Murder at the Mill Read online

  ‘Yes,’ Iris agreed, cautiously. ‘Some talk more than others, obviously.’

  ‘I’m guessing Dom was a talker,’ Jenna laughed.

  ‘He was.’ Iris smiled. ‘But in all truth, I didn’t know him well. We’d only had four sittings together before…’

  ‘Before he died.’

  ‘Yes. Jesus Christ!’

  Jenna slammed on the brakes, sending the car into a noisy, terrifying skid. A stag had suddenly leaped out of the woods on Iris’s side and landed in the middle of the road, right in front of them. It was a huge, magnificent monster of an animal, with antlers that must have stretched five feet across. Iris saw its eyes widen with shock, its powerful legs frozen in fear as the Volvo careered directly towards it. For a dreadful moment she felt certain they would hit it. That it would come flying through the windscreen, antlers first, and impale them like lambs on a spit. Jenna closed her eyes and winced. Leaning across, Iris grabbed the wheel on instinct and jerked it to the right, swerving so violently that they mounted the steep grass verge. In the same split second, the deer made his own move, scrambling up the opposite bank and disappearing into the thick of the trees as suddenly and silently as he had appeared.

  The Volvo wobbled back down off the verge before finally coming to a stop. They had spun a hundred and eighty degrees and were now effectively parked lengthwise across the deserted lane, blocking it completely like a fallen tree. Both women sat silent for a moment, in shock.

  Jenna spoke first. ‘Are you OK?’

  Iris nodded. ‘Fine. Are you?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ said Jenna, before promptly bursting into tears. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’ She sniffed, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. ‘It’s not the stupid deer. It’s everything. What happened to Dom.’

  ‘I’m sure it must be terribly stressful, staying in that house,’ said Iris sympathetically.

  Jenna shook her head, still crying. ‘It’s like living in a Dalí painting, I’m telling you. It’s surreal. Marcus. His mom. The two of them exist in this sea of denial. They refuse to see what’s staring them right in the face.’

  ‘Which is?’ Iris probed.

  Jenna turned to face her head on. ‘Let me ask you this, Iris. Did my father-in-law ever come across to you as suicidal? In those four sittings you guys had?’

  Iris shook her head.

  ‘Or ever?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he seem depressed to you?’

  ‘No,’ Iris admitted. ‘But like I said, I didn’t know him well. And I’m not a psychologist.’

  ‘Well, I am,’ said Jenna. ‘Not that you need a psychology degree to know that the idea of Dom Wetherby taking his own life is nuts. It’s just nuts.’

  ‘But that’s what your husband thinks? That it was suicide?’ asked Iris.

  ‘It’s what the police seem to think,’ said Jenna. ‘Which is shocking enough, if you ask me. But the way that Marcus and Ariadne have just accepted that idea. Like, “Oh, he killed himself, did he? Oh. OK.” That’s what really gets to me. They must know as well as I do it isn’t true. They just can’t face admitting the alternative.’

  Iris frowned, trying to get to the heart of what Jenna was saying.

  ‘So you’re saying you believe Dom was killed?’

  Jenna gave her a pleading look. ‘Don’t you?’ Grabbing Iris’s hand, she went on. ‘That’s why I needed to talk to you, Iris. To talk to someone outside of that asylum who actually knew Dom, who saw him in the weeks before he died, saw what was going on in that house.’

  What was going on in that house …

  Iris wondered if Jenna was thinking the same thing that she was.

  ‘Do you believe Dom Wetherby killed himself?’ Jenna asked bluntly.

  Iris paused before answering. Not because she didn’t know the answer, but because she was afraid of having Jenna Wetherby, or anyone, rely on her. Whatever battles Jenna was having with her husband’s family, or the police, they were her battles, not Iris’s.

  ‘For Dom’s sake,’ said Jenna, sensing Iris’s hesitation. ‘Please just tell me truthfully. Do you believe it was suicide?’

  ‘No,’ said Iris. ‘I don’t.’

  Jenna exhaled, visibly relieved to have found an ally, albeit an unwilling one.

  ‘Which means he was killed.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ agreed Iris.

  ‘But Marcus and Ariadne will never admit it. Not now the lazy-ass police have decided it was suicide before they’ve even started a freaking investigation!’ Jenna seethed. ‘Because admitting it would mean admitting that he’s a monster.’

  ‘Who’s a monster?’ asked Iris, although she already knew the answer.

  ‘Who do you think?’ said Jenna. ‘Who was the one person who wanted Dom dead?’

  Was there only one person? thought Iris.

  ‘The one person evil enough and bold enough actually to do it? The one person that Marcus and Ariadne would risk everything to protect, even if it means poor Dom gets blamed for his own death, and his killer never gets justice?’

  ‘You mean Billy?’ Iris clarified.

  ‘Of course Billy!’ Jenna sounded increasingly agitated. ‘Who else?’

  She hadn’t realised quite how much she’d feared and disliked her brother-in-law until now, when all the evidence pointed to this most heinous and unnatural of crimes. On some deep subconscious level, she also knew that her hatred of Billy was linked to her resentment of Marcus and his constant idealising of his family. Now, at last, Marcus would have to face the truth, to wake up to the reality of who his brother and his mother really were.

  ‘Even if you’re right,’ Iris said after a long pause, while Jenna restarted the car and began a laborious seven-point turn to get them back on track, ‘and even if I agree with you, I’m not sure what you want me to do.’

  ‘I want you to help me,’ Jenna said simply. ‘Marcus may choose to live in a fantasy world, but I won’t, not anymore. I can’t just close my eyes to the truth. I’m hoping you can’t either.’

  Au contraire, thought Iris, ironically. Little did Jenna know that the last year of Iris’s life had been almost exclusively devoted to closing her eyes to the truth. Although admittedly this was different.

  This wasn’t a slowly crumbling marriage.

  This was murder.

  ‘We owe it to Dom,’ said Jenna, her eyes now back on the road. ‘Not because he was a great guy. He wasn’t. But he’s dead, and he didn’t deserve that, and everybody’s lying about it, even his own family, and it’s just … it’s wrong.’

  She was right. It was wrong.

  ‘I can’t do this alone,’ Jenna went on. ‘Marcus and I will have to go home eventually – soon. Lottie has school, and Marcus has work. He hates the thought of leaving his mom, but we both know it’s coming. And when it does, there’ll be no one left here, no one looking for the truth. Except you.’

  Except me.

  Iris’s mind whirred.

  She could stay on in Hazelford and help Jenna. That would be her reason. Because she owed it to Dom. Because it was ‘right’.

  She could stay.

  ‘Help me, Iris,’ Jenna drove the point home, not realising she’d already won. ‘Help me prove Billy Wetherby murdered his father.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Shivering on the porch outside Mill House, Iris screwed up her courage and pulled back the heavy brass knocker, rapping it three times loudly against the weathered oak front door.

  It was the first week in January, a time for fresh starts, for leaving the past behind. Only this year, it seemed, the past was refusing to let go, clinging to the Mill and everyone in it like the cold tendrils of mist coiling themselves round Iris’s legs. Iris had brought Dom’s unfinished portrait over from the cottage, covered in an old canvas cloth to protect it from the elements. She’d been meaning for days to ask Ariadne what she wanted her to do with it, now that Dom was gone, but the time had never felt quite right. Now, though, with her promise to Jenna still
fresh in her mind, it seemed as good a moment as any to step into the lion’s den.

  ‘Billy won’t let anything slip to me,’ Jenna had told Iris on their drive home from Betcheman’s Farm. ‘He’s too smart for that. He knows I can’t stand him.’

  ‘We aren’t exactly best friends either,’ said Iris, filling Jenna in on her awkward encounter with Billy at the cottage at the beginning of Christmas week.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. He likes you. I can tell. Plus you’re not a family member, which automatically puts you in a better position where Billy’s concerned. Just see if you can get him to tell you where he went on Christmas Eve, after the row. If we knew that, we’d have a place to start.’

  Iris wasn’t sure she shared Jenna’s confidence in her abilities to get Billy Wetherby to ‘open up’. But she certainly wasn’t going to get anywhere, with Billy or anyone else, unless she found an excuse to go back inside Mill House.

  Still no answer.

  Iris was about to knock again when the front door slowly opened, creaking like a haunted house in one of Lorcan’s Scooby-Doo cartoons.

  ‘Oh! Hello.’ Ariadne gave Iris a weary smile. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’

  She looked tiny and positively frail, standing in the doorway in a black polo-neck sweater and wide-legged woollen trousers that swamped her petite frame, her wild grey-blonde hair swept up in a messy bun. Iris wondered whether the black was mourning dress or just a coincidence. Either way, it made her look ghostly and ill.

  ‘Is this a bad time?’ she asked hesitantly. ‘Because I can come back if it is.’

  ‘No, no, not at all,’ Ariadne reassured her, swinging the door wider. ‘And I see you’ve brought the painting with you. How lovely. Do come in.’

  The house was quiet. Eerily so.

  ‘Is everybody out?’ Iris asked, following Ariadne down to the kitchen and propping the portrait against the larder wall while Ariadne put the kettle on.

  ‘Almost everybody.’ Ariadne sighed. ‘Billy’s around somewhere. Marcus took the children and Lorcan to some ghastly indoor-play place near Southampton, bless him. It’s the first time Lorcan’s been out of the house since … since it happened.’

  ‘How is he?’ asked Iris.

  Ariadne shrugged sadly. ‘Withdrawn. Jenna’s the only one he talks to at all, as far as I can tell. I don’t know what I’ll do when she and Marcus go back to London.’ Reaching up to a shelf above the Aga, she pulled down two teacups and a red-spotted pot.

  ‘When will that be?’ asked Iris.

  ‘After the funeral. Although heaven knows when that will be, as the police still haven’t released Dom’s body.’

  Iris frowned. ‘Haven’t they? Why not?’

  She was no expert in these things, but ten days seemed an awfully long time to hold on to a body, especially when the autopsy had been performed within hours of death.

  ‘Don’t know.’ Ariadne sounded unconcerned about this detail as she poured the tea. Perhaps she’s relieved, thought Iris, as it means Marcus will have to stay for a little longer. Although surely she would want the closure of a funeral, for Lorcan if not for herself.

  ‘Marcus said he’d ask what’s going on tomorrow if we haven’t heard,’ said Ariadne, adding milk to Iris’s cup. ‘But anyway, enough about all of us – it’s too depressing. How are you? Have you been painting again, now that those dreadful reporters have finally found something else to do?’

  ‘A little,’ Iris replied. ‘Although not much outside. It’s still too cold.’ She nodded towards the covered portrait. ‘I have added a few touches to Dom’s portrait here and there. I wanted to ask you what your plans are with that. If it’s not too painful.’

  Ariadne looked perplexed. ‘Plans?’

  ‘Well, you can have it as it is, of course. Unfinished. Or I can try to finish it, using photographs and home video if you have any, as well as from memory.’

  ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘It’s not ideal, obviously,’ Iris said. ‘But it is possible to work that way if there are no other options. Just like you might sculpt an animal from pictures.’

  Ariadne shook her head. ‘I couldn’t do that. No, no. That wouldn’t work at all. I need the living creature in front of me. I need to feel it under my hands.’

  ‘Or I could just … get rid of it,’ Iris offered. ‘If it’s too painful for you now. I’d pay you back your commission fee, obviously.’

  ‘Heavens!’ Ariadne held up a horrified hand. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it! And of course you mustn’t destroy the picture. For one thing, it’s a work of art in its own right. And for another, finished or not, it’s the last record we have of Dom. May I see it?’

  She stood up, animated now, and walked towards the draped canvas. Although framed as a question, it was clearly rhetorical. Whipping back the cover, she found herself staring straight into her dead husband’s eyes.

  ‘Dear God!’ she gasped, stepping backwards and steadying herself on the kitchen table.

  ‘You don’t like it?’ Iris asked, worried. ‘Because really, Ariadne, you don’t have to…’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Ariadne whispered, her eyes still glued to the portrait. ‘It’s just that it’s so real. I mean … it’s him! It’s him, looking right at me. Right through me. It’s like he’s alive. How do you do that?’ She turned to Iris in genuine wonder.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Iris said modestly, but also truthfully. ‘It just sort of happens. Not every time, and not with every subject. But Dom was very alive. I saw him as this bright light.’

  ‘He was,’ Ariadne agreed, adding, almost to herself, ‘He could be blinding sometimes. Blinding and blind.’

  Iris watched and listened. Was this Ariadne the grieving wife talking or Ariadne the artist? Could the two even be separated? There was definitely a detachment about her, about the way she stood staring at the portrait, head cocked to one side, that seemed frighteningly cold to Iris for a woman who’d just lost her partner of thirty-five years. All dressed in black, for an instant Ariadne looked like Billy’s description of her – the wicked witch.

  But then, Iris thought, hadn’t Dom been every bit as detached, in his own way? Every bit as selfish? Graham had described him jokingly as ‘a thoroughbred narcissist’, and he was right, at least in Iris’s view. Perhaps that was part of what had attracted Dom and Ariadne Wetherby to each other: that uniquely artistic self-centredness that they both shared.

  Like Ian.

  Like me?

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ Ariadne turned back to Iris. ‘Was he happy? During his sittings with you. Would you say he seemed … content?’

  ‘He seemed to be. Yes.’

  Iris waited for the obvious next question – didn’t she think it strange that Dom would have killed himself? – but it never came. Instead, once again, Ariadne turned the conversation back to Iris, asking her about her own life, and Ian, and what her plans were for the next few months.

  ‘I thought I might stay on here, just for a bit. I could try to finish the portrait, if you wanted that.’

  ‘I do. Definitely,’ Ariadne asserted. ‘Once we’ve had this tea, I’ll search for some photos and whatnot for you. Or you can come back and delve through Dom’s things by yourself if you prefer. Either way, you’ll have plenty of material. He was so vain, he adored having his picture taken.’ She laughed, warmly, and for the first time Iris detected unmistakable affection in her voice. Then, catching Iris off guard, she added, ‘Don’t let things slip away with your husband, Iris. You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like. But if you do still love him, you must go and see him. Life’s so hideously short.’

  ‘I will,’ said Iris. ‘I mean, I am. This weekend, in fact. I’ve said I’ll come to London. We still have a lot of things to try to work out.’

  ‘Good.’ Ariadne took her hand and squeezed it, relieved. ‘That’s very good.’

  Twenty minutes later, weighed down under three shoeboxes stuffed full of loose photographs, rolls of film and old
VHS cartridges with labels like ‘France’ and no date, Iris set off back towards the cottage, not sure what, if anything, she’d learned from her encounter with Ariadne.

  Like Jenna, Iris found it weird that Ariadne seemed so willing to accept the verdict of suicide. She’d said nothing about Dom being down or worried, and seemed devoid of curiosity about what his motives for such a terrible act might be.

  Unless she already knows his motives? She knew him better than anyone, after all.

  Perhaps the suicide wasn’t a shock to her. But in that case, why ask Iris about Dom’s mood during the sittings? That question definitely suggested Ariadne had her doubts.

  And yet despite all these unexplained reactions, her detachment and her desire to let sleeping dogs lie, it seemed clear to Iris that Ariadne Wetherby had loved her husband. Deeply. If Jenna was right and Ariadne was sweeping the truth under the carpet to protect Billy, then she must love Billy very, very deeply, too.

  ‘Need a hand?’

  Iris jumped out of her skin so violently she might even have screamed. Billy, all in black like his mother, with a heavy duffel coat and scarf over drainpipe jeans, had sprung out from behind the kitchen garden wall as silently and suddenly as a panther.

  ‘Did I scare you?’ He smiled wolfishly. The idea seemed to delight him.

  Fighting back her natural anger and dislike for him, Iris decided to seize the opportunity. She might never have a better time to strike up a conversation with Billy, and losing her temper with him now might ruin everything.

  ‘Yes, you scared me!’ she replied, but she did it with a smile. ‘You almost gave me a heart attack. Where on earth did you come from?’

  ‘The dark wilds of your imagination!’ Billy responded in a flirty, mysterious voice, pleased and surprised by Iris’s warm reception. ‘Not really.’ He chuckled. ‘I actually just got back from London. Here, let me take those. What are they, anyway?’

  ‘Photos,’ said Iris, handing him two of the boxes and holding on to one herself as they fell into step together. ‘Of your father. Your mum just gave them to me. She wants me to try to finish the portrait.’