With a shock that left her cold and bewildered, she realised who it was. ‘Sergeant Reardon!’ The policeman.
‘Miss Wentworth. So you recognise me after all this time. Not many people do, nowadays.’ His tone was challenging, as it always had been, but it held a new edge of defiance.
‘Of course I do.’ Recognition had come to her, in fact, mainly by the way he walked – dogged, hands behind his back, and by something familiar in his shape and the Cock Robin tilt of his head, as if permanently on the lookout. She might not have known him otherwise. Burns, she thought. The mutilation was horribly familiar to her, as was the surge of pity and outrage such sights still brought. One side of his face was puckered with scars, pink and shiny, made the more shocking by comparison with the other side, which was almost normal, apart from a slight tautening of the skin. He had been a good-looking young man. He was lucky he hadn’t been blinded. She knew better than to sympathise, however; that was the very last thing any of the wounded men wanted, something she well understood. ‘Don’t dare be nice to me,’ she used to declare fiercely as a child, ‘or you’ll make me cry.’
‘What brings you here, Sergeant?’
‘What better place to stay, for a few days’ walking? I intend to book in at the Greville Arms, if they can accommodate me.’
‘Walking?’ She stared at him. ‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. I do actually enjoy walking, Miss Wentworth. But let’s say there’s also a matter of unfinished business, while I’m here, as it were. Loose ends.’
The only business he had been concerned with here had no loose ends. A verdict had been given, the police had withdrawn, case closed. But she didn’t pretend not to understand him. Conflicting emotions chased each other through her mind: bewilderment that the police were apparently ready to reopen a hurried investigation they had patently never had enthusiasm for in the first place, and a kind of dread, which she couldn’t explain.
‘I see you’re not pleased at the idea. Well, I didn’t expect you would be, any of you.’ He was an alien figure in his motorcycle gear, a heavy coat and breeches, the helmet and big leather gauntlets in one hand and a pair of goggles dangling from his wrist.
‘None of us could be delighted at the prospect, Sergeant. It’s been four and a half years, and we’re still trying to come to terms with what happened.’ (But never to accept it, she thought.)
‘Not Sergeant any longer, or not for the moment, at any rate, just plain mister. I’m out of the police now. Maybe for good. I haven’t quite decided whether to take up my old job again yet – it would be my own choice if I did,’ he added, as if to dispel the notion that the police would be unwilling to inflict his disfigurement on the general public.
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand why you’re here, then.’
Herbert Reardon, ex-police detective sergeant, ex-army sergeant, had found himself strangely unable to forget that last case he had worked on before joining the army. It had come back to him, haunted him to be more precise, at odd, unexpected and mostly inopportune moments throughout the war: in those tense, nerve-wracked silences in the front-line trenches while they waited for the heavy shelling to start again from the other side; when he was wading thigh-deep through the disgusting black hell of thick mud, parts of other men’s corpses and the huge bloated rats that fed on them; during brief, temporary lulls in the fighting when he was lying, half awake, almost too exhausted, mentally and physically, to grab a few hours’ sleep; and latterly, between operations in the hospital when they were doing what they could with his mutilated face. It was the unutterable waste of lives – sons and brothers, husbands and fathers, boys barely out of the schoolroom – which invariably led him back to that other untimely death. That lovely young girl, before the war, found dead in the far-off, by then almost unimaginable beauty of a sweet English summer morning. Though she hadn’t been lovely anymore when he’d first seen her. By that time, twelve hours in the water had robbed her red-gold hair of its lustrous shine, her skin of its pale radiance, her body of life. He had, however, seen the photographs her distraught family had produced. In life she had been beautiful, a remote, pre-Raphaelite maiden, in death a Millais Ophelia.
It was indeed partly because it wasn’t in him to leave anything unfinished that he had decided to come back here, but also because he felt that she, the victim, did at least have the right to have her pointless death explained, a basic human right denied the men who had died, equally pointlessly, for nothing, during the insane war that had for so long held the world in its fist. He had never been satisfied about Marianne Wentworth’s death.
Reardon was a loner, with problems of his own to sort out. As yet, he hadn’t much idea what his future was to be. The only child of elderly parents, he now had no relatives or dependents, his father, the owner of a small printing works, having died while he was at the front, leaving him a tidy little sum which would last him until he made his mind up what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He was still not much above thirty, and if he did not in the end rejoin the police, he thought he might travel: to India maybe, China, take the golden road to Samarkand, explore unknown continents. A passionate self-improver, he wanted to study other peoples, other religions, see if he might begin to make sense of what the world had come to, and why. He had first suspected the non-existence of God when, as a young boy, he had seen his mother die agonisingly of cancer, a suspicion reinforced later in his police career, when he’d seen how men were brought to dishonesty, brutality and violence through poverty and ignorance. Had there been a God, He would surely never have allowed that. Nothing in the futile and inhuman slaughter of the last years had made him revise his opinions, but maybe, somewhere, there might be some sort of an answer.
He knew that there was no question of the police reopening what it had suited them to write off as an open-and-shut case. Even supposing – and there was in his mind no certainty about this, yet – supposing he did take his old job back, he would not be allowed to resume enquiries. He was sailing close to the wind even now, in taking this on himself. And in any case, he admitted in the privacy of his own thoughts, finding answers might prove an impossible task. But he was damned if he wasn’t going to try.
‘If you are not back in the police, do they know what you are doing?’ Nella Wentworth asked suddenly, very sharp, seeming to have followed his thoughts with an accuracy which for a moment disconcerted him.
‘No,’ he answered honestly. ‘It’s a matter of personal satisfaction, wiping the slate clean. For you and your family, as well as for me.’ And perhaps a feeling that he had been spared, when so many others had not, to have the chance to right a wrong, he added to himself. It was on the cards that he might have come anyway, in the police again or not, just for that last. It was wrong that a young woman whose life had barely begun should lie in her grave with her death unexplained. It had officially been recorded as an accident, but did anyone actually believe that? Not many, if he was any judge. The circumstances of her going to that remote spot, alone, at night, when her family believed her to have been safely tucked up in bed, then accidentally falling into the water, were too bizarre for anyone, let alone Herbert Reardon, to believe. Most of the people he had spoken to during the all too brief investigation seemed to be of the same opinion. They were certain she must have gone there deliberately in order to take her own life, to drown herself in the lake…and what else would make a young girl take such a step but that tired old cliché…a man, disgrace? But the doctor who had been called in to examine her had pronounced her virgo intacta, no doubt mightily relieved that he would be spared having to pass anything else on to her grieving parents.
There had been one parent only, he recalled, Francis Wentworth. The Reverend Francis Wentworth. Not a man to like the idea of suicide, which was a mortal sin, his daughter dying with a total loss of grace. An accident had been far more acceptable than suicide. It was not the right time, yet, to put forward darker possibilities.
The sister was look
ing at him oddly and for a moment he thought he had her. ‘Won’t you help, Miss Wentworth?’
Nella huddled into her cloak. She felt frozen to the marrow of her bones. She said wearily, ‘I don’t see how you can possibly ask that – and I don’t in any case see how I or anyone else could help, after all this time.’
‘You can talk to me. That’s going to be my problem, getting people to talk, to remember.’
‘We all talked to you, four years ago. Told you everything you wanted – or needed – to know. I think you’ll find you won’t be welcome here.’
It might have been a smile that crossed his face. ‘I’m well used to that.’
She said suddenly, ‘Look, I can’t stay. I’m going on duty. I shall have to run as it is, or I’ll have Matron on my tracks.’ To emphasise the point, she threw a glance at the church clock; it was true, but that wasn’t why she didn’t intend to stand here talking pointlessly to Reardon. The truth was that this going back into the past was more than she could bear. ‘I’ve no more to say. Goodbye, Mr Reardon.’
He fell into step beside her, slapping the big gauntlets hard against his thigh, and then laid a hand on her arm to detain her. ‘Please. Don’t go just yet.’ His eyes, in that ruined face, wore the bright, piercing look she remembered from before. They gave her the same queer feeling she’d had on first encountering him four years ago, when she’d been reminded of the time they had come across a fox terrier pulling a screaming rabbit from its burrow where he’d chased it. She had thought then that this was a man, terrier-like, who would hang on like grim death until he arrived at a conclusion that satisfied him. That he would try to force them to admit the truth, however unpalatable. Now she saw something else in his eyes and for a strange moment thought it might be compassion. She shook off his hand and began to walk rapidly on.
‘I’m sure you mean well, but I really don’t want to hear any more. It was an accident that should never have happened, but it was long ago. Can’t we be allowed to forget?’
He suddenly stepped in front of her, so that she was forced to stop. ‘Miss Wentworth, don’t you want to know the truth?’ he asked, and heard the intake of her breath.
The truth? What was he insinuating? That Marianne’s tragic death had not been an accident? That the old, crumbling jetty by the boathouse had not collapsed under her weight so that she’d been unable to save herself? That it had been deliberate? Marianne, creeping out at night, jumping into the black waters of the lake to drown herself? Never! She had been so happy those last few weeks. Glowing from all the attention, aware perhaps for the first time of her sexual attraction. It had changed her, certainly, made her secretive and even a little distanced from Nella for the first time in their lives, but not even remotely in a way that indicated she might choose to take her life.
‘What do you mean, the truth? It was unbearably hot that night. The coolest place in the village was down by the lake. I’ve no doubt my sister couldn’t sleep and that’s why she went down there.’ She was aware how lame that sounded. Well-brought-up young ladies rarely went out alone, late at night or otherwise.
He said deliberately, ‘If that was so, I don’t suppose she was the only one out in the cool of the evening. But nobody ever came forward to say they’d seen her.’
‘The lake is on private land. The only people likely to have been around are those who had no business to be there. Why don’t you ask the Gypsies? They’re back again, down in the Leasowes. Goodbye, Mr Reardon.’
He stood back, and let her go. A few minutes later, already halfway to Oaklands, she heard the diminuendo of his motorcycle engine on the quiet air.
She was late for duty by now, and without realising what she was doing, she found herself taking the dreaded short cut past the lake: the path her sister had taken that last night. But her mind was now so full of the vivid, painfully resurrected recollections of those last days before Marianne died that it scarcely mattered.
Not that the whole of that golden, carefree summer had ever been too far from her thoughts since its terrible, unthinkable ending…
Chapter Seven
1914
Or had they all been golden, those pre-war days? It had seemed so. Tennis. Croquet on the Oaklands lawn. Tea under the big cedar, and Grev plucking the strings of a lute. Summer muslins and one’s hair up for the first time. Echoes of laughter. Lying on the grass in the hot sun. Wandering down to the lake in the valley because it was cooler there, surrounded as it was by the dense pines and the tall red sandstone cliff which threw a black shade onto the water, and from which Rupert made those spectacular dives. Long, endless days, unspooling like silken thread as though they would go on for ever.
But like a nub in the silk was the appearance of the Gypsy boy. He was seventeen or eighteen, perhaps, though it was difficult to tell exactly, his tribe generally being wiry and not tall in stature. He was usually barefoot, wearing cut-down breeches and a red handkerchief knotted round his neck, with straight black hair and deep-set eyes, as lean and brown-skinned as if he’d been carved from some tree, a savage, mangy dog or two at his heels. Wherever they were, the crowd of them, there he seemed to be, too, going about his business, whatever that might be, just beyond the periphery of the activities of their charmed circle, although in actual fact his presence didn’t really bother any of them, except Rupert.
Long before his arrival at the rectory, Rupert had been the object of much interested speculation by the girls, especially by Amy. At thirteen, she was just becoming aware of young men and the impression she made on them. ‘Rupert von Kessel. How romantic. Do you suppose he speaks English?’
‘Of course he speaks English, you goose!’ Nella had laughed. ‘He was at Rugby with William for five or six years, so it isn’t likely he wouldn’t.’
‘Well, William’s been over to stay with Rupert’s family in Salzburg and he doesn’t speak German!’
‘He’d hardly do that, after only a few weeks, would he? I don’t suppose this Rupert wears lederhosen, either. Though he looks as though he might.’
‘What are lederhosen?
‘Leather shorts with braces, worn by hearty types who stride over the mountains grasping an alpenstock—’
‘What’s—?’
‘Nella, don’t tease the child,’ said Marianne.
Amy tossed her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. I think he’s very handsome.’ She gazed at the photograph William had sent: brownish, inexpertly hand-tinted, so that Rupert’s hair was bright yellow, his cheeks an unnatural shade of pink. But it didn’t disguise the fact that he was tall and well made, very much the same build as William, most probably athletic like him, too, a product of school games, at which they had both excelled.
‘Sorry, Amy dear, I was only teasing – but he looks too boring to me.’ Nella remained unimpressed. She thought the photograph, a family group taken at Rupert’s home in Salzburg the previous year, one of the times when William had stayed with them, was typical of what she imagined Austrians to be – stuffy and stiff-necked, Rupert’s two older sisters as elaborately dressed as if for a royal garden party, sitting as if they had pokers down their backs; his brother, a dashing cavalry officer, resplendent in a scarlet and gold-braided uniform straight out of a musical comedy. His mother was extremely fat, and his father grim and unsmiling.
‘And I’m not a child,’ Amy said, still gazing at the photograph. ‘Why do you two always think me such a baby? You’re just as bad as me anyway, Marianne. You hope Rupert will carry you off back to his castle in Austria and make passionate love to you and—’
Marianne, who was never angry, stood stock-still, white-faced. ‘You’ve been prying into my notebook!’
‘No…I…it wasn’t prying.’ Amy was suddenly frightened. ‘You left it open on the parlour desk…and I just…happened to see it.’
‘Now, Amy, that’s a fib for a start,’ Nella said.
Marianne kept her notebooks in a private box in a drawer in her room and never left them lying around. She had
never let anyone read them, either, except Mrs Rafferty, and not her lately. She had long ago stopped telling stories to her sisters. She said nothing more, however, except, very quietly, ‘Don’t ever do that again, Amy. Ever. Do you hear me?’
Rupert, in fact, turned out to possess a kind of devil-may-care charm, and to be even more handsome than his photograph. He had acquired a patina of Englishness during his several years of public school education– where his father, a rich banker, had sent him because he had business interests in England and thought an English education for his son would be a distinct advantage to him– and his accent had by now almost disappeared, unless you listened very carefully. Nothing could quite disguise the fact, however, that he was not an Englishman born and bred, though to do him justice, he never tried to make anyone believe he was. He was very obviously exceedingly proud to be a member of the great Austro-Hungarian Empire, and on occasions it even seemed to amuse him to make himself appear more foreign than he really was, to emphasise his foreignness with wry remarks, and cultivate a slightly ironic tone and a dry self-mockery.
Nella saw that it made life more comfortable to pretend to laugh at oneself before others could do it, but she thought the habit quite irritating: it underlined things you might not have noticed if they hadn’t been forced upon your attention, but she kept her opinions to herself. He was her brother’s friend, and it was bad enough that in the current climate of opinion, the guest at the rectory was already being looked on with suspicion, by the villagers, and most of the local gentry. Von Kessel, what sort of name was that? Probably German, a sympathiser with the Kaiser, and who wanted to be on friendly terms with him, the way he was acting? Arming Germany to the teeth, picking quarrels with his cousin, the King. What was that…not German, but Austrian, this young fellow? Well, what was the difference, when the two nations were thick as thieves?
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