Chapter Text
"She died on a Tuesday," Maurice said. "My mum heard it from Mrs. Albright. A Tuesday, and nobody noticed for three days."
Roger made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Fitting."
"What is?"
"A witch dying on a Tuesday. Middle of the week. She couldn't even manage a proper death."
They were walking down Allerton Road with their hands in their pockets and nowhere particular to be, their school shoes still shined from morning inspection though the pavement had made its usual work of them. The afternoon had settled into that particular grey of late October — not raining yet, but intending to — and the coal smell was everywhere, in their collars, between the tobacconist's and the butcher's, clinging to the wool of their jackets in a way that no amount of airing seemed to fix. A woman crossed ahead with a pram and didn't look up. The bell above the chemist's rang for someone who had already left.
Jack walked slightly ahead, and said nothing.
He was often ahead, and he was often quiet, and both of these things tended to arrange themselves without any apparent effort on his part. His father used to say: empty vessels make the most noise.
"They say Father Brown came out," Maurice went on. "Him and Reidmacher. Went to the house Friday morning. Mrs. Albright said the smell—"
"Maurice." Jack interrupted without bothering to turn around.
"What?"
"Shut up about the smell."
Maurice shut up about the smell.
Jack turned the collar of his school jacket up against the damp. They passed the newsagent's and the narrow alley beside it where someone had written something on the bricks that a prefect would have made you scrub off with your own toothbrush. The sky ahead was the colour of old dishwater, and the street was doing what streets did at this hour on a Sunday — thinning out, growing quiet, giving itself over to stray cats and boys with nowhere better to be.
They did, technically, have somewhere better to be. They had been let out at half two and told to be back by six, and the town had spread itself before them with the usual meagre generosity — the cinema, the chippy, the record shop that let you listen to things you wouldn't buy. This was what passed for freedom on a Sunday.
The women at the market had been talking about it yesterday, Roger continued — he had a way of delivering gossip that made it sound like confirmation of something he'd already decided. Said the Cambourne woman used to hang about the churchyard. The mothers would watch her jewellery when she passed, trying to see if it smelled of grave dirt, or if anything about her smelled of it. Said she used to pull over on the bypass with that enormous leather bag of hers and collect whatever the cars had left on the road. Rabbits, mostly. Foxes. Whatever was there.
"The lads said she used to send the boy out at night," Maurice whispered. "To the cemetery. God knows what he was doing."
God knows.
Jack had seen the Cambourne boy perhaps three or four times in town over the past year. He would not have said he thought about it. Except that once, at the bus stop — late afternoon, the boy standing separately from the two women also waiting, reading something, or holding a book open and not reading.
And then he had looked up, and across the road their eyes had met for a second, and Cambourne hadn't looked away first, which was the thing that had stayed with Jack afterwards, irritating and without a clear reason.
Most people, when they caught Jack looking at them, did something with their face — arranged it into a smile, or looked away quickly, or suddenly found something urgent to study on the pavement. It wasn't arrogance to notice this. It was simply accurate. It was a system that worked.
Cambourne had not consulted the system.
Jack had thought about it for perhaps a day and then stopped thinking about it, which was, he felt, the right approach.
The houses were thinning. Allerton Road became Allerton Lane and the lane was narrower, older. Stone walls with gaps. Hedgerows. Then not much at all, and to the left, somewhere behind the bare trees, the slaughterhouse — you couldn't see it yet but the air changed, underneath the coal and the damp, there was a smell of rot.
Every boy in school knew this end of town.
The priests, when the subject came up, were divided. Some of them rolled their eyes — that's enough, don't repeat gossip — and some of them went very still and said quietly that the boys should keep away from that end of town. Brother Harrington had once caught two fourth-formers drawing pictures of her house on their exercise books and made them copy out the forty-second psalm three times in their best hand. Not as a punishment, he'd said. As a reminder.
Jack had been twelve when he'd first heard the name Cambourne, and it had meant nothing to him then beyond a story. He was sixteen now, and it still meant nothing beyond a story. He believed in things he could see. He believed in the order of a choir, the specific weight of his father's silence, the way a room changed when you walked into it correctly. Abstract threats had never much troubled him.
Roger said: "Her kid did the burial himself. Made the coffin, if you can believe it. Constable Reidmacher apparently told someone he'd done a decent job." He turned to Jack. "Imagine. Your mum dies and you just... knock some planks together and stick her in the garden."
"She's buried in the garden?" Maurice raised his eyebrows.
"Not the churchyard. His own garden."
"Is that even legal?"
"I don't know what the law says about it," Jack answered.
"Someone ought to stop him."
Jack didn't answer. He was looking ahead, where the hedge broke on the right side and you could see, through the bare trees, the roof of the Cambourne house. And in front of it, on the verge: a grey car, police plates, and two figures standing near it, and a third slightly apart.
He stopped.
Roger and Maurice pulled up beside him.
"Is that Reidmacher?" Maurice whispered.
"Come on."
"Jack, where—"
Jack was already moving off the lane and through the gap in the hedge, into the longer grass on the inside of the verge. He crouched and moved along the fence line — old wood, rotting at the base, gaps at intervals — and from here you could hear without being seen.
He didn't examine the impulse. It was simply the more interesting option, and he had always moved toward interesting options the way water moves toward low ground, without any particular drama about it.
A pause behind him, then the reluctant sound of footsteps.
Through a gap in the fence the three men were perhaps twenty feet away. The broad one leaning against the car was Reidmacher, cigarette held loosely, not quite smoking it — they'd elected him twice running, like an ugly family saloon, for lack of anything better. The younger one beside him had the stance of a man who'd come with something to say and was running out of ways to say it. And the third man — Jack recognised the coat before the face — was Father Brown from school.
Roger's elbow found his ribs. What are they saying?
Jack shook him off. Nothing. Want to hear, come look yourself.
Roger did not come look.
The younger policeman's voice carried thin and certain in the damp air.
"— something ought to be done. That's all I'm saying. We can't just—"
"What can't we do." Reidmacher said it without any particular inflection. He drew on his cigarette and exhaled and the smoke joined the general grey of everything. "Tell me specifically, Dan. What is it you want."
"We say it's a biohazard. Get a warrant for exhumation, and that's the end of it."
"Boys from the City confirmed natural causes. Stroke or near enough." Reidmacher looked at his cigarette. "The kid built her a box and buried her sixty feet from his front door. Half the magistrates have a family plot under the lawn. You want to take it to them, take it. Your name on the paperwork."
Dan turned to Father Brown in the manner of a man assembling support.
"Father. He might listen to you. You could speak with him."
Brown was looking at the house. "My position is no secret. Consecrated ground would be appropriate. Better for the boy, too, if he intends to remain here." A pause. "But I don't think we can compel him. Andrew is right. No court will touch it."
Jack pressed closer to the gap in the fence.
Reidmacher dropped his cigarette and put his boot on it. "The boy's mother died. Leave him alone."
He opened the car door. The engine turned over, and Dan stood for a moment in the particular way of men who want to argue and understand they've lost, then got in. Reidmacher reversed off the verge and pulled out onto the lane without looking at Brown, and the sound of the engine faded toward town.
Brown remained. He was still facing the house — there was a tree in the yard, split at the trunk by lightning at some point, and something hanging from one of the lower branches that Jack couldn't make out from here — and his hands were in his coat pockets and he appeared to be praying, or doing something that looked enough like it. Then he turned and walked back toward town, and his footsteps faded, and they were alone.
A branch snapped behind Jack.
Something struck him in the small of the back — not hard enough to put him down but his palms caught the ground, gravel biting into the skin.
"What on earth are you doing here."
Not a question. Flat and tired and with no energy left over for volume.
Jack got up before he thought about it — you didn't stay on the ground in front of someone if you could help it — and turned.
Like a gust of cold air through a room where all the windows are shut, Simon Cambourne appeared in front of him.
He had seen Cambourne across distances, through crowds, at bus stops. Up close was different. He was slight, shorter than Jack, with dark hair the school would have had off by now and a face that had the particular worn quality of someone who hadn't slept well and had largely stopped noticing. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, forearms dirty, knuckles dark with something that wasn't only mud. There was a smear of it along his jaw too, as though he'd wiped his face without thinking, and Jack found his eyes going there before he'd decided to look.
And he was looking at Jack the same way he had looked from across the road at the bus stop — directly, without whatever softening was supposed to come between looking at someone and letting them see it. Pure attention that had apparently decided Jack was worth it, and was waiting to find out whether that had been a mistake.
Jack dusted his palms off on his trousers, slowly, and met his eyes. "We were taking a walk."
Cambourne looked at him for a moment. "People usually walk on roads."
His voice, Jack noted, was quieter than he'd expected. Not soft — there was nothing uncertain in it — just low, unhurried.
"We were walking past."
Somewhere to his right, undergrowth crashed — Roger, unmistakably, and then Maurice close behind. There was a tug at his arm, once, which he didn't follow. He heard them go without looking.
Cambourne glanced toward the sound, then back. "You've got reliable friends."
"They're fast."
"I noticed." He looked Jack over, not slowly, not with any particular interest, and the assessment itself — its impersonality, its thoroughness — stung in a way that Jack filed immediately under irritating and left there. "You were listening."
Jack found he couldn't honestly dispute this, and the options were to dispute it anyway, which would have been unimpressive, or to say nothing and let it stand, which was what he chose. He straightened fully, putting several centimeters of height between himself and the observation.
Cambourne's gaze moved briefly to Jack's hand, to the scrape. "Walking past," he huffed, but without particular accusation. He seemed to reconsider something, and when he spoke again the edge had gone out of his voice. "My mother died. People have been coming past all week."
Jack looked at him. The feeling that moved through him was not grief, more like the sudden, flat awareness of what he'd actually been doing here, what it looked like from where Cambourne was standing, what it plainly was.
"I'm sorry. About your mother."
Cambourne's expression did something brief — a small shift, almost surprise, quickly settled.
"Thank you." And then, simply: "Most people are relieved."
No self-pity in it. No invitation to contradict. Just the thing he believed to be true, set down plainly. Jack turned over the obvious responses and found that none of them were quite honest enough to say, and so said nothing.
Cambourne wiped his hands on his trousers and held one out.
Odd gesture. Formal, almost — as if they'd met at a school function, as if there were a normal version of this conversation and they were having it. Jack looked at the hand for a moment. He thought, briefly and involuntarily, of what Roger had been saying on the road — the cemetery, the roadkill, the things that happened when you touched what Cambourne had touched — and recognised those thoughts as Roger's thoughts and not his own, and decided, in the span of a second, that he was not a person who let Roger's thoughts make decisions for him. So he took the hand and shook it.
Warm. Dry. Nothing to write home about.
"Merridew. Jack Merridew."
"I know." Cambourne released his hand. "Simon. I've seen you at the cinema."
Jack blinked. "The cinema."
"Saturday evenings, mostly. And sometimes Sundays. You sit on the aisle side, fourth or fifth row from the back. Your friend..." He paused. "The one who ran second. He talks during the films."
Jack frowned. He had no memory of ever seeing Cambourne at the cinema. How could he have overlooked him? Perhaps he blended in with the darkness after the lights went out.
The thought arrived before he could do anything about it: he's been watching you.
It arrived and then he looked at Cambourne's face — the careful neutrality of it, the slight distance, the eyes that were not performing anything — and revised it. No. Not watching. Just noticing. There was a difference, and it seemed, with Cambourne, like an important one.
"He does," Jack sighed. "It's insufferable. He's explained to me twice why the lead in The Third Man was miscast."
"Was he right?"
"Completely. Which makes it worse." The words came out before he'd decided on them, and he heard them and thought, mildly, that he hadn't intended to say anything amusing.
But Simon chuckled for some reason. It was an unexpected sound. Jack found, somewhat against his will, that he wanted to hear it again. "Does he bother you?"
"Sometimes."
"And still you take him."
"He's my friend."
"That explains it," Simon tilted his head slightly, studying Jack with that same unhurried quality, and Jack still couldn't tell whether it was ironic or not. "You're lucky. To have one."
He said it without any particular weight. Jack could not tell whether it was self-pity or simply an observation, and the uncertainty was uncomfortable in a way he chose not to examine.
"How old are you?"
Cambourne blinked. It was the first time something had caught him off guard. "Why?"
"I'm trying to work out where you ought to be." The town had its systems. School age meant school. If you weren't in school you were working, and if you were working you were seventeen at least, and Cambourne did not look seventeen. "Whether you're meant to be at St. Edmund's or not."
"I left school." A pause, brief and considered. "I'm fifteen. Don't mention it at the school gate or wherever it is you lot do your talking. I told the people at work I'd be eighteen this autumn. And I'd rather they kept thinking so."
What exactly did Simon think Jack was going to do — walk into the station and report him for working two years underage? Odd thing to say. Though perhaps, Jack conceded, not an unreasonable assumption from someone who'd just caught him crouching behind a fence outside his house.
"I won't tell anyone."
"Good." Cambourne nodded, once, and the subject appeared to close.
The afternoon light had gone flat and low, the kind of light that made everything look as though it was waiting for something unpleasant to happen. On the lane, nothing moved. In the yard behind the fence, the split tree stood with its hanging thing that Jack had still not been able to make out, and the amber light in the window was a little more visible now against the fading grey.
"I should go," he said.
"Sure." A beat. Then Simon's eyes dropped briefly to Jack's hand — the scraped palm, which had begun to sting in earnest. "Clean it when you get in."
"I was going to."
"Good." Simon rubbed the back of his neck and looked at the lane. The gesture was small and almost self-conscious. "And — sorry. For the shove. I'd had those three on the doorstep since eight in the morning. The younger one, Harris or whatever—"
"Reidmacher calls him Dan."
"Dan." The name came out flat and colourless. "He knocked twice before I'd had my coffee. The second time he had opinions about where my mother ought to be interred, and where she oughtn't, and whether I'd considered that a churchyard was more appropriate for—" He stopped. Pressed his lips together, briefly, and looked at the garden.
Jack followed his gaze. Past the corner of the house, sixty feet or so from where they stood, the ground was soft and darker than the grass around it, the earth still unsettled. Simple, seen plainly. Just ground.
He'd almost opened his mouth — why won't you let them bury her properly? — and caught himself.
His skin prickled, all at once.
The thought came without invitation and arrived complete: the weight of the spade in the morning cold, the handle slick with dew. The digging itself, which was just work, manageable, you could hold yourself together through work. And then the part after the digging when there was something that needed to be done that was worse than the digging, and you would have to cover her face quickly, and the weight of her on your arms would be something you would not be able to describe to anyone later. And your palms would blister from the handle and the blisters would split and ache for a week and after that they would not ache any more, and that would be a thing unto itself, that after.
He looked back at Cambourne, who was still looking at the garden with an expression that was closed and tired and entirely his own, and said nothing.
"Right," he said instead, and it came out slightly rougher than he meant it. "I should go."
Simon nodded. Jack turned.
"Jack."
He stopped. Turned back. Hearing his name in Cambourne's voice was new — not unpleasant, just...unexpected. New.
Simon dropped his eyes slightly, not all the way down, just enough that he was looking somewhere around Jack's collarbone rather than at him. He opened his mouth, closed it, and when he spoke he was looking at the fence post.
"Friday, five o'clock showing. I'm going regardless. Come if you want. I promise not to say a word during the entire film."
Jack felt the back of his neck go warm.
Jack told himself at once that the answer was obvious. He was not about to sit in a dark cinema beside Cambourne and hand the town a story it would repeat for weeks. He had spent too long learning how to stand straight in this place to risk that for a boy who lived beyond the slaughterhouse road, whose mother had just been buried in his own garden, about whom Roger had very specific and extensive opinions. His father would have said: you are known by who you are seen with. He would have meant it as a warning, and he would not have been entirely wrong. Sensible boys kept their distance from trouble.
But the clarity faltered when he studied Simon more closely. Jack had met boys who clung and boys who provoked; Simon did neither.
That unsettled him more than any rumor ever had.
“I’ll see how the week goes." He managed, finally. "If I am allowed out, I may come."
The corner of Simon's mouth lifted — not quite a smile, and gone before it became one. "Right. Have a good evening, Jack."
Jack turned and walked back to the lane. At the bend he didn't look back.
Jack told himself that he preferred boys who were easier to read, easier to control. He told himself that this invitation would be declined. The argument was sound, yet it failed to quiet the heat lingering at the back of his neck.