He re-read the article for the fourth time and then all the other articles from all the other local and national papers and then he went on-line and browsed through even more articles in French, Italian and German and then he printed them out and read them all again.
They all said the same thing: Sarah was missing and no-one had any idea where she’d gone or why.
He felt sick. Chilled, bloodless, amputated.
He supposed the news that she’d got married was eating away at him too, in a way, but he honestly didn’t care too much about that. He genuinely wanted her to be happy and fulfilled, with anyone of her choosing.
And if anyone chose to call him a liar for claiming such a thing, it was no skin off his nose.
He’d never been jealous, there’d never been any reason to be.
He couldn’t admit to being thrilled to hear about the ‘international businessman’ Mr Neil Morgan and the private ceremony at Calderwood Hall, but the real shocker was the fact that Sarah was no doubt in some kind of trouble.
She was missing, for some strange reason that no-one could fathom.
He just wanted her to be safe. He always had.
He wanted to do something. Anything, that might help find her.
And yet it wasn’t any of his business.
Not really.
There was no good reason for him to get involved. In fact, there were a lot of very good reasons for him not to get involved at all. He could imagine all kinds of people warning him off: get lost, piss off, sling your hook, it’s nowt to do wi’ you, mate… but such voices had been part of his life, in reality or otherwise, for as long as he could remember, and certainly since he’d been more or less hounded out of town at the age of 16, some 17 years ago. The taunts and jeers and accusations had had little effect – or so he liked to think – but they had been widespread, if not unanimous, and carried the resonance of true hatred and an immutable desire for vengeful retribution.
Rape charges tend to have that effect on people.
Understandably, in most cases.
And so if he were to get involved, whatever that might entail, he could only expect to face the same sentiments, grudges and scorn from certain parties, albeit unjustifiably – in his mind - if he ever went back again.
It wouldn’t be the first time…
Not that he cared.
Not that he gave a shit about the scum responsible for such taunts and torture. He was immune. And his susceptibility, or his pride, wasn’t a priority.
Sarah was the priority. She had disappeared. She was gone.
To be honest, she’d been gone for a long time. In fact, he had only seen her to talk to once in the past 18 years, and even then, only for barely a minute. But she was still with him, she was still a part of him, in a way he had never really understood and only vaguely attempted to understand. It was just the way things were. And always would be.
Perhaps he wouldn’t have said that himself. He would have seen it as sentimental. And he wasn’t the sentimental type. He’s a northern lad; they don’t do sentiment. Ask D.H. Lawrence. Ask Alan Bennett. Ask any Yorkshirewoman. And so he had always been wary of attempting to describe what she had meant to him, particularly to himself. To define it would have been to diminish it. It would have meant placing a value on it, because words, perhaps, convey and assign a particular value, that once stated, tends to endure. But it couldn’t be neatly pigeon-holed or labelled or categorised or classified… like a hotel or a restaurant.
He’s a writer by trade, meaning that on most of his official papers the word ‘author’ is often featured in boxes requiring a declaration of profession, and occasionally the word ‘journalist’… and indeed he does make a living from writing. Barely, admittedly, yet a living nonetheless. But his particular area of expertise is limited to writing restaurant and hotel reviews, sightseeing tips and travel advice for guide books and tourism websites, not describing more existential and ineffable subjects like deep-seated feelings, psychological trauma or, God forbid, love… or whatever else it is that may be involved here.
The cork-board above his desk is littered with long, tattered lists of synonyms for ‘cheap’, ‘cheerful’ and ‘tasty’, along with their equivalents in a few European languages. (He’s often paid by certain parties to post flattering ‘anonymous’ reviews of their establishments in French, German or Spanish, but don’t tell anyone). If he needs to stretch his descriptive talents to cover other areas of interest, then he’s lost. It’s not his beat. It’s not his bailiwick. And he will not deny it. He has already tried and failed.
Not long after his incarceration, with events relatively fresh in his mind, and the ‘emotional scars’ (a term he loathes) far from healed, he had found himself lying on his bunk in the dark, trying to find a word in his mind. But it wouldn’t come.
He switched on a small torch and found a book he had seen on his cell-mate’s shelf. It was called Roget’s Thesaurus. He flicked to the index and consulted a list or two, wondering if something might click and in some way fill what he felt was a hole in his head…
“Darling, sweetheart, girl-friend, beloved, apple of my eye, love of my life, my reason for being, soul-sister, angel, goddess, dream girl, heart-throb, sunshine of my life, honey, my treasure, my better half… “
Some of them were nice words and terms, and if you could go beyond a certain flatness that came from over-use and hackneyed associations and think about what they really meant, they carried a certain weight and pertinence… yet still they all seemed banal and disappointingly hollow and meaningless.
Which of them rang truest? Which of them could be applied to Sarah? All of them. And more. And again, he wasn’t being sentimental. Perhaps if he had found the one word that could encapsulate and embody the elusive notion he was trying to grasp, and fill the hole, then he would have accepted that to dwell on it and play with it and toy with it, like picking at a scab, would be to succumb to sentimentalism, to soppiness even, and so, in a way, he took comfort in the fact that the hole remained open and empty, and that his pursuit of definition was unresolved.
As he had grown older, other such ideas and formulations had taken shape, mostly in situations where he couldn’t avoid being reminded of his own past and her part in it. For their stories were linked, almost inextricably. Sentimental or not, and despite his efforts to build a whole new life, he had been struck by the relevance of the neo-Zen truism he had once read in a fortune-cookie in some tacky Chinese restaurant somewhere: “In order to know where one is going, one must know whence one has come”. And he knew that, despite everything, he and Sarah had come from the same place, essentially, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. She was no longer Sarah Hartley and he was no longer Paul Boyd. And yet they were, and always would be.
Sarah Hartley meant everything to him. Until he lost her.
And now she was gone. Again.
Chapter 6
Brighton, Monday April 22nd 2013
One advantage of being a freelance writer is that you can work more or less anywhere, anytime.
One disadvantage of being a travel writer is that you’re obliged to work anywhere, anytime; you don’t have much choice, it’s the nature of the business.
He had been travelling for several years, spending more than six months out of twelve in hotels and tents, caravans and barges, even yurts and igloos. His office was a bar or a café, a hotel bedroom or a train, an airport lounge or the back of a taxi-cab. His office hours were 24/7, if he wanted them to be, or none at all, if he didn’t feel like it. But he didn’t take much time off work… what was he going to do? Go on holiday?
A break, for him, meant coming back to his tiny flat in Brighton and catching up on films and TV series, seeing a football match at Falmer Stadium, going to the pub with some of the few people he knew there and borrowing his neighbour’s golden retriever for long walks on the beach or the Downs.
The rest of the time, he was on the move, and it was a life that suited him just fine.
He didn’t think of himself as having a home. Not any more.
And he liked the freedom… not having a regular schedule and no-one looking over his shoulder and telling him what to do and being able to go more or less wherever he wanted whenever he wanted.
Over the years he had learnt how to travel, too, which meant he didn’t get bored if he had to wait for a plane that was frozen to the runway or delayed by strike action. He didn’t get frustrated if a hotel reservation had got lost or someone showed up two hours late for an interview. It wasn’t that he was particularly patient or stoical, it was just that he saw time as being his time, every second of it, and he used it as he saw fit; reading, writing, listening to music, people-watching, eating, drinking, taking photographs, walking… He didn’t have to put up with other people’s bullshit, he could just walk away, or not… and if people didn’t like it, then that was just tough… If he lost a client, then it was no big deal, there were plenty more to be found.
People had told him it was a very selfish attitude and he knew they were right. It wasn’t always like that, but it was now.
He had no family to speak of, no pets, no long-term girlfriend, no house or garden and no real reason or desire to devote time and energy to anything but himself. His time was his time, his space was his space, and his life was his life.
He’d learnt that in prison.
On the Monday morning he unlocked his rental garage and finally managed to get the ageing Honda started and packed up a few bits and pieces and hit the road, heading north.
He had a few jobs that needed finishing and others that needed starting but for once, instead of following his own whims and fancies, he was giving in to an external influence. He felt drawn, pulled, sucked in to something that he knew he couldn’t resist. A force, as basic and elemental and irresistible as gravity, was urging him on, leading him back to a place he’d left a long time ago, and he didn’t even start to wonder why or consider the wisdom of it. Or the folly…
As the inevitable road-works on the M1 slowed traffic to snail-pace, he listened to the news on the radio. Sarah Hartley was still missing, they said, and the press conference in Halifax had been postponed until 4 p.m. the next afternoon, as the police were waiting for Neil Morgan to arrive back from Italy. The presenter handed over to a journalist in West Yorkshire who had apparently been doing some biographical digging. 31-year-old Sarah Hartley had been raised in the West Riding and attended junior school close to her parents’ home, Calderwood Hall. She had then attended Rushworth College for Girls until the age of 14, when her parents had sent her to Switzerland. She had been to university in Paris and New York and worked for an international relief agency and a number of charitable organisations, on the PR side, until her father had died the previous year, when she returned to take care of her mother and the family business.
She was the sole inheritor of a fortune estimated at 45 million pounds. She was described as ‘beautiful and vivacious’ and a ‘serious catch’. The fortunate beneficiary of her affections, they said, was a certain Neil Morgan, a ‘dashing and charming’ international businessman she had met 18 months ago. He was the owner and director of an import-export business between Holland and the U.K., specialising in flowers and fresh fruit and vegetables. The happy couple had been married only a few days before at the family home.
The rest of the piece managed to present Mr and Mrs Morgan as paragons of virtue and the perfect couple and the innocent victims of terrible, tragic circumstances, while simultaneously insinuating that both of them may have murky, unspeakable secrets to conceal, somehow suggesting that some appalling, evil machinations were at work and that a frightful outcome – kidnapping, suicide, brutal murder – could well be a breaking news item before the next commercial break.
He switched the radio off and stared at the back of the lorry in front of him for ten minutes before he realised its hazard lights were flashing and it had broken down and the traffic was flowing quite normally in the other lanes.
After the turn-off to Huddersfield at Exit 38 he felt a cold tingling in his stomach and he didn’t think it was hunger pangs. The last time he had driven this road had been in 2001, 12 years previously, on a dismal rainy night in late November. After five years away, and six years with no news of Sarah, he had returned to the place he’d been born. For his parents’ funeral. No-one had called him to inform him of their passing, he’d read about it in the paper. It was the last time he had ever spoken to her. And it was something of a miracle that he had survived the trip. He wondered if a similar fate was awaiting him this time.
Chapter 7
Halifax, Monday April 22nd 2013
He reached Halifax in the late afternoon and drove up the curving rise of Salterhebble Hill past the hospital and round the block where his Uncle Frank used to live and then back down to the valley again.
He hadn’t been ill much in recent years... there’d been no nasty after-effects from the hypothermia and the infected blood and his false teeth seemed to be standing him in good stead. The last time he’d been in hospital had been here, 12 years before, and he remembered the long weeks of rehab and therapy as his feet healed and his bones set and he said a silent prayer for the people who had helped him and the one person who had helped him the most. Without knowing it.
He followed the valley for a few miles, past garden centres and DIY warehouses and pubs with ridiculous trendy names and then he turned off the main road, crossing the canal and climbing up the hill towards Calderwood Hall. At the top, he pulled into a lay-by and switched off the engine and got out and lit a cigarette.
Down below, the valley was green, the vibrant green of spring, with pink and white blossom on the fruit trees and brief flashes of the setting sun picking out brightly-coloured groups of tulips and daffodils in gardens and window-boxes. He could see stretches of the canal between the trees and the tow-paths alongside it, with a couple of men fishing and some kids riding bikes. Over to his right, he could make out the White Hart, a big half-timbered place between the road and the canal lock, his Dad’s old local. He thought about whisky and the rape of an under-aged girl. He got back in the car and drove on and after a couple of hundred yards he turned off the road into a narrow lane that led up behind the estate. The lane dipped and rose again and swung to his right, bordering a long line of beeches on the edge of a field of sheep. He stopped and got out and looked over at the Cottage. His old home. He turned round and looked up at the turrets of the Castle, rising up behind the stone wall that surrounded the estate, wondering who was in there now, with Greville dead and Rebecca in care and Sarah lost, to him and to everyone else.
She owned all this now, he thought. She was the heir to the Hartley kingdom. Queen Sarah the first. Queen of the mills down in the valley and many of the houses and flats along the road he’d just driven. The Queen of the Cottage too. How would she feel about that? What would she do? What would her legacy be? Where would she fit in the history of the Hartleys?
The Hartleys had been mill-owners here since the late 18th century. Sarah’s great-great-great-grandfather, Clifford Hartley, along with several of his fellow entrepreneurs, had funded the construction of the first railway lines and canals to cut their way through the Pennine hills and valleys, carving out mass transportation routes for their wares, transforming the landscape with man-made gorges and cuttings, giant chimney-stacks, dramatic, humbling viaducts and massive brick and stone edifices that would soon turn black from the fumes and soot and grime that filled the air, creating the urban mesh and sprawl that still shaped and defined people’s lives 200 years later.
The family fortune was made from spinning American cotton and weaving Yorkshire wool. Some would say their wealth was the well-merited fruit of the innovation and foresight that inspired the Industrial Revolution, the reward for the pioneering spirit of men with vision and drive and limitless energy. Others may point out that over 70% of the workforce was made up of women and children, many of whom were under-age, m
ost of whom received little recompense, at least in the early days.
The factory system exploited slavery in the New World for as long as it could and, even after it had been abolished, found ways to prolong its philosophy and practicalities. The factory-owners employed networks of agents to scour the poor-houses and orphanages of London and other major cities down south. Children would be told they were going to be ‘parish apprentices’ and given a shilling to keep them interested. Then they’d be rounded up and loaded into horse-drawn coaches and driven two or three hundred miles north to dark, dank dormitories surrounded by a 3-metre-high wall where 150 of them slept three-in-a-bed and they were made to work 12 or 13 hours a day, six days a week, for no pay and a diet consisting of rancid oatcakes, raw onions and, if they were lucky, half a mug of milk. On their day off, Sunday, they were invited to clean the machines…
Sarah’s great-great-grandfather, Sir Herbert Hartley, had expanded the empire and consolidated his dominion by building Calderwood Hall on the hilltop overlooking the valley. It was an imposing stately mansion, also surrounded by a three-metre-high wall, with splendid, dominant views over the mills and factories down below which worked round the clock, their machines churning out miles of thread and yarn, every distant click and whir and clang and clunk like the sound of a new penny being dropped into the Hartleys’ coffers.
The King's Shilling Page 4
