unmade bed, not a proper sterile table.) He thought of his own children, his two daughters.
There was a soft rap at the door and he turned, pulled a sheet up over the boy’s body before speaking. “Yes?”
The door swung open slowly, an inch, two, three. Finally a little girl’s head poked through the narrow opening. “Are you the doctor?”
Kingsley stepped away from the bed and pulled the door open the rest of the way. He did his best to compose his expression, erase the sadness he felt must show there, and smiled down at the girl. “I am. My name is Dr Kingsley.” He held out his hand.
The girl brushed her fingers delicately against his palm, barely touching him, in lieu of a handshake. “I’m Anna. Your policeman was kicked in the head by my father.”
“I see.” But Kingsley didn’t see. Had no idea what she meant.
“It’s bled quite a lot, but he can talk and move about like anything. I believe he may have gone.”
“Does someone need my help, child?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
Kingsley frowned. He looked around the room and located his satchel, checked it to be sure he had the basic necessities if someone had been injured. He wasn’t sure what had happened, but there seemed to be a possibility that either Hammersmith or Day had been kicked in the head, and a head injury was never a thing to take lightly. He smiled at Anna again and went to the door, but the girl stepped farther into the room, her gaze fixed on the shape covered by the sheet.
“Is that Oliver?” she said.
Kingsley nodded. “Did you know Oliver?”
“He was my brother.”
Kingsley moved back into the room and took a tentative step toward her. Hammersmith or Day, whichever had been injured, could probably wait a moment. The girl hadn’t imparted any real sense of urgency. He set his satchel down on the miniature round table by the door, but didn’t know what to do with his hands. Living, grieving people were much more complicated to deal with than the dead. He assumed the girl needed to be comforted, but wasn’t sure how to go about that tricky process. His wife had tended to their daughters’ emotional lives. He had always concentrated on the relatively simpler tasks of teaching.
“I shouldn’t say that,” Anna said. She spoke to the dark corner of the room above the boy’s body, and Kingsley couldn’t see her face. “He wasn’t really my brother. Not properly. He only came along after my mother left. What did that make him?”
“I’m not sure,” Kingsley said. “Did he live with you as a brother?”
The girl nodded. Her hair bobbed and swung, heavy and clean and still slightly damp from melted snow.
“What’s your name again, child?”
“Anna. Anna Price.”
“The boy shared a name with you.”
“Yes.”
Kingsley waited, looked nervously at the black bag on the table, aware that time was passing and that someone might be bleeding downstairs. But he was loath to interrupt whatever Anna was experiencing and equally uncomfortable about leaving her alone in the room with the body of her brother.
“He could talk a little bit,” Anna said. “Only some words. And he could walk a bit, too, but he fell down a lot. He said my name. But he was sick. He coughed and he cried too much. He said my name when he was crying, but I didn’t help him.”
Kingsley reached out and laid his hand lightly on her shoulder, and she turned and buried her face against him and he felt her small body convulsing with grief. He hugged her and felt his throat constrict with the memory of Fiona, sobbing, inconsolable at the death of her mother. He had felt useless then and he felt useless now. Anna said something, but the folds of Kingsley’s waistcoat smothered her words.
“What did you say, Anna?”
She pulled her face away from him and looked up. Tears streamed down her cheeks and snot coated her upper lip. Her eyes were bright pink, bloodshot and swollen. “I put him there,” she said. “Peter and I did that.”
“Put him where, child?”
“In the well. We threw him into the dark, and he never liked being in the dark. But we did it anyway. He was gone already and we didn’t know what to do.”
Kingsley pulled back, horrified and confused. He put his hands on the girl’s shoulders and pushed her away, held her at arm’s length and looked at her livid eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, to try to understand what she was saying, but then the world opened up and collapsed around them.
The roof broke open with an earsplitting roar, and the wind and the snow and the ice banged into the room and filled it, and the spidery black sky came crashing down. Anna was torn from Kingsley’s grip as something hit him hard in the back and sent him stumbling across the room. He heard her screaming from somewhere nearby. He hit the wall and spun around and gasped as a tree thrust itself at him too fast for escape.
Icy branches punctured the plaster wall all around him and pushed through into the next room, and Anna Price stopped screaming and the world became curiously silent.
57
It sounded like a freight train bearing down on him, and Hammersmith was half turned, off balance, when the tremor reached him and threw him face-first into a drift. It buried him completely as snow shook loose and caved in over him. It was womblike under there, but cold crystalline light filtered through the white blanket. Hammersmith panicked and windmilled his arms, pushed himself up, and shook himself off. The handful of bloodstained rags that Rose had given him lay partially buried at his feet. Hammersmith touched his fingers to his head. They came back clean. No fresh blood. The wound was healing already. Or was frozen stiff. He turned and tried to see the inn with its giant protective tree through the falling grey sky, but it was invisible. He was alone.
It was possible that something had happened at the inn. The majority of the noise had come from that direction, not far behind Hammersmith. He remembered what he’d been told, that the villagers routinely shoveled snow off their roofs in the winter before their buildings became dangerously heavy. Nobody had done much shoveling in the past two days. He shook his head and turned and continued on the way he had been going. He left the rags in the snow, the red turning to pink and slowly disappearing under fresh snow.
Somewhere ahead of him was the killer of Oliver Price. He was sure of it.
–
Vicar Brothwood threw himself upon the altar as the entire church tipped and dropped several inches into a tunnel.
The building weighed nearly three hundred tons, a fact the vicar wasn’t privy to, but he had known for years that it was only a matter of time before the ground gave way under much of the village. It was, after all, a coal- mining village. What could one do except trust in the Lord and pray for the best?
The pews, which Henry had hastily put back in place, now slid across the center aisle and tapped against the pews on the other side of the sanctuary. The latter pews were fastened to the floor and held their ground against the heavy tide. Brothwood counted three sick men who had been knocked to the ground. The others, perhaps a hundred people, had stayed in place, even as pews and candlesticks and bibles skated smoothly past them. Brothwood smiled to see that a handful of people had slept through the disaster.
He ran to help the three men back onto their pews and sent up a silent prayer of thanks. Then he crossed his fingers, hoping the building would stay put just a little while longer, just until the people of Blackhampton were back on their feet.
–
A small tree, bigger than a sapling, but not more than five or six years old, had fallen across Day and
