The tip of his cigarette glowed brightly as he inhaled. ‘Well, I’ve checked out everyone who has ancestors on the island. Diaz is obviously not an island name. You know her maiden name?’
‘Nope.’
‘Thing is, she may know some signs, but that’s not the same thing as speaking the language. I can get us two beers in Tijuana, but that doesn’t mean I speak Spanish. People here like to say that everybody here spoke sign language. I don’t think it’s true. Everyone knew a couple of signs, knew enough to lip-speak so they could be understood. In LA, a lot of people can tell their maid to “limpia el baña”. It hardly counts as speaking the lingo, does it?’
‘My uncle had a couple of manuals of the language in his library,’ I said, to change the subject. With academics, you sometimes stumble on to some innocuous topic that turns out to be the pet rock they’ve been stroking for twenty years. Once Laura mentioned we’d just been to see Hamlet to an academic at a dinner party and we got three-quarters of an hour of ur-texts, Bad Quartos and printer’s errors.
‘Really? Why’d he have those?’
‘Local interest, I suppose.’ I realised that Winks assumed my uncle was English. ‘He was from Boston. He lived on the island.’ Mentioning Patrick made me remember the house, like a pile of a homework that I had left undone. The wicker rocker creaked as I stood up.
‘In the old Captain’s house?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Funky-looking old place.’
‘Well, you should drop round some time.’ I had begun to get ready to leave.
‘We’ll do that. Nice meeting you, Damien.’
‘Likewise.’
To their obvious pleasure, I thanked Terry and Mrs Fernshaw with a sign that Winks had shown me, then I went into the television room to say goodbye to Nathan.
‘See you, mate,’ I said.
‘See you. Thanks for taking me to the movie.’ He didn’t look round from the TV, but I felt so embarrassingly moved by his spontaneous gratitude that I didn’t know where to put myself for a second. I stood there long enough for him to turn to me with a puzzled expression, as if to say: Still here?
‘I’m off then,’ I said redundantly.
Winks stopped me by the kitchen table. He had his arm round Mrs Fernshaw. ‘Harriet says she remembers your uncle,’ he said. ‘It was your uncle, right?’
‘Patrick, yes.’
Mrs Fernshaw made a quick movement, drawing her hand over her face and pointing at me, nodding all the time, in a gesture that can only have meant: Yes, your face is familiar. I felt she wanted to say something more about him and I waited for a moment on the step. She hesitated, then smiled and turned away.
As I got into my car for the short drive home I was thinking to myself that the real risk in spending time with other people was that you might find you liked it. That was the dangerous outcome Patrick had ended up protecting himself against.
The grass on my lawn seemed to have grown during the afternoon. The blades were loaded with rain and brushed water on to my feet and the bottoms of my trousers. I tried to avoid getting my shoes soaked by picking a path along a slight ridge in the roll of the lawn where the grass was shorter and less like a brush full of wallpaper paste. I was so absorbed in finding my way in the dim light that I had virtually reached the porch before I noticed that my front door had disappeared.
The gap that remained was perfectly neat, but there was a suggestion of violence in its absence – like a missing tooth, or an empty sleeve pinned to the front of a veteran’s jacket. It was only when I got closer that I realised the door had been taken clean off its hinges and laid flat inside the entrance.
SEVENTEEN
I CALLED THE POLICE from the Fernshaws’ house and waited there for the patrol car to arrive. I had thought of going in by myself, but my natural timidity and a reasonable fear that whoever had knocked the door in might still be inside soon put an end to that plan. I had been thinking about the bit in Cross My Heart and Hope to Die when the caretaker of the school gets out of bed in his pyjamas to check a door banging in the attic and ends up impaled on a flagpole.
Officers Santorelli and Topper from the local force followed me back up the road in their car and we investigated the house together.
‘When did you become aware that your property had been burglarised?’ said Officer Santorelli.
‘An hour, half an hour ago. Whenever I called.’ I was distracted by the figure of Officer Topper, who was creeping through the kitchen with his long-handled torch held in that odd overhand grip that seems to be an obligatory part of police procedure, along with resting your thumbs in your belt loops and having a swaggering-buttocked waddle. I switched on the main light and he gave a slight start which he tried to conceal.
‘Apart from the damage to the front door, have you noticed any damage or items missing?’ said Officer Santorelli.
‘Hey hey, what’s this?’ said Officer Topper, playing his torch over the vitamin pills in the bathroom. ‘Looks like someone’s been after your pharmaceuticals.’
‘No, that was like that,’ I said. ‘There’s no room in the cupboard.’
‘Entry was gained via that. I’d guess egress was made via the same route,’ said Santorelli, pointing at the front door. He made ‘route’ rhyme with ‘grout’. ‘I’m going to take a look upstairs. Wait down here and see if you can find anything missing.’
The house looked much as I had left it – or, more accurately, as Patrick had left it. The burglar had opened some of the cupboards in the library, but didn’t seem to have made it as far as the second storey of the house. The hard part was figuring out what, if anything, he had taken. It took a peculiar kind of mental effort to look at everything that Patrick had gathered under that one roof and try to determine what wasn’t there. It was hard to imagine which, if any, objects would appeal to a burglar. It didn’t seem likely that someone would have bothered making off with an ice-cream scoop, or a set of hub-caps decorated with the Coca-Cola insignia.
‘British?’ said Officer Topper shyly.
‘Excuse me?’ I said.
‘You’re British.’
‘That’s right.’
Officer Topper looked pleased with himself. ‘I thought I detected an accent. What part are you from?’
‘Wandsworth,’ I said. ‘But my family’s originally from the States.’
He nodded knowingly. ‘My own family hail from up Norfolk way. The Thetford Toppers. The name Topper comes from “de Pearce”. My ancestors fought alongside Richard the Lionheart in the Holy Land. That there’s my crest.’ He held out a ring as big as a knuckleduster so that I could peer at his coat of arms. ‘A serpent couchant on a ground of gules,’ he said.
‘De Pearce – I think I’ve heard tell of their deeds,’ I said. ‘Will you and your colleague be dusting the house for prints?’
‘Unfortunately we’re seeing a lot of these seasonal break-ins,’ said Officer Santorelli when he returned. I explained about the derelict I had seen in the rainstorm. Santorelli made notes and then told me I would be contacted by a counsellor who specialised in helping the victims of crime.
I walked the policemen back to their squad car and then tried to go to sleep under the life mask of Keats in the summer kitchen. Although I felt indifferent about any losses, I had misgivings about sleeping in the house until the door had been strengthened and put back on its hinges. There was the unpleasant possibility that whoever had broken in might return to find something he had missed the first time. The summer kitchen had a sturdy wooden door with a porthole. It looked like something you would find on the wheel-house of a tea-clipper and felt solid enough to withstand a typhoon.
I was scared, of course, because of the burglary, but I also felt disappointed and angry. I turned on to my side in a futile effort to get comfortable in that narrow bed. I felt the weight of the possessions in the main house exerting a gravitational pull on me. I was a swimmer unable to free himself from the vortex of a sinking ship.
I
rrationally, the break-in seemed to confirm all my misgivings about living in the house. This life wasn’t what I had imagined, I thought ruefully. I had turned out to be the beneficiary of a dusty, fusty, overcrowded, high-maintenance, accident-prone wooden shack of a building. The house was a tar baby.
EIGHTEEN
THERE WAS WORSE NEWS to come. The burglary had delayed any possibility of my leaving by at least two weeks.
A cursory inspection of the house in the morning showed no obvious evidence of theft or damage, apart from the broken door. But after a frantic hunt for money to pay the locksmith, it became apparent to me that the burglar had made off with the black leather pouch that contained virtually all my cash, my credit cards and chequebook, both my passports, and my plane ticket back to London.
The locksmith was sympathetic; I was mortified. We had to drive in convoy to Westwich where I borrowed the money to pay him from Mr Diaz.
The previous day’s rain seemed to have purged the air of humidity. It was bright and dry, and the sea sparkled lazily all the way out to the horizon. It was a beautiful place, no doubt about that. The horn blast of the outgoing ferry split the air with an enormous moo. At the beginning of the summer I had welcomed the idea of spending months on Ionia. Now, two obligatory weeks there felt like a prison sentence.
‘What else did you lose?’ said Mr Diaz, when the locksmith had been paid off. His assistant brought us crullers and strong filter coffee. The office was furnished with a chunky reproduction Victorian desk and armchairs upholstered in generic law-office leather.
I told him I had no idea. ‘Nothing is obviously not there. I mean, nothing that was there is obviously missing. But you’ve been to the house – the difficulty is knowing where everything is … was. I could really use the inventory you mentioned.’
‘I am so sorry.’ Mr Diaz slapped his hand theatrically on his forehead. ‘I promised to get one to you and it completely slipped my mind. Let me get one copied for you now.’
Mr Diaz joked with his secretary for my benefit as he passed on his instructions to her over the intercom. ‘First we lock him out of his house, then we forget to send him his inventory. He must be wondering how I stay in business.’
The burglary involved me in several days of boring hassle with insurers, passport offices and the airline which had only two high points. One was using Mr Diaz’s office as a base for making phone calls and receiving faxes. I found myself enjoying being in an office again and flirted with a pretty paralegal called Stephanie, who unfortunately turned out to have a serious boyfriend. The other was my first-ever identity parade.
Officers Topper and Santorelli waited with me behind the one-way mirror while the suspects were marched in.
My guy – Bill Kelly – could hardly have been more conspicuous if he’d had three arms. He was the only one in the line-up who looked like he had spent the night in a bush. He had an uneven skull like a bumpy old potato – I heard later it was caused by an industrial accident – and I recognised the slack, unshaven face that I’d seen poking out of the bin-bag.
Leaving the police station, I was hopeful that I might find out what Kelly had done with my plane ticket and passports at least, but he remained adamant that he was not responsible for the break-in. He claimed he had been sleeping on the beach when he had been woken up by the rain. He wasn’t sure where he got the trash-bag sou’wester he had been wearing when I saw him, but eventually ‘remembered’ seeing a new-model Japanese four-by-four parked in my driveway.
‘Right,’ I said to Officer Santorelli. ‘In other words, the car that belonged to the real burglar.’
‘He says he took nothing from the house.’
‘But you don’t think he’s telling the truth?’
‘I’m not paid to have opinions, I’m paid to catch bad guys,’ said the policeman. I was beginning to miss Officer Topper and his signet ring. Officer Santorelli was a pencil-thin Italian American whose meagre physique somehow suited his officious, cheese-paring manner. He went on: ‘There have been cases – I’m not saying this is one of them – where collectibles are stolen to order. This kind of crime on the island has just exploded in the last couple of years. I guess the only way of knowing for sure is to go through the inventory and check it’s all there.’
I was so furious I could barely bring myself to speak to the trauma counsellor who came round to visit me – and turned out to be Officer Topper. ‘We’re a small force,’ he admitted. ‘We need to multitask.’
‘I’m very keen to get my property back,’ I said. ‘I would be inclined not to press charges against Mr Kelly if he just told me where I could find my passports and plane ticket. This whole … debacle’ – if in doubt with an authority figure it’s always good to slip in some ten-dollar words – ‘comes at a very unpropitious time for me.’
Officer Topper nodded sadly and told me that the first stage in overcoming any form of loss is learning to accept it.
After half an hour of this nonsense, he tried to engage me in another genealogical discussion but I couldn’t bring myself to humour him. People trace their genealogy to find out who they are, but as you climb up a family tree, the branches multiply exponentially. You don’t arrive anywhere, you dissolve into atoms, into primordial soup. Ten generations back, we all have one thousand direct ancestors and that number continues to double as you go further and further into the past. Who knew how many generations there were between Officer Topper and the Siege of Acre? He might have had a million ancestors alive at that time. There was a chance he was related to My Lord de Pearse, but there was an equal chance that he was related to some poxy old falafel seller in the Saracen army, or a one-eyed washerwoman who gave hand jobs to the Norman cavalry. We’ve all got kings, peasants, blackguards, bishops and salt-of-the-earth village blacksmiths in our ancestry.
But fixating on some probably spurious ancestors was no more ridiculous than what Patrick had done. Out of all the objects in the world, Patrick had chosen a handful with some arbitrary association to himself and designated them to be his legacy. Keeping it all together was so important that he’d made arrangements for its survival beyond his own life into the Patrick-less world that came after him.
I began to wish that Bill Kelly had just taken the whole lot and saved me from my role in perpetuating a dead man’s foolishness.
NINETEEN
IF THE POLICE BELIEVED that the likeliest villains were a gang of well-organised crooks who wanted to get their hands on my uncle’s cup-plate collection, it wasn’t my business to contradict them. In fact, it seemed more sensible to go along with their theory and inflate my insurance claim accordingly. I wasn’t hopeful that I would see much of the money myself, but I figured I might get some, and besides, the idea of selling or hiding some of Patrick’s beloved possessions satisfied an irrational desire for revenge on the house and its contents. At the back of my mind, I think I knew that I was behaving like someone who kicks a table leg after he’s barked his shin on it. All the same, I was determined to find some things in the house worth stealing.
Patrick had word-processed the inventory on his computer, a machine so obsolete it used floppy disks that looked as if they belonged in the jukebox. The printer was no less antique. It typed the text through a ribbon in a feeble, crabbed font that I remembered from letters he’d sent me at school. The document itself was two hundred and fifty pages long. I imagined Patrick revising it lovingly over long winter months, adding to it, elaborating his descriptions of the objects. Its tony prose read like the brochure of the auction house where I’d worked during my summer holidays: ‘twin-handled chamber pot in Sèvres porcelain, hand-painted with rosettes of acanthus leaves’; ‘four blown-glass decanters mounted in buffalo-hide tantalus, monogrammed in gold lettering, TWO’.
More than half of the pages dealt with his book and record collections, but I decided that in the interest of realism, I’d set these sections aside at first. The thief I had in mind was an opportunist with no special knowledge of the house.
It would strain credibility for him to be sifting through the filing cabinets of 45s in the hope of unearthing a rare piece of vinyl. Similarly, I knew various books were definitely missing from the library – having seen Edgar Huvas making off with them at the Greyhound station in Providence – but a bibliophile burglar was an unlikely apparition. My thief – and I was beginning to feel as if I knew him quite well – was more of a magpie. He would have sneaked in, grabbed the shiniest, most valuable-looking things he could find and made off with them.
The difficulty was that even the most optimistic or desperate burglar would have looked around Patrick’s kitchen with a sinking heart. I imagined the beam of his flashlight flickering over the penny-banks. He might have rummaged through the drawers over the sink looking for some cash. All he would have found were ‘five lace-trimmed tea towels in Derbyshire needlepoint’. Maybe he’d snatched the painting from above the kitchen table – ‘contemporary landscape in Primitive style by Martha Calhoun of Dennis, Mass. Painted in 1983 and signed by the artist’ – only to realise it was a picture of the house he was burgling. The burglar who tried to fence that might as well include an arrow showing where he’d got in.
I opened the inventory at random and stabbed at the page: ‘Alpine wineskin with hand-carved wooden stopper’ – hopeless.
Another stab: ‘authentic Gurkha kukri with notched blade. Cased in original leather scabbard.’ I remembered the knife – it looked like something for peeling potatoes. Then: ‘hand-painted satirical Russian matryoshka dolls’. I turned over half a dozen pages impatiently. This was more like it: ‘pair of early nineteenth-century English duelling pistols with chased silver handles’. Without thinking what I was doing, I put a tick by it on the list.
Was that smart? I reversed the pencil and rubbed out the mark. I started to feel slightly guilty about the whole exercise.
A bang on my door made me jump. I looked up to see Nathan Fernshaw shading his eyes and peering through the kitchen window.
The Paperchase Page 12