“WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND IS how the fellow came to be jammed in there. I don’t understand any of it! Who was he? Why was he here? And once here, why was he murdered?” Kenny Armstrong was comfortably folded into his favourite chair with his feet propped up on the kitchen stove, onto which he’d just put a kettle. His wife and Lane had put away the dinner things and had joined him in the worn and perfectly bottom-shaped rattan chairs. Lane smiled. Kenny was in a state of sublime happiness. Someone he didn’t know had been murdered, right here in King’s Cove, and because the Armstrong house was fed from a different creek, he’d not even been particularly inconvenienced.
“I’m sure, my dear, that your mother saw the whole thing,” said Eleanor, spooning some black tea into her teapot. She brought out her china, as if a discussion of this dead stranger warranted the good tea things.
“Well, if she did, she won’t be saying much. She’s not walking about talking to you, is she?” Kenny addressed this question to Lane.
“No. Aside from opening the windows, she’s a very quiet house guest. Though when I think of it, she must see me as the interloper. Harris is a handful, isn’t he? All that huff and puff. I thought he’d explode when the inspector asked me to go first to show him the scene. He seemed to think I was quite dim. He fumed and fumed and didn’t look like he was getting any relief until he was asked to speculate on who it was, which neither of us could have said, as we only saw the back of his head.”
“Yes. As stuffed as a shirt can get. You know he fought with my brother in France.”
“Mrs. Hughes told me that. When I mentioned it to him, in an ill-fated attempt to make conversation while we waited for the police, he plunged into a dark, moody silence. It was foolish of me to talk about the war. It’s so personal. Of course you can’t make light conversation on the back of so much suffering. I was very sorry to hear your brother died over there, by the way. It must have been ghastly for you all.”
Kenny swung his legs off the stove, something he did with the grace and energy of a young man, though he would surely be in his sixties. He tipped the kettle toward the pot, and then stopped. “You know, she never said a word. I was broken up about it myself. He was a wonderful, gentle sort of chap. I was going to go, but he insisted. He said I needed to stay with our mother and run the orchard. I always felt horribly guilty about the whole thing. Then, after the fire of ’19, I couldn’t be bothered with the orchards anymore. I just planted a few trees for Mum.
“Harris, to be honest, was more of a mess when he got back. He had a lot of bad luck on top of just being demobbed and having shell shock. His orchard was all but destroyed in the fire and his wife couldn’t cope and left before he even got back. Poor thing disappeared. We thought she’d gone to her people in Nelson but word got back that she’d never arrived there. Perhaps she went to the coast and died of the influenza. He got his batsman to come over and help him get started, and shortly after they’d replanted the orchard, the poor fellow was killed when he got in the way of a tree they were felling. Harris wasn’t so difficult before all that. He could be moody when he was young, but his temper after the war was unbelievable. I had to pull him off Reggie one time. I thought he’d kill him, and it was over some imagined slight. Jumpy as hell too. That’s what it was! Alice Mather had been going around shooting things and he nearly went crazy. Now he’s older, and apt to live on his past glory and think that everyone else is stupid. He’s a cousin of mine, as a matter of fact.”
Lane frowned. “You know, it’s so funny about people like that. I was watching for a minute when we took the police back to the body. Harris looked quite green. He seems so hardened.”
“So you didn’t get a look at his face? The dead man, I mean,” asked Eleanor.
“Sorry, no. He had a nice tweed jacket though. Leather buttons. I don’t think he’d be very old. Under thirty-five, to judge by the physique and the hair.”
“Stranger and stranger,” said Kenny. “Maybe Harris is right. We, aside from your good self, Lane, are all getting pretty ancient. Who but the Yanks, as he likes to call them, would have someone young come see them?”
“Except,” said Lane, “and I’ve just thought of this, I’d have put any money on his being English. I can’t even say why I’d say that. The Yanks have no experience with the English at all. They think we are all wonderfully quaint; me especially with my ‘cute’ accent.”
The sky, still light at nine-thirty, was nevertheless beginning to show a slight darkening of the complexion that presaged the coming of full night at ten. Lane wanted to get back across to hers while it was still light. As she was leaving with a couple of corked bottles of water for her morning coffee—she was loath to drink the water, which had finally begun to come through again late that afternoon, until some suitable period of time had passed after the body had been removed—Eleanor and Kenny stood in front of their door waving cheerfully.
“I hope Harris is okay,” she suddenly thought to say. “Should I give him a call, do you think?”
Kenny waved a dismissive hand. “I shouldn’t bother. He could have come to ours, and he was too bloody proud. Always has to hack through life on his own. He’d just be angry because he’d think you were implying he’s soft.”
Making a decision, Lane said, “I’m going up to town tomorrow. I think I’m going to splurge and buy myself a new hose. Can I bring you anything?”
“Goodness, yes! I need a sack of flour, if you wouldn’t mind,” said Eleanor.
“Done!”
It was, she supposed, too sanguine of her to imagine that this would be a normal night. If she had worried when she was first told that the ghost of Lady Armstrong resided in her attic, and was inclined to the action of opening windows, Lane quickly realized that imagining the ghost there was almost a protection from the internal spirits that haunted her. She had slept well enough on many nights since she’d arrived, though the nightmares were coming somewhat more often, albeit, she noted wryly, taking on a more and more metaphorical character. It surprised her that she was having more nightmares. She had been certain that she would have fewer with increasing distance and time from the war. She wondered if it was because the mind stored up the horrors for later when it was safe. Well, she was no trickcyclist. She couldn’t be fussing about with all that psychology business. Millions of people had had a far worse war than she had. She remembered her grandfather saying these things eventually passed. She hoped he was right. Her main thoughts, as she turned on her lamp and put her glass of hot milk on the bedside table next to her book, were reserved for Harris’s unsociable behaviour. She thought of him returning from an earlier war—shell shocked, his orchard burned, his wife gone. His age and bitterness seemed to tell the whole of his character, but she imagined him as one of the many young men she had known, early on, when they were still suffused with an eager, conquering spirit. They will all turn into him, she thought, propped up in bed, her book open but unread on her lap—all the ones who made it.
When images from the events of the day intruded, she pushed them back, and allowed only the medical van disappearing up her drive and the policeman with his hat in his left hand as he shook with his right, formal, unsmiling, unlike his constable, who gave her a cheerful smile and a wave as he climbed into their car. She did not even allow Inspector Darling’s charcoal eyes.
She always left her windows open. Everything was open. In this she’d taken after the late Lady Armstrong, who was so insistent on fresh air up in her little sphere, the attic. Now the silence gently blew in from the velvet dark outside. The silence was what she loved best. It was the antidote: the healing, green silence. She still had her last lot of letters on the bedside table. They would be neutral enough to read before she went to sleep. There were the two bills—these she put aside—and a letter from Mr. Nesbitt, the house agent from Nelson, asking after her and urging her again to reconsider living in town because, while the summers were lovely, the winters would be intolerable. She laughed at what Mr. Nesbitt must consider intolerable, and opened her last letter from England. It was from the first week in June, a time that suddenly felt months ago.
Darling Laneka, how are you? We are well here, though the rain has been unremitting. We never used to get rain like this in Bilderingshof, did we? Ganf is adjusting well to living here, though he misses the river. He scowls at the mailman with those great black brows of his when there is no letter from you. It is funny to be English but not. We are like strangers here. I have not been here since I was a girl, that dreadful time I came out in ’89, or ’90, I can hardly remember it seems so long ago, to see your grandfather’s sisters and they were so horrible to me. They’ve all died now, poor dears. It’s a good thing they missed this last war; they’d barely recovered from the first one. And we are all dispersed now, your sister to South Africa, you to Canada. I have heard that even the Watsons, who had thought to stay on in Riga, are coming back now. It will be nice to have someone to talk to who remembers our old life, but I suppose Mrs W. will be as tiresome about her health here as she ever was there. You would be pleased with the bed of black-eyed Susans you planted along the south border. They seem to thrive in this wet and are the most brilliant intense yellow, especially on grey days. They remind me of you. Please do not be downhearted, my love. I hope that you are finding ease and rest and forgetting.
Rest and forgetting. Her rest. Her forgetting. She folded the letter carefully back into the envelope, soothed somewhat by the very un-English outpouring of loving words that her grandmother always filled her letters with. This complete lack of the traditional taciturn stiff upper lip comes of being English, she thought, but living your whole life on foreign soil. And now she was doing the same thing. She sipped at her hot milk and thought again about her one great friend, Yvonne. Lane had known, after Angus, that she could not stay on in England and had tried France. Living with Yvonne in her great house in the Dordogne had been lovely, but France . . . too full of memories. Her nightmares were unrelenting there, as if the past could not be made to lie down but must be there with her every night. In the end she had said to Yvonne, who was being Gallicly tragic about not being able to help her, “I really must go somewhere far and new. Look at those posters advertising Canada—the beautiful young woman standing atop a ski hill looking across a range of mountains. That could be me.”
“You don’t ski,” Yvonne had reminded her coolly.
“I can learn. I am young.”
She knew Yvonne’s life must be busy. Full of her struggles with the local mairie over a building permit for an outbuilding for the horses she wished to raise. Yvonne had turned her energies firmly away from the war and thrown herself into horses, an expensive and all-consuming passion that her husband’s money allowed her. Lane was secretly pleased her own money allowed her nothing more than what she had: a house, a small living, and time.
SHE AWOKE SLOWLY from the dream, as she always did, rigid with fear that carried into waking and the darkened room. It made her afraid to move, and afraid to fall asleep. She knew that if she did not move, she would fall back into the nightmare as if she had not woken up. She lay with her eyes open, looking into the blackness, still hearing the roaring of the flames. She could not quite place where she was, and this confusion added to her fear. She moved her eyes slowly across whatever scene might be in front of her face, looking for clues—the grey from a window, the looming shadow of her wardrobe—and then she realized the wardrobe had been in her room in her brief childhood home in Kent. The curtains fluttered and seemed to be enough. “I am here,” she thought, and knew where “here” was.
It was the same dream again—the one that had so surprised her when it first came. She had abruptly stopped dreaming about the war: the dead faces she could not recognize when she woke but seemed to know so well in her dream; the many manifestations of missions she could not complete because she had lost some tiny piece of paper, or had missed the transport, or could not find the ship. Now it was always a variation on the same dream: she was standing on the road that wound through the wood to her house in Kent, and the entire road was burning so that she could not get through.
She reached for the pull chain on the light and blinked at the brightness.