Send Bygraves
Page 3
Drown in leaves and lichen,
Weed-bound, moss-begotten,
Where someone waits alone
Hidden in the bracken.
Wind. Fog. Rain
After evensong
Veils the path the verger
Lately crept along;
Where the cry of nightjars
Over Crackclaw Heath
Haunts the humpbacked bridge,
Someone waits beneath.
Fog. Rain. Wind
Rattles the box laurel,
Mutes the sound of footsteps
Coming on the gravel;
Something in the air,
Something like an ax—
The sharp question: Who’s there?
The whispered answer: Don’t look back.
25.
COLONEL BYWATERS TO HIS BUTLER
Tell me, Riddley:
What is that drink spilt on the rug, that stain
Running down the wall, the furniture
All anyhow, the draperies in shreds?
And isn’t this old Snively’s walking stick?
Where is he, then? I didn’t see his Bentley.
Damn all, Riddley!
What’s been going on? I turn my back,
Go off for a week’s shooting up in Scree—
Bring in that brace of pheasant, there’s a good chap—
And then come back to this. I see
You’ve left a dead cat lying in the garden.
You try my patience, Riddley. Why’s the post
Been messed about this way upon the salver?
Bills, bills, more bills. . . . I see the hunt’s to meet
Down at the Barley Mow. That Smythe-Montcrieff
Has shown good sport. But too much wire
On Crackclaw Heath. It’s all touts, tarts, and farmers,
Anyone in for a fiver. What’s this, then?
Who brought this ax in from the shed? And why’s
My pistol missing from its case? Riddley,
Have you been at the port again? Lady
Eiderdown requests my presence at
One of her dreadful lawn parties. Speaking
Of lawns, look there. Look! Who’s that on the path
In dreadnought and dark glasses? Riddley? Riddley!
Wake up, man! Find my shirt studs. Draw the bath.
26.
WHISTLEBY’S SONG
Whistleby,
The Little Pud poet laureate,
Strikes out across the heath,
Hair like milkweed, shirt undone,
Under his arm a slim volume
Of poetry. Whistleby
Stumbles on a log, strangles
On a vine, is within an ace
Of being sucked down in Crackclaw Bog.
Whistleby’s only alive by the grace
Of God or the Queen. Poor sod.
Whistleby’s thoughts scatter like leaves:
Why has he come? What dark design
Has forced him out-of-doors, gone off
And left his linen on the line?
Or left the kettle on the hob?
Or left that sonnet someone wanted?
Or left a debt of twenty bob?
Or left the sherry undecanted?
Or left the post without a stamp?
Or left the cat up in a tree?
Or left the dog out in the damp?
Whistleby stops to write an ode
On the humpbacked bridge. Dear God!
The very stones are weeping blood.
What is that floating downstream, snarled
Amongst the rocks? A bundle of
Letters and a pearl-gray glove?
Just as he plucks them out he sees
Racing across Crackclaw Heath
A motorcyclist—leather boots,
Trilby, dark glasses, dreadnought
Flashing in and out of sight
Like a dark and tangled thought.
Whistleby’s life is one long trial
Full of thickets, snares and traps,
Dangerous comers turned, unwise
Actions and precipitate
Accidents—scrapes, lunges, falls,
Headlong crashes into walls,
Lethal potions, mortal coils
He can’t shake off—
And now he’ll go
Straight to police. We know whose plate
This lot will land on. Billingsgate
Might as well shake down stars from a tree
As try to shake sense out of Whistleby.
27.
A NOTE FROM BYGRAVES TO CONSTABLE FEATHERS FOUND FLOATING IN THE DUCK POND BY TWO CHILDREN
Constable Feathers, I see
Nothing unusual here:
The tradespeople, the gentry,
The servants, the village lout—
All of the villagers out
To murder one another
In typical English fashion.
I wander through the fog,
Pondering the red herrings:
The bloodstained glove, the dogs,
The marmalade, the locket—
Laid on to cover up
The body at the manor,
Gone, last seen wearing
Trilby or balaclava.
I stroll through the typical High Street’s
Tangle of shops and pubs
In dark glasses, Burberry,
Unrecognizable
In my comer of the Bell.
In Boots and the newsagent
I have been taken for
A dustman, the Prince Regent,
Or someone with something to sell.
Feathers, it is midnight.
Shadows throng my room.
Ice forms in the puddles.
I scratch this out by lamplight,
I wonder sometimes while
Standing in copse or wood,
Watching from ends of lanes:
Will murder go out of style?
Will the halls of the C.I.D.
Ring like singing bone,
Echo hollowly
With no one to carry on?
Will crime be shot of me?
Will England be gone?
Rubbish, Feathers! Forget it!
I think it is time to gather
All of the suspects together.
Attached is a letter. Don’t let it
Fall into the wrong hands.
28.
AT THE MANOR HOUSE (III)
We have assembled in the library.
Whipsnade’s here, and Snively’s come;
Keepyhole, Tom Spratt, Blind Willie,
Madrigal, Miss Ivers. Crumb
Hands round cakes and salted almonds.
Sneed, the butler, pours the sherry.
We’ve chatted, smoked awhile, got bored
With one another rather quickly.
The little warnings we’ve ignored:
That pool of blood that’s spreading thickly;
The strangled cries we overheard—
We’ll deal with those directly
After tea. I’ve rung for Sneed,
Who does not come, who, I’m afraid,
No longer answers every need.
The fire’s unlit; the cloth’s unlaid;
And no one’s seen the upstairs maid
For ages. We have all agreed
Something is wrong. Doors creak. Panes rattle.
Leaves have piled up in the passage;
Light fades from the hills and ridges;
Drifts of snow have come to settle
On the sills and window ledges.
All of us have read your letter:
One of us tampered with his food.
One of us struck him on the path.
One of us lured him to the wood.
One of us drowned him in his bath.
One of us shot him on the road.
One of us strangled him in wrath.
Inspector Bygraves, in the dark
&nb
sp; We watch you smoking by the gate;
In the environs of the park
There is nothing to do but wait.
Will you step from the shadowed walk
And turn, and strike, and leave no mark?
29.
THE UNFORTUNATE END OF DETECTIVE SERGEANT BILLINGSGATE, CHRONICLED IN A NOTE TO CHIEF INSPECTOR BYGRAVES, AND FOUND IN THE PLEASANCE OF THE MANOR HOUSE
Sir:
I have questioned the lot
Down at the Bell and Anchor,
The Chairman’s Arms and the George.
Something has come to light:
This stranger hereabouts
Some say is a salesman, some,
A rag-and-bone man of sorts
Was last observed in the fog
At the end of Beggar’s Alley,
Wearing a trilby hat
(Some say a balaclava),
Burberry and rolled umbrella.
Odd. The description fits
The body at the manor.
Sir:
I begin to see
What has been going on.
Perhaps we have stumbled across
Some quintessential crime
Of which all others are less
Than shadowy replicas.
(Forgive me for putting it thus
Philosophically—
You came up through the ranks and distrust,
I suppose, a Cambridge degree.)
I stroll through the gardens and lanes
Where rumors are thick as vines,
Riddles are carved on walls,
Secrets are struck in stones.
Here where the manor house
Rises unreally,
Only the wind has a voice;
Fog veils the fields. Silence
Is like a wall. Murder
Is not what it used to be.
I am leaving my report
Here on this bench by the lake
With my badge and identity card.
Say good-bye to my wife and my mates
On the force. Say, if you will,
I was walking alone on the moor,
Or say I was working too hard,
Or say I was troubled of late.
But say I was true to the Yard.
Sir: I have always been
Your servant,
Billingsgate.
30.
THE BYGRAVES SESTINA
That chap on the comer smoking a fag is Bygraves,
Isn’t it? Was it at Harrogate
Last winter when you saw him, or at Bury
Saint Edmunds, Michaelmas? Or all those times
In London’s goblin lanes or ends of empty
Alleys when you thought you were alone?
A milky light glows in the George. A lone
Dog rattles the dustbins. Was it Bygraves
Who watched you where the milk-float stopped to empty
Pint bottles by the Bell and Anchor’s gate?
Or in the newsagent’s reading the Times,
In dark glasses, trilby hat, Burberry?
The milk-float leaves. The dog trots off to bury
His rag and bone. Fog strands you here alone
By Spoorscar Cemetery. There are times
Trees, lampposts, shadows take the shape of Bygraves—
Even this beggar standing by the lych-gate,
In balaclava, raincoat, pockets empty.
You hurry by his cup of sorrows, empty-
Handed, save for what you came to bury:
The glove, the carte-de-visite—(Did the gate
Click shut?) You see, along the path, the lone
Gravedigger, leaning on his shovel. (Bygraves
Will never think to search these graves in time.)
You will be bound for London in the meantime,
Far from Little Puddley’s bleak and empty
Moors and fens and marshes—far from Bygraves.
You find the station, buy your ticket, bury
Your face behind the Puddley Post. A lone
Porter stacks the mailbags by the gate.
An hour to wait. The Bell has locked its gate.
The barmaid in the Barley Mow calls, “Time,
Please, gentlemen.” On the High Street alone,
You try the Chairman’s Arms, the George. Both empty.
But on the road, that chap in the Burberry,
Smoking the fag. Surely, it must be Bygraves.
The past is dead and buried. It is time
You go to meet him, hand outstretched. “Bygraves!”
A gate creaks in the wind. The road is empty.
31.
A NOTE FROM BYGRAVES BLOWN ACROSS DREDCRUMBLE MOOR AND INTO YOUR HANDS
Mystery. It’s all the same:
Questions without end or aim.
What will lead us to the dead?
Footprints in the flower bed.
What appeals were made too late?
Sift the ashes in the grate.
What was fatal in the mug?
Pick the fragments from the rug.
What has tolled the final knell?
Find the sexton and the bell.
What heart had become too fond?
Cast the net across the pond.
What act was misunderstood?
Take the footpath to the wood.
What mind had succumbed to grief?
Search the rocks beneath the cliff.
What was buried in the sand?
Shine the lantern down the strand.
Clues that lie as scattered as
The blown leaves across our paths.
Silence, speak. Wind, unwind.
Everything will be explained.
Epilogue
UNTITLED PARCHMENT FOUND AMONG THE RUINS OF CRUNCHLEY ABBEY, NR. MORDANT-IN-MARSH, SURREY
There was a house across the moor.
There was a house. There is no more.
There is a lady chapel where
A knight lies by his lady fair,
Their marble likenesses the bare
Memory of who they were.
There is a tale. It goes like this:
That she, for his unfaithfulness,
Killed him with a poisoned kiss.
Now every night in her distress
She must rise up from her stone dress
And walk the moor, till she confess.
So few there are in earth or heaven
To whom the power to shrive is given,
Across the moor by conscience driven,
Three hundred years she’s walked unshriven;
Her only friends are owl and raven,
And morning light, her only haven.
The rattle of October leaves
Covers their twin effigies.
A wind blows through the nave and moves
The message in her marble gloves,
A scrap of paper that she saves
In hopes you’ll find it:
Read on for a preview of The Way of All Fish
by Martha Grimes
The sequel to her bestselling novel Foul Matter
The Way of All Fish Coming January 2014 from Scribner Books
[Click here to pre-order The Way of All Fish]
1
They came in, hidden in coats, hats pulled over their eyes, two stubby hoods like refugees from a George Raft film, icy-eyed and tight-lipped. They opened their overcoats, swung up Uzis hanging from shoulder holsters, and sprayed the room back and forth in watery arcs. There were twenty or so customers who had been sitting in the café—several couples, two businessmen in pinstripes, a few solo diners—some now standing, some screaming, some crawling crablike beneath their tables.
Oddly, given all the cordite misting the air like cheap champagne, the customers didn’t get shot; it was the owner’s aquarium, situated between the bar and the dining area, that exploded. Big glass panels slid and slipped more like icebergs calving than glass breaking, the thirty- or forty-odd fish
within pouring forth on their little tsunami of water and flopping around in the puddles on the floor. A third of them were clown fish.
All of that took four seconds.
In the next four seconds, Candy and Karl had their weapons drawn—Karl from his shoulder holster, Candy from his belt, Candy down on one knee, Karl standing. Gunfire was exchanged before the two George Rafts backed toward the door and, still firing, finally turned and hoofed it fast into the dark.
Candy and Karl stared at each other. “Fuck was that?” exclaimed Candy, rising from his kneeling position.
They holstered their weapons as efficiently as if they’d drawn them like the cops they were not. They checked out the customers with their usual mercurial shrewdness, labeling them for future reference (if need be); a far table, the two suits with cells now clamped to their busy ears, calling 911 or their stockbrokers; an elderly couple, she weeping, he patting her, stood nearby; two tables shoved together that had been surrounded by a party of nuts probably from Brooklyn or Jersey, hyena-like in their braying laughter, had been sitting at two tables pulled together but now all still were under the table; a couple of other business-types with Bluetooth devices stationed over their ears talked to each other or their Tokyo counterparts. A blond woman or girl, sitting alone eating spaghetti and reading something, book or magazine; a dark-haired woman with a LeSportsac slung over the back of her chair, who’d been talking on her Droid all the while she ate; and a party of four on a girls’ night out, though they’d never see girlhood again. Twenty tables, all in all, a few empty.
All of that ruin in less than a minute.
* *
The Clown Fish Café was nothing special, a dark little place in a narrow street off Lexington Avenue, its cavelike look the effect of bad lighting, rather than the owner’s artistic flair. A few wall sconces were set in the stone walls, meant apparently to simulate a coral reef. Candles, squat and fat, seeming to begrudge the room their light, were set in little iron cages with wire mesh over their tops, flames hardly flickering, as if light were a treasure they refused to give up. They might as well have been at the bottom of the sea.
Now these brightly colored fish—clown fish, tangs, angelfish of neon blue and sun-bright yellow—were drawing last breaths on the floor until one of the customers, the blond girl or woman who had been eating spaghetti, tossed the remnants of red wine from her glass, scooped up water and added one of the fish to her wineglass.
Seeing this, Candy grabbed up a water pitcher, dipped up what he could of water, and bullied a clownfish into the pitcher.