The Tower

Book 754: Murder Room

by P.M. Hubbard

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Suspense

Synopsis

From the church of St Udan's rises The Tower, threatening collapse unless a large sum can be raised to repair it. In its shadow, the brooding, macabre figure of Old Liberty, fire-and-brimstone vicar, rages against robust and clever George Hardcastle, humanist and self-styled 'antichrist', while between them wavers diminutive enchanting Mary Garstin, wearing her wealth and position uneasily Happening upon this tiny hamlet where nothing is quite what it seems, John Smith is held in thrall by the elusive charm of Cynthia Hardcastle - who plays Shakespearean games with her father, and crouches on tree stumps in the dark of night - and by a premonition of disaster.

Release date: September 6, 2012

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 188

Sample

THE CAR was running easily downhill, and the engine stopped working so quietly and suddenly that at first he did not notice it had happened. Then as the
slope eased for a moment he felt the car check, and saw the red light shining wickedly at him from the dial of the speedometer. He said, “Oh damn,” put his foot on the brake, thought
better of it and let the car run on in neutral.

It was dusk even on the tops of the hills and down in the trees below him quite dark. There were lights among the trees. It looked like a village, but he did not know what its name was. All he
knew was that ahead of him, another twenty miles along the road, there was a town called Frantham with a two-star pub called the Antelope. Two stars was about his mark on this trip.

A gaggle of signs came up suddenly in his not over-bright headlights. They said first COYLE and then BEND and NARROW
BRIDGE. He noted, but did not like, the name, negotiated the bend without having to use his brakes and saw the hump of the bridge ahead. The car checked at the slope, and he found himself
sitting forward, like a horseman at a jump, trying to ease her over the obstacle. She got her nose between the parapet walls, crawled up the slope with unexpected momentum, paused, dipped and began
to gather speed on the far side.

The hood was down, and he heard, in the suddenly almost motionless air about his head, the rush of a considerable stream below the bridge. Then the road leveled out and the car came gradually
but inexorably to a halt. He turned off the headlights and sat there. His mind, as always after a long drive, was numb and unresponsive. The emergencies of movement it could cope with, but not the
emergency of sudden stoppage. He said, “Damn” again, and shivered slightly.

Ahead, beyond the faint yellowish glow of the sidelights, he could just see the tarmac picking up the last of the light in the sky. It was dark on both sides with what looked like trees. He sat
there wrapped in the inertia of mild despair. The stream was some way behind him now, and the silence was absolute. He shivered again, and suddenly found himself cold and stiff.

Then, not ten yards ahead of him, a voice said, “Oh God, oh God,” and started to weep. He considered for a moment joining in the general lamentation, but came to the conclusion that
the situation did not warrant it. It did not, to be honest, matter whether he reached Frantham tonight. Or even, he thought, tomorrow night or the night after. There might even be a pub in Coyle
with attractions rivaling those of the Antelope. And someone else, at least, was unhappier than he was. He opened the door quietly and got out.

He reached into the chaos behind the driving seat, found his duffel coat and put it on. Thus wrapped, he felt better equipped to deal with what appeared, at the moment, to be a purely social
problem. He wanted to ask for help. But could he decently ask help of someone who seemed, at least in his own judgment, to be more in need of help himself? If the weeper had been a woman, a sense
of gallantry, or at worse a sense of opportunist adventure, might have driven him to offer help, even from his own position of relative helplessness. But he did not think it was. Admittedly, men,
when they cried, cried higher than they talked. A childish response seemed to activate naturally a forgotten childishness in the vocal chords. Admittedly, too, a man did not often weep audibly on a
dark country roadside, even in a village with a name like Coyle. He still thought, on balance, that it was a man weeping.

He began to walk slowly forward, and was at once aware that it would be impossible, in this dark desolation, to tiptoe tactfully past a fellow creature in distress and seek help elsewhere. The
words “Can I help?” formed themselves in his mind. It was what, a minute or so ago, he would have liked some solid and mechanically minded passer-by to say to him. He walked on
cautiously and, now that he came to think of it, quietly, as quietly as he could go. Then he found that the weeping had stopped.

He stopped himself and listened. Now that his ears were at­tuned to the silence, he could hear, very faint behind him, the murmur of the stream. Some way ahead, where the lights would have
been, a voice called “Good night” cheerfully, and a door slammed. Coyle was not, as he had somehow felt it might be, steeped in universal distress. But at hand there was nothing. No
voice, no breath, no movement. This at least made his decision easier. Indeed, it left no problem for a decision. You cannot offer to help, nor need you tactfully avoid, a person who on the
evidence is no longer there. He gathered his coat around him and stepped out for the village.

He had not gone twenty yards before he found that he was walking slightly but definitely downhill. Twenty yards pushing on the level, and the car would be moving again. It was a heavy car for
its size by modern standards, but well within his capacity on anything but a pronounced upgrade. He hesitated and then walked on. Better see, first, what the village consisted of and where he
should head for. The main thing was to get the car off the road, where he could turn the lights off. He did not trust his battery an inch. If he was going to slide silently into Coyle, pulled on by
gravity but pushed by himself or nothing, he must have an exact destination.

The houses came up very suddenly, first on one side of the road and then on the other. There were lights in some of them, but very faint and far back, as if the occupants were all in their back
kitchens or, in the front, crouched over their television screens. Then the road turned and he saw, high up on his right, a sign which said THE BELL. It was dimly lit, and
the gold paint on the picture looked cracked and tarnished. His heart sank, but at the same moment he saw, at the side of the house, a tall stone arch with the darkness of what looked like a yard
behind it. Even here there were next to no lights. He thought he could hear, not far off, the intermittent murmur of voices, but he could not tell where they came from.

He stopped at the archway and peered in. There was indeed a yard at the side of the house. There were dustbins on one side, along the end wall of the house, and what looked like garages on the
other. This would do for a start. He turned and began walking back to the car. He padded quietly along in his soft shoes, and heard, hard and clear on the tarmac, other feet, more substantially
shot, coming to meet him. They walked slowly but not, he thought, hesitantly. If this was the weeper, the man had wept it out of himself, and was coming back with reasonable resolution to face
whatever it was in Coyle that had set him weeping. From the security of his comparative silence, he got ready for the encounter.

Silence or no silence, the other man saw him first. A voice said, “Ah—? Ah, good evening.” It was a warm voice, but light and medium-pitched. He tried to connect it with the
desolation of “Oh God, oh God” by the dark roadside, but could not be sure either way. He said, “Good evening,” and only then his motorist’s eyes picked out the broad
shape coming up to him out of the darkness. He shortened stride, expecting further speech and ready with his hard-luck story about the car, but the other man did not stop. Still slowly, but
unremittingly, the metaled heels came down on the tarmac, and the man was past him and off toward the village.

The lights of the car looked orange-yellow and secretive. He leaned in and switched them off, conscious even in the enveloping darkness that there was a law in Coyle and that he was defying it.
He took off his coat and threw it on to the driving seat. Then he put one hand on the wheel, leaned his shoulder against the side of the windscreen and started to push. With the car aggressively
immobile, he had not bothered to put on the hand brake.

Another voice, this time distinctly feminine, said, “She’ll go, you know, if you’d rather.”

He said, “Good lord. Will she? Why?”

“It was a distributor lead. They jump off.”

He said again, “Good lord. Is that what they do?”

“Well anyway, this one did.”

“And you put it back on?”

“Uh-huh.” There was a figure now, pale and somehow suspended a foot or two off the ground. A spirit, he decided, but a benign one.

He said, “That’s very nice of you.”

“Think nothing of it. Good night.”

He hesitated, and then, finding nothing else to say, said “Good night” and got into the car. The engine started at a touch. He switched on the lights and saw, lit faintly in their
reflected glow, a girl watching him. She was perched owl-like on the top of what looked like a milestone, her knees drawn up almost under her chin. She looked as if she had been there for hours and
was still perfectly comfortable. There was no detail in the picture.

He put the car in gear and started off for Frantham. But when he came to the Bell, he braked and swung the car through the archway into the yard. He switched off the engine, turned the lights
off and went around to the front door of the pub. Even inside the light was no more than yellow. There were three doors, one ahead, unmarked, one on the left marked SALOON
and one on the right marked PUBLIC. He put his hand to the PUBLIC door and, as it started to open, heard a voice inside say, “He says, bugger
you, he says, I’ll bloody well do what I please, and you can fucking well do the same, that’s what he says.”

The voice was low and distinct against a background of dead silence. He pictured two men talking, one behind the bar and one in front of it. He opened the door wide on a room full of smoke and
beer fumes, and then saw in the faint light that it was also full of bodies. They sat everywhere, on benches, on settles, on chairs drawn up at tables. None of them moved. Only the landlord was on
his feet, leaning motionless on the bar with his shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, impassively presiding. He turned his eyes as the door opened, but answered the man who had spoken. He said,
“It’s nasty, that, having a chap talk like that.” He turned his head to follow his eyes and said, “Good evening.” No one else, apparently, moved at all, except for the
eyes. He felt himself suddenly caught and held in a blank concentration of eyes.

He said, “Good evening. I suppose—can you by any chance let me have a room for the night?”

The landlord looked at him speculatively. “We’ve got a room,” he said. “You got a car?” He said it almost as if he was about to suggest an exchange of
amenities.

“I put it in the yard.”

The landlord nodded. “I’ll tell my wife,” he said. “If you’ll go in the saloon?” He made it sound like a courtesy.

“Right.” He nodded, backed out and shut the door of the public bar behind him. No one else had moved or spoken. The saloon smelled of polished linoleum. It was dim, spotless and
quite empty. A small red-faced woman appeared suddenly behind the varnished bar in the right-hand corner. “Good evening,” she said. “You’ll be staying over?”

“If I may. I was going on to Frantham, but I think I’ve come far enough for the night.” He did not say, even to himself, that he wanted to know what made men weep in the
roadside trees and girls who could mend cars sit like owls on the top of milestones. The woman produced a book and opened it on the bar. “If you’ll just register,” she said.

He produced a ball-point from his jacket pocket and wrote, “John Smith, Ashby-de-la-Zouche, British.” She watched him as he wrote, and he felt an overpowering urge to tell her that
he really was John Smith. Someone had to be. She nodded. “Single?” she said.

“Oh yes, quite single.” That was the trouble with John Smith. They always expected you to bring in a giggling blonde with the wrong initials on her suitcase.

“I’ll see to the room,” she said. She turned to go and then stopped. “Have you had your supper?” she said.

“Well, no. I—”

She nodded. “Bacon and eggs do?”

“Oh yes, fine. And could I have a pint of bitter?”

He sat back on the polished settle, pulling slowly at his tankard and letting his mind clear. He could not make out whether the dreamlike quality of his recent experience lay in the experience
itself or in the daze of the recording consciousness. In any case, why worry? It was on the whole pleasant, after a long drive, to let the unreasonableness of facts take care of itself, and simply
to contemplate it, placidly and impassively, while the alcohol laid healing hands on his raw nerves. It was, he decided, very strong beer, and no harm in that. As a further sign of emancipation, he
yawned suddenly and deeply. Given the promised eggs and bacon, he could safely let go. With the morning light he would reconsider the evidence. The part of his mind that refused to be comforted
asked whether the sun ever really rose over Coyle, or whether the village lived permanently in a soft and dimly lit darkness, through which people moved oddly without explanation. But the question
remained unanswered.

The eggs and bacon, when they arrived, assumed the proportions less of a soporific than of a general anesthetic. He pushed the last pale slice of bread and butter around his plate, mopping up
the rich brown grease, and wondered whether he could ever rouse himself to get his things out of the car. The voices in the public bar, which he had been dimly aware of as he ate, swelled suddenly
into argument. There was some shouting and intermittent swearing against a background of rolling waves of laughter. He could not tell at all what it was all about, but nothing in any case could
have prepared him for the way it ended.

A man started to sing, casually, as if he was singing to himself, but loud enough to be heard above the general uproar. “Gloria Deo—” he sang, with a long twisting run
of notes on the rounded o of the first syllable. Two more voices took it up in different parts, a very sweet clear tenor led the way into Et Filio, and by the time Sancto was
reached he counted four parts going great guns with several voices to each. There was a second’s silence and then the whole lot came in together with Sicut in principio, and
suddenly, unbelievably, a piercing falsetto, harshly vibrant but bang on the note, soared up in a tremendous counter-tenor descant, that hung about under the smoke-laden ceiling joists until it
came toppling down to join the consort in a long-drawn unison Amen.

There was a second’s breathless silence, and then a roar of cheers and laughter. Benches were pushed back, drained tankards came down with bangs on the bare tabletops, and the company
began to bid each other good night. The landlord came through behind the bar, his hands full of empties, and apologized for the noise. John Smith shook his head at him and got slowly to his
feet.

“Ready for bed?” the landlord said. “I’ll get my wife to show you the room.”

John nodded and went out to the car. He pulled the hood over but did not screw down the clamps. His suitcase seemed unreasonably heavy as he lifted it out. The night was full of boots on tarmac,
and someone started up a car farther down the road. A man went past the archway, telling his companion that he’d be buggered if he did something that John could not catch. It was all
idiotically familiar and breathlessly unreal. He went back into the yellow light of the doorway, lugging his heavy suitcase.

The room was papered with rustic trellises, in which colored birds perched at predictable intervals among a repetitive profusion of seed-catalogue blossom. The window was curtained and he did
not look out.

It was the bells, ultimately, that woke him. . .