Death's Jest-Book (31 page)

Tues
Dec 18th

Dear
Mr Pascoe,

I
must have been exhausted by yesterday's adventures as the sun was
shining brightly when I was woken by the sound of activity somewhere
in the chalet. I emerged from my bedroom to find a young woman with
bright red cheeks and wearing what I presume is some version of
traditional costume, a combination giving her the look of an animated
doll, making my breakfast. None of your muesli either but a
substantial British fry-up!

My Coppelia
chatted incessantly, and incomprehensibly, till, as she was leaving,
she pointed at the letter I wrote last night and said,
'Post?' I
quickly scribbled your address (excellent quality stationery,
don't you think?) and off she went with it.

After breakfast, I decided to get
my bearings and, wrapping myself up well, I went for a stroll around
the policies.

The grounds of the castle are
extensive and lovely, and made even more so by last evening's
snowfall and this morning's frost. But my appreciation that I was in
a wilderness of groaning glaciers and towering Alps has proved quite
false! True, looking to the south.or west I can see the white swell
of the Jura, but in the other direction the land is much flatter and
predominantly pastoral. Nonetheless to one whose boundaries were for
so long prison walls and security fences, this sense of space and
distance was exhilarating. I strolled without plan, drinking in the
beauty of the frost-laced landscape where every tree seemed festooned
with glittering diamonds which seemed to my suddenly poetic mind to
harbinge the arrival of that still fairer jewel, the lovely Emerald!

What pickleheads love, or lust,
makes of us rational thinkers!

Eventually, shame at finding
myself behaving more like an adolescent boy than a rational adult
made me force my mind back to the real purpose of my presence here. I
recalled my feelings of the previous night when I found myself
confronted by those weird paintings which reminded me so much of
Beddoes' play. The circumstances and my state of mind had been
peculiarly Gothic, of course, and probably in daylight there would be
very little correspondence.

I decided to test this out and,
more by luck than judgment, found my way back to the ruined chapel.

I saw at once that I was right
and my impressions of the night before had been considerably
distorted. In daylight the chapel was much smaller than I had
recalled and thus even further removed from the 'spacious Gothic
cathedral' of Beddoes' play. Nor was there anything there to
correspond to the sepulchre of the dukes of Munsterberg from which
the resurrected Wolfram emerges. As for the frescos, there seemed to
be much less to see by daylight than moonlight. Any fancy I may have
entertained that perhaps Holbein or one of his pupils had popped
across from Basel to try out designs for his Dance of Death soon
evaporated. The style of these is pretty crude, completely lacking
the Holbein wit and energy my imagination had given them the night
before.

Yet I found myself thinking that
Beddoes lived in north Switzerland for some time. And doesn't Gosse
say in his memoir that when he fled from Zurich after the troubles of
1839, he went to the neighbouring canton of Aargau, which is where I
am now?

Brooding on these matters, I
strolled away from the chapel not paying much heed to my direction,
till finally I came out of the forest at the crest of a gentle rise
overlooking the castle. Distantly I saw a car crawling up the
snow-covered driveway towards the main entrance, and all thought of
Beddoes and rationality went clean out of my mind.

This had to be the car bringing
Emerald to Fichtenburg. Without conscious decision, I was running
down the slope, driven by my desire to be the first person to greet
her as she stepped out.

I believe I even had some crazy
notion of throwing my cagoule on to the ground before her, so that
her dainty feet wouldn't have to touch the snow.

Well, naturally I paid for my
impetuosity, and instead of the perfect gentle knight greeting his
lady with due courtesy, the first glimpse the inmates of the car had
of me was more like a court jester desperate for laughs, rolling down
the slope in a human snowball.

By the time I picked myself up
and brushed off the worst of the snow and made my way to the
forecourt, the new arrivals were already unloading their vehicle and
Frau Buff was standing in the doorway of the castle to greet them.

One glance told me that Emerald
was not among them. How could I have imagined she might be travelling
in a battered VW Estate with snow chains!

The party consisted of three
young women, all strangers to me, though the smallest of them did
have something familiar about her.

This familiarity and the nature
of the huge misunderstanding I had been labouring under became clear
when we exchanged introductions:

The small
woman was Musetta Lupin! This was the
Tochter
Frau Buff had
been preparing for. A moment's thought should have told me that the
divine Emerald in search of winter sport wouldn't waste her time and
beauty on a little pond like Blutensee; she would be adorning some
fashionable resort where the beautiful people strut their stuff.

Naturally I was at pains to
conceal my disappointment, but when the girls (for that is what they
are; all under twenty and none of them, I suspect, much experienced
in life) invited me to share the lunch that Frau Buff had prepared
for them, I refused politely and returned to the chalet to nurse my
wound. And to seek solace in starting this letter to you.

How lucky I am to have someone
like yourself I feel I can turn to in my troubles, though I sometimes
suspect that my good luck may be based on your bad luck. What I mean
is, I would have anticipated that a man of your ability and
amiability -would have napped his wings and flown far afield during
the years following our first encounter.

Please don't be offended. I'm not
belittling your achievement. For many officers, being a Detective
Chief Inspector at your age would seem pretty .fair progress. And you
were very lowly (meaning highly!) rated in the Syke; a clever, sharp
player, one not easily deceived, and offering you a bung was a waste
of time! Your one perceived weakness was your reluctance to cut
corners. Not that they rated you soft. Oh no. Hard as nails and a
terrier once you took hold. I didn't need anyone to give me chapter
and verse on that!

The main hope of the MYCF (the
Mid-Yorkshire Criminal Fancy!) was that you'd soon take off, leaving
space for someone more malleable, and I doubt if anyone would have
put money on you still being in your present job these several years
on.

So why are you, I ask myself?

Could it be that, like an elegant
schooner sailing in the lee of a huge battle-scarred man o' war, you
have been both protected from the weather and at the same time had
some of the wind taken out of your sails? In other words, is it the
Good Ship Dalziel which in some way has hindered the fair and speedy
voyage which all have mapped for you?

This is not to aim any sniping
criticism at the dear Superintendent. What use to snipe at
Juggernaut? He is, you will not be surprised to learn, the Public
Enemy Number One of the MYCF, their Hound of Heaven, the man they
most love to hate.

Oh, do not let yourself be hidden
too long in his huge shadow, dear friend, condemned to do the
flitting of the bat. Rather let yourself be the rapid falcon who
perches on the fabled roc's shoulders until those mighty pinions have
carried him as high as they can - then at last launches himself into
blue empyrean!

But I fear I have let enthusiasm
carry me into impertinence, and, worse, euphuism. My apologies. I
shall not send this letter till I have pondered whether I have earned
the right to speak to you with the frankness my heart so desires
between us.

Fri
Dec 21st

I
don't know whether I've earned that right, but if I haven't I must
purchase it on credit for once more I find myself in emotional
turmoil and, like an addict turning to his drug of choice, I find my
hand reaching out for my pen.

Let me take you back to that
first day at Fichtenburg.

I wasn't -left alone for long to
brood over Emerald's non-arrival. Early in the afternoon I heard a
knocking at my door and I found the girls had come down to skate on
the lake, which I only now noticed someone had swept clear of snow
during the morning. How rich a man must be to employ so many silent
workers to keep him comfortable! Shyly, the girls asked whether I
would mind if they used the chalet verandah for putting their skates
on. Naturally I said of course not, feel free to use all its
facilities. Then they said they'd brought a spare pair of skates and
would I care to join them? I replied I didn't skate. And they giggled
like Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing and Peep-Bo and said it was a doddle.

It wasn't! But
it was good knockabout fun. They were all pretty expert and each took
it in turn to act as my tutor and, more importantly, supporter while
the other two whizzed around with vigorous grace. There is nothing
like making a fool of yourself for breaking the ice (not quite
literally) between young people, and nothing like being
in statu
pupillari
for making you feel young! So by the time we all
retired to the chalet for in their cases a cooling and in mine a
warming drink, we were chatting away like any bunch of kids.

It turns out that they are all
teachers at the International School in Strasbourg. Zazie is (guess!)
French, Hildi is Austrian, and Mouse is of course English, but
they're all fluent in each other's languages and pretty hot, so far
as I can make out, at many others. Zazie is by far the prettiest,
full of vivacity and natural grace, definitely the girl to take to
the ball. Hildi is stocky and muscular. I suspect she never misses
her daily work-out in the gym, and from one or two things that were
said I gather she is a top-notch cross-country skier. If I get lost
in a blizzard, it's Hildi I want to come looking for me! As for
Mouse, well, she isn't pretty, that's for sure. In fact she's plain
plain, with many of her mother's features but none of that dominatrix
edge which can provoke a sexual shiver. And she's almost as timid as
her sobriquet. I'm sure she's great with young kids and it's probably
my childish antics on the lake that made her relax with me.

It seems she's spending Christmas
here with her mother's party and. her friends have just come for a
few days of pre-festive frolics. It was a subject of some mirth that
Linda's approval of their visit had been qualified by a warning not
to disturb the guest in the chalet, whom they'd pictured as some
ancient scholar, impatient of company, interested only in his books
and in need of absolute silence.

Well, during the next couple of
days there was practically no silence, lots of company and not much
scholarship, though I did make use of their linguistic skills. I
showed them the chapel and explained my interest in it. Hildi, who
had a genuine rather than a casual interest in antiquities, said I
should ask Frau Buff about it and volunteered to interpret, so off we
all went to beard our chatelaine in her den. Buff's knowledge of the
family history was extensive if anecdotal, and she shared this with
us as she took us on a tour of the castle, including the unused
apartments which take up more than half of it.

Johannes Stimmer (she told us),
the founder of the family's fortunes, was a mercenary soldier whose
military talent gained him rapid promotion and who managed the
difficult balancing act of both amassing considerable wealth,
surviving the country's many political changes, and preserving his
reputation as a social radical during the last quarter of the
eighteenth century. After Waterloo, he decided for reasons ranging
from status to security that it was time the family had its own
personal fortified seat and purchased Fichtenburg from its previous
owners, who'd managed to back every wrong horse that had run across
Switzerland in the past fifty years. (His descendants had clearly
moved far enough away from old Joe's radicalism to gain admittance
into Linda's circle of friends, I observed slyly, and to my delight,
Mouse laughed.)

Frau Buff also
provided two explanations of the name
Blutensee
(bleeding
lake). One is that at certain seasons the last rays of the setting
sun catch it in such a way as to turn the waters red. The other is
that during the long independence struggle against the Habsburgs in
the fourteenth century, a marauding troop of Leopold's cavalry
surprised the castle during a wedding celebration, massacred everyone
they could lay sword on, and threw their bodies in the lake.
Naturally (like Beddoes, I'm sure) I prefer the latter!

As we were walking through one of
the unused rooms whose walls were lined with murky oil paintings,
something must have registered in that corner-of-the-eye way and at
the door I turned back to view the pictures again.

There it was, a modestly sized
pen-and-ink wash of three young men, posed in front of what looked
like the ruined chapel, and wearing Elizabethan doublet and hose.

Two things hit
me. The first was the artist's name, scrawled rather modestly and
obscurely in the bottom left-hand corner. It read
G. Keller.

Now the only
Keller I have heard of is Gottfried of that ilk, the Swiss writer.
You probably know his autobiographical novel,
Green Henry,
whose
hero, like Keller himself, trains as an artist but ultimately,
recognizing his lack of real talent, turns to literature. Well, the
picture certainly suggested that, if G did stand for Gottfried, he'd
made the right decision! But more interesting to me was the
recollection that Beddoes had been acquainted with Keller, who shared
his radical views, and that, according to Gosse, it was in Keller's
company that Thomas had fled from Zurich to Aargau.