Grave Consequences

by Dana Cameron

  The figure was low because it was George Whiting; it was bulky because he was carrying a bundle of some sort. And now I could tell he was heading down the path to St. Alban’s Church.

  George made sense, I thought excitedly. He wasn’t interested in Mother Beatrice or her story, but he was vastly interested in Jane and her work, albeit in a hostile way. It would have been no trouble for him to break into the site—a good industrial-sized pair of bolt-cutters would have done the job. Perhaps he’d done no more damage because he’d been surprised; perhaps he’d felt only a token display of violence and vandalism was enough, either to vent his displeasure against my friend or to satisfy himself with a response. It had certainly stopped work for a day and put a cat among the pigeons, to say the least. But what was he up to now? Was it possible, as Andrew had hinted, that he might also be responsible for Julia’s death? Worse than that, was he trying to frame Jane for it?

  I followed along, more slowly now because Whiting was moving more slowly; I could hear the rough rasp of his breath from where I was, nearly twenty-five meters behind. I had to fall farther back when he reached the open field where Sabine had been playing soccer after her math tutorial last week. Once he moved past it, into closer proximity to the church itself, I felt it was safe enough to continue following him, but had to freeze halfway across the field, visible to anyone who cared to look for me, when he stopped just short of St. Alban’s churchyard and the low stone wall that encircled the modern cemetery. I waited until he began to fumble his way off the river path, looking for the entrance into the cemetery.

  I began to think I knew what was going on. I followed behind as he entered the churchyard and moved hesitatingly across the yard, occasionally tripping over the unevenness of the ground or perhaps a footstone. He stumbled across the yard until he reached the far side, which was sheltered by the huge oak that had been the marker of the makeshift letter-drop that I had used to communicate with Stephen, the young man outside the pub. He dropped his bundle gently, and I could almost swear that I hear the clatter of small, light objects. I wondered if he hadn’t been drinking because his breath was heavy and irregular, even for someone who’d been moving as long as he had.

  He dropped to his knees by the tree. For almost thirty seconds, I thought he was looking for another note that might had been left for me. But when I heard the all-too-familiar ring of metal on stone, I realized the truth.

  George Whiting was digging in the graveyard behind St. Alban’s.

  From my vantage point behind a large gravestone, I considered what to do. I could feel the cold, rough edge of the stone beneath my fingers, the cool radiating from the stone into the warm of the night. I swallowed as I hurriedly ran down my options. I could leave as quietly as I’d come and find the police. I could try and startle him, with any luck, ensuring that he would flee and I could find out what was in the bundle, though I had a horrid suspicion that I already knew. I could leave and crawl back into bed, and say nothing to anyone about any of this.

  His progress was slow; there were lots of roots that close to the tree. I waited a while longer in the hateful paralysis of indecision. But it was George himself who finally made me decide what to do. I realized that his heavy breathing and unsure movements weren’t because he was drunk.

  It was because he was crying.

  Looking back on it, I suppose I had been ready for anything else. Well, anything else providing he didn’t have a gun or accomplices or a plan. This completely disarmed me. What the hell was I supposed to do with a crying villain? Then, as though his sadness was communicable, I felt the weight of what the man was feeling, at what he’d done, at what he was doing now. It was ghastly, the way his sins seemed to overtake him now.

  I stood up and stepped from behind my headstone, no longer bothering about trying to be very quiet. He was so intent on his work that it kept him from hearing me. I moved closer, until I was a few steps away, and then I said, “What are you doing?”

  I stood, feeling incredibly stupid: He was too intent upon his work and hadn’t heard.

  Out of habit, I cleared my throat, and this time, Whiting shot up and whirled around as though I’d fired a shot off next to his head.

  “Who’s there?” He whipped his head around, straining to see in the dark.

  “It’s me. I think you should stop what you’re doing.”

  He gripped the trenching tool he’d been using; I could see by the moonlight that his worn face was streaked with dirt and tears. “Who is it?”

  I stepped back involuntarily. “Emma Fielding.”

  “Who?” I could see him peering against the darkness and I turned on my flashlight.

  “Jane Compton’s friend.” I cleared my throat. “The American.”

  “Oh, good Jesus.” His shoulders slumped and he wiped hurriedly at his face, turning it away from me. “Get out of here, why don’t you?” His voice was hoarse. “This doesn’t concern you. None of this concerns you.”

  “I’m not leaving without the bones, Mr. Whiting. They do concern me.”

  “I don’t know what I thought I was doing, coming here with them,” he said, almost to himself. “I would have been better off just tossing them in the river, bloody things.”

  “I expect you had other things on your mind,” I said, trying to make my voice as steady as possible. I found it hard to speak at all. “Julia’s death must be sitting pretty heavily on you.”

  “Oh, God, you know…” He slumped within himself, all the weight of his deeds and conscience heavy on him. “You have no idea what it’s been like…”

  “No. But it’s over now. Why don’t you just give me the bones, for a start?”

  He slung the bag of bones at me, but wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Take them.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I wish to hell I’d never found them.”

  The bag was surprisingly light; and I tried to catch it so as not to further damage the rattling contents. I looked at him in disbelief. “Found is a pretty strange word, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Found is the only word I can bear! Ellen was so pleased, so very pleased.” He shook his head slowly. “I hadn’t seen her smile for months, you see. I was so hoping she was having one of her good days. But then it all came out. She said, ‘Come, George, come and see! Our little girl’s come home!’”

  My skin crawled. Ellen Whiting had found the results of her husband’s vandalism? The poor woman…

  “Ellen was over the moon, as if everything was back the way it should be. When she ever told me she’d been to the digs, as she called the archaeological site, I thought I’d die. ‘I went looking for her at the digs and I found her, George,’ she said, ‘I’ve brought Julia back. My girl is safe and quiet, and she won’t cause any trouble anymore. I promise.’”

  My blood ran cold.

  “Then she showed me the bones. She’d dug them up, you see, put them in…in Julia’s bed. What happened was, I think she understood, at the last, what she’d done to Julia. And so she went looking for our little girl. First she went to the construction site, where Julia—”

  “Wait—that was when I saw her at the construction site. Last Sunday?”

  He nodded, resigned and weak. “That’s when she started to apologize for it. She’d had a moment, one when her head wasn’t so fogged. She understood, somehow, something of what she’d done.”

  Oh, my God, no. I felt dizzy, faint, at last understanding what had happened.

  “Ellen went back to the construction site to look for Julia. That was the day I began to suspect what had happened. She got out of her room again, early Monday morning and went to the archaeology site. That’s when she showed me the bones…your bones, there.”

  I swallowed hard, realizing what George Whiting had been going through since he’d learned of his daughter’s death.

  He looked anguished. “She’d done it because she was afraid of how furious I’d been with Julia. She was always trying to keep me from being angry; she of all people should have
known that it didn’t mean anything, really, with Julia. I was angry, I was hurt, when Julia went to study with that…Compton woman…but Ellen should have understood, it was never as bad as she imagined. Ever since Julia started her program and we fell out, Ellen’s turns have been so much worse. I wish I could have controlled myself better, but when you’ve got a wife who’s sick, a company to run, and a kid who’s just stabbed you in the heart, so to speak, it’s…hard not to…be on edge.”

  He’d lost a daughter and a wife, under the most horrifying of circumstances.

  Whiting continued. “When Ellen said she’d found Julia, at first I was hopeful, maybe there’d been some kind of mistake by the police, even though I’d identified her…her myself…Ellen had been so full of remorse over what she’d done—in that moment—she went looking for Julia. And she explained it all very carefully to me: Julia went to the house, two weeks ago this Friday, we had another row, she left. Ellen took her rubber washing up gloves, followed her…waited until she came back out from the Grub and Cabbage…then she called her, tried to get her to stop making me angry. When Julia said she wasn’t coming back, Ellen shoved her against the wall of the alley, cracked her head and…smothered her. Stuffed a…” He took a moment to choke out the words. “A plastic bag into her mouth. Held her nose. She took Julia to the skip, and brought her wallet back too; for some reason, Ellen didn’t want it to get lost. It’s in the sack there with the bones and the gloves, I was going to bury that too. Bury all the secrets—”

  I was trembling now. “We should go to the police. Tell them what happened. Your wife can get the help she needs—”

  That was what snapped him out of his reflections. “No! Julia’s dead. That’s the worst that could have happened, and it’s over. What good will going to the police serve? I’m a respectable man, I’ve made something of myself in this town. I’ve lost so much, so much, and now you’d take the rest of it from me as well? Do you have any idea what the tabloids would do to us? Surely you’d want to spare Ellen that?”

  He slumped back against the tree and slid to the ground, past exhausted now. “I never thought it would come to this. I’d always had my priorities straight—keep the business sound, the family in line, and everything will be well. These past weeks, I’ve lost so much more than I ever thought possible, you can’t imagine…” He looked at me. “Can’t you just let us alone to solve our own problems? The worst has happened, there’ll be nothing more, I swear. I’ll find a home, a hospital for Ellen—”

  I sat down heavily, too, barely able to believe what I’d heard. I swallowed, tried to gather my wits about me, but George Whiting was just that little bit faster.

  He looked up sharply. “You didn’t know all this, did you? You thought I’d killed Julia. You’d no idea.”

  I shook my head. “I thought you’d robbed the site to get at Jane. Maybe. I was out here in case whoever it was was really after Mother Beatrice’s bones.”

  “You’re joking! I’m a businessman, for God’s sake!” he said, disgusted. “If I want to fuck someone over, I do it with lawyers, hurt them in the wallet. I don’t sod about, stealing bits of bone and digging holes.” He considered this turn of events ruefully. “So you were just waiting out here and I happened along, is that it?”

  I shrugged. “Just waiting” had done the job.

  “Christ.” Then he seemed to find some hope there. He straightened himself. “See here, if this is all an accident, you needn’t say anything, do you? You just go home and let me sort this out. No one ever needs to find out about poor Ellen—”

  My anger was enough to put me on my feet again. “Poor Ellen? What about poor Jane? You’d be happy enough to have her convicted, I suppose?”

  Whiting made a face, waved that suggestion away. “They’ll never arrest Jane Compton. I’m sure they wouldn’t. There’s no proof besides her hatred of me and her dislike of my girl. And Ellen didn’t think about things long; she just did it. Less to cover up that way, I guess. The police have said they’re more interested in finding Julia’s brother, not that anyone knows where that miserable little sod is—”

  I suddenly had a very good idea where Julia’s brother might be.

  “—So you needn’t worry about your precious Jane.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I stood up. “I think I’ve relied too much on accident as it is, up till now, to leave anything more to chance.”

  “Oh, it’s very easy for you, isn’t it?” he said, recovering himself. “You don’t suffer any of the consequences, you don’t even need to stop here and see how others fare in your wake! You’ll go home eventually, and all this will be a memory of little consequence to you.”

  I laughed. “Trust me when I say this whole affair has been nothing but consequence to me.”

  He looked as though he was still convinced that there was a way out of this. “It would be very easy to ruin me with this. Ellen’s ill, badly ill, but what other harm can she do?”

  I was more surprised by his pleading than by his lack of logic. It didn’t suit George Whiting.

  “I’ll find a place for her…where she can’t hurt anyone, can’t hurt herself,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be better than a lot of fuss that wouldn’t serve anyone? I swear to you, that’s what I’ll do. I won’t lose everything I’ve worked so hard for.”

  It almost made a bizarre kind of sense, but I shook my head. “It leaves too many people wondering. It leaves a cloud over Jane, Greg, Andr—and everyone. There are too many questions that go begging answers.”

  He shook his head violently. “No, no, they wouldn’t wonder. People…people here know how to look after their own, when to keep it buttoned. It would just fade away.”

  I shrugged. “I’m sorry.”

  “The hell you are.” He spat. “This means nothing to you. I’m telling you, just walk away from this now. I’ve worked too hard to raise my family up and to protect them now. I won’t let you simply destroy it because you think it’s right.”

  He stepped forward, gripping the trenching tool tightly; he raised it, as if calculating whether it would do the job, if he decided it was worth trying. I willed myself to be calm, and, as if by habit, relaxed into a crouch. I had to wonder how far a tough man, who’d spent years fighting for position in town and the security of his family, would go to protect that position and the remains of that family. He’d already, even in the throes of grief over Julia, tried to help conceal her murder by his wife, and it didn’t take a lot of imagination to see that the accidental death of a visitor out walking by the river in the dark wouldn’t bother him very much in the least.

  I sized him up and could tell he was doing the same. He was less than a head smaller than I was, but the muscles that showed under his shirtsleeves were as tough as old roots. I knew how aggressive he could be and had no doubt that if he chose to attack me, I could get badly hurt, possibly even killed. On the other hand, I could see him struggling with himself, balancing grief and fear and anger against the slim possibility of making it better if he should succeed in silencing me, and the much larger reckoning, how very much worse it would be if he tried to kill me and failed. He could see that I was taller, though perhaps not so heavily built as he was. He didn’t know about my habit of running and my visits to Nolan, a personal trainer who was teaching me self-defense. He couldn’t know these things, but he was carefully considering the fact that I had followed him, had confronted him, and was now apparently calmly waiting for him to decide.

  He was wrong there. I wasn’t the least bit calm. The only thing that kept me from freaking out entirely was the idea that if I didn’t assume a ready posture, things would go that much more the worse for me when they did happen. So it wasn’t so much bravery or cool as it was a commonsensical approach to pain avoidance and the knowledge from once having dropped my flashlight on my bare foot, if I chose to lay it upside George Whiting’s head, he’d learn I wasn’t a pushover.

  “This means nothing to you,” he repeated. A thought str
uck him and he lowered the trenching tool a mite with a sly look. “But maybe it does once it’s put into the proper framework, eh?”

  I did not relax as I tried to read his face. It was with good reason that he’d made himself a success in a very rough business. “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is, your friends seem to know when to keep their mouths shut, don’t they? About Mads down at the cafe. I bet you couldn’t force Jane’s mouth open with a pry bar.”

  I could feel my heart thudding in my chest and I felt my hands go cold again. I shook my head, tried to keep my voice steady. “I don’t think she knows—”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I could have died. George Whiting seized on that, more and more sure of himself now.

  “But you do know, don’t you? I’m not surprised, really. People around here, they know everyone’s business, can’t help but, in a community as small as this one was once. No one was sorry to see Sebastian Hall go; my dad told me he even gave around he’d had gone up to London after, and everyone assumed he was killed in the Blitz. It wasn’t hard to cover up, though they could have done better to drop Hall off at the pig farm and let the porkers finish him off properly. But no one knew and no one cared to know and it wasn’t hard to keep quiet after. Poor lasses, what else should they have done? What would any of us have done in their places? Hmmm?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He pounced on that. “Exactly.”

  “But self-defense is different than outright murder…” I struggled to derive some sense from the distinction I was making.

  George moved impatiently. “My wife is out of her mind, do you understand me? She didn’t know what she was doing. I see very little difference between the actions of…someone who’s lost her mind, and a pair of young girls fighting in self-defense. Who’s to say there’s a difference?”