As if reading Lynley’s mind, he said, “I come up here time and again. Whenever I need reminding.”
“Reminding?”
Darrow responded to the question drily. “When I feel the urge for a woman. Then I have a look through Hannah’s diaries. That cures the itch like nothing else.” He heaved himself up the stairs.
The attic bore qualities not entirely unlike those of a tomb. It was eerily still, airless, and only slightly less cold than the out-of-doors. Dust hung thickly upon cartons and trunks, and sudden movements sent clouds of it fl ying upwards in suffocating bursts. It was a small room, filled with the scent of age: those vague odours of camphor, of musty clothing, of damp and rotting wood. A weak shaft of afternoon light sifted its way through a single, heavily streaked window near the roof.
Darrow pulled on a cord hanging from the ceiling, and a bulb cast a cone of light onto the floor beneath it. He nodded towards two trunks that sat on either side of a single wooden chair. Lynley noted that neither chair nor trunks were dusty. He wondered how often Darrow paid visits to this sepulchre of his marriage.
“Her things’re in no sort of order,” the man said, “as I wasn’t much concerned with what I did with everything. The night she died I just dumped the case out into her chest of drawers as fast as I could before getting the village up to search. Then later, after the funeral, I packed everything up in those two trunks.”
“Why did she wear two coats and two sweaters that night?”
“Greed, Inspector. She couldn’t fi t anything more into her case. So if she wanted to take them, she had to wear or carry them. I suppose wearing seemed easier. It was cold enough.” Darrow took a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the trunks on either side of the chair. He shoved the top off each and then said, “I’ll leave you to it. The diary you want’s on the top of the stack.”
When Darrow was gone, Lynley put on his reading spectacles. But he did not reach at once for the five bound journals that lay on top of the clothes. Rather, he began by examining her other belongings, developing an idea of what Hannah Darrow had been like.
Her clothes were of the sort that are cheaply made with the hope of passing themselves off as expensive. They were showy-beaded sweaters, clingy skirts, short gauzy dresses cut very low, trousers with narrow legs and fl ared bottoms and zips in the front. When he examined these, he saw how the material stretched and pulled away from the metal teeth. She had worn her clothes tight, moulded to her body.
A large plastic case gave off the strange odour of animal fat. It held a variety of inexpensive cosmetics and creams-a painter’s box of eyeshadows, half a dozen tubes of very dark lipstick, an eyelash curler, mascara, three or four kinds of lotion, a package of cotton wool. Tucked into a pocket was a fi ve months’ supply of birth control pills. One set of the pills was partially used.
A shopping bag from Norwich contained a collection of new lingerie. But here again, her selections were tawdry, an uneducated girl’s idea of what a man might find seductive. Insubstantial bikini panties of scarlet, black, or purple lace, overhung with garter belts of the same material and colour; diaphanous brassieres, cut low to the nipple and decorated with strategically placed, coy little bows; slithering petticoats slit to the waist; two nightgowns designed identically, without bodices and merely concocted with two wide satin straps that crisscrossed from waist to shoulders, covering nothing much at all.
Underneath this was a stack of photographs. Looking through them, Lynley saw that they were all of Hannah herself: each one showing her off at her best, whether she was posing on a stile, laughing down from horseback, or sitting on the beach with the wind in her hair. Perhaps they were to be publicity photographs. Or perhaps she had needed reassurance that she was pretty or validation that she existed at all.
Lynley picked up the journal on top of the stack. Its cover was cracked with age, several of the pages were stuck together and a number of others had become swollen with the damp. He leafed through them carefully until he found the final entry, one-third of the way through. Written on March 25, 1973, it was the same childish handwriting that was on the suicide note, but unlike that note, this work was rich with misspellings and other errors.
Its settled. Im leaving tommorrow night. Im so glad its fi nally decided between us. We talked and talked tonight for hours to get it all planned out. When it was decided for good and all, I wanted to love him but he said no weve not enough time, Han, and for a moment I thought praps he was angry becouse he even pushed my hand away but then he smiled that melty smile of his and said darling love we’ll have plenty of time for that every night of the week once we get to London. London!!! LONDON!!! This time tommorrow! He said his flats ready and that hes taken care of everything. I cann’t think how Im going to get threw tommorrow thinking about him. Darling love. Darling love!
Lynley looked up, his eyes on the attic’s single window and on the dust motes that fl oated in its weak oblong of light. He had not considered the possibility that he might feel even slightly moved by the words of a woman so long dead, a woman who painted herself with a garish array of colours, dressed herself with an eye for lubricity, and still managed to become caught up with excitement at the idea of a new life in a city that was for her a place of promise and dreams. Yet her words had indeed touched him somehow. With her buoyant confidence, she was like a water-starved plant, thriving for the very fi rst time under someone’s skill and attention. Even in addressing herself awkwardly to sensuality, she wrote with an unconscious innocence. Unschooled in the world, Hannah Darrow had ultimately made herself the perfect victim.
He began to flip forward through the journal, skimming the entries, looking for the point at which her relationship with the unidentified man began. He found it on January 15, 1973, and as he read, he felt the fi re of certainty begin its slow burn through his veins.
Had the best time ever in Norwich today which is fair hard to beleive after the row with John. Me and Mum went to shop there as she said that should cheer me up proper. We stopped in for Aunt Pammy and took her along as well. (She’d been tippling again since the morning and smelled of gin-it was awful.) At lunch we saw a playbill and Pammy said we owed ourselfs a treat so she took us to the play mostly, I think, becouse she wanted to sleep it off which she did with proper snoring till the man behind her kicked her seat. I was never at a play befor, can you credit that? It was about some dutchess who gets passed a dead mans hand and then ends up getting strangled and then everyone stabs each other. And one man kept talking about being a wolf. Quite a piece, I say. But the customes were real pretty Ive never seen nothing like them all these long gowns and head pieces. The ladys so pretty and the men wearing funny tights with little pouches in front. And in the end they gave the dutchess lady fl owers and people stood and clapped. I read in the programe whear they travel all round the country doing plays. Fancy that. Made me want to do somthing as well. I hate being stuck in PGreen. Somtimes the pub makes me want to scream. And John wants to do it to me all the time and I just dont want it anymore. Ive not been right since the baby but he wont beleive me.
There followed a week in which she wearily catalogued her life in the village: a round of doing laundry, seeing to the baby’s needs, talking to her mother on the telephone daily, cleaning the flat, working in the pub. She seemed to have no female friends. Nothing other than work and television occupied her time. On January 25, Lynley found the next pertinent entry.