Cannonbridge (11 page)

He wonders—and he has no idea if such a thing is even possible—whether the phone might not be interrupted, or blocked, in some way. After what he has just read there is nothing now which seems entirely beyond the pale.

Overhead, a seabird whoops and screeches as if in mockery of him.

Then, in the distance, like something glimpsed from the past, Toby catches sight of a red phone box. That most antiquated of notions: a public telephone. Wondering at their continued existence, he reclaims his sports bag, then walks on. A breeze picks up and he smells salt for the first time. He hurries on. Behind him, the pages of the
Standard
turn in the draught, rustling and sighing slyly.

T
HE BOX IS
further away than it first seemed and, for a while, as Toby walks towards it, as quickly as his churning nausea will allow, he even begins to speculate that the thing might be some optical illusion, a mirage conjured by a mind still grappling with horror. In painful increments, however, the cherry-red booth hoves gradually nearer until at last his hand pulls open the heavy iron door and he steps inside.

How long since he has been within one of these things? Five years? Ten? It smells of stale, sickly deodorant combined with something foul underneath. He wonders what the space is used for predominantly now—not, he suspects, for the making of legitimate calls.

As he feeds his change into the metal slot and taps in the number he even considers the wisdom of his actions. But soon instinct and tradition take hold.

“Caroline?”

Her voice is frosty and comfortless and achingly distant. “Toby? What is it? Why are you calling on this weird number?”

“Have you seen the news?”

A pause. “The news? Toby... you realise that we can’t just chat like this anymore, don’t you? We’ve got to move on with our own lives. Find our own happiness.”

“You don’t understand. No. I’m not calling just to... chew the fat.”

“The what? Listen, sorry if I sound harsh but I just can’t imagine that either of us has anything new to say to one another. Toby? Toby, are you still there?”

Dr Judd has been distracted midway through the speech by a knock on the glass of the box. There is a man outside—early thirties and balding, yet solidly built and in possession both of a braggart’s swagger and of the very worst collection of teeth which Toby has ever seen. The interloper looks extremely cross and is at present busy miming making a phone call, one hand clamped angrily to ear, the other gesticulating expressively.

“Give me a minute,” Toby says.

A tut. “You phoned me!”

“Sorry. Not you. There’s a man outside.”

“What? Where are you, Toby? What’s going on?”

“Something’s happened, darling.”

“Not ‘darling’. We’ve been through this.”

Another tap on the pane. Toby snorts and says: “In. A. Minute.”

The man sets his face into an expression of what he presumably imagines to be menace.

“Darling, I’m at a crossroads and I want to do the right thing but I’m scared and I’m fairly sure I’m in real danger and I need the help of... somebody I love.”

There is a long silence from the other end of the line. Another tap on the window which, Toby, frowning, ignores. It comes again and, in a surge of fury, he gives the stranger his middle finger.

“I’m going to sound like a bit of bitch now, Toby. I know that. But you’ve got to understand that we simply can’t do this any longer. I’m with J J. And I’m really not coming back. Ever. It’s necessary for you to accept these things.”

Toby bites hard on his lower lip. His vision seems to flicker. “Then I’ll...”

“Yes? What will you do?”

“Then I’ll do it on my own.”

As Toby places the receiver back into its cradle the door is wrenched open and he is pulled from the booth.

“Don’t fucking give me the fucking finger.” The stranger’s breath is rank and smells of tobacco. He is wearing too much cheap deodorant.

“Perhaps you need to learn some patience,” Toby suggests.

“More like you need to learn some respect.”

“Oh, really?” Toby has the mad, giddy sensation that he might be about to enter into his first ever fight. If he imagines that the stranger’s face is that of the noted cultural commentator Dr J J Salazar he suspects that he might even stand a chance.

The man steps closer. “Who uses a phone box these days, anyway?”

“Besides you, you mean?”

“I’m waiting for a call. I weren’t making one.”

“I see. Then I’m terribly sorry to have hijacked your office.” His appetite for confrontation already flagging, Toby turns now and starts to walk again the way he has come, towards the bench and the town beyond.

“Mate!” The man is shouting after him.

“What?”

“You’re not scared? Turning your back on me?”

Judd stops, turns back. “No, I’m not frightened of you,” he says. “Not that I mightn’t have been once. But after today—when you realise the scale of what’s against you, when you realise you’ve got nothing left to lose... well, there’s an odd kind of liberty in that. You don’t know it but you were present when I made the most important decision of my life and—I freely accept—very possibly the last.”

“Which was what?” asks the man contemptuously.

Toby looks him directly in the eyes. “To get to the truth. Whatever the cost.” He smiles and bows his head. If he had a hat, he thinks, he’d doff it. “Good afternoon to you.”

A
LMOST EXACTLY ONE
hour later, a man pays cash for a one-way coach ticket to Edinburgh. He is small, slim, rather beleaguered-looking and dressed in an old cord jacket. He sits quietly towards the back of the vehicle as it trundles towards Scotland. He is meditative in Southampton, faraway in the Midlands, lost in the North and almost asleep as darkness falls and they approach the edge of England. No-one sits next to him—he has, you see, become the kind of man whom other travellers avoid, the one who talks to himself, the oddball, the nutter. On the empty seat beside him is an old sports bag, with a copy of the
London Evening Standard
laid on top. The headline of the day is just visible. It reads: MURDERED COP NAMED.

As for the close-up photograph which accompanies the piece, you would no doubt recognise—as did Toby Judd, with grief and panic seizing at his heart like a snake about a mouse—the honest, pensive face of Sergeant Isaac Angeyo.

1842

THE PARSONAGE

HAWORTH

L
ONG HAS THE
shadow of death enfolded the parsonage. Showing no deference to the season, it is palpable here, now, even upon Christmas Day, as the family gather in their little parlour, filled with heartache and sorrow. They are five in number yet they are grievously depleted—a father is present and three girls and a son but their dear mother is twenty years in her grave and two other daughters, departed too soon, lie mouldering beside her.

It is of mortality, of course, that the patriarch is speaking as we draw near to them, of fragility, inevitability, impermanence. He is white-haired, bowed, sixty-five years old though he seems more senior still, with that great cravat which is bound about his neck like a funeral shroud, with his watery, sorrowful eyes and his trembling arthritic gait. When he speaks, his three surviving daughters—Emily, Charlotte, Anne—listen with dutiful attentiveness though the thoughts of that triumvirate are all, in their own ways, far from this isolated spot. The young man, Branwell, seems rather unsteady on his feet, a glass of whisky punch clasped in one hand.

The smell of roasting goose pervades the building. Outside, beyond the little window stretches the vast expanse of the moor. Bleak and seemingly limitless, it fills the horizon, its light dappling of snowfall serving not to render the scene a festive one but rather to accentuate its inhospitable, minatory qualities, its utter absence of mercy.

The old man’s voice is tired from hours at the church in the morning yet it is still firm from years of practice and skilful use. Whilst the rest of him, beset by grief, decays, that voice goes on.

“I wanted,” he begins, “before we sit down to eat, to say a few words about the year that has passed.”

His children, accustomed to such pre-prandial sermonising, listen respectfully. Only Emily, the middle daughter, seems distracted, her eyes flicking constantly from her father’s face to the view from the window, to the cruel sweep of the moor.

“Our losses have been severe. Mr Weightman has gone to a better place. Your beloved aunt also. And our particular friend, Dr Andrew. Such things are always hard and they seem at such times as these almost impossible to bear. Nonetheless, we must trust in the wisdom of the Lord and that, in drawing our dear friends to Him before what seems to us to be their natural time, He is fulfilling a divine design of which we are not granted comprehension. Today, of all days, we must trust in Him and we must yield to His wisdom and to His grace.” He turns to the youngest of his daughters. “Anne, my dear, I believe that you have something that you wish to share with us?”

The young woman in question, sober, dark-haired and with a certain pinched quality to her jaw, says: “A poem, father. In memory of Mr Weightman.”

“And you wish to recite it to us?”

“I do.”

At the prospect, her brother takes a sip of the punch. Charlotte’s lips purse. Emily’s gaze wanders outside towards the moor, the muddy green-brown of it capped with white. Her eyes seem to linger now upon a particular spot—on a dash of black in the palette. Something alien in the wilderness.

Her sister begins to speak, her words sugared and prim:

“I will not mourn thee, lovely one,

Though thou art torn away.

’Tis said that if the morning sun

Arise with dazzling ray

And shed a bright and burning beam,

Athwart the glittering main,

Ere noon shall fade that laughing gleam

Engulfed in clouds and rain.”

As her sibling speaks, Emily’s attention is all outside. The black speck, she sees now, is no mere quirk of the landscape, no stunted tree or discarded implement but rather something animate—something human.

“And if thy life as transient proved

It hath been full as bright,

For thou wert hopeful and beloved;

Thy spirit knew no blight.”

These words barely penetrate Emily’s consciousness. The speck has resolved itself into a man, tall, saturnine and dressed in dark and sombre clothes. His movements are unsteady; he seems, more than once, to stumble and at the sight of the stranger’s approach, Emily, oddly, remembers her father’s description of the moor aflame that summer, when the rioters had come to Haworth, and feels, as then, a sensation of wrongness, an invasion from forces which do not belong to this place or this time. She looks at her family—their attention either on her sister or upon the whisky punch—and realises that she alone has seen the arrival of the newcomer.

Anne speaks on (“If few and short the joys of life / That thou on earth couldst know / Little thou knew’st of sin and strife—”) but Emily feels that she has no choice but to interrupt her. “Father!”

Anne stops speaking, the quaint Sunday school rhymes dying on her lips.

The old man is reproving yet indulgent. “Tish, Emily. Your sister was reciting.”

Outside, the stranger comes closer still, as if he moves faster when her eyes are not on him.

“I know that, father. Forgive me, but...”

“Yes, my dear. What is it?” A note of concern in the old priest’s voice. Disapproval from her sisters. Quiet amusement from her brother.

Outside, the dark man is nearer still, almost at the parsonage.

“There is a gentleman approaching us, father. It seems to me that he is in need of help.”

“A gentleman?” repeats the old man.

“There!” Emily all but shouts, frustrated that the others do not sense the urgency of the moment. She points dramatically, almost with a flourish, and the family turn to look.

And there he is, the tall man, staggering towards the parsonage. Spurred on, perhaps, by the sight of civilisation, by the proximity of people, he reaches the window, and for one delirious instant, Emily thinks that he might be about to break the pane and crash through it, tumbling into their sitting room. Instead, almost within reach of the sill, he simply stops and stands, like a seeker after alms, although Emily can tell from his clothes that he is nothing of the kind. He stares at them—and the family gaze bemusedly back. He stumbles as if he is about to fall, righting himself but barely. A moment later, he moves uncertainly away—searching, Emily has little doubt, for the front door.

“Who is that man?” says Anne.

Her father is abrupt. “He is not known to us. No parishioner he.”

Then, the inevitable: the stentorian sound of metal on wood.

“It’s him,” Charlotte all but squeals. “Knocking at our door!”

“Branwell?” The old man’s voice is grave. “Pray, put down your glass, sir, and come with me. It would seem that there is a matter which demands of us our immediate attention.”

The young man grudgingly sets down his drink. His father glances rheumily back at the ladies.

“Girls,” he says (for such is how he still addresses them for all that they have achieved their majority). “Stay in your proper place.”

And so Emily is left with the others with nothing to do but wait. As she does so she cannot help but think and in the course of her meditations, oblivious to the chatter of her sisters, a stray reflection becomes a certainty—that when the dark-haired stranger gazed wildly through the glass, that it was by her, and by Emily alone, that his attention was riveted.

A few minutes pass and Emily, frustrated, strains to hear what is taking place outside. There is but little to be heard—the reedy, insistent tones of her father, the slurred baritone of her brother and nothing at all of the voice of the stranger. In the corner of the room, her two sisters whisper excitedly to one another like elderly gossips and Emily suddenly finds herself of a mind to hurl something at them, to enjoin them to silence and ask them in her most unyielding tone whether they do not understand the evident severity of the thing which was now almost in their midst.