Four British Mysteries Read online

  “Indeed, the promise of winter brings many guilty gluttons to our doorstep.” The elderly woman smiled, then winked at Freya’s children. “Besides, the more the merrier. We need the bodies.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “To warm the church, my dear. The building is old as anything in the village. Even filled it doesn’t hold heat well.”

  Darkness held no fear for Freya; she who had been left in the dark already, and there was familiarity in the cries of the dogs that conjured up memories of her last night with Robert, when they had sat at their dining table and eaten to the chorus of howls. Rather, it was the fragility of that memory that kept her awake at night and in a moment of madness, alone in her kitchen, she had threatened that...

  She left the old woman to her greetings, leading her children past the alcoves, where there were fewer people to disrupt. They slipped into the third-row pew and waited while the rest of Lynnwood’s church-going residents found their seats. The cruciform ground plan was typical of fourteenth-century traditions. Sitting in the third row, she had a clear view of the altar, the high place on which it rested and the transept at the head of the room. There was little of the ornament boasted by grander churches, but theirs was a practical parish. The pews were varnished oak. A table by the entrance held a vase of white-lipped lilies and the collection bowl. White plaster covered the walls and although some stained-glass windows overlooked the nave, these were of a simple design. It was a place of worship and nothing more; a church for a parish which needed spiritual nourishment, when the nights drew in and the dogs began to bay.

  Beside her, George fidgeted in his seat. He looked distracted, she thought, as did his sister, their eyes staring but not seeing. She didn’t judge them. Church was no place for the wild spirits of children.

  * * *

  “Do I have to come?” Lizzie had said that morning, when Freya stepped into her room and flung open the curtains. The room was dark, stuffy and filled with a menagerie of shapes in the half-light; the products of her daughter’s art classes. It smelled of adolescence, and the perfumes used by teenage girls to mask it.

  “Yes, darling,” she said. “This is family time.”

  “But it’s pointless! You think there’s some All-Father sitting up there, nodding when you go to church and frowning when you’re bad? You think Dad lived by those beliefs? We’re not a parish of medieval sinners. No one believes in God anymore!”

  “It doesn’t matter what you or anyone else believes,” she said, unlocking the window to let some air in. “It’s the done thing. The least we can manage is a Sunday, here and there.”

  “This is stupid,” said Lizzie. “Mark Thomas’s parents take him to beer festivals, and Rachel’s mum cooks her three-course dinners when they need family time. With cheeseboards. And pâté starters.”

  “You don’t like pâté, darling, and neither do I.”

  “That’s not the point,” said Lizzie. “You’re not listening to me. I’m saying church isn’t normal anymore.”

  “Your skirt’s on the bannister,” said Freya, unfaltering. “You’ve got twenty minutes, young lady.”

  * * *

  Freya had heard it said once, when shopping with Robert in Lymington, that the hungry were quick to forget. This was true of the conversation; they were enjoying afternoon tea at a small café and the table beside theirs had entirely forgotten what it was they had ordered. She remembered the café well; the miniature sandwiches filled with wafers of smoked salmon, the lace tablecloths, even the serviettes, printed in patriotic colours and folded carefully for each customer by their place mat. People loved the café, as they loved all places where they could gorge themselves under the pretense of propriety. They were modern predators, snouts speckled not with blood but tea and breadcrumbs.

  The saying was also true of Lynnwood, however. Perhaps that was why she had felt such guilt at her appetite, the Sunday she encountered the pig. She could not explain that morning’s weakness, which stood against everything she had upheld for over ten years, except that even as she remembered it her mouth began to fill with hot, wet anticipation. For the first time in a decade she had felt temptation, and she had succumbed to it in a moment. They might not be medieval, as her daughter had suggested, but Freya had sinned, and while she continued to sin there was Allerwood Church. The Dark Ages, it seemed, had endured to the twenty-first century, hidden beneath the boughs of the trees and in their hungry hearts.

  * * *

  The sky was grey and heavy with cloud when they left the service. They took the gravel-stone path through the churchyard and around the back of the church. The little chips made crunching sounds beneath their feet, like hard, dry cereal between her teeth. The three of them moved amid the headstones.

  As with most old parishes of its kind, an intimate, if not generous number of graves had sprung up in its grounds over the centuries. The very first graves, the earliest, were those nearest to the church. Some of them were little more than rock piles, their inscriptions long since eroded, or hidden beneath moss. These were the first settlers of Lynnwood, resting beneath its hallowed grounds, from where they might continue to keep a quiet watch over their village. There had been a petition to have the graves restored, she remembered, several years ago. Quite a number of signatures had been gathered from the village’s more spiritual residents. They had a more than vested interest in the maintenance of the graves, she supposed, as regular attendees of the church.

  Her signature had counted among those collected. She could still recall doe-eyed Ms. Andrews and Sam Clovely from the village council standing on her doorstep that morning; their beatific smiles as they talked to her about heritage, history and remembrance. She had signed, for what it was worth. They weren’t bad people and nothing had come of the appeal anyway. Clovely had disappeared one night, halfway through the local campaign, and all the signatures with him. She struggled to remember the details, which were unclear in her mind, but seemed to think they had found a book of his – a journal – in which he had written of noises at his window, late into the night, like the scrabbling of rats or light-fingered children. The general consensus was that he couldn’t have been of sound mind, the poor man. The money had gone towards refurbishing the village hall instead, and the leftovers used to fund some cookery classes there. She had attended one with Lizzie, in the spirit of the community. Her daughter seemed to have enjoyed the lesson well enough, though she had found it lacking.

  The further they walked from the church, the more recent the graves became. They were still old but their condition gradually improved. They stood higher and straighter in the soil and in many cases the names were still legible where they were engraved into the stone. The most recent dotted the outskirts of the churchyard. The names were still clear, some only a year or two old – if that. They must have been people she knew, to have been buried so recently, and yet she could think of only a handful of people who had passed away in this time. She inspected the family names on the nearest two headstones: Richards and Collins. They meant nothing to her and slipped easily from her mind.

  They were almost at the gate when George wandered from the path. She waited while he approached the nearest memorial. For almost a minute he stood in front of the headstone, which was roughly his own height and fashioned after the stony style of its forbears. She couldn’t see his face, standing as he was with his back to her, but she watched as he lifted his hand to touch the grey stone. The scene was strangely affecting, stirring something inside of her she couldn’t explain. It might have been the sight of one so small, standing alone between the gravestones, or it might have been his fingers on the stone; the living crossing the boundary of the dead. It might have been something obscurer still; her flesh and blood remembering the forgotten. A bouquet of flowers rested at his feet and it brought her some relief to know that someone besides her little boy was caring for the graves. Someone in Lynnwood remembered the buried dead, even if she could not.

  CHAPTER THREE
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  As if that first breakfast had unlocked something inside of Freya, they became a regular habit in the mornings. Any guilt at her activities, the violent shudders of her stomach, faded beneath the sizzling scent of hot fat, the wetness that flooded her mouth and the quick, primitive beating of her heart as she bit into that which was tough and fleshy and once a living, breathing thing. Her lips glistened with grease from swollen sausages and bacon – sometimes rare, other times as crispy and black as that horrid thing melted into McCready’s field. The very act of eating became sensual and primal as she remembered that last meal with Robert to be.

  Her children remarked on the readiness of cooked breakfasts, and the kitchen stank perpetually of smoke, but beyond that nothing was said. Nothing could be said, for her feasts were private and she always ate alone, before her children woke. The virtue of her vegetarianism was maintained, as was that of her motherhood, and life went on in Lynnwood.

  On the thirteenth of September she saw her children, George and Lizzie, return to school. Hollybush Manor was not an outstanding college of learning but it was built, like most of the village’s heritage, on old traditions. These aged values gave it strength. It was also blessed with being the only school in Lynnwood. Those children – or indeed their parents – with an appetite for education had nowhere else to turn without driving the distance through the Forest, to Lymington. The school owed much to that hunger.

  That morning Freya walked with her children to school. George was more than capable of looking after himself, when left to his own devices, but the other children weren’t so accommodating. Only last summer she had been called in for a meeting with his headteacher, Mrs. Morecroft, when it had emerged than Daniel Collins and some of the other boys from George’s class were bullying him.

  “Good riddance,” she said, as they set off from Haven House towards the village green. Nobody had missed the Collins family since they had moved last Christmas. Between their troublesome boy and Mr. Collins’s penchant for drink they had made terrible neighbours, undeserving of Lynnwood’s good name. She could never remember quite where they had moved to, or the precise date, though truthfully she gave such things little thought.

  “I feel sick,” muttered George, from where he walked beside her. He refused to hold her hand, no matter where they were, not since his eighth birthday when she had taken him to the park and another boy had laughed at them.

  “You feel sick, darling? Where is it, your tummy?”

  “Yes, my stomach,” he said. “It’s cramping.”

  “Maybe you ate your breakfast too quickly.” She paused, crouched to his level and brushed the stray hair from his forehead. “Did you rush your food? You know this happens if you don’t chew properly.”

  From several paces behind them Lizzie snorted. “Maybe you should stop force-feeding us fry-ups every morning.”

  “Yes,” Freya said. “Yes, I... I probably should.”

  They had stopped on the roadside, by the Old Dairy. The sky stretched pale grey, promising rain. The wind rushed against her face, stinging her cheeks and bringing tears to her eyes. She blinked them dry.

  Though the dairy had long since closed down, the field behind it was still used to graze cows. As she watched through the slats in the wooden gate, the nearest lifted its head from the grass and brought its sidelong gaze to bear on her. For several moments she stared at the cow and the cow stared back, its mouth slowly working the cud. And if it seemed as though the cow was chewing something else, something darker, fleshier, as she later thought when she tried to remember what she had seen, she knew that she was mistaken. Cows were herbivores, and largely placid animals at that. They didn’t eat meat.

  “Hurry up, Mum,” said Lizzie, “or we’re going to be late. He’s not sick, just nervous. I get it all the time when something important’s coming up.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Freya said.

  “Sure you did. That’s why I didn’t eat before my GCSEs last year, remember?” Shouldering her school bag, her daughter marched ahead.

  “Exams or not, you should always eat breakfast, Elizabeth Rankin. It’s the most important meal of the day.”

  “Come on, I think we’ve all established that much already...”

  Presently the grey, moss-flecked brick of the Manor rose into view. Freya knew all about the building, having once helped George with a piece of History homework on the subject. The school was first commissioned in 1698 when the wealthy merchant, Peter Young, passed through the village on his way to Lymington. So struck was he by the idyllic air of the village that he committed his thoughts to paper, a modern translation of which could still be read in Southampton’s City Library. Freya had found a scan of it on the Internet.

  “Knowing the area of the Royal Forest, the New Forest, so well and being so familiar with its surroundings already, which are nothing short of pleasant, I was entirely taken aback by the little village of Lynnwood. I call it a village still, although how it has not yet flourished into something more I cannot fathom. Surely, I challenge anyone who spends more than an evening here, or the day thereafter, to display anything other than reluctance at having to leave this place, or regret at not choosing to stay longer. The soul of this village, its wholesome spirit, is without doubt the public house, The Hollybush. The ale flows freely here, as does the custom, and nary on my travels through the Forest, indeed the county, have I encountered such friendly faces. But there is more to Lynnwood than its tavern. The air tastes clean, unlike that of my London. The cottages are quaint, modest buildings and everywhere I look I find trees, lush and green as any I have ever seen. They must feed well here, and must have done so for many years, to have grown to such heights. Beyond these things, I cannot identify the nature of the village’s charm. It is quite plausible this itself is the source of my being contented. An air of underlying pleasantry, which dulls the senses, illuminates everything so softly, and infuses me with a delightful hunger only Lynnwood can appease...”

  The children of Lynnwood were at this time educated in the village hall, although poorly and without much in the way of direction. Peter, a firm advocate of the merits of teaching wherever they might be imparted, sought to rectify this and Hollybush Manor was commissioned, named after the pub he had found so charming.

  That morning, neither Lizzie nor George was late. She left them to enter the grounds themselves, kissing them both before they went. Then she made the ten-minute walk back to Haven House. She stopped only once, as she passed the field behind the Old Dairy. This time the cows did not stare at her but stood and chewed, as only cows can.

  * * *

  October became November, the air grew colder, but the Forest still retained the russet glow of autumn. Red leaves clung to the branches, and orange and brown, so that it seemed as though the trees had patchwork quilts draped across the branches. Much of the ground was similarly coloured, where the leaves had started to fall, and the pathways were littered with puddles. These were the best indicators of the subtly changing seasons; even long into the afternoon the puddles retained the icy glaze of morning. Many were cracked, where they had been trodden on, but those that were undisturbed showed no signs of melting. Mawley Bog, when they reached it, was similarly chilled. Sheets of ice spread from the banks across the surface of the water, like hardened wax. Nor was Freya alone in her observations; gone were the swarms of flies, usually seen dancing just above the water level, and the frogs, which seemed to fascinate George so much, were nowhere in sight.

  “They’re hibernating,” he said, when she asked him about their absence. “They crawl into holes beneath the ground and wait out the cold.”

  She didn’t blame the frogs. She had anticipated a mild winter, thrown off, perhaps, by the lingering golden brown of the trees, but walking through the Forest she knew she had been mistaken. There was nothing mild about the air. Her faux coonskin cap protected her ears, and she had even seen need for a scarf.

  They took the long route around the water. Of the two
ways around Mawley Bog, this was the path her parents had always preferred. Often her father would take her for walks but sometimes her mother, Harriet, accompanied them.

  * * *

  Freya chased the dogs beneath the trees. The year was ’76 and she was nine years old. Though her chest heaved and her feet flew, her legs were only little. The dogs barked playfully as they dashed ahead, noses close to the ground. The earth was a spill of shadows and soil.

  “Careful, Freya, darling, don’t run too far!”

  She didn’t heed her mother’s advice. It was a wonder she heard it at all. The Forest was not Haven House. Propriety held no sway here, only sharp branches and soft leaves and the damp Forest mulch beneath her shoes. Here she could run as fast as she wanted, as far as she wanted, with her faithful hounds by her side.

  “David, she’s going to hurt herself.”

  “Let her run,” he said. His voice seemed to carry through the trees. “She knows to keep to the paths. And look at her, look at that smile. Have you ever seen her so happy?”

  “She’s easily pleased. Unlike her mother.”

  David’s voice thawed into laughter. “You’re telling me.”

  “You’d hardly think we were related, looking at her now. A wild child of the Forest.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. Look at how her hair streams behind her. And her cheeks, when she turns around. Tell me you don’t recognize those cheeks...”

  Freya’s parents continued talking until they faded out of earshot. Still she ran after the dogs. Exhilaration burned her chest as Ralph and Jack led her deeper into the trees. They came upon the hollow of an oak, where leaves had fallen, or been blown into a pile. She slipped between the dogs, kneeling before the hollow. It felt colder here, though not unpleasant. The air smelled ripe. Poking through the leaf-layer, like a child’s emerging tooth, was a small bone. She touched it tentatively at first, feeling the smoothness of the creamy surface, dry and light. Then she grasped it firmly and pulled it from its bed of leaves; a tool with which to repulse her mother and impress her father. How proud he would be of his brave little girl! How her mother would shriek!