A Dark and Stormy Night (11 page)

‘And I,' I said firmly, ‘am going out in search of that bottle.'

ELEVEN

N
aturally Alan tried to dissuade me. ‘There could be someone very dangerous out there.'

‘I thought we agreed it was either Harrison, who is dead, or Upshawe, who is unconscious. The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat, except they didn't quite eat each other up.'

It took him a moment to get that one. ‘Ah. The American version of the Kilkenny cats, I presume.'

‘Probably. Anyway, I'm in no danger from either of them at this point. And if you're still worried about me for some obscure reason, I'll take someone with me. Lynn, maybe. She got me – got
us
– into this, she can jolly well help out.'

‘Your English is coming along, my dear,' was his only response. I assumed silence meant consent.

I cornered Lynn while we ate our lunch (a chicken curry, which was superb), and she agreed to go for a walk with me in the afternoon. I didn't tell her why until we were on our way. Probably everyone in the house was honest. Probably. But on the off chance, I thought it was better not to broadcast my intentions.

‘And what do you think it'll prove if we do find it?' Lynn asked, reasonably enough.

‘Well – where one or both of the Harrisons had been yesterday after they left. Maybe no more than that. But at least the bottle is something tangible, and there isn't much else about this thing that is.'

‘Yes, well, it's a lovely day for a walk.' She shivered ostentatiously as she spoke. The sun shone brightly, but the wind, which had picked up a bit again, was freezing.

‘Pampered American! I thought you'd lived here long enough to become inured.'

‘In London, my dear, not in the country. My walks usually consist of the four yards from my front door to a taxi. I don't mind walking a little on a beach in high summer, but this, I remind you, is November.'

I sighed. ‘And tomorrow is Bonfire Night. I was so looking forward to the fireworks, but I don't suppose they'll have them now.'

‘I don't think they can, even if they wanted to. They were going to have a pyrotechnics expert in, and he'd have brought his own van with a battery and a computer and all, to set off the rockets electronically. No expert, no truck . . . no fireworks.'

‘So that's that. Maybe they'll burn the guy, anyway. I suppose they have a guy?'

Lynn laughed. ‘You bet they do! Joyce hinted that it's a really funny one. They wouldn't show it to me, though. It's supposed to be a big secret.' She sobered. ‘It really is a shame. They invited the whole village to come, you know.'

‘The old lord-of-the-manor bit? And would the village have come? If they were stand-offish about the Upshawes, I can't imagine they'd exactly warm to a couple of genuine foreigners in their midst.'

‘I get the impression things have changed quite a lot since the middle of the nineteenth century when the Upshawes were the incomers. I believe the village has lots of non-English living there now. A Pakistani couple run the shop-cum-post-office, I know, because I was in there the first day we came. Not a trace of an Asian accent, either, so they're probably second- or third-generation. But I don't think Jim and Joyce are trying to be the village squires. It's just friendliness. But now nobody can get here. Look, where are we going?'

I had led Lynn through the walled kitchen garden and out the gate. We could more easily have stepped over the wall; it had collapsed in several places, and the gate hung crazily from one hinge. But to treat the wall thus cavalierly seemed, somehow, to give in to the devastation. So we had edged through the gateway.

Now we were headed downhill, southward toward the place where Harrison and Upshawe had been found. I shrugged. ‘They ended up here. They might have gone this way. It wouldn't have been as dark as heading north, for one thing, or as hazardous. This part is mostly open meadow, with no trees to block the starlight or lie in one's path.'

‘I can't figure why they left at all, any of them,' said Lynn. ‘The Horrible Harrisons must have understood they couldn't get very far. Jim made it plain enough. And Upshawe didn't seem to have any reason to be out here at all.'

‘The Harrisons are, I think – were – I don't know what the right tense is – anyway, I don't think logic is a big part of their make-up. They were furious and wanted to get away; therefore they left. Maybe they thought they could ford the river down that way, or something.' I retied my headscarf; it was much too windy for any hat. ‘Upshawe is a harder one to figure out. Alan thinks maybe he went after the Harrisons for some reason, and ended up pushing Dave into the river. But he can't come up with any compelling motive, or any motive at all, really. And neither can I.'

We fought the wind all the way down to the ‘bottom of the loop', as Upshawe had described it, and stood, awestruck.

It was impossible here even to guess that there was a separation between the east and west arms of the river. An angry yellow torrent rushed past us, carrying tree limbs with it. As we watched, one limb snagged on something, rotated wildly in the current, and then broke free and sped on downstream. The wind tossed up waves, giving the illusion of rapids.

The river was still rising. Ripples spread closer and closer to us, drowning here a patch of coarse grass, there a clump of dead weeds. ‘Those dead branches will have dammed up somewhere downstream,' Lynn said, shouting above the noise of the wind. ‘The flood is going to get worse.'

I nodded. ‘We'd better get back. I think Alan wanted Ed to take some pictures, and I'll bet the footprints on the riverbank would be something he'd want. And they'll be gone soon.'

We hurried up the hill, moving as fast as my new knees would take me, our quest for the liquor bottle forgotten. It had always been a silly idea, anyway. As Lynn had suggested, finding it wouldn't tell us anything relevant.

But we did find something. As we neared the house, we passed a clump of gorse, that thorny shrub that is so beautifully yellow in an English spring. Low, sturdy and compact, and somewhat protected by a stone bench, it had escaped the devastation of the storm. It wouldn't have many blossoms left now, but—

‘Look, there's still one little gold flower clinging here,' I said, charmed. I reached out a hand to it and then pulled back.

‘What's the matter, stuck by a thorn?'

‘No. Look. It isn't a flower.

Hanging from an inch of broken chain that had caught on a thorn, a small gold cross shone brightly in the hard wintry sun.

‘Alan needs to see this. And look at the way the wind is tugging at it. It could blow away any time. Lynn, could you find him and bring him here? And Ed should come, too, to take pictures.'

I thought I would freeze into an ice statue before Lynn returned with the two men. ‘They were taking pictures of the skeleton,' she said, panting. ‘I ran all the way. Is it still there?'

I had protected the cross as well as I could without touching it. Alan and Ed approached and looked it over, and Ed pulled out his digital camera. ‘Because,' Alan explained to me, ‘we'll need to show this around, to see if anyone recognizes it, and we won't be able to get prints from the film shots for a while.'

‘Won't be too long,' said Ed, busy all the time shooting. ‘I brought chemicals with me; didn't know if the village would have a photo lab. Not many places do, nowadays. And I wanted to see prints of the house pictures before I left, to make sure they turned out.' He guffawed at that, and I joined him. I wondered just how many decades it had been since one of Ed's pictures hadn't ‘turned out'.

‘Any closet can be a darkroom,' Ed went on. ‘I even brought a safelight. Don't know for sure how well that's gonna work, with no electric. These OK, do you think?'

He handed his camera to Alan and showed him how to page through the images.

‘Splendid,' said Alan. ‘We'll show these to everyone as soon as possible. Meanwhile, though, we'd better go down to the river and see if any of the footprints are still above water. Dorothy, take this up to the house and seal it in an envelope for me, will you?' He pulled the cross free, using his pen, and put it in my gloved hands. ‘Handle it as little as possible, and don't touch it with your bare hands. I want to keep this very safe until we can identify it as someone's property.'

‘It'll probably turn out to be Joyce's, lost months ago,' I said crossly to Lynn as I walked on up to the house. I was cold, and my knees hurt.

‘You don't really think so,' said Lynn calmly. ‘It's as shiny as the day it was made. It hasn't been out in the weather for more than a day or two.'

‘Gold—' I began.

‘Even gold gets dirty.'

It was, thank God, tea time when we got to the house. I would have headed straight for the kitchen, the fire, and some boiling-hot tea, had not Lynn reminded me. ‘You need to seal that up, don't forget.'

In martyrly fashion I detoured to the library, where I found an envelope in a drawer, dropped the little gold ornament in, sealed it, and stuffed it in the pocket of my slacks.

Our ranks were sadly depleted around the tea table. With two of our number confined to their beds and two out documenting the scenes of various crimes – and one beyond the need for sustenance – we were only eight. I was glad to see that the vicar had joined us.

‘How are your patients, Mr Leatherbury?' I asked when I had one cup of hot tea inside me and had poured myself another.

‘Mrs Harrison is feeling much better,' he said. ‘There was, I think, nothing much wrong there except exposure, and she was found before any permanent damage had been done. That is, I'm not a doctor, but her skin seems healthy, and she has no fever.'

‘Has she said anything about what she was doing out there?'

The vicar looked uncomfortable. ‘I don't quite know how much I am at liberty to repeat. She was rambling a bit, but she knows I am a clergyman. She may have felt I would keep her remarks confidential. In any case,' he hastened to add, ‘much of what she said was unintelligible.'

Pat Heseltine, gorgeous Pat, was listening closely to this. ‘I'm not at all sure the confidentiality privilege applies in this case,' she said thoughtfully. ‘You're not her priest, nor were you attending her qua clergyman. If she was rambling, she might not even have known who she was talking to. In which case . . .'

‘My dear Pat,' said the vicar with unusual firmness, ‘the question is not a legal, but a moral one. It is up to me to make the decision to reveal or not to reveal her . . . conversation is hardly the word . . . her comments.'

‘You could be required to, you know, in court. Or I think you could. It's an interesting point. I must look it up when I get back to my books.'

‘The matter will scarcely arise. In any case, no one can force me to speak if my conscience forbids it. And the point is moot. I'm sure nothing she said has the slightest bearing on . . . on any of our worries.'

Pat looked stubborn. As she opened her mouth to continue the argument, I hastily spoke again. ‘And Mr Upshawe? I gather his condition is much more serious.'

‘Yes,' said the vicar. ‘Excuse me, please.'

And he left the room.

‘
Well!
' said Mike, who had been silently watching the action, his eyes avid. ‘The good father has more nerve than one would have expected from that placid exterior.'

‘The good father, as you put it, is a man of courage and integrity,' said Pat fiercely, ‘and don't you ever forget it.'

‘My dear!' Mike looked startled. ‘I never doubted it, I do assure you.'

‘Then stop sneering at him! We're in enough trouble here without your attitudes to contend with.'

Jim and Joyce started to speak at the same time, thus cancelling each other's good intentions. It was Tom who poured oil on the increasingly troubled waters. ‘I'm sure Mike was just saying what we were all thinking, that Mr Leatherbury is handling a difficult situation with grace and kindness. I know we're all grateful he's here, though the poor man must be worried about his duties.'

I looked a question.

‘Sunday. Tomorrow's Sunday. Who's going to take the service at St Michael's?'

Speculations about that occupied them for a few minutes, while I consumed tea and various improvised biscuits, and wished Alan would come back.

He wasn't long after that. He and Ed came in looking cold and famished, and proceeded to remedy their condition before they did anything else. The others finished their food and drink and began to push back their chairs. Alan stopped them.

‘Ed took a picture I'd like you all to see. Tell me if you recognize the object.'

Ed fussed a bit with the camera until he had the best image of the cross on the small screen. He handed it around. Heads were shaken until the camera came to Pat.

‘But that's the cross from Paul's prayer book! I'd recognize it anywhere – see the carving on it? At least, it's scarcely carving, just tracery, but very nice, I've always thought. He's had it for years. His daughter gave it to him, and he always uses it as a bookmark. However did it come to be caught in gorse?'

‘That,' said Alan mildly, ‘is what I need to find out.'

TWELVE

A
lan asked me to come with him, and bring the cross. ‘I'd like a witness to what he says, Dorothy, and you're the only one I can trust completely.'

‘But you surely don't think he had anything to do with Dave Harrison's death!'