by Dana Cameron
The windows were darkened and there was no sign of life anywhere on the grounds. I walked past and tried to peer into the back yard—garden, I corrected myself. From the small patch I could see through the wrought-iron fence, the back mirrored the front. No patio for parties, no much-loved garden shed housing the noisy old lawn mower, no deck furniture in this eerie place. I tried to imagine what it would be like to grow up in such an inhospitable house and suddenly could see how, if it had not been born in this place, Julia’s quietness had stood her in good stead here. Such an inhuman precision would drive anyone to find quiet corners and unobtrusive amusements. It seemed to me that even the birds didn’t bother to nest anywhere near here, or maybe it was just the rain that prevented me from hearing their song.
The next stop was the pub Julia had visited the night of her death. The Grub and Cabbage was nothing like either the Prince of Wales or the Fig and Thistle. On the edge of this tony district, it was of new construction that looked as though it had been poured from a bottle of “Acme Instant Public House.” It wasn’t open yet, so I headed for the next stop on my grim pilgrimage: the construction site.
A little farther on, away from the center of town and the dig, was Leather Street, a place that was full of new houses and the blank gaps where old buildings had been torn down to make way for new ones. In the middle of it all was a huge area fenced in with chain link that reached ten feet into the air, barbed wire around the top. There was only one gate, a massive sliding thing on wheels that reminded me of Hollywood evocations of medieval castles, fastened with a massive chain and padlock. I walked all the way around, just to make sure I wasn’t missing some other entrance, and couldn’t even find a hole where kids might have crawled through to play on the dangerous site or rob scraps or whatever kids might have done. There was no way in except for that gate, and there was no way through the gate without a key. As his house had demonstrated to me, there was nothing sloppy about the way that George Whiting conducted himself, but I didn’t recall the police stating the construction site had been broken into. How had the murderer gotten in with a body? Or had Julia reached the construction site under her own power?
Having spent some time near construction sites—archaeologists are often called in to investigate what they uncover—I could tell that this was extremely well organized. Trailer for plans and meetings, sheds for storage of tools, piles of raw materials, cranes hoisted compressors into the air to keep them hanging safely out of reach. Foundations poured, rebar jutting up like claws into the sky. Dust making everything a uniform color, save where bales of brick sat like a thick, angry scar on the ground. There were two skips or Dumpsters, new ones, it seemed, off to the side of an older one, still festooned with the blue and white tape that warned a police investigation was taking place here. I wondered whether work had been allowed to continue here and made a note to ask. If it hadn’t, it struck me as a double blow to the man: kill his daughter, then rob away his livelihood. Which seemed to me to be an incredibly dangerous thing to try with George Whiting. But what if that had been the goal in the first place…? Who would want to hurt him so? Palmer sprang easily enough to mind, but I made myself think the next fearful thought: Jane? Both had their reasons for hating him. He had never shied from hurting either of them when it suited him.
I walked around the construction site again, as much to make certain that I hadn’t missed another entrance as to give myself time to think. I also tried not to look as suspicious as I felt; it was ghoulish, what I was doing, but as far as anyone else was concerned, I was only out for a walk. But as I walked, any worries that I might have been watched slowly dissolved, and between that and my growing confidence, I began to relax, not move so skittishly. There were very few people on the street, and most of these seemed to be hurrying, nicely dressed, to church at ten o’clock. The other noises that I could hear from the street, strangely muffled roars, I soon identified as the sounds of a televised soccer match. The fact that these were occasionally overwhelmed by anguished cries or violent cheering confirmed this for me. Good. With any luck, for the next hour or so, I might just be left largely unnoticed.
I was on my way back around to the front gate when I saw her. She stuck out as much as I did on that deserted street; more so, because her behavior was so erratic. At first I thought it was Morag, but it wasn’t. I was fooled by the raincoat that reminded me of her dark, flowing clothes. This woman was taller, and had graying hair, and was dressed in street clothes that grew more distinct as I moved closer: skirt, blouse, shoes, stockings, all quite ordinary, upper-middle-class wear, well made but badly fastened and worn. The thing that was extraordinary was the woman’s face—suffused with loss and grief so pervasive that it should have been a model for the theatrical tragedy mask, so openly emotional that I was automatically uncomfortable, more so, now, in this place where self-restraint in certain matters was a matter of national pride.
The other thing that was so alarming was her posture. She clutched at the fence, her arms out wide, and whether she was thinking of climbing up or tearing the fence down, I don’t know, but her grip on the fence was so intense that I could feel the faint vibrations as they traveled through the cold aluminum links to where I’d stopped. Arms outstretched, she wept in agony, sobs that wracked her body and were communicated down the fence in increasingly loud waves. The fence was sturdily built—it had to be—but the woman succeeded in making that uncaring metal hum with her emotion. The hulking machinery on the other side, the bulldozers and cranes, remained unmoved.
I watched this, hoping that she would wear herself out, calm down, but it only seemed to build as she went on. I was closer now, moving much more slowly, wondering what the hell I should do, when I began to hear the words she was saying.
“…Quiet now, it is quiet now, and there’s no more strife, but I’ve lost my little girl and she’s not here. She’s so lost and I am lost and the quiet is horrible—”
What should I do? Ring a doorbell? Another roar went up from one of the houses and I knew the soccer match was still on. Finally, I thought I’d better just ask the woman herself if there was anything I could do. I think also that I was trying to deny that I knew who she must be.
“Are you—?” Don’t be an idiot, Emma, of course she isn’t. “Is…is there someone I can call?” Vaguely, I was aware of a car engine in the distance.
The woman turned to me and stopped speaking. She looked at me without comprehension, though she still clutched the fence like it was a life preserver in stormy seas.
“Can I help you? Can I call someone—?”
There was a revving of an engine as a car pulled up right alongside us. A dark green Jaguar. George Whiting got out of the driver’s side and ran over to us.
I froze and acknowledged to myself who it was I was talking to.
“You can’t call anyone. We’re all lost now,” the woman said to me.
Whiting seized the woman’s left wrist. “Oh, Jesus, Ellen, what are you trying to do?” He saw me, recognized me, then yanked at her hand with a rough curse. The woman shrieked and banged herself against the fence, clutching at it with all her might. Whiting swallowed, and with forced patience, carefully prised her fingers off the links, one by one, until he had that hand free. “Ellen, Ellen, come on now. You don’t want to do this. Come now, love.”
I saw the blood then, coming from where the fence had torn at her palm, staining his hands too. Ellen Whiting writhed against her husband, but it was easier for him to remove her right hand, even while he still held her other wrist pinioned. He was a good deal shorter than his wife was but so very strong, and something about his insistence seemed to drain some of the fight from her. But as he started to lead her toward the car, the engine still running, she began to scream.
“Julia! Juu-lia! Juli—”
Whiting, with something that looked like practice, forced his wife into the car and gently shut the door, cutting off the rest of her cry. He then turned around to me.
By
this time, several doors had opened up and people were starting to peer out to find the source of the racket. George glanced at them, no more, then spoke to me.
“You remember what I said before.” His words were low. “Bloody archaeologist. Don’t you ever say a fucking word about this. Never.”
And that was all. He was at the right hand driver’s side before I could blink. He slammed that door and then gunned the engine. So overwhelmed was I by what I’d just seen that I just stared. As the Jaguar tore past me, I could see, briefly, that Ellen was no longer screaming, but sat, looking back at the fence, her bloodied hand pressed against the window as if in farewell, smearing the glass.
Chapter 15
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN MY AWARENESS OF THOSE TWITCHING curtains or the sudden rumbling of my stomach that spurred me away from there. That is what I told myself; in reality, I was driven away by the shock, the raw emotion of what I’d left behind. Pain, madness, fear, anger were dangerously exposed like a wire with the insulation chewed off it. What was most startling, what stayed with me longer than Ellen’s nearly mute misery, was the way that George Whiting had behaved toward her. He approached the scene with a familiarity that bespoke weariness and a tenderness that spoke of an abiding love and patience I wouldn’t have imagined the man possessed. I recalled Jeremy’s words—“rough around the edges, but no worse”—and realized, in this instance, at least, it must be true.
And then there was Whiting’s constant reference to archaeologists. It was so out of place with what he should have been concerned with—a murdered daughter, a more than distraught wife—that there must be something more than his antipathy toward Jane behind it—
No, I realized. Blaming Jane, ranting about archaeologists, it was just noise, I was willing to bet, it was a necessary distraction, like Shylock crying over his lost ducats to mask his distress at Jessica’s betrayal. Julia Whiting’s profession was a minor thorn in her father’s side, given the present circumstances, but focusing on that kept Whiting from thinking about the horrors that had lately enveloped his life…
I fled. I decided to have another look at the Grub and Cabbage, but promised myself I wouldn’t stick around if it turned out to be like the Fig and Thistle.
Nothing could have been less similar. Despite the fact that it was a clean, well-lighted place, it was stuffed with all the appurtenances of a pub, but none of the life. I got the same feel from it as I did from certain theme restaurants in the United States, where clutter was scientifically accumulated and situated to produce a maximum level of inoffensive nostalgia. People came to this haven of hanging plants, toby jugs, and horse prints because it was conveniently situated on a busy road with a large parking area; they didn’t know or care to know the name of the guy behind the bar, a pimply faced lad in an ill-fitting black bow tie and clean white shirt, who looked bored and out of place as he cut limes and washed glasses. From my seat, I watched as patrons entered—mostly couples—pausing at the door briefly. They were nonlocals passing through, it seemed, for a swift half and “real” steak and kidney pie. The waitress who took my order smiled briefly and asked if I thought it would stop raining soon, but didn’t appear to hear my answer, her eyes focused somewhere past me. All in all, it seemed to me to be an excellent place to conduct an illicit affair and I wondered whether Julia hadn’t arranged to meet her boyfriend here after her visit home and whether he met her before she was killed. The police in the newspaper article mentioned she’d stopped here, and left shortly thereafter.
I finished my half pint and plowman’s lunch. It wasn’t bad, but it sure wasn’t good. The cheese was curled at the edges and the salad was wilted; I wondered whether the cold plate didn’t indicate that it had been stacked with countless identical others in the industrial fridge. I had another look around. Maybe it was the way I’d spent my morning, maybe it was how it had finished, but the place seemed to me to be almost as gloomy as my evening at the Fig and Thistle. I certainly didn’t feel threatened here, but equally, there was nothing inviting in this place, nothing that made me want to ease back in my seat and relax for a while. It was more as though I felt like I was part of a demographic being serviced. I never would have stopped here, ordinarily. So why hadn’t I just walked back to the center of town, to the Prince of Wales? I could have ignored a grumbling tummy for another twenty or thirty minutes. Easily.
The answer was simple. I wasn’t here to eat. I was here to ask questions. To investigate.
In that moment, I knew what Sabine had been after, why she’d been so angry when I’d first asked her about people in town. I threw down a bank note and some change and hurried out of there.
I found the vicar in the graveyard behind the church. Reverend Jones was still in her cassock, surplice, and stole, her hair was neatly pulled back and in as tidy shape as I had ever seen it. She was smoking and looking so tranquil under the oak tree that I hesitated. If Sunday morning was her busy part of the week, then how much more precious would the quiet moment after that be? I had just decided to turn around and come back another time, when the gravel I stepped on shifted and rattled. Sabine turned around quickly, a little irritated.
Her face relaxed only a little when she saw me. “Hello. Come to see me?”
“I don’t want to bother you. This must be like Friday night for you.” I noticed that her stole was embroidered: one side was covered with a multitude of tiny, finely wrought sheep. On the other was a shepherd carrying a single lost sheep. Someone had put a lot of handwork into that.
She waved me over. “There are no Friday nights in this job. On the other hand, that also means there are no Monday mornings, really. Come on, have a seat.” She patted the stone wall she was leaning against.
We sat there quietly for a while, Sabine smoking, me looking at the gravestones. I’d seen that there were a couple of good ones in the churchyard—meaning early ones with ghoulish, instructive carvings of winged hourglasses and skulls—but most of them around where we sat were from the nineteenth century. Yawn—I could get that at home. Rain ran down the stones and pattered on the leaves of the oak tree that sheltered us, and the calm was quietly wonderful. Of course it couldn’t last.
“This is a marvelous place,” I said. And it truly was, even in the gentle rain. I looked over my shoulder, across the river. The sky was closer, a more intimate sky than I was used to at home, and the green of the trees on the other side of the river in town was accented by the wet. A little sun and a cow and we would have had a Constable.
We sat quietly a moment longer.
“Maybe you can explain something,” Sabine said. “When I used to go abroad more often, Americans would find out I was English and tell me how much they felt like they were coming home when they came to England. It always confused me. I don’t suppose they were talking about genetic memory? That’s a bit much, if you ask me. But they do tend to say it quite a lot. Why is that?”
I thought about it for a moment. “It is memory.”
She frowned, not convinced. “You don’t really think it’s something passed down, do you?”
“I don’t think it’s so much genetic memory—I mean, not all Americans are descended from English colonists, right?—but a kind of cultural memory that gets built in school. You’re taught English poetry and plays and literature, some of those images are bound to stick with you, become iconic. You watch enough Merchant–Ivory or Brideshead or even just PBS, and the landscape gets reinforced without you really paying attention to it. So that’s why people think they recognize things and places and feelings when they get here. I don’t think it’s anything more than that.”
“Hmm. Possible. Better than anything I came up with, I guess.” She knew that wasn’t why I was here.
I took a deep breath. “How did you become a priest? You’d been in geology before?”
Reverend Jones raised an eyebrow and stubbed out her cigarette. She reached under her robes, pulled out her papers and tobacco, and rolled another, looking at me curiously. “The two ar
en’t unrelated. Nothing is, I suppose. I was on holiday, in Turkey. There was an earthquake. I was trapped for several hours under the rubble of the building I’d been in, a little cafe. It was gone, utterly destroyed. A pile of wood scraps and clay brick rubble. The owner, who was the only other person in there, was killed. Though not right away.”
She was silent for a moment.
“That’s where you got the scar?” I prompted, gesturing to the pale line over her brow.
“Oh, no. That? Tch, no, I got that playing rugby.”
I had a distant image of a herd of burly men tossing a large white ball and slamming into each other with bone-crunching intensity. It wasn’t such a stretch for Sabine, I guess—she enjoyed sport—but far from the peaceful quiet of the graveyard in which we sat. “You played rugby.”
“At school.” Sabine stuck her cigarette in her mouth and, hands freed, pulled up one leg of her trousers, revealing dark green nubbly socks. Rugby socks, I supposed. “Still miss it.”
