“He’s in here,” she said, having kicked off her boots and pushing open another door leading from the lobby. “I just don’t know what’s the matter. He’s usually so communicative.”
I scraped my unrecognizably wet shoes on the doormat, hoping that would suffice, because I’d just realised my left sock had a sizeable hole on its heel. In fact, apart from my new trench coat, I still wore clothes marked with various paint and bleach stains. Evidence of decorating.
Thankfully, the woman I’d once fancied asking out for a drink, was too pre-occupied to notice. Instead, she pointed towards an oblong table and assorted chairs at the end of a breakfast room leading from the kitchen, where a man sat slumped over a pile of papers, both sets of fingers opening and closing as if this helped him concentrate. Next to him stood a half-empty tumbler of whisky.
“That’s him.”
His shock of white hair, once so black, made me start.
“Stephen?” I said.
He looked up. His face that of a man twenty years older. Moreover, a man who’d been punished, but by what? By whom?
“Well, good to see you.” I held out my hand.
He ignored it.
“For God’s sake…” complained Catherine.
“Leave God out of it. That’s been the fucking trouble.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Nothing.”
His wife’s colourless cheeks bore a patch of red as she left the room, slipping her wet mac from her arms as she did so.
“Those old letters?” I ventured, standing next to him. “Are they that bad?”
He nodded, before those sunken eyes met mine. “There’s more.” His voice became a whisper. “A threat, if you please. Handed to me by Reception at the university on Friday.”
Stephen tried to stand, I placed a hand firmly on his shoulder.
“Stay put,” I said. “And I’ll sit here if that’s OK. You just fill me in.”
“Wait.”
Catherine had returned, bearing a tray with two full mugs of tea and a plate of chocolate digestives arranged in a perfect circle.
“Better than whisky.” She set it down on the uncluttered end of the table and caught my eye. “Do you want me to stay?”
“No!” His reply like gunfire. “I mean, best not to. At least, not yet…”
I stared after her, aware not only of the rising tension between them, but also how that room, the hub of what was built as a family home, bore no sign of anyone else. Tasteful, landscape watercolours hung in strategic places, while books relating to the couple’s specialisms and highbrow, literary fiction, were crammed into shelves either side of the glowing woodburner.
“This threat?” I reminded him, passing over the mug bearing his initials. Also, the biscuits. Instead he downed the rest of his whisky and pulled out a sheet of A4 paper from the bottom of the pile.
DROP IT OR YOUR DEAD
A WARNING
Charming.
“Drop what?” he protested. “I don’t get it.”
“Look at the spelling.”
“I have.”
“Deliberate typos are commonplace with this kind of thing. Designed to deceive, they usually point to someone who’d never normally commit such a faux-pas. Had it arrived by post at your university?
“No, and I binned the envelope. It just had my name on, in the same font.”
“There may have been useful prints on it.”
And on the paper, but not any longer.
“Alright for you to talk.”
Let it go.
“Look,” I persevered “You must have some idea what this is about. Have you told anyone else?”
He shook his head.
“What’s also weird is that both those letters I mentioned to you on the phone this morning, were left for me a week ago, in my bicycle saddle bag under its tarpaulin, if you please. Read them,” he said. “And remember their signatories’ names.”
*
A squall of rain hit the nearby window as I reached the end of the heartbreaking, obviously hurriedly typed letter dated 10th December 1920 from a Doctor Vincent Lovell, concerning the owners of a local farm, and a family who’d come to work there. How they needed urgent treatment for leprosy at somewhere called Vesper House. The response, dated 13th December 1920 from the Reverend Henry Beecham, was little more than a death sentence. His tone, despite the flowery handwriting, hard as winter ice.
Hadn’t Catherine Vickers also been a Beecham?
I passed it back to my old friend, still thinking about that disturbing threat. Wondering if these strange events mightn’t be related.
“Both letters certainly smell old,” I said. “But I’m no expert.”
Stephen bridled. “What are you implying? That I don’t know what’s genuine or fake?”
“This doctor’s address is missing. Where did he live?”
“God knows. No time to check either, what with this and that bloody meeting to prepare for.”
“Who do you think left it for you and not Catherine?”
“You tell me. I’ve not heard any other car or whatever. Nor anyone hanging around, I can only think it’s some damned ghost.”
He wasn’t joking.
“Does Catherine know?”
“Course not,” he hissed. “And she mustn’t. This is my thing.”
I glanced up at the kitchen door from behind which came sounds of a meal being prepared. His wife had never struck me as being overly domesticated. Her uni room had been untidy, and I remembered her cooking limited to anything needing a tin opener. But then people change or are changed. Or simply reveal themselves. Perhaps her orderly arrangement of the biscuits and of the house I’d seen so far, was a kind of substitute for no kids.
Whatever. It was a private matter between them both, and not for me to interefere. But something else was.
“Who exactly was this Dr Lovell?” I asked. “Seems to have rattled the Reverend’s cage alright.”
Stephen leaned towards me. Still whispering. “A general practitioner, who fought for his principles. However, according to police records at the time, he’d vanished while on a walk, just before Christmas 1920. Not so long after that letter of his was written.”
I thought of Catherine being kept in the dark. “Are you sure you want to keep all this to yourself?”
“I’m not.” He poked me in the chest. “There’s you as well.”
“I don’t mean me.”
He sighed.
“To be honest, we’ve both hit a bad patch. She keeps mentioning how I wouldn’t let her adopt, once we knew we couldn’t have our own child. It’s never gone away, but she’s been busy. I’ve been busy. She’s also a committed Christian, which gets right up my nose. As for Sundays,” he shrugged. “Forget it. If it’s not the matins choir, it’s the damned Carers’ Club, then Sunday School…”
The carriage clock on our mantelepiece meanly chimed three o’clock, and beyond the window and the rain, the bell of St. John the Martyr also began to mark the hour, reinforcing my determination to not interefere.
‘Least said, soonest mended,’ had been my Gran’s motto, and I’d not always remembered it.
“Any more info from 1920?” I said instead.
“Bits and bobs. In my study. Under lock and key.”
“I’d like a look, if that’s OK.”
Stephen Vickers unfolded himself from the chair and loped off towards another door further down the room. In his absence, I sensed a sudden hopelessness eddy around in my mind, drowning any more rational thought. That certain painful events had happened before even my parents were born, in an era when the media weren’t the sniffer dogs they’d become by 1988. When, in such a sparsely populated rural area, it was easy for events to slip under the radar.
When he returned, Stephen registered the expression on my face but not what was churning inside, accompanied by a trace of that same, nauseating smell.
“Where’s Vesper House?” I asked him.
&
nbsp; “Was,” he corrected me. “Struck by lightning just after those letters were written, then demolished.” He placed a green, vinyl folder secured by four matching rubber bands in front of me. Its cover dominated by a large UWN HISTORY DEPT. label and the words PROFESSOR S.D. VICKERS. RESTRICTED USE ONLY.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I began, aware of a warning bell growing louder in my head. “I think I might have made a mistake.” I pushed my chair back and stood up to put some distance between me and what was clearly significant. “I’m not the one to be helping you with this. I’ve just…”
“What?” he challenged. “Moved into a nice new house? Driving a nice new car?”
He picked up the folder and pressed it to his chest. “Come on, Johnny. You were one of the best up in Nottingham. She told me.”
“Who?”
Pause.
“Sorry. I won’t mention her again.”
“Thanks.”
“As for this folder, there’s more proof of a sustained dereliction of duty by the Reverend Henry Beecham, which, if discovered at the time, might even have caused a constitutional crisis.”
I blinked. “How come?”
“Our Queen is head of the Anglican Church, yes? Dieu et mon droit and all that?”
I nodded, thinking of Alison lying on top of me in bed. How my aspirations had dwindled to my unread books. Unheard music. Pursuing a quiet life, and yet…
“Please… “
I looked up at the man I’d not seen for over three decades, and realised he was deadly serious. That his research profile wasn’t priority now. This was grief.
5. STANLEY.
Saturday 17th July 1920. 12.05 p.m.
“That Devil sun up there’ll be the death of us all,” complained Pa, limping behind me around the edge of Parson’s Field, so called ‘cos way back, a Parson Willocks of St. John the Martyr had last bin seen standing in the middle of it one afternoon, praying for rain, then he’d vanished.
For all I knew, I might have bin walking over him at that very moment, but then Pa grabbed the back of me vest. Not me usual overall. Not today, thank you, in this fecking furnace…
“Yer goin’ too quick,” he panted. “Tryin’ to kill me off an’ all are ye?”
Always the same taunt. As if…
I’d already been down Longstanton Police House on three previous occasions, and that had been enough for me. That little tart Susan Deakins still had a lot to answer for…
Sly bitch.
“How about here?” I said, stopping to poke the bone-dry ground with me stick. “Then we can run an underground channel from the Howse over there.” I gestured towards the river fed by the Waveney just a mile away. Always a reliable supply.
Pa stared at the spot. Struck the grey grass and the baked earth beneath with the heel of his boot, then glanced over to the row of thin, leaning poplars bordering the river, marking our western boundary. “Aye. This’ll do. Then perhaps we can grow corn again. Make real money…”
He then turned to me, the skin on his face like crumpled, brown paper. “But who do we trust to dig? I can’t, an’ ye’ve too much on with the pigs.”
“Johnny Foreigner. Why not? He needs us. If he’s caught outside of here, he’ll be picked up and put on the first banana boat to wherever.”
Pa thought for a moment, then said, “He’ll take too long on the job. He’s skin and bone.”
Fatten him, then.”
Pa tilted up the front brim of his hat and turned towards the farm, as if still thinking hard. Once a full hand taller than me, he now barely reached my shoulder. His stoop were to blame, as if by the year’s end, his nose would be rubbing the dirt.
And how fitting wud that be?
“I’ll get the wife to make four portions instead of three,” he suggested. “Bake an extra loaf and give him the drippin’ off the bottom of the roastin’ tin. That should do the trick.”
At mention of the roasting tin, spit began filling me mouth. Jealousy me heart.
“He’s a monkey, remember?” I said.
Pa glanced at me the same way he had when I’d come home that March evening with Susan Deakins’ blood on me coat that I’d somehow not noticed. Stubborn, like her. “So, we’ve made a decision,” he said. “What’s next?”
“Let him stay on. Make hisen useful.”
*
Above us, the burning sun had climbed to the highest point in the flat, blue sky. I’d forgotten what a cloud looked like and tried to imagine one full of rain suddenly appearing. I pulled me vest away from my armpits and me hair seemed to crawl off me skull as I walked back in front of him again, thinking of the cool scullery and a gulp of warm water from the outside pump, whose well level was already too low.
“Wait, son!” he called out behind me. “I ain’t done yet.”
I stopped, rubbing sweat from my eyes.
“’He can work through the night,” Pa wheezed. “He’ll be black on black. That way, once the pit’s done, no-one’ll notice. There’ll just be me water hole. In me own land.”
Me own land…
We spoke not another word till we reached the farmhouse where the combined smells of pig shit and a stew cooking reached me nose. Pa went straight in while I hung around looking for The Monkey.
“Oi? You there?” I yelled, and it were the pigs what answered from inside the barn. Grunts, squeals, more high-pitched than usual, I thought.
Summat were up. They only fussed when they knew me blade wud soon be on their throats. Not till September, that. So, what were going on?
The yard were clean enough, just the odd trail of slurry. Nothing to complain about so far, but that were before I’d closed its iron gate behind me and walked into the din and darkness of the stinking barn.
*
The Monkey. At last.
I rubbed me hand over me eyes, then again to make sure I weren’t mistaken. But no. Still in his overalls, he stood really close behind Bessie, our biggest Large White, gripping her by the ears as he pushed his long, black cock in and out of her, while her tail stuck up straight as a wand in the air. And were that a smile on her face or a trick of the light? If so, had she been his willing partner before? It certainly seemed so.
I waited, feeling my own soldier down below begin to stiffen until what little food I’d eaten so far, rose up into my gullet. The Monkey stopped moving for a second and groaned to high Heaven before finishing the job. His fat lips closing, crinkling…
Then he saw me. Pulled himself free of her and ran through the scattering herd, his wet cock bouncing with every stride until he clambered up the far wall’s old stones, so he could reach the thick oak beam that ran from end to end of the barn.
“Scum!” I hollered up at him. “Black scum. I’ll teach ye a lesson.”
He now lay directly overhead, laughing huge white teeth while hot, pungent drops of piss hit me face. I ducked to one side, shouting, “wait till I tell Mr. Bulling. Ye won’t be seeing tomorrow morning…”
Then I sicked up over me own boots.
Torn for a moment between going after him and keeping the pigs from escaping into the furnace outside, I made the wrong decision. That beam were too high, splintering me hands as I crept along it, just feet away from this other animal’s boots. His body stink filling my nose, making me reckless, speeding up until I lost me grip; began to twist and see the barn floor coming closer. And then came laughing, singing, words I’d never heard of as a sudden, solid jolt brought a black veil over everything. The taste of hot blood in me mouth.
6. SARAH.
Monday 19th July 1920. 9 a.m.
It was often hard to believe that almost seven years ago, Will and I had moved from Iwerne Minster in Dorset, where we’d both been born and raised, to a smaller village in Hampshire, in the depths of the New Forest. His tractor repair business had dwindled to nothing after most of the men in the area’s farming community had taken the King’s Shilling, so we’d been forced to look elsewhere for a new home and a livelihood.
> Oak Leaf Cottage in Swayhurst proved to be perfect. Part of Lord Edward Brocken’s estate, and we paid him three pounds a month together with any fresh vegetables we could spare, to enjoy its unique situation and quietude. Will’s job as agister in the forest suited him well, and all of us including young Mollie and Buck looked forward to a brighter future. That is, until he returned from a secret visit to Southampton one windy October afternoon in 1914, proud that he too, would be joining up.
I’d not spoken to him for a week after that, seeing only a widow’s weeds looming, with two young children to feed and clothe. Five-year-old Mollie began sleeping badly and Buck, only three, developed a weakness in his lungs that I put down to too much crying…
And here we were again, with Will, still not fully recovered from his Wednesday night ordeal, wanting to run, and me having changed my mind, wanting his callous attacker found and punished.
“What you staring at?” He looked up at me from the kitchen table covered by his outspread map of Norfolk - part of a collection begun when he was a lad. A county with no connection whatsoever for any of us. A land so flat, I’d heard it could break even the strongest heart. Yet he was set on it.
I did sometimes wonder - and I asked God to forgive me - if his brain hadn’t been touched not only by the War but his terrible experience in the Forest last Wednesday night.
“You,” I replied. “And if you don’t go out and at least show your face, the Verderer’s Court will want to know why. The last thing we need.”
“Then the Forest Eyre. I know.”
A sudden and intense frown creased his fine forehead as he mentioned the highest court used to try poachers and other criminals.
The Official Verderer, appointed by no less than the Monarch, came to mind. A young giant come down from north Yorkshire with no family, but a soul of steel.
“It was him, wasn’t it? Mr. Untouchable?” I said, and that nickname brought a shot of fear to Will’s eyes.
After that, with the morning sun falling on the top of his still-matted hair and sounds of Mollie and Buck getting out of bed upstairs, I realised that despite my deep misgivings, his need to bolt to what seemed to me like an alien place, was probably justified. But who would tell the children?
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