Recalled to Life

FIVE

‘I am like one who died young. All my life might have been.’

Cissy Kohler lay on a patchwork quilt and thought: The way I feel, this ought to make me invisible. Bits and pieces of past lives, some hers, some not, stitched together in a show of wholeness. Through the chintz curtains she could see the branches of a wych elm swaying in the wind. In the room below she could hear voices but she didn’t strain her ears, for she knew they couldn’t be saying anything that mattered.

‘Charming place,’ said the tall man in the dark suit whose impeccable cut was a foil to a stringy tie which looked as if it had been dropped in a bowl of Brown Windsor and wrung out by hand.

‘Yeah, very quaint,’ said Jay Waggs. ‘How can I help you, Mr Sempernel?’

‘Belongs to Jacklin, I gather? Decent of him to let you have it.’

‘I figure it’ll be on his bill.’

‘What? Oh, quite. These solicitors. But it’s ideal. Good security. Just the one track down. And that wall behind. Perfect.’

He was looking out of the window into the small rear garden.

The cottage stood in the U-shaped nook which some peasant who knew his rights had indented in the twelve-foot boundary wall of an extensive country estate.

‘Perfect,’ agreed Waggs. ‘The wall and the guard, they make Cissy feel really at home.’

‘Ha-ha. Droll. Though the guard, as you call him, is of course positioned here to keep the media hounds out, not to keep Miss Kohler in.’

‘So she’s free to come and go.’

‘But naturally. Within the limits of our agreement, of course, which I do not doubt that Mr Jacklin has spelt out in tedious detail. Nevertheless, let me recap. Miss Kohler’s early release –’

‘Early!’

‘Indeed. HM Government has agreed for humanitarian reasons to anticipate the proper legal process, but not without undertakings on your part. These are principally that Miss Kohler has agreed that neither she nor her advisers will make any public comment, nor publish any form of memoir of this unhappy business, without the approval of the authorities. In return for this undertaking, HM Government has indicated it will offer no resistance to any legitimate claim for compensation.’

‘Big of them.’

‘I think so. Also Miss Kohler has agreed to remain in this country until the completion of the official inquiry into the circumstances leading up to this unfortunate miscarriage.’

‘Which could take years!’

‘No. I assure you matters are moving fast. Deputy Chief Constable Hiller whom you have met has the business in hand and we anticipate a speedy conclusion. Incidentally, Mr Hiller tells me that if by chance Miss Kohler had kept any written record of the events at Mickledore Hall, sight of it, on loan of course, might speed matters up and obviate the need of any further interview with her.’

Waggs laughed.

‘Come on, Sempernel! You know there’s no record. You guys went through her cell like a pack of rats before she got out.’

The long man smiled thinly.

‘The papers seem to think she may have had some ally through whom such a memoir may have been smuggled out to a place of security.’

‘Like me, you mean? Well, I don’t deny that, given the chance, I’d have been glad to help. But I wasn’t and I didn’t.’

‘I’m happy to accept your word on that, Mr Waggs,’ said Sempernel. ‘There are other possible sources of assistance, of course. She was after all inside for a long time, and could hardly avoid forming relationships. The unfortunate Miss Bush, for instance …’

‘That was long before my time,’ said Waggs. ‘The only memoir I’m aware of is in Cissy’s head and I don’t know how easy it’s going to be to pry that out.’

‘No? You’ve met with quite a lot of success so far,’ murmured Sempernel. ‘Rest, quiet, and above all time are great healers. They are all at your disposal here. Enjoy them.’

He made for the door, stooping to avoid the sagging lintel. Beneath it he paused, looking like Alice in the White Rabbit’s house.

‘One last thing,’ he said, ‘Jacklin has, I hope, made it clear that any grant of a Free Pardon will be in respect of the Mickledore Hall affair only. In respect of the killing of Daphne Bush, there is no doubt about Miss Kohler’s culpability. Her release from that sentence is therefore merely under licence which may be revoked in the event of any breach of its terms. You follow me, Mr Waggs?’

‘You mean you’ve got a string you can twitch whenever you feel like it? I follow.’

‘Good.’ Sempernel passed through the doorway and straightened up so that his face was visible only from the long nose down. ‘I’ll say cheerio, then.’

Protected from the Englishman’s watery gaze, Waggs pushed his middle finger into the air as he said, ‘Yeah. Goodbye.’

He watched from the window till he saw the lanky figure negotiate the muddy path, then he picked up the phone and dialled.

‘Mr Jacklin, please. It’s Jay Waggs. Jacklin? Hi. How’re you doing? We’re fine. Yeah, she’s resting. Listen, Sempernel’s been here. Lots of that slippery Whitehall stuff, but all he’s doing is making sure my thick American mind understands the ground rules. Just thought I’d let you know. How are things your end? No change? That’s good. Well, keep in touch. Ciao.’

He listened for a while longer before putting the receiver down. It might be mere neurosis to imagine he heard significant clicks, but Sempernel struck him as a good man to be neurotic around. And if the phone, then why not everywhere?

He went into the kitchen, blew a kiss at the kettle and switched it on.

A few moments later he tapped on the bedroom door and entered with a cup of coffee.

Cissy Kohler had sat up on the bed and was reading her Bible.

‘Thought you might like this,’ he said. ‘It’s not home style, but near as I can get. How’re you feeling?’

She closed the book, laid it on her lap and took the cup.

‘I’m OK.’

‘Sempernel was here.’

‘Who?’

‘The one like a straightened out hairpin. He was just checking we knew the rules.’

She drank her coffee with her eyes closed as though taking in visions with the steam. He studied her face and wondered just how much of what was happening she really grasped. At least, if there were listening ears, it made role-play that much easier.

He said, ‘He was asking about your memoirs, Cissy.’

She opened her eyes.

‘Memoirs?’

‘Yeah. There are these stories in the Press that you wrote up everything that happened at Mickledore Hall, everything that happened afterwards in jail. Somehow you got them smuggled out and they are waiting to be picked up somewhere.’

He knew what the answer would be. They’d had this conversation before.

‘It’s not true,’ she said without heat. ‘They’re making it up.’

‘That’s what I told him. But if there were any memoirs, Cissy, it’d make things a lot easier for me. The book, the film …’

‘Which book? Which film?’ She regarded him blankly.

‘We’ll talk about it later,’ he said gently. ‘It’s early days. We’ll talk when you’re rested.’

‘How long will we stay here, Jay?’ she asked suddenly. ‘You said we’d go home soon. You said –’

This was dangerous. He cut her off, saying, ‘We will, Cissy, I promise. Just as soon as Mr Sempernel says it’s OK. Don’t you like it here?’

She shook her head and said, ‘Not much.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I don’t know. It feels so old … so English …’

‘Yeah. It shouldn’t be for long. You rest now, OK?’

Her cup was empty. He took it from her hands and she lay back on the patchwork quilt, with her hands crossed over the old leather Bible on her stomach. Her eyes were still open but he got no impression that they were seeing him. In fact he had a strange feeling that if he stayed here much longer he would stop seeing her.

He turned and left the room.

SIX

‘Now come and take your place in the circle, and let us sit quiet, and hear the echoes about which you have your theory.’

Sod’s Law.

How many times on his way home late to a loving family and a hot dinner had he been waylaid by Dalziel and more or less frogmarched down to the Black Bull?

This evening there was no sign of the Fat Man. He met Wield on the stairs and said, ‘Fancy a quick half?’

‘Sorry, it’s my karate night.’

On the next landing he hesitated, then went down the corridor to the inquiry team’s room. A mahogany plaque had been screwed to the door. On it in large black Roman was printed DEPUTY CHIEF CONSTABLE HILLER, with underneath in golden Gothic, KNOCK AND WAIT.

Pascoe knocked and waited.

Inspector Stubbs opened the door. Over his crêpe-de-chine’d shoulder Pascoe could see the green flicker of computer screens.

‘Thought you might like an intro to our local,’ he said. ‘The beer’s good enough to make the meat pies seem almost edible.’

‘Love it, but not tonight,’ said Stubbs regretfully. ‘Mr Hiller wants us to get all this stuff into the system before we knock off.’

He opened the door wider to reveal Sergeant Proctor surrounded by what Pascoe assumed were the Mickledore Hall files.

‘’Evening, guv,’ said the sergeant. ‘Who does your filing, then – a grizzly bear?’

Stubbs frowned, but Pascoe, recalling the state of his own records if ever Dalziel got among them, could not take offence.

‘Some other time, then,’ he said.

There was nothing to stop him going to the Black Bull alone, but if he was going to be a solitary drinker, he might as well do it in the privacy of his own home.

He heard his phone ringing as he parked the car but it had stopped by the time he got into the house and there was no message on his machine. He checked through his mail in search of Ellie’s hand.

Nothing.

He poured himself a beer and sat down to read the paper. Good news was obviously no news. His glass was empty. He went to fill it, opened instead a can of soup and cut a hunk of bread. This he ate standing at the kitchen table. Then he went into the garden, pulled up a few weeds, wandered back into the house, poured another beer, switched on the television, and watched the end of a documentary on homelessness. Twice he got up to check that the phone was working.

Finally he remembered Dalziel’s tape.

He switched off the TV and put the cassette into his tape deck, pressed the start button and sat back to listen.

An announcer’s voice first, blandly BBC.

‘And now the last in our series The Golden Age of Murder in which crime writer William Stamper has been positing that the Golden Age of crime fiction, usually regarded as artificial, unrealistic, and escapist, may have had closer links with real life than the critics allow.

‘So far he has examined crimes from each of the first five decades of the century. Now finally we arrive at the ’sixties and a case in which we will see that William Stamper has a very special interest. The Mickledore Hall murder.’

Now came music, sort of intellectually eerie. Bartok perhaps. Then a male voice, light, dry, with an occasional flattened vowel giving a hint of northern upbringing …

‘It was the best of crimes, it was the worst of crimes, it was born of love, it was spawned by greed; it was completely unplanned, it was coldly premeditated; it was an open-and-shut case, it was a locked-room mystery; it was the act of a guileless girl, it was the work of a scheming scoundrel; it was the end of an era, it was the start of an era; a man with the face of a laughing boy reigned in Washington, a man with the features of a lugubrious hound ruled in Westminster; an ex-Marine got a job at a Dallas book repository, an ex-Minister of War lost a job in politics; a group known as the Beatles made their first million, a group known as the Great Train Robbers made their first two million; it was the time when those who had fought to save the world began to surrender it to those they had fought to save it for; Dixon of Dock Green was giving way to Z-Cars, Bond to Smiley, the Monsignors to the Maharishis, Matt Dillon to Bob Dylan, l.s.d. to LSD, as the sunset glow of the old Golden Age imploded into the psychedelic dawn of the new Age of Glitz.

‘It was the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty-three, and it is altogether fitting that this crime of which we speak should have been committed in one of Yorkshire’s great country houses, Mickledore Hall, and that its dénouement should have taken place in that most traditional of settings, the Old Library.

‘If a Hollywood designer were asked to build a set for such a scene in an Agatha Christie film, it would probably turn out something like the library of Mickledore Hall.

‘Imagine a desk the size of a ping-pong table standing on a carpet the size of a badminton court. Scattered around are various chairs, stylistically unrelated except in so far as their upholstery has the faded look of the coat of a very old terrier. One wall is embrasured with three deep window bays hung with dusty velvet curtains, while the other three are lined with towering bureaux behind whose lozenged bars rot a thousand books, untouched by little save time, for the Mickledores were never famed for their intellectuality.

‘In nineteen sixty-three the incumbent baronet seemed cast in the traditional mould of Mickledore men, tall, blond, handsome, athletic, with an exuberant manner that might in a lesser man have been called hearty.

‘Yet there was another side to Ralph Mickledore – Mick to his friends – as evidenced perhaps by his close friendship with that most unhearty of men, James Westropp. At his trial, the defence projected him as the perfect type of English eccentricity, a country squire who ran his estate as if the twentieth century hadn’t arrived, with Shire horses pulling his ploughs, a water-mill grinding his grain, and poachers offered the choice of a Mickledore boot up the bum or a Mickledore beak on the Bench.

‘It was, however, a very different picture that the prosecution inked in. Victorian values might be the order of the day at the Hall, but away from Yorkshire, Sir Ralph came across as a Restoration roué. Nightclubs, casinos, racetracks, the grey area where the haut monde overlapped with the demi-monde, here was his urban habitat. The gap between his two lifestyles was presented not as harmless eccentricity but as black hypocrisy. And by the end of nineteen sixty-three, juries were very ready to think the worst of their social superiors, though, as we shall see, it was not this cynicism alone which helped confer on Ralph Mickledore the unenviable distinction of being the last man to hang in Mid-Yorkshire.

‘The house party assembled on Friday, August the second, for a long weekend taking in the following Monday, which was then the now defunct August Bank Holiday. The great and the good were all spilling out of London after the almost unbearable melodrama of the Stephen Ward trial. Though he once provided not the least sensational headlines in this most sensational of years, Dr Ward may have faded completely from some listeners’ minds, so perhaps a little potted history would go down well here as an entrée to the main course.

‘In March that year, John Profumo, the Minister of War (in those less mealy-mouthed days we had not yet invented Ministers of Defence) had resigned after it emerged that he had lied to Parliament when denying allegations of an improper relationship with a young woman named Christine Keeler. The impropriety was more than simply sexual. Miss Keeler was also alleged to have been the mistress of Captain Yuri Ivanov, a Russian naval attaché known by British Security to be an officer of the KGB. Such a link, however tenuous, between a Government Minister and an enemy agent, was clearly undesirable. But it was the lie to his colleagues that broke him.

‘The man who had introduced both Profumo and Ivanov to Keeler was a London osteopath and artist, Dr Stephen Ward, who besides manipulating the bones and painting the portraits of many highly placed people, also, it was alleged, provided more intimate services. Amid spiralling rumours of upper class debauchery on a scale to inspire a new Satyricon, Dr Ward was finally brought to trial at the end of July on three charges of living on the earnings of prostitution, and two concerned with procuring minors.

‘On Wednesday July the thirty-first, which seemed likely to be the trial’s final day, the court and the nation were shocked to learn that Ward had taken an overdose of sleeping pills the previous night and was critically ill. Despite this news, the judge summed up, the jury deliberated, and in mid-morning a verdict was delivered of Guilty on two of the immoral earnings charges, Not Guilty on the rest.

‘Sentencing was postponed till Dr Ward should have recovered. When the house party assembled two days later he was still lying unconscious in his hospital bed and it can scarcely be doubted that up and down the country there were many who prayed he would never rise from it.

‘I am not, of course, suggesting that there were any such among the arrivals at Mickledore Hall that day.

‘The house party fell some way short of that ideal constitution a fashionable host might have aimed at. Mickledore himself was unmarried, but his only “spare” guest was a man. Children were not usually included in such weekend gatherings, but Mickledore liked kids in the same way he liked dogs and the three couples who made up the guest list mustered eight between them, plus two nannies. And a final oddity; while the tradition admitted of, perhaps even encouraged, the inviting of a token American, this group had no less than three in it, or four if you counted one of the nannies.

‘But let’s get down to details.

‘The “spare” guest was Scott Rampling, a young US Embassy official, formally attached to the legal department though his subsequent career has been only loosely linked with legality.

‘The three couples were the Westropps, James and Pamela, plus their infant twins, Philip and Emily, in the care of their nanny, Cecily Kohler: the Partridges, Thomas and Jessica, plus their children Alison (three), Lætitia (seven), Genevieve (nine), and Tommy (twelve), in the care of their nanny, Miss Mavis Marsh: and finally, the Stampers, Arthur and Marilou, plus their nannyless kids, Wendy who was seven, and William who was eight.

‘That’s right. William Stamper, age eight. No coincidence. During that never-to-be-forgotten weekend at Mickledore Hall when the last of the Golden Age murders took place, I was truly there.

‘From a child’s viewpoint, the Hall was paradise. Inside there were attics full of marvellous junk. Outside there were woods, stables, a tennis court, an island with a lake and a couple of canoes, and a haunted folly. And there were only two rules; one, you didn’t go canoeing without supervision, and two, you became invisible and inaudible after six o’clock in the evening. Personally, I could have stayed there forever.

‘For most adults, however, a long weekend was probably quite enough. The atmosphere had something in it of a muscular public school. Non-stop activity was the order of the day, and slacking the unforgivable sin. My father loved it, perhaps because he worshipped the public school ethos with an apostate’s fervour. He should have been the perfect type of self-made Yorkshire businessman, forever advertising his humble origins and trumpeting his triumph over privilege and private education. Instead he used his growing wealth to purchase a place in the clubs and councils of the upper crust whose manners and mœurs he cultivated to the point of parody. Above all things he hated to be reminded that his growing business empire was based on the success of his first venture, Stamper Rubber Goods of Sheffield. I believe that in some areas of South Yorkshire condoms are still referred to as Stampers, and of course it was a mixed blessing for him to be awarded the upper class sobriquet of “Noddy”.

‘My mother was very different. Of the trio of American women present (the others being Pam Westropp and Cecily Kohler), she came from the “best” background, being a Bellmain of Virginia, no less, which was the nearest to aristrocracy my father dared aim at in his early years. Yet despite her breeding, she remained attractively unsophisticated, a wide-eyed innocent abroad whose unaffected enthusiasms often embarrassed my father, but no one else, for by knowing where her true home was, she was at home anywhere.

‘A very different type of American was Scott Rampling. Born in the urban sprawl of LA, he was a young man in a hurry to reach the rosy future he never doubted lay ahead of him. He had got to know Mickledore during one of his frequent visits to the Westropps in Washington and renewed the acquaintance when posted to London in ’sixty-one. After the events of that sensational weekend, he vanished from the scene and indeed the country with positively indecent speed, and the infrequency with which his name appeared in newspaper reports of the case and the trial suggests a considerable calling-in of cross-Atlantic favours.

‘The Partridges were as English as Rampling was American, to the manner and manor born. The family owned a goodly proportion of the North Riding, having preferred acres to earldoms as reward for their loyalty to the Stuart cause in the seventeenth century, and to the anti-Stuart cause in the eighteenth. It was not till Thomas’s retirement from active politics that a Partridge finally got a peerage, though as the noble lord says in his lively autobiography, In A Pear Tree, he would have preferred land if it had still been on offer. In nineteen fifty-five he had been elected Conservative member for the seat whose boundaries pretty well coincided with his own. By nineteen sixty-three he was a junior minister in the War Office, widely tipped for promotion in the next reshuffle. Then the sky fell in. He was too closely associated with his immediate master and long-time mentor, John Profumo, for comfort; his name kept coming up in the huge stew of rumours bubbling around Westminster all that spring and summer; and all poor Partridge wanted to do now was keep his head well below the rim of the cauldron.

‘His wife, Jessica, née Herdwick, fifth daughter of the Earl of Millom, was a formidably horsey lady with a great facility for breeding both champion chasers and handsome children. Her fifth (child, that is) was well on its way that weekend.

‘The Partridge nanny, Miss Mavis Marsh, had every qualification and quality then admired in her profession. In her mid-thirties, she stood about five feet four, but looked taller in her immaculate starched uniform because of her unyielding erectness of posture, a physical trait she extended into her attitude on matters of etiquette, expression, punctuality, probity, and even diet. You never left your crusts when Miss Marsh was at table.

‘The other nanny, Cecily Kohler, was quite different, more like a big sister than an agent of divine providence. She wore no uniform; indeed she even sometimes appeared in jeans, which were then not the universal garment they have since become. When she joined in our water sports, which as an expert canoer she often did, she was likely to end up as wet and tousled as the rest of us. Even her voice was a delight, for in it we heard the authentic accent of all that was most glamorous to our young imaginations. (We had no power to look ahead and see that the ’sixties were about to start swinging, with our own boring country at the very fulcrum of the mad intoxicating whirl.) We loved her because she loved us, and when I think of her, I still see the flushed and laughing face of a young woman, with russet hair blown across her brow in beautiful confusion. I have no art to link that image with the pallid skin, hollow cheeks and desperate, dark-ringed eyes of the woman I last saw being pushed into a police car outside Mickledore Hall.