Ritual Read online

  Chairs screeched as legs pushed them away from the table. Everyone stood up. Except Mrs. Spark. Cready was the first to actually move towards the door. He swivelled on Mrs. Spark.

  ‘So you did call the police, Mrs. Spark? You tricked us into coming here! Very neat, I’m sure! Such advanced psychology! But, by hell, you will have to answer this! I’ll have you charged with multiple libel!’

  As she stood up, Mrs. Spark knocked the Bible off the table. She found her toes flexing on its spine. She did not remove her foot.

  ‘It’s a lie, Mr. Cready! I swear I informed no policeman. This young gentleman will bear me out. And then he’ll leave this village, won’t you, Mr. Hanlin? There’s nothing for you here!’

  The mother was going to prove difficult. As difficult as the sexy daughter. David turned to Cready. ‘She’s telling the truth, sir!’ David said. ‘This investigation is my idea, backed of course, by my Super. No, don’t attempt to leave. Well, not for a moment. I have words to say.’

  Mrs. Spark pulsed her nostrils.

  ‘You cannot help us, Mr. Hanlin, or Inspector, or whatever you are. You see, you see, my daughter accidentally tripped out of a tree and died. Accidentally!’

  Relief, like a landslide, swept over the listeners’ faces.

  ‘No, I’m afraid you’re wrong, Mrs. Spark. I’m very sorry to say but we think it might be murder. I will question everyone in due course. Presumably Mrs. Spark knows all your addresses so you can go in peace. I look forward to greater intimacy.’

  Cready deliberately pushed past him. David’s hand clamped on his shoulder.

  ‘Mr…?’

  Cready snapped at him. ‘Cready, retired great-minor actor, at your doubtful service, Herr Oberleutnant!’

  Cready snapped into a Hitler salute, and screamed, ‘Zeig Heil!’ Twice. Then, with a flick of his voice, he proceeded to dazzle his audience with a brief display of baby noises.

  ‘Well, Mr. Cready, it strikes me that you must have studied young children, eight year olds in particular, a great deal. Maybe the odd experiment, too. Vocal, naturally. To achieve such consistent mimicry, you really must have put in a lot of time with your subjects.’

  ‘You are very observant, Inspector. It’s true the village children often come to play in my garden in the butterfly season. Should you care to join us in some of the more advanced games, you are welcome. We always appreciate innocence.’

  After the invitation was completed, the Inspector allowed him to leave. Squire Fenn was the next in line for the exit. The Inspector edged in front of him.

  ‘I’m Francis Fenn, Squire here. And I’m not sure whether I am at your service! There’s reservations on my visiting list. I think you’re one.’

  ‘Nice to make your acquaintance, Squire Fenn. Have you any little party pieces that might interest us?’

  ‘Yes, I warble on a flute, Inspector. Recitals are free to you any time. I play very badly, d’you see!’

  David leaned back on his right foot to allow the Squire to pass him.

  ‘Oh, by the by, Squire. I will be visiting you.’

  The Squire adjusted his cravat, making sure the imitation-diamond pin was still in place. Then he walked down the stairs.

  Rowbottom moved his lizard feet towards the Inspector.

  ‘As everyone is chucking in their oar, like—I thought it might be of interest to you to know that my daughter, Gilly, saw the accident. She saw Dian fall right out of that tree. And Gilly’s not a lying child. So you can forget any other ideas you might have had!’

  The Inspector held the door open as the competitors for strangeness left. He noticed Mrs. Spark’s silence. She was rethinking Sunday morning over again. The Inspector watched her. She was one of those women who have no delta of calm. She was all ice storms and thunder mountains. A rose, to her, was not a natural sculpture in silence, but a beautiful terror on fire.

  He turned sharply as Mr. Spark lumbered into the room. Anna spoke. ‘Dad, this gentleman is a policeman...’

  Anna began a recital of the official potential of David. She said that he would clear up, once and for all, the insidious rumours that rocked the village. She went on to request that he might stay in the spare room, Dian’s room, until the mystery ceased to be a mystery. As she finished her epistle, she dropped a wet smile from the shine on her bottom lip in David’s direction. This was observed and picked up by Mrs. Spark. Mr. Spark noticed nothing.

  ‘Well, Dad, what do you say?’

  Silence.

  Mrs. Spark flexed her eyebrows and said, ‘Definitely no! There is nothing to investigate! Nothing I have just been suffering belated shock, that’s all!’

  Mr. Spark was fascinated by the reversal of his wife’s opinions. He had not been, as he often put it, married to green eyes for twenty-seven years without realising there was nearly always a fiddle. But what was the fiddle this time, that was the problem. In an oblique way, he knew in the one-way streets of his mind, especially seconds before leaping into sleep, that his wife was dangerous. Profoundly so. But she was mainly dangerous to herself. There was a twisting pain inside her. Many evenings when the moon would not come and the stars were dead, he watched the terror brood in her. A force, not of herself, thrust fever in her eyes and her tongue. He had often asked her about it and been greeted with a blank laugh. She was afraid of talking of her depths. She was frightened of the barracudas and worse that lived in her imagination. Not only was she frightened of bringing them to the surface, she was frightened even to think about them as they battened on her. She was a very frightened woman.

  He watched his wife now as she continued to reiterate, ‘No! No! No! I don’t want a policeman in my house! Sadists all of you! No...!’

  Mr. Spark was considering possibilities. Perhaps this policeman could do some deep sea fishing in his wife’s mind and lug those fear fish into the light. Anna, David, and Mrs. Spark turned to him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr. Spark, ‘he can stay. I want my daughter’s death settled beyond any possible doubt. Hate is growing. Now, don’t you deny it, Helen, you know it is! And I want no hate in my house! Anna will show you your room, Inspector.’

  During this conversation, the three labourers had re-seated themselves. They watched with interest as the scalpels were applied within the family. They were very amused. As the Inspector followed Anna out of the room, they caught his eye by winking in unison. James wanted to spit very badly but restrained himself. His trouble in life was that he never missed. And that could have serious repercussions.

  Mr. and Mrs. Spark sat down at the table facing the labourers. They were unsure where their relationship was leading them. James produced a pack of cards from his back pocket and proceeded to deal from the bottom. He felt the coming tension zip between his shoulder blades. Very exciting.

  7

  The Inspector began to unpack. He had no interest in clothes. He unbundled his shirts and pyjamas and piled them in a twisty heap on the bed spread. Anna watched. He was now irritated with her. He wouldn’t mind her towards midnight, but not the middle-end of the afternoon, thank you! Sex did not assist murder investigations. He felt she was urging him to remove her dress. She wanted to uncoil from her panties, ping her bra and then perform the Rite of Spring, without the assistance of Stravinsky.

  Whilst he shoved his nylon socks and string underwear in the first drawer he found, Anna unpacked his wood sculptures. She fingered the chisels and then whooped out, ‘Marvellous!’ as she discovered three completed sculptures. A white wood scorpion, redwood snake and a yellow dragon. She stroked them intimately. Her fingers searched out the artistry. She liked the artist in him more and more. Her bra felt heavy under the sway of her breasts. Gently slipping her left hand into the top of her dress, she eased the weight and slightly changed the tight position of the bra cup. Because her bust was over-ripe, she often discovered red semi-circles below her breasts where the bra had cut into her body. Just thinking about herself naked, excited her. She wasn’t just fond of herself. She
was in love.

  Hanlin observed all this, as she intended he should. He decided to apply the fourth degree.

  ‘Anna, what do you know about your illustrious Squire?’

  ‘Oh, not much! But it is rumoured that Cready has some kind of hold on him. Financially, I suspect. I suppose you didn’t know that Cready now lives in the Squire’s Manor. Has for the last six years. And the poor old Squire, who is a honey, has to live in a cottage east of the woods. A couple of fields away, that is. These sculptures are really super! And I mean that!’

  ‘Yes, I think I’ll visit our Squire. This is a very scintillating village, you know, examined from a great distance—preferably London! I must admit, I love the way the villagers have taken to me—right to the heart! Such hospitality! And, oh, so helpful! Do you know, I haven’t had one straight answer to one straight question? It’s all been carefully parcelled up with secrets and suspicion. Why? Unless they have something to hide? A private darkness that is quietly corrupting the law. What a galaxy of planets we have here! There’s Gypo, the sadist—Squire Fenn, the fluter—Lawrence Cready, the actor—the children, the Indians—your Father, the peacemaker—your Mother, the danger—and you, what in the name of indiscretion are you? The evening corrupter? The brassiere loosener? The phallus teaser? It’s endless! Oh, and I forgot the Reverend White! The God killer! I will return.’

  He moved toward the door. She stopped him.

  ‘You suffer from too much police sophistication, David, my lamb. People are never so complex—or so simple. They are just lovely people—as you will see—if you pull back your eyelids. Oh, but you are a beautiful carver!’

  David ignored this, picked up his half finished paperknife and a chisel, and left the house.

  It took him twenty minutes to reach the Squire’s cottage, having been misled by one of the twins and the cat butcher. There was a definite subconscious hysteria in every villager he had met so far. It was too much to believe that everyone was suffering from guilt. Or was it? Since he had arrived he had acquired no definite proof of anything. Simply tremors. Blood tremors. Why, for instance, was the Priest so verbose? So unworried about sacrilege and so positive in avoiding the Police? Then, there’s the children, brought up in this climate of distrust. Their minds already cankered. The Police image to them was equivalent to Satan. But what, and here was the problem, but what did Satan mean to them? Was he the Devil? Or had they turned him into God?

  Dark and light are only of the mind. They are inter-changeable. It is a matter of opinion whether the dun-yellow of twilight is the growing of the dark, or simply the dying of the light. To the children maybe, the light interferes with the dark. Perhaps the villagers have trained themselves and their children to love the dark. Have they discovered the sexual release of fear? And do they need the night to cover them? What were they doing in the loft before I went in?

  Questions sprouted in the Inspector’s head. He paused outside the flaking garden gate of the Squire’s cottage. Strange flute notes crept out of the cottage. They were discordant, pursuing something beyond music. The notes were haunting, hunting something in the Inspector. They cut through all the musical rhythms he could remember. He found he wanted to dance. Not exactly dance, but lift one foot after the other, slowly. The sequence of sound seemed to limpet all the notes together until it concentrated into a howl. That’s it! That! It was an experiment in sound. In evil?

  A snort of pain assisted the music. The Inspector listened for some time to the counterpoint, before realising the snorting came from a white horse in the field next to the cottage. It was neighing in fear. Battering itself against a hawthorn hedge and collecting thorns in its flanks. Perspiration skipped from its neck onto the buttercups.

  Slowly the screech subsided. The notes reformed into honey in the late summer. The horse stopped thrashing itself against the briars. Two girlish ribbons of blood tied themselves on the horse’s white belly. The thorns had done their work. The blood was coming.

  The Inspector wanted to go into the field and mop the blood with his handkerchief. But he was very sensitive about being stamped to death. The horse relaxed under the summer sounds. It slowly knelt down. Japanese white against English green. Then with a tired neigh, it unbuckled its beauty and lay still.

  The music had become music, gentle, so gentle. The Inspector had to strain to catch the subtlety of the note patterns. But he broke it by forcing his hypnotised fingers to the latch on the garden gate. Pressing the heel of his thumb down sharply, he clicked the gate open.

  Leaning against his Jacobean fireplace, the Squire heard the click and instructed his flute to silence. His cottage had a very low cream-yellow ceiling, veined with black beams, like giant spiders’ legs. The Squire, who was nearly six foot, smoothed his hair. Then he ducked his head between the beams and looked through a gash in the curtains. As soon as he saw the Inspector strolling up the path, he sucked the flute to his lips and began to pipe a Nursery Rhyme. He missed most of the notes out. It was like a child learning the instrument. An unmusical child. In fact, he missed out more notes of ‘Old King Cole’ than there were notes in the tune.

  He was disturbed by the intrusion. The door knocker clattered twice. The Squire went into the dwarf hall and let the Inspector in. His white hair was no longer parted down the centre with such military precision. There was something distrait about his appearance. As if he had been dancing. Or worse. A whisper of sweat slid down his jugular vein. He no longer wore his cravat and his top shirt button was missing. The thread was ripped away from the shirt as though he had tugged open his collar violently.

  In the corner of the hall, David noticed an expensive modern steel bow and a quiver of aluminium arrows. He remembered that Gypo’s bow was steel and the arrows aluminium. Casually he brushed his fingers over the metal. The bow was strung. It had been used recently. The Inspector was sure of this.

  ‘Nice bow, eh, Inspector? Children must have left it behind. You know how forgetful they are. Always taken a keen interest in ‘em!’

  ‘You were doing some very strange fluting, Squire, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘Say so, indeed, sir, for I was indeed, sir, very strange! I’m only a beginner, d’you see—like in so many things—one has to begin to die from the start! Disturbing thought, don’t you think? Soon as you’re born, you begin to die. My piping’s just the same. Seems to die on me before it’s been born. Which presents certain chromatic problems, as I’m sure you can see! Come and see my garden. Too fair a day to stifle indoors.’

  The Squire led the Inspector through the front room to the kitchen. They practically crawled on all fours as the roof seemed to meet the mouse holes, which were planned symmetrically round the skirting board. The kitchen was piled with empty bottles of claret and second-best hock. The sink was a junk yard of marmalade plates, eggy saucers, bacon rind and chicken bones. The Squire is an organised man with a deep regard for cleanliness, thought David. The Squire opened the back door onto the garden.

  A long winding path led through fresh beds of roses. A shudder of petals, scarlet and yellow flames in the late afternoon sun. Rose upon rose, uncurling to the furnace in the sky. And the furnace was slowly dying. It was the prologue to the witching time. The centuries of dead felt calmer, knowing the seasons of ghosts were coming. The perfection of darkness was only a few hours away.

  ‘Talking of your fluting, Squire, I don’t think you played so badly at all. I stood outside the gate and listened for a good ten minutes. It was experimental, hypnotic, and a little disturbing—but I wouldn’t have said bad. The horse over there, you know, broke into a sweat as you played.’

  The white horse in the field saw the Squire, whinnied, and galloped in a sharp circle.

  ‘He doesn’t seem to like you, does he, Squire?’

  The Squire fondled the secret places of a rose. He uncurled the petals to reveal the nude centre.

  ‘Perhaps it’s you he doesn’t like, Inspector. Though, I must admit, it’s surprising w
hat bad Stravinsky can do! So much easier to be bad avant garde than good anything, don’t you think?’

  The Inspector knew he was lying about the flute and the bow and arrow—but was clueless as to why. Clueless. That was the problem. There were clues all right, but nothing to relate them to. ‘Inspector, I can give you a poor man’s Stravinsky recital any time. Now, if you like.’ He said this, fingering his flute in one hand and a rose in the other.

  ‘No, thank you, Squire. By the way, it’s very funny you should offer to show me your garden, for that’s one of the reasons I came. Could I see your herb patch?’

  “Course, Inspector. Delighted to find the police produce horticulturists as well as post mortemists!’

  They passed the roses and the giant sunflowers. Next came cabbages, and a fleck of red in the runner beans. The earth was thick brown, nearly black. Very fertile. At the bottom of the long garden, the smell of half-ripe apples softened the cabbage tang. Five apple trees stapled their leaves on the sky cloth. And one pear tree, without a single pear, shouldered arms and saluted the sun.

  Just this side of the orchard, they reached the herb patch. The Inspector knelt down and inspected the plants; bruised mint, rosemary and parsley. With the Squire’s permission, David ripped off a curled sprig of parsley and chewed it appreciatively. The aromatic green was refreshing to his palate. Whilst he was chewing, he found what he was looking for. A small bed of garlic flowers hidden underneath a mist of honeysuckle. There were other herbs beside the garlic, whose names he couldn’t remember. But he knew they were uncommon. He wondered why the Squire grew them.

  The Squire observed the Inspector’s interest flare up, but merely remarked, ‘Vast goodness in earth, Inspector, if only we could harvest it. Surprising the amount of plants and things that are waiting for their right uses, eh?’

  ‘Squire, I think you are being deliberately obtuse. You know perfectly well that Dian Spark was found dead, clutching a spray of garlic. Very few gardens bother to grow it. But you have. Why? Did you give Dian the flowers last Sunday morning? Were you, in fact, one of the last people to see her alive?’