An Old, Cold Grave

by Iona Whishaw

  “Oh, thank God,” Eleanor Armstrong cried, and rushed to envelop Lane, still with Darling’s coat on her shoulders, in an enormous hug. She loosened her grip immediately when she heard Lane’s gasp of pain.

  “I’m quite all right,” Lane said. “A bit tired and bruised, but nothing a hot bath and a good sleep won’t fix. I wanted to say thank you for all your efforts.”

  “But where were you?” asked Gwen.

  “In a sort of outbuilding at Angela and Dave’s. It was stupid of me not to figure out how to get out.”

  “How on earth . . . ?” began Gladys, but Eleanor interrupted. “That’s quite enough. She’s to go home and get some rest. There will be lots of time to find out everything later.” She bundled Lane back toward the car. “Constable, take her home.”

  “No, no. Please let me walk. I’ve been cooped up and I’m desperate to move about freely. Anyway, there’s a prisoner to be dealt with.” Lane removed the overcoat and handed it back to Darling.

  “Miss Winslow,” he began.

  “Good night, Inspector,” she said, moving toward the path that crossed the little gully to her house. She stopped when she got to Ames, who was standing by the car, hoping she’d change her mind about the ride. “Constable, thank you so much. As always, you’ve been so kind. I suppose you’ll be taking that hapless man back to town.”

  For a moment Ames had the ludicrous notion that she meant the inspector, and then understood that she meant the prisoner.

  “Yes, I guess we will. We have his abduction of you, he may be implicated in the matter of the child, and he might well have killed his father. It could be a long interrogation.” At this Ames looked over at Darling who was watching this interaction with some irritation. “Are you sure about the ride?” Ames finished.

  “Quite sure. Thank you. I am sure that you will need to know whatever details I can provide about my unfortunate time in Dave’s barn. Can you let the inspector know I shall come into town first thing in the morning for my interrogation?” Lane finished this with a bright smile and walked firmly toward the sanctuary of her house.

  The search parties had begun to return to their homes after the excitement of the afternoon, and the evening seemed to have fallen quite suddenly, the temperature dropping in a way that suggested it was not quite spring yet. Darling put his overcoat on and started down to the post office to retrieve their vagrant.

  “Well played, sir,” Ames said as they walked.

  “Shut up, Ames.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Nine days prior

  CHARLIE BLAKE PICKED UP HIS mug of coffee and put his feet up on the chair opposite. He had the paper open and folded over and was reading an article about yet another gold mine discovery in the Thompson River area.

  “These people is living in a dream land,” he said.

  “What people are those?” his wife asked from the sink, where she was rinsing dishes.

  “These people who think they’re going to strike it rich with gold. That’s the trouble with this country . . . everyone wants to get rich fast. I never fell for that. Get a good job, stick with it, that’s what I say.” He spoke in the secure knowledge that his good job with the movie theatre in Kamloops was just such a job—and entertaining to boot. At his age he knew he should retire, but the theatre was loyal, and the work of running the reels was still possible. He’d slowed down over the years, but he still didn’t fancy himself sitting around underfoot at the house all day.

  “And same with Andrew. I pride myself on knowing I kept him from rushing off on some wild goose chase. He’s feeding his family every day, instead of starving them to death with pipe dreams. Seeing them Anscombs turning themselves inside out for nothing did it for me.”

  “Now be fair, Charlie, they weren’t trying to find a gold mine. They was only trying to grow apples. I hardly think . . .”

  But what she hardly thought was lost. Charlie had put his coffee mug down with a thump that splashed coffee across the freshly laundered tablecloth and was in the process of folding the paper to isolate one small article in the lower right hand corner. “Oh my God. Oh my God.” He thrust the paper at her, his face white. He did not stand for the simple reason that he thought he might pass out.

  His wife, alarmed by the change in his demeanour, came from the sink wiping her hands on her apron and took the paper. She read the words in the headline, “Child’s Skeleton Found In King’s Cove, Foul Play Suspected” mouthing them silently to herself. “King’s Cove.” She shuddered. “Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me that something bad would happen there. You read it and tell me what it’s about. I’ve got work to do.”

  “God’s teeth! Joe. I’ve got to go there. I have to. It’s the only thing.” Charlie said, taking the paper back, and reading it again, as if he hoped it would be something else entirely.

  She stopped her journey back to the sink and turned slowly to look at her husband. “Why do you have to go back, Charlie? Why should you have to go back there?”

  Charlie sat, absolutely still, his heart pounding with a feeling he’d not experienced as strongly since he was a child and his ma had died and left him to fend for himself. Fear. It wasn’t much, what he had, but it was stable, and he had a life with his wife. Their boy had grown up and gone to the coast for a proper education and was now doctoring in Victoria, after serving in the medical corps. Could the past come flooding in and ruin his life, even that of his son? He put his head in his hands, closing his eyes, trying to think, to sort out what to do. The strongest current of feeling he could identify in himself was rage.

  “What has got into you?” She had sat down on the chair from which he’d removed his feet and tried to pull his hands away from his face. She had never cut and bobbed her hair, and now white hair had come loose from the tie that kept it off her face and fallen across her eyes. “For God’s sake talk to me! Why are you acting like this? Why would they be digging up a child’s grave? And why should it be Joe?”

  At this he looked up and shook his head. “It was Henry. He told me once they had some boy back in the prairies, before we got there, from the same home I was in, and he died accidentally, he said. I couldn’t make out why they arrested him. Do you remember that? Some Mounted Police came and took him. I remember Marla was frantic, told me I had to stop them. I was barely in my teens. She made me run after them to ask. All the policeman told me was they had got new information. She was allowed to go see him, and she came back and started packing everything. Do you remember? We had to leave in such a hurry. Then he turned up, said they let him go, that it was all right, they knew he wasn’t guilty. But I think he must have escaped.”

  Charlie got up and began to pace, his fists opening and closing. “I tried to get him to Mabs, to help him. He was barely breathing, but Henry caught me. He tried to stop me. He said our little Joe was dead. He hit me so hard. He told me it was an accident with Joe, and, you know, I saw red. ‘An accident like with that other kiddie?’ I asked him.

  “I looked for him, Henry, after that, for years. Finally found him, old and decrepit in hospital. I don’t know what I thought I was going to say to him, but he just made excuses, said nothing was his fault. I saw red. I think I killed him.”

  Finally she was able to find words. “You killed Henry? Oh, my God, Charlie, how could you? When?”

  Charlie sputtered, “I didn’t really kill him. I hit him, I was that angry.”

  “Why would you say you killed him? There’s something you’re not telling me.” His wife clutched the back of a chair, her face white.

  “I read Marla had died and I finally knew where to find him. Back in 1930, remember? I wanted to look at him, see the expression on his face. I wanted to see that he was sorry. They told me at this rooming house that he’d gone into hospital. You never seen nothing like it. He was old and broken. Nothin’ left to him at all.”

  “Why weren’t you arrested or something?” But Charlie ignored the question.

  “I asked him ag
ain about young Joe. I never was satisfied about what happened. He said, can you believe this, he said, ‘Who is Joe?’ How could he not remember how a child died? Then he must have remembered something because he started saying he was sorry. Kept saying he was sorry. All I could see in my mind was poor Joe lying there. I don’t even remember what happened then. I was angry, that’s all.” He got up, picked up the paper, and read some more. “I got to go there.”

  “Charlie, no! What if they think you killed Henry and you’re arrested? What will happen to me? Please leave it. It’s all done now. You can’t fix none of it. Please!” She pulled at his arm, but he shrugged her off.

  “I don’t know when I’ll be back. I have to see it righted. He has to be buried proper.”

  On the train, he was clear. He needed to go to the police in Nelson and tell them what happened. Simple as that. Only it wasn’t. With each bend bringing the train closer, he became more anxious. He’d be arrested if they learned about Henry.

  But maybe they wouldn’t. He’d read the paper when Henry was found dead. It’d said heart attack, though they had said they were looking for one Bob Anscomb. He’d gone back to calling himself by his real name, Charlie Blake, when he moved away with Isabel. Maybe that’s why they never tracked him down.

  He would go to the police to ask about the body they found. What harm in that? No. It was too dangerous. He’d have to try to find out on his own what they were planning for him. It all might come out, how Henry died. Then what would happen to Isabel? Or Frank? Everything good he’d ever had in his life was because of Isabel. He felt the steady beat of the tracks beneath him and thought about his life. In one way he was not surprised. He realized he must have been waiting his whole life for it all to come unravelled. When he’d first found Isabel, he’d thought his life would come right in the end. But no matter what he built up, he’d never be anything more than a boy on the streets.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  LANE WAS BEING INSUFFERABLE WITH her constant fits of pique at Darling, and she knew it. She was almost certain he didn’t deserve it. She had bathed, eaten a cheese omelette, and had a glass of whisky and a couple of aspirin, and now sat in her nightgown and a bathrobe, watching the flames in the belly of the stove. The bruising on her ribs and arms kept quiet as long as she didn’t move too much. She had a battered copy of Hemingway open on her lap. She turned the book over to look again at the title. The Sun Also Rises.

  “Ha!” she said out loud.

  Her friend Yvonne in France had given it to her. “If you are going to America, you must read some Americans,” she had said.

  It was not a soothing book, she decided, too much going on. And anyway, this place turned out to be the furthest thing from America. She needed simplicity. Perhaps that was her trouble, she thought. There was simplicity in her existence now. Just her, her house, this green valley and cool lake, and a few friends whom she might love but who would make no inroads into her deeper self. The utter quiet. She hadn’t even gotten a wireless yet, like everyone else in the Cove, or a record player like Angela had. She had thought about getting some animals; perhaps a couple of horses in honour Yvonne who reported in her letters that she had increased her stables. Not that she’d really know how to look after them.

  But she supposed it was something she could learn. Look at her sister in South Africa, who kept horses and dogs to the exclusion of all human company. Lane was twenty-six and would soon be twenty-seven. It struck her forcibly that she and her sister were much alike after all. She was hiding out in the middle of nowhere, fiercely eschewing human engagement with a house and a laughable “career” as a writer, and her sister was hiding out with her horses and dogs as far away from anywhere as you could get. In the next instant she fought against this characterization of herself. She was not ungenerous or unloving. She had given love a chance, and she did not even have a solid conviction that romantic love was doomed, though she suspected it probably was. God, how young she’d been when she met Angus. Nineteen, brimming with confidence, and full of pride. She’d gotten first-class honours and was lured into intelligence with a kind of flattery that would work with her: that her country needed intelligent women who could speak different languages and were brave.

  She hadn’t really been brave, she knew that. She had been businesslike and youthfully ignorant of the dangers. Well, her episode in the Bertolli barn told her she’d lost all that. She’d been afraid and peevish about being hit on the head and locked up, and she was afraid and peevish about love. She’d been youthfully unaware about those dangers as well. She quailed when she thought of how trusting she was then.

  November 3, 1939

  The Three Bells was packed. The pounding rain outside had soaked the people running from the government building at quitting time, and their wool clothes now let off a damp steam that added to the whirling smoke of pipes and cigarettes. The noise level was daunting. Lane was squeezed into a corner between her flatmate Emily and a young man with straight brown hair pushed off his forehead who smiled broadly at her and thrust out his hand.

  “Donald, fifth floor,” he shouted in her direction.

  “Lane, third,” she said. There was not much point, she thought. They wouldn’t hear each other. She had become used to these after-work scrums, but she wasn’t sure how much she liked them. The pubs in Oxford were somehow less desperate.

  The war, she supposed. Everybody being extra bright and cheerful. Or maybe it’s because we’re all so secretive. She had no idea what went on on the fifth floor, or if being on the fifth floor meant you were more “in the know” than if you were on the third. She suspected he might be surprised to learn she was engaged in weapons training and was soon going to be obliged to go out into the country somewhere to learn how to jump out of an aeroplane.

  She felt an elbow from Emily and turned. “He’s good looking,” her flatmate said, nodding in the young man’s direction. Lane turned and looked at Donald briefly, who smiled and raised his pint, and then she turned back. “So I get him because he’s next to me? Cheers.”

  “Well, if you don’t want him, let me have a go. What did he say his name was?”

  “Donald. Help yourself. I’m going for another glass. Same again?” At a nod from her friend, Lane struggled up and begged Donald’s pardon. He got up to let her pass, and then suddenly grabbed her hand and pulled her back toward him so that he could bring his head close to hers.

  “You’re a looker. Not leaving I hope?” he spoke this right into her ear and she recoiled at the tone. He’d gone from genial to offensive.

  She tried to pull her hand away. “You’re hurting me. Kindly let me go.”

  He held tighter, pulling her hand to rest on his thigh. “Come on, a pretty girl like you? I bet you’ve been around the block a few times.”

  Lane could feel her rage concentrating into a white-hot point.

  She looked directly into his eyes and said quietly, “If you don’t let me go, I’ll scream the place down.” Donald dropped her hand, saying, “Keep your shirt on. There’s plenty more where you come from.”

  She pivoted to make for the bar and then turned back just as he was sliding back onto the bench. “Oh, and you’d better not be there when I get back,” she said.

  She stood in line at the bar, her heart pounding, waiting for her rage to drain. She’d been propositioned before, at Oxford, but somehow they’d all been young and uncertain, easily put off. She turned to look around. The whole thing had gone completely unnoticed in the maelstrom of smoke and noise. A girl had better look to herself, she thought, smiling. At last, the barman nodded in her direction.

  “Two glasses of ale, please, cheers,” she said. She had her coins at the ready, and she plunked them onto the bar.

  “He’s left,” said a man standing next to her. “Very impressive.” She turned and saw a man in an RAF uniform. A little older than the mostly recent varsity grads crammed into the pub, she reckoned. Red-blond hair, very wavy. Blue eyes. He’s kind, she tho
ught. “One of us.” Her gran’s definition for someone you could trust.

  “Oh, God, did you see all that?” She laughed.

  “I did. Neatly dispatched. I won’t ask what you said to him. It’s a trade secret, I expect.”

  “I certainly hope it’s not a trade I’ll have to engage in often. Thanks,” she added to the bartender, who had slid the two ales across to her and helped himself to the money she’d left. She stood holding the two glasses and smiled, shrugging. “Well . . .” she said, inclining her head to where her flatmate was just telling someone the seat was taken.

  “There’s a space there now.” Crikey, she thought. I’ve gone from cutting a man dead to inviting another one to sit down. I can’t be trusted.

  “I’m on my way out, but thanks. I’ve got a couple more days of leave. Perhaps I’ll see you in here next time.”

  “Right, then.” Lane paused, smiling. “Thanks,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For noticing,” she said.

  “Think nothing of it. I am a great admirer of strength of purpose. Angus, by the way. Angus Dunn.”

  “Lane Winslow, cheers then, till next time.” She turned to squeeze her way through the crowds, admiring him for not being interested.

  “Your fellow left,” Emily said. “Not interested in me at all.” She sighed and cupped her hands around her glass.

  “You’re well out of it, trust me,” Lane said, looking toward the pub entrance. The door was closing.

  TWO DAYS LATER, Lane headed out of the building and around the corner toward the park. She’d told the others she was going to buy some stockings at a shop on Brentwood, and she’d skip lunch. She had no intention of buying stockings, as she’d been sent a plentiful supply by her gran, and turned instead toward Wormwood Scrubs park, where she longed to sit in the quiet. The weather was cool, but a pale sun seemed to have fought its way through, and she wanted to enjoy it.