Death's Sweet Echo

by Maynard Sims

  Priestley popped a piece of Stilton into his mouth and enjoyed it. When the time was right, he sipped some port and placed his glass down upon the table. He picked up his cigar from the ashtray and, holding it casually in one hand, he began to speak.

  ***

  Richard Randolph had enjoyed many years of success in the political melting pot of Westminster, and when his seat was lost at the general election that spring, he took it badly.

  It was always known he enjoyed the London life, and rumours were always chasing scandal and managing to remain one step ahead. It was said he had the ear of more than one newspaper editor. He would hear word of a story about to break just early enough to give him time to either block the worst of the damage or to have a strong enough alibi to weaken the accusations sufficiently so that they blew over quickly.

  He had the popular support an MP needs without ever being taken seriously enough to threaten to hold down any cabinet post of note. His was the career of the junior minister, the spokesman on worthy but slight causes, the erudite and articulate minister the cameras and sound bites loved, and who could be relied on never to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. He was considered reliable in some ways, but in the realms that mattered he was thought to be competent at best.

  The same could not be said of his personal life. The cliché of spending more time with his family was not one he could have trotted out when the time came for his parliamentary stay to end. He had been apart from the bosom of his family for some time, and a not-inconsiderable bosom it was, too. He had married the second daughter of a minor baronet, and the grace and favour that his elevated social standing gave him was a privilege he enjoyed for several years. Why he chose to squander the best asset he had was not a question he had chosen to answer, and certainly none of his closest friends could explain why he had taken the path that led him to such ruin.

  His wife, and owner of the formidable bosom, was Clarabel, mother to his two children, and a woman devoted to the role of wife of an MP. She was no shrinking violet and not one to sit quietly simpering while her husband made speeches around the constituency and farther afield.

  If there was a driving force behind his career path, it could be traced quite audibly to Clarabel, who was a woman used to getting her own way. If she decided Randolph should speak out against an issue, then shout and agitate he did. When he betrayed her, he made the single biggest mistake of his life, or so it seemed.

  ‘Why that woman?’ Clarabel shouted. ‘Those women?’

  ‘The children,’ Randolph implored her. ‘Don’t let them hear us argue.’

  Clarabel snorted, an unpleasant sound that conjured images of a raging bull crossed with a whale coughing after its first cigarette of the day. ‘It’s a bit late to think about them. Were they uppermost in your thoughts when you were disrobing that whore? Did you feel remorse for not tucking them up in bed and reading them their bedtime stories when you were enjoying that buxom bitch to bounce up and down on you?’

  Randolph knew he was defeated, personally and, as it later proved to be true, also professionally. He was devastated, there is no doubt about that. He may have been the engineer of his own downfall, and could blame nobody but the man he saw reflected back in his shaving mirror, but to say he took his fall from grace badly would be an understatement that very few would attempt to justify.

  The humiliation he felt as he stood on the platform stage of the village hall, and heard the gloating words of the chief counting officer, stayed with him. Beaten into third place, and behind those jokers of UKIP, and that damned fool from Labour. A majority overturned, and he was out – victim of smear tactics, he was certain of that. The news of his infidelities, and his investigations by the fraud squad into some business affairs, all leaked at just the wrong time. Voters liked him, enjoyed his personality and the edge of glamour he gave their pinched little lives, but to be taken for a fool was not something these good Shires people would countenance. He was out and he had to deal with the aftermath.

  Last day at Westminster, and he walked in with slouched shoulders, and eyes that darted everywhere but at his soon-to-be ex-colleagues’ eyes. He was a dead man walking, and the lengths that others went to so that they should avoid contact might have been humorous under different circumstances.

  ‘You’re a bloody fool,’ the Chief Whip told him in that no-nonsense style Randolph had admired for so long. ‘Keep your secrets safe, it’s the cardinal rule. Now we’ve muzzled the press the best we can, there really is no excuse these days to get caught with your trousers down.’

  ‘What can I say?’ Randolph said. ‘It’s just the way it is.’

  ‘What the hell does that mean? You know there might have been a way back if you’d shown just a modicum of regret, a shred of charm over the matter.’

  ‘If it was the one indiscretion, I might have been able to paper over the cracks, blend my features into a passable façade of apology and gobble up my humble pie, but there really was a bit too much on my plate, don’t you think?’

  The Whip made a noise at the back of his throat that sounded as unpleasant as the sounds Clarabel had been making lately. ‘The PM will see you.’

  ‘When will he…’

  ‘Now.’

  He didn’t have time to wait outside the PM’s office, and thus feel like an errant schoolboy waiting for the headmaster. He was no sooner taken along the corridors of power than the office door was opened and he was standing in front of the man so recently re-elected by a cynical and faintly disinterested public, despite the loss of several back-benchers such as Randolph.

  ‘You’re a bloody fool,’ the PM began.

  ‘I tell myself that in the mirror each morning.’

  The ruddy-cheeked PM glanced up but saw no trace of sarcasm in the bleary eyes of his one-time colleague. If anything, what the senior man witnessed was a man at war with himself. If he was prepared to take the time and the interest in this example of yesterday’s man, then he might have suggested counselling of some kind, perhaps a visit to his GP for medication, as it was obvious there was an inner turmoil at odds with a balanced disposition. It wouldn’t have surprised the busy PM if the man was diagnosed with depression.

  ‘That’s as may be,’ he said. ‘But I have a government to run, a cabinet to organise, and the party can do without the kind of lurid headlines you’ve heaped upon our collective heads these past few days.’

  ‘Just as well for you, then, that my seat was lost.’

  ‘Just as well… it’s lucky for you we picked up those marginals in the West Country, or our narrow majority would have been lost and then your carelessness would have proved a disaster for us.’

  ‘Instead it is just my personal disaster.’

  Randolph left the building some time later, his personal possessions boxed and labelled with the forwarding address. He said farewell to few, and in truth, not many sought him out. He carried his battered leather briefcase out of the gates for the last time and checked his watch. The train would not wait.

  He hailed a cab and made the journey to Paddington where the early evening train to Totnes was waiting for him, but only just. No sooner was he ensconced in his seat in first class than the train pulled out of the station. He had a book to read, he would avail himself of some coffee and a sandwich during the journey, and if he had time he would eat at The Waterman’s Arms before settling into his new cottage.

  It was under half an hour before he became aware that he was being scrutinised.

  When he first took his seat – on the train, not at parliament – he had thought he was alone in the carriage. That wouldn’t have been so unusual, as first class wasn’t what everyone chose, even for long journeys like the three-hour drag down to Devon. He was about to get cracking on the next chapter of his book when he experienced that uneasy feeling that he was being watched.

  He looked up and sure enough, there was a Spanish-looking fellow sitting diagonally across from him, and the s
warthy man was staring unashamedly at him. Randolph nodded and mumbled a ‘good afternoon’ before resting his eyes back onto the printed page. The feeling of being observed persevered.

  He looked up again, but the Mediterranean man had gone. Where he had been sitting was a copy of the evening newspaper, the lurid headline announcing ‘MP Investigated By Fraud Squad’. Typical. His past was determined to give him a final kicking even while he was on the journey to escape from it.

  Then he noticed a Pakistani man standing by the doors. He, too, was staring at Randolph with ill-disguised interest. On longer inspection, the man was not so dissimilar to the man he had thought to be from Spain, or maybe Portugal. Perhaps it was the same man, and the first impression had been wrong. If so, why was he now standing? And so near to the door when there wasn’t a stop for another five minutes or so?

  Was he ever going to be released from the scandals he had created? It was a shame that here, in an all-but-empty carriage, the guilt that he felt was being thrust into his face.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he called out to the man. He hoped that would be enough to discourage the attention, but if anything, the blank stare became even more intense.

  Randolph made himself tear his eyes away and tried, in vain, to concentrate on his book. He looked up again, and was relieved to see the man had gone. He probably shouldn’t have been in the first-class carriage at all, and he’d probably scuttled back to where he should be seated.

  But Randolph was still agitated with the sense of being watched. He kept glancing up from his reading, and occasionally he was sure he glimpsed movement, sometimes just out of the corner of his eye, but he couldn’t see anyone, or anything. Then he saw another person. This was a white face – very pale, in fact – dressed in a formal suit with waistcoat, and Randolph, if he had been asked later to give a first impression, would have said that the man looked as if he was dressed for a funeral.

  ‘Hey you,’ he said, quite loudly, and stood, intending to confront the man.

  By the time he reached the seat where the man had seemed to be sitting, several rows down the carriage, the place was empty. When he looked closer, there seemed to be a dark imprint on the back of the seat, a stain perhaps. He reached out with his fingers carefully and touched the black mark. It felt damp and a little sticky. His fingers left a trace on the back of the seat, as if soot had been disturbed, or as if a coating of some dark substance had been scratched.

  He went back to his own seat, picked up his book once more, and decided he needed a stiff drink from the bar, and he needed it right now.

  The train went through a tunnel, a long one, and blackness descended as if a switch had been activated, or as if a dark cloud had fully obscured the moon at night. Randolph sat uncomfortably in the darkness, his book held useless on his lap, his other hand resting on the table top.

  When something gripped his hand and lifted it clear of the laminated top, he screamed.

  What held his hand aloft felt furry, as if a beast had taken grip of his fingers and was examining them out of a brutal curiosity. The fur felt warm, and the strength in the beastly hand was deceptive.

  Randolph tried to pull his hand away, at the same time shrinking back in his seat. At first his hand was held firm, and long, jagged nails sank into the skin of his palm. Then suddenly his hand was free and he pressed it against his chest for security. He half stood from his seat, but in the darkness he bumped his knees against the plastic table top and fell backwards in ungainly fashion, his legs sprawling out beneath him, so that he ended up slumped on the train seat rather than sitting upright.

  The light that flooded the carriage when the tunnel was left behind was a huge relief to him. He stared all around, but he was alone in the carriage. He examined his hand and found three scratch marks marring the pink flesh of the palm of the hand. They were quite deep, although only one had drawn blood.

  He looked down at his book, determined to distract his mind with further reading. The book had been torn to shreds, the pages ripped and ruined. He threw it onto the table top, took his mobile phone from his briefcase, and marched off to find the bar. He needed a double whisky to calm his nerves.

  When stood at the bar, glass in hand, he flicked through his contacts list trying to decide who he could call and perhaps laugh about the way his mind was playing tricks on him. The list was long, but by the time he reached the letter M he realised there really was no one who would welcome his call. There was nobody he could confide in and release the dreadful burden he had unleashed upon himself. He had no one left who would support him. He drank a second double and made his way back to his seat.

  By the time the train pulled into Totnes station, he had been napping for less than an hour. As he felt the motion of the carriage change, he rallied himself and prepared to get off. He picked up his book and slipped it into his briefcase. If he wondered how it was that the book was undamaged in any way, he didn’t acknowledge the fact.

  As he stepped out of the train and onto the warm platform, his mind was alive with thoughts which scuttled around like insects under a lifted rock. He was trying to recall where the taxi rank was, he was hoping the keys to the new cottage would be where the estate agent had promised, he wondered if the pub would still be as he remembered it. If he considered for a moment the unsettling journey he had just endured, it was a minor footnote.

  He found the taxi cabs and instructed the driver the address of the small cottage he had purchased in the village of Cornworthy, situated on the River Dart. It was a major downsize from the marital manor house he had enjoyed for the past several years. Fortunately he had been able to negotiate it as a furnished property, and so he was able to accept the rather harsh terms that Clarabel dictated when the letters about the impending divorce were served.

  Would he be lonely? Probably, he hoped. He had felt for a long time that the hustle and bustle of London life, and even that of the Surrey family life, was leeching from him something that he struggled to define. That was as much the impetus for his diminishing behaviour as the greed, lust and pure bad choices had been.

  Taxi drivers, by definition, are either garrulous or taciturn, with no middle ground acceptable. Randolph’s man was a talker. Luckily, he rarely needed a response before he was off again on some tangent that Randolph tried to follow but lost before they were even at the summit of the hill out of Totnes. Once they turned off the main Totnes-to-Kingsbridge road and were into the narrow lanes, the driver may as well have been invisible so far as Randolph was concerned.

  He loved this part of the world, the South Hams, and hoped that it would learn to love him, as he dearly wanted this retreat to become rehabilitation for him. If there was a small part of his mind that harboured thoughts of a return to politics, the main part, vying for sensible supremacy, knocked the idea back without a second glance. Westminster was lost to him, and he to it. If he gripped onto the merest glimmer of hope that he and his family might seek reconciliation, he knew the grip was a tenuous one, and that particular ship had sailed a long time ago, lost in a flurry of lurid headlines and bitter recriminations.

  The lane down to the road that flattened out by The Waterman’s Arms, and then followed the narrow lane parallel to the Dart, was as steep as he remembered, with passing places cut out of the high hedges at various points on the way down, or indeed up. The driver was clearly used to the conditions, as he didn’t so much reduce his speed as quicken it as they neared the end of the hill. Once down and out into the relative open road of the main lane, Randolph saw the lights of the pub were on, and wondered if he would have the energy to visit later.

  The taxi stopped outside a pink-washed stone cottage with a neat front garden and the promise of hidden horticultural gems in the back gardens which blended down onto the banks of the river. Randolph paid the fare, with a healthy tip by way of apology for ignoring everything the man had said, took his briefcase and got out. Once the taxi had driven off, Randolph breathed in and listened. He c
ould hear the faint tinkling of water which could only be the river rushing over some stones along a shallow part. He heard birdsong and wished he could identify and name the different types of birds from the sounds they made. That was all.

  He opened the wooden gate and closed it behind him. The front door key was where it should be, under the third plant pot to the left. When he went to insert the key, he found the door was already open. Not just open as in unlocked, but ajar, not closed at all, the locking mechanism not in its catch, so that when he touched the key against the lock, the door fell open.

  ‘Hello,’ Randolph called out. ‘Is anyone there?’

  Of course there was no reply. The only sounds were the slow ticking of a clock on the mantelpiece, and his own breathing, which was more ragged than he would have wished for.

  Downstairs there was a cosy lounge, a compact bathroom, a utility-type room with a door through to the garden, and a small room which was laid out as a kind of reading room, with sofa, side table and a row of bookshelves. There was no sign anyone had been inside the house when he arrived.

  He ran up the stairs and checked the two bedrooms and bathroom. There was no one to be found. Making a mental note that he knew he wouldn’t follow through, to contact the agent and find out why the front door had been left open, he went back downstairs to see whether any of his meagre possessions had been delivered yet.

  He was surprised to find that the front door was open, even though he was sure he had closed it. He had, hadn’t he? He pushed it closed and turned the key in the lock, to make doubly sure it couldn’t open on its own again. When he turned back into the room, he found a black-and-white cat lying out on the rug in front of the log fire. The fire wasn’t lit, it was still too warm for that, but the cat was luxuriating as though the heat of the flames were caressing its fur.

  When it saw Randolph it stood on all fours and hissed at him.

  ‘Yes, well, I’m not too pleased to see you, either.’

  No one had mentioned a cat, but he guessed it had slipped in through the door. He’d leave it for now; it may well have been left, intentionally or inadvertently, by the previous owners, and it might feel, with some justification, that it was the rightful occupant, and that Randolph was the intruder. He would put it straight about that in the morning. For now he was more tired than he imagined he would be, and deciding not to bother with food, he took himself off up to bed. He had quite forgotten to see whether his boxes of stuff had been delivered.