The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries Part 15

"Beckwith House, I believe it's called."

"Aye."

"Is it here? In the village?"

"Noo." Her voice was soft, rounded as the cows she tended. "Noo, it's not."

That shook him a little. He had been so sure it would be here, friendly with other houses, neighboured.

"Where then?"

"It's up t'dale a way." She nodded towards the road behind him and the deep hills into which it led. Already, shadows were tumbling down the slopes, only the higher crests fully daylit, though he could still see the outlines of the dry-stone walls which criss-crossed the lower slopes, and the occasional brooding bulk of a barn.

"How far?"

"Two, three miles. Mebbe four. It's right on t'road."

"Thank you."

As she moved back towards the gate, she called after him: "Does she know you're coming?"

He stopped. "Does who know I'm coming?"

"The missus."

He smiled and shook his head. "No," he said. "She doesn't."

Back in the open again, after the temporary closing in of the village, he could feel wind sweeping down from the high fells, gusting the car towards the edge of the black road. Now that he was close to where he had been heading for most of his life, he felt none of the excitement he had antic.i.p.ated, merely a sense of a waiting void about to be filled.

"... somewhere ..." she used to say, cruelly. But where? Until today, he had not known. Now, the place, the time, the night edging down on him from above, fitted round him as though tailor-made.

The road began to wind. In the bend of a turn, he saw stone gateposts, iron gates twice as tall as he was, laurels ma.s.sed behind walls. He parked on the verge, tucking the car in close. Behind the gates was a short drive curving towards a house, square and two-storied. Though he had never been here before, he knew precisely how the path led round behind the house, past deep-silled windows to a porched side door. He knew it would come out on to a flag-stoned terrace looking over an enclosed garden. He knew the view from the windows at the rear of the house, and where the plums and apples would stand on either side of the wrought-iron gate set in the garden wall, through which, like a photograph, could be seen a segment of landscape. There would be a pond, too, beside the terrace, and a rockery full of alpines, little crawling plants that overflowed and spilled down the edges of white stones. On one of the gateposts there was a round slate plaque. Beckwith House. He traced the two meniscal curves of the B with his finger. He turned the handle of the right-hand gate. It whimpered metallically. The iron bars resisted as he pushed, then opened, following a deep groove in the gravelled earth behind it.

" ... somewhere ..."

Here. He'd found it at last, been drawn to it, almost, though perhaps that was a trifle fanciful. He had had so little to go on, just the whispered, half-heard word-"Garthway ..." Garthway? The more he tried to re-run the sequence in his head, the dying eyes filming even as they looked at him, the huge body heaving, the lips puckering as they tried to form the word while one hand twitched slowly on the turndown of the linen sheet with the border of drawn-thread work, the less he could remember what exactly had been said.

His feet made no sound on the earth. The gravel had long since sunk into the soil and now lay embedded in it like the eyes of drowning men below the surface of the water. Neglect entombed the house. He walked between the leaves of dark unpruned laurels. There was a faint light in one of the windows, its dirt-streaked panes almost hidden by creeper long left untended.

There was a glow, too, from the ornate fanlight above the front door. He banged the knocker and felt the house pause, listening, questioning. Footsteps came along the pa.s.sage towards him, brisk, almost eager.

The woman who opened the door stared at him for a time. Later he could not have said for how long. Two or three seconds? Or had they been minutes? Her mouth moved towards a welcoming smile, then let it be. She brushed her hand against the side of her head, even though her hair was neatly tidy.

"Martin," she said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"I knew you'd come."

"Yes."

"It's taken you long enough."

"I wasn't sure where to look." Even with the help of the police computers, it had taken weeks of work to pinpoint this place, this woman.

She nodded, as if she knew what the difficulties in tracing her had been.

"You'd best come in, then." She stood aside, flat against the wall of the narrow hall to let him pa.s.s in front of her.

"Straight through. I'm in the kitchen."

The kitchen was warm, pined, full of good smells. They were part of the things which had been denied him. He saw that the room had been redecorated: the wallpaper had been changed and there was shelving that had not been there before.

In the fuller light, he was able to see her properly. She was younger than he had expected. And much less sad. It seemed to him that she ought to have been sad.

"What are you now?" she said. "Thirty-two?"

"Next birthday," he said.

"Early June, isn't it?"

He nodded, not minding that she had forgotten the precise date; though they had not met for over thirty years, she knew the month, just as he knew that behind the door to the left of the range was the larder, that although there were only five bra.s.s dish-covers hanging above it, there had once been seven. She leaned back against the warm curves of the Aga and shook her head. "I'd have known you anywhere," she said.

"Yes." Of course she would.

She frowned. "You're with the police, aren't you?" she said.

"Am I?"

She frowned. "That's what she said, last time I heard. That you were with the police."

Was he? Sometimes, he could scarcely remember who he was or where he came from. Sometimes he could scarcely remember that he didn't really know the answer to the question. Which was why he was here now.

He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a package. He spread the contents on the shiny oilcloth which covered the kitchen table. And as he did so, the voices which never seemed to be far away, came back.

" ... somewhere ..."

"Where?"

"Somewhere."

"Where, Gran?"

"Up north."

"Where up north?"

"That would be telling, wouldn't it now?"

"Tell me, Gran. Tell me." Because even then, a child, six, seven, ten years old, he had known it was important. If she would just pinpoint the place for him, just give it s.p.a.ce, meaning, then he himself would finally be rooted.

"What happened, Gran?"

She would start again. "It was Christmas Eve." Then stop, laughing at him, the heavy rolls of her flesh shaking up and down her body. She was all too aware of the depth of the desire to know that filled him. Only to know.

"Christmas Day, Gran." It was part of the cruel ritual that the beginning must never vary.

"Oh yes. You're a knowing little monkey, aren't you?" A nod of the head, a stare over the tops of her gla.s.ses, a small not-quite-pleasant smile. "It was Christmas Day, and there was champagne in a silver bucket ..."

Ah, that champagne. For years he hadn't really known what it was. "Wine, dear, with a sparkle," she'd told him. "It made you feel good. Or bad, depending on your viewpoint." And she had giggled, an old woman scratching at memories.

When he was older, of course, he'd seen real, not imagined champagne, seen the big bottles, the shiny tops, the labels, special, rich, different from other labels on other bottles. Later still, drunk it, felt the bubbles at the top of his mouth. The sparkle of it was entwined in his earliest memories: that Christmas, that champagne.

"Yes, Gran. The champagne."

"There was champagne in a silver bucket, and then your mother ..."

And she would stop. Always. Her fingers would float above the photographs, her hands small and delicate against the grossness of her bulk, and he would see the past in her eyes, the something terrible that she would never tell him. He knew it was terrible by her silence. And always, briefly, her face would register again the shock of whatever it was had happened that Christmas Day, before she turned off into a story of Santa Claus or mince pies or some other yuletide ba.n.a.lity which he knew had nothing to do with the one which lurked behind her eyes.

"Then what, Gran? What?" But there would be no force in his voice now. She wasn't going to tell him. Not then. Not ever.

Now, the woman came forward, stood beside him, stirred the photographs on the table with her finger.

"Still got all the snaps, then?" she said.

"Yes."

"I suppose she's dead."

"Yes."

"About time. How did she die?"

Slowly, he wanted to say, but did not.

"Because I hope it hurt her to let go of life," the woman said. "I hope she fought against it, knowing she would lose."

That was exactly how it had been. He said nothing.

"I hope it was ... violent." Her voice shook. "Like his." She sifted through the photographs and picked one out. "Like his."

He was young. Dark. Hair falling over his forehead. A military cap held under one arm.

The woman moved her head from side to side. "He was so beautiful," she said, lifeless. "So ... beautiful."

"My father."

"Yes. What did she tell you about him?"

"She told me nothing. Except that he was dead."

"I don't imagine she told you why."

"No. Not even that this was his picture. At least-not until very recently." He'd managed to choke that from her, squeezing and relaxing the soft flesh of her throat, alternately giving her hope, then removing it. "And my mother," he'd said. "Tell me where she is, where she is." And almost left it too late. "Garthway," she had managed. That was all.

Outside the window, at the edge of the garden, he could see how the last of the sun caught the green hill through the iron gate which led out on to the moors. It shone like a transparency between the shadowed walls on either side.

"And now you've come back to see for yourself where it all happened, have you?" The woman filled a kettle at the tap and set it on top of the red Aga.

"She never told me what exactly ..." He picked two photographs out of the pile on the table. "... but I knew something must have."

Somewhere in his mind he heard the echo of the hateful voice: "It was Christmas Day, somewhere up north ..."

Two photographs. Christmas dinner, every detail clear: the turkey, the sausages, the roast potatoes and steaming sprouts, a cut gla.s.s dish of cranberry sauce, a china gravy boat. Beside the table, a silver bucket. The people leaned towards each other, smiling, holding up gla.s.ses, about to celebrate. At the head of the table was a woman of maybe forty, big-boned, fair-haired, her dress cut low over prominent b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She was handsome, ripe. His workmates at the police station would have whistled if he'd shown them the photo, would have nudged each other, said she was pleading for it, they wouldn't have minded a bit of that themselves. She was leaning towards the young girl sitting at her right, saying something.

"That's you, isn't it?" he said, his finger brushing across the girl's face.

"It is. It was."

And the same scene, seconds later. Gla.s.ses still in the air, but the smiles gone as they stared towards something out of frame, their faces full of horror and shock. The girl was gone. The woman at the head of the table looked straight ahead at the camera, smiling a small not-quite-pleasant smile.

"What happened?" he said. "I have to know." Because the body down in Wandsworth would never tell now. The swollen protruding tongue was silent at last. Had been for weeks. The small white hands would never again turn and turn through the photographs, reliving a past that a cataclysm had destroyed.

The woman lifted her shoulder and released a sighing breath. "You have a right, if anybody does," she said. "I didn't know Bobby was taking photographs then."

"Bobby?"

"My youngest brother. He was camera mad. He took all of these, photographed everything. 'It'll be a record for posterity,' he'd say.

"It's been that, all right."

Staring down at the photographs, the woman said softly: "She hated me, of course."

"Who did?"

"My mother." She indicated the woman at the head of the table. "It must have been some kind of madness, some pathological obsession. Or maybe she was just jealous because Dad loved me more than he loved her. They'd have a word for it today, I suppose. Perhaps they did then, but I never knew what it was, just that she was dangerous. My brothers tried to protect me, even little Bobby. So did Dad, while he was alive. I think she would have killed me, if she could." A silence. "She did the next best thing."

"Tell me."

Again the shuddering sigh. "Edward. Your father. He lived further up the dale. His family was rich, owned a lot of land. Edward was ten years older than I was, but it never mattered. Right from the beginning there was never anyone else for either of us." She turned her gaze on him. "We loved one another." On the Aga the kettle began to fizz, water drops skittering like ants across the surface of the hot plate. The woman got up, found a teapot, cups, saucers. "Do you understand that?"

"Yes," he said, though he knew nothing of love.

"I was sent away to school, to keep me from my mother, but the first day of the holidays, Edward would be there, outside the garden gate, and then it was like summer, like fireworks, like roses shooting out of the ground and birds singing." She smiled, looking back. Her voice was without emotion.

"What happened?"

"On my sixteenth birthday, in the middle of September, Edward wrote to me at school-he was in the Army by then-and said he was being posted overseas after Christmas and wanted me to come with him. He said I was old enough, he'd ask my mother if we could get married, since Dad had died the year before."