There were no pictures of Nell. No portraits or photographs. I had not even paid tuppence for her to sit for a charcoal sketch at the village fete. I had always considered that kind of thing a vanity, but it was something I came to regret.
Over the years, I had described my daughter’s appearance to the police many times, but there was little I could tell them about Nell. She was a child of average height, with chestnut curls a little looser than my own, but these descriptions made her sound like hundreds of other girls. There were things about Nell that I could not describe, of course – the little scar on her cheek that would crease into a dimple when she smiled, the strange hooded look that came over her when she was concentrating on one of her cheap novels, or the way her lips wrinkled before she laughed – but these were things that I would only recall briefly before the memory would fade. I think that is why I sometimes saw Nell again – it was my way of reminding myself of what she looked like as I had nothing to put in a silver frame or carry close to me.
There was only one other way I could remember Nell, and that was with the person who shared some of my memories, the one other who shared my pain.
* * *
Roy had left Oak Cottage before midday. Nell and I had watched his portly frame waddle down our short garden path, on to the road that edged the village green, and across the grass to the police station on the other side. I’d then sat for a while thinking of the previous evening’s events and the sleeping memories they had disturbed – the face of Iris and the flicker of the projector, the whispers of ‘murder’ and the accusing finger pointing to the screen – and then of my discussion with Roy, which had reduced them all to a newspaper article and scribbles in a little yellowed pocketbook.
It was well into the afternoon before I scooped up the newspaper that Roy had left on the arm of the chair and stuffed it into my handbag. I knew that Nell would not want it in the house, but she was already starting to fade, her features blurring until she was no more than a shadow, and by the time I put on my coat and slung the bag over my shoulder she had disappeared completely. When I said goodbye, it was to the chair alone and I shut the front door behind me without looking back.
I stepped out on to the road and turned towards St Cuthbert’s, heading for the crossroads with the old war memorial. I followed the road round the edge of the Sunningdale housing estate and away from town past the orchard and lido. I muttered to myself as I walked, cursing my aching joints. The black and white memories that had plagued me that morning had now faded in the sunshine but somehow the feeling remained.
After about half a mile, the road forked, and I turned on to a smaller dirt road that was ridged with tyre tracks and followed the edge of a narrow stream. I continued for a few minutes until the stream became shallower and the tyre tracks were little more than soft furrows in the mud as they veered towards the water’s edge. Here was another fork in the road, the smaller track almost hidden under the gushing waters of the stream, the muddied cobbles of the ford just dark shapes in the water.
On the other side of the water, the smaller road led up to two grand stone pillars, which marked the entrance to Haughten Hall, the smart red bricks and long windows of the house rising above it.
A motorcar was coming down the long driveway and I stepped back so that it would not splash me with the waters. As it drew closer, I saw that it was the old police Wolseley that I had so often seen from my window parked under the blue lamp of the police station. The motorcar slowed when it neared the ford, its engine rumbling as it splashed through the water. I glimpsed a couple of uniformed officers in the back seats, and Roy’s face through the dapple of light on the windscreen. If he saw me, he did not stop.
I took the little beam footbridge that crossed the stream and a bank of mud where the irises grew. It was too early in the year for any flowers but the mud was already thick with new spring growth, the pointed leaves rising from the waters. On the other bank, I followed the long driveway that led up to the grand marble steps of Haughten Hall.
It was Dora, the aged housekeeper, who answered the door and greeted me with the words, ‘Go straight up, Mrs Ryland.’
‘But I have not made an appointment,’ I said.
She looked at me wearily. ‘He has seen this morning’s paper – he is expecting you.’
I crossed the large hallway and climbed the grand staircase stiffly, catching my breath on the landing before lingering outside the open door of the study. Sir Howard sat at his desk, a newspaper spread open on the surface. He had been a tall and well-built man when we first met, but now, as he hunched over the desk, I noticed the bony jut of his shoulders and a patch of pale scalp through his thinning grey hair. His thick spectacles were clasped in a gnarled hand as he held them close to the paper, moving them slowly over the text, his bushy eyebrows drawn low as he squinted through the lenses.
It was the place I usually found him, and where I had first met him all those years ago when I had been summoned to Haughten Hall and interviewed for the post of a tutor, providing religious instruction for his daughter. I had known of Sir Howard Caldwell for many years before that, of course, because I had seen him with his daughter in church, but his family’s pew was only ever occupied at Christmas and Easter and I suspected that he actually cared little for his daughter’s religious instruction. He had been an active Member of Parliament back then and must have thought it some kind of civic duty to offer a little financial support to the local vicar’s widow.
I knocked lightly on the doorframe and he raised his head.
‘Have you seen the local rag, Agnes?’ he said.
I nodded and held up my bag, the newspaper poking from the top. ‘I haven’t read it though,’ I said. ‘I remember the kind of things they wrote all those years ago and I just could not bring myself to do it. After all, all the stories are utter—’
‘Shit!’ he concluded.
‘Well, I…’ But I did not protest at his language for I had known for a long time that it was his godless way.
‘It is as if they have no feeling for those involved,’ he continued, looking back down at the paper. ‘They have included every sordid detail, even about how the bloodied clothes were rent apart by foxes. At least you are spared this, Agnes. At least it was not the undergarments of your Nell which they describe in such detail.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘There is never much mention of Nell.’
‘There is not even mention of a story,’ he said. ‘They are just going over old ground; there is only one line about the old film that was shown – it says people fainted in the hall at the sight of her face.’
‘What rot!’ I cried. ‘I was at the screening myself – Roy must have told you that much. I have seen that he has already been round this morning, I saw his car crossing the ford.’
‘He did little more than bring me this rag,’ he said, pushing his spectacles further down his nose.
I crossed the room and sat down on the window seat without waiting for him to invite me because I knew that he would not. Despite Sir Howard’s abrupt manner, over the past twenty-five years we had become close friends. The study was a room I did not care for, but it was the room Sir Howard favoured because it was a place where the eyes of the one he had loved and lost gazed down at him.