by Lorna Gray
He turned his attention to the search for a spare key with which to lock the kitchen door – leaving the original neatly on the neighbouring window ledge for the remaining occupants – and I dutifully slipped my hands into the overly long sleeves. This was the moment I realised just how much I had to learn about night-time adventuring.
Then we were outside and he was drawing the kitchen door closed behind us with an awful lot of concentration on not letting it rattle. As we passed lightly along the length of the cobbled yard, he asked quietly, ‘Where precisely were you off to just now, anyway, looking like an angel of … I don’t know what?’
‘It was only my cousin’s housecoat. I think my aunt made it for her.’
‘Don’t you ever answer a question at the first time of asking?’
The question bore a touch of exasperation. He was leading the way to the corner of the tithe barn. Following close behind, I gave in. Outside the smoke was merely a faint scent on the air. This was feeling more and more like a needlessly cautious hunt for something that might be miles away. Or perhaps that was just wishful thinking.
I said baldly, ‘I was thinking about my cousin’s garden and the usual sequel to a visitation from the vegetable thief. And then I was thinking about cans of petrol being stored for future use in your barn and how sensible that might be for similar reasons.’
‘I—see.’ Then he said in an odd voice, ‘You really do pay attention, don’t you?’
It wasn’t fully dark because there were an awful lot of stars, but this wasn’t exactly my idea of a glorious walk in the romantic moonlight. Ahead, the machine barn loomed. Bleak and singularly unappealing. It was no place for me.
He sensed my hesitation. Amusement drifted on the night air as he whispered, ‘What is it?’
I wasn’t going to admit I was afraid. Instead, I betrayed it by saying rather too sharply, ‘I’m being realistic. I’m wondering why you wanted me to come along.’
Something metallic was put into my hands. It was the torch and I thought it was designed to give me a sense of control. He stepped ahead of me into the gloom, tracing his way along the edge of his car with a guiding fingertip while his eyes worked to adjust. He told me on a hushed note, ‘I asked for your help because if I’m to go wandering about where an arsonist has lately been at work, I judge he’ll find it considerably more difficult to catch me off guard if there are two of us. And less likely to try, too. It is a wise soldier and a long-lived one who tries to find the path of least conflict if he can … Careful. What did I say? I suppose it is more uneven than it looks in this light.’
This last part was as a jolt went through me and made me take a clumsy step. I rejected the impulse to steady myself with a sudden clutch at his sleeve and retorted dryly, ‘You know precisely what you said. I don’t want to contemplate the various ways your longevity might be curtailed. And besides all that, we might simply use the torch.’
‘And spoil the fun?’ That amusement was there again. ‘Look, cautious or not, only a fool would go alone and although I have, out of necessity, already told my father the bare bones of what might be at loose in our neighbourhood, I couldn’t rouse him for this because he’d feel obliged to crash about falling into things. I’m afraid I thought it would be easier for you. Do you really mind?’
I shook my head, which Richard probably didn’t see because he was running his gaze past me to the deep shade of the yard and the house front and its gardens. He was looking for signs of movement behind us. I suppose it was easier to be sure without the concentrated intensity of a torch that would inevitably leave us blind to all else. He answered my nervousness anyway with a brief murmur of comfort. ‘I promise I won’t let you be frightened.’
Then he led me deeper into the machine barn between the sleek line of the car and the towering menace of the slumbering steam engine. The tractor was there too, eyeing us as a suspicious extension of Danny’s disapproval. It was possible to feel a sense of the history that might have inspired Danny to give Richard his warning about me. It was as though we were following the ghostly memory this place had of all the times John had slunk out of the house this way without telling his father, perhaps at a more reasonable hour of the evening but always following a similar course down the hill to the ford near my cousin’s house. I thought John Langton’s walk might have taken him onwards up the path that wove its way through hawthorn and trees to Eddington. Danny, on the other hand, presumably preferred to do his visiting in daylight and under the guise of propriety. It was impossible to judge how hard a debate Danny might have had after his footsteps had carried him to the valley bottom and left him there to choose between his odd bond with Mrs Abbey to the right, and the short walk the other way downstream to the place where my cousin’s cottage stood.
Richard obviously wasn’t imagining romantic walks of any sort. He was focused and efficient. He established that the pair of fuel cans was still propped in the boot of his car – where presumably he’d had the foresight to secure them earlier – and then got me to dare a brief flash with the torch into the corners. Nothing loitered here except the antiquated teeth of abandoned haymaking implements. I turned out the torch and, while we waited for our eyes to remember how to see, Richard told me what he planned to do with the cans now that he’d escaped the embarrassment of giving an arsonist his fuel.
He said briskly, ‘I’m going to pay an early call tomorrow to the man in charge of the wireless station and get the cans safely locked away in his compound. I’ve no doubt he’ll be happy to keep them in return for a small percentage and I may even end up giving them to him, for all that it’s illegal to pass on rationed petrol.’ A movement in the air beside me as his eyes located the faint shape of the stunted hatch that was set in the great sealed doors of the barn. ‘So brace yourself, dear Emily, for this proof of the full extent of my criminal dealings. Anyway, what else am I going to do with them? I don’t want this car in London and after tomorrow my father thinks he may well decamp back to his flat in Richmond.’
‘After tomorrow?’ My enquiry was given blandly.
It hid nothing. Understanding gleamed briefly in the dark. ‘Yes, I’ll be going with him on Sunday. Now that I’ve had time to think about things, it seems …’ A hesitation. ‘… the safest course.’
‘Oh,’ I said clumsily, because a whole tumult of questions were instantly racing through my head in an embarrassing tangle that grew from a sense of all the promises I’d made earlier about not prying. Privacy wasn’t really the issue any more, but here was a void that loomed of wishing to go with him only at the same time being fully conscious of the possibility that it wasn’t so much that he hadn’t asked but rather that he couldn’t without thrusting us into a harder discussion about the danger here. His tone as he side-stepped the subject was different now; because we both knew I was here with him when he might have left me safely inside and he had, after all, promised that he wouldn’t frighten me. It wasn’t the most comfortable of thoughts.
So instead of broaching that grim line, I asked idiotically, ‘What’s going to happen tomorrow?’
He laughed at my question, necessarily very quietly, but it was a laugh all the same. ‘Good question, Emily. No, I’m not mocking you.’
Now we were passing deeper into the blank depths of the barn, towards the vague form of the small access door into the farmyard. Carthorses stirred in their stables as we slipped out into the starlight but nothing else moved. Richard’s voice was soft but relatively ordinary and it seemed to me he was more concerned about not making a noise that woke the villagers than any particular threat from a waiting vegetable thief as he led me through the yard gate.
‘Tomorrow, Father is having his customary dinner with his old army friends. And I’m afraid he’s naturally assumed you’ll be on hand and eager to help. I’m sorry.’ His voice was a touch of warmth in the night. ‘It’s preying all too heavily on that neighbourly kindness you offered, isn’t it?’
We had joined the trackway where it p
assed down the hill. The scent of smoke was so thin now that I half expected to be met by half a dozen men from the village puffing their way back up after putting out the fire. But no one moved. Richard seemed to feel it too; a sudden charge in the intensity of the silence like static electricity building for a storm. Perhaps it belonged to Richard himself. I was right about his hesitation before. He seemed suddenly very conscious of the risk, a hazard; which couldn’t be violence because I knew he’d never have asked me to help him now, but danger lurked here all the same and this was the cusp of it. He gave it away when he stopped with his hand on the final gate. ‘Emily?’
I didn’t know why but his doubt made me look back. The house was obscured and the village was dark, of course, but something about the quality of the night made me realise something I’d missed before. The lamp that had illuminated the gallery had been an oil lamp, which meant that the electricity was off. And this meant that it was the turbine house that had been selected as the vegetable thief’s latest victim.
Paul Abbey. It was high time I started using the fellow’s name.
And I knew now, because Duckett had told me, that those outhouses hadn’t been burned as a cruel thanks to the owners of a crop of purloined vegetables. It had been a systematic destruction of Abbey’s lairs.
It made me shake off Richard’s concern in the only way I could. I opened the gate myself and stepped through, and as I went I said irritably, ‘He’s been hopping in and out of your house for days. We’re lucky it’s the turbine house he’s targeted and not the Manor. I should have caught up with him today when I had the chance.’
A smile briefly ran through the dark. Richard eased the gate shut on its catch. ‘You shouldn’t. What would you have done if you had?’
‘I mean that I could have seen enough to identify him properly to the police. That might have helped, I think.’
Richard was leading again now. He went cautiously, assessing the rough ground on the path ahead. The patch of valley where the turbine house stood must have been somewhere in this gloomy view but no telltale gleam betrayed its location. There were no flames, nor even smouldering ashes. Smoke clung to the undersides of the trees that marked the limit of the steward’s ponds but that was all. In a way the absence of fire made this descent more reckless rather than less. Now that the thrill of tracing the smoke to its source was passing, it felt as if we were walking blind into a dark wilderness where harsher things must wait.
Richard led me off the trackway onto close-cropped pasture that smelled strongly of sheep rather than smoke. His voice was still level despite the tension. ‘The police already have Abbey’s name. Danny Hannis was given the task of relaying what he’d learned from the farmhands and from that brief chase through the Manor to PC Rathbone today. When you saw Hannis scurrying past the kitchen window earlier he’d just finished making his report to me in the library. I telephoned our policeman after dinner to give him what little else we’ve gleaned since. Constable Rathbone has got Abbey’s name from me and he’s going to relay it to his man from the Gloucester station once he’s caught up with him. Apparently this detective is proving elusive too, just like everyone else.’
‘Danny told the police?’
I must have stopped. Richard turned to wait for me. I didn’t quite know how to frame my concerns. I didn’t know how to ask if Danny’s information would be considered helpful for Mrs Abbey or a hazard because I didn’t quite know what I was looking for in the account of a man who might yet prove to be bound to her by more than just the ownership of her old house. Then it struck me. ‘Of course he would tell them. Paul Abbey attacked his step-father.’ Then, more urgently as a harder thought hit, ‘Richard, the turbine house was where Mr Winstone met his injury.’
It was there ahead of us. Richard was negotiating the tricky climb down from the rough ground that marked the last descent of the pipe and also the rough gravel of an old streambed. The turbine house was just a little way to our right. Silent and hulking in its damp footings.
The drift of Richard’s reply on the night air was calm. ‘It seems to me that we need only worry about Abbey if we should happen to catch him unawares. He did, after all, run from you earlier when he might have done otherwise and we mustn’t forget that he brought poor injured Bertie home. Which is why we’re talking as we go. I doubt very much this is a lure designed to claim me as Abbey’s next victim – how could he know that we’d come tonight and not tomorrow with an army of villagers? And if we give him fair warning that we’re coming, it’ll rather lessen the impression we mean to trap him. That’s PC Rathbone’s job. But I’m sorry, are you—?’
There was a crunch as a fragment of earth broke away beneath his foot and a slither as he caught himself. In the dark there was a low, ‘Blast.’ And then, entirely cheerfully, ‘And if that isn’t proof of why an attempt at stealth is absolutely a waste of time, I don’t know what is. That being said—’
He waited while I caught up with him. He put out a hand to restrain me. ‘Stay behind me, would you, for this last part? For all my confident assurances, there is always that tricky moment when you have to put your head around a door and hope against hope it isn’t answered by the report of a gun.’
I was suddenly clasping the hand he’d put out to hold me between both of mine. But we weren’t met by a gun. There wasn’t anybody there at all.
The fire in the turbine house was thoroughly out and had been for some time. The door was sagging from its hinges with its lock almost wrenched clean from its housing by the force of Abbey’s entry. Inside, the single room was in a filthy state. Torchlight picked out a bank of enormous lead batteries and the metal bulk of the turbine itself, all swimming in a lake of greasy water. The fire had a heart. Its charred remains lay directly upon the squat metalwork that looked, to my eyes, like a large painted bobbin about the size of a drawing-room table. Water was still shushing its way vigorously through its innards until Richard’s hand reached for the heavy metal wheel and stemmed its flow. It seemed perverse to me that whoever had been here before us to put out the flames should have been reduced to bucketing in water from outside when here was a carefully organised supply on tap, so to speak.
I asked in a voice made harsh by awe, ‘Did Abbey put it out?’
The fire had been set using a bundle of rags and paper before whippy twists of green hazel had been stacked on top. Flames had shot up to the apex of the roof and done considerable damage to the tiling and the metalwork. We were lucky that the roof had been set upon girders rather than timber. If the fire had taken hold there nothing would have stopped it, not when the bank of batteries waited like an explosive charge in a neat row against one wall.
They hadn’t escaped unscathed as it was. The heat had warped their housings and they were giving off an unhealthy chemical smell. The impulse that had driven the arsonist to save this place had fortunately included the wisdom to throw the switch that isolated the house from this power source so that the additional strain of circuitry hadn’t made matters worse.
Richard had the torch and it flicked back from the batteries to assist me in my examination of the matter on the turbine. ‘What do you think?’ His voice was still hushed but cooler now where the cheerfulness had gone out of it.
There was a small knot of rags by my foot that had tumbled to the floor. I bent to take a closer look. As I did so I remarked with unnecessary impatience, ‘Richard, the house fires in my neighbourhood were in the main lit by something rather larger than a match.’
‘Well?’
I was still struggling to achieve a more normal tone. Something was making my heart beat uncomfortably quickly and it wasn’t all in the ashes of this fire. I straightened. ‘Very well,’ I said shortly. ‘Since you’re really asking me because you want the opinion of a novice but are too polite to phrase it quite like that, I’ll say that I think it’s odd that a man as experienced as Abbey in the art of destroyed sheds and outhouses should have stacked his kindling on top of the metal casing of an enti
rely non-combustible water turbine. It’s as if he didn’t want the place to go up.’
The torchlight touched the batteries again. They swam in the inky water that had been flung over everything. My voice was hollow in the tinny acoustics of this small brick chamber. ‘Do you think he believed the foliage and twigs and things would make smoke rather than flames? Did it catch him by surprise and go up like a tinderbox because it’s been so dry of late? Where on earth did he get the bucket to put it out again? There isn’t one here.’
‘Bravo.’ The admiration was serious, but then so was his tone. The relaxed man who had led me down the hill was entirely grim now. ‘But it wasn’t Abbey.’
His hand reached out to take the matter from my fingertips. The light caught the fragment of cloth that lay singed and curling in his flattened palm. It was a small portion of blouse with the button still attached, reading CC41 – the date and the assertion of Crown Copyright over the design. The fabric was patterned with a large repeating design in orange and white in a manner that confirmed the substance of the comments I’d made earlier about the wartime enthusiasm for dressing women in cheerful clothing. This blouse had belonged to the ‘Utility’ branded range, which always featured robust fabrics because they were supposed to last a person for years before wearing out. Now I might have wished they had been made just a shade more flimsy, because I had every reason to believe that this fragment and all the survivors of this fire like it had once been part of my own treasured collection.