Page 38 of The Stranger in Room Six
Whipping the pheasants from his mother’s hands, he threw them out the back door. ‘We can’t have anything to do with that man.’
‘Stop.’ Frannie’s mother’s voice sounded angry in a way Mabel had never heard. ‘Do you want to bring harm on everyone in this family?’
She turned to Mabel with a pleading look on her face. ‘Please don’t tell the Colonel or your aunt any of this.’
‘I won’t,’ stammered Mabel. Then she remembered the lacemaker’s words.You must learn what to say and what not to say. It could save your life.
Shaking, she walked back home. There were voices coming from the library. ‘The date has been set,’ the Colonel was saying excitedly. ‘I’ve told the others. The time is coming, Clarissa!’
A date? Perhaps they were getting married. Before, she would have been excited, but Frannie’s brother’s angry words and his mother’s look of fear made Mabel wonder if there was more to the Colonel than met the eye. If she was honest with herself, there was something about him that she had never trusted.
24
Now
‘So, what happened to the Colonel and your aunt?’ asks Belinda, topping up the old lady’s china tea cup – part of a set that Mabel keeps hidden away in her room.
‘That’s for next time!’ replies Mabel, pretending to sound cheerful. In truth, she is shaken by the memories, including the lacemaker’s advice. Has she said too much already?
‘It sounds as though you were scared of stepping out of line.’
‘Yes,’ says Mabel. ‘I was.’
‘I know how that feels.’
‘You do?’
Each woman finds herself reaching for the other’s hand.
‘Pour me a drop of whisky, would you?’ asks Mabel.
By now, both have stopped pretending it’s flavoured water.
‘And have a dram yourself while you’re at it.’
Belinda shakes her head. ‘No, thanks. I met so many women in prison who’d committed terrible crimes just because they were drunk or on drugs. I vowed never to drink again.’
Mabel raises her eyebrows, which she pencils in softly every day: a trick learned from her aunt years ago. ‘What an amazing life you’ve lived, my dear.’
‘You too,’ says Belinda. She looks pensive for a moment.‘There are so many lessons to be learned, aren’t there? That’s why it’s important for stories like ours to be told.’
Mabel leans forwards so her face is just inches from Belinda’s. ‘It’s your turn again now. I want to know about that woman with green shoes. Was she causing mischief? Or did your husband really have a child with Karen?’
The Stranger in Room Six
A text pings through at midnight.
The top boss is getting twitchy. This isn’t just your head on the line, it’s mine too. So find something, or else.
I toss and turn all night with worry until, the next morning, I hear a voice outside my door. A hoity-toity tone that can only belong to one person: Mabel Marchmont.
She’s telling someone how she’s decided to go to the afternoon concert ‘even though I don’t usually care for them’.
Bingo! I’ve been waiting for the old crone to leave her room so I can go snooping. It’s got to be there somewhere, hasn’t it?
None of the residents’ rooms lock, in case there’s an emergency and the carers need access. In theory, anyone could break in and go through your things, which is awkward if, like me, you possess a gun. So, when I quietly leave Room Six, I take my Colt 45 with me.
Mabel is clearly very tidy, I have to say. Her clothes are neatly hung. There’s no paperwork, no bundle of letters, no mementoes. No photographs, even. Nothing that gives any kind of clue about Mabel’s past, apart from a creepy old doll that must have been made years ago. It sits on a chair, staring at me glassily. Gives me the fucking freaks.
