By then it was noon. Although I might have been forgiven if I had called the puppet conference people and told them what had happened and perhaps asked to have my seminar postponed to another day, the fact was that I hadn’t known the victim at all, I’d just been a witness after the fact. We had no connection apart from a remarkable likeness to one another, and I still had my commitment to the CIPF, who were, after all, paying my way. Although I had witnessed a horrible thing, I still felt honour-bound to come through with my part of the bargain.
I wandered back outside like a zombie, still searching for the tug-of-war lady, who I had decided must have been packing a blackjack under her tweed skirt and had done the dirty deed while Alma was gazing at Becket’s tomb. A wave of profound sadness washed over me as I walked slowly back to my B&B. I had a sudden yearning for a Canadian policeman and some stability, a yearning so strong it almost made me gag. And you know what? It wasn’t Becker I was wanting, it was Morrison. Go figure.
Seventeen
Break car journeys every two hours and take a short walk. Make sure your seat belt fits properly; the top strap should go between your breasts and the lower strap under your bump.
-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
Someone came looking for you,” Cedric Frayne said, as I stepped into the foyer of the Pilgrim’s Rest.
“Really? Who?”
“Well, he said he was from the local comprehensive—coming about your puppet thing at the university. He seemed dead keen on attending it, although he didn’t look much like a teacher, I must say. Still, it takes all sorts. I told him you were out and about, planning to watch that Right-to-Life March, as you said. I suggested he might be able to find you on the high street somewhere.” I’d told Cedric about the march that morning, asking him if it were a common thing to have such demonstrations in Canterbury in the mid-winter. We’d laughed about it as he slid a beautiful spatula-load of sizzling blood pudding onto my plate.
“Oh, yes? Did he leave a name? What did he look like?”
“Blobby,” Cedric said. “Big and blobby, but I suppose with youngsters these days, you’d want to be a bit meaty, to keep the blighters in line.”
“He wasn’t bald, by any chance, was he?”
“He was wearing a flat cap,” Cedric said. “Couldn’t tell. But I’ll tell you one thing—he was driving one of those white vans, which I thought was most peculiar for someone who’s a teacher at a comprehensive. Still, it might help to bung the little buggers in the back of a van with no air or light.” He chuckled wickedly. It was clear that Cedric Frayne held the youth of Britain in no high esteem.
I had gone back to the B&B to pick up my puppet case containing my innocent policeman and pregnant lady puppets. I was a mess, having seen what I had seen at the Cathedral, and though I suspected that Cedric would want a full report of the goings-on later (I was the only resident at the B&B, apart from an elderly gentleman who was studying Roman antiquities at the museum), I wasn’t about to fill him in right then. The most important thing for me in order to keep it together, I’d decided, was to go on with the program as planned. I would mourn for Alma later, after it was all over. I also planned to call up the police station and ask about Alma’s baby, whether or not it had survived. But that would be later. Right then, I was determined to remain in a comfortable state of denial.
Cedric dialled the combination of the safe where he had stored my case, hauled open the thick, black iron door and handed it over.
“You’ve got your other things in there, too, don’t forget,” he said. I had forgotten and appreciated his reminder. I’d put my passport and return ticket in the case, as well as the velvet bag containing Edward Becker’s ashes, none of which I’d be needing for my puppetry seminar.
“Thanks, Cedric,” I said, opening up the case and handing him the extraneous items. “No sense in loading myself up with unnecessaries.” My voice sounded ridiculously cheerful in my head, brassy and hyper, but Cedric didn’t seem to notice. “I’m going to be late, you know. Do you think you could call me a cab?”
“Of course, I’ll call one,” he said. “Actually, even better—I’ll drive you myself. I’d like to attend your seminar, if that’s all right by you, my dear. I’m an honorary member of one of the committees—I’ve forgotten which one. It won’t matter my being out for a bit. Mr. Binterhof has his own key, and anyway he won’t be back until this evening. He’s studying some mosaics they’ve unearthed over at Greyfriars.”
Mr. Frayne shrugged himself into an old grey cardigan and changed his leather slippers for a stout pair of boots, then he locked the front door and led me through a side door in the kitchen to a narrow garage beside the Pilgrim’s Rest. The sun was still beating down in a most un-winterly fashion, and it had to be at least sixty degrees Fahrenheit. I thought for a moment that the weather might have at least had the courtesy of going all sombre and dark in honour of Alma. We came out into a small courtyard, which was surrounded by a tall wooden fence with a wide door in it.
“I’ll need you to open the gate for me, if you don’t mind,” he said. I nodded and waited by the door that I assumed opened into the street. It had a spring lock that opened from the inside and would lock automatically when it was shut. Moments later, a strange, high-pitched coughing noise filled the courtyard, along with a belching of black smoke. It sounded like George’s tractor on a bad day—George’s tractor after inhaling a lungful of helium. What emerged from the garage was such a surprise, I found myself giggling again.
It was about the size of a bumper car at the Laingford Fall Fair. It was boxy at the back, sort of flat at the front, like the beak of a duck, and bright blue. It took me a moment to figure out why it looked so weird. Then I twigged. It only had three wheels. Two at the back, one at the front. He drove it, in fits and starts, past the big open door, which I closed carefully after he’d gone through.
Mr. Frayne leaned over and opened the passenger door for me, shouting above the descant chuggetty-chug of the engine.
“Hop in,” he said. “I haven’t taken her out in a while. She needs a tune-up, I think, but she’ll get us there all right.” I squeezed myself inside, feeling like a chick trying to crawl back into the egg.
“What on earth is this?” I said, as politely as I could.
“It’s a 1973 Reliant Robin,” he said, with pride. “I bought her for my sister—your benefactress, you know, and she gave it back to me in her will. I was the one to do the maintenance on her all these years—the car, I mean. She’s frightfully good on petrol.”
We were tootling along one of the back streets that ran past the Cathedral, and there were still police cars parked outside the gate.
“’Ullo, ’ullo—bit of bother at the church, it looks like.”
“Yes,” I said. “I was there, actually. But I’ll tell you about it later, if you don’t mind. I have to concentrate on the seminar now, or I’ll make a mess of it,” I said.
“Ah—an actor prepares. Yes, I know all about that. Right then—but I look forward to hearing about it. I do love a bit of excitement.”
Cedric Frayne was one of those drivers who witters and looks at his passenger while driving. We narrowly missed a pedestrian, who shook a fist at us, but laughed as he did it. We weren’t going very fast. In fact, in a race, the pedestrian would probably have won without breaking a sweat.
“Always get a lot of attention driving Maid Marian, you know,” he said.
“Maid Marian?”
“That’s what my sister called her. You know—Reliant Robin, Robin Hood, Maid Marian? Mary was always a bit fanciful, poor old dear.”
“I guess.”
“She was the one who started the puppetry conference, you know. Back in the eighties. She simply adored puppets. Which reminds me, I must show you her collection—well, some of it, anyway. Most of the pieces have gone to the Puppet Centre Trust in London, but I’ve kept her favourites. She had some very old ones, you know.”
“I’d like to see
them,” I said, but I wasn’t really listening. I was going over my notes in my head, trying to remember what the heck I was supposed to be talking about. Puppet construction—yes. Unusual accessories and marionette techniques. I wondered how I was going to keep a roomful of experts interested for a whole hour. What did I know? Why had they asked me to present something? I was in an agony of self-deprecation.
We stopped for a traffic light, and a weird thing happened. The driver of the car in front of us suddenly got out, slammed the door behind her, and walked away. I was about to comment on this to Cedric, who didn’t seem to have noticed, and I was wondering whether we should be honking or something. I was getting into quite a froth about it, actually, until the light changed and the car in front proceeded, apparently all by itself. Then I remembered that the driver was the person on the right, not the left, and it had just been a passenger getting out. The driver, on the right side, was short, and I hadn’t noticed him. This was to plague me all the time I spent in England.
We saw plenty of white vans on the road. I kept craning my neck to see if any of the drivers looked like my thug, but gave up after a while, because they all did. Every white van driver had a shaved head and a snarl on his face. It must have been one of the rules.
We made it to the university in one piece, but I had less than ten minutes to get to my seminar room and set up, so I excused myself to Cedric and left him with Phyllis (who had been getting into a froth herself by that time, thinking I wasn’t going to show up).
The room was moderately full, about ten or fifteen people, and I hurried to the front, where my table had been set up, and dragged a chair over to stand on, so I could demonstrate my marionettes. The puppets had weathered the journey remarkably well, considering the hassle they’d had at Pearson airport, and thank goodness, the strings weren’t tangled. I checked to make sure the little baby inside the tummy box of the pregnant lady puppet was okay (he was) and shuffled my notes a bit as a few more people came into the room. I noticed that two of the demonstrators from the wayang kulit group were there, which was very pleasing, and Blaise Killington came as well, which was an honour that left me feeling more than a little shaky about my material. Richard Seth arrived with a group of people, waved cheerily to me and took a seat near the front. It felt good to have him there—a bit of support from home. I hoped that his near and rather-too-attractive presence wouldn’t be distracting, then wondered what on earth I was doing entertaining impure thoughts at a time like this. I winked at him, though. I couldn’t help it.
Phyllis came up to the front to introduce me, and while she did so (saying all sorts of things that made me blush, making me out to be far more of an expert than I really was) another person slipped inside. It was the young policeman from the Cathedral, D.C. Potts. He was still in uniform, and some of the audience near the door eyed him curiously, but he didn’t appear to be about to arrest me, just took a chair near the back and sat to watch with a lively and interested look on his face. I presumed he’d come to talk to me and appreciated that he’d decided to wait until after my presentation was over. I wondered how he’d found me, but I suppose I had probably mentioned my reason for being in Canterbury, and he’d phoned to find out where I’d be. Then I was on, and I forgot all about Potts and concentrated on my job.
It was near the end of the hour when another person entered the room, and I barely noticed, being in the middle of a complicated manipulation, during which the policeman puppet had unzipped his trousers, removed his tiny little member, turned aside coyly and was pissing over the side of the table. The audience was laughing in a wonderfully gratifying way, and I risked a glance up to see if Potts found it funny, or was as shocked as he’d been when I’d talked about baby brains, back in the cloisters. He was roaring, which was a huge relief. That was when I noticed the other guy, hovering near the door. He was blobby, you might say. Big and blobby and wearing a flat cap, and he was looking at me with the kind of intensity you reserve for people you mean to harm. We stared at each other for what seemed like a very long moment, then I let my eyes slip sideways to look significantly at Potts. The flat-cap, whom I knew instantly as my breast-tweaker from Gatwick airport, took the hint, for hint it was, and left the room. Potts had caught the look and left a second or so later. I thought I heard running footsteps outside the door, but that might have been wishful thinking on my part. The whole thing had only taken a moment, and nobody in the audience appeared to have noticed much, except for the usual turning of heads that happens when someone enters or exits a hushed room. The policeman puppet completed his little whizz, tucked himself back into his trousers and turned back to the audience, bowing to the applause.
“Splendid demonstration, my dear,” Cedric said afterwards. I had enjoyed some minutes talking to people after the seminar, and really, it seemed as if my not using PowerPoint hadn’t mattered at all. I’d used the flip chart, drawing as I explained the basic construction of my puppets and the deceptive and complicated sort of physics of strings and manipulation bars and weight and angle-of-limb. People had a lot of questions, and it was great fun answering them. For that hour, at least, I had managed not to think of the horror at the Cathedral at all, except for a nasty moment when the pregnant lady puppet gave birth to her papier mâché cherub, and I thought of an emergency Caesarian in the ambulance, perhaps, a last ditch effort to save Alma’s baby. It was only a flash, though. The manipulation of the puppet required my full concentration, the marshalling of more than a dozen strings, the tilt of the puppet’s head, her hands hiking up her skirt, tenderly opening the tummy box, and the baby emerging and fluttering around her head like an angel. I had practiced the sequence for hours, getting it just right. I was not nervous. Funny that my eyes were full of tears, then. It was a moment of incredible hush. The audience members were perched on the edges of their seats, and I heard someone gasp as the baby came forth. I wished the real thing could be that easy.
Eighteen
It is often said that eating spicy food will help bring on labour—not true. There also is a myth that says having sex brings on labour. This also isn’t based on fact, and there is no evidence to show that it is true.
-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
I was still chatting with a few puppet-people when Constable Potts returned, looking like he’d run a marathon.
“Can I have a word, Ms. Deacon?” he said, and my companions melted discreetly away, although Cedric remained within earshot.
“Did you catch him?” I said. “I think that guy’s been following me.”
“I thought there might be something,” he said. “No, I’m afraid I lost him in this blasted warren of a building. But I’ve radioed him in, and we’ll be keeping a lookout for him, even though I only got a look at his back and the side of his head. He lost his hat, see? Recognize it?”
“He was bare-headed when I met him last,” I said. “But Cedric Frayne, the man who runs the place where I’m staying, might help. I think the same guy came to the B&B looking for me earlier today. “Cedric appeared in a moment at my elbow.
“Some trouble here?” he said with relish.
“Is that the hat you saw my morning visitor wearing?” I asked. He took it from the policeman and peered at it, turning it over in his hands and looking for a label. It was a tweedy thing, a flat cap worn by all the characters in every rural English drama you’ve ever seen.
“It might be,” he said. “He was driving one of those white vans, you know. If that’s any help. Although they all look the same, of course. Hundreds of them, all over the place.” Potts nodded and noted the information down in his book.
“I caught a glimpse of the bloke’s head when the hat came off,” Potts said. “Shaved bald, with a football emblem tattooed on the scalp. Nice identifying mark, that. It shouldn’t take us long to find him.”
“A football emblem? Huh?”
“Yes—Manchester United. I recognized it at once—my brother’s a big supporter.”
“A dev
il with a pitchfork and the three blobs above it?” I said. He smiled.
“More or less. You’ve seen it then—had a good look at him?”
“Oh, yes. He groped me at Gatwick airport—tried to steal my luggage—and again at the train station in London. But how come you chased him? Is he wanted for something else?”
“I saw the way you looked when he came into the room during your puppet show,” Potts said. “Your face drained white as a sheet. It was instinct, really. I just wanted a word with him, then he bolted, and when people run from a policeman, there’s usually some cause to give chase.”
“I see.”
“And I wanted to ask you a few more questions, Ms. Deacon, regarding this morning’s incident.”
“What incident?” Cedric said.
“Someone died at the Cathedral,” I said. “I’ll tell you about it later, Cedric. It was pretty awful. Did they save the baby, Constable?”
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, after a tiny pause. “They did all they could, you know. But it was too late.” I felt my eyes fill with tears. Two murders, then. At least, in my estimation they were murders, no matter what the police thought. All in the cause of pretending to protect the lives of the “unborn”. How horribly ironic.
“Did you find the woman Alma was fighting with during the march?”
“We spoke to her, yes. She was as shocked as anybody, you know, and she was with her group the whole time. We don’t believe she could have caused Ms. Barrow to fall and hit her head.”
“You’ve decided it was an accident, then?”
“Well, we’ve ruled out a blunt instrument, you know. The head wound was consistent with the stone step where she fell. But she still might very well have been pushed, or grappled with. There were bruises on her arms.”
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