Nicola Upson - An Expert in Murder

‘Yes, but her Uncle Frank always met her. She brought loads of luggage down with her which needed his van, and anyway, I liked to give her time to settle in with her family. I didn’t want to get in the way, so I went for a drink with a friend before work. Rafe Swinburne – he lives across the landing and he’s on at Wyndham’s, so we often go in together. We arrived in town at six o’clock, had a beer or two upstairs at the Duncannon, and left there in plenty of time to get to work. You can check with him if you like. He’ll probably be home soon.’

‘We’ll do that,’ Penrose said. The alibi had been offered very readily, he thought, and with more detail than was natural. He didn’t yet know what to make of Hedley White. He was certain 208

the boy was lying about Friday evening but, if he was capable of killing at all, Penrose doubted that he could do so in such a cold and calculating way. In the heat of the moment, perhaps, but not with the careful planning that both murders had required. Then again, he remembered what Frank Simmons had said about Elspeth’s travel plans.

‘I understand that Elspeth wasn’t supposed to come down until after the weekend, but you brought her visit forward and sent her the train ticket?’

‘Yes, although I didn’t buy it, of course. I could never have afforded first class. It was a special treat for her. Mr Aubrey helped me sort it out. He knew how much Elspeth loved the play because I’d told him, and he was making arrangements for Miss Tey to come down for the final week, so he suggested getting Elspeth booked on the same train. It was supposed to be a lovely start to the weekend. Mr Aubrey thought it would mean a lot to her to meet her favourite author, and he fixed the seats so they were bound to bump into each other and get talking. Elspeth always found it easy to talk to people – it was one of the things I loved about her.’

So Josephine’s encounter with Elspeth had been carefully orchestrated after all. He had never entirely believed in the coincidental meeting, in spite of Josephine’s reassurances, and, significantly, the hand behind it all was Bernard Aubrey’s. But was it important to the crime that the two had met? Would Elspeth still have been killed if Josephine had not been on the train? There was no doubt that the murders were linked, but how could Josephine have any part to play in Aubrey’s past? Whether the explanation was innocent or not, he wished fervently that Aubrey hadn’t decided to involve Josephine in something that had ended so trag-ically, no matter how kind his intentions had been towards Elspeth.

‘That was a very generous thing for Bernard Aubrey to do. Had he met Elspeth?’

‘No, but he always asked after her. When he found out we were courting, he looked out for us. The train ticket was typical of him –

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not just the money but the thoughtfulness. He’s always doing small kindnesses for people – well, they’re small to him but they mean so much to the people he does them for. He gave me the theatre seats as well – top price for Saturday night.’

Penrose would come to Aubrey’s death in a moment, but he was interested to note that there was no giveaway past tense in anything White had said so far. ‘Did you send anything else with the train ticket?’ he asked.

‘Yes, a note and a lily. The lily was from Miss Beaumont’s dressing room; she has so many flowers that she’s always giving them to us. So I put that in with the train ticket and a note. Well, it was just a line from the play, really – ‘Lilies are more fashionable’ – but it was one of Elspeth’s favourite scenes and I knew she’d recognise it and be thrilled when I told her where the lily came from.’

‘Are you sure it was a lily? It couldn’t have been another flower?’

‘I do know what a lily looks like. I ought to – we have enough of them on stage every night.’

‘But nothing else? No magazines or souvenir dolls?’

‘No, nothing else.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘I was going to give Elspeth one of those dolls – she so wanted one – but I hadn’t got round to it.’

If Hedley was telling the truth, someone had been very prepared when that train pulled in. Penrose asked if anyone else had known about the arrangements.

‘Uncle Frank, of course – I told him all about it. And Mr Aubrey. I told Rafe because I knew he’d be pleased for us – it was him that encouraged me to ask Elspeth out in the first place – and he teased me about keeping the noise down at night, not that he sleeps here that often. Oh, and Miss McCracken knew. She saw me putting the flower and the note in an envelope backstage, and asked me what the poor girl had done to deserve a night out with Richard of Bordeaux .’

‘When was the last time you spoke to Elspeth, or heard from her?’

‘The last time I actually spoke to her was ten days ago. She tele-210

phoned me at the theatre as soon as she got the note and ticket, just to say how thrilled she was. Then she phoned again on Thursday, but I was out getting some more candles for the play so I missed her. She left a message at stage door, confirming when she was arriving and saying she couldn’t wait to see me.’

‘Was the message written down?’

‘Yes. I collected it from the pigeon holes when I got back.’

Where anybody could have seen it, presumably. Penrose decided to change tack slightly; he was interested in relations between Hedley and the Simmonses.

‘How did her family react when you and Elspeth got together?

Were they pleased about the relationship?’

Hedley shrugged. ‘They seemed to be. Certainly we never had any problems seeing each other. I’ve never met her mother, of course. We’d only been together eight weeks and I didn’t have enough time off to go up to Berwick. Mrs Simmons never comes down here. Elspeth’s Auntie Betty was always perfectly polite, but Uncle Frank’s been fabulous, really friendly.’ Hedley pointed towards the photograph on the bedside table. ‘He took that and got three copies framed, one for each of us and one for himself. He and Elspeth were always really close. I suppose it’s because they had so much in common.’

Penrose hadn’t seen the photograph anywhere in the Simmonses’ flat. He wondered again about the nature of Simmons’s feelings for his niece. It wouldn’t surprise him if Frank turned out to be Elspeth’s real father, although where that left him with Bernard Aubrey and Arthur he couldn’t begin to work out.

‘What about your own family, Hedley? Tell me about them.’

‘I don’t see what they’ve got to do with any of this.’

‘Humour me. What does your father do?’

‘He died when I was a baby, just before war broke out, but he was a blacksmith. My mother was left on her own with six children, but she remarried a few years later, to a farmer, and we moved in with him. He had three children of his own, but we all got on really well. Still do. Most of my brothers and sisters stayed in or around the village, helping on the farm or teaching at the 211

local school. I missed them when I first left home to come here, but I go back as much as I can. I was planning to go in the summer and take Elspeth to meet them. They would have loved her.’

‘Did any of your family serve in the war?’

‘No. We were lucky. My dad was already dead, like I said, and none of my brothers were old enough. My stepfather was con-sumptive, so he was excused military service. It must have been terrible, though. Elspeth talked a lot about her father as we got to know each other better. His illness really upset her.’

‘Did she ever talk about what happened to him or anyone else he served with?’

‘No, just how bad it got towards the end. I think she and her mother both felt guilty for being so relieved when he died.’