And when she opened the cupboard, she tried to focus our attention on the wrong object. So she used the briefcase as a…What is it? A bloater? Kipper?
And beautiful, poker-faced Hugh Fraser as Captain Hastings: Red herring.
—
The second time I went for dinner with The Cop I wanted to talk about the woman from Comberton, even though I knew it wasn’t Deb. She’d gone back to her family, to her life, but had her life come back to her? The Cop looked at me over the plastic McDonald’s table and tilted her head to one side as I went on spewing questions. What would it be like to lose your past like that? Would you become a stranger to yourself? Or would that perhaps be the closest to actually knowing yourself that you could ever really get? At least, as an adult. It comes more naturally to children, I said, because they are not constantly suffocating themselves with memories. Memories, if you let them, become a crowd of ghosts following you around. Stuffing you further and further into your former life, until you can’t breathe. Or did she keep diaries, perhaps? At least then she’d have some little splinters of her personal past, written by someone who’d for a time used her body, borrowed her voice. Would that past-woman feel like a twin sister? I never had a sibling. I’d often wished for a sister, but The Cop said I was lucky because siblings were awful and got in the way.
I took a breath when she spoke, realizing I’d been going for a while, and asked if she’d heard of anything else lately. Any other possible news of Deb. She smiled slightly and said I’d actually jogged her memory about something, with all the ghost stuff.
“By the way,” she added through a mouthful of cheeseburger, “that was weird.”
A woman had been buried alive in a disused well on the estate of Wimpole Hall. Once she’d slipped in, she must have dislodged the structure of the well, and the sides had caved in over her, stifling any sounds of crying for help.
“Not that she would have been able to do that for very long anyway—the soil would have filled in her mouth and lungs quite quickly. Her eyes were open, and her mouth was full of dirt. They found a worm in her ear.”
She leaned over and wiggled her fingers at me, as if telling a scary story to a small child. “And her fingernails were very long—they keep growing after you die.”
“Out into the soil,” I said. “Like roots?”
“What?”
“From a plant that doesn’t know it’s dead?”
The Cop blinked. She was completely unperturbed by the facts, however grisly. She told them like they were the most ordinary thing on earth. It was my question that was wrong.
Anyhow, she explained, the local officers had ascertained that the woman had most likely fallen in by accident, and they weren’t treating the death as suspicious. She’d been wearing a tracksuit, and The Cop asked if Deb could possibly have gone running out there, but I said I had never heard of Deb going running. Or wearing a tracksuit.
“What colour was it?” I asked.
“Kind of light grey, they think. It was really manky of course, when they dug out the body, but it looked like it would have been grey originally. Seem to think it could be a girl from one of the farms round the Wimpole estate. Probably went out there at night for some reason without a torch, couldn’t see where she was going, fell straight in.”
She indicated the action with her free hand, finger-legs walking to the edge of the invisible precipice, then flat-palming the table with a slap.
I had heard of Wimpole. It was one of those grand country houses owned by the National Trust—the kind we used to visit on school trips—just a few miles south of Cambridge. I asked The Cop if she wanted to go out there with me at the weekend.
“Why? Whoever it is, she’s not still down there in the well. They’ll have taken her away by now to be buried. I mean, buried again. I mean, buried properly. Somewhere else.”
“I still think I’d like to go.”
“What for?”
I paused and smiled at the floor. “You’re a wise fish,” I said.
“What?”
“No wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.”
“Oh, I know this one! That’s the Mock Turtle.”
I nodded and smiled, and she looked pleased with herself.
“I bet the grounds of Wimpole are beautiful right now,” I proffered, “with all the autumn colours.”
She weighed this for a moment with a fake-serious frown, nodding and rubbing her chin.
“Yes,” she said eventually, “that’s a good porpoise. Okay, we’ll go.”
—
So she drove us down that Saturday. It was a soft day with thin sun, the kind that calls for wool scarves and thick socks. A short drive between flat, wide fields and big skies.
We plodded round the woods and the farmland, inhaling air thick with rich scents of leaf mulch and cow dung. “Good country air,” my aunt would have called it. Damp oak leaves caught on our boots, and we pocketed the green-gold acorns and chocolatey conkers.
