The Stranger House (22 page)

She said, “And the verdict was suicide, so something happened early that afternoon to push him off his trolley.”

“True. Though as I once heard the police trick-cyclist say, we shouldn’t forget that an event can take place in the mind with no apparent external cause.”

“Nothing happens without cause,” said Sam with the certainty of one to whom the concept of infinity was a working tool, “Any lunch guests? Any visitors after lunch?”

“No guest. No visitors that came forward.”

“What about the son, Pete? He’d just be a boy then. Was he at home?”

Melton smiled approval, and said, “Jacko asked that too. Yes, he was there.”

“And did Jacko interview the boy?”

“Ultimately. This was the emergency I mentioned before. Pete was eleven. When he found Bible class was cancelled, he bunked off before his dad got back and headed up the valley with the Gowder lads. They were in the same class at school and quite matey. They were scrambling around on some rocks when he slipped. Only
fell about six feet or so, but he managed to bruise himself badly, twist an ankle and break his wrist.”

“Poor kid. No wonder his dad was distracted!”

“Distracted … yes. And probably hopping mad his son had been breaking the Sabbath. The boy had to go to hospital, of course. They kept him in for observation. The Rev. Paul got back just before evening service was due to start. He expected that his curate would have shown up by now and have everything in train, so I daresay he wasn’t best pleased to find he had to head straight into church himself and do the business.”

“So when Jacko got to see the kid, what did he say?”

“Nothing helpful. Yes, he’d spoken briefly with Sam after lunch—he called him Sam, Jacko noted. He said he’d been in his bedroom getting ready for Bible class when the curate called up the stairs that it was cancelled. Then he went out.”

Sam thought for a while, then said, “So what it’s all down to is a crisis of faith. Suddenly starts wondering if there really is a god, so kills himself to find out. Is that it?”

“Balance of mind disturbed,
it says here. I think your version sums it up better.”

“What about DI Jackson? What did he think? You said he had his own ideas.”

“Maybe. But nothing to bother the coroner with.”

“I don’t reckon you’ve kept hold of his notebook out of sentiment, Mr Melton.”

“You’re right there,” said Melton, “Get sentimental about the past, you stop seeing it properly. OK. Jacko did have a working hypothesis, nothing he could prove, so it stayed in his head with a few hints in his notebook. It ran something like this. Sam Flood got on well with kids. Both sexes. Maybe too well. When pressed, Greenwood
admitted he’d heard a rumour about the curate and some under-age kid, but no names and nothing substantial enough to make him dust his magnifying glass off. Mind you, Jack the Ripper would have been on his sixth victim before Greenwood began to get suspicious.”

“But your Jacko found nothing to confirm this?”

“Not a jot. The more questions he asked, the more they clammed up. Pride themselves on taking care of their own here in Illthwaite. So all Jacko could do was speculate. Suppose Mr Flood found he had a taste for young flesh? Suppose he even found himself fancying young Pete Swinebank? Jacko got a sense the boy was holding something back. Maybe something happened after lunch when they were alone.”

“Like?”

“Like he went to the boy’s room and saw him naked and was horrified to realize just how much he fancied him. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the boy. Maybe he got a phone call. Or made a call and heard something that really threw him …”

Sam shifted in her chair. It was time to go. As an exercise in mathematical logic all this might be of some interest, but from a personal point of view all Melton had done was confirm what Winander had told her. But the old cop had been very kind.

She said, “Thanks for going to all this bother.”

“No bother. It’s always good to entertain a pretty young stranger. Sorry I’ve not been able to help much, but maybe that’s not a bad thing.”

“How do you work that out?” asked Sam.

“Your gran left England in spring 1960, the Reverend Sam Flood didn’t arrive here till summer 1960. Conclusion, there’s no connection, which has to be good
news because, believe me, Illthwaite’s the last place on earth you want to be looking for something the locals don’t want you to find. Ask them the time of day and they’ll likely say they’ll let you know as soon as their sundial comes back from the menders.”

Sam laughed and said, “Does that include everybody? I mean, when the vicar said I couldn’t look at the parish records because they’d been stolen in a recent burglary at the church, was he telling the truth or just trying to stop me spotting Sam Flood’s name?”

Melton went to his bureau and produced another folder.

“Silver chalice, paten, two collection plates, candlesticks, poor box—nothing about records. Would surprise me. Billy was no Einstein, but in his own line of business he knew enough never to steal anything he couldn’t sell.”

“Billy? You mean the police know who did the break-in? Has he been arrested?”

“Not by the police,” said Melton, “Didn’t even figure on their list of suspects till I told them. Even then they could find no evidence. But everyone round here knew it was Billy, like they knew it was him did the Stranger last summer, and the Post Office too just before it closed down. He probably got fair warning. But kids like Billy don’t listen.”

“He must be really scary if the locals let him get away with robbing their own church,” said Sam.

“I think most of them felt they could leave it to God to take care of his own business. Which, it would appear, He did. Billy had a motorbike. There was an accident. His full name was William Knipp. Illthwaite’s teenage tearaway. They buried him yesterday.”

Mig Madero stood before the Wolf-Head Cross. He felt no impulse to kneel.

“I’ve seen a lot of Christian antiquities,” he said slowly, “But never one that felt as
alien
as this.”

“You feel that too?” said Frek, “Usually Viking crosses are interpreted as showing how the new religion took over from the old. This one makes me look at things the other way round, as if the old religion were getting a burst of energy from the new.”

“So let my lesson begin,” said Madero, “Tell me what I’m looking at.”

“If you like. Right, let’s start at the bottom panel here at the front,” said Frek.

She took him through the cross’s Viking elements, speaking quickly and not dwelling overlong on any one feature, but this was no mere tour guide’s rote recitation. Everything she said was shot through with real enthusiasm.

“And this panel here is really interesting,” she said finally, “As you can see, it’s badly eroded. In fact I think there’s more damage here than even ten centuries of Cumbrian weather can account for. I’d say at some point someone took a hammer to it.”

Madero stared at the panel on which he could scarcely make out anything.

“Christian orthodox backlash, you mean?” he said, “Some pagan link-up that went too far for even the Illthwaiteans to stomach?”

“Maybe. I’ve looked at it very closely over the years. Made rubbings, taken photographs. I think it’s something to do with Balder. You know the Balder legend?”

“Yes. Killed by a dart of mistletoe. But why should he attract special attention?”

“Think about it. The legend is clearly a version of the same nature regeneration myth we see in the cults of figures like Adonis and Thamuz and Attis. Balder, son of Odin, is slain. Later he rises from the dead to take his place in the reconstituted creation that emerges from Ragnarok, the Nordic version of apocalypse. Remind you of anyone?”

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently, “I have read a little.”

She seemed amused rather than annoyed by his sharpness.

“Sorry to be teaching my grandmother,” she murmured, “Then you’ll have no problem seeing that using Balder as an unsophisticated prefiguration of Christ was a pretty obvious move for the clever old priests reworking the ancient myths. But suppose a mason somehow managed to insinuate that Christ was merely a pale imitation of Balder who is the real regenerative spirit?”

A movement caught Madero’s attention and to his annoyance he saw a figure coming round the corner of the church. It was the strange Australian child, her mane of red hair awash with sunlight. Not child. Woman, he corrected himself. But with a childish indifference to
interrupting the adult intimacy he hoped was springing up between himself and Frek.

She made straight for them, responding to his discouraging glance with a mouthed
Hi.

Frek, showing no sign of having noticed Sam’s arrival, went on, “In addition, some scholars have detected the presence of two figures on the defaced panel. The other could be Hod, Balder’s blind brother, who was tricked into throwing the fatal dart. Hod too rises after Ragnarok and takes his place alongside Balder in the new pantheon. That would be like elevating Judas alongside Jesus in Christian terms. You can see how this might be too much for some true believers to swallow, hence the defacement.”

Sam said, “Everyone round here seems pretty taken with this Balder guy.”

Frek looked at her as if one of the attendant sheep had spoken.

“Everyone?” she said with polite incredulity.

“Thor Winander anyway,” said Sam, “Said you thought my namesake, the guy who topped himself, sounded a bit like him.”

Mig understood none of this but it seemed to make some sense to Frek, who was regarding Sam with rather more interest.

“So I did. It was well before I was born, of course, but some stories enter into local legend. In the poor fellow’s reputation for goodness, charisma and beauty, I felt there was a parallel with Balder. Is there a possible link with your family, Miss Flood?”

She made it sound as if she hardly thought it likely.

“Doesn’t seem to be anything I can find and the dates don’t check,” said Sam.

“A pity. Or perhaps not. Now here’s something which is really interesting, Mig.”

She stooped to indicate the inscription on the lowest step of the cross’s base, obliging Madero to stoop also, physically reinforcing her verbal exclusion of the Australian. He felt quite sorry for the girl.

Frek continued, “The carving is clear, but the meaning is completely obscure. Could be Runic with a bit of Ogam, maybe. One more than usually nutty Oxford professor claims to have proved it was a version of the ancient Cypriotic syllabary. It’s been variously interpreted as a prayer, an epitaph, and a biblical quotation. Take your pick.”

“How about the maker’s name?” said that by now unmistakable voice.

Frek turned her head this way and that with the faint puzzlement of a saint hearing voices in the bells. Then she rose to her full height, at the same time lowering her gaze to take in the little Australian.

“I’m sorry?”

“Sort of a label,” said Sam, “I wondered about it when I saw it yesterday. I had this hunch the symbols could be semagrams maybe forming a rebus. And the crossed lines could be a date. Thought I’d like another look.”

“You are an expert on archaeological decipherment?” said Frek incredulously.

Sam laughed.

“Hell, no. But I did go out with this guy who thought that encryption/decryption was the be-all and end-all of mathematics and I read some of his books so we’d have something to talk about. There was a lot of language stuff in there, the Rosetta Stone, Linear B and so on. I guess you need to be a mathematician as
well as a linguist to really get to grips with that gobbledegook.”

“Is that so?” said Frek, in a voice so coolly polite you could have served caviar on it, “And has this strangely acquired wisdom produced any positive interpretation you care to share with us? The date perhaps?”

The Australian frowned slightly as if for the first time detecting antagonism, but replied relatively mildly, “Let’s see. If it’s a simple pentadic system, it would be 1589. Yeah, that would be it.”

Frek laughed out loud.

“Only five or six centuries out,” she said, “Or the mason couldn’t count?”

Sam removed her sunglasses and turned her unblinking slatey gaze on Frek who, rather to Madero’s surprise, let herself be faced down.

“Sorry,” said Sam, “I should have said. I didn’t mean the original maker’s name but the repairer’s. It came to me when I was talking to Thor Winander this morning and he told me his name was the same as some old Viking who got a lake named after him.”

“Thor’s been playing that little game with you, has he? My ancestor who owned Windermere,” said Frek, smiling, “But it’s true that it figures on old maps as Winandermere, meaning the lake of a man called Vinandr.”

“There we go then,” said Sam, “This oval here with the wavy line in it, that’s this Winander lake.”

“And these earlier symbols, you’re saying they’re semagrams too?” said Frek, clearly still doubtful but now, Madero observed, genuinely interested.

“Yeah. Difference is they form a rebus. This one here, the triangle like a roof, I think that’s a barn. And this one with the little cross on top, I reckon that’s an
abbey. All the other stuff is just a bit of ornamentation to confuse matters.”

“And this gives you … ?”

“Barn abbey Winandermere,” said Sam slowly, “Barnaby Winander who, according to Peter K.’s
Guide,
restored the cross in 1589. And from what I’ve read about the family and seen of this Thor guy, that’s exactly the kind of daft trick he’d get up to!”

“Well, well,” said Frek softly, “You are a surprisingly clever little thing.”

Madero could see that the Australian didn’t care to be patronized.

“Nice of you to say so,” she said, looking up at Frek as if seeing her for the first time.

Then her eyes widened in what looked to Madero like a parody of recognition and she exclaimed, “Hey, I thought you looked familiar.”

“I saw you briefly this morning outside the Forge,” admitted Frek grudgingly.

“No. Not outside the Forge. Inside. You must have been the model for that carving Mr Winander did. It’s a real close likeness.”