I was woken by the smell of burning again. My cousin and I were in John’s room since it was one of the few chambers that had a decent bed suitable for an invalid and enough space on the floor to make up a mattress of sorts for me. It had, believe it or not, been the Colonel’s suggestion. After the peculiarity of our pre-dinner conversation, Phyllis and the Colonel had enjoyed themselves immensely during the meal by arguing about the correct course for our nation’s behaviour to Greece and the miners’ strikes and other worthy issues. For me this had only served to prove that I’d been wildly naïve in ever imagining that I might tag along on Phyllis’s next trip. Her brand of splendid femininity and worldly cynicism was rather out of my league.
John’s room had an enormous Georgian linen cupboard that spanned the space between the bedroom door and the window. It towered in the gloom of night. It also gave off a faint smell as though something unpleasant had been left to dry in a corner in a way that even penetrated the pervading scent of mothballs. But all of it was overcome at about two o’clock in the morning when this eerie room became tinged with the odour of fire.
My mattress was practically beneath the heavy green curtains that screened the window anyway so it was easy enough for me to twist onto my knees behind them and peer out. The moon was a miniscule fingernail sinking behind distant trees. The garden terraces stood as dark bands beneath my window. They ran smoothly, line by line, downwards past the severe dark of the machine barn and the farmyard until they met the rougher blur of sheep pasture on the valley hillside below. The valley bottom was screened by the tall evergreen plantation, but I could make out the faint profiles of the rooftops from the settlement opposite. And far to the right, before the valley was obscured by the tall stand of trees that surrounded the steward’s ponds, a distant window light marked where Eddington must be. It was too steady and small to be a fire and was probably a small lamp set to act as a nightlight for the children. Apart from that there was nothing. Nothing but a faint haze in the valley bottom as if there would be a heavy dew in the morning, only there couldn’t be because the ground had been dry for weeks.
On an impulse I eased myself to my feet and claimed my cousin’s long cream housecoat from the back of a chair. Its silken lines were a long way removed from the box-like housecoat worn by that sweeper of steps in Gloucester; this was on the scale of borrowing the floor-length sophistication of a London socialite and it showed how little Phyllis was really suited to the strange, dithering character she had assumed in her cottage.
I was stopped at the door by murmur so faint that it barely took the form of sound.
‘Emily? Is that you?’
I opened the door a fraction and slipped out, making no more sound myself than a rustle of skirts. His eyebrows rose a fraction as he took in my borrowed glamour, but he said nothing. The unbrushed hair and the fine-drawn face was me. The long line of the gallery stretched behind him, dimly lit by a distant oil lamp. He didn’t even bother to mention the smell of smoke.
He merely said softly, ‘Will you come?’
I nodded and slipped back into my room. He was more properly dressed than I was. He was wearing trousers and a woollen jumper and this time he really was braced for walking because the jumper was also dark. I wished it wasn’t. Firstly it suited him and it was distracting when I ought to be serious. And secondly, the idea of stealth gave the urgency of our errand a different edge of tension.
He was waiting for me at the head of the servants’ stairs when I re-emerged some five minutes later, clad once more in my rather more ordinary slacks and blouse. He collected a torch from a broom cupboard in the dark of the stairwell and it was as he reached down a thin navy gardening coat from a hook by the kitchen door that I realised it wasn’t actually so warm on this summer night that I shouldn’t have thought of bringing a jacket. As it was, the coat was for me anyway. He hung it around my shoulders, hesitated for a moment in the act of straightening the collar to explain in an undertone, ‘Your present outfit isn’t quite as blindingly bright as your previous elegant getup, but it wouldn’t hurt to at least have the power of running to ground, even if we don’t intend to use it.’
He turned his attention to the search for a spare key with which to lock the kitchen door – leaving the original neatly on the neighbouring window ledge for the remaining occupants – and I dutifully slipped my hands into the overly long sleeves. This was the moment I realised just how much I had to learn about night-time adventuring.
Then we were outside and he was drawing the kitchen door closed behind us with an awful lot of concentration on not letting it rattle. As we passed lightly along the length of the cobbled yard, he asked quietly, ‘Where precisely were you off to just now, anyway, looking like an angel of … I don’t know what?’
‘It was only my cousin’s housecoat. I think my aunt made it for her.’
‘Don’t you ever answer a question at the first time of asking?’
The question bore a touch of exasperation. He was leading the way to the corner of the tithe barn. Following close behind, I gave in. Outside the smoke was merely a faint scent on the air. This was feeling more and more like a needlessly cautious hunt for something that might be miles away. Or perhaps that was just wishful thinking.
I said baldly, ‘I was thinking about my cousin’s garden and the usual sequel to a visitation from the vegetable thief. And then I was thinking about cans of petrol being stored for future use in your barn and how sensible that might be for similar reasons.’
‘I—see.’ Then he said in an odd voice, ‘You really do pay attention, don’t you?’
It wasn’t fully dark because there were an awful lot of stars, but this wasn’t exactly my idea of a glorious walk in the romantic moonlight. Ahead, the machine barn loomed. Bleak and singularly unappealing. It was no place for me.
He sensed my hesitation. Amusement drifted on the night air as he whispered, ‘What is it?’
I wasn’t going to admit I was afraid. Instead, I betrayed it by saying rather too sharply, ‘I’m being realistic. I’m wondering why you wanted me to come along.’
Something metallic was put into my hands. It was the torch and I thought it was designed to give me a sense of control. He stepped ahead of me into the gloom, tracing his way along the edge of his car with a guiding fingertip while his eyes worked to adjust. He told me on a hushed note, ‘I asked for your help because if I’m to go wandering about where an arsonist has lately been at work, I judge he’ll find it considerably more difficult to catch me off guard if there are two of us. And less likely to try, too. It is a wise soldier and a long-lived one who tries to find the path of least conflict if he can … Careful. What did I say? I suppose it is more uneven than it looks in this light.’
This last part was as a jolt went through me and made me take a clumsy step. I rejected the impulse to steady myself with a sudden clutch at his sleeve and retorted dryly, ‘You know precisely what you said. I don’t want to contemplate the various ways your longevity might be curtailed. And besides all that, we might simply use the torch.’
‘And spoil the fun?’ That amusement was there again. ‘Look, cautious or not, only a fool would go alone and although I have, out of necessity, already told my father the bare bones of what might be at loose in our neighbourhood, I couldn’t rouse him for this because he’d feel obliged to crash about falling into things. I’m afraid I thought it would be easier for you. Do you really mind?’
I shook my head, which Richard probably didn’t see because he was running his gaze past me to the deep shade of the yard and the house front and its gardens. He was looking for signs of movement behind us. I suppose it was easier to be sure without the concentrated intensity of a torch that would inevitably leave us blind to all else. He answered my nervousness anyway with a brief murmur of comfort. ‘I promise I won’t let you be frightened.’
Then he led me deeper into the machine barn between the sleek line of the car and the towering menace of the slumbering steam engine. The tractor was there too, eyeing us as a suspicious extension of Danny’s disapproval. It was possible to feel a sense of the history that might have inspired Danny to give Richard his warning about me. It was as though we were following the ghostly memory this place had of all the times John had slunk out of the house this way without telling his father, perhaps at a more reasonable hour of the evening but always following a similar course down the hill to the ford near my cousin’s house. I thought John Langton’s walk might have taken him onwards up the path that wove its way through hawthorn and trees to Eddington. Danny, on the other hand, presumably preferred to do his visiting in daylight and under the guise of propriety. It was impossible to judge how hard a debate Danny might have had after his footsteps had carried him to the valley bottom and left him there to choose between his odd bond with Mrs Abbey to the right, and the short walk the other way downstream to the place where my cousin’s cottage stood.
Richard obviously wasn’t imagining romantic walks of any sort. He was focused and efficient. He established that the pair of fuel cans was still propped in the boot of his car – where presumably he’d had the foresight to secure them earlier – and then got me to dare a brief flash with the torch into the corners. Nothing loitered here except the antiquated teeth of abandoned haymaking implements. I turned out the torch and, while we waited for our eyes to remember how to see, Richard told me what he planned to do with the cans now that he’d escaped the embarrassment of giving an arsonist his fuel.
He said briskly, ‘I’m going to pay an early call tomorrow to the man in charge of the wireless station and get the cans safely locked away in his compound. I’ve no doubt he’ll be happy to keep them in return for a small percentage and I may even end up giving them to him, for all that it’s illegal to pass on rationed petrol.’ A movement in the air beside me as his eyes located the faint shape of the stunted hatch that was set in the great sealed doors of the barn. ‘So brace yourself, dear Emily, for this proof of the full extent of my criminal dealings. Anyway, what else am I going to do with them? I don’t want this car in London and after tomorrow my father thinks he may well decamp back to his flat in Richmond.’
‘After tomorrow?’ My enquiry was given blandly.
It hid nothing. Understanding gleamed briefly in the dark. ‘Yes, I’ll be going with him on Sunday. Now that I’ve had time to think about things, it seems …’ A hesitation. ‘… the safest course.’
‘Oh,’ I said clumsily, because a whole tumult of questions were instantly racing through my head in an embarrassing tangle that grew from a sense of all the promises I’d made earlier about not prying. Privacy wasn’t really the issue any more, but here was a void that loomed of wishing to go with him only at the same time being fully conscious of the possibility that it wasn’t so much that he hadn’t asked but rather that he couldn’t without thrusting us into a harder discussion about the danger here. His tone as he side-stepped the subject was different now; because we both knew I was here with him when he might have left me safely inside and he had, after all, promised that he wouldn’t frighten me. It wasn’t the most comfortable of thoughts.
So instead of broaching that grim line, I asked idiotically, ‘What’s going to happen tomorrow?’
He laughed at my question, necessarily very quietly, but it was a laugh all the same. ‘Good question, Emily. No, I’m not mocking you.’
Now we were passing deeper into the blank depths of the barn, towards the vague form of the small access door into the farmyard. Carthorses stirred in their stables as we slipped out into the starlight but nothing else moved. Richard’s voice was soft but relatively ordinary and it seemed to me he was more concerned about not making a noise that woke the villagers than any particular threat from a waiting vegetable thief as he led me through the yard gate.
‘Tomorrow, Father is having his customary dinner with his old army friends. And I’m afraid he’s naturally assumed you’ll be on hand and eager to help. I’m sorry.’ His voice was a touch of warmth in the night. ‘It’s preying all too heavily on that neighbourly kindness you offered, isn’t it?’
We had joined the trackway where it passed down the hill. The scent of smoke was so thin now that I half expected to be met by half a dozen men from the village puffing their way back up after putting out the fire. But no one moved. Richard seemed to feel it too; a sudden charge in the intensity of the silence like static electricity building for a storm. Perhaps it belonged to Richard himself. I was right about his hesitation before. He seemed suddenly very conscious of the risk, a hazard; which couldn’t be violence because I knew he’d never have asked me to help him now, but danger lurked here all the same and this was the cusp of it. He gave it away when he stopped with his hand on the final gate. ‘Emily?’
I didn’t know why but his doubt made me look back. The house was obscured and the village was dark, of course, but something about the quality of the night made me realise something I’d missed before. The lamp that had illuminated the gallery had been an oil lamp, which meant that the electricity was off. And this meant that it was the turbine house that had been selected as the vegetable thief’s latest victim.
Paul Abbey. It was high time I started using the fellow’s name.
And I knew now, because Duckett had told me, that those outhouses hadn’t been burned as a cruel thanks to the owners of a crop of purloined vegetables. It had been a systematic destruction of Abbey’s lairs.
It made me shake off Richard’s concern in the only way I could. I opened the gate myself and stepped through, and as I went I said irritably, ‘He’s been hopping in and out of your house for days. We’re lucky it’s the turbine house he’s targeted and not the Manor. I should have caught up with him today when I had the chance.’
A smile briefly ran through the dark. Richard eased the gate shut on its catch. ‘You shouldn’t. What would you have done if you had?’
‘I mean that I could have seen enough to identify him properly to the police. That might have helped, I think.’
Richard was leading again now. He went cautiously, assessing the rough ground on the path ahead. The patch of valley where the turbine house stood must have been somewhere in this gloomy view but no telltale gleam betrayed its location. There were no flames, nor even smouldering ashes. Smoke clung to the undersides of the trees that marked the limit of the steward’s ponds but that was all. In a way the absence of fire made this descent more reckless rather than less. Now that the thrill of tracing the smoke to its source was passing, it felt as if we were walking blind into a dark wilderness where harsher things must wait.
Richard led me off the trackway onto close-cropped pasture that smelled strongly of sheep rather than smoke. His voice was still level despite the tension. ‘The police already have Abbey’s name. Danny Hannis was given the task of relaying what he’d learned from the farmhands and from that brief chase through the Manor to PC Rathbone today. When you saw Hannis scurrying past the kitchen window earlier he’d just finished making his report to me in the library. I telephoned our policeman after dinner to give him what little else we’ve gleaned since. Constable Rathbone has got Abbey’s name from me and he’s going to relay it to his man from the Gloucester station once he’s caught up with him. Apparently this detective is proving elusive too, just like everyone else.’
‘Danny told the police?’
I must have stopped. Richard turned to wait for me. I didn’t quite know how to frame my concerns. I didn’t know how to ask if Danny’s information would be considered helpful for Mrs Abbey or a hazard because I didn’t quite know what I was looking for in the account of a man who might yet prove to be bound to her by more than just the ownership of her old house. Then it struck me. ‘Of course he would tell them. Paul Abbey attacked his step-father.’ Then, more urgently as a harder thought hit, ‘Richard, the turbine house was where Mr Winstone met his injury.’
It was there ahead of us. Richard was negotiating the tricky climb down from the rough ground that marked the last descent of the pipe and also the rough gravel of an old streambed. The turbine house was just a little way to our right. Silent and hulking in its damp footings.
The drift of Richard’s reply on the night air was calm. ‘It seems to me that we need only worry about Abbey if we should happen to catch him unawares. He did, after all, run from you earlier when he might have done otherwise and we mustn’t forget that he brought poor injured Bertie home. Which is why we’re talking as we go. I doubt very much this is a lure designed to claim me as Abbey’s next victim – how could he know that we’d come tonight and not tomorrow with an army of villagers? And if we give him fair warning that we’re coming, it’ll rather lessen the impression we mean to trap him. That’s PC Rathbone’s job. But I’m sorry, are you—?’
There was a crunch as a fragment of earth broke away beneath his foot and a slither as he caught himself. In the dark there was a low, ‘Blast.’ And then, entirely cheerfully, ‘And if that isn’t proof of why an attempt at stealth is absolutely a waste of time, I don’t know what is. That being said—’
He waited while I caught up with him. He put out a hand to restrain me. ‘Stay behind me, would you, for this last part? For all my confident assurances, there is always that tricky moment when you have to put your head around a door and hope against hope it isn’t answered by the report of a gun.’
I was suddenly clasping the hand he’d put out to hold me between both of mine. But we weren’t met by a gun. There wasn’t anybody there at all.
The fire in the turbine house was thoroughly out and had been for some time. The door was sagging from its hinges with its lock almost wrenched clean from its housing by the force of Abbey’s entry. Inside, the single room was in a filthy state. Torchlight picked out a bank of enormous lead batteries and the metal bulk of the turbine itself, all swimming in a lake of greasy water. The fire had a heart. Its charred remains lay directly upon the squat metalwork that looked, to my eyes, like a large painted bobbin about the size of a drawing-room table. Water was still shushing its way vigorously through its innards until Richard’s hand reached for the heavy metal wheel and stemmed its flow. It seemed perverse to me that whoever had been here before us to put out the flames should have been reduced to bucketing in water from outside when here was a carefully organised supply on tap, so to speak.
I asked in a voice made harsh by awe, ‘Did Abbey put it out?’
The fire had been set using a bundle of rags and paper before whippy twists of green hazel had been stacked on top. Flames had shot up to the apex of the roof and done considerable damage to the tiling and the metalwork. We were lucky that the roof had been set upon girders rather than timber. If the fire had taken hold there nothing would have stopped it, not when the bank of batteries waited like an explosive charge in a neat row against one wall.
They hadn’t escaped unscathed as it was. The heat had warped their housings and they were giving off an unhealthy chemical smell. The impulse that had driven the arsonist to save this place had fortunately included the wisdom to throw the switch that isolated the house from this power source so that the additional strain of circuitry hadn’t made matters worse.
Richard had the torch and it flicked back from the batteries to assist me in my examination of the matter on the turbine. ‘What do you think?’ His voice was still hushed but cooler now where the cheerfulness had gone out of it.
There was a small knot of rags by my foot that had tumbled to the floor. I bent to take a closer look. As I did so I remarked with unnecessary impatience, ‘Richard, the house fires in my neighbourhood were in the main lit by something rather larger than a match.’
‘Well?’
I was still struggling to achieve a more normal tone. Something was making my heart beat uncomfortably quickly and it wasn’t all in the ashes of this fire. I straightened. ‘Very well,’ I said shortly. ‘Since you’re really asking me because you want the opinion of a novice but are too polite to phrase it quite like that, I’ll say that I think it’s odd that a man as experienced as Abbey in the art of destroyed sheds and outhouses should have stacked his kindling on top of the metal casing of an entirely non-combustible water turbine. It’s as if he didn’t want the place to go up.’
The torchlight touched the batteries again. They swam in the inky water that had been flung over everything. My voice was hollow in the tinny acoustics of this small brick chamber. ‘Do you think he believed the foliage and twigs and things would make smoke rather than flames? Did it catch him by surprise and go up like a tinderbox because it’s been so dry of late? Where on earth did he get the bucket to put it out again? There isn’t one here.’
‘Bravo.’ The admiration was serious, but then so was his tone. The relaxed man who had led me down the hill was entirely grim now. ‘But it wasn’t Abbey.’
His hand reached out to take the matter from my fingertips. The light caught the fragment of cloth that lay singed and curling in his flattened palm. It was a small portion of blouse with the button still attached, reading CC41 – the date and the assertion of Crown Copyright over the design. The fabric was patterned with a large repeating design in orange and white in a manner that confirmed the substance of the comments I’d made earlier about the wartime enthusiasm for dressing women in cheerful clothing. This blouse had belonged to the ‘Utility’ branded range, which always featured robust fabrics because they were supposed to last a person for years before wearing out. Now I might have wished they had been made just a shade more flimsy, because I had every reason to believe that this fragment and all the survivors of this fire like it had once been part of my own treasured collection.
Duckett. I was shaken. I barely needed to say his name aloud. Richard said absolutely nothing. He simply returned the fragment to the pile on the surface of the turbine and turned his attention to the scorched remains of paper that oozed soggily over the rim. I knew what they would be. They’d suffered more from the effects of the water than my clothes had, but if even a tiny fragment had retained its legibility, I knew it would reveal a note written in John’s extravagant hand, recording rents accrued and expenses made by the estate for the comfort of his tenants.
My whisper was lamentably hoarse. ‘Duckett set this fire. That’s why it’s different. There’s no vegetable garden here. And this place was locked. This isn’t Abbey’s usual dramatic attempt to expunge all traces of his lair.’ Then, more edged, ‘Was this left by Duckett as a warning for me? Because of what I did today? I thought he’d understood that I wasn’t involved in the game Abbey’s playing with the nerves of his wife.’ The remaining debris in my hand was wiped away as if it were poison.
Suddenly Richard’s arm was around me and as quietly secure as it had been under the arches of the hospital porch. This time he didn’t let me go again. ‘No, Emily. I—’
I swept on in a whisper of disbelief, ‘Is this supposed to embarrass me? Is this meant to capitalise on Mr Winstone’s silly joke about my face being the only features he can remember from that evening of the attack? Is Duckett trying to prove I did it by forcing my connection to this site? Because how can Duckett have possibly heard enough of Mr Winstone’s comments to think this would work? I mean, I can accept Duckett might have heard of the attack on Mr Winstone, but if he knows where it happened and he knows to use me here …’ I stopped on a shiver of doubt. I didn’t like where these thoughts were going. Because even on the hope that Duckett might discredit my witness statements with this fire to the extent that no word of mine would ever be believed again, all he was really doing here was risking incrimination himself. Particularly when I’d seen the culprit that evening on Mr Winstone’s path and he wasn’t Duckett. He’d been tall and dark-haired.
I asked, without really believing it myself, ‘Is this supposed to make Abbey culpable for the theft from the Manor as well as all the rest?’
Richard turned me with him as the torchlight played one last time over the building around us. I watched what he watched. There was nothing else here but the remains of a fire that had been deliberately set and then decisively extinguished supposedly for the purpose of leaving a perfect reminder of the connection between me and the violence in this place.
Richard’s reply was rough with the hush of night-time, deliberation in every word now. ‘No. He must know it just won’t stick. You saw Duckett take your case. He must at least suspect that I’ve deduced he took those ledgers at the same time. He certainly saw the policeman visit you at the cottage that day. And if we hadn’t told PC Rathbone then, Duckett must presume that after his little effort down by the docks today we’d take a pretty dim view of any further threat to your welfare.’
‘So he is hoping to discredit me and incriminate Abbey.’
Richard just held me and said nothing.
‘Richard,’ I began. My hand was gripping his clothing again, only this time, since there wasn’t a convenient lapel to clasp, my fingers had twisted themselves into a knot with the woollen jumper somewhere about his middle. My hand adjusted its grip restlessly. It came with a sudden reluctant concession to the doubt that had been building in Richard all the way through this madcap night-time excursion. I finally said what he needed me to say. ‘You don’t think this has been left here for me or Abbey at all, do you?’
‘I don’t believe it has, no.’
He left me the silence in which to accept that and the first of its unhappy implications. Then, bewilderingly, he reverted to talking about Abbey. He told me swiftly and quietly, ‘Danny Hannis found two of Abbey’s lairs today. After the funny little incident this morning where you chased Abbey through the house, it occurred to Hannis to take a good look at all our buildings and outbuildings for signs we’ve been harbouring this man. After all, our – or I should say Mrs Cooke’s – vegetable garden has been obliterated. And as predicted, Hannis found signs of a style of living room in the darkest corner of the watershed.’
‘No bed?’
‘Quick again, Emily. No, there was no sign of a bed. And he hasn’t slept in the hayloft above the stables either, where Hannis found similar signs of a little lair at the very back where Abbey’s been lounging away his days amongst the old musty hay. He hasn’t been sleeping in the house so wherever his night-time haunt is, it isn’t the Manor. When I saw the electricity go out tonight and then the smell of smoke followed it, I don’t know what I expected, but I certainly thought I knew enough of Abbey’s habits to discount the expectation that this would be just another fire in the style of the blazes set in other outhouses. Those have been the beacon trail left by a hunter who is drawing closer to his quarry and making a very bold statement about destruction. This blaze, I can see now, was a token gesture. Desperate, ill-thought-out and amateur at that.’
He was discounting the arsonist from this act. But all the same, Abbey’s name rang on and on.
My gaze was fixed fiercely on absolutely nothing except the memory of how reluctantly Mrs Abbey had been named between us this morning in the car. I remarked grimly, ‘I ought to be asking how Duckett even heard enough of the details of Mr Winstone’s assault to know what it would mean to leave this kind of mess, oughtn’t I? You heard Duckett tell me how he knew to find me at the cottage, didn’t you? And in just the same way, she must have told him about Mr Winstone’s assault. Duckett told me today that she’s a very old friend. He called her Florence.’
‘You’re reading this as a battleground between an old love and the new?’
I conceded, ‘I really do want to presume Mrs Abbey must have persuaded Duckett to do this, just as she told him I was harbouring her husband. It’s possible that she enlisted Duckett’s help and that she brought him to set this fire.’
‘But?’
‘But I can’t stop thinking how that man – Duckett – was a bully to me earlier.’
I felt his hand tighten its grip fractionally. I turned my head. His profile was being thrown into exciting shadows by the torchlight. I told him in a clearer voice, ‘Duckett is obsessed with the idea of betrayal, Richard. It begins with the treachery that led Abbey to thieve rationed goods and it ends with a new kind of treachery of the sort that leads a former prison inmate to haunt his wife and children. Duckett says it is all being done for little purpose other than revenge for the fact that Abbey lost his stake in the business, and then he lost his wife. Duckett is terrified that Abbey is going to target him next. You saw how Duckett handled his conversation with me because he perceives me as a part of the threat. Perhaps Mrs Abbey had to tell Duckett that I was harbouring her husband because otherwise Duckett would have decided she was betraying him too. Perhaps he wanted to leave a little challenge for you after your intervention today. It’s possible, isn’t it, that she told him about Mr Winstone’s attack here and said that this place belonged to the Manor and now he’s used my clothes to leave a warning for you because he hates that you intervened earlier and he suspects you’re helping Abbey too?’
‘No.’
‘Perhaps we should ask Danny Hannis.’ It burst out of me almost angrily. All these perfectly viable suggestions and Richard was contradicting every single one. ‘You have to consider it a possibility that Danny knows more about her feelings than he’s willing to admit. It’s very convenient that he’s been using that hay loft for months now while he feeds that poor blighted goat and now, today, he’s miraculously made the sudden discovery that Abbey has been using it as his daytime lair.’
I was thinking about the way Danny had kept his connection to Mrs Abbey secret. I was thinking about all the furtive exchanges the pair of them had made in Mr Winstone’s house on my first night here. And lastly I was remembering how my cousin had looked as she’d watched him walk past the kitchen window. And I was adding to the effect the information that he had been in the library with Richard only a few minutes before and had learned Phyllis was there, and had still emphatically decided to avoid her.
Richard’s voice was very gentle. ‘Emily, when I spoke to Hannis earlier, he said something to me that I think you should know. As well as giving me a sound ticking off for keeping you here and lecturing me, not unreasonably, on the Langton history when it comes to ruining innocent peoples’ lives, he growled something along the lines of ‘and you had to embroil her too, didn’t you?’ He was referring to your cousin Phyllis.’
It was a new small rescue.
Richard was firmly drawing my mind back from constructing its own horrible list of betrayals. I gave an involuntary shiver against the warmth of his body, not because it displeased me to hear Danny was angry that we’d rescued Phyllis from her hospital bed, but because if I’d been wrong and Danny wasn’t another man who belonged to Mrs Abbey, it meant nothing else could stand between me and a return to the wretched knowledge of what this really meant. I was back in that awful conversation in the car and the discovery that this man beside me was highly conscious that something was building around him and himself specifically. Only this time, instead of feeling alienated and confused, I could feel the full force of his arm around me and he didn’t want to let me go.
I felt Richard’s jaw brush against my hair as he led me to what must be said. ‘This was meant for others to find tomorrow. I was supposed to learn about it after the wide-eyed public and the police had waded in, as they inevitably will when the sun comes up and the farmhands start their walk to work. Instead, I’ve managed to come and see what they’ve left and I don’t like that it seems designed to work around your name.’
A fresh chill ran beneath my skin. That last part didn’t matter – surely no policeman worth their salt could possibly read this as proof that I had anything to hide, and I wasn’t prepared to worry about what that journalist might say about me before this particular well ran dry. But the rest was unshakeable. Richard wasn’t going to remove what we’d found, but all the same this was why he’d brought me along on this night-time trip and it was why he’d hesitated too, at that last gateway by the farmyard. It was an extension of the impulse that had driven him to attempt to put me on the train earlier. Now he’d committed himself to letting me understand the truth before the world rushed in and, knowing him, the decision wasn’t selfish at all.
I drew an unhappy breath. Proceeding very cautiously so that he should have full room to silence me if he wished, I asked in an oddly flat little voice, while my heart beat in strong painful strokes, ‘Richard? What did she say to you when you drove her to the doctors?’
I felt him stiffen. Then with deliberate steadiness, he told me, ‘You said before that you thought Mrs Abbey might be the victim here. For what it’s worth, in some ways I agree even now.’
There was no sound but the distant rushing of the stream, no feeling but the warmth of his arms and his body and the touch of his cheek to my hair in the pause before he added, ‘In the car this morning, I asked her frankly what had happened to leave that bruise. I thought it might give her the idea of not being left alone to face Abbey or Duckett or whoever struck her. Her reply was to tell me about the snow last March because she thought I would be interested to know that the harvest will be poorer than usual. Apparently, the awful weather meant that they had to put the seed in late.’
That last part had come with the wry delivery that would normally belong to the punch line of a bad joke. I was bewildered. I’d expected some lurid demand or a slander, or something. ‘You think she was protecting the ears of her children?’
‘On the contrary, I think she was keen to draw my attention to them and with John’s name ringing in my ears. I believe the mention of the bad spring was as close as she dared come to another mention of my brother, given the audience.’
‘Oh.’
Suddenly I was away from him and breaking through the battered doorway. Outside was better. The air was free of unhealthy fumes and there were stars and the hard glare of the torch could be put out. He’d followed me. I hadn’t been running from him. I stopped as my feet met the rougher terrain of the sheep-grazed hillside. He was with me. I could see his profile just slightly above me but the dark meant he couldn’t read my expression as I listened to him observe without a trace of accusation, ‘You’ve known about her claims of an affair for some time, haven’t you?’
We were standing at the point where the rough hillside met the track. The light at Eddington was out now. I wasn’t looking at him, but I could feel his gaze burning upon my face. We’d come to it all of a sudden and I hated it. ‘Yes. Yes, I have,’ I confessed bitterly, ‘because she’s been taking pains to mention his name to me too. And today I learned that she tried to sell her house to him.’
I heard his sharp intake of breath as he moved to ask a question. I raced to fill the gap. ‘She didn’t tell me about it. I heard it from her old neighbours on my ill-advised walk through Gloucester today. Only they didn’t say anyone’s name. They merely talked about Mrs Abbey’s ‘friend from up the hill’, which I took to mean your brother, and then a soldier turned farmer, who I guessed must be Danny. Did you know that he tried to buy her house?’
He might have deliberately misunderstood, but he didn’t. ‘John? Yes.’
I kept my gaze fixed fiercely on the grey form of the opposing hillside. Barely half a yard away to my right, Richard’s voice merged with the dark. He told me crisply, ‘The truth is, John was in the throes of thrashing out an agreement when he died. I only learned about it because the solicitor forwarded the papers with his will. Delightfully, it fell to me to write to her and inform her that the sale would not be proceeding, though I doubt that the news came as a surprise to her.’
He took another carefully regulated breath. ‘The popular explanation for the attempted purchase – had it ever been made public – would have inevitably been that he was intending to furnish it with his stolen riches, or something along those lines. The timeline certainly matches the culmination of his efforts in that department, but it doesn’t remotely make sense to me. As I understand it, he was meaning to profit from his activities, not fit out a house with them like a mad museum to crime. And yet, without all that nonsense, I still can’t quite fathom how he ever dreamed he might have managed the debt. You know the Manor is under an all-consuming mortgage. After his death, when it became my job to negotiate a stay of judgement from the bank on our payments, it would have made it a whole lot closer to impossible if John had managed to tack on the Parliament Street property too. So lately I’ve had to start wondering if the whole disaster – the attempt to sell his soul for looted goods – came about because he needed to pay a bribe. The sudden interest in her house certainly smacks of an attempt to pay her off, doesn’t it? A nice honest transaction over a private property to conceal a greater exchange of funds. But in truth I can’t believe for a moment any woman had such a hold over him as that.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? I should have thought it was obvious.’ This, suddenly, was said roughly. ‘My brother was a murderer. He’d found his own way of dealing with people he didn’t like.’
Ah.
Then he followed this bruising show of temper with a swift apology that I, in my turn, dismissed by turning to face him so that I could say quickly, ‘Richard?’
The meagre light was making it very hard to make out the features of his face. I could feel the watchfulness of his eyes, though, and knew this was hurting him. I added cautiously, ‘It makes you uneasy that the neighbours didn’t explicitly state that the friend was John, doesn’t it?’
Unexpectedly, I heard the breath go out of him with a little easing of tension. It was because we’d reached the core of what was troubling him and I was brave enough to face it – this something that was more painful for him than the small discomfort of having to embrace the idea that a brother who had willingly crossed so many other moral lines should have apparently indulged in a spot of adultery.
For me, this little nudge nearer to the grim truth made the space between us seem just a fraction wider. I think I’d spent so long teaching myself to believe that this existed only in my mind that it felt like a fresh betrayal to be mentioning it now. And this betrayal was of myself. Because it unleashed a dread that was horribly like loneliness.
Richard prompted, ‘Tell me what you know. Please.’
‘All right,’ I agreed with determined crispness, ‘But you should know that I think the part where her little boy might be John’s child doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny. The boy is roughly three years old, yes?’
A tip of his head in confirmation.
‘But she moved here herself three years ago, and only after her husband was imprisoned? So by her timeframe she was either heavily pregnant when she moved into Eddington or had a very young baby. It would be easy enough to check, I think, if it matters. What certainly does matter, and I’m sure you must have realised, is that for your brother to be responsible, he must have known her when she lived in Gloucester, when her husband was still free and at home, long before she applied to become John’s tenant and years before he even conceived of buying her house.’ Something in his stillness made me stop. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘This isn’t very nice.’
Richard’s manner was very gentle. ‘I can’t at this stage tell you which I should be more ashamed of. The fact that I’m leading you into dissecting the begetting of a young boy as if he were a badly bred calf, or the fact that I knew when I brought you down here that we’d end up discussing this and I swore I wouldn’t let anything upset you.’
I beat aside the chill that ran through me. It was a feeling very like anger. I told him firmly, ‘Mrs Cooke’s sister.’
Blankly, he confirmed, ‘Mrs Blake. Yes?’
The name scorched my mind. This was the second time today I’d heard the name and it sharpened my nerve. I’d only been about to observe that Mrs Cooke’s letter had mentioned a sister who was living in Gloucester and to ask Richard if he could remember the address. Now I said with a hard kind of impatience, ‘According to the rather fearsome ladies I met on that street earlier, Mrs Blake is their neighbour. And three years ago, Mrs Abbey was another. Surely if Mrs Abbey had been seeking to move and she’d mentioned it to her neighbours, the most helpful of them, Mrs Blake, might have happened to mention that the estate her sister worked for sometimes had vacant tenancies.’
I thought he must have sensed my determination. But his response was only a cautious, ‘She might.’
‘So it is perfectly probable that Mrs Cooke was the connection that brought Mrs Abbey to Eddington. Not John.’
His reply swept the thought away. ‘Don’t you find it a little odd that of all the rumours which abound about John, this is the first time that this one has come to light? Haven’t you wondered why Mrs Abbey has chosen this moment, this precise moment when her supposed lover is dead and her husband is released from prison – her violent, bruising husband, mind, who is stalking the neighbourhood – to risk some unverifiable scandal that might just jeopardise everything she holds dear?’
He was suddenly taking control over this discussion and it rocked me. This wasn’t quite about unpicking Mrs Abbey’s idea of truth any more. I watched with a kind of horror as he added with quiet force, ‘If she were claiming that the child was John’s and her purpose was to get the family to release funds for the boy’s care, wouldn’t you think that surely the swiftest way to reach that end must be an approach to the bereaved grandfather? For the sake of the dead son’s long-lost love child, she could be confident that the old man would fund a place at school, at the very least, even if he didn’t believe her. And yet my father doesn’t even know.’
This was for Richard. Again, the focus of this threat always came back to Richard. It hit me with a bolt.
‘No.’ The word was wrenched from me on a deep note of protest.
All of a sudden, I couldn’t look at him. The hillside around us was mottled black with grey patches where ant hills rose. Beside me, his presence was how I shall always remember him. Standing near by while I worked it through to its natural conclusion. Steady but not savage. He hadn’t wanted to tell me this, and for obvious reasons. There was a divide here; a severance of innocence; an acknowledgement that if I’d gone away on the train as he’d asked, I need never have known.
At the same time, though, I wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t relieved to be telling me now. That artificial idea of the purity of my innocence would have left a taint of a different kind; a divide with an alternative beginning but the same ending. Because knowing his character as I did, he would never have let me claim him while the secret of what he had tackled here – and presumably had been concluded – waited as a second trap to prove later that there was a world of difference between his experience of life and mine. Because somehow, and I knew this now without remotely understanding how, the secret must surely involve me.
I heard him draw in a sharp breath. Richard needed to admit it now. He led me to it. ‘You’re perfectly right – Mrs Abbey’s connection to my brother isn’t watertight. There is no real proof that he might ever have met her before her move from Gloucester, regardless of what developed between them afterwards. But—’
Suddenly I couldn’t bear it. ‘No.’
‘The evidence is there that I might.’
‘No!’
The cry silenced him. He waited there, a capable man with every muscle unspeakably braced. He looked, in fact, as he had that first day in the car when he’d first given me a glimpse of how much he was used to standing alone.
My breath snatched in my throat while I mustered the words to form my protest. They came in a desperate rush. ‘Your regiment might be the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars, but you said you were based in Bristol, not Gloucester. And besides, you were away at war!’
Now there really was a powerful force in his stillness. My protest held every sinew in him chained. I truly believe he’d anticipated recriminations; that my cry had been a forerunner to turning away, to refusing to bear this, to delivering blame. Not, perhaps, to the point of admitting that I believed the charge – I think that last part was reserved for his nightmares rather than waking sense – but there was still, for him, the perfectly reasonable likelihood that the accusation in itself was too great a burden for me. I’d said all along that I couldn’t bear the darkness of conflict. If I had an ounce of self-preservation, I should refuse it now. Even the admission of Mrs Abbey’s insinuation had the power to run nastiness through every single vein. I could feel it working there; staining me with disgust, and impotent, disbelieving rage.
But not directed at him. The part I couldn’t bear wasn’t what he thought. In him, resolve was settling to a softer kind of certainty that belonged to a sense of my care for him, and his subtle acceptance of it caused a wrench in me that hurt almost as much as rejection.
‘I know,’ he conceded gently. ‘But still I think she’s levelling the charge.’
I was shaking my head. I couldn’t give it the substance of being spoken, so he said it for me. ‘You are going to have to believe me when I say that although she hasn’t levied her actual demands yet, the suggestion is there and I’m expecting them any day.’
‘Blackmail.’ It was said scathingly. In a sneer. Angry resistance, even though I’d suspected this was her end for long enough myself. ‘And for what?’
‘You’ve seen the state my father is in. If her threat to me is to expose me and mine to the attentions of the world, don’t you think it’s reasonable to imagine I’d work to shield him from further public humiliation? Or myself?’
Or me now. I supplied the addition in my head and felt its strain while he added swiftly, ‘She doesn’t want money. She doesn’t want any help of the kind that would be within my power to offer willingly because if she did she would have asked me openly in the car. This is about snaring me, and me specifically, because I have the skills she needs.’
‘Because you’re a soldier.’
I was standing with fingers tugging at one fraying cuff of the gardening coat and staring blindly at the darkened streambed below. Beside me, I sensed the way the shadow of his mouth twisted into a brief show of a bitter smile. ‘I think, Emily dear, you’ll find that’s your prejudice. I can’t imagine my choice of career even ranks with her.’
It was a poor attempt at humour. ‘No,’ he continued, ‘she’s chosen me because she believes I’m a true brother to John. This is her other motive for continually mentioning him, I think. I imagine she has a pretty shrewd idea of what he was capable of and she must imagine the same blood runs through my veins. She means to harness it.’
There was one grim second before he added, ‘I suppose it proves at least that one part of this madness is true. The danger this arsonist poses to her must be real. What other insanity would lead a person to resort to spinning lie upon lie to tame a man she barely knows and make him her servant, when she could simply tell us all the truth and report her husband’s activities to the police and ask for official help?’
I offered quietly, ‘Unless she’s already tried, you mean, and got nowhere?’
It was there again. An echo of the debate he’d shared with Phyllis, where the actions within a conflict were either rational or not. Cold and distant, the weight of what Mrs Abbey was expecting of him finally hit me. To me the woman was seeming considerably less like a helpless victim facing unspeakable revenge at the hands of a violent husband and more like this was her final word in the bitter scheming of an acrimonious divorce, where all parties saw betrayal as the currency for everything. And all the time I was coming back to the one simple truth that coursed through it all. That even if she were the victim – to choose this route, to enlist a man against his will to undertake this work when there must be other, gentler ways to save her … It was barbaric.
My voice was not my own. ‘She’s treating this like a debt you have to pay. Because of who you are.’
Richard had said nothing. He was standing there watching me as I watched the blank and dormant turbine house.
I thought I almost surprised him into reaching out a hand towards me when at last I added on a completely bewildered note, ‘She really doesn’t know you, does she? I mean, if she’s so alone and Duckett isn’t enough of a friend to truly help her and she wants you to intercede between her and this husband who seems to think it is a good idea to hedge her in with little fires, why doesn’t she just ask?’
I found I had made him smile at last. When he returned to the self-imposed distance after that one impulsive movement towards me and nothing else moved in the valley bottom, he said on a wry note, ‘Why not, indeed.’
I thought I’d actually made him laugh. He confirmed it with a sudden return to that brisker tone I knew. ‘Anyway, let’s not forget that it doesn’t really matter what she has in mind here – regardless of whether I’m supposed to lay a little trap for Abbey and lure him out into the open, or hunt him down where he sleeps. I am my own man here. This isn’t war. There are no orders, and the lines between right and wrong remain perfectly clear.’
He drew a little breath, gathering his thoughts before lifting his jaw with a grace that actually verged upon arrogance. ‘To be frank,’ he added, ‘we can guess all we like at the depths of her predicament, but we both know she’s put it out of my power to do anything about it by her own actions.’ I could feel the anger there, licking like fire beneath the resolve.
He told me, ‘And I haven’t brought you here, either, for the sake of frightening you with the responsibility of understanding her choices. I’ve brought you here because it is right to tell you the truth of mine. I don’t intend to serve up my conscience on a platter to her as a bargaining chip for the sake of anyone’s reputation – not John’s, not mine, nor my father’s and not even yours – come what may. My going away on Sunday should put me out of the way of being called to immediate action while I calculate what can be done for her through more safely regulated channels such as PC Rathbone’s man from the Gloucester station. But I can’t stop her from following her part of the threat to its end. If even a fraction of what she’s engineered here gets out, the gossips’ll feed on me for months and they won’t care who else gets dragged into the crossfire. Do you mind?’
Abruptly, the charged, intimidating sense of this night’s isolation broke into relief. This had been my dread; the part I wouldn’t bear. It had dwelt in the impossibility of imagining how he could both deal with this threat and keep his integrity intact. But this was how he would do it. And in amongst all that, there was also a glimpse of an assumption he was making about my future.
Suddenly it was easy to lift my head and smile quite genuinely. ‘You ask me that?’
My question was answered in the steadiness of those eyes, but the feeling didn’t quite reach his mouth. Grit turned under foot as he took a step closer. He shook his head before his gaze dropped its hold on mine and cast something very grim out into the gloom. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really. I think you’ve made your position on the principle of sacrifice very clear at last, haven’t you? And you still have absolutely no idea what part you really play here.’
His gaze returned to me. I found I couldn’t quite understand what he meant by that. My mouth fractured to reveal the brittle self-doubt beneath. I knew he was confronting me with something about myself; the part of me that had made the unwilling confession earlier about refusing any new surrender of another person’s welfare for the sake of mine. For a moment I’d thought I ought to be happy because surely that was what I’d done just now – I’d wielded that power. But the hard evening spent debating conflict and salvation and the dreadful strain of being part of the world that called for both was suddenly taking its toll. And even if I didn’t yet fully understand what he had meant there, I knew full well what had been troubling him because it occupied the part that carried that note of temper. His doubt was in his sense of how my stubbornness would bear upon me, both now upon my happiness, and in the future as a person drawn in by my proximity to him. And for me even the thought of the debate that must be running through his mind about whether we would regret this decision to let me stay close – it made me angrier in a way that must leave permanent traces between us. It was all so desperately bleak.
‘Emily?’ My name came as a whisper on the air.
‘Yes?’
He hadn’t really meant the murmur of my name as a question. It was more a statement of fact. A simple assertion that I was still myself and unaltered and, like a ripple of the memory of the way he had looked earlier when I’d dared at last to call him by his name, I realised I must have gifted him this same sense of being valued.
It was probably the only word he could have used that was capable of sweeping all this hopelessness aside, as though he were wielding a little brush of light. The distance between us was nothing. He’d never been far away at all. The realisation was followed by a real whisper of his hand as it lifted to my cheek. With the lightest of pressure, he tilted my chin so that the features of my face were touched just a little by starlight. My body instinctively moved to follow the turn of his hand. I went to him with relief. My own hands found his chest and clung to his jumper there while his other arm closed about me, drawing me against him. I could feel his heartbeat beneath my fingertips. I thought he was going to finish this sudden relief of contact by enfolding me completely within the crush of his arms. But then his body stilled and his touch was held lightly against my jaw so that I had to look at him, and when he spoke, his voice was grave.
‘Ought I to have told you all this?’
He was reading every trace of every cruel second of my time in this place upon my face, waiting for a response to a question that had no happy answer. My reply was the faintest turn of my cheek against the warmth of his hand in place of a small nod.
Then I grew embarrassed and asked foolishly, ‘What do you think?’
I suspected there wasn’t a happy answer to that question either. The force of his life-blood beat beneath my palm, steadying and regular. Then he remarked on a quiet note, ‘I think you care for me.’
I could sense again that hint of doubt within the decisiveness that ran through every corner of his mind and, very faintly beneath it all, a disorientating confession of his need for me. But, suddenly, there was a shadow of a smile on that mouth. There was no need then for the strong rhythm of his heartbeat to set the pattern for mine. Because my pulse was hurrying, lifting into a lighter race really, and there was a wry twist of amusement in the darkness of this night.
He made my breath catch when he confided cheerfully, ‘I just wish I knew whether it was a reflection of who I am, or simply that you’re really, really kind.’