Weycombe

by G. M. Malliet

  His nagging had actually started a few years ago; it’s just that memory plays with timelines. Hoovering is not one of my major talents and he knew this going in. I remember him coming home one night before I lost my job, saying, as he dropped his coat over a chair, “I tripped over a kayak in the garage again. I thought you were going to mount them on the ceiling.”

  Really? The way they do in Better Homes and Gardens? Yep. I was on it, honest I was.

  Sometimes he’d start on the way I dressed. “Where are the pearls I gave you?”

  His mother’s pearls. Somehow he’d talked her out of them to give to me as a wedding present, carrying on a family tradition. The fact that handing them over nearly killed her was the only thing I liked about them. But he also gave me a beautiful diamond wristwatch that I always wore.

  Once at large in Weycombe I rejoiced in dressing down: Jeans, jacket, booties, turtleneck. Hair loose at all angles, or in a pony, or in a twist pinned at my neck.

  I used to wear the pearls just to please him sometimes, sometimes to bed with nothing else on, but when I wore them out to a party I kept hoping the clasp would break and they’d be stolen or lost. Drop like pebbles into the river so I’d never see them again.

  As for my housekeeping? It was erratic because I didn’t see the point. I’d get everything polished one day and the house would be falling apart the next. We used to have a maid come in every other week—Flora. Several of the neighbors, including Anna, used her. Why his lordship didn’t pitch in to help more often didn’t seem to be a topic for his day planner. Once I was at home all day and no longer helping with expenses, the whole cleaning thing became my responsibility. I decided, waiting for Will that night, that Flora was coming back. Life is too short.

  You could tell from his expression he’d been hoping I’d be in bed already—not waiting naked in some temptress pose, but sound asleep so he could avoid me. He spotted the bits of broken glass and started to say something. I cut him off.

  “I’ll get around to it,” I said. “But I want to tell you what happened around here today. And, you know, talk. Like we used to.” A shaky note had crept into my voice. I hated when that happened. I bit my lip to stop myself saying another word until I was under control.

  He didn’t seem to notice. Tiny shards of glass, yes; a distraught wife, no. He looked shaky himself—shaky and drunk as the proverbial lord, although that came as no surprise. Not drunk enough to be argumentative—he had passed that stage and gone into stupor mode—but too drunk to pick up on anything outside the storm roiling inside his own head.

  From dealing with my father, I knew enough to leave a drunk alone until he’d slept it off. But this, I thought, was Will. This time things could be different—there was still a chance I could make them different.

  I could learn. Will could learn.

  I put aside my own glass of wine; the book I’d been trying to read sat abandoned on the table beside me. “You won’t believe what hap—”

  “I know what happened,” he said. “Just … just leave me the fuck alone.”

  That did it: instantly, I was livid. At his words, at his tone. But I really was learning, because I snapped back the reply that would spin us out of control.

  It took all I had simply to stand and walk out of the living room. Will could sleep it off on the couch in his office. Again.

  Part 2

  4

  The day after Anna died the weather was perfect, the sky scrubbed blue, every blade of grass throwing off sunbeams. But winter was coming, you could smell it in the air, and you can’t begin to appreciate how dreary a prospect that is until you’ve lived in England. I used to like winter, even in Maine, but England had the kind of damp cold that made you feel your bones might rot from the inside out. I came to understand why so many princesses from the Continent succumbed to disease after being shipped in to wed some chinless British royal.

  The Weycombe Chronicle, a weekly, was late arriving. I guessed they had pulled an all-nighter putting together coverage of Anna’s demise. But they hadn’t called me for a quote, so maybe they hadn’t heard of my role. They generally were the last to hear the news.

  Everyone called it the Chronic. It was meant to be an adjunct to the broadsheets and tabloids of London, a cheaper alternative for local advertisers. Most recently the coverage had focused on a strip of riverfront being eyed by developers who were rumored to be in bed with our local MP, who was rumored to be in bed with nearly everyone.

  Murder coverage was not the Chronic’s strong point, but on the occasion of Anna’s death they put out a special edition. Their website was already full of the news, complete with typos and misspellings, so great was their haste to keep the village updated. Anna was one of their biggest advertisers, so the glowing tribute to her virtues as wife and mother might have been a stretch but the “heartfelt sadness” was not.

  Reading the Chronic was always a Talmudic experience, given Garvin Barnes’ penchant for digressions and explanations and footnotes. Garvin—owner, publisher, reporter, and editor—was a self-important little stoat who thought running a local paper made him a force to be reckoned with. He had reached retirement age in about 1985, a fact reflected in his rambling commentary on the rose-growing competition and the local school’s A-level results. When he had extra space to fill he’d print one of his own poems, a rare treat, if not nearly rare enough. He seemed to rely heavily on spellcheck. That and scotch.

  The coverage of the murder of Anna showed Garvin and the young intern he’d hired to do his website keeping well within their journalistic comfort zones. They had interviewed a few people to get quotes about their reactions on hearing the news. To a man and woman, they were “shocked.” The hardest-hitting reportage went something like this comment from longtime Weycombe resident Jessup Bladeworthy: “It is usually such a quiet village. We are locking our doors now for the first time. And they shall stay locked until this vile monster is caught.”

  There were pages of this sort of stuff, with nearly every villager quoted, but that was understandable: the chances the police would confide anything like real news to someone like Garvin were zero to none, so he made do with outrage and hand-wringing.

  There had never been a case like it in the village in recent memory. There had been the occasional dodgy overdose, but that was it. The place was as safe as the city fathers and mothers could make it. Anything else would discourage the tourist trade. (The actual residents were somehow less important—presumably we would not flee the village until someone was shot and left to die on our doorsteps.)

  No, this story would be big—big enough to bring my former colleagues from the BBC to the scene. I wondered if, as the person to discover the body, I wouldn’t be hearing from them at any moment. I debated for a bit and then unplugged the landline. I really didn’t want to be quoted on anything just yet, and I knew too well how these people worked with out-of-context remarks.

  I poured myself another cup of coffee and sat in the kitchen with the Chronic spread open before me, thinking. I noticed idly that Garvin had run one of the ads upside down.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to be part of the investigation—if I didn’t want my name kept out of it entirely. My grandmother swore by the old saying that your name should only appear in the newspaper when you were born, when you were married, and when you died. Every time I logged onto Twitter I saw the wisdom in that philosophy.

  But an idea was beginning to form. I had contacts in the news world, contacts who would want access to the story. And I was at the center of things, in a manner of speaking, although I knew that didn’t mean I would be kept in the loop by the police—far from it.

  Still, I had something these BBC types wanted, and they had something I needed. I had inside information by virtue of being a first-on-the-scene witness, likely to be interviewed by investigators at least one more time. Perhaps I would be asked to testify at the inquest. On
the other hand, the BBC would have access to the investigation in ways I would not be granted as a private citizen; unlike with Garvin, the police would not be so fast to brush them off.

  Talk about networking. Will would be so proud.

  It wouldn’t hurt to get my name out there. To keep my options open.

  All of these thoughts arrived in a muddle when what I needed to do was impose order. I dug out a new notebook from the stash in my office, along with a new disposable fountain pen. The notebook was purple with an engraved art deco design, and it had an elasticized band to hold the pages shut. It became my constant companion for a while—the repository of all my thoughts on the case of Anna Monroe.

  I began by describing her, as objectively as I could. Anna in life. And then, if I could bring myself to it, Anna in death.

  She was a showstopper, despite the cellulite, with the showgirl looks of a bygone era. Not many people have skin of that true porcelain hue I’ve described—most of us, regardless of race, are shades of yellow and brown. But Anna’s skin was Dresden-shepherdess porcelain, the purest of pure whites with not a tinge of yellow. In every group photo I have of her—on the Misty for the annual Weycombe Court Homeowners lovefest, at the occasional luncheon or party, boarding the train to London to see a play with the book club—she stands out like a white ghost among her dingy, sallow-skinned comrades. She seldom wore foundation—it was probably next to impossible to find that shade and anyway, why gild the lily? And despite her extra pounds, or because of them, she glowed with life and health, making me look particularly scrawny alongside her, my hair looking like I’d just swum ashore from a shipwreck. The eye was drawn to Anna, time and again.

  That play we went to see, come to think of plays, was Betrayal. A subject, many people thought, Anna knew a whole lot about.

  She was under five foot four, and those curves defied the rage for rangy people of the Kate Moss variety. Hers was a Snow White prettiness, with dark, expressive brows and raven hair and ruby lips to go with it. And those green eyes. The original witchy woman.

  Six years older than me, she had turned forty the year before, an occasion marked by the Lordy, Lordy party to which we’d all been invited Chez Monroe.

  She’d recently taken up running, maybe in response to that landmark birthday, and I can conjure a moving image of her even now, the dimpled white knees, the plump thighs emerging from her running shorts, legs pumping as she tried to leave behind those last stubborn few pounds. The flash of her expensive, colorful running shoes as she’d fly around the corner and disappear down Sheep Lane on her way to the river path. She would run along the west side of the river, then circle round the park, cross the bridge, and run back down the east side. She had told me she had lost seven pounds on this austerity regime. I could see for myself it was working—the jelly roll around her middle had shrunk by half.

  I learned from the Chronic that she and I shared a middle name. I am Jillian Anna Violet White nee Waterford, as in the Irish county. When Will and I married, I didn’t even have to buy new monogrammed towels. Anna was Priscilla Anna Monroe nee Buckford. I’m assuming the Chronic got that much right.

  As I had told Milo, Anna worked as an estate agent, and her day started early. In the past two years, more than thirty homes had sold in Weycombe for over one million—that doesn’t sound so special until you realize we are talking GBP, not US dollars. All these years and I still have to translate the exchange rate in my head. So Anna, who had handled many of those sales, was doing well for herself and for Alfie, although how much Alfie’s welfare figured into her calculations was anyone’s guess. Most members of the Weycombe Court Book Club thought she might be tiring of the role of sole breadwinner. I thought she thrived on it; it gave her control. What was she supposed to do, stay home and experiment with squash recipes from the Women’s Institute website? Anna the homemaker—that was not her style. Her job got her out and about.

  Her job, let’s just say it, got her out and about and under. Under men, I mean. Lots of men. It involved lots of dinner and drinks meetings, many late at night.

  I’ll mention that Anna’s background was working class, not that that has anything to do with anything. But I cannot begin to describe what that means in this country, except to say it is a very big deal. More than one PhD has been awarded for research on place of birth and accent and education, and how these things unite to keep one in one’s place.

  Anna’s stated goal was never to slip back into the class in which she’d been raised. The women she hung with were solidly middle class and had never known a day’s worry over money: it was somehow always just there. Will, being aristo, was the neighborhood superstar. As an American I was tolerated as his consort if not entirely embraced as his wife.

  Anna had made me her confidant, possibly as the one person in the Court indifferent to these social barriers. I came to think it more likely she didn’t care if I judged her because she didn’t care what I thought. She had been raised by a Catholic mother and grandmother in Bristol. Her father had not been much in the picture—something else she and I had in common. Her mother supported them all by working as a cleaning lady for the local church and its rectory. When the priest got grabby, her mother moved the family to London while she got herself sorted. One day she went to Brick Lane Market in Shoreditch and begged a job from a local greengrocer, a man she ended up marrying.

  Growing up, Anna had impressed everyone with her smarts and her drive. While not possessed of a top-drawer academic brain, she swotted hard and ended up as a scholarship student at St. Andrews. She went there, she told me, in hopes not so much of academic achievement but of making a good marriage. She was attractive and she knew it—one of those women with a sturdy yet come-hither way of walking that always made me think of Helen Mirren. Men obeyed by dropping whatever they were doing and going thither.

  She met Alfie at St. Andrews. He was a graduate student, already with a wife and baby boy. Like Anna he was working class and smart. Well, maybe not quite as smart as Anna. She may have had it in mind to marry up but she thought she saw in Alfie the pattern of someone very like herself. And marrying someone like you is far less stressful than having to keep up with the snooty Joneses all the time—trust me on this. In Alfie she saw someone also not willing to be poor, not ever again, and willing to do whatever it took to escape the large, deeply religious Methodist family into which he had been born. Moonstruck, he left his wife and child. Before long, he and Anna were married.

  But first his family talked him into a stint working with a relief organization in Africa, where presumably he worked off his debt of guilt. After that, always good with numbers, he decided to become something in finance in the City. People tended to trust Alfie, which is even better than being good with numbers. But what neither Anna nor he could foresee was that during his time served in Africa he’d picked up a bug, some intestinal thing that would flare up unannounced and leave him horizontal for days. He was finally judged unfit for duty and given a small pension to go away quietly. It was small only by the standards of the African tribe that had shared its parasites with him, but it was nothing like the sort of money needed to keep the monthly Weycombe mortgage paid. This is where Anna stepped in, going to work for the local estate agent’s office. In the UK the standards for this sort of thing are not too rigorous, but still, you need an aptitude and a can-do spirit, which Anna had in spades. She was soon the star earner for Desworthy-Neswith, or Des-Nes, as it was called.

  I was so focused on my Anna bio that I started at a sound coming from behind me. Actually, I jumped about a mile—I imagine that like everyone in the village that morning, my nerves were shot; it was not a great time to sneak up on anyone. Will had emerged from below, probably to fill his thermos with coffee for the train ride into the City. I shuffled the notebook onto my lap so he couldn’t see it. I’m not sure why, except that I knew he thought my journaling was a waste of time.

  He was
sober now, if looking like he’d slept under a tree in the garden. His rumpled shirt matched his expression. It seemed as good a time as any to ask where he’d been the night before, although why bother? I could guess.

  I was amazed he took the trouble to answer. He seemed somewhat contrite and very subdued, a complete contrast with the night before. Some days I thought he might be bipolar.

  “I was at the Bull,” he said. “I ran into Andy on the train, and he told me what had happened. We stopped in for a quick one.” His tie was loose, his hair still wet from the shower. He looked like he’d been caught in the rain. He looked vulnerable, like the man I’d fallen in love with. There was a time I’d ache to reach out and hold him, but no more. He shook his head. “God, it was awful. The whole village was there. Everyone’s hysterical.”

  I felt a twinge of envy. I so longed to be a part of that big gossipy village scene, everyone tsking and speculating in hushed, mournful tones about what had happened to Anna. Always the outsider, I wanted more than anything just then to belong. Somewhere. Anywhere. Will could have swung by the house to include me in this gossip fest. I was the one who’d found her, for God’s sake; I’d have had a lot to contribute.

  Of course he hadn’t even called to let me know he’d be late. This sort of thing had somehow become the usual, along with the casual assumption that since I had time on my hands (in his view), my time was less important than his.

  Never mind that I disliked the aptly-named Bull and Will knew it. It was the principle of the thing. Still, I didn’t want to pick a fight; we’d had enough of that and it had gotten us nowhere but further apart. Besides, I thought he might have picked up some useful information about the investigation and I didn’t want him to clam up on me.