‘Such a lot of shit in here,’ he muttered.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It even says that both the girls are dead.’
He did not respond, just glanced at me pityingly.
4
I left Haughten Hall with neither the comfort nor understanding I had been hoping for. There had been something about Sir Howard’s manner that morning that had been more sour than usual and, as we had said our brief goodbyes, I had seen a detachment in his eyes, as if his mind was already on other things.
As I reached the bottom of the driveway, I stopped and looked back at the big old house with its red brick walls and grand columned porch. It was something that I always did after my visits, hoping to see a face in one of the long windows or even the twitch of a curtain but as always there was nothing to see. The curtains were open in every window but the light from the mid-afternoon sun caught the chequers of glass in such a way that the whole place seemed armoured against my stare.
Nell had never appeared to me at Haughten Hall. Back in 1912 she had always complained of our visits there. In fact, she would sometimes say that she hated Iris but I was sure that this was down to nothing more than childish resentment as Iris was a sweet-natured girl, with never a bad word to say about anyone. Even back then Nell must have sensed the closeness between Howard and myself; she once accused me of being overly familiar with him – something she turned her nose up at.
I supposed that Nell’s complaints were the reason that she chose to stay away now, and I had never even glimpsed so much as her shadow lingering in a corner or her reflection in a windowpane. I suspected that she knew of my visits to Sir Howard and for this reason, every visit made me feel a little guilty as if I was somehow betraying her.
It was this guilt that made me hesitate as I crossed back over the little plank bridge. I thought then that I should do what Nell would have wanted so I took the right turn towards Missensham Common instead of heading home. I did not like to take the main track, so I cut across the grass at the first chance I got, and followed a steep trail through the gorse where the grass had been grazed close to the earth by rabbits and sheep.
After a while my joints began to ache and my breaths quickened from the thin air of the higher ground but I realised that the day was actually a fine one for April – the bracken already a rich green and the exotic smell of the first bloom of gorse catching in the air – and I stopped to look at the view.
On the far side of the common I could just make out the cart track, which hugged the lower slopes, and then, halfway along it a small thicket known locally as the Blood Elms, but that was a place that I did not like to go. Beyond the thicket, the edge of the common gave way to a view of Missensham: the Oxworth Road winding its way between the new housing estates, a single car crawling silently along the tarmac; the shop-lined high street; the spire of St Cuthbert’s; the small patch of village green. I could even see the round canopy of the oak tree that blocked the morning sun from the windows of my cottage.
I headed on across the grass towards the far end of the common where there was a cluster of tall fir trees, a group of twisted black chimneys rising among them.
When I grew closer to the trees, I cut down on to the cart track and followed the long brick wall that encircled the grounds of Waldley Court. It had once been a fine house but a few charred brick walls and the blackened chimneys were all that remained. The house had been empty for over twenty years, the owners choosing to abandon the home they could not afford to repair.
The gate to the stable yard was open, the wheezy bark of a dog echoing through the emptiness, the air rasping in the creature’s throat as if it had barked itself hoarse.
Here, I hesitated. This was the home of Sam Denman, the man blamed for the murders of Iris and my Nell, and the place that the police had visited just hours earlier. Sam had escaped but I did not share Sir Howard’s conviction that he would not return.
Sam had never lived well; he had come from a poor start but, as a distant relative of Thomas, my late husband, I believed that he must have had some of Thomas’s goodness in him. I had always felt a bit protective towards Sam because, with his slight build and gingery complexion, he reminded me of Thomas in a way that Nell never had. Sam had lived with us in the parsonage for a few months before Thomas became infirm. He had got on well with Nell and been a calming influence in the face of Thomas’s illness. He’d formed a friendship with Nell, which had lasted long after Thomas’s death.
With no son of our own, I had vowed to Thomas that I would protect Sam, but after Thomas’s death I was left with little means to do so. I was glad when my affection for the boy was shared by a wealthy widow, Mrs Elliot-Palmer, who gave him work and lodgings in the stable block of her estate at Waldley Court. It had been a fine life for a young man of Sam’s background, but just as Iris and Nell’s life had stopped on May Day 1912, so had Sam’s.
Sam had fought in the Great War but returned almost unnoticed; most people had assumed him dead, and wished it too. When he came back, it was to nothing – a fire at Waldley Court had left the main house beyond repair and the Elliot-Palmers had moved away. The war had broken Sam – he was shell-shocked, a drunkard and distrustful of anyone in a uniform. He took to living in the only way he had ever known – squatting in the run-down tack room of the place he had once worked.
He lived as he had done when he was a lad but now he was in his mid-forties, a little older than the girls would have been. I thought it a way of life that suited him though and I remembered how he would never dress for dinner when he lived with us at the parsonage, and how he would always eat with his hands – this boy I had once known.
‘Sam?’ I walked slowly into the yard, calling softly, for I was not sure if he had returned. ‘You don’t need to worry, Sam, it is me, Agnes Ryland, and I am alone.’ I stopped still and listened but there was no answer, only the bang of a door caught in the wind and the bark of the dog, which I now saw tethered to an iron ring on the stable wall.
I had not seen Sam for many years. I would sympathise with him and defend him in town, but, as with most people, I too avoided him because the once good-natured boy had changed so much over the years. To Sam, the farmers out shooting rabbits were German snipers, the foxhunt galloping through the fields was the charging cavalry, and the chug of a tractor an advancing tank, yet every day it was he who was accused of bloodshed. Now, faced with an army of uniformed men once more, Sam had fought and fled.
The stable yard seemed smaller and shabbier than I remembered. The barn was now empty of horses and there were tiles missing from the low-pitched roof. But there were other things that were amiss: tyre tracks swept through the yard, which was still muddy from the weekend’s rain; shirts and trousers were strewn over the fences and dangled from the gate; an old straw mattress lay in a pool of murky water; the bucket had been toppled from under the pump; an old iron brazier lay on its side, some of the coals still coated in powdery white cinder.
The door to the old tack room where Sam lodged was banging in the breeze, and I hurried to secure it so that it did not distress the dog who now strained on his rope. I wedged the door open with an old horseshoe but the dog did not settle, his barks becoming more frantic.
I walked over to him slowly, my footprints mingling with those of the constables, and held out my hand.