‘It’s odd … really, I remember Heather was … quite chatty … over lunch. But, after we’d been to see Mrs Diamond, she was like you … Well, like you are now.’
Harry tried to shut Mossop’s stumbling remarks out of his head, to concentrate instead on Heather’s words, the last words, in fact, that she had ever spoken to him. ‘I can’t turn back now, can I?’ Was this the moment, he wondered, on this dank pine-shuttered road to Tyler’s Hard, that she had realized, for the first time, that there truly was no turning back, that the momentum of her progress towards whatever awaited her on Profitis Ilias had become irresistible?
A Range Rover pulling a horsebox sped towards them round the next bend, straddling the middle of the lane and causing Mossop to swerve through a muddy ditch at the roadside. The splash of the water against the wheel and the splatter of it across the windscreen recalled to Harry’s mind the sound of falling water that had drawn him in a dream up the stairs of the Villa ton Navarkhon: a dream of statues made flesh, of messages concealed in images, of meetings both expected and located, amounting to what all logic suggests they cannot be: rendezvous to which one has already unconsciously agreed.
Suddenly, they were there. A single-track lane had taken them down through a straggling copse to a brackish meander of the Beaulieu river and Mossop had stopped the car just short of the cottage so they could see the building, the garden, the overgrown jetty which had given it its name and the shadowed finger of the pontoon reaching out into deeper water, without themselves being seen at all.
‘Did you go in with her, Nige?’
‘N-No. I waited here. She didn’t … didn’t want company.’
‘I daresay she didn’t.’
Harry climbed from the car, closed the door as quietly as he could and began to walk along the lane. He felt a measure of guilt for visiting Tyler’s Hard without Dysart’s knowledge, but the impetus of his curiosity more than overcame it. Coming to the gate, he looked in at the cottage and instantly recognized the fourth photograph in Heather’s collection. It could have been taken, he reckoned, from the very spot where he was standing, capturing the scene much as it now was, altered only by the onset of winter. Double gates to his right led to the garage, a modern construction complete with first-floor flat served by an external staircase and styled to resemble the cottage itself, which lay straight ahead of him, evidently well cared-for in the absence of its owner. To Harry’s left, the lane petered out in a gravel track curving round past the garden hedge to serve the jetty. Peering out along the pontoon, he could see the contrasting starkness of new wood at its farther end, the only trace in all this orderly solitude of what had occurred there eighteen months before.
Harry pushed open the gate and walked in. Then he hesitated, uncertain whether to try the cottage, the garage flat or the rear garden. A curl of smoke from a bonfire behind the house clinched the issue. As he followed the path that led towards it between bare-branched shrubs and sturdy evergreens, he fancied for a moment that he would come upon Morpurgo and find him a replica of himself, some doppelgänger of Dysart’s devising planted here in England whilst he had been banished to Rhodes. When he passed through an ivy-clad trellis arch and saw the man he sought, however, raking dead leaves and twigs into an incinerator, he realized how absurd the idea was that they could somehow be twin actors of the same part who had never met on stage till this unscripted moment. Between them, he discerned at once, there could flourish no hint of fellowship.
Morpurgo – Harry did not doubt that it was Morpurgo – was a tall, awkward-looking figure in beret, muddied boiler suit and galoshes, feeding the incinerator with needless energy, forcing the rake-held bundles down into its smoking contents with disquieting relish, with an intensity, indeed, which warned Harry from the first that something was amiss.
He did not look up as Harry approached, but went on working with the zeal and single-mindedness of one who is totally absorbed. The smoke from the incinerator made Harry blink and cough, but Morpurgo, who was stooped over the very top of it, seemed unaffected and still he paid his visitor no heed.
‘Excuse me … Mr Morpurgo?’
There was no response.
‘Mr Morpurgo?’
At last, there was a reaction. Holding down the latest addition to the incinerator with the prongs of his rake, Morpurgo slowly turned his head to look at Harry over his left shoulder. Harry nearly jumped back in surprise and flushed instantly in embarrassment at the distaste his flinching movement had signalled. Where Morpurgo’s left eye should have been was only a sickening fold of flesh. The cheekbone too, and much of the left side of his face, had vanished into this ill-defined cleft, leaving the nose twisted and the mouth distorted. An area which was presumably more hideous still, in the vicinity of the ear and temple, was obscured by the tugged-down band of his beret. As for his right eye, this was a perfect startling blue, gazing out blankly from beneath a solitary tuft of eyebrow.
‘Good … good afternoon.’
With a sudden lunging wrench, Morpurgo swung the rake free of the incinerator. For an instant, Harry thought he might be about to attack. Some snatch of verse from a Jacobean tragedy flashed through his mind: ‘When I look into the fishponds in my garden, methinks I see a thing, armed with a rake, that seems to strike at me.’ Then his misapprehension was explained. Morpurgo slammed the instrument down on the pathway and leaned against it, breathing heavily and fixing Harry with his cyclopean stare. There was clearly some disability to add to his disfigurement, as physical as it might well be mental.
‘My name’s … Well, it doesn’t matter.’ An obvious lie occurred to him. ‘I’m looking for Alan Dysart.’
Morpurgo’s mouth had begun to twitch in painful preparation to speak. When the words came, they were hissed and halting, each of them separately delivered and stressed and they were in answer to Harry’s first remark as if those that had followed had not yet been absorbed.
‘I-am-Morpurgo.
‘Ah, splendid.’ Cursing himself for sounding so patronizing, Harry felt a wave of pity wash over him. Morpurgo was some harmless retarded constituent for whom Dysart had provided employment and accommodation. Or perhaps some Falklands veteran crippled in mind and body while serving on Dysart’s ship. Either way, the smile Mrs Diamond had complained about was no more than a grim legacy of drastic surgery. What was ‘not right’ was no more sinister than the in-articulacy of a maimed human.
‘Good-afternoon.’
‘Good afternoon to you.’ Harry grinned fatuously.
‘Alan-is-not-here.’
‘Oh, I see. Another time perhaps.’
‘Yes.-Another-time. ‘
Harry made some weak farewell gesture with his arm, then turned to go. There was no point, he felt sure, in prolonging the conversation. It would prove as anti-climactic as Heather must herself have found it. He walked back along the path, rebuking himself for entertaining Mrs Diamond’s lurid notions. Perhaps she had allowed a horror of Morpurgo’s appearance to bias her judgement. Perhaps …
Abruptly, Harry pulled up. It was when he had pictured Morpurgo in his mind’s eye that it had occurred to him: such a trivial matter, yet nonetheless not right, not right at all – surely he must be mistaken. He turned round to find that Morpurgo had not moved. He was still leaning on the rake, gazing along the path towards him and, even at a distance of several yards, Harry could see that he was not mistaken. Beneath the boiler suit Morpurgo wore a shirt and tie. The shirt looked frayed and stained. But the tie was what seized his attention. Its pattern was a simple one: wide equal diagonal stripes of pink and white. Cerise and silver, Heather had corrected him. Cerise and silver, like the scarf she had lost on Profitis Ilias. ‘It belonged to my sister actually.’ That phrase of Heather’s, snatched from a context he could not recall, alighted in his memory.
‘Was-there-something-else?’ asked Morpurgo.
‘No. That is … Your tie: I couldn’t help noticing it.’
‘My – tie?’
&nbs
p; ‘Yes. It’s very … distinctive.’
Morpurgo pulled the end of the tie out from the boiler suit and stared down at it, frowning in puzzlement.
‘Where did you get it? Was it a gift from somebody?’
Morpurgo looked up. ‘No,’ he said with heavy emphasis.
‘You know: a present?’
‘Not-a-present.-It’s-mine.-I-earned-it. ‘
‘You earned it?’
‘Yes. At-uni-’ He paused, then tried again. ‘At-uni-versity.’
‘Which university was that?’
‘Oxford.’
Connections flashed through Harry’s mind. The scarf had belonged to Clare Mallender. It had the look of a college scarf. She had been to Oxford. She had met Jonathan Minter there. Perhaps they had attended the same college: the college whose colours were cerise and silver. And Morpurgo had been there too. And Morpurgo had smiled the day Clare was killed.
As he was smiling now. Some flood of childish pride as he pushed the tie back into the boiler suit and fondled the knot made Morpurgo grin at Harry: a chilling grin of fathomless delight; the same grin, beyond question, that had frightened Mrs Diamond. ‘Goodbye,’ he called, as Harry hurried away.
By the time Harry reached the gate into the lane, he was certain. The lure had been too compelling for Heather to resist and he had the photographs to prove it. Morpurgo must have been wearing the same tie the day she came to Tyler’s Hard. Perhaps he always wore it. At all events, there could be no doubt that the courtyard pictured in the next photograph, the fifth on the film, belonged to the Oxford college whose colours were cerise and silver and whose past bound three people to their parallel fates. According to Mossop, Heather had been tight-lipped during the drive back to Weymouth. She had told him nothing of what her interviews with Mrs Diamond and Morpurgo had yielded and he had not pressed her to do so. Instead, he had dropped her outside the Half Moon in Portesham, exchanged with her a few platitudes about the working week to come, then driven home to Radipole in time for tea with his mother. He had thought no more about their excursion until Heather’s disappearance had recalled it to his mind – and been followed by Harry’s visit.
None of this surprised Harry. Heather would have been as disinclined to confide in Mossop as he was himself. The young man was merely a means to an end and, in both cases, that end had now been served. Harry had Mossop drop him off at Brockenhurst station, where he commenced the journey back to Swindon, happy to find himself alone among anonymous travellers, able to concentrate at last on all the implications of what he had learned.
Morpurgo was too old to be a contemporary of Clare Mallender’s: he was closer to Dysart in age. Since Dysart too had been to Oxford, it was possible that by taking Morpurgo on at Tyler’s Hard he had merely been doing an old chum a favour. War service of some kind would account both for Morpurgo’s disabilities and for Dysart’s generosity. If theirs was the same college attended by Clare Mallender, that might be explained by Dysart recommending it to her at her father’s request. So far so inconsequential, but Heather would have been quite capable of deducing as much herself. Yet the photographs proved it had not stopped her pursuing her curiosity to Oxford.
The rail journey to Swindon involved no fewer than three changes, at Southampton, Basingstoke and Reading. During the trudging to and fro along echoing subways and draughty platforms that this necessitated, Harry began to notice, for all his preoccupation, that a man who had boarded the train with him at Brockenhurst was making the same complicated series of connections. At first, he thought little of it, assuming that their parallel paths, like those of all travellers, would eventually diverge. Joining not only the same train as him but the same carriage twice could be dismissed as a coincidence. When it happened for a third time, it became remarkable enough to distract him from a rapt analysis of Heather’s reasoning. At Reading, however, he felt sure that the coincidence would snap.
It did not. Less than ten yards away from Harry as he waited for the Swindon train, the same man stood examining paperbacks on a bookstall. Thin, slope-shouldered, raincoated and thoroughly inconspicuous, he could easily have been an innocent Sunday evening wayfarer, but for the fact that Harry was now convinced he was not.
The Swindon train arrived. Harry boarded it and the man followed, selecting a seat several rows distant but facing Harry down the open carriage. He seemed to make no use of this position for the purposes of observation, keeping his eyes trained instead on the pages of the paperback he had bought at Reading. It was soft-core pornography, to judge by the girl in black underwear featured on the cover, and it appeared to have riveted the man’s attention. His salacious choice of reading matter somehow reassured Harry, who, deeming his nerves to be in need of calming, made his way to the buffet and bought two drinks: a scotch, which he downed at the counter, and a beer, which he bore back to his seat.
As he moved past the man’s shoulder on his way back, Harry could not help glancing down at the book. The man was in the act of turning a page, and, in so doing, he momentarily exposed its front cover, which Harry had, till now, only seen at a distance. With a start, he saw that the girl in black underwear was slumped, dead, across a couch and that she had been strangled with a scarf, which was still knotted around her neck.
Harry stumbled to his seat. Why did it have to be a scarf? he wondered. Why did this man he had just begun to believe had no interest in him have to have chosen that book among the dozens of others? The coincidence was as incredible as its alternative, for if … Suddenly, Harry realized that the train was slowing. Glancing out of the window, he saw they were drawing into Didcot station, the only stop before Swindon. A way out of his dilemma at once presented itself to his mind. Yielding to the impulse, he rose and hurried towards the door.
The man did not follow. As Harry stood on the platform a minute or so later, watching the train pull out, he could see him through the brightly lit window, still immersed in his paperback, oblivious, it seemed, to Harry’s departure. It was foolish, he told himself, ever to have supposed anybody might be following him, yet the hour he was destined to spend on a chill damp station, awaiting the next Swindon train, was not entirely wasted. At least it proved that his suspicions were groundless. It proved it almost beyond question.
18
SOONER THAN HE had expected, Harry found himself back in Swindon Central Library, this time perusing the national newspapers for 2 June 1987 in the hope of gleaning from them some clue as to what had eluded him on his visit to Tyler’s Hard.
Their reports of the attempt on Alan Dysart’s life were, however, as similar as they were familiar. Harry felt as if he had heard or read them all before, in one form or another; and none of them shed any light on what had struck Mrs Diamond as ‘not right’:
The IRA yesterday claimed responsibility for the bomb outrage at the New Forest cottage owned by Alan Dysart, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for …
The IRA admitted yesterday that it had mistakenly killed secretary Clare Mallender instead of their intended victim, Alan Dysart, the junior Defence minister, by planting a bomb aboard Mr Dysart’s yacht …
The peace of a New Forest riverside was shattered yesterday by another addition to the sorry record of IRA terrorism on the British mainland …
Alan Dysart, the outspoken junior Defence minister, yesterday insisted that attempts on his life would not deter him from denouncing those seeking to overthrow democracy in Northern Ireland …
On inner pages, there were tributes from friends and relatives to ‘Clare Mallender, the beautiful and talented girl who lost her life in an explosion meant for her employer …, ‘ “It’s hard to believe such a vivacious personality is lost to us”,’ Dysart was quoted as saying, ‘ “and harder still to accept that the stand I have taken against terrorism may have brought about her death.” ’ But Charlie Mallender, fighting back tears according to one reporter, had flown to Dysart’s aid: ‘ “Grief-stricken though we are, we take comfort from the fact that Clare had alw
ays wholeheartedly supported Alan Dysart’s campaign …” ’ And the editorials were unanimous: ‘This appalling act will deflect neither the government in general nor, we suspect, Mr Dysart in particular from their principled rejection of the objectives of its perpetrators …’ There was no mention anywhere of Morpurgo or Mrs Diamond by name, nor hint in anything Harry read that all was not as it appeared to be.
A night’s sleep and this blank trawl of the news columns had considerably undermined Harry’s confidence in what he was doing. The photographs might represent a wild goose chase after the random neuroses of an insecure young woman. He had only known Heather for a few weeks, after all, and may well have been deceived by the impression she had created in Rhodes’ alien environment. Suppositions built on postcards and photographs might be as ill-founded as his short-lived suspicions of being followed the night before.
It was thus in a disillusioned, self-reproachful mood that Harry walked back to Falmouth Street. Absorbed in his own thoughts, he paid no attention to the purple saloon car parked at the roadside just short of number thirty-seven until, as he made his way past it, the driver’s door was pushed abruptly open to block his path.
A hard-faced young man stepped out and engaged him with a fixed stare. ‘Harry Barnett?’
‘Er, yes.’
‘Police.’ A warrant card was briefly flourished. ‘Get in the back, please, sir.’
‘Well, I—’
‘Get in!’
Harry obeyed. The seat he climbed into was the only empty one in the car. To his left was a heavily built grey-haired man, who looked straight ahead. The driver did the same. The man in the front passenger seat turned round, however, and grinned at Harry with cold-eyed hostility. ‘Lovely weather for the time of year, eh?’ he said, disregarding the fact that it was depressingly grey and damp.
‘What’s this all—’
‘You’ve just got back from Rhodes, we hear.’
‘Yes, but—’
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