The Unseen (50 page)

I found your bag, which was brought back to the house. I found what was in it, and Albert’s binoculars. I
know
your secret. The secret you will go to gaol to protect. Are you willing to die for it? They might hang you! And what use is your reputation as a theosophist when you have lost all standing as a man? Will your precious Society still have you, when you are a convicted killer? I think not. I think not. So why persist in this silence? What good does it do you? The date of your trial approaches. There isn’t much time. If you are hanged, what then? Is that what you wish – do you think that even if your life ends now, your name will live on for ever? That you will always be the theosophist who captured proof of the existence of elementals? I tell you now, it is not worth it. Already there are some who denounce your work, and the pictures you took, and their numbers will grow. You will be forgotten, as will your work. Speak out, and there is time to start again! Your father would rather have a failed theosophist or even a fraudster for a son than a murderer; I am utterly convinced of it
.

At one point I thought you noble, I thought you sacrificed yourself for Albert. But this was a foolish thing to think. Why would you? Everything you did was for yourself, from the moment you arrived at my home, and turned it upside down. Oh, why did you come at all! How I wish that you hadn’t, and that still Cat lived, even if she had run off with her George. She was my cousin, did you know that? She wrote it to me in a letter, which she meant for me to find once she had made her escape. Perhaps a while ago I would not have believed that my uncle would sire a child with one of his servants, and then place that child in my household without ever telling me. Now I think there is nothing men will not do, should it suit them. There is nothing they will not do
.

I believe I am with child. The symptoms are becoming harder and harder to deny. I thought I should tell you, though I have no idea what you will make of this news. If it will have any effect on you at all. I myself am quite destroyed by confusion and joy and doubt. Joy – how can there be any joy in this house any more? Ever again? Joy or laughter or merriment. All I wanted was a child, and now I come to see how true the adage that we should be careful what we wish for. Albert is like a ghost. He chills the room. He chills me. My own husband. I have not told him about the baby. How can I? Though soon enough he’ll see it. What then? Will I be beaten out of existence too? Will that be the end of me? This cannot go on – we cannot go on like this. Something must change. The truth must come out. I can’t carry this burden on my own; it’s too much for me. I can feel myself breaking with the strain of it, day by day. I have hidden all the things I found, that evil morning. They remain, and they tell their own story. The truth is waiting for you to
speak out
, Mr Durrant. If you do, I will help you. I swear it. I will tell them of my part in this, and Albert’s, and I will take my due. Perhaps they would be merciful
to me, knowing that I acted out of fear, and love for my husband. Perhaps not. Oh, but what then of our child? What would become of him? I do not know what to do. Help me
.

Hester Canning

14

2011

Leah spent a week reading the police files on the Cat Morley case, and searching the papers later in 1911 for details of Robin Durrant’s trial. She stared at the photograph of him that appeared each time the story was reported; at the elegantly curved top lip that she remembered from the dead soldier, so many miles away in Belgium. It was unsettling to recognise that the two faces, living and dead, were one. He was found guilty of wilful murder; the conclusion that it had been a crime of passion, since Cat’s reputation was not good and she was found wearing only her slip. As such, the jury recommended mercy and he was sentenced to life imprisonment rather than hanging. Only one man seemed to have had any doubts in what was otherwise treated as an open and shut case. The Home Office’s man, Professor Palmer, noted that there was much less blood staining on Cat’s slip than he would have expected had she been wearing only that when she was attacked and killed; and that if their meeting had been a passionate one, a tryst gone awry, then he found it strange that she had arranged to meet her other lover, George Hobson, and to elope with him that same morning. And also that she had removed her dress carefully, and folded it up neatly. Hardly the actions of a couple in the throes of passion. There were also the fragments of glass in the girl’s face, which never were accounted for.

Added into the file, like an afterthought, was an extra statement from Mrs Sophie Bell, the cook and housekeeper at The Rectory. Made several weeks after the inquest and shortly before Robin Durrant’s trial, Mrs Bell stated that she had found a bloodied towel
in the kitchen at The Rectory on the morning of the murder, and that it had subsequently disappeared. Asked why she hadn’t reported this before, the woman said she had been too shocked and upset at the time, and had forgotten all about it until later on. She also stated that the vicar and his wife had been most peculiar, and much changed since the killing; although she stressed that they had always been good and kind employers, and that the alteration in them might be purely ascribable to shock. There was a memo from Professor Palmer, suggesting that the statement be included in the trial evidence, and that further investigation be made into The Rectory and its occupants, but this recommendation was not acted upon.

Reading the files, Leah felt a tremendous sense of urgency. She knew where the glass in Cat’s face had come from – from the murder weapon, Albert Canning’s binoculars. She knew that the reason there hadn’t been much blood on Cat’s slip was because she’d been dressed as an elemental when she was killed. And she knew why the vicar, whose journal reflected a man rapidly losing his grip on reality, would have lashed out at the girl. He had been duped, surely and completely. Finding this out must have rocked him to his very core, and tipped him over the edge of reason. She knew why Hester Canning, desperate at first to stop any suspicion falling on her husband, had hidden the evidence she’d found at The Rectory on the day of the murder; and why thereafter, as she came to suspect her husband, she had been tortured by guilt and fear. Leah felt like running to somebody in authority with what she knew; telling the police, the press, anybody. As if she could change these events, a hundred years later. As if the real killer could be brought to justice, and Hester not forced to live out her shadowed life with him.

The newspapers, by the time of the trial, had managed to find photographs to go with the story. They printed the Cannings’ wedding portrait, taken in 1909. The couple stared serenely from the page, two pairs of pale eyes in soft young faces, the irises so
clear that even in black and white, it was obvious that they must have been light blue or green. Hester was smiling slightly, glowing with contentment. The vicar, who was wed in his clerical dress, had an air of mild anxiety and no smile on his lips. Leah stared at the woman’s face with a feeling of recognition. And there was a picture of Cat Morley, the murdered housemaid, whose role as the elemental was never publicly discussed, even if there had been those with suspicions at the time. It was a poor shot, taken from a distance at the Cold Ash Holt fête for the coronation in June, 1911. An array of finely dressed ladies, including Hester Canning, had paused in their revelry to have their picture taken. Bunting and parasols, tea tables laid with bright white cloths and three-tiered cake stands. And, behind them, a short, slight girl in a grey dress, with a clean apron tied tightly around her and a soft cotton cap on her head. She was holding a silver teapot, as if paused in the act of filling the china cups laid out in front of her. It was not a good picture, and too distant for her face to be clear. Short locks of black hair came out from under her cap, and her face was set in a scowl which might have been down to the bright sunlight, but might not. Dark brows drawn down in a thin, angular face.
The elemental
, Leah thought, with a pang of anguish for the girl.

The more Leah read, the more Hester’s letters made sense; facts and references dropping into place. She began to write her article, which grew and grew, and became as much about depicting the truth that Hester Canning had so longed for as resurrecting the dead girl, whose role in it all had never before been properly understood. And as she stared at the Cannings’ faces, and went back to Hester’s letters to Robin Durrant, something else became abundantly clear.

She was interrupted on Friday afternoon by a phone call from Mark.

‘Hello, stranger. Are you ignoring me now that you’ve got your story, or what?’ he said.

Leah smiled, glanced at the clock and realised that her legs were
numb, her back aching. ‘No! Sorry, Mark. Not at all. I’ve just been so caught up in filling in all the gaps … I have some rather significant news for you, actually. I was saving it until I could give you the finished piece, but perhaps I should tell you sooner.’ She stood up from her table in the reading room and stretched.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Oh, it’s far too juicy to tell you over the phone. Let’s have some lunch at the pub – but first, meet me at the church in Cold Ash Holt. Say, in an hour?’

‘All right then.’

‘And bring that picture of your grandfather, Thomas.’

The day was mild and blowy, a damp wind nudging at them and trembling the grass as they walked along the rows of gravestones surrounding the church of St Peter. Leah had a bunch of flowers underneath her arm, the cellophane crackling softly. White lilies and pink cherry blossoms; a big, extravagant spray.

‘If you’re looking for Hester and Albert, they’re over there,’ Mark said, pointing to an oblong tomb near a vast and brooding yew tree.

‘We’ll get to them. I’ll need a photo of their graves for the article. First there’s someone else I want to see.’

‘This article of yours is getting pretty chunky. Maybe you should turn it into a book?’ he said.

Leah paused, a smile spreading over her face. ‘That is an absolutely brilliant idea. Why don’t I? I’ve got enough to write about. Theosophy, a fairy hoax, a murder, a miscarriage of justice …’

‘Was it a miscarriage, though? After all, it was the theosophist’s fault she was killed, from what you’ve told me.’

‘Yes, but the vicar should have faced justice too, for what he did. Not just your great-grandfather,’ Leah said, and waited while Mark unpicked this remark.

‘What do you mean “the vicar, not just my great-grandfather”? The vicar
was
my great-grandfather,’ he said.

Leah shook her head, smiling. ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘What links those two letters Robin Durrant kept? What does Hester mention in both of them?’

‘Er … doubts and fears, suspicions … begging for information …’

‘But what else?’ she pressed. Mark shook his head. ‘Her
child
, Mark. She talks about her child in both of them. Firstly that she’s about to give birth, and that she thinks it’s a boy; secondly at length about him as a toddler.’

‘Maybe, but so what? She probably talked about him in the other letters she sent as well.’

‘Perhaps, perhaps not. And maybe he didn’t mean to lose the others. Why would she mention her child at all, to a man convicted of murder who she’s clearly uncomfortable writing to, and when she clearly has more important things to write to him about?’

‘I don’t know … aren’t all new mothers a bit obsessed with their kids?’ he countered.

Leah took a printed page from her back pocket. ‘I found this in the newspaper archive – it’s Hester and Albert on their wedding day.’

‘Oh, so that’s what they looked like. That’s great,’ Mark said.

‘Did you bring the picture of Thomas? Hester’s son? Can I see it?’ Leah asked. Mark pulled it from his coat pocket and handed it to her. She held the two portraits up side by side. The flimsy printout flapped a little in the breeze. ‘What do you notice?’

Mark obediently studied the two pictures for a while, and then shrugged.

‘I don’t know. What am I supposed to be seeing?’

‘The
eyes
, Mark. Any A-level biology student will tell you – it’s almost impossible for two blue-eyed people to have a brown-eyed child. Thomas wasn’t
Albert’s
son. He was Robin Durrant’s.’

‘My God … are you sure?’

‘I’m sure. They must have had a fling or something. Something that of course ended badly when the murder and all the rest of it
happened. The CWGC can do a DNA test for you, if you like. Your great-grandfather was a theosophist, was convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, and was sent to fight in the trenches like a lot of convicts. And he died there, with all of his secrets intact. Until now.’

They walked on for a bit longer, still searching, until Leah’s eyes lit upon the name she’d been looking for.

‘Here! Here she is,’ she said. But her excitement quickly faded into something more subdued. It was a small gravestone, so weathered and furred with lichen that it was easy to overlook. It sagged sideways with a slightly weary air, and the turf in front of it was tussocked and neglected. Just visible were chiselled words, the name and the epitaph.
Catherine Morley, April 1889 – August 1911. Safe in the Arms of the Lord
. ‘Her nickname was Black Cat, according to the papers,’ Leah said.

‘Why?’ Mark asked, as they crouched down by the stone. He put out his hand and brushed gritty lichen from her name with his thumb.

‘Who knows? Some things are just lost, after so much time. It could have been a slur on her character,’ Leah sighed. She put the bouquet of flowers on the grave and they looked out of place, too bright.

‘God, she was only twenty-two. So young. You haven’t got anything else to spring on me, have you? Cat Morley wasn’t my long-lost cousin or something?’ Mark smiled.

Leah shook her head. ‘No. Nothing like that.’