Dying to Read

by John Elliott

‘Whitever. Onyway, Ah wis telling ye there were real stars then. No they mimers wi microphones strapped tae their heids. Top of the bill an’ world class. Wan microphone centre stage mibbe. Nane o’ this flashing lights an’ big screens aw ower tae divert the concentration. Ah remember seein’ Sarah Vaughan. Billy Eckstine. No the gither, ye understaund. Guy Mitchell. Frankie Laine Wee Ruby Murray. Best singers. As guid as the Palladium. Variety the spice o’ life. Comics that were clean but hinted, ye ken.’

  ‘I thought it was notorious as the graveyard of comics.’ Hamish half rose as there was a clearing at the counter, but his grandfather laid a hand on hi sleeve to restrain him.

  ‘Ah don’t drink as fast as Ah used tae. Fur Christ’s sake don’t tell her, or ma life wull be mair o’ a Gehenna than Brigton Cross.’

  Hamish vouchsafed that he would never do so.

  ‘Oh aye. Jist as ye say,’ Peter now returned to his theme with relish. ‘If they were English it wis a racing certainty. I wisnae there masel, but the best yin o’ aw wis the Winter boys.’

  This time Hamish did get up. The punters at the bar had miraculously melted away like Rabbie Burns’s snowflakes in the river. ‘Gran’s waiting for one. The same?’

  Peter nodded. ‘Similar if ye must. Young folk hae nae patience.’ He took a swig of his beer chaser. ‘Never let it be said we hid a dry meetin’.’

  When Hamish returned with replenished glasses, Aileen was commenting on the satisfactory cleanliness of the loo, while Peter raised his eyes to the mandatory smoke free ceiling. ‘Everyin wants tae interrupt a guid story wi’ the tiresome minutiae o’ life,’ he lamented,’ but…’

  ‘You’ve started so you’ll finish,’ said Hamish à la Pat, giving the change back to Aileen and starting on his second pint.

  ‘Bravo that man!’ Peter gave an ironic clap. ‘Onyway, tae hae done wi’ it. The yin that wis the straight yin comes out an’ tries a bit o’ patter. London accent. East End I guess. Weel he wis greeted wi’ a permafrost tae gie ye chilblains. Deid in the watter an’ still the regulation time o’ the act tae go. Talk aboot the slow death in a banana boat up the Clyde. So the heckling sterts. Then believe it or no, on comes the ither yin wi the idiot’s beam on his physog an’ a voice frae the gods rises above aw the rest and shouts, “Oh fu…”’ Before he could fully shape the word a disapproving look from Aileen withered its possible completion on his lips. ‘Whit?’

  ‘Hamish doesn’t want to hear bad language from you. I’m sure he has to put up with enough of it at his work.’

  Peter was exasperated. ‘He’s a grown up for God’s sake. Whit am Ah supposed to say? Oh jings. Crivvens. Help ma boab. If we were at the Sheik o’ Fulham’s tent in Knightsbridge it would be alright an’ fashionable to use the correct verbatim but here in a Wethersponn’s we’ve got to be oh so lah dee dah. Onyway, ye’ve managed tae sink the punchline. She does it every time. Oh fuck there’s twa o’ them!’ He laughed. ‘There Ah’ve said it. Only there. Only there. Ye could nae beat it.’

  Twa. The Twa Corbies. Memories of the old Scots ballad his father used to recite momentarily drowned out Peter and Aileen’s renewed bickering in Hamish’s ears. Chilling words. Two crows picking at the remains of a corpse behind a dyke. No. Not that Something else. Get rid of the Scottishness. Forget Tam O’ Shanter and the likes of Sir Patrick Spens. Concentrate on Mike and Bernie Winters. There were two of them. Not one but a double act. Two of them! Somewhere in his gut he suddenly knew it made fresh sense. A key had turned unexpectedly in the lock revealing a secret room beyond. The other place of Augustin Cox, which Jerzy had sought so far in vain, and perhaps not solely a place but another within it, a second Augustin Cox. He felt his hand tremble as he lifted his pint to his lips.

  ‘Are you alright, Hamish?’ Aileen asked.

  He nodded. ‘Two of them,’ he repeated.

  Peter grinned at an old tale satisfactorily delivered. ‘One more afore we go and this time it’s on me. No don’t get up, son, if the auld legs can thole Oxford Street they can walk frae here tae the bar.’

  Hamish’s brain was in overdrive. Bert Hill saying Augustin’s accent was sliding all over the place. Of course he recognised a foreigner when he met one. A foreigner? Yet Mr Dunphy hadn’t been sure. Then later Leonie saying when Augustin accompanied her home he seemed lighter. She wasn’t explaining it very well. Because. Because what? There were perhaps two personalities in the same body or two separate bodies with different personalities. The Latin music lover who would dance with anyone young or old, according to Gonçalo Pereira, and who liked to spank women. Did he fit the adored Sparky, now grown up, of Joan Oliphant who would film and observe but never touch? It seemed fantastical but also somehow right. Was this what Blythe Fuller had stumbled on and why she had had to be eliminated? Finding Lucy Rubin must be the priority. She, he felt, might provide the answer.

  ‘A penny for them,’ his grandmother said. ‘You’re miles away.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s a murder case I’m working on, and I think inadvertently Grandad has given me a clue.’

  ‘Good heavens! That’ll be a first. Whatever you do don’t tell him. His chest is pushed out like an overfed bubbly-jock already.’

  Hamish promised. The evening, which, if truth were told, he had not looked forward to, had turned out surprisingly meaningful if not almost epiphanic. With a now much less jaundiced eye he watched Peter up at the bar contentedly engrossed in relating some other Glaswegian anecdote to a presumably uncomprehending Antipodean server.

  2. Unable to Sleep

  Jerzy woke up with a start and lay quite still feeling the gentle pressure of his wife’s adjoining thigh on his. Her subdued intake of breath and its soft release close to his cheek sounded like the incipient purrs of a drowsy cat. Fully content in sleep she saved her claws for the light of day and her continuing disapproval of the human race. Carefully turning over so as not to disturb her, he once more shut his eyes and tried to drift off, but it soon proved useless. The duvet now weighed too heavily on his flank, and the sheet below felt rumpled. As a habitually light sleeper he knew continued wakefulness was most likely to be the current outcome, whereas Bettina could sleep for England or for England and Poland combined for that matter. Reluctantly, he swung his feet to the floor, his brain too active to accept lying still. No rest for the wicked, people said, but in his experience a bad or good conscience had little to do with it. Sleep was a balm — even if it came in small doses — irrespective of the worthiness of its recipient.

  Still sitting on the edge of the bed, the fading vestiges of his dimly remembered dream of cavorting with hippos through moonlit waters had left his body unsurprisingly dry apart from the light beads of sweat he felt dampening his temples. The agile hippos, transformed from galumphing landlubbers to graceful swimmers underwater, had made a circle around him just like they once had done on the BBC One fill-in trailer. Then he, too, had become a link in their chain. Somewhere above, a figure not resembling his father, but in the dream identified as his father, had said, ‘Once you let a river horse into your house then others will follow. It’s their nature. Hospitality to one means hospitality to all.’

  No chink of dawn appeared through the flimsy curtains. No planes yet droned overhead. Night prevailed. Still taking care not to disturb the love of his life, he got up and padded naked to the kitchen. 3:28 am greeted him on the oven clock. He yawned, emptied the kettle, poured in fresh water, switched it on, got out the teapot, the tea caddy tin and waited for the water to boil. St Augustine lived a long time in Hippo Regius, a remote, unimportant Roman province in North Africa. In the saint’s case Augustine was spelled with a final ‘e’, unlike Augustin Cox late of Bedfont, an equally obscure outpost to the west of London. To his knowledge St Augustine had been a man with two voices: one Greek and optimistic, ready to counter any adversity with a rational and disciplined life, the other Christian, in which human will was impotent and the majority of folk were condemned, save for an elect and pre-destined few, to eternal punis
hment.

  The kettle switched itself off. Thoughts of hippos and Hippo Regius, presumably some sort of desert town, receded from his attention. It was time to brew the tea. So far he had operated completely in darkness, the familiarity of his surroundings needing no light. Now, however, in order to spoon out without spilling two portions of leaf tea into the strainer of the already warmed pot, light was needed. ‘More light!’ Who had said that? All he knew was they had been someone’s famous supposed dying words. He waited patiently giving the brew time to stand. More light and more time. Everyone wanted those, but they had been commodities denied to Augustin and now Blythe Fuller. They were connected in life, of that he had no doubt, but connected in death? He did have serious doubt. The MOs were too dissimilar. Knockers on skulls with blunt instruments were different in his experience from hands on stranglers. Similarly, movers of corpses did not usually fit into the ‘strike out and leave them where they lie’ tendency.

  The tea tasted hot and strong. Free from Bettina’s watchful eye, he had allowed himself one heaped spoon of sugar instead of a scarcely covered one. Slightly overweight he might be, at least that was his own estimation, but here in the quiet of the kitchen he was at peace with his body and at home, truly at home, even if for the time being he was unable to sleep. He raised his cup in silent toast to these so domestically mundane surroundings, to his sleeping spouse, still, after the passage of years, his one true love, and all those, Pat and Hamish especially, who were bound with him in the enterprise which was Jerzy Turostowski, DI. Not for much longer, he had to admit, but for now he gave them many thanks. Pat, he knew, was on his trail. Ever since his so-called seminar she had been ferreting about to get to the bottom of the mystery. Someone soon — if not himself — would blow the gaff. Heavily targeted hints of the tempus fugit and no spring chicken variety from Operations and Human Resources had finally ended in definite early retirement. He could just imagine how Pat would deliver the bombshell in her own very particular vernacular. Young offenders, the dark side and German record companies would be invoked to the hilt. The first two he had always understood as coming within her normal cultural terms of reference, but the last one, Deutschygramophon, Johann Sebastian alone knew how it had crept into her repertoire.

  Bettina had suggested they retire to Weymouth, or, if he preferred somewhere more bracing, then Great Yarmouth. From one mouth to another so to speak. Personally, he wanted to remain in West London and continue to keep in check the attractions of King Street, roaming when the spirit moved him, up to the Bush then down Goldhawk Road to the nearby allure of Chiswick and its erstwhile Cherry Blossom roundabout. The North Sea was too opaque and indifferent to human kind. The starkness of Portland Bill from Weymouth sands too redolent of confinement and memories of prisoners quarrying stone. The prosaic banks of the Thames would more than suffice. The lake in Ravenscourt Park was wide enough for any voyage he might contemplate.

  As he washed out his cup and emptied the tea leaves from the pot, he began mentally a geographical tour of British place names ending in mouth beginning from the North East of Scotland: Lossie, Grange, Eye, Tyne, then gave up. Ex, Bar, Sid and Bourne, the others, that occurred to him, were in the South Any further coastal hugging was overridden by the need to pee. He moved to the loo and lifted the seat. His flow of urine lacked the abandon of youth, but it still arced down with a satisfactory splash. The time to let go was nearing. It was becoming more and more necessary, but not just yet. He couldn’t leave his last case — as some others had been inevitably in the past — unsolved. Expectation of justice was too grandiloquent a concept. He didn’t deal in it or really seek it. Conclusion, yes. A drawing together and a sweeping up. He owed it to himself and to Pat and Hamish and to Augustin, this man whose life and death were unswept and still littered with unanswered questions. He flushed the bowl. Although it was dark outside, birds were busy intimating the dawn. The sound of the first flights in and out of Heathrow would not be far behind.

  Back in the bedroom, Bettina slept on as he dressed. When she awoke he would be by her side. When she stirred he would embrace her and hold her in his arms. ‘Why don’t we stay here?’ he would say. Everything’s here. We’ve got each other. The family comes to us. People come to us. This is our place — yours and mine. Forget the mouths by the sea. They’re only worth a short trip away.’

  Hospitality. People round the table. Grandkids wandering happily from room to room. Hippos aka river horses — the words of his dream came back to him — extending and expecting hospitality. Hospitality — a concept seemingly totally missing from the life of Augustin. Only his killer, invited in or already having a key, then no-one. No-one at all. No-one intimate or even curious. No-one from the hotel or Milly Simpson’s parties. Her one visit before their break up perfunctory and not repeated. No-one from his camera activities. Not Blythe Fuller or Joan Oliphant. No-one apart from the casual callers who knocked on every door and went away unbothered if there was no answer. Bedfont, it turned out had been synonymous with a leper colony to those who knew the victim. Hamish had wondered how it could have happened in this day and age to be left undisturbed for weeks and the body to decompose. He, himself, had said... No wait. That’s neither here nor there. Go back to when he had talked about the importance of names. Names bestowed by parents. That was why he had referred to St Augustine, but now he came to think of it there was another St Augustine, a more English one. Not of Hippo Regius and North Africa but somewhere in England. What if the name had come more from Augustin’s father’s background rather than his mother’s? This second saint was much later. He had a vague feeling he was connected with somewhere like St Albans or Canterbury or York. Where had Henry Cox been born or previously lived prior to marriage? There was something else about this other Augustine niggling at the back of his brain, and — yes, this was it — in addition he had drawn nearer to God through being beaten. Simultaneously, unbidden as it were, the thought of the dog which didn’t bark in the night in spite of the loud music Augustin kept playing flashed in among his saintly ruminations. He dismissed it with annoyance. Why on earth waste time thinking of Sherlock Holmes and fiction at this juncture? They had nothing to do with it. He must find out more about this other St Augustine, and why not now on the home laptop? Yet the intrusion of dogs, and in particular the image of Rudy perched defiantly on the sofa and Delman muttering about being unable to remove him and Augustin’s assault. Augustin didn’t like dogs. He’d kicked out at Rudy then Delman had shoved burning newspapers through the letterbox but . . . But Leonie had said, ‘As if the incident with Rudy had never happened’ when Augustin had accompanied her home. Had never happened. ‘Damnation!’ he said out loud.

  Bettina stirred and opened her eyes. ‘Is it time to get up?’ she asked on seeing him partly dressed.

  ‘No. Go back to sleep, sweetheart. It’s scarcely first light.’ He kissed her forehead. ‘We’ll talk at breakfast. I couldn’t sleep. It was best to get up.’

  ‘You worry too much, Jerzy. It’s not good for you.’

  ‘I know, but in order to be carefree you’ve got to know what cares are to begin with.’ He kissed her again. She closed her eyes without protest and rolled over.

  He hadn’t bothered to get DNA, bloody fool that he was. Okay, the funds weren’t there, and so far it had seemed irrelevant. Now as a matter of urgency, unless something was revealed in the prints on the camcorder brought in by Hamish and the spanking paddle belonging to Augustin secured during the search at Milly’s, he must use whatever influence and favours he could muster, because he could no longer be entirely certain he knew the definite identity of the corpse. Outside the window an unseen blackbird, or was it a thrush, piped and trilled, ‘I’m here. I’m here.’

  3. Books at Breakfast

  Hamish was coming. He had called last night. He had been affectionate and warm. He’d said how much he wanted to see her and things about her she found pleasant and then, when he really hit his stride, more than pleasant. Things she mi
ght foolishly have contradicted but didn’t. Things whose warmth she basked in and, slightly to her surprise, wholeheartedly accepted. All of which prompted her to say some things about him which might make him bigheaded but which didn’t in any way deter him from keeping on saying sweet things about her. ‘Love’ as a word hadn’t been in there. He hadn’t used it, and she had been glad, because ‘love’ was a word so easy to use and so often triflingly and wantonly used that it lost its meaning, so she, too, left it out. Then his tone had changed, and he said he had had a crazy idea about Augustin, and it might all be nothing, but he would tell her when he came round. Well, she did care about Augustin. Even so, she wondered afterwards if that was really the main reason he had called, and the rest, the nice things — no the wonderful things — had been as it were by the by and without this Augustin thought he might not have called at all.

  Oh Geraldine, just accept it, she told herself, while she lightly dusted surface tops in the library in honour of Norma’s continuing presence upstairs. Accept his compliments in good faith. You know you always find a down side if you dwell too long. She stopped flicking at sundry objects. This was ridiculous. Dusting didn’t become her. She wasn’t this kind of dusting-around-person just to satisfy convention, and love, it seemed, was too serious even to be admitted into her thoughts.

  Dusting, or now no longer dusting, she found her arm was near the shelf from which Norma had yesterday extracted the sizable tome. There it clearly was, A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. An author she had determinedly shied away from after having been bitten at a tender age by the mawkishness of Tiny Tim and the rest of the Cratchit brood gathered round their infernal goose turned turkey or vice versa. Later gobbets of Old Peggoty and Barkis is willin’ had confirmed her in her ostracism. Now, however, she opened the book and found her way past the Introduction and the Preface to the opening paragraph.