The Case of the Missing Bronte (14 page)

‘Are you ransacking the corners of your hearts? Are you seeking out the twisty byways of the soul?'

And after the Testimonies he would proclaim ‘Moses lives!' or ‘Hallelujah, Brother, you are clean!' Or sometimes:

‘Come and unburden your soul to me privately, if the spirit fails you now, if the sin gnaws too deep!'

This last bit interested me. I tried to work out some pattern to his saying it. Was it just to the sisters he said that? No, it wasn't. Was it just to the sins with financial overtones that he said it? No — he wasn't that stupid. But perhaps it was
mostly
to the sins with financial overtones. Or was it sins that he thought he might
use?

Like all these things, the public shriving generated its own momentum, but then gradually died away. Before it expired into a whimper, the Reverend Amos got a grip of things:

‘Do you feel cleaner, brothers?'

‘Yes! Yes!'

‘Do you feel whiter than white, sisters?'

‘Yes! Oh yes!'

‘Then we will now, before the Address, have a collection. Give to proclaim the Word, brothers! Give to spread the great joy, sisters! Give to testify to Moses Risen, Moses present among us, here today. And remember, brothers, sisters. Remember: I am your stay, your support, your staff, your foundation. If you should feel the need for personal Testimony, if the spirit should move
you to bare your soul in private, come to me, your support, your foundation. Come to me on Tuesdays or Thursdays. Come to me, all ye who are heavy laden, and ye shall find rest!'

And as the Reverend Amos slid over into rank blasphemy, a movement at the back of the hall signalled the start of the collection. I was in a bit of a quandry. My first impulse was to tear a button from my blazer, fling it into the plate, and leave. On the other hand, I did not want to make myself conspicuous by crossing the flabby pair of youths who I felt sure were the offspring of Amos and his pearl in a sow's ear. The thought of staying to the end, however, was quite intolerable. I had by now a fair idea of Amos Macklehose's speaking style: it was Mr Chadband out of Aimée Semple Macpherson, and I couldn't face a whole Address in the same vein. And if I stayed to the end, what if Amos imitated the Established Church and stood at the door to shake our hands? I felt I would hardly be able to resist kneeing him in the groin. As the plates approached me I saw they were beginning to fill with notes. Cursing myself for cowardice and the Bank of England for abolishing the ten shilling note, I drew a crumpled pound from my pocket and threw it in. Then, as the young men, unsmiling, advanced further down the hall, I slipped round the back of the last row of chairs and escaped into the night.

The fresh air smelt good, and I hurried down to the gate. But, having a sudden thought, I turned back to look at the notice-board I had seen originally from the road. Close to, I could read the details. There it was. Services Friday night and Sunday morning. Personal Testimony: Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 10 to 12 at 25 Pankhurst Road.

What a very unpleasant idea. Private confession, without any of the safeguards of the confessional. Unpleasant, and how very dangerous too, with a
shepherd of sheep who was mainly interested in their fleeces. I wondered what precisely the Reverend Amos was up to, not merely in connection with the manuscript, but in his normal line of business. I decided to stick around for a bit, and went round the corner where a high brick wall shielded me from view from the church. I lit a cigarette, and heard that high voice with the suggestion of American accent ringing out his Address. I lingered round under the benign sky, but still the Address did not end. I had smoked three cigarettes before some movement was heard. A trickle of people began reluctantly to tear itself away from the preacher's fascinations. ‘What I like, it's always that bit
different,'
I heard a woman say as she went through the gate. And from the door of the chapel I now heard his voice again.

‘A great pleasure, Brother Hebblethwaite . . . Glad you enjoyed it, Sister Nichols . . . Yes, I felt the wind of inspiration blowing through me tonight, indeed I did, Brother Hooper . . . See you on Tuesday, then, Sister Boothroyd. It will do you good, I know it will.'

And then, when all the congregation had drifted away, cleansed, I heard the voice, in lower tones, say:

‘Did you see that big guy at the back, boys? That's the cop I ran into at Hutton. Think you'll remember him again? Your mother pointed him out, did she? Both of you be very, very careful of that guy.'

And the voice of the minister of God faded into the night.

You couldn't quite say that all the world and his wife were going to Leeds for the tennis, but a lot of the North was, and they — and the sun — brightened up things considerably. The ‘wife' part tended towards hats, floppy or flowery, and the ‘world' part towards blazers and slacks, around and under paunches. Many of them seemed to know each other, and they lingered in the brick and stonedash streets of the Leeds suburb where the tournament was being held, hailing each other, exchanging small talk, and meeting up with others who puffed along from the point where they had been forced to leave their cars. There were lots of noisy kids, and generally the scene presented a Frith-like, bank-holiday atmosphere. Into which the Scandinavians, had they been there, would hardly have fitted.

But of course they were not there. Nor was it going to be easy to monitor their arrival. The Sports Centre where the tournament was to be held was, of course, a ‘complex', and that about summed it up. There were four separate gates, and though I told the policeman on each of them to keep his eyes open for large, fair, foreign-looking men, two of them, possibly together — I was nevertheless not hopeful. For a start, if they had sense they would not come together, and singly they would be a lot less noticeable. Then, they seemed to dress in a standard international fashion, and you had to look closely before you saw without doubt that there was something about them that was not English. Like the blank, almost Mongolian face of one of them. I had tried
to describe that to the various bobbies, but I gave up when I realized they all thought I meant mongoloid. And big men there were in plenty, among the spectators. As people drifted past me a daft fragment of conversation floated my way: ‘I do like a man to have a bit of meat on him,' said a woman to her friend. Most of the men around seemed only too happy to oblige her.

It would have been easier if I had known what they were there for. Knowing that, I might have been able to guess where they would do it, or how, and make appropriate preparations. To justify my presence there at all I had to assume it had something to do with the manuscript. That certainly seemed a reasonable assumption, in view of their turning up both in Timothy Scott-Windlesham's office and at James L. Parfitt's hotel. Not to mention their visitation on Tetterfield, because I felt morally certain that it was the shape of one of them I had briefly glimpsed in the street outside, and quite certain it was they who had done the poor old silly over.

The tennis must surely have been selected because it was the big event in the current Leeds calendar: that is, whatever was to be done, had to be done where there were thousands of people milling around, to give cover. It seemed to me likely that this was done on the orders of James L. Parfitt, or more specifically on those of Mr Secretary Waddington. The one who had made the phone call had been given the rounds of the kitchen for trying to see him at his hotel, because the gilt-edged boys were dead scared lest their connection with the manuscript be traced. In future, nothing but phone calls, and above all a maximum of obfuscation of the scent. So the next step had to be undertaken in a place guaranteed to cause maximum confusion — for fear that the Vikings were being followed.

But what was the next step?

One thing I was willing to bet: they had the
manuscript. I was made the more certain of this by something I'd heard that morning. Dr Tetterfield had been released, at his insistence, from the hospital, and a Bradford policeman had gone along to drive him home, and to make a last attempt to frighten him out of his complacent silence. But the complacent silence had been undented, and had been mingled — the chap said — with a sort of excited anticipation. After he had delivered him home, and had swapped heavy incivilities with his mountainous housekeeper, he had lingered in the doorway, warned by some sixth sense. A few moments later he had heard a despairing wail, and the voice of Tetterfield calling for his housekeeper. This made it pretty clear: after he had passed out under treatment, the Vikings had found what they were after, and had stolen it.

And now, presumably, they were passing it on. But to whom? Certainly neither Parfitt nor Waddington would take the risk. They were the clean-hand boys, and likely to remain so, certainly for as long as they were in this country. One possibility was that they had decided that the Nordic duo had outlived their usefulness, and that the prize was to be handed on to another contact — one that would take it out of the country, perhaps. Take it over to the States, where in a few years it would surface, and no one would know for sure whether it was that dubious manuscript, which few had seen, which had been mentioned in connection with a certain murderous attack in a Yorkshire village . . .

That seemed a possibility, but there were other possibilities as well. There might be further processes the gilt-edged boys wanted gone through before they committed themselves to the ultimate risk of smuggling it into the US. They could, for example, want it verified by an expert. Risky. But there were plenty of crooked experts around. Or they could want to get a typescript made of it.

And then I saw him. The taller, Nordic-looking one. I was in the biggest open space in the Sports Centre, behind the courts, with gates away to my right and to my left. The crowds were milling, because the first matches were about to start, and some were going to one court, some to another. And there among them was the regular-featured, clear-eyed, slightly anonymous-looking man I was after, advancing towards me. I withdrew to the shadow presented by a sweets and ice-cream stall, and watched.

He was alone. He pretended for a bit to be going with one of the streams towards Court One, but he went slowly, and I could see his eyes were darting around, searching for something, someone. Who? Me? His menacing-looking chum? Surely not — he was looking, I now realized,
down.
And looking, though he was being very canny about it, mainly at the women. Being very unobtrusive about it, as I say, but in my job you get to acquire a certain expertise in people's aims and intentions. Like you know the chap sauntering through Soho, looking everywhere, seeming to be interested in everyone and everything, is really only interested in one thing, and if you follow him you can easily find out what. Well, this chap was interested in a woman — perhaps someone he knew, perhaps someone he had a description of. Coming towards the entrance to Court One, he seemed to be afflicted by a change of mind: he stopped, turned, and started mingling with the crowd going towards the other courts. He would pass close to the sweets stall. I sank further into the shadow and looked about me.

You certainly saw all sorts there. I'd always been a bit prejudiced about tennis — thought it a snooty sport, all strawberries and cream and the Duchess of Kent. And, to be sure, there was no lack of snoots around. I saw two of the people who had been fawning on the Parfitts in the
hotel suite in Bradford: they were done up to the nines, and hail-fellowing it all over the show. I kept my eyes on
them
all right. But there were also coppers I'd met at the Leeds Police HQ — out with their wives and families, and presumably not on plain-clothes duty. There was a waitress who'd brought my breakfast that morning, and a member of Amos Macklehose's congregation (who presumably had wrestled with her spirit and decided that tennis too could be regarded as one of the gifts of God). So with the kids racing about the place and making a din, and the candy-floss and ice-cream being licked, the open areas round the courts had a real bank-holiday feel to them — much more so, I'd guess, than you'd find at Wimbledon.

The blond man strolled by me, deceptively casual, and I slipped behind the stall till he'd gone by. When I reemerged he was still going in the same direction, towards Court Four, but as I watched he almost imperceptibly increased his speed. I darted from cover and went after him. He began edging out of the stream of spectators, and suddenly I saw coming from the other direction, menacing and unfestive in that crowd, his friend and ally. Almost without a glance at each other they met up, and — still without a sign — changed course and started towards the nearest exit.

I made a frantic gesture to one of the constables I'd talked to earlier, a sign over the heads of the crowd. I pointed towards the duo, and as he edged over towards the exit I came in behind them to shut off their retreat. They saw the constable, sensed something was up, and the blond, Nordic one looked behind him. He began to swerve aside, but then he seemed to have second thoughts: weight for weight he and his pal matched me and the constable. But with a hostile crowd they would have no chance. He put his hand on the arm of the other, and they continued walking until they came to a halt at
the exit, their course stopped by a blank wall of constabular chest.

‘Excuse me, sir — '

‘Yes?'

‘There's a gentleman here would like a word with you — a gentleman from Scotland Yard.'

The tall one turned, and looked at me — blond, neutral.

‘Yes?'

His accent was neutral too. Like a lot of Scandinavians he could pass for an Englishman as long as he kept to monosyllables.

‘I want to talk to you both,' I said, wasting no words. ‘Is there an office?' I asked the constable.

‘We've got a room in the administration building,' he said, nodding to the block behind us. ‘I expect you could use that.'