Set in stone, p.23
Set in Stone, page 23
part #10 of Robert Goddard Series
“Mr Wisdom?” I ventured after squeezing into a narrow space at the bar beside him and buying a drink.
“Just Wisdom,” he replied in a reedy voice, letting his glasses slip down his nose so that he could give me a darting glance of his water-rat eyes.
“Your landlady said I might find you here.”
“Did she?” He grimaced. “It’s the wrong day of the week for a Lottery win. So, it can’t be good news.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Bet you’re not, Mr…”
“Sheridan. Tony Sheridan. Actually, it’s really a former fellow tenant of yours I’m looking for. William Hall.”
“Is that right?”
“You know him?”
“He used to live at Hatchmead. I still do.”
“Why did he leave?”
“A better question is why I stay. Vi Thursby’s not the motherly sort, let me tell you.”
“She said you and he…got on.”
“Chatting to her’s not worth the secondary smoking. You can’t rely on a word she coughs out.”
“But did you…get on with him?”
“We might have passed the time of day.”
“Here?”
“He’s not a drinking man.”
““He’s not.” Present tense. Sounds like you still know him.”
“I never said that.”
“You don’t seem to be saying much at all.”
“You catch on fast.”
“Look.” I pulled the envelope holding James Milner’s confession out of my coat pocket. “I’m trying to contact Mr Hall on an urgent matter.”
“Life and death?”
“You could say that.”
“I just did.”
“This is his writing. Recognize it?”
Wisdom stared down at Matt’s name and address. “You said your name was Sheridan, not Prior.”
“Matt Prior is a friend of mine. He’s ill.”
“What kind of ill?”
“Car accident. He’s in hospital.”
“Accidents.” Wisdom wrinkled his nose thoughtfully. “Nasty things.”
“Yes. They are.”
“Sheridan.” He nodded. His brow furrowed. “Don’t I remember that name? In the paper, a couple of months back. Accidental death. A cliff fall, wasn’t it?”
“You have a good memory, Wisdom.”
“For some things. You weren’t related to that Sheridan, were you?”
“My wife.”
“Sorry.” A tilt of his head seemed to be a signal that his sorrow was genuine.
“Thanks.”
“I lost my wife quite a few years ago. Still wear the ring, though.” He pushed his wedding ring proud of the finger with his thumb and frowned at it, then looked up at me. “You, too, I see.”
“Yes.”
“Mrs Sheridan wear a ring, did she?”
“Of course.”
“I thought it might have gone out of fashion.”
“No. Look, I—”
“Which finger?”
“What?”
“Which finger did she wear it on?”
I stared at him, more puzzled than I was exasperated. It was a bizarre question. People wear their wedding ring on their ring finger. He knew that. Of course he did. Everybody knows that. But it wasn’t true of you, was it, Marina? Not after you broke your ring finger a few years ago. The break left you with an enlarged knuckle, so you had to wear the ring on your middle finger. A trivial fact known to few. And it shouldn’t have been known to this man at all. But, if it wasn’t, why was he asking? And if it was, the same question applied.
“Which finger?” he gently prompted.
“Middle.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. Why did you ask?”
“Curiosity.”
“Nothing more?”
“What more could there be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. And I don’t know that there’s anything I can tell you about Bill Hall, either. Not a forthcoming man, our Bill. Not one to tell you his life story at second or third acquaintance. Or a hundred and third, come to that.”
“I’m anxious to contact him.”
“You said.” There was that little tilt of the head again, the one he seemed to reserve for his more sincere remarks. Message received and understood, it somehow implied. Or was I kidding myself? I couldn’t be sure. There was either more to Wisdom than met the eye—or less. But no amount of interrogation was going to clinch the matter, one way or the other. “If I see him, I’ll be sure to tell him.”
“Do you expect to see him?”
“No. I’ve not clapped eyes on him since he moved out of Hatchmead. I’ve no idea where he is. Torquay, or Timbuktu, or Tobermory. Your guess is as good as mine.”
“I doubt it is.”
“Well, some people are better guessers than others, it’s true. I keep in trim.” He nodded down at the newspaper. “You have to at my age.”
“And what’s your guess?”
“That unlikely things do happen.” He swallowed some Mackeson. “Not often, but not never.”
As soon as I left the Top Hat, doubt started to undermine my frail confidence in Wisdom as a conduit for communication with Cedric Milner. He might be no more than a lonely old man, eager to grab the merest hint of intrigue. Running verbal rings round me had to be more exciting than solving last week’s crossword.
I didn’t really believe that, of course. But I was tired, my mind numbed by too many questions. The only people I could trust absolutely were out of reach. And the people I wanted to trust instead were compromised by discoveries I’d have preferred not to make. Yet, as Daisy had said, once you know something, you can’t unknow it. Driving across Dartmoor that evening, my thoughts refused to leave the subject alone. Had Lucy come this way after dropping Daisy at Newton Abbot? Had she planned what she meant to do?
Beyond Okehampton, in the empty stretches of northwest Devon, fingers of declining sunlight stretched themselves across the landscape, casting shadows of trees and hedges and a solitary speeding car beside and behind me. I didn’t know what I was running from any more than I knew what I was running towards. But everything was open to question now. Everything was tinged with doubt.
When I entered Stanacombe, only the must of desertion and neglect was waiting for me. There was nothing else. Our life there, our life together, was suddenly and tangibly past. This was the moment, I realized, when the future should have arrived. This was when and how I was supposed to begin forgetting you. But I couldn’t forget a past I was still rewriting. Why had Wisdom asked about your ring? How could he have known?
And then there was the guilt I’d spent so long talking myself out of. Wisdom had noticed I still wore a ring. But I couldn’t help remembering lying with Lucy, your sister, in the bed she shared with Matt, my friend, and all the time—every time our ring had been on my finger. You were dead. I couldn’t betray you. Yet I could betray myself.
I rang the hospital and was told there’d been no change in Matt’s condition. I thought of Lucy and the anxiety she was enduring on his account, compounded now by my unexplained absence. Then I thought of the day of your death. One figure at the top of Henna Cliff—or two? There was a single true version of events. But in my mind all the possibilities—the mad, the sad and the downright unthinkable—swirled together until I couldn’t focus on what was probable or conceivable any more, until everything was as unlikely as everything else.
I’d given Wisdom our number, so I resisted the strong temptation to unplug the phone. Lucy didn’t call, as I’d feared she might. What she was thinking I couldn’t imagine. Perhaps the Priors weren’t leaving her much time to think about anything. Or perhaps Stanacombe was the last place she’d have expected me to be.
Nobody else called, either. There was no reason why they should. The idea of Cedric Milner contacting me, or even knowing I wanted him to, began to seem more and more absurd. I made up the bed and lay there, too cold and weary to sleep, staring into the utter blankness of the night until it filled my mind.
Early next morning I drove into Bude to buy a few basic foodstuffs: milk, butter, bread, cheese. I wasn’t sure why I was stocking up, even to this basic level. I had no intention of staying at Stanacombe for long. But then I had no real intentions of any kind. I must have been on autopilot, I suppose, functioning according to your domestic rules. Except that you’d have gone to the grocer and the baker in Holsworthy, not Bude’s very own soulless superstore.
It was in the car park, as I was leaving, that I recognized the policeman who’d been waiting for me at Stanacombe to tell me you were dead. He was off duty, dressed casually, unravelling himself from a car which looked too small for him. A woman was with him, and a child she was busy strapping into a pushchair. It was the Saturday morning supermarket run for him and his family. On an impulse, I walked across and said hello.
At first he couldn’t remember how we’d met. Why should he have done? It hadn’t been memorable for him. It was what he did for a living. Eventually, he did remember. “How are you getting on, then?” he asked with wary amiability.
“I’m not sure,” I replied, with total accuracy. “Could I ask you about a couple of things?”
Denying himself the start of a tour of the shopping aisles didn’t seem to be a huge sacrifice. He told his wife to go ahead and he’d catch up. “What sort of things?” he asked.
“There never was any doubt about…the outcome of the inquest, was there?”
“Why should there be?”
“Well, I’ve sometimes wondered if…it could have been more complicated than we thought.”
“Complicated?”
“I mean, how can we be sure it was an accident?”
“The coroner was satisfied.”
“But you’d have…checked other possibilities, wouldn’t you?”
“You seemed adamant, as I recall, Mr Sheridan, that your wife wasn’t the suicidal type.”
“I didn’t mean suicide.”
“What are you suggesting, then?”
“In situations like this, how do you rule out…foul play?”
“There were no indications of anything like that.”
“But what indications would there be? I mean, if my wife was taken by surprise, while she was near the edge of the cliff, there wouldn’t be any signs of a struggle, would there? And there were no witnesses to her fall. Nobody can say for certain what happened.”
“No.” He frowned. “They can’t.”
“So, there has to be some doubt. Doesn’t there?”
“Not as far as we’re concerned, Mr Sheridan. It was just a tragic accident. The case is closed. Unless…” He shrugged.
“Unless what?”
“You can give my superiors in CID a good reason to reopen it.” He looked me in the eye. “Can you?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Not really.”
I drove back to Stanacombe and drank some coffee, standing in the kitchen and looking out at the garden you’d had all sorts of plans for. It was overgrown now, the grass lank, the shrubs straggling. Nature was making short work of our aspirations for the future.
It was a fine morning, though clouds were bunching out to the west and there was a keen edge to the breeze. I put on my boots and walked out across the fields to the cliff path. The spring flowers were gone now, reabsorbed within the greenery of the hedges. But the sea didn’t change. It was as blue and limitless as it must have appeared to you that afternoon, lit from the west rather than the east, the shadows reaching inland behind you, not out into the surf, as they did for me.
I turned north, towards Duckpool and the cliffs beyond. Morwenstow was where I was going. Morwenstow and Henna Cliff, where I could sit on the bench by the stile and remember the times when you’d sat beside me.
I got there an hour later, scrambling up the rocky path from the bridge across the stream below the cliff. I’d only passed a couple of walkers on the way. It was still too early for most of them. That’s why I thought I’d have the cliff top to myself. But, as I approached the stile, I saw there was a figure sitting on the bench: a white-haired man, smoking a cigarette. He was dressed in tweed, with a yellow woollen scarf knotted round his neck.
He looked round and up at me as I mounted the stile. His face was lined and bearded, his beard merely grey where his hair was snowy, a schoolboyish quiff of it wafting across his forehead in the breeze. Our eyes met. His were a rheumy blue, like two small mirrors of the ocean. There was a faint tremor in his hand, where he held the cigarette. He drew on it, still looking at me as I climbed down onto his side of the stile.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Good morning,” he responded. The words came slowly, gravelly and unaccented. “Come far?”
“No. I live just to the south.”
“Whereabouts?”
“A house called Stanacombe. D’you know it?”
“I’m a stranger here,” he said, his tone somehow implying this wasn’t an answer to my question.
“On holiday?”
“No. I’m here to meet someone.”
“Up here.”
“Yes.”
“Strange place for a rendezvous.”
“Not if you like to be able to see people coming.” He glanced around at the empty fields and the blank sea-filled horizon. “But I don’t exactly have an appointment.”
“No?”
“This was just a guess on my part. Somewhere I thought he might turn up. Somewhere that has…associations for him.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“Expecting. Or hoping.”
I looked straight at him. “My name’s Tony Sheridan.”
“I know.”
“Yes. I thought you probably did.”
“Why don’t you join me?”
I walked across to the bench and sat down beside him. He offered me a cigarette. I took one and he lit it for me. The taste was pungent and unfamiliar. I coughed.
“Russian,” he said expressionlessly.
“In a Benson and Hedges pack?”
“A precaution. It doesn’t pay to advertise.”
“Hence William Hall, rather than Cedric Milner.”
“Who put you on to me?”
“Daisy.”
He nodded. “Technically, a breach of our understanding.”
“I left her little choice.”
“Because of my communication with your friend?”
“Among other things.”
“I gather he’s ill.”
“Severely injured in a car crash.”
“Accidental?”
“Yes.”
“Sure of that?”
“Absolutely.”
“Only it can be difficult. To be absolutely sure of such things.”
“Why did you send him your brother’s confession?”
“Why do you think?”
“As a warning of some kind.”
“If that’s what you think, you must be aware that there’s something to warn him about.”
“Otherways.”
“It did for James. And for Ann. Since returning, I’ve discovered there have gone on being victims. There’s no need for the Priors to be added to the list.”
“You could have explained that to Matt face to face.”
“Not without breaking my word to Daisy.”
“The penalty for which could have been exposure for what you are: a spy, a traitor, a wanted criminal.”
“Do I look like any of those things, Mr Sheridan?” He watched the smoke he’d just breathed out drift away into the air. “I’m just a harmless old man.”
“Like Wisdom.”
“Not quite like Wisdom.”
“Why did you leave Hatchmead?”
“Because I’d been there long enough.”
“Where did you go?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“What do I need to know?”
“That Otherways is dangerous for those who live there, or are close to those who live there. When I first read James’s confession, I thought the effect the house seemed to have had on him must have been self-induced. But since I came back here—”
“Why did you come back?”
“Because I’m an Englishman. This is where I was born and this is where I’ll die.”
“But conceived in Russia.”
He gave a wintry little smile. “And by the same token to be buried there? I don’t think so.”
“How long have you been back?”
“Long enough to become familiar with the recent history of Otherways.”
“And that’s convinced you your brother didn’t imagine its baleful influence?”
“I once surveyed the place, you know. To satisfy my intellectual curiosity about Posnan’s design. About the mathematics of it, I mean. It always seemed to me that there was something odd going on with the ratios of curvature.”
“And was there?”
“Not exactly. That was the oddest part of it. I could never assemble a consistent set of figures. Every time I double checked…they changed.”
“That’s not possible.”
“It shouldn’t be, certainly.”
“What did you expect Matt to do after you’d sent him the confession?”
“I hoped he would leave Otherways. For his sake—and for his wife’s.”
“You’ve met Lucy, I believe.”
“She acted as Daisy’s messenger.”
“How would you describe her state of mind on the day she came to see you?”
“Calm. Decisive. Detached.”
“Did she say where she was going afterwards?”
“No. She volunteered nothing.”
“Nobody knows, you see. She had a car. But she put Daisy on the train at Newton Abbot.”
“Daisy was with her?” He looked round at me, eyes wide with surprise. “In Torquay?”
“Apparently.”
“I didn’t know that.” He looked away again and made a slow sweeping gesture with his free hand. “If I had…”
