Jess
Saturday, half past one in the morning, and there's a police car parked across the causeway with its blue light going round.
I can see it from the milestone, grey in my headlights, knee high, Wisbech eleven, with the turf I put back on Monday gone flat and dark over the top of it. That end's dry. It's the far end that's under, past my bottle. The road goes down off the bank in front of me and out across the fen, and halfway over it stops being a road, and the blue light goes round on the water, and the water goes round with it.
I pull up at the barrier. A policeman gets out of the car in a big coat and comes over and bends to Mo's window with his torch. I wind it down. It goes down in jerks.
"Evening," he says. "Morning. Where are you off to?"
"Peterborough."
"Not tonight, love. It's over at the far end. Two foot and running. Nobody's going anywhere tonight."
"I've got a shift."
"Have you." He puts his torch on my face. My face is the size of a football and one eye's a slit. He takes the torch off it. "Not tonight," he says again, gentler. "Have you got somewhere?"
I've got a house with a cat in it and a church with a sack in it.
"Yes," I say.
"Go there, then."
I turn round. It takes three goes. Mo's car is a biscuit tin with a gearbox like a kitchen drawer, and the policeman watches me do all three with his hands in his pockets and doesn't help.
I drive back toward the town. I don't know where I'm going. The A forty-seven's an hour away on the other side of that water, and there's a cheque in my sock for ten thousand pounds that I can't pay in till Monday. I count it. Ten thousand. Fourteen thousand two hundred. A taxi in pieces in a tin shed. A bailiff in twelve days. Eleven, now, it's gone midnight. And tonight's the thirteenth night. Not my problem.
The high street's got water at both ends and none in the middle, and in the middle the Lamb's got its lights on.
There's a board on the pavement outside, chalked. Open All Night. Eel Row Welcome. Tea Free, Everything Else Normal Price. I park Mo's car on the kerb outside where Gavin's Range Rover used to be and I go in, because it's got lights on, and because it isn't the church.
It's warm. It smells of beer and wet dog. There's nobody at the tables. There's a dog asleep in front of the fire, which is out. And on the bar, lying on his back along the whole length of it, with his feet on the till and a tea towel over his face, is the landlord. He's snoring. It's a big, slow snore, in and out, like a door in a draught.
In the window seat, with half a pint of something pale in front of him and another empty one beside it, there's the vicar.
He looks up when the door goes. He puts both hands round his glass.
"Oh," he says. "Oh, no. Miss Crowle. Oh, I'm so sorry."
I go to the bar. There's a tap with Coke on it. I pull myself one, into a half-pint glass, and put one pound eighty on the bar by the landlord's elbow, because that's what it says on the board, and he snores at it.
Then I go and sit in the window seat opposite the vicar, because it's the only seat with a cushion.
It's the same seat. It's the table Gavin had on the Saturday, with his plans and his four pints. It looks straight up Low Drove. In the day you can see the whole mile, the dyke on each side, down to the dot at the end. At night there's nothing. A long black line where the drove is, with a lighter black either side of it where the water is. At the end of it, where the cottage is, and Mo's, there's no light at all.
"You gave them the sack," I say.
"Yes." He holds his shandy like it's medicine. "And then I couldn't look. I stood at my own altar rail with my back to it, like Pilate. Worse than Pilate. Pilate washed."
The landlord snores.
"How many have you had?"
"This is my second. Half. Shandy. I'm usually on lemonade."
"Usually."
"I sit here every night," says the vicar, to the glass. "Half nine, after evening prayer. Lemonade. This seat. Up the drove. Four years. Sundays too. Especially Sundays."
"That Sunday."
"I'd been at her gate." He's crunching. I didn't see him get the sweet out. "Every week since Christmas, to have it out with her about him, and every week she told me where to go. About half past nine she put her head out of the upstairs window and called me a wet curate and threw a slipper. The left one. It hit my bicycle. She was alive, Miss Crowle. Nobody's ever been so alive at me."
"Where was the cat?"
"On the sill. Inside the kitchen window. Awake, I'd swear to that."
"And the wall?"
"Mo's saucer, the one with the chip, with one of her tomato sardines on it. Not touched. He never touches those till he has to."
"Then what?"
"Then I came in here at twenty-five to ten and sulked at that drove for two hours, like a boy. I watched it as if it owed me money."
"What did you see?"
He looks at the window, at the black line going away. He shuts his eyes.
"The chip van stopped at the bend for someone. Doctor Pedley on her bicycle going toward the lock, before ten, in a tearing hurry. Ned's torch going along the dyke on his round. And Mo." He opens his eyes. "About half ten. Her porch light, and a torch going about under it, at her gate."
I look up the drove. A porch light, at a mile. You'd see it.
"She told the coroner's officer she was in all evening."
"Did she?" He blinks at me. "Well. A gate's not really out. Is it?"
"And after?"
"He threw me out at half eleven. He always does. I sat down in his porch to do my clips up and went to sleep, and I didn't know she was dead till dinner time on the Monday."
"You never said."
"Nobody asked me. The officer only spoke to Mo. The undertaker only asked about hymns." He puts his face in his hands. "A vicar in a pub. Every night. Asleep in a porch. Your aunt would have laughed herself sick."
The dog in front of the fire gets up, turns round once, lies down again with its back to us.
"The book," I say.
He takes his hands off his face.
"I wanted the names. I'll not lie to anyone any more, I've decided, about six minutes ago. I'd have stood on that bank with my bell and said every one and sent him home, and slept." He looks at me straight, which he's never done. His eyes are wet. "I didn't take it. I was in the church hall with the flood rota and thirty people asking me why they were on sandbags twice. I'd have liked to, very much. I didn't."
The tea towel comes off the landlord's face. He's up on one elbow on the bar with his feet still on the till. He's got a face like a pudding basin and a voice like gravel in a bucket.
"Every night God sends, him," says the landlord. "Sundays an' all. That Sunday I chucked him out half eleven and he went to sleep in my porch like a dosser and I had to carry him in. Had the dog on him till seven." He lies back down and puts the tea towel back over his face. "And it's not shandy," he says, under it. "It's lemonade with a dash. I'm not daft."
The vicar looks at his glass.
"Oh," he says.
The landlord snores.
I drink my Coke. It's flat. I look up the drove. A mile, straight, with the dyke on each side, and at the end of it nothing, and next to nothing, more nothing.
"Have you got anybody?" says the vicar, after a while. Quietly. "To go to? In Peterborough? Family?"
I don't know why I tell him. It's two in the morning and my face hurts and he's told me his.
"My mum left here at seventeen. She was having me. She called it a bath with the plug in and she never came back. She died last autumn, in a home in Peterborough I couldn't pay for."
That's all of it. It doesn't take long.
The vicar doesn't say anything. Then he says, "I'm so sorry," and for once it doesn't sound like a cough. Then he says, "Ruth. Whither thou goest. Except she didn't, did she. She came back. Sorry. That's the wrong way round. I always get the Old Testament the wrong way round." He crunches.
"It's fine."
"It's not," says the vicar. "But thank you."
I sit there till the clock over the bar says ten to four. The vicar goes to sleep with his head on the window and his glass in his hand. The landlord snores. The dog snores. Three of them, in turns, like engines. I take the glass out of the vicar's hand and put it on the table, and I go out to Mo's car.
I sit in it with the engine off and the keys on their string round my wrist.
I don't do why. I do where people were.
Half past nine, Agatha's alive at her window, shouting, and Mo's tomato sardine's on the wall, not touched, and the cat's on the sill, awake. Half past ten, a torch at Mo's gate, and that'll be Mo calling him in, and he's not come, or she'd not still be calling. Some time between, the cat eats a sardine on the wall, in oil, perfect, and sleeps so hard he doesn't wake when a woman stands on him.
In oil. Not tomato. Mo only does tomato. Eleven years of tomato. Somebody changed the fish, and they did it before ten, near enough, or he'd have come for Mo. Not Gavin. At four minutes past ten he was on the Lincoln Road, singing both parts.
I put my hands on the wheel.
Mo. At her gate at half ten, when she told the officer she was in. Her drops, going down like the Lord's drinking them. I hope you go down those steps. The tin off the table with Agatha at the bottom of the garden. And I bent down to Mo's window and told her, quiet, Agatha's book's in the glovebox.
Doctor Pedley. On the drove before ten in a tearing hurry, and at the lock at ten past, and not before, Shannon said so. The same brown bottle as Mo's in that black bag, for the almshouse round, Mo said. They die of steps, Pedley told me, the first day, like she was telling me the time.
It doesn't fit either of them. Mo's cried on that cat every day for twelve days. Pedley's only ever told me to stand still. I don't do faces. I know where they were, and they were both on that drove.
I turn the key. Mo's engine coughs twice and catches.
I turn the car round in the middle of the high street, one go, and drive it down to the bend, and turn in at Low Drove, Unsuitable For Motors, and go down it at ten miles an hour with the dyke right up to the ruts on both sides, toward the two dark houses at the end.
The lock's out on the fen, and Mo's next door. First I'm going to ask him exactly what he ate. Then I'm going to Mo's, because she's nearest.