Facing the Tank (8 page)

‘Ah.’

‘Besides, I hate categories. We’re not gay or straight; we’re just Tobit and Gloire who fancy each other.’

‘Clever Dick.’

‘I know,’ she said. He kissed her ear. She held him away. ‘Well?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll marry me?’

‘Yes. And soon.’

‘How about this month. Flowers are cheap and my parents are in Europe.’

Her parents had been telephoned over champagne within an hour of his acceptance. As they sped on to break the glad news to his, Tobit swung sickened between wild delight at having a perfect, loving creature beside him and blank-eyed panic at what he was doing. He had become a much faster driver since he met Gloire. Sometimes, when she urged him on and he slammed down the accelerator, he was tempted, with one easy swing of the steering wheel, to destroy them both. They would be torn, crushed, possibly burned beyond recognition, but at least it would be quick. At least it would be now.

It was barely seven-thirty on his first morning in Barrowcester when Evan was roused by the growls of crawling cars and an ensemble clicking of well-heeled feet. He pulled on his dressing gown and bleary-eyed his way through both the sliding doors to the kitchenette. He tweaked aside the net curtain to find both pavements full of Barrowers in their Sunday best heading towards the Close, and dropped it in a hurry when he caught the giggling eye of some behatted females passing three abreast. He was on the point of returning to check that his alarm clock had not stopped when there was a knock at the granny flat door and Mrs Merluza called out,

‘Professor?’

‘Good morning.’

‘How did you sleep?’

‘Very well, thanks. How about you?’

She opened the door a crack but kept her face turned firmly away, twisted by modesty. She had on a small, pearly-pink hat that matched her jacket.

‘I quite forgot that there’s an earlier service today,’ she said, raising her voice to compensate for having her back turned to him. ‘They’re digging up Saint Boniface, but there’s fresh coffee on the stove and I’ve just made you breakfast which is keeping hot on the hot plate.’

‘Fantastic. What was that you said?’

‘Are you out straight away?’

Evan rubbed at his white hair, which was still wild from sleep. He frowned from the effort of forming words so early.

‘Ah. Yes. I aim to be at the cathedral library at nine.’

‘Well I’ll see you this evening then.’

She closed the door. He heard a sudden rise and fall in the sound of excited chatter and feet as she let herself out of the house, then he set a bath running and left the granny flat to totter to what he had already rechristened The Little Boys’ Bowling Alley.

Bathed, shaved and discreetly scented, he came in search of breakfast half an hour later, an unaccustomed tie wrenching at his Adam’s apple. A slight, thin woman was polishing the hall mirror. As far as he could see, she had nothing on but a sea-green nylon housecoat thing. Her extraordinarily good legs ended in the sheepskin slippers that he could have sworn he saw Mrs Merluza wearing the night before.

‘Hello,’ said Evan. She stared at him in the mirror from a face like Old Father Time.

‘You must be her new lodger,’ she said and continued to polish.

‘Yes. I’m here for a couple of weeks, maybe less. To do some research in the libraries.’

‘I’m the slave. Two mornings’ cleaning a week and occasional gardening. Dawn Harper.’

‘Hello.’

‘You’ve said that once. She’s left breakfast on the hot plate for you.’

‘Smells … er … great’.

‘She makes the fried bread with olive oil. You do that in America?’

‘Er … no.’

He walked past her into the kitchen, where the air was already thick with the scents of frying. On the hot plate, under a Pyrex cover, lay a plate bearing fried bread, glistening pink bacon, a halved, blackened tomato and a fried egg whose yolk looked firm to dryness.

‘I’m not sure I can, first thing.’

‘Chuck it,’ she said, standing in the doorway to watch him.

‘Could I?’

‘I won’t tell. Here, let me.’

She scooped up the plate, using her duster as protection from its heat, and sloshed his breakfast into the pedal bin.

‘I’ll have this emptied before she gets back,’ she said, and watched him as he filled a mug with coffee. His hand shook slightly.

‘What did you say your name was?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t,’ he said, setting down his mug and spooning in several sugars, and saw that he had left his wedding ring in the bathroom. ‘It’s Evan. Evan Kirby.’

‘I thought you looked familiar,’ she said. ‘Can I have one of those?’

‘Be my guest.’

‘Thanks.’ She poured herself a coffee and stood sipping it, staring at him. He smiled briefly up at her, unnerved, and cast a glance around for a newspaper. There was a
Telegraph
but he would have had to get up and pass close by her to fetch it so he stayed put. ‘I’ve read your book,’ she said at last.

‘Really?’ He tried not to sound surprised. There had been a television documentary, after all; she might have read the picture book spin-off.

‘Yes. I read it a few times in the library, but it was too long to read comfortably in one go, and besides I wanted a copy of my own, so I stole it.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘I keep it by my bed.’

She examined him with the blank stare of a psychopath, or was it the guileless gaze of a rustic innocent? Not altogether rustic, evidently; she had read and clearly enjoyed the full version of
Visions of Hell
, much of which was meaty stuff.

‘Sit down.’ He waved a cigarette at the spare chair on the other side of the table.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You should be having breakfast.’

‘Go on,’ he said.

She sat.

‘I’m after something big,’ she said. ‘The police couldn’t help and the Cathedral lot’s too feeble. You could tell me, I know you could.’

‘What?’

‘What’s the strongest invocation for finding a missing person?’

He played for time.

‘Sorry.’ He laughed. ‘I don’t quite … er. Invocation to whom, exactly?’

She fixed him with her small eyes.

‘You know,’ she said, and smiled. Her teeth were clean and even, but looked unnaturally wide – like a horse’s. He knew.

‘You mean, the Devil?’ he asked.

‘Well, in your words, Professor, “he wears many faces”. My manual suggested I aim high and try for Belial.’

‘Which manual are you using?’

‘
Bugwash and Stavey
, seventh edition.’

‘Reputable enough,’ he said, seeing a way, albeit a rash one, of losing this rather frightening woman’s attentions. ‘But I think you could do better.’

‘Tell me.’

He saw her tough hands tighten their grip on her mug.

‘How badly do you need this … This person?’ He was putting it on, now, fobbing her off. She had probably fallen for some local swain beyond her reach; an estate agent, perhaps, or simply a plasterer bound round with wife and clinging children.

‘More than life,’ she said. She said it almost airily. Was he doing the right thing? His interest was purely academic. He didn’t believe, but there were plenty of unpleasant stories of those who did.

‘I’ve a better book,’ he said. ‘I’ll lend it to you to copy the relevant sections.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’ He rose. ‘Finish your coffee, first,’ she said. ‘It can wait.’

But he knew it couldn’t. She might only be after a local swain, but he sensed that if he didn’t find her the book now, she would gladly turn his room upside down in order to steal it.

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I’d finished.’

It was a valuable book, rarer than she could know, which was why he was carrying it with him rather than leaving it behind at the Booths’s. An early eighteenth-century demonic lexicon. He had found it cunningly sewn into the middle of the books of Isaiah in a later family Bible, and he had cut it out and had it rebound. The Bible had cost a small fortune, but the lexicon was worth more and the bookseller had given the Bible no more than a cursory glance front and back and knew nothing of the nasty little secret it held. Little more than thirty pages, but something Satanists would kill to possess. He had quoted it in
Visions of Hell
but a passing fear, doubtless irrational, had led him to lie about the source. Why then was he lending it to his landlady’s cleaning woman?

‘Because she needs it more than I do,’ he thought as he slid the little book from the lining of his suitcase, ‘and maybe because she can lose it for me.’

She said nothing when he passed it to her but opened it at once and began to read, scowling at the crabbed print and blotchy vellum.

‘I’ll be here for at least a week,’ he told the top of her head. ‘Drop it back when you’ve finished. I’ll … er … I’ll be off to the library now, then.’ And he left her to read and set out along the gleaming pavements, a cigarette defiantly in hand and a queasy uncertainty as to the wisdom of facing the day with an empty stomach, olive oil or no.

The well-dressed crowd was coming back from the Cathedral but in a state of overexcitement out of all proportion to what they had just been through. From what he could remember from the compulsory church-going of his Boston childhood, freshly emerged congregations rewarded their virtue and patience with a spirited round of greetings and, possibly, gossip. But that was on a Sunday, after a sermon and in most cases a week of unsociable labour; these people had emerged from what Evan took to be a sermon-free Holy Communion, a service to which he assumed they were inured. As he walked through to the Close, it became almost embarrassing to meet the directionless sparkle of so many happy faces. Their elation rested uneasily on these types of prosperous conformity as it had on the mundane forms of the worshippers he used to watch leaving the Chapel of Charismatics in his street in Nowhere, Vermont. He kept his eyes firmly on the Cathedral and cut an easy swathe through the beaming, mostly skirted, pedestrians. Then, nearing the foot of the south transept he had to ask the way to the library. He accosted a round, amiable creature in powder blue.

‘Carry on from here,’ she directed, ‘then turn right through that passage – we call it the Glurry – and on the other side you’ll see a lovely round building. That’s the Chapter House and the library is on the first floor.’

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘But I think I should warn you that there’s no visiting until ten-thirty.’

‘Can’t you see he’s doing research?’ clucked her companion, who wore navy and a less approachable aspect.

‘Actually yes, I am,’ confessed Evan.

‘Silly me,’ laughed the first woman, pointing with a gloved hand to his briefcase.

‘Tell me,’ he asked, feeling sorry for her as her navy companion clicked her tongue and stared, impatient, at the passers-by. ‘Why all the excitement? What have I missed? My landlady said something about a saint.’

‘Oh a miracle!’ gushed the first woman. ‘You missed a real
miracle
. And we saw it
all
, didn’t we, Marge?’

‘Popish tripe,’ snarled Marge. ‘So nice talking to you,’ she said to Evan and steered her companion away.

Evan watched them pass, bickering, round the corner of the transept then followed the path through the Glurry to find a chapter house every bit as fine as its equivalent in Salisbury and Wells. A short, neat, grey-haired woman was waiting for him at the door. He recognized her at once as the one with the fox terrier on the train from London.

‘Professor Kirby?’

‘Yes?’

‘How do you do. Petra Dixon.’ She shook his hand and her reading spectacles bounced on their chain against her small, no-nonsense bosom.

‘I should have introduced myself on the train,’ he said.

‘But you didn’t know me from Adam and I certainly had no idea who you were, so I would have found it rather odd,’ she replied simply. ‘I ran into Mrs Merluza in the Close just now and she told me you’d be on your way so I thought I’d wait outside in case you got lost,’ she went on, unlocking the door on to a short spiral staircase. As he followed her, Evan noticed that her hair was not cut short as he had at first supposed, but grown long then brushed back tightly off her head and swept up in an unexpectedly baroque chignon with a black velvet bow.

‘I trust
you
didn’t miss the miracle,’ he ventured.

‘I jolly well did,’ she said, pausing to open a second door into the high, vaulted chamber above. ‘My temper gets filthy if I don’t have seven hours’ sleep and I never turn in until I’ve heard the shipping forecast.’

‘Oh,’ he said, nonplussed. ‘I see.’

‘My brother-in-law’s a lighthouse keeper,’ she explained, reading his expression. ‘It helps me feel in touch. Had you not seen photographs?’ she continued.

‘No,’ said Evan who was involuntarily gazing up at the ceiling. ‘It’s incredible.

‘Mmh’, said Miss Dixon, sitting sidesaddle at her desk to change into her comfortable shoes before opening the mail she had brought up with her from downstairs. ‘Thirteenth-century. The shelves are much later of course. Downstairs is much the same only without the view and with stone thrones in place of books.’

The central single pillar seemed far too delicate to support such a massive structure. A maze of tracery radiated from it. The effect was like a magnification of the underside of a beech leaf. Though the Chapter House seemed round on the outside, within it was octagonal. The staircase and door took up one of the eight sides, high oak bookcases laden with riches took up four and the remaining three held leaded windows with views across the Close and on to the nearby windows of the Cathedral’s quire and south transept. The higher glass was clear though pleasantly uneven with age. The lower five inches of each window had been stained with a stylized design of running water with, here and there, a darting fish.

‘What exactly were you hoping to read?’ Miss Dixon’s tone brought him back to earth.

‘Pardon me,’ he laughed, ‘but I’m sure you’re used to people gaping.’ She said nothing so he dug in his briefcase and brought out an index card. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘
Barrow 341
to start with then Memling’s
Gravitas
and
Barrow 22
– that’s
On the Nature of Briddes
.’