Retribution: The Second Chances Trilogy Book Three

by M Mayle

  Seventeen churches of varying sizes and ages are crossed off the list when noon arrives with still no sign of a place to eat. At the first opportunity, he veers from the mapped-out route and takes his chances on an unnamed road. He hasn’t gone far before he sees a weathered sign advising of a village up ahead. Another sign boasts that archeological sites can be found nearby. He’d rather see a sign for a Blimpie Sub Shop. He’d content himself with a tandoori if need be. He’s even ready to eat mushy peas if he has to. On the outskirts of the village, he’s relieved to spot a picture board in front of a public house with a straw roof. The picture is of a black swan, fittingly enough, and a sticker on the door says cyclists are welcome.

  Inside, they serve him what they call a plowman’s lunch made up of a bread bun, cheese, pickle relish, and hardboiled egg, with an apple and grapes on the side. This sits exactly right. The Coca-Cola they provide isn’t cold and they don’t offer ice, but it nevertheless hits the spot. The barman’s talkative, asking what brings him to this part of Kent. Without saying why, Hoop answers truthfully that he’s interested in old churches. He could say he’s also interested in great stately homes and local celebrities, but that could make him memorable.

  He drinks another Coke before he leaves and takes an extra for the road. He’s glad for the extra when the terrain takes on some roll; he’s glad for a bike with gears when the roll becomes actual hills. As the afternoon wears on, he gets back on course after a long roadside stop to again match up church addresses and map quadrants. Now he’s on the lookout for the village of Harking. According to the map, it’s bordered by a Woodland Trust Estate—as they call their forest preserves—so it shouldn’t be hard to find.

  But he must have a ways to go yet because well-tended farms fill the view in every direction. Some are fruit farms with low-growing trees spaced out in even rows as far as the eye can see; others are planted with cereal grains and plots of root vegetables. He can only guess that the farms with vines trained to unheard of heights on frames taller than a man’s head are growing some foreign kind of pole beans. Maybe that’s what they store in the queer-shaped silos that interrupt the landscape in two’s and three’s.

  When forestland finally comes in sight, he’s on close watch for a signpost reading “Wheelwright Road” that will tell him he’s going the right way and has only a few more miles to go before reaching the next church—St. Margaret’s, according to the crumpled sheet from the phone book. He passes two crossroads without signposts of any kind and covers a lot of ground without seeing anything but trees and long runs of stone fencing. By his own estimation, he’s gone either too far or missed an uncharted turn somewhere. The burial ground he comes to looks like as good a place as any to stop and get his bearings.

  He crests the moderate rise that gives entrance to the cemetery and enters through a high arched gate. He walks the bike along the narrow graveled road, not because the grounds are all that hilly, but because he sees a couple of gravediggers across the way that might look on cycling among the dead as disrespectful. For the same reason, he resists sitting on any of the larger grave markers or the many that are toppled by age and instead pushes the bike over to the stone wall bordering the grounds. The wall is like all the others seen today—made of stones fitted together without mortar—but it’s sturdy enough to sit on once he’s stretched his legs and worked the worst cricks out of his back.

  Deep into map reading when a shadow falls over him, he looks up to see the owner of the shadow is carrying a spade-ended shovel. For a split second Hoop flinches the way he did when the lawyerwoman swung at him with a garden tool.

  “Ya one a them blokes ’at fancy grave rubbings?” the gravedigger says and sits down without being asked. “This is the new section yer in, the prized stones are down below, close by the church, they are,” he says, letting the shovel drop to one side.

  “What church?” Hoop says while wondering if grave rubbings are anything like grave robbings.

  “The one just there, over the hill, St Margaret’s. Innit the one yer lookin’ for?” The gravedigger stabs at Hoop’s open map with a blackened finger.

  “Yeah. Right. St. Margaret’s. Over the hill.” Hoop wants to stand up or at least stretch to see if there really is a church hiding behind the next crest, but he already looks dumb enough.

  The gravedigger fills and lights a tobacco pipe, then goes on talking like he’s being egged on. Bellyaches about working on a Sunday even though it’ll bring extra pay in his envelope; bellyaches even more about a broken backhoe; bellyaches most of all about the those wanting two graves dug on short notice for folks that’re long-dead.

  That makes even less sense than grave rubbings. “Two graves?” Hoop says of this fresh confusion while trying to understand what’s meant by long-dead.

  The gravedigger chimneys out a plume of smoke and says, “You’d think, wouldn’t ya, they coulda held off till the backhoe’s workin’ again. I ask ya now, what’s another day when it’s already took this long gettin’ the job done? But no, it is. Won’t hear of delay. Not after goin’ ta the trouble and cost a flyin’ a pair a stiffs over from America. And innit just like a high ’n’ mighty pop star, always wantin’ others ta kowtow.”

  “What pop star?” Hoop says without knowing if pop star is the same as rock star or what kowtow means.

  “Don’t know as I can say. Don’t pay mind to that kind ’less I have ta—such as now—but I may’ve heard my mate say it’s the same one ’at tied the knot here. A few weeks gone, that was, and wasn’t that ruckus hard ta ignore what with fancy motor coaches blockin’ the roads and them massive balloons clutterin’ the skies.”

  “When is the burial?”

  “I won’t be the one fillin’ in the grave holes so I can’t say the hour, but I do know it’s tomorrow. Monday. Why else would I be workin’ of a Sunday?”

  Hoop makes a big show of folding the map and stowing it in the rucksack. This keeps the gravedigger from seeing that his hands are shaking. Pulling his cap lower over his eyes keeps the gravedigger from seeing the sweat that’s about to stream off his shorn head and drip from his eyeglasses.

  The gravedigger advises him to get cracking if he’s going to complete his grave rubbings before the weather comes down. This draws attention to a darkening sky that might not have been noticed otherwise.

  “Off you go, then.” The gravedigger slaps the rear fender of the bike as he would the flank of a horse and sends Hoop in the direction of the church, where the best gravestones can be found. Where paydirt can be found if luck has finally come home to roost.

  On the narrow graveled road he hesitated to ride on before, he tops the hill and looks down on a church unmistakable as the one in the picture committed to memory. On level with the church, he reads a sign that didn’t appear in the picture. “St Margaret’s Church-in-the-Vale,” it says and gives the founding date as fourteenth century making it ancient in anyone’s book. On the other side of the paved road fronting the church he positions himself where the photographer stood to take a picture that seems bargain-priced now that everything checks out.

  Before leaving the area, he memorizes the view the way he did the picture. On the long ride back to Middlestone and the guest house, his head is so full of possibilities he hardly minds the heavy rain.

  — THIRTY-TWO —

  Midmorning, September 28, 1987

  Nate corrects an inclination to drift to the right side of the road and reapplies himself to the job of arriving at the country church in one piece. Fortunately, he’s on a sparsely traveled road when the drift occurs, so there’s little chance of colliding with anything larger than a tractor. Or the lone bicycle rider he passed a half mile ago.

  Amanda, in her capacity as Executive Assistant to the World—a title he’s threatened to have printed on her business cards—is coordinating transportation needs. One less thing for him to worry about. Not that he’ll notice the difference, not when Amanda herself is one of the worries. But that worry will have
to wait; there are too many others demanding immediate attention.

  He slows the Bentley at an unmarked intersection and very nearly turns onto Wheelwright Road before remembering they’re meeting at the church today, not Terra Firma. He again applies himself to arriving at the burial site early enough to review the arrangements one last time.

  Although he doesn’t disapprove of the plan to lay Laurel’s parents to rest in a remote English churchyard, he’s dead set against the timing—Amanda’s diversionary tactic notwithstanding. While certain members of the media might be led to believe a disinterment was a burial, an individual of Hoople Jakeway’s deranged determination might not. So went Nate’s argument against Amanda’s arranging for a mock burial service at a high profile New Jersey cemetery to disguise the opening of Laurel’s mother’s grave. So went all his failed arguments against holding public ceremonies—bogus or otherwise—until Jakeway has been captured.

  “What-the-fuck-ever,” he mutters and slows at the appropriate turnoff this time. By prearrangement he leaves the large sedan in a spot just beyond the lychgate, more on the road than off. He flips a curt wave to Bemus, who’s similarly positioned a Range Rover up ahead, then scowls his way through the gate and up the steep hill to a burial site marked by a large faded marquee.

  He approves the fake grass softening the appearance of the two open graves, the folding chairs fencing either side of the graves, the tarps covering twin mounds of displaced soil a discreet distance away. All as specified. As planned for. Nothing out of the ordinary; no lavish displays of flowers, no throne-like seating arrangements, no red carpet in any sense. And no disgruntled gravediggers skulking about, bemoaning their lot in life because of a malfunctioning backhoe.

  Before descending the graveled path to the church, Nate takes another look around. Gravediggers are not his only concern. St. Margaret’s-in-the-Vale is on every gravestone-rubber’s list as a prime location for stones dating from Norman times. Chances are slim that devotees of that offbeat hobby might also keep up with the contemporary music scene, but it would take only one. One of any sort of hobbyist who might recognize Colin Elliot could be enough to attract the attention of an assassin.

  The French have a better word for the shiver traveling his spine as he calculates that risk and takes a last look at the spot that might have been Colin’s burial site had things ended differently in Michigan. Frisson—he remembers the word when he reaches level ground with his spine still vulnerable to strange sensations.

  At the front of the church, where the mourners will assemble, he takes exception to everything he sees. The road here is too wide, the vistas too open with too many points of access and too many avenues of escape. Never mind that all this has been taken into consideration by those who do preemptive surveillance for a living and okayed by him as recently as yesterday. Today, it looks like nothing so much as a trap, an opinion he’ll have to keep to himself because it’s too goddammed late to halt the proceedings.

  Although the church won’t be used for the ceremony, he goes inside, grimaces at a dim interior which affords more hiding places than he’d care to count. He drops onto a hard wooden bench near the back, where he could be seen as a parishioner for having his whole body bowed in a posture of supplication. Dark thoughts come at him like a fall of dominos righting themselves, each one propping up the next. No, it’s more like a chain reaction of tombstones, each one thrusting up to rebuke him with graven notice of some step he didn’t take, was slow to take, or shouldn’t have taken. As relates to the Hoople Jakeway threat, the procession seems endless. A bad acid trip would be preferable. Any kind of trip. “Jesus,” he says softly—reverently—and gets to his feet. Maybe he can walk it off; maybe he can outdistance this absurdity.

  Striding up the center aisle of the church, he swivels this way and that to look inside each high-framed pew, then pushes his way into a side chamber, where he surprises a frowning clergyman wearing the robes of his calling, and Tom Jensen, whose girth and stature declare his occupation.

  They both assure him the church and grounds have been swept for intruders within the last hour and that all approaches to the venue have been monitored since daybreak. Tom reminds that those approaches will be cordoned off to all comers once the hearses and mourners have been waved through. The dour cleric tsk-tsk’s that the needs of the bereaved should take precedence over all this cloak-and-dagger bother.

  Ideally, they should. But without all this cloak-and-dagger bother, the bereaved might have even more to be bereaved about. That’s what he’d like to say. Instead, he mumbles respectful agreement and slips out through a side door opening onto the oldest part of the burial grounds. There, he picks his way through a stand of blackened slabs that want to mimic the tombstones of his flashback—his near-hallucination or whatever the hell that was—and heads for the dry-stone wall separating churchyard from a heavily wooded stretch of land.

  With one eye out for interlopers and the other for the arrival of full cast and crew, he paces this perimeter to its highest point, from which he can view the church as well as the newer section of cemetery where the ceremony will take place.

  Nothing within this view suggests a rational reason for being infected with worry. As panacea, he might be wise to remember that the principals were married here with relatively minor disruption by public and press—and without his direct involvement. It wouldn’t hurt to recognize that the open expanses at the front of the church are easier to safeguard than the woods behind him, say, so he might want to rethink his negative assessment of that area.

  He might want to rethink all his negative assessments because today’s security would not be tighter if Jakeway had been spotted in downtown Middlestone. Everyone involved in the production has been background-checked and checked again, their likenesses compared to artist renderings of Jakeway in various elements of disguise. No one’s been spared. Not even the rector, not even the gravediggers, not even the husky female driver of one of the hearses.

  Things could only be improved if Colin were in disguise and wearing body armor, but he’d no more stand still for that than he’d agree to electrify the Terra Firma fencing, install motion sensors, and put off the renovation of the oasthouse complex.

  During Nate’s attempt to wear himself down, two hearses have lumbered into position at the lychgate. Now a large ordinary passenger van pulls in behind the hearses and empties of the men involved. At the same time, a standard funerary limo disgorges women passengers at the front of the church, where they’re met by the rector.

  Colin, the Chandler brothers, Chris Thorne, Bemus, and Tom Jensen comprise the pallbearers wheeling each coffin into the temporary shelter of the lychgate. From there, on signal, they’ll have to carry each coffin up the steep incline to the burial site. The other men—Emmet, Brownell Yates, and Detective Grillo—distance themselves from this group as though afraid they’ll be pressed into service.

  In the other direction, the rector is visible leading the women from the church up a more gradual incline. Amanda stands out in this small group, pausing every third step or so to survey the scene or speak into her walkie-talkie. She eventually spots him on the heights and flickers a discreet wave. He acknowledges her by selecting one of the smoother cleaner capstones to sit on, signaling this is where he’ll be for the duration.

  Emmet, Yates, and Grillo join him once the second casket has been transferred. Makes sense, he supposes; they’re as auxiliary to the actual ceremony as he is, and they’re far enough away from the ceremony that the planned briefing session could begin here if they were so inclined. But that won’t be the case; to a man, they are as transfixed as he is with what amounts to a pantomime going on below. And just as well that they can’t hear what’s being said, the gestures of the eulogizers are affecting enough.

  “Amen,” Grillo mutters thirty minutes later when the caskets are lowered into the ground. He could be speaking for all of them as Laurel performs the final ritual by sprinkling handfuls of soil into each gra
ve; he could be venting relief that the drama has finally ended or expressing awe for the performers who got through it without breaking down. But his gestures indicate something else prompted the muted pronouncement.

  The detective’s head is cocked at the wooded area behind them, brows lifted, eyes rolled in that direction. “What was that?” he says behind a muffling hand. “I heard something,” he says with more eyerolling.

  They all listen; they all dismiss his concerns one way or another.

  “Hey, I know when I hear somethin’ rustling.” Grillo say without muffling.

  “I’m guessing it was hedgehogs, then,” Emmet says.

  “Angel’s wings’d be my guess,” Yates says.

  “One of our people covering the perimeter, no doubt.” Nate offers the logical explanation, congratulates himself for being able to offer it with conviction. Less than an hour ago he would have been with Grillo, ready to believe any incursion was possible and willing to believe any disturbance was life-threatening.

  They all stay put until the recessional from the gravesite reaches the church and breaks up into small clusters. At Nate’s behest they merge with the mourners, issue hackneyed phrases of condolence to the principals and prepare to leave the church grounds for Middlestone and the designated venue for the briefing. But their group hasn’t taken three steps toward the side road where the Bentley’s parked when Grillo halts their little procession.

  “What’s wrong with here?” he asks.

  “Sorry?’ Emmet says.

  “The church, here. What’s wrong with conducting the briefing right here in the church? You weren’t so hot about bein’ seen at the place I lined up in town, that guest house I’m stayin’ at. A little too quaint for your taste, maybe? Too lackin’ in the amenities department?” Grillo’s jibe is directed at Emmet but includes them all.

  “Don’t mistake me, detective. I’ve no qualms about being seen at a guest house, quaint or otherwise, with or without amenities,” Emmet answers for all. “I do, however, have misgivings—as previously stated—about the nature of a briefing that if observed by the wrong parties could create just the sort of misapprehension you seem to be laboring under. That is, if you care to remember, the reason we agreed not to get together in London and—”