The Living and the Dead in Winsford

by Håkan Nesser

  It was when I raised my gaze to observe the upper storey that I realized there were in fact three floors: there was a narrow window immediately below the gable gutter, and in that window I could just make out a face.

  It was pale, almost white, and it belonged to a young man who was evidently standing up there, watching us. He must have been pressing his face against the glass – no lights were lit in the house but even so his features were quite clear through the windowpane. It was a thin, colourless face, dark hair with a parting, prominent eyebrows and a long, pointed nose. A grim-looking mouth, little more than a narrow slit.

  And completely motionless – my immediate reaction was that it was a doll.

  But it wasn’t a doll. After we had been observing each other for about ten seconds, he slowly raised his right hand and made a very obvious gesture in front of his neck: a sideways movement across his throat. There was no mistaking its significance.

  Then he backed away into the darkness of the room.

  I had difficulty in moving away from the spot. Castor was halfway over the bridge to the house, and I called him back. A hen pheasant burst out from a clump of trees, a screeching male just behind her. In the distance I could hear the sound of a vehicle accelerating away, and concluded that we must be quite close to the village. I could also see that below the house the road became slightly wider: it must presumably be possible to drive up to here.

  As we stood there, getting on for a minute, the sound of water bubbling away on all sides became louder, sharper, and then a deafening shriek from a bird pierced the air – not a pheasant this time. I glanced up once more at the dark attic window, then began moving away at last. It felt as if something significant had happened, something irrevocable, I don’t know what.

  It took less than ten minutes to get down to the village – the final section was a muddy but easily passable road suitable for vehicles. There were traces of ponies’ hooves, but also wide wheel-tracks looking as if they had been made by a tractor. At regular intervals narrow channels of bubbling water crossed over the road. Where did all the water come from? I asked myself automatically – but then I recalled the previous day’s weather . . . Castor was forging ahead all the time now, as if he had already registered a whiff of civilization and the prospect of something tasty to eat.

  The Royal Oak had just opened for lunch, and since the plan was to walk all the way back to Darne Lodge, we went in. It had taken us more or less exactly an hour to get here, so it would probably take us about twice as long to get back up the hill.

  It wasn’t Rosie behind the bar today, but a man past the full bloom of youth. Perhaps he was Rosie’s husband. He greeted us heartily, and asked if I wanted some food. I said that I was indeed intending to have lunch, and sat down at the same table as the time before. He came over with a menu, but explained that today’s special – chicken breast and broccoli with fried potatoes – was not on it. He had a tattoo on his lower arm: Leeds United 4ever. I said I rather fancied the chicken breast. He nodded and asked if I minded if he gave the dog a few treats as well. I had the impression that Castor also nodded, and a couple of minutes later he was fully occupied guzzling down a plate of mixed meat trimmings and drinking half a litre of water before dozing off in front of the fire.

  No further conversation took place and no other guests turned up during the forty-five minutes we stayed at The Royal Oak. I tried not to think about the face in the window – and that gesture with the hand over the young man’s throat – with only limited success.

  Before starting back towards Winsford Hill – this time on the other side of Halse Lane, and over rather more open ground if I had read the map correctly – we went for a short walk round the village. There can’t have been more than about fifty houses, but on the other side of the church I discovered a sign pointing to something called ‘Community Computer Centre’. It turned out to be a low, modern-looking building with white plaster and featureless office-type windows, and as we passed it I noticed that it was open. We went inside and found ourselves in a room looking like a school classroom with about twenty rather old-fashioned computers. Sitting at a slightly larger table was a dark-haired woman of about thirty, chewing at a pencil and staring at a screen. She looked up and smiled when she saw me.

  And smiled even more broadly when she saw Castor.

  Good, I thought. A human being.

  ‘Welcome! How can I help you? What a handsome dog! A ridgeback, methinks.’

  ‘He’s a very good friend,’ I said, without adding that he was the only one I had. ‘I gather you have links to the internet here, is that right?’

  ‘It certainly is. It would be a bit much if we called ourselves a Computer Centre and didn’t have a link to the web, don’t you think? Are you travelling through?’

  I hesitated for a second before explaining that in fact I was living just outside the village. At Darne Lodge, if she knew where that was. Everything suddenly seemed very straightforward: I didn’t understand why I had been so reticent at The Royal Oak last week. If Mr Tawking wanted to let his house to a foreign woman writer for the whole winter, it was surely not impossible that he might have mentioned it to others, even if he was a miserable old curmudgeon. There was every reason to suppose that my presence up there was well known in the village.

  ‘Oh, so you’re the one, are you?’ said the woman with a smile. ‘I heard that somebody was going to be living there for quite some time. I’m Margaret, by the way . . . Margaret Allen. Welcome to Winsford, the end of the world.’

  ‘Maria. Maria Anderson.’

  We shook hands. Castor flopped down onto the floor with a sigh. I took the opportunity to introduce him as well. Margaret knelt down and stroked him over his neck and back. I felt the need to burst into tears, but managed to control it. There were occasions when weeping should be kept under control, even Gudrun Ewerts would agree with that.

  ‘I take it you don’t have an internet connection up there,’ said Margaret when she stood up again. ‘But you can come down here whenever you like. We’re usually open between eleven in the morning and six in the evening, but if there’s anything urgent you can always knock on the door of that little stone cottage next to the church – it says Biggs on the door. Alfred Biggs and I take it in turns to sit here, and he never says no to anybody, I can promise you that.’

  I thanked her and said that I had no urgent need to contact anybody just now, but I would be back in a few days’ time.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit lonely up there? Forgive me for asking, but . . .’

  She burst out laughing, evidently embarrassed by her presumptuousness. ‘I speak out of turn. I’m sorry, but we haven’t had a single client so far today – most people have a link in their own homes nowadays. It was a bit different when we started this place fifteen years ago. There’s been lots of talk about closing it down, but we do get quite a few young people calling in after school. And there are in fact a few families who are still not connected. I don’t know if it’s because they can’t afford it, or for some other reason . . .’

  It was obvious that she wanted to talk, and mainly out of politeness I asked if she knew anything about Darne Lodge. When it was built, and why, for instance.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Margaret enthusiastically. ‘There’s an awful lot to say about Darne Lodge. Didn’t old Tawking tell you anything?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose he would, that old miseryboots. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  *

  And while we drank tea and ate some biscuits with some black but rather tasty goo evidently called Branston Pickle, I was provided with a fair amount of information about the house I was living in – and would be living in for the best part of six months. I had the impression that despite her comparative youth, Margaret Allen knew more than most about what was what in the village. She also said that both she and her husband were active in the local folklore society, and in addition to her unpaid work at the computer centre she worke
d as a librarian in Dulverton.

  But anyway, Darne Lodge. Well, Margaret recalled that it was built at the beginning of the nineteenth century as the residence of a certain Selwyn Byrnescotte. He was a soldier who returned home as some kind of hero after the Napoleonic wars – the Battle of Trafalgar and two other sea battles that Margaret named, but I didn’t recognize. The problem with this Selwyn was that even before he had gone to war he had been disowned by his family – or at least by his father, Lord Neville – on the Byrnescotte estate roughly midway between Winsford and Exford. The background was top secret, but probably had to do with homosexuality. In any case, the Lord had Darne Lodge built so that his decorated but wayward next-oldest son would have somewhere to live (had it been his eldest son, things would have been much more complicated) at a fairly safe distance away from the family seat. However, Selwyn didn’t like being isolated on the moor and soon moved to London, where he led a dissolute and debauched life for several years. The war was still raging, but he was unable to return to the battlefield because of some injury or other. He came back to Darne Lodge to die – it was the same year as the Battle of Waterloo – and he hanged himself from one of the roof beams. As a result of his London excesses he also had another serious injury: half his face had been shot away in a duel. Apparently he was not a pretty sight when he was eventually discovered and cut down after several months. Nobody knew that he had returned to Darne Lodge.

  I suspected that Castor and I would be spending several hours with Margaret Allen – she didn’t leave out many details: but as luck would have it there was a hundred-year gap in the story. After Selwyn Byrnescotte’s tragic end, the house stood empty until about 1920 when it was bought by a Londoner who needed somewhere for himself and his household to spend the night while he was out hunting red deer on Exmoor. It was eventually taken over by his son for the same purpose, but after this unfortunate young man – his name was Ralph deBries and he seemed to be of Belgian extraction as far as one could make out – had also committed suicide there, this time with the aid of tablets, the house was sold at auction in 1958 and bought by the father of the current owner, Jeremy Tawking.

  Anyway, nobody had died in the house since 1958 – Margaret Allen was careful to stress that fact – and no doubt over two hundred people had been living there as Mr Tawking had been renting it out for at least twenty years. Usually by the week during the summer months, of course, but Margaret recalled that somebody had been living there last winter as well. In any case, it seemed to be well built and insulated, and was able to withstand the winter storms.

  I was able to confirm that this was the case. Even if the really hard winter storms hadn’t actually occurred yet – an assertion that Margaret agreed with. The worst usually came in January and February.

  I thanked her for the tea and the information, and reaffirmed that Castor and I would be turning up again very shortly. Margaret said she suspected she had been too negative about Darne Lodge in some respects, and apologized for going on so long.

  We said our goodbyes and left. The walk back up to Winsford Hill turned out to be quite difficult, with various gates, herds of bleating sheep and glaring cattle, and when we eventually came up onto the moor itself we had the wind directly against us all the way to the edge of the Punchbowl, which I could now see, looking at it from this direction, really did look like a crater. Or like the after-effects of a gigantic meteor that had crashed down several thousands of years ago and left behind a hole a hundred metres deep and roughly twice that wide.

  Nevertheless, we eventually got home – both Castor and I were equally muddy and exhausted – and even as I opened the garden gate I could see that there was a dead pheasant lying outside the front door.

  A magnificent male bird, lying peacefully on its side with its wings and its tail feathers in excellent shape and apparently uninjured.

  Apart from the fact that it was dead.

  Then Castor did something totally unexpected. He walked slowly up to the bird, sniffed at it from various angles, then carefully grasped it by the head with his teeth. Dragged it gently to one side, just a metre or so, then left it lying there next to the wall.

  Then he looked at me, as if to say that it was okay to go in now.

  19

  In the last-but-one chat show I ever hosted, something happened that I believe was unique in the history of Swedish television.

  The theme was quite serious: people who had vanished.

  And how family and friends cope with a situation in which somebody has disappeared, and nobody knows what happened. Not even if the missing person is alive or dead.

  We had several guests. A psychologist, a woman from the public registration office, a senior police officer who explained how the police deal with missing persons, and three people who had been affected. The latter trio comprised a couple from Västerås whose teenage daughter had been missing without trace for two years, and an elderly woman from Norrland who had reported her husband missing twenty-five years ago.

  And there were two of us presenting the programme, to make sure everything went without a hitch. In other words, a normal and carefully planned set-up for twenty-eight minutes of off-peak broadcasting.

  The woman from Norrland arrived quite late, just as we had planned. All the others had had their say, and the female half of the pair from Västerås had cried a little. I now turned to Alice, as the new woman was called, and asked her to tell her story. Who was the person who had disappeared from her life?

  ‘Ragnar, my husband,’ she said curtly.

  ‘And that was quite a long time ago, I believe?’ I said.

  ‘Twenty-five years ago,’ said Alice.

  ‘And what were the circumstances when he went missing?’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary. It was in the autumn, shortly before the elk-hunting began.’

  ‘And he disappeared from your home, is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  At this point my male colleague stepped in. He had interviewed Alice on the telephone the previous day, and received a fair amount of information from her.

  ‘When we spoke yesterday you said that he’d gone off on his bike to fetch your newspaper from the post box: is that right?’

  ‘No,’ said Alice. ‘We’d already collected the paper. He was going to see if there were any letters. It was round about lunch time.’

  ‘And this was twenty-five years ago?’ asked my colleague.

  ‘Twenty-five years and one month,’ said Alice.

  ‘And you haven’t seen him since then?’

  ‘Not since that day, no.’

  I intervened: ‘So he didn’t come back after going to fetch the mail.’

  ‘Oh yes, he came back all right,’ said Alice.

  I recall that she was wearing a very elegant dress. And high-heeled shoes. Her hair was newly trimmed and dyed in a slightly unusual hue verging on gold. I think I realized that something was about to go wrong, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do other than to keep going. I saw a floor-manager holding up two fingers – so there were two minutes’ broadcasting time left.

  ‘Are you saying that he did, in fact, come back?’ I asked, wondering if I had misunderstood what my colleague had said briefly before the programme.

  Alice sat up straight on the sofa and suddenly stared directly at the nearest camera – instead of looking at the person she was talking to, as we had instructed her beforehand, like we did with all our guests.

  ‘Oh yes, he came back all right,’ she said again. ‘And he’s been lying out there in the woodshed ever since.’

  For some reason it never occurred to anybody to stop the broadcast.

  ‘Why is he lying in the woodshed?’ asked my colleague.

  ‘I killed him with the sledge hammer,’ said Alice with something reminiscent of triumph in her voice. ‘Then I dragged him into the woodshed and covered him in firewood. I haven’t seen him since then. I always fill up with more firewood before he appears.’

>   Now I realized the seriousness of the situation. Time to cut. I signalled that we would go over to Camera 3 and begin to round off the programme.

  ‘He was an evil person,’ our guest from Norrland managed to get in. ‘But it’s statute-barred now, I can’t be prosecuted!’

  *

  There was quite a hullabaloo after we managed to stop broadcasting – but before that, the very first few seconds, a deathly silence. Everybody was staring at Alice, and it wasn’t hard to imagine what was buzzing round in everybody’s head.

  What exactly had she said?

  She had killed her husband.

  She had put him in the woodshed and left him there for twenty-five years. And reported him missing.

  She had confessed to murder on a live television programme.

  Or else she was a madwoman who had succeeded in creating a sensation. How come the programme research hadn’t discovered something odd was going on, incidentally?

  But then everybody started talking at once. Various studio officials came running up, and the police officer made a call on his mobile. The only person who remained calm in her place on the sofa was Alice. Sitting up straight, with her hands clasped on her knee, she contemplated the chaos on all sides with a slight smile on her lips. Order was restored when the programme’s producer came in and announced that we would all assemble in his office for a brief discussion.

  The woodshed in question – located on the edge of the village of Sorsele in southern Lappland – was examined by the police the following day. When they dragged out the skeleton of Ragnar Myrman, they tried to keep all the journalists and photographers and nosy parkers at a distance, but there was no chance of that. There were too many of them – a hundred or so – and in the coming weeks Alice Myrman received as much attention in the media as she had evidently aspired to. After interrogating her, the police released her without charges or conditions because, as she had rightly said during her momentous television appearance, the crime was so far in the past that under Swedish law it was now statute-barred.