A Half Forgotten Song (54 page)

There were portraits of Dennis with a multitude of different faces, and Zach studied them all, under the weak light from the solitary bulb overhead. He looked at all of Aubrey’s possessions, the scattered items on the desk, touching each thing gently, reverently. Tubes of oil paint and a bottle of turpentine—the chemical smell that had been so instantly recognizable to him as he’d sat in the darkness earlier, with Rozafa. Beneath some loose papers he found a startling thing. Military ID tags, still threaded onto a stiff and twisted leather bootlace. British, not made of metal like American ones would have been. A round red disk and an octagonal green one, made of some tough fiber, with the name
F. R. DENNIS
and his regimental details stamped clearly onto the surface of each. Zach ran his fingertips over the lettering.
Dennis. I’ve finally found you
.
You get to have a story now, too.
There was bound to be a photo of him somewhere. In some old family album. Zach would be able to see the face that Aubrey had so struggled to imagine.

“Dimity told me once that he never forgave himself,” said Hannah. Zach hadn’t even heard her come into the room.

“For what?”

“Stealing that soldier’s identity. He used him to get home, to get away from the war and make a break for it. Ruined his name by deserting, and denied his family a body, a burial. He had nightmares about it all the time. About the war, and about Dennis.”

“Why are all the Dennis pictures of different men?”

“They’re not. They’re all of him. It was Aubrey’s way of . . . giving him his life back. He never knew what he looked like, you see. Dennis was already dead when Aubrey found his body and switched their tags. Dead and so badly injured that he had no idea what the lad had looked like in life. This was his way of . . . paying him back, I think. He tried to give him back his face.”

“The pictures of Dennis that have come up for sale lately . . . they were so similar, but I knew . . . I
knew
there was something different about each one.”

“Yes.” Hannah nodded. “You’re the only one who looked closely enough to see it, it seems. I picked the ones in which he looked most alike. Where Charles had clearly got an image in his mind and had drawn it several times before it shifted. But he never got it one hundred percent the same, because . . .”

“Because it was a fantasy. He had no model.”

“Yes. It was a risk, putting them up for sale, but they were the only ones that wouldn’t have . . . raised questions.”

“Why take the risk?”

“We needed money. Dimity to live on, me to . . . to help Ilir and his family.” Zach considered this for a second.

“That most recent Dennis picture, the one that sold the week before last. That paid for Rozafa and the boy to come over, didn’t it?” he asked, already knowing the answer when Hannah nodded.

“Ilir has been working for me for years, and saving up what I could afford to pay him. He sent some of it to them in France, as well. But when the French authorities started to break up the Paris camps at the beginning of the month, it was too soon. We hadn’t got enough between us. We needed more.” Her eyes were wide and calm, but they were searching, too. She was trying to see how he felt about it all, trying to explain all the secrets, and the lies. To explain her part in it. “I never actually lied to you, Zach,” she said, as if reading his thoughts.

“You wrote fake dates on his pictures, Hannah. That’s forgery. You denied all knowledge of Dennis, and the new pieces that were sold. You lied to me and to the whole bloody world,” he said, realizing only then how much it hurt.

“It wasn’t forgery! The pictures
are
by Charles Aubrey.”

“Yes. The lie you told the world wasn’t as big as the one you told me,” he said. Hannah pressed her lips together unhappily, but she did not say
sorry
.

“What did you do with his body? You never did say. Does Charles Aubrey have a true grave that I could go and see?” Zach asked. He had a sudden dark vision of an exhumation, of relocation to hallowed ground. Of soil caught in grinning teeth and insects hiding in bony eye sockets. Hannah had been fingering the fine bristles of a paintbrush standing in a jar on the desk. She dropped her hand guiltily, as though he’d slapped her wrist.

“No. There’s no grave.”

“But . . . Don’t tell me you . . . burned the body? Jesus Christ, Hannah . . .”

“No! Not that. You have to understand . . . Dimity was near hysterical when I got here. With grief and with fear. She was
adamant
that if people found out he’d been here all this time she’d be in some kind of awful trouble. She kept going on and on about secrets and bad things . . . she was hardly making sense. It wasn’t long after . . . after I lost Toby. I wasn’t in a clear and logical place myself . . . And he’d been dead a while, you understand. I think . . . I think she’d been in denial, or maybe she just wanted to be with him for as long as possible. But he was . . . he was starting to smell.” She broke off, swallowing hard at the memory. “It was nighttime and there was this dead body—my second dead body that year—and Mitzy was sobbing and chattering and going on and on, so I . . . I went along with what she suggested.” She looked up at him, still with those wide eyes; expectant now, ready for his reaction. On any day before that day he’d have been happy to see that vulnerability on her face.

“Which was?”

“We gave him to the sea.”

T
he night he died was blowy and dry, the breeze a restless whisper, like a song. Dimity’s back was aching from scrubbing the kitchen floor. For years she’d supported herself and Charles by cleaning houses; riding the bus to the homes of people outside Blacknowle, newcomers, people resettling after the war. People for whom the name Hatcher had no connotations. And as soon as she could draw her pension, she did so, stopping work and spending the whole of each day with Charles at The Watch. The cottage no longer felt like a prison but a home. A sanctuary. A place where she was happy and her heart was full. But that night her bones were aching, right through to the marrow, and after a while the hairs on the back of her neck began to prickle, and an awful, sick feeling gathered under her ribs. She hummed and she sang and she went about her chores, and made a dinner of lamb chops and mint sauce, but she put off taking it up to him for as long as she could. She knew; she
knew
. But she didn’t want to see, to have it proven. Each step of the stairs was a cliff face, each push of her muscles a marathon. She forced herself up to his room when the chops had long gone cold and the fat from them had congealed in a ring around the plate.

The room was in darkness and she put the tray carefully on the desk before crossing to the switch. The hand she raised to pull it was leaden; weighed more than all the rocks on the beach combined. And there he was, fully dressed but lying on the bed with his legs under the sheet, arms across his middle, tidy and organized. His head was nestled into the center of the pillow and his eyes were shut, but his mouth was not. It sagged open slightly, just enough for her to see his lower teeth, the swell of his tongue. A tongue that was no longer pink, but grayish pale. And then, in that second, the world stopped turning and everything seemed to fade to shadows; nothing was real or solid anymore. The air wasn’t fit to breathe, the light burned her eyes, and the ceiling pressed down on her until her knees buckled. The house, the world, and everything in it turned to ashes, and she tottered to the bedside, gasping at the pain. His skin was cold and dry, the flesh beneath it too firm, inhuman. The white wisps of his hair were soft and clean when she put trembling fingers up to touch them. The years had given him sunken cheeks and gaunt sinews to garland the length of his neck, but when she looked at him all she saw, all she had ever seen, was her Charles, her love. For a long time she lay crumpled there, with her cheek pressed to his still, silent chest.

New faces, new voices, came to fill the gray hollow where Charles had been. They were indistinct at first; they kept their distance. They were suggestions of movement, voices too quiet to hear. But then, almost a week after Charles had left, she caught a flash of blond hair in the hallway mirror as she passed it. Dyed yellow hair, long and coarse and split at the ends.
Valentina.
And then that evening a seizure gripped her, a shudder taking over her arms and shoulders that was not hers, but Celeste’s. The dead were drawn to their own, she knew, like wasps to a murdered comrade. Death was in the air at The Watch, the smell of it was spreading, getting stronger, tempting others to come and look, to come visiting. She ran up to his room in terror, and held his cold hands for comfort. They were soft again now, but in a wrong way. His whole body seemed to be sinking, settling lower into the mattress. His eyes had drawn back into his skull, his cheeks were even deeper and the strands of his neck even looser. The tongue nestling between his teeth had darkened, blackened. His skin was waxen and yellow. “Hawthorn,” she murmured to him in anguish, as the day got old and the sun went down. “You smell like May flowers, my love.”

When she had no other choice she went down to the farmhouse, and Delphine opened the door. For a moment Dimity accepted this, and then she was startled because it could not be. She had seen Delphine carried out, years before. It was not Delphine but the girl, the dark-haired one who had sometimes come knocking on the door of The Watch when she was small, to ask for sponsorship for Red Nose Day, or to sell raffle tickets for the Brownies. A small, angular thing with scraped elbows and knees, she had been, but now here she was, grave and solemn and lovely. Her breath was ripe with alcohol, her gaze scattered and bewildered. But Dimity took her hand and pulled her back to The Watch. She could not lift him by herself. The cottage was roaring with the voices of the dead, but Hannah didn’t seem to hear. They stirred Dimity into a frenzy of fear and desperation. They had to go, they all had to go, and take their secrets with them. Secrets that had to be kept; too many of them, and too grave, for even one to be spoken—the pebble that would start the landslide. No police, no undertaker, nobody else but the two women and the dead man. Hannah put her hand over her mouth as they went into Charles’s room, and gagged. Her eyes were darkly alight with horror.

Between them, they lifted him off the bed. Heavier than he looked; a tall man with good, strong bones. They carried him out of The Watch and down to the cliffs. Not above the beach, but behind the cottage, to where the land dropped vertically down into the inlet. The tide was high, Dimity knew. She knew it so well she didn’t even have to think to know; the currents, too, the tow that would pull him under and take him far out to sea. The wind was buffeting, lifting white crests to beat against the rocks. It carried away the smell of hawthorn blossom; it carried away the sound of her sobs. They swung him back and forth, once, twice. Released him on the third. And for a second, just for a second, Dimity almost followed him down. She wanted to keep hold of him, to go with him, for there seemed little point in staying on without him. But her body had other ideas, some gut instinct to live, and her hands let him go, and he flew into darkness. Swallowed by the surging water; gone. She stayed on the cliffs for a long time afterwards. The girl stayed with her; with her sweet, whiskey-scented breath, her hair fluttering, and the sure grip of her hands, as though she understood what Dimity might do otherwise. Where she might go. Then later she was back at The Watch, with no memory of moving, and the place was as dim and quiet as a grave.

CHAPTER TWELVE

M
orning woke Zach, who had been dozing with his head on Dimity’s kitchen table. Sharp sunlight needled his eyes, and he lifted his head cautiously. It was thick with lack of sleep and the weight of his thoughts. His skull felt like an eggshell, liable to crack with all the new things crammed into it in the past twenty-four hours. He was alone in the kitchen, surrounded by cold, sticky mugs that stank of sour milk and brandy. He filled the kettle and put it on, drank a whole pint of water, and then went through to the living room. When he’d last seen Hannah, she’d been asleep in an armchair, curled up opposite the Sabris with her sweater pulled down over her hands and her mouth pursed so sweetly that he’d fought the urge to kiss it. Now the room was empty. Zach scrubbed at his eyes and tried to wake up.

“Hannah? Ilir?” he called up the stairs, but there was no reply. Then he heard a noise outside and opened the front door.

Hannah’s jeep was sitting in front of the cottage with its engine running and the doors open. Rozafa and Bekim were already in the backseat, and Hannah was swinging two canvas holdalls into the trunk. “Hey! What’s going on?” said Zach, shivering with fatigue in the cool of the early morning. Hannah looked over at him with a momentary flash of alarm.

“I’m taking them to the station. I didn’t want to wake you,” she said, dropping the bags into the trunk and striding over to him with her hands in her pockets. Zach raised a hand to shade his eyes.

“Is it safe to? Won’t the police still be watching?”

“I don’t think so. I spoke to James. They searched his place last night, too, and came away with nothing. He doesn’t think they’re still hanging around. They even apologized to me, last night. Apologized profusely, when they didn’t find anything.” She flashed him a quick smile.

“Will you be long?”

“No. We’re just going to the station at Wareham. Ilir is taking them north, to Newcastle. He has friends there—well, somebody he knows from home, anyway. Someone who can give them a place to stay and help get them settled, and my brother-in-law is a doctor there. He’s going to help with the asylum application, and start Bekim’s chelation treatment . . .”

“His what?”

“Look, there’s no time to explain it all now, we have to catch a train in forty minutes. They were going to stay with me for a few days’ rest before moving on, but after last night we thought it better not to wait,” she said. Zach took her hand, held it open in his, and studied it. Small and scarred, the nails broken off short and grubby at the cuticles, calluses on her palms, at the base of each finger. Tough, outdoor hands; hands that inhabited an entirely different world from his.