The Graveyard Position Read online

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  SCRIBNER

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fictigon. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Robert Barnard

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Scribner Edition 2005

  Originally published in Great Britain in 2004 by Allison & Busby Limited

  SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Barnard, Robert.

  The graveyard position: a novel of suspense/Robert Barnard.—1st Scribner ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 2. Family-owned business enterprises—Fiction.

  3. Rich people—Fiction. 4. England—Fiction. I Title.

  PR6052.A665G73 2005

  823’.914—dc22

  2004059131

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-8461-5

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-8461-5

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  FOR

  PETER AND SHEILA

  Partners in Crime

  Chapter 1

  Dust to Dust

  The organist was playing yet another slow, amorphous piece, and for the mourners who had taken their pews early, enough was becoming enough. You couldn’t expect the relentless cheerfulness of Rossini, but times had changed since the era when you got only the musical equivalent of a thick blackout curtain at funerals.

  “So very un-Clarissa,” said her niece Rosalind Frere. “Particularly in her earlier years.” She gave another of her surreptitious quick glances at arrivals through the main door. “Oh, there’s whatsername. Caroline Chaunteley. She never went near Clarissa in her last years, that I do know, though Clarissa was awfully kind to her when she was young…as we all were.”

  “Nobody went near her in her last years,” said Rosalind’s husband, Barnett.

  “That’s not fair! I went as often as I could. We’re not a drop-in sort of family—we keep ourselves to ourselves…. I did my best, though she was obviously failing, physically as well as mentally.”

  “You said she threw a meat pudding at you.”

  “Well, it was more a sort of gesture, showing she wanted to.” The levels of Rosalind’s truthfulness were well known to her husband, who merely raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh, here’s the coffin,” said Rosalind brightly.

  The music had changed inconspicuously to something with a muffled, marchlike beat and the coffin began up the aisle, borne by a mixture of undertaker’s men and relatives.

  “Oh look, there’s Cousin Malachi. They’ve put him in the middle, where he can pretend to carry. He’s all of a hundred and ten pounds, and short with it. Doesn’t he look ridiculous?”

  “We’re lucky he’s not wimbly-wambling all over the aisle,” said Barnett. “That’s what I saw him doing, back and forth across Boar Lane, last Friday night.”

  “He can’t have had a drink yet. It’s only half past eleven.”

  “What a sweet, innocent creature you are,” said Barnett, who knew better than most that she was neither.

  The coffin seemed to take forever. The organ march went on and on, obviously something that could be stretched to the crack of doom if circumstances demanded it. The bearers shuffled slowly forward, their expression either dour or bored. Cousin Malachi was the only one who let his sharp little eyes stray indiscriminately around the congregation.

  “Oh, get a move on,” said Rosalind, turning round. “Oh!”

  She swiveled her head back to the frontward-looking position.

  “What?” whispered Barnett.

  “Nothing…I must have got it wrong…. It can’t be.”

  Her husband always said that her whispers were more powerful than a public-address system, and behind her people reacted: some looked around unashamedly, while others continued looking straight ahead for a second or two, then attempted a slow, casual twist of the head.

  “What can’t be?” asked Barnett.

  Rosalind merely shook her head. The coffin began to pass slowly by her row, seventh from the front, but she hardly glanced to see how Malachi was faring, fearful of catching his bright little eyes. Her face was set, its expression thoughtful, miles away from the Church of St. Paul the Evangelist in Headingley. At long last the little procession reached the altar, and the coffin was slowly set down just in front of it, to a general but suppressed sigh of relief. Barnett noticed a woman slipping into a pew, and nudged Rosalind.

  “There’s that Mrs.—something-or-other—head of the Leeds Society of Spiritualists.”

  “Pity someone from the Other Side didn’t tell her the right time,” said Rosalind sourly. She was a woman of limited mental powers, and that sort of tired joke about spiritualists was just up her street. “Why couldn’t she just slip into a place at the back? There’s plenty of empty pews.”

  “You don’t get anywhere in the spirit world by being backward in coming forward,” said Barnett. He was conscious of his wife twisting her head around and taking a longer, more blatant look. “What is it, for heaven’s sake?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said again, an obvious untruth.

  “Dear friends,” began the vicar, who knew next to none of them, “we are gathered here today—”

  “—to see the old charlatan well and truly buried,” whispered Barnett.

  The vicar steered away from brutal truths of any kind, and tried to keep to truth of a more generous sort. He stopped short of claiming Clarissa Cantelo as a Christian, even of the “essentially” or “in her heart” order, but he dwelt, as well he might, on her spiritual side.

  “Clarissa Cantelo had, as many of you here today have cause to know, a sense of a deeper reality than most of us can conceive of. She felt God in nature, as many of us surely do, but she made little distinction between the world that we know so well and that other world that we may believe in, but would not claim to know. To Clarissa those who had died had not ‘gone before,’ but were still pres
ent, around us, functioning as before, affecting daily life in ways beyond our understanding. It is easy to call such people cranks, charlatans, even to suggest that they profit from other people’s misery and loss. No one could say that about Clarissa, however. Hers was a joyful, life-enhancing belief, generously shared.”

  “That didn’t stop her pocketing a fee, though,” whispered Rosalind. “She knew the going rate for news from the Other Side.”

  “Clarissa was from a well-known Leeds manufacturing family, and she had the family’s sense of responsibility. In her it took the form of a real and burning desire to help, to lead people at times of stress, at times when they felt the urge to go on a spiritual quest, and she did this out of love for her fellow human beings.”

  “With a strong streak of showbiz and ego trip into the bargain,” muttered Barnett.

  There was a disturbance at the back of the church, then someone scurrying forward and climbing across to a place in the second row behind them.

  “Terrible holdup at the Armley gyratory,” said a male voice.

  “Cousin Francis,” whispered Rosalind at her most piercing. “Really, it would have been better not to come into the church at all if he was going to be this late.”

  “The powers she believed she had she always used benignly, and the people she helped were her friends for life—”

  And so it went on, ecumenical and nonskeptical to the point of meaninglessness. Rosalind whispered that it was going down well—you could just feel it was. She sometimes thought she had powers of perception that made her especially akin to her aunt. When, after some seven minutes, the vicar’s tribute drew to a close, there were two more hymns, divided by an impromptu prayer and the one the Lord had formulated. The hymns were well known and middle-of-the-road, Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley. The congregation knew them and sang with a will—naturally so, since most of them were in very good spirits. Then the service drew to a close, the coffin was taken up on the shoulders of the undertaker’s men (missing Cousin Malachi’s by a good five inches), and the little procession made its way back down the aisle, out of the church, turning left to a distant east corner of the churchyard where there were still vacant sites to be filled.

  Rosalind kept her eyes glued to the floor as she went out. She did not want to see what she thought she had seen. Barnett looked around him, but couldn’t for the life of him spot what had been worrying her. Seeing things, he thought. Like Aunt Clarrie in her bloody séances.

  Aunt Emily stood by the clergyman with Aunt Marigold, representatives of Clarissa Cantelo’s own generation of the family. Emily had made most of the arrangements for the funeral, helped when she felt like it by Rosalind. Cousin Francis stood close by them, to make up for his lateness at church, but Cousin Malachi took his hundred and ten pounds off and collapsed onto a tomblike grave some yards away. The vicar scattered earth, and associated cousins and nephews and nieces followed suit. Her eyes on the immediate present, Rosalind scattered and murmured a little prayer. Then, clutching Barnett’s hand, she took a deep breath and looked around at the assembled mourners.

  Family, close to the grave, and beyond them all the expected people, every one in an aspect of deep gloom that was not always convincing: the lady from the Society of Spiritualists, neighbors and old friends, a young man Rosalind suspected was a reporter from the Yorkshire Post, representatives of the Leeds clothing industry, of which the Cantelos had been a mainstay for many years. And there, at the back of the group, not far from Malachi on his gravestone, him.

  Or not him, surely, but someone who looked like him.

  Light brown hair, with a strong chin, piercing eyes that Rosalind felt sure would be blue, sober suit, black tie, about the right height—five-ten, perhaps—and with a quiet, interested air. More still, more considered than the boy she had once known, but then people would say he had matured. Thirty-eight he would be now.

  “It’s not him,” Rosalind said.

  “Not who?” her husband demanded.

  “You never knew him. But I’d have thought you could guess.”

  Aunt Emily was talking to various relatives about the drinks and refreshments to be served back in Congreve Street, and Rosalind broke away from the group, dropped her husband’s hand, smiled her thanks at the vicar, and walked over to the bystander, who watched her coming without any alteration in his expression.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know who you are,” Rosalind said, “but all friends of Aunt Clarissa will be very welcome to drinks and refreshments at the Congreve Street house.” The young man looked at her for a moment or two, then, a tiny smile at the corners of his mouth, spoke.

  “You know me, Rosalind. I’d be delighted to come for refreshments. It will be good to see the old house again.”

  Rosalind turned and marched toward the gate of the graveyard and her husband waiting by the car.

  “After all, I was closer to her than anyone,” shouted the young man.

  Chapter 2

  Funeral Bakemeats

  The big dining room at number fifteen Congreve Street had been transformed by moving the long table to the window and spreading the twelve chairs around the wall. The table had been decked with cold bakemeats, pies, and gâteaux, and an elderly retainer, whom some of them recognized as Clarissa’s longtime home help, went backward and forward to the kitchen with tea urns and coffeepots. Some of the older members of the family had memories of uneasy meals here in the days of their father, the guiding force behind Cantelo Shirts. The memories didn’t make them any happier, so the atmosphere in the room had been edgy from the start. The representative of the Association of Leeds Clothiers had gulped down a cup of tea and disappeared into the afternoon pleading a prior engagement.

  “One doesn’t have a prior engagement at a funeral,” pronounced Rosalind.

  Getting the groups to mingle proved an impossible task. Even getting the relatives to talk to one another was less than easy. They were all hugging to themselves the thing they most wanted to talk about, for fear of saying something that Rosalind or Emily might pounce upon, or of being interrupted by the arrival of the thing itself. Emily, in welcoming the guests, kept shooting glances at the door in case he slipped in in the wake of more expected arrivals. Even Barnett was uneasy, having been enlightened about the identity of the surprise guest in the car from the church, and he kept throwing surreptitious looks through the window. This inattention to his job of dispensing drinks, in which he was already hindered by his wife trying to do the same things as he at the same time, meant that he had an accident with the bottle opener, making a gash across his thumb that ruined his usually airy de-corking technique.

  “Why doesn’t he come?” demanded Rosalind under her breath. “He said he was.”

  “Maybe he’s trying to produce the effect he actually is producing,” said her husband bad-temperedly, sucking vigorously at his thumb. “He’ll come when he’s good and ready.”

  “I’m looking forward to having a chat with him,” said Emily, bad omens in her voice. “I shall be interested to hear his recent history.”

  Rosalind nodded with a wicked relish: Emily had always had something of the Inquisitor in her nature. Cousin Malachi, however, incurred a squelch when he turned from his conversation with his brother, Francis, to say, “Interesting to hear what he’s been doing all the time he’s been away. Probably been round the world.”

  Rosalind was nervily putting little sandwiches and sausage rolls on a plate for Aunt Marigold, but she managed to throw in her pennyworth.

  “More likely cooling his heels in a Turkish jail,” she said.

  “Merlyn was never in trouble with the law,” protested Malachi.

  “All he needed was time,” said Rosalind, whose face had twisted when the name had been spoken for the first time. “And now he seems to think—” she began, and then seemed to feel she had been wrong-footed. “But of course it’s not him,” she lamely concluded.

  What she had been about to say, as everyone around her rea
lized, was “to think that he can come back and take over all this.”

  What she intended by “all this” was no palace. It was a three-story detached house from the late 1880s. It had a fine cellar, good-size ground-floor rooms, and five large bedrooms. It was situated in one of the good, but not best, parts of Headingley, too expensive to be converted into student lodgings. It would fetch a tidy sum on the booming property market, but it did not represent riches.

  “Here he is now,” said her husband. The moment he said it, all conversation stopped. They watched as the figure of a man in his thirties proceeded across the street and opened the front gate, walking confidently forward.

  “The hide of him—walking straight in!” said Rosalind, as he did just that.

  “Merlyn never knocked at his aunt’s door in his life,” said Malachi. “Why should he now?”

  Already two distinct pictures of the young Merlyn were emerging, the differences perhaps not unconnected with the question of whether the speaker had his or her own expectations from the dead Aunt Clarissa. Or perhaps the differences sprang from an ambiguity in the young Merlyn himself, the sixteen-year-old they remembered. At sixteen, no one’s character is set in stone.

  Merlyn had followed the murmur of voices and now came into the long, high dining room. He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking around him. He was very English-looking, brown hair and blue eyes, and the edges of his mouth were again turned up in the tiny smile that was attractive as well as quizzical. Aunt Emily swallowed, then advanced toward him as she had to all the guests.

  “So glad you could join us,” she said, though her face was grim. “Have you come a long way?”

  There was a brief laugh, unconcealed.

  “Not from a fetid Indian or Pakistani jail, anyway, Aunt Emily.” How could he know what they had been saying? they all wondered. “Actually from Brussels.”

  “How fascinating!” said Emily. “Please have something to eat, and Barnett will get you a drink. Wine or something stronger?”

  Barnett was holding his bandaged hand ready, looking at the man whom he was seeing for the first time.