House of the Lost (21 page)

Catherine looked back at the river. In the glowering light of the storm, from out of the unravelling towel, a little starfish hand came upwards as if its owner was trying to hold on to the world it was about to leave. Catherine cried out at once, and darted to the edge of the landing stage, then felt Dr Innes grab her arm and pull her back.

‘Sister, it’s dead,’ he said. ‘I promise you, there’s no question about it.’

‘But it moved!’ cried Catherine, kneeling on the edge of the timbers, trying to stretch her hand out to the small shape. It was too late, of course; the child was already being swept away. Soon the water would close over the small pale body.

‘It was the river’s undertow,’ he said, still holding onto her. ‘Catherine, please believe me, that’s all it was.’

Catherine was still staring at the dark river. How would it feel to drown in the cold black water, with the angry storm all round you? The baby was becoming a pale blur in the rainy darkness, already swept out into the main undertow of the river. Catherine suddenly said, ‘Charmery, you can’t let him go like this. Not into that darkness without even a name.’

‘But . . .’

‘He never had a life,’ said Catherine, beyond caring what Charmery thought of her. ‘Give him that, at least. Let me say the words of baptism.’

‘That’s for Catholics. I’m not a Catholic.’

‘Does it matter?’ cried Catherine, angrily.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘If it makes you feel better.’

‘Yes, it does. And it might make you feel better when you get on the other side of all this. What d’you want to call him?’

‘I don’t care.’ But her eyes were on the dark swirling river.

‘It’s St David’s Day,’ said Catherine suddenly. ‘Can we call him David?’

‘I suppose so.’ And then, with sudden entreaty, ‘Yes – please call him that.’

Catherine turned back to the river. ‘I baptize thee, David, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’

As she pronounced the brief words, the small shape vanished completely, and Catherine stared at the rain-misted river. David, she thought. His body would probably never be found. He would lie on the river bed of the Chet for ever and no one else would even know he had existed. I’ll know, though, thought Catherine. I won’t forget about you, David.

Somehow they got Charmery back to the house and onto a sofa in the long, low-ceilinged sitting room. Catherine brought a bowl of warm water and soap for her to wash. ‘And could I make tea or soup or something?’ she said.

‘A good idea,’ said Dr Innes. ‘You do that while I deal with Charmery.’

Catherine explored the kitchen, discovering that Charmery had stocked the fridge and larder very thoroughly indeed. The fridge was stacked with cheese and eggs and vacuum packs of ham, and when Catherine opened the big chest freezer it was filled to the brim with prepared meals and bags of oven chips and pizzas. The shelves of the deep, old-fashioned larder held rows of tinned fruit, meat and soup. It looked as if Charmery had intended to hide out here until after the birth.

Catherine opened two large cans of mushroom soup, and removed a packet of bread rolls from the freezer. She was just putting the rolls under the grill to thaw when Michael Innes came into the kitchen.

‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘The afterbirth’s out, and although I’m not a gynaecologist, I don’t think there are any complications.’ He watched Catherine for a moment, then said, ‘The birth of that child should be properly registered and also the death.’ He paused, then choosing his words carefully, he said, ‘But there are times when a doctor has to take things onto his own conscience.’

‘And ignore the law?’

‘Yes. No crime has been committed. The child was dead when it went into the river.’

‘You promise that?’ Catherine was still seeing that last uncertain movement.

‘Yes, I promise. So,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to report any of this. Only you’ll have to agree. And you’ll have to be comfortable about it.’

Catherine stirred the soup, not speaking, trying to sort out her thoughts.

‘When she put the child in the river,’ said Michael Innes, ‘I think she was trying to – to erase the whole thing. She’ll probably realize later that it won’t ever be erased, but for the moment . . . Catherine,’ he said, with a pleading note in his voice, ‘please agree to this. She’s extremely young.’

Catherine wanted to say that Charmery was only a little younger than she was herself, and no matter how young that might be, she had still managed to have a lover and give birth to a child.

‘It’s all a front, that flippancy,’ said Innes, as she still did not speak. ‘Under it she’s distraught at losing the child. It meant a lot to her – I think her cousin Theo meant a lot to her.’

‘I know he did.’ Catherine looked at him. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘If you believe it’s the right thing to keep it all secret, I’ll trust your judgement.’

A wry smile touched his face. ‘Conventual obedience, Sister Catherine? I would have thought you struggled with that a bit.’

‘I do struggle with it,’ said Catherine. ‘But I think this is more doctor/nurse obedience. You have more knowledge – more experience – than I do.’

They looked at one another. ‘Your conscience would be clear?’ he said.

‘Yes, I think so. Will Charmery be all right? I mean – physically?’

‘There’s nothing I can’t deal with over the next week or two. I’d rather she came into the local infirmary to get everything double-checked. I’ll try to persuade her, but I think she’ll refuse.’ He paused, then said, ‘Thank you, Catherine,’ and went quietly out.

When Catherine carried the soup into the sitting room Charmery was saying, ‘No. I absolutely won’t go to hospital. If you try to make me I’ll think of something to stop you. I mean it. Anyway, you can’t force me.’

‘No, I can’t. But the law—’

‘Sod the law,’ said Charmery, ‘the child never existed.’ Catherine heard the vulnerable note in her voice and knew Dr Innes had been right about the flippancy being armour.

‘If you won’t go to hospital, will you stay quietly here for the next week or so?’ said Dr Innes. ‘Rest on your bed or on this sofa, and let me call at the house each day to make sure you’re all right? Perhaps even let Sister Catherine look in as well?’ He glanced at Catherine who immediately said, ‘Of course I’ll do that.’

‘Well, OK, then,’ said Charmery. ‘Is that soup? Thank God. I’m utterly famished. Nobody tells you that giving birth is such a hungry business.’

As they drank the soup, Michael Innes said, ‘What I don’t understand is why you were here on your own in the first place. Surely your family—’

‘None of them knew,’ said Charmery. ‘Certainly none of them know I’m here. Just before Christmas I forged a letter from my ma to the school saying I was going to America with my family at the start of January and I’d be away for a month. The school was fine with it – they think travel’s educational, and it was my last half year there anyway and I wasn’t bothering much about A levels. I told my parents I was going on a long school trip – St Petersburg and all those tzar places. They believed me; they believe anything I tell them.’

Catherine thought people had probably believed anything this girl told them ever since she was born; she thought it had probably resulted in Charmery being spoilt.

‘It was only in December that I started to look a bit, well, chubbier,’ Charmery said. ‘But I wore really tight girdles and it was winter so I could wear loose sweaters most of the time. Oh, and I pretended to have a torn ligament in my knee, so I could duck out of games and swimming.’

‘But the school couldn’t have believed you’d be in America all this time,’ said Catherine, ‘not since January until now.’

‘No, but I wrote halfway through January saying I’d picked up a virus while I was there and I’d be away until the end of the summer term. I got a friend in Boston to send it for me so it would get there by airmail. I told her I was having a wild fling with a new boyfriend. Actually, of course, I was here at Fenn all the time.’

‘Since January?’

‘Yes. I travelled by train – I couldn’t use my car because I wasn’t supposed to be here at all, you see. I got a train to Norwich and bought masses of food there – packs and packs of frozen stuff and about a zillion tins, and long-life milk and stuff.’

‘I saw it,’ said Catherine. ‘If nothing else, you won’t starve out here.’

‘I got a taxi here and the taxi-driver helped me to carry everything in – it was a Norwich taxi firm so he had no idea who I was. And I’ve been here ever since. It’s been pretty boring, actually. I’ve never been on my own for so long – I’ve done nothing but read and sketch and watch TV and DVDs, can you imagine the tedium?’

‘But the birth,’ began Catherine.

‘I was going back to Norwich in time for that. I was going to order a taxi and book into one of the big anonymous hotels – a Travellodge or something – then dial an ambulance when it all started. It would have been an emergency admission, and I was going to give a false name. Only it happened before it was meant to.’

‘What were you doing in the boathouse anyway?’ said Innes.

‘I like it there,’ said Charmery, off-handedly, but Catherine heard a defensive note behind the words.

Dr Innes seemed to hear it as well. He said, ‘Fair enough. But listen, what about the child? Once you’d got yourself to a hospital and given birth, what would you have done about it afterwards?’

‘You hear of people walking out of hospitals leaving babies behind,’ said Charmery. ‘That’s what I’d have done.’

‘Would you?’

‘Yes. Yes!’ she said angrily.

‘It’s a mad plan,’ said Dr Innes, ‘but it might just have worked.’

‘I’d have made it work,’ said Charmery. ‘I didn’t want it to happen like it did this afternoon and I know you think I’m utterly soulless. But I dealt with it in the best way I could, and as it is, only the three of us know what happened. Will you both promise me never to tell anyone? No one else must ever know the child existed.’

‘Yes, I promise,’ said Dr Innes after a moment.

‘Catherine?’

‘Yes,’ said Catherine. ‘Yes, I promise, as well.’

The present

Theo awoke on the morning after his talk at St Luke’s feeling mentally and physically restored. He refused to be spooked by his discovery that Matthew was real, that he was a man who had sat on the Chet’s banks and in the grounds of the convent, and drawn what was in front of him. He would find explanations for everything that had been happening, even that grisly document on the computer.

The sun streamed into Fenn House as he ate breakfast, after which he made a pot of coffee and headed for the dining room and the computer. He had saved the confession onto the hard drive, and he was considering the possibility that someone had got into the house and coolly sat at the dining table and typed it while he was virtually unconscious. This was a pretty wild theory, but it was just about credible, although Theo had not yet worked out who the mystery typist might be. But it would not have taken very long to actually type it. Presumably it had been pre-written. Could it have been prepared on another computer, saved onto a disk or a memory stick, and uploaded onto Theo’s laptop? That would be the work of a few minutes and it would not need a particularly deep knowledge of computers. But that meant the document would have to have been saved, not only on the laptop – which it had not been – but also on the original computer – which would have meant leaving evidence. Whoever had typed it would surely not have risked that. It could have been hand-written and then typed but that meant he had been drugged beforehand. Was that really likely? Something in the casserole after all? Theo shivered at the thought that someone could have been watching him so closely, and remembered that the someone had also known about the sedatives prescribed in the summer.

And what about the child? he asked himself. The post mortem report had been clear that Charmery had given birth. Had this faceless watcher found out about that, as well? How? Theo was as sure as he could be that the family had not known – they could never have kept something like that to themselves. Could a journalist, hell-bent on scraping copy out of Charmery’s murder, have gained access to the report?

After he had finished his breakfast he hunted out a phone directory to find the number of a local locksmith. There was only one firm, but they were helpful and efficient and could send someone that afternoon to fit new, heavy-duty security locks. When Theo gave the address, there was a sudden pause at the other end. ‘You know the place, I expect?’ said Theo.

The voice said, rather apologetically, that yes, they did know it, bit of a landmark really, Fenn House. No, there was no problem about the work, unless Mr Kendal wanted anything out of the ordinary. They did not keep a very large stock.

Theo did not care if they fitted steel grilles and dug a moat round the place if it would keep out prowlers who typed bizarre documents on the computer while he was zonked from a spiked casserole, but he said he simply wanted the house made as secure as possible with whatever was to hand.

‘Fair enough. We’ll be there at three,’ said the voice and rang off.