Weycombe Page 2
At one time I’d thought I might get into doing voiceovers—American accents were much in demand in London—and I had turned the guest bedroom closet into a soundproof recording studio with a professional-grade mic and editing software. If you call the American Museum in Britain or the American Air Museum after hours you might still hear my voice on their recordings. But apart from that, my voiceover career had not come to much.
“But the son lives nearby?” Clearly Milo was not going to let this go. I stifled the impulse to tell him to go ask Anna’s husband if he was so interested. Anxiety broke in at the thought of Alfie. Who was going to tell him what had happened to his wife? How was he going to take the news? It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough problems. His illness had reduced him pretty much to skin and bone, and to eating the only two foods he could keep down: low-fat yogurt and buckwheat. The Monroe recycle bin overflowed with sad little containers of Fage 2%. But Alfie’s main regret about his illness was that it kept him from being of use helping others. That’s how he thought. He was the Melanie Wilkes of Weycombe Court.
The news would probably bring son Jason home like a shot, just to add to Alfie’s woes. Jason was a taker: that much I knew from everything Anna had told me, when she and I were still swapping confidences. No matter how she tried to gloss over it, Jason was very bad news.
“The last I heard, Jason lived in London, somewhere around Catford Bridge or Ladywell. But that was months ago—the last I heard.” I shifted uneasily, placing all the activity around Anna’s body more firmly out of my line of sight. The improvised screen had slipped and I could see they were putting little sock-puppet bags on her hands. The reality of all this was getting to me now and I doubted I’d sleep much that night, a doubt that held true for many nights to come. “May I please go now? I need to ring my husband and I really don’t have anything to add. I was walking and I recognized her shoes, of all things. They were new, you see; she was wearing them the last time I saw her. I called it in. You know the rest. I haven’t seen her since Monday, otherwise: rubbish collection day.”
He asked for my address and phone number and asked me to remain available in case the investigators had further questions. I started to tell him sure, I’d cancel that flight to Belize, and then I thought better of it. Milo didn’t look in the mood for jokes.
As he was turning to go I called him back. “Wait a minute. I just remembered—in all the excitement it went out of my head. I thought I saw someone walking away very fast—running, actually—toward the top of the hill. Just as I was approaching. Just before I found … her.”
“A man? Woman?” He wrote something in his notebook with what looked like a golf pencil; it was nearly swallowed up in his large, hammy fist. He wrote like a child; I half expected to see his tongue protruding from one side of his mouth as he concentrated on forming his letters.
“A man, I’m pretty certain. Yes, it almost had to be, from the way he carried himself. That or a very large, rugged-individual type of woman. We have a few of those in the village.” He smiled, a conspiratorial “don’t I know it?” smile. “I didn’t think too much about it because there are a lot of runners and walkers out this way. The thing is, he wasn’t dressed for running or for any kind of sport, really. He or she looked sort of scruffy and he—or she—was wearing long pants.”
“Coloring? Clothing?”
I shook my head. Not sure. “She lived next door,” I added as he continued his scribbling. I figured I might as well come clean now, because even the dimmest detective was sure to figure it out soon. “Anna did. At number 24.”
The dark eyebrows over the blue eyes shot upward. Somehow I just knew they would.
“Quite a coincidence,” he said. “That you were both out taking your exercise on the river path today, and all.”
“Not really,” I said. I was annoyed by the insinuation, but I kept my voice even. “I’m here nearly every day. Most days I walk all the way to Walton-on-Thames and back.” I expected him to ask, who has time for that? It’s a distance of seven and a half miles round trip. The answer was, in my case, the unemployed and the apparently unemployable. The bored and the lonely.
“Quite a coincidence,” he repeated. The conspiratorial smile was gone.
2
Nothing is ever so perfect as it seems. Not even in Weycombe, where they’ve had centuries to get everything just right: the twee cottages with pitched thatch roofs and mullioned windows; the meandering cobblestone streets lined with tiny shops selling yarn and wine and stationery; the flower boxes stuffed with well-tended blooms; the ancient inn, still the beating heart of the place. It was said ghostlike ruins sat at the bottom of the duck pond on the village green and could still be glimpsed on a calm summer day.
There were a lot of “it was saids” in these retellings, many dubious tales preserved like insects in amber, but spookiest of all were the tales of the church with its ancient crypt and graveyard, its layers upon layers of the dead-and-buried faithful now turned to dust. It needed little effort as I walked down Church Street at twilight to imagine ghosts flitting just at the edge of my vision, or to fancy I could hear the sighs of lovers or the whispers of those plotting mischief. Back then there were so many chances to get it wrong if you mixed up your mushrooms or your magic potions, or you misjudged the constantly changing political and religious scene, or even if you simply drank water straight from the river. It was no wonder if ghosts did linger, fastened by their penitential chains to the earth.
Today’s villagers live in luxury unimagined then, and a clean and sparkling river framed by willows runs beneath modern windows as it ripples eastward to London. My neighbors kept themselves to themselves, but from what I could tell their dreams were mundane: a new swimming pool and fresh wallpaper; a different hair color and adult braces; a new dress and nail tips for the annual charity ball at Branford-Sturgeon manor house. They were beautiful people, my neighbors. A lot of work went into being them.
Many in the UK dream of moving to America, but mainly those needing a fresh start. No one in Weycombe seemed to need that, at least not those living at my upscale postal code. If they had dreams of America, it was to wish for a winter house in Florida. Their roots were firmly planted in Weycombe.
As Sergeant Milo noticed, I am from the US, that land of inventors and re-inventors, the people who brought you the Segway and Lady Gaga. It is a place of wide-open highways and land grant colleges and prairie schooners and buffaloes and homesteads on the Great Plains, but my leanings were always New England-small, and my yearnings had always been to live in a diamanté European city like Bruges or a walled medieval town in France.
Or a place like Weycombe, in all its pretty perfection.
I arrived in the village by way of Oxford and a graduate diploma in medieval studies. This qualified me, in ways I never entirely understood, to be a talent coordinator for the BBC in London, where my job was to interview and create videos of likely candidates for various re-enactment programs. The decision to hire me may have had something to do with my work in amateur theater at University. Before long, my efforts were centered almost exclusively on their true-crime show. This job in turn led me to meet and marry William White.
I rather quickly achieved what I had most wanted: a life lived in the land of my ancestors—who came to America to get away from it all.
I don’t have words to tell you how shocking Anna’s death was to the yuppie settlement of Weycombe. The level of fear it unleashed, once it was understood she hadn’t just passed away from a dicky heart and overexertion. The shock was not in a “there but for the grace of God” or “never send to know for whom the bell tolls” sort of way, either. Because people like Anna just don’t get themselves killed: they pay good money to live in gated communities where every chance of such a fate is reduced practically to zero. Weycombe Court had private security patrols; it had neighborhood watch; it had neurotic pedigreed dogs that barked at any
thing that moved. And without the gate, it had Sergeant Milo and Co.
“Security First” should have been the Weycombe motto, along with “Perfection at any Price.” The council had people who came bi-monthly to mow the grass on the green in diagonal stripes because it looked better that way. The reasons behind this thinking should have been obvious to me, but I never learned all the rules. And when Anna died I was just beginning to understand that I never would learn them all.
Weycombe is a character in and of itself in this story, no different from the creepy man with gooseberry eyes who ran the butcher shop on the High and always made me think of Sweeney Todd. I’d still advise anyone looking for murder suspects to start with him.
Ticking all the cozy boxes, Weycombe had—still has, I guess—a war memorial, a village hall, tea rooms, restaurants, that old inn, and a trendy wine bar. It boasted a second-tier celebrity commuter or two, and a Michelin-starred restaurant on the road to Walton-on-Thames. It had its own sports ground and clubhouse and a thriving cricket club. Nearby was a famous prep school; there was also a renowned private “hospital,” actually a dry-out clinic for footballers and reality stars.
The village shop was a general store and off-license selling local produce and baked goods and packed with old-fashioned toiletries and patent medicines. There was a coffee shop on the High where I spent many of my waking hours. Writing, or trying to. The owner had a cat that would sun itself in the middle of the street, until some exasperated driver would finally climb out of his car and scoop it out of the way.
For culture, there was a bookshop, an antique shop or two, and a small art gallery owned by a woman with family money and appalling taste. Weycombe also had a theater for amateur dramatics; my husband took part in one production and was quite good, really. For years I kept the recording of his great booming baritone as he ran his lines.
Around harvest time, when Anna died, most of the village shops sported a straw mannequin dressed as, for example, Jack the Ripper or Margaret Thatcher. Halloween (or Hallowe’en) had become a bigger event each year. The pubs served local ciders and perries, and every street was a showcase of turning leaves.
I admit, I loved all this, at least at first. Weycombe looked like the setting for an episode of Midsomer Murders, which absolutely should have alerted me. As Agatha Christie wrote, “One does see so much evil in a village.”
Will and I lived on a crescent at one end of the High in a gated estate of detached and terraced houses—thirty new-builds, each designed to complement the other without being too cookie-cutter. The entry gate was made of wrought iron with an arch that proclaimed you were entering Weycombe Court. Beyond our little bubble of privilege were individual cottages surrounded by tiny gardens, and beyond them, farms and woodland.
Weycombe Court—in case you thought North America has some monopoly on pretentious names for housing developments. At least the “Court” part of the name makes a certain sense. We held court; we were courted (some of us). We conducted ourselves in a courtly manner (some of us). And we judged each other nonstop.
At one time I got a certain thrill as we drove under that archway, Will and I. Thousands, millions, would never know the key code to that gate, and we did. Our back garden ran down to the shining River Wey. We also had a terrace and indoor and outdoor fireplaces. Perfect.
Few tourists realized the Court was there. The hidden location was one of the wiser decisions made by the developers; the least wise was to turn to some dicey pals and relatives to fund construction, which was further delayed by a bad winter. The developers couldn’t wash their hands of the place fast enough so Will and I ended up paying about forty thousand pounds below market.
Our terrace house rose three stories above ground and had an English basement with its own separate entrance. The basement was intended for an au pair, a mother-in-law, or live-in help. In some cases, grown children stayed there until forced to vacate. Ours became an office for Will. A man cave. As his career progressed and our marriage disintegrated, he spent more and more time holed up down there.
But that came later. For a while, it was all just flawless, Stepfordish in its perfection (“but she won’t take pictures and she won’t be me!”). Sometimes I looked at my neighbor Heather across the way and expected to see wire trailing from under the hem of her dress.
The first day we moved into Weycombe Court I looked across the crescent into one of the neighbor’s bedrooms and watched a woman putting sheets on her king-size bed. As I watched this trim blonde dressed so impeccably to do her housework, I was overcome by a sense that finally, I had arrived. I now lived in this fairytale, ritzy postal code, and I was now one of the women who made their large beds (and lay in them) and somehow it was, I don’t know, a reward, or a vindication. I was proud and happy. I was one of the chosen.
Anna died on the northern stretch of the Weycombe path, a ribbon of paved asphalt that hugged the river where it ran below a precipice covered with small trees, bushes, and bramble. The path then passed several small villages on its way to Walton-on-Thames—hamlets where the cows outnumbered the people—curving around wherever the villages got in the way.
This well-maintained path was meant to be shared civilly by pedestrians and bicyclists, but in fact you walked or ran at your own risk, remaining ever alert to the soft whir of fast-approaching tires. Bike riders were the subject of many stroppy letters to the editor of the Weycombe Chronicle, letters the authors hoped might sway those who ruled with godlike indifference from the parish council.
What happened to Anna could so easily have been an accident. She could have been running flat out on her chubby legs, minding her own business, when some solicitor speeding by on his way to his office in Walton-on-Thames, anonymous in his ventilated helmet and ubiquitous black bike shorts, pushed her off the path, sending her rolling downhill and breaking her neck. That time of year, the path could be slick with wet fallen leaves. She might simply have slipped and fallen on her head.
That is certainly how it could have happened. Except that of course she was murdered, dead before her body came to rest at the edge of the river.
3
I returned home that day of discovery practically jumping out of my skin from all the adrenaline. I paced the living room in aimless circles in an effort to calm myself. Finally I began to load the dishwasher, my hands shaking, until I shattered a glass, dropping it on the floor. I searched out the broom and dustpan but soon gave up on finding the smallest shards. What did it matter?
I was doing what I always did, what I had been trained to do from childhood. Carry on, hang tough, for God’s sake act normal. Make the fact the dishwasher hadn’t been run for days and Will would hassle me about it more important than knowing Anna was dead.
She really was dead, my brain kept insisting; as in never coming back. I had done the same thing on 9/11—finished composing an email to one of my professors about a late assignment, adding just the right amount of groveling to pretend regret at missing his class the week before. I hit send, then sat back and reread old emails in the queue, deciding whether to reply or delete. It’s shock, of course. It’s what people do—something dull and routine to make time stand still, to give the brain a chance to catch up to the horror of what’s happened. I’d done much the same sort of thing when my brother died.
The broken glass had jolted me back to awareness. The clock was ticking—literally, the old grandfather clock Will had brought from his ancestral home when we married, over his mother’s protests. The Demon Dowager had protested both the clock and the marriage. Little good it did her.
Will would be home any minute and I didn’t think I could cope with his sniping about the state of the house. Not now. Dried egg on the breakfast plates would only distract us from the much larger subject at hand. I mean, hello: I was the one who called 999. I was the one who carried the memory of her dead, staring eyes. I had had to deal with Milo and all the rest of it. Sur
ely today of all days we could call a truce.
Right then, I’d have done anything to avoid seeing that pissed-off look on his face when he walked in, not even bothering to say hello until he’d scanned the state of the house. That entrance would be followed by snarky inquiries as to how I passed my day, and pointed questions about the progress of my job search.
I’d told Milo I wanted to talk to my husband, but that was of course an excuse to get away, to collapse in private. I had no real idea how to break the news to Will. I really didn’t want to see him until I’d looped the entire morning across my mind a few times. Will’s compassion and awareness were sometimes, shall we say, lacking. The man had an edge. It’s what I used to like about him. I mean, Lord Byron had an edge, too, and wouldn’t you rather spend an hour in his company than a year in someone else’s? But that gets old, all the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” stuff. I never broached a subject with Will anymore without first rehearsing my opening lines, afraid of his reaction.
It was no way to live.
The house was actually in worse shape now than when I had worked full time. Something about time expanding to fill the allotted indifference. But now as I roughly slotted the dishes into the machine I thought about Milo, and about Anna, of course, and how the news of her death would ricochet about the neighborhood. What a total disruption it would mean to the Stepfordian status quo. The few murders that happened anywhere around Weycombe were confined to the chaotic council estates. Even there, I’d be hard-pressed to say if they had more than the occasional drug-related stabbing—the Weycombe Chronicle relegated such skirmishes to the inner pages, saving the front page for breaking news of the winner of the Women’s Institute flower show.
The church clock was striking ten as Will finally got home that night. At a wild guess, he’d been at the Bull. It seemed as if most nights he only popped in to declare the house a disaster area. It was like I was an appointment scheduled into his day planner: “Complain to maid about untidy house. Terminate?”