Four British Mysteries

by Thomas Brown

  Mostly they told her about people. This, more than anything else, continued to draw her back. The same day that she fled from the Forge, she found herself again in the study. Evening light filtered through the window, catching every mote of dust, which floated on the air like grains of mud suspended in Mawley Bog. She read from many different diaries that evening, but her favourite was Ms. Andrews’s, to which she always returned. Not the later entries but those that came before, showing their vicar as Freya liked to remember her. That evening, once she had read her fill of hungry poems and horrid deeds, she retrieved the leather-bound diary once belonging to their vicar and turned to a middle page.

  * * *

  “It was dark when I left Allerwood and started towards the village hall. Street lamps lit the pavement, the rest of Lynnwood a shapeless smudge of grey and black, but despite this I knew it was not late. I pulled back the sleeve of my coat and checked my watch anyway. It read almost six o’clock.

  “Huddling deeper into the coat – an early Christmas present, from Maureen – I struggled on through the cold. The street lights guided my way, as did the sound of carol singers, faint but growing stronger. They carried on the wind. I knew the song instantly, ‘Carol of the Bells’. It was a favourite from my childhood. Memories surfaced from the cold crisp of Christmases past and I remembered sitting in the front row at Midnight Mass, watching open-mouthed choristers as they celebrated the Lord with their voices.

  “I walked on through the dark, coming to the village green. At first I thought to find it empty this evening. Doubtless the children had been called inside, for their dinner and bed. Then I noticed a solitary man, the homeless sort, sitting on one of the benches. I moved quickly through the darkness, feeling strangely vulnerable for the lack of company. Though never full, Allerwood Church was rarely without one person or another, come to pray, or else just stand in a House of God and be close to Him. Religious souls. ‘We are a dying breed in this day and age. The Righteous Damned,’ my father would have said.

  “My shoes made hollow sounds against the pathway, feet moving in time to the ethereal rhythm of the choir. The church had been especially busy this afternoon, and the green seemed all the more unsettling because of this. Much to my relief it was not long before the hall grew out of the darkness ahead. I glanced back at the man on the bench as I left the green – a cursory glance, out of pity or mistrust I was not sure – but he had not moved from his seat. I thought he must be sleeping. In his own way, I supposed he was a follower of Lynnwood Green, as I was Allerwood Church. The wooden slats of the bench were his pews, the trees his pillars, the empty bottle by his feet a source of inner comfort. And though I loved the Lord, I could not help but feel something for this man and his wide, wild religion.

  “My hand found the railings on the north side of the green, the gate between myself and the street swung open, but I paused. There was something more; something about this man tonight, alone on a bench, so cold, so close to Christmas. The wind picked my hair from my shoulders so that it fluttered against my face. I turned, stepped away from the railings and began walking slowly back across the green. The gate whined closed behind me.

  “I have walked this way many evenings, on my way to the village meetings. In the spring it made a pleasant route, with the flowering trees, the birdsong, and lush smell of freshly cut grass. Even in the summer, when it was hotter, the walk was not unpleasant. And while the winter stripped it of leaves and life, I did not mind this much.

  “I was right to suppose that the man was sleeping. His eyes were closed, his head thrown back, pale, stubbly throat exposed as though with the throes of laughter. I didn’t think he had been laughing, not for a long time. Pain – exhaustion – was etched in the lines around his eyes and his shallow, sunken cheeks. I thought of a dog, which had been presented too much food, and eaten until it could not move a muscle. If his religion was the world, it was a hard one.

  “Taking a few more steps, I came to a standstill beside him. I stared over him as he slept; this man, uncared for by anyone except God. I felt deeply sad. My eyes picked out more details: a bruise beneath one eye, the tattered collar of his beige coat, crumbs caught in that halfway beard. A label, sewn into his coat, read N. Roach. He was breathing deeply, I noticed; the sleep of the inebriated. I knew the sort well. Unloved, he had turned to drink to get through each day. I had not seen him in the village before this evening but I knew this to be true. What else would have brought him into my path, I, who love everyone with His unbiased eyes? It was never too late for redemption. Even the damned could be saved.

  “I slipped the letter knife from around my neck. The cool chain on which it hung felt like ice against my skin. Shaped like a crucifix, I wore the object there always, a cold reminder of the Lord against my chest.

  “It was the work of a moment, to press the cross gently to his forehead. I muttered a prayer. The wind rushed through the bare trees as I spoke and I heard His voice between the branches. It was grateful, justifying, and I knew I had done right by Him.

  “When the figure on the bench was blessed – at peace, I thought – I replaced the chain around my neck. I wished him Merry Christmas, as across the street ‘Carol of the Bells’ reached its righteous climax. Then I hurried home through the night, leaving the green and the trees, the voices of the carol singers fading on the wind.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  With morning came snow and the certain knowledge that the three boys were lost to Lynnwood. Freya had known it would snow from the whiteness of the sky, but there was still no preparing for the first icy breath, bearing with it fledgling flakes. Standing in the kitchen doorway with Lizzie, she watched as Eaton and George dashed across the garden, two spirits unbridled by the breath of winter. And though there was no denying the flicker of delight that accompanied those first few flakes, she couldn’t ignore the sickening realisation that the snow changed everything. The Forest, the village, the abandoned Brockenhurst line, the Old Barn, Mr. Shepherd’s snowdrops and his cruel traps... Beneath the blanket of white they were all the same.

  One by one, or sometimes in pairs, villagers emerged from the tree line, trudging slowly through the thickening snow. Their cheeks glowed red, their eyes sharp, narrowed perhaps from the wind, but there was a defeated look to each of them. Not because the snow had driven them inside, she thought – if anything, they looked hungrier, meaner – but because it had stripped them of an excuse to hunt beneath the boughs. Hope of finding tracks faded with the flakes. Hope of finding life faded with the cold. And so the searches were called off.

  She stood with her daughter for nearly an hour while child and beast stalked each other through the garden. They talked about many things: the Knightwood Oak, which seemed to have inspired Lizzie to new heights of artistic flare, her time at school, and what the future might hold for her. Lizzie told her then that she wanted to attend university. She had found the perfect course, a Fine Art degree at Winchester. Freya felt proud for her daughter, who she thought had grown into such a strong young woman. The world could teach so much but not that fierce drive; the determination to succeed, to lead the pack through the narrow spaces between the trees of Lynnwood, of life.

  She realised she hadn’t considered her own future for a long time. She had been enacting routines, daily rituals, but never living as Eaton lived, bounding through the snowy grass, tongue lolling, hunger burning. She liked to think she had felt those things, once, with Robert. But then he had left and with it her appetite for pleasure, indulgence, life... Until now, when she hungered as never before, when she could hardly sleep for the wild dream that filled her night-time thoughts, in which she felt so hot and happy under the trees.

  A euphoria settled over her, carried on the cold flakes, until it seemed she wasn’t standing in the doorway but floating there. Her daughter had moved from her side, to make them both a hot drink. Screams filled her ears; grievous animal sounds, as Mrs. Foxley stumbled past the cottage, mingled with the savage shrieks of Geor
ge as he chased Eaton round and round the garden. In that moment she forgot what it meant to be human or to be beast, or whether there’d ever been a difference.

  * * *

  That night Freya didn’t sleep well. Brandy eased the affliction, or seemed to smother it. Her mouth grew warm, her limbs numb, her thoughts slowly blurred. Finally she drifted into sleep, oblivious to the silent snow, which continued to fall solemnly past her window, or the masked figure standing outside Haven House.

  * * *

  In her dream, winter had settled fully over the brook. Long crystals of ice hung from the branches, which were grey and bare except where algae coated them. Sunlight streamed weakly through the trees, winking faster and faster before fading completely. The last flash caught the frozen brook, then vanished, leaving the lurid blue of twilight in its wake.

  She moved quickly through the trees towards the brook. Her feet crunched against the frosty floor, echoing the footsteps of her father behind her. Though the brook was frozen, she could still hear a faint trickling, of a tiny current coursing underneath. It rushed under the ice, weak and wonderful, so that the ice appeared to be moving, or melting, when everything else was still.

  At the banks she seemed to stop. The air stung her chest with every needle-breath. Slowly she looked down into the dark, translucent ice. The reflection staring back surprised her; she was not a little girl, as she had first supposed, so many weeks ago. Perhaps in that first dream she had been younger. Such concerns were fleeting. She seemed to have aged with the seasons, so that a familiar face stared back: long blonde hair, pale face rouged with cold, those lupine eyes, almost angled like those of a she-wolf. For what seemed like forever she stared at her reflection, only vaguely aware of her father behind her.

  A second silhouette leant over the ice. She didn’t need to look to know the Bauchan had appeared at the opposite bank. She glimpsed it from the corners of her eyes; a long, pale reflection in the murky ice, and she fancied a skeleton stood across the brook from her, or something equally thin and bleached.

  As before, the silhouette shifted, kneeling to dip its hands in the waters. When it encountered the ice, it paused and seemed to reconsider, hands pressing against the glassy surface. Then, fingers outspread, it began to tap, as if exploring the ice; hollow sounds in time to her beating heart.

  A familiar brightness radiated from the Forest, creeping into the corners of her vision. With every tap it seemed to expand, a snowstorm filling her view, until all she could see were the human hands, and it was then, as she pondered the nature of those delicate hands, that she felt another pair on her waist, and a thought struck her as strange: if this wasn’t a childhood memory, and she was not a little girl, then it couldn’t be her father who grasped her from behind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Words could hardly hope to convey Freya’s primitive urges, yet somehow George managed; her little boy reducing these bold, burgeoning feelings to structured sentences. To hear him speak of them, to see them shaped by the same mouth that kissed her goodnight before bed, was the most monstrous thing...

  “Lunch, darling?” she said that afternoon, moving to the refrigerator. Lizzie leafed through a magazine at the dinner table. “I’m happy to cook. Shepherd’s pie? Some pork belly? I bought some spices from the market, just last week.”

  Without looking up from her magazine, Lizzie shrugged. “Don’t worry about lunch. I’m going out.”

  “You’re going out?”

  “I’m meeting with Rachel, remember? To discuss my art project. School might be shut but the deadline’s still looming.”

  She thought about Lizzie and Rachel. The pair often worked on their art together. Their pieces last year had been selected for an exhibition; complementary collages using media cut-outs, displaying the Forest in summer and winter. Rachel had created the summer piece, although it was Lizzie’s that had struck her as the stronger; the tall, silver trees, made from newspaper headlines, stripped of their leaves, their lives, by winter’s bite. They had titled the two pieces ‘The Forest’. There were still some photographs from the exhibition on the school’s website.

  “Are you eating with Rachel?” she said.

  Her daughter nodded. “I need to leave actually, or I’ll be late.”

  “Stay in the village,” Freya said, as her daughter slipped from the kitchen. “Love you.” The front door closed on her words and she returned her attentions to the refrigerator.

  She felt George before she heard him; the tug of his hand on her sleeve. This in itself drew her attention. She could not remember the last time he had grabbed for her.

  “I feel different,” he said.

  Turning to her son, she pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. “Different how, darling? Is it your stomach? Your sister wasn’t very well last week; I hope you haven’t caught something from her...”

  “No, I mean different inside,” he said. “I feel bad.”

  She knelt to his level, taking his face in her hands. “It’s all right to feel bad, George. People feel bad all the time, for lots of different reasons. It doesn’t make you any less of a man, to be honest with yourself. Remember what I said before, about honesty?”

  He spoke quietly into her ear. “Honesty is good?”

  “Yes, honesty is good.”

  There was a moment’s silence, in which neither of them spoke. A car roared past the kitchen window – the third that day – its engine audible long after the vehicle had vanished. The noise was jarring, out of place, belonging to the city, not their little village. Lynnwood’s sounds were altogether more penetrating, the high-pitched squeal of burning swine singing again in Freya’s ears. She realised George was trembling.

  “It’s okay, darling. It’s okay, I’m here.”

  “I’m not scared,” he said.

  “Of course you’re not.”

  “I’m not scared, really. I just feel bad, because of Andrew and the others.”

  “What’s happened is awful, George, but it’s not your fault. You must remember that. You can’t blame yourself.”

  “But I know,” he said. “I know what’s happened to them, and I haven’t told anyone.”

  He looked up at her, his wide eyes revealing many things. She saw every ache, every shining fear, every wild gleam. She saw other things too, revealed for an instant. Then he spoke, and his words were like cold hands on the back of her neck.

  * * *

  George remembered the afternoon well, recounting many details Freya might have thought insignificant. Was anything significant anymore except the hurried thumping of her heart, the eager wetness of her mouth, her two children?

  Mrs. Welham, the woman at the head of the classroom, was a well-fed, well-to-do creature, with broad shoulders and a frame below to match. Like so many in Lynnwood she was partial to McCready’s produce: bacon, pressed between slices of thick white bread each morning. In the afternoons she spread the Allwood’s jam generously over warm fruit scones and when evening came her kitchen filled with the joyous glugging of Catherine’s reds as it sloshed into glasses still warm from the dishwasher. Freya knew these things about the teacher not because she had seen them with her own eyes but because she hadn’t; the private, impatient habits of the people of Lynnwood, revealed only through stray seeds caught between teeth, the jagged slash of red wine lips, the quivering light in their eyes.

  The subject of the lesson that afternoon was Sin. George told her how animated the woman had been, her fat arms flourishing, her mouth quick. He told her about the mud that was trawled across the carpet from the wet outdoors, the smears of rain against the windowpane. As he said these things, she thought about Sin and her own lessons in the subject. She remembered Ms. Andrews’s face as she preached the predatory nature of man at Sunday service, the stained-glass monsters in the windows, the churchyard of twisted statues; human figures bent low and bestial.

  In the brightly-lit classroom, with the dreary rain pressing at the windows, they discussed what happene
d to sinners. They had been taught about Heaven and its fiery opposite lots of times before, never mind from TV and films. It didn’t mean they were going to answer. To raise their hands, speak out, act know-it-all. George had long since learned the names for those people: teacher’s pet, mummy’s boy, tosser. Stooped in their chairs, heads held low, the class stared at Mrs. Welham. Christopher Savage dropped his biro. From the back row, somebody laughed. It was a thoughtless sound.

  “You mean prison, Miss? Like that old perve in Southampton?”

  “Andrew, I don’t think that’s appropriate –”

  “My dad said he got ten years, ’cause of those photos they found –”

  “Stop, Andrew –”

  “He said they were all –”

  “Stop.”

  The outspoken boy shrugged, loosened his tie, hunched further over his desk. Shaken, the teacher picked up her textbook. She flicked to a page and began reading aloud, scripture concerning Hell.

  George knew the way they treated Mrs. Welham wasn’t fair. She was much nicer than most of the other teachers. He supposed that was why they got away with it; the rest of the class, with their behaviour. The talking, the swearing, the sheer contempt. She was sensitive and they had a second sense for such things. Pack mentality, like newly-hatched spiders to their struggling prey, or the wild dogs he had watched on the Discovery Channel last week. They could sniff out the weak and the vulnerable like so much rotting flesh, smell the rank, intestinal tang of their fear. Playground scavengers.