‘Well, you said yourself you thought I knew something,’ I said, huffily. ‘This is what I knew. And you can see at once how it complicates matters, can’t you?’ I decided to focus my attention firmly back on the facts. ‘What Mrs Duffy is doing – for I’m sure it’s her doing it – does not make sense from start to finish. If she were ninety instead of fifty, one would think she was gaga. And Cara’s behaviour makes even less.’
‘But that’s a very good sign,’ said Alec. ‘There are so many inconsistencies already that there’s no way it can stay secret. I’ll bet as soon as we speak to Cara and her mother the whole thing will just dissolve.’
‘I have little hope of getting anything from Lena, although she may well let something slip that she doesn’t know is useful, as she has already,’ I said. ‘But Cara, yes. Cara is altogether different. Why, she said more to me at Croys than a child would, and she will surely yield to you under the slightest pressure.’ I did not trouble to keep the arch note out of my voice and was gratified to see him look discomfited.
‘Yes,’ he said, standing and coming to draw out my chair, talking in a mock grandiose style to meet my archness head-on. ‘By nightfall tonight, it will be laid plain before us.’ He went back to his normal voice. ‘We just need to speak to Cara.’
We were quiet again during the long afternoon’s drive through the forest and down, down towards the sea. I was engaged partly on digesting the weight of my luncheon, partly on planning approaches to Lena and Cara, but also on trying to sort what I knew in patterns, hoping to be the first one to pounce on the answer which had to, simply had to, be there.
By the time we were on the coast road, coming round the bay to Kirkandrews in the failing afternoon light, I was even looking forward to it. A few days spent in this soft, fresh breeze making all well for Alec and Cara, for Daisy and Silas, and even somehow I hoped for Mrs Duffy, was a pleasant prospect. My debut as an investigator was almost too easy to be called employment. A gentle word with Cara was all it was going to take, I was sure, to earn my fee.
Alec swung us off the road at the Kirkandrews fingerpost and I sat up in my seat, eager as one always is for one’s first glimpse of the sea. Someone was having a bonfire at the beach and the scent of wood smoke mingled with the salt tang which had just become discernible in the air. It was charming at first – I leaned my head out of the side window to sniff at the memories of Boxing Day picnics it carried – but it threatened to overpower us as we advanced. The smell of it rolled up in plumes, driven no doubt by the on-shore breeze, and soon we had to fasten the car windows against it. There was no visible smoke, just the engulfing smell of it, the stench of it now we were on the track which led right to the sand line. I began to think it could not be a bonfire after all, but something much bigger, out now although perhaps still smouldering. I looked towards Alec and saw that he was grim-faced and pale as he drove the car on, ignoring the bumps and hollows under the wheels and the reach of the gorse on either side of the narrow lane scratching at the paintwork. The growing acrid stink, the protesting rumble of the tyres and the ceaseless grinding of the engine all of a sudden seemed like an outside echo, horribly amplified, of the dread that had been threatening to consume me all week. Alec increased the speed again as we passed the sign for Reiver’s Rest and we jounced over the close-cropped turf faster and faster until the car rounded the last of the gorse into the open and skidded to a slithering halt.
In front of us, was a large plot of clipped grass ringed around with flower beds and edged with a white stick fence. A shell path started from a gate on the side nearest us and led halfway across the garden before it vanished abruptly, obscenely, to be replaced by a ring of scorched earth on which sat the blackened, reeking heap that was all there was left of the Duffys’ cottage. Such a tiny heap, almost all ash, with only a few withered sticks and splinters, unbelievable that it had ever been a building.
I stepped out of the car on shaky legs and had to hold my scarf across my mouth to save from retching at the stink of it. They must have doused the flames in sea-water – of course they had, the sea was a minute’s run from where we stood – and the smell of the wreckage still sizzling and settling now and then was unbearable. Even some of the men who sat slouched beside buckets in the long grass at the edge of the dunes still wore cloths covering their noses and mouths.
A constable in uniform and gumboots was picking his way towards us around the edge of the debris, poking at the settling ash with a charred stick, clearly waiting for someone of greater seniority to arrive. Every so often he looked at a small crowd of sightseers, gathered at a respectful distance, as though daring any of them to advance. When we approached him, he touched his helmet rim and threw the stick down.
‘Where are the ladies?’ Alec asked in a steady voice, showing the strain only in the lack of any words of greeting.
‘Away to the hotel at Gatehouse,’ said the man. I reached out and squeezed Alec’s arm. ‘The two of them,’ he added. ‘The mother and one o’ the lasses.’ He turned towards the remains of the fire and spoke softly. ‘The other lass was in there, God love her.’
Alec and I did not speak or even look at each other as we walked back to the car. There was nothing to say. It would have been ludicrous to voice the certainty that it was Clemence at Gatehouse with her mother, shameful to both of us to allude to the conviction – so strong we would have staked our lives on it – that now we should never be able to speak to Cara.
Chapter Five
Young men had died in their thousands, and I had known dozens and scores of them, sons of friends or lads from the village. I had mourned their deaths individually and collectively in the church Sunday after Sunday, year after year, and had stood in front of memorials – had even unveiled one – singing patriotic hymns and boiling with misery and rage. None of these deaths, however, not even young Sandy Masterton, to whom I had once fed broth when his mother was sick with a fever, stabbed at me like the death of Cara Duffy.
I take no pride in that. I loathe the grading of tragedy and the jostling for pre-eminence amongst the bereaved, that most disgusting example of the disgusting habit of claiming a starring role in any incident that touches one. I do not, therefore, mean to suggest either that my recent conversation with the girl made me peculiarly pained by her death or that one young girl, fair of face and gentle of birth, was materially different from thousands of coarser and plainer young men.
I wonder though. Might it be true that we are not really creatures of any imagination after all and that something, anything, happening under our noses necessarily affects us more deeply than something, anything, we merely hear about? I had hitherto suspected a grosser motive behind our menfolk’s reluctance to talk about the war; a selfishness, or worse a self-important chivalry, and had wondered if that was why they all seemed to disapprove so viscerally of the poets’ trying to make the rest of us understand. Now, I began to see that perhaps there was a gulf that just could not be crossed between those who had been there and seen with their own eyes and those who had waited at home. Why else would this death, sudden and shocking as it was, seem so much worse than what lay behind the names on the cenotaph?
These were the thoughts which occupied me as we drove up to the town of Gatehouse and unremarkably, typically I should almost say, they turned out to be quite wrong.
I expected to find Lena and Clemence installed in a bar parlour, smoky and dishevelled, perhaps even wrapped in blankets, with attendant police and servants talking in hushed voices. I hoped a comfortable landlady was bringing them soup and hot bottles for their feet and I steeled myself to be the one who must bring other kinds of comfort. It was with some initial relief then that Alec and I found the two of them, in the bar parlour at the Murray Arms to be sure, but looking quite fresh and somewhat indecently composed.