Chapter 30
‘Are you sure you want to go through with this, darling?’
‘There’s no other way to convince you. You’re not going to believe me unless I show you.’ Lisa tried to sound reasonable, practical. Inside herself she felt a fear, a terror even. Alec had sprinkled Multiplier around the fruit trees. A ghostly shroud formed in her mind, then split in two, two into four, then... Wraiths dancing in dark branches, she told herself. Flashes of torchlight flittering reason away. She bit her lip, drew blood.
‘Sort of ghoulish, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know what you’re worried about.’ Lisa forced herself into a matter-of-fact response. ‘You think I’m off my head, that there’s no toddler’s body there. It’s all a figment of my fevered fertile imagination; a chimera. No need to worry then, is there?’ she finished up triumphantly.
‘Just as you like, Lisa. Between the apricot and the nectarine, you said?’
‘Right. You planted them in early spring last year, if you remember.’
‘Of course I remember. Saunders dug the ground really well; said Moorpark and Lord Napier would be the ideal cultivars for this area. What makes you think Don chose the ground between those two trees? Because prunus species grow so fast?’
‘Nothing to do with the trees. I expect he noticed the ground had been dug recently. He probably thought it wouldn’t show up new disturbance. And that border is the farthest from the house.’
Alec was striding down towards the stone wall facing south, with the rhyne on the west separating Mark Ditcheat’s field from their property. It was already getting dark. They carried a Tilley lantern.
‘And he probably thought no one would be digging this bed again for years,’ she added. ‘It must have seemed the perfect place.’
‘Here?’ Alec turned to her. ‘You’re quite sure? I don’t want to disturb the soil for nothing.’
‘There!’ Lisa insisted. ‘The last two trees before the rhyne. It’s not hard to work out the right place. It was the nectarine leader which was damaged.’
‘Leader?’ Alec said, emphasising the word sarcastically. ‘Leaders, you mean! I suppose I should have guessed it couldn’t just be the dog. Peregrine was also damaged.’
‘Don never went near the peach, I’m sure. That wretched Duffers must have done the rest, just as I said.’
Alec began to clear the topsoil. ‘I hope that’s right. I hardly want to dig up the whole row!’
What state would the body be in? Would there be a whole skeleton, the skull’s sockets accusing her? Had the little boy, his life so short, rested in peace? She choked back feelings.
‘I know where he buried it - him,’ Lisa insisted. ‘I’m not likely to forget.’ She shuddered as she remembered what she’d gone through that day: her horror at hearing Don’s voice, the realisation that he was digging a grave in their garden. And now retrieving the body was just as important. Without it Alec wouldn’t believe her. She would once more have to manage on her own, considered seriously deranged, conveniently set aside as unable to distinguish between fact and fiction. Until the time that Janus cloned again. Next time it might not be possible to protect Janus, and her family, from disaster.
‘Mark Ditcheat was in his field, counting his cattle. Don was right by the end of the wall, otherwise Mark probably wouldn’t have noticed him.’
Alec began to dig. Slowly, methodically, he spaded up the compacted soil and placed it on the path. It took energy and time to lift off the top spit.
‘According to you this is where we should find the first clues,’ he said, wiping his forehead, looking from Lisa to the clumps of earth. ‘If you’ve got it right I should come across something any minute.’
They stood in silence, green boots trampling in soil, looking at one another across the moths flickering around the lantern light. Bats swooped up insects. “Bats be demons”, Lisa remembered Meg telling her. “Them spirit away souls of folk dying at night. Them’s not about during daytime.”
‘Positive you want me to go on with this?’ Alec said softly.
‘Want?’ Lisa suddenly sat down on the grass beside the path. She felt enervated, unable to support herself. ‘Of course I don’t want you to do it. But it’s the only way you’re going to be satisfied.’
Alec changed spade for fork and placed it into the second spit of the shallow trench he’d been digging. ‘Right, then. Here goes.’ He hoisted earth again; searching, careful, one slow forkful after another, soil spreading black on to the path. Stained earth. ‘Was he wrapped in anything?’
‘Two pillowcases were missing.’
‘Rotted by now, I suppose.’
‘I would have thought there’d be large bits and pieces,’ Lisa said tremulously. ‘Is that a bit of something?’ Lisa could see a dim reflection among the dark earth.
Alec stooped down. A glint of white; hard and brittle. A piece of broken china. Squeaks of metal against metal as Alec hit a small tin. A ring of silvered paper caught on a tine, then reflected gold in the lantern light. Lisa was momentarily reminded of the earrings; had she put…? She bent down to pick it up. Just foiled paper which undid itself into a strip.
‘Saunders said there was any amount of junk when he was digging here. A previous owner must have used it as a dump.’ Alec hesitated his fork into dense soil again. Clod after clod of rich loam methodically enlarged the growing mound already on the path. There was no sign of anything but earth, interspersed with a few pieces of broken crockery and glass, some bottle tops.
‘There’s nothing, Lisa.’
‘There has to be,’ she whispered. ‘Don buried him here.’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘Perhaps we need more light.’
He held the lantern up and shone the bright torch round and over everywhere. No sign of cloth or body, no sign of bones.
‘You’re not going deep enough.’ Lisa grabbed the fork from Alec’s hand and began to dig. In her eagerness her strength increased. Careless of her ungloved hands, she levered the fork in deep and wide.
‘There’s nothing except good black loam, Lisa.’
She straightened up at last. The bed between the fruit trees had been dug out at least two and a half spits, three in some places. Don would have buried the infant well down, but not lower than that.
‘We’ll have to try the space between the next two trees,’ Lisa insisted eagerly. ‘Moorpark and Peregrine. Perhaps you’re right. It was quite dark, and I must have got it wrong.’
‘All I remember is that Moorpark was bashed about more than either of the other two. So it could have been on the other side of that,’ Alec said, starting to spade again. ‘This soil’s much harder going than the other site,’ Alec announced after the first spit, sour and tired. ‘It’s not even going to do the trees any good.’ He spaded great hulks of grey clay which covered the path.
Clay, Lisa remembered now - clay! The lower spit Don had dug had been clay. Grey solid clay which he’d heaved in chunks into the rhyne to disintegrate. So she’d been right. The first site had to be the place where Don had buried the clone, because there was no clay there. Had the little body already turned to earth? Even his bones? His skull? Could he really have disintegrated so quickly?
‘You might as well stop digging, Alec. I know it was between the last two trees in the row, the apricot and the nectarine. I know because the subsoil is heavy clay. Don dug great clods to make room for the body. He threw them in the rhyne to hide them. I saw them there. I noticed because of one he’d overlooked.’
Alec straightened, resting on his fork. ‘There was nothing there, Lisa. We dug the whole distance between the trees. Absolutely nothing! No sign, no vestige, of a body, or even of material. It couldn’t possibly decompose completely in such a short time.’
‘Don must have put the lime on it. You must remember that. You couldn’t work out what had happened to the lime.’
He smiled; a small wan smile. ‘I do remember that,’ he agreed with her. ‘But it’s hardly proof of a child’s body. Now is it?’
He got to work to fill the second hole, neatly cleaned the path and raked it level. ‘There’s something I should mention,’ he said. ‘Not very pleasant, but it is a point.’
‘You’ve found something?’
‘I don’t like talking about it in this way. We’re here to unearth the body of a human being - a child. It sounds so brutal.’
‘What, Alec? What are you talking about?’
‘Well, if there’d really been a body...’
‘Yes?’
‘It would have decayed.’
‘So?’ she almost shrieked at him. ‘So what?’
‘The soil would have sunk down.’
Lisa thought for a moment. There was something in what he said. ‘I expect Don wedged some of the clay around it.’
‘Think so?’ He looked at her, obviously startled. ‘Even so; the soil above it would have settled. There’d be a dip.’ His voice was low and sombre. ‘I’ll bring a load of scalpings down,’ he told his wife. ‘Tidy all this up.’
Multiplier; Alec had used it liberally. Perhaps, Lisa thought despondently, exhausted, unable to fight any more, instead of reproducing the body, the wretched stuff had reproduced the animals - the worms - which hastened its rotting. That’s why there was nothing there, that’s why the earth was such rich loam. What other explanation could there be