by Jane Johnson
I go around the house making an inventory of all the possible points of entry and find them all secure, and at last make my way into the kitchen. I am busy making coffee the way Mo and Reda like it, the way I have now come to prefer it – in a little stove-top espresso pot on top of the range – when a shadow passes the window onto the back alley.
I jump back with a yelp. Somehow, I manage to knock the espresso pot over and a thick black ooze of coffee grounds sizzles and burns on the hotplate so that the kitchen is filled with a bitter, searing stench.
It’s probably the postman, I tell myself, trying to settle my racing heart. But I know it’s too early for the postman or anyone else on bona fide business. Too early even for Mo and Reda. It is, I know with horrible certainty, Saul or Ezra Sparrow, come back to do me harm. I remember their threatening words, the disgusting rat shoved through the letter box. But I also remember the thousands and thousands of pounds their thieving mother has extorted from a vulnerable old lady, and Gabriel’s mimicking of an attack on her, and my fear transmutes into some sort of anger.
Rolling pin in hand (I swear I will keep it with me all the time – ‘Weapon? Of course not, officer, I’m a keen baker.’), I tiptoe to the window and catch the flick of a dark coat just disappearing around the corner to the right of the house. I imagine the intruder skirting the wall on the other side of Olivia’s suite, picking his way between the overgrown flowerbeds there, rampant with weeds and brambles. I have not yet got around to tidying up the garden.
I run down the hall corridor and wait by the front door, obscured by the stained glass panel, until the inevitable shadow falls across it. Then I turn the key, haul the door open and leap snarling through it, brandishing the rolling pin. If the Sparrow brothers are determined to have a battle, they will get one!
The figure in the dark coat falls away before my fury and when I look down Eddie is looking up at me in bewilderment.
Relief is swiftly replaced by confusion. How can Eddie be here? He’s three hundred miles away. And how on earth has he found me…?
Goosegrass and stinging nettles are wrapped around the leg of his smart black jeans. His Armani raincoat has slipped off one shoulder, revealing his favourite black cashmere sweater: both are covered in dust. Sprawled on the cracked concrete apron where once the porch stood, he looks as I have never seen him before: inelegant and uncurated.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
He gets to his feet, looking aggrieved. ‘I’ve come all the way down from London to find you, on the fucking sleeper train – or should I say the “so-called fucking sleeper train”, since I didn’t get a wink – and that’s the best you can do? We’ve been apart for weeks! I thought you might be missing me. Or at least want to know how my show went.’
I completely forgot about his show, and I don’t even feel guilty about it. ‘How did you get this address?’ But I already know. Bloody James, bloody male solidarity. Or bloody Evie, doing a favour for ‘darling Eddie’.
‘Aren’t you pleased to see me?’ He isn’t even looking at me, more concerned with dusting off his coat and removing the weeds from his jeans. I take some small satisfaction at seeing him wince as one of the stinging nettles gets him and he jerks his hand away and sucks it like a child.
‘No, I am not pleased to see you.’ I lower the rolling pin. ‘Why are you here?’
He cocks a look at me from underneath his heavy black fringe, and there is mischief in his eyes, his confidence returned: for how could any woman resist him? ‘Don’t I even get a kiss?’
He comes at me and crushes me against him, rolling pin and all, and bends his head to mine. ‘Oh, Becks,’ he breathes into my neck, and then he is kissing me there, my ear, my cheek, my mouth. ‘I’ve missed you.’
My knees start to weaken in that old familiar way. ‘Hey, stop that!’ I wrench my head away.
But Eddie thinks my evasion is some sort of game. He pulls me back in and I am engulfed by that familiar scent of musk and orange blossom and it is as if each breath I take erases another degree of my hostility and soon his arms around me feel like a haven rather than a threat, and then all I can think about is sex.
There’s something about Eddie. He casts a spell. It’s easy to say that men like Eddie are ‘good in bed’, but when Eddie makes an effort you become the centre of his world, the focus for every iota of his attention. This proved intoxicating for someone like me, who’d never thought much of herself. It was a novelty to see myself through his eyes – he who worshipped beauty, who caressed my body the way he caressed his pots. He made me feel ultimately desirable. Suddenly, I remember standing in front of Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde in the Musée D’Orsay in Paris with no one else around to make me embarrassed at examining some other woman’s hairy nether regions, going weak at the knees as he breathed into my ear, ‘That’s you, that is: the essence of woman, the origin of the world. I can smell her cunt, can’t you? I can smell yours. Let’s go back to the hotel and fuck till dawn.’
Uncouth but somehow irresistible.
It’s been a long time since I felt desirable, let alone desired.
I can feel his hardening cock pressing against me, hot and insistent, and his tongue is in my mouth, the musk of him all around me, rising up through the orange blossom…
I lead him into the house and up the stairs. In seconds we are naked and tangled together on the big old brass bed.
17
Olivia
1943
LIGHT GREYED THE ROOM. A PRETERNATURAL QUIET HAD fallen outside: no wind, no rain. The storm had blown over. Even the parrot was hunched and still as if the violence had shocked it into silence.
Olivia sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, watching the Dark Man warily. He put his hands up as if in surrender. They were covered in blood. He said something in French, but Olivia was too shaken to make sense of the sounds. Her head throbbed, her throat and shoulder smarted. There was blood everywhere – splatters of it, and a widening dark pool like a black halo around the airman’s head. She could not stop looking at his staring eyes – the pupils vast and fixed, haloed by a fine ring of grey iris.
The Dark Man sat back against the wall, breathing heavily, a hand pressed to his side. Olivia watched in horrified fascination as blood pulsed between his fingers. Yet more blood. ‘You’re hurt,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Sorry. I can’t think of the words in French.’
He looked up with difficulty as if his head was heavy. She had to do something or there would be two bodies in her parlour. She got to her feet, feeling sick and dizzy. Concussion, she thought, then pushed the word away. Bandages. She needed bandages, to stop the bleeding. She had to clean the wound. She fixed on this idea and made it move her feet, past the corpse, past the Dark Man, past the couch and out into the hall. She left a bloody handprint on the door jamb, and another on the kitchen door, saw them both as she returned with clean linen tea towels, a bowl of water, the bar of Wright’s Coal Tar soap and the kitchen scissors.
When she re-entered the parlour she found the Dark Man sitting beside the body, his hands close to the dead man’s head, his fingers working in small, clandestine movements. His face was downcast, his lips moving silently. When she approached he looked up. He held a string of beads in his hand and she recognized it with a start.
‘Une prière, pour le mort,’ he explained. A prayer for the dead. He put the beads away in his trouser pocket, wincing as the movement caused his wound to leak again.
Olivia could not move. She recognized those beads. The light was not yet bright enough to see the colour of them, and yet she retained an image of redness, a dark cedar-red, just like the string she had seen on Mamie’s doll in her hedgerow lair. Was the red from the blood? Why would he have Mamie’s beads?
Her suspicion must have shown on her face for he was looking at her intently, all the lines of his handsome face focused into her eyes, boring in.
‘Where is Mamie?’ She forced the words from her damaged throat and watched as
he listened. A great sadness came over him.
‘I have made… prière… for the dead deux fois, two times today,’ he said softly. ‘The first was hardest.’
Olivia’s fingers opened and she dropped what she was carrying, the bowl sloshing, the soap and scissors clattering onto the bare boards, the tea towels floating down to cover them all like a shroud. ‘She’s dead? Mamie’s dead?’
‘He kill her… zamal.’
‘What happened?’ Olivia sank onto the couch, feeling hollow.
‘Tempête… tonnerre, scare animals… vaches. Door not shut… they push past farmer and men and…’ He gestured, indicating the widespread dispersal of the cows. ‘Mr Roberts he fall, blessé, Mikael, he escape.’ He nodded towards the corpse. ‘Big confusion, grand bruit, confusion, running here, there. I go after Mikael mais trop lentement, trop tard.’ He shook his head.
‘And Mamie?’ Olivia pressed, despite not wanting to know, an awful dread growing inside her.
‘Don’t know how he find her, elle jouait avec sa poupée…’ She was playing with her doll. ‘He pull her dans la cour du ferme’ – into the farmyard – ‘he have knife, mais elle lutte, she fight, and when he see me he—’ He made a brutal gesture, a finger across his throat. ‘He push her at me and we fall.’
‘Oh God, oh God.’ That poor little girl, who never did anything bad to anyone. How could she die like that? The world had gone wrong, it was all awful, a nightmare. She wanted to wake up from it, to walk into a clean dawn with nothing worse before her than the household chores.
‘I try stop le sang’ – the blood – ‘but so lots. And she, gone, like that. Elle est morte, je peux pas le croire. I not believe it. Mamie, la mignonne. I shake her,’ he demonstrated, ‘but she gone. I put her down, close her eyes. I take her poupée and put it in her hands and say prières for her, and then they come, Leo and Nipper, and they see me. They think I kill her! And the prayer beads on the doll – I take them…’
Olivia’s mind felt scrambled. His gaze was open, earnest. ‘Are you telling me the truth?’
‘I swear to merciful God that I am. Alhamdulillah. I run then. J’ai couru. No explain. They not believe me. And I know Mikael, what he want. You, your car, la voiture. So I go after him. He talk voiture a lot – he see you in car two times, he like. He ask why you in it, not man, if no man in your house, aucun homme chez vous. Leo, he talk too much, il aime le pilote, comme il est un grand hero, big Luftwaffe man. They all laugh, say now you no allowed visit farm no more, have to go to village for your milk and eggs, faut chercher vos choses ailleurs, you alone toute seule, in house now les filles, Marj et Beryle, come to farm. And Mikael, il écoute.’ He fell silent, listening. ‘They come here soon, I think, looking.’ Then he winced and blood oozed from his side.
Did she believe him? She did not know. Her brain wasn’t working. She picked up her first aid things and concentrated all her thoughts on cutting the fabric into strips and dealing with his wound, trying to remember what she had been taught of anatomy, and whether there were organs just below and left of the ribs, trying not to think that he too might die. But the hole was shallower than she’d thought and with some effort the wound was soon cleaned and plugged. He did not make a sound through it all. Despite herself, she thought him very brave. ‘Merci,’ he said at last, and repeated it as she addressed his lacerated hands. ‘I go. After move him, I go.’ He shook his head. ‘He kill that child. Zamal.’
‘No,’ she rasped fiercely. ‘We will move the body and you will stay. Il faut rester. They will kill you otherwise. Vous tuez. Besides, you saved my life.’ She grabbed a cushion and shucked the cover off it, then pulled it over the airman’s ruined head. It was a relief not to have to see those staring eyes any more.
In life Mikael had been heavy; in death he was as immovable as a menhir, but somehow together they half-dragged, half-carried the corpse into the hall. They sat him at the top of the cellar steps while Olivia fetched the hurricane lamp. While the Dark Man held the cellar door, Olivia gave the body a shove with her foot. Down it went, tilting into a graceless forward roll, limbs flailing, contacting steps and wall in a series of grotesque acrobatics until at last it came to rest in a crumpled heap in the gloom far below. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to go down too,’ Olivia said quietly. ‘Can you make it? Vous pouvez le faire? There’s a rope rail, une corde, here.’ She guided his hand to it and down they went, the leaping light making their passage ever more nightmarish. Olivia crossed the cellar and opened the door there with a large iron key.
She wondered if the tide was in, and if they could get the body all the way to the cove, but she knew the local currents only too well: even if they could get it through the pinch point and manoeuvre it out to the waves it would bob out as far as the encircling rocks, get caught in an eddy and linger accusingly. The hope that the sea would swallow the evidence was a vain one, too easy a solution to a hard problem. Sins and secrets were not so easily hidden.
Between them, they pushed and dragged the corpse across the dusty floor and out into the chill of the rock tunnel. Olivia closed the door behind it, locking it again with the big iron key.
‘Stay here,’ she told the Dark Man. ‘Restez ici. I must clean the blood away upstairs before Rosemary gets up.’
‘Rosemary?’
‘There is a child in the house,’ she explained. ‘Il y a un enfant ici.’ She felt calmer now that the airman was out of sight. ‘I’m going to lock the door up there, but only to stop anyone finding you. I will knock three times. Je vais frapper trois fois, like this,’ she demonstrated. ‘If anyone else tries the door up there utilise le clef, use this key to go out into the tunnel.’ She handed him the iron key and watched as he took all this in, feeling like a character in a book – The Thirty-Nine Steps, maybe, or The Riddle of the Sands. Except that this wasn’t fiction, and Mamie was dead. The murderer had died in her own parlour. It seemed surreal.
Exiting the cellar, she locked the door at hall level, put the key up on the lintel and took in the scene with dismay. There were wide smears of blood across the tiles, and a glimpse of abattoir through the door into the parlour. Picking her way down the clean margins of the hallway, she closed the door on the horrible vista within. At least Mary was scared enough of the parrot that she wouldn’t go in there: she could clean that up later.
She ran to the kitchen, gathered a pail of water, a scrubbing brush, some Oxydol and an old towel and worked her way down the hall, expunging the evidence. The blood was not yet dry, it came away easily, leaving the tiles gleaming, but even so the water quickly swirled pink then rusty red and she had to empty the bucket down the butcher’s drain in the scullery three times. She had just cleaned the parlour door and handle and was hefting the final bucket back towards the scullery when a small voice said, ‘What are you doing?’
Mary’s head had appeared through the rails of the banister, her eyes pale holes in her white face.
‘I spilled some milk,’ Olivia lied easily.
The child regarded her suspiciously. ‘No you didn’t.’
They locked eyes.
‘I drank the last of the milk in my cocoa before I went to bed,’ Mary said. ‘And why are you whispering?’
Olivia went hot and cold. ‘I kept some back for breakfast,’ she said, trying to speak normally. ‘But unfortunately now there’s none left. I think I have a cold coming on.’ She walked to the kitchen door, away from that penetrating gaze, then noted with horror her bloody print upon it and quickly placed her hand over it.
‘I heard noises in the night.’ Mary had followed her down the hall. The soles of her slippers left little half-dry patches on the damp tiles.
‘It was probably the storm. It was very noisy.’
‘I heard voices.’
Olivia laughed, a little hysterical. ‘You ninny, of course you didn’t, you must have been dreaming.’
‘I’m not a ninny!’ Mary said furiously. ‘I did. I heard people shouting.’
‘That was
probably the parrot,’ Olivia rasped. ‘You know how he is when he gets upset.’ Before Mary could say anything else, she added, ‘There’s a little bit of cream left. You can have it in your porridge.’
Mary looked disbelieving. ‘Really?’
‘And some jam. Run back upstairs and have a very good wash – I shall check behind your ears – and put on your pinafore and your lace-up shoes’ – that would keep her occupied – ‘and I’ll make the porridge.’
As soon as Mary had disappeared back upstairs, Olivia wiped the handprint off the door, then swiftly returned to the scene of the crime.
The parrot sat hunched on his perch, looking shell-shocked. Olivia stuck a finger through the bars and stroked his head. He was too miserable even to try to bite her. ‘I’ll bring you treats later, I promise.’
Olivia took in the devastation of the room, then pushed the couch back against the wall, rolled up the ruined rug and shoved it underneath. A large stain remained in the middle of the floor. She pulled the big wool rug they used as an antimacassar off the armchair and laid it over the mark. It would have to do till she had time to give it a proper scrubbing. She removed the worst of the spatters of blood, stuffed the killing log into the grate and dumped the knife with which the monster had murdered poor Mamie into her bucket.
She had just shut the door on it all when she heard voices outside.
18
OLIVIA WENT TO THE DOOR. OUTSIDE STOOD SERGEANT Richards and a man in a trilby, whom he did not introduce. ‘I don’t mean to alarm you, Miss Kitto, but two of the POWs from up Treharrow escaped last night and we have reason to believe they’re highly dangerous. Just want to make sure all is well here and to assure you we’re doing everything we can to apprehend them.’
Olivia said nothing, aware of the second man’s gaze on her, so intent she was sure he saw her guilt and fear. Or perhaps there was blood in her hair – unconsciously, her hand rose to her head.