Days Without Number

by Robert Goddard

His mind was as full of questions as it was empty of answers. Strictly speaking, they did not know Elspeth was responsible for the video. Nor could they be certain either Farnsworth or Davey was involved in planting it in Nick’s car, although how else it could have got there was hard to imagine. He would have to speak to Andrew again later, when he was calmer, and try to find a way forward. Meanwhile—

  A thought burst suddenly upon him. Whoever had put the video in the car had necessarily had the run of the boot, where Nick had put the envelope holding the contents of the file his father had kept on his breakdown. Was it still there? He pressed his foot to the floor, desperate to reach the next lay-by.

  Where all, it transpired, was well. The envelope did not look as if it had been tampered with. Nick stood by the open boot, the chill moorland air buffeting around him as he leafed through the documentary evidence of his loosened hold on reason. It was all there, every letter, every bill, and much more besides.

  Including, chanced on by his questing fingers, the printed programme for the degree ceremony he had not been supposed to attend. He pulled it out and stared at it for a moment. Visitors are asked to enter and leave the Senate House only during the interval between the presentation of the candidates from different Colleges, the heading read. Photography and smoking are not permitted. There was the date: Friday, 29 June 1979. And there were the names, in orderly columns. He knew he would find his own, if he looked, listed as one of those proceeding to a degree in absentia. His father must have asked for the programme to be sent to him, a small and poignant memento of an occasion he had no doubt hoped to witness proudly and in person, whereas instead—

  It was then that Nick remembered Elspeth’s brother, the brother she had supposedly gone to see collect his own degree that day. That must have been a lie, of course, devised to account for her knowledge of Nick’s breakdown. But why tell it at all? What had she gained by it?

  Or was it, perhaps, the truth—the one thing she had told him that was not a lie? Nick closed the boot and got back into the car, the programme clutched in his hand. He began scanning the names, unsure what he was looking for. Not Hartley, obviously. But something, someone. King’s College, Trinity, St John’s, Peterhouse, Clare

  ‘My God,’ he heard himself say. His finger trembled where it had stopped at the place in the Clare College list. Bray bourne, Jonathan Charles.

  Pru was on the point of leaving when Nick reached Trennor. He told her he would be staying at least for another day and saw her on her way. Then he got busy on the telephone, though to little effect. Clare College had no current address for Jonathan Braybourne and would not have volunteered it if they had, though they would have been willing to forward a letter. Bristol University cagily referred Nick to Boston University for current information on Elspeth Hartley. The switchboard there offered to leave a message for her. Their records did not extend to her residential status. Nick halfheartedly asked them to ask her to ring him and left it at that.

  The breakthrough, such as it was, had led nowhere. That was the truth of it, a truth Nick bleakly confronted as he took himself off for a run round the lanes in the hope that physical exercise might clear his mind. It succeeded to an extent. Jonathan Braybourne and Elspeth Hartley, the real Elspeth Hartley, were red herrings, he suddenly understood. Pursuing them was a distraction, as perhaps it was meant to be. The only certainty was the money lodged with Hopkins & Broad hurst. Who had it been repaid to? The answer to that question was all that really mattered.

  The telephone was ringing when Nick opened the front door back at Trennor and stepped breathlessly into the hall. He hurried to pick it up, wondering if it might be the genuine Elspeth Hartley, returning his call. But it was not.

  ‘Nicholas? Thank goodness I’ve caught you. This is Julian Farnsworth.’

  ‘Dr Farnsworth? What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’m phoning from Tintagel.’

  ‘What are you doing there?’

  ‘I decided to spend a few days up here before returning to Oxford. But that isn’t really the point. I’m phoning about your brother.’

  ‘My brother?’

  ‘Andrew.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He’s behaving very strangely. I met him at Mr Davey’s house.’

  ‘You were with Davey?’

  ‘Yes. I wanted to ask him some more questions about the excavations. Then your brother arrived. To say that he was overwrought is to put it mildly. He accused us of well, some kind of conspiracy against him—and you. None of it made the slightest sense. He was ranting. Raving, I think it fair to say. We had to threaten to call the police before he would leave. I was genuinely fearful that he might become violent. I still am, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ The lie was a reflex. Nick understood all too well that discovering Farnsworth and Davey together must have seemed to Andrew like confirmation of their darkest suspicions about the pair. What he did not understand was how Andrew thought charging up to Tintagel to confront Davey—and Farnsworth, as it had turned out—would help. But maybe Andrew was beyond thinking. If so, Nick would have to think for both of them. ‘Where’s Andrew now?’

  ‘I’ve really no idea. He stormed out of the house just as he had stormed into it. But he said he’d be back. Mr Davey took it as a threat and I can’t say I blame him. Whether your brother knows where / am ’

  ‘And where is that?’

  ‘The Camelot Castle Hotel. On the headland.’

  ‘Do you want me to come up?’

  ‘I rather think I do. I suspect him of lurking somewhere in the neighbourhood, Nicholas. Biding his time. Waiting till dark. I could not forgive myself if some harm came to Mr Davey for lack of action on my part. I should hope you might feel the same.’

  ‘I do, obviously, though—’

  ‘I’ll expect you within the hour.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  There was no more to be said. The line was dead.

  An hour was cutting it fine. Nick drove faster than usual, north through the clearing afternoon. The cloud thinned and tumbled away in scraps of grey as a keen wind blew across from Bodmin Moor, emptying the sky and scouring the land. The sun appeared, late and low, skimming blindingly over the hills.

  Nick reckoned he had last been to Tintagel more than twenty years ago, though twenty years would not, he felt sure, have wrought many changes in such a place. The worn stump of the medieval castle would still be there, on its virtual island of storm-sieged rock, while inland the pubs and cafes and gift shops doubtless still lined the village street. Many of them would be closed at this time of year, of course. The car parks would be empty, the track down to the castle scarcely trodden. The place would be held in an out-of-season trance.

  As Nick rounded a bend on the upland road in from the east, he suddenly saw the crumpled coastline below him, a blue-grey sea spilling whitely over black rocks. Barras Nose and Tintagel Island butted into the ocean and, between them, on a platform of land, looking far more like a castle than the nearby ruins, stood the Camelot Castle Hotel, a Victorian architectural folly intended to serve as the terminus hotel for a railway line from Camelford that had never been built.

  As Nick descended the hill into the village of Bossiney, which tourist development had turned into an annexe of Tintagel, the coast ahead was lost to view, and the hotel with it. It was then that he remembered something his father had said to him more than once about Tintagel. ‘It’s a strange looking place; and it’s stranger than it looks.’

  But its main street looked merely prosaically drab and predictably quiet as Nick drove along it. He had no reason to stop there en route to the hotel—until he saw Andrew’s Land Rover, parked outside the Sword and Stone pub.

  Nick pulled in on the other side of the road and got out. Andrew was nowhere in sight. But the Sword and Stone, though just about the least inviting of Tintagel’s hostelries, with its stark frontage, peeling paintwork and biggest pasties in town sign, appeared at any rate to be open
. He crossed over and went in.

  The bar was as dismal as he might have expected, sparsely decorated and cavernously chill, with a pool-table at the far end and a country-and-western tape playing through indiscreetly placed loudspeakers. Two middle-aged men with big bellies and blank faces, dressed in matching jogging kit, sat at one of the tables, drinking pints of lager. The only other customer, propped on a bar stool, was Andrew. The glass in front of him looked as if it contained whisky, though clearly not as much as Andrew had already consumed. He was so drunk he did not even seem surprised to see his brother walking towards him.

  ‘Hey, Nick. Want a drink?’

  ‘What’s going on, Andrew?’

  ‘Buggered if I know.’

  ‘Farnsworth phoned me. Said you’d been making trouble at Davey’s house.’

  ‘They made all the trouble.’

  ‘Going there wasn’t a very bright idea, you know.’

  ‘Wasn’t it? I caught them together, though, didn’t I?’ Andrew’s gaze narrowed. ‘The pair of them. Scheming against us.’

  ‘You can’t prove that.’

  ‘Don’t need to. I know. And now they know I know.’

  ‘You’re not thinking of going back there, are you?’

  ‘Maybe. Davey on his own could be an easier nut to crack.’

  ‘That’s crazy. Do you want the police involved?’

  ‘Only a matter of time before they are anyway. Now, what are you drinking?’ Andrew nodded at the bleary-eyed barman who had shuffled out from a back room.

  ‘I’ll have a Coke.’

  ‘The real thing, hey? Very adventurous. You heard the man, squire. I’ll have another Bell’s. Make it a large one.’

  The drinks were supplied and the money taken from a pile of change next to Andrew’s elbow. The barman stared glumly into the empty ice-bucket for a moment, then wandered off with it into the rear.

  ‘Do you believe in coincidence, Nick? I don’t. Farnsworth wasn’t round at Davey’s place to see how retired quarrymen live. Or catch his reminiscences of digging up old pots out at the castle. His being there is all the proof I need. They’re what we’re up against. The bastards.’

  ‘What do you propose to do about it?’

  ‘I’m thinking about that. But more than you. That’s for sure.’

  ‘Look, I’ll go and see Farnsworth. Smooth things over as best I can. Then I’ll drive you home. How about that? You obviously can’t drive yourself.’

  Andrew cast him a woozy gaze. ‘Smooth things over? You must be joking.’

  ‘It’s all we can do for the present. We need to take stock.’

  ‘Take stock? Bloody hell, Nick.’ Andrew shook his head slowly in disappointment. ‘What use are you, hey? What fucking use?’ He slid off the stool and lumbered away towards a door beyond the pool-table marked gents, flapping a dismissive arm behind him. ‘Go and lick Farnsworth’s arse if you want to. I don’t care. I’ll deal with him and Davey—and that Hartley bitch—my way. I’ll have to, won’t I? No choice if you’re chickening out. Should have known, I suppose. It’s only what you’ve always done when the going got rough. It’s only—’

  Andrew’s words were choked off by the slamming of the loo door behind him. The other two customers stared at Nick, their faces marginally less blank than before. Nick took an evasive swallow of Coke. Then he noticed Andrew’s car key lying beside the pile of change on the bar.

  He thought the matter over for no more than a few seconds. Then he picked up the key, drained his Coke and headed for the exit.

  It was a short drive to the Camelot Castle, out at the northern end of the village. A ribbon of new executive-style dwellings had closed the gap between the jumble of bungalows Nick remembered and the hotel itself. The building was a stolid mass of castellated Victorian Gothic, cast in deep shadow by the sun, which was dazzling still as it sank over a cloudless horizon.

  Nick parked next to Farnsworth’s Citro n and climbed out. It was colder here, he noticed at once, his breath frosting. The air seemed to be chilling by the second. He glanced across at Tintagel Island, where the shadowed stumps of the medieval castle looked like a row of worn-down dragon’s teeth, planted on the cliff. Then he hurried towards the hotel entrance.

  Before he reached the door, however, Farnsworth stepped out into the porch to meet him. He was muffled up in overcoat, scarf, gloves and a deerstalker that might have looked charmingly eccentric on the streets of Oxford but here looked merely bizarre.

  ‘Ah, Nicholas. I thought I’d take a breath of air before nightfall to calm my nerves.’ He treated Nick to an entirely nerveless smile. ‘I had begun to despair of seeing you, I must admit. You are somewhat later than we agreed.’

  ‘It couldn’t be helped. I bumped into my brother.’

  ‘Rather you than me. Has he calmed down?’

  ‘Yes. As far as he needed to. He was no clearer about your disagreement than you were.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. He hardly seemed to know what he was alleging. Certainly I don’t. Can you shed any light on the matter?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  Farnsworth raised his eyebrows. ‘You have no idea what prompted his extraordinary behaviour?’

  ‘Not if you haven’t.’

  A momentary silence fell. Then Farnsworth said quietly, ‘That’s a pity.’

  ‘He was obviously surprised to find you at Davey’s house.’

  ‘Surprise I can understand, Nicholas. But not outrage. There was nothing sinister about it. Mr Davey participated in one of the most significant British digs of the twentieth century. I was interested to know what he remembered of it.’

  ‘Nothing my father couldn’t already have told you if you’d asked him, I imagine.’

  ‘Another point of view is always illuminating. Alas, I gleaned little of value, thanks to your brother’s intervention.’

  ‘I’m sorry if Andrew upset you.’ Nick exerted himself to sound genuine. The truth was that he felt as suspicious of the improbable pairing of Farnsworth and Davey as Andrew did. Someone had spirited the video into his car and this elderly aesthete gazing blandly at him through the Tintagel twilight was a prime candidate. But it was an accusation that had to go unlevelled. If Farnsworth really was threatening them, they could not afford to admit it. ‘I’ll take him home myself and make sure he causes you no further problems.’

  ‘Where is he now, may I ask?’

  ‘A pub in the village.’

  ‘I suppose that will suffice, then. Will you call in on Mr Davey to set his mind at rest?’

  ‘I think it’s more important for me to take Andrew home, don’t you?’

  ‘Perhaps so. I’ll telephone Mr Davey and let him know what’s happened.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘It was a most disconcerting experience, Nicholas. There was no occasion for your brother to behave as he did.’

  ‘I’ll phone you in the morning, Dr Farnsworth. OK?’

  Farnsworth nodded thoughtfully. ‘Very well.’

  Nick drove back round to the Sword and Stone in a turmoil of competing thoughts. Getting Andrew out of Tintagel was essential given his present condition. But what were they to do about the video? Andrew’s tactic of direct confrontation had been disastrous. But no other tactic Nick could devise promised to be any less disastrous. They were dangling on a hook. But they could not say for sure who was twitching the line. And as to why

  The blank-faced pair were still nursing their lagers. The barman was leafing through Exchange and Mart. But of Andrew there was no sign. The slew of change on the bar in front of the stool he had been occupying had vanished.

  ‘He’s gone,’ said the barman, anticipating Nick’s question. ‘Left right after you.’

  ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘Nope. But it can’t be far. He said as you’d half-inched his car keys. He was seriously pissed off about that. But maybe you were just being a good citizen, him being well over the limit, like.’

  Where ha
d Andrew gone? Only one answer came to Nick’s mind. ‘Do you know a bloke who lives round here called Fred Davey?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘His address is three, Butcher’s Row.’

  ‘Butcher’s Row?’ The barman gave a reasonable impression of thinking. ‘Not sure I know it.’ He thought some more. ‘Hold on. The row of cottages out beyond Tregatta, off the Camelford road. Isn’t that called Butcher’s Row?’ He looked at the blank-faced pair, who responded in their own good time with a slow, synchronized nod of confirmation. ‘Yeah. That’s it.’

  Night had fallen by the time Nick drove clear of the village. The B road to Camelford was a busier route than the one he had arrived by, with the modest local version of the rush hour cranking itself up. Tregatta was a hamlet about half a mile south of Tintagel and according to the barman Butcher’s Row was about another half-mile further on. But this was the only road to it. If Andrew was set on revisiting Davey, Nick should be able to overhaul him on the way. He was in no state to have covered a mile in the time that had passed since their parting.

  But there was no sign of him. For that Nick was in one sense grateful, because beyond Tregatta there was no footpath and not much of a verge. The roadside was no place for a drunken pedestrian.

  Butcher’s Row was down a minor road just past the first bend after Tregatta. Nick slowed to a crawl, getting horned by the car behind. But he succeeded in spotting the lane in time and turned off along it. A terrace of four low-roofed slate cottages fronted directly on to the lane. Nick pulled over as far as he could opposite it under a straggling thorn hedge, jumped out and headed for the Daveys’ door.

  There was only the dimmest of lights visible through the front window, behind thin curtains tightly drawn. Nick gave the knocker several loud raps and heard a shuffling approach on the other side of the door.

  ‘Who’s that?’ came a female voice.

  ‘Nicholas Paleologus,’ he shouted.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mrs Davey?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Nicholas Paleologus. Is my brother with you?’

  The door was suddenly wrenched open, to reveal two figures standing in a narrow hallway. Fred Davey looked shorter than Nick remembered him from the funeral and his wife Margaret was shorter still. Their clothes were threadbare and there was no gust of warmth from the adjoining sitting room, only a faint, musty chill. But there was no hint of frailty in their expressions. The Daveys were a well-matched pair, worn by hard lives to stony old age. J