The Hiding Places

by Katherine Webb

  ‘It’ll be all right, Mum,’ she said, for perhaps the tenth or eleventh time. She knew it was mostly for herself that she said it, and wished she could believe it. ‘Dad will make them see sense. And they’ll find out who really killed Mr Hadleigh, and they’ll …’ She had to stop, and swallow a fresh storm of tears. Mr Hadleigh, dead. Alistair, murdered. Gone. The pain of each reminder was terrible. She sat there, shuddering, utterly helpless.

  When Dr Cartwright got home he looked bedraggled and exhausted. His hair was messy and damp, as were his clothes. His face had a grey heaviness to it that Pudding had only seen once before – when he’d got back from visiting Donny in the convalescent hospital where he’d spent the first two months after returning from the front. She leapt up and took his coat and hat and bag, and put the kettle on to boil again, as the doctor sat down wearily and took Louise’s hands.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said, softly. ‘A day we won’t soon forget, however much we might wish to.’

  ‘Where’s our Donny?’ said Louise. ‘Is he not back with you?’ Dr Cartwright glanced up at Pudding, but she could only shake her head.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be back soon, my dear,’ he said, quite calmly, though his knuckles, as he held his wife’s hands, were white. For a long time, they didn’t speak. Pudding passed her father a cup of tea. Warm, damp air drifted in from outside as the sun finally broke through, and the birds began to sing. It was mid afternoon, Pudding supposed, but that didn’t seem to mean anything any more – neither did what day it was, or what month, or what year. She felt it ought to be night. It ought always be night from then on.

  ‘Well, I’d best get the supper on, I suppose,’ said Louise, rising and brushing her skirt. ‘I’ve got some pork loin, and there are finally enough broad beans to make a meal.’ She paused, frowning in thought. ‘Does Donny like broad beans? It’s quite gone out of my head.’

  ‘Yes, he loves them,’ said Pudding, dully.

  ‘Of course he does.’ Louise smiled. ‘What a thing for a mother to forget!’ She hummed as she put on her apron, and stood at the sink to wash her hands. Pudding sat down opposite her father.

  ‘What have they done with Donny, Dad? Where is he? Can he come home?’

  ‘He’s in the holding cells at the police station in Chippenham, Puddy – he can’t come home just yet. They’ve given him something to eat, and dry clothes. I asked for his others to bring back and wash but they … said that they’ll be kept as evidence.’

  ‘Evidence? You mean … they still think it was him? Didn’t you tell them it wasn’t?’

  ‘Of course I did. Of course I tried.’ Dr Cartwright sighed, and rubbed his chin. ‘But they still think it was him – and we must try to be patient with them. They don’t know our Donny; they can only go on the evidence as they perceive it. They say he was holding the very shovel that was used to kill Mr Hadleigh, and nobody else was seen at the mill who could have done it.’

  ‘But he just found Mr Hadleigh like that – he told me! He said he tried to help him, and that must be how he got blood on himself. And … and he was probably just taking the shovel back to where it belonged, in the boiler house – you know what he’s like about odd things like that, and—’

  ‘Hush now, Pudding; you don’t need to convince me!’ The doctor took Pudding’s hand and tried to pat it but she gripped it so hard he winced.

  ‘But we have to make them see. We have to make them realise he would never do such a thing.’

  ‘And we will. We will.’ But with a sinking feeling, Pudding realised how tired her father sounded already; how defeated.

  ‘You look exhausted, Dad. You need to rest. How did the birth go? The one that kept you from coming to the mill?’

  ‘Not well. The child was lost,’ said the doctor. ‘A dark day indeed.’ He took a sip of his tea, carefully, because his hand was shaking.

  Pudding was so beset by the urge to be up and doing – something, anything – that it was soon impossible to bear it another second. It felt as though something were creeping up behind her; she didn’t know what it was, but it was frightening, and she was sure she didn’t want to let it catch her. Everything was wrong, and Pudding’s first impulse had always been to put things right.

  ‘I’m going down to the mill to talk to whoever it was first found Donny. And whoever it was first found … poor Mr Hadleigh,’ she said, pulling on her boots.

  ‘Pudding, you can’t. The mill’s closed off. The police are still talking to the workers,’ said her father. She paused with one boot on and the other in her hands, and her eyes filled with tears again.

  ‘Poor Mr Hadleigh,’ she said, quietly. ‘Who on earth can have wanted to hurt him? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither do I, my dear. Neither do I.’

  ‘What’s happened to Mr Hadleigh?’ said Louise, from the stove. Her voice was high, and anxious.

  ‘Remember I told you, Mum? He’s been killed.’ Pudding fought to keep her voice steady.

  ‘Pudding,’ said the doctor, in a warning tone.

  ‘But we can hardly go about pretending that he hasn’t!’ she cried.

  ‘Oh, how dreadful!’ said Louise. ‘Was it an accident of some kind? How simply dreadful!’ Unable to bear another second of it, Pudding wrestled her foot into her other boot and went out into the glare of the sun. The spring tinkled its crystalline water into the stone trough, as pretty as anything, and Pudding felt as though a huge crack had opened up right through the middle of the world. She stood on the track and wept, and through the burn of tears saw a figure, coming slowly up the hill. It was Hilarius, his gaunt features as unreadable as ever.

  ‘Horses want seeing to,’ he said, curtly, when he reached her. He squinted into the sun, his eyes all but invisible. A watchful glitter, hard as diamonds. Pudding gaped at him for a moment.

  ‘But … Mr Hadleigh is dead!’ she said, anguished. ‘And … and they’ve taken my brother away!’ Hilarius considered her for a while, then nodded.

  ‘’Tis bad enough,’ he said. ‘Knew young Alistair afore he were born, I did, and he went a long way towards lifting the dark off that house. But those beasts don’t know aught about it. Waiting on ’ee for their well-being, they be.’

  ‘Well, I can’t come now … I can’t! I need to …’ Pudding tried to think what it was she needed to do. ‘Can’t you just see to them, Hilarius?’

  ‘Not my job, girl. It’s ’ee thar kicking at doors for.’ He stared at her a moment longer, then nodded and turned to make his way back down the hill, awkward on his bandy legs. Pudding watched after him a while, rubbing her face where the salt made it itch. Then she followed behind him, and went to work.

  * * *

  In the sultry nights that week, Clemmie couldn’t sleep. She fidgeted and turned and kicked off the sheets, until Josie sighed and Liz threatened to strangle her if she woke her one more time. Clemmie slid out of the bed and knelt down by the open window, low beneath the eaves. Their room trapped the heat of the day and exhaled it at night, and the air outside was only a little cooler. Bats wheeled and twisted along the river and across the yard, feasting on moths; a tawny owl called across the valley, and was answered by another. The river’s soft rush was constant; the sky was blue-black, and a crescent moon turned everything else to grey. Clemmie didn’t know what to do. The police constables from Biddestone and Chippenham had been lingering at the mill for days, eyeing everyone with such suspicion and gravity that Clemmie, with her guilty heart, fled from them as soon as she saw them. She could feel their scrutiny like a physical touch, and felt utterly transparent. On one of her visits she’d tried to take the milk into the canteen as usual, and been turned back. She’d overheard one of the women who usually worked in the bag room complaining at having been asked to clean the blood off the office floor.

  ‘Can’t be my job, can it?’ she’d muttered, with a sickly, buttoned-up look on her face. ‘How can it be my job to do it?’ On another occasion, Clemmie had overheard someone talking ab
out Isaac Tanner.

  ‘Got an alibi, so they say, but hasn’t he ever? They’re a bad lot, all them Tanners, and I said as much to that copper when he asked me.’ Her heart had got into her throat then, and all but choked her.

  She hadn’t seen Eli since it had happened; she didn’t know what she would do when she did. She was torn in two, knowing what he had done, even if his father had made him, but loving him so completely. She’d been to Thatch Cottage and lingered for a while, half hoping he would come out and half hoping he wouldn’t. Then, beneath the window, she heard one of Eli’s brother’s say, shakily: ‘Why’d he have to hit him so hard? I don’t see why … I don’t see why he had to go at him so hard.’ Clemmie didn’t know who the boy was speaking to, and she didn’t hear the reply, if there was one. She’d shut her eyes, feeling cold, hot, and full of fear. She prayed that the words had been spoken about Isaac, and not about Eli. But Isaac had infected all the Tanner boys with his anger, and his violence. She had seen it.

  Her thoughts, as she knelt by the window, were in constant, kaleidoscopic shift. She had overheard their plan; she hadn’t known how brutal it would be, how serious, but she had known something bad was coming. She could not have spoken of it to anyone, and she didn’t know if she would have done so even if speech had come easy to her. She didn’t think she could ever say anything to bring trouble down on Eli. But she felt culpable; she felt a liar of some kind. She hadn’t even let on to Eli that she knew of their plan, or tried to discourage him from taking part – she’d let him kiss it away, and carry her out of herself with his touch. But she also knew she could not have stopped him – not if his father was set on it. She’d felt Eli’s anger, worse than ever, and seen the cage he lived in, and had felt only love, only desperation on his behalf. But now there was blood to be scrubbed from the mill office floor, and nothing would be the same again, and the weight of what she knew would not go away. She would do nothing to betray him, yet she could not do nothing. She gripped big handfuls of her hair, yanking at it till it hurt, trying to force the thoughts to come clearer, and make sense. Her skin was as softly clammy as the night air, and her breath felt too hot in her mouth. There was no peace to be had, and as if in agreement a vixen shrieked, down by the river’s edge, a harsh sound echoing against Weavern’s walls, and in Clemmie’s ears.

  By morning she was dull with fatigue. She seemed to be tired all the time lately as it was – nagged by a lassitude that dragged at her steps and made everything seem like harder work than it should have been. There were purple shadows under her eyes.

  ‘Buck up, my Clem,’ said her mother, Rose, as Clemmie stood staring at a jug of yesterday’s milk, gone sour because she’d forgotten to scald it before bed. ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘Got other things on her mind, I reckon,’ said Liz, and Mary shot her a dark look that wiped the smirk off her face. They all glanced at their father to see if he’d noticed anything, but he hadn’t. He hunched over his plate of food, ate with a mechanical rhythm, and paid them no attention. The look on Rose’s face as she watched her husband was sad, exasperated, and a little lost. Clemmie lingered around the farm that morning, unsure whether to go to the mill again, or to look for Eli. Still unsure what she would do if she found him. She helped Rose put the rhubarb through the mangle, to squeeze out the juice for wine. They did it in the shade to one side of the house, turning the ground sticky and pink with juice, the air impossibly sweet. They covered the crushed stalks with sugar and packed them into earthenware jars to macerate out the last of the juice they would ferment.

  ‘Is anything amiss, Clemmie?’ Rose asked her, as they finished the job. ‘You needn’t be frightened – I won’t be angry with you, my girl, whatever it is.’ Clemmie held her eye for a moment before shaking her head. For once, she was glad to have no voice with which to have to try to explain.

  It had taken a few days for work to resume at the mill, but farms were different. Animals couldn’t wait, and neither could crops. Farms were living things, systems that had to carry on breathing or die. Everywhere, as she walked along the high ridge to the east of Slaughterford, Clemmie saw teams of horses, with their glossy mahogany coats and their leather collars black with grease, turning the first cut of hay, or pulling great carts loaded with timber, or beans, or women and children being taken out to walk the fields and pull the weeds and wild oats from the wheat. She usually liked the clank of the box bells on the horses’ harnesses, and the hair flying around their feet, and the stink of their sweat as she pressed to the hedge to let them pass by. But now she couldn’t enjoy anything, because of what had happened, and what she knew about it. Knotted thoughts, and fear, and missing Eli like air. Driven by those three things, Clemmie found herself in the yard of Manor Farm. The cob pony looked out over its stable door at her, the chickens peered side to side at her, and swallows arrowed above her head. Mrs Kent, a widow, was doing the laundry in big vats beneath the half-portico at the front of the house. She gave Clemmie a little wave then stood with her hands on her hips, taking the chance to straighten her back. When Clemmie neither gestured nor approached, she went back to work with a sigh, stirring the sheets with a wooden paddle. Clemmie stared at the farm’s front door, the date stone above it and the iron knocker, hanging there, waiting.

  But what could she do, if she could neither speak, nor write? She’d always relied upon people asking the right questions – and they couldn’t possibly know the ones she needed them to ask now. She wished she could see Alistair. She wished she’d seen him in time. He might somehow have been able to coax the words from her, in the quiet seclusion of his office – he had come closer than anyone at showing her how to master it. She could have warned him of Tanner’s plan to steal from him, at the mill, which had gone so horribly awry. Guilt came over her in a wave, and galvanised her to act. But Alistair wasn’t there, and Nancy Hadleigh was another thing altogether. And then there was the chance that Eli would be arrested because of her. In an agony of indecision, she paced back and forth by the yard gate. She could not ignore what she knew, but could do nothing about it either. She ground her teeth together and moaned in her throat, and then, out of the blue, as if to surprise herself, she tried to say, I know about what has happened. The I was fine, but by the n of know her mind had caught up, and the rest of the word gathered behind her teeth and stuck there, an immovable thing she could neither swallow nor spit out, blocking everything. Her heart raced and she felt her face reddening with the effort, and she balled her hands into fists, and when she finally gave up it was with a cry of pure frustration.

  ‘What in heaven’s name’s up with ’ee, hen?’ called Mrs Kent, but at the same time the farm door opened and Nancy Hadleigh came striding out.

  She moved with such angry purpose that Clemmie took an involuntary step backwards. Nancy was slight but her body was hard and her will was like thorns all around her that you ran into at your peril.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said, barking out the words. Clemmie flinched and dithered, shifting from her left foot to her right and back again. She saw Nancy’s red eyes and pale face, her mottled skin and bitten lips; saw then that she was in anguish. The strain of it was making her wiry form thrum. ‘Oh, what is it? What do you want?’ Nancy cried. ‘Alistair told me that there’s no reason why you can’t talk, so go on. Talk!’ But Clemmie couldn’t. Nancy’s eyes narrowed, her face went tight. ‘Perhaps I can guess what you want, in fact. Perhaps I can.’ Her voice dropped as she said this, and Clemmie waited, hope kindling. ‘Is it not enough to haunt the mill, and have your … lessons – is it decent to come and bother us here as well? Is it?’ she demanded. Clemmie shook her head, confused. ‘Go away. Alistair isn’t here. Don’t you understand that, you stupid girl? He’s gone, and it’s too late. You can’t have him!’ Tears choked off these final words, closing Nancy’s throat so that she had to wait and catch her breath. Clemmie watched her cautiously, waiting for whatever would come next. The misunderstanding was so huge that she couldn’t bring
herself to go, and let it remain. She shook her head, but Nancy was dabbing at her eyes and didn’t see, and then she threw up her arms and shooed Clemmie back, pushing her when she resisted. ‘Go on, why don’t you? Go!’ she said, not looking up, her face shining wet. Defeated and afraid, Clemmie hurried away.

  In the afternoon, William Matlock put the back of his hand across his mute daughter’s face, after she lost control of the herd between fields and they jogged off happily, raiding the hedgerows along Weavern Lane towards Honeybrook Farm. Hedgerows still full of wild garlic that would taint their milk for at least a day, maybe two. Clemmie tried without success to get ahead of them and turn them, and they were only turned back by lucky chance, when Honeybrook’s dogs barked and sent them into a panic of blown breath and clattering hooves.

  ‘Will!’ Rose exclaimed, as the blow landed, then said nothing more as her husband strode out into the yard and Clemmie stood with her hand pressed to her throbbing face. It was a good blow and she could taste blood where her lip had split a little. ‘He don’t mean it, Clem, you know how he is,’ her mother said, dabbing at the blood with a wet cloth. Clemmie nodded, not even minding. Her lip had soon swollen up and felt odd – huge, numb and sore at the same time. She batted her mother’s hands away, then went around the kitchen searching until she found an old chitty for cattle drench and the stub of a pencil, then sat down at the table and tapped the paper urgently with one finger. Rose frowned slightly. ‘You want to write something down? You’ve something to tell me?’ she said. Clemmie nodded emphatically. ‘But … we’ve tried you with learning your letters before, love, and not managed it,’ she said, gently. Clemmie jabbed the paper even harder, tears in her eyes. ‘All right, all right; don’t get in a lather. We’ll find a way.’