I gazed at him but he wouldn’t meet my eye. “Not much chance of anything else,” I said.
He held the cigarette away from his face, waving it slightly to deter a small, persistent fly. “I’m serious. If you do think you owe me, give me your hand and promise me this. Promise me you’ll always defend my good name. That’ll level all debts.”
So it was that, when he offered me his hand, I grasped it and gave him my promise. Despite our mutual solemnity, I didn’t take him that seriously at the time. He was Browning, scion of a military dynasty that went back even further than mine, son of a Victoria Cross winner, young officer on the fast track. What could go wrong? It was only later that I began to hear the rumors about him. They tended to be repeated with more admiration than concern, especially after he was mentioned in dispatches for leading an assault on a guerrilla unit that his platoon had caught out in the open. The guerrillas had all died and Browning had started to build his reputation as a fearless leader of men and a commander who didn’t take prisoners.
But even amongst the Paras, who weren’t generally known for their bleeding-heart liberalism, there was an undercurrent to the side-of-mouth comments, a suggestion that Browning had endangered others in his head-long charge at the enemy, a hint that the berserker rage that drove him in action had darker undercurrents than mere valor or lust for glory.
I know that people with my condition are prone to obsessing about such times but I also know that incident with Browning, in that secret and largely-unremembered desert campaign, was a turning point in my life. It was, however, to be close to another ten years before my comrade’s darker instincts would undo him and burden my life with the disgrace of that terrible night in Kosovo.
***
Someone in a neighboring cell started to scream before subsiding into moans and sobs. The sounds of pain brought me back to myself and I felt the stirrings of the familiar black wolf, evading the sentries of logic and gliding through the subterranean reaches of my mind, the places reason cannot reach. There’s no real defense from the waking dreams of depression. People tell you to pull yourself together and look on the bright side, to think about people who are worse off than yourself, as though you can simply flick a mental switch and snap out of it. It doesn’t work. It makes things worse. I stopped holding my shoulder and rested my face in my hands.
There was a quote I’d read in my book about Shakespeare. In his last play, The Tempest, the magician Prospero says: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep”. Too often, my life was the stuff of nightmares and that it sometimes seemed to me that that sleep of death was something to be welcomed. I wondered, not for the first time, if I could ever follow Browning into oblivion.
My fingernails were digging into the skin of my forehead. I ordered myself to be calm. Tomorrow, I’d be away from this place. Tomorrow I might experience anything. Even redemption.
But the subconscious is a constant traitor. My thoughts never give me peace.
I hated this weakness but could never defeat it.
Chapter 15
I slept fitfully, stirring whenever I rolled onto my damaged shoulder, until my guards signaled the arrival of a bright new day by switching on the bright neon light. Breakfast was burnt toast and shriveled sausage, fodder that compared unfavorably with my previous all-time worst-ever meal, porridge that our quartermaster had scrounged from a nearby farmhouse and, given that we were on exercise and forbidden to light fires, served cold in the middle of a Scottish glen in February. They should try serving the toast and sausage to young offenders, I thought, if they really wanted to deter them from a life of crime.
By nine o’clock, they’d removed my plate and escorted me back into my favorite interview room. Amanda the lawyer was already waiting for me. She was a brisk woman in her mid-thirties who stood and shook my hand and then sat primly on the straight-backed police station chair, smoothing out any creases that might have dared to appear in her exquisitely-tailored business suit. She asked me how I’d been treated and I told her I was fine and we proceeded to discuss events of the previous night until the door opened again and Tench and Rainbow walked in. From their faces, I guessed they’d had been working hard on their suppressed-rage act, having had time to ponder my unfortunate association with a clear majority of the murders that had been committed on their patch during the past decade.
Tench again pressed buttons on a tape recorder and then left his colleague to do the talking. Rainbow informed me that they’d identified the dead man as Stephen Marr, an employee of the local corporation, and asked me to tell him in detail what I’d been up to the previous day. I ran through the version of events that I’d previously discussed with Amanda, describing my visit to the Stratford museum, my meeting there with Frederick Taylor and the appointment I’d set up with Marr.
Rainbow leaned across the table towards us. I could smell the acrid scent of cigarettes on his breath and, from the way Amanda’s nose wrinkled, guessed that she’d caught a whiff of it too. I wondered if being forced to go cold turkey during interrogations in the non-smoking station made his mood even worse than normal and, if so, whether anyone could tell. “So, you were in your hotel room last night, waiting for Dr Marr to come and talk to you about this scrap of paper.”
“That’s about it,” I told him.
“After you got his phone number from his assistant at the museum?”
“Right again.”
“And when he didn’t come?”
I shrugged. “There wasn’t much I could do. If I’d thought about it, I’d have asked his assistant for his mobile number when I was at the museum. But I didn’t. So I had no choice but to sit and wait.”
“I think, if it was me, I’d have tried to look up his number in the phone book and give it a call,” he said.
“I can’t see what good that would have been,” I told him. “The phone book would only have given me his land line. It wasn’t very likely that he’d have been at home.”
“Somebody there could have given you his mobile number, maybe.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
For the next hour, we continued to go over my story, with the policemen asking the same questions over and over. I took my time with my answers, making sure I was consistent in what I told them. Eventually, Amanda decided we’d had enough fun and asked Rainbow when I would be free to go. Rainbow asked if there was any rush and she calmly informed him that they had surely had all they were going to have from me and then pointed out that the police had no firm evidence whatsoever to connect me to the death of Marr. For a moment, it looked as though Rainbow would argue the point and Amanda went on to threaten him with writs of habeus corpus, phone calls to the Chief Constable and everything short of confiscation of his pension rights unless he released me and apologized for his outrageous intrusion on my civil rights. Several times, Rainbow tried to interrupt her flow and she just kept straight on and talked over him as if he wasn’t there. I folded my arms and listened to her in rapt admiration.
Eventually, Rainbow agreed that they would release me if I promised to keep them informed about my movements and, of course, not leave the country. I crossed my heart and my fingers and, shortly afterwards, Amanda and I were walking out of the gloom of the station into a sunny Warwickshire morning.
***
The one advantage of the time I’d spent in the police cell was that it had given me lots of time to plan my day. As soon as Amanda left me to drive back to London, I made a brief detour to the hotel – to clean up and change my clothes – and visited a couple of shops. Then I returned to the museum where I joined a short queue at the front entrance and did my best to look like an innocent tourist.
Once I’d pushed through the turnstile into the museum proper, I discovered that the Shakespeare bust was conveniently close to the entrance. I paused in front of it and read the inscription on its plinth, which told me that it was a plaster replica of an original in Stratford’s Holy Trin
ity church. I stood back and looked at the somber white face for a while. Busts and statues always ensnare my attention, as though they retain an essence of the person they describe, speaking to the viewer across space and time. The image before me was the familiar one of Shakespeare, all high-domed forehead and receding hair-line. Somehow, I knew this image had little resemblance to the real man. It was too solemn, too reserved, and I pictured him as the actor he was for much of his life, lively and extrovert, carousing with his actor mates in Bankside taverns, drinking sack in Cripplegate inns and chasing dark ladies through the teeming streets of old Westminster.
Still, it was what Marr had told me about the bust that had brought me here. I looked around. The surveillance camera on the opposite wall pointed towards the entrance rather than where I was standing and the area was obviously a low security zone: the bust was only a copy, with little intrinsic value. I figured, however, that if I was to simply walk over and pick it up, it might attract some attention from the wandering tourists and, if not them, from the museum attendants. I strolled on, turned a corner and found a quiet nook beside a cleaner’s cupboard. I unbuttoned my jacket and slipped out my little bag of purchases. I used my penknife to pierce the metallic seal of a can of lighter fluid and poured half of the contents into a white china saucer. I draped a handkerchief over the lip of the saucer so that the lighter fluid soaked into it and then dropped a couple of rubber pencil erasers into the middle of the fluid. Pushing the whole thing away from the wall – I wanted to create a distraction, not cause the wholesale destruction of an innocent museum – I struck a match and ignited the cloth. The result was a burst of bright yellow flame followed, as the rubber began to burn, by a satisfyingly dense cloud of dirty black smoke.
I stuck my hands in my pockets and walked calmly back towards the bust. By the time I’d got there, a portly German tourist and his rake-thin wife had smelled the burning rubber and begun to make loud sounds of alarm. Other visitors turned to see what the commotion was and I saw an attendant snatch up a fire extinguisher and run towards the source of the smoke. A moment later, just to add to the fun, the fire alarms started to ring.
I looked around, checking that all eyes were focused elsewhere, and then tilted the bust toward me. It came easily and felt hollow. I reached my hand into its base and, after a moment’s groping, my fingers encountered something that felt like paper, attached to the plaster with adhesive tape. It came away when I tugged it and I saw that it was an envelope, about half the size of an A4 sheet. I tucked it into the pocket of my jacket in one smooth motion, feeling a bit like one of those slick thieves in a sixties heist movie, before restoring the bust to its proper position.
Looking back in the direction of the fire, I could see that although the attendant had the flames well under control, the smoke was still hanging in the air and there was plenty of excited movement and shouting coming from the other side of the room. Visitors were starting to stream towards the exit from the various parts of the museum, moving with that calm nonchalance that people assume in a fire drill and only starting to look worried when they smelled the astringent odor still coming from the smoldering erasers. I joined the crowd, waiting patiently to push through the turnstiles at the exit, and finally walked back into the bright sunshine of the day.
***
First things first. When I returned to my room, I grabbed my overnight bag and packed away my belongings. The suit I’d bought earlier was an approximate fit and, I discovered, the only tie I’d brought with me featured red and blue stripes. I wasn’t going to set any new standards of sartorial elegance at Thorpe’s funeral but, after all, that was hardly the point.
When I’d finished getting changed, I took the envelope back out of my jacket pocket and, for a few moments, turned it over in my hands. The wisest course of action would be to delay opening it until later. I needed to get moving and it was high time I had a break from the delights of Shakespeare country. The temptation to see what had provoked so much intrigue and violence was, however, overwhelming. I slid the nail of my thumb under the envelope’s flap and, squeezing it open, peered at its contents. The papers inside were mostly yellowed and ragged-edged with age. Carefully, I slid the small bundle onto the bed cover and spread out the individual sheets.
There was, in fact, one modern-looking note containing a few words and a roughly-drawn sketch. I looked at it with interest for a few seconds and then put it back in the envelope. I counted eleven other pages, all covered in faded handwriting. I picked out one from the middle of the bundle and tried to read the contents. There was a date – 1616 – at the top of the page but I found it difficult to understand the words that followed. I did, however, recognize the language. When I was at school, my teachers had told me that one of the benefits of a classical education was an understanding of Latin. That, I had always thought, might have been true if I had ever discovered a practical use for the noun declensions and verb conjugations that they’d crammed into my unwilling schoolboy brain. Now, at last, that ancient learning may have had some use if I’d been able to remember enough to make sense of the handwriting before me.
I put the pages down and peered at the one that had been on the top of the small pile. The first words were also in Latin but were, at least, a little easier to read:
Vicesimo Quinto die Martii Anno Regni Domini nostri Jacobi
nunc Regis Angliae etc decimo quarto & Scotie xlixo Annoque
Domini 1616
Testamentum
Willemi Shackspeare
Registretur
It wasn’t too hard to work out that this text referred to some sort of will and testament, written during the reign of King James The First. The words that followed were in English but they were written in an archaic-looking scrawl and were still hard to follow. I picked up a pen and a sheet of the hotel’s complimentary writing paper and did my best to transcribe the words I could recognize. The first paragraph began:
In the name of god … something…I William Shackspeare of Stratford upon Avon in the countie of Warr’, gent in perfect health & memorie god … something… make & Ordayne this my last will & testament in manner & forme …
There was a passage then that I could hardly make out at all. I skim-read down the page. Further on, I saw words that did make some sense:
I Gyve and bequeath unto my Daughter Judyth One Hundred & ffyftie pounds of lawfull English money to be paied unto her in manner and for me follewing That ys to saye One Hundred Poundes in discharge of her marriage porcion …
It went on in similar vein. Part-way down the second page I read the famous reference to Will’s wife, his bequest to her of his ‘second-best bed’. This, as I’d learned from one of the books I bought at the museum, was the basis of another celebrated Shakespearean mystery. Scholars had been debating for centuries whether there was a reasonable explanation for such a strange legacy or whether the clause was an unsubtle gibe at a wife he’d come to dislike or even hate.
As I read on, I saw the name of Hamnet Sadler, the man Bakst and Marr had mentioned to me. Shakespeare had bequeathed him a ring of some sort and had also had him sign the document as a witness.
I turned the other pages slowly in my hand. Something chimed in my memory and I opened the Shakespeare biography I’d been reading and leafed through the illustrations in its center. Towards the end, I found a photograph of a document with words similar to the one I was holding. The handwriting in the two wills was, however, different. The legend next to the photograph told me that the will had only been discovered in the eighteenth century and that it would have been written out by a scribe of some sort, probably a law clerk.
There were other differences besides the handwriting. The copy in the book had a number of crossings-out and part of one paragraph had been damaged and lost. The paper I held in my hand had no alterations and seemed to be intact. The question was whether this was evidence of forgery or whether the hopes of Marr and Roden had been justified and this document had been written by Shakespe
are himself.
I gazed again at the pages written in Latin and saw, on the second of them, a list of plays. Interestingly, a work called ‘Love’s Labor’s Wonne’ was recorded, as well as ‘Cardenio’, the play which the museum worker Frederick Taylor had told me was one of the lost works. The words around the list were, however, incomprehensible. The only page that wasn’t covered in dense Latin script was the last in the bundle. Here, the words finished a third of the way down the page and were followed by a crudely-drawn map showing what looked like a house and some other buildings, some foot paths and various other hard-to-interpret symbols.
I considered buying an English-Latin dictionary to help out my meager linguistic ability and then remembered that there were Internet sites that provided translation services. I decided to try some of these sites when I got home, hoping that, with the assistance they gave me, I’d be able to translate enough of the papers to get a general gist of what they said. The alternative would be to show the documents to an expert who understood the language and could translate it for me properly, but the more I thought about this, the more I realized that finding someone I could trust would be a problem. If these papers did contain information about the life and times of Shakespeare, any scholar worth his salt would want to know where they’d come from.
I shrugged. It would have to wait, anyway. I packed the papers in my bag, went downstairs and paid my bill, and then walked out to the little Toyota. The wind was a northerly and, hanging over the horizon, I could see clouds that were dark and heavy with rain. At least, I thought, I’d be driving south and hopefully running ahead of the coming bad weather.
The traffic in the street next to the hotel was heavy and I had to cut in front of a massive Mack truck just to get out of the car park. The driver gave me a blast of his horn and shook his fist and I looked at him in the mirror and blew him a kiss. In the narrow street, our speed would have made a sloth look hyperactive and we crept towards the old stone bridge at a frustratingly slow pace. Finally, though, I drove across it and was able to accelerate away past the parked tourist coaches and hired cars, looking for the road that led to the south coast.
Waking Caliban Page 11