Nicola Upson - An Expert in Murder

He looked at the velvety brown and green flowers without understanding her meaning. ‘ Hermodactylus tuberosus , Inspector. Or, to 173

you and me, the widow iris.’ At the door, she offered her hand again and looked gravely up at him. ‘Will I be able to see Bernard’s body soon? We may not have been in love, but we did always respect each other and the more I see of the world, the rarer I consider that to be. I don’t intend to stop now simply because he’s dead.’

‘Of course. I’ll have a car sent for you in the morning. Would midday suit?’ She nodded, and Penrose paused at the door. ‘I spoke to Bernard very briefly tonight – I wanted to ask him about Hedley White and Elspeth Simmons – and he said there was something he needed to see me about, too. I don’t suppose you have any idea what that might have been?’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t imagine why he would need to talk to the police but I can easily understand why, if he did, he would choose you. Thank you for your courtesy, Inspector, and for your intelligence. I appreciate them both, and I’d be grateful if you could do one thing for me. When you find whoever did this, as I’ve every confidence you will, I’d like you to make sure that they know what they’ve done. I don’t mean bring them to justice in the courts

– that will happen, of course, but I have no faith in capital punishment. Death means different things to different people, and I think Bernard was right when he said it could often be the easy way out.

But before they die, I’d like you to try to make sure they understand what they’ve taken from this world. He was a good man.’

Penrose knew it wasn’t his place to question what Grace Aubrey had said about the relationship she shared with her husband, but he couldn’t help reflecting that there were many kinds of love. As he left, he could not decide for whom he felt the greater sadness: the man who had died so full of regret; or the woman left alone to deal with a grief which she had sincerely never expected to know.

A walk through London in the early hours of the morning would not have been Josephine’s preferred way of dealing with the shock of Aubrey’s murder, but she found herself with very little choice.

Archie’s departure had been followed by an uncomfortable interlude in the Green Room, during which Marta’s anger had dis-174

solved into frustration tinged with embarrassment, and things were only made worse when Lydia snapped at her to calm down and stop wrapping her in cotton wool. Josephine’s gentle suggestion that they all go home and get some rest met with adamant refusal.

‘No, you two go home if you want to,’ Lydia said, getting up suddenly, ‘but after what I’ve seen tonight I intend to put off rest for as long as I can – particularly the eternal sort. I need to see a bit of life, so I’m going for a walk. You’re welcome to join me, or I’ll see you later.’

Marta started to protest but thought better of it and gave Josephine a look which begged for solidarity, so they left together, accepting a police chaperone as far as Number 66 and then, as soon as the constable’s back was turned, setting off in the other direction. God help him if any harm came to them, Josephine thought: Archie’s fury would be merciless.

The night was cold and damp, but the rain seemed to have cleared permanently now and the air was not unpleasant. All signs of Saturday’s revelry were long gone and, as they skirted Covent Garden and crossed the Strand to head down Villiers Street towards the river, there was barely a soul to be seen. It was a little after 3 a.m. and ordinary people – those whose evening had not been interrupted by death – had gone home to bed long ago, leaving London in the care of a very different populace. The coffee stalls – which appeared out of nowhere as the public houses closed, taking up their nocturnal pitches at the foot of bridges and on street corners – were in full swing, a magnet to the sleepless, the lonely, and the fugitive; to anyone, in other words, who could be regarded as a poor relation of the city’s daylight hours. Josephine and her friends crossed Victoria Embankment and made for the stall that was tucked against the steps to Hungerford Bridge. The soft yellow glow of its interior was a welcome distraction from the unrelenting blackness of the river, and the pungent aroma of sausages and coffee did its best to be inviting, but Josephine doubted that the affirmation of life which Lydia craved was to be found among its clientele.

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‘Never let it be said I don’t know how to show a girl a good time,’ Lydia insisted with a flash of her old humour and walked undaunted to the counter, where a man and a woman stared out into the street as if from a box at the theatre. As the woman pushed three mugs of hot liquid towards Lydia, her wedding ring

– sunk almost without trace into the middle-aged plumpness of her fingers – seemed a revealing expression of the extent to which she had given up on life.

They sat down on one of the benches that lined the Embankment, and Lydia was the first to speak. ‘It’s funny, you know, now I think about it – although it was such a shock to find Bernie tonight, I couldn’t honestly say it’s a surprise that he ended up like that.’

Josephine was intrigued. ‘Why do you say that? I know theatre can be harsh but violent death seems to me a little excessive.’

Lydia was quiet for a moment, trying to put her finger on why she felt the way she did. ‘This may sound melodramatic, but he always seemed to live in a darker world than the rest of us – something more sinister than the sad old muddle that most of us will admit to. I remember we got drunk one night during a particularly awful run of the Dream . It was Christmas Eve and his wife had gone to visit their son in Cirencester, and Bernie didn’t fancy seeing Christmas in on his own so we sat in his office and got smashed on his finest malts.’ She drained her mug, staring out across the river. ‘It’s not the most cheerful of drinks at the best of times,’ she continued, ‘and it was getting close to the anniversary of my brother’s death, so we soon got to talking about the war. It surprised me, his attitude towards it all.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, I’d always thought of him as quite a peaceable man, a reluctant soldier if you like, but he was adamant that war was a natural instinct. I can still hear him saying it, in that great booming voice he had when what he was saying came from the heart – that the trenches appealed to those murderous instincts which slum-bered close to the surface, and the war had simply smashed this flimsy armour of culture that we all thought was so strong. Up until then, I thought that war was the interlude for him as for all of us –

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tragic, unforgettable, but something to leave behind. That night, I realised he carried it with him all the time. All the colour and the joy and the make-believe that he made so real for the rest of us – it had never convinced Bernie.’

Privately, Josephine wasn’t sure how many people it had convinced. Lydia lived her roles wholeheartedly – it was one of the great joys of watching her on stage – but she would be the first to admit that she sometimes found it reassuring to continue the performance in her daily life. Like Aubrey, Josephine found it difficult to ignore the contradictions between her personal sense of justice and the single-mindedness which war demanded: one day, if an Englishman killed a German he was hanged; the next he was a patriot, and she remembered how upset she had been to see her friends and neighbours, even her family, scanning the papers for news of enemy slaughter with hopeful eyes, driven by fear for those they loved. She was not yet twenty at the time but, as the years passed, she realised that her revulsion had nothing to do with age: now, with talk of Nazi rallies and worries over Britain’s air power, another storm was gathering and, at thirty-seven, her anxiety for people on both sides was as complex as ever. If war broke out again, she knew there would be some difficult years ahead for people who felt as she did.