Ferney (25 page)

‘He’s not saying it just happened once,’ said Gally, surprised that Mike should think that. ‘He’s saying it happens over and over again. It’s always been like
that, him and me.’

‘Oh, what?’ Mike sat in silence then looked wildly all around, his mouth moving, before he swung back to her. ‘I get it. You mean he’s telling you that the two of you
have always been a couple?’

‘No, not
always
, but often.’ It was like breaking bad news. She could have said ‘usually’, but ‘often’ seemed kinder.

Mike started to sound angry. ‘You must be able to see what he’s doing, surely? He’s just a lonely old man and he fancies you something rotten so he’s spinning you a yarn.
You can’t be taken in by that?’

‘You promised you’d listen.’

‘I am listening, but it’s just nonsense.’

She sighed. ‘It’s not nonsense.’ She looked around at the Greek trees, the Greek sand, the hushed wavebreaks of the Greek sea and distance undermined her. ‘At least, I
don’t think it is.’

He was smart enough not to trumpet the small victory. ‘Eat your food,’ he said softly. The fat was congealing white on his pieces of lamb and she picked at the salad. There was so
much more she had wanted to say.

‘How do you feel about him?’ Mike asked.

That was the hardest question to answer because she had shied away from answering it to herself, let alone to him.

‘I’m very fond of him,’ she said. ‘I do feel like I’ve known him for a long time.’

‘Should I be jealous?’ He said it as a joke but it was far from that.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, ‘he’s over eighty,’ but she knew that wasn’t the point. When, before coming here, she thought of Ferney it wasn’t the
ageing, present envelope that came to her mind, it was the living essence of the man – an essence that had always joined with her own fiercely, brightly, fully. Being here, she found herself
looking at the memory of that emotion rather than the emotion itself and that made it easier to pass the question off.

‘I don’t know what to make of this,’ Mike said unhappily. ‘Do you think, maybe, it would be a good idea if you stayed away from him when we get back?’

‘Mike, he’s very old and he hasn’t been well and I think he’s going to die quite soon. Surely it can’t hurt if he takes a little comfort from talking to
me?’

‘It can hurt. You’ve shown it can hurt.’

‘It does me good, too. He makes me feel much more, well, calm I suppose.’

Mike nodded, unable to deny the truth of that.

‘I’m sorry,’ Gally said and meant it. ‘I didn’t mean to do this at all. This holiday is so precious. I don’t want to ruin it. Let’s just stop talking
about it for now.’

‘Can you do that?’

‘Yes,’ she said firmly, aware that there was so much more they hadn’t even touched on – the baby for a start and all that might imply. ‘Eat up and let’s go
for a walk along the beach. I want to share it with you.’

Each managed to pretend that their sadness was simply the sadness of the holiday ending. They papered over the cracks with a walk along the shore, then drove back to the village for glasses of
ouzo on the roof of the tower as the night whispered past. In bed, with wide-open windows failing to stir the room’s stored daytime heat, they made love like gentle strangers, both feeling it
was expected of them.

The morning jumped on them with demands of travel and timing that, for Gally, made the leave-taking an unsatisfactory and rushed affair of stolen backward glances as the last reality of the
village was wiped away by a bend in the road. Slow steps of readjustment took them through the airport check-in, the departure lounge and on to the plane, but even then there was the sight of
Greece beyond the window to anchor her. The final residue of the holiday was only rinsed away when London appeared below the wings and Mike said, ‘I wonder how the builders have been getting
on?’

It was better to have told him something than nothing, she thought as they drove down the A303, and it was probably better to have told him something than everything. In his own time he would
get round to asking more questions. She just hoped she would know what answers to give.

They usually turned off to avoid the roadworks, but when they got close they could see something was going on ahead.

‘What’s all that?’ said Mike, slowing.

‘I don’t know.’

It might be another accident, he thought. That would be a bad way to arrive, but whatever it was seemed to be happening off the road. The trafffic was slowing to look but there was no blockage.
In any case he feared the place still had the power to worry her. He glanced at her, but if any emotion showed in her face it seemed to be mild, curious excitement.

‘You want to see?’

‘Yes, let’s.’

‘Something’s definitely happened. There’s two police cars there.’

A small knot of people clustered by a digger and Mike pulled on to the verge when he’d turned off the main road and switched off the engine.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s see what’s going on.’ Gally found she still didn’t like the place, but she followed him with an increased pulse rate and
slight shortness of breath.

A section of the great excavation had been cordoned off with incident tape and in the bottom of the trench a man in overalls was busy. A sudden burst of irrational fear stopped Gally in her
tracks. Mike hailed their postman who was standing on the fringes of the group of men. As she saw Ferney, talking to a policeman on the far side of the ditch, he lifted his face and stared at her
and she heard the postman say, ‘It’s a body. Bones, I should say. The digger uncovered them a couple of hours ago. Coroner’s men have been down and some of these forensic people,
they say.’

Ferney had first heard about the plan for the roadworks almost a year earlier, and from the moment the surveyors began to peg out the line of the excavation along the A303 it
had been the focus of his existence. It seemed to him then that it was the main unfinished business of this final life and he believed the diggers must succeed where his spade had failed. That
focus and much besides had shifted with Gally’s unexpected reappearance. He no longer found it so pressing to keep a close eye on the hole when it suddenly became clear to him that, against
the odds, the story hadn’t ended there after all. Since then he spent his time instead keeping an eye on what was happening at Bagstone Farmhouse and had more or less forgotten about the
excavation, so when Michael Garrett’s grandson stopped his raucous, shuddering tractor in the lane by Pear Ash and told him the diggers down there had turned up human bones, it took two
heartbeats before the meaning of the news sank in. When it did a strong emotion seized him, part anger, part sorrow and finally part exhilaration at being near at last to the final proof of his
long-held suspicion, and he began to walk with greater speed than his legs could gracefully accommodate down the hill in the direction of the main road.

All the work had stopped when he got there and he saw at first glance that the police had already started the process of protecting the public from any accidental exposure to the evidence of
death. Flapping plastic sheeting strung between poles shielded one side of the excavation from direct view by the passing traffic and three sides of white tape, forbidding entry with thin
authority, completed a square. He got round that easily enough by crossing the road further down and coming up along the far side of the hedge. It was a route he hadn’t taken for a long time
and he noted with momentary surprise that there was no longer any sign at all of the old path to the forge. Screened by the undergrowth, the policemen by the great trench couldn’t see him,
but equally he couldn’t get a clear view down to the bottom of it, so cautiously he squeezed through between a tree-trunk and a bush and found himself looking straight down on to a scene that
took his breath away in sharp sorrow and old anger.

A man in official, freshly laundered overalls crouched in the broad bottom of the ditch, maybe fifteen feet below ground level. The long side of the ditch showed a narrow, vertical mark. It was
darker than the surrounding earth to either side, packed with looser material where the diggers’ long slice had cut a cross-section through Cochrane’s old pit, and sticking out from the
side towards the base of that mark, where the man was scraping and brushing at the earth with archaeological care, was a pincushion of stained ivory. Letting himself feel the sorrow for the sake of
all those years, Ferney looked at the earth surrounding the bones as if for signs of the soft, sweet flesh that had rotted away into it. There was nothing to see but the bones themselves and they
seemed haphazard.

It was no burial. Her limbs had not been laid out with care. She had been tipped into the hole, head first from the look of it, if that was indeed her skull down at the bottom where the man was
taking such trouble. It was the thought of that casual act of savagery and the succession of bleak years that had followed that brought Ferney too far into view. In his mind’s eye the old
smithy had regrouped its dispersed stones to take shape before him, the little storehouse behind it blocking his direct view of the pit, so that he moved out into the open to see round it, down
through the double-vision, ghost earth to the bones. The policemen on the other side noticed him then.

‘Excuse me, sir. Do you mind moving away from there, please? This is a closed area.’

They were insubstantial, less real than the smithy, their voices thinned by his retreat from their time so that he paid them no heed and they, out of concern for his agitated state more than
displeasure at his attitude, came round to him and jarred him back to the present, not by words but, when those failed, by the touch of their hands.

He heard one of them say, ‘Is there anything wrong?’

Confused, he replied, ‘That’s my wife down there,’ before he came fully back to the present and caution rushed in to warn him.

They sat him in the back of the car then, half official, half solicitous, and a sergeant came to occupy the front, an intelligent man with quick, observant eyes and a twist to his face that gave
him an accidental smile on the side that faced Ferney.

‘What makes you think that’s your wife?’ said the sergeant. Ferney recognized one of the constables outside the car, but he didn’t know this man at all, a man with a
voice from somewhere else.

‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

The sergeant nodded. ‘But you did say it, so I do have to ask you.’

Ferney nodded but stayed silent and the sergeant considered him. ‘Something made you say it.’

They weren’t going to let him just shrug it off, that was clear. ‘My wife disappeared, you see?’ he said. ‘I suddenly thought that might be her down there.’

‘When would this have been?’ asked the sergeant gently.

‘July the tenth 1933,’ said Ferney immediately.

The sergeant raised his eyebrows, reached for his notebook.

‘I’d better write this down,’ he said. ‘Could I start with your name?’

‘Ferney Miller,’ he said. ‘That is, William Miller, number twelve, Castle Orchard Close in Penselwood.’

‘And what was your wife’s name?’

Ferney had to think about that for a moment. ‘Jennifer.’

‘And when you say she disappeared . . .?’

‘That’s what she did. She went out one day and she didn’t come back.’

‘Did you tell anybody?’

‘Of course I did. I told everyone. We went out looking for her for weeks on end.’

‘But did you tell anyone official? The police, I mean.’

Ferney thought back. ‘Yes, I did. It wasn’t like today, you know. I sent a boy with a message to Wincanton and someone came out on a bicycle in the end. Didn’t do any
good.’

The sergeant thought a minute, unclipped the microphone and called his headquarters.

‘I have a gentleman here,’ he said, ‘thinks these remains they’ve uncovered might be his wife. He says he reported her disappearance. Can you do a check for me?
Over.’

He knew what their reply was going to be and looked as though he was savouring it. The voice on the speaker was businesslike. ‘Is there a date on that? Over.’

‘Yes, 1933, July the tenth. Name of Miller.’

There was a short silence. ‘Confirm 1933. That is three three? Over.’

‘I say again one niner three three, over.’

The voice became a little less formal. ‘Sarge, where do you suggest we start looking for that?’

‘I haven’t a clue. Try the archives. They must keep the files somewhere.’

He signed off, turned back to Ferney with a quizzical look, but before he could continue a PC came to the car and knocked on the window. He excused himself and got out to talk.

The window wasn’t completely shut, but the policemen clearly didn’t expect someone as old as Ferney to have keen hearing. He could just about follow their conversation.

‘The foreman says the old boy was always coming down, looking in the hole. Wouldn’t say why,’ said the constable. ‘A bit barmy, he reckoned. Nearly got himself run over
by a truck once. Oh, and chummy down the hole says the skeleton’s female, probably a woman in her twenties.’

That was it. The confirmation that he didn’t really need.

‘Any idea how long it’s been down there yet?’

‘He said more than ten years, less than a hundred. He’ll need a lab test to get nearer than that.’

‘No idea of the cause of death, I don’t suppose?’

‘Nothing obvious. The skull’s intact.’

Ferney thought about that. All that really mattered now was whether she had suffered.

The sergeant got back in the car and his attitude showed he was taking it more seriously now. ‘Look, Mr Miller,’ he said, ‘if there’s anything in this, we’ll have
to go through the protocol later and get it all down, but just to cut corners, would you mind telling me the story first?’

‘I don’t really know what else to say. She went out in the morning saying she was going to see her aunt in Chaffeymoor and she didn’t come back at lunchtime like she was going
to, so I went down to find her and her aunt said she’d never even got there.’