What Lies Beneath

Chapter 28

The Present

Jan Malik had been glad to keep out of all the gossip and speculation surrounding the death of Clem Poulter.

He was not asked to give evidence at the inquest, and he had only been questioned by the police in the most cursory way. This was fair enough; he had met Poulter on only a couple of occasions. But for the sake of politeness and Amy Haywood he went to the hearing, sitting quietly at the back of the little public gallery. Amy was with her grandmother, who gave evidence of having found the body and was clearly distressed by the whole thing. Jan, who had half-wondered whether to ask Amy to have lunch with him afterwards, saw it would not be appropriate.

Amy smiled at him in a subdued, half-guilty way, as if she thought a smile might be out of place on such a sombre occasion. She had abandoned the jeans and cheesecloth, and was wearing a black pinstripe trouser suit and cream silk shirt, which made her look unexpectedly responsible. Her hair was brushed into a shining waterfall and clipped back. But there was still the impression that she had not been cut from quite the same cloth as the majority of her species. Jan studied her covertly, supposing she was linked up to some grubby young man in Durham, who made selfish and careless love to her half the night and did not appreciate her.

Immediately after the inquest, back at the Red Lion he scribbled a brief note to her, explaining he would be travelling around over the next few days in search of more traces of Ambrosian plainchant in the area. He would be back at the end of the week, he said, and maybe they could meet up for a drink if she was still in Upper Bramley. He wrote four drafts of this without hitting the right note of casual friendliness, and was about to embark on a fifth when he realized he was taking a great deal of trouble over a casual acquaintance. After this he folded the current version in an envelope, found her grandmother’s address in the phone book and posted the note before he could change his mind.

Amy thus satisfactorily dealt with, he set off to scour the surrounding villages. He took the sketch he had made of the glass shard found at St Anselm’s, along with the scrap of music notation. The photographs Amy had taken were in the same envelope. Amy. There he was, back again with his feline sui generis girl.

The first three villages he explored yielded no clues, but on his third day he found a church about twelve miles east of Upper Bramley, dedicated to St Luke the Hospitaller. Prowling absorbedly through mildewed parish records provided by a helpful churchwarden, Jan found something that delighted him.

It was a brief account of how, at Christmas 1920, St Luke’s Choir (mixed) had travelled by charabanc to join the choir (male) of St Michael’s, Upper Bramley at the dedication of a newly installed organ at St Anselm’s in Priors Bramley. This appeared to have been quite an event, and the diligent chronicler – Jan thought it might be the choirmaster – recorded that the choirs had joined together for two hymns, Nunc, Sancte, nobis Spiritus and Rerum, Deus tenax vigor, which Mr Cadence had particularly requested be sung.

Jan, who had been bent over the small table in the vestry, sat back, smiling. There were only four hymns universally attributed to St Ambrose, and these were two of them. Good for you, St Luke’s, he thought, making notes of dates and names for further investigation, because he had not expected to find such clear evidence of the plainchant being used into the twentieth century. It was a strong tradition of the Roman Catholic Church, and the churches in this area were almost entirely Anglican. Even if the notation on the St Anselm’s stained glass was the Sanctus, it would most likely be a left-over fragment from the Popish days before Henry VIII swept Catholicism out of his realm.

The first hymn, the Nunc, Sancte, nobis Spiritus, appeared to have taken an extra verse unto itself for the occasion: a stanza from Wordsworth’s famous poem ‘Tintern Abbey’, which Mr Cadence had also asked be included. The diligent chronicler, clearly wishing to record all the details, had written the extra verse out in full:

The still, sad music of humanity. It was the strange troubling line on the plaque in St Anselm’s and, viewed logically, it was not a particularly unusual or remarkable find. Some long-ago member of the Cadence family had wanted to include a few lines from a favourite poem at a special church service. Where’s the big deal? Jan’s students might have said.

But Jan was suddenly curious about this unknown Cadence gentleman. Nineteen twenty. For a moment, his hands still resting lightly on the faded pages, the scents of old timbers all round him, he felt the past brush against his mind. Nineteen twenty, with half the world still recovering from the Great War.

Who were you? he thought, staring back at the faded, slightly foxed pages. And why did that piece of Wordsworth mean so much to you that you not only had it set to music that had virtually vanished, but you also caused a line from it to be engraved into the fabric of the church?

Jan’s curiosity about this enigmatic Cadence man took strong hold of him over the next couple of days. He reached Upper Bramley and the Red Lion too late that night to do anything about it, but early next morning he headed for the local newspaper offices. If the donation and dedication of St Anselm’s organ had been an event worthy of those records, surely it had been worthy of an article in the Bramley Advertiser.

It was not really part of his research; it was merely an interesting byway that might sprinkle in a few extra details about the area’s tradition of plainchant, and it would not add anything. But it all bound up with the deserted village – the desolate poisoned Priors Bramley – and Jan wanted to know more.

The Advertiser’s staff were helpful. The paper had been in existence in 1920, they said, in fact it had started in 1908. Oh yes, all issues had been preserved on microfiche – that had been done ten or fifteen years ago when the title was bought by a big newspaper group. If Dr Malik wanted the actual newspapers, they were stored at the local library. Mr Poulter – oh dear, poor Mr Poulter – had been meticulous about record-keeping.

‘I really only need to look at a few copies,’ said Jan. ‘I’ll try the library first.’ He told himself this was because it would be quicker, not because Amy might still be working there.

She was not – she’d left to concentrate on her holiday essays – but one of the girls on the desk thought it would be fine for Dr Malik to have access to the newspaper archives.

‘We’re taking day-to-day decisions as we think best until Mr Poulter is replaced.’

‘I was so sorry about his death,’ said Jan conventionally.

‘So we were. He’d been here all his working life – well, you could say the library and Upper Bramley actually were his life, I suppose. Sad in a way, isn’t it? Still, all the old papers are in the cellars. The police were there a week or so back – looking for clues about those bodies. I don’t think they found anything useful, though.’

‘Do they know who the bodies are yet?’

‘If they have, nobody’s been told. They didn’t take any of our records away and they didn’t say the public couldn’t have access.’

As Jan surveyed the archived copies of the Bramley Advertiser in the dingy cellars, the unshaded electric light casting a hard radiance, the feeling of the past reaching out swept over him again. This is how history preserves itself, he thought as he began to turn the brittle pages. Not because anyone folds it in camphor or lavender, or scatters magic charms in and out of the creases, but because so much of it gets written down. Originally it was recorded in home-made ink on curling brown parchment, then in newsprint. Nowadays it’s hard disks and memory sticks and video tapes. As he scanned the headlines and the articles about local events, he thought this was the real heart of history. This parish-pump news, this miscellany of trivia. This England…

The Bramley Advertiser had originally been a fortnightly publication and had not achieved the dizzying heights of being produced once a week until 1922. Jan started his search at the beginning of 1920. The dedication of the new organ would have been a significant event in the villages. Surely the paper would have reported it?

But it had not. He went through the entire batch of papers from the start of 1918 to the end of 1922 but found nothing. This was vaguely irritating, but he was sufficiently used to dead ends in research not to be too daunted. It was possible his eye had missed a small paragraph. But even if he had, it did not matter.

But the image of that shadowy man who had clearly cared deeply about music and had found some resonance in Wordsworth’s words had lodged in his mind. He wanted to know more. It would have to be the digital age after all.

The microfiche at the Bramley Advertiser was available, and Jan was shown to a small room with a table, chair, and desktop viewer. It took him some time to fathom the database system, but eventually he mastered it, and typed in ‘Cadence’, and also ‘Cadence Manor’ as search requests.

This elicited quite a number of references to the Cadence family in general, and Jan read them diligently. In the main they were reports of how Sir Julius Cadence or his wife had opened some local event, or smudgy photographs of parties at the manor house. But there was nothing linking them to St Anselm’s, and mentions of the family itself trickled to almost nothing by 1930. Perhaps the upcoming generation had simply married and gone away, or perhaps the men of the family had died in the Great War. There must be a war memorial, and he should see if any Cadences were listed on it.

He was just thinking he would have to admit to a dead end as far as the Bramley Advertiser was concerned when his eye was caught by a much later article that the search request had turned up. It was headlined ‘Distressing Incident at Cadence Manor’, and the date was the late 1940s. It could not have anything to do with what he was looking for, but none the less he called it up on the viewer’s screen.

It was not a very long article. Jan skimmed it, at first with only slight interest, then with growing attention.

The article was interesting for its insight into the mood of English village life in the years after the Second World War, with people still suspicious of strangers, and any incidents of this kind instantly put down to Germans unable to make their way back to their own country. Probably if it had not been for that, the incident would not have been reported.

But the real interest was in the attached photograph. It was clearly an existing snapshot that the paper had made use of, and it showed Brenda Ford in a garden. She was smiling rather warily, as if she did not much like having her photo taken but as if she was prepared to indulge whoever was wielding the camera.

Allowing for the difference in ages and hairstyles, it might have been a photo of someone Jan had just recently met. Amy’s grandmother. Ella Haywood.

‘It wasn’t part of my research,’ said Jan, seated opposite Amy in a corner of the Red Lion. ‘But I thought you might be interested in it.’

‘So that’s my great-grandmother,’ said Amy, propping up the printout Jan had made from the microfiche, and studying it with interest. ‘I never knew her – I think she died ages before I was born. She’s very like Gran, isn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘Poor old great-grandmamma Brenda, being attacked and thinking it was a Germany spy,’ said Amy, still looking at the printed photo. ‘Could I borrow this to show Gran? I’m sure she’d be interested. I don’t think she’s got any photographs of her mother. Actually, I don’t think she’s got any of her father, either. If she has, I’ve never seen them. I could let you have it back.’

Jan started to say he did not particularly want the printout back, then realized her returning it would set up a further meeting and said, ‘All right.’

‘And now tell me how you got on grubbing around the churches for music and musical legends,’ said Amy.

‘I think I found the source of that engraving at St Anselm’s,’ Jan told her. ‘At least, I found a reference to it.’ He told her about the report he had found at St Luke’s, describing how the choirs had joined forces, and how some unknown Cadence man had apparently requested the Wordsworth stanza be set to music and added on.

‘That’s brilliant,’ said Amy, her eyes glowing. ‘I’d love to know who he was, wouldn’t you? I know the Cadences aren’t the last of the Romanovs or anything, but they’re starting to sound really romantic and mysterious. Imagine it: they were once a famous banking house, only they went bust, and when you think about that crumbling old manor inside the poisoned village…’

‘You shouldn’t be studying archaeology, you should be writing Gothic fiction,’ said Jan, smiling. ‘When did the Cadences go bust?’

‘I don’t know. They were going strong in the early 1900s, I think, because there’s a lot of references to them in the library archive stuff.’

‘And in 1920 one of them donated an organ to St Anselm. Don’t laugh at me, one of us was going to make that pun sooner or later.’

‘Well, anyhow, they’re not around now,’ said Amy, still grinning ‘Maybe the Wall Street Crash got them. When was that?’

‘In 1928 or 1929, I think.’

‘D’you know what I’m thinking about that plaque?’

‘That it probably came off the organ itself?’

‘Exactly. And I think,’ said Amy, ‘that I might go back to St Anselm’s to see if there’s anything else among the rubble. If the police have stopped searching Cadence Manor I might see if I can get into the grounds as well.’

‘Why the manor particularly?’

‘I’d like to find out a bit more about the Cadences. And houses say a lot about their era and the people who lived in them. Even ordinary houses like we live in.’

Jan said, ‘Benjamin Britten wrote an opera based on Henry James’s story Owen Wingrave. The theme running through it is “Listen to the house”.’

‘I love that,’ said Amy, at once. ‘What does the house say?’

‘The central character comes from a family of soldiers, but at heart he’s a pacifist, and he struggles with that while the voice of the house tells him he should fight in the Great War like his ancestors would have done.’

Amy said, ‘Even ordinary houses have a voice about people who’ve lived in them.’

‘They do, don’t they? I’ve got a tiny house on the edge of Oxford, which is supposed to have been a farm labourer’s cottage when it was built,’ said Jan. ‘I keep meaning to track down its origins.’

‘You should,’ said Amy, enthusiastically, trying not to take too much notice of the fact that he had said ‘I’ and not ‘we’. ‘Start with land searches and work back.’

‘You do dash from one thing to the next, don’t you? Like quicksilver.’

‘Well—’

‘Don’t worry about it. Quicksilver is very attractive.’

‘Really?’ said Amy.

Jan had been about to reach for the Red Lion’s bar food menu but he looked across the table at her. As their eyes met, he said, very softly, ‘Oh yes, really.’ Then, before she could think how to respond, he said, ‘It’s half-past twelve. Shall we have some lunch while we’re here?’