An Air That Kills

by Andrew Taylor

  ‘Most people don’t even realise why it’s called Templefields,’ Charlotte explained to Jill. ‘It was originally owned by the Knights Templar. There’s said to be medieval masonry in some of the cellars though I must admit I’ve never seen any myself. It may go back even further. The Romans were at Lydmouth, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t know you wrote for the Gazette,’ Jill said.

  ‘Not as a journalist, dear. I’m the secretary of our little local history society. I was writing in that capacity.’

  Charlotte, Jill remembered, had read history at Oxford just before the war.

  ‘I’ll get a pad,’ Philip said. ‘I’m sure Thornhill won’t mind.’

  Glass in hand, he got up and left the room. Charlotte’s face acquired a knowing expression. The silence lengthened.

  ‘Poor old boy,’ Charlotte said at last, bending towards Jill and speaking in a hushed voice. ‘We lost our senior reporter on the Gazette last week. Heart attack, I’m afraid. Philip’s had to plug the gap. He’s been working very hard, poor lamb.’

  The doorbell rang.

  The two women heard Philip’s footsteps cross the hall, the door opening and the sound of men’s voices. The sitting-room door opened. Philip, still with his glass in his hand, ushered in a slim, dark-haired man.

  ‘This is Inspector Thornhill, dear,’ Philip said. ‘Inspector, this is my wife, Mrs Wemyss-Brown, and this is Miss Francis, a friend of ours from London.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you to see me at such short notice,’ Thornhill said to Charlotte. ‘Especially at this time of day.’

  ‘Not at all, Inspector. It’s never too late to help the police, after all.’

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ Philip asked.

  ‘Thank you, but no.’

  ‘Do sit down,’ said Charlotte graciously. She indicated the chair beside hers. ‘Now – how can we help you?’

  Thornhill sat down. He took his time answering. He was dressed in a tweed jacket and flannel trousers. The elbows of the jacket had been neatly patched with leather. Jill envisaged an adoring wife, industriously devoting one evening a week after supper to the family’s mending. She thought Thornhill might have seemed quite handsome if his expression had not been so supercilious; he looked, she decided, like a grammar-school master whose absolute control over the boys in his charge had gone to his head.

  At that moment, he glanced up: his eyes met hers. Quickly, she looked away. She took a sip of her drink. All this – her assessment of him and the meeting of their eyes – had taken no more than a couple of seconds.

  Thornhill turned to Charlotte. ‘As I said on the phone, Mrs Wemyss-Brown, some bones have been found in Templefields. There were a couple of other things found with them. We wondered whether you might be able to help us identify them.’

  ‘I shall be delighted to give you all the help I can, Inspector. By the by, is there any reason why you’d prefer us not to treat this as a news story? It’s not top secret or anything, is it?’

  ‘No – the workmen who found the bones must have spread the story by now.’

  Philip put down his drink. He sat up, took a shorthand pad from his jacket pocket and uncapped his fountain pen. For an instant, Jill glimpsed the Philip she had known all those years ago. Deep inside the plump and prosperous citizen there still lurked a cub reporter eager for glory.

  ‘This afternoon, four of Mr George’s workmen were clearing out what appears to have been an old cesspit at the back of the former Rose in Hand inn.’ Thornhill cleared his throat: to Jill he sounded absurdly formal, as though he were in court. ‘They disturbed a box. Either inside it or near it were a few small bones. Luckily the foreman, Ted Evans, used to help his father who was the sexton at St John’s. He thought the bones might well belong to a baby. Dr Bayswater thinks he may be right.’

  For Jill, his words were like an incision reopening a wound. There was no escape from what had happened. Even this provincial policeman was in the conspiracy to remind her.

  ‘Why just a few bones?’ she said, desperate to distract herself.

  He looked at her, and his face was cold and bleak. ‘Rats, Miss Francis. That’s the most likely explanation.’

  The thought of it made her feel ill. He shrugged, brushing aside her interruption.

  ‘I should emphasise that all the indications are that the bones are very old,’ he went on. ‘The workmen also found a small silver brooch and a little bit of newspaper. I wondered if you could help me identify the newspaper, and also perhaps give me an idea of the history of the Rose in Hand.’

  ‘A pleasure, Inspector,’ purred Charlotte.

  He was already taking two envelopes from an inside pocket. ‘I’m afraid the piece of newspaper is rather fragile.’ He opened one of the envelopes and shook out the yellowed triangle of newspaper with surprising gentleness into the palm of his hand. ‘Perhaps we might put it on something.’

  Philip got up to fetch a book. Jill noticed he’d already covered nearly a page of his pad with neat shorthand hieroglyphics. Thornhill took the book with a muttered word of thanks and transferred the piece of newspaper on to it. He passed it to Charlotte, who examined it for a moment.

  ‘Well, judging by the advertisement it’s obviously a local paper, as I am sure you realised. James Gwynne – now let me see – probably the grandfather, or perhaps the great uncle, of John Gwynne.’ She looked at Philip whose head was still bent over his pad. ‘They were before your time – they used to keep the draper’s shop at the bottom of Lyd Street. They moved to Cardiff just before the war.’

  ‘Do you think it’s from the Gazette?’ Thornhill asked.

  ‘It certainly looks like our typeface and layout. I suppose it might be the Post – but I doubt it. They’ve not been going for more than fifty years, and this looks older.’ She looked up. ‘May I turn it over?’

  Thornhill nodded. ‘But please be careful.’

  Charlotte slid the scrap of newspaper off the book, turned it over and replaced it. ‘Now I think that Sunday School was closed down before the war – the First War, I mean. Before my time, of course, but I remember hearing my aunts talking about it. There was some problem with the last superintendent. It was all rather hushed up.’

  Jill thought briefly of some of the possibilities: embezzling the collection, perhaps, interfering with choirboys or displaying Romish tendencies – or even fathering unwanted babies on members of the congregation.

  ‘What about the Rose in Hand? Can you tell me anything about that?’

  ‘Well, of course, parts of the cellars may go back to the Middle Ages. The Knights Templar owned the—’

  ‘I was thinking of more recent history. Perhaps the last hundred years.’

  ‘How obtuse of me,’ Charlotte said with unconvincing humility. ‘You must be assuming that the newspaper and the bones belong to roughly the same period.’

  ‘It seems the most likely possibility at present.’

  ‘The place used to be a coaching inn. Quite a substantial establishment, I believe. But the coming of the railways put an end to all that. And they built the Railway Hotel, of course, which must have been a lot more convenient for travellers. Also, they opened a coal pit to the east of Templefields in the 1850s and I think that helped change its character.’

  Philip looked up. ‘My wife means that no one lived there who could afford to live elsewhere. Which is more or less the case today.’

  Thornhill nodded. ‘So – sixty or seventy years ago, Templefields would probably have been a working-class area? A bit of a slum, perhaps?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Charlotte agreed. ‘I know the Rose in Hand had rather a bad reputation in my grandfather’s day. It attracted a lot of undesirable people. Indeed, as I’m sure you know, the area itself still does.’

  Jill thought that ‘attract’ was not the word she herself would have chosen. She said, ‘May I have a look at it, please?’

  Charlotte glanced at Thornhill, who nodded. Jill leant forward and Charlotte passed he
r the book on which the triangle of newspaper lay.

  ‘Assuming that does come from the Gazette,’ Thornhill went on, ‘would you be able to find it in your files? Then we could date at least the newspaper, if not the bones.’

  ‘My husband will get one of our people to go through the backfile first thing tomorrow morning,’ Charlotte said. ‘Did you say you found something else?’

  Thornhill opened the second envelope and shook a tarnished brooch on to the palm of his hand. He passed it to Charlotte.

  ‘No need to worry about fingerprints, I suppose,’ she said with a smile.

  Jill handed the book back to Thornhill. He took it from her without meeting her eyes. She disliked men who would not look her in the face.

  Charlotte passed the brooch to Jill, who turned it over in her hands. The hallmark on the back looked perfectly clear. With a little cleaning and a magnifying glass, it should be legible. She thought she could make out an anchor, which meant the piece had been assayed in Birmingham; but the inspector would be able to find out that sort of thing himself. He must be sick of members of the public offering him help he didn’t need.

  She turned the brooch over again. Her throat tightened. A true love’s knot. There was no knot that couldn’t be undone – or if you couldn’t undo it, you could cut it or burn it or simply let it rot. She put the brooch on the arm of Philip’s chair, turned towards the fire and pretended to warm her hands. The manoeuvre prevented the others from seeing her face.

  ‘Ah, well,’ Charlotte was saying. ‘No doubt the obvious explanation is also the correct one. Some poor unfortunate servant girl. A stillborn child – we must hope it was stillborn, in any case. Desperate to conceal her shame. Of course, in those days the line between right and wrong was very clearly drawn. If people do these things, then they must expect to have to pay the price.’

  Jill stared at the flames. What do you mean – do these things? she wanted to say. Fornicate? You stupid woman, you don’t really believe that the wages of sin should be death? And what about the man, for God’s sake? What price did he have to pay?

  ‘And mark you, there was a lot to be said for making it quite clear where people stood. None of this shilly-shallying we get today. Making excuses. Some things you can’t excuse and that’s the end of it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Thornhill said. He busied himself with returning the brooch and the piece of newspaper to their envelopes. ‘You’ve been very kind.’

  ‘And what happens now, Inspector?’ Charlotte asked.

  ‘I’m not sure. I shall have to talk about this with the superintendent.’

  ‘Mr Williamson?’

  Thornhill nodded. ‘In case we do take this further, is there anyone else you would advise me to talk to about the history of the Rose in Hand? It’s not that long ago, is it? There must be records and so on.’

  ‘You need to have a word with John Harcutt. He probably knows more about nineteenth-century Lydmouth than anyone else.’

  Thornhill put the envelopes in his pocket and took out a notebook. ‘Harcutt? Could you give me his address please?’

  ‘He lives in Edge Hill, Inspector. It’s that big white house on the main road – opposite the church. Chandos Lodge.’

  Thornhill stood up. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  He said goodbye. Philip got up to show him out. As the door closed behind the two men, Charlotte reached for her cigarette case.

  ‘Seemed quite pleasant, I thought,’ she murmured.

  ‘I thought he looked a bit like a schoolmaster.’

  ‘I suppose these days you need a certain amount of education to become a detective inspector. Quite a good-looking man, too. I wonder if he’s married.’

  They heard the thud of the front door closing.

  ‘Someone sewed those patches on his jacket.’

  ‘Yes, dear, but that might have been his mother, or a sister or something.’

  ‘I still think he’s married,’ Jill said. ‘He looks that sort of man.’

  Chapter Six

  Victoria Road sloped gently up to the park and the cemetery. It was considered to be one of the better residential addresses in Lydmouth. It was also one of the more expensive. Edith Thornhill had cajoled her husband into renting a house at the lower, cheaper end of the road. It was semidetached and late-Victorian. Thornhill would have preferred to buy, but that would have to wait until they had saved enough money for the deposit.

  He parked the Austin immediatley outside the house. The landing light filled with a dim yellow radiance the uncurtained windows of the front bedroom he shared with Edith. He let himself into the hall. Three empty tea chests and a smell of polish greeted him. The wireless was on behind the half-open door of the kitchen. He didn’t call out for fear of waking the children.

  As he hung up his coat and hat, he caught sight of his face, tired and serious-looking, in the mirror by the pegs. He wished he could hang up his job and everything that went with it at the same time as his hat and coat. These days he seemed to carry his working life around with him wherever he went and whatever he did: it was like a weight on his shoulders which as the months and years passed grew steadily heavier. His shoulders twitched; a second later he realised that he was trying to shrug the weight away.

  He walked down the hall and pushed open the kitchen door. They called it the kitchen, though in fact they used it as a living room and did their cooking in the scullery at the back; the kitchen was the warmest room in the house because it contained the boiler which heated the hot water. Edith was sitting in the armchair darning one of the children’s socks. A man was saying something about the National Debt on the radio, but Thornhill didn’t think she was listening to him.

  She looked up and smiled. ‘Hello, Richard.’

  He bent down and kissed her cheek. ‘Sorry I’m late. Are the kids asleep?’

  ‘Well, they’re upstairs. Come and get warm while I fetch your supper.’

  The scrubbed deal table was laid for one person; Edith must have eaten with the children. The man talking about the National Debt had a voice whose cultivated arrogance reminded Thornhill of Dr Bayswater’s. He reached out a hand and switched off the radio. In the silence, he heard the clatter of a pan in the scullery.

  The inactivity irked him. He slipped upstairs to say goodnight to the children. At present, and at their own request, they were sharing a room, perhaps to help them cope with the novelty of their surroundings. For once they were both asleep. Thornhill felt obscurely cheated. It was much colder upstairs, and both children had burrowed deep under their bedclothes. All he could see of them were two patches of hair.

  He went back downstairs. Edith was sitting in the chair again with a couple of socks on her lap and his baked beans and toast were waiting on the table. She assumed that the police canteen provided him with a proper hot meal in the middle of the day: usually she was right.

  ‘Did you have a good day?’

  No, he wanted to say, it was awful. He said, ‘Not too bad, thanks. And you?’

  Talking in a low, placid voice, she took him step by step through her day. She was an orderly woman who liked to describe things chronologically. Thornhill finished his baked beans and helped himself to an apple and a slice of Cheddar cheese. While he ate, he watched Edith. She was almost as tall as he was, with the sort of light-brown hair which had once been fair. She wore no jewellery except the thin gold wedding band. Suddenly, he wanted to go to bed with her. Not in an hour’s time – but now. And it didn’t have to be bed, either. The table would do. Or the floor. Anywhere.

  He cut himself another slice of cheese with a hand that trembled slightly. She was telling him what David’s teacher had said about his reading. This was followed by an account of Elizabeth’s attempt to run away to their old house in Cambridgeshire while they were walking back home from school. Still talking, Edith went into the scullery to make some tea.

  ‘What kept you so late?’ she called through the open door.

  He pushed back his cha
ir and followed her into the scullery. Lust made him clumsy and he banged his arm against the corner of the cooker. The water had boiled while he was eating. Edith had her back to him and was spooning tea into the pot. He stared hungrily at the shapeliness of her waist.

  ‘Some workmen found some bones at that building site near the station,’ he said. ‘They may have belonged to a baby. They’re probably about sixty years old.’

  ‘The poor thing.’ She brought the kettle back to the boil and started to fill the teapot. ‘Was it in a graveyard?’

  ‘No. A cesspit.’

  ‘Oh, dear. But I suppose it might have been a natural death. An illness or something.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Talking of illnesses, I thought Elizabeth was looking a little peaky this evening. I took her temperature, but it was normal.’

  Thornhill put his hand on her right hip. He sensed – or imagined he did – the warmth of her body and the softness of her flesh through the thick tweed of her skirt. The crudeness of his reactions shocked him: touching her had the effect of doubling his urgency.

  ‘David must come into contact with lots of germs at school,’ she went on, stirring the tea vigorously. ‘I know he hasn’t been ill himself but do you think it’s possible that germs can leapfrog on to someone else? He might have passed it on to her without having had it himself.’

  Thornhill put his other hand on her left hip. It was hard to breathe normally and his mouth was dry. He stroked his hands down her thighs and moved his body against hers.

  ‘Oh, darling, don’t. I’m sorry but there’s such a lot to do before bedtime.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  He stepped backwards. The scullery was unbearably hot. Edith put the teapot on the tray and covered it with the cosy. She saw him watching her and smiled, as if to reassure him that she wasn’t annoyed. He smiled back. Behind the mask, anger and shame churned silently inside him, blending with what was left of the lust.

  ‘Let me.’ Thornhill picked up the tray and waited for her to precede him out of the room.