by Simon Parke
Applause.
‘Now, no more rambling from me.’
‘Hear, hear!’ Virgil again.
‘Now if anyone else would like to offer a word, please do. Virgil, you seem eager to start - though in a way, you’ve never really stopped!’
‘If I may just intervene,’ says Martin Channing, moving smoothly forward and assuming control. ‘Because I’m sure I speak on behalf of us all, Dr Minty, when I say how good it is to have you back in Stormhaven and to have Henry House returned to hands that are fit to run it.’
Restrained approval, with no one feeling this was the time to settle old scores.
‘Why do you print so many lies?’ asks Virgil, feeling free to wander from the script. Martin remains charming:
‘Lies? Strong word, Virgil. Where’s my lawyer?!’ He’s joking.
‘Just answer the question.’
‘Well, I think it was the psychoanalyst Jung - .’
‘Jung?’
It’s Patience.
‘Jung, yes.’
‘That was the name of the Mind Gains budgie! He was called Jung!’ Martin seizes the opening provided:
‘Indeed, whom Frances tried to gas in the oven.’
‘What?’ says Rebecca, who hadn’t read anything about this. ‘How could anyone do that?’
‘That’s exactly the question we asked in the Sussex Silt,’ says Martin, ‘being tireless campaigners for animal rights. Though for accuracy’s sake, it was the DI here who actually killed the bird - making the decisive strike with a rock. Isn’t that so, Detective Inspector?’
Aghast eyes now look at Tamsin.
‘I had to kill the bird, it wasn’t well.’
The remark doesn’t sound as caring as she’d hoped.
‘Then we must all hope the Detective Inspector never takes up a career in nursing,’ says Martin with a smile.
Laughter.
‘But to return to Jung - the psychoanalyst not the budgie - it was he who said that “What is truth for us in the morning is often a lie by the afternoon”.’
Some dismay.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asks Rebecca.
‘Truth and lies,’ says Martin, ‘these things are perhaps more complex than we imagine, more closely related even.’
Stubborn Virgil returns to his question: ‘So why do you print so many lies?’
‘Well, I can tell you one thing for sure,’ says Channing, ‘We will be the most supportive of papers towards all that goes on here in the re-born Henry House. And I can today announce a £5000 donation from the Sussex Silt towards the Barnabus Fund!’
‘Ooohh!’ noises.
‘Thank you, Martin’ says Dr Minty, surprised. ‘Much appreciated.’ Though he’s not sure if it is, tainted gold and all that.
‘Not a grant you want made public,’ mutters Tamsin under her breath, still smarting from the bird-murder allegations.
‘I’d like to say a few words,’ says Patience, stepping forward.
‘You have the floor,’ declares Minty gratefully.
‘Because this place has changed my life.’
Genuine approval. This is what the punters want to hear, innocence and energy, words to suggest that life means something, that light can shine in darkness, that darkness is not the end - that, simply put, it’s worth everyone getting up tomorrow morning.
‘As you know, I was formerly a cleaner here - .’
‘A secret cleaner,’ murmurs Ezekiel.
‘Yes, a secret cleaner, Dad. I had to be. We’ve had our problems as a family, still have our problems, which family doesn’t?’
General acknowledgement.
‘But this place was a refuge when I needed it.’
Ezekiel is still not sure that she did need it. Did she really need it? A child should not need to take refuge from her parents, if they’re godly. He hadn’t taken refuge from his parents, he’d taken the punishment without complaint.
Patience continued: ‘I hid for four days in the priest hole over there, which I discovered, quite by chance, when cleaning.’
She paused. Did people really want to hear this? She’d never spoken in public before.
‘Tell it,’ said Abbot Peter quietly. ‘Tell us your story, Patience. It would be good to give it some air.’
Ninety Three
And so Patience did tell her story, confessing she didn’t know Bella planned to kill both her and Barnabus at the Feast of Fools, which was a good way to get everyone’s attention... though she then felt stupid and said that of course she didn’t know, how could she have done, because murder is rarely announced, apart from in declarations of war. And so death was the last thing on her mind when, after the Feast, she went downstairs to change: ‘I was on cloud nine, I was in love!’
‘So sad,’ said Peter to Tamsin.
She then went on to describe how Kate asked her into the office, in a most insistent way, like it was really important, and once inside the room told her that everyone was in danger, there was a madman around, and how she then put a knife in Patience’s hands for her protection. It all happened so fast, and then Kate was saying no, she was too young and told her to put the knife down and come over to the cupboard where she showed her the body of Barnabus, at which point she broke down and started to cry, it was terrible, and then Kate had said she’d get help, and it didn’t cross Pat’s mind to wonder what sort of help but when she looked round, the door was locked and the knife gone and she knew she was in trouble, instinctively knew, with her hand print on the knife, she said she felt like ‘a goat tethered outside the slaughterhouse’.
Shock around the group, who’d been expecting something more innocent from these young lips, more hopeful, something less smeared by human evil.
‘I also knew that my father - I must be honest tonight - had only come to the Feast because he suspected I worked here. I don’t know how he found out, but I was aware that whatever else I did, there was no going home.’
Nervous eyes glanced across at Ezekiel, who stood in a trance.
‘So I disappeared,’ she says, ‘like Virgil tells me he used to disappear as a child.’ And she recounted how trapped in the office, she escaped into the priest hole, hoping no one else knew of it: ‘Please, God, please!’
She’d told no one, it had always felt like a secret, a secret she shared with the house alone. She then heard Bella come in, with Kate, and she heard Bella asking where Pat was, and Kate saying she’d definitely been here, and must have got out the window, and Bella was furious and couldn’t see how I could have got out the window, and then manage to lock it after me, and Kate said that I must have dematerialised, which was hardly likely, and Bella called her something and then they left and there was silence.
There was also silence in the Long Room, apart from Virgil saying ‘Sick cows’ under his breath.
Patience continued: ‘A little later, I heard the door open again, which I suppose was Frances making her final rounds - .’
‘Hardly Florence Nightingale - .’
‘And then I heard a noise, somewhere between a crack and a thud, which must have been, must have been when...’ And for a moment she could get no words out, and her mother was holding her, tears, sobbing and then strong again, pulling herself free, and talking about the long night that followed, how she made her way up the ladder, which brought her to the first floor where there was space to sit, and how terrified she was she’d be found, not knowing who could now be trusted.
Rebecca started to cry, and Michael consoled her with an adolescent arm, now old enough to protect.
‘It’s difficult to describe it now. Tonight, I stand here with a fire burning, with friends and a glass of wine - but believe me, on Halloween night, it wasn’t like that.’
‘A remarkable story,’
says Martin Channing.
‘Put your cheque book away,’ says Virgil.
‘He can’t help himself, can he?’ says Tamsin to Peter.
‘Who?’
‘Either of them.’
‘And so I lived here for the following five days, sealed in by day but able to roam a little at night.’
‘The Detective Inspector thought you were a ghost,’ says Peter.
‘I didn’t think she was a ghost.’
‘I think you did.’
‘I didn’t realise you believed in ghosts, Tamsin!’ says the Chief Constable.
He’s grasping at straws, of course, still making his way back, six months on, from his embarrassing words at Mick Norman’s party. He now regretted his unguarded flirtation and had tried to put the whole thing to bed - ‘unfortunate simile, but you know what I mean, Tamsin’ - bluff apologies which accompany the morning after every works do: ‘Drink, eh?’ he said. ‘You probably don’t remember much!’ But Tamsin remembered everything, every word and inflection and, like a ship holed beneath the waterline, her boss had never quite recovered, never got back to the port called authority. Not that Tamsin ever mentioned the evening, but then she’d never had to: why mention the obvious when the obvious is there without mention? They don’t talk of snow much in Greenland.
Patience explains the ghostly appearance: ‘You caught me out. I needed the loo and I thought the building was empty, and then suddenly I see figures in the hall. I was more frightened than you! So I hunched a little, hoped you’d believe I was a ghost - I knew I stood where once the Harlequin had - but I never imagined you would!’
‘I didn’t.’
Peter: ‘She did. I saw her face.’
And then Patience described how she’d survived on the kitchen supplies and midnight press-ups, sit-ups and stretching, until her life-saving entry into the murder room.
‘I’d been listening to everything: Bella’s voice was not hard to hear, though I couldn’t always make out the Abbot’s words.’
‘Like most clergy, he struggles without a microphone,’ says Tamsin, keen for revenge.
‘You think I had a microphone in the desert?’ replies the Abbot under his breath.
‘In the desert, you were talking to yourself, which doesn’t count.’
‘And I had a noose round my neck at the time. You must try it sometime; it does tense the throat a little.’
‘You seem very defensive.’
‘And I did have my back to her.’
‘People stood behind Martin Luther King, but they still got the gist of his dream. Why are you wriggling?’
‘I’m not wriggling.’
‘Face it, your diction is disappointing.’ She liked to win.
‘I’ll be forever haunted by your remarks,’ says Peter.
Meanwhile Patience is wrapping things up, describing how Bella had been stronger than she thought; how, despite the press-ups, she found an unexpected steel and strength in her opponent, the pain of the knife wound, the feelings of giddiness and how she couldn’t believe it when Virgil suddenly flew across the room.
‘I knew she’d be hiding there, just knew it, had to be, spent half my childhood in the same place - and then I get to save the Abbot’s bacon too!’
Laughter and ‘good old Virgil’ feelings, how he glowed in the gathered love and the wave of acknowledgement from Peter, almost a blessing, and then conversation breaking out as the Abbot slipped out into the night, best avoid the goodbyes. Goodbyes made him cry and so they became rigid, distant affairs. Be hale and hearty - or just creep out the door, and he crept out tonight, case packed, taxi soon to arrive, the pilgrimage starting here.
Tamsin thought he was mad to set off in further pursuit of the dead.
Ninety Four
Stormhaven had come to London but not for the shopping. This was true for Abbot Peter, but true also for Frances, Bella and Kate.
HM Prison Holloway, also known as the Holloway Castle, sits red bricked and modern in London’s Camden Road. It’s new build, newer than the original of 1852 and single sex since 1903, needs must, for where else to put suffragettes, poisoners and war time fascist sympathisers - not that they’re the same, not at all, but each in need of a good locking up here in north London, where five judicial hangings have taken place. Not for a while, of course, the last - the famous last - being Ruth Ellis in 1955, whose remains still lie on site in an unmarked grave, there was a film about her... though superseded in the headlines by other fatal women like Myra Hindley, Brady’s assistant on the torturing Moors; Francoise Dior, niece of Christian, French socialite, Nazi sympathiser and burner of London synagogues; and Maxine Carr, more Soham than socialite, and giver of false alibis to the child-murdering Huntley.
But not one of Holloway’s guests down the years had ever come from Stormhaven - until now, when suddenly, like the red buses that offer travellers a free glimpse - ‘That’s Holloway prison there, no really, and it has a fantastic swimming pool apparently’ - three from Stormhaven all came at once: Frances Pole, Bella Amal and Kate Karter.
They’d done their best to avoid each other, both on remand and since conviction. Beyond memories of Henry House, what on earth did they now share? And avoidance was possible. With each on a different landing, they were spared each other’s company during evening ‘Association’, when cell doors were open and convicts could roam - a time for showers, phone calls and gossip with the thirty others who shared your space. But the work day was different, and the whole day was work in Holloway prison, morning and afternoon, paid work but unpredictable, you couldn’t be choosy about companions on your shift. And there was a day that spring, perhaps it had to be so, when Stormhaven met, when each was assigned gardening duty, less supervised than kitchen or laundry, a sign of trust. And there in the garden tea room, as they took a break from planting, it was a table for three, the Stormhaven Three, the meeting each had avoided yet each had known must occur - and perhaps wanted, who knows?
All of them ‘lifers’, slowly getting used to the word, but the meaning varied, with different minimum sentences: Frances and Bella not less than twelve years and Kate not less than eight. She’d be the first back to the sea, if she still fancied a dip.
‘Well, here we all are,’ says Frances, different in her overall, her polished skin even more polished.
‘Don’t know what the big deal is,’ says Bella, quite excited, quite frightened.
‘Sorry about Gerald,’ says Frances to Kate.
‘That’s life,’ she replies, and it sounds stupid as soon as she says it.
Bella: ‘A weak man.’
‘Made weak by you,’ says Kate.
‘Oh yes, blame me, babe.’
‘Yes, I do. Oh I do. He was free, making good, in his way.’
‘He was a kiddy-fiddler - who’s crying?’
‘Do you ever take responsibility?’
‘Not for perverts.’
‘You’re repulsive.’
‘Perhaps you’re looking in a mirror.’
The tea break hadn’t got off to a good start.
‘Do you never give up? asks Frances, who views Bella with disdain, a poor appointment, no, a bad appointment by her, how stupid she’d been, how unforgivably stupid, the woman was a complete bitch, though really, Kate should get a grip, stop moping, something of a lost soul since her arrival in Holloway, as though she wasn’t here, that’s how it looked, as though Kate had left Kate and, since Gerald hanged himself, almost full time in the chapel, a place where the emptiness echoed her own.
She’d asked Abbot Peter to come and see her after Gerald died. She’d written to him, pleading. And he had come, travelled up on the train to Victoria and then by tube to Caledonian Road. And he’d passed through the checks and bolted doors, and sat with her in a visitor’s room, in a habit th
at Kate felt needed a clean. But it hadn’t gone well, quite apart from his clothes, it hadn’t gone well, hadn’t achieved what she wanted. He’d said how sad he was at the news of Gerald’s death, and how angered he was by the hounding which led him there, a hounding led by the Silt. But she discovered she didn’t want his sadness, or his anger, what good were these, she wanted to move on, to find a new interest, to which Peter had simply said:
‘You can’t say goodbye to something until you’ve first said hello to it.’
And this wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear... why say hello to sadness or anger, she wasn’t the sad type, and not the angry type, though she wasn’t now sure what type she was. And they’d sat in silence for a while... and she wasn’t saying sorry to him, because she hadn’t had a choice that night, she’d had to leave him strung up on the bench, so how could she say she was sorry? She remembered the quiet, before Peter wished her well and took his leave.
And of the three - and in a strange way they were a three, not friends but a three through circumstance, the Stormhaven Three - Frances had settled most easily into this ordered life, impressing staff... almost viewed as one of their own and merging quickly with the prison’s posh circle, those in for fraud, office types with arts degrees caught shifting money around on a screen. They were a bit of a club, the elite, while the rest were mainly theft, supermarkets and clothes, low-life with a habit to fuel; and there were killers, not many but a few, partners in the main, revolting partners, partners knifed in rage, and really, with their stories told, it was hard to say they were wrong. Bella hung around the edges of the thieves, unable to belong anywhere, but adept at finding the vulnerable to sit with and knowing which staff to approach, keeping busy and noting who was with who.
‘Anyone missing Henry House?’ Someone had to ask and it was Kate.
