by Sarah Rayne
‘I said if they couldn’t distinguish between the garments of an English lady and those of a French cleric, matters had come to a pretty pass. (He was seventy-five if he was a day, for goodness’ sake. Although an absolute lamb.)
‘So then I said there was a set of black silk underwear, which I supposed no one would ascribe to a gentleman of the cloth, after which I threw discretion to the winds by telling them I had packed it because I was expecting my lover to join me for a weekend. You’d think the French would understand such a thing, wouldn’t you, but they looked scandalized, although to be fair that might have been due to the Monsignor’s presence. (He was very politely pretending not to understand – what a gentleman.)
‘Then I remembered that there was a hot-water bottle in the suitcase with a knitted pink cover (present from Miss Pringle, the dear love), and I thought that would clinch my ownership, although it threw them for a few moments, because you could see that although they could certainly slot together a lover and black silk lingerie, the inclusion of the hot-water bottle confused them utterly.
‘Thankfully, at that point the Monsignor stepped forward and said he must retract (or it might have been rescind or even recant) all claim to the suitcase, because he certainly did not have a hot-water bottle amongst his luggage, although he thought I was very wise to have brought one, because Paris could be très froid at nights. (We didn’t mention the black silk underwear.)
‘I signed one or two forms, and somebody went off to make a new search for the Monsignor’s missing case. We all parted very amicably; in fact the Monsignor invited me to take you to have lunch with him if you do manage a weekend. He’s a very charming gentleman and he’s given me his card and it looks as if he lives in a very respectable part of the city.
‘While I’m here I’ll see if there are any traces of Scaramel. That poster in Linklighters referred to her being back “Fresh from her triumphs in Paris”. I don’t suppose there will be anything, but I’ll try.
‘And I’ll look forward to hearing about your explorations into the underground river cellar. Don’t fall into that, will you, and don’t get tangled up in anything dangerous or seductive while I’m away.
Arabella.’
Phin enjoyed this missive very much, although he thought that the chances of Arabella finding any trace of Scaramel in Paris were slight.
He sent a reply, promising to see about fitting in a weekend, pointed out as diplomatically as possible the necessity for being wary of charming and courteous gentlemen in airports, no matter their apparent religious affinities, and requested Arabella on no account to mislay the black silk underwear before he, Phin, could get to Paris.
After this, he returned to Professor Liripine’s letters in a much happier frame of mind, and began to sift carefully through them.
In the main they were, as the professor had said, from Liszt’s more decorous years, but they were interesting and they would be useful. Phin worked systematically through them, typing notes on to the computer as he went.
It was getting on for midnight when he turned over the last of the letters, and he was just thinking he might call it a night. All around him the house and its various occupants had fallen into silence, although there had been a series of thuds from Toby Tallis’s flat shortly after eleven, followed by some muffled feminine giggling, which suggested Toby had not returned home alone from his night out. Good for Toby.
The last document from Professor Liripine was a photocopy of a newspaper cutting from an old French newspaper. Phin saw with relief that the professor, efficient and thorough as ever, had sent a separate sheet with the translation.
He adjusted the desk lamp so that its light fell more strongly on the page, and began to read.
SPLENDID AND MOVING TRIBUTE TO MAESTRO
TEN-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATH OF VIRTUOSO FRANZ LISZT CELEBRATED
Music lovers and faithful admirers of the works of Franz Liszt gathered at the Hall de la Mélodie on Saturday evening to celebrate the great man’s music ten years after his death at a concert aptly titled, ‘Liszten to the Symphonies’.
Liszten. The word seemed almost to explode off the page. Liszten. As in, Liszten for the Killer, thought Phin. I won’t leap to any conclusion, though, not yet. That play on Liszt’s name must have been used many times.
Or had it? Could this be the definite link between Scaramel and Liszt he had been trying to find? There was no date, but the ten-year anniversary of Liszt’s death would have to make it 1896. He read on.
The concert was a glittering and well-attended occasion; the hall being packed with people from many walks of life, although it is understood that the organizer wishes to remain anonymous. This newspaper does, of course, respect that, although one source has suggested that it was a lady whom Herr Liszt had greatly admired in his last years.
[We courteously remind our readers that Herr Liszt was a gallant gentleman when it came to the company of ladies.]
The orchestra was applauded enthusiastically, and encored several times. After the performances a lavish supper was provided by Maison dans le Parc. M’sieur Alphonse himself presided over the tables.
A charming note came immediately before supper, when bouquets and beribboned magnums of champagne were carried out by two small children and presented to the conductor, the soloists, and the first violinist.
We understand the children to be twins, and they curtseyed and bowed with grave politeness. It was not possible to obtain their full names, but it is understood that they are English, and that their first names are Morwenna and Mervyn.
They were delightfully dressed in the costumes of Harlequin and Columbine.
Phin read the article a second time and then a third. It’s all there, he thought. The pieces from the mystery. Or is it? Let’s look at it fragment by fragment.
First of all, the anonymous organizer. Scaramel? She had not sounded like a lady who would have shied away from publicity, but perhaps she had wanted to be discreet about a liaison with Liszt. Did the dates fit for an actual liaison, though? Liszt was born in 1811, and Scaramel’s heyday seemed to have been the late 1880s and early 1890s. So she could have been born anywhere from 1840 to 1860, which would have meant an age gap of anything from thirty to fifty years. Phin conceded that a liaison would not have been impossible, but remembered that Liszt had written to Cosima that while he had a great admiration for Scaramel, he had added rather sadly that nowadays such admirations were a matter of the mind only. So Phin was inclined to think there had not been any actual bed bouncing, and that what Liszt had felt for Scaramel had been an old man’s benevolent but sexless passion.
How about the play on Liszt’s name? Liszten – this time it was ‘Liszten to the Music’. Was that coincidence? Or had Scaramel known about the Liszten for the Killer sketch?
But for the moment it was the twins who were attracting his attention – the two small children dressed for the glittering occasion as Harlequin and Columbine. It’s the commedia dell’arte motif again, thought Phin. The famous Italian ‘comedy of art’ from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Harlequin and Columbine and all those other characters – Punchinello and Pantalone. And, of course, Scaramouche – the feminine version of which was Scaramel.
Would anyone other than a flamboyant music hall artiste known to the world as Scaramel – a lady who performed at a place situated in Harlequin Court – have dressed those two children in those particular costumes?
Staring at the names, the images dancing tantalizingly across his mind, Phin was gradually aware of a tugging in his mind. Something he had found earlier, was it? Relevant to the twins? Their costumes? Their names? Their names. He reached for the book in which he had found the original mention of Scaramel, and flipped through the pages. Here it was.
‘There is a song from the era (i.e. the 1880s and early 1890s), which referred to the murder … The composer of the song’s music is not known, but one source suggested that the song’s lyrics had been written by a Welsh write
r.’
Welsh. A Welsh writer. And here were twins, turning up at a concert connected to Liszt and probably to Scaramel as well. And those twins had unmistakably Welsh names – names that were not very common, and that surely would not have been common at all in late nineteenth-century Paris. Phin closed the book thoughtfully. He still could not see how any of these pieces fitted together, but he would certainly have to find out more. He went to bed with an increasing conviction that there was something in Linklighters he had missed.
TWELVE
The morning brought Toby Tallis, who came breezily into Phin’s study.
‘I’ve found a promising hunting ground for our book,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean your academic one, I mean the one we’re doing on ballads and news-sheets and related spin-offs. It’s a pub near Marble Arch – I was there last night as a matter of fact.’
‘I heard you come home,’ said Phin, then, in case Toby wondered what else might have been audible, he hastily added, ‘I mean I heard your door open and close.’
‘She’s a physiotherapist from the hospital,’ said Toby, apparently feeling clarification was required. ‘I’m still on rotation – three months in osteology, so I’m meeting quite a few new people. It’s a subdiscipline of anatomy, really, and it’s not compulsory, but I thought I’d take it in, because you never know, and it’s actually rather an interesting area of medicine. Bones and a bit of archaeology and forensic stuff.’
‘And an interesting physiotherapist in the mix?’
‘She is interesting, as it happens. Very good company. And somebody had recommended this pub – it has a bit of a theme, you know how they do these days – and it makes great play of the fact that it was on the site of the old Tyburn gallows. Well, the general area of the gallows, because nobody seems able to agree on the precise spot.’
Phin observed that Toby certainly took his girlfriends to the best places.
‘Don’t mock,’ said Toby. ‘It was a very lively pub and we enjoyed each other’s company, and …’ He paused, and then, with unusual awkwardness, said, ‘Well, you know how there are some girls you feel really proud to be with when you walk into a public place …? Yes, of course you do, you’ve walked into enough public places with Arabella these last few months, and she certainly makes people look at her twice.’
‘Twice and usually three times,’ said Phin, smiling and knowing exactly what Toby meant. To smooth over Toby’s moment of near-embarrassment, he said, ‘What was the pub like?’
‘Very good. We had a very nice meal, too. But the evening wasn’t all given over to pleasure, because I was looking out for material for our book.’
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Odds and ends,’ said Toby. ‘They don’t have framed stuff on the walls like Linklighters – but they’ve got huge scrapbooks of the pub’s history and the history of the area. They’ve been put together over the years – a bit here and there; people contributing old newspaper cuttings from attics, and ancient photographs and woodcuts. It’s an ongoing project. The bar staff let me make a few notes, and they said they’d be happy to photocopy anything I wanted. Did you know people used to buy what they called execution ballads – the printers churned them out by the ton. And when there was a hanging, crowds would gather round the gallows to sing them – very Les Misérables, isn’t it?’
‘I expect it was a day out for most of them,’ said Phin.
‘Yes. And nowadays terrorists post videos of live executions on Facebook and YouTube,’ he said, his cherubic face suddenly serious. ‘Human nature doesn’t change so very much, does it?’
‘You’re unusually philosophical this morning. Is that the physiotherapist’s influence?’
‘Well, it might be. But,’ said Toby, ‘I do think we could use some of the ballads. I only glanced at a few, but they all looked very solemn.’
‘So we’d need to find lighter ones for balance.’
‘Yes. You get the impression that whoever wrote or distributed most of them was trying to convey a sense of bells tolling and of people watching in awed and respectful silence. Whereas probably everybody was cheering and shouting rude comments and blowing raspberries.’
‘And scoffing pies and jellied eels from street vendors between times,’ agreed Phin.
‘Anyhow, I did find this, though, which is nicely quirky,’ said Toby. ‘I think it’s about London’s underground rivers. Listen …
“Never be lured to the ghost river beds,
Only sleep in a bed where you’re safe.
In a ghost river bed, you could end up quite dead.
On some terrible night, you’ll be Pigged in the Dyke,
Or Kilned in the Lime – what a terrible crime,
You’ll be Cocked in the Pie and then left there to die,
You’ll be Tied in the Burn or Sluiced by the Earl –
And that is a fate that will make your toes curl.
“You’ll be chopped, you’ll be strangled, or fed to the mangle,
And most of your guts will be left in a tangle,
Your bones will be spread on the dark cobblestones
And you’re too deep below to make heard your moans.”
‘That,’ said Phin, ‘is possibly one of the most macabre things I’ve ever heard.’
‘It is grim, isn’t it? There’s a bit more,’ said Toby, with a grin. ‘Listen again.
“And there’s really no use
To try raising the sluice.
Street grids and street grilles will not help your ills,
For you can’t reach the grilles when you’re dead.
So the bed of a friend – whether new, whether old
Is safer by far than the grue and the cold
Of the ghost river beds down below …”
‘It’s a play on all the old river names, isn’t it?’ said Toby.
‘Is it?’ Phin took the verses from him and re-read them. ‘I think you’re right,’ he said. ‘And all bawdiness aside, the Cock and Pye – spelled pye – is the old ditch, or a river tributary, that runs under Harlequin Court. Loretta Farrant told me about it. She used the term ghost river, too.’
‘And Tied in the Burn’s got to be Tyburn, hasn’t it?’
‘I don’t know. Was there an underground river there?’
‘Bound to be. London’s veined with them,’ said Toby. ‘Is your computer on? Oh, good.’ He sat down at Phin’s desk and typed in a search request. ‘Yes, here it is. Apparently the Tyburn runs directly beneath Buckingham Palace – and if that isn’t good material for our book, I don’t know what is. I bet we could get several pages on royalty wading through sewage when there was an overflow. We’ll call the chapter, “The Night Edward Vll Caused the Loo to Back Up”.’
‘Did he? Cause the loo to back up?’
‘Hasn’t everybody at some time? Anyway, nobody could prove he didn’t.’
‘What about being Sluiced by the Earl?’
‘It sounds like a polite term for getting rat-arsed with the aristos, doesn’t it, but … No, here it is,’ said Toby, still at the computer. ‘Earl’s Sluice. An old waterway near the Old Kent Road. I expect the other references will check out, too. Fun, isn’t it?’ he said, getting up from Phin’s chair. ‘Sort of Victorian crossword clues. Anyway, I thought we might go back to the pub tomorrow night – thee and me, I mean – and see what we can turn up. I can’t do tonight, because I’m on a late ward shift.’
‘Tomorrow would be fine. Yes, let’s,’ said Phin, pleased.
After Toby had gone, in deference to Professor Liripine’s wishes, Phin set about tracking the details of Franz Liszt’s soberer years in the monastery. He drafted a possible timeline for Liszt, including what Liszt had termed his ‘vie trifurquée’ – the threefold existence he had pursued in later life, when he had travelled between Rome, Weimar and Budapest, giving master classes in piano playing. This was all fine and could be expanded. The trouble was that he could not escape the feeling that Scaramel and Links were eyeing him reproa
chfully from the shadows. In the end, immediately after lunch, he put Liszt away and went out. Linklighters would be closed at this hour of the afternoon, but there was Thumbprints to explore.
Thumbprints, when he got there, had a pleasingly old-fashioned air. Phin enjoyed it very much, and he wandered along the bookshelves until he found himself in a small section displaying framed paintings and prints. This was what he had really come to see. There were a number of sketches and prints on display – several more in the shop’s windows – and there were also large pocket folders hanging from racks, containing unframed prints and sketches. It was not very likely that any of Links’s work had survived, apart from the occasional reproduction in old books, but Phin wanted to make sure. This seemed as good a place to start a search as anywhere.
There were some nice old sketches in the portfolios – mostly prints, but a few originals, with several of the immediate areas around Harlequin Court. Phin thought Arabella might like one of the originals for her flat – it was her birthday next month. There was a particularly nice one of a pub in Covent Garden called Ben Caunt’s Head, which apparently had stood on the site of what was now the The Salisbury. Phin remembered Loretta saying something about the freeholders of Harlequin Court being the Salisbury Trust or the Salisbury Estate, and he set this sketch aside and went on looking through the rack.
And then he saw it. It was almost at the end, and it was behind a larger print of St Martin-in-the-Fields.
It was not a sketch of Harlequin Court this time but, even to Phin’s untutored eye, it was from the hand that had drawn the menacing figure by the streetlight. It was not signed, but when he looked more closely, there was a scribbled L in the bottom right-hand corner. It looked as if it had been hastily done – almost as if, having finished the sketch, it had not mattered to the artist about adding his name, and as if somebody had nudged him to at least initial it. But it’s Links, he thought. I’m sure it is.
He laid the sketch carefully out on a small display table, and studied it more closely. It was fairly large; in today’s measurements, it was probably about double A4 size – perhaps it was A3. It was longways on – landscape rather than portrait. But it was disturbing in the way that the Liszten sketch had been disturbing.