by Gary Newman
My brain was racing, and as I always do on such occasions, I went out into the garden to try to restore my equilibrium. Time to mulch the clematis on the east wall – it would give them a boost, and they liked a cool, moist root-run. It was good to be in the open air, and I whistled a tune as I wheeled a half-barrowload of rotted-down seaweed from the compost bin behind the shed to the clematis clump under the window. I’d trained the plant up a trellis, on two main stems, which forked, one stem on each side of the window, from the stump below.
I couldn’t help wrinkling my nose as I forked the compost out of the barrow and laid it in a three-inch layer round the roots of the climber: no matter how long you left seaweed to rot, it always kept some of its sewage-like pong. Having worked my way round the whole border, I gave a last pat to the surface of the mulch with my fork, slung the tool in the barrow, and wheeled both back to the shed.
Once indoors again, I cleaned up, then settled down in my cane armchair with a mug of coffee and a barrel of ginger-snaps. I considered the question of motives in the Rawbeck Affair. Rawbeck had set up his show for power and money – easy one. My grandfather’s drawn in because he’s crazy for Carrie Bugle, and he can only get to her through her Svengali, Rawbeck. Tarquin Rivers joins initially for esoteric knowledge, then things become increasingly complicated by a platonic pash he conceives for my youthful grandfather. Jimmie Toland joins Convocation through exuberant silliness and because he knows Rawbeck can procure young men for him. Laurence Victor Pidgeon, the Vickybird, is a chancer, and there’s probably been some sort of blackmail-nexus that binds him to Rawbeck. The Vickybird above all wants out, and the indications were that he’d killed Rawbeck to achieve this.
But Philip Forbuoys the flute player, what motivates – if that’s the word – him to jump into the Thames? What ill has he that’s not for mending? And Carrie herself, how does she see all this? Is it all just rip-roaring fun for the girl from Gatti’s music hall, as she plays the Vickybird against Rawbeck, and both against my wet young grandfather? Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay . . . It struck me that with her experienced, cynical eye, she’d have seen through them all. Maybe poor Forbuoys longed for her, too?
Then there’d been Carrie’s surname, Bugle. Just right for her and her profession, as if it had been designed by a publicity man. Had it been her real name, though?
I put my mug down on the side table, and, getting up, made my way over to the bureau, and the London Residential phone book. I stood and flicked down the ‘B’ columns: half a dozen variations on the theme of ‘bugler,’ two almost-spellings of Carrie’s surname, six Trumps and seven Trumpers, but nary a Bugle as spelt. Maybe the name had originally been something more prosaic, like Budgell, but her manager had thought Bugle would add a touch of charisma?
I flicked the wad of pages idly back – there were Pidgeons, too, and a dozen or so Nyes, but none in Hackney. In any case, how could you just work down the list, cheerily enquiring: ‘Good afternoon, could you by any chance be descended from a Victorian music hall dancer who’d something to do with cutting the throat of the artist she occasionally modelled for?’ Or, in the Vickybird’s case: ‘Hello! Would your great-grandfather have been a psychopathic pub cellar boy who bashed his landlady’s skull in in 1893?’
I decided to leave it all there for the time being, and the evening jogged along through supper to an early bed, but not for long, because for some reason I woke up suddenly in the pre-dawn of that Sunday morning. I turned over – and over again – but couldn’t get back to sleep – don’t say it was going to have to be the sleeping pills again – until, when it was more or less daylight, I got up grumpily, dragged on my robe and went downstairs.
On my way to the kitchen, I paused at the open door of the sitting room – something wrong. I went in and took a look round: everything seemed as I’d left it when I’d turned in on the previous evening, but yes, I could smell the sea . . . I glanced down at the carpet, and it was as if some sea-creature had flopped and hobbled across the floor: there were brownish stains in a huddle under the mantelpiece and round the bureau at the other side, then a trail of them leading to the window. I walked over to it, and flung aside the curtains, to let in the grey morning light. The windowsill was muddied with some of the seaweed compost I’d been applying under the window the previous evening, and there were little heaps of sawdust where someone had drilled up the window-hasp, which was cocked up at ninety degrees.
I pushed open the windows, and, stooping out, saw footprints deep in the newly applied mulch below. Cursing myself for not having installed window-locks immediately on buying the house, I hurried back in, my hands trembling with anger, and went and checked the front and back doors, which were locked and bolted from the inside, as I’d left them on turning in the night before.
Next I turned my attention to the sitting room, where everything appeared to be in place, including my grandfather, the anxiety in his large eyes frozen forever in his silver-framed photograph. A new fear surged through me, and, foolishly, I reached into the pocket of my robe for the key to the bureau compartment, where the Jiffy bag from Jersey was lodged.
Cursing myself again, I dashed upstairs for my jacket, in the pockets of which – along with my grandfather’s precious notebook – I found the bureau keys. Back downstairs, I unlocked the bureau-compartment, and, praying as I worked, checked all the items – 1871 OS street map of London, Bible, Crockford, and all the letters – in the Jiffy bag. I checked the contents of every envelope, including those in the folder in the back of the Bible, and the one sandwiched between its pages. All there – thank God! – but, hang on – the overlarge letter that had been squeezed into an envelope that was too small for it – the letter written to my grandfather in French from Madame Pidgeon in Niort before the war – was gone.
Chapter Twelve
I went outside to examine the footprints in the mulch: a big foot – size ten or even eleven – and quite a shallow impression, in spite of the softness of the seaweed compost. I weigh just under thirteen stone, and the imprint of my shod feet on soft earth is noticeably deeper. Barring a little man with outsize feet – very rare, in my experience – we were looking for a tall, thin man, with big feet; one, moreover, who was agile enough to break into a house and nip through a window so as not to awaken the upstairs occupant. A fairly young man, then.
The above criteria ruled out Liam Brogan, even if he’d been stupid enough to have taken a second pop at my property within days of my having caught him at his midnight tampering with my shed. My son Paul was fairly tall – five-ten-and-a-bit – and wiry with it, but he took a size eight shoe, and the idea of his doing anything quietly just made me smile. The shoe-test also ruled out Reet, as well as Frank and Pat Hague – I knew Pat’s narrow, brown feet pretty well, with or without shoes. As for Leah – just for the sake of elimination – she was tiny. Plainly ridiculous.
Who did that leave, then? I recalled the tall, lanky figure I’d seen standing with his back to the sun in Headland churchyard on Good Friday morning, and the tall man I’d seen out on the headland itself the other evening in the dimity light, when I hadn’t been sure whether he’d been looking out to sea or at my lighthouse. In addition, there’d been the Joe Cool in the foreign-looking clothes and dark glasses who’d propped up the wall of the Walberswick auction room two days before. They all – or perhaps it had been the same man? – fitted my Identikit description of the previous night’s burglar.
Just then the shrill song of a blackbird broke my train of thought, and I shivered as it was borne in on me that there was nothing between my skin and the chill April air but an old bathrobe. I flopped back indoors on slippered feet, bolted the door behind me, and ducked into the bathroom and ran a bath. As I kicked off the slippers, I wondered where my night visitor might have chucked his incriminating, seaweed-ponging shoes. Which roadside ditch or unwitting council-tax-paying citizen’s wheelie bin might be holding them at that moment?
I slipped off the robe and climbed into the s
teaming bath, where I sank luxuriously into the hot water. My night intruder would no doubt be over the hills and far away by now, and with part of my grandfather’s life history in his pocket. I minded that very much. But, hang on: the fact that he’d only taken the pre-war letter from Madame Pidgeon in Niort, and had left all the other letters, suggested that he already had a fair idea of what was in them: the details of the early life of Sebastian Rolvenden the First. In any case, the stolen letter had been from a Pidgeon, suggesting a tie-in with the Vickybird’s role in Grandfather’s distant ordeal.
What then was the big-footed burglar’s game? Nothing altruistic, judging by his entry to the lighthouse. I sank back deeper into the joint-caressing hot water, and narrowed my eyes like some sybaritic pasha. If Big Foot needed to know about me as much as I now felt I needed to know about him, it was a racing certainty our paths would cross again, and then . . . I sloshed upright in the bath again, as I realized that I wasn’t the only Rolvenden within an hour’s drive – I remembered how put out Reet and Paul had been when Brogan had been mooching around the Holt. I must warn them. I got out of the bath and dried myself, pulled on my robe, then went to the sitting-room phone and rang the Holt, Reet answering. No need to apologize for the early call – they were always up with the larks.
‘Watch out for a tall, youngish bloke,’ I warned her. ‘He’s broken in here last night.’
‘You’re all right?’
‘Mmm . . . slept through the whole thing, more’s the pity.’
‘What did he take?’
‘An old letter to my grandfather.’
‘You’re still going on with that stuff? Really, Seb – it’s your life – but you should lay off all that . . .’
Disappointment registered in Reet’s tone: she’d never had much patience with this preoccupation of mine with my grandfather, regarding it as an unhealthy King Charles’s Head that kept me tied to aspects of my childhood immaturity.
‘You’ve no idea who this man is?’ Reet went on. ‘Nothing to do with the little guy who came round in the Micra, is it? The antiques man? Paul said if he comes around again, he’ll –’
‘I don’t know if there’s any connection between them, but I think I’ve seen the man who broke in – if it was him – before. Tall, lanky, foreign-looking chap in dark glasses at the saleroom in Walberswick the other day . . .’
There was a pregnant silence at the other end for a couple of moments.
‘All right, Seb – thanks for telling me. I’ll be on the alert – I’ll tell Paul as soon as he comes in.’
‘Right – bye,’ I signed off, feeling a pang at no longer being able to add the ‘darling’ I’d have used two years and more before.
And that was it: when I’d mentioned the Walberswick auction sale, not a word from Reet as to why she’d been there herself. Let alone why, more annoyingly, she’d made an extravagant bid for an object connected to my grandfather, whom she’d just been dismissing again as an unhealthy obsession of mine! I sat back in the chair and recalled the breakfasts we’d had in our first little flat in Earl’s Court, when we’d just been married. She wearing the ancient, checked woollen dressing gown Dad had chucked out, her long red hair combed over to one side as she’d sat with both hands round the coffee mug, talking in the quirky, dogmatic way I’d then been in love with: right and wrong, black and white, cut and dried . . . Youth! And how warm the white skin of her cheek and neck had been to the lips – so white, yet so warm. The days that were gone – I had so many of them now. But why hadn’t she mentioned being at the auction . . .?
It was no use: I just couldn’t sit around at home. Having broken into one Rolvenden house and got away scot-free with his haul, Big Foot wasn’t going to wait long before having a crack at the Holt. I looked at the mantelpiece clock: still only six forty-five. I could easily make it up to the Holt, do a recce there, and be down in West Mersea in time for my beloved ritual Sunday lunch with Leah. A good breakfast, then, and a quick dash up the A12 for an unscheduled visit to the Suffolk coast.
I got to the Holt at eight-forty, and parked discreetly in the piney hollow on a sand ridge that gave the farmstead its name. The little wood rose abruptly amid the gorse waste that formed a belt between the eroded seashore and the farmland of the hinterland. The hollow was at the end of a rough track that led off the A12, so I was in a position to watch any traffic going in the direction of the farm. It would have been here that Brogan had parked, I supposed, before Paul had shooed him away that day. I guessed that, after the first wave of farm chores, Reet and Paul would be sitting down to a late breakfast. I got out of the car with my little set of field-glasses, had a look round – no company in the quiet pine thicket – and clambered up to the top of the ridge.
Dead weed stalks cracked like gunshots under my feet as I made my way up, and there was an ominous croaking of crows above me, as the disturbed birds wheeled blackly round the tree canopies. At the summit of the ridge, I plied my glasses over the grey sea, as it lapped and foamed on to the rotted black fingers of the breakwaters. Under the overcast skies, there was nobody on the beach, and in the distance I could vaguely hear the lin-lan of a church bell – someone getting some practice in, no doubt, before actually summoning the worshippers in a couple of hours’ time.
I swept the glasses landward – apart from the ridge I was on, there was only a vast, green flatness, with, immediately below me, the buildings of the Rolvenden farmstead. The family Land Rover was parked at the front door of the red-brick, Dutch-tiled farmhouse, and there were three cars parked in the yard formed by the three sides of the single-storeyed farm-adjuncts. Hadn’t Pat Hague told me they now had students in residence?
Ah! Reet had just come out by the kitchen door of the farmhouse, with a bucket: she was making for the garden compost bin, near the tunnel cloches. She looked purposeful and unconcerned. And there was Paul’s head popping out of the door – he’d be making some remark after his mother. My son was smiling. A peaceful, normal scene, then: no suggestion in it that they’d been troubled by any uninvited callers. I sighed inwardly with relief, and made back down to the car.
Once inside the vehicle again, I wondered if, unseen by me, the Tall Man might be making the selfsame reconnaissance as I was? Maybe he was watching me now from some concealed hide or vantage point . . . If so, where would he be staying? Not in the nearby village of Thruxton-under-Holt – he’d stick out like a sore thumb in one of the farmhouse B&Bs there. Unless he was yo-yoing it from London – hard going – or from some bigger town like Bury or Ipswich, Southwold was the likeliest place. Not too far away, but big enough to be anonymous. Better give it a look-see . . .
I pulled out slowly, and crept along the path to the main road again, then set off for the couth seaside residential town. Good morning, Southwold . . . As I drove on, I reflected that, at that moment, Leah would be just stirring in her concrete tower, Frank Hague would be twitching his whiskers nervously over his breakfast Sunday paper in anticipation of the day’s wheeling and dealing, and Pat would be amusing herself – probably not alone – in their weekend boathouse in the Wivenhoe Marina. Liam Brogan would no doubt be glittering punters over breakfast in some small, but discreetly expensive London hotel, and Big Foot, the tick who’d stunk out my sitting room with seaweed compost and pinched Madame Pidgeon’s letter to my grandfather, where would he be, and what would he be doing?
Just then I entered Reydon, where the service population of Southwold – Hampstead-on-Sea to the irreverent – was housed. Then I’d hit Southwold itself, with its Toytown fishermen’s cottages, jolly white lighthouse and self-consciously idiosyncratic beach huts of many colours. I knew Reet found the town’s charms resistible – the first time we’d gone there, she’d dismissed it with the remark that the brewery was the only ‘real’ thing about the place.
I slowed down to a cruise, looking to see what I might see, especially in the forecourts of hotels and pub-inns. A goodly scatter of foreign number plates –mainly German –
in the car parks of the respective hostelries; then, a hundred yards or so beyond the lighthouse, a Renault with a French number plate.
Distinctly interesting, I thought, in connection with the foreign clothes of the tall Joe Cool in the auction rooms and the French ramifications of the Rawbeck Affair.
I pulled up in the first available space, about a hundred yards ahead. I then sat back and had a think: how to approach this one? I couldn’t very well barge into the place where the French car was parked – the Low Light Inn – because if the car belonged to the lanky individual who’d been shadowing me, I wanted to keep tabs on him. Adiscreet enquiry by phone, I thought – the Low Light Inn displayed its phone number prominently on its fascia. I took out my mobile, and rang the number.
‘Good morning,’ came the bright, professional voice. ‘Low Light Inn – I’m Dot Steel. Can I help you?’
‘Good morning, Mrs Steel.’ I returned her greeting. ‘I believe you’ve a French gentleman staying with you at the moment . . .’
‘Ah, you’re Mr Rolvenden, aren’t you?’ she said cheerfully. ‘Monsieur Ramier’s left a message . . .’
Chapter Thirteen
That fairly knocked me off my perch, and then I realized what had happened, my suspicion being confirmed immediately in Mrs Steel’s next sentence.
‘I recognized your voice, Mr Rolvenden; in fact, I was going to ring your mother . . .’
She’d obviously taken me for my son, Paul, our voices being very similar.
‘Mum’s busy at the moment,’ I improvised, trying my best to sound relaxed and youthful. ‘I can pass on Monsieur Ramier’s message to her if you like.’
‘He just wanted to tell your mother that if he isn’t here on time tomorrow morning, could she possibly hang on a bit till he arrives? She won’t have to wait long, as he’s checking out at eleven-thirty.’
‘Oh, righto,’ I said. ‘I’ll let her know.’