Old Moorhen's Shredded Sporran: The Belchester Chronicles Book 4 Read online

  ‘Do allow me to assist you, madam,’ she carolled, in anxious tones.

  ‘Grrr, wossit umpher elph,’ came from inside the giant fondant fancy.

  The assistant suddenly seemed to be all arms, and in only a couple of minutes, she had straightened out the dress, tamed it, and got it properly fitted on to its incandescent occupant.

  ‘There, madam, I think you’ll find that satisfactory. Would madam care to take a look in our mirrors, so that she can see it from all angles?’

  ‘Blasted thing positively ate me,’ puffed Lady A. ‘If you hadn’t intervened, I swear it was just about to start to digest me. Oh, bloody Norah! What, in the name of all that’s holy, do I look like? I’m tricked out like a giant cake. Whatever will Hugo say? He’ll become incontinent with laughter. I’ll never live this down.’

  A very quiet voice behind her almost whispered, ‘I like it,’ and reality returned. It was to be Enid’s day. She mustn’t be so selfish or rebellious as to spoil anything for her.

  ‘Do you like it, Enid? Let me take a look at you. My goodness, you’re transformed. Beauchamp will want to ravish you as soon as he sets eyes on you,’ she said, as generously as possible, hoping that no one mistook her for the wedding cake and tried to cut a slice out of her, for she now knew that she’d be wearing this mountain of pink icing on the day.

  ‘Don’t you like it, Amanda?’ asked Enid, with a catch in her voice, as if she feared perfection was to be snatched from her when she had only just caught sight of it.

  ‘If it’s what you would like me to wear for your wedding, then it must be perfect,’ said Lady A unexpectedly, both hands behind her back with all her fingers crossed at the blatant lie. ‘And you look like a million dollars.’

  ‘Oh, thank you so much. Er, what actually happened in the changing cubicle?’

  ‘It would appear that I got some of the hooks that attach pieces of the froth to the right part of the dress entangled with my hair grips and, the more I struggled, the worse things got. All over now, though. Let’s get into our own clothes and get these ready to be delivered, unless you’d like to leave them here until nearer the wedding.’

  ‘They’ll have to be altered anyway,’ replied Enid, knowingly. ‘They’re all made with the hem unsewn, so that there’s no problem with extra-tall women. We’ll have to come in for a proper fitting before the wedding for the length, then we can take them away.’

  ‘How knowledgeable of you, dear. I just thought it was the current fashion, to have the garment about two feet too long.’

  ‘You’re not very tall, are you? – no offence meant. That’s why there was so much spare.’

  ‘Good things come in little packages,’ concluded Lady A.

  ‘And so does poison,’ mouthed End, who was longing for a puff on one of her filter-tipped, king-sized drug-sticks.

  Chapter Eighteen

  That Evening

  After Beauchamp had put away the Rolls and entered the house, Lady Amanda, who was still in the hall, clapped her hands in the air, as if preparatory to breaking out into a fit of flamenco, and cried, ‘Come along, my man. I shall have a Bridesmaid Cooler. It’s definitely cocktail time, or at least a quarter to it, and I deserve something with a bit of a kick and just the right name, after what I’ve been through.’

  ‘Did everything go all right?’ he asked, genuinely interested, for he could not see his employer putting up with a lot of trailing round bridal shops.

  ‘It was perfect heaven,’ replied Enid, with an uncharacteristically dreamy look on her face. ‘We only had to go into one shop, and we found both my dress and Amanda’s.’

  ‘How spiffing,’ he replied, letting out his breath like a spurt of steam, in relief. He’d been nurturing a mental image of Enid arriving back in tears, with Lady Amanda spitting fire, after a fruitless trip round every bridal shop in the city. ‘I’ll prepare a Bridesmaid Cooler for you, your ladyship.’

  ‘I’ll have the same, I think,’ Enid declared. ‘I may not be a bridesmaid, but I definitely need a bit of a cooler, after fighting my way in and out of that complicated wedding dress.’

  ‘I shall wear a morning suit – with top hat, I think.’

  ‘Perfect!’

  ‘Chop chop, Beauchamp. I shall die of thirst if you don’t get a wiggle on. I’ve got a hard day ahead of me tomorrow, with heaven knows how many builders to phone about converting your flat.’

  ‘How exciting life has become. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll soon fix that,’ said Lady A, but she had a twinkle in her eye, to show she was only joking.

  After a fairly early evening meal that day, where the talk had been almost exclusively about the wedding, Lady Amanda reminded them that she would be contacting several builders in the morning, to arrange for estimates for the conversion of some of the rooms into a self-contained flat for them.

  ‘And I shall need to go home early this evening,’ Enid informed them. ‘If I’m going to be living here, I shall have to start doing something with my own little house.’

  ‘Are you going to rent it out for income, or sell it?’ asked Lady A.

  ‘I haven’t quite made up my mind. I think I’ll probably put it up for rent; that way my mother can’t land on me again, and I can put it on the market when I’ve got used to the idea. If she claims she needs somewhere to go, when she falls out with my sister, she can camp out there if I haven’t got a tenant. I don’t ever want to be in the situation where she thinks she can muscle her way in on our home here.’

  ‘Heaven forbid! I should never allow it.’

  ‘Get in the queue,’ replied Enid vehemently. ‘Whatever I do, I need to clear out everything that is surplus to needs, and start transferring some of my stuff up here. I’ll definitely need a skip before I’ve finished. There’s shedloads of stuff in the attic, and every nook and cranny is full of unnecessary ornaments and souvenirs – stuff like that I just don’t need now I’ve got a completely new life beckoning.’

  Beauchamp positively preened at this last statement, but it wasn’t just he that had transformed her existence: it was the detecting, and the increased closeness of the friendship she had with Lady A. Everything had changed since she had first gone ‘undercover’, just after Mr Hugo had moved in. She had never felt so alive.

  ‘Come along,’ said Beauchamp, ‘and I’ll get the Rolls out again. We can have a singsong in the car on the way home.’

  ‘Scrumptious,’ replied Enid.

  Lady A turned her face away, so that she could make a ‘being sick’ face without being observed.

  Enid entered her little house in Plague Alley feeling rather nostalgic. She might not have led the high life under its rather wavy roof, but she had spent a great number of years in its shelter.

  She and her first husband, Ted, had moved there shortly after they had married; they had both been so young. Her Ted was not the sharpest knife in the canteen, when closely examined – she supposed he was more akin to a spoon – but they had survived.

  They had just never prospered, and Ted had spent a lot of time out of work. Many of the years they had lived there, she had been the sole bread-winner. In fact, she didn’t really want to think about Ted any more. Better to leave the memories undisturbed. No point in raking up the past when the future was out there waiting for her.

  Their only child had been their poor stillborn son. Enid knew she could never withstand that heartbreak again, when she had looked at his little body so perfect, so beautiful, lacking only one thing – that essential spark of life. She had thought she would die of grief and join him, for a long time after his poor little body was buried. No, she must not think of the past.

  She wandered around, picking up little ornaments and framed photos that reminded her of happier times. She had come here as a young bride. She was leaving it as a grey-haired woman. Somehow, though, she felt the best years were still before her. Beauchamp was a one-off, the like of which she never thought she would meet, and
here she was preparing to marry him. How lucky she was.

  She’d start with her wardrobe, she decided, beginning to mount the stairs. There were a lot of drab garments in the various cupboards and drawers on the first floor that she simply could not bear to wear again. She needed some new clothes that just sang with colour, the way her life was beginning to. They didn’t have to be expensive; just loud.

  She knew she was wasting a lot of money on cigarettes at the moment, and made the sudden decision to give up, and put what she had been spending on this highly addictive weed into a clothes fund. She’d buy everything just a bit loose, as she was bound to put on a bit of weight when she didn’t have this appetite suppressant any more, and was a married woman, much more content with her lot.

  The decision brought a big smile to her face, as she hurled grey skirts, beige cardigans, and brown jumpers into a big heap in the middle of her bedroom floor. She’d have to go downstairs and get some black bags to put them in. She’d even take them to the charity shop. It wasn’t that they were particularly worn; just that she was a different person now, and didn’t want to be seen in such drab colours.

  Underwear; she’d need complete new underwear, especially drawers, for she didn’t want her new husband to see her in the ‘twice round the gasworks’ numbers she currently wore. She’d just have to keep a few pairs back so that she had time to get to the shops.

  Before she knew it, she had filled three big bags, and it was past midnight. She’d have to get to bed, as her fiancé would be calling for her in not too many hours. She’d spend the next couple of weeks coming here in the evenings, sorting things out into keep, take and discard categories.

  She’d probably have to take some boxes with her to sort at her leisure: those that involved memories, and needed more careful consideration. She actually had the opportunity to edit her past, should she so wish.

  They could use the trailer and take things to the tip, or really push out the boat and order a giant skip to take everything, once it was sorted, for no way was she going to leave it out in the street overnight so that her neighbours could fill it with old mattresses and rusty fridges. She’d talk to her husband-to-be about it, and at this thought, a shiver of excitement at what the future might hold shook her body.

  When Beauchamp returned, he cleared away everything from dinner and put on the dishwasher. He then took care of his late evening duties so that they were out of the way. His last task, before having some time to himself, was to make two cups of cocoa so that Lady Amanda and Hugo could take them up to bed to sip while they had a little read of their library books.

  When he had seen them safely up the stairs, he locked up, retired to his pantry, which was sacrosanct, then shook and strained himself a double Wolf’s Lair, before sinking down into the ancient armchair he kept in his sanctuary of sanctuaries for cogitating. He’d had a lot on his mind lately, and he felt the need for a deep think.

  Of course he regretted what he had done. Who wouldn’t? But he knew there was no way he could have avoided it, and there was always a way to put it right without too much inconvenience. He had realised the first time it had happened, that it was part and parcel of who he was, and he could no more change that, than he could lasso the moon for his bride-to-be.

  It had been building up inside him for a long time, just as it had before, and he had to control it until he could unleash it without anyone he cared for being caught up in it. After all, no one would ever know. And given the spacing between the two attacks, he would probably be dead before it happened again, which was a good thing.

  It was only he, however, who knew who had killed those two occasional maids, and only he that knew why Jimmy ‘the Jemmy’ Aldridge would never confess to their murders. It hadn’t, after all, been him who had committed them. The man was as totally innocent of these crimes as he was of the gunpowder plot and the great train robbery.

  Of course, he regretted that he had had to … do them in, he supposed, was the kindest way of putting it. It had to be someone, just as it had to be someone before, and they would be the least missed. They weren’t inextricably bound up with the day-to-day working of the household, both were getting on a bit, and neither had large families, let alone very satisfying existences. Also, they were a couple of nosy old bags to boot, and he couldn’t risk them going through his desk or anything underhand like that. It could have proved disastrous.

  Actually, he felt rather smug about his creativity with these two executions. Florrie Searle’s demise from the blows from the A flat clarinet had caused him particular glee. Firstly, he had remembered to use his footman’s gloves when carrying out this murder, and he had used this particular instrument just for pure badness’s sake – he knew how his mistress loved it. And his victim had suspected nothing, as it was only the butler who was in the room while she was working.

  Edie Hare’s death had been carried out in a most ingenious way, in his opinion. When he had heard her going outside to get her bicycle, he had rushed into the domestic quarters. There was just enough time for him to extract a leg of lamb from the freezer

  With this hidden behind his back, he had gone outside on the pretext that he thought she might have left her gloves on the hall table. When she had turned away to get off the machine she was just mounting, he had bopped her over the head and roughly concealed the body in the shrubbery. Then he had merely washed the blood from the joint of meat, and put it in the refrigerator for use during the next few days. No forensic evidence existed of either crime.

  At least this time he knew what was happening inside his head. The last time – the first – he had been terrified of what he was thinking, and the safest way to let out the pressure – blow down the boilers, as he thought of it – was to nick the brake pipes on the master’s car. As luck would have it, with the amount of alcohol the old master had consumed, the chances were very high that they would have gone off the road anyway, and been killed without any contribution from him.

  He had been distraught when he realised that his own mother was in the car alongside the master, but he learned to live with his guilt and settle back into his normal routine as though nothing had happened. And as his mother had felt no guilt about having sex with the old master and actually bearing his child, so Beauchamp felt no guilt – more a passing sadness – at the deaths he had caused recently. They were necessary for him to clear his mind, so that he didn’t lose it.

  He’d be perfectly all right now, for at least a couple of decades. If it happened again in the future, he’d find a ‘safe’ way of dealing with it, as he had this time. His little aberration didn’t make him mad, just different, in his eyes. And, if he was careful, no one would ever know about it, save himself.

  He rose to his feet, feeling much more calm and contented, now that he’d had this little rationalisation with himself, moved to the cocktail ingredients, and stirred and strained an ‘Incredible Cocktail’. He felt he deserved it.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Some Days Later

  Beauchamp had had the good sense to provide both ladies – in the interests of subduing Lady Amanda – with a double tulip glass apiece, filled with an extra-large serving of a Hen Night Zipper-Ripper – although he did not divulge the name of the drink, lest he scandalise them – before he drove them to the dress fitting session. At least, with some alcohol down her throat, his employer was liable to be a good bit nicer than she would be stone cold sober.

  The Day Before the Wedding

  The cake was delivered on the Friday afternoon. It was a traditional, white wedding cake with five tiers and icing flowers and lace. On the top was a (plastic) model of a bride and groom and, although it was nothing out of the way, the mere sight of it made Enid shiver with secret delight at what was to come in the very near future.

  The night before the wedding was not treated as a traditional hen or stag night. They were simply too old for those sort of shenanigans. Instead, Lady Amanda arranged with caterers to serve them a meal consisting o
f lobster bisque, beef wellington, and baked Alaska. They were three dishes all four of them were very fond of, and she raided the out-of-bounds bit of the cellar for some vintage champagne the market price of which she dared not even imagine.

  Before the meal arrived, Beauchamp provided them all with some more Hen Night Zipper-Rippers, this time telling them the name when he served them, which produced a disapproving frown at this stage of the evening, but much hilarity, later on, when it was recalled after a good bellyful of alcohol.

  After they had eaten, he and Hugo retired to his pantry and each enjoyed a pint of Old Speckled Hen, and had a bit of a chinwag. It was all very low key and relaxed, as it was back in the drawing room, where Enid and Lady Amanda enjoyed an almost last chat before Enid became Mrs Beauchamp.

  Nothing outrageous occurred, and no one went to bed really befuddled. Things boded well for the morrow.

  The Wedding Day

  The day of the wedding itself dawned bright and sunny, with even a bit of warmth in the air, to herald the arrival of spring. Lady Amanda had booked the caterers, her treat, and they arrived shortly after sun-up to prepare the rooms that were going to be used.

  They had decided not to hire a chauffeur, dispensing with the tradition that the groom arrived at the church first. It had been arranged that professionals would have arrived to help both women into their complicated dresses – Enid’s with veil and bouquet – deal with their hair and make-up (also courtesy of Lady A), and they would all leave the big house in the same car, arriving at the church together, although the groom and best man would take their places in the right-hand front row before the bride and maid-of-honour got out of the car.