The Hiding Places

by Katherine Webb

  On a whim, Irene went to fetch the doll from where she’d stowed it, wanting to see it, and perhaps provoke again the feeling it had given her, in case it was any clearer this time. But it had gone from the drawer. She pulled open a few more drawers, in case she’d remembered wrong, though she knew she hadn’t, but the doll was not in any of them. Irene went to ask the housekeeper.

  ‘I don’t make it my business to take things out o’ drawers in the family rooms, Mrs Hadleigh,’ Clara told her, stiffly.

  ‘No, I’m not accusing you of anything, Mrs Gosling. I just wondered—’

  ‘Nor Florence, neither. She’s a good girl,’ said the housekeeper, folding her arms.

  ‘Right you are,’ said Irene, retreating. She found Nancy looking through invoices for sheep drench and pig pellets in the corner of the back sitting room where she had her desk. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Nancy, only I’ve misplaced that old doll we found in the chimney of the schoolroom. I just wondered if you’d seen it anywhere?’

  ‘You’ve what?’ Nancy peered up over her reading glasses, and Irene marvelled that after so many weeks under the same roof, and with the tumult of the emotions they’d survived, she still couldn’t read a thing from Nancy’s face.

  ‘That doll we found in the chimney. I put it in a drawer up in our room, and now I can’t find it.’

  ‘Well,’ said Nancy, and blinked. ‘I expect Clara put it out with the rubbish, where it belonged.’

  ‘She says not – quite adamantly.’

  ‘Well, gracious, Irene, I’m afraid I haven’t a clue,’ Nancy said with some asperity. ‘Is it terribly important?’

  ‘I suppose not. It’s just … strange, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t know why you wanted to keep it anyway. It was hideous.’ Nancy adjusted her glasses and returned to the invoices with such immaculate unconcern that Irene’s nameless unease increased.

  She was halfway across the yard to see Pudding when she stopped. Old Hilarius was sweeping out the cob house, which was one of Pudding’s jobs, and she realised at once that the wrongness of the morning was that Pudding wasn’t there. Not even the day of Alistair’s death – the day of her brother’s arrest – had she not turned up for work. Irene turned and searched the yard, then stared out at the paddocks; all the horses were there, grazing, swishing their tails, not being ridden by Pudding. Anxiously, she suppressed her reluctance and went over to Hilarius, who had stopped sweeping and was watching her with his far-off eyes. The summer had put a deep crimson shine across his hawk’s beak of a nose, and turned every other scrap of exposed skin the colour of saddlery.

  ‘Hilarius, has Pudding not come up today?’ Irene asked. The old man shook his head but didn’t speak. Irene looked around again. ‘Well, it’s odd, isn’t it? I don’t like it. There isn’t a phone anywhere in the village, is there? I shall have to go up to them. Is Dundee in?’ she said.

  ‘Out. Trouble, you reckon? Quicker to walk,’ said Hilarius. ‘You know the footpath to Spring Cottage, far side of the river?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Irene. ‘I’ll go right away.’

  ‘I’ll come along.’ Hilarius leant the broom against the wall. ‘She wanted to be careful,’ he muttered. ‘I never said, when I should o’ said. She wanted to be careful.’

  ‘Pudding ought to have been careful? Careful of what? What’s happened?’ said Irene, suspiciously, as the old man led her out of the yard, but before he could answer, the creaking of a bicycle chain and the sound of laboured breathing stopped them, and Constable Pete Dempsey pedalled up the hill towards them.

  ‘Mrs Hadleigh,’ he gasped, swallowing, fighting for breath. ‘I’m looking for Pudding. Is she here?’

  ‘No – we were just going to try to find her. Is she all right? What’s happened?’

  ‘I don’t know – I don’t know where she is, but we have to find her! The most unbelievable thing has happened!’

  * * *

  Clemmie was awake before dawn. She slid out from under the blankets, and tucked Betsy’s doll under her arm. It reminded her of Eli, in a strange way – it was the one thing, besides herself, that had been in the place where she still pictured him. In the quiet dark she ran one hand over her middle, where there was definitely a bump now – a tautening of the skin, the flesh beneath less giving. The baby was growing: safe, well, on its way. Betsy’s doll would be its first birthday present, Clemmie decided, and when she thought of that day – the day she would finally hold the piglet – she pictured a roaring fire in Weavern farmhouse; it would be winter, and her mother would be red-faced and clammy from the heat, and she herself red-faced and serene; she imagined the baby’s first cries softening towards sleep; her sisters hovering about, and Eli upstairs with her father, waiting, possibly drinking; or out at work on the land, if it came in the daytime. She willed this future into being, as she hurried up the path between the fields, and along Weavern to Germain’s Lane.

  She had managed to say Isaac in front of Mrs Tanner. It might have seemed a small thing to most people, but to Clemmie it was huge. But she worried that even that one word had been too much to give away – or rather that that one particular word had been the wrong one to say to Eli’s mother, who loved her son but was married to Isaac, a man who would not tolerate disloyalty. Mrs Tanner had asked many more questions after Clemmie had managed to say it, but none of them had been the right ones, and Clemmie hadn’t managed to say another word. She never could when she was upset or afraid – it took focus, and as much calm dissociation as she could muster, when instead she was hounded by the feeling that time was somehow running out. Rose still watched her daily, and her sisters pestered her with their theories and ideas and all their wrong questions, and she knew she needed a peaceful place. So she was going to the mill, to Alistair Hadleigh’s empty office, to find it.

  The mill was quiet; the first shift hadn’t yet started and there was almost nobody about. Two men crossed the yard, their footsteps echoing in the early calm, but they were used to seeing Clemmie and paid her no mind. The air was as still and smooth as deep water; softly grey, neither cold nor warm. She waited outside the old farmhouse until she was sure that the foreman, with his red whiskers, was not inside. However kind he was, she was sure she wouldn’t be allowed up to Alistair’s office by herself. Satisfied, she crossed from the lee of a storehouse and slipped inside. Up in Mr Hadleigh’s room she shut the door behind her, softly.

  The office was cool, steady and still. Immediately, Clemmie felt steadier herself. She leant against the door and let the breath run out of her lungs. His desk, his books and papers, his heavy wooden chair, the brass instruments he used to check the paper – all were unchanged by his absence. It was subtly different without him – as though a piece of furniture had been moved out of its normal place and she couldn’t put her finger on what had changed. Someone had brought up a bucket of coal for the scuttle, and had left it and a grubby shovel against the wall by the hearth, which would never have happened if Mr Hadleigh had been there. But it was still the room in which, under Alistair’s tutelage, she had managed to say more words than anywhere else. At once, she began to remember some of the things he’d made her try – breaking a word into its separate parts and saying each part on its own – in the wrong order, even – rather than trying to run all the sounds together; starting with the second sound a word made rather than the first, if the first wouldn’t come; using a rhythm, like in a clapping game, and almost turning the word into a song. She put her back to the window, closed her eyes, imagined Mr Hadleigh there, and got to work.

  The sun slid higher, flooding the sky outside with colour, but Clemmie didn’t notice. She hummed some sounds, and sang others, and spoke the ones she could. She went through the two phrases of her declaration in her head until she knew them back to front and inside out, and could come at them sideways, surprising her tongue with them. Some were easier than others. Isaac, she could say with relative ease, but heard refused to take any kind of shape. She could say Mr Hadle
igh well enough, as long as she left off the H; and she could say he is the one almost fluently, as long as she left out guilty. Other parts of her statement dodged and darted out of her reach, or tied her up in long minutes of agonised silence, but she persevered, and tried not to let herself get angry, or impatient, or wound up. It was exhausting; she could feel the blood pounding hotly in her face. At one point she realised she had Betsy’s doll in a chokehold, her fingers gouging holes in the fabric and disfiguring its face. When she felt despair creeping up on her, and felt it all slipping out of her grasp, she went back to the phrases she had mastered. Mr Hadleigh. He is the one. Over and over. Immersed in the sounds and the labour of it, she forgot where she was and didn’t notice time pass. And then the office door was flung open without warning, and Clemmie gasped in fright.

  10

  Two Confessions

  Pudding went through to the lock-ups at the back of Chippenham police station with a feeling she couldn’t name. Her pulse was ticking in her fingertips, and it didn’t feel as though her head were connected properly to her body. Just a few weeks ago – the longest weeks of her life – she’d been there to visit Donny; now she was there to visit Alistair Hadleigh’s real killer. A tall man, almost elderly but not quite, was sitting hunched on the narrow bench, just as Donny had sat. He looked up as Pudding came to stand in front of the iron bars that ran from floor to ceiling, caging him, and he was at once familiar and unknowable to her. A strange expression worked across his face, like clouds crossing the sun; it was an expression his face looked ill-built for – like years without practice had left it unsuited to anything so tender. But it vanished again as he stood up, hidden by resentment and well-worn anger lines. Pudding took a step backwards as Eli Tanner came to the bars.

  ‘Have you come to crow?’ he said. His breath was stale, his grey hair dirty and his chin furred with whiskers. Pudding swallowed, and shook her head.

  ‘To say thank you,’ she said. Tanner was silent, waiting. ‘They’ve … they’ve let my brother go,’ she said, still hardly able to believe it. ‘He’s at home now – Superintendent Blackman brought him in the motor car. Donny thought it was the best fun ever; he had this huge grin on his face by the time they got home …’ She trailed off, realising she was gabbling. ‘Why did you do it?’ she said.

  ‘It weren’t right, them hanging the lad when he never touched Hadleigh. Why’d he have to go and pick up that shovel, and carry it away? Why’d he have to go and do that, the gormless bugger? I had my alibi all sorted up at the pub … I had ’em convinced I was out of it, so I could slip away and back come morning, and not be seen. The coppers wouldn’t ’ave known where to look, till he went in and picked up that bloody shovel. I thought I could let him swing for it, with him being dummel, and half shot-away. But I couldn’t. She wouldn’t have wanted me to. It was like the kit rabbit I let go for her, back when first we met – it would ’ave been a wrong thing. A wrong killing. I knew it then and I know it now.’

  ‘No – I mean, I understand why you’ve confessed, and I’m … I’m glad you have. But I meant to ask why you killed Mr Hadleigh in the first place.’ Tanner stared at her, hard and unreadable. Pudding waited a good while, but he didn’t reply. ‘Please, I … I have to know,’ she continued, her throat tightening. ‘I mean, he was … such a good man. Such a kind man. I’m sure he’d never hurt a soul in his whole life … Was it because you were fired from the mill? Were you … drunk when you did it?’

  ‘That’s what folk say, is it?’ Eli grabbed the bars angrily, putting his face up close to them. ‘That a Tanner’d kill for so small a slight? That I would – kill a man that showed me and my family more respect than anyone, because I’d had too much beer? And you believe it, do you?’

  ‘But why then?’

  ‘I’ll tell you for why!’ Tanner yanked at the bars but they didn’t budge, so he jolted himself instead. ‘He killed the one person I loved more than any other! He killed a girl as innocent as a newborn!’

  ‘What? What girl?’ Pudding shook her head. ‘Alistair never killed anyone!’

  ‘I did for him same as he did for her. In that old farmhouse, cut down with a shovel.’

  ‘You can’t mean …’ Pudding’s mind ran to catch up. ‘You can’t mean Sarah Martock, the “Maid of the Mill”?’

  ‘Matlock. Her name was Matlock, not Martock. That weasel from the newspaper wrote it down wrong, then everyone copied his mistake. Sarah was her given name but she weren’t ever called that,’ said Eli, his voice thick with grief. ‘She was called Clemmie.’

  ‘But that was fifty years ago!’ said Pudding. ‘Alistair wasn’t even born!’

  ‘My Clemmie. We were to be wed.’ Eli wasn’t listening to Pudding; he was in the past, looking at a face she couldn’t see. ‘I only found out about her real name after she died; her mother told me it. To me she was Clemmie, for Clematis – nicknamed after that mad hair of hers; and it did look just like a winter hedgerow, snowy with the stuff. She were that lovely.’ The old man shook his head. ‘She were that lovely she stole your breath away. I should ’ave come straight after her from Swindon. But I wanted to keep that job, and find some way to fetch her back. If I’d come right after her, it wouldn’t ’ave happened.’

  Pudding touched his knuckles gingerly to get his attention. Eli’s eyes jerked back to her and she flinched.

  ‘Mr Tanner,’ she said. ‘She died fifty years ago – how can Alistair Hadleigh possibly have killed her? It’s madness!’

  ‘His father, then! The other Alistair Hadleigh! How else did Betsy’s doll wind up hidden in the manor these fifty years? How else? I’d waited half a century for some clue … for something to prove who took her. She’d carried that doll about with her ever since Swindon, her folks said. She was even killed in his room at the mill, but that family were above suspicion. Above everything! She used to go to him to get lessons in speaking, since she was mute. She was in and out of there, all the time. I wish I’d known it then; I could have put a stop to it. But her family and me never spoke till after.’ He curled his hands into fists around the bars, turning his knuckles white with the force of it.

  ‘You … you killed Alistair to punish his father?’

  ‘How else could I take anything from the man? When he took everything from me?’ Eli shook himself against the bars again; his eyes sparkled, and there was rage and pain in the tears. ‘She had our baby in her belly when he did it.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Pudding breathed.

  ‘Only the Hadleighs knew, outside of our families. Rose Matlock went and told ’em, like they’d have helped. But it weren’t her fault – she never knew about me and Clem till after. We never told the police – they’d only have painted her a harlot. But it was my baby. My family.’

  ‘Mr Tanner … that’s so awful. It’s so sad.’ Tears prickled Pudding’s nose, and turned her face hot, but they were for Alistair – her Alistair. ‘But you shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have! Our Alistair was the best of men. It wasn’t his fault, if his father did … what you say he did.’

  ‘He did it all right!’ said Eli, vehemently. ‘As soon as you and the new wife brought that doll down to the cottage, I knew it. All this time I waited … long years of strife, just waiting to find out who took that girl from me, then in you two walk, carrying Betsy’s doll, I knew I finally had my answer. And I could finally punish the man that hurt her. When you love like that … when you’re loved like that, it doesn’t ever go.’

  ‘But Alistair was innocent!’ Pudding blew her nose and stepped back from the bars. She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t right. Whatever his father did, it wasn’t right!’ Tanner’s face twisted in anger.

  ‘Well, the law’ll agree with you, I daresay, so don’t you fret. I’ll swing for it soon enough. And I don’t mind that so much. Not now I know I’ve done what I could for Clemmie.’ He let go of the bars, shoulders sagging, face sagging. ‘Best part of me died with her anyhow. Scant difference it’ll make.’

  * * *r />
  Irene knew something was wrong as soon as Pudding relayed to her everything Eli Tanner had said. The girl suffered a fresh storm of weeping when she finished speaking, but it was less bitter than it had been; less frightened, more sorrowful. They were sitting either side of a pot of tea at Manor Farm’s kitchen table, and Pudding blew her nose wetly into the handkerchief Irene passed her.

  ‘Why are you frowning like that?’ she said. Irene shook her head.

  ‘Look … something’s not right. I think … I think Mr Tanner’s got it wrong. Well – he must have,’ said Irene. Pudding’s eyes went wide.

  ‘What? Why? He was adamant – the doll you found belonged to Sarah Martock. Matlock, I mean. Old Alistair used to try to teach her to speak in his office – she was mute, you see – and that’s where she was killed …’

  ‘Yes, but, Pudding – Alistair’s father was in America when she was killed! He was getting married to Alistair’s mother. I’ve seen the marriage certificate. There’s no way whatsoever he could have travelled between here and there so quickly. It’s impossible,’ said Irene. Pudding stared ahead blankly as this sank in.

  ‘Oh, hell and damnation,’ she said. ‘He has got it wrong, then. He’s killed Alistair for no reason at all. Oh, Irene! It’s just too bloody awful!’ she cried. Irene nodded, and Pudding put her face in her hands for a moment. ‘I know I should be happy because they know Donny didn’t do it – and I am happy! And I know nothing could ever have brought Alistair back. But … but for it to have happened for no reason at all? How can that be fair?’

  ‘It isn’t fair,’ Irene agreed. She got up and went around to Pudding’s side of the table, put her arm around her and squeezed. ‘Life isn’t, as my mother likes to say. Sadly, it’s true,’ she said.

  ‘And whoever did kill Sarah – Clemmie, Tanner says she was known as – has got off scot-free.’