The Stranger House (42 page)

“I’ve not fingered anyone yet, so far as I’m aware,” said the landlady firmly, “You’ll have to learn how to fathom men for yourself, lass. At least I’m glad to see you and Mr Madero seem to have got things straight between you.”

Jesus, thought Sam. We didn’t make that much noise!

She said primly, “We are friends. But I’m not sure I can stand up to the competition, even if I wanted to.”

Mrs Appledore let out her merry laugh.

“Competition like Frek Woollass, you mean? And here’s me thinking you Aussies liked a real challenge!”

This should have been jokingly flattering, but the stress had been on
real
and a hint to Sam was like an autumn leaf to a kitten.

“You saying she’s a lezzie?” she pounced.

“Oh yes. Doesn’t flaunt it like some. And I think she enjoys a bit of a laugh when some fellow who doesn’t realize fancies her. Shall I bring you more coffee?”

“No thanks,” said Sam, digesting this information, “Though if you’ve got a bit of that chocolate cake left

The landlady took the cake out of a cupboard and carved a generous slice.

Sam took a bite. It was even better than she remembered. Did Mig know Frek was gay? she wondered. Of course he did! she answered herself. Probably found out
yesterday, which explained a lot about last night. Did it matter? Of course it didn’t!

Through the crumbs she said, “Edie, I was wondering about Thor …”

“Now hold on! You’re not suggesting …”

“No, no. I meant, you and him seem pretty friendly together …”

“And you’re wondering why I didn’t blame him?” said Edie, who was also pretty good at cutting to the chase, “Don’t think I didn’t think about it back then. Taking advantage of a kid and all that. A scapegoat’s always handy when you’re feeling guilty. But my whole point in everything I was in relation to Sam was that I weren’t a kid, so it would have been really pathetic for me to start claiming I was just to wriggle out of my share of the blame. And to tell the truth, Thor was so ready to heap all of the blame on himself that I almost resented it! Funny things, folk, aren’t we? In the end I asked him if he hated me for what I’d done. He said no, of course not, and I said I didn’t hate him either. And that was the choice we had. We could either hate each other or we could take comfort together in recalling how much we both loved him. We settled for comfort.”

“And that’s all?”

“Has to be. We tried sex once. It was no use. We were both watching the door.”

Sam nodded. She could understand that. But there were things she couldn’t understand.

“So why do you think Sam came to the pub that day?”

“I told you what happened earlier,” said the woman impatiently, “I’d put myself on a plate for him and he’d turned me down. Didn’t stop us being in love.”

“So you reckon he was coming to … what? Apologize
and persuade you he was right? Apologize and screw you? Which?”

“You don’t wrap things up, do you?” said Mrs Appledore, “I don’t know, and I doubt I ever will, not unless you’ve got some way of making contact with the dead!”

There was a cough from the doorway. Mig stood there and for a second Sam was tempted to reply,
Funny you should say that, Edie …

“Come in, Mr Madero. Do you fancy a piece of cake?” said Mrs Appledore.

Sam, who’d just taken another bite, waved her slice to signal recommendation.

Mig said, “No thank you. Can I use the phone, Mrs Appledore?”

“Surely. I’ll leave you to it.”

She went out. Sam made to follow her.

“It’s OK,” said Mig, “It’s not private. I’m just ringing Max Coldstream to tell him to forget about publishing my translation of Simeon’s journal.”

“You’re giving it back to the Woollasses then? Why?”

“It belongs to them if anybody. I can’t expect other people to be honest with me unless I’m honest with them.”

“You’ve just worked that out? Left the seminary before you reached the ethics course, did you?”

“Maybe I failed it,” he said, smiling at her.

He looked so happy. She thought, oh shit. Someone else’s happiness was a big responsibility.

She said, “About that spare hour, you’ll have to kill it by yourself. I’m going to Candle Cottage to see Mr Melton.”

His disappointment was painful to see, but not so painful as the speed with which he tried to hide it.

“That’s fine,” he said, “Well, I’m sure we’ll run into each other later.”

He thinks it’s a brush-off, she thought.

And then: if I do want to brush him off, this is a good moment.

She directed her thoughts back to the previous night.

She’d wanted company. She’d got company.

She’d wanted a diversion from her troubled thoughts more certain than Carroll’s
Pillow Problems
or Goldbach’s Conjecture. She’d been diverted.

And, in the end, she’d had a great time.

Again would be nice.

For her.

For him it would be commitment, which spelt complication. Mig might hop around like a wise old wallaby, but in this respect he was little more than a joey.

What the hell! she thought. So long as she enjoyed the hopping, she could deal with a bit of complication.

She said, “I’ll probably come up to the Hall later. There are questions I want to ask that old bastard too.”

Not enough. She saw it in his eyes.

She went to him, stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek, leaving some cake crumbs there.

Still ambiguous, she saw. You might get as much from a nun.

Hell, if he wanted unambiguous, let him have it.

She put her hand on his inner thigh and squeezed hard.

“Keep practising the counting,” she murmured.

Then she broke away from him and half walked, half danced out of the kitchen, chewing on her slice of cake.

He watched her go, his heart bursting with delight. He wanted to run after her and suggest that without
further ado they dropped everything that had brought them here to Illthwaite and went away together. But it was easy for him, he reproved himself. The injustice to his family was five hundred years old. Her pain derived from something in living memory, and its perpetrators were probably still living also.

He put his hand to his cheek, picked off the crumbs he felt there, and licked them off his fingers.

Then he went to the phone and dialled Max Coldstream’s number.

As Sam made her way to Candle Cottage, her super-analytical mind had plotted Madero’s thought processes with a degree of accuracy which might have worried him.

He had described his efforts to subdue his natural young appetites in an entertaining way, but his comic narrative had not been able to conceal the huge expense of will which had gone into repressing and rechannelling these energies.

Now at last the fruit which his own choice had for so many years put completely out of his reach had fallen into his hands, its taste all the sweeter for the long delay (and perhaps also for a disappointment with Frek). At the moment, in the afterglow of that bliss, he could not entertain the notion that their coupling had been sinful. Indeed this experience seemed so intense that it figured as the single most important thing in his life.

She told herself he would certainly be feeling exactly the same if it had been Frek Woollass he’d been able to have his wicked way with.

Not that his way was all that wicked. Not yet. But, as she’d told him, he was a fast learner and it might be fun being his mentor.

Then, because her powers of analysis did not permit
self-deceit, she took a further step back and gently mocked herself for trying to assume the safe role of experience guiding the steps of innocence.

She liked the guy!

Why? Here her powers of logical analysis failed her. He was so many things she didn’t go for. Physically she preferred the blond Anglo type, like her namesake the unfortunate curate as he appeared in Winander’s painting. As for the inner man, there were so many counts against him, it was hardly worth counting! He was serious, and spooky, and religious, plus he’d travelled a helluva long way down the road to becoming a Catholic priest.

She tried to imagine her pa’s reaction if she took Mig home.

The wine might help. A bottle of El Bastardo to whet the appetite, followed by a couple of Vinada’s gold-medal Shiraz to wash down the grub …

But first she’d have to get Pa to sit down at the same table, which wouldn’t be easy, even though she could now assure him it definitely wasn’t a priest who’d knocked up her grandmother.

She’d made no effort to contact home since her talk with Betty. She needed to get this business sorted completely before she did that. The bastard who’d abused that poor little kid had lived round here. The Gowder twins’ dad seemed number one suspect, and he had gone beyond justice, at least beyond hers if not Mig’s. But, dead or not, she wanted to be certain. And that was what she should be focusing her mind on now, not her own romantic entanglements.

The door of Candle Cottage stood open. She stepped into the living room, calling, “Mr Melton, hi!”

“And hi to you too, Miss Flood.”

He came out of the kitchen carrying a tray set with two mugs, a coffee pot and a plateful of biscuits, mostly dark chocolate. He’d remembered. She was touched. He might be, in the local parlance, a bit cracked, but she found she quite liked Noddy Melton. However she looked at it, she still felt it was a crying shame no one had ever told him that his lost Mary was alive and well and living in Spain. But it wasn’t her call. She had enough on her plate without taking on board that responsibility.

As she sat down, without thinking she took her sun hat off and laid it on the arm of her chair.

He regarded her skull bird-like, head cocked to one side.

“When I first joined the Force they encouraged haircuts like that,” he said, “I take it the lady in Newcastle told you they cut your gran’s hair off?”

“With shears,” she said. Then added, “I never mentioned Newcastle.”

He shrugged, self-deprecatingly. Apologetically. That was the giveaway.

She said, “And you knew I was a mathematician before I told anyone. It was you who searched my room!”

“So you did notice? Sharp. I’m sorry. I was curious. And as I think you’ve discovered, you need to be nimble on your feet and willing to cut corners to keep ahead of the game in Illthwaite. Sorry. But I’ve no way, legal or illegal, of discovering what you found out in Newcastle, not unless you care to tell me.”

She told the whole story again. This was the third time. The first had been to Edie Appledore and that had been like reliving her own experience of hearing it. The
second had been to Mig and that had been a kind of cathartic sharing, bringing her to a closeness which made all that followed possible.

This time it felt, perhaps not unfittingly, like a statement made to a policeman.

He nodded when she’d finished and said, “I thought it might be something like that. Not the detail but the timing. After the first time we talked, I got to thinking, there’s too much going on here for there to be no connections. The name; the circumstances of the curate’s death; above all, Illthwaite. The only thing which stopped it making any sense was your dates. Spring 1960. If somehow you’d got that wrong, then we’d got ourselves a whole new ball game. Everyone leaves traces, even kids. If she lived in Illthwaite even for a short time, she’d be on the school roll.”

“I thought of that but the school closed down a couple of years back.”

“Schools die, records don’t. Oh, they might be dusty and spidery, but they’d still exist somewhere. I made a phone call. Yesterday morning I got a call back.”

“Useful friends you’ve got,” said Sam.

“Who said anything about friends?” said Melton, “You don’t get to the top of most heaps without knowing where a lot of bodies are buried. Here’s what I found out.”

He handed her a sheet of paper. It was headed
Pamela Galley
and contained all the details she’d got from Edie Appledore.

Not wanting to downgrade his efforts, she said, “This is great.”

He gave her a sharp look and said, “You knew this already, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I did. Sorry. But I’m really grateful. What else have you found out?”

“I ran a check on Jim Gowder this morning. Wife ill, sexually frustrated, young girl available in house. It’s classic. The record shows convictions for drunkenness, affray and failure to pay rates. But nothing sexual. Without any background of similar offences, you might find it hard to get him in the frame after all this time, if you made it official.”

“Official? Went to the cops, you mean?”

It must have sounded as if she thought this was pretty way-out because he smiled and said gently, “You’ve taken a big step in that direction already, my dear. In fact, once I’m convinced an offence has taken place, I really ought to make it official myself.”

“What would happen if you did?”

“Coming from me, and concerning Illthwaite, probably nothing,” he said sadly, “But if
you
pressed, they’d have to take notice. On the plus side, once a prima facie case of sexual assault on a minor was established, they could require all likely suspects to supply DNA samples which would be checked against yours.”

“And on the minus?”

“Publicity,” said Melton, “Once the press got hold of this—and get hold of it they would; the modern police force has more leaks than a Welsh allotment—they’d be all over you, not to mention your family, as well of course as Illthwaite. Illthwaite has it coming, but it wouldn’t be pleasant for your folk. You’d need to think about it.”

Sam thought about it for long enough to eat two chocolate biscuits.

Finally she said, “You’re right. I’d need to talk to my pa and ma first. Could the police make people give samples?”

“If they’re alive and suspect, yes,” he said, “With Jim Gowder they’d need either to dig him up or get the twins to volunteer a sample. As for the curate, that’s more difficult as he was cremated. There’s always the stones he weighed himself down with, but they’re so smooth and they were under water for many hours, I’d be surprised if they helped.”