But at least she hadn’t wasted her time that evening.
The long trail that had started on Wednesday, over the telephone, was beginning to bear fruit.
At first, she had come to the conclusion that it was easier finding a fully dressed woman in The Sunday Sport than getting information out of the American Embassy. People were polite – insufferably so – but she was shunted from one minion to another for the best part of an hour and came out with nothing but an earache and a growing distaste for condescending and suspicious American men who called her “ma’am.”
By the end of the day, she had managed to discover that the personnel at Rowan Woods in late 1943 would have been members of the United States Eighth Air Force, and it was very unlikely that there would be any local records of who they were. One of the more helpful employees suggested that she try contacting the USAFE base in Ramstein and gave her the number.
When she got back from the Leeds council estate, even though it was early evening, she phoned Ramstein, where she discovered that all air force personnel records were kept at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. She checked the time difference and found that St. Louis was six hours behind Harkside. Which meant it would be afternoon there.
After a little more shunting around and a few abrupt requests to “please hold,” she was put through to a woman called Mattie, who just “adored” her accent. They chatted about the differences in weather – it was raining hard in St. Louis – and about other things for a short while, then Annie plucked up the courage to ask for what she wanted.
Expecting some sort of military smoke screen, she was pleasantly surprised when Mattie told her that there was no problem; the records were generally available to the public, and she would see what she could do. When Annie mentioned the initials “PX,” Mattie laughed and said that was the man who looked after the store. She also warned Annie that some of their records had been burned in a fire a few years ago, but if she still had Rowan Woods, she’d set the fax to send it out during the night. Annie should get it the next morning. Annie thanked her profusely and went home feeling absurdly pleased with herself.
But it didn’t last.
Sometimes when she felt irritable and restless like this, she would go for a drive, and that was exactly what she did. Without making a conscious decision, she took the road west out of Harkside, and when she reached the turnoff for Thornfield Reservoir, she turned right.
By then she had realized that Banks wasn’t the problem; she was. She was pissed off at herself for letting him get to her. She was behaving like some sort of silly love-struck schoolgirl. Vulnerable. Hurt. Let’s face it, Annie, she told herself, life has been pretty simple, pretty much regimented for some time now. No real highs; no real lows. Only herself to think of. Manageable, but diminished.
She had been hiding from life in a remote corner of Yorkshire, protecting her emotions from the harsh world she had experienced “out there.” Sometimes when you open yourself up to that life again, it can be confusing and painful, like when you open your eyes to bright light. Your emotions are tender and raw, more than usually sensitive to all its nuances, its little hurts and humiliations. So that was what was happening. Well, at least she knew that much. So much for cool, Annie, so much for detachment.
A misshapen harvest moon hung low in the western sky, bloated and flattened into a red sausage shape by the gathering haze. Otherwise the road was unlit, surrounded on both sides by tall dark trees. Her headlights caught dozens of rabbits.
She pulled into the car park and turned off the engine. Silence. As she got out and stood in the warm night air, she started to feel at peace. Her problems seemed to slip away; one way or another, she knew they would sort themselves out.
Annie loved being alone deep in the countryside at night, where you might hear only the very distant progress of a car, the rustles of small animals, see only the dark shapes of the trees and hills, perhaps a few pinpricks of light from farmhouses on distant hillsides. She loved the sea at night even more – the relentless rhythm of the waves, the hiss and suck, and the way the reflected moonlight sways and bends with the water’s swell and catches the crests of the waves. But the sea was fifty miles away. She would have to make do with the woods for now. The appeal was still to the deep, primitive part of her.
She took the narrow footpath toward Hobb’s End, walking carefully because of the gnarled tree roots that crossed it in places and the stones that thrust up out of the dirt. Hardly any moonlight penetrated the tree cover, but here and there she caught a slat or two of reddish-silver light between branches. She could smell the loamy, earthy smell of trees and shrubs. The slightest breeze butterfly-kissed the upper leaves.
When Annie reached the slope, she paused and looked down on the ruins of Hobb’s End. It was easy to make out the dark, skeletal shape, the spine and ribs, but somehow tonight, with the slight curve of the High Street and the dry riverbed, the ruins looked more like the decayed stubs of teeth in a sneering mouth.
Annie skipped down the slope and walked toward the fairy bridge. From there, she looked along the river and saw the blood-red moonlight reflected in the few little puddles of water that remained on its muddy bed. She walked on past the outbuilding where Gloria’s skeleton had been found, and the ruins of Bridge Cottage next to it. The ground around had all been dug up and was now taped off for safety. The SOCOs from headquarters had brought their own crime-scene tape. She headed down what was once the High Street.
As she went, Annie tried to visualize the scene from Michael Stanhope’s painting: children laughing and splashing in the river shallows; knots of local women gossiping outside a shop; the butcher’s boy in his blood-stained apron riding like the wind; the tall young woman arranging newspapers in a rack. Gwynneth Shackleton. That was who it was. Why hadn’t she realized it before? Somehow, the revelation that Stanhope had also painted Gwen Shackleton into his scene thrilled her.
She looked at the ruins to her right and saw where once was a detached cottage with a little garden, once a row of terrace houses opening directly onto the pavement. This was where the ginnel led off to the tanner’s yard; here was the Shackletons’ newsagent’s shop, here the butcher’s, and a little farther down stood the Shoulder of Mutton, where the sign had swayed and creaked in the wind.
So real did it all seem as she walked toward the flax mill that she began to fancy she could even hear long-silent voices whispering secrets. She passed the street that led to the old church and stood at the western end of the village, on that stretch of empty ground where the houses ended and the land rose toward the mill.
As she stood and breathed in the air deeply, she realized how much she wanted to know what had happened here, every bit as much as Banks did. Without her wishing for it, or asking for it, Hobb’s End and its history had imposed themselves on her, thrust themselves into her consciousness and become part of her life. It had happened at the same time that Banks had become part of her life, too. She knew that, whatever became of them, the two events would be united in her mind forever.
When she had challenged him on his obsession with it the other night, she hadn’t even attempted to explain hers. It wasn’t because of the war, but because she identified with Gloria. This was a woman who had struggled and dared to be a little different in a time that didn’t tolerate such behavior. She had lost her parents, then had either abandoned or been cast out by the father of her child, had come to a remote place, taken on a hard job and fallen in love. Then she had lost her husband in the war, or so she must have believed. If Gloria had been still alive when Matthew came back, then she would have had to face a stranger, most likely. Whatever else happened, someone strangled her, stabbed her nearly twenty times and buried her under an outbuilding. And nobody had tried to find out what happened to her.