Death Notes (A Phineas Fox Mystery)

by Sarah Rayne

  It’s a beautiful theatre, the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, with a baroque stage and magnificent porticoes. We had almost a full house, so I expanded my act considerably, both as to volume and expression. I believe there was quite a run on the bar in the interval immediately after my appearance, which speaks for itself.’

  Phineas re-read this a second, and then a third time. So Roman Volf had sired a son, and that son had taken to the music halls.

  He rather liked the sound of Quince – there was a touching, almost childlike vanity in the writing, although Phin smiled rather wryly at the mention of the Shepherd’s Bush audience making hastily for the bar after Quince’s performance.

  There was not much left of the extract, but he read what there was.

  ‘Readers may be interested to know that since coming here to Ireland’s west coast, I have been involved in a number of theatrical projects – music festivals and concert parties during the 1940s, staged for the war effort. Even now, in my mature years (I use the word mature advisedly, rather than the term old age, for I believe I still have a kick or two left in me yet), even in this peaceful backwater of Kilcarne, I believe I can still achieve further successes before I finally retire to create my memoirs.’

  Until this last paragraph, Phin had been making notes to follow up the Shepherd’s Bush Empire lead, his mind already delightedly remembering its BBC years, thinking it was possible that Quince’s appearance there might be documented.

  He had not, however, expected to be confronted with the need to travel to Ireland’s west coast. But there it was. Kilcarne, where Quince had spent what he called his mature years, and been involved in wartime entertainments and music festivals.

  Had Quince finally created those memoirs? Had they ever been printed? And was there any possibility Quince had married in that peaceful backwater and left a son or daughter – a descendant of Roman Volf?

  Mortimer Quince’s diary

  I am amassing some excellent material for my memoirs. Actually writing them is to be a task for my old age – although I shall never refer to myself as ‘old’ in the memoirs or, indeed, out of them. The word old is much too evocative of senility’s more undignified aspects. False teeth and a truss, not to mention rheumatism, and very likely a few other things one would not want known – especially not by the ladies (God bless them).

  And so I am making diligent notes. I daresay Sam Pepys did much the same, although I shouldn’t think it will ever be necessary for me to bury cheese in the garden to save it from a Great Fire as he did, or be chased round a bedroom by an irate spouse brandishing a cooking pot. If, that is, I had a spouse … A gentleman never tells, of course, but I believe there are one or two ladies who would not be unwilling. And cometh the hour, cometh the man …

  Note to self: Look up that last reference and make sure that (a) it is correctly quoted, (b) that I know who originally said it, and (c) that it is not in any way improper, because it sounds as if it might be very improper indeed in certain contexts.

  I’ve never talked about Roman – although I am hoping I shall be able to do so when I finally embark on creating my memoirs. However, for the moment and in the privacy of these pages I feel it’s safe to mention him.

  I’ve always tried to believe that Roman’s part in the tsar’s assassination sprang from altruism – that it might be interpreted as romantic and even noble. But there is nothing romantic or noble about strangling on the end of a rope in a St Petersburg prison yard, with half the country baying for your blood.

  At some scarcely acknowledged level I think there was more to Roman’s death than being hanged – that there was something dark and dreadful. I believe if I could identify that, I could send the wretched nightmare fleeing for its life. But there is no one I can ask about Roman’s life or his death, and in any case I dare not let my paternity be known.

  This afternoon I spent an hour polishing my renditions of ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’, and ‘Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms’. I worked hard, so I feel it was unkind of the man in the rooms below to stump up the stairs and hammer crossly on my door. He is a very disagreeable person, and when I refused to open the door, he shouted through the keyhole that my voice resembled the yowling tomcats in the alley below.

  Later:

  The disagreeable person’s rudeness has been somewhat alleviated by the lady living in the second floor back, who tapped on my door a few moments ago to invite me to take a glass of port with her after supper. She thought I might also favour her with some of my singing. (Much fluttering of eyelashes at this point, and arch prods in the ribs.)

  I do not care overmuch for port, and the lady herself is a little too well-upholstered for my taste. However, it seems discourteous to decline.

  Later still:

  Port definitely does not agree with me. I gave my hostess a performance of ‘Little Rosewood Casket’, after which I disported myself to some purpose with her on her chaise longue, since clearly it was expected, and there are times when a man must yield to the inevitable. Regrettably, however, I fell prey to violent and undignified indigestion at what I can only call an unfortunate moment, but thankfully, I regained my own rooms without unseemly incident.

  Note: The evening is not one to be included in my memoirs.

  THREE

  It had been almost two years since Beatrice had looked inside the folder containing the various documents relating to Abigail’s death. She had pushed the file to the back of a shelf and pretended it and its contents did not exist.

  But before setting off for Ireland and Tromloy, some impulse had made her reach for the folder and drop it into her suitcase. I’m taking you with me, Abi, she thought, and then was annoyed with herself for such a slushily useless sentiment.

  The ferry crossing from Liverpool was calm, the Dublin hotel where she spent that night was comfortable, and driving out of Dublin towards Kilcarne next morning, Bea began to think this had been a good decision. She pulled in to a large supermarket for provisions. Tins and jars and packet soups. Bread and cheese and fruit. Coffee and tea bags and long-life milk, because there was no guarantee that the power would be on by the time she got there, and even if it was it would take a few hours for the elderly fridge to clank its way to a safely cold temperature. On that thought she added candles and matches.

  Setting off again, she tuned the car radio to a local, pleasantly chatty station, and smiled to think she would soon be seeing the familiar signs: GALWAY/B. Átha Luain/ATHLONE/Gaillimh.

  Niall used to quote Yeats’s famous ‘Innisfree’ poem on this part of the journey. It was as if the nearer they got to Tromloy, the more he pulled his Irish antecedents around him like a cloak. ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree …’ The next verse was something about finding peace, wasn’t it? With the thought, the words slid into Bea’s mind. ‘And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning …’

  Bea turned on to the straight run of Ireland’s M6 and put her foot down. In the far distance were the misty smudges of the mountains behind Kilcarne. Niall always called them the Mountains of Midnight, with magnificent disregard for their real names. One night he and Bea had walked out to the foothills, taking a bottle of wine with them. They had drunk the wine lying in the deep, soft grass, and Niall had made love to her, with the distant chimes of a church clock sounding midnight. Bea always believed that had been when Abigail was conceived, there in the soft purple twilight, on the exact stroke of twelve. Innisfree: ‘There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow …’

  Niall said it was absurd to fixate on that one night, and hadn’t they both been drunk as owls anyway, but Beatrice had always thought of Abi as the child of that soft, enchanted midnight. Was it possible she was out there now, wandering the foothills of her father’s Midnight Mountains, not knowing who she was—? Reciting the lyrical, beautiful poetry Niall had taught her … She had never understood more than one word in ten, but even as a small gi
rl she had loved the cadences and the rhythms of the words. She had loved pretending she was one of the people from the old tales, as well. ‘Today I’m Mab,’ she would say. ‘I’m an Irish Queen, and I’m going to fight battles so I can get a throne. An’ then I’ll dance by pale moonshine and hide in an acorn cup an’ have a chariot made out of a hazel-nut. Won’t I?’

  ‘You might, but you’ve got a bit of old Bill Shakespeare mixed up in that one,’ Niall used to say, indulgent and amused. ‘Because that’s one of the Queen Mab speeches, but it’s Romeo and Juliet.’ He began the speech, in his soft, caressing voice.

  ‘O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you;

  ‘She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

  ‘In shape no bigger than an agate-stone.

  ‘That’s the line for you, Abigail. Because you’re not much bigger than an agate-stone.’

  Beatrice dashed an angry hand across her eyes, to wipe out the scalding memories.

  Here were the uneven crossroads with the lopsided signposts, like two drunken tinkers propping each other up. The road to Tromloy was the right-hand one; the left led to Kilcarne’s small cemetery. Abigail was in that cemetery, and so was Niall. After they died, Bea had initially thought she would bring their bodies back to England, but then she had remembered the big, neatly ordered English cemetery with its uniform rows of graves and memorials, and she had thought Abi would hate it. Abi would rather be here with the midnight mountains and the tanglewood trees, and the lyrical legends all around her. (And her father who had killed her lying in his own grave nearby …?) Bea took a deep breath, and swung the car over to the left and the cemetery.

  There were no Victorian Gothic iron gates or admonitory notices, or warnings about it being locked at sunset. The cemetery was open to all comers at all hours, because the Irish liked their dead to be accessible. You’d want to be nipping in for a prayer or two for the poor departed souls now and then, they said, practically.

  Even though it was two years since she had last been there, Bea went unerringly along the paths to the patch of ground beneath the old beech tree. Abigail would have liked the tree; she would have made up stories about the creatures who might live inside it, and who might come out to dance in the moonlight when the humans were not around. Bea stood for a long time, looking down at the grave. Impossible and unbearable to think of her midnight child down there. She knelt down, and half reached out a hand, then, impatient with herself, stood up and turned away.

  Walking back, she saw for the first time that there was an inner garden here. A small wrought-iron gate was set into the old stone wall that ran along one side of the graveyard. Glad of anything that would push the memories away, Bea went over to it. It probably led to the church, or it was the priest’s private garden and securely locked. But the gate swung inwards with only a small scrape of old hinges. Bea hesitated, then stepped through.

  It was not a garden and it did not lead anywhere. It was a smaller, older cemetery. Most of the graves had memorial stones, and, rather surprisingly, they were all well tended. She walked slowly along them, seeing a few names she half recognized from the little Kilcarne community. O’Brien – that was the family who had owned the local pub ever since Bea could remember. She and Niall had sometimes had a bar meal there. And Cullen – weren’t there still Cullens here? Bea had a vague memory of a rather gloomy house, and of two rather timid ladies. There was a pallid look about her picture of them, as if they had been left out in the rain, causing their colours to become diluted.

  At the very end, she paused, and as her eyes fell on the inscription of the final grave, the lowering skies seemed to tilt and blur all around her.

  The name on the stone was Maxim Volf. The date of his death was 1955.

  Maxim Volf. Beatrice had never met Maxim Volf, but she had hated him for two years deeply and bitterly. He had been there when Abigail died – he had seen her die – his evidence had been used at the inquest. Beatrice had been told, later, that he said he had tried to save her. She had not believed it.

  But, according to the plaque on that sad, hidden-away cemetery, Maxim Volf had died in 1955. More than half a century earlier.

  Bea did not remember walking back to her car, but she must have done, because the next thing she knew was that she was sitting inside it with rain spattering the windows.

  Maxim Volf. It would be nothing more than a coincidence of names, or someone from the same family – perhaps the father of the man who had been there when Abigail died.

  But it was an unusual name. As for family, Maxim Volf had not seemed to have any family or any connection with Kilcarne. One of the newspaper reports had said it was the purest chance that had taken him along that road on that day.

  Much later he had sent a message to her through the Garda. He expressed his deepest and most heartfelt sympathies and regret for what had happened, and added his assurance that he had done everything he could to save her daughter and her husband. The message had been forwarded to Beatrice, who had crumpled it up angrily and thrown it away.

  The rain was worsening, but she got out of the car and opened the boot to get the folder she had brought with her. She knew the contents by heart, but back in the car, she took out the sheaf of papers, doing so with extreme care, almost as if, this time, the information might be different.

  Death certificates, coroners’ reports, police reports, burial authorities … Everything was there. At the bottom was a newspaper cutting from a local Irish newspaper. Bea smoothed this out and read it.

  Tragedy at Kilcarne – witness finally named

  The man who witnessed the tragedy that took place at Kilcarne in early January, and who tried to save 12-year-old Abigail Drury and her father, Niall (42), has been named as Mr Maxim Volf.

  We understand Mr Volf suffered a lengthy period of amnesia immediately after the incident, which prevented him from being identified. In addition, the injuries he sustained in his attempt to save Abigail and Niall Drury made speech difficult, and severe burns to his hands made it difficult for him even to write information for the doctors and the Garda.

  The inquest brought in a verdict of Death by Misadventure on Abigail and Niall Drury. Mr Volf was being treated at University Hospital, Galway, at the time, but was able to dictate a brief statement which was read out to the coroner and the jury.

  Later, the Garda had told Beatrice that Maxim Volf had been discharged from hospital and presumably had returned to his own life. Bea had not wanted to know where or what that life might be. She had a dreadful suspicion that if ever she met Maxim Volf she might fly at him and try to claw out his eyes, because she had never managed to rid herself of a conviction that he had not tried hard enough to save Abigail and Niall, and she had been left with a disturbing impression of a man who had materialized almost out of nowhere, played a small part in a tragedy, then vanished. What she had not been prepared for was to find a sixty-year old grave with his exact – and quite unusual – name on it.

  She put the cutting back in the folder, and realized with a shock that it was almost four o’clock, and that in another hour it would be practically dark. She had not wanted to reach Tromloy in the dark, but you lost all sense of time when you stepped back into the past.

  She drove away from the cemetery, and this time when she reached the drunken signpost, she took the right-hand turn to Tromloy. Here was the five-bar gate that Abi used to swing on, and in the distance were church spires and a few crumbling watchtowers, sharply black against the darkening sky. In a few moments she would see Tromloy. It was starting to feel overwhelmingly right to be driving to Tromloy through the cool dusk, with the after-scent of the rainstorm coming in through the car’s open windows.

  On the left was the old piece of stone that Niall had found somewhere in the scrubby land surrounding Tromloy, and had engraved with the house’s name. It was a bit of the old manor house that had once stood here, he said. Kilcarne Mainéar. He was going to find out more about it one day. He had dented the ca
r’s wing on that stone, taking this bend too fast one night because he wanted to get home and make love to her. The mark was still visible on the stone.

  Now she had reached the turning on to the path. Thick branches and brambles grew over the path; they whipped across the windscreen, leaving soft green-grey smears so that when Tromloy came at last into view, its outline was blurred.

  Bea stopped the car halfway up the track. It was going to be all right. Tromloy still held all of its magic. It was still the serene, forgotten corner that Time had overlooked, the place where peace dropped from the veils of the morning. She engaged a lower gear for the rest of the steep path, and, closer to, a little of the house’s enchantment began to dissolve. Even in this half-light she could see that the windows were thick with grime and a section of guttering had worked loose from under the eaves. A few slates were missing from the roof and there were cracks in the paving stones at the house’s front. Still, what had she expected after so long? And windows could be cleaned, guttering could be nailed back in place, slates and paths could be repaired, and grass could be mown. She parked on the scrubland at the house’s front, and as she got out of the car the silence and the twilight closed around her.

  Bea left the headlights on to see her way to the front door, but as she took her case from the boot there was a movement on the rim of her vision. Her heart jumped. Had a figure darted across one of the downstairs windows, or had it been her imagination – or even just the reflection of clouds scudding across the sky? Bea waited, but the movement did not come again, and she relaxed. Even so, she would check all the rooms, and be ready to beat it outside at the speed of light if she encountered anything suspicious.