The Fever of the World, page 24
Somehow she hadn’t even had a chance to shake hands with the man who must be Royce Portis, now standing almost within touching distance, eyes lowered, not looking at her or the coffin while she talked briefly about his father. Pointing out that there were people far more qualified to discuss Peter’s life and achievements, as they would have heard in the first hymn, on page three of the order of service, ‘Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past’.
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away…
But government rules forbade the singing of hymns because of the powerful – and possibly harmful – breathing they required. The word of God spreading infection. Jesus.
Royce Portis had thick near-black hair, finger-combed back from his broad face. He was looking down at something black between his hands that wasn’t a prayer book. Maybe his phone. The woman next to Royce – long-sleeved black woollen dress, fairly low-cut for a funeral – caught her eye and smiled warmly. With sympathy, Merrily thought. Unlike Royce, she looked comfortable here.
Merrily pulled her eyes away, concentrating on the coffin, which didn’t seem to have any connection with Peter Portis. She’d found a picture of him online, much younger, sitting on a backpack, relaxed, a cigarette between his fingers, smoke drifting up to the rocks. She’d imagined him scaling the misty cliffs over the river, smoky goggles shielding his eyes from an intense sky as he hauled himself up. She looked at the coil of nylon rope, the crossed pitons, the lamp.
And drew a tight breath. A nugget of light was aglow in the lamp on the coffin. Reflection surely.
She smiled quickly at Mr Unsworth, elder statesman of Hereford’s property trade, watch-chain glinting between waistcoat buttons under his well-worn black jacket. She saw Smiffy Gill doing his naughty-little-kid grin, eyeing him warily. Was he in danger of losing his programme or something? Did he need to be in the public eye today?
‘Erm… your eulogy, first, Smiffy?’ she murmured, fearing that he was going to tell her not to let it worry her pretty little head.
But Smiffy Gill became serious again, explaining how Portis and two mates had been brought in to teach The Octane Show team how to look like real climbers for an edition they’d done in Snowdonia.
‘It was faked but it had to look dangerous. Pete wasn’t happy with that. Had a standup row with the producer. His steely side came out when he insisted on abandoning the SUV we were demonstrating. You… “did not diss the rocks”.’
Merrily noticing Smiffy Gill had two voices, one giving away the private education he tended to disown on the show.
‘That was always his catchphrase: “Do not ever diss the rocks”. Wouldn’t let me off the ground till he knew I knew what I was doing. No fakery, no camera tricks. He was firty years older than me and twice as fit. But I remember one of his team sayin’ that if it ever came to him doing a piece sittin’ there in his garden, lookin’ up at the rocks and sayin’ he was no longer… equal to them, you’d know…’
Merrily tensed. God, Smiffy, not now…
‘…you’d know you were at his retirement party.’
Smiffy stepped back from the river. Out came the posh voice.
‘If he’d suddenly been diagnosed with a debilitating heart-condition or something which would mean he’d never climb again, who knows? He was on his own. This was between him and the Seven Sisters. And they were this close.’
He crossed two fingers and held them up near Merrily’s face.
‘It might be unwise,’ Mr Unsworth said, ‘to suggest he committed suicide because he thought he might be unfit to climb or in danger of losing his skills. He told me last year that he was deriving even more satisfaction these days from his work with young miscreants, carried out on the lower rocks.’
Perhaps it was the combination of the tight congregation and the open air, but this was the first time she’d been aware of eulogies turning into chat. But she was inclined to trust Mr Unsworth – unexpectedly supportive in that difficult exorcism-of-place in the avenue of valuable homes at Aylestone Hill.
Smiffy backing down at once.
‘Well, he found me a nice weekend cottage at a good price. People rip me off all the time, just because it’s me. I’m not gonna start rumours, Geoffrey. Let’s just give him a decent send-off, leave it at that.’
Mr Unsworth nodding, looking at Merrily.
‘He was a capable and cautious man, with an uncommon integrity. With regard to his death, I would not disagree with Mr Gill and, like him, should hate to fuel rumour with no particular evidence…’
A flurry of breeze. Merrily stepped in front of the loose crowd and patted down her cassock. Smiffy Gill’s eyes played with hers.
‘There is nuffink I can fink of, Mrs Watkins, as indisputably erotic as what you might call “a woman of the rumpled cloth”. Pete would’ve told you that.’
Mild, nervous laughter.
‘He might have thought that, Mr Gill,’ Geoffrey Unsworth said, ‘but I doubt he’d have said it aloud.’
During the staggered shuffling sound of a congregation relaxing, Merrily gave Geoffrey Unsworth the nod and he stepped carefully forward and cleared his throat into the new silence.
‘We estate agents nurture no illusions about our professional popularity. In the competition for public opprobrium, we used to jostle for base position between tabloid journalists and politicians.’ He paused, smiled. ‘Luckily, in recent years, the bankers have come to our rescue.’
Beyond the coffin, a man laughed sharply and smothered it. Royce Portis looked up, stroking his forehead as if brushing away an insect. Merrily managed to let her eyes do the laughing. She’d moved down to where she could see only a corner of the coffin. The light had gone. Mr Unsworth cleared his throat again.
‘The property business is, as you realize, terribly aggressive, and Peter certainly had aggression, but he expended it, I think, on his physical contests with the rocks. “You cannot get to the top,” he said, “without a respect for the rocks.” Well, as he well knew, you can get to the top in this trade by climbing over more scrupulous chaps, but… it was about the standards he set for himself and what gave him the moral strength to keep to them. He was a good man, and in danger of earning his profession something approaching respect. He would invariably alert prospective purchasers to any potential problems with a property: if it was on a busy main road, for example, or close to a towering electricity pylon, this would be obvious from the photos in his window.’
He looked up in time to catch a few people nodding and a small ripple of support.
‘In the decades I knew him, I never heard of him selling a house that would subsequently prove to have been far from the bargain it first seemed. Even by the standards of a small county like Herefordshire, his level of honesty was exceptional. I wish I could say that all his competitors would consider him a great loss.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Unfortunately, in all honesty, I… I—’
He stumbled.
Quite hard.
Oh God, no… Merrily grabbing his arm before he slipped. Snatching up his stick and holding its shaft for him to grip the handle and fall forward. He looked confused.
‘I think,’ he whispered, ‘that I need to sit down.’
‘Relax a while, Geoff,’ Smiffy Gill said. ‘You may not die. Not quite yet.’
Two mourners walked either side of Mr Unsworth back towards the church. The season seemed to have regressed, the sky looking soggy and soiled, like a well-used dishcloth.
She watched his laboured moon-walk towards the parked cars. Everybody staring, not at him but her.
Because she hadn’t finished.
‘Better wrap this up, Merrily,’ Smiffy Gill said.
Behind him, Peter Portis’s trolleyed coffin looked like a wheelybin awaiting a refuse collection. When the bier was pushed away, there was no organized procession behind it, only the few mourners shuffling like a bus queue. Merrily was preparing to do the last business at the grave. She was at the head of the short procession, striving to keep up with Royce Portis and feeling like a cottage in the shadow of a tower block.
‘Thank you… Mrs Watkins, is it?’ Portis looked down at her, past the black stubble probably forming faster than his smile. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t have time, when you rang, to find out exactly why you were replacing Ripley.’
‘But I thought you…’
She looked up uncertainly. It’s my responsibility, Arlo had told her in the shadow of St Giles, Goodrich. I’ll explain to them in full.
Maybe he hadn’t explained. But he’d sounded so decisive about it. I don’t want them to have two versions, he’d said.
It didn’t make sense. Arlo didn’t want her to explain why she was replacing him. But it seemed he hadn’t offered his own explanation to Royce.
There were always dark secrets at funerals, and you could cause lasting damage to someone’s memory of the occasion by allowing them to leak out.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Watkins, you were about to say something?’
Royce was still looking down at her.
‘I… I was pleased to do it. Nobody should be buried without… prayer.’
A few minutes later, she was looking into the exposed shaft of the grave, a few yards from the new river bank.
‘We have entrusted our brother Peter to God’s mercy. We now commit his body to the ground. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to…’
She lifted her head and turned to find the churchwarden holding a linen bag, which he raised above the wet shaft and shook. The contents drummed unevenly on the coffin, not sounding like soil, and she saw it had been a shower of small stones.
‘Rock fragments. From the Seven Sisters,’ Adrian Fenn revealed in her ear. ‘I should’ve told you earlier. Someone collected them. It was felt, somehow, to be appropriate.’
Merrily was aware of a bird cruising over the waiting grave. It was the size of a crow, had a black head. She’d only ever seen one peregrine falcon before, briefly alighting on the high rock above Symonds Yat.
This one was in no hurry.
42
Heavy house
SHE WALKED OUT of the gate into the little car park and then the lane, where swollen trees dripped on her. Looking from side to side, she followed a track that led behind the churchyard wall. This suicide possibility? Where did that start? Smiffy Gill hadn’t just dreamed it up, had he?
She was confused and anxious for Mr Unsworth. Her car was near the entrance. She hadn’t heard an ambulance. Was one on its way?
He was leaning against her driver’s door, with his back to her.
She stopped.
‘Are you OK?’
He said, ‘My old friend’s safely in the ground?’
‘Yes, he is. Thank you for what you said. Are you…?’
‘I’m fine. Can we get in your vehicle and park somewhere out of sight in the village?’
Five minutes later she pulled into a space outside the caravan park, opened the door behind her seat for Mr Unsworth.
‘Are you really all right?’
‘I wanted to talk to you,’ he said. ‘And not small talk. No time for pleasantries, and I didn’t want Royce around.’
‘Oh?’
‘Nor Diana. Definitely not Diana.’
She switched off the engine. He was now sitting in the far corner of the back seat – social distance, just about. He’d lowered his side window.
Merrily said, ‘I didn’t know you knew her.’
‘Oh, she’s a damn good surveyor,’ Mr Unsworth said, ‘for one so young.’
‘Royce was lucky to find her.’
He laughed.
She said, ‘Erm, you don’t see it that way, do you?’
‘Well, she’s certainly good at property. Buying it. And buying it back when it doesn’t live up to expectations, or… becomes difficult to inhabit.’
‘Difficult?’
‘The atmosphere of a house can change. Become less welcoming. You… must have encountered this phenomenon in your work.’
His eyes crinkled. He knew more or less what she did at work.
‘I suppose I have,’ she said. ‘From time to time.’
‘Diana Farrowman worked for me for a few months.’
‘At Lang/Copper?’
‘Until Peter poached her. I didn’t mind too much at the time. I was a little insecure about her, and I didn’t quite know why.’
‘But then you did?’
‘I wondered. Royce didn’t suspect anything at all, and Peter didn’t really know about these things. I tried to warn him, but… well, you know what that’s like with your bishop, I believe.’
She smiled at him.
He said, ‘The Portises and the Farrowmans were almost neighbours in the Wye Valley. And Peter knew how much his son desired the smouldering Diana. He also knew that she was good at her job, if not yet quite how good… or exactly why.’
Merrily said, ‘Royce and Diana… when they got together, in a place as sparsely populated as this part of the Wye Valley, it must have seemed like destiny.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And destiny, of course, can be assisted. As can circumstance. One senses that strings are sometimes pulled. But by whom, in this case? Or by what?’
Didn’t understand quite where his mind was going, but she knew him well enough to trust his judgement, however unlikely it appeared. Aware of the way he would study the history of properties he was buying, knowing at the start when he might be handling a heavy house.
‘As a small child,’ he said, ‘Diana might easily have drowned at the same time as her parents, but instead she placidly went to sleep in a cave not far from the river. She was too young to understand what impact that particular cave might have on her subconscious mind. Of course, I don’t know if it did have an effect, I’m just an old estate agent, but that cave—’
Merrily said, ‘I agree that you don’t know. You can’t know, but you can feel. You can follow instinct and you’re one of those people who senses when an instinct is genuine.’
‘Thank you, Merrily.’
‘Nothing to thank me for, just keep following your instincts. Now… King Arthur’s Cave up in the Doward: what is it about this cave?’
He leaned back.
‘It’s a Stone Age residential cave. As an estate agent I’ve always said it’s the oldest actual dwelling we know about along the course of the Wye. It was continually inhabited for thousands of years by… some significant people, I would suggest.’
‘Druids?’
‘I don’t know a great deal about druids.’
‘Nobody does. Except by instinct,’ Merrily said. ‘And inheritance, perhaps. Druids may have known how places can influence people. Places like, I’m guessing, this cave, used for hundreds even thousands of years.’
‘Sometimes,’ Mr Unsworth said, ‘one wants to be influenced by places. Sometimes not.’
Merrily thought about this. It was silent in the Freelander for a while, until Mr Unsworth spoke again.
‘I’d like to deal with Royce. The truth is I didn’t particularly like him, although I understood him better than Diana. He once… well, he romanced a girl who worked at Lang/Copper, as a secretary. She subsequently asked for a confidential chat with me. We went out to a café but had to leave when she virtually broke down. We ended up talking in my car, with her offering to resign on the basis that she’d compromised the firm. He’d got her drunk and gone home with her. I don’t think she even knew who he was but he charmed her, seduced her and was asking her all kinds of questions about her job.’
‘He’d targeted her to find out about aspects of your firm’s business?’
‘Everything he did was easy for me to understand. He’s an unscrupulous young man. One can only guess what he was after. I didn’t accept the girl’s resignation, and fortunately she didn’t see him again. Peter Portis would’ve been appalled if he’d known.’
‘This would’ve been before Royce’s marriage?’
‘No, no, afterwards. That was the worst of it. I think he told her he was ready to leave his wife.’
Mr Unsworth looked uncertain, telling her that when Peter and his wife, Royce’s mother, had parted, he’d become a different man – showing a declining interest in the business. But he was said to be applying himself to the rocks with a new commitment. Soon afterwards, PPP had closed its Hereford office and Peter Portis had opened a new office in Whitchurch and moved home, with Royce and his daughter, who’d soon marry, to that lonely house near the Seven Sisters rocks.
‘Mr Unsworth,’ Merrily said, ‘would you say Royce had changed?’
He chuckled, but he was not amused.
‘Not for the better, I’m afraid. They were never close, Peter and his boy. Royce has never been interested in climbing. Or finding the right house for someone, come to that. Property’s not really in his soul, only his bank account.’
She stared at him. You didn’t often hear the words property and soul in the same sentence, but this was an old-fashioned estate agent.
‘Peter worked for us once. Must have been over thirty years ago now. We were sorry to lose him. Terrific energy. Worked all hours. Might’ve been his own company. Peter advised the diocese on glebe land, effective disposal of redundant Church property. Always undercharged for his services in that area, too, and was regarded as a good man by bishop after bishop. Disposal of glebe land is now to be handled by Royce, who will not undercharge. But Peter, as I said, was a good man and Royce, I regret to say, is less scrupulous.’
‘Which the Bishop…’
‘Is not expected to notice.’
‘Is it hard for an estate agent to be a good man?’ Merrily asked. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean…’
Mr Unsworth chuckled, and this time he was amused.
