Drowned Lives

39

Detective Sergeant Graham and I were both wrapped up in coats and scarves as we stood on the towpath next day and watched scenes of crime officers in paper suits go over the blackened wreck of the boat. Our breath steamed the frosty air as I waited for Graham to speak. But for a while he seemed content to let me stew. His expression was more worried than ever, and his face was pale with cold under his stubble.

‘Did nobody see anything?’ I asked at last.

He gave me an impatient glower. ‘The couple who pulled you out of the water saw nobody. And the lady in the next house over there only remembers you, Mr Buckley. The same neighbour who told us you’d visited Ash Lodge previously.’

‘Mrs Wentworth.’

‘That’s the lady’s name.’

‘Yes, you know perfectly well I visited Ash Lodge. I didn’t deny it. I came to see Samuel Longden, but he wasn’t here.’

‘Remind me, was that before or after the time you were supposed to meet him in Lichfield market square?’

‘Before, obviously. Afterwards—’

‘Afterwards, he was dead. Of course. You seem to have had bad luck trying to meet up together. But looking for him on his boat nearly three weeks after his death seems a bit desperate, sir.’

I gritted my teeth to prevent myself from getting angry at the insinuations. I wasn’t in the best of moods. As far as I was concerned, I’d been brained with a windlass and then almost burned to death before nearly drowning in the canal. Was it too much to expect a bit of sympathy?

It was the owners of Rose Marie, moored further along the bank, who’d come to my rescue with a life belt and a boat hook. Having dragged me to the towpath side and onto solid ground, they’d tried to persuade me to go to hospital for treatment. But apart from a few minor burns and scratches, the worst injury was the gash in my scalp where the windlass had hit me, and the raging headache it had left me with.

In another few minutes, I might have yielded to common sense and gone for a check-up. But the policeman who’d turned up with the fire brigade had been interested only in getting my name and address and my garbled version of events. He’d questioned me suspiciously as I sat and shivered in front of the stove on Rose Marie, wrapped in a blanket.

In the end, the policeman’s attitude had made me feel so angry that I could think of nothing else except sneaking off to collect the package which I’d dropped in the long grass on the far bank, and which I desperately hoped might contain something that would give me a clue why all this was happening. Only when I’d done that, I thought, would I feel able to get off home to a couple of paracetamols and a warm bed.

But it had been hours before I was able to get away. I’d been forced to stay and watch while the firemen performed the futile and ironic task of pouring water into a boat, a paramedic patched up my wounds, and my new boater friends had hunted round to find me some dry clothes. Even after the firefighters and the police had left, I’d waited in my car until I was sure that the Rose Marie people were settled down for the night. Then I’d walked along the towpath to the nearest footbridge, a quarter of a mile along the canal, before I could work my way along the edge of the fields and locate my package — a soaking mess in the grass.

By then, I’d been nearly blind with weariness and pain. I’d driven back to Lichfield in a stupor, like someone drugged. A few hours later, I’d woken up lying on my bed in my clothes, soaked in sweat and stiff with bruising, whimpering with terror — only to be called back to the scene and forced to explain myself all over again to DS Graham on a freezing canal bank.

‘If you’ve talked to Mrs Wentworth, she’ll have told you that the reason I came out here last night was because she rang me,’ I said.

‘Yes, she did,’ admitted Graham.

‘And she rang me because she couldn’t get any satisfactory response from the police.’

‘I’ve checked with the control room. She did make two calls, but the information she gave was very vague. A patrol came by during the evening, but everything seemed to be quiet.’ He shrugged. ‘We get a lot of calls like that. Especially from householders in this sort of area. Strange noises at night, you know. Very common.’

‘So she rang me instead, and I came. But there seems to have been someone else here too. Doesn’t there, sergeant?’

‘If your version of events is correct, Mr Buckley.’

I knew I was fighting a losing battle. Everything that happened seemed to conspire to convince the police that I was a one-man crime wave. For the moment, Graham would have to be allowed to believe that I’d set fire to Kestrel myself. I had no evidence to prove otherwise. Moreover, I hadn’t even got a theory about why any of it had happened.

But I knew that I had an accurate memory of the smell of diesel, as well as the subtle movement of the boat like someone stepping on and off the stern. Had the fire been meant for me personally? If so, why? Had this unidentified person realised I’d find something on board Kestrel? But who had known I’d be there at the boat? And who’d known that Godfrey Wheeldon had given me the keys? There was no one person that fitted the bill for both questions, which made the whole thing impossible.

‘And you say you got the keys to the boat from a gentleman in Cheshire?’ said DS Graham with a disbelieving rise in his voice.

‘His name’s Godfrey Wheeldon. I’ve given you the address. He said he was sure Great-Uncle Samuel wanted him to pass the keys on to me.’

‘Even so, that doesn’t make the boat your property, Mr Buckley. At the very least, we’re looking at illegal entry.’

Caroline Longden appeared at the end of the path at the back of Ash Lodge. She spoke to neither of us, but merely gazed coolly at the wreck of Kestrel. She was wearing a red fleece, and her face was flushed a clashing pink.

‘I’ll need to talk to you later, Miss Longden,’ called DS Graham.

‘I’ll be in the house,’ she said, with a cold stare in my direction. Then she disappeared again.

Graham turned back to me. ‘Naturally we asked Miss Longden to make sure everything was all right in the house.’

‘Naturally?’

Gradually, under his penetrating gaze, the message began to sink in. The police did not believe my story about why I’d been on the boat. They thought I might have ransacked the house, too, looking for valuables. Had Caroline told them something that would give them this idea?

‘She’s rather upset, of course,’ said Graham. ‘Who wouldn’t be? But we’ve got somebody up at the house with her to check on the contents.’

‘Funnily enough, I’m quite upset as well. It was me that someone tried to kill, you know. If I’m not mistaken, that’s generally considered attempted murder in English law.’

‘We’ll be conducting a full investigation, sir.’

And from the way he said ‘sir’, I could see that I would get no further.

When Graham had finished with me, I walked up the path to Ash Lodge and knocked at the front door, like a polite visitor. Caroline was reluctant to let me in. The chill that struck outwards from the dark hallway wasn’t entirely due to the fact that the house had stood empty for weeks. She regarded me with a hostile expression as I tried to explain falteringly what had happened.

‘Really?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Are you feeling quite well?’

‘Well, just a few cuts and bruises—’

‘I was thinking more of your mental health.’

‘You think I’m making it up?’

‘It’s all rather far-fetched, isn’t it? People following you and trying to kill you? I suppose you’ll say that none of it is your fault.’

‘Well—’

‘You must admit that rather a lot of things have gone wrong since you came into my father’s life. What is it going to be next?’

‘Caroline, you can’t blame me for—’ I was about to say ‘for what happened to the boat’, but I saw from her eyes that it was more than that. I felt a sense of shock, and the words came out as if someone else had spoken them. ‘But of course. You blame me for your father’s death.’

‘Well, it’s in the blood, isn’t it?’ she said, a trifle defensively. ‘The famous split in the Buckley family.’

‘I never knew anything about the damn, stupid split until Samuel told me.’

‘How can I believe that?’

She was right, of course. It was unbelievable. Unbelievable that I should have known nothing about the division in my family, even about the very existence of half of it. I could barely believe it myself. And if my credibility with Caroline was already undermined from the word ‘go’, why should she believe me about anything else?

Before I could say any more, a figure appeared behind Caroline, a dark shadow in the hallway. He glowered ferociously when he saw me at the door.

‘Mr Buckley,’ said Simon Monks, managing to load my own name with a dripping weight of menace. ‘It must be a little while since we met at Fradley.’

‘Two weeks,’ I said, grimacing at the prospect of even more unpleasantness.

‘Really? Long enough to forget what we were talking about, was it?’

‘I’ve come to explain to Caroline—’

‘Yes, I heard what you were explaining. And I heard her say she didn’t want to know.’

How could Caroline stand him? Couldn’t she see the potential for violence that oozed from his every pore?

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Chris was just going anyway.’

‘Excellent. Then you won’t mind if I walk you back to your car, Mr Buckley.’

Caroline watched us for a few moments. But before we’d gone ten yards I heard the front door close behind us. The slam sounded like the door of a prison cell closing behind the condemned man as he walked to the gallows. Though Caroline could barely bring herself to be civil to me, I desperately missed her presence as soon as I was alone with her fiancé.

Monks fell into step with me, walking close by my elbow — much too close for comfort. I could smell his sweat, mingled with a cheap deodorant. He was six inches taller than me, and I found myself gazing down at my feet to avoid having to look up at him. I noticed the heavy toe caps and thick soles of his black boots. They must have been size ten, at least.

As somebody who’d just escaped a violent death, I ought to have been able to stand up to crude intimidation, but I couldn’t account for the irrational fear he instilled in me. I wondered where the police officer was who DS Graham had sent to the house. If there was ever a time I wanted to see a policeman, it was now.

Monks’s voice was low and threatening when he spoke. ‘You’re on a slippery slope, Chris,’ he said. ‘When are you going to see sense?’

I tried to quicken my pace to get ahead of him as we neared the bottom of the drive.

‘Is that your car?’ he said. ‘It’s seen better days, I’d say. A bit like you, old pal.’

I was ashamed to see that my hand shook as I slid my key into the lock. My body was tense and painful, as if it was expecting at any moment to get a punch in the kidneys or a hand slammed in the door. That was the way Monks made me feel with every word he spoke. It was a dread and apprehension made familiar in my childhood by a certain note in my father’s voice.

I wondered if Mrs Wentworth was watching from her front window, and whether she’d report it if she saw Monks attack me in the street. She must know him as Caroline’s fiancé, while I was reduced to the level of a suspicious person again, a definite undesirable. For all I knew, she might be the kind who longed for tough vigilantes in size ten boots dispensing summary justice to keep the riff-raff out of the area.

Monks placed his hand on my shoulder before I could get fully into the car, and I found myself unable to move, crouched at an awkward, undignified angle that sent spasms of pain shooting through my aching legs and back.

‘Be careful,’ he said.

Finally, he let me get into the car. It didn’t give me any reassurance to be able to see him in my mirror, watching me as I drove away.

Back at Stowe Pool Lane, the front room was starting to look like an explosion in a library. Sheets of paper lay limp and crumpled on almost every surface, with the gas fire left on to provide enough heat to evaporate the water that had soaked into them. There were damp patches on the table and the seats of the chairs, and drips had landed on the carpet in dozens of places. The windows had steamed up, and condensation was running onto the ledges.

Inevitably, I hadn’t been in the house more than a few minutes when there was a knock on the back door. Rachel had called to see how I was.

‘Have you still got a headache? How’s the lump on your head? That burn could do with some cream on it.’

‘I’m all right, Rachel. Don’t fuss.’

‘All right? You look a wreck.’

I felt it, too. But I didn’t want reminding of my injuries, because I was trying to keep my mind off the events that had caused them. It was proving very difficult, and I needed something to distract me. I was hoping the last bit of Samuel’s manuscript would do it.

‘What are the police doing? Have they got any clues who it was?’

‘As far as I can gather, they seem to think I cracked my own skull, tried to set fire to myself and then nearly drowned, just to annoy them.’

‘Useless! I presume they’ve made the link with the break-in. It must have been the same man who broke into your house and attacked me. Well, mustn’t it?’

I groaned pitifully as her voice got louder and more piercing. ‘I really don’t know, Rachel.’

Then she saw the snowdrift of damp paper. ‘Good lord, what’s all this?’

‘From the writing, I think it’s more of Samuel’s manuscript.’

‘Wow. The missing section?’

‘Could be. Though whether it’s going to be legible, I don’t know.’

‘Whoever attacked you could have taken their chance to get the manuscript,’ said Rachel. ‘I wonder why they didn’t.’

‘Perhaps they didn’t know it was there. Or they took the easy way and decided to destroy it, along with anything else on board Kestrel.’

‘And you.’

I nodded. ‘The fire would have burnt the manuscript to a cinder, if I hadn’t grabbed it.’ I looked again at the soggy, faded mass of pulp. ‘As it is, they pretty much succeeded anyway. I don’t think they wanted the manuscript for themselves. They just didn’t want anyone else to have it.’

Rachel lifted a page from the edge of the table, and a pool of water ran from under it onto the floor. She screwed up her eyes to make out the writing, which was beginning to smudge and blur.

‘Be careful with it.’

‘This looks like page one,’ she said. ‘What’s it about?’

‘I haven’t attempted to read it yet.’

‘If you don’t read it soon, it’s going to disappear altogether.’

I looked over her shoulder. The black scrawl was fading in front of my eyes. ‘God, you’re right.’

‘It’s water-soluble ink. He never seemed to use a ballpoint pen, did he?’

A feeling close to hysteria took hold of me. The ordeal on board Kestrel and my enforced dip in the canal had only seemed tolerable as long as there was something worthwhile at the end of it. But if the manuscript became illegible, it would all have been for nothing. The pounding in my head was like the worst hangover I had ever suffered — except that when I had a hangover I knew that I’d already enjoyed my pleasure beforehand. This was different. My reward for what I’d suffered was about to be snatched away from me by the effects of a bit of canal water.

‘We’ll have to make a copy, quick.’

‘It’s too late,’ said Rachel. ‘There are barely any fragments still legible.’

‘Tell me it’s not true,’ I pleaded.

‘There is one name here I can make out,’ she said. ‘Not a Buckley though.’

‘Yes?’

‘Sounds a bit familiar. Lindley Simpson. Who’s he?’

It was about this time that I began sleeping badly. Fear and guilt are insidious, and they do strange things to your mind. Sometimes, in my dreams, I imagined myself responsible for the violent deaths of my ancestors — not only Samuel, but also his grandfather Josiah and even the distant William.

I saw myself rather like the central character in that old Ealing comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets, who bumps off his relatives one by one so that he can inherit the family title. In the film, all the relatives are played by Alec Guinness. And in my disordered mind, all my ancestors became a blur, too — they all had the face of Great-Uncle Samuel. Then I would awake from the dream and realise that it wasn’t me who’d been destroying my Buckley ancestors, but someone else. And I was a Buckley too. I would be next on their list.

At other times, there was a different dream. For weeks I’d been plagued by images of Great-Uncle Samuel dying in the road at Castle Dyke. But now there were other scenes mingled with it in a terrifying panorama of death.

First I seemed to see a horse, and to hear a man with a wheeze in his throat. I heard a whistling sound, like something passing through the air... Then it switched to Kestrel, and the impact of the windlass hitting my skull, the stench of diesel fuel in my nostrils and the sound of flames around me as I faced the prospect of my own death. But suddenly I was out of Kestrel and on the hatches of a strange boat, moored by a lock gate, watching the water boil in the darkness, seeing a spreading stain and a shape rising from the depths... And once more I was back to the day before, floundering helplessly in the cut, ready to go down to the muddy bottom for the second time as Kestrel burned above me.

They say that it’s possible to regress to an earlier life, and even to remember your own death. This dream was like dying three times over. Samuel, Josiah, William.

Was it just an over-active imagination? Or was it some kind of genetic memory? Great-Uncle Samuel had planted the idea in my mind, and my subconscious had taken over. Now I was living the deaths of my ancestors over and over.

The effect was peculiar. An attack on an ancestor felt like an attack on me, and it gave me a new outlook on the idea of vengeance. Few people can be presented with the opportunity of avenging their own death.