The Devil`s Feather by Minette Walters Read Free Book Online

is murky!” But how did Shakespeare know that troubled women need to clean themselves obsessively? Is it something we’ve done for centuries to purge ourselves of filth?
    I remembered reading in the web description of Barton House that there was a fishpond in the garden. It wasn’t visible from my car, so logic said it was round the back. It doesn’t matter what drove me there to wash my hands, but I’ve often wondered since if the reason I became interested in Lily Wright’s story was because I knelt to wash my hands where Jess Derbyshire had found her dying.

 

    5

    F ROM WHAT I learnt later, I don’t believe Lily and I would have been friends. She had old-fashioned views about a woman’s place, and would certainly have frowned on an unmarried war correspondent who put job before family. Her position in life was to play “grande dame” to Winterbourne Barton because Barton House was the oldest and largest in the valley and her family had lived in it for three generations. While her husband was alive, and before the demography of the village changed with an influx of outsiders, she took an active part in community life, but after his death she became increasingly detached from it.
    It was a slow process that went largely unnoticed, and most people assumed that her regular mentioning of close connections with Dorset’s aristocracy meant she preferred her old associates to Winterbourne Barton’s newcomers. Her daughter, Madeleine, who visited irregularly from London, reinforced this view by talking about her mother’s social standing; and, since Lily glossed over her deceased husband’s squandering of her fortune on the stock market and made a pretence of being wealthier than she was, it was generally accepted that her friends were outside the community.
    She survived on a state pension and some small dividends that she’d managed to keep from her husband, Robert, but poverty was always lurking round the corner. It meant that Barton House was in a terrible state of repair—something I discovered as soon as I moved in—with bowed ceilings and damp walls, but as few visitors were allowed beyond the hall and drawing-room this wasn’t generally known. Stains on carpets and walls were hidden beneath rugs and pictures, and wisteria was coaxed across the peeling paintwork on the windowsills outside. She dressed elegantly in tweed skirts and jackets, with her white hair twisted into a loose chignon at the back of her neck; and she remained a handsome woman until Alzheimer’s stopped her caring.
    Her garden was her passion and, though it was running wild by the time I arrived, the care she’d lavished on it was still obvious. The house remained much as it had been in her grandfather’s time. There was no central heating and any warmth came from the Aga in the kitchen or had to be provided by log fires. Upstairs, the damp made the bedrooms cold, even in summer, and there was never enough hot water to fill the big, old-fashioned bath. Showers were non-existent. There was an antiquated twin-tub washing-machine, a small fridge-freezer, a cheap microwave and a television in the back room where Lily spent most of her time. During the winters she wrapped herself in a great coat and blankets, which she discarded if anyone came to the front door in order to pretend she’d been sitting in front of an unlit fire in the draughty drawing-room.
    Like much of Dorset, Winterbourne Barton had changed radically over the previous twenty years with house prices soaring and local people selling up in order to realize their most valuable asset. Two or three of the properties became second homes and remained empty for large parts of the year, but most of the newcomers were city retirees on good pension schemes who bought into Winterbourne Barton for its picture-postcard quality and proximity to the sea.
    The village began life in the eighteenth century when a previous owner of Barton House used some unproductive land to erect three