by Iona Whishaw
HE HAD IMAGINED a small, thick-walled, whitewashed cottage, able to withstand the sea winds, but the house he found at the end of a little-used drive on the other side of the town was two storeys and made of brick. There was a matted garden at the front and a pre-war Austin that looked as though it was slumped against a small outbuilding. He stood on the stone doorstep and took a deep breath. When he raised his hand to knock, the door swung open before he made contact.
“I’ve watched you all the way from the village. What do you want, then?” said a woman who could have been any age from seventy to ninety. Her head of white hair seemed to be in permanent surprise, lifted outward by an invisible wind, and her eyes were the watery grey of the sea. She wore baggy trousers and an aged man’s cardigan over her thin frame.
“I’m . . . my name is Jack Franks.” How could he explain? He stood like a drifter on her doorstep, damp from the mist and the walk, with a small suitcase. He wouldn’t blame her if she slammed the door. An elderly lady was unlikely to let a stranger in the door if she lived alone.
“Are you now? Well you’d better come in, Jack Franks. Sit by the stove, have some tea. Nothing but toast I’m afraid, but it will do until supper.”
THUS FRANKS FOUND himself in a spare, tidy, rather dowdy kitchen, warming his stocking feet against her ancient Aga, holding a thick mug of tea with a splash of brandy. Rosemary Trevelyan had evinced no surprise at seeing him; indeed, she had about her an air of having expected him, and being surprised to see him arriving so late.
Rosemary had settled him into a room in the house on the second storey and now they sat in the kitchen in front of the stove, which gave off a soft, deep heat. She had put a stew of chicken into the oven and given them each a good shot of brandy. Franks felt as if he could sink into this stranger’s chair and stay forever, protected from whatever the outside world could do to hurt him. Rosemary Trevelyan began to unfurl his own, unknown life before him.
“For starters, your father is my nephew.”
“Is? Is he still alive?” Franks had assumed, he realized, that if his mother was dead, his father was either unknown, or dead as well. He was surprised to discover that this woman was on his father’s side.
“Yes. He is a stupid man, or was. I assume he still is. You, my dear boy, were not his first mistake. What were your parents like?” She asked this in a kindly manner. “I would love to think that you had been happy. I met your adoptive mother, you know, at the agency. She seemed very happy, even though you were already six months old. We found, you know, when your actual mother died, that we couldn’t really manage. I hope you can forgive this. We were not used to children. It would have been, perhaps, not a warm existence for you.”
Franks looked into his glass and tried to think of what to say. He could not even identify what he was feeling. A deep well of sadness at the loss of his parents, his real parents as he saw it, who brought him up, was all he could immediately discern. He tried to feel something else.
“My parents were, well, my parents in every way. They were kind and devoted. I believed I was like my grandfather, I played with my cousins on holidays. I have trouble imagining any different family. I suppose I should thank you, really. I did have a very happy childhood, and they sacrificed a great deal to make sure I got a good education. No education can prepare one for this.” He fell silent and looked searchingly at this woman who had engineered a life he had believed was absolutely real. “Do you have a picture of her?” he finally asked.
“No. She was only with us a short time, poor love. She arrived when she was seven months gone, and of course died when you were born. She did not seem a happy woman, but of course she was in a strange country, among strangers. He sent her to us because she had no place else to go. Apparently she could not go home to her own people.”
“Her own people? But where was she from?”
“Did I not say? She came from Canada. Your father has been out there for years, long before the Great War. To be honest, we didn’t know much about her. She didn’t say much to us. We think the reason she came out is that she was married to a bloke who was at the front and she couldn’t be there with someone else’s baby when he got back.”
That night Franks lay in the narrow bed on the second floor of Rosemary Trevelyan’s house. His great-aunt’s house. He had left the curtains open so that he could see outside, but the darkness both inside and outside was complete. Gusts of wind made the windows rattle softly. He tried to imagine his mother, young and dying, with him in her arms for a first and last time, or his father who had sent her away, all the way to this house from Canada. In that moment he and she seemed like one person to him: strangers in a faraway land, lying in the dark, in this room, alone, alone. He knew he would go to Canada, and he knew he would find his father, but it provided no comfort. He drifted to sleep with his heart aching.
DAVE ALTERNATELY LOVED the sudden silence when Angela and the boys had tumbled off to go to the beach and feared it. As a city boy he had never known silence. It had at first been terrifying, especially at night, along with the utter darkness on moonless nights. He had wondered, when he first got here, if it had been worth it at all. He’d been surprised how enjoyable it was to build the additions to the house and he’d been thrilled to install his piano, after its arduous train journey from Brooklyn, into the large, light-filled place he’d made for it in the living room. Composing again returned his equilibrium, and the job at the high school teaching music, even with the drive back and forth to Nelson every day, was better than he’d expected. The life and noise of a high school seemed to redress the silence of living in the country.
Angela had taken the boys to give him time alone. He was in the middle of a piece for a film, one of his American contracts. He’d told her to just head straight down to the lake and he’d pick up the mail. A walk would do him good before he really settled down. Eleanor had been cheerful, as always, and looked with mild curiosity at the American stamp on the letter she handed him. Curiosity was not what he felt when he saw the writing.
With an increasing feeling of dread, he took the flowers she offered him and trudged back up the hill to the cabin. Now, the flowers languished on the kitchen sink, un-vased, and Dave sat on the piano bench, the single page of the letter he’d received still clutched in his fist. He found himself again turning over in his mind how hard it was to really lose yourself in this world. First a dead body; now this. He might as well be in Brooklyn, he thought bitterly. In his mind King’s Cove, so far away, and in another country, had once seemed the safest place on earth. He wished now he’d told Angela the whole truth. She was so plucky and willing to accept whatever life he’d ordained for her. She hadn’t even minded the loneliness. The boys, the return of her childhood love of gardens, had made her happier than she had expected to be. Now, she couldn’t imagine another life. He couldn’t destroy that with his troubles. He threw the balled-up letter in the wastebasket and brought his hands down on the keyboard in a great, crashing minor chord, and wondered what on earth he would do. Of course. The police here would have been thorough. Could he keep it from Angela? This Darling person must know the importance of this. He would have to go in to town, he supposed, to talk with him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
NIGHT HAD CREPT UP ON Lane where she was sitting on the veranda, nursing a scotch. Her father had finished every evening off grimly alone, in the sitting room with a scotch. She looked at the sky, a growing mantle of velvety darkness with stars beginning their appearance. For once, the heat of the day carried over into the evening, so that instead of the dewy cool that usually sent her inside for a sweater, the night seemed dry and warm still. She sighed. Now, it seemed to her, she was much like her disagreeable father, alone with her thoughts and a glass of scotch. Perhaps mulling over the same concerns; he was, after all, a spy. Now she was as well, in a way that had never really sunk in until today. A spy because she could not escape it as she had hoped to. There was no “normal life” for her to return to. She
was locked into this as surely as her father had been.
She thought about Angus. She had trusted him completely. But that day on the train, so long ago, had spelled the beginning of the end. She realized that though she told herself over and over that it was work, and that it was reasonable she might not know every facet of her lover’s life, there had been growing distrust. She was shaken to realize that she had been deceived, not by Angus, but by herself. What she had thought of as her infallible ability to know whom to trust, who was “one of us.” And then he had died and she had ached at his loss, forgotten her misgivings about him, and turned away any notion of love again.
She knew he was dead but now she was forced to think again about what she had been to him; if he had had a whole other life she knew nothing of. She shivered at her own lack of consequence in his life. She felt, here in the dark, the full loss of innocence she had endured; the loss of love, and now, more clearly than ever, the loss of her innocent ability to trust. Well, she had mourned him once. She wasn’t going to do it again. What should be the next step in tackling her own situation?
It was a good thing she’d not told Darling more. She wasn’t ready in her mind, she realized now. What would she have told him? What could she? What had she sworn to, really, when she’d left the service after the war? Not to talk about her war work, this she understood, but not to say she’d ever been in the service? Under the circumstances, suddenly suspected of a murder, at least this one piece of information might protect her. She got up and stretched. She was glad now to have had the opportunity to think it through. She must tell Darling something and she felt she could at least tell him this. It would have to do.
She woke from a deep sleep, with the vague sense that she had been someplace lovely and hadn’t wanted to leave. She widened her eyes in the dark trying to see if even grey dawn was coming through the window yet, but it was pitch black. There it was again. The blasted attic window! “Oh, God!” she groaned aloud. She didn’t bother turning on the lights, but felt her way up the stairs. The window stood open and had stopped making noise, as if now that she was here, its job was done. The night air came through like a refreshing drink of cool water, heavy with the smell of the forest just beyond her lawn.
Just as before, she felt no inclination to just shut the window and stagger downstairs to her bed. She leaned on the windowsill, looking out at the dim shape of the lake and the mountains beyond with the diamond mantle of stars above it. Without really knowing why she did it, she said quietly, “What is it? Why have you brought me here?” Last time, she had seen the flashlight making its way through the underbrush. She gazed across the darkened landscape before her, but all was quiet and dark.
“Well, if you’re going to be like that, I’m leaving the thing open. It’s a lovely night anyway,” she finally muttered crossly, and she went back to bed.
She woke the next morning to the sun pouring through the sheer curtains on her bedroom window. She had been in a deep sleep, and she turned slowly to look at the clock. 8:25. That was very late for her. It had been light since before five and she often woke with the sun. In the kitchen, she stretched luxuriously and revelled in the smell of the coffee percolating on the stove. Was there anything lovelier than the simplicity of this moment? The smell of coffee and the clean, clear morning of an as yet unmarked day. In her pyjamas—she had always worn men’s pyjamas—with a mug of coffee in hand, she started toward her usual chair on the porch where she could sit and watch the lake, and then changed her mind. She should go to the other side of the house, wander past the pond under the weeping willow, and around the quiet and unused outbuilding toward a small, upper field, which once had been home to horses, if the old salt lick was any indication.
AS ALWAYS, THE whispery silence of the forests and trees around King’s Cove gave a sense of deep, still quiet that she loved. No cars, no people talking, even in the distance. She was aware that some people would go mad in this quiet, this lack of diversion and society, but she loved it. She imagined that it must have been like this to live on a distant estate in England in the eighteenth century, before cars and radios, with a manageably small number of completely predictable human contacts. She walked up to the top of her grassy drive and leaned on the fence that ran parallel to it, enclosing the now-unused field. The sounds of nature loomed large. The buzzing of insects, the robins who still had something to say after the early morning sing that usually went on at first light. There were some fifteen trees of, she had been told, Red Delicious along one side of the field, which was now grown high with grass with no animals to crop it. She would have to pick and box the apples, though she had already been told by Harris that if she didn’t spray them, they would be in no shape to sell. She had been dissuaded in this by seeing him at the post office in coveralls covered in an acrid yellow dust after one of his sessions in his orchards. She had been told by Kenny that this was DDT, which Harris considered a miracle substance that killed insects and worms that could cut your crop profits in half. She wondered then if everything she bought had been sprayed with some noxious substance like this? Anything smelling that vile could not be good for anybody. She had decided then to go one season without and see how she did. In any case, she had her own money; she would not need to live off the sale of her apples. She’d sell what she could and spend the profit on typewriter ribbons.
Her coffee finished, she sighed contentedly, turned back down the drive, and then stopped. Suddenly unsure, she looked first at the gate. It was closed and the chain was over the post, as she always left it. She looked down and realized what had nudged her unconscious; the grass was flattened, as if a car had driven over it. Had the police driven their car this far in on their last visit? She frowned. The last car had been her own, a day and a half ago, when she’d gone into town to look at the body. There had been a heavy rain since then. The ground in front of the barn doors looked different. It crossed her mind that it had been somehow deliberately arranged to look undisturbed. She had a momentary memory of a book she’d read as a child about Indians in the New World. There was an illustration, she remembered, of a warrior covering his tracks by walking backward, sweeping the ground with an evergreen branch. It was nonsense. Why on earth should anyone want to be covering tracks in her yard, miles from anywhere? Yes, well, why would anyone come here to die with her name in his pocket?
Something inside her chest constricted. She used to get this in the war. That heightened sense of alertness and a kind of fear. She could make no sense of what she was seeing. She’d not heard a car come in the night and now, looking down toward the house, she could see nothing amiss. But she could not shake the feeling that someone had been here. It was like the shoe all over again. That hadn’t been there the day they had found the body but someone had put it, or dropped it, there the night she’d madly gone out to see about the flashlight in the dark. Someone was trying to throw suspicion on her. She glanced at the barn doors, but the padlock still hung on them, undisturbed. Feeling suddenly absurdly vulnerable in her pyjamas, she made her way back to the house to change. When she got to the door she turned and looked back up the drive and across the evergreen-strewn part of her yard to the barn. Nothing seemed amiss. She turned back in, saying to herself, “See? Nothing wrong. Pull up your socks!” But the problem was, she knew that something was very wrong.
Lane reached her door by the blue spruce and felt the relief of the relative safety of the house. And anger. Anger that her haven, this little bit of heaven, now felt unsafe. She turned the brass knob on her door and walked inside. She had never locked her doors since she’d been here. Now she felt she had to. It was nearly ten, and the morning was now hanging still and heavy. She propped the door open with the rock she kept for the purpose, and then paused, looking up her drive toward the barn. How beautiful it all was in the still sun. Not a single leaf on the weeping willow moved and the warm greens and yellows of the sun and shade patterns thrown by the trees across the driveway and the grassy verge would, if she were
not so shaken, have made her heart soar. It was like being inside the most perfect painting, held forever at this moment. She angrily pushed the rock against the door again. She would not close it. She would not be afraid in her own house.
She walked through to the kitchen and poured a glass of water, reminding herself logically that the body was long gone, and then pushed open the French doors to let whatever air there was move through the house. Well, there was something. She had been leaving the French doors wide open unless it was raining, but she had shut them on the way out the door for her walk. She must unconsciously already have been nervous. She had learned to trust this feeling completely. Any idea or thought that came into her brain had been treated with equal respect. She felt they were messages from her unconscious. The new work in psychology had fascinated her, in spite of her prejudice against newfangled “therapy,” and given her a theory on which to hang her practice.
Well, every little piece of a puzzle mattered, however bizarre, and unless this case was solved, she would never feel safe here again. She would have to give Darling every piece of potentially relevant information. Finishing her water with a gulp, she stood up, resolved. She picked up the receiver and spoke into the horn when the operator came on. “Nelson police station, please.” She turned and leaned against the wall while she waited, listening to the mysterious faint clicks and fuzz on the line as the call was put through. It was part of the charm, this old-fashioned phone system, and in truth, in spite of the old instrument, which required her to stand and sometimes shout into the horn, it sometimes took this long to put a call through in London. The sound of picking up. “Nelson police station.”
“Oh, hello. Can I speak to Inspector Darling, please?”
“One moment, I will put you through to his office.”
It was Ames who picked up the phone. She surmised that Darling would probably not answer his own line. “Constable Ames here.”