Minette Walters - The Devil's Feather

She tipped her chin towards the envelope. “Are there any instructions in there?”

“I don’t know.”

“If Madeleine wrote them, you won’t be able to light the Aga yourself. She doesn’t even know how to spark the ignition, let alone prime the burner.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask who Madeleine was, or even Lily, the name she’d mentioned earlier, but there was no point. “I’m not staying,” I told her.

She didn’t seem surprised. “You’ll need your car keys then.”

I nodded.

She fished them out of her pocket and held them up. “I took them from your bag when I was looking for an inhaler. It was close to where you dropped your mobile.”

“I’m not asthmatic.”

“I guessed.” She curled her fingers round the keys. “I’m going to hang on to them to stop you driving. You can’t leave yet…not behind a wheel, anyway. If you want them back, you’ll have to come into the house and get them.”

Her assumption that I would tamely do as she said annoyed me. I still thought of her as younger than she was, but there was a rigidity about her slight frame that suggested a strength of purpose I didn’t have. “Are you a policeman?”

“No. Just playing safe. You’ll damage yourself as well as other people if I let you go now.” She searched my face again. “Was it the dogs?”

I recalled how long it had taken me to drive through the entrance. “No.”

She gave a satisfied nod before tucking the keys back into her pocket. “The doctor who’s coming-Peter Coleman-knows nothing about panic attacks,” she said bluntly. “He’ll probably tell you to take tranquillizers and write out a shopping list of anti-depressants to lift your mood. I only phoned him to cover my arse in case you tried to sue. You’d do better to put your faith in paper bags and break the cycle.”

A small laugh floated round my head. “Are you a psychiatrist?”

“No, but I had a few panic attacks when I was twenty.”

“What were you afraid of?”

She thought for a moment. “Not being able to cope, I suppose. I was left with a farm to run, and I didn’t know how to do it. What are you afraid of?”

Suffocation…drowning…dying…

“Not being able to cope,” I echoed flatly.

It was a truth of sorts but she didn’t believe it. Either my tone was wrong or my face was telling her something else. I wondered if she was offended that I hadn’t confided in her, because she pushed herself to her feet and disappeared back into the house again. Some while afterwards, the doctor arrived.

He drew up alongside Jess’s Land Rover and I watched him ease himself out of the driver’s door. He was a tall, dark-haired man, dressed in a linen jacket and cavalry twills, and I could see a golf bag propped on the front seat of his BMW. He stooped to check his tie in the driver’s window before walking past me and into Barton House. I heard him call, “Where the hell are you, Jess? What’s this all about?” before his voice was swallowed by the walls.

If anything was guaranteed to set me panicking again it was the thought of all the fuss that was going to follow. Ambulances…psychiatrists…hospitals…the press. I could predict the tabloid headlines: “Distressed Connie Has Breakdown.” It was the stimulus I needed to get out of the car because I knew I couldn’t face the shame of disclosure again. I should have been as brave as Adelina.

Did you try to resist? No.

Did you ask the men who they were? No.

Did you ask them why they were doing it? No.

Did you talk to them at all? No.

Can you tell us anything, Ms. Burns? No.

I eased my fingers out of a fist to reach for the door handle, and found I’d been gripping the paper bag so hard that it had begun to disintegrate in the sweat of my palm. It’s the little things that frighten. I had a sudden, terrible fear that this was my last bag.

It wasn’t. My stash was still in the pocket to my right, a heap of folded brown paper that represented a lifeline. It’s a trick I discovered on the Internet. If you inhale your own carbon dioxide, the symptoms of panic begin to lessen. The brain understands that the body isn’t going to die of asphyxiation, and the vicious cycle of terror is temporarily broken. As I learnt later, the means of managing her attacks had been Jess’s key to stopping them, but, for me, paper bags were merely a last resort before I died of suffocation.

I wiped my hands fiercely against each other to rid myself of the shreds. It was Lady Macbeth stuff. “Out, damned spot! Out, I say! Hell is murky!” But how did Shakespeare know that troubled women need to clean themselves obsessively? Is it something we’ve done for centuries to purge ourselves of filth?

I remembered reading in the web description of Barton House that there was a fishpond in the garden. It wasn’t visible from my car, so logic said it was round the back. It doesn’t matter what drove me there to wash my hands, but I’ve often wondered since if the reason I became interested in Lily Wright’s story was because I knelt to wash my hands where Jess Derbyshire had found her dying.

FROM WHAT I learnt later, I don’t believe Lily and I would have been friends. She had old-fashioned views about a woman’s place, and would certainly have frowned on an unmarried war correspondent who put job before family. Her position in life was to play “grande dame” to Winterbourne Barton because Barton House was the oldest and largest in the valley and her family had lived in it for three generations. While her husband was alive, and before the demography of the village changed with an influx of outsiders, she took an active part in community life, but after his death she became increasingly detached from it.

It was a slow process that went largely unnoticed, and most people assumed that her regular mentioning of close connections with Dorset’s aristocracy meant she preferred her old associates to Winterbourne Barton’s newcomers. Her daughter, Madeleine, who visited irregularly from London, reinforced this view by talking about her mother’s social standing; and, since Lily glossed over her deceased husband’s squandering of her fortune on the stock market and made a pretence of being wealthier than she was, it was generally accepted that her friends were outside the community.

She survived on a state pension and some small dividends that she’d managed to keep from her husband, Robert, but poverty was always lurking round the corner. It meant that Barton House was in a terrible state of repair-something I discovered as soon as I moved in-with bowed ceilings and damp walls, but as few visitors were allowed beyond the hall and drawing-room this wasn’t generally known. Stains on carpets and walls were hidden beneath rugs and pictures, and wisteria was coaxed across the peeling paintwork on the windowsills outside. She dressed elegantly in tweed skirts and jackets, with her white hair twisted into a loose chignon at the back of her neck; and she remained a handsome woman until Alzheimer’s stopped her caring.

Her garden was her passion and, though it was running wild by the time I arrived, the care she’d lavished on it was still obvious. The house remained much as it had been in her grandfather’s time. There was no central heating and any warmth came from the Aga in the kitchen or had to be provided by log fires. Upstairs, the damp made the bedrooms cold, even in summer, and there was never enough hot water to fill the big, old-fashioned bath. Showers were non-existent. There was an antiquated twin-tub washing-machine, a small fridge-freezer, a cheap microwave and a television in the back room where Lily spent most of her time. During the winters she wrapped herself in a great coat and blankets, which she discarded if anyone came to the front door in order to pretend she’d been sitting in front of an unlit fire in the draughty drawing-room.