Emma wasn’t been able to move. She looked around her and saw a piece of black polythene, tossed by the wind so it looked like an enormous crow, flapping over the bean field. And then, miraculously, her mother appeared. Emma could believe, looking as far as the horizon, that her mother was the only other person alive in the whole village. She was battling her way along the footpath towards her daughter, her greying hair tucked into the hood of her old anorak, Wellington boots under her Sunday-best skirt. The last thing Robert had said when Emma flounced out of the kitchen was, “Just let her go. She has to learn.” He hadn’t shouted. He’d spoken patiently, kindly even. Mary always did as Robert told her, and the sight of her silhouette against the grey sky, fatter than normal because she was bundled against the cold, was almost as shocking as the sight of Abigail Mantel lying in the ditch. Because after a few seconds Emma had accepted that this was Abigail. No one else had the same colour hair. She waited, with the tears running down her face, for her mother to reach her.
A few yards from her, her mother opened her arms and stood waiting for Emma to run into them. Emma began to sob, choking so it was impossible for her to speak. Mary held her and began to stroke her hair away from her face, as she had when they’d been living in York, when Emma had still been a child and prone to occasional nightmares.
“Nothing is worth getting that upset for,” Mary said. “Whatever’s the matter, we can sort it out.” She meant, You know your father only does what he thinks is right. If we explain to him he will soon come round.
Then Emma pulled her to the ditch and made her look down on Abigail Mantel’s body. She knew that not even her mother could sort that out and make it better.
There was a horrified silence. It was as if Mary too had needed time to take in the sight, then her mother’s voice came again, suddenly brisk, demanding a reply. “Did you touch her?”
Emma was shocked out of the hysteria.
“No.”
“There’s nothing more we can do for her now. Do you hear me, Emma? We’re going home and we’re going to tell the police and for a while everything will seem like a dreadful dream. But it wasn’t your fault and there was nothing you could have done.”
And Emma thought, At least she hasn’t mentioned Jesus. At least she doesn’t expect me to take comfort from that.
In the Captain’s House, the wind continued to shake the loose sash window in the bedroom. Emma spoke in her head to Abigail. See, I faced it, remembered it just as it happened. Now, can I go to sleep? But though she wrapped herself around James and sucked the warmth from him, she still felt cold. She tried to conjure up her favourite fantasy about Dan Greenwood, imagined his dark skin lying against hers, but even that failed to work its magic.
Chapter Three
Emma couldn’t tell the aftermath of her discovery of Abigail as a story. It didn’t have a strong enough narrative line. It was too muddled in her head. Details were missing. At the time it had been hard to follow what was happening. Perhaps shock had made it difficult to concentrate. Even these days, ten years on, the image of the cold, silent Abigail flashed into her mind when she least expected it. That evening, the evening after the discovery of the body, when they had all sat in the kitchen at Springhead House, it had lodged in her brain, blocking her vision and making all the questions seem as if they were coming from very far away. And now it made the memories jerky and unreliable.
She couldn’t remember the walk back to the house with her mother, but could see herself, hesitating by the back door, reluctant still to face her father. She always hated to disappoint him. But even if he’d been preparing a lecture when he heard them approach, he soon forgot about it. Mary took him into a corner, her arm round his shoulder, and gave a whispered explanation. He stood for a moment still as a stone, as if it was too hard for him to accept. “Not here,” he said. “Not in Elvet.” He turned and took Emma in his arms, so she could smell the soap he shaved with. “No one should have to see that,” he said. “Not my little girl. I’m so sorry.” As if he, somehow, was to blame, as if he should have been strong enough to protect her from it. Then they wrapped her up in the scratchy blanket which they used as a rug on picnics and there were urgent phone calls to the police. Shocked as she was, she sensed that once he’d come to terms with what had happened, Robert was rather enjoying the drama.
But when the policewoman arrived to speak to Emma, he must have realized that his presence might make things more difficult and he left the three women on their own in the kitchen. That would have been difficult for him. Robert always felt he had a contribution to make at a time of crisis. He was used to dealing with emergencies: clients who slit their wrists in his waiting room, or had psychotic episodes, or jumped bail. Emma wondered if that was why he enjoyed his work so much.
Perhaps someone else came to Springhead with the detective and talked to Robert in a different room, because occasionally in the lull in the conversation, while Emma struggled to answer the policewoman’s questions, she thought she could hear muffled voices. Above the wind it was difficult to tell. It was possible that her father was talking to Christopher and she was imagining the third voice. Christopher must have been in the house that day too.
Mary made tea in the big brown earthenware pot, and they sat at the kitchen table. Mary apologized.
“It’s so cold in the rest of the house. At least here there’s the Aga…” And for once the Aga behaved itself and gave off some heat. Condensation had been running down the windows all day and had formed lakes on the sills. Mary hated the Aga then, before she got more used to its ways. She faced it every morning as if preparing for battle, muttering under her breath, a prayer, Please get hot today. Don’t die on me. Please stay warm long enough to cook a meal.
The policewoman, though, still seemed cold. She kept on her coat and clasped her hands round her mug of tea. Emma must have been introduced to her though that bit escaped her memory, escaped as soon as it had been spoken. She could remember thinking that the woman must have been a policewoman although she was wearing her own clothes, clothes which had seemed so smart to Emma that she noticed them as soon as she walked in. Under the coat there was a skirt, softly fitted, almost full length and a pair of brown leather boots. Throughout the enquiry Emma would struggle to remember this woman’s name, although she would become the family’s only contact with the police, returning whenever there was a development in the case, so they wouldn’t have to find out from the press.
As soon as she sat down the policewoman Kate? Cathy? asked that question, “What were you doing there, out on your own in the storm?”
It was so hard to explain. Emma could hardly just say, Well, it’s Sunday afternoon. Although in her mind that was all the explanation needed. Sundays were often tense, all of them in together, trying to be a model family. Nothing much to do after church.
That Sunday had been worse than usual. Emma had some good memories of family meals at Springhead, occasions when Robert was expansive, telling silly jokes that had them doubled up with laughter, when her mother waxed passionate about some book she was reading. Then it almost seemed that the good times they had enjoyed in York had returned. But those had all been before Abigail died. That Sunday lunch had marked a watershed, a change in atmosphere. Or so it would seem to Emma later. She remembered the meal with unusual clarity: the four of them sitting at the table, Christopher uncommunicative, caught up as usual with some project of his own, Mary dishing out the food with a sort of desperate energy, talking all the time, Robert unusually silent. Emma had taken the silence as a good sign and slipped her request into the conversation, hoping almost that he wouldn’t notice.