Caroline Minuscule (13 page)

His opinion of Cedric would have been even lower. Dougal swallowed, the whisky suddenly tasting acrid in his mouth, at the thought of the gormless expression on Cedric's face.

For one terrible moment, he felt the weight of the little man in his arms, his head and legs trailing and scraping against walls and door jambs.

‘Time, please,' said Mrs Livabed, and Dougal thought, that was just what he needed: time to work out what was happening, time to work out what he'd done in Bleeders Hall and, most of all, time to rest. He became aware that the conversation was flowing on.

‘Job security's nil,' Amanda was saying. ‘And TV companies tend to go for established names, not semiamateurs like us. And William's conducting a running feud with the taxman.'

‘Incredible,' said Lee. For a moment, Dougal thought he meant it. ‘Don't you destroy my illusions. We salesmen are so caught up on the financial roundabouts – we like to think there's some fun to be had on the swings.'

He glanced at his watch – a square monster with a broad gold bracelet and a multipurpose digital display – and pantomimed surprise. ‘Getting on, isn't it?' He drained his glass and stood up. ‘I'm off to bed.' His Irish accent became more pronounced. ‘Och, you young things have just begun.' A roguish smile flitted across his battered features, like a kitten sprinting across an armoured car. He wished them goodnight and strolled out of the bar, turning left in the direction of the stairs.

‘Whole bloody evening's been hysterical,' said Amanda. ‘How about yours?'

‘Let's go to bed.' Dougal was finding it hard to focus on Amanda's face.

‘Hey, there's one thing I found out this evening, despite that creep Lee being around. There's an Ordnance Survey map up on the wall by the reception desk. I was looking at it after dinner. I found a village a few miles away from here. And guess what it was called. Charleston Parva.'

‘Oh, no.' Despite the whisky and shock which between them maintained a delicate balance of befuddlement in his mind, Dougal saw the significance of the name immediately. That, he supposed drearily, was why Hanbury had chosen him.

One of Mrs Livabed's minions swooped to collect the empty glasses.

‘Yes,' said Amanda. ‘Caroline Minuscule.'

The difficulty Dougal had with the stairs forced him to realize how tired he was. On the first-floor landing, they passed the Church Dormant who was shuffling towards the lavatory at the end of the passage. Dougal averted his face and walked more quickly. Amanda looked at him sharply, but said nothing. Dougal tried to resist the flickers of paranoia; it was ridiculous to feel there might be a mark of Cain glowing on his forehead and absurd to fear that a clergyman would be particularly sensitive to its presence.

Once in the bedroom, Dougal's legs refused to work. He collapsed on the bed while Amanda stood with folded arms looking down at him.

‘For God's sake, William. What have you been doing?' She had the white of the door behind her and looked dark, stern and beautiful.

‘Well . . . I got into the house – one of the windows was unlocked – and searched the place from top to bottom.' His voice sounded harsh and alien in his ears: too many cigarettes, and now he wanted another one. ‘It had been cleared out, except for the heavier bits of furniture.' And the damp, and the watchful darkness. ‘There was nothing left to find.'

‘Then why are you in such a state?'

Because I killed a man. I didn't mean to. The knife stuck in the wound like a cork in a bottle. When I touched his hair, it felt like the skin of a dead rat.

‘There was a man there, in the kitchen. You remember that tramp with the violin in the marketplace? Lee had hired him. No, Tanner did the hiring, I think. Just to keep an eye on the place – see if anyone else was interested in Bleeders Hall . . .'

He'd have to tell her the truth, he realized, there was no alternative. She was too important to him. Even if it sent her scudding out of the room and down to the police. He was playing Consequences with his future: and she said . . . and the world said; but he hoped the world would never be in a position to form an opinion.

‘I talked to him a little, then he attacked me. With a broken bottle and a knife. The torch went out, and we were rolling around on the floor.' No need to go into detail. ‘It was all so confused . . . we were both trying to get the knife, but it got to his heart first.' Not much blood: just a slender circle round the half of the knife and a trickle from the corner of the mouth. The immobility of death hadn't ennobled Cedric's face: life and cunning had seeped away, leaving an expression of impersonal imbecility behind. ‘I . . . killed him, you know.'

‘Oh, Jesus.' Amanda was suddenly busy: searching for cigarettes in her handbag. Dougal lay in silence. The confession had sucked him dry. His bruised shoulder was aching. For the first time since Cedric's death, resignation filtered through the despair. There was nothing more to do – it was out of his hands. The prisoner in the dock could only wait for the jury to return. Guilty or not guilty?

‘The body, William, what did you do with the body?'

Dougal stared at her with surprise and some unidentifiable feeling that was curiously close to disappointment. The jury hadn't returned. It couldn't, because it had never existed. He was facing another sort of tribunal.

‘There's a cellar. Cedric – the tramp – was sleeping down there. He'd pulled a mattress down from the attics. All his stuff was there.' Cedric's parting present to the world had been a duffel bag containing a magazine named
Slinky Morsels
, a Noddy toothbrush with its bristles grey and splayed, an army surplus jersey, a pair of filthy, gaily checked, nylon socks and a half full bottle of reddish liquid which, by its smell, seemed to be a cocktail composed of red wine and methylated spirits. ‘I carried him down and laid him on the mattress—' trying to keep his stomach from heaving and his heart from pounding, trying to believe that he might have been a butcher's apprentice carrying the carcass of a lamb ‘—and wrapped his fingers round the handle of the knife . . . it was all I could think of doing.'

He was silent, groping in a jungle of memories: the soft moaning noise he made as he crawled across the flagstones in search of the torch, dropped at some point during the struggle; that evening on the Ganges five years ago, watching the fires glowing on the ghats of Benares, with the air hot and heavy with improbable barbecue smells; and an article he'd read somewhere which distinguished between murder, manslaughter and accidental death.

‘Fingerprints,' said Amanda coldly.

‘I was wearing those gloves all the time. I threw them in the river on the way back.'

‘They'd float.'

‘I weighted them with gravel.'

‘What else did you do with him? Cedric.'

‘Not much. I poured a bit of his booze over him, tried to make him seem even more pissed than he was. The bottle he attacked me with got broken, but I left the pieces where . . . it happened – he could have dropped it himself. There was no blood to clear up . . .' His voice trailed miserably away. He wished he knew what forensic scientists were capable of. ‘We've got to get away from here. And I'd better destroy these clothes.'

‘Did anyone see you?'

‘I don't think so.' The worst moment had been leaving Bleeders Hall. A woman in the next-door garden had been calling her cat. ‘There was no one in the meadow or down by the river. By the time I got back to the town itself, people were coming out of pubs. I don't see why anyone would have noticed me.'

Amanda sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up her hairbrush. Her rituals were sacrosanct, Dougal thought: even World War III wouldn't be allowed to begin until eyeliner had been applied to her satisfaction.

He began to unlace his boots – occupying his hands might occupy his mind as well.
I've killed a man . . . I've killed a man
. The words circled his mind like a bluebottle trying to escape from a room with closed windows. It was difficult to apply them to himself – William Dougal who infuriated Amanda by rescuing spiders from the bath instead of flushing them away.

His boots thudded on the floor. Dougal flexed his toes in relief and decided that the time had come to pull himself together.

‘What have
you
been doing this evening?' He spoke more loudly than intended; Amanda's head jerked up, though her brushing didn't falter.

‘Damn. It's all knotted . . . got bored, mainly. I had dinner early, and then came up here and read for a bit. I wish we had a room with a television. You didn't come back, so I went down to get some more coffee and a drink. That's when I looked at the map. Do you think there's anything in this Charleston Parva business, by the way?'

‘Must be, I should think. Too much of a coincidence. And, from Hanbury's letter, it's just the sort of thing which would have appealed to Vernon-Jones.' It wasn't worth mentioning, Dougal decided, that Vernon-Jones might have thought that the name of the village was a tasty red herring; the significance of Caroline Minuscule might still lie elsewhere.

‘I'd just seen the village on the map when Lee came up behind me. It was horrible – as if he knew just what was in my mind, which he can't have done. He offered me a drink and I said yes, just to get him away from it. I think he's decided we're worth checking up on – he was asking where we lived, and how we knew Mrs Munns. Then you came in, looking like a ghost, which didn't help.'

‘Oh, God.' With Cedric in the past and Lee looming in the future, the present was becoming increasingly unbearable. ‘We've got to get away, you know.'

‘We can't go now,' said Amanda firmly. ‘Besides, what about Charleston Parva?'

She was right, Dougal thought. Demanding the bill at this time of night would only draw attention to themselves. And trying to slip out unobserved might be even worse.

‘Early tomorrow morning, then. It's just too dangerous to hang around here now.'

Amanda nodded. ‘We could go through Charleston Parva on the way – it's only a mile or two off the A1.'

Dougal looked at her. She was dabbing cold cream on her face, frowning as she smoothed it around her eyes. For her, their route home was settled. He was too tired to argue. He got to his feet. The things he had to do before sleep stretched uninvitingly before him – his teeth, washing, the lavatory and undressing, an iron routine which was justified only by its goal.

Amanda reached for the cotton wool. ‘Why don't you check Pooterkin's book? He might mention Charleston Parva.'

Dougal swore. The words bounced randomly in the air between them; they weren't aimed directly at Amanda – merely at the fact that Cedric was dead and she was talking about Charleston Parva. He became aware he was being ridiculous; there were no graceful exit lines available, so he picked up his toothbrush.

Surprisingly, Amanda laughed. She tipped up her handbag and extracted the keys of the wardrobe and the briefcase from a nest of paper handkerchiefs. While Dougal concentrated on his upper molars, she found the book and tossed it on the bed beside him. It fell open at the page where Hanbury's photograph acted as a marker.

His eyes began to read automatically: . . .
after the conquest, it is possible to discern the gradual invasion of Norman script and scribal routines. The use of a more pointed quill makes its first appearance, as might be expected, in the documentary band
. . .

And then he remembered. He got up and spurted the contents of his mouth in the general direction of the basin. His mind was abruptly emptied of everything except one awkward memory.

The photograph had not been between these pages, but further on in the book – marking the passage about the Rosington Augustine.

Which meant that someone had looked at it.

‘Amanda,' he said urgently. ‘Have you opened the briefcase before just now?'

She shook her head. She sat in a strained silence while Dougal examined the locks of the briefcase and the wardrobe. There were tiny scratches around them.

‘It must have been Tanner.' Her voice had a taut, dry quality, which Dougal automatically put down to fear. It had been absent when he told her about Cedric. But this affected them both.

‘While Lee kept us occupied downstairs . . . so now they don't just suspect us, they know.' Dougal sat down heavily on the bed.

The tic above his eye was jumping more violently than ever. His fingers groped across the bedspread and picked up Vernon-Jones's visiting card. It must have fallen out of the book. He flicked the pasteboard with his fingers. Oh, God, Tanner must have found the reference on the back – by now, Lee would know as much as they did. No, more – for he must have his own clues.

He turned the card over and stared at the pencilled reference on the back.

It should have read
Matthew vii 7
.

Nothing was that easy this evening, Dougal thought dully. Since he had last looked at the card, the reference had changed.

Proverbs xxiii 5.

W
hen Dougal crept back to consciousness in the grey light of morning, he was surprised to find that it was nearly 8:30
A
.
M
. He had expected to sleep fitfully, if at all. They had packed most of their belongings the night before, in the hope of an early start. That was now impossible – their tired bodies had seen to that.

The events of last night were fresh in his mind but they were no longer hedged in by that breathless sensation of panic; that had disappeared with the darkness. In its place had come an equally urgent feeling.

He was starving.

Leaving Amanda to slough off her morning surliness and apply her makeup, he went down to breakfast, taking the stairs two at a time. He picked up an
Observer
from the reception desk and slipped into the dining room.