‘There’s something else, ent there?’
‘I don’t know if I ought to tell you,’ he said. His face was pink.
‘What?’ she said, sharply. ‘You got to tell me now.’
‘Well, I suppose you are family. It’s only, when the body of the American was found, an old man came to tell us he’d seen him the night of the flood. He’d seen the two of them together. The American and Arthur Silver. And not when Arthur said neither. Later. Past midnight. The Air Force want to talk to him, you know.’
‘What you going to do about it?’ she asked him.
‘Can’t really say,’ he said in his policeman’s voice. But then he added, ‘It might be nothing.’
She nodded, running her teeth across her bottom lip.
‘Best be off now,’ he said.
She turned to see if Arthur had gone but he was still standing next to his bike as if he’d been watching her the whole time she was talking to Rod. She waved. He raised his hand then finally got on his bike and rode away.
Muriel still didn’t go home. There was work to be done, her mother to check on. But there was also Arthur cycling off into the early dark, his bike light a tiny dot now. She wanted to warn him, to help him somehow, but she didn’t know how.
8.
By the time Arthur reached the driveway to the farm, light flakes were falling and the sky had darkened to a sickly yellow-grey. Already it was hard to see far ahead on the bike. He pedalled without thinking, stopping only when he came in sight of the farmhouse.
He didn’t really know why he was here. He had only felt the urgent need to get away from Blowers. He looked up at the house, which was half obscured by the snow falling, heavier now. It was soaking into the driveway but had started to settle on the ornamental trees. The house stared down at him. He had been happy here, but it felt like long ago now. The windows were blank. He wanted Verity to open the door, to tell him he was forgiven.
While he stood holding onto his bike, someone came crunching around the side of the house. Instinctively, Arthur shrank back against the trees. It was Peter, hunched against the cold, in his flat cap and tweeds. In his right hand, he was carrying a rifle. Arthur silently watched as Peter opened the door to the gun store, returned the rifle and shut it again. Arthur’s breath curled up and vanished into the freezing, whitening air. He could call out to his old friend, ask him for help. But in what words, he couldn’t think. And he imagined Peter’s and Verity’s faces when they found out the truth – the horror, the disgust, the revulsion. He wanted to cry, then, to know that this was no longer a place of safety for him. He felt a sense of vertigo – as if the earth had cracked open and he was teetering on the edge of a void. He swayed against his bike, his hands clenched white around the handlebars and his body tensed as if for a fight. Peter disappeared around the dark side of the house.
The car. He could take Mr Frost’s car: the old Jag in the garage. He could drive along the Holkham Road and see what was out there, what Jack had hidden.
In the house, lights flickered on in the upstairs rooms. Peter would be in there. If he found out what he’d done he would hate him. But at this moment, Peter was all he had. He leaned the bike against a tree and crossed the drive quickly to ring the bell.
*
Peter had left Verity in her room with a book and a tray of tea and bread and butter that Mrs Timms had brought up for her. His sister was deathly pale and distracted. There was definitely something wrong; she might be sick, but he had no idea what to do about it. He felt the pang of loss of their mother, who would have stroked her hand at the very least. Verity always protested that Mother had been distant but it wasn’t how he remembered her. To him, their mother had been a barrier between him and his father. He wished… but it was pointless wishing.
Downstairs, he was pouring himself a second large glass of whisky when the doorbell rang. Mrs Timms had gone home. She said the snow was coming and she’d better go now or she’d get stuck. He had a funny image of the shapeless, furry brown hat like a small dog that she wore in the winter, sticking out of a snowdrift. Father was out cold on the sofa next to the fire. They’d spent the day repairing fences and had found the carcass of a rabbit stuck in the wire. Peter couldn’t think who on earth would be calling at this time but he took his drink and cracked open the front door.
‘Peter.’ Arthur was shivering in the doorway, shifting from one foot to the other in his greatcoat.
‘Hello, old boy. What are you doing here? Come in and warm up with a drink!’
‘No, I – I can’t come in. Listen, I wondered if there was any chance I could borrow your car?’
Peter frowned, bewildered. This was such an unexpected question. Arthur was talking hurriedly, as if desperate to get the words out. ‘Got some tricky deliveries, awful weather, but I don’t want to let them down, you see. The old dears.’ He trailed off. He was lying, Peter knew it. He fixed his eyes on Arthur. The lie hurt, but it made him alert. Arthur had been acting strangely ever since the flood. Something must have happened between him and Jack that night.
‘Yes, I see, right. Thing is, Arty, there’s absolutely bugger all petrol. Just used it up getting supplies for what’s left of the cattle, you see. Awfully sorry.’ Peter’s conscience was hammering on his skull. There was the emergency petrol store. He could give it to Arthur.
Arthur nodded slowly and rubbed his hands in the cold. ‘Right,’ he said at last. A gust of icy wind blew a few flakes into the hall. ‘Yes, I understand. I better get back then, can’t keep them waiting.’
‘You sure you don’t want a nip of whisky or nice juicy port to keep you going?’
Peter waited as Arthur looked longingly towards Peter’s glass and the faint glow of warmth emanating from the drawing room. If Arthur came inside, he’d lend him the car, he’d say he made a mistake. But Arthur looked up behind Peter to the banisters and first floor landing, and frowned as if he’d seen something. ‘Love to. I really would. I can’t, though, Peter. Sorry.’ Immediately, he turned on his heel and disappeared into the dark of the drive.
Peter shut the door but didn’t move. He almost opened it back up and shouted to his friend to please come in for a drink, to force him. To say, Listen, old boy, I just remembered. There’s a secret stash of petrol. Take it! But the seconds ticked by and he was still at the door, listening. There was no sound. Arthur must have gone. As Peter’s shoulders relaxed, he thought he heard a noise outside. It was probably an animal searching for food. Again he heard the sound of something creaking. Gently, he turned the catch on the front door and inched it open. At first, he couldn’t see anything. Then he realised the door to the gun store was open. He was about to step out and shut it, when someone came out.
For a fraction of a second he thought it was a burglar. It was a figure in a greatcoat and he’d taken one of the shotguns and was now mounting a pushbike. But the way the figure moved was familiar and Peter knew it was Arthur before the man glanced back and his face was half lit by the light of the hall.
He opened his mouth. ‘Arthur?’ then, ‘Wait,’ a bit louder, but Arthur just seemed to shake his head. Then he rode off down the lane and disappeared into the darkness.
Peter stood still on the stone step with his drink in his hand in the yellow glow of the hallway as faint, wet snow fell around him. He was sick with indecision. Arthur was his old friend. But Peter had loved Jack, no matter what he had done. He suddenly remembered Skitmore telling him that Arthur’s gun had gone off on the partridge shoot last autumn and it had nearly got someone killed. He’d felt uneasy about it but it sounded too preposterous. But what if Arthur had wanted to scare Jack? Had hated him all this time? He’d taken a gun, he was acting distinctly rum. It was all coming together with a horrible inevitability. And if Arthur had really hurt Jack – it was unforgivable. He downed the whisky and breathed through his nose. Then he went back inside and picked up the telephone in the hallway and called the police station.
At the other end of the line,
it crackled. He had a nasty feeling the lines hadn’t been fixed since the flood but he was flustered because, of course, he knew they were. Finally, a man’s voice came through on the other end.
‘Can I speak to PC Blowers, please?’
‘Blowers, you say?’ said the voice on the other end and a guffaw. ‘Don’t see why not. Who’s speaking, can I ask?’
He told the man. Then he heard a muffled exchange. ‘Wants you,’ said the older man, evidently amused, and Peter remembered that Blowers was the junior man at the station. But he didn’t care. There was no one else he could tell.
‘Mr Frost, how can I help you, sir?’
Peter hesitated. Arthur was his oldest friend. ‘We – that is – I – thought you ought to know that a friend of ours – a close friend of mine actually – has been acting, uh – strangely. I’m terribly worried about him.’
The policeman would be sure to dismiss him outright, and rightly so, he thought. And that would be that. But Blowers just said, ‘In what way, sir? Would you mind telling me where you last saw the gentleman?’
When he put the receiver down Peter went upstairs. He needed to talk, to tell Verity, to be reassured somehow that he’d done the right thing. He had only said he was worried about Arthur. It was all he’d done, surely. He couldn’t bear it for anything bad to happen to Arthur. He leaned his head on Verity’s door before opening it. But she wasn’t in her room and although he called and looked all over the house, she was nowhere to be found. Outside, the snow was falling more thickly but through it he could have sworn that he heard the sound of a horse’s hooves.
*
Arthur breathed out, a ragged, shuddering breath. It had been a mistake to come here. They had a petrol stash, he knew it. Which meant Peter had lied to him. But at his back, in the town, was Muriel and her cousin, Blowers. That callow, lanky boy was on his tail, he knew it.
He could leave Wells. A clean break. He could go to London. But the train station was still closed after the flood, and how far could he get on his old pushbike? And in snow? Think. He could still find Jack and Verity’s hideout. But there was no way he could get out there on the bike now anyway. He had hardly any time. He imagined Blowers on the telephone to the base; the Air Force, the officer he’d seen Jack talking to a million years ago at the Midsummer dance coming for him. There would be lights tracking him, sirens…
He flung the bike down and set off across the marsh with the gun.
9.
Into the narrow beam of her torch, the snow fell in thick flakes into the darkness. Although Verity knew the route to the cabin as if it was imprinted on her hand, the night and the snow made it foreign and strange, and she was thankful she had remembered the torch. But beyond that, she wasn’t at all sure she knew what she was doing. She’d taken Gypsy and ridden the usual way along the Holkham Road, past the entrance to Harborough Hall and towards the little path that led to the cabin. She left the poor, cold horse at the same place she used to leave him, by the clump of deformed hawthorns. He had whinnied and stamped in agitation, and she patted his muzzle, telling him she’d be back soon.
The door was iced shut again but it wasn’t hard to prise it open. It was old and rotten with the damp from sea spray. It was no warmer inside the cabin than outside except there was some protection from the wind coming off the sea and a sudden quiet. Although it was tempting to light a candle or the little stove, she knew she could not. She switched off the torch and used her mittened hands to feel her way down the passage. She had heard Arthur talking to Peter. She would know Arthur’s voice anywhere and the very fact of his turning up unannounced on a snowy, winter night was odd. And then asking for the car – the Arthur she knew was too proud to do that. She’d watched from her bedroom window as he’d left on his bike, then, in increasing confusion, watched as he’d dumped the bike and set out on foot across the front fields towards the marsh. She remembered what he’d said about the key he had and she’d felt an urgent panic to get the briefcase, because wasn’t that what he was after? He hated Jack and wanted to destroy the memory of him. There was no point following him across the marsh. It was faster as the crow flies but she had Gyps.
Now in the cabin, she imagined Arthur here before her, but he had no idea where it was. There was no sound but the scurrying of mice. All of this was tumbling through her mind but hardly consciously as she fumbled through the dark passage to the bedroom. In the wardrobe, the black briefcase was where she had left it. She took off her mittens and her hands felt its smooth, cool leather as she pulled it down from the top shelf. It wasn’t heavy and she wondered if she’d got it wrong, that there was nothing in it after all. But why would anyone lock an empty briefcase?
She turned on the torch and the metal clasp shone up at her. Oh Jack, what were you doing? She laid the briefcase on the little table in the kitchen and scanned the room with her torch for something she could use to open it. Leather could be cut. There must be something. She got down on her knees and reached through the little curtain under the dirty old sink. There was nothing. In the kitchen drawer, old knives, but nothing sharp enough. Then she had an idea. She remembered that there’d been a cupboard with crabbing equipment, rusty traps and buckets. In one of the buckets was a small knife. It had probably been used for slitting open crabs. She ran her finger along the blade. Sharp enough. She hacked and hacked at the leather and at first it hardly made a mark. It was like slicing through tough, old skin. She tried not to think about how Jack had been sliced open. Soon, the briefcase had a deep, jagged line carved into it, below the lock. She pushed her hand down inside the slit she had made and felt shiny paper. Ripping the slashed leather further apart, she pulled out the handful of papers inside, spread them out on the table and shone the torch on them.
Photographs. A4 size, printed onto high-quality photographic paper, black and white and artistically arranged, as if they were paintings. Not Top Secret or Classified documents. All of women, lying or sitting, most of them on a bed, looking away from the camera. Half naked. Their white thighs, bare shoulders, exposed flesh shone out in the gloom of the cabin. Most of them she didn’t know. They were strangers. Prostitutes she guessed, with dark make-up around their eyes and dimpled skin, a breast lolling into an armpit. With a shock, she recognised one of the women, clothed this time, taken outside. With fumbling, urgent hands, she flicked through them and dropped them on the table. She was nauseated. He was a voyeur and a pervert. This wasn’t it. This couldn’t be it.
She reached in again and pulled out more sheaves of paper: landscape shots he had taken from this cabin across the marsh to the sea; pictures of unidentified, old English streets she didn’t know. Then in among the larger shots, one small snapshot of him in front of a plane, with the rest of the crew. Her hand shook. The plane was RAF, she thought: the target roundel was just visible. The men were lined up in front of the nose of the plane. On the nose someone had painted a huge, bloodshot eye, the veins like tentacles clearly visible across the cornea. Jack was at the end of the row, his shoulders slouched and slightly leaning to the side in a relaxed pose. It didn’t seem to make any sense that he would have flown with the RAF. At the bottom she saw Jack’s handwriting, curled and expressive, the words – Holkham, January 1952. January? He’d arrived in May, with the jet bombers. She thought back to when she’d met him, in the lower field. He had said he’d just arrived. But it wasn’t true.
This was the only shot that had anything to do with the military. The rest were innocuous: more landscapes, more streets. There was a self-portrait he must have taken with a timer, squinting into the sun, a white shirt open at the neck, tents behind him. She couldn’t look at it. Then one of a boy. A bright-haired boy in a polo shirt grinning at the camera on a lawn somewhere. Behind him a blurred figure, female. She brought the picture up close. The camera seemed to gaze at the boy lovingly, focusing on him rather than the woman behind, the light of the sun shining on him like a halo. She wondered who the boy was. But she couldn’t linger. It wasn’t w
hat she was looking for. Trance-like, trembling, she sifted through the rest of them, faster and faster under the torchlight until, finally, she came to what she had been dreading. Photographs of her.
*
Snow fell onto the sea and the ground and blew sideways into Arthur’s face. He imagined it melting into the damp marsh and the black sea. The snowclouds obscured the moon and there was no other light. He could barely breathe through the wet flurries and his chest was tight with panic. What if someone came after him? But no one knew where he was. He saw Peter’s boyish, worried face at the door. He might go out looking for him, he might find the bike, dumped on the lane, but it seemed unlikely. Peter would do nothing.
Arthur’s boots were filled with icy water and it reminded him of the night of the flood, but he had to block that out. He had to keep going. He had to find the place where Jack had hidden his secrets. Negatives, details of contacts – there had to be something. Ahead of him was a small ball of light, burning yellow-white against the pale flakes of snow. He tried to speed up but he stumbled into mud, silt and sand, tripping on tufts of grass. His boots were wet and his trouser cuffs soaked through. The light was still flickering. Perhaps he was imagining it. The closer he got to it the brighter it seemed to burn. Then to the left of the eerie light, another appeared, a tiny moving prick of fire. Unsure which to follow, he stopped and watched. The warm, flickering light hovered in the air. He thought it must be a will-o’-the-wisp, come to guide him and he must resist it. He moved towards the other light but as he did, it extinguished like a candle flame and he was suddenly disoriented, snow in his mouth and hair. He could not get lost out here. He waited. The light came on again. He hurried towards it, the bitter wind from the sea pushing him on. The tiny yellow dot was coming from a building of some sort, a rickety old barn or something. And though he couldn’t know it, he felt that the box he was looking for must be here. There was nowhere else. Someone had beaten him to it. But he still had the key. And the gun.
The Night of the Flood Page 25