An Old, Cold Grave

by Iona Whishaw

  Mabel went around to the side of the house that overlooked the lake, holding the pile of towels. Henry Anscomb had just finished with the tap, and Kenny Armstrong was now holding his head under the running water. Bob Anscomb was standing looking out at the lake with Kenny’s younger brother, John.

  “God, I could use a swim,” John was saying with a longing sigh.

  Bob unbuttoned his shirt. “Brilliant. In our birthday suits,” he said. He turned toward the tap, saw Mabel with the towels, and smiled, giving her a nod. “Would you come with us? It would be nice to have some pretty girls along.”

  “Certainly not,” she said. But she was blushing and suddenly conscious of the loose hair clinging to her damp forehead.

  John frowned and glanced at his older brother, Kenny, who shrugged and raised his eyebrows in an expression that said, “Well, what did you expect?”

  “Thanks, Mabs,” Kenny said, taking his towel, and applying it to his dripping head with a sigh of relief. They folded their wet towels over the wooden fence to dry and went around to the front of the house. Only Bob remained, and Mabel waited, watching him shake his head under the running water, seeing his back, his suspenders hanging at his sides. She wanted to put the towel down and run back to the lunch table, but he turned off the tap and held his hand out, water streaming down his face. She handed him the towel and turned away.

  “Here you are, then,” he said behind her, holding his damp and muddy towel out. He pulled his shirt back on, leaving it untucked, and pulled up his suspenders.

  “What do you want me to do with it?”

  “Haven’t a clue. Isn’t it why you were waiting?” He tucked the towel into the crook of her arm and started back to the front of the house.

  Mabel turned in confusion and anger and hung the towel over the fence that her father had built along the edge of the drop where the path wound down to the post office, and then stood looking out toward the lake, trying to compose herself. When she turned he was there, reaching for her hand. “Come on. You’ll miss lunch.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LANE STOOD LOOKING AT THE space that had once been a glorious rolling English garden under the expert eye of Lady Armstrong. She had seen the photo. She had not paid much attention to it, but now, because it was her first spring, she knew she was supposed to do something. What, she couldn’t begin to imagine. She wished for a moment that she’d paid more attention to the gardeners in the house where she grew up. Her only gardening act in her new home, besides watering what was there, was to plant some raspberry canes the previous fall that Inspector Darling had given her as a sort of joke. But she liked raspberries and hoped that they would amount to something, joke or not. She looked at them now along the back edge of a border that must have contained vegetables. They didn’t look very impressive. Then she recalled that Eleanor had told her that she could not expect any raspberries the first season. Raspberries take a year to get established. She would devote herself to vegetables instead. When she’d seen Kenny earlier, he seemed to be engaged in turning over the soil and putting something into it. She’d better ask him what.

  It was no good. She could not stop thinking about what was going on up at the Hughes place. They must surely be finished by now. A glance at her watch told her it was nearing five o’clock. It seemed like hours since Ames had drunk his coffee and gone back up the hill, leaving her anxious to find something to do as an antidote to thinking about, well, anything. She was about to turn back to the house when the now-familiar police vehicle pulled into her driveway. With her hands in her trouser pockets she went to the top of the road by her barn to meet it, trying to recall if Ames might have left something behind. But it wasn’t Ames, it was Darling, and, unusually, he was driving. “What have you done with your right-hand man?” she asked him as he got out of the car.

  “I sent him back with the van. I’m tired of his chattering.”

  She stood before him in dark trousers and a white blouse, and a sweater of a green that seemed to him at that moment to be nearly magical, so perfectly did it emphasize her eyes. He tried to block out the voice in his head that was saying, “God, she is beautiful.”

  She smiled. “I like his chattering. He’d be a very cheerful companion to have around.”

  “That’s what you think. I sent him down to give you a message. I assume he gave it to you.”

  “Yes, come in, he did. He told me to mine my relationships here to see what I might be able to find out. I’ll tell you something right now. I’ll not mine anything if it means any of those sweet old Hughes ladies going into the clink!”

  Darling collapsed into the armchair in the sitting room and looked out over the lake. Lane went into the next room and shut the French door, then came back and made for the scotch bottle on the bookshelf. “Drink?”

  “It’s a bit early, but maybe a short one. It’s a sad situation, but I think a very old one. It appears to be a young person, a girl, could be any age between six and sixteen? It must have been a good many years ago. There are some shreds of fabric and a locket. That’s what makes me think it must be a girl, the locket. The body might have been rolled in a blanket and placed on her stomach with the hands trapped underneath. You know, in Roman Britain bodies used to be buried facedown so their spirits could not escape to haunt the living. It obviously doesn’t work.” Darling sighed and took a drink.

  “You are full of arcane knowledge. Speaking of something feeling haunted, I was up at the old schoolhouse here for the first time this morning. I hadn’t known about it till Kenny mentioned it and told me how to get there. It ran until about thirty years ago, and I guess it fell into disuse in the war. It was full of mouldy workbooks, but there were assignments the children had done. When you see their actual handwriting, you do have a momentary feeling that they are reaching out to you from the past. And now to think this child might have gone to that very school.”

  “I could use your help,” he said. “Do you mind?”

  “So, you will be opening an official investigation?”

  “Yes. Perhaps not with the urgency of a case where a dangerous killer is at large right now, but certainly, yes. It is the least that child deserves. I don’t know, after all this time, if we’ll be able to see how the child died. Gilly came along with us today to see if he could learn anything from the burial itself. I don’t know if he got any joy from it. He just made ‘hmming’ noises and took notes. As to the cause of death, he will have to see to that in his lab, but the burial is unorthodox in the extreme, and I’m sure has come as a shock to the poor Hughes ladies, provided one of them isn’t involved.” He smiled as he said this.

  “I know, it does seem laughable. But in spite of what I said, surely no one can be off the list, however fond of them I may be. It’s not honest to pick and choose, is it?”

  “Spoken like a true deputy. Do you mind collecting a bit of information at this end? I can’t spare anyone to do the spade work at the moment.”

  “No, not in the least. I’ll gather what I can for you. I’ve had a bit of a think. I shall need to find out as quickly as possible the name of every family that lived here around the time the cellar was built in 1910.”

  Darling felt a renewed surge of the admiration he had developed during the Russian matter. He liked, he decided, people who were clear thinkers. He had been going to suggest such an approach himself. “Yes, thank you. That would be extremely helpful. We might be able to track down some information on each of them that would help us create a list of likely candidates. And on our end I’ll start by getting Ames onto exploring the archives for missing children. My time is rather consumed at the moment by a blasted teenage girl who’s sabotaged a sawmill. I thought it was going to be straightforward, but it’s anything but. Her parents were initially demanding she be released immediately when we picked her up. Now they’ve completely changed their tune and want me to keep her locked up. Clearly I can’t keep a young girl like that under lock and key, so they’ve taken her off and dumped her wi
th an aunt.”

  “Gosh. How enterprising on her part. How do you sabotage a sawmill? Has she given a reason?”

  “Not a bit. She’s been absolutely mum. Her parents say they had a huge argument with her a couple of days before she went on the rampage. They aren’t saying much except that she’s been disobedient and she can go to the devil. Well, ‘rampage’ is a bit of an exaggeration. But she did attempt to bring work to a halt by jamming an axe into some part of the workings.”

  “Whose sawmill is it? Does her father work there?”

  “No. In fact, he works on the railway, some sort of management position. His wife doesn’t work, of course.”

  “What’s so ‘of course’ about it? Women do work nowadays.”

  Darling glanced at her, his heart catching at the little pulling together of her eyebrows that accompanied her slightly mocking tone. “Yes. Well, evidently not in this family. My real difficulty is that she won’t talk to anyone about it, and I’m afraid she’ll do something like it again. Aside from this little escapade she has been a model citizen, apparently. Very good student, belongs to the youth group at their church. Never behaved like this before. The parents are beside themselves. She supposed to marry next year, and they now think no one will have her.”

  “Marry! How old did you say she was?” Lane asked, amazed.

  “She’s eighteen. Her young man does work for a sawmill, but not the one she visited.”

  Lane sipped her scotch and tried to remember herself at eighteen. It was only eight years ago, but with the war, a lifetime. Even so, she could not imagine herself having married at that age. Plenty of her friends had though, among the girls in London that she roomed and worked with. Some of them began to have children right away.

  “Perhaps that’s what she wants. To be considered unsuitable,” she said suddenly. “Perhaps she doesn’t want to marry. I wouldn’t have at that age. Well, at any age, come to that.”

  Darling glanced at her. Did she mean that? It wouldn’t surprise him. Not from what little he knew of her life. He felt an unaccountable tinge of disappointment.

  They sat in silence after this. Lane was surprised at the comfort of it. Her interactions with the inspector in the last year had been a roller coaster of surprising moments of ease in each other’s company, and unsurprising stretches of prickly, and sometimes cross, interactions. She could feel an almost physical sense of his presence now, slumped comfortably in his chair, his jacket off, his tie slightly askew, his hair a little dishevelled. She felt, suddenly, the risk to her peace of mind this feeling of ease in his company presented. It would not last. She did not know what she felt about him, but she thought about him more than was absolutely necessary, she decided, and hated the feeling of emptiness she had whenever they parted. She was on the verge of making a sardonic remark to break the spell, when he spoke softly.

  “I find it difficult to shake the image, the feeling, of someone’s life, when I am having to deal with their death. This little girl for instance. What was she like? Was her life hard, her death inevitable? Did someone love her? Did she have a dog? Was she afraid? It was like that in the war as well. I couldn’t stop thinking about the lives I must have shattered as a pilot, the gunner releasing bombs below me, in the icy cold, onto all those unseen people.”

  Lane watched him, softening, and feeling small at how close she came to her own brand of unkindness—wanting to protect only herself. “Is that why you became a policeman?” She hoped it was the right question.

  “I suppose so. I was studying history and literature at the University of British Columbia; then a friend of mine was killed quite by accident by someone trying to rob a bank. I struggled with trying to understand how a whole life could disappear like that. Someone’s hopes, all the possibilities of their future that are real in one moment and evaporate into nothingness in the next. And I wondered about the bank robber, too. Who was he? What happened in the course of his life to lead him to such a desperate recourse? It’s all nonsense, I suppose. I have never put anyone’s life back, and the war came and I became a taker of life. And now there’s this girl.”

  Lane leaned forward. “Here’s what I think,” she said. “I think people are going to die, but what matters is making sure their story is not lost. Every time you solve a crime, a murder, you recapture some of the story. This little girl has a story. You will find it out, and it will matter to someone.”

  He looked at her, feeling his heart catch at the kindness in her eyes. “You know, I was trying to write you a note yesterday. There are still balls of paper around my table at home. Poor Mrs. Andrews, my old housekeeper, would have had a fit.”

  “It’s probably a good thing. She’d be insufferably nosy and unfurl them all to read them. What would she have read?”

  “Nothing exciting. Some said ‘Miss Winslow,’ and some said ‘Dear Miss Winslow.’ One even said ‘Dear Lane,’ but that was rejected out of hand. I was only going to ask you how the raspberries were doing.”

  Lane looked down to cover her smile of sheer, dangerous happiness. “You could have telephoned me. I’d have told you that I just learned from Eleanor Armstrong that I won’t get a single berry off them for another year. They are as useless as brambles till then.”

  “Those blasted raspberries are in danger of being a metaphor . . . anything worth having takes time, something like that. Anyway, I didn’t want to telephone because everyone on your party line could listen to all our personal agricultural conversations.”

  “A note to me on Nelson Police stationary, delivered to the King’s Cove post office would be much safer. There would be no speculation then.”

  “You’re right. Much safer to come ask you in person.” Darling stood, imagined for a moment another world in which he leaned over and kissed her, and then said, “I have the remains of that poor girl going back with Gilly to the lab. I will phone you with everything we discover. Having half the Cove listen in on that conversation might be useful. It will start them all talking, and then we will set you among them.”

  Lane walked Inspector Darling back to his car. “Are you sure you can cope with the driving? Ames must have felt very nervous letting you out on your own.”

  “I used to fly a plane. Tell him that if he comes complaining to you.”

  “Inspector. Thank you for including me. I will try not to let you down.”

  “I doubt you could,” he said. But all the way back to town, he could hear her saying she wouldn’t want to marry at any age.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE ARMSTRONGS AND THE HUGHES stood under a light drizzle the day after the exhumation and surveyed the remnants of the root cellar. They had been apologized to and told not to touch anything for another week in case the police needed to come back and continue the search. The tarpaulin, upon which the rain now tapped out a desultory rhythm, remained suspended over the trench.

  “If it rains any harder tonight, that thing is going to fill up with water,” Kenny remarked. “Have they dug right through?”

  “I think so, or as close as dammit,” Gladys said. “It’s going to be job putting it back together.”

  “Maybe it’s time to move on,” said Gwen. “Join the modern world.”

  “And has the modern world some place to store our potatoes?” Gladys asked. “We’re not moving anywhere. But I do think we can modernize it a bit. Put some better lighting in there, tidy up the shelving so things don’t get pushed into corners.”

  Gwen shuddered. “I can’t see us putting potatoes in here ever again.”

  “We’ll get up a work party like we used to have in the old days, eh? I still remember when we built this. It was good fun,” said Kenny.

  “Yes, and we were all a lot younger then,” said Mabel, irritated. “It’s only you and Robin, you know that, don’t you? Everybody else is gone or dead. And you two are no spring chickens.”

  “Mabel, really!” exclaimed Gwen.

  “We could invite the others. David Bertolli will help. He�
�d find it quaint, I’m sure. And Glenn Ponting. He can’t be prospecting all the time. And Lane. She’d love to help,” Eleanor said, smiling happily at the thought of a real community event. “We could make lunch if the weather is fine. Remember in 1910 when we put tables out and ate outside? Even the children were helpful. We can get the Bertolli boys to carry things!”

  “Oh my God. You can’t be serious,” Mabel exclaimed. “Anyway, it wasn’t children. It was just that Anscomb girl and her little brother. And I don’t recall him being much help.” At this they all fell silent, looking at the trench, which now, in the gloom, took on the air of what it really was: an open grave.

  “It’s no good pretending. Someone put a dead child in there, and we know who it was.” This pronouncement caused everyone to look at Gladys with shock.

  “What are you saying?” Mabel said, her face flushing.

  “I don’t mean we know who the child was, or who did it, do I? I’m just saying, we must know who the child is. It was someone we knew. Nobody would bring a child here from somewhere else. No. It was one of our King’s Cove children. One of the Watfords, or whoever it was that lived over in the cabin by the lake, or those miserable Anscombs, even. How many of them were there?”

  “The Anscombs? Rubbish. For one thing the only girl was Isabel, and she was already fifteen or sixteen then. There were those two children they kept mostly at home: that sickly boy, whatever his name was, and a baby. I remember the mother being all wet. Always sick with something,” Gwen said, revealing that edge of superiority that the hale feel over the weak.

  At this they fell into gloomy silence. Mabel surveyed the scene with distaste. “I’ve got work to do,” she said. “I’m not planning to catch my death standing around out here,” she added disingenuously, as she had never caught anything from being in the rain, and further, did not believe in it.