What Lies Beneath

Chapter 21

Ella was very cool with Clem when he phoned her the following day to invite her to his party. Just a small gathering of friends, he said, so of course Ella and Derek must come.

‘I don’t know if we can manage it,’ said Ella, who was not going to enthuse over a last-minute invitation. ‘We both have a lot on at the moment, and with Amy staying—’

‘I’ve invited Amy,’ said Clem. ‘And she thought you’d be free. And I’ve got a really scrummy meal worked out – a delicious recipe from a Brittany fishing village.’

‘Derek can’t eat shellfish,’ said Ella at once. ‘Shellfish upset his stomach. Don’t you remember the time you served clam chowder—’

‘There won’t be shellfish,’ said Clem, who did not want to hear again the grisly details of Derek’s rebellious intestines after the clam chowder episode. ‘Do come, Ella. It will do you good.’

‘I’ll see,’ said Ella, irritated that Clem thought she needed something to do her good. ‘I’ll phone later to let you know,’ she said, preparing to put the phone down.

‘Well, make it this evening at home,’ said Clem. ‘I’ll be in all night. My rehearsal for Friday’s meal, you know. I always like to do a dummy run with a new recipe, in case—’

‘Yes, you always tell us that,’ said Ella, who had sat through many a meal at Clem’s house, glassy-eyed at the saga of how he had adjusted the juniper berries after his dummy run or how he discovered there was no lemon grass in his spice cupboard.

‘And I’ll be busy here at the library all day,’ went on Clem. ‘I want to tidy up the cellars after the police visit. I expect Amy told you all about that.’

Ella discovered that rather than putting down the phone, she was gripping it so tightly it dug into her hand. She managed to say, ‘Amy didn’t mention anything about the police. D’you mean they came to the library? What did they want?’

‘My dear, didn’t you know?’ said Clem. ‘They’ve found another body.’

Ella felt as if something had dealt her a hard blow across the eyes. She said, ‘Another body? You mean a second one?’

‘You wouldn’t have thought it, would you?’ said Clem. ‘But apparently there is another one and they’ve just found it. I got a real shock when they told me. They said it was inside Cadence Manor itself, so it must be the man we saw that morning. You know, Ella, when they found the one at the lodge, I assumed it was a tramp – a coincidence – because our man couldn’t possibly have crawled down there—’

‘Let’s not talk about it on the phone,’ said Ella, quickly. People insisted phone systems were computerized and automated these days, but there were always reports about them being tapped. It was mostly royalty and football stars, but it went to show you could not be too careful. ‘Why did the police come to you?’ she said.

‘To look in the library’s archives.’

‘I didn’t know you had any archives.’

‘Of course we’ve got archives, we’re a library, for goodness’ sake.’

‘Why were the police interested in the archives?’ demanded Ella.

‘In case it helped them identify the bodies,’ said Clem with exaggerated patience. ‘I don’t think it did, but they went through some old newspapers. I suppose they were looking for reports of anyone vanishing around the time Priors Bramley was closed.’

‘Newspapers?’

‘We’ve got quite a lot of the back issues of the Bramley Advertiser, although most of them were transferred to microfiche when that Middle Counties group took them over.’

Ella’s mind was working furiously. She was not overly worried at the police enquiries, because surely they would be part of normal routine. Even if the body was identified – either body – it would not matter. But a tiny nagging doubt made her say, ‘Clem, are you sure they didn’t find anything? I mean anything that might lead back to us – to what happened?’

‘Such as your watch?’ said Clem. ‘No, I don’t think they found anything. But I’ve been thinking, Ella, perhaps we should tell them what happened that day.’

Ella sat very still. Then she said, as lightly as she could, ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary. And after so long it might look a bit peculiar.’

‘I don’t see why. Specially since there’s another body now.’

‘The one in the lodge has nothing to do with us,’ said Ella quickly.

‘I know, but if we gave a description – of our man, the one in Cadence Manor, I mean – that might help them identify him at least.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Ella sharply. ‘None of us can remember what that man looked like—’

‘Can’t you?’ said Clem very quietly. ‘I can. In any case, it’s all in my diaries.’

This time Ella felt as if her chest had been punched. ‘What do you mean?’

‘My Jottings, you know.’ He gave one of his silly giggles and Ella hated him. ‘So I can look it all up. In fact I could even let the police see the entry. I know it’ll be a bit simplistic – I was barely nine – but it’ll be reasonably accurate.’ He paused and, when Ella did not reply, said quite seriously, ‘Ella, I think we must bite the bullet on this. We didn’t do anything really wrong that day. That man threatened us and we were frightened and defended ourselves. His death was a tragic accident.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Ella slowly.

‘I am right. It’s no good being intense and neurotic about it all these years later.’

‘I’m not. But, Clem, don’t do anything about talking to the police until we’ve discussed it again,’ said Ella. ‘And I’ll let you know about Friday’s fish supper,’ she added, thus relegating pretentious Breton seafood recipes to their proper place.

She replaced the phone firmly, but she could not get up because her legs had turned to cotton threads and she felt sick and dizzy.

Clem’s diaries. He had frequently said they would one day be part of Bramley’s history, but Ella had never taken them seriously. She did not think anyone had. Derek once said Clem fancied himself as a modern-day Samuel Pepys, which was a waste of time and energy, to Derek’s way of thinking, and Clem Poulter would have done better to occupy his time with something more useful. Who would ever want to read the ramblings of a local librarian? demanded Derek, laughing.

Remembering that, Ella thought: the police would want to read them, that’s who. Not all of them, but certainly anything around the time Priors Bramley was sealed off.

It was starting to seem as if the diaries might have to be destroyed. Burned or buried or shredded. But where were they? Did Clem sit at a desk or a table and write them into a book? Surely most people used computers for writing almost everything nowadays? Derek had bought Ella a laptop last year; it was very smart and sleek, and it was nice to be able to refer casually to it, to mention having emailed Andrew designing his bridges in Africa, or talk about having ordered something on-line. She wrote the occasional letter on it, as well, although other than that she did not use it very much.

But Clem might use a computer regularly. There had been no such things when they were children, but he might have put those early, childhood diaries onto a computer recently. Ella knew that could be done; Derek often talked about scanning documents onto hard disk. Would Clem have done that?

She forced herself to take deep, calming breaths, and presently she saw exactly what she must do.

She was surprised to discover there was a deep, secret satisfaction in behaving absolutely normally that evening, so that neither Derek nor Amy suspected anything.

Ella cooked and served supper as usual. As they ate, Derek was banging on about something to do with the office. She hardly listened, but a word or two got through and it sounded as if the audit had uncovered something suspicious.

‘Clear case of fraud, from what I hear,’ said Derek, shovelling forkfuls of food into his mouth. ‘That’ll mean the sack and probably prosecution. And all for a paltry couple of thousand, apparently. Shocking, isn’t it? Now if I was of a criminal turn of mind and planning to defraud the local authority—’

‘Amy, are you going out tonight?’ said Ella, because once Derek got onto the subject of how thoroughly he would defraud the local authority if he had a criminal mind, he would go on for hours.

‘I thought I might wander down to the Red Lion,’ said Amy, leaning over her plate so that her hair tumbled forward over her face. ‘Why?’

‘I like to know what’s happening, that’s all.’

‘Meeting your academic again, are you?’ said Derek.

‘He might be there,’ mumbled Amy.

‘Well, don’t come home on your own very late,’ said Derek. ‘No, I know it isn’t very far to walk, but you can’t be too careful. A man at the office was telling me—’

‘Amy will phone one of us if she wants picking up,’ said Ella, who was still managing to appear ordinary, but could no more cope with Derek’s man at the office tonight than she could cope with his silly tales about how he could defraud the local authority to the tune of half a million, if he put his mind to it.

‘I’m rehearsing tonight, don’t forget,’ said Derek. ‘Technical run-through for lighting cues. You won’t believe this, but last week the stage manager—’

‘If you’ve finished eating, I’ll clear away and Amy can fetch the pudding,’ said Ella, getting up.

‘Well, I wouldn’t mind another helping of stew before I have any pudding,’ said Derek, and Ella winced because it was not stew they were eating, it was an Elizabeth David chicken casserole with corn-fed farm chicken and fresh basil and tarragon.

Clem had stayed at the library a little later than usual this evening so he could see what the CID men had been up to yesterday in the cellars.

The library closed at five, and by half-past the two girls who manned the loan desk had gone. Clem often walked round the silent rooms on his own before locking up. He liked feeling that this was his domain and the books in their serried ranks were his possessions. Sometimes he spoke to the books in his mind, exchanging a genteel word with Miss Austen, perhaps apologizing to her if she had been put on a shelf cheek by jowl with some raunchy slash-and-gore book or bodice-ripper; sketching a military-style, heel-clicking salute in the direction of war books, or humming a snatch of a Northumberland folk song as he went past the shawls-and-clogs section. It was behaviour that Clem thought of as whimsical, although he suspected most people would have said it was Mr Poulter being slightly dotty.

Tonight, however, he went straight down to the cellars, switching on the lights and descending the stone steps with care. He did not much like cellars, which were usually cold and damp, but he did like the feeling that cellars had a life of their own. They housed secrets and memories, and romantically minded people said if you stood very still and concentrated very hard you could sometimes actually smell the stored-away memories and tragedies and comedies, and the lost loves and forgotten hopes. Clem tried to do this now in case he could write a little article about it, but his recent cold had affected his sense of smell, and all he got was mildew and the disinfectant the cleaners had sloshed around on their last spring-cleaning session. It was a sad day when history and cobwebby romance were smothered by Jeyes’ fluid and Dettol.

The newspaper archives were on the far shelf in thick leather binders, one for each year, neatly labelled and stacked in date order, all the way back to 1908, when the paper had started. It did not look as if the police had disturbed them. But if newspaper accounts alone were what they wanted, they could use the newspaper office’s microfiche.

The boxes were all labelled as well, mostly with the year their contents related to, or with a general heading, such as ‘School Registers’ or ‘Town Hall Re-modelling’ or the recent twinning of Upper Bramley with some unpronounceable Polish town. It was a bit of a miscellany, and it looked as if the police had searched some of these boxes, although they had been quite tidy about it. The only box they had left out of place was the one labelled ‘Cadence Manor’. A note was taped to it saying, ‘Contents checked by DS Barlow, nothing taken away,’ and the date was scribbled at the bottom.

Clem thought it would not hurt just to peep inside the box. It was so packed with photographs and newspaper cuttings the cardboard was starting to split, which was a pretty good excuse to check it. He lifted out a bundle of photographs, wondering if he would suddenly come across the face of the man they had sent to his death that day. It was fifty years ago but Clem thought he would recognize him. There had been an odd, deformed look to his features.

But the photographs here were mostly stilted family groups, and the only person he vaguely recognized was old Lady Cadence, Serena, who had died when Clem was a child. He studied the photos of her: she had been quite nice-looking, although a bit severe. He remembered going to her memorial service at St Michael’s.

There were a few letters tucked into large manila envelopes alongside the photos. Clem opened these because you never knew what might be grist to the writer’s mill. There was a batch of general reports about Cadence Manor from someone who had lived there and seemed to think it necessary to make some kind of regular accounting. Across the corner of one of these was an impatient scrawl that read, ‘Do wish C would stop this irritating habit of thinking he must account to me for every last farthing!’

It was interesting to speculate who ‘C’ could have been, but it was not what Clem was looking for. He opened a few more envelopes, most of which contained household accounts, and finally, finding nothing pertinent, switched off the light and went back upstairs. He might go through the Cadence Manor material properly sometime, but not now because tonight was earmarked for his recipe rehearsal. People thought he fussed and finnicked about his menus, but Clem did not mind that because the proof of the pudding would be in the eating, or, in this case, not so much the pudding as the Breton fish dish, which was a kind of bouillabaisse. Clem was going to serve it on the gold-edged plates that had belonged to his great-grandmother, and accompany it with what the recipe book called ‘a medley of spring vegetables’. He’d provide crusty bread to mop up the sauce, as the French did.

He called in at the supermarket, filling his wire basket with the ingredients he needed, exchanging a few words with the check-out girls. They were always interested in his little evenings.

‘My word, Mr Poulter,’ they said tonight, ‘that’s an unusual lot of things you’ve got. One of your dinner parties, is it?’

Clem, pleased to think they had noticed, told them all about the new recipe he was trying. It made for a pleasant little exchange and the supermarket was not very busy at this hour, although two shoppers in the queue behind him tapped the counter and said very loudly that some people wanted to get home, if he didn’t mind.

In the end, he did not reach his house until almost seven o’clock. He distributed his shopping in the fridge and larder, and made a cup of tea, which he drank while listening to the evening news on the kitchen radio. After this he assembled his ingredients for his fish dish, using scaled-down portions. It would take an hour to simmer, then he would eat it himself, making notes about seasoning and thickness of the sauce. It would make his meal very late and he was already quite hungry, but it could not be helped.

He bustled happily round the kitchen, chopping parsley and tarragon, pleased he had remembered the bay leaves. You could hardly ever buy fresh bay leaves but there was a house on the way back from the library that had a very lush garden; the owners were, in fact, cronies of Ella’s, all of them belonging to one of those arcane gardening societies. In their garden was a bay tree, which very obligingly grew at the edge, near the footpath. More than once, on his way home, Clem had discreetly reached over the hedge to pluck two or three of the leaves from the flourishing bay tree. He always made sure no one was watching, of course; it would never do for anyone to see nice Mr Poulter from the library pilfering something, even if it was only a couple of bay leaves.

Amy left to go to the Red Lion shortly after seven, calling cheerfully that she would phone if there was a problem about getting home, and no she would not walk along the streets by herself late at night, Jan would probably drive her home anyway, and would Gran for goodness’ sake, please stop fussing.

Derek left soon afterwards, phoning somebody he referred to as Pish-Tush to say he would pick him up as arranged. He told Ella he would not be very late getting home, and went off singing about being a wand’ring minstrel he, a thing of shreds and patches. Ella would be glad when this stupid Mikado was over and done with.

She gave them both a quarter of an hour, then put on her coat and went out.