She seemed perfectly confident, but it was difficult to be sure, for she wrapped herself firmly within her interest in the subject of the evening’s course. That was all right by Harry: he found it an area of perennial fascination, and it still seemed a remarkable bonus when someone responded to his enthusiasm like this. And it was safe ground.
He said eventually, “You’ve obviously read quite a lot about the issues of the Civil War before.”
She looked at him then, hazel eyes dwelling on him steadily. That sudden smile lit up her face as she said, “A long time ago. I did the Tudors and Stuarts for A-level.” When he did not respond, she said, “That was in the days before History was all primary sources and secondary sources, and children were allowed to get interested in the people who made it.”
He grinned. “Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back that way. You seem to know all about the modern philosophy of history teaching. Are you by any chance a teacher yourself?” They got plenty of them in these courses, though many of them waited until they had retired.
She laughed. “No. But I have a son of fifteen who finds it the most boring subject of all, when I think it should be lighting up his day.”
He knew he should be saying that she couldn’t be old enough to have a son of fifteen, just as he should have said her A-levels couldn’t have been all that long ago. But he never had been much good at that game. There was quite a pause; she stopped looking at him and ran her finger round the edge of her glass. Then, without looking up, she said, “I’m thinking of going back to college to become a teacher, actually. If I can raise the courage.”
“Oh, you must. You’ll make an excellent teacher.” She looked at him down the length of that fractionally too long nose, the green-brown eyes full of amusement. “I — I mean mature entrants usually make excellent teachers. I’ve taught some of them myself, you see. I’m a great enthusiast for adult education in all forms. People studying because they want to, rather than because they’re forced to be there.”
He was so afraid that she thought he had been flattering her for his own purposes that he went on at length on his hobby horse of how the British felt that they had to cram all knowledge into children at school. “It’s ridiculous. We put Othello, a play about the complexities of sexual jealousy in marriage, into the hands of sixteen-year-olds, when it demands all kinds of experience to appreciate it —”
“You can say that again!” she said with feeling. Then she realised that she had given away more of herself than she intended, and looked embarrassed for the first time. Eventually they grinned together, recognising the discomfort each had felt.
There was a silence. He was amazed that he felt easy enough with her not to need to fill gaps with small talk. But perhaps he was merely afraid of stumbling into more gaucheries.
She said, “I’m separated, you see. On the way to divorce. I need to think about a way of making a proper living if I’m to be independent. I shan’t live off my husband.” Both of them seemed for a moment to be digesting that thought. He wanted to encourage her again to plunge into training for teaching, even to offer her his own help, but he could not do so without seeming to be on the make. She said, “Are you married?”
It was the question he had dreaded during his years inside. He had pictured it coming at him from a woman, but had never been able to make that picture precise. Now it did not seem anything like as bad as he had expected. He said simply, “No. I was, at one time.”
As he had sensed she would, she left it at that. He looked down into his glass: she must not see his relief and gratitude.
Impulsively, she thrust out a hand. “Sarah Dickenson,” she said. He wondered if that was her married name, or whether she had reverted with the departure of her husband. The husband who had caused her such agonies of jealousy; somehow he knew the jealousy had been hers.
“Harry Bradshaw,” he said, shaking the hand. The touch was firm but neutral: neither of them wanted to go further with this yet.
She looked at the small watch on her other wrist. “Must be off,” she said. “You have to pretend they’re adults when they reach fifteen, but I don’t like to leave it too late.”
He stood up awkwardly. “I’d offer you a lift but I don’t have any —” He spread his arms in a gesture she found curiously touching. Against all her wishes, it made her want to mother him; she had just got rid of one man because he had the irresponsibility of a spoilt child.
“Come on, I’ll drop you off. If you don’t mind a woman driver in an old banger.” It couldn’t be far if he had come on foot to the class.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m only half a mile. I’m quite used to —”
“Come on,” she said, picking up her bag and fumbling for her keys. “It’s the least I can do. You’ve given us good value tonight, one way and another.” Secretly, she wondered why he had no car. He didn’t seem the type to be banned. Was that wife bleeding him for maintenance? She was taking his side already, she noticed. Maybe the wife was a saint, whom he had cruelly exploited.
Harry Bradshaw shuffled, awkward but grateful, behind her. The evening had gone far better than he could ever have expected. The teaching had been fine, and now this was a bonus at the end of the day. How much of a bonus, he had not yet worked out. He would analyse his feelings in the privacy of his own cell-like room at Westhaven. He followed his new friend into the cool night air, breathing deeply of it after the smoke of the pub.
The divisions within the old-fashioned bar had accorded privacy of a kind to their small party, even an encouraging intimacy after the other members of the group had departed. But the privacy was deceptive, in that it was merely visual. On the other side of the upholstered back-to-back seating, a solitary figure had heard and digested everything that Harry had said, every response his companion had made.
Not by chance, for he had followed the group of animated students who surrounded Harry into the pub quite deliberately, and positioned himself on the other side of the partition specifically to hear their exchanges. What had begun as mere curiosity was now a keen interest.
The slight figure flitted cautiously into the car park, well behind the couple who were so unaware of him. “Well, you’re a dark horse, Harry,” it murmured, watching its quarry levering himself stiffly into the battered Fiesta. “Picking up a woman, just like that. And never mentioning your record. Naughty naughty.” The shape remained in the shadows, lips curling in contempt at the initial uncertainty of the old engine as it turned into the road and began its short journey.
Dick Courtney began the short walk home. The diversion he had made after he had rid himself of Denis Frankland had been most illuminating. He permitted himself a smile that was quite invisible in the darkness.
Chapter Eighteen
Tom Harrison’s funeral was a muted affair.
The person he would most have wanted to attend was on the other side of the world. Barbara did not send a wreath; she knew her father’s preferences too well for that. Instead, a spray of Tom’s favourite spring flowers and a card saying “To a Dad who will never be forgotten” lay on top of the coffin. In New Zealand, she wept for the awkward, loving, lovable man she would never see again; especially on those Tuesday nights when she had been used to waiting for his phone calls.
Twelve thousand miles away in the West Midlands, the church was cold, on an uncertain April morning when low, scudding clouds were more dominant than the periods of brief, dazzling brightness. The dark-suited, professional men who had been hired with the hearse hurried the coffin into the church with eyes upon the uncertain skies.
The requiem mass meant more to the few strangers who chose to worship than to any of the small party who were in official attendance. Trevor and Ros Harrison had both been brought up as Catholics, but neither of them believed any longer in the rituals being conducted on the tall marble altar in front of them. Of the rest, none had been reared as a Roman Catholic. Three of them were officially C. of E., but only because it had been the most anonymo
us religious label available to them in Her Majesty’s prisons. In that context, Harry Bradshaw’s agnostic tag was ironically a more assertive designation than theirs.
It was ten days since Tom had died; the post mortem and the inquest had occasioned some delay in the committal of his remains to the earth. Ros had insisted on a burial, simply because she knew that Tom would not have countenanced a cremation. Similarly, she had overruled Trevor in arranging this requiem mass in which none of them believed, because she knew that for Tom it would have been inconceivable to depart without it. For the first time, as she looked around the high, brick-walled interior of the church, she wondered if it had been a wise decision.
Well, at least everyone from the house had come — except the children, of course. They had been far more upset by their grandfather’s death than she had anticipated, and she was certainly not risking further traumas by involving them in today’s mumbo-jumbo. But it was touching that all four of their present guests — she hated the word, but had not yet arrived at anything better — had chosen to come here today.
It was loyalty to her and Trevor, she supposed, rather than respect for the man in the coffin. None of them had had any cause to love Tom, or even, if she was honest, to regret his passing. Mind you, affection was a strange, unpredictable emotion: one she fancied she was not very good at herself. She had been surprised by a discovery of it only yesterday when she had finally brought herself to clean up Tom’s den. She had not realised until then the skill and the amount of work Harry Bradshaw had put into the hi-fi set-up he had devised for Tom. The care and attention to detail was far beyond what the exercise had necessitated. She wondered if the old man had ever appreciated the thought and craftsmanship that had gone into the installation.
Beside her, Trevor’s gaunt profile could have been hewn out of stone. He regarded the central figure on the altar, listened to the thin, half-hearted dialogue between priest and congregation, with a distaste he did not trouble to conceal. Her thin, ascetic husband might in an earlier age have been a reformer of the church’s ills, a village Luther, Ros thought. Or more likely an anonymous martyr: his capacity for irritating authority would have been ill-suited for the age of the Inquisition.
Trevor was thinking that even the man in the coffin would not have enjoyed this farewell to his life on earth. Tom had been brought up on the Latin mass, with its impenetrable ritual and its unchanging form throughout the world. He had despised this attempt to involve the people in the pews more directly with what went on on the altar. Perhaps, Trevor thought sourly, because the changes made the ridiculous improbability of the beliefs enshrined in the mass only the more obvious. The old boy had been no fool.
Suddenly, belatedly, he confronted for the first time the irreversibility of this death, and found himself fighting back tears as he looked at the coffin and its canopy of flowers. One was supposed to be composed at funerals, for the sake of others. He had never had much sense of timing.
Not many words were passed in either of the cars on the short drive to the cemetery. Fred Hogan was looking forward to the meal that had been booked for them at a hotel. He had been to only two such functions in half a century on the earth Tom Harrison had just left. It was with a child’s eager anticipation of novelty that he was looking forward to the muted little celebration which would follow. There would be a hot meal, not the ham people told him was traditional. And wines: Ros had told him of the arrangements as she made them. They were getting closer and closer.
He watched her as carefully as a lover as they moved to the graveside. She was looking pale, even ill, he thought, though he had done everything he could to ease her burdens in the last week. Perhaps the children were playing her up a bit; he had heard them crying in the evenings, the noise coming to him faintly through the thick walls that separated the family quarters from those of the other residents. Well, at least she was safe now in the house, able to plan for the future. And with any luck, he too was safe there with her.
The plastic “grass” around the grave was wet from the latest shower. The priest placed his thin leather shoes on it with the care experience had taught him to exercise, and began briskly to intone the last rituals of death. “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes… Out of the depths have I cried to Thee, O Lord, Lord hear my voice… May eternal light shine upon him…”
He was a little younger than any of the group around him except for Dick Courtney. But his thin, discontented mouth and spinsterish air might have belonged to a much older person; his fair, curly hair sat oddly on top of his small, bony face. His solemnity was professional, his sadness merely ceremonial. He had not known the man whose remains they were committing to the earth more than superficially, and anyway there seemed to his practised eye no great evidence of grief around this grave. Ex-convicts, he had heard: well they looked respectable enough, even if not all of them had been able to raise a dark suit. But probably, like him, they were only here from a sense of duty…
Michael Ashby was, certainly. Since the rebuttal of his advances by Ros Harrison, he had taken care to play things absolutely by the book. It had been easy enough to get the last hour of the morning off from Colley’s Office Equipment to tack on to his lunch hour, and he was glad of an excuse to get away. He had shown the boss ways to save money on stock control yesterday. There had been no thanks, but he had learned today from the stores clerk that his recommendations had been implemented. Sooner or later they would have to acknowledge his expertise.
He picked his way with spinsterish care over the damp earth, ensuring that his carefully polished shoes were not sullied. Then he studied the group around him surreptitiously as they bade farewell to troublesome Thomas Harrison. He didn’t think Trevor knew of his assault on Ros’s virtue, though he wasn’t sure. It would be just like the stuffy old sod to say nothing, even if he did: probably wouldn’t know how to handle it. But better be suitably contrite, just in case. Westhaven was a good billet, and he would need it for a good deal longer yet. He wondered how Dick Courtney had got to know of the unfortunate escapade.
That young man seemed to get to know everything. Time someone took him down a peg or two, showed him he wasn’t as clever as he reckoned himself to be. No doubt it would happen, in due course. Michael Ashby took the little jar of holy water and sprinkled it on to the coffin at the bottom of the grave, as he had seen the others do on his left.
He passed it to Harry Bradshaw, who stepped forward with a murmured, embarrassed prayer to pay his final respects to the man he had never really got to know as well as he would have liked. He was the only one who had recognised the old man’s loneliness in his own house, though he had been able to do precious little about it. He had enjoyed fitting a hi-fi system into old Tom’s den. Perhaps he would have talked to the old man more, if he had not been so afraid of rejection, so accustomed to the solitariness he had created like a shell around him. Perhaps if he had met Sarah earlier, it might have made him risk a little more with Tom. He was surprised to find himself admitting so much, even to himself.
But their interests, at the end, had been opposed: Tom had wanted the ex-convicts out of his house, Harry had been desperately anxious to stay there, for not even the prison visitors had pretended that it would be easy for a man who had killed to get accommodation. Westhaven was a great bonus for him, and one he could not afford to lose. He joined with Trevor in throwing the first small clods of earth on top of the coffin.
Dick Courtney was the only man who positively enjoyed the scene at the graveside. He felt no regrets for the man they were interring, just an openness to an experience that was completely new to him. Because he was not disturbed by emotion, he was able to watch the movements and reactions of those around him, building up his knowledge, checking his expectations against the reality of their behaviour.
He felt immensely superior, immensely better equipped in his knowledge of them than theirs of him. He was more and more in control. He now knew things about all of these people which they would not care to have
publicised, and knowledge was power. Things were coming right for him; there would soon be a wealth of opportunities for him to exploit. This death had been the beginning of his progress.
Dick threw first water and then earth on top of the old man. The ceremony was concluded.
The party moved away with relief towards the cars and the warmth of the hotel. The first large drops of rain fell heavily as they neared the gates of the cemetery, allowing them to run the last thirty yards to the cars. The gravediggers, with an eye on the skies, moved forward as they saw the mourners depart to pile the earth back on top of the coffin. In half an hour, only the wreaths and his daughter’s spray of spring flowers would break the harshness of the raw yellow earth on top of Tom Harrison’s coffin.
His murderer rode away feeling completely secure. The Accidental Death verdict at the inquest had been all that was needed. But to see the corpse disappear under the ground was a curiously satisfactory conclusion to the business, a visual confirmation that the crime had gone undetected.
Chapter Nineteen
Three weeks to the day after Tom Harrison’s death, his son held his first House Conference since the one on that ill-fated Sunday evening. It had seemed to him a mark of respect to omit the meetings of the previous weeks, out of deference to the spirit which had so consistently opposed them and was now gone. There had been no objection to the abandoning of the conferences from any of the other residents at Westhaven. Just as there was now no notable enthusiasm for their resumption.
If enthusiasm was not there, it mattered little, for Trevor assumed it. For once, he was almost impatient as he asked the men to report on their progress, hardly able to wait for the moment of his own more portentous announcement. He said nothing to support Fred Hogan’s stumbling account of his failure to find any employment at the job centre.
Who Saw Him Die? (Inspector Peach Series Book 1) Page 12