The Hiding Places

by Katherine Webb

  ‘Yes, and I’m about ready to lose patience with the girl,’ she said. ‘Why on earth can’t she just accept what’s happened, as I have had to accept it, and let us all move on?’

  ‘She loves her brother too much, I suppose,’ said Irene, carefully, glad not to have let on about her own role in Pudding’s covert investigation. Nancy sighed.

  ‘She does. Of course she does.’ She shook her head. ‘Perhaps I would be just the same if my own brother had done such a terrible thing. But the fact is that nobody can really know a man as damaged as young Donald – or what he might be capable of. Who knows why he did it? Perhaps Alistair did speak to him about those ruined rose bushes. Perhaps he even talked to him about finding work elsewhere. But perhaps it was simply something inside his own head. We can’t ever know what set him off.’

  ‘But don’t you think it’s odd that the … killing so resembles this other one, all those years ago?’

  ‘Everything about what has happened is odd; in the worst possible way.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘I simply do not wish to hear about it, Irene,’ Nancy snapped, and Irene held her tongue. There was no way to make Nancy feel any of the injustice Irene was feeling on Alistair’s behalf – as far as Nancy was concerned, her nephew’s killer was in gaol, and would get his just deserts. Her grief was all-consuming, and didn’t leave space for more considered emotions, like Irene’s. She looked around at the endless sweeps of green, the endless daisies and buttercups and clover, and it felt as though it had been summer forever, and that the summer would last forever, just like when she was a child. She felt as though time had slowed there in Slaughterford – as though the extraordinary events had isolated them from the rest of the world. As if the place needed to be any more isolated, she thought.

  Pudding knocked at the door after lunch, and to Irene’s surprise, Nancy invited her to come and sit with them and have some of the ice cream she herself had hardly touched.

  ‘Florence will sulk if it goes back to the kitchen, melted and unwanted.’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ said Pudding, but Irene could see that food was the last thing on her mind. She ate a bit, dutifully, her eyes roaming the room, her body tense. Irene found herself dreading what the girl would say next, and wishing that whatever it was she’d button it until Nancy had left the room. Irene had the sense that she and Pudding were stirring a very deep, very old pond, and she was starting to feel uneasy about what they might bring to the surface. Things that might horrify them; things that might bite. She knew they couldn’t stop yet, but she didn’t want to be seen doing it.

  ‘So, was there something about the horses you needed to discuss?’ said Nancy.

  ‘The horses? No – that is, not unless one of you wants to ride this afternoon?’ said Pudding, but Nancy shook her head.

  ‘I might,’ said Irene, hoping to forestall Pudding, but failing.

  ‘Oh. Good. Well, I spoke to P— Constable Dempsey about this other murder. He’s going to talk to Superintendent Blackman, and hopefully he’ll be looking into it.’ There was silence at the table. Pudding put down her spoon and hurried on. ‘He – Pete Dempsey, that is – suggested that I look into it myself. You know, ask some of the older people in the village who were around then and now, and see if they have any idea at all who was responsible for the murders, and—’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Pudding, you really do go too far,’ said Nancy. She pushed back her chair and stood up. ‘If anybody had had the first clue who was responsible for that girl’s death back then, don’t you think they’d have told the police?’

  ‘Well, yes – and maybe they did.’ Pudding’s face reddened. ‘I’m hoping that’ll be in the police records, and I can go and ask them about it. If they’re still around … But maybe there just wasn’t enough evidence to support—’

  ‘None of this will help your brother, child!’ said Nancy. ‘I hate to say it but it seems that somebody will have to. Donald attacked Alistair, and whether he meant to kill him or not, he did; and it is …’ She paused, not able to look at Pudding. ‘It is only right that he has been taken into custody.’ Pudding stared at Nancy in horror.

  ‘But how can you say that?’ she asked, meekly. ‘You know Donny!’

  ‘I knew him. Before the war. Pudding, I know how hard this is for you – don’t forget that I have also lost a brother I adored. Before you were even born. So if you’re about to tell me I don’t understand, then believe me, I do. But one must … face the facts, as they are, square on.’

  ‘But I’m trying to find out the facts!’ said Pudding, desperately. ‘And then I’ll face them. Donny told me it wasn’t him, and that he only found Mr Hadleigh lying there, and I believe him. I need to talk to Hilarius again, and Ma Tanner. And when did Jem start work here, do you remember? And I wanted to ask you, Nancy – when did your family first come to Slaughterford? Weren’t the Hadleighs here at the time of the first murder? Can you think of anybody you saw – perhaps a stranger – who you think could have …’ Pudding’s words broke against the cliff face of Nancy’s silence.

  ‘At a time like this, Pudding Cartwright, you’re asking me if I know who killed some peasant girl fifty years ago?’ said Nancy, quietly. ‘Go back to the yard, and look after the horses, and please stop creating more drama on top of the real crisis we already have.’

  Once Nancy had gone, Irene could breathe.

  ‘Oh, Pudding,’ she said. ‘You have to tread more softly around Nancy! I know you’ve known her a long time, but she’s under a terrible amount of strain. She might send you away if you keep bothering her, and don’t let her grieve in peace.’

  ‘I know,’ said Pudding, her eyes welling. ‘But I’m under strain too … and my family. And poor Donny, locked away in a cell.’

  ‘I wish he wasn’t. I wish none of this had happened! But it has, and …’ Irene wasn’t sure what to add. ‘I want whoever really did this to Alistair to be caught. You know I do. I’ll help as much as I can, but—’

  ‘Will you have a look through Alistair’s things, and find out if there’s anything there that might … explain his death?’

  ‘Would I do what?’

  ‘Have a look … through his papers and what have you. Perhaps there was something to do with the business that he hadn’t told anybody. Trouble of some kind …’

  ‘But that would be spying. Spying on my husband.’ It seemed an indecent thing to do.

  ‘But … Alistair’s dead, Irene,’ said Pudding. Irene blinked. Somehow this fact made the idea even less decent. ‘He can’t mind.’

  ‘But I … What exactly do you want me to look for? I’m sure there’ll be nothing about the Tanners in there …’

  ‘Forget the Tanners! I mean … perhaps it’s not him, after all. I don’t know. Or perhaps there’ll be clues to who might have hired Tanner in there. Anything! Anything that … might help explain anything.’ Pudding spread her hands helplessly. Irene watched her, uneasily, sympathetically, and saw the girl take a deep breath. ‘It’s only a week now until Donny goes before the magistrate. I only have one week to find something that could help him, and maybe make them let him out on bail. He’s … he’s not coping in gaol. He’s suffering, and I … I can’t stand that.’

  ‘All right,’ said Irene. Pudding’s fear and need were like a fog it was hard to see through, and they were contagious. ‘All right. But I expect most of the business correspondence is down at the mill.’

  ‘Well, you could look there, too.’ Pudding nodded, like it was all settled. She gripped her chair as though to push it back but then hesitated. ‘Irene, you looked … frightened when I first told you about this other murder – the first murder.’

  ‘Yes. Well,’ said Irene. For some reason, the statement made her feel guilty.

  ‘You looked as though you’d … almost expected it. Or not quite that. Like you knew already, and me telling you only reminded you.’

  ‘That’s more or less how it feels.’ Irene looked away, u
ncomfortably.

  ‘Has there been anything else? Do you know … what it was you were afraid of?’

  ‘Pudding, if I knew anything, I would tell you. The feelings I get are just that – feelings. Intuition, at best. I’d be worried if I thought you were relying on them, overly, and—’

  ‘But what if they’re right?’ said Pudding.

  ‘They might be, but they might not. I don’t believe it’s second sight or anything … supernatural …’ Irene shook her head. ‘It’s just the notion that something important has been … hit upon, on each occasion. It’s rather like … when you’re looking at your own reflection in a window, and then you suddenly realise there’s someone else on the other side of the glass. You have to change the way you’re looking at it. But it’s not that specific, you see.’

  ‘Well. Please say, won’t you, if you do think of anything,’ said Pudding, as she got up. ‘Or find anything. I’m sorry for upsetting Miss H. Would you tell her, when you see her? And do you really want to go for a ride?’

  ‘If it’d help, yes.’

  They rode for an hour, then Irene spent the rest of the afternoon in Alistair’s study, feeling horribly intrusive as she opened the drawers of his desk one by one, lifted the contents onto the top and went through it all, one item at a time. Though she found nothing that could possibly have made anyone want to be rid of him, she soon found herself drawn in, fascinated, peering through a window into the life he’d lived before she’d known him. There was a box of letters from his relatives in America, stacked neatly in order, like library cards; the envelopes getting smaller and more yellowed the further back in time they went. She took out the first one, which was dated April 1871, and had been written to Alistair’s father from his mother, Tabitha, before they were married. Curious, she took it out and read it – a very chaste kind of love letter that spoke a good deal about respect, regard and beneficial union, and very little about love or passion. But that had been the spirit of the age, she supposed; and Alistair had told her that his mother had been a very devout Catholic. She remembered Nancy calling her a papist delusionist, but then, given how Nancy had loved her twin, Irene doubted whether any woman could have been good enough for him.

  In another drawer, in a file labelled Sundries, was her own marriage certificate, and behind it Alistair’s parents’ one, issued in New York City on July 15th, 1872. Which answered the question of where the Hadleighs had been at the time of the murder of the girl down at the mill, Irene noted. Outside, the sky curdled to grey and thunder rumbled in the distance. Then it started to rain. The light in the study went flat and dim, and Irene found her interest waning, and all the letters and papers began to feel like what they were – remnants of past lives that she had no business looking at, which brought on a stifling, almost claustrophobic feeling. She flicked through more quickly, impatient to have done with the task.

  One other thing caught her attention before she finished the search. In the cupboard containing Alistair’s guns, binoculars, fishing tackle and the like, she found a box file of more papers, mostly old sports log books, postcards and maps, but in the bottom – deliberately hidden – a bundle of letters with Alistair’s own writing on the front, tied up with string and with a covering note wrapped around them. Dear Mr Hadleigh, the note read, in an elegant, sweeping script. I do regret any pain I have caused you, but must ask you to cease writing to me. It does no good, you see, for either of us. You were kind enough to release me from our engagement, for which I will always be indebted to you. Surely you understand that no amount of debate, and no set of circumstances, can possibly cause me to change my mind, having taken such steps as I have taken? It was signed Miss Annabelle Cross, and dated July 12th, 1914.

  Irene felt a thrill as she read it, a peculiar jolt, like she’d looked up, thinking she was alone, to find somebody else in the room. She’d quite forgotten that Alistair had been engaged elsewhere before proposing to her – and Nancy’s claim to have extricated him. If it were true, then she’d done it by scaring the girl off somehow, not by talking her nephew out of it – just as Cora McKinley had said. She wondered what on earth Nancy could have said or done to cause the relationship to collapse so completely; she wondered if Miss Annabelle Cross had known that war would be declared so soon after she broke it off with Alistair, or that she would be sending him into battle with a broken heart. And his heart had been broken. Irene read only a few of his letters to Annabelle, first adoring and then frantic, but they were enough. She sat with the bundle in her lap, not wanting to spy on his heartbreak any longer, and feeling strange to find he’d loved another woman. Loved her enough to keep his own letters to her hidden away – because she had touched them, Irene supposed. Because they had traces of her skin, her scent; were relics of her.

  So perhaps Alistair’s quiet manner hadn’t only been a result of the war, but of this heartbreak; and perhaps his sympathy for Irene’s plight had been based as much on understanding how it felt to be publicly dropped by a person you adored as on his infatuation with her. She wondered if he’d ever known that his aunt Nancy had been the reason for Annabelle’s flight. Somehow, she doubted it. She sat and tried to decide how she was feeling, and whether or not the needling resentment at the back of her mind was a touch of jealousy. Ridiculous, given that she’d made Alistair live with her continued love for Fin for weeks, and hadn’t given herself the chance to fall in love with Alistair. There were no clues as to what had become of Annabelle, and Irene hoped that Pudding wouldn’t think it was relevant, and want to track her down – she had no wish to trespass any further into her husband’s humiliation.

  She kept the bundle to give to Pudding and put everything else back as she’d found it, then went over to where her wedding photograph stood, on the mantelpiece. She picked it up and stared hard into Alistair’s face, rendered in shades of grey. The happiness in his eyes was genuine. She felt she could see his whole soul right there in the picture – his kindness, his tolerance, his capacity for joy, coming off him like a soft, pale light. Her own face looked like that of a stranger. She looked like a shell, absent from herself. She hadn’t even managed a smile, just a neutral expression like one painted on a doll. Shame washed through her. She didn’t know how Alistair could have stood it, marrying her when she was in such a state. Alistair had deserved to be loved, of that she was wholly certain.

  ‘If we’d had more time, I would have done,’ Irene told him, surprising herself by speaking out loud. ‘I know I would. I only needed a little time.’ Suddenly, she desperately needed him to hear her, and believe her, but of course he never could. She kissed his image, on impulse, leaving a smudge from her lips on the glass. As she rubbed it away with her cuff she felt her anger on his behalf burn brighter, cleaner. She hadn’t been much use to him while he was alive. Charles McKinley had said that marrying her had made Alistair happy, but Irene didn’t feel as though that were at all good enough. She was going to make damned certain she was useful to him now. She put her wedding picture back carefully, slipped out of the study and closed the door as softly as she could, to make up for having invaded so completely.

  As the light began to fail, and cooking smells seeped from the kitchen, Irene put on boots, a mackintosh and an oilskin hat, and went out for a walk in the rain. The claustrophobic feeling of the old papers had persisted, and after so many weeks of sunshine – the weather so settled it had come to seem as though she were waking up each morning cursed to live the same day, over and over again – she wanted to feel the rain hitting her head and hear it splashing under her feet. The low sky flickered yellow now and then, but the thunder stayed quiet and distant – more of a rumbling in her bones than a sound. She walked down into the centre of the village, near to where the mill steamed and thumped, and stood a while on the hump bridge across the river, watching the way the rain pocked the water. A pair of ducks made their way upstream, paddling laboriously. The banging of an engine got louder, and she watched a lanky lad, his hat pulled down low over his
eyes and his face maudlin, drive a load of half-stuff across from Rag Mill in the little motorised wagon. Then, bracing up, Irene took the path that ran right through the mill. She passed the old farmhouse where Alistair – and where the girl, Sarah – had been killed, and had to force herself to look at it. The painted wooden door, closed now with the rain, a light on inside, and George Turner at his desk by a downstairs window, carefully inserting a sheet of paper into the micrometer. The sight of the place still turned her throat dry; she had a powerful urge to be somewhere – anywhere – else. She made herself walk slowly past, and then on through the yard with the towering brick generator house on her right and the beater house on her left, across the bridge and up to Germain’s Lane. There she turned back towards the village, because she didn’t want to go past the Tanner place. It was getting late, anyway; the thick clouds made it darker, and seem later still.

  Past High Bank, the row of three cottages with the shop at one end, Irene turned off the lane, went through the gate and into the paddock in which the church sat, walled off, all alone. This was the short cut to the farm that Pudding often used, though it was steep and you had to dodge the cowpats. The rain shone on the grass and the ground squelched, and Irene went slowly so as not to slip. She looked over the low wall of the graveyard and saw how the onslaught was ruining Alistair’s flowers – stripping off the petals, battering the foliage. She hated to think how upset Nancy would be at the sight, so even though she was getting cold, and the rain had found a way through the seams of her mackintosh at the shoulders, she went in to see what tidying she could do. She had her face down, at the graveside, and was wondering where to start when she became aware of someone approaching, and looked up with a gasp. A tall, grey-headed man was coming towards her from around the church, and with a thrill of fear she recognised Tanner. He didn’t seem steady on his feet, and she wondered if he’d seen her – or would see her before he barrelled into her. There was nowhere for her to hide from him, and she stood rooted to the spot until he was within two strides of her and still hadn’t slowed. Then, inadvertently, she cried out in alarm.