Читать книгу In the Event of My Death - Emma Page - Страница 8

CHAPTER 3

It was easy to imagine Nina Dalton as a fashion model, with her tall, willowy figure, fine-boned face, honey-coloured skin and large, expressive eyes of a clear golden amber. Her wealth of pale blonde hair, full of natural waves and curls, was taken up on top of her head, displaying the graceful line of her neck.

She had worked for charity in one capacity or another, paid or voluntary, since the day she had left secretarial college. She wasn’t a native of Brentworth but came from a small town some distance away. It was when she was on the payroll of a national charitable organization that she had first met Matthew Dalton; she had called on him in the course of a fundraising campaign directed largely at businessmen.

She had walked in through the door of his office at a crucial moment in Matthew’s life. He had just managed to break away from a long entanglement with an older woman, a divorcée, good-looking and sophisticated, with more than one string to her bow. Matthew had finally realized the relationship was leading nowhere, it was time his bachelor days were done; what he needed now was a conventional marriage, settled and supportive. He married Nina three months after she walked into his office.

She had spent the latter part of Friday morning dealing swiftly and competently with the affairs of a small local charity set up a hundred and fifty years ago for the benefit of retired governesses by a wealthy widow who had herself been a governess before her marriage. The endowment, so munificent seeming in its day, was now greatly eroded and governesses were a dying breed. These days, the charity’s business required only an hour or two of Nina’s time on alternate Friday mornings. For this purpose she was allowed a corner in the Brentworth office of a national charity for the welfare of the elderly: Friends of the Third Age. Any mail that arrived for her was always put aside unopened against her next visit.

On Friday afternoon, Nina gave her time to the Cannonbridge hospice appeal, taking her seat at a desk in one of the rooms behind a thrift shop in a side street; the shop had offered free use of the room for the duration of the appeal.

The bulk of essential money had now been raised and building work was due to start on the hospice site at the end of February. A well-known television entertainer, a dedicated supporter of the hospice movement, had promised to lay the foundation stone a month later. But there could be no slackening in the fundraising. Money would be needed for the upkeep and running of the hospice, for the many extras, improvements and refinements that would be looked for along the way.

Nina spent the first part of her stint sketching out yet another publicity campaign; publicity was one of her fortes. She was still busy with minor matters at the end of the afternoon when the other voluntary workers had gone. The phone rang on her desk: James Milroy, acquainting her with the outcome of the buffet lunch. As he had predicted, she was delighted with the figures.

‘Wonderful weather we’re having just now,’ James went on to remark. ‘I imagine you’ll be thinking about opening up the cottage any day now.’

‘I imagine I will,’ she agreed. The cottage stood in beautiful countryside, the best part of two miles from the nearest village, in a spot roughly equidistant from Brentworth and Cannonbridge. It had belonged to the Dalton family for a great many years and currently formed part of the trust property. James and Esther had spent weekends there in the early days of their marriage and Esther had made regular use of it later, when the boys were small; she still retained a key. The cottage was now used chiefly by Matthew and Nina. Nina had devoted considerable time and effort to having it extended and modernized, the furnishings and decorations renewed, the garden set to rights. Esther made little use of her key these days. She would sometimes drive over there when she felt particularly low, wandering round the garden in a fruitless nostalgic attempt to recapture the happiness of the first years of her marriage when her days were full and satisfying, without the need to go searching for activities to fill them.

‘I might take a run over there myself, one day next week, if the weather holds,’ James continued, his voice light and easy.

‘Might you, indeed?’ Nina returned, equally lightly. In theory, James and Esther were as free to use the cottage as Matthew and Nina, but in practice Matthew and Nina would seem to have taken over the property completely.

‘Maybe I’ll see you there,’ James added.

‘I rather doubt it.’ Her tone was friendly, touched with amusement, but with a hint of underlying granite; she kept from her voice any lingering echo of old sentiment. She had known James before she met Matthew, she had encountered him in the same way, through her fundraising activities. If James had not been a married man with two young sons, a man still moving up the ladder, careful not to blot his copybook in any way, Nina would in all probability at this moment have been Mrs James Milroy instead of Mrs Matthew Dalton.

Nina glanced round at the sound of the door opening. A woman came into the room, a voluntary worker with a problem to be solved. Nina brought the conversation with James to a rapid conclusion.

Shortly after the woman left, Nina had another caller: a publican with a handsome cheque from various fundraising activities organized among his customers. Nina thanked him warmly and wrote him out an official receipt. His eyes rested on the elegant gold pen she used, an engraved inscription discernible along the barrel; he made an admiring comment. Nina smiled and held out the pen for him to read the inscription. The pen had been presented to her a few years ago after she had worked night and day to raise money for a local day centre, threatened with closure, for handicapped and disabled youngsters. The pen hadn’t been bought out of the money raised for the centre but by a private whip-round the youngsters’ parents had made among themselves, in appreciation of Nina’s prodigious – and wholly successful – efforts.

After the publican had departed, Nina rang Matthew, as she always did, to ask what his plans were for the evening, what he wanted her to do about a meal. He told her he’d be staying on at his office again, he’d be home around eight.

‘That’ll be fine,’ she assured him. She didn’t stay chatting, she knew how busy he was these days. She could now work on at her desk a little longer, there were still matters to attend to. She made a number of phone calls, checking and finalizing arrangements for a sponsored half marathon to be run shortly by older pupils from local schools. Then she sat considering the merits of making another round of all the business premises in town, deciding at length in favour of it. It could be carried out this time by a team of pretty girls; that would surely bring in a worthwhile sum. She could get Verity Thorburn to round up a decorative bunch from among her fellow students.

Verity was a connection of Nina’s by marriage, a great niece of Nina’s father-in-law, Bernard Dalton. Over the years, Bernard had gathered more than one stray chick under his wing. As an orphan and a relative, Verity had had a double claim to his protection. She was at present taking a course at the Brentworth College of Further Education. She was always ready to assist Nina, always willing to do what she could for the hospice appeal.

Nina looked at her watch. Too early to ring Verity now, she would still be at the college; she had a late class on Fridays. She would ring her at her flat later this evening.

The college was a large building, put up after the Second World War. Verity was taking a two-year course, begun shortly after her seventeenth birthday, eighteen months ago. She had chosen a somewhat unusual combination of subjects: secretarial skills, cordon bleu cookery and art. She enjoyed them all and was doing well.

At a few minutes after seven she came out of the college, bound for the little basement flat where she lived alone. She had moved there six months ago from the larger flat she had shared with two other girls, both students at the college.

She was slightly built, not very tall, with an elfin face, big brown eyes, a vulnerable look. Her long dark hair hung straight and heavy. Her temperament was highly mercurial; she harboured deep feelings of insecurity, due in no small measure to the abrupt and brutal fashion in which she had been orphaned at the age of nine.

Her parents and maternal grandparents had all been medical missionaries in Africa; the grandmother was a sister of Bernard Dalton. When the grandparents were retiring, they decided to spend a month at the mission station run by Verity’s parents before returning to England for good.

In the middle of their visit, Verity attended a birthday party given for the daughter of friends living some distance away; she was to stay overnight. In the early hours of the morning the mission station was attacked by a roving band of marauders who had slipped over the border from a neighbouring territory under cover of darkness. The buildings were looted and burned, every man, woman and child – black or white – savagely butchered.

A week later, Verity was sent home to England, into the care of her great uncle, Bernard Dalton, and his second wife, Grace.

Now, on this fine February evening, as she set off for her flat, she caught sight of someone standing by the entrance gates, looking across at her. Her heart gave a wild leap of joy. It was Ned Hooper; it was more than a week since she’d set eyes on him.

Then her heart sank. He didn’t come forward to meet her but remained unsmiling by the gates, waiting for her to reach him. It didn’t augur well.

Ned was eighteen years older than Verity. Tall and strongly built, good-looking in a very English way, with fair hair and blue eyes, an open expression. He had studied art at the college and now did occasional supply teaching in the art department, to eke out the exceedingly slender living he contrived to make as an artist.

‘Are you coming along to the flat?’ Verity wanted to know, the moment she had greeted him. Her manner was intense and eager. Her main reason for moving to a flat of her own was so that the pair of them could be together without the knowledge of her flatmates – or her relatives and guardians.

Ned shook his head with resolution. He knew once they were indoors she’d try every trick in the book to get round him. Or else she’d set about creating the kind of scene he couldn’t stomach. He gestured in the direction of a small public garden near by. ‘We can talk over there.’

They walked side by side, in silence, not touching, till they reached the garden. At this time of evening there were few strollers along the gravel paths. They found a seat beside the beds of winter heather; in silence they sat down, a little apart. She sat stiffly upright, gazing straight ahead, waiting for him to begin.

‘We’ve had some good times,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t forget them. But they’re over now, it’s definitely finished.’ Her head came sharply round, she darted a beseeching look at him from her great dark eyes. It was those eyes he had first noticed, fixed on him in class, with that intense, searching gaze, the gaze he had once found so intriguing.

‘It doesn’t have to be finished,’ she declared vehemently.

He didn’t waver. ‘I’m afraid it does. It really is over. You’ll meet someone else, someone your own age. You’ll forget about me in no time at all.’

She clenched her fists. ‘I don’t want anyone else. I want you.’

‘I’m afraid you can’t have me,’ he threw back at her with asperity. ‘I’m bowing out for good.’ With an effort he softened his tone again. ‘You must accept it’s over. It does no good trying to argue about it.’

‘It’s Mrs Bradshaw,’ she said with sudden ferocity. ‘You’re moving in with her, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am moving in with her,’ he replied brusquely. ‘I’m a free agent.’

Her voice rose. ‘You don’t love her! You can’t! She’s old and fat.’

‘She’s neither old nor fat,’ he retorted. Mrs Freda Bradshaw was in fact forty-two years old. She might carry a little more flesh than was currently fashionable, but it was certainly no hardship to look at her. She had been a good-looking girl and was still an attractive woman. She was the widow of a man more than thirty years her senior, the owner of a chain of cut-price clothing stores up north. She had started out at sixteen as a sales assistant in one of his stores and had early taken his eye. When his wife died, Freda lost no time in stepping into her shoes.

She had played fair throughout the years that followed. She had been genuinely fond of her husband, had looked after him devotedly in his old age, nursed him in his last illness. She had inherited everything. There had been no children from his first marriage, no relatives to argue the toss.

Freda had then set wholeheartedly about enjoying the rewards of her devotion. She sold the business and salted away the proceeds, then she set off for fresh pastures. Some wind blew her before long to Brentworth. She came across Ned Hooper at an art exhibition.

‘I can’t bear to think of you with that woman.’ Verity laid an urgent hand on his arm. ‘If it’s just her money, you know I’ve got money coming to me one day. Quite a lot of money. You can have it all.’

He shook off her hand. ‘I don’t want your money,’ he said roughly. ‘What do you take me for?’

She wasn’t done yet. ‘I’m sure I could get hold of some of the money now. You can have every penny.’

He made a contemptuous gesture of dismissal and got to his feet. She remained seated, looking pleadingly up at him. ‘You’d better get it into your head,’ he said with profound irritation. ‘This really is goodbye.’ He went rapidly off along the path.

She sat biting her lip, staring after him as he plunged out of the garden, disappearing from view along the busy evening pavement.

Shortly before seven-thirty, Esther came out of the Brentworth hospice where she had been putting in a little extra visiting, as she not infrequently did on evenings when James wouldn’t be home before bedtime. She didn’t use her car if the weather was fine, as it was tonight; the walk both ways helped to fill the long stretch of time.

She set off without haste in the direction of Oakfield Gardens and her solitary supper, choosing her usual route that took her through the town centre with its cheerful bustle and brightly-lit shop windows, postponing as long as possible the moment when she must let herself in to the silent house.

As she approached the block where Matthew had his offices, she glanced up to see if any of his lights showed, as they had so often done of late. Yes, light was showing. She slowed her pace to a halt and stood pondering, then she made up her mind and went quickly in through the swing doors, into the deserted entrance hall.

She could hear someone rattling about, along a corridor; the caretaker, no doubt. She wasn’t anxious to encounter him; he was a dour character with a chronically gloomy view of the world. She slipped quietly up the stairs to the floor where Matthew had his offices.