Dying to Tell (2 page)

"You'll go?"

"Maybe. But I don't suppose it'll be necessary."

"It will be. There's something wrong. I know it."

"Let's wait and see."

This afternoon, you say?"

"Without fail."

"Unless you drink too much of that ... lager ... and forget all about it."

"I won't." I smiled sheepishly at her. "Forget, I mean."

"I had to go to your parents for your address." The remark almost amounted to light conversation. They seemed well."

"Oh, Mum and Dad keep pretty fit."

"Your father asked me to send you their regards."

"Did he?"

"Struck me as odd. I mean, you must see a good bit of them, living so close."

"Just his sense of humour, Win." I forced a grin. That's where I get mine from."

The day definitely wasn't unfolding as I'd anticipated. And it was about to take another unwelcome twist. I saw Win off on her way to the bus stop, then made a bee-line back to the bar of the Wheatsheaf, where the sly sparkle in Les's eyes forewarned me of mischief.

"Lancelot, is it?"

"What?"

"Lance is short for Lancelot. I'd never have guessed."

I took a slow breath. "We went into the garden for a private conversation."

"I was checking the soap in the Ladies'. Just in case your friend wanted to powder her nose. And the windows happened to be open, so ..."

"How long did it take you to check the soap?"

"I did a thorough job."

"Naturally."

"Well, you said your dad has a sense of humour. Lancelot proves it, I'd say."

"Would you?"

"Who's this Rupe, then?" Les lacked the Falstaffian figure of the classic landlord, but liked to throw himself into the father-confessor part of the role. "Never heard you mention him."

"A friend of mine. I do have some, you know."

"Pity you don't bring them in here. How's he related to raincoat woman?"

"Brother. He and I went to school together in Street."

"Millfield, was it?"

"We were born and bred in Street, Les. We went to Crispin, like everyone else."

"How'd he come to save your life?"

"It was a caving accident."

"You, caving?"

"A long time ago."

"What happened?"

"Does it matter?"

"Background colour on my regulars is always valuable."

"I can't see how." But I could see he wasn't going to rest until he'd wheedled the story out of me.

Back in the summer of 1985, Rupe had persuaded me to join him on a caving expedition in the Mendips. He was a member of a caving club, but a reluctant one, preferring to go it alone, which he assured me wasn't as risky as it sounded. Several times more risky was how it seemed to me once the two of us were underground. And negotiating a couple of ducks short stretches of flooded cave where there was precious little air space between the water level and the roof -had me spooked long before Rupe noticed signs that the water level was rising, presumably because of rain on the surface. Only then did he reveal that the weather forecast had mentioned the 'possibility' of heavy showers. We turned back, though Rupe said it would probably be safer to go on and up to some refuge where we could sit out the flood. Naturally, that didn't appeal to me, whereas the open air did, mighty powerfully. So, back we went, in my case in a tearing hurry.

That was my undoing. Rupe had all the gear ropes, harnesses, lamps, karabiners and knew how to use it. If I'd followed his instructions, there wouldn't have been a problem. But I was cold, wet and frightened especially frightened. I wanted out. And out involved climbing a more or less vertical slope, using a flexible ladder. Rupe went first, but hadn't finished life lining the rope for my ascent when I started after him. Halfway up, I slipped.

"What happened?" Les's prompts had become repetitious by this stage of the story.

"I fell."

"How far?"

"Far enough. There was plenty of slack in the rope thanks to me not waiting. I hit the floor." Les winced. "Broke an ankle. And several ribs. Can't recommend it."

"Painful?"

"Worse than a hangover from your house red."

Les ignored the jibe, apparently too caught up in the tale to notice. "Rupe went to fetch help?"

I smiled. "Not straight away."

"Why the hell not?"

The floodwater. He realized I'd drown if he left me where I was long before a rescue party arrived."

"So what did he do?"

"Hauled me back to a higher level."

"That can't have been easy."

"No. But he did it. Most of the time, I was no better than a dead weight. But we made it. He put me in a survival bag, waited till the water had stopped rising, waited some more till it had gone back down again, then went for help. The ducks were still flooded by then, of course, right up to the roof, and for longer stretches. Diving through them must have been pretty scary. The rescue party had oxygen when they came to get me, but Rupe just had his own judgement to back. Lucky for me he was a good judge."

"Could just as easily have been wrclucky, though."

"Too right. Which is why I've never been underground since. Not even down the Tube."

"You're joking."

"No. When I lived in London, the bus was always good enough for me. I wouldn't even feel at ease in your cellar."

"No need to worry about that." Les suddenly put on a straight face. "There's no bloody way you're going down there."

Les was all for me using his phone to call Rupe's employer, keener than me as he was by then to find out what was going on. I claimed (which happened to be true) that I didn't have the phone numbers I needed on me. I went back to the flat to dig them out and decided to take a nap that turned into an hour or more of solid zizz. Unexpected visitations and traumatic recollections can really take it out of a guy. Eventually, around four-thirty, I made the calls.

I got what Win had got: the answering machine on Rupe's home number and some politely worded but totally unhelpful spiel from the personnel department of the Eurybia Shipping Company. "Mr. Alder is no longer with us." How long had he not been with them? "I'm afraid I can't say." Who did he work for now? "I'm afraid I don't have that information." How could we find him? "I'm afraid I don't know." Thanks for nothing. "Thank you for calling."

But there were resources I had that Win didn't. (Things really would have been desperate otherwise.) Simon Yardley had been at Durham with Rupe and me and was something big or at least well paid in merchant banking. The three of us had met for a drink occasionally in London when we'd all been working there. And I was pretty sure Rupe and he had gone on meeting after I'd dropped out of the picture. I still had Simon's number, so I rang it. It was way too early to find a merchant banker at home, but the message on his answering machine suggested trying his mobile. Unlike Rupe, Simon didn't want to be hard to contact. And he wasn't.

"Hi."

"Simon, it's Lance Bradley."

"Who?"

"Lance Bradley."

"Oh, Lance. Well, this is ... How are you?"

"Fine. You?"

"Never better. Never busier either. Listen,"could we do this some other time? I'm '

"It's about Rupe, Simon. Rupert Alder. Can't seem to get hold of him."

"Haven't you got his number?"

"He never answers."

"Try his office. Eurybia Shipping."

"He's left them."

"Really?"

"Have you got a mobile number for him?"

"Don't think so. Left Eurybia, you say? He never hinted he was thinking of moving."

"Have you seen him recently, then?"

"Actually, no. Not now you mention it. Sorry, Lance, but I haven't a clue. And I've got to run metaphorically, that is. Next time you're in town, give me a bell. Ciao."

Ciao? It was a new addition to Simon's patter and not exactly easy on the ear. Strange how he'd naturally assumed I wasn't in town. He was right, of course, rot him. But maybe not for much longer. Win wasn't going to stop tugging at my conscience until I'd done something more than make a few futile phone calls.

1Q

Did they have to be futile, though? I rang Rupe again and left a message, asking him to contact me urgently. I even gave him the Wheatsheaf number to try. My reasoning was that he might be reluctant to speak to his family for some good reason. Perhaps he'd been sacked by Eurybia. That would explain why the money had dried up. But he wouldn't need to worry about speaking to me. He didn't owe me anything. If I was right, he'd probably be in touch.

He wasn't.

CHAPTER TWO

I've never been too sure about chance. It's a slippery commodity at the best of times. That's why I bet on horses, not the Lottery. I like the idea that I can think my way to a fortune. What you win by pure chance you can just as easily lose.

Take my stress less but far from prosperous existence in Glastonbury. After losing a good job, a lovely woman and an over-mortgaged house in London during the recession of the early Nineties, I went to stay with my parents in Street purely as a stopgap. Then I met Ria and, instead of heading back to London, found myself living with her in a flat in Glastonbury High Street, helping to run Secret Valley, her New Age joss-stick and Celtic charms shop. Then Ria chucked in the shop along with me and buggered off to Ireland with a Celtic charmer of the human kind called Dermot, Secret Valley became the Tiffin Cafe and I went .. . nowhere.

With so much evidence to draw on, it naturally didn't escape my analytical mind that a brief sortie to London in search of a missing friend might extrapolate itself into all manner of complications. I didn't think it likely. But I was aware of the possibility. And I can't deny that it had a certain double-edged attraction. The question was: did I want a change as much as I probably needed one?

The answer was still proving elusive the following afternoon, when I caught the bus down to Street to report my lack of progress to Win. (Car ownership had slipped out of my life even less ceremoniously than Ria some time before.)

Glastonbury is ages deep in history and legend. We all know that, none better than me, thanks to having for a father a man so caught up in Arthurian myth that he insisted on saddling me with Lancelot and Gawain as names to carry to my grave. (My mother was allowed to name my sister, which is how she had the good luck to end up plain Diane Patricia.) The short bus ride took me past Wearyall Hill, where Joseph of Arimathea is supposed to have landed (most of Somerset being under water back then), and over Pomparles Bridge, site of the original Pons Perilis from which the dying Arthur is said to have ordered Bedivere to cast Excalibur into the lake. (I was always on Bedivere's side myself. With the Dark Ages looming and smelting technology about to take a nose-dive, throwing away a superior specimen of sword craft like Excalibur made no sense at all.)

Street, by contrast, is distinctly short on legend. As serious-minded Quakers, the Clarks were concerned with more practical issues. And shoes are about as practical as you can get. At least, Clarks shoes always have been. My father worked for Clarks for close on fifty years. So did most Street males of his generation, along with half the females. All that changed around the time I came back from London, with shoe production transferred to Portugal and the works turned into a shopping centre for 'famous brands at factory prices'. There were jobs to be had there, of course, but not for the likes of Winifred and Mildred Alder or their simpleton brother, Howard. I'd assumed they'd been living on the state since then. But now it looked like Rupe had been keeping them afloat, which can't always have been easy for him, however frugally they lived.

Exactly how they did live I was about to find out. But first I had to steer a path through various humdrum fragments of my own past. I turned off the High Street opposite the Living Homes furniture store, more familiar to me as Street Junior

School, and headed south. Soon I was in Ivythorn Road, off which, at 8 Gaston Close, I entered this life one Friday afternoon in November 1963. At that time, much of the land away to the west was still orchards and fields. Penfrith was in the countryside then. Now the town had crept out to surround it. My parents had moved to a Seventies bungalow in that new stretch of housing. But the Alders hadn't moved. They'd stayed exactly where they'd always been, while the world changed around them.

Hopper Lane still looked stubbornly like a country byway. There were modern houses at the Somerton Road end, but the middle course was all overgrown orchards, weed-choked small holdings and run-down cottages. The afternoon seemed to grow damper and duller as I pressed on, the air a mix of rotting apples, leaf mush and drifting bonfire smoke. Penfrith itself didn't look quite as bad as I'd thought it might. But that was mainly because the house was almost completely invisible behind a rampant forest of rhododendrons. Logically, they had to be the same plants I remembered as shrubs. But that logic was hard to hold on to.

If Penfrith had been put up for sale in its present state, I'd have suggested advertising it without a photograph. With one, it would have to have been ANY OFFER ACCEPTED. Enough slates were missing from the roof to turn it into a colander in wet weather and the apex had an ominous sag to it. There was more bare wood than paint on the window frames and several of the panes were cracked. Behind them some faded rags that might once have been curtains hung limp and forlorn.

Bending sideways to avoid a swag of rhododendron, I reached the front door and tried the bell. It didn't work no surprise there so I gave the knocker several heavy raps instead and found myself with a palmful of rust to wipe away. Several silent seconds passed. I could hardly believe they weren't at home and I was about to try again when I had a distinct, shivery feeling of being watched. I turned to my right and jumped back in surprise at the sight of Howard Alder staring at me through the front bay window.

"Bloody hell, Howard," I shouted, 'did you have to give me a shock like that?" He didn't seem to hear and it was pretty obvious his powers of comprehension hadn't improved since I'd last met him. Like Win, Howard wasn't exactly wearing his years lightly (early fifties in his case). He was unshaven, with what hair he had hanging lank and grey to his shoulders. He was wearing some sort of lumpen grey cardigan over a grubby Durham University sweatshirt (a gift from Rupe, presumably), and below that, as far as I could see over the sill, faded pink-and-white-striped pyjama bottoms. This definitely wasn't the new autumn look for men. "Aren't you going to let me in?"