by Alex Pavesi
He rubbed out the circle labelled V and wrote a new V next to the S.
Julia copied it down. ‘I’ve thought of something, though.’ Grant motioned for her to proceed, swirling the olive branch as a substitute for his hand. ‘How do you deal with the case where there are different crimes within a single story, each with different killers and victims?’
Grant sat back and pulled his hat down. He frowned. ‘That is a good question. We have to treat them as separate murder mysteries that happen to be bundled together in a single book. There’s no other way to do it. It’s cheating, really.’
Julia was still making notes. ‘I see,’ she said, and closed her notebook. ‘That’s very helpful. Should we walk back to your cottage while there is still some cloud cover?’
He didn’t respond to her suggestion. ‘I am enjoying these discussions, you know. I’ve had so little stimulating conversation in recent years.’ The frostiness that was between them that morning had thawed out with the coming of the sun.
‘I’m glad,’ said Julia.
Grant placed a warm hand on her shoulder. He was still holding the olive branch and she could feel it scratching the back of her neck. It hurt, a little.
‘Before we go,’ he said, ‘you must have something to share with me?’
Julia laughed. ‘Yes, I’d forgotten.’ She opened her notes again. Their routine was more like a ritual now. ‘Well, I did find another inconsistency. Or unexplained detail, or whatever you’d like to call it. There was a dog on Blue Pearl Island. What happened to it?’
Grant smiled. ‘That is the puzzle for this afternoon?’
‘Yes,’ said Julia. ‘It seems to be. When Sarah meets Mr and Mrs Stubbs in the lane by her house, there’s a dog walking behind them with the fisherman. We’re led to assume it belongs to the fisherman, but its presence is never explained. The only sensible conclusion is that it belongs to Mr and Mrs Stubbs. And that it stays with them on the island.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Charles and Sarah find several signs of it as they explore the house. What else could explain the chewed meat in the kitchen corridor, the smell of excrement by the jetty outside, the animal hairs on the rug in the lounge and the animal tracks in the hallway? The rest of the island is barren, with only a few seabirds living on it.’
Grant scratched at the ground with his branch. ‘I suppose you’re right. It’s unlikely that anything bigger could survive there.’
‘But the dog has vanished by the time Sarah and Charles arrive. So what happened to it?’
‘It was another victim, I assume.’
‘Perhaps. But would Stubbs kill his own dog? And what happened to its body?’ Julia smiled. ‘I’d like to think it swam back to the mainland.’
Grant nodded. ‘It’s a possibility, at least. We can think it over as we walk back. Shall we go now?’
Julia got to her feet. ‘You go on,’ she said. Something had just occurred to her. ‘I want to stay here for a moment and make some more notes.’
‘Well,’ said Grant. ‘Then I shall see you back at the cottage.’
She leaned against the low stone wall of the churchyard and waited until he was almost out of sight. Then she walked around to the distant side of the church, where a number of gravestones rose from the dust. The sun was behind the clouds, so not one of them was casting a shadow. But the names written on them were just about legible. She walked steadily along each of the rows, looking to her right and left. Eventually she came to a stop at the side of the churchyard nearest the sea. Before her was a modest, butter-coloured headstone.
Julia closed her eyes. She’d suspected since their first conversation that Grant had been hiding something about his past. Now she knew what it was.
11. The Cursed Village
Dr Lamb had a view of the twilight in two rectangles. That’s the last beautiful thing I’ll ever see, he thought, as he looked through the window. His companion, a man called Alfred, was standing in front of it, blocking the light.
‘Well, how bad is it?’ Dr Lamb pushed himself up to a sitting position.
Alfred turned towards the bed. There were tears in his eyes. ‘If I give you the mirror, you can diagnose yourself.’
‘As bad as that?’ The doctor’s voice was hoarse.
‘It’s plain to see,’ said Alfred. ‘The small of your back is bright yellow.’
Dr Lamb swore and his composure dissolved into a string of weak coughs. They were autumn leaves crunched under footsteps; everything reminded him of his body’s inevitable decay.
‘What will you do now?’ he asked.
Alfred put a hand on the doctor’s forehead, the index finger overlapping his hairline. ‘I have to take my things and leave. I can’t risk the scandal of being found here. You understand, don’t you?’
The doctor grunted. ‘We had a good run, didn’t we?’
‘Yes,’ the other man sighed. ‘It’s a shame it has to end like this.’
Dr Lamb watched him pack for a few minutes and then drifted off to sleep. He woke up to the sound of the door closing. He gathered the blankets around him and went to the window. Alfred was walking away down the street. His last lover, abandoning him.
He turned back to the bed. ‘Well then, there it is. My literal deathbed.’
The rest of the room was bare. There was just the desk in the corner, with a rectangle of white paper on top of it that he’d placed there the day before.
If his illness had entered its last stages, he knew what that meant; there was a vial of morphine and a clean syringe waiting for him in the bathroom. But there was one other thing he wanted to do first.
He shuffled over to the desk and sat down in the chair. The blankets spilled over the sides and brushed against the floor. He slid the sheet of paper towards him, took up a pen, and wrote Lily Mortimer’s name at the top of it.
Five years before that she’d come to see him. She’d taken the underground train out to his neighbourhood, climbed up out of the earth and stepped out onto the cold street.
A man tried to sell her a newspaper. She shook her head and walked purposefully along the pavement, looking at the road signs. She’d caught the train at Piccadilly Circus where the huge streets, lined with shops, had seemed easy to navigate, but out here there were only houses and offices and everything seemed squashed together. They were tall, pale buildings with imposing black doors, lined up along the frozen street like gravestones in the snow.
It was her first time in London, in fact her first time leaving the village alone. She was only seventeen years old. When she’d told Matthew she intended to come here, he’d just sighed and lifted the dog onto his lap, as if that expressed his feelings on the matter.
One of the narrow residential streets had a name she recognized and a few minutes later she was outside the building she wanted. She rang the doorbell. A young woman opened it. ‘Hello. I’m here to see Dr Lamb.’
‘And your name is?’
‘Lily Mortimer.’
Dr Lamb greeted her at the door of his office and sat her down in a chair, asking the receptionist to bring them some tea.
‘Lily.’ He took her coat. ‘It’s been many, many years, but you haven’t changed. I think you must be the most dependable patient I’ve ever had. When you were a child, your poor sister would bring you to see me whenever you scraped a knee. I think she was a little overwhelmed by the responsibility. But I suppose you don’t remember any of that.’
Lily smiled. ‘For me, life began with that broken arm. I think I was five. I fell out of a tree.’
The doctor put his head back and laughed kindly. ‘I’d forgotten. That one almost killed her with worry. How is she, your sister?’
‘Oh, Violet’s all right. She married Ben, of course. A few years ago. They live in Cambridge.’
Dr Lamb grinned, picturing the pale, melted girl he’d known, wearing a white veil. ‘And the rest of the village? Your uncle Matthew?’
‘The same as ever. Matthew
has a dog now. And the village hasn’t changed. You’d still recognize it, if you ever deigned to come back.’
‘Good, good.’ The doctor adjusted a pen on his desk and moved some papers around, to signify the end of pleasantries. ‘And how can I help you?’ The awkward silence spread like spilled ink. ‘Something about Agnes’s death, I understand?’
The mention of that name seemed to bring the cold in from outside.
‘I wanted to see you,’ Lily began, knowing it was her turn to ask questions. But her questions were darker and more direct than his, and she wondered how to approach them. ‘I wanted to ask why you left the village so quickly after it happened?’
He breathed in sharply. ‘That’s a little personal, isn’t it? Do you really think it’s relevant?’
‘I think so. Do you mind me asking?’
‘Perhaps not. But tell me what you’re really getting at.’
‘As I said when I wrote to you, I’m trying to understand the circumstances of my grandmother’s murder. You lived and worked in the village for twenty years, then left within a year of it happening. Leaving your patients behind rather abruptly. So it must have affected you?’
‘In fact, the two things were unrelated. I wanted a different kind of life, that’s all. Perhaps the murder hurried me along. People looked at me differently afterwards. You can blame your aunt for that.’
‘My grand-aunt,’ Lily corrected him.
‘No one would even have considered me a suspect if she hadn’t insisted on it. But everybody wants to believe that a doctor can also be a killer; it’s so macabre, so topsy-turvy. There were whispers everywhere I went. It was like walking through tall grass.’
Lily nodded. ‘But that would have passed, in time. What exactly is different about your life here?’ She was thinking about his surgery in the village: a large room just like this one. ‘From the outside, it seems remarkably similar.’
He stood up, slightly insulted by the statement, and went to the window. At that moment the receptionist brought in their tea. Dr Lamb watched her pretty hands arranging things on his desk and her fine figure as she walked away.
‘I have a receptionist here, for one thing.’ He sat back down. ‘Some day you’ll understand just how small that village is.’
Lily returned his patronizing smile. ‘Oh, I’m aware of that, Dr Lamb. And I’m sure I’ll make my own way in the world, soon enough. But I’d like to know the truth about my grandmother’s murder first. It’s a chapter of my life that I’d like to finish.’
‘Then you’re imprisoned there, for a crime you didn’t commit. Can’t you leave the past in the past?’
‘But it’s still the present for me. It changed the course of my life in a way that nothing else ever has. I’ve thought about it every day since it happened. Perhaps you wouldn’t understand that.’
The doctor looked at her with sadness. ‘I’m very sorry, it must have been awful for you.’ He drained his teacup down to the black dots at the bottom and placed it back on the saucer. ‘Unfortunately, I can’t tell you anything about it that isn’t already public knowledge.’
But of course he’d been lying. And now here he was, five years later, riddled with cancer and on the edge of death himself, with no one left to protect and no career left to lose. After Lily had departed that day, he’d found himself wishing that he’d given her some kind of hint or clue, something that might have helped her make progress in her search and revived the exhilaration of the first few weeks after the murder, when the world had seemed split into devils and saints. He hadn’t done so then, but there was nothing stopping him now.
It was five years since her visit and more than ten years since the murder itself. He no longer knew her address, of course, but if he sent a letter to Lily Mortimer, care of The Grange, it was bound to reach her.
So Dr Lamb took up his pen and began to write.
‘Unfortunately, I can’t tell you anything about it that isn’t already public knowledge.’
Lily sipped her tea slowly, as if to show him he couldn’t end their conversation so easily. ‘You might not know who killed her, but any recollection of the details would be helpful. I was so young when it happened, it’s hard to separate memory from imagination. And Uncle Matthew won’t talk to me about it; he says it’s too painful. I’d hoped you might do so instead.’
The doctor smiled. ‘I’ll fill in the details, if I can remember them myself. But chronologically the story begins with you, doesn’t it? You and William. Shouldn’t we start with how you found the body?’
‘Yes.’ Lily nodded. ‘I can go first.’
The murder had happened six years earlier.
The garden at The Grange was full of secrets and Lily and William – eleven and nine years old, respectively – were not particularly surprised by the boat they found floating in the small pond under the willow tree, though they’d never seen it there before. It could have been an alien artefact, dropped from a spaceship during the night. But to them it was primarily an oversized toy, almost the size of the pond itself, and they didn’t hesitate before planning their morning around it. There were things in the garden they were often told not to play with, they reasoned, but never anything made of wood.
Lily climbed into the unsteady vessel and sat on the low seat that ran across the back of it, her shoulders very straight, as if she was practising her posture. It bobbed gently with her weight. William stayed on the bank and reached across to take hold of the stern.
‘I’m on the ocean,’ said Lily.
‘Whereabouts?’ William asked suspiciously.
‘The Arctic.’
He began to rock her from side to side. ‘It’s a storm,’ he said. ‘An ice storm.’
Gracefully, she kept her balance. ‘That feels more like a whirlpool. We’re being taken down to the abyss. The captain has drowned.’
He began to hammer his fists on the side. ‘It’s a shark swimming by.’
‘It’s a whale,’ she corrected him. ‘A sinker of ships.’
An apple flew past William’s head and hit the side of the boat, bouncing into the water. Lily opened her eyes; she and William both turned around, knowing who would be there.
‘Some very large hailstones,’ said a man in his early thirties, with scruffy brown hair and a moustache floating over his satisfied grin.
‘That’s mean, Uncle Matthew,’ said Lily. ‘You could have knocked me right into the water.’
‘I’m playing by your rules, aren’t I?’ He towered over them, his hands on his hips. ‘Besides, Lily, I wasn’t aiming at you.’
William stayed silent and watched his own reflection.
‘What are you doing here anyway, Uncle Matthew?’ Lily asked him. ‘You’re always causing trouble.’
The man shook his head in disbelief. ‘Trouble? You silly thing. I’m off to meet my Aunt Dot at the station. I came over with Lauren. She’s looking after Mummy, giving your sister the morning off. We’ll be joining you for lunch.’
William glanced back at the white house. From this side only the attic window was visible; the lower half of the house was strangled by trees. He swore under his breath.
Matthew leaned towards the two of them. ‘Would you like an apple?’
‘Yes please,’ said Lily. He passed one to her.
William hadn’t answered, but Matthew knelt down by him anyway. ‘I think yours went in the water. You might try to catch it next time.’
‘I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.’
They were both in the boat now, on the back seat. Matthew had left them ten minutes earlier, content with his little act of cruelty.
The family that lived at The Grange was an incomplete, twisted thing, born of tragedy and circumstance. Lily and William, the two children, were cousins to each other and Matthew was uncle to both of them. Their grandmother, Agnes Mortimer, had had three children: Lily’s father had been her son and William’s mother her daughter, but both had died – the son in the war and the daughter during
childbirth – leaving Matthew as her only living child. Lily’s mother had died a few years after her husband, from the Spanish flu, and Lily and her sister Violet had moved to The Grange to live with Agnes. William had arrived the following year, after his father had vanished one afternoon. So now the three orphans lived with their grandmother, a widow herself, in this tall white house at the edge of the village.
Agnes was too old and unwell to look after them properly, but Violet was mature enough to help out and Matthew, who had married Lauren and moved to a smaller house in the village, gave them assistance when they needed it. The only point of friction in the arrangement was between William and his uncle Matthew, who saw the young boy as a miniature version of the brute who’d taken his sister away. The two of them hated each other.
‘Well,’ said Lily, ‘one day you’ll be as big as him, then he won’t be able to bully you any more.’
William laid a handful of leaves and twigs and bits of grass on the seat in front of him, to make an illustration of his tormenter. He arranged the leaves into a moustache, over a mouth made of twigs. One eye was a stone and one a large crumb of dirt.
‘Why don’t we take all these leaves,’ said William, ‘and put them through his letterbox?’
Lily shook her head. ‘But what about poor Aunt Lauren?’
William went quiet; his mind was not quite made up about Lauren.
‘We could put them in his pockets then, when he comes back. Leaves and slugs and droppings.’
‘It wouldn’t work,’ said Lily. ‘He would know it was you.’
‘Then we could follow him through the fields and throw stones at him. He wouldn’t see us if we hid.’
Lily frowned and adopted her most adult tone of voice. ‘That’s exceedingly dangerous, William. You might kill him.’
William hit the plank with his fist; leaves flew into the air. ‘I want to kill him. I want him dead.’
