Bleeding Heart Square

Rory glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Would you mind if we start? I promised to meet Dawlish for a drink, and I haven’t used my shorthand for months, not properly. And it’s like speaking a language, you see. If you don’t use it for a while you have to get your ear in again.’

‘Does it matter what I talk about?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve got it all worked out. I think it will be best to start with something completely unseen, completely unexpected. And then try something political from the paper — something with the same sort of vocabulary as they’re likely to be using tomorrow. Afterwards I’ll try and read it back to you.’ He smiled at her. ‘Are you sure you don’t mind? I know it’s an awful lot to ask.’

‘It’s all right. We’ve had supper — there’s nothing else I need to do.’ That was untrue. If you didn’t have servants, Lydia had discovered, there was always something you needed to do. ‘I’ll just talk away then. Are you ready?’

He picked up his newly sharpened pencil and turned over a page in his shorthand pad. ‘Fire away, Lydia — oh damn. Sorry. Mrs Langstone, I mean.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You can call me Lydia if you want.’

‘As long as you call me Rory. Right, Lydia. I’m as ready as I ever will be.’

‘I talked to Mrs Renton,’ Lydia began, her cheeks a little pinker than before. ‘I showed her the skirt and the note. She used to do sewing for Miss Penhow. Mr Serridge introduced them. She even made some clothes for her.’ Lydia watched Rory’s pencil travelling across the paper. ‘Then Miss Penhow moved to the country, and she lost touch.’ She paused again. ‘As a matter of fact I went to Rawling yesterday.’

The point of the pencil snapped. ‘What were you doing in Rawling, for God’s sake?’

‘My godfather used to live there. His wife had to go down for a funeral. I went with her.’

Rory pushed the pad away from him, abandoning the shorthand. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t even begin to understand.’

She smiled at him. ‘It’s much less complicated than it seems.’

‘Just a whacking great big coincidence. Yet another.’

‘Not really. Serridge only bought Morthams Farm because my father sold it to him. My father only owned it because he was left it by old Mrs Alforde. My godfather is another Alforde — so he’s a sort of cousin by marriage to my father. That’s why he’s my godfather — he and Father used to know each other long before I was on the scene. The Alfordes know my mother too — they came to my wedding, actually. My mother asked Mrs Alforde to talk to me. To try to persuade me to go back to Marcus.’

Rory looked consideringly at her. ‘And did she?’

‘Yes and no.’ The colour rose in her cheeks. ‘She tried but she didn’t succeed.’ She rushed on, stumbling a little over her words. ‘My mother and father met at Rawling. In a way the Alfordes connect everything, you see. Mrs Narton worked at the Hall when they were there. And so did Rebecca at the Vicarage.’

‘You met her?’

‘When we had lunch with Mr Gladwyn. It didn’t end there, either. I went to have a look at that little barn you mentioned, the one with the skulls. Robbie shut me in. He thought I was trying to steal his skulls.’

He whistled. ‘As the goat’s skull was stolen?’

‘According to Rebecca, he’s convinced Narton took it.’

‘When?’

‘Probably a few days before he died.’

‘I saw him on Saturday,’ Rory said. ‘He could have posted it then. So Robbie thought you were another skull thief? How did you get out?’

‘I banged on the door. Mr Serridge rescued me in the end.’

‘Serridge? What was he up to? Was he following you?’

Lydia shivered. ‘I’m not sure. He was very strange — in one way he was as nice as pie to me. But he was also rather terrifying. I’m sure he’s up to something. And there was another thing — I found something else on the shelf with the skulls, a cigar box. Rebecca told me that when she worked at Morthams Farm, Miss Penhow kept her diary in it. She thinks Miss Penhow was hiding it from Serridge.’

‘When did you manage to talk to Rebecca?’

‘Afterwards, at the Vicarage. I felt rather sorry for her. I imagine Robbie’s hers, don’t you?’

‘What? Why do you think that?’ Rory felt, as he often did when talking to his sisters, that where relationships were concerned they were equipped with a form of perception that he lacked. ‘I thought he was her nephew.’

‘He may be, I suppose. But she dotes on him. It’s far more likely he was Rebecca’s little accident, and her sister unofficially adopted him.’

‘Anything else?’ he asked with a trace of sarcasm in his voice. ‘Or have you pulled the last rabbit out of the hat for the time being?’

‘There’s the heart this morning,’ she said, smiling back at him.

‘I know about that. Serridge and Byrne were having a row about it when I went out this morning. Howlett came and calmed them down.’

‘It was nasty,’ she said soberly.

‘Sorry,’ he said perfunctorily. ‘I’ve got a couple of scraps of information of my own,’ he went on. ‘Nothing to compare with yours but better than nothing. I saw a photograph of Miss Penhow at Fenella’s. She looked quite pretty, but Fenella said she was older than she looked.’

‘According to Rebecca, she spent a lot of time and effort trying to make herself look youthful. It was rather pathetic, actually — she was trying to make herself attractive to Serridge, and he only had an eye for the girls.’

Rory looked at his watch again. ‘I’d better go. Are you coming tomorrow?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘My husband will be there. Not to mention my future brother-in-law.’

Rory saw her out of the flat. At the head of the stairs he said, ‘By the way, talking of photographs, you remember the one Rebecca showed me?’ He lowered his voice. ‘Amy Narton in the altogether on Serridge’s bike? There was a little dog in it. There was also a dog in that photograph of Miss Penhow. It could have been the same one. Yesterday I was standing outside by the pub and someone went by on a bicycle. Nipper was there. And that was when it clicked: the dog in both photos looks just like Nipper.’

Fenella was a bitch. In fact, she was a bloody bitch. And if one were to be absolutely precise about it, as Virginia Woolf would no doubt wish one to be, Fenella was a bloody, calculating bitch.

Lydia huddled over the fire in the big cold sitting room of her father’s flat with A Room of One’s Own open but unread on the arm of her chair. It was a short book but was proving very hard to finish.

She was pleased for Rory — of course she was: she hadn’t seen him so happy and excited since she had met him. But she couldn’t help suspecting that Fenella had an ulterior motive. Perhaps she was one of those women who are constitutionally incapable of releasing old lovers: they want to retain the advantages of the relationship without the romantic drawbacks. Fenella was keeping Rory dangling and she was probably doing the same with the unfortunate but well-connected Julian Dawlish.

She had to face facts, Lydia told herself: one reason she felt unsettled was that if Rory became a regular contributor to magazines like Berkeley’s, he would no longer have to live at Bleeding Heart Square. The only things that connected them were the accident of their being under the same roof and this disturbing business about Miss Penhow. And it was all so humiliating too — she really didn’t want to be so interested in an unemployed journalist who had been to a grammar school and had holes in his socks. She wasn’t in love with him — it was simply a morbid fascination that had nothing to do with Rory but everything to do with Marcus.

If she didn’t soon find a more effective distraction than Virginia Woolf, she would drown in her own thoughts. There was no one to talk to — she was alone in the house; even Mrs Renton’s room was in darkness. She could hardly swagger into the saloon bar of the Crozier and order a large whisky. Without warning, she had an acute sense of her own isolation and, before she knew what was happening, she felt tears in her eyes.

But she was damned if she was going to wallow in self-pity. She looked around the room, for distraction, for anything that would take her away from her own emotions. Her eyes fell on her father’s old writing box, which was still on the shelf on the left of the fireplace. Fimberry had disturbed her when she was looking at it before.

She put the box on the dining-room table and removed the lid with its broken hinges. Inside was the jumble of dried-up inks, stubs of sealing wax, rusty nibs and paper clips, broken pencils and scraps of paper. There was the