An Air That Kills (6 page)

‘By the way – just for the record – who was with you when you found the bones?'

‘Frank Thomas. Emrys Hughes.' Evans yanked his door handle; the door swung open, letting in a blast of icy air. ‘Charlie Meague.'

Evans got out of the car. ‘Thanks for the lift.' He shut the door and walked unhurriedly through the rain up the steps to the library.

Thornhill kneaded his gloved fingers together in an attempt to squeeze the cold out of them. The rain slid diagonally down the windscreen from left to right. Cars, a bus and two lorries swished past.

Charlie Meague again, he thought. In his job. Thornhill had long ago learned to respect the power of coincidence. Williamson was right, at least in this: Lydmouth was a small world.

Several people came in and out of the library. Almost everyone was in a hurry because of the weather. There was one exception – a man in a billowing raincoat. He was hatless and had a nautical beard which in profile gave him a resemblance to the head of King George V on prewar coins.

The man sauntered down the steps from the library and glanced about him. He raised his face and sniffed the air as though it brought him a bracing sea breeze rather than the foggy vapours of a cold November evening. Thornhill watched him crossing the road and strolling into the pillared entrance of the Bull Hotel.

None of the passers-by gave the Austin or Thornhill a second glance. From a purely professional viewpoint, this was, if anything, an advantage, but it also made him feel anonymous and insignificant. It reminded him yet again that he was a stranger here.

In his previous job, he had been based in an area he had known since boyhood. He had not been sentimentally attached to the Fens, but they had a stark simplicity which he had appreciated – not at the time, but since the move to Lydmouth. In the Fens of north Cambridgeshire, the flatness, the huge fields, the ruler-straight dykes, the scarcity of trees – everything made concealment difficult. Here, in this land of trees, rivers, hills and unexpected valleys, it was the reverse. He looked at the people who flowed along the pavements, their faces dark and closed. Most of them were swathed against the winter cold and he felt that they were hugging secrets to themselves.

Thornhill glanced over his shoulder at the box on the back seat. There was another secret – and one which in all probability would remain a secret for ever. He had gone to Templefields as a matter of routine, mainly to avoid giving Williamson further grounds for criticism. But the contents of the box had caught his imagination and he wished that they hadn't. A handful of bones, perhaps from a baby. A scrap of newspaper, probably from the last century. The silver brooch that might or might not have something to do with the other items. Weren't knots in jewellery often designed to be given and received as tokens of true love?

There was something pathetic about the cluster of grubby objects. ‘Someone's by-blow,' Dr Bayswater had said with an implicit sneer attached to the verdict: silly girls shouldn't get themselves pregnant, and if they did, they had to cope with the consequences.

Suddenly the pity of it became unbearable. Part of the pity was for Thornhill himself and part of it was for whatever had happened at the Rose in Hand all those years before.

He raised his hands, balled them into fists and hammered them against the steering wheel.

Chapter Five

When the phone rang, Charlotte left the room to answer it. Jill heard the voice of her hostess in the distance, but could not distinguish the words.

Philip sidled back to the trolley where the drinks were.

‘Top up your glass?'

Jill smiled and shook her head.

With his back to her, Philip poured himself some gin. He turned back to Jill and raised his glass.

‘Cheers.'

She smiled dutifully at him, raised her glass and took an unwanted sip of sherry.

‘So what are you going to do if you're not going to be Bystander?' he asked. ‘Carry on as before?'

‘I don't think so. In fact I know so. I've resigned.'

‘With nothing to go to?'

‘I feel like a change, that's all. Perhaps I'll freelance for a while.'

‘Rather you than me.'

Charlotte came back into the room; Jill knew from her face that something had pleased her.

‘Do you know an Inspector Thornhill, Philip?'

‘He's a new chap. CID, isn't he? I haven't met him yet.'

‘He wants to come and interview me,' Charlotte announced. ‘It seems that they've found some old bones at Templefields. He's on his way.'

Philip glanced at the clock as he sat down. ‘Bit late, isn't it? We'll be having dinner soon. Couldn't it wait till the morning?'

‘Actually it was my suggestion.' Charlotte sat down and picked up her sherry. ‘He was quite happy to leave it till the morning.' She sipped her drink and peered over the rim of her glass at her husband. Her eyes were bright and shrewd. ‘But I thought it would be something for the
Gazette
. If there's anything worth having, one wouldn't like the
Post
to get it first.'

Philip shrugged. ‘You've got a point, I suppose. But on Jill's first evening . . .'

‘But I'd be interested—' Jill began.

Charlotte overrode her. ‘Jill knows what it's like, darling. I'm sure she won't mind a bit. I've had a word with Susan and asked her to put dinner back twenty minutes. Nothing's going to spoil.'

Philip shrugged. ‘You know best in that department.'

‘Besides, it sounds as if I was right. I said this would happen, you know. That dreadful man George – bulldozing his way through that wonderful collection of old buildings. Heaven knows what he's going to destroy.'

‘I told you Charlotte's got a bit of a bee in her bonnet about local history,' Philip said. ‘She did a couple of articles for the
Gazette
.'

‘Most people don't even realise why it's called Templefields,' Charlotte explained to Jill. ‘It was originally owned by the Knights Templar. There's said to be medieval masonry in some of the cellars though I must admit I've never seen any myself. It may go back even further. The Romans were at Lydmouth, you know.'

‘I didn't know you wrote for the
Gazette
,' Jill said.

‘Not as a journalist, dear. I'm the secretary of our little local history society. I was writing in that capacity.'

Charlotte, Jill remembered, had read history at Oxford just before the war.

‘I'll get a pad,' Philip said. ‘I'm sure Thornhill won't mind.'

Glass in hand, he got up and left the room. Charlotte's face acquired a knowing expression. The silence lengthened.

‘Poor old boy,' Charlotte said at last, bending towards Jill and speaking in a hushed voice. ‘We lost our senior reporter on the
Gazette
last week. Heart attack, I'm afraid. Philip's had to plug the gap. He's been working very hard, poor lamb.'

The doorbell rang.

The two women heard Philip's footsteps cross the hall, the door opening and the sound of men's voices. The sitting-room door opened. Philip, still with his glass in his hand, ushered in a slim, dark-haired man.

‘This is Inspector Thornhill, dear,' Philip said. ‘Inspector, this is my wife, Mrs Wemyss-Brown, and this is Miss Francis, a friend of ours from London.'

‘It's very kind of you to see me at such short notice,' Thornhill said to Charlotte. ‘Especially at this time of day.'

‘Not at all, Inspector. It's never too late to help the police, after all.'

‘Would you like a drink?' Philip asked.

‘Thank you, but no.'

‘Do sit down,' said Charlotte graciously. She indicated the chair beside hers. ‘Now – how can we help you?'

Thornhill sat down. He took his time answering. He was dressed in a tweed jacket and flannel trousers. The elbows of the jacket had been neatly patched with leather. Jill envisaged an adoring wife, industriously devoting one evening a week after supper to the family's mending. She thought Thornhill might have seemed quite handsome if his expression had not been so supercilious; he looked, she decided, like a grammar-school master whose absolute control over the boys in his charge had gone to his head.

At that moment, he glanced up: his eyes met hers. Quickly, she looked away. She took a sip of her drink. All this – her assessment of him and the meeting of their eyes – had taken no more than a couple of seconds.

Thornhill turned to Charlotte. ‘As I said on the phone, Mrs Wemyss-Brown, some bones have been found in Templefields. There were a couple of other things found with them. We wondered whether you might be able to help us identify them.'

‘I shall be delighted to give you all the help I can, Inspector. By the by, is there any reason why you'd prefer us not to treat this as a news story? It's not top secret or anything, is it?'

‘No – the workmen who found the bones must have spread the story by now.'

Philip put down his drink. He sat up, took a shorthand pad from his jacket pocket and uncapped his fountain pen. For an instant, Jill glimpsed the Philip she had known all those years ago. Deep inside the plump and prosperous citizen there still lurked a cub reporter eager for glory.

‘This afternoon, four of Mr George's workmen were clearing out what appears to have been an old cesspit at the back of the former Rose in Hand inn.' Thornhill cleared his throat: to Jill he sounded absurdly formal, as though he were in court. ‘They disturbed a box. Either inside it or near it were a few small bones. Luckily the foreman, Ted Evans, used to help his father who was the sexton at St John's. He thought the bones might well belong to a baby. Dr Bayswater thinks he may be right.'

For Jill, his words were like an incision reopening a wound. There was no escape from what had happened. Even this provincial policeman was in the conspiracy to remind her.

‘Why just a few bones?' she said, desperate to distract herself.

He looked at her, and his face was cold and bleak. ‘Rats, Miss Francis. That's the most likely explanation.'

The thought of it made her feel ill. He shrugged, brushing aside her interruption.

‘I should emphasise that all the indications are that the bones are very old,' he went on. ‘The workmen also found a small silver brooch and a little bit of newspaper. I wondered if you could help me identify the newspaper, and also perhaps give me an idea of the history of the Rose in Hand.'

‘A pleasure, Inspector,' purred Charlotte.

He was already taking two envelopes from an inside pocket. ‘I'm afraid the piece of newspaper is rather fragile.' He opened one of the envelopes and shook out the yellowed triangle of newspaper with surprising gentleness into the palm of his hand. ‘Perhaps we might put it on something.'

Philip got up to fetch a book. Jill noticed he'd already covered nearly a page of his pad with neat shorthand hieroglyphics. Thornhill took the book with a muttered word of thanks and transferred the piece of newspaper on to it. He passed it to Charlotte, who examined it for a moment.

‘Well, judging by the advertisement it's obviously a local paper, as I am sure you realised. James Gwynne – now let me see – probably the grandfather, or perhaps the great uncle, of John Gwynne.' She looked at Philip whose head was still bent over his pad. ‘They were before your time – they used to keep the draper's shop at the bottom of Lyd Street. They moved to Cardiff just before the war.'

‘Do you think it's from the
Gazette
?' Thornhill asked.

‘It certainly looks like our typeface and layout. I suppose it might be the
Post
– but I doubt it. They've not been going for more than fifty years, and this looks older.' She looked up. ‘May I turn it over?'

Thornhill nodded. ‘But please be careful.'

Charlotte slid the scrap of newspaper off the book, turned it over and replaced it. ‘Now I think that Sunday School was closed down before the war – the First War, I mean. Before my time, of course, but I remember hearing my aunts talking about it. There was some problem with the last superintendent. It was all rather hushed up.'

Jill thought briefly of some of the possibilities: embezzling the collection, perhaps, interfering with choirboys or displaying Romish tendencies – or even fathering unwanted babies on members of the congregation.

‘What about the Rose in Hand? Can you tell me anything about that?'

‘Well, of course, parts of the cellars may go back to the Middle Ages. The Knights Templar owned the—'

‘I was thinking of more recent history. Perhaps the last hundred years.'

‘How obtuse of me,' Charlotte said with unconvincing humility. ‘You must be assuming that the newspaper and the bones belong to roughly the same period.'

‘It seems the most likely possibility at present.'

‘The place used to be a coaching inn. Quite a substantial establishment, I believe. But the coming of the railways put an end to all that. And they built the Railway Hotel, of course, which must have been a lot more convenient for travellers. Also, they opened a coal pit to the east of Templefields in the 1850s and I think that helped change its character.'

Philip looked up. ‘My wife means that no one lived there who could afford to live elsewhere. Which is more or less the case today.'

Thornhill nodded. ‘So – sixty or seventy years ago, Templefields would probably have been a working-class area? A bit of a slum, perhaps?'

‘Oh, yes,' Charlotte agreed. ‘I know the Rose in Hand had rather a bad reputation in my grandfather's day. It attracted a lot of undesirable people. Indeed, as I'm sure you know, the area itself still does.'