The Lazarus Tree

by Robert Richardson

  ‘Stephen, if Michelle’s playing strange games and if they could be even remotely connected with Gabriel’s death, then ...’ Maltravers shook his head impatiently. ‘It can’t be kept a village secret because you don’t like it.’

  ‘Who murdered Gabriel has been kept secret,’ Stephen pointed out. ‘I’m convinced some people have suspicions, but they haven’t told the police about them. It’s that sort of place.’

  ‘But if somebody knows anything that might help solve a murder, they have to tell the police. You know ...’ Maltravers broke off in frustration. ‘For Christ’s sake, why am I having to spell this out to you?’

  ‘You don’t have to spell it out, Gus,’ Stephen replied. ‘I know. I just need you to help me through it.’ They stared at each other for several moments, then Maltravers broke the silence. ‘I’d like you to buy me a drink. Suddenly I need one. And we seem to have a lot to talk about.’

  As the two men left the churchyard, Michelle rolled out of the lounger as the last of the afternoon sun moved off her. She stretched lazily and looked across to St Leonard’s through the gap where the gate broke the high garden hedge and saw them passing under the lychgate. Flinty and suspicious, Medmelton eyes glittered like a lizard’s.

  THREE

  Nature had not been kind to Mildred Thomson. In her childhood, people had remarked on her energy and constant laughter, diplomatically avoiding any comment on her looks. As she grew up in a generation which had neither invented the word nor recognised the concept of a teenager, even the most charitable had to say she was ... different; the less charitable bluntly called her ugly. Increasingly conscious of her appearance, she became resentful of other girls, any one of whom seemed pretty in her presence. During the Second World War, she lived away from Medmelton for the only period in her life, working as a canteen assistant in Plymouth dockyard, where sexually frustrated sailors outnumbered available and co-operative females. The word rapidly spread that when all else failed there was always Mildred — and all else failed constantly. Peace ended the job and with it a time of pleasure and satisfaction. In 1946 she returned to her parents’ all-purpose shop and for the rest of her life went no further from Medmelton than Exeter and occasional return visits to Plymouth. By the time her parents died, she had become as much a part of the village as the Memorial Hall, which was also unlovely, functional and taken for granted.

  But Plymouth had left a sour aftertaste. Between nineteen and twenty-four, Mildred Thomson had enjoyed the attentions of men, something she would hardly ever know again. Her contemporaries flirted, dated, and were chased; Mildred sliced bacon. Then they married; Mildred threw confetti and cried herself to sleep after the one occasion when she caught the bride’s bouquet. Then they produced daughters; Mildred sold them boiled sweets. Then the daughters married and Mildred was no longer invited to weddings. Then the daughters had daughters and all of them were pretty. Memories of brief happiness turned sour and quietly rotted into bitterness and resentment. Emotional needs that could not be fed turned inward and consumed her.

  Then she began to detect the dissatisfaction among the teenagers hanging around the village, bored with its monotony, convinced that if they could only escape to Bristol or London or anywhere, life would become exciting. There was nothing to do in Medmelton — until Mildred offered something forbidden, guarded like a thrilling secret. Because only a carefully selected few were allowed to know it. And of that few, Michelle Dean was special. Granddaughter of a woman who had hurt Mildred with unthinking adolescent cruelty years before, father unknown, Medmelton eyes reversed, daring, rebellious and with the ability to keep silent about anything.

  *

  ‘What an extraordinary looking woman,’ Maltravers commented as he and Stephen walked away from Medmelton Stores where he had stopped to buy more cigarettes.

  ‘You mean Mildred?’

  ‘That woman in the shop. I hate to be unkind, but I’ve never seen anyone quite like that before. When she speaks, her mouth stays still and her face moves.’

  Stephen laughed. ‘Sorry. We’re used to Mildred’s looks, but they are a bit off-putting at first. She’s all right.’

  ‘Is she married?’ Maltravers asked as they crossed the green towards the Raven.

  ‘No,’ Stephen replied, ‘although everyone believes she’s worth a packet. She inherited the shop from her parents and it’s a gold mine. You’d think someone would have been prepared to put up with her looks to get their hands on the money.’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t want that,’ Maltravers commented. ‘But when nature’s been that unfair, you have to find some compensations. What are hers?’

  ‘Classic gossipmonger, I expect,’ Stephen said. ‘The shop’s a focal point of the village, so everybody knows Mildred. She can be moody sometimes, but who can blame her?’

  They reached the pub and Maltravers followed Stephen into the lounge bar. Dating back into hazy time, the Raven had remained unchanged for centuries until it fell victim to a brewery combine’s modernisation programme. Broad oak floorboards sprinkled with sawdust had been swept and covered with fitted carpet; the tough texture of granite walls smothered with plaster; evocative dirt-aged beams cleaned up and painted; a plain wooden counter where one could imagine characters out of Hardy drinking rough cider replaced with an anonymous polished bar, brass fittings and padded stools duplicated in thousands of other pubs. It had been sacrilege in the shape of the corporate plan, spawned of a mentality that would put plastic thatch on Anne Hathaway’s cottage. Maltravers looked at the labels clipped to a row of imitation pump handles, all offering beers he would refuse in London, and settled for a glass of wine. Bland melodies recorded by bored session musicians seeped through the sterile room.

  ‘O brave new world,’ he groaned as they sat down. ‘Where’s the Space Invader machine?’

  ‘There isn’t one,’ Stephen told him. ‘They tried it, but most people still played dominoes and cribbage.’

  ‘There’s hope yet ... anyway, let’s get back to Patrick Gabriel. Do you seriously think Michelle was mixed up with his death?’

  ‘I think she could be mixed up with this nonsense under the Lazarus Tree — and that obviously could be linked to Gabriel,’ Stephen replied. ‘I know it’s bizarre, but I don’t think I’m being irrational.’

  ‘All right.’ Maltravers discovered that his wine was better than he had expected. ‘Let’s start with Gabriel. Did Michelle have anything to do with him while he was here? Where did he stay, incidentally?’

  ‘He rented a cottage next to the rectory behind the church. It belongs to some friends of his in London,’ Stephen told him. ‘I don’t know if Michelle had anything to do with him, but it’s possible. He often wandered about the village and was prepared to talk to anyone.’

  An ugly possibility crossed Maltravers’s mind; Michelle would have been only about fourteen at the time Patrick Gabriel was staying in Medmelton ... he kept the thought to himself.

  ‘Is she interested in poetry?’ he asked.

  ‘In certain poets — and she likes Gabriel’s work.’

  ‘They’d have got on like a house on fire, then. Gabriel thought that everyone should fall down and worship his genius.’ Maltravers did not like the way in which the unpleasant thought returned. ‘But, even so, it’s a hell of a jump from them talking to each other to her knowing something about his death.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Stephen acknowledged. ‘But nobody knows anything about Gabriel’s death, so everything becomes possible. Most of us were as mystified as the police. There was no apparent reason why anyone should kill him and rumour took over. It became a sort of challenge to come up with any theory more excessive than the last one. If you believed them all, just about anyone in Medmelton could have done it. The weirdest one I heard was that the rector was mixed up in it.’

  Maltravers looked amused. ‘And what was the basis for that?’

  ‘I can’t remember now.’ Stephen leant forward on the table. ‘It was crap anyw
ay — and most of the other theories weren’t any better — but everything suggests that Patrick Gabriel was murdered by someone from this village. And until I know who it was and why they did it, I don’t know who else could have been involved. And that now includes Michelle. I don’t like that, Gus, but I can’t ignore it.’

  Maltravers remained silent for a few moments, absently splitting open the edge of a beer mat with his thumbnail. Stephen needed reassurance, but without more information it was impossible to give it to him.

  ‘Fill me in on the details of the murder,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve forgotten most of them.’

  ‘Details are scarce anyway,’ Stephen replied. ‘Gabriel was apparently killed at the Lazarus Tree — there was no sign that his body had been taken there from somewhere else. The police combed the churchyard, but didn’t come up with anything. It was in the middle of a dry spell and the ground was bone hard. They never found the weapon, although ...’

  ‘Just a minute,’ Maltravers interrupted. ‘I remember reading that the body was found in the morning, but when was he actually killed?’

  ‘According to the police, between midnight and one o’clock.’

  ‘So what was he doing in the churchyard at that time ... and who knew he’d be there?’

  Stephen shrugged. ‘Join the guessing game. He was drinking in here until just after eleven, then he certainly went back to the cottage because he telephoned somebody in London about eleven thirty. This all came out in the press reports.’

  ‘Anything significant about the phone call?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. I think it was to his agent. Funny time to call.’

  ‘Typical of him,’ Maltravers said. ‘He kept to his own clock and expected everyone else to adjust to it. Did the police turn up anything in the cottage?’

  ‘The only significant thing was that the poetry wasn’t there. There were several sets of fingerprints and they wanted to know who they belonged to. They finally set out to fingerprint everyone in Medmelton — it wouldn’t have been difficult, it’s a small enough place — but there was too much resistance.’

  ‘You mean people refused?’

  ‘The police can’t force you to let them take your fingerprints,’ Stephen pointed out. ‘There were endless arguments about it in here and a lot of people wouldn’t have anything to do with it. They got uptight about being suspected.’

  ‘But they weren’t suspected,’ Maltravers argued. ‘It was just elimination.’

  ‘I know that, you know that. They weren’t having it.’

  ‘So how many wouldn’t co-operate?’

  Stephen shrugged. ‘I don’t know exactly, but a lot. Telling the police to get lost became something to boast about.’

  ‘I assume that you co-operated.’

  ‘Yes — but Veronica didn’t. She just said it was nothing to do with her. She wouldn’t give permission for Michelle either. It was as though ...’ Stephen hesitated, ‘... either as though finding who killed Gabriel wasn’t important or that outsiders shouldn’t interfere.’

  ‘A murder inquiry is hardly interference,’ Maltravers commented.

  ‘Not everybody thinks like that in Medmelton.’ Stephen finished his beer. ‘I’m going to have another half. Same again? We’ve got time.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  More customers had arrived and Maltravers watched Stephen greeting them at the bar. There was the instant camaraderie of people who inhabited a small, insular world, elliptical remarks incomprehensible to an outsider. It was unremarkable enough; pubs in even the most densely populated areas of London had coteries of regulars sharing a localised identity. But in Medmelton it ran deep, jealously guarded to the extent of defying outside authority. Had any of those who refused to co-operate with the police done so because they knew something which they had decided should go no further? A resentment of outsiders taken to extremes? Fulfilling Stephen’s request that he should try and find something out could run into very solid walls. Absorbed with his thoughts, he did not register as someone else came into the pub and paused by his table.

  ‘Hello again.’

  For a moment, the name would not come back, then he remembered. ‘Hello. Sally Baker. The directions were perfect. Thank you.’

  ‘It’s not hard to find ... Can I buy you a welcome-to-Medmelton drink?’

  ‘Thanks, but Stephen’s getting them. Would you like to join us?’

  ‘I’m meeting someone. Another time though.’

  She crossed to the bar where she also was welcomed by several other customers, including Stephen who had just been served. Maltravers mentally noted that Sally Baker had again shown that she at least was not hostile towards strangers.

  ‘That’s the woman who gave me directions when I arrived,’ he said as Stephen rejoined them. ‘We met outside her cottage. She seems friendlier than what appears to be the norm around here.’

  ‘Sally’s been tainted by the outside world,’ Stephen told him. ‘She was born here, but her husband was some big wheel at the Foreign Office and was posted all over the place. She came back about five years ago after he died. She’s settled in again — on the parish council and very active in the church — but she actually knows that if you drive beyond Exeter, you don’t fall off the edge.’

  Maltravers grinned. ‘A definite sophisticate. Anyway, back to Gabriel. He’d been here about a month when he was killed, hadn’t he? He must have made some sort of contact with people during that time. Did anything particular happen that was ... I don’t know ... suspicious?’

  ‘Not that I know of. He bought basic necessities at the stores and came in here most evenings. People were a bit distant at first, but thawed out when they found he was always good for a drink.’

  ‘But he wasn’t the easiest person to get on with,’ Maltravers commented. ‘I’ll rephrase that. He was an obnoxious sod on his good days. I can’t imagine him sinking a few in here and not picking a row with someone.’

  ‘If he did, I never heard about it. I chatted to him myself a couple of times and he was all right. I knew his poems and was interested in what he was working on.’

  ‘Well, as long as you were suitably adulatory, you’d have been all right. He was convinced he was a genius — and in fairness, he could be that good — and was always ready to talk about himself. Did he tell you anything about the poem he was writing?’

  ‘Not in detail, but he said it was about love. Profane, romantic, forbidden, divine, you name it. It was going to develop the Rage in Passion collection. Have you read that?’

  ‘Of course I have. Some of his best work is in it.’ Maltravers frowned. ‘I wonder where he was taking it?’

  ‘More to the point, why did someone steal it? He said he used a series of notebooks. One for ideas, one for first drafts, one for second, then another for the final version. There wasn’t a single one in his cottage. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Unless someone intended to try and pass it off as their own later.’ Maltravers dismissed the suggestion as quickly as he raised it. ‘But that would never work. Gabriel’s style was as distinctive as Hopkins’s sprung rhymes. Anyone would recognise it.’

  ‘So why were the notebooks stolen? The obvious assumption must be that the theft was connected with his death. And where are they now?’

  An interpretation of ‘Just the way you look tonight’ played with all the lyricism of a Gregorian chant floated out of a loudspeaker above Maltravers’s head. Stephen was not thinking certain things through because he didn’t like where such thoughts might lead. He was obliquely asking to be made to face them.

  ‘Have you searched Michelle’s room?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘No.’ Stephen looked away. ‘But I ought to do that, oughtn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, and you know it. But I can understand why you don’t want to. How frightened are you about what you might find?’

  ‘Try terrified.’ Stephen sighed. ‘Veronica’s turned off, everybody else wants to forget it and I can’t hack it on my
own. Look, Gus, just tell me I have to do it and perhaps I’ll be ...’

  ‘No,’ Maltravers interrupted. ‘If you haven’t been able to convince yourself of that, there’s no reason why I should be able to. My best offer is to ask questions as a vaguely inquisitive tourist and see if I unearth anything. I’m not promising results — talking to strangers isn’t the done thing round here — but people can do nothing worse than tell me to get lost. Unless it’s always open season on writers in Medmelton.’

  Maltravers suddenly became aware of Sally Baker again. Sitting on a bar stool at the far side of the room and paying no attention to the man talking to her, she was looking straight at him; she held his eyes for a moment, then turned away.

  *

  As she finished setting the table for dinner, adjusting a place mat, fractionally moving the Georgian silver cruet, Veronica’s uncertainties reawakened. Stephen had never really explained why he had suddenly been so keen for Maltravers to visit them. Of all his friends, she had liked Gus and Tess the most for their acceptance of her, their instant respect for the limits of how close they could approach. But she recognised that Gus had been intrigued, the writer in him watching for signs that would explain her personality. And when he had telephoned after receiving the letter, Stephen had almost insisted that he must come. Afterwards he had been evasive; a visit was overdue, it fitted in with Tess’s coincidental work in Bristol, it was just time they came. But this was not the moment to invite outsiders to Medmelton, not when so much was creeping back to the surface, so much that had been kept quiet for so long.

  Upstairs in her room, Michelle held the key tight in her fist as she thought; finding different places to hide it had become part of the secrecy. First she had cut a hole in the pages of an old book, then it had been taped underneath the frame of her bed, then tucked into the toe of a shoe. There was no need for such precautions; even if her mother or Stephen realised that the cupboard in her white bedside unit was always locked, they would assume it contained something personal and both of them had always respected her privacy. But she still had to be careful. This time the key could go in the pocket of her sundress, washed and hung away for next summer. As she dropped it in, she remembered letting Nicky’s skilful olive fingers slip the straps off her shoulders in her hotel room that afternoon in Naxos. Nothing had happened, because they had been interrupted; Steve had wanted to complain to the hotel manager, but her mother told him to forget it. And afterwards Nicky had moved on with the indifference of a languid Greek satyr, amused and satiated by an endless supply of eager girls. For the rest of the holiday Michelle had watched them — Claire from Lyons, Carol from somewhere in the Midlands, Lise from Copenhagen — faces flushed with excited guilt betraying them whenever he appeared. Nicky used them like he had nearly used her and she hated that; it made her as stupid as the rest of them. Back home in Medmelton, she had poured out that hatred to Mildred, the only person who really understood that Michelle Dean was different.