* * *
—
I look it over, the crumpled-tarp mound. Underneath lie flesh, skin, bone, teeth. Three and a half hours dead.
I wonder if he’s still warm. My husband. Warm to the touch. I Google it. Either way, I don’t want the shock.
Okay.
Okay, the arms and legs should be cold to the touch but the main body will still be warm. Okay then.
I take a long, full exhalation.
Okay, here we go….
I stop. Wait.
I don’t know why, but I clear his burner phone’s search history. It’s pointless, I know; the phone’s untraceable and after a couple of hours in the damp October ground it won’t work anyway. But then, maybe it will. I place the burner back in his coat pocket and slip his personal iPhone out of his chest pocket. It’s on airplane mode.
I look through the photo library. Us. Tears well and then streak in two hot dribbles down my face.
I fully remove the tarp, exposing everything it conceals. I wipe the phone for prints, return it to its warm chest pocket, and brace my knees to drag.
* * *
—
I’m not a bad person. Or maybe I am. Maybe you should decide?
* * *
—
But I should definitely explain. And to explain I need to go back. Back to that anniversary morning, three months ago.
We woke up before sunrise this morning. Mark and I. It’s our anniversary morning. The anniversary of the first day we met.
We’ve been staying in a boutique pub hotel on the Norfolk coast. Mark found it in the Financial Times’s “How to Spend It” supplement. He has a subscription but the supplements are the only bits he ever gets time to read. The FT was right, though; this is “the cozy-country bolt-hole of your dreams.” And I’m glad this is “how we’re spending it.” Of course, it’s not my “it” we’re spending, really, but I suppose it will be soon.
The hotel is a perfect country nest of fresh seafood, cold beer, and cashmere throws. Chelsea-on-Sea, the guidebooks call it.
We’d spent the past three days walking until our muscles were loose and heavy, our cheeks flushed from English sun and windburn, hair smelling of forest and salty sea. Walking and then fucking, bathing, and eating. Heaven.
The hotel had originally been built in 1651 as a coaching inn for customs officials making that bumpy trip to London and had since boasted famous Norfolkian and Battle of Trafalgar winner Vice Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson as a regular patron. He stayed in room 5, the one next to ours, and came here to collect his dispatches every Saturday of his five-year unemployment, apparently. Interesting that Lord Nelson had stretches of unemployment. I suppose I always thought if you were in the Navy, then you were just in the Navy. But there you go. It happens to the best of us. Anyway, throughout the years, livestock auctions, assizes, and all the fun of the Jane Austen fair had been hosted here in the hotel.
The coffee-table book in our room had gleefully informed us that the preliminary hearings for the infamous Burnham Murderers trial had been held in what was now the private dining room downstairs. “Infamous” is questionable. I had certainly never heard of them. So I read up.
The story began in 1835 with the wife of a shoemaker violently retching up her stomach at the family dinner table as her husband watched. Mrs. Taylor, the retcher, had been poisoned with arsenic. The flour in the larder had been laced with the stuff, and arsenic traces were later found in her stomach lining at autopsy. An inquest into the poisoning found that Mr. Taylor had been having an affair with their neighbor, a Mrs. Fanny Billing. And Fanny Billing had recently purchased three-pennyworth of arsenic from a local druggist. That arsenic had made its way into the Taylors’ flour bag and consequently into the dumplings that ended the life of Mrs. Taylor. I guess Mr. Taylor was abstaining that evening. Perhaps Mr. Taylor was on a no-carbs diet.
Further information supplied by another neighbor at the inquest stated that a Mrs. Catherine Frary had had access to the Taylors’ home that day and had been heard telling Fanny before her questioning, “Hold your own and they can’t hurt us.”
Upon further investigation it was found that Catherine’s husband and her child had also both died very suddenly the previous fortnight.
Foul play was suspected. Catherine’s husband’s and child’s stomachs were shipped to Norwich, where analysis confirmed they too contained arsenic. A witness at the Taylor house attested he had seen Catherine attending to the sick Mrs. Taylor, post-retching, and he had seen her add a white powder “on the tip of a knife from a paper packet” into Mrs. Taylor’s gruel, poisoning her a second time. This time fatally. The two women had also poisoned Catherine’s sister-in-law the week before.
Catherine and Fanny were hung in Norwich for the multiple murders of their husbands, as well as Mrs. Taylor, Catherine’s child, and Catherine’s sister-in-law. According to the Niles’ Weekly Register of October 17, 1835: the pair were “launched into eternity amidst an immense concourse of spectators, (20,000 or 30,000), above one-half of whom were women.” Launched into eternity. Nice shipping reference.
Odd to put “the Burnham Murderers” in the hotel information booklet, especially considering the nature of weekend getaways.
* * *
—
The alarm wakes us at four-thirty in the morning from our warm bundle of goose down and Egyptian cotton. We dress in silence, our clothes laid out the night before: thin cotton T-shirts, walking boots, jeans, and woolen sweaters for before the sun rises. I make us some coffee using the little machine in the room while Mark fixes his hair in the bathroom. Mark’s not a vain man by any standard, but like most men in their thirties, his getting ready seems to be mainly hair-based. I like his dithering, though, a little chink in his perfection. I like that I can be ready quicker. We drink our coffee fully clothed on top of the duvet, windows open, his arm around me, silent. We’ll have enough time to jump in the car and get to the beach for the break of dawn. Sunrise is listed as 5:05 on the daily information card by the bed.
We drive in relative silence to Holkham Beach, breathing and thinking. We’re together, but alone with our thoughts and each other. Trying to hang on to the thick sleepiness that hasn’t quite faded away yet. There’s an innate sense of ritual to it all. We have that sometimes; things just happened that way for us. A little bit of magic creeps into our lives and we nurture it like a succulent. We’ve done all this before; it’s one of our things. Anniversary morning. As we pull in to park I wonder if we’ll still celebrate this day after we’re married, two months from now. Or maybe that will be our new day?
We get out to thick quiet at Holkham Hall. Silence pierced intermittently by bursts of rich birdsong. A herd of deer in the adjoining field look up as we slam the car doors, and freeze. We hold their gaze, all momentarily caught in stasis, until their attention drops back down to the grass.
We are one of the first cars of the day in the clay gravel car park; it will get much busier later—it always does—with dogs and families, horseboxes and riders, family clans eking out the last of the good weather. Apparently this heat won’t last. But then, they say that every year, don’t they?
No one is in sight yet as we make our way along the gravel tracks down to the great desert stretch of Holkham Beach, four miles of golden-white sand skirted by pine forests. The North Sea wind bends patches of wild grasses and whips sand up into the air along the ridgebacks of towering dunes. Miles of freshly blown sand and sea and not a soul in sight. Unearthly in the predawn light. A fresh barren landscape. It always feels like a clean start. Like the New Year.