by Henry Porter
So he had read the documents and was so alarmed by their contents that he had come to find her.
‘I think we’d better call the police and ambulance. I’ll dial, but I want you to speak to them. Just give them the address and say you’ve been attacked during a break-in.’
When he had finished she replaced the phone and reached for a bottle of water lying on the desk, and handed it to him. He put it to his lips: the plastic bottle made a cracking noise as he gulped.
‘OK?’ she asked, kneading his shoulder gently. ‘The cut is not too bad. It’s stopped bleeding. Don’t tell the police I was here, but say what was stolen. It’s important that this all goes on record. Say it was private material left by the late David Eyam. Was there anything else in the safe?’
‘About seven hundred pounds in cash.’
‘Are you sure it’s gone?’
‘Well, look for yourself!’ he said testily.
She didn’t need to. It was possible that this was just an ordinary burglary, but the voice of the man shouting on the stairs didn’t sound like a local thug, and anyone committing a burglary would surely have snatched her bag when it fell to the floor. This was a professional job and the money had been taken to disguise the real purpose of the break-in.
A siren was making its way up the street. ‘Is there another way out of here?’ she asked.
‘Go downstairs and to the back of the building. You’ll find a door with the key in the lock. You’ll need to slide the bolts top and bottom.’ He stopped, revolved his head then rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Did you see the man who did it?’
‘There were two of them, but let’s keep that to ourselves for the moment.’ She touched him on the shoulder. ‘You’re going to be fine; just stay there. I’ll be in touch.’
Downstairs she worked the bolts and found herself in an overgrown garden. In the half-light she felt her way to a gate and wrenched it open. There was a path, which she followed down an incline into The Cut. She was shocked but clear in her mind. If the men were professionals, why didn’t they wait until the offices were empty and they could take all the time they needed to search Russell’s files? In an hour or so they could have broken into the rear of the building and had the place to themselves without risk of disturbance. She knew the answer to her own question. They didn’t have the luxury of time because Eyam’s files were so important that once they suspected they were in Russell’s possession they had to move quickly. It didn’t matter who was in the building or what violence had to be used. It was also clear to her that only after Russell had found her at the Green Parrot cafe did they understand where Eyam’s documents might be. From the moment since she’d showed her face at the inquest and rather naively entered her name in the register at the door they had been waiting to see who would contact her.
8
Civic Watch
When she entered the hotel she saw that the Jubilee Rooms had been cleared and a long table set up and laid for dinner. At the reception she was handed two envelopes with her key. The first was from Darsh Darshan and contained his card with a note scratched in childish writing. ‘Please contact me in person soonest.’ The second was an invitation from Mermagen to a nightcap in the bar after dinner.
Once in her room, she undressed and bathed the gash on her anklebone, then examined the bruises on her shoulder and by her left kidney. Eyam’s scarf had done something to protect her neck, but there was a bump on the back of her head which, like the grazes on her upper arm and shin, wouldn’t show. Violence shocked her and when directed at her made her feel a sense of total astonishment. She recalled the breath and the violence of the man who held her down, and his evident excitement, and hoped that he had been injured by the jab with the chair leg. From the minibar she took a whisky miniature and Canada Dry, which she drank looking out into the night. At least they hadn’t got the will or Eyam’s letter, and according to Russell, there was nothing on the documents to show who they were intended for, although that would be easily deduced once the will was known about. Though surprising, the will was straightforward enough. The letter, on the other hand, struck her as bizarre and strained. She took out the envelope and ran her finger along the words of the last passage.
The evening I speak of at the start of this note is perfect. I write on a patch of gravel garden in front of the cottage resting on an old metal table, which I inherited when I bought the place. I have a glass of Puligny Montrachet at my side; a neighbour’s dog is making eyes at a bowl of cheese sticks. It has been a very hot day. The sun has set and the sky is bruising a gentle purple in the west. It is just past eight o’clock, and the cuckoos call from the other side of the valley. There are hawks hunting in the dusk above me. As ever, the Dove is their prey. The birds sing but mostly they listen and watch at this time of the day. You will find it all very much behind the times, but I have been happy here.
If you are reading this it means I’m gone. The evening is yours now with al its grandeur and its flaws: you are more than equal to both. Good luck, and look after my books, my beloved Bristol and my garden – especialy my vegetable patch.
With my love, David.
Dove Cottage, August 20th.
It was as if someone else had written it. Eyam’s prose was fluent and stagey: long sentences with plenty of asides placed between dashes that could try the reader’s patience. These staccato eruptions of sentiment weren’t him at all. And there was much else that jarred. For a start, Eyam hated dogs and white wine, even when it was very good. Montrachet was her favourite wine, not his. She remembered one of his rather obsessive monologues talking about the village of Puligney Montrachet on the Côte de Beaune, where he had once found himself looking for a restaurant. The village was dead; the houses had been bought as investments by the wine growers and were empty. There were no shops and no one about. It was like an abandoned film set, a place with no content, waiting for lines to be spoken to give it semblance of life. Montrachet was a fraud and so was its wine, he said.
He also loathed descriptions of sunsets, once saying to her that it was impossible even for a genius to evoke a sunset without seeming like a booby. Sunsets were off limits, as were all love poetry, walks in the moonlight and nightingales.
Which brought her to the cuckoo. She didn’t know much about British natural history but she did remember a verse her English grandmother had taught her: ‘The cuckoo comes in April, Sings her song in May, Changes tune in the middle of June, And then she flies away.’ The letter was dated in August by which time the cuckoo was well on its way back to Africa. Like the neighbour’s dog and the Montrachet, the cuckoo was a fraud. The cheese sticks too. Eyam was allergic to dairy products, particularly cheese. He had once keeled over at Oxford after eating cheese on top of a shepherd’s pie.
The sentence ‘I kiss your clever eyes for good fortune and the happiness that has not been ours’ touched her but she had to admit it didn’t sound like Eyam. He simply didn’t think that way, at least he never said or wrote such things. So the entire point of the letter was to warn her that he had been watched and that things at Dove Cottage were not as they seemed. It didn’t make any sense to her, because the letter was oblique in its meaning yet at the same time obviously coded. She rose and walked around the room, working through the events of the day.
The process of fixing the elements of a problem calmed her because she had a faith, acquired in part from Eyam, that no difficulty existed without a solution: optimism was the prerequisite for civilisation, he used to say. Without optimism humanity was ruled by fear and superstition. She dressed again, went downstairs and asked the man on reception if she could use the phone. Tony Swift, the coroner’s clerk, answered from his usual stool in the Mercer’s Arms. They met forty minutes later at a Thai restaurant a five-minute walk from the eastern end of the square, which with various diversions and feints took her the full forty minutes.
‘I wonder if I can ask you a few more questions about the inquest,’ she said when she sat down.
‘I fell over,’ she said. ‘Bruised my ribs and ankle. About the inquest: can you tell me about it?’
‘Off the record, sure.’
‘Why was the hearing held here?’
‘When Lady Eyam decided she’d have the funeral where her stepson lived, it became a matter for the coroner, because he has jurisdiction if a body lies within his district. We were notified that the remains would eventually arrive in High Castle and so the investigation – such as it was – went ahead.’
‘Its purpose being to . . . ?’
‘Establish the cause of death.’
‘Was there any kind of official interest in this case? Pressure from anyone?’
‘What are you asking?’
‘Did anyone try to stop you investigating what had happened in Cartagena?’
He eyed her thoughtfully. ‘You’re asking if I think he was assassinated, aren’t you?’
‘Well, it’s a possibility, surely?’
‘No, I spoke to Detective Bautista by phone before the formal interview and he was clear which group planted the bomb and why. They wanted to kill as many as possible in that party headquarters and not David Eyam. Besides, there was no motive to kill Mr Eyam.’
‘What if you were told that Eyam had offended certain parties in Britain; would that alter your view?’
He shook his head. ‘I knew that he’d had to resign from government. He told me. He made no secret of it. Everyone knew.’
‘Was there anything that you discovered that was not submitted as evidence to the inquest?’
‘What do you have in mind?’
‘The money – Eyam’s father’s money. He was worth between twenty and thirty million. I happen to know that Eyam did not inherit anything like that.’
‘Maybe there wasn’t time. After all, they died only a couple of months apart.’
‘So you looked into that.’
‘No, I read about his death in the papers. I put things together.’
‘Come on, Tony, you talked to people. You followed your instincts. I can see it in your eyes.’
He lifted the glass of wine to his lips and ruminated. ‘I am not an investigator,’ he said eventually.
A procession of small dishes began to arrive, which he marshalled and addressed with the kind of relish that made her think food was a substitute for something missing in big, slow-moving Tony’s life.
‘The Swedes – what happened to them? And the man who shot the film?’
‘They were treated for minor injuries and shock and went home.’
‘Why didn’t you interview them? They might have seen something that the camera didn’t pick up.’
‘We had the detective. That was all that seemed necessary, but I grant you that the Swedes might have had something to say.’
‘Have you got their names? Contact numbers?’
‘No, I don’t believe we do.’
‘That’s an odd way to conduct an inquiry.’
‘We have limited resources. We do our best.’
‘But no one questioned what Eyam was doing in Colombia? Why was that? There is probably no country in the world that would have been less appealing to him, and yet no one thought to ask what he was doing there. It doesn’t cost any money to ask a question like that.’
Swift shook his head and mumbled something.
‘Did you check with the border police? Did you find out the flights he took? His onward journey? The government collects all that information nowadays.’
‘Of course.’
‘So you know when and where he left the country.’
‘Not exactly. There are no records of his departure.’
‘What . . . Jesus, and you didn’t produce that at the inquest.’
‘It was in no way relevant to his death.’
‘But it could have been, Tony. It could have been.’ She slammed her palm down on her table. Then she thought for a second. ‘Maybe he left using another name.’
‘Then why would he check into the Hotel Atlantic under his own name? Apart from the film, that’s the reason we know he was involved. The room key: remember? And his passport was returned to Britain.’
There was a silence while Swift concentrated on his food. He encouraged her to join him by waving his fork at the dishes but she told him she wasn’t hungry. ‘Look,’ he said at length, ‘David Eyam is dead and we will never know what he was doing in Cartagena, or what he planned to do in his life. It’s wrong. It’s wrong such a talented and wonderful human being is dead, but sometimes injustice is the nature of things.’
‘Sheer fatalism,’ she said and ordered a whisky. ‘I don’t believe that injustice or mystery is the natural order of things. That is why I am a lawyer.’ She stopped and waited until she felt she had his attention. ‘I heard that Eyam was sick.’
‘Really?’ he replied without raising his eyes. ‘He didn’t look ill. I saw him in November at a screening of The Big Sleep. He’d lost a bit of weight but he looked fine to me. That was the last time we met.’
‘Maybe cancer,’ she said. ‘Why would anyone suffering from cancer go for a long trip to Colombia? He looked like shit in the film. Wasted. You know what a wonderful physique he had. A rower’s build. But in that film . . . Maybe he needed treatment.’
‘Whether he was ill, or not, has nothing to do with the coroner’s court. Our business is to establish the cause of death, not what someone might die from if they’re lucky enough to live to eighty.’
‘You know, Tony, I think you’re full of it. You come over as this self-effacing guy, this bachelor who eats on his own, a little disappointed maybe, down-trodden.’
‘I’m divorced, of course I’m bloody well disappointed and downtrodden.’
‘But I know you’re different than that.’
‘In this country educated people still say different from, not different than.’
‘And I know you’re smarter than you’re letting on. In my job I see a lot of men come into the room and throw their weight around. I never pay any mind to them. The ones I’ve learned to watch are the people like you. I know you, Tony. I know you asked all these questions yourself and you’ve gotten more answers than you told them because nobody of your intelligence could have failed to ask them.’
He looked up and shook his head. ‘You just said all that in near-perfect American idiom. You know, you could pass for an American. Look, I wish I was the man you describe but I’m not.’ His eyes flicked to the door. She turned to see a slim black man looking in their direction. Swift gave a tiny shake of his head and the man vanished.
‘A friend?’ she asked.
‘An associate,’ he said. ‘It can wait.’
‘Maybe Eyam’s other friends can help me. Was there anyone special in his life?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘What about his interest in the bell ringers? Did he do any kind of work? Diana Kidd says not, so what the hell did he do out here for two years?
‘Why are you asking all this?’
‘No more diversions – just tell me about his friends,’ she said and then she realised that along the way she had struck a nerve because Tony Swift’s expression had become several degrees more resistant. ‘I met some people at the wake today – Chris Mooney, Evan Thomas and Alice Scudamore. Know any others?’
He began to reel off the names. She looked in her bag for some paper, ignored the envelopes containing the will and the letter, and withdrew the list for the Eyam dinner. On the back she wrote the names of Danny Church, picture framer and sometime journalist; Michelle Grey, a divorcee who lived with the town’s best restaurateur; Andy Sessions and Rick Jeffreys, partners in a web design business; Penny Whitehead, a former probation officer now a local councillor and Paul Sutton, a retired publisher who with Diana Kidd was involved in the Assembly Rooms. He told her that Chris Mooney was a portrait photographer and Alice Scudamore a writer.
The contrast between the
list for Eyam’s dinner and the people he mixed with in High Castle couldn’t have been starker. On one side of the piece of paper Mermagen had handed to her during the wake were some of the most powerful people in the land, all of whom knew Eyam well enough for them to travel to his funeral and attend a dinner in his memory; on the other side were his new friends, people you’d find in any provincial town in England making their lives in decent, humdrum obscurity.
Finally Swift wiped his mouth with a napkin and gazed at her with his tongue searching some particle of food lodged in his upper gum.
‘What is it? What do you want me to ask you?’ she said.
‘Anything. It’s not often that I am out with such a beautiful woman.’
‘These people: I know it sounds snobbish but they all seem a bit, well, underpowered for Eyam.’
‘They’re good people,’ he said firmly. ‘And nearly every one of them is suffering because they were friends with Eyam.’
Then he told her with a series of coughs and murmurs that since Eyam’s disappearance, all of them had fallen foul of the law or of the tax authorities. It had taken a couple of months for them to put it together, but as he understood things from his friend, Danny Church, their troubles intensified just after the New Year. All were under some kind of investigation or had been charged under new laws, which they didn’t know existed.
‘What are they doing about it?’ she asked.
‘What can they do? Most of them have broken the law. Penny Whitehead made the mistake of repeatedly writing to some company about global warming and has been charged under the harassment laws. Chris Mooney had his accounts seized. So did Danny Church. Both look as though they will be done for tax avoidance. Alice was an easy target because she’s an ID card refusenik. Her property has been repeatedly seized in lieu of fines for not having a card. They always go for her computer so she can’t write her books and they do a fair amount of poking about among her personal papers. I heard Rick and Andy have had some trouble with their business, and their premises have been searched.’
