Latimer

by Brian Martin

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

The narrator resigns his post at an Oxford school where Latimer's son has been educated. This enables him to develop his relationship with Latimer's wife, Francine, in order to discover more about Latimer himself - whose past is not what it seems. As events descend into a spiral of distrust, jealousy, sex and murder, the narrator is increasingly certain that he is being haunted by the presence of Latimer's son - and that these unseemly happenings are more than just the product of his over-active imagination.

A spine-chilling, psychological drama, Latimer shows Brian Martin at his most thoughtful, thrilling best.

Release date: April 27, 2023

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 224

Sample

It was at North’s funeral that I first met his father. A traditional Church of England service had been arranged followed by the committal and a cremation; the notion of his ending up in flames not altogether out of keeping with North’s preoccupation with the role of Satan in Paradise Lost. I was reminded of Milton’s fiery burning lake from which the Fallen Angel and his rebel legion struggled to escape. North himself had dropped to his death from the top of Oxford’s Magdalen Tower. No one knew whether it had been murder, suicide or accident. On the evening of the fatality I had been with him. We had met briefly early on and he had suggested a tentative later meeting. It was because of my confusion about the strange nature of the enigmatic, mesmeric North, whose dark intelligence and extraordinary precocity had captivated me, that indeed I had gone out later that evening and yet I was unable to recall exactly where I had been; I suffered a memory-obliterating attack of chronic amnesia. Lurking at the back of my mind was an awful suspicion that I had met him and that, for some reason or other, we had gone to the top of Magdalen Tower and I had brought about his death – that, in fact, I had killed him. The police were still, as they say, “pursuing their enquiries”, but I knew they were inclined to think that what had happened to North was accident or suicide.


I was still finding it almost impossible to believe that North was dead even though the occasion of the cremation was a fortnight after that dreadful night. As I stood in the crematorium chapel next to Francine, his mother, on one side of me and Jenny, one of my teaching colleagues and a close confidante, on the other, I imagined that behind me, at the back in the shadows, the handsome North with his icily glittering eyes was standing, watching amusedly, waiting for everything to finish so that he could appear later at my house to reflect with relish on the superstitious unctuousness of the proceedings. It would not have surprised me at all, if I had looked round, to see him acknowledge me with a nod of his head as he further obscured himself from the view of others in the dark recesses, and vanished. It would have been a continuation of our intimate conspiracy against the rest of the world. Somehow we had been on the same mental wavelength and it did not seem to stop with his death. Some mysterious inner force of his seemed to continue and still connect with me. It is difficult to describe. As I stood there uncomfortably in that bare, rather clinical, multi-faith chapel, I was convinced that, although his physical remains might have been there resting in the box on trestles in front of us, the real force of North, his essence, his spirit, was still active in the world.


Jenny put her arm through mine. ‘You’re agitated. Keep calm. It won’t be long. It’ll soon be over.’

I whispered back. ‘I’m not sure I want it over. My mind won’t settle. I can’t believe that North’s gone.’

On my other side, Francine, elegant, beautiful, white-faced and tearful, kept her eyes on the coffin in a state of determined meditation. For the moment, the rest of us were out of her scope. She was communing with her lost son.

There were not many present in that grieving congregation, probably no more than forty. A few people came along from the school North had attended and at which I taught on a part-time basis. I had no need to work full time; my father had left me well off and my investment portfolio that I monitored daily had prospered over the years. My wife, Giselle, after her appalling accident was trapped in, what seemed to me if I considered it long enough, a permanent hell, what those in the medical profession call a “permanent vegetative state”. There was nothing I, or anyone else for that matter, could do for her. I was able to devote my time to my research and writing, and to the small allocation of teaching I was allowed at the school. The arrangement with the school was ideal. I liked the stimulation of lively intellectual minds in that initial process of rapid development that those senior students provided; North’s, of course, had been one of them.


Francine, Jenny and I stood in that austere building at the front and to the left. We occupied the first pew. On the other side of the aisle was Sam, North’s art teacher, and partially filling the rows a group of Francine’s Oxford and London friends. Behind us there were a few of North’s student friends, some on their own, and others with parents. The rest of the chapel was sparsely scattered with acquaintances of Francine and North, and the sombre choreographers of funerals, the undertaker’s pall-bearers and escorts. Somehow they merged during the service with the dark shadows behind us. Their mistress of ceremonies was a curiously mannered woman in her late forties dressed in a severe black frock-coated trouser suit. As I had awaited the arrival of the cortège, she stood outside the main door and orchestrated the carrying of the coffin from the hearse to the chapel’s interior. She had preceded it, setting the slow tempo of the brief procession to the grand music of Handel’s great dirge, the ‘Dead March’ from Saul, played on the crematorium’s electric organ. North would have approved the solemn music but not the meagre, electronic instrument; I remember him remarking the magnificent playing of the march that he had heard from film soundtracks of the funerals of Russian heads of state. On her head she wore a black silk top-hat with black crepe ribbons flowing from the back of it and a black veil pulled down from the brim over her face. I thought to myself that she was an anachronism and more appropriately belonged to the torch-lit obsequies of a Victorian midnight funeral. I reflected how interested North would have been and how he would have wondered to me about her home life. I knew how he would have thought. Was this all a commercial charade? Was it simply simulated mourning on her part? After all, how many times did she do this sort of thing each week, even each day? She did not know North. When she entered the chapel slowly to the grave music, she removed the hat and veil to reveal that she wore pale mauve lipstick. Where did she live? What about her sex life? Did her profession of looking after the remains of the dead deter the attentions of Eros? Perhaps elsewhere she wore brightly coloured dresses from All Saints or, more expensively, from Etro since I have always understood that undertaking is a lucrative business. To me she looked as though she belonged to a Fellini film set and had been hired by Francine for this occasion from a studio in Rome.


I leaned towards Jenny. ‘I can’t believe this is happening. It’s awful. I can’t believe North is in that box.’

‘Sh-sh, be quiet. Keep calm. It’ll all soon be over.’

The short, squat priest dressed in the black stole and cassock of the old reformist church intoned the verses of Psalm 39. Most of them I did not hear; I was too absorbed by my own thoughts of North. Gradually the monotone of the priest’s voice made an impression on me. ‘Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long: and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee; and verily every man living is altogether vanity.’ Was that how it is? Was North’s life nothing but vanity, a meaningless void? That was very hard to take. I could not accept that. North was too original, too extraordinary, charismatic, captivating, too clever to be seemingly worthless. His God could not have made him without some pride and purpose. ‘For I am a stranger with thee: and a sojourner, as all my fathers were,’ the portly priest continued, his bespectacled eyes concentrating on his text. North was no stranger to me; and his father continued to live. I knew that almost certainly, either to my right-hand side or behind me, North’s father would be present. Francine had told me that he was to be there at his son’s funeral. I had not caught sight of him.


The service proceeded, through the famous passage from Corinthians, ‘Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners. Awake to righteousness and sin not … There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.’ I contemplated North’s belief in another world, a different form of existence; we had discussed and recognised the antagonistic forces of good and evil. I was not entirely sure that North would have been happy with this ritual proceeding in the chapel. He might have loathed it or he might have laughed at it. Again the priest intoned from the short prayer on the transience of man’s existence, ‘He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.’ Indeed, North had gone into the shadows.

Then it was done. The bearers stepped forward from the rear of the chapel, lifted the coffin from the trestles and placed it on the rollers in front of the drawn curtains. They stood back to one side, the priest touched a button on the wall, the curtains drew apart, and North’s shattered remains rolled inwards to the furnace. I could not help imaging that the fires of Hell awaited him. The priest proclaimed that since it was pleasing to God to take, ‘unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the fire; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’


I wept; Francine wept; Jenny wept. I felt an awful emptiness and despair. The words of hope and optimism about the general resurrection that end the service slid away from me. I hardly heard them; such was my intense desolation of spirit. North’s ashes joined the dust and ashes of his ancestors.

We left the gloom of the chapel interior. Outside the sky was overcast. We stood on the tarmac apron in front of the chapel entrance. An official in a black uniform who looked like a hotel commissionaire directed us to one side. The relentless fires of the furnace had to be kept fed and the next corpse was waiting to be burnt. Already mourners for the next victim were queuing to fill the pews we had just left. People from our small congregation edged towards the car park. Around us the rose gardens were largely without blooms; the bushes seemed to be between flowerings. Bordering the grounds and marking off the car park were tall gaunt fir trees, their greenness so dark as to be almost black. At the back of the low building I saw its chimney that reached as high as the trees, and from it fumes and smoke emerged and drifted on the prevailing west wind towards farmland. I had noticed on the way in that off to the right of the crematorium’s entrance was a Pick-Your-Own farm where people from the Oxford suburbs picked strawberries and raspberries, fruits fertilised by trace elements from the ashes of the recent dead borne on the vagrant winds. I did not relish that harvest.


Once again I was brought to tears. I imagined North’s ruined body consumed, its fumes carried away in the air, his spirit gone. Jenny said, ‘Come on. Let’s go. This is no place to be. Where’s Francine?’

Francine had paused and detached herself from the two of us. She had gone to talk with a couple of smartly dressed women who were walking slowly to the car park. ‘She’s over there,’ I said and indicated by a nod.

A Mercedes saloon, an E222, obsidian black with slightly tinted windows, came up the drive from the main road, and I thought that it would hold latecomers for the next cremation. It parked about twenty yards from the chapel entrance, the noise of its running engine only just audible. From the half light of the chapel porch a man of medium height, his dark suit covered by a black overcoat of a continental design, wearing a jet black fedora low over his brow, stepped out and signalled with his raised right hand to the driver. At once Francine turned round and saw both the car and the man. She broke away from her conversation and stepped towards the figure whose face I could not quite see. They stood a little apart. There was no greeting, no embrace, no touching of hands. They looked most formal. Francine looked uncomfortable and distressed. I could see that she had begun to cry again. She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief whose whiteness contrasted brilliantly with the rest of her black outfit.

‘Francine’s very upset,’ I said to Jenny. ‘I’ll just go and see if I can help her. We’d better go with her to the wake. She’s in a pretty bad state.’


I walked the short distance to the pair. The chauffeur had turned off the engine and sat in concentration, keeping his eyes on the stranger. I touched Francine lightly on the elbow. ‘Forgive me, are you OK?’ I inclined my head to the man in the fedora. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt. I thought we might give Francine a lift back to the house.’

Francine turned and smiled through her tears. The man took off his hat. Francine murmured, ‘This is North’s father, Latimer.’ She took hold of my hand and held it out to him and said, ‘A great friend – North’s mentor and someone so good to me.’ I felt embarrassed. No one, not even Francine, knew the true nature of the relationship that had existed between North and me and I had treated Francine as I would have done anyone else. Momentarily I felt confused. The name Latimer conjured up in my mind images of burnings at the stake of iron-willed, principled bishops in Oxford’s Broad Street. My thoughts could not escape flame and fire.

Everything about the man was in keeping with the sombreness of the occasion. He put out his hand and I shook it. His grip was firm and confident. The double cuff of his shirt sleeve edged forward to what I judged was a hand-tailored measure. I caught a glimpse of a cufflink, some black stone set in silver. He wore, curiously, on his right wrist an expensive watch; I could see that it was a Swiss IWC Schaffhausen, chunky, metallic, rugged and durable. It somehow gave me a mark of the man. I wondered why he wore it to his right hand; was he left-handed? The trousers of his suit tapered to break precisely on his brilliantly polished shoes; it was as though an army batman had been at work with spit and polish. This man was elegant, proud, dominant; he exuded the confidence of a man used to being in charge, making quick decisions, giving orders. He looked straight at me directly into my eyes. I felt he wanted to get right inside me, scan my soul. He kept his hair short and he grew a small beard on his chin, sculpted at the sides and closely cropped. I recognised in this man qualities of North. His eyes were intensely, deeply, blue and, as he shifted slightly to glance at Francine, I could not help noticing that same mysterious, dangerous glint that sometimes used to lie in North’s eyes, as though there were slivers of ice inside that reflected outside light back again. There was no doubt that North was this man’s son.


I bowed my head and said quietly, ‘I am so sorry about what has happened. I mourn with you. He was so original, so extraordinary. There are no words …’

He held his fedora to his chest, similarly bowed his head, and replied in a soft, carefully modulated American New England accent, ‘I know. No one grieves more than I do. In spite of the physical distance between us, North and I were very close.’ There was only a trace of American accent left in this man’s voice. I thought to myself that Francine was certainly grieving more than him. Then there was me; in a way I reckoned I knew North better than anyone. I was the one who was most tearful. Latimer certainly was not.

A London woman friend came up to Francine, kissed her on both cheeks, hugged her and said that she would see her back at the room in Quod, the smart restaurant on Oxford’s High where I had first observed North with his history teacher, Bernadette, the first victim of his tantalising seduction. I had arranged for Francine the hire of a room where thirty or so of North’s relations and friends could meet after the funeral.


Francine stood apart from Latimer. So far as I could make out there had not been, nor was there then, any physical contact. She kept a cool distance from him. ‘Will you came back to Quod?’ she asked him.

‘Yes, I’ll come for a short time. I must be back in London by seven.’ He turned to me. ‘We can talk. You can tell me what you thought of my son. I’d like to know how you felt about him.’ With that, his fedora in his left hand, he walked to the Mercedes and got into the back seat. The driver put the car into automatic gear and the car drove quietly away. I watched them go and looked back at Francine and Jenny who was now with her. Beyond them the tall, dark firs shivered in a strengthening breeze. A group of people, seven or eight of them, were coming from the car park to the chapel; and, extraordinarily, I thought I saw walking away amid the trees, in no hurry, a dark youth. It could have been North. The mind plays tricks. I have often thought that in a crowd, let us say on Paddington Station, or twenty-five yards ahead in busy Oxford Street, that I have glimpsed a long-dead friend. Hallucinations, illusions; I have always assumed these are visions of what the mind would like to see, not what it actually sees. Almost certainly that young man leaving the crematorium’s gardens was one of North’s friends. From afar he looked like North. I could not be certain who it was.

For some reason Francine glanced to where I thought I saw North. I did not say anything. Our fellow mourners began to drift away. ‘Come on. Let’s get going,’ I said. Francine and Jenny accompanied me to the car and we drove to Quod.

When we arrived in the car park of the Old Bank Hotel and its restaurant, Quod, having rumbled our way slowly and carefully over the old cobblestones of Merton Street, I opened the doors on the passenger side of the car and helped Francine get out from the front. She was upset. Jenny, as always, was calm and in control. Francine sighed now and again. In her severe black mourning suit she looked chic, fashionable and extremely attractive. She looked after herself well. She wore little make-up, a light touch of lipstick, a suspicion of eye shadow. That day I detected the distinctive perfume of Chanel Number 5 which had been G’s favourite. Francine had a natural beauty; and I could see that North’s striking looks came from that fusion of her fine features and the dark, handsome cast of Latimer’s face. The sadness that had overtaken her and that had settled a terrible seriousness on her countenance made her look even more attractive than usual. It invited consolation. I felt the need to comfort her, even to hold her and make her feel secure in my arms. I did not do this and I had not done so; since North’s death I had merely hugged her, rather distantly, twice. As she stepped on to the gravel of the car park, I felt like holding her close and weeping with her.

I noticed above the rooftops, Merton College’s flag flying at half mast, no doubt as a sign of respect for some recently dead old don. At the same time, the emblematic fluttering was appropriate for North. The three of us went across the terrace into the rear entrance to the hotel. The restaurant lay off to the left, the hotel ahead of us and to the right. The Estonian receptionist welcomed us. I nodded to her in greeting. Jenny and Francine went off to the ladies washroom. Other friends were arriving. I welcomed them and indicated a private room on the ground floor of the hotel that my friend, the proprietor, used for meetings and, occasionally, for private parties. He had offered it to me when Francine was wondering where to hold the post-funeral reception. The corridor walls leading to the room were lined with framed photographs of Oxford scenes from the late sixties and seventies by Paddy Summerfield, undergraduates with bicycles in Radcliffe Square, champagne punting parties on the Cherwell, rowing eights on the Isis, snapshots of idyllic Oxford life, something that once North might have enjoyed. The walls of the room itself held a collection of Stanley Spencer drawings and prints that had been bought over the years by my friend. Tall sash windows looked out on to the terrace and the car park. A couple of waiters offered glasses of champagne as the mourners came in, a modest Moet that I had chosen.


I had expected Latimer to be there before us but he had not yet arrived. It was another twenty minutes before he made his entrance and when he did appear it was dramatic. He was attended. Another man, whom he introduced as his personal secretary but I considered looked more like a bodyguard, was with him. There had been no one else in the Mercedes with him apart from the driver; he must have picked up this extra acolyte after the funeral. I imagined that presumably at the obsequies Latimer must have felt safe.

Latimer was wearing dark glasses as he entered but removed them once he was in the room. It was not just the effect of the bodyguard. Latimer had a presence, a charisma. It filled the room when he entered. People m. . .