Pudding caught herself imagining the summer as though Alistair hadn’t been killed – as though he were still alive, and Donny were at home, and life were going on as it had before. It hadn’t been perfect, she reminded herself, but by God it had been better than it was now. The eleven days since his death had been like a bad dream in which familiar things looked wrong, and frightening. She kept waiting for a return to reality, only for the permanence of what had happened to reassert itself with sickening clarity. She hated to see Slaughterford returning to normal life; the shock of Alistair’s murder being assimilated into its long history, like a rock thrown into the river – there were still ripples, but the surface had closed over, and the flow continued, unabated, as it ever had. People still talked of little else, but in doing so they had begun to make it commonplace. Donny’s involvement was spoken of in tragic terms – a young man broken by the war. Shocking, terrible, but not shameful. Mrs Glover in the shop had even said as much to Pudding. Nobody’s blaming your family, Pudding. As though Pudding ought to have been grateful to them for that, or reassured. She’d paid the shillings for the tea and sugar and left without a word. And she determined – increasingly, every day – to keep the water from smoothing over altogether. The mill might be running again, and the men back at work, and the crops ripening from green to palest gold; the main topic of conversation might have moved on to what Mrs Hadleigh might choose to do with the mill and land, and what that meant for the workers and tenants, but Pudding wasn’t going to let it rest. She wasn’t going to let the water close over Donny.
Her early incredulity at his arrest had hardened into steady dread when nobody else was caught – when nobody else was even questioned. When it became abundantly clear that the police believed they had their man. She wanted to shake them all. Their willingness to accept Donny’s wrongful arrest and move on was excruciating. She didn’t know how they could think it of him – Donny, who’d been captain of the boys’ cricket team three years in a row; who’d once run straight into the carpenter’s shed when it was on fire because the man’s elderly terrier was sitting inside, stupefied by the danger; who’d once eaten an entire tray of lardy cake for a bet, and had such a bad stomach the next day he couldn’t go to school. This was the Donald Cartwright they believed could pick up a shovel and batter to death a man he had known and liked all his life. Pudding remembered the white flash of Donny’s smile in the gloaming, shot back over his shoulder as he’d sneaked out to meet Aoife one night just before the war; safe in the knowledge that Pudding wouldn’t betray him. Safe in the knowledge that she loved him – adored him – and wouldn’t let him down.
Pudding avoided talking to people as much as she could, worried that sooner or later something would burst out of her – something angry and desperate and harmful. She walked to work with her head down, watching her marching feet. Not that avoiding people was difficult. In fact, her friends and neighbours seemed to welcome it, and paused as she passed, silencing themselves. If it hadn’t been for Hilarius, Irene and Nancy, Pudding could have gone whole days without talking to anybody other than her parents. But on the morning a message came from the police station in Chippenham that Donny’s hearing before the magistrate had been fixed for two weeks’ time, Pudding found she had to talk to somebody. The magistrate would hear the facts of the case, and the evidence against Donny, and would decide what exactly he would be sent to trial for: manslaughter due to diminished responsibility, diminished understanding of the results of his actions, and the fact that he probably hadn’t intended, and certainly hadn’t planned to kill Alistair; or wilful murder, for which he would certainly hang if found guilty.
Two weeks. Pudding read the note with her heart walloping right up into the back of her throat as panic gripped her. She had just two weeks to find out who was really behind the attack, or to at least raise enough doubt about somebody else being involved that the police would keep looking, and Donny wouldn’t be tried for wilful murder. And in spite of Irene Hadleigh’s tentative support, she had no idea what to do next. Irene had asked, the day before, what she could do to help and what Pudding would do next, even though she was the adult, and eight years older than Pudding. And Pudding had no answers for her.
‘Well, can’t you think of something?’ she’d cried, the last time, pushed beyond the bounds of good manners. Irene had flinched slightly, and gone away with a quiet apology, which had made Pudding feel awful. It was the twenty-eighth of July, a Friday; and on Friday, August eleventh, her brother’s fate would be all but sealed.
Thomas Hancock turned his hat in his hands, looking profoundly ill at ease. He was a small man, bony at the shoulder, widening to a pot belly perched on skinny legs. Irene guessed his age at around sixty, but it was hard to tell with some of the villagers. Their lives were lived outdoors, in all weathers, so their faces were beaten and creased from an early age. Thomas came with a powerfully organic aroma, reminiscent of the sheep he farmed.
‘Won’t you sit down, Mr Hancock?’ she said, and the old man cast a horrified look around at the floral furnishings of the sitting room. He was dressed for farm work in a smock from the previous century, over canvas trousers and caked boots, and Irene knew she’d brought him into the wrong room, but when Florence had announced him she hadn’t had the first clue who he was or what he might want. She’d pictured some other acquaintance of Alistair’s, come to commiserate.
‘Beggin’ pardon, ma’am, best I don’t,’ he said. Irene cleared her throat and tried to think of some way to put the man at his ease, difficult when she was so on edge herself. She attempted to smile, but that only made him fidget more.
‘How may I help you?’
‘Ar. ’Tis only this, ma’am. ’Tis this.’ He paused and looked down at his hands, and Irene agonised for a moment over whether to instruct him to call her Mrs Hadleigh, instead of ma’am. ‘What with our Brandon gathered to the Lord last winter, and I with the farmer’s lung … what with all o’ that, we’d fallen behind with the rent. On the cottage and land, see. Only your husband, God rest his soul, he told I ’tweren’t a problem, and I could make it up through the year as best I could, see?’ Thomas cast her a guilty, beseeching look, and flinched from Irene’s frown, which in fact was only down to having to concentrate to penetrate his accent. ‘I know we must pay up, ’twas ever my design to. Only I hadn’t quite made it up when he … when he were taken. I suppose … I do suppose if the estate is sold up, such debts as mine will be called in.’ He studied the hat in his hands again – a battered felt affair, dark with grease around the brim. ‘Any new owner should want to begin afresh, I should think,’ he mumbled.
The penny dropped, and Irene blinked. It appalled her that an elderly man should feel he had to come to her – quite literally cap in hand – to ask her for mercy. She felt, quite definitely, that she hadn’t the right. She didn’t belong in Alistair’s place; it was a situation she had never contemplated. There has been a terrible mistake. She had to stop the words speaking themselves.
‘Mr Hancock,’ she said, shaking her head and dropping all attempts to sound authoritative. He looked up at her, and the fear in his eyes affronted her. ‘You may continue to repay any arrears by whatever arrangement you had with my husband. I shan’t be calling in any such debts, I assure you.’ Thomas brightened.
‘Then … you shan’t be selling up, ma’am? There’s to be no new squire?’
‘I … I can assure you, you and your family will not be turned out of your home,’ Irene hedged. ‘I will see to it personally.’
‘Well, now …’ Thomas Hancock nodded. ‘Thank you most kindly, ma’am. Thank you. You have taken such a weight from my shoulders … You’re as good and as kind as your late husband, God rest his soul, and I shall see to it that folks start to know of it.’
‘They think otherwise, then?’ said Irene, and the old man looked sheepish.
‘Beg pardon, ma’am.’
‘No, you haven’t offended me. No one could ever be as good or kind as
Alistair was, in any case,’ she said, quietly.
‘Ar, that may be so,’ said the old man. ‘There never was a worse loss, round these parts.’
When the old man had gone, Irene stayed a while in the sitting room, lost in sombre thoughts that were beginning to feel like an inner blockade of some kind – one that she probed, uncomfortably, constantly, trying to dismantle. Nancy interrupted them, wrinkling her nose from the doorway.
‘Here you are – what is that unholy stink?’
‘Oh – one of the tenants came to see me. Thomas Hancock.’
‘Woolly Tom? That explains it.’ Nancy grunted, and crossed to open the window. ‘I do wish the peasants would keep outdoors. They smell worse than the collies on a wet day – why on earth did you bring him in here?’
‘I didn’t know who he was,’ said Irene, with a shrug.
‘Asking for another extension on the missed rent, I’ll wager.’
‘It seemed kind to agree to it. He seemed most … anxious.’
‘Of course he’s anxious, he’ll never be able to pay it back. Alistair knew as much, but he let them linger on. Soft as butter,’ she muttered, without any real feeling.
‘I intend to honour all such agreements my husband made with tenants and workers alike,’ said Irene, with more heat than she’d intended. Nancy gave her a long look.
‘You must do as you see fit,’ she said, stonily, walking back towards the door.
‘It’s the right thing to do, wouldn’t you say?’ Irene called after her, not wanting to start a row. Nancy turned, and softened.
‘I suppose it is,’ she said, and left. Irene sat quietly for a while longer, and realised that her inner blockade was anger. She realised just how furious she was.
She was angry for Alistair, to have been robbed of his entirely blameless life. She was angry for all the people who relied on him for their livelihoods. She was angry with the world for letting it happen, and in some amorphous way with herself, for lying in bed while it did. She was angry that she was now alone, when for a heartbeat it had seemed as though she might actually start to live again. She was angry with whoever had killed him. Very, very angry. And it was at that moment she realised that she didn’t believe it had been Donald Cartwright. Her anger was not directed at him but at some unknown, faceless other person; some figure on the edge of her vision; shifting, moving, always out of reach, and vanishing when she turned her head. It was maddening. She closed her eyes tightly and tried to see; tried to piece the fragments of thought and feeling and impulse into some kind of whole picture, but it wasn’t long before she was forced to give up. Along with the anger came a small measure of Pudding Cartwright’s desperation that her brother had been blamed, and the real killer was being allowed off scot-free. And yet, when Pudding had asked for Irene’s help after the funeral two nights before, Irene had hedged, and stepped back, and been uncertain and afraid. As she had always been. She got up, and went out to the stables.
She found Pudding bent in half with one of Bally Girl’s hooves between her thighs; she was smearing the inside with a sticky ointment of some kind. Pudding’s eyes were red-rimmed, and her cheeks looked chapped.
‘Hello,’ said Irene, still keeping a safe distance from the horse. ‘What’s that you’re doing?’
‘Oh. She always gets cracked heels when the ground is this hard. See here, where the bulbs have gone all shrivelled?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Irene lied.
‘The grease will help to soften it all.’ Pudding put the hoof down and wiped her hands on a rag. ‘Did you want to go riding?’
‘No. Well, perhaps, later. I wanted to talk to you about … about your brother.’ At this, Pudding was immediately alert. ‘I never really gave you an answer, when you asked for my help the other night. But the thing is … the thing is …’ Irene paused, suddenly beset by doubt. Her feelings of unease and prescience might all be fiction; she simply couldn’t tell. She might be encouraging Pudding into a false and damaging hope; engaging in a dangerous game of some kind. She might be about to interfere in serious matters that were no concern of hers, and make them worse. Irene checked herself. Alistair’s murder was most certainly a concern of hers. ‘The thing is, I’m really not at all sure of your brother’s guilt.’
Pudding gasped, and took an involuntary step towards Irene. She simply stared for a while, as though lost for words.
‘But … all those things you said about him being found with the shovel, and all that?’ she said, in the end.
‘I know. I might have been trying to convince myself, I think. Because, you see, I have a feeling about it. That sounds terribly feeble, I know. I shall try to explain.’ So she told Pudding about her cousin Gilbert, and how he’d died; she told her about the other times she’d had odd feelings like that, down the years. ‘It’s always been quite rare – just a handful of times – but then, since I came here, there have been several. And somehow … I don’t know how, but somehow I feel as though they’re … connected. Connected to what’s happened, I mean.’ She paused, and tried to decipher Pudding’s expression. It seemed entirely likely that the girl would think her mad. Irene was oddly breathless, her pulse too quick. ‘It all sounds very … fishy, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘Quite fantastic. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything.’
‘Well, what feelings have you had since you got here? About what?’ said Pudding, with a slight frown.
‘The first one was when we found that old doll in the schoolroom chimney. That one was very strong. It was almost as though I recognised it – you know when you’ve seen a place or a person before, but you can’t for the life of you remember where, or when? Then … then of course there was the very odd way Tanner reacted to it when he saw it, and Ma saying change was coming … That wasn’t quite the same, but it must have been significant, don’t you think? Change has certainly come, after all.’
‘It has.’ Pudding’s voice sounded older than her years. Irene went on to describe the odd fire she’d found in the house on a hot day, which nobody would lay claim to having lit. ‘Who could it have been, if it wasn’t Nancy, or the servants?’ said Pudding.
‘Well,’ said Irene. ‘That’s the thing. Who? And the other time I felt anything odd was …’ She hesitated. ‘Well, it was when I met Hilarius. The groom. And every time I have met him since.’
‘Hilarius?’ Pudding exclaimed. ‘Well, that can’t be right! Hilarius is fine … he’s a friend. Of sorts.’
‘I don’t mean to speak ill of him, Pudding. I just … I felt some oddness. A darkness. That’s the only way I can describe it. Like he cast more of a shadow than he ought to have done.’ She stopped talking because Pudding was shaking her head.
‘People have always taken against him because he’s foreign, and not one of them,’ she said.
‘That’s not the reason, and I’m not set against him. I was just trying to tell you everything. I mean … he could have lit the fire in the house; he is here all the time, after all.’
‘Tending to the shires or sleeping, yes. I’d be willing to wager he’s never once set foot inside the actual house—’
‘He has,’ said Irene, suddenly and inexplicably certain of it. ‘Sorry.’
‘Well,’ said Pudding. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘Cup of tea?’
Irene sat on a stool in the tack room while Pudding set a kettle of water to boil on the tiny stove. The small room smelled strongly of saddle soap, leather and neatsfoot oil, and Irene felt out of place in her skirt and blouse. She crossed her legs awkwardly, and clasped her hands over one knee as Pudding spooned tea leaves into a chipped brown pot. ‘I didn’t think you’d want to help, really,’ said Pudding, not looking up. ‘I only asked because of … of everything being so desperate. But you’re the first person to say they don’t believe Donny’s guilty.’ She looked over at Irene with such a potent mixture of hope and fear that Irene said a silent prayer that they were right. ‘Even old Jem, and Nancy … They’re all very sorry, but they all
think it was him.’
‘If nothing else, he had no reason to whatsoever, from what I gather,’ said Irene. ‘No reason to lose his temper, even.’
‘Exactly!’ said Pudding keenly. ‘That’s what the superintendent said – that he always likes to know why, to be sure he has his man. He’s decided that Donny doesn’t need a reason, but he does! He does! He would never have just … attacked him! And I know that Alistair – I mean, Mr Hadleigh – wouldn’t have said anything to Donny about the broken roses. He told me as much. Not that Donny would have been angry if he had, only sad, and—’
‘Pudding,’ Irene said, to halt her. ‘Pudding, please. There’s no need to try to convince me.’
‘Sorry.’ Pudding took a deep breath, and Irene saw how much sheer willpower alone was holding her together. She felt a flash of admiration for the girl, and then shame at the thought of how completely she herself had collapsed in the face of adversity. Collapsed and let it all march right over her.
‘Don’t be. I think the superintendent is right. If we can find out who wanted to kill him, and why, then … well, then we can’t help but find the person who did it.’
‘But how do we do that? There’s nobody! Everybody loved Alistair.’
‘Clearly, not everybody,’ said Irene, quietly. There was an uneasy pause, then she went on. ‘I can’t help thinking about Mr Tanner. He certainly seemed … upset about something, when we saw him at his home that time. Very upset. And he is, by all accounts, the violent type.’
‘Oh, terribly violent!’ said Pudding, savagely mashing the tea leaves in the pot. ‘But he has an alibi, remember?’
‘Yes, I heard. But it’s not so very far to Biddestone, is it? Couldn’t he have come back in between being put to bed, so to speak, and being put out in the morning?’
‘There’d have been plenty of time. But the landlord said he was there all night; he said he was unconscious with drink.’
The Hiding Places Page 22
