The Book and the Brotherhood (65 page)

Duncan
thought
, he
reflected.
He said to Crimond, ‘We must explain this as an accident. Of course it
is
an accident. But how? What’s the best story? Let’s say we were shooting at the target and he got in the way. That’s the best I can think of now, at least it’s simple. Look, help me, we’ll pull him down to the far end, near the target. Just as well there’s so little blood.’

Duncan began to pull Jenkin’s body by the legs. Crimond did not help, but walked beside him, weeping, as Duncan dragged the thing into position near the target. Crimond then went back to the bed and sat down on it and gave himself up to silent crying, his hands in front of his face.

Duncan pushed the two tables up against the wall. He even picked up some books and put them on the tables.

He said to Crimond, ‘Shall I ring the police or will you?’

Crimond did not reply, continuing to shed tears. Duncan saw his tears, from his bent head, falling to the floor.

It was only at that moment that it occurred to Duncan that
he didn’t have to stay there.
He could simply
vanish.

Duncan picked up his jacket and his tie and put them on. He put on his overcoat, stuffing the gloves well down into the pockets. It took him a moment to realise what the hammer was when he touched it. He said to Crimond, ‘You must telephone the police. I don’t have to be involved. You understand?
I wasn’t here.
You’re the one who’s got to explain. Just stick to the story, it was an accident, he got in the way. Do you hear, do you
understand?
I’m going, I was never here at all.’

Crimond did not respond. Duncan stood still, trying to
think.
What else must he do? Something about guns, fingerprints. He took out his gloves and put them on, then picked up the gun which he had fired, broke it, and poured out the contents of the cylinder onto the table. One spent cartridge and five duds. He replaced the spent cartridge in the blackened chamber, then carefully cleaned the handle of the gun with his handkerchief. He took the gun to Crimond and held it out to him, holding it by the barrel. Crimond automatically took it and laid it down on the floor. Duncan repeated the process. Crimond took the gun, held it a moment in his palm, then put it down. He paid no attention to Duncan, did not look up. Duncan decided to leave the gun on the floor near Crimond’s feet. He turned his attention to the other gun, broke it and up-ended the cylinder. He shook it. Nothing came out. He looked at the gun. The chambers were all empty. He said to himself, I’ll think about that later. He put the gun away in the cupboard, which also contained an automatic pistol. He
thought, is that everything? No. The five dud cartridges were lying on the table. Crimond had made them carefully, cutting the lead and pressing it in, so that the contest would be
fair.
Duncan thought, he won’t be able to explain those, I’d better take them with me. He put them in his pocket.

He went to Crimond and shook him, seizing him by the shoulders and pulling him violently to and fro. Crimond raised his head and put out a weak hand to push Duncan’s grip away. Duncan
shouted
at him, ‘I’m going now. I wasn’t here. You shot him by accident, he got in the way. Just
think
what happened,
picture
it. Then ring the police, ring them soon. Do you understand me?’

Crimond nodded his head, not looking at Duncan, still trying feebly to push him away with a hand wet with tears.

Duncan went out, closing the door of the playroom, went up the stairs and quietly let himself out into the icy cold street. Cars were passing, people were walking. No one, evidently, had paid attention to a revolver shot. Duncan set off to walk to the Underground station, a taxi was too risky, anyway he would be unlikely to meet one. He turned up his coat collar and hunched his head down inside it and walked fast but not too fast. When he reached the station he heard the sound of a police car in the distance. Perhaps Crimond had pulled himself together and got his story ready and made the telephone call.

Duncan returned as quickly as possible to the office, amazed to find that he was able to arrive there before lunch time. No one seemed to have remarked his absence. Duncan rang Jean on some vague pretext. She sounded very glad to hear his voice. She said she had rung earlier, he said he was at a meeting. Duncan had lunch in the office canteen and chatted conspicuously with a number of people. He ate his lunch. On the way home he bought the evening paper as usual. There was a small confused item about an accident with a gun. The reporter had not even taken in who Crimond was. So brief is mortal fame, Duncan reflected, as he sat in the train going home.

Rose was standing at the window of her bedroom looking out at the sun shining upon the long wide lawn and the Italian fountain and the huge handsome chestnut trees and some fields full of black and white cows and some sloping woodlands and a receding horizon of hills. The funeral was over, the visiting mourners were gone. This was not the funeral of Jenkin Riderhood, now in the past, but the funeral of Reeve’s wife, Laura Curtland. Rose was not at Boyars but at the house in Yorkshire. At Boyars the snowdrops were over, but here in the north a few clumps lingered in sheltered corners under still leafless trees and bushes. In the birch copse beyond the lawn the early double daffodils were coming into flower.

Laura Curtland, so long a
malade imaginaire
, had vindicated her status by suddenly dying. After maintaining for years that she had cancer when she had not, she developed a quick inoperable tumour and passed away. Perhaps, everyone said later, she had in some sense been right all the time. Laura’s sudden departure caused a good deal of surprise, some dismay, and a certain amount of terrible grief. At Fettiston (this was the name of the house) grief, shared by the servants, prevailed. A few village people shed tears too. The relations, with the exception of Laura’s husband and children, were calm. Rose, who had never particularly got on with Laura, found herself wishing that she had made more effort to get to know someone of whose good qualities she was now suddenly aware. Rose had felt that Laura was hostile, anxious to keep Rose at a distance. Perhaps, Rose now reflected, Laura had reasonably felt that Rose neglected them, found them dull, spent minimal time in Yorkshire, had made a rival ‘family’ for herself in London. Rose was moved, and deeply moved, by the
evident, even frantic, anguish of Reeve and Neville and Gillian. The flowing tears of cook and maids, the bowed heads of sorrowing gardeners, also counted as evidence. From her
chaise longue
Laura has presumably not only organised that large house and garden, but aroused affection in those whom she directed as well as enjoying the absolute love of her nearest and dearest. Rose had been aware that Laura was not a fool, but in some way she had never taken her seriously, and no doubt Laura sensed this. Of course all these sensible reflections came too late.

Rose, who had come before the funeral and stayed on at the request of Reeve and the children, had now been at Fettiston for over two weeks. Rose was surprised later, though at the time it seemed natural and inevitable, at the speed with which it was
she
who, in the immediate management of the scene, took Laura’s place. Reeve and Neville and Gillian, helplessly overwhelmed by grief, begged Rose to take charge and, without being told to, the servants all ran to her with their problems. The Vicar rang Rose about the funeral arrangements, and Rose extracted Reeve’s wishes. Rose organised the ‘party’ after the funeral, and allotted bedrooms to relations who were staying the night. She also decided what, in the emergency, to delegate to Mrs Keithley, the extremely able cook. Of course Rose was glad to be of use; and a little more than that, she felt a certain ambiguous gratification at being suddenly important in a house where she had often felt she counted for little. Fettiston was a larger and far more beautiful house than Boyars. It was a pure simple unspoilt eighteenth-century house built in a local stone which varied in colour between a liquid brown and a faint rose. An ancestor who had visited Vicenza had adorned the balustraded roof with rows of statues, which had been removed to discreet places in the garden by Reeve’s and Rose’s great-grandfather. The house sat upon a wide terrace reached from the lawn by a fine narrowing stone stairway. Upon the lawn was the fountain, a rather more successful addition by the same ancestor. Beyond was the vista of English countryside, and farther away the slopes of the Pennines fading (today), outline against outline,
into a blue distance which became the sky. Rose had never had any strong sense of ‘family possessions’ or indeed of family, beyond her parents and Sinclair. After they were dead she had settled to an idea of herself as having friends but, except in some formal or literal sense, no relations. She felt no belongingness to ‘the Curtlands’, no ‘old Yorkshire family’ bond, though the ‘old house’ had been in Yorkshire and all her forebears had lived there. (A local joke had it that when Curtlands referred to ‘the wars’, they meant the Wars of the Roses.) Rose was fond of Boyars, but would not have felt any great or special pang if she had had to sell it. Now, experiencing the Yorkshire house more intimately, she thought how odd it must be for Neville and Gillian, though perhaps after all they found it natural, to feel that this place was
their
place, to be entrusted to them and to their children and to their children’s children, and filled with the pale strong presences of their ancestors, whose pictures, painted, unfortunately, by minor artists, hung (mostly) in the larger rooms, though some were banished to the bedrooms. On the wall of Rose’s bedroom was a small awkward seventeenth-century picture of a rather touching lady, who had lived before Fettiston was built or thought of, who looked remarkably like Gillian.

The drama, for it was that among other things, of Laura’s death had interrupted Rose’s prolonged period of mourning for Jenkin. In a sad but understandable way it had come as an almost welcome interruption. It had removed Rose from the dark obsessive almost maddening atmosphere in London, to a place where her emotions were less deeply involved and where there were many practical things she could do. Her usual Christmas visit to Yorkshire, coming fairly soon after Jenkin’s death, and before Laura’s condition was diagnosed, had been a nightmare. Christmas at Fettiston was celebrated, as usual, with every extreme of jollity, log fires, Christmas trees, mountains of holly and ivy and mistletoe from the garden, carols, indoor games, excessive eating and drinking, and manifold exchanges of beautifully wrapped presents. Sleigh rides, skiing and skating were also hoped for, but a perverse period of
warm weather made these impossible. Rose, hating every moment, got away as soon as she could. She had said nothing to her cousins about the terrible thing which had happened, and they made only perfunctory enquiries about her life elsewhere. Gerard, in so far as he had ‘spent’ or ‘noticed’ Christmas, passed it with Gideon and Patricia. It had been a notable occasion because, evidently persuaded by Gideon, Tamar and Violet had joined them. Jean and Duncan were in France as usual. Lily went to stay with her friend Angela Parke. Gulliver was said to be ‘in the north’, in Leeds or Newcastle. Rose had at first intended to stay in London with Gerard, but he had urged her to go to Yorkshire. In fact both Rose and Gerard felt a certain relief at being separated. They had spent too long grieving together and helping to make each other even more miserable. It was perhaps ‘good for them’ to be with people less affected, or unaffected, with whom they would have to behave in ordinary ways. Rose had become aware, after the appalling shock of his death, how much, how much more than she had ever realised, she had loved and depended on Jenkin. A slight haze had perhaps always, for her, rested upon him because of an old jealousy of Gerard’s affection for him, a sense as if one day Jenkin might take Gerard away from her altogether. Now she remembered what a wonderful
presence
Jenkin had been in her life, he had indeed ‘given a soul to all things’; and remembering his wisdom, his particular gentleness, his kindness to her, the unique charm of his physical being, it also seemed to her that he had perhaps loved her with some kind of special love. This thought made her particularly miserable, mingling her sorrow with remorse. Life without Jenkin seemed impossible, too much had been taken away. Her own mourning had of course blended with Gerard’s much greater grief. Gerard’s grief had appalled Rose, and wounded her the more because she could do nothing for it. Inevitably this death made them speak of Sinclair and renew their old sorrow. Rose had forgotten that Gerard could cry, and cry so terribly, sobbing and shedding wild tears as women do.

What, as time passed, they more and more discussed, and
made themselves more wretched thereby, was the extraordinary nature of that death, the circumstances, the accident. Here, after a while, they found themselves asking and saying the same things over and over again. Well, it
was
an accident, wasn’t it, and accidents are bizarre. To the police and at the inquest Crimond had explained in the utmost detail what had happened, how he and Jenkin had been discussing Crimond’s marksmanship, and had had a bet on his ability, how Jenkin had gone down near the target, how Crimond had told him to keep clear, and, concentrating upon his aim, had fired just as Jenkin turned and moved to say something to him, not realising he was in the line of fire. It was a simple, awful accident. The verdict was death by misadventure. Crimond’s evident grief impressed the police and the coroner. Many reliable people were ready to testify that Crimond and Jenkin were friends, no one suggested they were dangerously close friends. Jenkin’s golden character was attested by all. There was no suggestion of a sordid homosexual feud, nothing about jealousy, or about money, no shadow of any motive for foul play. If there was carelessness, it was on both parts. Crimond did get into trouble for possessing firearms without a licence, and was heavily fined. The police searched his flat but found nothing incriminating. He had never, in fact, even in his days of fame, been a terrorist suspect. He was now, so long had he been a recluse, scarcely news at all. No keen young reporter, apt to find out some hidden infamy, was sent to pursue the case. It did not seem to occur to anybody that there might have been a quarrel about politics. There was at that moment a great deal of ‘news’ around and plenty of far more scandalous and violent and sickening goings-on involving far more famous and important people. This odd little accident attracted small attention. Gerard did not expect, or receive, any communication from Crimond after the event, and of course neither Jean nor Duncan heard anything. The only person Crimond was known to have communicated with was Jenkin’s schoolmaster friend, Marchment, who mentioned in the course of his testimony that Crimond had telephoned him from a call box just after Jenkin’s death and immediately after
he had rung the police, and told him briefly what had happened; and that Crimond had later told him the whole story in much greater detail. Gerard telephoned Marchment, then went to see him, and received the same account. So it was an accident. It was not possible, was it, that Crimond had murdered Jenkin? No, it was not possible. There was no conceivable motive. Surely it was not possible?