Recalled to Death

by Priscilla Masters

  Walk on.

  The committal was brief, the words pared to a bare minimum, just enough to give their man dignity. The coffin was plain pine, the cheapest in the range, the brass plate simply saying unknown man, the date and whereabouts of his murder and an identification number. It would be useful if they did exhume him as the undertakers would be the ones to identify the coffin. The plot would be marked with a simple white wooden cross. Nothing fancy for Mr Nobody.

  Martha murmured a brief prayer of her own, not only the usual rest in peace, but also a pledge that they would not rest until they had found his killer. She never made promises she could not keep and so resisted the temptation to promise that they would find his killer – even to herself. They might not. Ever.

  On the other side of the grave stood the rest of the investigating team, their heads bowed, hands clasped, respectful. There were a few members of the public. She recognized Gilbert Warrilow from English Heritage and a small cluster of people she imagined were the inhabitants of Moreton Corbet. One was a sulky looking but glamorous blonde who shuffled on unsuitable heels from foot to foot, impatient to be somewhere else or simply uncomfortable. And right on the edge of the cluster of people, to her delight, she recognized Miranda with a man in jeans and thick white hair. She gave them both a swift smile. It would not do for the coroner to be seen smiling at an unknown’s funeral.

  Right at the back of the graveyard stood four of the homeless, heads also bowed, shuffling away from the grave already. They’d paid their respects.

  She was aware of Alex Randall turning to face her and his hand moved involuntarily towards her so she knew he felt the same as she did. To be able to hold hands would have brought comfort to them both.

  ‘Thank you for being here,’ he mouthed over the well-known words.

  ‘We flourish like a flower of the field; when the wind goes over it, it is gone and its place will know it no more.’

  Never had the phrases sounded so poignant.

  Martha repeated the words to herself. When the wind goes over it, it is gone and its place will know it no more. The words rang in her brain, jangling, discordant, almost a warning: And its place will know it no more. She had a picture of a man sliding into a quicksand which closed over his head so completely it seemed to her not only that its place would know it no more, but rather it was as though its place had never been.

  The man who never was.

  As the soil rattled on the coffin she walked straight across to DI Randall. ‘It isn’t the end, you know, Alex,’ she said.

  He looked bleak. ‘It just feels like it.’

  ‘Will you be winding down your investigation?’

  ‘Not yet. But the time will come, you know. Like it or not.’

  Miranda, dressed in black trousers and jacket, had approached them. With a hugely flirtatious smile, she held her hand out to the detective. ‘You must be Alex,’ she said with a grin as wide as the bloody Mississippi. ‘I’ve heard so much about you.’

  Martha felt her lips tighten and shot her friend a furious scowl. How dare she.

  Alex was discomforted. ‘Umm,’ he said, and looked to Martha for a cue.

  She took the challenge smoothly. ‘If she heard it from me it would all be extremely bad,’ she said, shooting a grin now at her friend. ‘So don’t worry, Alex.’

  He entered into the spirit of things. ‘Then I won’t,’ he said, still a little stiff and uncomfortable in Knebworth’s presence, whom he hadn’t quite crossed off his list of suspects.

  Knebworth, for his part, was perfectly comfortable. ‘And you must be our coroner,’ he said to Martha. She smiled and nodded.

  ‘We’re just going to go for something to eat,’ Miranda said to both Martha and Alex, not in the least abashed. ‘Will you join us?’

  ‘Umm,’ he said again.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Thursday, 30 October, 11 a.m.

  It was a week after the funeral that Martha’s brain finally clicked into gear and it was as though the cog had found its forward motion. She could not think why or how she had not put two and two together before and realized why the phrases spoken by their unknown man in his sleep had sounded so familiar. Her subconscious must have been wrestling on with the problem all this time. She took a book from the bookshelf to check. And knew she had been right.

  She picked up the phone and rang Alex Randall’s extension number. To her frustration it was put straight through to answerphone. Almost breathless with excitement she left her name, the time and date of the call and asked that he ring her back as soon as he received her message.

  It was hard to focus on her work with something like a wasp buzzing around in her brain. She wanted to ring again but knew there was no point. The detective inspector was not available.

  An hour and a half went by, Martha by now frantically impatient. Finally, at twelve thirty, the phone rang.

  ‘Martha.’ Alex’s voice. ‘Whatever is it? You sounded almost fizzing with excitement.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘Can you come over?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He laughed. ‘This very minute?’

  He was teasing her again. Oh, Alex. It reminded her so much of Martin. He would use that same light tone to gently tease what he saw as her red-headed passions.

  ‘OK,’ he said, giving in. ‘I’m on my way.’ He couldn’t resist one last leg-pull. ‘Do I need to put the blue light on?’

  Two could play at that game. ‘If you like.’

  He chuckled and put the phone down.

  Twenty minutes later he was knocking at her door.

  Jericho was having to get used to the intrusions of the DI who had greeted him, told him the coroner had summoned him this time and climbed the stairs, long legs two at a time.

  Martha didn’t even try to hide her excitement. ‘I think I’m close to understanding Charles’s obscure references,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I think he was a shoemaker,’ she said.

  Alex Randall sank down into the chair, his eyes fixed on her. ‘How on earth do you come by that?’

  ‘We had clues,’ she said. ‘The shoe?’

  ‘Ye-es?’

  ‘One hundred and five, north tower. Your homeless man who heard him talking in his sleep thought he must have been in prison. But he couldn’t have been or you’d have had a record of his fingerprints. DNA.’

  Randall nodded cautiously. Warily.

  She ploughed on. ‘And didn’t he call the girl in the charity shop Lucy?’

  Again, Randall nodded, still with the same caution, but frowning now.

  She handed him a book. Randall looked at it.

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘Ages ago,’ he said.

  ‘Do you remember a character in it called Doctor Manette? A man wrongly imprisoned in the Bastille who takes up a shoemaking hobby?’

  ‘Hobby?’ He was startled. But it was one way of putting it.

  ‘He has a daughter called Lucy. And in the Bastille he was forgotten about. Anonymous as though he was dead. He wrote a letter denouncing the person responsible for his imprisonment.’

  Alex Randall was speechless.

  ‘I know this book well,’ she continued. ‘One Hundred and Five, North Tower refers to his prison cell.’ She said the words with a shiver before explaining her familiarity with the classic. ‘Sukey was in a production of A Tale of Two Cities last year.’ She leafed through her copy. ‘The part she played,’ she said, ‘was the daughter of Doctor Alexandre Manette, Lucy.’

  ‘Sukey?’ he queried.

  ‘My daughter. Eighteen and now studying to be an actress.’

  ‘Really? That’s an interesting career choice.’

  ‘Not mine,’ she said, holding her hands up. ‘I didn’t say anything to her about being an actress. She just chose it. I don’t know where it came from.’

  ‘And your son?’ He knew she had twins: a gir
l and a boy.

  ‘Sam – well, he’s playing football at the moment but there’s another shock.’ She hunched her shoulders up. ‘He now says he just wants to do this for a few more years and then train as a teacher. Kids,’ she said in mock exasperation.

  ‘I envy you,’ he said. ‘They sound wonderful. Just wonderful.’

  ‘And like the completely biased mother that I am,’ she said, laughing, ‘I heartily agree. Now then, we both need to act as detectives in this, don’t we?’

  He nodded. ‘That’s what I came for.’

  She was smiling now. He was the detective, not she.

  ‘So we need to pool our knowledge about the man we’ve been calling Charles,’ she said. ‘Everyone describes him as polite, private, reticent. He wasn’t a drunk or a drug addict.’

  Randall shook his head.

  Martha continued, ‘You’ve had Mark’s toxicology report as well. That supports that. He was clean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We think he was well educated and at some point in his life he had the money to go on a skiing holiday.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ Randall agreed tentatively, not quite sure where all this was leading.

  ‘He made veiled references to having had two lives.’

  Randall leaned forward, listening hard.

  ‘He said he was already dead.’

  ‘Yes.’ He could not but agree.

  ‘And he’s been on the road for somewhere around five years.’

  ‘Again, yes. But what does this tell us?’

  She held a finger up. ‘Patience, Alex. I don’t know it all. I’m just throwing everything we know about him into the melting pot. Just to refresh your memory,’ she continued, her eyes sparkling, ‘Doctor Manette wrote down an account of his trials,’ she said, ‘of the injustice that was done to him. He hid it in a hole in a chimney where a stone had been worked out and replaced.’

  Alex Randall was staring at her. ‘Moreton Corbet,’ he breathed.

  ‘Then what are we waiting for?’

  TWENTY-NINE

  It took them twenty long minutes to reach Moreton Corbet Castle, still closed to the public and with an officer on guard. Not for much longer. They would be winding down the investigation now that the inquest and funeral were over. Surely, Randall had reasoned, they had collected all the evidence? But as he parked in the lay-by and Martha climbed out, he wondered.

  Signs of the murder were almost gone but not quite. Flowers had been laid. Quite a lot considering no one knew who their victim was. Martha scanned some of the cards as she passed.

  We don’t know who you are. We don’t know why you died but you are in our thoughts.

  Unknown man. We are sorry.

  You are not a nobody.

  We will pray for you. This one signed by the Vicar and Congregation of Moreton Corbet Church.

  And a slightly puzzling one considering the circumstances: Tell us who you are.

  Then there was the one that always surfaced in such circumstances: The ubiquitous why?

  There was still police tape denying access to the general public and the site was deserted apart from the one solitary PC who was now striding towards them.

  Alex turned to Martha, supressing a smile. ‘Do you think, if we’re going to vandalize this place we should at least run it past English Heritage?’

  She shot him a frustrated look before realizing that he was, again, teasing her.

  He greeted the young PC and they opened the gate. ‘Right, so where?’

  But Martha had stopped, almost out of respect. ‘It’s such a place, she said. ‘It has such an air of tragedy. It almost seems fitting that a murder should happen here.’ She turned to face him. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not the first.’

  She was right. It was a ruin you could not ignore but, anxious to get on with the job, Randall simply nodded and moved forward.

  ‘OK, clever clogs,’ Randall said, not looking at the ruined house now but at her flushed, eager face. ‘So where now?’

  ‘Well …’ Martha stepped over the grass. ‘Didn’t you say Charles was found in the cellar?’

  ‘Yeah, over here.’ Randall’s long legs were already taking him across the lawns, heading towards the main facade. ‘And here is the dining chamber …’

  Martha was struggling to keep up with him as they scrambled over the stones. ‘So here …’ she was now standing in front of what must once have been a fireplace, ‘… is where the chimney would have been.’

  They stood in front of it. ‘Remember the words,’ Martha reminded him. ‘In a hole, in the chimney, where a stone had been worked out and replaced.’

  They had thought it would be easier but they spent almost forty-five minutes pulling and wriggling stones before Alex found one that yielded to his fingers. He hardly control his excitement. ‘Martha,’ he said, urgency in his tone. ‘I think I’ve found it.’ He pulled and a large stone came tumbling out, behind it a hole containing a child’s exercise book.

  They were both dying to touch it but Randall knew the rules and slipped some gloves on before leafing through a couple of the pages. ‘I think it’s all going to be here,’ he said and placed it in an evidence bag.

  He summoned the police officer, who took photographs of the site where the book had been pulled from and pointed out, ‘Something else here, sir.’

  He pulled out the very same edition of the very same book that Martha had had in the office.

  A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, Macmillan and Co., Limited, St Martin’s Street, London. And underneath the date of this edition: 1945. The year the Second World War had ended.

  The drive back to the station was as frustrating as the drive out had been. They were both dying to read their man’s notes, to finally know his name, to find out his fate, and there was now a distinct possibility that they would discover the identity of his killer.

  And so, in Alex’s area of the office, they finally read the story of the man they had half-mockingly, half-pityingly called Charles.

  And the first thing they read was a name. But their tramp did not disclose all straight away. He held them on a string.

  This is my confession. As a true Catholic it is important to me that I make it not only to a priest. My name is Ishmael, only it isn’t. We all know Ishmael is Melville’s wandering whaler so no. I am not he. You will know my name in time. My great-grandfather came from Holland in the late nineteenth century. Already skilled as a shoemaker. Martha shot a triumphant glance at Alex.

  Yes, shoes and shoemakers. So many in literature, their man mused. The Brothers Grimm’s ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’. Cinderalla’s glass slipper. The slippers you wear which will dance you to death. Moira Shearer’s Red Shoes – the shoes that fit. And the most poignant of all, Doctor Manette’s 105 North Tower and the shoemakers’ bench which he could not bear to be parted from and turned to in times of crisis. Shoes for a lady, shoes for a man – for a fine man. My great-grandfather made shoes for all kinds, ladies and gentlemen, but the shoes he was most proud of he gave away. They were clogs for children that had no shoes. And he made them just as carefully. One little girl wore them and then gave them back. She said she had nothing else to give him as a thank-you present and so she took them off her feet, hardly worn, and presented them to him. My great-grandfather was touched. He talked about the widow’s mite and when his factory expanded and became hugely successful and he a millionaire many times over he preserved the shoes in a glass case to remind him. They were, he said, the most precious gift he had ever received. The child had walked away barefoot because she wanted to give him a present. She had given him all she had. Needless to say, he brought the child back and, put it like this: her life was not poor after that.

  She eventually married my grandfather.

  My grandfather and then my father and later myself joined the business, still making leather shoes and boots. The factory did well then. We were exporting to many countries long before this was common practice. We expand
ed but did not over- expand. The factory made soldiers’ boots throughout both wars and provided uniform boots and shoes in the years between. You might have seen my set of medals. More about those later.

  I married a girl called Verity, which is a laugh as the name means truth. She was a dancer and we had been considering whether to branch out into dancers’ shoes. Pointe shoes. They are always uncomfortable and hurt and damage dancers’ feet, giving them all sorts of problems later on in life. My father, who loved the ballet, was unhappy about this and spent many years researching into Pointe shoes. He came up with a new design and I went to the ballet school to see what the dancers thought of them, and that was how I met Verity. We were married in the year 2000 when she was just eighteen years old. I was thirty. But we were happy for a few years until roughly 2008. You know how these things are. It is hard to put your finger on one particular day and say that is the day it started to go wrong but certainly by the end of 2009 I was aware that something was very wrong. I do not need to go into detail yet.

  We had many friends, amongst whom was a man called Rafael Poulson. I don’t know how he became one of our circle of friends. He liked boats and said he’d been in the military like his father and grandfather before him. Another family business, he joked. I didn’t even think Verity liked him. But perhaps dancers can be actresses too. I never saw her speak to him but he was apparently one of our friends. Suddenly there he was.

  I move forward to 2010, March. A cold and blustery day. Poulson and I had fallen into the habit of sailing from Chichester, just taking trips around the bay, you know. Boy stuff, Verity used to call it. Sometimes she would come with us. Sometimes not. That evening she did come. The water was rough so I was surprised. She had a delicate – hah – constitution and often used to say she felt very sick on boats. That night is still hazy, like a bad dream, as though my mind wants to protect me from its ugliness. I wanted to turn back but Rafael did not. He loved the adventure and he was a competent sailor. No doubt about that. I did feel safe with him at the helm. Right up to when he crashed the boom around and struck me on the head. Verity was standing behind him and to my shock she was encouraging him. No, not encouraging – goading him into killing me. Her face was villainous. Evil. And she actually grabbed the boom and hit me again so I fell into the water. But the sail had swung with the boom, catching the wind, and the boat capsized. I lay in the water without the volition to swim or even try to float. I was puzzling over what had happened. My wife wanted me dead? And the last image I had was of her face, hating me.