Grave Consequences (21 page)

What should I do? Ring a doorbell? Another roar went up from one of the houses and I knew the soccer match was still
on. Finally, I thought I’d better just ask the woman herself if there was anything I could do. I think also that I was trying to deny that I knew who she must be.

“Are you—?” Don’t be an idiot, Emma, of course she isn’t. “Is…is there someone I can call?” Vaguely, I was aware of a car engine in the distance.

The woman turned to me and stopped speaking. She looked at me without comprehension, though she still clutched the fence like it was a life preserver in stormy seas.

“Can I help you? Can I call someone—?”

There was a revving of an engine as a car pulled up right alongside us. A dark green Jaguar. George Whiting got out of the driver’s side and ran over to us.

I froze and acknowledged to myself who it was I was talking to.

“You can’t call anyone. We’re all lost now,” the woman said to me.

Whiting seized the woman’s left wrist. “Oh, Jesus, Ellen, what are you trying to do?” He saw me, recognized me, then yanked at her hand with a rough curse. The woman shrieked and banged herself against the fence, clutching at it with all her might. Whiting swallowed, and with forced patience, carefully prised her fingers off the links, one by one, until he had that hand free. “Ellen, Ellen, come on now. You don’t want to do this. Come now, love.”

I saw the blood then, coming from where the fence had torn at her palm, staining his hands too. Ellen Whiting writhed against her husband, but it was easier for him to remove her right hand, even while he still held her other wrist pinioned. He was a good deal shorter than his wife was but so very strong, and something about his insistence seemed to drain some of the fight from her. But as he started to lead her toward the car, the engine still running, she began to scream.

“Julia! Juu-lia! Juli—”

Whiting, with something that looked like practice, forced
his wife into the car and gently shut the door, cutting off the rest of her cry. He then turned around to me.

By this time, several doors had opened up and people were starting to peer out to find the source of the racket. George glanced at them, no more, then spoke to me.

“You remember what I said before.” His words were low. “Bloody archaeologist. Don’t you ever say a fucking word about this. Never.”

And that was all. He was at the right hand driver’s side before I could blink. He slammed that door and then gunned the engine. So overwhelmed was I by what I’d just seen that I just stared. As the Jaguar tore past me, I could see, briefly, that Ellen was no longer screaming, but sat, looking back at the fence, her bloodied hand pressed against the window as if in farewell, smearing the glass.

I
T MIGHT HAVE BEEN MY AWARENESS OF THOSE TWITCHING
curtains or the sudden rumbling of my stomach that spurred me away from there. That is what I told myself; in reality, I was driven away by the shock, the raw emotion of what I’d left behind. Pain, madness, fear, anger were dangerously exposed like a wire with the insulation chewed off it. What was most startling, what stayed with me longer than Ellen’s nearly mute misery, was the way that George Whiting had behaved toward her. He approached the scene with a familiarity that bespoke weariness and a tenderness that spoke of an abiding love and patience I wouldn’t have imagined the man possessed. I recalled Jeremy’s words—“rough around the edges, but no worse”—and realized, in this instance, at least, it must be true.

And then there was Whiting’s constant reference to archaeologists. It was so out of place with what he should have been concerned with—a murdered daughter, a more than distraught wife—that there must be something more than his antipathy toward Jane behind it—

No, I realized. Blaming Jane, ranting about archaeolo
gists, it was just noise, I was willing to bet, it was a necessary distraction, like Shylock crying over his lost ducats to mask his distress at Jessica’s betrayal. Julia Whiting’s profession was a minor thorn in her father’s side, given the present circumstances, but focusing on that kept Whiting from thinking about the horrors that had lately enveloped his life…

I fled. I decided to have another look at the Grub and Cabbage, but promised myself I wouldn’t stick around if it turned out to be like the Fig and Thistle.

Nothing could have been less similar. Despite the fact that it was a clean, well-lighted place, it was stuffed with all the appurtenances of a pub, but none of the life. I got the same feel from it as I did from certain theme restaurants in the United States, where clutter was scientifically accumulated and situated to produce a maximum level of inoffensive nostalgia. People came to this haven of hanging plants, toby jugs, and horse prints because it was conveniently situated on a busy road with a large parking area; they didn’t know or care to know the name of the guy behind the bar, a pimply faced lad in an ill-fitting black bow tie and clean white shirt, who looked bored and out of place as he cut limes and washed glasses. From my seat, I watched as patrons entered—mostly couples—pausing at the door briefly. They were nonlocals passing through, it seemed, for a swift half and “real” steak and kidney pie. The waitress who took my order smiled briefly and asked if I thought it would stop raining soon, but didn’t appear to hear my answer, her eyes focused somewhere past me. All in all, it seemed to me to be an excellent place to conduct an illicit affair and I wondered whether Julia hadn’t arranged to meet her boyfriend here after her visit home and whether he met her before she was killed. The police in the newspaper article mentioned she’d stopped here, and left shortly thereafter.

I finished my half pint and plowman’s lunch. It wasn’t bad, but it sure wasn’t good. The cheese was curled at the edges and the salad was wilted; I wondered whether the cold
plate didn’t indicate that it had been stacked with countless identical others in the industrial fridge. I had another look around. Maybe it was the way I’d spent my morning, maybe it was how it had finished, but the place seemed to me to be almost as gloomy as my evening at the Fig and Thistle. I certainly didn’t feel threatened here, but equally, there was nothing inviting in this place, nothing that made me want to ease back in my seat and relax for a while. It was more as though I felt like I was part of a demographic being serviced. I never would have stopped here, ordinarily. So why hadn’t I just walked back to the center of town, to the Prince of Wales? I could have ignored a grumbling tummy for another twenty or thirty minutes. Easily.

The answer was simple. I wasn’t here to eat. I was here to ask questions. To investigate.

In that moment, I knew what Sabine had been after, why she’d been so angry when I’d first asked her about people in town. I threw down a bank note and some change and hurried out of there.

I found the vicar in the graveyard behind the church. Reverend Jones was still in her cassock, surplice, and stole, her hair was neatly pulled back and in as tidy shape as I had ever seen it. She was smoking and looking so tranquil under the oak tree that I hesitated. If Sunday morning was her busy part of the week, then how much more precious would the quiet moment after that be? I had just decided to turn around and come back another time, when the gravel I stepped on shifted and rattled. Sabine turned around quickly, a little irritated.

Her face relaxed only a little when she saw me. “Hello. Come to see me?”

“I don’t want to bother you. This must be like Friday night for you.” I noticed that her stole was embroidered: one side was covered with a multitude of tiny, finely wrought sheep. On the other was a shepherd carrying a single lost sheep. Someone had put a lot of handwork into that.

She waved me over. “There are no Friday nights in this
job. On the other hand, that also means there are no Monday mornings, really. Come on, have a seat.” She patted the stone wall she was leaning against.

We sat there quietly for a while, Sabine smoking, me looking at the gravestones. I’d seen that there were a couple of good ones in the churchyard—meaning early ones with ghoulish, instructive carvings of winged hourglasses and skulls—but most of them around where we sat were from the nineteenth century. Yawn—I could get that at home. Rain ran down the stones and pattered on the leaves of the oak tree that sheltered us, and the calm was quietly wonderful. Of course it couldn’t last.

“This is a marvelous place,” I said. And it truly was, even in the gentle rain. I looked over my shoulder, across the river. The sky was closer, a more intimate sky than I was used to at home, and the green of the trees on the other side of the river in town was accented by the wet. A little sun and a cow and we would have had a Constable.

We sat quietly a moment longer.

“Maybe you can explain something,” Sabine said. “When I used to go abroad more often, Americans would find out I was English and tell me how much they felt like they were coming home when they came to England. It always confused me. I don’t suppose they were talking about genetic memory? That’s a bit much, if you ask me. But they do tend to say it quite a lot. Why is that?”

I thought about it for a moment. “It is memory.”

She frowned, not convinced. “You don’t
really
think it’s something passed down, do you?”

“I don’t think it’s so much genetic memory—I mean, not all Americans are descended from English colonists, right?—but a kind of cultural memory that gets built in school. You’re taught English poetry and plays and literature, some of those images are bound to stick with you, become iconic. You watch enough Merchant–Ivory or Brideshead or even just PBS, and the landscape gets rein
forced without you really paying attention to it. So that’s why people think they recognize things and places and feelings when they get here. I don’t think it’s anything more than that.”

“Hmm. Possible. Better than anything I came up with, I guess.” She knew that wasn’t why I was here.

I took a deep breath. “How did you become a priest? You’d been in geology before?”

Reverend Jones raised an eyebrow and stubbed out her cigarette. She reached under her robes, pulled out her papers and tobacco, and rolled another, looking at me curiously. “The two aren’t unrelated. Nothing is, I suppose. I was on holiday, in Turkey. There was an earthquake. I was trapped for several hours under the rubble of the building I’d been in, a little cafe. It was gone, utterly destroyed. A pile of wood scraps and clay brick rubble. The owner, who was the only other person in there, was killed. Though not right away.”

She was silent for a moment.

“That’s where you got the scar?” I prompted, gesturing to the pale line over her brow.

“Oh, no. That? Tch, no, I got that playing rugby.”

I had a distant image of a herd of burly men tossing a large white ball and slamming into each other with bone-crunching intensity. It wasn’t such a stretch for Sabine, I guess—she enjoyed sport—but far from the peaceful quiet of the graveyard in which we sat. “You played rugby.”

“At school.” Sabine stuck her cigarette in her mouth and, hands freed, pulled up one leg of her trousers, revealing dark green nubbly socks. Rugby socks, I supposed. “Still miss it.”

I realized that she had worn her rugby socks under her robes when she’d given her service that morning. “Got psyched up for your sermon today, did you?”

She grinned. “It is a bit like getting tooled up for a match.” Then she resettled herself and looked serious again. “No, I wasn’t badly hurt, aside from a lot of bruises and a broken collarbone. I was very lucky.”

“And that’s how you knew,” I said.

“No, not a bit. It wasn’t because I had survived and others hadn’t. It isn’t that simple.” She seemed to struggle for her words. “I had always been religious. Very casual about it, but I believed nonetheless. My true conversion, if you will, the thing that solidified my faith, wasn’t something I noticed right away. It was days after the quake, really. And my calling came even later after that.”

I was determined to have it from her. I didn’t care how personal it was, I needed to know. “It was the…what can I call it? The power of the earthquake?”

“No, it wasn’t that either, though let me tell you, I never want to go through that again, believe you me. Even when I figured out what was happening, why the room, everything was shaking so much—even with my training, it took a moment—all I could think, as I tried to reach the door, was: “Bugger, I’m done for.” Not very scientific, not very eloquent last thoughts, as I imagined they might be.”

“So
how
did you
know?
”

“It wasn’t because I knew something. It was because I stopped needing to know something. It was because I stopped being afraid. Oh, I don’t mean I wasn’t terrified at the time, I was. You can’t know how bad it was. It was weeks after that I noticed, that little background hum of worry was gone. That everyday fear that always seemed to hang over me had vanished. The uncertainty, the anxiety that was always niggling away at me, gone.”

“Well, I guess something like that put things into perspective for you—”

She broke in impatiently. “No, Emma, it was more than that. And before you ask, what was it, how do I know, I will tell you, I don’t know. All I can say is that it was the most sure I’ve been of anything, ever. On very good days, in prayer, I am that sure again. It’s called faith.”

“I see.” I didn’t really.

Sabine didn’t believe me either. “Let me try this. When you are working on some theory or other, it doesn’t always
match the data as soon as you know it’s right, does it? You just really know, it feels right.”

I shrugged; I had to grant her that.

“Well, it’s just the same. It is that conviction that while I don’t have all the answers and never will have, I am absolutely right on this one point.” She looked at me. “So what is it that you are so unsure about, that you need to ask someone else how they know what they know?”

Suddenly, all my resolve leached away. “I feel stupid talking about it.”

Sabine snorted. “Please don’t let that stop you.”

“First of all, let me explain: I’m not that religious—”

“Okay.”

“I mean, I have ethics that I feel pretty strongly about, just nothing, you know, organized.”

“Emma, it’s okay.”

“It’s just that…lately…I’ve been feeling like…I’m in the middle of a lot of things. I keep finding myself in the center of…stuff.”

Sabine gave me a sarcastic look. “Now I know you’re better able to express yourself than that.”

I took a deep breath. “Death. Lately, I’m finding myself surrounded by a lot of death.”

“And why does that bother you?”

I looked at her. “Well, jeez. I mean, that’s enough, isn’t it?”

“Not really.” She shrugged. “I find myself near a lot of death—”

She didn’t get it, I thought. “No, I mean
violent
death—”

“Yes, that too. So do police officers, fire fighters, ambulance drivers, doctors, lots of people.”

I spread my hands. “Yeah, but why me?”

“Ah, the eternal question.”

“No, you know what I mean. Those others, they get in the middle of things because of their work, because they choose to. It’s part of their jobs.”

She nodded. “They asked for it.”

“Well, yeah.” I picked up a leaf from the ground and began pulling the stem from it.

“Assuming that you don’t believe in a Godly plan, I think it’s because you can.” She carefully stubbed out her cigarette and immediately began rolling another with deft efficiency. “We talked about perspective before—well, rather, I was talking about it. You were ducking it—and I think we’ve come back to that. Death isn’t unusual, we’re just better at hiding it, pretending it doesn’t happen these days. I think you just find yourself ‘in the middle of it,’ as you say, because of how you look at things. It seems a natural progression to me. Your job is, at times, to be a professional outsider. Mine too, really, except I haven’t the luxury of distance, like you do.”

“It’s no luxury,” I said. “You have to work hard to care about the dead, they’re so removed from you.”

“Yeah, but you have to work harder to care about the living,” Sabine replied, “because they’re much more likely to piss you off. But I digress. You’ve set yourself apart, you have a certain set of skills, and you have your ‘strongly felt ethics.’ That lets you see things others mightn’t and you find yourself inclined to act upon them—even if you don’t know why—because of those pesky ethics. The question is, you find yourself in a position to use these skills, where perhaps no one else can or would want to—I’ll bet you don’t get any prizes for your interest—”

I was reminded of Palmer’s words: There is no prize for finding the fox.

“—So I’m left asking: What are you going to do about it?”

I stared at the river. Maybe the answer was out there.