The Graveyard Position

by Robert Barnard

  Sam stood there, a lowering, fuming presence.

  “I’m saying nowt. This is nothing but fairy-tale stuff. Not a scrap of evidence. If the police were putting this to me I’d say the same: ‘Show me your proof.’ And they wouldn’t be able to.”

  Merlyn nodded slowly.

  “No, I don’t think they would. You did well, Sam. You got away with murder for twenty-six years, without a breath of suspicion. Renee certainly suspected something but she knew nothing certain or she wouldn’t have talked to me as she did last time I was round. There’s a bit more than a breath of suspicion now, but I think you’ll get away with it for the rest of your life.”

  “I can live with suspicion,” said Sam, relaxing a little, “’specially from a jumped-up civil service pen-pusher like you. Now just be shifting yourself. I’ve had enough of playing host to someone who’s barged into my house to accuse me of murder.”

  “Right, I’ll be making tracks,” said Merlin, turning toward the door as if intending to do just that. “But I think you’ll be playing host to other people shortly who’ll be accusing you of murder. I’m pretty sure the police will be along soon.”

  “Oh? You’re running the police force now, are you? Why should they question me about something that there’s nothing to connect me with?”

  “Oh, my grandfather’s death won’t be what they’re interested in. At best that’ll be a subsidiary matter. What they’ll want to question you about will be the attempt on my life.”

  “Your life?” said Sam, an easy sneer coming over his face. “If I wanted to send you to kingdom come I could do it with a couple of karate chops.”

  “You probably could. But something a bit more indirect fit the bill better, didn’t it? Who more capable of fixing the brakes on a car than the man who had just sold it?”

  “That’s rubbish, that is,” said Sam contemptuously, with a phony confidence. “You decided on the car, we did the paperwork, and you drove it away. I didn’t have time to do any hanky-panky on the brakes.”

  “Not then, agreed. You came to Congreve Street at night, and did it then. Perfectly simple operation—a little hole in the brake pipe and hey presto! Pity the wrong person came along and pinched it, poor bugger.”

  “So what proof will there be that I did that?”

  “DNA, I wouldn’t mind betting.”

  “DNA? Don’t talk rubbish! I could have left DNA on that car anytime, by working on it while it was in my used car lot.”

  He was sharp—with the brazen flyness of someone who is accustomed to treading the borderline between the legal and the criminal.

  “And the car to the front of my car, and the car to the rear? They took samples from them too. And are you quite sure you didn’t leave traces on them too? Oh, granted that fixing the brake pipe is a simple job, it’s still the case that you’re a bulky individual, and you didn’t have the car on a hoist like you’d be used to. Are you sure you managed to do it without leaving traces on the other cars, on the road, the pavement? I very much doubt it!”

  Sam stood uncertain, the aggression still palpably there, but contending with an attempt to remember every little action he had taken on that night in Congreve Street.

  “So I bet you touched things, left all sorts of little remembrances of your presence. Your vicious, brutal, vengeful presence. And that’s what the police will be here soon to take you in for doing. You thought you were going to put a stop to me before my nosing around came anywhere near you. Instead you killed a poor bloody tearaway who’d never done you any harm, or anyone else much. And you’ll go down for it, I promise you. Go down for a very long time.”

  There was a moment’s pause, then the big man threw himself on Merlyn. As he tried to dodge and caught the attack on his left shoulder, Merlyn heard a bark, then a yelp of pain from the man heading down to the floor, then the more surprising sensation of being joined in his attempt to hold him by first a dog, then by one woman, then a second, then a third. Sam was being extinguished by his womenfolk. Dimly, as he pulled the man’s hand behind his back in a half nelson, Merlyn heard the voice of the woman in the garden next door speaking into her mobile to summon the police.

  Chapter 19

  Getting On

  A couple of hours later Merlyn and Charlie were heading for the White Horse pub, where they had first met. Oddie was off work that day, looking at a commercial property in the center of Halifax. Charlie cast his eye balefully over the plates of thick short-crust pastry enclosing a dribble of gravy and odd fragments of meat, advertised in the menu as steak and kidney pie, and ordered a sandwich. Clearly he had different standards once outside the police canteen, Merlyn decided, and ordered the same. They went over to a dark and unfrequented corner to go through the events of the day in hushed voices.

  “So we have someone in custody—violent, thuggish, and what else?” Charlie asked. “I suspect you could have been badly hurt, if it wasn’t for the dog and the women.”

  “I think you’re right. Their help came as a big surprise. Never underestimate small dogs, and as for the women—well, I’d put the wife down as in some way a willing participant in domestic violence, but in the event, the chance of actually being rid of her husband at long last must have seemed too good to miss.”

  “Do you think the women knew? About the murder, I mean.”

  “Not Renee, I think. I expect she’s learning of it now. But she must have known who the father of her granddaughter was, and directed me away from her family and toward my own. And Patsy? Surely it must have come out in one of those rows.”

  “So what’s ahead of her? A quickie divorce while he’s safely stowed away in the jug?”

  “I’d guess so. And quite possibly a swift transfer to a man called Kevin with a dim wife. We’d better pray he’s not the same type as Sam. As to the daughter of the marriage, she’s a sad case. I would guess she’s felt her supposed father’s hand all the time she’s been growing up. What she needs is a long and exhaustive course on parenting, but she’ll be the last person to acknowledge that she needs one.”

  “So how do we approach Honest Sam? Set one of our feisty women detectives on to questioning him? Lively, cheeky, argumentative, verging on the stroppy? That often works with ageing sexist thuggy types, which seems to be what he is.”

  “You’re the expert. Sounds a promising approach to me.”

  “In a sense that’s all academic. We’ll never get him for the Cantelo murder, not after more than a quarter of a century. And for the car business, we’ll just have to wait for the analysis of the DNA samples. If they fit, he could be sent down for nine years, which will probably mean four. But if the Forensic Service people don’t come up trumps, he’s out on the streets within a month or two, and back selling dodgy cars.”

  “If that happens it’s best I’m out of the country. Which is what I intend to be anyway.”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows satirically.

  “Back to Brussels? Doesn’t being head of the Cantelo clan have any appeal to you at all?”

  “Not the tiniest bit. And there is no clan: clans are about solidarity, sticking together, group protectiveness. The Cantelos may have come together to get rid of Daddy when his activities threatened their inheritance and their respectability, but it was a one-off phenomenon, and probably full of doubts, suspicions, and potential betrayals and explosions. The Cantelos were brought up to compete, they were played off one against the other, and Grandfather Cantelo reaped a bitter harvest from that. Hugh may well not have done it, but morally he was as guilty as Sam Kettleby. And Rosalind realized this, and thought I was in danger of uncovering the secret.”

  “Oh sure. And with Sam too you feel old Cantelo got his just deserts—though we policemen aren’t allowed to think like that these days, are we?”

  “Yes, seducing the pick of the workforce is something unpleasantly nineteenth century, isn’t it? Mill owners were pretty quick to claim their droit du seigneur, in spite of their scorn of the aristocracy. It’s
disgusting because the girls had very few means of comeback, apart from demanding money for their silence. The women in his family had far more.”

  “They did,” agreed Charlie. “They could tell their husbands, they could threaten him with a far worse stink than a machinist in a sweatshop could kick up.”

  “You know,” said Merlyn thoughtfully, “though I realized from the start—in fact I knew it when I lived with Clarissa—that the Cantelos were a divided and unloving family, I’ve often thought of them, in the weeks since I came back here, as an entity. ‘Why are the Cantelos doing this?’ I thought, often subconsciously, but the impulse was there. But ‘the Cantelos’ weren’t doing anything, because they were never a family unit.”

  “Just individuals, acting as individuals.”

  “Yes. If I thought, ‘Why did Caroline invite Roderick to her little party?’ when all the rest seemed to keep him out in the cold, then the answer lies in Caroline’s character. She latches onto any man under forty, and she has a mischievous streak, which means that she quite likes to create piquant and embarrassing situations.”

  “Why do you think your father got into the act?”

  “The plot to murder old Merlyn? Pretty much the same emotions as Paul had: revenge for humiliation, though in his case it was retrospective. He didn’t get the idea I wasn’t his son till long after my birth.”

  “No, I meant, why did he make contact with you when you came home, when he’s been indifferent to you for years?”

  “I suspect a similar Cantelo instinct to stir things up was active there. Probably Malachi, after our dinner, rang him up. He has the same sort of instinct as Caroline—the instinct to cause mayhem, quite blithely and without scruple. He told him I was back, and poor old Jake maybe started thinking, maybe even got to feel slightly guilty. Anyway, the feeling came over him that he had to check me out, see what I’d become, assuage any feelings that he’d been a bad father to me. In a lazy sort of way, and provided it doesn’t inconvenience him in any way, Jake likes to feel that he’s a pretty good bloke.”

  “So the family was going any which way but the same way—with Rosalind the most vocal and active, still trying to preserve the image of her beloved father, who was in fact the nearest thing in the family to a con artist, and morally the murderer of his father to boot.”

  “That’s about it. Though one should really share the moral guilt around. Someone said that murder seems to run in families. There was no series of murders in the Cantelo family, but the one that was contemplated involved almost all the family.”

  “Except your aunt.”

  “Exactly. Except Clarissa. She was kept out, ostensibly because as a major inheritor she would be the first to be suspected, but in fact because they knew she wouldn’t consider for a moment going along with it.”

  “And when she began to get whiffs of what had been going on, she decided to get you out of the way because the financial motive that had led to the death of her father could very easily be transferred to you as her next heir.”

  “Yes. Stripped of the spiritualist trappings that she entertained in her mind, that was probably the essence of it. I don’t resent or regret what she did for a moment. It gave me a new life, and a new self.”

  “Which you’ll now go and resume?”

  “Oh yes. I’ve made an appointment to get a pet passport for Dolly. Thank God the old nonsense about quarantine is a thing of the past. I’ll put the house on the market, get the top price I can for it, and take refuge in darkest Brussels.”

  “And marry and have children and defy the curse of the Cantelos?”

  “Yes. I don’t for a moment believe in curses, do you?”

  “Not for a moment,” said Charlie.

  “To put the matter at its most basic, I’ve learned from the Cantelos a whole range of things not to do—in marriage as well as in bringing up children. I’m not going to go into the whole business of having a family with a thick, dark cloud hanging over me. The Cantelos are history. What happens now is up to me.”

  “True of you,” said Charlie, getting up, “and true of me. I’ve just heard I’ve got my inspectorship.”

  “Wonderful! Congratulations! The future is yours!” said Merlyn with a touch of irony.

  “Not really. An inspector is just the superintendent’s dogsbody, looking for a way of making his own mark.”

  “That’s true of all promotions. Unless you stay happily on the lowest rung—which may be the sensible thing to do—that’s how it is for everybody with ambitions.”

  “Well, I’ll look forward to you being president of the European Union.”

  “That will be a job for politicians, if we ever get it. I’m not a politician. I’m a civil servant. One of the lower forms of human life.”

  They parted outside the White Horse. Charlie went back to Millgarth to arrange a celebratory dinner with Felicity—which, since they wanted Carola to be involved, turned out to be the better sort of fast food joint. Merlyn wandered through town and dropped into an estate agent’s to start the process of ridding himself of the burden of the house in Congreve Street. Then he popped into W. H. Smith to riffle through their section of continental newspapers, to start the process of getting back into the work routine. He selected Paris Match and Corriere della Serra. The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was being childish again. Nothing new under the sun.

  He wandered around the paperback shelves, looking for something to read on the journey, but in fact musing on the fate of the brood brought up by Grandfather Cantelo. He thought that his mother must have been the most normal of all. He found Clarissa and perhaps Paul were also likeable, but Clarissa had taken refuge in her dubious clairvoyancy business, and Paul’s aspirations had led him far, but only geographically: he suspected that the creative writing professorship in Arkansas had very little to do with writing of any sort, either elevated or popular. Family Business had gone off at half-cock because he had no faith in himself or his satiric gifts. Both these attractive scions of the family had been damaged individuals. Paul’s target remained unhurt because Grandfather Cantelo was a bigger person than the flea-biting satirist who was his son: Grandfather did at least know about business, even if as a family man he was a disaster.

  Merlyn shook the thoughts from him, paid for his papers and a Peter Robinson, and left the shop.

  Out in the open area in the middle of Lands Lane, a little knot of religious maniacs, led by a woman with a foghorn voice, was proclaiming its faith to passersby, and to a few amused listeners whose expressions suggested they were encountering something out of The Lost World.

  “You are the chosen of the Lord, His own special people,” bellowed the woman, “but He demands of you obedience to His laws, the will to do His will daily, hourly. Is that too much to ask?”

  “A lot too much,” said a middle-aged woman in the group of spectators.

  “No, not a lot too much! The very least He could ask! The God Who made you, loves you when you do His will. But how do you think He feels when you trudge knee-high through the mire of adultery, perversion, vileness of all kinds—”

  There was a pull on Merlyn’s sleeve.

  “You got the price of a cup of tea, mate?”

  It was one of the little knot of believers: an old man, ill-shaven, with bright, sharp eyes.

  “I might have,” said Merlyn.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but I knew I could rely on you. You’re the right sort, I can always tell. Have you ever thought of becoming a British Israelite?”

  Suddenly the thought occurred to Merlyn that this might be Uncle Gerald, father of Malachi and Francis, lost long ago to the wilder shores of religion. For a moment he looked into the face with interest, intent on detecting signs of a Cantelo inheritance: the low forehead, the determined nose. He had almost physically to shake himself free of the impulse: Whatever need could he have for one more Cantelo relative? In this case a jostler for an eternal place in the heavenly pecking order? None whatsoever. H
e must stop, from now, being obsessed with the Cantelo family. He rummaged in his pocket for loose change.

  “Here, have this,” he said, handing the man a Euro.

  He wheeled around and went in search of a travel agent to book his flight back to Brussels. Then he phoned Danielle and left a message on her answering machine. “See you tomorrow” was followed by “Marry me.”

  About the Author

  Robert Barnard’s most recent novel is A Cry from the Dark. Among his many other books are The Mistress of Alderley, The Bones in the Attic, A Murder in Mayfair, The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori, No Place of Safety, The Bad Samaritan, The Masters of the House, A Scandal in Belgravia, and Out of the Blackout. Scribner released a classic edition of Death of a Mystery Writer in 2002. Winner of the prestigious Nero Wolfe Award as well as Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity awards, the eight-time Edgar nominee is a member of Britain’s prestigious Detection Club. In 2003, he was honored with the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in mystery writing. He lives with his wife, Louise, and with pets Jingle and Durdles, in Leeds, England.