The Quick and the Dead (A Sister Agnes Mystery)

by Alison Joseph

  ‘Today. I took the day off, made them lunch. What do they eat, these young people? I swear she’d never seen fresh salmon in her life.’

  ‘Mike, you know this is against all the rules.’

  ‘Oh rules, rules — who are they for, eh? Sam’s sixteen, she can do what she likes.’

  ‘But the procedure —’

  ‘The way I see it, the procedure is to protect vulnerable kids from trouble, right? Not to prevent a kid who’s had a rough ride finding some kind of stability with her real dad. Isn’t that so, Agnes?’ Agnes swallowed hard. ‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘it’s just a formality in our case. It’s not as if anyone has grounds to oppose our plan, is it?’

  Agnes bit her lip. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No grounds at all.’

  ‘Thanks for doing your bit,’ he said. ‘Must go now, see you around. Keep in touch with us, won’t you. Sam’s really fond of you.’

  He hung up. Agnes replaced the receiver slowly. She could hear, from her kitchen, the sound of a saucepan boiling over. She went to the kitchen and snatched the lid off the frothing pan, then yelled in pain as it clattered to the floor. She swore loudly, switched off the heat, and flopped on to a chair.

  ‘Bloody Mike bloody smoothy Reynolds,’ she said, out loud.

  She noticed a pack of peanuts in the comer of a kitchen cupboard. And if Sam gets fed up with him, or he with her, she thought, wandering to the cupboard, tearing the comer off the packet, what then? She put a large handful of nuts in her mouth. How dare he think that he knows best? A skilled professional team has been dealing with Sam for several months, and he just waltzes in and makes off with her … She stood by the window, munching, as the phone rang. She picked it up.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, through a mouthful of peanuts. Immediately, it went dead. She glanced out of the window. The phone box was empty. Right, she thought, and dialled 1471.

  ‘Sorry, no telephone number has been stored,’ the well-bred electronic voice told her. Agnes slammed the phone down.

  She found she’d finished the pack of nuts. She went to her kitchen and poured herself a gin and tonic. She took a large gulp, then checked a number and dialled it. Sheila answered.

  ‘It’s Agnes, I wonder if you could help me?’

  ‘Sure, yes, how are you?’

  ‘OK. Listen, Charlie, your brother — do you think he’d talk to me about Becky if I asked nicely?’

  ‘Mmmm — dunno. We have an understanding — we get on really well as long as we don’t try to do each other’s work —’

  ‘I can see that. It’s just that I’m getting menacing phone calls —’

  ‘You too?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Everyone here.’

  ‘How’s the computer?’

  ‘Trouble-free again. No problems at all.’

  ‘And Charlie?’

  Sheila paused for a moment. ‘Oh, go on, give it a go. He’s OK. Just don’t get heavy or he’ll clam up. Let me warn him, and I’ll phone you back with his number, OK?’

  Agnes sat and waited for Sheila to phone back. She took another large gulp of gin. So this was life, once you got outside the confines of normality. Being photographed by men in bushes, being telephoned by silent callers … The phone rang again, and Agnes jumped.

  ‘Sheila, again. Charlie says OK. I reminded him who you were, told him you knew Becky and that you’re a nun, it seemed to help.’

  Agnes took down the number, thanked Sheila and hung up. She still felt jumpy. It was not yet nine. She finished her gin and dialled Athena’s number.

  ‘Hello?’ Athena answered.

  ‘It’s Agnes.’

  ‘Oh, hi.’

  ‘You’re not alone?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You sound kind of odd.’

  ‘Me, no I’m fine. Have you eaten?’

  ‘A large gin and a packet of peanuts. Various things have made me lose my appetite this evening.’

  ‘You too?’

  ‘Athena, what is it?’

  ‘Could I just pop over for a while?’

  ‘I was hoping you’d say that.’

  Athena was wearing a crumpled floral dress and no makeup and her black hair was uncombed. She flopped on to Agnes’s sofa-bed.

  ‘Did you say gin?’ she said.

  Agnes poured two large glasses, and splashed chunks of ice into them. She handed one to Athena.

  ‘You look terrible.’

  ‘Darling, I feel terrible. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

  ‘Is it Nic?’

  ‘No, he’s great. No, this is physical. I can’t eat, I’m totally exhausted and I feel sick.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since the weekend, really. It’s got worse today.’

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’

  ‘No. Don’t want to.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  Athena took a large gulp of gin, looked at the glass and laughed, emptily. ‘Mother’s ruin,’ she said.

  Agnes waited. Then Athena said, suddenly, ‘Agnes, women of my age don’t get pregnant, do they?’ Agnes stared at Athena, then took a long swig of gin. ‘I mean, honestly poppet,’ Athena went on, ‘I’m practically menopausal, I must be, my mother was barely forty-five when she stopped — and my cycle’s all over the place and anyway we’ve been sensible, only condoms but they’re supposed to work, aren’t they — are you listening?’

  Agnes got up and twisted another cube of ice into her glass. ‘Yes, of course I’m listening. I just can’t imagine — mean, what you’ve described — you’re ill, not — not … ’

  ‘The word’s “pregnant”.’

  ‘Athena — you can’t be. You just can’t.’

  Athena poured herself another gin. ‘Sweetie, I just hope you’re right.’

  Chapter Ten

  Agnes squinted at the bottle of gin. It was completely empty. The morning was humid and dull, she already had a headache and it wasn’t yet eight o’clock. She put the bottle with the rubbish, then noticed a large pan full of congealed tagliatelle still on her cooker. She opened the bin and tipped the whole lot into it. She put on the kettle, and then went and sat at her desk, leaning on one hand, while she waited for it to boil. Her eye fell on the note she’d made of Charlie’s phone number. She sighed, picked up the phone and dialled it.

  ‘Our Sheila said you might call,’ Charlie said, when she’d explained who she was. ‘You want to grill me about the Stanton case?’

  ‘Well, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, I shouldn’t rightly be talking to you, but if it’s off the record, like —’

  ‘It’s just to set my mind at rest, really.’

  ‘Can you drive over this way, then — maybe later this evening? Nine-ish?’

  ‘That would be great. I’m in Chelmsford today anyway, at the library. Thanks.’

  *

  Once again Agnes found herself in the bright reading room of the Essex Record Office.

  ‘I’d like to see everything you have about the village of Broxted,’ she said at the Inquiries Desk.

  ‘Everything?’ The young woman pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘We’ve got quarter sessions and tithe rolls, we’ve got deeds and parish records, we’ve got the correspondence of Hall Manor, we’ve got miscellaneous documents …’

  ‘Fine,’ Agnes said. ‘All that. Please,’ she remembered to add.

  ‘From the Deeds of Jessops Farm in the Parish of Broxted Juxta Ongar … The Mark of James Wytham, the ninth day of November, in the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and six …’ Agnes raised her eyes from the pile of papers in front of her. The clock said quarter to two. She had read through all the quarter sessions from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, she had Heard the plea of Anne Dockrell against William Hume, her employer, who had used her most cruelly, she had handled certificates signed by Oliver Cromwell for the safe passage and future financial security of his wounded
soldiers, she had read the deeds of Hall Manor in which there was a dispute over a well on the land. Now, as she wearily thumbed through the tithe rolls it occurred to her that the Manor’s well was positioned on the same plot as Emily Quislan’s farm. She turned to the description of Emily’s land. The Well Mead, of course. And there, clearly marked, was the well itself. But then, she thought, remembering the camp, the well could only be a few hundred yards away from the proposed road link. In which case, why didn’t the camp use it, instead of walking to the rather filthy stream each time they needed water?

  She turned to the next batch of documents, and found it was a local essay competition from the 1960s. ‘My Essex Memories’ was the title, and all the entrants had to be over the age of sixty. Agnes began to browse through them.

  ‘When I was six I was taken to Scotland to visit my grandma for the first time. I remember she stood by the table in a black dress with a white lace collar, and she had a little black-and-white dog by her side …

  ‘There was a scarecrow we used to pass on the way to school. Once my sister told me he’d come to life if the wind ever changed from north to south, and to this day I check the old weather vane just in case …

  ‘In 1926 my Uncle Jim had an accident with a piece of farm machinery, and his hand was completely severed from the wrist … all us children simply stared and stared …

  ‘I remember the local Squire had a plan to reclaim the swamp land after Fyffes Well was filled in, and we were dead against it because we used to go blackberrying down those fields …

  ‘That was the summer we built our den out by Harton’s field. We had to dare each other to go out there because of the witch who was buried there, and everyone said she’d come back and curse you if you walked on her grave …’ Agnes yawned, closed all the files carefully, returned them to the desk and left.

  *

  Charlie’s house was cool after the humidity of the day. She found him sitting with Sheila on the patio, both with a glass of cold beer. A woman appeared and struggled to light a couple of large candles which were stuck in the edges of the flower-beds.

  ‘Leave ’em, Sue,’ Charlie said. ‘They’re more trouble than they’re worth.’ One candle flared briefly, guttered and went out. ‘And they just attract moths,’ he added. Sue came past him, made a face at him and went back into the kitchen.

  ‘I thought I’d keep you company,’ Sheila said. Agnes sat down next to her, and Sue reappeared with two more glasses of beer.

  ‘Cheers,’ Charlie said, raising his glass. Sue got up and tried a candle again. ‘So, you want to discuss Becky Stanton?’ Charlie said. ‘You knew her, you told me, before the road protest?’

  Agnes nodded. ‘Briefly in the hostel I work in, and then at the road camp. Although she was dead really, as soon as I —’

  ‘If you ask me,’ Charlie said suddenly, ‘and Sheila knows I think this, it’s just some psycho. Not that I’m in the incident room much these days, but I’m around the lads at work, you know. They reckon it’s a sticker.’

  ‘A sticker?’

  Charlie took a gulp of beer. ‘How can they charge anyone? No motive, no family problems, no boyfriends — no sexual assault either.’

  ‘So you think if you sleep out in a field …’ Agnes said. Sue’s candle was at last flaring steadily, throwing guttering shadows across the grass. She checked it was firmly bedded in, then came to sit down with them.

  ‘Put it this way,’ Charlie said, ‘I wouldn’t let my daughter out across that way at night.’

  ‘Charlie’s not known for his tolerance of an alternative lifestyle,’ Sheila said gently.

  ‘Nothing to do with it, Sheila. Alternative or whatever, that’s not the point. All I’m saying is, too many nutters about these days. There was a murder last year, out over towards Epping, on the common there. Couldn’t pin it on anyone. Might be the same bloke for all we know. Not to say we won’t catch him in the end, mind. But we need witnesses. And who’s going to have been out and about in them woods in the middle of the night, eh?’

  ‘All sorts of people,’ Sheila said, ‘if all these reports of detectives and security people are to be believed.’

  Charlie drained his glass. He glanced at his wife and she went into the kitchen. ‘Wouldn’t know about that,’ he said. Sue appeared with some more bottles of beer, and Charlie took one and opened it.

  ‘Wouldn’t you, Charlie?’ Sheila said.

  He shook his head. ‘You know my views, Sheila. The Government owns that land, in law, right? It’s a democratic process, the majority of those local people want that road. Simple.’

  ‘It’s not democratic when the Government is totally skewed in favour of —’ Sheila began.

  ‘And,’ Charlie interrupted, ‘it’s not as if those friends of yours at the camp are angels, is it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Agnes said.

  ‘I mean, it would be OK if these environmentalists stuck to the normal channels for stating their point of view. But when they’re all tied up with anarchists and terrorists and —’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ Sheila said.

  Sue got up and went into the house.

  ‘You just won’t face facts, Sheila. You’ve never grown out of Sussex bloody University —’

  ‘Here we go again.’

  ‘Show her, Sue,’ Charlie said, and Sue, coming back into the garden gave Sheila a piece of paper.

  ‘You’ll have seen these before, won’t you?’ Charlie said. Sheila read it, shook her head and handed the paper to Agnes. Printed on it in large uneven capitals were the words ‘WITHAM’S WATER IS POISON. FYFFES WELL IS RUN BY FILTH AND THEIR FILTH IS POLLUTING THE WATER. DON’T DRINK IT.’

  Sheila looked at Agnes and then at Charlie. ‘I’ve never seen one of these before.’

  Agnes took the piece of paper and stared at it.

  ‘Not one of your friends, then?’ Charlie said to his sister. ‘Mind you, there’s so many of these groups now. But I bet someone you know’ll know this lot.’

  ‘Are the police taking it seriously?’ Agnes asked.

  ‘We’re waiting. Might be just a nutter, or a hoax. Might develop into something else.’

  ‘Fyffes Well,’ Agnes said. ‘Can I keep this?’ She pocketed the flyer. ‘I thought the well was filled in?’ she said, as phrases from her day’s research dropped into her mind.

  ‘It was unblocked just recently; a local businessman has turned it into a spring water company,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Good luck to him,’ Charlie said. ‘If your friends don’t get to him first.’

  Sheila bit her lip. ‘It’s not far from the Ark,’ she said to Agnes. ‘Just a bit further up the hill.’ Sheila drained her glass.

  ‘Well, we’ll keep an eye out for you, won’t we,’ Agnes said brightly. ‘And perhaps you could check out all the threatening behaviour that we’ve experienced recently.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Charlie said.

  ‘I’ve had several silent phone calls at home. And Sheila’s had the computer tampered with.’

  Charlie poured himself some more beer. ‘As I said, I wouldn’t know about all that. I can help you put your mind at rest about the Stanton girl, but beyond that …’ He shook his head. ‘Some decisions are made way above the heads of the likes of me.’ He smiled at Sheila.

  She smiled back, then turned to Agnes. ‘We should be going,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll drop you back.’ Agnes stood up. ‘Thanks for agreeing to see me,’ she said to Charlie. ‘And if we find any more threatening things about poisoned water, we’ll let you know.’

  Charlie smiled. ‘I doubt if she will,’ he said, getting up to see them out. ‘Too much of a hippy, and at her age too.’ He laughed, and ruffled Sheila’s hair, and Agnes saw a look of real affection pass between them.

  She dropped Sheila off at her house.

  ‘I’m sorry about my brother,’ Sheila smiled as she got out of the car.

  ‘He’s all right,’ Agnes said.

&n
bsp; ‘Yes,’ Sheila said. ‘Yes, he is actually. Despite everything.’

  *

  As Agnes joined the M25 she found herself wondering what it would be like to have a brother. Or a sister, for that matter. She blinked against the pulsing headlights of the other cars and thought about the convent, with its echoes of family life, its imitation mothers and sisters. Better that, she thought, for me, anyway, better a family I choose than one which just happens along, like husbands or children. She thought suddenly of Athena, Athena feeling sick and tired and talking about pregnancy. It wasn’t a fantasy she’d ever had, Agnes thought, believing oneself to be pregnant when one wasn’t. With Hugo she was terrified that she might bring a child into such a marriage, and since Hugo … well, it was out of the question. As it was, of course, for Athena too.

  Early the next morning she went to Mass at St Simeon’s Church. Afterwards, at the church door, Julius shook hands with the few faithful communicants. Agnes was the last and he shook her hand too, and then grinned at her. ‘How are you then?’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’m at the hostel for the next two days.’

  ‘Nothing more exciting than that?’

  ‘No. And anyway, I need to reflect a bit.’

  ‘How’s the matriarchal goddess religion?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘I thought that’s where you might be heading, after seeing through God’s illusory maleness.’

  ‘Ah, so it’s a put-up job, this male God, a smokescreen maintained by a male priesthood?’

  ‘What else did you think it might be?’ Julius smiled.

  ‘Do you know, I did think — and in fact, still do — that God might be a truth so large as to be beyond gender.’

  ‘Now there’s a thought,’ Julius laughed. ‘You get off to that hostel now and fry some eggs instead of worrying your pretty little head with theological niceties,’ he added, then ducked as she aimed a blow to his right ear, to the surprise of the last departing parishioners.

  The day passed peaceably enough, giving Agnes time to reflect on the connection, if there was one, between Fyffes Well and the Ark. The point is, Agnes thought, as the day drew on, they’re both on Emily Quislan’s land. And Emily Quislan, whoever she is, is talking to Col — and scaring him half to death. And that horse and rider in the woods were as real as the prints they left behind.