The Graveyard Position

by Robert Barnard

  “Did she talk to you a lot? Confide in you?”

  Again she shot him a glance. Maybe she was already suspecting that the request for domestic help was mainly a cover.

  “Not so’s you’d notice,” she said. “Not like some, who’d tell you their whole life history, or who their husbands are sleeping with. You hear all sorts of things—you’d never believe it. Clarissa was a lady, and there was nothing of that. Just now and again I’d see that she was worried, and I’d say something, and she’d maybe come out with this and that—bits and pieces, you know.”

  “About the family, I suppose?”

  “Well, yes. I’m talking about when her dad was alive. Later she had her clients, as you’ll know, but she couldn’t see them at home while her dad was living there. He’d have exploded and told them they were fools. And she never talked about her clients anyway—like a priest not revealing what he’s told in confessional. So mostly what she talked about would be the family, if she talked at all. Some of them I met, though not often. Funny lot.”

  “Yes, we are, aren’t we?”

  “Oh, I wasn’t including you, Mr. Docherty.”

  “Merlyn.”

  “Well, Merlyn then…You’re different. And Clarissa always said that you were. But you could see most of them are a bit funny, and I saw it again at the funeral. They just make you feel…uneasy.”

  “Really? At Clarissa’s funeral? Of course I was seeing them for the first time in years.”

  “So was I, I can tell you. The Cantelos were never ones to go calling on each other. That was the first time I’d seen them together since Old Man Cantelo’s funeral. They were just the same then.”

  “And they made you feel uneasy?”

  She frowned, trying to pin it down in words she was used to.

  “They couldn’t do what people try to do at funerals. They couldn’t pretend to be friendly, united in grief, that sort of thing. Loving would be even better, of course, but there was no question of that. They did all the surface stuff, smiling, shaking hands, asking how they’d been (because they obviously hadn’t seen each other in years, mostly) but then it would wear thin, and there’d be these snide remarks, these boastings—about money, jobs, prestige, as if they were all in competition with each other. Tell you the truth, I thought it was childish. School playground stuff.”

  “Was it a sort of cover, do you think, or reflex action?”

  He saw he had disconcerted her with that last expression.

  “Maybe a cover. Or maybe like going back to childhood. I thought then that all they were really thinking about was who got Clarissa’s house and money. And that meant you, didn’t it? So all the ones who had hopes turned on you, or said you weren’t really you at all. Daft. Even I, who didn’t know you well, could see it was you. And these days things like that can be proved scientifically, can’t they?”

  “They can, thank heavens, and they have been. But you said things had been the same at Grandfather Cantelo’s funeral.”

  She nodded vigorously.

  “The same in spades. Edgy? You wouldn’t believe how edgy they all were, especially considering most of them were pleased as Punch. Clarissa went round to speak to them all and she just couldn’t understand. Everybody knew then that she was going to get the house, and the money was going to be divided among the daughters, who got a bit more than the sons, so what was eating each of them? And what made it stranger was that they’d seemed to be getting on better in the last months of their father’s life, so what had gone wrong?”

  “I’d never heard that they’d been getting on better.”

  “Probably because it didn’t last. I had it from Caroline Sowden, who was a little mate of mine—still is, in a way. Caroline Chaunteley she is now—daft name. Everyone treats her like she isn’t all there, but she’s not so green as she’s cabbage-looking.”

  “I’d forgotten that expression,” said Merlyn, smiling. “But did it really apply to Caroline?”

  “Did, and still does. I knew her then because she’d come to Congreve Street now and then, maybe with a message from her dad. But he was also my doctor. He and Marigold had a big house and surgery overlooking Kirkstall Abbey, and I’d sometimes see her and have a chat with her there. She told me at the time that there’d been a family meeting at their house, and others at the houses of her aunties and uncles. Emily was there, Paul, even Rosalind’s father, as well as the Sowdens.”

  “Not Clarissa or Gerald?”

  “Not so far as I know.” She shook her head. “No one would ask Gerald if they hoped to have any sensible discussion.”

  “No,” agreed Merlyn. “But if it was some kind of peace conference, you’d have expected Clarissa to be at the heart of it.”

  “That’s true. But we don’t know it was anything like that. Anyway, whatever it was was going on, they were back to normal by the time of the funeral. Paul for one stormed out, and all the rest could hardly bring themselves to talk to one another. It was something Clarissa just couldn’t understand.”

  “Did she ever talk about it later?”

  “Not for ages. But once, maybe two or three years ago, it came up in conversation, and she just said: ‘I never understood that, not for years.’ I was going to ask what had been behind it, but I looked at her and her eyes had that shut-down look they sometimes had, and I kept my mouth buttoned. I had to do that quite often, working in Congreve Street.”

  “You’re thinking of Grandfather Cantelo and his young girls, aren’t you?” asked Merlyn. He thought immediately he had made a mistake. She was too old to discuss something like that readily. She merely tightened her lips.

  “Least said, soonest mended. I didn’t know anything except the odd rumor, and I don’t know any more now. But it was an enormous embarrassment for the family, and I’d be willing to bet the older generation was planning to do something about it.”

  “I talked about that with Mr. Featherstone.”

  “Is that Clarissa’s solicitor?”

  “Yes. One of the possibilities the younger generation of the family seem to have discussed was to have him declared mentally incapable of handling his own affairs.”

  “He wasn’t,” said Renee Osborne in a downright manner. “I saw him regularly at that time. He was a bit funny—embarrassing, like—but he was perfectly clear in his mind, and particularly so about money.”

  “That’s what I thought. Nobody mentioned him being senile when I started to visit, which was not long after he died.”

  “I bet they didn’t mention him and the young girls either.”

  “No, that’s true. They didn’t.”

  “In some people’s mind the two things went together: one was proof of the other. But in any case they would never have dared to try to get him certified—that was the expression we used in my day. Even the strong ones—Emily, Hugh, Clarissa—they never stood up to him, especially not face-to-face. They didn’t have the guts when things came to a head. Even if they’d sent a solicitor along to assess his mental state, there’d have been the devil’s own bust-up, and they’d probably all have been out of the will altogether. Because if the solicitor wasn’t bent, there was no way he could have declared old Merlyn barmy.”

  “Which still leaves us with the question of why the Cantelos were meeting secretly together.”

  “Hmmm. Well, you won’t get anything out of the older generation, since it’s something they’ve kept secret for twenty-odd years. You might try the next generation.”

  “You said Caroline was sharper than she seems. I must say that comes as a bit of a surprise.”

  She pursed her lips.

  “I don’t think I said that. But she knows a lot more than she gives on about, hoards of things—knowledge, little scraps of information. I meet her in the supermarket now and then, and we always have a good chat, and I always get a feeling of ‘You’d be surprised what I know.’”

  Merlyn considered this.

  “She’s well disposed towards me, so I could give
her another try. Or perhaps someone new would do the trick better. I must say I was a bit afraid she was sizing me up as husband material. She seems to have had a crush on me when we were at school, though at the time she kept it deadly quiet.”

  “She keeps everything deadly quiet,” explained Renee. “She’s good at hiding things, storing them up. I think it makes her feel powerful, important. And she’s got no particular feeling for her mother, by the way. She won’t hold things back on her account, I don’t think. And the same goes for your friend Edward Fowldes—he was your friend at school, wasn’t he?”

  “He was my best friend among the Cantelos.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “No, I haven’t. I don’t quite know why. He was always a quiet, tactful, considerate boy. I suppose I thought Malachi a better bet…and I suppose I felt rather rotten about trying to squeeze things out of someone I once liked.”

  “Worth trying, though.”

  “Yes, I think you’re right. We must have another chat, Renee. There’s all sorts of people we haven’t really talked about. Young Roderick Massey, for example.”

  Those pursed lips came back.

  “Never met him. Never heard Clarissa speak of him. Only heard about him from Caroline. I knew his…Paul Cantelo. Flibbertigibbet sort of chap. No backbone.”

  “Seems he became some sort of writer, and a teacher in an American university…Now, when could you come and do a day’s work in the old house?”

  “Pretty much as soon as you like.” She obviously held her diary in her head. “Tomorrow I’d rather not, because Patsy and Sam have their silver wedding, and they’re having a do at the Parkside Hotel. What about Thursday?”

  “You won’t have a hangover?”

  “I will not. I wouldn’t be so daft. So I’ll see you on Thursday. Good-bye for now, Dolly.”

  Dolly gave a moderately enthusiastic wag, and signaled that she was ready for another of Merlyn’s marathon walks. When the two of them had got through the front door and out of the gate, they started back up Kirkstall View, and every step they took sent a little nerve in Merlyn’s brain twitching with a reproach, over and over:

  You bloody fool. You forgot. You bloody fool. You forgot.

  But it was a long time ago. And when he was at Clarissa’s he had had little to do with the other Cantelos. Whatever the reason, he kicked himself for forgetting that interesting little fact: that Caroline’s elderly father was a doctor.

  “I got more out of her than out of any of the family,” said Merlyn to Charlie and Oddie later that day. “Mr. Robinson said to me that I should go for outsiders, and he was right.”

  He had taken a bus into town, feeling rather strange, and had gone along to Millgarth Police Headquarters, and was sitting in Oddie’s office, with a view over the market and toward the expensive flats in the Calls, the old dockland quarter. How different Leeds was from the town he had known twenty-odd years ago, he thought.

  “That may be right up to a point,” said Oddie. “The outsiders will talk more easily. But when it comes down to it, how much will they know? An outsider will have rumor, hearsay, gossip to retail. I heard a lot yesterday from one of Cantelo’s fellow businessmen. But in the end you have to go to the heart of the matter in question. And that means getting a reliable, informed story from one of the people at the center.”

  “That could only be one of the older Cantelos,” said Merlyn.

  “Maybe,” put in Charlie. “We have no reliable evidence of a conspiracy aimed at old Merlyn by his children. Can you blame us that we’re concentrating on the person who tampered with your car? That’s a definite crime, whether or not it leads us to something else. Can you imagine us ever getting enough evidence to put six or seven Cantelo children or their wives and husbands into the dock charged with—what, parricide? That’s pretty much what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’ve had in mind,” admitted Merlyn.

  “With this Marigold’s husband as a lynchpin, obediently signing the death certificate?”

  “Yes, maybe.”

  Charlie’s mouth was screwed wryly.

  “I’m not saying it’s nonsense. I’m just saying we haven’t a hope in hell of putting together a case.”

  “On the other hand,” said Oddie, “if that is behind the attempt on you, then of course we’re interested.”

  “You mean that whoever it was tampered with the car probably sees me as the main one who’s going into all this, and sees getting rid of me as the main way of putting a stop to the investigation?”

  “Yes, basically.”

  Merlyn pondered a moment.

  “Rosalind came to see you, didn’t she? She would know that getting rid of me wouldn’t stop you going into all this.”

  “That wasn’t what we talked about. She was much more interested in talking about you than about the family in general. She tried to convince us that your aunt was afraid of you, scared of your violence and what you might do.”

  Merlyn looked at them for a moment, then burst out laughing.

  “Nice try, Rosalind!”

  “Though now I remember it,” Oddie went on, “when we were talking about who could confirm this new slant on things, she was insistent on asking us what we would be asking them.”

  “Why do you think that was?”

  “Well, conceivably she could prime them on your aunt’s supposed fear of you, but she seemed to want to make sure that we were not going into other matters where perhaps she couldn’t be so sure of them not giving away things she wanted to have kept hidden: things like the death of your grandfather, for example.”

  Merlyn seized on the suggestion.

  “If I’m right about that, and if Rosalind knows about it too, there’s no reason why other members of her and my generation shouldn’t know about it.”

  “No reason why they shouldn’t, and none why they should.”

  “Point taken. But I think it’s time to find out.”

  “I agree,” said Charlie, who had been taking skeletal notes. “You’ve talked to Caroline, Rosalind, Roderick Massey, Malachi and Francis Cantelo—who else?”

  “No one else of my generation, and Roderick only at a party—the sort of chat I’ve also had with one or two others: Marigold, Emily, Edward. Edward is one I think I should talk to again, and alone. He’s one I’d like to do myself, at any rate first, before you get to him. He was a friend twenty years ago, and this may count for something. I think he is an honorable man, and he might tell me if he knows anything to the purpose.”

  “If he’s an honorable man and knows something, he should have told us as soon as he found out about it,” Charlie pointed out.

  “Not necessarily. He may not know, and what he does know may not be criminal, or he may have found it out so long after the event that he thought the time was past when it could be followed up. And of course he may be completely in the dark. But I do think that if the Cantelo parents were getting together, their children ought to have noticed that something out of the ordinary was going on. And from what Renee Osborne told me, Caroline Chaunteley did. So should the rest of them.”

  “Why do I get the impression,” asked Charlie, “that you want to talk to Edward because you’d like one of us to talk to Caroline?”

  “Because I’ve already talked to her twice, because she had a crush on me when we were teenagers, and because I find her irritating and a bit embarrassing. But Renee says there’s a lot more to her than people generally think. So it’s just possible that a new broom might sweep her clean.”

  “And a new broom of her generation would be most effective, wouldn’t it?” said Oddie cunningly.

  “Undoubtedly,” said Merlyn. Charlie sighed.

  That evening Merlyn rang Brussels, and told Danielle that he thought things might be coming to a head. He found it enormously refreshing to talk to someone who was intelligent, uncomplicated, and an outsider. He was beginning to get irritated by the Cantelos, and to cast around in
his head for the words that best summed them up. He thought what most of them suffered from was congenital inward-looking antagonism.

  “I’m getting the impression of a little group of people who weren’t united by anything except being of the same family, and otherwise just squabbled with each other, ran each other down, or kept their distance from each other. I suppose the thing it most resembles is a political party.”

  “Well, you don’t get anything more full of squabbles than a Belgian political party,” said Danielle. “As you know. But these are all people you knew already, aren’t they?”

  “Some of them. But even when I knew them I didn’t understand them. I was only sixteen at the time, remember.”

  “So you’ve been going around talking to them and finding out what really makes them tick, have you?”

  “To some extent. My car was stolen by joyriders, so I’m not very mobile at the moment. But I’ve talked to the maid, for example—the woman who worked at Congreve Street while I was living there, and for years before and after. It was a view from outside, but very suggestive.”

  “I see. Suggestive of what?”

  “Well, of the Cantelo family ganging up in an unlikely way.”

  “To do what?”

  “To protect their interests.”

  “I see…. So tell me about your car being stolen.”

  It must have been something in his voice when he mentioned it. He had tried to be airy, perhaps tried too hard. He had known Danielle for two years, and she knew when he was lying, or when (more often) he was trying not to tell her something to avoid the need for lying. He took a deep breath.

  “I’d better tell you,” he said.

  So he told her about the car, the tampered-with brakes, the dead boy. When he had finished, Danielle said, with steel in her voice. “You’re coming home. Now.”

  They argued back and forth, Danielle threatening to come to Leeds to get him, and in the end Merlyn said:

  “I’ll get a flight tomorrow week.”

  Chapter 16

  A Chield’s Amang You

  Takin’ Notes