by John Elliott
The sound of running feet pattering behind him broke his reverie. A second later, a jogger eased by, his shoulders rotating as he moved purposefully ahead. Sonny saw him reach the Port Steps and forge onwards without a sideways glance. Down there, out of sight in his sheltered enclave, he hoped he would find Jacob Kemmer hard at work—Jacob Kemmer who might hold the answer to the previous night’s exhibition without exhibits.
His crouching figure, assorted chalks strewn in front of him, was indeed there when he came to descend the initial flight. Beyond Kemmer’s outstretched hand, Sonny spotted a variety of scenes separated by jagged black boundaries in the manner of a stained-glass window.
‘You’ve forsaken the ancients I see,’ he said.
Jacob Kemmer leant back on his heels and turned his head. ‘Mr,’ he paused, ‘Ayza,’ he completed with satisfaction. ‘A second visit so soon. This qualifies you as an interested spectator. With luck, I may come to count you as one of my regulars. Yes, as you rightly observe, I have temporarily abandoned the city’s founding fathers for some of its enticing fin de siècle melodramas, all pictured here in their notorious crime settings.’
‘Minus the corpses it seems. Reminiscent of the style of an exhibition with only blank walls.’
Jacob Kemmer looked up enquiringly. ‘I’m afraid you’ve lost me. What do you mean?’
‘Don’t you remember? You gave me a card yesterday. You told me photographs of your work were on show. Admittedly, the venue had been changed, but when I got there I found nothing. Just people staring at an empty space. Concept had defeated content.’
Jacob shrugged. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. The images weren’t under my control. Photographers and gallery owners play fast and loose, but I hope you didn’t have a totally wasted journey.’
‘No, as it turned out. I learned something, and after all I followed your direction.’
Ignoring Sonny’s last veiled remark, Jacob stood up and, with an open gesture of his hands, invited, ‘Please, look.’
Sonny obeyed. Nothing straightforward would come his way, of that he was sure, yet he still sensed Kemmer was some kind of messenger who was taking a particular interest in him.
A grey rotunda, topped by a white dome in a fold of green parkland dotted with hollow oaks, occupied the bottom left of the composition. Across its thick black dividing line, a cupboard door stood partly ajar in a dilapidated kitchen. On a dark-blue wall by its side hung a row of bells. Gorse bushes, licked by fire, on a railway embankment straggled upwards, bisecting other blocked off segments, to a red-brick signal box, numbered 94, below which the tracks disappeared into a tunnel mouth. In the middle right, a man holding a raised lantern illuminated the floor of a stationary brougham where a bunch of white heather lay. The remainder of the piece was as yet unfinished.
Jacob provided a clipped explanation while Sonny took it in. ‘Scene of a lovers’ suicide pact. The girl died. The man survived and was charged with a conspiracy to murder. The cupboard in the kitchen of Dr Alsop’s suburban villa where the poison was found. The bells used by Alsop and his mother to summon their two victims, illiterate servant girls, to the upper rooms. Police, alerted by the burning scrub, stumble on the beginning of “The Case of the Mistaken Signalman”. The so-called hermaphrodite corpse discovered by Peeps Monaghan at Number 8, Little Chapel Yard. All of them assembled from the annals of crime, greed and folly, which titillated and fortified public opinion in the 1890s. From the heart of old Greenlea to its ever widening margins . . . ’
The sound of approaching footsteps halted Jacob’s commentary. He turned away from Sonny, who had been waiting for an opportunity to press him further on the events of the preceding evening.
‘Mr Guthrie, it’s a pleasure to see you again,’ Jacob said warmly.
The newcomer, scarcely acknowledging the greeting, immediately thrust his hand deep in his coat pocket and pulled out his wallet. He separated a note between his fingers then propped it in Jacob’s collection tin. ‘Important things first,’ he said. ‘The niceties can look after themselves.’
Jacob gave a mock bow. ‘You have the priorities as ever.’
This ostentatious display grated on Sonny. He felt it was a show of my generosity outweighs whatever it is you have managed to produce. Silently, he studied the features of the new arrival. He had a well-fed, rounded face whose jowls and incipient double chin were tending to fat. His head stayed lowered on Jacob’s work preventing a clear view of his eyes until, suddenly aware of being scrutinised, whilst the pavement artist enumerated his historical sources, they flashed across to stare at their beholder. Some quirk in their set and the high bridge of the nose separating them struck Sonny as somehow vaguely familiar. At the back of his mind, he recognised a characteristic look he had come across before in a context he could not quite place.
‘I am remiss. Forgive me,’ Jacob said, seeing their mutual curiosity. ‘I should have introduced my new spectator. Since yesterday he’s begun to include me in his daily routine. Mr Ayza. Andrew Guthrie.’
His words and his accompanying smile, however, failed to elicit any sign of polite enquiry. Instead, Andrew Guthrie frowned and shifted his feet, as if he were on the point of going there and then. He directed a long, sardonic glance at Sonny and said, ‘Carry on, Jacob, I was listening.’
Disconcerted and sensing the growing tension between the two men, Jacob hesitantly continued, ‘Executions followed, of course. It was an unbreakable pattern. Murder committed. The guilty identified, then tried and condemned to death to great public approval. True, they no longer had a cart to follow with celebrations on the way, but the initiates still gathered in force outside the prison walls at dawn.’
Damn him, Sonny thought. I am not going to go just because he snubs me. He dropped the change he was carrying beside Guthrie’s note. ‘When you’ve finished,’ he said, ‘I’d like a word with you, Jacob.’
‘You bear an unusual name. Unusual, that is, in Greenlea,’ Guthrie intervened. ‘Your first name wouldn’t happen to be Roberto by any chance?’
‘It is.’ Sonny nodded curtly.
‘In that case and taking a guess about your age, well, I’d say you’d netted a connoisseur, Jacob. Perhaps even a competitor.’
Jacob looked blank. He turned to Sonny for help.
‘Mr Ayza, if I’ve got it right, is quite the skilled draughtsman,’ Guthrie continued. ‘Sketches of his wormed their way into my early life. 48 Saint Roch, Llomera, to be precise.’ He stared directly at Sonny. ‘Old Paca Ceret at the dram shop used to talk about your father and mother. She was a fount of gossip. You have a sister, I believe.’
‘Veronica,’ Sonny replied, completely taken aback.
‘So you two know each other,’ Jacob said. ‘It’s true what they say about Aphrodite Park and the Port Steps. People are bound to meet up again at least once in a lifetime.’
‘Oh, I doubt Mr Ayza was even aware of my existence,’ Guthrie went on, ‘but for some reason my mother kept some of his youthful drawings, and, God knows, my father was forever praising them. He was an admirer of yours, Roberto. Many a night, especially when he had been drinking, he’d make sure I knew how gifted, how intelligent you were. “That’s a boy with a future,” he’d say. “A real future for one of our own.”’
‘Who are you?’ Sonny’s muttered question faltered and almost died in the air between them.
Guthrie smiled sarcastically. ‘Why, Andrew Guthrie, of course. I am a businessman here in Greenlea. In fact, probably like Jacob you’re one of my customers. I own the controlling interest in Sunrise Tea & Coffee. Once, I came from another country as you did. I was a different person then, in the same way we were all different people before. There’s nothing else to tell.’
‘Then I’ll rephrase my question, as you insist on being semantically correct. Who were you? Llomera is a very small place. If your parents knew me I must have heard of them.’
‘Easy. My mother was Antonetta Simon. My father, Batiste Cheto.’
‘You’re not making sense.’
Jacob, satisfied that they both had paid and realising that they were involved in their own private conversation, resumed his chalking. Sonny distractedly looked over at his initial energetic marking before replying. If this was Fernando, should he mention Elizabeth Kerry’s message, and what should he say, if anything, about Agnes Darshel’s presence? ‘I mean you talk of being a boy in Llomera, but your father couldn’t have gone back. It would have been far too dangerous.’
‘Twice. He went twice. He was a Cheto don’t forget. The first time to see my mother and impregnate her. The second when I saw him with my own eyes, but that’s all in the past. Now, we live in other times. It’s been interesting to meet you, Roberto Ayza. I even believe it has done me good, for you can’t imagine how I used to hate you. How much I wanted to see you crushed and destroyed by misfortune. Now here you are, and in the end I wish you no harm. I must go. I have business to attend to. Goodbye, Mr Ayza. Until the next time, Jacob.’
Kemmer waved his hand without rising. Andrew Guthrie walked to the first step then stopped, paused and came back close to Sonny. ‘On reflection,’ he said, ‘come and see me at home tomorrow if you can. Make it morning, around ten. I live in Massard. Here’s the address. We’ll disinter the bones and give our upbringings a proper funeral. By the way, what line of work are you in?’
Sonny took the address card. ‘I’ll be there. Chance Company, I work for Chance Company.’
Andrew Guthrie had already reached the top of the steps. Sonny did not catch the baleful expression that crossed his face.
*
‘Why stop here? We can’t be far away surely.’ Agnes watched with irritation as Emmet pulled off the road and drew up on the verge of a narrow track which led into the woods.
‘I’ve got to relieve myself. Besides, I feel like stretching my legs. You should take the time to do the same. The lake’s through there. Enjoy the view now the mist’s gone.’
Still annoyed at the delay, Agnes waited until his retreating figure finally disappeared amongst a clump of silver birches before opening her door and stepping out. The now prevailing chill breeze flicked across her face making her eyes water. Hunching her shoulders against it, she plunged her hands as deep as they would go into the pockets of her coat and walked down the rutted track, avoiding the scatter of icy puddles slowly melting in the faint, intermittent sunlight. A civilian—that had been Emmet’s judgement of her father. In the eyes of a professional criminal, René Darshel’s transgressions—she refused to think in terms of his other names—had been simply those of an overly greedy Joe Schmoe. Was there any comfort in that? Had his actions been for anyone else apart from himself? And suppose he had pulled off the deal, whatever it was, was it possible he would have reappeared, gone back to Sula and herself, continued his music, forgotten life as Joe May? Or, there was a thought, gone back to being Fernando Cheto Simon. Either way, it had not happened. He had evaded again, presumably into a new identity.
The sullen, grey waters of Lake Ambret were now clearly visible through the trees. The track petered out, giving way to squelchy ground and the low line of the foreshore. Emmet stood a short distance away, his eyes fixed on some indeterminate point on the lake’s surface. His concentration was so intense it gave Agnes the feeling he had deliberately come here in order to stare at something whose significance was hidden from her. ‘Let’s go,’ she called out. ‘We’re wasting time. You said you had to be back in Greenlea, and I must meet someone there after I see Alakhin.’
He did not budge. ‘Go back. I’ll be with you in a minute,’ he shouted. ‘We won’t lose anything.’
Blast him, Agnes thought. He is here to help me and now he is trying to order me about. She stopped where she was, determined not to give him satisfaction. ‘How big is the lake?’ she asked. ‘I can’t see the other side from here.’
Emmet ignored her question. His gaze remained fixed over the water, then he shrugged and moved towards her. ‘Not that big. Travel ten miles and you’d be round the other side. You haven’t bought me, you know, nor has Chance Company.’ He fell silent and looked away. ‘I needed a few moments alone, that’s all. There are things I need to sort out.’
The gentle change in his tone encouraged her to ask a more personal question, ‘You still got a family, Emmet? I mean back where you originally came from.’
‘Hallie’s my family. I don’t hold no other. Family’s overrated. You share a name or blood, so what.’
‘Share a name.’ Agnes grimaced. ‘That’s my problem. My father seems to have donned them off the peg whenever the fancy took him, but then neither of us has a real name. Women always have men’s surnames and, no doubt, yours belongs to some dead slave owner.’
‘I don’t let that shit get to me. It’s not worth perplexing yourself with it. What we do is what we do.’
‘You got a photo of your Hallie with you?’
‘Sure. Want to see it?’
Agnes nodded. ‘Please.’
He fished out his wallet and handed her a colour snapshot. ‘It’s from six years ago. We were at a reunion at the Blue Papaya. I got someone to take Hallie on her own.’
Agnes studied the middle-aged black woman in front of her. She was wearing a silver evening gown and sitting on a midnight-blue banquette. Her head was tilted forward, her lips slightly parted. Her expression was one of amused seductiveness, as if she were teasing the photographer to delay his shot for as long as possible. By her looks, she must have been quite something in her youth. ‘She’s beautiful.’
‘It goes beyond. She’s changed. Things change.’ He put the photo back in his wallet. ‘You wanted to go. Let’s do it.’
‘Yes. Alakhin will be waiting.’
They turned away from the shore and walked together towards the car. The sense of her aloneness printed itself on each of Agnes’s successive steps. Emmet had Hallie. He belonged here. It was the part of the world he inhabited, whereas she had no one. She had only strangers telling her things about a man who was proving himself more of a stranger. A twinge of apprehension tensed her shoulders. What would Alakhin reveal? Steady, she told herself. I’ve been through worse. The face on the photograph she would pull out if someone asked her, as she had asked Emmet, was, as yet, unknown and unformed, but one day, one day it would be there. ‘Keep her safe,’ she said, more for her own benefit than his.
Once on the road again, Emmet put his foot down. The speedometer climbed to 80mph and held there on the long, straight stretch ahead. Glimpses of the lake flashed by between the thinning clumps of birch and elm. On the other side, ploughed fields were interrupted by unmade roads leading to corrugated-iron roofed sheds and open hay-filled barns. A large sign promised a soon to be developed haven of executive housing.
‘It’s around here somewhere,’ Emmet said, after he overtook a furniture removal van and braked sharply into a series of S bends. ‘He’s sure picked an isolated hole to end his days. I’m told it’s a renovated gamekeeper’s cottage. If we see a garage I’ll stop and ask.’
‘There,’ Agnes said a few minutes later, ‘just up ahead. It looks like a store of some kind. I’ll
go in.’
Emmet flashed the indicator lights and drew up alongside the cluttered display window of Lakeside Chandlers & Mini-Mart. Agnes got out. She pushed then pulled the door open. A bell above her head announced her arrival.
Five minutes later she re-emerged, waving a sheet of paper. ‘They drew me a little map,’ she said, easing back in her seat. ‘They didn’t recognise the name of the house, but once I mentioned Alakhin they said, “Oh, the detective’s. Sure.” See, we’re here and there it is. We go through the next hamlet on the side road to our left and then it’s first right into the woods and first right again down a private road. They’ve never seen Alakhin, but evidently he’s the subject of a lot of gossip.’
Emmet started the engine. ‘No wonder I couldn’t find it. It’s in nowhere surrounded by nowhere. I’ll bet you made their day.’
‘Country ways, country time,’ Agnes joked. ‘My popping in was a mini-event in the mini-mart.’
Their new directions proved simple to follow. A straggle of three houses led into a narrow road bordered with plantations of young firs, which turned into another one enclosed by old woods of beech, elm and holly bushes. Beyond lines of stacked timber, they arrived at a sign marked Private Road.