by Iona Whishaw
Returning to her car, she looked for some sort of cloth in which to wrap the boots and found in her trunk the picnic rug that she used for trips down to the lake. The rug would probably end up smelling of mildew, she thought regretfully, but a good airing would take care of that. Inside the house, it was so dark that she could barely see what she was about. With a quiver of distaste she moved through the kitchen and sitting room to the bedroom to retrieve the boot.
She could see immediately that it was gone. She crouched, frowning, and lifted the cloth. Nothing. Now frightened, she backed toward the door, looking through the murky light to make sure she was alone, and then she turned and surveyed the living room, trying to hold her breath so she could hear any sound. The silence pressed in and seemed to emphasize the rapid beating of her heart. And then she saw it. Sitting on the window ledge. Carefully placed there by someone. “Hello?” She said. She could hear the wavering in her voice.
There was no answer. She darted forward, seized the boot, and, clutching the boots, bolted out the kitchen door. Her anxiety to be away from the house gave her wings, and she hurried to the car and sat in the driver’s seat, her heart pounding. Carefully she put the boot next to its mate on the blanket on the seat beside her and went to start the car. Blast! She’d dropped the car keys somewhere. Propelled by a combination of fear and fury at herself, she went back to the woodshed, thinking that it was the most likely place she had dropped them, because she would have heard them hit the floor in the house. She could not see them at first glance. Wincing, she began to feel along the sod floor, hoping it was relatively rat free. With a flood of relief her hand fell on them where they lay on a scrap of discarded cloth near the wall.
She seized them and was about to retreat, anxious to be home in the warmth and light of her sitting room, when she pulled at the cloth. It seemed, in the dark, to be a garment. God knew how long it had been there. Mice had no doubt been nesting in it. She peered at it for some time before she realized it was a shirt. She was about to turn away and leave it, when it came to her that what she could see of it looked like it was small—something belonging to a child. She grabbed it, bolted back to the car, and threw it next to the boots.
Back in her own house, she locked her door for the first time, looking nervously into the dark through the panes of glass in her door. She should get a curtain, she thought. Anyone could see in. In the same moment she rebelled against any loss of her sense of security and carried her takings into the kitchen. She laid the shirt and boots out on a towel and looked at them. It was impossible now not to imagine that these belonged to the dead child, though the shirt could have belonged to anyone in the Anscomb family and been demoted to a cleaning rag. It was stained and mouldy and appeared to be very fragile. It might have been blue once, she thought. One sleeve had been patched, tiny stitches unravelling along the edge of the repair. With a sigh she realized she had left her basket of purloined wood sitting outside the woodshed.
Putting her treasures on the stairs to the attic, she went outside, looking defiantly into the darkness as if to challenge any interloper who would dare approach her, and got a few logs for the fire. Her night’s supply of wood by the stove, she lit the fire and turned her mind to dinner. She washed her hands thoroughly in her kitchen sink to get off the stink of mildew, put her kettle on, and opened her fridge to see what she could put together. She smiled at the irony of its sparse contents. She loved good food, had grown up with excellent cooks, and had many fine meals even during the early years of the war with Angus, who managed to find out-of-the-way restaurants that still produced top-notch food until scarcity reduced everyone’s diet to Spam and root vegetables.
There was still cheese to be had in her fridge. Beans on toast, she decided, with cheese grated onto it. Having settled on that, she opened a can of beans and dumped it into a saucepan, turning the heat on low. She cut a thick piece of bread and decided not to put it in the toaster till everything else was ready. She’d far too often been distracted and left the toast to burn. She would eat, as she always did, in front of her Franklin, and think about the case.
The flames danced cheerfully in the grate, and Lane, full now, with her plate and wine glass on the floor beside the chair, could not shake the memory of the almost elemental fear she felt when she saw that the boot had been moved. Darling was right. She was far too careless. Someone had been in the house, found the boot, and placed it on the window ledge. Though she was sure he had not been there at the moment she discovered the boot was moved, he could have been.
What if he was the killer and, having read the paper, was coming to cover his tracks? To make sure he’d left nothing that could be traced back to him? She looked at her watch. She wanted desperately to tell Darling, but it was too late to reach him at the station. And she’d have to listen to an earful about not being careful. Well, he could jolly well wait. Her doors were locked, and she was perfectly safe. As she washed her dishes in her gleaming sink and put them away, she thought about the lives of the Anscombs in that miserable house in those last years before the Great War. Some rural people even now in these modern times did not yet have running water, electricity, or telephones. Many still used wood stoves even when they did have electricity. The Hughes and the Armstrongs still did. She tried to imagine life in 1910, without even the option of electricity and hot water to augment the stoves in the long, cold winters with short days, and the endless need to keep the stove full, wood cut, children fed long after whatever had been harvested was nearly gone. The one big impression, she decided, was of a gruelling existence.
Any children would have had to work as hard as their parents from the minute they could contribute any small labour. She thought again about how dangerous it must have been, especially for children. Everything she had seen posed a danger: hot stoves, kerosene, axes, saws, falling, drowning, sickness and infection, lack of adequate food, the neglect of an exhausted and depressed mother. Her childhood had been filled by the sad head shaking of the cook and the maids at her grandparents’ house when yet another child had died of some mishap in the home of one of the local farmers. Children were hard to keep alive, she thought, which led to either an almost casual neglect of their emotional needs as children or to an overabundance of cosseting and care. She herself had been fussed over by every member of her household from the housekeeper to the parlour maid. She had been in very little peril with so many adults looking out for her and no responsibilities for chores or the use of dangerous implements. When her mother had gotten ill, she was not even allowed to see her until she was dying, so great was the fear of her becoming infected.
Well, that wasn’t fair, she thought, to think ill of the dead child’s mother. She may have been an excellent mother. But somehow, a child, possibly one of hers, had died, probably right here, and been buried, illogically, in Gladys’s root cellar. Possibly killed by someone in its family, perhaps by whoever had moved that damn boot. She pushed aside this thought.
She wished now she had seen the child. Perhaps she would ask Darling if she could come in and see the skeleton. She wasn’t sure what good it would do, though she might be able to get a sense of the child’s size. Darling had said that the coroner saw evidence of damage to the ribs and a bang on the head, plus the healed wrist bone. How old was the break? she wondered. An accident, or a thrashing? She should add dangerous parents to her list, she thought, and sat up, pulling her little table with her notepaper on it toward her.
Meticulously making a list of everything she had seen, she wrote down the ways a child could have died. Though it was a grim list, noting all the ways a young person could die by accident or sickness, it was nowhere near as gruelling as imagining someone deliberately taking the child’s life. It was significant, she suddenly realized, that the pathologist believed the injuries had happened all at once, bar the one on the wrist. It could mean, and she rather earnestly hoped it did, that the child had not been beaten, and even that it had died through no fault of the parents. After all,
the child might have fallen. Or might have been carried away by an infection, or some sort of flu, and the bones crushed by the weight of the soil it was buried in. She made a note to ask Kenny whether a spate of illnesses had swept through the area before the war. She suspected, though, that the fact that the child had been buried in this secretive manner gave lie to any of her hopes of an accidental death. There was nothing to explain that and she, and all the members of the King’s Cove community, might have to accept that it was possible that no one would ever discover why.
CHAPTER TWENTY
November, 1930
“MR. A! TIME TO WAKE up for your tea. Come on, old-timer.” Wendy gave him an gentle shake on the shoulder. The old man slumped forward, his head falling with a bang on the card table he’d been sleeping in front of. His arms, which had been resting in his lap, slid off to hang by his sides like dead snakes.
It was only Wendy’s first week at the nursing home, and her shrieks brought the woman who manned the desk at the end of the room running. The woman surveyed the scene with a practiced eye. She could see immediately what had happened. Heart attack. They had them all the time. No need for this chit of a girl to carry on like this. “There, now. You calm down. Run and get the doctor in his office. Mr. A. was bound to go. It was just a matter of time. Come on. Pull yourself together—now!” Wendy ran out of the room, sniffling, trying earnestly to pull herself together, wiping her sniffles with her handkerchief, but she couldn’t still the voice in the back of her mind that kept saying, “But he was fine this morning.” Everything went out of her mind except that awful sound of his head falling like a cannon ball. The shouting, the man who had left, banging the front door behind him. Everything was washed away from her mind by the awful finality of death.
AFTER A RESTLESS sleep, Lane made tea instead of coffee. This morning she wanted its sugary comfort. When she tried to analyze her own unease, it was, she realized, that she had had to lock her doors. She stopped midway in putting the second spoonful of sugar into her cup. She had begun to think of the vagrant as dangerous. But why? He might have had something to do with the child’s death. Why had he come back now? Oh, of course, the newspaper. Was he coming to cover his tracks? But really, all that had happened was that he had, in the course of his exploration of the house, found the shoe and moved it. It wasn’t much after all. He’d not tried to break into anyone’s house, had not stolen anything. She shook her head at her own foolishness. The light of day made everything clear, blowing away ridiculous and unfounded fears.
But she knew as well that part of her mood was from having written down the night before how a child might die. The process had given flesh and substance to the child from the burial. She felt . . . she tried to give it words . . . thought about “haunted,” and then settled on “bound.” She felt bound to the child, a determination to know about its short life, to tell its story.
“INSPECTOR,” LANE SAID, “Good morning.”
“And a good morning to you.” Darling paused, and she could hear that he’d put his hand over the receiver and was talking to someone else. “There. I’ve gotten rid of Ames. He’s had no luck at all tracing likely missing children. I’ve sent him off on a quixotic errand. I hope you are calling to tell me that you have found out the name of the child and how it died.”
“We all seem to be off on quixotic errands of your devising. I’m no further forward with knowing, I’m sorry to say. I’m afraid I will disappoint you when I tell you I went back to the house late yesterday afternoon. We’re still assuming that is where it happened . . . anyway. I did spend the evening making notes about all the ways a child could die in that miserable house. I was quite depressed by the time I went to bed.”
There was a brief silence, and then Darling said, “You’re right. I am disappointed. We have a possible culprit, and we have a vagrant whose identity and intentions we do not know.”
Lane ignored the implications of this observation. “I’m afraid I will further disappoint you when I tell you that my object in going there was to swipe some wood that I found on my last visit, already chopped and ready to burn.”
“I shall add larceny to your charge sheet, then. And?”
“Yes. Well, I didn’t come away empty-handed. You remember I found a boot the first time I went there? Yesterday afternoon I found its mate in the woodshed, under a pile of logs. So I went back into the house to get the first boot, only . . .” She paused trying to think how to put it so it would sound quite reasonable. “Only I found that someone, our vagrant I suppose, had moved the boot. I found it sitting on the windowsill.” There was a long silence, during which Lane felt her heart sinking. He was going to be tiresome, she thought.
“I see.” He could hear the pinched anger in his voice. He too stopped and tried to think about what to say.
“Look, Inspector. I’m sure you’re cross because you told me not to go back there. No doubt you are imagining me meeting him in the dark and getting hit on the head or something. But I thought about it, and I won’t say I wasn’t scared . . . I did skedaddle out of there . . . and I even locked my doors, before you ask, but when you think about it, that vagrant has disturbed no one at King’s Cove. He bathes in the lake and hasn’t tried to break into anyone’s house or steal food. I’m sure I was perfectly safe.”
Darling sighed. “I suppose you are right. But suppose, shall we, that he is the one who murdered the child and is back to cover his tracks?”
“I thought of that. I think it’s the reason I got out of there in a hurry and locked my doors. But just because one is afraid, it doesn’t mean there is a real threat. He could simply be what he seems, a vagrant or a disturbed ex-soldier who, like me, pottered about the house exploring. We don’t even know how long he’s been here. He could have been here for ages, living quietly on the fringes.”
Darling had to confess to himself he saw the reasoning in this. “I don’t see that the possibility of his being a disturbed ex-soldier makes it better,” he said begrudgingly. “Anything else?”
“I also found a shirt belonging to a child in the shed. I brought the shirt and boots home, and they are lying now on my attic stairs on a towel, making the place smell of mildew. The shirt is most likely a discarded rag, but the boots made me realize that I have no idea how small the person was, and I was going to ask if I could come in to see the remains.”
“That’s a good idea. Better than some of yours. Why don’t you come into town today? Erin’s hearing is this afternoon. You could come and sit among the plebs. Of course, you are welcome to look at the remains of the child. I should warn you it’s a bit grim.” He paused and before Lane spoke he added, “I know. You’re not likely to swoon. I shouldn’t have said anything. If you want to know the truth, it is I who find it hard to look at.”
Lane felt a flood of warmth. They so often batted witticisms at each other, she had been about to do it again and was completely caught off guard by his sudden honesty, his guileless putting of himself in her hands. This habit of exposing his real feelings when she was set to make some cynical remark was unnerving because she felt herself always on the verge of being unkind. It would have to stop. “I don’t think there is anything harder to contemplate than the death of a child, Inspector. I made myself quite miserable thinking about it last night. I can’t imagine how you cope with all you see. I will come in and am very interested to hear about Erin. I’ll bring the shirt and boots as well. Oh, and perhaps my map. What time would be good?”
“If you leave now-ish, we’d have time for a visit to the morgue and lunch before the hearing. I’d better take you along to Lorenzo. I suspect he’s been pining after you. Do you think you can get yourself here in one piece?”
“Very funny, Inspector. See you soon.”
Lane hung up the receiver, pressing down the faulty hook that she still had not fixed, and thought with sudden delight about anyone listening in. The exchange girl in Balfour was quite capable of it. Lane imagined the girl’s shock at hearing about
a visit to the morgue, followed callously by a nice lunch at Lorenzo’s.
IT WAS THE loneliest thing she’d ever seen, Lane thought, looking at the skeleton, lying on the cold metal table, still stained with the soil it had lain in for all those years. “I wish we knew for certain it was one of the Anscombs,” she said, quietly. “You know, the little boots I found would fit.”
Upstairs in his office, Darling had laid out the shirt and boots on his desk, and he, Ames, and Lane now contemplated them. “Sherlock Holmes would have done any number of experiments with obscure chemicals to determine whose shirt it is, if it has blood stains, and the name of the tailor,” Lane said.
“You know, it doesn’t look like it was cast away to be used as a cleaning rag. Of course, I’m probably just imagining that. The boots could definitely have fit this child, even been a little big. No laces. It would have flopped around in them, like so many children in the cast-off boots of an older sibling. We’ll get these analyzed, see where they were made,” said Darling.
“There seems to be so much contradictory evidence,” Ames said. “On the one hand, the child is buried in a way that is meant to hide the death, on the other, you have the gold locket being left, and even the fact that a broken arm was properly set, indicating it was cared for to some extent.”
Lane sighed. “A thing that surprises me is that no one at King’s Cove describes the family as squalid in the way, say, a family might appear in the poorer parts of London, where I lived during the war. The father drinking and beating his wife and children, the children stealing to eat, and so on. If I put together everything people remember, the father was grim but worked hard, both for himself and for other members of the community, if the story of the construction of the cellar is to be credited. Three of the children went to school, at least part of the time. The mother is interesting though, always described as unwell or sickly and as never coming away from the house. Now, mind you, she had another young child and a baby. She would have been fully occupied just keeping her family clean and fed, and if she wasn’t strong, it is easy to understand why she wasn’t gadding about the Cove attending teas. It just seems like a family that had beastly bad luck and could never quite make a go of it.”