After that, we went for breakfast. I was exhausted by then, but I had to undertake a full day out, experiencing the wonders of Burnham-on-Sea because we couldn’t go out for the day and be ready to go home by seven in the morning.
“Why didn’t we just smash the lock on the garage and tell them we found it stolen when we got up?” I asked him. After all we didn’t have external CCTV at Langley Hall, just an alarm for the livingquarters to protect all his electrical gadgets. James put up cameras when he first bought the house, but a few years ago the subscription lapsed and he decided not to renew.
“In all the years we’ve been here, no one’s tried to break in,” he’d said. The worst had been the odd teenager on the grounds. “We’ve still got the box up there; that’s enough to scare people off. Double bluff.” James was a fan of the double bluff and in this case, so far, it seemed to be working. Maybe the place just looked too dilapidated to contain anything worth stealing.
We endured a day out until midafternoon, then we went to the spot James had chosen and he phoned the police to report the car as stolen. I managed to cry when we told them about the earrings. They were tears of fury. We got a taxi home and I cried all the way.
We didn’t wait for the Audi to be written off before I drove James to the dealership to buy a new one. James only had insurance because it was less trouble to have it than to deal with the potential legal ramifications of not having it. In fact, he decided not to bother the insurance company at all; he just added another car to the policy.
“We don’t want them looking too closely at the damage, do we?” he said. “Might turn out to be incompatible with a fall from a cliff.”
And in the end, I got my earrings back. They found the car and pulled it out of the water. Someone was good enough to look in the glove compartment and phoned me to say I could go and get them; they weren’t too badly tarnished. So all was well that ended well.
Chapter Eight
Over the following weeks we fell into a new routine, eating together in front of the TV, watching the news. We didn’t usually watch the weather forecast at the end, but that night we both sat, finishing our chicken wings, as they predicted torrential rain within the next twenty-four hours.
“Better put some buckets out on the top floor,” James said, and I raced around, putting down buckets, repositioning buckets, searching Amazon for more buckets, wishing James would just get the roof fixed.
I felt glad that Lennie was in the mausoleum, keeping dry.
That night, the buckets overflowed and the river burst its banks. It swamped all the nearby fields and swept devastation through some of the best gardens in the village, putting the annual flower festival in jeopardy. Elsewhere, the damage was worse and the local news crews entertained themselves for a day, wading through ruined kitchens and marveling at submerged cars.
“Good job we got the mausoleum checked out,” James said. “A flood like that could knock it off its foundations if they weren’t solid.”
Oh, really?
***
The next morning, after James had gone to work, I made my way down to the mausoleum.
Well! The river covered half the graveyard, my trainers were soaked in seconds, and as James surmised, disaster had struck. One wall of the mausoleum had collapsed into the water, the two adjoining it were spread in pieces across the sodden grass, the door lay uselessly on the ground. The fourth wall was mostly standing, but the roof was at a forty-five degree angle, one end pitched into the ground. I looked down and saw a tibia floating in a puddle in front of me. I screamed.
Birds flew up from the nearby trees. I looked around to see who might have noticed, but on a Wednesday morning, in our personal graveyard, it seems no one can hear you scream. A closer look revealed shattered coffins, some halfway out of the mausoleum, and bones scattered everywhere. Some had made their way to the river and no doubt as far as the village and beyond. A jawbone, complete with teeth, was snared in the reeds. I wondered which ancestor it was. An Eleanor, or a Richard, or maybe a rare Hugo?
Our names were going to be mud when the authorities realized we’d unleashed an early Halloween on our neighbors, but that was the least of our worries. I crept up to what had been the door of the mausoleum and peered at what had been the interior, looking for Lennie. I couldn’t see him.
***
I ran up and down the riverbank looking, but there was no sign of Lennie. I paced the graveyard, searching for any trace of him or his clothing. Not a sniff, although I did see a patch of meadowsweet, which is good as a natural sweetener, if only James would let me use it.
I followed the river downstream to the gate and through it. I crossed the road, which crossed the river, and went through the opposite gate into the field there and followed the public footpath along. No sign. At the end of the field, the river turned one way, the path another, and the rest of the riverbank was blocked off by bushes.
I walked farther, through the fields, until I could see the house and the garden of the west farm, with the Newman family out in it. Then I turned round and went home before they saw me.
Half an hour later I went back out and looked again, but still no luck.
All day, I kept going down there, but each time, there was no change. I found a stick and poked the skull in the reeds clear to set it on its way, but it sank and I realized that if I was going to do anything, I should have rescued it to be reburied.
It occurred to me that Lennie’s body could still be nearby but stuck under the water, snagged on a tree root, ready to break free and float back up just as a walking group passed by. It would certainly be one of their more memorable outings.
I stood at the edge of the riverbank and peered hard. Where the water flowed by what had been the mausoleum, it was clear and you could see down to the pebbles on the riverbed, but not much further along it was deeper and murky. Anything could be under there, including Lennie.
There was nothing for it. I went back to the house, took a beanpole from Mr. Billings’s shed, and put on a pair of boots that had beennear the back door since before I arrived. I marched down to the river, checked there was no one around, and stepped into the water. The boots leaked. After a minute my feet were so wet there was hardly any point wearing them. I waded in deeper and water flooded over the top. I wanted to scream with the cold, but I kept my mind on the job and pressed on, poking around with the beanpole as I did so.
I prodded as gently as I could; I wanted to know where he was, but I didn’t want to actually release his corpse from a tangle of reeds and send him on his merry way toward the village. I wasn’t sure which I dreaded more: not finding him, but knowing he was out there, a disaster waiting to happen, or finding him and having to ask for James’s help to hide him again. Still, I carried on along the river, the current pulling at me and the cold freezing me. What else could I do?
“Have you lost something?”
