“Yes,” Hilde said. “I suppose it is. Oh, of course it is. I’m sorry. It’s only that it would be so much more special if it were from a person, wouldn’t it? I mean, if the person weren’t hurt too terribly.”
Kingsley opened his mouth to respond, but before he could speak, the front doors banged open. Calvin Campbell rushed through the foyer and down the central aisle without bothering to shut the doors behind him. He took no notice of anything or anyone, but ran, slipping and sliding in his wet boots, straight to the apse and through the door to the vicar’s cramped quarters. Brothwood hurried after him.
Kingsley patted Hilde on her head and stood. He looked for Henry and saw his giant assistant rushing up the aisle toward the foyer. Henry bounded up the three steps and closed the door against the blowing wind and snow. He turned to Kingsley with a puzzled look on his face, but the doctor shook his head and shrugged.
A moment later, someone shrieked. It was a woman’s voice, and it came from the small room that Campbell and the vicar had just entered. The voice sank in pitch and became a low wailing sound, longer and louder than the combined moaning of the villagers in the sanctuary. It wasn’t recognizably human, there were no words, but it was undeniably the most mournful sound Kingsley had ever heard.
Someone’s life had just been ruined.
He and Henry stood, side by side, their eyes riveted to the door. It slowly opened and the vicar reappeared. He went directly to the altar and knelt before the cross. Then Calvin Campbell emerged from the back room, his arms around a woman who could barely walk. Kingsley was good at sizing people up by sight: age, weight, social class, obvious maladies and defects. But this woman’s face was distorted by crushing grief, and it was impossible to tell whether she was thirty years old or fifty. She staggered along beside Campbell, who was half carrying her, her long blond hair like a veil, a rough blanket draped over her shoulders.
The two of them walked past Kingsley and Henry without looking up or acknowledging their presence. They went beyond the last of the pews and turned and walked through the foyer. Campbell opened the main doors and led the woman out.
Henry watched after them until they had been swallowed by the storm, then closed the doors again and returned to Kingsley’s side.
“Who was she?” he said.
Kingsley glanced to the front of the church where Brothwood still knelt in prayer. “We’ll find out eventually,” he said.
Henry nodded and crossed the aisle and picked up another pew. There was still work to do.
45
The man in the tunnels had walked slowly south from the unmarked grave and continued for half a mile. He was weak and tired. No sleep and little food in days, so he sat for a bit with his back to the wall. He knew the old seams and pits like the back of his hand. He had spent many lonely nights traversing every passage. He had visited the grave often, each time wondering whether he would finally feel remorse or shame, and each time he had felt nothing at all. He knew that he was an evil man, but knowing it didn’t make him feel anything, either.
There was a second grave that had been dug next to the first, an open empty hole, waiting for the man, but he hadn’t found the strength yet to lie down in it.
He was far from the active seam, but there were still ways in and out, and he easily found the egress he wanted. When he felt rested, he climbed twenty wooden rungs that were sunk deep into the earth on both sides of the shaft. Nobody used those rungs anymore, but at one time this had been a heavily trafficked shaft and dozens of men had traveled up and down them every day. The ladder here was permanent and would probably outlast everybody in the village. It would last until the tunnel eventually collapsed in on itself.
The rungs were dusted with snow, each rung piled higher than the one below it, but he was still mildly surprised to find himself in the midst of a storm when he poked his head up out of the shaft. He had been in the tunnels for days and had anticipated bright spring sunshine up above.
He hauled himself up onto level ground and adjusted the pack on his back. He squinted into the snow. Ahead was the village well. Beyond it, he knew, was the inn. He was a few paces from the main road. His home was nearby, and he assumed his remaining children were waiting there for him. It was even possible his wife was waiting there, too, but he considered it far more likely that she was already in West Bromwich or Scotland or somewhere even farther away. Maybe she had taken the children with her. The man wouldn’t have blamed her for that.
The parish church wasn’t far. Beyond that, nothing but wilderness. He judged it was late morning, perhaps early afternoon, but the smooth grey sky gave him no clues. It wasn’t nighttime, and that was the only thing he could tell for certain. Constable Grimes might be anywhere in Blackhampton, but he was most likely to be somewhere along the road between the well and the church. That was where the tiny jail, the tiny post office, and all the other tiny businesses were located. The man had just got his bearings and decided on a course of action when he heard a woman crying. The noise was soft, but distinct, muffled by the falling snow and distorted by the wind. The man took a step back away from the road, and a moment later, two shadowy figures staggered past, moving purposefully along the road. They were looking down at their feet and walked right by the man without seeing him.
He was close enough to recognize the woman as his wife. And she was crying. And he was reasonably certain he knew why.
She was not in West Bromwich or Scotland. She had stayed. There was only one reason for her to do that. And there was only one reason she might now be crying, so many days after she had left him.
They were headed in the opposite direction from the one he’d already decided to go in. They were walking toward the inn. He let the couple get a few yards ahead of him and then he stepped onto the road, its cobblestones buried deep under ice and snow, and followed in their rapidly filling tracks.
46
Day and Hammersmith trudged through the snow, half supporting each other, snowdrifts up past their ankles, swirling under the legs of their trousers, and whipping about their calves. Day was nearly frozen solid, his shredded coat and gloves useless, sopping wet. Hammersmith was sicker than he had let on, barely conscious. Blackhampton had not been kind to its London visitors.
They followed in the general direction in which the village woman had taken the baby’s body, hoping to find shelter wherever they were going. Then the inn loomed up out of the storm, no more than twenty feet in front of them, the enormous ancient tree sheltering it from the wind like a cliff, and Hammersmith closed his eyes and walked blindly toward it, pulling Day along. Someone opened the door when they got there and someone else ushered them to one of the blazing fires and settled them in big comfortable armchairs by the hearth. Their coats and boots were removed and thick blankets wrapped around them and hot mugs of boiled broth shoved in their hands and, when Hammersmith opened his eyes again, Bennett Rose was standing in front of him with a glass of beer. He set the beer on a little table beside the chair and nodded gravely at the sergeant and disappeared in the direction of the dining room.
Hammersmith sipped at his broth. He didn’t care whether it was drugged. Warmth spread through his chest and radiated outward through his arms and into his fingers, down through his groin and legs and toes. He gulped the rest of the broth and set the mug on the little table and took up the beer and drank that, too. For a brief moment, he thought he might vomit it all back up, but it stayed down and he began to feel like a human being again. He glanced over at Day and saw that the same process of transformation had begun to occur in the inspector. He closed his eyes again.
–
He woke to the sound of the inn’s door opening and slamming shut again. He sat upright and looked over the back of the chair and saw Calvin Campbell step across the threshold into the great room. Campbell was escorting, practically carrying, a woman who might have been lovely had her face not been screwed up in a rictus
