by Phil Rickman
It was clear she wanted out, the police said. She wanted the bigger scene. She’d be in Birmingham now, or Cheltenham or London. Or even in America. Wherever she was, she’d have landed on her feet. She was twenty-three years old, said the travellers. She should have been married.
She was dead, said their puri dai.
But no body was ever found.
And the Emperor of Frome, still raging in private over the corruption and defection of his wife? Oh, he was never even questioned in any depth.
Al looked like he wanted to spit.
Sally Boswell said, ‘We look at the 1960s and we tend to think that was not so very long ago. The young musicians now are all influenced by sixties music – the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead and people freaking out on hallucinogens, the voice of youth.’
She leaned forward under the wall-light, as if to make herself more real, her museum curator’s voice taking over. She must have been breathtakingly beautiful back then, Merrily thought.
‘But the sixties were a long time ago,’ Sally said.
Particularly the early sixties, when there was still an almost mystical aura around the Royal Family… when, in the countryside, this was still feudal England… when the Lakes were the squirearchy, clear descendants of the Norman marcher lords. And when their actions were not subject to examination.
Conrad Lake’s friends included MPs and would-be MPs like Oliver Perry-Jones. The Emperor dined and drank with senior councillors, magistrates, chief constables… and this was the time when the senior police would tend to be ex-army officers with medals from the Second World War, men for whom stability meant the preservation of a hierarchy – and the structure – at all costs. When the police knew their place.
‘Conrad was himself a magistrate for a time,’ Sally said. ‘He was also Worshipful Master of the local Masonic lodge. And the gypsies were vagrants, and their so-called culture was primitive. And they lied, of course. And they also had a grudge against Conrad. So when the police were told that Rebekah Smith had been seen getting into Conrad’s car…’
‘And they were told,’ Al said. ‘There was more than one witness.’
‘Uncles or brothers?’ Lol asked.
Al smiled. ‘You see the problem.’
Merrily saw how intense Lol had become, as though he’d channelled his confusion and distress into an urgent need to know.
‘Isabel told me the police finally concluded the gypsies had simply made it up to get back at Lake for banning them from his hop-yards,’ he said.
Sally nodded. ‘That was one suggestion, yes.’
‘But she also thought Stewart Ash had evidence linking Lake to the disappearance. Does that mean he just spoke to the gypsy witnesses who the police chose to disregard?’
‘Oh, more than that,’ said Al. ‘It would have to be more than that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like photographs. She took a very good picture, did Rebekah.’
Merrily stayed quiet. Lol hadn’t told her any of this – not that there’d been time.
‘Especially naked.’ Al’s eyes glinted metallically. ‘Gypsies aren’t the most inhibited of folk, and Rebekah – well, she was not the most inhibited of gypsies. I imagine there would have been times when she had Conrad crawling to her feet.’
‘Conrad took many photographs,’ Sally said quickly. ‘He liked to have photos of his land and the things he owned – or wanted to own. He’d bought all the most expensive equipment.’
‘You sound as if you know that Stewart had pictures,’ Lol said.
‘Well, of course.’ Al extended long hands that bore no signs of arthritis. ‘We know Stewart found some of them when he was carrying out his rudimentary renovation of the kiln. Stored behind the furnace, like a private porn collection. For a long time, Stewart preserved the old furnace. I guess it would be – when?’ He looked at his wife. ‘Early last year? When he decided it was going to have to come out to make more kitchen space.’
‘It was certainly well into the spring when he showed you one of the photographs and asked you if you recognized the woman.’ Sally turned to Lol. ‘When the furnace came out, the builder had found a space at the rear, well away from the heat, where the bricks could be removed. And that was where an old briefcase had been stowed. It contained, apparently, about two dozen photographs. Of the same naked woman.’
‘Though not necessarily the same hop-bine,’ Al said.
Merrily saw Lol flinch slightly. She drew the cardigan around her. She didn’t like where this was going.
‘And those pictures of Rebekah,’ Lol said. ‘They were going in Stewart’s book, right? So where are they now?’
Al laughed. ‘You tell me. He showed me just the one. He said he had the others. We became excited, naturally, that an old mystery might be solved, an old injustice exposed. But I warned him to keep quiet. Obviously, it must not get back to Adam Lake.’
‘And did it?’ Merrily asked. She wasn’t convinced this would have exposed an injustice. What was there to link these pictures to Lake?
‘Well, if it did, it wasn’t us who told him,’ Al protested.
‘If it did get back to Adam,’ Sally said, ‘it was probably through Stewart himself. Consider: Stewart bought the kiln at a knock-down price, after the receivers moved in – Conrad’s death being almost contemporaneous with all this.’
‘The Emperor became old quickly and died quickly,’ Al said, with evident approval. ‘When his second wife left him, taking the child, Adam, they said his mind was already going. They said he drove her away. Eventually, the old bastard had a timely coronary while out patrolling his shrinking domain. He was found by a walker, dying in the hop-yard below the kiln. Yes… that hop-yard. I like to wonder if, knowing the kiln was being sold, the Emperor was on his way to retrieve his photos when he was struck down… and died knowing his final crime was there to be discovered.’
‘Why would he keep them there?’ Merrily asked.
‘We can’t know, can we?’ Sally said. ‘Perhaps it was his old hiding place, going back to when the kiln was part of his farmhouse. He knocked down the house in the bitter wake of his first marriage, built the new house for his second.’
‘That’s another thing – why did he knock down the house and leave the kiln standing?’
‘We don’t know,’ Sally said, too quickly.
‘Why would he have kept those pictures at all?’
‘Obsession, Mrs Watkins.’
Merrily didn’t ask her to expand, didn’t think it would get her anywhere, not yet. ‘You were about to tell me why Stewart might have told Adam Lake about the pictures.’
‘To get him off his back, of course,’ Al said. ‘Obsession again. Adam’s obsession was to recover what he could of the old empire – especially that bit. Maybe he even knew there was something in that kiln, maybe that was another reason why he was so anxious to get it back that he was prepared to make Stewart’s life a misery. Maybe Stewart told him about the pictures and tried to blackmail him. Who knows?’
‘Al,’ Lol said softly. ‘Who really killed Stewart?’
Al’s head tilted. ‘You’re asking me?’
‘You couldn’t let Stewart turn those pictures over to Adam Lake, could you? Not at any price. If Stewart had let Lake have the pictures, they’d have been destroyed. So the truth would never have come out.’
Al looked down at his long, guitarist’s fingers. ‘Yes,’ he said calmly. ‘Quite right, Lol.’
‘And he would have, wouldn’t he?’ Lol said. ‘He’d have given them away in exchange for money or just the removal of the big blue barn – just to be left in peace and a decent amount of light to get on with his books. I mean, I never knew Stewart, obviously, but I don’t see him as any kind of investigative writer. The idea of publishing those photos – that would’ve scared him to death, probably. I mean, how often do you find soft porn in a local-history picture book? The story of Conrad Lake’s war with the gypsies, maybe culminatin
g in an undiscovered murder – it wasn’t exactly an obvious sequel to The Hop Grower’s Year, was it?’
Merrily stared at Lol with, for the first time, a kind of awe. She wondered how long he’d been brooding about all this? And what had happened in that cold, sterile hop-yard to sharpen his focus.
There was momentary quiet around the table. Then Sally Boswell pushed away her mug of cooling tea.
‘You’re right, of course. Stewart Ash was a gentle soul. I feared very much for him, with the appalling Adam Lake pursuing the kiln. He was so happy there – compiling his little books, talking to the locals about the old days. Taking his careful photos with equipment so old that Conrad Lake would have discarded it without a thought. You’re right – poor Stewart just wanted to be left alone in his beloved kiln-house.’
Sally said she’d once asked Stewart to whom he planned to leave the place. It would have to be his favourite niece, he said – despite her dreadful husband. And so it was Sally who had suggested, half humorously, that he make a will leaving it to the most obnoxious of his relatives, with a clause pre-empting resale… and then tell Lake what he’d done. On the other matter, the book, Sally had asked Stewart if he’d consider turning the photographs over to her, saying she was prepared to write the book and publish it, too, and sell it in the museum if no one else dared take it.
‘He could keep the profits, for all I cared,’ Sally said.
‘And what did Stewart say?’ Lol asked.
‘He was thinking about it,’ Sally said. ‘He was still thinking about it when he was killed.’
‘By who?’
Al exploded. ‘Mother of God, there’s no big mystery here, boy. Stewart was gay. He was doing a book on the hop-pickers of yore, and his bits of research did indeed bring him into contact with some very nice gypsy boys. Most gypsies have very few hang-ups about sex. Twenty quid for a three-minute hand job would sound very reasonable indeed.’
‘And these are nice boys,’ Sally said cynically. ‘Very friendly. He can trust them. So perhaps we weren’t the first ones to see those photographs.’
‘Let’s just imagine,’ Al went on, ‘that Stewart – no doubt more interested in the hop-bine than the naked girl – gives one of the photos to the Smith boys and asks if any of them can tell him who the girl is. They say they’ll take it back to their family and ask around. They return the picture a day or so later, heads shaking: “Terrible sorry, guv’nor – nobody’d recognize this one at all.” ’
Al flashed his goblin’s grin around the table.
‘But in fact someone in the family whose opinion you do not, under any circumstances, discount, has said to the Smith boys, “It is your duty to the family to go back and get the rest of these photos and if you know what’s good for you for the rest of your dishonourable lives, you will not return without them…” ’
‘So the Smith boys did do it,’ Merrily said.
‘Never any doubt in my mind. It was probably much as it was told to the court – an attempted burglary. They went for the pictures – all of them. And the book, too, whatever stage it was at, to find out how much Stewart knew, find out what really happened to Rebekah Smith. Oh, a mission of great importance. And had it been anything else – anything but his precious book – Stewart would’ve said, “Go ahead, take it, take it all.” ’ Al sat back. ‘Anything but his bloody book.’
A large moth, with black rings on its wings, landed in the centre of the table, moved around it for a few moments and then fluttered away.
‘There goes Stewart now,’ Al said whimsically.
Lol kept asking about the pictures. Where were they now? Did the Smith boys take them, or did they panic and leave empty-handed, as had been implied in court? If the Smiths had taken them, would they have had time to pass them on before they were brought in by the police?
Merrily thought Lol seemed obsessed, as if he was determined to spread out all the mysteries of Knight’s Frome, like the cut and turned hay under the full moon.
‘If the family have the pictures,’ Al said, ‘they’ll keep bloody quiet about it now, at least until after the appeal. No stronger evidence of the boys’ guilt. And it’s all spoiled now, anyway. Who could ever justify the murder of an innocent man to prove the guilt of another who’s already dead?’
‘Besides which,’ Merrily said, ‘it’s just a photograph of a naked girl – no proof of who took it and no suggestion of what happened to the girl.’
Lol looked at Al and then at Sally. ‘And what did happen to the girl?’
‘No one knows,’ Sally admitted. ‘We don’t know how the relationship between Rebekah and Lake came about, which of them seduced the other, who exploited whom. But everything I know of Conrad suggests that it was probably going on before Caroline left him. He would have taken a perverse delight, knowing of her friendship with the Romanies, in forming one of his own. However, Conrad’s idea of a relationship was not… a two-sided thing.’
‘But he picked the wrong woman.’ Al pushed long white hair behind his ears. ‘He picked the woman with the mouth which would eat the world. It’s likely that the departure of Caroline would have fed some ambition into her head. So what does he do? Does Conrad Lake, good friend and supporter of Oliver Perry-Jones, marry a gypsy? Out of the question. Can he pay her off, perhaps? Ha! Does even the Emperor of Frome have enough money to pay off Rebekah Smith? I think not.’
Sally said, ‘I don’t know how he killed her. Probably strangulation. But I think I can guess how he disposed of her remains.’
Merrily stared at Sally, and the night quivered around her.
Vision, when it came, could knock you sideways.
The burning stench of gunpowder and rotten eggs, the smell of cheap fireworks from when you were a kid, fierce and searing as a jet from a blowlamp, the hot breath of hell; brimstone.
Just because the pictures of Rebekah were found in the kiln, didn’t mean—?
Merrily put a hand to her throat. She saw the sudden concern in Lol’s eyes, recalling his anxiety in the kiln, during the Deliverance – the utterly needless deliverance of the soul of the inoffensive Stewart Ash to God. It wasn’t Stewart, it had never been Stewart. Stewart wasn’t the type…
Al Boswell put his head on one side. ‘Drukerimaskri?’
‘Is it possible,’ Merrily said, ‘that Rebekah Smith might have died in the kiln? Was this the conjecture at the time?’
Sally Boswell raised up her glasses on their chain, put them on, gazed through them into Merrily’s eyes. Her face was severe and, for once, she looked her age.
‘Oh yes,’ she said.
‘And could she have choked?’
‘Sulphur,’ Sally said. ‘Do you know what sulphur does?’
‘Yes. I’ve a strong idea.’
Sally spoke in her museum curator’s voice, without emotion. ‘What happens in a hop-kiln is that when the sulphur is to be burned, everyone gets out very rapidly. Sulphur, in small quantities or as an element in spa water, can be beneficial to health. Sulphur burning in a confined space can be horribly poisonous. It causes extreme reactions very quickly. It attacks, the eyes, the throat, the lungs, the skin. It turns hops yellow. I think that anyone exposed to sulphur fumes, in a confined space and unable to get out, would be… grateful to suffocate.’
Al said, ‘Lake always took his women to that kiln. Common knowledge.’
‘Women? How many women did he have?’
‘How many sheep in a flock?’ Sally said. ‘And after the cursory search for Rebekah was over, he became less cautious. He’d pick up prostitutes in Hereford and Worcester and bring them back – right up to his death. He had a mattress in the loft.’
Al regarded Merrily gravely. ‘How do you come to know of this?’
Merrily’s phone began to shrill.
Al suddenly smashed a fist down on the iron table. ‘He locked her in, didn’t he? He locked Rebekah in the fucking kiln with the sulphur rolls burning blue in the brimstone tray?’
‘I don’t
know that,’ Merrily said. ‘I just—’
‘He turned her yellow! And then he came back and did whatever else was necessary, and then he fed her to the furnace. The reliable old oil-fired cast-iron furnace, burning at two million BTUs… cremation guaranteed!’
Merrily stood up and found she was shaking. She took the phone to the edge of the weed-choked terrace.
‘M–Merrily Watkins.’
Behind her, Sally was saying, ‘We’d always suspected he must have spread her ashes on the hop-yard, then had them dug in.’
‘Mum…’
‘Jane?’
‘Mum, I swear to God we thought we were doing it for the best but it, like… it’s all gone wrong.’
‘Where are you?’
‘We’re in the car. We’re on our way to Canon Pyon.’
Merrily said tightly, ‘I didn’t know there was a Canon Pyon in Pembrokeshire.’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ, Mum, we went to tell Amy Shelbone to stay the hell away from Layla Riddock, but she’s piss—she’s run away…’
Behind her, Lol was saying, ‘What do you mean, “in the real sense”?’
‘Jane,’ Merrily said, ‘what have you done?’
‘So we were in this like really difficult situation, and we ended up telling Mr and Mrs Shelbone about Layla Riddock, but it was only when—’
‘You did what?’
‘It was only when I said, just, like, in passing, that Layla’s stepfather was – was Allan Henry…’
‘Dear God,’ Merrily said drably.
When she came back to the table, Al Boswell was saying intensely to Lol, ‘… drains him, you know? Exhausts him sexually, but it’s like a drug, until he doesn’t know what day it is. You know what I’m telling you, boy?’
