All Things Undying (16 page)

‘The woman threw a wobbly, threatened to take legal action, so the contractor agreed to move the monument to her garden. She had them set it in place next to the tombstone of her dog, Rex, and she's planted flowers all around. Her husband's body is still in the graveyard at St Andrews, of course, so I don't know what the point of that exercise was.'

I think I knew. ‘After the funeral is over, don't we all need a physical
place
where we can go to mourn?' I thought about Cathy Yates, trying to locate her father's body so she could fill not only the empty plot waiting for him back home in Pittsburgh, but the hole in her heart. And what of the Embankment where mourners continued to build a floral tribute to Susan Parker at the very spot where the medium had breathed her last?

Lilith looked up from her knitting. ‘I agree completely, Hannah. And in this electronic age, that place can even be an online memorial page on Facebook.'

‘Don't I know!' I said. ‘I came completely unglued when I got an email from a friend who had recently passed away. It was sent by her daughter, as it happened, but it gave me quite a turn when my friend's name popped up on the “From” line in my mailbox.'

Lilith inclined her head toward mine. ‘Answering machine greetings are the worst, you know.' She shuddered. ‘They forget to change them, so you get a voice from beyond the grave.'

‘Well, on that cheerful note, I have to be off!' Liz fished around under the table for her handbag, then stood up. ‘Nice to meet you, Hannah. Will you be here next Tuesday?'

‘I'll walk out with you,' I said, picking up my own handbag.

When we got to the bottom of the steps, however, I revised my plan. ‘I hope you don't mind, Liz, but I think I'll stay a while and say a little prayer for Susan Parker. Until next week, then?'

I saw Liz out the door, picked up a Book of Common Prayer from the bookshelf, then made my way down the south aisle to the beautiful little Lady Chapel. I sat down in one of the blue-cushioned chairs, opened the prayer book to the section on the burial of the dead, and read:
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

Life after death; Susan's stock in trade. Was what she did for a living so incompatible with Christianity? I didn't think so. With the book laying open in my hands, I closed my eyes and prayed for Susan's soul, and that whoever was responsible for her death would be brought to justice.

When I opened my eyes again, I noticed a Sacrament lamp – a perpetual candle in a brass holder hanging from a chain attached to the wall. I stared at the lamp, opening my mind, embracing the silence, hoping – but not really believing – that Susan might actually reach out from the beyond and speak to me. But my only answer was the volunteers' happy chatter spilling down from the gallery as they did the washing-up after the lunch.

I took the long way round on my way out of St Saviour's, passing through the Ambulatory – past the antique hand pump fire engine and the Armada chest – through to the Chancel where I found myself standing, quite literally, on the splendid Hawley Brass.

Dressed in a full suit of armor, John Hawley the Second lay tall and ramrod straight between his two wives, looking none too happy about it. Each lady was adorned with jewels in her hair, and was accompanied in the afterlife by a pair of toy dogs wearing bells on their collars. But John, I noticed, was holding Joanna, the first wife's, hand. It was a good thing that Alicia, wife number two, had predeceased old John, or she might have had a thing or two to say about that.

Meanwhile, back in the twenty-first century, I thought about Jon Hamilton and
his
two wives, my friend Alison and Wife Number One, who had perished at sea.

How was it, I wondered, that in all the years that we'd known Alison and Jon, the subject of Wife Number One had never come up? We still wouldn't have known about her if Susan Parker hadn't picked up vibes about an earlier marriage at Janet's dinner.

Clearly, I didn't know Alison as well as I thought. Over the years, we'd exchanged frequent emails, annual Christmas cards. Alison emailed my daughter, Emily – who called her Auntie A – and remembered to send cards on my grandchildren's birthdays. How could a relationship be so one-sided? Now I even found myself wondering if their daughter, Kitty, was Alison's, or Jon's by his previous marriage to . . . who was it? . . . Beth?

Alison and I were friends, weren't we? I figured I'd just pop over to her house and see how she was doing. And while I was there, I'd simply ask her to tell me about Beth.

But before I did that, I decided to pay a visit to the Dartmouth Public Library.

TWELVE

T
he Dartmouth Public Library occupies the ground floor of the Flavel Arts Centre, a modern, tastefully designed building with a dramatic zig-zag roof over a glass façade that exposes each of its three floors to public view, like a doll house. I had to pass by the police station to get there, and as usual, I looked in. Although the station was open, the young officer manning the counter would tell me nothing about their progress on Susan Parker's case except to say that the investigation was ongoing.

Damn, I thought, as I crossed the street and headed for the library. I'd learned more than that from the woman reading the news on television that morning. Forensic analysis was being done of the victim's clothing, the reporter had told the viewing public over their Weetabix, toast and orange marmalade. Furthermore, an accident reconstruction expert had been called in from Croydon, and his report was expected shortly.

As I waited for assistance at the library reference desk, I began to case the joint. I was surrounded by shelves crammed with books, magazines, DVDs, and other material, so closely spaced that the effect was almost claustrophobic. If e-books didn't become all the rage, I figured it wouldn't be long before the library ran out of shelf space. Nearby, a rank of computers was provided for public use. I'd come at a good time, apparently, as only one of the machines was occupied.

A librarian materialized from somewhere in the stacks and greeted me with a friendly, ‘May I help you?'

I explained that I was looking for old newspaper reports.

‘I suggest you start with Newsbank,' the librarian said. ‘That's our most comprehensive resource, and it's online.' She pointed to a terminal. ‘Click online resources and you'll find Newsbank among those listed.'

I sat down and followed her instructions.

Newsbank came up immediately, filling the screen with a multicolored map of the UK. Because I wanted to see newspapers in the South West, I clicked on the turquoise section of the map. Of twenty-two newspapers in that general region, almost all had come online in 2007.

Rats.

Surprisingly, the
Dartmouth Chronicle
wasn't listed at all, and of the others, the one of most likely interest, the
Western Morning News
out of Plymouth, went back only as far as 1999. I figured Beth Hamilton had gone missing around 1994, so that was no help at all.

‘I guess I should have been more specific,' I told the librarian when she reappeared at my elbow to ask how I was getting on. ‘The articles I need would have come out in 1994 or 1995.'

A few minutes later, I found myself seated at a microfilm machine, having flashbacks to my college days at Oberlin as I reeled my way through newspapers on film, starting with the paper closest to home, the
Dartmouth Chronicle.

Elizabeth and Jon Hamilton had been avid sailors, that I knew, but finding numerous references to sailing races in which they had participated brought that fact into sharp focus. Jon's Contessa 32 was a sprightly little craft, I realized as I scanned the results of race after race. When she wasn't winning outright,
Biding Thyme
was consistently placed in the top three. No wonder Jon was loathe to part with her.

Halfway through the
Dartmouth Chronicle
for 1994, I found what I was looking for: ‘Local Woman Presumed Drowned in Solo Sailing Accident'. When I noticed the date on the article, all the breath left my body.

July 30. The date of Janet's dinner party, when Susan Parker had been guest of honor. No wonder Beth's spirit had been sending out vibes that evening. No wonder Jon had freaked.

Beth had been seen by several people, the newspaper reported, sailing out of the marina alone. Several hours later,
Biding Thyme
had been discovered, sails still set, at Stumpy Steps not far from the Castle. There was nothing in the article that I didn't know already, except that Jon and his daughter had been away at the time, visiting his mother in Exeter.

I paged forward to the following week's
Chronicle
to find, as expected, that police were still searching for Beth's body. The shore on both sides of the Dart had been thoroughly combed by police and volunteers, I learned, but to no avail. A tiny spot of blood that proved, upon analysis, to have come from Beth, had been found on the stern of
Biding Thyme
, but there was no way to tell how the blood had got there, or when. ‘There is no evidence of foul play,' a police spokesman said.

The week after that, the
Chronicle
reported, an expert on wind and water current patterns had been called in from Oxford University. Cardiff University in Wales sent the top tide man from their Hydro-Environmental Research Center. When the two experts put their heads together, they produced a series of graphs and hydrographic charts with circles and arrows, and the joint opinion that Beth's body had floated out to sea.

The week after that, nothing. Ditto the week after that.

As far as the
Dartmouth Chronicle
was concerned, Beth Hamilton had vanished off the face of the earth.

I sat back and gnawed on my thumbnail. The way I saw it, there were four possible explanations for Beth's disappearance:

Beth had tumbled overboard and drowned. An accident.

She'd jumped overboard and drowned. A suicide.

She'd been boarded, clobbered, and thrown overboard. Murder.

She went sailing, leaped overboard, swam to shore and disappeared. A runaway.

‘Beth is a strong swimmer,' Jon had been quoted as saying.
Is
, I noticed, and not
was
. But what could she have been running away from? A bad marriage? From what Alison had told me, their marriage had been perfect, so there was little likelihood of that.

If not running
from
something, was there anything she'd been running
to
? A lover, perhaps?

I wanted to slap myself for thinking such vulgar thoughts, but the idea must have occurred to the police, too. Two weeks after she went missing, the
Chronicle
had published a picture of Beth with the caption, ‘Have you seen this woman?'

Only four explanations for Beth's disappearance. I rubbed my tired eyes and went over them again in my head. Accident, suicide, murder or AWOL. No, wait a minute. Five. Beth could have been abducted by aliens.

Maybe I needed a break.

As I was returning the microfilm reels to the reference desk, I remembered something Janet Brelsford had said the night of the party:
each year the Dart takes a heart
.

Back at the computer, with Newsbank on the screen, I put my fingers on the keyboard and typed in ‘Dart' and ‘Drowning,' then scanned the search results covering the past ten years. One death a year was about right. A tourist falls off a luxury yacht; a widow drowns near her favorite spot; a canoeist is trapped under his overturned canoe; a drunken youth tumbles off the Embankment. In most cases, the body of the victim had been recovered in a few days. In one case, rescue teams used an Air Force search and rescue helicopter equipped with thermal imaging cameras to help find the body.

Alas, no such technology had been called into play when Beth Hamilton went missing. Gradually, everybody seemed to forget about poor Beth, except for Jon Hamilton and his daughter, Kitty, age six.

THIRTEEN

‘Elderly Driver Creates Spectacle At Seaford Opticians',
Brighton News
, 27 June 2009

W
ednesday morning dawned dark and drear, with rain drizzling from a leaden sky. An earlier phone call to Alison had produced nothing but an invitation to leave a message on her call minder, so after a quick breakfast, I zipped myself up in a slicker, grabbed an umbrella and headed up Waterpool Road to her house.

The way Alison had been carrying on the previous day, I expected to find the shades drawn, a black wreath on the door, and have my knock answered by a lugubrious butler droning, ‘I'm sorry, Madam, but Madam is indisposed.'

Imagine my surprise, then, when Alison herself opened the door almost immediately, dressed in neat jeans and an Aran pullover, hair brushed until it shone, and make-up so expertly applied that it hardly showed. She held an open lipstick in her hand; I'd apparently interrupted her in the act of applying it while peering into the mirror in the tiny foyer.