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by Bill James

  Mrs Gaston took a piece of paper from her bag and gave it to Harpur. ‘The van reg,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Dad has to go, but I’ll make us some tea,’ Hazel said.

  ‘There are scones,’ Jill said.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Harpur heard from behind him the door to the chapel open and then a few quick, discreet footsteps. He assumed it must be a latecomer to the funeral and didn’t look around. He thought that would have seemed nosy and disapproving. But Iles, in the pulpit, facing towards the congregation, and about to begin with whatever in his special style he’d chosen to begin with, paused for several moments and gave a small, sympathetic smile as if to welcome the new arrival while he or she found a seat. Observing him, anyone who had never come across Iles before would decide that here was kindness, tolerance and general good nature in a top-of-the-range, brilliantly cut ceremonial uniform.

  And, based on present evidence, this would be a reasonable view. But present evidence was limited. His behaviour could be markedly unlike today’s – today’s so far – depending on … well, ultimately depending on the type of building he was in. The architecture and acoustics of big-time, ornate, steepled churches could really get up Iles’s nose at funerals. Incense, if there was any, also got up it. Whereas, if the proceedings took place in a more humble and/or workaday setting – say a mission hall or, like Thomas Wells Hart’s this morning, at the plain crematorium chapel – his attitude might be in remarkable contrast. The comparative simplicity worked a change on the assistant chief, persuaded him into decent, unfeverish, non-loutish behaviour, so that he became almost stable, and seemed well on the way to quite a spell of conditional sanity. Harpur thought the knuckleduster and cuffs might not be called for. This delighted him. He’d always felt certain that these were not the correct kind of kit for use at a funeral, or even brought ready for possible use. He had to be equipped in case, though.

  A little while ago Iles had explained his differing attitudes to these rites. ‘What I need is pricks to kick against, Col,’ he’d explained.

  ‘You’ve known plenty of those, sir.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pricks.’

  ‘In a different sense, Col.’

  ‘Which is that?’

  ‘You’ll remember from your Sunday School days how God asks Saul, bound for Damascus, to do some ethnic cleansing, why he is persecuting Him; and tells Saul that kicking against the pricks – meaning, in picture language, against an all-powerful Creator – is a no-win mug’s game, particularly as, in Middle East style, Saul probably had only sandals on with no socks. The cactus-type pricks could really get at his toes with their jabbing. The modern, non-Middle East version of kicking against the pricks would be running one’s head against a brick wall or trying to get the toothpaste back into the tube.’

  The pricks Iles wanted to kick against were not easy to define, but Harpur knew the ACC did feel that the ‘damned, self-satisfied, burly, grey, exposed stone’ of historic churches was present deliberately to taunt and ridicule him by lasting for so many centuries, and being virtually certain to last for many more. This made him feel temporary and fleeting and merely like other people: i.e., short-term. Pointedly, he’d asked Harpur once what the hell he, Iles, had been created for, with his questing mind, exemplary legs and strongly demarcated eyebrows, if he wasn’t given the necessary time.

  ‘Time for what, sir?’ Harpur had asked.

  ‘Yes, exactly, Col, time.’

  Harpur guessed the ACC meant time to get a decent proportion of people globally, women as well as men, to observe these Ilesian qualities – plus several more – and react with instant glad wonderment. Wasn’t this daft curtailment of his life wasteful, profligate?

  ‘What d’you think of effigies?’ Harpur had replied.

  ‘These are attempts to humanize some of that smug, sacerdotal stone,’ Iles had said. ‘Or, reversing the process, to turn some of that humanity into perpetual, adamantine stone. Farcical, pathetic, doomed, yet I sympathize.’

  ‘Effigies can show eyebrows pretty well,’ Harpur said.

  ‘I wouldn’t object if you suggested a job of this kind be done on me in due course, Col.’

  ‘Clearly, not before then, sir,’ Harpur had promised.

  ‘When?’

  ‘The due course. I’ll write a reminder card for the office so I can regularly check whether the due course has arrived.’

  At today’s service, Iles was now ready to begin his commentary. The small disturbance at the rear while someone took his/her place seemed to be over. Harpur had the notion it would be a woman because along with Iles’s look of genial, top-rate patience from the pulpit, Harpur also detected in his eyes, under those exceptional brows, a lingering and purposeful tit, bum, and possibly face inventorying of her. But Harpur still did not turn his head for a gaze.

  ‘Friends,’ Iles said, ‘I approve so heartily the present practice of calling a funeral not a funeral but the celebration of a life. Hail to thee blithe positive! True, some regard this as evasive and unreal. Well, who considers the real was all that lovely? Not I. Too much of it around in my opinion. Who was it said, “humankind can’t bear very much reality?” Mao? Winnie the Pooh? Bob Hope? Why should we let reality advertise itself? Others ask, if it’s such an occasion for celebration why don’t people speed up death by not looking both ways before they cross the road? But this is shallow, mere playing on words. I believe the celebratory note is especially appropriate for Thomas Wells Hart. Regrettably, I never met him, not while he was clearly alive, but I know him to have been a splendid and gifted professional. He was, I’m sure, brilliant in his vocation.’

  Harpur relaxed. There would be no Desilesian vaudeville today. None of the special irritants designed to set him off was present, although a marvellous collection of these existed. And, because he felt untroubled, comfortable, in the crematorium chapel now, Harpur could safely let his mind sneak away to consider at least one other of the ACC’s blistering hatreds. For instance, Iles’s loathing for bare stone in full-blown churchy churches tied in neatly with another of his religion based bugbears. Iles had once or twice told Harpur he detested the flagrant echo effect often produced by church organ riffs. ‘Why the hell should they have a double life?’ he’d asked. He said such music ‘blared in naves and apses and transepts and those kinds of admittedly sacred sodding spots.’ The din bounced off the ‘ugly, smirking wall slabs,’ and so flourished at least twice, original and copy or copies. ‘What we get, Col, is fucking flamboyant fortissimos, chasing one another around the holy, spired, cavernous shack’s big innards.’ Whereas he – he, Desmond Iles, Assistant Chief (Ops) – he would get only the one go at existence here below, despite his obvious distinction, poise and gorgeous, purgative rages.

  The assistant chief’s vivid resentment took in not just the echo and the church as a malignant structure but the ancient masons who had trimmed the stone to manufacture that structure and be complicit in the flatulent, multi-impact, boom-boom hymnal. He obviously felt compelled to resist, to counter-attack, when in such places. He did this by occasionally turning vastly stroppy and anti-liturgical at a church or cathedral funeral service; yes, kicking hard at times against the pricks, including Harpur – very much including Harpur – who tried to fight their way up the steps to flush him out of a pulpit.

  But funeral services away from these dire, dwarfing places hardly ever set Iles off on one of his jungle-law protest capers. Background recorded organ tunes accompanied the singing today, but it was muted, without off-the-wall repeats. In any case, a man in conventional clothes, no dog collar, but who seemed to be running things, had actually forestalled Iles – either by shrewdness or sheer luck – and invited him to ‘address this gathering of relatives and friends of Tom with some commemorative words.’ Invited him! That is, he actually suggested Iles should take over for a spell. It was surrender before the possible fight had even begun.

  This had
badly wrong-footed the ACC. He needed resistance. He needed pomp so he could rapidly and rabidly de-pomp it. He had to have pricks to kick against and as the Hart proceedings none showed – the opposite, in fact: these were people who treated him with mysterious fondness and who obviously longed to bask in his forthcoming tasteful address. The room was fairly anonymous and functional, only an ante-area to the ovens, but it did supply a pulpit. Iles would not have to elbow, punch and knee his way into it, though, or battle to hold it. This pulpit stood empty, gagging for penetration. It lacked only a banner with fluorescent lettering, ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the assistant chief (Ops.).’ The man in charge had smiled at Iles and made a small gesture with his right hand to confirm the invitation. It was as if he knew Iles, and this handover of the meeting for a while had been planned to make his exuberant, crash-ball tendencies unnecessary. Iles, in light-blue, full-dress gear and carrying his cap, nodded acceptance – a single, brief, shockingly polite movement – and had gone forward to take his place there.

  Harpur often thought that ordinary language didn’t do when the topic was Iles-centred, and many topics were Iles-centred: he generated topics. That phrase, for instance – ‘took his place in the pulpit’ – was factually correct, but it couldn’t give any suggestion of the way once into a pulpit the ACC looked exactly right for a pulpit: they seemed sort of part of each other, like a turtle with its immemorial shell, although the ACC was not in priestly robes. Iles had put his silver-trimmed cap aside using a careful, two-handed grip, as if asking a pawnbroker how much he’d lend on it, and make it quick.

  He was well into his performance now. All continued serene. ‘I have mentioned Tom’s vocation,’ he said. ‘Of course, his vocation borders on another, my own: the police service. He was a detective (private) and I am with you today in the company of a detective (police.) This is Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur, in the third row, with the knife-and-fork haircut. I wouldn’t call him renowned exactly but he does get about quite a bit, and he’s certainly not entirely without integrity. Yes, true, he was clandestinely banging my wife for a while although I never touched his underage daughter, except the flesh of our hands – palm to knuckles – her palm and my knuckles, or reversed – these might have been in momentary – or not so long as momentary – inadvertent contact when she was serving me tea and a slice of seedy cake in Harpur’s sitting room, while he and her sister were also present.

  ‘I say again, while he and her sister were also present, and able to monitor everything that took place during those innocent, exclusively cake moments. I’d swear to this on my mother’s grave, if she were dead. Life has its snags as well as its boons and we have to take both aboard.’ Iles paused, as he often did after mouthing some creaking platitude. It was as if he couldn’t now believe he had said what he’d said and needed time to put distance between it and himself and recuperate from the corniness.

  These few moments of silence were an invitation. From somewhere behind Harpur, a woman spoke, her voice low but audible, her tone sad, pained and regretful. Harpur recognized it, of course: Judith Vasonne’s, last heard at Cairn Close after the shooting. ‘Shall I tell you why I am here?’ she asked Iles.

  Iles dredged up a quick response that could easily have been taken for genuine tenderness and consideration. This was another of Iles’s showpieces that Harpur had seen several times in the past. Even so, he still felt startled when it happened. Now, the assistant chief said comfortingly, ‘I believe you are here, as are the rest of us, Judith, to mourn, but also, as has been mentioned, to celebrate a life. Positivism is present.’ Harpur saw no rage froth on the ACC’s lips despite this uncalled for interruption of his address.

  ‘I might have helped put an end to that life,’ she said.

  ‘In which respect?’ Iles replied, leaning forward over the edge of the pulpit, perhaps to improve contact with her, or get a better position for spitting.

  ‘Death,’ she said.

  ‘There is a death, certainly, and wreaths,’ Iles said.

  ‘And then to have cut him off. Cruel,’ she said.

  ‘To cut off his life?’ Iles asked.

  ‘My mobile. To deliberately disable it. He would have no one to call for support,’ she replied. ‘I know I didn’t mention this when we were all at the close. I felt too much guilt.’

  ‘Which kind of support?’

  ‘This is how I try to compensate,’ she replied.

  ‘By coming to the funeral?’ Iles said. ‘He would appreciate this, I’m certain. From what I’ve heard, I believe he was that kind of person – appreciative, and especially appreciative of someone making it to his funeral, despite possible delays en route, perhaps leading to entirely excusable lateness.’

  ‘Maybe. He’d grown a little distant, a trifle indifferent,’ she said. ‘That’s what the years can do. No good complaining.’

  Iles came effortlessly back to full, rosy Ilesness. ‘Yes, yes complain. Fight it. Do not go gentle. Let time know how you abhor it. Who was it referred to “sluttish time” – Bismark? Joe Louis? Ché?’

  To address her, Harpur did turn now. ‘Mr Iles has a longstanding grievance against time,’ Harpur said, ‘–that he’s unlikely to get enough of it. Although this grievance is longstanding by normal standards it is not as longstanding and will not be as longstanding in the future as the stone walls of cathedrals.’

  ‘Time? In fact, our best, most brilliant, time was when I ludicrously proposed a career in feet for him and then, almost immediately, exposed and condemned this as a lumpen waste of his flagrant potential,’ she replied. ‘Feet are not negligible, but nor were they right for Tom. I should have seen that sooner. Reject! Reject! Reject!’

  Iles said, ‘In his forgivably plonking style Harpur will probably point out that being, as Tom was, a gumshoe is not all that different from a career in feet, since feet have to be placed in those gumshoes if the gumshoe is to do a gumshoe’s work.’

  Harpur said, ‘Being, as Tom was, a gumshoe is not all that different from a career in feet, since feet have to be placed in those gumshoes if they are to do a gumshoe’s work.’

  ‘True, Col,’ Iles said.

  ‘If necessary I could have convinced him that there were plenty of other people, including some from the school we were both at then, who would give proper care to the community’s feet,’ she replied. ‘He need not feel guilty of abandoning this occupation before he had even started it.’

  Most of the congregation were looking towards Judith, now. Some of them, and possibly most, would only have attended the funeral because they’d heard Iles was due there and liable to go into one of his entertaining famed fits of prime obsequies ructions. They might not even have heard of Thomas Wells Hart, but Iles had become part of the city’s folklore, and information about him and his intentions circulated continuously, especially in the matter of funerals. This wouldn’t be exactly the sort of carry-on they were expecting, but a fair substitute.

  Judith was standing in the aisle. Harpur found he had her very accurately in his memory: she’d be about twenty-seven or -eight, tall, slim but busty, oval faced, natural fair to blonde hair worn to just below her ears, blue eyed, strong, short nose, wide mouth that could probably offer a good grin, but didn’t now. She had on a long, navy-belted great coat buttoned up to her throat and a black, trilby style hat. The coat fitted close and emphasized her slimness. ‘But perhaps I shouldn’t interrupt,’ she said suddenly and sat down on a nearby chair.

  The ACC quivered. All that was visible of his upper body above the rim of the pulpit had a thirty-second, very thorough tremor. In his right cheek this tremor promoted itself into an occasional serious twitch. The distinguished insignia on his shoulders bunched up like a drunk tailor’s work, then settled flat and authoritative again. Harpur knew that this kind of abrupt, knees-bent, drop to a chair or bench or settee by an attractive, young woman could deeply stir Iles, not so much spiritually as otherwise. He’d mentioned to Harpur that he could visualize in ex
act, useful detail the way her body made frank contact with the surface of a seat, although it was through a couple of layers of clothes, one of them possibly silk and in a promising pastel shade, far be it from him to mind which. His voice weakened for a moment once more, became hoarse and faint, and then recovered. ‘Please do not criticize yourself. Good interchange with those assembled to pay respects is always welcome,’ he fluted.

  ‘Perhaps we could talk better at the post occasion piss up,’ she replied.

  ‘That would be grand,’ Iles said.

  ‘No! No! Whatever has to be done and said should be done and said here while he is still with us.’

  Harpur, like Iles, had been watching Judith take her seat, Iles still with the shakes. She hadn’t spoken after her suggestion of a later meeting. The voice that shouted those words, was a woman’s, but a different woman’s; a very powerful voice, and despite the plainness of the setting it managed to get quite a decent echo. The actual spoken double ‘No’ came over as four or even six. Harpur’s gaze switched to her. This woman was sitting at the end of a row on the far right of the chapel. She’d be late forties, Harpur thought, probably mid-height, rugged, aquiline face, plentiful grey hair. She stayed seated. Like Harpur, most of the congregation adjusted their field of view so as to examine this new heckler.

  She said, ‘Do we really need such language?’

  ‘Do who need it?’ Iles replied.

  ‘All who are assembled here,’ she said. ‘Do not they – we – deserve more respect than this?’

  ‘Which language?’ Iles asked.

  ‘“Piss up”. Isn’t there a less crude term available, given the nature of this gathering today? Judith Vasonne wants to sound worldly, uncowed by the circumstances. Typical. Egomaniac. Devious. Ingratiating.’ Harpur reckoned that the period gaps between these snarled words were of exactly equal lengths as though they had been prepared and rehearsed ready. She couldn’t have known the term ‘piss up’ would be available as a prompt, but she’d probably have found some other way of sourcing her string of slurs. Who was she? And why did such hate for Judith flow from her. He wondered whether Iles, with his famous intuition could work it out. But, in any case, answers began to show themselves now.