‘Clare didn’t see or hear me coming. Wheels are quieter than feet, you know, which is about all I can say for them. She was sitting at the table with her back to me as I approached, concentrating on something in her hand. As I came up behind her, I saw what it was. Must say, it gave me a shock. Inconsequential in its way, but not to me. A photograph, that’s all. Small, black-and-white, crumpled at one corner. Head and shoulders picture of a man. Smiling and informal, you understand, not some passport mug-shot. More the sort of snap a relative or friend might carry. Or a lover.
‘That was my first thought. She had her handbag open on the table and had taken out a small leather wallet with several plastic pockets in it, for cheque cards and the like. I had the impression – fleeting, I grant you – that the photo had come from one of the pockets. That she’d removed it to look at, I mean. Just as some moonstruck Juliet would if it were a picture of her other-side-of-the-world Romeo. To be reminded of the distant object of her affections. Well, what’s so remarkable in that? A mystery man in her life would have explained a lot. Her chastity where Dysart was concerned for a start. But that’s not the point, Barnett, not the bloody point at all. I was just silently congratulating myself on tumbling her secret at last when I realized who the man in the photograph was. I recognized him, you see, and his identity took me properly aback, I don’t mind admitting. Surprise isn’t the word for it.’
Cunningham drew on his cigar and paused for eye-twinkling effect, but already Harry had foreseen what he would say next. Heather’s film would have led him there even if intuition had not, for the next picture on it was of some kind of school or college and there was one member of the Tyrrell Society’s inner circle, the circle in which Heather had been vitally interested whatever Cunningham might believe to the contrary, still unaccounted for. He was neither dead nor crippled. He had proposed the visit to Burford on 17 May 1968 but had dropped out of the ill-fated return journey. And he had been lately reported, according to Ockleton, teaching in the West Country.
‘The photograph was of somebody you seem to have heard of already, Barnett. A fellow Old bloody Breakspearean of mine. Jack Cornelius.’
24
HARRY RETURNED TO his room shortly before midnight, feeling less drunk than he had latterly behaved. Rex Cunningham, it had transpired, was a toper of the old school, who believed in polishing off a bottle where lesser men would merely finish a glass. Harry had realized at an early stage, however, that he would need to keep a clear head if he was to remember all he was told. Accordingly, he had restrained his own consumption just as Cunningham’s had begun to accelerate out of control.
Cunningham had now been wheeled away to bed by an obliging porter, having reached that maudlin stage of inebriation which is most painful for others to bear. Harry, by contrast, had no intention of subsiding into forgetful slumber: he had far too much to occupy his mind for sleep to seem attractive. Cunningham had strengthened his belief that if he could only follow the clues for which Heather’s photographs were somehow emblems he would find the truth – and Heather with it. The next step along the road was therefore all he could think of.
At first, the difficulty he had in opening the door of his room seemed no more than an irritating trifle. Forced to devote his attention to the problem, he found he had succeeded in locking it when he had thought he was unlocking it, the reason being that it had been open all the time. Only when he trawled his memory of leaving the room earlier, and found there a distinct recollection of checking that he had locked the door behind him, did irritation turn to anxiety.
But it was short-lived. When he switched on the light and went in, he found everything in order. No drawers gaped open, no cupboard doors swung free. The bed had been turned down, however, and he assumed the maid who had done that had also been responsible for leaving the room unsecured. He fetched himself a scotch from the mini-bar and dismissed the matter from his thoughts. By the time the telephone rang a few minutes later, he had forgotten it altogether.
‘Nadine here, Harry. Rex is sleeping like a babe. Could we have that chat you promised me?’
‘Er, yes, or course.’
‘I’ll come to your room straightaway.’
She was still wearing the clinging black dress and seemed to have passed a stressful evening, to judge by the dark smudges beneath her eyes and the odd loose strand in her previously immaculate hair. Somehow these hints of vulnerability seemed to make her more attractive still, more likely to accept and understand the needs and fallibilities of others. Harry poured her a drink and noticed that her hand was shaking as she accepted a light for her cigarette.
‘How did you find Rex?’
‘Generous, amiable: the perfect host.’
‘Really?’ She shot him a wild, almost desperate look. A smile was overdue, but showed no sign of coming. ‘You don’t have to mince your words for my benefit, Harry.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘It’s one huge act. You must have noticed.’
‘Must I?’
‘You of all people.’
‘Why me – of all people?’
‘Because of what you are. Because of what you know.’
‘Which is?’
She did not answer. Instead, she began to pace around the room, casting cryptic glances at the Stubbs and nervous puffs of smoke towards the ceiling. Why she should have discarded her confident pose of earlier in the evening he could not understand. He had said nothing to disturb her, nothing, that is, that should have disturbed her. He found himself following the line of marks left in the carpet by the sharp heels of her shoes, caught himself watching the alternate bracing of her calf muscles as she moved to and fro. She had said she was worried and now he believed her. This, he felt certain, could be no act.
‘I’m a nobody, Nadine, who knows next to nothing. That’s the truth, take it from me.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘Why not?’
She turned to face him, her eyes blazing where before they had sparkled. ‘Why did you come here, Harry?’
‘You know why. I told you. I thought your husband might be able to help me find Heather.’
‘There’s more to it than that, though isn’t there?
‘No, there isn’t.
‘There has to be.’
‘Why?’
Again there was no answer. She stubbed out her cigarette with an air of decision and sat down on the bed, leaning back against the plumped pillows.
‘When I told you earlier that Alan Dysart had once worked for me, you seemed … surprised. Why was that?’
‘Because I was surprised.’ Nadine’s voice was calmer now, subdued and contemplative as she gazed up at the ceiling. ‘Alan Dysart works for no man – except himself.’
‘I thought you hardly knew him.’
‘You thought right. But Rex knows him – from way back. Which means I know him. Him and his like. Rex has told me all about the Tyrrell Society and their activities a dozen times if he’s told me once. He still lives it, you see, all that lost frothy fecklessness of his youth. He calls it the ’varsity spirit. Says nobody who hasn’t experienced it can understand it. Least of all a woman. Co-education was unheard of in his day, of course. I think he was crippled by his upbringing just as badly as he was by the car crash. I can’t get near him, you know, not within touching distance. I don’t mean physically, I mean … mentally. He’s a closed book. A locked door. I’ve tried to fathom him, God knows. I thought I was too clever to be kept at bay by his all-palls-together manliness, but I was wrong, Harry, so wrong it’s almost laughable.’ But she did not laugh. Instead, she seemed close to tears.
‘How long have you been married to him?’
‘Seven years. I was a waitress in his previous hotel. A smaller place, in Godalming. Altogether less grand. He wanted to expand. Hence the Skein of Geese. Hence our marriage. He needed a wife for professional reasons and I was it. It got me out of clearing tables for a living, but I thought it meant more than that. Some m
istake, eh?’ She paused to sip her whisky. ‘The truth is, Harry, Rex is obsessed by that car crash twenty years ago and what led up to it. Understandable, you might think, but the tragedy of the accident isn’t what concerns him, oh no. It’s the weeks beforehand. The weeks following a St George’s Night dinner when—’
‘Ramsey Everett was killed.’
She looked at him in mild surprise. ‘You know about that? I was right then. There is a connection.’
‘A connection with what?’
‘Did you tell Rex that Alan Dysart worked for you in Swindon during university vacations?’
‘No. The subject didn’t crop up.’
Nadine clicked her tongue and smiled for the first time. ‘Then that’s one up to me. You see, Harry, Rex adored the Tyrrell Society and everything it stood for. He says now he was only interested in the food and drink, but that’s a lie. Maybe he never was on the same intellectual plane as some of the others, but he still believed in their picture of the world. The Tyrrell Society was everything to him. Body and soul. Its suppression after Everett’s death was a shattering blow. That comes out clearly when he’s drunk enough to let it.
‘It’s typical of Rex really that he should blame the poor man who died for all his troubles. Ramsey Everett was never quite one of them, it seems, never quite convinced that the world did owe them all a living. He was the weevil in the fruit, according to Rex, the canker in their midst. His death was the beginning of the end, the ultimate cause, as Rex sees it, of his own injuries. Don’t ask me to justify it for him, because I can’t, but that’s what he believes. He even has a name for it. He calls it the Defenestration of Ramsey Everett. His grand undoing. I had to look the word up, you know, look the word up in a dictionary to find out what it meant. He wouldn’t have told me. No, not him. Do you know what it means, Harry?’
‘Defenestration?’ Somewhere, buried deep in his memory, Harry sensed that he had once known the word. Into his mind came a sudden vision of a classroom at Commonweal School, with motes of chalk-dust swirling in shafts of sunlight. He seemed to hear the gravelly voice of Cameron-Hyde the one-eyed history master discoursing on the origins of the Thirty Years’ War. The Defenestration of Prague (yes, that was it): as significant in its way as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo. But it was no good. At the vital moment of explanation, Harry must have been selecting the England cricket team on the back of his exercise book. Cameron-Hyde had discoursed in vain. ‘It’s beyond me, Nadine. What does it mean?’
‘Defenestration is to be thrown from a window, Harry. Not to fall or slip, not even to throw oneself, but to be thrown. Or pushed. Like Ramsey Everett was.’
Ramsey Everett had been murdered? Cameron-Hyde’s lesson at once recurred to him. For some reason quite beyond Harry’s comprehension, somebody had been thrown from a window in Prague in the year of grace 1618 and this had provoked thirty years of bloody conflict all over Europe. A tiny spark for a vast conflagration. And so it was with Ramsey Everett. Somebody had pushed him to his death from a window in Oxford in 1968 and, twenty years later, Harry was pursuing the consequences. This was the starting point, the origin of the mystery, and the end was whatever had befallen Heather on Profitis Ilias. The photographs were markers on her path to the answer. And the answer was where he would find her.
‘Could you fetch me another drink, Harry?’ Nadine spoke consolingly, as if she had read his thoughts.
‘Sure.’ He carried her glass across to the mini-bar, refilled it and walked back with it to the bed. Their fingers brushed as she took it from him. Then he picked up his own glass and sat down on the edge of the bed beside her.
‘Are you in love with her, Harry?’
‘Who?’
‘Heather.’
Was he? Surely not. His principal objective was to clear his name of the suspicion attached to it. Friendship finished a poor second and love … But as soon as he had reminded himself of his motive, it rang as hollow to him as he felt sure it must to others. He smiled ruefully. ‘I don’t know,’ he murmured. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Did you ever make love to her?’
‘No.’
‘Did you ever try?’
‘No.’
‘Not even when you felt lonely?’
‘Not even.’
‘Then you don’t have to be loyal to her, do you?’
He turned to look at her. Made the more appealing, perhaps, by alcohol and half-light, she was nonetheless beautiful, her elfin face crossed by a touching sadness, her brow furrowed by some longing she could not define. She cradled the whisky glass between her breasts, the amber surface of its contents trembling faintly in time to her breathing. ‘Why do you ask?’ said Harry, his voice thick with sudden loneliness.
‘Because I don’t have to be loyal either.’
What would happen if he took the glass from her hand and kissed her parted lips Harry glimpsed in that instant, prefigured in the alluring darkness of her dress, darker, it seemed, than even the deepest of the shadows around them. He saw himself, as in a mirror, lifting the black cloth from her white flesh, felt, as if it had already happened, the softness of her body closing around him. Night had fallen and with it his defences. He had been alone too long.
It was Nadine, in fact, who took the glass from Harry’s hand, and placed it with her own on the bedside cabinet. She smiled nervously as she looked back at him and seemed about to say something, then, instead, leaned forward to kiss him. As their lips met, the urgency of their mutual need declared itself. They were suddenly breathless, falling together onto the pillows. Her hand was loosening his tie, his was sliding up the tingling curve of her thigh. She rolled onto her side to let him pull down the zip of her dress. He opened his eyes and reached round to find the fastener.
Then he stopped. For an instant, his gaze had shifted to the bedside cabinet, where their whisky glasses stood beneath the lamp. From this angle he could see what he had not noticed before: the drawer of the cabinet, open by a few inches, and, inside, picked out clearly in the lamplight, an envelope with two words written on it in Greek. XAPH MIIAPNETT. Harry Barnett.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Nadine. But Harry did not hear her. He reached across and pulled the drawer fully open. It was a Skein of Geese envelope, with three of the wretched birds embossed in brown on heavy cream vellum. And Harry’s name, written in black anonymous ink. XAPH MIIAPNETT. Nothing else. Just his name. In Greek. In England. A violent shudder ran through him. He grabbed the envelope, felt the thickness of at least one page inside, ripped the flap open and plucked out the contents.
A single sheet of hotel writing paper, blank save for the pre-printed address. No message. No other words, in Greek or any other language. No greeting but his own accursed name and empty, watermarked derision.
‘What is it, Harry? What’s the matter?’ Nadine was sitting upright beside him, staring at the envelope. She was a party to his deception, he felt certain. She had to be. The unlocked door. The timely phone-call. The expert seduction. Was it meant to end when it did? Had she judged the precise moment when he would make his chilling discovery?
‘Who put you up to this?’ he demanded.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘This!’ He thrust the envelope towards her.
‘What is it?’ Her mixture of alarm and bafflement would have been utterly convincing, had Harry not already passed beyond the reach of any appeal she might care to make.
‘My name. In Greek.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Was it your husband, Nadine? Did he tell you to plant this here while he wined and dined me? Did he send you here tonight to make an utter bloody fool of me?’
‘This is—’
‘Did he?’
She made to rise, but Harry grabbed her by the wrists and she subsided back onto the bed with a sharp cry of pain. ‘Let go of me!’
‘Not until you tell me the truth.’
‘What truth? This is insane!’
‘When I came back here tonight, I found the door unlocked. I thought the maid must have left it that way. But it wasn’t the maid, was it? It was you, Nadine, come here to leave this letter where you knew I’d be bound to see it. Bound to see it because you planned every move – every touch – in this tender little scene.’
‘You’re mad!’
‘No. That’s what you want me to be. But it’s not going to work. Because you’re going to tell me who planned this. And why.’
‘Nobody planned anything.’
‘Yes they did. You know they did.’
Nadine’s mouth set in a firm, determined line. She was breathing heavily and, in some clinical compartment of his brain Harry pondered how that same panting note could signify three completely different emotions: the passion she had simulated, the fear she was struggling to control, the anger that bubbled beneath the surface. ‘Listen to me, Harry,’ she said with icy composure. ‘If you don’t stop this now, you’ll regret it. They think you murdered Heather, don’t they? They think you raped her and killed her. I don’t, but they do. What happens if there’s an assault on me to be taken into the reckoning? What happens then, eh? Do you think anyone will believe it wasn’t just more of the same?’
Silence, and with it a circle of bewildering calm, closed about them. Nadine was right. Nobody would believe him. The Mallenders. The police. The newspapers. They would all be vindicated. Nadine’s defiant glare told him what he should have realized already. She was stronger than him in every respect save the purely physical. Only greater humiliation could result from an attempt to wrench the truth from her. His grip slackened. His hands fell away from her wrists. ‘Get out,’ he murmured.
And she was gone. Without another word. There was a click of the door as it closed behind her. And Harry was alone. He stared at the envelope again but found there no clue to what had been enacted. A wall in Oxford. A locked room in Surrey. They were drawing closer, ever closer, whoever they were, but their purpose remained obscure. To stop him? To unnerve him? Either way, they would not succeed.
Into the Blue Page 21