Waking Caliban
Page 24
***
“There’s still time,” she said. “At least we can move one of the cylinders.”
“I don’t think so. Another few seconds and they’ll be in a position to see us. If they can see us, they can identify us. If they can identify us, the law is going to lock us up and bury the key deeper than Hamnet Sadler’s well.”
“Shit!” She glanced at the copse and then back at me. “You could shoot them all…”
“It’s possible I could. But I’m not going to. Why don’t you?”
Her eyes went to the rifle that she’d dropped to the ground. “I don’t think so. Shooting people full of holes really messes up my nails.”
I grabbed her arm and turned towards the gate. For a moment, she resisted. “Surely we can take one of the cylinders,” she pleaded.
“And then what? We try to sell them, knowing that every law enforcement agency in the world will be looking out for them?”
“I know people. I’ll find a way.”
I dragged her after me. “It’s not just that…”
She stumbled and almost fell. “Then what?”
I wondered if I could tell her that, of all the things I’d heard from Ernst Bakst, the only comment I really, truly agreed with was that it would be a travesty if the plays and poems that had lain together for so long beneath this field were separated. It was crazy, I guess, but it would have seemed like a betrayal of the man who’d created them and towards whom I felt some unreasoning timeless empathy.
I could try to explain but I didn’t think she’d get it. I pulled the sleeve of her jacket. “There’s no way through this, Miranda. Get used to it. We can get away now or we can spend the rest of our lives in jail.”
After a moment, she stopped resisting and we broke into a run. After we’d climbed over the gate, I stood for a moment in the narrow track and looked back. The archaeologists had arrived at the barbed wire fence separating the copse from the field. I wondered what was going through their minds as their torches shone down on the carnage below them.
I looked back towards the bodies strewn around the ancient well. Memory stirred but it was a moment before I realized what the scene recalled. I’d only ever seen Hamlet performed as a school play but the last act, with the corpses of all the major players strewn across the stage, had always stayed with me.
The rest, as the man said, was silence.
Epilogue
1
During the following week, I spent a lot of time in the company of members of various police forces. Even though they had no firm evidence to connect me to the killings in Warwickshire, the cops were short of other suspects and decided to lavish attention on me. I spent whole days in an interview room in Scotland Yard. Its color scheme was a little classier than the one in the cell I’d come to know and love in Stratford but, other than that, it was about as much fun as a seaside resort in wintertime. Its charms soon faded for Amanda the lawyer, too, but she stuck it out and, between us, we told a consistent story, that I’d spent the night of the Stratford shootings in Madame George’s, reading my book on the biography of the British pound sterling. George, who had that special contempt for the police known only to middle-aged transsexuals, backed my alibi every step of the way. So did Chantelle and, in his own manner, Colonel Isbey: he had no evidence to suggest that I’d been involved in the affair after I’d stopped working for the agency and, given the firm’s aversion to publicity, was only too ready to tell the cops the same thing.
At one point, one of the investigating detectives asked me if I’d ever heard of a man called Peter Millard and I assumed they’d made the connection with the mysterious character who had been with Ghassan Salim and his party, when they’d arrived at Heathrow airport on board a chartered jet from New York. No, I told them, I’d never known anyone called Millard. The man had vanished into thin air as surely as his weighted-down passport had disappeared into the waters of the Thames.
At one point in the proceedings, Tench and Rainbow arrived from Stratford to have themselves an all-expenses-paid day in the big smoke. They mentioned a Smith and Wesson revolver that had been found in a housekeeping trolley in the Almoner’s Arms and were at pains to speculate about its origins and share their general feelings of disgust with me. But by this time I knew neither they nor anyone else had any real evidence to connect me to the events under investigation.
The ‘Stratford massacre’, as it became known in the media, dominated the nation’s news services for a while but the days passed without reporters staking out the door to George’s establishment. Instead, the media decided that the carnage which had left seven people dead in a Warwickshire field was most likely the result of a falling-out between rival antiquity-smuggling gangs. One of the tabloids even managed to weave the Russian Mafia into it.
I followed with interest other media stories, about the lawsuits being planned to support treasure trove claims by a bunch of Warwickshire archaeologists and about the landowner on whose property the killing had occurred. Fortunately, the latter gentleman was able to compensate for the temporary loss of milk production by his traumatized dairy herd by charging coach-loads of tourists to walk the grass trampled by as desperate a bunch of villains as ever trod the Shakespearean stage.
***
The police asked me many questions about a woman called Miranda Smart. I told them that I’d had a couple of phone calls from a woman calling herself by that name but that, apart from those calls, I knew nothing of her. The cops wanted to know about the conversations we’d had but I simply told them that she’d been trying to get information from me, around the time of Roden’s death, and that I’d told her nothing that she couldn’t have read in the newspapers. I gradually discovered that nobody else knew a whole lot more. Apart from a US passport and a couple of credit cards issued in her name, there was no record of her, either in the States or Britain.
Some time later, I returned to the apartment she’d used in Grosvenor Square but the young man who opened the door told me he’d recently rented the place and the letting agent claimed to have no record of the previous tenant.
So, my last memories of Miranda start with us sitting in Bakst’s BMW, after we’d driven through the night. We were parked in the narrow lane at the back of Madame George’s. The first glow of dawn was on the horizon, sun beams painting orange stripes on the undersides of the distant clouds.
She turned off the engine and looked straight ahead, through the windshield. “You need to move it, Hastings. I’ve got to dump this car and make some arrangements.”
“And then?”
“We have to be apart for a while. Best if the police don’t find out we know each other…”
“How did you really come to be there with that rifle, Miranda?”
“I told you, I escaped from Salim’s van. Come on Hastings, I’m telling you the truth.”
“What Bakst said, back in the field, about Thorpe’s death…”
“I didn’t have any part in Thorpe’s death, Hastings. Jesus, if I’d been a killer, don’t you think I’d have shot those goddamn archaeologists back there? Come on, Hastings. You know I wouldn’t cross you on something like this.”
“After all we’ve meant to each other?” I looked through the window at a newspaper delivery boy who was wandering past the entrance to the lane. When he’d moved on, I opened the car door, climbed out, walked around to her side. She lowered her window and I rested my hand on the car roof, above her head.
“What next?” I asked.
2
Shakespeare, like me, was a student of history. In his case, the books he read provided the plots for many of his plays. I think he understood that periods of peace have been unusual interludes in the history of these islands. Read the chronicles of England from the arrival of the Romans to the present day and you’ll find war after war in every century, most of these conflicts following the same pattern, ruthless rulers pursuing power or personal gain, their humble subjects suffering torment and starvation for reasons they rarel
y understood. Shakespeare knew.
The cache of documents from Hamnet Sadler’s field went to the British Museum. By the time carbon dating proved their authenticity, the lawyers were already arguing over their disposition. The recovered works included the lost plays, Loves’ Labor’s Won and Cardenio, but omitted some works, including Pericles and Titus Andronicus, that had previously been attributed to Shakespeare. Some experts took this as proof that those plays weren’t really his and there is no end in sight to the happy little controversy that ensued.
***
The cache in the meadow wasn’t, however, the full set of papers that Shakespeare left behind. When Marr lay dying, in the creaky old lift in that Stratford hotel, he told me about the pages he’d hidden in the bust in the museum. But these were simply the first installment from yet another cylinder that Hamnet Sadler had hidden. Unlike the other containers, Sadler had buried this one in the cellar of his cottage, which was where Stephen Marr had discovered it, nearly four hundred years later, on the archaeological dig. Marr removed the handful of the papers I later found but returned the others to their lead canister, which he reburied in the garden of his own house. Its location was described on the only modern piece of paper in the bundle left under the museum bust. The cylinder was still where it had been buried when, after the fuss died down, I returned to Stratford to look for it.
The documents inside Marr’s cylinder, like the ones in the British Museum, seem to be in Shakespeare’s own hand. They are well preserved but, even so, it took me a month to translate them from their seventeenth-century Latin to modern day English.
The autobiography is a modern concept but Shakespeare was the greatest literary genius of all time and genius does things that don’t occur to lesser mortals.
So. The papers from Hamnet Sadler’s cellar are a continuation of the writer’s testament. They set out his innermost thoughts and the dreams he’d held and then lost as his life progressed from his days as a young schoolteacher to the time when he left London and the adulation of his public to live in retirement with the Puritan wife he disliked so much.
I’ve said that, even before I read these papers, I had this feeling of kinship with the man. Perhaps I should have understood before why this was so. Will’s despair began with the death of his son and bloomed when he lost the dark lady of the sonnets. It came to fruition with the final blow, the fire that destroyed his beloved Globe theatre, on June 29, 1613. Seventeenth century London was a cesspool of disease and corruption, riven with crime and plague and the stench of the bodies, left to rot on Tower Bridge, of those who offended the rich and powerful. But it was the death of the Globe that finally opened Will’s heart to the mistress of true melancholy, a sadness to match that of Hamlet himself. It left him with little appetite for work and the return to his childhood home was the closest he could find to balm for his heart. Day after day, month after month, he spent his time collating the works that he’d collected together during his last years in London and, on the days when the black wolf did not make him incapable of activity, writing his memoir.
Finally, with death in sight, he had taken the final step to secure his legacy. His delivery of the sealed containers to Sadler was only due in part to his distrust of his wife. It was, I believe, really driven by something deeper, a despair of the world and the brutality and deceit of men. His final instruction to his old friend was that his works should be put away and not revealed until a day came when men and women had learned nobility or, at least, something close enough to it to stop them killing each other in the name of greed and selfishness.
It’s too late to stop his plays being revealed to the world, but not too late for me to hide away his true testament. For if the summer’s events prove anything, it’s that the day the poet dreamed of has yet to arrive.
3
I sat outside, in Madame’s back garden, amongst the fountains and cartoon figures and Greek statues. The sun was high in the sky and, as if to demonstrate the infinite perversity of the English weather, the autumn day was warmer than most had been in the summer. I wasn’t handling idleness any better than I ever did. In my heart, it was darkest night, the witching hour when churchyards yawn and hell breathes out contagion. I had my eyes closed. The mental movie running on the screen behind my eyelids was a repeat.
I was standing next to her car, with my hand on the roof. I spoke to her through the open window. “What next?”
“The first set of papers... The originals of the ones you took to the States…”
“I’ll just hold onto them, Miranda.”
“I guess you wouldn’t want me to take them for safekeeping?”
“It’s like I told you back there in the field. These papers are linked to a billion pounds worth of treasure trove and a dozen murders. If anyone ever tried to sell them, the cops would be onto them like wasps on a picnic.”
“I know people, Hastings.”
“Think about it. They’re the only thing that ties either of us to what’s happened.”
“I could-”
“It’s not going to happen, Miranda.”
“What will you do with them?”
“The British museum will get a donation. Anonymous, of course. Mailed from a post office nowhere near here.”
Her expression was more serious than at any time since I’d known her. “Trust me to fall in love with an honest man.”
“We’re in love, are we, Miranda?”
She reached forward and turned the ignition. The serious expression vanished and she was the Californian beach girl again. “Don’t get all soppy and romantic on me, Hastings. I don’t think I could take it.”
I held my hand against the frame of the door, as if that would stop the car from pulling away. “When I said ‘what next’, I meant, ‘what next for us?’”
Her eyes were locked on the end of the lane. “I told you, we can’t be seen together, Hastings. But I’ll be in touch, sometime.”
“When?”
“Sometime. Maybe. Watch out for me.” She leaned her face towards me and I bent and kissed her lips, lingering until she pulled away from me and put the car into gear.
As I watched her drive away, a line I’d heard somewhere came back to me.
‘When my love swears she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies.’
***
Chantelle roused me from my rerun visions, walking outside and sitting down beside me. I asked her how she was feeling and she nodded, her face as serious as ever. She was fine, she said. Fully recovered. Brabant was due back on duty next week too, which meant she and the other girls would be seeing a bit less of me: I’d spent the last couple of months filling in for Brabant, although I was sure I was less than adequate as a bouncer. I lack Brabant’s massive size and fearsome appearance and I suspected that George’s establishment had suffered more than its usual share of disgruntled patrons who decided they could push their luck with the house protection and ended up sitting on their backsides in the middle of the street.
“How come you never laugh, Chantelle?”
“I told you once before. I laugh on the inside.”
“I’ve never even seen you smile.”
“There’s daggers in smiles.”
“When was the last time you laughed on the outside?”
“Oh, when I was about five years old.”
“So…”
“You don’t ask me, Hastings, and I won’t ask you.”
She leant back in her chair and her long, dark fingers dangled in the water of one of the pools. “I was thinking I might take me a vacation in the States.”
“That so?”
“I been feeling the need to go home. Just for a while.” She turned her face towards the sun, closed her eyes. “So what you gonna be doing with yourself next?”
“I’ll carry on working like before. Isbey’s been leaving me phone messages about some protection job they’ve got coming up in Scotland.”
After a few seconds, she opened
her eyes and flicked water towards a blackbird perched on Donald Duck’s head. The bird gazed back at her contemptuously. “You wanna check whether your passport is up to date?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“I was thinkin’ you might want to head Stateside with me.”
“Are you serious?”
She looked at me gravely. “I am always serious. I got no-one else to go with and I’d like company. We could rent us a car and do some touring round. We’ll go visit the Grand Canyon, drive Route 66, see Vegas.”
I thought about it for a moment. “When do we leave?”
“Soon as we can book ourselves some tickets.”
I knew it wouldn’t last but, just for now, I felt better than I had for a while. I went inside and fetched Madame George, glorious in blue chiffon and a hat the size of Belgium, and a bottle of champagne. George sat herself down in the chair next to mine and I opened the wine and watched as the cork popped and flew over a statue of Apollo and the hidden remains of an air raid shelter that, buried a foot under its floor, contained a lead cylinder and all the secrets of a long-dead poet’s life and dreams.
END
Table of Contents
Boson Books by Michael J. Cartlidge
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue