Today was Friday, which meant Elspeth was in her favorite place in the world—the Reverend Lucien Broughton’s home. She always started her cleaning in the kitchen and then moved to the parlor and then the bathroom. The Reverend’s house was immaculate, but she still cleaned it with a fervor that was a religion in itself. She saved the best part of the house for last.
She always quivered with delight when she entered his bedroom. No other woman was allowed into this sanctum, just she, mousy little Elspeth Dowdell. She’d heard one of the young mothers refer to her that way, and laugh a little after. A cruel little laugh. Well, the girl could laugh as she liked, she was married to a great lump who already had a red nose from the drink, and him not even thirty yet.
The bedroom was on the second floor and had two large windows that looked out to the east. It was filled with light in the mornings, during which time she knew the Reverend prayed, sometimes for two whole hours. He was beautifully pious.
She checked his hairbrush for stray hairs, and found to her delight that there were five today. She gathered them and tucked them in the small envelope she kept on her person for just this purpose. She had almost enough to finish the doll she was making of him. It was her hobby, a small passion that she had, making dolls to resemble people she knew. There wasn’t anyone that she knew, not even old Mrs. Cruikshank, who could stitch as finely as she could. She had a trunk at home, her father’s old army barrack box, which was filled with scraps of cloth and bright beads, threads in jeweled colors, tiny buttons and bows, and bits of leather to fashion shoes. When she could she liked to use real hair for the dolls, though it was difficult to procure. In making the Reverend’s likeness she wanted it to be as authentic as possible and so she had collected his hair when the opportunity presented. She knew some people thought her hobby was creepy, but the Reverend didn’t. She had shown him the doll she had made of the Queen, and he had exclaimed over the bright yellow wool suit and the marcelled brown curls in delight, saying he’d never seen such a likeness. It was then she’d had the idea to make one of him, for him.
The bed was made, just as it always was, with military perfection, corners tight and the sheet folded down over the blanket to an exactness that pleased her soul. Elspeth loved order, exactness, cleanliness, holiness. The sheets were white, none of your brash colors for the Reverend. She pictured him lying here at night sometimes when she was in her own narrow spinster’s bed, and her breath would get short and her skin would feel swollen all over. Sometimes she would get up and pray for the impure thoughts to go away. Sometimes she would just allow it to happen.
Today was the day she washed the linens, a task she loved. There was something almost religious about it, washing the linens, hanging them to dry, ironing them with long strokes and then putting them, still warm, on the bed. Then smoothing the sheets over the mattress with her hands and sometimes kneeling there for a moment at his bedside, smelling the clean scent of the bedding and knowing he would lie upon that which her hands had made ready for him that very night.
She took the coverlet off, and folded it carefully, laying it on the stool the Reverend kept by one of the windows, where he knelt for morning and evening prayers. The sheets were always pristine, the Reverend didn’t have any of the nasty habits that most men were afflicted with. One would almost think no one slept in this bed, only she knew he did, because she could smell his scent on the sheets when she lifted them to her face and breathed in deeply. He smelled pure and yet somehow very masculine at the same time, it was almost an absence of scent. The smell made her think of swans on a river, or fields of cotton under a silver grey sky.
She stripped off the top sheet and then frowned. The sheets were not pristine today, for there was a hair on the snowy white linen. A long black hair. She picked it up, a sick feeling rushing up from her stomach, for this was a woman’s hair. She walked to the window, to better look at it. It shone iridescent in the filtered sunlight, glittering with tints of violet, green and blue. Released from the sheet, it spiraled down in loops. Why was there a woman’s hair in the Reverend’s bed? It made no sort of sense. She had never seen him so much as glance at a woman, nor had there ever been one in this house since he had taken up residence. She had never even seen a woman who had such—such temptress hair. Had he tracked it up perhaps, on his socks, on the sleeve of one of his immaculate sweaters? She clutched one arm across her middle, she felt sick at the thought of the Reverend giving in to a man’s baser nature.
She looked at her reflection in the mirror over the bureau. Her face was mottled with anger, eyes wide with shock. It wasn’t flattering. She whirled away from the mirror, her well-ordered world shaken by this simple discovery of a woman’s hair in the Reverend’s bed. Her sleeve caught on the corner of the bureau, and the top drawer, situated on well-oiled runners, flew out and landed with a crash, depositing all of its contents onto the floor. She felt a moment of horror—what if the Reverend should come upon her and think she was snooping through his things? It was just sweaters, as the Reverend kept separate drawers for particular articles of clothing—underwear in second drawer down, socks in the next, vestments and collars in the bottom. In the jumble of pale woolens now spread across the wood floor, she saw a flicker of brown—an envelope, sealed and thick. She leaned down and picked it up. There was nothing written on it, but it was substantial. She ran her fingers over it, wishing the flap was unstuck. She took a shaky breath. It would be the work of a minute to unstick it and then she could easily smear a dab of glue on the flap and stick it back together. The Reverend was across the way in the church, going over the arrangements and details for a marriage he was conducting this weekend. She would have plenty of time. She gathered up the sheets to take down to the laundry tub, she wanted to wash the filth of the woman’s hair away as soon as possible. She put the kettle on to boil while she put the sheets in the washer. She added a little bleach along with the laundry powder, just to make certain the sheets would be entirely sanitized.
The kettle was letting out puffs of steam when she returned to the kitchen. It took two minutes to unstick the flap. She turned off the stove and headed back up the stairs, the damp envelope clutched to her chest.
Inside the bedroom she knelt down on the wood floor and shook the contents out of the envelope. There were papers in a bundle, a small leather-bound book, a long narrow envelope, and several pictures. She started with the papers, which appeared to be legal documents, property details and bank accounts. There were also dossiers on a few policemen, one a name that she recognized. She committed the names to memory and moved on to the notebook. Its pages were filled with tiny crabbed writing, line after line of it, so small she could hardly make it out. She could read snatches here and there, but knew it would be foolhardy to linger too long over deciphering it. There was a name repeated in it a few times, a name that she was familiar with because she had often seen it in the pages of the newspaper.
The pictures were of a variety of people, some women, some men and some families merely getting into their cars or walking together in a park. Half-way through the photographs, she came to the woman with the dark hair. There were several pictures of her. Some with a tall dark-haired man, and some just with children, clearly the offspring of the man. She peered closely at the pictures and determined that this was indeed the woman from whose head the incriminating hair originated. What to make of it? Why did the Reverend have pictures of the woman? She was clearly married, and Elspeth couldn’t fathom that the Reverend would take up with a married woman.
Her mother had taught her that men had no control over the appendage between their legs and therefore it was the woman who must always be the guard over her own virtue. If the Reverend had this woman in his bed, it was because he was, like all men, weak in this area. She was pretty, very pretty, and Elspeth understood how much that was valued by men and how daft it could make them. She would not have thought the Reverend particularly vulnerable in this area, and found it rather disappointing that he was
. She sighed; men could not be held accountable for their own actions when such a woman practiced her wiles upon them. She felt a wave of hatred for the woman so profound that her skin turned hot with it, small droplets of sweat breaking out on her face. She picked up the long narrow envelope last, and was happy to see that it wasn’t sealed, but rather that the flap was just tucked inside. She opened it. There was something wrapped in tissue inside, something dark and silky. She unwrapped the tissue carefully, and then gasped in horror. It was the same hair, only there was a bunch of it here, carefully ordered, shimmering in the rare sunlight that was pouring in through the windows. The hair was neatly tied with a white ribbon. A man would have to be madly in love to do such a thing, to have a woman’s hair in his bureau, bound in ribbon like it was a precious object, treasured as a love lock. She thought of her own mousy thin hair. There would not be enough to bind together, even if she were to shave her head bald and present the Reverend with the harvest.
“Elspeth, what are you doing?” The voice was calm, but she startled in horror. There was no way to fix this now, his sweaters were still in disarray on the floor and the pictures, the glossy wee squares, gleaming evilly, were everywhere. She was still clutching the silky hair in her hands, and the ribbon had come undone, the hair spreading and falling from her hands, winking like jeweled threads. His eyes were so cold as they looked at her. Surely he would fire her and maybe even banish her from the church. Everyone would know her shame; just walking down the streets to get milk from the corner shop would be an exercise in humiliation.
He knelt down beside her and took the hair from her hands. He was not smiling, but then he rarely did. He did not seem angry either. And then he said the words she had wanted to hear from the day she had met him, the most desirable words in the world.
“Elspeth, I need your help.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Life, Death and Lemon Loaf
TO HAVE A LOVED one missing was to exist in some strange alternate universe in which that person was neither dead nor alive, but rather in a dreadful limbo which had all sorts of legal ramifications, and yet no real help forthcoming from the actual law. Life itself took on a ridiculous aspect, simple things that used to have meaning no longer did. Choosing what to wear in the morning seemed silly at times, because what could a shirt or a pair of shoes matter anymore? Pamela was surprised if she managed to wear two shoes from the same pair, if she remembered to comb her hair more than once a day, if she remembered to eat, to sleep, to breathe. These alone still felt like monumental tasks each day.
No one warned you about the macabre visions that went along with all the uncertainty. The things that haunted you and belonged to the necropolis through which your mind wandered during the wee hours while the living world slept. The worry that he was cold, that he had suffered pain, that his body was now in some anonymous hole where it would never be found, and there would never be an answer for her, for Patrick, for Conor and Isabelle, for Deirdre. Or worse yet that he’d been left to the elements, to wind and rain and animals to scavenge and scatter. It was incomprehensible to her that his big body, so strong and capable and loving, could be gone, could be hurt and harmed and made to stop, like a great light snuffed out, leaving a dark hole in the midst of her own universe.
Then there was the search for answers. On that front she was banging her head into the same patch of brick wall over and over, regardless of the figurative blood and bruising she kept sustaining. There was always the hope, admittedly getting smaller by the week, that at some point she would ask the right question, or discover the one tiny detail that would lead to finding out what had happened to Casey. And on the underside of that there was the fear that she would never find the right question, never stumble across the truth, and that if she ever did, she wouldn’t be able to bear it.
The truth was she had no patience left and she was exhausted by the ridiculous and ultimately meaningless dance she had to do each time she wanted any sort of update on whether the police had found something—anything—to indicate what had happened to her husband. Today had been especially unpleasant as it had been Constable Blackwood and not Constable Severn who came out to talk with her. It was her third time meeting with this constable, and he wasn’t getting any more pleasant with familiarity. There was something about the man that made her feel like she needed a hot shower after even a few minutes spent in his presence. Patrick had gone with her the last time, and had no better luck than she in determining if the police were doing anything at all to follow up. She was driving home from her latest encounter with the constable, hoping that the soft late spring day would take some of the taint of the meeting away before she picked up Conor and Isabelle from Gert’s.
Another season, come and nearly gone. It was hard to watch the pages on the calendar go past, flicking faster and faster and causing time to blur. Because, as it turned out, even when your heart was broken the seasons still changed, and life, as inexorable as a river in full spate, kept moving. Leaves broke free of buds, rivers rose and fell, lambs and calves were born and grew, and so did children.
Up ahead was a roadblock. A soldier was in the roadway motioning her to slow down. She sighed, this roadblock was a new one. It must have been erected after the shooting of a soldier last week. It consisted of a barricade of sandbags across half the extremely narrow road, a gate that had to be opened manually and a hastily constructed tin hut. She slowed to a stop and rolled her window down. Roadblocks were simply part of her daily life, but she was still uneasy any time she was stopped. In a country filled with flashpoints roadblocks were just one of many, it was a place where tensions naturally rose and things could quickly go awry. At least this soldier didn’t aim his rifle at her face—that had happened more than once, and while usually it was just the soldier using the telescope to get a better look to determine who was driving, it was still terribly unnerving.
She rolled her window down, as one of the soldiers approached. She put on what she thought of as her ‘neutral face’, though Casey had always told her she didn’t possess any such thing.
“Good afternoon, Ma’am.”
Whether it was a good afternoon was highly debatable, but Pamela felt it was unwise to argue with the man carrying the machine gun. She knew the drill, and already had her license out to hand to him.
“Where are you coming from today, Ma’am?”
“Newry,” she said.
“And where are you going?”
“Home—just outside of Coomnablath.”
He nodded and stepped back and she got out of the truck and opened the bonnet for him. He gave it a cursory once over and nodded. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said and retreated to the tin shed from which came the insistent crackle of a radio. She got back in the truck confident he would come back out and wave her through in a few seconds. He was several minutes, though, and when he emerged from the tiny hut he had an uneasy look on his face.
“I apologize. I’m going to have to ask you to pull aside, Ma’am. There’s a P-check alert on your vehicle.”
“A what?” she asked blankly, distracted by the thought that she would now be late.
“It means you’re on the list of vehicles that have to have their license run, and that means we have to get authorized permission each time for the release of your vehicle through the stops.”
“I…since when?” She wanted to bang her head on the steering wheel in frustration, this was going to add at least another half hour to her trip, and not just today but every blessed time she had to pass through one of the numerous roadblocks that pocked the countryside. She had been driving Noah’s truck unimpeded through roadblocks for weeks now, so this was a new development.
The soldier shook his head. “I don’t know, Ma’am. I’m only following instructions. I’ll need you to pull over to the side.”
She sighed. There was nothing for it except to do as he told her to. It wasn’t his fault and there was little use taking her frustrations out on him. She pulled
over and turned the truck off. It scared the hell out of her that the vehicle had been registered as one to be watched by the security forces. It was likely this was down to her association with Noah. She knew the Army kept an eye on Noah constantly, and so it stood to reason that they might want to keep an eye on anyone associated with him, regardless of the reason.
The soldier came over to her window. She rolled it all the way down and looked at him.
“I’ve radioed through, but sometimes it takes them a bit to run the plate and get back to me. So I’ll have to ask you to be patient.”
“This is ridiculous,” she snapped, her self-restraint worn thin, “I’m going to be late to pick up my children.”
“Well, most things here are ridiculous or hadn’t you noticed?” the soldier said, and smiled, taking the sting from his words. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m only following orders.”
“Yes and how many sins have been glossed over using those words?” she said sharply.
The soldier gave her a mild look. “Probably a great many, but none here today. Unless you count the lustful looks Jock,” he nodded toward the stocky soldier who was the only other being at the roadblock, “was throwing at the sheep that ambled through a half hour ago.”
She laughed in spite of herself, and he smiled. “I know it’s a pain in the arse, but being that neither of us has any choice about it, we’ll try to make it as painless as possible.”
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 21
