by Adam Thorpe
They even had my motive worked out for me: they seized my diary, you see – and John Wall had fed them with stuff about Rachael, my threats, all that. The only sticking point was how I managed to get the dead man into the tree. I didn’t tell them that a man, even an old man, can have the strength of a leopard if he’s a leopard man. I didn’t tell them anything. Barry was useless, even though he did a lot of the talking. Morris and others gave excellent character references but sounded panicky on the radio and television news, in between shots of Alan G’s Hamlet saying he was only mad when the wind was southerly. Imagine, Mother!
The pictures grew worse day by day. Some of them were actual nightmares. I saw Muck’s terrified face and my clawed hands tearing at it. I saw Malcolm’s chin turning into the agonised rat, forcing his mouth up into his eyes. The tinted frontal lobe positioned itself securely just here, tap tap, drilled in by Nuncle. The cell became your room, full of munching ants. Crocodiles bumped their snouts against the window’s reinforced glass. But the very worst thing, Mother, was that Sir Steggie finally found me. After all that time, all that searching, he tracked me down. He did something very clever: he pretended to be Herbert E. Standing, in the same white cricketing togs. That’s why I let him come close. Then off came the mask and it was Sir Steggie. His lips were right off his teeth, as if eaten away, but it was only a smile. He was sweaty and dirty, as if he’d come a very long way. He was holding your letters – I mean, the letters Nuncle forged in order to destroy me. Sir Steggie put a finger out and touched me on the cheek. His finger was sticky.
‘Hello, Hugh,’ he said. ‘We meet at last. Yum yum.’
I was screaming – it was my only defence, Mother! Now they tell me that there was no one in the room at all – that I was screaming at my reflection in the window glass! If only they knew! I don’t wear dirty spectacles, do I? I don’t have fingers covered in Lyle’s Golden Syrup, do I? I don’t have a head like an armadillo, do I? And how do they explain the dab of Lyle’s Golden Syrup on my cheek? Eh? I kept showing it to them, but no one would listen.
But the very worst thing, Mother, was that I began to believe the letters were not forgeries. The police found the grass-cutting rota for Effley parish church in my back pocket (I can’t think why it was there, right now, but it made things even stickier, of course) – and its crooked type looked just the same as yours, and Nuncle’s, and half the old typewriters in the world, I should think! So I began to believe that it was you who’d bashed out the letters – and all that that must mean for me! As I began to believe that I had sallied forth at night with the leopard spirit in me, and settled an aching score!
I’m getting worked up again. Enough to have them popping their head round. I’m fine, now, I tell them. They need reassuring, you see. Poor souls.
Then one day they open the door and tell me that I can go home. Isn’t that amazing, Mother? I ask them why. Because John Wall has come down to the police station and told them. Although he’s very drunk. Told them what? That he did it, he did it, he did it. ‘I dunnit, I dunnit, I dunnit.’
Do you know who told him to tell them? His mum.
Your affectionate son,
Hugh
Bright and breezy. Lovely colours.
My dear Mother,
I’m doing rather well.
Fagg isn’t around to apologise. A minion hands me a holdall with the bits of Africa they had taken away. ‘Tell Detective Sergeant Fagg that leopards stalk baboons in the trees, so he’d better watch out.’ The minion smiles, funnily enough.
Most of my stuff is still in Ulverton, so I have to return to that wretched village. I take the bus, this time, but there is no one I know – there is almost no one, in fact! Ilythia turns as we pass, behind her Scotch pines; next to the gate there’s a fluorescent planning-permission poster. Not quite a green shoot, but it’ll do.
Ted thinks he’s seen a ghost when I walk in. ‘Hello, Ted. I’m to be hung tomorrow but they thought I ought to do a few more murders, starting with you.’ Or words to that effect. Ted, you see, phoned the police when I crept out at dawn. He was asked to do this. Community service, I suppose. He stands me a double whisky in recompense, but in the back room. I do need a drink. His spectacles are right on the end of his nose as he tells me all. John Wall got the skins and Muck took them to the taxidermist. There’s a roaring illegal trade in skins, you see – badger, fox, rabbit, even otter. And then your leopard one comes along. By the caravan next to the wildwood, on the old gypsy plot, Muck made a pass at John, that’s what they think. ‘If you know what I mean, Mr Arkwright. Hands, y’know.’ He flutters his hand, grips his own thigh. ‘Always something a bit corkscrew about Muck. John hits Muck, slightly too hard. Couldn’t stop hisself, that’s what he says to Scott-Parkes, this morning. Put the boot in, over and over. Horrible, really. Sort of frenzy. Then he, he rips him up with the leopard claws to make it look as if, as if it was an animal as had done it, see. Hides him up the tree. Inhuman strength, I call it.’
Now I see!
‘An animal, Ted?’
‘That’s right. Cunning bloke.’ He knows damn well what I’m thinking. He’s still got the odd dry tea leaf in his cardie. I make a growling noise – I’m acting, it’s an act. Then I point to myself. Ted frowns and shoves his spectacles up.
‘This is the animal he was thinking of, Ted. He knew I’d been seen with the missing leopard skin just the day before. Malcolm Villiers told him, over a wood-pigeon pie. It’s called framing someone. But I didn’t have the leopard skin, did I?’
Ted shrugs his shoulders and offers me another whisky. I refuse.
‘What time did the murder take place on Sunday night, Ted?’
‘Oh, the early hours. John was going on about rough cider what had made his head go round and round, or summat, this morning. Poor bugger. You ask Doc Scott-Parkes. It was him as got the confession. God knows why.’
‘Oh, I expect I’ll read all about it.’
He thrusts his spectacles up his nose again, goes over to the door, hovers. ‘You know you’ve been in the papers quite a bit already, don’t you? We told them journalist buggers you were in the clink, you wouldn’t be coming back here. Put ’em off the scent, anyway. All they did was drink, if you ask me. And there’s a bit of post upstairs.’
The post goes straight into my bag along with everything else. I open only one letter, the one with a District Council stamp, from Rob Gardner. He confirms that the freshet, and the soil it floods into, has been seriously contaminated by a long-term leaking of arsenical pesticides and other ‘agricultural products of a chemical nature’. The Jennets have been contacted. No mention of gas or corpses.
I pop into the shop. Marjorie pretends nothing has happened, that she knows nothing. I go over to Gracie in her basket chair and take her hand and kiss it. She has a bowl of redcurrants in her lap. Her hand is even lighter, like a sticky red fledgling. ‘God bless you, Gracie,’ I murmur. There are tears in my eyes.
‘Don’t folk gabble!’ is all she whispers, as if it’s something only she and I can share.
I go across to the Old Barn. ‘Goodbye Jessica. In another age I would have married you.’ She kisses me on each cheek and says that she never thought I’d done it, it was that creep Malcolm’s doing and of course that weirdo John Wall’s. ‘Blame no one,’ I say, ‘but a ghost.’
‘What ghost?’
‘The Red Lady. Ghosts are will o’ the wisps, they lead you off the path into bottomless bogs.’
‘Do you believe in ghosts, Hugh?’
‘Of course not. That’s the trouble.’
The local headlines flap inside the grilles of the two hoárdings outside the newsagents. Not changed since last week, I suppose: HORRIFIC MURDER SHOCKS VILLAGE, shouts the Netherford Advertiser. But the Netherford Weekly News has chewed its pen to shreds, clearly: THE LION OF THEATRE SPOTTED WITH KILLER SKIN. And the nationals ran even harder with it, Morris will tell me. Now there’s egg on their filthy faces – but my reputation is dead. I
am the Tate & Lyle lion, now, with bees making a hive in my head.
Buzz buzz, they go – even here, even as I’m writing to you, Mother. Reminding me that John Wall sits in his cell saying he didn’t do it, these days. This is what I’ve read. He always was a liar, I tell myself. I dunnit. I never dunnit. One of these is a lie. One of these is a mask. It’s all his mum’s fault, to my mind. (My head is such a hive of these sticky thoughts!)
People I pass stop in shock, or hurry across to the far side. Not everyone’s heard! Then I spot Mrs Pratt, busy nattering to someone by the antiques shop. Rollo scampers up as I walk towards her. She turns her head and actually squeals. ‘Mrs Pratt,’ I say, ‘you have nothing to worry about – even a leopard has taste. But watch out for the crocodiles. They eat anything, at any time. Crocs are not fussy at all.’ She gives a little swallowy gulp and invites me to tea. I laugh.
On a whim, I enter the phone box in the square. ‘Mr Gardner? I’m out. I didn’t do it.’ Rob Gardner sounds unwell. I ask him if any of the poisons on his list has a garlicky odour. No, he says, he knows of no product that smells of garlic apart from mustard gas. He is personally very very sorry that no traces of mustard gas have been detected in the samples. ‘You have done me a profound service, Mr Gardner,’ I say. ‘You see, a scent of wild garlic is all I have left.’ Silence. His breathing. As if he’s wearing his mask.
Passing the primary school, on my way to the parish clerk’s house, I hear a drum. Bom bom bom. It’s Malcolm’s drum. So I tap on the window until he stops and turns. His expression is one of sudden horror, since I am leering at him. The children laugh and some of them burst into tears. My face squashes against the glass and I’m wiggling my fingers by my ears. His rodent chin is covered in stubble. He hides it behind his own fingers. Then I leave him to his fright.
Mr Quallington comes to his door and pales on seeing me. ‘I’ve been let out into the community,’ I say. ‘John Wall has confessed.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ he says. He huffs and he puffs, full of apologies for not finding out about your plot, Mother.
‘I’m leaving for ever this afternoon,’ I say. ‘It’s now or never.’
The vestry’s chilliness is stronger than the warm smell of wine and linen and beeswaxed wood. Mr Quallington pulls out a big leather-bound file containing half a century of documents relating to the graveyard. Your plot, Mother, was near Aunt Joy’s, but is now someone else’s. ‘I want to know when it became someone else’s,’ I say. He huffs and he puffs and turns the big pages through the 1930s. Nothing. The war, but the gummed-in scraps continue as if nothing has happened. Deaths. Reclaiming of old plots. A small fee to tend it when there’s no one else.
At last – an Arkwright! It’s the copy of a letter to Father, dated late November 1944. From Herbert Hobbs, Gracie’s husband. The winter is harsh, there are more deaths than usual, the churchyard is short of space. He wants to know whether Mr Arkwright might consider releasing his late wife’s plot. Father’s reply on the next page is tardy but terse, his hand shaky from drink. He is writing on the eleventh anniversary of his dear wife’s disappearance. He can see no objection to annulling his reservation of the plot and thus freeing it. (He was broke, for one thing, Mother, but he didn’t say that.)
The next letter pasted in gives me a little shock. It’s from Nuncle. He objects to this annulment, speaking as the dead woman’s brother, in sorrow but also ‘eternal hope’. Mr Quallington smooths the page. The husband overrules the brother. ‘A bit of a kerfuffle, it seems,’ says the little man, gloatingly. ‘Oh, it’s par for the course in this book.’
Jessica will kindly drop me off in Netherford – but I will go, not immediately to the station, but to the library. I will scroll the microfiched pages of the Netherford Weekly News for the last wintry weeks of 1944. There! Owing to the wartime blackout, and the danger of waving bright lamps about at night, Ulverton Manor’s carol-singing round took place in the morning.
The librarian will wonder why I am laughing so loudly, in a place of whispers. What I guess in the vestry will be confirmed, you see. The carol-singers crunched from house to house on the same morning!
I mean, Mother, the morning of the day Herbert Hobbs received Father’s letter. The tea was an elevenses of hot mulled-wine and cake. It was all accounted ‘a great success, despite the bitter temperatures’. Well, I am glad.
Their lamps swinging on chains through the grey gloom, but not for reading by, oh no. Gracie, dear Gracie, is neither a liar nor ga-ga. You weren’t dead for her in 1933, were you? You were only dead for her when her husband mentioned, oh good, the Arkwright woman’s plot is free. No longer waiting for Mrs Arkwright? No, she’s gone for good, my dear. From then on, I was the only one waiting for you, Mother. I was the only one keeping you alive.
So who did the tipsy Gracie see that day, in a cherry-red coat and raven hair, crunching over the snow in the noon light? That day you were officially extinguished, Mother.
Well, it could have been anyone. Mrs Rachael Arnold, for instance. Newly wed. Getting used to the country. The coat emerging with a rustle from its cellophane, now its owner was officially extinct. An expensive coat, wartime scarcity, the bitter cold. Father would’ve had no use for it, would he? Kept in the family, never used.
The effigy of you, from the back, in the days before she declined.
He’s talking again, the huffy-puffy little man in that place of wine and beeswax and mothballs. He’s turned to the next page, another typed letter on wartime paper under his finger. He sees his father’s signature – it makes him very happy, this. Rambles on about the old times, about Len and Harry the gravediggers. Somebody’s practising scales on a piano somewhere near, it wafts over the churchyard and enters by the open door, plink plonk plunk. Harry grew prize geraniums. Crumbled bone for fertiliser. Bright red geraniums. He’s rambling. Rambling about rams. A ram. A ram’s skull.
I open my eyes in the shadows, on my little wobbly chair. He’s stabbing the book with his plump finger, looking at me expectantly. ‘Isn’t that funny?’ he says. ‘Never made the connection.’
‘What connection?’
‘Between your mum’s plot and the ram!’
‘What ram?’
He sighs. Where have I been just now? he’s thinking. Goodness knows. Then he softens, because I’m old and the cassocks hang next to my cheek, reminding him to be charitable. He folds his hands like the people fold them here, not quite in prayer.
‘They found a ram’s skull, in your mum’s plot. Len and Harry did. Nice big twirly horns. My dad was the replacement sexton, you see, it being the war, so I was there when he was shouted for. Me a little lad in shorts, next to him, peeping over. Frost on the ground, earth hard as nails. And these twirly horns at the bottom of the pit, in this sort of rotted sack. Horrible smiling teeth, big skull, just like you find them out on the downs. Now who would stuff a sheep’s head into an empty plot?’
I continue to sit in the shadows.
‘It wasn’t stuffed,’ I say, ‘it was dropped into a pit secretly dug for the occasion.’
He clears his throat and puffs. He doesn’t like to be corrected. Who does?
‘Were there any other bones, Mr Quallington? Or was it just the ram?’
I’m tapping my frontal lobe, which still tends to be tinted.
The letter crackles under his finger. ‘Not according to my old dad’s report, no. Apart that is, from a pig’s trotter and an ox tail – but we’re always finding bits of lunch in the churchyard, Mr Arkwright. That’s what Harry used to say: this place is one big lunch, he used to say. Gallows humour, see. All out on contract, now, of course. Oh no. No human bones, anyway.’
He chortles as I go to the door. Stand there, a bit dizzy: the churchyard, the trees, the open downs. The high-piled sky. He’s talking behind me, huffing and puffing again. ‘I hope I’ve not upset you, Mr Arkwright. I mean, with respect, even if there was a whole lorry-load of bones found in your mum’s plot, there’s one poor soul you
can bet they wouldn’t belong to, Mr Arkwright.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Your old mum, God bless her.’
He gives another little chortle, then thinks better of it. My hands are trembling. The cell did me no good. The pork pies. The shiny walls. The smell of bleach.
‘God bless her indeed, Mr Quallington,’ I whisper from the door, ‘for you are absolutely right.’
Then I stride away, without falling over.
You see, Mother, it’s only since I have come here that I have regained my faith. It’s taken a long time to rebuild, piece it back together, bit by bit!
Nuncle’s typewriter bashed away that little bundle of foul lies, oh yes. But why? That is the question. Why go to such trouble? Such invention? And so very meticulous! And then to tuck it away for the years to come. For me. For the one person he knew must happen upon it in time. Tick tock!
I am still working that one out, Mother. When I have worked it out, I will leave here and travel to Africa. I will steam up the river to Bamakum, of which I believe there is nothing left. Because when I close my eyes and travel there in my head, I see only tendrils and creepers hanging from tall trees and the dark swirl of water before them. Nothing else. Shall we go there together? We’ll take a panga each and cut our way to Father’s road. Do you think Father would come, too? The three of us should manage it, in silence of course, each as speechless as the trees. We’ll keep cutting our way to Odoomi, and then take the ancient paths to your dark lake in the crater. This time, I promise I will try to swim.
And may I invite Quiri?
Yes, I’ll start arranging it now: a certain long moment lost in Africa.
Our own, our own long moment, Mother.
Your ever loving son,
Hugh
5
BUEA, NOVEMBER 2ND, 1920
Dear Joy and Edward,
Well! Here we are! And it is not nearly as hot as James implied. I’ll tell you why in a minute. No, why not now? We are halfway up (at a guess) a most enormous mountain – a volcano, would you believe, and not in the least bit dormant. Don’t fret about us: the lava flowed down the other side, last time, about fifty years ago. Isn’t this, Edward, what Alex Keiller said things were like when we were all still apes? Except that in Buea there are fine tea-roses – and cups of tea to keep away the foggy chill!
