Читать книгу St Oda's Bones - Marcus Attwater - Страница 16

Coming back with the weekend's shopping from the Waitrose in Rivergate, Henrietta found herself looking at Abbey Hill with closer scrutiny than she had for years. It had always appeared almost accidental that the place she now lived in had also been the place where she had grown up. Although she knew it intimately, she had no strong feelings about it. But she was very much aware now that this was the place it had happened all those years ago, to her and to others. Every street, every building held memories. But also, every street was familiar. She had always been perfectly at ease here, when she was young. It was when she was first taken out of the known world of Abbey Hill that she finally experienced the insecurities of growing up. At Exeter, far from home and without Gail and Lynn and Fiona by her side, she found she did not have the confidence of the old Henrietta, who could call boys across the room just by looking. She was no longer always the smartest person in the room, or the prettiest. There were boys - young men - who were not interested in her, as she found out painfully, and there were girls - young women - to whom she was just a provincial nobody. There were teachers who weren't especially impressed by her progress. She learned to be wary, she became quieter, observed more than she joined in, and that became the pattern for the rest of her life. But she had also made her closest and most lasting friendships there. Carol and Elizabeth were far flung now, but they had always kept in touch, easier now in the age of email and WhatsApp. Bridget she still saw every week, and she realised once more how much she relied on her best friend's clear-headed views now she found she couldn't speak freely to her.

She put away her shopping, bread and coffee and yoghurt and the New Zealand white the sad youngster in the wines aisle had recommended. She'd forgotten to buy fruit. Again. She really should learn, at her age, to take as good care of her body as she did of her mind, she told herself sternly, as she went into the little branch of Tesco's in the High Street to get her seedless grapes and bananas. She had been thinking that Abbey Hill had changed little, but that wasn't quite true. This had been the butcher's when she was a girl, with Layton's groceries next to it, and they certainly hadn't been selling seedless grapes. The W.H. Smith across the road where she bought a condolence card for the Harwoods was Hopgood's stationers' back then, and the village had still boasted a bookshop. Now the nearest one was on the Priory Heights campus, and useful only if you shared the tastes of the average 19-year-old. The Oxfam shop was still there, though. She used to buy books there in her teens, and she still did. Sometimes, nostalgically, the same books. But really, couldn't she think of anything which the village had gained in the last three decades? The campus was an obvious addition, and the offices of a software company on Holywell Road had brought new young families, so the population wasn't growing uniformly elderly. Otherwise, Abbey Hill had just imperceptibly merged with the southern outskirts of town, to the point where some of the newcomers didn't regard it as a separate village at all.

'I'm afraid we're going to have to break our rule,' Henrietta told her friend, when Bridget rang her from Brighton. 'I'm seeing DI Collins on Monday, and if this body you have found is who I think it is, I'll be helping your inspector with enquiries. And I suppose I should not influence you by talking about the case.'

'I see. Of course, it would be wiser. Oh God, does this mean Owen is going to talk to me about you?'

'Probably. Try not to laugh. Meanwhile, we'll have to restrict ourselves to other subjects.'

'Well, if we can't talk about my job, let's talk about yours.'

'Do we have to? It all seems increasingly pointless. The thing is, I think I do no longer believe in what we are teaching.'

'But you enjoy the organisational side of things, you were getting quite the management buff,' Bridget said.

'Yes, I enjoyed that, because it was something new. But I think I've gone as far there as I can.' She sighed, 'Oh, I don't know. I just need a new challenge, I suppose. But what? It doesn't even have to be work. A new hobby would do. Maybe I should take up knitting.'

'I do hope you're joking.'

'I used to be a good knitter. No great shakes at a pattern, but one winter I knitted scarves for all my friends - don't you remember? Yes, I'm joking. Something like that would be fun, but it's not what I mean. I need something more consuming. And, I don't know, it sounds so pretentious, but I would like to make a contribution. Do something that doesn't just make me feel better.'

'That's what we set out to do, wasn't it? Twenty-five years ago, and rather unfashionably at the time, as I seem to recall, we were going to make the world a better place.'

'There's no denying you succeeded. You're catching criminals.'

'If you look at it like that, yes. But once you get above inspector, it's all really just management and PR, like in any other job, and I can't deny I'm enjoying it. And the same could be said of you. Aren't you raising the next generation of psychologists?'

'If this is the next generation of psychologists, God help us all. I don't know if I have grown too cynical or if the profession has, but no, I really don't feel I'm making the world better for anyone at the moment.'

'What did you want to do, when you started out?' Bridget asked, 'I mean, what kind of job?'

'Become a therapist, I think. I saw myself as dishing out good advice to all and sundry, their lives miraculously changing. I think that lasted well into the second week of our first term. And then I started to learn.'

'You're pretty good at dishing out advice, still.'

'Thanks. But I can hardly go and dish it out indiscriminately.'

'Maybe you should start an Agony Aunt column in the Messenger. I'll send in some suitably horrifying dilemmas to get you going.'

'Henrietta Helps?'

'Oh no, that's too soft. Make it more absolute than that. How about Dunstable Decides?'

Henrietta rang off laughing. She might not be closer to a decision about her own dilemmas, but she definitely felt better.

She met up with St Oda's Singers in the afternoon to rehearse the music for the celebrations. As Jessamy had promised, some singers from the cathedral choir had joined them. There was that nice historian who was on the Millennium committee, Peter Harwood's wife Sue, and Justin Banks, the head of Economics, who lived quite near her on Ivy Street. She'd no idea he was interested in music.

After the singing she went over to Mrs Harwood to offer her condolences.

'Thank you. She wasn't young, of course, but the way of it was a shock. Eliot's very upset.'

'Eliot is your son?'

'Yes, he was close to her. And then to have the police asking all those questions…'

Fiona Barton joined them, clearly thinking they were talking about something else.

'Do you think they'll question all of us, just like they did back then?'

But Mrs Harwood hadn't been in Abbey Hill in 1983, and Henrietta quickly explained about Kester's disappearance.

'That police inspector!' Fiona said, 'I told him everything I knew, and precious little it was, but he just went on and on with his questions, as if one were a suspect! I don't see why they have to be so heavy-handed, especially as we had nothing to do with.'

'I think the point is that the police do not know that we had nothing to do with it,' Henrietta tried gently, 'Anyway, I spoke to Inspector Collins on the phone, and he was very polite.'

'Well, I wish he would stay away. I hate to think what the neighbours will say.'

Oh, Fiona, she would have liked to say, Fiona I remember you with green hair. I remember when you had to wear a hat for a week, and you thought that was quite funny yourself. And look at you now, standing on your dignity, so afraid of what people will think.

What she did say was, 'I suppose the police are just doing their jobs,' noticing that speaking in clichés must be contagious.

'Of course, you are friends with that chief inspector, aren't you? You must be used to this kind of thing.'

That made so little sense that Henrietta wondered if she should dignify it with an answer. Did Fiona think Bridget interviewed suspects in her living room?

'This is the first time I have been involved in a criminal investigation,' she said shortly.

'Except that one other time, of course.'

That was the trouble with Fiona. She might sound like her conversation had been scripted beforehand, but she wasn't stupid, not really.

'Except that one other time,' Henrietta agreed, 'Excuse me, I want to have a word with Elly.'

She didn't really, but Elly could always be relied upon to talk. She asked about the preparations for St Oda's Millennium.

'We're hard at work for the exhibition,' the rector's wife said, 'You know, trying to find an alternative now we can't show St Oda's relics. In fact, I'd better ask Mr Walsingham how that is getting along.'

'Oh, I hadn't thought of that. Does it upset your plans terribly?'

'Well, we were always going to wait for confirmation of the bones' provenance before making any announcements, but we had rather counted on them being our centrepiece. I hope Dominic manages to come up with something equally interesting. We would like to have real relics, you know, to reflect the history of the church, even though some people feel uncomfortable with that.'

'Well, good luck with it.'

She'd never thought about the committee being thrown into a panic when St Oda turned out not be St Oda after all. She'd been thinking about the past so much, but of course the life of the parish just went on. As it had done for a thousand years. It would be interesting to see what they made of the exhibition. She wondered what Elly meant about some people feeling uncomfortable about holy relics. Nothing in it, probably. She had noticed in both Aidan Hollis and his wife a tendency to assume a rectitude of faith in their parishioners few of them lived up to.

Henrietta spotted Fiona approaching her again, and beat a hasty retreat before she could be regaled with another string of platitudes. Sometimes she wished she sang in a choir in which she hadn't known everyone for years.