by Iona Whishaw
The ultimate irony was, of course, that the whole time the universe had been keeping secrets from him. He’d rushed back when the neighbour had called to say his house had been hit. Stunned, not by the destruction he’d expected to see—after all, it had killed his parents outright—but by the lack of damage that was evident. The bomb had hit the back of the house, right in the garden, and both his parents had been in the kitchen, where somehow they’d been killed by the blast. How? He’d stood dumbly trying to work out how they could have died, and his neighbour, old Miss Pritchett, stood by clucking softly. “They was such dears, your parents. Always a kind word. Your mum used to bring me jam whenever she made it. How she found things during the war, I don’t know, but she did. And they was so proud of you.” Here she reached over and took his hand and stroked it as if she were rubbing lotion into it. “They always was. Even that first day they brought you home. You were a tiny little mite; couldn’t have been more than six months. But she fed you up and soon you were a going concern. You made them very happy.”
It took a moment, but then he realized what she’d said. “They moved here when I was six months old? I always thought they’d lived here since they were married.”
“Yes, luvvy. They moved here when they were married. The house had been your gran’s and she left it him.”
“But then I came here when I was born, not six months old. No wonder I looked insubstantial. God, I’m going to have to arrange things. Miss Pritchett, thank you so much for letting me know. I’m glad you weren’t hurt. It must have been terrifying for you. I’ve got to get back to my work, so I’m going to close up the house; I still can’t get over there being a house at all.”
Miss Pritchett shook her head. “I’m all right, me. But . . .” she hesitated, and then seemed suddenly resolved. “You’ve had a shock. You’d better come in, and I’ll put the kettle on. The arranging can wait.” And that’s how he’d found out, sitting in his neighbour’s parlour, that his parents had indeed brought him home at six months because they couldn’t have children of their own, and they were ever so happy. They couldn’t, she told, him, have loved you more if you was their own.
Now there was Elizabeth Conally in Cornwall, all the way on the bloody end of the country. As he walked back to the empty house, the kitchen of which he’d begun to repair, somehow feeling he could not let down his parents, who’d done so much for him, who’d saved him from . . . here his imagination gave way. Being an orphan, he supposed. So much about this surprised him. He never had felt, as so many children apparently did, that he was a foundling, that he was so ill suited to his parents that he must have been adopted. He had felt completely theirs, completely a part of them, and in the early years when his dad’s parents were still alive, he was sure he could see himself in his granddad, a man who could do anything with his hands, though he’d been a writer who taught him to love history through the stories he told.
Miss Pritchett must be told that he would be going away. Perhaps that nephew of hers could come stay in the house while he was gone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
FINALLY ABLE TO BREAK THE bonds of fear, Lane moved. A surge of impatience and anger assailed her. Could she not have a night now without this? She could hear, she realized, a faint scraping noise somewhere above her and she wondered if this is what had wakened her. There was a kind of translucent, dark light from her open windows that sketched out the shapes in her room: her dressing table, the easy chair Kenny had given her, the bedroom door ajar into a much darker hall. She got out of bed and decided not to switch on her lamp because she’d never get to sleep afterward. She stepped into the hall to better hear the noise. It was definitely coming from the attic. Still feeling her way in the dark, she climbed the attic stairs and pushed open the door. The windows. She’d closed them, most assuredly, before her supper. But here they were, wide open, one of them rocking a little against the frame because of a light wind, causing the noises she’d heard. She really must get the latch fixed. She shivered. It was one thing to think of Old Lady Armstrong ghosting about opening windows in the middle of a sunny day, but at night, alone as she was, she felt a wave of apprehension that made her almost turn and go back down the stairs. But she couldn’t have that window scraping all night. It would drive her mad. Resolutely she went to the open windows on the west side of the room, nearest the stairs, and reached up to close them. Even at night, the view from the top of the house was expansive.
She gave up on the closing and leaned out to look across the dark horizon. It was a clear night and the stars gleamed in swirling multitudes. She could see layers of different shades of darkness: the slope of the lawn, the bank of trees at the end, the lake, somehow reflecting light from the faraway universe, and then layers of darker and darker mounds of the distant mountains disappearing to the rim of the sky. There was a kind of beautiful melancholy about the moment, as though the windows stood open, waiting for something that would never happen. She wondered if she could capture this feeling in words. She would try in the morning. No. If she was true to her commitment, she would try immediately when she was downstairs, where her notebook and fountain pen were at the ready. Light be damned. She could sleep when she was dead. She’d heard this often in the sleepless nights of wartime. It was no less true now.
The breeze lifted suddenly, making the window move, and Lane pulled her attention back to the problem at hand. She spoke out loud. “I wouldn’t mind getting some sleep, Lady Armstrong.”
She reached up to the latch and then felt the strongest urge to look back out the window. Her gaze went toward the almost blacked-out mass of trees that covered the border between her property and Harris’s. Her apprehension grew into fear. Night made the forest into an alien and hostile realm. She’d always been a little afraid of the dark. It was why she’d agreed to go into intelligence in the war, in a way: to stand up to the fear. She latched the window and went defiantly to the other side of the attic, where the windows looked out over the blue spruce at her front door, and the sparsely treed space between her house and her barn. Her gasp was involuntary and sounded too loud in the silence of the night. There it was again: a flash of light coming on and disappearing somewhere near the barn. She stood rigid, straining to see, wanting to open the window to lean out but fearing the noise. And as quickly as it had seemed to start, the blinking light stopped and there was only the night to look upon. That light had not been heading toward the road. It was on the other side of the barn, nearer the fence that closed off her small bit of pasture adjacent to Harris’s barbed-wire-enclosed land.
Lane sat in her darkened kitchen, now fully dressed, trying to think through what she ought to do. She had decided against turning on any lights in case whoever was out there was alerted to someone knowing they were there, so she had dressed in the dark and found her torch, which was standing upright on the table in the hall. She had an idea that it must be Harris. It was in the direction of his land that the light seemed to be going. But she shook her head, as if to get the nonsense out. What would he be doing, a bit lame and none too young, thrashing about in the bush at, was it nearly three in the morning? If it was he, it was really, none of her business. It was his land, and maybe he was having trouble with a mare foaling. On the other hand, it was highly unlikely a mare would be out in the underbrush. Perhaps he needed help? She supposed she could phone him but if he wasn’t in trouble, she would wake him and irritate him for nothing.
Not sure why in the end, Lane delivered herself into the frightening world of the nighttime forest, and picked her way up the path at the back of the barn and toward her field. She stood, undecided for a few moments, and then turned off her torch and let her eyes adjust again to the darkness. Before her was the fence between her land and Harris’s. She would have to climb over or through it, to get to the other side. The barbed wire was a singular deterrent. Pulling gently on the top strand, she tried to find a way to pull it enough to squeeze through without damaging herself on the barbs. It gave readily and
she could just see that the strand directly beneath it sagged downward, as if this had been used before as a crossing point. With care, she bent herself through the gap and swore softly when a barb caught the back of her shirt. Safely on the other side, she surveyed the darkness. Whoever it had been was neither visible nor audible now. She could just see the line of the top of the forest against the sky. If she could make her way through the nearly waist-high grass to the other side of the field, she should be able to look down the slope and see if she could catch any sign of the mystery torchlight. She moved as quickly as she could, hoping the swishing sound she was making in her progress could not be heard. Then she stopped. There was the sound: a stick cracking on the edge of the field before her. She realized that it must be very near the road. Muttering a silent “Damn!” she stood stock still, peering blindly at the wall of darkness. Even as she listened for another cracking twig, her heart pounding out an anxious rhythm, she caught a brief flare of light. She had a momentary flash of the war and Morse code transmissions. Another faint sound, as if someone was moving through the bushes in the distance. There! The burst of light again. She felt the breath catch in her throat. Was the person coming closer or going farther away? When the light reappeared, it seemed to have moved to the left and farther down. Definitely to the road, then. What on earth did she think she was going to do? If she tried to follow the person, it could well put her in danger and, she realized belatedly, mess up any tracks or evidence the person might be leaving.
She knew she was mad to be out here at all, and wanted nothing more than to scurry back across the field to her safe, if haunted, house, but now she had to investigate whatever it was that she thought she’d seen in the underbrush. No she didn’t! If it was Harris, however peculiar it was, it was his land and he had a right to smash about in his own underbrush. On the other hand, he’d been smashing around in her underbrush as well, she was sure of it. The light she’d seen from the attic was right near her barn.
She watched the velvety dark for any more signs of the mystery person’s receding light and strained to hear any further sound. The person could have continued away from her or turned back toward her, if he’d seen the light she was carrying, or he could be, like her, stopped in the dark, watching and listening for her next move.
The wait was becoming agony and her body felt like it was beginning to congeal into the position she was holding. Still, there was no sound or repetition of the light across the field. Blast, she thought, I can’t slink about here all night. She turned and walked back the way she’d come. She’d become used to the dark, and she could just make out the path she’d made for herself. When she got to her fence, she climbed back through it, this time without mishap, and for the first time wondered why there was no gate into this field near the barn. She would have to look into it. When she was safely over, she turned her torch back on to light her way back to the house. It was in the clearing around the barn that her foot hit something and she shone her torch down to see what it was. There, in the patch of light, was a man’s shoe.
Illogically she looked quickly around, as if in the pitch dark, she might see someone or something that had dropped it. Squatting down, she shone the light on the shoe. A light brown leather, the laces still done up. Well polished and slightly worn along the inside of the heel. It was tipped sideways. She could have done that, kicking it. She moved her torch around the perimeter of the shoe to see if there were signs of someone going by. Of course there must be and she was trampling all over them! Though she could not know for certain, she would bet this shoe had not been there before. It looked, well, recent. It wasn’t dirty, or looking as if it had been there for some time, enduring the weather that though dry, would still have delivered a nightly dew that might have shown on its otherwise shiny surface.
With some reluctance, she realized it would be more prudent to retreat and wait till morning to call the police out from Nelson. She was sorry about this sensible decision, because for a moment she felt something like the rush she used to feel in the field at night when she hadn’t known if she’d find the drop point, or who might find her. She made peace with herself by resolving to come out in the light of the early morning to see what she could see.
GNAWING HUNGER TOLD Darling it was nearly noon, but he was reluctant to give up yet on the survey report for King’s Cove he had open on his desk. It appeared to contain not so much nothing as nothing immediately comprehensible to him. He would have to get someone to interpret what it said. It was a faint lead, but he liked to get a sense of everything that might conceivably have any bearing on a case. He was somewhat relieved when a figure appeared at his door.
“Inspector. I think you’d better see this.” Darling rubbed his eyes; they tired more easily since he’d come back from his life as a bomber pilot. Charles, the lab man, was hovering with a look of contained excitement, holding a large photograph by its corner. It was still damp, and so must have been rushed untimely up from the lab for the inspector’s perusal.
“Go on, then.”
Charles placed the photograph triumphantly on Darling’s desk, the survey having been carefully put back into his in-tray. Darling turned his complete focus on what Charles had to offer. Initially, he was unrewarded. The photograph before him was of a piece of blurry, damp paper with various stains darkening its wrinkled surface.
“Yes?” said Darling.
“Look closely, sir.”
“I am looking closely, Charles. What do you think I’m doing?”
“Sorry, sir. Here.” With the back of a pencil, he began to trace the air over the photograph. “It was the piece of paper you found in the victim’s pocket, sir. We thought we wouldn’t get much, but the enlarged photograph does trace out a couple of partial words. Here, you can see what must be the end of a word, ane, and then after this bit of blurring, ins, and maybe a Where at the end.” By this time, Ames had wandered in, sensing excitement, and was watching Charles’ performance keenly, his hands in his pockets.
“What is the name of the girl up the lake?” Charles asked suddenly. “Winslow is the last name, but what was her first name?”
“Lane,” Darling said, leaning closely into the photograph again. “Could that be Lane Winslow?” he mused.
“It could, sir, now that you say it. There is only one smudge here in front of the first set of letters. In fact, now that I see it, I can’t see how it would allow for another interpretation.”
DARLING AND AMES were at the counter of the café on Baker Street that had such excellent ham and cheese sandwiches, and coffee that still tasted good after the swill of the wartime rations in Europe.
Though he felt a small pang, Darling could not keep a note of I-told-you-so out of his voice. “So, it turns out Mr. Tweed Jacket arrived here with her name on a piece of paper and got himself killed. What do you say to that, defender of the too-lovely-to-kill-anyone?”
Ames was gloomy—though, being young, not too gloomy to make inroads on his ham sandwich, and so he spoke with his mouth full. “Yeah. Well. It’s still circumstantial, though, isn’t it? We don’t have any proof that she killed him and while we are on the subject, all that dragging and stuffing of the body into the creek would require more than the usual ladylike amount of strength. She’s not that big, if you’ll recall.”
Darling, who recalled this very well, sighed. Not too big and yet, pleasantly, not fragile either. “Well, it’s the only lead we’ve got, and they’re definitely connected, and we definitely still don’t have the shoes and no id for the victim, which it now appears she might be able to help us with after all. And now there’s a reason to worry that if she is involved after all, she could be cleaning up the site, which I fear we need to retrace, so we might finish our lunch and have another drive up the lake, eh?”
They had only just got back into the station when a flustered desk sergeant called out, “Ah, Inspector Darling, sir. I took a call very much earlier this morning, sir, and misplaced the slip. A Miss Winslow would be gra
teful if you could return her call at your earliest convenience.”
Darling looked at Ames with raised brows. “Well, speak of the devil, eh? What time did the call come in, Phillips?”
“I’m sorry sir, right when we opened up at eight-thirty.”
“Hell,” said Darling. “What’s that, Ames?”
“I was saying, sir, I still cannot bring myself to think she is. The devil, I mean,” mused Ames.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DARLING AND AMES WERE STANDING in the kitchen of Lane’s house, Ames poised to take minutes in his notebook. Lane wished she could get them all to sit down.
“Miss Winslow, just out of curiosity, why were you up at three in the morning in the first place?”
Lane hesitated. She was somewhat used to delivering every relevant piece of information to a commanding officer, and Darling felt like a commanding officer, but she thought she could hardly share her little fantasy that Lady Armstrong went about opening windows in a disembodied state. “I have a window in the attic with a broken latch. I went upstairs when the wind made the window scrape against the sill. It woke me.”