The Anathema Stone

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘So our char has told us.’

  ‘So soon? I found John Horrocks a strangely reasonable and fairminded man, though he has – or perhaps it would be truer to say that he had – a quite pathetic faith in that squalid social experiment.’

  ‘I’ll agree with the past tense. He must know now that it could never have worked with the rag, tag and bobtail that they have in tow. For my money, it’s the girl-friend who’s blindly committed; and Horrocks is blindly committed through her.’

  ‘My impression, too; but more to the point – might Davina have gone there that night – it was cold, possibly going to rain again – with the prospect of at least a roof and a sympathetic hearing from Horrocks? As well as teacher, he appears to have been mentor and protector.’

  ‘It depends,’ Kenworthy said. ‘It depends on what happened that other night – the night she nearly bit off more than she could chew with Kevin O’Shea.’

  Gleed looked at him with a sudden irrepressible touch of self-satisfaction.

  ‘You know the details?’ Kenworthy asked hopefully.

  ‘Nothing certain. Nothing even workably reliable – because this was a schism buried deep in the politics of the Beaker Folk. Even Horrocks hasn’t penetrated the facts to his satisfaction. But I must say he was convincingly candid with me last night. And he told me he’d called you in as catalyst, to try to get the truth to gel.’

  ‘You arrived half an hour too soon.’

  ‘Sorry about that. But we can’t put the clock back. Anyway, what Horrocks thinks happened is that Davina, ripe but inexperienced, was pushing things fine with O’Shea –’

  ‘Brinkwomanship.’

  ‘With a poor sense of timing. She was nearly raped by O’Shea, saved at the post by an incursion of women; O’Shea’s harem, Horrocks called them. And they set out to teach her the lesson of her life. It was summer-time, and it all took place somewhere in the overgrown grounds of the Grange. The whisper is – and although a lot of it’s a tight secret, it’s already a kind of folklore in the group – that they stripped the girl of her tee-shirt and jeans – and wiped her gently with nettles: over her ribs and her breasts, her buttocks and thighs – and anywhere else that seemed appropriate. Excruciating pain – and complete humiliation; that’s probably why she never breathed a word of complaint. Nobody knows for sure which of the women were concerned. Even Horrocks doesn’t. But after they’d dealt with Davina, the story goes that they went for O’Shea. But by then O’Shea had gone – the first stage to Nuneaton. The Irish imagination had some idea of what was coming.’

  Gleed leaned back and tried to will a reaction out of Kenworthy.

  ‘Any comment?’

  ‘Only what I’ve said to a long succession of sergeants: that imagination is the most precious and yet the most dangerous of our tools. A theory can be so good that it looks too attractive.’

  Gleed waited for him to expand on this; but Kenworthy waited to be asked.

  ‘What I mean is, you’ve mentioned three places to which she might have gone that night. All highly probable. But don’t let that blind you to the possibility that she might have been headed for somewhere quite different.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I don’t know: another valuable weapon. You’ve got to have a don’t know clause in this sort of scenario. And you’ve got to keep reminding yourself that it’s there.’

  ‘I agree that that’s sound.’ But Gleed sounded disappointed.

  ‘Then you’ve got to bear in mind that whatever her chosen destination, she may never have reached it.’

  ‘What do you know, Kenworthy?’

  ‘I don’t know anything. And that’s another keen blade in the armoury, remembering how much you don’t know. I don’t even know for certain that it was O’Shea that Davina was titillating.’

  ‘Who else, then?’

  ‘Why not Horrocks? Surely he’s done enough for her to have earned the crush of the century?’

  ‘I can’t picture him allowing her to get very far.’

  ‘And I don’t think he would. But she might have tried. And if she did, she’d have stirred up a right old nettlebed, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘The inscrutable Christine?’

  ‘She’d be worth a few more imaginative minutes,’ Kenworthy suggested.

  It was late afternoon by the time that Kenworthy was back in Spentlow. Elspeth was out. The boiler was choked solid with stone-cold clinker. The electric light bulb had blown, and he had to go over to the grocery for a replacement. He was served civilly; but only just; or, rather, a trifle too markedly so. A knot of housewives insisted that he jump their queue; they were in there mainly for the gossip – but it was gossip that had dried up immediately he went in. There was no encouragement for him to indulge in small talk, even if he had been in the mood for it, and he was aware of a shrewd hostility in every pair of eyes that rested on his. It would break out into words the moment he set foot again across the Green; but he would never know (unless Mrs Scadbolt were to tell him) what those words might be. He bought a two-hundred-watt bulb. That would throw up a fresh drabness in the once-yellow wallpaper.

  It was after five when Elspeth returned. He had forgotten that it was the afternoon of her talk to the Women’s Institute. She looked tired, and had unusually little to say for herself. Slowly, and with informative resignation, she tore up the notes of her talk and dropped them, a pinch at a time, into a wastepaper bin decorated with reproductions from the walls of Lascaux.

  ‘There are aspects of a detective’s wife’s life that had not occurred to me after all.’ She had been looking forward to giving that talk.

  That was all she ever said to him about her failure to make any rapport with the Spentlow women. The honeymoon stage of the Kenworthys’relationship to Spentlow was over.

  The next day, Kenworthy made another of his early morning excursions, swinging a walking-stick, whistling ebulliently, throwing hearty ‘good morning’s’over garden gates and walls, whether people cared to know him or not, leaving the village briskly behind him, the very image of a man bound for a long day in the hills.

  He went only to Spentlow Grange, past the field in which Jesse Allsop’s tractor and trailer still lay overturned. But he did not go up as far as the commune’s main drive and lodge gates. He crept into the grounds along a narrow track that, to judge from the specialized debris that lay scattered about one of its rare grassier patches, was a favourite courting-walk of Spentlow’s summer visitors. He came after a quarter of a mile into thickening woodland, and was soon lost amongst trees, and safely out of sight of the great house.

  He came soon to an intersection of tracks, there being another well-pounded footpath which led down a shallow valley as an alternative and circuitous route back into Spentlow, swinging round a copse-scattered slope to a distant spidering limb of the village.

  Kenworthy moved slowly now, taking as much care of his footfalls as a tracking Indian. After several abortive inspections of the land on either side of him he began to move circumspectly towards the house, coming at last into a clearing amongst the trees bounded on one side by a neglected yew hedge that marked the boundary of one of the great lawns. It was here that a quarter of a century’s rubbish had been tipped: not merely, nor even mainly, that of the Beaker Folk, who seldom walked even as far as this from their quarters to dispose of their garbage. But there was stuff left by casual campers – as well as evidence of earlier squatters: mattresses, bicycle frames stripped of anything with the most optimistic of mechanical futures, beer-cans, wheel-less prams, pram-less wheels. Corned beef, condensed milk, cardboard packets ravaged by storms. On two sides of the glade there were banks of old nettles, the year’s crop, blackened by frosts, straggling and overgrown. And it was here, caught casually amongst the dead bottom stalks, that he found what he was looking for: the last three pages of Davina’s Anathema Stone script.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The same afternoon, he went down to see Jesse Allsop again. The day was indo
lent and ashen, and he announced to Elspeth that he thought he would go down and offer their landlord a little advice about his letting practices. The village was deserted as he walked through it, and if there was anyone lurking to speculate on his motives their secret was well kept. The farmyard was exactly as it had been left after the scrabbling out of the Stone; an asymmetrical gash under the front door, a hoist of sorts assembled on a tripod of old piping.

  Allsop was busy at an afternoon’s officework in his parlour. Box-files of correspondence from putative customers were spilling out over an antique table top. A table of next year’s weeks, plotted against the fanciful names of his caravans, was pinned to a square of hard-board: Casa Nostra, Elfin View, Sunset Corner. There was a stack of duplicated specifications of his cottages beside a pile of cheap manilla envelopes. But there was nothing of caprice or vitality in the spirit in which he was tackling his work. He was plodding through it in the same slow lumbering fashion in which one of his neighbours might have addressed a root crop with his hoe. There was about him none of the fire and fright that had moved him to try to shift the curse from his premises. He did not look like a man who had recently undergone a harrowing experience; he looked like a man whose crisis, now past, seemed barely credible. His window looked across the catastrophic yard, and, from where he was sitting, his eyes, whenever he raised them, must have caught sight of the wreckage where the Stone had been. If he had wanted to avoid the reminder, there were a number of places to which he could easily have moved his chair. But Jesse Allsop, sombre as ever, dark-shadowed about cheeks and chin, glossily groomed about his head, seemed to have extricated himself unscathed from events. It was as if certain things had never happened, Davina Stott amongst them.

  If Kenworthy had wanted to make a few gentlemanly suggestions to Jesse Allsop about his shortcomings as a landlord, the way was signposted for him by the litter on the table. But Kenworthy did not talk about open-air holidays.

  ‘There are one or two things I want to tidy up, Jesse, if you’ll forgive my intrusion on your time. I’d like to see the layout of your bedroom, and the window from which you first saw the girl’s body.’

  Allsop nodded vacantly, not pleased by the request, but evidently not minded to argument or obstruction. Nor did it appear to strike him that the demand was at odds with Kenworthy’s frequent assertion that he had no concern in the case. He led the way up a respectably carpeted staircase, past gloomy oil-paintings of the dales in the days of Walton and Cotton, to a landing whose window commanded a flanking view of the yard and the site of the Stone. Allsop jerked his head as if he were making him a present of the view; an angle of the yard very similar to that they would have used in the play. From here Allsop could indeed have had a perfect view of the corpse.

  There were sounds of other activity on this upstairs floor, and through an open bedroom door Kenworthy caught sight of a middle-aged woman ironing. She looked up as they passed, startled for a moment, as if the very act of plying an iron were an illicit activity. Jesse Allsop paid no attention to her, but led Kenworthy straight to his own bedroom, which was vast, fusty and innocent of conscious design. Kenworthy did no more than put his head round the door, made an exaggerated business of not being interested in the intricacies of the room, looked only briefly in the direction of the window. Then he asked if he might go to the lavatory, to which Allsop took him: a hair-cracked porcelain pedestal, with rust stains running down from the screws in the heavy wooden seat. When he came out again, Allsop was talking to the woman, but had not gone into the room with her, and she had not come away from her ironing board. Kenworthy recognized her by sight, but did not know her name. She had been doing some odd jobs in the Hall at their rehearsals.

  ‘You normally go out of your way to look out of the landing window when you get up in the night?’

  Kenworthy nodded suggestively at the geographical arrangement of the bedroom and lavatory doors. A trip across the landing was an unnecessary excursion.

  ‘Sometimes, if it’s a nice night. Or if I’m interested in tomorrow’s weather.’

  ‘You can see precisely the same view from your own room.’

  ‘My curtains are always drawn at night. These never are.’

  ‘You didn’t walk across the landing because of something you’d heard, or thought you’d heard?’

  ‘No. There was bright moonlight falling in, and I went to look out.’

  Kenworthy seemed to accept that. They went back down, into the parlour and Allsop asked if he should get his daily woman to make them a pot of tea. Kenworthy declined, and Allsop did not press. But suddenly, as Kenworthy was within half a step of leaving the room, the morose little farmer made a dive into a lower shelf of a glass-fronted bookcase.

  ‘Now, here’s something –’

  It was an impulse, a decision on which he had been sitting undetermined throughout Kenworthy’s visit. And it was something which, all but for a split second, might never have come Kenworthy’s way.

  ‘Here’s something from the Gabbitas papers that never did get into Dunderdale’s hands.’

  It was a black-bound inch-thick notebook, its pages interleaved with all kinds of incunabula and printed forms of memorial services, invitations, formal notes from parishioners and the like. Allsop opened it out at a particular page, which he had no difficulty in finding.

  ‘This is something that Gertrude took with her when she went into the hills. It was something I could never understand, when I was young, why she should run away from a man, and yet take such a personal slice of him with her. But I know now only too well. None of us knows what we really do want, do we? But you read that. If Dunderdale had known I’d got this, he could have brought out a damned sight better new Hob book.’

  The handwriting was pinched and ineffectively ornate, the loops entangled in fuzzy flourishes that did nothing for them. Whole paragraphs of scribble had been decisively crossed out. There was a tentative sketch of prototype goblins, their lower limbs incomplete, but no attempt, at this draft stage, to conceal the imperfections.

  ‘That’s a story that Wilbur Gabbitas never did finish.’

  In point of fact, it was not a story at all, but the sketchiest of foundation notes for one. A stranger had come into the land of Hob’s people and taken to wife a woman of the Sopalls. She was beautiful, contrary, talented, constricted, misunderstood not only by her own kindred but even by herself. But under the influence of the stranger she discovered herself, became known far and wide for her grace and great gifts; until, that is, she was driven away; driven away by the women of the land. Gabbitas had left the briefest of notions why, which he had never found it in himself to develop: long silences when she went to the shops; witches’laughter round walls and corners; faithful friends suddenly tainted by the mob.

  ‘Now you know,’ Allsop said, ‘why Gertrude fled. And you asked me the other day why it was that Davina Stott stopped coming here. I can tell you. It was because of the damned women.’

  ‘Which women?’ Kenworthy asked.

  ‘A man shouldn’t be asked to name names. When people gang together they aren’t single people any longer. They aren’t individuals.’

  ‘I think you ought to give me a hint or two, all the same. You want this thing cleared up.’

  ‘I don’t want it cleared up. It’ll never be cleared up. As soon as one part is cleared, another corner will darken. Besides – you don’t

  need to be told.’

  Kenworthy nodded.

  He walked energetically back to the cottage: fallen leaves were clinging dispiritedly to the damp pavements.

  ‘Well – have you got the wicked landlord to mend his wicked ways?’

  Elspeth, too, was ironing.

  ‘No. But I noticed that he has a double bed, made up with two pillows, the linen freshly laundered. And a woman about the place about whom he has nothing to say.’

  ‘I’ll make a few enquiries,’ Elspeth said. ‘Though in Spentlow’s present mood, I expect there’ll be tig
ht lips. Still, there’s always Mrs Scadbolt. She knows everything.’

  ‘It would be interesting to know whether there was a woman on the premises on the night Davina was killed.’

  ‘I dare say that practically everyone in Spentlow will know.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  That same evening he decided that, press-men or no, and whatever the state of his popularity in the village, he was going to have a beer. But, not for the first time since he had come here, his road to the Recruiting Sergeant was delayed by the sight of lights across the Green.

  He saw them as he came out of the cottage gate: great, bright shining oblongs that exaggerated the shadows of the church buttresses, the square lines of the primary school and the Tudor chimneys of the vicarage. It was exactly as if the play was in full rehearsal again, and such a notion was supported by the activity in the forecourt of the Hall, in which a great many cars seemed to be parked.

  When Kenworthy had made it clear that he did not intend to go on with his part in the play it had given a great jolt to the vicar’s committee. At an emergency meeting three members had reversed their previous votes, and Dunderdale had had to resign himself to holding off the play for a year or two, if not for all time.

  Kenworthy set off towards the oasis of bustle and light. As he neared the Hall, he saw that one of the parked vehicles was the outside broadcast van of a television company, and that a thick trail of cable was leading in through the main entrance.

  He gave the front door a wide berth, and picked his way through the churchyard in order to approach the Hall from the rear. There was a small kitchen behind the stage, and through its window, thanks to a mercifully open door, he was able to see about two-thirds of what was happening on the platform.

  The scene had been set for the first encounter between Gabbitas and Gertrude in the Dogtooth yard – but far more comprehensively than at any rehearsal in which he himself had taken part. The backcloth was in position, and at right angles to it a canvas flat showed part of the wing of the farmhouse. The bales of straw were in position, as was a realistic representation of the pump. Christine, as Gertrude, was wearing full make-up, including a tangled black wig. The intention was precisely the same as Davina’s had been in the part, but the personality presented looked utterly different. Christine was taller, for one thing, and the short ragged dress she was wearing brought out the lines of a bosom that normally seemed to have disappeared beneath the rebellious shabbiness that she affected. She had made up her face to suggest country diet and healthy weathering, and had somehow contrived to give it a wholly more rounded look. The effect, in fact, was not only to give a quite startlingly satisfying evocation of Gertrude, but also a totally new conception of Christine.