Eliot had watched his progress, noted his undiminished self-esteem, and wondered how the man could have lived with himself all these years.
At last he opened the envelope and began to read the thick, black, confident handwriting:
Dear Voysey,
Of course I remember you, but I must confess I am at a loss to see the point of your communication.
You must recall that I was very drunk the last time we met—I freely admit that—and perhaps said some unwise things, though I cannot recall exactly what I did say. However, to suggest that I confessed to murder—my dear Voysey! But no, I have not taken umbrage at the suggestion—in fact, I find it amusing rather than offensive.
I can understand how you jumped to conclusions, totally unwarranted though they are, after what I said to you that night, and it is true that we had an argument that developed into a fight, that Canadian officer and I, but such encounters often serve to clear the air. We were both hot-blooded young men, and Leonie was after all a very beautiful woman. However, I can assure you Sutherland was very much alive when I left him. There must have been someone who saw him before he caught the train for London the next morning—although it is, of course, unlikely in the extreme that anyone will now be found who remembers doing so, so many years after.
So, dig as they may, no skeleton, no uniform buttons will ever be found in that barn, for the simple reason that Sutherland was not killed there. Unfortunate though it was, he certainly died when that bomb fell on Brundell’s Hotel.
Poor Leonie. I did hope she might have turned to me after that, and it was a bitter thing to find that she did not, that I might as well have not been there for all the notice she took of me. Ah well, we were all young and thought love was a once and only thing! I wonder what became of her after the war? If ever you should meet her, give her my kindest regards.
Yours
Youlgreave.
Eliot folded the letter, put it back in his wallet. He sat motionless on the dark-blue perforated metal seat in the stuffy waiting-room. The smug confidence of the letter, the certainty that the remains would not be found, baffled him. Yet . . . was it possible that he, Eliot, had been wrong all these years, that Sutherland had, after all, gone to London and perished in the air raid?
Or—his mind began to race . . .
For suddenly, in a flash of bewildering clarity, he remembered, in the way his memory sometimes worked nowadays, recalling events which had happened half a lifetime ago more clearly than those of last week. He was there, that night, on the bridge, with the dark stream moving slowly below, Youlgreave’s car pulled up on the verge, the churchyard behind and Youlgreave himself, with his damaged, dirt-streaked face, his hands, arms and his white shirt caked with soil. It all fitted in so perfectly that he knew beyond doubt he was right.
There had, after all, been no need to go digging up the floor of a barn to hide a body when there was a freshly dug grave waiting, only needing to be dug a little deeper, the body carried from the barn in Youlgreave’s car, thrown in and covered over . . . until the legitimate occupant, Bert Havelock, was lowered in and the grave filled up the following day. It was not the first time in history such a thing had been done.
Eliot thought for a long time about the letter he held in his hand, and the man who’d written it, but any ideas of doing something to bring him to justice died at the moment he came to that last sentence. Sutherland was dead, and however he had come by his death was unimportant, compared with the living . . . All those concerned were now old; no one would be better for raking up past miseries during the time that was left to them, for the sake of so-called justice. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.
He stood up, left the waiting-room and the station, and walked across the car park to where his wife was sitting in the car, reading.
‘Goodness, how late the train is again, darling!’ she remarked, kissing him affectionately and raising her deep violet eyes to his; she was a still-beautiful woman, despite her age. ‘What was it this time?’
‘Oh, nothing much, Leonie dear, nothing that matters now. I met an interesting young man on the train, but that’s all,’ said Eliot. ‘Perhaps I’ll tell you about him, when I’m not quite so tired.’
But he knew he never would.
ACCOUNT RENDERED
The man with the curved scar on his face, the man called Hans Meyer, left his car and carried his grip to the hotel.
The Hotel des Chevaux Blancs was so hidden in a fold of the green mountains that it could easily be missed. It was shabby, its paintwork was blistered by the sun, the stone façade blended indistinguishably with the rock, so that visitors had almost passed the entrance before they saw it, but to those who knew it, it was a pleasant place to stay.
Old Pierre polished the glasses behind the bar perfunctorily. It was too much to ask one to work in this heat. And besides, he was still aware of the good choucroute he had eaten for lunch—and the bottle of wine that had accompanied it. He yawned pleasurably in anticipation of his afternoon snooze.
Hans Meyer walked smartly through the open door. ‘A room if you please, monsieur.’
Pierre snapped his jaw to in the rest of the yawn. ‘Certainly, monsieur. A single? And for how long?’
‘A single, yes. I am not sure how long I shall stay’
Pierre pushed over the register, and watched while Meyer signed. ‘You will enjoy your holiday here. We have many German visitors.’
‘I am not German, I am Swiss.’
‘A thousand pardons, monsieur. I am not usually mistaken.’
He called his sister’s grandson, Jean-Paul, from his play outside and directed him to show the visitor to his room. Though he looked fit, M. Meyer too was an old man, and it was time the boy learned that there was more to life than daydreaming about and watching insects and wildlife. The child talked of nothing else, and was delighted that in M. Meyer he had a captive audience. ‘I’m going to be an entomologist, monsieur,’ he announced, proud of the word, as he humped the visitor’s bag upstairs. Pierre watched them thoughtfully.
The register stated that M. Meyer was from Montevideo, which would account for the deep tan and the fine white wrinkles around his eyes where the sun had not reached. So, he did not live in Switzerland. Trouble, perhaps? A man with the look that Pierre had seen in M. Meyer’s eyes certainly had trouble. Probably women—they were without doubt the greatest source of trouble in the world. With one exception . . .
For a moment the tough old man held his breath against that ancient pain, then he reached out his hand, almost blindly, to grasp the passing Yolande’s plump, yielding waist. ‘Come, mon petit thou,’ he whispered. ‘There will be no more visitors . . .’
There was still one way—even at his age, thank God—of obliterating a memory he could not bear to think about, even now.
But this time, Yolande made a pretence of pushing him away. ‘You old goat! Who is the German?’
‘He’s not German, he’s Swiss.’
‘Which is lucky for him, eh? You do not take kindly to our German visitors.’
Pierre picked up a glass to wipe, twisting it so viciously that its stem snapped. ‘I do not forget, that is all.’
Meyer had been given a room which looked out directly on to the road leading to the top of the mountain. The pastures on both sides were lush and dotted with flowers, the pines and oaks were thick, deeply shading the road. But nearer the top, the trees thinned out and on the summit there was nothing but sparse grass, where in winter the wind would sweep the snow into deep drifts.
Meyer shivered, despite the heat, and turned away. He began to unpack his grip, stacking his belongings methodically in the drawers and wardrobe. Then, with slightly shaking fingers, he took his tooth glass and poured into it from the bottle at the bottom of his bag a large quantity of spirits, which he drank straight off, as he needed to do when his nerves were on edge.
* * *
He stood apart from the coachload of tourists who were grouped around the guide,
outside the bare, lonely, beautiful little church.
‘It was built, m’sieur-dames, to replace the old one which was bombed during the war. You will please look here . . .’
Meyer hadn’t noticed that the old barman, Pierre, was behind him, until he spoke. ‘He does not tell them, of course, that it was their countrymen who bombed it. That, naturellement, they would not like to hear. You observe, they are for the most part Germans. I cannot myself understand why they come here.’
Meyer turned away from his contemplation of the valley where once a village of some four hundred souls had stood. ‘You were here in the war?’ he asked.
‘I was here, twenty years old and fighting with the Maquis. One day, I came home and found that my village, down there, had disappeared. In one single bitter winter night the Germans had murdered its inhabitants, the old, the sick, women and children.’
‘Murdered?’
‘What other name is there for it? The next morning they ordered those few who by some miracle or other had been spared to pack up and go to the next village. They wanted the place totally evacuated, you understand, so they could raze it to the ground. The people were forced to pack up what belongings they could carry, and to set off. Half-way there, machine guns were turned on them . . .’
Eighty of them, lying like scraps of torn paper in the snow. Red blood, and white snow, and the red, white and blue of the defiant tricolours they had carried.
‘And there was something else, too. That night the wild horses were heard.’
Meyer’s face, which had up till then retained its controlled lack of expression, twisted. ‘All horses are basically wild, my friend.’
‘You do not like them, eh?’
‘I have worked with them for most of my life in South America.’
‘Nevertheless, you are still—afraid of them?’ Pierre asked shrewdly.
‘Let us say, rather, that I have respect. You must have respect for anything that can do this to you.’ He touched the livid, crescent-shaped scar that ran from his brow to his temple. ‘But what of your wild horses?’
‘Three hundred years ago, a troop of them roamed free as the wind on the Pass. Alas, they died out—or so it was said. But we in our village used to put out hay, apples, a little sugar. And always the next morning the offerings had gone. Yet no one ever saw the horses, except for that night. They were heard, whickering and neighing all through the hours of darkness. The sound of galloping hooves echoed through the streets. There are some who say they still roam, and will not cease until vengeance has been extracted for that time of horror.’
White horses, that might have been flurries of snow in the moonlight, though no one seriously believed that, galloping, swerving, with manes and tails flying, eyes rolling, nostrils aflare . . .’
Meyer mopped his forehead. The day was already hot, it would be stifling by nightfall. There was a hint of thunder in the air. My God, he could do with a drink.
‘M. Meyer, the soldiers who did that were animals, and worse—but they were acting under orders. Who could have given that order?’
Who indeed? Hans Meyer turned his eyes away from the lined, weatherbeaten face of the old man in front of him, and looked down into the valley. A young officer, not much more than a boy, homesick and lonely and too drunk to remember what orders he had given? Too sodden to recall anything the next day except the night-long beating and drumming of the wind that had turned itself into a nightmare of stampeding horses?
‘Why do you stay here?’ he asked Pierre.
‘I am waiting.’
‘For what?’
‘For the man who did this thing. He was sent away, immediately afterwards, but he will return. I feel it, I know it, here.’ He touched his breast, and looked Meyer full in the face.
‘But sixty years can change a man, can it not?’
‘However much he has changed, I shall know him.’
‘And if you did recognize him, what would you do?’
‘I should kill him. One of those villagers was my young wife of six months.’
That night, Pierre served his guest with a dish of mountain blue trout of such delicacy that the taste was like angel food on the tongue, and a bottle of Riesling so rare that M. Meyer was tempted to take a little more than was wise. He was already more than half drunk when he retired to his room, raised the bottle of spirits to his lips and drained it.
* * *
Pierre drove back to the hotel with Yolande, who had been spending her day off in the town. She sat with her hand on his knee, until she found it necessary to use both hands to keep her balance. The parcels on the back seat, which he had paid for, jumped every time he wrenched the steering-wheel round another zigag of the road. He was too old to be driving, she thought, but judged it better to keep the thought to herself. He didn’t take kindly to references about his age.
Pierre knew he was driving badly. It was because he was angry. ‘Why the hell did you let Jean-Paul go off this morning with that German?’ he demanded.
‘You said he was Swiss.’
‘Swiss, German, it’s all the same, you know what I think.’
‘But they are such friends. He tells the boy such stories—and he’s given him a camera. They went out to take butterfly pictures.’
‘Butterflies? Friends? How can you say that? You know nothing of this Hans Meyer. He might be anything—a rogue, a murderer!’
Yolande sighed patiently. ‘Pierre, you are letting your imagination run away with you again.’ It was not the first time she had heard something like this from the old man, and not the first time he had been mistaken. ‘Monsieur Meyer is a kind and gentle old man. I cannot think why you dislike him so much.’
The dusk was closing in and Pierre switched on the headlights; the trunks of the pine trees glowed redly.
‘Do not forget that I am responsible to my sister for Jean-Paul. If anything happened to him, she would never forgive me.’
‘You worry too much,’ she said, hoping to distract him with the hand she laid back on his knee, which he ignored.
‘Even you must admit how strangely he acts, staring down into the valley—and the amount he drinks, mon Dieu!’
She withdrew her hand, but said softly, ‘But men have many different ways of forgetting, have they not?’
‘And of remembering.’ Pierre swung round the last bend but one before the hotel.
Here, the road led straight upwards before the last bend, at which point it curved almost at right angles and led directly through a short tunnel which had been blasted through the rock. It was a highly dangerous spot, and there, in the full glare of the headlights, stood Meyer, just in front of the tunnel, his back against the sheer rock face. Without thinking, without conscious effort, Pierre put his foot down and drove straight towards him.
He had never imagined that when the moment came, he would be reluctant to do it.
For years he had conjured up such a moment as this, savouring it, rolling it around in his mind like good wine on the tongue, now, he broke out into a cold sweat and had to force himself on, conscious of Yolande with her hand to her mouth, petrified with fear, and the figure of Meyer, like one of Jean-Paul’s butterflies, against the rock. It was only at the very last second that some reserves of strength, or sensibility, enabled him to swerve the car away.
But as the car veered across to the left, the figure of a small boy darted out from that side. Pierre jammed on the brakes, something large and heavy flashed across the windscreen, the car met it with a violent impact, and there was a long, shuddering scream.
Jean-Paul lay like a broken doll in the road, a wing of dark hair across his forehead. Pierre walked stiffly towards him, knelt down at his side, and the boy opened his eyes. The blood drained from Pierre’s heart, leaving him weak and giddy with relief.
The boy’s eyes fell upon the shards of glass and plastic by his side. ‘Oh, my camera!’ Then, frightened, ‘Monsieur Meyer!’
Pierre stood looking down numbly at the bo
dy of Hans Meyer. Or was it Hans Meyer? The face was waxy white in the car’s headlights, and the anonymity of death had already spread over the features.
There was a soft, distant sound of what might have been thunder, that might have been the galloping of retreating horses, and Pierre crossed himself and backed away fearfully as he noticed that the hoof-shaped scar on the dead man’s face was slowly disappearing.
PORTRAIT OF SOPHIE
Waiting for Daniel to arrive, I pulled my car off the road and sat savouring the view across the familiar stretch of bare Pennine moorland falling steeply away a few yards from where I was parked. On the opposite side of the valley was more moorland, rising in the distance to hills that were a deep teal blue on the skyline. Two pewter-coloured reservoirs could be glimpsed deep in the folds of the descending hills, and right there in the horizontal cleft where their slopes met at the bottom tumbled the swift-running river. The sky was duck-egg blue. Larks sang. It was good to be back, after all.
I’d left the heavy, continuous stream of traffic behind on the motorway and come over the tops, taking the road across Ingshaw Moor. Once an ancient packhorse track, it wound sinuously downwards towards the first straggle of houses and the hairpin bend hiding the small-town industrial sprawl in the valley. The first of the houses, whose slated roofs I could just see to my left, had been home to me since I was eight years old, when my grandfather had brought me there after my mother died.
Built towards the end of the nineteenth century for a woollen clothier, the house stood above a steep, narrow drive that led off the road between two stone pillars, bearing the two words, left and right, ‘Ingshaw House’. Its solid Yorkshire stone was now darkened by natural weathering and by the industrial pollution that used to emanate from the valley’s mill chimneys during the bad old days. But it was handsome and solid, not so big as to be uncomfortable, and with plenty of scope for accommodating the Brereton furniture-making business, and secluded enough to satisfy my grandfather’s solitary inclinations while remaining accessible for business purposes. The outbuildings where the work went on gave no indication at the moment of their present function. The yard was quiet and still.
Account Rendered & Other Stories Page 13
