by Gary Newman
‘They had good hearts in their bellies in those days,’ my unexpected guest said with a chortle: ‘facing that thing every morning!’
I was definitely intrigued by the final R. of the initials on the handle of the razor, which I reclosed carefully and laid on the table again, along with my visitor’s business card.
‘Yes,’ Brogan went on, looking meaningfully over at the drinks cupboard on the back wall, ‘a very chilly night for April . . .’
There might be an advantage in loosening his tongue, I thought, and went over to the cupboard.
‘I’ve some Irish stuff, here,’ I said. ‘Bushmill’s . . .’
‘Just what the doctor ordered, Mr Rolvenden – neat, thank you kindly.’
I came back with the whiskey, and handed it to the compact figure with the merry eyes. He stared at me for a second or two, between his first sips of whiskey.
‘I should’ve thought you’d have been able to follow me home from the National Gallery on Monday,’ I said from the other armchair.
‘Escalator conked out in Baker Street underground station, and by the time I’d got to the entrance, you were gone. Make anything of the initials on the razor?’
I shook my head – Brogan would have to do the talking.
‘Daines Bartlett Rolvenden, midshipman, Royal Navy – made for him in 1816. Beffreys have a complete record of all their customers since they started in 1797. They’ve no record of any more being made for your family since then.’
‘There was a long run of poor rural parsons for the rest of the nineteenth century – they wouldn’t have run to customized West End accessories.’
‘Ah . . .’ Brogan went on. ‘D. B. Rolvenden died in 1877, and I assume the razor would have passed to his son, Francis Skeat Rolvenden, then when he died in 1894, to his son – your grandfather and namesake, Sebastian John Rolvenden.’
‘You’re quite a living compendium, Mr Brogan.’
An eager light came into the little man’s eyes.
‘It’s not just the money – oh, no! – the chase is everything to me! When I’ve a full provenance for an object, it’s, it’s . . . like possession itself!’
‘And the full provenance of the razor?’
Brogan took another sip from his glass and a sly look came back into his eyes.
‘A lot of fresh stuff coming on to the market over in Jersey, Mr Rolvenden. An old feller from one of the rural parishes – no need to go into details, but all above board – used to bring all sorts of things in to me. He died very recently, more’s the pity . . .’
Would the rural parish have been St Marc’s, I wondered, where my grandfather had been vicar and where I still owned a beachside farmhouse? And would the ‘old feller’ who’d sold the razor to Brogan have been the parishioner who’d looted Grandfather’s vicarage when he’d been interned by the Germans in 1940? If so, it probably meant that the contents of the Jiffy bag that Lawyer Le Touzel had forwarded to me after the ‘old feller’s’ death had been just one step behind Brogan . . . In that case, I’d stepped on his toes big-time, and would have to box cleverly with him.
‘You rather alarmed my wife and son in Suffolk, the other day, Mr Brogan.’
‘Yes, and I’m terribly sorry if I’ve caused you embarrassment. You see, I got your details from the blurb of the book you wrote with your lady, and I’d no idea you and she were no longer . . .’
I recalled a detail of his visit to the Holt, as recounted to me by Reet when she’d called on me on the Wednesday afternoon.
‘You haven’t been an antique dealer in Jersey for long, Mr Brogan.’
The eyes became positively saucer-like.
‘Oh, and how do you make that out?’
‘You still need a road map to get round the island.’
‘Ah, nice one! The map in my car – your son – a very observant young man! As for my visit here tonight, thing is, it took me longer to find this place than I thought it would – it’s a sort of a backwater of a backwater . . .’
‘That’s one of the reasons why I like it. As a matter of interest, how did you find me here?’
‘Your regular gardening article in the Dumfries Herald – just out today. I read it online. About garden bamboos. In the article you mention your “new venture, your lighthouse in Essex . . .”’
You had to hand it to him: Brogan was thorough.
‘Right,’ my puckish visitor went on, ‘but when I did eventually find this place, it was so late I wasn’t sure whether to bother you with a call. I thought it might be better just to note the spot and come back in the morning, but when I saw the gap in the hedge that adjoins the shed . . .’
‘Professional curiosity did the rest.’
‘In one, Mr Rolvenden!’
‘Well, I don’t keep any family mementoes in the shed, and I certainly haven’t anything in the antiques line to sell, so it’s very late, and if you don’t mind . . .’
Brogan smiled on, seemingly undeterred, then reached in his pocket for something, and handed it across to me.
‘All sorts of things coming on the market on the island . . .’ he remarked brightly.
The object was a platinum tiepin. In tiny diamonds was the stylized monogram J. R., which I recognized as Julian Rawbeck’s from his paintings. I was lost in speculation as I gazed at the rich little trifle, and by the time I’d looked up again, Brogan was on his feet and examining the photographs on the mantelpiece. I got up and joined him, noticing in passing that the razor and the business card he’d given me were no longer on the side table where I’d put them. I handed him back the tiepin without a word.
‘Let me guess,’ he said, pocketing the jewelled Rawbeck relic, while nodding in the direction of the sharp-featured, bearded face in the framed photograph. ‘That’s your grandfather.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I’ll bet he could tell quite a story, Mr Rolvenden: quite a story.’
With the thought that my dead grandfather was already telling me a remarkable story, I showed the opportunistic dealer to the front door.
‘I suppose your Micra’s hidden away somewhere in the undergrowth,’ I said, as I switched on the porch light.
‘A discreet little model, Mr Rolvenden,’ Brogan said, busy with a pencil on the back of the business card he’d handed me not long before. There was complete confidence in his voice as, on handing me back the card, he made his parting remark.
‘Well, we know where to find each other, now. I’ll be on the mainland for at least a month, and I look forward to seeing you again. Goodnight; or rather, morning!’
In the light of the porch lamp, I looked at the writing on the back of the card. The address of a London hotel and a mobile number. If what I’d just examined had been the razor my grandfather had missed when he’d returned to his digs after fleeing the murder room in 1899, and if the victim Rawbeck’s tiepin had been part of the stuff looted from my grandfather’s vicarage in Jersey in 1940, then, yes, I thought I would be seeing Liam Brogan again.
I switched off the porch light and shut and bolted the front door, then went and did as much for the back door before returning to the sitting room. I looked up at the clock: a quarter to one. I remembered the anxiety Brogan’s visit had caused Reet – would she still be up? I sat down on the sofa and rang the Holt.
‘Mum’s gone to bed,’ my son Paul answered shortly.
‘What d’you want?’
‘The little guy in the Micra who’s been nosing around up at your end’s just been here to see me. He’s an antique dealer.’
‘He didn’t look like a knocker to me.’
‘No, he’s a real dealer – an offbeat character, but I don’t think he’ll bother you again – he’s only after me. If you’ll just tell your mother first thing – set her mind at rest.’
There was a tense silence at the other end, and I sensed I’d said the wrong thing.
‘She seemed worried when she called here on Wednesday,’ I went on, ‘and I only thought I’d �
�’
‘You’re a fine one to talk about setting her mind at rest – just leave her alone: you’ve made her unhappy enough already.’
‘I’ll ring her myself in the morning,’ I said wearily.
There was a short silence, then the voice came back more calmly.
‘Don’t bother – I’ll tell her – but don’t think –’
‘Goodnight, Paul.’
I put the receiver down, then held my head in my hands for a little while, just to compose myself again. Yes – Brogan – just how much did he know about my search for the truth about my grandfather and his part in the disappearance of Julian Rawbeck? He’d seemed very confident I’d rise to the bait, in the form of the monogrammed tiepin – just left the next move to me. At any rate, I seemed to have picked up another shadow. And yet another connection with Jersey . . .
I remembered my last stay in the farmhouse there with Reet, Frank and Pat, a thousand years and two summers before. How it had all started with Pat. That afternoon, I’d seen everyone – or so I’d thought – off at the gate, Frank and Reet having decided to trek down to the reed ponds at La Mielle du Moro on the bay. In my mind’s eye, I saw the sweep of the bay: the low-lying, rich fields and the few whitewashed farmhouses, their walls incandescent in the July glare, then, higher up, the gorse scrub that led up to the abrupt, granite escarpment.
Reet had always been a bit of a twitcher, and I knew the RSPB hide at La Mielle would claim her for the rest of the afternoon. Frank, too, would have been busy with his camera, for nowhere seemed real to him unless he’d captured every detail of it on film. If he hadn’t snapped it, he hadn’t really been there. I’d stayed behind to make some phone calls to the mainland, and Pat had taken the Land Rover to drive into St Helier for shopping – or so she’d said.
Yes, and there’d been the funny incident at the gate with the solemn little boy as my company had got ready to set off. He’d been walking with his father along the footpath to the beach when he’d stopped and confronted us, then, after he’d stared intently at me for a moment, he’d turned to his dad and, pointing at me, asked him if I was ‘the man in the shed’. We’d all laughed, and the father of the little boy had grinned sheepishly and led his charge – his head turned, still staring at me – away along the path.
Frank had then made one of his impromptu cracks about my having been up to my old tricks somewhere – to a sharp look from Reet – and the party had broken up, to go our separate ways; in my case, to stay behind in the farmhouse.
Funny how often Frank hits the mark with his tactless blurtings: when Pat had come back to the farmhouse on some pretext ten minutes or so later, I’d got up to some of my ‘tricks’ with her. She’d made it fairly obvious what she’d expected of me, and what with the heat, the still, charged air, and her, all brown and spare in her shorts and blue top, I’d played the part more than willingly.
Hence the misunderstanding between us. I’d thought then from her approach that she’d meant it – as I had – to be a mere episode, leaving no traces – a sort of fit of absentmindedness on a hot afternoon, as these things happen. But Pat had something more in mind. Even then – if I’d resisted her the second time – I might have been able to nip it in the bud. That had been when, two months after the Jersey farmhouse incident, Reet and Paul had been over in Belgium for the Florilegium thing. Frank had been on one of his trips to the States, and Pat had turned up in her provocative way that Sunday afternoon at the Holt. I hadn’t resisted, and so it had gone on, hence the present merry dance she was leading me.
‘Pish!’ The collapsing log on the fire brought me out of my reverie, and back to the chill, early hours of Good Friday in my lighthouse in Essex. I looked up at the photo of my grandfather on the mantelpiece, wondering inconsequentially if he was disapproving of such unholy reflections on this most solemn of religious festivals. I turned to the clock – one-thirty, and time for bed – but I lay awake upstairs for quite some time, chewing over the visit I’d just had from the Irish antique dealer.
Hadn’t I overlooked something rather obvious about the heirloom razor he’d shown me, the one with my naval forebear’s initials on it? If it had been the one found in Philip Forbuoys’ pocket after his body had been fished out of the Thames in 1899, how could it have been found among my grandfather’s effects years later?
The razor the River Police had found on Forbuoys’ body had been used in evidence at the Coroner’s post-mortem, so how could it have found its way back to my grandfather in Paris? What did the authorities do with bits of evidence after court hearings? File them away somewhere? Return them to the owners or the next-of-kin? Flog them off at a Crown auction? There was still no solid evidence to connect the razor my grandfather had missed from his wash-stand in his digs in Victorian London, and which Brogan had produced so melodramatically an hour previously, with the one that had been found on Philip Forbuoys’ body.
And Brogan’s motives: he’d clearly invested a lot in this show, gone to prodigious pains to track down the rest of my grandfather’s stolen Jersey hoard, but surely he was after bigger game than the trinkets he’d flashed in front of me like a party magician? What was the Big Prize? I thought back to the legend of Rawbeck’s lost masterpiece, The Ruffian on the Stair. Its price – if it existed, and were to be unearthed today – would surely run into six or even seven figures. Now there was a prize worthy of the Irish dealer’s efforts . . .
I knew Rawbeck had taken many of the titles of his paintings and drawings from literature, a typical Victorian trait. The Ruffian on the Stair rang a bell with me: I seemed to connect it with something about your being ‘Captain of your fate, Master of your soul,’ or was it the other way round? Ah! Henley – W. E. Henley – that was the writer! I remembered now, but ‘The Ruffian’ had been another poem of his: how had that gone? Yes:
Madam Life’s a piece in bloom
Death goes dogging everywhere:
She’s the tenant of the room,
He’s the ruffian on the stair.
The Ruffian on the Stair, then, was Death.
Chapter Eight
I woke very late to full day on that Good Friday morning, and all, I congratulated myself, without my having popped a single pill. The sun was streaming in through the square-paned window, and out in the garden a blackbird was shrieking its heart out like a working men’s club turn. I remembered the previous night’s encounter, and in my musing, morning mind wondered how Liam Brogan would be marking the Crucifixion on this most solemn of days. No doubt he’d have a full programme of skulduggeries lined up – who cared nowadays?
I got up, showered and dressed and went downstairs to make some coffee and toast. I looked into the sitting room, and glancing at the white ash in the hearth, realized that for the first time that year it was mild enough to leave the fire unlit.
After breakfast I drifted unwillingly upstairs again to my workroom to check my Inbox: nothing, not even from Leah. She’d said she’d be working on at the university, and I decided not to bother her till she actually got in touch again. I sat vacantly in front of the blue screen for a moment or two – a little bit of rewrite still to do on the Tod Slaughter biography, but nothing terribly urgent. My gaze strayed to the window, where the sun was egging me on like a feckless companion. I’d walk out into the springtime morning – along the headland to the marshes. I closed down the computer and went downstairs again, donned my old leather bomber jacket and left by the front door.
I drew in deep draughts of salt air as I strode down the tarmac of the headland, the sea-reek having been displaced for a moment on the breeze by the faint, hay fever aroma of sun-warmed broom blossom. As I drew nearer the muddy vastness of creeks and marshes the sea-influence began to reassert itself over the pervasive scent of broom, and I stood still for a moment, closed my eyes, and thought of nothing. Why couldn’t this be enough?
I started walking again, the tarmac swerving back inland, and brushed the village – well, just a couple of straggling bun
ches of farm buildings, really. The place was known simply as Headland, with the squat, twelfth-century church as focal point. There were three churches in the parish, served by the one vicar, and Holy Trinity, Headland, was used only on certain high holy days in the year, of which this was the most solemn.
Standing back a bit, I could hear over the cluster of cars parked on the rough grass of the glebe, and through the low, Norman-arched open doorway, the organ strains to ‘I was glad when they said unto me, Let us enter the house of the Lord’. I took this as a sign, and went in rather awkwardly and perched on the edge of the pew nearest the door. As the solemnities unfolded up front, I closed my eyes in the Norman coolness and meditated. I’d had the usual youthful intimations and inklings of Glory, but as our time becomes more limited these fade, and I’m no exception to this process. It was soothing, though – definitely.
Then they sang ‘There is a green hill far away’, and all my half-forgotten religious education came back to me on a wave of unworthiness. Wasn’t I the grandson of an ordained priest, and what had I made of the life that God had given me? What clean thing had I to offer up to Him? A knockabout career of lucky hobbies, and a wife and son I’d betrayed and failed. Unworthy . . .
I got up and went out, and began to retrace my steps back down the headland, but, as I went, I felt an odd vulnerability in the small of my back. I looked over my shoulder, and saw a tall, slim man standing all alone in the churchyard. The sun was behind him, so I couldn’t make out any features, but he was looking in my direction. The fancy came into my head that he was like an unravelled question mark. I looked ahead again and walked on. Suddenly, the sun went in, and the breeze that had earlier brought the scent of broom now brought drops of rain. I hurried homewards.
I’d had notions of having lunch on Mersea Island, but the prospect of hordes of Bank Holiday trippers put me off that idea, so on arriving back at the lighthouse I simply washed down a pie with a mugful of coffee, then went straight upstairs to my computer. I got stuck into the ‘little’ rewrite job, which as nearly always happens involved much complicated tying-up of loose ends opened up in the surrounding text. The upshot of it was that it wasn’t till nearly seven-thirty in the evening that I could slump back in my cane chair downstairs and shut my stinging eyes for a spell.