Ceremonies of Innocence

by Annie Bullen

  Then she shivered. It’s getting chilly, she thought, forgetting Hugh, although the strains of his tune still floated from the upper windows. The car heater was unreliable and the journey to London would take a couple of hours or more. So instead of getting into the driver’s seat, she went round to the back of the car once more to pull a sweater from her suitcase. Dorelia could not bear discomfort, and being cold ranked high on her scale of unpleasant conditions.

  It was as Dorelia wriggled backwards out of the rear double doors of the estate car, holding the cream cricket sweater aloft so as not to dirty it, that Fergus ran out of the front door of the Hall. He moved with an odd upright gait, bursting through the doorway and pausing for a split second halfway down the steps, putting out a hand to steady himself against the pillar. He stumbled and ran on, moving his head from right to left, scanning the driveway uncertainly, trying to calculate his destination.

  ‘Coooeeee … Fergus … over here!’ Dorelia slammed the doors shut and waved the sweater, a white flag in the glim of dusk. It did not occur to her that Fergus was panicking, running away from something. She moved round to the passenger side of the car, the better to see him. Fergus put on a spurt of speed and stumbled towards her. She gasped as he gripped her bare forearm and she smelt his harsh sweat as he opened the door and pushed her roughly inside. She was pulling at her skirt, trapped in the hastily slammed door as he threw himself into the driver’s seat and turned the ignition key. Dorelia freed her skirt and clutched the cricket sweater tightly in her lap. She saw the man who had been asking for Hugh and Fergus run out of the front door.

  ‘Why is that man chasing you? Who is he?’ she demanded as Fergus pumped the accelerator of the old car which, by some miracle, started with a hearty roar.

  Dorelia, fascinated, watched the shadow that was Tim Tyson running towards them.

  ‘Fergus, watch out!’ she screamed. ‘Fergus!’ She covered her ears with her hands as Fergus, noisily engaging reverse gear, backed so that he could complete the circle that would take them out of the driveway. Tyson, who had reached the gravel, leapt hastily back onto the steps to avoid being run down.

  Dorelia panicked. She screamed, and the noise ran through Fergus’ head, a thin drill of sound as he desperately tried to work out how to switch on the lights. Sweating and fumbling he turned towards her.

  ‘Shut it!’ he said, viciously.

  Small pieces of gravel spurted and pattered behind them as, wheels spinning, they roared noisily out of the brick gates, blindly turning towards the inky darkness on the left. There was one sickening thump and the car faltered and juddered, but Fergus kept his foot down and they roared on. At last he found the light switch and the grey road, revealed at last, rolled away in front.

  ‘What was that? What did we hit? Will you please stop this car!’ Dorelia was very frightened and very cross.

  ‘I expect we killed a couple of those old chickens that are always pecking around the gate, don’t you?’ Fergus mocked as he put his foot to the floor.

  ‘If you don’t stop at once I shall open this door and jump out,’ Dorelia threatened.

  But Fergus took no notice of the bravado and steered, stony-faced, down the country lanes.

  ‘Anyway, I thought you had your driving licence taken away. For drinking.’ Dorelia’s voice became childlike, whiny.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything? Why can’t the bastards just leave me alone. Cunts!’

  Dorelia, clutching her cricket sweater, sat very still, shocked by the use of the word. It was one that she had heard schoolgirls giggle over, but she had never heard it used, by a man, in extreme anger. Her plight became grown-up, threatening. She tried to put the evening’s events together, to work out what was happening.

  ‘That man wasn’t a policeman was he? He asked for you when he arrived.’

  ‘And I suppose you went and told him where I was.’

  ‘How was I to know you had anything to hide? He asked for Hugh as well. Oh my goodness!’ She was hit by the implications of the chase and the flight.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The concert. My mother’s concert. The whole thing will be ruined. You ruined it. What were you doing at our home anyway? Why did you come tonight? You don’t like music. You don’t like Hugh,’ she added.

  ‘Your old lady asked me. Anyway why shouldn’t I come over? What’s the matter with me?’

  ‘What’s the matter with you … you’re …’ You are smelly and anti-social and boring and a grotty old junkie, was what Dorelia was going to say. But a mixture of compassion and fear stopped her. ‘You are … I don’t know. There’s nothing really wrong with you I suppose, except that you must have some pretty bad reason for running away, and why you’ve taken this car with me in it is something I don’t understand and I don’t like very much.’ Dorelia burst into tears and buried her salty face into the clean cream pullover which lay crumpled on her lap.

  Dorelia’s conjecture about the effect of Fergus’ behaviour on her mother’s concert was, happily, at this stage unfounded. No one had been disturbed by Fergus’ sudden departure or Tim’s more discreet exit. Tim had, as Dorelia forecast, arrived in time to have something to eat and drink, but he wanted to get the business with Fergus out of the way, and started to search for him. Fergus was out of the room, having a quick prowl round the house, from force of habit rather than any particular intent.

  Tim decided to wait for a few minutes, sighing inwardly at the thought that he might have to sit through an hour or so of music if Fergus did not come back. He picked out Hugh accurately by guesswork, although perhaps this was not such a difficult feat of detection. The composer was enjoying the attention of several women; as far as was compatible with eating and drinking as much as decorously possible, he was playing the eccentric musician for all he was worth. Tim realized it would be impossible to tackle him now.

  Kattie, also alight with the occasion, hovered brilliantly, darting bright-eyed from group to group, accepting congratulations with a regal bow of the head.

  ‘How she is loving it!’ Clem said fondly to Angela, who found herself astonished at the scale of the concert and said so, more than once.

  ‘Oh, these things just sort of grow.’ Clem indicated infinite growth with a single flourish of his hand. Very glad of it she was too, the music and the chatter and the people all eating and drinking to distract her from the horrid possibility that Billy might suddenly turn up, a very substantial spectre at this jolly little feast. She clenched her fists, screwed her eyes up tight and muttered to no one in particular, ‘Please, God, don’t let him appear now!’

  At this point two things happened. Fergus came back into the room and Kattie gave Hugh the signal that the second half should begin.

  Hugh, torn between eagerness to play and reluctance to put down his glass and plate, moved, still chewing surreptiously, through the rows of chairs back to his seat at the organ. Tim suddenly saw Fergus and decided to tackle him now rather than wait until the end of the concert, but was hampered in his journey across the room by the well bred pressure to claim good seats.

  Fergus looked up and saw the policeman raise his hand discreetly. The effect was not at all what Tim had expected. Their conspiracy was over. Fergus bolted. It is doubtful whether he even remembered that he had been trying to set Hugh up. All he thought of was the largish piece of resin wrapped in silver foil in his jacket pocket and the long trek back to the nick, to the courts and then back inside for a stretch. How the hell Tyson knew he had the stuff on him or even cared that he did any more was something that he did not stop to consider. His instinct was to get away quickly. Standing as he was by the door, the exit presented no problem. Tim was not allowed such an easy passage. At first he did not fully realize that Fergus was fleeing; when he did, the urge to chase was strong.

  But by the time he reached the gravel drive Fergus was already backing the car, and he had to jump sharply out of the way to avoid being hit. He peered into the darkness to confirm th
at there was a passenger in the car. By the time he regained the house to search for a telephone the concert had resumed. A swell and fall of clapping indicated that Hansard was poised to start playing again. He swore as he ran over Fergus’ dramatic exit and recalled his own near miss, and decided that matters should be put on an official footing.

  He was helped by Angela, who suddenly felt she could not bear to stay in the ballroom a moment longer. The press of people, the sheer richness of everything, had become too much. What had helped her to forget her fears a few minutes before was now choking and stifling her. She left to stand outside and breathe the evening air. Now she felt certain that Billy would arrive, and she needed to clear her mind to think what she was going to say to him; how she was to deliver her decision.

  In the event, she need not have bothered.

  She showed this man who looked a little like a car salesman to the telephone on the hall table. Far too polite to ask his business, she then hovered in the hallway, just in case he should do something untoward. Tim was dialling the police station number when a small clatter in the doorway made them both look up.

  A dark, tall woman stood in the pool of light below the shell-shaped fanlight of the double doors.

  ‘I have come for my baby,’ announced Anna. Tim, not often nonplussed, found himself gently replacing the receiver before he had dialled the last number. He looked from one woman to the other.

  ‘And perhaps you ought to know,’ said Anna, calmly walking forward into the hallway, ‘there’s a dead man by your gate.’

  ‘Where is this place? Why are we going in here? Look, I’m meant to be in London, staying with a friend tonight. Fergus!’ Dorelia screamed at him as he shuddered the car to a halt outside a bungalow which they had reached by a maze of country lanes and then a pot-holed track.

  ‘You said you wanted to see my place. Remember? Well, we’re here now. Go on, get out the car.’

  Fergus leaned across her and opened the passenger door, giving her a little push as he did so. She shuddered as his greasy greying hair brushed her face, and glared at him as he straightened up.

  ‘You horrible boy – don’t you hit me.’

  Fergus laughed. ‘Okay lady muck, out you get. Remember we’re on my patch now.’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Off you go then. But I’m keeping the keys.’ He sniggered at her as he forced the car keys into the hip pocket of his too-tight trousers.

  ‘Well, I’ll come in just to have a look. And then you’ll give me my keys and I’ll drive back.’ Dorelia, heroine of countless imaginary dramas, was out of her depth.

  Fergus sniggered again and sniffed loudly in the back of his nose before leading the way into the bungalow through a dark outbuilding. Dorelia, still clutching her cricket sweater, blinked as she tried to adjust her eyes to the bright light which Fergus flicked on.

  An image of old films flashed into Dorelia’s mind before she realized that the kitchen was like a set from a movie made in the Fifties. Cupboards and the splay-legged table were all faced in shiny red Formica patterned with black speckles. The grimy woodwork was painted duck-egg blue and there were bent tin ashtrays with little shaped channels to hold the cigarettes. The fridge, which stood on little legs, was enormous and rounded and it hummed loudly. The cooker, also supported by spindly legs, was a large version of a Baby Belling.

  ‘What a sweet little kitchen,’ she said mechanically. She was beginning to feel very tired.

  ‘Yeah. Well, my old lady had it all done up when they got this place and the money. It was the latest there was then, see.’ He led the way across the red and blue rubber tiled floor into a dim hallway made even darker than it must have been naturally by an old carpet which was tacked over the front door.

  ‘We come in and out the back way. It’s easier,’ said Fergus.

  He led the way into a large room, dimly lit and with a strange musty smell. A log fire blazed at the end by the door, the fireplace with its carved wooden mantelpiece and surround taking up almost the width of the wall. A vast sheepskin rug was spread in front of the fire. There were two dented bolster-like cushions at one end of the rug, which seemed extremely dirty.

  All Dorelia took in at first, accustoming her eyes to the light thrown out by the fire and trying to identify the spicy smell, was the area occupied by about a third of the room. An old leatherette sofa, parallel with the rug and facing the fire, was the boundary of this piece. It was strewn with a great many battered cushions, some of them obviously home-made and many with bits of stuffing poking through.

  Dorelia looked beyond this fairly inviting area to the nether regions of the room. There seemed to be a source of light right at the back and she moved round to see better. A huge table, large enough to take upwards of a dozen people comfortably, stood solidly behind the sofa. It was made of a dark wood and designed to fold in on itself to make it smaller. The light was coming from behind this, and as Dorelia moved towards it, and the area made dark around it, she saw dismembered pieces of motorcycle lying on the worn carpet. Bent over them was a young man with a shiny bald head, wearing a sleeveless denim jacket and jeans.

  ‘That’s Tommy,’ said Fergus. The young man looked up, nodded at Dorelia and turned back to his machine. She saw that although his head was completely bald on top, he had allowed the back hair to grow very long and kept it neatly tied back in a pony tail. Tattoos of eagles and snakes encircled his bare right arm. Dorelia stared at these.

  ‘Don’t you mind him mending his bike in here?’ she asked.

  ‘Course not. He couldn’t see to do it outside, could he?’ Fergus picked at his teeth and considered her. ‘Come and sit down by the fire and have a smoke.’

  ‘I don’t, thank you,’ Dorelia said, primly.

  ‘Not even some of this?’ He pulled the lump of resin from his pocket and shoved it under her nose, still in its wrapping. She recognized the smell as that which impregnated the room.

  ‘Not now, thank you.’ She was shocked. ‘Please Fergus, will you take me home now?’

  ‘Can’t do that I’m afraid.’ Fergus grinned at her, enjoying his power.

  ‘Well, just give me my car keys and tell me the way then!’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Well, I’ll ring for a taxi then!’ Dorelia stamped her foot on the ground. She was near to tears. She heard the bald boy at the back of the room whistle softly through his teeth.

  ‘Phone’s not working. Sorry.’

  ‘All right!’ Dorelia was sobbing now. ‘All right! I’ll jolly well walk.’ She went to march out of the room.

  ‘Tom!’ Fergus called over to the tattooed man. The lad uncoiled himself, and before Dorelia had reached the doorway he was standing in front of her. He was very tall. He grinned, and she saw that he had no teeth.

  ‘Sorry love. If Fergus says it’s no, then it’s no, see? Go and sit down like a good girl.’ His voice lisped and mumbled but his eyes were hard and bright. He grinned his gummy threat at her and twiddled a small knife in his hand.

  ‘Are you mad? Fergus, tell him to move out of my way.’ But Fergus, lying dreamily in front of the fire, his head pillowed on one of the bolsters, was puffing away at a joint. He chose not to reply. Dorelia, breath coming in sobs, eventually moved back to the sofa and gingerly sat down.

  ‘Tommy, mate,’ said Fergus after a while. ‘Forgot to say. The Old Bill is after me, I think. Better get rid of anything that might be lying around. And this. In the usual place mate. Got that?’ He handed Tommy the rest of his piece of dope. Tommy really did look dangerous now.

  ‘Why the fuck didn’t you say before? They know you’re back here. Are they on their way?’

  ‘Dunno. Spect so. Uncle Tim started chasing me at this posh do at her place’ – Fergus nodded at Dorelia, who sensing rescue, became alert. She pulled her cricket sweater on.

  ‘Look at her – she thinks they’re coming to get her,’ mocked Tommy.

  ‘Oh, no they won’t,’ said Fergus, sitting up. �
��That’s why I brought her with me. She’s our hostage.’

  Sadly for Dorelia, no one back at Puttnam was worrying about her yet. Kattie, popping up to the bedroom at the height of the confusion, saw the note and, groaning in a desultory fashion at the child’s thoughtlessness, assumed that her daughter had gone off to London. Detective Inspector Tyson, with the added burden of a body, felt that the explanations due in the case of the dead outweighed an investigation of Fergus’ affairs and he put off the dubious pursuit. He had jotted down the number of the getaway car and made a mental note to ask about it, and also about the tall young lady with the red hair, before he left.

  Anna, with little Juanita, snatched from her basket in the kitchen, clasped firmly to the maternal bosom, was patting Angela on the arm with her free hand. She had taken emotional charge of the situation.

  ‘Your poor husband! But he cannot have suffered at all you know! I looked at him quite carefully and I am sure he died instantly. A single blow. He must have come here by taxi, like me. My driver dropped me a little way from the house because of the cars.’ She looked accusingly at Kattie. ‘I imagine it was the same in his case. A man with one leg!’

  Kattie, sensing the implied criticism, flushed bright pink. She was about to reply when Tim Tyson butted in. It was at this point that he realized what had happened.

  ‘Can anyone tell me anything about a tall young lady. With rather striking red hair?’

  ‘Well, of course. That’s my daughter, Dorelia. But she’s in London. What has all this to do with her?’

  Kattie, nettled by Anna’s arrival, the incipient loss of little Ju and the abrupt termination of her concert, felt increasingly hostile towards this policeman. Irrationally she was beginning to blame all these untoward events on him, feeling, not without a little justification, that his arrival had somehow precipitated the disasters. She was certainly not mourning Billy. In fact, although she would not have admitted it, even to Clem, there was the beginning of a twinge of excitement at what she was to perceive as Angela’s release.