Grave Consequences (29 page)

I moved as quietly as I could toward the river to try and get a better look. I had to wait a while after I left the pool of light that came from the street lamp, until my eyes adjusted, but I tried to make the most of that pause as well. The weeds and river were silver in the moonlight. Trying not to panic,
as whoever it was moved steadily away from me, I got the impression that it was someone not used to stealth and who was now not especially trying to move silently. A brief break in the steps; the walker stumbled. The path was overgrown but perfectly obvious, even in moonlight. Whoever it was wasn’t used to moving on unpaved surfaces.

I followed along, not daring to use my flashlight. There was plenty of light, now that I was away from the street. Not only did some of the lights from across the river break up the gloom, but there was bright moonlight as well. As long as I moved cautiously and tried not to focus too much on the path right in front of me, letting my peripheral vision aid me, I could follow easily enough. A certain amount of familiarity with the path and with moving through woods and fields helped; I was no Hawkeye, but even a little bit of advantage goes a long way if you concentrate on it. Perhaps it was to my advantage that I was not one of Cooper’s characters: I was lucky enough not to step on any dry twigs and give myself away.

The figure ahead of me was low and bulky and crouched over. When it paused at the far side of the site, outside the fence, I felt certain that I was on the right trail. I had the impression of someone looking around from the shadows and crouched as carefully as I could, but then the figure moved on. I almost gave up then; it could have been a kid sneaking home from a rave, it could have been a house thief coming home from work: It had nothing to do with the site, it seemed. But then, a brief parting of shadows, a little reflection of moonlight off the water, reassured me and my heart sped up even faster when I saw who it was.

The figure was low because it was George Whiting; it was bulky because he was carrying a bundle of some sort. And now I could tell he was heading down the path to St. Alban’s Church.

George made sense, I thought excitedly. He wasn’t interested in Mother Beatrice or her story, but he was vastly interested in Jane and her work, albeit in a hostile way. It
would have been no trouble for him to break into the site—a good industrial-sized pair of bolt-cutters would have done the job. Perhaps he’d done no more damage because he’d been surprised; perhaps he’d felt only a token display of violence and vandalism was enough, either to vent his displeasure against my friend or to satisfy himself with a response. It had certainly stopped work for a day and put a cat among the pigeons, to say the least. But what was he up to now? Was it possible, as Andrew had hinted, that he might also be responsible for Julia’s death? Worse than that, was he trying to frame Jane for it?

I followed along, more slowly now because Whiting was moving more slowly; I could hear the rough rasp of his breath from where I was, nearly twenty-five meters behind. I had to fall farther back when he reached the open field where Sabine had been playing soccer after her math tutorial last week. Once he moved past it, into closer proximity to the church itself, I felt it was safe enough to continue following him, but had to freeze halfway across the field, visible to anyone who cared to look for me, when he stopped just short of St. Alban’s churchyard and the low stone wall that encircled the modern cemetery. I waited until he began to fumble his way off the river path, looking for the entrance into the cemetery.

I began to think I knew what was going on. I followed behind as he entered the churchyard and moved hesitatingly across the yard, occasionally tripping over the unevenness of the ground or perhaps a footstone. He stumbled across the yard until he reached the far side, which was sheltered by the huge oak that had been the marker of the makeshift letter-drop that I had used to communicate with Stephen, the young man outside the pub. He dropped his bundle gently, and I could almost swear that I hear the clatter of small, light objects. I wondered if he hadn’t been drinking because his breath was heavy and irregular, even for someone who’d been moving as long as he had.

He dropped to his knees by the tree. For almost thirty sec
onds, I thought he was looking for another note that might had been left for me. But when I heard the all-too-familiar ring of metal on stone, I realized the truth.

George Whiting was digging in the graveyard behind St. Alban’s.

From my vantage point behind a large gravestone, I considered what to do. I could feel the cold, rough edge of the stone beneath my fingers, the cool radiating from the stone into the warm of the night. I swallowed as I hurriedly ran down my options. I could leave as quietly as I’d come and find the police. I could try and startle him, with any luck, ensuring that he would flee and I could find out what was in the bundle, though I had a horrid suspicion that I already knew. I could leave and crawl back into bed, and say nothing to anyone about any of this.

His progress was slow; there were lots of roots that close to the tree. I waited a while longer in the hateful paralysis of indecision. But it was George himself who finally made me decide what to do. I realized that his heavy breathing and unsure movements weren’t because he was drunk.

It was because he was crying.

Looking back on it, I suppose I had been ready for anything else. Well, anything else providing he didn’t have a gun or accomplices or a plan. This completely disarmed me. What the hell was I supposed to do with a crying villain? Then, as though his sadness was communicable, I felt the weight of what the man was feeling, at what he’d done, at what he was doing now. It was ghastly, the way his sins seemed to overtake him now.

I stood up and stepped from behind my headstone, no longer bothering about trying to be very quiet. He was so intent on his work that it kept him from hearing me. I moved closer, until I was a few steps away, and then I said, “What are you doing?”

I stood, feeling incredibly stupid: He was too intent upon his work and hadn’t heard.

Out of habit, I cleared my throat, and this time, Whiting
shot up and whirled around as though I’d fired a shot off next to his head.

“Who’s there?” He whipped his head around, straining to see in the dark.

“It’s me. I think you should stop what you’re doing.”

He gripped the trenching tool he’d been using; I could see by the moonlight that his worn face was streaked with dirt and tears. “Who is it?”

I stepped back involuntarily. “Emma Fielding.”

“Who?” I could see him peering against the darkness and I turned on my flashlight.

“Jane Compton’s friend.” I cleared my throat. “The American.”

“Oh, good Jesus.” His shoulders slumped and he wiped hurriedly at his face, turning it away from me. “Get out of here, why don’t you?” His voice was hoarse. “This doesn’t concern you. None of this concerns you.”

“I’m not leaving without the bones, Mr. Whiting. They do concern me.”

“I don’t know what I thought I was doing, coming here with them,” he said, almost to himself. “I would have been better off just tossing them in the river, bloody things.”

“I expect you had other things on your mind,” I said, trying to make my voice as steady as possible. I found it hard to speak at all. “Julia’s death must be sitting pretty heavily on you.”

“Oh, God, you know…” He slumped within himself, all the weight of his deeds and conscience heavy on him. “You have no idea what it’s been like…”

“No. But it’s over now. Why don’t you just give me the bones, for a start?”

He slung the bag of bones at me, but wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Take them.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I wish to hell I’d never found them.”

The bag was surprisingly light; and I tried to catch it so as not to further damage the rattling contents. I looked at him
in disbelief. “Found is a pretty strange word, wouldn’t you think?”

“Found is the only word I can bear! Ellen was so pleased, so very pleased.” He shook his head slowly. “I hadn’t seen her smile for months, you see. I was so hoping she was having one of her good days. But then it all came out. She said, ‘Come, George, come and see! Our little girl’s come home!’”

My skin crawled. Ellen Whiting had found the results of her husband’s vandalism? The poor woman…

“Ellen was over the moon, as if everything was back the way it should be. When she ever told me she’d been to the digs, as she called the archaeological site, I thought I’d die. ‘I went looking for her at the digs and I found her, George,’ she said, ‘I’ve brought Julia back. My girl is safe and quiet, and she won’t cause any trouble anymore. I promise.’”

My blood ran cold.

“Then she showed me the bones. She’d dug them up, you see, put them in…in Julia’s bed. What happened was, I think she understood, at the last, what she’d done to Julia. And so she went looking for our little girl. First she went to the construction site, where Julia—”

“Wait—that was when I saw her at the construction site. Last Sunday?”

He nodded, resigned and weak. “That’s when she started to apologize for it. She’d had a moment, one when her head wasn’t so fogged. She understood, somehow, something of what she’d done.”

Oh, my God, no. I felt dizzy, faint, at last understanding what had happened.

“Ellen went back to the construction site to look for Julia. That was the day I began to suspect what had happened. She got out of her room again, early Monday morning and went to the archaeology site. That’s when she showed me the bones…your bones, there.”

I swallowed hard, realizing what George Whiting had
been going through since he’d learned of his daughter’s death.

He looked anguished. “She’d done it because she was afraid of how furious I’d been with Julia. She was always trying to keep me from being angry; she of all people should have known that it didn’t mean anything, really, with Julia. I
was
angry, I was hurt, when Julia went to study with that…Compton woman…but Ellen should have understood, it was never as bad as she imagined. Ever since Julia started her program and we fell out, Ellen’s turns have been so much worse. I wish I could have controlled myself better, but when you’ve got a wife who’s sick, a company to run, and a kid who’s just stabbed you in the heart, so to speak, it’s…hard not to…be on edge.”

He’d lost a daughter and a wife, under the most horrifying of circumstances.

Whiting continued. “When Ellen said she’d found Julia, at first I was hopeful, maybe there’d been some kind of mistake by the police, even though I’d identified her…her myself…Ellen had been so full of remorse over what she’d done—in that moment—she went looking for Julia. And she explained it all very carefully to me: Julia went to the house, two weeks ago this Friday, we had another row, she left. Ellen took her rubber washing up gloves, followed her…waited until she came back out from the Grub and Cabbage…then she called her, tried to get her to stop making me angry. When Julia said she wasn’t coming back, Ellen shoved her against the wall of the alley, cracked her head and…smothered her. Stuffed a…” He took a moment to choke out the words. “A plastic bag into her mouth. Held her nose. She took Julia to the skip, and brought her wallet back too; for some reason, Ellen didn’t want it to get lost. It’s in the sack there with the bones and the gloves, I was going to bury that too. Bury all the secrets—”

I was trembling now. “We should go to the police. Tell them what happened. Your wife can get the help she needs—”

That was what snapped him out of his reflections. “No! Julia’s dead. That’s the worst that could have happened, and it’s
over
. What good will going to the police serve? I’m a respectable man, I’ve made something of myself in this town. I’ve lost so much, so much, and now you’d take the rest of it from me as well? Do you have any idea what the tabloids would do to us? Surely you’d want to spare Ellen that?”

He slumped back against the tree and slid to the ground, past exhausted now. “I never thought it would come to this. I’d always had my priorities straight—keep the business sound, the family in line, and everything will be well. These past weeks, I’ve lost so much more than I ever thought possible, you can’t imagine…” He looked at me. “Can’t you just let us alone to solve our own problems? The worst has happened, there’ll be nothing more, I swear. I’ll find a home, a hospital for Ellen—”

I sat down heavily, too, barely able to believe what I’d heard. I swallowed, tried to gather my wits about me, but George Whiting was just that little bit faster.

He looked up sharply. “You didn’t know all this, did you? You thought I’d killed Julia. You’d no idea.”

I shook my head. “I thought you’d robbed the site to get at Jane. Maybe. I was out here in case whoever it was was really after Mother Beatrice’s bones.”

“You’re joking! I’m a businessman, for God’s sake!” he said, disgusted. “If I want to fuck someone over, I do it with lawyers, hurt them in the wallet. I don’t sod about, stealing bits of bone and digging holes.” He considered this turn of events ruefully. “So you were just waiting out here and I happened along, is that it?”

I shrugged. “Just waiting” had done the job.

“Christ.” Then he seemed to find some hope there. He straightened himself. “See here, if this is all an accident, you needn’t say anything, do you? You just go home and let me sort this out. No one ever needs to find out about poor Ellen—”

My anger was enough to put me on my feet again. “Poor Ellen? What about poor Jane? You’d be happy enough to have her convicted, I suppose?”

Whiting made a face, waved that suggestion away. “They’ll never arrest Jane Compton. I’m sure they wouldn’t. There’s no proof besides her hatred of me and her dislike of my girl. And Ellen didn’t think about things long; she just did it. Less to cover up that way, I guess. The police have said they’re more interested in finding Julia’s brother, not that anyone knows where that miserable little sod is—”

I suddenly had a very good idea where Julia’s brother might be.

“—So you needn’t worry about your precious Jane.”