But the knowledge slipped away.

An Actress Prepares

The double doors at the end of the corridor opened on to a large airy room, filled with mid-morning light from the extensive windows. Armchairs and settees were dotted around, and a central table laid out with biscuits, cakes and tea in paper cups. It was warm, uncomfortably so. Hobbes cursed to himself.

‘What’s wrong?’ Latimer said.

‘I can hardly breathe.’

According to the day manager, there were more than thirty patients currently, all women, all over sixty. And most of them, it seemed, were sitting in a circle of chairs at the far end of the room. Hobbes and Latimer approached; they could already hear the voice of the woman who stood at the centre of the circle. She spoke loudly and clearly, in a skilled voice that still had some power to it, enough to draw the two detectives closer. They stopped a short way from the chairs.

Mary Estelle Graves was eighty-three years old, and looked frail, with a walking stick held in one thin-boned hand. But she was still lively, moving her arms around and bending her back when necessary. She used the stick both as occasional support and also to jab home a point in her dramatic monologue. Or maybe monologue was the wrong word, for her voice changed from one character to another with ease, deepening to play a man, lightening to become a child’s delighted cry. And then Mrs Graves rose to her fullest height, seeming to add inches to her slight frame, and her voice rang out, trained as it was to reach the back rows of theatres and music halls.

‘I gathered my children to me, all of them, so sweet they looked, and I took them into the parlour in order to play a game of hide and seek. The house rang out with their laughter, and then with whispers of their hiding places. Of course, I found them all, except for crafty little Abigail. She was always finding a new place to hide. “James,” I said, “James, we must lock the doors tonight, for the wind is fearful and the rains may come again and the flowers shall wilt in the garden. Too late the sun came, too late the days of light. Oh, what shall I do, James? For our autumn years are coming to an end, only winter awaits us. The old house will have to live on without us, and the childhood ghosts find their own long-lost friends.”’

Here she stopped, held the moment with a gesture of her hands, and her stick, then gracefully bowed. Her audience of attentive women, fellow residents of the home, all burst into applause. Many a handkerchief dabbed at wrinkled cheeks. And then a nurse clapped her hands vigorously and said to them all, ‘Ladies, that is all for now. I’m sure Mary Estelle is very tired. But, my, what a lovely performance!’

More nurses appeared to take charge of wheelchairs and to help the weaker patients to their feet, leading them over to other activities, or out of the lounge. Gradually, the room quietened. Mary Estelle Graves was left sitting alone. She looked exhausted, now her performance was over. All the energy had drained from her body, and the powerful actress that Hobbes had just witnessed had been replaced by a little old lady, struggling to catch her breath. She was dressed in a long gown, plainly coloured but set off by a string of gaudy beads around the neckline. Her hair was cropped in the urchin style, entirely grey, and circled by a cloth band decorated with yet more beads. She had retained, or gone back to, the 1930s style of her youthful days. Her spectacles were the arched type, designed to give a catlike appearance to the face.