An Old, Cold Grave

by Iona Whishaw

  “Well, we need to add to that picture a father strongly implicated in the death of a child before. With that, and the information about the locket possibly belonging to Isabel Anscomb, I’m not sure that we need look further. Mind you, we don’t fully know the circumstances of the earlier death in Manitoba, and the fact that this child was buried in the Hughes’ cellar means one of them could still be implicated, though it seems a very long shot, under the circumstances,” Darling mused.

  “I can’t think it would be Gladys! It’s nearly thirty-six years ago . . . that would make Gladys forty-something. Already tough as boots, given the strength she still displays with shovels and that massive garden she keeps. In 1910 she has two nearly grown daughters and her husband was recently deceased. Isabel, if we are going with one of the Anscombs . . . annoys her? Comes for tea and falls face down in the chicken coop and bangs her head and Gladys can’t revive her and doesn’t know what to do with the body? She digs up the carefully constructed roof of her own root cellar, buries the girl there with her gold locket to assuage the spirit? It won’t do, Inspector. Anyway, I’ve seen Gladys’s locket. It houses a picture of a fearful old relation of hers. However,” Lane put up her hand to stop a comment from Ames, “the problem is that though we have a possible candidate for the murderer, we still do not have a candidate for the child . . . and it seems to me that we are narrowing down to three possibilities for the corpse, since Gilly isn’t completely sure of the sex. Either Isabel or one of the two smaller Anscomb boys, the one who does go to school or the small boy who is kept at home most of the time. Did I tell you? When I went to the schoolhouse I found a lot of abandoned scribblers in boxes. One of them had one little attempt at a sentence by Joseph, who was the youngest boy, barring the baby. The teacher, Lady Armstrong, had clearly been the one to write his name at the top of the page. It was rather sad, really. It gave the impression that there was only one day he ever went to school. Of course, one can’t know that. Anyway, one of those three would make the most sense if we decide Anscomb is the guilty party.”

  “Well, we might never know if it was Anscomb senior,” Ames said. “I found out he died of a heart attack in Creston back in 1930.”

  “Oh,” said Lane. “If he’s dead, he’s not the vagrant coming around covering his tracks. I do wonder if anyone else was involved in the build that the Hughes ladies don’t remember because they were more peripheral . . . the people who delivered the lumber, say. I also don’t know if everyone is telling the absolute truth. That’s a very depressing thought. The really odd thing is that there is not a whisper of gossip. No one saying, ‘Remember all that funny business.’” She turned to Ames, “Obviously nothing came of your research into a missing child during the early 1910s, or you would have said. Though when I think of it, I’ve been told twice that Isabel ‘disappeared.’”

  “Nothing. In fact, his nibs had me look into locating any of the three of them, and so far it’s like they disappeared off the face of the earth. Mind you, I haven’t heard from everywhere, but still. Good grief, I hope they haven’t all been killed!”

  “Well, if they have, I’m sure Miss Winslow will find the other bodies for us,” Darling said. “Miss Winslow, can we have a look at your map? I’m not sure what more it can do, but I’d like to be able to visualize the whole scene.”

  Lane pulled out her folded paper. She smoothed the map down and said, “Here it is, though at this juncture, I think there is little doubt we are looking at the Anscomb family.”

  Darling looked at where she was pointing: the square she had drawn at the end of the top of the road that went past the Bertollis’ renovated cabin. “It’s a goodish bet, yes, though it’s still circumstantial. There’s nothing we have in hand at the moment to tell us that. Even the boots you brought are too big for a small child and probably too small for a big one. I’m not sure we’ll ever know for sure. The gold locket appears to be the one that Gwen Hughes says she saw on the older girl, Isabel, and certainly there are two boys that might be possible candidates, but we’d have to explain how either of them ended up with Isabel’s locket. We have the boots and shirt, but they could belong to absolutely anyone. As to who did it, we have the possibility that it could have been the father, Henry Anscomb, either deliberately or accidentally, as we know now that he may have form. But I wouldn’t want to hang a man on that kind of evidence. In any case, nothing to hang. There is something odd there, though. Ames is waiting for them to call back with a report that was taken at the time, because one of the nurses thought Henry had died after an argument with his son.”

  “Gracious,” said Lane, “very odd indeed. The peculiar thing is that no one who spoke of him, the father, I mean, described him as particularly violent. But of course, people can be quite violent in their own homes and not show that side of themselves to the outside world. Mostly they talk about how poor the family was. It seems that the older of the two younger boys, Andrew, was quite sturdy. He was out and about a good deal according to Kenny and Harris. The only person who claimed to have ever seen the younger one was Harris. He seems to have been palsy with the oldest boy, Bob. They were of an age. In fact, he said they had fought once when Bob thought Harris was making passes at Isabel. It must not have disturbed the friendship much, though. He said he was up at the house helping from time to time, and they would get the littlest boy, Joe, to help with small things. And I did find that one little copybook with his name in it.”

  “Who lived in the Bertollis’ fancy log cabin during this period?” asked Darling, looking back at the map with interest.

  “That is where the Chases lived. The cabin wasn’t fancy then. They’re the ones whose youngest little girl drowned. I think they might have been gone by the time the cellar was built in 1910.”

  “We don’t even properly have a year for this. Sometime between 1910 and just before the Great War, since that’s when the Anscomb family left,” Darling said.

  “Well, closer to 1910, if we take into account when the gooseberry bushes might have been planted. It would be easier to bury someone in recently dug up soil. It’s so hard to imagine all those people thirty-seven years ago,” Lane said. “Kenny and Harris would be in their early twenties and Gwen and Mabel in their teens. So we have Kenny and his brother, John, and Harris all living here, with Lady Armstrong, at what is my house. We have the Armstrong cottage that is now the post office, and an Arthur Renshaw lived there on his own with no children. And then up the hill are the Hughes girls. And it’s quite a distance from this cluster of houses up to the Mather house, and then the Bertollis’ cabin and the Anscombs’ house.”

  “I’m just trying to make out how isolated they were from one another,” Lane continued. “One thinks of a small community as a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business, but I wonder about King’s Cove in the early days. No telephones, everyone hard at work trying to survive. Is that how a child could disappear and no one hear about it? Especially if you had a reclusive family.”

  “Could the mother have done something, by accident, say?” Darling asked.

  “Yes! Why not?” Lane said. “And if they are already reclusive, might they not have felt shame and not want to let anyone know? I had a sort of feeling the other day that shame might have played a part.”

  “The problem is, it could have been any of these other people. What about this postman, Renshaw? He lived on his own, he could have had unsavoury predilections,” Darling pointed out. “But I can’t see why it would have been hidden like this. The police, or someone, would have been involved. What’s so odd is there appears not to have been any gossip. It’s like someone disappearing underwater without a fight or a trace. That’s why I think it happened inside the family. I . . . well, never mind.”

  “No, what?” asked Darling.

  “No, it’s nonsense. It’s like that damn ghost of Lady Armstrong opening my windows. Fantastical rubbish. But when I was at the house I felt it. I felt the child had died there. In fact thinking of it now, I
think that’s why I find the house so utterly oppressive. It’s like the child’s spirit is locked in there and can’t get out. Of course that’s rubbish. It’s all about poverty and want, the dangers of homesteading. When I was a child the local farmers’ children were always having mishaps. Falling or being kicked by horses, trapped in house fires, or hurt by farming equipment they were too young to use. For whatever reason, I think the child died there. There’s no other explanation for the secrecy.” As Lane spoke she saw that she had indeed given words to what she believed, felt, while she was in that dark house.

  “Miss Winslow,” Darling said, sensing a new danger: her persistence. “I want to ask you again to be careful and not to return to that house. The vagrant may be staying there, and we don’t know what he is up to. Try, please, to leave this part of it to us.”

  “Yes, Inspector Darling,” Lane said, with the most disarming smile.

  Darling looked at his watch. “We’d better get a move on if we’re to get in lunch before the hearing. Not you, Ames. You are doing very well so far. Reward yourself with a sandwich from next door and then get on the telephone again to see if they’ve scared up the report about Henry Anscomb’s death.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  BEAMING WITH DELIGHT, LORENZO WELCOMED them into the Italian restaurant he ran near the railroad station. He was very fond of the inspector for supporting his restaurant immediately after the war, when the local population had taken against any unfortunate immigrants from Italy or Germany. Things had begun to improve slowly for him, as more people were attracted to the excellent food and the patriotic wartime spirit of empire was being replaced by current and local concerns, but he never forgot a kindness. It had been some time since the inspector had come to the restaurant with the beautiful Miss Winslow, and his view on her corresponded very much with that of Sergeant Ames: the inspector was mad to leave Miss Winslow unattached. “How lovely to see you again,” the beautiful Miss Winslow now said to him. “I’m ravenous!”

  Darling put his hat onto the coat rack and followed Lorenzo and Lane to the table. He rather liked being bossed around by Lorenzo, and he approved of his admiration for Miss Winslow. If oh, so many reasons kept him from admiring her in the way he was beginning to believe he’d like to, at least Lorenzo could serve as his proxy.

  As was the usual practice, Lorenzo forbade any contemplation of the menu and brought instead what was the crowning achievement of his wife’s labour in the kitchen for the day: an aromatic lemon-scented risotto with veal. His wife watched her husband take the plates to the table. Lorenzo was right, she thought. The girl was extraordinarily beautiful. Not the blond kind of beauty that seemed so favoured in this largely Anglo town, but dark, with all that rich auburn hair and green eyes. More like the beauty back home. Her husband loved the inspector and had already made up his mind that this Miss Winslow was for him. She shook her head, turning back to the stove. You could never interfere in the love lives of others, however obvious a match might seem. So many things could get in the way.

  “I was going to say how unimaginable it is that a child could disappear without a trace, and no one would care, but . . .” Lane said, sipping the house white.

  “You’ve said it now. But what?”

  “But if the child had been done in by a member of its own family, that child would never be reported as missing. But was Henry Anscomb violent? I mean, he was described as standoffish and grim. I would be too if I were fighting for every scrap to feed my family. They are variously described as pathetic and unlucky, but hard-working, willing to chip in to help neighbours.”

  Darling shook his head. “The trouble with violence in families is that it is often hidden from anyone on the outside. Children are afraid to talk; wives say they’ve fallen down the stairs. It’s very hard to get hold of. It’s also very hard to get a conviction of a man who beats his family unless he manages to kill someone.”

  Lane was silent at this. She could hardly think of an adequate response. “Or that older boy. He gets into a fight at least once that someone remembers, and he was mentioned in that earlier incident in Manitoba. Anyway,” she said finally, “I can’t shake the image of that child dying.” She felt in danger of an embarrassing bout of tears. What was it about Lorenzo’s that seemed to bring out her vulnerability? She glanced around, slightly aggrieved. “Come, let’s put it aside for now. In my experience problems sometimes solve themselves when you walk away from them. I’m in danger of being a miserable lunching companion.”

  “I would not lunch with anyone else in this world just now,” Darling said. He reached across the table and placed his palm open on the table. Lane put her hand lightly into his. “I remember the last time we came, when my father died. I made a miserable lunching companion then as well.” Darling’s heart turned over. That lunch the previous December, when Lane had been distraught over the death of her father, she had allowed herself to be comforted and, for one brief period, had let him in. That lunch had become the centre around which all his imaginings now flowed.

  “I don’t suppose it would be a proper lunch if you weren’t being miserable,” he said. He pulled back at the sight of Lorenzo bearing two bowls of fragrant risotto.

  Lane closed her eyes to take in the aroma of the dish. “Where does he get lemons at this time of year? What a luxury!”

  “He, or should I say the missus, is an alchemist, to be sure.”

  Lane smiled, watching Lorenzo attending to a new customer at the door. “An excellent lunch like this fairly cries out for the balance of human tragedy. Otherwise we would become complacent, and begin to develop the misapprehension that life, as the old song says, is just a bowl of cherries.”

  “An error into which both of us, with our life experiences, are bound to fall.”

  “Très amusant. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Look at this lunch, or spend a spring morning up at the cove, with the sun glinting off the lake and the leaves beginning to appear on trees. Life is good, or I want to believe it is. When I came there last spring I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. I felt like it was an elixir to heal all sorrow. But I’m not sure now that all sorrow does heal. It fades a bit, I suppose, until something reminds you. You know, when I was looking at that wretched house on a cloudy afternoon, I saw all the dangers, for children in particular, and I thought, I won’t marry, I won’t have children. The risk of loss is too great.”

  Darling hardly knew what to say to this, feeling himself risking great loss at that moment. There are so many things we will never tell each other, he thought. He reached over and retrieved her hand. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to think about you a bit too much. Even when I should be working.”

  Lane was silent for a moment, feeling her heart compress. “Really?” she managed. “I would have thought you had more discipline. Anyway, I’m not very interesting, and I suspect I am a secret misanthrope.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps we all are after the war. It might be what draws us toward one another.” He was unable to relinquish her hand.

  “This isn’t very professional, Inspector. I’m sure you don’t do this to Ames.” She allowed him to turn her hand over and stroke her palm.

  “Ames is unrepentantly sunny. He never has to be brought back from the brink of despair.”

  “Well, I’m back now. You can unhand me. I can never look at beans on toast again, not after having a meal like this. Perhaps we should not let it go to waste. Lorenzo would not forgive us for letting his lovely meal get cold.”

  “Lorenzo, come here,” Lorenzo’s wife was looking through the round window of the kitchen door. “Look at that. He is holding her hand. Are you happy now?”

  Lorenzo smiled and kissed her on the cheek. “I am. I want him to be happy like me.”

  ERIN SAT WITH her parents and aunt and uncle before the judge, her head down. Darling left Lane at a bench near the back of the courtroom, with a few curious onlookers who appeared to be habitués of the entertainments to be found in
courtrooms, and moved near the front, as he was to be called. Darling had told Lane that the proceeding was going to be relatively informal because Erin had never been in trouble before, and in the end the damage she had done had been minimized by its timely discovery and had hurt no one. They really only wanted to give her an object lesson. Still, Lane did not envy the girl this scrutiny.

  “I arrived at seven, as usual, and walked through making sure everything was in order prior to firing up. I was a bit more careful because Paul, the night watchman, had called me when he’d had to stop the young lady from wrecking the machinery. She’d jammed the axe into the chain that runs the belt.” The foreman, in his work clothes as he had come away from his shift at the mill, was testifying.

  “I see,” said the judge. “And what might the consequences have been had she not been discovered?”

  “What? Oh, I get what you mean. It likely would only have stopped the machine from working when we flipped the switch, but I suppose it could have somehow snapped out and hurt someone. As it was, it was jammed in pretty good, and we had a hard time getting it out. The blade of the axe was hooked under the chain, and it was awkward to get at.”

  At this the judge looked over at Erin with an expression of mild interest, perhaps curious about how she could have had the strength to shove the axe in so that it was hard to remove. “It must have cost some production time to remove it?” he asked the foreman.