The Stopped Heart

by Julie Myerson

  Mary looks around her.

  “I don’t think it’s here now either. If it really was a kestrel. The one that we saw that time.”

  “We don’t know for sure.”

  “That’s right, we don’t.”

  Eddie takes Mary’s face in his hands and he kisses her and for a moment she lets him. He holds her face for a longer moment, looking at her.

  “This is agony,” he says, releasing her again.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t love me, do you?” he says.

  She says nothing. He looks at her.

  “Where are you with Graham?” he says at last. “How are things between you? Are you OK? Have you told him yet—about the baby?” Mary hesitates and she feels him watching her face. She does nothing. “What?” he says.

  She looks down at her hands in her lap. Her heart churning. She licks her lips.

  “It’s complicated,” she says.

  She feels him still looking at her. She almost can’t bear it. At last he sighs. He puts a hand on hers.

  “There never was a baby, was there?” he says.

  Mary glances away at the fields, the blue sky, her heart still racing, all the blood coming to her face.

  “I don’t know what’s been happening to me,” she says. “This whole summer. Something’s been going on. I haven’t been myself.”

  He’s silent a moment.

  “Well, of course you haven’t.”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s like I’ve had to switch whole parts of myself off. Whole parts of who I am shut down.”

  He takes a breath.

  “That’s just called grief.”

  Mary shakes her head. “No. No, it’s more than that.”

  She thinks for a moment about whether it’s worth trying to say it aloud to him, whether it’s something she can dare to articulate to herself. And before she can even stop its happening, her mind starts to take her in there, around the house—rooms, walls, landing, windows, fireplace, table—racing out fast into the garden, in darkness now—face at the window, night coming down, soil in her mouth, a tree falling, doors slamming—

  “What? Mary, what is it?”

  She puts her hands up to her face.

  “I think it has to do with the house,” she says at last.

  “The house?” Now he looks surprised.

  She hesitates.

  “I suppose I’ve been deciding what to do. How to live. Whether to live. Whether it’s going to be worth it.”

  “What’s that got to do with the house?”

  “I don’t know.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  She hears him sigh.

  “I’m not going to ask you what you decided. About living, I mean.”

  “No, that’s right, please don’t.”

  “You don’t want to answer that question?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Eddie says nothing. He looks off across the fields for a moment, then before she can see what he is looking for, he turns and looks straight back into her eyes.

  “Run away with me.”

  Mary laughs.

  “I’m serious. Let’s go. Today. Now. I have money. Just pop home and get your passport. We need never come back.”

  She laughs again.

  “I’m deadly serious.”

  “I know you are,” she says.

  IT TURNED OUT THAT MY FATHER DIDN’T NEED MANY REASONS TO go looking for James. It turned out that he had actually been holding it all in for some time. My father was a peaceful man generally and not a hard person at all, but once his blood was up, you did not want to let yourself too near him.

  I asked him very quietly if any of this had to do with my mother and the new baby.

  His face went dark. It was a look I hadn’t seen in a while but I knew it very well from the old days of Isaac Roper.

  What do you mean? he said. In what way could it have anything to do with them?

  I shrugged.

  I don’t know what you’re talking about, he said.

  All right, I said.

  All right? What exactly are you trying to say to me, Eliza?

  Nothing, I said.

  He told me then that, in the village, people had been saying things for some time. More than a month ago, a man had come up from Ipswich with a handcart selling cloth from the draper’s there to measure people up for Sunday suits. And among the tidbits of news he brought with him was that, back in the spring, a man had been going around breaking into various houses in the town and taking valuables. And someone had seen him leaving through a pantry or back kitchen window and had reported that he had red hair. He’d had a case of jewelry and a couple of silver salvers and a brand-new silver snuffbox that belonged to the draper’s own late uncle, who used to be the rector there.

  I suppose I didn’t want to believe it at first, my father said. He seemed honest and willing enough. And he worked hard and seemed so good with the little ones and all of that. But it turns out he’s no more than a common thief.

  He hasn’t stolen anything from us, I pointed out, though even as I said the words, something cold went through me.

  My father gave me a sharp look.

  I don’t know why you’re suddenly standing up for him.

  I didn’t know either, so I stayed quiet. Isaac Roper had been right all along, I thought. A murderer, a swindler, or a housebreaker—James was all of those things. Call the constable, Isaac had said—and he’d been right. It was all almost exactly as he had said. My father folded his arms. I saw that he looked very uneasy.

  The things he did to you, Eliza. I don’t want to discuss it, but there will be consequences. That man will be punished. He will have to pay.

  That man. I nodded. As well as the coldness, a big, hard shiver was starting to spread through me. It started in my head and trickled its way down through the center of my body to the tips of my feet, my fingers, the very edges of my toes.

  Maybe I was thinking about Phoebe Harkiss. Or maybe I was thinking about the other murdered girls that Miss Narket had mentioned to my mother a while ago and which I’d had to make a big effort not to think about. I could not tell which it was, but it was as if my mind had suddenly cleared and I could see much more than I wanted to. I could see it all. The bad things that were behind us. And the vast terribleness of what lay ahead.

  I’m afraid there’s more, my father said.

  He told me then that Miss Narket had recently gone to visit her married niece in Lowestoft and it turned out that the niece had a friend who did charitable work at a home for distressed gentlewomen down by the docks and all the talk around there was of a good-looking red-haired man who’d gone around the whole of the previous year seducing any woman he could.

  It was said that he’d been most lavish and convincing with his affections. He’d married at least two of them, one of them a young girl barely out of childhood, and promised marriage to several others. He’d left a girl of only sixteen in the lurch with one small kid and another on the way, and some people said he’d also gone around with her sister who was not yet twelve.

  He seemed to be a collector of stolen goods and of women’s hearts. A liar too. And a conniver. He could slip and wheedle his way in and out of any situation or responsibility, petty as a child and always quick to blame others for his own failings and wrong-doings.

  I am afraid he is a con man, Eliza, my father said. A chancer. A person who does not seem to care a fig for the trail of chaos and harm he leaves in his wake.

  I shut my eyes. It was the only way to stop the tears coming.

  Then he must surely be very unhappy, I said with a sob.

  My father looked at me as if I was mad. He said he didn’t care a jot if a criminal such as him was unhappy. In fact, he hoped very much that God would see to it that he was.

  Why didn’t the police catch him, then? I asked. If he was so very busy doing bad things?

  My father said it wasn’t that simple. He said that he�
�d had such a wide variety of different names, this man, that the police seemed to stand no chance whatsoever of keeping up with him. John Allen. Horace Doddington. George Gandy. Ted Mullins had been the last one. At least two women had been promised marriage by Ted Mullins, my father said.

  I asked him what the rector had been called.

  What rector?

  The dead one whose snuffbox got taken.

  He said he didn’t know it, but I was not at all surprised when a few days later he asked around and discovered that the rector’s name was the Reverend James Dix.

  Meanwhile three men from the village and my father had looked all over for the man who called himself James, but he was nowhere to be seen. He had vanished.

  I didn’t know whether to be glad or not. I didn’t want to think about where he might be, though I suppose a part of me didn’t want anything to have happened to him.

  But I also didn’t want to think about what might happen if he turned up. So I didn’t do anything. I tried not to think about it. I stayed in my room and prayed that the fluttering in my belly would stop.

  PEOPLE HAD WANTED TO LAY FLOWERS AT THE LEISURE CENTER but the council declared it unsafe, so they laid them at the school instead. Piles and piles of bouquets, wrapped in cellophane and tied with string to the black-painted railings or spilling over onto the pavement.

  There were toys, too. Many people made a point of bringing two of everything. Two pink roses. Two dogs. Two teddy bears. A pair of dolls. Someone wrote both of their names in shells, though later these got kicked and became unreadable.

  There were cards and messages. “Rest in peace, little princesses, you’re safe from harm now.” “We didn’t know you, but we know you’re together in heaven.” There were football scarves, even though neither of them were interested in football. A Barbie balloon, even though they both hated Barbie. Someone put a frozen pizza there.

  One or two people tried to light candles but were stopped—it was a school, after all. And when stuff overflowed onto the zigzag yellow line, the police were forced to remove it. In the end so many bright-colored bits of tissue and plastic and feathers came off and got sodden in the rain and blew into the gutter, that the street sweeper made a point of coming by twice every day to clear them up. It was said that he went out of his way to do this because he remembered the little girls—the smaller one used to wave to him sometimes—and he didn’t want the display taken down any sooner than it had to be.

  They never went near the school or saw any of this for themselves, but they knew about it because it was in the papers, all of it, and of course on TV.

  BACK HOME, MARY FINDS NO ONE IN THE HOUSE. FEELING HOT and tired, she decides to take a shower. Going upstairs and pulling off her clothes and dropping them on the floor and standing under the water before it has even run properly warm.

  Stepping out, dripping onto the mat and reaching for the towel off the hook on the door, she glances out the window and immediately she sees her. A young girl, the same one, she’s certain, that she saw in the garden—long-haired, in a strange and floppy cotton hat, drab brown clothes, walking down the lane in the still bright, late-afternoon sunshine. She walks slowly, dragging her feet, her face gazing down at the ground. When she reaches their house, Mary watches, expecting her to continue on past, but no—

  She holds her breath. She cannot move—standing there still wet, the towel wrapped around her, tense, afraid even, watching as the girl seems to move toward the house and then out of sight. She can’t see the gate from where she stands but she’s certain she hears the sound of the latch lifting. She waits in a kind of terror for what must surely happen next. The sound of feet on the step. The quick rap on the door.

  But no, there she is again, stepping back through the gate and moving off, the long ribbons of her hat falling down her shoulders as she continues slowly on down the lane. Mary keeps watching her until the tall yew hedge is in the way and the girl is entirely swallowed up into its vast, dark shadow.

  For a moment she stands there, relief thudding through her. Then, slowly, she begins to dry herself again. Aware, at last, of a familiar dull ache starting in her belly, something tells her to look down at the towel. What she sees there does not surprise her. Thank God, she thinks. Thank God. At last.

  She dresses and goes downstairs. The kitchen clock says almost seven. There’s no sign of Graham and the girls and she wonders briefly if they’re in the garden, before seeing the notepad propped on the kitchen counter. At pub. Join us?

  She stands at the sink and runs the tap to fill a glass with cold water. She is still standing there and drinking it, suddenly more thirsty than she’s been in a very long time, when the man from the coroner’s office calls.

  He apologizes for ringing so late and asks her how she is. He tells her he’ll cut straight to the chase. They’ll be getting a formal letter in the post in the next couple of days. But he thought that she and her husband would be relieved to know that the remains are far too old—a hundred and fifty years at least—for them to need to take the case any further.

  Slowly, Mary puts down the glass of water.

  “The case?”

  “Well, we can’t say exactly how she died. There are things that point toward a blow to the head. Possibly some damage to the thoracic spine, the rib cage. It wasn’t natural causes, let’s put it that way.”

  She pulls out a chair, sits down.

  “A she? You can tell it’s a she?”

  “Oh, yes. That part’s easy. Definitely female. And quite young. Between fourteen and sixteen years old, they reckon. And evidence of a fetus, too. So a young, pregnant female.”

  “What?”

  Catching her breath. Watching the bright surface of the glass of water as it wobbles in front of her.

  “Which may or may not have something to do with why she died. Though we’ll never know for sure, of course.”

  Very carefully, as if it were the most fragile thing in the whole world, Mary picks up the glass and sips from it.

  “But—so, I don’t understand. What happens now?”

  “What happens?”

  “You mean there’s nothing you can do?”

  “Do?”

  “To find out what happened to her.”

  There’s a pause. Mary senses him looking at his watch. Wanting to wind it up now.

  “After all this time? Well, it’s not like there’s a missing-persons case to follow up. And any perpetrator’s going to be long dead. And as I said, these remains are at least a hundred and fifty years old.” He coughs. “Not quite antiquities yet, but—you’ve heard the expression a cold case? Well, this isn’t even a cold case. This one’s packed in ice and buried at the bottom of the bloody arctic circle, if you’ll excuse my French.”

  JAMES DIX CAME TO ME IN A DREAM BUT IT WASN’T A DREAM: there was nothing soft or unlikely about it, it was big and bold as real life. In the dream, I tried everything in my powers to make him want me again but he didn’t—he said he couldn’t and he wouldn’t ever again—so instead I told him what I’d seen behind the apple shed. That got his attention straightaway.

  It’s not possible, he said. You know it’s not. You know very well where she is.

  Where?

  Why, in Yarrow’s ditch, of course. Where we both put her. Wherever else could she be?

  You don’t think she could have moved?

  Please God, Eliza! You put her there yourself. It was even your own idea. Don’t you remember that we tipped her into the thick black water and watched her sink and then, when we were quite satisfied that she was gone, we came back to the house and washed ourselves at the pump and played a game of hearts and ate like horses and had a good old laugh about it all?

  I gazed at him in horror. I did not remember the part about washing or eating or playing cards and I certainly did not remember having a good old laugh. That day had lodged in my mind as a cold and dark and terrible day, the very worst day of my whole life and especially since it was also the
beginning of everything being over between him and me.

  But I saw her, I said.

  He smiled.

  You’ve been dreaming.

  But—

  I tell you, the dead are the dead and they can’t move. They stay right where they are. That’s the beauty of the dead. You know just exactly where you are with them.

  I tried to think about this.

  But I tell you, James, she was there. I saw her. There was no doubt at all about it. She was so very real—

  It was a dream, Eliza.

  Covered in muck and worms and—oh!—Reaching out for me, she was—Her horrible fingers—I saw the bones . . .

  James continued to smile.

  A dream, he said again.

  I looked at him, the eerie contentment on his face, the chill, frank beauty of him, and I took a breath.

  And now? I said.

  What about now?

  What if I’m dreaming now? Talking to you like this. What if all of this is a dream? What if I’m simply dreaming you saying all these things to me?

  He frowned at me then, rubbing at his hair just as he always did in real life. He yawned.

  I don’t know, Eliza. How can I know if your whole life isn’t one long dream and one day you’ll finally wake up from it and—

  And what?

  He looked at me with a sudden tenderness.

  And be released, he said.

  And he bent his head to kiss me, and I was so startled by the sly spark of his lips on mine—a thing I had ached to feel for so very long—that I awoke.

  AT HALF PAST EIGHT, GRAHAM AND THE GIRLS STILL AREN’T home, so Mary walks the five minutes down the lane to the pub.

  The verges have all been mown and the grass lies in piles where it was chopped, a couple of blackbirds wrestling a worm from underneath. The sun has gone and the sky is mauve, the air still warm but moist with the promise of dew. Two kids with scooters are playing in the road, chatting and laughing and swearing. Mary hears a woman calling to them from somewhere behind the cottages.

  She goes around the back of the pub, through the car park, her feet loud on the gravel. Graham and the girls are sitting out on the darkening lawn in the exact same place where she and Eddie sat that day that already feels like a very long time ago. For a moment she’s stopped in her tracks by the sight of them. A relaxed and smiling man and two teenage girls. A family. Then Graham sees her standing there and waves. She goes over.