She swallowed hard. ‘It’s, “A Short History of Sudden Death in the Reign of Queen Victoria”. Because—really, Joe, you’ve got to admit—in the Victorian era, the opportunities for dying by accident increased beyond belief, which from a literary point of view equals authors having much more choice over how to kill off their characters. If you read Victorian newspapers, the number of whole houses that got blown to smithereens while gas was being installed, or the number of workmen frizzled to death when they were trying to get the country electrified, or the number of people, you wouldn’t believe it, killed on the railways, hundreds, thousands, seriously, crushed, or with bits fatally severed, let alone pigs and cows—and then there was sleep-walkers falling out of high windows once the masses were crowded into city tenements; honestly, you could do a whole book on this subject, factories, construction projects. But, yes, for the purposes of surviving my talk, my idea was that the press notices of these disasters can be quite hilarious, and of course, every one of them has a guaranteed superb ending. You didn’t answer my question, by the way.’
Joe shook his head uncomprehendingly.
‘How are you?’
There was a long pause, then, rather than answer, he said, ‘What is it with you and violence, Kit?’
She herself paused, before replying lightly, ‘Oh, God, violence—well, what I think about violence, crime, I don’t know. My feeling is, that people who have the imagination to do crimes properly should have the imagination not to do them at all. Mostly people do them rather badly. No, that’s a stupid thing to say—depending, as ever, on what’s meant by “properly”—and, of course, by “crime”.’
A wave of terrible fatigue assailed her; the warmth of the restaurant, her overfull stomach, the wine she had drunk, and the knowledge that her answer had been garbled because she hadn’t known what to say.
‘But violence in particular interests you?’ Joe asked.
Of course it was hopeless of her not to be able to understand the least particle of what he did, but he seemed so unwilling to talk about himself, unless she had missed something. ‘I wouldn’t say that it was a notable feature of my daily life,’ she said.
‘It is a feature of mine,’ said Joe, and he lifted his right hand up, and showed her the knuckles.
‘What happened?’ she asked, a little shocked.
‘I didn’t think I could cook for you,’ he said, staring at the scabs and bruises. ‘I’ve been eating with this one,’ and he indicated his left.
So he had. She had noticed without thinking about it. ‘What happened?’ she said again.
‘Humpty got in a fight last weekend.’
‘You’re kidding.’
He wasn’t.
‘And you?’ she said. The thought that she was having dinner with someone who hit people unsettled her.
‘Let’s say I helped extract him.’ At the look on her face, he added, ‘I did boxing at school.’
‘Oh. Goodness. Isn’t it banned in schools?’
‘Not formally, no.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You mean it, though? You actually punched someone?’ She peeped at her own knuckles, which she’d scraped doing the somersault, but they were healed again.
Joe put his hand back in his pocket. ‘What I was wondering was, you get something out of it at a distance, yes?—on the page, or the screen, or in old newspapers? You like clean-dirty, right?’
‘Have I done something wrong?’ she whispered.
‘I’m just asking. I didn’t mean to—whatever. I’m just trying to understand you,’ said Joe.
‘Well, thanks.’ On reflection, Kit added, ‘Maybe I should mention that I find you quite hard to understand, myself.’ As he didn’t reply to this, she continued, ‘I get caught by what I’m reading, you know, and all the world looks bad to me for a while, even if it’s just wasps and starlings and apples and fog and blackberries. I don’t know what to do with the bad bits inside my head. It doesn’t feel clean in there, definitely not. Did you really, fully slow down and picture to yourself, when you read about Nancy, what it would be like to beat a woman to death with a club while she knelt in front of you; or what it would be like to be the person killed that way? Don’t you ever think sometimes that the things inside your head are too violent?—and that smacking something solid would be easy, in a way?’
Joe looked down into his lap and said quietly, almost to himself, ‘Although I wanted to hit him, the reason I wanted to is that I’m so sick of being in a position where doing something like that, where hitting someone, is even remotely imaginable.’
Kit found herself at a loss for how to reply, so she merely gave Joe back his line a little altered, as if this were a psalm: ‘You wanted to hit him because you didn’t want to have to.’
‘Kit,’ Joe flicked a look at her for a second, ‘I should tell you, I want to tell you—Humpty, even for him, Humpty’s in a bad way. I have a bad feeling about it. Christ knows, we’ve been through enough with him already in my family, but, right now—this isn’t a great time, and,’ Joe was looking all around the restaurant now, ‘he got sent away to Milan to get him out of the way, I deduce, which may be the last favour any of them ever does him—’ he shook his head. ‘I wish I’d met you when things were simpler, but they just aren’t.’
Kit paled. His finishing remark sounded oddly rehearsed, and it arose in her mind that perhaps this was it, that Joe was preparing to terminate their friendship, Michaela had been right: The End. Michaela—‘I know someone who could get him a job,’ Kit said, ‘in a bottle factory, near Rochester, Humpty. You—’ Joe was visibly flinching, Kit began to get in a snarl again—‘last week, you said—I found out for you in case it was a help.’
‘You spoke to someone about my brother?’ he asked, his tone caustic.
‘I didn’t say who it was about.’
‘I’m glad to hear that,’ still icy.
‘I just asked about it,’ she said, adding without conviction, ‘for his own sake.’
‘A bottle factory?’
She quailed. ‘Isn’t that—the kind of thing he might do?’
‘He’s a furniture restorer,’ said Joe crushingly, ‘a craftsman. A fucking bottle factory, I’m not so sure. You know the Mackintosh desk in the flat?’ His voice began to rise. ‘You don’t just decide to send my brother away and stick him in a fucking factory, Kit. Where did you get that idea? What—have you found him somewhere to live?’
She felt sick. Joe was swearing at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise—I didn’t know what he did. He keeps saying about living in a field. I didn’t decide anything. It was just—’ She remembered now, the first time she’d met Humpty, saying to Joe afterwards, ‘In at the deep end,’ and Joe saying, ‘This is nothing like the deep end.’
The waiter came, crashed their plates together, and said, ‘Can I bring you the menu?’
Joe cleared his throat. ‘Kit?’
‘No, no, I’m good,’ she said.
‘Coffee?’
‘No thanks.’
She tried to split the bill with him, but he wouldn’t let her.
Outside, the temperature had dropped so far that their clothing was no longer adequate to keep them warm. Kit hugged her coat around her tighter than the job done by the buttons. A thick fog was making everything damp now, not just the air.
‘This way?’ said Joe, pointing up towards the Woodstock Road.
Kit nodded.
‘Do you want to take a bus?’
‘Walking’s fine,’ she said, and thought that, this way she could pace herself into readiness for a fumbled goodbye. Perhaps he really was going to finish it, was just waiting for a suitable turn in the conversation: The End. ‘Unless you want to, I mean,’ she said. She looked round at Joe, startled by a misapprehension that he was choking. He had merely cleared his throat. He seemed so much more definite to her than she felt she was herself, with his low voice, scarred fist, and his eyes, that her tallness didn’t compens
ate for how slight he made her feel.
They proceeded to walk, and spoke about this and that, woodenly at first, before a sham ease came over their conversation. They strolled along together through the stage-set fog, chatting like friends, until, all too soon, they drew near to Kit’s home.
‘Where are we going?’ she said, birdlike in the tilt of her head, and was almost fearful when Joe suggested coffee at his flat.
As they turned down his street, Kit recognised the elderly gent who emerged from the mist into a pool of street-light ahead of them. ‘There’s Buddy,’ she said. It was intrinsically quaint to her to be able to call an old man, ‘Buddy’.
‘Yes, right, you met,’ said Joe.
‘Joe,’ said Buddy, with a well-worn nod; and then, staring around, he said, ‘How about this, my word. And you can just smell winter, the sniff of it.’
‘Kit,’ said Joe, introducing her.
‘Evening,’ said Buddy. ‘I won’t keep you. This feeling keeps—reminds me of when I was a boy. My father died when I was twelve: didn’t really know him. Bit of a reprobate, like Humpty.’ Again the gruff nod to Joe. ‘I went to the Public Record Office at Kew the other day. Very interesting. Read all his dispatches from the Second World War.’
‘The Public Record Office,’ breathed Kit, thinking, of course.
‘Gave an account every month, two figures at the end of each: so many wounded, so many dead. He filled them all in till he got his fingers shot off and became one of them. Never took a bullet again.’ At this, Buddy sounded almost regretful. ‘He died of a fever in the end. To be honest,’ he said, ‘not many young take an intelligent interest in the war these days.’ And then, returning to where he’d started, ‘This fog reminds me of when I was a boy.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Kit, touched with excitement: she hadn’t really been listening. The Public Record Office, how could she not have thought of it? Imperatively, yes, she must check their catalogue—because, what if they had holdings on Eliza? ‘Brilliant,’ she said.
Buddy took stock of her, surprised. ‘Well, in that case,’ he said, ‘I’ve a little something you might like to look at.’
‘I—yes?’ Kit glanced round at Joe for help, whence no help came, only a smile.
‘He wasn’t much of a correspondent,’ said Buddy, ‘but I’ve my grandfather’s letters from the Great War, and they’re a gold mine, a treasure trove, mostly the Macedonian front. He was a padre, but he insisted on sticking with his battalion when most of the chaplains flunked it. Spent months in front of the guns, took services in the trenches, constantly under fire. Had to organise the burial of the dead, a massive job in this case, out on the mountain slopes.’
‘Thank you so much,’ said Kit. She had begun to concentrate now. ‘I’ll look forward to that. It sounds excellent. But you mustn’t trust me with anything too precious.’ This funny old man had supplied her with an opportunity to be kind, to appear kind; and yet, a first-hand account of the horrors of trench warfare, let alone Orson’s 600-page novel—where was she going to get the time? Oh God, what a messed-up day.
‘Don’t you worry about that,’ Buddy was saying. He gave Joe a wink—of approbation, it seemed, a not-bad sort of a wink, evidently with reference to Kit. ‘Won’t keep you. Cheerio for now, then,’ he said.
As Buddy ambled off, Joe murmured, ‘That made him happy.’
‘No, well,’ said Kit, ‘I’m extremely grateful he made me think of the Public Record Office.’
‘You think you’ll go? Keep hunting?’
‘If they have anything, yes.’
Joe nodded at this information. He let them into the house, the front hall of which wasn’t much warmer than outside.
‘Where do you imagine Buddy was off to?’ said Kit, as she hung up her coat. Her heart began to race at what she was doing.
‘Buddy?’ said Joe. ‘You mean, will he be back soon, and will he come straight up here with his war notes?’
‘Exactly. A hundred per cent spot on, because I—’ a nervous carelessness overtook her, she didn’t want the day to end badly—didn’t really want it to end at all, ‘because—I quite feel like taking all your clothes off; but, if Buddy’s going to show up, yes. I mean, he was going away from the house, right, wasn’t he?’
‘If Frank hadn’t just died—’ said Joe.
Ah, he was turning her down. That was a no. Kit’s heart thumped yet harder inside her. A ‘no’, then. Ah. Well, never mind. So what? Did it matter?
She yelped as Joe slid his icy left hand under her tee shirt, and pulled sharply away from him—a reflex. ‘Sorry,’ she cried, clutching the cold imprint of his hand on her belly. ‘Sorry. I’m sorry. Sorry.’
He looked at her. ‘Finished?’ he said.
‘Yes.’ All of a sudden they were joking together with their eyes. Kit listened, in pantomime, for footsteps on the stairs, then said, ‘Well, this is a silly situation.’
‘Only quite,’ Joe replied. ‘Anyway, Buddy’s no fool.’
‘Let’s go out on the balcony,’ she said. ‘Let’s jump out of the window.’
‘Why? It’s freezing.’
‘Please.’
‘Kit—’
‘Please.’
Outside, aloft, up above the great array of back gardens, visibility was so poor that it hardly extended over the balcony’s rim, apart from the weak glow of lit windows trailing away to either side. Across Joe’s vertical flower beds, innumerable spiders’ webs gleamed with water droplets. The sodden air was heavy also with the scent of wood smoke, and there was a light splashing sound as drips fell from gutters and soaking trees. The scene was strange, yet earthly; quiet, but also fantastical.
Kit communicated her next thought with one eyebrow and a gesture of the hand.
‘Out here?’ said Joe. ‘You mean it?’—his voice subdued by the deadened air. ‘I’m at your mercy, I’m just asking.’
‘Out here,’ she replied, with artless determination.
‘This puts a whole new slant on the concept of a blanket of mist.’
‘Blankets would definitely be good,’ she said, ‘and,’ stooping back in through the window, ‘we could—’ she began to attempt what she was describing, ‘get your mattress thing—’ She hefted it towards her. After all, she understood now how he organised himself, when he lay out on the balcony and thought about maths.
Joe laughed, climbed back inside, disappeared, then returned with a heap of bedding. ‘Pillows, two blankets, a quilt,’ he said. ‘This is going to be uncomfortable.’
‘I’m not fussed.’ Kit took a deep breath. ‘We could be on the moon out here.’
Joe looked up into the invisible distance. ‘Not that you get mists on the moon.’
‘No.’ Not that you did.
‘Also cold, though,’ he said.
And these were the last words either of them spoke, ‘also cold though’. Whatever else they might have said, understood or not understood, they put it aside for now. Nobody wanted them, nobody cared, as the fog lent a kindly, obliterating halo to their wishful human forms.
CHAPTER 6
Kit crawled out of bed, her hands shaking. The past few days she had suffered a series of debilitating headaches, though she felt mysteriously sure now that she was clear of them; only her hands, and the dullness of fatigue, slowing her down. Friday: it should have been a high point of the week. But maybe not this time.
She had parted from Joe seven days earlier unsure she hadn’t offended him, and had become increasingly stricken since at the thought that her generous attempt to get rid of Humpty had been really a big mistake. She had become convinced that Joe must still be planning to drop her—he could make do with the quality-goods blonde, right?—that in the unfortunate minute that she had spoken of the bottle factory, he could only have relegated her to the position of false friend. After all, real life wasn’t like some pulp Victorian novel where you sent your unwanted relatives away; and even if it were, nine times out of ten, she thought wryly, in a boo
k of that kind, the dreadful relative came back at the end and made things worse.
Kit brushed her teeth, her hands still unsteady. Joe had made a date with her the previous week to meet at the club this evening, it had been almost the first thing they’d discussed. But whether the date still stood, she didn’t know. She had felt confused when she’d climbed back in off the balcony; euphoric, wrung out, and so suddenly angry that she hadn’t wanted to speak—hadn’t asked about it, hadn’t been told.
She would go to the dance hall in the hopes he might be there, but wouldn’t expect it.
First, though, right now, Friday morning, she was going to make a lightning trip to London. It wasn’t a sensible plan but she was doing it anyway. She hadn’t gone on Wednesday as she’d intended, had slept through her alarm and woken in a haze at around eleven. But today, here she was awake in time, and, if shaking, still determined.
She got herself out of the house and stumbled along the cold and quiet streets to the railway station, picturing for no good reason how it might have been had she been murdered on Joe’s balcony, killed like Eliza or Nancy, but out on a balcony, a great amount of blood spurting scarlet over the rail and falling down, down, down through the fog, to the untended garden below.
On the train Kit slept again, densely. She awoke at Paddington feeling sick, dozed on the Underground to Kew, drank a large amount of coffee in the Public Record Office cafeteria, then made her way up to the main reading room to work.
She had ordered in advance two murder confessions, the sum total of relevant material she could find listed under ‘Grimwood, Eliza’. As these had to be false confessions, Kit was very aware that she didn’t really have much excuse for bothering with them, interesting though they might prove, in their own way.
Buried amongst the correspondence in the first of two boxes was a letter that implicated a girl who had supposedly admitted to killing Eliza out of jealous affection for Eliza’s last client. The tenor of the note was frankly unconvincing. The second box yielded up a confession made directly by a pathetic individual, ‘of extreme bad character’, who had hoped by this means to get himself discharged from the army, preferring prison. As he turned out to have been unavailable at the time of the murder, this wasn’t convincing either. What the documents did both show, however, was that raising the Grimwood case at this time was a sure-fire way to get yourself noticed. In the 1840s, if you claimed to know who had killed Eliza Grimwood, even where the chances of your being right were unbelievably slender, the police would still be summoned. The government had continued to be anxious to see the thing solved.
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