Drowned Lives

12

‘I noticed your early morning visitors,’ said Rachel. ‘Were they interested in buying your car?’

She’d knocked on the door only a few minutes after the police had left, making me panic that they’d decided to come back and arrest me. I almost didn’t open the door, and it actually crossed my mind to escape by the back way and leg it across the gardens into The Charters. But I’d overcome the guilty response, and sense had returned. When I saw my neighbour standing on the doorstep, my first reaction was relief, then a burst of irritation.

‘I hadn’t even realised you were selling it,’ she said. ‘Are you getting a new one?’

‘Fat chance,’ I said.

‘Oh. Well, they gave it a good looking-over, didn’t they? I was surprised you didn’t take them for a drive round. I usually want to sit inside and try out the seats when I’m buying a car.’

‘Really? How interesting.’

‘I couldn’t help but notice, of course. I was just coming back from Mrs Knowles’ house.’

‘They were the police,’ I said. ‘And they weren’t thinking of buying my car. They were deciding whether or not to take me in for further questioning.’

Rachel laughed, thinking I was joking. Then she saw I wasn’t, and her eyes widened. ‘Seriously? But what do they think you’ve done?’

I leaned closer to her, with a conspiratorial whisper. ‘It could be murder.’ That should send her packing, I thought. And serve her right for being nosey.

She gasped. ‘You poor thing. That’s terrible.’ I felt her hand on my arm, and the next thing I knew she was in the house, leading me into the sitting room like a child. ‘You sit down while I make a cup of tea, and you can tell me all about. It must be an awful shock, being accused of something like that.’

She vanished into the kitchen, and I heard the sound of water running and a cupboard opening as she located my crockery with an unerring instinct. I wasn’t quite sure how it came about, but within five minutes I was sitting on my own settee telling Rachel what had happened to Samuel Longden.

Needless to say, she was riveted. She sat and listened with the kind of concentrated attention no one else ever gave me. Apart from the occasional word of encouragement or a small, probing question, she let me do all the talking. It was only as I re-lived the moments when I sat in the pub and watched the old man waiting on his bench that her eyebrows rose and she looked at me doubtfully.

‘I know, I know,’ I said, waving my hands defensively.

‘That sweet old man.’

‘Don’t you think I feel guilty enough?’

‘And he walked away from there... and died.’

‘So it seems. I suppose if I’d gone out and met him, if I’d spoken to him, instead of being such a coward... If I had the courage to explain to him how I felt...’

‘No,’ she said briskly. ‘It’s no use thinking like that. If these things are going to happen, they’ll happen. Accidents can’t be foreseen or avoided. It’s just fate.’

I wasn’t so sure about that. But I hadn’t yet fully acknowledged to myself what I feared about Samuel Longden’s death. I certainly wasn’t ready to share the fear with Rachel.

‘The police can’t seriously think it was you who ran him over,’ she said. ‘Not now they’ve met you.’

I wasn’t quite sure how to take that. ‘Thanks very much.’

‘You’re not the hit and run type, Chris.’

‘Hmm.’ Was that really true? Wasn’t it exactly what I had done to Samuel in a way? A hit and run? I’d been trying to run away from our sudden contact. But I hadn’t been running fast enough.

‘So what about all his stuff now? What happens to that?’ she asked.

‘Stuff?’

‘The files, and the box. All the things he left. You said you were going to give them back to him. What are you going to do with them now?’

‘I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose I’ll get rid of them some other way.’

‘We can read them first, of course. That would be all right, wouldn’t it? He did give them to you. You owe him that, at least. It must have been what he wanted.’

Thanks to the tea and the opportunity to tell the story, I was starting to feel better. There might have been something in what Rachel said about owing Samuel a bit of my time to read the files. But there was a telltale word she’d used, that ‘we’. It sent a shiver of horror through me. There wasn’t going to be any ‘we’, if I could help it. Quickly, I searched for a get-out.

‘There’s a daughter,’ I said at last.

‘What?’

‘His neighbour told me Samuel had a daughter.’

‘You never mentioned that.’

‘I forgot. It didn’t seem important until now. But obviously I’ll have to give the files back to her, won’t I? Next of kin and all that.’

She looked disappointed. ‘Did she live with him?’

‘I’ve no idea. I’ll need to find out.’

‘We could just have a look at some of it in the meantime,’ she suggested.

I shook my head. ‘They’re not mine. They were Samuel’s. And so they must be his daughter’s now.’

Rachel pulled a face. ‘It seems such a shame. How can you resist taking a peek?’

‘I’ll survive.’

She stroked the wooden box. ‘Tell you what, let me take the box and clean it up. It needs a bit of beeswax and a good polish, and some metal cleaner on the brass. It’ll look beautiful then. It would make a real feature.’

‘Rachel, it doesn’t matter.’

She sat back, disappointed. ‘So when will you give them back?’

‘As soon as I can find someone to give them to.’

She was right, of course. I had an irresistible urge to go through the papers Samuel had left. I had no idea what I’d be looking for, but instinct told me something was waiting to be found in there. It was a half-familiar tingle I felt — one I remembered from my early days as a reporter, when I’d still been young and keen, when the excitement of knowing I was onto a good story was like a sexual thrill.

But I had to ignore it. It was a weakness of mine that I had to fight, that tendency to be sidetracked into some easy option, anything that meant I wouldn’t have to face up to the difficult situations in my life.

Then I remembered Mrs Wentworth. I couldn’t imagine how she might have known about the meeting Samuel had arranged with me. But it was certainly Mrs Wentworth who’d informed the police of my visit to Ash Lodge. I stood up and looked down at Rachel as if I’d never seen her before.

‘In fact, I’m going back to Whittington right now,’ I said.

Of course, I was doing quite the opposite of what I thought. The secrets that lay in Samuel Longden’s manuscript were far from being the easy option.

Mrs Wentworth was surprised to see me. She looked frightened at first, as if she genuinely believed I’d killed Samuel Longden. Then her expression changed to one of embarrassment when I explained why I’d come. She still kept me standing safely on the doorstep, shivering in the wind.

‘The police asked me who’d been to see him recently,’ she said. ‘I had to tell them about you. He never got many visitors, not in the last few years. In fact, you were almost the only one for a while.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘But did you tell them why I came?’

‘Oh yes, I told them what you said, and that you’d put a note through his door.’ Her face slipped slightly as she recalled that she wouldn’t have been able to see me do that unless she’d been watching me from her kitchen window. But I wasn’t bothered about that.

‘Did you tell them anything else?’

‘No.’ She frowned, puzzled now.

‘I’m not sure how well you knew your neighbour. Did you talk to him much?’

‘Hardly at all,’ she said.

‘Had you spoken to him since I came that day?’

‘No.’

‘I still want to return those items to somebody. Do you know where Mr Longden’s daughter lives?’

‘Caroline? Oh, I couldn’t say. Sometimes she stayed at Ash Lodge with her father, but not for a while. There’s certainly no one there now. I seem to recall she was going away somewhere.’

‘Can you remember where?’

Her brow furrowed. ‘I remember thinking it was an awful long way away. It could have been Australia. Brisbane.’

I didn’t set much store by her memory. She said ‘Brisbane’ as if it were some mythical country way off the edge of the world. I supposed it could just as easily have been Belgium or Burundi. I wondered if Mrs Wentworth had ever been out of England. Being stuck on an island can colour your perception of the world. I speak, of course, as a global citizen who once spent a holiday in Majorca.

‘Did Samuel never go away himself?’

‘Hardly ever. He mentioned he was going to see a friend in Cheshire once or twice, but he was only away for a couple of days. Apart from that, he was always here. Mostly on his own, unless Caroline came.’

‘I suppose he was quite a lonely old man.’

Mrs Wentworth studied me thoughtfully. ‘Caroline will get the house, I imagine.’

‘Yes, she will.’

‘And the kestrel.’

‘Sorry?’ I thought I must have misheard. It was the first indication that Samuel Longden had shown an interest in falconry. I peered over the high privet hedge towards Ash Lodge, expecting to see an aviary that I hadn’t noticed before. ‘Who’s looking after it?’

Mrs Wentworth laughed, a strangely girlish giggle. ‘The Kestrel. Did you think I meant a bird? The Kestrel is a boat. A narrowboat — that’s what they call them, isn’t it? It’s kept on the canal down there.’ She waved vaguely towards the garden at the back of the house. ‘Old Samuel hadn’t been anywhere on it for years, of course. But he still spent a lot of time down there. Tinkering about, I suppose. As men do.’

‘A boat. I didn’t know that. But it makes sense, in a way.’

As soon as I could, I thanked Mrs Wentworth and went back to Ash Lodge. I hesitated for a moment, then determined to check whether she was right about the boat. I made my way through the gate at the bottom of the garden and emerged onto a little path that led to the Coventry Canal. I knew Mrs Wentworth would be watching me from the windows of The Chestnuts, but I didn’t care by now.

The boat was just where she’d said, tied up to a couple of bollards set into the canal bank, almost within view of the upper floor of Samuel’s house. Kestrel was a full-length narrowboat, almost all of its seventy feet being occupied by cabin space where the hold would once have been. But this wasn’t an old working boat which had been converted. It was a more recent job, specially built as a pleasure vessel.

Kestrel was painted green and red, with white rope fenders at its stem and stern, and its name in decorative lettering on the cabin side. Steel shutters covered all the windows, and there was a large padlock on the stern cabin door.

But it was obvious the woodwork hadn’t been re-painted for a while. In places the paint was starting to wear thin and the wood showed through. Streaks of green mould were creeping up the sides of the hull, and a pool of rainwater lay on the deck boards of the counter, where the steerer would stand to control the Z-shaped tiller. It was only short-term neglect, though — the effects of exposure to the weather. Not long ago, this boat had been in first-class condition.

I looked northwards along the canal. The water and towpath looked peaceful after the roads around Lichfield. I began to walk along the gravel path, enjoying being able to step out in quiet surroundings, with no one around. I supposed it might help me to think.

Within a mile, I reached Huddlesford Junction, where the Ogley and Huddlesford Canal branched off from the Coventry. It was in water for only a few hundred yards, until it came to a stop at a bridge. Beyond that, the line of the canal had disappeared under ploughed fields. A few narrowboats were moored on the opposite bank, near to where a bridge crossed the water. A middle-aged couple were polishing brasswork on a boat called Rose Marie, registered in Nottingham.

This was where narrowboats had emerged into the Coventry Canal after descending thirty locks in the seven miles from Ogley. This little junction had been a crucial link in the waterways network, connecting the Birmingham canals to the Trent and Mersey at Fradley, and to the Oxford and Grand Union canals via Coventry. The area must have been thronged with boats at one time. Now the scene was tranquil, most of the pleasure boats moored here still locked up and shrouded for the winter.

I turned my back on the water and saw the Plough Inn across the road in the village of Huddlesford. I decided there was time for a couple of drinks before I walked back to Whittington.

A few minutes later, as I sat in the Plough and watched the dark water of the canal being flicked into life by the wind, I found myself reminded too vividly of the three-quarters of an hour I’d spent sitting in the Earl of Lichfield, watching Samuel Longden waiting for me. The old man had walked away and died. But the memory of him wouldn’t leave me. It had embedded itself in what I suppose must have been my conscience. I wondered if there was a way I could dislodge the memory. The beer in my hand might work in the short term, but it wasn’t the permanent solution I needed.

I sat and stared at the canal for a long time. But my thoughts were blown along as helplessly as the small waves on its surface were being driven by the wind.