The Cure of Souls

Cheltenham or London. Or even in America. Wherever she was, she’d have landed on her feet. She was twenty- three years old, said the travellers. She should have been married.

She was dead, said their puri dai.

But no body was ever found.

And the Emperor of Frome, still raging in private over the corruption and defection of his wife? Oh, he was never even questioned in any depth.

Al looked like he wanted to spit.

Sally Boswell said, ‘We look at the 1960s and we tend to think that was not so very long ago. The young musicians now are all influenced by sixties music – the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead and people freaking out on hallucinogens, the voice of youth.’

She leaned forward under the wall-light, as if to make herself more real, her museum curator’s voice taking over. She must have been breathtakingly beautiful back then, Merrily thought.

‘But the sixties were a long time ago,’ Sally said.

Particularly the early sixties, when there was still an almost mystical aura around the Royal Family… when, in the countryside, this was still feudal England… when the Lakes were the squirearchy, clear descendants of the Norman marcher lords. And when their actions were not subject to examination.

Conrad Lake’s friends included MPs and would-be MPs like Oliver Perry-Jones. The Emperor dined and drank with senior councillors, magistrates, chief constables… and this was the time when the senior police would tend to be ex-army officers with medals from the Second World War, men for whom stability meant the preservation of a hierarchy – and the structure – at all costs. When the police knew their place.

‘Conrad was himself a magistrate for a time,’ Sally said. ‘He was also Worshipful Master of the local Masonic lodge. And the gypsies were vagrants, and their so-called culture was primitive. And they lied, of course. And they also had a grudge against Conrad. So when the police were told that Rebekah Smith had been seen getting into Conrad’s car…’

‘And they were told,’ Al said. ‘There was more than one witness.’

‘Uncles or brothers?’ Lol asked.

Al smiled. ‘You see the problem.’

Merrily saw how intense Lol had become, as though he’d channelled his confusion and distress into an urgent need to know.

‘Isabel told me the police finally concluded the gypsies had simply made it up to get back at Lake for banning them from his hop-yards,’ he said.

Sally nodded. ‘That was one suggestion, yes.’

‘But she also thought Stewart Ash had evidence linking Lake to the disappearance. Does that mean he just spoke to the gypsy witnesses who the police chose to disregard?’

‘Oh, more than that,’ said Al. ‘It would have to be more than that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like photographs. She took a very good picture, did Rebekah.’

Merrily stayed quiet. Lol hadn’t told her any of this – not that there’d been time.

‘Especially naked.’ Al’s eyes glinted metallically. ‘Gypsies aren’t the most inhibited of folk, and Rebekah – well, she was not the most inhibited of gypsies. I imagine there would have been times when she had Conrad crawling to her feet.’

‘Conrad took many photographs,’ Sally said quickly. ‘He liked to have photos of his land and the things he owned – or wanted to own. He’d bought all the most expensive equipment.’

‘You sound as if you know that Stewart had pictures,’ Lol said.

‘Well, of course.’ Al extended long hands that bore no signs of arthritis. ‘We know Stewart found some of them when he was carrying out his rudimentary renovation of the kiln. Stored behind the furnace, like a private porn collection. For a long time, Stewart preserved the old furnace. I guess it would be – when?’ He looked at his wife. ‘Early last year? When he decided it was going to have to come out to make more kitchen space.’

‘It was certainly well into the spring when he showed you one of the photographs and asked you if you recognized the woman.’ Sally turned to Lol. ‘When the furnace came out, the builder had found a space at the rear, well away from the heat, where the bricks could be removed. And that was where an old briefcase had been stowed. It contained, apparently, about two dozen photographs. Of the same naked woman.’

‘Though not necessarily the same hop-bine,’ Al said.

Merrily saw Lol flinch slightly. She drew the cardigan around her. She didn’t like where this was going.

‘And those pictures of Rebekah,’ Lol said. ‘They were going in Stewart’s book, right? So where are they now?’

Al laughed. ‘You tell me. He showed me just the one. He said he had the others. We became excited, naturally, that an old mystery might be solved, an old injustice exposed. But I warned him to keep quiet. Obviously, it must not get back to Adam Lake.’

‘And did it?’ Merrily asked. She wasn’t convinced this would have exposed an injustice. What was there to link these pictures to Lake?

‘Well, if it did, it wasn’t us who told him,’ Al protested.

‘If it did get back to Adam,’ Sally said, ‘it was probably through Stewart himself. Consider: Stewart bought the kiln at a knock-down price, after the receivers moved in – Conrad’s death being almost contemporaneous with all this.’

‘The Emperor became old quickly and died quickly,’ Al said, with evident approval. ‘When his second wife left him, taking the child, Adam, they said his mind was already going. They said he drove her away. Eventually, the old bastard had a timely coronary while out patrolling his shrinking domain. He was found by a walker, dying in the hop-yard below the kiln. Yes… that hop-yard. I like to wonder if, knowing the kiln was being sold, the Emperor was on his way to retrieve his photos when he was struck down… and died knowing his final crime was there to be discovered.’

‘Why would he keep them there?’ Merrily asked.

‘We can’t know, can we?’ Sally said. ‘Perhaps it was his old hiding place, going back to when the kiln was part of his farmhouse. He knocked down the house in the bitter wake of his first marriage, built the new house for his second.’

‘That’s another thing – why did he knock down the house and leave the kiln standing?’

‘We don’t know,’ Sally said, too quickly.

‘Why would he have kept those pictures at all?’

‘Obsession, Mrs Watkins.’

Merrily didn’t ask her to expand, didn’t think it would get her anywhere, not yet. ‘You were about to tell me why Stewart might have told Adam Lake about the pictures.’

‘To get him off his back, of course,’ Al said. ‘Obsession again. Adam’s obsession was to recover what he could of the old empire – especially that bit. Maybe he even knew there was something in that kiln, maybe that was another reason why he was so anxious to get it back that he was prepared to make Stewart’s life a misery. Maybe Stewart told him about the pictures and tried to blackmail him. Who knows?’

‘Al,’ Lol said softly. ‘Who really killed Stewart?’

Al’s head tilted. ‘You’re asking me?’

‘You couldn’t let Stewart turn those pictures over to Adam Lake, could you? Not at any price. If Stewart had let Lake have the pictures, they’d have been destroyed. So the truth would never have come out.’

Al looked down at his long, guitarist’s fingers. ‘Yes,’ he said calmly. ‘Quite right, Lol.’

‘And he would have, wouldn’t he?’ Lol said. ‘He’d have given them away in exchange for money or just the removal of the big blue barn – just to be left in peace and a decent amount of light to get on with his books. I mean, I never knew Stewart, obviously, but I don’t see him as any kind of investigative writer. The idea of publishing those photos – that would’ve scared him to death, probably. I mean, how often do you find soft porn in a local-history picture book? The story of Conrad Lake’s war with the gypsies, maybe culminating in an undiscovered murder – it wasn’t exactly an obvious sequel to The Hop Grower’s Year, was it?’

Merrily stared at Lol with, for the first time, a kind of awe. She wondered how long he’d been brooding about all this? And what had happened in that cold, sterile hop-yard to sharpen his focus.