The Quick and the Dead (A Sister Agnes Mystery)

by Alison Joseph

‘Yeah, but is anyone convinced?’

  Agnes looked at Sheila. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing more to tell. She obviously thought he was a bit of a joker, except I think she fancied him like hell. But the other thing she said, was that he was into computers and spent most of his time in Colchester on the Net.’

  Agnes took an olive stone from her mouth. ‘So your friend was cyberzapped by the Superhighwayman too?’’

  Sheila looked at Agnes, and they both giggled. Then Sheila said, serious again, ‘Who knows? More coffee?’

  Agnes absently scanned Sheila’s chaotic notice-board while Sheila refilled their mugs. ‘Are you worried about Lily?’ she asked her.

  ‘Should I be?’ Sheila said, coming back to the table. ‘You know more about religion than I do.’

  Agnes shook her head. ‘I know very little about that kind of religion. Does Lily seem distant, brainwashed? Is she turning against you?’

  ‘No. Not brainwashed. Rather cheerful, most of the time. Happier than she’s been for a while. Although she does keep going on about getting married.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘This preacher of theirs is very keen on his flock marrying when they’re barely out of school and then living happily ever after. With God on their side, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Still, there’s no one specific, as far as I know. And at least he’s not trying to make a harem of his own.’

  ‘Well, that’s something.’

  ‘She gets cross with me, but then what child that age doesn’t? Only in her case, it’s because I won’t welcome Jesus into my heart, and so I’m just going to burn in Hell, apparently.’

  ‘Poor old you,’ Agnes laughed. ‘Still, you’ll be in good company.’ She finished her coffee and stood up. ‘Mind if I check the computer before I go?’

  She went up to the computer room and scanned the e-mail messages. One caught her eye, from JEL@ Bosh.co.uk, and she called it up.

  It said, ‘Two down. How many more before justice is done?’ Then the name, ‘Emily Quislan.’

  Agnes erased the file, switched off the machine and went back downstairs.

  Chapter Thirteen

  At eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning, Agnes was sitting at a reader’s desk at the Essex Record Office. The day was warm and still, and Agnes had a headache, brought on by the drive from London and now made worse by the hopelessness of the task before her. She looked at the documents she’d called up, maps, school rolls, the OAPs essay competition again, the land tax register … Needles in bloody haystacks, she thought. Emily Quislan, where the hell are you?

  She turned once more to the competition and pulled out all the essays catalogued under Broxted. She flicked past the familiar ones, the witch buried in Harton’s field, the blackberries on the swamp field. She found one about com dollies. ‘… My grandmother used to weave a particular shape which she said originated in Broxted. She used to hang one over the lintel on the full moon, to protect her from the ghost, she said. Once I asked her which ghost, and she said the lady in the long dress who rides side-saddle across Harton’s field sprinkling sweet herbs …’

  The sheaf of papers fell from Agnes’s grasp in a rustling heap, causing the reader opposite her to look up. Her hands shaking, she gathered up the papers and read the words again, over and over. ‘There is no ghost,’ she said to herself, ‘there is no ghost.’ The man opposite her was staring again, and she realised she was muttering. She put the essays aside and turned to the next document. It was the school rolls for the parish school, founded 1837. She turned the yellowing pages, finding names and ages of children, their health, their misdeeds, the rather grim punishments meted out to them; wondering why she was bothering, knowing that Emily Quislan, a woman old enough to own land, was hardly going to be registered in the parish school. Quislan, she saw, in spidery black ink, as a page turned in her fingers. She turned it back. James Quislan, registered at the school, September 1840, aged six.

  Agnes’s headache had become a pounding in her ears. She stared at the name. She turned to September 1841. James Quislan, aged seven. September 1842, the same, aged eight. September 1843. The words swam before her eyes. James Quislan, it said, aged nine. But through this name there was a neat black line, and underneath, in the same ink, it said, James Hillier, aged nine.

  Agnes looked up at the clock. It was twelve twenty-eight. Outside the heat was beating down from a metallic grey sky. There was no sense to be made of this at all. It’s about the well, Agnes thought. Fyffes Well. Something happened in 1843 to do with the well. And, somehow, it’s happening again now.

  She read right through the school rolls to 1860. James Hillier attended for a couple more years after 1843. There was no more mention of a Quislan. She closed the book, and grabbed the essay competition again. The well, she thought, thumbing through the pages, someone here must have some memory of the well apart from it being blocked in.

  Blocked in, she thought. In 1843 James Quislan became James Hillier, and Emily Quislan blocked in the well. In revenge, Agnes thought, her mind racing ahead. In revenge for her son becoming someone else’s son. She put down the pages and gathered her thoughts. If he was her son. She might have had a younger brother. Or a cousin. Or some distant relative. And maybe it wasn’t a change of name. Maybe James Quislan did leave the school, and another James took his place.

  She picked up the land tax records from 1876, and turned to the plots listed for Emily’s land. The Homestead at this point had someone called Widow Velley living in it, as a tenant. Checker Mead listed as its owner William Harton, who also owned the neighbouring farm. And Well Mead was owned by Edmund Wytham, along with much of the surrounding estate. So at some point Harton and Wytham carved up Emily’s land between them. And the well? She turned to the Ordnance Survey map, made about forty years after Emily’s time. There was no well marked.

  All the same, Agnes thought, handing back the files, and going to find a cup of coffee, the well could have been blocked in any time from the 1840s to the 1870s. There was nothing to say it had anything to do with Emily Quislan.

  *

  The gate said, ‘Fyffes Spring Water Company. No unauthorised visitors.’ Agnes got out of her car, opened the gate, got back into her car, drove through, and got out to close the gate behind her. The perimeter fence glinted in the heat, the vertical steel lines slicing through the parched rolling curves of the stubble fields. Agnes turned to get back into her car. Ahead of her she saw the huge round tanks of Fyffes Spring shimmering in the heat, like an oil refinery in the Arabian desert. She drove up the drive, parked in the car park and looked around for an entrance. A series of sparse bungalows ended with a door marked ‘Reception’. She approached it, and knocked, then opened the door. There was no one there. She closed the door again, and hesitated. ‘Can I help you?’

  The voice was gruff and male, and belonged to a man wearing a grey suit. He was short, with gingery hair and now he squinted at her in the glaring sunlight.

  ‘Um, yes, I hope so,’ Agnes began. ‘I’m just visiting really. I’d heard a lot about your mineral water, and —’

  ‘Purest stuff for miles around. Only no one’ll believe us.’

  ‘Um, yes —’

  ‘Have you tasted it?’

  ‘Not actually, but —’

  ‘Come with me.’ He led her past the bungalows to a huge windowless wall, in which there was a door. He opened it, and she followed him in. Inside there was a rumble of machinery, a gloomy darkness and a clean, wet smell like fresh earth. Agnes followed the man into a little office, which had a high window and a cheap Formica desk almost entirely covered with papers. There was a low plastic-covered armchair, also covered with papers. Strewn around the room were several blue plastic bottles of water. The man threw himself into the chair behind the desk, gestured vaguely to the unusable armchair and grabbed a bottle of water. He unscrewed the top and handed it to Agnes.

  ‘There you are, then,’ he said.
He grabbed another bottle, opened it and began to swig from it. Agnes politely took a mouthful of hers.

  ‘Only still at the moment. Pure spring water, bottled. We’ll be going fizzy as soon as we can. Whaddya think?’ He waited, his eyes bright with expectation.

  ‘It’s — it’s very good,’ Agnes said, truthfully.

  ‘See?’ he said. ‘You try telling them, though. Those morons out there will knock back any amount of French bog water, could be recycled from the bidets of Paris for all they know, but do they care? If it has a fancy French name, then that’s fine, they’ll drink it by the bloody Froggy litre. But good stuff like this, pure, un-meddled-with crystal-clear H-Two-Bloody-Oh —’ He sighed.

  ‘I’m sure it’s just a matter of time,’ Agnes said. ‘With something as good as this, word will spread, surely.’

  ‘If we were bloody French, they’d be heaping Ecus on us just for the sake of it. Old Chirac would be lining my pockets even as we speak. But this country — this Government … I could be employing twice as many people if I had the money, I could be advertising, talking to supermarkets, getting this carbonation sorted … Richard Witham,’ he said, abruptly. ‘Managing Director, for what it’s worth.’

  Agnes took the hand he stretched out awkwardly across the desk. The name Witham resonated in her ears.

  ‘Agnes — um — Bourdillon,’ she mumbled, trying to pronounce her ex-husband’s surname in the most English way she could manage.

  ‘Come on, I’ll show you round.’

  Agnes followed him round pumping plant and bottling machinery, saying hello to the occasional member of his workforce, nodding over the plans for the carbonation plant — ‘It’s the future, in this business, if you can’t do bubbles you might as well give up’ — and being taken to the site of the spring itself which was imprisoned in clanking steel. ‘People are always disappointed. They expect some bloody waterfall, mountain stream, that sort of caper,’ he said.

  Finally she followed him out of the factory and into the fields behind, listening to his plans for expansion. As she tramped across the bare earth, the plant humming in the background, she thought, This is Emily’s land. This plot, with this spring, and probably that tree too, belonged in 1839 to Emily Quislan. She screwed up her eyes against the sun, staring towards the silhouette of a derelict building, a barn. Maybe even a farmhouse. Emily’s house.

  ‘… the bottling, you see, with fizzy, different bottles, new technology.’

  ‘Yes,’ Agnes nodded.

  ‘And,’ Richard went on, ‘if no one’s going to drink the bloody stuff I’m barking up the wrong bloody tree altogether.’

  ‘What made you choose this?’

  ‘Me?’ He looked at her, taken aback. ‘Oh, well, you know … well, actually —’ He stepped a little way in front of her, so she could no longer see his face — ‘life fell apart a bit, rotten luck. New start.’ He turned and faced her, blushing, then looked at the ground where his toe was prodding at a stone. ‘My wife — well, not her. Not her fault, really. Business collapsed, last one, jewellery, salesman. Couldn’t keep up, mortgage, you know, all that. Don’t usually talk about it …’ He raised his eyes and smiled, briefly. ‘On my own again now, a bit of family money, we’re local, go back years, started again.’ He looked out over the soft curves of the hayfields.

  ‘I’m sure it’ll work for you,’ Agnes said gently. ‘People worry about water.’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Only, this water … D’you know,’ he turned to her, sharply, ‘I’ve had a couple of the locals refuse to work here. Say it’s unlucky. When you ask them why, they mumble into their beards about something their grandmothers told them. Which is crazy if you think about it, because I had the devil’s own job convincing the borough surveyor and his cronies that there was anything here at all.’

  ‘How did you find it?’

  Richard Witham blushed again. ‘Dowsing. I was looking for um, well, treasure, actually. Bit desperate in those days. But I found water. Just as good,’ he said, brightly. ‘As long as it works.’

  ‘When you unblocked it, was there any clue as to — as to how it had been blocked in the first place?’

  Richard nodded. ‘Now thereby hangs a tale. The council people were quite taken with it. A whole crowd of them came to pick over it. It had been packed with rocks. Thorough job, they said, difficult to keep it down, water like this. It explains the flooding in the valley down there, all the pasture there used to be swamp, nearly. They reckoned it had been blocked for about a hundred years, maybe more.’

  ‘Deliberately?’

  ‘That’s what they said, yes. The records show various attempts to unblock it, various rumours about it being a spring, but I’m the first to make a go of it.’

  They began to walk slowly back to the car park. Agnes sensed in his silence the hesitation of words about to form. As they reached her car he said, ‘The problem is, it’s still there.’

  ‘What’s still there?’

  ‘The bad feeling. I’ve had threats, you know. Someone wants to poison the spring.’ He stood, uncertainly, biting his lip, regretting having made his doubts take shape by speaking them aloud.

  ‘Why should they want to do that?’

  Richard shook his head. ‘Grudge? Mad? How should I know? Wait here.’ He ambled back to his office and emerged a minute later with a bottle of water and a piece of paper. ‘Here. For you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Agnes said, taking the bottle. ‘I shall sing its praises wherever I go.’ She unfolded the piece of paper, knowing in advance what it was.

  ‘POISON BEGETS POISON. HE WHO SOWS ON STOLEN LAND WILL REAP A BITTER HARVEST.’

  ‘You can keep that,’ Richard said.

  ‘You really have no idea who might have done it? Maybe someone you’ve sacked?’

  He shook his head. ‘I haven’t upset anyone. You can ask them if you like: “what’s old Witham like?”’

  Again the name echoed around Agnes’s aching head. ‘How do you spell your name?’ she heard herself ask.

  ‘W-I-T-H-A-M,’ he replied.

  ‘Was it ever spelt differently?’

  Richard looked puzzled. ‘Well, maybe. We go back years around here.’

  ‘With a “Y”?’

  ‘Well, maybe. I’m more the Suffolk branch, but perhaps the Essex lot might have done that. Maybe.’

  ‘So this land — you owned it once.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I’ve looked in the tithe maps, and —’ Agnes realised she’d said too much. Richard Witham was now looking at her hard.

  ‘You see,’ Agnes faltered, ‘I knew about this threat. I picked up some of these leaflets —’

  ‘Where? Where did you happen to find leaflets like this?’ Richard’s voice had a new edge to it, his eyes narrowed as he waited for her answer.

  Agnes took a deep breath. She met Richard’s gaze and said, ‘I’ve been spending time at the road camp. You know, the protesters, over in the woods there. No, wait, let me finish. Whoever is endangering your spring here is also threatening them. That’s how I came to see the leaflets, that’s what made me come to visit you.’ She watched the steel of his eyes soften into grey again, and added, ‘I wouldn’t have mentioned the tithe maps if I didn’t think I could trust you.’

  ‘Trust me? It’s not me who’s —’

  ‘I mean, trust you not to hassle the road-camp people. They’re innocent. It’s just that one or two of them might have got mixed up in something — um — sinister.’

  Richard blinked in the bright sunlight and scratched his head. ‘There was that girl killed down there.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think it’s connected with — heavens! Do you think I’m in danger?’ He smoothed gingery strands with his fingers, blinking down at Agnes.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Should I call the police? I’ve been thinking of it.’

  Agnes smiled warmly. ‘It’s entirely up to you.’

  ‘I’d rather not add to the rum
ours at the moment. As long as I’m not in danger. What do you think?’

  ‘Perhaps wait and see.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  They shook hands by Agnes’s car. ‘We get all sorts dropping in. It’s not for me to ask, but if you’d mentioned the leaflets first, well, saved a lot of time, that’s all.’

  Agnes smiled. ‘Yes, I know. I’m sorry. There’s one other thing. I’m a nun. Sister Agnes, it is. Look, here’s my number in London,’ she said, scribbling it on a page from her notepad. ‘Just in case.’

  ‘Quite,’ he said, waving the scrap of paper at her as she got into her car. ‘Y’ never know.’

  *

  Emily Quislan, thought Agnes, pulling out into the middle lane, does not exist. The sun had bleached the sky to shimmering steel, and the traffic zipped and rumbled in a haze of smog. She did exist once, but she doesn’t now. Emily Quislan is a person from the mid-nineteenth century. So how the heck does she think she can poison Fyffes Well? In all the Church’s teachings on the subject of the after-life, and God knows there’s enough said about it, there is nothing to say it is possible to come back and wreak revenge.

  Revenge, thought Agnes. The bitter harvest from the stolen land. Emily Quislan lived on the land until Edmund Wytham took it over sometime in the 1840s. In 1843 something happened to James Quislan. And Emily — perhaps — Emily filled in the well. In revenge. And now the well is reopened — by a Witham. And Emily is back.

  Agnes dropped her speed and slipped into the left-hand lane again. She found herself thinking about Nicholson, the farmer, wearily tilling the fields for the last summer before the road was built. And the land that had never quite gone right for him, been uphill all the way, he’d said. She pulled out to overtake a Volkswagen Beetle, remembering how Nicholson had said the Hartons were desperate to get rid of their land. A brother and a sister. Agnes saw in her mind once again the neat script of the essays, the words passing across her eyes so that the lights of the car in front rushed towards her and she only just braked in time, the Vauxhall behind hooting in rage and swerving to overtake her with a mouthing of silent invective. Agnes slipped back into the left-hand lane, still seeing, in somebody’s best handwriting, someone long since dead, the words, ‘That was the summer we made our den in Harton’s field … where the witch was buried.’