Sitting alone on a bar stool in a pub which he hoped nobody he knew ever frequented, Mellor ordered a second large whisky chaser for his third pint of bitter. He could feel his head beginning to swim and this was an unfamiliar and disconcerting sensation for him.
Mellor was really fed up. He had considerable respect for Rose, particularly for her flair and intuition — never his strongest qualities, he knew — but she often operated on such a disconcertingly emotional level. Sometimes he longed for a more regulated working life, and rather wished he worked for a straight-down-the-middle old-fashioned sort of copper. Preferably a man too.
He also thought that if Rose Piper didn’t start spending a lot more time at her desk instead of running around trying to do everyone else’s job for them she was going to find herself in big trouble. All he wanted was for this case to be wound up as quickly and efficiently as possible. It was stirring up far too many forbidden memories for him.
Ten
It was the second Tuesday in November and Freddie expected his wife to be going to visit Aunt Ada as usual. It was only over breakfast that morning that she told him, without at first offering any explanation, that she would not be doing so.
It was unlike Constance to break her routine, to alter the established pattern of her life — just as it was for Freddie. He was surprised and also mildly curious. He asked why she had abandoned her regular monthly trip.
‘I’ve just got so much on in the village,’ his wife replied. ‘And there’s a lot to do here on the farm, goodness knows.’
She sounded distracted. Not for the first time recently, Freddie thought that perhaps Constance was finding it more difficult to cope with all her many roles than she used to. They all expected so much of her.
He rested his hand lightly on hers. ‘There’s always a lot to do here, and you usually manage to run the entire village as well,’ he said. ‘In the past I’ve just assumed you were superwoman.’
Constance smiled, but he could see the tension in her face.
‘I can’t imagine why,’ she said.
‘Because, my darling, through most of our marriage you have continually behaved as if that is what you are.’
Constance manoeuvred her hand so that she was able to wrap her fingers around his, and her grip was tight and somehow urgent.
‘I do love you, Freddie, you know that, don’t you? Whatever happens, you know that?’
‘Of course I do, my darling.’ She seemed to need the kind of reassurance that it had never before been necessary for either of them to give each other. And what did she mean by ‘whatever happens’? What on earth did she think was going to happen? They had always been happy, hadn’t they? And they had such a good secure life together — he had never had any doubts about that before. He leaned forward and touched her cheek with his free hand.
‘Of course I know you love me, Constance. And I love you. Don’t I always say the best day of my life was the day I met you?’
She turned her head so that her lips brushed against his fingers.
‘I just hope you never change your mind about that, Freddie.’
‘No chance.’
He spoke easily but he was beginning to worry more and more about his wife. She seemed nervy and even perhaps unhappy, both of which were quite unlike her. He remembered again the aftermath of her last visit to Aunt Ada when the car had broken down on the motorway and she had been so violently sick when she arrived home. And she had admitted to feeling poorly since then. Again he felt that now familiar chilly tremor run up and down his spine. Could she be ill? Was she keeping some horrible illness a secret from him? Now that would be just like her. He thought about it for a moment. She had not been physically sick since that one occasion a month ago, as far as he knew. But he realised that she could easily have been ill when he was not around, he spent so much time out and about on the farm. And she was definitely looking increasingly tired and drawn. It also occurred to him that she might have lost weight. Anxiously he studied her face, she was so pale, the high cheekbones more prominent than ever and now giving an almost gaunt appearance to those finely sculptured features.
Her gaze was riveted on their entwined hands, as if she didn’t want to meet his eye. His words of reassurance had provoked a wan smile again, but he was sure he could see tears beginning to form.
Several times in the last four weeks he had expressed his anxiety about her health, and asked her bluntly if she were quite sure she was well. She had remained adamant that she was perfectly fit. Nonetheless Freddie was moved to try again.
‘Constance, if you were ill, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?’ he said.
‘Of course.’
She replied quickly, automatically almost. He continued to stare at her. Eventually she spoke again, as if accepting that he needed, even deserved, a little more than that.
‘Things have been getting a bit on top of me lately, that’s all, Freddie. I can’t believe it’s less than two months before Christmas. I’m supposed to be putting on the village pantomime again and we’ve barely started...’
Freddie interrupted. ‘Bugger the village pantomime!’
He rarely swore, but he wanted his wife back the way she used to be, he wanted everything the way it was. He didn’t know quite what had changed and he certainly didn’t know why — but he knew something had.
‘You’re overdoing it, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? It’s about time the rest of this village pulled its weight. Let somebody else stage the damn panto...’
Constance squeezed his hand even more tightly. ‘I’ll be all right, Freddie, honestly,’ she said. ‘Everything will be fine, you’ll see...’
There was a faraway look in her eye now, and Freddie had the feeling she was assuring herself of that as much as him. He could think of nothing else to say. He sighed heavily. There was a load of overdue paperwork in the farm office that he really must turn his attention to today. Constance had always done most of it in the past and invariably had been bang up-to-date, but every time he had mentioned the backlog to her over the last couple of weeks, she had murmured vaguely that she would try to get around to it tomorrow — and never had. That wasn’t like her, either. She was normally so efficient. Now Freddie had no choice but to attend to the paperwork himself. He didn’t really mind that, although he would have preferred a heavy stint of manual labour to take his mind off things, but it was yet another indication that, however much she protested, all was really not well with Constance.
Freddie had never felt so uneasy in the whole of his life.
Later that morning Freddie and Constance’s elder daughter Charlotte popped into the farm. She lived on the edge of Chalmpton Peverill in Honeysuckle Cottage, which Freddie had given her and her husband as a wedding present.
Charlotte, a tall, slim, long-limbed, and strikingly attractive twenty-four-year-old, had been born with a sunny disposition which a near-perfect childhood and a so far happy marriage to a local man, Michael Lawson an architect with Somerset County Council whom she had fallen in love with while still at school, had only enhanced.
She was, however, unusually anxious. On her way to the village shop a little earlier she had encountered her father who had told her that her mother had cancelled her usual monthly trip to Bristol and would probably appreciate a visit. He had said no more than that, but Charlotte could read between the lines. She suspected that he was as concerned about her mother as she had become, and was hoping she might be able to find out what was wrong — although neither father nor daughter had actually expressed their feelings of anxiety to the other yet, perhaps not wanting to fully admit them even to themselves.