feeds them.’
She set off towards the house. Nipper backed away, squatted and scratched vigorously behind his left ear with a hind leg. Fleas, probably, Rory thought. Behind him there was the ring of a bicycle bell and one of the mechanics at the workshop at the end of the square cycled past. It was the conjunction of those two factors, the bicycle and the dog scratching its ear, that collided with a third item that was lying like an unexploded bomb in his memory.
Mrs Renton was unlocking the door of the house. ‘Are you coming, Mr Wentwood?’ she called. ‘I haven’t got all day, you know.’
‘Oh dear. Oh dear me. A fall? How very unfortunate.’
Lydia stripped off her ruined gloves. ‘No bones broken. It was all my fault. Luckily Mr Serridge came to my rescue.’
Cheerfulness broke like sunshine across Mr Gladwyn’s round, red face. ‘Serridge — yes. One of nature’s gentlemen. Rebecca, take Mrs Langstone upstairs and see what you can do to help.’
Lydia held up her arms as Rebecca helped her out of her coat. ‘Is Mrs Alforde back?’
‘No — she’s still at Mrs Narton’s, I presume.’ Mr Gladwyn gnawed his lower lip. ‘She wouldn’t want us to wait for her, I’m sure, especially in the circumstances. You’ll need something to sustain you, Mrs Langstone. As soon as you are ready, we shall have tea.’ He glided into his study to wait for it.
‘This way, madam.’ Rebecca led Lydia towards the stairs. ‘I’ll see what I can do with the coat while you’re having your tea.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But I’m not sure there’s much we can do with the gloves,’ Rebecca said as they climbed the stairs.
‘Throw them away.’ Lydia wondered how long she would have to work at Shires and Trimble to earn enough for another pair of gloves like that.
Rebecca showed her into a guest bedroom with its own washbasin. Lydia removed her hat and stared at her pale face in the mirror above the taps. How on earth had that smear of mud arrived on her nose? Rebecca brought towels and a flannel. She murmured that the WC and bathroom were next door.
Lydia turned on the hot tap and picked up the flannel. ‘Rebecca?’
‘Yes, madam?’
‘I went to the little barn.’ She watched the maid’s face in the mirror. ‘The one you can see from the lane. Where Amy Narton died.’
Rebecca’s face remained blank and faintly disapproving, the face of a well-trained servant.
‘I didn’t fall over,’ Lydia went on, turning off the tap. ‘Someone shut me in. They wedged the door closed with a bit of piping. That’s how I ruined the gloves, by picking up a brick and hammering on the door.’
‘Oh, madam,’ Rebecca said. ‘Shall I ask Mr Gladwyn to call the police?’
‘That depends. I think I know who did it, you see.’ Lydia rubbed at a smear of mud that had unaccountably appeared on her cheek. ‘There was a fresh footprint in the mud underneath where the piping was lying. Someone with small feet. A child, probably.’ She rinsed the flannel and wrung it out. ‘So that means it was almost certainly Robbie.’
The colour slipped away from Rebecca’s face. But most of all Lydia noticed her eyes, the way they moved to and fro, looking for something that couldn’t be found. It was a miserable business, bullying someone, which was what this came down to.
‘What — what do you know about Robbie, madam? You do mean my nephew?’
‘Yes. I know that you’re fond of him. And I know that the barn is a special place because no one else normally goes there, even Mr Serridge. Perhaps especially Mr Serridge.’
‘Did Mrs Alforde tell you, madam?’
‘Not about Robbie. Mr Wentwood did. As it happens, he’s a friend of mine.’
Rebecca let out her breath but said nothing.
Lydia picked up the towel and turned to face her. ‘It’s all right. I don’t want to make life difficult for Robbie. Or for you. But I thought you should know what happened. And there’s something else: Mr Serridge said the barn was dangerous. He’s going to have it pulled down.’
‘I’m so sorry, madam. I just don’t know what to say. If Mr Gladwyn hears that-’
‘There’s no reason why he should,’ Lydia interrupted.
‘You see, he’s so funny about that barn and the skulls. Robbie, I mean. They’re … they’re special.’
‘His private Golgotha?’
For the first time Rebecca smiled, as one woman to another. ‘Yes. Mr Wentwood told you about that.’
Lydia turned back to the basin and buried her face in the flannel again. Afterwards she said, ‘You’d better warn Robbie. He’ll want to move his skulls.’
‘There’s no harm in them,’ Rebecca said, as though Lydia had said something quite different. ‘It’s just that they’re like toys to him. Or even friends. He was that upset when one of them went. I don’t know what he’d do if they all did.’
‘When he lost the goat’s skull?’
The maid nodded. ‘He thinks it was old Narton.’
‘Hold on.’ Lydia dried her face again and sat down at the dressing table. ‘Sergeant Narton? When?’
‘I’m not sure. Robbie’s not very good with time. Must have been only a few days before he died.’
‘Are you sure he meant Narton?’
‘Yes. He saw him coming out early one morning. He didn’t dare go up to him. Narton hit him once.’
Lydia picked up the hairbrush. ‘Robbie told you all this?’
The maid hovered at Lydia’s shoulder. ‘He can speak more than you’d think, madam. It’s just that he doesn’t like doing it with strangers and it takes a bit of practice to understand what he’s saying.’ She bent closer. ‘Are you really not going to do anything?’
‘About Robbie this afternoon? Of course not.’ For a moment she thought the maid was about to burst into tears. ‘It didn’t matter.’
‘Thank you. He was a bit funny today, you know, a bit overwrought. That must have been why he shut you in. He probably thought you were after the other skulls.’
It occurred to Lydia that at no point had Rebecca questioned Lydia’s accusation: she had assumed that it was perfectly likely, even probable, that Robbie had shut her in the barn.
‘I’ll take the coat down to the kitchen, shall I, and dry it by the fire. That mud will soon brush off.’
‘Thank you. Tell me, what was she like? Miss Penhow, I mean.’
‘I called her Mrs Serridge, of course. She was all right, quite a nice little thing. I was only with her for a week or two, but we got on fine. She gave herself airs sometimes but there was no harm in it. And you couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. She was so unhappy.’
‘Was that obvious?’
Rebecca nodded. ‘She wanted to follow him around like a spaniel but he wasn’t having any of it. She spent a lot of time crying. Or sulking, or trying to coax him round. She thought — she thought she was, well, attractive to him. That she could win him round that way. But then she found she couldn’t.’
‘Was she pretty?’
Rebecca shrugged. ‘She could make herself look well enough. She needed an hour in the morning to get ready. I used to help her sometimes, and she was so fussy. But she dressed quite well, I’ll say that for her. And she wasn’t bad-looking, either, not when she had her teeth in and she’d had her hair tinted. She was a lady who needed her rouge and powder. Even so, you could see just by looking at them together that he was a good ten or fifteen years younger. And then if you saw her when she wasn’t ready for company, you saw how old she really was. I dare say she felt younger than she was.’
‘We all feel that.’
‘Anyone with half an eye could see it was pointless.’
‘What do you mean?’
Rebecca drew herself up and stood primly, her hands clasped together in front of her. ‘He likes the younger ones, madam. Girls.’
Lydia stood up, leaving the towel draped on the end of the bed and the flannel on the edge of the basin. Rebecca folded the coat neatly over her arm and opened the door. It was odd, Lydia thought, and rather unsettling,
