The Lazarus Tree

by Robert Richardson

  ‘Not as far as I know. There always seem to be plenty of boys about, but the ones her own age bore her. That’s common enough. I’ve often thought that the male teachers at her school should tread very carefully if they don’t want to make fools of themselves.’

  ‘An older man then?’ Maltravers suggested. ‘Stephen might know if anything’s going on at school.’

  ‘What about Patrick Gabriel?’ Sally Baker asked bluntly. ‘Or do you want to keep stepping around that?’

  Maltravers wondered how much he had been doing that, thrusting it from his mind because he found the idea distasteful. Gabriel’s sex drive had been like an addiction with a predilection for young bodies; his talking openly about it had made it even more obscene. The availability of willing, cynically enthusiastic, street-smart girls from London had not excused his behaviour, but such girls went in with knowing eyes wide open and could look after themselves; a village teenager would be hopelessly vulnerable. Obsessed with dreams of city life, impressed with Gabriel’s fame, naïve while deluding herself she was experienced, Michelle would have leapt at the excitement of it. And Gabriel would have casually used her, indifferent to any harm he was doing.

  ‘She’d have been only about fourteen when Gabriel was here,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, she would. Sick, isn’t it?’ Sally Baker leant forward in her chair. ‘I’ve got nothing specific to go on, but I met Gabriel a few times in the Raven and he was obviously a lecher. Michelle hangs around the village in the evening and I saw him talking to her more than once. I can’t imagine they were discussing poetry all the time. Stephen told me she was distressed when he died ... and now I think somebody is trying to conjure up the dead. I don’t like it, but it fits together.’

  It did in a grotesque sort of way, but Maltravers wanted to knock it down. ‘But there’s no way I can see Michelle believing in Ralph the Talespinner, Anyway, it’s only guesswork. There’s no proof it’s her.’

  Sally Baker’s eyebrows raised. ‘Oh yes, there is. You gave it to me.’

  ‘I did? How?’ he demanded.

  She looked wryly amused by the reaction in his face. ‘Oh, you poor city innocent. You really can’t see it, can you?’

  ‘Can’t see what?’

  She sighed like a teacher losing patience with a slow pupil. ‘Tell me again what you heard Michelle saying during the night.’

  Still bewildered, Maltravers took out his diary. ‘I could only hear parts of it ...’

  ‘Just the last bit.’

  He checked on what he had written. ‘You mean, “born is that man”?’

  ‘Exactly. One of the oldest tricks of witchcraft was saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards. An ultimate blasphemy. Think about it.’

  ‘So it’s “Man that is born ...” ‘ Maltravers hesitated for a moment, then picked it up. ‘ “ ... of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery”.’ As he looked at Sally Baker again, he felt suddenly chilled. ‘For the service for the burial of the dead.’

  ‘Precisely. And said in reverse to undo it. There’s nothing about Mary Twelvetrees trying that in Ralph’s story, but Michelle could have decided to add something herself — or been told to. Incidentally, what time did you hear her saying this?’

  ‘I’m not sure ... oh, yes. When I turned the light on, I noticed it was nearly half past midnight.’

  ‘Patrick Gabriel’s body was found at half past six in the morning and the police said he’d been dead for about six hours.’ Her face defied further argument. ‘Michelle Dean put those things under the tree. Don’t try and tell me otherwise.’

  Maltravers looked again at his notes, incomprehensible until Sally Baker had produced an explanation. Passing Michelle’s bedroom door that morning, he’d glanced inside. Posters of New Kids on the Block and George Michael, clothes scattered on the floor, a ghetto blaster, books and coloured pencils on a desk unit, even soft toys on the unmade bed, survivors from childhood. All the normal images of modern adolescence — and mute witnesses to practices from old and dark superstition?

  ‘For God’s sake, she’s just playing games.’ He looked at Sally Baker as though seeking assurance. ‘Isn’t she?’

  ‘Of course she is,’ she agreed. ‘But dangerous games — and we’ve now got reason to think they’re somehow tied up with a murder.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘That’s what we need to talk about.’ Sally Baker smiled at him. ‘Frankly, I’m awfully glad you’ve turned up. I’ve been worried about this, but Patrick Gabriel was almost certainly murdered by someone from this village and nobody knows who or why. So who could I approach about what I suspected was happening? How could I be certain I’d be safe?’

  ‘There are surely some people you can rule out as the killer,’ Maltravers argued. ‘Some of them must have had alibis.’

  ‘Not many when you get down to it. A few people were away, but of those who were here, being in bed, even with your wife or husband, in the small hours of the morning is easy to say and difficult to prove. The bottom line is that I could not be absolutely certain that whoever I talked to didn’t know something about Patrick Gabriel’s death. Asking questions could be dangerous.’

  ‘But what about Stephen and Veronica?’ Maltravers began, then hesitated uncertainly. ‘I was about to say you had an obligation to talk to them — but if you were really worried that anybody you spoke to might be the killer, then that had to include them.’

  ‘I’m afraid it did,’ she replied. ‘That was part of the problem. I’m sorry, it’s a horrible thing to say to you about your friends, but ...’

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ Maltravers interrupted. ‘I can’t bring myself to believe it, but I’m grateful to you for being so honest and I’ll take it on board. Anyway, the immediate point is that you didn’t talk to them about what you suspected Michelle might be up to.’

  ‘Apart from being ultra-careful, I had no reason to.’ Her hands made a gesture of frustration. ‘All right, I thought that Michelle could be mixed up in it, but it’s only now that you’ve provided me with some proof. What you have to remember is that after the murder, nobody in Medmelton knew how to play it. We tried to persuade ourselves it had been an outsider, but none of us really believed that. We were all suspicious and all under suspicion. I don’t like thinking that way about people I’ve known for years, but life in the diplomatic service taught me to be very cautious. I’ve kept my thoughts to myself.’

  ‘Including who the murderer might be?’

  ‘No,’ she corrected. ‘Because I have no idea. Oh, I heard plenty of rumours, but they were nearly all based on settling old scores. Somebody had had a row with somebody else, so they took a perverted delight in hinting that there was something there the police ought to look into. They never went to the police with it of course, it was just malicious. Anyway, it was much better to persuade myself I was being hyper-imaginative. Harmless children’s games under the Lazarus Tree was a much more comfortable explanation. Unfortunately, I can’t bring myself to believe that now.’

  She finished her coffee. ‘So welcome to Medmelton, where women have strange eyes, people protect murderers from the police and witchcraft is still practised. It must make London seem quite safe.’

  SIX

  Bernard Quex suffered from having enjoyed a childhood so happy that he had never wanted it to end. Up until their deaths in his forties, he continued to call his parents Mummy and Daddy, clinging to names that held warmth and security. Family holidays in the West Country had been a special bliss: the excitement of the drive from Sussex, the reassuring familiarity of the cottage they rented each year, the unchanging pattern of existence of the people who lived there, the rediscovery of remembered landscapes. When, eight years after his ordination, he had been offered the living of Medmelton, he had unquestioningly taken it as a sign that life had prepared him for such a place, to understand and protect it from change. For years, nothing disturbed that conviction as the villagers accepted him and he became on
e of them. Without realising it — without thinking about it — he abandoned a sense of vocation for mundane church activities, polite coffee mornings and the fellowship of the Raven. In a hollow of his beloved Devon hills, he had status, respect and, he persuaded himself, affection. A demanding sense of faith had been replaced by platitudes, a lost concept of calling by hospitable niceties. His congregation was obedient and undemanding, the parochial church council malleable, his bishop at a safe distance and God reduced to a lord-of-the-manor figure, Quex’s benign social superior in an untroubled and comfortable world.

  The one disaster had been Celia’s death after only seven years of marriage. Losing the baby had denied her a desperately needed reason to live which she had not been able to find as his wife. Quex had never understood why she could not accept her share of his contentment. She had said such dreadful things about people in the parish, had been resentful of her duties, hated the social events and religious festivals, regular and dependable as the slow seasons. The more settled he became, the more her fretfulness grew until every day brought another crisis. Time and again he had tried to persuade her of what they had, of how important it was; but it had been important only to him. Separation was as unthinkable as divorce. When she suggested it, he would quote their marriage vows, citing the laws of the Anglican church in place of understanding, not so much because he was unable to understand but because he really did not want to. One afternoon he had returned from a christening to find her dead with the empty bottle of pills and had destroyed the note before calling the police. It was a truth not to be faced and he had later rationalised it to the degree where he actually believed the verdict of accidental death. If he accepted that Celia had been driven to taking her life, it meant there was something very wrong with his. And that threatened the security of a little boy racing across holiday meadows, laughing with happiness. So he had lied, persuaded himself he had not lied, and had been protected by the warm, unsuspecting sympathy of his parishioners. Celia was dead, but Medmelton still offered sanctuary.

  Then evil had invaded his safe world. Patrick Gabriel had brought corruption, disturbing order, shaking the certainties that Quex needed. For a period, he had felt besieged, battling against an enemy who had penetrated his private fortress. At first he had reasoned that Gabriel would not stay long and could do no lasting damage, but then he had come to see him as a malignant virus that had to be destroyed before infection spread beyond hope of recovery. And the virus had been destroyed, almost literally cut out in a painful, bloody but necessary operation; the horror of violent murder had been eased by a sense of cleansing. The police investigation had passed, the wounds had begun to heal, normality had returned. Quex had regarded the villagers’ reluctance to co-operate with the police as recognition that they also valued the sanctity of Medmelton’s precious little world; not revealing the murderer had been a form of damage limitation and the pattern of bland sermons, safety and goodness had been restored. But he had started avoiding the Lazarus Tree, taking the long way round the churchyard from the lychgate to reach the rectory. Greeting worshippers in the west porch after Sunday services, he would not look at the sweet chestnut less than thirty feet away, laying silent siege to a life built on the deception both of others and of himself.

  Then, like some malevolent force of nature, the tree had become the focal point of a revived evil and the tacit, unquestioned pattern that wove together church and everyday life was threatened again. Quex regretted he had ever told anyone about the things he had discovered in the churchyard, realising too late they were as corrupt as Gabriel’s mutilated body. But he had impressed upon people that they were harmless and should be ignored. The majority had accepted his assurances — perhaps because they also wanted to — and those who had reservations had at least not done anything. But Quex knew how the fragile defences could crumble and now another stranger had arrived, one without an unquestioning love for Medmelton ... and one who had known Patrick Gabriel. His conversation with Maltravers had been very brief, but the murder had been raised, perhaps out of passing curiosity, possibly for more dangerous motives. What could the man do? Nothing. He might talk to people, but they would tell him little if anything. In a few days he would leave, having learnt it was none of his business. Bernard Quex would continue to keep Medmelton safe, and in doing so would also protect his own reason for existence. As he walked through the village, dropping off leaflets for a church jumble sale, there were constant little encounters to remind him of what a benign God had placed in his care.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Tucker. Family well? Splendid ... Oh, John, glad to catch you at home. The boiler’s playing up again. Can you have a look at it? Thank you ... And why aren’t you at school, William? Sore throat? What sort of excuse is that? Make sure you’re better for choir practice ... Miss Gregg. How very kind of you to send that cake round to the rectory. Absolutely delicious. Your sister’s well? Good ... Dorothy, I meant to say on Sunday how wonderful the flowers looked. Tell David I want to know his gardening secrets ... Good morning, Brigadier. Tackled The Times crossword yet? It’s a stinker.’

  How dare Patrick Gabriel have infested this sanctuary? He might have been a poet, but he had also been loud-mouthed and uncouth, an outsider contaminating good people. His ever-open pocket had made him popular in the Raven, but Quex had found him distasteful, telling obscene stories about his personal life in London even when there had been women at the bar. One night he had called Quex a hypocrite preaching a discredited and irrelevant God. Voice slurring with drink, his accusations had become increasingly outrageous, and what had appalled the rector was that nobody had tried to stop him; he even felt that in some ways many of them silently agreed. So Gabriel’s death had been ... no, it was sinful to call it divine punishment. It had been ... appropriate, as though a malignancy had been removed. But did some poison remain, breaking out beneath the Lazarus Tree? As he returned to the rectory, Quex again avoided passing the tree and its sense of waiting terror.

  *

  Maltravers walked back to Medmelton from Sally Baker’s. October had begun with autumn decay lit by sunshine fit for May, a wash of gold over browns, purples and fire oranges. Halfway down the hill he stopped and looked at a view that could have been lifted straight on to a Devon country calendar. He should be enjoying the pleasure of escape from London, not embroiled with an unknown killer and a girl playing some absurd game of what she thought was witchcraft when she was obviously intelligent enough to know better. What was Michelle really up to? Whoever was manipulating her might not be as much in control as they thought. If he — or she — could be found ... but it apparently had to be someone with access to a first edition of Ralph the Talespinner. Anyone could have read the copy in Exeter Library and it would be impossible to trace them — which left some hermit couple ... or the rector. For a member of the parochial church council, Sally Baker had been curiously ambivalent when Maltravers had mentioned the rector, softening his implication by suggesting he could have lent his copy to somebody.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she had agreed. ‘But ... oh, how can I put this? Bernard’s slightly creepy sometimes. There’s so much goodness about him that you begin to suspect it.’

  ‘Clerics are meant to be good,’ Maltravers had commented.

  ‘Of course they are, but when they make you feel uncomfortable ...’ She had shrugged uncertainly. ‘It’s difficult to explain, but I don’t really trust him sometimes.’

  She could not — or would not — be more specific, but had suggested that he should speak further with Quex and draw his own conclusions. It was a fairly preposterous starting point, but there was nothing else to go on. Maltravers was disinclined to talk to Stephen again until or unless he had something specific to discuss; he was too close to the situation to be objective.

  Immediately behind St Leonard’s, with its own gate in the churchyard wall, the rectory had the appearance of late Victorian gentility reduced to distressed circumstances. Its net curtains needed washing and the brass
step outside the front door was blotched dark brown verging on black; the entire house gave the indefinable impression of being in need of dusting. A weather-stained postcard pinned beneath the bell announced that it was not working, so Maltravers used the knocker. From somewhere inside a voice shouted, ‘It’s open!’ and he pushed the door then stepped over the threshold. As he hesitated in the hallway, Quex called out again. ‘In the study.’

  The voice came from a room halfway down the hall and Maltravers went and stood in the open doorway. Quex was sitting at a desk in the alcove of a bay window with his back to him, writing.

  ‘Won’t be a moment, darling.’ He spoke without looking round. ‘I must just finish this list of helpers for the stalls before I forget who’s doing what, then I’ll be with you. You’re earlier than I ...’

  ‘Hello, again.’ Maltravers felt he ought to say something before there were any more indiscretions. Quex whirled round, startled. ‘Sorry to just walk in like this, but you did say that the door was open.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. I ...’ The rector looked like a child rapidly thinking up an excuse when caught stealing. ‘I was miles away. I hardly knew what I was saying. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m the one who should apologise. I should have called out who I was. I’m afraid I’m interrupting you.’

  ‘It’s nothing important.’ Quex turned away, somewhat unnecessarily, to close the notebook in which he had been writing. He stood up. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘I want to ask a favour,’ Maltravers replied. ‘Stephen was telling me last night about Ralph the Talespinner and I said I’d like to read him. I understand you have a copy of his works and I wondered if I could possibly borrow it.’

  ‘Ralph the Talespinner?’ Quex sounded surprised. ‘Doesn’t Stephen have a copy?’

  ‘He couldn’t lay his hands on it ... and anyway it’s the later edition which I understand isn’t complete. Yours is the original, isn’t it?’