No Graves As Yet (32 page)

“Thought you’d lost your tongue,” Mrs. Channery said with satisfaction. “Found it again, have you? Well, nothin’ you say’ll get me into one of them machines!”

“Then I shan’t try,” Judith answered, exactly as if it had been the next thing she had intended. “Do you know where he went?”

“Who? Your father? Do you think Oi asked him, Miss Reavley? That would be very ill-fatched up o’ me, now wouldn’t it?”

Judith’s eyes widened for a moment. “Of course you wouldn’t, Mrs. Channery. But he might have said. I imagine it wasn’t a secret.”

“Then you imagine wrong,” Mrs. Channery pronounced with immense pleasure. “It were a secret. Your dear ma asked him, an’ he went four wont ways about answerin’. Just said he’d be back for her in an hour . . . an’ he weren’t! Took him an hour and a half, but she never said a word.” She fixed Judith with an accusing eye. “Good woman, your ma was! No one left like her no more.”

“I know,” Judith said quietly.

Mrs. Channery grunted. “Shouldn’t have said that,” she apologized. “Not that it ain’t true. But it don’t do no good cryin’. Not what she’d have wanted. Very sensible woman, she were. Lots o’ patience with others what was all but useless, but none for herself. An’ she’d have expected you to be like her!”

Judith glared at her, angry not only at what she had said, but that she, of all people, should have known Alys well enough to have understood so much about her.

“You were very fond of her,” Joseph observed, to fill the silence more than anything else.

Mrs. Channery’s lips trembled for a moment. “O’ course Oi were!” she snapped at him. “She knew how to be kind without lookin’ down on folks, an’ there ain’t many what can do that! She never come by without askin’ first, an’ she ate my cake. Never brought any of her own, like needin’ to keep score. But she brought me jam now an’ then. Apricot. An’ Oi never told her as how the rhubarb jam was horrible. Like so much boiled string, it were. Oi gave it to Diddy Warner, her with the toddy-grass all up in the air like a gummidge. That surprised her. Should have seen the look on her face.” She smiled with satisfaction.

“With the hair like a scarecrow?” Judith clarified.

“In’t that what I just said?” Mrs. Channery asked.

“I can imagine!” Judith said frankly. “She was the one who gave it to Mother! It was disgusting.”

To Joseph’s amazement, Mrs. Channery burst into laughter. It was a deep, chesty guffaw of delight, and she laughed so hard he was afraid she was going to choke. The sound was so genuine and so infectious, he found himself joining in, and then after a moment, Judith did also. Suddenly he knew why his mother had bothered with Maude Channery.

They stayed another half hour, and left in surprisingly good spirits.

Walking back to the car, they were serious again.

“He went somewhere,” Judith said urgently, catching Joseph’s sleeve and forcing him to stop. “How can we find out where? He was different when he returned, and that night he called Matthew. It has to be where he got the document!”

“Perhaps,” he agreed, trying to keep his thoughts in check. They started working again. He wanted intensely to believe that there really had been a document of the importance his father had attached to it. And yet if there had been, the implications were enormous, stretching into an uncertain and dangerous future. And where was it now? Had John Reavley managed to put it somewhere safe before he was killed? If so, why had no one found it?

They reached the car.

“What are we going to do?” Judith demanded, slamming the door as Joseph cranked up the handle at the front and the engine jumped to life. He took the handle out and climbed in beside her, closing his own door more gently. The car moved away, and she changed gear with practiced ease.

“We’re going home to see what Appleton knows about where the car went,” Joseph replied.

“Father wouldn’t have told him.” She steered with panache around the corner and into the main road from Cherry Hinton back toward St. Giles.

“Doesn’t Appleton still clean the car?” he asked.

She glanced at him sideways and increased speed.

He put out a hand to steady himself.

“Of course he does,” she answered. “You think he’d have noticed something? Such as what?”

“We’ll ask him. And from what Mrs. Channery said, Mother was there an hour and a half, so he can only have gone a certain distance. We ought to be able to narrow it down. If we ask, someone will have seen him. The Lanchester was rather noticeable.”

“Yes!” she said exuberantly, pressing her foot down harder on the accelerator and sending the car forward at nearly fifty miles an hour.

Asking Appleton turned out to be a delicate matter. They found him in the garden staking up the last of the delphiniums, which were beginning to sag under their own weight.

“Alfred,” Joseph began, “when my father returned from taking Mother to visit Mrs. Channery at Cherry Hinton, did you clean the car afterward?”

Appleton straightened up, his face dark. “O’ course Oi cleaned the car, Mr. Joseph! An’ checked the brakes an’ the fuel an’ the tires! If you think Oi din’t—”

“I want to work out where he went!” Joseph said quickly, realizing what accusation Appleton had assumed. “I thought you might be able to help me, from anything you observed.”

“Went?” Appleton was confused. “He took Mrs. Reavley to Cherry Hinton.”

“Yes, I know. But he left her there and went somewhere else, then came back for her.”

Appleton tied up the last sky-blue delphiniums absentmindedly and stepped out of the flower bed onto the path. “You think summin’ happened to the car?”

“No, I think perhaps he saw someone, and I need to know who it was.” He did not intend to tell Appleton more than that. “It’s about three and a half miles from here to Cherry Hinton. Is there any way you can tell how much farther he went?”

“Course Oi can. Just got to look at the milometer. That’ll tell you pretty exact. Course it won’t say where to, only how far.”

Joseph felt the silence settle into the hot garden with its motionless flowers, gaudy splashes of color, butterflies pinned like precarious ornaments onto the lilies.

“Did you see anything at all that would help us to know where they went?”

Appleton screwed up his face.

“Dust?” Joseph suggested. “Gravel? Mud? Clay? Peat, maybe? Or manure? Tar?”

“Loime,” Appleton said slowly. “There was loime under the wheel arches. Et to wash it off.”

“Lime kilns!” Joseph exclaimed. “He was gone an hour and a half altogether. How fast does the Lanchester go? Forty . . . fifty-five?”

“Mr. Reavley was a very good driver,” Appleton said pointedly, looking at the path where Judith was coming toward them. “More loike thirty-five.”

“I see.”

Judith reached them and looked inquiringly from Joseph to Appleton and back again.

“Appleton found lime on the car,” Joseph said to her. “Where are the nearest lime kilns, close enough to the road that the lime itself would be tracked across, so someone would pick it up?”

“There are lime kilns on the roads south and west out of Cherry Hinton itself,” she answered. “Not east back to St. Giles or Cambridge, or north toward Teversham or Fen Ditton.”

“So what lies south or west?” he said urgently.

“Over the Gog Magog hills? Stapleford, Great Shelford,” she said thoughtfully, as if picturing the map in her mind. “To the west there’s Fulbourn, or Great and Little Wilbraham. Where shall we start?”

“Shelford’s only a couple of miles from here,” he replied. “We could start there and work our way north and west. Thank you, Appleton.”

“Yes, sir. Will there be anything else?” Appleton looked puzzled and faintly unhappy.

“No, thank you. Unless there’s anything he might have said about where he went?”

“No, sir, not that Oi can think. Will you be taking the car out again, Miss Judith? Or shall Oi put it away?”

“We’ll be going straight out, thank you,” she replied firmly, turning back toward the house without waiting for Joseph.

“What shall we say to the people if we find out where he got the document?” she asked when they were on their way out of St. Giles again on the road southward, climbing almost immediately up into the shallow hills. She kept her eyes on the road ahead. “They’ll know who we are, and they have to realize why we’ve come.” It was a question, but there was no hesitation in her voice, and her hands were strong and comfortable on the wheel. If there was tension in her, she masked it completely.

He had not thought of that in detail; all that weighed on his mind was the compulsion to know the truth and silence the doubts.

“I don’t know,” he answered her. “Mrs. Channery was easy enough; it seemed like following Mother’s footsteps. I suppose we could say he left something behind?”

“Like what?” she said with faint derision. “An umbrella? In the hottest, driest summer we’ve had in years! A coat? Gloves?”

“A picture,” he answered, the solution coming to him the instant before he spoke. “He had a picture he was going to sell. Are they the people he was going to show it to?”

“That sounds reasonable. Yes . . . good.” Unconsciously she increased the speed, and the car surged forward, all but clipping the edge of the grass on the side of the road.

“Judith!” he cried out involuntarily.

“Don’t be stuffy!” she retorted, but she did slow down. She had been almost out of control, and she knew it even better than he did. What it took him longer to realize, and he did it with surprise, was that it was exuberance that drove her, the feeling that at last she was able to do something, however slight the chances of success. It was not fear, either of the process or of the discovery of facts she might find painful.

He was looking at the profile of her face, seeing the woman in her and beginning to understand how far behind the child had become, when she turned and shot him a glance and then a quick smile.

He drew breath to tell her to concentrate on the road, then knew it would be wrong. He smiled back and saw her shoulders relax.

They stopped in Shelford and asked, but no one had seen John Reavley on the Saturday before his death, and the yellow Lanchester was a car they would have remembered.

They had sandwiches and a glass of cider on the village green outside the pub at Stapleford.

He was not quite sure what to say, afraid in case his voice unintentionally carried disappointment. While he was still considering, she began the conversation, talking about various things, interesting but inconsequential. He felt himself gradually enjoying it, his mind following hers as she spoke of Russian theater, then Chinese pottery. She was full of opinions. He did not appreciate how hasty they were until it dawned on him that she was speaking to reassure him, to lend him the strength of normality and of not being the leader for a little while. It amazed him and embarrassed him a little, and yet there was a warmth to it that for an instant brought a sharp prickle to his eyes, and he was obliged to turn away.

If she noticed it, she affected not to.

Afterward they drove north again. They turned right on the Works Causeway, past the gravel pits and the clunch pit—named for the peculiar sticky local clay—and drove into the village of Fulbourn. It was nearly three o’clock, a bright afternoon with the heat shimmering up from the road. Even the cows in the fields sought the shade, and the dogs lying on the grass under the trees and hedges were panting contentedly.

They swung into the main village street and drew to a stop. It was almost deserted. Two boys of about seven or eight stared at them curiously. One of them had a ball clutched in a grubby hand, and he smiled, showing a gap where his front tooth was still growing in. He was obviously more interested in the car than in either of its occupants.

“Ever seen a yellow car?” Joseph asked him casually.

The boy stared at him.

“Do you want to look inside?” Judith offered.

The other boy backed away, but the gap-toothed one was braver or more curious. He nodded.

“Come on, then,” she encouraged.

Step by step he came toward the car and then finally was persuaded to peer inside the open door while she explained to him what everything was and what it did. Finally she asked again if he had seen a yellow car.

He nodded slowly. “Yes, miss. Bigger’n this, but Oi never seed inside it.”

“When was that?”

“Donno,” he answered, still wide-eyed. “Way back.”

And no matter how she tried, that was all he knew. She thanked him and reluctantly he allowed her to close the door. He gave her a beaming smile, then turned and ran away and disappeared into a crack between two cottages, closely followed by his companion.

“Hopeful,” Judith said with more courage than belief. “We’ll ask again.”

They found an elderly couple out walking, and a man with a dog, strolling in a side lane, thoughtfully sucking at his pipe. None of them remembered a yellow car. Neither did anyone else in Fulbourn.

“We’ll have to try Great and Little Wilbraham,” Joseph said flatly. “Not very far.” He glanced at her and saw the anxiety in her eyes. “Are you all right?”

“Of course!” she answered, staring back at him levelly. “Are you?”

He smiled at her, nodding, then started up the car again and climbed in. They headed back into Fulbourn and from there north across the railway line east to Great Wilbraham. The streets were quiet, towering trees motionless except for the topmost leaves flickering gently in the breeze. A flock of starlings swirled up in the sky. A tabby cat blinked sleepily on top of a flat gatepost. The peal of church bells sounded clear and mellow in the warm air, familiar, gentle as the smell of hay or the sunlight on the cobbles.

“Evensong,” Joseph observed. “We’ll have to wait. Would you like something to eat?”

“It’s early for dinner,” she answered.

“Tea?” he suggested. “Scones, raspberry jam, and clotted cream?”

They found a tea shop willing to serve them at this hour. Afterward they went back into the street and walked up toward the church just as the congregation was leaving.

It was not easy to approach someone gracefully, and Joseph was awaiting an opportunity when the vicar saw him and walked over, smiling at Judith and then speaking to Joseph.