‘I’m so terribly sorry...’ he began.
Wordlessly Constance Lange opened the door wider, stepped back, and let the two police officers into the house. In just a few seconds she seemed to have aged twenty years, the Inspector thought.
‘Your husband died at once, that might be some comfort to you,’ said Inspector Barton gently.
Constance Lange still did not speak. The Inspector had hoped that learning her husband was unlikely to have suffered might soften the blow. He knew all about the Langes. They were a respected long-established Somerset family, good people. Why was it always the good ones who went young, he asked himself, not for the first time.
He went through the motions of explaining the details. The accident had happened shortly after midnight on an open stretch of the A38 just five miles from Chalmpton Peverill. There had been no other vehicle involved. Freddie’s car appeared to have crashed into a stone wall at full speed. It concertinaed.
Mrs Lange seemed barely to be listening. She sat silently at the kitchen table. The woman sergeant set about making a pot of tea and then asked her if there was anyone else who should be informed, anyone who could be with her.
Constance at first shook her head. The woman didn’t seem able to function at all.
‘But you have a married daughter, don’t you, Mrs Lange?’ Inspector Barton asked in what he hoped was a soothing, coaxing sort of voice. ‘Shouldn’t she be told? She lives here in the village, doesn’t she?’
Constance stared at him blankly for a few seconds, then nodded. As if she were being operated by some strange kind of remote control, she reached out for the kitchen phone, rejecting the inspector’s offer that he or the sergeant would break the news if she preferred.
‘Charlotte has a phone by the bed,’ she remarked rather curiously, Inspector Barton thought, almost as if that made everything all right.
The phone seemed to be answered quite swiftly. Mrs Lange did not waste any time or words, just told her daughter briefly and clearly, although in a small, very tired voice, what had happened.
Across the room the inspector could hear a shriek of despair and shock coming from the receiver. Mrs Lange’s expression did not change. Distractedly she replaced the receiver in its cradle, walked back to the kitchen table, sat down again and continued to stare unseeingly into the distance.
Charlotte, her face already stained with tears, arrived within minutes, accompanied by her husband, Michael, a sensible, kind-looking young man who gave the impression, Inspector Barton thought with some relief, that he would be a solid fellow to have around in a crisis.
Certainly the inspector was very glad to see them both. It was not the first time he had broken the news of a sudden bereavement, and he knew from experience that it was often the ones who appeared to take it calmly and quietly who were actually taking it the worst.
Charlotte, sobbing quite openly, wrapped her arms around her mother, but seemed to get little more response from the older woman than had the policeman. Constance merely carried on staring straight ahead, her face drawn but her eyes dry — and blank to the point of being almost uncomprehending.
Inspector Barton thought there was something chillingly unreal about Mrs Lange’s reaction. He had seen all sorts in his time, but this was different, no doubt about it, although he couldn’t quite put his finger on how. He found it very disturbing indeed.
The Lange family withdrew into itself, closing ranks against outsiders. Helen was still in the Musgrove Hospital — kept there for observation although she had been recovering well and the original meningitis diagnosis had definitely been wrong — when her father died. It was Charlotte, thankful that she had married such a supportive man, who in the morning went to the hospital with Michael to break the news to her. And it was Charlotte who lavished her shocked and tearful sister with the comforting love she so needed. Constance, previously always so warm and so strong, this time did not seem to have the strength or the inclination to give solace to anyone — not even her seventeen-year-old daughter.
Constance appeared to be inconsolable and completely disinterested in anything other than her own misery. Michael and Charlotte brought Helen home from hospital straight away. She had in any case been due for release and they thought that the girl needed more than anything else to be with her family, particularly her mother. But Constance, although she went through the motions of taking Helen in her arms and uttering a few words of comfort, continued to act as if she were not really a part of all that was going on around her. She spent only a few curiously distant minutes with poor Helen before saying that she wanted to spend the rest of the day alone in her bedroom. She didn’t want any food, she didn’t want anything. She was unable, she said, to cope with people, even her own family.
Practical as ever, Charlotte did everything she could to help.
‘I’ll take Helen home with me tonight, mum,’ she said, aware that her sobbing sister was now quite bewildered as well as distraught.
At first Charlotte saw nothing particularly amiss in her mother’s reaction, accepting that she must be in deep shock — after all, everybody knew how close, how in love still, Constance and Freddie had been.
William returned from agricultural college later that day, and he seemed to be a completely different person from the wayward boy who had been temporarily suspended for bad behaviour three months earlier. He looked years older for a start, Charlotte thought, and it was William who provided the calming assurance the Lange family had always previously sought from Constance. Out of character, Charlotte rather disloyally considered, but welcome nonetheless.
William’s grief was obvious in his strained and tense appearance. But there was also about him a grim determination. It was William who immediately took over the plans for the funeral and began checking at once that the farm was continuing to run as it should. This was indeed a greatly changed William.
He had been home for several hours — and had refused to allow his mother to be disturbed — when Constance finally emerged. She wandered into the kitchen looking almost as if she did not know quite where she was.
William was leaning against the Aga talking to Charlotte, who was standing alongside him making tea for the umpteenth time that day. Helen, exhausted by weeping, was asleep in the old armchair in the corner. Under other circumstances it would have been a cosy family scene.
As she walked aimlessly into the room Constance spotted William and her face broke into a big smile of welcome. She began to move more purposefully across the kitchen, arms outstretched as if she were about to embrace him. Charlotte felt instant relief. She had grown up knowing that her kid brother was her mother’s favourite, in spite of Constance’s valiant attempts to hide it, and had never minded. Her mother had always had more than enough love to go around. Perhaps William was going to be the tonic their mother needed. But then Charlotte saw Constance stop abruptly as she drew close to her son, the smile, which had perhaps been automatic, freezing across her face, her eyes, at first open and expectant, clouding over again. It was as if she had suddenly remembered something momentarily forgotten, Charlotte thought. She looked at her brother then. He was showing none of the warm response she would have expected. No compassion. No love. No emotion at all, in fact. His bearing was stiff and forbidding. He did not smile or stretch out a hand to Constance. Nothing. No wonder her mother pulled back.