The Graveyard Position

by Robert Barnard

  “You could be right. But eight is quite a number.”

  “All I have to go on is conjecture. My first thought was that it might be Paul.”

  “I never knew him. I have the impression of a nervous, impulsive, intellectual type of person.”

  “That’s not far off. Inclined to go over the top, people said (the Cantelos, that is, who for the most part never went over the top). And he had, by all accounts, a really strong motive, quite apart from the prospect of losing his share of the family money.”

  “Yes. Cuckolded by his own father.”

  Eddie nodded, and was silent for some time.

  “And then, immediately after the funeral, he disappeared. No one knew where he was. Then, months later, when it was clear that the death had been accepted by the police and everyone else as natural causes, he made contact from America—Arkansas, of all remote and little-known places—and sued for divorce. Adding all those things together, there seemed to me to be a circumstantial case against him—not that he was got out of the way, but he panicked and fled.”

  “Why did you give up the idea of its being Paul?”

  “I didn’t. It’s a possibility. But there are others, and fairly convincing ones too.”

  “Such as?”

  “Malachi thought the one who got the X was Gerald’s wife, his mother, and that she worked Gerald up to do it as a religious duty.”

  “You sound skeptical. I think I would be too. I heard she ruled herself out.”

  Eddie nodded.

  “The American religious right have some pretty fearsome direct-action people. The British lot aren’t like that: they’re just ineffectual cranks waiting for the Day of Judgment or peddling some wild racial nonsense without the sort of venom of the political right. I never heard anyone say Gerald was capable of taking on a squirrel in a bad mood.”

  Merlyn left a pause and then said, “So?” Eddie remained sunk in thought, looking into the depths of his mug for inspiration. Then, taking a small swig, he said, “There was another person whose life was changed by Grandfather’s death.”

  “Oh? Who?”

  “Hugh. Rosalind’s father. Bluff, good-looking, a hail-fellow-well-met type. At the time of his father’s death he was working for BP, after a shortish spell working in the Cantelo shirt firm. The money he inherited from his father enabled him to buy into one of the London security firms then springing up, and shortly after he went to work for British Telecom, just after it was set up, and soon he was hopping from branch to branch, onward and upward, up to the time when he died in a car smash.”

  “So he did well out of Grandfather’s death.”

  “Definitely. And you’ve only heard the half of it. The move to London involved the ditching of wife and family—Rosalind, that is—and the taking of a new and luscious dolly-bird wife with social cachet to boot. He lived a smart, fast lifestyle, and the responsibility for the car crash, in which five died, was entirely his. He was a slippery, voracious individual, all misleading facade. His daughter adored him. I would guess she saw him once a year, if that, after he wiped the dust of Leeds off his boots.”

  “All very interesting,” said Merlyn. He grinned and said, because Eddie was an old friend he felt he could be direct with, “But only proving he’s the sort of man you don’t like.”

  Eddie smiled in return.

  “The bookworm schoolteacher loathing the smooth operator and envying him his worldly goods? Maybe so. Though you know I’m one of those teachers who’s never wanted to be anything else, and the satisfaction I get when one of my flock reads Great Expectations and enjoys it warms me for weeks…. I did dislike him and his hearty manners, and I was sorry for Rosalind and still am: his neglect of her was cruel, and she’s lived her life with a totally false picture of him, which is her form of protection from reality. She’s still defending his memory.”

  “I know. Do you think that that’s behind her recent antics?”

  “Like saying Aunt Clarissa believed you were a teenage psychotic killer in embryo? That’s gone round on the rumor grapevine. I would guess so. How much she knows I’m not sure, but Rosalind is a compulsive gossip and information hoarder, so it’s a fair bet that she knows a good deal.”

  “And your money is on Uncle Hugh as the man who popped in and did the deed a day or two early?”

  Eddie thought for a bit. Then he swilled down the last of his beer and stood up. “I don’t need a taxi. I can walk home. It’s only ten minutes, and I feel like the exercise. But just to answer your question: no, my money is not on Hugh.”

  “Why not? After all you’ve just told me.”

  “Because they were a necessary preliminary. There’s one thing I haven’t touched on yet. It’s not a fact, or a clue, just a trait of character. Dodgy evidence, quicksands stuff, but interesting, in my view.”

  “And that is?”

  Eddie leaned forward, his hands on the table.

  “Hugh had the reputation—at Cantelo’s, BP, his London posts—of being the sort of man who leaves all the dirty work to his underlings. If there were redundancies he worked out the numbers and the identities, but left the announcements to his second-in-command. If there were dodgy dealings among the staff—fiddled expense accounts, underhand stuff with the firm’s rivals—he’d do the investigations himself, but leave the confrontations and sackings to the same poor, unfortunate right-hand man. Nothing was allowed to dent his breezy, cheery image. He liked his life to be like the Lord Mayor’s procession, and left it to others to go round with the shovel afterwards.”

  Merlyn pondered, looking up at his old friend.

  “So what you’re saying is that, if he got the slip with X on it, he’d—what? Hire a hit man to do it? Somehow I can’t see Leeds in the seventies to have been teeming with willing hit men.”

  “You’d be surprised…. That would be one possibility. There is another. Grandfather’s life in his later years had left a trail of victims of one kind or another: people who had strong emotional reasons for wanting to be rid of him.”

  “True. Do you mean that if one of them didn’t pull the right straw they’d have been willing to do it anyway because they so desperately wanted to do it? Are we back to Paul again, then? Or perhaps my father?”

  “I think you’re throwing the net too close to the ship,” said Eddie. “There were all sorts of people outside the family circle who had similar sorts of motives.”

  “Yes, I do know he didn’t confine his attentions to women in his own family.”

  “Why should he? He had seven or eight years as a widower. There were other affairs, rumored and virtually acknowledged.”

  Merlyn considered this.

  “Acknowledged children, you mean?”

  “At least one. One that I suspect, at any rate. Think about it, Merlyn. Think about it. I’m not making any direct accusations. I don’t know enough. But try and make the connections yourself.”

  And raising his arm he strode up in the direction of Horsforth, his lean body seeming to form a sort of question mark.

  Chapter 18

  Cleaning Up

  Merlyn did not tidy or clean up the house in Congreve Street for Renee’s visit the next day. Danielle had gone off into great gales of laughter over his instinct to do so, which her commonsense Belgian attitudes revolted over. This sometimes meant important papers going missing, involving hours of searching, but in general he agreed with her, and so the next day he left everything pretty much where it was.

  “I’m only camping out here,” he told the old woman when she arrived, “so there’s not much to do apart from Hoovering and dusting. Just make the place so an asthmatic could come in without suffering an attack and I’ll be happy.”

  She nodded, and went to the hall cupboard for the vacuum cleaner.

  “How was your party last night?” Merlyn asked, as he fetched his jacket, wallet, and papers on the case.

  “Oh, nothing special. Just a few people along to drinks and things at Patsy and Sam’s fav
orite local. Very nice eats they were, though—better than what Rosalind managed to get for the wake here. I like my food better than a lot of drink as I get older. It doesn’t make you feel rotten afterwards. But people don’t make much fuss about wedding anniversaries these days, do they?”

  “Don’t they? I’m virtually a foreigner, remember. I should have thought that if you manage to stay together for twenty-five years when everyone around you is splitting up, you deserve a bit of a celebration.”

  And raising his hand and saying “See you later,” he went out of the house. He thought he had got most of what he needed from her in their last meeting. He didn’t, however, leave Headingley for some considerable time, because there had been an accident and a traffic snarl-up on the Otley Road, and none of the town buses got through to Kirkstall Lane. It was nearly an hour before he got into town, and he was late for a meeting with Oddie and Charlie Peace, which he had arranged in anticipation of there being something worth reporting from his meeting with Eddie.

  They had coffee and rolls from the canteen. Merlyn decided that policemen did not seem to do themselves particularly well when it came to feeding and watering, and was surprised. Charlie and Oddie just stuffed it in, however, as if they were shoving coins into a parking meter. Merlyn told them about his meeting with Eddie, and what they’d talked about in the house and then at the Vesper Gate. The policemen were interested, but by the end they made it clear they were more than a little disgruntled.

  “Why was he so enigmatic?” Charlie asked. “He complains about my Caroline being an information flirt, then he plays exactly the same game himself, with the same sort of tricks. She was forthcoming by comparison.”

  “That was sex,” said Merlyn. “She was interested in you. I didn’t have the same weapon for getting things out of Eddie.”

  “You had friendship, going back a long way,” grumbled Charlie. “I would have thought that was a much more powerful weapon.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Merlyn. “We talked about our friendship and what we did together, but a friendship that has had a twenty-year interruption isn’t much of one, is it?”

  “Why do you think he was so coy?” asked Oddie.

  “Maybe the person he suspects is someone he loves, admires, owes some kind of loyalty to. Those emotions would be important to a man like Eddie.”

  “We’re talking about the hit man—or woman—here,” said Charlie. “Morally the man who hired him is the main villain, and surely Eddie need feel no loyalty or love for either of them.”

  “As far as Hugh Cantelo is concerned, certainly he feels none at all. He obviously disliked and distrusted him when he was alive, and apparently with good grounds. But I think a more likely reason for Eddie’s caution—yes, it came out as coyness, but I think it wasn’t that—was that he has an idea who did it, but is far from sure. In that situation he preferred to leave it to me. If I had been prompted by him, there would be no satisfaction for him if I came up with the same name. If I had the same information as him but no prompting, he would feel that his suspicions had been confirmed. Eddie’s a sensitive, conscientious, morally aware type of person—very unusual in our family. He’d have scruples about throwing unsubstantiated allegations around.”

  They all thought about that.

  “Makes sense,” said Oddie. “I’d just like to say one thing. The whole business of the death of your grandfather is rather beside the point. I doubt if we could ever prove he was murdered, let alone who did it, so what joy is there in it for us? Only in as much as there may well be some connection with the dead boy Terry Bates, who got what was surely intended for you.”

  “I’m sure there is that connection,” said Merlyn. “It happened after I’d been snooping around for some time, and when I became more vulnerable by moving to a private address, where before I’d been living in an efficient, modern hotel.”

  “Right,” said Charlie. “Not a very firm connection, but it’ll do until we get something more substantial. The neighbors say you haven’t been playing Kylie Minogue records at full blast through the night, and from the family there’s nothing of more substance than Rosalind’s very vague allegations about your aunt’s suspicions.”

  “Just lies,” said Merlyn.

  “Probably. Or your aunt intentionally misleading the family.”

  Merlyn treated that suggestion with skepticism.

  “I doubt it. She had her reputation as a clairvoyant to consider.”

  “So what do we have? Eddie’s suggestion that the hit man could have been someone outside the family. That could have been misdirection on his part too.”

  “Agreed. But the suggestion does seem to fit in with Hugh’s inclination to shuffle off responsibility, which is easily checked. The family was very vulnerable, once they had ganged up together. They were at the mercy of anyone who got cold feet, or someone temperamentally unreliable, like my father—who according to himself went ever more seriously off the rails in the years that followed.”

  “He could have blabbed after a couple of double scotches in those years,” Oddie pointed out.

  “He could. Though if he was himself involved, as apparently he was, some form of self-protection would probably stop him doing that. Anyway, getting someone from outside the charmed—or charmless—circle makes sense. That could be a hit man hired for money—”

  “They come surprisingly cheap, hit men,” said Charlie.

  “—or it could have been someone with a really important grievance against the old man.”

  There was silence while they thought.

  “I liked the idea of your uncle Paul, the one with the strong grievance,” said Oddie, “but temperamental instability seems to rule him out. No one sensible would rope him in to do a job like that.”

  “No—I’d rather rope in Eddie’s mother, Aunt Emily, given the choice between her and Paul. She’d certainly get the job done,” said Merlyn, with a reluctant admiration.

  “What we seem to be looking for is someone tough, strong-minded, reliable—a doer rather than a thinker or an organizer, and someone with a whiff of the primitive about them.”

  “The problem is,” said Charlie, “that very few people from outside the family have come into the case so far. I wonder how old Rosalind’s husband, Barnett, would have been at the time.”

  “Barnett?” said Merlyn, surprised. “But he would have had no connection with the family then. Rosalind would have been just a girl.”

  “How do we know he had no connection? It may have been the connection that brought them together.”

  But they were interrupted by a call to Oddie about a body found in a council flat in Morley. That was the end of the conference: there was life, or at least death, going on in Leeds, and it took precedence over the death, twenty-odd years before, of the elderly businessman Merlyn Cantelo.

  The present-day Merlyn took himself off, considered taking a taxi home, then took a bus instead from the station nearby. It too was delayed by a visit of minor royalty to Leeds, and by the time Merlyn got back to Congreve Street, Renee had already finished her jobs around the house and gone home. He’d have to call round with her money. Old as she was, she looked to have done a good job. The carpets were looking brighter, the surfaces dust-free, the kitchen sparkling.

  This house will fetch a fortune, he thought.

  It was not a thought prompted by slavering cupidity. He lived in a city where property prices were still reasonable in spite of the sky-high wages paid to EU employees and European MPs. He was well paid himself, and could join in the property rat race when he and Danielle decided to marry and settle down. But the money from the old house in Congreve Street would certainly help him to settle comfortably—no, better than comfortably, he told himself.

  He wandered around the house, room by room. Bright though the kitchen looked, the new owner would probably want it completely redone in a more modern style. Kitchens tended to weaken the resolve of even the most fanatical conservationist. The size
of both the sitting room and the dining room would be an attraction, particularly as the central heating seemed efficient. He passed the telephone table in the hall and saw that the top leaf of the pad had been tidied away—no chance now of acquiring his aunt’s old banger (somehow he knew it would have been an old banger, because that was his aunt’s style of car) and taking it on a trip to Brussels before consigning it to the knacker’s yard.

  The staircase, he could see, would be a wonderful selling point: oak, supremely solid and confident, sheer Victorian class. With all his aunt’s bits and pieces, from family stuff to sheer tat, removed, this part of the house could be genuinely impressive. Upstairs, he looked again at the five bedrooms: all were of a good size, and his aunt’s and his grandfather’s got morning light. The bathroom was a period piece—a large bath for the stretched-out luxury soak, an early-twentieth-century shower that gave waterfalls to stand under, and hot towel rails. Please God, the new owner kept this room as it was.

  Something was niggling in the back of his mind.

  “Try and make the connections yourself,” Eddie had said. Easier said than done. Had he got all the information that Eddie himself had? He doubted it. He had been cut off from the family’s information network four years after the death of his grandfather. If Clarissa hadn’t known something, he would have had no chance hearing of it.

  As he made his way downstairs, like Eliza Doolittle making her entrance at the ball, the phone rang. Merlyn speeded up and found that it was Charlie.

  “Just an item of news,” the policeman said. “We’ve got the report of the SOCO people on the car. This confirms that the brakes were interfered with—a hole was made in the brake pipe. It was a deadly piece of work, efficiently carried out.”

  “Interesting,” said Merlyn.

  “Very, we thought,” agreed Charlie.