It was enough for us. More than enough. We spent the summer playing a game in which we searched for the diamonds. The game was a ritual, the ritual a spell. As though from above, with an all-seeing eye, I see the five of us, each of us a finger of a single hand, probing the manor’s nooks and crannies.
I used to try to hear the diamonds. When we played the game, I used to listen for them, very hard, making myself quiet, as though they would speak to me and tell me where they were.
Perhaps a month before the end? An August rain falls from a cloudless sky and dries instantly. I am barefoot by the stables. I have been balancing on a rotting rain barrel searching the guttering. My hands are green with slime. David is walking toward me. He has been wading in the fountain. Wet footprints trail behind him. His T-shirt and shorts are soaked through. He is wearing an expression of mild surprise. It is an emptying thing to play the game. The hours slip by. The past and future retreat to dark corners far away. Something inside, in the heart, is being worked upon. There is an unlocking feeling, an unlocking feeling in the chest.
So David wears a surprised smile, a dazed look. His expression is reflected on my face. Our smiles touch first. I turn and go back toward the stables, toward the open door to the room full of birds’ nests, spiderwebs, and old bits of tack. David follows me. His footprints shrink and disappear.
In the stables it’s cooler. I have pretended for a long time that I am not frightened of anything, that there is nothing left that can frighten me. I have removed myself to a safe place, so it is so. My self comes back to my body, unsteady, circling. David shivers and I shiver.
I put out my hand and put it over his heart. After a moment, he does the same. The pads of his fingers pressing gently against my chest through the cotton of my shirt.
This is the other game, and I do not know how to separate them.
CHAPTER 9
ENCHANTED PALACE I
Fridays and Saturdays, I worked for Darren in the office, matching purchase orders with invoices and delivery notes, then stapling them together. I slid the drawers out of the big metal filing cabinets and rifled through pink carbon copies for serial numbers matching the ones on a list Jules had given me. When that was done, I fired up the computer and played about with the payroll program with the manual open on my lap until Marcus came to pick me up.
Em finished at the tearooms at three. She came out in her black and whites with the little cap still on and got changed in the back of the van as we took the road out to the manor.
“Tips any good?”
“Busload of Americans!” She was unpinning her cap, her hair—mouse brown and poker straight—falling over her face.
“Did you get us anything?”
“Might have a few scones about my person, my love.” She smoothed down her hair and began unbuttoning the white frilly blouse they made her wear. Marcus kept his eyes glued to the road. In stillness, she could sometimes take on the look of a lady from an old painting, keen-eyed and white-throated, with a smile that guarded secrets. But Em was not often still, and when she spoke it was broad Wiltshire. The tights and skirt came off. The maid disappeared. She had on a cream satin padded bra we’d nicked from Dorothy Perkins and a pair of yellow Snoopy underpants, then a T-shirt and shorts.
“Where’s Peter?”
“At a wedding I’m guessing.” Peter picked up tidy sums playing the “Wedding March” and “Jerusalem” for couples getting hitched. “Least no one was answering when I called.”
But I was wrong, because when we got to the manor, Peter was already there, quite at home, sitting on a blanket I recognized from the vicarage conservatory, David beside him in the sunshine.
* * *
He told the others what he had told me. The school trip to Italy at Easter, the theft of the coat and cards. Same details, same confidential tone. I tried to look like it was news.
“How did you get back into England?” Em asked. “Didn’t they have your name on a list at the airports?”
“I hitched lifts with lorry drivers. I came across on a ferry from Calais to Dover with Bob from Barnes and a load of Parma ham. At customs, they barely even looked at my passport.”
“This teacher, what’s he like?” Peter was scratching his shin where an ant had bitten him. My eyes wandered to his bike. It was on the grass, back wheel spinning slowly in the breeze.
“Badger? All right, I suppose.” David swallowed. “A bit funny maybe, even for a teacher, but easy enough if you stayed on his good side.” David had been at boarding school on a scholarship, but because of the business in Italy, he’d missed his exams.
“You could get a caution,” Marcus said. Sentencing was a matter of interest among his friends. What you got for doing what.
“Don’t know if they have cautions in Italy.”
“Or maybe you can get the charges dropped, get him to say he’d given you the card, or it was all a mistake.”
David looked a bit queasy at that.
“Not impossible,” he said. “But I think everyone should cool off a bit first. Then I was thinking I might write him a letter.” He was still looking for the right move, or perhaps for the problem to just go away. David didn’t believe rules applied to him. “Maybe,” he said, glancing at Peter, “you can help.”
“Won’t your parents be going mad with worry?” Em asked.
“I sent them a postcard.” Later, he would describe them as “Nice people, you know. Nice, very law-abiding.” He gave a suffocated laugh. “Dad’s desperate for me to get an apprenticeship. Mum writes down everything she spends and eats in a little book. On Sunday mornings they test the smoke alarm.”
David got up and we followed him into the house. The kitchen was cold enough to bring out goose bumps. There was a table, chairs, and a deep enamel trough. He’d found the mains and turned the water back on.
While the tap ran, we got some cups together. David handed me water in a tea-stained mug and our fingers touched.
We went out again, this time into the courtyard, and from there into the rose garden. David’s head was inclined attentively to Peter who was talking about a book he was going to lend him. Marcus slipped his arm around my shoulders. Em skipped ahead. We had come to stand in front of the stone bench where, all those years ago, mysterious Mr. Mortimer had been found dead. I cleared my throat.
“So, Mrs. East says…”
* * *
In the beginning, it gave us a reason to look around as much as we liked. We talked about hiding places, the places where, had we been Mortimer, we would have chosen to secrete the necklace. We had to remember it was freezing, and the middle of the night, and that we had a heart condition, that we were panicking!
The diamonds were not under the old terra-cotta flowerpots.
Nor did we find them in the shallows of the lake, the wet mud squidging between our toes.
Not among the spiders in the cellar or with their cousins in the attics.
Or among the rotting tack in the stables.
Or in the greenhouses, as we tiptoed among the broken glass and the empty snail shells that littered the floor like spent bullet casings.
Still, I felt a singing feeling in my blood, as though Mary Ashton’s discovery of her loss, the following uproar in the manor, the arrival of the police, were not events long past, but just about to happen.