Shadows

by Thorne Moore

  Sylvia was distressed at the mere mention of the police. ‘I have no idea. Newport? Cardigan? Fishguard? I’ve never thought to find out.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have walked all that way.’

  ‘Maybe we should phone them,’ suggested Vicky. She sensed our reluctance. ‘I’ll speak to them. I won’t mention all those awful things she was saying last night.’

  I smiled gratefully at her, and we left her chatting pleasantly to the local constabulary, as the sound of the returning Volvo took us out to the yard.

  ‘Any sign of her?’ asked Sylvia. ‘We’ve phoned around, but no luck.’

  Michael emerged, holding up a muddy shoe, its sole partly ripped from the upper. ‘Found this. In the grass by the road. Do you recognise it?’

  It was a sensible walking shoe, the sort Hannah would wear. Vicky had finished her call to the police. ‘I just asked if a Hannah Quigley had contacted them,’ she said. ‘They have no record of her. But it could be—oh.’ She saw the shoe Michael was holding. ‘That’s Hannah’s.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes, it was splitting, and she was making a terrible fuss about it.’

  The four of us stood staring at it. She surely couldn’t have walked far with one shoe missing.

  ‘When did she leave?’ I asked, awaiting the inevitable answer.

  ‘When would it have been? Late evening. Nine o’clock perhaps. Or ten? She and Ronnie came here, and when she came back she was almost hysterical. We were trying to calm her down, then Shelley said something, told her to, well, in so many words, to go away, and she went berserk, grabbed her things and marched out, screaming about finding somewhere to stay, phoning the police, reporting everyone, complaining to the university. We just let her go. Oh dear, we should have stopped her. What could have happened to her?’

  We looked blankly at each other, thinking of Hannah marching down the road, just as Christian was storming out of Llys y Garn.

  I could see the horror spreading on Sylvia’s face, a horror that was the antithesis of the appalling hope edging its way into me. I had felt death in the night. I didn’t doubt that for a moment, but suppose it hadn’t been Christian, after all? I’d felt ill will in plenty for Hannah, but I hadn’t wished her dead. I couldn’t be to blame, if it were her.

  Hannah’s wretched face rose before me, accusing as ever, but I could only shut my eyes and think ‘Thank God.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry we’ve made things so awkward for you,’ said Vicky. Awkward? If she but knew.

  *

  ‘I don’t suppose you saw Hannah Quigley last night?’ I asked Al, as he took a break. The oriel window was repaired now, a small gem of exquisite craftsmanship, which seemed, somehow, no longer relevant.

  ‘No.’ Al stretched on the meadow grass and closed his eyes. He looked exhausted.

  ‘I thought maybe, since you were driving around last night—’

  ‘I didn’t see her,’ he said firmly. ‘Why is everyone so uptight? Anyone really want her back?’

  I sat up, looking away. Was I honestly thinking that her death would be a blessing? ‘Back, no. Far away would be much better. Australia? But we need to know if she’s dead or alive.’

  ‘Do we? Why?’

  His callousness shocked me as much as my own reaction. ‘Because she’s vanished. A woman has disappeared, Al.’

  ‘Look, she’s an adult. She can elect to walk out, any time she likes.’

  ‘In her state? At night? With no luggage, and minus one shoe? Michael found one of her shoes by the road.’

  ‘She left a shoe behind?’ Al frowned.

  ‘The police think the same way as you. She’s an adult, free to come and go, so they won’t do anything.’

  ‘You’ve been to the police?’ He propped himself up on his elbow.

  ‘Michael made the Prof phone them. Which was probably a mistake, because Ronnie managed to make it sound like much ado over nothing.’

  ‘So it is,’ said Al, lying down again. Hannah Quigley had been threatening to accuse his sister, and whether her allegations were true or false, he wasn’t going to waste sympathy on her. I recalled him removing her arm from me, his fingers gripping her wrist. The bandage she wore afterwards.

  ‘She ought to be found,’ I insisted. ‘We can’t leave it, just because Ronnie failed to tick the right boxes with the police. He told them there was no evidence of a crime and she wasn’t threatening suicide or certified insane—’

  ‘She should be.’

  ‘Yes, obviously, that’s the point. She was crazy. She wasn’t safe to go off like that. But the police aren’t prepared to do anything. They might, eventually, but not yet, so Michael’s taken some of the students out to search. If the police won’t help, we’ll have to find her ourselves.’

  Al sat up properly and hugged his knees. ‘You’re serious?’

  ‘She’s vanished, Al. And there was Christian. Out there, at the same time. Mad as Hell. Capable of anything.’

  ‘Yes of course. Christian threatened her, didn’t he?’ Al considered the possibility, dispassionately. ‘Which would make him the prime suspect. Well there you are.’

  ‘Where are we? Or rather, where is she?’

  ‘Kate!’ Tamsin was calling. ‘Kate, where are you?’

  I jumped up, hurrying up the steps to the terrace. ‘Here, Tam. What is it?’

  She came jogging round from the Great Hall, breathless with excitement or concern. ‘Oh Kate, they’ve found a bottle.’ She stopped to catch her breath.

  ‘A bottle?’

  Al came up behind me. ‘What’s up?’

  Tamsin was too urgent even to query what we’d been doing, down there in the long grass. ‘Mike took some of the students to search where he found the shoe, so they were combing along in the verge...’ Another pause for breath. She must have run up from the road. ‘They found this broken bottle and it’s got blood on it.’

  ‘I see,’ My heart missed a beat. The scenario painted itself, the lurid sky, the distraught girl walking, Christian’s wild drive, two insane people in collision. And then that terrible sinking moment of death. Blood on a bottle. It was so obvious what had happened. ‘This sounds bad.’

  ‘Yeah. But no sign of Hannah. Everyone’s looking now. Mike’s phoned the police again. He says, would you mind warning Mum.’

  *

  Blood made all the difference. Neither Al, not the professor, not the police, could continue to dismiss Hannah’s disappearance as an exercise in unbalanced free will. It made a difference to me too, to the way I was thinking about the girl. I pictured her murdered, dumped in some ditch, and wondered how I could have felt relief at the possibility. However irritating she had been, the idea of her death was appalling.

  While Michael took his team further out along the surrounding lanes, I overruled a still dithering professor and organised the rest of the students into parties, to search the woods. I hadn’t heard Chris return in the night, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t come, silently, creeping through the long grass. Planting a murder victim under his mother’s nose was just the sort of malice he was capable of, and I didn’t want the slightest risk of Sylvia chancing upon a bloody corpse.

  I left her and Tamsin making tea for everyone, while I toured the outbuildings, the empty workshops, the stores. In the Great Hall, I climbed to the upper chamber, empty except for a few tools – Al’s crew had been seconded to the search of the woods. I went to check the cellar. No. The door onto the winding stair had been padlocked and nailed shut for safety during the Fayre, and had not yet been re-opened. He couldn’t have put her down there. The armoury: it was piled high with timbers, sacks of cement, rubble, tarpaulins, and I peered and poked among them before bracing myself and opening the door into the Great Hall. The doorway with its secret panel. The shadow heaved around me, telling me to flee, but I couldn’t. I had to touch the panel, steady my fingers, let them search for the secret catch that Al had proudly shown me. The door to the priest hole swung open, and
blackness engulfed me.

  Fighting nausea I forced myself to look in, waiting for my eyes to accustom to the dark.

  Nothing. No bones, no Hannah.

  I quietly let the panelling click shut, then ran for the walled garden, gulping down the clean air as I looked around. The well. That would be an obvious place, wouldn’t it? I pushed back the heavy cover and the very notion of losing my balance brought me close to doing so. I peered gingerly down, into the clammy darkness. Daylight reflected as a white disk on the surface of the water far below. No broken body floating.

  As I pulled back with relief, sirens split the air, echoing down the valley. This time the police were paying attention, and they were doing so in force.

  *

  For the first half hour I was happy that officialdom was taking charge. The minutest of Hannah’s details were taken; her property was bagged up; dogs were out sniffing along the lane. I was happy until I, along with everyone else, was questioned. It was a matter of course, they insisted, but even now I couldn’t shake off the memory of my childhood interrogation, more than twenty years before. You know what we do with bad girls who tell lies? We put them in prison. The frustration and misery of that day had ingrained an automatic resistance to police questioning.

  ‘So you spoke with Hannah Quigley last night?’ DC Phillips, plump and wheezy, was appointed to interview me.

  ‘No. I saw her. I don’t think I spoke to her personally.’

  ‘But you heard her? Making allegations.’

  ‘She’s been here for weeks, feels like years, and she’s complained non-stop from the start. I’ve never taken any of it seriously.’

  ‘Mm.’ DC Phillips tapped his pen on the table top. ‘You heard her threatening to go to the police?’

  ‘Yes, but then she also threatened to go to the university, and her MP and The Daily Telegraph. Last night it was the police. Today it would probably have been the United Nations.’

  ‘So you don’t think she really intended to do so?’

  ‘I don’t know her well enough to know if she ever follows up on these wild threats. She’s clearly paranoid and she never really makes much sense.’

  ‘Mrs…’ He checked his notes. ‘Mrs Victoria Ives contacted us earlier today. She certainly seemed to think that Hannah was on her way to speak to us.’

  ‘No she didn’t. She was worried because Hannah had stormed off, upset. We phoned all the local lodgings and there was no sign of her, so we were trying all other options. The police were last on our list.’

  DC Phillips nodded, tapped his pen again. ‘Miss Quigley was alleging that drugs were being sold on these premises.’

  ‘Yes, Dr Bradley is obviously a Columbian drugs baron in disguise.’ Why did I say that? Didn’t I know better than to joke with the police?

  ‘Dr Bradley is a chemist.’

  ‘Oh come on. Petroleum, not pharmaceuticals. Used to be. Now he’s a wood carver.’

  ‘So there’s nothing in the allegations?’

  ‘We have a holiday cottage, students coming and going at the dig. I can’t swear there aren’t reefers being smoked in the woods or tablets being swapped behind the Portaloos. But I haven’t seen anyone trading anything illicit. If I had they would have been out of here like that.’ I snapped my fingers.

  ‘You’ve never suspected drugs were being used by the travellers, camping on your land?’

  ‘I am one hundred percent certain that Al would do everything in his power to keep hard drugs out of their camp,’ I said firmly. There was no need to mention Molly’s cakes and tisanes. But it didn’t help; Al’s crew were doomed, once more, to be the focus of police attention.

  ‘Mr Alistair Taverner,’ said Phillips, consulting his notes again. ‘He has quite a violent record, of course.’

  ‘A bit of a barny at a protest?’

  Phillips looked deadly serious. ‘Quite apart from that assault on a police officer, he also put an informer in hospital. Fractured skull. A very serious assault; nearly killed her.’

  ‘Rubbish.’ Al had told me he’d removed Kim’s drug dealer. Removed. Christian had said – but Christian was a liar. I remembered the sorry little would-be mugger in Hyde Park, the blood running from his nose. ‘Rubbish,’ I repeated.

  Phillips sat back, not arguing but gauging my reactions. ‘Did you see Mr Taverner, last night?’

  ‘I—yes, he was here when Hannah descended on us.’

  ‘As was…’ The notes again. ‘Professor Pryce Roberts, Dr Bradley, Mrs Callister, Tamsin Callister and Christian Callister?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Miss Quigley was threatening to report, let me see, Christian Callister, Mr Taverner’s sister, and Dr Bradley?’

  ‘She was accusing anyone and everyone.’

  ‘Christian Callister left the house shortly afterwards?’

  ‘Yes, he was driving back to London.’

  ‘After the accident. I understand you had a fire?’

  ‘Yes, Sylvia’s oil lamp. Yes, it was an accident.’

  ‘And apart from Christian Callister, everyone else remained at Llys y Garn?’

  ‘I was upset by the fire, so I went to bed. As far as I know, everyone else went too.’

  ‘You heard nothing?’

  ‘I’m a sound sleeper.’

  ‘Very well, Mrs Lawrence.’

  Released from interrogation, I went and sat on the steps down to the meadow, to calm my nerves. Kicked myself for my infantile determination to say nothing and tried not to rerun everything that Phillips had said, but I couldn’t help myself. Al had put a police informer in hospital with a fractured skull because he saw her as a threat to his sister. That was far more than twisting a wrist. Now Hannah had been threatening to inform on Kim. He did go out in the night. His indifference to Hannah’s fate had already struck me as uncomfortably callous. Could it really be…?

  Oh but this was utter rubbish. Al? Kill Hannah? No. Absolutely not. Swat her out of his way, maybe, but he wouldn’t kill her, no matter what she said about Kim. I could imagine him killing Christian without compunction, and I wouldn’t even blame him for doing so, but not Hannah.

  I would tell him, I decided; warn him of the things the police were insinuating. But when I tried to find him, I was too late. He and the rest of his crew had already been rounded up for their session with the police. Instead, I walked to the archaeology camp, imagining that, with a police investigation under way, a hint of hysteria and anxiety might have set in. Not a chance. I was met with a theatre of excited prurience. They were all delighted to be facing police interrogation.

  Vicky gave me a helpless shrug. ‘Do you know, I think some of them are actually enjoying it.’

  ‘It’s probably just a game to them.’

  Vicky winced. ‘Oh why didn’t we stop her last night? We should never have let her go.’

  ‘But she was – is an adult. How could you have stopped her?’

  ‘We could have tried. The police are contacting her mother, but apparently they didn’t get on – her stepfather – I don’t know. She’d lost her job recently. And there doesn’t seem to have been a boyfriend. There ought to be someone to worry about her.’

  ‘Yes of course.’ There should have been someone to worry about her a long time ago, and now it was too late. Now there was nothing left to worry about, except finding her body.

  And when that happened, still there would be Sylvia to worry about. No matter what happened, there would be Sylvia to worry about. I had wished her son dead; that would have been bad enough, but now she was going to learn that he was a murderer and there was no way I could protect her from it.

  For a moment, when I returned to the house, I thought the moment must have come. Sylvia was in the kitchen, sobbing uncontrollably, with Tamsin hopelessly trying to comfort her.

  But Tamsin’s first words told me nothing was that simple. ‘You won’t believe it. The police have taken Mike.’

  ‘Mike?’ I was floored. ‘Where?’

 
‘To the police station. For questioning.’

  ‘What are they charging him with?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ wailed Sylvia. ‘What can we do?’

  ‘It’s stupid!’ said Tamsin hotly. ‘What’s him being a chemist got to do with anything?’

  ‘Oh Tammy.’ Sylvia hugged her daughter and raised guilty, tearful eyes to mine. ‘I told them that he went out last night—well he did. He was worried. He went after Christian. Chris was so wild when he left, Mike was worried maybe he’d have an accident. I couldn’t tell them that, could I? Not about Christian. I can’t put the police onto him again. So – oh why didn’t I keep quiet? I should never have said anything.’

  ‘Hush.’ I soothed her, realising that my own prevarication on the subject had been utterly pointless. ‘Michael probably told them himself.’

  ‘And then they wanted to know, did he have any witnesses to finding the shoe? And why did he move it? And why did he have everyone out contaminating the crime scene? And he said he’d had everyone out searching because the police hadn’t given a damn, and that’s when they took him away.’

  ‘Sylvia, stop worrying. He’s annoyed them, so they’re going to annoy him, but Mike can look after himself; he’s not a child. He won’t let himself be bullied by big bad men. After all, we don’t even know for certain that a crime has been committed. Maybe it wasn’t a crime scene.’

  ‘But the blood—’

  ‘We don’t know that it’s Hannah’s.’

  ‘Whose else could it be?’ She looked at me, in panic, and I gave up trying to argue. Hannah was dead, and the police should be tracking down Christian. Not Mike, for God’s sake! Christian was the first, the only suspect, the one name that should be forced on the police. I couldn’t ask Sylvia to do it. Even after the fire and Christian’s loathsome behaviour, every maternal sinew in her screamed against repeating that betrayal. But I should have spelled it out myself, instead of letting others be suspected.

  ‘They’re so stupid!’ repeated Tamsin. ‘Michael! Honestly.’

  ‘Let’s keep calm,’ I said. ‘They can’t keep him for ever.’

  They didn’t. It wasn’t long before he phoned. ‘Can you pick me up, Kate? I’m in Haverfordwest, and the police don’t provide a taxi service.’