by Jessica Mann
It would have been just as easy to spill transparent contact adhesive on Pedro Barnes’s work-table; Tamara recalled to her memory what she had heard others say about the death of Ian’s father. Tamara had been far away and had not been told, or enquired, the details at the time. Perhaps she had, in an undefined way, believed that Pedro died from grief. She knew the bare facts by now, for enough people on Forway were still chewing them over, all those months on, and it did not seem that there were more than bare facts to know. The explanation of a macabre accident had been universally accepted. Yet Tamara could imagine how easy it would had been for a visitor to spill the almost invisible liquid without Pedro noticing anything; and how easy, too, in such a storm, to bring down a power cable, leaving the laboratory hut to get gradually colder and colder.
Nonie’s Irishman would have done it; of that Tamara was illogically, deplorably, sure. He could have done it, too. But why should he? Why should Frank, or whichever of his friends had been staying at Trinder’s Castle a year before, have wished to wipe out the Barnes family?
Tamara sat on one of the filthy stairs, her head in her hands, fighting back nausea.
Always suspect coincidence. That had been one of her first lessons, both as an archaeologist and as a spy. And was it not the greatest coincidence of all to find that the three members of one nuclear family had all died unnatural deaths? Ian, Pedro, and now Freya … could there be one mind and one hand responsible?
Ian’s car had been booby-trapped by terrorists. Although he had told Tamara that he was investigating drug importation at the time, she had assumed since that he must have been concealing from her his real assignment. She had never doubted since that day that the Irish terrorists were his target, as he had been theirs. But they could have had no conceivable interest in Ian’s inoffensive parents.
Who could have wished for the extermination of the three members of the Barnes family? Who would benefit from those three deaths?
Means, opportunity, motive: Tamara had been taught that the last was the least significant.
Means? Available to anyone.
Opportunity: Who could have visited Pedro during the great gale? Who could have loosened a gas tap and insulated a door on her boat? Who could have poisoned her food?
John Yetts, who had serviced the van? Lena Gerson, who brought Freya food? Or the discredited Selwyn Paull?
Selwyn Paull, whose telephone conversation overheard on that first day would admit of more than one discreditable interpretation; who had claimed to check the fan belt on the van for Freya; who could be sure not to eat what he did not choose, as a guest in her house; Selwyn Paull, who seemed to pull too many strings on Forway; who would have known that Pedro would never support U.D.I. but, having persuaded Pedro’s widow otherwise, had the greatest cause of anyone to dread the withdrawal of Freya Barnes’s material support.
Following the stretcher party back across the causeway through the lapping tide, Tamara stood to one side as the police Landrover bounced by, splashing up a wave of spray. Two of the newly arrived security men were going to search Trinder’s Island and The Castle for subversives or explosives. But the Irishman, Frank, and Dierdre Tyrone had long since moved on from their refuge.
Chapter 23
The schoolchildren were draping bunting in loops from the roof, little triangles of brightly coloured cloth against the stone. I was surprised to see a cardboard carton full of Union Jacks on sticks and equally surprised to find that all three shop windows displayed patriotic decorations. Mrs. Windows had put up a portrait of The Visitor, framed in a plait of red, white, and blue. My father was under sedation in Thetis Lisle’s care and she said I should leave him in peace until the morning, so I set off to walk back to his house.
It was so rare to see Forway in this perfect calm and sun that I was touched by a charm to which I thought myself immune. The little patches of dank field scattered on the rough hillside, the smiling sea, even the heaps of drying turf, seemed full of some unique value that was worth preserving unaltered. But that was to sentimentalize. Tomorrow the wind would blow and the sea would roar; those shoots of corn would be stripped, that missing slate in a shed roof would be ripped into a gaping hole, salt would brown the petals of these rare orchids.
The two Yetts brothers were standing in a field now stripped of the cauliflower crop, bare stalks sticking unevenly above some healthy weeds.
“What next?” I asked casually.
“Not worth sowing anything now,” John Yetts said.
“We’ll be letting the land go,” Fred said.
It was a small field, roughly five-sided, that hard toil had once won from the hillside. Its hedges were made of the stones removed from the ground, though there were many left, but by Forway standards it was not a bad patch. I did not know what he meant.
“Shan’t be here much longer,” Fred explained.
“Why not? You don’t think the U.D.I. will work?”
“No chance.”
“Why not?”
“It never was on, not really. Kind of play acting, wasn’t it?”
“Have you thought that all along?”
The two brothers were very alike, long, angular men with dark brows. Put them in city suits or petunia robes and they would be naturals as peers or bishops. On Forway, in workmen’s overalls, they did not look as sophisticated as they evidently were.
“We aren’t soft, Magnus, just on account of being islanders.”
“But you went along with it. I mean, you let people think—”
“Did you not hear about the money, then?” John Yetts said. “All Pedro Barnes’s millions?”
“That’s coming to the islanders, isn’t it?” Fred agreed. “Equal shares between all Forway men and women resident for more than three years and aged over sixteen. That’s the words, isn’t it, John?”
They stood nodding identically. I was reminded of a cartoon in which the eyes are drawn as dollar signs. Had they been cheating Freya’s generosity, I wondered? Or had she been bribing them to go along with her schemes?
“I thought the money was going into a trust,” I said.
“Only if the Independence came off. Well, there wasn’t any harm in her dreaming. Kept her and your dad really busy, these last months, making all their plans. Ever so happy, she was.”
“Good way to go, really,” Fred said.
John offered me a fill of tobacco, but I no longer smoke, so he lit his own pipe, and I watched him strike the match and remembered what happened to Freya when she did that last.
“I suppose it might have come off, all the same,” Fred Yetts said. “If we hadn’t heard all that about your dad, Magnus.”
His brother replied derisively, “Don’t be so daft, Freddie, how could it have? You wouldn’t think the lad was in the navy and went to see the world, would you, Magnus? Just fancy being taken over by the Commies, do you, Fred? Wouldn’t see much of Pedro Barnes’s money then.”
“Do any of the islanders think—?” I began.
“We was all playing along. All except Godfrey, that is. I’m not so sure about Thetis Lisle. Now Godfrey’s a fine bloke, mind, nobody I’d sooner have in the lifeboat with me, but he isn’t realistic. Bit of a dreamer, our Godfrey.”
“What are you all going to do then?” I asked.
“We’ve put our share into a hotel in County Kerry, haven’t we, Fred? Now the Windows, they’ve got an option on a ranch in Canada, and Annie Foggo’s got plans on the mainland.”
“You have all thought ahead, have you?”
“Damned fools if we hadn’t. Way things are going, we’ll all be off here come Michaelmas twelvemonth. Course, the old ones don’t fancy the change much.”
“You don’t mind the idea of leaving Forway then?”
“Case of having to,” Fred said.
“Can’t stop progress, can you?” John said.
“My father thinks you can.”
“Sure of that, are you?” John Yetts asked. “Or did he want to hand us o
ver all nice and gift-wrapped to his foreign friends? There was a bloke called Hawker here the other day, said something that set us wondering. Could be your dad had some other plans than what he was telling us about.”
“Now there’s one who’ll be the loser,” Fred Yetts said, jerking his head at Rik Gerson’s yellow van, which was bumping over the hillside towards us.
John Yetts did not try to conceal his satisfaction. “Not lived on the island three years, has he?”
“And he paid Peter Aragon well over the odds for that place.”
“Compensation money, he said. From the Civil Service.”
“Blessed if I can see why you can’t be a civil servant with a bad memory,” John remarked.
“Except that kind,” his brother replied, gesturing at the men driving the police Landrover back to The Town. The island seemed to be swarming with them.
“Got to go through the motions, I suppose,” John Yetts said, waving a casual hand to them. Rik Gerson pulled in beside us. He leaned out to say to me, “There you are. Someone has been trying to ring your father. He got on to me. Apparently your father’s phone is bust.”
“All right. Thanks.” I left the Yetts brothers to their unprecedented and enjoyable idleness and went slowly onward.
There was no hurry. I left the track where a faint path turned downward towards a miniature plateau above the sea, known as Magnus’s Splatt. It was here, nearly one hundred feet above the usual level of the sea, that a mariner from the wrecked Thetis, two days out of Liverpool, had been thrown by a mountainous wave, a piece of human flotsam, had survived the fearful injuries sustained from rocks and sea, to marry an island girl and beget an island son, and perpetuate another island name.
The episode would be unimaginable, on this calm and balmy day, to one who had not seen the fury of the elements against this Atlantic pimple. But I had been there on days when small boats were dashed to pieces in the harbour; when the Church roof was torn from its setting and the furniture within tossed out into the wind as though the wood were as insubstantial as balloons; when iron rails were twisted like wire in the storm. Sometimes the whole force of the Atlantic Ocean seems to concentrate on Forway, and the rock-laden surge sounds like the rumble of doom. No wonder, I thought, remembering that terrifying phenomenon, that the Yetts and the Windows and the other islanders are not sorry to leave. Given the hope of a share in the Barnes fortune with which to escape from this gaunt prison, I should not have been too scrupulous either.
Chapter 24
Mr. Black was considerably more interested in the news of Dierdre Tyrone and of Frank, presumably, he said, Hooley, than in Tamara’s run-down of the events and atmosphere on Forway. She spoke to him at about the time that I was having the scales of illusion scraped from my eyes by the Yetts brothers, and of course, being what she was, Tamara already knew what I learned then. She had spent the evening in The Hotel with John Yetts, after the two of them had climbed down to rescue what they could from Freya’s van, when I was stewing in a hospital bed. “I don’t like whisky, especially with an e in it,” Tamara told me, “but I drank it, and without water. They said the island was too short of that to waste it on spirits. But they told me what they were all really planning. Actually, what they were excited about was seeing The Visitor in the flesh. None of them gave a damn about politics. Just money and royalty.”
Tamara was also forewarned about the accusations to be made about my father. Mr. Black read her the paragraph from an advance copy of the Watchman.
Mud sticks, and it is impossible to prove a negative. The defamatory statements were plausible. They were the kind of thing people enjoy believing. As I write, it is accepted by those who know, that the addition of the name of Selwyn Paull to that demonology of establishment traitors is unjustified, yet once named, never believed innocent.
He is, however, innocent of that charge. The Prime Minister has affirmed so in The House of Commons; his former colleagues have supported him in letters and interviews. Tamara Hoyland, who had cause to wonder, is now certain, as I am, that he was no more than he claimed: a retired administrator of limited imagination, who was guilty of nothing more reprehensible than bad judgement.
Circumstances had conspired against him. Carl Hawker’s accusation had fallen into ground made fertile by suspicion. It could all have been true.
Tamara and I were not the only people who had heard him, at various moments, discussing the progress of the independence plans on the telephone, but even that was harmless, not, as I had feared, a progress report to a foreign master. I found the explanation in his papers, once it was obvious that he would never return to sort them out himself. Tamara had found it some time before. She searched through them on the evening of Freya’s death, the evening before The Visit.
I had not gone back to my father’s house before a late and drunken bedtime. But the persistent telephone caller tracked me down. Lena Gerson, like the Ancient Mariner, had called me in to tell me how dreadful Freya’s death had been.
“I have never known anyone that died like that before.” Unanswerable; who had?
“You will miss her, I expect,” I said. I realized that I would miss her too. Having lost my own mother when I was twelve, I had always been kindly treated by Freya on my visits to Forway, and it was she who interceded for me when my father was in one of his frequent furies about my imperfections. He would have preferred a son like Ian, who was good at everything physical. My father and Ian had often gone off together to shoot or fish, while I stayed with Freya to talk about poetry or listen to her stories of life in a university town. I am not pretending that she was ever like a mother to me; only that I felt suddenly bereaved.
Lena Gerson’s house was in a mess. Some half-spun wool was smouldering with a horrible stink on the hearth. Through the open door into the lean-to kitchen, I could see an open, half-packed suitcase.
“Are you going away?” I asked the question out of purely social politeness, but she looked terrified and denied it so vehemently that I began to think about it. Why were the Gersons packing up? Surely those who had chosen to abandon civilization for Forway should be among the last to leave it again? In any case, the day of forced evacuation must still be far off. They could have months more of the Good Life.
She, and I, were distracted by her telephone. “It’s the same man, he’s been ringing and ringing to reach your father,” she said. “He said he’d been given our number for emergencies.” What did I expect? A guttural Eastern European voice issuing commands? A sinister Chinese one demanding explanations?
It was my godfather, Philip Cooper, my father’s old friend from Cambridge days. They had taken the same exams, chosen the same career, and for forty years corresponded across the world about the problems of maintaining British rule across the seas. Now Philip Cooper lived in mourning for the beautiful territory over which he had once presided. He was racked with guilt that he had assented to its dismemberment. When he stood there in plumes and sword beside Princess Margaret and watched the Union Flag lowered for the last time, he had felt, he told me once, as though he should draw that sword from its scabbard and impale himself upon it. I think he always remained ashamed that he had survived that day. He lived in a bungalow near Eastbourne and in his genteel comfort read about anarchy in the land he had cherished.
The vultures had not smelt Philip Cooper out yet; he was not ringing about Carl Hawker. He wanted to know whether my father had remembered to notify the Holy See at Rome in his preparations for Independence.
“So many things to think about, my boy, and nobody else to do the staff work,” Philip told me. “It will be a miracle if we manage without any omissions. Have to get the formalities right. Of the utmost importance.”
“I will tell him. Have you been in on this from the beginning?”
“Right from the start. A heaven-sent chance to put one thing right before I pass on, you might say.”
There was a fat file of correspondence between the two men. When I read the let
ters from Philip Cooper and the carbons of my father’s replies, I was reminded of two gleeful schoolboys on a spree, the last fling of a pair of superannuated men of the world.
“Mind you mention the Vatican to him, Magnus. It is these little details that make all the difference.”
I left Lena Gerson to her secretive clearing up. I couldn’t blame her if she was planning to leave the wretched Rik, now that Freya was not there to need her ministrations.
Outside their shack, the hole in which the Gersons flung their trash, obtrusively close to my father’s windows, was overflowing. They ate a lot of tinned food. I kicked some loose gash towards the heap and noticed among it a square-cornered tin, about the size of one of John Yetts’s tobacco tins, which was labelled “Fuses from ICI.”
It will be obvious by now that I am a man of inaction and have led a protected life. I merely wondered why the Gersons should have needed fuses, in a dwelling that had not even self-generated electricity, and then I assumed that my father had thrown the tin there when he discarded it. The electrical fuses frequently need replacing, with the fluctuating supply provided by a wind generator. The word meant nothing else to me. But it did to Tamara, and she heard me mention it later, when I was making some joke about the self-sufficient Gersons’ diet. To her, fuses were not necessarily connected with heating or lighting.
Chapter 25
When Tamara entered Selwyn Paull’s house later that evening, she was safe from intrusion because his son was drunk in The Hotel. She drew the curtains (crimson velvet, lined and inter-lined) to prevent any chinks of light falling into the yard that separated that house from the Gersons’, and she went through all Selwyn Paull’s possessions and papers. She was methodical, and so had he been, so that it did not take her too long. The filing cabinet, unlocked, contained the recorded history of a civil servant’s life, divided into brown folders: certificates, licences, policies, testaments, and reports. Numerous letters had been preserved and filed under the correspondent’s name: his wife, his son, his parents, his colleagues. The arrangements for Forway’s independence were neatly documented and discussed at length in the file of correspondence from Philip Cooper. By the time she had finished her investigation in the house, Tamara did not believe that Selwyn Paull was anything but what he seemed and what he claimed to be.