The Emerald Comb (27 page)

‘It’s just interesting,’ I protested.

‘So interesting it takes all your time, and you can’t even make me a cuppa when I get back after a shite day?’

The kitchen timer began bleeping. Lauren’s cookies were ready. She peered in through the kitchen door, as if wondering whether it would be safe to enter. I hated the kids hearing our rows. We didn’t argue often, not like some couples, but when we did it could be loud and heated.

‘It’s all right, sweetie,’ I told her. ‘Come and take your cookies out. Oh, put some shoes on first.’

‘Why?’

‘Daddy smashed a mug on the floor.’

‘Oh yeah, that’s right. I hurled it down in a fit of rage. Make me out to be an ogre, why don’t you, Katie?’ Simon stormed out of the room, tea in hand, past an open-mouthed Lauren.

She tip-toed over to me in her stockinged feet and climbed onto my lap. Eleven years old but not too old for a cuddle. ‘I don’t like it when Dad shouts at you,’ she said.

‘I don’t like it either,’ I said, hugging her. ‘I guess he’s tired after visiting Nanna Smith. Come on, let’s get the cookies out before they burn. You sit here while I fetch your shoes. I don’t want a little girl with cut feet to deal with on top of everything else.’ I kissed her head then shuffled out from under her.

With her trainers slipped on but untied, Lauren dealt with the cookies while I swept the floor and put my laptop away in the study. I made myself a cup of tea, and put a few warm cookies on a plate for Lauren to take to Simon, who was in the living room. I followed her through. She made a little curtsey as she placed the plate in front of him. ‘Will there be anything else, sir?’

He stared at her, and I saw him fight back a chuckle. Lauren’s childish charm had worked. ‘I’ll ring if I need you, shall I?’ He nodded at the old servants’ bell-pull, hanging beside the fireplace. Lauren curtsied again, and ran out.

I sat down beside him. ‘Sorry, love. You’ve had a bad day, and I was insensitive.’

He put his arm around me. ‘Yep, I had a terrible day. Guess I just needed to let off steam. I’m sorry, too.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

He shrugged. ‘Not really. Mum didn’t know who I was, again. Thought I was “from the council”, come to put her into a home. She couldn’t even grasp she was already in a home. Got quite irate at me.’

‘Oh, love.’

‘Just something I have to deal with, I suppose. It’s hard, though.’

‘If she doesn’t know who you are, it’d be understandable if you just, well, stayed away…’

He shook his head. ‘No, I can’t do that. When she’s gone I’d regret it, wouldn’t I?’

‘Probably.’

He was right. There was no solution that I could see. He might talk about focusing on the living but there were times when the dead were an easier proposition. It was a terrible thing to think, but Veronica would be far less of a burden on Simon once she’d passed away. I couldn’t exactly wish for it, but I knew that when the time came, I would certainly feel a sense of relief. And so, I suspected, would Simon, underneath his grief. In many ways, he’d lost his mother already.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I should probably go and get the dinner ready.’ I got up to go.

‘Thanks. These cookies will keep me going a little while, anyway.’ He pulled me towards him for a kiss, and slipped his hands into the back pockets of my jeans. ‘Ugh, what’s this?’

It was the scrap of fabric. ‘Thomas found it, in the garden. Probably from the skeleton.’

‘Ah, I see what set you off again on that infernal research.’ He grinned. ‘Did you find anything out?’

‘Not yet.’ I had a sudden idea. ‘Simon, do you fancy going up the road to the pub after dinner tonight? I can ask Eileen if she’ll sit with the kids for a couple of hours. She always said she wouldn’t mind.’

He grinned. ‘Great idea! I do fancy a pint or two.’

A couple of hours later, we were strolling arm in arm up the lane to the pub. Thomas was in bed and the older two were playing Monopoly with our neighbour Eileen. The rain had stopped and everything smelled fresh and clean, the dust of summer rinsed away. The dark clouds had parted and moved on, and a low evening sun was making everything seem manageable again.

I leaned my head against Simon’s arm as we walked. ‘Feeling better now?’

‘Almost. Nothing a decent pint of Guinness can’t sort.’

‘My round,’ I said, as I pushed open the door to the White Hart.

‘OK. I’ll find us a table,’ said Simon, and wandered off.

Steve, the landlord, served me. ‘You found any more skeletons in your garden, Katie? Or should I say in your closet? Ha! That’s a good one, innit?’

I grinned. ‘Haven’t gone looking for any more, Steve. One’s enough, in any case.’

He set my wine glass in front of me. ‘Seven-forty, please. Any idea who that skeleton could be?’

I handed over a tenner. ‘No. It was a woman, youngish, and she was buried before 1842. That’s all the police could tell me, and probably all we’ll ever know.’

‘Aw. I’d want to try to find out who she was. Maybe start by researching people who lived in your house around that time? You can do it all on the internet these days, you know.’ He nodded sagely as he handed me my change.

I smiled. ‘Maybe I’ll do that.’

He topped up the Guinness and I took the two drinks to the table Simon had found, tucked in a niche at the far end of the bar. Steve’s comments about skeletons in the closet had made me think of the one from Simon’s closet, who went by the name of Amy. I wondered if he’d heard from her again. But after the day Simon’d had, I didn’t want to be the one to bring up that particular subject.

I didn’t have to. As I placed Simon’s pint in front of him he looked up at me, his face drawn, his eyes tired.

‘Love, I know we’re out for a quiet drink, but I think I do need to talk to you about Amy,’ he said. ‘She’s emailed me a few times lately. She’s coming down to London soon from Durham, and wants to meet up.’

I sat down, and took his hand. ‘Of course she wants to meet up. And when we talked before, you wanted to meet her too.’

‘Yes, but now it’s all becoming real, and close.’ He took a long pull of his pint, then wiped away the moustache of froth with the back of his hand.

‘Does she want to come here?’ I asked. I wasn’t sure it would be a good idea bringing her to our home on the first meeting.

‘Yes, but she thinks we should meet in London first. She’ll be staying there with a friend and has asked me to go up. She’s even picked out a meeting place.’

‘Where?’

‘A pub. The Argyll Arms, just off Oxford Street. I know it – it’s an old place with lots of little snugs. If we can get one of those to ourselves it’ll be quite private.’

‘Sounds perfect.’

‘Katie, I’ll admit it, I’m nervous as hell about meeting her. What will she think of me? I got her mother pregnant then left and had no further contact with her!’

‘You didn’t know Sarah was pregnant, did you?’

‘No, but maybe I should have gone to see her after we split up, made sure she was OK…’ He sighed.

‘She’d have thought you were still after her. Stalking her or something. You said you wrote to Sarah a few times. Did she ever write back?’

He picked up his pint and nodded over its rim. ‘Once or twice.’

‘So she could have told you she was pregnant, but chose not to.’ I leaned towards him across the table. ‘Simon, it’s not your fault you didn’t know about Amy. You can’t beat yourself up about it. And if she’s anything like you, she’ll understand. She’s probably as nervous as you are about meeting up.’

‘She sounds really together in her emails.’

‘Sarah brought her up well, then.’

‘Do you think I should ring her first? Speak on the phone before we meet?’

‘Do you want to?’

‘Um, not really. I don’t like the phone. You don’t get any clues from expression and body language. No, I think I’d rather speak to her first when we meet face to face.’

I nodded. I would do the same. ‘I’d like to meet her too, but I think you should meet her on your own the first time.’

‘Yes, I will. OK, I’ll email her back and try to set a date. Got to get it over with, I suppose.’

I smiled at him. Who knew how this would work out. Getting to know each other could end up being wonderful for both of them. Or perhaps there would only be a few meetings and then Christmas cards every year. But he had to give his daughter a chance. His daughter! It still made me gasp every time I thought of Amy in that way. I was gradually getting used to the idea but there was a way to go yet. And I wondered too what the children would make of their grown-up sister. It was Lauren I worried about. She’d been a Daddy’s girl from the moment she was born, and had relished being the only girl in the family. How would she react to finding out she wasn’t his only daughter?

Simon had finished his pint, and stood up to go to the bar. ‘Same again?’

‘Please.’

He was back in a minute. ‘Steve was asking about our skeleton.’

I grinned. ‘Yes, he mentioned it to me, too. We are quite the local celebrities.’

‘Everyone seems desperate to know who it is. I suppose I’ll have to let you go on with that research after all, to satisfy their curiosity.’

I punched his arm. ‘
Let
me? What are you, my lord and master?’

‘If only. Anyway, from your research so far, who do you think it might be?’

I told him about the two servants I was trying to trace to rule them out.

‘You think it might be one of them?’

I shrugged. ‘It makes sense to start with the closest people – those who lived in the house at that time. If I can’t find what happened to them after the 1841 census then they’re a possibility.’

‘So, if you find them after 1841 then you rule them out, and if you don’t find one of them, it could be because she was buried in our garden?’

‘That’s about it.’

‘You’re looking for a missing record, then. It’s impossible to find something that’s missing. By definition!’

He had a point. I took a sip of my drink. ‘Well, even so, those women were part of my ancestors’ household so I’m interested in them anyway.’

Simon frowned. ‘Hey, you don’t think your ancestor, this Bartholomew chap, bumped her off, do you? Like, if he was shagging a servant, and she was giving him grief…’

‘Well…’

‘Or, if she was pregnant, and he needed to bury the evidence… Tiny foetus bones could easily have disintegrated completely in the earth…’

‘Simon! What a horrible idea!’

‘Well, think about it. It’s possible, isn’t it? Or maybe his wife found out he was having an affair and killed the servant in a fit of rage. I hate to say it, Katie, but one of your ancestors could have been a murderer.’

He didn’t look as though he hated saying it. There was a spark of ill-disguised glee in his eyes. Yes, it was a possibility, and one that had crossed my mind too, that Bartholomew or even Georgia might have had something to do with the body in the garden. But I hadn’t wanted to dwell on this. They were family, after all – their genes were in me. OK, pretty diluted as they were so many generations back, but still. No one wants to think they’re descended from a murderer.

‘It’s possible, I suppose,’ I said to Simon.

‘Aw, love, don’t look so heart-broken about it,’ he said. ‘Who your ancestors were and what they did during their lives has little to do with who
you
are. It’s how you were brought up and what
your
life experiences have been, that defines who you really are. Not what genes you’ve got. They might determine your hair and eye colour, but not how you act and react. Not what makes you tick.’

It was the age-old argument and one I’d had with Simon a hundred times. Nature versus nurture. As an adoptee he preferred to think he was a product of his environment, not of the chance encounter between sperm and egg of two people he didn’t even know. I’d always suspected he maintained this viewpoint as a kind of excuse – to explain why he had no interest or desire in tracking down his birth parents – and as a compliment to his adoptive parents.

And now the tables were turned on him, and his own daughter was tracking down the birth father she’d never known. I wondered if this would change the way he thought about the issue at all. If she was like him at all, in the way she thought or acted, it would be nothing to do with her upbringing and everything to do with her genes.

But now wasn’t the time to say this. Time would tell – after he’d met Amy, he might think differently.

‘You’re probably right,’ I said. ‘Anyway, Bartholomew was just one of my thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents. There are a lot of other people’s genes in me besides his. I’ll go on with the research to see if I can work out who the bones were.’ I took another sip of my wine. ‘And who knows, maybe we’ll find more clues somewhere in the house or garden. Talking of which, we really must open up that loft hatch some time soon.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Simon, nodding. ‘I’ll add it to the never-ending list of stuff to do, shall I?’

Chapter Nineteen: Hampshire, December 1841

Bartholomew looked again from the corpse of his wife to the face of his lover. Agnes was still curled on the floor at his feet, clutching his leg and staring up at him with wide, frightened eyes.

‘What are we to do?’ she whispered, her voice shocked and fragile. ‘Oh God, what have we done?’

What indeed had they done? No, what had
she
done? It was Agnes who’d pushed down on the pillow, Agnes who’d smothered the life out of her mistress. Bartholomew stared at her. All he’d done was…nothing. He’d stood frozen, as though she’d put him in some kind of trance. It was her fault. All her fault.

A gurgle from the crib reminded him of Barty’s presence in the room. He glanced over at the cot. Barty was sitting up in his cot and staring wide-eyed at his mother, lying dead on the bed. Had he watched the whole thing? Was the image of his mother’s last moments imprinted on the back of his eyes? Would he remember this moment, when he was older and able to understand what he’d seen? Bartholomew shook his head to clear the thoughts. Nothing to be achieved by thinking about that. What was done was done. But what to do, now? He forced himself to think clearly. There was no going back. At his feet, Agnes sobbed, her face pressed against his legs. She had done this, but only he would be able to find the way forward.