The Lazarus Tree Read online

  The Lazarus Tree

  Robert Richardson

  © Robert Richardson 1992

  Robert Richardson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1992 by St. Martin’s Press Incorporated.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For Michael and Rona

  All characters In this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, Is purely coincidental.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The village of Medmelton does not exist, in Devon or in any other county, so it follows that the people who live there cannot exist either.

  Table of Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  ONE

  Throughout that summer of sensational headlines, the dead man attracted countless unwelcome visitors to Medmelton. After following the black and white sign on the dual carriageway between Exeter and Plymouth, they drove nearly three miles along narrow lanes into the valley, buzzing with macabre curiosity. They tramped through the churchyard, taking photographs of themselves standing where the body had been discovered, and bought drinks in the Raven with an air of excited apprehension, as though any of the regulars in the bar might be the killer. But they left disappointed and none went more than once; the villagers resented their presence, inquiries to locate the cottage that the man had rented were met with feigned ignorance and persistent questions aroused hostility to the point of rudeness. When nobody was arrested, notoriety faded, the stream of the curious dried up and Medmelton returned to centuries-deep isolation amid farmland, sprawls of trees and low, protecting hills. Other Devon villages wanted to attract tourists to their historic churches, gift shops and tea rooms; Medmelton wanted nothing more than its anonymity back. When Augustus Maltravers turned to follow the sign on the last day of September, more than a year after the murder, he was the first stranger to drive down the lane for weeks.

  Squeezed between thick hawthorn hedges twice the height of his car, the lane was only as wide as a single vehicle and at one point he had to reverse to a passing space to allow an oncoming tractor through. He waved to the driver, but received no acknowledgement except a look that could have been surprise or suspicion. The road divided, twisted and rose, passing beneath shallow hammocks of cables linking a procession of stark electricity pylons, then the land fell again and Medmelton appeared, cupped in its hollow. Maltravers stopped by a millstone cottage and got out of the car to look. The biggest building was the church, square Saxon tower half-hidden among thick yews and tall copper beeches; just beyond was the sparkle of a shallow ford where the road crossed the Ney, a minor tributary of the Teign, before climbing again between hedged ploughed fields of dark red soil and disappearing towards the sea. Around the church and immediately beyond the ford, ancient cottages fringed an open green with newer housing forming a spreading stain into the farmland. The only sign of life was a speckle of grazing cattle on the far side of the valley. Under amber autumn sunshine, it looked the sort of place that would be disturbed by nothing more dramatic than jam-making jealousy in the Women’s Institute or rivalry with another village’s darts team. But, putting the murder aside, Stephen Hart’s letter had hinted at something sinister, and Stephen was a level-headed, worldly-wise Londoner not susceptible to excessive imagination. He had asked if Maltravers could fulfil a long-standing invitation to visit him and Veronica and see if a detached mind could make sense of something at best ridiculous, at worst threatening. Maltravers’s blue eyes squinted against light the colour of syrup as he tried to work out where his destination must be.

  ‘Good afternoon.’

  A woman had unexpectedly appeared by the wall of the cottage’s front garden. Dressed in denim dungarees, she was about fifty, with the slenderness of youth ripened but not become fat, and a helmet of ash blonde hair framing a long oval face.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.’

  ‘I was behind the wall.’ Her hand holding a trowel indicated downwards. ‘Weeding. I heard your car stop and thought you might be coming here.’

  ‘No, I was admiring the view. I’m visiting friends. Can you tell me how to find Dymlight Cottage? All I know is that it’s near the church.’

  ‘Stephen and Veronica’s?’ The woman walked to the wooden gate, opened it and came to stand next to him, pointing with the trowel again. ‘Cross the ford and there’s a turning immediately on your right. You can’t quite see it from here. Dymlight’s the last cottage you reach.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Now close to her, he could see her eyes; one was brown, the other green. ‘Obviously someone born in Medmelton would know.’

  ‘And was I born in Medmelton?’

  ‘Somebody in the family was ... “Young men beware, if they be wise, a maiden with Medmelton eyes.” ‘

  ‘I see.’ Intrigued and amused, the eyes sparkled. ‘A visitor who does his homework ... or did Stephen and Veronica tell you?’

  ‘They told me,’ Maltravers admitted. ‘Although I don’t think you’re a particularly extreme example.’

  ‘No, I’m not. The legend runs a bit thin in me. You’ll see much more dramatic ones in the village. Are you staying long?’

  ‘Only a few days.’ He held out his hand. “Gus Maltravers.’

  ‘Sally Baker.’ She pulled off a soiled canvas gardening glove and the handshake gripped like a man’s. ‘I ought to warn you that you’ll find yourself a novelty round here. Not many Londoners visit Medmelton.’

  ‘And am I from London?’

  She nodded towards the dealer’s sticker in the rear window of his car. ‘Somebody bought the car there.’

  Maltravers laughed and gave a slight bow of acknowledgement. ‘Touché. Are all Medmelton maidens so quick?’

  ‘You’ll find out, won’t you?’ Sally Baker pulled her glove back on. ‘Anyway, enjoy your stay. Perhaps we’ll run into each other again.’ She smiled and returned to the garden.

  Maltravers said goodbye and climbed back into his car. As he dropped down the hill, his mind idly ran over what they had been talking about. Medmelton eyes — the brown one usually on the right — could be traced back to 1608 when one Joan Garret had been charged at Exeter Assizes with bewitching the husband of another woman. She was sentenced to a painful flogging at a cart’s end drawn through the village and nothing more was heard of her, but the eyes, turning up at random in several unrelated families, had been associated ever since with the sort of girl who made parents of young men nervous. The fact that the overwhelming majority had led blameless lives and in the nineteenth century one of them had been a courageous and saintly African missionary had done nothing to ameliorate their reputation. Science had long explained the phenomenon as a genetic hangover of close relation breeding in past generations, but it was still remarked on when it occurred. Veronica Hart had them, as did her daughter Michelle, an odd but attractive feature.

  Maltravers reached St Leonard’s and stopped again. His journey had been quicker than he had anticipated and he was not expected for nearly another hour. As the church was apparently a central point of Stephen’s concerns, it seemed worth exploring. He unlatched one half of the double lychgate and passed beneath its weather-blackened shingle roof; a red shale path ran straight ahead between the tombstones to the porch of the west door, outside whi
ch stood a sweet chestnut, helter-skelter bark twisted round its broad trunk. In the grass beneath was a small, rusty iron plaque with ‘The Lazarus Tree’ cast into it. It was the focal point of a highly dubious legend involving a young man who had promised to marry a girl when it bloomed on the feast day of St Leonard; as that was November 6, he didn’t start planning his bachelor night. But, as he should have known is inevitable in such stories, on the appropriate morning the tree had duly been in full flower with the girl standing beneath it, ready and probably smug in her wedding dress. The original tree was long dead, but a replacement had been grown from it, and others in turn had been produced to preserve the story.

  But such pretty nonsense was not the reason for Maltravers’s interest; more than a year earlier, Patrick Gabriel had been found under the Lazarus Tree, not, as those who knew him might have expected, drunk, but dead from a savage knife slash which had severed his throat. Maltravers had known Gabriel slightly — they had shared the same publisher — but had not liked him. Arrogant, conceited and provocatively rude, the only thing that had made him tolerable had been his unquestioned talent; he was one of a minute number of poets successful enough to make a living from his craft. He had gone to Medmelton to complete what was to be a book-length poem which had caused excited anticipation in lit-crit circles as soon as it was known to be planned. Nobody knew why he had chosen the village, except that it was quiet and far removed from the interruptions his reputation caused in London; until his death, virtually no one knew he had gone there. Then someone had killed him, with no sign of a comprehensible motive. It had been a mystery, sensation and literary tragedy, the latter compounded by the fact that his rented cottage had contained not a single line of his writing for posthumous publication. Somewhere on a police file it remained an unsolved murder, the subject of wildly speculative newspaper articles and endless gossip, frequently libellous, until it had become passé and half-forgotten.

  Maltravers moved on to the church. The porch had stone seats running down each side of a wide chequered tile step with a wooden board fixed to one wall carrying notices announcing times of services, the name and address of the verger, village events and a parish council meeting and advertising the work of the Church of England Children’s Society. He could explore no further as the door was locked. He walked back to his car, reflecting that television aerials and a satellite dish did nothing for the appearance of a terrace of cottages on the far side of the green. Tyres throwing up low waves as he bumped across the ford, he immediately saw his turning and followed the churchyard wall until he reached Dymlight Cottage, hidden behind a ten-foot privet hedge. Taking his suitcase from the boot, he opened the gate and walked through the garden; outside the open front door a teenage girl lay on a faded sun lounger, transistor radio playing pop music turned low next to her. It was still warm enough for her to be wearing shorts, slender legs crossed at the ankles, and a sleeveless scarlet T-shirt under which disturbingly mature curves rose and fell with drowsy breathing. Spiky black hair was cut short and the youth-hollow face was disguised by sunglasses, worn more for effect than necessity.

  ‘Hello, Michelle,’ Maltravers said.

  ‘Mmm?’ The girl sounded irritated. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s not a what, it’s a who. Follow the sound of my voice.’

  She turned her head without raising it, one hand pushing the glasses on to her forehead. ‘Oh, hi. They’re inside somewhere.’ The glasses covered the eyes again and she abandoned what temporary attention she had paid to him. He went in search of a more enthusiastic welcome.

  Dymlight Cottage had been built solid and functional in the 1870s for a farmworker and his family; one large, all-purpose downstairs room with a scullery at the back, two bedrooms and a midden in the garden. More than a century and a great deal of money later, all that the Victorian tenants would have recognised were the outer stone walls and preserved, if now purely decorative, chimney stack. Bits had been ripped out, added on, adapted, converted, enhanced and occasionally ruined. The scullery had been in turn woodstore and utility room, its primitive facilities long overtaken by the gadgetry of a picture window kitchen extension at the back. The cottage had grown sideways and upwards to provide a second downstairs room, third and fourth bedrooms and upstairs bathroom (the malodorous midden was now a toolshed). Changing tastes had produced successors to the original blackleaded fireplace including a mercifully long gone tiled version in the style of a 1930s semidetached, a pretentious imitation stone monstrosity circa 1955 and now a brick-lined inglenook in which stood a hammered copper cauldron filled with an eruption of dried flowers; heating came from radiators, architecturally idiosyncratic but thin enough to be unobtrusive. The front door still opened into what had been the single downstairs room, stone walls painted soft green above the mahogany brown parquet floor. Among the furnishings, only the television and CD player were modern; the dining suite, sofa, occasional chairs, display cabinet and bookcases had been garnered from antique shops and house auctions, with nothing later than the turn of the century.

  Opposite him was the door into the kitchen and Maltravers could see Veronica at the sink under the window overlooking the back garden. Black as her daughter’s, her hair hung loose almost to her waist, vivid bougainvillaea flowers printed on her Indian cotton dress half-hidden by its coal-dark, gleaming waterfall. He had made barely any sound, but she seemed instantly to sense someone was there and even who it was.

  ‘Hello, Gus.’ She did not move for a moment. ‘Good journey?’

  ‘Fine. Even had time to stop and look at Stonehenge.’

  He put down his case and she finally turned as he crossed the living room. With its high forehead and long nose, her face at first appeared plain until its individual, slightly stern beauty struck you, enhanced by the striking eyes. As they kissed — she had to raise herself only fractionally to his six-foot height — he felt again the quality which had struck him the first time they had met. Veronica had an uncanny self-control. Her emotions never showed and he had found it almost impossible to reach her as a person. She was not unfriendly, but always gave the impression in any conversation of doing no more than politely stepping out of a private shell. There was a sense that if Stephen and Michelle were suddenly to die, she would not feel the anguish of being alone because she always was alone, protected by barriers that could not be breached. They probably went back to her childhood, but it seemed that she had gone into total hiding behind them when her daughter was born. Even now, nobody knew who Michelle’s father was.

  ‘Where’s Stephen?’ Maltravers asked.

  ‘In the loft. Why don’t you go up? You can put your things in your room. It’s the last door along the landing. I’ll make some tea.’

  The greeting was typical. Apart from the briefest inquiry about his journey, no questions, no idle chat to make contact. Veronica did not start conversations, she only responded to them; her talk, like her actions, was basic and practical.

  His room was in the rear of the extension, with a view across the interlocking hills rising towards the main road. He left his case to unpack later and went back to the landing from which an aluminium folding ladder led up through the loft entrance in the ceiling.

  ‘Permission to come aboard,’ he called as he started to climb the steps and his head appeared through the hole. The loft had been completely floored and was illuminated by neon strip lights fixed to the roof beams. Stephen Hart was sitting at a desk, working through a pile of exercise books. It was difficult to analyse how he simply looked like a schoolteacher, but he did. Tall and gangly in stone-washed jeans and corduroy shirt, he retained the air of a radical student, an impression enhanced by the close-cropped beard, darker than his now unfashionably long reddish hair. He turned to Maltravers, brown eyes alert behind gold-rimmed glasses.

  ‘Hello, Gus. Welcome to the back of beyond.’

  ‘And a very pretty back of beyond,’ Maltravers commented as he stepped off the ladder. ‘People take photographs of places
like this and wish they lived here.’

  ‘Mind the beams,” Stephen warned as he straightened up. ‘Stay in the middle and you’ll be all right.’ They had first met at a weekend literary workshop when Maltravers had been called in at the last minute to replace a rather more successful television writer who had been taken ill. In the bar one evening, they had started discussing the Brontës — Maltravers had suggested they were an example of bad parenting rather than genius — and had gone on to Hardy, Dickens and Somerset Maugham, concluding that weird childhoods created the best writers. Several beers later, Maltravers had claimed Hampshire as England’s greatest county because it had produced both Jane Austen and cricket; thereafter the talk had been of Sobers, Cowdrey and Botham, classic batting rather than classic literature, and a friendship had begun. At the time, Stephen had been an English teacher in Hornsey, near enough to Maltravers’s Highbury flat for them to meet regularly and spend afternoons at Lord’s and the Oval. One evening, Maltravers and his partner Tess Davy had invited him to join them at a Sondheim charity concert at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and he had asked if he could bring a girl he had met on holiday. She was Veronica Dean and Tess had told Maltravers that evening she was convinced they would marry; less than six months later they did, Stephen finding a job at a comprehensive in Exeter and moving to Veronica’s cottage in Medmelton. Apart from a couple of visits to London by Stephen, Maltravers had not seen them since the wedding.

  ‘Veronica’s making tea, so we ought to go down,’ Maltravers said as they shook hands. ‘I met Michelle on the way in. How old is she now?’

  ‘Fifteen going on twenty-five,’ Stephen replied caustically. ‘When she goes off to the disco in Exeter, she’s jail bait.’

  ‘I can imagine it. A friend of mine once said you’re getting old when you realise you’re old enough to be the father of something you fancy. Crude, but accurate. What does Veronica think about it?’