"Gill, B M - Tom Maybridge 03 - The Fifth Rapunzel 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gill B M)

Rendcome, the Chief Constable, remembered booking a hearse driver for speeding once, a long time ago, when he'd been on the beat. At times of death you tend to think of your youth, not necessarily with nostalgia. Middle age was a comfortable age, emotionally. You had learnt self-control and were confident and authoritative. Unused to a passive role, he forced himself to remain passive. If anyone helped out with a sensible suggestion, such as bidding everyone a polite farewell, it would have to be one of the villagers. Maybridge, possibly, he'd lived here a long time. He turned his gaze on him.
Maybridge, aware of the mental semaphores directed towards him by his chief, ignored them. It was up to the vicar to bring the service to a close, and if he were wise he wouldn't make excuses for Simon. Excuses weren't necessary. The boy had taken off because he couldn't bear it any more. Understandable. His composure had been like a skin over a growing tumour and the skin had ruptured. The lad needed solitude for a while. In times of stress most people did. You didn't pursue them officiously and thrust your company upon them. Pursuing officially was a different matter altogether and a regrettable part of Maybridge's job. A reluctant sympathy for the felon on the run had always been difficult to quell when the man - woman - whoever it was - had finally been run to ground. He had once confessed this to Bradshaw. "Much as I'd loathe your job," he'd told him, "there are times when I'd almost be prepared to swop with you." He'd gone on to describe the lad who'd taken refuge in a cave in the Chilterns after knifing his girlfriend to death. Together with his sergeant, he'd found him cowering in the dark, very cold and hungry, his amber eyes wide and frightened like those of a cornered fox. Bradshaw's reply had been dry and laconic. "The fox wore bloodied shoes," he said, "group AB. Same as the girl's. Careless of him." Bradshaw the pragmatist. And Bradshaw the father? Only Simon knew about that.
Meg was the first to see him as he left the copse and began climbing the lane towards the house that glittered with windows up on the hill. A white sugar lump of a house, large, expensive, and totally out of character with the ancient grey stone cottages that clustered nearby.
"There he is," she said.
Yes, Maybridge thought, there indeed he was, and there wasn't much they could do to help him. At least not yet. Later, he and Meg would call on the lad. Sometime this evening or tomorrow when he was more controlled. When he had first arrived from school, Meg had suggested he might like to spend a few days with them and had made up David's bed in anticipation. He had refused. He was used to being on his own, he'd said. An odd comment. There isn't much solitude in a boarding school unless you're clever enough to find it inside your head, in which case it's all right, or you're ostracised for one reason or another by your peers, in which case it certainly isn't. He hoped it was the former. He was a difficult boy to know.
Kester-Evans, Simon's headmaster for almost ten years, had agreed when Maybridge had done some gentle probing. Simon Bradshaw puzzled him, too, he'd admitted. Superficially he appeared to conform and was academically rather better than average. When younger he had been a nuisance from time to time, as most of them were. But not a spontaneous nuisance. An outsider watching herd behaviour and occasionally taking part because he thought he should, described his attitude. During the last couple of years, the difficult period of late adolescence, he had seemed to settle more into himself and let the herd go its own way. He had friends, two or three in the sixth form who, like him, had followed the same science syllabus and been promised places in medical school in the autumn, but they were friendships that didn't go deep. He hadn't wanted any of them to come to his parents' funeral. The support of his peers apparently wasn't necessary.
Kester-Evans, aware that his own support could quite easily have been dispensed with from Simon's point of view, watched the distant figure disappear round a curve on the hill. It was the first spontaneous act he had seen Simon make. An emotional, absolutely natural, escape from the unbearable. He wondered when he would be ready to return to school for the few remaining weeks of term but now wasn't the time to ask, and he couldn't wait the few tactful hours until the time was right. He had to drive back to Dorset to chair a managers' meeting at the school by five thirty. To go without taking leave of the boy seemed heartless, but someone here might deliver a verbal message for him later. May-bridge possibly. But the detective chief inspector was with the police contingent at the moment and he didn't want to intrude. The vicar, then? Or the vicar's wife, whose invitation to 'eats' up at the vicarage he had declined? 'Eats', what a crass expression! 'Funeral meats' was the old-fashioned term. What, he wondered, would future generations do to the elegant cadences of archaic and beautiful prose? Hammer it into the ground on their word processors? Kester-Evans, musing in the shadow of the church, looked at sunlight sparkling on muddied pools and was reminded of recent rain. He prudently carried his umbrella with him everywhere and before the service he had left it in the porch. He must remember to fetch it as soon as the vicar spoke whatever final words might suit the situation and release everyone from the trap of silence and embarrassment that held them so still.
The Reverend Sutton, forgetting in his confusion that he had already intoned it, raised his hand and repeated the blessing: "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen."
There were a few murmured amens and then the mourners moved slowly away.
Maybridge, about to do the same, halted in surprise as his sergeant approached him, carrying one of the wreaths. Radwell, his hands shaking, was holding it at arm's length as if he were a nervous acolyte about to present an unspeakable object at a Black Mass. "I'm awfully sorry, sir," Radwell muttered. "I should have spotted it earlier." Lying semi-concealed in the circlet of flowers was a pig's trotter streaked with dried blood.

2.

Rhoda Osborne was sitting on a bench in the porch eating a Mars bar when Kester-Evans returned for his umbrella. She felt light-headed due to too long a fast. She'd had nothing to eat since a cup of coffee and a biscuit at Paddington buffet before catching the Bristol train. The chocolate now was necessary. She had hoped to be emotionally detached from all that was going on here, but it hadn't been possible. The service hadn't bothered her too much; she had sat in one of the back pews and made all the usual responses with everyone else. But watching the coffins being carried down the aisle on their final inevitable journey had stripped away her calm, forcing her to grip the back of the pew in front so that she could remain standing. Later, at the graveside, she had closed her eyes and listened to a bird singing. A thrush. A sweet gentle twittering that mocked the vicar's solemn tones. Mindless, happy creatures, birds. Humans know pain, are prone to tears. Today she hadn't wept. Be thankful for that, Rhoda, she told herself. You are in control. The only stupid thing you did was to drop your camera. And now the creep who helped you pick it up has come looking for you.
She watched Kester-Evans coldly as he went over to the umbrella stand. He nodded at her politely, found his black umbrella with the carved rosewood handle, and was about to go when he noticed a fragment of lens under the table holding the prayer books. He retrieved it and handed it to her. "There is a time and place for everything," he said censoriously. "It is not good form to take photographs of the deceased at such close proximity."
She smiled faintly. "They were boxed. And no photograph was taken."
"The bearers might have tripped on the shards." Her tone annoyed him.
"In which case they would no longer have been boxed and you would have been right to censure me."
He knew he had no right under any circumstances, it was one of the weaknesses of schoolmastering to assume a right where none existed. Even so, the vision of shattered coffins was grisly. "It would have been appalling for the boy. For Simon, their son."
"But it didn't happen. And I didn't intend taking a picture. Afterwards, at the interment. Not then."
He didn't believe her, though it could have been true. When the boys lied to him he usually 'talked things through', as he put it, and the truth emerged eventually. Why he should bother about the truth now, he didn't know. It wasn't his concern. Even so, almost out of habit, he sat beside her and waited for anything else she might have to say.
She moved impatiently. Half rose, then sat again. Examined her nails, carefully manicured and painted a dark shade of maroon. Sighed.
He was a patient inquisitor, adept at silence. She broke it at last. "He wore a black tie. For God's sake, what ghoul would give a kid like that a black tie?"
He had given it. And Simon wasn't a kid, he was a sixth former in his final term. Being called a ghoul wasn't pleasant.
"It could have been one of his father's," she said, "though I've never seen Peter wear one like that. A bow tie with a tuxedo, sometimes. Never a black lumpy monstrosity."
He was interested that she knew Professor Bradshaw that well. Perhaps she wasn't a professional photographer, after all. He was about to ask her when she got up and wandered over to the door. The mourners were congregating in groups down by the cemetery gates and some were leaving in their cars. It hadn't been difficult to suss out the police amongst the bearers of Peter's coffin and they were still together, she noticed. D.C.I. Maybridge, the local man, would have been more difficult to place if she hadn't already found out who he was. When standing with his colleagues he exuded an air of authority like the rest of them, and of very obvious annoyance when she'd dropped the camera in the porch, but when reading the lesson there had been a depth of sincerity in his voice and he had looked at the boy with compassion. He might be approachable some day. So far she had had no luck with any of them.
Kester-Evans, hoping for a response, introduced him self. "John Kester-Evans, headmaster at Collingwood in Dorset. Simon's school, and his father's before him, though not in my time, of course."
She glanced at him over her shoulder. So this gangling elderly man with the straw-coloured hair was Simon's dominie. A useful link, perhaps. Worth cultivating, maybe. She went to sit beside him again. "He must have thought well of Collingwood," she said, "to send his son there." It was polite. Peter's words came back to her. "A minor public school. I found it bearable. I think Simon does. The head is a bit of a pain, but harmless. Well meaning." Harmless. A favourite adjective. He had used it frequently. Well meaning? Yes, she could believe it. She smiled at him and her smile transformed her.
Kester-Evans, a bachelor in an all-male environment, responded with some confusion. "Yes. Quite so. Thank you." He always believed first judgments to be correct, and they usually were, but now he was less sure. The hard, pure lines of her face had softened. He told her he was concerned about Simon. During the last conversation he'd had with him, just before the funeral, the boy had mumbled something about medicine being "the sickest career there is, especially my father's branch of it", and then, aware of the double entendre, had tried to make a joke of it. It wouldn't be funny if he refused his place at medical school. The bereaved tended to act on impulse. The sooner he returned to school for the last few weeks of term, the better. He needed a guiding hand and the company of his peers.
"His friends here in the village are very helpful," he went on. "The Maybridges particularly so. But the academic relationship is important. I've guided Simon and I know his potential. He'll never be as brilliant as his father, but if he chooses another speciality in medicine he could do very well."
Brilliance, Rhoda thought, could blind. Like a diamond it had many facets. Sharp edged. Sometimes cruel. "Cadavers," she said quietly, "don't bleed."
"What?" Kester-Evans thought he had misheard her.
She let him think it and then responded in the way she believed he would want her to. Her own career as a freelance journalist was important to her, she said glibly. In retrospect she cherished her years at university and wouldn't have missed them for anything. But she understood Simon's attitude now. Grief was unbalancing. She hesitated. "Someone just a few years older than him - well, someone my age - might be able to get through to him."
Steady, she told herself, you're going too far, too fast.
Kester-Evans glanced at the camera case which was bulging in the wrong direction like a dismembered corpse in a plastic bag. And then he looked at her face again. She smiled her transforming smile.
"It was unfortunate," he said.
"Indeed, yes," she agreed.
"Expensive?" He was playing for time, making up his mind.
"Yes, but it doesn't matter. I'm sorry I was rude to you just now, but I was upset. Not about dropping it -a camera can be replaced - but dropping it where I did. I'd hoped to take a picture at the graveside, as I told you. I'm planning to write a profile of the Bradshaws for one of the Sundays - The Times, possibly, or the Observer." (Well, it seemed a good idea, impromptu but plausible.)
They were quality papers and he approved of them with just a few reservations. His reservations about her were fast disappearing. "You've known Simon's family a long time?"
"Long enough."
Maybridge might have wondered, "Long enough for what?" Kester-Evans, more naive, more trusting, didn't. He explained that he had to return to Dorset for an urgent appointment at the school and wouldn't have time to call on Simon before leaving. "I've bought his rail ticket - seeing it should persuade him to use it. It's valid until the end of the month, but I don't want him to wait that long. I was hoping someone from the village, one of his friends, would hand it in and pass on a message from me." He took it out of his wallet. "I could post it, of course, and write, but a letter is too easily ignored."
She agreed that it was. "The sooner you're able to talk to him directly, the better. He needs a little gentle urging to return to Collingwood without delay."
A little gentle urging. He was so easy to mimic. Too easy.
She added hesitantly, afraid of blowing it by appearing too keen, that she didn't have to return to London until the evening and that she would be happy to call on Simon if he would like her to.
Her hesitancy won him. "It's most kind of you. I'm grateful." He handed her the ticket. "If you could give the lad just a few hours on his own before calling he might be more receptive to your good counselling."
She promised that she would and that she would be tactful. "Is there any message, apart from returning to Collingwood, that you'd like me to pass on to him?"
Kester-Evans thought about this for a moment or two. He hadn't written the usual letter of condolence. It hadn't been necessary, he had been in contact with Simon most of the time. But today, this special day, perhaps something more spiritual should be touched upon. In similar cases he had found Ovid's quotation about immortality suitable and soothing. It began 'Morte carent animae' and was rather lengthy. In translation it might sound clumsy and even - though God forbid - a little pompous. He had genuine sympathy for the boy, so why not express it simply? "Give him my best wishes," he said rather stiffly. "Tell him I'll be in touch soon." He ran his fingers over the knob of his umbrella. Silky wood. Very smooth. "Tell him ... tell him ... that his father was proud of him ... had great hopes for him ... and ..." He knew he should mention Simon's mother, but didn't know what to say. In all the years the boy had been at Collingwood he had never met her. "And his mother, too," he finished lamely.
"Yes," Rhoda said, "his mother, too." Her voice was clear and steady, but she was careful not to look at him.
Embarrassed, a little emotional, Kester-Evans took his leave of her. It wasn't until he was musing over the day's events some while later that he realised he hadn't asked her name.