That Summer: A Novel (44 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

Herne Hill, 2009

Nick’s kiss was nothing like the one in the attic over a month ago.

There was nothing tentative about this kiss; it was hot and demanding, filled with all the frustration of the past three weeks of waiting. Nick’s shirt was damp with sweat beneath Julia’s fingers, the fabric molded to his skin. She could feel the heat of his fingers through the thin fabric of her dress, his hands splayed open against her back, holding her close as his lips devoured hers.

When they parted, Julia felt as though she’d just come up from a long dive underwater. She blinked at him, her breath coming fast.

Nick looked to be in a similar state. His hair was sticking up on one side, his cheeks flushed, his chest rising and falling rapidly.

He took a step back, his eyes never leaving Julia’s. “If we—”

Whatever it was he had meant to say was lost as a horrible cracking noise filled the air.

It all happened in the space of a moment; Nick’s eyes opened very wide and his arms flailed for balance as the floor opened beneath him, sending him lurching sideways, one leg suddenly considerably shorter than the other.

“Bugger!” he cursed. “Bugger, bugger, bugger.”

Julia hurried towards him. It would have been comical if it weren’t for the look of very real pain on Nick’s face. One of his legs was wedged in a new gap in the boards. “Oh, God, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said, tight-lipped. “Just a little scratched up. Stupid. Bloody. Floor.”

Lending him a hand, Julia helped him out of the hole. It wasn’t deep. There was little more than a foot between the platform and the floor, but it was an awkward position for a man with one leg in and one leg out, particularly when a jagged bit of wood had caught on the back of his jeans.

Of all the ludicrous, farcical, ill-timed … She would have thought the ghosts of old lovers would have been more amenable to sharing their trysting place.

“If it’s any consolation,” Julia said, caught somewhere between laughter and annoyance, “you hurt it more than it hurt you.”

Nick pulled a wry face. Leaning over, he shook the splinters from his pant leg, wincing a bit as he did. “You might say that. There was something under there. It cracked when I landed.”

“Buried treasure?” suggested Julia.

“I doubt it,” Nick said, but he hunkered down by the hole all the same, moving a little stiffly. He landed heavily on his knees. “More likely just the sound of my shattered pride.”

“The timing was not ideal,” Julia agreed, trying to gently shift the conversation back to whatever it was he had been about to say before he went flying.

It was no use. His attention was absorbed by whatever it was he had seen down there in the dirt. He looked like a little boy, his hair sticking up, leaning over to poke at something down in the gap between the boards.

Cautiously, Julia took a step closer. She was lighter than he was; with any luck, she probably wouldn’t go plunging through anything. “Nick?”

He looked up at her, and something in his face made the smile die on her lips. Slowly, he rose to his feet, gesturing Julia forward. “Look at this.”

“This doesn’t sound good,” she said, her eyes on his face, not the floor. She squatted down where he had been, squinting into the dark cavity.

At first, she thought it was a twig. It was brittle and brown. But twigs didn’t have fingers. There was a hand lying on the packed earth beneath the floor of the summerhouse, a hand that had, until recently, been attached to an arm. Julia rocked back onto her heels, blinking against the sunlight, seeing dark spots against her eyes.

There was a corpse. In her summerhouse.

Or, rather, under her summerhouse.

Julia staggered to her feet. “That’s a hand,” she said unnecessarily.

Nick took her place by the side of the hole, tugging at the splintered edges of the board, trying to enlarge the gap. “You must have some tools—an ax?”

Julia hovered behind him. “Shouldn’t we leave the body where it is?” she asked, with vague recollections of
CSI
episodes. “In case we’re destroying evidence?”

“I don’t think we need to worry about that.” Nick looked up at her over his shoulder. “Whatever this is, it’s been here a long time.”

“Not whatever,” said Julia soberly. “Whoever.”

She hadn’t paid terribly much attention in ninth-grade bio class, but even she could identify a human skeleton when she saw one. The only plus side that she could see was that it couldn’t have been recent; didn’t it take the body some time to decompose all the way down to the bone like that? There had been no flesh on those skeletal fingers.

The thought was enough to make her feel cold in the heat of the day.

Nick had no such reservations. Working industriously away, he had succeeded in widening the gap so that about a square foot of the ground beneath the summerhouse was bared. He pointed at something next to the body. “The poor sod had his luggage with him when he died.”

Gingerly, Julia knelt by the edge of the broken section. It felt curiously like one of those viewing stations at a nature museum, as if she were on a macabre sort of class trip. Mercifully, she couldn’t see the skull; the section Nick had cleared revealed a torso, clad in a rotting jacket with tarnished buttons and legs in the tattered remains of trousers.

Beside him, next to his outflung hand, lay a large leather bag. The brown leather was disfigured with patches of green mold, gnawed through in part by rodents. The contents had fared equally poorly. A smell of must and mold rose from the whole.

Julia’s attention was caught by a flat, rectangular parcel. Unlike the satchel, it appeared to be largely intact, wrapped in a dark, tightly woven fabric.

As Nick tugged at the floorboards, attempting to widen the gap, Julia drew the package out of the hole, the fabric gritty against her fingers. It must have been treated with something. Wax, perhaps? It was dirty but hadn’t decayed.

The wrappings came away with difficulty, revealing a large portfolio, the leather scratched and scraped with use but otherwise intact. Retreating to a relatively solid stretch of ground, Julia laid the portfolio flat on the floor, hunkered down on her haunches, and undid the string tie.

The top sketch was of a man, kneeling, his head turned slightly away, one hand raised to shield his face in a gesture of contrition or shame. It looked like the visual equivalent of someone thinking aloud, bits drawn and then redrawn. Julia could see where portions had been rubbed out and reconstituted; the man’s legs looked as though they had been moved from one knee up, one knee down, to both knees on the ground. Even in the rough black and white sketch, she could tell that the man was wearing a stylized sort of armor and a helm and sword lay discarded by his side.

He looked a lot like the figures from the Tristan and Iseult painting. In style, that was. She couldn’t remember that any of them had been in quite this pose.

“I’m going to find an ax,” Nick said from somewhere over her shoulder. He sounded very cheerful at the prospect of getting to demolish a substantial subsection of her summerhouse. He thought about it. “Or a hammer. That would do.”

Julia nodded, her attention fixed on the pictures in front of her. “There should be a garden shed,” she said vaguely, and felt the boards beside her creak as Nick edged past, intent on his mission of destruction.

There was another study for the same painting, the same man, kneeling, but this time with a screen in front of him and a large chalice, floating seemingly in mid-air. The next one had a woman holding the chalice; the one after that reverted to the chalice elevated of its own accord, giving out rays of light like a Renaissance halo.

Julia flipped through, with growing excitement, marking the stages of a picture in a progress, pages devoted to nothing but the set of an arm or fifteen versions of the same chalice. But it was the sketch of the woman that made her really stop short.

This wasn’t the stylized lady of the Arthurian sketches. Her gown was tight waisted and full skirted, not the pseudo-medieval robe of the woman holding the Grail. She lay on her side on the grass on a blanket. A picnic basket sat open beside her, ripe apples spilling out onto the grass, giving an impression of fecundity and bounty.

Somehow, even in nothing but black and white lines, the artist had managed to convey the impression of a sunny summer day, the grass thick below, lines of light and shadow falling across the woman’s supple body. She wore a demure dress, tightly buttoned to the waist, but the heavy skirts were tucked under and around her, creating an impression of softness despite the prim collar and long, fitted sleeves, a froth of petticoat showing beneath the hem of the skirt.

The woman’s dark hair was soft and mussed with sleep. Her hands were tucked up under her face, and there was a slight smile on her lips, as though she was dreaming pleasant dreams.

Julia knew those features. She had seen them, studied them, on the portrait on the drawing room wall and in the painting of Tristan and Iseult. There was none of the wild quality here that Julia had seen in those others; this woman wasn’t haunted or wracked with dangerous passions. She looked peaceful. Content.

The sketches weren’t signed. They didn’t need to be.

Julia heard the steps creak with Nick’s return. Without looking up from the sketch of the sleeping woman, she said, “Nick?”

“Yes?” Nick hunkered down next to her, a hammer dangling from his hand.

“Look at this.” Julia pushed the portfolio towards him. She looked at him soberly. “I don’t think Gavin Thorne ever made it to New York.”

*   *   *

The discovery of a 160-year-old corpse in the garden of a house in suburban London caused a mild media sensation.

It was the silly season, Nick said, that was the problem. Whatever the reason, Julia found herself mobbed with inquiries from a dozen tabloids and local news stations. Had she ever felt anything strange in the house? Did they know who it was? Was the corpse only one of many?

When Julia countered all questions with a terse
no comment
, they dredged up obscure historians with lisps who wagged their heads and talked of unsolved murder cases and legends of haunting, and, even worse, people who claimed they had once lived nearby and recounted with relish tales of odd moanings and wailings and clankings from the garden of the house at Herne Hill.

“Can I sue?” Julia fumed to her best friend, Lexie. Admittedly, Lexie did corporate transactional work in the United States, not UK lawsuits, but a lawyer was a lawyer when all was said and done. “This is not going to help with my property values!”

“You never know,” said Lexie helpfully. “Some people are willing to pay a premium for a haunted house.”

People were certainly eager to come and gawk. On the second night of the onslaught, Julia was woken in the night by strange noises and lights flashing in the garden, not from any spirits but from the ghost hunters who had snuck in by a gate she hadn’t even known existed, all the way down at the far end of the property, by the overgrown remains of an old orchard. After seeing them off the property, Julia had grimly nailed the gate shut. She’d hung up a few handmade Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted to the Full Extent of the Law signs as well, just for good measure. She had no idea what the law was in England vis-à-vis trespassers, but if one more film crew tried to sneak in at midnight for “ghostly messages” she fully intended to use it.

It wasn’t all bad. Julia’s father and Helen offered to fly out to help her cope with the reporters; Jamie and Robbie just wanted to see the bones. The Tate approached her about buying Thorne’s paintings and sketches. A psychic offered to contact Thorne’s spirit for her for the reasonable price of only five thousand pounds.

“Only five thousand pounds for the first hour and nineteen-ninety-nine for every subsequent communication?” said Julia to Nick at the end of the first week.

She was getting a bit slaphappy by then. It was more than a little surreal to emerge from her house for groceries only to find reporters with fuzzy microphones standing on the sidewalk. No wonder celebrities were so skinny; they couldn’t leave their homes for sustenance. She didn’t mind subsisting on the last of her stock of Tesco’s frozen dinners, but she did very much mind the fact that she was nearly out of coffee.

“We can’t have that,” said Nick, and showed up at her door two hours later with two bulging sacks of groceries, among which were two pristine cans of illy coffee.

She hadn’t seen Nick since they’d seen the bones into the hands of the local police the previous Sunday. The police had been justifiably bemused at being presented with a 160-year-old crime scene but had duly wrapped her summerhouse in crime scene tape all the same and taken the skeleton into custody. By the time they’d gotten through, it had been late, and Nick had an early flight to catch, a buying trip to various far-flung estates in France and Belgium. He’d offered to cancel, but Julia had told him it was fine, she could handle it.

He must, she realized, opening the door to him in his suit and collared shirt, a tie tucked into his pocket and an overnight case slung over his shoulder, have come straight from the airport.

“Bless you,” said Julia gratefully, accepting one of the bags and hastily bolting and locking the front door behind him. “But you could have gone home first.”

She wasn’t quite sure what any of this meant. They’d spoken on the phone over the course of the week, but he had been in hotels and she’d been fuming over the idiocy of people who really believed you could track ghosts using a flashlight and a thermometer. There had been no time for state-of the relationship talks.

“I couldn’t leave you under siege and uncaffeinated,” said Nick. “Some of the reporters might get hurt.”

Instead of sitting in the kitchen, they lit the fire in Aunt Regina’s old study, with its wood-paneled walls and warm carpet. It also had the benefit of overgrown shrubbery blocking the window, as well as heavy drapes.

Delighted as Julia was to see both Nick and his overnight bag, the prospect of
The Star
having a long-lens camera looking through the window in the hopes that she might stumble on another corpse did put a distinct damper on amorous thoughts.