The Grail Tree

by Jonathan Gash

Let her have her way. ‘Grail, then. Honestly I’m not. But one thing keeps nagging in my mind.’ I weighed Martha up. Maybe it wasn’t the right moment to talk about killing. ‘Is it possible that . . . well, that Henry had something really valuable? I mean, did you ever see his, er, Grail?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head.

  ‘Didn’t he show you a picture, draw it for you, anything?’

  ‘No.’ She was looking at me, though I tried to stare casually into the middle distance. ‘Lovejoy, what is it?’

  I shrugged, wondering how best to go on. For all I knew Martha herself might have . . . No. Impossible. Look at the woman, for heaven’s sake, the state she was in. I decided to plunge.

  ‘The boat. It was just a hull.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So tin boats only explode when there’s something to explode.’

  I’ll say this for Martha Cookson. She’s pretty cool. She sat there a full five minutes, occasionally lifting her head as if to speak but saying nothing and letting her eyes wander about the garden. She was very pale.

  ‘You believe . . .?’ she tried finally.

  ‘Yes, love.’

  ‘Have you told the Inspector?’

  ‘I’ve tried to, the pompous sod. He takes no notice. I’ve had a go at him. Look.’ I leaned across our table earnestly. ‘Henry said he’d fetch something back, right? A day passes. Then a . . . er, a tragedy. See what I mean, Martha? Henry said he was going to fetch something precious back. Well,’ I ended lamely, ‘maybe he did, see?’

  ‘You mean –’ Martha faced up bravely.

  ‘You know what I mean, Martha. No need to say it.’ We obviously had to go in stages or she’d be shattered. ‘Where did Henry go that day?’

  ‘I don’t know. He took some money.’ She wept a steady minute or so, remembering. ‘Henry isn’t – wasn’t – a very worldly man. I always had a tobacco jar in the living room with money in it, so he could take whatever he needed. It’s empty. He was pleased that day, very quiet. Kept to himself.’ Again the slight defiance. ‘He prayed a lot. And before midday he went to church. They don’t burn candles or anything hereabouts, so he does it in the stables.’

  ‘He what?’

  Martha fidgeted, obviously wondering if it was disloyal to reveal Henry’s foibles. She decided I could take it.

  ‘I was always having to buy candles. He had rather a thing about sanctification, you see. I can’t say I quite understood entirely.’ She sniffed again while I pondered the rum image of an elderly reject lighting candles in a stable. Some symbolism there, I supposed, if you bothered to look.

  ‘Always in the stables?’ I asked shrewdly.

  ‘Not necessarily. The boat, the stables, the garden shed sometimes. On the little wharf, the river bank beneath the big willow trees there, if there were no anglers out.’

  ‘Where would Henry actually keep it, though?’

  ‘He only ever brought it once before, that he ever admitted.’ She smiled, full of tears. ‘About six years ago. Twenty pounds of candles, all in one week. You see, the church . . .’

  I nodded. East Anglia’s so Low Church you’ve to be careful blowing your nose in evensong – the merest flash of a white linen hankie’s enough to set people worrying that papists are smuggling altarcloths in.

  ‘Those two friends of his?’ I asked. ‘The ones I met at your house after lunch?’

  ‘Sarah and Thomas?’

  ‘How often did he see them?’

  ‘Very rarely. They never stay, only maybe an hour or so. You know how old college relationships decay.’

  ‘Show me the house?’ I asked. She thought a bit, nodded and discreetly paid the bill.

  She let me poke about on my own outside.

  The stables were a short row of three but now they were connected. Henry or somebody had removed the intersecting walls. It was quite a large roomy building, single windows to each third and those daft half-doors horses like to gaze over, only there were no horses. Sure enough, you could see black smudges and opaque white droplets where his untidy candles had burned on the sill. He had erected a trestle table for a crude work bench at the far end. I couldn’t resist going across, though it seemed an intrusion.

  A spindle, hand-drill and a few small saws. A power drill. A good piece of thickish mahogany. A lathe. Underneath a table was a chair, in pieces. I picked up a loose leg, lovely African mahogany. Though you can’t really tell without seeing it entire, it had the feel of a mid-1880 English withdrawing-room chair by a good maker. Its weight puzzled me until I found the plug. ‘Whoops. Sorry, Henry.’

  I’d intruded further than I wanted to. You fake old furniture by increasing its weight, making vigilant would-be purchasers think they’re buying heavy and dense (and very rare) hardwoods. A really skilled faker will drill down the interior of a chair leg and insert a beaten lead cylinder, carefully plugging the hole up with filings glued in place by an epoxy resin, or plastic wood stained under a coat of hard polyurethane varnish. It isn’t too easy to spot by naked eye alone if it’s done really well, but I’ve never seen a ‘reamer’, as it’s known in the antiques game, you can’t detect with a reasonable hand lens.

  ‘You sly old dog, Henry,’ I said. He wouldn’t want this wicked evidence found after his promise to Martha to go straight. I mentally asked Henry’s permission to come up one day when Martha was out. I’d finish it for him. ‘No good leaving a job half done, is it?’ I asked the bare ceiling innocently.

  There was also a drawing. An emigrant miner’s brooch. It looked as though Henry was a regular contributor to the world of so-called antiques. These brooches are lovely small solid gold works of art. Cornish miners off to South Africa’s gold fields in late Victorian days made these precious brooches and pendants, often including a South African gold coin of the year in the design. Mostly though it is crossed shovels, picks, lamps, flags and suchlike. Naughty old Henry was obviously intending to fake one. I scanned around, but no gold.

  The stable floor was beaten earth. Bare beams in clear view. No signs that one part of the whitewashed wall had been repainted lately. I went on to the cobbled courtyard to see the two loyal yokels duck back behind their kitchen curtains.

  The shed was a blank. Hardly anything but garden tools. I meandered about to get the feel of the place. From the workshop bench in the stables you could see the shattered longboat and its huge tethering willow tree. I lit the stump of a candle and put it in a broken plantpot for safety before heading back in. Martha would be wondering what I was up to. I was careful to walk all round the house first. It took some time.

  ‘Did you see everything?’ She’d made hot crumpets, for heaven’s sake. I like them but get covered in butter. Everybody else never does.

  ‘Almost.’

  ‘I suppose you have questions to ask, Lovejoy.’

  I drew breath. ‘There are two sets of stapled wires leading up to one of the windows.’

  ‘That was Henry’s idea.’

  ‘An extra phone, aerials?’

  ‘No.’ She smiled, embarrassed again, but defiant. ‘Henry’s hobby was badgers, owls, wildlife. He had night cameras and bleeps. They used to wake . . . us up.’

  ‘And . . .?’

  ‘He’d sometimes photograph them.’

  ‘At night? In the dark?’

  ‘Oh, yes. From our bedroom window. And night-glasses by the bedside.’

  She showed me Henry’s elementary electronic centre upstairs. One was a commercial warning device, an interrupted ray system. Anyone walking between an issue and receptor outside activated an alarm by their bed. I’d found three boxes concealed among low foliage and wires from them dipping into the ground. The other was a battery-operated bell for the outside tripwire, crude but good. Benign old Henry had been pretty vigilant.

  ‘Did Henry set them every night?’

  ‘Without fail.’

  I asked to see his books. They were theological, travel, literary and biography. But who ever heard of a wildlife enthusias
t with no books about wildlife? Outside, I walked to and fro across the garden. Electronic cells were set in the mortar of the balustrade. You couldn’t reach the boat’s mooring without activating the alarm. The tripwire ran from the river to the house. However you reached the boat, you’d create some sort of a racket. I had one crumpet for the road, and said my thanks.

  ‘Are you any nearer, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Give me time, Martha, and I’ll say yes.’

  Martha gave me a lift back to the village. I waved at the lovable Constable Jilks to brighten his day and got Martha to drop me at the chapel to show the constabulary what posh friends I’d got.

  Lydia was walking round the cottage. She jumped a mile when I bowled up.

  ‘Admiring the view?’ I joked. I momentarily wished I was in a Lagonda in which I could screech to a stop like Honkworth does in his massive roadster, but caught myself in time. Man’s desire to impress a bird has a very bad record.

  ‘Yes,’ Lydia said, all misty, gazing at the obnoxious view. ‘Isn’t it just beautiful?’

  ‘Eh?’ I peered. She actually meant it. I cast a glance at the river below, the valley’s green shoulder, the woods and fields and a few cows noshing grass. ‘Do you mean the viaduct?’

  A lovely railway still runs over the river a mile off, though trees obscure full sight of it. There are seven luscious brick arches soaring from the fields so the railway can straddle the obnoxious countryside and passengers need not notice it if they don’t want.

  ‘Of course not.’ She smiled at me. ‘The fields. The farms. How lucky you are.’

  ‘Come inside,’ I said, thinking: I’ve got another nutter here. I always seem to draw the short straw. ‘None of that’s man-made.’

  ‘But it’s still beautiful.’

  ‘How can it be?’ I decided to brew up for her. She was the sort who’d admire my domestic skills.

  ‘Because it’s alive, and pretty.’ She shelled off her coat and was stuck for a place to hang it. I pretended not to notice because I’ve only one peg and that’s snowed under. People should learn not to depend on me so much. ‘You can’t call a viaduct pretty, can you?’

  ‘Yes.’ I got the kettle on. She came into the main room carrying her coat on her arm. She’d brought a bag full of notebooks and learned tomes.

  ‘That’s absurd.’

  I took her gently by the shoulders and sat her on the divan, to her alarm. I saw Jean’s dire warnings streak into her eyes.

  ‘Listen,’ I began savagely, more than a little narked. ‘Once upon a time, this valley was just as you see it, but without the wires, the bridges, the viaduct, the roads. Then a gang of hard tough men came hauling stones. They scrabbled in the fields and splashed in the water flinging up a beautiful arching roadway from hill to hill. The cholera came and they died in their ramshackle tents by the score. They drowned in the floods and some are still crushed under the landslides of that terrible winter. They froze in the snow and shattered their limbs under massive stones. Their women worked with them, carrying hods of bricks and iron rails. Their children were dosed with nepenthe so they didn’t cry from their hunger gripes. They slogged twenty hours a day and died drunk and penniless.’ I could see the fear of rape had dwindled. ‘Now, love, don’t you try telling me that a bit of dirt and a blade of grass is beautiful when there’s an old viaduct to look at. If mankind made it there’s beauty in every crack. Beauty’s not a posh field or a bored cow.’

  She said nothing. I let her go and rummaged about for books and catalogues to give her. She went all quiet making the tea. I gave her a summary of reading, starting with Savage on antique forgeries, Crawley on Furniture, Bainbridge on antique glass, J.N. George on short and long handguns, and a collection of catalogues on some famous antique auctions of the past decade.

  ‘Read that lot fast. I want to teach you to buy later on this week.’ I rather hurried her after that because I wanted to find out who’d been at Cambridge with old Henry. She said a friend was calling for her at the chapel crossroads and she’d get home all right. I had an idea it was Col. He was sure to be a fine clean-living lad. I watched her down the drive. She gave a half-glance towards the viaduct spanning the river valley.

  ‘So long,’ I called after her. She hesitated at the lane as if to wave, but her hand never quite made it. Ah, well.

  There was nothing for it. A couple of minutes to lock up and I cranked up the Ruby. It notched a pacy fifteen up the lane. Your friend and mine stepped forward, hand raised, once more to enforce personal prejudice. I pulled in obligingly, smiling.

  ‘Got you, Lovejoy!’ George squawked delightedly, hauling out a notebook. Being already chained ostentatiously to a pencil, he was all prepared. I watched the little ceremony with interest. They’re teaching absolutely everybody the alphabet these days. Education’s wonderful.

  ‘Doing what, Constable?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘Driving your car while –’ He paused.

  I said, all patience, ‘I know you’ve reported me for drunken driving, George, but my case isn’t heard till next week.’

  ‘Get out,’ he growled, jerking his thumb to show he meant if.

  ‘If I do, George,’ I said gently, ‘I’ll kick you silly.’ We waited. ‘Well, George, what’s it to be? Me resisting wrongful arrest and you with your leg in traction, or a general return to sweetness and light? Maslow will be very vexed.’

  ‘Maslow?’ They go all shifty when you’ve got them. He’d heard of Maslow, obviously a right bastard to everyone, police and all. It wasn’t just me.

  ‘You know him, surely?’ I chatted. ‘Burly bloke, about middle age, smokes –’

  ‘One day,’ our law-abiding constabulary threatened, uttering foul obscenities. ‘One day, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Any day, you like, George,’ I offered back, ‘but remember that I’ll leave you seriously in need of an orthopaedic surgeon. Agreed? Mind your piggies.’ I’d unlocked the handbrake while passing the time of day and zoomed off with a surge – well, a flick – of power towards the Cambridge road.

  War, folks.

  Chapter 12

  EAST ANGLIAN ROADS are a rum mixture of corkscrews and rulers. You’re bumbling along a stretch running straight as a die over the low Hundreds, whistling and thinking how good it will be to reach the next antiques shop, when suddenly you’re fighting to stay on the most macabre switchback roads on earth. The straight stretches we owe to the good old Romans. The crazy bits are legacies from the Ancient Britons or rearrangements carried out by the Early English, undoubtedly history’s most forgetful organizers. They had an unenviable habit of losing parts of the Roman roads, or just simply deciding that too much straightness was a drag and that there were prettier views elsewhere. An artistic attitude, but death to sane travel.

  My Ruby spluttered thankfully to a stop in Cambridge. We were knackered as each other by the journey. I streaked into the town library for an hour, then strolled to Selward College.

  A hoary old philosopher led me through beautiful ancient doorways and across quadrangles to an office containing a choice of luscious bird undulating at one desk and a decrepit ancient crone withering away at another. He deposited me with unerring foresight at the crone. I explained the problem, my poor Uncle Henry dying. I wanted to get his obituary details right.

  ‘Good heavens!’ she squeaked. ‘We were notified only yesterday! He was one of ours! How very sad! You must be so upset. May we express our sincerest condolences?’

  ‘Er, thank you.’

  ‘Same here,’ said the luscious bird from the other desk. She didn’t look sincerely condoling at all. She was doing things with a lipstick. I forgot to be downhearted.

  ‘I’ll get the records for you.’ The crone wheezed off into the middle distance. I sat on the luscious bird’s desk.

  ‘Look, comrade,’ I began. ‘Old H.S. was no more my uncle than you.’

  ‘So?’ She pretended to be busy typing but I put a stop to all that by taking the paper out.

 
‘So you have a golden opportunity to help me.’

  ‘Cheek.’ She wound some new paper in the machine but I could tell she didn’t much care what went on it.

  ‘Your reward will be a slender chance of making me, on some future nocturnal occasion,’ I said, ‘and the benefit of knowing that you’ve soared in my estimation of you – already very high.’

  ‘Stop looking like that.’

  She made a great show of buttoning her twinset.

  ‘Send me a list of old Henry’s class.’

  ‘She’s doing it for you,’ she said, jerking her head. Women don’t like each other. I’ve noticed that.

  ‘Ah,’ I added. ‘I want their full addresses and other personal details, you see.’

  ‘That’s not allowed.’

  ‘That’s why I came to see you, love.’

  She gave me a quizzical glance and typed a line in low spirits. ‘What do you want it for?’

  I could hardly tell her I was going to report one of the people on her list for complicity in murder.

  ‘It’s to do with a will,’ I admitted reluctantly. ‘The old man was a millionaire. He has these houses and big estates and that. His daughter’s being done out of her inheritance by this old woman.’ I thought of calling the old woman Mrs Blenkinsop, as that was the name on the crone’s desk, but decided it was stretching the story too far. I shrugged, half disclaiming. ‘It’s really none of my business, I suppose. But I was . . . well, friendly once with the old man’s daughter, though we broke up, and . . . er, and . . .’

  ‘And you still want to help her, don’t you?’ the little helpful darling finished for me, all misty. ‘Despite having parted,’ she prattled on, ‘you can’t let that grasping old bag do her down, and you’ve come here trying to protect her, though deep down –’

  She rambled away adoringly while I looked cut to the quick but noble with it.

  ‘I’ll be outside the main gate, if you can do anything, love.’

  I had a hard time tearing my eyes from her as the crone creaked back carrying a blue volume. We disengaged hands just in time.

  Mrs Blenkinsop confirmed old Henry’s dates. I quickly scanned the class photograph and the list of names, all casual. I thanked her, bowed gently towards Joyce’s desirable shape and strode nobly from the room. It can be quite pleasant inventing the odd falsehood. The trouble is I start believing the bloody stuff. I was out into the college grounds before I could stop seeing myself as a brokenhearted lover and made my way to a pieshop opposite Selward’s main gate.