The Black Country (2 page)

T
he American waited inside the train’s rear passenger car until the two policemen were gone. He gave the porter a sixpence coin and stepped out onto the platform. The cold air on his cheeks felt invigorating after the closeness of his forward compartment. He took in the grey landscape with his grey eyes and checked the pocket of his grey leather duster to be sure the folding knife was still there. He smiled when his fingers touched the cold metal handle. The American’s smile was lopsided and horrifying. Even with his lips closed, a puckered hole from his left ear to the corner of his mouth exposed sharp yellow teeth behind the flesh of his cheek.

A sign swinging from the station’s awning welcomed the American to Blackhampton. He was in the right place. It was possible he’d bought old information, possible the soldier had moved on from Blackhampton, but this place felt right. He could almost smell his quarry. He’d never been so close. The American sniffed and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his duster.

He swung his knapsack and rifle case over his shoulder and walked away from the empty station, following the fresh wagon tracks in the snow.

D
ay and Hammersmith sat together facing Grimes, who had taken the backward-facing bench, leaving the better seats for the visiting policemen to see out through the windows on either side. Hammersmith hunched forward on the seat and cleared his throat.

“Tell us about the missing family,” he said.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather settle in first?” Grimes said. “You’ve had a long trip.”

“There’s a child missing, no?” Hammersmith said.

“Every hour we delay diminishes our chance of finding the boy and his parents,” Day said, “if they’re alive.”

Grimes shook his head. “Been gone for days. I’m afraid it’s bodies we’re looking for.” He looked away from them at the shifting scenery outside, but not before Day saw the sadness in the constable’s red-rimmed eyes. Day remembered his own time as a village constable, the responsibility he’d felt for his people. He sympathized with Grimes. “We’ll stop at the inn,” Grimes said. “There are people who want to meet you, want to help. I’ll introduce you round, let you get a feel for the way things work here. Might be questions you want to ask, though I’m sure I’ve asked ’em already.”

“We were told you’d found some evidence,” Day said.

“’Twas little Hilde Rose found it.”

“You’ve talked to her.”

“I have, sir.”

“Wonderful. Good work. Of course, we’ll want to talk to her, too.”

“I suppose you will,” Grimes said. “If her father’ll let you within a mile of the girl.”

“He’s protective?”

“He’s set in his ways.”

“How long after the disappearance was the eyeball found?”

“Well, you see, I’m not at all sure about that. It might have been the very next day, but it might have been as much as three days. Hard to pinpoint when they went missing. The weather’s made school a bit of an off-and-on thing round here, and the children weren’t missed right away.”

“Children? I thought it was just one child.”

“Oh, it is, but he has three siblings.”

“And they’ve been accounted for?”

“Yes.”

“Well, how long do they think their brother’s been missing?”

“Not to mention their parents,” Hammersmith said. “Didn’t they miss their parents right away?”

“I’m sure they did, but they have conflicting stories, and they’re not all able to tell time very well. The oldest kids say they thought their father had taken an extra shift at the mine. He’s a night guard.”

“And their mother?”

“Is not truly their mother. She’s the second Mrs Price. Was their nanny before the first Mrs Price run off. No love lost there. They say they simply didn’t notice whether she was around or not.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“Be that as it may, sir, it’s what they’re tellin’ me.”

“Are they staying with someone?”

“The housekeeper’s got them under control for the moment. I suppose we’ll have to find a new place for ’em if their parents don’t turn up soon.”

“Any other staff currently at the Price home?”

“None. We’re not a posh estate here.”

“Of course.”

The three lapsed into an uneasy silence, and Day watched the scenery roll by outside the carriage. As they drew closer to Blackhampton proper, the train tracks, which crisscrossed the countryside and jounced the carriage as it eased over them, thinned out and were replaced by high ridges covered with a thin rind of snow. Hammersmith pointed past Day out the window.

“Slag,” he said. “What remains after the smelting process.”

“Where?” Day said.

“The hills. The villagers pile the slag about, and after a few winters it becomes fresh soil. Good for gardening. Vegetables, potatoes, that sort of thing.”

Day smiled. Tiny rivulets of melt-off curled through the maze of slag mounds, bordered by stone footpaths. Children, bundled in coats and mittens and boots, ran about, jumping over the water, throwing snowballs, and shaping small round snowpeople.

“What kind of bush is that?” Day said. He pointed to a large woody thicket that seemed familiar.

“Not a bush,” Grimes said. “That’s a tree. Or the top of one, at least.” He indicated a strange-looking house several yards behind the bush. “It’s all sinking.”

Day craned his neck to see the house as it disappeared from view around a bend in the road. It was a single story with a sloping red roof and lined all about with small windows. There was no door on either side of the house that Day could see.

“Do they enter by the back door?”

“Doors are underground now,” Grimes said. “That place was two stories tall once. House and tree was above a seam what’s been mined already, so everything tends to sink down into the tunnel. People livin’ in it—that’d be the Baggses, mother, father, five children, and the lady’s sister—they go in and out through a window.”

“So even though that looks like a bush . . .”

“It’s an oak tree. It’ll be dead by spring, its roots down past the dirt layer.”

“Will it keep sinking?”

“Aye, until it falls the rest of the way through.”

“Then they shouldn’t be living in that house, should they? Won’t it collapse beneath them?”

“It’s their house, innit? Their choice, I suppose. Frankly, it’s a common problem round here.”

“But why would you tunnel under your own homes?”

“You’ve got it turned round in the case of that house. Been mining this area for generations. Some of the shafts under here are hundreds of feet deep, and some’re just below the surface. Nobody knows where they all are anymore, but we’ve got to live and work, don’t we?”

“You’ve built on top of the tunnels.”

“Sometimes. Built where we could build. No real way to avoid the mines.”

Grimes pointed to another building, small and faded red, set back from the road on a hill and barely visible through the swirling snow. “That one’s built better for the mines beneath it, but the road up to it can be a mite tricky in weather like this. We had an early spring here, nice and warm, but then a late storm hit. Snow shut the road down yesterday.”

“It’s a barn.”

“No. Though ’twas a barn at one time. Now it’s a schoolhouse. Put it up on stilts what go right down into the tunnels and rest on the floor.”

“So it won’t sink like the other buildings?”

“Oh, it’ll still sink. Even the floors of the tunnels’ve got tunnels beneath ’em, but it’ll take it a wee bit longer and we’ll move it to a new place and put it up on new stilts when it starts to go. We don’t take chances with our children round here.” He smiled at them, proud of his village’s commitment to the future.

“But I’ll wager you put them to work in the mines,” Hammersmith said.

Grimes’s smile disappeared. “I don’t do that, no,” he said. “That’d be their parents’ decision, wouldn’t it?”

The two men glared at each other, and Day kept his eyes glued to the window beside him. In his experience with Hammersmith, the sergeant could be hostile whenever he spotted something he deemed an injustice. At times, his attitude made him difficult to handle, but Day admired his unwavering sense of right and wrong. There was never a doubt in Hammersmith’s mind, which wasn’t something that Day could say for himself.

The carriage rolled across a wide field. Half-sunken houses and crumbling stone walls dotted the landscape. Far in the distance, Day could see furnace towers, flames leaping high against the dull grey sky. As they drew near the village, Day saw a grouping of at least a dozen old converted train cars, set side by side and painted in bright colors. Green and red and yellow and cornflower blue, curtains in the windows and wooden fences painted the same colors as the cars bordering tiny square lawns. They looked warm and dry and homey, but curiously unpopulated. It seemed to Day that there ought to be more people out and about.

But there was only a long line of dust-covered men slouched past the carriage. Miners headed home after a long day. Their skin was brushed with black, and their hair was matted grey. It was impossible to tell how old any of them were.

The carriage passed the village well and pulled up next to a neat stone two-story building with a thatched roof and two tall chimneys that billowed smoke. An enormous tree grew next to the inn, centuries old by the look of it, its branches spreading out over the roof, its roots invisible under the covering of snow. Day wondered what might happen if it ever sank into the village’s mines.

“Here we are,” Grimes said. “The best inn in town. The only inn, of course, but it’s a good one nonetheless.”

“Does it get much business? The inn? Blackhampton can’t have all that many people passing through.”

“I suppose you’re right. Besides you, there’s just one guest at the moment. But when they converted the old inn, someone must have felt the need to build another one.”

“So the inn’s new?”

“As new as things get around here. Perhaps fifty years old? I’m not certain.”

Day opened the carriage door and jumped to the ground before the horses came to a full stop. Hammersmith followed. Day grabbed his suitcase before Grimes could get to it, but he noticed that Hammersmith left his bag on the carriage, waiting to see if he would be given the same courtesy Day had been given at the train station. Day watched Grimes hesitate before picking up the sergeant’s luggage.

“You go ahead, Constable,” Day said. “I’d like to talk to Mr Hammersmith alone, if you don’t mind.”

“Again?”

“We’ll just be a moment.”

Grimes frowned, then shrugged and pushed open the inn’s front door with his free hand. A wave of warmth and human voices washed over them before Grimes disappeared through the door and it swung shut behind him.

“You wanted to talk to me, Inspector?”

Day sighed. “You’ve already antagonized the local police, Nevil.”

“I haven’t either.”

“But you have. You’ve taken an instant dislike to Mr Grimes, and he to you, and it won’t help us in the least.”

“He doesn’t like me?”

“Well, he doesn’t seem warm toward you. And you must admit that you dislike him, don’t you?”

“Why wouldn’t he like me?”

“You haven’t been kind toward him.”

“I didn’t realize. If that’s true, I’m sure it’s not his fault. He does seem eager enough to find the missing child.”

Day stepped back and looked out over the snow-covered fields. From far off, the sounds of the forges came echoing down the grey wind.

“Were things as bad as all that,” Day said, “when you were a child?”

Hammersmith looked around and pulled his overcoat still tighter to his torso. When he sighed, Day could see the breath steam from his nose and rise against the sky.

“This place does take me back,” Hammersmith said.

“Did you grow up near the Black Country?”

“No, nowhere near here. But the sounds, the scents . . . I hear the smelters and I’m back there again, back in a hole, alone in the dark, waiting for the coal carts to come up through the tunnels.”

“How old were you? When you started in the mines?”

“Oh, three or four. I forget. Too young.”

Day opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. He watched his unspoken words drift away like smoke and he avoided Hammersmith’s eyes. After a long moment of silence, he tried again. “I suppose there’s not much difference between one coal mining village and another?”

“The houses here,” Hammersmith said. “Their homes are different.”

“That’s something, then. Something different. Remember, you’re a policeman, not a miner.”

“Aye.” Hammersmith nodded. “It has been a long time.”

“And you are not the person that you once were.”

“Maybe not. But the child is the father of the man.”

“Is that a saying?”

“From a poem I read.”

A figure reeled at them from out of the dusk. The man wasn’t wearing a coat, but he had woolen mittens on his hands and he waved at them as he passed by. His face was cherry red, and he staggered, went down on one knee, and righted himself, a fresh glaze of snow on his trousers. He smiled and blinked and shuffled off out of sight.

“Drunk,” Hammersmith said.

“I can think of worse ways to keep warm in a place like this,” Day said. He clapped his hands together and stamped his feet. “I miss my wife, Sergeant. I’d like to finish this case and get home. I very much fear that my child will come into the world before we return.”

“You have time. Claire’s got weeks to go, and we’ll be leaving Blackhampton on Friday.”

“True enough, I suppose. Still, I worry.”

The two men stood side by side in the snow, quietly studying the crystalline landscape. The setting sun reflected through a million tiny prisms and sparked an electric red wire on the horizon. Behind them, out of sight over the hills, the train they’d arrived on sounded its bell and chuffed slowly away.

“The child is the father of the man,” Day said. “I quite like that.”