Read an Excerpt
PROLOGUE
King’s Cove, June 28, 1946
The barn was a quiet solace to the old man’s agitation. The envelope from His Majesty’s Government lay where he had thrown it that morning on the bare kitchen table, but his mind still felt partially colonized by his dark fears. As he cranked the engine, he became aware of another sound. He stopped and listened. A motorcar had pulled up along the front of his fence. Some bloody idiot asking the way, he thought. They weren’t going to get it from him. He stayed in the shadow of the overhang and watched the road. Whoever it was would give up.
A young man emerged from the motorcar, and stood looking from the house to a piece of paper. He removed his hat to fan himself for a moment. He climbed the steps of the house and knocked on the door, waited, and then called out, “Hello? Is there anyone here?”
An Englishman! The old man went from irritation to misgiving to stomach-turning panic in one swift moment.
He took a step toward the barn door to go out and confront the man and then changed his mind. If he didn’t show himself this person might leave. He waited while the Englishman called out again, and then muttered “Bugger” under his breath. The old man could hear the other man’s progress down the steps and waited to hear the motor door open, but instead heard footsteps come around the house and toward the barn. He looked desperately behind him into the murky darkness of the barn. Not knowing why, he clutched the starter crank in his hand and felt frozen to the spot.
The young man reached the barn and peered in to the dusky interior where he suddenly caught sight of the figure cowering in the shadow and jumped back in alarm. “Oh, gosh, you startled me. Hello. My name is Jack Franks. With whom am I speaking?”
“None of your business,” said the old man, scowling.
Misunderstanding him, the young man reached into his jacket and pulled out a billfold from which he extracted a white identity card. “It’s quite all right. I’m legitimate. Here, I work for the British government.”
Something inside the old man froze. So. They had come.
CHAPTER ONE
Lanette Winslow sat on a large wooden box that had miraculously arrived the same day she had and listened to the silence. Old Kenny Armstrong, whose mother’s house this had once been, had disappeared along the path to the post office, leaving her with her keys and a plate of cold chicken that his wife, Eleanor, had sent over. Sitting in the shaft of afternoon sunlight that had broken through after rain earlier in the morning, she was grateful not to have to cook tonight.
In the kitchen, true to Kenny’s word, all of his late mother’s culinary equipment was neatly stored on shelves. Slightly daunted, Lane surveyed the many implements of cookery and wondered what she’d use, after all. After a lifetime of being cooked for, she’d become used to cooking everything in one pan on a single electric element in the shared flat in London. The mysteries of food preparation on any but a wartime, flatmate scale were an opaque mystery to her.
In anticipation of her arrival, Kenny had lit the fire in the Franklin stove in the drawing room at noon, to take down any dampness, and she had only to add to it to keep it going. A neat, fresh pile of chopped wood sat in the basket next to the stove. Looking at the growing swath of sunlight, she thought she would not need to keep it going. She got up and found the kettle, the one implement with which she felt expertise, filled it, and plunked it onto the stovetop. An electric stove in this nearly wilderness setting seemed the ultimate luxury. She wondered if the late Lady Armstrong had insisted on it, or if Kenny had put it in against a future sale of the house. It was very nearly new. She had brought some bags of groceries from Nelson and she stowed them in the fridge, another unanticipated luxury, and then tested the kitchen light several times for fun, because it was hers and she’d never owned one before, attached to a whole house as this one was. After looking inquiringly at the kettle to see if she could hear it heating up, she took a delicious amble through the rooms. She ran her hand along the walls and around the door jambs as she went from room to room.
It was hers. Every board and window and foot of it. She paused in the bedroom and wondered about the north-facing windows. Had she heard somewhere that this was not lucky? Perhaps it was more that she had heard that in some cultures an east-facing room was important.
Her tour took her upstairs next, to the second floor. The fourth stair creaked and she smiled, stepping backwards to hear it again. It was the voice of her house. There was no door at the top of the stairs into what Kenny had referred to as the attic. It was all one large room, occupying the full second floor, with banks of windows on all four sides. It had been equipped with sliding cupboards under the windows, in which, no doubt, boxes of Lady Armstrong’s accoutrements, accumulated over her lifetime in two countries, were now stored. She had told Kenny not to move anything on her account; she was quite happy to store anything of his mother’s. She wondered about moving some of the cookery items in the kitchen up into storage, but then chided herself. She must learn to use them. That was the meaning of a full life in the New World, where there were neither servants nor war to limit one’s experience of it. Light bucketed into the room, making it a canvas of warmth and shadows. She was surprised to find the west-facing windows, which looked out over the lake below her, were standing open. Perhaps Kenny had opened them to air the house out, though it was a peculiar thing to do when rain must have been pelting down in the morning, if the mud in the driveway was any indication.
She closed and latched the windows, looking at the damp on the floor and judging that it would dry all right in time, without damaging anything, and went downstairs to have tea and begin to think about her crate from England. Tomorrow she would explore her outbuilding, a large, weathered but well-constructed barn that was positioned to the left of the driveway that led from the road to the house. The nascent archaeologist in her thrilled to the prospect. Her childhood home had been a rambling of no-longer-used outbuildings and attics, where she had explored with a gnawing feeling of excited dread that these places would all be forbidden to her if her aunts but knew where she went. Perhaps her barn, where she had glimpsed the shapes of things, tools she supposed, hanging in the small dusty windows, would yield that same sense of the now-silent stories of lives lived in an unknowable past, where all the world had smelled of rust and the acrid tang of decaying chemicals and oil. But that was for tomorrow.
Kenny Armstrong kicked the mud off his boots, took them off, and then stood thoughtfully in the doorway.
“Well, that is a lovely girl!” he declared enthusiastically. “And there’s no accounting for tastes, because she took the keys right out of my hands. I thought we’d never sell the thing and we would have to turn it under and plant apples over it to get rid of Mother.” He moved in and fell into his chair by the stove and began pulling off his thick wool socks.
Eleanor, his wife of nearly thirty-four years, smiled and pulled open the stove to push in another stick of wood. “Maybe she’ll stop haunting the place now that there’s someone in the house. It’ll be jolly good having someone else young around here.” Aside from the Yanks, who didn’t count, the place was turning into a community for superannuated and shell-shocked vets from two world wars, and their mad wives and mothers. “She’ll get to meet them all at the vicar’s tea. Poor girl! I do hope the Mather boy isn’t going to be bothering her. Who knows what she’s been through in the old country. I’m sure she’d just like some peace and quiet.”
Lane would have been surprised by Kenny and Eleanor’s enthusiasm for her looks. She was not vain, having had very little time to develop vanity because of the pressures of her work, which began smartly in 1939 when the war started and she was only nineteen. She was slender but strongly shaped with bigger feet than those of her friends and because she couldn’t be bothered redirecting her eyebrows higher up on her brow ridge as many of the girls had done, she was sure she looked a bit like a gorilla. She had been surprised when Angus had run his thumbs gently along the length of her brows that day so long ago and said, “Lovely, lovely!” She had never felt worthy of Angus, truthfully, and he was the furthest thing from her mind now, as was everything from her life in the last seven years, pushed determinedly away by the green presence of this new land.
That was the best thing about relocating an ocean and a continent away. Her whole dark past would recede into the mist, like the skyline of Liverpool, from where she’d embarked. She was here now. She had met no one yet but Kenny and Eleanor, who had been left this house by Kenny’s mother but who preferred to stay in their cottage on the other side of the creek. The cottage had been designed before the turn of the century to house the post office for the sparsely populated and far-flung community and it suited their modest view of what was necessary for happiness. It was tiny and comfortable for the two of them and had a big west-facing porch overlooking the garden.
Lane was sure that no matter who lived in King’s Cove, she would be happy because she had her house, and it would be possible to begin shaping her life away from the past and into the future, away from the shadows and into the light.
—From A Killer in King’s Cove
