Sweetheart, Sweetheart

by Bernard Taylor

  “Yes.”

  I just stared at him, then I said:

  “You . . . you’re Alan De Freyne . . .”

  “Yes . . .”

  My mind was whirling like Catherine wheels. I heard myself say stupidly:

  “You left your bicycle lamp at the cottage . . .” Inside my brain a voice kept churning out the words. Alan De Freyne. He’s alive . . .

  And if he was alive, then whose body was lying in the thicket grave . . . ?

  “I was a fool to come here,” he said. “But—well, now there’s an end to it all.” We looked at each other in silence for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am.” And then he was turning, and I watched, like someone in a trance, as he left the churchyard, left my sight. Running to the wall I was just in time to see him as, astride his brightly coloured bicycle, he pedalled around the bend in the road. I wanted to shout after him; wanted him to stop, to come back, but I kept silent. After a few moments I walked back to the car.

  “Everything okay?” She­lagh asked as I got in beside her. I avoided her gaze.

  “Yes, everything’s fine.” Where was the sense in going after De Freyne? What could it lead to?—only further unanswered questions to add to the tangle of them that already snarled up my mind. And I was through with all that. With all of it. Through.

  I turned the key in the ignition. “Come on, let’s go and see Mr. Pitkin and then get back to the cottage . . .” I put the car into first gear and we drove away.

  When I pulled up and switched off outside Pitkin’s shop I leaned back, patted my pockets. “I left my cigarettes in the house,” I said. “Did you bring any?”

  “I smoked the last one while you were there—in the cemetery. Shall I get you some?”

  “Thanks.” I dug out a handful of loose change and gave some of it to her and she got out of the car and walked away along the street towards the tobacconist’s. I was putting the rest of the coins back into my pocket when I saw that among them was the round piece of metal I had found that day in the garden. There was something familiar about it; I couldn’t think what it was.

  I still had it in my hand when I went in to see Pitkin. He greeted me warmly as he came towards me. Seeing his limp I reflected briefly on his feelings of guilt he’d been carrying around for most of his life—and said to myself that he, too, in his own way, was another casualty of Gerrard’s Hill Cottage.

  I apologised for not being there when he’d called; I said we’d had to go out unexpectedly. “Anyway,” I said, “if you’d like to fix it up with Jean Timpson she’ll let you in. She’s got keys to the place. I’ll leave word with her that you’ll be sending someone to collect the dresser.”

  “Are you going away so soon?”

  “We’re leaving Hillingham today.”

  “And going back to America.”

  “Yes, tomorrow. We’re spending the night in London.”

  “I’d better write you a cheque now, then,” he said. “You tell me how much for . . .”

  “No.” I shook my head. “You can have the dresser for nothing. You’ve waited long enough.”

  His expression of gratitude was almost embarrassing. He kept insisting that I take something for the dresser, while I was just as adamant in my refusal. By the time She­lagh came in with my cigarettes though, he’d accepted the gift and was trying to persuade me that we could at least stay and have a cup of tea with him before we dashed off. No, I told him. “Thanks all the same, but we really do have to go . . .” Just to say the words gave me a feeling of relief. In half-an-hour we’d be gone away, forever . . .

  In my fingers I had been turning over the piece of metal—and suddenly I realised what it was. I was staring at it when Pitkin’s voice came through to me, saying, “You’ve dropped your buttonhole . . .” and I looked and saw that he was stooping, picking up the white rose that had fallen from my lapel. He stood up straight, put the flower to his nostrils, closing his eyes momentarily as he breathed in the scent. He nodded appreciatively. “A beautiful specimen.”

  I thanked him and took the flower from his outstretched fingers. He went on speaking but I wasn’t really paying attention. I was on the way to the door before I fully realized what he had said, and the significance of it.

  I stopped dead in my tracks, slowly turned to face him.

  “I’m sorry . . . ? What did you say . . . ?”

  And he repeated his words, and he went on talking, and I just stood there, unmoving, letting the words sink in. Then, a moment later I was running outside to the car.

  She­lagh had come after me. “No,” I said to her, “stay here.” I was opening the door, getting in. She looked puzzled into my tight face and began to open the other door. I shouted at her. “No! She­lagh, darling—please! Please stay here!” And I reached across, grabbed the handle and slammed the door shut. I saw her mouth open in bewildered protest, but I couldn’t stop to explain. In the mirror, briefly, I had a further glimpse of her as she stood at the kerbside watching while I drove away. I saw how the rising wind flapped her skirt against her legs. In miniature she stood there, a study of amazement, one hand lifted out towards me, fixed, frozen.

  32

  I knew now, at last, the truth.

  It had been there before me all the time. All the pieces of the puzzle had been there. I should have realised. I had days ago accepted that fact that the ghost was there, and that, surely, when pitted against our twentieth century demand for scientific logic, had been one of the most difficult factors to come to terms with. Why, then, having negotiated such a major hurdle had I not gone a step further? It would have required only a little more imagination.

  But now I had taken that further step. I had been forced to; Pitkin’s words came back to me, repeating over and over, and with each echo I was more firmly convinced that now I knew. I knew.

  Oh, Colin, how could I have doubted you? How? But no more. And soon I would have proof. Not that I needed that proof. Not to clear Colin’s­ name. No, Colin, that proof which I shall surely find will put an ending to a story other than your own . . .

  Gravel flew up, spraying, as I turned into the driveway and put on the brakes. I jumped out and went straight to the toolshed. From there I ran to the thicket.

  In the clearing I dimly realised that I’d not had a chance to change out of my suit since the trip to London. I was hardly dressed for digging but it couldn’t matter less. I threw aside my jacket, rolled up my shirtsleeves, took up the spade and got to work. I worked as if in a fever, sweating like a pig; sweating not only from my exertions, but also from my anticipation and strange, fearful excitement.

  I went on digging, methodically throwing up the earth—far more than I had removed before; that first time I hadn’t done enough; maybe if I’d kept on I would have found the answer long before this time.

  But I was getting to it now, that answer, and I knelt in the dry, dusty earth, careless of my trousers, and raked and brushed with my hands till I was sure, absolutely sure.

  And when I was sure, when I knew there could be no possible mistake, no other possible explanation, I continued to kneel there, while in my mind those twisted tangled threads moved and shifted and became a tapestry, all-telling, so clear, giving me, at last, the whole story . . .

  After a while I got to my feet and began to spade the earth back into the hollow. By the time it was done I felt exhausted, though mixed with my fatigue there was elation, great elation; I had the proof I needed.

  Yet not all my questions were answered. There was still one. How, I asked myself, was it possible for her to have covered up the traces so completely?

  I put my jacket on and carried the spade back to the shed. I must get back to Pitkin’s shop and collect She­lagh. She would think I was mad, running off like that in that crazy way . . .

  At the kitchen sink I washed the soil from my hands. My trousers, I saw, were a job for the cleaners. And still, amongst such mundane preoccupations that same question still kicked. How had she so
successfully got rid of the signs that would so easily have proclaimed her guilt? But she had—that was a certainty.

  I was drying my hands when Jean Timpson came in.

  “Oh, I didn’t know you were back,” she said, and I put on a smile and said, “I’m just going down the road to get She­lagh.”

  “Your packing’s done. Your cases are all ready.” She gestured. “They’re in the hall.”

  “Thank you.” I nodded vaguely. I was thinking that somehow the answer I sought had something to do with her, Jean Timpson; I saw myself running after her through the orchard, through the gap in the hedge and down to the water. I remembered how I had plunged in to bring her up from the bottom of the pond . . .

  Yes . . . Yes . . .

  I hesitated for only moments, then picking up the towel from where I had dropped it I ran outside again.

  Following that same path when I had earlier gone after her and Reese I hurried across the lawn and through the orchard gate. I ran past the broken sundial, through the orchard and then through the gap in the hedge at the far end. Once, I told myself, the gap would have been wider, much wider; time had allowed the brambles to spread, closing the space; but once it would have been wide enough; it would. Wide enough, too was the track that led down through the thicket to the edge of the pond.

  When I got to the water I didn’t pause at all. I took off my clothes, everything, and then, quite naked, took a step down the steep bank and dived in.

  This time my view under the water’s surface was clearer; there had been no struggle to stir up the mud. I knew too what I was looking for and now I headed straight down, eyes straining to see in the gloomy depths. Oh, yes, I knew what I was looking for; I had seen it before, though I hadn’t realised what it was . . .

  My dive of exploration takes longer to tell of than it did to do. It took only a few seconds, and in those few seconds my last question was answered. I found again the wheel, half-buried in the mud, that had trapped Jean Timpson in her suicidal jump. And the rest of the trap was there too, all there. I saw and traced with my hands the other wheel, the shafts, the main, rotting, body of the trap, weighted down with the large metal trunk and the smaller one. There were large stones wedged in too, ensuring that it could never rise to the surface. The mud and the thick, grasping weeds had, over the years, done the rest to keep it hidden.

  I’d seen enough. I turned over in the water and struck out and upwards for the surface.

  On the bank I dried myself with the towel, got dressed and set off back towards the house; not up through the orchard, though, the way I had come, but along first by the edge of the pond, then turning so that the orchard was on my left. When I got to the clearing in the thicket I paused for a moment at the spot where Colin had marked out the summer-house, the spot where I’d been so recently digging. I hadn’t done too thorough a job of filling it all in again after my work; I could clearly see, beneath a couple of stones, part of the pathetic remnants of Effie’s parasol. Her parasol; she’d been so proud of it. Little remained of it now but the ivory handle, a few bits of the ribs and fragments of the discoloured fabric . . . I hooked the stones aside and with the heel of my shoe pressed what was left of the sunshade deeper into the earth . . . next to where Handyman was lying . . .

  If I had looked more carefully that first time I would have known. I had been so certain that it was De Freyne’s body there; finding his bicycle lamp had convinced me of it. But if I had remembered my lessons in school—and applied a little of that knowledge to what Timpson had told me I wouldn’t have been so easily convinced. The roses grew so well, Timpson had said, because of the high acid content of the soil. And that acid in the soil, while it kept at bay the bacteria which would otherwise cause a body to decompose had, at the same time, attacked, by corrosion, the metal of the lamp. The body I had first discovered there had the remains of hair and flesh and clothing, making me assume that it hadn’t been there very long, when all the time, over all the years, the acid had been preserving it. That must be it . . . Now, recalling Colin’s­ rambling last letter to me I could see the significance of what he had told me. He had written that getting to work on the summer-house had made it all clear to him. It had. He had found the bodies there when he had begun work on the new summer-house for Helen. And obviously, for some reason, he had gone back there at night, using De Freyne’s bicycle lamp for light. And he had unintentionally left the lamp there and accidentally covered it up along with the remains . . . But really he had been smarter than I. He had realised at once who lay there. As I had done today so he, earlier, had found the remains of all three bodies there: the animal, the woman and the man. The man with part of his left hand missing . . .

  The more I thought about it the more I was aware of all the hints I had had; all the odd bits of knowledge. There had been so many bits of information that didn’t gel. Pitkin, for instance, talking to us in the cellar; something he had said then had bothered me. And now it was clear. Bronwen Temple, it was well-known, had been fastidious almost to the point of eccentricity yet when she was found dead—according to Timpson—she had so much dirt and bits of leaves sticking to her clothes, and her clothes themselves were stiff with mud and dried water. And all that was explained now. And I’d even found part of her brooch. Now I really did know the whole story . . .

  I pictured it all. Like watching a film. I pictured Effie setting out with her parasol and her little tin box, going to the spot, beneath the tree, where she had arranged to meet Handyman. The storm coming on; her growing impatience turning to worry and then, when Handyman still didn’t show up, to positive fear.

  But in spite of that fear she had been brave enough to go and search for him. She must have done that. And that was when Bronwen had caught her. Had killed her. And by that time, probably, Handyman was already dead. Bronwen had killed her husband rather than let him leave her . . .

  Bronwen’s task then was to destroy or hide any evidence that would prove that her husband had not left her. And her most difficult job must have been to get rid of the horse and trap in which Handyman and Effie had planned to make their escape. I pictured Bronwen, in the rain, driving the horse and trap through the orchard, through the gap in the hedge and down the wide track to the pond where she unhitched the horse, weighted down the trap and somehow managed to push it down the bank into the deep water. After that she had led the horse up through the thicket to the clearing, and there, during the remaining hours of the morning she had dug the grave next to the summer-house. She must have led the horse into the grave before killing it; that would have been the only way. The bodies of Effie and Handyman would have been manageable.

  And how successfully Bronwen had fooled everybody. Her secret had lasted so many years. To this day Pitkin believed that he was responsible for her death. Well, now I could tell him that he was not. Bronwen had not been a murderer’s victim. She had been the murderer.

  I could see her so clearly in my mind’s eye; see her there in the thicket, digging, digging, while the storm raged all around her. I pictured her there when at last her task was done; imagined her standing over the grave, her clothes sodden and mud-spattered, her tired, strained face wearing a look of satisfaction.

  But any satisfaction she might have felt hadn’t lasted long. The falling tree must have struck her while she was on her way back to the house—perhaps after she had been down to the pond to make a final check. Yes. The tree that had fallen in the storm. It had broken the sundial and it had cracked Bronwen’s skull. It was there, where she had been felled by the tree, that she had lost her brooch. Yet even that was not the end of her; she had still managed to crawl back into the house . . .

  I took a final look at the area of freshly-turned earth before me, and moved away. As far as I was concerned Handyman and Effie would never be disturbed again.

  My main mistake, I said to myself as I walked back towards the house, was in assuming that because Helen’s first name was Rose, then she it was who had to be connected with t
he roses that had appeared on my pillow and in the painting. And of course it was not. It wasn’t until Pitkin had handed me the white rose that had fallen from my lapel that I had realised the truth. He had smiled gently at the rose as he placed it in my outstretched hand. “Beautiful . . .” He murmured the word. “Beautiful. Bill Gerrard developed two or three lovely hybrids, but none of them could touch the one he named after his daughter, Bronwen Denise . . .” It was then I knew that it was Bronwen all the time. The white rose was her own, very special emblem. All of it added up with that piece of knowledge—and the remains of her brooch I had found by the broken sundial.

  I had blindly attributed everything to Helen; yet there had been indications that it was not she. The alterations to the paintings, for example. That added work was too crude to be her work—if I’d realised it at the time.

  Poor Helen, I thought. I saw you as the perpetrator of so much evil, when all the time you were just another victim of the spirit of Bronwen; just as Colin was, just as Sad Margaret had been before. I remembered Sad Margaret’s sampler with the Keats quotation:

  And they are gone: ay, ages long ago

  These lovers fled away into the storm.

  Margaret Lane had known. Her sampler was stitched in irony—brave irony—before Bronwen had really got to work on her. And when she had, and with a vengeance, poor Margaret hadn’t stood a chance. Pitkin had told me that I looked something like John Lane . . . It all added up. Bronwen had wanted him and she wouldn’t rest until he was hers. Had she actually set fire to the summer-house while Margaret was inside, or had she driven her to do it from madness and despair? It didn’t matter how. She had done it, and that was enough. And afterwards John Lane had been hers—until smallpox and the lack of any will to live had taken him away.

  Then Bronwen had had to wait until Colin came to the cottage. And it was from that time, De Freyne had said, that Helen had been threatened. That’s what he had felt. And, I realised now, he had been right. Bronwen had fallen in love with Colin when he came to live with Helen, and from that time Helen’s life had been in danger.