Suddenly, Harry’s increasing breathlessness sparked off a coughing bout. He had the impression whilst he paused to recover himself that Cornelius was watching him intently, that his piercing gaze was sweeping over him in search of every weakness, every strength, every facet of his character that an opponent might need to know.
‘It sounds bad,’ Cornelius said drily, when the coughing had subsided.
‘I’m getting over flu,’ Harry panted.
‘Perhaps you should have given yourself longer.’ Harry looked at him then and thought he saw what it was that glimmered beneath the affable surface of his remarks. Contempt, coursing like some seam of metal through his words and their meaning, the contempt felt by one who knew his own powers for one who clearly did not. ‘It’s always a mistake to overdo things, Mr Barnett, don’t you agree? To reach beyond one’s grasp.’ Now, Harry was certain, Cornelius meant more than the length of time a middle-aged man should give himself to recover from influenza. ‘If you’re ready, we’ll carry on.’
They descended a flight of steps, entered a classroom block by a side-door and began to thread a route through corridors and passages busy with bustling knots of purple-blazered schoolboys. Harry noticed in their faces, as they glanced at Cornelius, neither affection nor hostility, but something he would never have associated with the juvenile mind: awe. To every humble last one of these boys, Jack Cornelius was either a devil or a god. The realization bit into Harry’s confidence that he could outwit such a man: who was he really fooling?
A broad staircase led down into a hushed and panelled hallway. Here, it seemed, pupils were not permitted to stray. The only faces that greeted them belonged to sun-dry dead abbots glaring down from dusky oil paintings. Cornelius’s striding progress carried them to a heavy oak door with the sign HEAD OF CAREERS fixed to it. He opened it and stood back to let Harry enter ‘ “Head of Careers” is an absurd title, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘As if I could in some way decide for those leaving us what they will go on to do.’
Harry remembered the expressions of the boys they had passed. ‘Perhaps they think you can.’ But Cornelius’s only answer was a gnomic smile. He was not to be drawn.
The room was large, furnished like the private study of a rich and cultured man: desk, chairs and bookcases in what looked like hand-tooled mahogany, a tapestry covering one wall, several ornately framed paintings, a chaise-longue, a couple of wingbacked armchairs. The windows were tall and mullioned, looking out onto the courtyard Harry had crossed earlier, with the top panels stained purple and gold to match the colours of the school.
’I generally have a glass of sherry before lunch,’ said Cornelius. ‘Will you join me?’
For all his loathing of sherry, Harry heard himself agreeing. A drink was pressed into his hand, a chair held back and he found himself seated opposite Cornelius by the window, for all the world like some sixth-former seeking advice on whether to go for Oxbridge or the Guards.
‘Let me save you some time, Mr Barnett. Heather Mallender visited me here on Sunday the eighteenth of September. She wanted to know – as I suspect you do – what my relationship had been with her late sister. I told her – as I am happy to tell you – that I had met Clare Mallender on three or four occasions, all of them in the company of other people. Receptions to which Alan had invited me – and an educational conference which we both attended. We were the vaguest of acquaintances, nothing more.’ There was no false note in Cornelius’s voice, but, all the same, Harry doubted every word. ‘Heather was as sceptical as you yourself appear. Rex Cunningham had told her that he had seen Clare in possession of a photograph of me which had convinced him we were intimate friends. Well, dear Rex was either lying or labouring under a misapprehension. No such friendship existed. I cannot say with absolute certainty that Clare Mallender did not possess a photograph of me, but I can say that there was no reason why she should have done.’
It was as simple as only a barefaced lie could be. Yet it was also unchallengeable. Cornelius was too accomplished a performer to let his smugness show, but it was palpable all the same: he could not be caught out. Heather had made no headway and nor, Harry felt sure, would he. ‘You reject Rex Cunningham’s claim?’ he said lamely.
‘No,’ Cornelius replied with a smile. ‘Rex is as capable of making an honest mistake as he is of lying. I would not venture to say which he is doing in this case.’
‘Haven’t you taken it up with him?’
‘Why should I? He wouldn’t change his mind, whatever I said.’
‘But if it isn’t true—’
‘It isn’t, believe me, Mr Barnett. Besides …’ He cast a sidelong glance through the window, as if ruminating on a philosophical problem. ‘Besides, it occurred to me that Rex might be deliberately misleading Heather in order to prevent her discovering some connection between Clare and himself.’
The suggestion was preposterously unlikely, but that, Harry suspected, was just the point. It declared as openly as Cornelius dared that he could invent a dozen different theories if he was obliged to, behind which the truth, whatever it was, could be concealed forever. ‘Is that all Heather wanted to know?’ Harry said, detecting as he spoke the strain of exasperation in his voice.
‘No.’ Cornelius signalled by a flicker of one eyebrow that he knew Harry had expected him to say the exact reverse. ‘She also asked me to recount for her the circumstances leading up to the car crash in May 1968 in which poor Willy Morpurgo suffered brain damage.’ Honesty, it seemed, was also a string in the expert liar’s bow. ‘Are you familiar with that sad tale, Mr Barnett?’
‘Yes. I am.’ Cornelius, the man who had suggested the ill-fated drive to Burford, the man who had stayed behind when the others started back to Oxford, sat before Harry, twenty years on, with a smile on his face that mixed candid reminiscence and flagrant duplicity. According to Ockleton, he had become ‘as maudlin as only an Irishman in liquor can.’ But now, looking at the lined, self-knowing expression of this consummate dissembler, Harry found it easier to believe he had merely staged a performance, an expert and convincing charade that had achieved the desired result. ‘You were very lucky that day, weren’t you?’ Harry said hesitantly. ‘To miss the return journey, I mean.’
‘I was also drunk, Mr Barnett. We Irish are renowned for both qualities.’
Drunk? Harry had the impression this was one man who had never been drunk in his entire life. He guarded his tongue and his thoughts too well to let alcohol betray them. ‘Why do you suppose Heather wanted to know about such distant events?’
‘She claimed they might have some bearing on Clare’s death. Why such a bizarre notion should have entered her head I cannot imagine, but I did not like to disillusion her, so I told her what I could. She thanked me for the information – and then she left.’
Had Heather really gone that quietly? Cornelius’s smile, reaching Harry across the grey pool of light that spread between them, glistened like the fly on a fisherman’s line. Harry would learn nothing, it implied, unless or until it was too late for him to profit by it. Far too late. ‘You’re an historian, I believe, Mr Cornelius. Can’t you conjecture why Heather should be so interested in this piece of ancient history?’
The smile broadened. ‘Which piece do you mean, Mr Barnett? Walter Tyrrell? The Burford Mutiny? Or a simple car accident on the seventeenth of May 1968?’
Betrayal, the theme that had first entered Harry’s head in Burford, recurred to his mind now as the link between all the widely spaced events that had borne down on Heather Mallender. An arrow in the forest. A lie on hallowed ground. A push in the dark. The laughter of drunken fools. And of one who was wiser than the rest. A country lane, wet after rain. The squeal of rubber tyre and human terror. But no skid marks. No clue or sign or token. Unless Heather had found one. ‘Actually,’ he said, commencing slowly what every contrary sense told him was a venture into dangerous territory, ‘the piece of history I had in mind was a defenestration. Not the famous one at Prague, but another,
closer to our own time.’
A mirthless chuckle was Cornelius’s admission that Harry had displayed more subtlety than expected. ‘Your grasp of history impresses me, Mr Barnett. Perhaps you understand – as many do not – that the past is not only always with us, but is us, the cause and context of our every action. What we do is prompted by what we believed a minute or a year or a century ago. Wouldn’t you agree?’
Anthony Sedley. Prisoner. Prisoner of the past. Was he the reason Cornelius had lured them to Burford that day? To point a moral? Or betray a trust? ‘Yes. I’d agree.’
‘Then perhaps you can assist me on a minor point of methodology?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘What enabled you to be so certain Heather Mallender visited me here?’
‘It seemed likely—’
‘Not likelihood, certainty!’ Cornelius’s voice was suddenly harsh, as if a pupil’s essay had revealed a deficiency of logic. ‘You did not deduce that Heather Mallender came here. You knew it for a fact. That is obvious to me. The question is: how did you know?’
Harry did not know what to say. No lie would aid him in a contest with a master of the craft, but the truth, his only hope of gaining the upper hand, had to remain hidden. He felt confused beneath Cornelius’s unwavering stare, unsure whether he had not betrayed himself by patting his pocket to check if the photographs were still there. Cornelius had no cause to suspect their existence, of course, yet – Suddenly, there was a tap at the door. With a rush of relief, Harry looked round to see a boy – senior, to judge by his appearance – peering nervously into the room.
‘Oh, excuse me, sir. I thought you’d be alone.’
‘What is it, Appleby?’
‘Well, I was hoping to have a word with you about this week’s Greek tutorial.’
‘Hmm.’ Cornelius’s expression mellowed. ‘All right. Wait outside. I’ll be with you in a few minutes. Mr Barnett and I have nearly concluded our business.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Appleby withdrew.
‘I trust I’m correct,’ said Cornelius, as the door clicked shut. ‘There’s really no more to be said, is there?’ A moment ago, he had seemed to have Harry at his mercy. Now he was content to release him, to toss him back in the water like a catch unworthy of the landing.
‘Er, no, I suppose there isn’t.’ Harry rose from his chair, eager not to let the opportunity of escape slip from his grasp. He wanted nothing so much at the moment as to be out of this man’s piercing sight and withering scrutiny. It was only when he had followed Cornelius most of the way across the room that the significance of what had just happened dawned on him. ‘Hold on! I thought you taught history here?’
‘I do,’ Cornelius replied, pulling up and turning round to face him.
‘And Greek as well?’
‘Ancient Greek. To those few students of Latin who express a particular interest. There are not many. Hurstdown’s Benedictine origins encourage us to emphasize the language of Catholicism at the expense of that of Orthodoxy. But one or two boys every year venture into Greek in preparation for a Classics degree.’
‘And you’re able to help them?’
‘As it happens, yes.’
The writing on the wall. The name on the envelope. The phrase learned and spoken by the man on the train. At last they began to make sense. At last the warning pointed to its source. ‘You find a knowledge of Greek useful, then?’
‘Occasionally.’ Cornelius smiled and stretched out his hand to open the door. ‘As you’ll appreciate, Mr Barnett, it does have its applications.’
32
THE ROSE AND Crown, Hurstdown, extended an icy welcome to strangers. The fireplace was monopolized by a garrulous half dozen whom Harry identified as a fair sample of the school’s lay teaching staff: lots of leather-patched tweed, regimental ties and braying accents. At the other end of the bar two or three farm labourers muttered glumly to each other. Somewhere in the glacial no-man’s-land between, Harry ordered a pint and drew the ninth photograph from his pocket.
‘My hobby’s ecclesiastical architecture. A friend recommended this church to me.’ He held the picture out for the barman to see. ‘Do you happen to know if it’s near here?’
The barman’s expression suggested he found it as easy to believe Harry was a student of ecclesiastical architecture as that he was an undercover weights and measures inspector. He glanced at the picture for about half a second, then said: ‘Could be.’
‘Any idea where?’
Another glance, this time a lingering affair of about three seconds. Then an ostentatious sniff. ‘Looks like Flaxford. Next village north of ’ere. ’Bout three mile. Turning to the left. You can’t miss the sign.’
Silence lunged from every briar-riddled field and stark-boughed tree as Harry climbed from the car outside Flaxford church. It lay half a mile or so short of the village itself and as far again from the turning off the main road, its sombre red stone darkened still further by the damp and chilly hollow in which it had been built. The setting rendered its vast and soaring tower – tier upon traceried tier of lights, buttresses, pinnacles and battlements – so absurdly ill-proportioned that Harry could almost have believed it was an optical illusion. But the photograph in his hand proved it was not.
He went through the lych-gate and walked up the short gravel path to the porch. Rank grass between crooked gravestones. Lichen-choked inscriptions. Celtic crosses worn smooth by time and weather. There was nothing unique here, it seemed. All was much as it might have been in a hundred other neglected country churchyards: winter closing on the dead and disregarded. He turned the handle of the heavy iron-strapped door and pushed it open.
Inside, dampness contended with beeswax polish, darkness with columns of light shaped by lancet windows. Belfry, font, aisle. Pews, pulpit, screen. Choir, organ, altar. Where was the clue, where was the key? Dust. And Harrry’s footfalls echoing on uneven flagstones. Heavy velvet. Warm wood. Glittering plate. Nowhere did Heather seem close at hand. And yet, and yet … Anthony Sedley. Prisoner. Was that a mouse scratching in the rood-loft? Or another prisoner, carving his name for perpetuity’s sake? His name – or hers.
On a table just inside the door were arranged missionary leaflets, guidebooks on the church’s history, a card requesting donations to the tower restoration fund and a visitors’ book, held open by a rubber band, ballpoint pen tied to a length of string beside it. With sudden eagerness, Harry snapped off the band and turned back through the pages. Heather had been here on September 18th. He knew because Cornelius had told him so. He knew because Heather had given him a way to be certain. Each page was ruled in four columns, headed ‘Date,’ ‘Name’, ‘Address’ and ‘Comments’. He ran his finger down the dates on the right-hand sheet. 15th September. 16th. There it was, in Heather’s recognizable hand. ‘18th September 1988. Heather Mallender. Sabre Rise, Portesham, Dorset. I found no ghosts here, not even the one who left her name.’ The one who left her name. Some instinct had drawn Heather here from Hurstdown, some instinct that told her this was where Cornelius’s denials would be refuted. If he had only known Clare as ‘the vaguest of acquaintances’, she would never have been to Hurstdown, far less Flaxford. She would have had no reason to come here. Or to leave her name.
Flaxford Church did not attract many visitors, it seemed, for eighteen months took Harry back only half a dozen pages. Why he looked first for 16th May 1987 he did not know, except that Clare and Dysart had dined at the Skein of Geese that day, which made it as good a starting point as any. This time he ran his finger down the column of names rather than dates. And, at the bottom of the first sheet, found what Heather had discovered before him.
‘22nd May 1987. Clare Mallender. London.’ That was all. No comment. No praise for the stained glass. No message from beyond the grave. Just a date, a name, a place – and a lie nailed.
33
SOME AMALGAM OF guesswork, inspiration and logic uncannily like an assurance from Heather’s own mouth told Harry that th
e site of the eleventh photograph lay close at hand. Heather would surely not have left Flaxford without seeking further evidence of Clare’s presence there and the gloomy stone house at the end of a tree-arched drive she had captured on film had all the makings to his eye of a run-down country parsonage. A card in the church porch referred enquiries to the Reverend F. J. Waghorne, BD, at Flaxford Rectory, an address which did not prove difficult to find. Overgrown and over-sized, the rectory stood in its own grounds just the other side of the village. And was instantly recognizable.
The door was answered by a tiny blonde-haired girl in white tee-shirt and bright yellow trousers, feet lost in a pair of her mother’s high-heeled shoes. She stared up at Harry through breakfast-saucer eyes and solemnly announced, ‘You’re not Mr Clatworthy.’
‘No.’ Harry attempted an appealing smile. ‘Is your father in?’
‘Mummy thought you were Mr Clatworthy.’
‘Well, as you see, I’m not. Is your father …’ But it was useless. Turning away, the girl began an awkward, shoe-shovelling retreat along the hall.
‘Mummy! It’s not Mr Clatworthy!’
Harry could see the entrance to the kitchen at the far end of the hall. As he watched, a flustered figure in apron and jeans, hair held back by a bandeau, appeared in the distant doorway. ‘What? Victoria, why on earth are you wearing— Oh!’ She noticed Harry and grinned nervously. ‘Sorry. We were expecting the plumber. To be honest’ – she glanced apprehensively towards the sound of running water – ‘we were praying for the plumber.’ She began wiping her hands in a towel. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I was hoping for a word with the rector.’
‘He’s rather busy at the moment.’
‘It’s a matter of some urgency.’
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