The Winter Ground (32 page)

‘Are you after me, madam?’ She was knotting ropes on to the beam.

‘A brief word,’ I said. My voice sounded strange from the way my head was thrown back, very deep and threatening, not at all conducive to a fruitful interview. ‘Are you up there for the duration?’ I said. ‘Or can you come down?’

‘If only,’ said Topsy. ‘Way things are these days I wish I
could
just stay up here out of it all. Mind out there, madam, a minute.’

I stepped back towards the ring fence and Topsy sent two ropes tumbling down to hang with their looped ends dancing above the ring. Then she shuffled along the beam and grasped the pole to climb down to me.

‘Trouble is,’ she went on, joining me on the ground and going to tug on the ropes, ‘you still see it all even if you’re up and away. See even more of it from up there sometimes.’

She spoke carelessly enough, but her words struck me.

‘You don’t mean …? You didn’t see what happened to Ana that night, did you?’

‘No,’ said Topsy. ‘Don’t know whether to say “worse luck” or “thank God”, mind. If I’d have turned me round I could have seen it, but I was facing out. Never saw a thing. And I was down before anyone knew what had happened.’

‘A pity,’ I said. ‘Anyway, what I wanted to ask you, Topsy, was something else you might have seen, actually. Mrs Wilson and Anastasia. Did you ever see them together?’

‘Mrs Wilson?’ said Topsy. She had been tying wooden rings to the ends of her ropes with a series of complicated knots, but she stopped now and stared at me. ‘Sure it makes more sense than any of us, but why?’

‘I’m only asking if they knew one another,’ I insisted, but there was no fooling Topsy.

‘I’m keeping out of it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what happened or what’s happening now or what’s going to, but I’ve done enough.’

‘What have you done?’

She shook her head until her curls bounced.

‘I thought I was so smart and I’ve just made a mess of everything.’ She was beginning to sound ragged and looked as though she might cry. ‘I can’t help you, madam. I never saw a thing.’

I was getting precisely nowhere and was stirring up not even hornets’ nests, for at least hornets come right out and sting one in an honest fashion, but rather wisps of ghosts of hornets which threatened to sting but disappeared when one swatted at them. So I rapped rather more sharply than was warranted on Andrew Merryman’s door and could hardly blame him for opening the top half and peering out rather than calling a welcome. When he saw who it was, though, he unfastened the bottom and waved me inside where, sitting down again, he looked like some kind of giant insect, his knees around his ears and his elbows out to the sides, while he stitched at an enormous patchwork garment with a tiny needle. There seemed to be much more sewing involved in a circus life than I could easily manage, even if I ever got used to the box-beds and ashy potatoes.

‘A quick question, Mr Merryman,’ I said. ‘It’s about Mrs Wilson and Anastasia, and how well they knew one another.’

‘Hardly at all,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘You know that for a fact?’

‘Yes. Why? Do you think Mrs Wilson would be in danger if Ana had confided something to her before she died?’

‘Confided what?’ I asked, astonished.

‘I’ve no idea but why else would you be asking?’

I had to disagree with Alec; this was no dwam and the briskness seemed to strike up an answering briskness in me.

‘I’m asking because despite the fact that the police have given up on Ana and she is to be buried and forgotten and all as you were, I’m still trying to solve a murder.’

‘No one would have murdered her,’ he said. ‘It’s not circus.’

‘Good Lord, not you too!’ I cried.

‘It’s a hard thing to explain to an outsider,’ he began.

‘Oh, come now, Mr
Fanshawe
,’ I said. ‘If I am an outsider then so are you. And, more to the point, so is Mrs Wilson.’

‘Mrs Wilson?’ he said, looking puzzled. Then his mouth dropped open. ‘Is that why you’re asking about her? What on earth would make you think that Mrs Wilson had anything to do with it?’

‘Honestly?’ I asked. ‘It’s a straw and I’m clutching at it. Mrs Wilson … is not being herself. But then, no one is. You’re not, Bill, Topsy, Pa, Charlie – everyone is hiding something.’

‘How true,’ said Andrew. ‘And you missed out Tiny.’

‘You’ve come from Andrew’s, han’t you?’ said Tiny, crinkling his eyes at me. ‘I can always tell. We’ve got a trick we play in t’big towns, sometimes. We put on our checked suits and yellow bowlers and do quick swaps in café windows. Get it? Some flatty looks over, sees Andrew, looks away and back, sees me, goes to get his mates and we swaps again. Nearabout caused a tram crash one time.’

‘Wicked man,’ I said, and Tiny gave a very convincing diabolical laugh and hugged himself.

‘What can I do for you?’ he asked presently.

‘Confirm what is becoming very clear,’ I replied. ‘Anastasia was not a chum of Ina Wilson’s, was she?’

Tiny shook his head as I had expected.

‘No, but her man’s laying on the funeral anyway,’ he said. ‘Did you know that? Should have been Cooke’s that paid for it, like, but we’re not in a way to insist. Coming to something, in’t it, missus, when her nearest and dearest can’t give her a proper goodbye. That’s the least we should do.’

‘You are very kind,’ I said. ‘But surely you – you, personally, I mean – are not scratching around for “the least you should do”?’

‘Am I not?’ he said, his face falling, deep lines forming on either side of his mouth. ‘You’re being too kind to me,’ he said. ‘Dazzled by my mesmerising looks and my charisma. But there I go again, see? I wasn’t kind to that poor girl. Not at all. She needed to be took serious, to be cared for gentle, and I just joked and teased and used her lightly same as I do everyone. I’d have been better just to keep right out of her way, like the Russians did, and there was no love lost there. At least t’rest can make theirselves feel better by carrying her coffin tomorrow, but I’m not cut out for a pall-bearer, me.’

Zoya was alone in her wagon with Akilina, her youngest child. The little girl was sitting very still while her mother snipped with scissors at her wetted fringe.

‘Forgive me stay busy,’ said Zoya.

‘While you work,’ I said, settling myself down in the other chair, ‘might I ask a few questions?’

‘Of course,’ Zoya said.

‘I shan’t say anything that might upset the little one,’ I assured her, but she shrugged off my concern.

‘Ilya has got not much of English,’ she said. ‘Kolya is so sure we will go home and our girls need to be Russian girls for then.’

‘Very well,’ I said. I was sorry that her mind was tending towards her ‘beloved Mother Russia’ given what I was planning to ask her, but I smiled encouragingly and pitched in.

‘It’s about Ana,’ I began. Zoya interrupted me.

‘I am patient woman,’ she said. ‘Everyone circus must be very patient, very steady, or never learn anything, see?’ I nodded. ‘But that one, “Anastasia”, she make my blood to boil like black sugar spilled over.’ It was a horribly apt phrase, even coming from this calm, pale woman bending over with her face so close to that of her daughter.

‘I can see that she must have annoyed you.’ I said. Zoya looked up at the inadequate word. ‘Incensed you, I mean.’ She looked down again and smiled at Akilina. ‘What I need to ask is this. I’m just about sure of what the answer will be, but tell me: did you ever see any sign that Mrs Wilson was a friend of Anastasia?’

‘Mrs Wilson? The lady from the castle? You think she killed Ana?’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I just want to know if you ever saw them together. Or if Ana ever mentioned her.’

‘Anastasia never spoke to me of anything,’ said Zoya. ‘She had too much pride and too much fear to speak to me.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘You could have been her undoing in an instant.’

‘Until very soon ago,’ Zoya said, sitting back and thinking about it. ‘Some weeks, a month. Before we come here. Then she said to me one day: “I will reign over you, Madame Prebrezhensky. You shall see. You shall be sorry you ever to laughed at me, when I reign over you.” That is what she said.’

‘You must have been very angry,’ I said.

‘What, you think maybe I kill her?’ said Zoya. ‘You think all Russian just go kill everyone, hey?’

I began to clamour, shouting her down, but she was smiling at me.

‘How?’ she cried. ‘How? Magic? Send a spell?’ She closed her eyes and chanted a strange incantation in her sepulchral voice then opened her eyes wide and threw her arms up in the air like a falconer letting his hawk go. Akilina giggled.

‘Of course not,’ I said, thinking to myself that there was never a set of people in the world less prone to taking offence than these circus folk. Who else could one rather doggedly accuse of murder day after day only to have it brushed off with smiles.

Outside, I was looking around the ring of wagons wondering where to turn next, when I became aware that Akilina Prebrezhensky was standing at my side, looking up at me intently, her gaze all the more piercing given the severity of her mother’s trimming. She licked her lips and spoke in a tiny, peeping voice.

‘Missus,’ she said. Her hand curled into mine as small and soft as a rabbit’s paw and she pulled me backwards, pulled me outside the ring of wagons altogether, into the shadows where we would not be seen.

‘Missus,’ she said again. ‘Me seed.’

‘You seed?’ I echoed. I did not want to be discouraging, but I could make nothing of that. Akilina pointed back over her shoulder towards her wagon and mimed to me, making heads of her hands and snapping her fingers and thumbs together rapidly like talking mouths. She pointed at me and made the mime again. It began to make sense.

‘You understood what we were saying?’ I said. ‘In there?’ She nodded hard.

‘Me seed,’ she said again. With the kind of prickling sensation one sometimes gets from large gulps of overly fizzy champagne, I felt illumination spread through me.

‘You saw?’ I whispered. She nodded again. She pointed at her own living wagon and mimed crouching at the window, her hands up under her chin as though grasping the windowsill over which she was peeping.

‘What did you see, Akilina my darling?’ I asked her. ‘What did you see?’ Akilina licked her lips again and took a couple of deep breaths, scraping for the words to tell me.

‘Missus Lady … tchah!’ she said, then she pointed frantically over her shoulder. I turned round.

‘What? The stream? The water?’ I was miming too now.

Akilina shook her head, stood high on her tiptoes and heaved her pointing hand over her head as though trying to throw a heavy object a long way. I thought about what was beyond the stream and the trees.

‘The castle!’ I said. ‘You mean the lady from the castle? Mrs Wilson.’

Akilina clapped her hands and nodded, jumping up and down. She pointed to the performing tent and then walked her fingers away from it. And it was then that I realised, with a thump of excitement, that Alec, checking off his list of witnesses from the night of the show, had missed someone out after all.

‘Yes, yes, you’re quite right. Oh, you clever little girl. She left the tent.’

Then Akilina pointed at Ana’s wagon and shook her head hard, her mouth pushed out in a pout and her brows low and angry.

‘No!’ she said. ‘Not Ana! Lady no!’

That could hardly be clearer.

‘She didn’t hurt Ana?’ I said, just to check. Akilina shook her head so hard that the rats’ tails of her still-wet fringe banged against her head. Then her expression changed. She put her arms out and circled them as though embracing someone, closed her eyes and made loud kissing noises, swaying dreamily like Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. She was an accomplished little actress and it should have been squirm-inducing to watch, but just then I did not care.

‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Who was she kissing?’

But Akilina was lost in her performance now and could not be halted. She mimed writing, sealing the letter with a kiss and blowing it into the air, where it became a bird and fluttered away, coming to earth a long way off, piercing the lover in the heart and making him swoon.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘not just kissing, eh? Love?’

‘Love,’ she said and then began a new bout of really rather excellent silent acting. She breathed out hard four times, moving her head a little between breaths, and then she polished the four spots she had breathed upon. She swept the ground with a broom, shook out and laid a cloth upon a table, lovingly smoothing it, and set down upon it a lamp, also burnished in passing, which she then lit. Her meaning was clear.

‘Love and marriage,’ I concluded. ‘I see. But who is it, darling? Who is it she loves? Who?’

Here, maddeningly, she stopped miming, stopped even pointing and spoke a stream of Russian, higher-pitched than one would have imagined Russian could be and at breakneck speed.

‘What? Who? Slow down,’ I said. ‘In fact, no. Point. Where is he? What does he look like?’ With my hands, I sketched a beard and a fat middle, spectacles and a long nose. Akilina gave me a pitying look – clearly unimpressed – and then set to herself. She held her hand up high above her head, as high as she could reach, then she smoothed back imaginary hair, plucked at a bow tie, twirled a walking stick and sauntered back and forth in front of me like Burlington Bertie from Bow.

‘The tall gentleman in the beautiful suiting,’ I said. ‘Robin. Of course.’

My head was popping like fireworks with new ideas, zapping with every new connection like low branches touching a tram wire in a thunderstorm, but one thing was very clear. I squatted down, ignoring the sound of my skirt seam straining and splitting, and looked hard into Akilina’s grey eyes. I needed all my tiny store of miming talent now for, if Ina Wilson were out of the picture, there was no other possibility except that one of the circus folk was guilty after all. And that meant that this little girl, with what she knew, might be in danger.

I pointed at my chest and at Akilina’s, put my finger to my lips and let out a long, very quiet, Sssssh!

Akilina turned a key in the middle of her mouth, took the key out and handed it to me. I put it in my pocket. We nodded again, and sealed the bargain by shaking hands. Then she stole away round the outside of the wagons to her own and I sidled off in the opposite direction feeling like a spy.