Opposite the Cross Keys
Page 1
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Contents
S T Haymon
Dedication
Prologue
PART I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
PART II
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Ninteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
S T Haymon
Opposite the Cross Keys
S T Haymon
Sylvia Theresa Haymon was born in Norwich, and is best known for her eight crime fiction novels featuring the character Inspector Ben Jurnet. Haymon also wrote two non-fiction books for children, as well as two memoirs of her childhood in East Anglia.
The Ben Jurnet series enjoyed success in both the UK and the US during Haymon’s lifetime: Ritual Murder (1982) won the prestigious CWA Silver Dagger Award from the Crime Writers’ Association. Stately Homicide (1984), a skilful variation on the country house mystery, was praised by the New York Times as a ‘brilliantly crafted novel of detection … stylish serious fiction’, and favourably compared to the work of Dorothy L. Sayers.
Dedication
To my husband
Prologue
The bicycle was a dowager of its kind: a Hudson, black with a yellow stripe outlining its tubular bits and pieces. The upper half of its rear wheel was obscured by a skirt guard made of black and yellow strings twisted together, waspish.
The handlebars were set square on to the frame, no nonsense of sportiness, with grips made of a Neanderthal plastic, liable, when grasped, to shed prickles which embedded themselves in the palms like ticks, requiring a penknife to pry them out. The brakes were programmed to respond only to large hands which wouldn’t take no for an answer.
The bicycle belonged to my sister Maisie, who was grown up and gone to work in London. It was to be mine as soon as my legs were adjudged long enough by those who had the power to decree what was long and what was short – which was to say, when you came down to it, Maud. Maud, with that insufferable smirk of hers which drove me barmy, said that my feet did not reach the pedals. I protested that they did; and it was a fact that, quite often, when practising on my own on the Hippodrome forecourt, I was able to sit on the saddle and control the bike with complete sang-froid for minutes at a time. Seconds, anyway. The maddening thing was, that whenever she came out to check up on my progress, my legs shrank yards and I would find myself faced with the choice of either having to stand up on the pedals – a practice for some reason considered only slightly less reprehensible than wetting one’s knickers – or dismounting altogether.
It was, I suppose, something to be grateful for that we lived in St Giles, a few doors away from the Hippodrome, and that Mr Fitt, its owner, was a friend of my father’s. As such, he gave me permission to practise my cycling on his forecourt, which was kept railed off with chains during the day to prevent anyone parking there before it was time for the first house in the evening. Whilst I was deeply sensible of the favour, the truth was that I was never in my best cycling form there. The splendidly stuccoed building with its twin domes and its pediment between, surmounted by an Ancient Greek lady holding aloft an electric light with deep suspicion, was overawing, out of scale. My scale, that is. It made me feel smaller, my legs shorter, than my nine years.
Though the façade of the Hippodrome was emblazoned with the words ‘Grand Opera House’, it was, in 1928 at any rate, a music hall. On that day which I have, for good reason, selected out of all the days upon which I practised my cycling there, I was overlooked on one side of the carriage sweep, by a larger-than-lifesize poster of Max Miller, the Cheeky Chappie, and, on the other, by a male impersonator in top hat and tails and a bust like a ski slope. It was hot and half-term and only four miles away lay St Awdry’s and the Fenners, appropriately opposite the Cross Keys, the keys to heaven. It was more than flesh and blood could stand to possess the transport to Paradise and still be denied my chariot of fire.
The Cheeky Chappie leered down at me in friendly derision, daring me to do something about it. There scarcely seemed room in the forecourt for me and the bicycle and the male impersonator’s bust. It overhung the two of us like an impending avalanche. In the nick of time, more reflex action than naughtiness, I dragged the bike under the spiky chains, and got us both away.
The bicycle was little easier to push than to ride, but I had more sense than to try and ride it along the winding streets which were my way out of Norwich. Not until I reached Hellesdon pond, well out on the Aylsham road, where some carters had driven a quartet of shire horses into the water to have a cool-off – and where, sweating and already weary, I could happily have joined them – did I venture to mount my conveyance, finding the pedals sufficiently often to keep it more or less on its way along the straight and level half-mile that ended at Horsford Point.
At Horsford Point the road forked, the left fork sheering off towards places of no interest, the right-hand one beginning its serpentine meander up to St Awdry’s. At the tip of the V, closing in the approach, was a heavy post, upon which, as if by magic, a huge wooden square balanced itself on one corner. A gibbet could not have been more instinct with mystery and threat.
Long before I reached the Point I began to mutter to myself the words which alone could get me safely past. ‘Ma gerto o ca!’ I mumbled breathlessly.
When I actually arrived, I got off the bike, wheeled it on to the grass verge, and propped it against the hawthorn of the hedgerow. Making sure nobody was looking, I bobbed the curtsey we were taught to do in school when greeting persons of consequence. I looked up at the great shape, its constituent planks warped by the passage of centuries, and recited once more the password painted there in letters all but erased by time; the cryptic formula without which all who travelled further down that road must unfailingly perish, their crow-picked bones whitening in the ditches. ‘Ma gerto o ca!’
The fact that, even as I pronounced those syllables of power, one part of me knew quite well that the legend on the signboard, long abandoned and uncared for, had once read MANN EGERTON FOR CARS in no way lessened the dread and doom of Horsford Point. I bowed deeply, wheeled the bike back into the road, and remounted, with a sense of dark forces appeased.
A Riley sports car which came whizzing round a bend on two wheels gave me – and no doubt its owner equally – a bad moment, but the pony-and-trap encounter really shook me. Its driver, as confused as his pony over the best way to get past a machine which was lolloping all ov
er the road, lashed out at it with his whip and plucked the front lamp off its little bracket on the steering column. The bad-egg smell of carbide overlaid the sweetness of the May hedges. The man, shouting oaths, did not stop to apologize.
I dismounted: it was not quite a falling off. With trembling legs I wheeled the bike along, astonished that a road which seemed quite level when travelled over in our Morris Oxford tourer should present such a mountainous face to traffic of a humbler kind.
Two men who were unloading some telegraph poles from a lorry on to the grass at the side of the road looked at me kindly. One of them inquired, ‘Got yerself a puncture then, have yer?’
I explained that my bicycle was the least bit on the large side.
‘Want me to let down the saddle for you?’
I explained that the saddle was already let down as far as it would go.
‘Oh ah. Going far, then?’
‘Only to St Awdry’s.’
Only!
The two men looked at each other. Then the one who seemed to be in charge said, ‘Drop you off, if you want. The bike can go in the back.’
My legs felt like jelly, but I had been conditioned from babyhood never to accept lifts from strangers, so I replied politely, ‘No, thank you.’
‘Please yerself,’ the man said. I didn’t blame him for sounding huffy. He and his mate went round to the front of the lorry, got into the cab, and drove off without saying goodbye. I sat down on the pile of telegraph poles. The rest and the scent of pine were restorative, and I only got up when the poles began to stick to my bare calves, when I discovered that there were broad stripes of tar down my socks and the back of my legs.
For honour’s sake I mounted the bicycle to ride into the village High Street, standing on the pedals and the hell with it; past the triangle of green at the crossroads; past the brick and flint of the churchyard wall, the brick houses, the village store. Not that there was anybody about to watch me, except for Ellie Fenner, who didn’t count. Even when I had to stand outside the Cross Keys for an age, waiting to wheel the bike across the road, she gave no indication of having noticed me.
She sat, as usual, her loose body loosely draped in a faded wrapper, on a kitchen chair set out on the rudimentary pavement of gravel and beaten earth which insulated the terrace of four cottages known collectively as Opposite the Cross Keys from the highway. As usual, she had out the enormous comb whose rapacious teeth did not repay inspection, and she was combing her hair, which was stringy and lustreless, but long enough to sit on. Ellie spent a lot of time outside on the pavement demonstrating that she could indeed sit on her hair.
It was on the strength of this talent, I imagine, that she was designated by the Fenners their family beauty, an icon too precious to go out to work like the rest of them. My difficulty – and, looking back, I am sure that Ellie sensed it, though not a word was spoken; that it was the source of the glum disregard with which she invariably favoured me – was that I truly found her, not merely not beautiful, but downright ugly. If Ellie were beautiful then Maud, who was her sister and had a slight cast in her right eye and a wart on her nose like Oliver Cromwell, was Clara Bow and Greta Garbo rolled into one.
When I had got myself and bicycle safely across to Opposite the Cross Keys, Ellie stopped combing; raised her bum sufficiently to let her hair drop down to its full length, and resumed her seat, this time sitting on hair and bum together1 She said with undisguised satisfaction at disappointing me, ‘Ma’s up at Randall’s, plucking.’
‘Oh.’
‘Stratton Strawlers, you want to go up there. Reckon she could do with a hand.’
Why don’t you go and give her one yourself, then, you lazy mauther2 I thought but did not say. Ellie knew very well how much I hated plucking, I had proclaimed it often enough. Even so, for the pleasure of Mrs Fenner’s company I would gladly have pressed on to Stratton Strawless, another two miles, if only my legs had been that tiny bit longer.
As it was, I suddenly felt at the end of endurance. I leaned bike and myself against the cottage wall and closed my eyes: then opened them again as, out of the corner of one, I became aware of a coloured rag dangling in the heat.
It was then I saw the Union Jack. The four cottages which made up Opposite the Cross Keys were arranged as follows. At either end lived, respectively, the Harleys and the Leaches, the latter in the largest one, at the end of the row furthest away from Norwich. The Fenners’ place was next to the Harleys’. In between the Fenners’ and the Leaches’ was a derelict cottage which was only kept up at all by the support of the dwellings on either side. At one time it must have been some kind of shop, because the ground-floor window was a good deal larger than the mingy little front windows of the other three cottages. The window panes were all gone, however, replaced by flattened petrol cans which, oxidized to purples and peacock blues of a barbaric intensity, lent the frontage an appearance that was distinctly unwelcoming.
There were children in the village who said that the old man – the old josser as everyone called him – who was the last person to live in the ruined cottage had died sitting in his chair in front of the fire, and that he was such a filthy old devil nobody had bothered to fetch him out and get him over the road and into the churchyard, which was why the landlord had never thought to do the place up and rent it out again. The grown-ups said that was ridiculous; but they, no more than the children, ever thought to put a foot to either the front door or the back one – both of them rotting on their hinges – to settle, once and for all, what was the truth of it.
When I stayed with the Fenners, my bed was the old horsehair sofa which was pushed up against the wall dividing their cottage from the derelict one, and at night the noise of the rats on the other side of the partition was horrendous. Gyp the dog, who slept on the opposite side of the room from me, on the rag rug in front of the fire, never so much as stirred in his snuffly sleep except for an occasional exasperated tail-thump when the sound rose to a double-forte, but I found it dreadfully disturbing. What could the rats find to eat in that empty house? I reckoned they must long ago have finished all that was edible of the old josser, so what next if not me, so conveniently to hand? I lay awake straining for the gnawing through lathe and plaster which would mean they were on their way.
When at last I mentioned my fears to Mrs Fenner, she only laughed. Rats were no fools, she said. They knew which side their bread was buttered. If they ran out of grub next door it stood to reason they would start on the further, the Leach side. Mr Leach was something in an office over Catton way and went to work every day in a collar and tie, the stuck-up bor3 The Royal Family would open their eyes at what Mrs Leach spent at the Co-op every week. Catch rats wasting their time on the Fenners when they could have the freedom of the Leach larder!
Somebody had removed several of the flattened petrol cans from the window of the derelict cottage. There was no breeze to set the Union Jack waving. It hung limply from its stick which rested on the ruined window sill.
In my exhausted state I puzzled the meaning of this sign. Ellie was looking at me with that simpering expression of hers which signified ‘I know something you don’t, Miss Clever Dick!’ Suddenly, to my astonishment, her purse-faced gaze melted, the little pleats round her mouth opening out like a drawstring bag when the ties are unloosed. With a lumberingly coquettish gesture she rearranged her wrapper over her large breasts as the front door of the derelict cottage opened, and a man came out.
He was a man of medium height, compactly built; wearing black trousers and a waistcoat over a black-and-white shirt without a collar and with its sleeves rolled up to above the elbows. He was powdered all over with what looked like plaster dust, dust which had settled on the hairs of his bare arms, giving them a bloom like the bloom on a peach. On his head he wore a black cap, from under the back of which little black curls stuck out. He needed a haircut and no mistake.
Either the curls were dusty too, or he was going grey. It was hard to tell the age of the brown f
ace in which white teeth flashed under a natty little moustache like John Gilbert’s or Ronald Colman’s.
He came out of the derelict cottage in a cocky, confident way, holding his arms forward, hands opened out, like one of the Russian Ballet dancers I had been taken to see on my last visit to London; making his entrance and circling the stage as much as to say, ‘Here I am – the one you’ve been waiting for. Now you’ll see something!’
The cloth of his clothes was the usual horrid stuff that only the poor wore, and his cap the kind you could see hanging in bunches outside the cheap shops in Magdalen Street, his boots the stiff casings that made you wonder sometimes if the feet of working-class men weren’t a different shape from one’s father’s feet, high-arched and narrow in their polished leather. Frosted with white, he nevertheless looked dirty and unshaven; yet, with it all, possessed of a slim-waisted elegance not to be denied.
His eyes were black and bright with mischief.
‘Hello, ’ello!’ he said. ‘You must be that Sylvie gal Ma Fenner’s always on about.’
I roused myself out of my terrible fatigue enough to exclaim automatically – the first thing Maud had taught me was that the people low down on the ladder must be accorded their proper respect: it was their only wealth – ‘Mrs Fenner!’
‘Mrs Fenner!’ the man repeated, with a mocking emphasis. ‘She warned me you were a proper little madam.’ He came over to where I drooped limply against the wall and, eyes screwed up against the sun, took a closer look at me. He smelled, of course. Everybody at Opposite the Cross Keys smelled; but a new combination I would have to get used to.
‘Too much to suppose Lady Godiva here’d get off her arse an’ make you a cup of tea.’
Ellie, who had freed her hair from its durance vile, and gone back to combing it with the unspeakable comb, said, ‘She knows where the kettle’s kept.’