by Gary Newman
Chapter Five
I got home just after three-thirty, and dashed up to my study and tore immediately into the gardening article, finally emailing it to Dumfries at twenty past four. After that, it was straight downstairs to get myself a mug of coffee and a crunch of biscuits before tackling Grandfather’s notebook and letters again. I’d now be able to read them in the light of my new discoveries, in particular that of Rivers, the Camden-based desert wanderer of the turn of the last century.
I found that there was only one mention of Rivers in all of the Jiffy bag texts, and that was confined to the notebook entries in the ‘disjointed’ section. Of course, Rivers’ Camden address and the fact that he’d left England for good in the year of Rawbeck’s disappearance might have been pure coincidence, but if the ‘S. R.’ of the dedication of his Baalbek book of sonnets had stood for Sebastian Rolvenden, we were into exciting new territory . . .
But then there were Reuben’s Court, Smoking Altars and Home in the East to crack, not to mention Soundings A. And if only I knew who else – apart from P. F., the lugubrious flautist – had been at the Camden Hill Convocation on the night of my grandfather’s horrible awakening in the unidentified house with the beguiling stairhead window . . .
The tentative quack of a car horn outside broke my reverie. I plonked my mug down on the side table and went over to the window. Leah? She’d told me she was up to her neck in compiling exam papers. I twitched the curtain aside, half-ready to groan with dismay at the sight of Pat Hague’s boxy, black vintage car, but my heart sank into my shoes when I saw the familiar – in both senses – Land Rover parked on the headland, and my ex-wife Reet getting out of it. She was dressed any old how in an anorak, woollies and denims, with the scuffed oil-rigger’s half-boots she usually wore on the smallholding. Her hair was now its natural grey, but she was as spare and graceful as she’d ever been.
At first I felt totally confused and abashed, as you do towards someone who knows everything about you, but with whom you’re not right. I hadn’t given much thought up to then about how I might feel if I ever ran into her again – the relief had been so total when I’d walked out of the divorce court the year before – but I found that what I actually felt was shame – and, yes, a sort of subdued excitement. She looked calm enough as she walked up to the front door, which I ran forward to open.
‘Coffee?’ was all I could say as, shaking her head, she wiped her boots on the front doormat. ‘Please . . .’ I heard myself saying.
‘All right, then,’ Reet said indifferently, and I scurried off to the kitchen.
I drew her a mugful from the brew I’d made not long before, and returned to the sitting room, where she was sitting on the cane sofa she’d bought herself for our first home an age before. I took a seat at the other end.
‘I’ve been to London,’ my ex-wife said as I plied her with coffee – milk, but no sugar. ‘Just turned off the A12.’
It must be important, I thought, then: if this was Pat Hague’s work . . .
‘You didn’t arrange these . . .’ Reet said with a little smile as with her long fingers, reddened by country living, she stroked the brightly coloured cushions on the sofa.
‘Er, no,’ I said: had Pat been talking to her about Leah?
‘You’ve not been well?’
I could cheerfully have wrung Pat’s neck.
‘Been a bit under the weather, but I’m fine now.’
She glanced at me reproachfully, and I noticed how firmly her high-coloured skin still held over the high-bridged nose and high cheekbones.
‘I’ve been under the weather, too – Seb, have you been sending a private detective to watch me?’
‘No!’ I yelped angrily, spluttering over my coffee. ‘Of all the . . . Who’s been telling you . . .’
‘Sorry, then . . . It’s just that lately there’s been a car parked on the side road behind the stables and once actually inside the trees at the Holt. Paul waited behind the hedge the other day for the driver to come back. When he did, he said he was looking for Mr Sebastian Rolvenden, and Paul told him you didn’t live there any more. Paul said he’d looked on the top of the dashboard of the car – a light-grey Nissan Micra – and there’d been a copy of our book there, and a map of Jersey.’
Reet and I had co-authored a book on our organic experiment at the smallholding years back – the snooper at the Holt must have got our address out of it – and now there was another possible Jersey connection. I remembered the odd little encounter I’d had at the end of my visit to the Rawbeck collection at the National Gallery on Monday.
‘Was he a bullet-headed little man, by any chance?’ I ventured. ‘Stubbly grey hair, round blue eyes and a cooing voice with an Irish accent?’
‘Yes, that’s pretty well how Paul described him – d’you know him, then?’
‘No, but I’m beginning to think he might know me: he spoke to me, or rather behind me, at the National Gallery on Monday. Did he tell Paul his name?’
‘No, he asked him where you were now, and, er . . . Paul said he’d no idea . . .’
I smiled a grim little smile: I could well imagine how forcefully my son would have responded to such a query.
‘Then the man just said there’d been a misunderstanding,’ Reet went on, ‘and drove off. I wouldn’t have bothered you, but . . .’
‘Did Paul suggest I’d been sending a private detective to the Holt?’
Reet put her mug down and, getting up, went over to the back window. ‘The kitchen garden’s looking lovely, Seb – you’re more suited to working on a small scale.’
She then swung round to face me, real disquiet in her eyes this time.
‘Why were you at the National Gallery, Seb?’
‘Mmm . . . to look at some, er . . . Impressionists – something I’m working on at the moment. Why do you ask?’
She seemed on the point of saying something, but hesitated before replying.
‘I just thought it might’ve been something to do with the man who came to the Holt.’
‘Reet, if our friend shows up again, will you send him down here to me?’
‘All right – if that’s what you want – but I hope it’s all right.’
I got up and walked over to her, gently touching her sleeve. I wanted to say something to her, but didn’t know what it was.
Reet softly disengaged my hand from her arm and started to make for the door.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘must be going. Evening chores waiting and all that.’
She paused in the doorway, and the anxious expression came back into her eyes.
‘Seb, you’re a clever guy, but you can’t always see.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Just that the truth doesn’t always set you free – Bye, take care . . .’
I stood at the door, till the Land Rover had disappeared up the headland. What had all that been in aid of? I could understand Reet’s desire to head off a potential dust-up between me and Paul over his private detective notion – there’d been enough spats between us in recent years – but what could it possibly have been to her if I’d visited the National Gallery recently? And that stuff about my not ‘seeing’? I also wanted to know what the puckish Irish bloke who’d buttonholed me in the Gallery was up to. I still had a strong suspicion, however, that Pat Hague’s fine Italian hand might be in this, so on finally shutting the door and going back inside, I rang the Hagues’ number in Wivenhoe, Frank answering my request to speak to his wife.
‘Pat?’ he replied. ‘Not in – destination unknown. Mine not to reason why – not at the boathouse at the last count – maybe on the trail of the Bard of Swansea.’
‘Could you ask her to ring me up when you see her next?’
‘Righto – that all?’
‘That’s all, Frank – thanks and cheers.’
I put down the receiver and returned to my new discovery: Sir Tarquin Rivers’ possible connection with the Camden Hill Convocation, and the dedication of his book
of poems to someone with at least my grandfather’s initials. I’d started another browse in Grandfather’s notebook, when, around five, Leah rang from the university to ask how I was. I excitedly explained about my new find in London that afternoon.
‘Rivers,’ Leah repeated, ‘Tarquin. Right, I’ll try the English section in the University Library – see you round seven-thirty – and have my dinner ready!’
I laughed, rang off, and returned to my grandfather’s notebook. I riffled the meagre pages – such a wad torn out – but wasn’t there something I’d forgotten in my concentration on the surviving text? What they did in the best old crime films? I went over to the bureau and rustled up a soft-leaded pencil, then began to shade the first blank sheet after the torn-out section. But there was no imprint outlined in the pencil-shading. Leave it for now – there was dinner to get ready.
A couple of hours later, Leah was sitting in my kitchen opposite me, looking enigmatically over the leek dumplings.
‘You’ve found something out, haven’t you?’ I quizzed her.
‘Watch this space,’ she said, even more enigmatically. ‘These are nice dumplings . . .’
After the meal, we took our wineglasses over to the sitting-room sofa, and Leah looked dreamily into the fire as I enlarged on what I’d told her earlier about my findings in Camden Town.
‘How long is it since you took any medication?’ my companion asked, as if she hadn’t been listening, and cutting off my stream of excited speculation.
‘Damned if I can remember . . .’
The soft olive features turned smilingly in my direction.
‘Good – soon you’ll be completely back into life.’
‘And who’ve I got to thank for that?’ I murmured, caressing Leah’s firm, plump thigh as I sought her mouth.
‘Aren’t you interested in what I found out in the University Library?’ she asked, pushing me away good-humouredly.
‘Yes – Rivers . . .’
Leah pulled a folded A4 sheet from the pocket of her denim top, unfolded the paper and started to explain.
‘This is Tarquin Rivers’ foreword from a 1907 collection of his poems: Salix Babylonica . . .’
‘The Willow of Babylon,’ I translated aloud. ‘In the Bible, that’s what the exiles hung their harps on, wasn’t it?’
‘. . . and wept,’ Leah capped my paraphrase, ‘when they remembered Zion.’
‘Exile,’ I said. ‘Longing – Rivers’ theme song.’
‘Well,’ my companion went on, ‘I think he explains here why he left England.’
Now I sat bolt upright on the sofa, all attention.
‘As to my reason for leaving my native land,’ Leah read out Rivers’ words, ‘suffice it to say that, roaming on a sleepless night in London, and idly following the hot-chestnut man home, I chanced upon a jewelled casement in a mean house. I entered the room whose door the casement guarded, and found inside a truth whose burden I knew I could not bear under English skies.
That truth, with its burden, is still with me, and will remain with me forever.’
‘The “jewelled casement”!’ I exclaimed. ‘The red-and-blue stained glass that Grandfather said in his notebook “beguiled” him on the landing window as he was doing his runner from the pub where he woke up with Rawbeck’s body!’
‘Rivers’ “burden”,’ Leah suggested. ‘What was in the room . . .’
‘But what was his part in it?’ I said, clapping down my wineglass on the side table, getting up and pacing the room in my agitation. ‘Was Rivers there while Rawbeck was still alive? Did Rivers in fact do him in? In that case, he wouldn’t have dared come back to his “native land” . . .’
‘And where was your grandad when Rivers barged – if he did – into the murder room? Remember, if the S. R. in Rivers’ dedication of the other book stood for Sebastian Rolvenden, Rivers was probably mad about the boy. Deep waters . . .’
‘And we know now that Rivers’ night-wander through London was after pub-closing time – very late at night in Victorian days . . .’
‘Oh?’ Leah challenged. ‘How do we know that from what I’ve just read?’
‘You haven’t had my experience in researching, my dear – over the years a hack becomes a repository of useless knowledge. In those days, hot-chestnut and hot-potato sellers used to gather in front of the pubs at closing time to catch the home-going revellers.’
‘Like burger stalls today.’
‘Right, and the fact that Rivers was following the hot-chestnut men home after a night’s trade indicates that the pubs would have been well and truly empty by that time. There’d have been no witnesses to whatever his part was in what went on in the murder room over the pub Grandfather describes in his notebook. We’re narrowing it down.’
‘What’s the next move, then?’ Leah asked as she forked into her third dumpling.
‘Examine the surrounding events of the time; after, say, the beginning of November – Rawbeck was last seen by his associates in the London art world around that time – 1899. Any reported events in London – crimes, arrests, anything – that might have a resonance with my grandfather’s account in the notebook.’
‘A trawl through the newspaper archives . . .’
‘My pigeon in Colchester tomorrow.’
And so, next morning, after Leah had driven off to the university and her exam papers after breakfast, I cleared my Inbox – a little Spanish translation job for an art gallery in Gateshead, with a fairly elastic deadline – then got into my car and drove again to the Colchester Reference Library. For the next hour or so, I pored over microfiche spools of their back copies of The Times for November and December 1899.
There was no reference to Julian Rawbeck in any of them, which was to be expected in the case of such an elusive character. He’d been capable of goofing off on the spur of the moment to Malaga or Algiers – anywhere – and prowling around there alone and incognito for months on end in search of inspiration. In this light, it wasn’t surprising that his absence only began to be noticed months after the time-window I was exploring.
I went on trawling carefully through each edition of the paper, from house property adverts to foreign news, through the Court Circular to the obits, without spotting anything with seeming relevance to the Rawbeck Affair. Then something caught my eye – a full name I could put significant initials to – in one of the small inside news columns in the issue of Friday, 11th November:
Suicide of Musician
The body of Mr Philip Forbuoys, aged about thirty, was taken from the Thames last night under Tower Bridge. Mr Forbuoys, who was unmarried and had rooms in Camden Town, was an executant of the classical flute, and according to his landlady, had seemed to be in low spirits for some time.Some indication of his intention to take his own life was provided by the fact that he appeared to have bought a secondhand razor in the course of the day of his death, his own being still upon the washstand of his lodgings, where he had left it upon leaving the house yesterday morning. The fact that he had seemed to have changed his mind during the course of the day, and chosen water as the means of his death, was indicated by the stones found in his pockets, along with the second-hand razor, after the discovery of his body. Mr Forbuoys had studied music in Germany, and was well known in artistic circles in London. The matter is now in the hands of the Coroner.
I sat back on the seat of the library carrel, and stared, unseeing, into the screen of the spool projector. Even through the dry language of the old Times report something of the blackness in the hapless flautist Forbuoys’ mind before he’d taken the final plunge into the deadly eddies under the piers of Tower Bridge came through to me. I pictured in my mind the ‘Convocation’ scene in my grandfather’s account, with his description of his writhings, to the accompaniment of a mournful tune on the flute, under the effects of the magic mushroom potion. I wondered whether the unfortunate Philip Forbuoys – the flautist ‘P. F.’ in my grandfather’s account – had been aware at the time that he’d
been playing his own funeral dirge.
Chapter Six
I joined Leah for lunch in the university cafeteria, near-deserted in this vacation-time, and we did a post-mortem on my morning’s find among the back numbers of The Times in the nearby City Library.
‘Mmm . . .’ Leah murmured thoughtfully over her undistinguished chicken curry. ‘On the face of it, given the way all the other circumstances fall into place, it’s unlikely to have been coincidence.’
‘None at all – P. F. in my grandfather’s notebook – Philip Forbuoys in the Times article on his suicide – both flautists – Forbuoys’ death on virtually the same day as Rawbeck’s disappearance.’
‘Which from the article’s dateline – 11th November 1899 – we can pin down to the 10th of that month. And I think we know now from the article who took your grandad’s family-heirloom razor from his digs . . .’
‘Right!’ I agreed. ‘Forbuoys . . . But did he take it along beforehand to the pub to murder Rawbeck and leave it there to frame my grandfather –’
‘Or did he turn up at the pub after Rawbeck’s murder, and take it away from the murder room to save your grandad? The flute player and your grandad may even have been in cahoots to get rid of Rawbeck, and as time goes by young Sebastian simply blots the thing out of his mind: not like me at all, so I couldn’t have done it –’