J (13 page)

‘And what, in your view, constitutes a compelling argument?’ the policeman asked.

‘Well there you’ll have to ask the murderer,’ Densdell Kroplik replied.

‘And what’s this about a proud warrior history?’ Gutkind pressed. ‘There haven’t been warriors in these parts for many a year.’

Densdell Kroplik wasn’t going to argue with that. ‘The Passing of the Warrior’ was the title of his first chapter. But that didn’t mean the village didn’t have a more recent reputation to live up to. It was its touchy individualism, its fierce wariness, that had gone on lending the place its character and kept it inviolate. Densdell Kroplik’s position when it came to outsiders, the hated aphids, was more than a little paradoxical. He needed visitors to buy his pamphlet but on balance he would rather there were no visitors. He wanted to sing to them of the glories of Port Reuben, in its glory days called Ludgvennok, but didn’t want them to be so far entranced by his account that they never left. The exhilaration of living in Ludgvennok, which it pained him to call Port Reuben, walled in by cliffs and protected by the sea, enjoying the company of rough-mannered men and wild women, lay, the way he saw it, in its chaste unapproachability. This quality forcibly struck the composer Richard Wagner – if you’ve heard of him, Detective Inspector – in the course of a short visit he made to Ludgvennok as it was then. In those days husbands and lovers, farmers and fishermen, wreckers and smugglers, settled their grievances, eye to eye, as they had done for time immemorial, without recourse to the law or any other outside interference. Sitting at a window in a hostelry on this very spot, Wagner watched the men of Ludgvennok front up to one another like stags, heard the bacchante women wail, saw the blood flow, and composed until his fingers ached. ‘I feel more alive here than I have felt anywhere,’ he wrote in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck. ‘I wish you could be with me.’
¹

Der Strandryuber von Ludgvennok
, the opera Wagner subsequently wrote about the village (and dedicated to Mathilde, who had by that time given him his marching orders), was rarely performed; this Densdell Kroplik ascribed not to any fault in the composition but to the lily-livered hypocrisy of the age.

‘All very laudable,’ Detective Inspector Gutkind conceded. As it happened, he had not only heard of Wagner, a composer beloved of his great-grandfather, but kept a small cache of Wagner memorabilia secreted in his wardrobe in fealty to that passion. He could even hum some of the tunes from his operas and went so far as to hum a few bars of the
Siegfried Idyll
to show Kroplik that he too was a man of culture. Nonetheless, ‘All very laudable but I have a particularly savage double murder on my hands, not a few high-spirited drunks kicking nine bells out of another,’ was what he said.

‘Your point being?’ Densdell Kroplik wanted to know. He was irked that the detective inspector had heard of Wagner, let alone that he could hum him. He wanted Wagner for himself.

He was sitting in his favourite chair by the fire. In all weathers a fire burned in the Friendly Fisherman. And on most evenings Densdell Kroplik, steam rising from his thighs, sat by it in a heavy seaman’s sweater warming and rubbing his hands. He cultivated a take it or leave it air. He knew what was what. It was up to you whether you wanted to learn from him or not.

‘My point being that it gets me nowhere to be told Port Reuben is back to doing what it has always done best.’

Densdell Kroplik shrugged. ‘It might,’ he said, ‘if you understood more about the passion for justice and honour that has always burned in the hearts of the men of these parts.’

‘I doubt that a passion for justice and honour had anything to do with the murder of Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock.’

Densdell Kroplik pointed a red, fire-warmed finger at the policeman. ‘Is that something you can be sure of?’ he said. ‘There was a famous five-way murder here about a hundred years ago. Two local women, their husbands, and a lover. Whose lover was he? No one was quite sure. Am I hinting at pederasty? I might be. All that was certain was that he was an aphid – which makes pederasty the more likely. Buggers, the lot of them. From the north or the east of the country, it doesn’t matter which. Somewhere that wasn’t here. A pact was what the coroner decided it had been, a love pact born of hopeless entanglement. They’d gone up on to the cliff, taken off their clothes, watched the sun go down and swallowed pills. What do you think of that?’

‘What I think is that it doesn’t help me with my case,’ Gutkind said. ‘A pact is suicide, not murder.’

‘Unless,’ Kroplik went on, ‘unless the villagers, motivated by justifiable disapproval and an understandable hatred of outsiders, had taken it upon themselves to do away with all five offenders. In which case it wasn’t a mass suicide but a mob attack in the name of justice and honour.’

‘And it’s your theory that the whole village could have done away with Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock?’

‘Did I say that? I’m just a barber with an interest in local history. All I know, from reading what I have read and from using these’ – he made a two-pronged fork of his fingers and pointed to his all-seeing eyes – ‘is that people have been subdued here for a long time. They have a proud history of torrid engagement with one another which has been denied expression. There’s no knowing what people might do – singly or in a group – when their natures rebel against repression.’

‘Well you might call it torrid engagement, I call it crime.’

‘Then that’s the difference between us,’ Densdell Kroplik laughed.

After which, to show he was a man who could be trusted, he gave the policeman a free haircut, humming all the while Brünnhilde’s final plea to Wotan to let her sleep protected by flame from the attentions of any old mortal aphid.

Kevern Cohen stayed aloof from the malicious speculations. He had flirted with Lowenna Morgenstern occasionally, when they had both had too much to drink, and more recently he had kissed her in the village car park on bonfire night. He was no snogger. If he kissed a woman it was because he was aroused by the softness of her lips, not because he wanted to wound them. Breaking skin was not, for Kevern, the way he expressed desire.

Lowenna Morgenstern had a wonderful mouth for kissing, deep and mysterious, the musky taste of wood-fire on her busy tongue.

‘Kissing you is like kissing flame,’ he had said, bending over her. ‘You should have been a poet, you,’ she told him, biting his neck until the blood trickled on to his shirt collar.

And now someone had killed her. The man found dead beside her could just as easily have been him.

Ailinn picked up on his sombre mood. ‘Did you know these people well?’ she asked.

‘Depends what you mean by well,’ he said. ‘I knew her to say hello to. Yythel I’d heard of but never met. He was a pub singer. Not from here. Lowenna was reputed to have a taste for musical talent. Her husband Ade is the church organist. A discontented,
eering man. A hundred years ago he and his brothers would have stood on the cliffs with lamps and lured ships on to the rocks. Then he’d have laughed as they looted the wreckage. If he killed his wife he was just carrying on the family tradition.’

‘But then if he did,’ Ailinn said, ‘he’s only wrecked himself.’

‘Don’t we all,’ Kevern said.

She stopped to look at him. They were walking arm in arm in the valley in their wellingtons, splashing in puddles. The trickle of water called the River Jordan had swollen to the dimensions of a stream. The trees dripped. It would have been the height of fancy to think of it as nature weeping, but Kevern thought it anyway.

‘What do you mean
don’t we all
?’

‘Did I say that?’

‘You did.’

‘Then I don’t know. I suppose I was feeling the tragedy of what’s occurred.’

‘But it’s not your tragedy.’

‘Well it is in a sense. It’s my village.’

‘Your village
! That’s not how you normally talk about it.’

‘No, you’re right, I don’t. Maybe I’m just being ghoulish – wanting to be part of the excitement.’

‘I’m surprised it still excites you. Don’t you have a lot of this sort of thing down here?’

‘Murders, no. Well, a few. But nothing quite as bloody as this.’

‘We have them too . . .’ She pointed, comically, over her shoulder as she had done the day he met her. As though she were throwing salt. ‘. . . Up there, if that’s north. People are unhappy.’

‘I suppose that was all I meant by saying
don’t we all
. That we all end up unhappy. You say yourself you walk in fear of unhappiness every hour.’

‘Unhappiness? I walk in fear of being hunted to my death.’

‘Well then . . .’

‘Well then nothing. It’s not the same. The whales know who’s coming after them, but they still quietly feed their young. You have to risk it. I am still determined to be happy.’

‘I was only quoting your own words back to you.
People are unhappy
.’

She put her hands to his face and pulled at his lips, trying to force his melancholy mouth into a smile. ‘But we’re not, are we? Us? You and me?’

He let her fashion a smile out of him. His eyes burned with love for her. Part protective love, part desire. She could look dark and fierce sometimes, like a bird of prey, a hunter herself, but at others she appeared as helpless as a little girl, the foundling picked out of a children’s home in the back of beyond.

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘We’re not unhappy. Not you and me. We are different.’

Yes, they were overdoing this.

Later that week he was asked how well he’d known Lowenna Morgenstern.

¹
Liebling,

The days go by without my hearing from you and I wonder what I have done to deserve your cruelty. Everything I see, I see only that I might relate it to you. Had I only known how wonderful I was going to find Ludgvennok I would not have allowed you to persuade me to come on my own. When I think of all I have written about the regeneration of the human race, and all I have done to further its ennoblement, it cheers me to find a people here who live up to everything I have ever understood by nobility of character. It can sometimes, of course, be as much a matter of what one doesn’t find as what one does, that renders a place and a people congenial. Whether by deliberate intention or some lucky chance, Ludgvennok appears to have been released from the influence of those whose rapacity of ambition and disagreeableness of appearance has made life such a trial in the European cities where I have spent my life. Even the ear declares itself to be in a paradise to be free, from the moment one wakes to the moment one lies down – without you, alas, my darling – of that repulsive jumbled blabber, that yodelling cackle, in which elsewhere the ----s make the insistence of their presence felt. Here it is almost as though one has returned to a time of purity, when mankind was able to rejoice in its connection with its natural soil, unspoiled by the jargon of a race that has no passion – no
Leidenschaft
, there is no other word – for the land, for art, for the heroical, or for the rest of humanity.

My darling, I do so wish you could be here with me.

Your R

Friday 3rd

SUDDENLY EVERYONE, AND
I mean
everyone
, is taking an interest in my man. Have I said that already? Suddenly everyone’s taking
even more
of an interest in my man, in that case. I can’t pretend I’m comfortable with this upsurge of curiosity. One guards one’s subjects jealously, as one guards one’s wife or reputation. If there was more they needed to know, why didn’t they just ask me? I have a nasty feeling I’m being superseded, which could mean one of two things: either I’m not up to it, in their estimation, or Kevern Cohen’s in trouble too deep for me to fathom. I don’t care how this impacts on my good name – I have other fish to fry, when all is said and done – but I’m concerned how Kevern will fare, given all his oddities, without a sympathetic person to keep an eye on him. I like the fellow, as I have said. Whatever is actually going on, it strikes me as cruel that someone so predisposed to paranoia should have all his delusions of persecution and incrimination confirmed. And that’s just me I’m talking about . . . Ba boom! as my grandfather would say when he made a bad joke. Back in the days when people liked to make bad jokes. Or any kind of joke, come to that. But to return to me . . . I always liked that silly joke, too, when I was small: ‘That’s enough of me, so what do
you
think of me?’ . . . but to return
seriously
to me, it’s hard to tell how I’m regarded ‘upstairs’. Certainly no one has – at least in so many words – called my work into question. But ‘something a little more definite and up to date wouldn’t go amiss’ is not exactly the remark of an examiner about to give me an A++ for effort, is it? Tell us something we don’t already know, the expressions on their faces said when I first delivered them the news that he had a girlfriend.