The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (10 page)

Hartmann was by now incapable of being astonished. His world had, in the last twelve hours, been inverted, upended and then shaken loose from its fixings. He was drifting into areas of the map that he hadn't even known existed. "What?"

Rosenthal looked up from his yolk. "Is that not enough? We could perhaps stretch it to thirty thousand … "

"But I don't understand," protested Hartmann. "Why are you offering me money?"

Rosenthal nodded, implying that at last Hartmann was shaping up. "Because we want you to do something."

Illegal, obviously, and when Hartmann voiced this Rosenthal waved his knife again, this time dismissively. "Let us say, merely 'unethical'."

And Hartmann, as if he had a choice, decided to display some morality for the first time that weekend. "But I can't."

Rosenthal had by now completed his repast, although Hartmann's lay unheeded upon the chinaware. He expressed some surprise at this assertion, as if he had been bitten by a teddy bear. Then a look of weariness stole over him and with a languid smile he asked, "Oh no? Let me see … " He frowned as if searching his memory. "Bookmaker's debts of sixteen thousand. Credit card bills of seven thousand. Repayments on the car of five hundred and six pounds per month."

He waited as if there was something that Hartmann might care to say about all this. When he was greeted by silence, he continued. "And there is the other side to all this, of course." He looked from the pathologist to the video and photographs, still in Hartmann's hand, then back to the pathologist. "Mr Justice Brown-Sequard, your wife, your mother … "

Hartmann's face felt suddenly cold and stiff at the thought.

Rosenthal went on, "By the way, they are not, of course, the only copies. Indeed that tape is extensively edited — your whole performance was recorded."

Hartmann knew, as he had known secretly all along, that he was going to do exactly as he was commanded. He had no option. He felt crushed and humiliated and, the inevitable corollary, he felt impotent anger that he had been manipulated so easily and thereby made so willingly the fool.

"How do I know you won't send them anyway?"

Rosenthal's face showed tiredness at this. "You overestimate your importance if you think that we are interested in destroying you, Dr Hartmann. We want your cooperation in one matter and one matter only. It would not suit us to take it further."

It took him a little while to find the words but find them he did.

"What would you like me to do?"

Eisenmenger had just returned from a long walk when his past found him at last. The weather was gusty, seeming both bright and dull, cold and yet warming; the optimism of spring fitfully leavening the dull depression of winter. His back and legs ached and he was sweating abominably but he was at the same time savouring the feeling of accomplishment. He sat on a bench (placed in honour of
Rosemary
Egger
,
widow
of
this
parish
,
who
died
in
1998
,
aged
93
.
From
her
daughter
,
Mavis
) on the small, triangular green and contemplated the view. Before him was the hill ("tump" as the locals called it) and the ploughed field that surrounded it, muddy and puddled with too much recent rain, while a small copse to its right hid the schoolhouse where he was living, and to the left the lane wound through more fields and copses down to Castleberrow House.

It was a beautiful scene, with no more intrusion from the modern world than a distant rumble of traffic from the main road and occasional forays from training flights of the RAF.

So why couldn't he connect with it? Why was he able to know but not feel that it was beautiful?

He knew that it wasn't familiarity; he had only been staying in the tiny, two-bedroomed house with its grimy windows and damp stains for two months. He knew also that it wasn't in his nature to find such a scene unmoving, for he remembered appreciating other such views, other such pockets of peculiarly English loveliness. Remembered them but could not empathize with them.

He heard the car before he saw it. The wind blew and the wild daffodils bent before it and the smell of the garlic grass came to him. He was getting cold just sitting there and the idea of idleness was still sufficiently novel for him to have to fight to suppress the urge to get up and just be active. In the early days it had been the restlessness that had been the worse thing to deal with.
Do
something
his mind kept saying,
Do
something
, else you might fall back into the past.

And fall back he had done many, many times. Back to Marie, thence back to Tamsin. Too much had happened to people he had known, for reasons that he couldn't entirely separate from emotion.

His lips smiled. Euphemism; for
emotion
read
guilt
. He had learned that the mind was very good at avoiding awkardnesses. He had learned much about his mind in his attempts to control it, bring it back to him. Much but not yet enough.

The car appeared, slowing then parking in front of the schoolhouse. It was yellow and adorned with a taxi sign. He could only just make out the figure who sat in the back of the car looking out uncertainly at the house, but it was one he knew well. Again he had to suppress memories, associations.

Helena.

The desire to get up and go to her was strong but not strong enough. The stench of muck as it was spread in the field behind him drifted around the bench. The small war memorial in the middle of the green didn't seem to mind so Eisenmenger thought it was probably okay. The tractor's roar became louder; Eisenmenger was by now used to the modernization and thus destruction of the rural myth. He tried to ignore Helena; he knew that sooner or later he would talk to her, but he saw no reason to hurry the encounter.

His palms were itching as they often did and he had to fight the urge to scratch them. He recalled his mother telling him that itchy palms meant that money was coming to him. It was a deep and untainted memory, and thus a pleasurable one.

Helena had got out of the taxi and was still looking at the School House, examining its shoddy outside, half covered with ivy, half with dilapidation. Even from this distance he could see that she was wondering if he could possibly be living in such a dwelling. Surely a consultant pathologist, foremost member of the professional middle classes, should reside in a more salubrious place?

She had presumably told the taxi driver to wait.

The smile returned to his lips but this time there was more than muscular contraction to it.

Why had she come?

That was the question, but a tricky one to handle without treading on mined territory. He had last seen her nine months before when he was still in hospital, the burns still hurting almost as deeply as the emotional wounds. It had been an awkward meeting, but all their meetings, ever since they had first met, seemed to have been awkward. The talk had been small, so desultory as to be turgid, so artificial as to be tasteless. What was it about Helena that had inspired in him such mute desire, such impotent craving? He was aware that she too had tragedies in her past — her parents murdered, her stepbrother accused, convicted and subsequently taking his life — and he was aware also that these events had sculpted a carapace around her, but for the moment he could think only of himself. In the pecking order of those assaulted by life, he reckoned that he outranked her.

The distant figure had rung the doorbell twice. She had stepped back from the house to look up at the two small windows on the first floor. With no response she now turned back to the car, looked up and saw him on the bench. She dismissed the taxi driver with payment and, as it drove off, she began to walk up the curving lane towards him.

She looked good, he decided. He now realized how much he had missed her and that he really liked her very much indeed. Her hair was even shorter, he noticed, and he thought perhaps that she had lost some weight, although not as much as he had.

"There you are!" she called from five metres away. "I thought I'd missed you."

He smiled a greeting but stayed sitting. "Ten minutes earlier and you would have done."

She sat on the bench beside him, perhaps half a metre away but angled towards him so that her knees almost touched his, a pose of concern.
She
wants
something
, he decided and then,
So
what
else
is
new
?

He tried to ignore the tinge of sadness that these thoughts brought.

"You're looking well."

Now that was a lie since he had lost four stone and found to replace them a pallor that he feared the sun would never hide, but he admired the brazenness of the falsehood's delivery. Part of a lawyer's training, he supposed. "So are you, Helena." And he meant it. And he found himself hoping that she heard that he meant it.

"How do you feel?"

What did she want — the truth or the platitude? He reflected that only when asked by a doctor was that particular question answered honestly. He shrugged and that, it seemed, was enough.

"I had trouble finding you. This place is miles from anywhere."

From the field behind the breeze blew muck fumes around them and Helena wrinkled her nose. Eisenmenger looked at her out of the corner of his eye. He knew the farmer vaguely — a large corpulent man who was perpetually short of breath and short of money in the way that only the wealthy have — and had grown used to the less romantic aspects of modern agriculture, but clearly Helena still had more roseate notions, despite the two squashed rabbits, now surrounded by crows, that were clearly visible on the road before them.

She said then, "I didn't tell you, but I went to the funeral."

Not
that
there
was
much
to
bury
.

"Did you? I didn't."

He knew that he was making it difficult for her, but she had always made it difficult for him. She pressed on through this solid wall of cold indifference. "Nobody blamed you, John."

Why was she trying so hard? Love?

He didn't think so.

He said tiredly, "My problem was never other people's view."

"No, but … " she faltered, finishing lamely, "you know … "

He did know. Marie's suicide — her spectacular, tortured suicide — had inevitably raised questions about his part in the affair. Just as it was always assumed that a police investigation implied guilt, so Marie's action was automatically linked to his supposed culpability. Even though she had been clearly disturbed in the days leading up to the tragedy, the question that recurred in his mind and therefore presumably in everybody else's was, what had happened to make her disturbed? It was that unknown that had played on him in the months since. He didn't know and because he didn't know he wondered where he might fit in. It was only fair that others who had known her might also wonder what part her former lover might have played in the tragedy.

"How are your hands?"

Her question brought him back to the present and for that at least he was grateful. He shrugged. "Not too bad. Getting there."

There were no contractures, a fact for which he was so grateful to God he had sometimes wept, but much of the feeling had gone from the palms, although not from the fingertips. Still, he not infrequently dropped things if he wasn't paying attention. Slow improvement had come and it still continued.

There was a hesitancy about the next enquiry. "What about … working?"

And then he understood.

"No, Helena," he said firmly.

*

She wanted to go for a drink to the local pub, but it wasn't a model village where a microcosm of society was clustered about the village green and the friendly pub landlord had a paunch and five teeth missing.

"The nearest pub's five miles away."

So they had gone back to his house and there he had made coffee without too much difficulty whilst he watched her watch him through the kitchen doorway, and she talked about the relatively few things they had in common.

He brought the coffee in two bone china mugs to the small sitting room. She thanked him, picked up the coffee and cradled it in her hands although he did not think it was cold in the room.

"Are you renting?"

She asked this hopefully, implying that she could not believe that he would have bought such a hovel.

"It's mine."

"Oh."

She looked around, baffled. He wanted to tell her that the atmosphere meant something to him, that its smells and simplicity took him back to before Marie, before even Tamsin, back to his childhood. A place of safety, as simple as that. For the time being he wanted it preserved. Maybe later he would gut it and turn it into a twenty-first-century home.

He wanted to tell her but he wanted more to keep things to himself.

Instead he said, "Having sold the flat, I thought a nice little place in the country Buying this hardly dented the proceeds."

Another pause. The questions formed on her face as she looked at the dry rot around the windows, the peeling of the paint on the door, the threadbare carpets, but not one of them chose to explain itself.

She said, "Bob's retired."

Bob Johnson. One of the few images of the past that didn't come packed with panic. Bob had always understood Eisenmenger more than most, had seemed unlike most other policemen, both in character and in outlook. Eisenmenger was more grateful to Johnson than he had ever dared to admit. When Tamsin had died in his arms it had been Bob who had been there with him.

"How's his wife?"

"She seems fine. She left hospital about five months ago. They moved and now Bob's working with his brother-in-law."

"What was wrong with her? I never found out."

"She had some sort of nervous breakdown … "

Helena's face matched her silence as the words took on their own significances and echoes. He could almost laugh at her embarrassment, enjoying this thing of poise caused to stumble, but the pause lengthened and therefore became intolerable. "And you?" he asked. "What are you doing?"

"Oh, still the same. A bit more criminal work, I'm glad to say."

"And what about a boyfriend?"

Had he mean that to sound so crass? Or had he meant to imply it didn't matter in the least to him whether or not she was seeing someone else?

Helena seemed for a moment to freeze, then withdraw, then make an effort and come back towards him. She wore a smile that was shy and ghostly, gone with a glimpse. "Not at the moment."

He was trying to analyse why he had asked the question and in doing so he allowed his subconscious another sneaky chance at the controls. "Look, Helena … "

She was at once turned towards him.

" … I know that I should have tried to contact you … "

She raised two thin eyebrows. Her lips were a dusky red, her eyes green. "Your choice." There was a tonal shrug in the phrase.

"I'd just like to say that … "

Her expression was full of innocent interest and he suddenly realized that she was teasing him again. On her face was the expression of someone who knew precisely what was to be said and knew precisely how much pain there was in saying it. The first time he had ever spoken to her she had begun to tease him and it had made him at once delighted and frustrated. Once again he found himself both cursing her and wanting her. Once again he found himself manipulated and pleased. Once again he ducked out.