The Ruffian on the Stair

by Gary Newman

A silence fell, a silence more marked than an exchange of glances: had I put my foot in it somehow?

  ‘Let creaking joints lie, is what I say,’ Morris quipped, breaking the tension. ‘I understand that, as well as being married to an antique dealer, Mrs Hague enjoys a bit of a punt on antiques herself? Auctions and so on.’

  ‘Yes, for one thing, they tie in with her line as an English lecturer – letters, signed books, writers’ realia sort of thing.’

  ‘And prints, Mr Rolvenden?’

  ‘Ah, that – yes.’

  ‘You’re friends with Mr Frank Hague?’

  ‘I’ve known him since I was eight – we went to the same boarding schools.’

  ‘Do you dabble in antiques, too, Mr Rolvenden?’

  ‘No, I can’t say they interest me all that much.’

  ‘Never go up to London to the big sales? With Mr Hague, perhaps?’

  ‘No, never – I know he has interests in London.’

  Morris remained stone-faced as to my last remark, and turned to something else.

  ‘You mentioned before that Mrs Hague liked to have a joke with you from time to time – a bit of a tease, in fact.’

  This change of tack rather put me off my stroke.

  ‘Ah, yes – the Pidgeon pie email. She has a rather zany sense of humour – plays with words to see how you’ll react. She’s been that way for as long as I’ve known her.’

  ‘And, knowing Mrs Hague’s little ways, you always take this, er . . . winding up in good heart, do you, Mr Rolvenden?’

  By now there were beads of sweat on my upper lip – I thought I knew what this was leading up to.

  ‘Well,’ I said, with a feeble chuckle, ‘as I say, it’s part of her personality.’

  ‘Did you meet Mrs Hague at an auction sale in Walberswick, Suffolk, on . . .’

  ‘Friday, 25th April,’ DC Conlon murmured in his capacity as remembrancer.

  Christ! I thought, here it comes . . .

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I did meet her there, Sergeant. There was an interesting print on sale, and I thought it might be relevant to something I was –’

  ‘And did you have an argument with her there?’

  ‘Well, I’d been interested in the sketch,’ I improvised, ‘and I thought she’d bid it away from under my nose to keep me in suspense – she could give it to her husband to sell on at a profit, anyway, and –’

  ‘And was the print so important to you as to make you shout that you hated her, that you, er . . .’

  ‘”Loathed her with all his being”,’ Conlon read aloud from his notes.

  Another, quite crushing silence descended as both Morris and Conlon stared me out as if I’d been a specimen in a butterfly case.

  ‘I, er . . . lost my rag that time,’ was all I could think to say.

  Rising from his side of the sofa, Morris smiled a smile of infinite tolerance, while his assistant got up and fumbled with his inseparable document case.

  ‘We all lose our rag at times, Mr Rolvenden,’ Morris remarked. ‘All of us. Well, thanks again for now – needless to say, we’ll be keeping you informed about developments.’

  My hands were actually shaking as I showed the pair out, with an irritating and mildly embarrassing little pause in the lobby while Conlon made a quick visit to the bathroom. Once the front door had closed after them, I went back into the sitting room and, hurrying over to the bureau, poured myself three fingers of whisky from the bottle on the tray on top of it. I could already hear the door of the prison cell clanging in my face . . .

  Just then the phone rang. I gulped down the whisky, put the glass back on the tray, and ran over to the line phone on the little side table. I picked up the receiver, to hear Frank Hague’s voice, incisive and concerned.

  ‘Just to warn you – the law have been round here an hour ago. As far as I could work out from what they told me, it seems they’ve found a couple of sight-witnesses to Pat’s arrival at the boathouse from the university last Thursday.’

  ‘But didn’t you say you’d asked around the marina after you went there to deliver the American package to her, but no one there had seen her?’

  ‘Must’ve been someone I didn’t talk to – the paper-boy, or maybe some driver on the same route back as she was on – but the main thing is that it’s beginning to look as if you were the last person to turn up at the boathouse before she disappeared. If the coppers come round, be very careful what you say to them.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning, Frank, but you’ve been pipped at the post.’

  ‘They’ve already been round there? Of course, you never know how much they’re telling you is bluff, but I’d watch out for Morris.’

  Frank talked as if he and the Detective Sergeant were already acquainted.

  ‘What were they after at your end, then?’ Frank asked.

  ‘They were just more or less confirming what you’ve just said: my phone call to the boathouse after Pat’s email on the Thursday, my drive round there soon afterwards, and, er . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Oh, about a stupid spat I had with Pat at the auction rooms in Walberswick a couple of weeks ago – you weren’t there on that occasion. I was interested in a print they were offering, and she outbid the whole house just to wind me up – or that’s how I saw it at the time.’

  ‘A print?’ Frank queried. ‘She didn’t tell me she’d bought any prints . . . Dammit, though, that was a week before Pat disappeared – surely the police can’t be thinking that you’d brooded over the spat for a week, then gone round to the boathouse and, well . . .’

  We were already taking it for granted that she was dead, and I knew that neither of us was surprised, in view of the role of tormenter Pat had revelled in. But even now I couldn’t talk to Frank about Pat without embarrassment over the fact that I’d jumped into bed with his wife in Jersey a couple of summers before, and again later in England. All the same, grateful as I was for Frank’s current warning and information, I couldn’t help raising a mental eyebrow in the face of his coolness towards his wife’s disappearance. But of course that was sentimentality on my part, as all the wells of communication between them must long since have been poisoned. No, the real wonder was still the fact that he’d put up with her for so long.

  ‘Well,’ Frank was concluding, ‘just thought I’d better ring up and put you in the picture.’

  ‘Thanks a lot, Frank – I appreciate it. Cheers!’

  So, he didn’t know that Pat had bought the print at the auction: this tended to confirm that her buying it had been connected with Pidgeon and the Rawbeck Mystery. In turn, it was very much on the cards that her disappearance must somehow tie in with Pidgeon’s quest for the lost Rawbeck masterpiece. What if he’d kidnapped her in order to get something that would help him in this? But that was fantastic in view of how much he’d come into the open lately – far too dangerous from his point of view.

  I hadn’t broached with Frank the matter of the bizarre and disturbing tape of my voice found in Pat’s office, for the simple reason that it was supremely unlikely that she would have shared her wheeze with him, especially in view of his tendency to report everything to me. No, it had all the hallmarks of one of her tricks, and I felt cold fury rising within me when I pictured her gloating – perhaps with an unknown accomplice – over an aspect of my life I’d clearly been carrying around with me for so long while at the same time being completely unaware of it.

  It wasn’t looking good. I now seemed to have been the last person in the vicinity of where she was before she’d disappeared, I’d admitted to the police that she was in the habit of taking a rise out of me, and, moreover, had confirmed to them that I’d had a flaming public row with her not so long before.

  I wondered how DS Morris and DC Conlon had assessed my character on our first meeting? The neurotic, flaky type? Up for anything? And would they have the right at this stage to question my doctor about me? About my breakdown, and my fugues, when, apparently, there’d been who
le days in my life when I hadn’t really been aware of – or responsible for? – my actions.

  No, it wasn’t looking good at all . . .

  But, after all, I hadn’t actually been accused of anything yet, and it was still possible that Pat would turn up again, or send us a teasing postcard from some sunlit, faraway place. What if even now she was sussing out Swansea, prior to her sabbatical, for her Dylan Thomas book project? But at this moment I needed something to take me out of myself: could I drive over and help Leah with her decorating? No, give her a rest from my troubles. What, then? I had to do something . . . Something heavy and unthinking – yes, I’d go out and bushwhack the brambly patch at the bottom of the kitchen garden, where I hid the New Zealand compost bins.

  A vigorous hour’s sweat in the May sunshine did much to restore me – physically, at any rate – so that, by seven-thirty, I was ready to go inside again for a meal. Then, around eight, Aunt Hertha rang me from Malmesbury.

  ‘Hello, Seb? Pidgeon’s scooted – to Wales!’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Last Wednesday – the day after I told you he’d turned up in the back lane here.’

  ‘Mmm . . . you were gathering rhubarb for a policeman friend of yours . . .’

  ‘That’s right – Steve Hunter – well, Steve memorized Ramier’s – or rather, as you say, Pidgeon’s – car number in the lane, and that evening he spotted the car in the car park of the Four Feathers, and noticed that it was gone the next morning.’

  ‘And Wales?’

  ‘Steve keeps in with the people at the local garage – essential contacts in his line of work – and he found out from one of them that a tall foreigner with his hair in a quiff – unmistakably our Pidgeon – had popped into the shop there and bought an OS map of Wales, then had got into his car and joined the B4040.’

  ‘That would have taken him down to the link with the M4 and the Severn Bridge. Mmm . . . really does look like Wales he was headed for, then.’

  ‘If Pidgeon’s still in search of our family,’ Aunt Hertha speculated, ‘I didn’t know we had Welsh connections?’

  ‘Me neither. Did Pidgeon say anything about Wales when you showed him round the house?’

  ‘No, just about your grandfather and his life, and paintings – what I told you.’

  ‘While we’re on to things Welsh – or Welsh-sounding – does the address Cwmdonkin Drive mean anything to you, Aunt Hertha?’

  ‘Can’t say it does – why? D’you think that’s where Pidgeon’s headed?’

  ‘Just an address the police mentioned to me recently – anything’s possible – but at least you’ve now given me a lead on Pidgeon’s whereabouts. I can’t thank you enough, Aunt Hertha!’

  ‘Our enquiries are proceeding!’ she said enthusiastically. ‘Bye for now . . .’

  I put down the receiver and sank back deeply in my armchair. Cwmdonkin, Cwmdonkin – where had I heard the name before? I closed my eyes, and presently an image of an old Bush cabinet wireless took shape against the void. Then the dial of the wireless began to glow, and with memory’s eye I could see the matchstick Dad had stuck in the gap of one of the ivorine pegs beneath, to steady it, one of the pegs you pushed to get the various regional transmitters they had in the Fifties.

  Next, the wireless of my reverie started to warm up, and a voice started to intone – a beautiful, crackling masculine voice, with the ghost of a Welsh lilt. It was unmistakably the young Richard Burton.

  As the voice rolled out the brilliant wordsmithery, I fancied I could smell Dad’s pipe tobacco, taste the Tizer I’d been meditatively sipping as the magic of the half-understood words had begun to take hold of me. The voice of my reverie had gone on for quite an hour, then had come the prim, prissy voice of the Third Programme announcer: ‘You have been listening to Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas, first broadcast in 1953 . . .’

  The vision vanished as I opened my eyes wide and sat upright in the armchair. Of course, hadn’t Dylan Thomas, the roaring boy of Swansea, the Toast and Tipple of New York, whose biography Pat Hague had been working on just before she’d apparently disappeared, once dubbed himself the ‘Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  And Rimbaud rang a bell, too – yes! – I recalled now where I’d last come across the name! On the plaque on the wall of the house in Royal College Street in London, when I’d gone there to check out Rawbeck’s Victorian haunts and the crosses on Grandfather’s old street map. Rimbaud and fellow poet Verlaine had lived there for a short while in the 1870s. And if Dylan Thomas had modelled himself on the French enfant terrible, surely Pat Hague would at least have gone to look at the place in the course of her researches into the Welsh poet’s life and influences? The ways seemed to be meeting . . .

  By now dusk was gathering, and I got up out of my chair and went over to switch the light on. Already nine o’clock by the clock on the mantelpiece. I knew I wouldn’t sleep that night without dope. But there was one thing I could do immediately: ring up Aunt Hertha to act on her invitation to go down and stay with her in Malmesbury. I might be able to take up the trail of the elusive Pidgeon again, and I was desperate to get away for a while to clear my brain.

  I rang my aunt, and it was arranged that I’d go up there next morning, Thursday, so, after a wretched night, I got up at six and drove without stopping till I reached the approaches to Malmesbury around lunchtime.

  Last time I’d gone up to the limestone town on the hill, in its loop of the Avon, had been on foot, through the stream-cut watermeadows. Then I’d made my way uphill, threading through the great trees on the lower slopes, brushing through the cow parsley and finally entering the town through one of the deep arches that penetrated the curtain wall of narrow, high-gabled cottages, and so, upwards on limestone steps to the ruler-straight High Street, at the end of which, beyond the intact Market Cross, lay the great eleventh-century bulk of the truncated Abbey Church.

  This time, though, I was in the aftermath of the arrival of the Jiffy bag from Jersey, and I’d other things on my mind, so I simply drove straight off the M4 and up the A429, going through the little town centre and on to the Foxley road, where the vicarage stood.

  Aunt Hertha proved to be in excellent form, in her Fifties outfit of blouse and slacks, with tints of blond worked into her brushed-up grey curls. I left the car on the gravel of the front drive, and followed her into the high-ceilinged lobby of the big old red-brick house. I couldn’t help pausing on the black-and-white chequerboard tiles and thinking of Nanny Rolvenden.

  ‘I daresay this house’ll be full of memories for you, dear.’

  ‘They’re like a sort of pack on your back – it gets heavier with each passing year.’

  ‘Don’t I know it! Don’t forget I’ve a good head start on you! If it’s any consolation to you, though, when you get to the home straight, the pack gets lighter. The memories are more real than they were first time round, because you’ve learnt to see them in perspective. At times, they’re so clear, it’s as if they’re waiting for you . . .’

  I looked beyond Aunt Hertha’s tanned, brave smile, and I could hardly suppress a shudder when I thought of myself at seventy-five, waiting for the arrival of the Ruffian on the Stairs. Perhaps he’d take the form of Julian Rawbeck . . .

  ‘Lunch now!’ my aunt commanded briskly. ‘Then we’ve a lot to talk about!’

  And so we had – about Aunt Hertha’s rackety, useful life as an organizer of medical relief in most of the dodgier parts of the world, family gossip, and my own, less admirable attempts at being fulfilled, solvent and happy. Finally, I gave her a run-through of what I’d unearthed about Grandfather’s secret history, and the mess I found myself in now. She stared attentively the while through her library-frame glasses, slightly open-mouthed, until I’d finished my account.

  ‘Of course we all vaguely knew about your grandfather’s life as an alleged bohemian in Paris, when he was young, but nothing like this! And now we’ve a music hall girl i
n the family – wonderful! D’you really think that when I showed this Pidgeon man round the pictures here, he was looking for the lost painting?’

  ‘The Ruffian on the Stair, Aunt Hertha, and if he wasn’t looking for that, then he must’ve been looking for some clue or indication as to where it might be.’

  ‘What, then? And how do you know my showing him the pictures had anything to do with his seeming trip to Wales, if he has gone there?’

  ‘Only one way to find out – thanks for a delicious lunch, by the way! – please lead on . . .’

  My aunt led me out of the kitchen to the reception rooms, then to the ones upstairs, where we surveyed the pictures on the walls. Most of these were pencil sketches and watercolours – Nanny’s sister Maud had been a keen watercolourist – with a few heavy Victorian oils of the Every-Picture-Tells-A-Story school donated by various dim family members between 1900 and 1920. Nothing of very great interest or real value, just the usual sort of stuff you’d expect to find in an educated, middle-class setting of the period. And all remarkably preserved.

  ‘Haven’t really had time yet to get rid of all this junk,’ my aunt said cheerfully, as we retraced our steps along the upstairs corridor. ‘Except, perhaps, Aunt Maud’s watercolours – one or two are not at all bad . . .’

  ‘Such as this one,’ I remarked, pausing under one of the said pictures on the corridor wall. ‘I know the house well . . .’

  It was a carefully done study of Dad’s weekend cottage at Capel-le-Ferne in Kent, where, until 1966, I’d spent my school holidays. The watercolour showed a blue-and-white bungalow, in a clump of trees set back from a chalk road, with a solid Norman church in the background to the left. The church was still there, but the chalk surface of the road had long since been tarmacked over; nor had the cottage been painted blue-and-white when I’d known it forty years before. And of course nowadays there was a slight matter of a thousand-and-one other bungalows competing for the space on all sides. Nor did the proximity of the roaring M20 dual carriageway make for an atmosphere of rural seclusion.