door open.
To Rory’s relief, there was no one else in the room. It looked as if Lydia had been writing a letter. ‘Are you busy?’
‘Nothing that can’t wait.’ She moved swiftly past him, slipped her letter under the blotter and capped her fountain pen.
‘What is it?’ she said, looking at the parcel.
‘It’s a skirt. It’s all rather odd.’ At that moment it occurred to him that he and Lydia had not talked properly for days and even then, at their lunch at the Blue Dahlia, he had said nothing about Narton. Lydia was looking at him with close attention, as if she found what she saw very interesting. He went on in a rush, ‘When we had lunch the other week, I told you something about Miss Penhow.’
‘I remember.’
Still standing, they faced each other across the table.
‘I didn’t tell you everything.’ He paused, and wished that she would say something. ‘In particular, I didn’t mention that I had been approached by a man called Narton, who’s been watching this house for some time. He said he was a plain-clothes police officer and he wanted my help. Like me, he was interested in the Penhow case. He said the police hadn’t been able to find any evidence that Serridge had done away with her, but they weren’t satisfied.’
‘A little man, middle-aged, in an old tweed coat and a hard collar?’
‘How did you know that?’
‘I saw you together once in the Blue Dahlia.’
‘You’re observant. You think there’s any chance that Serridge might have seen us too?’
Lydia shrugged. ‘Not that I know of. Anyway, what happened?’
‘He persuaded me to go to Rawling and talk to the Vicar. He said he couldn’t go himself, or one of his colleagues, because the Vicar was a chum of Serridge’s, and he didn’t want to run the risk of Serridge finding out that the police were still interested. But then I happened to discover that Narton himself lived in Rawling, which was something he hadn’t seen fit to tell me. The next thing was that I found a copy of the local newspaper in the dustbin downstairs when I was throwing out my rubbish.’ He wondered whether to mention the goat’s skull but decided to leave that until later. ‘It must have been Serridge’s. There was a stop-press item about a man who had died at a cottage in Rawling at the beginning of the week. It was Narton.’
The silence in the big, cold room lay heavily over everything. He watched Lydia swallow. He wished he hadn’t been such a fool as to mention this. She would blurt it all out to her father, who would tell Serridge. Or she would even tell Serridge herself, Serridge who might well be sweet on her.
‘I think we’d better sit down,’ Lydia said. ‘Don’t you?’
She sat down and waved him to the seat opposite hers. He laid the parcel on the table, dislodging the blotter in the process. Rory felt the muscles in his shoulders relax. He had been tense for a long time, he realized, though he had not been aware of it. The reason for the slackening of tension arrived in his mind a split second afterwards: it was a relief to have told someone about Narton at last, even Lydia Langstone, a woman whom he didn’t really know.
Shifting the blotter had exposed part of the letter that Lydia had been writing. Rory had just time to read the address, the date and the salutation of the letter:
Once again his muscles tensed. He hadn’t been open with her, so why should he expect her to be open with him?
She was looking at him, her lips slightly parted. ‘How did he die?’
‘While cleaning a shotgun.’
‘Which means it was probably suicide?’
