by F. G. Cottam
‘He’s a younger version of the professor. They’re the same type of man, physically and temperamentally. But de Morey isn’t the most reliable of narrators, is he? He perjures himself on the subject of Eleanor Bloor.’
Jane was quiet again. The road unfurled before them. Night had descended. ‘It might be the whole point of the deposition,’ she said.
‘What might?’
‘I can’t think of any other reason for his having written it. De Morey was a cultured and intelligent man, but he was a warrior, not a scribe. He seems to me to lack the personal vanity to bother to record a memoir detailing his feats in the shadow world. Maybe it was written to be discovered and believed by those sent to pursue Eleanor and punish her for the crime of crossing.’
‘Or take her back,’ Adam said.
‘Either way, it would make sense, everything in the account written truthfully to conceal the one lie contained within its pages.’
‘What a devious mind you have.’
‘There’s an old teacher I know,’ she said. ‘He’s retired now, but he’s very patient.’
‘So?’
‘I just thought he might be able to help you, that’s all. I mean, with the reading thing.’
Adam yawned. ‘Just so long as his name isn’t McGuire,’ he said. He thought about the artefact he had discovered in the forest, how, confronted with it little more than a week ago, he had thought that it might make him famous and rich. Now it resided in a locked cupboard in the old doctor’s flat in Brighton and he did not care in the slightest what happened to it. Shortly after reaching this conclusion, he dozed off in his seat.
Jane drove. From time to time she looked at the young man asleep beside her. She didn’t feel tired. She didn’t think Adam had either. Sleep was a refuge for him from concern about the father he had just found and was shortly to lose. But she thought that he would need his sleep. She sensed the uneasy quickening of events. She had a name now for the man she had seen in the forest at Cree. He was called Rabanus Bloor and he was half-brother to Adam and he meant nothing but harm if the look of naked malice on his face was any guide.
She looked at the motorway lights, at the bright passage of high performance cars and the careening juggernauts and the dot matrix displays of information spelled out in red on steel and concrete gantries above the three pulsating lanes of rapid traffic. And she wondered at what it would take to bring it all crashing to a silent halt. Not much, really. The world was so complex now and so relatively small.
Chaos had been caused in the static universe of earth in the fourteenth century by a plague virus. It would be much easier now to provoke war and disease and to crush hope. Mankind was less fatalistic than it had been then, more fractured and agnostic. Faith was a virtue in short supply and the painful chronology of the planet did not inspire much optimism.
‘We’re ripe for it,’ Jane said, to herself. ‘And they bloody well know we are.’
Grayling travelled to Liverpool pretty much on a whim. His students had plenty to do in the aftermath of the dig, and his return from Scotland, earlier than scheduled, meant that he had no seminars or lectures planned until the following week.
He caught the train. The express was much quicker than the Land Rover, and he could use his laptop and so avoid the journey being a waste of time. His destination was only a mile’s walk beyond the Liverpool terminus at Lime Street Station. Aboard the express, he took a call from McGuire that explained where Martin Prior had got to and why. He had phoned McGuire from Canterbury to warn him that matters were accelerating, but the news concerning Martin still came to him as a shock.
It meant that this latest tilt at the world was gathering momentum. It meant they were comfortable with breaking cover. It signified confidence.
It was eight o’clock in the evening when he reached the port city of Adam Parker’s birth. He walked to where his student’s old boxing gym was located. The streets here were still, some of them, cobbled. The houses were terraced. The street lights were scant and the howl and barking of stray dogs a constant and threatening soundtrack, given the breeds favoured by the residents of the broken dwellings Grayling walked among.
The gym was an old factory workshop. As Grayling approached, he could hear the slap of leather against the floorboards as boxers skipped. He could catch the smack of the hook and jab pads and the thud of the heavy bags being hit. Closer to the door, he could smell sweat and leather and embrocating cream.
He pushed open the door. There were a dozen or so boxers going through their separate routines. Two were sparring fiercely in a training ring. Bags of various sizes and shapes hung on chains suspended from metal beams in the low ceiling. All of them seemed wrapped and patched and fortified by as much broad black sticking tape as remaining leather.
It was very hot. There were strip-lights screwed to the ceiling and their illumination was white and harsh. The ages of the boxers ranged from late teens to early thirties. It was an environment in which boys became men or failed to. Its rules were unbending and its regime tough and Grayling thought that altogether, he rather approved.
He was ignored until a four-minute clock on the wall clanged the end of the round and the minute of respite it gave. Boxers always trained in rounds, Grayling remembered. They skipped and even did their floorwork to the dictates of the clock.
‘Can I help you, mate?’
‘Are you Mick Yates?’
‘You plainclothes?’
Grayling smiled and took out his university accreditation. ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions about one of my students. His name is Adam Parker.’
‘Clever lad. Is he in bother?’
Grayling sighed. ‘Does every conversation one has in Liverpool have to involve the law? Is it somehow obligatory?’
Mick Yates smiled. ‘Mostly football talk is obligatory in this part of the world, professor,’ he said. ‘But I’ve no interest in that. And when someone comes here in a suit, it’s usually because one of the lads has got off the lead, or gone on the lash, and it’s ended in tears. Come to my office and I’ll make us a brew and fill you in on Adam Parker.’
Yates’s office was a sort of hut on stilts in the far right-hand corner of the gym, reached by a narrow staircase.
‘Great lad, Addie,’ Yates said, sitting and inviting Grayling to do the same.
‘Addie?’
‘What we all called him.’
‘But it’s not even an abbreviation. Addie is no easier to say than Adam.’
‘No one called him Adam. Maybe his mum did – far too formal for us. This is a friendly environment.’
‘Your friendly environment is somewhere people come to get hurt. Sometimes they get maimed.’
Yates shrugged. ‘You’ll get no apology from me for the contradictions of boxing. I’ll leave the philosophizing to the educated likes of you, professor.’
‘What kind of boxer was Adam Parker?’
Yates appeared to ponder this question for a long time. ‘Problematical,’ he said eventually.
‘Glass chin? Fragile hands?’
Yates smiled. ‘No real interest in boxing was probably at the heart of it. He just wanted to get the other feller out of there as quickly as he could. And he generally did that. In fact, he always did that. None of his bouts went beyond a round.’
‘So he was a big puncher?’
‘Not really. I mean, he could punch, don’t get me wrong. He was a correct puncher, great balance, sound technique. It was his hand speed that was the wonder. He was phenomenally quick.’
The one window in the cheap wood of Yates’s office was smeared with condensation. Grayling reached across and rubbed it clear, then looked down at the muscular young men going through their ritualistic drills.
‘Good fighters almost never get caught cleanly,’ Yates said. ‘Watch them. Even when they get hit hard they are almost always sliding off the punch, taking the momentum out of it with head movement that comes from instinct and anticipation, from reading
their opponent. You couldn’t do that with Addie. The lads he tagged said it was like being hit flush with a lump hammer.’
There was a silence between the two men.
‘Where do you stand on David Attenborough?’
‘I’m a fan,’ Grayling said. ‘I love wildlife films. Is there any point at all to that question?’
‘Have you ever seen a panther or a cheetah snatch at prey? He was like that, was Addie. He was that quick.’
‘Why was that problematic? Didn’t he rack up the wins?’
‘We couldn’t train him. He always went to war. Too much devil in him once the bell went. Lovely lad outside the ring, but he couldn’t hold back. Addie kept knocking his sparring partners spark out. If he wasn’t such a sweet-natured kid, I’d say God put him into the world to hurt people. I’d say that was his vocation, the task he was born for.’
‘Maybe it is.’
‘He fenced as well, you know. Not garden fencing, I’m talking about swords, like in an old-fashioned film. I rang his fencing master once. I was curious. Apparently there are two main schools, two fencing traditions, the Italian and the French. I hadn’t known that, before phoning him. He told me swordsmanship was something Addie just had a gift for, like it was in his blood, so to speak.’
‘Was he as quick with the foil as he was with his fists?’
‘Épée was his weapon of choice, Mr Grayling. They filmed him once, his coach said. Pointless, he said, if you’ll pardon the pun. They had to slow it down to single frames to follow some of his moves.’
Grayling detoured slightly before returning to Lime Street Station and his return train. He found the street in which Adam had been raised, the house his mother still occupied in her fictitious widowhood.
There was a net curtain over the one downstairs window and in the living room beyond he saw the flicker of a television screen. It would be on all the time, he thought. It would greet her in the morning and say goodbye to her at night, her gaudy, chatty window on a world to which her junk channel providers convinced her she belonged.
The professor knew that he was a snob, but he did not think snobbery a particularly sinful vice. What he thought, passing Adam’s mother’s house, was that the cunning of man was quite something and that maybe there was hope after all. He strode to the station and his late train with a positive spring in his step. He was very glad he had made the trip. It had provided him with a degree of reassurance he had hoped for but had not confidently expected to find.
Adam sat at his father’s bedside aboard the barge and held his hand. He found the old callus, the one that had felt to his reaching fingers as a small child like a coin. His father’s breathing was a faint sound, as though to breathe with more authority might offend. There wasn’t much breath left in him. Adam had his eyes closed. He knew that if he opened them, he would weep. He did not want his grief upsetting his father and so his eyes stayed shut.
‘Why did you change our family’s name?’
‘McGuire suggested it.’
‘When was that?’
‘He advised I should do it as I rowed him back to the ship, after that first visit to the other place.’
‘Your entry into the shadow world took place by chance. McGuire picked you from the crew at random.’
‘Nothing happens at random, Adam. Chance is how we describe events when we don’t yet know their purpose. I changed our name for the same reason as I left. It was to protect you. It was a small thing. It was insignificant compared to the leaving of you.’
‘We’re bastard offspring, Dad. The blood of what you call the other place runs through our veins.’
His father tried to laugh, but the laughter turned to coughing and it was a while before he could compose himself and reply. ‘Dilute by now, I should think, Adam. Anyway, it’s noble blood, to port and starboard; there’s pedigree on either side.’
‘McGuire told you?’
‘Aye, he did.’
Adam had worked it out on the ferry crossing. Jane could tease him about the speed at which he read, but there was nothing slow about the turn of his mind. He had identified the flaw in her theory about the de Morey deposition as the waters of the North Sea churned darkly beneath the hull of the travelling ship.
He had written it when he was old. So he had not written it to prevent pursuit of Eleanor Bloor from the shadow world. Had that been his intention in writing it, he would have composed it immediately on his return. Adam believed she had crossed. He believed she had successfully passed. They had lived happily together and at the heart of the vast estate royal patronage had endowed him with, de Morey and his willing sword had been the only protection she had needed.
But she had also borne his child. She had borne him a son, a half-brother to Simon. The conflict was dynastic, and de Morey, old by then and feeble, had needed to protect his younger son from the Crimson King’s retribution.
So he had written the deposition, truthful in every detail but for the one lie that was the reason for its very existence. And the child had survived. Adam’s own name was de Morey and it was the name his father had endowed him with and then denied them both, and he thought he now knew what Grayling had meant in that odd metaphor about clay fired in the kiln and its quality.
‘How old are you, Dad?’
‘Older than you might think, Adam. More tired than you can imagine.’
‘Why did you go back?’
‘I was a sailor in my soul, I think, as much so as that distant ancestor of ours was a soldier. I was always restless, always keen to be away on some voyage, the further flung the destination the better, if I’m honest. But there is always a yearning for home. It’s the contradiction at the heart of every sailor’s life, that yearning pull. And in a way the other place was home and I longed to go back there, and I suppose I answered that longing.’
‘It sounds an awful world.’
‘It’s in your blood.’
‘Dilute, you said.’
‘I said noble, too. As to how awful it is, you will have to judge that for yourself.’
Nothing is random. Chance is how we describe events when we don’t yet know their purpose.
‘You should rest, Dad.’
‘I’m dying, Adam. I have little time left and want to spend what’s remaining of it with the son I love and have missed so dreadfully. I’m due a rest, granted. But it will be a long one and it will come soon enough for both of us.’
They were silent for a while. Adam trusted himself to blink open his eyes. His father, looking directly at him, said, ‘I used to lift you on to my shoulders and carry you up those giant sand hills on the beach at Formby Point.’
‘I remember.’
‘It’s hard to believe it, now.’
‘Not for me. I remember your motorbike too, the Norton.’
‘I’d forgotten about that old beast. If I had a pound for every time I changed the head gasket on the Norton.’
‘You’d have a few quid.’
‘I would.’
‘I remember the fish and chips at Reilly’s on Blackpool promenade. And Reilly’s mushy peas.’
‘They tasted green.’
‘They did! You always used to say that, that their mushy peas were the greenest tasting in the whole of Lancashire. And you used to say their tea tasted brown.’
‘Did the Tizer taste orange?’
‘I’ll give you the same answer I gave you then, Dad. Tizer’s a very reddish sort of orange. And to me, to be honest, it just tasted of pop.’
‘I came to see you. You were sixteen. I was five rows from ringside when you beat O’Grady for the area title. You flattened him in twenty-seven seconds.’
‘I’d have held him up for longer if I’d known that you were there.’
‘I’d have been there always, if I could have. You were always in my heart.’
‘I know. I know that now.’
‘They will come for you, Adam. You will need to be on your mettle.’
‘I will be, Dad.
’
‘And I’ll be watching you.’
He died about half an hour after this exchange. Adam raised to his lips and kissed the hand he held and then gently put it down and closed his father’s eyes. His own were blurry with tears. His smudged vision took in the details of the cabin, the books and the brasses, the rigged model ships in dimple bottles and metal framed prints mounted in a neat row, the coffee pot cold beside its ring burner, the meticulous possessions of a single man.
Delilah Crane was standing on the deck in the darkness when he climbed the stairs to reach it. Her arms were folded across her chest and she was staring down at where the oily water lapped against the hull.
‘You poor boy,’ she said. ‘I’m so very sorry.’
‘There wasn’t enough time.’
‘There never is.’
Adam sniffed. Grief shuddered through him. He shook with it.
‘Come here,’ she said. But she went to him and held him. He sobbed on her shoulder, thinking that he might never stop.
TEN
The following morning, Adam breakfasted with Delilah. After the previous night, he had an appetite. She, by contrast, seemed to have a hunger only for cigarettes and coffee.
‘They’ll kill you,’ he said, of the former.
‘Eventually,’ she said, exhaling.
‘Were you my father’s lover?’
‘He was not always an invalid.’
‘I know that. I remember his strength.’
‘But he wasn’t chosen for the fray as you are, Adam. There is strength and then there is strength. Did he warn you?’
‘He said they would come for me.’
‘They will. You cannot attend the funeral. It is too great a risk.’
Adam nodded. ‘How old are you?’
‘That question is ungallant.’
‘I apologize for it. What would happen if they came for you?’
She dragged heavily on her cigarette and then sipped at her coffee, which she took black. She did not look dishevelled in the morning. She looked as seductive as she had the first time he had seen her. ‘It would depend on who they sent. At the least, they would cut out my tongue. Actually, they would tear it out. They might make me consume it.’ She crushed out her smoke in the ashtray on the breakfast table between them. Given what she’d just said, Adam thought the nicotine habit more understandable than he had.