The Bell Ringers

by Henry Porter

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’ll play along with them and just tell everyone in the group that I have to do this.’

  ‘They’ll offer the same deal to someone else who may take it,’ she said, ‘which means they will know you’re stringing them along.’

  Mooney opened his hands in dismay. ‘Fuck it. I’m not used to this. I’m a bloody photographer, not a double agent.’ He stopped. ‘But you’re a lawyer. Tell us what we should do.’

  She thought for a moment. ‘You need a narrative and a timeline of exactly what has happened to all of you. It’s no good you fighting this thing by yourselves. You need to band together and make a convincing case – which takes in everything – and find other people across the country who appear to have suffered like you. Then go to a London lawyer who specialises in this area of the law and campaigning and make your pitch. Someone will take it on. Get it out in the public domain.’

  Andy Sessions, who with Michelle Grey had not spoken, drummed his fingers on the table, leaned forward and said, ‘Tell us about yourself, Kate. You arrive out of the blue and inherit David’s house and all his possessions. We want to know who you are and where you stand on all this.’

  The noise from the bar swelled and briefly silenced the group. Kate looked up and through the hatch saw the slender black man Tony had signalled to two evenings ago. He was standing at the bar between two young men, who looked like identical twins. Her eyes met the black guy’s and he turned away to one of his companions.

  ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I’m not really in the mood to explain myself to a bunch of complete strangers. If what you say is true about your group being under surveillance it wouldn’t really be sensible, would it? I am sorry about your problems but I’m no part of them. David Eyam is dead. Hugh Russell is dead. Forgive me if I don’t get too worked up about your tax inspections and parking fines.’

  ‘So you’re not interested,’ said Alice Scudamore, who had watched her with a private intensity that made Kate suddenly consider the possibility that she’d once been close to Eyam.

  ‘I’m not interested in establishing my credentials for you,’ she said. ‘Yes, you have problems and yes, Merrie old England sometimes seems like it’s becoming a shitty little dictatorship, but a case is what interests me and you don’t have anything that resembles one.’

  A silence fell on the group.

  ‘Who are the bell ringers?’ she said.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ said Alice Scudamore.

  ‘David Eyam left money to the Bell Ringers of the Marches Society in his will. I never knew he was interested in bell ringing, but then again there was a lot I didn’t know about David’s life down here.’

  ‘They’re a group,’ said Swift slowly. ‘They rang the bells at his funeral. He was friends with some of them.’

  ‘Good friends apparently: he left them a hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds. What would bell ringers want with that kind of money?’

  ‘There are all sorts of expenses,’ said Mooney. ‘I’m a member of the group.’

  ‘Well, you must be pleased,’ said Kate.

  Mooney grunted.

  Not much more was said and a few minutes later they began to get up and leave separately through the bar. She looked at Tony Swift, seated with his pint and his immovable, owlish self-containment.

  ‘So tell me what that was all about?’

  ‘They wanted to have a look at you and see where you were at.’

  ‘Where I’m at, Tony!’ she said, putting down her glass. ‘And you, Tony? Where are you at? Does all the information you hear get passed up the line of the Citizen’s Watch? Or are you a paid-up member of the High Castle chapter of Paranoia International?’

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, getting up and draining his glass, apparently unfazed.

  Outside she said, ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘Me? Where am I at? Oh, I just do my job, keep my nose clean and try to help people when I can.’ He stopped and looked at the moon sinking through some cloud above the castle battlements, then hitched up his trousers and buttoned his enormous black coat.

  ‘There’s something very familiar about you, Tony. I can’t put my finger on it.’

  ‘It’s because I seem like every middle-aged bloke you’ve ever met. We’re the same the world over.’

  ‘No, that’s not it. There’s something else.’

  They began to walk.

  ‘The black guy in the bar with the twins – who is he?’ she asked. ‘I know you know because you nodded to him the other night.’

  Swift smiled. ‘You’ll meet him one day. His name is Miff.’

  ‘Miff?

  ‘Yes, Miff is a friend.’

  ‘And the twins?

  ‘David and Jonathan: they’re Jehovah’s Witnesses.’

  ‘In a pub? Jehovah’s Witnesses? It doesn’t seem very likely. Who are they? Why does this Miff character shadow you?’

  Swift stopped and looked up at the moon. ‘We’re living through some strange times here. But I prefer to think of them as an eclipse, Katy; not the beginning of the long night.’

  ‘You called me Katy. I haven’t been called that since my first year at Oxford.’

  ‘Sorry, it somehow seemed natural.’

  ‘And Miff – why does he follow you?’

  ‘We have business together.’

  ‘Business. What kind of business?’

  ‘It’s of no interest.’

  ‘You were saying about the eclipse and the long night.’

  ‘I believe this is an eclipse because I’m an optimist. However, I am also a realist about myself. I’m just a coroner’s clerk: no more than that. I have to move at a speed that is in keeping with my station in life. You’re an extremely clever woman, as well as a very beautiful one, I might add. But don’t embarrass me by asking me to explain things to you.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Ah, but you will,’ he said, quietly turning to her. ‘You will. We have to keep our powder dry.’

  ‘What powder?’

  His hand found her shoulder. ‘There you go asking questions. I am going to say good night, Kate. Sorry.’

  He looked long and hard at her, then turned away and took his thoughts off to what she assumed was a loveless bed, unless Miff was waiting there for him.

  She got lost trying to find Dove Cottage in the dark, but after an hour eventually came across the spot where Hugh Russell had died. There was no police car, just tape cordoning off a portion of the road and the area where the Audi had ploughed into the bank. She reminded herself to phone Paul Spring the following day to ask how she should approach Hugh Russell’s wife.

  Inside Dove Cottage there was such a desolate air that she nearly turned and left for the hotel. But she unpacked the groceries, lit a fire and read a note from Sean Nock saying he would come in later to see she was OK. What now? she thought, looking round the kitchen. Make herself at home? Play house by making those minor adjustments that would put her stamp on the place? Start thinking about replacing the floribunda pattern curtains, which reminded her of her mother, or the tapestry cushions in the sitting room? No, Dove Cottage was still indisputably Eyam’s, and it always would be. She could not assume ownership even if she wanted: it would be like wearing someone else’s clothes.

  The sitting room warmed up quickly, and she sat by the fire with a cup of soup and crackers thinking about the group she had met in the pub. Her eyes moved to the bookshelves. It was a while since she’d done any serious reading away from the law and the occasional detective mystery. And now she had the time and all Eyam’s library at her disposal. That was quite an interesting prospect, but what the hell was she going to do with the library that Eyam had asked her to look after? There must have been at least twelve hundred volumes in the sitting room alone.

  She swept the shelves, making a rough calculation. At regular intervals, he had pushed the books back to accommodate various objects on the
shelves – a photograph of his mother in a silver frame, a fragment of a Greek amphora, a little terracotta Roman head, a Russian icon, an old brass microscope – knick-knacks, most of which she recognised from his flat in London. Occasionally, instead of an objet d’art breaking the line a book had been turned so that the front cover showed.

  And then she gasped, because there was the book: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez, the book Eyam had been reading in the bar in Cartagena and gave to Detective Bautista before he died; the book the detective had flourished in front of the camera and claimed was some kind of good luck charm: the last gift of a true English gentleman, he had said. She put the bowl down and went to fetch the book – a slim volume, first published in Spanish in 1970, then in English translation in 1986. She read the first sentences of Márquez’s preface about the eight crew members being washed overboard from the Colombian destroyer Caldas, which had been bound for Cartagena; how the search for the sailors was abandoned after four days but one sailor had lived to crawl up a deserted beach in northern Colombia, having survived ten days without food or water, drifting on a raft in the ocean. His name was Luis Alejandro Velasco. García Márquez described him as looking like a trumpet player, not the national hero he became; a man who had natural instincts for the art of narrative, an astonishing memory and ‘enough uncultivated dignity to be able to laugh at his own heroism’.

  She flipped through it. About halfway through, the top of one page had been turned down, a sure sign that Eyam had been at the book. There didn’t seem to be anything of particular significance on that page but maybe that wasn’t the point. The point was this: if Eyam had already read the book, what was he doing with another copy in Cartagena? Eyam had a miraculous ability to absorb the written word, barely forgot anything he read, and was able to quote whole passages from years before. His comprehension and memory for the written word were of a very high order indeed, and he did not re-read books because he didn’t need to, especially books with such an elementary story.

  She sat down and began to read the hundred-odd pages with the attention normally applied to a complex legal case. The vitality of García Márquez’s tale and of the storytelling impressed her, but when she put the book down an hour later she had only one thought. When the sailors were washed overboard everyone in Cartagena believed Velasco was dead. As they prepared his funeral he was out there on the ocean sipping seawater and catching seagulls to eat. When he was found and news reached Cartagena it was truly as though Velasco had come back from the dead.

  She poured herself a glass of whisky and checked herself: brought herself up short and tried to think of something else. But it wasn’t as if she was imagining all this. The same book was there, clear as day in both the tourist recording and the interview with Bautista. Not the Spanish edition, mind you, but the English translation in paperback with a cover that looked very much like the one she held in her hand – an ocean with a warship steaming towards the horizon.

  She put on a jacket and went into the garden to ring Nock’s number. ‘I’m back,’ she said. ‘Can you come round? I want to ask you something.’ Then she dialled her message service and worked through the accumulation of new messages until she reached Eyam’s and listened to it again. ‘Hello there, sister – it’s me. Eyam. I felt like having a chat, but it seems you’re busy and I now realise it’s not ideal this end either, because I’m sitting outside in a street bar and a bloody wedding party has just appeared so you wouldn’t be able to hear much anyway. But, look, I miss you and I’d really love to see you when I get back. Perhaps we should meet in New York.’

  An ordinary message but one with a secret, she was sure. At the end of a list of options she was invited by the automated voice to key eight for message details. There was no record of a telephone number, but the message had been left at five thirty-eight p.m., Saturday, January 19th – not January 12th, the date of the explosion. So when Eyam called she wasn’t in the office working on a deal, but staying with Sam Calvert and his wife. She went into the phone’s calendar to make sure. January 18th–20th was marked off with the words Calverts – country. It was the same weekend she’d told old Sam Calvert she wanted to leave and he had shown her into his den on that Saturday afternoon and persuaded her to take a few months off, then join the London office. He didn’t want to lose her but he reckoned it was time for her to get her bearings in her personal life, by which he meant that she should get a personal life. Hell, he’d even pay for a cruise or finance a pro bono section in the London office if it meant she’d stay. She could have a baby on the firm, if she wanted. Whatever it took, she only had to say.

  She checked the GPS facility, which rather unnecessarily in her view kept a record of the phone’s precise location for every minute it was switched on. She entered January 12 and an approximate time, and a map of Manhattan came up with the address on Sixth Avenue in a panel below. Right, she was in the conference room and the phone would have been on the table beside her and switched on; she would have answered. She did the same for the following weekend. There was no record of the phone’s location in the afternoon because it had been switched off, but for that morning it gave an address in Connecticut.

  There was no mistaking it – the call had come a week after he had died, and yet Eyam had taken care to locate and time the message by mentioning the policeman and the wedding party passing in front of him. She turned towards the lights of the cottage with a profound sense of bafflement. There could only be two explanations. Either the automated message service had made a mistake on the date of the call, which seemed highly improbable, or Eyam was alive and moreover meant to convey that astonishing fact by obliquely alerting her to these discrepancies. That of course was absurd – impossible. But just pretend it’s possible, she said to herself. What would the phone message mean? He was saying, yes, I am in the film that was shot outside the cafe but I wasn’t killed by the explosion. The presence of The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor was an internal clue, planted there by Eyam, who could be sure that she would search the cottage high and low after his letter. Her mind reeled. She stood shivering in the cold, staring vacantly at her breath clouds, which were lit blue by her mobile. If Eyam had faked his own death there must be others involved – Detective Bautista for one. And Darsh for another: she remembered that odd look he gave her when he talked about the red admiral butterfly, the butterfly that hibernates then comes to life in the spring, or flies north from France. Was he saying Eyam was still in France? Did Darsh know and if so was he dropping a hint to see if she had any suspicions of her own? His theatrical display of grief at the funeral might also contain its own message – the prayer he quoted about the inward man being renewed and the things that are not seen being eternal.

  And it wasn’t just Darsh who was dropping hints during the service. She went inside, found her bag in the kitchen and drew out the order of service for the funeral that Eyam had planned with such care and prescience. On the back was the poem entitled The Death of Me. She read the second verse: ‘I may be gone for now, sister, For others say I’ve died. But I’ll wait for you here, sister, ’Til we take the waters wide.’ This wasn’t an anonymous American folk song, but verses Eyam had knocked up himself and with some gall placed on the back of his own funeral service. She stared at the words and whispered, ‘Eyam, you fucking bastard.’ Gripping the booklet, she sat down heavily and struggled to get a hold on her thoughts. Until this moment, disbelief, hope and joy had competed to overwhelm her but now the hardening conviction that Eyam was alive sparked a sense of what? Betrayal seemed the best word. He had deceived her, used her unscrupulously without thought for the grief and remorse she would experience, jeopardised her life and caused the death of an innocent man. Faking a death was somehow the ultimate lie and Eyam had done it in order to pass all his troubles to her and escape the responsibilities of the cause he seemed to have created. Cowardice was the other word that came to mind, but she had no time to refine her thoughts further becau
se Sean Nock was hailing her from the open front door.

  ‘Come in,’ she said, getting up.

  Nock was in a loose lumberjack shirt and steamed in the cold. He had run all the way. ‘You sounded worried on the phone.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said coolly. ‘I’m going to ask you a question and I want a straight answer.’ She picked up The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor and handed it to him. ‘This book was placed facing outwards from the middle of the bookshelves. Did you put it there?’

  ‘Maybe it was moved during cleaning,’ he said innocently.

  ‘I don’t have a cleaner.’

  ‘Yes, you do – it’s me.’

  ‘You’re an engineer, Sean, not a cleaner.’

  ‘I was paid to look after the place and that included doing a bit of dusting and vacuuming.’

  ‘Sean, did you put that book there so that I would see it? Were you told by anyone to do that?’

  ‘I don’t think so – no.’

  ‘Don’t fuck with me, Sean. Did you put it there?’

  Nock gave her a look of bewilderment. ‘Really, I don’t remember moving it.’

  ‘You stay here. I’m going to make a call outside. When I come back I want some answers.’ She snatched up her bag and left for the end of the garden where she took out Kilmartin’s phone and dialled his number. He answered after the first ring. ‘We need to talk as soon as possible,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I agree; we have much to discuss,’ said Kilmartin, ‘but I can’t speak now. We should meet tomorrow. Town or country, which suits you?’

  ‘Country. Near here.’ As she said it she saw several headlights slashing through the trees at the top of the track.