What Lies Beneath

Chapter 8

The Present

The man’s body had not been found. Ella knew that for sure, because news of such a discovery would have caused a considerable stir in Upper Bramley. But the body would certainly be found when the decontamination teams went into Priors Bramley. Would the police be able to identify it after so long? Probably they would; you only needed to watch a television crime programme to know about DNA and dental records. But even if the man’s identity were discovered it would not matter, although it would feel strange to know his name. What would matter was if Clem or Veronica lost their nerve and talked about what had happened all those years ago. How likely was that?

Ella could easily imagine Clem spinning one of his stupid stories, telling everyone how the three of them had walked through Priors Bramley on its last day. He would probably not refer to the man’s death because he was not that stupid, but he might get carried away and embroider his story with ridiculous little fantasies, never seeing the harm he was doing. He was exactly like his name: he was like a clucking old hen in a poultry coop, strutting round the little local library where he had worked almost his entire life, exchanging tittle-tattle with everyone who came in.

Derek, who had Scottish grandparents, said Clem was a bletherskite, but Derek had never liked Clem since he saw him smoking scented cigarettes. Affected, that was Derek’s opinion. He never refused an invitation to one of Clem’s elaborate little dinner parties, though, because Clem was a very good cook and Derek enjoyed his food. What he did refuse were invitations to evenings Clem called ‘musical soirées’, but everyone else called listening to records at Clem’s house. Derek had once gone with Ella to one of these, but said afterwards she was never to drag him out to listen to such a load of boring rubbish again because he would rather watch television. This had surprised Ella, what with Derek being a member of the Operatic Society; music was music, surely. But Derek said there was a difference between Gilbert and Sullivan and the pretentious bilge Clem played. Ella had said, oh yes, of course, she had not seen it like that.

It was starting to seem as if Clem would have to be watched. He often sent articles to local magazines and county newspapers about events in this area. None of them was ever published, but the point was that he wrote about things that happened in Bramley – things that might provide clues to the past.

When Ella thought about it a bit more, she saw Veronica would have to be watched as well. She had been married twice, and had had a number of gentlemen friends since, although Ella did not ask questions and tried not to listen when Veronica talked about that side of her life. Bragging, that was all it was. But Veronica had been hinting that there was a new man in her life, and Ella thought she might spill the entire story to him while they were in bed. Pillow talk, they called that, although Ella had never really understood how it worked, because Derek had always fallen instantly asleep after that kind of activity.

The decontamination of Priors Bramley took place on schedule. A shocking disruption it would be, said people, torn between annoyance at having huge vehicles rumbling through the lanes, and subdued excitement at the reopening of the village. There was not a great deal of excitement in the town as a rule; the last time anything of any real note had happened was when a soldier, deserting from the Royal Fusiliers during the war, attacked a couple of village girls, and everyone thought he was a German spy.

People who liked to appear knowledgeable talked about neutralization and oxidation, which would be used in the spraying of all the buildings, and the Bramley Advertiser printed an article about a decontamination solution called DS2, which hardly anybody understood and which the senior science master at one of the schools said was full of inaccuracies.

Both the local schools took the opportunity to step up chemistry lessons, introducing sessions on the early pioneer chemists and formulae for organic compounds. The sixth formers were subjected to the complexities of synthesis, while one of the more progressive teachers tried to instil some recent history into his classes by drawing a parallel between the opening of the village and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, although as somebody caustically pointed out, unwinding a few yards of barbed wire was not on the same scale as demolishing the Iron Curtain, and Sparrowfeld Lane was hardly Checkpoint Charlie.

No one was allowed into the village itself, but most of Upper Bramley went along to watch the start of things, and the mayor cut the barbed wire with special cutters and made a speech. The decontamination team walked clumpily along the lane into Priors Bramley, clad in white disposable suits and boots, carrying huge pressure jets and followed by a chugging generator on the back of a lorry.

There were parties of students from both the local schools, because it was a piece of local history and the teachers supposed a school project might as well be set up. The students were agreeable to the outing. It gave the girls chance to wear jeans and high heels, neither of which were allowed in the classroom. Watching a bit of barbed wire being torn down and listening to some droning old fart make a long-winded speech was pretty boring, but it was better than sitting at a desk. Some of the older ones sneaked off to Mordwich Copse for various forbidden activities ranging from smoking to snogging, and were resignedly hauled back by their teachers.

The Red Lion, never slow to seize its own opportunity, made up batches of sandwiches and baguettes, and went along to sell them to the watchers, with bottles of cider and Coke.

Clem Poulter was there as well, telling the decontamination team please to ignore him, because his mission today was to take notes, like William Russell writing up the Charge of the Light Brigade for The Times in 1854.

One of the teenagers who had worn killer heels sprained her ankle falling down Mordwich Bank; two people were sick in the bushes from what they afterwards insisted was a rogue prawn in the baguettes but which everyone else said was overindulgence of cider, and Clem Poulter fell into a bed of nettles and had to be hauled out.

Ella had not wanted to go, but in the end she had done so because a lot of people were going and it might look odd if she were not there. But standing on the Crinoline Bridge along with a handful of neighbours, including Veronica, who was wearing a totally unsuitable outfit, she felt the past claw at her mind and for a really bad moment she was a child again, in the shadowy old church, listening to the sombre music pouring out, and hearing the agonized sobbing of the musician. But then she blinked and looked about her, and of course she was in the present-day, and the only sound she could hear was the phut-phut of machinery and the chatter of the local people. After a while she drove home, where she felt slightly better, but when Derek suggested strolling along to the Red Lion, Ella said irritably he had better go on his own because she had a headache and was going to bed early.

The air around Priors Bramley was filled with thrumming machinery for the next few days and a mist rose up from the high-pressure jets, causing romantically minded people to say the old village would reappear from out of the fog like the ghost village of Brigadoon in the old film. Less fanciful souls said that it was all a lot of fuss about nothing, and had anyone noticed how extremely low the water pressure was as a result of the Water Board allowing the decontamination team to connect their equipment to the mains?

Two days after the start of the decontamination, Ella went to meet her granddaughter Amy at Bramley railway station. Going down Market Street, driving slowly because of all the untidily parked cars and unwary pedestrians, she saw Veronica in absorbed discussion with a strange man. He could surely not be the one Veronica had hinted and smirked about, but if he was, he was certainly not her usual fare. In fact, Ella did not think he would be anybody’s fare. He might be any age, from twenty-eight to forty-eight, he was wearing an aged herringbone coat that trailed on the ground, and he looked as if he should be queuing up for a hand-out at a Salvation Army hostel. She slowed down and leaned over to wave, but Veronica did not see her so Ella drove on. But pausing at the traffic lights at the end of Market Street, she glanced in the driving mirror and saw the man nod to Veronica, then go into the Red Lion as if he was familiar with the place. This was unexpected, because the Red Lion liked to think it attracted quite an élite clientele and would not be best pleased to have someone who looked like a tramp wandering in.

Parking in front of the station entrance, Ella was glad to think she had managed to veto Amy’s plan to work as a barmaid at the Red Lion for the holiday, or to volunteer to help at the Bramley Gate hostel with the children taken into care. When Ella had been in her teens the only kind of part-time jobs available had been newspaper delivery rounds or Saturday morning work in shops, neither of which her mother would allow.

But when Amy’s father, Andrew, was growing up, people thought it was useful and admirable for youngsters to take holiday jobs, and he had done what was called work experience, trying out different things for a few weeks at a time. He had finally gone into engineering, studying at a polytechnic ten miles away, catching a bus and later using a little moped, which Derek bought him. He had done well; Ella was very proud of him, although she did not really understand him. She did not really understand Amy either, or why she had decided to read such peculiar subjects as archaeology and anthropology at Durham University. In Ella’s day girls had learned shorthand and typing, or book-keeping, and gone into offices. She could not imagine the kind of job Amy would finally get, but Derek only laughed and said Amy was headed for a very interesting career, and they would be as proud of her as they were of Andrew.

Ella was proud of Amy now; it was simply that she did not understand her any more than she understood Andrew. Still, she was pleased she had talked Amy out of the Red Lion idea. She had persuaded Clem to create a little part-time job at the library, which would be much more suitable and which Amy would enjoy.

Amy Haywood, arriving in a tumble of untidily packed bags and flying hair at Bramley station, thought the next three weeks would be pretty boring. Gran would be stuck in the genteel 1950s, and Gramps would be stuck in his balance sheets by day and Gilbert and Sullivan by night. But it had been nice of them to ask her to stay for the Easter vacation, what with Mum and Dad being in Africa, where Dad was building a bridge or designing it, or something, and taking six months to do it so that Mum had gone with him.

And she would see if she could jazz up Gran’s wardrobe while she was in Bramley, which would be fun, and maybe go along to some of Gramps’s rehearsals and help slosh paint on scenery. She had intended to try working at the Red Lion for a couple of nights a week – it got quite lively there sometimes – but Gran had gone up in smoke at the idea and said they could not have their granddaughter working as a barmaid, whatever would people think?

It would be as well for dear, respectable Gran not to be told that Amy had recently been entangled with a very unsuitable person indeed or there would be a big row and boring lectures about correct behaviour and breaking the rules. It would all be devastating and Amy was devastated enough as it was, and screwing a tutor was only breaking the rules a very little bit. But Gran would be shocked to her toes and, even worse, Gramps might say he would have a word with Amy’s College, because tutors were not supposed to have – h’rrm – relationships with students. That would be utterly mortifying, because Amy had so far managed to keep everything quiet, not wanting anyone to know she had been taken in by the tutor of English, the biggest screwer-around in college. It was utterly shameful to find you had been lured into bed with velvet-voiced quotations from John Donne and Shelley. Thirty years ago he would have been called a wolf and a rat, that tutor. He was a rat, anyway. He was not even a very good English tutor, and he had probably looked up the Donne and Shelley lines in a dictionary of quotations.

Veronica had seen Ella driving through the village, but had not waved to her because of being in discussion with a very interesting new acquaintance. She had first encountered him at the Red Lion, when some neighbours had taken her there for a meal. She did not particularly like the neighbours, but she had gone because she had a rather elegant new jacket and it was a pity not to give it an airing.

The man had been at an adjoining table, eating the Red Lion’s lasagne, apparently absorbed in reading a book propped up against his wine glass. Veronica had glanced at him indifferently, vaguely thinking him rather scruffy, and wondering that the Red Lion had deigned to serve him, because they were generally quite particular. But later, going up to the bar to order some drinks for the neighbours who had brought her, she had heard the man asking for the key to his room at reception. She had instantly revised her opinion, because he had the most beautiful voice she had ever heard – pure BBC, it was – and the landlord had called him Doctor somebody – the surname had sounded vaguely foreign. And, of course, circumstances altered cases, and you heard of absent-minded professors and research people who went about looking positively tattered. Considered again, in the light of this new knowledge, whoever he was, whatever kind of doctor he was, he had the kind of face you saw in old portraits – Henry VIII and people – well, not Henry himself, of course, but those people whose heads he had chopped off. Martyrs and suchlike. Paul Schofield had played one of them in a film.

Seeing the man again in Market Street, Veronica made a point of pausing to say good morning, and that she hoped he was enjoying his stay in Upper Bramley. This was not being forward, and anyway Veronica was entirely caught up with the new man in her life, but you had to be polite to visitors to your home place. Seen at closer quarters, the doctor with the foreign name was a bit younger than she had first thought, although it was still difficult to be sure. He might be mid-thirties. Asked, he said he was in Bramley for perhaps two or three weeks for local research; Veronica would like to have asked more, but he nodded a polite dismissal and went back to the Red Lion. Still, she thought he had looked at her quite fixedly and she was glad she had put on a particularly smart outfit, even though she was only shopping for a rather intimate little supper party. She went into the delicatessen to buy smoked oysters, pâté and French bread. No need for wine, that would be provided by her guest. In Boots she bought two packs of condoms so people would know she was still what nurses at clinics called sexually active. To emphasize the point, she added to her wire basket a pair of expensive black stockings with lace tops.

After this, she looked in at the library, to ask Clem if he knew who the visitor at the Red Lion might be. If he was really here for local research, the library would be his first port of call. But Clem was not much help. He had developed a cold since going to the decontamination of Priors Bramley and it was as much as he could do to sit at his desk, which he said was very annoying because he wanted to write an account of the day. Pressed about the man at the Red Lion, he admitted he had seen him, but he did not know anything about him.

‘Well, that’s other than the fact that he dresses like a dropout and looks like the Holbein portrait of Sir Thomas More,’ said Clem, sneezing four times into a large handkerchief.

Veronica supposed, crossly, that she might have expected Clem to be absolutely useless.