The Hiding Places

by Katherine Webb

  ‘But … he was there, Pudding. He was … holding the shovel,’ said Irene, as kindly as she could.

  ‘That doesn’t mean he killed Alistair! It doesn’t! I know you all think I’m just saying that because I don’t want it to be true, but that’s not it at all. I know it isn’t true.’

  ‘Is that why you accused me instead?’ At this, Pudding hung her head miserably, then sat back down on the damp grass.

  ‘I’m … I’m sorry about that. I was so confused, and I … I know you didn’t love him.’

  ‘That hardly makes me a murderess!’

  ‘But how could you not love Alistair? And why on earth did you marry him, if you didn’t?’

  With a sigh, and her head beginning to ache, Irene sat down next to Pudding.

  ‘People get married for all sorts of reasons,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Well, that’s no kind of answer.’ Pudding scrabbled in her sleeve for a handkerchief, and blew her nose. ‘They’re going to hang him, you know. Donny. If I can’t get to the bottom of this, they’re going to hang him.’

  ‘Maybe not … maybe, because of his injury …’

  ‘That just gives them an excuse.’ Pudding shrugged helplessly. ‘You heard that policeman, talking about him like he’s a mad dog that wants putting down. That’s not what he’s like! Just because he’s different now, because he’s a bit slower about things than he was, and can’t stand up for himself, they think they can paint him any which way they choose! And pin anything on him! Well, they can’t. It’s not fair.’

  ‘No. It isn’t,’ said Irene. ‘But, Pudding, there was nobody else around …’ She remembered again all the odd signs, and ill-defined feelings, and fought to keep the facts to mind.

  ‘Nobody was seen.’

  ‘Well, that’s rather the point, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll find out. I have to. This is Slaughterford – there are no real secrets here. Somebody will know. The person who did it knows, and the next person they saw after doing it – they know too. Somebody knows everything, here. I just have to find them.’

  ‘How will you do that?’

  ‘I … I don’t know yet,’ said Pudding, and started to cry again. Irene felt heat radiating off the girl, and smelt the salty damp where tears had got into the hair hanging around her face. Pudding exuded a kind of irrepressible vitality, even in her denuded state, which made Irene feel hollow, a husk, in comparison. She put her hand on the girl’s shoulder and squeezed it for a moment.

  ‘Come up to the house for a while. We’ll have cocoa, and there’s tons of food.’

  In the kitchen, now empty of Clara Gosling, Irene peered helplessly at the stove, trying to work out how to make it hotter, and where to put a pan to heat milk, and what size or type of pan she should use. She opened the hatch into which she’d seen Clara pouring coal but there was nothing to see, just a small pool of darkness, stinking of smuts. Pudding watched her curiously for a while.

  ‘You don’t know how to do it, do you?’ she said, eventually, incredulously. ‘You don’t know how to heat milk.’ Irene folded her arms and stared at the stove. She was incredibly tired.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve never done it before.’ She couldn’t quite bring herself to look at Pudding, but the girl groom got up and set about it without another word.

  ‘Can you fetch out the cocoa and sugar?’ she said, returning from the pantry with a huge covered jug of milk. ‘Back there, right-hand side, top shelf.’ Soon, the childhood smell of warm milk was filling the kitchen, rising with the shreds of steam from the pan, and in the soft glow of the single lamp, Irene remembered being ushered out of the kitchen as a child, when she’d been drawn down to it by the warmth and the light and the voices because she was cold, lonely and sleepless. Back upstairs where you belong, Miss Irene. If your mother catches you … The servants had tried to be kind, but they knew her parents too well. Pudding and Irene sat opposite one another at the table, and in the corner of the room the tap dripped steadily into the stone sink, adding to the small stalactite of scale on its lip.

  ‘You loved Alistair,’ said Irene. ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘Everybody did. Well – almost everybody.’ She glanced across at Irene. ‘I’ve known him all my life. That is, I had known him all my life.’ Having used the past tense, Pudding gulped. To ward off fresh tears, Irene spoke.

  ‘The reason I didn’t love him was not because I’m some … heartless thing,’ she said, floundering. But the night was dark and she had no idea of the time, and the wine had left her lucid and uncaring. ‘I know I haven’t … got to know any of you. So, just like with Donny, people here have thought and said whatever they’ve liked about me. It’s not that I don’t have a heart, but rather that I have a … a broken heart.’

  Pudding looked up at her in wonderment, as if this were a wildly exotic thing to have.

  ‘Have you really?’ she said. Irene nodded. The girl’s eyes were like headlamps. Irene shifted in her seat. The joy and terror of having said it aloud were irresistible. She hadn’t spoken a word about it since leaving London. ‘Superintendent Blackman said you’d run away from a scandal. He said you were a woman of dubious character.’

  ‘Well,’ said Irene, her face heating up, ‘perhaps I am. There was a scandal. And I was … I was a fool.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I … I fell in love with a married man,’ said Irene, and Pudding’s eyes grew even wider.

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘His name was … is … Finlay Campbell. And he was – is – married to a woman called Serena. Who was my friend.’ She looked up to see if Pudding would judge her badly for this, but she didn’t seem to.

  ‘And she found out that you loved him?’

  ‘It was worse than that. He was unhappy. He’d been unhappy for years, he told me. He told me he hadn’t known what love was until …’

  ‘Until he met you?’ Pudding breathed, wistfully, and Irene nodded. ‘How romantic.’

  ‘Serena was a friend but not a real one. That hardly makes sense, does it? There was every semblance of affection between us, but it was only skin deep, and underneath it was a kind of competition, a kind of … envy and distaste. I had the money, I was the right class, the right … style. She had all the ease and charm I’ve never had. She bewitched people – virtually enslaved them. She enslaved Fin. I don’t say any of that to excuse what happened.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We … had an affair. I loved him so much, I agreed to an elopement. I agreed to run away with him, and live with him until he was free of his marriage, and then we would get married ourselves. He promised me, and I never doubted him for a second. And it didn’t seem wrong, because it was true love.’

  Irene shut her eyes for a moment and was back there again, on the concourse at King’s Cross station, with her case in her hand and her coat buttoned up to her chin, on an unseasonably chilly day in early spring. She’d been shaking all over with pent-up nerves, excitement, love. All the mad terror of what she was doing, coupled with the certain knowledge that it was right – that she couldn’t be without him, and could no longer keep her feelings a secret from Serena, her parents, their friends. It was love – the love people spoke about and read about but never seemed to feel. Not like she was feeling it. Women in furs, and felt coats and hats, and plain brown drab; men hurrying to work with bowler hats and leather cases; the stink and hiss of the hot trains waiting, breathing out plumes of soot and steam. Her ears had been full of echoes – voices and footsteps and engines – all bouncing about in the iron rafters far above her head. Pigeons had strutted everywhere; a small child was on his own, crying, and when his mother found him she gathered him up, her face white. The station clock was a ponderous presence, the minute-hand moving with a reluctant clunk every sixty seconds. Irene had watched that clock for a long time. She’d been too nervous to eat breakfast, and the smell coming from a handcart selling roasted peanuts had made her stomach rumble. She’d spent a
long time wanting to buy two cones of them, one for her, one for Fin, but not daring to leave the agreed spot in case he missed her in the throng.

  The minute-hand of the station clock, black and ornate against a white background. How many times did she see it go around, getting colder, getting hungrier, becoming more afraid? At least sixty times, before she realised that Fin wasn’t coming to meet her. Their train – to Cambridge – pulled out of the station behind her, and she simply stood and let it. She stayed a long time after that as well, chilled to the bone, just in case he had simply been delayed. And in spite of the clock she had little idea what time it was when she finally left, and walked, dazedly, to the house where Fin and Serena had their apartment. She’d been sure something terrible must have happened to him, that he’d been injured in some horrible way; she could conceive of nothing else that might have detained him. Not until she saw the look of unabashed triumph on Serena’s face at the door, and, as she smiled the coldest smile Irene had ever seen, heard her say: What on earth do you want?

  ‘What did she say?’ said Pudding, hanging on Irene’s every word.

  ‘Not much,’ said Irene. ‘She came down, took my case and threw it into the street. All my things went everywhere, and blew about. She said Fin didn’t want to see me ever again. That my attempt to steal and disgrace him had failed.’

  ‘But … he approached you first, you said?’

  ‘Yes. Not that it matters, really. We were in it together.’

  ‘You can’t have believed what she said! Didn’t he come out to talk to you?’

  ‘He did.’ Irene recoiled from the memory. Fin, entirely cowed, Fin crushed, Fin too ashamed to look her in the eye. She still had no idea what had gone wrong, how Serena had found out, how she’d made him change his mind, and give her up. Perhaps it had only been that strange power she had over him, the corral he didn’t seem able to break free from. Perhaps it was something more cast iron than that – something she had over him. She swallowed painfully. ‘He told me to go. He just … stood there, while Serena called me such things … words I’d never heard her use before.’

  ‘And he didn’t defend you?’ Pudding was outraged. Irene shook her head. ‘The … the worm!’

  ‘Serena was just too strong for him. And she was his wife – is his wife. She told all our friends, my parents, everybody we knew – her version of events, of course. That I’d a passion for her husband and had seduced him into my bed, and tried to get him to elope with me, and had even thought he actually would.’ She shook her head again. ‘Not that there is a good version of the events, of course.’

  Pudding thought about it for a while, and Irene finished the last of her cocoa.

  ‘He can’t have loved you. Not really,’ Pudding concluded, crossly. ‘To give you up like that, and let you take all the blame.’ If the words were meant as a comfort, they had the opposite effect.

  ‘No … no, he loved me,’ said Irene. ‘I’m sure of it. At least … at least, I was sure of it.’

  ‘Perhaps he did, then,’ said Pudding, retracting in the face of Irene’s misery.

  ‘What does it matter now, anyway? It couldn’t matter less. He’s made his choice, one way or another.’ Her attempt to sound resigned to it was fake in her own ears. She thought of the mad, vain hope the wine had conjured only that evening – that she and Fin would somehow be reconciled. But she wondered then if that hope were still genuine, or merely a habit of the mind.

  ‘So you married Alistair out of … revenge?’

  ‘Revenge? No, not at all! I married him because he asked me, and he … he seemed a nice man. And he offered me a home away from London. And I … I couldn’t think what else to do. My parents wanted nothing to do with me, they told me to marry Alistair or I’d be cut off completely; none of my friends …’ She shook her head, and looked up at Pudding. ‘Those probably don’t seem like very good reasons to you, do they?’ Pudding looked down, blushing a bit.

  ‘It just doesn’t sound very fair on Alistair,’ she said quietly.

  ‘It wasn’t,’ Irene agreed. ‘But he knew it all, at least. He was right there, and saw it all happening, but he married me anyway. As much out of kindness as out of love, perhaps.’

  ‘Yes.’ Pudding sighed. ‘That sounds like Alistair. No wonder Miss H hasn’t warmed to you. Are there any sandwiches left? I’m ravenous.’

  ‘Tons, in the pantry. Help yourself.’

  Pudding came back to the table with a silver platter covered with a cloth, beneath which were a mixture of sandwiches – salmon, cucumber, cheese. She tucked in eagerly, then looked at Irene.

  ‘Aren’t you having any?’ she said. Irene shrugged a shoulder, and took a cheese sandwich as much out of politeness as anything. It tasted heavenly, and her stomach squeezed in utter delight as she swallowed, so she picked up another.

  ‘So you see,’ she said, ‘even though I didn’t love my husband as he should have been loved, I had no reason to wish him dead. He rescued me. He was the only chance I had.’ Pudding nodded.

  ‘The policeman thinks you might have seduced Donny into doing it for you,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t think he really thinks it. But perhaps he does. I thought he almost believed me, you see, when I said it wasn’t Donny. But it was just that he thought it might have not been Donny on his own.’

  ‘You don’t think that, do you? That it was me, I mean. Me and Donny.’

  ‘No,’ said Pudding, without hesitation. ‘You could be Queen Titania and he still wouldn’t have hurt Alistair for you. I’m … I’m sorry I accused you. It seems stupid now. All I wanted was for them to know it wasn’t Donny. But even that didn’t work – even when Superintendent Blackman thought it might be you, he still thought it was Donny as well. So it was a waste of time.’ They both reached for another sandwich, and ate in silence for a while, and it felt so good to have food inside her that Irene didn’t know how she’d survived so long without it. The tap dripped, and their thoughts were a mystery to one another. Irene looked at the girl sitting opposite her, and tried to imagine how hard it all must have been for her.

  ‘How old are you, Pudding?’ she asked. Pudding gave a tiny smile.

  ‘I was sixteen today, actually,’ she said. Her face fell. ‘My parents forgot. Not that I blame them. I almost forgot myself.’

  ‘Oh. That’s …’ Irene trailed off, not wanting to say awful, or tragic. ‘Too bad,’ she opted for, lamely.

  ‘I don’t think it’s been a birthday I’ll care to remember,’ Pudding said, quietly. Irene reached for another sandwich. ‘Will you help me, then?’ Pudding added then, her face lighting with sudden desperation.

  ‘In what way?’ said Irene, uneasily, feeling ill-equipped to be this girl’s ally. She still felt ill-equipped to be of use to anybody.

  ‘To find out who really killed Alistair, of course. To prove my brother is innocent of it.’

  ‘But I … I don’t know how to,’ she said, and Pudding sank again.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Neither do I.’

  The two of them stayed at the table until all the sandwiches were gone, and the petits fours as well, and fatigue was dragging heavily at both of them. Birds were starting to sing and the sky was turning gauzy as Pudding fell into a guest bed, still dressed, asleep before she was fully horizontal, and Irene watched over her for a little while – noticing that she looked even younger in her unconscious state, with her skin so smooth and clear, and her bushy curls flung out around her, and her mouth slightly open. She saw something angelic and something animal in Pudding then; an odd mixture of guts and innocence. Then she went up to the room she’d shared briefly with Alistair, where the beams still wriggled drunkenly across the ceiling, and in the final moments before she slept realised that she felt, in some intangible way, just a little better than before.

  7

  The Roots of Things

  The run of fair weather had gone on so long that people had begun to take it for granted –
there was no need to look out for signs the night before to know how the morning would dawn. The thundery rain that had fallen on the day of Alistair’s murder seemed to have been accepted as unnatural, just like his death; some people even said it had been nature’s response to the killing. Now, again, the sunshine could be relied upon. Blue skies, high white clouds, the river getting a little shallower each day, the water slowing down as though tired. The whole By Brook valley seemed to be slowing down – the baby birds had all fledged and breeding was over, so the dawn chorus was a half-hearted affair; the marsh marigolds along the riverbanks had softened from their first vibrancy into a kind of leggy languor. Slaughterford basked; its residents basked; nothing was done in a hurry now that haysel was over and harvest not yet begun in earnest. In times past, mill production would have suffered with the lowering water, but Slaughterford Mill was immune to that now, with its boilers and steam generators, and production was back to normal just a handful of days after the hiatus for Alistair’s funeral. George Turner was supervising the day-to-day running of things, as he had done before, and when he came up against a decision that Alistair would have made he consulted Nancy instead, who told him to do whatever he thought best.

  Down by the privy at the back of Spring Cottage, the rhubarb was half as high as Pudding, with leaves two feet across in places. The stalks were a violent magenta, gone too thick and tough to be eaten, and in the dank shade underneath, slugs gorged on the soggy ruins of rotted leaves. The garden was criss-crossed with their silver trails – and those of snails as well. The hostas and carnations had been eaten into oblivion. Louise Cartwright no longer cared to keep up her war on the creatures – once, she had collected them in a bucket and walked them down into the valley to tip them into a hedge, ignoring Ruth’s suggestion to apply a brick to them and have done. By the middle of the afternoon, when the sun was at its hottest, buzzards rode the thermals over the hills, so high up in the blue that their faint, triumphant cries could be heard when they were too distant for the eye to make out. It was glorious. It should have been glorious.