Days Without Number

by Robert Goddard

  Nick was barely aware of what Andrew had said. In his mind’s eye he could see a splintered hole in the skull of a long-dead stranger. And in his hands he could feel the weight and shape of the bone. And beyond that an unanswered question clogged his thoughts: why had Elspeth lied?

  ‘Nick?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Is that OK with you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A family get-together at Trennor tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘Oh—’ Nick struggled to summon a reaction. ‘Yeah. Fine.’

  Nick did not expect to sleep well that night. Strangely, though, he plunged into nine hours of dreamless oblivion, mind and body closing down to dramatic effect. It was midmorning when he woke.

  It was also the fourth Sunday of the month, which meant there was an 11.15 service at Landulph Church, according to the parish newsletter somebody had delivered earlier in the week. For reasons he did not care to analyse too closely, Nick decided to abandon the idea of a run and go to church instead. He tried Elspeth’s mobile before leaving the house. It was still switched off.

  The brass plaque commemorating Theodore Paleologus had been recently polished. Candlelight glimmered across its inscribed surface as the service unfolded. Nick’s gaze wandered often to it as he sang the hymns and murmured the prayers with a true agnostic’s lack both of practice and of confidence. Yet he was aware also of something chilling and soulful that the previous night’s work had stirred in him. It amounted, he realized, to a desire for absolution. But before absolution came confession. And what he and Andrew had done they could never confess.

  Theodore Paleologus had been convicted in Italy of attempted murder. He had come to Cornwall as a fugitive and an exile. His ancestor, Michael Paleologus, had ascended to the throne of Byzantium in 1259 after murdering the Regent of the baby Emperor, John IV. Within a couple of years of his accession as co-Emperor, the founder of the Paleologus dynasty had had the infant John blinded and imprisoned for life. His successors had exhibited equal ferocity in clinging to power, until dispossessed by the Turks two hundred years later. If there was a Paleologus gene, it did not tend to squeamishness, as the clear evidence of another Michael Paleologus’s ruthlessness seemed to confirm. They were a violent lot when they needed to be.

  But genetics was not an all-encompassing process. Stepping out of the church at the end of the service into a meek and mild splash of Cornish sunshine, Nick recognized in himself none of that ancestral ruthlessness. He did not understand it. He certainly did not believe himself capable of it.

  Which might merely mean, he reluctantly acknowledged as he walked back along the lane towards Trennor, that for him the need had simply not arisen. Yet.

  Irene and Laura were first to arrive for tea that afternoon, bringing to a halt Nick’s unavailing half-hourly calls to Elspeth. He had last seen his niece at his father’s eightieth birthday party. Since then, she had grown from a slight and diffident eleven-year-old with braced teeth and a ponytail into a tall and self-possessed fifteen-year-old looking more like eighteen and already displaying much of her mother’s poise and elegance.

  Nick had never taken his role as uncle any more seriously than Laura had. He had moreover never been sure how much Laura knew about his troubled past, an uncertainty which he had usually dealt with by saying as little to the girl as possible. Accordingly, Laura could not be blamed for finding him dull. As they conversed less than sparklingly about her exam schedule and the train journey from Harrogate, Nick had no doubt that she was silently summing him up in one word, or perhaps three: boring, boring, boring. Which was ironic, since had she known what he and her uncle Andrew had been up to the previous night, boring was unlikely to be the way she would describe it.

  ‘Mum’s told me about Mr Tantris,’ said Laura at some point. ‘Who is he, exactly?’

  ‘A very wealthy man,’ put in Irene.

  ‘Yeah, but you must know more about him than that.’

  ‘We don’t really need to.’

  ‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ said Nick.

  ‘Great,’ said Laura. ‘A family row.’

  ‘There’s nothing of the kind, young lady,’ Irene responded snappishly. ‘Mr Tantris will pay more than he strictly needs to for this house and we’ll all benefit from that, you included, so, if the poor man wants his privacy—’

  ‘But he isn’t poor, is he?’

  ‘You know what I meant.’

  ‘What do you think, Nick?’

  ‘I think there’s a difference between privacy and secrecy.’ He smiled appeasingly. ‘But I also think your mother probably knows best.’

  The arrival of Anna and Basil relieved the pressure on Nick to contribute conversationally. Laura’s three negligent uncles were compensated for by an attentive aunt. Anna, indeed, seemed not in the least depressed by Zack’s absence, flourishing a printout of an e-mail from the boy, in which he expressed his sorrow at missing his grandfather’s funeral. She possessed a sharper instinct for the passions and preoccupations of a teenage girl than Irene and homed in on them effortlessly.

  After some time had slipped vapidly by, Nick and Basil conspired to drift into the garden, leaving the girls to chatter in the drawing room. Outside, among the wintry borders, Basil volunteered quite neutrally that Nick was not looking his best.

  ‘Careworn is how I’d put it, Nick. Distinctly careworn. Not on account of this discrepancy in Miss Hartley’s summary of the Bawden letter, I hope.’

  ‘Andrew told you about that, did he?’

  ‘Telephone call this morning. Irene was treated to one as well, I believe. Apparently, we all think you’re worrying unnecessarily.’

  ‘What do you mean by “apparently”?’

  ‘Well, my opinion’s irrelevant, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not to me.’

  ‘Really? How pleasantly surprising.’

  ‘Spit it out, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Very well. Miss Hartley claimed the letter referred to the Doom Window quite explicitly, whereas in reality it’s altogether more implicit.’

  ‘You could say that, yeah.’

  ‘Quite. Now, should that worry us?’

  Only when it became apparent that Basil did not intend to answer his own question did Nick turn to him and say, ‘Well? Should it?’

  At which Basil grinned unhelpfully. ‘I really don’t know.’

  Nick’s last encounter with Tom would have been, as with Laura, at his father’s eightieth birthday party, but for a more recent crossing of paths in London. One dismally wet afternoon the previous October, they had met by chance outside the British Library, Nick en route for Euston station, Tom for King’s Cross. A ten-minute chat over cardboard-cupped

  cappuccinos in the Library’s street-front coffee-shop had followed. What they had discussed Nick had no memory of, although that almost counted as a memory in itself. Both had been evasive, he recalled, paying mutual lip service to the uncle-nephew relationship. Tom, of course, had postgraduate unemployment to draw a veil over, while Nick had his own reasons to be reticent. Tom had looked well—soft blond floppy hair, big brown puppy-dog eyes, square jaw emphasized by several days’ growth of beard, gym-honed physique filling out fashionable clothes—but, as to how he felt, Nick would have been no worse informed if they had passed each other by without exchanging a word.

  When Tom came in with Andrew, Nick noticed a change in him that he suspected the others were probably in no position to. He was certainly more communicative than on that rainy day in the Huston Road, but that was only to be expected, with aunts and uncles and a cousin to be faced in the company of an all but estranged father. The change that Nick detected was hard to define but clear to him nonetheless. Tom’s gaze had become narrower, almost wary. And he had lost a little weight. Unemployment, Nick reckoned, had taken its toll.

  Andrew was in over-compensatory mode, talking too much and too loudly. Tom, for his part, deflected questions about life in Edinburgh with charm and adroitness, before expr
essing his fondness for his late grandfather and his regret at not having seen more of him in recent years. He slotted into the family mood of restrained mourning with such ease that it came as a surprise to Nick that he had not been told about the Tantris offer.

  This only became apparent when Laura, who had clearly decided her cousin had become something of a dish since she had last set eyes on him, said suddenly, ‘What do you think we ought to spend the money on, Tom?’

  ‘We haven’t gone into that yet,’ put in Andrew, with an exasperated glance at Irene.

  ‘What’s this all about?’ Tom’s look around the room was an understandable mix of curiosity and irritation.

  ‘We’ve been made a generous offer for Trennor,’ Andrew explained. ‘Well, it was made to your grandfather, of course, but it falls to us now.’ Clearly, he saw no need to mention what Tom’s grandfather had thought of the offer. ‘It seems there may be some historically important stained glass hidden—’

  ‘Stained glass!’ Tom sounded suitably incredulous.

  ‘Believe it or not, yeah. It’s all tied up with the Civil War. This historian thinks glass from an ancient window in St Neot Church was concealed here some time in the sixteen forties to protect it from Cromwell’s troops and that it’s almost certainly still here. She works for someone who’s willing to pay handsomely for the chance to find out.’

  ‘So how are they going to do that?’

  ‘Well, they’re going to do whatever it takes.’

  ‘Pull the place apart, you mean?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘But nearly,’ observed Basil.

  Tom gave an ironic whistle. ‘Don’t suppose Grandad went a bundle on the idea.’

  ‘Not at first,’ Andrew cautiously admitted.

  ‘Who’s the man with the money?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Just asking.’

  ‘His name’s Tantris,’ said Irene. ‘That’s about all we really—’

  ‘Tantris?’ Tom stared at his aunt in apparent stupefaction.

  ‘Yes. As I—’

  ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘Why not?’ Anna said with a laugh. ‘It’s not as unusual a name as Paleologus.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’ Tom seemed to be having difficulty grasping something that was, on the face of it, very simple. ‘He can’t be called Tantris.’

  ‘But he is,’ said Irene.

  ‘Come off it. This is a joke, right?’

  ‘What’s wrong, Tom?’ Nick said suddenly. ‘Why can’t he be called Tantris?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘Self-evidently,’ said Basil, ‘we do not.’

  Tom looked from one to the other of them, absorbing the reality of the situation. Then he said, ‘I’m just going to get something from my bag, OK? Can you give me the key, Dad?’

  With a puzzled frown, Andrew pulled the car key out of his pocket and handed it over. Tom hurried from the room, leaving the others to share their bemusement.

  ‘Weird,’ murmured Laura.

  ‘You can say that again.’ Anna shook her head. ‘What’s this about, Andrew?’

  He shrugged. ‘No idea.’

  ‘Some bizarre misunderstanding,’ offered Irene.

  ‘Bizarrerie is a family speciality, after all,’ Basil observed.

  ‘Shut up, Basil,’ snapped Anna.

  ‘Weird,’ Laura repeated.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Andrew smiled gamely. ‘We’ll soon sort it out.’

  A few minutes later, Tom walked back into the room holding a slim paperback in his hand. He plonked himself down in his chair and held the book up for them to see. It was a Penguin Classic: The Romance of Tristan, by Beroul. ‘Grandad sent this to me a couple of weeks ago with a note attached. “You should read this.” That was all. Some joke of his, I reckoned, though what the joke was ’ He shrugged.

  ‘You never mentioned it to me,’ Andrew complained.

  ‘I didn’t think it was any big deal. You didn’t mention a much bigger one, did you?’

  ‘I was going to.’

  ‘What’s the significance of the book, Tom?’ Nick intervened.

  ‘Oh yeah. Well, I guess we’ve all heard of Tristan and Yseult, the original star-crossed lovers.’

  ‘Remind us,’ said Irene.

  ‘Right. OK. I flicked through the book on the train down, basically to see if I could work out why Grandad sent it to me. Beroul’s the name of some twelfth-century storyteller. His version of the romance is the oldest surviving. The way he tells it, Tristan was the nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, who—’

  ‘Whose court was at Tintagel,’ Basil interrupted.

  ‘Yeah. Well, I thought that must be the point. You know, Grandad going down memory lane, reminding me of the legends linked to the place he helped excavate back in the Thirties.’

  ‘But he was always scornful of the legends,’ said Nick.

  Irene sighed. ‘Why don’t you just come to the real point, Tom?’

  ‘I’m trying to. The legends aren’t it. I get that now. Yseult is the daughter of the King of Ireland. Tristan kills her uncle in fair combat, but is wounded in the process. The wound refuses to heal so Tristan casts off in a boat with neither sails nor oars, trusting to God to take him wherever he needs to go to be cured. He’s washed up on the Irish coast, taken into the court posing as a minstrel in distress and has his wounds tended by Yseult, who turns out to have the magic touch. Tristan’s cured and returns to Cornwall. He and Yseult only become lovers later, when Yseult is sent to Cornwall under Tristan’s escort to marry King Mark. Her mother gives her a love potion to drink with the King on their wedding night, but it gets mistaken for wine on the voyage and she shares it with Tristan instead. The tragic love story unfolds from there. But earlier on, when he first meets Yseult, Tristan uses a pseudonym to avoid identifying himself as her uncle’s killer. The pseudonym is actually an anagram of his own name. He calls himself—’

  ‘Tantris,’ said Basil softly.

  ‘What?’ Irene looked sharply across at her brother.

  ‘Tantris,’ Basil repeated. ‘Yes, of course. The two syllables turned the other way round. I should have thought of that.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Tom nodded. ‘Tristan called himself Tantris when he needed to conceal his true identity.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Andrew. ‘Are you saying—’

  ‘There’s no such person as Tantris.’ It seemed to Nick as he spoke that he had known this for some time, but only now been forced to admit it. There never has been.’

  Anna stared at him in obvious bafflement. ‘Would someone mind telling me what the hell we’re talking about?’

  ‘There’s no Tantris,’ said Nick. ‘It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘And no Tantris,’ Basil began, ‘means—’

  ‘No money.’ Andrew’s words were muffled by the hand he had raised to his face. ‘Oh God.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  At ten o’clock the following morning, with their father’s funeral only two hours away, Andrew, Irene, Basil, Nick and Anna sat, black-suited and sombre-faced, in their solicitor’s cluttered office in Plymouth. Maurice Baskcomb, also black- suited but somehow failing to look sombre despite a frown, kneaded his large, sausage-fingered hands together and leaned forward on his desk.

  ‘I think it fair to say I’ve never experienced the like of this in my far from short legal career,’ he said, forming the words slowly and deliberately. ‘When you telephoned me last night—’

  ‘We’re sorry to have disturbed you at home, Mr Baskcomb,’ said Irene.

  ‘Think nothing of it, Mrs Viner. It was, I think we can agree, an emergency. In some ways, it still is. As you suggested, I contacted Mr Tan—’ He paused, pursed his lips, then continued. ‘I contacted the solicitor I’ve been dealing with on your behalf, Miss Palmer of Hopkins and Broadhurst, London. She could not tell me a great deal, bound as she is by rules of confidentiality.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ growled Andrew.


  ‘Such rules exist for the protection of the client, Mr Paleologus, not the solicitor.’

  ‘We understand that,’ said Irene. ‘What could Miss Palmer tell you?’

  ‘Well, it appears she’s never met Mr Tantris, which is hardly surprising, given the unusual circumstances. She’s dealt only with his assistant, a Miss Elsmore. Now, I did give your description of Miss Hartley to her and, though she wouldn’t commit herself, I had the distinct impression that the description could easily have fitted Miss Elsmore. I also contacted Bristol University’s personnel department this morning. There is an Elspeth Hartley on their academic staff, but she’s currently on sabbatical in Boston.’

  ‘Would that be Boston, Lincolnshire,’ Basil enquired, ‘or Massachusetts?’

  ‘The latter, Mr Paleologus.’

  ‘She set us up,’ said Anna, whose tone was still fixed in the disbelief that had overtaken her the previous night.

  ‘She’s clearly been less than open with you,’ Baskcomb went on. ‘And with me. And indeed with her own solicitor.’

  ‘What about the money?’ asked Andrew, the undertow in his voice suggesting he already knew the answer to his question. ‘What about the half a million quid Tantris was supposed to have deposited with Hopkins and Broadhurst?’

  ‘Withdrawn late Friday afternoon,’ Baskcomb gloomily replied. ‘Miss Palmer was apparently about to telephone me to report that development when I telephoned her.’

  ‘How was it withdrawn?’ asked Irene.

  ‘In the form, I imagine, of a Hopkins and Broadhurst cheque.’

  ‘Payable to whom?’

  ‘To Miss Elsmore, presumably. Or to whomsoever Miss Elsmore nominated as payee. Miss Palmer had no authority to give me that information.’

  ‘But it’s the only way to track down the bastard behind this swindle.’ Andrew glanced round at his siblings for support. ‘She has to tell.’

  ‘There’s been no swindle,’ Baskcomb calmly responded. Tin afraid it amounts to nothing more than an elaborate practical joke.’