The Discourtesy of Death

by William Brodrick

  Peter never knew where to draw the line. It was as though Emma had dropped between them, flapping on the beach like one of the gulls hunting for scraps. He doesn’t understand that he’s just a child. Treats him like an adult. Gives him choices when he should tell him what to do. The poor boy is growing up too fast. He can’t carry the weight of responsibility.

  Emma had been talking about choosing films. The gamut between Universal and Eighteen. But this was far more serious. Peter wanted to talk to Timothy. He’d been holding himself back, but in his heart he wanted to sit down and have it all out, man to man.

  ‘Why did my dad throw that brick?’

  Timothy had asked the question as if he were giving Michael a second chance. At some point he was going to ask his father again, too. And this time he wouldn’t be accepting ‘Grief’ as the answer. Would Peter tell him the truth? Would he put that burden on a boy’s shoulders, thinking he’s old enough to understand?

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Michael, helplessly.

  Would Peter go that far? Could he stop himself, now that Timothy had learned persistence? He’d already begun to question why Michael never saw Nigel, why Emma avoided Peter, why Helen moved around between them. He was systematically dismantling the myths upon which his childhood had been constructed. And, rest assured, he was going to keep asking his father the question that had never been satisfactorily answered. Faced with the pressure and prescience of youth, would Peter collapse … like he’d collapsed in Manchester? Would he quietly tell Timothy that his mother had been killed? Would he tell him how it had been done and by whom?

  They’d reached a sculpture on the shoreline. A gigantic steel scallop shell. It stood on the glistening shingle like an open fan, something dropped by the sea because it was too damn heavy to drag off the beach. Timothy stood behind the raised casing, shielding himself from the wind. He was still hunched, hands in his pockets. His black hair was still tangled, fashionably. His face was still pale, his eyes cold. But the clever boy who’d once flashed emotion at his grandfather had gone. He viewed his grandfather from afar and said:

  ‘Why do you keep two passports?’

  Michael was totally thrown. There was no connection to the previous discussion. The boy’s mind had dodged from right to left and Michael had been left off balance.

  ‘My father was a Canadian who settled in England,’ explained Michael, uneasily, smiling false calm. ‘He made sure his children obtained dual nationality just in case we ever wanted to live or work in Vancouver. I’ve kept the two passports ever since … it means I can always choose the shortest queue whenever I pass through a foreign border.’

  Timothy made an unbelieving shrug, but he said nothing. He simply looked at his grandfather, his face stiff and cold, his brown eyes drained of colour, the whites bright like snow. And then, very slowly, and painfully, Michael understood. Years ago, when this whole tragedy had begun, after the accident, Michael had urged Timothy to speak to him. To share his anger and confusion. And his grandson had never taken him up on the offer, until now. And Michael had let him down. They both knew that the brick-throwing had a secret meaning, only Michael refused to tell him what it might be. He’d dished up the same old myth. And in so doing Michael had failed him … on the first and only occasion that Timothy had sought help; help to understand the pain in his family.

  So why ask about the passport?

  Because Timothy was clever. He asked questions to which he already knew the answers. He was saying, ‘You’re not who you say you are. There are two of you. One of them isn’t real. The other is hiding something, like my father, with my father.’ The unspoken condemnation cut into Michael’s fast-beating heart. They’d once been companions making sense of boats sinking into the sand. Two secret travellers who didn’t need to say everything in order to be understood. But that time had gone. The sun had set on the convenience of silence.

  ‘Granddad,’ said Timothy a third time. ‘Why did my father throw a brick at that kid in Manchester?’

  ‘Because he’s got a secret,’ replied Michael, man to man. ‘He has something to say to you.’

  ‘Thanks, Granddad,’ said Timothy, his suspicions confirmed; and he stepped forward out of the shell and into the wind. He had the frightened, wonderstruck appearance of the newborn.

  They walked south, finally reaching some artificial boulders and old wooden groynes. The area had once been a bustling fishing port called Slaughden. The original village had completely vanished, claimed by the minute workings of the sea. A whole community – their lives and houses and memories – had been slowly undercut and gradually washed away. All that remained now was Slaughden Quay at the mouth of the Alde, where Michael kept Margot. Struggling along the steep shingle, they talked of Timothy’s schooling as if there’d been no discussion about Peter’s behaviour. They were side by side, helping each other over the slippery defences.

  If you can do it for your country, whispered the wind off the sea, you can do it for your grandson.

  Michael walked again to the great shell on the beach, this time alone, this time carrying a gun. In the evening light the shingle was brown with particles of blue, purple and red. It was as though he was treading upon elemental matter. Michael had, at last, come right down to the nitty-gritty. Peter Henderson had to die if only because, in the long run, he couldn’t keep quiet. He couldn’t keep his own secret. Looking up at the lip of the scallop shell, Michael read out loud the phrase from Britten’s Peter Grimes that had been pierced through the steel, to be seen against the sky:

  ‘“I hear those voices that will not be drowned.”’

  Michael thrust his hands deep into his overcoat pockets and set off once more for the black groynes and grey boulders of Slaughden. He was going to silence Peter Henderson in two days’ time. He’d head out to sea in the dark with Margot, dispose of the body and then head back to the quayside. Timothy would finally learn what his father had wanted to say – that he couldn’t live without his mother. It had been grief after all, and the business in Manchester was nothing as compared to what happened upon Peter’s release from prison … the house burned to the ground followed by a mysterious disappearance. In time, helped by Emma and Michael, Timothy would come to understand why Peter had vanished, probably to take his own life. Leaves had got blocked in the drain, more than anyone could have realised. There’d been guilt in there, too, for how he’d treated Jenny. These would be the sincere, adult conversations for which Timothy was now pining. They’d bind them all close together and that would be the end.

  The very end.

  The insistent voices would at last fall silent – even Liam’s, the softest, most enduring and haunting of them all, last heard following the bang of a spoon against the bottom of a pan. The Nutting Squad had taped his confession and then shoved the recording through his mother’s letterbox.

  On the way to Southwold, Michael purchased a heavy-duty stapler.

  33

  ‘Did you get your confession?’ Mitch asked, wrenching a gear.

  ‘Yes.’

  They were quiet, as though each of them were stunned by the sudden end to the investigation. After a mile or so, Mitch said: ‘He told you … what he did … how and why?’

  Mitch’s hesitation demonstrated how difficult the conversation must have been. How brutal. His tone asked if it had been really necessary.

  ‘Yes, he told me everything,’ replied Anselm.

  He was looking out over the low flat fields, thinking quietly to himself. They were moving away from the strange magic of the sea – that sense of open space, no boundaries, just air and water: an uncomplicated vista. After a few more miles, Mitch spoke again:

  ‘Was this Jenny’s decision? He did what she asked?’

  Trees and hedges divided the pasture, imposing order on the land. Marking out ownership and responsibility.

  ‘So he says,’ murmured Anselm, eyeing the neat hedgerows.

  Mitch sighed and Anselm knew he was appraising another land
scape: the anticipated fallout: arrest, public reaction, private pandemonium. The Hendersons weren’t best equipped to manage all that. Mitch cleared his throat. For some reason he accelerated.

  ‘Are you going to hand him over?’

  Anselm thought for a very long while.

  ‘No.’

  Mitch absorbed the reply but wanted to check for any misconstruction:

  ‘You’re not going to call the police?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘He goes home to get on with his life?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The change in Mitch was instantaneous. Anselm hadn’t quite noticed but his assistant’s shoulders had been slightly raised. There’d been a taut quality to his arms and hands. But now he relaxed and, involuntarily, he dropped some speed. All at once, the friendliness re-established in the club seemed to warm them once more. Mitch’s word of caution to Anselm had sunk in – this is what Mitch was thinking, making occasional glances at the enigmatic monk. Anselm had seen beyond his family history and opened his mind to a foreign kind of wisdom. Mitch’s voice was nuanced with sympathy and admiration:

  ‘Can I ask why?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Anselm turned from the increasingly built-up fields. There were houses and fences and tended gardens; roads and lanes and narrow tracks. ‘Because I don’t believe him.’

  Mitch took some time to process the information. The tension didn’t return to his body and he didn’t accelerate. He made a kind of knowing, melancholy laugh. The ‘I should have known’ kind.

  ‘You don’t accept his confession?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Gut instinct. I’ve spent most of my life listening to people tell me what they’ve done and what they haven’t done, and Peter Henderson wasn’t very convincing.’

  ‘So,’ concluded Mitch, ‘the investigation goes on?’

  ‘Yes, it most certainly does.’

  There was nothing more to be said. But Anselm was very aware that the atmosphere between himself and Mitch had changed radically. The musician had given an ultimatum. He’d said if Vincent Cooper’s story was broadly confirmed, then he was off. And that confirmation had come to pass, far sooner than either of them had expected. In an attempt to bridge the gap that had opened between them, Anselm shared some of his thoughts – the conclusions he’d reached on that lonely beach after Peter Henderson had walked away.

  ‘He didn’t kill her, Mitch.’

  That was the first, critical point, but there was no rejoinder.

  ‘And she didn’t die of cancer. Peter knows that, which is why he confessed. Now think it through: if Peter had agreed to kill her and didn’t, then someone else must have done it …’

  Mitch stayed in the slow lane, listening dutifully.

  ‘… and unless that someone else was part of some other agreement, which is unlikely, then there’s only one conclusion: Jenny was murdered.’

  ‘Then why the hell would Peter confess to something he didn’t do?’

  ‘To protect the killer.’

  Because whoever killed Jenny was a part of the family. There were no other candidates. Peter – ravaged and tortured by what he knew – was prepared to take responsibility because he believed that his confession to a mercy killing was far more preferable to the exposure of the truth. It was the lesser of two evils. Faced with Anselm’s determination, Peter had seized the initiative, intending to shut down the inquiry. He didn’t want Timothy to know how his mother had died and who had killed her. In those circumstances, the only way to protect the boy was to protect the killer.

  ‘So who is responsible?’ asked Mitch. ‘Michael?’

  ‘No, I can’t accept that.’ Anselm hadn’t even examined the possibility with any seriousness. There was no point. ‘Michael wouldn’t kill his own daughter. Helen Goodwin is simply wrong. No offence, but the idea belongs in the same bracket as yours, about someone planning to kill Peter Henderson. It’s sheer imagination.’

  ‘And that leaves who? Emma? Helen? Ingleby?’

  He made the suggestions sound ridiculous so Anselm returned his thoughtful gaze to the passing fields. It was an argument to no good purpose. They let the subject drop, not speaking at all until Mitch drove under the plum trees at Larkwood.

  ‘The investigation goes on, then?’

  ‘It must,’ replied Anselm.

  Mitch cut the engine. A light rain had begun to fall. Very gradually, the purple leaves and distant hills lost their clear lines, the colours smudged into the late-afternoon light.

  ‘I tried to warn you, Anselm,’ said Mitch, with regret. ‘I don’t want to be involved any more. Me, I accept Peter Henderson’s confession. And even if I didn’t, I don’t think anyone murdered Jenny – in the sense of killed her against her will. If it wasn’t Peter, then it was someone who loved her. They’d faced the one fact that you can’t face – that sometimes life is hopeless. That too often there are no last-minute surprises. This is the real world, Anselm. A world without miracles. No redemption in this life. Someone did what had to be done.’ He turned the key and the motor grumbled. ‘Your mother was one of the lucky ones; and so were you. Just let these people go … it’s biblical, isn’t it?’

  Anselm stepped out into the rain, blinking as the rain touched his glasses.

  ‘It is, Mitch. But so is “Thou shalt not kill”.’

  Anselm leaned back into the Land Rover aware that this was the sudden end of his great project of mutual rehabilitation. He wanted to say thanks for the music, the argument and the beer. And those sausages, too. Instead he ventured: ‘And so is “Thou shalt not steal”. Will you tell me what you did with the money?’

  Mitch appraised Anselm as if he’d never quite seen beyond the end of his nose. ‘Steal?’ he replied, remotely. ‘You’d never understand.’

  Anselm ran head down to the Priory’s main entrance, pushing open the door and coming to a halt in front of Sylvester’s outpost. He dried his glasses on his scapular and then appraised the old man. He was glowering back as if Anselm had an awful lot to answer for.

  ‘There’s a rumour going round,’ he said, accusingly.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The young ’uns.’

  The ‘young ’uns’ were, in fact, grown men. Anselm smiled, wearily. It was soothing to enter the Nightwatchman’s world from time to time. Particularly when he felt misunderstood or saddened by the seemingly unavoidable breakages in human relationships.

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘Benedict and Jerome. They’re up to no good apparently.’

  ‘What’s the word on the camp trail?’

  ‘That they’re trying to make a bomb in Saint Hildegard’s.’

  ‘A bomb?’

  ‘Yes. Out of altar wine, fertiliser and an old tractor battery.’ Sylvester shook his bony head, his eyes large in their hollowed sockets. ‘Bede reckons they wouldn’t have got the idea if you hadn’t been dabbling in terrorism. Me? I say this is what happens when things change.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Traditions, Anselm,’ he revealed, mysteriously. ‘The old rules.’

  ‘What old rules?’

  ‘Sign language.’ Sylvester nodded at Anselm’s incomprehension as if he would brook no opposition. ‘That’s right, sign language. We should never have got rid of it. It narrowed down what you could talk about and how much you could say. Those boys wouldn’t be making a bomb as we speak if all they could do was twiddle a few fingers. They wouldn’t take the risk of misunderstanding one another.’

  Anselm was dumbfounded. First, no one was making an improvised explosive device. Someone was pulling the Lantern Bearer’s leg. And second, no one in those good old days had violated the rule of silence more than Sylvester. The Prior of the day had been compelled to banish him to the shore of Our Lady’s Lake to learn the values of submission and sile
nce. Even then, the story went that Larkwood’s scout had just sat down and talked to himself.

  ‘Anyway,’ said the old man, ‘this came for you.’ And, as if using that revered system of signals, he pointed with solemn deliberation at a sheet of paper on his desk. ‘It’s from a doctor. Have you got a temperature?’

  ‘No, Flying Eagle, I’m fine.’

  Anselm picked up the faxed letter. It was from Nigel Goodwin. Anselm had completely forgotten his request. Standing by Jenny’s grave, he’d asked the doctor to leave aside the conclusion he’d reached about Peter Henderson’s guilt and simply put down on paper who’d seen Jenny on the night of her death. He’d been interested to know who saw her alone, if only for a few minutes. Coming from anyone else the level of detail laid out would have been extraordinary, but Nigel Goodwin had spent his intellectual life in the world of Karl Barth. No unit of information was too small to merit exclusion. In the hands of many a reader, the chronology would have been overwhelming. But not in Anselm’s. Which was not to flatter himself. It was just that years of cribbing from guidebooks for idiots had given him an eye for the telling, decisive particular. And there, at the bottom of the page, was a late visit to Polstead, after everyone had gone home. Anselm read the name in quiet disbelief. He’d given no consideration to the individual whatsoever.

  34

  Michael waited until dusk before he went back to the Killing House. During this, his last rehearsal, he wanted to replicate the light conditions. He parked the car and walked a few hundred yards to the cottage, thinking all the while of the lanes around Polstead. He waited near the sitting room window, checking his watch until the right level of obscurity had fallen upon the chair, the bag and the book. As soon as he was sure that sufficient light remained to provide an outline of bulk, he noted the hour and set off for the imagined fuse box.

  He took out the gun and screwed on the silencer.