Lakenheath was piqued in spite of himself.
‘Hold on a sec,’ he said. ‘You’re not quite right in all particulars, you know. In fact, at a glance, I’d say you came a lot closer to that little description than I do. Take school, I went to a South London comprehensive where the going was so rough that even socialist politicians took their children away and sent them to Harrow! I’ve never been closer to Oxbridge than the M1. And the nearest I ever got to a good regiment was when I stepped out of a taxi into a pile of horseshit in the Mall ! ’
‘Oh,’ she said, nonplussed for a moment, then went on: ‘If you expect me to retire in confusion, Mr Lakenheath, you’ll be disappointed. OK, so you’re not the creature I depicted. No, you’re worse, because you pretend to be him. Still, at least I know I’m dealing with a fraud, which brings me to that other fraud who’s just left. Diss alias Calgary. Just which is he? Diss trying to fool the police or Calgary trying to fool you? And why?’
‘I’m not really sure, Miss Gray,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t you just have misheard what Fell said?’
‘I am not deaf!’ she cried with indignation.
‘Me neither. But you do get upset, don’t you? Why’s that? Something to do with your name, perhaps. What possessed your parents to give you such a name. Zeugma ! But it fits. It means one word incorrectly doing the work of two, and that’s you to a T, isn’t it?’
‘My father wanted me to be distinctive,’ said Zeugma coldly.
‘God ! You must be the apple of his eye now!’ laughed Lakenheath.
‘My father died when I was fourteen, Mr Lakenheath.’
Lakenheath looked discomfited but Zeugma didn’t notice. She was contemplating the justice of his strictures on her. Why she was so agitated by what was patently someone else’s problem, she was not sure; something in her make-up needed anger. And she had been given some cause.
‘You’re evading my question,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ve told you that I suspect Diss is a fraud. What are you going to do about it?’
Now he gave a defeated shrug and reached for the bottle again.
‘And what would you do?’ he asked wearily.
‘I don’t know. That’s up to you,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Consult Sergeant Fell, I suppose.’
‘I see. All right then, I don’t suppose it matters much now. Yes, you’re quite right about Diss. There’s no such firm as Charnell Bearings and whatever slab-face’s name is, it’s not Mervyn Diss. Satisfied?’
Zeugma’s mouth dropped open in a cartoon portrayal of surprise. It was one thing to vehemently propagate a theory, but something else when suddenly without effort it blossomed into a fact.
‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘I mean, are you sure?’
‘I’m sure,’ he said, faintly amused at her discomfiture.
‘But how, I mean, how did you find out? Did you check with the Directory of Companies or something?’
‘No. Nothing so complicated,’ he said, getting up from the bed and taking his bottle across to the window. It was still raining heavily.
‘Much simpler than that,’ he said. ‘I knew from the very first moment I saw him that there was no such company as Charnell Bearings and no such person as Mervyn Diss.
‘I knew because I invented them in the first place.’
Never sit on a man’s bed unless you intend to lie in it, said one of Whitethorn’s more memorable dicta, falling (as so many of them did) in a category between etiquette and morality.
A hard chair was just permissible and Lakenheath had vacated his. But Zeugma’s podgy knees simply bent like the pink plasticine they resembled and she found herself sitting on the blue-and-yellow counterpane.
‘I don’t suppose there’s any way of getting you out of my room without explaining,’ said Lakenheath gloomily.
She shook her head in vigorous confirmation.
‘Well, it’s simple, really. It’s this job, you see. It’ll probably please you no end to hear that I haven’t done terribly well.’
‘If doing it well means bringing in the bulldozers and concrete mixers,’ she replied, ‘yes, that does please me.’
‘Well, it doesn’t much please the people who hired me. Sayer in particular.’
The name spread through the room like darkness visible. The rain beat hard against the window-panes and the low-powered bedlight which was the room’s only illumination seemed to contract into itself.
‘Well, at least he’s not worrying any more,’ said Lakenheath after a pause. Zeugma felt herself reacting to the apparent callousness of the remark, but held herself in check as she sensed that this was far from the speaker’s intentions.
‘The thing is, no one seemed much interested in setting up shop here. I don’t blame them really. I whipped up a bit of interest when I came here six months ago, but that died down very quickly. Things looked pretty bleak. Poly-fibre, that’s Bulstrode’s company, the man I was with the first time we met, was the last hope. After that, nothing. Endless days with just me and Miss Peat and nothing to do. Clearly I wouldn’t be allowed to continue long on those terms. I needed something in reserve.’
‘So you invented Charnell Bearings.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Diss.’
‘Yes.’
‘Just so you could keep on getting paid for a job you were not competent to perform.’
‘Yes.’
Zeugma got off the bed. She felt quite strong now. In fact she felt her strength was pretty near the strength of six or seven because her reactions were so pure.
‘I find that pretty contemptible, Mr Lakenheath,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t clash with the general picture. You take a contemptible job and in it you behave contemptibly. When this fellow turns up masquerading as Diss, you haven’t got the nerve to call him a fraud to his face. You let the game go on, do your pathetic spy act and meanwhile poor Sayer dies.’
‘Sayer? That’s not my fault,’ protested Lakenheath.
‘He wouldn’t have been on that road if you’d spoken out,’ said Zeugma. ‘Good-day, Mr Lakenheath.’
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I haven’t finished.’
But she was gone and her gentle closing of the door was somehow more powerfully expressive than the violent exits of the previous day.
Lakenheath stood unmoving for a while, then he knelt, pulled a small suitcase from beneath the bed, unlocked it and gazed down at its contents.
A broken string of beads, a silk stocking, a woman’s shoe.
For a moment it seemed the most important thing in the world that Zeugma should return and be made to understand. But the moment passed and she was just a small, plump girl of no consequence again.
In addition there now came another interruption to his attempts to become a solitary drinker. There was a gentle tap at the door.
‘Come in ! ’ he yelled, pushing the case back under the bed.
Ten seconds passed and he began to think he had mistaken the noise. Then the door slowly opened.
On the threshold stood Miss Peat.
‘I just heard about Mr Sayer,’ she said in her slow deliberate manner. ‘I thought I should come.’
‘Well, that was most kind of you, Miss Peat. Will you step inside?’
Reluctantly she put one foot across the threshold, but the other seemed firmly rooted in the corridor. Slowly her gaze ran round the room, performing a visible ellipsis when it reached the bed.
They all think the worst of me, thought Lakenheath sadly.
‘Miss Peat,’ he said gently and without hope. ‘Do you drink?’
She considered the question.
‘Not much,’ she said then unexpectedly added, ‘except Pernod.’
‘Then why don’t we go down to the bar and talk about this sad business?’ said Lakenheath. Suddenly lonely drinking had lost its attraction. It was that bloody girl’s fault. If she would only mind her own business … if she had minded her own business he might be dead.
‘After you, Miss Peat,’ he said.
9
While some have studied Monuments, others have studiously declined them; and some have been so vainly boisterous, that they durst not acknowledge their graves.
Zeugma found that a long soak in the Old Kith’s even older bath did a great deal for her physical well-being and also for her temper. Controlled scorn was even harder on the nerves than outbursts of fury, and she had felt that a chat with Charley over a quiet drink in the bar would nicely round off the repairs. But ten minutes later, she felt the frayed edges beginning to show once more.
‘So you met Crow?’ said Charley again.
‘Yes,’ said Zeugma patiently. She had grown used to this Cumbrian desire to seek confirmation of every statement made or piece of information given before accepting or acting upon it, but it wasn’t easy.
‘On the waste? You met Crow on the waste?’
This was bad, even for Charley, and she thought she discerned something more here than just the customary slow and repetitive conversational development. It was as if before committing himself to any admission of knowledge of Crow, he wanted to make sure she was a fit recipient of such confidences.
‘Yes. I met him on the waste. He raced his dog against a man on a motor-bike and the dog won and I won ten pounds which I will share with him next time we meet. Then I saw him again in his cottage and we had a long talk and he gave me something to drink, Athole Brose I think he called it.’ She repeated the information in a rapid monotone. This seemed to do the trick.
‘He’s a strange one, Crow,’ said Charley knowingly.
‘Is he? I’ve never heard anyone mention him before.’
‘No. Well, he’s not a man to talk about, not with people he doesn’t know or doesn’t like.’
So that was it. Charley was afraid of Crow, but at the same time proud of knowing about him. Zeugma settled herself more comfortably on the old well-polished bar-stool.
‘How does he live?’
‘Oh, he takes care of himself, never fret. Makes a bit of money at the wrestling when he cares to. He’s the best round here, which means the best. If he wanted to go off to Grasmere or yon places, he could sweep the board. Wrestling, guide races, anything. And what he didn’t win, that dog would ! ’
‘Oh,’ said Zeugma, a little disappointed. Crow had struck her as rather more than just a sporting hustler. But Charley was going on.
‘He built that house with his own hands, from the bottom up,’ averred Charley.
‘No,’ interrupted Zeugma.
‘What?’
‘No. There are clear signs of a previous dwelling, I would say. I mean, the very building technique and the interior layout disappeared from vernacular architecture at least three hundred years ago.’
‘That’s as may be,’ said Charley sucking in his beer with some irritation. ‘But there was nought there three summers since. No, he moves around, does Crow. Never stays in one spot long. Follows the animals, some say. He’ll never starve, that’s certain. He can run a rabbit down, or if he can’t, Twinkle can. Mark you, if he wanted a chicken or a side of bacon round here, he’d just have to ask. No one would refuse. But he pays his way. Takes nothing locally he doesn’t earn.’
‘Why would no one refuse?’ asked Zeugma. Crow did not strike her as the popular, hail-fellow-well-met type. ‘And how does he earn what he earns?’
She could have made a good guess at the answer.
‘He’s a bad man to be on the wrong side of,’ said Charley evasively. ‘And he’s good with animals, can set bones, lance boils, deliver calves.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’ asked Charley.
‘And what else? Can he cast the runes, mix a love-potion, cause a rick-fire or a death? Has he got three nipples and no shadow? Is he the local witch?’ She laughed derisively.
Charley downed the best part of a pint without his usual hedonist self-congratulatory closing of the eyes.
‘I’ve work to do,’ he said abruptly.
Zeugma was instantly remorseful. It was a mixture of irritation and the three gins she had just consumed which caused her to speak so mockingly.
‘I’m sorry, Charley,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’
‘I’m not the one you should worry about offending,’ he said grimly.
‘You mean, Crow? Well, he won’t know I’m chatting about him unless you tell him, will he? Have another pint on me.’
She smiled as she spoke, but when Charley retired to the cool recess in which he kept his cask of best, she found herself glancing uneasily round the shadowy limits of the fire-lit room.
‘Wasn’t there something about a girl?’ she called, to break the silence.
‘What?’
‘Something about Crow finding a girl’s body.’
‘Aye, there was,’ said Charley returning to the bar. ‘But naught was proven.’
‘Nothing proven?’ she echoed.
‘And them as spoke out of turn, they came to no good.’ He said it like a warning.
‘You mean Crow was under suspicion?’
‘He found her and he wouldn’t account for his being where she was found.’
‘And what do you think, Charley?’
Charley did not answer but, clutching his tankard, retreated into the shadows, so like Marley’s ghost that Zeugma would not have been surprised to see the door open of its own accord behind him.
She felt exasperation rising in her again. These men, so naive, so self-obsessed; it was hard to accept them sometimes as part of rational creation.
Crow now – he was something different. But she was far from sure what.
He had done her no harm, in fact shown her nothing but courtesy. Yet the impression that remained was one of strangeness. She was, or imagined she was, quite good at seeing what made people tick (her recent failure with Lakenheath was a misinterpretation of cause not of effect) but Crow was different. Crow, she had to admit, was frightening. And she could not say why.
It might, she thought as she went through into the kitchen to see what plain delights Charley’s taciturn wife had prepared for her, it might be interesting to find out.
Next morning it did not seem in the least interesting. She had a slight headache, having ended the previous night on cherry brandy – possibly, Pasquino used to say, the most revolting drink ever offered to a human being.
She shook him out of her head, winced and set off to the waste to let fresh air and hard work mould her skull back to shape. Once outside however, she did not head straight for her site but on an impulse made a diversion to the nearby village of Bewcastle. Pasquino had escorted her round the ruined castle and the church, both built out of stones remaining from the Roman Fort which had preceded them here. Zeugma recalled Lakenheath’s gibe about the locals not being very conservation-conscious either in the past or now.
At least, she told herself, they took what they found and re-used it. It wasn’t just a matter of pulverising the past out of existence.
It was to the churchyard that she made her way now, not pausing till she stood before the tall grey column of the famous cross. Pasquino had lectured her on it in his usual informative and idiosyncratic fashion. His interpretation of the runes on the cross’s west face, normally taken as a dedication to the memory of King Alcfrith, was radically different from all others, as were his theories on the absence of the actual crosspiece which tradition said had been taken off by a Howard of Naworth and sent to Camden, the historian, in the early seventeenth century. She wished she understood better this need of his to be different. But more important just now was to understand her own needs. Was the feeling of loss she had experienced when he had so unaccountably disappeared merely a gauge of her own uncertainties or was there something more? She had always been aware of the presence in herself of totally irrational fears; her reaction on meeting strangers was usually suspicious, often actively antipathetic, a kind of mild paranoia which was rendered harmless (so she assured herself) by her recognition of it. Upas had bee
n an exception to the rule. Something stirred in her at the memory of the man. Something about him worked a strong charm on her, it was true; but how much was this feeling related to the fact that he had come from Leo?
What I’m really asking myself, she thought firmly is, could Leo and I get married?
There it was and it hadn’t been so painful. He was her guardian, but there’d hardly be a law against it. And he was old enough to be her father. Perhaps that’s what it had all started from. Her mother she could hardly recall now, even in photographs. But her father was different. Photographs brought him back completely, and also brought back that hideous morning at Whitethorn when, feeling rather pleased that she had been removed from her Latin class before her turn to parse had arrived, she was escorted to Miss Akenside’s study and told the news of his death.
No wonder I’m slightly neurotic, she told herself. I’m lucky not to be a raging nut !
She tried to concentrate on the cross. The Old Kith, one theory went, was a corruption of Alcfrith. It could be true. But the hints Charley had dropped about Crow suggested other interpretations !
She walked slowly round the cross, pausing at the south face to peer up at the semi-circular sundial. There was no chance of its working today. The weather was milder and calmer than the day before, but the sky was still overcast. In any case, the gnomon was missing. Doubtless Pasquino would have an original explanation for that too.
He wouldn’t leave her thoughts, she realized. So, what were her feelings for him? And what were his feelings for her? She had no points of reference. The only other important emotional relationship in her adult life had been with Hasan in Cairo. When Leo became aware of this, he had definitely disapproved. At the time she had wondered whether a previously concealed racism had come to the surface, but in the end had decided it was merely the age difference between herself and Hasan which bothered him. This wasn’t very encouraging now. Hasan had only been ten years older than herself, whereas Leo was twenty. Still, rules were always for other people. She had been very hurt when Hasan had gone away and made no effort to keep in touch. At the time it had seemed like the great love of her life. Looking back at it now, five years later, she wondered how much of it had been this father-thing again. Hasan had known her father during his service in Baghdad and it was this which had first brought them together. Why someone as elegant and worldly wise as he was should have been interested in herself, she couldn’t imagine. She had decided then that it was something to do with the special chemistry of love. Now she was able to tell herself dispassionately that Arabs liked their women well fleshed.
Beyond the Bone Page 8