A finer end - Deborah Crombie [90]
“I’m sorry.” Winnie’s voice was bitingly firm. “Those are things Faith told me in confidence, and I simply can’t reveal them without her permission. You’ll have to find some other way.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Prove all things, and hold fast that which is true.
—FREDERICK BLIGH BOND,
FROM THE GATE OF REMEMBRANCE
FAITH INSISTED SHE didn’t mind staying on her own. Jack had offered to take her with him to visit Winnie, but there were too many things she couldn’t face talking about just yet. Not with Winnie, when she still didn’t know how much Winnie knew, or if Garnet were responsible for her accident. And now Garnet was dead.
Dead. Alone in Jack’s house, Faith repeated the word to herself, desperate to make sense of it. Garnet had been alive—she had sung to the cats in the morning when she thought no one could hear; she had put courgettes in everything she cooked, even though she knew Faith loathed them; she had read tattered copies of National Geographic in the loo; she had kept a doll collection wrapped in tissue paper in a box in her bedroom cupboard.
And now she was not.
She spent the first hour after Jack’s departure watching some mindless comedy on the old telly in the sitting room, but when the snow on the screen began to give her a headache she gave it up. She had asked Jack once why he hadn’t kept any of his own things when he came back to Glastonbury, and he’d replied that they’d absorbed too many memories, like emulsion on film. He’d sold everything in a job lot.
Would Garnet’s possessions bear her imprint? Faith had watched her in her workshop, handling her tools with such delicacy. Those she had loved, and her books, and her cape and colorful clothes.
Faith wandered about the house, running her fingertip through the layer of dust on the furniture, her thoughts skittering. She felt as if someone had taken her apart and put the pieces back in the wrong order.
Without conscious decision, she climbed the stairs, slowly, one hand supporting the weight of her belly. She had not been in any of the upstairs rooms except the one Jack had put her in. Now she opened each door along the corridor, peering inside. Hers came first, then a tiny room that bore traces of boyhood occupation. The large room near hers had a high four-poster bed and smelled of Jack and, faintly, Winnie. The other two rooms were filled with boxes, stacks of books and papers, and odd bits of furniture.
What had it been like to grow up in this house? she wondered, recalling her parents’ cheerful suburban semi. That brought a pang of intense homesickness, immediately squelched, as was the thought of what she would do once her baby was born. How could she think past this day?
Closing the doors again, she went back down the stairs. She would do something useful, have a meal ready for them, whenever they came back. Scrounging in the pantry, she found some canned chicken stock, a package of dried peas, rice, and some spices: probably all well past their prime, but she might concoct a passable pot of soup.
She had put the peas on to soak when the doorbell rang. It must be Nick, she thought, and waddled—you could hardly call it walking anymore—as quickly as she could to the front door. She swung it open anxiously, to find not Nick, but Inspector Greely and a woman in plainclothes.
“We’d hoped we might find you at home, miss.”
“Jack’s not here.” Faith started to close the door.
“No, no, it’s you we’ve come to see. Can we come in?”
When Faith hesitated, not sure if she could refuse, Greely said, “Unless you prefer that we interview you in the presence of your parents, of course.”
“I’m seventeen,” she retorted, bristling. “I can speak for myself.”
“Then we’ll have our little chat now.” The Inspector stepped inside, and Faith realized with a sinking heart that she’d backed herself into a corner.
She took them into the sitting room, and let them seat themselves on the worn velvet upholstery, surrounded by silver-framed photos of Jack’s relatives.
“This is Detective Constable