‘Who?’ I said.
‘Sarah. Sarah Hurst.’
I picked up the photo. Sarah wasn’t looking at the camera. She was looking away, towards the far side of the garden, with a neutral expression above a thin smile. I looked more closely. Her eyes were slightly sunken, and there was a haggard look to her, as if she had not slept very well for some time. And she seemed strangely cut off from the other two people in the photograph, bewildered, almost as if she couldn’t quite figure out what she was doing there.
I slipped the photo into my pocket, not sure what to make of it. Graves shrugged. We sat for a little bit longer and finished our drinks. Then we trudged downstairs and stepped outside into the cold. I waved goodbye to Graves and walked towards my car, which was parked outside the station, thinking that Graves maybe wasn’t so bad after all. Then felt guilty for thinking it and for taking him to one of Powell’s old drinking holes.
I walked quickly to the car and tried to remember what Rebecca had really looked like when I had seen her. But I had seen her only that one time, staring at me from a high window.
Then I started to think about the crumbling graves and the thick vines clinging to the walls of the church in Lower Quinton. I remembered the flowers on the grave in the cemetery and the Hurst family plot out there.
Another image of her came to me as I remembered the black-and-white picture I had seen of her in the house. That school photo in the newspaper stuffed at the back of an old drawer. Her father had cut out the text but kept the photo. It was odd. In my mind I stared at the printed page, and from far off it was as if I could hear the crisp sound of ice cracking. I walked on. Already the memory of the photo was slipping away from me, becoming distorted.
I tried to bring it back. The dots in the picture once more joined together and contrived to form a face. Her hair was tied back behind her head in a bun, making the smooth curve of her jaw more pronounced. But then the image of her disappeared again and all that remained were dots.
39
I had a late dinner, which I cooked and ate with complete indifference. Then I phoned Powell and talked to him for a while. He started going on about some old wives’ tale concerning the pond in Quinton. He wasn’t able to focus, and his voice sounded ragged and almost incoherent.
These remote Cotswold hills had always held a fascination for him, and for years he had regaled me with innumerable stories and anecdotes about each of the villages. For Powell, this was his way of showing you who he was. When he reached out into the past it was as if he were seeing it. But on the phone it all seemed garbled and incomplete. He described how they used to drown witches in the pond; ‘swimming a witch’, they had called it. In the end Alex took the phone from him, apologized and hung up.
I was just about to go upstairs to bed when I heard a car drawing to a stop in my driveway. Seconds later the doorbell rang. It had actually been so long since someone had rung it that for a second I was sure that it must have been the television. Then it rang again. A hectoring bullying demand. Frowning, I walked quickly through the hallway, switched on the light and swung open the door. Warm light flowed on to the path of snow and on to the two people standing in front of me, shivering with cold. The woman in front of me smiled. And then a camera flashed behind her.
‘Chief Inspector Downes?’ the woman said. ‘I was wondering if we could have a quick word. I know it’s late. But we thought you might want to talk to us, as it’s about Gail and Elise. We hear you’ve stopped searching out Hurst’s house. And that you’ve still to make an arrest – is this true?’
‘How the hell did you get this address?’ I said, shocked.
‘It’s just a few questions,’ the woman said. ‘May we come in? You know, it’s really freezing out here and poor old Bob’s been stuck in the village all day, taking pictures.’ She smiled. Behind her the roofs of the other cottages gleamed in the moonlight. ‘We won’t take much of your time. Maybe we can help.’
‘Help?’
I turned around, went back into the hallway for my house keys, stepped outside and then slammed the door shut behind me. I took a quick step forward. The camera was raised once more, aimed at my face. I took another step and, catching the photographer off guard, snatched his camera from him.
‘Hey,’ the man said. ‘You can’t do that.’
The journalist, however, seemed unperturbed. ‘It’s Guillermo, right?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘We were at Frank’s house this afternoon. We were surprised to see that no one’s out there any more, weren’t we, Bobbie? Nobody’s searching at all. Surely it must be a possibility that there are more victims out there? Victims you don’t even know about yet. Why aren’t you still looking?’
‘Hey!’ the man said. ‘Give me back my camera.’
I was so stunned by the intrusion that I very nearly threw the camera into the bushes. ‘I asked you how you got this address.’
The woman ignored me and took a step closer. ‘What about Nancy Williams? Do you think she was an accomplice? And someone knew. Same way they knew about Hurst.’
‘No, I do not, and don’t go printing anything about Nancy,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s none of your damned business, that’s why. Get the hell out of here.’
‘But why? Frank was a suspect all along,’ she said almost gleefully. ‘We didn’t know that. But you found a hairpin years ago in his swimming pool, didn’t you? Apparently he wasn’t even brought in and questioned when you found it. Which just seems incredible, really, seeing that the hairpin exactly matched one Gail Foster had been wearing the day she disappeared.’
I didn’t even bother to answer. I just handed back the camera, went inside and slammed the door behind me. I closed the curtains. There were mutterings from outside. Then, later, the sound of steps crunching through the snow. I waited until I heard their car disappear down the drive, then went into my kitchen.
How had they got my address? God, they were relentless. It was the only way to describe them. They made the local journalists look like complete amateurs. Hard not to admire it in a way, though. The persistence.
But it was a different matter altogether when you were on the sharp end of it. Of course, it wasn’t hard to know where they had found out about the hairpin, now that I thought about it. They must have talked to Gail’s mother and she must have told them and exaggerated its importance. Made it out to be a complete match. I couldn’t say I blamed her for it. It was a good way to get their attention.
I refilled the kettle, put it on the hob and made myself a mate. It’s best served at around 80°C, and it’s easier to judge the temperature with a stove-top kettle than with an electric one, which boils too quickly. Then I slumped down into my armchair.
All was silent. Outside my window, the snow-covered fields stretched out under the moonlight. Bloody journalists. Coming out here in the middle of the night. I tried not to think about them and started to think about the pond instead. What had Powell been talking about on the phone? A witch they had drowned years ago in Quinton. No. Drowned was not the right word.
Swimming a witch. That was the phrase Powell had used. They had dragged the poor woman out of her cottage, stripped her, bound her hands to her ankles and thrown her into the pond to see if she would float. It was a known fact that water rejected those who had signed pacts with the devil. And so she had floated. But she hadn’t floated for long.
Christ, what a nice little tale. I suddenly caught sight of my reflection in the window. A fierce look of worry crossed my face. But it wasn’t Powell I was worried about this time.
I stared through my reflection at the hills rising into the distance and at the wide strip of trees beyond. I sat there for a while thinking of that old story. Why had Powell told me that one? My arms lay limply at my sides. I had left the kettle on for too long. It had begun to boil and steam rose up, leaving beads of moisture hanging on the ceiling above the stove.
I stood up,
grabbed a cloth and absently took the kettle off the hob. I moved back to the window, pulled the curtain back farther and leant against the wall. Looking outside, I remembered staring at the pond from the silence of the graveyard after I had talked to Nancy. I remembered the pond staring back at me from the middle of the village like a black unblinking eye. And then I thought of Rebecca. For a moment, the unformed outline of something falling fast came into view. Rebecca burning in my arms.
40
I was waiting on the library steps in Stratford when the librarian came to open up the next morning. I spent hours searching through the newspaper archives and reading about the Taylor boys and their accident in the pond. The story had even made some of the national newspapers at the time.
It went very much as it had been described to me. The two boys had gone on to the ice along with Rebecca. They met at just after midnight on a school night in December, a few days before the Christmas holiday. Both boys, Ned, aged twelve, and Owen, aged thirteen, fell through the ice and drowned. Rebecca had been lucky. She had fallen in the water but managed to get out. Both boys were pronounced dead at the scene.
All of the accounts were the same. But one write-up in the local paper also ran a half-page photo. It was the same photo Hurst had had in the back of his drawer. I put down the paper, asked the librarian for a photocopy of the article and marched out into the cold. I got into my car and drove to Lower Quinton, where I sat inside my car, listening to the radio crackling on the dashboard. Then I stepped out, locked the door and walked alongside the village green.
I blinked and looked around, as if surprised to find myself back here in the village. Across the grass, on the other side of the green, I caught a glimpse of grey and then sudden light as the winter sun sparkled briefly on the pond’s surface through the trees. I passed the old broken-down bench in the middle of the green. I took one quick backward glance at the village before making my way through the wall of trees that surrounded the pond.
There was a single gate at the far end of the chainlink fence that encircled the pond. Again, I was struck by the pond’s size but more so now. The branches of some of the older trees reached all the way across the top of the fence and hung over the ice. The local kids had heaved a few rocks at the fence, trying to break it. The rocks now lay encrusted in the surface of the pond, along with arcs of hardened earth and pieces of torn grass.
I took a step forward and leant against the fence. The water beneath the ice rippled with a strange urgency into the freezing rivulets of mud. There was a faded yellow sign that had been put up on a pole in the centre of the pond. It showed a silhouette of a man pitching forward into a sharply edged black hole. DANGER: THIN ICE.
I stared at the pond for quite some time. Then I decided to try the gate, and when that didn’t budge, I took off my coat and placed it neatly in the crook of a branch. Then I climbed the fence and lowered myself to the ground on the other side.
I walked to the edge of the ice and with all my strength stamped at the edge of the water. Nothing happened. I tried again and again. A few moments later the first splintering crack went shooting along the surface. The water began to bubble beneath, ominous and slow. And then it began to pour through the crack. The crack opened wider as the edges fell and toppled beneath the surface. The water spread and brushed against the snow, which melted, revealing the dark clean ice.
From somewhere far off came another splintering crack. Another sound, louder this time, from somewhere near the centre. The water began to move, to push. Bubbles streamed upwards and broke against the roof of ice. I gazed at the gently lapping surface. I was very still for a moment. And suddenly I knew.
41
I spent the rest of the day finding out as much as I could about the accident on the pond. Everyone seemed to remember those two boys being dragged lifeless to the banks, and all the accounts were fundamentally the same as those that had appeared in the papers. But I kept on knocking on doors and asking about it. And all afternoon I kept on hearing the same story repeated over and over. It was getting dark by the time I decided to try the shopkeeper in the village shop.
She was wearing a drab housecoat, and she looked impatient and tired out. But her expression changed when I asked her about the pond. It was one that I had got to know well during the afternoon. I could almost hear her thinking, pond? What pond? It was as if she had forgotten it was there, though it was right across the road. It seemed that for the shopkeeper, like many others in the village, especially those who had been there for a number of years, the pond had slipped permanently out of view and remained invisible behind the wall of trees. That was until you brought up the accident. Now, looking at the pond through her dusty shop window, I couldn’t help thinking there was something undeniably secretive about the way it almost seemed to be receding out of sight, as if the trees and shrubbery had conspired to shield it from prying eyes.
The single customer in the shop was already heading towards the counter, dragging a battered wicker basket behind her like a reluctant dog. She placed a bottle of milk along with some teabags next to the till and waited while the shopkeeper rang it all up.
‘Billy Mathews,’ the shopkeeper said without warning, as she handed over the change and waited with amusement for the customer’s look of vague puzzlement to change to recognition. ‘Thought you might remember,’ she said quietly.
The customer looked up at me quizzically.
‘He wants to know if I know anything about the pond,’ the shopkeeper explained.
‘Two lads died out there years back,’ I said. ‘I was wondering if you might remember it. Perhaps you even saw it.’
‘Billy Mathews,’ the other woman repeated slowly, putting away her purse, ‘now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.’
Whatever errand she might have set out to do next could clearly wait; she shifted towards the counter and placed her bag in an alcove beneath the shop window. She smiled at the shopkeeper and said, ‘Billy Mathews. My God.’ Then she laughed. It came out like a bark, and the shopkeeper and I both jumped.
‘Billy Mathews?’ I said, confused. ‘I want to know about two brothers … Ned and Owen Taylor. Who’s Billy Mathews?’
But both of the women ignored me.
‘God, he was a little sod, wasn’t he?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t go as far as that,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘He weren’t that bad. High spirits, that were all it was. Anyway,’ she added, ‘must be thirty years now.’
‘Try forty,’ the customer said bluntly. ‘Of course he was older than me, so I didn’t know him as well as Helen,’ she said, looking at me.
The shopkeeper managed another weak smile. ‘Well, it was only two years – doesn’t make much difference now, does it, Eleanor.’
Eleanor looked at her as if she had just said something absurd and then said, ‘It was the council’s fault those two boys died. That pond’s a lot deeper than it looks.’
The colour in her already ruddy cheeks rose as she lapsed into thought about the village council. ‘Oh, they had all kinds of wonderful plans as usual,’ she said. ‘They were going to restore the pond to its former glory as a kind of memorial to Billy Mathews. Those were their very words: “its former glory”,’ she said and gave another one of her barkish laughs. ‘Though what for I’ll never know – so we could all enjoy endless picnics by its banks, I suppose, and feed the ducks. But of course, there weren’t any ducks out there. There never have been.’
‘So they weren’t the first to drown out on the pond?’ I said, shocked.
She looked at me very seriously and said, ‘No, they weren’t. After what happened to Billy, they were going to cut down all the trees and build a little wooden pier so you could go stand in the middle of it. And they were going to build a white fence all around it, so none of the kids could get near it again.
‘They said it wouldn’t take long – three weeks tops’ – she drew out the words slowly – ‘three weeks to drain it and pump out the silt, and th
en a few months for the rain to fill it. Nothing could have been simpler,’ she said, letting out a long and exaggerated sigh. ‘Took three weeks just to drain it.’ Her face formed an expression of acute disgust. ‘The stink of it was absolutely awful. There was no getting away from it for months. And it was deep, that pond. No one could believe just how deep. It seemed to go down for miles and miles – like a big black hole – which, when you come to think of it, is exactly what it is. The council lost enthusiasm for it after that, and were off to go and mess up something else.’
She moved forward to the counter. Her voice had taken on a solemn edge. ‘That wasn’t the worst of it, though. The thing is, they never got around to building a proper fence, which was about the only decent idea they ever had. That’s how the Taylor boys managed to get in there much later.’
The shopkeeper shook her head. ‘I watched him,’ she said. ‘We all did, didn’t we, Eleanor? Load of us kids traipsed on over with Billy. To see if he were going to do it.’
‘Did it for a dare.’
‘He walked right into the middle of the pond,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘He wanted to walk across it only once – that’s what he said he were going to do – but then of course he started showing off.’ She laughed. ‘Started doing these silly pirouettes on the ice. You remember that, Eleanor, how he kept on going round and round?’
Eleanor smiled grimly. ‘Yes, Helen, I remember,’ she said.
The shopkeeper nodded her head vigorously, as if she had just recalled something else. ‘He used to wear those thick black glasses like Buddy Holly. And he was always breaking ’em or losing ’em.’
The shopkeeper’s eyes had grown dim, I noticed, as if she were seeing herself once again as a child amongst the group of children gathered around the banks of the pond. And it wasn’t hard for me to imagine myself amongst them too. For a moment, it was as if I had traipsed out in the cold with all the other children and was now craning my neck and staring at the boy on the ice.
The Drowning Ground Page 22