‘Last night?’
‘Yes. Or this morning, that is – I mean, when you found Father Lawless. Your husband said you couldn’t sleep and—’
‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, with a tinkle of rueful merriment, ‘I never sleep!’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Strafford paused a moment, licking his lips, then pressed on again. ‘But last night, in particular, I understand you were very – very restless, and that’s why you came downstairs. Will you tell me what happened, exactly?’
‘What happened?’ She gazed at him in seeming bafflement. ‘What do you mean, what happened?’
‘I mean, when you found Father Lawless,’ he said patiently. ‘I wonder, did you switch on the light?’
‘The light?’
‘Yes, the electric light.’ He pointed to the light fixture above his head. It had a pink shade, with roses painted on it. ‘Did you switch it on, when you went into the library?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because I’m wondering how clear a view you had of the body – Father Lawless’s body.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she murmured, frowning, and casting this way and that, as if searching for enlightenment from the wallpaper, or one of her china figurines.
Strafford sighed.
‘Mrs Osborne, you came downstairs at some time in the early hours of this morning and found Father Lawless in the library. Isn’t that so? And he was dead. Do you remember that? – do you remember finding him? Had you turned the light on? Did you see how he had died? Did you see the blood?’
She sat motionless, in silence, still scanning the room in perplexity. ‘I suppose I must have,’ she said uncertainly, in a faint, faraway voice. ‘If there was blood, I mean, I must have seen it’ – she turned suddenly and stared at him – ‘mustn’t I?’
‘That’s what I’m asking you,’ he said. He felt as if he were trying to unwrap some delicately breakable thing from fold upon fold of unexpectedly resistant tissue paper. ‘Can you remember?’
She shook her head from side to side, like an uncomprehending child, still staring at him. Then she stirred herself and sat up very straight, setting her shoulders back and blinking, as though she had just woken from a trance. ‘Would you like some cake?’ she asked, setting her brilliant smile in place again, like a carnival mask. ‘Mrs Duffy baked it – I asked her specially.’ Her look darkened, and she sank abruptly into a sulk. ‘I’m sure it’s very nice,’ she said petulantly. ‘Mrs Duffy’s cakes are always very nice. She’s famous for her nice cakes, Mrs Duffy is – everyone talks about them – the whole county talks about them, Mrs Duffy’s cakes!’
Fat iridescent tears welled in her eyes and sat trembling on the lower lids, but did not fall. Strafford, steadying his cup and saucer with one hand, extended the other across the table, and the woman before him lifted up her own hand, with a child’s solemn tentativeness, and placed it in his. He felt the chill of her palm, felt the small thin bones beneath the skin. Her knuckles were blue. Neither of them spoke, but sat gazing at each other in a shared, bewildered helplessness.
The door opened, with what to Strafford seemed a bang, and Colonel Osborne came bustling in.
‘Ah, here you are!’ he said, beaming at his wife. ‘I was looking for you everywhere.’ He paused, staring at the two of them staring back at him, one holding the other’s hand. ‘Is everything – is everything all right?’ he asked, bewildered himself now.
Strafford let go of Mrs Osborne’s hand and rose from the chair. He was about to say something, he wasn’t sure what, but Mrs Osborne cut him off. ‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ she snapped, in a new, hard voice, ‘why can’t you all leave me alone!’ Then she jumped up from the sofa, brushing away the unshed tears with the heels of her hands, and pushed past her husband and was gone.
‘I’m sorry—’ Strafford began, at the same moment that Colonel Osborne groaned, ‘Oh Lord!’
11
It was stingingly cold, but she didn’t care. She had been making her way down the hillside through the trees when, just in time, she caught sight of Strafford, stepping out of the caravan and starting up through the trees in her direction.
She moved sideways, away from the path – it was her path, she had been making it for months, no one else walked on it or even knew it was there – and hid herself among a stand of birches. Her duffel coat was the same colour as her surroundings, and she hoped it would camouflage her. But what if he had spied her already? What if he had been specially trained in looking for people in hiding? He seemed to her a hopeless sort of detective, but appearances could be deceptive, as she very well knew.
If he did spot her, though, crouching here among the trees, what would she say, what excuse would she come up with for hiding from him? She could say her father had sent her with a message for Fonsey, something about the horses, and that she had got a fright when she saw a figure in black boots and a slouch hat climbing towards her up the hillside. But he wouldn’t believe it, she knew he wouldn’t.
Yet why was she hiding from him, anyway? Why shouldn’t she be out walking in the woods? She had more right to be there than he did.
All the same, she would have turned and run back up the hill to the road, except that it was too late now, he was already halfway up the slope. He wouldn’t find the path, though, her path, but she could see he was going to pass very close to where she crouched among the pale slim trunks of the birches, hardly daring to breathe.
Was it fright or excitement that was making her heart beat so fast? Both, she supposed. Because she was excited, she was frightened, though in a pleasurable sort of way, thinking how maybe he’d spot her, and come over, and – and what?
Maybe that was it. Maybe she wanted to be caught, maybe she longed to be caught, not just here and now, on this snowy hillside, but always, and everywhere. Sometimes, when she was little, Dominic would let her play hide-and-go-seek with him and his friends, and when the game had started and she had hidden herself inside a wardrobe, behind a rack of her mother’s dresses that smelled of sweat and stale scent, or was lying under the bed in the back bedroom, breathing in dust and trying not to sneeze, she would feel a sort of thick hot surge of something rising inside her – it was a bit like that heaving sensation you have when you’re just about to vomit – and she wouldn’t know whether she was afraid of being discovered in her hiding place, or hoping to be caught and dragged out in shame for everyone to see.
Once, one of the bigger boys, Jimmy Waldron was his name – she could still see him as he was then, with his buck teeth and greasy hair – had pounced on her where she had tucked herself behind the open door of the upstairs lavatory. Instead of shouting out to the others that he had found her, he had pushed her back into the lavatory and locked the door and put his hand up her dress and tried to kiss her, and wouldn’t let her go, until in the end she bit him on the lip and made it bleed.
Strafford was level with her now, and so close, not more than five or six yards away, that she could hear him panting from the effort of scrambling up the steep, slippery slope. What if she were to spring out at him, like an animal, all fangs and claws? That would ruffle his composure, make him take notice of her, oh, yes. But she didn’t move, and held her breath and let him go past.
She watched him until he had reached the crest of the hill and she couldn’t see him any more. She heard a lorry going past, up there. Serve him right if he got knocked down.
He was dreadfully stuck-up, as bad as the chinless wonders at hunt balls who never asked her to dance because they were afraid of her, or her father’s so-called horsey friends, who stood about with sherry glasses in their hands and smiled at her in that stupid, glassy-eyed way that they did. Half of them couldn’t even remember her name. He wasn’t as bad as her stepmother’s family, though, the Harbisons, who thought they were God’s gift to the county, and out of snobbery had let their dotty daughter marry her poor father and make his life a misery.
All the same, the detective was good-looking, in
a scrawny sort of way – how could he be so thin? – and he had nice hands, she had noticed them, the nails clean and neatly clipped. She had a phobia about nails, the way they kept growing, like hair, growing and growing, even after you were dead, so someone had once told her. Imagine being stretched out six feet under the ground in the black-dark, your skull swathed in hanks of hair like steel wool, and your skeleton fingers clasped on your skeleton breast with inches of stuff as brittle and shiny as mother-of-pearl sticking out of the tips of them.
She left the shelter of the trees and went down the slope. She took her time, going carefully. She couldn’t afford to slip and land on her backside in the half-frozen muck, for the skirt she was wearing wasn’t her own. When she was sure Doctor Hafner – the Kraut – had left, she had gone into the bedroom where the White Mouse lay passed out on the bed, and had taken one of her tweed skirts and a heavy jumper out of the wardrobe, and brought them to her room and put them on.
She liked to wear her stepmother’s things, she wasn’t sure why, except that it gave her a sort of shivery feeling that she darkly enjoyed.
Now she paused in the trees at the edge of the clearing and took off her knickers – it wasn’t easy, because of her riding boots – and put them in the pocket of her stepmother’s skirt. The air, cool as silk, caressed her thighs. It didn’t make her feel chilled at all – quite the opposite, in fact. She smiled. Oh, she was a bold girl, she knew she was, and gloried in it.
Here was the caravan, with Strafford’s footprints leading away from it, and the big circular bloodstain in the trampled snow.
At the door she hesitated. Even still, after all this time, she hadn’t been able to work out a form of etiquette to deal with these – whatever they were – she couldn’t even think what word to use to describe what she was doing when she came down into the wood like this. Visits? It sounded ridiculously formal, and when she tried it out she heard it in exactly the prissy, strangulated way – ‘vsts’ – that the White Mouse would say it, when she was doing her Queen Lizzie act and putting on that tiny clipped voice that made her sound just like a mouse squeaking. What about ‘trysts’? No, that sounded like ‘vsts’, only stupider.
Anyway, what did it matter? In her own mind, she wasn’t really here. It was strange – how could one be in a place and at the same time not?
She lived in her own mind, that was the fact of the matter. Once, on a bright-green summer morning sparkling with dew – she remembered it so clearly – she had disturbed a spider’s web that was strung between two heads of cabbage in the kitchen garden, and all the baby spiders had suddenly run out along the threads in all directions, there must have been hundreds of them, thousands, even. That was how it was with her, she was the spider sitting at the centre of the web, and all the little black things scurrying away from her were images of herself escaping into the world.
She gave the door a perfunctory knock – he could be up to anything, in there, the dirty brute – and entered through the narrow doorway.
When she was a child and her mother read The Wind in the Willows to her at bedtime, she had always been on the side of the weasels and the stoats.
Fonsey was squatting on his haunches in front of the stove, feeding it with lengths of cut branches.
‘That wood is green,’ Lettie said. ‘How do you expect to get the thing going with green wood? You’re such an ass.’ He didn’t even turn to look at her. The collar of his leather jacket was turned up, and he was wearing tennis shoes without laces – the boots he had just taken off stood beside the stove, agape like giant mouths and with their tongues hanging out. She could smell him from where she stood. ‘And you stink like a polecat.’ He mumbled something. ‘What?’ she said sharply. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said, how do you know what a polecat smells like?’
‘Well, at least I know what a polecat is’ – she didn’t, in fact – ‘which you don’t.’
He stood up. She was always surprised by the size of him. In the impossibly narrow confines of the caravan he looked even bigger than he was. Getting to his feet like that, in his lumbering way, rolling his huge head on its short thick neck, he might have been some huge wild thing surging up out of its hiding place in a hole in the ground.
At these moments, when she came to the heart of the wood and climbed into his smelly lair, she knew she should be afraid of him, but she wasn’t. It was he who was afraid of her, she knew he was. He was twice, three times as strong as she was, he could break her wrist, or her arm – he could break her neck – with one twist of those butcher’s hands of his, yet of the two of them, she was the one in control. How could that be? Men, all men, in her experience of them, went in fear of women, though her experience in this area, as even she had to admit, wasn’t what could be called wide-ranging.
Just then she caught sight of the eviscerated rabbit on the table. ‘What’s that disgusting thing?’
‘My dinner.’ He took down a blackened frying pan from its hook above the sink and set it atop the stove. ‘Want some?’
‘You won’t get that thing hot enough with that—’
‘—green wood. I know.’
‘So what will you do, eat it raw? I can just see you, munching on a slab of it with blood dribbling down your chin. You’re half animal yourself.’
He looked at her. She met his look with one of her own. Those awful pimples, she said to herself – how could she bear to come close to him, with those things all over his forehead?
‘Did you bring any fags?’ he asked.
From the pocket of her duffel coat she took a flat silver cigarette case and clicked it open. The case was one of numerous items she had borrowed from her stepmother, without asking, and had kept it. The cigarettes were Churchman’s. She usually brought Senior Service, a fistful of which she would scoop out of one of the boxes of two hundred that her father ordered fortnightly from Fox’s of College Green. The Churchman’s she had pinched from Father Lawless. He wouldn’t miss them. ‘I got this, too,’ she said, bringing out from an inside pocket a naggin bottle of Cork Dry Gin. She laughed. ‘We can have a cocktail party.’
Fonsey did his crooked smile, showing the gap in his front teeth. ‘Are you going to take off your coat?’ he asked softly. When they were together like this, in the wood, he could make even the simplest question sound suggestive.
‘Do you know how cold it is in here?’ she demanded indignantly. ‘Why don’t you take off your coat, or whatever that thing is called that you’re wearing?’ He had told her his jacket was made from horse-hide, and that it had been worn by a Spitfire pilot in the war, who was killed. She didn’t believe it, of course, except the bit about the horse-hide, for the thing reeked of the knacker’s yard. Was it true, she wondered, what Dominic had once told her, that dog dirt was used in the process of tanning leather? The world was horrible in so many ways.
She was tearing the seal from the gin bottle with her fingernails. He watched her happily, picking absent-mindedly at the sore on his lip.
‘That detective was here,’ he said. ‘Stafford, or whatever his name is.’
‘I know. I saw him going up the hill. That rabbit really stinks, by the way. I can smell it from here.’
‘Smells like you,’ Fonsey said with a sly grin, pressing the tip of his tongue through the gap in his front teeth.
‘You’re disgusting.’
They sat down on the bunks, facing each other, leaning their backs against the walls of the caravan. They had lit their cigarettes, and now Lettie uncorked the gin. She held up the little bottle before her, frowning. ‘How are we going to drink this?’
‘Share and share alike.’
‘You mean, the two of us drink from the same bottle? Not on your life – and certainly not with that revolting sore on your mouth. Find me a glass.’
He went and opened the cupboard and came back with a grimy tumbler. ‘It’s filthy!’ she cried. ‘Don’t you ever clean anything?’
She took hold of a length of the hem of
her skirt and ran it vigorously around the inside of the glass. Fonsey threw himself down on the bunk again, supporting himself on an elbow. Lettie’s right leg was raised, and he could see all the way to the top of her stocking and the suspender button holding it taut.
‘You have nice legs,’ he said.
‘Yes, nice and bandy, thanks to dear Papa.’
‘I like them.’
‘You’d like anything.’
She poured half the gin into the glass and handed him the bottle. ‘Chin-chin.’ She took a sip and grimaced. ‘I hate the taste of this stuff, I don’t know why I drink it.’
‘Because it makes you feel better.’
‘Maybe it makes you feel better. It makes me feel as if I’ve swallowed a dose of paraquat.’
‘Then don’t drink it. Give it to me.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ she said, feeling listless suddenly, and turned her face away from him. She took another drink, and another puff from her cigarette. She hadn’t learned to inhale yet. A good smoke was wasted on her, Fonsey always said. She was studying the latening light in the dirty back window. ‘What did you say to Sherlock Holmes?’ she asked.
‘Who?’
‘The detective, remember? He was here? Or has he slipped out of your mighty brain already?’
‘Did he see you?’
‘Of course he didn’t! I hid.’ She paused. ‘What did he ask you?’
‘Nothing. He wanted to know where I was last night.’
‘And what did you say?’ She watched him over the rim of the glass.
‘What do you think I said?’
She nodded, thinking. ‘He’s not as much of a duffer as he looks.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just do.’ She had drawn up both knees, and Fonsey’s gaze was fixed on the pale undersides of her legs, which now she parted a little, pretending not to notice she was doing it. He stared, and she laughed. ‘Have a good look, why don’t you?’ she said, and took another, longer drink from the grimy glass.
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