Ruined Stones

by Eric Reed

  “Come in then, and I’ll see you get some! Nica, visitors for you!”

  The little girl led them into the kitchen and pointed proudly at a doll’s pram sitting by the fireplace. “See? Santa brought that! But I don’t know how he got it down the chimley. Do you?”

  Mavis smiled. “It’s secret. And here are some little things there wasn’t room for in your stocking.”

  Veronica exclaimed most enthusiastically over her teddy bear and tucked it into the pram beside a cross-eyed dolly.

  “She’ll appreciate the hood and mittens when she’s out in the cold,” her grandmother remarked softly.

  Then Grace handed over the hastily wrapped brooch. When the little girl struggled to attach the silver aeroplane to her jumper, Grace pinned it on securely for her.

  “By, but it’s lovely,” Veronica smiled broadly, inclining her head to see it. Turning to her grandmother she asked, “Will there be any more presents? Is auntie going to come today, too? She brings ever such nice things.”

  Mrs. Gibson changed the subject hastily. “Where’s your manners, Nica? You never said thank you to these ladies.”

  ***

  “Children are told Christmas night is magical,” Rutherford informed his cats. “But, of course, as magical animals you already know that.”

  A tabby sitting under the table mewed.

  “Ah, you think I have forgotten my friends? Of course not.” He opened a drawer and removed a box. Cats swarmed to him from shadowed corners or jumped down from perches around the room. One or two latecomers hastily pattered down the hallway when he called “Puss, puss, pussy!” in a high-pitched voice.

  Opening the box, he distributed several rat carcasses to the waiting cats. “Ah, you know the call to come and eat a treat, and I hope you appreciate how many times I get my fingers pinched by traps hidden in nooks and crannies,” he said, sitting down at his desk and taking up a scribbled piece of paper. “But then,” he addressed the nearest feline, “cats are not only magical but know more than they ever reveal. Except to their friends. To think you were all gods long ago and now nasty boys try to catch you to torment you in back lanes. But the temple knows. There’s always a nice fat rat caught in one of my traps there.”

  He smiled to himself and turned his attention to the paper he held. “My feline friends, according to my calculations, the time is almost ripe to erect a cone of power, yet fools refuse to contemplate the notion. Still, we must do what we can. Perhaps I could persuade the older children…but would that work? They probably wouldn’t agree to take their clothes off and that’s vital. And how to get them up on the moor at night to begin with?”

  He rubbed his eyes. “Always problems. But first let us work out the ritual.” He commenced writing, consulting books now and then. The shadowy room’s quiet was disturbed only by the crunching of cat jaws, the rustle of paper, and their owner’s occasional distracted comments.

  “If I can get enough to agree, enough to make a circle…but how to hide the fire?…we’d have to avoid air raid wardens and other nosy parkers…now, the incantation…”

  There was a brisk knock on the front door and before he could react singers struck up a spirited “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”

  ***

  She rifled through the gaudy paste jewelry in her dressing table’s drawer until she found a cigarette packet. It was empty.

  “Bloody hell, Joe! You said you’d bring me more tabs. Bloody awful Christmas this has turned out to be.”

  Joe Baines sat up in bed and laid a tentative hand on her arm. “I’m sorry but—”

  “Sorry! You’re always sorry, Joe. Sorry’s the word for you!” She didn’t bother to move away from his hand, letting his fingers lie against her skin as if she didn’t feel them, as if they were of no consequence.

  “I know I haven’t been at my best today.”

  She tossed the empty cigarette packet back into the drawer. “No? Really? I’m not sure I can recall what your best is like anymore. Here it is Christmas and if your face got any longer you’d be sweeping the floor with your chin.”

  Baines squeezed her arm in supplication. She offered as much response as a statue, so he took his hand away. “I didn’t mean to…well, I never thought I’d react like this, but it’s the first Christmas, you see. My first Christmas alone.”

  She jerked around and glared in the dim lamplight. “Alone? What am I, then? A piece of bloody furniture?”

  “I didn’t mean…I meant without…without…” The words wouldn’t come out.

  “We both wanted your wife out of the way, didn’t we?”

  “But not the children. And I didn’t want their mother dead.”

  “That’s not what you said before. How many times did we sit right here in this bed with you moaning about how she made your life a misery? How you’d do anything to be rid of the bitch?”

  “Talk. Just talk. I didn’t know how it would be…”

  She apparently had a sudden change of heart, because she leaned over and put her arms around his sagging shoulders. “Don’t feel guilty, Joe. It’s not your fault the bloody Germans dropped a bomb on your house.”

  “No,” he said, his voice a faint echo. “It wasn’t my fault a bomb hit the house.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  On Boxing Day, the day of the funeral, Carter Street residents came calling. They came not so much to pay their respects to Ronny, Grace thought, as to show their support for Mavis. Grace was stiff from sleeping on a mattress on the kitchen floor for a second night but she did her best to keep the teapot filled.

  Mrs. Gibson arrived first, bringing newspaper screws of tea and sugar as gifts for Mavis “for to help out wi’ the funeral tea, hinney.” Removal of her coat revealed she was swathed in a green pinafore over a shabby black dress. “Shame about Ronny, hinney,” she said perfunctorily. “Give us your bread knife and I’ll start making sandwiches.” She slapped a loaf on the round wooden breadboard, took the saw-toothed knife, and started cutting thin slices from the loaf. “Don’t expect many, do you?”

  Mavis shrugged. “Not really. Charlie, what about him?”

  “Aye, he intends to be at the funeral, sorry to say.”

  Grace was surprised to see Lily, the aspiring prostitute, arrive with her mother, who looked frail but had a powerful voice.

  “Sorry about Ronny,” the woman began. “Me daughter here the same. Who’s going to follow the coffin, then? No men about the house to do it, are there?”

  “They’re all hiding in me backyard, Mrs. Dixon,” Mavis said.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” came the reply.

  Lily, considerably cleaned up and looking younger without her homemade makeup, dared send a few sulky glances in Grace’s direction as Mavis showed the two visitors to the bedroom.

  More local residents arrived. Grace recognised a number, having interviewed them. Conversations filled the kitchen. She had trouble enough deciphering the local dialect while concentrating on a single speaker. Listening to the mingled voices she might as well have been sitting in the middle of a marketplace in Istanbul—although there she might have caught the conversation of an expatriate or two.

  Sefton showed up again, closely followed by Charlie Gibson. Mrs. Gibson looked up from arranging sandwiches on a plate and frowned.

  “Rotten cold weather to be standing about in a cemetery,” Sefton observed, warming his hands at the fire.

  “Oh, Ronny’s toasty enough,” Charlie replied.

  “Charlie, you know this is not the…” his wife began.

  “Does it look to you as if the widow is upset?” he replied. “Not that I blame you, Mavis. I’ve nae doubt you’re glad to be shot of him. As for me, I reckon he got what he deserved.” His face reddened. “I just wish it was me what gave it him, the swine.”

  “His marrers would say different,” Seft
on put in.

  Charlie swung round. “What marrers were these, then? A bunch of thieves and worse.” He was shouting.

  Sefton matched his volume in defense of Ronny and the two started arguing.

  There was a muffled thudding. Grace entertained the sudden thought the departed had risen from his coffin to warn them they were disturbing his rest, but then realised a neighbour was banging on the party wall to indicate they could hear the shouting and were not pleased about it.

  Evidently the neighbours on the other side did not bother with a warning since, as the argument between the two men became more heated, Wallace arrived.

  “Howay, lads, this is too much noise. Let’s have some respect for the dead,” he said.

  “I was just saying Ronny got what he deserved, and—” Charlie snapped at him.

  “There’s them who reckon you was the person who gave it to him,” an exasperated Wallace interrupted. “And others who hint you spend most of your air raid duty hours in the pub. Easy enough to slip out on the pretence of needing to use the netty, but go down the back lane somewhere else instead. Things go on in the blackout the light of day would blush at. My advice is to watch your step, Charlie, and gan canny. We all know you had an axe to grind with Ronny.”

  “Better to be lounging in a pub with the entire street on fire than visiting tarts!” Sefton gave Wallace a wink.

  “Why, you—” Charlie shouted, grabbing the other man by his lapels.

  “If I have to I’ll arrest you, Charlie,” Wallace said. “Have some sense, man. It’ll be a hard enough day for Mavis as it is. Go outside and cool off a bit. It’s almost time.”

  As the men left, Wallace turned toward Mavis. “I’ll go with them to make sure no riots break out. Don’t want the vicar to be upset.”

  Mavis thanked him. “And come back for the tea, won’t you? We’ll have it ready by then.”

  Mrs. Gibson sat down and started to cry. Had Wallace really had to air his suspicions of Charlie for everyone in the room to hear?

  ***

  Wallace joined the party which followed Ronny to St. John’s Cemetery. Surrounded by monuments and gravestones, the handful of men—they could hardly be termed mourners—stood shivering in a cutting wind off the river. Two others stood at a distance behind them, flat-capped and patient, waiting to shovel earth back into the trench into which Ronny’s coffin had been lowered. Here and there dingy seagulls pecked forlornly at the grass. A thin drizzle fell from a grey sky.

  A man who said he was the cemetery watchman stopped Wallace and asked for news about the matter of the vandalised statue.

  “You’ll have to come round the station and talk to Constable Baxter about that.”

  “I will, but women in the force, what good is that, I ask you?” The watchman pinched out his cigarette and lodged the stub behind his ear.

  “Aye, that may be so,” remarked a member of the party, “but you got to admit they’re red hot workers when they get down to it.”

  A gust of wind stirred dead flowers on a grave next to Ronny’s.

  Wallace scanned those gathered at the grave. It’s your funeral when you find out who your friends are, he thought. Or your survivors found out. By the look of it Ronny didn’t have many, unless those living elsewhere couldn’t be bothered to come out into the cold to see him off.

  Was Charlie Gibson there to make sure the man who should have been his son-in-law and given Veronica a name was buried with a final bitter, unspoken curse?

  Sefton’s presence was not too surprising. They’d been marrers in the old days and it was only right he should show that much respect to Ronny, even if his departed friend had been a well-known swine.

  Mr. Elliott read the funeral service, shoulders hunched, hair ruffled in the wind. Earlier at St Martha’s Church he had reminded his scanty congregation that they had all entered the world empty-handed and would leave it in the same state.

  Was that true? Ronny had left with a mystery in his pocket, and the cleverest pickpocket could not get hold of it.

  He glanced at two men who stood on the other side of the grave. Their faces were familiar. Both were involved in Ronny’s illegal activities before the war. He had attended the funeral in the hope such acquaintances would appear.

  Now the minister declared that man did not have long to live, cut down flower-like, fleeing like a shadow.

  Wallace found himself wondering at the local custom frowning on women attending funerals. Perhaps its roots were in Victorian ideas of protecting frail womanhood? Then there came the more practical notion: if everyone went to the funeral who would prepare the funeral tea awaiting mourners afterward?

  He could just do with a nice hot cup of tea. He studied the two men across from him. Both looked like retired dockworkers. They were the Anderson brothers, now well into their seventies, with records as long as the funeral service seemed to be taking.

  The oldest was Mike, whom Wallace had lately been told by Baines was involved in blackmail but unlikely to be prosecuted since the victim refused to press charges. The younger brother, Matthew, was notorious as the more violent of the pair. He had recently served time for severely coshing a Salvation Army lass, a crime that so disgusted the area the force had had several anonymous tips within days of the assault.

  The blackout indeed covered a multitude of sins. Had the brothers seen something useful to the current dual investigations?

  And now finally came the end of the service, a couple of handfuls of earth thrown into the grave, and Wallace was free to quickly step around its foot to address the men starting away.

  “One moment, you two. I want a word.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The men who had attended Ronny’s funeral returned to Mavis’ kitchen. Cleaning the dirt off their soles on the scraper in the niche by the front door, they came into the kitchen slapping their hands together, and clustered near the fire before starting on the sandwiches and eggless sponge cake laid out on mismatched plates on the table. Quantities of weak tea were drunk. Things were said that are always said on such occasions and sound shallow and meaningless except at the very moment of grief, when they strike to the heart. Before long everyone left. The men held their hats, anxious to leave, while the women hugged Mavis and offered useless but well-intentioned advice.

  Mavis took a deep breath when the final visitors were gone. “Thank heaven that’s over. I need a breath of air.” She went out into the backyard.

  Grace, who was tired herself, sat down at the table. She closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them, there stood Hans, unshaven and dressed in crumpled clothing.

  “Look what the cat dragged in,” Mavis said, coming in behind him. “Where you been, Hans? Helping Santa out, was it?”

  Hans laughed loudly and then pantomimed covering his mouth, as she continued. “You didn’t have to come to the backyard. There’s a front door. Scared me out of me wits suddenly seeing you.”

  “Sorry, Miss Mavis. I didn’t want to disturb your guests.”

  “Oh well, at least you’ve turned up again like a bad penny. Grab a chair and tell us all about it.”

  “I am happy you are not angry with me.”

  “We were worried sick about you, Hans,” put in Grace. Mavis appeared to have a remarkably cavalier attitude to her missing friend’s abrupt return. Her husband had just been buried. Anything else must feel trivial for the time being. But Grace saw how she bit her lip and gave Hans a sideways glance as he settled into a chair.

  “I hope you are not angry with me either, Miss Grace. I would never want to worry you.” He briefly put his hand over hers where it rested beside her plate.

  Her attempt at a smile failed miserably. She was duty bound to report Hans’ return, meaning he would be brought to the station to assist the police with their inquiries, as official announcements would have it.

&nb
sp; Hans guessed what she was thinking. “I shall go to the station shortly, but first I wanted to assure my two good friends here I am not floating facedown in the river or locked in a police cell somewhere.”

  “Doesn’t mean either might not still happen,” Mavis pointed out. “What did you have to go and do a bunk for? Talk about suspicious behaviour, me husband found dead and me so-called fancy man disappearing. No doubt that fond fool Baines suspects us both.”

  So Mavis did grasp the situation after all, Grace thought. “She’s right, Hans. Why did you run away?” Simply to see his reaction, she probably should have asked if it was because he had killed Ronny, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  Hans admitted it did not look good. “But you see, I am a foreigner and always suspected. In such situations regrettable mistakes are made, and I did not wish to be found hanging from a lamppost. I stayed at a hostel. It was for those who have lost their homes. They were very kind and gave me a meal.

  “It was foolish of me,” Hans went on. “Naturally, I will be suspected in the circumstances.”

  “What about suspects not called Hans?” Mavis asked Grace.

  “Could be a person from Ronny’s past, a private grudge. His death might be payback for something that happened before the war. Sorry, Mavis, but you did ask.”

  “For that I would pick Charlie Gibson,” Mavis replied. “What if he caught Ronny in the blackout and decided to administer a little private justice for being so crippled he couldn’t work at his old job? Not to mention for Nica. She’s not been long at school. Everyone knows her story and kids can be cruel.”

  Grace considered the idea. “The Gibsons obviously love her, and Charlie has a quick temper, saw that myself.”

  “Charlie may not have the strength he once had, but a cosh can do a lot of damage in the right hands,” Mavis pointed out.

  “Do you think there’s a link between the two deaths?” Hans put in. “The way the arms and legs were arranged, and both of them found at the same place?”

  “Do we have to dwell on it? There’s more darkness than light these days, what with bombs and factory smoke hanging over these streets.” Mavis added, “How about if I play something on me gramophone?”