Chapter 29 UNDERWATER CRYPTOGRAPHY

I returned to my own rooms, my feet moving as slowly as my thoughts. Nothing made sense. Why had John-the-dig died? Because someone had interfered with the safety catch on the ladder. It can't have been the boy. Miss Winter's story gave him a clear alibi: While John and his ladder were tumbling from the balustrade through the empty air to the ground, the boy was eyeing her cigarette, not daring to ask for a drag. Then surely it must have been Emmeline. Except that nothing in the story suggests that Emmeline would do such a thing. She was a harmless child, even Hester said so. And Miss Winter herself couldn't have been clearer. No. Not Emmeline. Then who? Isabelle was dead. Charlie was gone.

I came to my rooms, went in, stood by the window. It was too dark to see; there was only my reflection, a pale shadow you could see the night through. At last I listened to the quiet, persistent voice in my head that I had been trying to ignore. Adeline. No, I said. Yes, it said. Adeline. It was not possible. The cries of grief for John-the-dig were still fresh in my mind. No one could mourn a man like that if she had killed him, could she? No one could murder a man she loved enough to cry those tears for? But the voice in my head recounted episode after episode from the story I knew so well. The violence in the topiary garden, each swipe of the shears a blow to John's heart. The attacks on Emmeline, the hair-pulling, the battering, the biting. The baby removed from the perambulator and left carefully, to die or to be found. One of the twins was not quite right, they said in the village. I remembered and I wondered. Was it possible? Had the tears I had just witnessed been tears of guilt? Tears of remorse? Was it a murder I had held in my arms and comforted? Was this the secret Miss Winter had hidden from the world for so long? An unpleasant suspicion revealed itself to me. Was this the point of Miss Winter's story? To make me sympathize with her, exonerate her, forgive her? I shivered.

But one thing at least I was sure of. She had loved him. How could it be otherwise? I remembered holding her racked and tormented body against mine and knew that only broken love can cause such despair. I remembered the child Adeline reaching into John's loneliness after the death of the Missus, drawing him back to life by getting him to teach her to prune the topiary. The topiary she had damaged. Oh, perhaps I wasn't sure after all! My eyes roamed over the darkness outside the window. Her fabulous garden. Was it her homage to John-the-dig? Her lifelong penalty for the damage she had wrought?

I rubbed my tired eyes and knew I ought to go to bed. But I was too tired to sleep. My thoughts, if I did nothing to stop them, would go round in circles all night long. While I waited for the tub to fill, I cast about for something to occupy my mind. A ball of paper half visible beneath the dressing table caught my attention. I unfolded it, flattened it out. A row of phonetic script. In the bathroom, with the water thundering in the background, I made a few short-lived attempts at picking some kind of meaning out of my string of symbols. Always there was that undermining feeling that I hadn't captured Emmeline's utterance quite accurately. I pictured the moonlit garden, the contortions of the witch hazel, the grotesque, urgent face; I heard again the abruptness of Emmeline's voice. But however hard I tried, I could not recall the pronunciation itself.

I climbed into the bath, leaving the scrap of paper on the edge. The water, warm to my feet, legs, back, felt distinctly cooler against the macula on my side. Eyes closed, I slid right under the surface. Ears, nose , eyes, right to the top of my head. The water rang in my ears, my hair lifted from its roots. I came up for air, then instantly plunged underwater again. More air, then water. In a loose, underwater fashion, thoughts began to swim in my mind. I knew enough about twin language to know that it was never totally invented. In the case of Emmeline and Adeline, it would be based on English or French or could contain elements of both.

Air. Water. Introduced distortions. In the intonation, maybe. Or the vows. And sometimes extra bits, added to camouflage rather than to carry meaning. Air. Water. A puzzle. A secret code. A cryptograph. It wouldn't be as hard as the Egyptian hieroglyphs or Mycenaean Linear B. How would you have to go about it? Take each syllable separately. It could be a word or a part of a word. Remove the intonation first. Play with the stress. Experiment with lengthening, shortening, flattening the vowel sounds. Then what did the syllable suggest in English? In French? And what if you left it out and played with the syllables on either side instead? There would be a vast number of possible combinations. Thousands. But not an infinite number. A computing machine could do it. So could a human brain, given a year or two.

The dead go underground. What? I sat bolt upright in shock. The words came to me out of nowhere. They beat painfully in my chest. It was ridiculous. It couldn't be! Trembling, I reached to the edge of the bath where I had left my jottings, and drew the paper near to me. Anxiously I scanned it. My notes, my symbols and signs, my squiggles and dots, were gone. in a pool of water and had drowned. I tried once more to remember the sounds as they had come to me underwater. But they were wiped from my memory. All I could remember was her fraught, intent face and the five-note sequence she sang as she left.

The dead go underground. Words that had arrived fully formed in my mind, leaving no trail behind them. Where had they come from? What tricks had my mind been playing to come up with these words out of nowhere? I didn't actually believe that this was what she had said to me, did I? Come on, be sensible, I told myself. I reached for the soap and resolved to put my underwater imaginings out of my mind.