A Hovering of Vultures (2 page)

“I'm a bit worried about this place. It's going to be very crowded, isn't it?”

“I'm afraid so, especially just before and just after the meetings. We may have to restrict access at times. Perhaps have a series of viewings every half hour. Yes—that's the best idea.”

“I was just thinking, sir, if I'm showing folks around upstairs, there's no one keeping an eye on things down here. I know some of the papers are just copies, but there are the Susannah Sneddon typescripts, and those first editions you say are so valuable . . .”

“I shall be here, and I shall do my bit of escorting round. If you are upstairs I shall be downstairs. Not that I think you need worry. These are fans, and very respectable people. Still, I hope they'll be a lively, varied bunch: plenty of young people, people from all walks of life. We don't want to be too respectable. There used to be an air of smug, middle-class self-congratulation about the Brontë Society, and I wouldn't want the Sneddon Fellowship to get like that. Though the Brontë people have livened up an awful lot recently.”

“I wouldn't know about that, sir.”

“No, no, of course not.”

“Oh, one more thing, sir.”

“Yes?”

Mrs Marsden was showing signs of hesitation. Eventually she just pointed towards the floor by the kitchen grate.

“Do I say anything about
that,
sir?”

He was always telling her to call him Gerald, but she could never quite manage it. He fingered his little beard.

“Ah yes, that is the question, isn't it? On the whole I think
not.
With the more casual trippers you will get in the summer I think yes—it's regrettable, but that's the sort of thing they will be looking for. With most of our visitors this weekend, I feel they would appreciate a more tasteful approach, a more discreet one. So I would say if they ask, then point it out and move straight on. Otherwise don't mention it.”

Mrs Marsden nodded her agreement, but the two of them lingered for a moment, still looking down at the brown stain
on the bare floorboard, stale witness to the fact that it was there, close by the kitchen range, that Joshua Sneddon had killed his sister with an axe, before going out into the spinney at the end of the field and shooting himself.

T
he InterCity 125 pulled out from Kings Cross on time and began its leisurely journey to Leeds. As usual it was full-ish, though there were a few empty seats left for passengers getting on at its usual stopping places. Some of the travellers were still fussing with baggage and getting down books and reading glasses for the journey; others were wondering when the buffet-bar would open. Gregory Waite heaved his rucksack and his girl-friend's neat little suitcase on to the rack and sat down, grinning at her.

“You're a smart packer, I'll give you that,” he said. “That suitcase is as light as air.”

“I was just thinking it odd that you should need so much more for a walking holiday than I need for a cultural one,” said Gillian Parkin, shaking her lustrous bobbed brown head of hair.

“No mystery about that. I'll be roughing it while you're in the lap of luxury at the Black Horse.”

“From what I hear of it the Black Horse is far from the lap of luxury. It's a rather dingy pub these days, in spite of its associations with Branwell Brontë and Joshua Sneddon.”

“Did Joshua drink, in the serious sense?”

“No, that wasn't one of his problems.”

“What was? You'd better tell me the essential points about this pair, so that I can at least hold my own tonight.”

Gillian Parkin sighed. She was an intelligent, enthusiastic twenty-four year old, and it always depressed her when people hadn't heard of her thesis topic.

“You really ought to know about them,” she said. “It's not as though you don't read.”

“I read plenty. I'm a very well-read oik. I just haven't caught up with Susannah and Joshua Sneddon. If anyone had asked me out of the blue I suppose I'd have guessed they were characters from a minor Thomas Hardy novel.”

“Well, they're not. They were brother and sister, born on this rather bleak farm just outside Micklewike. Their mother was very religious, but also a great reader—dreamy, romantic. She saw education as a means of escaping from a life she hated, or at least as a means of escape for her children. This meant the children always had books about them—they used to trudge down to the free library at Batley Bridge at least once a week.”

“When was this? Victoria's last years?”

“Edwardian, more like. Though they were both born in the early 'nineties. Joshua joined up in 1914, but he was invalided out quite soon. And he had to take over the farm when his father died in 1916, though there is abundant evidence that it's the last thing he would have done by choice. Their mother died in the great influenza epidemic just after the Armistice, and from then on they were there on their own.”

“Scribble, scribble, scribbling?”

“Yes, pretty much so. It's thought they wrote a lot in childhood, but none of it survives beyond the odd school exercise book. But Susannah's first book was accepted and published in 1921.”

“Hot breathing in the hedgerow?”

Gillian looked at him disapprovingly.

“Be your age. It was rural, yes, and there was love interest, yes. I've never seen why the combination of those two things should be regarded as funny.”

“Sorry I spoke. Go on.”

“Well, from then on there was a book every year or eighteen months until she died. There was a mild success with
Between the Furrows
in 1923, and something of a succès-de-scandale with
The Barren Fields
in 1927. The Home Secretary, Joynson-Hicks, wanted to ban it.”

“Is that the man Waugh was getting at? ‘Powerful against literature, the Home Secretary'?”

“You are a
very
well-read oik.”

“You are too kind, lady . . . Anyway, no prizes for guessing what they were getting up to in the barren fields, or even between the furrows. How did she summon up all this steamy passion? Who was the man in her own life? Not her brother, I hope?”

“Well, there is a school of thought that says so, but not a large one. There are suggestions that she was in love with a farmer from over Oxenthorpe way.”

“What happened? Killed in the trenches?”

“He was married. There were difficulties, in those days, if one of you happened to be married.”

This was a thoroughly underhand reference to an episode in Gregory's past to which he himself had confessed, in an unguarded moment. He ignored it.

“What about the brother? He wrote too, didn't he?”

“Yes—most unlikely books. He was bitten by the modernist bug—read early Joyce, Ezra Pound, all that sort of thing. He wrote experimental novels published by a tiny publishing firm called the Frolic Press. Perhaps this name led the critics to assume the books were just meant as a joke, though the humour was often very bitter. Anyway, they met with nothing but ridicule, when they were noticed at all. They sold in tens, and Joshua made practically no money from them. The farm was often in difficulties because he was a lousy farmer.”

“Walking around thinking of agenbite of inwit when he should have been ploughing a straight furrow?”

“Something like that.”

“Meanwhile the sister was doing rather well? So what was the relationship between them like?”

“More and more fraught, apparently. They only had each other, you see. Neither of them mixed much in the village.”

“By the way, how do you
know
the situation between them got more and more fraught?”

“By the result.”

“Unscholarly, but go on.”

“When Susannah had free time she wrote. Joshua had very little, but he did manage three slim novels. Tension grew and grew. Even the village must have sensed it, because there was very little surprise when it happened.”

“When what happened?”

“One day in 1932 Joshua got a brief note from the Frolic Press rejecting his fourth book. He brooded over it all morning. Then he came into the kitchen with an axe and killed Susannah. He made himself a cup of tea, wrote a note that just said ‘I did it', then went out into the little wood nearby and shot himself through the head. Like everything else he
did, his suicide was not a great success. He was still alive when they found him, though he died on the way to the hospital.”

“My God, what a story!” said Gregory Waite appreciatively. “It sounds like
Wuthering Heights
rewritten by Joe Orton. It must have knocked the tabloids for six at the time.”

“They didn't have tabloids—or not many—at the time. Actually there wasn't all that much publicity. Micklewike was pretty remote then—it wasn't a touristy area, as it is now—and Susannah just wasn't well-known
enough
for the newspapers to get hysterical. There was a very mild sensation, which probably led to one or two reprints of the early novels. That was about it.”

“Until when?”

“Until the Untamed Shrew Press came along, early in the 'eighties, and reprinted
The Barren Fields
and then all the others. Since then interest has grown and grown.”

“Among whom? Male, female? Old, young? Is it all middle-aged women looking for a successor to Mr Rochester?”

Gregory's tone, pre-feminist-revolution as it so often was, irritated Gillian. She flinched.

“All ages, both sexes. But she does seem to have a particular appeal to the young.”

As if to illustrate her words, Gregory watched as a young black man, two rows down, reached up into his Adidas bag on the rack, took out a copy of
The Black Byre,
and settled down to read it.

• • •

At the far end of the carriage Mr Rupert Coggenhoe, author of
Starveacre,
made himself comfortable for the journey north
to Leeds. He had glanced at the headlines of his
Daily Telegraph
(“Major is not his own man, says Thatcher”) before noting which newspapers and which books his fellow travellers in Standard Class were reading. This was normal practice for the professional author, and Rupert Coggenhoe was a very professional author indeed. He had written, as Jed Parker, novels about money, power and autopilot sex when Jeffrey Archer was in vogue. He had written, as Chantalle Derivaux, a steamy saga of sex, glitz and the fashion industry. He had written a chronicle of working-class Bootle, and, going further back, had even written books about a sexy secret agent and historical novels about various pathetic or fascinating royal ladies
(Fair Rosamund, The Swan Neck
). He had, in fact, so many aliases that his real name was known only to his agent and to his immediate neighbours in Luton. He was a professional writer, and he sold very respectably.

Respectably, however, was not how he wanted to sell. He yearned to sell in millions. He coveted special displays in W. H. Smiths, queues down Piccadilly when he signed in Hatchards, appearances on Wogan, special interviews in the colour supplements. The fact that these desiderata had never come his way he blamed on his agent, his editor, the distribution side at his publishers, and above all the publicity people. So hopeless were these last (“They couldn't sell icecream in the Sahara desert” he used to say) that he was forced to arrange most of the publicity for his books himself. But even then his fluent tongue and rather distinguished profile didn't secure anything but reluctant media interest.

Now he settled himself down, feet projecting out into the gangway, and read a copy of
Starveacre,
the book held poised so as to be visible to people as they made their way to the buffet. Two carriages down, in a seat with her back to the
engine, his wife did exactly the same, making sure that the title was visible to those on their way back from the buffet. That was what she had been told to do, and that was what she did.

• • •

Detective Constable Dexter (“Charlie”) Peace was getting a trifle bored with
The Black Byre.
He had fetched it down when he did because he had been listening in to the conversation of the young couple some seats down from him, and it suited his sense of drama to do it just at that moment. In any case he had to get as many as possible of the Sneddons' works read. He had moderately enjoyed
The Barren Fields,
had been slightly less enthusiastic about
Orchard's End,
and was now becoming bored with
The Black Byre.
He was finding the absence of irony or any other sort of humour rather oppressive. Life with Susannah can hardly have been a bundle of laughs. He imagined her as so whole-hearted, so breathlessly committed, so devoted in her relationships that he himself would have run a mile from her. To be loved by such a woman would be sheer hell.

Mind you, he'd been interested in the Introduction to
The Black Byre,
which had given details of the murder-suicide that he had not come across before. Now if he had been investigating
that
business he'd have known exactly what to do: what steps he'd have to take to check that what
seemed
to have happened was what actually happened; what weight to give to the various experts' reports; how to present his own report.

He would have been able, too, to make his own judgments on the people involved, and that would be the most interesting
part. The fact that Joshua Sneddon, after murdering his sister, had drunk a cup of tea, smoked a cigarette and (according to the Introduction he had just read) stubbed out the cigarette on his dead sister's bare arm seemed to him immensely significant: this was not just an intense fit of jealousy but a hideous subterranean rage that had been boiling and seething in him for years. A rage that persisted even after murder had to be a terrible thing indeed. No, the deaths of the Sneddons he could have coped with, taken completely in his stride.