The Winter Ground (19 page)

Of course, it was not only the cold that was the trouble. On the ground between us, although the light was low and the huddled shape quite small so that one should have been able to overlook it lying there, Anastasia seemed to glow and even glitter as though with movement and one had to make efforts, over and over again, to look away. Perhaps there
was
movement; there must have been – her hair bright and soft in the lamplight might have settled gradually against the ground; certainly from the way her costume winked the sequins must have been shifting somehow although there was no breeze. And there were sounds, which was worst of all. Once, a sigh, unmistakable, and other sounds too, infrequent and faint, but they kept us silent, catching at our breaths and straining to hear any more.

At each soft terrible sound, each hint of settling movements, impossible, unbearable, Ma Cooke moaned gently to herself and once I heard her whisper, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ almost too quiet to be heard.

It was my first experience of spending this time – this slow and gradual dying time – with someone who, as Mrs Cooke put it, is leaving; my first lesson that we do leave gradually, the body rather more reluctantly letting go than the soul. I had seen people die before that night, several times in the officers’ convalescent home in the war when it turned out that some young man was not convalescing at all, but was dying of something so swift and inevitable that there was no reason, sometimes no time, to move him. I had even seen violent death before – twice since taking up this new occupation of mine – and it had its horrors, but I had never stood sentinel like this while the coil was left to its slow unwinding.

No particular wonder, then, that the arrival of the police, far from striking the final note of despondency one might have expected, seemed rather more a welcome relief. Certainly the two large constables and the sharp-eyed sergeant did well to avoid having me fall upon their necks when they lumbered in.

Inspector Hutchinson did not inspire anything like such confidence at first glance. His hair was rather long for a policeman and a kind of defeated grey in colour. His moustache was grey too and drooped down low on either side of his long mouth. Brows high in the middle and low at the ends and heavy pouches under his eyes only added to the impression, and the bluish mottled cheeks hinted not even just at weariness but positively at drink.

Sergeant McClennan took care of the first formalities. Ma identified herself as Polina Ilchenko Cooke and Sergeant McClennan extracted a full measure of sighing and rubbing out before he had got it down, working off the frustrations of his own pointlessly elaborate name, I thought, which must have given him a lifetime of mishearings and misspellings even in his native land. (I have often wondered why anyone perseveres with the endless MacLellands and McLennans and MacClements, when they are obviously exactly the same thing, appearing distinct only because of the early – and let us face it, not so early – illiteracy of the Highland clans.)

‘And this?’ said the sergeant, pointing to Ana with the end of his pencil, once he had got Polina Ilchenko Cooke and Dandelion Dahlia Gilver printed out in neat letters and had got his eyebrows down again.

‘Anastasia,’ said Ma.

‘Oh aye?’ said the sergeant.

‘I can’t tell you her surname, for I never knew it myself,’ Ma went on, ‘but it’ll be with her papers in her wagon there and someone’ll find it for you.’

‘Aye, right,’ said the sergeant.

‘What my sergeant means is we’ll take care of that, Mrs Cooke,’ said Inspector Hutchinson rather more diplomatically. He stepped forward and crouched beside Ana, lifting her hair and shining his electric torch into her eyes. I looked away.

‘Poor lass,’ he said. ‘Just a girl, isn’t she? Twenty? Twenty-five?’

‘Couldn’t have been much more, if that even,’ said Ma, and her voice was tremulous. The inspector stood up again.

‘Well, how about we away somewhere into the warm and let my lads take over watching her?’ he said gently. ‘I think you could do with a cup of tea, Mrs Cooke, at least. Let’s away and you tell me all about it, eh?’

In the Cookes’ wagon, over strong, sweet tea laced with whisky, which made me retch and shudder but certainly warmed me, Inspector Hutchinson drew the story of the evening out of Ma, Pa, Alec and me. Sergeant McClennan sat with his notebook in one hand, pencil in the other, looking like nothing so much as a small boy with a net and jar waiting for butterflies to flutter into range, but the inspector’s questions were quite benign.

‘Mr Truman, Mr Merryman and a Mr Cooke,’ he said. ‘A relation?’

‘My brother,’ said Pa, ‘but you must understand, just because they were behind the doors, that doesn’t mean they saw her. They’d just as easy have been in their wee place, getting propped for the first spot, and Ana – well, she’ll have gone straight through most like. There’s a horse tent by the back doors. Not the proper stalls, they’re down away separate, but a strawed tent where the prads go between spots, and Ana will have trotted Harlequin straight there, straight past the clowns. They’ll not have seen nothing.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said the inspector. ‘I’ll have a word with them anyway, though. Anyone else?’

‘I was back there,’ said Ma. ‘And Bill Wolf too. He wun’t in the spec tonight, but he was running on and he was waiting ready. Lally Wolf too, getting little Tommy togged to run on with his pa.’

‘And what did you see?’ said the inspector. ‘What can you tell me?’

Ma Cooke looked at him for a long time before she spoke, and the hesitation was so out of character for her, the slow careful look so unlike her, that I found myself watching her closely. I saw her considering her answer, screwing herself up towards courage and then, at the last chance, with her breath already gathered in to begin speaking, subsiding again, sinking back into her chair, shaking her head a little even.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I was in by Zoya’s trunks there, getting the shawls ready for them little maids. Cold as it was, I’d thought to put them round hot bricks and so I was unwinding them again ready for the spec coming off. I din’t see nothing.’

‘Did you hear anything?’ said the inspector.

‘Heard the clowns come off,’ Ma said.

‘Anything else, Mrs Cooke?’

Once again, Ma Cooke took her time to answer.

‘You must understand,’ she said at last, ‘that it was noisy from the ring all this while, see? I can’t be sure, but I think – think, mind – I think Tiny and Andrew went straight to their table and so they wun’t have seen nothing. That right, Pa? They take care of the props, most usually, ’count of Charlie is the boss, see?’

‘Boss of the clowns, she means,’ said Pa. ‘I’m the boss of the circus.’

‘Well, I beg your pardon, Mrs Cooke,’ said Inspector Hutchinson, ‘but it’s no use telling me what should have happened, according to the rules. I really need to know what you heard. What you actually heard, see?’

‘And in’t that what I’m saying?’ said Ma. ‘I heard two of them go to the props table. Two sets of boots on the boards. All I’m telling you there is what two it was, most likely.’

‘And the third?’

‘Charlie? I can’t say where he was. I din’t hear him passing and he din’t call out to anyone. Most likely,’ she held up her hand as if to acknowledge the inspector’s objection before he raised it, ‘I wun’t put my hand to a bible on it, you’re right there, but most likely he’d go to the back door and have his smoke.’

‘And when you say the back door, you mean the door where she fell?’

Ma opened her eyes very wide and put her hand to her mouth.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘I din’t mean nothing by it. I din’t see him nor hear him. I shun’t of spoke up at all there, really.’

What was she playing at? I was not fooled for a moment by the hand clapped to the mouth and the look of surprise. She had deliberately dropped Charlie Cooke right in it. I was not alone in being troubled. Pa’s chest was rising and falling rather rapidly, the spangles on his lapels winking in the lamplight, and he chewed on the ends of his moustache as he watched her.

‘I’ll start with Mr Cooke then,’ said the inspector. ‘He might be able to clear all of this up and let us away to our beds, eh?’

‘He never said a word, Poll,’ said Pa, unable to keep quiet any longer. ‘When we were all together with the poor lass. He said not a word.’

‘Aye, but still,’ said Mrs Cooke, ‘he wurr shaken up bad, wun’t he? He might have been too upset by it all to speak. Mind you,’ she went on, ‘if it wurr me I’d start by asking myself why she come off when she did. I’d start by asking them ring lads and little Sal on the Panatrope what they saw, cos of no one else could see what happened behind them liberty horses, could they?’

Now it was my turn to catch my lip. What was she doing? She had set the inspector on to Charlie Cooke as surely as pointing her finger and crying ‘
J’accuse
’ and now my poor boys were to be tossed into the fray too.

‘And where might I find those three?’ said the inspector.

‘Little Sallie Wolf’s in the second wagon before the pond over the ways there,’ said Ma, ‘and …’ She looked over at me, rather belatedly it seemed to me.

‘Yes,’ I said, for there was no use trying to avoid it. ‘The ring boys. My sons, as a matter of fact. I’ll show you their wagon, Inspector, and I shall stay while you question them too, if you don’t mind.’ I am not proud to admit that as well as a deal of confusion, shock, a little cold still and more motherly concern than is my usual measure, I was feeling a surge of angry delight that, when one got right down to it, my boys being woken in the night to answer police questions could be laid fairly at Hugh’s door. I was almost looking forward to telling him about it.

‘Your sons,’ said the inspector in a carefully blank voice. Sergeant McClennan had looked up from his notebook too. ‘I see. Yes, I had been wondering how you fitted in exactly, Mrs Gilver. Your sons, yes, I see.’

I attempted an explanation as we crossed the ground, Alec hindering rather than helping with his tuppenceworth, and Inspector Hutchinson could hardly be blamed if he formed the opinion that Donald and Teddy were spoiled brats, I was a clinging fusspot, Hugh was indifferent to all three of us, and Alec was so lost to decency that he not only trailed around the countryside after me to dinner parties, married woman or no, but did not trouble to keep away from my impressionably aged sons, who thought of him as a kind of uncle. Actually, the last of these points was not too far from the truth, but it is always a bother to have such people as the inspector cast an eye over one’s perfectly blameless existence and draw their own thrilling conclusions, for the shopkeeper class – being by far the most rigidly proper and as a result the most filthy-minded – do tend to gasp and fan themselves at the very ideas they alone are entertaining. As Grant says about the seamstress in Gilverton village who makes her frocks: shocked to the core, tell me more.

The touch of Alec’s hand to my arm as we neared the shepherds’ hut was especially unwelcome, then, but when I ignored him he tugged quite urgently and I could see his eyes flash. He jerked his head backwards the way we had come and I turned just in time to see a shape moving along behind the wagons on the far side of the ground. It was a shortish, roundish shape, moving swiftly. At a guess, I should have said it was Ma Cooke and the steps she slipped silently up and the door she eased silently open were Charlie’s.

‘Now then, Mrs Gilver,’ said the inspector, stopping at the shepherds’ hut. ‘You had best go in first and wake them. We don’t want them alarmed.’ The alarm, though, was all mine for the little hut was empty, the stove cold, the bedrolls nowhere to be seen.

At least that should convince the inspector that I was not the clinging type, I thought to myself, but I did feel a growing sense of something or other. Had I even given them a glance as I made my way back to Ana earlier? Had I simply swept past? Was it possible that hours later they were still sitting there on the ring fence as I had told them to? Words cannot express the surge of relief I felt at the sound of a door latch lifting and Zoya’s voice calling gently from the nearest wagon pair.

‘They are here, Mee-zuss Kilvert,’ she said. ‘Asleep like babies. All good, all well.’

We trooped over to the Prebrezhenskys’ wagon and crowded around the door. Zoya and Kolya were sitting wrapped in dressing gowns with glasses of tea and Donald and Teddy were indeed fast asleep, top to tail, in a little wheeled cot which had been trundled out from under the box-bed. Inya and Alya were sleeping cheek to cheek in another and little Ilya waved drowsily at us from a canvas hammock strung above them. Bunty was in front of the stove, on her back with all four paws in the air waggling gently at each breath.

‘Well, who would have the heart?’ said the inspector, his face softening as he gazed at them. ‘The morning will do, I’m thinking.’ With a nod at the adults he stepped away and closed the door softly.

‘A very touching little scene,’ he said, standing and rubbing his hands together, looking around at the ring of wagons. ‘A … taking … kind of a place, isn’t it, a circus? The more for being so precarious, these days. I can see how a body could be quite swept away with it all. I can quite see how a body could get to thinking what a shame it would be if anything came along to spoil it. They’re lost for ever once they’re gone.’

He turned, rather abruptly, to face Alec and me and switched on his torch. Of course, he did nothing so boorish as shine it in our faces – he was very careful not to – and so we did not screw up our eyes, but treated him to a clear display of expressions in which guilt, surprise and sheepishness were chasing one another around like horrid little olives being swirled in the dregs of a particularly nasty cocktail.

‘Here’s another view of it,’ he said, and for the first time there was not a trace of warmth in his voice. ‘A girl is dead. A bunch of circus folk – understandably – have got the willies from her dying and don’t much want the police about the place, and a pair of … I’d put a tanner on self-styled detectives … who should know better are playing silly beggars instead of doing their duty. Mrs Cooke has fed me her brother-in-law like a sweetie for a bairn and now she’s taken off on tiptoe to tell him what to say when I get there. Will I carry on?’