Desire Line (52 page)

And it's a time bomb, he made. You won't get the significance first off, of material that if come across by Josh, (I've no way of knowing he did) was ‘more bloody Thomasina— just what the world needs!' And for me, realness was as important as contents— to begin with. The script's near illegible so try and decipher a whole sentence and your eyes do their normal flick round the screen for the translation. Except it's not on screen and there isn't one, so you don't bother. You turn over. No reverse side. And yet Sara had this in her possession when she died and the sheet of A4 used as wrapping for a priceless item, a bit of padding—

—is her note. A responsible suicide, she'd left one. It just wasn't what we were looking for and not in the place everybody looked.

How did it happen? It is vivid as a day picked from childhood… more so, since mine seemed to slip by on a current of sunlit Alice Liddell afternoons. But for now spring had only just arrived and along rural dual
-
carriageways was putting on a festival of catkins, sloe blossom and, lesser blooms whose names would not have eluded Fleur. She and a doll-like Eurwen had shrunk in my rear view mirror and were far behind me, while ahead, I thought, lay joy of another order. To Heystrete Hall, to echo Pepys who in June 1668, had fewer words to say about it than the highly relished ‘Bristol Milk,' later responsible for his insensibility. I'd taken this road once as a new graduate student: a ninety-mile jaunt from Oxford into Wiltshire that changed my life. This is what I set down then, a modest scene-setting that my editor at Pythian took against and excised. (‘So-o History sweetie! Could we have just
you
arrived—
your
impressions that first time?')

‘The Quarrie name, its roots in the Old French word ‘quarre' meaning squarely-built and possibly implying stoutness, was synonymous with Heystrete for four hundred years. (Although in an earlier reference, Matilda Relicta atte Quarrie is recorded carrying on her late husband's glove trade at Chippenham during the fifteenth century.) The Hall on its present site began as a plain, timber-framed yeoman's house of the 1600s but during the next century was embellished with so much local, curd-coloured limestone, so many loggias, bays and broken pediments that…'

And so on. Today the door is opened by a teenager in a soiled dress; the fleshy, fussy little man she summons to meet me is new and from no aristocratic stock either. All around us the familiar old Hall is being dragged from its winter dream. In a month the first visitors' eager push will be accompanied by injurious light… Curtain rods are being tested, carpets groomed, ormolu tables unclothed and glass in numerous cabinets must sparkle for the Easter arrivals… and is why a space has to been found for me elsewhere. Cramped and low, in contrast to the Long Gallery, Rose Saloon and Card Room along our route, the Comptroller's den is surprisingly frigid, even after out-of-doors. I shiver as though in the grip of premonition. Yet before me lies, in all likelihood, hours of frustration as a fan heater wafts away anything not anchored down and I dip my bucket into a dry well. Littered with broken pens, embellished with likenesses of a wife and children, it is to here the reeking hoard of paper, jottings and missives, newly ripped from beside a water tank, is delivered… and fills the desktop. In the distance a volunteer workforce prattles while a dozen vacuum cleaners drone like bagpipes. I yearn to begin. Yet the little man lingers to assure me of Thomasina's enormous value to them, the strengthening stream of fee-paying admirers she lures in… that she personally has eradicated fungi the size of dinner plates sprung from oak timber, banished much worm and even relined in their original ecru silk the hangings of the Chinoiserie Bedroom. And though politeness requires, ‘Ah-h! I'm so glad,' I think this: as my revision of
A First
is nearing completion, has another rich vein of Thomasina been broken into? An accident of maintenance…

He departs. And it is only a short interval, before I seize upon:

Heystrete Tues Jany 26

My Dear Sir

Thank you for yours I Rec'd yesterday & am much obliged for yo amiable service and advice. I was please'd to return the mare to Ruben Smith & say it is not want'd. The fellow is drunk most times & this afor noon. I have spoke to him but he does not recall. John Jenks came t'day at about three oClock to say the old man John Jenks his father dyed who hd the Life Lease at Benger by whose death the property there descends to me. I am very sory for it. It is a fine property worth 1000l. You must soon wish me good fortune of it.

Our friend Lady Nairne is to come to us tomorrow. The house is all in uproar as there is a vile smoke from the chimneys but I do not think Lady Nairne will be fobb'd off with soot.

The hound Faithful has dyed. My Lady Quarrie sends her love to you & my Ant.

I am Your affectinate nephew etc

L. Q.

Of course, it's a fake, Yori. He's read it through once, twice— or maybe not? Again. Realises what it says but also what it means. And even then, taken in before by the products of Glenn Hughes' invention— simmering at how often— he's still got doubts.

Honestly? I've got no doubt – and I'm back there with Sara, sitting through another rerun of a rancid memory. Hoovers drone on and volunteer oldies try to spike their boredom with jokes. Muffled giggles follow sudden crashes or banging doors. Endless offers of tea are made. Of course she's gone over all this before in her journal. No mention of the
objet trouve
though. She turned that into a poem or song or other ornament to hold up and distract the audience with. And her description was a lie. (Like I'm the young Archie Kao that I'm not, but much better for you to be imagining handsome him than plain me as we went along, yeah?) Now here's the original scene. I admire how she cuts it— just at the frame where one mouldy sheet of paper is set aside and her good work, her whole future,
shattered into smithereens
. Because the well wasn't dry, was it Sara? More like poisoned. Sir Louis Quarrie's wandering scrawl re: horses, chimneys, dead dogs and peasants had, on second thoughts or no thought, been left to stick in Heystrete like a sting. And was real. She knew. I know. Read it and learn how a modern Sir Louis' fortune would've stayed safe from Casino Pigalle and any number of Linda Darnell lookalikes. Never a gambler, the ‘wager' he'd won with— who? John Cane and the Honourable Somebody (I could look them up only their page is already burnt) wasn't so much a bet as a racing certainty. Thomasina hadn't needed to shine keeping her term at the University. A great brain didn't need dazzling. Because ‘duped' Dr Buller had always been Family, a poor relation like Yori, OK, and along a weak branch that history'd lost sight of, yet Family. And the proof was stolen by Sara Meredith, teaser-out of the Thomasina legend, architect of The Peerless Girl and project manager to a million bettered lives from Manchester to Manila to Mombasa to— wherever. Which made the entire Thomasina story and each testament to her suspect, a jumping-on the bandwagon of a bright child that revelled in Star Attraction billing in a country pub. A celebrity. And smart enough, behind her pretty façade, to take everybody's measure, including the ale-drinkers, and parrot back all she picked up in her father's tap room till she managed to break out and become
famous for just being me.

Even Fleur couldn't have guessed the size of the question mark hanging over ‘Tom Swift'. Nobody knew except Sara— and now Yori— that she'd removed the evidence but not destroyed it. She'd come clean to the future but never told. Only one quarter of suicides ever do tell because I've checked, (
Kuso –
what are those, mammoth's footsteps pounding on my ceiling joists?) and so Sara had spared The Peerless Girl. Not herself, though. Like the honourable Japanese she turned out to be she walked her desire line on blistered feet. Thumpthumpthump is getting louder. Outside, dolt, now! – that
is
Libby you can hear on the stairs – and use what you've got in your hand to feed the fire.

Notes

*
Who is Welsh not many people remember. His real name was Alfred Reginald Jones. Born in Neath, a coal-mining area of South Wales, so he named himself after the town's Milland Road— not vice versa as I've seen claimed. Jones/Milland was the first Welsh actor to win an Oscar. His fan base will tell you his greatest achievement was
The Lost Weekend
. But it's Dial M for me.

Appendices

A

The Murderer At The Fair

In 1961 it was a Londoner called James Hanratty who came to Rhyl after shooting a man dead and raping his girlfriend. Hanratty like many a drifter before him got work at the fair, on the Dodgems, no questions asked. Dodgems would have been his choice— the cars with the trapped inside girls, having to be unjammed back into circulation, Hanratty perched on the flanges, a ready stream of dirty jokes. First day, Hanratty met up with some ‘like minded individual'. A vicious loner straight off the bus, where else could he meet up with a ‘like-minded individual' but in good old Rhyl, already on its way to being the sink-hole of north Wales? His new friend was Terry Evans who let him sleep on his sofa that night and gave him a pair of shoes. Well that was one story. Another is that at the time of the murders, Hanratty was already tucked up in a Rhyl guest house, Ingledene a grim sounding bolt-hole. A dozen assorted Rhyl residents could vouch for him. If you're charged with murder this is definitely a better story than a stint on the Dodgems and a night on a couch. Which makes it all the odder that Hanratty didn't try it out on the police in the first place. But he didn't. Perhaps there's something about witnesses from Rhyl. They weren't called to testify. None of them. So Hanratty – though he must have been innocent, mustn't he? – was hanged, as they were just about to stop doing back then. He was the sort that bad luck followed around like a stink— which is why he became the eighth last person to get the death penalty. But wait a bit. Once DNA was discovered, surely that could settle the score? So
there's an appeal goes in on Hanratty's behalf. It failed. How? DNA at the scene of the crime was— James Hanratty's. So Hanratty may or may not have worked at Ocean Beach. And a man called Terry might have given him a new pair of shoes, while in London, 200 miles away, someone else, that one in a billion match with his DNA was committing murder. 
Or not.

B

The Kicker

The history of Rhyl's riddled with plans and schemes that went pear-shaped. From attractions that bankrupted everybody involved to the small-scale shaggy dog stories. Or shaggy bird.

Reginald Cobb was a comedian, singer and acrobat. You could find him at the bottom of the bill in music halls up and down Britain. He surfaces in Rhyl in 1902, one half of Reggie and Roma, a musical duo. 1903 has him back, solo, at The Pier Amphitheatre, as The H'archbishop of Humour. By 1904, Cobb's living alone minus his Roma at an address in Butterton Road. It's here, according to local legend, he somehow got hold of and started to train a young ostrich. It was called The Kicker.

At first a backyard was big enough to keep the bird in. Training on the beach often drew a small crowd and Cobb could take round the hat for pennies. There would be a bit of added knockabout when The Kicker tried to eat the coins. Cobb was always short of money and ran up bills at a local corn-merchant as The Kicker's appetite grew. But the act seemed like a real prospect. The bird could soon ‘do a simple dance with wings outstretched in elegant fashion'. It also dribbled a football. The Kicker became a local celebrity and Reggie Cobb had hopes of a spot at the newly opened Queens Palace. He told people it had been promised him.

On a Sunday morning in June, 1904, Cobb and The Kicker were on their pitch and by ten o'clock were into their act. Then it all went wrong. Perhaps it was the church bells. Maybe someone brought along a dog that The Kicker hated.

The ostrich stopped listening to Cobb's instructions and started making dives into the crowd. A big man in a straw boater (another of The Kicker's pet hates) shouted he'd been pecked. Women screamed, children yelled and in trying to control the bird, Cobb got a blow to the head. Some thought The Kicker had done it. Others said the man in boater hat had punched him. It must've taken a superhuman effort for poor Cobb to get the ostrich back to its pen, a good two hundred metres from the beach. But he did. And he fed and watered it and then seems to have sat down in the corner of the yard. He spent long hours here anyway, keeping The Kicker company so if any of his neighbours looked over they wouldn't have thought it out of the ordinary. Only when it was going dark did somebody check and discover poor Reggie Cobb stone dead.

People always want to know what happened to The Kicker. That's the funny thing about the story— you can't find out. They say in Rhyl that the owner of the house just opened the yard gate and let the bird walk off. Rhyl was even smaller then and the countryside a lot nearer. Perhaps it made for the hills.

But it was a six-foot-high black and white ostrich.

You'll find Reggie Cobb's overgrown grave in the churchyard at St George, a village 6.5 kilometres ‘backaways' from the coast. His brother-in-law and sister Anne Foulkes are listed as poultry dealers there.

C

How Sato Tomiko Lost His Name