The Quick and the Dead (A Sister Agnes Mystery) (15 page)

‘Briefly. He dropped in, I sent him away.’

‘He seems nice.’

Athena put down her fork, looked at Agnes, then picked it up again. Agnes took another mouthful, chewed a moment, then said, ‘Athena, if we’re not honest now, we’re not going to survive this.’

Athena twirled pasta around her fork. ‘Fine. What do you want to say?’

‘Nic wants you to keep the baby.’

‘I know.’

‘For reasons that he calls karmic.’

‘Yup.’ Athena took a large gulp of wine.

‘And — and because he cares about you.’

Athena put down her glass. ‘Great. His karma, your God. I’m surrounded by people who really care, aren’t I? Lucky old me.’

Agnes broke off a piece of bread. ‘He’s nice without the ponytail. It suits him.’

‘Years and years of careful cultivation, that ponytail, all lopped off, apparently, for me. Such sacrifice. And yes, he’s dying to be a dad because he made so much of a hash of it first time round and he’s desperate to have a second chance so he can be like all those men in
GQ
or
Esquire
or whatever it is. So I have to ruin my body, and my life, in return — and to appease your God-The-Father who, let’s face it, was quite happy to dump His only son on someone else when it came to it …’

‘Athena — we care about you. That’s all. This may be your last chance, you can’t predict how you’ll feel when it’s too late.’

‘If you both care about me, then you’ll know that I’ve done the right thing. I’ve made an appointment, did he say?’

Agnes nodded.

‘Good. Fine. People who care about me can bloody well accept my decision, then.’

Agnes hesitated a moment, then said, ‘Athena — when I offered you wine, you said, “I’m not supposed to drink this.”’

‘Did I say that? Oh ho, silly me. Anyone would think I was going to have a baby.’ Athena laughed hollowly, and Agnes saw her eyes fill with tears.

That night in her prayers Agnes was haunted by an image of a tiny, floating life, of a translucent foetal face and waving limbs. She tried to push it away, to concentrate instead on the familiar words of her evening worship, but even when she closed her eyes to sleep it was still there.

*

She woke late on Monday morning, aware of having spent half the night chasing dreams, and after a quick cup of tea got into her car and drove to the camp. She found a group of about twelve people sitting near the fire, most of whom she recognised, some she didn’t. Rona nodded in greeting and went to pour her some tea. ‘We’ve got the eviction order,’ she said to Agnes. ‘They’ve given us two weeks.’

‘So,’ Jeff was saying to the assembled group, ‘the main thing we’re going to need is people. People who can climb, obviously, but people on the ground too.’

Agnes noticed Sheila sitting by the fire. She also noticed Jenn some way away, wandering vaguely towards the forest. Sheila was saying something about producing leaflets for the local area, and Agnes got up and followed Jenn. She found her sitting on a log at the edge of the wood.

‘Jenn?’ Jenn looked up blankly, then seeing it was Agnes, smiled.

‘You OK?’

Jenn nodded, then shook her head. ‘I’ve never felt like this before.’

‘Like what?’

Jenn raised her eyes to Agnes and said, ‘Like I don’t care. They can evict us for all I care at the moment.’

Agnes sat down next to her. ‘Well, to be honest, they will, won’t they? There’ll be hundreds of them and a handful of you.’

‘Yes, but — before, it’s always felt worthwhile, the fight. It works, you see, it has a kind of snowballing effect for the future. But now I look at the camp, and I think, I’ve had it, I’ve been full-on for months now and Col’s dead and Becky was killed here, and no one’s going to find out why, ever, and … I dunno, I’ve lost it.’

‘Do you have anywhere else to go?’

Jenn nodded. ‘I’m having a year out from a university course, I can take that up again this autumn if I want. Sociology, at Manchester, though I might change to history.’ They sat on a log together in the August heat. There was a chirping of crickets around them. ‘Jenn,’ Agnes began, ‘you know that inhaler?’

‘Col’s?’ 

‘It was his, wasn’t it?’

‘It wasn’t anyone else’s.’

‘He might have had a bad reaction to it.’

‘He hadn’t been well for weeks.’

Jenn watched the slow march of a line of ants at her feet. She stretched, and stood up. ‘If you mean Bill, he’s harmless. A lot of ego, and I know people here don’t trust him, but he wouldn’t …’ She shook her head.

‘Jenn — why do you think Becky died?’

Jenn glanced down at her. ‘How do I know? I’m going for a walk, clear my head.’

Agnes watched her go. There was something not being said. Something, Agnes thought, as she went back to the fire, that Jenn knew.

The meeting had broken up. Sheila was sitting next to Jeff, who was strumming vaguely on a guitar. She smiled as Agnes came to join her.

‘Will you be there on the day?’ she asked.

‘The eviction? I hadn’t really thought —’

‘Yeah,’ Jeff said, ‘she’ll be there,’

‘Isn’t it rather dangerous?’ Agnes asked, feeling old.

‘Nah. Fluffy, it is,’ Jeff said. ‘You can bring your daughter.’

Sheila looked doubtful. ‘The problem is, evangelical Christianity is all about wearing nice clothes and joining the establishment. And anyway, they’d be useless, all they do is smile inanely and bang their tambourines.’

‘Tell them we’ve got all the angels on our side,’ Jeff grinned. He got up and went off to climb a tree.

‘How’s Charlie?’ Agnes said.

‘The same,’ Sheila grinned. ‘He liked you, for some reason.’ 

‘That’s good. I could do with talking to him again.’

‘He won’t trade secrets, him. Copper through and through.’

‘I don’t think it’s secrets I need.’

‘I know, come back for lunch, now. You can phone him from my place.’

‘Detective Sergeant Woods? Just putting you through,’ the switchboard operator said. Agnes sat in Sheila’s warm, bright kitchen, through which wafted the smell of pitta bread and coffee, and waited.

‘Sister Agnes?’ she heard Charlie ask.

‘It’s about this new sudden death. Col Hadley, from the road camp.’

‘I’d heard a whisper from the Coroner’s officers.’

‘I just wondered —’

‘You have the nose for it, don’t you. What did you just wonder?’

‘The post-mortem report?’

‘Haven’t seen it.’

‘Charlie — there were bright yellow stains around his fingers.’

‘Why should I find out more for you?’ Charlie asked.

‘Because I care. And because Col has no one else. I cared about him when he was alive, and I need to put my mind at rest now he’s dead.’

There was a pause. ‘You know,’ Charlie said, ‘there was a warehouse broken into last week sometime. Out by Southend. Chemical storage place. Various stuff gone missing.’ Agnes heard him hesitate, then he said, ‘Yellow, did you say?’ 

‘Really bright. Weird.’

‘Look, this post-mortem report,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Any return of the Superhighwayman?’ Agnes asked Sheila over lunch.

Sheila shook her head. ‘No. Though I haven’t had much time on the machine recently. But something funny happened in town the other day. I bumped into a friend, an ex-colleague from my teaching days — and she’s moved to Colchester. I was telling her about the Ark and the eviction and everything, and she said, had I met Forest Bill? Like it was a joke. And it turns out that she knew him, about six months ago. I think they had an affair or something, and he said he was going to live in the woods by Epping for a while.’

‘But he behaves as if he’s been there for years.’

‘Yeah, but is anyone convinced?’

Agnes looked at Sheila. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, there’s nothing more to tell. She obviously thought he was a bit of a joker, except I think she fancied him like hell. But the other thing she said, was that he was into computers and spent most of his time in Colchester on the Net.’

Agnes took an olive stone from her mouth. ‘So your friend was cyberzapped by the Superhighwayman too?’’

Sheila looked at Agnes, and they both giggled. Then Sheila said, serious again, ‘Who knows? More coffee?’

Agnes absently scanned Sheila’s chaotic notice-board while Sheila refilled their mugs. ‘Are you worried about Lily?’ she asked her. 

‘Should I be?’ Sheila said, coming back to the table. ‘You know more about religion than I do.’

Agnes shook her head. ‘I know very little about that kind of religion. Does Lily seem distant, brainwashed? Is she turning against you?’

‘No. Not brainwashed. Rather cheerful, most of the time. Happier than she’s been for a while. Although she does keep going on about getting married.’

‘Married?’

‘This preacher of theirs is very keen on his flock marrying when they’re barely out of school and then living happily ever after. With God on their side, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘Still, there’s no one specific, as far as I know. And at least he’s not trying to make a harem of his own.’

‘Well, that’s something.’

‘She gets cross with me, but then what child that age doesn’t? Only in her case, it’s because I won’t welcome Jesus into my heart, and so I’m just going to burn in Hell, apparently.’

‘Poor old you,’ Agnes laughed. ‘Still, you’ll be in good company.’ She finished her coffee and stood up. ‘Mind if I check the computer before I go?’

She went up to the computer room and scanned the e-mail messages. One caught her eye, from JEL@ Bosh.co.uk, and she called it up.

It said, ‘Two down. How many more before justice is done?’ Then the name, ‘Emily Quislan.’

Agnes erased the file, switched off the machine and went back downstairs. 

Chapter Thirteen

At eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning, Agnes was sitting at a reader’s desk at the Essex Record Office. The day was warm and still, and Agnes had a headache, brought on by the drive from London and now made worse by the hopelessness of the task before her. She looked at the documents she’d called up, maps, school rolls, the OAPs essay competition again, the land tax register … Needles in bloody haystacks, she thought. Emily Quislan, where the hell are you?

She turned once more to the competition and pulled out all the essays catalogued under Broxted. She flicked past the familiar ones, the witch buried in Harton’s field, the blackberries on the swamp field. She found one about com dollies. ‘… My grandmother used to weave a particular shape which she said originated in Broxted. She used to hang one over the lintel on the full moon, to protect her from the ghost, she said. Once I asked her which ghost, and she said the lady in the long dress who rides side-saddle across Harton’s field sprinkling sweet herbs …’

The sheaf of papers fell from Agnes’s grasp in a rustling heap, causing the reader opposite her to look up. Her hands shaking, she gathered up the papers and read the words again, over and over. ‘There is no ghost,’ she said to herself, ‘there is no ghost.’ The man opposite her was staring again, and she realised she was muttering. She put the essays aside and turned to the next document. It was the school rolls for the parish school, founded 1837. She turned the yellowing pages, finding names and ages of children, their health, their misdeeds, the rather grim punishments meted out to them; wondering why she was bothering, knowing that Emily Quislan, a woman old enough to own land, was hardly going to be registered in the parish school. Quislan, she saw, in spidery black ink, as a page turned in her fingers. She turned it back. James Quislan, registered at the school, September 1840, aged six.

Agnes’s headache had become a pounding in her ears. She stared at the name. She turned to September 1841. James Quislan, aged seven. September 1842, the same, aged eight. September 1843. The words swam before her eyes. James Quislan, it said, aged nine. But through this name there was a neat black line, and underneath, in the same ink, it said, James Hillier, aged nine.

Agnes looked up at the clock. It was twelve twenty-eight. Outside the heat was beating down from a metallic grey sky. There was no sense to be made of this at all. It’s about the well, Agnes thought. Fyffes Well. Something happened in 1843 to do with the well. And, somehow, it’s happening again now.

She read right through the school rolls to 1860. James Hillier attended for a couple more years after 1843. There was no more mention of a Quislan. She closed the book, and grabbed the essay competition again. The well, she thought, thumbing through the pages, someone here must have some memory of the well apart from it being blocked in.

Blocked in, she thought. In 1843 James Quislan became James Hillier, and Emily Quislan blocked in the well. In revenge, Agnes thought, her mind racing ahead. In revenge for her son becoming someone else’s son. She put down the pages and gathered her thoughts. If he was her son. She might have had a younger brother. Or a cousin. Or some distant relative. And maybe it wasn’t a change of name. Maybe James Quislan did leave the school, and another James took his place.

She picked up the land tax records from 1876, and turned to the plots listed for Emily’s land. The Homestead at this point had someone called Widow Velley living in it, as a tenant. Checker Mead listed as its owner William Harton, who also owned the neighbouring farm. And Well Mead was owned by Edmund Wytham, along with much of the surrounding estate. So at some point Harton and Wytham carved up Emily’s land between them. And the well? She turned to the Ordnance Survey map, made about forty years after Emily’s time. There was no well marked.

All the same, Agnes thought, handing back the files, and going to find a cup of coffee, the well could have been blocked in any time from the 1840s to the 1870s. There was nothing to say it had anything to do with Emily Quislan.

*

The gate said, ‘Fyffes Spring Water Company. No unauthorised visitors.’ Agnes got out of her car, opened the gate, got back into her car, drove through, and got out to close the gate behind her. The perimeter fence glinted in the heat, the vertical steel lines slicing through the parched rolling curves of the stubble fields. Agnes turned to get back into her car. Ahead of her she saw the huge round tanks of Fyffes Spring shimmering in the heat, like an oil refinery in the Arabian desert. She drove up the drive, parked in the car park and looked around for an entrance. A series of sparse bungalows ended with a door marked ‘Reception’. She approached it, and knocked, then opened the door. There was no one there. She closed the door again, and hesitated. ‘Can I help you?’

The voice was gruff and male, and belonged to a man wearing a grey suit. He was short, with gingery hair and now he squinted at her in the glaring sunlight.

‘Um, yes, I hope so,’ Agnes began. ‘I’m just visiting really. I’d heard a lot about your mineral water, and —’

‘Purest stuff for miles around. Only no one’ll believe us.’

‘Um, yes —’

‘Have you tasted it?’

‘Not actually, but —’

‘Come with me.’ He led her past the bungalows to a huge windowless wall, in which there was a door. He opened it, and she followed him in. Inside there was a rumble of machinery, a gloomy darkness and a clean, wet smell like fresh earth. Agnes followed the man into a little office, which had a high window and a cheap Formica desk almost entirely covered with papers. There was a low plastic-covered armchair, also covered with papers. Strewn around the room were several blue plastic bottles of water. The man threw himself into the chair behind the desk, gestured vaguely to the unusable armchair and grabbed a bottle of water. He unscrewed the top and handed it to Agnes.

‘There you are, then,’ he said. He grabbed another bottle, opened it and began to swig from it. Agnes politely took a mouthful of hers.

‘Only still at the moment. Pure spring water, bottled. We’ll be going fizzy as soon as we can. Whaddya think?’ He waited, his eyes bright with expectation.

‘It’s — it’s very good,’ Agnes said, truthfully.

‘See?’ he said. ‘You try telling them, though. Those morons out there will knock back any amount of French bog water, could be recycled from the bidets of Paris for all they know, but do they care? If it has a fancy French name, then that’s fine, they’ll drink it by the bloody Froggy litre. But good stuff like this, pure, un-meddled-with crystal-clear H-Two-Bloody-Oh —’ He sighed.

‘I’m sure it’s just a matter of time,’ Agnes said. ‘With something as good as this, word will spread, surely.’

‘If we were bloody French, they’d be heaping Ecus on us just for the sake of it. Old Chirac would be lining my pockets even as we speak. But this country — this Government … I could be employing twice as many people if I had the money, I could be advertising, talking to supermarkets, getting this carbonation sorted … Richard Witham,’ he said, abruptly. ‘Managing Director, for what it’s worth.’

Agnes took the hand he stretched out awkwardly across the desk. The name Witham resonated in her ears.

‘Agnes — um — Bourdillon,’ she mumbled, trying to pronounce her ex-husband’s surname in the most English way she could manage. 

‘Come on, I’ll show you round.’

Agnes followed him round pumping plant and bottling machinery, saying hello to the occasional member of his workforce, nodding over the plans for the carbonation plant — ‘It’s the future, in this business, if you can’t do bubbles you might as well give up’ — and being taken to the site of the spring itself which was imprisoned in clanking steel. ‘People are always disappointed. They expect some bloody waterfall, mountain stream, that sort of caper,’ he said.

Finally she followed him out of the factory and into the fields behind, listening to his plans for expansion. As she tramped across the bare earth, the plant humming in the background, she thought, This is Emily’s land. This plot, with this spring, and probably that tree too, belonged in 1839 to Emily Quislan. She screwed up her eyes against the sun, staring towards the silhouette of a derelict building, a barn. Maybe even a farmhouse. Emily’s house.

‘… the bottling, you see, with fizzy, different bottles, new technology.’

‘Yes,’ Agnes nodded.

‘And,’ Richard went on, ‘if no one’s going to drink the bloody stuff I’m barking up the wrong bloody tree altogether.’

‘What made you choose this?’

‘Me?’ He looked at her, taken aback. ‘Oh, well, you know … well, actually —’ He stepped a little way in front of her, so she could no longer see his face — ‘life fell apart a bit, rotten luck. New start.’ He turned and faced her, blushing, then looked at the ground where his toe was prodding at a stone. ‘My wife — well, not her. Not her fault, really. Business collapsed, last one, jewellery, salesman. Couldn’t keep up, mortgage, you know, all that. Don’t usually talk about it …’ He raised his eyes and smiled, briefly. ‘On my own again now, a bit of family money, we’re local, go back years, started again.’ He looked out over the soft curves of the hayfields.

‘I’m sure it’ll work for you,’ Agnes said gently. ‘People worry about water.’

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Only, this water … D’you know,’ he turned to her, sharply, ‘I’ve had a couple of the locals refuse to work here. Say it’s unlucky. When you ask them why, they mumble into their beards about something their grandmothers told them. Which is crazy if you think about it, because I had the devil’s own job convincing the borough surveyor and his cronies that there was anything here at all.’

‘How did you find it?’

Richard Witham blushed again. ‘Dowsing. I was looking for um, well, treasure, actually. Bit desperate in those days. But I found water. Just as good,’ he said, brightly. ‘As long as it works.’

‘When you unblocked it, was there any clue as to — as to how it had been blocked in the first place?’

Richard nodded. ‘Now thereby hangs a tale. The council people were quite taken with it. A whole crowd of them came to pick over it. It had been packed with rocks. Thorough job, they said, difficult to keep it down, water like this. It explains the flooding in the valley down there, all the pasture there used to be swamp, nearly. They reckoned it had been blocked for about a hundred years, maybe more.’

‘Deliberately?’

‘That’s what they said, yes. The records show various attempts to unblock it, various rumours about it being a spring, but I’m the first to make a go of it.’

They began to walk slowly back to the car park. Agnes sensed in his silence the hesitation of words about to form. As they reached her car he said, ‘The problem is, it’s still there.’

‘What’s still there?’

‘The bad feeling. I’ve had threats, you know. Someone wants to poison the spring.’ He stood, uncertainly, biting his lip, regretting having made his doubts take shape by speaking them aloud.

‘Why should they want to do that?’

Richard shook his head. ‘Grudge? Mad? How should I know? Wait here.’ He ambled back to his office and emerged a minute later with a bottle of water and a piece of paper. ‘Here. For you.’

‘Thank you,’ Agnes said, taking the bottle. ‘I shall sing its praises wherever I go.’ She unfolded the piece of paper, knowing in advance what it was.

‘POISON BEGETS POISON. HE WHO SOWS ON STOLEN LAND WILL REAP A BITTER HARVEST.’

‘You can keep that,’ Richard said.

‘You really have no idea who might have done it? Maybe someone you’ve sacked?’

He shook his head. ‘I haven’t upset anyone. You can ask them if you like: “what’s old Witham like?”’

Again the name echoed around Agnes’s aching head. ‘How do you spell your name?’ she heard herself ask.

‘W-I-T-H-A-M,’ he replied.

‘Was it ever spelt differently?’ 

Richard looked puzzled. ‘Well, maybe. We go back years around here.’

‘With a “Y”?’

‘Well, maybe. I’m more the Suffolk branch, but perhaps the Essex lot might have done that. Maybe.’

‘So this land — you owned it once.’

‘Me?’

‘I’ve looked in the tithe maps, and —’ Agnes realised she’d said too much. Richard Witham was now looking at her hard.

‘You see,’ Agnes faltered, ‘I knew about this threat. I picked up some of these leaflets —’

‘Where? Where did you happen to find leaflets like this?’ Richard’s voice had a new edge to it, his eyes narrowed as he waited for her answer.

Agnes took a deep breath. She met Richard’s gaze and said, ‘I’ve been spending time at the road camp. You know, the protesters, over in the woods there. No, wait, let me finish. Whoever is endangering your spring here is also threatening them. That’s how I came to see the leaflets, that’s what made me come to visit you.’ She watched the steel of his eyes soften into grey again, and added, ‘I wouldn’t have mentioned the tithe maps if I didn’t think I could trust you.’

‘Trust me? It’s not me who’s —’

‘I mean, trust you not to hassle the road-camp people. They’re innocent. It’s just that one or two of them might have got mixed up in something — um — sinister.’

Richard blinked in the bright sunlight and scratched his head. ‘There was that girl killed down there.’