‘Is that normal?’ Berenice was gazing out of the window.
He didn’t reply.
‘“… the man who has the power to turn lead into gold,”’ she said. ‘“Purified by one drop of baptismal water…’’
‘Oh, the Book.’ He sighed.
‘You don’t approve?’
‘My view on the Book is that it’s seventeenth century alchemical rubbish re-written by a nineteenth century obsessive. And that wouldn’t matter, if it wasn’t that poor Tobias got far too caught up in it. Murdo’s wife should have kept it away from him.’
‘It belonged to Elizabeth.’
‘It was in her family. So what?’
Berenice shrugged. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘So what.’
‘You want me to say it was some kind of love token? The way the men were both after it – and the Professor…’ He stopped, looked at her. ‘That doesn’t make it true,’ he said.
‘No,’ she agreed.
His attention had drifted away from her towards the corridor.
‘However,’ she went on. ‘Like you, the author of the book is struggling with faith, and evidence. And like you, he’s finding another way to ask questions of the chaos.’
Liam seemed to be about to say something, but then the door clicked open behind Berenice, and all she could see was the change to his face as he jumped to his feet.
‘Helen.’ His voice shook slightly. ‘You knew where to find me?’
‘Neil walked me through reception. They gave me a pass,’ she said.
‘You know DI – um – ’
‘We spoke on the phone.’ Helen offered her hand.
‘So we did.’ Berenice got to her feet. ‘We were just discussing chaos,’ she said.
Virginia poked at the ash in the grate. The early frost had given way to grey cloud and the room was dull and cold.
‘Love gone wrong,’ she said.
Chad, still in his coat, sat on one edge of the sofa.
‘Hate,’ she went on. ‘Hate is love gone wrong.’
He listened to the scraping of the ash.
‘A few sticks of wood,’ she said. ‘At least they’re dry. I don’t usually bother, but today…’
‘Not on my account,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not on your account.’
She laid the fire, struck a match. The flames struggled in the damp chimney, then flared into a feeble fire. She came to sit next to him. ‘His birthday,’ she said. ‘He’d have been fourteen.’
She sat, dry-eyed, next to him. After a while, he placed one arm around her shoulders.
‘Your husband, Mrs. Meyrick - ’ Berenice watched the glance between Liam and Helen and wondered why she felt as if she’d said the wrong thing. ‘He’s been a great help to that family.’
‘Tobias.’ Helen was unbuttoning her coat. ‘Poor kid.’ She turned to Liam. ‘I met Elizabeth. At the caravan. She was so helpful.’
He was gazing at her as she stood in her jeans, her pastel pink cashmere, her coat slung over one arm, her hair loose around her shoulders. Tall, and poised. Like a fashion model, Berenice thought. No wonder he’s looking at her like that.
Helen turned to Berenice. ‘She was going to come and see you. We found Lisa’s hair band at the old house, she’s disappeared from the caravan but her dog was there, looking terrible - did she tell you? She said she’d call at your offices - ’
‘I – um – I haven’t been there.’
‘Perhaps she handed them into someone else. One of your team – ’
Berenice could see the question in Helen’s eyes.
‘We were really worried about her,’ Helen said.
‘A dog – she was going to hand it in?’
Helen shrugged. ‘She wasn’t that keen on keeping him, I don’t think. Mud all over her flash car…’
Liam was smiling at her.
‘I’ll go to HQ and see what they say.’ Berenice seemed reluctant to move.
Beyond the slatted blinds, the sky was growing dark.
‘It’s going to rain,’ Liam said.
‘This land dispute – ’ Berenice turned to him. ‘How much of a dispute was it?’
‘All I know is,’ Liam began, ‘Alan was very keen to get the land from whoever owned it – the Voakes, you say? I don’t know much about it. And the sale was agreed just before he died.’
Berenice picked up her bag. ‘I should be going,’ she said. At the door she turned to Liam. ‘These recent results – they’re not what you were expecting?’
‘They’re odd, sure.’
‘WW Boson scattering sort of odd?’
‘Yeah.’ He smiled. ‘That sort of thing.’
‘Not bad for a handful of leaves,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the teachings.’
‘And you call me a hippy?’ he said.
She returned his smile. ‘See you around.’
It was as if the tension in the room drifted out into the corridor with her. Her last glance backwards, as the door shut, took in the two of them, Helen taking a step towards him as he reached out his arms to her.
The flames crackled in the grate.
‘There is nothing,’ Virginia said. ‘In the gaps. There’s silence. And nothing. Murdo knew that too.’
Chad withdrew his hand from her shoulder. He sat, motionless, next to her.
‘He knew it the way a scientist knows it,’ she went on. ‘Matter. Anti-matter. The nothing in the gaps between the smallest smallest particles. The silence of space. That was how he knew it. As a scientist.’
‘Whereas you – ’
She turned to him. ‘When there’s life, and breathing, and you’re listening to the in breath and the out breath, and in between… in between there’s a gap. And you listen, the breath in, the breath out… and they get slower and slower, and the gaps get longer and longer… and in those gaps there’s silence and nothingness. And terror, I suppose…’ She turned back to face the fire. ‘When he stopped breathing, I listened to the silence. And I knew it would always be with me.’
The sticks of wood shifted, settled. Chad moved his hand so it was touching hers.
‘Perhaps that’s what you’d call God?’ She turned, slightly.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘The God beyond words, perhaps.’
‘The gaps are still there,’ she said. ‘The nothing. Your God can’t fill those gaps.’
‘No,’ he agreed.
They stared at the fire. The tired plaster of the walls seemed to brighten in the firelight.
‘But in the gaps,’ he said. ‘Where God is. There is love.’
‘Love?’ Her voice was harsh. ‘Do you really think that?’
He turned to face her. ‘I don’t mean easy love. I don’t mean happiness, or joy, or comfort… I mean the love where in our suffering God walks by our side.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not something I know. Does he walk next to you?’
He met her eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t say he does.’
She went to the grate. ‘Your wife – ’
‘Yes?’
She picked up a log from the basket.
‘She must be in mourning too.’
‘Not like yours.’
‘No,’ she agreed. She placed the log on the fire. ‘Murdo and I, we didn’t survive, you see. The silence. The nothing.’
‘No.’
She came and sat next to him again. ‘She’s far away from you.’
He wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, she is.’
She turned to him. She seemed full of life, her features softened by the firelight, her eyes bright as she gazed at him. Once again, he reached out and took her hand.
After a moment she withdrew from him. She stood up, brushing ash from her skirt. ‘He’ll be back soon. Tobias. He said the bus would be late, repairs on the main road. We need to consider him.’
‘We do?’
‘Of course.’ She looked down at him. ‘He’s still
a suspect, he’s taken refuge in all that magic. He’s still afraid.’
‘The police must know that he can’t possibly have done these things.’
‘I keep telling him that,’ she said. ‘I’ve told him that we’ll keep him safe.’
‘We?’ He gazed up at her.
She smoothed at her skirt. She looked towards the window. ‘It’s getting dark,’ she said.
Falling. Helen stared at the darkened hotel window as the word touched her thoughts.
Falling.
His breathing, next to her. The tangle of white sheets, the white floodlights of the car park softening the darkness of the room.
How had this happened?
She could trace their path, of course. The walk to his car, the ring road, twilight, car park, the swish of doors, the awkwardness, his joke - something about a loyalty card - the cool blank look from the receptionist. And then no words, no jokes, just clothes ripped off, just the aching gasping breathing of desire, the play of limbs, the hot, sweating, timeless hours of pleasure and possession.
And here I am, she thought. Here, in darkness, in these clean white sheets. And next to me, his breathing. Rising. And falling.
He rolled sleepily towards her. ‘I love you,’ he murmured.
‘No you don’t,’ she said, into his chest.
‘Do.’ He raised himself on an elbow, looked down at her. She saw the curves of his jaw, the stubble on his chin, the downy hair of his chest, his smooth muscularity, the dark yearning of his gaze, and felt once more a convulsion of desire.
‘Prove it,’ she said.
The flames were dying down. The fire made a dim glow in the twilight. ‘Shall I put on another log?’ he asked.
‘Are you staying?’ She went over to the table, switched on the lamp.
‘Do you want me to?’
She gave a small shrug.
‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘as it’s his birthday.’
She turned to him. ‘All these years, I’ve done this day alone. It makes no difference to me.’
The light lent her a kind of grace, her hair in soft curls, her skirt in smooth folds.
‘And if I want to stay?’ he said. ‘If I don’t want you to be alone?’
‘You have a home to go to.’ Her voice was flat.
‘It’ll be empty,’ he said, and as he spoke he knew, with a pit-of-the-stomach certainty, that it was true.
She watched him. ‘If that’s the case,’ she said at last, ‘then the answer doesn’t lie in staying here. Does it?’
‘You and Murdo,’ he began, wondering where his words would lead him. ‘And – ’
‘Elizabeth van Mielen?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘No one loved that man as I did,’ she said. ‘Our child’s death was the ending of us.’ She sat down heavily on the sofa again. ‘Jacob’s death was sudden, of course. One minute here, the next gone. But what I didn’t realize was, death is also a slow, slow thing. And we died with him.’
She was sitting very close to him. It occurred to him that he was waiting for her to speak again, waiting for her to fill in a gap, as if there was more to the story, and her silence now seemed like a deliberate withholding.
The fire was turning to ash, with wisps of smoke.
‘Perhaps I should go,’ he said. He stood up. Then, looking down at her, he said, ‘Is there more you want to say?’
She met his eyes. ‘No’, she said. ‘Should there be?’
He shook his head.
‘It’ll take you longer,’ she said. ‘Main road closed for repairs.’
The room had grown cold. He reached for his coat. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Check you’re OK.’
She nodded.
On the doorstep he touched her arm. ‘I’ll pray for you,’ he said. ‘In the gaps, and the silences.’
She reached up, then, and all of a sudden, kissed his cheek. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
The door shut, and he was out in the cold evening air.
The headlights cut across dark lanes. Chad drove slowly, not wanting to go home, not wanting to face the empty silence of the vicarage. At the roundabout the signs said ‘Diversion.’ The road was unfamiliar, but signs still said Town Centre, so he followed them, until he found himself heading away from the town, somehow, and the signs were saying Canterbury.
Whether he knew the church was there, or whether it was chance, a random event, or even the Lord’s will, but there it was, a steeple in the headlights, a flash of gothic windows… He parked, got out, his breath making mist in the cold night.
He tried the doorway. Locked, of course. A funny sort of church. An archway in thick grey stone. The gravestones too seemed old, with odd carvings, though he couldn’t read the dates.
The half-moon had risen above the trees. He stood in the graveyard. He thought about how Virginia had hesitated, there on her doorstep. He wondered what she was hiding from him. He wondered why he didn’t want to go home. He wondered what he was afraid of finding there.
He walked slowly back along the overgrown path.
A man’s face emerged from the branches. Chad stopped, stared, his heart racing. The face stared back.
Chad wondered whether to speak. He breathed, took a step forward.
The face was empty-eyed and still, and made of stone, Chad realized as he approached. A carving of a man’s head emerging from a tree. Chad put out his hand and touched the rough jaw, the tangles of hair entwined with leaves.
There were other carvings, Chad saw. Another tree, a snaked wrapped round its trunk, a man and a woman carved on each side. The fall, of course, Adam and Eve. And then the third, the Holy Cross itself, and Jesus crucified. All in rough stone, but the details stood out, the patterns on the leaves, the apple in the woman’s hand, the almost friendly smile of the snake, the wounds in the body of Our Lord.
Was it a progression? he wondered. From something ancient and Pagan, through the Fall, to our redemption of sin by Christ’s death. Or, just a commentary, a series of stories. Or even, a commission, and the sculptor just doing as he was told…
In every case, a tree. A tree of life. He looked back towards the church, and in the moonlight it looked squat and ancient, as if it had been here forever, long before the Christian story, bearing witness to other tales, far older, even, than our own.
Life, it’s beginning and its end.
And it still goes on, he thought, in the circle of the tunnel down the road, telling the story of the first few moments of the universe itself.
For Newton, it was still the work of God. In the discovery of the vacuum, the Great Nothing, God’s starting point. For those chaps down the road, they don’t need God. In their great, silent, colder-than-cold Nothing where the truth will be revealed, they have no need of God. I don’t suppose that friend of my wife’s believes in God.
Perhaps that’s what she needs.
It was a sudden, jolting thought. Chad sat down, breathless, on a gravestone.
That scientist, sitting in my house, all warmth and smiles. While my wife and I, living in emptiness, struggling with childlessness, and all I preach is God and love...
I’ve driven her away.
The Green Man seemed to watch him in the darkness. A story too ancient to be told.
He stared back at the stone face. He thought about the sculptor, echoing some ancient truth, now lost. He gazed at the crucifix, another version of man emerging from a tree, but in this case a tale of humanity divine, a God in human form.
A promise of redemption.
Chad stood up, stamping his feet against the cold.
And what if it, too, is an empty promise? What if this God, who so loved the world that he gave us his Son, is no more or less true than the hurtling particles in the gleaming tunnel, or this savage ancient face that stares me out, telling me a story that I cannot understand.
He fished in his pocket for the car keys. The graveyard had a pale sheen in the moonlight, in the frosty air, as he walked ba
ck down the drive.
He started the car engine, picturing his home. One version, cold and dark; the other, warm, illumined, his wife seated at the kitchen table.
He turned back towards the lane. Whether present or absent, he thought – the truth is, that she’s left me.
Helen sat in her living room, watching the slow tick of the carriage clock.
He is with Virginia, she thought.
I’m back home, showered, changed, it’s now nearly eleven, and my husband is not here.
He is with that woman.
Which of us has done this?
She went to the window, stared out into the night.
Then she rushed to the pages, snatched them up, read Amelia’s words, seeing a new sense in them.
‘It is over, my husband said to me. It is the ending. And now I write these words, a woman alone, with no husband and no child. And I say to him again, though he is far away, which of us is to blame? Which of us has brought about this destruction, this catastrophe? Were I to blame him, then he could turn to me and place the blame on me. Yet am I blameless.’
Helen held the pages in her hands. She placed them back in the folder.
A car engine, a distant hum, approaching.
I am to blame, she thought. Whatever he has done… I am to blame.
The gravel on the drive. The engine stops. My husband, coming home.
I will never make love with Liam again.
And my marriage is over.
Berenice drove fast through the dark lanes.
‘Bastard – Stuart fucking Coles – Bastard…’
The brakes screeched on a corner.
‘Bastard – to take me off the case and then do that…’
She’d gone from the lab to HQ. She’d gone to the Chief’s office, asking to see him. He’d refused to meet her. Ben, in the corridor, stopped her, told her that the woman from the lab had come in with evidence, Lisa’s dog, of all things, he’d sent her away…
‘Sent her away?’
She’d gone straight to his office then, asked him straight out, Lisa’s our main witness, her dog is a gift, the best way to find her, if she’s still in the country –
Dying to Know (A Detective Inspector Berenice Killick Mystery) Page 25