‘What will Morpurgo do?’
‘Do?’ Dysart’s eyes seemed to focus on some object far beyond the confines of the room. ‘I can’t imagine. I really can’t imagine.’ His gaze returned to Harry. ‘Now, where were we?’
‘But you virtually admitted responsibility for crippling him.’
Dysart ignored the point. ‘Have you put the pieces together yet?’
‘What?’
‘Have you seen the pattem? Have you re-assembled the jigsaw?’
‘What pattern? What jigsaw?’
The smile broadened. ‘Our life, Harry, yours and mine.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Really? You disappoint me. Perhaps a clue would be in order. Paul Stobart was murdered on the night of Thursday the twentieth of March, 1947. Gwendolen Stobart ran away with her son the same night and vanished. Her son was not with her when she commmitted suicide in Cardiff four months later. He’d been lost along the way.’
‘Along the way?’
‘Perhaps I should say … along the railway.’
Forty years were swept aside like a curtain at Dysart’s words. Harry was no longer standing in a cottage in Hampshire, no longer bound by the fatigue and self-pity of his middle age. Suddenly he was eleven years old, school cap askew, hair tousled, blazer button lost on a paling, knees chafed beneath the short serge trousers, shoes scuffed, satchel strapped to his back, tie tucked into his shirt. He was blowing between his mittened hands for warmth, wetting his pencil with his tongue and folding open his book of train numbers as he crouched by the gap in the fence between St Mark’s Churchyard and the railway line. He was in Swindon at dusk, on the first raw, snow-covered day of spring in the year of our Lord 1947, unaware of the murder committed in Bermondsey the previous night, unaware that time and chance were about to dictate that his path through life and that of a nameless child who would grow to be Alan Dysart were about to intersect.
No, it was not a pile of snow. It was a cardboard box, propped against the far rail of the down-line, along which the Cardiff express was about to pass. The Cardiff express, number not yet legible but King class, if his luck was really in. Of course, it would squash a cardboard box flat without the driver even noticing. Not that – Hold on. That could not be right. There was something in the box, moving and flexing and, yes, crying, a tiny red-faced white-swaddled bundle that could only be – The train was moving faster, gathering its mighty strength as it left the station, smoke belching from the stack like a storm cloud, steam rolling like seaspray round the thrusting pistons and half-hidden drive-wheels as the whole unstoppable leviathan bore down on one fragile carton and its oblivious occupant. In a minute it would all be over. In less than a minute an infant life would be ended.
There was no time to think, no time to judge or calculate. An impulse of schoolboy derring-do carried Harry through the gap in the fence and across the narrow strip of snow-patched grass. Without hesitation – for he sensed hesitation would be fatal – he started across the three tracks separating him from the box, jumping swiftly from one rail to the next, each one vibrating more strongly than the last, his ears filled with the roar of the train but his eyes fixed only on his objective, his thoughts refined to a fervent prayer that he would neither slip nor stumble. Then he was there, stooping as he leapt, snatching up the box and its contents, clearing two more rails and turning as he came to a halt to see the driver’s white and angry face glaring at him from the cab, too shocked to shout what he was doubtless thinking, too surprised to understand what had occurred.
Harry sank slowly to his haunches and set the box down gently in a safe haven between the rails whilst the carriages of the train swept by in a blur. The baby was staring up at him, blue with cold about the fingers and cheeks but apparently unperturbed by its brush with death. Indeed, as Harry peered closer, it seemed to him that the baby was smiling, a slow but genuine smile of unexpected beauty.
A dramatic rescue act yesterday by a Swindon schoolboy saved the life of an abandoned baby. When Harry looked at Dysart, he saw that he was smiling still across the interval of years. The police have appealed for the mother to come forward as soon as possible. ‘It was you,’ he murmured. They praised young Harold’s conduct and described him as a ‘brave, quick-witted and resourceful lad’. ‘You were the baby in the box.’
‘Yes, Harry. That was me.’
‘What is it, Mr Barnett? What is it here or in you that Dysart clings to? What binds him to you?’ Ellison’s words chimed in Harry’s mind as he stared in slowly deepening understanding at Dysart’s smiling face. The murderer’s son who survived to emulate his mother. Alan Dysart and Harry Barnett. One man and his saviour.
‘It’s why I came to Barnchase Motors and gave you all the help I could. It’s why I persuaded Charlie Mallender to take you on. It’s why I chose you as caretaker of the Villa ton Navarkhon. I’ve never forgotten what I owe you, Harry. I’ve never stopped trying to repay you. But how can you repay the gift of life itself?’
‘Why did you never say?’
‘Because I thought you’d value friendship more highly than gratitude. Because I thought you’d prefer generosity to recompense.’
‘But … all these years …’
‘I’ve known what you haven’t: that but for you I’d be dead.’
The corollary of Dysart’s proposition struck Harry with hideous force. ‘And your victims … would still be alive.’
‘Yes.’ Dysart nodded in solemn confirmation. ‘That too, of course. That too. It’s ironic, don’t you—’
The door flew open as if hit by a battering ram and crashed against the wall in a scatter of plaster. On the threshold stood Morpurgo, flushed, trembling and breathing heavily, his one eye staring wildly at Dysart. And before him, raised as if to strike, he held a rake.
For a frozen instant, nobody moved. Then Dysart, signalling with his hand behind his back for Harry to retreat across the room, took a single step forward, smiling gently. ‘Hello, Willy. What do you—’
A scything blur of the rake caught him on the head and sent him reeling against the wall. There was blood on his forehead and on the prongs of the rake: dark droplets of it spattered across the carpet. Harry gaped at the scene, unable for a moment to believe that it was happening, unable to accept the reality of what he saw: Dysart stooping forward, left hand steadying himself against the wall, right clutching at his brow; and Morpurgo, his breath hissing through his teeth like a piston, his one eye red and unblinking, the rake swinging back in his hands. A thing, armed with a rake, that seems to strike at me. The remembered phrase prised its way to the front of Harry’s mind and capered there for a ghastly, mocking instant, as if to say: ‘Didn’t you foresee this? Didn’t you realize it was bound to end like this?’
Morpurgo struck again, this time with a savage upward swing that jolted Dysart away from the wall with a blow to the left side of his face. There was blood now on Harry’s shirt, blood and something worse blotting and merging across his chest and shoulders as Dysart staggered sideways into the centre of the room, moaning gently with arms spread wide and head uplifted, as if no longer seeking to shield himself or staunch his wounds. Through the gauze of his own disbelief, filtered but not obscured, Harry saw, where Dysart’s left eye and cheek should have been, a raw crater of mangled flesh and bone. He and Morpurgo were suddenly equals. And with his other, barely focusing eye, Dysart was staring at Harry, acknowledging the irony of the moment, accepting the justice of what he was suffering.
A third blow, descending from somewhere above Morpurgo’s head, a flashing arc of fanged metal that bit and sliced into its victim. A squelching, grinding composition of sound. A splatter of blood and tissue. A hideous, gurgling moan. And Dysart, tumbling slowly backwards into a tall bookcase set against the far wall, books and vases sliding and crashing about him, a shattered, twitching subsidence to the floor, shards of china and torn pages pattering down about him like the last tumbling pebbles of an avalanche.
/> Morpurgo advanced across the room, rake raised high. Dysart rolled onto his back, blinking up with his right eye from what had been, only a few seconds before, a handsome unmarked face. The torn edges of his mouth rippled, as if trying to speak or smile. His left hand quivered and flexed. And Harry, his limbs at last obeying his orders, lunged forward to block Morpurgo’s path. But Morpurgo’s strength was that of a man possessed. A single lash of his left arm felled Harry to the floor. And all he could see above him as he looked up was Morpurgo’s crouching shape and the slender, saw-headed shadow of the rake stretching itself across the wall behind him, stretching and vanishing as it slashed down into its target, then recoiling to strike again and again and again, the sound of its impact worse than the sight of it could ever have been.
Then the frenzy was over. Less than two minutes after it had begun, it was complete. Dysart was dead. And Morpurgo, with a cry of grief as much as of triumph, flung the rake clattering into a corner, cast one panting glance at his victim, then turned and rushed headlong from the room.
Harry rose to his knees and confronted the butchered remains of Alan Dysart. Twenty years’ worth of incoherent rage had found its quietus. What the train had spared the rake had claimed. What Harry had saved Morpurgo had slain. Alan Dysart’s day was done.
And there, beside him on the floor, its covers spread flat, its pages creased and torn, was the book he had gone to Strete Barton to retrieve three days before: The Reign of William Rufus. Harry pulled it towards him and flipped it open at the fly leaf. Across the inscription and the signature of the book’s five donors, visible now where it had always been implicit, lay an indelible circle of Dysart’s blood.
65
HALFWAY THROUGH THE service it occurred to Harry that this was the first funeral he had attended since Uncle Len’s more than forty years ago. Two more contrasting occasions it would have been hard to imagine. For Uncle Len there had been several hymns, a lengthy address by the vicar, a snail’s pace cortège to the cemetery, a graveside ululation by one of Harry’s great aunts and a boiled ham tea at Falmouth Street. For Alan Dysart three mourners and a mumbling priest had gathered in the antiseptic ambience of Southampton Crematorium, attended by electronic music and a pervading impression of distasteful business being discreetly done.
Before it had seemed properly to begin, it was over. The coffin had slid silently away through the curtain, the music had reached the end of its tape, the last prayer had stuttered to its close and the sparse congregation had begun shuffling towards the exit. Ellison had led the way at the regulation pace, whilst Cyril Ockleton twittered along beside Harry at the rear.
‘Extraordinarily poor turn-out, I must say. It was far from convenient for me to leave Oxford at such short notice with term but lately commenced. Nevertheless, I made the effort. Despite the dreadful scandal which Alan inflicted upon the college and the fact that I had to cancel three tutorials, I came. Purely out of a sense of duty, you understand. That and nothing more. And what do I find upon arrival? Well, with all due respect to you and this … this …’ He flapped his hand towards the figure now leaving the chapel.
‘Ellison. Ministry of Defence.’
‘Quite. Well where, I should like to know, is Mrs Dysart?’
‘Kitzbühel. Declined to break her holiday.’
‘And other members of his family?’
‘He had none.’
‘What about people he served with in the Navy, then?’
‘They sent a floral anchor. You’ll see it outside.’
‘And his political associates?’
‘Washed their hands of him completely.’
‘Good God.’
They were beyond the chapel doors now, passing but not pausing to inspect the paltry pair of wreaths that had been received. Ahead, Ellison was thanking the priest, whilst his driver was joking under his breath with the undertaker’s men.
‘And Rex. I really did expect to find Rex here. Did he send any kind of message?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘It is perplexing, Mr Barnett, not to say distressing. This whole business has shaken me, really it has. Alan dead, Willy under arrest and Jack … Tell me, was the newspaper report accurate? Was there really nothing to suggest why Willy set upon Alan in that brutal fashion?’
‘Nothing at all. ‘
Ockleton shook his head. ‘It is so uncharacteristic, so completely unlike anything … I do wish Rex had come today, I really do.’ He glanced about him. ‘Well, I ought to pay my respects to the padre, ought I not? Excuse me, Mr Barnett. Charming to meet you again, quite charming.’ With that, and a fleeting handshake, Ockleton bustled off.
Relieved to find himself alone, Harry took a deep breath of the damp grey air and walked slowly away from the crematorium concourse until he had reached a point offering a clear view up the drive. There he stopped and gazed towards the main road for several minutes, so intently that he was unaware of Ellison approaching from behind him until his soft, insistent voice sounded in his ear.
‘Looks rather as if we’ve got away with it, Mr Barnett.’
‘Got away with what?’
‘A quiet cremation. No press. No television. No curiosity-seekers. Hardly any mourners to speak of.’
‘Would you rather there had been none at all?’
‘None at all might have been conspicuous in its own right. As it is . . ’ Ellison sighed. ‘From an official viewpoint, Dysart’s death is a positive godsend, of course, the more so since the man who killed him is clearly mad as a hatter, thus sparing us all the embarrassment of a trial. I cannot pretend, however, that this conclusion to my investigations does not leave me feeling slightly … cheated, shall we say?’
‘Why should you feel cheated?’
‘Because you still puzzle me, Mr Barnett, you and your late but excellent friend, Alan Dysart.’
Harry said nothing. He continued to stare straight ahead.
‘Oh, don’t worry. The case is closed. Your secret is safe, safe as … the grave, shall we say?’ Harry looked round at him. ‘The undertaker tells me you’ve asked for his ashes. Might I ask what you intend to do with them?’
‘I intend to scatter them on a railway line.’
Ellison frowned. Clearly he suspected Harry of sarcasm and, equally clearly, he did not relish being its butt. ‘I see,’ he said slowly. ‘Well, I’ll bid you good day, Mr Barnett. I don’t suppose we’ll meet again.’ Without offering to shake hands, he turned and walked away.
Five minutes later Harry was still standing in the same place, watching as three vehicles drove away up the crematorium drive. Ellison’s official car was in the lead, followed by Ockleton’s bedraggled specimen, with the hearse bringing up the rear. As the last of these turned onto the main road and vanished from sight, another vehicle turned in, almost as if it had been awaiting this triple departure as a signal for it to appear. It was a taxi and it came to a halt about halfway down the drive. As soon as he recognized the person who climbed out and began walking towards him, Harry raised his hand in greeting.
‘I thought you weren’t going to show up,’ he said when she was within earshot.
‘I nearly didn’t,’ Zohra replied. ‘It seemed to me we’d said all there was to be said.’
‘We had.’
‘So what’s changed?’
‘Take a walk in the garden with me and I’ll tell you.’
Around the crematorium gravel paths had been laid, winding through wooded glades where faded wreaths propped against tree trunks were a constant reminder of the common cause which brought people to such a place. For a little way, Harry walked in silence, listening to the crunch of his feet on the gravel and the hum of traffic from the nearby motorway. It crossed his mind that to any onlooker studying their appearance – Harry was wearing something that passed for a black suit, Zohra a dark raincoat and beret – it would seem obvious that they were discussing the loss of a mutual friend or relative. The true purpose of their meeting could never be gu
essed and, even if explained, would probably never be believed.
At the top of a hillock looking down on the chapel, Harry stopped and turned to Zohra. ‘I’ve had an idea,’ he said cautiously.
‘About what?’
‘Your predicament.’
Zohra flushed. ‘If you’ve brought me here so you can have the pleasure of gloating—’
‘I don’t want to gloat. I want to help.’
She frowned. ‘Why?’
Harry gestured vaguely towards the smoke drifting from the crematorium chimney. ‘Because everybody’s lost: Heather, Dysart, Cornelius, Morpurgo, you, me. We’ve all stooped or been lured to some form of treachery and none of us has profited by it. You were right. We’ve all had our just reward.’
‘So?’
‘So I want to repair some small part of the damage that’s been done, salvage something from the wreckage.’
‘By helping me?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you can’t help me, Harry. That’s just the point. I’m beyond help.’
‘I don’t think so. If you could obtain immediate entitlement to British citizenship, they’d have to allow you to stay, wouldn’t they?’
‘What’s the point of discussing it? I’ve exhausted every possibility there is.’
‘Not quite. There’s one way you haven’t tried.’
‘What way?’
‘Well …’ He smiled uncertainly. ‘You could marry me.’
She stared at him in silent incredulity.
‘I realize I’m not much of a catch. Twice your age, unemployed, penniless, all that and worse. On the other hand—’
‘Stop it!’
‘Today’s the twentieth, Zohra. You don’t have to leave for another eleven days. Ample time to arrange a register office wedding, I should have thought. This cousin of yours, the solicitor in Newcastle: he could confirm it would let you off the hook.’
‘You’re proposing a marriage of convenience – a legal fiction – to save me from deportation?’
Into the Blue Page 51