He wandered round again, admiring the mellow timbers and stroking the panelling while Edith watched and wondered about him, this hitherto unknown cousin.
‘Haven’t you had your portrait done yet?’ he enquired as he completed his second circuit and when she shook her head, he offered, ‘I’ll do one of you if you like?’
Startled and doubtful, she stammered her thanks.
‘Don’t worry,’ he told her, eyes gleaming with amused malice as he evidently read her mind. ‘I promise you I’m quite good. As long as I use crayons I can colour in very nicely now, without going over the lines.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ she was stung to retort. ‘Why are you so touchy? I didn’t mean that, I—’
‘Oh yes you did,’ he snapped then climbed down off his high horse. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Edith. You’re right, I am touchy and I do need to get over myself. I’ll tell you about it some time or other, but honestly, I’m perfectly competent and I really will do a portrait of you soon. I’d like to anyway, maybe get some echoes of Dame Margery in it somehow, a stylized background of some sort, perhaps, vaguely Tudor. It’d be an interesting project.’
Mollified, she led him to a pair of portraits near the painting of her father. ‘We really ought to go back and help, but I wanted you to see these two before we leave it for now. This was painted not long after they got married. Grandpa was stationed abroad for a few years at the end of the war and he met Gran when he came home on leave. Her entire family were killed by a Doodlebug bomb and the only reason she didn’t die too was that she was at a Girl Guides meeting. They don’t talk about it but I think she must have had a bit of a breakdown afterwards though she was getting better and living with an aunt when they met.’
‘I can believe that,’ he said with sympathy. ‘You can see it in her eyes; she’s got a haunted look, and she’s very thin too.’ He looked again. ‘I’d never have pictured her with chestnut hair, though. I suppose I’d have assumed she was a blonde like you and Dame Margery.’ He looked at the blue-eyed, fair-haired young husband in the painting. ‘The colouring is different, but the features – and the rest – he’s actually very like your father—and me, isn’t he? The family likeness is really strong.’ he murmured.
‘You’re a lot taller,’ Edith gave him an appraising look. ‘And not stockily built like them, but apart from that….’ She stared up at the two figures and tried to smile. ‘If Grandpa had been killed last week—’
‘What do you reckon actually happened?’ His voice was kind as she knuckled away a tear.
‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head in exasperation. ‘It can’t possibly be true, he must have been mistaken. It just isn’t possible that anyone would drive at him deliberately, intending to run him down.’
She looked soberly at Rory. ‘But he’s so certain and the alternative, that he’s cracking up mentally, is even more unthinkable. I wish I knew what to believe.’
‘Let’s go and see what’s going on downstairs.’ Rory tucked her hand into his arm and turned her gently towards the door. ‘You know, when we’ve got more time, there are some things I’d like to do in this gallery; some research I want to carry out. I think there’s something rather interesting in here that nobody seems to have noticed. More than interesting actually, but I need peace and quiet and most of all time, to get a proper look at it.’
She raised her eyes to his face at that.
‘No, I’m not telling you. I said I need time and I’m not jumping the gun. Meanwhile, don’t you go dropping any hints to anyone, not even your grandparents. I think you urgently need to get someone in to see the gallery and anyway, if I’m right about the other thing, this could be something spectacular!’
At 7.30 that evening Harriet Quigley looked round the guests knocking back champagne, or something more or less resembling champagne, in the hall at Locksley Farm Place. Aware that the organizers liked to put on the Ritz for the annual dinner, she had dressed her best in her favourite midnight-blue silk jersey with her mother’s ancestral brooch in the shape of a gold acanthus leaf pinned beside the low, square neckline.
On the edge of the party she could see Karen, looking adorable in polka dots and a rustling taffeta petticoat. She was policing the Inner Wheel ladies and supervising the men in charge of the bar while keeping an unobtrusive eye on her elderly employers.
Harriet smiled and relaxed a little. With three of us at it, she told herself, they’re in good hands. Like Edith, who was also watchful, she too had been worrying about Walter Attlin’s accident, but looking at the well-behaved people around her she frowned. It had to have been vandals or hooligans, she thought, surely not one of these people. Nobody he knew could have tried to kill an old man, surely. The idea had her twisting round to check on him: no, he looked fine. A little frailer than usual, perhaps, but he was in his late eighties, for heaven’s sake. And absolutely sane, she decided after another glance at the good-looking old man flirting happily with the village’s chief flower arranger.