The Wrath of Angels

V



Tread lightly, she is near

Under the snow,

Speak gently, she can hear

The daisies grow.

‘Requiescat’, Oscar Wilde





(1856–1900)





43





When I was a boy, I thought everyone over thirty was old: my parents were old, my grandparents were real old, and after that there were just people who were dead. Now my view of aging was more nuanced: there were people in my immediate circle of acquaintances who were younger than I, and people who were older. In time there would be far more of the former than the latter, until eventually I might look around and find that I was the oldest person in the room, which would probably be a bad sign. I recalled Phineas Arbogast as being almost ancient, but he had probably not been more than sixty when I first met him, and possibly even younger than that, although he had lived a hard life, and every year of it was written on his face.

Phineas Arbogast was a friend of my grandfather and, boy, could he talk. There were people who crossed the street when they saw Phineas coming, or dived into stores to avoid him, even if it meant buying an item that they didn’t need, just so they wouldn’t get drawn into a conversation with him. He was a lovely man, but every incident in his day, however minor, could be transformed into an adventure on the scale of the Odyssey. Even my grandfather, a man of seemingly infinite tolerance, had been known to pretend that he wasn’t home when Phineas dropped by unexpectedly, my grandfather having been given some warning of his approach by the belchings of Phineas’s old truck. On one such occasion, my grandfather had been forced to hide beneath his own bed as Phineas went from window to window, peering inside with his hands cupped against the glass, convinced that my grandfather must be in there somewhere, either sleeping or, God forbid, lying unconscious and requiring rescue, which would have provided Phineas with another tale to add to his ever-expanding collection of stories.

More often than not, though, my grandfather would sit and listen to Phineas. In part he did so because, buried somewhere in every one of Phineas’s tales, was a nugget of something useful: a piece of information about a person (my grandfather was a retired sheriff’s deputy, and he never quite set aside his policeman’s love of secrets), or a little shard of history or forest lore. But my grandfather also listened because he understood that Phineas was lonely: Phineas had never married, and it was said that he had long held a flame for a woman named Abigail Ann Morrison, who owned a bakery in Rangeley that Phineas was known to frequent when he went up to his cabin in the area. She was a single woman of indeterminate age, and he was a single man of indeterminate age, and somehow they managed to circle each other for twenty years until Abigail Ann Morrison was sideswiped by a car while delivering a box of cupcakes to a church social, and so their dance was ended.

So Phineas spun his stories, and sometimes people listened and sometimes they did not. I had forgotten most of those that I heard; most, but not all. There was one in particular that had stayed with me: the story of a missing dog and a lost girl in the Great North Woods.

The Cronin Rehabilitation and Senior Living Center was situated a few miles north of Houlton. It wasn’t much to look at from the outside – a series of blankly modern buildings built in the seventies, decorated in the eighties, and allowed to remain in stasis ever since, the paintwork and furnishings restored and repaired when required, but never altered. Its lawns were well tended, but there was little color. Cronin’s was nothing more or less than a neutral corner of God’s waiting room.

Whatever the subtleties of defining the aging process, there was no doubt that Phineas Arbogast was now very old indeed. He lay sleeping on an armchair in the room that he shared with another, marginally younger, man who was reading a newspaper in bed when I arrived, his eyes magnified enormously by thick spectacles. Those owl eyes focused on me with alarm as I approached Phineas.

‘You’re not going to wake him, are you?’ he asked. ‘The only peace I get is when that man is asleep.’

I apologized, and said it was important that I spoke with Phineas.

‘Well, on your head be it,’ he said. ‘Just permit me to get my gown on before you go rousing David Copperfield over there.’

I waited while he got out of bed, put on his gown and slippers, and prepared to find somewhere to read undisturbed. I said that I was sorry for a second time, and the old man replied, ‘I swear, when that man dies God Himself will move out of heaven and join the devil in hell to get a break from his yammering.’ He paused at the door. ‘Don’t tell him I said that, will you? God knows, I’m fond of the old coot.’

And away he went.

I remembered Phineas as a big man with a gray-brown beard, but the years had picked the meat from his bones just as the fall wind will denude a tree of its leaves before the coming of winter, and Phineas’s eternal winter could not be far off. His mouth had collapsed in on itself with the loss of his teeth, and his head was entirely bald, although a little of his beard remained. His skin was transparent, so that I could count the veins and capillaries beneath it, and I thought I could discern not just the shape of his skull, but the skull itself. According to the nursing assistant who had shown me to his room, there was nothing wrong with Phineas: he had no major illnesses beyond an assortment of the various ailments that beset so many at the end of their lives, and his mind was still clear. He was simply dying because it was his time to die. He was dying because he was old.

I pulled up a chair and tapped him lightly on the arm. He woke suddenly, squinted at me, then found his spectacles on his lap and held them to the bridge of his nose without putting them on, like a dowager duchess examining a suspect piece of china.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘You look familiar.’

‘My name is Charlie Parker. You and my grandfather were friends.’

His face unclouded, and his smile shone. His hand reached out and shook mine, and his grip was still strong.

‘It’s good to see you, boy,’ he said. ‘You’re looking well.’

His left hand came out and joined the right, like a man being saved from drowning.

‘You too, Phineas.’

‘You’re a damned liar. Give me a scythe and a hood, and I could play Death himself. If I stumble by a mirror when I’m up to take a piss at night, I think that’s the grim old bastard come for me at last.’

He took a brief coughing fit then, and sipped from a can of soda that stood by his chair.

‘I was sorry to hear about your wife and your little girl,’ he said, when he had recovered. ‘I know you maybe don’t like folk reminding you about it, but it has to be said.’

He took my hand in his again, there was a final tightening, and the hands withdrew.

I had a box of candy under my arm. He looked at it bemusedly.

‘I got no teeth left,’ he explained, ‘and candy plays hell with my dentures.’

‘That’s okay,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t bring you any candy.’

I opened the box. Inside were five Cohiba Churchill cigars. Cigars had always been his vice, I knew. My grandfather would share one with him at Christmas, then complain about the smell for weeks after.

‘If you can’t have Cuban, I figure the best Dominicans will have to do,’ I said.

Phineas took one from the box, held it beneath his nose, and sniffed it. I thought he might be about to cry.

‘God bless you,’ he said. ‘You mind taking an old man for a walk?’

I said that I didn’t mind at all. I helped him to put on an extra sweater, and a muffler, then his coat and gloves and a bright red woolen hat that made him look like a marooned buoy. I found a wheelchair, and together we set off for a stroll around those dull grounds. He lit up once we were out of sight of the main building, and happily talked and puffed his way to a small ornamental lake by the edge of a fir copse, where I sat on a bench and listened to him some more. When he eventually had to pause for breath, I took the opportunity to steer the conversation in another direction.

‘A long time ago, when I was a teenager, you told my grandfather and me a story,’ I said.

‘I told you both lots of stories. Your grandfather was still here, he’d say that I told too many for his liking. He hid under his bed from me once, you know that? He thought I didn’t see him, but I did.’ He chuckled. ‘The old fart. I kept meaning to use it against him sometime, but he upped and died before I could, damn him.’

He drew again on the cigar.

‘This one was different,’ I said. ‘It was a ghost story, about a little girl in the North Woods.’

Phineas held the smoke in for so long I was convinced it was going to start coming out of his ears. At last, when he’d had time to think, he let it out and said, ‘I remember it.’

Of course you do, I thought, because a man doesn’t forget a tale like that, not if he’s been a part of it. A man doesn’t forget hunting for his lost dog – Misty, wasn’t that her name? – in the depths of the forest, and finding her all tangled up in briars with a little barefoot girl waiting nearby, a girl who was both there and not there, both very young and very, very old, a girl who claimed to be lost and lonely even as those briars started snaking around the man’s shoes, trying to hold him there so that the girl could have company, so that she could draw him down to the dark place in which she dwelled.

No, you don’t forget a thing like that, not ever. There was a truth to the tale that Phineas Arbogast told to my grandfather and me, but it wasn’t the whole truth. He had wanted to tell the story, to share what he had seen, but some details needed to be changed, because one had to be careful about such matters.

‘You said that you saw the girl somewhere up near Rangeley,’ I said. ‘You said she was the reason why you stopped going up to your cabin there.’

‘That’s right,’ said Phineas. ‘That’s what I said.’

I didn’t look at him as I spoke, but I kept my voice soft and there was no accusation or blame to my tone. This was not an interrogation, but I needed to know the truth. It was important if I was to find that plane.

‘Do you think she roams, this girl?’

‘Roams?’ asked Phineas. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘What I’m wondering is if all of the North Woods is her territory, or if she just sticks to one small area? Because my feeling is that she’s linked to a place, that maybe she has, well, a lair, for want of a better word. It could be where her body lies, and that’s where she returns to, and she can’t or won’t stray too far from there.’

‘I couldn’t say for sure,’ said Phineas, ‘but I guess that sounds about right.’

Now I looked at him. I touched his arm, and he turned his face to me.

‘Phineas, why did you say that you were beyond Rangeley when you saw her? You weren’t anywhere near Rangeley. You were farther north, past Falls End. You were deep in the County, weren’t you?’

Phineas looked at his cigar.

‘You’re spoiling my smoke,’ he said.

‘I’m not trying to catch you out. I’m not blaming you for altering the details of the story. But it’s important that you tell me where you were, as best you can, when you saw that girl. Please.’

‘How about a story for a story?’ said Phineas. ‘Suppose you tell me why you need to know?’

So I told him of an old man on his deathbed, and a plane in the Great North Woods, and I told him what linked Harlan Vetters’ search for a boy named Barney Shore to the discovery of that plane: the ghost of a girl. The plane lay in her territory, wherever that might be, and despite Harlan Vetters’ story about malfunctioning compasses and lost bearings, I believe he did have some notion of where exactly that plane rested. Perhaps he had chosen not to share the location because he didn’t trust his son, not entirely, or because he was dying and confused, and couldn’t keep all of the details straight in his head.

Or maybe he did share that detail, but only with his daughter, and she had held it back from me for reasons of her own. She didn’t know me, and it could be that she wanted to see what I’d do with the information she’d already given me before she entrusted me with that final, crucial element.

When I was finished telling my tale, Phineas nodded his approval. ‘That’s a good story,’ he said.

‘You’d know,’ I replied.

‘I would,’ he said. ‘Always have.’

His cigar had gone out, so engrossed had he been. He lit it again, taking his time with it.

‘What were you doing up there, Phineas?’

‘Poachin’,’ he replied, once the cigar was going again to his satisfaction. ‘Bear. And maybe mournin’ some.’

‘Abigail Ann Morrison,’ I said.

‘You got a memory almost as good as mine. I suppose you need to, given what you do.’

Now he told the story again, and it was more or less as he had told it before, but the location was changed to deep in the County, and he had a landmark to offer.

‘Through the woods, behind that girl, I thought I saw the ruins of a fort,’ he said. ‘It was all overgrown, more forest than fort, but there’s only one fort up in those woods. Wherever she hides, wherever that plane lies, it’s not far from Wolfe’s Folly.’

It was growing colder, but Phineas did not want to return to his room, not yet. He still had half a cigar left.

‘Your grandfather knew that I was lying about where I saw that girl,’ said Phineas. ‘I didn’t want to tell him that I’d been poachin’, and he didn’t want to be told, and it was none of his business if I was crying for Abigail Ann, but I wanted him to understand that I’d seen the girl. He was the only person I could tell who wouldn’t have laughed me away, or turned his face from me. Even back then, people in the County didn’t care to hear the fort being brought up in conversation. She still comes to me in my sleep, that girl. Once you’ve seen something like that, you don’t forget it.

‘But you were also part of the reason for changing the location. I didn’t want to be putting fool ideas into your head. We don’t talk about that part of the woods, not if we can help it, and we don’t go there. If it hadn’t been for that damned dog, I’d never have gone there.’

I had brought a copy of the Maine Gazetteer, and with Phineas’s help I marked the area in which Wolfe’s Folly lay. It was less than a day’s hike from Falls End.

‘Who do you think she is?’ I said.

‘Not ‘‘who’’,’ said Phineas, ‘but ‘‘what’’. I think she’s a remnant, a residue of anger and pain, all bound up in the form of a child. She might even have been a little girl once: they say there was a child in that fort, the daughter of the commanding officer. Her name was Charity Holcroft. That girl is long gone. Whatever’s left bears the same relation to her as smoke does to fire.’

And I knew that what he said was true, for I had seen anger take the form of a dead child, and heard similar stories from Sanctuary Island at the far edge of Casco Bay, and I thought that something of my own lost daughter still walked in the shadows, although she was not composed entirely of wrath.

‘I used to wonder if she was evil, and I came to the conclusion that she was not,’ said Phineas. ‘She’d have done me harm, but I don’t think she’d have meant it, not really. She may be angry, and dangerous, but she’s lonely too. You might as well call a winter storm evil, or a falling tree. Both will kill you, but they won’t consciously set out to do it. They’re forces of nature, and that thing in the shape of a little girl is kind of a storm of emotion, a little whirlwind of pain. Maybe there’s something so terrible about the death of children, so against the order of things, that this residue, if it sticks around, naturally finds form in a child.’

His cigar was almost done. He stamped it out beneath his foot, then tore apart the butt and scattered the tobacco on the breeze.

‘You can tell I’ve thought on this over the years,’ he said. ‘All I can say for sure is that’s her place, and if you’re going in there then you need to watch out for her. Now take me back to my room, please. I don’t want a chill to get into my bones.’

I wheeled him back to the center, and we said our goodbyes. His roommate was back in his bed, still reading the same newspaper.

‘You brought him back,’ he said. ‘I was hoping you’da drowned him.’

He sniffed the air. ‘Someone’s been smoking,’ he said. He shook his newspaper at Phineas. ‘You smell like Cuba.’

‘You’re an ignorant old man,’ said Phineas. ‘I smell like the Dominican Republic.’

He reached into a pocket of his coat, and waved a fresh Cohiba at his rival. ‘But if you’re good, and you let me nap in peace for an hour or two, maybe I’ll let you wheel me out to the lake before supper, and I’ll tell you a story . . .’





44





Shielded by looming pines, Wolfe’s Folly hid itself from the setting sun; less a fortress than the memory of one constructed by the forest, its lineaments blurred by shrubs and ivy, most of its buildings long collapsed in on themselves and only its log walls still standing intact.

Its proper name was Fort Mordant, after Sir Giles Mordant, an advisor to General Wolfe who had first suggested its construction. It had been intended as a supply depot and a place of refuge, a link in a proposed chain of such small forts stretching from the colonies on the east coast of the British claims to the St Lawrence River by the northwest of the French territories, part of a new front from which to harry Quebec. Unfortunately, the changing fortunes of war had left Fort Mordant unsuited to its purpose, and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 made the fort redundant. By then Wolfe himself was dead, killed at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham with his enemy Montcalm, and Sir Giles had been shipped home with a chest wound from which he never fully recovered, dying at the age of thirty-three.

In 1764, it was decided that the fort was to be abandoned, and its small garrison sent east. By then, the name Wolfe’s Folly had stuck: while the blame for the fort more properly lay with Mordant himself, it was Wolfe’s folly to have listened to him in the first place. It was said by some that Wolfe owed a substantial debt of money to Mordant, and was obliged to support his scheme; others took the view that Mordant was a fool, and Wolfe preferred to have him concentrating on his fort than interfering in more important matters of war. Whatever the reason for its construction, it brought no luck to either man, and had no impact on the outcome of the conflict.

The man entrusted with bringing word of the decision to close the fort and supervising its evacuation was a Lieutenant Buckingham, who traveled northwest in April 1764 accompanied by a platoon of infantrymen. They were still three days’ march from the fort when the first rumors began to reach them. They encountered a Quaker missionary named Benjamin Woolman, a distant relative of James Woolman of New Jersey, a leading figure in the burgeoning abolition movement. Benjamin Woolman had taken it upon himself to preach Christianity to the natives, and he was known to act as a conduit between the tribes and the British forces.

Woolman informed Buckingham that the garrison at Fort Mordant had carried out a punitive expedition against a small Abenaki village a week or so earlier, killing more than twenty natives, including, it was said, women and children. When Buckingham requested information about the reason for the slaughter, Woolman replied that he had no knowledge of why it was carried out. Such a small native group, scarcely more than a single extended family, could have posed little threat to the fort or its inhabitants, and, as far as Woolman was aware, there had been no particular tension between the soldiers and the natives. The Abenaki considered the fort’s construction to be an exercise in foolishness. More importantly, they tended to avoid the area of the forest in which it was located, terming it majigek, which Woolman translated as ‘wicked’. In fact, that was one of the reasons why Mordant had chosen that location for the fort’s construction. One of his sole redeeming qualities was his interest in the traditions of the native population, and he left behind him dozens of notebooks filled with jottings, essays, and sketches on the subject. The French were dependent upon their native guides, and if those guides were reluctant to enter certain areas of the woods, then a fort situated in such a place would enjoy relative immunity from attack. Thus it was that there could be no logical reason why the Abenaki should have been attacked by the British.

Woolman also said that, when he tried to seek further information about what had occurred, he was denied entry to Fort Mordant by its commander, Captain Holcroft, and he was now concerned for the officer’s mental state. He was also worried for the safety of Holcroft’s wife and daughter. Contrary to advice from all sources, Holcroft had insisted that his family join him when he took command of the fort. Woolman had been traveling east in the hope of communicating his worries to the appropriate authorities, and thus he agreed to accompany Lieutenant Buckingham and his men back to Fort Mordant.

They could see the buzzards hovering while they were still some distance away. When they reached the fort they found its gates open, and everyone inside dead. There were no signs of an Indian attack. Rather, it appeared that some dispute had arisen within the garrison, and the soldiers had fallen to fighting among themselves. Their uniforms were no longer regulation attire but had been accessorized with pieces of bone, both human and animal, and their faces were painted to resemble ferocious masks. Most had died from gunshot wounds, the rest at the point of a sword or a knife. Captain Holcroft’s wife was found in their quarters with her heart cut out. Of her husband and her daughter, there was no sign. A subsequent search of the surrounding forest revealed the remains of Captain Holcroft himself, and here, for the first time, there was found some indication of an Abenaki presence: Holcroft had been scalped, and his body mutilated and hanged from a tree.

While Buckingham’s men buried the dead, Buckingham and Woolman went in search of the Abenaki. Buckingham was reluctant to meet them without his men to protect him, for the Abenaki had fought on the side of the French, and the memory of their atrocities was still fresh in the minds of the British. Following the siege and subsequent massacre at Fort William Henry in 1757, the ranger commander Major Robert Rogers had found six hundred mostly British, scalps, decorating the Abenaki village of St Francis, and had destroyed it entirely in revenge. Relations with the Abenaki remained uneasy. Woolman assured Buckingham that, with him as a go-between, and with no demonstration of hostile intent, they would be safe. Buckingham grumbled that Holcroft’s violated remains gave him little comfort, and he considered the murder of the officer, for whatever reason, an act of war by the natives.

After riding for three hours, during which time Buckingham believed they were always under the eyes, and potentially the knives, of the Abenaki, they were met by a heavily armed party of natives, who quickly surrounded the two men. The leader gave his name as Tomah, or Thomas. He wore a cross at his neck, and had been baptized into the Catholic faith by French missionaries, accepting Thomas as his baptismal name. Buckingham was not sure what troubled him more: that he was surrounded by Abenaki, or surrounded by Catholics. Nevertheless, he and Tomah sat down together, and, with Woolman acting as translator, the Abenaki told them of what had transpired at the fort.

Most of what was said did not pass into the official record. Buckingham’s report on what came to be termed ‘the incident at Fort Mordant’ stated only that a dispute of unknown origin arose there, possibly fueled by alcohol, which led to the deaths of the entire garrison, including its commander, Captain Holcroft, and his wife. The role played by the Abenaki in Holcroft’s murder became clear only when Woolman’s private diary was discovered after his death, but Woolman also glossed over much of what was disclosed by Tomah, apparently by mutual agreement with Buckingham. Neverthelesss, the contents of Woolman’s diary went some way toward explaining why Buckingham allowed the killing of a fellow officer by the Abenaki to go both unreported and unpunished. Buckingham was a professional soldier, and he understood that, sometimes, a lie was preferable to a truth that might tarnish the reputation of his beloved army.

Woolman’s diary revealed a few pertinent details. The first was that Holcroft had been discovered by the Abenaki while apparently hunting his own daughter, but despite the Abenaki’s own efforts, and a further search by Buckingham and his men, the girl was never found. Second, the Catholic Abenaki told Woolman they had set out to kill the inhabitants of the fort in reprisal for the earlier slaughter. The small band of warriors who had been willing to overcome their fear of the territory were all Catholic converts, although they were additionally armed with totems of their tribe. They arrived at the fort to find that the soldiers had done the job for them, and had to be content with taking their revenge on Holcroft alone, whom Tomah described by using the same word that Woolman had used when Buckingham first met him: majigek.

Finally, according to Woolman, the Abenaki claimed that, before he died, Holcroft came to his senses, and begged his tormentors for forgiveness for what he had done. Woolman admitted that he had trouble understanding Tomah’s description of Holcroft’s final words, and was forced to clarify them in halting French, to little avail. Holcroft, it seemed, had railed in English, of which Tomah knew little; in French, of which Tomah knew slightly more; and in some mishmash of Passamaquoddy and Abenaki that Holcroft had picked up during his postings in the region, for like Mordant himself he was known to be a scholar of languages, and a civilized man.

As Woolman understood it, Holcroft claimed to have committed the slaughter of the Abenaki on the orders of the tsesuna, the Raven God who pecked at his window. He also termed him the apockoli, the Upsidedown God who spoke to him from behind his shaving mirror, and who sometimes called to him from the depths of the forest, his voice bubbling up from deep beneath the earth. It was this same entity, this demon, who had infected his men with madness, and turned them upon one another.

Holcroft had used another word too in connection with him before the Abenaki set to torturing him: it was ktahkomikey, a word that referred to wasps, particularly a certain species that nested in the ground.

Holcroft had died screaming of the God of Wasps.





45





Outside the Cronin home, I rested The Gazetteer against the steering wheel while I tried to figure out the journey taken by Harlan Vetters and Paul Scollay on the day they found the plane. Marielle Vetters had told me that her father believed he and his friend had tracked the deer for four hours or more, traveling northwest or north-northwest for the most part, as best they could tell. There was a logging road that ran north from Falls End. It was the one Phineas had used on his illegal bear-hunting trip, and it seemed the most likely route for Vetters and Scollay to have taken as well. It veered northeast after ten miles, as though the road had been specifically designed to discourage anyone from venturing farther northwest: where the road altered direction was probably the closest point to Fort Mordant. From there, we’d move into the forest on foot. I had considered the possibility of using ATVs, but they were cumbersome to transport, and also noisy, and we were not the only ones looking for that plane. The sound of four ATVs moving through the woods might well be enough to get us killed.

I was so lost in the map, as though I were already deep in those woods, that the ringing of my phone came as an unwelcome distraction, and I didn’t even glance at the number before I picked it up. It was only when I had pressed the green button that I thought again of the message I had left on Marielle Vetters’ answering machine, and the possibility that the police might have listened to it, but by then it was too late.

Thankfully, it was only Epstein on the other end. He was calling from Toronto. I could hear traffic in the background, and then Epstein’s words were overcome by the roar of a jet.

‘You’ll have to repeat that,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t hear you.’

This time, I heard him clearly.

‘I said, “I know who was the passenger on that plane.”’

Wildon’s widow remembered Epstein. They had met once before, she said, at an event to raise funds for the collection of DNA from Holocaust survivors so that the separated members of families might be reunited, and anonymous remains identified, an initiative that eventually became part of the DNA Shoah Project. It was the first time that Wildon and Epstein had come face to face, although each knew of the other’s work. Eleanor Wildon recalled the two men shaking hands, and that was the last she saw of her husband for the rest of the evening. Epstein, too, remembered that night, but he had forgotten entirely that Wildon’s wife had been present, so pleased was he to meet a kindred spirit.

They were sitting in the drawing room of her apartment, which took up the entire top floor of an expensive condominium in Yorkville. A pair of Andrew Wyeth paintings hung at either side of the marble fireplace: beautiful, tender studies of autumn leaves from his late period. Epstein wondered if, as their lives came to a close, all artists found themselves drawn to images of fall and winter.

Two teacups sat on the table between them. Mrs Wildon had brewed it herself. She lived here alone. She was not a particularly beautiful woman, nor had she ever been. Her features were plain at first glance, her face unremarkable. Had he not been distracted by her husband at their earlier meeting, Epstein would still barely have noted her presence, if he had noted it at all. Even here, in her own home, she seemed to blend into the furniture, the wallpaper, the drapes. The pattern on her dress echoed the textures and colors of the fabrics, rendering a chameleon quality to her. It was only later, when he had already left her, that Epstein understood this was a woman who was hiding herself.

‘He thought very highly of you,’ said Mrs Wildon. ‘He came back that evening more animated than I’d seen him in years. I thought it was all foolishness, his stories about angels, his fascination with the End Times. It wasn’t harmless, because it was too odd for that, but I tolerated it. All men have their eccentricities, don’t they? Women too, I suppose, but men’s are more ingrained: it’s something to do with their boyishness, I think. They hold onto the enthusiasm of childhood.’

She didn’t sound as though she thought this was a good thing.

‘It got worse after he met you, though,’ she said. ‘I think you fueled his fire.’

Epstein drank his tea. The accusation was clear, but he did not look away, or express sorrow. If this woman wanted someone to blame for what had happened to her children, perhaps her husband too, then he would accept that role as long as she told him what she knew.

‘What was he looking for, Mrs Wildon?’

‘Proof,’ she said. ‘Proof of the existence of life beyond this one. Proof that there was an evil beyond human greed and selfishness. Proof that he was right, because he always wanted to be right about everything.’

‘But there was a moral component to his work too, was there not?’

She laughed, and as her laughter faded it left a sneer on her face. Epstein realized that he disliked Eleanor Wildon, and he did not know why. He suspected that she was a shallow woman, and he allowed his eyes to take in his surroundings once more, seeking evidence in the furniture and paintings and ornaments to confirm his opinion. Then he saw the small framed photograph of two young girls on a shelf of Lladró porcelain, and was ashamed of himself.

‘A moral component?’ said Mrs Wildon. The sneer held for a second or two before melting, and when she spoke again she was walking in other rooms, living another life, and her voice came from somewhere far away. ‘Yes, I suppose there was. He was making connections between killings and disappearances. He spoke to retired policemen, hired private investigators, visited grieving relatives. When good people died in unusual circumstances, or vanished and were never seen again, he would try to find out all that he could about them, and about their lives. Most were just what they appeared to be: accidents, domestic situations that tipped over into violence, or just the misfortune of meeting the wrong person at the wrong time and suffering for it. But some . . .’

She stopped, and bit her lip.

‘Go on, Mrs Wildon. Please.’

‘Some he believed were being committed by one man, who moved through the northern states, both in this country and yours. There were police investigators who thought so too, but they could never make the connection, and it was all – what do you call it? – “circumstantial” anyway: a face in the crowd, a half-glimpsed figure on a video screen, nothing more. I saw the pictures. Sometimes there was another with him: a horrible-looking man, bald, with a swelling just here.’

She touched her hand to her throat, and Epstein started.

‘Brightwell,’ he said. ‘That one’s name was Brightwell.’

‘And the other?’ asked Mrs Wildon.

‘I don’t know.’ Wildon had hinted at some of this in cryptic messages to Epstein. He was a man with a love for the gnomic and the hidden.

‘That’s a pity,’ she said, ‘as he was the one who killed my children.’

She said it so matter-of-factly that Epstein was convinced for a second that he had misheard, but he had not. Mrs Wildon took a sip of tea, and went on.

‘What interested my husband was that these men, or people who looked very like them, seemed to turn up, their features no different, in old photographs and reports of crimes from thirty, forty, even fifty years earlier. There might have been a woman too, he thought, but she wasn’t involved as much, or was more careful than the others. He wondered how that could be, and he came up with an answer: they were not men or women but something else, something old and foul. Such nonsense. I’m sure I used that word with him – “nonsense” – but it still frightened me. I wanted him to stop, but he was so single-minded about it, so convinced that there was a truth to it.

‘And then they took my girls, and they buried them alive in a hole in the ground, and I knew that it wasn’t nonsense. There was no warning, no threats against our family if my husband continued to stick his nose into their business. There was only retribution.’

She put her cup down, and pushed the saucer away from her.

‘It was my husband’s fault, Mr Epstein. Those others, whoever or whatever they might be, killed my little girls, but my husband drew them down on us, and I hated him for it. I hate him, and I hate you for the encouragement that you gave him. You all share the blame for leaving my daughters to suffocate in a pit of dirt.’

There was that same, neutral voice. There was no anger to it. She might just as easily have been discussing returning a flawed dress to a store, or a movie that had disappointed.

After that, she and her husband had drifted apart, like wreckage from a sinking ship separated by shifting tides. She shared his desire to find and punish those responsible for the deaths of their children, but she did not want her husband in the same house with her, in the same room or the same bed. He left their home and went to live in one of the apartments that he owned, and he lost interest in his business affairs, and in his wife, and she in him. They were united only by memories, and a kind of hatred.

‘Then, on the night of July 13, 2001, he called me. He said that he had found the man who had killed our little girls, the man from the photographs. He was living in a place outside Sagueney, in a trailer park surrounded by crows.’

‘Did he have a name?’

‘He called himself Mr Malphas.’

An interesting choice, thought Epstein: Malphas, one of the great princes of Hell, a deceiver, an artificer.

The Lord of Crows.

‘My husband told me that they had him. They’d drugged him, and there was proof of what he had done, or was planning to do.’

‘They?’

‘There was a man who occasionally assisted my husband in his work. Douglas something – Douglas Ampell. He was a pilot.’

‘Ah,’ said Epstein. So he had been right about the source of the plane. ‘And what proof did your husband find?’

‘He was babbling. He was in a hurry. They had to get this man, this Malphas, away before his friends discovered what was happening. He said something about names, a list of names. That’s all.’

‘Did he say what he planned to do with Malphas?’

‘No, just that they were taking him to be questioned by someone else, someone who would understand, someone who would believe. That was the last time we spoke, but he warned me that if something happened to him, or if I didn’t hear from him again, I was to stay quiet. There was money in trusts, in hidden accounts, and I could sell the house. His lawyers had all of the details. I wasn’t to look for him, and I was to send all of the evidence he had collected to you, and you alone.’

Epstein was puzzled. ‘But I received nothing from you.

‘That’s because I burned it all, every last scrap of paper,’ she said. ‘It killed my daughters, and it killed my fool of a husband. I wanted no more part of it. I did what he told me to do. I stayed quiet, and I lived.’

Now he was certain. ‘He was on his way to New York,’ said Epstein. ‘He was bringing Malphas to me.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Wildon, this empty woman, this shell of grief, brittle as the Lladró figures that stared down from her shelves. ‘And I didn’t care. My husband didn’t understand. He never understood.’

‘Understood what, Mrs Wildon?’

Mrs Wildon stood. Their meeting was over.

‘That it wouldn’t bring them back,’ she said, ‘that it wouldn’t bring my little girls back to me. You’ll have to excuse me now, but I have a plane to catch. I’d like you to get out of my home.’

Malphas. I found that I had written the name on the open page of the Gazetteer.

‘Malphas was the passenger on the plane,’ said Epstein. ‘Ampell went missing on the same day as Wildon. He owned a Piper Cheyenne aircraft, which that week was based at a small private airfield just north of Chicoutimi. The plane has never been found, and Ampell never filed a flight plan. They didn’t want to draw attention to themselves, or their cargo. They didn’t want anyone to suspect, but Wildon had to tell his wife. He wanted her to know that he’d succeeded in finding this man, except she didn’t care. She blamed her husband for what had happened to their children: Malphas was just the instrument.

‘And Malphas survived the crash, Mr Parker. That’s why there were no bodies in the wreckage. He removed them, or perhaps they survived too, and he killed them and disposed of their remains.’

‘But he left the list, and the money,’ I said ‘The money might not have been important to him, but that list was. If he survived, and was strong enough to kill anyone else who had lived, why did he leave the list where it could be found?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Epstein, ‘but it’s another reason to be careful in those woods.’

‘You don’t believe that he’s still out there?’

‘He had been discovered, Mr Parker. They hide themselves away, these creatures, especially when they’re under threat. Those woods are vast. They can conceal an aircraft, and so they can conceal a man. If he’s alive, where else would he be?’