Corpus

by Rory Clements

  He depressed the throttle. The car was low to the ground, had power and held the road well. The drive was not quick, however, not in late November. These country roads were small, unlit and mostly unmarked. Too many ruts and potholes, some deep. Roads from another century. England had not awoken from the self-satisfied torpor of its Victorian age.

  Half an hour later, on a deserted stretch, a mile outside another typical English hamlet – pub, church, green, war memorial and duck pond – he turned left on to a small farm track, where he killed the car lights and switched off the engine. A stranger would never have found this place, even with an Ordnance Survey map, but he knew it well. He lit the last of his Swiss-made Parisiennes, then got out of the car and stretched his legs. The night air was chilly but not cold, and stank of fox. A low mist clung to the ground between the hedgerows. A quarter of a mile away, across a field, he could see a single upstairs light in an uncurtained window of a remote manor house. As he watched, the light was switched off and the house plunged into darkness.

  He climbed back into the car, covered himself with his greatcoat and settled down to wait, staring into the darkness. The only light was the glowing red tip of his cigarette. From now on, he’d smoke Players Navy Cut. Apart from the soft, slow sigh of his breathing as he sucked in the smoke, the only sound was the distant hoot of an owl. A little while later, he opened the car door, pushed the cigarette butt into the soil and covered it with a layer of earth. He slumped back into the driving seat, closed his eyes and fell asleep.

  On waking, he was uncertain at first how long he had been out. He reached to his left and dragged a small leather case from the footwell onto the passenger seat and flicked it open. He clicked on the electric torch which lay on top of a couple of shirts, then pulled out a flask of water, drank deeply and gasped before pouring some of it into his cupped hand and splashing his face. He looked at his watch. It was twelve thirty.

  Pulling aside the shirts, he found his tools: a handgun, two lengths of mountaineer’s rope, a large paintbrush, a long and curved hunting knife, its blade honed so sharp he could have shaved with it. He climbed out of the car again, without his greatcoat, and tucked the blade and gun into his belt, coiling the ropes around his chest bandolier-style. He switched on his electric torch. He was ready.

  *

  The house was easy. He had anticipated breaking a window, but a side door was unlocked and so he was able to enter in silence. He removed his English brogues and left them by the back door, then padded deeper into the house. In the pantry, he found a galvanised bucket and mop. He removed the mop and took the bucket.

  He went through to the drawing room. Years ago, he had spent pleasant evenings here on exeat from college, drinking fine wine and Cognac with Cecil and Penny Langley and their rather staid friends, plus, of course, their beautiful daughter, Margot, who was in love with him. He recalled the old upright piano against the wall closest to the garden window. Penny had loved to play Chopin to entertain her guests, blissfully unaware of how badly she performed and how out-of-tune the instrument was kept. Now it had been replaced by a Bechstein grand, which held pride of place in the middle of the room. Such a magnificent piano was wasted here.

  Slowly, he examined the familiar space, playing the torchlight across the furniture and walls, into all the crannies of the curtained room. One corner of a wall was given over to sports photographs from another age; pictures of a young man in climbing gear with peaks soaring behind him, pictures of young men with cricket bats and balls. Some of the sports pictures were draped with faded caps, won by Cecil who had played for county and varsity in the days of his youth. The torch beam alighted on a side table holding silver-framed photographs. At the forefront, in pride of place, was the Führer, his signature scraped in black ink in a downward sloping arc along the bottom of the photograph. Behind it were various other well-known faces: Mosley, Ribbentrop, the Marquess of Londonderry. The King’s picture was directly behind Hitler’s. The man smiled thinly. So the German corporal took precedence over the British monarch. The world turned upside down.

  Another table held family photographs. Aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, distant cousins, but most of all Margot, the beloved daughter: Margot on the beach in Devon with friends, Margot tanned and glowing with tennis racquet on the lawn, Margot riding side-saddle with high hat and hunting jacket at the Easter meet, Margot in the Alps with her father, Margot in her wedding gown being kissed by her bridegroom in front of the lychgate of a small country church. And then there was another picture, from Cambridge. Four of them, outside the arched college entrance in Trumpington Street: a young man in college gown, standing between Margot and Nancy Hereward, with Lydia Morris at the side. They had their arms about each other, four friends and lovers. His eyes stayed on Margot a moment. Someone had once said she was like a Newmarket filly. Jittery. Likely to snap a leg. Poor Margot.

  Turning away, he set to work. He put down the torch on a side table and removed all the equipment he had brought: the ropes from his shoulder and the weapons from his belt. He laid them on the floor, then undressed, leaving his clothes in a neat pile on a wing chair. With the residual heat from a coal fire, the room was warm enough, even naked. He slung the ropes over his bare shoulder and picked up the weapons, the pistol in his left hand, the knife and torch in his right. He would come back for the bucket and brush.

  The building was a large manor house from the seventeenth century. It had been refurbished and carpeted throughout. And yet still the boards creaked as, barefoot and naked, he climbed the stairway to the first floor. He paused on the landing. There were five doors. He wondered whether they had a maid. They had always had someone from the village, but perhaps that had changed. He would deal with that matter later, if necessary. From behind the door at the back of the house, he heard breathing – light, comfortable snoring. Slowly, he turned the handle and pushed the door open an inch at a time.

  It was a perfect bedroom, well-proportioned and airy, with a high ceiling dominated by a long supporting beam.

  His tread was soft. Standing at the foot of the bed, he directed the torchlight at the two sleepers. Cecil was on the left, Penny on the right. Cecil was lying on his side, head beneath a pillow, grunting in his sleep; Penny was on her back, her head on the pillows, her lips parted.

  He put the torch on a chest of drawers and approached her. Looking down into her placid face with its yellow teeth just showing, he recalled how pleased she had been when Margot brought him home. She had wanted to know all about him and his family. Her husband had seemed less enamoured. Cautious, distant, unwelcoming. What had gone wrong? It was the picnic by the river, of course. He smiled. The long summer had ended then and they had gone their separate ways, Margot to marry her decent young farmer or whatever he was.

  Whether it was his breathing that awoke Penny Langley or some sixth sense was unclear, but her eyes opened and met his. He saw the horror, saw her try to recoil. His face was no more than a foot from hers. Almost instantly, the horror turned to recognition and relief.

  ‘My dear,’ she whispered. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Sshh.’

  ‘It’s so late. You should have teleph–’

  She said no more. His blade sliced deep into her throat, releasing a rush of blood. Her dying hands came from under the bedclothes and thrashed the air in uncomprehending frenzy.

  From the other side of the bed, Cecil Langley, still asleep, elbowed his wife and pulled the blankets away from her as he snuggled further down. The killer leant over the dying woman’s body, his arms and chest slippery with her blood, and put the muzzle of his pistol to the sleeping man’s temple.

  ‘Wake up, Mr Langley.’

  *

  Afterwards, he went to the bathroom and was pleased to discover a new and efficient hot water system. For a full minute, he gazed at himself in the mirror. The blood was all over him – face, arms, legs, torso. Arminius the warrior, knee-deep in Roman gore at Teutoburg. His eyes were ice blue, at
avistic beacons. His hair as pale as the sands of Friesland.

  He ran a bath and sank into it, rinsing the blood from his hair under the tap and scrubbing every part of his body, then climbed out and dried himself on a large white towel. After pulling the plug, he wandered the upstairs rooms, listening, looking. Satisfied, he returned to the drawing room where he dressed quickly. Finally, he used the butt of his pistol to shatter the glass fronting the picture frames of Hitler, Mosley, Ribbentrop, Londonderry, the new King. He pulled out the photographs and tore them to shreds, scattering the little pieces in a snowstorm around the room. He took all the pictures of Cecil Langley and hammered the glass into tiny shards.

  The first part of his work was done. At the side door, he was loosening the lace on one of his brogues, but then put it back down and returned to the drawing room. From the picture table, he took the photograph of the young man and the three young women outside the college gate, slid it from its silver frame and placed it in his pocket.

  TUESDAY DECEMBER 1, 1936

  CHAPTER 3

  It was eleven in the morning, but Nancy Hereward was still half asleep. The telephone was ringing. Why would anyone be calling her? She wasn’t expecting any calls. She wished she had never had it installed.

  She crawled from bed and made her way downstairs. Her throat was parched. She hadn’t even had a cup of tea yet. Her eyes fell on the silver syringe, but she turned away. The telephone was on a low table by the front door. She picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello. Nancy Hereward speaking.’

  ‘Nancy. It’s Margot.’

  ‘Margot?’ A voice from years ago. An urgent voice. The last person she would expect to call. ‘Margot, where are you?’

  ‘Can you get a message to Mummy for me? Please. I tried calling her, but—’

  The line went dead.

  Nancy held the receiver tightly to her ear. ‘Hello, Margot? I can’t hear you, Margot. Is that really you?’ Why on earth would Margot Langley be calling her? Where had she got her number? And why had she hung up? Nancy put the receiver down. She should call Lydia. She’d know what to do. Not yet, though; she couldn’t face the day quite yet. She felt shaky. Anyone would. Her eyes alighted once more on the glittering needle.

  *

  The gyp put his head round the door of Thomas Wilde’s room. ‘Good evening, professor.’

  ‘Good evening, Bobby.’

  ‘Two young gentlemen are here to see you. They say you agreed to hold their supervision before Hall.’

  ‘Ah – Maxwell and Felsted. Send them in. Oh, and Bobby, some tea if you will. Perhaps rustle up a few biscuits. And you know what for me.’

  Bobby grinned. ‘I think I might have a bottle of Scotch secreted about my room, sir.’

  ‘You never fail me.’

  ‘Your comfort is my pleasure, as always.’

  Professor Thomas Wilde was tall and angular, with high cheekbones and hair that was a little too long for some of the stuffier fellows of this most ancient and venerable of Cambridge colleges. He had spent much of his life in England, but he was American by birth and nationality and even in winter his skin had a summery hue. He had an outdoor face, uncommonly healthy among the morbid pallor of his academic colleagues. His voice was a hybrid that seemed to have washed up from the broad Atlantic; not quite American, not quite English.

  He turned towards his old oak desk, remarkably uncluttered save for a typewriter and a two-inch thick pile of foolscap paper, the first three hundred pages of a biography of Sir Robert Cecil, the Elizabethan and Jacobean statesman, successor to Sir Francis Walsingham as the Queen’s spymaster. He pushed the manuscript towards the back of the desk.

  Though some might have thought his college rooms a little Spartan, Wilde enjoyed working here. He barely noticed the walls, stained yellow from the cigarette smoke of his predecessor, or the cracking and peeling paintwork. Apart from the desk, he had a calf-hide sofa where he read and dozed, two armchairs and a window with a pleasant view over the scuffed lawns, the tall chimneys, the dormers, the mullions and the wintry grey walls of the old court. They were airy, academic rooms, used only for work, not living. There was, too, a smaller room, cell-like and cold, with a narrow bed where he had been known to sleep when he simply couldn’t be bothered to trudge home to his modest late-Georgian house in one of the older quarters of Cambridge near Jesus Lane.

  The only other sign of domesticity in his rooms was a painting, an oil by Winslow Homer, left to him in his father’s will. Occasionally, Wilde would stop and gaze at it, at the young barefoot boy with a straw hat, standing in a meadow, staring away into the distance. The picture seemed filled with yearning, a longing for something lost or not yet found. Wilde imagined his father to have been that strong American boy.

  The warmth of the rooms, such as it was, came from a coal fire, which was stoked and refuelled throughout the day by the ever-cheerful Bobby, whose domain was across the stairs, no more than four feet from Wilde’s outer door. The gyp room had all the necessary supplies to keep those fellows and students assigned to Bobby warm and watered. Endless supplies of bread for toasting, tea, milk, sugar, butter, jam, coal for the grate, whisky, bottled beer, brandy, cigarettes, tobacco and matches. Bobby was a squat man, whose ever-present smile was marred only by the lack of several front teeth. He had once been apprenticed to a Newmarket trainer and had hopes of becoming a professional jockey, but a bad fall had left him with a limp, a mashed jaw, and had done for his dreams.

  Wilde couldn’t think of his rooms as homely; he had spent too long enjoying the comforts of North America for that. But he assumed his pupils found them welcoming enough, for they didn’t avoid his supervisions. The smoke of the coal, the uneven heat, the soot and grime on the walls; it might have been a railway station waiting room, save for the Homer painting. Well, he wouldn’t stay here tonight. All he had to attend to was this supervision and then the irritation of a meeting in the Combination Room. Then home.

  Maxwell and Felsted appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Come in, come in.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ In unison.

  ‘Foggy outside, sir,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Well, Bobby will bring us a warming pot of tea to take the chill from your bones.’

  He sat the young men together on the sofa and turned his own desk chair to a ninety-degree angle from the desk so that he could face them. At his elbow was a fountain pen, an ink bottle and a blotting pad.

  ‘Did you hear about the Crystal Palace, sir?’ Maxwell said. ‘It burnt down last night.’

  ‘Yes, I did hear of that. A great shame.’

  ‘The communists,’ Felsted announced. ‘After all, they set fire to the Reichstag . . .’

  ‘Oh, nonsense!’ Maxwell retorted. ‘The Blackshirts did it, sir. Mosley and his filthy gang.’

  Wilde raised his hand, but not his voice. ‘Enough.’ He liked these young men. They were not the best history students he had ever taught, but a long way from the worst. Very raw, with the sheen of school still not washed away. Wilde wanted his undergraduates to take the long view of history, but Roger Maxwell and Eugene Felsted’s black and white views on the politics of the twentieth century were intruding on their understanding of the sixteenth. They needed to learn to speak in measured tones and, more importantly, to think.

  ‘The BBC suggests it was started accidentally,’ Wilde said quietly. ‘I confess I have no idea. But I would also suggest that you two have no idea, either.’

  ‘But, sir—’

  ‘No, don’t speak. Not yet. For a moment, simply listen. You might learn something.’

  Maxwell and Felsted had the glowing skin, soft hands and well-fed faces of the privileged. Their hair was slicked back with Brilliantine and they were dressed almost identically in flannel shirts, old school ties, Fair Isle sweaters and bags, topped off by their college gowns.

  ‘You must learn not to rush to judgement. None of us here in this room has any evidence regarding the Crystal Palace fire,
so how can you possibly reach a verdict? All you have are your prejudices, which are worthless. It is the same with history.’

  Bobby knocked on the door and entered with a tray holding a pot of tea, three cups and a plate of biscuits. He deposited it by the fire. ‘I’ll be back with the Scotch in just a moment, sir.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll come and collect it before I go.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  When he had gone Wilde turned to Felsted. ‘Your turn to be mother, I believe. Now then, we were talking about evidence and prejudice. How would it be if a jury, instead of listening to evidence, convicted someone of murder or theft – or arson for that matter – simply because they didn’t like his politics?’

  ‘But a Dutch communist was convicted of the Reichstag fire, so there’s a precedent, isn’t there?’

  ‘Is there? Does that mean because one man with a white beard is known to be a diamond thief, then all diamond thefts are committed by men with white beards? I hope you’ll agree that’s absurd, because if you don’t then I rather think you might be wasting your time at Cambridge. History, I’m afraid, is bedevilled by prejudice. Take the case of Mary Queen of Scots. Was she a saintly figure murdered by the Protestant state and her wicked cousin Elizabeth? Or was she a murdering, scheming witch guilty of every sin known to man or woman? Maxwell, what do you think?’

  ‘I think she was a murdering, scheming witch, sir.’

  ‘Felsted?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘And which Church were you two gentlemen brought up in?’

  ‘Church of England.’ The two undergraduates spoke in unison.

  ‘That does not surprise me in the least. But I can tell you this, there are young men and women of your age brought up in the Roman Catholic Church who would say precisely the opposite. So which version is true? To discover that, we must look at the evidence.’

  ‘But the evidence was presented in court – and she was found guilty.’