The Anathema Stone

by John Buxton Hilton

  Mobile teams from two rival television companies had had to content themselves with shots of places that the presenters tried to turn into something sinister: the Hall, the Stotts’bungalow, the ‘Roman’ paving. The ubiquity of journalists was such that Kenworthy was even done out of his nightly beer: there were times when even ‘No Comment’ could be twisted into a dangerous statement.

  Just after closing time in the Sergeant, on the night after the Kenworthys’ long walk, there was a knock on the door, which Elspeth answered. John Horrocks was standing there, courteous, and strangely unsure of himself. Kenworthy came to him.

  ‘Mr Kenworthy – I wonder if I could trespass on your time and goodwill. I’d like to ask your professional advice.’

  ‘By all means. Come in.’

  Kenworthy caught sight of the pale, motionless and amorphous figure that was Christine. She had not entered the gate.

  ‘We won’t, if you don’t mind. I was wondering if you would be so kind as to come back with us to the Grange. That is – I know it’s a tricky business, asking the opinion of an off-duty policeman –’

  ‘You can at least try me out.’

  ‘I mean – nobody knows for certain whether you are off duty.’

  There was still something untypically nervous about him.

  ‘That seems to be everyone’s problem. Let’s put it this way: I am off duty, but being careful, very careful. In any case, if it’s advice you want, I don’t think I’d be very good at talking to an Ultimate Anarchist about the law.’

  John Horrocks laughed, after a fashion, but the pleasantry had not been enough to put him at his ease. There was no response at all from Christine.

  ‘You mustn’t get us wrong, Mr Kenworthy. Ultimate Anarchy acknowledges that the world is not yet ready for ideal lawlessness. What we believe and practise among ourselves is not something to be forced on others.’

  ‘I’m relieved to hear it. What’s your problem?’

  ‘I’d prefer to leave that, if you don’t mind. It’s a decision that faces our community as a whole. If they think I’ve briefed you in advance, then both you and I will be rejected.’

  Elspeth was already holding Kenworthy’s coat for him. He and Horrocks joined Christine on the pavement. She moved round so that Horrocks was in the middle; but it was the proximity of Kenworthy that she was trying to avoid.

  They walked together up the hill towards the Grange – a long mile, and a steep road that they eventually left to follow a drive between dilapidated lodge gates. Spentlow Grange was a late nineteenth-century parvenu creation that had fallen into disuse out of economic impossibility: any owner who could have afforded to keep it up could have laid out his money on something significantly more comfortable. The trio moved under dark trees, a dank fungoid smell rising from the undergrowth. Before they came in sight of the lights of the house, they heard the sound of decidedly amateur flamenco guitar. There had been virtually no conversation on the way up, attempts at inconsequentiality petering out as artificial. As they were approaching the front door – one glass panel replaced by the side of a cardboard carton, another by a sheet of sacking – Horrocks was constrained to make yet another apologetic preamble.

  ‘I hope, Mr Kenworthy, that you won’t judge irretrievably by your first impressions.’

  ‘I hope I’m not coming to judge at all.’

  ‘But you’re bound to, aren’t you? I mean, your world –’

  ‘Do you mean my bourgeois ghetto – or my fascist bacon-factory?’

  ‘What I mean is – you’re about to come up against prejudice.’

  ‘And you’re afraid I can’t stand up for myself?’

  The bare wooden floor of the entrance hall had been swept, but if it had been scrubbed when they first took up occupation, no sort of job had been made of it. The grime had merely been swirled about and left to dry. Ethical enlightenment went hand in hand with either physical inertia or circumstantial purblindness. Moreover, there was a smell of recently-burned joss-sticks, and Kenworthy knew what that was probably meant to screen.

  Horrocks showed him into a ground-floor room at the front of the house, where a number of people were gathered in knots in an incomplete circle. The windows were uncurtained, the furniture was rudimentary. There were cushions on the floor, an old mattress or two, even the frame of a rucksack serving as a sort of armchair.

  There seemed to be about a dozen men and women present, in all manner of costume, drabness prevailing. Even their patchwork skirts and their sweaters bedecked with cheap badges and escutcheons seemed singularly colourless. Horrocks looked round, making a mental roll-call.

  ‘Someone go and fetch Bob and Catherine. I want a full house.’

  A messenger went, and a tall girl in a sleeveless black H-line dress got up and made for the door.

  ‘Triss, I want you to stay.’

  ‘You want me to stay?’

  ‘We want you to stay.’

  ‘But I know what we’re going to hear.’

  ‘In that case, you might affect the majority decision.’

  ‘I don’t believe in majority decisions. They coerce the minority. Everything worthwhile in history has been achieved by minorities.’

  ‘Then stay and achieve something now.’

  ‘I shall only become insulting.’

  ‘Mr Kenworthy can stand that.’

  ‘Mister Kenworthy!’

  Horrocks looked round the room for support. Most of those present were putting on an act of aggressive boredom.

  ‘We are going to make a decision tonight – after we have heard all points of view. If we do not hear all points of view, the decision will be a false one.’

  Christine came forward, grasped the tall girl by the shoulders and pushed her back towards the nest of gutless cushions from which she had risen. At the same time, the couple who must be Bob and Catherine came in: a man with a head of hair like a Kaffir, and a girl with a baby at her bared breast.

  ‘I do not propose to act as chairman,’ Horrocks began.

  ‘We do not have chairmen,’ Triss said. ‘A chairman can only inhibit.’

  ‘Therefore my role is solely that of Prologue. We are here because a girl has been murdered.’

  ‘Whereat all subscribers to conventional religions should surely rejoice. Because they believe she has gone –’

  ‘I object,’ a man said, ‘to this quest for advice from an acknowledged authoritarian.’

  ‘Authoritarians are, alas, what we are going to be up against in the very near future. Uncompromising authoritarians. It is because of that that we owe it to ourselves to hear the legalist viewpoint. The threat to this community, my friends, is very great.’

  Horrocks was trying to be persuasive with dignity; but dignity was itself suspect in this circle.

  ‘We are not going to promise ourselves that we will do what Mr Kenworthy advises. But we would be fools not to hear his advice.’

  ‘But why, for God’s sake? We didn’t murder the girl!’

  ‘No. But as a community, we know we have something on our conscience.’

  ‘Conscience is only a manifestation of social conditioning,’ someone said.

  ‘I’ll put it a different way, then. There is not one member here who is not ashamed –’

  ‘Shame is only –’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Triss.’

  The man who protested was a lumbering specimen wearing spectacles in round tortoiseshell frames that must date back to the 1920s.

  ‘What was done was not done in the name of the community.’

  ‘It was done by a substantial number of us.’

  ‘It was not. Why fight shy of the facts? It was done by a handful of women.’

  There was a ripple of female dissent.

  ‘I fail to see what that incident has to do with the murder of the girl.’

  ‘It hasn’t –’

  ‘It has,’ – this was the man in the spectacles again – ‘if the girl had been treated according to the principles
on which we pride ourselves –’

  ‘I don’t know why this has been brought up, anyway.’

  ‘It has been brought up,’ Horrocks said, ‘because it’s only a matter of time before it’s brought up by someone who’s going to be neither patient nor tolerant. It’s not the sort of thing that can be kept dark. It hasn’t been kept dark. Keeping it dark might even make it seem worse than it was.’

  ‘So what’s your proposition, then, John? That someone volunteers to go and tell them the truth?’

  ‘That we first establish what the truth was.’

  ‘Casuistry. You mean, cook it? Concoct an agreed version?’

  ‘No. Establish the true version.’

  ‘So you bring in one of the Elder Brethren,’ a man said, ‘to hear us argue it out? Hoping that he’ll leak it back and salve your tender conscience that way? I’m sorry,’ he said sideways to Kenworthy. ‘I’m quite sure that you’re the nicest of chaps. I would be delighted to go with you on a walking tour of the Vosges. But you do happen to be our enemy.’

  Kenworthy stood up.

  ‘Thank you. I dare say you’re quite a reasonable sort of cove yourself, though I’ll pass up on your holiday offer, if you don’t mind. I’m sorry if I seem to have been brought here to try to force a premature decision. But it does seem to me that you’re sitting on something pretty uncomfortable. And it’s also plain that you’re not ready to agree any statement yet. I can’t think that my presence is anything but a hindrance. If John Horrocks can find me somewhere private to sit it out –’

  ‘Privacy is several kinds of theft,’ Triss said. She was ignored.

  Horrocks took him upstairs to what he called the Quiet Room, a sort of communal study with bookcases improvised from the ubiquitous cardboard cartons.

  ‘I hope you don’t think I brought you here just to force their hands.’

  ‘That’s what I do think, as a matter of fact. And a damned good idea, too, if I may say so.’

  ‘Something happened here last summer. Something involving Davina and Kevin O’Shea. I’ve a rough idea what, but the details are elusive. It may be irrelevant to the final issue, but if your colleagues find out about it before we tell them ourselves it’s going to complicate matters no end.’

  Left alone, Kenworthy looked over their library. It was obvious that the books had been pooled from three or four major sources: there was exotic religion – Zoro-astrianism and the Occult; Pelican sociology; Marxist economics. On a rough deal table Horrocks had been correcting school exercise books – apparently with great pains. He caught sight of a dog-eared copy of The Anathema Stone script. He picked it up and lifted the weather-stained top sheet. The stapling had come undone and a few of the lower sheets were missing. He recognized alterations to stage directions in Davina’s hand. She had had this copy with her the morning they had been saddled with Mrs Scadbolt. She had also had it that last night when he had said goodnight to her outside her bungalow. How could it have got there, unless she had brought it herself?

  He picked up a book: Zimmermann’s Vademecum for Activists: time-pencils, self-igniting phosphorus bottles, subversion by blackmail, infiltration of media. He read one chapter at length: How to make friends with the enemy.

  Then, footsteps up the uncarpeted stairs; a strangely dragging gait: Christine in a long, shapeless dress, in some material that had once been white, her sandals loose about her heels. She came and stood framed in the open door, looked at him, took note of what he was reading, her face as accusing as her expressionless eyes could be. Of all the Beaker Folk he had met, she was the one who remained implacably hostile.

  ‘They want you downstairs.’

  A lazy voice, as if even the passing of this message to him was something for which she prayed cosmic forgiveness. He stood up, and she swung round with her back to him to lead him downstairs.

  ‘How does this come to be here?’

  ‘That?’

  ‘No. Not Zimmermann. That can be bought over the counter, more’s the pity. But it doesn’t worry me – it takes staying-power to be a terrorist – more than you’ve got in this bunch. No: I mean this – Davina Stott’s script.’

  She seemed to come near to a moment of pleasure: no more than a movement of her upper lip; but it was a tremor of satisfied contempt.

  ‘The vicar. He returned it to John.’

  He began to follow her down the stairs, keeping his distance, because she was having as much difficulty with the long dress as with the sandals. She might at least have held it up about her ankles, but gave the impression that she rejected anything so ladylike. She seemed to prefer to risk breaking her neck through the hem catching under her toes and heels.

  But not for long. They had not gone far down the stairs when the hall below them was suddenly full of noise, of feet and men’s voices. Two uniformed constables rushed past them up the stairs, ordering them down to join the others in the common room on the ground floor. Boots clattered up to the landing above them: the stock tactics for shock house search – the advance party rushing up to the top of the building whilst bewilderment lasted; the remote corners occupied whilst the argument over warrants was still going on with the principals.

  Gleed was down there, holding the stage in their common room. Kenworthy also recognized Sergeant Cottier. And on the edge of the headquarters party was Bill Clingo, evidently on secondment.

  ‘I want everyone to stand by his own possessions.’

  ‘We don’t have possessions.’

  That was the girl Triss, her laughter tinkling and provocative.

  ‘Then you, you and you will come with us. The rest of you stay here.’

  Gleed thus nominated his prospective witnesses, among them Horrocks and the man with the Kaffir hair; but not including Christine. Her anger at being omitted seemed even greater than her indignation at the fact of the raid; her face drained of what vestiges of colour it had had. Kenworthy tried to catch Gleed’s eye; but Gleed wasn’t playing. Bill Clingo nodded to him in such a way as to discourage contact. Clearly Bill was under injunction, and not scripted to say anything yet. A uniformed man misinterpreted Kenworthy’s apartness from the group.

  ‘Go in there with the rest of them. Don’t let’s have any trouble.’

  Chapter Twelve

  The raid and house search of the Beaker Folk’s quarters took all of two and a half hours, for the whole of which time Kenworthy had to sit under the eye of a passively pugnacious looking constable, alongside the small-fry of the community. Unreason was sweet to these people at the lower end of the anarchical pecking order, and they dropped easily into the assumption that Kenworthy’s visit had had something to do with the mounting of this invasion. They sat in boredom, frustrated in their efforts to interpret the noisy feet in adjacent rooms. Many of these were empty, but it sounded as if every loose floorboard, and a good many sound ones, were being investigated. Once, a child started howling, and a woman was allowed upstairs to attend to it. Once, a small party came down into the hall with such purposeful clattering that it sounded as if a critical juncture had been reached. But nothing came of it, and it was after two a.m. that the maddeningly leisurely process was wound up. It then became obvious that one man, one woman and John Horrocks were going to accompany Gleed back to his headquarters. Only then did Kenworthy have the chance to sidetrack Bill Clingo. Clingo, with the reputation of a rustic – largely on account of a sing-song accent which it had never occurred to him to lose – had transferred to the Met. from the East Anglian force in the early 1950s. He was a good copper, with a gluttonous capacity for work, but also with a collector’s appetite for his personal records: a small-minded man. As a result, he went for small profits and quick returns, and was something of a joke at the Yard for his rounding-up of lesser lights. Perhaps that was why he was one of the oldest inspectors on the ground: he suffered from an unaffected satisfaction with his own achievements.

  And so it had been again now. Kenworthy could see that Clingo was puffed with the feeling of
having pulled something off. And he could not conceal his feeling that his own standing was good locally, while Kenworthy was clearly out in the shade.

  ‘Thanks for the tip-off, Simon.’

  ‘Did you a bit of good, did it?’

  ‘We picked up O’Shea in Nuneaton yesterday.’

  ‘On what sort of rap?’

  Clingo’s pleasure knew no bounds. He did not normally work anywhere near Kenworthy. His deference for rank was within a shade of immaculacy. But what was not immaculate about it was the way his self-satisfaction showed through.

  ‘You mean you don’t know? For heaven’s sake don’t tell Gleed that I’ve told you –’

  Kenworthy maintained both his patience and his patient appearance.

  ‘Illegal immigrants.’

  ‘You mean they’ve been using this place as a transit camp?’

  ‘That’s the object of the present exercise.’

  ‘I was under the impression that it had to do with the death of a girl.’

  ‘That first and foremost, but between you and me, there’s a lot on the side.’

  Then Gleed came up to them, and Clingo all but jumped nervously. Yet the Derbyshire Chief Inspector looked in no way betrayed at seeing him talking to Kenworthy. He nodded as if they were his familiar spirits.

  ‘You’ve finished with me?’ Kenworthy asked.

  ‘Of course. You’d have been free to go a couple of hours ago, if I’d spotted how you were being treated.’

  Kenworthy managed to look as if he believed that. There were a couple of minutes of headlamp confusion as police vehicles shunted themselves away from the Grange. As Kenworthy was leaving down the front steps he met Christine coming back into the house, apparently having tried to take some sort of leave of Horrocks as he was driven away. Somehow she combined raging dignity with a stance contemptuously devoid of all grace. A curtain of hair hung in front of her eyes. It was surprising that she could see anything at all.

  ‘Satisfied, Kenworthy?’

  He stood and looked at her silently, so that she did not know whether he was about to lose his temper, or reason with her smoothly, or start to question her, or perhaps insult her with a phrase or two of hypocritical small talk. He stood thus for the space of half a dozen leisurely breaths, then turned away into the night without saying anything.