The Stranger House

by Reginald Hill

  There was a burst of laughter and a chorus of greeting.

  Dunstan advanced, using the cane for support but with a grace that reminded you of Astaire rather than his age. Tables and chairs were pulled aside to allow him a direct course toward Mig’s table. He nodded acknowledgment and bestowed gracious smiles on most people. Only to the Gowders did he speak direct, saying, “Silas, Ephraim, how are you?” Does he really know which is which? wondered Mig.

  The twins muttered an inaudible reply, at the same time touching what would have been their cap-peaks or their forelocks, if they’d sported either. Sister Angelica smiled approvingly on this display of feudal hierarchy, but Gerry scowled as if he’d prefer to exercise his seigniorial power by having the Gowders flogged behind a cart.

  Frek meanwhile diverted to the bar and slid elegantly on to a stool next to Thor Winander.

  Mig stood up as the trio reached him and pulled out a chair for the nun, another for the old man. Gerry had to borrow a chair from a neighboring table.

  Sister Angelica said, “Ta,” as she sat down and Dunstan said, “Good evening, Madero. I trust I find you well?”

  In the same instant Mrs. Appledore materialized with a tray bearing four well-filled brandy balloons which she set on the table.

  “Evening, Mr. Dunstan,” she said, clearing away Madero’s dishes. “Nice to see you back in the Stranger. It’s been a while.”

  “I lead a busy life, Edie,” he said.

  “So they say. Just shout when you want a refill. You’ll not be disturbed.”

  “Well, here’s to us,” said Sister Angelica, taking a sip of her drink.

  “Good health,” said Madero, following suit.

  It was, as he’d anticipated, the same excellent cognac Mrs. Appledore had given him in the kitchen on the night of his arrival.

  Gerry Woollass seemed disinclined to join the toast, but under the nun’s calm expectant gaze he took a token taste.

  “Mr. Madero,” said Dunstan. “Frek has passed on what you told her this morning.”

  He paused. Mig glanced toward the woman at the bar. She had a small wineglass in her hand which she raised in mock salute when their eyes met.

  He didn’t speak. It was up to Woollass to set the terms of this encounter.

  The man continued. “It explains a lot. I can see how you might feel you’ve been treated unjustly. On the other hand, you were not as open with us as you might have been, so you must take your share of the blame.”

  Madero nodded.

  “I do. My defense is it was a sin of omission. My principal motive in contacting your family was as stated, to pursue my researches into recusancy. If you had not replied positively, I wouldn’t have come anywhere near Illthwaite.”

  “Fair enough,” said Dunstan.

  The expression on his son’s face suggested he wasn’t inclined to be so understanding, but Angelica was smiling at him encouragingly.

  It was time to move things on. He picked up his briefcase which was resting against the table leg and opened it.

  “Mr. Woollass, I have something to show you. As Frek will have told you, I found a document in the hidden chamber last night. It was in code. This is a translation.”

  He set his laptop on the table, brought up the translation and turned the screen toward the old man.

  Dunstan read it with nothing in his expression beyond polite curiosity. Sister Angelica read also and from time to time scrolled the document down. Gerry didn’t even look at the screen but said angrily, “And where’s the original document that you stole?”

  His father glanced at him long-sufferingly, then murmured, “Very interesting, Madero. And I gather that you are persuaded this fugitive with your name is in fact a direct ancestor of yours?”

  “All the evidence supports such a belief.”

  “Including your own — how shall I put it? — metaphysical experience?”

  “Frek clearly told you everything about me,” he said, trying not to sound aggrieved.

  “Which would make you, in some degree, an agent of God’s purpose,” said Dunstan with a faint twitch of the lips as though he found the concept amusing.

  “Aren’t we all His agents, Mr. Woollass? In some degree,” said Madero.

  Gerry looked as if he was going to break out again, but Sister Angelica gave him a warning glance and Mig an encouraging smile. He was beginning to understand her presence, both here and at the initial interview. She wasn’t Gerry’s spiritual so much as his worldly advisor! The man, despite his down-to-earth manner and appearance, lacked any real shrewdness in his dealings with others. To his father, who Madero judged wouldn’t have been out of place in the super-subtle political world of the Curia, he must have been a great disappointment. Possibly the nun also reported directly, or rather indirectly, to the old man, who clearly had a certain way with women.

  Mig said, “Putting aside any dispute as to final ownership of the journal, what it establishes beyond all doubt is that my family has as real and personal an interest in Father Simeon as yours.”

  “Beyond all doubt?” said Dunstan, raising his eyebrows. “I think we might need expert advice on that.”

  “Seek it by all means. But I need neither written words nor expert opinion to tell me that my ancestor once hid in that chamber. Nor I suspect do you.”

  “What do you mean by that?” demanded Gerry indignantly. “You’ve no right to judge others by your own shifty standards.”

  The nun made a wry face as if to apologize for a teenager’s outburst.

  Mig regarded Gerry thoughtfully. Unless he was a very good actor, he clearly knew nothing about Simeon’s encounter with Miguel. Unlike Dunstan, who he guessed had already known a great deal even before he saw the transcript.

  As for Sister Angelica, how much does she know? he wondered.

  In fact, what was there to know?

  It was pretty clear that the secret of the Stranger’s hidden chamber hadn’t been known by anyone in the family, or surely it would have been explored years ago. Probably it was passed on by word of mouth alone during those dangerous years. It hadn’t been till much later, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century perhaps, that such a revelation would have ceased to have its attendant dangers. But by then the fragile word-of-mouth chain could so easily have been broken by early death, or the onset of senile memory loss and, once broken, there was no way of repairing it.

  But even given the care Alice Woollass had taken in the way she recorded events in her journal, a subtle-minded scholar with more time to scan the document than a single morning might have been able to guess at much.

  And indeed, given that the same scholar had had all the time in the world to study the journal, who knows what portions of it may have been removed before anyone else was allowed near it? He recalled his sense of breaks and jumps in the narrative.

  Dunstan said, “You say the original is in code? Not a very complex code if you managed to break it so quickly.”

  “I had help,” said Madero.

  “Indeed? Would that perhaps have been from the young Australian woman who seems to have been causing a stir in the village? I gather she has some expertise in the field of ciphering.”

  Frek really did keep him informed, thought Madero. Perhaps this was her way of compensating for the huge disappointment she must have caused Dunstan by bringing the Woollass line to a full stop.

  “Yes, it was Sam,” he said.

  “An interesting woman by the sound of it. I should like to meet her.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible. She decided there was nothing for her here and moved on this morning,” said Mig.

  He was beginning to feel maneuvered away from the main theme of this encounter. He looked for a way to get things back on course, but he was preempted by Gerry, who clearly agreed with him that things were being allowed to drift.

  “I’ve got better things to do than sit around listening to idle chitchat,” he declared impatiently. “If you’ve got anyth
ing to say about our family, Madero, why don’t you spit it out? Otherwise, just hand over our property, which you illegally removed from the chamber, and we can bring this meeting to an end!”

  His voice rose as he spoke, drawing attention from the rest of the room. Not, Mig suspected, that attention hadn’t already been focused on the nook, but hidden beneath a surface of normal barroom sociability. Now heads were unambiguously turning their way.

  Across his mind ran the silly irrelevance that this was the point at which a good movie director would factor in a dramatic interruption.

  And once more it was as if he’d put a megaphone to his lips and cried, Action!

  The door burst open and into the bar erupted a small slight figure like a creature escaped from fairyland under the hill. Its eyes looked huge in a death-pale face and its skull was spattered with tufts of bright red hair between which patches of white skin gleamed like traces of snow in a poppy field. For a moment no one recognized her, not even Mig.

  Then she opened her mouth and her identity was unmistakable.

  “Now listen in, you lying Pommy bastards!” she cried. “Two nights ago I stood here and asked if anyone knew anything about my gran, Sam Flood. You all said no, the name meant nothing to you. I knew you were lying then, but I was still stupid enough to be persuaded your Sam Flood had nothing to do with me. All of you bastards knew different. Now I know different too. My gran came from here, and she left here in 1961, and all she took with her was a piece of paper with Sam sodding Flood’s name and address on it. No, I’m forgetting — not quite all. There’s something else I know which some of you had to know too. She was twelve years old when she left and she took a little bit of Illthwaite with her. She was pregnant. So come on, you bastards. Which of you’s my grandfather so I can say a proper hello? Or is he in hell where he belongs? Was screwing my gran the reason your precious perfect bloody curate topped himself? Well, was it?”

  6

  Wasn’t that fun?

  SILENCE.

  Mig Madero tried to take in everything.

  Thor Winander slumped on his bar stool and seemed to put on ten years. Next to him Frek Woollass was unmoved except perhaps by her usual secret amusement. The Gowder twins looked at each other as if seeing each other for the first time. Pete Swinebank closed his eyes while his lips moved. In prayer? Noddy Melton’s sharp gaze darted hither and thither around the room. Edie Appledore stood frozen for a moment then turned and vanished from behind the bar.

  Closer to, Dunstan’s eyebrows arched in mild surprise, then he slowly turned his head to give himself a view of this interesting newcomer. Sister Angelica’s lean good-natured face registered shock and compassion, while Gerry looked like a spacewalker whose safety line has just broken and who finds himself falling away from the security of his ship into the unfathomable depths of deep space.

  But it was back to Sam Flood that Mig felt his gaze irresistibly drawn.

  The little Australian stood with her back to the bar, those huge eyes glaring defiantly, but now it was defiance shading into despair as the rage which had carried her this far began to drain away and with it her strength. She tried not to let it show, leaning against the bar for support. But Mig saw it and began to rise, wincing as his left knee gave notice that the exertions of the morning still had to be paid for.

  Even without the knee, he probably wouldn’t have been as quick as Sister Angelica, who was moving swiftly forward, her face creased with sympathy.

  “Let’s find you somewhere to sit down and talk this over, dear,” she said, reaching out toward Sam.

  The response was shocking.

  “Don’t you dare touch me, you fucking cow!” said Sam in a voice so low and vibrant with hate that it sounded as if it came from another world.

  It stopped Angelica in her tracks. Then before she could make the possibly fatal decision to move forward again, Edie Appledore came into the bar, pushed past the nun, put an arm round Sam’s shoulders and, without speaking a word, led her unresistingly out of the room.

  As the door closed behind them, talk resumed in the bar, hesitant at first, a word here, a phrase there, but quickly building up to a buzz. There were some who didn’t talk. The Gowders had vanished almost immediately, leaving undrunk beer in their glasses. And the vicar had slipped out in the wake of Sam and Mrs. Appledore.

  Sister Angelica, visibly shaken, returned to the table where Gerry Woollass was draining his brandy glass with a greed suggesting that if it had been full to the brim he would still have emptied it.

  “Sit down, Sister,” said Mig. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, don’t worry about me,” said the nun, pulling herself together. “I’ve been called worse, and that was in the convent. It’s that young lass we should be worrying about. Clearly something pretty awful’s happened to her.”

  “She’s not a lass, she’s in her twenties and highly intelligent,” Mig heard himself saying defensively. “She has a First in math from Melbourne University and she’s here to carry on her studies at Cambridge.”

  “That makes it worse,” said Angelica. “For a mature woman to react like that means… I can’t think what it might mean.”

  “Extraordinary,” murmured Dunstan. “Whatever it means, I think it marks a convenient point to terminate our meeting. I was already feeling a little fatigued. I don’t get out very often, Madero, and when I do, I rarely encounter such excitements as these. Now I feel I could not give these weighty matters we were discussing my full attention. Would it be possible for you to join us up at the Hall in the morning? About eleven o’clock, no point in being uncivilized.”

  “That would suit me very well,” said Mig.

  “That’s settled then,” said Sister Angelica. “Come on, Woollasses. Let’s get you home. Then it’s up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire for both of you by the look of it.”

  She escorted the two men across the room. At the door Frek joined them, but made no move to take over the nun’s comforting role. She glanced toward Mig, raised her eyebrows as if to say wasn’t that fun?, then followed the others out of the bar.

  All eyes watched them go but no one called goodnight.

  Mig finished his brandy, taking his time. Then he too rose and made for the door.

  En route he let his gaze touch everyone he knew, but no one was catching his eye.

  Out in the dark hall, he could see a chink of light under the kitchen door.

  What was going on in there?

  Should he knock and ask how Sam was?

  He thought about it.

  The answer was no. Whatever balm Edie Appledore was pouring on to the little Australian’s troubled spirit, he didn’t want to risk disturbing the process.

  He made his usual silent way up the stairs to his bedroom.

  7

  A slice of cake

  IT WASN’T TILL SHE’D BEEN TALKING to Edie Appledore for ten minutes that it struck Sam that in fact this woman wasn’t part of the solution but part of the problem.

  By then she’d drunk an ounce of the landlady’s excellent cognac and was now drinking her second mug of coffee and, not having eaten since the pub at lunchtime, feeling a strong inclination to get her teeth into a second slice of the scrumptious chocolate cake which had been set on a plate before her.

  Another woman in face of these goodies might have felt inhibited from suddenly diverting from confidence to accusation, but such social niceties had never troubled Sam.

  “You lied to me as well,” she broke out. “Soon as I got here, the way I looked, and my name, they all meant something to you but you said nothing.”

  The woman made no attempt at denial.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But round here you don’t tell folk what you don’t need to tell them, not until you’ve got some idea exactly what it is they’re after.”

  This philosophy was close enough to her pa’s to quieten Sam for a moment. But rapidly she resumed: “It was more than just keeping quiet, wasn’t it? You did thing
s too. OK, nothing as extreme as knocking me off a ladder like the Gowders. But you spread the word about me, didn’t you?”

  “I rang Thor, yes. But that was it. If what you say about the Gowders is right, I’m sorry, but I’m not responsible for what they get up to, am I?”

  “I suppose not,” said Sam, beginning to feel frustrated. “But you searched my room, right?”

  “I did not!” declared the landlady indignantly. “I never laid a hand on your things.”

  “Someone did.”

  “Then I apologize. In my house! I’ve been meaning to get proper locks on those bedroom doors. Anyone could have crept up the stairs and got in. You believe me?”

  Sam nodded. Why shouldn’t she believe her? This was truth time.

  She finished her story, telling all that she’d discovered in Newcastle, and then she settled to wait for the payback.

  They were seated at an angle of the big table, chairs skewed so they faced each other. Mrs. Appledore stretched out her right hand, laid it on Sam’s left and squeezed hard. It was a gesture too natural to be intimidating.

  Then she said, “I bet you’ve hardly had a thing to eat since you left here this morning, right? Get stuck into that cake. It’s all right, you know. We don’t do the dead any good by starving ourselves.”

  She wasn’t being evasive, Sam recognized, just practical. And she was right.

  She carved another slice of cake and took a large bite.

  “Grand,” approved Mrs. Appledore. “Now, where were we? Oh yes. You’re dead right, of course. Soon as I set eyes on you I thought of little Pam. It was the hair. Not so much the face, though I do see a resemblance, except in the eyes. And of course she was a little elf of a thing like you.”

  “And you said nothing!” accused Sam.

  “What was I to say? You said your name was Sam Flood. It was all I could do not to slap your face! I thought someone’s playing a dreadful joke on me. Then I saw your passport. I’ve never asked to see a passport in my life, but I needed to see yours. When I saw your name really was Sam Flood, I began to think it was maybe just an unfortunate coincidence. Or more truthful, I began to hope it was. And when you said your gran had left in 1960, I heaved a sigh of relief. It was still very odd, but you were so definite. And one thing I knew for certain was that it was 1961 when little Pam left Illthwaite.”