The Mask of Memory

by Victor Canning

  He said, ‘’Tis no use letting the bread go stale while we’re away. Wait there. I’ll get my case.’

  She said, ‘ I’ve arranged it all. You don’t mind that, do you, darling? Just this once?’

  He rubbed, the back of his right hand gently across the tip of her hose. ‘If you want to be a masterful woman – that suits me. Just this once.’ And, going to the house for his case, he thought without concern that it was easy to give in order to receive, easy to obey rather than command if the moments were right. And this moment was right. She had gone through more than he could ever have imagined would have happened to her. She had to find something now to mark the ending of a captivity and the beginning of freedom. There was no sense in not humouring her, nor hardship either. She had been a caged bird, now unexpectedly free, wings strong, pinions eager for flight. Away up, girl. Fly high, and I’ll be with you. The hollowness and artifice of his conceit made him grin and the grin was still there when he came back, suede jacket over one shoulder, his old suitcase in his hand.

  When she made a move to get into the driving seat, he said,

  ‘No. I’ll drive. You know where we’re going. You can tell the way. You’ve got a man now to do the dirty hard work for you.’

  She sat beside him as they bumped slowly up the old military road and she kept her head lowered for a while so that he would not see the wetness of unbroken tears in her eyes. And then, because she knew he would know they were there, she half turned and smiled, a tear breaking down one side of her face.

  The sight of her tears moved him strangely into a moment of confused emotion. He said, ‘The year’s too mild. There’s frogs’ spawn in the ditches two months ahead of time. And I picked up three starlings’ eggs on the field out back where they come to grub. I’ve never done that before the beginning part of February before. You want me to turn left or right on the main road?’

  ‘Left.’

  As they crossed the car park to take the rise to the main road, the orphanage crocodile was coming down to the beach, the wings of the nuns’ bonnets flapping white in the southerly wind, the hem of their robes flicking the dust. Seeing the children, she thought of him years ago in a similar file. She said, ‘What was she like, the Irish nun who named you?’

  He said, ‘She had a terrible temper if you crossed her. She came from a poor family in County Clare and she was the seventh child of a seventh child which meant that she was full of magic. She was and it was all white not black. You know what they say around here about a fisherman who’s like that? Seventh of the seventh. All he’s got to do is sit in his boat out there when the fish are running and whistle. The salmon line up to jump aboard. She had hard-worked hands. But they never seemed hard to me. And she had a knack of tucking you in at night so that the blankets kept their place against any had dream or nightmare. And I loved her almost as much as I love you…’

  ‘Oh, Maxie, that’s beautiful.’

  And he knew it was because he had meant it to be. When the time was ripe, words made stronger bonds than iron chains. But just for a moment he wondered whether at times there wasn’t a magic in words, too. You freed them from your mind to serve you, but the moment they were out, like new fledged birds from the nest, they were away to a liberty of their own which you could never control.

  They slept that night in a small hotel in a Welsh valley with the sound of a river fall drumming at their window. The hotel register marked them as man and wife under a name which they had chosen as they drove. She slept in his arms, her slow breath touching his face, and he lay listening to the call of a pair of tawny owls in the woods across the river, shrived now of all thought that fate had worked too easily for him.

  Quint watched as Warboys read first the brief summary of his findings, and then turned to the Ankers letter which was attached to it. The middle finger of Warboys’ right hand tapped in a long-intervalled movement against the tooledleather top of his desk. A browning bloom of a pot of white cyclamens on the desk dropped off. Absently Warboys reached for it, teased it into an untidy ball with his fingers and then dropped it on the desk. His finger tapped again. Finally Warboys pushed the papers from him and looked across at Quint.

  He said quietly, ‘ You’ve done well, Quint. And you’ve done it quickly.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Have you taken any action on it?’

  Warboys heard himself speaking, the Warboys who was entitled to sit in this chair, the Warboys who not for a moment was going to share the agony of that other Warboys who had taken another’s comradeship, friendship and admiration and had corrupted them. He would have to be entertained later.

  ‘No, sir. You said to keep this low-key. I could have phoned Lopcommon Barton … Commander Tucker or his wife might have answered.’

  ‘Quite right.’ Bernard, though, would never have answered. Warboys was sure of that. Had he been ill at home he would have called long ago. He had either to be dead, unconscious or absconded. He made no choice in his mind about the possibilities.

  ‘If I may say so, sir, I would suggest that a confidential call to the Devon Chief Constable at Exeter might be the way.’

  He watched Warboys run his fingers over his thin white hair. He was taking it well. But at that moment he was far less interested in how Warboys was taking it than in waiting for his reaction to his suggestion because it was the first time he had gone beyond the bounds of his brief. No suggestions, no questions until they were clearly called for. He waited for Warboys to say, ‘Just leave the suggestions to me.’

  Warboys said, ‘Yes, I think so. Who is the Chief Constable?’

  The answer liberated Quint from a grade long held. The one freedom licensed others. He said, ‘He’s an old friend of yours.’ He put a piece of paper on the desk in front of Warboys.

  Warboys glanced at it, nodded, and said, ‘All right. I’ll have a word with him. I’ll let you know. Is Lassiter in?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Tell him to stand by. You’ll have to go down. It’s Sunday tomorrow – no trains. He can drive you.’

  When Quint was gone he put in a personal call to Devon for the Chief Constable. ‘Wherever he is. If you have any trouble come back to me.’ He got up and went across the room to a wall cupboard and poured himself a drink.

  He sat at his desk with it, waiting for the call to come through. At the moment he could dispense with all concern with the present fate of Bernard. That would be known soon and dealt with. In his mind was thought only for the man all those years ago who had broken a hard rule, whose breach even now would have marked him enough to have denied him the future rewards and position which he had come to covet. One act of revolt, long dead, but hung about his neck forever … like that bloody albatross. The word brought back a host of sea images; the bird itself hanging low over the water off their port bow in the southern seas. He had loved Bernard, and had wanted him. And Bernard had known it, known the response in himself, hard-schooled it, and given it no licence. Lacking that, but not hope, he had taken him with him … forced him, subtly but ruthlessly. And all the time Bernard had wanted to escape, but had no power to match the persuasions which he could deploy. Could do nothing but make this stupid, immature, half-quixotic gesture. Praying that it would be noticed; praying that discovery would give him freedom. And Fate had thrown dust in the eyes of all around him. The hundred-to-one chance had succeeded.

  The telephone rang and he spoke to the Chief Constable. The conversation finished, he sat and waited. Memory served him well. He had made two visits to the Scottish training centre. The night before he had left, after his second visit, there had been a dinner for some local people, part social, part politic because there had been some feeling against their presence. A young woman called Margaret had sat on Bernard’s right. Back through the years he could re-create her, summoning her up from the fringes of limbo; a tall, fair-haired young woman, an unbroken, gawky grace in her body, near nervousness or shyness keeping her mostly silent, forcing a mechani
cal deliberateness into her actions as she ate and drank and mostly listened. Some sign there must have been then for him to catch, but he had seen none, regretted it now, but was far too gone in age and all the succeeding years to blame himself or to find any anger for or condemnation of Bernard.

  An hour later, the telephone rang again and the conversation was brief. When it was over he put his empty glass back in the cupboard and then signalled for Quint; Quint who would never make another Bernard Tucker, either in failure or success, but Quint who had been born destined to find some cold goddess to serve and had been rewarded by an early revelation and had made his vows eagerly.

  To Quint, sitting across from him, Warboys said, ‘I’ve spoken to the Chief Constable. The police there are expecting you. They will book two rooms at the Empress Hotel. They’ve no brief – except what you give them. They know, naturally, that it concerns Commander Tucker, but his status has not been defined nor should be. They’ll assign you a man and give you all the assistance you ask. I want Sir Harry Parks’s papers and, if it exists, Commander Tucker’s report. Nobody down there knows the nature of these. Nobody must know. All right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Quint sat unmoving. The question was in him to be asked, but he knew that there could he no surer way of marking himself than by asking it. He knew, too, that the pause while he sat, watching Warboys’ face, was limited in precise professional fractions of time. He could not take a few seconds’ unlicensed grace before he moved, and he knew, too, that Warboys was deliberately running him up to the limit. To hell with him. He put his hands to the desk edge, shaping to rise from his chair.

  Warboys said, ‘Commander Tucker’s dead. Accidental. You’ll get the details. The inquest was on Wednesday, and the burial – cremation – was on Thursday. That’s all.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Quint left the room. A lesser man, he thought, might have begun to express some conventional sorrow, surprise, or appropriate condolences. A lesser man would have made a big mistake. Warboys’ face, immobile from a swift inner freezing of the spirit, had asked for nothing. Quint put his coldness down to an icy professional concern for a highly important mission so unexpectedly disrupted, not knowing that the man was imprisoned in a glacier of grief.

  They left the hotel the next morning, and drove along the Sunday quiet of small mountain and country roads deep into the high heartland of Wales. They ate lunch at a small inn and then left the car and walked, dressed securely against the squally weather, up the course of a mountain stream until they came to a hill tarn, cradled between the shoulders of high peaks. The wind bowed the shore reeds of the lake and worked thin furrows of foam-edged waves across its surface. As though some conventional, romantic sentiment in Nature indulged them, a wild squall of rain sluicing across the waters swept over them briefly and then the sun broke brightly from a break in the clouds behind them and created across the far end of the tarn the perfect arc of a rainbow.

  For Margaret, standing at the water’s fringe, Maxie’s arm around her, steadying her against the wind that spun spumedrift off the waves into the air, it was a moment she knew she would always remember. To be held and coupled to a man by the strength of his arm, to stand with a man who loved and asked nothing of her but her love in return, was a joy not rare, but unique, which only the perfect splendour of the rainbow could commemorate. It was hers for as long as she lived, to become imperishable in her memory.

  As the rainbow died slowly like a wraith against the far peaks, Maxie said, ‘Look. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen one. For a moment I thought it was an old buzzard. But look at its tail.’

  Away to their left, wheeling slowly, low over the shore was a kite, fork-tailed, head dropped low as the bird scanned the ground, the long, slender wings motionless except for an occasional flick of the sharply angled wing tips.

  Maxie took the field glasses from his pocket, watched the bird for a while and then handed them to Margaret. She focused them and the bird came up clearly in the lens. She could see the yellow-rimmed eyes and the matching yellow cere on its beak, the faintly streaked, greyish-white head and the rich, ruddy plumage of its wings and body.

  Beside her Maxie said, ‘There used to be hundreds of ’em. All over the country. Scavengers in the filthy gutters of old-time towns. Now, they’re just here in Wales. A handful. But they’re coming back. When they do, then folk will have to look to the washing on their lines.’

  Margaret gave him the glasses, and said, ‘What do you mean?’

  Maxie grinned. ‘They build a big, old untidy nest and they line it with mud and paper and rags, girl. If you were an educated type like me, you’d know that from your Shakespeare. Somewhere in one of his plays that I had to do at school he says, “When the kite builds, look to lesser linen”.’ He looked across at the wheeling bird and went on, the burr strengthening in his voice, ‘Aye, girl, there’s something marks ever the good days in a body’s life with a special sign. ’ Tis a pity most folk don’t use their eyes to find it.’

  ‘And that’s our sign for today?’

  ‘Aye, it is that.’

  She smiled, loving him so much when his voice took on its accent, knowing now that he did it deliberately at times for her pleasure, and knowing, too, that the kite was his sign for this day, but not hers. This day, for her, had already been marked by the rainbow.

  She turned herself against him, putting her rain-wet lips against his. Across the lake, unseen by them as they embraced, the kite dropped earthwards and on the fringe of the lake took a water vole among the sedge grasses, its scythe-tipped talons killing it instantly.

  Chapter Ten

  The young detective-constable was the one who had originally interviewed Margaret. His name was Kerslake and he was waiting for them when they arrived at the Empress Hotel. He sat now by the wide window that looked out to the broad, tidal reach of the river above the old stone-built town bridge. His official brief was limited. Unless these two men decided differently they wanted to avoid police headquarters. He knew nothing about them, except the identity cards which they had produced after first seeing his. He was not here to ask questions, but to answer them and to render all the assistance he could. Curiosity he had, but he kept it to himself. He knew that in some way their presence was connected with Mr Bernard Tucker – Commander, it seemed. Apart from that he indulged his own imagination and speculations privately, but was determined not to let them interfere with his role. Others Could have been assigned to them, but he had been given the job. Promotion rested on such small preferences.

  Quint, the tall, dark-haired, younger man of the two, was reading the reports of the Coroner’s inquest and of the two police interviews with Margaret Tucker. He had a lean, hard face with dark, still eyes, a face that was cut in sharp, flat planes as though some sculptor had over-worked it almost to near-caricature. Fancy thought, Kerslake told himself; but the presence of these two men from a world which was a distant spin-off from his own stimulated his imagination. The other one, Lassiter, sitting on the edge of the bed, was older, the florid touches in his complexion instantly recognized and, maybe, giving the clue to his subordinate position. A longarmed, short-legged monkey of a man, neat as a pin, reading the reports that were handed back to him by Quint, much quicker than Quint had. Lassiter, Kerslake guessed, he would get on with easily. He would get on with Quint, too, but it would be deliberate, nicely calculated work.

  Quint finished reading and while Lassiter caught up with him, lit a cigarette, offering one to Kerslake Who shook his head gently. Finally Lassiter handed the slim bundle of reports back to Quint who slipped them into them into his brief case.

  Quint said, ‘How long have you lived in this town, Kerslake?’

  ‘All my life, sir. But I worked for eighteen months in Exeter when I first started in the force.’

  ‘What’s been done so far?’

  ‘Nothing, sir. Those were the instructions.’

  Quint said, ‘When we’re in private you
can cut out the “ sir”.’

  ‘Thank you.’ It was a cold concession but Kerslake appreciated it. It put him on their side. From little acorns great oaks grow … maybe.

  ‘Was it generally known that Mr Tucker was a retired naval man?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘Tell me what you know about Commander Tucker and his wife – other than the stuff in the report.’

  ‘Very little. Never any trouble with us. Well off. Big house at Lopcommon. No children. He came home infrequently. Worked in London. Company director or some such. Nothing specific. He was a member of the golf club for a little while. Few social contacts. Much the same for his wife. Little social life. There must be dozens more like them around here. Mostly retired or semi-retired people who’ve come here within the last ten or so years.’

  Quint gave a little look in Lassiter’s direction. The man on the bed swung his short legs and kept his eyes on his neat, finely polished shoes as he said, ‘You any thoughts a bout the Coroner’s findings?’

  Kerslake knew at once what they were after. This was no official, protocol-dominated interview. Neither of these men ultimately would care a damn how or where they got whatever it was they were after. But once they were gone he would have to live in the town. His job and its prospects had to be protected. He said, ‘ Only what’s in the official findings.’

  Lassiter looked up and grinned. ‘A very proper answer.’

  Quint gave a bleak smile and said, ‘ But not much good to us. Between the three of us, Kerslake, you can go off the record – as a policeman and as a local resident. Nothing will come back to you—’

  ‘So,’ interrupted Lassiter, ‘if it should become necessary to let us know your Chief beats his wife and has three mistresses you can say so without fear. Is that clear?’