by Ann Cleeves
Perhaps though she’d already made the connection subconsciously and that was why the memory of her father’s stay in hospital had been the subject of so many of her daydreams. It was an unsettling thought.
The letter continued: “There was a notice in the paper about her funeral. I’d like to be there. She was a friend and I feel awful that I didn’t give her more support when she needed it. But I can’t face those dreary rituals and I wouldn’t know what to say to her family and friends. So I thought I’d come to see you that day instead. It’ll stop me brooding. I’d like to see where Bella finished up. Strange that she ended her days so close to where I started mine. Perhaps you can take me for a walk. I’ll point out some of my old haunts. Don’t worry about my getting there. A friend has offered to give me a lift.”
The letter ended on a strange note. “You will take care, won’t you?”
She found that touching. He didn’t usually worry about her. She was the one that did all the worrying. All the same it hadn’t occurred to him that it might be inconvenient for him to visit her, or that after his making so many demands on her she might not want to see him.
“It would serve him right if I phoned him and told him not to bother,” she said out loud, but she knew she wouldn’t do it.
She tore the letter into many tiny pieces and threw them a handful at a time up into the air and watched the wind scatter the fragments safely over the hill. Then she walked on, well outside her survey area until she came to Langholme village. She thought she would use the public phone to talk to her father, but quite by chance she stumbled on the house in the photograph, the house where her father had lived before he had married her mother.
It was much more ordinary than she’d expected, on the outskirts of the village, not very close to the big house at all, though you could see Holme Park at the end of the long straight lane. It was tidier, of course, than in her father’s day. The bags of rubbish had gone. She wondered if it might be possible to dream up a plausible excuse for looking inside, but then Anne Preece arrived, intruding again with all her questions. Apparently she’d been at Holme Park drinking coffee with Lily Fulwell. That surprised Grace, who hadn’t previously had the impression that the two were good friends. It was another warning that she had to be careful.
Chapter Twenty-Seven.
The day of Bella’s funeral Grace saw Rachael and Anne off, then waited for her father. He appeared, surprisingly, on foot, walking down the track to Black Law with a small rucksack on his back. The track through the farmyard was a public footpath and at first she thought he was just another walker. He moved very fast, though once, as she watched, he turned to look over his shoulder. He seemed jumpy, restless. She put the kettle on because she knew he would want coffee as soon as he arrived and went out to wait for him.
“You’ve not walked all the way from the village?”
“I don’t know why you’re surprised. I’m fit for my age.”
“Not that fit.”
“All right,” he admitted. “A friend dropped me at the gate.”
“You should have brought her down for coffee.” She had guessed that it would be a woman. Rod was his only male friend and he still had the ability to attract.
“I asked but she’s a bit shy. Besides, she’s got things to do. She’ll wait for me up there later.”
She took him into the house. She expected comment about the state of the kitchen but he seemed too preoccupied to disapprove.
“I’ve seen this place from a distance but I’ve never been inside. A bit primitive, isn’t it? But I don’t suppose you mind that, do you, Gracie? You’re used to roughing it.”
In the rucksack, carefully wrapped, were homemade biscuits to have with the coffee and an asparagus flan for their lunch.
“But no booze, Gracie. I hope you’ll give me the credit for that.”
She thought then it would be all right. When she’d read his letter she’d worried that there’d be tears. A scene. She wasn’t sure she had the energy. He insisted on a guided tour of the cottage and all the way round he was asking questions, to most of which she had no answers.
He asked about Bella and Dougie and how they’d managed. About Constance Baikie and the Trust, and the students that came and the research they did.
She laid the table in the living room for lunch. He always thought food should be treated seriously. He hated picnics.
“You look as if you need feeding up,” he said, only half joking.
She managed to eat the flan. Most of it.
“I want to see where Bella lived,” he said.
“You’ve seen it. You walked past the farmhouse to get here.”
“I want to see it properly.”
She shrugged. It didn’t seem worth fighting over. They stood in the empty yard with the house on one side, and in the other the shed where Bella brought the lambs in to ewe. It was a gusty, sunny day. The shadows of small clouds blew across the hill. Edmund went over to the shed, unbolted the top half of the door and looked in. Inside were some wooden pens, a pile of mucky straw. He turned round quickly.
“I want to go in the house,” he said.
“You can’t. It’s locked.”
“You must have keys. For an emergency.”
“The police locked it all up when Dougie left.”
“I need to see where she lived. She talked about it all the time but I never came here.”
“You kept in touch then?” She hadn’t realized.
“A few of us from the old group met up occasionally. You know, for encouragement, support, it helps.”
“It must have done.” He still had bouts of depression but he’d never had to go into St. Nick’s again.
“So you can understand why I need to go inside.” “I’m sorry,” she said, starting to lose patience. “It’s not possible.
I told you I haven’t got the keys.”
“We’ll have to break in then.”
“Don’t be daft,” Grace yelled, thrusting her face close to his in an attempt to make him see sense. “How are you going to get away with that? And don’t you think I’ve got enough to lose here already?”
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry.” He seemed close to tears. “It’s just that you don’t realize … You have to have been through that sort of desperation. And then I feel responsible. Perhaps I should have guessed.”
“When did you last hear from her?”
A few of us met in the restaurant about a month ago. Rod lets me cook for them sometimes when it’s closed to the public. And I phoned her the week before she died.”
“Why?”
He seemed shocked by the question. “It’s personal. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“The police might want to talk to you. Rachael said they were wanting to trace people who might have some idea why she killed herself.”
“Rachael?”
“Rachael Lambert. She’s supporting the project. Bella was a friend of hers.”
“I didn’t realize Bella had any friends except us.” So much, Grace thought, for Rachael’s notion that she and Bella were closer than mother and daughter. Bella hadn’t even considered her worth mentioning.
“Anyway,” Edmund said suddenly, “I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with the police. Bella would hate it. She’d left all that behind long ago.”
“All what?”
But he shook his head and turned away. He walked round the house, looking in each window in turn, occasionally holding his hand between his forehead and the glass to shield the reflected light from his eyes.
“I don’t know what you’re expecting to find.”
“I can’t tell what went on here,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her.
“What was she like?”
“How should I know?” Grace snapped. She thought it was morbid, this peering into the house of a dead woman and she was worried in case Rachael or Anne came back early and caught them at it. “She killed herself the night before I arrived.”
“Yes,”
Edmund muttered resentfully, as if somehow Grace had been responsible for that, as if her imminent arrival had been the trigger of Bella’s suicide.
“Shall we go back inside then?” Grace touched his arm gently, her way of making peace with him. “We can’t do any more out here and I’m cold.”
She shepherded him back toward Baikie’s. He went ANN CLEEVES
without argument, and sat quietly while she made tea. Later he looked at his watch. “I’ll have to go soon. She said she’d be there about five.” She. No name. Perhaps he couldn’t even remember it. Since Sue he’d tried not to get too involved.
“I’ll walk up the track with you.” “No,” he said quickly, so she thought perhaps he’d made up a fiction about this trip. Perhaps he hadn’t admitted to a daughter. “I told you she’s shy.”
“I’ll say goodbye here then.” They stood awkwardly in the cramped kitchen.
“So?” he asked, an attempt to fatherly good humour. Now he seemed reluctant to go. “How’s the project working out?”
“It’s not easy. Doing what you ask.”
“No, well, I appreciate that. But you wouldn’t want it, would you? A great scar out of the hill. On my land.” He hesitated, looked at her significantly. “Our land.”
“I’m not even sure it’ll do any good in the end.”
“What do you mean?”
“A few otters. What do they matter compared with all that money, all those jobs. That’s what people’ll say!”
“More than a few.” He paused again. “According to your survey anyway.
Significant numbers. That’s what you promised.”
“I’m not sure I can keep that up. Rachael’s already started to question my counts.” And anyway I’m no good at lying, she thought. Not when it comes to science. To the important stuff.
“Do your best, eh? For me.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a strain.”
“I know.” But he didn’t know at all. Like a spoilt toddler he couldn’t recognize anything beyond his own needs, his own distress.
“Look, I’d better go.” “Can’t keep her waiting,” Grace said sarcastically.
“No.”
She went outside with him then turned in the opposite direction, towards the old mine. Deliberately she didn’t turn back to wave. She sat among the debris of the mine close to the stream which seemed very fast and deep channelled in the culvert, and began to brood again. She knew it was dangerous, this obsession, this desire to find meaning and connection. She almost believed that all the events which were troubling her were linked in an elaborate web Bella’s death, Anne’s hostility, the quarry, the person who seemed to be following her. And she was the spider in the centre of it, causing the events without understanding why.
At last the length of the shadows thrown by the mine building made her realize how late it was. As she walked back to the cottage in the orange evening light the exercise relaxed her and it occurred to her that she might be ill, like her father. He could be paranoid too and she’d read that such diseases could be inherited. Rather than frightening her, the thought was reassuring. She could talk to someone. Get treatment. She probably wasn’t in any physical danger at all. It was all in her head.
She kept this thought clear in her mind for two days, long enough to drop a note to her father, asking if he could arrange for her to see his doctor at St. Nick’s, and a letter to Antonia Thorne. The letter was unspecific. She still didn’t feel sufficiently safe to commit herself to paper. She just said it would be good to have a talk.
Something was worrying her. She got a lift out to Langholme with Rachael to post them. Even though the letters were sealed she was reluctant to hand them over.
Chapter Twenty-Eight.
Grace only went to the pub with the others so she could use the public phone in Langholme. It wasn’t so much that she had a puritan attitude to communal drinking but she hated the crowded intimacy, the jostling at the bar, feeling strangers’ breath on her neck. She’d gone out occasionally with people from her hall at university so as not to seem stuck-up, and student haunts were always packed and noisy. Edmund had never suggested taking her to the pub. When he drank it was seriously, on his own behind closed doors.
Rachael must have thought Grace would resist because when she suggested the trip she said, “Project leader’s orders. You’ve got to come. It’ll do us all good to get away from this place for a while.”
So they’d climbed into Rachael’s tiny car and driven through the dark to Langholme. Grace had been a bit anxious about leaving all her work at Baikie’s with the farmhouse empty anyone could break in, but the others said she was being ridiculous. Who would drive all that way to steal a pile of papers and a couple of pairs of binoculars? And she saw that she probably was being foolish. With help she’d come to realize that.
She waited until it was almost closing time to phone her father from the call box in the street outside. In the short space of time they were in the pub Anne drank four gins and flirted with the young boys by the bar.
Grace could hear the clatter of plates, sense her father’s wavering concentration.
“Well?” she shouted. “Did you get my letter?”
“Yes.”
“Have you made me an appointment?”
“Don’t be stupid. You’re the most sorted-out person I know. You don’t need to see a shrink.”
Only then did she realize how much she’d been relying on the doctor to provide her with a way out. She stood in the phone box, cut off from the pub by the road. A lorry went past, dazzling her with its headlights, making the small panes of glass in the old-fashioned box vibrate.
“Dad?” She’d lost concentration and was scared he’d hung up on her.
“Yes.”
“I can’t carry on doing this, Dad.”
“Of course you can. It’s not for much longer, is it?”
“It’s too long. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“For me, girl. Stick it out for me. The old team, working together.”
There was a shout in the background, a crash of plates and without saying goodbye, her father replaced the receiver.
For a long time she stood where she was, trapped in the box. She couldn’t face Rachael or Anne in the smoky pub. She was afraid she’d burst into tears, not of sadness but of confusion. She didn’t know what to do and she’d always been able to take decisions before. Then a drunk old man came out of the pub and staggered crabwise across the road towards her, lit by a single lamp further down the street. She pushed open the heavy door and fled. She passed him on the pavement but he seemed not to see her.
In the pub Anne was back at the bar.
“You’ve been a long time,” Rachael said.
“I couldn’t get through.”
Then Rachael told her that Anne was planning to move into the box room
“I think she just needs the privacy,” she said apologetically.
“Why?” Grace demanded. “What’s she up to?” It was her way of trying to warn Rachael, but the other woman looked at her strangely and changed the conversation, so for a moment Grace wondered if they were working together, if there was a conspiracy against her.
I am going mad, she thought. Just like my father.
The next morning Rachael went off early. She said she had a meeting with Peter and the developer. Grace, who hadn’t slept much, was up before her, and tried to make normal conversation. She made Rachael coffee, then watched the small car drive away, the engine straining up the hill. Back in the cottage she put bread under the grill to toast, but didn’t get round to eating it because Anne appeared, still in her dressing gown, her wet hair wrapped in a towel.
“I’m on my way out,” Grace said quickly. “I won’t be back until this evening. It’ll be quite late.”
Anne must have seen the bread slowly turning brown under the grill but she only shrugged and said OK.
It wasn’t until midday that Grace realized she’d rushed off in such a hurry
that she hadn’t left details of her proposed route at Baikie’s.
She didn’t want to give Rachael cause to look more closely at her work so she decided to go back. She assumed that by then Anne would be out with her quad rats There was a car parked by the cottage and for a moment Grace was suspicious. It wasn’t Peter Kemp’s car and they never had other visitors. Then she thought again that she was being ridiculous. It probably belonged to someone who was looking at Black Law farmhouse and the land, a valuer or an agent.
As soon as she went into the kitchen she heard the noises in the other room, snuffling, squealing sounds. Without thinking she opened the door into the living room to look in. There was a smell of food, of smoked fish and ripe fruit, which made her feel sick. She saw Anne Preece lying on the floor with a man. His naked bottom was in the air, his trousers round his ankles, so like the pose in a smutty seaside postcard that she wondered briefly if it was a practical joke. Anne’s way of getting back at her. But Anne wasn’t laughing. Underneath the man but facing the door she saw Grace at once and was obviously shocked. The man had to turn to look at her. At the same time he was pulling up his underpants with one hand and bearing his weight with the other. It was quite a gymnastic feat. As soon as he turned, Grace recognized the man’s face. Edmund had sent her newspaper cuttings about the Black Law development and Godfrey Waugh had featured. Grace stared at him for a moment then withdrew, shutting the door behind her.
So Anne had been in league with the opposition all along. That at least hadn’t been part of her imagination While she was considering what to make of the information she tore a page from her notebook and wrote the details of where she expected to be that afternoon.
The door opened and Anne came in, not super cool any more, but ruffled, diffident. As uncertain, Grace could see, as she was. Looking at Anne Preece, Grace decided not to pass on the information about her affair with Waugh to her father. It would have to be dealt with, but not in that way. She hated the idea of Edmund gloating over it, rolling the details round and round in his mouth as if it were an expensive brandy to be savoured.
So when Anne talked about Godfrey’s wife and child she said, “It’s all right. I won’t say anything.”