Sarah Rayne - What Lies Beneath

As it was, Derek, who had come in his own car, went back to his office to deal with some cock-up somebody had apparently made over the planning budget, and Amy thought she had better devote what was left of the afternoon to working on one of her holiday projects. Veronica was standing in the car park, explaining to anyone who would listen that she had not driven here because she had known she would be far too upset to drive back afterwards, and ostentatiously looking up the number of the local taxi firm on her mobile phone. Ella felt bound to offer her a lift. They dropped Amy off, then went on to Veronica’s house.

‘Have you got time for a cup of tea or even something stronger?’ said Veronica. ‘We should at least raise a glass to Clem, shouldn’t we?’

In Veronica’s too-warm sitting room, drinking tea, Ella felt better. Life was gradually but surely sinking back into normality. Clem was out of the way with an unthreatening verdict of Accidental Death pronounced on him, and it sounded as if the police investigations into the bodies at Priors Bramley were petering out.

Veronica had finished her tea and was drinking vodka and tonic, which Ella thought a bit louche at three o’clock in the afternoon. She suddenly set down her glass and said, ‘Ella, there’s something rather strange about Clem’s death.’

A prickle of alarm scudded across Ella’s skin. ‘What?’

‘And the more I think about it, the stranger it seems.’

Every nerve-ending in Ella’s body jangled like alarm bells, but she said, ‘What kind of strange?’

Veronica appeared to take a moment to organize her thoughts, then said, ‘It’s Clem’s diaries. They’ve vanished.’

The alarm bells screeched through Ella’s entire body, momentarily blotting out every other sensation. Then, making a massive effort, she said with a little laugh, ‘Oh, Clem’s famous diaries. But they were only ever part of Clem’s fantasies about becoming a writer.’ Careful, she thought. Don’t be too sneery. You’ve just been to the man’s funeral: you ought to be awash with sentiment. So she added, ‘Dear old Clem and his journals and jottings. But we all knew they didn’t actually exist.’

‘But they did,’ said Veronica.

‘Are you sure?’ said Ella. ‘How do you know?’

‘Because he showed them to me one night. It was only two or three weeks ago, actually. I was quite flattered. He was usually as secretive as MI5 about anything he wrote.’

‘Why did he show the diaries to you?’

‘We were at his house – he was thinking of having his kitchen refitted and I was advising him on colours. Some people say I have quite a good eye for colour, you know. Oh dear, poor Clem, now he’ll never have his grand new kitchen. Anyway, we had a drink or two,’ said Veronica. ‘Well, we had more than one or two. He got a bit maudlin and talked about how he’d been an observer of life since he was a child. He’d always lived life from the sidelines, he said. But he didn’t mind, not really. He saw himself as a – what was that man’s name who wrote those famous diaries hundreds of years ago?’

‘Samuel Pepys?’

‘That’s the one. He took me up to his spare bedroom. Honestly, Ella, I’ve been in a few bedrooms in my time, but that’s one I never expected to go into, not that it counted, because Clem was hardly—’

‘You saw the diaries?’ said Ella. ‘You actually saw them?’

‘Yes. Leather-bound notebooks, all stacked in date order. They certainly weren’t fantasies, I promise you. He said they were his life’s work and he talked about how he would live on through them when he was dead.’

‘Did you read any of them?’ demanded Ella, then realized her voice had been much too sharp.

But Veronica did not seem to notice anything wrong. She said, ‘No, I didn’t, but I’d have liked to, because I’ll bet there was some juicy stuff in them. You remember what a shocking old busybody his father was. Always listening to people’s conversations and sneaking peeks at letters if he came to the house. I remember once, my parents invited him and Clem for Christmas, and my mother said afterwards she was sure he had gone into the bedroom when he went up to the loo and looked through my father’s bank statements. I bet he told Clem all kinds of things, and I bet Clem wrote them all down.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Local scandals, I expect, and don’t say there haven’t been any, because there are scandals everywhere. Things about us, I dare say. Certainly things about me.’ She gave the stupid coy giggle that always rasped on Ella. ‘And there’d be things about our parents, I imagine, and your mother. In fact, very likely quite a lot of things about your mother. She was supposed to have been a bit of a girl, wasn’t she?’

‘No, she wasn’t,’ said Ella at once. ‘People were unkind about her, that was all. Just because she lived on her own and my father died when I was a baby and nobody in Upper Bramley ever knew him—’

‘Oh, Ella, even if you were illegitimate what does it matter?’ said Veronica, sounding slightly exasperated. ‘There’s no shame in it these days. Good Lord, the word’s almost vanished from the dictionary.’

‘I was not illegitimate,’ said Ella angrily. ‘And anyway, how do you know Clem’s diaries weren’t found?’

‘Because I’m the executor of his will,’ said Veronica. ‘Didn’t you know that?’

Ella stared at her. ‘I didn’t, as a matter of fact,’ she said. ‘So?’

‘So I went into the house with the solicitor straight after the inquest. The house will have to be sold, of course, and most of the money goes to various charities – education of illiterate adults and that kind of thing, mostly. But they’re going to see if they can trace any relatives first. I think there’s a distant cousin in Australia. The solicitor’s an executor as well and he’ll do most of the work, I expect, but I’m supposed to know what’s going on and agree to things.’

Ella wanted to scream at the stupid woman to stop talking about trivialities, but she said, quite calmly, ‘And what about the diaries?’

‘They weren’t in the house. I looked absolutely everywhere and they’d gone.’

‘Why were you so keen to find them?’ said Ella.

‘Well, partly because I thought they might make spicy reading – I told you that already. But also I thought the local history society or something might have been interested in them. So I wanted to make sure the coroner’s people hadn’t thrown them away by mistake. Clem would have hated it if his precious diaries had been consigned to some municipal rubbish tip, you know that.’

‘Yes,’ said Ella. Would the silly prattling bitch never come to the point?

‘I asked the solicitor about them and he checked with the coroner’s office. They’d been through the house before the inquest – not a police-type examination, but they had to make sure there was nothing suspicious, nothing that might make it necessary to actually set up a police investigation.’

‘Yes?’

‘At first they thought I meant just a day-to-day diary,’ said Veronica. ‘Addresses, dentist’s appointments and stuff like that. The coroner’s man had found one of those by the phone. But I said no, there were at least twenty leather-bound books, and I told him where they’d been. But he said there definitely hadn’t been anything like that, he’d have remembered, and he certainly wouldn’t have let them be destroyed. They’re not allowed to destroy anything without the executors’ permission in that situation.’

‘It is a bit odd,’ said Ella, after a moment. ‘Probably there’s a perfectly ordinary explanation, though.’

‘I think it’s more than odd,’ said Veronica. She was watching Ella. ‘I think it’s extraordinary and quite thought-provoking that those diaries seem to have vanished. Specially since you were the one who found Clem’s body that morning. That’s the really thought-provoking thing.’