by Iona Whishaw
At that moment the phone rang, and both stopped to listen. It stopped at two and a half rings. “It’s mine,” Lane said, and went into the hallway. Darling tried not to watch her leave the room, but he was intrigued by her old phone. He wondered how many other rural communities still got along with these trumpet affairs. The hall was dark compared to the brightness of the kitchen and, as he watched, she seemed to be consumed by the darkness. He heard her pick up the earpiece and talk loudly into it.
“Hello, KC 431. Oh, yes, hello.” There was something hesitant in her manner. “I’m busy just now,” she continued to whoever it was. In the dimness, he could see her glance back at the kitchen toward him. There was something in her voice that alerted him, and he did not look away. “Um, yes. It’s the police, actually.” Her tone suggested she said this very reluctantly. There was another long pause as she listened. “No, I’m not sure. Listen, another time, all right? No, I’m fine, thank you. Yes, bye now!” She reached up to replace the earpiece. He heard her bang it a little. “Bloody thing,” she muttered in an unladylike manner, and she came back into the kitchen, looking as if she was trying to recompose herself.
“Are you all right?” Darling asked, watching her face. “You might want to get a new telephone. It’s quite quaint, that shouting into a horn. My mother used to do that.”
“Yes, quite all right, thank you,” she said thoughtfully. “That was, in fact, one of the locals, Sandy. He said he was going along to the Hughes’ and saw the car pull up, yours I mean, and he, like you, wondered if everything was all right.”
Darling consulted his memory banks. “Isn’t he the son of the old gentleman at the top of the hill? Mather?”
“Yes, that’s right. I can’t make out why he’d be going up to the Hughes’. To buy eggs? That must be it. And is he phoning from home now? He hasn’t had time to go up there and come back. You’ve only been here a short time.”
“He could be driving,” Darling suggested. “Why does it matter?” But even as he asked, he realized that he had not interviewed Sandy properly, and Lane’s concerns seemed to suddenly make him feel he’d been neglectful.
“No. I’d have heard the car. You hear anything moving here because there is so rarely any traffic. And you’re right,” her face cleared, “it doesn’t matter. I’m a little nervy, I think, thinking that someone around here has killed someone. I sometimes think they are just lying in wait, waiting to be discovered, as if it is some sort of cat and mouse game. I hopefully imagine myself to be the cat, but I might well be the mouse.” She thought of her bold map on the floor upstairs, with its lines and notations and thought, Who am I kidding? I’m no detective. I’m just doing it to keep from being nervous.
“Is there something about this Sandy that makes you particularly nervous?” asked Darling.
“He’s angry, that’s all. He feels he’s had a rough deal from his father. Sometimes . . . it’s nothing. Anyway, it’s all fantasy, isn’t it?” She brightened. “That man might well have been killed by someone outside. He could have been followed here by some shadowy arm of British Intelligence and done in for something he knows. Or whoever did it could have done it in a passion over an argument, and have no desire to kill anyone else.” She did not tell him about the debacle of the fishing trip. Indeed, she was working hard to put it out of her mind, and Sandy’s solicitous phone call had not helped. Was he watching her?
“What were you going to say? Any small thing might be relevant.”
“This won’t be. It’s just . . . I sometimes think he’s following or watching me. Nonsense, of course. As I said, I’m just a little nervy, I think.”
Darling made a mental note—he had stopped making actual notes when he stopped being a constable—to interview this Sandy. It was disquieting to think of him following Miss Winslow around. “You said you’d been working out something about the locals. Can you tell me about that?”
“It’s nonsense too, really. I just realized I’m doing it to keep me from being anxious. I think it’s left over from the war. I’m like a commander just trying to work out where an attack might come from by drawing it all out. You can certainly come and see it. I’ve laid it out on the attic floor because the only long wall I have is in the bedroom and I don’t feel like sleeping in a war room.” She stood up and led Darling into the hall and up the attic stairs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE THING THAT HAPPENED NEXT began quietly enough. In fact, it began just as Lane Winslow and Inspector Darling were on their way up to her attic to look at her map. Mather went to the post office. He had sent Sandy to pick up the mail, but Sandy came back empty-handed because he said he’d found some of the fence on the south side of their property knocked down and had come back to get a hammer. Reginald mentally cursed his son and his wife, who was still not well after the cougar incident and was sitting on the couch staring morosely at nothing. Not well. She was as mad as a hatter. She’d kill someone one day, crashing around in people’s driveways after cougars with a loaded rifle.
He pulled his cap off the stand by the door, seized his cane from its peg, and slammed out the door. Sandy, he saw, had been on the telephone. Who was he calling? He was behaving more and more strangely. Alice was mad, there was no point in denying it, and Harris had apparently promised him the land but had made no move to seal the deal. Feeling aggrieved was nothing new to Reginald Mather, but his grievances seemed to be pressing closer, to be more immediate. He no longer had the luxury of being bitter about the thwarting of his ambition to build a lumber empire, which was always somewhere in the future. Now his troubles were moving in.
As he walked briskly down the hill, swinging his cane, he fixed on his wife and the gun incident. It was not the first time she had gone off in this manner and he’d told her before that she’d kill someone someday. But now someone had been killed. Had she shot the man found in the creek? He wished he knew more about how the man was supposed to have died. Drowned, he supposed. That relieved him a little. She would shoot someone in her wild, mad, get-anything-that-moved way, but she wasn’t likely to drag a man into a creek. Why? How? And who was the man? He wished now he’d not been so aloof when it first happened. He could have asked the damned police more instead of being pushed around by them.
On a whim, he went to the car and looked through the window onto the back and then the front seat. Hadn’t the police found the gun in the trunk where Sandy had put it after Alice’s shooting spree? He pulled open the trunk and saw the rifle, broken open and flung into the shadows at the back. He took it out and checked it and then looked around, wondering where he could stow it. He finally decided on the barn. He’d not had horses since Sandy was a boy and Alice never went near the place. He rested it on the shelf created by the crossbeam above the inside of the door, stretching to push it into place. It was dark there. That should put it right out of her reach.
Limping more than usual, he walked slowly down the road. It was hot now and he stopped when he came abreast of the Winslow gate to wipe his forehead with a handkerchief. The maroon car was pulled up to the gate, and he realized the police were there. He had a small buoyant feeling of relief. If the police were back at the Winslow woman’s place, it must mean they were following her as a lead. This relief was momentary, however, because thinking of her led back to thinking of Sandy.
The boy was clearly obsessed with the Winslow woman. Sandy tried to cover it, but Reginald had seen a change in his son since the day he’d met her at the Armstrongs’ tea party. Well, she was a murderer and it would serve him right! Idiot. Mather whacked at a fern at the edge of the road with his cane and, with a dark expression, walked the short remaining distance to the post office and pushed open the door. He realized that he did not know who Sandy’s friends were, or if he had any—what he thought—where he went. In this maelstrom of unfamiliarity, the question came to him. Where was Sandy when the murder happened? It had been some days ago. Or was it at night? He realized that in his imagination, Sandy was the co
mpliant, if sullen, third member of his household. Always there at the dinner table, always in the sitting room in the evening with them, listening to the wireless or reading. But now, shaken, he realized Sandy was, in fact, often not there of late.
The wooden window slid up noisily and Eleanor Armstrong grinned at him. “Good day, Reginald. I wondered when one of you would get down. I just saw Sandy across the way and I thought he was on his way, but he never got here. I’ve your paper and a letter. It’s from the old country. In fact, I was having a peer at the stamp and the postmark surprised me. This letter was sent in April. I don’t know why it’s so late. I dare say it got stuck in the bottom of bag somewhere and they’ve just sent it on.” She held out the folded Nelson newspaper and the letter. He looked at the handwriting and recognized, with a shock, that of his aunt. She had not written him in a good twenty years.
“How is Alice?” Eleanor asked, and she reached under the counter and pulled out a bouquet of sweet peas with the stems dripping. “I cut these this morning. I thought they might cheer her up.” Mather grunted a near-thanks as he took them. His unsettled mood about his son was replaced first by puzzlement at the letter in his hand, then puzzlement about what Eleanor might have meant by “across the way,” and finally, his annoyance that everyone knew his wife was “ill” or needed “cheering up.” He put the mail under his arm and, with the sweet peas clutched unceremoniously in his large hand, he started for the door, which he was on the verge of pushing open with his cane, when he turned back.
“What do you mean ‘across the way’? Across the way where?”
“I was just coming out of the root cellar this morning and I saw him coming down the road and was just preparing to go into the post to get your mail when he went along that little path toward Miss Winslow’s. I was surprised, because he normally would have gone in at the top of the road by her driveway. It looked like he decided suddenly to go see her. The funny thing was, I don’t think he ever went right to the house, because in a few minutes he was back out again, and off back up the road toward yours.”
Mather grunted and turned back up the road. Eleanor Armstrong watched him for a moment and then called out, “Bye now!” in a cheerful voice and got nothing in return.
So, he was up to something, Mather was thinking. Sandy had stopped at the gate to Miss Winslow’s and looked at the policeman’s car. Why had he gone toward her house? It wasn’t because he hadn’t known the police were there and changed his mind at the last minute; he would have seen their car at the top of the drive. Was he wanting to spy on her for some reason? Then he remembered that Sandy had gone straight into the hall and used the telephone for a muffled conversation. Had Sandy called her? He tried to reassure himself by looking up the familiar road he’d walked for forty years, but he could not shake the feeling that he was suddenly not in command of his life. He was certainly not in command of Sandy.
He picked up his speed and arrived home to find Sandy chopping wood with uncharacteristic energy. He experienced again an unfamiliar sense of dissonance. They did not speak; this, at least, was familiar, and Reginald went into the house, hung up his cane, and sat with a grunt in his chair by the window. He now turned to the other mystery. This letter from his aunt in Cornwall. It had been mailed in April; this much was clear from the postmark over King George’s face. It occurred to him that someone must have died; perhaps he would get some money? But, of course, there was no one left but her and she’d written the letter. He sliced open the envelope and adjusted his glasses, turning the letter into the light from the window.
Dear Reginald, I hope this letter finds you well. I’ve not heard from you in some time but I imagine I would have heard if anything had happened. I’m writing to you because I think you may need to be prepared. A young man named Jack Franks is on his way to you in Canada. This will mean nothing to you now, of course, but it will. I suppose that even you will not have forgotten the wretched young woman you landed on us in ’17?
He favours her, though she was a most unprepossessing young woman. I don’t know if you wondered what became of her, or if you couldn’t bother even to do that, but she had a rather bad time of it at the birth and died of an infection. She lived long enough to beg me under no circumstances to tell you where the child was or what had happened. Another convert for you there. Well, that’s all water over the dam. The boy, or should I say, man, for he is something near thirty years of age, turned up after he did some sleuthing at Somerset House when his parents died in the Blitz and he discovered he’d been adopted. Don’t worry. He doesn’t want anything, apparently. Just to look at you. I’ll be honest with you, I told him it was a waste of his time, but you know what the young are like: full of ideals.
Reginald slumped back in his chair and stared out the window. His garden gleamed like a show garden, belying the apathy and disorder in the house. Alice had once been the gardener, but increasingly, she could not cope and spent her time when she was there maniacally digging, hurling dirt everywhere, and then storming back into the house with muddy boots. He had to keep up the appearance of his front garden so that his neighbours would not see the disarray in their lives. It used to soothe and comfort him, but he found himself asking, for what? His mad wife, his idiot son? There was nothing worth caring about. And now, suddenly, this. He opened his hand to look at the single sheet of paper that he had crushed in his shock. Smoothing it out on the table, he reread it. This man, Franks, was his son. His first son.
He turned and looked through the door at the couch where Alice still slumped, dozing now, with her mouth open and her lips fluttering slightly with her breathing. Reginald stirred uncomfortably at his desk, wanting suddenly to hide the letter, or to hide from what came flooding back. Thirty years had not altered that memory. He had helped that wretched girl, seen to her wood, her chimney, the state of the house. The rest of that winter after Harris had left for the front, and through the next two years, he had worked Harris’s orchard with her, had been surprised at Robin’s sparse correspondence, and then the summer of 1917. Funnily, it was water again, he mused. He closed his eyes, thinking perhaps to shut out the memory, but instead he fell into it and could not turn away.
July, 1915
In that year, King’s Cove had come on to the telephone, and on this July day, his rang for the first time, startling him. It was Elizabeth. He laughed at the sudden intimacy of her voice in his ear. She shouted, thinking that one had to raise one’s voice to be heard so far away. “I’ve got no water again, Reg.” She sounded fed up.
Sunlight filtered through the trees that day and into his memory now. They stood thigh-deep in the icy water, their clothes hiked up as far as possible to keep them out of the way, clearing leaves and sticks away from the wooden pipe’s entrance, and then stood, panting as the water began to flow again. After a moment he started toward the bank and then held out his hand to help her up. When she stood on the green verge, she began to pull her skirts out of her waistband, and moved to free her hand, but his grip tightened and with his other hand he reached down past her skirts to her bare leg, moving his hand upward slowly along the wet surface of her skin. She was shivering.
Had she been willing? At this thought his eyes flew open. He frowned. She must have been. But lurking in the memory was a dark moment, when she twisted and pulled. He tried to follow the memory carefully, but only arrived at a vision of her lying on the bank, her head turned away from him, and her utter silence. He saw now, as if for the first time, the tears. Afterward, she would not speak to him. If they met on the road she turned away, or looked at him with blazing eyes if he tried to touch her. He had left notes under her door when she would not answer his desperate knocking, begging to see her. Then one morning she had come up the hill and banged on his door. “You bastard,” she’d said. “You have to do something.”
LANE STOOD BACK as they reached the top of the stairs so that Darling could see the arrangement. He was, however, momentarily struck by the strange, empty beauty of this at
tic room. Light poured in from windows on all four sides, and illuminated the soft, variegated pattern of the wooden floor. It was pine, he could see, and finished with an oil that brought out its grain. The room was instantly calming in its emptiness, and he ran through the palette for these colours of light and shadow, with the greens framed by windows.
“Inspector?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. It’s such a lovely room. What a complete luxury to keep a room empty like this.” He turned to look at the paper taped to the floor. “Explain?”
“I’ve drawn a rather inaccurate rendering of the system of roads here, marked the houses, and written what I know about the people who live in them. What I see is missing is the connection between them, or indeed, the connection between any one of them and the dead man. I’ve made a note to myself to ask Eleanor Armstrong about mail coming in. While she is in no way a gossip, or interfering, she will have noticed anything unusual. I say this because perhaps this man sent a letter to let someone know he was coming. I’m sorry about the floor, only I haven’t got a table big enough to lay it out on,” Lane said, apologetically. His eyebrows furrowed, Darling stood gazing at the map. He saw the juxtaposition of personality on geography; each resident at the end of his or her road with little comments of known facts. Well, known to Miss Winslow, at any rate.
