Charlie by Lesley Pearse
So many times in the past days and nights he’d closed his eyes and pictured her face. The slant of her almond eyes, the way they crinkled up when she laughed, the curve of her lips and the delicacy of her cheekbones. Lying on the hard stone floor, he tried to warm himself by imagining her body curved into his. He could smell her skin, her hair, feel the smoothness of her breasts in his hand. He thought how many soldiers must have had such images in their heads on the eve of a battle, knowing they might not return, and wondered too if it was that which gave them the courage to fight.
Daphne hardly said a word to Baz as he drove her down from London into Kent. She was rarely thrown by any problem, somehow the solution always seemed to spring up at her effortlessly, but if this girl Mick had caught was Charlie Weish, then everything she’d planned was in jeopardy.
The scheme to dispose of Andrew Blake was already underway. Within minutes of talking to him back in Shepherd’s Bush on Friday, he had told her enough about his troubled relationship with Charlie and his background for her to see that a carefully faked suicide was the perfect way of getting rid of him.
Right now she had a young man in her employ, of similar colouring, age and build, posing as Andrew, using his identity, cheque-book and wearing his clothes, moving from guest-house to guest-house along the south coast. In each one he was carefully building up an appearance of a man in distress. He would be last seen close to Beachy Head. Meanwhile Andrew would be taken there too, dressed again in his own clothes, and thrown off the cliff.
So maybe this girl down at The Manse wasn’t Charlie Weish and she was worrying unnecessarily. But if it was, how did she find the place?
The only people who knew Daphne owned it were her own two brothers. The solicitors who’d handled the cash purchase of it back in 1964 knew her as Mrs Jennifer Randall. The telephone, rates and every other service were in the same name and she never had visitors there.
Nine years ago it had been her intention to turn it into a grand country house hotel. It had seemed perfect then, within easy reach of London, but remote enough for reclusive weekends and holidays. She’d intended to extend the stables, add a swimming pool and gymnasium. But a shortage of funds had halted her plans, and as time went on and her circumstances changed, she found she’d lost the impetus to start such a venture, and now only spent occasional weekends there. Thanks to a sudden boom in property prices, however, she was about to put it up for sale. She would stop seeing it as a mistake when she made a good profit.
‘What are we gonna do if it is’ er?’ Baz said suddenly, interrupting her thoughts.
‘I’ll have to find out how she found the house before I can decide that,’ she answered crisply.
Baz turned in his driving seat to look at her, his expression one of extreme anxiety.
‘Don’t look like that,’ she said sharply. The twins often reminded her uncomfortably of their mother. Not in looks – they’d got their father’s squat features, his brawn and his knack of getting women to keep them. It was more the weakness in their mouths, the pleading in their eyes, she’d seen her mother with that expression so many times when Danny came back from the pub drunk. ‘I mean talk, that’s all. I got the boy to open up, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, but—’ he stopped abruptly. He shared his brother’s views about his sister, sometimes he could swear she wasn’t human. He wanted to say that at the end of the day it would be he and Mick who’d be chucking the boy off the cliff, and she’d be sitting safely miles away. He had a feeling if this girl was Charlie Weish she would end up with a similar fate too. But right now it probably wasn’t a good idea to irritate Daphne with incidentals. She was, when all was said and done, the brains in their family. But for her, he and Mick would have nothing.
‘Trust me,’ she said, laying one cool, beautifully manicured hand on his and giving him that heart-stopping smile that reminded him of when they were kids. ‘Haven’t I always done the best for all of us?’
Mick saw the red Mercedes coming up the lane from the study window and ran downstairs to open the door. He was surprised the lad didn’t call out again, he’d made enough noise first thing this morning to wake the dead.
As Baz drove in and stopped, Mick opened the passenger door for his sister and bent down to speak to her. ‘It is ’er! Charlie Weish,’ he said. ‘I done exactly what you said. I kinda made out I felt sorry for ’er. But it’s gotta be just a fluke she came ’ere. She can’t know about us or she wouldn’t ’ave told me ’er real name.’
Daphne sat there thinking as Mick rattled out the whole conversation. ‘What yer gonna do, sis?’ he asked finally.
‘Give me time to think and change my clothes,’ she said. ‘You two go through to the kitchen and wait for me there.’
Daphne waited until her brothers had gone through the door from the hall into the back of the house, then, taking off her shoes, she tiptoed across the hall and up the stairs. She didn’t want the boy to know there was a woman in the house too.
Her bedroom was a vast and beautiful room at the front of the house, furnished with opulent antique furniture, which included an exquisitely carved seventeenth-century four-poster bed. The room reflected her aspirations at the time she’d bought the house. She had wanted to be lady of the manor then, with horses in the stables, crystal chandeliers in the hall and drawing room and servants kowtowing to her. But that dream vanished when Ralph refused to marry her. Without his wealth to pour into the place she had never got beyond transforming this room.
The rest of the house was an acute embarrassment to her – still so many empty rooms left as they were from the time it was an isolation hospital in the Twenties, the back garden overgrown. It was impossible to heat adequately, every window at the back needed replacing, all she’d managed to do was create a façade of country house living by keeping the front neat and tidy. She hated the place now and couldn’t wait to get shot of it.
Stripping off her black business suit, she stood for a moment in front of the cheval mirror wearing only her black lacy underwear and appraised herself. She was forty-six, but her body was still almost as good as when she was twenty: firm, full breasts, a tiny waist, curvy hips and long slender legs. All her adult life people had remarked on her beauty and likened it to Elizabeth Taylor’s. She could see the similarities – the black wavy hair, eyes that dominated her face – yet felt she had the edge on the actress for there was no vulnerable little-girl weakness in her perfect features, she was also taller and slimmer.
Moving nearer to the mirror, she examined her face closely. There were a few fine frown-lines on her forehead, and tiny puckers round her eyes and mouth; she would need to do something about them before long.
Bringing herself back to the job in hand, she went over to the walk-in wardrobe, switched on the light and began rummaging through the rails to find something suitable to wear to deal with this girl.
Back in her days of owning property in Paddington she had often adopted a disguise to get information about her tenants. In her time she’d been a district nurse, an official from the National Assistance Board, even a canvasser from the Labour Party. This was why being Martha Grimsby for an afternoon posed no problem to her. Yet she couldn’t see how a disguise would help this time, not if the girl was wily enough to find this place.
As an idea came to her, she pulled out a pair of slacks and a black sweater and slipped them on. She would keep out of it. Mick might be as thick as two short planks, but he had already got the girl to reveal her real name, so that suggested she believed his story about being Mrs Randall’s gardener. After being locked up for over two hours, she’d be frantic; with a little friendly persuasion she might very well be ready to spill out exactly how she came upon this address, and how the police were reacting to her boyfriend’s disappearance.
Daphne smiled to herself. Once she had that information, a solution would present itself, it always had before.
Charlie leapt up from her chair as the door opened at last. In the two hours she??
But on seeing the man again, still alone, she felt angry. ‘Where are the police?’ she shouted at him. ‘You can’t keep me here like this. I haven’t done anything.’
‘I’m sorry, love,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘They’ve just rung me to say they’ve got a big job on and they’ll be along soon. So why don’t you come on upstairs with me, ’ave another cuppa and we’ll have a little chat. If you can give me a good enough reason for poking around in the garden, I might just drive you down to the station and let you go without waiting for them.’
Charlie’s anger was wiped out. He was just a working man doing the best for his employer, he was being reasonable, so she must be too.
‘Okay,’ she agreed and forced herself to smile. She wondered if she could persuade him to give her something to eat too, it was half past three and apart from the bar of chocolate she’d had nothing to eat since the night before.
Yet as he led her up a narrow bare wood staircase into the main part of the house, and they didn’t arrive at the big Victorian hall Rita had described, she felt disorientated and uneasy. He led her down a long, gloomy magnolia-painted corridor, with several doors leading off it, but everyone of them was shut. She surmised by the modern panelled doors on her right that they opened on to rooms at the back of the house. Therefore the more solid, older ones on the left led to the front. The corridor gave it a very institutional, spooky appearance, and it struck her as a peculiar home for an old lady living alone.
Right at the end of the corridor the man opened a door on the left-hand side. ‘’Ere we are at last,’ he said jovially. ‘Mrs Randall’s dining room.’
Charlie was soothed by the sight of a tray of tea on the large oval antique table and its matching spoon-backed chairs, also by the view of the front garden through the windows. ‘It’s a very big house for an old lady,’ she ventured as he pulled out a chair at the side of the table for her.
‘Yeah, much too big,’ he said, sitting down at the end of the table with his back to the door. ‘Mrs Randall spends most of ’er time these days at her daughter’s place, that’s why I ’ave to be so careful.’
The bone-china tea service, the lace-trimmed tray cloth, was all appropriate for the room and indeed for the age of the woman he worked for. Yet on a moment’s reflection it seemed strange to Charlie that a working man would choose to use it. The gardener at ‘Windways’ wouldn’t have dared take anyone beyond the kitchen, and if he was making tea it would have been a mug.
It crossed her mind that he could be an intruder himself! Suppose he’d actually been burgling the house when she startled him? But she dismissed that thought as ridiculous; although he looked and sounded like a stereotype of a burglar with his bulging muscles and his missing front tooth, he was too relaxed, too at ease for that. As he poured the tea, he chatted companionably about how he wished he could find time to tackle the back garden, but just keeping the front nice was too much work.
Looking around her at the many large paintings on the walls, all in ornate gilt frames, she noticed there was no theme to them. Portraits were mixed with views, animals and seascapes. Her father would have dryly commented that the owner had no real interest in art but merely bought a job lot as an investment and had them framed identically. Likewise, the large silver salver and three different-sized tureens on the sideboard looked as if they’d been placed there to create an impression of country house living.
‘Now, how about telling me why you really came in here?’ the man said suddenly as he handed her the tea. He smiled disarmingly at her and his blue eyes were twinkling. ‘I’ve been around the block a few times, Charlie, so don’t try to kid me. From the field at the back you can see the road clearly, so no one but an idiot would push their way through that fence and brambles. And you ain’t that, are you?’
Charlie smiled weakly. After being so long on her own and frightened out of her wits for most of the time it felt good to find he wasn’t the bully she’d taken him for at first.
‘No, I’m not stupid, just nosy,’ she said. ‘Okay, I did come in purposely, but only because I saw the front of the house and it looked so posh I wanted to see the back too. I found I couldn’t see anything through the bushes, so I wriggled through a small hole. Once I got inside I was baffled as to why the back garden was so overgrown. I thought maybe the house was empty, so I couldn’t resist taking a peep in the windows.’
He smiled again and patted her hand almost affectionately. ‘That’s better, now we’re getting somewhere. But that’s not all, is it? I’ve got a feeling someone told you something about this house, and that’s why you looked for it. Am I right?’
Charlie was tempted to tell him the truth, to be done with it all and get back to London, yet a sixth sense told her not to.
‘No, no one told me anything. Why, is there something strange about its history?’ she said, looking at him inquiringly.
‘Not that I know of.’ He shrugged. ‘But you said you lived in London, so why come here? It ain’t a place people usually go for day trips.’
‘I had a holiday somewhere near here when I was a kid,’ she said impulsively. ‘I just remembered it being pretty and wanted to see it again. But I must have taken the wrong road from the station, because I couldn’t find the cottage we stayed at.’
He smiled again, and now his rather cold blue eyes looked warmer. ‘I did that once, tried to find a place out in Essex I’d been to. Got meself well and truly lost.’
‘I hope you didn’t wind up in trouble like me?’ she laughed.
‘Well, I didn’t go traipsing round anyone’s garden,’ he said, raising his eyebrows reprovingly. ‘Now, do you live with your mum and dad, Charlie?’
‘No, in a flat.’
‘On your own?’
It was an innocent enough question but aware she was vulnerable enough here in a strange house miles from anywhere, with a man who hadn’t even told her his name, she didn’t think she’d better portray herself as a loner.
‘No, with three other girls,’ she said. ‘It gets a bit noisy there too, that’s why a day in the country seemed a good idea.’
‘Did you tell them where you were going today?’
All at once she felt uneasy. ‘Yes, I did,’ she lied. ‘In fact if I don’t get back by the time they get in from work they’ll be worried about me. I couldn’t phone one of them at her work could I?’
When he didn’t reply immediately Charlie looked hard at him. He was rubbing his chin as if thrown by the request.
‘I’ll pay for the call,’ she said quickly. ‘Please?’
He still didn’t reply and his eyes moved sideways. Charlie assumed he was actually looking towards the phone as if pondering on her request. Yet there was no phone in the corner to which he glanced, only a small hatch, the kind for passing food through from the kitchen.
‘The phone’s not working,’ he said.
‘You said you’d called the police?’ she retorted indignantly.
He looked flustered. ‘I went out to phone them.’
At that alarm bells began to jangle in Charlie’s head. It would have been fair enough if he’d refused to let her use the phone, but why lie to her? Had he forgotten he said the police phoned him back just recently?
All at once all the oddities she’d noticed about him and this house bound themselves into one large mass. Maybe it didn’t belong to Daphne Dexter, but there was something very strange about the whole set-up here. The hairs on the back of her neck were standing up, and she felt threatened. ‘I need to go to the toilet,’ she blurted out. It was the only ruse she could think of which might give him a chance to prove he was harmless. ‘Where is it?’
Again his eyes flitted to that hatch. All at once she realized why. There had to be another person on the other side of it listening to them.
A
She had to know for certain. Leaping up, she rushed to the hatch and pushed it open before he had a chance to stop her.
As the two doors fell back Charlie recoiled in shock. It wasn’t an old lady there, or even another man, but a dark-haired woman with vivid blue eyes.
Their eyes locked for only the briefest split second before the woman slammed the hatch shut, but Charlie instinctively knew who it was.
Daphne Dexter.
Coming face to face so unexpectedly with the woman she was sure was responsible for all the misery in her life suddenly made her feel faint. But as the man grabbed hold of her arm to haul her away from the hatch, she realized she was now in a very dangerous situation.
‘I know who you are, you bitch,’ she yelled at the top of her voice. ‘Don’t even think of hurting me like you did my mother because the police are on to you.’
‘Take her back downstairs, Mick,’ she heard the woman call out.
Stunned and scared as Charlie was, when the man grabbed her arm more tightly, she knew she had to fight from being taken back to the basement. She had already checked the barred windows in that room and they were as strong as the vaults in a bank. She had no doubt now that the man was one of the two who’d helped maim Rita and crippled her mother. She had to get away from up here and save Andrew.
‘Don’t lock me up again,’ she pleaded with him as he manhandled her bodily out into the corridor. ‘I’ll do anything you say, just let me stay up here.’