Four British Mysteries Read online

  Ms. Andrews was born and bred of the village. Christ was in her blood, she said; passed down from her father, and his father before him. She was the first and last woman in her lineage to take the title as vicar of Lynnwood. She had never seen fit to marry and, at seventy one, was childless.

  There had been one man in her life, beside the Lord himself; a Frederick Mangel, travelling from Brittany the summer of ’63. Already in Normandy visiting family, it had been the small matter of a ferry across the waters and he was among the Forest. He had remained in Lymington for three days before venturing deeper into the trees. It was his purpose to see as much of the place as he could; he had desired to visit for many years and, with business growing – he ran a small recruitment agency – he doubted he would have the time again for months to come.

  On the fourth day he discovered Lynnwood and that, as Ms. Andrews put it, was that. A Romanticist at heart, he found an intense, spiritual satisfaction in the dappled light of the trees, the intoxicating freshness of the air, the carefree birdsong in the branches.

  Ms. Andrews first met him in the churchyard while laying flowers by the headstones. He asked her to dinner. She accepted and they ate matelote, which he cooked himself using fish from Bauchan Brook. She could not remember ever having eaten such delicious food and it was true to say she melted somewhat under the warmth of that sharp cider stew.

  It wasn’t meant to last, however. That very Christmas – on the twenty-first, to be exact – he excused himself politely from dinner, citing reasons she couldn’t since recall. She couldn’t remember seeing him leave the Vicarage, or whether he had packed any clothes. All she did know was that she never saw him again. He flashed behind her eyes sometimes, when the dogs howled or the winter air rattled at the windows. All other times he was a shadow. A ghost of her past. He had proposed only three days prior to his leaving and, against every doubt, every pang of uncertainty, she had said yes.

  That, she confessed over a glass or three of mulled wine two winters ago, was her one regret. She had been quite tipsy at the time and the confession had brought tears to both of their eyes, for Ms. Andrews deserved better. She was mild-mannered but stern, loving but fair, and charitable. When she encountered those people down on their luck, drinkers and the homeless, she would often sit and talk with them. Sometimes she gave them her blessings and when she prayed they were never far from her thoughts. Such charity, she said, cost nothing.

  It was this grounded sensibility, this honesty and good nature, that endeared her to Freya and ensured that, when she voiced her unsettling dream, Freya listened. These were not the ravings of a mad old woman. Ms. Andrews was no Dickensian spinster, no matter her circumstances. And had they been ravings, she would have humoured them with her time anyway. Joan Andrews deserved that much.

  CHAPTER SIX

  One week to the day since her conversation with Ms. Andrews, Freya found herself on the banks of Bauchan Brook. She stared out over the brook for several minutes, watching the rushing waters run their course. They leapt and fell in smooth, undulating motions, curving around pebbles, sparkling in the afternoon light. Though bright, the air was still very cold, her gloved hands finding homes in her pockets. The sound of running water filled her ears. More than once, she thought she heard voices on the wind, of far-off people talking between the trees.

  She had continued to gorge herself each morning. These feasts were without conscience; she ate until her jaw ached, her stomach turned and her hands were slick with grease. It was the grease that she craved so much. Even after finishing, if it could ever be called such when she was always left so dissatisfied, she would lick her fingers clean, sucking the fleshy flavours from them until there was nothing left to taste.

  At first she would cook the food. Such civilised habits were hard to break, even in the throes of abandon. But as days became weeks and her appetite grew, so her impatience grew with it. There was no tolerance in gluttony, after all; no lenience, no admirable qualities of any kind. It was a dark pit of self-gratification, from which the hungriest figures clambered forth with ravenous intent. In her impatience she forwent the act of cooking. The kitchen became a different place then; filled with the wet, bestial sound of chewing as Freya tore into raw meat and other such foods however she could find them. It was into this kitchen that George tumbled, the morning he almost caught her.

  * * *

  Neck-deep in the refrigerator, only half-aware of her son’s sudden presence in the doorway, Freya froze. She spoke to him without turning, raw egg spilling from her lips.

  “You’re up early today and on a Sunday, too.”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he said, moving to stand behind her. She felt his hand as he tugged at her dressing gown. “What’s for breakfast?”

  “You couldn’t sleep?” She swallowed down the gelatinous albumen, before too much of it escaped her mouth. The rest she wiped on the back of her sleeve. “Why couldn’t you sleep, huh?”

  “The man from the tunnel keeps coming to my room.”

  She struggled to remember, to place his words. They came to her slowly, as if through a dream, a parting veil. “Your friend?”

  “He’s not my friend anymore.”

  “Don’t worry, darling,” she said, turning and hugging him tightly. He stood quite rigid while she embraced him. “Nightmares aren’t real. They can’t hurt you.”

  “I know. What’s for breakfast?”

  “What would you like for breakfast?” she said.

  He seemed to think about this. “Eggs?”

  “We’re fresh out,” she said, standing and swallowing. “How about some cereal, does that sound good?”

  He shrugged and seated himself at the table.

  It was a bright November morning, most of the clouds having rained themselves out the night before. Sunlight streamed in through the kitchen window, cold but pleasant, catching the raindrops that lingered on the glass. It promised to be a lovely day. The perfect weather for a walk through the Forest.

  “What were you doing?” George said, watching her from the table.

  “When?”

  “Just now, when I walked in.”

  She frowned, opened her mouth to speak, then thought the better of it. “Waking up,” she said, smiling. “Just waking up.”

  “You were eating raw eggs,” he said.

  “Don’t be silly, darling. People don’t eat raw eggs.”

  “It’s all down your sleeve and at the end of your chin.”

  She moved into the hallway and examined her face in the mirror there. A string of cloudy egg white hung from her chin, like saliva from a dog’s mouth.

  “I don’t know...” she started hesitantly. Wiping her face clean, she returned to the kitchen. “I can’t remember.” Then, more certainly: “You shouldn’t eat raw eggs, George. Some of them contain salmonella. That’s a disease that you can catch from certain foods, if they’re not cooked properly.”

  “I know I shouldn’t. And I know what salmonella is, I read about it in a book. And you were eating raw eggs. There’s evidence.”

  She heard Lizzie on the stairs; the last three always creaked, then her daughter was standing in the doorway.

  “Morning, Mum...”

  “Morning, darling.”

  “What’s for breakfast?”

  “Not eggs,” said George. “Mum’s eaten them all.”

  “I haven’t eaten any eggs, George!”

  “I don’t mind, except that you have and it’s not very safe.”

  Lizzie crossed the kitchen, also in her dressing gown, and seated herself opposite her brother. “Eggs aren’t unsafe. They’re really good for you.”

  “Not when they’re eaten raw, as Mum likes them.”

  “George, enough!” snapped Freya.

  “Mum!” said Lizzie, “what the hell?”

  Slamming the refrigerator door shut, Freya rounded on the dining table. “I haven’t been eating raw eggs. The consumption of raw eggs isn’t advisable and I never want to see
either of you risking your health that way. Understood?”

  Silence settled over the kitchen. She stared at her children and they stared back. Outside, from the back garden, two blackbirds took up song, broken only by a single, delicate crack, as an egg rolled from the work surface to the floor.

  “I’m going back to bed,” said Lizzie.

  “You haven’t eaten anything,” said Freya.

  “Not hungry.” Lizzie rose and left the kitchen.

  George began swinging his legs, in time to the blackbirds’ chirps. “What cereal have we got?”

  * * *

  It had been a long time since she had born witness to the brook in the flesh. She had stopped coming here after her father had died. It hadn’t felt right, walking the paths they had walked together without him. She could still remember the tales he used to tell, which had so frightened and fascinated her as a child...

  The wind whispered louder in her ears and she fancied it was the Forest’s voice telling her those stories again; of the Bauchan, who haunted the hungry waters, luring careless young girls to their wild, watery deaths in the brook of its namesake, and how it would claim her, too; if she strayed too far from the paths.

  Such tales were nonsense, of course; stories concocted to keep children safe, if not obedient. She had lived long enough to know the power of fear. Their society was built on it and the order it maintained. She thought this was what Ms. Andrews had meant, when they had spoken in her drawing room. The church upheld peace. It promised life everlasting to the good, the docile. And those who strayed from the path... She had only to open the pages of a Bible to read these things; the eternal damnation that awaits the immoral, the armies of Sin that plagued the land and other Christian legends. There still existed statues of those same Sins in the churchyard; fickle creatures, so much like men and women but twisted and monstrous as the vices they personified.

  Fear fulfilled its purpose. Her father had told her these things not to scare her but to keep her safe. In Southampton and London, children were taught the dangers of traffic, of unsafe streets and knife-crime. Their urban Bauchan went by other names; Rawhead and Bloody Bones, Jack the Ripper, the Bunny Man. Even now, younger, no-less horrible apparitions existed, the urban legends of today. Fear was nurtured, fed like an appetite, until it had grown into something bloated and undying.

  Reaching for a stone, she tossed it underarm into the brook. It vanished instantly beneath the rushing waters, but she continued to stare after it, deep in thought. Lynnwood’s dangers were different, of course, but no less cautionary. They warned of older things, more insidious than traffic or knife-crime; those of the wild woods, of becoming lost, of drowning beneath the trees.

  Instead of visiting the brook alone, she had played behind the Old Barn with the other children. She had gone to church, walked the safe places and lived a good life. Without fear and the order it maintained they were little better than the beasts of the Forest.

  * * *

  As the afternoon wore on she wandered even further down the brook. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, as she followed the delicate music of the water downstream. A torrent of memories, a welling of emotion, the Bauchan, thin and hungry, standing opposite her on the bank...

  She smiled to herself as she wandered by the shallows. Her father would have encouraged her to return here. It wasn’t a place to fear anymore but somewhere pleasant, somewhere genuine and beautiful. She vowed to come again soon, with the children. Lizzie would love the visual spectacle of the brook; the sheets of broken ice that covered the banks, the sluice of the currents, the dead leaves, which were swept helplessly away. And as she walked with George she would speak to him in hushed tones of the Bauchan, and the legend of this particular forest spirit would live on through the telling, as it had done for so long already.

  It occurred to her, as she shouted for Eaton through the trees, that this might have been the reason for her dreams. They were calling her, as readily as she summoned the dog, back to the wild waters and the place of her memories. Dreams were one thing, but even their lucidity could not match the brush of the breeze against her face, the glittering brook in the afternoon light, the roughness of the bark when she dragged her fingers over the trees.

  Eaton broke from the undergrowth and pottered into the shallows. His fur was matted with burrs and sticks but it was the bird in his mouth that drew her eyes and held them; a magpie, chewed almost beyond recognition, iridescence flashing from its tail-feathers.

  Wincing at the sight, she bent to retrieve the poor bird, only half aware that, distorted by the currents, her reflection might have been grinning as it stooped to snatch the dog’s prey from his mouth.

  * * *

  That evening, at dinner, George wept over the fate of the magpie. There was no escaping the influence of the Forest; the rank, metallic breath of mortality. They were all mercy to the wild whims of the trees, which could one moment bear them to peaceful epiphany, even as they cast their chill shade over Lynnwood.

  George disclosed to her that evening that he had only two friends in Lynnwood, the first of whom was a magpie, which had that very afternoon failed to show at its perch for the first time in nearly a year. And what horror – his face pale, small lips quivering, mouth agape with something else than hunger. More familiar than most his age with the harsh brevity of life – the insects he admired lived brittle, brutal existences – the death of this bird represented something entirely different. His grief was a testament to the loneliness she had always worried he felt, but had never before admitted to herself.

  George often wandered down by the old train tracks, tracing the line through the Forest. All manner of insects made the tarnished metal sleepers their home and he went there to hunt for them beneath the rotted wood beams and cold, dew-slicked sleepers. This, he said, was where the magpie lived, where they met each afternoon at around three o’clock, when he finished school for the day.

  The line had been important once, linking Lynnwood to Brockenhurst and, from there, the rest of the county. Built in the 1890s, it had meant a great deal to Lynnwood, which had until then been isolated by the very Forest that sustained it. The line had brought the first meaningful waves of visitors to the village, opening it up to Hampshire. For all its benefits it had not lasted. Lynnwood seemed incapable of supporting the industrial intrusion; the Forest unwilling to tolerate such a hungry competitor. The Old Places were so often indifferent to change, Freya knew. The Oldest seemed almost opposed to it.

  The bird would always greet George from where it perched, on the rotten remains of its tree. He said its tree, not because it nested there or ever had done, to his knowledge, but because that was where it waited. Indeed, it never seemed to move from the spot, except to cross the clearing, or settle nearer to him as he moved down the track. Occasionally it would emit a gleeful croak; a raucous sound, like the rattling wings of a giant cicada. He hadn’t named the bird. What difference did a name make except to belittle something, to make it less than it actually was? Its scientific title was Pica pica, he knew, not entirely dissimilar from the sound it made, and that was enough for him.

  A keening sadness sprang inside of Freya as her son recounted these things, but he seemed genuinely happy in his own company. Nor did he know any better. Perhaps that was his saving grace; a wild streak, that of the lone hunter, sparing him the heartache of solitude. Even as she thought this, she knew it wasn’t true; why else would he be brought so low by the death of the bird, unless it had meant something to him? Through these sobering realisations she began to perceive the nature of her son more clearly.

  They were eating roast chicken at the dinner table when he learned the horrid news. The cooked bird was golden and large, served with all the trimmings. This in itself had caused a quiet stir between her children; Freya hadn’t sat down to a roast with them in living memory.

  “You’re not eating very much,” she said to Lizzie between forkfuls.

  “And you’re eating chicken,�
� replied Lizzie.

  “I’m making an effort,” she said, feeling herself redden before her children. Steam pressed heavily against the inside of the windows in dripping, opaque smears. She thought quickly, then realised she needn’t lie. “I haven’t been feeling myself recently.”

  “Me neither,” replied her daughter. “Too many fry-ups. They’re making me sick.”

  The kitchen fell silent, disturbed only by the slow scrape of cutlery on plates. She tried to concentrate, to counter her daughter, but found her thoughts numbed by the rich aromas of the food. Instinct swelled under those scents, pressing against her chest, filling her mouth with juices. Inside, she screamed to throw herself across the table, to take up great handfuls of food, to tear the legs from the chicken and force them into her open mouth, so hungry, so desperate to be filled –

  Somehow, she held herself in check. Instead she sat quite still, contenting herself with one forkful at a time.

  Almost automatically, to fill the silence as much as reclaim some sense of self, of civility, she recounted the events of her day, and it was then, as she mentioned Eaton and the magpie, that her son’s face fell and the truth of his circumstances came tumbling out. With them came his tears, uncharacteristic as her appetite for meat.

  * * *

  The nib of her pen buries into the page. Her hand is shaking, her fingers white as the sheets of paper beneath. Words seem to have momentarily lost meaning and there is nothing but the memory of her son’s face; tear-stained at the upheaval of death, of the wild spirit leaving that magpie’s body, its cold, decaying remains, left to be devoured by the dogs and the beetles.

  His face shines before her eyes, so pale, so vulnerable, and her chest heaves; a generous, violent movement. Then she swallows, as if consuming the memories might make them leave, as it has made everything else disappear. It is not what has become of her son that upsets her; she knows he is in a better place. She sees that now. He is wild, free as the magpie to which he was so endeared; to move between the trees, the light, the dark, to relish in unbridled freedom beneath the vast sky, to run and hunt and eat as appetite desires...