The Painted Altar

Chapter Five

Plot reminder: Having promised Irene not to reveal her existence to her half-sister and brother, Mary is unable to share in the family's grief and is forced to proceed with investigations alone, feigning to be a journalist. In a previous chapter she described her arrangements to meet with an expert on local history who has been helping police with their investigations.

~~~~~

I've never been one for fairytales. For bloated myths and legends. Neither did I have any great desire to see my mother's coffin lowered into the same fenland soil which for more than 60 years had enveloped my father. As the priest offered transubstantiation to those of the congregation thus inclined, I made my discreet exit, snuck back out into the rain. There was my appointment with the local history expert John Simmonds to keep.

The short journey out towards Northdyke was a route I'd taken once before, eighteen months earlier following one of my visits to Irene. The B-road was a thin treacherous thread lined on either side by more or less continual ditches, the fields it traversed little changed, I suspected, from 1943. Green lines of sugar beet shoots in the main, military straight, the passing perspective creating a rolling loop of diagonals. Though still two or three months short of harvest, I could almost picture the teenage Irene stooped there alongside the other Land Girls, the animated figures of the Italians scattered all around.

Camp 106a had been located half a mile from the western fringe of the village. My visit there, I remember, had proved disappointing. Though the perimeter barb had for obvious reasons of public safety long since been removed, the replacement fence had been quite some distance - a hundred metres perhaps - from the tight cluster of huts it had encircled. The numerous rusted 'Keep Out' signs seemed to have had limited effect with the local youth, this judging from the smashed windows and braindead spray-can graffiti. Indeed, there had been a gaping tear in one section of the fence - work, clearly, of a voraciously applied wire-cutter. The temptation to squeeze myself through, have a good peek around, had been a strong one. It hadn't so much been the risk of ripping my raincoat or scratching the back of my hand which had held me back, more the potential ignominy of me, a near-retirement-aged primary school headmistress, being caught trespassing in what had still officially been the off-limits property of the British government.

Given the viewing distance, it had been difficult therefore to get a sense of the place, for my mind to animate it with the voice-booming latin comraderie which had once echoed throughout its confines. Through the dreary winter mist, it had even seemed foreboding, somehow sinister. As if on some subconscious level I had already been able to perceive the dark atrocity which had taken place there.

*

The scene which awaited me on the morning of my mother's funeral was markedly different. Gone were the huts, the surrounding fence. All hint of the site's historical significance.

Instead, I was faced by a sort of muddy moonscape, one churned by snaking binaries of tyre tracks, the various diggers and loaders which were dotted around the site standing idle. In front of a small copse of ash trees over on the lefthand side was a portacabin, its padlocked door further evidence of forced cessation of work. The reason was evident: towards the centre of the expanse stood two white scene of crime tents approximately thirty metres apart. The figure of a forensics officer could seen trudging between the two, boots raised high to counter the down-sucking mud.

"Place had always fascinated me," John Simmonds explained, glancing across at me as we surveyed the scene. "Ever since I was kid."

He'd unfolded himself from his car moments earlier, extended a firm handshake of greeting as I'd pulled up at the edge of the site, offered me partial shelter beneath his umbrella. Despite his advancing years, he retained still half a head of silvery hair, a youthful bounce to his stride. As a retired teacher I would under normal circumstances have enjoyed swapping classroom anecdotes with him, sharing a head-shaking lament on the deterioration of educational standards over recent decades. I had to remind myself that I was playing at being a freelance journalist however, had to feign a purely professional level of interest in the case.