****
‘You knew that your auntie had a cardiac condition,’ Inspector Fliques said accusingly.
‘So did a lot of other people.’
‘And I suppose you’d say that a lot of other people could have mounted the display as well.’
‘I set it up for the Parable of the Talents, then I went for a walk. The Mission wasn’t locked. Anybody could have gone in and made the substitution.’
Fliques rummaged around in his paper bag for an uneaten chestnut, and came up with nothing but shells.
‘Anybody could have called your Auntie Jacqueline’s lover,’ he said, ‘or tipped me off about the jewels at your Auntie Peggy’s farm. But it wasn’t just anybody – it was you.’
‘You can’t prove that,’ I told him.
‘I can’t prove it yet,’ he admitted, ‘but there’ll be other chances. I know you better than you know yourself, Bobby, and I wouldn’t give your Auntie Sadie more than two years maximum. And this time, you just might make a fatal slip. Then I’ll have you.’
Fliques looked around for a litter bin, and then – there not being one in evidence – screwed up the paper bag and put it in his pocket. He turned his back on me and started to walk away, but I’d got used to his methods by now, and anticipated his sudden about-face.
‘You’ll be around for a few days?’ I suggested. ‘So if you were me, you’d make sure your bike lights were working properly?’
Fliques grinned. ‘Right,’ he agreed.
‘By the way, Inspector Fliques,’ I said, ‘if you really want that promotion of yours, you could do a lot worse than drop a hint to your Chief Constable that you’ve been talking to someone who’s been through my Auntie Catherine’s correspondence.’
5
Shelton Bourne is perhaps most famous for its association with Digger Morton. It was there that Digger was raised, there that he was living in retirement at the time of his arrest and trial. Notwithstanding all his dastardly crimes, he was something of a local hero and in an odd sort of way he probably deserved his hero status, because he was, undoubtedly, an innovator – the man who turned the gentle art of piracy into something of a cold-blooded science.
The story goes like this. Digger had spent a hard day on the high seas, chasing – and failing to catch – a Spanish treasure galleon. That made it three that he’d missed since Sunday, so, all-in-all, it had not been a good week.
‘Sod this for a game of buccaneers!’ he muttered to himself as he sat in his cabin, a bottle of rum clutched in his hand, and his feet up on a crouching Negro slave girl.
There had to be a better way to make a dishonest living, he argued to himself. And then he had his idea. Instead of all this pursuit lark – involving as it did, endlessly mucking about with sails and swinging from ropes with a knife held between your teeth – why not make the victims come to him?
He chose as his new base a small island convenient for the main shipping lanes. The natives who already called it home objected to being supplanted, but by the judicious use of gunpowder and musket balls, Digger persuaded them that their souls – if not their bodies – should vacate the island, and soon he was master of all he surveyed. All he had to do now was to wait for the ships.
It was Digger himself who sailed out to meet the first one – a heavily armed English man-of-war.
‘Help me, brother!’ he shouted from his deliberately crude raft.
These were dangerous, pirate-infested waters, where even the British Navy was wary, but what threat could one man in tattered clothes possibly pose? A line was thrown down, and Digger climbed aboard.
According to his own testimony at the Chepstow Assizes, he was taken to the poop-deck, where the Captain happened to be at the time.
‘Where have you come from, my good man?’ the worthy officer asked.
‘That island over there, sir,’ Digger told him, pointing to a patch of greenery not three miles distant.
‘And how long have you been a castaway?’
‘We’ve been there for over a year, sir.’
‘We? Are there other men with you?’
‘No, sir.’
‘You’re not making sense.’
‘It’s not men on the island, sir – it’s women.’
‘Women?’
‘Twenty of them, sir, ladies travelling to the New World, hoping to marry into the colonial nobility. Great beauties they are, all of them. But no man in his right mind would marry them now.’
The crewmen within earshot had stopped working, but the Captain didn’t notice.
‘Why will no man want to marry them?’ he asked.
‘Well, sir, the shipwreck turned ’em all a bit odd. They were very respectable before, but now they can’t control themselves. Sex is the only thing that interests them.’ Digger sank to his knees and hugged the Captain’s legs. ‘Please take me away, sir. There’s only so much a man can stand. And they’re on at me day and night.’
Some of the later captains who were victims of the scam refused to land. Not a wise move! Within seconds, they had a mutiny on their hands. Within minutes, they’d taken up permanent residence in Davy Jones’ Locker.
Nothing like that happened with Digger’s first victim. He was an English gentleman – by God – not a Frog or a Dago, and if there were damsels in distress, he’d jolly well go and rescue them, even if they were a little … err … strange in their habits. This, in its own way, was as unwise a decision as the ones taken by some of the Frogs and Dagoes he looked down his stupid English gentleman’s nose at.
Actually, the only really wise course would have been to blow Digger out of the water as soon as he came into sight. But then it’s always difficult to know these things in advance, isn’t it?
As the ship sailed closer to the island, any idea the Captain may have had about trickery were dispelled by what he saw through his telescope. Three young ladies who – though he didn’t know it – came direct from a successful appearance in Blind Mary’s brothel, Nassau, were frolicking naked on the beach.
‘I shall send a party of five men ashore,’ the Captain announced to his First Officer.
The menacing mutters of the crew, half of whom were now on the poop-deck, disconcerted him.
‘Or perhaps ten,’ he hastily amended.
Most of the sailors seemed suddenly interested in cleaning their fingernails – for which purpose they had taken out their long seamen’s knives.
‘We will leave a skeleton crew of officers on board,’ the Captain decided, ‘and everyone else will go ashore. The men deserve a little leave.’
There were four longboats in all. The first, since it contained Digger himself, was allowed to land, but as soon as it touched the shore the pirates descended on it with such typical cries as ‘Charge, me hearties,’ and hacked the sailors to pieces.
The rest of the crew, finding their desire to visit the island had somewhat abated, turned their longboats around, and rowed rapidly back towards the ship.
‘Cannons!’ Digger roared.
Cannons quickly appeared from their hiding place between the trees at the edge of the jungle.
‘Fire!’ Digger ordered.
The cannon was a notoriously inaccurate instrument of destruction, but Digger’s gunners were skilled at their trade and, more to the point, were motivated by the fact that they really liked to kill other people. They scored two direct hits, and soon the sea was full of driftwood and sailors. It was then that Digger’s ship, the Bloody Shovel, appeared round the headland, causing the sailors in the remaining longboat to feel more than somewhat depressed.
‘Ram ‘em!’ Digger screamed from the shore, and though the men on the Bloody Shovel couldn’t hear him, that was exactly what they did.
By the time Digger boarded the man-of-war again, the officers had gone over the side, believing – correctly – that being eaten by sharks was preferable to falling into the hands of the pirates.
There was no
reason why the scam shouldn’t have worked forever. Who, after all, was left alive to reveal its mechanism? Yet with the passing of the years, Digger found he was growing bored with stabbing, shooting, skull-splitting and bloodletting in general. It was time to take his ill-gotten gains and retire, he decided.
He settled back in Shelton Bourne, a real local-boy-made-good. Since there were no living witnesses to his infamy – his last act as Captain having been to get his crew blind drunk on the deck of the Bloody Shovel and set the ship on fire – he could reasonably expect to live out his remaining days in peaceful respectability. And so he would have done, had not his craving for immortality made him commission one Daniel Defoe – already famous for his “true” histories of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders – to ghost-write his memoirs. Morton intended the book to be published posthumously, and indeed it was – but post-humousness came quicker than he had anticipated because Defoe, calculating correctly that the rewards of informer were greater than those of ghost-writer, shopped him to the local constabulary.
He made a good death, the Chepstow Register reported.
‘You may have found me,’ he thundered from the gallows, ‘but you’ll never find my treasure – even though it’s right under your noses!’
The crowd cheered him wildly, then munched on their baked potatoes as they watched him swing back and forth in front of them.
So Digger passed out of life, and into legend. His treasure became something of a local obsession. Several amateur historians made it their life’s work, two of them publishing monographs on the subject. Generations of young children in the village had played an elaborate game called “Morton’s Gold.” The thriving Digger Morton Society met twice a month in the church hall. And the pub – always packed with tourists clutching metal detectors in the summer – went by the name of The Treasure Hunter’s Arms.
Since I am not in the habit of going off at a tangent, you may wonder why, instead of talking about Aunt Sadie, I have devoted my efforts to describing the career of a notorious and long-dead pirate.
Or perhaps you think you already know.
Perhaps you assume that Morton’s Treasure will have an important role in this part of my narrative – you may even assume that I find it.
If that is the case, you are half-right and half-wrong. I didn’t find the treasure, although, in a way, it determined both my own future and my aunt’s lack of one.
6
March came, and no sooner had the snow melted than Sir Llewellyn Cypher launched his spring campaign. The point of attack was a small parcel of land in front of the almshouse.
‘It’s a toe-hold, nothing more,’ Sadie said. ‘But it shows us which direction he’s thinking of moving in.’
‘It’s the almshouse he really wants, you mean?’
‘Exactly.’
The almshouse, I should explain, had long since ceased to have any charitable associations. It was now, in fact, two rows of twenty small cottages, the only part of the village where the original inhabitants existed in any force.
‘Those cottages have large gardens as well,’ Sadie pointed out. ‘With all that land, Cypher could do whatever he wanted.’
‘Is there any chance the people who are living in the cottages will sell?’ I asked her.
Sadie shook her head. ‘Not from what they’ve told me. They’re mostly old couples. They were born in the village, and their dearest wish is to die here. But when they do die, who’s to say what their children will do? Most of them don’t live here – or even in the area – anymore. Why should they turn down a price which is well above market value?’
‘It could be years before the process is completed,’ I said.
‘Ten years,’ Sadie replied gloomily. ‘Ten years at the most. And then the village will be ruined.’
I’d grown very fond of Shelton Bourne, but it was not for the love of rural England that I put my mind to creating a scheme which would protect the almshouse forever. I did it because I wanted to please Aunt Sadie.
****
The idea started to form in my head while watching him on Joyspear, the popular BBC chat show which was later to make me something of a celebrity. Cypher had agreed to appear on the programme mainly because his latest development proposal, the erection of a bowling alley and cinema complex on the site of an ancient Celtic burial ground, had caused something of a furore in the press.
‘Balls to the Welsh!’ had proclaimed one of the tabloids, following the headline with an article which, though written in simple vocabulary, left me confused as to which side it was on.
‘Cypher 1, Celtic 0 – but suspicions of foul play!’ trumpeted another, the newspaper for which, a few years in the future, my late fiancée Rosalyn would do such sterling work.
‘It will be a great cultural and historical loss,’ said one of the heavier dailies, showing by its choice of verb tenses that though it was choosing to protest, it considered the fight already lost.
‘Sacrilege!’ screamed The Druids’ Monthly, though since it had an average circulation of only a hundred and fifty, its protest had little impact.
And so it was left to Cadbury Joyspear, the chubby Irishman whose salary accounted for about half the BBC’s annual budget, to bring Cypher down a peg or two.
Joyspear’s first guest, an octogenarian who’d gone round the world on a monocycle while playing Rule Britannia on a harmonica, had some novelty value, but it was plain half-way through his interview that the audience was waiting impatiently for the main event.
Joyspear looked sincerely at the camera. ‘My next guest is perhaps the most controversial builder in Britain today,’ he said. ‘Will you welcome Sir Llewellyn Cypher.’
The audience clapped, and Cypher walked down the stairs. I’m not quite sure what I’d been expecting – a giant of a man, perhaps, with a concrete mixer of a mouth and a chin you could have driven rivets in with – but Cypher’s appearance took me completely by surprise. Though he was quite tall, he was also remarkably thin. He had grey hair, combed straight back from his widow’s peak, but sticking up in small tufts over each ear. His face was deathly pale, making the narrow eyebrows which snaked across his forehead seem blacker than they really were. He had eyes of the sort you feel are watching you in a thick, dark wood on a stormy night. His nose was hooked, his mouth small, and from his chin hung a pointed Mephistophelian beard. I shuddered and found myself glancing down at his feet, just to make sure they were not actually cloven hooves.
Joyspear uncrossed his legs and leant forward slightly, a sure sign to anyone familiar with his body language that he was sliding into attack mode.
‘Sir Lew,’ he began, ‘it has been said that you’re the Genghis Khan of the modern building industry. How would you respond to that?’
Cypher stroked his beard, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle.
‘I can’t respond to it,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen one of Genghis Khan’s car parks.’
Joyspear looked a little nonplussed. ‘What I mean is, people think of you as something of a wrecker,’ he said.
‘That’s nonsense,’ Cypher replied. ‘I’m not a wrecker, I’m a builder. I take perfectly empty tracts of land and stick huge concrete blocks on them.’
‘Exactly,’ Joyspear said, getting back on track. ‘And some of the buildings you’ve erected, in what was once unspoiled countryside, have been pretty ugly, haven’t they?’
‘Yes.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Joyspear, who had not been expecting that answer at all.
‘Yes, I’ve erected some pretty ugly buildings in what was once unspoilt countryside,’ Cypher told him. ‘If it will make your job any easier, I’ll go so far as to say that I’ve erected some horrendously ugly buildings on what was once beautiful countryside.’
Was Cypher’s apparent candour nothing more than a trap?
Joyspear looked as though he thought it was.
‘Why do you do it?’ he a
sked cautiously. ‘Isn’t it just as simple to put up an attractive building as it is to put up an ugly one?’
‘No,’ Cypher said. ‘It’s always harder to do things well than to do them badly. Anyway, why should I bother?’
Joyspear switched his expression to one of mild outrage.
‘You surely have some responsibility to the environment …’ he began.
‘If you want beautiful buildings, go to Athens,’ Cypher interrupted him. ‘Have you seen the Parthenon? It’s a marvellous piece of work. And it will still be standing when all the rubbish I’ve built has long since fallen down.’
‘You still haven’t …’
‘It was built in the Golden Age of Greece,’ Cypher said. ‘Do you think this is another golden age?’
Joyspear loosened his tie slightly. ‘Err … no,’ he said. ‘Not exactly.’
‘This is an age when people grab whatever they can – and to hell with anyone else.’
‘Including you?’ Joyspear asked, fighting back.
‘Especially me!’ Cypher responded. ‘I’m the most advanced man I know. I’m right at the top of the evolutionary scale.’
‘But …’ Joyspear protested.
‘We’ve turned into a race of greedy, grabbing, sweaty materialists,’ Cypher ploughed on. ‘The ancient Greeks went to see great comedies and tragedies as a way of purging their souls. We stay at home and watch other people on quiz shows win prizes we wish we could afford ourselves.’
‘I …’
‘You get the architecture you deserve. This is an ugly age: I give it ugly buildings. And do you know why I can say that? It’s because as long as I keep my prices low, nobody cares enough to try and stop me.’
Joyspear was famous for his coolness in the face of crisis. Now, however, he seemed to be in trouble. His face had gone as white as Cypher’s, and the microphone on his lapel picked up the fact that his breathing had been reduced to short gasps. He looked like nothing so much as a man who suddenly discovers that his soul has been sucked from him while he wasn’t looking.
A Conspiracy of Aunts Page 14