‘I owe you an apology, Irene,’ she said, coming to stand beside the card table. Irene was struck dumb. ‘I ought to have explained to you about Mrs Cartwright’s condition. It was unkind of me not to – to the pair of you.’
‘Well,’ said Irene, fingering the green baize of the table. Nancy grunted.
‘It seems to me that, as much as anything, you’re frightened of people.’ There was mild exasperation in her tone as she said this. ‘You’ll grow out of it, I’m sure. But there we go. I ought to have said. It can’t have been an easy visit for you.’ With that she went back to the sofa and her book, and Irene steeled herself to continue the conversation.
‘Nancy, did you light the fire in your sitting room today?’ she said. Nancy peered at her across the top of her book.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I looked for you in your sitting room earlier, and found the fire lit. It was dreadfully hot in there. Clara and Florence both say they never lit it. I was just … wondering, I suppose.’
‘Well, why on earth would they? Why would anyone, on such a glorious day?’ said Nancy, looking back at her book, and Irene still hadn’t decided whether or how to go on by the time Alistair returned. ‘What did you want me for, anyway?’ Nancy asked.
‘Sorry?’ said Alistair.
‘Irene was just saying that she came to look for me, earlier.’
‘Oh, nothing. It doesn’t matter,’ said Irene, relieved beyond words that she hadn’t found Nancy and tried to tell her off over Louise Cartwright, when this apology had been in the offing.
‘Shall we go up, darling? I don’t think I can take another pasting at cards tonight.’ Alistair smiled and held out his hand, which Irene took gratefully.
It had been so long since a day had dawned dark and wet that when Irene woke the following morning, she thought it was still night-time. Alistair was gone, and she hadn’t been aware of him getting up; she was becoming accustomed to sleeping beside him, and to the small sounds and movements as he rose and disappeared into his dressing room, as softly as he could. She turned over and looked at the clock, and even though it was late in the morning, she settled her cheek back into the pillow for the last peaceful half an hour before she would have to rise and face another day. To her surprise, she found that the thought of the day ahead wasn’t so very bad at all. Her stomach growled hotly for some food; she put out her hand to feel if any warmth remained between the sheets on Alistair’s side of the bed, and wished she’d seen him before he’d gone out for the day. She’d started to look forward to his smile, and the way he cared for her in spite of it all – when it felt like nobody else did. She lay a while and thought about that, wondering why her first impulse was to resist it. Something her mother had shouted at her – during one of the many rows once she and Fin had been discovered – came back to her then. Why do you actively seek to destroy yourself, Irene? You always have. Ever since you were five years old and took scissors to your own hair. Neither at that time, nor at any time since, had Irene been able to explain that it was because she had never felt good enough. But she didn’t want to resist Alistair. There and then she decided not to, and shut her eyes to pledge it to herself.
She got up and peered out at the rain – a steady downpour that draped a curtain across the valley, muting the trees and fields to grey. It washed the smoke and steam from the mill chimneys before it could rise, and the sound of it hitting the window drowned out the thud of the machinery. It was like waking up in a wholly different place. Irene dressed, ate some of the dried-out scrambled eggs in the breakfast room and sat down with the paper, and it was a while before she began to feel as though something might be amiss. The quiet was too quiet; the house felt as though it were holding its breath. For no reason she could trace, the skin prickled restlessly at the back of Irene’s neck. She got up and went to the window again, and was still staring out when Nancy came in and stood beside her. Irene braced herself, but Nancy was looking down at the mill and seemed lost in thoughts other than Irene’s failings that morning.
‘Good morning, Nancy,’ said Irene.
‘Good morning. Did you see Alistair before he went off?’
‘No, not this morning.’
‘Me neither. Odd.’
‘Is it?’
‘He hates rainy days. Always has, even when he was a boy. I used to have to chivvy him up, and now he’s a man he still uses it as an excuse to lie about in bed.’
‘I can’t imagine that, somehow.’
‘No, well.’ Nancy shrugged.
‘Will the river flood?’
‘If it keeps this up much longer, it just might,’ said Nancy. It was the closest they’d yet come to an easy, civil conversation, and Irene was pleased, even if it was about the weather.
‘You can’t even see the smoke from the chimneys, or hear the Fou … the paper-making machine,’ she added, and Nancy frowned.
‘The Fourdrinier. No,’ she said. ‘You can’t. And that is unusual.’
They stood side by side for a while longer, and Irene searched for something else to say – something pertinent – but had come up with nothing by the time Nancy turned to leave again. She paused by the door, and seemed to weigh something up. ‘I’m going down to stick my nose in,’ she said. ‘Are you coming?’ She fixed Irene with an accusatory look, as though daring her to decline, or perhaps to accept. Irene nodded.
‘Yes, all right,’ she said. ‘Only … I haven’t a raincoat.’
‘Not to worry. I’ve an oilskin mackintosh that will fit you, since there isn’t a shred of flesh on you.’
‘I’ve had some eggs this morning,’ said Irene, and then loathed herself for trying so blatantly to please.
‘Well, good. Let down your hair and have some lunch later as well, why don’t you? Come along. You’ll want a hat as well.’ Nancy strode off along the corridor towards the back kitchen where coats and boots and walking sticks waited in their ranks, and Irene went along in her wake, with the anxious sense of having found a point of balance that might very easily be lost again.
A torrent of muddy water poured down the lane outside the farm, towards the village; fast and deep enough to roll small stones along with it. Pudding was newly back from a hack on Baron, Alistair’s hunter, and looked as wet and bedraggled as a drenched cat. Water dripped from the peak of her cap, but she hallooed them as they passed.
‘Dismal day for a walk!’ she called. Steam rose from the horse’s flanks.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, girl,’ said Nancy. ‘We’re off to the mill. I think the machines have stopped.’
‘Not really?’ said Pudding, looking aghast, and Irene wondered how bad it could really be, since presumably the machines could simply be started up again at some point.
‘Seems so, but I’m not sure. Do get that horse in and thatched, Pudding.’ They carried on into the village, where they didn’t see a soul. The beaters of Rag Mill were audible, and ragged pennants of steam rose from the brewery in spite of the rain, and Nancy’s face darkened.
‘Is it so very bad, if the machines stop?’ Irene asked, tentatively. Nancy grunted.
‘Not life and death, no. But it usually means the boilers have been allowed to go out, and it takes an awful lot of fuel and effort to get them back up again. It ought not to happen at all, and if it has I shall very much want to know why.’
The mill was eerily still. Outside the bag room, two women were standing idle, holding a coat over their heads as an umbrella. They stared at Nancy and Irene with wide, fearful eyes, and though Nancy drew breath to interrogate them, the words died on her lips. Most of the rest of the mill workers appeared to be gathered around the huge sliding doors to the new boiler house. The rain had soaked their shoulders darkly; they stood hunched, hands in pockets, staring across the yard at the old farmhouse. A few more men clustered at the door to the offices. Standing in the rain as though they’d been prevented from going inside. ‘What in hell’s name is going on here? Why is nobody at work?’ said Nancy,
as she strode over to the farmhouse door. Irene hastened after her, the rain pattering loudly on her hat. One of the men put out his arms to block their path, and Irene recognised him as the paper-maker she’d been introduced to. The look he gave her was so grave that Irene’s throat went dry.
‘Best not to go in, Miss Hadleigh, Mrs Hadleigh,’ he said, sombrely. ‘Best not to.’
‘Get out of the way, man,’ said Nancy.
‘Miss Hadleigh—’ Nancy pushed past the man and, with Irene on her heels, walked into the dry warmth of the offices. And there she stopped.
For a few moments, Irene could make no sense of what she was seeing. Something was heaped on the floor near the old inglenook; spilt dark liquid had puddled there, lustrous as oil, and more men were standing in the way, so that the thing could only be glimpsed through their legs. There was an odd smell, metallic but fresher than the hot, greased metal of the steam engine and boilers. A butcher’s shop smell that made the hair stand up along Irene’s arms, and her stomach start to turn. Nancy rushed forwards, fell to her knees, then froze. Irene took two steps after her, but her legs felt numb and watery, and she no longer trusted them to carry her. She stopped, and stared. In the weird hush of a roomful of people not talking, Nancy started up an awful keening. It sent a shiver right through Irene, but she couldn’t react. She had no idea how to react, as her eyes registered what they were seeing.
It was Alistair, lying on the floor, and the dark, lustrous stuff was his blood. His neck was a ruin of deep, ugly wounds, and one had cut into his right cheek as well – there was a grey-white flash of bone, a ghastly flap of skin, hanging loose. He was sprawled on his back with his arms flung out and his legs at odd, uncomfortable angles. His eyes were open, gazing up at the metal lamp above his head as though mesmerised by it. It seemed, to Irene, far too gentle an expression for him to wear, when he had been subjected to such violence. But then, that was Alistair, she supposed. Had been Alistair. She swallowed. There was no chance that the broken thing on the floor was a living person any more. Irene felt a hand on her shoulder, but couldn’t turn her head.
‘He was found this way soon after the first shift started, Mrs Hadleigh,’ a man told her, softly. ‘We’ve sent Kenny – the office boy – to Biddestone to fetch the police constable, and they’re sending to Chippenham for more men, too, in case he gives us any trouble. They oughtn’t to be much longer.’
‘Why weren’t we told?’ Irene whispered. She pictured herself feeling Alistair’s side of the bed for warmth; sitting at the table, eating scrambled eggs. ‘Why weren’t we told right away?’
‘Nobody wanted to be the one to …’ The man trailed off. ‘There didn’t seem to be anything to be gained by it,’ he said, heavily.
‘But I should have been told,’ she said, her voice shrinking. She felt as though she were shrinking. Nancy was still weeping, kneeling beside her nephew, and Irene knew she ought to go over and try to comfort her. But it was a ridiculous idea. Nancy couldn’t possibly be comforted in the face of such a loss, and the sight of her bent and broken on the floor was almost as bad, almost as unnatural, as the gentle expression on Alistair’s face.
Then they all just stood, for a while. Nancy cried, and Irene didn’t blink, and one of the men coughed, and the rain hammered down outside, trickling musically along the guttering. The implausibility of it all robbed Irene of the slightest idea of what to do, and from the way the men fidgeted and glanced at one another, they were all similarly stupefied.
‘Someone ought take the women away,’ one of the men muttered, but nobody moved to. The idea of making – or even suggesting – Nancy do something was alien to them all. Irene was steeling herself to be the one to try, and had even managed a step forwards, with her heart hammering so loudly she could hardly hear above it, when she was barrelled from behind by the wet, breathless form of Pudding Cartwright.
‘Here you all are. See! Keith came up to the farm to tell us, but I knew it couldn’t be …’ she said, but halted abruptly when she saw. Irene turned to her, and saw her face contort into an expression of such utter agony and disbelief that Irene felt it in her own bones. With a small cry, Pudding seemed to deflate, and she sobbed unashamedly, like a child, with her chin on her chest and her shoulders heaving. Behind her, Jem Welch the gardener appeared, and old Hilarius the groom – servants who’d known Alistair since he was a baby. Their lined faces were heavy and afraid, and neither one of them spoke. The smell of it all wormed its way inexorably into Irene’s nose – wet bodies and blood and horse and earth and hair. A cacophony that her mind reeled from. Black blotches crowded in at the sides of her vision, and she staggered to one side, reaching out for balance.
‘That’s quite enough, now,’ said George Turner, the foreman, finally taking charge. ‘You men – take these three ladies back up to the farmhouse, and get Mrs Gosling to make them sweet tea. It’s a terrible shock, and none of them ought to have seen him this way. I’m sure the police constable will be up to call on them very shortly. And Pudding ought not see her brother carted away in irons.’
Pudding’s head came up in an instant. Her face was blotchy and red.
‘What? What did you say?’ she gasped. George pressed his lips together until his moustache all but hid his mouth.
‘Best you get on home, Pudding. Or up to the farm with Mrs Hadleigh here. We’ve sent for your father but he’s attending a difficult birth in Yatton.’
‘Yes … a doctor. My father could help …’ said Pudding, hopefully. Then she looked at the blood and the wounds again, and that hope vanished. ‘But what did you say about Donny?’
‘Now, Pudding—’
‘Is he hurt too? Tell me!’
‘Girl’s going to find out sooner or later,’ said another man, gruffly.
‘Speak up, man,’ Jem told George, curtly.
‘It seems that … Donald was the one to attack Mr Hadleigh.’
‘No.’ Pudding shook her head. ‘He wasn’t.’
‘He was found in the machine room with bloodied hands, and shirt, and … holding a shovel, also bloody. One of the coal shovels, it seems. He was just standing there, and still is, and he’ll not speak a word in his own defence.’ George’s reluctance to give this news was evident. Jem Welch’s face went through outrage and disbelief to a kind of resigned sadness, but Pudding shook her head madly.
‘But that’s just what he does – he likes to watch the machines! That’s just what he does. It doesn’t mean a thing! You can’t possibly believe he would hurt Mr Hadleigh?’
‘Perhaps he didn’t intend to … inflict such injuries as he did, but nevertheless—’
‘He didn’t do it,’ said Pudding. ‘I know he didn’t. I’ll ask him and he’ll tell you!’
At that point the sound of an engine came into the yard – the police superintendent from Chippenham, with the Biddestone constable beside him and two other young officers, in a steaming, spluttering car with mud splashed all up its sides. A wave of palpable relief went through the men in the room, and they began to file out like some kind of sombre welcoming committee. Nancy hadn’t moved from Alistair’s side; Pudding was still gabbling, struggling to breathe through her tears – Hilarius had hold of her arm and was trying to lead her outside. The superintendent came in, wiping rain from his spectacles, and began at once to order them away from the corpse, out into the rain. On sudden impulse, Irene struggled forwards through the moving wall of shoulders and chests. She knelt down close to Alistair’s head, and was careful to look at his eyes, which were going dry and losing their shine, rather than at his terrible wounds. They drew her gaze with a hideous, irresistible fascination. There was blood in his fair hair, matting it. His mouth was soft, lips slightly parted; Irene’s skin still had the memory of their touch from the night before. It was all so impossible – what she was seeing, what had happened – that it felt like a terrible, terrible ruse. She reached for one of his hands, wanting to hold it, tightly, as though he might still feel it, but it was cold a
nd oddly hard, and didn’t feel right at all. She dropped it and recoiled, losing her balance, and when she put her hand down to steady herself it smeared the pool of his blood, and that was cold too. The room receded behind the deafening crash of her heart, and the black blotches crowded in again. Then she felt hands grasping at her arms, lifting her up.
Pudding and her mother sat at the kitchen table with their tea gone cold. Outside, the rain had cleared and the sky had turned an ugly, incandescent white as the sun set about burning through the cloud. Pudding wondered how it could dare to. How it could show such disrespect. Louise’s eyes were red and puffy; Pudding was sure her own were worse, but she was at least grateful that when she’d told her mother what had happened, Louise had understood – Pudding hadn’t had to explain it three different ways, when she could scarcely believe it herself. It felt like a nightmare she should wake up from at any moment. She prayed that she would. They’d only let her see Donny for a second before they’d taken him away. She wished more than anything that her father had been there – he would have made them wait; he would have made them see sense. Somehow. Donny had gone as quietly as a lamb, climbing obediently into the car and not seeming to mind when nobody answered his question about the type of engine it had. Pudding had told them that they didn’t need to put handcuffs on him, but they hadn’t bothered to answer her either. The rain had begun to wash the blood from Donny’s hands but it still daubed the front of his shirt, and was smeared up his sleeves. Alistair’s blood. It had made Pudding’s throat close up in horror.
‘Donny – you didn’t hurt Mr Hadleigh, did you? Tell them,’ she’d said.
He’d given her a faraway look, and said: ‘I tried to get him to safety, Puddy. Just like I tried with poor Catsford.’
‘But it wasn’t you that hurt him.’
‘I found him there. I found him.’
‘There! You heard that! It wasn’t him!’ she’d said to the superintendent, who was very tall and thin, with black hair, a pale face and a steady, unsettlingly gaze. He’d asked who Catsford was – another young Tommy, Donny’s new best friend, who’d died in France, Donny had written home to tell them, draped on the barbed wire like dirty laundry – and then told Pudding to move out of the way. He wouldn’t have treated her father in such an offhanded manner, and if she’d had room to feel it, she would have been furious. She reached across the table and took her mother’s hand again, and gave it a squeeze.
The Hiding Places Page 14
