An Air That Kills (7 page)

Jill thought that ‘attract' was not the word she herself would have chosen. She said, ‘May I have a look at it, please?'

Charlotte glanced at Thornhill, who nodded. Jill leant forward and Charlotte passed her the book on which the triangle of newspaper lay.

‘Assuming that does come from the
Gazette
,' Thornhill went on, ‘would you be able to find it in your files? Then we could date at least the newspaper, if not the bones.'

‘My husband will get one of our people to go through the backfile first thing tomorrow morning,' Charlotte said. ‘Did you say you found something else?'

Thornhill opened the second envelope and shook a tarnished brooch on to the palm of his hand. He passed it to Charlotte.

‘No need to worry about fingerprints, I suppose,' she said with a smile.

Jill handed the book back to Thornhill. He took it from her without meeting her eyes. She disliked men who would not look her in the face.

Charlotte passed the brooch to Jill, who turned it over in her hands. The hallmark on the back looked perfectly clear. With a little cleaning and a magnifying glass, it should be legible. She thought she could make out an anchor, which meant the piece had been assayed in Birmingham; but the inspector would be able to find out that sort of thing himself. He must be sick of members of the public offering him help he didn't need.

She turned the brooch over again. Her throat tightened. A true love's knot. There was no knot that couldn't be undone – or if you couldn't undo it, you could cut it or burn it or simply let it rot. She put the brooch on the arm of Philip's chair, turned towards the fire and pretended to warm her hands. The manoeuvre prevented the others from seeing her face.

‘Ah, well,' Charlotte was saying. ‘No doubt the obvious explanation is also the correct one. Some poor unfortunate servant girl. A stillborn child – we must hope it was stillborn, in any case. Desperate to conceal her shame. Of course, in those days the line between right and wrong was very clearly drawn. If people do these things, then they must expect to have to pay the price.'

Jill stared at the flames. What do you mean –
do these things
? she wanted to say. Fornicate? You stupid woman, you don't really believe that the wages of sin should be death? And what about the man, for God's sake? What price did he have to pay?

‘And mark you, there was a lot to be said for making it quite clear where people stood. None of this shilly-shallying we get today. Making excuses. Some things you can't excuse and that's the end of it.'

‘Yes,' Thornhill said. He busied himself with returning the brooch and the piece of newspaper to their envelopes. ‘You've been very kind.'

‘And what happens now, Inspector?' Charlotte asked.

‘I'm not sure. I shall have to talk about this with the superintendent.'

‘Mr Williamson?'

Thornhill nodded. ‘In case we do take this further, is there anyone else you would advise me to talk to about the history of the Rose in Hand? It's not that long ago, is it? There must be records and so on.'

‘You need to have a word with John Harcutt. He probably knows more about nineteenth-century Lydmouth than anyone else.'

Thornhill put the envelopes in his pocket and took out a notebook. ‘Harcutt? Could you give me his address please?'

‘He lives in Edge Hill, Inspector. It's that big white house on the main road – opposite the church. Chandos Lodge.'

Thornhill stood up. ‘You've been very helpful.'

He said goodbye. Philip got up to show him out. As the door closed behind the two men, Charlotte reached for her cigarette case.

‘Seemed quite pleasant, I thought,' she murmured.

‘I thought he looked a bit like a schoolmaster.'

‘I suppose these days you need a certain amount of education to become a detective inspector. Quite a good-looking man, too. I wonder if he's married.'

They heard the thud of the front door closing.

‘Someone sewed those patches on his jacket.'

‘Yes, dear, but that might have been his mother, or a sister or something.'

‘I still think he's married,' Jill said. ‘He looks that sort of man.'

Chapter Six

Victoria Road sloped gently up to the park and the cemetery. It was considered to be one of the better residential addresses in Lydmouth. It was also one of the more expensive. Edith Thornhill had cajoled her husband into renting a house at the lower, cheaper end of the road. It was semidetached and late-Victorian. Thornhill would have preferred to buy, but that would have to wait until they had saved enough money for the deposit.

He parked the Austin immediatley outside the house. The landing light filled with a dim yellow radiance the uncurtained windows of the front bedroom he shared with Edith. He let himself into the hall. Three empty tea chests and a smell of polish greeted him. The wireless was on behind the half-open door of the kitchen. He didn't call out for fear of waking the children.

As he hung up his coat and hat, he caught sight of his face, tired and serious-looking, in the mirror by the pegs. He wished he could hang up his job and everything that went with it at the same time as his hat and coat. These days he seemed to carry his working life around with him wherever he went and whatever he did: it was like a weight on his shoulders which as the months and years passed grew steadily heavier. His shoulders twitched; a second later he realised that he was trying to shrug the weight away.

He walked down the hall and pushed open the kitchen door. They called it the kitchen, though in fact they used it as a living room and did their cooking in the scullery at the back; the kitchen was the warmest room in the house because it contained the boiler which heated the hot water. Edith was sitting in the armchair darning one of the children's socks. A man was saying something about the National Debt on the radio, but Thornhill didn't think she was listening to him.

She looked up and smiled. ‘Hello, Richard.'

He bent down and kissed her cheek. ‘Sorry I'm late. Are the kids asleep?'

‘Well, they're upstairs. Come and get warm while I fetch your supper.'

The scrubbed deal table was laid for one person; Edith must have eaten with the children. The man talking about the National Debt had a voice whose cultivated arrogance reminded Thornhill of Dr Bayswater's. He reached out a hand and switched off the radio. In the silence, he heard the clatter of a pan in the scullery.

The inactivity irked him. He slipped upstairs to say goodnight to the children. At present, and at their own request, they were sharing a room, perhaps to help them cope with the novelty of their surroundings. For once they were both asleep. Thornhill felt obscurely cheated. It was much colder upstairs, and both children had burrowed deep under their bedclothes. All he could see of them were two patches of hair.

He went back downstairs. Edith was sitting in the chair again with a couple of socks on her lap and his baked beans and toast were waiting on the table. She assumed that the police canteen provided him with a proper hot meal in the middle of the day: usually she was right.

‘Did you have a good day?'

No, he wanted to say, it was awful. He said, ‘Not too bad, thanks. And you?'

Talking in a low, placid voice, she took him step by step through her day. She was an orderly woman who liked to describe things chronologically. Thornhill finished his baked beans and helped himself to an apple and a slice of Cheddar cheese. While he ate, he watched Edith. She was almost as tall as he was, with the sort of light-brown hair which had once been fair. She wore no jewellery except the thin gold wedding band. Suddenly, he wanted to go to bed with her. Not in an hour's time – but now. And it didn't have to be bed, either. The table would do. Or the floor. Anywhere.

He cut himself another slice of cheese with a hand that trembled slightly. She was telling him what David's teacher had said about his reading. This was followed by an account of Elizabeth's attempt to run away to their old house in Cambridgeshire while they were walking back home from school. Still talking, Edith went into the scullery to make some tea.

‘What kept you so late?' she called through the open door.

He pushed back his chair and followed her into the scullery. Lust made him clumsy and he banged his arm against the corner of the cooker. The water had boiled while he was eating. Edith had her back to him and was spooning tea into the pot. He stared hungrily at the shapeliness of her waist.

‘Some workmen found some bones at that building site near the station,' he said. ‘They may have belonged to a baby. They're probably about sixty years old.'

‘The poor thing.' She brought the kettle back to the boil and started to fill the teapot. ‘Was it in a graveyard?'

‘No. A cesspit.'

‘Oh, dear. But I suppose it might have been a natural death. An illness or something.'

‘Perhaps.'

‘Talking of illnesses, I thought Elizabeth was looking a little peaky this evening. I took her temperature, but it was normal.'

Thornhill put his hand on her right hip. He sensed – or imagined he did – the warmth of her body and the softness of her flesh through the thick tweed of her skirt. The crudeness of his reactions shocked him: touching her had the effect of doubling his urgency.

‘David must come into contact with lots of germs at school,' she went on, stirring the tea vigorously. ‘I know he hasn't been ill himself but do you think it's possible that germs can leapfrog on to someone else? He might have passed it on to her without having had it himself.'

Thornhill put his other hand on her left hip. It was hard to breathe normally and his mouth was dry. He stroked his hands down her thighs and moved his body against hers.

‘Oh, darling, don't. I'm sorry but there's such a lot to do before bedtime.'

‘Yes, of course.'

He stepped backwards. The scullery was unbearably hot. Edith put the teapot on the tray and covered it with the cosy. She saw him watching her and smiled, as if to reassure him that she wasn't annoyed. He smiled back. Behind the mask, anger and shame churned silently inside him, blending with what was left of the lust.

‘Let me.' Thornhill picked up the tray and waited for her to precede him out of the room.

‘Thank you, darling,' she said.

Chapter Seven

Charlie Meague waited until midnight.

He had never needed much sleep, even as a child. During the war, he had developed the ability to catnap just as Winston Churchill was said to do. He waited in bed because it was the warmest place to be.

Though he didn't sleep, he let his mind lose its focus. Thoughts and images paraded themselves before him. A memory kept recurring: the box he had found this afternoon – not its contents, but the box itself. What haunted him was its familiarity. It was as if he had dug it up before, which was impossible. Somewhere another memory twitched and stirred in its hiding place. There must, he thought vaguely, be a good reason why that memory was so well hidden.

His mother's snoring changed its rhythm, distracting him. She was lying only a few inches away on the other side of the thin partition wall. He heard every cough and wheeze and sniff. She had had bronchitis in winter for as long as he could remember. It must be like trying to breathe through treacle.

The old woman had had a bad day. One of her ladies had given her the push, and her cough was bad again; he had come back home to find her blue-faced and gasping for air. He'd tried, with some success, to take her mind off her sorrows by buying her three port and lemons at the King's Head. He would have preferred to drink at the Bathurst Arms himself, but it was much farther away; besides, all things considered, it was probably safer to keep away from the Bathurst.

In the pub, Charlie had enjoyed watching Ma Halleran queening it behind the bar and listening to her reliving her nocturnal adventure. Her account of her burglary became more dramatic with every retelling. The woman was a barefaced liar. She needed locking up.

‘The bitch,' his mother had murmured between coughs and genteel sips, and for once she didn't mean Ma Halleran. ‘The bitch. All the years I worked there, and she didn't even give me the chance to explain.'

Charlie had been tempted to point out that even if the bitch in question had given his mother the chance to explain, there was nothing she could have usefully produced in her defence. She had been trying to steal that silver box, that was all there was to be said about it. His mother was lucky that Mrs Wemyss-Bitch hadn't gone to the police. He just hoped that the old battle-axe wouldn't tell the other people his mother worked for.

In any case, it had been such a stupid thing to do. As so often when he thought about his mother, Charlie Meague was torn between exasperation and affection. At the age of six, he had realised that he was cleverer than her. He had never seen any reason to revise this conclusion. If the silly cow had thought about it, she would have known that sooner or later the theft would have been discovered. And of course they would suspect her of having done it. It was always easier to suspect the cleaning woman than a friend. Besides, in this case, Mrs Wemyss-Brown would have told herself that the crooked streak obviously ran in the family. In Lydmouth, people had long memories. Like son, like mother, they'd say to themselves: bad blood will out. What irritated Charlie most of all was the reason why his mother had done it. Though he had said nothing to her, she knew that he needed money: she had stolen the box for him.

The house cooled around him. At least it was no longer raining. He had left the curtains undrawn and through the window there were stars. There might even be a frost tonight.