A Half Forgotten Song (51 page)

“He’s gone by the morning—him or the pair of you, I don’t mind which. Or I’ll turn him in myself. You got that?”

T
he night was long, and pitch-black. Dimity did not sleep. She bathed Charles from top to toe, with basin after basin of warm water and every washcloth and rag in the house. She washed the mud and grease from his hair, took a fine comb and cleared as many of the lice and eggs as she could. She smoothed the blood from the cut on his cheek and stitched it as neatly as possible. Charles didn’t wince when the thick needle pierced his skin. She cleaned every trace of dirt and stink from his skin, feeling a blush light her cheeks when she took off his trousers and saw his naked body for the first time. Charles seemed to find nothing amiss in this, and accepted her attentions calmly, obediently. She cut his toenails, and scrubbed the dirt from under his fingernails with a small brush. A tremor ran through his arms and hands, a constant shuddering. It brought with it a memory of Celeste, which Dimity carefully ignored. Her own hands were steady, entirely sure of themselves. His clothes would have to be burned, and new ones found for him. Straightaway she knew which washing lines she could pinch them from, easily and discreetly. When she was done Charles slept, as naked as the day he was born, with the blanket tucked around him tightly. Dimity gazed at him for a long time and ran her fingers softly down the contours of his face. She did not notice that he was too quiet; that there was an emptiness behind his eyes that hadn’t been there before. She did not notice that the fire that had once lit him, the quickness and surety of his movements and words, had burned out. She knew only that he was there, with her.

Eventually, she left him to sleep. There was no room for two in her bed, but she didn’t want to lie down anyway. She couldn’t remember when she’d last felt as awake as she did then. She tidied up the detritus of Charles’s extended bath, taking his clothes out into the backyard and dropping them onto the burning heap. It was close to dawn. A faint gray glow was seeping across the black sky. Almost midsummer, and the nights were short, sweet. The year was rising to its apex, and about to peak. An auspicious time, a time of change. Dimity felt it in her blood; in her bones. The Watch was silent, and she felt it watching. Thatch and plaster, wood and stone. And Valentina, the hard heart of the place. Sharp as a barking dog, watching her all the time. She poured herself a glass of milk, drank it slowly, then rinsed the glass and went up to her mother’s room.

Valentina was deeply asleep, with her arms thrown back above her head and her hair straggled out across the pillow. She had enough pillows for two people, as though the bed was always half empty and just waiting to welcome another occupant. Pale dawn light made her mother’s face silvery, made her hair shades of gray and white. She was almost beautiful, Dimity saw. Her cheekbones rose delicately beneath her eyes, her nose was fine and feminine, her lips still full. But even with her face slack and relaxed in sleep, the marks of her habitual expressions remained, etched into her skin. The furrow of her frown between her eyes; the scathing lines across her brow; the bitter brackets on either side of her mouth; fine lines along her upper lip, where she puckered her mouth around cruel words. Her chest rose and fell with perfect rhythm. Dimity looked down at her and thought how small she looked, how vulnerable. Never something she had thought about Valentina before, but there it was now, with sudden clarity.
Vulnerable.
Valentina had always been there; the bitter kernel at the center of life.
You have always been there to make things worse,
Dimity told her silently. Her mother’s chest rose and fell, her breath swept in and out, in and out. Dimity watched, and soon her own breathing moved to the same rhythm. For that short time, they existed in perfect harmony. But when she left the room a while later, with her fingers aching peculiarly, Dimity’s breath was the only song still singing.

Dimity hid Charles when the police came. She coaxed him out of her bedroom, down to the backyard, and sat him on the wooden seat of the privy. At first he didn’t seem to understand who was coming, why exactly he should hide. Then, when she explained, he thought that the police were coming for him, and that he would be taken back to the war. He was shaking all over when she left him, pressing a long kiss of reassurance onto his lips.

“They won’t find you. They’re not looking for you. I promise,” she told him. Sweat beaded his brow and ran down at his temples. With her heart aching for him, Dimity shut and latched the door, went back inside and waited for PC Dibden to arrive. PC Dibden was a young man whose mother knew Valentina well, although perhaps not as well as his father had known her, before he’d died of a heart attack scant hours after a particularly strenuous evening three years previously. The young man was awkwardly fascinated by her corpse, and kept glancing at it as he took Dimity’s statement and waited for his superiors to arrive.

Valentina lay in the same position in which she’d been sleeping—on her back with her arms flung up—and Dimity also glanced at her as she told the policeman that Valentina had had a visitor the night before but that she hadn’t seen his face, only the back of his head as he’d gone into the bedroom. She glanced at her mother to be sure that her chest remained still, that her breath had not returned. That her eyes were still shut. She did not trust Valentina to make anything easy for her. She gave a description of the man she’d supposedly seen. Medium height and build; short brown hair; wearing a dark-colored jacket of the kind every man within a fifty-mile radius possessed. PC Dibden wrote all this down dutifully, with an expression on his face that told her how useless it would be in finding the killer. There were no fingermarks on Valentina’s neck, no signs of violence. It was possible, said the policeman, that Valentina had died of natural causes and that her visitor had run off in panic. Dimity agreed that it was quite possible. She gnawed at her thumbnail until it bled, but even this could not bring tears to her eyes.
Shock,
said PC Dibden to the undertaker, as they took Valentina out later that morning and the police dusted the bedroom and the banister for fingerprints. There would be hundreds, Dimity knew. Hundreds and hundreds.

The funeral was quick and sparse. PC Dibden came along and stood a respectful distance from Dimity. Wilf Coulson was there, and his father, which came as a surprise to Dimity. None of Valentina’s other visitors had dared to show their faces. The Brocks from Southern Farm stood close together, hands clasped respectfully. Still Dimity did not cry. She cast the first handful of earth over the coffin, after the vicar had read a short sermon, and found herself praying that Valentina would stay down there. A sudden storm of fear swept through her, and she stumbled; stooped for another handful of earth and threw it after the first. If no one else had been there to see, she might have fallen to her knees and clawed the whole mound back in with her bare hands.
Buried, buried. Gone
. She clenched her fists for calm, and met nobody’s eye as she walked back to The Watch. No conversations, no wake. No words of sympathy. PC Dibden trotted up behind her and tried to give her an update on the case, but in truth there was nothing to update. He assured her they were doing all they could to find out who had been with her mother that night, but the apologetic look in his eye told her otherwise. They held out little hope of finding him, because they weren’t really looking all that hard. There were other, more important cases to solve. They weren’t even sure that a murder had been committed. Valentina’s suffocation could have been accidental, during whatever activity she’d been engaged in. And, in the end, the police didn’t really care. Valentina was no huge loss to the community, other than to her visitors, and they were content to stay silently anonymous.
She got what was coming to her,
Dimity thought, and knew she wasn’t the only one to think so.

When she got back to The Watch and rounded the corner of the cottage, out of sight of any onlookers, she pushed her shoulders back and straightened her spine, and a joyous smile broke out across her face. She had hidden Charles in the privy again, and he wept with relief when she let him out and told him that it was all over, that nobody else would be coming. He clasped her tightly and sobbed like a child.

“You must hide me, Mitzy! I can’t go back,” he mumbled. Dimity held him and sang to him until the fit passed; then they went back into the house together, slowly, like the walking wounded, and she shut the door behind them.

B
ut . . . I heard somebody moving around in here. I heard it! I’m sure I did . . . you heard it, too, right, Dimity?” said Zach. He waited for a reply from the old lady, but she seemed lost in her own mind; her gaze settled on him when he took her hand but it was diffuse, absent. Hannah shook her head.

“You know how old houses move around and creak. Plus the window’s been broken for ages. I offered to get it fixed for her, but she point-blank refused. Because it meant opening the room, I guess. But the wind’s been blowing through here for months, shifting the papers around, making the floorboards damp . . .”

“No, I heard a person. I’m
sure
of it,” Zach insisted. Hannah threw up her hands and let them fall to her sides.

“You can’t have, Zach. Unless you believe in ghosts now.” She meant it as a throwaway remark, but Zach noticed Dimity’s eyes flicker as she said it, and then follow Hannah as she paced the room restlessly. Zach took a deep breath and wondered what surreal world he had stumbled into that night. An odd other world where he fled from place to place through a dark night, smuggling people, avoiding the law; where huge collections of art lay hidden, like buried treasure, left by a man who had lived far beyond his own death. None of it seemed quite real.

It was late, and Zach and Hannah sat at the kitchen table with cups of tea going cold in front of them. Ilir was in the living room, keeping vigil over his wife and son. Bekim was fast asleep, laid out on the sofa with a moth-eaten blanket draped over him. Rozafa sat by the child’s head with one hand on his shoulder, her head tipped back, also sleeping. Ilir curled his body over them protectively, as though now he had them back he would let nobody near them, and no distance come between them. Zach wondered how long Ilir had been in Dorset; how long had it been since husband and wife had seen each other. Dimity was still upstairs in the little room full of pictures. Zach had taken her some tea, but the old woman was quiet and still and would not come downstairs. Uneasily, he’d noticed the way her chest rose and fell, quick and shallow. Sipping at the air as if she couldn’t quite reach it.

“Tell me how you saw him. How he was. What happened that night,” said Zach. Hannah sighed, and got up.

“We need something stronger than tea,” she muttered, and pulled open kitchen cupboards until she found an ancient, sticky bottle of brandy. She poured a good measure into two mugs and brought them over to the table, sliding one to Zach. “Cheers.” She knocked hers back in one, then rolled her lips over her teeth in protest and shuddered slightly. “Mitzy came down to the farm late one evening. It was in the summer and it had only just got dark, so it must have been ten or half-past ten. She was confused, panicking. She asked for my grandmother at first, and didn’t seem to remember who I was until I explained. I knew at once something was up. She hadn’t come knocking on our door for . . . well, for as long as I could remember, anyway. She asked me to come back with her, and wouldn’t say why. Practically towed me out of the house. ‘I can’t do it by myself,’ was all I could get her to say. And so I went with her, and she brought me here, and up to that room, and there he was.” She exhaled heavily.

“Dead?”

“Yes. He was dead,” she said. “Mitzy said we had to get rid of him. Hide the body. I asked her why . . . why we couldn’t just call an undertaker. But she was convinced that the police would come, if anybody knew; and she was probably right. Sudden death and all that, and he wasn’t even supposed to be here. He wasn’t supposed to exist. I gathered this slowly, as she told me who he was.”

“But . . . he must have been
ancient,
” said Zach.

“Almost a hundred. But then, he’d lived a very . . . sheltered life. The latter part of it, anyway.”

“And you had no idea before that that anybody was living here with her? All those years and you didn’t suspect a thing?”

“All those years. Not so surprising when you consider how cut off her cottage is. The farm is the only place that looks onto it, and we never made a point of looking. And besides, he never came out of this room. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’d been inside The Watch before that evening, and I’d never been upstairs, not once. How would anybody have known?”

“Did you . . . Did you know who he was?”

“Not at first, no. But when Dimity told me . . . I’d heard of him, of course. My grandmother used to talk about him all the time. And then I saw the pictures, and I knew it had to be true. It had to be him.”

“But . . . how the hell did he
get
here? His body was buried on the Continent—it was found, identified, his death was recorded, and he was buried . . .”

“
A
body was found.
A
body was identified.
A
body was buried. I don’t know how much you know about the retreat to Dunkirk?”

“I’ve . . . seen films. Documentaries.”

“It was chaos. Thousands and thousands of men on the beach, waiting to be evacuated, and hundreds of small boats coming over from England to help. Fishing boats, charter yachts and pleasure boats, cargo ships. Charles got on one of those small ships. It brought him all the way back to England, and then he . . . slipped away. Made his way back to Blacknowle somehow.”

“You mean he deserted?”

“Yes. AWOL. Dimity told me . . . she told me he was quite happy to stay here. Very happy. That he insisted he couldn’t go back. He wouldn’t go back. Hiding for the next sixty-odd years might seem a bit extreme, but it sounds to me like he had a breakdown of some kind. Post-traumatic stress or something. And I guess once you’ve been hiding for a certain length of time, it stops feeling like hiding and starts to just feel like . . . the way you live.”