Ferney (26 page)

‘How long had you been married at the time?’

‘Nine years. Got married when we were seventeen. Known each other all our lives.’

‘And had you had a row or anything like that?’

‘Did I kill her, you mean?’ Ferney snorted. ‘We never had a row about anything.’

‘No, I didn’t mean that at all. I just meant was there any reason why she might have decided to leave?’

‘She wouldn’t have left me,’ said Ferney simply.

The sergeant thought about the foreman’s words – ‘he was always coming down, looking in the hole’. Caution told him to keep them to himself, just in case this calm,
pleasant old man should turn out to be the least likely of murderers, but that still left an obvious question.

‘What made you think this might be her?’

Ferney was starting to fret at the cramped confines of the car. ‘Can I show you how it was?’ he asked. ‘Out in the fresh air?’

They got out and he led the sergeant a few yards down the verge next to the excavation. ‘There was a blacksmith’s shop here,’ he said. ‘Been a smithy here for a hundred
and fifty years since the turnpike came. Tatty old place, it was, just about on its last legs by that time. Trade was dying out with the cars.’ He looked round and hacked a heel into the
ground. ‘The door would have been just about here. It was a long, low, tumbledown sort of a place. The forge was at the other end. He gave up on the blacksmith work in 1935 – turned it
into a petrol garage instead. He put a shed on the end, all timber and iron and great signs all over it.’

‘You wouldn’t know there’d ever been a garage here,’ said the sergeant, looking along the verge.

‘Didn’t last long. No sign of it now. Anyway the smith, he’d dug this ruddy great hole at the back. Said it was going to be his toilet, you see, but he never finished it off.
Left it like that for months – but then he filled it in again.’

‘Where was that exactly?’

Ferney gestured down towards the excavation. ‘Just there. You can see the marks of it all the way down the side of the trench, right where they found her.’

‘So why should your wife’s remains be here, Mr Miller?’

‘The blacksmith was called Cochrane,’ said Ferney slowly. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to blame him entirely, I’ve come to think. He had a bad time in the war, the Great
War that is. He was a stoker in a ship that was hit at Gallipoli. Shell-shocked. He was on the rum.’ He turned his eyes on the sergeant. ‘But he wanted my girl, you see? Wanted her so
badly it made no difference that she was married to me. He went right on pestering her and bothering her for years.’

‘You’re saying this Cochrane killed your wife and put her body down the hole?’

‘That’s what he did,’ said Ferney, nodding. ‘I’ve thought that for years and now here’s the proof. He filled in the hole that day, you see?’

‘Didn’t you tell people that?’

‘Oh yes, I told everybody. I wanted them all to help find her. We even dug down in the hole but they wouldn’t believe me when I told them how deep it had been and they gave up too
soon.’ He nodded towards the figure in the trench. ‘You can see for yourself. Who’d have thought she would be down so far?’

The sergeant was a Londoner, but he’d transferred to a more rural force because he had one great weakness as a policeman – a vivid imagination which all too often compelled him to
put himself in the position of those he had to deal with in everyday life. It occurred to him that the old boy didn’t seem quite as upset as he might have done, but then, he told himself,
he’d had not far off sixty years to get over it.

The PC by the car shouted for him and he asked Ferney to wait. There was a photographer working down in the trench now and Ferney saw the flashes, subliminal reinforcements of the afternoon sun.
On the road, cars were slowing down as they passed the scene, unsure what to make of the police cars and the tapes. Ferney wondered for a minute at his own detachment. Six months earlier he would
have been distraught. During that terrible time when the men first started digging out the hole for the road junction, he had been in a constant ferment of anxiety, unable to stay away from the
hole in case he should miss the evidence he had sought for such a long time. Now he took advantage of the sergeant’s absence to walk back to the edge of the hole and look in. No one bothered
him. The photographer was packing his gear away and the man in the overalls was picking the bones out of the earth and putting them, one at a time, into a bag. It meant nothing now, just tidying up
some old rubbish, the remains of a suit of clothes.

She had come back, that was the point. By coming back she had chased away the demon that had sat on his back for fifty-seven years. That demon was guilt because every day of every month of every
one of those years, Ferney had wondered where he had condemned her spirit to go, so alone, when he sent the water flowing in to wash out Effie Mullard and in doing so broke their long life-line.
Terrible visions of limbo had troubled him all that time, much more than the death itself. It was the first time he had felt truly bereaved, but now her tenacious spirit was back by some miracle he
did not yet understand and those bones down there brought no tears, only regrets and the vestiges of tired anger.

The sergeant came back to him. ‘Well, Mr Miller,’ he said, ‘there’s some people down in our cellar with dusty clothes thanks to you.’

‘Did you find it?’

‘Yes, we found it. Lucky the mice hadn’t got it. Just as you said except it doesn’t list your wife’s name as Jennifer.’

‘Did it say Gally?’

‘Yes.’

‘That was what you might call a pet name. She was born Jennifer.’

‘Now, identification’s going to be a bit difficult, but you’d better tell me whatever you can about this man Cochrane.’

‘I don’t know that much. I had a set-to with him and he stayed away from me after that. I tried to have it out with him, but he’d run for it every time he saw me. A big man he
was, much bigger than me.’

‘He was older than you?’

‘Oh yes, ten years older, I’d say.’

‘So, he’d be how old now?’

‘I’m eighty-three so he’d be ninety-three.’

‘The chances are he’s no longer with us,’ said the sergeant.

‘Oh no, he’s not. He’s been dead for years.’

‘Ah, right,’ said the sergeant in relief. ‘You know that for certain, do you?’

‘Yes, I do. He died in fifty-nine.’

‘Do you know where?’

‘Here. Up in the village.’ Ferney might have left it at that but he wanted to explain that Cochrane was a man of violence. ‘Someone killed him, see?’

‘This man Cochrane was murdered?’

The sergeant sounded incredulous.

‘Well, killed. Self-defence more like. Seemed fair enough to me. He was half-Danish. They’re a violent lot. I’ve always had trouble with the Danes.’

The sergeant frowned. ‘Did they catch the man?’

‘Didn’t have to. He didn’t try to run anywhere. Lad called Billy. We used to call him Billy Bunter. Wasn’t his fault. Cochrane was always attacking him.’

‘I’ll find all this in the records, will I?’

‘Should do.’

‘We’d better leave it there for now,’ the sergeant said, scratching his head. ‘I can’t say I’ve come across one quite like this before. I suppose we’ll
have to look through the old files and get back to you.’ He stood there in silence for a minute, clearly feeling there was something more he ought to say.

Ferney looked again at the ditch and the scatter of old bones. The man in overalls tugged a femur out of the side of the hole and Ferney tried unsuccessfully to see a connection between the bone
and the memory of the living woman. Instead he only felt a vague worry about the present Gally. They must be due back. He’d been missing her.

The sergeant came to what he wanted to say. ‘We’ll have to be in touch again when the lab reports come through.’ He paused. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said,
‘if it is your wife, I mean.’

‘It was a long time ago,’ said Ferney vaguely.

‘It must have been lonely for you.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Ferney, then he looked up and saw Gally and her spidery husband walking up to the other side of the pit, joining the crowd. Gally looked golden brown and beautiful and
the life came pouring out from her and drove the last possible sadness away from the spare parts down there in the hole. He was tempted to go straight to her, but he needed a bit more time. He felt
that a sad chapter had been finally closed and knew that he’d been given a warning – a warning that they must both stick to the old plan and together make sure that what now followed
was far, far better.

Gally closed her eyes as they drove in through the gate. Three weeks away, three weeks of stored-up surprises. The healing of the house, previously robbed of dramatic impact by
her constant presence, should by now have leapt ahead. She wanted to gain the fullest effect by keeping her eyes shut until after the car stopped so that she could take it all in at once, but she
didn’t get the chance. She felt the car sway diagonally into the uneven yard then start the swing round to face the house. That was when Mike uttered an exclamation of astonishment and she
couldn’t help opening her eyes to see what had prompted it.

At first she looked in the wrong direction. The house basked in the evening sun, looking even better than she had hoped it would. The roof and the front wall were finished, so that for the first
time it gave an illusion of completion and yes, the builders had listened to all that she’d said about the need to be sympathetic to the structure. White primer shone where two new window
frames had been set in to replace terminally rotten originals, but apart from that everything was harmonious and once they were painted she knew they too would blend in perfectly with the weathered
appearance of the rest of it. She took in all of that in the briefest of glances, checking rapidly for the source of Mike’s displeasure, then she realized he wasn’t looking at the house
at all, but off to the side towards the Bag Stone. Even then it took her a second to work out why he was surprised. The stone was in its usual place, leaning at a gentle angle from the edge of the
stream towards the valley beyond the house just as it had always been.

‘Who did that?’ said Mike incredulously and then she was equally astonished at the sudden realization that it shouldn’t be there at all. When they left it had still been lying
flat, partly buried by a long accumulation of earth and leafmould.

‘The builders must have done it.’

‘But why? We didn’t tell them to.’

‘Well, no, I suppose we didn’t . . . but we did say we were going to do it some time, didn’t we?’

‘Some time, maybe, but not now. I told them exactly what we wanted them to do while we were away. I gave them a list, damn it.’

‘Perhaps they did it all.’

‘Perhaps they did, but they didn’t even ask us where we wanted the bloody thing.’

‘It’s all right, love, it’s in the right place. That’s where . . .’ She was about to say ‘where it’s always been’, but changed it in time.
‘That’s where it is in the picture.’ It wasn’t quite, but she knew with some inner certainty that was only due to artist’s licence.

‘He’s behind this, isn’t he?’ said Mike grimly. ‘He’s been in and somehow he’s persuaded them to do it.’

It seemed likely, though she didn’t want to admit it.

‘Let’s go and see what’s been going on in the house,’ she said quickly.

She went inside, hoping he would follow, hurt and sorrowful that all the conflict they had left behind had stayed here to come leaping out of the shadows and chase away the holiday calm. If it
was Ferney’s idea, it was hardly diplomatic. She hoped the builders had simply taken it into their heads to do it as some sort of a surprise, but she knew that if they had it would be
different, standing there the wrong way round or at the wrong angle, not just perfectly so. The change inside was startling enough to provide a diversion. The upstairs floor was in place, new
boards on the old beams, and they’d started making good the damaged sections of plasterwork in the downstairs walls. The new staircase was in and now that they could walk freely upstairs
across defined, reliable floors it had begun to feel like a habitable house again. She found herself longing for it to be finished, to be able to sit down in a comfortable chair in her parlour and
look out at the sunshine.

Mike had followed her and came up the stairs behind her. ‘Not bad,’ he said grudgingly.

‘It’s better than that,’ she said. ‘I think they’ve got on really well.’

‘I’m glad they didn’t spend
all
their time putting stones up.’

‘Don’t go on about that. What’s wrong with you?’ she said, not as gently as usual. ‘They’ve done much more than I expected and anyway I think it’s
really great to have the stone back there. You should be pleased.’

He looked slightly ashamed of himself. ‘I would be. It’s just that it’s
our
house and I want things done the way
we
want.’

‘Well, I’m half of the
our
and the
we
and my half likes it. Come and look at it with me.’

She took his hand, dry and long-fingered with brittle papyrus sunburn circles crumbling fragments of skin into her palm, and led him out to the stone. The geometry of the house felt complete and
satisfactory to her as though the stone that faced them focused it all. When Mike had argued against putting it up again he’d said it might look fake and fanciful, but it could never look
either of those things. It held mystery and gravity and it was not to be approached lightly.

‘I don’t know about this,’ said Mike as they walked slowly towards it. ‘It’s not very . . .’ he searched for a word ‘. . . cosy.’

‘You wouldn’t want it to be, would you?’

‘Don’t you feel it? It’s sort of . . . severe, I suppose.’

‘I don’t mind that. It’s what it is.’

They stopped short of it and the stone loomed above them, a little taller than Mike at its oblique tip. Gally wanted to touch it, perhaps even to press herself against it to welcome it back, but
Mike’s doubtful presence inhibited her.