The Orpheus Trail (17 page)
Authors: Maureen Duffy
I knew once I had seen Stalbridge off in a black cab that I had to contact Hildreth but I had agreed to give him a day before speaking to the police. Perhaps he needed time to recover enough to face them. It suited me to prevaricate. I was going to look at best a fool, at worst someone who had withheld possibly vital information and impeded a police investigation into very serious crimes. As Stalbridge’s cab drew away I wondered whether among the loiterers in the square there was anyone watching. His sudden collapse had meant I might have been seen in the street with him when I had tried so hard to keep our meeting secret.
Should I warn Hilary? But what more could she do that I was fairly sure she would already be doing as a city dweller: not opening the door to strangers, not coming home late at night alone. I would ask Hildreth whether to warn her when I spoke to him in the morning. But next day, it was Hildreth who got in first. I was still having my breakfast when the phone rang.
‘Ah, Alex, I’m glad I’ve caught you. Were you going into work?’
‘Yes, yes I am.’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to postpone that. I need you here in Oxford.’
‘Why? What’s happened?’
‘Meet me at Professor Stalbridge’s flat as soon as you can. He’s dead.’
The line itself died but I stood there holding the buzzing receiver and knew I was deep in trouble, even danger. As I drove towards the legendary dreaming spires I tried to rehearse what I would say but every attempt at an explanation sounded so lame in my head, like a kid caught nicking cheap sweets from the newsagents, that I gave up. I had to wait for Hildreth to speak first. And then? I just hoped some inspiration would come from whatever god of prevaricators and cowards.
There was the usual police presence outside the house when I drew
up at Stalbridge’s flat, as if I were a walk-on part in some detective series and Morse or Linley or Barnaby, or even Wexford, would be behind the front door. In my present state of guilt-ridden anxiety I rather hoped for Wexford’s comforting voice with its unthreatening rustic burr. They were all father figures who would restore order,
chastise
the wrongdoer, and we watchers could only observe and
empathise
with the surrogate victims who died in our place for our failings of commission and omission, the done and the undone.
I gave my now usual pass formula, Hildreth’s name, and was waved upstairs. The door to what had been Stalbridge’s flat was open.
Hildreth
stood by the fireplace with a long white envelope in his hand, expecting me. The men below must have told him I was on my way up.
‘Come in, Alex. You made good time.’
I looked around quickly and was relieved that there was no sign of a body. The room as far as I could see was completely undisturbed, uncannily as I had last seen it and as if Stalbridge might walk in at any minute.
‘What happened?’
‘He seems to have taken his own life. At least at the moment we see no reason to suspect anyone else was involved. He left this addressed for you. I’d like you to open it now and then we can talk about what this all means.’ He held the envelope towards me and I put out my hand to take it as if it might itself be dangerous, a poisoned chalice I was being told to drain.
‘How did he die?’
‘The usual overdose, washed down with a lot of whisky. The
cleaning
woman found him this morning but time of death is set at around midnight.’
So often it seemed it was women who went out to clean that were faced with these lonely deaths. They fitted their duplicate key in the lock, called out to see if anyone was in, went through to look for a note and found a body, and an envelope not addressed to them, or just an exhausted still lump, in a bed or slumped over the lavatory seat. There ought to be a society dealing with post-traumatic counselling for the army of cleaners. I opened a corner of the flap sealing the envelope and ran my forefinger along its length. Then I took out a sheet of A4
closely written on both sides in a script as small as on a clay tablet in cuneiform, that I recognised as Stalbridge’s.
‘Can I look through it first? I don’t know his writing very well. It’s rather hard to make out.’
‘Take your time, Alex. There’s no hurry. We’ve got all day.’
I carried the letter over to the window where the light was better. I had driven down through waterfalls of cloudburst that had my
windscreen
wipers swinging dementedly. Now the sky was a sullen grey.
Dear Alex Kish,
I am writing this to you because I feel I owe you more of an
explanation
than I was able to give you earlier today when we met, and because this is my last chance to try to set things right and help, perhaps, to repair some of the damage.
I was jealous of Jack Linden on several counts which was why I shopped him to the project managers. I was jealous of his
commitment
, his idealism. He wasn’t out there for status or money but out of a passion for the history of civilisation and a possibly naive belief that we could learn from it, whereas I believe that what history really teaches us is that we’ve learnt nothing, seem destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over until we finally destroy ourselves, and history indeed comes to an end as Fukyama once suggested, although he meant it rather differently, and anyway has since retracted his own proposition.
But I was also jealous of his relationship with Fareed. The boy loved him and he did nothing about it. And I wanted him but he only had eyes for Linden. It became an obsession until I determined that if I couldn’t have him no one would. I was afraid that Linden would succumb and at the same time contemptuous of him for his failure to seize his chance. Then he made his lucky discovery and I couldn’t cope with his totally undeserved success. So I alleged that he was fucking the local boys who worked for us on site and he was sacked.
The dig finished and I applied for the job at St Julian’s where my published reports, as well as my experience in the field, gave me a headstart. I should have settled down, put it all behind me but I
couldn’t. It was a terrible itch I had to scratch. It wasn’t just sites for artefacts that I knew must be stolen or looted, that I accessed.
So when they contacted me they knew and I knew, that I was guilty and therefore vulnerable on two counts. Of course I suspected what they wanted my experience for. It’s a very specialist but
lucrative
market, the luxury end of the trade you might say.
The pier fire wasn’t one of mine. Too crude and not very well researched. I had seen about the glass egg on your doorstep, though of course I didn’t know that, or you then and, I saw its possibilities. It was also a test of how well organised they were, how capable of carrying out a complicated project requiring the kind of skills and co-ordination you have to have to set up a dig.
The order was for something bizarre, beautiful and deathly. I even made maquettes of how each scene should look. I destroyed the last one tonight. They were a kind of Fabergé in their field, a development of the Victorian tableaux if you like. But I truly had no idea that they would use real boys until it was too late. When I protested once, they told me that the boys were already dead when they got them, that they were merely latter-day body snatchers, plundering the dead but no more guilty than the old anatomists.
As for who ‘they’ are, I don’t know. We dealt only over the
internet
on websites that were constantly changing and anyway I was too afraid of exposure to the college authorities to risk trying to track them down. That was the real hold they had over me: the loss of my job, the public disgrace, my name on a register that would bar me from ever working in academia again or anywhere near children. I’m too old for fieldwork, and anyway a lot of countries prefer to employ their own rather than be patronised by us.
Now what I feared and tried to avoid by digging myself in deeper will inevitably happen. The police will go on until they’ve hunted down everyone involved. I can’t face that. I haven’t even the physical stamina let alone the mental resources.
I’m merely anticipating a little and it frees you and everyone else to go on.
I believe they were responsible for Linden’s death and would
certainly
have been for mine, one way or the other.
By the way the pieces from the Prittlewell Prince’s grave were my undoing. I saw them advertised on one of the specialist websites and when I tried to buy them they pounced. Then under pressure, blackmail I suppose you call it, I told them how to use them, almost superstitiously to give the boys some kind of rite of passage like the obols placed in the mouths of the dead. They gave me the coin that I gave you as a kind of devilish contract. If I believed in such things, in anything, I’d probably say it was cursed. Lock it away from you, just to be sure.
Then came his signature.
JS Stalbridge
When I’d finished reading I looked up. Hildreth waited silently. Now he held out his hand and I passed him the letter. He studied it minutely while I stood in an agony of anticipation and shame.
Finally he spoke. ‘Well we see some bizarre things and weird people in this job but this is up there with the best of them. This is only his version of events, as you might say the Stalbridge edition, and now he’s put himself beyond questioning. So Alex, when and where did you meet him and what did he tell you?’
‘Yesterday, at the London Library.’
‘Why there?’
‘It’s a members-only library, by subscription, just off Piccadilly. You can find somewhere private to talk and we couldn’t be followed in except by another member of course.’
‘And were you followed?’
‘It seems not, at least he doesn’t suggest it in the letter.’
‘And what did he tell you?’
I did my best to remember and repeated our conversation as
accurately
as I could. At the end Hildreth nodded.
‘And who set up this meeting? Did he ask to see you?’
‘I’m afraid it was my suggestion.’
‘Why Alex, after I’d warned you about going off on your own?’
‘I thought I might find out something, that because I was in the same sort of business and had known Jack that he might confide in me. Then of course I would inform you.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘He asked me to give him a day before going to the police. He was ill. I thought he needed time to recover.’
‘Time to destroy or bury any evidence he might have given us.’
‘I didn’t think for a minute that he would kill himself.’
‘No, you didn’t think. Well that’s all water under the bridge now. I intend to keep you in my sights in future. That means you’ll have to take some time off. I’m going to Amsterdam and you’re coming with me. Unless I charge you with impeding a police enquiry and lock you up. Which is it to be, Alex?’
His gentle half-mocking tone didn’t deceive me.
‘I’ll tell them at work I’m taking some of my leave now.’
‘Right. Meet me at my office at ten o’clock tomorrow. Don’t forget to turn up, with your passport. I don’t want to send someone in uniform knocking on your door.’ Hildreth heaved himself away from the buff tiled mantelpiece he had been leaning against.
‘I’ll be there.’
‘Yes, you will. Reckon to be away at least one night.’
‘There’s just one thing.’ Desperately I tried to assert a more
favourable
image of myself, in my own eyes as well as Hildreth’s.
‘What’s that?’
‘Stalbridge thought at first his blackmailers would use dummies, replicas, something like that. Then he seems to have believed the boys were already dead when they were used in the tableaux. Were they, and was that the point of it all?’
‘Forensics support that view. As to why, the answer has to be porno pics for internet circulation, either for love or money. But you must have sussed that.’
‘And have they been circulated?’ Again I felt a fool with my naive questions.
‘Oh, yes. They’ve been turning up all over the web. Now we have to find out who’s doing it and, most of all of course, where the boys’ bodies are coming from.’
I didn’t remember the drive home or how I managed to get there without accident in my agony of humiliation. It would have been
hypocritical
to feel grief for Stalbridge but I should have felt renewed pain
for the unknown, lost boys. I had slipped back into my old cocoon of numbness and alienation from ordinary human emotion that Hilary had briefly dispelled, so much so that I couldn’t bring myself to ring her but sat emptying the whisky bottle until I fell asleep in my chair, and woke chilled to stumble to bed.
When I reached Hildreth’s office the next morning he was already waiting with his overcoat on. ‘Have you remembered your passport, in case we get separated?’
For answer I held up the plum-coloured pasteboard.
‘Right. A car will take us to Waterloo. We’re going on
Eurostar
. I don’t like flying. I’m relieved they’ve decided it’s bad for the environment.’