A Hovering of Vultures

by Robert Barnard

  “Well, there is a school of thought that says so, but not a large one. There are suggestions that she was in love with a farmer from over Oxenthorpe way.”

  “What happened? Killed in the trenches?”

  “He was married. There were difficulties, in those days, if one of you happened to be married.”

  This was a thoroughly underhand reference to an episode in Gregory’s past to which he himself had confessed, in an unguarded moment. He ignored it.

  “What about the brother? He wrote too, didn’t he?”

  “Yes—most unlikely books. He was bitten by the modernist bug—read early Joyce, Ezra Pound, all that sort of thing. He wrote experimental novels published by a tiny publishing firm called the Frolic Press. Perhaps this name led the critics to assume the books were just meant as a joke, though the humour was often very bitter. Anyway, they met with nothing but ridicule, when they were noticed at all. They sold in tens, and Joshua made practically no money from them. The farm was often in difficulties because he was a lousy farmer.”

  “Walking around thinking of agenbite of inwit when he should have been ploughing a straight furrow?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Meanwhile the sister was doing rather well? So what was the relationship between them like?”

  “More and more fraught, apparently. They only had each other, you see. Neither of them mixed much in the village.”

  “By the way, how do you know the situation between them got more and more fraught?”

  “By the result.”

  “Unscholarly, but go on.”

  “When Susannah had free time she wrote. Joshua had very little, but he did manage three slim novels. Tension grew and grew. Even the village must have sensed it, because there was very little surprise when it happened.”

  “When what happened?”

  “One day in 1932 Joshua got a brief note from the Frolic Press rejecting his fourth book. He brooded over it all morning. Then he came into the kitchen with an axe and killed Susannah. He made himself a cup of tea, wrote a note that just said ‘I did it’, then went out into the little wood nearby and shot himself through the head. Like everything else he did, his suicide was not a great success. He was still alive when they found him, though he died on the way to the hospital.”

  “My God, what a story!” said Gregory Waite appreciatively. “It sounds like Wuthering Heights rewritten by Joe Orton. It must have knocked the tabloids for six at the time.”

  “They didn’t have tabloids—or not many—at the time. Actually there wasn’t all that much publicity. Micklewike was pretty remote then—it wasn’t a touristy area, as it is now—and Susannah just wasn’t well-known enough for the newspapers to get hysterical. There was a very mild sensation, which probably led to one or two reprints of the early novels. That was about it.”

  “Until when?”

  “Until the Untamed Shrew Press came along, early in the ’eighties, and reprinted The Barren Fields and then all the others. Since then interest has grown and grown.”

  “Among whom? Male, female? Old, young? Is it all middle-aged women looking for a successor to Mr Rochester?”

  Gregory’s tone, pre-feminist-revolution as it so often was, irritated Gillian. She flinched.

  “All ages, both sexes. But she does seem to have a particular appeal to the young.”

  As if to illustrate her words, Gregory watched as a young black man, two rows down, reached up into his Adidas bag on the rack, took out a copy of The Black Byre, and settled down to read it.

  • • •

  At the far end of the carriage Mr Rupert Coggenhoe, author of Starveacre, made himself comfortable for the journey north to Leeds. He had glanced at the headlines of his Daily Telegraph (“Major is not his own man, says Thatcher”) before noting which newspapers and which books his fellow travellers in Standard Class were reading. This was normal practice for the professional author, and Rupert Coggenhoe was a very professional author indeed. He had written, as Jed Parker, novels about money, power and autopilot sex when Jeffrey Archer was in vogue. He had written, as Chantalle Derivaux, a steamy saga of sex, glitz and the fashion industry. He had written a chronicle of working-class Bootle, and, going further back, had even written books about a sexy secret agent and historical novels about various pathetic or fascinating royal ladies (Fair Rosamund, The Swan Neck). He had, in fact, so many aliases that his real name was known only to his agent and to his immediate neighbours in Luton. He was a professional writer, and he sold very respectably.

  Respectably, however, was not how he wanted to sell. He yearned to sell in millions. He coveted special displays in W. H. Smiths, queues down Piccadilly when he signed in Hatchards, appearances on Wogan, special interviews in the colour supplements. The fact that these desiderata had never come his way he blamed on his agent, his editor, the distribution side at his publishers, and above all the publicity people. So hopeless were these last (“They couldn’t sell icecream in the Sahara desert” he used to say) that he was forced to arrange most of the publicity for his books himself. But even then his fluent tongue and rather distinguished profile didn’t secure anything but reluctant media interest.

  Now he settled himself down, feet projecting out into the gangway, and read a copy of Starveacre, the book held poised so as to be visible to people as they made their way to the buffet. Two carriages down, in a seat with her back to the engine, his wife did exactly the same, making sure that the title was visible to those on their way back from the buffet. That was what she had been told to do, and that was what she did.

  • • •

  Detective Constable Dexter (“Charlie”) Peace was getting a trifle bored with The Black Byre. He had fetched it down when he did because he had been listening in to the conversation of the young couple some seats down from him, and it suited his sense of drama to do it just at that moment. In any case he had to get as many as possible of the Sneddons’ works read. He had moderately enjoyed The Barren Fields, had been slightly less enthusiastic about Orchard’s End, and was now becoming bored with The Black Byre. He was finding the absence of irony or any other sort of humour rather oppressive. Life with Susannah can hardly have been a bundle of laughs. He imagined her as so whole-hearted, so breathlessly committed, so devoted in her relationships that he himself would have run a mile from her. To be loved by such a woman would be sheer hell.

  Mind you, he’d been interested in the Introduction to The Black Byre, which had given details of the murder-suicide that he had not come across before. Now if he had been investigating that business he’d have known exactly what to do: what steps he’d have to take to check that what seemed to have happened was what actually happened; what weight to give to the various experts’ reports; how to present his own report.

  He would have been able, too, to make his own judgments on the people involved, and that would be the most interesting part. The fact that Joshua Sneddon, after murdering his sister, had drunk a cup of tea, smoked a cigarette and (according to the Introduction he had just read) stubbed out the cigarette on his dead sister’s bare arm seemed to him immensely significant: this was not just an intense fit of jealousy but a hideous subterranean rage that had been boiling and seething in him for years. A rage that persisted even after murder had to be a terrible thing indeed. No, the deaths of the Sneddons he could have coped with, taken completely in his stride.

  Whereas the Sneddon-related matter he was now sent on and which he had just been to London to discuss at Scotland Yard was so vague and nebulous as to approach the invisible, and the instructions were hardly more than that he maintain a watching brief. What he would do when he arrived at Batley Bridge, what he would hope to find in Micklewike and what he should do if he found it—about all these things he was uncertain.

  Still, one thing he did know: the girl from two rows down would be there. He studied the pair. The man was gangling, carefree, perhaps a little pleased with himself. The girl on the other hand had in her eyes somet
hing—what was it?— something predatory, something at any rate very determined, very insistent on getting her own way. He didn’t feel they made a couple. Much more, they made a contrast.

  One other thing was certain: he would have to be able to talk knowledgeably, if not intelligently, about the works of Susannah Sneddon. (The works of her brother, he gathered, were in the nature of optional extras, and from the accounts he had read of them he was profoundly glad they were.) So, reverie over, he settled down once again to The Black Byre. The heroine had just heard heavy breathing from the hay loft.

  • • •

  Mrs Letitia Farraday, widow of the late Howard C. Farraday III, sat firmly ensconced in an almost empty first class compartment, her luggage around and above her. The porter had been friendly and respectful, scenting American money. He had not been disappointed.

  The first class of British Rail was its usual somnolent, antechamber-to-death self, though at the far end a besuited young man was holding forth in chain-saw tones to a look-alike about financial matters. From the fragments of conversation that penetrated down to her Mrs Farraday gathered that he had been a teenage millionaire, and had lost much of it in the Wall Street slump of ’eighty-seven. She shook her head. Young people had not been thus when she had been a girl in this country.

  For though the porter had been right in scenting American money, he had been wrong in assuming that Mrs Farraday herself was American, except by adoption, accent and passport. She had grown up in the North of England. Though she would never have used the phrase herself, she was now coming home.

  She had been coming back to Britain every three or four years since her second husband died, but the truth was she had no particular feeling for the country—felt happier twinges of anticipation those years when she was going to Venice, Paris or Scandinavia. She had enjoyed times in Edinburgh, North Wales and York, liked London less and less as it became progressively shabbier and more traffic-logged, and tried to avoid it. But in general she felt she could cope with anywhere on earth, could make her way without panic or disaster in all five continents.

  “I am a citizen of the world,” she would tell herself complacently. And she would add: “Not bad at seventy-five.”

  And now she was going home. She had never wanted to before, had felt no urge to retrace her steps. She had quarrelled with her parents and had quit the atmosphere of Bible and biliousness which had been the dominant notes of her childhood. She had sent them a postcard from New York in 1939, with her address on it, but they had never replied. New York had seemed heaven to her, but it would have been Sodom and Gomorrah to them. No doubt at some stage they had died, and been buried, but Letitia Farraday had no idea when, or by whom. Presumably a cousin had done the decent thing, for she had no living brothers or sisters.

  Why then had that article in Time magazine been so evocative, why had it tugged her so strongly back to the bleak little village for which she felt no affection? There was the Sneddon connection, of course, though she had not been fond of Susannah, and had found Joshua distant and rather odd. The idea of a Weekend, or Conference, or some kind of jamboree in the old farmhouse had certainly appealed to her. Time magazine, ever alive to trends, had perhaps played it up a bit: her travel agent reported that it would be a distinctly modest affair. But in spite of the sub-standard accommodation which was all the area afforded, and in spite of being conscious that there were few if any of her village contemporaries she particularly wanted to meet again, she was distinctly looking forward to this weekend.

  Perhaps it was the fact that she had something to contribute. Perhaps it was because, though she had told no one in advance, she was one person who really knew the Sneddons, and remembered in some detail the life they had led.

  Letitia Farraday, in some corner of her amiable mind, anticipated with pleasure being a woman of importance.

  • • •

  When the InterCity 125 drew into platform five of Leeds Station most of the passengers streamed towards the ticket barrier, while a few clustered under the flickering indicators, trying to work out which platform to go to. Charlie Peace cast an eye over them, wondering which would turn out to be conferees: a cherubic young man who might be a clergyman in mufti—maybe; a tweedy woman with a West Highland terrier—hardly; a large American lady with a willing porter in tow—quite probably, because as he strode past them he heard the name of Micklewike, though as he looked back he saw them heading for the exit.

  As he headed down the steps for platform nine Charlie saw something that intrigued him. The man whom he had seen reading Starveacre on his way to the buffet had met up with the woman he had seen reading Starveacre on his way back from the buffet. No, not met up—been reunited with. And together they were kissing in parental fashion a sulky, nondescript young woman in a college scarf who was leading them in the direction he was going himself. No, not nondescript really: actually quite pretty. But decidedly morose, and not more than dutifully pleased to see her parents. Well, actually not even that.

  On the little sprinter train to Batley Bridge near Micklewike, which limped rather than sprinted, Charlie positioned himself not too far from them, and kept his ears open. At one point he heard the girl say:

  “You’re just using her. Capitalising on her popularity.”

  And he heard the father reply:

  “Not at all, my dear. You know nothing whatsoever about it. Susannah Sneddon was a literary forebear, an honoured predecessor. I am merely paying my tribute.”

  It was said with the utmost complacency. Charlie was staggered: he would never have believed that there were people in the world who could talk in that way. Whatever else this inaugural conference of the Sneddon Fellowship threw up, it certainly seemed likely to display character types quite new to his experience. They could well turn out to be grisly beyond his imagining.

  Chapter 3

  Encounters

  In the dignified but bland stone house on the Haworth Road which led eastwards out of Batley Bridge Charlie Peace set out his belongings. He had decided on a bed and breakfast place, as being the most likely accommodation for someone in his age group. The man who had let him in had done the usual double-take on realizing that the cockney voice he had talked to on the phone when the room was booked turned out to come from a black face. Charlie occasionally used the line “Sorry about being black—I should have warned you,” accompanied by his most ferocious smile, but on this occasion the man had seemed welcoming enough, and Charlie on his present mission had every reason not to make waves.

  Now, in the attractive, chintzy bedroom, he unpacked his things: hung up his most conservative suit, put in the drawers his white and striped shirts (God! how fed up he was with striped shirts, but what else could you get these days?) and set out on top of the chest his light portable typewriter. He was aiming to use any spare time this weekend to improve his typing, which he was the first to admit was ludicrously ham-fisted. He was also intending to make a written record of every impression, oddity or ambiguity that came through to him over the weekend. He felt it was going to be that sort of a case—if, indeed, it turned out to be a case at all. Now he slipped a piece of paper into the machine and typed: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” Then he put the wooden shield over the keys, set out the key guide, and typed it again: “The wuick brown foz jumped over the laxy dog.” Three mistakes. Not bad. Not good either.

  He knotted the sleeves of a pullover round his neck, for by now he knew Yorkshire weather and had a healthy mistrust of its sun. Then he patted his trouser pocket for money and the front door key and left his room, bounding down the stairs. On an impulse, and hearing noises from the kitchen, he went down the hallway and poked his head round the door.

  “Hello—sorry to bother you: I’m your b. and b. man,” he said to the plump woman at the sink. “I was wondering if it will be all right if I should decide to stay until Monday. If the weather’s good I might decide to do a bit of walking.”

  “Oh yes, that should b
e all right. I’m Mrs Ludlum, by the way. We don’t have many bookings this time of year. We have our regulars, but they’re mostly in the school holidays. In April and May it’s mostly casuals sent from the Tourist Office. If you could tell me Sunday breakfast time, so I don’t give the room to anyone else during the day.”

  “I will . . . Where do you think most of the Sneddon Weekend people will be staying?”

  “Oh, all over. You’re lucky we had this room these two nights—we had a cancellation. Most bed and breakfast places are full for tonight and tomorrow, and so is the Duke of Cumberland. That’s where you’ll find the best part of them, at the Cumberland. It’s got fifteen or twenty rooms. Turn left when you go out the front door, and when you come to the town centre it’s the big, sprawling pub painted white.”

  Charlie smiled his thanks, and made tracks back to the town centre. The Duke of Cumberland was indeed sprawling, but its very ramshackle structure made it attractive. Several drinkers were sitting outside in the watery, early-evening sun, many in plaid shirts and heavy boots. Charlie scented conference-goers and decided to join them, but as he was getting his pint of Bodington’s from the bar he felt a hand on his arm.

  “Young man, do you think you could be so kind as to take my glass over to a table? It’s difficult hobbling with a stick and a glass as well.”

  The voice was American. He turned and saw the large woman he had seen on Leeds station. Her hand was firmly grasping the head of her stick, and a determined but friendly expression was on her face. A woman who knew her own mind and would speak it, he decided: someone who would despise meanness and double-dealing. A fair woman.

  “Sure,” he said. “Need my arm as well?”

  “No, no. I manage, I manage. It’s worse than usual tonight. I got a bit stiff on the long train journey from London, and then in the taxi from Leeds.”