Nocturnes (2004) Read online

  “You sound almost disapproving, Inspector. Don’t you believe that ladies should socialize with their husbands? Doesn’t your good lady accompany you on the occasional evening?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “That is a shame,” said Mrs. Allinson. “I believe that a wife tames a man wonderfully. A good woman, like the alchemists of old, can make gold from the lead of most men.”

  “Except the alchemists failed in their efforts,” said Burke. “Lead remained lead. I expect the late Mal Trevors might have been construed as a man of lead, don’t you think?”

  “Mal Trevors was corrupted metal,” said Mrs. Allinson dismissively. “In my view, he is of more benefit to the earth now that he lies beneath it than he ever was when he walked upon it. There, at least, he will provide food for worms and nourishment for plants. Poor eating, admittedly, but sustenance for all that.”

  Burke did not remark upon this display of feeling.

  “It appears that few people have a good word to say about the late Mr. Trevors,” he said. “I expect it will be a short eulogy.”

  “I believe succinct is the word, and any eulogy would be more than he deserves. Do you have any theories yet on how he might have died? They talk in the village of a wild animal, although my husband scoffs at the possibility.”

  “We are keeping an open mind on the subject,” said Burke. “Nevertheless, we appear to have become sidetracked from the subject of Miss Elsie Warden. My understanding is that she was taken ill on the night that Mal Trevors died.”

  “She had a moment of weakness,” said Mrs. Allinson. “I took care of her as best I could.”

  “May I ask the cause?”

  “You may ask Elsie Warden, if you choose. It’s not my place to tell you such details.”

  “I thought it was only doctors who took the Hippocratic oath?”

  “Women have their oaths too, Inspector, and I doubt if even Hippocrates himself could rival them for their fastness when they choose to be silent. I am curious, though, as to whom it was that spoke to you of Elsie Warden’s illness.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say,” replied Burke. “Policemen too have their secrets.”

  “Never mind,” said Mrs. Allinson. “I expect I will find out soon enough.”

  “Elsie Warden clearly trusts you a great deal, for one so recently arrived in the village.”

  Mrs. Allinson tilted her head slightly and regarded Burke with renewed interest, rather like a cat that suddenly finds the mouse with which it is toying making an unexpected but ultimately doomed break for freedom, all the while with its tail pinned firmly beneath the feline’s paw.

  “Elsie is a strong young woman,” answered Mrs. Allinson, with what Burke construed as a degree more caution than she had previously exercised. “This is not a village known for its tolerance of strong women.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Burke.

  “They hanged witches here, many years ago,” said Mrs. Allinson. “Three women died at the heart of the village, and more languished in jail until they too began to die. The hanged women still bear the name of Underbury when they are spoken of, and their bodies lie buried beyond the cemetery walls.”

  “The three stones,” said Burke.

  “So you’ve seen them?”

  “I didn’t know what they were, although I suspected that they marked graves of some kind,” said Burke. “I was surprised to see plots beyond the wall commemorated in any way.”

  “I don’t believe the stones were placed there to commemorate three murdered women,” said Mrs. Allinson. “There is a cross carved in the underside of each stone, facing down. The superstition that caused their deaths followed them into the ground.”

  “How do you know about the crosses?”

  “The village records. In a small place like this, one has to entertain oneself as best one can.”

  “Yet these are more enlightened times, and Underbury is no longer as it once was.”

  “Would you have considered Mal Trevors an enlightened man, Inspector?”

  “I never met him, except to look upon his remains. All I have is the testimony of others as to his character.”

  “Why are you not married, Inspector?” asked Mrs. Allinson suddenly. “Why is there no woman in your life?”

  Now it was Burke’s turn to answer cautiously.

  “My job takes up much of my time,” he began, uncertain why he was even attempting to explain himself to this woman, except that in doing so he might learn more about her. “Perhaps too I have never met the right woman.”

  Mrs. Allinson leaned forward slightly.

  “I suspect,” she said, “that there is no ‘right’ woman for you. I’m not entirely sure that you like women, Inspector. I don’t mean in the physical sense,” she added quickly, “for I am sure that you have appetites like most men have. Rather, I mean that you don’t like them as beings. You perhaps distrust them, maybe even despise them. You don’t understand them, and that makes you fear them. Their appetites, their emotions, the workings of their bodies and their minds, all are alien to you, and you are afraid of them for that reason, just as the men of Underbury were afraid of the women whom they named ‘witches’ and hanged amid the winter snow.”

  “I’m not afraid of women, Mrs. Allinson,” said Burke, a little more defensively than he had intended.

  She smiled before she spoke again, and Burke was reminded of the faint smile on the face of Mrs. Paxton as she reassured her husband earlier that day. He heard the sound of footsteps approaching the house, their rhythm slightly distorted, and knew that Dr. Allinson had returned, yet he found himself staring only at Mrs. Allinson, caught in the depths of those green eyes.

  “Really, Inspector, I don’t know if that’s true,” she said, apparently untroubled by any offense that she might be causing him. “In fact, I don’t believe that’s true at all.”

  Dr. Allinson joined them and, after a suitable period had elapsed, his wife announced that she was retiring for the evening.

  “I know I’ll be seeing you again, Inspector,” she said, as she left them. “I look forward to it.”

  Burke spent another hour with Allinson, learning little that was new but content to bounce theories back and forth with someone whose knowledge of physiology was so intimate. Allinson offered to take him back to the village, but Burke declined, consenting only to a little brandy to warm him on the journey.

  Burke almost instantly regretted taking the brandy once he set out for the village, for while it was undoubtedly warming, it clouded his head, and the cold was doing little to sober him. Twice he almost slipped before he had even made it to the road, and once upon it he kept to the center, fearing for his safety if he drew too close to the ditch. He had been walking for only a few minutes when he heard movement in the bushes to his right. He stopped and listened, but the presence in the undergrowth had also paused. Burke, like Stokes, was every inch the city dweller, and supposed that there must be a great many nocturnal animals in these parts, yet whatever was on the other side of the bushes was quite large. Perhaps it was a badger, he thought, or a fox. He moved on, the lamp raised, and felt something brush past his coat. He turned suddenly, and caught a flash of black as the creature entered the bushes to his left. It had crossed the road behind his back, so close to him that it had touched him as it went.

  Burke reached behind himself and brushed at his coat. His fingers came back coated with something dark and flaking, like pieces of charred paper. He brought them closer to the lamplight and examined them, lifting them to his nose to sniff them as he did so.

  They smelled of burning right enough, he thought, but not of paper. Burke recalled an incident, some years earlier, when he had been forced to enter a house about to be engulfed by fire in an effort to extract any survivors before the building collapsed. He found only one, a woman, and her body was already badly burned when he discovered her. She expired upon the road outside, but Burke remembered the way that fragments of h
er skin adhered to his hands, and the smell of her had never left him. It was why he rarely ate pork, for the smell of roasting pig was too close to that of human meat burning. That was the smell that now lay upon his fingers.

  He brushed it away on his coat as best he could and continued toward the village, faster now, his footsteps slapping upon the road as he ran, and all the time he was conscious of being followed from the undergrowth, until at last he came to the margins of Underbury itself and the creature stopped before the first house. Burke was breathing heavily as he scanned the blackness in the bushes. He thought for an instant that he saw a darker shape within it, a figure within the shadows, but it was gone almost as soon as he registered it. Still, its shape stayed with him, and he saw it in his dreams that night: the shape of its hips, the swelling of its breasts.

  It was the figure of a woman.

  The next morning, Stokes and Burke, accompanied by Waters, drove across the village to the farmhouse occupied by Elsie Warden and her family. Burke was quiet on the journey. He did not speak of what had occurred the night before on the road back to the village, but he had slept badly and the stink of charred meat seemed to cling to his pillow. Once he awoke to the sound of tapping at his window, but when he went to check upon it, all was still and silent outside, yet he could have sworn, for a moment, that the smell of roasted fats was stronger by the sill. He dreamed of Mrs. Paxton, watching him through the glass with her breasts exposed, but in his dream her face was replaced by that of Mrs. Allinson, and the green of her eyes had turned to the black of cinders.

  Elsie Warden’s brothers, too young to enlist, were out in the fields, and her father off on some business of his own in a neighboring town, so only Elsie and her mother were in the kitchen when the policemen arrived. They were offered tea, but they declined.

  In truth, Burke was not entirely certain why they had come, except that there had clearly been bad blood between the Warden family and the late Mal Trevors. Mrs. Warden remained sullen and unresponsive in the face of their questions, and Burke saw her glance occasionally through the window that looked out over the family’s fields, hoping to catch sight of her sons returning from their labors. Elsie Warden was more forthcoming, and Burke was a little surprised at the level of assurance exhibited by a young woman brought up in a household largely composed of menfolk.

  “We were all in the pub that evening,” she told Burke. “Me, my mum and dad, and my brothers. All of us. That’s the way around here. Saturday nights are special.”

  “But you knew Mal Trevors?”

  “He tried to court me,” she said. Her eyes dared Burke to dispute any man’s reasons for pursuing her. The detective was not about to argue with her. Elsie Warden had lush dark hair, fine features, and a body that Sergeant Stokes was doing his very utmost not to notice.

  “And how did you respond to his advances?”

  Elsie Warden pursed her lips coyly.

  “Whatever do you mean by that?” she asked.

  Burke felt himself redden. Stokes appeared to be suddenly afflicted by a fit of coughing.

  “I meant—” Burke began, wondering what exactly he had meant, when Stokes came to the rescue.

  “I think what the inspector means, miss, is did you like Mal Trevors, or was he barking up the wrong tree, so to speak?”

  “Aaah,” said Elsie, as if she were only now beginning to understand the direction the conversation was taking. “I liked him well enough, to begin.”

  “She always was attracted to bad sorts,” said her mother, speaking a full sentence for the first time since they had arrived.

  She kept her head down as she spoke, and did not look at her daughter. Burke wondered if the old woman was scared of her. Elsie Warden seemed to radiate life and energy, and it was clear that she had the capacity to arouse strong feelings in men. There was something fascinating about her, especially seeing her seated next to the worn-out figure of her mother in the gloomy kitchen.

  “Was Mal Trevors a bad sort?” asked Burke.

  Elsie tried the coy look again, but it faltered a little on this occasion.

  “I think you know what Mal Trevors was,” she said.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “He tried.”

  “What happened?”

  “I struck him, and I ran.”

  “And then?”

  “He came looking for me.”

  “And took a beating for his troubles,” said Burke.

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” she replied.

  Burke nodded. He took his notebook from his pocket and flicked through the pages, although he had no need of its contents to guide his thoughts. Sometimes he found that the very act of checking the written word was enough to disconcert an individual under police scrutiny. He was pleased to see Elsie Warden crane her neck slightly, as though in an effort to discern what might be contained within.

  “I’m told you took ill the night Mal Trevors was killed,” he said.

  Elsie Warden flinched. It was a small reaction, but enough for Burke. He waited for an answer, and watched as Elsie appeared to analyze the possible answers she might give. Burke felt a shift in her, and was aware of the charm slowly seeping out of her, disappearing between the cracks on the floor to be replaced by what he could only regard as a form of restrained ferocity.

  “That’s true,” she said.

  “Before or after you heard about Mal Trevors?”

  “Before.”

  “May I ask what ailed you?”

  “You may ask,” she said, “if you want to embarrass yourself.”

  “I’ll take that chance,” said Burke.

  “I had my visitor,” she said. “The monthly guest. Are you happy now?”

  Burke gave no sign of happiness or unhappiness. Underbury was giving him much-needed practice in hiding any embarrassment he might feel.

  “And Mrs. Allinson assisted you?”

  “She did. She took me home later, and tended to me.”

  “It must have been most severe, to require her ministrations.”

  He was aware of a sharp intake of breath from Stokes, and even Waters felt compelled to intervene.

  “Now, sir, don’t you think we’ve gone far enough?” he said.

  Burke stood.

  “For the moment,” he said.

  Suddenly, he staggered, overcome, it seemed, by a moment of weakness. He stumbled and brushed against Elsie Warden, then found purchase on the mantel.

  “Are you all right, sir?” Stokes had come to his aid.

  Burke waved him away.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Just a little light-headedness.”

  Elsie Warden now had her back to him.

  “I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “I hope I didn’t injure you.”

  Elsie shook her head and turned to face him. Burke thought she was a little paler than before, and her hands were folded across her chest.

  “No,” she said. “You didn’t.”

  He took a breath, thanked the women, then left. Mrs. Warden saw them to the door.

  “You’re a rude man,” she said to Burke. “My husband will hear of this.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” he replied. “I should tend to your daughter, if I were you. She looks ill.”

  He said nothing to Stokes or the disapproving Waters as they returned to the village. Instead, he thought of Elsie Warden, and the look of pain that had crossed her face as he brushed against her body.

  And of the new speckles of blood upon her blouse that were almost, but not quite, hidden by her folded arms.

  Mal Trevors was buried in the churchyard the following day. Many turned out for his funeral, despite his reputed failings as a human being, for in a village such as Underbury a funeral served a greater social purpose than that represented by the mere interment of a body. It was an opportunity to exchange information, to gather, and to speculate. As Burke looked around the graveside he could see faces familiar to him from his brief time in the village. The Warden
s were there, the family making its dislike of Burke clear only through hostile glances in his direction rather than outright force. So too were the Allinsons and the Paxtons. As the ceremony concluded, Burke saw Emily Allinson leave her husband, who made his way over to join Burke and Stokes. Mrs. Allinson walked by the wall of the cemetery, staring out over the fields toward the spot where Mal Trevors had died. She exchanged a few words with Elsie Warden as she passed her by, and they both looked for a moment in Burke’s direction and laughed before going their separate ways. Mrs. Paxton seemed to be keeping her distance from both of them, but Emily Allinson cornered her and laid a hand on her arm, a gesture simultaneously intimate and somehow threatening, for it effectively held Mrs. Paxton in place while the tall, elegant Mrs. Allinson leaned down to talk to her.

  “What do you think that’s about, sir?” asked Stokes.

  “A little friendly greeting, perhaps?”

  “Doesn’t look too friendly to me.”

  “No, it doesn’t, does it? Perhaps we need to have another talk with Mrs. Paxton.”

  By now, Allinson was almost upon them.

  “Any progress on your investigation?” he said.

  “Slow and steady,” said Burke, who felt a sudden stab of guilt as he recalled the appearance of the doctor’s wife in his dream.

  “I hear you stirred up the Wardens.”

  “They’ve spoken about our visit?”

  “The mother has spoken of little else. She seems to think you’re somewhat improper in your manner. She’s suggesting that someone ought to teach you a lesson.”

  “Any candidates for the role?”

  “No shortage, apparently. The Warden family is large, extended, and very male. I’d watch my back, if I were you, Inspector.”

  “I have Sergeant Stokes here to watch my back,” said Burke. “It leaves me free to watch other people.”

  Allinson grinned. “Good. I’m rather hoping that you won’t have any reason to call on my services in a personal capacity.”

  “You know,” said Burke, “I’m rather hoping that too. Tell me, does your wife know a little of medicine?”