The Quick and the Dead (A Sister Agnes Mystery)

by Alison Joseph

  Checking on her phone that evening, she was surprised to find no messages on her machine, and no strange clicks. The next morning, as she sat over a cup of tea before leaving for work, the phone rang.

  ‘Agnes —’

  ‘Athena, is that you? You sound terrible.’

  ‘Can I come over — now?’

  ‘Y — yes, sure.’

  Ten minutes later Athena walked into Agnes’s tiny flat waving something small and white. Her face was puffy and Agnes noticed that her hair, which was usually shiny black, had grey showing at the roots.

  ‘I took a cab. Oh God, it’s awful — look —’

  Agnes looked at the plastic stick that Athena was thrusting towards her.

  ‘Should I know what that is?’

  ‘Bloody pregnancy test. Bloody positive. Look, thin blue line, couldn’t be bloody clearer. I did two, they’re both like this.’ Athena flung herself down on Agnes’s bed and hugged a cushion to her. ‘What the hell am I going to do?’

  ‘Um — do you want some tea?’

  ‘And it’s horrible, abortion,’ Athena went on, while Agnes clattered in her kitchen. ‘I had one with Chris, we were too young, we thought.’ Agnes handed her a mug of tea. ‘And then when we wanted a baby, one never came. Funny how these things work out. But now? Oh God, it couldn’t be worse.’

  ‘What does Nic say?’

  ‘Nic — haven’t dared tell him. I worked it out, either he’s going to scream and run away and I’ll never see him again, or he’s going to go all gooey about being a trendy dad like you see in all the ads these days. I can’t face either prospect, frankly.’ She slurped on her tea. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I think it broke up me and Chris. I thought afterwards, if we’d just ended up parents, we weren’t brilliant together, but we’d have been OK. Not that I regret it now, but I thought it at the time.’

  Agnes sipped her tea.

  ‘I suppose you’ve never been through all this. Although, with Hugo —’

  Agnes shook her head. ‘I ended up thinking I was infertile when I was with him. Maybe because he kept telling me I must be. Another reason to hate me, my failure to produce an heir.’

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘Among other things. But a baby never happened. Thank God.’

  ‘Agnes — if it had … ?’

  Agnes shivered. ‘I’d have kept it. I had no choice.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Agnes looked at her friend. ‘I — it’s just — with my faith, I have to.’

  ‘Have to what?’

  ‘I believe all life is sacred.’

  ‘Well, you’re a great help, aren’t you?’

  ‘It doesn’t mean I’d judge you —’

  Athena looked up, then shook her head.

  Agnes went on, ‘It’s not that I’d think the worst of you, really, it’s just that my tradition does hold the view that the un, unborn, I mean — if one was to …’

  ‘Kill it, you mean.’ Athena’s voice was flat. She stared into her mug, swilling the liquid around inside it.

  ‘No, not kill it, it’s just that we do believe that life is, well, life really —’

  ‘Oh God.’ Athena’s lips were pinched and dark against her pale skin. ‘You really are the worst bloody person I could have confided in. I might as well have tootled off to Rome to have a chat with Il Papa himself.’

  ‘Athena, please —’

  ‘And there’s you and his Holiness, conveniently celibate, or infertile — it’s easy for you, condemning other people for things you’re never going to have to think about, like murdering babies.’

  ‘Athena, I never said murder, you’re my friend for God’s sake!’

  They looked at each other. Athena took a swig of tea, then said, quietly, ‘It’s got to go. I can’t possibly raise a child at my age, and anyway, there’ll probably be something wrong with it.’ She looked at Agnes. ‘I don’t care what you think. You can tell me it’s murder all you like but it won’t change anything.’

  ‘Athena —’

  ‘OK then, if you’re my friend, tell me it’s OK. Tell me that when I go down that clinic and emerge no longer pregnant, thank God, that that’s OK by you. Go on, then.’

  Agnes looked at the floor, struggling to find the right words. Athena waited, then got up and threw her pregnancy test into the wastepaper basket. ‘It’s not OK at all, is it?’ she said quietly. ‘Not as far as you’re concerned. I might have bloody known.’ Agnes, still staring at the floor, heard the door slam as Athena left.

  The day at the hostel seemed muffled. Agnes had a sense of being surrounded by a grey fog, distanced from real life. As soon as she could, she finished her shift and took a bus across the river to Hackney, to the community house. To her relief, Madeleine was in that evening.

  ‘Come on, you can help me with supper,’ she said, seeing Agnes’s drawn face.

  ‘What should I have said?’ Agnes asked her, explaining the conversation with Athena as they chopped vegetables and peeled potatoes.

  Madeleine tipped a large pile of courgette slices into a pan. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘You see, I do believe that all life is sacred. I can’t help but think that.’

  ‘Well, you were honest, then.’

  ‘Yes, but not helpful. And all day I’ve been thinking, say I got pregnant with Hugo, like Athena said — what would I have done? And would it have been the right thing, to let a child be born into that hell, instead of — of doing what Athena’s thinking of doing …’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Agnes looked at Madeleine and sighed. ‘I know what I think. I think it’s wrong. To kill a baby.’

  ‘Yes, but now you’re talking generally. I mean, surely one has to take each individual human dilemma on its own terms, like in cases of rape or something. Or medical reasons.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘So, what are Athena’s reasons?’

  ‘Because she’s never really thought of herself as a mother, apart from a brief flirtation with the idea when she was married, and she doesn’t intend to start now.’

  ‘Do you think she’d suffer from having an abortion?’

  Agnes imagined Athena dressed in a scruffy sweatshirt, putting all her dry-clean-only clothes to the back of the wardrobe. She thought about Athena’s flat, imagining the spotless radiators bedecked with tiny clothes, the chrome chairs sticky with forgotten porridge, the Persian rugs matted with biscuit. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  Then she thought of Athena. All the life about her, her capacity to give ten times more love than she received, her limitless passion, more often than not squandered on unreliable men. A baby, she thought. A baby for Athena.

  ‘All I know is,’ she said, ‘we can’t know what God intends for us, can we?’

  ‘So you think she shouldn’t kill it.’

  Her voice was barely a whisper. ‘Madeleine, I know she shouldn’t kill it.’

  *

  Agnes had a restless night, and on Friday morning was woken at five by a noisy lorry delivering in the street outside. She couldn’t get back to sleep. She lay awake thinking about Athena. Maybe God will sort it out, she thought. Maybe she is too old and this new life that’s only just touched down will quietly float away again. But then that’s hardly a solution, she thought. She mused on Sam, and Mike, and what happened to your life when your parents didn’t want you. And me, she thought, for all the apparent privilege of my childhood, was I wanted any more than Sam?

  It was five thirty, and light. She got up and made tea, and sat by the window in her pyjamas, staring out into the distinctive grey brightness of the new day. She looked at the phone box, standing alone, illuminated. Two tall young men with mobile phones strode down the deserted street, silent in huge trainers, and disappeared into the flats across the road. Agnes dressed, got into her car, and drove to the Ark.

  At the camp, no one was about. Zak’s dog Dog growled sleepily as he heard her approach. Zak poked h
is head out of his bender, saw it was Agnes and went straight back to sleep. Agnes sat by the embers of the fire, and after a moment Dog came and joined her. She wondered why she’d come out so early, why she felt such an urgency to be here.

  She needed to clear her mind. If the Ark people were caught up in something to do with Emily Quislan’s land, how was it that only Col and Sam seemed frightened by the return, in whatever form, of Emily Quislan? She got up and wandered towards the woods, and Dog followed, sniffing at tree-stumps. She walked for a while, hearing in the rustling of the leaves the murmured voices from the past. The scarecrow that might come to life, the blackberry bushes in the swampy fields, the witch’s curse on Harton’s field. Harton’s field. She halted, and Dog stood, alert, watching her. What had Nicholson said? Something had gone wrong in the past, and the land was never quite right. Emily Quislan’s land.

  Agnes set off again. How could it be, she asked herself, that someone who’d owned land in the mid-nineteenth century could be exerting an influence now? It was against all reason. She realised that she was now at the edge of the woods, and facing towards open fields. From what she remembered of the tithe maps, Fyffes Well must be just over the next hill. Her eye was caught by movement in the fields beyond, and she saw two figures pass by the edge of the field and then stop, deep in conversation. Dog watched them too, and Agnes realised the animal’s concern for her was unusual, to allow him to be taken this far from his master’s side. She looked again at the distant figures. One of them was Col, she was sure, judging from his posture, which was hunched and nervous. The other person was of similar height, with chin-length blonde hair, standing upright, legs apart, head slightly back. Agnes looked at Dog, who was staring at them intently. ‘What shall we do?’ she whispered to him, and he glanced at her, then back at the scene. ‘What do you think?’ she went on. ‘Is that Emily Quislan? And if Emily Quislan rides again, where’s her horse?’

  As they watched, the pair separated, the stranger turning to run back across the fields towards Fyffes Well, and Col walking, slowly, to the edge of the woods, his hands in his pockets, every so often glancing behind him.

  Dog looked up at Agnes expectantly. She patted him on the head. ‘I don’t know why you’re looking at me as if I know what’s going on,’ she said to him. ‘I thought you were in charge.’ They walked back slowly together through the woods, Dog stopping from time to time to sniff at interesting bits of twig. Agnes heard the rustle of leaves behind her, the soft tread of feet, then a voice.

  ‘Up so early, Little Sister?’

  Agnes was cross with herself for passing so close to Bill’s bender. She wasn’t in the mood.

  ‘I could ask the same of you,’ she said.

  ‘Me, I keep nature’s hours,’ Bill said. ‘None of that clustering round campfires into the night. I’m asleep at dusk and up at dawn.’ Somehow, Agnes doubted the truth of this. There was so much she wanted to ask him; about ghostly horsewomen, about Fyffes Well — but then she realised that even if she did, there was no guarantee he’d tell her what he knew. She stood there, uncertainly.

  ‘Any sightings of the cyberbandit?’ he laughed.

  Agnes sighed. ‘Do you know something?’ she said, sweetly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re a bit of a prat, really, aren’t you?’ She smiled up at him, then went on her way, back to the camp, Dog at her heels.

  *

  Zak was up and blowing half-heartedly at the smouldering fire. ‘So it was you kidnapped my dog,’ he said. ‘Not that I missed you,’ he added, as Dog ran to his arms and licked his face. ‘Something up? He don’t usually go off like that.’ Agnes sat by the fire. ‘I don’t know. We saw Col talking to someone. Dog seemed to take it seriously.’

  Zak blew at a single feeble flame and it went out again. ‘Arse.’ He stood up. ‘That’s it, then. I’m going to hitch into town and blag a cup of tea there, it’s quicker ’n waiting for this fuckin’ fire. Look after ’im, will you?’

  Agnes got to work on the fire, and had the kettle boiling just as Rona abseiled down from her tree-house. ‘Hi Agnes, how’s it going?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You’ve missed Sam, I’m afraid. She was away last night.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘With her dad, I suppose. It’s all worked out really well.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Rona eyed Agnes. ‘You’re not convinced?’

  ‘No, I mean, no, it’s fine, I’m really pleased she’s happy.’

  ‘No, I don’t trust him either. Fathers don’t just pitch up again after sixteen years.’

  Agnes looked at Rona. ‘I’ve done all I can, I’m afraid.’ Rona shrugged. ‘People have to make their own mistakes, don’t they? Anyway, she’s coming back here today, she hasn’t shipped out there altogether. You’ll see her if you hang about.’

  ‘Rona?’ Agnes fished in her pocket for the leaflet that Charlie had given to her and showed it to Rona. ‘Do you know anything about these?’

  Rona took it and looked at it. ‘Never seen it before. What is it? Isn’t Fyffes Well that new spring water company?’

  ‘Yes. It’s just, I wondered if anyone here was involved in a campaign against it?’

  Rona screwed up her nose. ‘Why would we do that? I don’t know of anything going wrong up there.’ She shrugged, and went to the kitchen bender to get tea bags. Agnes saw Col appear at the edge of the camp, then walk over to a tree and begin to climb up it. She followed him.

  ‘Col —’ she called out from the base of the tree.

  He continued to climb. ‘Col,’ she said again, putting one foot on a jutting edge, watching him recede ahead of her. She took hold of the abseil rope with both hands and pulled herself up, her legs swinging wildly until she found a niche between two branches for one foot. One huge step up, and she was on a sort of platform as the trunk divided in two. She looked up and saw Col was only a few feet away from her.

  ‘Col,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It seems to me,’ she said, trying to catch her breath, ‘that there’s quite a lot going on with you.’

  ‘Nah, not really,’ he said. She heard the wheezing at the edge of his voice, as he turned to climb again.

  ‘Col, wait.’

  He watched her as she struggled to find a way up to his branch, grasping the rope again, realising, as she caught sight of the ground, that it was a long way to fall. She wedged one foot hard against the branch and took all her weight on her hands until she could get one knee against the branch and pull herself up.

  Col was sitting on the branch as if born to it. He grinned at her. ‘You must think I’ve got loads to tell you, to go to all this trouble.’

  ‘Only if you want to tell me.’

  ‘And how are you going to get down without harness, eh?’

  Col laughed and Agnes realised he was wearing abseiling gear slung between his legs. ‘Anyway, ain’t got nothing to say.’

  Agnes tried again. ‘What makes you think,’ she said, calmer now that she’d caught her breath, ‘that there’s anything I need to know?’

  He stared at her, and his eyes were suddenly huge and childlike again. He swung his legs to and fro, watching his feet. ‘Dunno. Just thought, wiv Becky an’ all —’ Agnes waited. ‘Just thought, wiv you following me to the woods an’ all, you’d worked something out.’

  So he’d seen her earlier. ‘Dog was concerned about you,’ Agnes said. Col stared at his feet. ‘Who were you talking to?’ Agnes tried again. He didn’t even look at her.

  ‘Look,’ Agnes said, taking the crumpled leaflet from her pocket again and showing it to him. He snatched it from her and stuffed it in his pocket.

  ‘Where d’ you get that?’

  ‘Never you mind.’

  ‘You’ll get me killed, you will.’

  ‘Col,’ Agnes said, gently. ‘Whatever the danger you think you face, it can’t be as bad as your fears.’

  ‘Can’t it?’ His voice was hoarse.


  ‘Col, hadn’t you better get away from here?’

  ‘Like Sam?’ he said. ‘We don’t all have daddies who appear from nowhere.’

  ‘I can help,’ she said.

  ‘What can you do?’ He turned dark eyes to her. ‘Where would I go? On the streets? Into a fuckin’ hostel — and then what?’

  Agnes was silent at the truth of what he said. She could offer him three nights of safety, and then — nothing. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘Maybe after the eviction,’ Col was saying, ‘I’ll move on with this lot.’ He stood up, balanced perfectly on the branch, and proceeded to unstrap the harness. ‘Look, put this on, get down yourself, and then just swing it back up on the rope, OK?’ She clung to the tree-trunk, feeling suddenly foolishly shaky, as he passed the straps between her legs and fastened the harness around her waist. ‘There. Sorted. All you have to do, right, is loop the rope around here, like this, and put this hand here, right, then you sit back on the other side, like this, and hold it tight. This hand controls how fast you go, if you’re scared just lock it off like this. The main thing to remember is to keep your legs horizontal, so you can control how far you are from the tree. Right, ready?’

  Agnes felt her legs shake as she swung out from the tree, with only a piece of rope between herself and certain mutilation. ‘The leap into faith,’ she muttered, thinking that as a metaphor it was rather apt. She took her feet off the branch and hung there, foolishly. A small crowd had gathered at the foot of the tree.

  ‘Let some rope out,’ Col said, echoed by the people on the ground. She let go and slid fast about two feet down, then tightened the rope in terror and stopped again. She suddenly realised the question she had to ask Col.

  ‘Col —’ she called up to him, seeing him standing a couple of feet above her where she’d left him. ‘Col — who is Emily Quislan?’

  Col seemed to freeze. He swayed on the branch for a second, and Agnes was worried he’d fall. Suddenly he whipped a penknife out of his pocket, grabbed the rope from which she swung and held the knife to it.

  ‘See this,’ he hissed. ‘Swear to me now — now, right — that you never say that name again. Or you hit the ground hard.’