Harry did not reply and Ockleton did not press the point. The truth was that Harry’s only token of significance was the set of photographs which he had resolved to show as few people as possible. He justified his secrecy to himself as a necessary precaution, but, lying somewhat deeper, there was a wish to preserve the intimacy of the link with Heather that they represented, a desire to conceal both his possession of them and his pursuit of what they meant.
They drove north out of Burford, down over the old packhorse-bridge across the river Windrush, then up into the hills beyond. After a mile or so, Ockleton turned off the main Chipping Nonon road and headed east up a narrow lane that breasted the downs above the Windrush valley.
‘When we came to leave the Lamb that afternoon, Mr Barnett, we were all in similar states of intoxication, but Jack had become as maudlin as only an Irishman in liquor can. He insisted that he wanted to return to the church to sample some more of the atmosphere: commune with the spirit of the Levellers – that sort of nonsense. The rest of us were all for starting back to Oxford and Jack suggested we go without him. He said he’d prefer to visit the church alone anyway and that he’d catch a bus back to Oxford when he was good and ready. Rex and I had annoyed him by belittling the Levellers over lunch and there was no reasoning with him when he got into one of his self-righteous moods, so we left him to it.
‘I stretched out in the back of the Mini and Rex travelled in the front with Willy at the wheel. Willy was as drunk as any of us, if not more so. He began by taking the wrong road out of Burford, then tried this lane to get back to the A40. As you can see, it runs flat and fairly straight along the crest of the hill until it dips down suddenly, in a quarter of a mile or so, towards the valley floor. By this time, I for one was asleep. Willy was driving too fast for safety, naturally, but that didn’t become apparent until we started down the hill.’
Ockleton had slowed as the lane began a sharp and winding descent. Round the next bend, Harry saw two things simultaneously: give-way lines at the foot of the hill, where the lane joined another road, and a scene with which he was already familiar – the subject of the seventh photograph. Even as recognition flashed into his mind, Ockleton pulled in by the hedge and stopped the car. Thirty yards ahead, an innocent rural road junction presented its prosaic features for inspection. The hedges suggested that, in May, they could well have obstructed vision. The dry-stone wall on the farther side looked solid and uncompromising. Twenty years on, the ingredients of a predictable accident remained intact.
‘I was oblivious to the danger right up to the moment the crash happened. According to Rex, we never had a chance of negotiating the bend, let alone stopping, given how fast we were travelling. The car careered out diagonally across the lane, heading straight for the wall on the other side. Instead of ploughing into it, however, it struck a tractor and trailer coming from the left. The sound of the collision was what woke me up: a terrible grinding, smashing wrench.
‘I was the lucky one, Mr Barnett: a broken arm, a couple of broken ribs, assorted cuts and bruises. The front of the car, and those in it, took the brunt of the impact. Rex was trapped by his legs and had to be cut free. Willy was propelled through the windscreen onto the wall: that’s how he incurred such nasty head injuries. The tractor driver walked away without a scratch. As for the longer term consequences, Rex was paralysed from the waist down and Willy, as you know, was left with severe brain damage.
‘It was all our own fault, of course. We were culpably self-indulgent and criminally irresponsible. Yet what our little coterie suffered was, I believe, disproportionate to our vices. Ramsey was dead, Willy and Rex were crippled. The rest of us were left to reproach ourselves for what had happened. Jack for one never forgave himself for encouraging the venture in the first place. I daresay we have all tried to forget about it, but I don’t suppose any of us has succeeded – except Willy. And maybe not even he.’
The frail winter sunlight had faded and dusk was advancing across the silent fields to either side. Harry shivered – but not because he was cold. Here, it seemed, twenty years ago, the mystery of what had befallen Heather Mallender had begun to unfold. Its nature remained unknown, but now at least it had a name. Ockleton had unwittingly supplied it and Harry sensed that he would find, in the mark it had left on both its victims and its practitioners, the indelible trace of what he sought. Betrayal had become the name of his quarry.
21
HARRY WOKE THE following morning in a guest room of Breakspear College which Ockleton had generously made available to him. They had found too much to discuss for the last train to Swindon to remain a realistic option and Harry had gladly accepted the offer of overnight hospitality. Only when his first movement unleashed the pounding headache bequeathed to him by half a bottle of the college’s specially shipped port did he begin to regret the decision.
They had returned to Oxford from Burford in the early evening. At an alcove table of the Eagle and Child, Ockleton’s favourite pub, they had then debated the circumstances of Heather’s disappearance on Rhodes and how they might relate to her visit to Oxford more than two months before. Ockleton, true to his academic training, had been disposed to dismiss the very idea of such a connection. Yet he had been unable to deny, especially when alcohol had begun to leech the starch from his scholarly brain, that her avid interest in the distant doings of Everett, Morpurgo and the Tyrrell Society was inexplicable, unless it constituted a cause corresponding in some way to the effect of her disappearance.
Pressed by Harry to tell what he knew of his fellow Tyrrellians’ subsequent careers, Ockleton had covered familiar ground where Dysart and Morpurgo were concerned. As to Jack Cornelius, it seemed that he had returned to his roots in Ireland and become a teacher. Lately, Ockleton had heard it mentioned that he was on the staff of a Roman Catholic boarding school in the West Country. Despite confinement to a wheelchair, Rex Cunningham had evidently prospered and was now the proprietor of a country house hotel-cum-restaurant in Surrey.
‘Strangely enough,’ Ockleton had said, Harry having to strain to hear him amidst the noise and smoke as closing time drew near, ‘Rex was the one who seemed to interest Heather the most. When I referred to this restaurant of his, the Skein of Geese, her ears pricked up. The Master dined there last term and told us all about it. He said it was done out like a brothel and that the food wasn’t fit for a rabbit. But the Master, it must be said, is a man of plebeian tastes. At all events, when I mentioned it to Heather, she asked me to repeat the name of the restaurant. When I confirmed that it was called the Skein of Geese, she pulled out one of those little books of matches they give away in such places and said: “The same as this, you mean?” And there it was: an artist’s impression of three geese in flight and the name and address of the restaurant, all clearly shown on the flap. Naturally, I assumed she had eaten there herself, but she denied it. Somebody had apparently given her the matchbook and she had been carrying it around with her ever since.’
Why Cunningham? Harry wondered as he climbed from the narrow guest-room bed and began to dress. Why this trail of lapsed tragedies and tantalizing trifles? Heather must have had some compelling reason to follow in the direction they led, yet what that reason might be he was no nearer discovering. To visit Tyler’s Hard, even Oxford, in mourning for her sister made a kind of sense, yet the photographs proved she had not stopped there. She had gone further, far further, than bereavement alone could justify.
And, along the way, Harry had chanced upon a minor mystery that impinged on his own past. Back in Ockleton’s rooms at Breakspear, seated by a roaring fire and sipping finer port than he could ever recall tasting, he had asked Ockleton to explain his reaction earlier to Harry’s revelation that Alan Dysart had once worked for him in Swindon.
‘It’s simply that we all thought it so unnecessary, Mr Barnett. Alan’s father died during his first year at Breakspear, leaving him a very wealthy young man. A fortune from nuts, bolts and screws, as I expect you know. That being so,
vacation employment was scarcely something he needed to seek. If he were simply bored, I should have thought, begging your pardon, that he could have found an occupation rather more civilized than grease-monkeying in Swindon—’
‘It wasn’t grease-monkeying!’
Ockleton had raised his hands in a placatory gesture. ‘Forgive me, Mr Barnett, for trampling on your entrepreneurial sensibilities. You will agree, nonetheless, that it was more than a little odd. Many of us speculated as to his reasons. I personally favoured a psychological explanation. The whole arrangement seemed to me irresistibly reminiscent of T. E. Lawrence retreating. from fame as an army officer to obscurity in the ranks, or of Anthony Asquith, the film director, spending his weekends behind the counter of a transport café in Yorkshire. Put bluntly: slumming. Expressed more sympathetically: hiding behind the anonymity of the common working man from a more celebrated but also more demanding life. Alan was well aware of his own gifts and of what they might lead him to become, but I am not sure he entirely welcomed his role as a leader of lesser men. I think his “Swindon vacations” were a way of forgetting what his future held.
Harry had derided Ockleton’s theory at the time. Now, as he stumbled towards the window of his room, he recognized that resentment lay behind his disbelief: resentment that his friendship with Dysart might have an origin he had never dreamed of; that, in lending him a helping hand whenever he could, Dysart had merely been slumming.
Harry tugged back the curtains and squinted out at the painful brightness of a frosty morning. Condensation was streaming down the windowpanes, so he wiped one dry with his shirt-cuff to gain a sight of the day. His room was on the first floor of the college, looking down into a narrow street that ran beside it. Straight ahead soared the blank rear wall of another college. Suddenly, as he peered out through the moisture-smeared pane, something near the base of the wall seized his attention: letters spray-painted in white on its blackened surface, forming words he could not, in that instant of recognition, quite believe. Wrenching up the sash, he leaned out for a clearer view.
ΠPOΦHTHΣ HΛIAΣ. The unique and unmistakeable characters roared their silent greeting up at him. PROFITIS ILIAS. In Greek. In Oxford. Lying in wait for him. Placed there to confront and confound him. Profitis Ilias. Where neither chance nor accident could deflect its meaning. He was followed. Or foreseen. Tracked. Or forestalled. Profitis Ilias had stretched out its hand to find him.
A few minutes later, Harry was standing on the pavement below, staring across the road at the crudely wrought message. He could ransack his brain a dozen times, he realized, and still he would be unable to explain it. Nobody but Ockleton knew who he was or why he was in Oxford. Yet somebody had sprayed those two words on the wall, somebody who knew what they would mean to him and to no other occupant of Breakspear College.
A weary-looking man in overalls appeared from the college entrance to his right, carrying a scrubbing brush and a bucket full of acrid-smelling liquid. Catching Harry’s eye, he tossed his head and said ruefully: ‘These bloody students!’
‘You think students wrote that?’
‘Who else?’
‘It’s Greek, you know.’
‘Oh yes? Well that proves it was students, doesn’t it?’
‘Why?’
‘Who else do you know who can write flaming Greek?’
Who else indeed? As the man crossed the street and started work, Harry headed back into the college. He could believe some drunken classics student had run amok with a spray-can, but not that he had chanced to write two words of no classical significance beneath the window of the room where Harry happened to be staying. Nor could he believe he had been followed to Oxford by somebody determined to leave this macabre calling-card for him to see, for to believe that opened up possibilities too sinister to be endured. There thus remained only one explanation consistent with logic and the sooner he tested its validity the calmer he would feel.
Harry found Ockleton eating breakfast in hall with three or four other fellows of the college, spaced round a vast high table beneath drab oil paintings of half a dozen dead masters. They all looked suitably taken aback by his entrance, muttering disapproval whilst he insisted that Ockleton step outside. Eventually, his face crimson with irritation and embarrassment, Ockleton agreed, only to repeat as they crossed the quad what he had maintained throughout their whispered altercation in hall.
‘I suggest you pull yourself together, Mr Barnett. In the first place, I am no classicist. In the second place, if you think I crept out into the street last night and daubed some portentous graffito on the wall opposite your room, you are very much mistaken. In the third place, you may recall that I escorted you to your room at half-past twelve; but the college gates are locked at midnight, from which it follows that I would have had to rouse the duty porter in order both to be let out and to be let in again, something he will most certainly confirm I did not do. In the fourth place, I consider the levelling of groundless allegations to be a shameful response to the hospitality I have extended to you. And in the fifth place …’
They had emerged into the street and looked across at the overalled figure and the patch of wall on which he was working. The cleaning fluid he was using had been remarkably effective. The letters were becoming blurred and faint. Soon, they would be erased altogether. Some of them had already run and spread in such a way as to lose their identity. Π now more nearly resembled an M and Φ a Q. The evidence was disappearing before their very eyes and, once it was gone, Harry was not sure he could convince even himself that it had ever been there.
Half an hour later, Harry left Breakspear College with scarcely a glance at what was now only a faint stain on the opposite wall. He walked swiftly westwards, eager to leave behind the scene of his humiliation. Message or mirage? From beneath the caves of ancient colleges flanking his route, gargoyles grinned down to torment him with the knowledge of his own uncertainty. Atop their pillars round the Sheldonian Theatre, the busts of Roman emperors cast classically guarded looks at his retreating figure. But Harry hurried on, consoling himself with the thought that he still retained one secret advantage over those who thought they had the better of him.
At the corner of Broad Street and Magdalen Street, he walked into a bookshop. Among the welter of aids to discerning travellers, he found exactly what he was looking for: a comprehensive guide to British hotels and restaurants, each entry accompanied by a brief description of the establishment and a small photograph. He flicked quickly through to the section covering Surrey, then proceeded a page at a time until he reached his goal.
Skein of Geese, Haslemere, Surrey. Proprietor: Mr R. Cunningham. Rating 72%. Standing in its own attractive grounds, this haven of civilized living combines old-fashioned comfort with captivating individuality in that rarest of double acts: princely accommodation and memorable cuisine. All bedrooms are equipped with …
But its picture spoke louder to Harry than any drooling prose. The small scale marred definition and the angle was not the same, but there was no doubt at all about what he was looking at. The Skein of Geese was the subject of Heather’s eighth photograph.
22
RESOLUTION CARRIED HARRY only so far. He reached Haslemere in early afternoon, hired a taxi and discharged it fifteen minutes later on the other side of the road from the Skein of Geese Hotel and Restaurant a few miles south-east of the town. And there the momentum of his pursuit faltered for the first time.
It was not as if what he saw fell short of his expectations. On the contrary, the Skein of Geese was exactly as Heather had photographed it, save only that the trees behind it had been stripped of their leaves and the croquet hoops put away for the winter. A black-and-white Tudor manor house, separated by a gravelled car park from a modern two-storey extension mocked up to resemble stables; lawns behind sloping away towards the wooded flanks of the Surrey hills; the colours of St George hanging limply from a flagstaff; three geese in flight across a swash-lettered nameboard; and smoke plumin
g vertically from slender chimney stacks. The cold and windless afternoon made of the mellow brick and pastel grass a perfect conspiracy of pretension and nature, an exact depiction of everything Harry most loved and loathed in his homeland. But this, he knew, was not the reason for his hesitation.
Profitis Ilias was the reason. His memories of Heather, bolstered by his possession of her photographs, had given him courage and hope, emotions to which he had been a stranger for more years than he cared to remember. Yet Profitis Ilias, whether recollected in repose or recorded in the teeth of logic on an Oxford wall, remained his undoing. There he had come to Heather’s aid too late. And there, some plunging sense of his own inadequacy assured him, he would find the bitter end of his search.
He crossed the road, willing himself to suppress the significance of what he had already accepted: there was no turning back. With every step he took, innocent as it might seem, trivial though it was in itself, he made retreat the more impossible.
The reception desk was located in the modern part of the hotel. Here muted lights, soft leather, stained wood and anaesthetic chamber music prevailed. Somewhat to his own surprise, Harry found himself booking a single room, despite the exorbitant tariff, and following the prim receptionist as she led him to the door.
The room was comfortable, though scarcely as ‘princely’ as the guidebook had led him to expect. The view from its ground-floor window was of an empty reach of the car park. An equine print after the style of Stubbs adorned the longest wall. The key-fob was decorated with the hotel’s logo, as was the complimentary book of matches to be found in an ashtray on top of the television. Harry slipped the book into his pocket, wondering as he did so which previous patron of the Skein of Geese had handed such a thing on to Heather. Then, as much in guilty reaction to the receptionist’s parting look of disapproval as in the hope of ordering his thoughts, he took himself off to the bath.
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