Grave Consequences (30 page)

“How can you be so sure?” I stood up. “I think I’ve relied too much on accident as it is, up till now, to leave anything more to chance.”

“Oh, it’s very easy for you, isn’t it?” he said, recovering himself. “You don’t suffer any of the consequences, you don’t even need to stop here and see how others fare in your wake! You’ll go home eventually, and all this will be a memory of little consequence to you.”

I laughed. “Trust me when I say this whole affair has been nothing
but
consequence to me.”

He looked as though he was still convinced that there was a way out of this. “It would be very easy to ruin me with this. Ellen’s ill, badly ill, but what other harm can she do?”

I was more surprised by his pleading than by his lack of logic. It didn’t suit George Whiting.

“I’ll find a place for her…where she can’t hurt anyone, can’t hurt herself,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be better than a lot of fuss that wouldn’t serve anyone? I swear to you, that’s what I’ll do. I won’t lose everything I’ve worked so hard for.”

It almost made a bizarre kind of sense, but I shook my head. “It leaves too many people wondering. It leaves a cloud over Jane, Greg, Andr—and everyone. There are too many questions that go begging answers.”

He shook his head violently. “No, no, they wouldn’t wonder. People…people here know how to look after their own, when to keep it buttoned. It would just fade away.”

I shrugged. “I’m sorry.”

“The hell you are.” He spat. “This means nothing to you. I’m telling you, just walk away from this now. I’ve worked too hard to raise my family up and to protect them now. I won’t let you simply destroy it because you think it’s right.”

He stepped forward, gripping the trenching tool tightly; he raised it, as if calculating whether it would do the job, if he decided it was worth trying. I willed myself to be calm, and, as if by habit, relaxed into a crouch. I had to wonder how far a tough man, who’d spent years fighting for position in town and the security of his family, would go to protect that position and the remains of that family. He’d already, even in the throes of grief over Julia, tried to help conceal her murder by his wife, and it didn’t take a lot of imagination to see that the accidental death of a visitor out walking by the river in the dark wouldn’t bother him very much in the least.

I sized him up and could tell he was doing the same. He was less than a head smaller than I was, but the muscles that showed under his shirtsleeves were as tough as old roots. I knew how aggressive he could be and had no doubt that if he chose to attack me, I could get badly hurt, possibly even killed. On the other hand, I could see him struggling with himself, balancing grief and fear and anger against the slim possibility of making it better if he should succeed in silencing me, and the much larger reckoning, how very much worse it would be if he tried to kill me and failed. He could see that I was taller, though perhaps not so heavily built as he was. He didn’t know about my habit of running and my visits to Nolan, a personal trainer who was teaching me self-defense. He couldn’t know these things, but he was carefully considering the fact that I had followed him, had confronted him, and was now apparently calmly waiting for him to decide.

He was wrong there. I wasn’t the least bit calm. The only thing that kept me from freaking out entirely was the idea that if I didn’t assume a ready posture, things would go that much more the worse for me when they did happen. So it wasn’t so much bravery or cool as it was a commonsensical approach to pain avoidance and the knowledge from once having dropped my flashlight on my bare foot, if I chose to lay it upside George Whiting’s head, he’d learn I wasn’t a pushover.

“This means nothing to you,” he repeated. A thought struck him and he lowered the trenching tool a mite with a sly look. “But maybe it does once it’s put into the proper framework, eh?”

I did not relax as I tried to read his face. It was with good reason that he’d made himself a success in a very rough business. “What do you mean?”

“What I mean is, your friends seem to know when to keep their mouths shut, don’t they? About Mads down at the cafe. I bet you couldn’t force Jane’s mouth open with a pry bar.”

I could feel my heart thudding in my chest and I felt my hands go cold again. I shook my head, tried to keep my voice steady. “I don’t think she knows—”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I could have died. George Whiting seized on that, more and more sure of himself now.

“But you do know, don’t you? I’m not surprised, really. People around here, they know everyone’s business, can’t help but, in a community as small as this one was once. No one was sorry to see Sebastian Hall go; my dad told me he even gave around he’d had gone up to London after, and everyone assumed he was killed in the Blitz. It wasn’t hard to cover up, though they could have done better to drop Hall off at the pig farm and let the porkers finish him off properly. But no one knew and no one cared to know and it wasn’t hard to keep quiet after. Poor lasses, what else should they
have done? What would any of us have done in their places? Hmmm?”

“I don’t know.”

He pounced on that. “Exactly.”

“But self-defense is different than outright murder…” I struggled to derive some sense from the distinction I was making.

George moved impatiently. “My wife is out of her mind, do you understand me? She didn’t know what she was doing. I see very little difference between the actions of…someone who’s lost her mind, and a pair of young girls fighting in self-defense. Who’s to say there’s a difference?”

I kept quiet. He continued, as if building a proof.

“But let’s say your friends don’t know. What would it do to Greg Ashford to find out his poor old ‘aunty’ has been done for murder? Could she stand up to a trial? The publicity might kill her. Could you do that to her? To them?”

I hadn’t decided that yet, myself.

“And what if they do know?” Whiting went on. “Might look pretty bad for them, don’t you think? What if they were working there as a means to help cover up her all-too-hasty burial of Hall, however long ago? Never mind what it might do to your friends’ reputations, there’s something called aiding and abetting after the fact, isn’t there?”

He watched me for a moment. “It’s not as easy as you might think, is it? A little more difficult to come waltzing in and do your damage, when you don’t know anyone or care what will happen to them. A little more difficult, now, isn’t it? You wouldn’t peach on a harmless old lady, but can you really see yourself telling on Ellen now? It’s not so easy after all.

“Take your bones, I didn’t want them. I just wanted to do right by them, try to undo a little of what my Ellen’s done. I see it’s got me nowhere. But now you try and see how easy it is to do right, when you’ve got a little more on the line than you did before. My Ellen won’t hurt anyone ever again. I
promise. So you take your precious bones and you think long and hard before you decide how to take anything else from me.”

And with that, he left me in the cemetery, holding the bag.

I
PICKED MY WAY OVER TO THE WALL NEXT TO THE TREE
and sat down heavily on the wall. Now that I had relaxed slightly, I could feel the way the sweat sat on my clammy skin, the way that my heart still raced. I brushed a stray hair out of my face and wasn’t too surprised to see how my hand trembled. I set the bag on the wall next to me and it took two fumbling tries with the zipper before I could open it to see if it contained what George Whiting claimed. My eyes confirmed what my ears had already identified: I could just make out two slender arm bones, radius and ulna, jutting out of the jumble of darkened bones that rattled loose in the cloth bag. Since I didn’t have anything with me to better pack the fragile bones, I settled for organizing them so that they wouldn’t accidentally break each other, moving the skull so that it was at one end of the duffel and sorting the long bones so they didn’t act as levers against one another and snap. I didn’t touch the gloves or the wallet. Then I rezipped the bag and began to think furiously.

It was clear to me that I had to go to the police immediately: I knew who’d murdered Julia and why, and I also
knew why the bones had disappeared from the excavation. But he was right; it wasn’t that easy, there was too much at stake for other people. I had to consider that, even if every minute, I risked George Whiting returning with renewed resolve to keep me from going to the police at any price.

He was right about one thing: I was free and clear. I was heading to London in less than a day and could leave this all behind me. But there were others who were not so lucky. At least now I knew that neither Jane nor Greg had been directly responsible for Julia’s death, and if they had not been aware of Mads’s disposal of the body by the abbey ruins, then there was really nothing that should hurt them now, save for perhaps a little embarrassment. Maybe that would even help Jane, as it never hurts to let those who are intimidated by you see a crack or two in your armor every now and then. If they had been in on it, then it was bound to come out anyway, and if the community as a whole had been in on it, then I couldn’t believe anything truly awful would come of this.

Aunty Mads was another situation. If people already knew about it as a publicly kept secret, and the court finding was for self-defense, as it was sure to be, then she had nothing to worry about, either, really. I was much more worried about how she would take the idea of being found out after so many years, however. I didn’t see how, after not being able to confess to it openly for sixty years, she would be able to bear it now. But it would be so much worse to have George Whiting dangling the possibility of exposure over her head, I thought. Which would she choose, I wondered: risk having Greg find out what she’d done, or risk having him seen as an accomplice after the fact?

The problem was, I was the one who had to decide. I couldn’t leave it, not when I was hanging around a graveyard at four in the morning with a bag of five-hundred-year-old bones by my side and a man’s big sapphire ring in my pocket. Whatever would happen to Mads would be lessened
by pulling George Whiting’s fangs before he had a chance to use them.

That left the man himself and his deranged wife, a woman I’d met briefly, glancingly, once. They would suffer the worst. Perhaps he was right, maybe the worst had already happened and anything more would be adding insult to injury. Maybe there really was no difference between what Mads had done and what Ellen had done, when you got right down to it. There was no premeditation—but who was I to decide that I should pursue things only if the murderer hadn’t already suffered enough? If Jane had been guilty, I would have gone to the police, because she was guilty. I had no business splitting philosophical hairs simply because I thought that the Whitings had already been through an awful ordeal. I wasn’t a judge of anyone but myself, and the responsibility I had was to do what I thought was right.

I believed I should go to the police, but how did I know that I was right to do so? This wasn’t any of my business—

Until I made it my business.

I was no way part of this community—

Until I decided to step up for Jane.

I could throw the ring into the river; I could dump the bones anonymously by the gate to the site, the police would probably find out Ellen had done it anyway—

George said that they didn’t seem to know where to look next.

George would say anything…

I heard an animal stir by the riverbank and it roused me from my speculations. I couldn’t afford to hang around here anymore. I needed to decide.

I didn’t need to decide, I realized; I knew what the right thing to do was. I just needed the guts to do it.

Marchester was starting to wake up, ever so slowly. The false dawn lightened the sky and I hopped off the stone wall and began to follow the path back into town, duffel bag in hand. Dew covered the weeds and soaked my sneakers and
jeans and I was chilled by something that had nothing to do with the predawn air. I walked past the site, past the turn off for Liverpool Road where I thought wearily of my quiet bed on the third floor, and down toward the Hewett Street police station.

When I was conducting archaeological research, I didn’t throw evidence away when it didn’t support my hypotheses; when I undertook the responsibility of investigation, I also accepted the fact that things might not turn out the way I thought. It was the same situation now. I didn’t like what I’d found, but since I’d taken on the burden of looking into things, I realized I also had the obligation to see it through to the bitter end.

I reached the door and paused. I hoped Jane and Greg would understand; I hoped that Mads would believe I was acting in her best interest, because I had to finish this. It was with a heavy heart, in no way lightened by my decision, that I climbed the stairs and opened the door to the police station, just as the sun showed itself over the horizon.

A
FEW HOURS LATER, AT NEARLY SEVEN O’CLOCK
, I found myself standing in front of the door to 98 Liverpool Road, once again summoning my courage to enter. Finally admitting that the longer I took, the worse it was going to be, I let myself in and went downstairs to the kitchen. I sat, too tired even to think about making a cup of coffee, when Jane and Greg came downstairs together. Both of them looked haggard, as though they’d been up all night too. Probably another long night in trying to patch their marriage back together, now that I knew for sure that they weren’t worrying about worse things. They were startled to see me.

“It’s early for you Emma,” Greg said. “I hope we didn’t disturb you earlier—”

“I never went to bed,” I said shortly. “I just got in and I’m afraid I’ve got bad news to tell you.”

They exchanged a surprised look but nodded. “It’s all right, you know. I think we already know what you’re going to say,” Jane began as they sat down.

I held up a hand to cut her off. “Look, this is going to suck any way you slice it, but I’m not going to be able to do
this if I don’t do it all at once. I’m not sure how you’ll feel about me after, but I just have to do this now.”

They nodded again, a little confused, and I told them what happened. I couldn’t sit; I got up and began to pace. Their eyes widened when I told them about what I saw at the site and about my encounter with George Whiting in the cemetery. Jane took Greg’s hand when I told them about why Whiting thought that he might be able to blackmail me—us—into silence. Tears streamed down Greg’s face as I told them what Mads had told me, believing that I was Jane. Jane blowing her nose loudly was the only other sound in the room as I finished my story.

“I hope to God you can understand why I had to go to the police, Greg.” I finally tore my eyes away from the window and made myself look at him. “I didn’t see any other way about it and I didn’t think I could take the time to tell you first, because, well, I just didn’t want to place any faith in George Whiting’s concept of right and wrong, if you know what I mean. I wanted to make sure the police knew everything as soon as possible so that there was the best chance that no one would get hurt. I mean, more hurt.” I finally sat down again wearily. “I’m so sorry—”

“Emma—”

I ran my hand through my hair, then rubbed my eyes. “I just thought you should know now, because you should be with Mads when the police speak to her. I’m sorry. I don’t expect you’ll appreciate this, I don’t expect you to forgive me. I didn’t decide this lightly. I just needed to tell you that I was trying to keep her, everyone, from some greater harm—”

“Emma, listen to me.” Greg pulled out a handkerchief, unheedful of the bits of string and paper that fell out. Jane bent over and picked them up absently. “When I said that I hope we hadn’t disturbed you earlier, it’s because the phone rang so early. About four-thirty or so.”

My heart stopped. Had George Whiting made good on this threats to reveal Mads’s secret? Had I acted too late?

“It was Aunty’s nurse,” he said. “Aunty Mads died this morning, very quietly. No one can hurt her now.”

“What?”

“Mads died. She’s been so poorly, for weeks now.” He and Jane exchanged a look. “Now we know it was since we started at the site. She finally gave up.”

“I don’t understand.” I looked from Greg to Jane, and back again.

“It’s okay, Emma. It’s over.”

“Oh.”

Jane had been silent up until now. She looked at me and frowned. “It seems you’ve been going to an awful lot of trouble, looking into things around here. Why? I mean, it’s really nothing at all to do with you, is it?”

As familiar as Jane’s questions were to me, I couldn’t help being vexed by the way she asked me, as if she was more worried that I had transgressed some boundary of etiquette. Still, she had the right to ask, and I’d already come up with the best answer I could.

“We are friends. You were in trouble. I thought I could help so I tried.”

“Oh,” Jane said, still frowning. It wasn’t a suitable answer at all, to judge by her expression. Maybe she was surprised because I had done it and we weren’t great friends, only brand new friends, coming from a long acquaintance. Maybe she felt dismayed because she didn’t know if she would have done it for me. It didn’t really matter; when you got right down to it, it didn’t have anything at all to do with Jane.

“Well, thank you, Emma,” she said, formally. “Thank you very much.” Then, obligation met and discharged, the mood abruptly shifted, and Jane the organizer came back.

“There’ll be no work on the site today. I’m helping Greg settle Aunty’s affairs and…well, they’re burying Julia Whiting sometime this weekend. The public’s been asked not to send flowers or attend, even, the very small private service, and from what you’ve told me, that’s a blessing too, now. But I thought I’d give the crew the day off so they
could have the chance to put this behind them and give us some time to think about Aunty. We’ve still a couple of weeks left. We’re in fine shape for finishing our work.”

There was another awkward silence. “Well, I’m going to pack up my things then, and get ready to head into London this afternoon. Unless there’s anything I can do to help—?”

“No, no,” they both said quickly, just as I expected.

“I left your number with the police, to find me here,” I said, apologetically. “And I’ve given them the number where I’ll be in London, if they need to call me back to testify, or clarify, or whatever. Just so you’re expecting it if they should call.”

“Once I get Aunty’s affairs started,” Greg said, “I’ll stop by Hewett Street, if they don’t contact me before then. And we’ll need to be in contact with them about Mother Beatrice’s bones, in any case.”

“Yes, so don’t worry about that,” Jane said. “It really ties up a lot of loose ends for us, you see. Right. I’ve got to start calling people. Let’s meet up around lunchtime, shall we, Emma?”

“Sure, Jane.”

She smiled, tight-lipped and grim, and began to busy herself with her diary and the telephone. I walked to the other side of the room to look at the tortoise. Greg followed, a carrot peeling and cabbage offering in hand.

“You know, I really want to thank you,” he said. He handed the food piece by piece into the tank.

I watched as Hildegard began to move as quickly as she ever did to get to the greens. “Why’s that?”

“The care you took over people. Worrying about Jane. Worrying how Aunty Mads would be, we would be, if any of this information got out. I mean, it was bound to happen sooner or later, but you took it to heart. And I appreciate that like I can’t tell you.”

“It’s okay,” I said. I glanced back at Jane, still busy on the phone.

“Jane doesn’t understand why you did it,” Greg said,
dropping in the last carrot shred. “It confuses her. Don’t worry about it. And don’t worry about us. We’re going to work things out. It will be hard, we’ve both a lot to learn. But you remember my friend Simon, from the pub last week? He’s going to lend me his parents’ holiday place in Cornwall for a week. Jane and I will go down there, away from all the distractions, get started on fixing things. Good thing we’re both so stubborn.”

We looked down at the tortoise, which was doggedly trying to drag the long piece of carrot across the tank. After weeks of casual glances at Hildegard, I realized how lovely she was, in her way. Her carapace was a domed mosaic the colors of aged ivory and dark lacquer and her bright eyes communicated an intelligence that I hadn’t expected. I wondered whether Greg generally had an affinity for hard-shelled creatures or if he just related to Hildegard’s capacity for sustained patience.

“I think Andrew is going to look into that job up north,” he said. “That will help.”

I looked at Greg quickly, but he only shrugged. “It’s too easy to hide behind things when there’s a third party in the house,” he said confidentially. “Always on too-good behavior.”

“That doesn’t help,” I agreed. Greg didn’t know about his friend’s feelings. Probably.

“Can I feed Hildegard a worm? I’d like to,” I said.

“Ermm. Well.” Greg looked away, then looked back at me, coloring, with an apologetic, embarrassed grin. “Hildegard is actually more of a vegetarian.”

I recalled Andrew making such a grand display of collecting the worms from the students and frowned. “But I thought—”

“Well. It was very kind of Andrew, of course.” Greg took off his glasses and polished them carefully. “He was so pleased with himself the first time he brought them home that I simply didn’t have the heart to tell him Hildegard doesn’t care for worms.”

We watched the tortoise wrestle with the cabbage, then I went upstairs to pack.

A half hour later, the phone rang. Greg called out. “Emma, it’s for you.”

I went downstairs and picked it up. “Hello?”

“Emma, Jeremy Hyde-Spofford here. I was calling to see whether I could entice you to come back to have a look at my bits of things, tomorrow say?”

I could feel my face fall. “Oh, I’d love to, but I can’t. I’ve got to catch a train to London this afternoon.”

“Surely you’re not leaving us so soon? Why, you’ve only just arrived!”

“I’m sorry too—”

“Hold on a moment. I was going to run myself up to London tomorrow morning. What say I drive you that evening? We can have a nice long chat about my bits, just the two of us. Would that put your schedule too much awry? I know it’s awful of me to ask, but I have so enjoyed chatting with you, however briefly.”

Jane and Greg were only going to run me over to the next town and they had plenty on their minds. But it was the fact that Jeremy had said “just the two of us” that made me decide. “I’m afraid I’d be putting you to too much trouble—”

“Oh, no, the imposition is entirely mine upon you. Say you will.”

“I’d be happy to.”

“Excellent! I’ll pick you up at noon and we’ll have lunch. See you then.”

I replaced the phone and told Jane and Greg of my plans. They didn’t seem too upset, really, not with everything they had to cope with. There was still about an hour and a half left and I tried lying down to sleep, but I was far too wound up to do it. So I went for a walk.

I wandered through the streets for a little while; the cafe was closed, a hastily made sign announced, until Monday. I walked downriver one way, then crossed the bridge to the business side of town, walked, and returned the same way,
ending by chance or habit at the field next to St. Alban’s churchyard. I heard the familiar rasp and ring of soil being shoveled up and dumped aside and it took me a moment to recognize why I should hear that particular noise in this place: Someone was digging Julia Whiting’s grave at the far side of the cemetery. I sat down, behind the wall, where I couldn’t be noticed, and watched.

As comparatively “new” as St. Alban’s churchyard was, it had been filled up over the past four hundred and eighty years. Hence the use of a lone man with a shovel: There would be no room to use mechanical equipment between the existing graves. Soon, however, he was joined by another, who protested that the traffic had held him up. The two fell quiet and worked quickly, methodically, with the ease of considerable practice. They moved down through the ground at a rapid pace, the soil mounding up neatly next to them in a long, low bank. I was thankful that they were silent as they worked.

I thought of all the homely human endeavors that began with the instant of a shovel biting into the earth. Fields tilled for grain, clay dug for pottery, trenches excavated for water, cellars scooped out for storage, and finally, perhaps, a little house fashioned for the last rest. I wondered if the sexton who dug Mother Beatrice’s grave beneath the cold stone floor of the abbey worked in reverent silence or whistled tunelessly and scratched himself during the course of what had been just one in a long line of working days. His two modern counterparts seemed to be working faster and faster, and with a start, I realized that they were tucking a length of grass-green material over the berm. They hurried away just as the back door of the church opened and I realized that I was witnessing Julia’s Whiting’s funeral.

If I stood now, it would be as if a jack-in-the-box sprang open, and I had no desire to draw any attention to myself, no wish to disturb their privacy. I huddled down next to the wall, everything concealed from the eyes down.

There were only a handful of people: Sabine, now appro
priately solemn as vicar in her robes, George Whiting; and a few others, none of whom I recognized, unless you counted PC Whelton, who stood with another officer in plain clothes, discreetly at the edge of things. There was no sign of Mrs. Whiting. I realized that this was as close as I had ever been, would ever be, to meeting Julia.

The service was as brief as it was melancholy to watch. I couldn’t hear but every fourth or fifth word, and recognized most of those only because of how the funeral rites inevitably become a part of anyone’s adult life. I thought then of how robes and words transformed one. Sabine’s cassock, surplice, and stole reminded me of Jane’s graduation photo and it was right they should: They were both derived from the same medieval tradition. Morag had her robes too—I recalled the photo in her office—and I smiled, thinking that the three women had more in common than any of them might recognize or want to admit.

The breeze rattled the leaves, and my concentration on the scene before me was such that I almost didn’t hear the footsteps next to me.

I looked up with a start. The young stranger from outside the Fig and Thistle was there, the one who had left the note in the graveyard signed “Stephen.” He looked worse off than before, hollow eyed from little sleep, and his clothing was showing definite signs of wear not so much as clothing but as camping gear. He had made another effort to wash up, though. He nodded to me, as if expecting to see me down there, and then turned all his attention to the ceremony in the cemetery. He leaned forward expectantly, balancing on the balls of his feet, hands clenched into fists, and it was then that I recognized the family resemblance.

The service was over. The few people who’d been there with George Whiting now left and the two of us by the stone wall watched as the Reverend Sabine Jones spoke earnestly to George Whiting. The police pulled back to a respectful distance, and I marveled that it should be the case. Sabine seemed to be the only person he ever let talk to him, advise
him, as I remembered from having seen them at Jeremy’s house that rainy day of the faux hunt. Something about her insistence touched him this time, because although he responded with no more than a curt nod, body still tense, she leaned back from him with what looked to be a sigh of relieved satisfaction. Some breakthrough had been made. She followed George to the door of the church, where the police joined him.