The Orpheus Trail (23 page)

‘So,’ Hildreth began when we were all inside my office, ‘another staged bit of necroporn.’

‘But this one’s quite different,’ I said, not knowing that I was going to speak but as if I too were some kind of automaton whose button had been pressed.

‘How do you mean?’

‘There’s nothing of beauty. It’s grotesque, a mockery of death. Nothing redeemed, no voyage to the Blessed Isles.’

‘What are you talking about, Kish?’ The chairman turned on me angrily.

‘Go on, Alex.’ Hildreth held up his hand.

‘All the others, the ones designed by Stalbridge, that is, were an attempt to deny the ugliness of death, to put art and a kind of love or at least desire for the beautiful against it in some sort of ritual. This hasn’t any of that.’

‘What you’re saying is that the others were designed for a different market.’

‘If you want to put it like that.’

‘I don’t follow any of this,’ the chairman said. ‘I hope you don’t want to keep us hanging about here. Someone has to deal with this mess.’

‘That’s right, sir. We all have to deal with it in our different ways.’

A girl I didn’t know appeared at the door. ‘Sergeant Thomas,’ she said. ‘Can I help?’

‘The sergeant will take statements from you and then you’re free to go. Alex, you can come with me. Mr Kish,’ he turned back to the others, ‘is being a great help to us in our enquiries, providing the kind of background expertise we don’t have to hand on the force.’

Obediently I followed him out. ‘Your chairman,’ he said, ‘strikes me as being out of the same mould as our super.’

‘You may have saved my job. He’s demanded my resignation.’

‘I think we need a drink. Where’s the nearest pub.’ We turned right along Victoria Avenue towards Prittlewell Church and the Blue Boar where I had sometimes gone for lunch in what seemed like another life.

‘Now then,’ Hildreth said when we were settled at a table with our drinks in the near empty saloon. ‘What did you mean back there? You do think this is different?’

‘It seemed obvious to me then. I suppose I’m not so sure now. This seems quite different in feeling, in tone almost. The people who set this up don’t have the same intention. There’s no underlying religious symbolism.’

‘So why have they done it?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what it means or why.’

‘The other scenes were designed by that Professor Stalbridge, partly for the pictures they would make for the benefit of the Ganymede Society, and others with similar tastes. Hebophiles, as we call them in the unit, with a dash of necrophilia, all tastefully arranged. Then you say there’s some sort of religion mixed in. But what sort? Does that give us a clue.’

‘That may just have been Stalbridge’s private input, nothing to do with whoever is behind it all. Stalbridge called them “some people who play rough”. They must have been the ones who got him to do the designs. Then they had someone also quite skilled in a different way to set them up. This time they simply took the Aunt Sally figure away, dressed up the body in her clothes and put it in her place.’

‘There couldn’t be any little gold square involved either, like the others.’

I’d been hoping that Hildreth wouldn’t bring the amulet into it. Now I mentally took a deep breath and said, ‘That’s of course because they’re all in my safe,’ I paused and took a deep breath, ‘along with the one Stalbridge sent me.’

He put his pint down carefully. ‘What else have you been keeping from me Alex?’

‘I would have told you. But I thought you’d just laugh if I said they’d stolen my cat.’

‘Your cat?’

‘You see. That’s exactly what I was afraid of.’

‘How do you know he was stolen, that he didn’t just run away or get run over? Cats do.’

‘They sent me a note with some of his fur. Then they let him go and he found his way back.’

‘Where is he now, this Houdini of a cat?’

‘I keep him shut in.’

‘They were warning you off – is that it? And if so, this latest stunt could be directed at you in the same way.’

‘Me? Why?’

‘Look at it like this. You agree this is different, that it isn’t done for the same purpose as before, the same market as I said, so what’s its purpose? To frighten you off. It’s a threat. Now you’ve told me about the cat it’s clear. They’ve seen you with me. Maybe they even followed you to Amsterdam. They wouldn’t have known we were meeting Beemsterboer but if they were keeping track of you they’d have seen that we went to the Dutch police headquarters. You’re in danger, Alex. What about your girlfriend, Dr Caistor?’

‘We haven’t been meeting recently. I thought it best.’

‘Alex, we may have to use you as bait, to draw them out. Would you be willing to help? You see, this isn’t just aimed at you but through you at all of us. They’ve got cocky and that may be their undoing. Beemsterboer thought there was nothing we could do but if they step outside their original activities, providing a little tasteful soft porn for kinky professors who’ll get all the references, then we may have them. They’ll make a mistake.’

‘If you could prove they killed Jack…’

‘That trail’s gone cold. No, we need something new. Who knows, we may get something from forensics on this one. I must get back on the job. I’m afraid they’ll have made rather a mess of your exhibition.’

I left him at the entrance to the Discovery Centre and went straight to my office without the courage to look in at the, no doubt, orderly chaos where ‘A Victorian Day at the Seaside’ should have been.
Shutting
the door I took the key from my desk and opened the safe. I had to be sure that the little bag holding the pieces from the amulet was still safely inside.

Opening the drawstring neck, I shook the four thin pieces of gold and the coin into my hand. I’d never been one for crossing my fingers or not walking under ladders but now I felt again the same tremor of fear the prince and his grave goods had always provoked in me. I thought of Shakespeare’s curse on ‘the man who digs my bones’, and the so-called curse of Tutankhamun. It was a commonplace: the desire to lie quiet in the grave, in hope perhaps of a resurrection that would reverse the ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust’ grim dictum of a burial service. Had Lucy known she was dying? Had she been afraid? We never talked about it.

The other animals were lucky not to have the burden of this
consciousness
, the real curse of Adam, the penalty for the knowledge of good and evil, or just knowledge. Yet even they mourn an absence, a loss. Now science gives us a new immortality! Our dust breaks down into its elements and is whirled about the world to be reincarnated. Transmigrate, in new life forms, satisfying all the old suggestions for life everlasting. But for our egos, the individual apprehension of
ourselves
, the biological unit, it isn’t enough. We still want to survive as an ‘I’, a ‘me’, subject and object, to outwit the extinction of that unique consciousness.

We’ve invented art to try to combat our fear, to give permanence where there’s otherwise only mutability as the Elizabethans called it. Jesus hangs on the cross, beauty in death, like the sculpted figure of the dying Gaul. Even without a resurrection Jesus is immortal in
paintings
, in music and words; art and religion intertwined, something we can believe in without belief. Was that what the scenes Stalbridge set up had meant?

He had thought, or so he said, that there would just be an effigy at the heart of his designs and by the time he realised the truth he was in too deep. He thought he was making a kind of art but it had the frisson of a real death. The phone was ringing. I picked it up. It was the chairman.

‘Well, Kish, I meant what I said. Just because you think you’ve been indulging in some kind of sleuthing with police involvement it doesn’t excuse the neglect of duty that’s led to this serious breach of
security
. It can’t go on. Who knows what people got up to while you were swanning off to Amsterdam to play detective.’

‘If you mean my staff, I trust them implicitly.’

‘It seems to me there’s been too much taken on trust. No, as I say, it won’t do.’

‘I take it you’re still asking for my resignation?’

‘Well I’m glad you agree you have no alternative.’

‘I expect the terms of my appointment to be honoured in full.’

‘We can talk about that.’

‘I believe I’m entitled to a month’s notice. I shall date it from today.’ A sliver of ice had entered my heart at the unfairness of his reaction. He wanted a scapegoat or, maybe all along he had been wanting someone he could browbeat even more than he did me, always the mark of the petty tyrant. ‘A dog’s obeyed in office.’ Now more than ever I needed the comfort of Hilary’s voice. I would have to ring her when I got home. She must hear what had happened from me, not just read about it in the papers.

I decided to leave by the rear entrance to the museum so not to have to pass the Discovery Centre, now crawling not just with police but sniffer dogs. At least I told myself that was the reason but the truth was a reaction had set in that made me afraid of my own shadow. If Hildreth was right and this latest happening was aimed at me what might I find when I got home: a trashed house and a dead Caesar? The sense of relief when I closed the front door and walked into first the kitchen and then the sitting room and found it all as tidy as Doris Shepherd had left it that morning and Caesar safely curled up on my bed, was so intense that it left me feeling sick and exhausted.

Hilary wouldn’t be home yet. I poured myself a drink and rang the cattery. Caesar would be safer there. Then I began to search my old green metal filing cabinet for the copy of my contract. I was
determined
to go down fighting. I had just pulled it out when the phone rang. It was Hildreth.

‘Alex, I thought you’d like to know what we’ve come up with so far.’

I wanted to say I’d had enough but I knew it was no good. ‘Go on.’

‘You were right that this is different but you couldn’t know how different.’

‘Yes…’

‘This boy is British, Scotch I should say. Ran away from home, brutal stepfather, usual story, taken into care, ran away from the hostel, been living rough, died of malnutrition and drugs. On the Missing Persons Register.’

‘What about the blood?’

‘Animal. They think pig, you know, bleeding like a stuck pig.’

Hildreth’s brand of gallows humour had begun to grate badly, reviving the overwrought sensations that the whisky and familiar
surroundings
had begun to soften.

‘You’re talking about a dead boy.’

‘This job is like being a surgeon. You have to develop a shell or you can’t wield the knife. What I don’t get is, why they think they can frighten us off with these tactics. Or is it just the self indulgence of revenge.’

‘Well they’ve succeeded. I’ve agreed to resign. In other words I’ve been sacked.’

‘Is that my fault?’ Hildreth’s tone was one of simple enquiry not denial.

‘In a way I suppose, though I don’t blame you. You were doing your job. I went along with it. Maybe I was flattered and so it is my fault. I’m accused of neglecting my duty, playing detective, ironically being negligent about security.’

‘I’m sorry, Alex. I didn’t foresee this. I hadn’t sussed out your
chairman
sufficiently. What will you do?’

‘Oh, they’ll have to pay me redundancy. I’ve got a five-year
contract
. Maybe I’ll join the police. You like graduates these days, I believe. Immediately though, I’m insisting on a month’s notice to put things in some sort of order for the poor sod who takes over. I wish him luck. Are you issuing a statement yet? I’d like a copy before the press come calling.’

‘I’ll see you get it.’

‘Tonight?’

‘I’ll make sure it’s emailed to you. There’s not much in it. There’s not much we can say at this stage. Get some sleep. With luck there’ll be more to tell you tomorrow.’

‘I’m not sure I want to hear it,’ I said and put back the receiver, only
to feel very alone as soon as I’d cut the link, like a dog that’s slipped its lead and finds itself in a strange street and hungry for home.

The boy had slipped his lead; thousands do every year, the papers tell us, and thousands are never found, spirited away, gone
underground
with the rejected asylum seekers, illegals, druggies, an
underworld
we treat as the festering residue at the bottom of our society, a murky sediment we try not to disturb in case it muddies our clear waters, underclass in the underpass, with ‘subprime’ the new word for the next layer up who still have aspirations to be part of the common weal or wealth.

Trying Hilary’s number I got her answering service. There was no help to be had there; nowhere I could give my self-pity a workout. Perhaps I should take up Buddhism or Stoic philosophy. What about a book:
Meditation for Non-Believers
? Instead I poured a good measure of Famous Grouse and, suddenly seeing its relevance to my present state of mind, felt my mood lighten and raised my glass. ‘Here’s to you, kid,’ I toasted myself.

Next morning I called the staff together to tell them I would be leaving at the end of the month. It was Phoebe who showed the
strongest
reaction, putting up her hand to her mouth and almost sobbing, ‘Oh, Mr Kish!’

‘Will you put in for the job?’ I asked Lisa after the others had left. ‘I’d give you a glowing reference of course, but I don’t know that that would do you much good’.

‘I don’t think I could cope with the chairman,’ Lisa laughed. ‘I may apply somewhere else.’

Selfishly I hadn’t thought about the impact my going might have on the staff. Locked in my own bleak bubble I’d been oblivious to their loyalty, even affection over the years. It was something, a real plus to set against my low self-esteem.

‘What will you do, Alex?’ Lisa asked. She rarely called me by my first name, nearly always using the non-committed ‘you’ without attribution.

‘I honestly don’t know. It’s all been so sudden I haven’t had time to think.’

Phoebe brought in a stack of newspapers. The tabloids had gone
to town, ‘Lost Boy Found Dead.’ ‘Billy’s Last Grisly Gameshow.’ The
Daily Muckraker
had tracked down his parents. ‘We don’t know why he ran away. I never lifted a hand to him.’ ‘Sinister Gang Targets Homeless.’