The Graveyard Position

by Robert Barnard

  Merlyn took a quick walk with Dolly to the supermarket on the Otley Road, and had a better lunch than breakfast had been. Then he had his hour’s siesta. When he had woken and had a cup of tea he decided he had to breast the waves of the past and investigate the bedroom that had been his whenever he sought refuge from the drunken binges of his father, and then continuously for the years 1981 to 1982.

  He was glad he was alone. Even Danielle would have been a hindrance, because he remembered quite clearly that there was nothing of any distinction about the room, no clear impression that he had made on it. That would have puzzled or distressed Danielle. But to him it was natural and normal—as if he had realized he was merely camping out there, not setting up home in it.

  He stood on the landing, swallowed, then threw open the door and put his hand around the jamb to turn on the light.

  It was almost exactly as he had left it. The only difference was that the bed had been unmade, and the eiderdown draped over the bare mattress. Then, watched by Dolly from the door, he began a prowl around his old room. In the cupboard was football gear, in the drawers his flannels and white shirt for school cricket. Not much use in Italy, he had obviously thought when packing. Clothes he had already grown out of when he left were still in the wardrobe and drawers, along with the school uniform he no longer would have use for. His school satchel was under a chair, but it was empty. The early summer when he had left had been a period of transition: exams were over, revision was useless, he had had a feeling that an end had been made. Even if he had stayed in Leeds, that summer would have marked an end to one part of his life: he remembered that he had decided, if he was going to continue his education, to go to a further-education college, rather than continue at his present school. Perhaps that was why he was ripe for Clarissa’s suggestion that he make a complete break.

  The books told him more. No children’s books. The Enid Blytons and the Arthur Ransomes had been left in Sheffield. Perhaps they had been lapped up by Jake’s second family, but more likely thrown out years before. There was the odd crime novel on the shelves—Christie, Ross Macdonald, P. D. James—and the beginnings of his adult taste in fiction: Dickens, Hardy, Waugh, Joyce Cary. He must be one of a tiny number of Cary readers left. Then he discovered on the shelves Nostromo and Heart of Darkness. Conrad had been a recent find when he left Leeds, but one that had stayed with him. He found a little shelf of solid history tomes in paperback: Trevelyan’s Social History, the Penguin histories of Great Britain, Dennis Mack Smith on modern Italy. This last had been preparation for a new life once the idea had been mooted, he remembered, but too heavy to form part of his luggage.

  Then he unearthed in the cupboard a pile of exercise books, full of essays: Palmerston’s foreign policy 1830–41; Mr. Gradgrind’s “political economy” (he had nearly been put off Dickens by having Hard Times as a set book for GCE). More interesting, underneath the improvised bookshelves was a notebook with plans for his schoolwork, particularly for all the subjects where essays were involved: English literature, history, and French. He realized that even then he had a lawyer’s caution, a desire to be well prepared, an instinct to make any written work the product of considered and meticulous planning.

  But in among the notes for essays he found memoranda of a more personal nature: not a diary by any means, but a record of some of the things that were worrying him that year leading up to the GCE—the autumn of 1981 to the summer of 1982. There was a note about the end of his relationship—really no more than a friendship—with Jenny Watson, and the bombshell of her pregnancy. I bet it’s Ben Eastlake whose responsible, the note ran, not too grammatically. Then there was a note about his father. It is now six months since I’ve seen or heard from Jake. Well, if he doesn’t give a dam, why should I? The sentiment didn’t surprise him, though the spelling did.

  And then there were three notes relating to his aunt Clarissa, and the crisis that had led to his leaving the country. He did not remember making the memoranda, but he remembered the emotions and events they recorded. The first read:

  February 23. Today I got aunt to admit she was worried. I said “Is it the family?” and she just gave a nod. I asked “Which one of them are you worried about?” and she answered “All of them.” Then she shut up.

  The second read:

  April 3. At last Aunt has said something else about the family, and what is worrying her. I asked her if it was about money, and she said: “It could be money, and it could be,” she hesitated, “something else.” I said that problems usually came down to money or sex, and she just said she wished she’d learned more about sex.

  The third read:

  May 30. Aunt thinks I’m thretened by this family business. I said I didn’t see how I could be involved, and she said “You are though. You’re my hier.” I didn’t know this. I suppose if I wasn’t around (dead) someone thinks they would inherit instead.

  So there it all was, in blue-black and white: the reason he had been sent abroad. There was a later entry, Quite afraid, but definitely excited which surely related to his feelings at the prospect. Also the confusion Clarissa felt at the time about—about what, precisely? There was hardly a hint about that. What was she afraid of, what was she fearing might happen? And why? But the question of money and the question of sex did seem to lead back to the last years of Grandfather Cantelo.

  Merlyn shut the book and took it downstairs. It was tantalizingly scrappy, but yet suggestive enough to ponder on.

  When Rosalind had left and Mike Oddie had opened the window to air the office, symbolically, of her high-octane personality, he and Charlie sat down to talk things over.

  “What do you think of it all?” Charlie asked him.

  “It could be true,” he said cautiously.

  “Yes, and crop circles are made by little green men scything them from spaceships from Mars.”

  “No—wait. There could be scenarios that mean she was speaking the truth. One is that Clarissa was genuinely scared of her nephew. We only have his word for it that there was a loving relationship between them.”

  “They kept regular contact from 1982 until her death.”

  “We only have his word for that.”

  “He wouldn’t have risked telling us that unless he had kept up pretty well with all that was going on in the Cantelo family.”

  “Plenty of people could have kept him up to speed on that. But the other possibility is maybe more interesting and likely: that Clarissa put this around to keep the Cantelos on-side, so as not to give them the impression that there was thought to be a threat that emanated from them.”

  “Hmmm,” said Charlie, considering carefully. “That’s more like it. Wouldn’t she have told Merlyn about doing that on one of their weekly phone calls?”

  “Maybe. But since the idea of sending him abroad was to cut off all connection with the Cantelos, maybe she preferred to let him start his life all over again without reminding him of the past, particularly things likely to make him uneasy.”

  “Fair enough.” After a moment Charlie came out with his doubts. “But I thought Rosalind was a pretty poor liar, and I still feel the whole thing was made up by her.”

  “I’d say the same, but that’s impression, not evidence.”

  “Agreed. And it doesn’t answer the question: Why should she be involved?”

  “Why? She’s a member of the Cantelo family. What’s your point?”

  “She was vague about her age. If she was in the school year below Merlyn’s, which would account for her interest in his GCE papers, she’d have been fifteen then. About thirty-seven now, which seems about right. It’s difficult to see her being involved at the time, though—no, it’s more than difficult, it’s absurd. The idea that Merlyn had murderous intentions wouldn’t even have been mentioned in her presence.”

  “Well, maybe her concern is more or less inherited from her father. No—more likely her mother,” Oddie amended the thought. They both pondered for a moment on the situation in the family
twenty-odd years before.

  “You know,” said Charlie at last, “there’s something odd here, because one gets the distinct sense of the Cantelos acting together on something. Not so much now—there seems to be lots of tensions and groupings—but back in the eighties or earlier. And yet in other ways they seem to have been a very divided family, with little social or emotional connection even then. Would you agree?”

  “Yes, I think so. The question is—”

  “What brought them together. Exactly.”

  “I haven’t the faintest glimmerings of a notion,” said Oddie. “But—assuming we take all our information from Docherty at its face value—it’s got to be something very important.”

  “Probably. Why do you say that, though?”

  “It’s got to be something that even now is worth killing him to keep concealed.”

  Chapter 14

  Big Business

  Superintendent (soon to be ex-Superintendent) Oddie looked around him glumly. The room they were in was the firm’s headquarters in the center of Leeds—a new building at the end of the Headrow with lots of glass and light streaming through the windows. The furnishings had got rid of the stark look that had afflicted companies such as Witherspoon and Company for thirty or more years, and they looked capacious, comfortable, and—which perhaps was the point—expensive. They did not lighten Oddie’s mood. Dotted around the long room were the top and toppish brass of Witherspoon’s, the firm in question, and they were mingling with the applicants for the post of director of security—a sensitive position, granted that the firm manufactured armaments and sold them to anyone who could stump up the necessary—provided the deal could be squared with the government’s ethical foreign policy (as it almost invariably could). It wasn’t the top brass who deepened Mike’s gloom. They seemed amiable enough on the surface (thin though that surface probably was). It was the ram-shackle collection of men who were the applicants who depressed him. Many of them were known to him, had even been colleagues of his, and the number of them he would want on any detective inquiry he led could be numbered on the fingers of half a hand.

  “Good luck,” Charlie had said to him the day before.

  “And what does that mean?” Oddie had asked.

  “Not getting the job,” said Charlie.

  And, looking around, Mike was inclined to agree.

  The majority of the presumably short-listed applicants were senior police officers near to or past retirement age, and a dim, undistinguished lot they were.

  They’re probably thinking the same about me, he thought.

  But he knew in his heart he was not dim and undistinguished, and he knew in both his heart and his head that they were. Most of those whom he had had anything more than routine dealings with had given him more aggro than satisfaction, and of the three he had respect for, one had a private life that ought to have put him beyond consideration, granted the dangers in that particular post of blackmail. The policemen of lower rank who had applied for the post displayed, for the most part, awareness that it was beyond all reasonable expectation on their part, so they probably were there mainly for the food and the booze, and perhaps for the experience. One or two were thugs, one or two were crooks, but most were reasonable and competent cops. Given the choice Oddie would have preferred a competent cop to the Lothario superintendent any day, but he was not conducting the interviews, and he was willing to bet that those who were would go for rank, as something they could plausibly boast about.

  Charlie’s other piece of wisdom, proffered more than once over pints of bitter when they were on a case together, was to buy into a little specialized business.

  “Run a shop selling model trains and planes, or one selling clocks, or cookery books, or jigsaws,” he said. “Something where you can mug up the expertise quite quickly and give a service to enthusiasts and cranks, along with reminiscences of your most fascinating cases. Might not be heaven, but it would beat security work. Then when you really want to retire, you can sell it as a going concern.”

  The more he thought about it, the more he saw the company assembled in the long, light room, the better the advice sounded. Provided, of course, that he could make it a going concern.

  “Hello. You’re Superintendent Oddie, aren’t you?”

  Mike steeled himself and turned around. He had known there would be this sort of thing, and he had prepared himself mentally for it. The man was thirty-fiveish, immaculately blue-suited and smooth-haired, and horribly sleek.

  “I’m Gabriel Witherspoon. A very minor twig on the family tree, but one of the people you’ll be talking to today. I’m very much looking forward to hearing your ideas.”

  Like hell you are, thought Mike. But then he revised his opinion. He decided that he must be one of those short-listed, and marked down as a definite prospect. Many of the others were there as makeweights, to demonstrate that this was a London marathon among security jobs.

  “Yes, I’m still a superintendent—for another couple of months,” he said, shaking hands (immaculately dry, the other hand, and tanned to boot). “And I’ll be interested to hear what you have to tell me about the job.”

  “Oh quite. Quite. Exchange of information and ideas, that’s the thinking behind all this.” He waved his hand at the people, the plates of savory thingumabobs, the bottles. “You mustn’t think of it as an ordinary job interview.”

  Except that at the end of the day one of us will be appointed, and twenty-five or so will be disappointed, Mike thought.

  “And the other people here—the Witherspoon people I don’t know—who are they?” he asked.

  He omitted to mention that he did know some of the Witherspoon people, and had met them in his official capacity.

  “They’re all directors of the company. We had thought to have the present director of security along, but we were advised that that isn’t the ticket any longer. Inhibits innovation, new thinking, radical approaches. No firm can afford to be stick-in-the-mud these days, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Of course not,” said Mike, with false heartiness.

  “You won’t find us a bunch of fuddy-duddies,” said Gabriel Witherspoon. “And there’s no ageism here either. In fact we range in age from my granddad, Tom Witherspoon over there, to young Andrew Cattermole, my nephew, who’s twenty-five.”

  Mike seemed to sense a clenching of the teeth when the latter name was mentioned, as if not being stick-in-the-mud had its limits where Gabriel Witherspoon was concerned, and appointing a twenty-five-

  year-old as a director definitely transgressed them.

  He was glad when the smooth Gabriel moved away, sliding toward the superintendent with the thousand and three conquests. Mike disliked smoothness and sleekness—prejudice, perhaps, and typically Yorkshire ones, but they had been justified over and over by his experiences as a policeman.

  He looked over toward the figure of Grandfather Witherspoon. He was a rather shambling man with an untidy mustache that could have been modeled on H. G. Wells’s, and a distant, dreaming expression in his eyes, as if he had already started the process of detaching himself from his firm, his associates, perhaps from life itself. He had shunned all the little groups of people, interviewers and interviewees, and had sat himself by one of the small tables and was helping himself to the canapés, which were very good. A man who was reducing his life to the vital necessities, Oddie thought, and doing it without shame or embarrassment. And perhaps, like most old people, living on his memories rather than his present-day experiences.

  He went over to him.

  “The prawn ones are very tasty,” he said, helping himself.

  “And so are the blue cheese ones,” the old man said. “I’m Tom Witherspoon.”

  “I know. And I’m Superintendent Mike Oddie.”

  “I know. What do you want?”

  Mike knew the directness of old age, but he hedged.

  “Well, I suppose I want a job here.”

  “You don’t seem too certain. Wise man
—you’ve got brains. But what I meant was, why have you come over to talk to me?”

  “You’re very sharp.”

  “I’d be playing golf with all the other compulsorily retired businessmen if I wasn’t. I still have my uses, though they are occasional, and my advice is ignored as often as followed. In my experience people want to talk to an eighty-year-old for one reason and one only: to tap his memory. They don’t want the wisdom gained by running a business for fifty years, because it’s not worth a bean in today’s world, or so they think. So what area of my past do you want to talk about? I’m good on the early days, average on the middle ones, and quite hopeless on anything that happened yesterday or the day before. Everything is done by other people now, and I try to ignore or forget what they choose to do.”

  Mike opted for an equal directness.

  “Cantelo. The shirt people.”

  There was a touch of cantankerousness in the old man’s expression.

  “I know they’re the shirt people, or were. How many Cantelo families do you imagine there are in Leeds?…Merlyn Cantelo…”

  “That’s right.”

  “Funny bloke. In his day—his good days, when the firm was very prosperous—he was a sententious beggar, inclined to lecture you on what you should do in any particular set of circumstances, or what you should have done in some particular crisis or difficulty in your business that had come to his attention. Very hot on business ethics, the spirit of capitalist enterprise, the moral imperative to better yourself or stash away more money. Most people just switched off. I pitied the family rather. He had no sense of humor at all. They probably got that sort of stuff morning, noon, and night—and God help them if they switched off! He would have found some ingenious way of making his displeasure known, and felt. He was that sort of man. He had to be in charge, and to be felt to be in charge.”

  “You might think that would unite the family against him.”

  “You might. But my impression is that they weren’t united at all. Not that they were at sixes and sevens with each other all the time—that wasn’t the case, and Cantelo would have stamped on it if there were signs of it happening…. No, it was just that they clearly didn’t pull together. Each went his own way, and there was no affection for each other, no mutual loyalty, no support for each other in times of crisis or against their over-bearing parent. I suppose Clarissa made some attempt to keep them together. Most people felt she was the best of the bunch.”