The Grail Tree (13 page)

‘Did Henry set them every night?’

‘Without fail.’

I asked to see his books. They were theological, travel, literary and biography. But who ever heard of a wildlife enthusiast with no books about wildlife? Outside, I walked to and fro across the garden. Electronic cells were set in the mortar of the balustrade. You couldn’t reach the boat’s mooring without activating the alarm. The tripwire ran from the river to the house. However you reached the boat, you’d create
some
sort of a racket. I had one crumpet for the road, and said my thanks.

‘Are you any nearer, Lovejoy?’

‘Give me time, Martha, and I’ll say yes.’

Martha gave me a lift back to the village. I waved at the lovable Constable Jilks to brighten his day and got Martha to drop me at the chapel to show the constabulary what posh friends I’d got.

Lydia was walking round the cottage. She jumped a mile when I bowled up.

‘Admiring the view?’ I joked. I momentarily wished I was in a Lagonda in which I could screech to a stop like Honkworth does in his massive roadster, but caught myself in time. Man’s desire to impress a bird has a very bad record.

‘Yes,’ Lydia said, all misty, gazing at the obnoxious view. ‘Isn’t it just beautiful?’

‘Eh?’ I peered. She actually meant it. I cast a glance at the river below, the valley’s green shoulder, the woods and fields and a few cows noshing grass. ‘Do you mean the viaduct?’

A lovely railway still runs over the river a mile off, though trees obscure full sight of it. There are seven luscious brick arches soaring from the fields so the railway can straddle the obnoxious countryside and passengers need not notice it if they don’t want.

‘Of course not.’ She smiled at me. ‘The fields. The farms. How lucky you are.’

‘Come inside,’ I said, thinking: I’ve got another nutter here. I always seem to draw the short straw. ‘None of that’s man-made.’

‘But it’s still beautiful.’

‘How can it be?’ I decided to brew up for her. She was the sort who’d admire my domestic skills.

‘Because it’s alive, and pretty.’ She shelled off her
coat and was stuck for a place to hang it. I pretended not to notice because I’ve only one peg and that’s snowed under. People should learn not to depend on me so much. ‘You can’t call a viaduct pretty, can you?’

‘Yes.’ I got the kettle on. She came into the main room carrying her coat on her arm. She’d brought a bag full of notebooks and learned tomes.

‘That’s absurd.’

I took her gently by the shoulders and sat her on the divan, to her alarm. I saw Jean’s dire warnings streak into her eyes.

‘Listen,’ I began savagely, more than a little narked. ‘Once upon a time, this valley was just as you see it, but without the wires, the bridges, the viaduct, the roads. Then a gang of hard tough men came hauling stones. They scrabbled in the fields and splashed in the water flinging up a beautiful arching roadway from hill to hill. The cholera came and they died in their ramshackle tents by the score. They drowned in the floods and some are still crushed under the landslides of that terrible winter. They froze in the snow and shattered their limbs under massive stones. Their women worked with them, carrying hods of bricks and iron rails. Their children were dosed with nepenthe so they didn’t cry from their hunger gripes. They slogged twenty hours a day and died drunk and penniless.’ I could see the fear of rape had dwindled. ‘Now, love, don’t you try telling me that a bit of dirt and a blade of grass is beautiful when there’s an old viaduct to look at. If mankind made it there’s beauty in every crack. Beauty’s not a posh field or a bored cow.’

She said nothing. I let her go and rummaged about for books and catalogues to give her. She went all quiet making the tea. I gave her a summary of reading,
starting with Savage on antique forgeries, Crawley on Furniture, Bainbridge on antique glass, J.N. George on short and long handguns, and a collection of catalogues on some famous antique auctions of the past decade.

‘Read that lot fast. I want to teach you to buy later on this week.’ I rather hurried her after that because I wanted to find out who’d been at Cambridge with old Henry. She said a friend was calling for her at the chapel crossroads and she’d get home all right. I had an idea it was Col. He was sure to be a fine clean-living lad. I watched her down the drive. She gave a half-glance towards the viaduct spanning the river valley.

‘So long,’ I called after her. She hesitated at the lane as if to wave, but her hand never quite made it. Ah, well.

There was nothing for it. A couple of minutes to lock up and I cranked up the Ruby. It notched a pacy fifteen up the lane. Your friend and mine stepped forward, hand raised, once more to enforce personal prejudice. I pulled in obligingly, smiling.

‘Got you, Lovejoy!’ George squawked delightedly, hauling out a notebook. Being already chained ostentatiously to a pencil, he was all prepared. I watched the little ceremony with interest. They’re teaching absolutely everybody the alphabet these days. Education’s wonderful.

‘Doing what, Constable?’ I asked innocently.

‘Driving your car while –’ He paused.

I said, all patience, ‘I know you’ve reported me for drunken driving, George, but my case isn’t heard till next week.’

‘Get out,’ he growled, jerking his thumb to show he meant if.

‘If I do, George,’ I said gently, ‘I’ll kick you silly.’
We waited. ‘Well, George, what’s it to be? Me resisting wrongful arrest and you with your leg in traction, or a general return to sweetness and light? Maslow will be very vexed.’

‘Maslow?’ They go all shifty when you’ve got them. He’d heard of Maslow, obviously a right bastard to everyone, police and all. It wasn’t just me.

‘You know him, surely?’ I chatted. ‘Burly bloke, about middle age, smokes –’

‘One day,’ our law-abiding constabulary threatened, uttering foul obscenities. ‘One day, Lovejoy.’

‘Any day, you like, George,’ I offered back, ‘but remember that I’ll leave you seriously in need of an orthopaedic surgeon. Agreed? Mind your piggies.’ I’d unlocked the handbrake while passing the time of day and zoomed off with a surge – well, a flick – of power towards the Cambridge road.

War, folks.

E
AST
A
NGLIAN ROADS
are a rum mixture of corkscrews and rulers. You’re bumbling along a stretch running straight as a die over the low Hundreds, whistling and thinking how good it will be to reach the next antiques shop, when suddenly you’re fighting to stay on the most macabre switchback roads on earth. The straight stretches we owe to the good old Romans. The crazy bits are legacies from the Ancient Britons or rearrangements carried out by the Early English, undoubtedly history’s most forgetful organizers. They had an unenviable habit of losing parts of the Roman roads, or just simply deciding that too much straightness was a drag and that there were prettier views elsewhere. An artistic attitude, but death to sane travel.

My Ruby spluttered thankfully to a stop in Cambridge. We were knackered as each other by the journey. I streaked into the town library for an hour, then strolled to Selward College.

A hoary old philosopher led me through beautiful ancient doorways and across quadrangles to an office containing a choice of luscious bird undulating at one desk and a decrepit ancient crone withering away at
another. He deposited me with unerring foresight at the crone. I explained the problem, my poor Uncle Henry dying. I wanted to get his obituary details right.

‘Good heavens!’ she squeaked. ‘We were notified only yesterday! He was one of ours! How very sad! You must be so upset. May we express our sincerest condolences?’

‘Er, thank you.’

‘Same here,’ said the luscious bird from the other desk. She didn’t look sincerely condoling at all. She was doing things with a lipstick. I forgot to be downhearted.

‘I’ll get the records for you.’ The crone wheezed off into the middle distance. I sat on the luscious bird’s desk.

‘Look, comrade,’ I began. ‘Old H.S. was no more my uncle than you.’

‘So?’ She pretended to be busy typing but I put a stop to all that by taking the paper out.

‘So you have a golden opportunity to help me.’

‘Cheek.’ She wound some new paper in the machine but I could tell she didn’t much care what went on it.

‘Your reward will be a slender chance of making me, on some future nocturnal occasion,’ I said, ‘and the benefit of knowing that you’ve soared in my estimation of you – already very high.’

‘Stop looking like that.’

She made a great show of buttoning her twinset.

‘Send me a list of old Henry’s class.’

‘
She’s
doing it for you,’ she said, jerking her head. Women don’t like each other. I’ve noticed that.

‘Ah,’ I added. ‘I want their full addresses and other personal details, you see.’

‘That’s not allowed.’

‘That’s why I came to see you, love.’

She gave me a quizzical glance and typed a line in low spirits. ‘What do you want it for?’

I could hardly tell her I was going to report one of the people on her list for complicity in murder.

‘It’s to do with a will,’ I admitted reluctantly. ‘The old man was a millionaire. He has these houses and big estates and that. His daughter’s being done out of her inheritance by this old woman.’ I thought of calling the old woman Mrs Blenkinsop, as that was the name on the crone’s desk, but decided it was stretching the story too far. I shrugged, half disclaiming. ‘It’s really none of my business, I suppose. But I was . . . well, friendly once with the old man’s daughter, though we broke up, and . . . er, and . . .’

‘And you still want to help her, don’t you?’ the little helpful darling finished for me, all misty. ‘Despite having parted,’ she prattled on, ‘you can’t let that grasping old bag do her down, and you’ve come here trying to protect her, though deep down –’

She rambled away adoringly while I looked cut to the quick but noble with it.

‘I’ll be outside the main gate, if you can do anything, love.’

I had a hard time tearing my eyes from her as the crone creaked back carrying a blue volume. We disengaged hands just in time.

Mrs Blenkinsop confirmed old Henry’s dates. I quickly scanned the class photograph and the list of names, all casual. I thanked her, bowed gently towards Joyce’s desirable shape and strode nobly from the room. It can be quite pleasant inventing the odd falsehood. The trouble is I start believing the bloody stuff. I was out into the college grounds before I could stop seeing
myself as a brokenhearted lover and made my way to a pieshop opposite Selward’s main gate.

She was almost an hour and arrived breathlessly, carrying a thick brown envelope. It took another hour prising it off her. Still, it was effort expended in a good cause.

There were maybe sixty names. Haverro was there, and Devonish, but no other I recognized. So, Thomas Haverro and Sarah Devonish’s late husband had been at Selward College as undergraduates when old Henry studied there. I drove south, angry at myself. I’m always like this when I’m worried sick about something, collecting facts that seem important but usually turn out no use at all. Thomas, Devonish and Henry Swan were old chums, but again so what? I tried to concentrate on the Satsuma-Jimmo problem but that only got me madder.

Some sleuth.

I
RATTLED HOME,
resisting the temptation to call in at Liz Sandwell’s place at Dragonsdale. Every light her shop possessed was on. Gimlet-eyed and stoical, I drove noisily past. Sooner or later, I’d have to see Liz made an honest man of me, as long as Margaret didn’t find out. And Betty. And Lisa. And Jean. And their tough male hangers-on. Thinking what a rotten unfair world it was, I eventually chugged into my garden.

Once you try to put a thing out of your head, it only returns with renewed vigour. Ever noticed that? As I hotted my frozen grub and washed up enough crockery to make noshing a respectable enterprise, people’s faces kept haunting me.

Sarah Devonish is the sort of woman a man can’t help going for. And J.H.C. Devonish was one of the names under the photograph of Henry’s class, though I hadn’t been able to locate which young smile had been his. Sarah must have been a lot younger than good old J.H.C. Yet for a forlorn widow she seemed particularly belligerent and nastily knowledgeable, which makes a bloke wonder why she’d been the main mouthpiece that day, telling old Henry to shut up and all.

I cleared a couple of square inches of table free of
debris to eat on. Hardly worth laying the table just for me. The kettle boiled. I made some evil coffee and sat waiting for the oven to signal that my tastebuds were again about to be tantalized. Thomas seemed utterly benign and apologetic, for all that he was a medical scientist. Well, even that’s still legal. The oven clicked but I telephoned Martha to ask about Dolly.

I cut through the chitchat. ‘That day, Henry and I were er, sloshed, Martha. You said something about Dolly’s friends calling for her.’

‘Well, yes.’ Her voice levelled from the tremulous. ‘It
was
rather shameful, Lovejoy –’

‘Yeah, yeah.
Which
friends, Martha?’

‘The one with the big car. I find them somewhat . . . well, showy isn’t too strong a word, is it?’ She thought a second. ‘He has a funny name.’

Big car, showy, funny name. Couldn’t be. ‘Honkworth?’

‘That’s the one. Though he was so kind helping Henry that one often wonders if indeed one is somewhat prejudiced . . .’

‘One does,’ I agreed. ‘Hang on.’ I went and put the oven back on to give myself time to think. The Dolly–Henry chain had suddenly lenghened by a few links it shouldn’t have had. ‘Er, helped? How?’

‘Giving him a lift back from the station,’ Martha explained. ‘Didn’t I tell you? He was so terribly late, and getting a taxi to meet the last train’s absolute hell.’

‘But you have a car, Martha.’ I had a funny feeling even before she said it that I’d missed something terribly obvious.

‘Oh, yes. But Henry never learned to drive, you see.’ Served me right for not checking.

We went round and round this same conversation
a couple of times before ringing off because I wanted to drive the main facts into my thick skull. My pasties were practically radioactive from the heat by the time I settled down. Honkworth had not only seen Sarah, Thomas and me at Martha’s house, but knew enough to be waiting in his flashy crate when Henry was stuck at the station. And give the old bloke a lift home, the crawler. Now supposing Henry had been carrying something precious, what then? A worm like the revolting Honkworth might be tempted . . .