The Case of the Missing Bronte

by Robert Barnard

  ‘No, indeed. I’m actually checking up on a missing Brontë manuscript.’

  ‘Really? And could my husband help you?’

  ‘Not as yet, anyway. You haven’t heard of it?’

  ‘Oh no. Where manuscripts are concerned I’m a dimwit. I couldn’t tell one of those dreary sisters from the other. Furniture is my thing — my very special passion in life.’ She turned a fraction of an inch back towards the Duke, who must surely have been well-furnished. ‘So pleased to have met you, Mr Trethowan.’ She had remembered my name, with that miraculous transatlantic faculty for such things. The smile, though, was one of super-cordial dismissal. I slipped out of the charmed circle.

  Back by the door I took a deep breath. All that suaveness, and well-oiled charm, and money, took it out of one. However did they keep it up? I took a whisky from a passing tweeny, who smiled and sketched a curtsey. I decided she must be a recent graduate of drama school, unemployed. The local toffs were still wandering in, nervous but hopeful smiles engraved on their well-bred, under-chinned faces. I looked at them as if it were an identity parade, and they swerved off in the other direction. However, Frank Witteringham wandered along to where I stood, holding two whiskies.

  ‘So that I can say my journey was not entirely wasted,’ he explained.

  ‘No luck?’

  ‘The nicest possible cold shoulder. Why would he be interested in a dubious Reynolds of one of my ancestors? There’s the Duke with a Poussin, some of the best Chippendale in the country, and a Hilliard miniature — all discreetly on offer. Did you get what you came for?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I did.’

  I downed my whisky, made fond farewells to Mr Witteringham, most likely never to meet for another twenty years, and went out into the corridor. No, I didn’t think I had got what I had come for. I ignored the lift and started off thoughtfully down the stairs. If James L. Parfitt was a crook, he was a good deal better at it than the bumbling amateurs I had met hitherto. One had the sense of dealing with class, in that as in every other respect. There had not been a flicker when I mentioned my profession or my business. He had expressed a healthy and natural interest in the nature of the manuscript. Of course, one had the impression throughout of an incredibly quiet machine, performing its functions. Mrs Parfitt had even managed ‘His Grace’. But it would be in the nature of things that the whole operation would be smooth. American millionaires must run a very neat ship. No, there was no reason at all to suspect Mr James L. Parfitt.

  It was as I descended the last flight, down into the pink plush of the foyer, that something happened. I was aware, out of the corner of my eye, of two figures entering the swing door of the hotel. They turned naturally in the direction of my staircase, but as they caught sight of me descending they did the smoothest of about turns and marched straight out into the street again. No doubt they were sure I hadn’t seen them. I hardly had. But I recognized their shapes, and the backs of their heads. They were the two men I had seen coming out of Timothy Windlesham’s office.

  CHAPTER 9

  EAVESDROPPING

  I could have run after them, of course, and tried to catch them up. But what could I have said to them if I had? Instead, I nipped over to the foyer window of the Royal Edward, and watched them walking through the car park outside, down to the street. They were going at a fast lick, straight ahead, almost marching, and by their size intimidating other casual walkers out of their way. At one point the taller of the two swung his head round purposefully and looked towards the hotel entrance. Satisfied, he swung it back, and kept on striding ahead. I watched them till I saw them swerve left towards Bridge Street, then I streaked after them.

  I kept well behind them, but my eyesight is good and I managed easily to keep them in view. They went down Bridge Street, past the Town Hall, then up Sunbridge Road. It’s a straight hill, which helped me keep them in view. Once, again, the tall, fair one swung his head round to look behind him, but I was in a doorway inspecting the lower shelf of a display of ladies’ slippers by the time he had focused on the street. I was pretty sure he had not seen me. On they went, now much more relaxed. They came to an intersection with a phone-box, and the taller went in while the other remained loitering outside. I became fascinated by what Bradford’s Stereo Centre had to offer. After a minute he came out, looking puzzled and bad-tempered. He shook his head at his companion, and muttered something. Then they were off again. They plunged into that bewildering maze of hilly side-streets I’d driven around before. Left, right, left, up, down, into a shopping centre, into a market. Real thorough boys, these. Finally they turned into a large pub with a long frontage and a dimly-lit interior.

  I lingered outside, peering through the mottled glass, but I could see nothing. I didn’t want to go in before I was sure they had got their drinks and were perhaps settled down at a table. But mightn’t they be watching the door for new arrivals? I noticed a tiny alley down one side of the pub, leading to a notice that said Saloon Bar. I nipped down and pushed the door open, and found myself in the sort of bar that only the furtive or the incurably respectable would patronize.

  There was a door into the Public, and I found I had an excellent view of it. The two were leaning — looming, almost, they were so large — over the bar, and being served with pint mugs of — not beer, it seemed, but perhaps draught lager. I watched them try it, then wander away from the bar into the body of the cheerless, wooded, high-ceilinged barn of a room. There were tables and benches in rows in the body of the place, and frosted glass panelling between them, making some attempt to produce a more intimate atmosphere. The men went away from me, and I saw them take seats on opposite sides of a table on the far side of a glass panel. I paid for my beer, an extra 2p or so, then to the barmaid’s surprise I dodged through the door into the Public and strolled nonchalantly over to the table on the other side of the glass panel. The fair heads were unmistakable. I put my pint down on the table, and slid into the bench.

  At first, with the buzz of conversation around me, I found it difficult to tune my ears in to their talk. There were people at the nearby tables — talking about dog-racing, pigeons, the government, and all sorts of nonsense. Then I caught their tones — very low for two such large men, and blurred. I could hear them talking, but I could not hear what they were talking about. I edged along the bench, closer but not too close to the frosted glass. They obviously had no suspicions. They were leant forward over their table, their heads close together. As they got deeper and deeper into their conversation their voices got higher and higher in tone. I could hear what they said, but —

  They were talking in a foreign language.

  • • •

  I sat there kicking myself and cursing my luck. I should have thought of that. Just the look of the men — two fair men together, big, well-built, not an ounce of fat on them. It wasn’t English, somehow. I sighed, and tried once again to tune my ears in.

  It wasn’t French — that, in spite of my remarks to Mrs Parfitt, I could have managed. Nor, from the sound of it, was it any of the Mediterranean languages. They looked about as Latin, anyway, as Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls. German, then? No, it didn’t have the guttural heaviness of German. Scandinavian, of course: one or other of the Scandinavian languages. Just what one might have thought, looking at them.

  Which didn’t help much. Knowledge of the Scandinavian languages is not widely diffused, and it certainly wasn’t diffused in my direction. I tried to make out individual words. Now and again something popped up that I thought I understood. ‘Leeds’, surely? But who could say whether ‘Leeds’ meant anything in Swedish, or whatever it was. Then I heard a name, twice. Waddington. Only he said it with something between a V and a W at the beginning. Who was Waddington? Their boss? I thought I heard the word ‘manuscript’, or something like it, but I couldn’t be sure, it was all so fast and low. I felt like a blind man at a strip show. If only I’d got a cassette recorder, I could have taken it to a linguist
later. I sat there, fuming, and hoping that perhaps the name ‘Brontë’ would occur.

  But when a name came, it wasn’t that. ‘Tennyson’. I heard it as clearly as anything. A minute or two later, it came again: Tennyson. What the hell had the Old Queen’s tame bard to do with all this? What connection was there between Tennyson and Emily Brontë? Those two particular misty mountains never came together, surely? There it was again! You’d think they were bloody research scholars. I sat there in mounting frustration.

  Then I sensed movement in the booth beside me. Were they going? Would they go back and make another attempt on the Royal Edward? But no: they took their glasses. They were going to the bar again. With blessed prescience the architect had placed a long mirror behind the counter, above the bottles. By turning sideways I could study them out of the corner of my eye as they stood there waiting for their refills.

  The taller of the two was the one I had got the best sight of so far. Thickset, in good trim, with cream-coloured hair and regular features, but with something of heaviness about him that was not a heaviness of body only. Now I got a good look at the other one, and he could never in a hundred years be English — but, oddly enough, nor did he look particularly Scandinavian either. His hair had a silvery fairness, it is true, but his face had a lowering, almost Mongolian impassivity about it: blank, massive, cruel. That was the impression of the body too: he was shorter than the other one, but even wider — a tough, threatening muscularity. I didn’t like the look of them at all. They looked, as Jan said, like thugs. They looked like somebody’s heavies. I was so fascinated I tipped my drink over as I turned to get a better look. I swung back round and retrieved most of it. Then I crouched over it for a minute or two.

  When I looked back they were staring unsmiling ahead as their drinks were brought. The tall one slapped down a couple of pound notes. When they turned round from the bar I was slumped low over my beer again. How long would they stay? Where would they go when they left? I waited for them to sit down. And waited. Surely they wouldn’t be likely to stop and chat to anyone. They hadn’t the air of pigeon fanciers, or of being at home in this kind of place at all. I cranked my head round cautiously, but I couldn’t see them. Still they didn’t come. I turned round more openly, anxious. Then I got up and scanned the whole barn of a Public Bar.

  They must have rumbled me when I upset my beer. They were nowhere to be seen.

  • • •

  And of course when I went to the door on to the street there was no sign of them there either. At an empty table in the middle of the bar there were two full pint mugs of draught lager. They had obviously spotted me in the mirror, registered nothing — they had the kind of faces built for registering nothing — and then when they had got their beers they had set them down and scarpered. I had bungled the whole thing.

  Not that I would have been likely to get much out of any further overheard conversation. Eavesdropping on a foreign conversation is a bit like observing the sex life of earwigs — a lot’s going on, but you don’t get the point of it at all. But I might have followed them again, perhaps found out where they were staying. I somehow couldn’t see them going back to the Royal Edward now, not after they’d seen me there, then spotted me listening in to their conversation — even if they could have been pretty sure I would not have understood it. I finished my beer, feeling frustrated and fed up with myself, and went out into the street.

  What does one do in Bradford on a drizzly summer evening? The various options didn’t seem enticing: the streets were nearly empty, but there was the odd window-shopper, the odd street-corner punk, and I supposed there might be the odd multi-cinema, where I could go and see one film and hear three. I toyed with the thought of an Indian meal, but my stomach said ‘Not on your life’.

  Ringing up Jan didn’t seem likely to restore my self-respect, but I’m a bit of a masochist, so I rang her up just the same.

  ‘Jan,’ I said, when we’d made our greetings, ‘did you bring all those books on the Brontës up to Harpenden with you?’

  ‘Most of them. All except the ones that were totally and absolutely ga-ga. Why?’

  I told her the whole story.

  ‘Well, you didn’t distinguish yourself, did you?’ she commented brutally. ‘A right fumble-bum. Do you know, men got demoted in the Victorian force for less than that?’

  ‘Stop wallowing in nostalgia. I’m not looking to distinguish myself on this case, just to get hold of that manuscript.’

  ‘You don’t seem to be making much of a hand of that either.’

  ‘You do do marvels for a man when he’s down, Jan. Now, will you go and look up those books? I want to know what connection there was between the Brontës and Tennyson.’

  ‘Oh — hell, Perry, they’re in the Georgian wing. Ring me back in ten minutes, will you?’

  Harpenden is the sort of house that makes you wish escalators and moving walkways had been invented a little earlier. I rang off, and spent the time ringing the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police at Leeds, asking them to contact all the hotels and guest-houses in the Leeds and Bradford area, to see if any of them had had a couple of Scandinavians staying there. They said it might take a bit of time. Bradford has never caught on as a holiday resort, but there were scores of small places for commercial travellers. I told them to get on to it. Then I rang back to Harpenden. Jan answered the phone, breathless.

  ‘Give me a chance,’ she said. ‘Do you realize how long it takes to get around this great barn of a place?’

  ‘I should do. I was brought up there. Now you’ll start to appreciate the flat in Maida Vale.’

  ‘Well, I do begin to,’ she admitted. ‘My ankles are beginning to swell. Wait a minute, I’ll look in the indexes.’ There was silence, except for the sound of pages being flicked over. ‘Well, really, there hardly seems to be any connection at all. Emily liked Tennyson’s poems. Charlotte and Anne brought her back a volume when they went to London . . . A few references here and there, but that’s about it.’

  ‘There must be more to it than that,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps there isn’t any real connection: perhaps they were talking about something else — some other manuscript altogether.’

  ‘Two manuscripts, with the heavies after both?’ queried Jan. ‘It doesn’t sound very likely. Too wholesale altogether.’

  ‘You’re right there,’ I admitted. ‘Then why this mention — three times I heard it — of Tennyson?’

  ‘Perry — will you be at the cottage tomorrow?’

  ‘I suppose so — if you catch me early. Why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Just in case I wanted to ring you.’

  And she rang off, leaving me as dissatisfied as when I had rung her, and a mite suspicious as well. What did that last bit mean? Had Jan got an idea, one that she was holding out on me with? It seemed only too likely.

  There was nobody outside waiting for the phone. There was nobody outside at all. Bradford in the rain really is not an enlivening place. I decided on a little experiment. I heaved up the local telephone directory, found the number of the Royal Edward, and rang them.

  ‘Could I speak to Mr Waddington, please?’

  ‘One moment, and I’ll see if he’s in,’ said the receptionist. They never call you ‘sir’ if you ring from a phone-box. After a moment I heard ‘I’m putting you through’, and then ‘Hello-o-o,’ in an American accent and a (or did I imagine it?) slightly wary voice.

  ‘Oh, good evening, Mr Waddington. My name is Trethowan. We met earlier. I just wanted to apologize for gate-crashing Mr Parfitt’s party this afternoon.’

  ‘Good heavens, no apologies needed. He was delighted . . .’

  ‘I feel bad about it. I certainly wouldn’t have gone up if I’d known. But you will keep in mind my request to let us know if you get any offers of Brontë material, won’t you?’

  ‘Surely, surely. I’ve made a note of that already. But nothing so far, I’m afraid, Mr Trethowan. And that’s a real shame, because it sure would have been ni
ce to pick up a Brontë item in Brontë country, wouldn’t it?’

  It sure would have, Mr Waddington, I thought, saying my adieux and ringing off. And I wasn’t at all sure they hadn’t managed it already.

  CHAPTER 10

  AT THE SIGN OF THE RISEN MOSES

  After a night spent tossing and turning in one of Miss Wing’s inadequate little beds I arose next morning with sore bones, a general feeling of depression, and a sinking sense that I had little or no idea what to do next. Which way was my decidedly erratic investigation going to direct itself now? Admittedly there were some loose ends to be cleared up, and I pottered around clearing them — phoning here and there to fill in the picture. I checked with the hospital and there was a glimmer of good news about Miss Wing’s condition: there seemed to be signs of returning consciousness, though they were still unsure how far the brain was affected, and it would certainly be several days before she could be questioned. Then I heard from the Bradford police about two Scandinavians who had stayed at an obscure guest-house on the outskirts of the town. They had checked out yesterday, with no forwarding address. They had given their names as Hans Olsen and Jens Nilsen, of Oslo. Ho-ho, I thought. The Norwegian equivalent of John Smith and Bill Brown of London. Another door slammed in my face.

  For there really did not seem to be anything very obvious to follow up next, and I could hardly sit around in the cottage day after day at the Yorkshire police’s expense, waiting for something to turn up.

  It was at that point that Jan rang.

  ‘Hello. Still feeling down in the dumps?’

  ‘I’m certainly not dancing tiptoe through the clouds. So if you’ve rung me up to tell me what a cock-up I’m making of this case, Jan, you can just ring off. I have no idea where the manuscript is. The two Scands have disappeared, leaving behind them nothing but false names and Oslo as their address. And I haven’t had a single idea about any possible connection Tennyson may have with the case . . .’