Grave Consequences (28 page)

“I suppose that’s why Greg’s always been that precious to us. He brought me and Caroline together again, poor little lad, after his parents died in that dreadful car accident. I suppose I haven’t been too fair to you, on his account, but I don’t never say I’m sorry about that. You’ll have him the rest of your life, if you’re lucky, and I only wanted him for the little time I had left. You look after him now, and you be very good to my boy.”

She groped for my hand. “Just don’t tell him, don’t you. He’s a sweet boy, but he might not understand. Men don’t always understand…”

She was starting to fade a bit now, rambling a little. I swallowed.

“You know,” I said, close to her ear, as gently as I could, “if anyone was going to understand, it would be Greg.” I could hear the nurse and Greg still talking out in the kitchen.

Mads tried to shake her head; she clutched at my hand, with her last bit of strength. “Never tell him! You understand? Do that for me. Only—Jane? It’s a relief now to have it off my mind, these past weeks have been awful hard for me. Ever since he told me where you was going to be digging up. It’s a wonderful relief, when I’m so tired.”

She patted at my hand again, missing the first time, then catching hold of it again. “You do whatever you like with the ring, Jane. It doesn’t matter now. Just look after him. He’s my good boy.”

She fell asleep then, still clutching my hand. The ring burned heavy and sweaty in my other hand. Greg and the nurse came into the doorway then, pausing.

Very, very gently, I slid my hand from Mads’s.

“She’s asleep,” I said. I got up and met them; the nurse went in and fussed about Mads, smoothing out the blanket, checking her pulse, looking around the room.

“What were you two talking about?” Greg said.

“She told me to look after you,” I said. I tried to smile, my eyes brimming.

Greg looked startled.

“She thought I was Jane.” I wiped my eyes with my sleeve.

The nurse looked up and nodded. Greg said, “Mrs. Haywood said she’s been in and out like that for a day or so now.”

“Well, that happens, at the end, doesn’t it,” the nurse said matter-of-factly. “She’ll sleep a bit now, so why don’t you show me around and I’ll settle in.”

“I’ll wait in the front room,” I said. I hurried down the hall, wondering whether I would make it before the ring, which seemed to be growing larger and larger every minute, slipped out of my hand. I stuck it into my pocket and wiped the sweat from my palm, sitting, staring, and letting my mind go blank until Greg was finished.

He came down the hall with the nurse. “And here’s my number at home, should you need it,” he said to the nurse. “Any little change, please call me.”

“I will. Don’t worry, Mr. Ashford, I’ll make your aunty as comfortable as possible.”

He nodded and we left at long last. I was left wondering who to tell—and what I should tell. Worse, I was now more than ever in a position to ruin my friends’ lives in so many ways.

Dinner that evening was a nightmare. Every time I instinctively went to bring up some of what was on my mind, I found myself confounded by the knowledge that I couldn’t say anything of what I’d learned to either Jane or Greg. Every bite half-choked me. I was acutely and miserably aware of just how much information I had that I shouldn’t have, and how secrets are a burden. Problem was, sometimes secrets need to be revealed to do good, sometimes they have to stay secret, and a burden, in order to do some good.
I wasn’t at all certain which sort of time this was. So between me, snared in indecision, Greg, quite down about Aunty, and Jane, just tired of trying, the meal was largely spent in silence, the three of us pushing our food around on our plates in an approximation of dining.

That was the best case estimate, though. It might well have been that I was seated at dinner with a friend who was also a murderer.

We just gave up trying in the end. As Jane put away the leftovers and Greg was absorbed in arranging the heat lamps over Hildegard, I decided to give my one idea voice.

“Jane, can you get ahold of your reporter friend?”

She gritted her teeth and closed the small refrigerator with a slam. “He’s no friend of mine.”

“But you could reach him, right?”

She nodded.

“Maybe you can use his little overeagerness in publishing the story about the discovery of the skeleton to some good end.”

Jane turned, eyebrows raised, lips pursed. “You’ll have to tell me what good can come of it.”

“Well, I was just wondering. On the off chance that it was someone interested specifically in Mother Beatrice’s remains—”

“And not just in foxing me?”

“Right. On that chance, what if we put a bit in the paper that said that the bones that were taken were not Mother Beatrice’s? We could say that you’d got the location wrong—”

Jane crossed her arms over her chest, cocked her head, squinted at me in disbelief. This was not going to be an option for her.

“—Or that the bones that were taken were from a later burial and Mother Beatrice was right beneath. Or something like that.”

She looked skeptical still. “And what exactly would that do?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I just had the thought that maybe if they weren’t Mother Beatrice’s, maybe whoever stole the bones might dump them, or return them, or something. It’s a faint hope, but it might stir up a response. The reporter could ostensibly be reporting on the theft itself, and isn’t it good that nothing important was taken, that sort of thing.”

Jane didn’t look like she was buying it. Greg was a little more optimistic, on the other hand.

“Well, it’s better than nothing,” he said. “I can’t think of anything else worth trying. Can you?”

“No.” Jane thought a bit more. “I’ll give it a shot. God knows the little scoundrel owes me that much. I’ll try to get it in for the afternoon paper tomorrow.” She went over to the phone and dialed the number. After some vigorous to-ing and fro-ing, along with the thinly veiled threat that the reporter’s premature article might have been responsible for the vandalism and theft, Jane got what she wanted.

“Well, that’s sorted. It’ll run tomorrow afternoon. Who knows what might come of it, but we’ll give it a shot, what?”

The phone rang, and Jane, probably expecting some further argument from the reporter, answered brusquely. “Yes?”

Her face changed almost immediately. “Yes, yes of course. Just a moment, please.” She covered the receiver. “It’s for you, Emma. Says it’s Kam?” She handed me the receiver and mouthed “very posh sounding” with a suggestive roll of her shoulders. It was the first time I’d seen her smile and mean it all evening. She and Greg went upstairs to the parlor.

I grabbed the phone like it was the last life preserver on the
Titanic
. “Hey Kam!”

“How are you, Emma?” His voice was strained.

My shoulders slumped. “Oh, you know.”

“Yes, Brian told me. Probably not a good time to talk about that?”

“It’s not.” It wasn’t really private in the kitchen, with peo
ple in the living room, and I was glad that I wasn’t going to have to give voice to all my grim thoughts. It was also very nice to talk to someone whose life or reputation I didn’t hold in my hand. A loud background noise came over the phone, like a treeful of excited birds. “What was that?”

There was silence on the other end of the line, followed by a sigh. “Mariam. And my mother.”

Since Kam almost never called my friend Marty by her proper name, I could only assume that he was annoyed with his fiancée. Little alarms went off in my head: Theirs had been an unhurried engagement, which looked to many like nerves on Marty’s part. I knew better, but while they were due to be married next spring, this sounded like real trouble. “First visit not what you’d hoped?”

“Oh, Emma.” Kam sounded absolutely defeated and my heart broke for them both. “They get on like a house afire.”

I hesitated. “Um. You’d think that would be a good thing, wouldn’t you?”

“It is, it is. I suppose. But, well, frankly, Emma, and I tell you this in the confidence of our long friendship, for years I have been my own man and I liked it that way. My mother, it is true, was the one person who could make real demands upon me and I, glad to be able to oblige her, would do so, most frequently. The fact that there was 3,000 miles of ocean and a lengthy flight between us made this easy. Everyone was happy.”

“Ah.”

He continued on confidentially. “Mother encourages me to be rather more experimental in dress than I would ordinarily care to be. I could, however, in the past, wear the neckties she chose for me quite happily when I visited, and she was happy never knowing that they languished in my closet at home. I could take her to the ‘hot’ places whenever I visited, and then quite simply retreat to my quieter haunts when I returned to Boston. A small price to pay, to please her, and so filial duty was easily discharged. I could always go home.”

I tried to offer some consolation. “But you had been afraid that they wouldn’t get along…”

“It’s true. I was worried that Mother would find Marty’s flamboyance
de trop
; I was worried that Marty would be put off by Mother’s quiet, sometimes daunting, rectitude. I was prepared for uncomfortable silences, though doubted it would ever come to anything so unhappy as outright hostility. It’s so much worse than that.”

He had to say it out loud, I thought. He has to own it. It’s the only way.

“Emma, they’ve ganged up on me.”

I would have giggled at the piteousness in his voice, if he hadn’t been so truly despondent.

“I should have recognized it. They’re exactly alike. In the glow of courtship, I never realized that when Marty chided me for acting like an ‘old poop’ when I admitted I didn’t share her love of Versace, it was exactly the same as when mother would gently remind me that I was a young man and that I ought to dress less like her generation and more like my own. I never realized, when Marty was trying to drag me to all those places where she could see and be seen, that it was precisely analogous to Mother asking to be taken to some scandalous club she’d read about in the papers. While I thought they were so very different, the fact is that they’ve embraced each other as readily as oppositely charged magnets. It’s a catastrophe. Emma, I’m done for.”

Just then, I heard my best friend’s voice cry out in delight. “No! Not Mills and Boon!” whereupon I thought I could hear the usually unflappable Kam actually grind his teeth. “I’m going to put a stop to this right now.”

“Kam, what’s Mills and Boon?”

“I’m afraid I need to ring off. When are you coming up to London?”

“Friday.”

“And you’re staying in Bloomsbury?”

I recited the address of a small hotel I’d never been to before. Kam didn’t approve.

“Well, it’s a bare step above Russell Square, but an important step, I suppose. You’re sure you won’t stay with us? There is plenty of room…” He trailed off hopefully.

There was no way I was going to introduce myself into that maelstrom until everything had been sorted out and Kam finally gave way to the inevitable. “No thanks, it’s closer to the libraries than Mayfair. Maybe next time. I’ll call when I get in.”

My friend sighed. “Very well. Early dinner Saturday night all right, then? Any place in particular you’d like to go?”

Kamil Shah was polite. He also knew I didn’t know London at all, and more than that, he knew I didn’t know any of the quietly luxurious places where he felt most at home. He was counting on me. He was an old friend, so I gave him what he sought but couldn’t ask for.

“No, Kam. You pick.”

I
N SPITE OF THE DIVERSION OF BEING ABLE TO THINK
about what might come after the Marchester dig, which had let me fall asleep when I tried to later on, I was wide awake around four in the morning. It was very warm in my room and since I knew, reluctantly, that there was no chance of getting back to the land of Nod, I sat up and looked down at my suitcase. I had kept it so tidy and organized for the first few days, a gesture to being in someone else’s neat house; now laundry and papers had begun to spill out of bounds, creeping across the floor with the slow inevitability of a glacier. Perhaps it was because my little borrowed room was the only place where I felt the least bit at home, and distracted by what was going on at the site and my nagging questions about Julia Whiting’s murder, I had let it go unchecked. Easy enough to sort it out and do some laundry before I left for London.

I got up, put things in order, and then, seeing I still had another couple of hours until I actually needed to be up and about, took out a notebook and started to try to impose some order on my unruly thoughts. Starting was an excellent no
tion, but I got no further than taking the cap off my pen and putting it back on again. I was too tired to think straight, so I gave up for the moment.

It was quite hot by the time I dragged myself downstairs for a bath and my breakfast. I was up before everyone else so I dug around until I found Jane’s coffee and coffee press, and made some to my own specifications, which, after nearly two weeks of malcaffeination, was nirvana. I thought of those Chinese illustrations of gods, the ones where the celestial beings are traveling around on little clouds, quite regally apart from mortal earth, and thought I knew a little of how that felt. I felt swift, sure, sapient, and sharp. I resisted the urge to rub some of the grounds into my gums. How could I have deprived myself for so long?

Greg came downstairs, dressed but rubbing the sleep from his eyes and jumped when he realized he wasn’t alone. “Oh. Hallo. You’re up early.”

Maybe he noticed the divine light blazing forth from my eyes, or maybe he saw the grounds and kettle steaming behind me. “Found the coffee things all right then? Good.”

He busied himself with tea things for himself and Jane and fed the tortoise Hildegard, and I heard footsteps thumping toward the door upstairs pause, then turn around and head downstairs toward the kitchen.

“Is that coffee?” Andrew asked his friend in disbelief. Then he saw me. “Oh.”

“Want some?” I was in far too good a mood to deny anyone.

“Yeah, all right, since you’re offering.” He poured himself a cup, drank deeply, and began to cough. His eyes streaming, he finally regained control of himself. Andrew glanced at his cup and then stared at me.

“Fuck me. That explains a lot.” He turned to Greg. “I’m off, then.”

We heard the door slam, announcing Andrew’s exit. “He comes off a bit rude to people who don’t know him well,” Greg said, shrugging slightly.

“He comes off a bit rude to those who do know him well,” I answered.

Greg’s eyes widened.

“I’m sorry. That was uncalled for,” I said. “Andrew’s got a lot on his mind at the moment.”

“Oh? How do you know?”

I realized I couldn’t tell Greg about any one of Andrew’s problems—the ones I knew about, at least. “Why else would he be so grumpy, unless he were preoccupied?”

He nodded. “I suppose you’re right. He’s been talking for some time about making a move up north, going to work with a friend up there. Company, not a university program.”

“Why hasn’t he, then?”

Greg shot me a sharp, questioning look. “I suppose he’s just used to life down here in Marchester, is all. No real reason to make a change.” He picked up a couple of mugs of tea. “I’ll just bring this up to Jane then. We’ll be down in a half a tick. Help yourself to the muesli and such, if you like.”

“Thanks, Greg.”

I ate my breakfast and wondered: Perhaps Greg didn’t know about his friend’s infatuation with his wife. Then again, maybe he did.

When we finally headed out to the site, I was shocked at how warm it had suddenly become. While the weather had been cool and tending to rain for the past ten days, now it was nearly eighty degrees, just before nine in the morning. The really appalling thing, I observed walking down the street, was that the populace at large was generally ill equipped to deal with this happy turn of events. Many people were in summer clothing that might have been appropriate at home if the mercury had been closer to one hundred: women were wearing short shorts and tank tops, very small children were in their bathing suits, men were clad in Bermuda shorts. The amount of paler than fair white flesh exposed was quite startling, and since I didn’t get a whiff of sunblock, I realized that most of the population of Marchester would be proudly sporting first-degree sunburns by
the end of the day. I passed one particular couple and shuddered: She was wearing an entirely out of date and ill-advised tube-top that made her look like a sausage escaping its casing and he wore some sort of sleeveless T-shirt that appeared to be made of netting that barely covered a truly world-class beer belly, a thing of pride he’d been crafting for years. It wasn’t good sense about being in the sun or even a deeply ingrained Yankee Puritanism that made me flinch: It simply wasn’t right.

“Jane, can I have a string vest like that man’s?” Greg whispered after we passed. He grinned at me behind his wife’s back.

“You even think about it and you’re done for,” she replied indignantly.

There was little for me to do at the site. I sifted through the destroyed unit and found a couple more teeth and a clothing fastener and a couple of pins, but nothing more. Everything that had been in the grave had been taken. I decided to take the rest of the day off to do my laundry. Jane was fine with that; since I had only another day left, she wasn’t too keen on me starting up something that someone else would have to finish after I was gone.

The next day, Thursday, I helped out the students, where I was needed, but space was tight and soon I found I was at loose ends. There was one thing I had to do, though, before I left. I picked up my backpack and waited for my chance as I worked on my notes. As soon as Dean Avery bent over, however, I whipped out my camera and took his picture. With a telephoto lens. He heard the click and spun around. I waved and he glared at me.

Taste of your own medicine, I thought. “You made it look like such fun,” I said. “I’ll send you a copy. I’ll send you a hundred.”

I didn’t want to waste the sunshine, though, and after a moment’s inspiration, was reminded of the view of the
abbey ruin that I’d copied down from Jeremy’s painting. I wondered from where the perspective was taken: had there been some kind of manor opposite the site on a hill, or was the picture merely some sort of artistic convention? I decided that I would have a walk around and find out.

It wasn’t hard to find the location of the rise; it was just opposite the site on the same side of the river. There was nothing but houses there now, newer and more expensive than the ones down by where Jane and Greg lived. There was nothing to indicate there had been a house there from which the ruins of the abbey might once have been seen and the rest of the view was blocked by the city’s growth over the centuries. Thinking once again of Sabine’s words about the two of us being trained outsiders, observing things from different perspectives, I also saw that the trip hadn’t been a total waste of time. I realized that I would sit up tonight at the site and see whether the planted newspaper article about Mother Beatrice’s bones managed to stir up any effect.

Jane had wanted to have a good-bye dinner for me that night, considering that the next day I was going back to London, but no one was really in the mood for it. So it was just the three of us at table, excellent food in front of us, with the least imaginable air of celebrating or farewell. Everyone was so wrung out that there was no point, and Greg kept making halfhearted comments about how much fun I’d have when I visited next time. My stomach tightened at the thought of a “next time.” It wasn’t long before everyone found his way up to bed, whereupon I changed into a dark T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, made a thermos of coffee, and with my flashlight, quietly closed the door behind me on 98 Liverpool Road.

The air was still warm, even at ten o’clock in the evening, and there was not a breeze to be felt. My footsteps echoed on the empty pavement, and the only people I met seemed to be hurrying to or from the pubs, islands of light and muffled noise that marked each quiet block. It didn’t take me long to get to the site, and I realized that even if I had wanted to, I
wouldn’t be able to watch from inside the locked enclosure: I didn’t have a key. Still, I reasoned that I would be less visible if I situated myself among the small trees and weeds outside the compound, not easily visible from either the road or the path along the river, or even the river itself.

Again, I tried to order my thoughts regarding what I knew about Julia’s death. The people closest to her seemed to be the ones most intensely antagonistic to her, and it seemed to me that all of the high feeling she engendered, simply by being who she was—bright, opinionated, young, passionate, and demanding—obscured the truth better than the most carefully contrived false trails. Julia might have been the main source of so much of this emotional turmoil, but there was enough fallout from Jane and Greg’s marital problems, Jane’s conflicts with Morag and George Whiting, and Andrew’s misplaced affections to compound matters significantly. History fed into it all too, what with the connections between Palmer and Whiting, Palmer and Avery…

I dozed off briefly, then awoke with a start; the ring that Aunty Mads had pressed into my possession was biting into my leg through my jeans pocket. Eventually, I knew, I’d have to do something about that too, but the possible ramifications against a sick old woman and my own friends were daunting. I drank more of the coffee, wishing it was a little warmer, a little more comforting.

It was getting to around three o’clock in the morning and I was starting to think that I was on a fool’s errand. More than that, I had been suspecting I had been out of my mind for some time. If it was someone who was interested in Mother Beatrice, good, but there was little chance of him going back to the site after the publicity; if it was someone interested in hurting Jane, either by impugning her character or disrupting her work, then there was even less chance of his reappearing. But I decided to give it just another half hour before I packed it in; as long a shot as it was to be out here, I had a much better chance of learning something than
if I’d stayed in my room. Besides, it was long enough since pub closing time to be assured that anyone out would not be strolling idly, but on his way
somewhere
. Any later, and whoever might visit the site would start running into milkmen and paper carriers and the like; anyway, that was how I was rationalizing it.

Still, there were less attractive places for a stakeout, if I wanted to grace my misguided vigil with fancy names. If I squinted, blurring my vision slightly, I could imagine away the chain-link fence around the site and focus on the low line of ruined abbey wall, the moonlit river beyond that, and the occasional light across the river. Very nice and Romantic, with a capital R.

That thought actually woke me up: it was very romantic, but romance and ruins were more of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not the sixteenth. I recalled the presence of the ruined abbey in Frobisher Cholmondeley’s portrait. Why was the ruin depicted there, and not the new church downriver? Or his private lands, perhaps, or his library, as many a proud churchman might have shown? The fact of the ruins being shown in the painting made me wonder whether he hadn’t been one of the churchmen in conflict with Mother Beatrice and whether, years after her death, the destruction of the abbey seemed to be some vindication of his side of the squabble. I tried to recall the dates of Mother Beatrice’s life and whether there might be some overlap there, but the picture and its subject certainly bore some further consideration. I’d have to remember to tell Jane. I yawned hugely; if I couldn’t have answers, I wanted my bed and three hours of sleep.

The coffee I’d drunk was long gone from the thermos, but now making increasingly urgent demands on my bladder, so I considered the porta-potty. There are few things less inviting than a portable toilet in the dead of night: They are not places where one feels comfortable groping about. I thought about turning on my flashlight and then realized that unless I wanted to climb the fence with the flashlight in my mouth, it
was the bushes for me. I found as secluded a spot as I could and tried to get down to it.

If using a public convenience as impermanent as a plastic lavatory during the day requires a certain element of cultural training—everyone, including those on the outside waiting for their turn, does her level best to ignore what is going on and is not muffled by permanent walls and doors—then going
outside
those thin plastic walls at night, with the comparative dead silence of an abandoned site around you, is downright eerie. I actually found myself unnerved by the quiet, and the small noise that I made caused me to feel terribly exposed. It was the only time I suffered from anything remotely resembling penis envy: Guys could pull something like this off with relative ease. Hell, it was even socially sanctioned, in some instances, a casual bonding experience. They didn’t have the back-to-the-paleolithic, down-and-dirty experience of being so completely exposed to the elements. I never felt so strongly the acute lack of horns, fangs, claws, and defensive armor on humans as I did then, and when something squawked and then splashed down by the river, I jumped a mile. I finished up as quickly as possible, hoping that dear old Mr. Whatsit across the river wasn’t an insomniac bird watcher with his binoculars out at that moment, for I had no desire to fog up his lenses. This always seemed so much less complicated when one was camping.

Just as I’d fastened my belt, I heard something. I froze; I was far too tired and susceptible at the moment and didn’t want to break an ankle chasing after a river rat or another restless bird. The rustling came again, and persisted, this time, in a regular, strictly bipedal, cadence. Someone was moving through the weed-choked path that ran along the river.