The Loney

Chapter Twenty-nine

Coldbarrow is still all over the television.

I saw yesterday morning that they had erected a tent on the sands close to where I almost drowned all those years ago. They were working quickly to collect as much forensic evidence as possible before the tide turned, though there can’t have been much left. Not now.

The reporter was standing on the mainland, shouting over the driving gales and sleet. The police had now launched a murder inquiry, he said. Two elderly local men had been taken in for questioning, and they were searching for a third.

Things were gathering apace. But I was prepared. All those evenings I’d spent writing everything down hadn’t been wasted. Everything was clear now. Everything was straight. Hanny was safe. It didn’t matter what anyone said to the contrary. Leonard, Parkinson and Collier wouldn’t have had the wit to plan as I had. They had been too reliant on each other’s silence and hadn’t reckoned on The Loney revealing everything they’d done.

I waited for as long as I possibly could before I had to leave for work, with one eye on the news and the other on the weather outside. A blizzard had been raging since the dark of the early morning and the street outside was becoming lost under heavy drifts of snow. It was starting to come light but only just. A grey colour spilled across the sky, pale as dishwater.

Walking down to the station I outpaced the cars that were waiting to get onto the North Circular in a long line of exhaust fumes and brake lights. People stood huddled at bus stops or in shop doorways which were still shuttered and dark. Even the Christmas lights they had strewn along the high street were out. The city was grinding to a standstill, it seemed, and the crib outside the church on the corner was the only thing of brightness.

They set it up every year — a kind of garden shed crammed with life-sized shepherds and wise men and Mary and Joseph kneeling before the plump little Christ in the hay. Music plays on a loop all day and night, and as I paused to cross the road, I caught the tinny trickle of Joy to the World before the lights changed.

The tube was packed, of course. Everyone steamed and sneezed. Coldbarrow was headline news on most of the papers. Each had the same syndicated photograph of Thessaly tumbled to ruins on the beach. Some had grainy images of people in white boiler suits stooped over the rubble. I wondered how long it would be before I saw Parkinson or Collier or even Clement blazoned across the front page. They would be in their seventies now, perhaps their eighties. About to be jolted out of the complacency of old age.

At the museum, I let myself in through the back door. It was so quiet that I wondered if there was anyone else there, but going through the staff kitchen there were a few others standing around in their coats drinking tea, in a kind of holiday mood, thinking that it was very likely the museum would be closed for the day. And they were probably right. I mean, who was going to risk life and limb or a bout of the flu to come and see an exhibition of pewter or Edwardian millinery?

‘Hey, I wouldn’t get settled,’ said Helen jovially, as I gave them all a cursory good morning nod and headed to the basement.

I know they think me rather odd and talk about me when I’m not there. But I don’t really care. I know who I am and I’ve worked out all my failings by myself a long time ago. If they think I’m fastidious or reclusive then they’d be right. I am. And so where do we go from there? You’ve worked me out. Well done. Have a prize.

Helen gave me a frowned smile as I undid the security grill. She looked as though she was going to come over and speak to me but she didn’t and I pulled the shutters aside and went down the stairs, unlocking the door at the bottom that once closed behind me meant that no one was likely to bother me for the rest of the day. There is a phone but if I get any correspondence it’s through email. They understand that I need quiet to work. They’ve learnt that much about me at least.

A waft of warm air met me. It’s always warm in the basement. A dry heat to stop the damp getting to the books. It can be a bit oppressive in the summer but that morning I was more than thankful for it.

I switched on the strip lights and they pinked and flickered and lit up the long rows of bookshelves and cabinets. The homes of many old friends. Ones I’ve got to know intimately over the last two decades.

When I have a moment, which is becoming rarer these days, I like to visit Vertot’s History of the Knights of Malta or Barrett’s Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warres. There’s no better way to spend an hour or two once the museum has closed than reading these volumes as they were written — in quiet reflection and study. Any other way is worthless. Having them spread open in a display case upstairs for people to glace in passing is an insult if you ask me.

I generally work at the far end of the basement where there’s a computer I use for research and a wide desk where I can keep all the bookbinding equipment and still have plenty of elbow room.

I don’t know why I felt the urge to do it, and it makes me feel like someone out of a Dickens novel, one of Scrooge’s clerks perhaps, but a while ago I moved the desk under one of those glass grids they have at street level where I could look up and watch the shadows of feet going past. I suppose there was something comforting about it. I was down there warm and dry and they were out in the rain with people and places to hurry to and be late for.

But today the glass was opaque with snow, making the basement even gloomier. The strip lights don’t do much apart from create shadows, if I’m honest, and so I switched on the angle poise lamp and sat down.

For the past few weeks, I had been working on a set of Victorian wildlife books that had been donated from the sale of some laird’s estate up in Scotland. Encyclopaedias of flora and fauna. Manuals of veterinary science. Copious volumes about badgers and foxes and eagles and other reprehensible predators. Their habits and breeding patterns and the many ways to cull them. They were in a reasonable condition, given that they had been languishing in a gillie’s hut for years, but the leather covers would have to be replaced and the pages re-sewn if anyone was ever going to read them again. Someone would. There was always someone who would find such things fascinating. Academics might take pains to go through all the details, but what was of interest to the museum, the bit of social history they could sell to the public, was the handwritten marginalia. The little insights of the anonymous gamekeeper who had stalked the moors of the estate and kept his master’s animals safe for nigh on fifty years.

Notes about the weather and nesting sites were strewn around the sketches he had made of the things he had had to kill in order to protect the deer and the grouse. A fox caught in a snare. An osprey spread-eagled by shotgun pellets. They seemed at first glance, gruesome, boastful things, no better than hanging trophy heads along a hallway, or rats along a fence, but the detail of feathers and fur and eyes that he had taken time to render with his fine pencil made it clear that he loved them dearly.

It was, to him, no different to pruning a garden, I suppose. The gillie hadn’t hated these animals for following their instincts of survival anymore than a gardener hates his plants for growing. It was a necessary mastery that he exercised over the estate. Without him, there would have been nothing but chaos, and I suspect that it’s reverted back to wilderness now that there’s no one looking after it anymore.

I worked for an hour or more until I heard the doors at the other end of the basement opening. I put my glasses down on the desk (I have become short-sighted in recent years) and looked around the shelves. Helen appeared, her coat over her arm.

‘Are you there?’ she called, making a visor with her mittened hand and peering through the shadows.

I got up from the desk.

‘Yes? What is it?’

‘Good news. We can go home,’ she said.

‘Home?’

‘They’re going to close the museum because of the snow.’

‘I’ve got work to finish off.’

‘You don’t have to do it,’ said Helen. ‘Everyone else is leaving.’

‘All the same. I’d like to get it done.’

‘It’s really coming down out there,’ she said. ‘I’d get going if I were you. Otherwise you might be stuck here all night. If you need a lift, I can take you as far as Paddington.’

She had come further towards me now and stood at the end of the 990s: history of New Zealand to extraterrestrial worlds.

‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

‘It’s out of your way,’ I replied.

‘It doesn’t have to be.’

I looked back at the book on the desk.

‘I’ve too much to do to go home,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you?’

She looked at me, gave me that frown smile again and zipped up her coat.

‘I’ll see you on Monday,’ she said and went back towards the door and the basement became silent again apart from the steady tick of the central heating.

I returned to the book and gently removed the stitching from the spine of McKay’s Prevention of Galliforme Diseases with a pair of tweezers before dropping the brittle strands of thread into the bin. No, it was better that I stayed here. It wasn’t fair to ask Helen to drive a mile out of her way in this weather. And they would only start gossiping again if they saw us together in her car.

***

I didn’t stop working until hours later. It was three in the afternoon. I hadn’t eaten any lunch, but I wasn’t hungry, and I often lose track of time down there in the basement anyway, separated as I am from the world of scurrying feet above. A day could sometimes easily pass without me once looking up from what I was doing.

I switched on the kettle to make tea and as it boiled I looked up at the glass panel. It glowed with a buttery light and I wondered if it had stopped snowing at last and the sun had come out. Whatever, it would be going dark before long.

I sat back down at the desk but hadn’t taken a sip before there was someone knocking at the door. It wasn’t Helen come back to rescue me, I knew that. She had keys. Most likely it was Jim, the caretaker, who I’d fought tooth and nail to keep out of the basement with his anti-bacterial sprays and his polish and his propensity for throwing things away. He’d always been a little abrupt with me since I’d had his key off him and rattled the ones he had left in a plaintive way, it seemed, as though without the full set he felt somehow emasculated.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t dislike him. I’d just rather it was me who kept the place clean and tidy. Jim doesn’t really get the idea of an archive, keeping things. I quite admire him in many ways and had half expected him to have stuck around that afternoon. He’s a stubborn old sod like me and wouldn’t have gone home just because it was snowing.

I put the cup down and went to open the door. Jim stood there — brown overcoat and navy tattoos — his mace-head of keys hanging from his belt.

‘Yes?’

‘Visitor for you,’ he said, stepping aside.

‘Hanny?’ I tried to sound surprised, but I knew with all this business at Coldbarrow that he would come to see me sooner or later.

‘Hello, brother,’ he said as he sidled past Jim and shook my hand.

‘I’m locking up at four,’ said Jim pointedly and wandered off up the stairs, jangling his keys.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said and gestured for Hanny to go down to my desk as I closed the door. He was damp with snow and his scarf was caked in ice.

‘I rang the flat, but there was no answer,’ he said. ‘I must admit I thought you’d be at home today.’

‘I’ve too much to do,’ I replied.

‘You work too hard.’

‘Pot. Kettle.’

‘Well, you do.’

‘Is there any other way to work?’

He laughed. ‘No, I suppose not, brother.’

‘Tea?’

‘If you’re having one.’

I made Hanny a cup as he draped his wet things over the radiator.

‘Don’t you get lonely down here, brother,’ he said, looking up at the glass panel.

‘Not at all.’

‘But you do work alone?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘You said that with some conviction.’

‘Well, there was someone else once.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘She wasn’t quite suited.’

‘To what?’

‘To detail.’

‘I see.’

‘It’s important, Hanny.’

‘It must be.’

‘It’s not easy staying focused all day,’ I said. ‘It takes a particular type of mind.’

‘Like yours.’

‘Evidently.’

Hanny took the cup of tea off me and pressed the back of his thighs against the radiator. He looked up at me, went to say something, but stopped short and changed tack.

‘How are things going with Doctor Baxter?’ he asked.

‘Baxter? Alright I suppose.’

‘He said you were making progress last time I spoke to him.’

‘I thought our sessions were meant to be confidential.’

‘They are, you fool,’ said Hanny dismissively. ‘He didn’t give me any details. He just said you’d turned a corner.’

‘That’s what he seems to think.’

‘And have you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You seem happier.’

‘Do I?’

‘Less anxious.’

‘You can tell that about me in just a few minutes?’

‘I do know you, brother. I can see it, even if you can’t.’

‘Am I that transparent?’

‘I didn’t mean that. I meant that it’s hard to perceive things about yourself sometimes.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, I can see that Baxter’s making a difference. And that our prayers are too.’

‘Oh yes, how are things at the church?’ I said.

‘Couldn’t be better,’ he replied.

‘Still packing them in every Sunday?’

‘Sunday, Monday, Tuesday … We’ve been very blessed, brother. We light a candle for you every day.’

‘That’s good of you.’

Hanny laughed quietly. ‘God loves you, brother,’ he said. ‘Even if you don’t believe in Him, He believes in you. It will end. This sickness will leave you. He will take it away.’

Perhaps it was the light down there, but he looked old suddenly. His black hair was still thick enough to have been tousled into a nest by his woollen hat, but his eyes were starting to sink into the soft cushions of the sockets and there were liver spots on the backs of his hands. My brother was slowly slipping towards pension age and I was following like his shadow.

He embraced me and I felt his hand on my back. We sat down at the desk and finished the tea in silence.

Having circled around what concerned him and run dry of small talk, he looked troubled now, frightened even.

‘What is it, Hanny?’ I said. ‘I’m sure you didn’t come all this way to ask me about Doctor Baxter.’

He breathed out slowly and ran his hand over his face.

‘No, brother, I didn’t.’

‘What then?’

‘You’ve heard the news about Coldbarrow, I take it?’ he said.

‘I could hardly have missed it, could I?’

‘But have you heard what they’re saying now?’

‘What’s that?’

‘That this poor child was shot.’

‘It was on the news this morning, yes.’

‘And they reckon it was some time ago. Thirty or forty years. Back in the 1970s.’

‘Yes?’

‘When we were there.’

‘So?’

His hands were trembling slightly as he brought them to his face again.

‘I’ve been having this memory,’ he said. ‘They sometimes come back to me out of the blue but I don’t always know what they mean.’

‘Memories about the pilgrimage?’

‘I suppose they must be.’

‘Like what?’

‘A beach. A girl. An old house with ravens.’

‘Rooks. That was Moorings.’

‘Moorings, yes that’s right. And I vaguely recall going to the shrine, but that might just have been Mummer putting things into my head. She was always talking about it, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

It was all she talked about.

‘And there are other things, brother, things that are just feelings or images. A door. A tower. Being trapped and frightened. And …’

‘And what, Hanny?’

He looked at me, blinked back a few tears.

‘Well, this is it. This is the memory I’ve been having since I saw Coldbarrow on the news.’

‘A memory of what?’

‘A noise close and loud. And something thumping against my shoulder.’

He looked at me.

‘Like a gunshot, brother. Like I’d fired a gun.’

‘What are you saying, Hanny? That you think you did it? That you killed this child?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why would you? It makes no sense.’

‘I know it doesn’t.’

‘It’s a trick of the mind, Hanny,’ I said. ‘We were always playing soldiers on the beach. That’s what you’re remembering.’

‘But it seems so real.’

‘Well it isn’t. It can’t be.’

His head sagged.

‘What happened to me, brother? I’ve prayed so many times for Him to show me, but there’s nothing but shadows.’

‘You were healed by God. Isn’t that what you believe?’

‘Yes, but …’

‘Isn’t that what everyone believes?’

‘Of course …’

‘Isn’t that what brings them to the church every day, Hanny?’

‘No, no,’ he said, raising his voice a little. ‘Something else happened that Easter.’

‘What?’

He breathed out and sat back in the chair, nervously thumbing his bottom lip.

‘I’ve never really talked about it, brother, not even with Caroline, and I suppose I’ve tried to push it down inside me, but if I ever think about the pilgrimage, there’s always something else there in the background.’

‘Something else?’

‘Behind all the euphoria.’

‘What?’

‘A terrible guilt, brother.’

I shook my head and touched him on the shoulder.

‘I feel as though I’m going to drown in it sometimes,’ he said and his eyes glistened again.

‘It’s not real, Hanny.’

‘But why would I feel like that, brother, unless I’d done something wrong?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps you don’t feel as though you deserved to be cured. I understand it’s quite common in people who have been saved or rescued from something. Don’t they call it survivor guilt?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Look, I may not believe in what you believe, Hanny, and perhaps that’s my loss, but wherever it’s come from, even I can see that you’ve not wasted the opportunity you’ve been given. You’re important to people. You’ve brought so much happiness into their lives. Mummer, Farther. Everyone at the church. If anyone deserved to be released from the prison you were in it was you Hanny. Don’t throw all that away now. You’re a good man.’

‘If only Mummer and Farther were still around.’

‘I know.’

‘I just wish I could remember more,’ he said.

‘You don’t need to. I can remember everything as it was. I’ll speak for you if the police come.’

‘Will you?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’m sorry to have to rely on you, brother, but I just can’t remember anything clearly.’

‘Do you trust me?’

‘Yes, yes of course I do.’

‘Then you needn’t be troubled anymore.’

He wept now and I put my arms around him.

‘Those nights I spent outside the house,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you or worry you. I just wanted you to know that I was there.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m not ill.’

‘No, no, I know that now.’

Jim knocked on the door again. I heard him coughing and rattling his keys.

‘We’d better go,’ I said.

‘Yes, alright.’

‘Once Jim sets his mind on something there’s no getting around it.’

He looked me square in the eyes. ‘Thank you, brother.’

‘What for?’

‘Watching over me.’

‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, Hanny.’

‘I’m sorry that I didn’t let you.’

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I said.

Jim let us out and then closed the main doors behind us.

‘Did you come in the car?’ I asked as we wound scarves and fitted gloves at the top of the steps.

‘No, I couldn’t face the traffic. I got the tube.’

‘I’ll come with you some of the way then.’

Hanny looked at me.

‘Why not stay on and come back to the house?’ he said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sure.’

‘What about Caroline?’

‘I’ll talk to her. She’ll understand.’

It had stopped snowing and had gone dark. The sky was clear and full of hard stars. Everything had been whitened and thickened and there was a crust of ice over the drifts. Road signs were buried and street edges dissolved. Hanny went down the steps and hesitated at the bottom.

‘I think I’ve lost my bearings, brother,’ he said, looking back up at me with a smile.

‘This way,’ I said and took his arm and led him along the road to the station.

***

We sat opposite one another on the tube, my faint reflection hanging next to his face. We couldn’t have looked more different (I have become a little gaunt around the cheeks these last few years, a little thin on top) but we were brothers none the less. Bonded by the business of security and survival.

Like Father Bernard said, there are only versions of the truth. And it’s the strong, the better strategists who manage them.

Who were the police going to believe fired the rifle? Hanny? Pastor Smith? The dumb boy healed by God? My gentle, middle aged brother sitting across from me, swaying with the rhythm of the train?

No, they would believe what I would tell them. That we were nowhere near Thessaly when it happened. That we were running back across to the mainland, stumbling through the water channels in the fog, when a single gunshot echoed around The Loney, and was lost in the silence of the sands.