DS Cabbot glanced down at the skeletal hand.
“Come on,” Banks said. “There’s nothing more we can do here. This poor bugger’s probably been dead longer than we’ve been alive.”
Vivian Elmsley felt bone-weary when she finally got home from the signing. She put her briefcase down in the hall and walked through to the living room. Most people would have been surprised at the modern chrome-and-glass decor in the home of a person as old as Vivian, but she far preferred it to all the dreadfully twee antiques, knickknacks and restored woodwork that cluttered up most old people’s houses – at least the ones she had seen. The only painting that adorned her plain white walls hung over the narrow glass mantelpiece, a framed print of a Georgia O’Keeffe flower, overwhelming in its yellowness and intimidating in its symmetry.
First, Vivian opened the windows to let in some air, then she poured a stiff gin and tonic and made her way to her favorite armchair. Supported by chrome tubes, upholstered in black leather, it leaned back at just the right angle to make reading, drinking or watching television sinfully comfortable.
Vivian glanced at the clock, all its polished brass-and-silver inner workings exposed by the glass dome. Almost nine. She would watch the news first. After that, she would have her bath and read Flaubert.
She reached for the remote control. After the best part of a lifetime’s writing in longhand, with only an old walnut-cabinet wireless to provide entertainment, she had given in to technology five years ago. In one glorious shopping spree the day after she received a large advance from her new American publisher, she went out and bought herself a television, a VCR, a stereo system and the computer she now used to write her books.
She put her feet up and clicked on the remote control. The news was the usual rubbish. Politics, for the most part, a little murder, famine in Africa, a botched assassination attempt in the Middle East. She didn’t know why she bothered watching it. Then, toward the end, came one of those little human-interest bites they use to fill up the time.
This one made Vivian sit up and take notice.
The camera panned a cluster of familiar ruins as the voice-over explained that the drought had brought this lost Dales village of Hobb’s End to light for the first time since it had been officially flooded in 1953. She already knew that – this was the same film footage they had used when the story first made it to television about a month ago – but suddenly the angle changed, and she could see a group of people standing by the bridge, one of them a uniformed policeman.
“Today,” the voice-over went on, “a young boy exploring the scene discovered something he hadn’t bargained for.”
The narrator’s tone was light, fluffy, the way so many of the cozy mysteries Vivian detested made light of the real world of murder. It was a mystery worthy of Miss Marple, he went on, a skeleton discovered, not in a cupboard, folks, but under the muddy floor of an old outbuilding. How could it have got there? Was foul play suspected?
Vivian clutched the cool chrome tubes at the sides of her armchair as she watched, gin and tonic forgotten on the glass table beside her.
The camera focused on the outbuilding, and Vivian saw the man and woman standing on the threshold. The narrator went on about the police arriving at the scene and refusing to comment at this early stage, then he brought the piece to a close by saying they’d be keeping an eye on the situation.
The program was well into the weather by the time Vivian had recovered from the shock. Even then, she found that her hands were still gripping the chrome so tightly, even her liver spots had turned white.
She let go, let her body sag in the chair, and took a deep breath. Then she reached for her gin and tonic, hands shaking now, and managed to take a gulp without spilling it. That helped.
When she felt a little calmer, she went into the study and dug through her filing cabinet for the manuscript she had written in the early 1970s, three years after her last visit to Thornfield Reservoir. She found the sheaf of papers and carried it back through to the living room.
It had never been intended for publication. In many ways, it had been a practice piece, one she had written when she became interested in writing after her husband’s death. She had written it when she thought the old adage “Write about what you know” meant “Write about your own life, your own experiences.” It had taken her a few years to work out that that was not the case. She still wrote about what she knew – guilt, grief, pain, madness – only now she put it into the lives of her characters.
As she started to read, she realized she wasn’t sure exactly what it was. A memoir? A novella? Certainly there was some truth in it; at least she had tried to stick to the facts, had even consulted her old diaries for accuracy. But because she had written it at a time in her life when she had been unclear about the blurred line between autobiography and fiction, she couldn’t be sure which was which. Would she see it any more clearly now? There was only one way to find out.
Banks had never been to Harkside before. DS Cabbot led the way in her metallic purple Astra, and he followed her along the winding one-way streets lined with limestone and gritstone Dales cottages with small, colorful gardens behind low walls. Many of the houses that opened directly onto the street had window boxes or baskets of red and gold flowers hanging outside.
They parked beside the village green, where a few scattered trees provided shade for the benches. Old people sat in the late-summer dusk as the shadows grew long, wrinkled hands resting on knobbly walking sticks, talking to other old people or just watching the world go by. At the center of the green stood a small, obelisk-style war memorial listing the names of Harkside’s dead over the two world wars.
The essentials were arrayed around the green: a KwikSave minimart, which from its oddly ornate facade looked as if it had once been a cinema, a Barclay’s Bank, newsagent’s, butcher’s, grocer’s, betting shop, Oddbins Wines, a fifteenth-century church and three pubs, one of them the Black Swan. Though Harkside had a population of only between two and three thousand, it was the largest place for some miles, and people from the more remote farms and hamlets still viewed it as the closest thing to the big city, full of sin and temptation. It was simply a large village, but most local people referred to it as “town.”
“Where’s the section station?” Banks asked.
DS Cabbot pointed down a side street.
“The place that looks like a brick garage? The one with the flat roof?”
“That’s the one. Ugliest building in town.”
“Do you live here?”
“For my sins, yes, sir.”
It was just a saying, Banks knew, but he couldn’t help wondering what those sins were. Just imagining them gave him a little thrill of delight.
They walked over to the Black Swan, a whitewash-and-timber facade with gables and a sagging slate roof. It was dim inside, but still too warm, despite the open door and windows. Though a few tourists and ramblers lingered over after-dinner drinks at the rickety wooden tables, it was long past their bedtime. Banks walked to the bar with DS Cabbot, who asked the bartender if they could still get food.
“Depends what you want, love,” she said, and pointed to a list on the blackboard.
Banks sighed. The guessing game. He had played it often enough before. You walk in about ten minutes after opening time and ask for something on the menu, only to be told that it’s “off.” After about four or five alternatives, also declared “off,” you finally find something that they just might have. If you’re lucky.
This time Banks went through tandoori chicken and chips, venison medallions in a red wine sauce and chips, and fettucine Alfredo and chips before striking gold: beef and Stilton pie. And chips. He hadn’t been eating much beef for the past few years, but he had stopped worrying about mad-cow disease lately. If his brain was going to turn to sludge, there wasn’t much he could do to stop it at this stage. Sometimes it felt like sludge already.