Skeleton Key

by Robert Richardson

  Skeleton Key

  Robert Richardson

  Copyright © Robert Richardson 1988

  The right of Robert Richardson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the UK by Victor Gollancz Ltd as ‘Bellringer Street’.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s note

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Extract from An Act of Evil by Robert Richardson

  Author’s note

  Those who know—and particularly those who live in—Fore Street and the neighbourhood of Old Hatfield, Hertfordshire, should be assured that only some local architecture and geography have been borrowed. All the events of this book are invented and the various characters who experience them are of imagination all compact.

  1

  Breaking off from idly pecking at the ground, an iridescent, bejewelled peacock raised its head and surveyed Augustus Maltravers with disdain, before turning its back and walking dismissively away with the hauteur of a Duke who has been approached by some upstart to whom he had not been introduced. Watching the bird’s slightly tatty Argusian tail sweep the ground like a train in its wake, Maltravers felt that such behaviour embodied attitudes no longer appropriate as noble and time-hallowed families clung doggedly to their Stately Homes of England. Peacocks were now kept as an additional attraction for paying visitors, not as ornamental and suitably toffee-nosed pets of the wealthy, titled and privileged in their private gardens. He looked beyond the bird at a further manifestation of such diminished glories; the impressive seventeenth-century pile of Edenbridge House, formidable focus of the twelve hundred acres of Edenbridge Park, principally farmed but still patched with residual rustic woodlands and open fields.

  ‘One day, my boy,’ he promised, ‘all this will be somebody else’s.’

  Ten-year-old Timothy Penrose was unimpressed.

  ‘Please can we have an ice lolly?’ he asked, generously including his younger sister Emma in the request.

  ‘A modest enough demand. Here you are.’

  Maltravers produced coins from his pocket and the children raced off towards a nearby ice-cream van, their enthusiasm for Martian Monsters of singularly sickly flavour vastly exceeding impossible dreams of very upmarket real estate ownership. Left with Tess Davy, the established natural lady in his life, Maltravers returned his attention to the home of the Earls of Pembury.

  ‘Now that’s just the sort of little place in the country I’d like, please,’ Tess told him as they admired its domed square towers and redbrick Gothic chimneys thrusting upwards above regular grids of windows with diamond-patterned lead lighting, each crowned with a classical ornamental moulding. ‘I was made for the lifestyle.’

  She whirled round and the professional actress in her conjured up the instant impression that pencil-thin jeans and floppy T-shirt had been transmuted into a less practical but greatly more elegant crinoline. Her startling green eyes shimmered impishly before her pre-Raphaelite cascade of russet hair and Gainsborough face dipped in mock obeisance.

  ‘Welcome to our simple home, my Lord.’ The trace of huskiness in her everyday voice had disappeared, replaced by slightly over-genteel cadences belonging to another woman held in the graceful half-curtsey. Certain attitudes, however, remained intact. ‘My parents are away but they bade me make you welcome—my room’s the fourth along on the first floor.’ She raised her lowered head and looked at him again, a face of virtuous innocence framing eyes glittering with knowing carnality.

  ‘I may stay for some time,’ Maltravers replied. ‘I think I’m going to like this place.’

  ‘You’d better believe it,’ Tess told him tersely, the invisible crinoline cast off as swiftly as it had been created as she straightened up and looked back at the house. ‘How much do you think it would cost?’

  ‘More than any writer of my level of success will ever make,’ Maltravers told her. ‘Jeffrey Archer could just about afford the down payment on the outhouse, assuming they have such a thing. The Earl of Pembury would make the average millionaire look comparatively penniless.’

  Maltravers was right to a degree, in that the recently elevated twelfth Earl did not lie awake at night worrying about the odd hundred thousand pounds here or there, but the sublimely balanced architectural geometry and discreet grandeur of Edenbridge House disguised the fact that it had been undergoing a financial earth tremor as rising taxes and other troublesome fiscal legislation threatened it sorely. The roots of the problem had been planted by the eleventh Earl, who had survived for a formidable ninety-seven years, stubbornly insisting on passing the last of them in the same secure and pleasant manner as he had enjoyed the first. Subtle accountants had repeatedly tried to persuade him of the advantages offered by the law in the form of tax havens, allowable expenses and other cunning loopholes, but he had loftily dismissed them from his presence and only agreed to open his home to the paying public when forced to do so by unforgiving necessity. He had surveyed the invasion of the masses with distaste, before grumpily retiring to the West wing with his memories to devote his remaining years to the completion of his autobiography From Enfant Terrible to Éminence Grise; in a somewhat pedestrian life, he had failed to fulfil either role, but the title had come to him one day and he adamantly refused to abandon it. Increasingly reclusive and resentful, he had resolutely regarded the Chancellor of the Exchequer and all his works as not worthy of the attention of an English gentleman, and Edenbridge’s cash crisis had grown with his years. When death had abruptly turned off the old man’s heart while he was shaving one morning, his son felt sorrow but also considerable relief that some very pressing matters could finally be given overdue attention. A brief reading of the uncompleted life story offered little prospect of profitable publication and it was despatched to the less accessible regions of the Edenbridge archives. Having placed his father (fully shaved) in the family vault with proper ceremony, the new Lord Pembury had speedily called back the accountants to put his ancient house in order.

  Thus, while in the guidebooks Edenbridge House remained a great stately home, saturated with treasure and heavy with history, it was now in effect the head office of a limited company with Lord Pembury occupied with much the same sort of business decisions as the managing director of a boot factory. The previously token gift shop in the old kitchens had been massively enlarged, selling everything from elegant cut glass to tacky kitsch plastic place mats (tourists’ tastes covered a range as wide as their means and all had to be catered for) and plans were in hand to establish a safari park in the grounds. Meanwhile, death duties, the inescapable companions of the event itself, were still metaphorically standing at the gate, sternly demanding satisfaction in connection with the latest reduction in the family numbers. Negotiations concerning the State’s acceptance of the great Rubens at the turn of the stairs were at an advanced stage, with the Canaletto in the library under consideration to make up the balance. The Pemburys, who had dined for a hundred years ignoring the growing spectre of Socialism at the feast, were demonstrating great skill at learning the precautions required to hang on to the family silver.

  The children returned, each happily clutching a repulsive icy amalgam of water and disgusting artificial flavouring in vivid maroon.

  ‘There’s a joke on the stick,’ Timmy announced delightedly, then sucked the obscene object with juvenile rapture, revealing that what taste he had did n
ot extend to his mouth. Maltravers sighed; the general level of wit on lollipop sticks was dire and it seemed unjust that his generosity to his friends’ children should result in him being subjected to it.

  ‘Come on, let’s get you home,’ he said. ‘We should arrive just in time for those things to have ruined your appetite for lunch.’

  They turned away from the house and made their way through the crowds of visitors wandering about the park and gardens. Serious and efficient Germans consulted their guidebooks and meticulously ticked off items of interest they had seen; perpetually cheerful Japanese, festooned with cameras of incredible complexity though small size, looked endlessly polite over a heritage that was comparatively recent by their culture; well-padded and flamboyant Americans were vaguely overawed by so much antiquity but found the local variety of the hot dog criminally deficient; the English, who are generally appallingly ignorant about their history, were unmoved by such a richness of it. All of them looked overcooked in the burning midday sun that hammered down on the stable yard with its cafeteria and toilets, casting slate-edged shadows on brick walls like the lining of a furnace. Everybody moved slowly between the immense dark green yew bushes that lined the drive leading to the house and the roofs of the multi-coloured patchwork of vehicles in the car park were crowned with a trembling film of heat.

  ‘Are you going to the concert tonight?’ Timmy asked as they passed through the dark-shadowed, two-storey brick arch of the Bellringer Street lodge gate; a middle class upbringing had included proper instruction in the manners of polite conversation.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tess. ‘Are you?’

  ‘No way. It sounds awful,’ the boy replied, twisting his head at an unnatural angle to capture an escaping lump of rapidly melting ice. ‘I’m going to watch Superman II on the video again. It’s dead good.’

  ‘There are those who think Old English music is dead good,’ Maltravers observed. ‘Although they usually express it rather more elegantly.’

  ‘It’s boring,’ Timmy pronounced conclusively. ‘There’s no beat.’

  ‘Well, it’s not quite Duran Duran country,’ Maltravers admitted. ‘But it does have its points.’

  The boy regarded him with renewed and unexpected interest. On previous occasions when they had met, he had found the tall, loose-limbed man with the amused blue eyes in a face drawn in long, vertical lines passable company for someone so old—Maltravers was thirty-five—but it had never occurred to him that he might have some familiarity with contemporary rock bands. Despite his serious reservations about someone who actually quoted poetry in everyday conversation, he was favourably impressed.

  ‘Do you like them?’ he asked.

  ‘I prefer Tears for Fears, but Duran are very good,’ Maltravers told him. Timmy returned his attention to his lollipop, still unconvinced of the qualities of Old English music but becoming vaguely aware of the possibility that the company of some grown-ups might not actually be a total waste of time.

  They passed through the huge wooden lodge gates and back into the blinding heat, with St Barbara’s parish church on their left and the hundred yards of parallel terraced houses that made up Bellringer Street dropping steeply down the hill in front of them. The street was frequently loosely described as Georgian but in fact contained a range of styles from late Regency to post-Victorian. The bricked-in archway in the wall rising to their right had once been an entrance for stage coaches when the twenty miles or so from Capley to London had been a day’s journey and the building, now converted into flats, was one of eight hostelries which the street had contained to cater for their passengers. Now only the ghosts of the pubs remained, immortalised in a verse written by one of their long-dead customers—

  Candlestick, Kingmaker,

  Arms of the baker,

  Sun in the morning

  And parson’s retreat.

  Cricketer, virgin

  And coach driver urging,

  These are the taverns of Bellringer Street.

  Maltravers found it an agreeable thought that at one time a pint in every one—Candlestick, Earl of Warwick, Baker’s Arms, Rising Sun, Pulpit, Batsman, Maid’s Head and Coach and Horses in inebriated descent down the hill—would have resulted in a very pleasantly accumulated hangover. Lamentably, all were now converted into private houses with the exception of the Batsman which remained about halfway down to pursue its decent calling and—thanks be to God—the noble efforts of those dedicated to the preservation of real ale ensured that it still served beer infinitely more drinkable than the hideous chemical urine mass-produced in an evil flood by the giant brewery combines. The double-sided sign, suspended from the ancient, swirling iron bracket protruding at right angles above the pub door, portrayed the patriarchal image of W. G. Grace and, whether looking up or down the hill, the cricketing doctor surveyed the most expensive and select of residences. Bellringer Street was now a very good address in the estate agents’ league table; its assorted collection of weathered bricks, imposing front doors, occasionally plastered façades, varied windows and rippled roofs of tiles or slate increasing in value almost between the rising and setting of each day’s sun. Even the absence of front gardens, which meant stepping from each house on to paving slabs cracked, battered and patched like a crude jigsaw, was presented to potential purchasers as further evidence of a unique and enviable lifestyle.

  For Bellringer Street was now in Old Capley, a name jealously guarded by its residents to disassociate themselves from the post-war Capley New Town which had been gracelessly stuck on to the western edges of the original. A distant prospect of its high-speed motorway, high-rise flats and high-intensity shopping centre was visible from the top of Bellringer Street, but ancient and modern maintained somewhat separate existences, each darkly suspecting the other of either well-heeled snobbishness or a deplorable habit of not bathing regularly. Both attitudes were seriously flawed, but class prejudice is a two-way street—or avenue.

  With the commercial activity of the town moving westward with the new development, Old Capley had become something of a pleasant residential backwater, although a handful of local shops still survived in the square at the bottom of the hill, including a mail order establishment catering for those with a taste for erotic underwear and bedroom attire not conducive to a quiet night’s sleep. This undertaking was regarded ambivalently. While it was clearly deplorable that persons of irregular sexual habits should apply to an address in Old Capley for their supplies of peep-hole bras or black suspender belts, the proprietor of the enterprise, a quietly-spoken, middle-aged man with teenage daughters of unquestioned purity, was both a sidesman at St Barbara’s and a visible supporter of the Conservative Party. That both the Church of England and Tory Central Office might have numbered several of his customers among their members had occurred to Maltravers on previous visits, but he had prudently not voiced such an outrageous suggestion. For no particular reason, he was contemplating the intriguing possibility again as they walked away from the lodge gates and Timmy came up with an unexpected question.

  ‘How do you stop a rhinoceros charging?’ The Martian Monster had been devoured and the legend on its stick exposed.

  ‘I have the dreadful feeling you’re going to tell us,’ Maltravers replied.

  ‘Take away his credit cards!’ Timmy hooted with laughter, revealing an interesting familiarity with modern finance in one so young.

  ‘Not bad by lollipop standards,’ Maltravers admitted. ‘Come on, Emma, let’s get it over with. What does yours say?’

  The little girl was examining her stick in some mystification. ‘I can’t read it,’ she announced, and offered it to Maltravers who peered at it gravely.

  ‘Help. My name is Lord Lucan and I am a prisoner in a lollipop factory,’ he said, straight-faced.

  ‘Give it to me,’ said Tess. ‘Right. What goes quack and has water coming out of its head?’

  ‘She said it, she actually said it,’ Maltravers muttered in disbelief.

  ‘What?’ d
emanded the children.

  ‘Moby Duck.’

  ‘What might be called a children of Ishmael joke,’ Maltravers commented, and was contemplating the possible commercial rewards in a singularly odd field of creative writing as they entered what had once been the entrance to the public bar of the Warwick Arms, now the kitchen of Peter and Susan Penrose’s home. Standing on the corner of a rough-stoned right of way opposite the church gates, it was a house curiously piled upwards from capacious cellar, through kitchen and dining room on the ground floor, sitting room and bedroom one floor up and the two remaining bedrooms upstairs again. As they walked in, Susan, a walking advertisement for motherhood and Laura Ashley, was producing some sort of lunchtime organisation out of comfortable chaos and Peter was engrossed in the Araucaria crossword in the Guardian.

  ‘In game, I am gen,’ he announced runically, looking up at Maltravers. ‘Two words of six and ten letters, second word begins with a V.’

  ‘I noticed that before we went out.’ Maltravers looked at the puzzle over Peter’s shoulder. ‘I have been giving it considerable thought during our walk and still haven’t the remotest idea.’

  The two men had originally met while working together as reporters on the Worcester Evening Echo, sharing a passion for cricket, crosswords and similar indecent ambitions regarding the body of Susan in the accounts department. Observing where Susan’s preferences lay, Maltravers had diplomatically withdrawn his attentions and had subsequently been best man at their wedding. Although their careers had drifted apart—Maltravers into enough success as a playwright to pay most of the bills and now a first novel and Peter into something mysterious with the BBC World Service—they saw each other regularly. The current visit followed Maltravers’ completion of his book and also the end of the run of a play in which Tess had been appearing. Their plans for the week centred mainly on driving into the neighbouring countryside in search of historic buildings, preferably with attendant decent pubs, and Maltravers had also agreed to turn out for the Edenbridge Estate side in their annual cricket match against the Capley Town team. His appearance had been requested at the last minute following an incident involving an Estate player, stepladders and a greenhouse roof, which had resulted in the smell of broken glass and a liberal application of plaster to his person. It was some years since Maltravers had played, but he reasoned that the standards would not be such as to embarrass him.