The Widows Club

was livid with you. I planned to murder you the minute I got out, but when I read that green notebook and realised that someone else was in all likelihood making the same plans, I didn’t have time for claustrophobia.”

I touched his face, so handsome, so concerned. “It was the same for me, in a way. When I became caught up in worrying about you, I stopped being frightened of food; I didn’t have time to concentrate on not eating.”

His arms entwined about me. “Ellie, don’t be afraid now. We’re going to the police; this monster-The Founder-will be stopped.” His lips brushed my throat. “We’ve made a lot of mistakes, but what can we expect, we are only beginners. I don’t suppose I’ll ever understand you completely. I don’t need to understand you to love you. All that matters is that I would have crawled through the centre of the earth to get to you and that I wasn’t too late.”

The moment was so fragile that I was afraid to say anything of what I felt, in case it broke. I cleared my throat and asked if Poppa was all right.

“Yes and no. Physically he’s fine, but he’s worried about how Mum’s feeling and consumed by guilt because in the shock of being plunged into the dungeon he accidentally spoke to me.”

“What made you look for me here?” I asked as Ben helped me to my feet.

“When we were racing up to the gates of Merlin’s Court, Poppa and I saw Miss Primrose Tramwell; she was in a flap about everyone being missing.” He touched his fingers to my lips. “It’s all right, darling. Everyone is found. Poppa is with them. I didn’t know where to look for you until we saw Sweetie coming along Cliff Road, and I clutched at the possibility you might have gone looking for her in the churchyard. When I turned that way, she ran back ahead of me and eventually in here to the cake.”

I shivered, as much at owing Sweetie a lifetime of gratitude as the memory of what I had been through. She had probably only come in here to ‘go’; so Roxie would claim anyway; but I would buy Sweetie a lifetime subscription to How to Train Your Owner. My mind began to whirl with questions. Had Ben and Poppa seen Edwin Digby when they exited in his cellar? What had befallen my comrades-in-arms? And… where was The Founder now?

Ben guided me to the door. “You have to get some fresh air, darling.”

As we stepped onto the grass, my legs went pulpy, and the noonday sky seemed to tilt. The Founder could be behind any one of a hundred tombstones. I gripped Ben’s hand tighter.

Mr. Digby was standing on the sun-dappled path, a gun in his hand, and my surprise was that I was surprised. Everything had pointed to him, but in his drunkenness he may have thought himself invincible. Mother was waddling around him in narrowing circles. I felt sorry for the goose. Mr. Digby’s purplish fingers were pointing the gun, not at Ben and me, but at someone standing in front of an angel monument.

“Mrs. Haskell.” His head moved an inch in my direction. “My abject apologies on behalf of my daughter Wren.”

Ben and I turned in slow motion.

“No!” I exclaimed. “She can’t be, she isn’t… this is Jenny! Jenny Spender.” I had suspected Bunty might be his daughter; she was the right age and admitted she used a nickname. Digby had said Wren was living with a man; gossip said Bunty and Lionel weren’t really married. But, Jenny! Ridiculous! On second thought, maybe not…

Her eyes, those eyes which I had always thought too old for a child’s face, drifted over me and fixed with the most chilling hatred on Mr. Digby’s face.

“Jenny Wren.” Ben stroked my hair back from my face. “Hyacinth Tramwell recorded all the clues in her little green book. That farthing, as well as the photograph in the pocket of the pin-striped suit you borrowed from Mr. Digby, suggested to yours truly that Jenny was the one. The farthing was the smallest coin in the realm and carried the symbol, on one of its sides, of the smallest British bird, the wren.”

“She was such a tiny baby,” Mr. Digby mused, “and she had given me that farthing in the happy days for a good-luck charm. It was easier to believe I had gone mad than to think of her grown evil. These past five years I have cowered in the bottle. But when you, Mr. Haskell, with parent in tow, burst into my house ranting about a widows club, I knew I had to pull the stopper, on myself, on my child.” The gun wavered but he steadied it with his free hand.

Ben stared into the wedge-shaped face framed by the childish plaits. “The Founder had to be someone who could observe and listen unnoticed. A hairdresser? A solicitor? A secretary? A charwoman? All good possibilities, but what better cover than that of a child?”

Jenny smiled, her fingers gripping the angel’s marble wings as if she would snap them.

“You were at Abigail’s the night of Charles Delacorte’s death,” Ben continued, addressing her, “carrying a white plastic raincoat. How convenient! I suppose you walked into the office, smothered him, and wore the murder weapon off the premises.” He paused. “Did you inherit your stage presence from your mother, along with your father’s macabre imagination? Was she eternally youthful, like you?”

“I can’t sing like Mummy,” said Jenny in that dreadful childish voice, “but I do have her ear, as well as her great sense of timing.” Her laughter went right through me. “I was able to phone all the ladies in the aerobics class- pretending to be Bunty Wiseman-and I cancelled the rehearsal. Then I rang her up, claiming to be Miss Thorn, saying the church hall wasn’t available. A clever ploy, wasn’t it, Mrs. Haskell,” she twiddled with a plait, “to get us alone?”

Ben continued remorselessly, his hand tightening around mine. “Ann Delacorte recognised your mother as Sylvania, the singer on whom she had an almost schoolgirl crush, when she went to the Dower House that day with Ellie. That idea sneaked up on me when I read that the nanny called your mother Vania. And I’ll wager the record being played was one of hers, from her heyday. The excitement caused Ann to turn faint-two thrills in one day, Lionel Wiseman and now the discovery of her idol.” Ben shook his head. “Foolish Ann. She made a big mistake. She thought The Founder was pretending to be an invalid, not a child. And she was gripped by the sort of groupie closeness that gave her the confidence to go and ask a favour. That green car that slashed past you, Ellie, when you made your pregnant visit to The Peerless, I wonder if it was Ann’s Morris Minor?”

“I really enjoyed killing her.” Jenny’s voice wasn’t a child’s anymore. It seemed especially evil that she should make such a pronouncement in this little place of consecrated ground. “I became quite expert at archery when Daddy here was doing research for his book, Robin of Nottinghill Gate. Simon tried to talk me out of retiring Mrs. Delacorte. He said it might stir up a panic among the widows, but Simon always comes around to my way of thinking. That’s what love does-it turns people into fools. I rather enjoy watching the good doctor squirm for me the way my mother used to squirm for Daddy.”

“Not true, Wren,” said Edwin Digby.

“Yes, she did. She, the sparkling, glittering Sylvania, who had men reaching for her every time she stepped on stage and lit it up with her voice. She was ageless and she loved you, God only knows why, you ugly man, only to discover that you were trying to relive some adolescent passion with your secretary, the washed up, washed out Lady Peerless.” Jenny took on Teddy’s toothiness. “And because of you and your unfaithfulness, my mother, my exquisite mother, stuck her head in the oven and wasn’t lucky enough to die. She became a husk. I can look in her eyes and call, but she isn’t there.”

Edwin Digby took a step toward his daughter and then retreated, the gun dangling in his hand. “Wrong, Wren! Your mother never really loved me. Her one passion was her career; she would never acknowledge she was married, even after you were born. She was obsessed with keeping up the aura of being unattainable. She insisted that I use the pseudonym Edwin Digby-in private life, to tighten the veil of secrecy, and you were kept hidden away with her childhood nanny.”

He was a figure out of a vampire skit, with his twirled eyebrows and beard forked by the wind. “Teddy and I had been youthful sweethearts, but Sylvania demanded that I sever all ties with the past. Think what you will of me, all of you!” His eyes glared at Ben and me as well as his daughter. “Teddy is guiltless!” The words might sound as if they came from one of his books, but I felt drops of water on my face, that weren’t rain. “She did not realise she would be working for me when she applied for the post of my secretary, ten long years ago. She had known me under my real name of Robert Burns, which-” his rheumy eyes were turned fully on Ben and me now, “I never used professionally, for obvious reasons.”

“And you fell in love.” Jenny (she would always be that to me) made the words sound like gutter ones.

“I swear there was no unfaithfulness. What drove your mother mad”-Mr. Digby’s lips twisted-“was the idea of so unworthy a rival.”

Jenny smiled mockingly. “You did not think it unfaithful to ask Mumma for a divorce.”

I said, to be saying something, “The parrot in Teddy’s office talks like one of your characters, Mr. Digby.”