An Act of Evil Page 6

  Their conversation drifted into less contentious areas concerning the festival until they reached the north transept where Webster said he was going to see the Bishop. Maltravers continued his walk round the cathedral, pausing to read the excessive sentiments carved in marble for the ancient dead, reflecting on the singular and apparently unsullied virtues of past generations. He continued all the way round the building, passing the south transept hastily to avoid another confrontation with Miss Targett and finally sat for a while in the Lady Chapel, staring impassively at the great window of Christ enthroned that filled most of the end wall, letting the still quiet calm him. Distantly, he heard the clock in Talbot’s Tower strike six and decided it was time to go back. In order to avoid the still lurking Miss Targett, he was going to leave through the north transept and walk round the outside of the cathedral but as he stood up he noticed a small door in the south wall of the Lady Chapel which, he reasoned, must be almost directly opposite Michael and Melissa’s front door and would serve his purpose if it was not locked. It wasn’t and did indeed stand in the relationship he had assumed, although his view of the Punt Yard house was impaired by a police car parked on the double yellow lines outside. When he went inside Jackson was waiting for his return.

  “Officially, I’m not here,” he said. “But I thought I’d call on my way home and bring you up to date. Miss Porter is not in her flat and there’s nothing we can find there that helps. We’ve spoken to most of the people who were at the garden party but nothing significant has emerged and the only relative we’ve been able to trace — her brother in Bristol — hasn’t seen her for several months. I think you know her parents are dead?” Maltravers nodded.

  “So she’s just vanished without trace?” he said.

  “Apparently. And more importantly without a reason.” Jackson paused and bit his lower lip. “Look, I don’t want to add to your worries but the longer it goes on like this the more serious it becomes. She’s well known and she had a business appointment she would obviously keep. Twenty-four hours without anything at all is a long time in these circumstances.”

  “We’ve been thinking about loss of memory,” said Maltravers. “She’s never suffered from it as far as I know but it is possible.”

  “We know it happens but it doesn’t make people invisible,” Jackson commented. “Her passport’s still in her flat so we can assume she’s not gone abroad. Anyway, if it’s any comfort, you can rest assured we’re doing everything we can. The Standard’s carried a story with a picture in the late editions this evening and television will probably have it tonight. Tomorrow’s national papers should as well, they’ve certainly been asking enough questions. I gather news is a bit slow at the moment, which is to our advantage.”

  “Thanks for calling,” said Maltravers.

  Jackson stood up to leave. “I never actually met Miss Porter but I saw her performance in the Chapter House and was very moved by it. I can’t make promises but I’ll try to keep you informed on a slightly less official basis than usual. All right?”

  They shook hands and Maltravers saw him out as Tess came downstairs. They went through to join Michael and Melissa in the kitchen. Maltravers told them Jackson’s news — or lack of it — then Michael turned on the radio just as the item they were interested in was finishing.

  “…where she had been taking part in the Vercaster Festival.” The announcer paused momentarily then continued, “At the London Divorce Court today a man was jailed for contempt after firing a catapult at a judge. Unemployed company director Stanley Thackery from South London said he was protesting at the amount of alimony Mr Justice Hereward had ordered he should pay to his estranged wife. The judge, who was not seriously injured, told him…” Maltravers turned the set off.

  “Slow news day indeed,” he remarked. “Anyway, we didn’t miss anything we don’t already know. Let’s see if your Mystery Plays can take our minds off our own mystery.”

  Performed in the Great Hall of Vercaster’s Edward VI Grammar School, a stubborn survivor in an age of more egalitarian education, the plays did entertain and occupy them. The evening was taken up with the first three plays of the cycle, the Fall of Lucifer, the Creation and the story of Adam and Eve, and Noah’s Flood. The Vercaster Players destroyed all Maltravers’ dark misgivings about the horrors of amateur theatre, showing themselves well rehearsed, imaginatively directed, capable of ingenious effects and entertainingly inventive. They treated the works of the monk Stephen of Vercaster with intelligent adaptation, abandoning antique and incomprehensible references for modern interpretations in modifications by the school’s senior English master. They also tellingly extended the role of the Devil, introducing him throughout every play as a counterpoint to God, now evil, now mischievous, terrifying or amusing. He fell from grace with maniacal and sinister laughter, watched the creation of Adam and Eve with mouthwatering anticipation of the possibilities of corruptible innocence and caused total and hilarious havoc during the building of the ark and the loading of the animals. As the wives of Shem, Ham and Japheth tried to shepherd the children dressed as all the beasts of the world into some sort of order, the Devil constantly moved among them — he explained in an aside to the audience that he was invisible — shouting contradictory instructions until there was complete chaos. As offstage thunder rolled and Noah and his family bewailed the violence of the storm, he calmly stood to one side of the stage sheltering under a red umbrella and when the little girl dressed as the dove made her exit after delivering the olive leaf he maliciously tripped her up.

  After God had bestowed his blessing upon Noah and promised mankind no further elemental wrath, the Devil watched them depart rejoicing. Then, alone on the stage, he turned to the audience to deliver his sinister valediction:

  The end is come of storm and rain

  But Lucifer will here remain.

  About this world I here will stay

  Until the dreadful judgement day.

  His eyes glittered malevolently with fiendish relish of what was to come. Then a burst of crimson smoke enveloped him and the stage plunged into darkness.

  Melissa took Maltravers and Tess backstage to meet the cast and Maltravers sought out the Devil, now emerging from costume and make-up as Jeremy Knowles, a hatchet faced local solicitor whose natural expression was inescapably evil.

  “You should have gone into the profession,” Maltravers told him.

  “You’re very kind,” he replied. “But I think the Vercaster Players and the local magistrates’ court are as far as I want to go.”

  “I assume we’ll be seeing more of you in the rest of the cycle?”

  “Oh, yes. In Trevor’s adaptation I’m hardly ever off the stage. We’ve taken a lot of liberties, but I think they’ll work. Incidentally,” he added, “I saw Miss Porter on Saturday night. Is there any news of her?”

  However much he tried to put it to the back of his mind, Maltravers thought, Diana’s disappearance sounded like a constant keynote. He explained briefly then returned to Tess who had been identified as an actress and was signing autographs for some of the children in the play.

  “Are you an actor?” demanded a freckled redheaded boy.

  “No. I’m a writer.”

  “Oh,” said the child and managed to combine disinterest, dismissiveness and contempt in the single syllable as he turned away. Writing, as Maltravers very well knew, was not a glamorous calling. But he felt slightly deflated by the incident. What had been a strangeness the previous afternoon had grown like an emotional cancer into a concern, a worry and now a creeping fear.

  Waiting for Tess to finish, he crossed to a window and looked out over that part of Vercaster which lay below the hill on which the school stood. Over to the right, on its own higher hill, Talbot’s Tower rose against a sky washed in blue-black ink, faintly glowing with street lights. His eyes passed casually over the irregular mosaic of slate and tiled roofs broken by glimpses of road or open space. Below one rooftop lay a cheaply furnished bedroom w
ith slime green paint and cheap wallpaper aged to the colour of an old dishcloth in which, the previous night, Arthur Powell had slept, his precious picture of Diana Porter on the stained and cracked varnish of the table by the bed. Maltravers’ gaze passed idly over it and on to the edges of the city where he could see the moving lights of distant motorway traffic.

  “Goodnight!” a voice called behind him.

  Maltravers turned and saw Jeremy Knowles, his face slashed by a smile that unnervingly made him look more wicked, looking towards him.

  “See you again,” he added, then swiftly turned and was gone.

  Chapter Five

  DETECTIVE CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT William Madden’s head appeared to be constructed only of skull and skin without any living humanity of flesh; his hair was the colour and texture of an old tennis ball left out in all weathers. He rarely smiled, laughed only with bitterness and was so totally a professional policeman that his very plain clothes seemed as much a uniform as the one he had ceased to wear.

  On Tuesday morning he sat at his desk reading the summary of the investigation into Diana’s disappearance while David Jackson stood, stiff and uneasy, before him. Madden’s reputation extended beyond his own force and into national police legend — ruthless, methodical, unsympathetic and very good — and Jackson had arrived at Vercaster apprehensively anticipating their first encounter. Madden, his body still, as if carved in granite, read swiftly and silently, then put the papers down and reached to adjust the position of a file tray that was fractionally out of line with the edge of his desk. Jackson waited patiently while he thought.

  “Absolutely nothing? Anywhere?” he demanded.

  “No, sir. We’re still waiting for final reports from two of the South coast ports in case she took out a temporary passport but it doesn’t seem likely.”

  Madden squeezed the end of his nose hard between thumb and forefinger and breathed in and out deeply; it was his only observed physical peculiarity.

  “Right,” he said. “Either someone’s hiding her — possibly without realising it if she’s in some remote hotel or something — or she’s dead.”

  Jackson felt he was making conclusions too soon but knew better than to argue. Madden worked on the principle that co-ordinated police procedures were infallible because he was convinced that he was infallible and he expected all other police officers to be the same. He also had an impressive track record of being right.

  “The problem is that we’re dealing with the acting profession,” Madden went on. “Emotional. Irresponsible. Artistic.” He had standard definitions for nearly all classes of society, each one rarely using more than three pejorative adjectives; somehow he imagined that all life was as orderly as his desk .

  “This man Maltravers. He was the one who brought her to Vercaster and was among the last to see her.” He looked sharply at Jackson. “Thoughts?” he demanded, revealing that he had already thought the matter through, reached his own conclusions — which by definition must be right — and wanted to see if his subordinate could follow the same process.

  “I take your point, sir, that he knows Miss Porter very well,” Jackson began. Madden’s logic was obvious and rooted in established patterns. If Diana Porter had been murdered it was statistically likely that the murderer was someone who knew her. Add to that the link with her presence in Vercaster, discount the possibility that unusual and therefore non-statistical forces were involved, and you ended up with Augustus Maltravers. Having reached that point, the next step was simple. Question Maltravers with increasing intensity until he gave himself away or cracked under pressure and confessed.

  “But I can’t see him as a potential murderer,” Jackson went on, adding incautiously, “always assuming that Miss Porter has in fact been murdered.” The possibility of Diana being murdered was attractive to Madden. The alternative of her hiding out with unpredictable friends meant time-consuming and irritating police inquiries; a simple murder according to oft repeated and established patterns of human behaviour was infinitely preferable, statistically more likely and greatly more convenient.

  Jackson decided it would help their future working relationship if he made his feelings clear on the matter.

  “In fact, to be quite blunt, I think that the possibility of Mr Maltravers killing Miss Porter is total crap,” he said. “Sir,” he added.

  Madden’s face rose like that of a very old turtle and stared at him like a basilisk. Jackson drew in his breath quietly and resisted the temptation to add anything that would seem to qualify and, by implication, apologise for his statement.

  “Indeed?” Madden said the word quietly but with a whiplash of rising inflection, then stretched Jackson’s nerve with a resonant interval of several seconds’ silence which he stubbornly refused to break. Madden lowered his gaze back to the papers on his desk.

  “Very well,” he said. “Keep me informed on any developments.” He handed back the summary impassively.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Jackson and left Madden’s office. “That,” he muttered to himself as he walked down the corridor outside, “was a damned close-run thing.”

  *

  Maltravers was reading to Rebecca in the living room at Punt Yard when the telephone extension from Michael’s study rang at his elbow. It was Joe Goldman.

  “Gus, has she turned up?” he demanded. “She’s got to be found.”

  “Joe, everything possible is being done. As soon as…”

  “Do you know who called me?” Goldman interrupted excitedly. “Clive Zabinski. Yes, Zabinski, the Hollywood super-brat. He’s in London, someone shows him a video of Success City and he wants to talk to Diana. Of course I tell him to ignore everything in the papers. It’s all a misunderstanding I tell him. Of course we’ll be at the Dorchester tomorrow, Mr Zabinski. Gus, when Zabinski calls you don’t say the actress he wants for a new movie can’t be found! Nobody says that to Zabinski!”

  “Joe, calm down will you? We’re all worried sick up here.”

  “You’re worried? I’ll do you a favour — I’ll worry for everybody. You just find her and get her back to London by tomorrow!” The line went abruptly dead.

  “Where’s Diana?” asked Rebecca, still sitting on her uncle’s knee. He ruffled her hair.

  “I think Diana’s playing a game of hide-and-seek,” he said. “She’s playing a joke on us.”

  “But I heard Mummy crying this morning,” objected the child. “Not laughing.”

  “Look, the Wild Things are having a Wild Rumpus,” said Maltravers picking up the book again. “They’re not frightening at all, are they?”

  “I wasn’t frightened of them,” Rebecca said simply. Maltravers finished the book and glanced at his watch.

  “Come on,” he said. “There are some appalling computer cartoons on television.” Rebecca scrambled down, crossed the room and turned on the set and Maltravers went into the kitchen where Melissa was at the table peeling mushrooms.

  “What’s all this crying about?” he asked. “Rebecca heard you.”

  “Oh, you know me. The bad thoughts just got too much.”

  “Come on, she’s just mysteriously vanished. It’s all this police activity that makes it seem worse. And this morning’s papers didn’t help.”

  Faced with the standard problem of having to fill space with little sensational material, Fleet Street had practised its customary excesses, with each paper trying to outdo its rivals in imaginative headlines, eye-catching design and impact vocabulary. Diana’s irrelevant nude appearance featured prominently in all the stories and her disappearance was variously a mystery, a riddle or a fear. The police in turn were baffled, concerned or involved in a search of international proportions. Maltravers usually observed such antics of newspapers obeying Frayn’s Law — that journalists write for other journalists — with detached amusement, but his personal involvement on this occasion made him acutely aware of the distress such insensitive behaviour could cause.

  “I know I’m being silly,” sa
id Melissa. “I’m just trying to keep busy and not think about it. What are you doing today? I’m taking Rebecca to some friends for lunch and we’ll probably be there most of the afternoon. Can you amuse yourselves? Don’t forget it’s the cathedral concert this evening.”

  “We’ll find something to do,” he said. “We’ll have lunch out and be back later.”

  Maltravers and Tess spent the rest of the morning buying presents for Rebecca and their hosts, then went to a pub called the Saracen’s Head where a Crusader’s lunch was the alternative title of the standard ploughman’s. They were discussing the previous night’s Mystery Plays when Jeremy Knowles approached their table bearing food and drink and asked if he might join them.

  “Talk of the Devil,” said Maltravers as he shuffled along the dark oak settle to make room for him.

  “It’s odd I should run into you,” said Knowles as he sat down and arranged his lunch on the table. “Canon Cowan was telling me last night about the theft of the Latimer Mercy and this morning I had a very strange letter in the post. Here, have a look.”

  He produced a pale blue envelope, addressed to him at his office, which had been posted in Vercaster the previous day. It was marked “Strictly Personal” and was typed, unsigned and without any address shown at the top. While Knowles began his lunch, Maltravers began to read, passing each sheet to Tess as he finished it.

  “For reasons that will become obvious,” he read, “this letter has to be anonymous. It concerns the theft of the Latimer Mercy Bible from the cathedral which I read about in this morning’s Times. The police seem to think it may have been taken abroad, but I suspect it is much nearer home. For personal reasons which I cannot go into, I do not want to approach the police directly as any information I give might be traced back to me. Of course, they will take no notice of an anonymous letter, but if you, as a local solicitor, were to approach them it would be a different matter.

  “I would suggest that the Bible was stolen by (or at least for) Councillor Ernest Hibbert who, as you probably know, is a great collector of antique books. Most of them are on display in the library at his home but I happen to know that the corner cupboard in that library, which he always keeps locked, also contains a number of books which he never shows to anybody. It does not matter how I discovered this but you can take my word that it is true. I would most urgently suggest that the police search that cupboard. If Councillor Hibbert objects to such a search, it will indicate his guilt.