Sarah Hurst.
Frank’s second wife. Her name stood out clearly in gold leaf. Still, even after all these years, her gravestone looked almost new. There were some withered flowers half buried in the snow on top of her grave; I looked around and, seeing no one about, very gently picked them up. Six roses. They were dry and brittle, but they looked as if they had been put there quite recently. I replaced them neatly on top of the disturbed snow.
I walked towards the church. At the side of the building Hurst’s old foreman on the farm, Sam Griffin, and his wife were talking to Frank’s old housekeeper, Nancy Williams. Williams lifted her hand, nodded and moved off. I followed and caught up with her near the church gate.
Nancy looked up at me with the same shrewd expression that she’d had the first time we met. She’d aged over the past five years of course: her chin and neck were fleshier; her eyes were more watchful. Heavy gold rings dug into her fingers. She was wearing a simple black skirt, a white blouse, a heavy fawn coat and a lot of make-up; her high-heeled shoes looked unsuitable for the weather. There was a dry sweetish smell of perfume. Gardenias.
‘Hello, Nancy. You remember me, don’t you?’ I said. But I found that my voice came out in a harsh, inaudible whisper. I swallowed and tried again.
She seemed to hesitate a moment and then nodded. ‘Mrs Hurst’s accident,’ she said. ‘The swimming pool. Yes, I remember.’
‘I hear you’re living over in Brighton nowadays,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Nancy said. ‘I run a guest house there.’
‘Sounds all right. So you thought you’d come and pay your respects, did you?’
Nancy shrugged. ‘Thought I’d come and see my sister as well. While I’m at it.’
‘You’re staying with her?’
‘Yes, over in Lower Slaughter.’
‘Quite a long way to come for an ex-boss,’ I said. ‘I heard you weren’t all that upset about it when you found out.’
Nancy shrugged. ‘He were always all right to me. I’ve had a lot worse.’
‘He had to let you go in the end, though, didn’t he?’
‘Well,’ Nancy said reasonably, ‘there wasn’t much point me hanging round. It was just him alone in that house after Rebecca took off. Said he didn’t really need me any more. He were pretty nice about it, though. Made sure I had time to get another job lined up before I left.’
A deep silence had fallen in the graveyard. There was a sharp, clear smell of moss-spattered stone. Nancy tightened her coat around her shoulders. Her eyes turned up towards me. I reached for the bottle of pills in my pocket and unscrewed the top. Nancy watched me.
‘I suppose you know by now that we’re doing some digging down there?’ I said, tipping a pill into the palm of my hand.
‘Yes, I heard.’ She seemed curiously detached.
‘Do you know what was down there, under the house?’ I asked. ‘There seemed to be some kind of space beneath those big old French windows at the back, underneath the steps.’
‘So that’s where you found the little girl?’ Nancy said quietly.
‘Yes.’
Nancy shivered. ‘We used it to dump stuff sometimes.’ She grimaced at the expression. ‘Or put things we thought might come in handy later. Crates and such like. You could get under there round the side of the house.’
‘And you never noticed anything?’ I said. ‘Nothing was moved or seemed out of place?’
Nancy shook her head. ‘I hardly ever went down there.’
‘And who else knew about the space under the house, apart from you and Frank?’
‘Quite a lot of people, I expect. It weren’t all that difficult to miss. The gardeners, when they came, they used it as a kind of extra shed when they needed to do any work near the house, and Mr Hurst used it to dump old things he didn’t want any more. Bottles. Bits and pieces.’
I waited. Then, making up my mind, I said quietly, ‘But you know that there might be another girl down there, Nancy. Under Frank’s house.’
She became very still. Her heels dug deep into the gravel beneath the snow. She didn’t say anything.
I decided to change tack. ‘I was hoping that maybe Rebecca might have shown up,’ I said, looking around. ‘Have you heard from her since all this started? She ran off, didn’t she?’
‘They kicked her out of boarding school,’ Nancy said. ‘She was too much for ’em to handle. Thought they might knock some sense into her and do her some good. But it was no use. She walked all over him and he let her.’
‘But where is she? All we know is that she might be in London somewhere. Used to send him letters every now and again. That’s what we’re hearing.’ I motioned towards the car park. ‘That’s what his brother told me anyway.’
‘No, not letters. Rebecca never’d take the time to write him a letter. Too selfish. Just postcards.’
‘Postcards. And they ever have an address?’
Nancy shrugged.
‘And how often did she send them?’
‘Not often,’ Nancy said crisply, and plucked at the collar of her blouse. ‘Mr Hurst spoilt that girl rotten. But that’s how she paid him back. She walked out on him without any kind of warning. No apology. Nothing.’
Behind us the bells from the clock on the church tolled out into the cold morning air. As the last echoes of the bells rang out, I said, ‘You know he locked himself in. Barred all the windows.’
Nancy nodded. ‘I heard. But it was after I’d gone. He wasn’t always like that. He never used to be afraid of anyone. It was only later, after she left, that he really started to change. He kind of…’ Nancy paused. ‘Well, he kind of lost it. When Rebecca left he kind of … he took it pretty hard. Kind of gave up. He couldn’t understand it. Blamed himself, I guess.’
‘But why did she leave, Nancy? Was there a fella, maybe, who she might have run off with? A friend from the village? Someone who left around the same time that she did?’
‘She didn’t have any friends,’ Nancy said. ‘Not in the village, and she stayed at home most of the time. Of course, her dad didn’t like her coming out here to the village.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because of what happened down there of course.’ Nancy gestured impatiently down the hill, towards the green. ‘He didn’t want her thinking about it. He wanted her to forget it.’
‘Forget what?’
‘Her accident,’ Nancy said, and sighed loudly. ‘Out on the pond.’
‘What accident?’
‘Some policeman you are. He nearly lost her.’
‘Lost her?’
‘When she were little. She and her mates were playing silly buggers. Out on the ice. She went in and nearly drowned. The other two weren’t so lucky. They all went to the same school.’
‘Ned and Owen Taylor,’ I said quickly, remembering the picture in Hurst’s house.
‘That’s right. Brothers. She managed to pull herself out. But they couldn’t. Drowned. Both of ’em.’
I took a step back and involuntarily looked at the graves, wondering if the two boys were buried here as well. Nancy was looking across the wall and towards the pond. From up here you got a clear view of it: it was surrounded by an ugly chainlink fence. At its far end, amongst huge clumps of dogwood, was a crumbling wall.
‘And you were there? The day she left?’ I said finally.
‘No. I came back the next morning and Mr Hurst told me she’d gone. She’d taken all her stuff. No note. Nothing like that.’
‘But she sent him these postcards. I guess that was to put his mind at rest, I suppose. Can you remember what they said? The postcards. Where they were from?’
‘They were from London, like you said. Can’t remember much about them. He went to see her there once, though. She arranged to see him. Got his hopes up like that and then never even bothered showing up.’
‘But what happened?’ I said.
‘All I know is that he took the train up there,’ Nancy said impatiently. ‘That’s what he t
old me. He arrived early because he didn’t want to miss her. They were going to meet at a café. Somewhere public, in case he made a big fuss. But she stood him up. He waited there all day long. That was just like her, you know. Bloody selfish. When she didn’t make an appearance he got the last train home. He was hoping that maybe she’d phoned and left a message.’ Nancy paused and took a half-step backwards. ‘And that’s when he saw someone had broken into his house,’ she said. ‘They’d broken through one of the windows at the back. But nothing had been taken or even touched. Or that’s what he thought to begin with. But then he thought that maybe she’d got him to go to London, so she could sneak back in and get some of her old things. Or perhaps she was after some of his money. But there was no money missing.’
‘So he checked her room?’
‘Yes, someone had been in there. He thought it was Rebecca – that she’d come back.’
‘And had anything been taken? Taken from her room, I mean?’
‘No, not as far as he could tell. But it had been turned inside out. The whole thing was a mess. I should know because I had to spend the following week clearing it up, didn’t I? The bedding and her clothes were all over the floor. Drawers turned out. Even the mattress had been torn open.’
‘And did he report it to the police?’
‘He didn’t think much of the police,’ Nancy said pointedly.
‘And did he ever hear from her again?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘And you never heard from her. You never saw her again?’
‘No. Never.’
16
I got back in my car, and, although there wasn’t much light left, I drove straight to what remained of Hurst’s house. The air still stank of burnt wood and acrid plastic and burnt foam. The immensity of the blaze hit me and not for the first time. Where there had been something, there was nothing now.
The constables whom Graves had commandeered for the huge task of removing the debris from the back of the house were all gone. The rubble they had been able to move stood piled in stacks in the centre of the lawn. Ten new-looking wheelbarrows and a neat line of equally new-looking spades stood propped against the wall. Graves had done a pretty good job. It couldn’t have been easy telling all those police constables what to do. They wouldn’t have liked taking orders from him, but it looked as if he had whipped them into shape, and quickly too.
The whole back section of the house had been removed, so that where the raised platform had once stood there was now the semblance of order. Indeed, the chaos of the ruin stopped abruptly exactly where Graves had ordered the removal to begin. A cleared, oblong black space, around twice as long and twice as wide as the central strip of a cricket field, lay behind the charred ruin of the house, with two telescopic lights shining down directly on to it. The lamps were powered by two generators, which filled the air with a repetitive fairground hum.
Graves cut a forlorn figure as he picked his way along the edge of the cleared space, making demarcation lines with police tape. His shoulders were stooped as he stared into the blackened ground before him, like an old farmer working in a field. The only other person there was a police constable called Drayton, who was busy arranging something inside the white tent that had been erected at the side of the garden. He was getting on a bit, but could still be useful when he had a mind to be.
Long tracks of hard, overturned mud stretched across the lawn, marking the path taken by the two work crews with their wheelbarrows full of shattered pieces of tile, masonry and glass. The rest of the house rose behind, black and filthy-looking in the winter sunlight.
I waved to Graves to let him know I was here and then walked towards the house. All around us the blackness of the evening gathered, and the wind began to rise. I stared in awe at the jagged wreckage juddering in the cold wind, its rippling shadows cast upon the flowerbeds and the lawn. I started thinking about the girl I had dragged out just inches from where I now stood. Only a few days ago I had seen her in the morgue beneath Cheltenham General Hospital, with Brewin standing in stony silence beside me. It hadn’t been just the sudden bright horror of her. That she had been buried down here like an animal was what somehow made it worse than anything else. Even worse than the terrible way in which she may have died.
For a moment longer I stood there, remembering. Brewin had admitted straightaway that it could take weeks, even months, before they would be able to determine age and even gender for sure. He was already arranging the transfer of the remains to the forensic anthropology lab in Oxford. He had also collected DNA samples from the body, which he would compare to those of both sets of parents. When the girls had disappeared, DNA for forensic profiling had been in its infancy. But two years ago Brewin wisely, and with my approval, had collected DNA from the girls’ parents, so that we would be able to make comparisons should the need arise.
Brewin had placed the groundsheet on the side of the room on a stretcher. It had been laid flat, but the corners draped over the edges. It was burnt and torn in places, and the tin eyelets in the corners were bent or broken. At first, I hadn’t been able to make out what it was. In fact, none of it had seemed to make any sense to begin with. Then, ever so slowly, she had begun to take form.
A mass of crumpled and charred bones. Some fragments of clothing but not many. Jeans? A dress? A school uniform? I couldn’t be sure. Tarry-looking flesh clung to the bones here and there. Repulsively withered and hardened. A strand of hair. Her face had been burnt away, and there were whole parts of her missing or, worse, torn in two. Bone poked through jagged pieces of wet material. A forearm stood alone, separated from the upper arm, so that you could see the shining polished metal of the trolley beneath it. A piece of backbone. The spine curved upwards towards the neck and then the skull. The upper jaw and mandible yawning wide open as if in laughter.
I stood before the house a while longer. Glad in a way that someone had felt fit to torch it. Ash poured black and thick from the ruins and swirled in the wind amongst the snow. Within seconds, the rising wind had blown pieces of feathery black grime out and across the fields towards Meon Hill. I thought of the girls again. Which one was still buried in the blackened ground? The images of both, here, in this place, would be stamped indelibly in my mind.
17
I got home just after dark. Although I wasn’t supposed to drink at all with the bright yellow pills, I made myself a drink anyway and then had a quick shower.
Hurst’s videotapes were still locked in my study, along with the three pale grey files from the detective agency, which I’d been meaning to call all day. So, after I got changed, I decided to start there.
I lugged my old video player out of storage and hooked it up to the portable television in the kitchen. Then I hauled the crate of tapes on to the table.
I reached in for a tape and slid it out of its box. The white label running along the front read: ‘1 May 2000’.
I ended up emptying the crate of tapes on to the thick carpet in front of the electric fire, then I arranged them in date order, starting with February 2000 and finishing with March 2001. Two tapes a month to start. Then once a month or so, and sometimes less frequently as time went on. Then once every two months. Then every now and again, until they petered out altogether.
They had all been labelled with the same elegant hand. I went back upstairs and fetched the three files from my study. There was no doubt about it. The handwritten notes at the back of the files matched the handwriting on the tapes.
I walked quickly downstairs, grabbed one of the tapes at random from the middle of the row, slotted it in and pressed ‘play’. To begin with nothing happened. There was just white static and a blank screen. I pressed ‘fast-forward’. Again, nothing happened. The tape was empty.
I reached for another tape and then another, starting on the left of the pile this time and moving slowly along the row. But they all seemed to be blank. I would have to go through them sooner or later, so I fast-forwarded through the tapes, be
ginning at the latest one first, as I prepared myself a huge steak. I flipped the meat and when I turned round I saw that something had come into focus on the screen. I turned down the heat on the pan. Then I reached for the remote, rewound the tape and pressed ‘play’.
I looked more closely at the television screen and saw the dim interior of a car. The footage had been taken by a camera that was propped up on the dashboard on the passenger side; concealing it was a blue coat or sweater that was getting in the way of the top of the picture. Outside the car window it was night. Yellow lights and cars lined both sides of a narrow, curving street. Sitting with its mouth open on the driver’s side of the dashboard was a half-empty packet of Benson & Hedges. After a few moments a podgy male hand reached for the gold packet and removed one. There was the sound of a window being wound down and then of a lighter being clicked open and then snapped shut. Grey smoke filled part of the screen.
Smoke, I now realized, was filling my own kitchen, so I moved quickly to retrieve my steak from the hob and open the kitchen windows. With the remote still in my hand, I again looked closely at the television. It looked as if the camera was pointing very purposefully to a house about three quarters of the way along the street. It was more run down than the other properties. There was a new-looking white van parked in the driveway.
I turned up the volume on the television. There was a rustling sound of someone shifting restlessly in their seat. Someone in the car sighed loudly. The car radio was on in the background. Pop music. But very faint. The camera stayed steady and focused on the house. A man’s voice started humming tunelessly along with the song.
I did not recognize the street. I wondered if it might be London. Maybe that detective fella – what was his name? – Bray had found Rebecca after all. Perhaps there had been other files in Hurst’s house that had gone up in smoke. But it didn’t look like London to me.
The Drowning Ground: A Novel Page 11