‘Trinity.’
‘You know if she ever wore a white coat? Raincoat, trench coat?’
‘I don’t know. I remember a dark cloak, that’s all. Keeping a low profile, I am, for now, little Grayle. A haunted house – what is it? An imbalance, perhaps. Might be no more than atmospherics caused by something physical like a crossing of natural watercourses underneath. Might be something… less natural.’ Cindy frowns. ‘Trinity’s a victim.’
‘She’s still around?’
Sometimes Grayle can’t believe she can still talk like this. She looks across at Cindy in his mauve and pink woollens, Cindy who can make you believe anything. Even in the dimness, his features are soft and kindly – not effeminate, but not what you’d call uniformly masculine either. Monkish, perhaps, although when he smiles it’s the smile of a tarnished monk who knows that an abbey is the very last place he should be.
For once, he doesn’t answer.
‘You don’t have strong feelings?’
He crosses his legs, in pink tights under the skirt.
‘I’m rushing into nothing. Ever since Trinity died, I’ve felt inadequate, as you know. I didn’t see. Now I find myself withdrawing into a corner. Useless, as Marcus often says, for any of us to pretend we know what we’re doing.’
‘Least of all HGTV.’
He laughs.
‘Tension, friction, the combustion of negative emotions. What fun.’
Silence. Here in the chapel, in the sanctuary, she believes. And she’s afraid for them, these overpaid losers.
‘But the reason for this,’ Cindy says, ‘the reason I’ve had to employ all this subterfuge… I do need your help. Need you to visit someone for me.’
‘Well…’ She’s wary. ‘If it’s not too far, it might be possible. They’d apply manacles if they could. That is, we can get out, but they like to know where we’re going.’
‘Leave early, my advice. Before they’re up. They’ve taken our phones, see.’
‘I know.’
‘Mrs Lyons goes through all our messages to see if there’s anything urgent. Missing nothing that smells of betrayal.’
‘I realize that.’
‘So when she found a particular text, marked urgent, from a certain Mrs Emma Moore, I was called in here to see if it was life-or-death important. Naturally, I said not. Said Emma Moore was just a long-time fan who pestered me. Of no consequence.’
‘But in fact…?’
‘She’s the daughter of Trinity’s housekeeper, Poppy Stringer. Whose name would be recognized at once, throwing suspicion on both of us.’
‘So Stringer knows you’re here?’
‘I told her. I went to see her a few days ago. Poppy’s a strange woman, see. Loyalty’s important to her. More important than anything. Her husband was disloyal in some minor way and almost immediately became history. And it seemed to me there were some things she hadn’t told me because of Harry Ansell. Because he’d been her employer. It occurred to me that now Harry Ansell was
dead…
’
Didn’t push her, just left his phone number, and she gave him the name of her daughter who he’s never met. Mrs Stringer, he reminds Grayle, is a very old-fashioned person, discretion her watchword and therefore closer to the Ansells than any of their other former employees. Defford would have liked her to lead his catering team, but she wouldn’t come
back. If he was paying her, she’d feel under pressure to answer questions about her former employers, the Ansells.
‘Wouldn’t talk to me, Cindy, that’s for sure.’
‘Well, exactly. I’m… grateful to young Jo for arranging this meeting. And I think I’m taking too long in the toilet. Even for an upset stomach.’ He stands up. ‘Evidently, Poppy has something to tell me. You’ll have her phone number?’
‘But she wouldn’t talk to me.’
‘She will now, I think,’ Cindy says.
The gate to the walled garden has been left unlocked and she gets out onto the footpath at the foot of the pine-topped hill. Moving quickly; it’s started to rain and she has no coat.
No flashlight either, other than the tiny one on her cellphone, useful for lighting up a key in a lock and not much else. The half-moon which guided her here has been swallowed by cloud. Knap Hall rears behind the wall, to her right.
Right?
That’s wrong. In her hurry, she turned the wrong way.
Shit
.
Just one light visible, far back in the house, glad when, at the end of the building, the path broadens and a sliver of escaping moon lights a gathering of eerie little growths like dwarf monoliths.
The knot garden, with the open-fronted barn on the other side of it. Just need to get around the garden and she can start to run through the hardening rain.
Then the cellphone’s shrilling in her jeans. Damn. She pulls it, shielding it with an arm. The screen says:
Marcus
. She picks up the call.
‘Just gimme a minute, Marcus.’
Walks around the knot garden and takes him out of the rain, into the barn. It’s now packed to the entrance with straw, old bales stacked up forming interior walls. She switches on the little flashlight in the phone, looking for a place to squeeze in; it’s LED and better than she figured, showing the barn to be
older and higher than she thought from outside. Oak trusses which, presumably, once supported a hayloft, long gone.
She enters a narrow alley between the stacks of small bales, some probably brought in from the stable block when it was cleared.
‘Marcus?’
‘You able to talk, Underhill? Thought you’d be watching your programme.’
‘Long story.’
‘Commercial break. The woman playing hell about elder wood on the fire. That a set-up?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Anyway, made me think I ought to leave a message for you, get you to call me tomorrow. Didn’t expect an answer. Where are you?’
‘I’m, uh, in a barn? Sheltering from the rain.’
Smell of must, air full of dust. Very dry but, hell, it’s cold. She slips into a space between straw-towers. The floor feels harder underfoot.
Marcus tells her he’s spent most of the day reading old farm documents. Found an expert who emailed him scans of documents going back to the late 1700s, showing evidence of transactions between A. Fishe and John Lucas, both tenant farmers.
‘Transactions?’
‘Stock. Sheep, mainly. Just needed proof they knew one another. Unlikely they didn’t, their farms being so close.’
‘This is significant?’
‘Lucas was the farmer renting the land around Sudeley Castle from the then owner, Lord Rivers. Lucas was the man who discovered, in a shallow grave, the remains of Katherine Parr, in a coffin like a lead body-bag. And exposed the body. In a remarkable state of preservation.’
‘Like a saint. Allegedly.’
‘The word “moist” is used.’
‘Maybe too much information, Marcus.’
‘A surfeit of detail indicates it’s not mythology. I’ve emailed you some of the letters from Lucas to Lord Rivers, and also the reports of various antiquarians. Doesn’t make edifying reading, Underhill, but I think you need to.’
He tells her how proud Lucas seems to have been of his discovery. How many people he showed it to over the period of KP’s final decay. He tells her about –
Jesus
– the reports of molestation. He’s thinking of what might have happened when the body was newly discovered, her face and body good as—
‘Marcus, I’m not a
queasy
person, but…’
Oh hell, something’s fallen to the ground with the familiar, always slightly upsetting, sound of breaking glass.
Marcus didn’t hear, goes on talking.
‘The word “antiquarian” was a general cover-up for various busybodies and opportunists. One, as you’ll see, claims he was one of the first to learn of the discovery of Parr’s body. Rushed to the castle, to find it was gone. Nobody about to ask. When he returned a week later, it was back and he was told it had never been moved. Where did it go?’
‘What are you saying? They thought she was in such good condition after two hundred years that she could, like walk? Marcus, look… could you just hold on a minute, I think I broke something.’
She lowers the phone, switches on the LED flashlight.
On the flagged floor – a floor swept clean – a framed photo lies, its glass smashed. She bends to it, with the lamp, sees a face in a faded colour photograph. She shakes away fragments of glass, uncovering a youngish woman, dark hair pulled back into a white ribbon.
Where did this come from? As she stands up, holding the picture, postcard-size, by its frame, the light finds an alcove in the straw walls, four bales arranged into a square base, a blue cloth over it.
Blue with gold edges. Like an altar cloth.
Grayle throws the little light around, illuminates a small silver dish. A leather-bound pocket Bible. A prayer book.
Another tier of bales rises behind the cloth, and there’s a foot-high wooden cross pushed into the straw.
What…?
Grayle switches off the light, brings the phone to her ear.
‘Marcus?’
‘Something wrong?’
‘Marcus, I just walked into this barn, and it’s full of piled-up straw bales and in the centre… I just found an altar? A Christian altar?’
‘In a barn?’
‘Not even used as a barn any more, just a store. No reason for anybody to come in here, apart from shelter, and even then…’
‘Old?’
‘Barn’s old. The altar, not at all. No dust. And there’s a picture of a woman in a frame? I don’t know who she is. It’s like a goddamn shrine. Somebody swept the floor.’
‘No one knows about it?’
‘No one told
me
about it.’
‘You know what, Underhill, I’d get out of there. Check it out tomorrow. In daylight. With someone else. Then call me.’
‘Right. OK. I think I will.’
She feels tight inside. Shrivelled up against the cold. She starts thinking of what might be under all the straw. She thinks of a two-centuries-old moist woman.
Too much information.
51
Not to be understood
A WOMAN IN
a black parka is standing at the bottom of the lane, close to the hedge, hooded against the wind-driven rain. Grayle slows the Mini, brings down her window, identifies herself.
The woman nods, and Grayle leans over and lets her into the car.
‘
This
wasn’t forecast,’ the woman says.
She doesn’t lower her glistening hood until they’re out on the bottom road. Grayle glances sideways and finds she doesn’t look like someone called Poppy Stringer. Her hair is long and fine and near-white. Her face is long, too, and serious. She wears no make-up, nor really needs it. She’s like some mature noblewoman from a Renaissance painting.
Grayle called her an hour ago, after first checking with Jo Shepherd to make sure nothing crazy occurred in the night. Poppy Stringer told her she’d be attending communion at St Peter’s, ten thirty. Too late; Defford would be screaming by then. Eventually, she said she’d meet Grayle in the lane and they would walk.
But it’s too wet and windy for walking, if you need to talk at the same time.
‘I’d have come to your house, Mrs Stringer.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
It’s a local accent, but refined, voice low and sure. Grayle doesn’t even know where her house is, only that it’s one of a group of former farm cottages.
At the bottom of the road, Grayle looks both ways.
‘Where should I go?’
‘Not through Winchcombe. Too many people know me there.’
‘OK…’
She turns left, up towards Cleeve Hill, not quite understanding why Poppy Stringer should not want to be seen in a car with a someone whom almost no one in Winchcombe is likely to recognize.
It’s hard going. Or maybe just hard to concentrate this morning. Too many overlapping images, mostly dreadful. She had a tortured night in the pop-up, thanks to the stuff Marcus sent to her laptop. Like he says, none of it can ever be proved, but it sure sours your sleep.
She’ll need to call Marcus when she gets back. Also talk to someone, discreetly, about the altar in the barn. Maybe Jordan. Or maybe, considering the barn’s proximity to his knot garden, Jordan already knows. So maybe not Jordan. Not yet.
‘I watched your programme last night,’ Mrs Stringer says. ‘The poor elder.’
‘Pretty widespread piece of folklore.’
‘I still burn it, sometimes.’
Grayle glances at her, slowing the car.
‘You burn the devil’s wood?’
‘One can resist the devil without having to run away from him at every turn. The harder you run, the faster he follows you.’
‘Oh.’
Grayle drives on for a couple miles until she’s looking down on what, in better weather, would be a wide view over the melanoma housing and the fields where Lisa Muir’s family farms. Sensing a big question approaching, she pulls into a lay-by alongside a copse, shuts off the wipers, kills the motor. Waits till it comes rolling towards her like a bowling ball.
‘What are they trying to do at Knap Hall, Miss Underhill? Are you allowed to tell me?’
No, of course she isn’t.
‘Call me Grayle.’ She watches the windshield misting over, sealing them in a grey capsule. ‘I think they would like it to appear that the house may be haunted by Katherine Parr. And also Trinity Ansell.’
‘And what does Mr Lewis say about that?’
‘Cindy? Uh… he isn’t sure.’
‘He was kind to the girl who was afraid of the wood.’
‘I, uh, think he’d like to’ve been kinder to Trinity Ansell.’
‘She would have invited him to the house more often, I think.’
‘If Harry Ansell—’
‘Mr Ansell didn’t know him, Grayle. He was suspicious.’
‘But not you?’
‘He tends to wins you over, Mr Lewis.’
‘One of his… skills. Would’ve come himself this morning, but they don’t get to leave the house till it’s all over.’
Poppy Stringer’s hands are in her lap. She’s unzipped her jacket, but not by much.
‘He’s been in touch with me, Mr Lewis, a few times. In relation to Mrs Ansell’s diary. Her third short volume. Which she sent to me from her parents’ cottage, not long before she died. To keep safe for her. She didn’t know if she’d ever show it to anyone. Even Mr Lewis.’