The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (43 page)

But then Julian just said, ‘That’s it. Not a very glorious story.’ He looked away, embarrassed.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Patrick said. ‘None of it was ever your fault—not Father, not Lydia, not France. Not David.’ He hesitated. ‘Not Kitty.’ And there was real compassion in his eyes.

‘I owed him,’ Julian said. Laurence thought he meant Digby but Julian went on, ‘David. I’d said to him that if there was anything I could ever do for him, I would.

‘Near the end of the war he wrote to me. He’d heard Digby had been mentioned in despatches.’ He faltered. ‘Easton needed them to have died bravely, you see. He’d seen the shambles we’d really been in but he said nothing. He asked about Easton. Said he’d been thinking we’d need hands to replace all the losses. Said he would like to work for me. He knew the area from childhood. His family were dead. He didn’t want to return to his pre-war life in London. He was a widower, he said. Wanted to marry again. Said the war had changed things. I suppose I guessed there was some petty criminality. Or money owed. But I liked Susan—I would have had it out with David if I’d known the truth. He said he was a hard worker. Wanted to start a new life. And I judged him a good man.’

Patrick looked sceptical but Laurence knew that, in war, where your life might depend on it, quick judgments might be made.

‘And Victor Kilminster?’ Laurence said.

This time Laurence thought Julian seemed uneasy.

‘No mystery there—he’d tripped over. One of those freaks of war. Tripped, went down and stayed down as his friends were ripped to pieces about him. Came to see me in hospital while I was waiting to go back to Blighty.’

And he knew exactly what sort of a leader of men our brother had turned out to be?’ Patrick took out his cigarettes with an unsteady hand. And Kilminster, who’d grown up with our estate workers, whose cousin had been led to his death by Digby—he was willing to go along with it all and be sent away?’ Patrick said.

‘I suggested I could set him up in Australia. I spoke to him, man to man. He knew what I was offering. He wasn’t very happy. I said he’d have to spend any remaining leave in London. Never go home. At first he was dead set on coming back to Easton and I couldn’t have stopped him, but over the next few days I think he saw what it would be like. He didn’t have living blood family beyond Ellen’s children. Apart from me, he was the sole survivor. He would be the only man in the village who was not old or a child or impaired. It wouldn’t have been easy.’

Patrick nodded. ‘Still, I would have thought he’d want to come back.’

‘Well, he did come back,’ Julian said. ‘He had six years of it in Australia and turned up here once more.’

‘No wonder you were cross,’ Patrick said.

Julian shook his head. ‘Not cross. Afraid, perhaps. And I hadn’t given him more than the fare and the contact. But yes, I thought if he came back he’d probably tell people that Digby had failed. How he’d behaved. And now that he’s here, you know, I don’t think he will. How could it help?’

Laurence was uneasy. The story still felt incomplete.

‘But what about David? Who was he before? Who was Susan?’ Patrick said. ‘Did you ever know?’

‘David was David Ennals, not Eddings. He changed his surname but to one that sounded and looked similar, so if he ever met anyone who had known him years ago, they would think they’d simply misheard. He’s a clever man. Susan was just Susan,’ Julian said. ‘She’d met him exactly as she said she did—she sent a message in a tin of biscuits. Anybody might have picked it out, might have thrown it away, joked about it with their pals. But it was David who took and kept it. David who was unhappily married and unable to escape. David who spent hours on his own. Then this small message arrives, “full of innocence and goodness”, he said to me.’

‘She might have been a married grandmother of sixty,’ Laurence said. But he knew himself that holding on to a dream, however improbable, might help a man survive.

‘Did he tell you this?’ Patrick looked perplexed.

‘No, of course not. Not then. He told me the whole story only when his real wife was dead.’ Julian looked away.

‘You always knew?’

He hadn’t just known, Laurence thought with certainty; he had helped David hide the body. Laurence had looked closely at the walls in the church on the way back from talking to Walter Petch, to see whether the practical David might have set up a temporary pulley, such as Petch had once fixed up for the former Mrs Easton. But he had found nothing. Without such a pulley, there had to be two men to lift the hatch and he doubted it was David who knew about the hiding place beforehand.

‘He came and told me. He’d been spotted at the exhibition. He had been afraid it could happen; it was why he wouldn’t leave the car, but he hadn’t known he’d already been seen.

‘His real wife turned up at the lodge. She was very drunk. Susan was up at the Hall. David was at home. He said she was standing in the doorway, unsteady on her feet, but looking triumphant. There were baby clothes airing on a clothes horse—gifts from Ellen Kilminster and from Lydia, but at first his wife was standing with her back to them. He said she was smiling all the while, saying she would just wait for his lady friend and introduce herself, and then she’d go on up to the Hall to talk to his employers.’

Julian stood up and walked to the window.

‘He asked her not to. To accept that the marriage had been all wrong, that he didn’t make her happy. And then she asked for money to go. He didn’t have any. He started to explain when she turned to look around the room and saw the layette Susan had been putting together.’

Julian stopped and then went on, ‘I have no reason to doubt him. He was almost in a state of collapse when he came to see me. He said Susan might have walked in at any second. That woman—his estranged wife—was screaming and although their place is a way from the village he was frightened someone might hear. She grabbed some of the baby things and began to tear them apart. He took hold of her, trying to stop her, to calm her, and she spat in his face. Then she stumbled to the stairs. He tried to pull her back by her dress. He pushed past her, stood barring the bedroom door. They wrestled. She lost her footing and fell straight back.

‘David said he heard the crack as she hit the stone floor. He said she was so instantly quiet that he knew it was bad. She was still breathing but oddly, and while he sat next to her there, frozen, trying to decide what to do, she stopped breathing altogether. He was trained to think and act quickly but he had limited options. He dragged her out to the wash-house and covered her with sacks. It was unlikely that Susan would go there until wash day the following Monday. But the weather was hot ... He collected some quicklime from the village.’ His eyes went to Patrick apologetically. ‘We used it in the war.’

‘I know what it’s used for.’

‘The next morning, when Susan was in the village, he drove the car up to the lodge and loaded the body into the boot. If he had a plan, I think it was to take her away from the village and bury her, hoping they’d never tie her in with here. But he couldn’t be gone long or we’d be asking questions. He couldn’t leave her where she might be found in case she’d told someone back in London and they tracked him down.’

In a way Julian seemed relieved to finally get things off his chest.

‘He’d just put her in when Susan reappeared, saying I wanted him back at the house. She looked bothered, he thought, and presumably he was quite a sight—he was bewildered by what had happened and sweating with the exertion of hauling his wife’s body into the boot. So he couldn’t go off straight away and he couldn’t load a spade into the car with Susan watching. So he drove up to the Hall.’

‘What stopped him taking her away later?’ Laurence asked.

‘I came along,’ Julian said. ‘I’d only wanted him to talk about closing the sluices because of the drought. But David was standing there, looking shifty, frankly. He’s not very good at lying. And then I saw the bag, it had fallen out of the driver’s door. It was a cheap handbag, but not old and it was on the ground by the car. I picked it up and was just about to ask him what it was when he started to cry.’

It seemed to Laurence that David had thought himself safe, forgetting to look behind him to see if the past was catching up. He’d woken up that day with a woman he loved, a child about to be born and a good life. He’d gone to bed that night as a bigamist, covering up a death, possibly manslaughter, possibly, a court might think, murder. No wonder he cried.

Julian’s expression was desolate.

‘It was his dead wife’s, of course.’

‘Why on earth didn’t you turn him in then?’ Patrick asked. ‘I mean, he’s a good man but a woman was dead.’

‘I owed him a life,’ said Julian.

It was oddly put but there seemed to be nothing much more to add.

After a few minutes, Laurence said, ‘When we found the body and you sent David off to get the police, you were giving him a chance to escape, weren’t you?’

‘Yes. But he didn’t take it. He wouldn’t leave Susan.’

It got darker and the house fell silent. It was only as Laurence was thinking that he should take himself to bed that Patrick spoke again.

‘And you were willing to take the blame for David,’ he said, ‘because he saved your life? Or because of Susan and the child?’

Julian shrugged, but said nothing.

‘How did you know about the vault?’ Patrick sounded matter-of-fact.

Laurence felt a surge of something like relief. Everything that he thought he would have to keep a secret, Patrick had worked out for himself. It was not so surprising. Patrick had once struggled to open the entrance with Laurence. He too knew it took two men.

Julian didn’t seem perturbed, merely weary.

‘Mother. When Father found out what she was doing—her chapel, her secret religious practices despite his views—he waited until she was down there and cut the pulley she had rigged up. She must have been in the dark for hours.’

He looked at Patrick in a way that suggested the easing of a burden.

‘She didn’t appear at dinner, or lunch the next day. The next dinner she was still absent. Father said she was indisposed. Then as I was preparing for bed I heard this noise. I thought at first it was a vixen or an animal in a trap. But it went on rising and falling out in the night. I went into Digby’s room. It wasn’t so loud there but he could hear it too. Eventually we got up, went outside and followed the sound to the church. I was about twelve, I suppose. I can tell you, my hair was standing on end—part of me thought it was some ghost or werewolf. Something from Digby’s more ghoulish stories.’

‘And it was Mother?’ Now it was Patrick who looked stricken.

‘After that, I swore I’d never go down there again, I’d forget about it. She was in a dreadful state. Half mad, with dirty, broken fingernails. She wouldn’t look at us, or talk to us. She was just babbling prayers, going round and round and round in circles. Her candles can’t have lasted long and, as far as I can gather, she’d been blundering around in the dark—things were broken. I think she believed Father was quite capable of leaving her down there to die.’

‘Did he say anything?’ Laurence asked.

Patrick jumped in. ‘Of course he didn’t. This is the Easton family—we talk a lot but say nothing.’

‘No,’ said Julian, ‘he never referred to it. And she was dead just months later. She was pregnant at the time he shut her in. And Digby—Digby was beside himself, which is why I could never understand...’ He stopped abruptly.

‘About Lydia.’ Patrick finished the sentence for him. ‘I hope he came to hate himself for that, however ill or mad he may have been.’

Then Julian said vaguely, ‘It felt like a good place for David’s wife. Under the church. Full of Mother’s spirit, not Father’s.’

But they still had to shovel quicklime on her, Laurence thought, in the hope she would soon be unrecognisable. And where was she now?

‘I’m tired,’ Julian said, almost like a child. ‘I want to go to bed now. I’ve had enough.’

‘Shoot me.’

He thought he must be talking to himself. But then he realised the eye below him was moving. The dead man blinked and the mouth had opened.

‘Shoot me,’ it repeated. ‘Just—get on—with it.’ Each phrase seemed to exhaust the body because it closed its eye again and stopped speaking.

He looked down, thinking it had been easier when he’d thought Digby was dead. Then it had all suddenly been straightforward. Now, apart from the mess of God knows what, sticking out of something badly adrift at the top of the leg, Digby was making demands again.

There was a hoarse noise, an almost mechanical sound. And yet although he had thought he might be mad, and although he’d thought that usually if blood was black and clotted and drew flies, rather than bright and fresh and increasing like his own, the man would be dead, he knew that Digby was still alive.

‘I’m finished,’ Digby said. ‘They’ve shot my fucking balls off. And my hand.’ He began to sound as if he were trying to find the energy to cry. You wouldn’t let your bloody dog go like this, Jules.’

Julian looked down at the stump. He could see the white bone and something yellowish that had emptied into a sticky pool. So Digby’s perfect hand had been blown off, yet he still had his scarred, imperfect ones.

But why was Digby still alive?

As if in response to his thoughts—or had he spoken aloud?—his brother seemed to drift into unconsciousness. For a time there was just the sound of his breath rattling and the occasional animal whimper.

‘Please,’ Digby said.

He tried not to think about the patrol, or about Digby emerging, late and malign, from another night of drinking.

He’d been along the line at a meeting with the CO, covering for Digby. When he returned it was all as good as over. Digby had decided to send Peter out on a recce the following morning. He was smoking a cigar. Julian couldn’t reason with him. In reality they were cut off. The lines had been severed by a stray mortar. Ahead of them was a German machine-gun, behind them, German trenches. He had known all along that Digby had misread the maps.