‘Joey,’ said Mr Brown, jerking his head towards the back.
His daughter lifted the flap of the bar counter to let us pass.
‘I’ll give ye five, ten minutes,’ said Brown, ‘then I’ll come up and let Joey down again. Somebody needs to stay here.’ There were indeed several customers in the pub tonight and so this seemed reasonable, although I had noticed in earlier visits that the Browns did not usually take pains to man the counter. I wondered if perhaps it was more that each felt disinclined to talk to us in the presence of the other.
Joey led Alec and me through the kitchen and along the passageway, clear today, all the boxes vanished.
‘Upstairs, Miss Brown,’ I said, ‘if it’s all the same to you.’ I did not want another interview in the noxious wash-house in the basement. Joey nodded without turning her head and opened a door concealing a box staircase to the upper floor. A few moments later we were facing one another, a little too close, in what seemed to be a spare bedroom at the back of the house. There was nowhere to sit except the narrow bed and so we remained standing, awkwardly, waiting for someone to speak.
Perhaps we can blame the compulsion to make sure one’s guests are always having fun at one’s parties, deeply ingrained at finishing school where we were taught how to handle any social encounter with aplomb, or perhaps the even earlier training of being scrubbed and primped and brought down after tea to bore Mummy’s guests with endless verses of ‘The Blessed Damezel’. Of course, it is only now that one can see how bored they must have been. At the time, well-schooled themselves, they seemed enchanted. For whatever reason, it was me who cracked first and broke the silence.
‘You recognized him,’ I said, making not quite a question but more than a statement of it. Joey Brown heaved an enormous guttering sigh and turned away from us. In the silence we could hear voices from the bar below.
‘I thocht I did,’ she said.
‘And are you saying that he didn’t make any attempt to contact you?’ said Alec. ‘That the only time you saw him was here, on the Burry Man’s day?’ She turned back at that, looking at him quizzically.
‘I thocht I recognized him,’ she said with more emphasis, ‘but I wis wrong. He wis that like his daddy. And wi’ the face all covered up and jist the eyes and the hands, I wis sure fur a minute, but I wis wrong.’
I could not quite see where this certainty came from but I could understand the sadness in her voice: even if she had concluded that the vision of her sweetheart was a haunting, she would rather have had that than nothing. I could not think what to say to her to bring comfort. Would it be better for her to keep believing that her eyes had played tricks or would she want to know that he had indeed been here and was still alive, but had left her without a word? I wished the clamouring voices downstairs would hush and let me concentrate.
‘Did you tell your father?’ Alec asked her. ‘Is that why he rushed outside to challenge him?’
She nodded.
‘And was it your father who told you you were wrong?’
Joey seemed to consider this carefully before she spoke.
‘Aye,’ she said at last. ‘Father telt me it wis Rab Dudgeon right enough. Telt me I wis bein’ daft – I’ve always been feart o’ the Burry Man.’
I tried to catch Alec’s eye to see if he knew where to go from here. It was possible, I suppose, that she had recognized Bobby Dudgeon but had been persuaded out of it by her father, but there was more going on here than Miss Brown was telling. Alec was studying her intently, frowning a little, as distracted as I was by the cries from below.
‘Shop!’ came a particularly lusty yell, followed by laughter.
‘Shinie! Joey! We’re dyin’ o’ thirst here,’ came another.
‘You had better go down,’ I said to her. ‘Your father is obviously on his way to find us and your customers seem to be getting restless.’ Joey bobbed a curtsy without looking us in the eye and hurriedly left.
‘Do you believe her?’ I asked Alec once she had gone. ‘Do you believe that it was only a passing notion – one that happened to be spot on – or do you think she knew full well that it was Bobby Dudgeon in the suit?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Alec. ‘There’s something not right here. Lord, I wish those men would shut up. She should be there by now. What’s taking her?’ Indeed, the shouts for service from the bar customers had, if anything, got louder and more sustained.
‘I’m trying to cast my mind back to that day,’ I said. ‘There was always something odd about the way Shinie Brown went crashing out into the street to confront him. The way he held out the glass, the way they locked eyes. There was something so urgent about it all. So I can believe easily that Shinie rushed out to see if it was true – to see if it really was Bobby – and that he recognized that it was, and Bobby knew he’d been recognized, and Shinie knew that he knew and so on and so on. And they didn’t bumble the glass and spill the whisky, you know. The Burry Man reared back like a stag at bay and Shinie quite deliberately, contemptuously, dashed it away on to the ground. So that fits too.’
‘Yes,’ said Alec. ‘The father of a lost soldier wouldn’t want to welcome home a deserter with a glass of cheer.’ He was having to talk loudly now to be heard above the chanting from below.
‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘He’d sooner…’
‘What?’ said Alec.
‘I was going to say he’d sooner poison him.’
‘If he happened to have poison lying around.’
‘And not just the Turnbulls’ idea of poison,’ I said. ‘Good God, what a noise from down there. Where are they, do you suppose? Shinie was supposed to come to us when Joey went back.’ We waited a moment or two longer, and then it seemed to dawn on us both together: the shouts for service had begun even while Joey was here. She had led us upstairs out of the way and, like lambs, we had followed.
We practically fell over each other trying to get out of the door and down the narrow stairway. There was no one behind the bar counter or in the back kitchen, only the customers shouting for their beer and joking about search parties. Then we wasted precious moments searching for a back door into the yard before realizing that the only exit must be from the basement. We clattered down the steps, banged open the door to the cellar room and ran in.
A sharp cry stopped me dead. Joey was there, huddled once more into the same corner behind the copper, shaking. Alec, beside me, still panting, looked around and his mouth fell open.
‘Good God,’ he said.
‘Where is he?’ I demanded, going up to Joey and taking her chin in my hand. ‘Where did he go?’
She bit her lip and shook her head, tears beginning to gather in her eyes.
‘I wis wrong,’ she said again. ‘I telt him it wis Bobby and I wis wrong. It’s all my fault.’
‘Listen to me,’ I said, grabbing hold of her arms but managing not to shake her. ‘You were right. It was Bobby.’
‘But it was his father who…’ she said.
‘It was his father who what?’ I asked. I could sense that we were getting to it now.
‘It was his father… afterwards.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was his father again afterwards.’
‘And he never went home. He stayed and went to the greasy pole and – and – he died. So I must have been wrong.’
Suddenly I could see what she meant. She had been inside somewhere, probably right here, that day when Brown had followed the Burry Man outside. She had not seen a thing.
‘He didn’t drink it,’ I said. ‘Do you hear me? He didn’t drink from the glass out there in the street. I saw it all.’