Wychwood--Hallowdene

by George Mann

  These symbols, Daisy knew, were part of the ritual that would reawaken Grace’s spirit before it left this world, and heal her body so that she might yet live.

  Agnes worked quickly, tearing the nightdress as she continued her work, swirling whorls of charcoal across the dying woman’s belly. Then, when she had finished and the woman’s body was thus complete – a canvas that had been worked into a letter for the gods – she returned to her roll and collected a bundle of herbs, which she pushed into the pink, ragged hole in the woman’s flesh, packing it with salve. The woman – close to death, yet stirred by the horrific pain – bucked and screamed, her wail echoing through the trees, startling birds, which burst from cover, scattering into the night.

  Rocking back on her knees, Agnes began to mumble a litany of foreign words, unspoken in this place for centuries. The trees seemed to respond in kind, whispering and rocking, until the litany became a song that built in a crescendo. Cuthbert Abbott watched in appalled fascination as the body of his wife seemed to jolt to life, twitching as if in violent spasm, writhing on the ground, foaming at the lips, eyes rolled back in their sockets to show only their milky undersides.

  Daisy was crying out, now, telling Agnes to stop, but her words were silent and unheard; she was simply a spectator, a witness out of time. All of this had happened before, and would happen again as she watched, as sure as the changing of the seasons.

  The ululating song came to an end. Everything was still. Agnes breathed, ragged and deep, rocking forward on her knees. Even the trees of the Wychwood seemed to know their place, and stood becalmed, silent and unmoving.

  The man took a step forward, but halted at Agnes’s raised hand. She shuffled forward on her knees, cradling the head of the other woman on her lap, using her sleeve to wipe away the spittle from Grace’s chin.

  She watched in silence for a moment, waiting for Grace’s chest to rise and fall with the intake of her breath. It did not.

  Gently, she laid the woman’s head upon a pillow of leaves, and turned towards the man. The look in her eyes was answer enough, and enraged, he rushed forward, striking Agnes hard across the side of the head with his fist. She crumpled to the ground, crying out, but Cuthbert was incensed, and he struck her again, and again, and then kicked her in the stomach as she lay on the ground, weeping.

  “Without grace or remorse,” said the voice in Daisy’s ear, and she finally understood what Agnes had been trying to tell her.

  Cuthbert had killed his wife, and had gone to Agnes in search of help. When she’d been unable to save the woman’s life, he had instead laid the blame at her door. The body had been covered in charcoal markings depicting strange symbols, and herbs had been stuffed inside her wounds, and so Cuthbert had argued that Agnes had used her craft to murder his beloved wife, and the villagers had found her wanting. She had been put to death for Cuthbert’s crime.

  He had abandoned her to die, and he’d continued to live his life unsuspected, without Grace, and without remorse.

  “Help! Help me!” he called, bellowing at the top of his lungs. Daisy knew that Grace’s screams of agony must have already drawn the attention of the villagers, and now Cuthbert was calling for them, ready to accuse Agnes of his crime. She heard voices amongst the trees. They were coming. There was nothing Agnes could do.

  Daisy could feel Agnes’s rage, her hatred, boiling up inside her.

  She turned back to the clearing. Agnes was sitting up again now, clutching her midriff, her back to Daisy. Daisy wanted to go to her, to help, but there was nothing she could do.

  And then Agnes turned and looked straight at her, peering out across the centuries, and the look in her eyes was so vengeful, so demonic, that Daisy issued a wail of terror. She turned to flee, clawing at the branches that were suddenly closing in on her from all sides, crowding her, blocking her escape.

  And then the whispering returned, and everything went black.

  She came around screaming. She recognised the place immediately, from the scene she’d just witnessed. She was out in Raisonby Wood again. She had no idea of the time. She didn’t even know if this was real or a dream. Her feet were bare, bleeding profusely from innumerable cuts, and she was still wearing her pyjamas. She’d torn the hem of both legs. Her left cuff was wet and muddy, and her lip had split and then healed, the dried blood gritty in her mouth. She dropped to her knees, whimpering in the darkness, and allowed the tears to stream down her cheeks.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  “You look done in.”

  “Long day,” said Peter, stepping aside to let her in. She stopped just inside the doorway, reached up on her tiptoes, and kissed him square on the lips. Then she tossed her handbag down in the hall and marched through to the kitchen, where she found two glasses and a bottle of brandy, and poured them both a large measure. She’d been over to visit her mum while Peter worked late on the case. Now, it was nearly midnight, and he still seemed to be at it.

  “How was Griffiths in the end?” she called through to the other room.

  “Oh, you know,” replied Peter. “Her usual brusque self. But I must admit, with three murders on my plate, I could do with all the help I can get.”

  She carried the drinks through to the living room to find he’d returned to what he’d been doing when she arrived – squatting on the floor amidst a dizzying array of handwritten notes, drawings and what appeared to be genealogy charts.

  “What’s all this about, then?” She handed him his drink.

  “Papers from Lee Stroud’s house. I was thinking about what both you and Daisy said about him being obsessed with local history, and it got me thinking: could there be anything in his notes to help us understand what’s going on?”

  “About Agnes Levett, you mean?” She took a long draught from her glass, enjoying the warm sensation as the brandy hit the back of her throat.

  “About any of it,” said Peter. “Do you know he’d mapped the entire village?”

  “As in the layout of the houses?”

  “No, as in one massive, extended family tree. Every family, every individual, every single connection; it’s all here, going back years.” He reached for a fat lever-arch folder and passed it up to her. She flipped through the pages inside. Every chart was meticulous, drawn in fine black ink. Even his handwriting was perfect, each letter carefully inscribed. “And that’s only one file. There are dozens of them.”

  “Dozens?”

  “Yeah. They stretch right back to mediaeval times. And they’re bang up to date, too. At least as far as the main Hallowdene families are concerned, the ones who’ve been there for centuries, such as the Abbotts and the Heddles.”

  “He must have spent his entire life compiling it all,” said Elspeth. On one hand she was impressed at the scale of the achievement, on the other, saddened that a person could spend so much time concerning themselves with other people’s lives that they allowed their own to pass them by. “Once you’re finished with all this, we should do something with it,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Give it to a museum or a library? Anything that stops it ending up in a skip. I couldn’t bear to think of it being destroyed.”

  “There’s a distant cousin,” said Peter, “at least according to this.” He tapped his finger on another nearby file. “And there might yet be a will. But yeah, I’ll make sure it goes to a good home if the family don’t want it.”

  Elspeth found a perch on the arm of the sofa. There was nowhere else to sit. Peter’s house had always been full of stuff even when it had belonged to his parents, but now, with his growing collection of comic books and paperback crime novels, it felt more compact than ever. More homely, thought Elspeth. More lived-in, a bit like Daisy Heddle’s cottage. That’s what her apartment was missing, Elspeth decided. It was all still too new, too sparse. She hadn’t expanded to fill it yet, hadn’t accumulated enough of a life there. But there was time. Especially now she’d decided to make it more of a permanent arrang
ement.

  “So, have you found anything useful?” she said. She kicked off her boots, propping her feet on the coffee table.

  “Move those, if you want,” said Peter, indicating the heaped folders on the sofa. “I won’t be much longer.”

  “It’s all right,” said Elspeth. “Tell me what you’re looking for. I might be able to help.”

  “Nothing specific. I’m just going through the family records of the key suspects, seeing if anything obvious jumps out,” he said. “The problem is knowing where to start. Some of these records go back to the fifteenth century. Lee Stroud was meticulous.”

  “Start with the people themselves,” said Elspeth, “and work backwards from there. If there is anything worth knowing, it’ll most likely be in the last few generations. I can’t imagine people are going to hold on to grudges that go back much beyond their grandparents.”

  “All right, good point,” said Peter. “I suppose I was just getting lost in all that stuff about Agnes, trying to unpick what had happened in the 1640s, who the victims had been.”

  “No joy?”

  “No, it’s all here, but it doesn’t make anything clearer. There’s no familial relationship to the current victims, so far as I can tell.”

  “Then maybe it’s the killer, rather than the victims, who bears some relationship to Agnes? Is there a chart for the Levetts?” said Elspeth.

  “Hang on, I’ll take a look.”

  “Right. And I’ll make a start with…” she picked up a folder at random and opened it “… the Abbotts. Now this should be interesting.”

  She opened the folder out on her knees and started leafing through. It was filed in chronological order, oldest to youngest. It seemed Stroud had traced the Abbott family line back as far as the 1450s. There were pages of the tree for each era, each contained in a plastic wallet along with supporting documentation. She unfastened the clip and paged ahead, jumping right to the end. Here she found another plastic sleeve, and she slipped it out of the folder, sliding out the thin sheaf of pages, much of which consisted of photocopies of birth and death certificates, and printed pages from the online census. She opened out the folded A3 page containing the most recent portion of the family tree.

  It appeared to go back as far as the Victorian era, with Thomas Abbott’s children listed in the bottom right-hand corner being the most recent additions.

  Of immediate note was Nicholas Abbott, right in the centre of the page. Stroud had already updated the record to show his death date, and written beneath it in bright red ink were the words:

  Cause of Death: Murder

  Elspeth peered at it in wonder. Stroud had managed that pretty quickly. He must have written it in on the day that he, himself, had died.

  She followed the line across, discovering that Nicholas had once been married, but that his wife, Sarah Abbott, née Winthrop, had divorced him twenty years ago. Good for her. They’d had no children.

  The surprising thing, however, was that another line was appended to Nicholas Abbott, connecting to another woman’s name: Sally Jameson. According to the chart, she had borne a child to him in 1991, while he’d still been married to Sarah. The child’s name was omitted, with the word ILLEGITIMATE written instead, in black capital letters.

  Elspeth sat back for a minute, considering this. Sally Jameson had once, presumably, had an affair with Nicholas Abbott, and had carried his child. Was it Christian? She’d heard no mention of his absent father. If so, had Nicholas acknowledged him or left Sally to fend for herself? She presumed he had not accepted the boy as his own, judging by the fact that it wasn’t until seven years later that his wife had finally left him. How had Sally stomached it all these years, with Abbott coming into her tearoom, making lewd remarks about the waiting staff, inappropriately touching Daisy in front of everyone? She’d obviously seen it happen, if it was as frequent an occurrence as Daisy had made out. Is this why she’d never thrown him out, or called the police? Because he had some sort of hold over her? On top of that – how had Lee Stroud found out about the affair? Had Sally told him?

  “Peter?”

  “Mmm-hmm?” he mumbled, still poring over the Levett file.

  “Has anyone mentioned Christian Jameson’s father in all of this?”

  “No. Not that I’m aware of,” he said.

  “Is there a file for the Jamesons?”

  He looked up, bleary-eyed. “Yeah, it’s on the sofa somewhere.”

  She twisted around, opening a few of the files until she found the one she needed. This one also went back to the fifteenth century. She skipped to the end and found the chart she was looking for. There it was again: Sally Jameson was listed as having given birth to a child by Nicholas Abbott in 1991. This time, the chart read: CHRISTIAN JAMESON.

  “Peter, you need to see this,” she said. “I think I’ve found something.”

  “Hold on,” he said, raising his hand. “Just a minute. I’ve found something too.”

  “Well, you go first.”

  “I’ve been following the Levett family tree. It seems Agnes had a sister, who’d married into another local family a few years before Agnes was tried and executed,” he said. “What’s interesting is that, if you follow the family tree, within three generations the family name became Heddle.”

  “The same as Daisy,” said Elspeth. “So Daisy has a direct familial link to Agnes.”

  “There’s more,” said Peter. “Unlike most people in the village, the Heddles and Abbots have lived around Hallowdene for centuries. There’s so much intermarriage that it seems almost inevitable, but according to this, the Jameson family are also directly linked to the Levetts, descended on the female side.”

  “It’s the Jamesons I wanted to tell you about,” said Elspeth. She handed him the Jameson chart. “Here.”

  He stared at it for a moment. “What am I looking at? I’ve been at this for hours.”

  “Sally Jameson, down the bottom there,” she got up, walking around behind him and indicating with her finger. She traced the line across to the father of Sally’s child. “Look at that.”

  “Nicholas Abbott,” he said. “Now that is interesting. So Christian…”

  “… is Abbott’s son,” she finished.

  He placed the chart on the floor before him, and then glanced at his watch. It was close to midnight. “Looks like I’ll be paying Sally Jameson a visit in the morning,” he said.

  “I think that’s enough of charts and family trees and other people’s business now, don’t you?”

  He sighed, and looked up at Elspeth. “I suppose so. Tea?”

  She smiled, and cupped his face in her hands. “Peter?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Take me to bed.”

  * * *

  Elspeth woke to the sound of a trilling phone.

  At first she tried to ignore it, surfacing slowly from her comfortable dream, but the sound was a persistent irritation, and in the end, heaving a sigh, she rolled over and grabbed it from the bedside table. Beside her, Peter had propped himself up on one elbow, peering at her with bleary eyes.

  It was Daisy. She thumbed to accept the call.

  “Hello?”

  The breathing on the other end sounded ragged, desperate. Daisy was crying. “Ellie?”

  “Daisy? What’s wrong?” Elspeth was awake now, the fear in Daisy’s voice sending a shiver down the length of her spine.

  “I… I didn’t know who else to call. I’m sorry.”

  “What is it? What’s happened? Are you okay?” She glanced at the clock. It was just after 2 am.

  “I’m not sure. I blacked out. I’ve been out in the woods. I saw something…”

  “Daisy, do you need an ambulance, or the police?” She sat up, swinging her legs out of bed. Behind her, Peter shifted, concerned.

  “No, no. I just… I just need to talk to someone. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’m scared. Look, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called.”

  “Where are you?” said E
lspeth.

  “I’m at home now. I’ll be all right.” She didn’t sound convinced.

  “Stay where you are. I’m coming over.”

  “No, really, it’s okay.”

  “It doesn’t sound okay. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  “All right. Thanks, Ellie. I’m sorry.”

  The line went dead.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said, turning to Peter.

  “Then I’m coming with you.” He pushed back the covers, starting to get out of bed.

  “No. Whatever it is, she needs to talk about it. She told me as much earlier, and I put her off, telling her we could talk in the morning. If I turn up with you in tow, she’ll think I’ve brought the police.”

  “I can’t let you go over there alone at two in the morning!” he said.

  “It’s fine, Peter. I know what I’m doing.” She tugged on her skirt and pulled her blouse over her head. “I’ll call you. I promise.”

  “I don’t like this, Ellie,” he said, although it was clear he knew that he’d already lost the argument before it had started.

  “If she’s in trouble, I can’t leave her,” said Elspeth. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Go back to sleep.”

  “As if that’s likely,” he said, as she ran out the door.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Hallowdene was silent.

  No one walked its ancient streets. Even the cats that usually prowled the rooftops and verges had sensed the disturbed atmosphere and slunk away to seek comfort in their owners’ homes. It seemed to Elspeth as if she had somehow entered an eerie, otherworldly reflection of the place she had come to know during the last few days; as if this was an empty place, devoid of all life. There wasn’t a single light on in any of the windows, and she had the bizarre notion that the entire village was drawing its breath in anticipation.

  She turned the Mini onto the main street, past Richmond’s and down the incline towards Daisy’s cottage. Overhead, streamers had been hung from the lamp-posts in preparation for tomorrow’s festivities – the fayre was still going ahead, as far as she knew – and they fluttered nonchalantly in the breeze. They seemed out of place here, now – colourful and celebratory, jarring against the silent stillness that seemed to have settled over the village at this hour.