Helen was sitting mutely at Liam’s side, and it seemed to Chad that he had become a guest in his own house, and that Liam was the host.
But then Helen caught his eye, and whatever she saw there roused her to action. She got to her feet. ‘I think we need to eat,’ she said. ‘Chad, dear, you’re still in your coat.’ She laughed, went to him. ‘Let’s fix everyone some food.’
In the hall, he took off his coat, hung it on its peg. Too many questions, he thought, hearing her taking plates from shelves, opening the fridge, the clink of a bottle of wine. Who was that girl? Who had injured her so badly? And that dog, now nuzzling her elbow, licking her hand. How did they get here, these people, sitting there in my lounge? Who brought whom? Did Helen just find them on the doorstep?
Later he would ask her, did Liam bring them?
She’ll hear him ask the question. She’ll hear, underneath his words, something unasked, something waiting to be asked. She’ll find that she can’t lie. No, she’ll say. Liam was already here, she’ll say to Chad, knowing that in these words she’s sowing seeds of doubt, unable to protect him by untruths.
But, for now, they stand in the kitchen, side by side, stirring soup on the hob, cutting bread, pouring drinks, helping Lisa sit at the table, helping her manage a spoon in her good hand, breathing again as, wincing through pain, Lisa eats, and laughs.
‘The Green Man...?’ Berenice wondered if she’d spoken out loud. She took a sip of red wine, turned back to the book.
‘As did the Green Man himself once emerge from the Tree of Life, only to Merge once more into leafy desuetude, so does this knowledge risk falling on stony ground unheeded, and will go unnoticed by generations to come. In the wrong hands it brings terrible dangers, as witnessed once already; so do I commit these notes, the only true account of my findings, to these pages, in hope that by these rays of truth we may see more clearly.’
She took another sip of wine, turned the page.
‘In the time of the Ark, when the world convulsed and the floods broke forth, they said it was to cleanse mankind of sin. And yet, what I say now, is that the world is made clean by the tears shed by mankind himself, as we bury our dead, as we commit our children to the earth, until the next flood comes again.’
Berenice rolled some spaghetti on to her fork. She closed the book and placed it on the far side of the table, don’t want that vicar complaining about tomato sauce stains…
Terrible dangers, witnessed once already.
She wondered what they were. And children, committed to the earth, and people shedding tears.
Stories, she thought. The truth is always there, in the stories people tell themselves. All you have to do, is listen.
She swirled more spaghetti around her fork.
Dead children. Murdo and his wife had a child who died.
It takes less than that to kill a marriage.
And there’s that Dr. Merletti with her passionate declaration of love, the mistress’s manifesto, always the same, I could have written it myself.
Stories, she thought. It’s time to talk to Virginia again.
20th September, 1922
The hum of the machine seemed to fill the room, so loud, that at first Gabriel didn’t hear the click of the door. Then, aware of a shadow across the bench, he turned, sharply.
‘Amelia,’ he said.
‘Were you hoping I was someone else?’ She brushed her fingers along the edge of the bench.
‘What news?’
‘The doctor’s here. He says it’s a fever. He says she may be over the worse. Nanny Roberts is with her now.’
‘Has she managed to eat?’
‘A little soup, that’s all.’
She watched him as he went to his switches, pulled them across. The hum faded. Outside, the sky was pink with the last of the day.
‘I have been praying - ’ she began, but he interrupted, appearing not to hear.
‘No more.’ His voice was rough. ‘We have laid your father in his final resting place, and your brother. There will be no more loss…’
‘I hope that you are right, my dear.’ She laid her hand briefly on his arm.
He went to the bench, fiddled a wire into place. There was a fizz, a spark.
‘We will be a family, you and me and our dear child,’ she said, but he was concentrating on a dial. ‘And the shadow of our loss…’ she said.
‘Oh, such a dark, dark shadow.’ He seemed to be speaking to his dials. ‘A gap that cannot be filled…’
She saw that his eyes had filled with tears. He blinked, dabbed at the corners of his eyes with a finger. He turned towards the bench, flicked another switch.
From the house she heard the maid calling her.
‘Doctor Fitzgerald is about to leave,’ she said. ‘I must go to him. I’ll see you at dinner.’
He gave a brief nod. She shut the door behind her.
Chapter Nineteen
Brightness after the rain. From the window of the spare bedroom, Helen could see the strip of sea, rippled with morning sunlight.
Lisa lay in the bed, fast asleep, breathing gently, her dog at her shoulder. The bruising around her eye looked darker, but the swelling seemed to have diminished, and the cut looked clean where Liam had washed and dressed it.
Helen gazed down on her sleeping form. Tazer stirred, watched her.
She ought to see a doctor, she thought. Or the police. Or someone.
I don’t know what to do.
The room had pale blue walls. The curtains had a blotchy, abstract pattern in mauve and pink.
Our child would have slept here. Chad had let that slip, once, during the move, the nursery he’d called it, carrying a box of books.
The box was still there in the corner of the room, gathering dust.
And what about Clem? Was he going to pursue his daughter? Are we all somehow in danger now?
She thought of Liam, how cool he was, how calm and in charge. The sense of danger retreated at the thought.
She left Lisa sleeping, her dog too, snoring quietly.
She went back to her bedroom. She drew the curtains, funny old things, she’d been determined to replace them when she and Chad had first moved in, pale grey with abstract floral whorls in yellow.
She looked out at the shining slate roofs. From downstairs came the smell of coffee, the clatter of the dishwasher.
They’d overslept, woken to sunshine, blinked at each other, at the lateness of the hour, at, more than anything, finding themselves together, in their bed, facing each other in the unexpected sunlight.
He had put his arms around her, kissed her forehead, murmured about that poor girl in the spare room, was she going to be all right? And she’d answered something about how she couldn’t go back to that awful father, and he’d agreed, they must think about it, he didn’t have much time today, something about a session with the churchwardens and then a meeting about a funeral, yet another, it would be nice to have a marriage, or a baptism or two but such is the dear old C of E, he supposed…
Helen sat on the unmade bed. Last night he had come home, expecting silence, finding us all there. She remembered his flicker of surprise at seeing Liam, the questions, unasked, in his eyes.
She put on her slippers.
Downstairs Chad was pouring coffee. He held up her cup, and she said, ‘Yes, please.’
They sat opposite each other.
‘How is she?’ he asked.
‘Fast asleep. Very bruised still.’
‘Perhaps we should call a doctor, he said.
‘They’re so scared of her father,’ she said.
‘Should we tell the police?’ he looked at her.
‘She won’t let us.’
He spread butter on a piece of toast.
‘A funeral, you said,’ she said to him.
‘What? Oh, yes. Nice chap from over the other side of town is coming to see me, his mum was in a nursing home up the hill, you know the one, it looks like an old convent or something, li
ttle stone arched doorway, anyway, finally she’s died, ninety-four or something, so the niceties have to be done. She used to worship with us, apparently.’
‘With dear old Robinson?’ Helen asked.
He smiled at her across the table. ‘No doubt,’ he said. He reached for the marmalade. ‘And then, I’ll probably call in on Virginia.’
‘Will you?’ Helen watched him.
He continued to spread his toast. ‘She left a message on the answering machine, she’s feeling very shaky as you can imagine…’
‘Oh, yes, I can imagine – ’
‘ - Tobias is just hiding away waiting for the knock at the door. The first thing is to help her find a lawyer, he needs to feel that someone, other than us, is on his side.’ The toast sat untouched on his plate.
‘I’m sure he does.’ She stood up, placed the kettle on the stove. ‘Someone other than us,’ she repeated.
‘Did you say something?’ He was looking at her now.
‘Us,’ she said again.
He picked up his toast and took a large bite.
‘You can ask your Virginia,’ Helen went on, ‘what Clem Voake has got to do with Tobias, that when his daughter tries to defend the boy, her father goes for her.’
‘I can, can I? And in turn, will you explain why that man was in my house?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ She stood, looking down at him, and it was as if she had become much taller, and he had somehow shrunk. How had this happened, that in a few seconds they’d gone from amicable fondness to this bristling hostility.
‘That man,’ he was saying, ‘that man from the lab, sitting in my house, next to my wife, bringing chaos into my kitchen, danger, even, introducing me to people I’d never seen before in my life, in my own house…’ The last few words were almost shouted. He took another large bite of toast.
She listened to the loud crunching in the silence of the room. Not only hostility, but these odd, clichéd sentences.
‘Did you invite him here?’ her husband was saying. He was holding his piece of toast in front of his face.
‘If we’re going to argue, at least put that down,’ she said.
‘I can eat toast, can’t I?’
In a minute, she thought, I’ll burst out laughing, and so will he, and none of this will have been real, as if a script had been put in front of us and we started reading it off before we realized that it wasn’t ours, we were just a married couple having breakfast together before we went to our day’s work…
But there was no laughter. Instead, he got to his feet, looking at his watch. ‘I must go, I’m late,’ he said, ‘Robbie will be wondering where I’ve got to, always prompt, that man…’
He walked out of the room without looking back. She heard his coat taken from its peg, the jangle of keys, the slam of the front door.
How had this happened?
The question circled in her mind.
What was he running away from? The poor girl upstairs? The threat of her father coming after her? The need to make decisions about her care?
It was more than that. We’re both running away, she thought.
She wandered into the living room, drew back the curtains, went to the shelves, picked out the notebook into which she’d placed the pages of Amelia’s writings.
“There was a time when we lived in peace, my husband and I, when we had hope of a future lived in joy. All that is gone now, squandered between the rays and beams, the light of our love dying away to darkness…”
She folded the page away.
These deaths, the lab, the book. Virginia living in the shadows of the past…
Footsteps behind her. Lisa stood in the doorway. Helen’s borrowed shirt drooped on her slight form.
‘Lisa – ’
‘I’m starving.’ She slumped at the table. The bruising seemed worse, one eye half-closed, one side of her face swollen.
‘Sure. Breakfast? What would you like?’
‘Don’t care.’
Helen threw her a look.
‘Have you got a fag?’ Lisa said.
‘We don’t smoke.’ Helen said.
‘I’ll have whatever there is. And then I’m going home.’
‘Home? But – ’
‘But what?’ Lisa faced her.
‘The state you were in last night – ’
‘What do you know about it?’ Her voice was hoarse.
In silence, Helen poured tea, made toast, put butter on the table. She wondered what to do, who to tell about this troubled girl returning to certain danger, who to confide in about the criss-cross marks across her arms, savage red lines glimpsed through the thin fabric of her borrowed shirt.
“The spirit endeavours, in the virtue of its magnetick nature, to mix itself with the corporeal planets, until at last they arrive to the highest degrees…”
‘It’s rubbish, this,’ Berenice said, putting the book down on her desk. ‘I don’t know why I asked that vicar to bring it in.’
Mary looked up from a pile of papers. ‘He didn’t seem that keen to part with it, either.’
Berenice turned the book over in her hands. ‘And yet that poor sap thinks it’ll tell him something, and the Professor seemed to think it had something too.’
‘That poor sap – ’ the morning sun glinted on her pen, as Mary made notes on a form. ‘He may not be the best guide of what we need as evidence.’
Berenice smiled. ‘Yeah. You’re right.’ She flicked through a few pages, then read out loud, ‘“And though we may be separated from our true nature, from our paradisiacal nature, though we are fallen, living in exile from Eden, yet we know that the Green Lion resides in Eden still, and with this purification can we be made whole so that our eyes may once more see the Garden of our true souls…”’ She looked at Mary. ‘It sounds just like my nan in church,’ she said. ‘Almost word for word, I’d say.’
Mary laughed.
‘There’s all this stuff about the lighthouse,’ Berenice said.
‘Hank’s Tower?’
Berenice nodded. ‘The author here, Johann, he’s obsessed with it. He does experiments there. Calls it the Scallop Tower, but the vicar said that was the old name for it.’
Berenice closed the book and placed it on her desk. ‘It would be more use if it helped me find a killer.’
‘The Chief Super was asking about Clem Voake.’
‘He was?’
‘Yes.’ Mary stared at her pile of papers.
‘Why doesn’t he talk to me?’
‘He said, if we’ve scared the bastard off it’s going to make his job twice as hard.’
‘If we’ve scared him off? And what makes him think I’ve got anything to do with - ’
The click of the door silenced her. Ben stood there. ‘There’s another one downstairs, asking for you.’
‘Another what?’
‘Another physicist. He wants to talk to you in confidence, he said.’
‘About the universe?’
‘About the case. I think. I hope, anyway.’
‘Which physicist?’ Berenice asked.
‘Iain Hendrickson.’ Ben consulted a bit of paper. ‘Shall I send him up?’
‘Sure. I might ask him about the luminiferous aether while I’m about it.’
Liam gazed at his computer screen, clicked the mouse, typed a bit. ‘Fossil relics of the Big Bang,’ he said. He clicked some more. ‘Spin half particles,’ he said. He leaned back in his chair and looked down at his dog. ‘Three generations of spin half particles, eh, Jonas? And we don’t know why.’ He ruffled Jonas’s head. ‘Or perhaps you do, old dog. Here we are, replicating the conditions in the universe when it was less than a trillionth of a second old. It should all be plain to see – ’ he waved at his screen. Jonas looked at the screen too, then back at Liam, one ear cocked.
Liam scrolled through the data. ‘None of this makes sense,’ he said, to his dog. ‘Iain thinks that we’re seeing axions, but I don’t see how that would produce these char
ges. And anyway, whatever we’re seeing is some kind of muon, surely…’
He looked at the dog. ‘All I know is, we’re going to have tell the world at some point. Results like this, we can’t keep them to ourselves.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘It used to be fun, Jonas. Of course, you didn’t know me in my student days, discovering more and more about this stuff, knowing that this was all I wanted to do. I loved it. But now…’ He glanced back at his screen. ‘I never thought it would be dangerous. Something’s up, that’s for sure. But none of us knows what it is.’ He patted his dog’s head again. ‘And that book of Helen’s, what does he say? He says, that whatever it is, this thing called Gravity, all we know is that it explains the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea, and yet we do not know its cause. We’re no further on than that.’ He looked back at his screen. ‘We’re no further on than some Edwardian madman.’
He watched the live feed from the beam, studied the curves of data. He yawned, thought about coffee, wondered when to go into the lab.
‘Too much to think about, Jonas,’ he said. Last night he’d driven into Faversham, dropped that boy Finn off at some kind of hostel, ‘sure you’ll be OK, don’t like the look of those lads,’ and Finn had laughed, they’re safe they are, he’d said. And he’d made Liam promise, don’t let Lisa go back to her dad. Whatever she says, OK? And second promise - don’t tell the feds. It’ll make it so much worse for her if he knows she’s grassed him up.’ And Liam, exhausted, had promised.
And that was on his mind. But more than that, was the expression on the face of Helen’s husband as he’d walked in the door. And then, ten minutes later, he and Helen are serving out soup as if they’d both invited him to tea…
He sighed, looked down at his dog. ‘Out of my depth again, eh, Jonas?’
And what is she anyway, he thought. A lonely vicar’s wife who wants to be pregnant. Hardly an option for anything long term…
He found he couldn’t quite remember what she looked like. He leaned back, his hands behind his head.
Dying to Know (A Detective Inspector Berenice Killick Mystery) Page 17