Deadly Pleasures

by Martin Edwards

  ‘You said Gudrún denied killing her father,’ he said at last. ‘How did she seem?’

  ‘Totally distraught. At the end of her rope. She just broke down. She answered our questions quietly, with tears streaming down her cheeks. It was hard to read her: I couldn’t tell whether she was upset because of all the pressure of the last few days, or whether she couldn’t face what she had done. Inspector Ólafur was sure she was guilty.’

  ‘And what about you, Vigdís? What was your instinct?’

  ‘I told you: I wasn’t sure.’

  Magnus looked at her steadily. He raised his eyebrows. ‘I know you, Vigdís. Not being sure isn’t your style.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think your gut feel is that she’s innocent and you don’t want to admit it.’

  ‘Magnús, that’s ridiculous! We are detectives. We deal in evidence.’

  ‘We deal in people,’ said Magnus. ‘It takes a certain kind of daughter to shoot out the eye of her father. I’ve met one or two of that kind of woman in America. None in Iceland that I can think of.’

  ‘So are you saying Sveinn shot him? He wasn’t even in Raufarhöfn.’

  ‘No.’ Magnus was quiet for a minute, staring at the fishing boats. Vigdís let her boss think. ‘Do you have any spare spent .22 bullets among the evidence? Doesn’t matter which gun they are from.’

  ‘We have a few from the range Halldór used back at the station.’

  ‘Perfect. Let’s grab one and then go for a drive.’

  It was a rough drive from the bridge to the farm. On one side of the dirt track the salmon river rushed down towards the nearby sea. On the other side the Melrakkasléttarnes stretched northwards through marsh and bog. A tough bleak place to scratch a living.

  They parked outside the farmhouse. An Icelandic sheepdog rushed up to them barking and wagging its tail at the same time.

  ‘Bjartur! Quiet!’ The old farmer came out to meet them, wearing blue overalls and a peaked cap. Vigdís was right, the skin under his beard was criss-crossed with crevasses and fault lines, but his face broke into a smile of welcome when he recognized Vigdís. ‘The blue policewoman! Come in, come in! I have a little coffee, but no cakes, I’m afraid.’

  Before they entered the house, Magnus glanced across the river towards the more prosperous farm on the other side. The view was clear and uninterrupted. ‘So that’s where the polar bear was shot?’ he said.

  The farmer frowned and nodded. ‘Yes. It was a cruel day.’

  They sat at a table in the cosy kitchen and Egill poured a small quantity of thick gritty liquid from a thermos into two cups. There wasn’t enough for himself. ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting visitors.’

  Magnus sipped the coffee and tried hard not to grimace.

  ‘Do you know who murdered Halldór yet?’ Egill asked Vigdís.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Vigdís.

  ‘Yes,’ said Magnus. Vigdís glanced at him quickly.

  And so did Egill. The bright blue eyes focussed on Magnus under bushy eyebrows.

  Magnus produced a clear plastic bag, inside which was a small brass-coloured metal object.

  Egill’s eyes turned to the bag.

  ‘Did you know, Egill, that our scientists can examine a rifle and determine whether it was the one that fired this bullet? With 100 per cent accuracy.’

  Egill shook his head, still concentrating on the bullet.

  ‘We’ve come to ask you for your rifle,’ Magnus said slowly. ‘So our scientists can examine it. See if it was the weapon that fired the bullet that killed Halldór. Can you fetch it for me?’

  Egill didn’t move. He stared at the bullet. Then looked up at Vigdís and Magnus. He sat back in his chair. ‘You know I told you about that polar bear in Grímsey. The man the bear saved was supposed to be my great-great grandfather.’

  ‘It might be wrong to shoot polar bears,’ Magnus said quietly. ‘But it’s very wrong to shoot people.’

  ‘That man risked Anna’s life just so he could get the credit for killing a bear,’ Egill said, his eyes suddenly on fire. ‘OK, so he shot the bear through the eye, but that was just because the bear was moving slowly.’ He leaned forward. ‘If the bear had charged, and it could easily have charged, then it would have been almost impossible to hit it with that accuracy. If he had hit the bear in the chest or the neck, Anna would be dead now. So I couldn’t understand when everyone was treating the man like a hero when he had almost killed a child.’

  ‘How did you get him up to the henge?’ Magnus asked.

  ‘I told him what I had seen. Said I needed to talk to him, and suggested we meet at the henge by one of the gates there. I made him think I was going to blackmail him. I waited a short distance away from the henge and shot him. Through the eye. He was standing still.’

  ‘I think you had better show me where your rifle is and come with us,’ said Magnus.

  Egill bent down and patted the dog at his feet behind the ears.

  ‘Sorry, Bjartur, old fellow. I’m going to leave you now. Perhaps Anna will look after you.’

  For the first time a tear appeared in the old man’s eye.

  ENCHANTRESS

  Peter Robinson

  Peter Robinson was born in England, but moved to Canada, and now divides his time between that country and Richmond, North Yorkshire. His first novel, Gallows View (1987), introduced Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, and launched a long-running series, now successfully adapted for television as DCI Banks, with Stephen Tompkinson in the lead role. He has written many short stories, winning numerous awards, and his non-series books include Caedmon’s Song and Before the Poison.

  The train journey passed pleasantly enough, despite a long delay at Crewe. It was a hot day, and the compartment smelled of warm upholstery. Occasionally, a puff of acrid steam drifted in through the open window. As we rattled out of the station past the backyards and allotments, the rhythm of the wheels clacking on the lines and the flashes of sunlight on car windscreens grew faster and faster. I felt as excited as when I had been a young boy, and I realised I could hardly remember the last time I had taken a train.

  We passed a canal where two boys sat fishing with nets against a backdrop of distant cooling towers. At one level crossing, a farmer in a tractor raised his flat cap to us, and two young lovers shared a long goodbye kiss at Nuneaton. As we chugged through the lush green English heartland, I settled back in my seat and alternated between reading Ian Fleming’s new novel, From Russia With Love, and watching the landscape go by, thinking about where I was going and what had triggered my journey.

  A week ago, I had received notice that my oldest friend Roland Stringer had died. It wasn’t unexpected; Roland had been suffering from cancer for almost two years, and many would call his death a blessing. He had always been the more successful of the two of us. While I slaved away trying to communicate the joys of Beethoven, Schubert and Tchaikovsky to children who wanted to listen only to Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele and Elvis Presley, Roland was out there in the fields, fishing boats and factory yards collecting folk songs, writing about them, and generally making a name for himself in the world of musicology. It was folk music that had brought us together, as university students in the early Twenties, and it was folk music that was to bring us together again now, after his death.

  Roland had asked in his will that I be made his literary executor, should I so wish, and his son Cecil had offered his father’s house in Highgate, now empty, as a place to stay while I worked. At first I was uncertain about taking on such a task, but the summer holidays had just begun, and I had no plans, nothing stretching ahead of me but empty, futile days, dragging into weeks, so I decided to go. The news that a small but adequate sum had been set aside for my expenses and remuneration certainly helped to sway my decision.

  The outskirts of London snapped me out of my reverie: rundown housing estates, factories stacked with pallets, a small church, a school, a football ground. Finally, we arrived amid the smo
ke, bustle and clamour of Euston station, and I made my way to the taxi rank.

  I was overwhelmed by the apparent chaos in Roland’s study. The high-ceilinged room was filled with teetering piles of papers, reels of tape and boxes of wax cylinders. However, I soon began to discern a pattern in Roland’s work, and after a few days, what had seemed impenetrable chaos became more manageable. Fortunately, Roland had transcribed all the songs and variants he had collected into large bound notebooks, listing their corresponding tape or cylinder number; I was therefore able to match the notebooks to the recorded versions far more easily than I had thought I would.

  After I settled down to work, I soon found out that Roland had not only been collecting songs and writing about them, but he had also been setting down his experiences on the road and making notes on the characters he had met. To Roland, the folk song was a living, growing entity. There was no end to it, never any one final version. Go to the next fishing village, the next farm, the next back-to-back terrace house, and you would find a variant, an extra verse or two that a singer had added, perhaps, or a name substitution, subtle alterations in the narrative. It would be fascinating to explore his work, I couldn’t deny it, and if my name appeared with his on any opus, magnum or other, that I could mould from the raw mat-erial of his research, then so much the better.

  As I made my way through Roland’s life’s work, I found variants of such familiar songs as ‘Bruton Town’, ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’ and ‘Famous Flower of Serving Men’ alongside songs I had never heard before. And then one day I came across something I hadn’t expected.

  Roland had discovered several variants of a Child ballad known as ‘Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard’ or ‘Matty Groves’. Most changes were minor, of course, but one version I came across made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

  He had listed the title as ‘Mattie Greaves’, and the song mentioned a place called Swainsdale Manor, the family seat of the Bewlays, one of the area’s most prominent families. I knew this place, and the people who had lived there. My Aunt Gwynneth had been in service to Lord and Lady Bewlay before the Great War, and my mother and I lived in nearby Eastvale. I had spent many an idyllic summer’s day as a young lad within its majestic walled grounds.

  On checking Roland’s notes, I found that he had collected the song from Jack Metcalfe, landlord of the Black Heifer, in the village of Lyndgarth, in 1928. The manor, as I remembered, was only half a mile or so from the village. The song itself specified no date for the events it recounted. All Roland’s notes said were: ‘Jack Metcalfe. Bit of character. The jovial host. Likes to tell stories. Clearly has grudge against gentry. Seems something of a laughing stock locally, but at least left interesting variant of Child ballad 81.’

  The Bewlays were an old family, and generations of them had lived in Swainsdale Manor. How could I know whether Jack Metcalfe’s variant referred to the Lord and Lady Bewlay I had known? I say known, but, of course, as the mere relation of a lowly serving girl, I was hardly privy to the family’s friendship and patronage. But there was more, far more, than a casual relationship. What came back to me most of all, and what still shook me to the core, was that I remembered Lady Bewlay. Her first name was Isabella, and Isabella just happened to be the name of the lady in the song. One summer, almost forty-five years ago, I had fallen in love with Lady Isabella Bewlay.

  Of course, it was an adolescent infatuation, and perhaps one of the first examples of my setting my heart on someone I could never possibly have, which, in turn, may be one reason why I never married. The only women I ever wanted were like Lady Isabella: far beyond my reach. I was fourteen years old, and had just started to feel excited and awkward in the presence of girls. We were living in Eastvale when Mother first took me to Swainsdale manor to visit Aunt Gwynneth on her afternoon off. It was the beginning of the Great War, and my father was already away fighting in France.

  I won’t say it was an opportunity I jumped at. What fourteen-year-old boy wouldn’t prefer playing cricket with his mates, fishing out on the Leas, or swimming in the river by Hindswell Woods if the weather was warm enough? But I went along dutifully, as my mother was still a sad and lonely figure in the wake of my father’s departure, and I soon found myself fascinated by another way of life – a paradise, it seemed to me, beyond the high garden walls – and I was enchanted by the beautiful young woman I met there. Without a doubt, she was ‘the fairest among them all’.

  We got off the bus at the village green and walked the half mile or so of winding country lanes to the manor. Then I got my first glimpse of the place. I had never seen anywhere so magnificent, so opulent, so regal as Swainsdale Manor, but then I had lived a somewhat sheltered life. It was built of local limestone with a portico and marble pillars at the front, like some sort of Greek temple. It had a classical symmetry about it that I admired, and as one approached it down the long drive, it almost resembled a face.

  I am not sure how many rooms there were, for we never ventured far beyond the kitchen and my aunt’s small bed-sitting room. All I remember is a broad staircase and a profusion of dim wainscoted corridors, varnished wood gleaming in the candlelight, paintings of local landscapes in ornate gilt frames, brass-handled doors leading off to bedrooms or salons.

  The grounds were extensive, with woods, a pond, a folly, and even an old well, covered with a wooden lid for safety. With Lady Bewlay’s permission, Mother let me go off and explore by myself, and mostly I pretended to be Robin Hood in the woods while she and Aunt Gwynneth sat on a blanket on the grass, ate cake and drank tea, and gossiped in the shade of the great copper beech.

  Lord and Lady Bewlay were quite young. I remember hearing that he was thirty and she only seventeen when they had a married a year or two before my aunt went to work there. The young lord’s parents had been drowned in a tragic boating accident off the Isle of Wight shortly after the wedding, and consequently he had inherited the land and title at an early age. Though he would always say hello to me, ask me how I was doing at school, I remember him mostly as a remote and distracted figure, never quite there.

  But Lady Isabella. What a contrast! She was life itself – so young, so full of energy, so gay, with a smile that would light up the darkest corners of any sad soul and dazzle the very angels. And her laugh. It was the kind of music that made you want to make it your mission in life to make her laugh all the time. But there also seemed, to my romantic soul, a deep sadness and loneliness about her, too, as if she had lost something important to her, or had not yet found something she craved. Of course, it is only with the benefit of hindsight that I can indulge in such fanciful ramblings.

  When I first saw her, she was leaning against one of the columns, her skin pale as the marble, wearing a long summer dress, her blonde hair cascading over her shoulders. With her girlish figure, cornflower blue eyes and unblemished complexion, she looked for all the world like some sad medieval princess waiting for her prince to come and rescue her. Whether she needed rescuing, I had no idea. While I was perfectly capable of being smitten by such a beauty, I was far from any understanding of the ways of married life, or of the grown-up world in general. Now that I think of it, perhaps she did need rescuing, and no doubt I believed that I was the one to do it.

  In most versions of the Child ballad, Lady Barnard sees Little Musgrave in church and persuades him to spend the night with her at her bower. Her page overhears this and runs to tell his lord, betraying her. As the two lovers lie in the afterglow, Lord Barnard enters and challenges Musgrave to a duel, giving him the best sword. Musgrave strikes first and wounds the lord, then Lord Barnard strikes and kills Musgrave. He asks his wife what she thinks of her lover now, and she avows that she loves Musgrave best, even though he is dead. At this, Lord Barnard kills her, then he has the two of them thrown in a grave together, with his lady on the top.

  In the version Roland collected from Jack Metcalfe, however, Lord Bewlay goes off to war, and Lady Isabella takes up with a young lad called Greaves
, another name I knew from that period. The lord is killed in battle, and one night a ghostly, disfigured creature turns up at the manor for vengeance, slaughters the young lovers and throws them in a grave.

  Why, I wondered, would Jack Metcalfe alter the narrative details of a ballad that dated back to the seventeenth century? It also seemed to me that he was mixing the supernatural and the revenge ballad with the domestic tragedy. And why hadn’t I heard anything about this before? I could recall hearing no stories or rumours of such a lurid nature. Surely, if anything like that had happened, I would have heard?

  Though perhaps not. We left Yorkshire for Dorset in the late summer of 1916, and we lived on a remote farm with my grandparents for some years after that. Communications being what they were back then, I never heard another word of Lord Bewlay or Lady Isabella. I was miserable for a time, pining for my lost love, but life went on, and in the end I suppose I accepted my inevitable bachelorhood much as I accepted most other things in life, without much of a struggle. I pursued my music, my school teaching career, such as it was, and I had a rather unmemorable war as part of the Army Transport Corps, where I saw a great deal of the world, but very little in the way of action.

  I thought of her often over the years and wondered what had become of her, always stopping just short of trying to find out. I know that I was merely an adolescent boy, and she was a young woman, a fantasy, an unattainable dream, but somehow, I had never experienced such depth of feeling for any woman other than my own mother before or since. I have never known how to talk to women, to be at ease with them.

  When I closed my eyes in that Highgate study after reading Roland’s transcription, I could picture her as clearly as if she stood before me. I had the sudden realisation that I had lived my life in a fantasy – the needle of the gramophone stuck in adolescence – all to a soundtrack of old folk ballads and Romantic composers. This surely must be fate, I told myself. Now that I had got this far, now that the past had reached out and grabbed me by my lapels, I couldn’t get free. The old song says that as love grows older, it grows colder and fades away like the morning dew. But my love had never been consummated, had never been given the chance to grow old or cold. Now that I had ‘found’ Isabella again, the old feelings came back with a vividness that startled me.