by Simon Parke
‘There you go again, implying - .’
‘You’re what they call a “temp”, Bella.’
‘I’ll call the police.’
‘You’ll call the police?’
The rage in Virgil is overwhelming, like a tidal surge through a bamboo village.
‘I’ll have you evicted!’ she says, backing away as he moves towards her. Already off balance in her platform shoes, Virgil’s deliberate shoulder sends her flying against the chest of drawers, before falling to the floor. He moves now towards the door, but blocking his way is Kate Karter.
‘What are you doing here?’ she cries out, as he pushes past.
‘Ask yourself the same question,’ he shouts, disappearing back to the gallery. ‘What are any of you doing here?’
‘Rude man! Have you no manners?’
Kate enters the room and sees Bella on the floor, struggling to get up.
‘What was that about?’ she says. ‘I hope you didn’t upset him.’
‘The man’s a maniac,’ says Bella, smarting.
‘I thought he was a bit restless at the Feast.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?’
‘No,’ says Kate, ‘you wouldn’t. But when we threw our costumes into the laundry basket at the end, he said, ‘Well if that’s the best Mind Gains can do, I don’t anticipate a long stay here in Stormhaven.’ He said it as if nothing would make him happier. Strange fellow.’
‘Barnabus did intimate he could be difficult,’ says Bella. ‘So are you going to help me up?’
They struggle and slide a little, but once Bella is standing, she pulls away, brushes herself down and goes to the mirror to recover her face.
‘So what are you doing here?’ she asks.
‘I was interviewed.’
‘That was earlier.’
‘And then I decided to hang around a while, go for a walk.’
‘A walk?’
‘It’s not a crime.’
‘Can’t see the point.’
‘And I was in the hall collecting my bag, when I heard your voice.’
‘There are still police around,’ says Bella, touching up her lipstick.
‘Well, there would be, wouldn’t there?’
‘I’m just saying.’
‘And you’ll have to put up with them, even if they do get in your way.’
‘None of them wipe their shoes.’
‘You’d think forensics would.’
‘Would what?’
‘Wipe their shoes.’
‘None of them.’
‘But probably good at washing up... no evidence of bolognese sauce unnoticed on the saucepans.’
Bella’s lipstick is sorted and her face restored.
‘I just wonder what he was doing here?’ says Kate.
‘Who?’
‘Virgil. Yours, I think.’
Kate has found Bella’s missing earring but receives no thanks.
‘Virgil? I have no idea,’ she says, ready to go. ‘As far as I can see, he was just sitting on the bed. I’ll tell the police obviously.’
‘Have they found Pat?’
‘Pat?’
‘I heard from the young policeman she’s gone missing. He sort of implied it.’
‘It’s time you were gone, Kate.’
‘Didn’t you know about Pat?’
‘Don’t worry about me, Kate. I know all I need to know.’
‘I was only seeing how you were.’
‘And I’m fine, so lead the way, I have things to do.’
And with that, the two women left the room, returned to the hallway and without a further word, parted company.
Bella watched as Kate got into her car and drove off. She didn’t like her, she was an unsettling presence, hysterical and stupid, and Bella was restoring order to Henry House. She was getting things back on track, back in place, as if nothing had happened and no murder had occurred, because that was the way forward.
But now Abbot Peter and Tamsin appear in the hall, led towards the office by an excited constable.
‘We found them in the cupboard, Ma’am... though no one knows what they mean.’
‘What exactly have you found, Constable?’ asks Tamsin, as they disappear into the office.
And being Director of Administration, and perhaps a nosy busybody, Bella is wondering the same.
Fifty
Your thousand limbs rend my body this is the way.
The ten words, in spidery script - ‘way’ is particularly pained - had been found as they prepared to move the body from the cupboard. They were written in black biro on the inside wall, where the crumpled form of Barnabus the Clown still lay. Tamsin had deliberately withheld the body from Peter’s gaze before the interviews.
‘We’ll look at the corpse after the interviews,’ she’d said.
‘But you’ve already seen it.’
‘I have, yes.’
‘So the delay is on my behalf.’
‘We don’t have the time.’
‘We always have time for what we want to do.’
‘And you want to see it?’
‘No.’
‘Well then.’
‘I’m just wondering about motive here.’
‘The murderer’s?’
‘Yours.’
‘Mine? Well, I just think it would be better.’
‘Because?’
‘Because I do.’
Tamsin hoped Peter was making life as difficult for the murderer.
‘It’s not because you care about my feelings,’ said Peter, ‘so why?’ How had the conversation gone? Tamsin had said Kate Karter, the first of the suspects to be interviewed, was waiting for them, true as far as it went... she had been. But she knew her uncle was right, Kate hadn’t been the reason, and no, it wasn’t because she cared, or not in the traditional sense of the word. She didn’t care for the feelings of others, because why would anyone do that? Who’d ever cared for hers? But she did care about the success of her investigation. And although the Abbot claimed Barnabus was not a friend, and claimed it repeatedly, Tamsin viewed the dead man as the closest approximation to a friend her uncle had. His murdered body, the crumpled clown, would lodge in his mind, this is how she’d been thinking, and she’d wanted his mind clear during the interviews... and at its listening best. Otherwise what was the point of having him along? And so, yes, she’d delayed the showing.
But now, led by an excited constable, Peter and Barnabus were finally to meet, meet for the last time, with as much intimacy as tape, lights and plastic baggery would allow. Peter looked down, said ‘My God,’ and then simply stared at the battered clown, a spent figure on cold knees, lurched sideways across the cupboard, head down, right arm reaching forward.
‘Stab wounds to the neck and stomach,’ said Tamsin.
Blood stains were clear on the wall behind, like the dry drips left by an inexpert decorator... and blood on the red and yellow of the twisted harlequin silk, though where red dye ended and blood began, was hard to tell.
‘But death arrived by two blows to the skull with a heavy metal object,’ continued Tamsin, ‘almost certainly the poker from the fire.’ She pointed to it, now wrapped in clear packaging. Peter nodded.
‘So are those his lines?’ asked Tamsin.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Did he write those words - on the wall.’ Peter hadn’t given the words a thought.
‘I can’t really see them.’
He remained a few feet away, hesitant.
‘Well get closer, for God’s sake! You were the one who wanted to see the body.’
‘No, I was the one who wondered why you weren’t letting me see the body. There
’s a difference.’
‘It’s eluding me.’ Pause.
‘But with hindsight, Tamsin, it was a wise call.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I might well have been distracted in the interviews.’
‘So is it his writing?’
Peter edged closer, close enough now to touch the chilling flesh.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, tucking his habit behind him as he knelt down. ‘He usually emailed.’
‘But are they the sort of words Barnabus would write?’ persisted Tamsin.
‘You’re asking for rather specialised insight there. To know what someone would write when dying - .’
‘But do they ring a bell?’
‘Strangely, they do,’ said Peter, gazing on the uneven scrawl. ‘But it’s a distant bell, only faintly heard across the valley of time.’
‘Can we take the body, Ma’am?’ asked one of the team, impatient to be off.
‘In a while, Joseph, but first do something cultural.’
‘Ma’am?’
‘Go on a tour of the historical Elizabethan kitchens - keep it brief - and while there, make us a cup of tea on the best bone china available.’
‘Yes, Ma’am.’
He seemed pleased to have something to do, even it was just making tea.
‘The human needs to work,’ she said. Peter’s head was still in the cupboard.
‘Appropriate,’ he said.
‘What’s appropriate?’
‘The crockery. You do know that bone china first came to Europe during the reign of Elizabeth?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Oh,’ said Peter, faintly disappointed.
‘How have I got as far as I have?’ said Tamsin.
‘Available only to royalty, nobility, rich merchants - so very probably to the Rowse family who lived here.’
‘Everyone else drank straight from the kettle presumably?’
‘And, of course, in those days it was actually made from bones.’
‘As the name suggests.’
‘Which gave the delicate pottery its surprising strength.’
‘The crockery industry is not having my body.’
‘Oh? I quite fancy the idea of being drunk from and washed up every day.’
‘Then our ambitions differ.’
There was a pause as Peter returned to the matter in hand.
‘The skull took a good battering,’ he said, contemplating the encrusted blood in the dark curly hair.
‘I’m wondering if the murderer left the words.’
‘Some sort of signature?’
‘Yes.’
‘Seems unlikely. Apart from anything else, the angle’s all wrong.’ Peter got up to impersonate the murderer leaning down to write. It wasn’t working.
‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘if Barnabus did write them, and it looks like he did, it means -’
‘ - it means he was in the cupboard alive for some length of time,’ said Tamsin. ‘The thought had crossed my mind. He certainly didn’t write them after the assault with the poker.’
‘And so the next question: why was he put in the cupboard half-alive and then re-visited later - we don’t know how much later - for the killing?’
Tamsin went to the window.
‘He wrote those words,’ she said, as if the matter was settled.
‘I think I agree.’
‘Couldn’t you just agree without the caveat?’
‘No.’
‘Because?’
‘Because I don’t agree without a caveat, so why lie to help you feel better?’
‘What better reason to lie?’
‘They do feel like a message, that’s the thing. And if they are a message, then he wrote them to help us.’
‘So why didn’t he just write the killer’s name?’ Peter pondered for a moment.
‘Perhaps he knew they’d be back and so used a code they wouldn’t understand.’
There was a pause.
‘But which you would!’ said Tamsin.
‘Sorry?’
‘But which you would! That’s it!’
‘Me?’
‘Why not? I suddenly feel like a gooseberry here, a strange feeling, but I do. This is one bloke to another. He knew you’d read this.’
‘I struggle to see how.’
‘What did you talk about when you last met?’
‘Nothing of great consequence.’ Tamsin gave him a look.
‘Well, I suppose he was very interested in the dead vicar at St Michaels and my small part in the investigation.’
‘Precisely. All the more reason to attempt communication with you. He guessed you’d be involved.’
‘Possibly.’
‘What else did you talk about?’
‘He wanted to write a book.’
‘I hope you advised against it.’
‘I did.’
‘We need a purge not an increase.’
‘But apart from issues here at Mind Gains, I can’t really remember much else.’
Tamsin was now on a roll.
‘Well, what do you have in common?’
‘What did we have in common?’
Peter remembered Barnabus on his arrival in the desert, such a troubled soul, so fresh from a failed marriage, so guilty, so vulnerable. But somehow he’d found new life in the dry air, and refreshment in the sparse heat.
‘We had the desert in common, I suppose.’
‘Start there.’
‘The desert’s a big place.’
‘Where’s the tea?’ said Tamsin with some force, after which she left the room to harass the constable. Peter pondered the twisted figure before him.
‘So, my friend, what are you trying to tell me? Your thousand limbs rend my body this is the way. The funny thing is, I can hear you saying it... perhaps once you did say it to me... but why are you saying it now?’
Fifty One
‘Why do you not love me as a woman should love her husband?’ said Ezekiel.
He was pacing the room, a small man in his green silk suit, precise, contained but rigid with rage.
‘I do love you as a woman should love her husband,’ said Rebecca, sobbing by the empty fireplace.
‘But you want to disobey me.’
‘I don’t want to disobey you.’ She did want to disobey him.
‘Then why do you question me?’ Why did she question him?
‘Is it disobedience to love your daughter?’ she said.
‘I love my daughter.’
‘I know you do.’
‘But I love her with a holy love.’ Distinction drawn.
‘Do you think I do not love my daughter?’ continued Ezekiel.
‘Of course you love her.’
‘Do you think I don’t know what’s best?’
There was hesitation from Rebecca, the sin rising in her again: the sin which said he didn’t know best, that she knew best, that he was mad, that she hated him and hated what he was doing to her and her children. Shame on you, Rebecca! Oh, when would she be free of such terrible thoughts? She was younger than Ezekiel by twelve years, and still learning, so much to learn. He’d worked hard to make her a good person, and here she was, aged 37, with so much sin in her. How could he ever forgive her?
‘You are still a spiritual child.’
‘I know.’
‘You understand little of the ways of the Lord.’
‘Help me, Ezekiel.’
It was a relief to hand over responsibility, to accept once again that in the divine order of things, the man was the head of the household. And Ezekiel was a good man, he did not drink as her father had don
e, and neither did he go after other women as some men did. There was much to worship and obey as her marriage vows demanded of her.
‘You know what’s best, husband.’
And then remembering the words of Mary, when told she was to give birth to Jesus:
‘Let it be unto me according to thy word.’
He’d like that and part of her was cunning enough to feed him what he wanted.
Ezekiel’s chest expanded with honour as he looked down on the girl he had plucked from the youth group to be his wife, under God.
‘She will come back to the true path,’ he said, ‘but she’s a wayward girl and best not indulged.’
The trouble was, Rebecca still admired her daughter’s spirit and hoped it would never be crushed.
Never!
Fifty Two
It was Frances who told them about the ghost of Henry Hall - though as Tamsin said, who believes in ghosts these days?
They met Frances in the hall as they were leaving, the first day of the investigation complete.
‘And does Henry Hall have a ghost?’ Peter had asked. He’d heard some local tale about a haunting.
‘Oh, please!’
Tamsin was incredulous.
‘Of course we have a ghost,’ said Frances briskly and Tamsin asked if she’d seen it.
‘Every old house has its ghost,’ said Frances, ‘and particularly Tudor houses.’
‘They’re more ghost-ridden than others?’
‘They were violent times, times when many lives ended prematurely, and - well - horribly.’
There was a pause as they stood in the dark hall. Violent times, premature deaths, some horrible, she’d said - like clowns being bludgeoned to death with a fire poker?
‘So much more civilised now, of course,’ said Peter.
‘I’ll just get my coat,’ said Frances.
‘The ghost of Ann Boleyn is said to haunt both Hever Castle and the Tower of London,’ remarked Peter, almost expecting a ghoul to appear from a doorway, holding its head.
Tamsin says: ‘I didn’t realise ghosts could divide their time.’
‘But then you don’t believe in them.’
‘Of course I don’t.’
‘No mystery allowed in Tamsin’s world.’
