by F. G. Cottam
‘More or less I am. I can see where this is going. It’s multi-agency involvement. It will be argued that his problems were ignored, that he was a victim of official incompetence and neglect.’
‘He was involved with eight separate agencies. That’s become nine if you count us. Ten if you include his legal aid defence.’
‘How many trained and qualified and salaried individuals are we talking about?’
‘I would estimate between twenty and thirty. He’s at the sharp end of a growing industry.’
James nodded, licking rime from his salty upper lip. He was thinking about council and social services jobs that were really sinecures and the pension provision that went with them. He was thinking of his taxes paying for all this and justice never being delivered as a rightful consequence of the damage done to his innocent son.
‘What does she do for a living, the perpetrator’s mother?’
McCabe said, ‘Don’t make me laugh.’
‘His father?’
‘His father was killed in Mogadishu in a firefight four years ago. He earned his living as a warlord.’
‘What do you think the chances are of it coming to court?’
‘The odds have dropped to about sixty–forty against. I’m sorry, Mr Greer.’
‘Thanks for trying.’
‘It’s my job.’
‘It’s eleven, by the way.’
‘Come again?’
‘The number of agencies involved is eleven. A hospital surgeon and his theatre team were involved in patching up my boy. He hasn’t needed the treatment for psychological trauma they offered to provide, but it is there if required. The case notes have been compiled and a psychiatric counsellor briefed. The NHS makes it eleven.’
‘You’re right. I stand corrected.’
James looked out over the glittering sea. ‘How does it make you feel, all this stuff you have to deal with, Detective Sergeant?’
‘Where this case is concerned? Like somebody drowning,’ McCabe said.
The weather was on the turn by the time the evening’s festivities began at the pub. The wind had changed and the atmosphere had grown heavy and humid and the sky had become the cloud-dense colour of impending rain. The troupe of morris men performed their enigmatic ritual on the cobbled square outside the pub, under the stony gaze and bare-knuckled guard of Gregory Abraham, the old prizefighter.
They danced to the music of an accordion and a fiddle, expertly clashing the sticks they carried, weaving in and out of clusters in their white costumes and black top hats, bright with tied ribbons and pinned rosettes and slung baldricks, bell pads jingling at their knees and their iron-shod boots ringing on the ground.
For one dance they carried handkerchiefs and for another swords that looked like naval sabres from Nelson’s time. Perhaps they were, thought James, who watched the spectacle drinking a glass of ale and wondering what its origin was. The fact was that nobody really knew. All sorts of theories existed about the origins of morris and mummery rites but they had been established without their creation being properly chronicled. They were folk traditions, peasant in origin, and their mysteries defied scholarship as a consequence.
The tempo of the music was sufficiently rapid for dance and there was a definite enough rhythm to it, but there was also something plangent about the sound. Perhaps it was the instruments, James thought. The accordion had its avuncular wheeze and was redolent of sea shanties. Stringed instruments had a way of engaging the emotions though and the violin possessed a dark tonality. The effect of the two instruments combined was curiously wistful, melancholy almost. It sounded very Celtic. It could have been music shaped by a tradition that existed nowhere else on earth.
There was something about the costume and choreography that very quickly made a company of the dancers, so that it became impossible to view them really as individuals. They possessed a collective character. They were a skipping, clattering, jingling pageant. They also had about them, in their separateness and insularity, something slightly ominous. Some of the dances seemed warlike.
Fat raindrops began to fall in what soon became a persistent downpour just as the dancing finished. The morris men hurried inside the pub, their thirst fully justified by their exertions. James went into the pub in their wake and was standing at the bar ordering a fresh drink when the Penmarricks arrived and greeted him like an old friend. Curiously, on only his second full day in the village, it was almost what he felt.
Elizabeth Penmarrick seemed to have totally overcome her shyness of the previous evening. Her smile was broad and relaxed and she kissed him on the cheek in saying hello. He thought that tonight she looked like an advert for Laura Ashley from the pages of a Sunday supplement published in about 1975. Her husband was dressed like one of those louche former public schoolboys who managed rock bands in the same decade. He bought them a drink and the three of them toasted one another silently.
‘I’m going to introduce you to a few people,’ Richard said, looking around. The interior of the pub was atmospheric with lantern light and Charlie Abraham had lit a log fire in the large grate of the saloon bar. It was June and not cold, but the flames added to the cheery mood of togetherness and warmth as the rain lashed and the wind whipped up in strength around the building.
‘Before I do that, though, I want to show you something.’
James followed him through the throng to the big picture window overlooking the bay, thinking that the Leeward did excellent business. Then again it was a special night, some sort of celebration of something. He would have to remember to ask the Penmarricks precisely what.
Beyond the window, beneath louring cloud, the sea boiled with elemental fury. It was green and glimmered and its white spume appeared yellowy in spires and peaks and the troughs of the sea were dark, lurching chasms. And it all stretched, this anarchic, watery violence, to a dim horizon.
‘I hope that glass is thick,’ James said, awed.
Beside him, Richard chuckled. ‘It is. But a storm such as this is a reminder that we live at the mercy of the world. Our lives are grace and favour existences. At least, they are while nature rules us.’
‘Let’s hope she goes on doing so benevolently,’ James said.
‘Nature’s benevolence is a relative thing,’ Richard said. ‘It would not seem benevolent tonight if you were out there in a boat.’
‘But we are not. We’re in here, in comfort and warmth.’
‘And conviviality,’ Richard said, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘And we are behind our goodly landlord’s glass and Charlie Abraham is risk averse and I can assure you that the glass is very thick indeed.’
‘So we can stand here and enjoy the view.’
‘Only at the risk of neglecting my wife,’ Richard said.
James looked back across the bar. Elizabeth Penmarrick did not look terribly neglected. She was standing at the centre of a group of people and looked deeply engaged in conversation with them.
‘Come,’ Richard said. ‘There are several people you should meet.’
The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. That had been Lillian’s phrase about the people she would have expected to populate the Brodmaw Bay of her Chubbly & Cruff book illustrations. He was reminded of it as Richard guided him back to the group. But in truth, none of them looked like tradesmen and when he was introduced to them, none of them was.
Philip Teal was the headmaster of the village secondary school. He looked reassuringly tweedy and wore a grey goatee beard and James estimated was in his late thirties, though he contrived to look older. His school, the Mount, was a co-educational secondary and the one, all being well, Jack would attend. He told James to consult the Ofsted report online if he had any doubts concerning the resources or academic merit of a school in so small a settlement as Brodmaw. Then, with an enthusiasm James thought charming as well as contagious, he talked about the after-school activities the school ran and promoted.
Martin Sharp owned the chandlery. James was f
rank with him about his own almost complete lack of sailing knowledge or skills. Martin said that the children should be encouraged to learn to sail because the benefits of doing so were considerable in terms of building confidence and independence.
‘And they will enjoy it,’ he said, ‘and so will you.’ Then he cautioned James to consult him before buying a boat from anyone in the locality. ‘I’ll secure you the friends and family discount,’ he said with a wink. Physically, Martin reminded James of a front-row rugby forward. He was warm and friendly, but possessed a stolid power in his thick neck and the broad shoulders above his massive chest.
Angela Heart was the principal of the primary school Olivia would attend. James did not think that she looked very much at all like an educator. She was svelte and stylish in a black pencil skirt and a matching black jacket and crimson lipstick. There was a femme fatale quality to her that seemed somewhat at odds with mixing poster paint and setting homework assignments. She was in her early forties, a few years older than he was, James supposed and the sort of woman he thought most men would be intrigued by. He put the apparent clash between her appearance and occupation down to male prejudice. But he found her green, appraising eyes totally alluring.
The last person he was formally introduced to in the Leeward that evening was Ben Tamworth, owner of the principal building firm in the region. In fact, Richard said, it was the only building firm in the region.
‘Ben will take proper care of all your requirements, should you want or need anything done to Topper’s Reach. That’s assuming of course that you and Lillian take the decision to live there.’
‘I’ll give you a competitive rate on any work you put my way, James.’
James thought this unlikely. Richard had just told him Ben enjoyed a local monopoly. But he did not challenge or contradict what Ben had said. The blue eyes in the builder’s broad, tanned, freckled face looked entirely honest. He did not wish to alienate the man whose workforce might be called out to do emergency repairs on his roof in weather like that currently raging outside. As if to remind him of the fact, there was a volley of thunder then that sang and whined through the pub rafters and made the polished glasses crowning the bar shiver on their shelves.
The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. Later, reminiscing about that evening in the Leeward, James would ponder not on who he had, but on who he had not met. Various people were pointed out to him. There was the boatbuilder, Billy Jasper, florid over a pint among the rest of the morris troupe. There was Michael Carney, a local poet and an authority on the short life and poignant times of Adam Gleason. There was the pharmacist, Rachel Flood, and Bella Worth who edited the Brodmaw Clarion.
All the leading lights of the little coastal community seemed to be in the Leeward that night, packing Charlie Abraham’s pub to its oak rafters with boozy conviviality. The good cheer was almost palpable. The pub that evening was the village itself in gossipy, backslapping, flirtatious, chummy microcosm. And there was no man of the cloth present. There was not a dog collar anywhere to signal the vicar or priest whose job it would be to minister to the spiritual needs of the village and its inhabitants. This did not strike James as odd or unusual at the time. He was far too busy enjoying himself. Later, he thought of it as an omission so glaring he wondered how he could have missed it. But by then, it was far too late.
At about ten o’clock, sensing a lull in the storm in the lengthening pauses between thunder peals, he decided to brave the weather outside for a breath of fresh air before the singing began. The smell of salt was strong in the darkness and the washed cobbles black under a streaked sky still sullen and threatening. The storm had only paused to gather itself for a fresh assault, he thought.
He wondered what it would be like, then, to exist alone, in isolation. He was away from his wife and children for the first time he could remember. What if he could never go back to them? What if they did not exist and this place and the people here comprised the whole of his future? It was an odd, distressing, dislocating thought. His family, for James, were the whole of him. Without them, he would be the one to cease to exist. The charm of Brodmaw was intrinsic to the place. It was honest and unspoiled and picturesque. But its allure for him was entirely as a refuge for the three precious people who made up his personal world.
He was not alone though, was he? He was not even alone in the storm lull outside the pub. Someone was there, watching him. He looked and saw that it was Angela Heart. Her black clothing and black hair when she’d had her back to him must have concealed her in the surrounding darkness. But she was facing him now, pale-complexioned and crimson-mouthed and smoking a cigarette, standing next to the plinth on which Gregory Abraham maintained his granite guard.
Just for something to say, to allay the awkwardness of the moment, he said, ‘Do you think the storm is over?’
She pulled on her cigarette. When she had exhaled, up towards the sky, her jaw taut and the skin of her exposed throat startlingly white, she lowered her head and smiled at him and said, ‘I think the storm has only just begun.’
It was something of a contrast to a traditional night of song in a Bermondsey pub, James thought, when the music began. He was more familiar with the London knees-up, complete with pearly kings and queens and jouncing piano keys. There was always something very contrived about those events, a stagey air of knowing self-parody that made them seem bogus to someone from the north of England like him. After a few pints he’d find himself half expecting Dick van Dyke to take to the stage, dressed as a chimney sweep. London was like that, always peddling its own myth, striving to live up to the stereotype. The music in the Leeward that evening, by contrast, could not have been more authentic.
The wind and rain howling and hammering at the exterior of the pub increased the feeling of intimacy shared by those sheltering inside. The interior light was so dim that the major source of illumination seemed to be the fire, flickering as pockets of resin in the logs were found by the heat and flared into life. The thunder continued to boom sporadically above. Ale was an amber glitter in the glasses drinkers raised. Faces were shiny in the firelight and rapt with expectation as the first performer took to the small raised stage and coughed to clear his throat and began, in a strong tenor voice, to sing.
Sitting with Richard and Elizabeth Penmarrick, the three of them sharing a table, it struck James that the songs sung and the instruments that accompanied them combined to make sounds that would have seemed familiar to the pugilist celebrated on the plinth on the cobbles outside. There were eternal verities: truths common to every man and woman, subjects like love, loss, sacrifice, grief and joy that resonated in the human heart through and in spite of the passage of years. And these songs celebrated them in a way that was not so much traditional as timeless.
Billy Jasper sang a selection of sea shanties, finishing up with ‘The Wild Goose’. Ben Tamworth sang ‘The Sleepless Sailor’. Philip Teal sang George Butterworth’s setting to music of ‘Is My Team Ploughing?’ from A Shropshire Lad in a high tenor voice so affecting that it silenced the pub entirely for a few seconds before earning a fierce and sustained ovation. Michael Carney recited a poem. Rachel Flood sang the Scottish lament ‘Annan Waters’.
The stage cleared after the pharmacist had finished her sorrowful Highland song about a lover drowned on the way to meet his sweetheart and James had a heretical moment when he thought that perhaps Angela Heart, Brodmaw Bay’s answer to Marlene Dietrich, might get up and growl her sultry way through ‘Stormy Weather’. But of course that did not happen. Instead, Elizabeth Penmarrick stirred in the chair to his left and smiled across him at her husband and rose and, to loud clapping from what seemed every pair of hands in the pub, took to the stage.
She strapped on a guitar and tuned it, saying quietly that she was going to sing a Sandy Denny song. This announcement provoked a further ripple of applause. Either the population of the bay contained a disproportionate number of folkies, or they had heard her sing the song before. Ja
mes assumed the latter. Elizabeth looked beautiful on the stage, lit by a single lamp and dabs of ochre from the declining fire. She looked calm and self-possessed and as comfortable in the scrutiny of an audience as anyone he had ever seen on a stage.
She strummed the opening chords of the song and he recognised it as ‘The Sea’. Then she began to sing. Her voice was a contralto with no trace of sibilance or vibrato in it at all. It was a pure instrument. And it was a powerful surge-tide of sung emotion, thrilling, engulfing, almost overwhelming in the force and feeling with which it delivered words and melody.
‘She’s unbelievable,’ he said to Richard, when the song had finished and the applause had finally subsided sufficiently for him to be able to be heard. ‘She’s a force of nature.’
Richard smiled. He raised his eyebrows and nodded at the stage signalling that his wife had not quite finished performing yet.
Elizabeth sang ‘John Barbury’. She sang it without accompaniment. Where she had sung ‘The Sea’ with a sort of powerful grandeur, she sang this lovely, wistful song with a delicacy that was almost heartbreaking. James sneaked a look round. By the final verses it seemed like half the audience were sniffing and dabbing at moist eyes with hankies.
Her interpretation of the song was precise and lovely and unbearably poignant. He struggled not to shed a tear and James was not a demonstrative man where emotions were concerned. He had simply never heard timbre or phrasing like that this woman possessed. The sung words shaped by her lovely mouth emerged into the room and left her audience spellbound. He felt as she finished that nothing of him had been left unaffected by her voice. It had stirred him to his core. It had flayed his heart. His very soul had been shaken just listening to it.