Murder on Skiathos Page 6

  ‘Stuff and nonsense!’ replied Miss Peony rather bad-temperedly, from her position in the chair. ‘You do talk a great deal of rot, Hyacinth; you always did, even as a child.’

  ‘Well, really, Peony!’ exclaimed Miss Hyacinth, dropping the handkerchief she was holding, in her surprise.

  What had startled her most, however, rather than the actual words spoken, had been the sound of her sister’s voice. For Peony Trimble had a tendency to act as if she were mute as well as deaf, a circumstance that had initially arisen due to her fear that her deafness might lead her to speak too loudly in public. She had an abhorrence of being stared at, or worse, of making a spectacle of herself, something she was secretly of the opinion her sister did every time she opened her mouth. And having adopted this rather unenviable position, she had found that when in company she was very often ignored; certainly, she appeared invisible in large gatherings. Had she been her sister, Hyacinth, Peony Trimble might well have been distressed by this discovery. Instead, she thrived for she found to her delight that it enabled her to freely eavesdrop on conversations. Due to her reported deafness and the insipid creature she presented in public, very few people bothered to lower their voices in her presence, and indeed frequently spoke quite candidly in front of her under the misapprehension that she was present only in body, not in mind. She had, therefore, gleaned many a piece of gossip or fascinating fact of which she would otherwise have been quite ignorant.

  This did not explain, of course, why she should remain silent when she was alone with her sister, who’s good opinion she did not seek. Miss Hyacinth, if asked, would have explained, again in a lowered voice, that her sister had quite got out of the habit of speaking. Miss Peony, however, would have explained it quite differently. ‘Hyacinth,’ she would have said, ‘requires no encouragement. She speaks quite enough for the two of us, and what she does say isn’t worth listening to.’

  Miss Hyacinth was, therefore, rather taken aback that her sister should deem it necessary to contribute to the conversation on this occasion. After mopping her brow with the handkerchief that she had retrieved from the floor, she gave her sister a particularly reproachful stare.

  ‘There’s no use your looking at me like that, Hyacinth. It doesn’t do anything for you. And you do talk stuff and nonsense,’ continued Miss Peony, in the rather gruff voice she adopted when addressing her sister, which was reminiscent of a cough. ‘You’d do well to follow my example. Now how does the saying go? Something about it being better to keep quiet and be thought stupid, than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.’ The elder Miss Trimble threw her head back and roared with laughter; the noise reminded Miss Hyacinth of a croaking frog.

  ‘Peony!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Hyacinth,’ said her sister, mopping her eyes with a large gentleman’s handkerchief that had once belonged to her father, ‘but really you have only yourself to blame.’

  ‘Father always said –’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re always spouting Father. He was a miserable old miser, who never did anything for anyone.’

  ‘What a dreadful thing to say!’ objected Miss Hyacinth, looking a little flustered. ‘Really, Peony, dear, it is not a bit kind to speak of Father in that way.’

  ‘I don’t mean to be kind,’ retorted Miss Peony, completely unruffled by her sister’s words of reproach. ‘Father may have been a vicar, but he behaved like a despot.’

  Miss Hyacinth pursed her lips and said rather primly: ‘I see you are in one of your moods. It is not the slightest bit of use my talking to you when you are in one of your moods.’

  For the next few minutes she pointedly ignored her sibling, occupying herself instead with straightening the sheets on the beds and rearranging the flowers in the vase on the washstand. Having completed these few domestic tasks, she seated herself at her dressing table, her back turned purposely towards her sister, and began applying cold cream to her face.

  Miss Peony knitted her brows in a restive manner and regarded her sister’s reflection in the mirror. Hyacinth really was too much. Why, she often wondered, did her sister have to be such a sensitive soul? She sighed, for she had realised, rather belatedly, that she had played her hand all wrong. It was not in her character to apologise, nor to attempt to smooth any ruffled feathers caused by her curt tongue. On this occasion, however, she was tempted to intervene. If she did not, Hyacinth was likely to sulk for hours and, really, she could not be expected to keep her bit of news to herself.

  ‘Mr Vickers was quite right,’ she said intriguingly.

  Hyacinth Trimble, who was engrossed in the act of applying cold cream to her forehead, did not reply immediately.

  ‘Mr Vickers was quite right about the ‘Disappearing Duchess’,’ continued Peony, with growing asperity.

  ‘Was he?’ said Hyacinth, sounding not even vaguely interested in what her sister had to say.

  It was time, Peony thought, to take decisive action. She rose from her chair, crossed the room, and extracted a newspaper from her travel bag. Out of the corner of her eye she was encouraged to see that Hyacinth was watching her movements in the mirror. Quickly, she scoured the pages of the newspaper until she had found the article she was looking for.

  ‘Ah!’ With a note of triumph, she crossed the room and banged the newspaper down on the dressing table, almost upsetting the pot of cold cream. ‘There,’ she said, jabbing her finger at a photograph underneath which was written: ‘The Duchess of Grismere’. Now, tell me that isn’t your Miss Dewhurst!’

  Mr Vickers coughed and spluttered and stumbled into his room. His throat, as was usual at this time of night, felt parched and, with unfocused eyes, he surveyed the room in vain for a tumbler of water. Swaying slightly, he put a hand up to his scrawny neck and clutched at his limp bow tie, which came undone all too readily in his hand. He regarded it with distaste, as if it were some foreign object, and flung it on to a chair. The creased jacket followed shortly, abandoned unceremoniously in a crumpled heap on the floor. On something of a roll, Mr Vickers next discarded his shoes, without first untying the laces. He tottered unsteadily around the room in stockinged feet, managing to stub his toe on the leg of the bedstead.

  With a savage oath, he sprawled himself, fully clothed, on to the bed. A few strands of hair stuck unbecomingly to his damp forehead. He passed a tongue over his dry lips. He did not make a very pleasing spectacle, looking in every respect the reprobate he undoubtedly was.

  God, he hated this place. Full of toffs and gentry, it was, and them as thought they were better than everyone else, when, really, they were worse. He’d seen the way they’d looked at him, turning up their noses and averting their gaze whenever he came into view, as if he were something dragged up from the gutter, no better than a sewer rat. Well, he’d show them, all right. They might give themselves airs and graces and talk all lardy dardy, but they weren’t no better than him. He supposed that Thurlow chap was all right at a push. At least he worked proper; this was no holiday for him. Pleasant enough young fellow he was too. Happy enough to give him, Vickers, the time of day as long as Miss Mabel weren’t there. Everyone could see the chap had it bad, though why he should set his sights on a vicar’s daughter, he didn’t know. Well, good luck to him, that’s what he said. He supposed the Misses Trimble were all right in their way. At least the younger one was, though she wouldn’t stop her chattering. It would be enough to drive a man to drink. He didn’t think much of the other one. The looks she could give a chap could turn him to stone, they could. If she could talk, he bet she’d have a vicious tongue, just like his Aunt Em, who could screech like a fish wife when she put her mind to it.

  No, it was the proper gentry he didn’t like. That Lady Lavinia, now, she was a one. A looker, he’d give her that, but the way she looked at him, wrinkling up her nose, as if he were an unpleasant smell. The cheek of it. It could give a man a chip on his shoulder, it could. He had as much right as anyone else to be there, he had, and he’d been tempted once or twice to tell h
er to her face. Now, whether he’d have chosen this hotel for himself, if it weren’t to do with work, was another thing. Of course, by rights, it shouldn’t have been him as came. Frank, now he’d have been much better at it, would old Frank. He’d have blended in just fine, what with his fancy ways and his handsome looks. He wouldn’t have bought a dinner jacket from a pawnbroker that was two sizes too big for him, he wouldn’t; not Frank. But Frank had gone and broken his leg, and what else could Jameson do but give him, Vickers, the job? Not that he had wanted to, of course. You could tell by the look on his face that he’d rather do anything but that. But needs must, as his good old mother would have said, and it was worth a pretty penny. ‘Now, don’t you let me down, Alfie,’ Jameson had said, glowering at him as if Frank’s broken leg was all his fault. ‘You’ll need to smarten yourself up, you will. It’s no use you going about the place looking like you’ve just been pulled through a hedge backwards; else, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb. This isn’t just any old job, you know. If we do this one right …’ He’d regarded Vickers’ poor, emaciated physique with more than a critical eye. ‘And don’t you go drinking,’ he’d warned him. ‘It ain’t food, you know. You look half starved. You’d do better putting a bit of steak and kidney pudding in your stomach than a whisky.’ He’d leant forward then and pointed his finger at Vickers. ‘You’re to remember you’re on a job, my boy. None of your larking around that’d make a man half your age blush. You’ll need to keep your wits about you. That’s to say, what little wits you have, which isn’t saying much.’

  Vickers sighed, as he remembered his instructions. Jameson had a mean way about him, all right. He’d been in half a mind to tell him what to do with his job and all, only jobs weren’t so easy to come by, not nowadays. And it was all very well for Jameson to utter commands in that disagreeable way of his, but it wasn’t him as was here on what felt like the other side of the world, among people he could not fathom, and who made it all too obvious they detested him. Look at the way the hotel proprietor had looked him up and down as if he’d answered an advertisement for a position on the hotel staff. Kettering hadn’t wanted to give him a room; his face had said as much as clear as day. As it was, he’d been allocated a room that was little more than a broom cupboard. And he’d had nothing to do for the most part but twiddle his thumbs and prop up the hotel bar. He might have liked it well enough if it hadn’t been so hot and if he’d had someone proper to talk to, someone to share a pint of beer with. He might have thought of it as a holiday if he hadn’t had to stuff himself into a boiled shirt every evening and eat those fancy meals that played havoc with his stomach. He’d never felt so conspicuous or lonely, not even when the wife had left him to take up with that chap in the haberdashers. What else could a chap do in such circumstances, but drink? Especially when someone else was paying. It would have been rude to have abstained; the temperance movement held little attraction to him. What man in his position would have refrained from drinking? Save for Frank, who always was something of a stickler for the rules.

  Minutes passed as Vickers lay on his back regarding the ceiling and cursing his lot in life. Gradually, however, his memory cleared. He sat up with a jerk, and his mind became more focused. A vague recollection of the events of the evening had come back to him, and with them a smile appeared on his cracked lips. Though his head was throbbing, he scrambled off the bed with an energy hitherto unknown to him. He made a rapid search of the pockets of the dinner jacket that had been so carelessly tossed aside. After a moment, he found what he was looking for, and extracted a photograph, which he studied carefully.

  ‘That’s her, all right,’ he declared to himself. ‘I’d swear a month’s wages on it being her.’ He gave a sly grin, though there was no one present to witness his sudden jubilation. ‘She’s no better that she ought to be, though like as not she considers herself my better.’ He laughed mirthlessly at his joke and jabbed the photograph with a grimy finger. ‘I’ll not be put in my place by the likes of you,’ he said savagely.

  Mr Vickers was not the only guest to return to his rooms that night in something of a befuddled state. Ron Thurlow was his fellow in this regard, though his condition was not the result of an overindulgence in liquor. Rather, it owed its cause to a severe shock or, to be more precise, to two harsh shocks, that seemed to tear at his very innards, so that for a few minutes he was rendered uncomfortably helpless.

  ‘Well, I’ll be blowed!’ he said at last, recovering some of his usual good humour. ‘Now, what are the odds of that happening to a chap?’ His face soon darkened, however, as he somewhat reluctantly acknowledged the peril in which his present predicament placed him. Painful memories rose unbidden to the surface. ‘Damn the lot of them!’ he exclaimed. He was used to carrying his various secrets bottled up inside him and, by the ordinary way of things, he’d have been all right. The past was the past and could be buried; in time, memory and knowledge of it would be diminished. The likelihood that the various secrets of his existence should threaten to surface, become entwined and be exposed by the same hand, was incredulous. Yet, this was the future that awaited him, a ruin of sorts on a Greek island far removed from the England he had left behind him. He had thought himself to be safe here, and in this he had been mistaken. What a stupid fool he’d been.

  He cursed himself severely and began to pace the room, all feelings of tiredness having left him. If he had not been afraid of bumping into Vickers, he might have retired to the hotel bar for a last whisky and cigarette and a chance to contemplate his future. Instead, he ventured out for a stroll, his steps taking him towards the cliff edge where, unbeknown to him, he narrowly missed coming upon the Earl and the Countess of Belvedere on their homeward journey.

  The very act of walking, coupled with the night air on his face, proved restorative. He was able to consider the matters troubling him in a more reasoned manner. It was true that he felt agitated still, yet he was relieved to find that the awful sense of dread that had initially filled him had subsided. Instead, he felt intrigued, as if he held a puzzle in his hand.

  ‘But it’s an odd old business, just the same,’ he acknowledged, the words escaping from his lips before he could retrieve them. Humming softly to himself, he returned to his rooms. What, he wondered, was the worst that could happen? If all else failed, he reasoned, he could escape the island, though he felt tolerably certain that it would not come to that. It did not occur to him then that events might take a far worse turn.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘I thought I’d find this island dreadfully dull,’ remarked Ron Thurlow to Mabel Adler, the following morning.

  They were climbing the steep cliff path that wound its way up from the beach. It was little more than a stony, meandering track, on one side of which the hotel had erected a crude wooden handrail to aid the ascent. It was still a tiring climb, however, and required a degree of concentration and effort. The conversation between the two hotel guests, therefore, was sporadic and uttered between panted breaths.

  ‘And isn’t it?’ teased Mabel, continuing the thread of her companion’s observation. ‘Dull, I mean?’ she added, when he looked puzzled. She was slightly ahead of Ron on the path and paused for a moment to gaze down at him, conscious of her elevated position.

  ‘Far from it,’ answered Ron at last, as they emerged at the top of the cliff somewhat out of breath, though both were laughing, as if they shared some private joke. ‘The younger Miss Trimble is a frightfully good sort. She’s full of the most useful information. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned about Clyst Birch. Of course, I’ve never been to the village myself, but I feel I know it quite as well as any denizen. In fact, I’m thinking of arranging an escorted tour there one of these days.’ He grinned at her. ‘I say, do you fancy coming?’

  Though pleased by the invitation, Miss Adler ignored the question, and instead asked one of her own. ‘Are the Trimbles the only reason you don’t find this place dull?’

  ‘Oh, rather! I mean to say, on
e can say the most frightful things to the older Miss Trimble and she won’t take offence because of her being as deaf as a doorpost.’

  ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ declared Mabel, but not without humour. ‘That you say anything frightful, I mean. Why, I’ve never heard you say an unkind word to anyone.’

  ‘That’s because I view everyone as a potential client and am always on my very best behaviour. Though, there’s always a first time.’ He paused a moment to give Miss Adler a meaningful look. ‘Of course, I’d never utter an unkind word to you.’

  ‘I should think not,’ retorted Mabel, blushing fetchingly. With crimson cheeks, she turned her gaze to look back out to sea. Apparently unwilling to forsake the subject, she said, still looking into the distance: ‘Is it just the Trimbles’ company you find amusing?’

  ‘Oh, hardly. Mr Vickers is quite a hoot. It’s –’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mabel, turning to face him, a deliberate note of disappointment in her voice.

  ‘Of course,’ said Ron hurriedly, ‘none of them is a patch on you.’

  ‘Aren’t they?’ enquired Mabel, rather breathlessly.

  ‘No,’ said Ron, with feeling.

  Mabel felt her stomach give a little flutter. ‘We shall be returning home soon,’ she said, giving her companion a sideways glance. ‘Father and I, I mean.’ She permitted herself to look a little crestfallen.