The thirteenth tale (44 page)

Behind the group of men, a white tent had been erected to cover
part of the site. The house was gone, but judging from the coach house, the
gravel approach, the church, I guessed the tent was where the library had been.
Beside it, one of their colleagues and a man I took to be their boss were in
conversation with another pair of men. These were dressed one in a suit and
overcoat, the other in a police uniform. It was the boss who was speaking,
rapidly and with explanatory nods and shakes of the head, but when the man in
the overcoat asked a question, it was the builder he addressed it to, and when
he answered, all three men watched him intently.

He seemed unaware of the cold. He spoke in short sentences; in
his long and frequent pauses the others did not speak, but watched him with
intense patience. At one point he raised a finger in the direction of the
machine and mimed its jaw of jagged teeth biting into the ground. At last he
gave a shrug, frowned and drew his hand over his eyes as though to wipe them
clean of the image he had just conjured.

A flap opened in the side of the white tent. A fifth man stepped
out of it and joined the group. There was a brief, unsmiling conference and at
the end of it, the boss went over to his group of men and had a few words with
them. They nodded, and as though what they had been told was entirely what they
were expecting, began to gather together the hats and thermos flasks at their
feet and make their way to their cars parked by the lodge gates. The policeman
in uniform positioned himself at the entrance to the tent, back to the flap,
and the other ushered the builder and his boss toward the police car.

I lowered the camera slowly but continued to gaze at the white
tent. I knew the spot. I had been there myself. I remembered the desolation of
that desecrated library. The fallen bookshelves, the beams that had come
crashing to the floor. My thrill of fear as I had stumbled over burned and
broken wood.

There had been a body in that room. Buried in scorched pages,
with a bookcase for a coffin. A grave hidden and protected for decades by the
beams that fell.

I couldn’t help the thought. I had been looking for someone, and
now it appeared that someone had been found. The symmetry was irresistible. How
not to make the connection? Yet Hester had left the year before, hadn’t she?
Why would she have come back? And then it struck me, and it was the very
simplicity of the idea that made me think it might be true.

What if Hester had never left at all?

When I came to the edge of the woods, I saw the two blond
children coming disconsolately down the drive. They wobbled and stumbled as
they walked; beneath their feet the ground was scarred with curving black
channels where the builders’ heavy vehicles had gouged into the earth, and they
weren’t looking where they were going. Instead, they looked back over their
shoulders in the direction they had come from.

It was the girl who, losing her footing and almost falling,
turned her head and saw me first. She stopped. When her brother saw me he grew
self-important with knowledge and spoke.

‘You can’t go up there. The policeman said. You have to stay
away.“

“I see.”

‘They’ve made a tent,“ the girl added shyly.

‘I saw it,“ I told her.

In the arch of the lodge gates, their mother appeared. She was
slightly breathless. “Are you two all right? I saw a police car in the street.”
And then to me, “What’s going on?”

It was the girl who answered her. “The policemen have made a
tent. You’re not allowed to go near. They said we have to go home.”

The blond woman raised her eyes to the site, frowning at the
white tent. “Isn’t that what they do when… ?” She didn’t complete her question
in front of the children, but I knew what she meant.

‘I believe that is what has happened,“ I said. I saw her desire
to draw her children close for reassurance, but she merely adjusted the boy’s
scarf and brushed her daughter’s hair out of her eyes.

‘Come on,“ she told the children. ”It’s too cold to be outdoors,
anyway. Let’s go home and have cocoa.“

The children darted through the lodge gates and raced into the
Street. An invisible cord held them together, allowed them to swing around each
other or dash in any direction, knowing the other would always be there, the
length of the cord away.

I watched them and felt a horrible absence by my side.

Their mother lingered next to me. “You could do with some cocoa
yourself, couldn’t you? You’re as white as a ghost.”

We fell into step, following the children. “My name’s Margaret,”
I told her. “I’m a friend of Aurelius Love.”

She smiled. “I’m Karen. I look after the deer here.”

‘I know. Aurelius told me.“

Ahead of us, the girl lunged at her brother; he veered out of
reach, running into the road to escape her.

‘Thomas Ambrose Proctor!“ my companion shouted out. ”Get back on
the pavement!“

The name sent a jolt through me. “What did you say your son’s
name was?”

The boy’s mother turned to me curiously.

‘It’s just— There was a man called Proctor who worked here years
ago.“

‘My father, Ambrose Proctor.“

I had to stop to think straight. “Ambrose Proctor… the boy who
worked with John-the-dig—he was your father?”

‘John-the-dig? Do you mean John Digence? Yes. That’s who got my
father the job there. It was a long time before I was born, though. My father
was in his fifties when I was born.“

Slowly I began walking again. “I’ll accept that offer of cocoa,
if you don’t mind. And I’ve got something to show you.”

I took my bookmark out of Hester’s diary. Karen smiled the
instant she set eyes on the photo. Her son’s serious face, full of pride,
beneath the rim of the helmet, his shoulders stiff, his back straight. “I
remember the day he came home and said he’d put a yellow hat on. He’ll be so
leased to have the picture.”

‘Your employer, Miss March, has she ever seen Tom?“

‘Seen Tom? Of course not! There are two of them, you know, the
Miss Marches. One of them was always a bit retarded, I understand, so it’s the
other one who runs the estate. Though she is a bit of a recluse. She hasn’t
been back to Angelfield since the fire. Even I’ve never seen her. The only
contact we have is through her solicitors.“

Karen stood at the stove, waiting for the milk to heat. Behind
her, the view from the small window showed the garden, and beyond it, the woods
where Adeline and Emmeline had once dragged Merrily’s pram with the baby still
in it. There could be few landscapes that had changed little.

I needed to be careful not to say too much. Karen gave no sign
of knowing that her Miss March of Angelfield was the same woman as the Miss
Winter whose books I had spotted in the bookcase in the hall as I came in.

‘It’s just that I work for the Angelfield family,“ I explained.
”I’m writing about their childhood here. And when I was showing your employer
some photos of the house I got the impression she recognized him.“

“She can’t have. Unless…”

She reached for the photograph and looked at it again, then
called to her son in the next room. “Tom? Tom, bring that picture from the
mantelpiece, will you? The one in the silver frame.”

Tom came in, carrying a photograph, his sister behind him.

‘Look,“ Karen said to him, ”the lady has got a photograph of
you.“

A smile of delighted surprise crept onto his face when he saw
himself. “Can I keep it?”

‘Yes,“ I said.

‘Show Margaret the one of your granddad.“

He came around to my side of the table and held the framed
picture out to me, shyly.

It was an old photograph of a very young man. Barely more than a
boy. Eighteen, perhaps, maybe younger. He was standing by a bench with clipped yew
trees in the background. I recognized the setting instantly: the topiary
garden. The boy had taken off his cap, was holding it in his hand, and in my
mind’s eye I saw the movement he had made, sweeping his cap off with one hand,
and wiping his forehead against the forearm of the other. He was tilting his
head back slightly. Trying not to squint in the sun, and succeeding almost. His
shirtsleeves were rolled up above the elbow, and the top button of his shirt
was open, but the creases in his trousers were neatly pressed, and he had
cleaned his heavy garden boots for the photo.

‘Was he working there when they had the fire?“

Karen put the mugs of cocoa on the table and the children came
and sat to drink it. “I think he might have gone into the army by then. He was
away from Angelfield for a long time. Nearly fifteen years.”

I looked closely through the grainy age of the picture to the
boy’s face, struck by the similarity with his grandson. He looked nice.

‘You know, he never spoke much about his early days. He was a
reticent man. But there are things I wish I knew. Like why he married so late.
He was in his late forties when he married my mother. I can’t help thinking
there must have been something in his past—a heartbreak, perhaps? But you don’t
think to ask those questions when you’re a child, and by the time I’d grown
up…“ She shrugged sadly. ”He was a lovely man to have as a father. Patient.
Kind. He’d always help me with anything. And yet now I’m an adult, I sometimes
have the feeling I never really knew him.“

There was another detail in the photograph that caught my eye.

‘What’s this?“ I asked.

She leaned to look. “It’s a bag. For carrying game. Pheasants
mainly. You can open it flat on the ground to lay them in, and then you fasten
it up around them. I don’t know why it’s in the picture. He was never a
gamekeeper, I’m sure.”

‘He used to bring the twins a rabbit or a pheasant when they
wanted one,“ I said and she looked pleased to have this fragment of her
father’s early life restored to her.

I thought of Aurelius and his inheritance. The bag he’d been
carried in was a game bag. Of course there was a feather in it—it was used for
carrying pheasants. And I thought of the scrap of paper. “Something like an A
at the beginning,” I remembered Aurelius saying as he held the blur of blue up
to the window. “And then an S. Just here, toward the end. Of course, it’s faded
a bit, over the years, you have to look hard, but you can see it, can’t you?” I
hadn’t been able to see it, but perhaps he really had. What if it was not his
own name on the scrap of paper, but his father’s? Ambrose.

From Karen’s house I got a taxi to the solicitor’s office in
Banbury. I knew the address from the correspondence I had exchanged with him
relating to Hester; now it was Hester again who took me to him.

The receptionist did not want to disturb Mr. Lomax when she
learned I didn’t have an appointment. “It is Christmas Eve, you know.”

But I insisted. “Tell him it’s Margaret Lea, regarding
Angelfield House and Miss March.”

With an air that said It will make no difference, she took the
message into the office; when she came out it was to tell me, rather
reluctantly, to go straight in.

The young Mr. Lomax was not very young at all. He was probably
about the age the old Mr. Lomax was when the twins turned up at his office
wanting money for John-the-dig’s funeral. He shook my hand, a curious gleam in
his eye, a half-smile on his lips, and I understood that to him we were
conspirators. For years he had been the only person to know the other identity
of his client Miss March; he had inherited the secret from his father along
with the cherry desk, the filing cabinets and the pictures on the wall. Now,
after all the years of secrecy, there came another person who knew what he
knew.

‘Glad to meet you, Miss Lea. What can I do to help?“

‘I’ve come from Angelfield. From the site. The police are there.
They’ve found a body.“

‘Oh. Oh, goodness!“

‘Will the police want to speak to Miss Winter, do you suppose?“

At my mention of the name, his eyes flickered discreetly to the
door, checking that we could not be overheard.

‘They would want to speak to the owner of the property as a
matter of routine.“

‘I thought so.“ I hurried on. ”The thing is, not only is she ill—
I suppose you know that?“

He nodded.

‘—but also, her sister is dying.“

He nodded, gravely, and did not interrupt.

‘It would be better, given her fragility and the state of her
sister’s health, if she did not receive the news about the discovery too
abruptly. She should not hear it from a stranger. And she should not be alone
when the information reaches her.“

‘What do you suggest?“

‘I can go back to Yorkshire today. If I can get to the station
in the next hour, I can be there this evening. The police will have to come
through you to contact her, won’t they?“

‘Yes. But I can delay things by a few hours. Enough time for you
to get there. I can also drive you to the station, if you like.“

At that moment the telephone rang. We exchanged an anxious look
as he picked it up.