Friends in Low Places

by Simon Raven

  “Usual procedure,” said Detterling. “I thought we’d try up in the hills for a start.”

  “We can’t start too soon for me. Did you see that look the waitress just gave us? Let’s go before we get poisoned.”

  “Dreary day,” said Mark to Isobel, as he looked out of her caravan window. “What would you like to do?”

  “Be with you.”

  “Easy. Let’s drive down to Weston-super-Mare and giggle at the people. And if the rain doesn’t stop, let’s come back here after lunch, and then - ”

  “ - Yes please,” said Isobel. “I shall enjoy that very much.” And so at about ten o’clock that morning, within a few minutes of each other, all four parties set out.

  10

  THE KILL

  _____________________________________

  CANTELOUPE’S CAR was the first to reach Westward Ho! By this time the rain, which had been falling intermittently since ten o’clock the previous night, had become a heavy, continuous, absolutely vertical downpour, from a sky that was like an immense slab of filthy cotton wool which was being slowly lowered to stifle the earth. Not surprisingly, the caravan site looked appalling; but Canteloupe was quick to distinguish between the damage done by the elements and that done by man, and to find the latter even more deleterious than he had expected.

  “Bloody great puddles are one thing,” he said: “but when you can see dead dogs floating about on them, it’s time to take action.”

  “Dead dogs” was an exaggeration; there was in fact only one dead puppy, the one which Cruxtable had kicked on the day of the opening and which, having fallen into a decline in consequence, had been deserted by its owners when they left the site. But one puppy was quite enough to make Canteloupe’s point, and he now strode off through the mire, Carton Weir bringing up miserably behind him, to confront the Camp Commandant. Fielding and Peter, there being nothing else for it, sat in Canteloupe’s Rolls having drinks from the miniature cocktail cabinet. They were just about to pour themselves a second round, when they saw Tom Llewyllyn’s 1935 Mercedes, which was giving off dense fumes of protest after its struggle with the muddy uphill track, skid to a halt by the gate.

  “Company,” said Fielding, who found himself oddly unsurprised by this apparition. “Let’s invite them over.”

  Canteloupe’s chauffeur was despatched through the rain with the invitation. Tom accepted this, but Alfie, who was conscientious about his reporting, felt bound to undertake a tour of inspection; so he was fixed up by the chauffeur with a golfing umbrella and some galoshes, which Canteloupe had been too angry to bother with, and trudged away gallantly into the wet. The other three exchanged desultory chat over their drinks for a while and then, overwhelmed by the desolate aspect of Westward Ho!, by the total lack of human activity and by the constant drumming of rain on the roof of the Rolls, abandoned further social effort. Tom picked his nails; Fielding prepared the account he would give to Detterling of how he had outwitted Jude Holbrook; Peter sulked; and in front the chauffeur, who had fallen asleep, gently but persistently snored.

  Mark and Isobel, having found nothing in Weston-super-Mare to giggle at on such a morning, and being still nervous of the police, decided to return to Westward Ho! even earlier than they had planned. There was a tin of something which they could eat for lunch in Isobel's caravan, and they would go out to the little hotel they had found for a proper dinner in the evening.

  “If we can still get out,” said Mark as they drove away from the sea front.

  “The site’s on a hill, darling. All the rain will be drained off.”

  “If it goes on like this, we’ll find ourselves on an island. Like Noah and Co. on Ararat.”

  “Delicious,” Isobel said, and started tickling the inside of his left thigh.

  After a while Mark said:

  “I found a Times in Weston, Still nothing from your old man.”

  “I don’t mind. I like it as we are.”

  “Something’s got to be settled sooner or later.”

  Isobel started to cry.

  “Darling heart. . . what is it?”

  “I don’t want it to end,” she sobbed. “I want it to go on like this. Even if Daddy did put a message in The Times, what could we do? We couldn’t come out in the open, not with the police still looking for you.”

  “Perhaps your father could make it all right for me.”

  “He’d never do that. He’s so upright, so hard. He won’t understand about us. Sometimes I think this time in the caravans is the only time we shall ever have. In our own little world, because if ever we leave it there’ll be some curse to break the spell.”

  They were both too preoccupied to notice a cerise Rover which was parked in a lay-by. The two men in the Rover were also preoccupied, as they had been quarrelling about where to go for lunch, but one of them gave the grey Morris Traveller a quick glance as it passed.

  “YOB,” said Detterling: “remember?”

  He started the engine and dawdled along behind the Morris.

  “Try to see who’s in it,” he said.

  “I can’t see anything in this rain,” grumbled Stern. “I think there are two of them.”

  “Could be . . .”

  “Could be the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Just because Isobel Turbot was seen, days ago and miles away, getting out of a Morris numbered YOB . . .”

  “It’s worth trying.”

  Stern twitched.

  “I want my lunch,” he said, “and I want to ring up London. I’m meant to be running a business. Remember?”

  Detterling nodded, then settled the Rover at a steady thirty-five miles an hour and about a hundred yards behind the Morris. As they neared the Quantocks, the black sky moved lower and lower, as though it must surely engulf them at any second.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Lord Canteloupe was saying to Commandant Hookeby, “I understand your difficulties. But what I want to know is why there’ve been no new arrivals. Until yesterday the weather was perfect. For every one who moved out there should have been ten moving in.”

  Hookeby muttered something about teething troubles. “You’d have got over those - if there was an atom of morale in the place. But because you’ve let things slide, let all the campers drift away, the staff have lost any guts they ever had.” Canteloupe banged the office table with his fist; a tray of pencils clattered on to the floor; Hookeby began resentfully to pick them up. “But for all that,” Canteloupe went on, “I still can’t understand why no one else is coming. We could make everything all right - even now - if only people would come here. And God knows, we’ve run a wide enough advertising campaign.”

  “Salinger’s have been going downhill,” Weir remarked.

  “It’s nothing to do with Salinger’s. They only print the stuff. It was good stuff - I saw to that.”

  “There never were any visitors worth talking of,” said Hookeby, still scooping up pencils. “That opening - we had to hire most of them. You know that.”

  “That was just to get things off the ground. Of course people weren’t going to come straight off. The holiday season hadn’t really started, for one thing. But now . . . with that splash on television . . . they ought to be pouring in.”

  “The locals,” said Hookeby, “have a story about this place.”

  “Story?”

  "Legend. It seems that there was a wood on this spur before it was all cleared away.”

  Hookeby paused. Like many lazy men, he had a taste for local chatter, which he would absorb by the hour in the nearest pub. Uncritical by nature, he listened with placid interest to whatever he was told, little caring whether it was true or not; but it had now occured to him that Lord Canteloupe might make a less tolerant audience.

  “It’s nothing really,” he said.

  “Go on, man.”

  “Well, it was a great place for lovers, this wood. Always had been from right back. So far back that it wasn’t quite a joke. There was supposed to be some kind of . . . guardian, I suppose
you’d say . . . who was very fussy about who came up here. Only real lovers could be happy. The rest found they weren’t - well - welcome. Not that this guardian was hostile, exactly, he just didn’t make them welcome. So what I mean is, perhaps none of us are wanted ... if you get me.”

  Canteloupe did not. But he had no time to say so, because his chauffeur came into the room unannounced, dripping wet, and with a very funny look on his face.

  “Please come at once, my lord,” the chauffeur said.

  Alfie Schroeder, sloshing round the caravan site, wondered whether there was a story in it. He’d seen the opening on television and he knew there had been something phoney about it; and now here was the camp, festering and derelict, looking for all the world as if it had been briefly occupied and then deserted by retreating troops - bored, unhappy, frightened men, who did not know where they were or where they were heading, only that they were passing through doomed wasteland in a foreign country, far from home. And yet . . . surely the place had been beautiful once?

  Alfie looked at the dead puppy dog, then away to the blank windows of the Maison Bingo. He walked a hundred yards to the swimming pool; the outlet had been blocked, and scummy water lapped over the edges towards a shuttered ice-cream stall. He turned in among the caravans. One at least was inhabited, for the door, which had been left unlocked, swung open as he passed to reveal a gay little row of summer shoes and a bright cape hanging above them.

  “Is anyone in?” called Alfie.

  No one answered, so Alfie poked his head round the door. He saw the remains of breakfast for two, a lot of wine bottles, both empty and full, and, at the end of the room, occupying the entire width of the caravan, a double bunk, unmade but somehow jolly and inviting, as though it expected people to leap back into it at any moment. So someone’s having fun, thought Alfie, and his spirits lifted a little. But not for long.

  As he passed down the rows of lifeless trailers, most of which were supported by rusty iron bars or piles of brick, as he walked through the echoing toilets (his soles scraping on the dank and gritty floor), as he turned back again, through the obscenely dripping showers, out into the rain (surely it was even heavier) and down another row of soggy caravans, Alfie began to feel as low as he had ever felt in his life. A story? What story? Official incompetence? It seemed more like the wrath of Jehovah, who had apparenty decided, by contrast with the quick, clean end which he had allotted Sodom, to destroy this place by gradual infection - to let it be slowly rotted to pieces by the spreading poisons of its own rain-diluted filth.

  Well, thought Alfie, I’ll tell them about it at Billingsgate House and see if they want something made of it. It all depends what line the old man’s going to take on Canteloupe: the old man likes the idea of British Holiday Development, so he may want to give him a good, long chance; on the other hand, he won’t like the idea of its being mishandled, so he may want to crunch him straight away. These galoshes are no sodding good and this umbrella weighs a ton. Only another fifty yards, Alfie boy, then into that steaming Rolls for a lovely goblet of fire-water.

  But this was not to be. As Alfie emerged from the ranks of trailers and into view of the gate in the outer perimeter, he was greeted by an extraordinary spectacle. The door of the Rolls was wide open and three heads - Gray’s, Morrison’s, Tom’s - were absurdly sticking out of it. The heads were all turned towards the gate, through which marched Captain Detterling, carrying a limp figure over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. Behind, twitching and gesticulating, stumbled Gregory Stern. And circling round them both, kicking up her heels behind her in a desperate, jerky trot, round,and round and round, went Isobel Turbot, her mouth opening and shutting, like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy, in a series of low howls which only just carried through the rain to Alfie:

  “Eheu. Eheu. Eheu.”

  When Detterling was ten yards inside the gate he halted. Stern drew up to him and looked into his face, as if asking for instructions; while Isobel, whimpering, began to stroke the head which hung down by Detterling’s left hip. From all sides people converged on this group: Alfie from the caravans; Canteloupe, Weir and the chauffeur from Hookeby’s office; Tom, Peter and Fielding from the Rolls.

  “I couldn’t get the car up the hill,” Detterling explained to no one in particular; “and she wouldn’t let me leave him down there.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  One look at the dangling head which Isobel was caressing was enough to answer that.

  “How . . . ?”

  “For God’s sake,” said Canteloupe, “we must get out of this rain.”

  “Hookeby’s office,” Weir suggested.

  “We’ll leave Hookeby out of this.”

  Canteloupe looked round him, then walked straight through twenty yards of puddle and up the steps of the Maison Bingo. When the door wouldn’t open, he put his shoulder to it and at the second heave sent it crashing inwards. One by one the rest trailed after him, except the chauffeur, who knew his place and went back to the Rolls.

  Detterling took his burden to the far end of the Maison Bingo and laid it on the low stage. He pressed a switch on a panel in the wall, hoping to get some light, and got Harry Belafonte singing “Mary’s Boy-child” instead. Isobel, who had followed him to the stage, clapped her hands over her ears and ran towards the entrance.

  “It was my fault,” she squealed above Belafonte; “we were so happy and I knew it couldn’t last, not after what he said, and I twisted the wheel.”

  Everyone turned towards her as she stood in the door. She looked back at them with hatred, opened her mouth as if to curse them, then turned and disappeared into the rain. Fielding made to follow her.

  “Leave her,” Canteloupe said. “Let her cool off.”

  “Born on Christmas Day,” sang Belafonte, “Born on Christmas Day, Born on Christ - ”

  “ - For Christ’s sake turn that bloody thing off. What happened?”

  “We were some way behind,” said Stern in a high voice; “we couldn’t see.”

  “Could it have been what she said?” asked Tom.

  “I don’t know,” said Detterling. “They disappeared round a sharp bend. When we came round it, their car had left the road and run down an embankment . . . not very far. Could have skidded. There was nothing the matter with her except hysteria. He’d broken his neck.”

  “Who is he anyway?” said Canteloupe.

  “Mark Lewson,” said Tom.

  They all turned towards the body on the stage, rather as if Tom had uttered a summons and they expected to see the body acknowledge it. Instead of this they saw Peter Morrison with his hand in Lewson’s breast pocket.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Detterling laughed. “He’s taking action at last,” he said. “Looking for the letter.”

  “What letter?” said Tom and Alfie, like a well trained chorus.

  “No, I'm not,” said Morrison, cringing slightly. “Fielding’s got it. But I thought Lewson might have a copy, I thought it should be destroyed before anyone - ”

  “ - You've got the letter?” said Detterling to Fielding.

  “What letter?” repeated Tom and Alfie.

  “I was right,” said Peter. He held up some sheets of paper. “A photostat by the look of it.”

  “Let’s have a look,” said Weir soothingly.

  “Give it to me,” said Canteloupe.

  Peter handed over the photostat copy. Canteloupe began to read.

  “You see?” Weir kept prompting him.

  Gregory Stern sat down on the floor, although there were at least twenty rows of chairs, and started to weep.

  Tom, Detterling and Alfie crowded round Fielding, who shyly produced the original. He had been hoping to tell the full story of his ingenuity detail by detail, but this was not possible because of the incessant interruptions from Tom and Alfie. As Tom began to understand approximately what had happened and what was in the letter, his brow darkened and his eyes receded. He breathed deeply a
nd muttered words like, “Treason . . . murderer . . . exposure.” “Steady, laddie,” Alfie kept saying, though he too looked quietly furious. Meanwhile, Fielding did his best to continue his tale of Holbrook to Detterling, who was not really listening as he was too busy instructing and observing Tom.

  “So that was it,” Alfie said at last. “Someone was putting pressure on the old man. Lewson.”

  “And Lloyd-James.”

  “But neither of them even had the bloody letter,” said Tom. “That’s good, that is.”

  “They did at first. Then Holbrook must have pinched it - ”

  “ - And I,” said Fielding fatuously, “got it back.” He brandished it above his head. “For God’s sake listen to me ... As I was saying, I found Burke Lawrence at the Infantry Club, and after I’d questioned him - he thought I was an authorised investigator,- you see - after I’d quest - ”

  “ - You shut up,” said Lord Canteloupe, who was now standing on the stage by Lewson’s body as if about to make a funeral oration, “and listen to me.” He folded the photostat copy and put it in his pocket. “Now then. There’s enough here” - he tapped his pocket - “to send several highly respected public men to the Tower of London for life and make a scandal to last a generation. If it’s true. All I’ve seen is this copy.” He tapped his pocket again. “It could be a fake, it could be a joke, it proves nothing at all - unless there’s an original which will stand up to every test in the book. You apparently claim,” he said to Fielding, “to have that original. You will be so good as to hand it over to me.”

  Fielding did not move.

  “You heard. Give it to Lord Canteloupe,” said Weir smugly.

  “To the Leader of the Labour Party,” said Tom.

  “To the Director of Public Prosecutions,” said Alfie.

  “Keep it,” said Peter Morrison. And then, when Detterling laughed, “We found it.”

  “And you stop blubbering,” shouted Canteloupe to Stern, in order to have something to do while the squabble continued in the body of the hall.