Chapter Four #2
“No,” I said. He couldn’t be dead. Only a few minutes before, James had told me he might not even need to go to hospital. He’d had his eyes open. He’d tried to speak. I’d only been gone a few minutes. He couldn’t have gone from that to this in such a short time.
I knelt down beside him, searching for signs of life. I couldn’t find anything: no breath, no pulse. His neck was all loose, maybe because it was relaxed now, in death, or maybe he’d damaged the bones or the windpipe.
“Oh, Lennie,” I whispered. I’d killed him. I looked at James. I was close to tears.
“Don’t start,” he said. “We need to sort this out. I’ve got work in the morning.”
“You’re going to work tomorrow?” I was surprised.
“Of course I am. We have to behave as if everything is normal.”
“But what are we going to do? We can’t leave him here. Mrs. Billings is due in the morning. Shall I cancel her?”
“No, don’t cancel her; everything has to be normal. Do you want to go to prison?”
Of course I didn’t, but, “I won’t go to prison if it was an accident,” I said. “He just stepped out in front of us. I didn’t have time to react.”
“How are you going to explain the fact that, instead of calling the emergency services, you put him in the car and drove him home?” James asked.
“That was you.”
“And you.”
James looked around the room as if he was going to tidy him into a cupboard or something. “We’ll have to bury him,” he said.
I shook my head; I didn’t have the strength, physically or psychologically.
James ran his hands through his hair. “Eric Billings digs in the garden, so that’s no good, not unless we want him coming up with the potatoes next year.
We’ll bury him in the copse; no one goes there,” he said.
Then, “Better idea, we’ll put him in the graveyard…
No, we’ll put him in the mausoleum. Of course, the mausoleum! ”
“But it’s for family!”
“Then, welcome to the family, my man,” James said. Then to me: “Go and get changed.”
I thought about telling James I’d changed my mind and that, on reflection, yes, I did want to go to prison, more than I wanted to dispose of Lennie’s body in the middle of the night.
At least then I would sleep again one day.
But I’d done whatever James told me to for years—at least when I was in sight of him—and it was a hard habit to break.
I ate what he told me to, I wore what he told me to, I went where he told me to, and now I buried what he told me to.
I stepped out of my stilettos and went to get changed.
***
We hoofed the body out of the back of the house, through the garden, through the little copse that separated the main house from the burial area, and into the graveyard that contained the mausoleum, tripping over stones and sinking into holes as we went.
James wore a rucksack that contained a number of large keys. He hadn’t been sure which was the right one, not having had cause to unlock the mausoleum before.
The building stood in the far corner, a stone structure with a gabled roof and sculptured angels at the corners.
In the graveyard, around the mausoleum, were the last resting places of more distant family members and the occasional favorite servant.
The river ran alongside it by the edge of the graveyard and off toward Upper Iffley.
On the side walls were the names and dates of all the people interred within. Most of them had been rendered illegible over the years from the weather and the lichen. The only names that could be read clearly were Lord Ashbury’s and the two lords immediately before him.
I imagined James wanting to add Lennie to the list. “Phone an engraver,” he’d bark at me on his way out one morning. “And make sure they spell it right.”
“We should’ve used Mr. Billings’s wheelbarrow,” I said, regaining my breath as we dropped the body at the wooden door framed by decorative Roman-style columns and rested for a moment.
“Now you tell me.” James opened the rucksack and started trying the keys in the lock. It took a few goes, but eventually it opened, the stiff metal sounding loud in the night as it ground against itself.
“What if someone hears us and comes to see what’s going on?” I asked, wincing at the creaking hinges as James heaved the door open.
“Who’s going to hear us?” he said. “We’re miles from anywhere. It’s the middle of the night.”
“But what if they do? It’s a public right-of-way, someone could be passing.” There was a public footpath running through the field. “An insomniac.”
“We’ll lock them in here as well, in that case.” He stepped back from the doorway. He put his hand in his pocket, took his phone out, and used it to shine a light into the cavern. “After you,” he said.
I hovered on the edge, inhaling the fetid odor that came from inside, and took a pace backward.
James stepped past me into the interior and shone his phone around. I thought about taking him up on his own threat and locking him in there…
That would be quite the conundrum when they were found: James in the mausoleum, probably at the door, having died trying to claw his way out, and Lennie, battered and bruised, outside.
But I was too slow; he came back out and started hauling Lennie by the shoulders.
“Help me. Come on.”
For the last time, I picked up Lennie’s ankles, and we moved him in.
We always referred to the building as the mausoleum, the whole village did, but really, it was more of a huge walk-in tomb.
The coffins were all on shelves along the walls, the oldest at the back.
I could hardly see those and I didn’t want to: after centuries they couldn’t be much more than sticks and bones.
Nearest the door was Lord Ashbury and it made me shudder because I’d seen him in the village when he was alive, and I remembered him as a posh and affable old man.
We got Lennie over the threshold and dropped him on the floor, toward the middle, then we hurried back out, locked the door, and made our escape.
Back at the house we saw Lennie’s satchel lying by the chaise longue.
“We should’ve taken that with us,” James said, but we would’ve risked dropping things out of it again, leaving a trail of evidence to follow from the house to the mausoleum. Instead, exhausted, we put it in a cupboard in the drawing room.
I took my makeup off, brushed my teeth, changed into my pajamas, and got into bed on autopilot, the shock setting in and making me numb.
But in bed I lay awake, thinking about the moment of the accident, Lennie’s lifeless face, the trip to the mausoleum.
I thought of us running back from the graveyard, stumbling over the uneven ground, trying not to run into trees in the dark, and I thought about how I wasn’t going to be leaving James the next morning after all.