Ferney

by James Long

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Ferney had first heard about the plan for the roadworks almost a year earlier, and from the moment the surveyors began to peg out the line of the excavation along the A303 it had been the focus of his existence. It seemed to him then that it was the main unfinished business of this final life and he believed the diggers must succeed where his spade had failed. That focus and much besides had shifted with Gally’s unexpected reappearance. He no longer found it so pressing to keep a close eye on the hole when it suddenly became clear to him that, against the odds, the story hadn’t ended there after all. Since then he spent his time instead keeping an eye on what was happening at Bagstone Farmhouse and had more or less forgotten about the excavation, so when Michael Garrett’s grandson stopped his raucous, shuddering tractor in the lane by Pear Ash and told him the diggers down there had turned up human bones, it took two heartbeats before the meaning of the news sank in. When it did a strong emotion seized him, part anger, part sorrow and finally part exhilaration at being near at last to the final proof of his long-held suspicion, and he began to walk with greater speed than his legs could gracefully accommodate down the hill in the direction of the main road.

  All the work had stopped when he got there and he saw at first glance that the police had already started the process of protecting the public from any accidental exposure to the evidence of death. Flapping plastic sheeting strung between poles shielded one side of the excavation from direct view by the passing traffic and three sides of white tape, forbidding entry with thin authority, completed a square. He got round that easily enough by crossing the road further down and coming up along the far side of the hedge. It was a route he hadn’t taken for a long time and he noted with momentary surprise that there was no longer any sign at all of the old path to the forge. Screened by the undergrowth, the policemen by the great trench couldn’t see him, but equally he couldn’t get a clear view down to the bottom of it, so cautiously he squeezed through between a tree-trunk and a bush and found himself looking straight down on to a scene that took his breath away in sharp sorrow and old anger.

  A man in official, freshly laundered overalls crouched in the broad bottom of the ditch, maybe fifteen feet below ground level. The long side of the ditch showed a narrow, vertical mark. It was darker than the surrounding earth to either side, packed with looser material where the diggers’ long slice had cut a cross-section through Cochrane’s old pit, and sticking out from the side towards the base of that mark, where the man was scraping and brushing at the earth with archaeological care, was a pincushion of stained ivory. Letting himself feel the sorrow for the sake of all those years, Ferney looked at the earth surrounding the bones as if for signs of the soft, sweet flesh that had rotted away into it. There was nothing to see but the bones themselves and they seemed haphazard.

  It was no burial. Her limbs had not been laid out with care. She had been tipped into the hole, head first from the look of it, if that was indeed her skull down at the bottom where the man was taking such trouble. It was the thought of that casual act of savagery and the succession of bleak years that had followed that brought Ferney too far into view. In his mind’s eye the old smithy had regrouped its dispersed stones to take shape before him, the little storehouse behind it blocking his direct view of the pit, so that he moved out into the open to see round it, down through the double-vision, ghost earth to the bones. The policemen on the other side noticed him then.

  ‘Excuse me, sir. Do you mind moving away from there, please? This is a closed area.’

  They were insubstantial, less real than the smithy, their voices thinned by his retreat from their time so that he paid them no heed and they, out of concern for his agitated state more than displeasure at his attitude, came round to him and jarred him back to the present, not by words but, when those failed, by the touch of their hands.

  He heard one of them say, ‘Is there anything wrong?’

  Confused, he replied, ‘That’s my wife down there,’ before he came fully back to the present and caution rushed in to warn him.

  They sat him in the back of the car then, half official, half solicitous, and a sergeant came to occupy the front, an intelligent man with quick, observant eyes and a twist to his face that gave him an accidental smile on the side that faced Ferney.

  ‘What makes you think that’s your wife?’ said the sergeant. Ferney recognized one of the constables outside the car, but he didn’t know this man at all, a man with a voice from somewhere else.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

  The sergeant nodded. ‘But you did say it, so I do have to ask you.’

  Ferney nodded but stayed silent and the sergeant considered him. ‘Something made you say it.’

  They weren’t going to let him just shrug it off, that was clear. ‘My wife disappeared, you see?’ he said. ‘I suddenly thought that might be her down there.’

  ‘When would this have been?’ asked the sergeant gently.

  ‘July the tenth 1933,’ said Ferney immediately.

  The sergeant raised his eyebrows, reached for his notebook.

  ‘I’d better write this down,’ he said. ‘Could I start with your name?’

  ‘Ferney Miller,’ he said. ‘That is, William Miller, number twelve, Castle Orchard Close in Penselwood.’

  ‘And what was your wife’s name?’

  Ferney had to think about that for a moment. ‘Jennifer.’

  ‘And when you say she disappeared . . .?’

  ‘That’s what she did. She went out one day and she didn’t come back.’

  ‘Did you tell anybody?’

  ‘Of course I did. I told everyone. We went out looking for her for weeks on end.’

  ‘But did you tell anyone official? The police, I mean.’

  Ferney thought back. ‘Yes, I did. It wasn’t like today, you know. I sent a boy with a message to Wincanton and someone came out on a bicycle in the end. Didn’t do any good.’

  The sergeant thought a minute, unclipped the microphone and called his headquarters.

  ‘I have a gentleman here,’ he said, ‘thinks these remains they’ve uncovered might be his wife. He says he reported her disappearance. Can you do a check for me? Over.’

  He knew what their reply was going to be and looked as though he was savouring it. The voice on the speaker was businesslike. ‘Is there a date on that? Over.’

  ‘Yes, 1933, July the tenth. Name of Miller.’

  There was a short silence. ‘Confirm 1933. That is three three? Over.’

  ‘I say again one niner three three, over.’

  The voice became a little less formal. ‘Sarge, where do you suggest we start looking for that?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue. Try the archives. They must keep the files somewhere.’

  He signed off, turned back to Ferney with a quizzical look, but before he could continue a PC came to the car and knocked on the window. He excused himself and got out to talk.

  The window wasn’t completely shut, but the policemen clearly didn’t expect someone as old as Ferney to have keen hearing. He could just about follow their conversation.

  ‘The foreman says the old boy was always coming down, looking in the hole. Wouldn’t say why,’ said the constable. ‘A bit barmy, he reckoned. Nearly got himself run over by a truck once. Oh, and chummy down the hole says the skeleton’s female, probably a woman in her twenties.’

  That was it. The confirmation that he didn’t really need.

  ‘Any idea how long it’s been down there yet?’

  ‘He said more than ten years, less than a hundred. He’ll need a lab test to get nearer than that.’

  ‘No idea of the cause of death, I don’t suppose?’

  ‘Nothing obvious. The skull’s intact.’

  Ferney thought about that. All that really mattered now was whether she had suffered.

  The sergeant got back in the car and his attitude showed he was taking it more seriously now. ‘Look, Mr Miller,’ he said, ‘i
f there’s anything in this, we’ll have to go through the protocol later and get it all down, but just to cut corners, would you mind telling me the story first?’

  ‘I don’t really know what else to say. She went out in the morning saying she was going to see her aunt in Chaffeymoor and she didn’t come back at lunchtime like she was going to, so I went down to find her and her aunt said she’d never even got there.’

  ‘How long had you been married at the time?’

  ‘Nine years. Got married when we were seventeen. Known each other all our lives.’

  ‘And had you had a row or anything like that?’

  ‘Did I kill her, you mean?’ Ferney snorted. ‘We never had a row about anything.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that at all. I just meant was there any reason why she might have decided to leave?’

  ‘She wouldn’t have left me,’ said Ferney simply.

  The sergeant thought about the foreman’s words – ‘he was always coming down, looking in the hole’. Caution told him to keep them to himself, just in case this calm, pleasant old man should turn out to be the least likely of murderers, but that still left an obvious question.

  ‘What made you think this might be her?’

  Ferney was starting to fret at the cramped confines of the car. ‘Can I show you how it was?’ he asked. ‘Out in the fresh air?’

  They got out and he led the sergeant a few yards down the verge next to the excavation. ‘There was a blacksmith’s shop here,’ he said. ‘Been a smithy here for a hundred and fifty years since the turnpike came. Tatty old place, it was, just about on its last legs by that time. Trade was dying out with the cars.’ He looked round and hacked a heel into the ground. ‘The door would have been just about here. It was a long, low, tumbledown sort of a place. The forge was at the other end. He gave up on the blacksmith work in 1935 – turned it into a petrol garage instead. He put a shed on the end, all timber and iron and great signs all over it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know there’d ever been a garage here,’ said the sergeant, looking along the verge.

  ‘Didn’t last long. No sign of it now. Anyway the smith, he’d dug this ruddy great hole at the back. Said it was going to be his toilet, you see, but he never finished it off. Left it like that for months – but then he filled it in again.’

  ‘Where was that exactly?’

  Ferney gestured down towards the excavation. ‘Just there. You can see the marks of it all the way down the side of the trench, right where they found her.’

  ‘So why should your wife’s remains be here, Mr Miller?’

  ‘The blacksmith was called Cochrane,’ said Ferney slowly. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to blame him entirely, I’ve come to think. He had a bad time in the war, the Great War that is. He was a stoker in a ship that was hit at Gallipoli. Shell-shocked. He was on the rum.’ He turned his eyes on the sergeant. ‘But he wanted my girl, you see? Wanted her so badly it made no difference that she was married to me. He went right on pestering her and bothering her for years.’

  ‘You’re saying this Cochrane killed your wife and put her body down the hole?’

  ‘That’s what he did,’ said Ferney, nodding. ‘I’ve thought that for years and now here’s the proof. He filled in the hole that day, you see?’

  ‘Didn’t you tell people that?’

  ‘Oh yes, I told everybody. I wanted them all to help find her. We even dug down in the hole but they wouldn’t believe me when I told them how deep it had been and they gave up too soon.’ He nodded towards the figure in the trench. ‘You can see for yourself. Who’d have thought she would be down so far?’

  The sergeant was a Londoner, but he’d transferred to a more rural force because he had one great weakness as a policeman – a vivid imagination which all too often compelled him to put himself in the position of those he had to deal with in everyday life. It occurred to him that the old boy didn’t seem quite as upset as he might have done, but then, he told himself, he’d had not far off sixty years to get over it.

  The PC by the car shouted for him and he asked Ferney to wait. There was a photographer working down in the trench now and Ferney saw the flashes, subliminal reinforcements of the afternoon sun. On the road, cars were slowing down as they passed the scene, unsure what to make of the police cars and the tapes. Ferney wondered for a minute at his own detachment. Six months earlier he would have been distraught. During that terrible time when the men first started digging out the hole for the road junction, he had been in a constant ferment of anxiety, unable to stay away from the hole in case he should miss the evidence he had sought for such a long time. Now he took advantage of the sergeant’s absence to walk back to the edge of the hole and look in. No one bothered him. The photographer was packing his gear away and the man in the overalls was picking the bones out of the earth and putting them, one at a time, into a bag. It meant nothing now, just tidying up some old rubbish, the remains of a suit of clothes.

  She had come back, that was the point. By coming back she had chased away the demon that had sat on his back for fifty-seven years. That demon was guilt because every day of every month of every one of those years, Ferney had wondered where he had condemned her spirit to go, so alone, when he sent the water flowing in to wash out Effie Mullard and in doing so broke their long life-line. Terrible visions of limbo had troubled him all that time, much more than the death itself. It was the first time he had felt truly bereaved, but now her tenacious spirit was back by some miracle he did not yet understand and those bones down there brought no tears, only regrets and the vestiges of tired anger.

  The sergeant came back to him. ‘Well, Mr Miller,’ he said, ‘there’s some people down in our cellar with dusty clothes thanks to you.’

  ‘Did you find it?’

  ‘Yes, we found it. Lucky the mice hadn’t got it. Just as you said except it doesn’t list your wife’s name as Jennifer.’

  ‘Did it say Gally?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was what you might call a pet name. She was born Jennifer.’

  ‘Now, identification’s going to be a bit difficult, but you’d better tell me whatever you can about this man Cochrane.’

  ‘I don’t know that much. I had a set-to with him and he stayed away from me after that. I tried to have it out with him, but he’d run for it every time he saw me. A big man he was, much bigger than me.’

  ‘He was older than you?’

  ‘Oh yes, ten years older, I’d say.’

  ‘So, he’d be how old now?’

  ‘I’m eighty-three so he’d be ninety-three.’

  ‘The chances are he’s no longer with us,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Oh no, he’s not. He’s been dead for years.’

  ‘Ah, right,’ said the sergeant in relief. ‘You know that for certain, do you?’

  ‘Yes, I do. He died in fifty-nine.’

  ‘Do you know where?’

  ‘Here. Up in the village.’ Ferney might have left it at that but he wanted to explain that Cochrane was a man of violence. ‘Someone killed him, see?’

  ‘This man Cochrane was murdered?’

  The sergeant sounded incredulous.

  ‘Well, killed. Self-defence more like. Seemed fair enough to me. He was half-Danish. They’re a violent lot. I’ve always had trouble with the Danes.’

  The sergeant frowned. ‘Did they catch the man?’

  ‘Didn’t have to. He didn’t try to run anywhere. Lad called Billy. We used to call him Billy Bunter. Wasn’t his fault. Cochrane was always attacking him.’

  ‘I’ll find all this in the records, will I?’

  ‘Should do.’

  ‘We’d better leave it there for now,’ the sergeant said, scratching his head. ‘I can’t say I’ve come across one quite like this before. I suppose we’ll have to look through the old files and get back to you.’ He stood there in silence for a minute, clearly feeling there was something more he ought to say.

  Ferney looked again at the ditch and
the scatter of old bones. The man in overalls tugged a femur out of the side of the hole and Ferney tried unsuccessfully to see a connection between the bone and the memory of the living woman. Instead he only felt a vague worry about the present Gally. They must be due back. He’d been missing her.

  The sergeant came to what he wanted to say. ‘We’ll have to be in touch again when the lab reports come through.’ He paused. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said, ‘if it is your wife, I mean.’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ said Ferney vaguely.

  ‘It must have been lonely for you.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Ferney, then he looked up and saw Gally and her spidery husband walking up to the other side of the pit, joining the crowd. Gally looked golden brown and beautiful and the life came pouring out from her and drove the last possible sadness away from the spare parts down there in the hole. He was tempted to go straight to her, but he needed a bit more time. He felt that a sad chapter had been finally closed and knew that he’d been given a warning – a warning that they must both stick to the old plan and together make sure that what now followed was far, far better.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Gally closed her eyes as they drove in through the gate. Three weeks away, three weeks of stored-up surprises. The healing of the house, previously robbed of dramatic impact by her constant presence, should by now have leapt ahead. She wanted to gain the fullest effect by keeping her eyes shut until after the car stopped so that she could take it all in at once, but she didn’t get the chance. She felt the car sway diagonally into the uneven yard then start the swing round to face the house. That was when Mike uttered an exclamation of astonishment and she couldn’t help opening her eyes to see what had prompted it.

  At first she looked in the wrong direction. The house basked in the evening sun, looking even better than she had hoped it would. The roof and the front wall were finished, so that for the first time it gave an illusion of completion and yes, the builders had listened to all that she’d said about the need to be sympathetic to the structure. White primer shone where two new window frames had been set in to replace terminally rotten originals, but apart from that everything was harmonious and once they were painted she knew they too would blend in perfectly with the weathered appearance of the rest of it. She took in all of that in the briefest of glances, checking rapidly for the source of Mike’s displeasure, then she realized he wasn’t looking at the house at all, but off to the side towards the Bag Stone. Even then it took her a second to work out why he was surprised. The stone was in its usual place, leaning at a gentle angle from the edge of the stream towards the valley beyond the house just as it had always been.