Echoes of Silence

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘Only what I remember, plus what I’ve read up again in the old news reports. I take my work seriously,’ she added, unperturbed by his unspoken censure, by what he thought of the lengths to which she’d gone. ‘I do a good deal of research, even if all of it doesn’t appear in the finished narrative. Like an iceberg, you know, most of it’s below the surface. And Mrs Denshaw’s attitude made me frankly curious. We’ve mapped out a rough outline for the book, gone through her version of her early life, and listed every member of the Denshaw family she knows about, but she’s never mentioned this child at all, or what happened. The mother, being her son Peter’s first wife, yes, she was briefly mentioned, but not a single word about this child, Beth. However, she absolutely dotes on Peter, so I assumed the reason was she thought he might find it just too upsetting to read about when the book’s finished. He was, after all, a suspect for a while, until the mother’s confession. But then …’

  She paused to pour herself more coffee, holding up the pot inquiringly. He shook his head. ‘Then what, Mrs Austwick?’ he forced himself to ask.

  She waved the piece of paper. ‘Then I came across this. Which I think you’ll find very interesting. As far as I can tell, it suggests there might have been other people involved in the child’s murder.’

  He wouldn’t ask to see it again, anticipating the refusal. ‘Scribbles like that, even a rough draft, if that’s what it is – a letter or whatever that might never have been sent out, that’s useless. If that’s all you have, I’m sorry —’

  ‘I think the case should be reopened.’

  A waiter appeared to replenish the fire and the coffee. Richmond waved him away on both counts.

  ‘On what grounds?’ he managed eventually. She tapped the so-called letter, and he shook his head. ‘I’ve told you, it’s useless. Unless you have anything further.’

  She watched him assessingly. ‘I might have.’

  ‘You realise, if that’s so, you could be charged with withholding evidence?’

  ‘Not unless the case is reopened. And if it is, then I shan’t withhold it.’

  He disliked the woman excessively by now and wouldn’t trust her an inch. The very fact that she’d breached her client’s confidentiality was enough to raise his hackles. But it went deeper than that.

  ‘Tell me,’ he asked softly, ‘what’s in it for you? Why are you so concerned? Why are you, personally, so keen to have this case reinvestigated?’

  ‘Why? Why do you think? I want to see justice done.’

  He didn’t believe that for a moment. There was something here he didn’t understand, a hint of spite that suggested other reasons than altruism for her intervention in this.

  ‘What do you think I can do about it, at this stage?’ he countered, almost roughly. It was becoming increasingly difficult to hide his feelings.

  ‘I don’t know – but you will do something, won’t you? After all, it was your daughter who was murdered, wasn’t it?’

  Time stopped. Lurched. Started again.

  Your daughter. Your little Beth. Eight years old.

  His application for the job here hadn’t been made without a good deal of heart-searching. He’d known what he was letting himself in for – pain, reminders of the past that he’d rather not face. But years of trying to convince himself that it was over and done with, part of his life that he must put behind him, had made no difference. He’d been driven on, a relentless inner voice had never ceased telling him that it wasn’t finished, that somewhere the truth was hidden, that some day it must come to light. But not like this. This wasn’t how it should be. No way could he jeopardise his plans and begin his new job by initiating the reopening of an old case in which he had a strong personal interest – even had there been sufficient grounds.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Austwick. It’s out of the question.’

  ‘Don’t dismiss it so easily. Think about what I’ve said. Just think about it.’ She stuffed the flyer into the depths of the big leather bag and stood up. ‘I’m tied up for the next few weeks, but after that, from the beginning of December, you know where to find me.’

  4

  Polly took Harriet upstairs, still protesting she wasn’t tired, that she wouldn’t ever go to sleep, leaving Sonia at last saying final farewells and promising to drive cautiously.

  It was a not inconsiderable journey up to the bedroom, once Polly’s, where Harriet now slept. Spooky, whispered Harriet, listening to the moaning of the wind in the chimneys, pleasurably frightened by the possibility of encountering one of the ghosts the twins had sworn they’d seen. She didn’t believe them, but she held tightly on to Polly’s hand all the same.

  After dark, Polly thought, you were always more aware of how old the house was, of its sighs, creaks and groans, as if settling itself down for the night, like an old dog in its basket. More jumpy, at the echoes of its silence and the shadows in the corners. Silly, really, when every nook and cranny was as familiar as your own face – though when she was away, it was strange how she sometimes couldn’t remember it properly. Coming back to Low Rigg was always a journey of rediscovery to her, wandering through the house and reacquainting herself with it, coming to terms with how she felt about it. She’d been born here and felt a passion for it which she was never sure was love, or hate. She did know that it frightened her sometimes, the power it held, its strangeness and remoteness from the life of Steynton.

  She was almost as grateful as Harriet was for their warm hand contact, as they moved from one part to another, swinging arms and singing a nonsense rhyme, giggling the way she and Ginny, and Elf, too, had done. She ran her fingers along the honey-coloured walnut of a small table, caressed threadbare tapestry curtains, pausing only for a moment to glance at the portrait of old Josiah Denshaw. Too late for the ritual of a Josiah story for Harriet tonight, however short and amusing.

  A third-generation woollen manufacturer he’d been, a character, a stout Victorian about whom tales were legion, looking down at them out of an important frame with full knowledge of a settled and rosy present, and confident expectations of even better things to come. It was as well he hadn’t been able to see into the future: a succession of male heirs killed in two world wars, leaving only two great-great-grandsons, Laurence and Philip, neither of whom was interested in carrying on his hard-won woollen empire. Gathering up the remnants of the fortune Josiah had made, these last two had sold their shares for much less than they should have done and got out of the industry. Laurence had taken up schoolmastering and Philip, medicine.

  Low Rigg had been in the possession of the Denshaws ever since Josiah had moved from the valley and acquired the old manor-house when his aspirations began to stretch to being more than the biggest wool-comber, dyer and spinner in the area and included hopes of being looked on as some sort of squire. He had bought Low Rigg Hall from the last descendant of its original owners, along with most of its sparse contents, and to his wife’s chagrin had filled the empty corners, being too tight-fisted to buy new, with the sort of second-hand furniture at that time poorly regarded: old-fashioned Regency tables, Hepplewhite chairs and the like. Over the years they, plus the Elizabethan oak of the original pieces and later, Victorian and Edwardian additions, had grown into something to make an antique dealer’s mouth water. Josiah’s wife would never have credited what they were worth now.

  As Polly reached out for the knob on Harriet’s door she found grit under her hand, from where she’d trailed it along the walnut table. She rubbed her fingers together irritably. She wasn’t finicky about housekeeping, but the neglected state of the house could always be guaranteed to reduce her to annoyance.

  She ought to confront Dot Nagle with it, but knew she wouldn’t. There were some things Freya would tolerate, but criticism of either of the Nagles was not one of them. She and Dot formed an unholy alliance, cronies from that former, distant, shiningly remembered world they had both once inhabited. Freya had few other friends, she was almost as much a stranger here now as she had been
forty years ago, when she came here as a bride. Dot had been summoned as a mother’s help when Elf had been brought into the family as a baby, Polly had known her practically all her life, but she was still wary of tangling with her unnecessarily.

  She’d been a dresser at some couture house or other when she and Freya had met – nobody could ever do up eighteen back-buttons on a model gown like Dot, with her quick, deft fingers, declared Freya. Small and skinny, a Cockney sparrow to her fingertips, salty-spoken and with a trenchant sense of humour and a sharp temper, she was undeterred by the change in her lifestyle, by having to look after four children, simply dealing with them in the same rough and ready fashion as she’d been brought up herself. A clip round the ear when they disobeyed; solid food at mealtimes and if they didn’t like it they could do without. ‘You just thank your lucky stars you don’t have to eat what I had to,’ she told them. ‘Fish and chips if we were lucky. Pie, mash and liquor. Jellied eels. And a good hiding if we didn’t finish every crumb.’

  Jellied eels! Ugh, yuk! they’d repeated, making sick noises.

  Otherwise she’d left them largely to their own devices while she and Freya gossiped and reminisced. She wasn’t so bad nowadays, Polly thought, as long as you were careful to keep on the right side of her.

  Nagle had come on the scene later, just when, Polly couldn’t now quite remember, ostensibly to drive the now long-gone Daimler. Eddie Nagle, retired marine, who hung about all day, except for the times he spent at various dog-tracks around the country, and working at his part-time job as an attendant at the fitness club in Steynton, otherwise looking macho and not doing much else that Polly could see. She’d been afraid of him as a child but now, the picture of him that came to mind – stocky and muscular, with that extraordinary pink, shiny bald head, square, almost completely cuboid, the rubbery lips – gave her only the usual shiver of distaste. She used to tell herself it was only that he looked frightening. Yet she unconsciously rubbed a hand down the side of her skirt, as if she’d accidentally brushed against him.

  ‘Mummy?’

  Harriet was snuggling beneath the duvet, eyes almost closing. ‘Eddie says he’ll get me a puppy, if you’ll let me. Can I have one, please, can I?’

  Polly didn’t correct either her grammar or the way she called Nagle ‘Eddie’, though this was at his request. He was, she reluctantly had to admit, good with the children. ‘Isn’t one dog enough? There’s Lady, isn’t there?’

  ‘She’s not mine, she’s Eddie’s,’ Harriet pointed out. ‘And sometimes he won’t let me play with her. Joey and Sam have one each!’

  The two enormous, unruly mongrels that the twins had been allowed to choose from the animal shelter weren’t much of a recommendation. ‘If you’re thinking of one like Sheba – sorry, Hattie!’

  ‘She has a lovely disposition,’ Harriet offered. ‘Aunt Ginny says.’ Polly smiled, half-way to giving in. One like Lady, a shivering, gentle, sweet-tempered greyhound who used to race but had been pensioned off and saved from the knackers when she grew too old to win – a rare sign of weakness in Nagle – perhaps wouldn’t be so bad.

  ‘Besides, Lady wants a friend to play with, as well,’ Harriet said, the unconscious pathos of the ‘as well’ smiting Polly.

  She brushed the soft fringe of dark hair back from her daughter’s forehead, kissed her and promised, ‘We’ll see,’ as she turned out the light.

  At midnight Richmond realised the receptionist’s predictions had been made in the spirit of wanting to please rather than in the interests of absolute truth. He could hear all too clearly the distant but insistent thump of the music. The ‘retirees’, he reflected, punching his pillow, evidently had more stamina than he had. It wouldn’t have been loud enough to keep him awake had he been tired enough, but as it was, the memory of the meeting with Mrs Austwick jumped around in his brain, along with the distant beat, tormenting him, repeating itself over and over but getting nowhere.

  In the end he gave in, switched on the lamp and the electric blanket to keep the bed warm, got up and padded over to the tea-making facilities in the corner. He made tea and sat in the bolt upright, hard-stuffed armchair, huddled into his dressing-gown while he drank it, and at last allowed himself to think of Beth.

  Silver-blonde hair, a retroussé nose, small for her age. A bouncy, laughing, happy child, full of pep. From the moment she’d first been put into his arms, he’d adored her. The divorce from Isobel had been acutely painful, but the separation from his daughter had been like cutting out a piece of his heart. Still was, shot through with regret and remorse at being too late, desperately as he’d tried, to save his marriage.

  It had come as a shock to Richmond when Isobel married again so quickly after the divorce, more so that she chose to marry the young vicar of St Wilfrid’s, although she’d been attending his church for some time, with all the earnestness and zeal of the newly converted. She was not a person to cope with the sort of stress life had thrust upon her and, though he didn’t know Peter Denshaw, Richmond had to admit that perhaps she’d found the support and stability which the Church, and presumably Peter Denshaw himself, had been able to give her and he, Richmond, had not. What was certain was that Isobel was constitutionally unsuited to being the wife of a detective with inordinate demands on his time and energies.

  Detective Constable Tom Richmond he’d been then, having married Isobel when she was only eighteen. Keen and full of ambition to the point where he hardly saw his wife and child. The usual story, I’m doing it for you, so that you and Beth can have a better future. Refusing to see that he was killing his marriage. Tom Richmond, the white hope of the CID, who couldn’t see that, and hadn’t been able to do a damn thing about helping to find his own child’s murderer.

  Orders had been issued immediately his involvement in the case was revealed, as soon as the powers-that-be learned that the mother of the missing child was Isobel Denshaw, Richmond’s ex-wife, and that he was the father. It was standard procedure that he should be called off, there was every good reason for it. He’d been given compassionate leave which he hadn’t wanted and didn’t know what to do with. He hadn’t been allowed to put so much as a toe into the investigation, though he’d picked up what information he could. He had never been able to rid himself of the idea that the case had been botched.

  He’d read somewhere, recently, of the relationship between cancer and stress, and could well believe it. The note Isobel left when she took an overdose said there was no point in waiting for the cancer, recently diagnosed, to kill her. She’d no more desire to fight it, nor did she deserve to go on living when Beth was dead, when she was to blame for her own child’s death.

  How could anyone ever have believed that?

  Never in a million years would he, at any rate, believe that Isobel, however neurotic or disordered by her illness, would lift a finger to Beth, never mind bludgeon her to death, any more than he himself would have done. But evidence had been given that there had been a quarrel between them the morning Beth disappeared, overheard by one of Peter Denshaw’s parishioners - a quarrel which Richmond reluctantly had to admit was possible. Beth had been an innocent casualty of the divorce. She didn’t understand the terrible splitting apart of her life, and her fear and bewilderment had manifested itself in behavioural problems. Happy, biddable little Beth had at times become naughty, cheeky and disobedient, Isobel reported. Richmond might not have believed that, either, except that he’d witnessed both, himself, once or twice, on the occasions when it was his turn to have her for the weekend. The last time she’d stayed with him, she’d wet the bed.

  The music downstairs had finally ceased. He got back under the sheets that the electric blanket had kept warm and eventually fell asleep to the continued repetition of Wyn Austwick’s confident assertion: ‘You will do something about it … she was your daughter, after all.’

  And as he slept, he dreamed of Low Rigg Hall as on the only time he’d seen it, dark stone surrounded by daffodils in their thousands, blow
ing in the March wind, the bleak moors beyond.

  The Reverend Peter Denshaw pushed aside preparations for his monthly letter for the next parish magazine and stared morosely out of his study window. The view of the outside was marginally better than that of the interior and might be of greater help in suggesting an analogy to the coming Christmas more acceptable to his parishioners than the rather clever and erudite one which had just occurred to him. Hands in the pockets of his cassock, he stared across at the church, but no brilliant revelation came to him.

  St Wilfrid’s, a Victorian edifice unremarkable for anything, stood in a churchyard which was a subject of controversy within the PCC, most of whom wanted the gravestones laid in the grass for easy passage of the verger’s mower. He watched Mrs Lumb, champion of those whom Polly called the Levellers, and stalwart leader of the flower arrangers, as she emerged from the church and passed through the wicket gate which led into the garden of his old home. The Lumbs had bought it and tarted it up and called it the Old Vicarage when the PCC deemed the upkeep was costing the church too much. Its sale had brought in more than enough to build a new vicarage on church land between the churchyard and the C of E school, though the hoped-for saving on maintenance of the vicar’s home hadn’t amounted to much, mainly because they’d employed Sykes & Co. to build the new one. They were the cheapest of those builders who put in a bid for the work, and the new house was jerry-built and full of problems, as anybody who knew Harry Sykes could have told them it would be. It was called, dispiritingly, the New Vicarage.

  As the parish assumed he would, Peter humbly bowed to the inevitable and accepted the transplantation without demur. It would hardly be the thing, after all, for the vicar to grumble that the rooms of the new house were small, square and characterless, and the thin walls offered no privacy whatsoever, when overall the house was warmer, so much easier to run and to furnish, and there was very little garden to distract him from his parochial duties. He even embraced these disadvantages, and the central heating boiler which threw tantrums worse than those of the old boiler at Low Rigg. He stoically put up with Miss Spriggs across the road, who spied on her new neighbours from behind her intimidatingly white lace curtains, she who still donkey-stoned her doorstep according to how she’d been taught by her mother. It was cramped quarters inside the New Vicarage, and the extensive view across the beautiful old garden and into the valley, which the old one had enjoyed, was obscured by the bus shelter outside. Boys rode their bikes and skateboards round the shelter and teenagers of either sex gathered there at all times of the day and night, littering the ground with their take-away trash and their fag ends. The noise from the Red Lion car-park further along the road at closing time was impossible to ignore. There was a fish and chip shop within smelling distance.