Gilgamesh

by Jo Bannister

  She clearly wasn’t very used to jokes, at least not mine. I don’t think she was all that good on literature either. “I’ve heard of him.”

  I couldn’t resist it. “Yeah, I thought his name might ring a bell.”

  It proved a longer job than I had expected. Ellen came home half-way through, amazed to find her yard full of cow-shit and her kitchen full of onions.

  “What are they doing?”

  I brought her up to date. She turned pale, even the delicate shade of green brought to her cheek by the slurry stench draining away. “You mean, he’s been back here?”

  I shrugged. “I think so. No one else does.”

  “But why?”

  “If he did leave it here, maybe to pick up the painting. The police had gone, you were at the hospital, Sally and Karen were busy with the horses; maybe he thought it would be as clear a run as he was likely to get. He must have thrown a fit when he walked round the corner of the byre and found me peering into the slurry tank.”

  “Then he’s been watching us?” There was an audible shudder in Ellen’s voice.

  But she was right. He’d done a lot of watching, from before this started. He knew the French window in the study was likely to be open on a warm evening and the alarm switched off. He knew where to find Foxford’s one treasure. He knew where he could hide it and when he could come back for it unnoticed. He’d been very careful, very well prepared. He deserved better than me wandering onto the scene, uninvited and unexpected, throwing his plans into confusion.

  I said, “I don’t expect he’ll still be hanging round, not after this. But if you’d rather not be alone, I can stay on up here for a few days. Or you can come down to us.”

  “I can’t leave horses in the stables and no one on the premises,” said Ellen; but she sounded as if she’d have liked to.

  “Then suppose I move in,” ventured Sally. “If you can put Pasha up too, it would actually be a fair bit easier for me than toing and froing between here and Standings.”

  It might have been true. Ellen didn’t think so, but she recognised an act of kindness when she met one. She said only, “That would be tremendous, Sally, thank you,” but it was clearly a considerable relief to her.

  I said as an aside to Sally, “Let me give you a bit of advice. If she offers you the four-poster, take the settee.”

  Outside the pump stopped throbbing. The sudden silence was deafening.

  “Does that mean they’ve found it?”

  “Or that the tank’s empty?”

  I shrugged. “We’d better go and see. Anyone want a fresh onion?”

  It meant that the tank was empty. Nothing except the obvious had come up the vacuum pipe, but when I thought about it, there had never been a chance that something the size of that painting would.

  I looked sidelong at Harry. “I suppose now—”

  “I know,” he said forcibly, “I know. Someone’s going to have to go in there. I’ve got it all organised, Clio. I’ve got a chap climbing into a scuba outfit right now. I’ve got a lifeline ready to haul him back if he gets into trouble. I’ve got a couple of men lifting slats in the byre to let in some more light. Is that all right? Is there anything I’ve missed?”

  Mostly he was joking, though I’m not sure anyone but me knew it I said meekly, “No, dear.”

  “I wonder how I ever made chief inspector before I had you,” he glowered, a hint of humour in the depths of his scowl.

  I patted his arm in a gracious gesture of wifely accord. “Oh, so do I, dear; so do I.”

  The man in the wetsuit, possibly the world’s least-becoming attire, tied the line round his middle, started his air supply and climbed down into the hole. We could hear him moving round in the semi-solid residue at the bottom of the tank. We could see the wash of his torch and the snaking of the lifeline through the hatch as it followed him around.

  After perhaps a minute the line stopped moving and the torch went out, and a few moments after that the prehistoric head of a man in a wet suit and breathing apparatus emerged from the hatch. “I’ve found it.”

  It took them a minute to manoeuvre it out, but it was clearly what we were looking for. The shorter side of the frame was longer than the side of the opening, so they had to lift it up awkwardly on the diagonal. It was heavy too, with the big wooden frame and the accumulation of bovine waste.

  Vindicated, I took my first deep breath for some time. It wasn’t a good idea; I went back to my onion.

  When it was lying flat, brown, and squelchy on the concrete and oozing down the hill, we stood round it in a ring and wondered what to do next. Was there any way of fingerprinting it?

  Harry said, “We’d better unwrap it. We’ll hose it off here, then take it down to the station.”

  The man in the wet suit, now without his breathing apparatus and dripping noxiously, said, “Something you should know before you turn the hose-pipe on it. It isn’t wrapped in anything. How it came off the wall is how it went down the hole.”

  Chapter Seven

  Incredibly, he was right. That precious thing had been dumped in the slurry tank with no protection whatever from the filth and acids. No plastic cladding, no shroud of mackintosh, not even a sheet of brown paper tied up with string. He’d shot a man in the back to get it and then dumped it with no more concern for its safety than if it had been last Sunday’s colour supplement. It didn’t make any sense at all.

  “I don’t suppose,” I ventured into the stunned silence, “that cow-shit is like peatbog and preserves anything that falls into it?”

  I met a glum chorus of shaking heads. Well, I hadn’t really thought so. “Then perhaps you had better hose it down—well, sponge it down—because anything under that lot that’s still worth restoring is probably dissolving even as we look at it.”

  A man came up from Skipley Museum to co-ordinate the conservation of the painting with its treatment as forensic evidence. As he was arriving, with a box of tricks that made the average Scenes of Crime kit look like a make-up bag, I was leaving for the hospital.

  I walked down to our house and drove from there. Driving your own skull down for its X-ray is not really sensible practice, not the sort of thing a doctor would sanction in anyone else, but I felt pretty well back to normal by then, and indeed, the X-ray showed nothing to worry about. The blow had only stunned me; the gas had put me out.

  Before I got away, I was solemnly advised what possible symptoms would require further investigation, as if I didn’t know my coccyx from my humerus, but the clear inference was, Don’t call us, well call you. I went to enquire after David.

  I thought he was sleeping and was about to back away when he opened his eyes, spotted me, and waved me over. The gesture was weak but deliberate enough: he not only wasn’t at death’s door but didn’t even think he was.

  It was now about twenty hours since he’d been shot. In that time he’d had an operation, a good night’s sleep, and a couple of visitors. If it was far too soon to say that the rate of recovery had implications for its final extent, it was at least hopeful to see him harnessing his youth, strength, and fitness to his recovery instead of to frustrating it. Sportsmen can be terrible patients: they tend to expect immediate results and wallow in misery when they don’t get them. A bit like doctors.

  I pulled up a chair. “Hi there. How are you feeling?”

  He grimaced. “Don’t ask.” The tubes that had hung round him like festoons last time I had seen him were gone now. His voice was breathy but unmistakably his own.

  “Harry said he’d called by.”

  “Thank God he did. No one else in this dump was prepared to talk to me about what happened. They still won’t talk about what happens next.”

  “They won’t know yet. With spinal injuries it takes a bit of time before a picture starts to emerge.”

  “Then for God’s sake, why don’t they say that?”

  “I don’t know.” Despite training and for twelve years practising as one, I have never really unders
tood doctors. I have had some loud and vitriolic arguments in my time, and lost all of them, about the essential information the profession is reluctant to entrust to its patients. I finally decided that the guiding principle was not prescribing regimen for the good of our patients according to our ability and judgement (Hippocrates, born 460 B-C. approximately) but preventing anyone from finding out that we are only doctors, dependent on ability and judgement and then some luck, and not gods at all.

  “How’s Ellen managing?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Sally Fane’s helping her with the horses; did she tell you?”

  He nodded. “That’s a weight off my mind. Sally knows what she’s doing. She broke that big bay bastard of mine.”

  “So she said.”

  “She should never have sold him. He’d have come right for her, and then he’d have taken her anywhere she wanted to go. Still, selling youngsters is her business. You don’t make much money keeping them all, and you don’t make much more only selling the duff ones.”

  I told him about my close encounter with his star pupil, and he tried very hard not to grin. I got the impression it was the most cheering thing he’d heard all day. “And the police found your painting.”

  His head came up, his eyes rounding. “Where? Who had it? Did they—”

  “No, they didn’t get him. They still don’t know who he is. The picture never left Foxford; he dumped it in the slurry tank.”

  David’s face was a study in confusion. For a long time, although his lips moved, nothing came out of them but breath. Anger and anguish warred in his eyes. Then he blinked rapidly, and there were tears there too.

  Almost from the moment it happened, when all his hopes and much of his future were ripped from him in the split-second agony of a bullet driving into his back, he had been struggling to come to terms with it, to find some kind of balance, some point of reference within the maelstrom of emotional response—the outrage, the grief, and the fear. And he had been getting somewhere, because greed was a motive that anyone could understand, even if it was barely conceivable that one man could have so much greed in him that he would destroy another man’s life to assuage it.

  And now I was telling him that it wasn’t greed at all which had prompted someone to come to his house and shoot him down without a word while he was working at his desk with his back to the window. If there had been no intention to recover the painting, then the shooting was deliberate, personal, and incredibly vicious. How could he begin to come to terms with that?

  But if there had been no intention to recover the painting, why had the man returned to Foxford? Could I have been wrong? Might my assailant have been no more than an imperfectly wedged manhole cover?

  Finally David whispered, “Dumped? You mean, he didn’t want Gilgamesh? He never wanted it? All he wanted was to do … this … to me?” Deep with horror, his eyes travelled down the shape of him in the bed, mapping that half of him under the sheet that only his eyes told him was still there, and then slowly up to my face. “Who hates me that much? In God’s name, why?”

  I took his hand and held it tight enough to hurt both of us, and part of me was a little embarrassed at this intense and intimate contact with a young man who not only wasn’t my husband but was my friend Ellen’s. But mostly what troubled me was a raging discontent that this sliver of human warmth was all the comfort I had to offer him.

  In this hospital and others like it reposed such skill, such knowledge and wisdom and science, that its adepts could replace lungs and livers and kidneys and hearts, if not at will then at least when the will coexisted with the finance. And arguably more than that—they could create life where no life could have existed without them, in wombs which nature alone could not have filled. But if there was a gap in the nerve-chains linking this young man’s limbs with his spinal cord, and it was no wider than that pin-head with all the angels dancing on it, they could do nothing to restore use or feeling or any life beyond the purely mechanical to those parts of his body beyond it.

  And if there was no gap, they could look at the pictures their skill and science could make of it and say, “Well, he might walk again”; but they couldn’t say when, and they couldn’t say how well, and they couldn’t even say whether for sure.

  And me, with much of that same knowledge and wisdom supplemented by my own celebrated disdain for the sacred cows of medical theocracy, what could I offer him that was better, that promised more, that took greater cognizance of his innate human dignity? Only a handshake, that left both of us with bruised fingers and bloody palms. I knew no more than anyone else, not even why.

  I found a voice, though it wasn’t immediately recognisable as mine: people who thought me a cynic would have been surprised at the thickness of it. “David love, I don’t know why. But if that is what happened, there is a reason; there must be.”

  He forced a snort of desperate laughter. “Clio, if you tell me it’s all part of some cosmic plan, I shall hit you with a bedpan.”

  He’d known me for a year and still thought I had potential as a God-botherer? I shuddered. “I don’t believe in cosmic plans, David, only human ones. Whoever shot you had something quite specific in mind. It may not have been theft—it begins to look like it wasn’t—but nor was it the random act of a passing maniac. Somebody stood to gain by putting you here and would have gained no more by killing you, because if he’d wanted to, he had every opportunity.

  “I don’t know who would stand to gain from disabling you or what the nature of the gain might be. But the nature of the wound is quite specific: it was always going to lay you up for a long time; it was never going to threaten your life. I don’t think that was arbitrary. He had all the time he needed to make that shot and to make another if he wasn’t satisfied with the first. He had time to steal a painting he didn’t want, after all, and to dispose of it, all within earshot of people in the next room. That’s not irrational behaviour; it’s deeply calculating.”

  I was thinking on my feet, as it were, with only the vaguest idea of where the line was taking me, and maybe I shouldn’t have been doing it in front of David who was weak and shocked and almost as vulnerable as it’s possible for a man to be. Or perhaps he had as much right to know how the crime of which he was the victim was being investigated as he had to know how the condition of which he was the prisoner was being treated. Anyway, the argument was largely academic: I needed access to his thoughts in order to advance my own. Maybe that was pretty calculating too.

  “And if it wasn’t irrational, then there was a reason—a motive, a history, an essentially logical development from events in which you were involved. It’s grudge or gain: either somebody’s paying you back for something he blames you for or he’s putting you on the sidelines because you’d have been in his way otherwise. Either way, this is personal.

  “So there’s no one in this world more likely to have the answers than you, David. You may have to go back years. You may have to rummage in an attic of cast-off memories for something so trivial you never gave it another thought. But it mattered to someone, because he’s gone to a lot of trouble to set this up. Someone wanted something from you, and it may be your hurting or it may be something he couldn’t have with you out and about. But it’s the motive for this, and you know something about it, even if you’re not aware of doing; and if we can isolate the motive, we can identify the man responsible.”

  He might be weak, shocked, and vulnerable, but David Aston was essentially a level-headed lad. When I finished the big sell, he said with interest, “Is this how you plot your books?”

  Inside I flinched. If even good friends considered me exploitive, was I safe in assuming they were wrong?

  I managed a grin, though it was a wry one. “Not really. I work from the solution back: it’s easier that way. Also, the characters do what I tell them and don’t go sneaking off on their own account when I’m not looking.”

  He smiled. Quite suddenly he looked tired; I knew I’d have to go soon. I patted his
arm. “Listen, don’t worry about it. Harry will sort it out; it’s what he’s paid for. You concentrate on getting better.”

  “Or what? Will you write me out if I can’t walk again within three chapters?”

  “No, I thought I’d put you in a stage play entitled Whose Horse Is It Anyway?”

  He chuckled at that. As I stood up he said, “If you’re talking to Sally, tell her thanks for her offer, and yes, if she can keep the big bay bastard fit, he might get to the World Championships yet.”

  He caught the pain I couldn’t keep out of my eyes and smiled quite gently. “It’s all right, Clio. I don’t think I’m going to be riding him. But I’m going to make him available if the selectors want to put someone else on him. He’s good enough, and there’s time to do it, and he should have his chance while he’s at the peak of his ability. Four years is a lot of miles under a horse; even if I’m fit for the next one, maybe he won’t be. If they want him, they can have him. And if Sally wants to compete with him until they decide, his entries are in the office diary. She’ll know who to contact. Just tell her not to get herself hurt.”

  I thought Sally would want to hear that right away, so I drove back to Foxford. The police had left; the smell had largely abated. Ellen and Karen were doing the evening meals. Sally’s horse was in a spare box, but Sally herself was missing.

  “She went home to collect some clothes,” said Ellen. “She has things to arrange; she’ll hardly be back before bedtime. Was it important?”

  I rocked a hand. “She might think so.” I explained.

  Ellen nodded and smiled. “You’re right; she will consider that important. You could call her.”

  “No, I’ll drive round. I’m on my way home now. I’ll just go the scenic route.”

  But I had no idea, when I turned right out of the gate and along the top of The Brink, just how scenic a route it was.

  I had been to Standings a couple of times, to a dinner party the Colonel gave soon after Harry and I were married and later to the parish fête, for which he lent his lawn. It was a mile or so beyond Foxford as the crow flies, maybe twice that as the lanes wander; but people who haven’t used these little Warwickshire byways can’t imagine just how much they do wander. Nor how narrow they are, nor how overhung with hawthorn and honeysuckle. Two cars pass by, each shrinking into the nearside hedge. Two tractors don’t pass: one backs up to the nearest gateway.