Drowned Lives

41

Although I had been out of work for only a matter of days, I’d already fallen into the habit of getting up late. The dreams I was having didn’t help. I spent the night tossing restlessly in my bed, tormented by formless anxieties, and occasionally waking up with a jolt of panic. The result was that I got up in the morning feeling sweaty and drained. Thanks to whoever had wielded that windlass so effectively, I now also had a constant thumping headache, and a churning nausea to go with it.

The sick feeling in my stomach made me feel as though I’d swallowed too much canal water. But in fact, it was caused by the memory of fear. It was a continuous, writhing terror in my guts that came every time I recalled how near to death I’d been, how somebody had coldly and deliberately attempted to cremate me on board Kestrel.

Some people seem to be able to brush off fear. But not me. I was an ordinary man who’d lived a quiet, even sheltered life. I’d experienced nothing more threatening than the face of a pub landlord calling last orders, or a white envelope containing my P45. Violence was alien to me. Or it had been since my childhood. I’d always hoped it would never touch my life again.

It was an irony that I’d spent the last few weeks thinking about death. The deaths of William and Josiah Buckley, and particularly the untimely death of Great-Uncle Samuel, which had been painful enough. Events had even made me reflect on the passing of my own parents, sad and unpleasant deaths in their own particular ways. But it takes a moment when death stares you personally in the face to make you recognise what it really is.

It was something for which I had been ludicrously unprepared. The shock of it had jolted me from a deeply ingrained complacency. And it had taught me what true fear was.

When I answered the door that morning, clutching my temple against the excruciating racket of the bell, it was in full expectation of finding Rachel on the doorstep, full of overwhelming sympathy and bright new ideas. But instead I saw a face whose expression held a fear that I recognised as if it were my own.

‘Frank!’

He was fidgeting and nervous, casting glances down the street, and his clothes looked as though they’d been thrown on in any order. He was pale, and his hair stood up on end as if he’d been running his fingers through it.

‘Chris, can I come in?’

He was asking plaintively, as if he fully expected me to say no and send him away. But how could I do that when I recognised a fellow sufferer? Here was another man who’d discovered that life was not as benign as he’d always been led to believe. He was a man whose fragile defences had failed to cope with the real world, and I was beginning to know how he felt.

‘Have you been home?’ I said as he entered the hallway. ‘Does Sally know where you are?’

‘No, I haven’t been back,’ he said, and shivered as if he was remembering a night spent sleeping rough on the street.

‘You’ve got to talk to her.’

‘I will. But I’ve got to do this first.’

‘Do what?’

‘Tell you what you wanted to know, that first day you came to Chasetown. I thought if I didn’t help you, I’d be able to keep out of it. But I got frightened. It was after you came that second time, and you saw me by the reservoir, I realised that I was in a more vulnerable position than I thought.’

I frowned at him, trying to work out what he meant. ‘Did you think I might try to put pressure on you once I knew your little secret? Well, don’t worry about that. I’m not into blackmail.’

‘No, no, it’s not that. Please don’t be angry with me, Chris. This is very hard for me. I’ve had a very bad couple of days. For a while, I thought... well, I thought there was only one way out.’

His shoulders slumped, and I could see in him the classic case of a weak man, unable to resist the temptations that tormented him, who’d suddenly seen the prospect of his respectable facade being blown apart. He was facing a future spent trying to explain and justify the unjustifiable.

I took him into the sitting room and turned on the gas fire in the tiled fireplace to fight the chill. Frank stood facing the fish tank as if frightened of contact with the yellow three-piece suite.

‘When you left home, what did you intend to do?’ I asked. He stared at the fish without seeing them. ‘I didn’t know what I intended to do. I was very confused. But frightened too. Frightened of what you might do, and what other people might do. But I didn’t have the courage to find a way out. I’m too much of a coward for that. So in the end I went back, with my tail between my legs. And I saw that the only thing to do was tell you everything. Then you might not make the mistake of putting yourself in danger too.’

‘I think I’ve already done that, Frank.’

‘Oh, hell,’ he said. He followed the movement of a neon tetra with absorption. I recalled Leo Parker standing in almost the same spot admiring the fish in his calculating way, like a visiting salesman.

I told Frank about the fire on the boat and my narrow escape. He listened carefully, his expression growing ever more fearful until I thought he was going to burst into tears.

‘Maybe we both need a stiff drink,’ I said. ‘Then you can tell me what you’ve come to say.’

‘I should have come before. I hope I’m not too late.’

I fetched a bottle and two glasses from the kitchen and poured Frank a large Glenmorangie. At first he spluttered and coughed over it like a man who’d never tasted real whisky before. But the colour came back to his face almost immediately, and his eyes began to lose a bit of their haunted whiteness. I persuaded him to settle in one of the armchairs and turned up the heat on the gas fire. A smell of burning dust filled the air, but neither of us paid it any notice.

While my father’s old carriage clock ticked away on the wall and the tetras and mollies flicked restlessly backwards and forwards in their tank, Frank told me that he’d been ten years old when his parents divorced, born when his mother Alison was just eighteen. Though his father had stayed in Burntwood, Alison had taken their son and moved to Lichfield, putting four or five miles between them. Not very far on the map maybe, but enough of a symbol of separation for a young boy.

Then Frank’s mother had gone back to work. She’d found a job in the offices of the Sandfields Brewery, which was expanding under the guidance of its new chairman, Samuel Longden. Alison was thirty by then, and an attractive woman, according to Frank, who may have been biased. Within two years, Alison had become the boss’s secretary, and Samuel came to rely on her as he finalised plans to sell off the brewery to one of the national companies in Burton-on-Trent.

In 1969, Samuel retired a wealthy man. Alison might well have been out of a job, if he hadn’t solved the problem by asking her to marry him. Though she was twenty-three years his junior, Alison had agreed.

‘What did Samuel look like then?’ I asked Frank.

He stirred uneasily and gulped the last of his whisky. I refilled his glass while he collected his thoughts, thrown out of gear by my interruption.

‘He was tall, very upright, with wavy grey hair swept back. Distinguished, I suppose you’d say. He never seemed to laugh much, though. Sally once said he had a mysterious air about him, like somebody who’d suffered in the past. She thought it must be something to do with his time in the navy during the war. And there was something else the women always seemed to go for. He had these blue eyes...’

‘Was that what your mother saw in him, do you think? A romantic figure?’

Frank bared his teeth in a bitter grin.

‘Oh yes. But did I mention that he was stinking rich as well?’

‘Go on.’

Frank had been furious at Alison’s marriage to Samuel Longden. As a teenager he’d spent a tortured period living in Ash Lodge with his mother and the doting Samuel, shutting himself in his room and playing Rolling Stones records at full volume.

My great-uncle apparently had the good sense to leave the lad to his own devices. Though money was no object, Frank had stubbornly refused to accept expensive presents. Instead, he’d thrown himself into his A levels, and had escaped permanently by earning a place at a polytechnic in Birmingham to study Electrical Engineering. He’d spent his college vacations at his father’s terraced house in Burntwood rather than at the gloomy Victorian retreat that Samuel had taken his mother to. There was even more reason for him to stay away from Whittington when his mother became pregnant with Samuel’s child — Frank’s half-sister, Caroline Longden.

He and Sally married in the late 1970s, but never had children, which was a great disappointment to Sally. There was an underlying hint that she’d been envious of Alison, who now had a new child, nineteen years younger than Frank.

‘You don’t have to tell me all this,’ I said. ‘It’s Samuel I want to know about.’

But he was well into his second tumbler of whisky, and the alcohol was loosening his tongue. Once he’d started talking, it came in a flood, while his eyes roved the room, staring at the clock, peering at the fish in their tank as if he could read a meaning to his life in their gaping mouths and flickering tails.

When the Chaplins visited Whittington, Sally had been taken by the young Caroline, who was bright and musically talented. More than once, disparaging comparisons had been made between Caroline and Frank. The suggestion that Frank had cause to regret inheriting his character and looks from his father rather than from his mother planted a seething animosity in his heart.

David Chaplin had died in 1986 after a stroke. Frank was devastated, and made no secret of the fact that no relationship went anywhere near the closeness he’d felt to his father.

When his mother was killed in that car crash on the A38 just two years later, his first reaction was that justice had been done at last. Frank had hardly been able to mourn his mother in the way he should have, because there was no room for fresh mourning alongside the grief for his father. In his soul, he became once again that rebellious, long-haired seventeen-year-old. He didn’t want to speak to Sally, and certainly not to his stepfather. All he wanted was to be left alone to replay those old Rolling Stones songs — if only in his mind.

‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry?’ Was he referring to Samuel? Did Frank really see his stepfather as an evil monster who’d wrecked his life? I was beginning to wonder where Frank had been on the night that Samuel was killed, when he spoke again.

‘That was my favourite. Most people go for “Honky Tonk Women” or “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” from that period. But I liked the Beggar’s Banquet album the best. Do you know it?’

‘Oh, the Stones? I was more of a Beatles fan myself. Everybody was always one or the other, weren’t they?’

‘Sure.’ He looked at me condescendingly, and for a moment I could see that sneering, bad-tempered teenager. ‘“Street Fighting Man”, that was on Beggar’s Banquet. But I liked “Sympathy for the Devil” best. Can you remember how it starts?’

‘Yes, I think I remember that.’

Frank laughed and looked for more Glenmorangie. ‘The number of times I played that at full blast after Mum told me she was going to marry Samuel Longden. Over and over. It must have driven her up the wall. “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste.” She knew who it was meant to be about, all right.’

‘Did you lose touch with Samuel altogether after your mother died?’

‘For a while,’ said Frank. ‘But he turned up again.’

Frank had been made to feel uncomfortable at his own mother’s funeral. For a start, it was far more lavish than he was used to, and the eulogies were too pious and sentimentalised for his non-conformist inclinations. He knew very few of the people there to mourn his mother. They’d been friends of hers and Samuel’s and ‘not his type’, he said. The salt in his wounds was the contrast between the no-expense-spared extravagance of his mother’s sending-off and the perfunctory hymn and a few words as his father’s plywood coffin had been shoved into the flames at a crematorium near Sutton Coldfield.

For ten years after that he’d seen almost nothing of Samuel and Caroline Longden. As Frank put it sourly, ‘they didn’t move in the same circles’. Once or twice, Caroline had phoned to ask how Frank and Sally were and suggested the Chaplins might like to visit Ash Lodge. But the right time had never presented itself, and perhaps she hadn’t meant it anyway, said Frank. There had never been any possibility of the Longdens visiting Chasetown.

And then, out of the blue, old Samuel had appeared at the bowling club one Sunday morning. Frank got the shock of his life when he saw the old man standing on the far side of the green as he was lining up one of his woods. It put him right off his aim, and his partner had made sarcastic comments. Samuel had just stood there, in his black overcoat, leaning on his stick, until the game was over. And then he’d walked over to Frank and had greeted him like a long-lost son. Yes, that was exactly it, said Frank — like a long-lost son.

‘When was this, Frank?’

‘Last year, towards the back end. September, probably.’

‘Just five or six months ago.’

‘About that.’

‘Okay.’

Frank returned his gaze to the fish tank, switching effortlessly out of the present and back into the past.

Samuel had wanted to take Frank somewhere for lunch. But Frank had refused to go ‘anywhere posh’ and they ended up eating meat pies in the clubhouse. He often stayed all day at the bowling club, and so Sally wouldn’t be expecting him for lunch. It was almost as if Samuel had known this, just as he’d known where to find Frank despite their lack of communication for years.

And then the old man asked for his stepson’s help. Frank had been so astonished that he nearly choked on his pie. But as Samuel told his tale, Frank had become increasingly sure that his stepfather had turned senile and lost his marbles completely. It was a complicated, rambling story that went back into ancient history and was all about people Frank had never heard of being murdered by other people he’d never heard of. There was a feud, Samuel said, lasting two hundred years — and it was Samuel’s job to set the record straight and take revenge. That was the first time that Frank had ever heard the name Buckley mentioned.

‘You told me at Chasetown that it was your mother or father who mentioned Samuel once being a Buckley,’ I said.

‘So I was lying. You might think it was for your own good, Chris, when I’ve finished.’

Despite my prompting, Frank was hazy on the details of the feud that Samuel described. Yes, he remembered there had been a William Buckley a long time ago who was an engineer of some kind, connected with the canal. He’d been a good man, but had upset the wrong people and they had him disgraced and murdered. That was Samuel’s very phrase — ‘disgraced and murdered’. And there was another one who was something to do with the canal, with a strange name. Yes, it could well have been Josiah. Murdered too, Samuel had said.

But it had all passed over Frank’s head. At least until Samuel mentioned Alison, Frank’s mother, and ‘the murder of another Buckley’. The old man said the feud had pursued him for centuries, and that it claimed the life of his son. Of course, Frank had no idea that Samuel had a son, and made the mistake of laughing when the old man explained that it was his unborn son. Because Alison had been fifty years old when she and Samuel’s secretary, Karen Mills, had died on the A38.

Samuel became angry at the laughter and told Frank that there was just one thing he needed him to do. There were documents, Samuel said, which proved what he’d been saying, which implicated those responsible for the murders. He wanted Frank to look after them until they were needed. Samuel believed it was too risky keeping them at Ash Lodge. He thought the documents would be safe in the hands of someone like Frank, who was ‘family’. Safe — but on one condition.

‘He told me then about how he’d been a Buckley until he had changed his name,’ said Frank. ‘And he told me who the other family were in this feud.’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t you want to know?’

‘It was the Parkers, wasn’t it?’

‘Oh.’ Frank looked disappointed, as if his whole story had been in vain. ‘Yes, he warned me that I’d have to be wary of anyone called Parker, that they might come after me if they thought I had the documents. He told me to watch out for anyone asking around about my connection with Samuel Longden, that I should tell him straightaway, so that he could decide what to do. Anything else would be very dangerous, he said.’

‘At least he was honest with you about that, Frank.’

‘Oh yes. But when somebody did come asking around the bowling club one day, Samuel was already dead. So I didn’t know what to do. Suddenly it seemed as though it must all be true. I thought “They’ve killed Samuel, just like he said they would, and now they’re going to kill me because they think I’ve got those documents.” I was still a bit upset after you saw me on the heath, and I sort of panicked.’

‘You should have come to see me sooner.’

‘Well, I thought of you, of course. After what you said at the funeral, about the book, I knew you were carrying on where Samuel left off. So, of course, I did try to find you. I didn’t want to come to your house at first, in case they were watching. But I saw your car, and I followed you to that old canal place.’

‘The wharf at Fosseway.’

‘That’s right. I was going to try to attract your attention and tell you what I’ve told you now.’

‘So what went wrong? Why did you run off?’

Frank dragged his eyes away from the fish tank and shuddered. He hunched closer to the gas fire, seeking warmth. But it wasn’t the cold that had made him shiver.

‘Just at the last minute, I recognised him,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘The bloke who was asking about me at the bowling club. It was him. I saw him at the club, and I saw him again at Fosseway. He’s one of them, isn’t he?’

‘Leo Parker,’ I murmured.

‘Samuel warned me to watch out for the Parkers.’

‘Did he mention the MP, Lindley Simpson?’

Frank shook his head. ‘Only the Parkers. He said they’re dangerous.’

‘I’m sorry you’ve got so involved, Frank. It isn’t really your fight.’

‘You’re right, it isn’t. But they don’t know that, do they? I want you to get them off my back. That’s why I came. That’s why I’ve told you all this stuff. You can see it’s nothing to do with me.’

‘If you give me the documents, that would be a lot safer for you.’

‘What?’

‘Let me have the documents Samuel gave you for safe keeping. Then I can look after them instead. I might know what to do with them.’

‘You’re joking. I haven’t got any documents.’

‘But you said—’

‘Do you think I’m stupid? He wanted me to take the documents, yes. But as soon as he told me how dangerous it was, I said “no” right away. Why should I put myself at risk? He was no relative of mine, not really. I didn’t owe old Samuel Longden a thing.’

I stared at Frank, amazed. ‘Still no sympathy for the devil then,’ I said quietly.

‘You what?’

But his attention had drifted back to the tank. Something in there was fascinating him, as if it reflected his own doubtful future.

‘By the way,’ he said at last, ‘did you know one of your fish is dead?’