‘It seems so. But, you know, she was killed fifty years ago. To have found out the truth now would have been remarkable.’
‘But then … how on earth did Clemmie’s doll get into the chimney here at the farm?’
‘I don’t know …’ Irene thought about it. ‘Somebody who was working here, perhaps … or I suppose anybody could have sneaked in.’ She thought of old Hilarius, and felt a thrill all along her spine. But she hunted around for positive things to say. ‘At least Donny’s home. Your parents must be so happy.’
‘They can hardly believe it. Dad, that is,’ said Pudding, blowing her nose again. ‘Mum carries on as if he never went anywhere. Dad has this look of … astonishment on his face. He keeps checking on Donny wherever he is, as though he might just vanish again.’
‘And they must all be so grateful to you,’ said Irene, smiling at her. ‘After all, if you hadn’t kept digging at it, the truth might very well have stayed hidden forever.’
‘I don’t know,’ Pudding demurred. ‘Perhaps Mr Tanner would have confessed anyway.’
‘I’m not so sure.’
‘Gosh, what a turn-up,’ said Nancy, when Irene told her the news. She wore a strange look, as she always did when discussing anything to do with her nephew’s death – tense, distant, almost as though waiting for something. Irene wondered if some part of her were waiting to hear that it was all a mistake and he hadn’t been killed at all. Nancy raised a hand to her lips for a moment then let it drop back into her lap, where her withered fingers grasped her other hand, claw-like.
‘So … we’ll have young Donny back at work, of course?’ said Irene.
‘What? Yes. Yes, of course,’ said Nancy.
‘Right. I’ll let Pudding know,’ said Irene. She thought about touching Nancy, since there was something abject in her posture, in the way she sat, so straight and hard that she looked as brittle as glass. But she still wasn’t sure enough of herself, or of Nancy.
‘Have we any idea why Tanner killed my boy?’ Nancy asked, in a small voice, as Irene turned to go. Irene paused.
‘He … it was revenge, it would seem. Served very cold. He’s convinced that … your brother, Alistair’s father, killed Sarah Matlock, who was his sweetheart. His betrothed, really, but it was all secret. They’d planned to wed, and she was carrying his child when she died.’
‘His child?’ said Nancy. She looked bewildered, her eyes searching for something in the corners of the room but not finding it. ‘No,’ she said, quietly.
‘I know. It couldn’t possibly have been him – you were all in New York, for the wedding,’ said Irene. Nancy blinked, and nodded. She opened her mouth but didn’t speak at first.
‘Foolish,’ she said, eventually.
‘Well,’ said Irene. ‘Shall I get you some tea, Nancy?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Nancy, her eyes still so veiled that Irene couldn’t tell if she was refusing the tea, or something else altogether.
She went into the kitchen to put the kettle on, more for something to do than out of any real desire for it. Something was still pestering the hindquarters of her brain, preventing her from feeling any satisfaction at all at the real killer being brought to light; at having got justice for her husband. It wasn’t done yet, she knew. There were missing pieces. She was staring out of the window at the sun-drenched fields of daisies and dandelions when she saw a familiar figure at the orchard gate – the same woman she’d seen several times before, dressed like a peasant, surrounded by a long mass of frizzy hair gone white with age. Irene took the kettle off the stove and went straight out to her, and they met in the shade of an apple tree older than both of them put together.
‘Hello, I’m Irene Hadleigh,’ she said. The old woman nodded.
‘I know that. I’m Rose Matlock,’ she said, in a voice as thin as winter sun.
‘Matlock?’ Irene lit upon the name. Rose nodded.
‘Clemmie’s ma.’
‘You’ve been trying to come and talk to me for a while, haven’t you? Did you know that … that Eli Tanner had killed my husband?’ she asked. Rose nodded. Through her hair, her scalp showed pinkly; as pink as the rims of her pouched eyes, and the gaps in her gums when she spoke.
‘I don’t blame Eli, mind, and I were willing to let it lie till they took that boy for it instead.’
‘You’d have let Eli Tanner get away with it?’ said Irene. Rose’s face hardened.
‘’Bout time my girl had some justice. An eye for an eye.’
‘But my husband didn’t kill her!’
‘Blood’s blood,’ said Rose, darkly.
‘His father didn’t, either. Mr Tanner got it wrong – Alistair senior was in America when it happened, getting married. All the Hadleighs were. He couldn’t have killed your daughter.’
‘We’ll see,’ said the old woman, and Irene wondered if her wits were quite intact. ‘What else was Eli supposed to do? Ever since you showed him that doll he’s set about falling apart all over again.’
‘It was her grave he was visiting when I saw him in the churchyard, wasn’t it? I saw him crying, and he’d taken flowers.’
‘He loved my Clem like breath, though I only found it out after she was killed.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Well, she couldn’t tell us – she might not’ve even if she could. Thought we’d never accept him, they did – especially Clemmie’s dad – what with him being a Tanner.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Maybe they was right about that, but if he’d only got around to wedding her, we’d have taken them in, and the baby, all three. William would have come around in the end. But there was other trouble with the Tanners that summer – a robbery at the mill, and the office boy bludgeoned near to death when he stumbled upon it. He lay in a stupor for weeks afterwards, and the police arrested some pedlar who happened to be passing. Had to let him go again, o’ course, since he weren’t to blame. Isaac had bought himself an alibi but folk knew who to blame – near as good as evading the law as they are at breaking it, that family. Old Isaac was the devil himself, and he’d just been laid off from the mill again. And I suspect he’d made Eli go along with him. Eli tried taking Clem off to Swindon to start over, but she had her roots in this land and came back without him.’ Rose fell silent for a moment. ‘People pointed their fingers at the Tanners for murdering her, but seventeen strappers saw Isaac sleeping it off in Obby Hancock’s hay barn at the time, and Eli was in Swindon. Not that he’d have harmed a hair on her head. We never did know who done it, till you found that doll Betsy gave her. She was never without it after she was back from Swindon. We guessed she’d had it with her when she died, but we never found it. Till now.’
Irene caught the old woman’s scent, hanging around her. Milk and cow manure, unwashed clothes and carbolic soap. Her hands, though gnarled, were spotlessly clean.
‘You live out on one of the farms, Nancy told me?’ she said. Rose nodded.
‘Weavern. My eldest, Mary, has it now, with her husband, Norman. My William’s long dead – a seizure took him not long after Clemmie went. Her death broke what was left of his heart after our little Walter. He was killed when Rag Mill’s boiler blew up,’ she said. ‘So many have gone on before me, but I weather on. Not many folks my age can still climb these hills, and I can still help with the milking,’ she said, with a touch of grim pride. ‘I’ve been on that farm since I was a girl of seventeen, and I’ll leave it in my coffin, whenever that day may come. They left it a sad place for me, though, my Walter, and my Clemmie, and Will.’
‘Why did you want to talk to me, then, if you weren’t going to give Tanner away?’ said Irene. Rose thought before she answered. The breeze fluttered her worn-out blouse against her ribs, and Irene saw how thin she was, how frail. ‘Would you like to come inside, and sit down?’ she said, but Rose shook her head at once.
‘I’ll not set foot in that house again,’ she said. ‘I mean no offence, I’m sure, ma’am. Thing was, folk used to say my Clemmie was touched. They thought sh
e was slow, because she was silent, and some folk treated her like she was worth less because of it. And she only half belonged to us, it’s true – half to us, half to the birds and bees. But she was right as rain, truly, just different to the rest – just like the doctor’s boy. They were quick enough to believe he’d done it, because he’s different to the rest of them. People can be as vicious as rats in a nest, eating their weakest.’ She shook her head. ‘My Clemmie would have burned with the injustice of it. I came up here because I wanted to say it weren’t him. But I couldn’t say who it weren’t without sayin’ who it were, see. So.’ She shrugged. ‘Eli came to see me when you found that doll. Told me what it meant, and what he would do. Since they took the doctor’s boy off, I’ve been working on his conscience to come clean.’
‘You … you knew Tanner planned to kill Alistair? And you told nobody?’ Irene went cold.
‘Ar. Tell that to the police and you’ll find my wits quite scattered by my very great age,’ said Rose, curtly. ‘Blood for blood. A lot of things got broken the day she died, Eli Tanner’s heart not the least of them. He’d waited long enough to make a body pay for that.’
‘But the wrong body. The wrong man. A good and blameless man!’ Irene cried. She found her eyes stinging with tears of outrage, and wiped them away with her fingers. ‘Why come now and tell me any of this? It changes nothing, after all,’ she said. Rose Matlock nodded slowly.
‘I wanted you to understand. I’m sorry for your loss. It’s all of it a pity, and a black stain on each of us. In some folk, grief is like a slow poison; I hope it won’t be so for you. But I wanted you to see, Eli had no choice. Somebody had to pay.’
‘Yes! But it ought to have been the right person.’ Irene was suddenly angry at the skin and bones woman in front of her, with her flawed logic and her defensive stare. Alistair’s death had been as entirely futile as Pudding had declared it, and the unfairness of that was staggering.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Rose said again, nodding as if Irene had agreed with everything she’d been told. ‘But the real crime happened before you were even born, ma’am. In time, you might come to see it.’
* * *
Ma Tanner sat in her carver chair and flexed her hands around the armrests. Her eyes were on the old man, asleep in his truckle bed against the far wall. Pudding sat awkwardly, her hands clasped around a cup of tea she was loath to drink. It smelled of mouldy hay, and the cup had a crust of grime around its rim.
‘Isaac Tanner, you’re the fount of so much grief,’ said Ma, at last. Pudding followed her gaze to the old man, whose face was so slack and grey in sleep he looked like a corpse. ‘That man there. Do you know why I married him?’ she asked. Pudding shook her head. ‘Because I was frightened of him. What a way to start out a life together. What a way to bring a clutch of babies into the world! He fancied the looks of me, and I was too scared of him to turn him down.’ She shook her head. ‘We wed when I fell pregnant. I figured he might change. Ha! What a fool. Figured having littl’uns about would soften him, I did.’
‘Oh,’ said Pudding, uncomfortably.
‘He only ever got worse. Not his fault, you understand?’ Ma switched her stern eyes back to Pudding. ‘His own father brutalised him, and sent him out into the world thinking that was the only way to be. Why I should be surprised that he then brutalised his own, I don’t know. Why I should be surprised that Eli …’ She paused, shutting her eyes for a moment. ‘Why I should be surprised that my soft Eli should end up swinging for murder, I don’t know.’ She opened her eyes with a snap. ‘He had a chance, he did! He loved that girl from Weavern! He’d got away from Isaac … They had a chance, the two of them.’
Pudding took a sip of the tea for something to do, and, sure enough, wished she hadn’t. She tried to think of Eli Tanner as soft, but couldn’t. He was a figure of evil legend, and she’d been afraid of him all her life. She wasn’t sure why she’d come back to Thatch Cottage, other than because of a vague sense that she had somehow contributed to the chain of events that had led Ma Tanner to lose her son, and the agonising thought that it had been for nothing.
‘Eli’s … been very brave, in turning himself in,’ she said, then cursed herself silently for reminding Ma what would soon happen to her son. The old woman sighed, and looked pained.
‘Loyalty,’ she muttered. ‘In a family like this, if you can’t count on that from each other, what can you count on? I would never have uttered a word against my boy, no matter what I knew.’
‘I understand,’ said Pudding, biting down her anger on Donny’s behalf. But Ma Tanner saw it.
‘The way you feel about your brother, child, is how I feel about my Eli,’ she said, pointedly. Pudding refrained from saying that Donny hadn’t killed anybody. She didn’t count the war; she refused to think about the war.
‘You know he’s wrong about Alistair’s father being the one to kill Clemmie, though, don’t you?’ she said, cautiously. Ma Tanner was staring at Isaac’s denuded figure again.
‘He done the robbery at the mill that summer, and was never fingered for it. Not long before Clem was killed. Made Eli and John go with him; made them guilty too.’
‘There was a robbery?’
‘He’d been fired from the mill – been on the bottle again, he had. We were that hard-up, that year … I thought we’d starve come winter, I did, and the bairns along with us. He took the boys and went down to rob the wages from the mill – and rob it they did – but one of the office boys was there, working late. Isaac gave him such a blow on the head he damn near killed the kid. He lay in a stupor for such a long while, and I held my breath the whole time, waiting for him to die. Waiting for Isaac to have made murderers of my boys.’ Ma sighed again. ‘He came to, eventually, thank God, but it was the last straw for Eli, I think. The violence of it; the shadow of the noose. That finally gave him the strength to get away from his father. That, and the chance Clemmie gave him. A chance of something better.’
‘Why didn’t they just get married? And move away?’ said Pudding. Ma shrugged one shoulder.
‘I suppose they couldn’t without telling her folks. They hadn’t a coin between them. And Clemmie wasn’t like the rest – she needed to be here. She needed her farm, and her family. Besides, you don’t know the … the hold a person can have on you, if you’re scared o’ them. Once you’re proper scared o’ them, they’ve a hold on you it’s fiendish hard to break. But Eli was doing it … he might have done it for good, if Clemmie hadn’t been killed. After it, he got more and more like Isaac with every day that passed. After it, he was in ruins.’
They sat in silence for a while, and Pudding raised her cup to her lips, remembering just in time not to drink. The injustice, and the pointlessness, of Alistair’s death was like a dreadful ache that she couldn’t ignore. She knew she shouldn’t say anything else about it, but she also couldn’t quite bring herself to leave until she had.
‘Still,’ she said. ‘Poor Mr Hadleigh—’
‘Poor Mr Hadleigh indeed,’ Ma Tanner interrupted her. ‘Lord knows, he were a good sort. But he got caught up in something bigger and older than himself.’
‘But he wasn’t caught up at all! It was nothing to do with him – not if his father wasn’t the original killer!’
‘Is that so,’ said Ma, cryptically. Eli’s wife, Trish, came in, carrying a heavy sack that she let thump to the floor inside the door. She straightened to stretch her back. At the noise, Isaac Tanner opened his rheumy blue eyes and glared at her. Pinch-faced, she glared right back.
‘All right, Annie,’ she greeted Ma, wearily. ‘I got a good price on ’em.’ When her eyes adjusted and she saw Pudding, Trish Tanner stopped, and stared. Her expression was openly hostile, and Pudding shrank from it.
‘Well done. Go on out and see that the sow hasn’t rolled on any more of the littl’uns, will you?’ Ma said. Trish folded her arms and puckered her mouth, but obeyed without a word. ‘She don’t like any mention of Clemmie,’ Ma explained, when
she’d gone. ‘God help the woman, but she only went and fell in love with Eli. He married her just for the sake of it, though, and she knows it. He never stopped loving Clem, and she knows that too.’
‘Ma, what did you mean by “is that so”? There’s no question as to where Alistair’s father was at the time.’
‘No, there ain’t,’ Ma agreed.
‘What then?’ she pressed. Ma studied her calmly, as though weighing up what to say, and what not to say. Just as she always had before.
‘Spoken to that old tinker, Hilarius, have you?’ she said, in the end.
‘Yes. Well, no – I don’t know. What about?’
‘He owes the Hadleighs his whole life, you know. They took him in when he was a tiddler, and his folks had died – they were tinkers, travelling folk, and they froze out in the snow one night when no one round here would take ’em in. That was a fierce winter, and no mistake. Not that the Hadleighs raised him as one of their own, but they fed him and kept him warm, and gave him work. He was about five when he came here, I think, and he never left.’
‘You can’t mean …’ Pudding was astonished. ‘You can’t mean that he’s “the snow child”, from my murder book?’ She felt as though she’d just seen a paper bird flap its wings, and take flight. Ma Tanner shrugged. ‘In my book, Murder Most Foul, in the story of “The Snow Child” … It says the family went from door to door asking for shelter, and that everyone who turned them away was partly guilty of murder. His mother and father died on either side of him and his sister. They died trying to keep the children warm.’
‘As foul a thing as any these parts have known, and the whole village has carried the guilt of it ever since. Folks has never warmed to him, have they? Expecting him to hate them, you see. Expecting him to take revenge on ’em somehow. Feeling that they deserve as much.’ Ma shook her head. ‘I was six, the year it happened, but I remember it. They came here, see. We turned them away, same as everyone. We had no space, no food, no wood to burn. My grandmother died that same winter, for want of hot food. We heard them knocking and we didn’t even open the door – didn’t want to let the cold air in. So we’re as guilty as all the rest.’
The Hiding Places Page 37