The Tuscan Child(5)

“I was supposed to be in Italy right now, but I had some important meetings with the board of trustees and so I am stuck here,” she said as she went ahead of me, her high heels tapping on the marble floor. “But it could have been worse. We are certainly experiencing some lovely spring weather, are we not?”

She was doing what the English did. When anything embarrassing or emotional threatened to come up, one discussed the weather. Always a safe topic.

“Are you planning to go away at all this year?” she asked.

“No plans as yet,” I replied, certainly not about to admit to my current impecunious state.

We had reached the door of her study. I remembered it well, staring at that brass plate on her door—“Miss Honeywell, Headmistress”—and trying to breathe before I knocked and went in to face my doom. Now she opened the door and smiled at me again. “Do come in,” she said. “Take a seat. I’ll see if Alice is around to bring us tea. As you can see, the place is pretty much deserted. Only a skeleton staff. Everyone else is gone for the Easter holidays. In fact, it was lucky that I always take a morning walk myself or your father might not have been found for days.”

She picked up the phone on her desk and dialled. I watched her drum long red fingernails impatiently before she spoke: “Ah, Alice. Good. You’re still here. I’ve Miss Langley here and we’d like some tea. Yes, in my office. Splendid.” She put the receiver down and looked up at me with a smile as if she had done something rather clever.

“Where were we?”

“My father,” I said. “You said you found him lying in the grounds?”

“I did. Quite a shock, I must admit. I was out with Bertie, my cocker spaniel, and he ran ahead and started barking. Well, he has a knack for finding disgusting things like dead birds so I shouted at him to leave it, and when I got there I saw it was a man lying face down in the grass. I turned him over tentatively and it was your father. Quite dead. Cold and stiff. So I ran back to the house and dialled 999. They’ve taken him off to the morgue and I expect they’ll conduct an autopsy.”

“So you don’t know what he died of?” I asked tentatively. “He wasn’t . . . I mean . . .” I couldn’t say the word “murdered.”

She looked horrified. “Oh no. Nothing like that, I’m sure. There wasn’t a mark on him. Natural causes, I’m sure. In fact, if he hadn’t been so cold and white, you’d have thought he was sleeping. Heart, it must have been. Did he have a weak heart, do you know?”

“I’ve no idea,” I said. “You must yourself know that my father was a very private person. He never discussed anything that might be in the least personal. And I have to confess that I haven’t spoken to him for some time. If he had been in poor health, he would never have told anybody.”

“I had noticed he was rather more remote than usual recently,” Miss Honeywell said. “Depressed, maybe.” She paused. “I always thought of him as an unhappy man. He never quite got over the loss of his status and property, did he?”

“Would you?” I asked, my hackles rising on his behalf. “How would you feel if you had to live in the lodge of your former home and watch schoolgirls trooping through the rooms where you had grown up?”

“He need not have stayed,” she said. “There were plenty of things he could have done. I gather he was a talented artist before the war. Up and coming.”

“My father? An up-and-coming artist?”

“Oh yes.” She nodded. “One gathers he exhibited at the Royal Academy. But I’ve never actually seen one of his paintings, other than posters he did for school events and scenery for our plays. Competent, clearly a trained artist, but certainly not unusual.”

“I had no idea that he ever painted,” I said. “I knew he had studied art, but I never realised he had been a real artist. I wonder why . . .” I was going to add that I wondered why he stopped, but I answered my own question before I said the words—because his world had come crashing down around him.

“They say artists are temperamental, don’t they?” Miss Honeywell said. “Highly strung. And of course he was from a high-born family, too. Inbreeding among the aristocracy does make for instability.”

“You don’t think he took his own life?” I asked sharply, the anger that she was suggesting my father had been somehow mentally unstable fighting with my own feelings of guilt that were threatening to engulf me.

She gave me a sad little smile. “If he had wanted to end his life, he would have had no reason to walk into the middle of the woods to do it. He could just as well have finished it at home. No one would have been there to stop him. Besides, as I mentioned, there was no sign of distress about him. Nothing like poison or a gunshot wound.” She paused, looking out of the window to where a starling had landed on a rose bush. “Of course, I rather suspect he had been drinking more heavily lately.” She turned her attention back to me. “Oh, I’m not implying that he was drunk on the job or anything, but the groundskeeper did report that empty bottles went out with the rubbish, and Miss Pritchard, the history mistress, did bump into him in the off-licence buying Scotch.”

I was tempted to ask what Miss Pritchard had been doing in the off-licence, but wisely stayed silent. “I expect we’ll find out the cause from the doctor who conducts the autopsy,” I said. “Not that it matters, does it? He’s dead. Nothing can bring him back.”