Fear of Drowning

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘Well, I’ll go and have a chat with them. If I don’t come back, send a search party for me.’

  ‘Will do, sir.’ The sergeant smiled.

  Yellich drove out of Malton into steadily closing countryside, until he came to a narrow lane which had once, many years earlier, been metalled, now it was cratered after many years of ice and rain action. He drove gingerly, trying, not always successfully, to avoid the potholes. The foliage on either side was close, overwhelmingly so. He came to two large stone gateposts with wrought-iron gates which were held shut with a heavy padlock and chain. A painted sign on the gate showed a robed, Christ-like figure with outstretched palms against a celestial background, standing above the planet earth, with the Americas dead central to the planet as it was depicted. A brass bell, similar to a ship’s bell, was fastened to the gate. Yellich got out of his car and rang the bell loudly, causing the birds in the nearby trees and bushes to take to flight. There was no response, and calm and tranquillity, birdsong and insect chirruping returned.

  Yellich waited for a minute, perhaps, he thought, nearer two, then he rang the bell again, and again birds in the nearby greenery took to flight.

  Still no response.

  Then a robed figure, a male, approached the gate from within the grounds. He wore a long white robe, sandals, and walked with his hands crossed in front of him. He walked up to the gate and held eye contact with Yellich. He had a calm manner, his skin was clean, very clean, as though the pores had been cleaned by steam, Turkish-bath style. His eyes had a glazed expression which unnerved Yellich. ‘Can I help you, my brother?’ he said softly. Yellich thought the man to be the same age as himself.

  ‘Police.’ Yellich showed his ID. The man made to reach through the bars of the gate to get hold of the plastic card but Yellich withdrew it. ‘No, you can look at it but you can’t hold it, that’s the rule.’

  ‘Very well. What can I do for you, my brother?’

  ‘I’d like to look inside the house.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Police business.’

  ‘You have some concern about the house?’

  ‘No, nor about you or your friends. It concerns a matter which took place before you took up occupancy. I want to examine the scene of an accident.’

  ‘Well, we have nothing to hide and welcome all visitors.’ The man took a key from his pocket and unlocked the padlock. He opened the gate and Yellich stepped inside. He turned and watched the man lock the gate behind him. The man turned to Yellich. ‘We have nothing to hide and welcome visitors, but we do like to control egress and exit, it’s no more than you keeping your front door locked.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Shall we go up?’ The man began to walk up the wide, curving driveway. ‘We try to keep ourselves to ourselves in order not to antagonize local people but we don’t succeed. When we first came here we would find padlocks and chains round the gate extra to the one we put on. We took our wagon and oxen into the community but stopped when the local children would not stop throwing stones at us. It’s the nature of prejudice, people are frightened of anything that is different, anything they don’t understand. You know, it amuses me that the British can get on their high horse about racism and human rights issues in other countries, but if a group of Neanderthals had escaped the march of time and still lived a Neanderthal existence in the Scots lowlands or Thetord Forest, do they honestly think the same kind of prejudice would not exist here?’

  ‘I imagine it would,’ Yellich conceded.

  ‘It is, as I said, the nature of prejudice. How is my brother called?’

  ‘Yellich. DS Yellich.’

  ‘I am Pastor Cyrus. D? S? David? Simon?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant.’

  Pastor Cyrus, nodded and the two men walked side by side in silence up the drive and emerged from the trees into a lawned area in which stood a large house of blackened stone. Clearly, thought Yellich, early Victorian as had been reported, squat, uncompromising, very ‘new money’ of its day, not here is the graceful architecture of the classicism of a century earlier, here was the representation of the beginning of the sweeping aside of the English aristocracy, a process, mused Yellich, which is not yet complete. On the lawn, a group of children in robes sat cross-legged in a circle listening to a young woman, also robed, who spoke to them. Yellich noted that not one of the children, nor the young woman, even glanced at him, clearly a stranger in city clothing. He felt invisible.

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘About seven years. We had a haven in the East of London but had to endure violence and intimidation. It was a testing time for us but eventually our leader had a vision of a large house surrounded by trees somewhere in the North of England, and I and another were sent to seek it. We found it and money was forthcoming, and Oakfield House as it was, is now “the British Temple of the World Union of God”.’

  ‘So the house had been vacant for some time before you bought it?’

  ‘It had, and vandalized. Not a pane of glass remained intact. Village lads, you know.’

  ‘You’ve made a good job of its repair.’

  ‘I thank my brother for that comment.’

  ‘What do you know about the last occupant?’

  ‘Little, though doubtless it was he that sustained the accident which interests my brother?’

  ‘He is, or was, or whatever.’

  ‘Well, our first impression was that he was a brother of restricted growth, all the doors in the house had handless set low down, at about waist level to the average person.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything.’ Yellich turned to Pastor Cyrus. ‘That was the Victorian fashion, it just made sense to have door handles which were at hand height if the adult was standing with his arms by his side. It was only in the twentieth-century that we thought it would be a good idea to put door handles at shoulder height.’

  ‘Oh … but even so, there were, and still are, other indications: the sink in the kitchen, well, one of them, was lowered, there was also a small cooker very low on the ground and some wooden steps by the bath and a sort of platform in the bath on which to sit or stand. We have retained them because we find it useful for the children.’

  ‘I’d be particularly interested to see the bathroom.’

  ‘The bathroom with the steps and the platform? I ask because we have three bathrooms.’

  ‘Yes, that one.’

  Yellich and Pastor Cyrus approached the steps of the house and as they did so the large door with a highly polished brass handle swung open silently. A girl of about eighteen years, full white robe and sandals, hands crossed in front of her at waist height, stood in the doorway.

  ‘This is Lamb,’ said Pastor Cyrus.

  Yellich smiled at Lamb, who said nothing but cast down her eyes in a gesture of humility.

  ‘Lamb,’ Pastor Cyrus addressed the girl, ‘please escort our brother to the children’s bathroom and also anywhere else he wishes to go.’ Then he turned to Yellich. ‘Lamb is a recent convert, she has been with us for only a month now and so is still a novice. Please don’t ask her questions because she has taken a vow of silence which she must keep for three months, except for one hour each evening when she may ask questions of the elders as part of her training. Apart from that she may not utter at all except in an emergency.’

  ‘So she can yell her head off if the house catches fire?’

  But Pastor Cyrus simply smiled and said, ‘If you’d like to follow Lamb.’

  Lamb took Yellich into the cool, dark, spacious interior of the old house. In the front hall men and women, all in robes, read in silence. Lamb climbed an angled staircase and walked along a narrow corridor. In one room off the corridor, Yellich saw rows of children sitting in front of computers with determined concentration. Not one looked up as he passed the open door of their room. Presently Lamb came to the bathroom in question, stood on one side of the door, bowed her head and with a fluid wrist action, bade him enter the room.


  So this, Yellich thought, as he entered the room, was where Marcus Williams died. It was a rectangular room with a deep, long bath set in the middle of the floor, as was often the style in Victorian houses – it was a bathroom, so let the bath dominate it. A shower attachment, obviously of much later design, was fastened to a stainless-steel support, very barrack-room basic. It would not have lasted long if the house had had a woman to organize it, but it would, thought Yellich, suit the functional, no-frills needs of a bachelor. He noted the wooden steps leading up to the bath which were not attached but could be set apart if necessary, and a seat or a platform in the bath which was of wood and suspended from the sides. It was about three feet wide, and so, thought Yellich, more probably a platform for a person taking a shower, than an infirm person sitting on it rather than fully in the bath. Yellich turned to Lamb and said, ‘Thank you. I’ve seen enough.’

  Outside, Pastor Cyrus stood motionless in the sun, awaiting his return. Yellich stepped out of the cool of the building and into the heat. ‘Computers?’ he said.

  ‘This is not an archaic church, brother Yellich. God wants us to keep up with His times.’

  * * *

  ‘I liked him.’ Sam Sprie sat in an upright chair outside the front door of his small council house. Yellich sat beside him in a white plastic chair which had been brought from the rear garden for him. They sipped tea which had been pressed on them by an insistent Mrs Sprie who had then departed dutifully into the shade of her home, behind a multicoloured fly screen in the form of many thin strips of plastic which hung on the door of the house, not a permanent fixture, but put up and taken down as the need arose. The garden in front of Sam Sprie’s house was a sea of multicoloured flowers, mainly pansies, boarded by a small privet hedge, neatly trimmed, green at either side, yellow at the front. It was a gardener’s garden. ‘I hardly ever saw him.’

  ‘You hardly ever saw him, yet you liked him?’

  ‘That’s why I liked him. He allowed me to get on with my job and didn’t interfere, you can always tell whether your gardener’s working. So long as I shut the gates behind me, as Mrs O’Shea had to as well. We both had a key to the padlock on the front gate so we could let ourselves in in the morning and lock up behind us after we left for the day.’

  ‘So there was just Mr Williams in the house each evening?’

  ‘Each evening and each weekened. Mrs O’Shea and myself worked five days a week. Mr Williams could cook a meal if he had to, so he didn’t starve when Mrs O’Shea was ill, or on holiday, or each weekend. But no, he wasn’t alone strictly speaking, he had three Dobermans. He was safe, allright, the Dobermans knew me and Mrs O’Shea and Mr Williams but practically nobody else. The post was left in a box by the gate, as was the milk. The Dobermans would protect him, at least buy him enough time to phone the police.’

  ‘And how would the police get through the gate and past the dogs?’

  Sprie smiled and nodded his head. ‘Don’t think he thought of that. He was a bit like those people who barricade their homes against burglars, which is all very well until you want to get out to escape the fire. Bars keep them out, but they also keep you in. But that was Mr Williams. A little … what’s the word?’

  ‘Eccentric?’

  ‘Aye, that as well.’

  ‘What sort of man was he?’

  ‘Better ask Mrs O’Shea that, she knew him better than I did. Like I said, if the garden was kept he never bothered me. I never saw him, save in passing, never went into Oakfield House.’

  ‘He drowned in the bath?’

  ‘You asking me or telling me?’

  ‘Asking.’

  ‘Aye … well, there’s some as says he did and some as says he didn’t.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Well, his death just didn’t seem right … he never took baths but I didn’t know that until after he died. Mrs O’Shea … she’ll…’

  ‘Aye … I’ll ask her.

  ‘He lived alone. A recluse?’

  ‘That’s the word. I’ve been thinking of him as a hermit but the word didn’t fit … recluse … yes, I like that word.’

  ‘No visitors at all?’

  ‘One or two over the years, a tall man would visit once in a while. I was told that was Mr Williams’s brother … first time I saw him he drove up in a car with a wife and a couple of children … I was close by that time … he went into the house looking worried, made the children and his wife wait in the car a good long while. Then came out looking pleased with himself, I saw him smile at his wife and tap his wallet … you know, his jacket breast pocket. His wife smiled back. Then they drove off.’

  ‘What do you think had happened?’

  ‘He tapped him for some money. That’s what I felt. Since then I’ve only ever had the impression of the brother visiting Mr Williams whenever he wanted money. Nothing regular about the visits … I mean, I’ve got one surviving brother and we see each other at the Sun each Sunday lunchtime. It was nothing like that, Mr Williams’s brother would visit as and when and stay for about half an hour then he’d not visit again for three, four months, then he’d turn up and leave again as though he’d got what he wanted. Didn’t take to him. Mrs O’Shea told me that Mr Williams was upset that his brother had kept his wife and children in the car when they visited that first time, he felt as if his brother was ashamed of him.’

  ‘Ashamed?’

  ‘Well, Mr Williams, he was about that high.’ Sam Sprie held a sinewy arm out level about three feet from the concrete path on which he and Yellich’s chairs stood.

  ‘Was he self-conscious about it?’

  ‘Well, if he was, his brother hiding him from his sister-in-law and nephew and niece didn’t help, especially when the only reason they visited was to tap him for cash.’

  ‘It wouldn’t. I’m surprised he entertained his brother at all.’

  ‘He was a generous sort. He had a lake in the grounds.’

  ‘A lake?’

  ‘Very big pond, very small lake … it was circular, about from here to that tree from bank to bank.’ Sprie pointed to a magnificent oak tree in a field opposite the line of council houses. Yellich thought the distance between house and tree to be about two hundred yards.

  ‘Big enough.’

  ‘It was about ten feet deep with steep sides, it was excavated by the man who had Oakfield House built back in the eighteen-thirties. He created the lake and had it stocked with trout. Anyway, the lake hadn’t been fished for a while before Mr Williams moved in and when he moved in it was just teeming with fish. We were looking over the grounds after he’d taken me on and he told me he wanted the lake filled in. I asked him if we could take the fish, we have an angling club in the village … he said yes … we organized ourselves, no more than six rods at any one time, each man having a four-hour slot … and still it took us a week to fish out the lake. He was generous like that, but that week sticks in my mind because there were more folk in the grounds than ever before or since, and in that week I never saw Mr Williams once. But he was accepted well after that, people knew about him, and left him alone … not like the group of weirdos that are in there now … we don’t know what’s going in the house, aye.’

  ‘Any other visitors that you recall?’

  ‘Only one, a young man, called a few times … this was in the last year of Mr Williams’s life … a friend, a relative … I got the impression that he was calling on Mr Williams, not his money … he also liked the dogs and they took to him after a while … throwing sticks for them. He was seen in the village at about the time Mr Williams died. Not by me, by Sydney Tamm. He used to be the churchwarden at St Mark’s.’

  ‘Used to be?’

  ‘He’s still alive…’

  ‘Where do I find him?’

  ‘Ask at the vicarage. That’s St Mark’s.’ Sprie pointed to a steeple, dark grey against the blue sky. ‘The vicarage is behind the church. The vicar will put you right.’

  * * *

  ‘I used to enjoy doing fo
r Mr Williams.’ Tessie O’Shea sat in an armchair with a black cat on her lap. ‘Just me and Petal now, isn’t it, Petal? You know, you get to an age when all you can do is enjoy each day for its own sake and not worry too much about the future.’ Tessie O’Shea’s cottage was small and cosy and warm and homely. As much as Sam Sprie’s garden had been a gardener’s garden, Yellich thought that Tessie O’Shea’s cottage was a domestic worker’s domicile. It was a stone-built structure with thick stone walls which Yellich knew would be warm in the winter when the open hearth was burning and he noted it to be cool in the summer. The stonework above the door of the cottage had a date 1676 AD carved into it and it sobered Yellich to ponder that when Napoleon retreated from Moscow Mrs O’Shea’s cottage was already in excess of two hundred and thirty years old. ‘But you want to know about Mr Williams?’

  ‘Yes. Huge house for you to look after.’

  ‘If he lived in all of it, it would have been, but he had the one bedroom, the one sitting room, the one study, he ate in the kitchen. The rest of the house gathered dust. So I could manage it. You know when I said he used to eat in the kitchen, I meant that he sat down with me and ate at the kitchen table, me and him ate together, him in his high chair … what kind of man would sit down and eat with his domestic? A gentleman would, that’s who would. He was a gentleman, treated me as an equal. I loved working for him. I did better for him because of it … his attitude, I mean. I always made sure he had plenty of tinned food in so he could survive if I wasn’t there, so he didn’t have to go out to the shops. He was a bit shy about his height, he was a small man, about three feet high. It wasn’t so bad when I was ill for a day or two, or at the weekends, but I used to enjoy a fortnight in Ramsgate every July. I’d worry about him then.’

  ‘I understand that it was yourself who found his body?’

  ‘Aye … me … I’ll never forget it … I knew something was wrong … the dogs, you see, they were in a strange state … looking sorrowful … whimpering … and they flocked round me when I rode up on my bicycle … as if I was a rescuer. I went into the house … the dogs had licked their water and food bowls dry … so I gave them some water, plenty of water … it was the summertime, this time of year … and then went looking for Mr Williams … calling out his name … found him in the bath … his little body and all that water. Face down, he was. There’s a few things that didn’t add up, oh no, they didn’t, didn’t add up at all.’