August 20th.
It was as if someone else had written it. Eyam’s prose was fluent and stagey: long sentences with plenty of asides placed between dashes that could try the reader’s patience. These staccato eruptions of sentiment weren’t him at all. And there was much else that jarred. For a start, Eyam hated dogs and white wine, even when it was very good. Montrachet was her favourite wine, not his. She remembered one of his rather obsessive monologues talking about the village of Montrachet on the Côte de Beaune, where he had once found himself looking for a restaurant. The village was dead; the houses had been bought as investments by the wine growers and were empty. There were no shops and no one about. It was like an abandoned film set, a place with no content, waiting for lines to be spoken to give it semblance of life. Montrachet was a fraud and so was its wine, he said.
He also loathed descriptions of sunsets, once saying to her that it was impossible even for a genius to evoke a sunset without seeming like a booby. Sunsets were off limits, as were all love poetry, walks in the moonlight and nightingales.
Which brought her to the cuckoo. She didn’t know much about British natural history but she did remember a verse her English grandmother had taught her: ‘ The cuckoo comes in April, Sings her song in May, Changes tune in the middle of June, And then she flies away. ’ The letter was dated in August by which time the cuckoo was well on its way back to Africa. Like the neighbour’s dog and the Montrachet, the cuckoo was a fraud. The cheese sticks too. Eyam was allergic to dairy products, particularly cheese. He had once keeled over at Oxford after eating cheese on top of a shepherd’s pie.
The sentence ‘I kiss your clever eyes for good fortune and the happiness that has not been ours’ touched her but she had to admit it didn’t sound like Eyam. He simply didn’t think that way, at least he never said or wrote such things. So the entire point of the letter was to warn her that he had been watched and that things at Dove Cottage were not as they seemed. It didn’t make any sense to her, because the letter was oblique in its meaning yet at the same time obviously coded. She rose and walked around the room, working through the events of the day.
The process of fixing the elements of a problem calmed her because she had a faith, acquired in part from Eyam, that no difficulty existed without a solution: optimism was the prerequisite for civilisation, he used to say. Without optimism humanity was ruled by fear and superstition. She dressed again, went downstairs and asked the man on reception if she could use the phone. Tony Swift, the coroner’s clerk, answered from his usual stool in the Mercer’s Arms. They met forty minutes later at a Thai restaurant a five-minute walk from the eastern end of the square, which with various diversions and feints took her the full forty minutes.
‘I wonder if I can ask you a few more questions about the inquest,’ she said when she sat down.
‘Are you all right? You look distraught.’
‘I fell over,’ she said. ‘Bruised my ribs and ankle. About the inquest: can you tell me about it?’
‘Off the record, sure.’
‘Why was the hearing held here?’
‘When Lady Eyam decided she’d have the funeral where her stepson lived, it became a matter for the coroner, because he has jurisdiction if a body lies within his district. We were notified that the remains would eventually arrive in High Castle and so the investigation - such as it was - went ahead.’
‘Its purpose being to . . . ?’
‘Establish the cause of death.’
‘Was there any kind of official interest in this case? Pressure from anyone?’
‘What are you asking?’
‘Did anyone try to stop you investigating what had happened in Cartagena?’
He eyed her thoughtfully. ‘You’re asking if I think he was assassinated, aren’t you?’
‘Well, it’s a
It was as if someone else had written it. Eyam’s prose was fluent and stagey: long sentences with plenty of asides placed between dashes that could try the reader’s patience. These staccato eruptions of sentiment weren’t him at all. And there was much else that jarred. For a start, Eyam hated dogs and white wine, even when it was very good. Montrachet was her favourite wine, not his. She remembered one of his rather obsessive monologues talking about the village of Montrachet on the Côte de Beaune, where he had once found himself looking for a restaurant. The village was dead; the houses had been bought as investments by the wine growers and were empty. There were no shops and no one about. It was like an abandoned film set, a place with no content, waiting for lines to be spoken to give it semblance of life. Montrachet was a fraud and so was its wine, he said.
He also loathed descriptions of sunsets, once saying to her that it was impossible even for a genius to evoke a sunset without seeming like a booby. Sunsets were off limits, as were all love poetry, walks in the moonlight and nightingales.
Which brought her to the cuckoo. She didn’t know much about British natural history but she did remember a verse her English grandmother had taught her: ‘ The cuckoo comes in April, Sings her song in May, Changes tune in the middle of June, And then she flies away. ’ The letter was dated in August by which time the cuckoo was well on its way back to Africa. Like the neighbour’s dog and the Montrachet, the cuckoo was a fraud. The cheese sticks too. Eyam was allergic to dairy products, particularly cheese. He had once keeled over at Oxford after eating cheese on top of a shepherd’s pie.
The sentence ‘I kiss your clever eyes for good fortune and the happiness that has not been ours’ touched her but she had to admit it didn’t sound like Eyam. He simply didn’t think that way, at least he never said or wrote such things. So the entire point of the letter was to warn her that he had been watched and that things at Dove Cottage were not as they seemed. It didn’t make any sense to her, because the letter was oblique in its meaning yet at the same time obviously coded. She rose and walked around the room, working through the events of the day.
The process of fixing the elements of a problem calmed her because she had a faith, acquired in part from Eyam, that no difficulty existed without a solution: optimism was the prerequisite for civilisation, he used to say. Without optimism humanity was ruled by fear and superstition. She dressed again, went downstairs and asked the man on reception if she could use the phone. Tony Swift, the coroner’s clerk, answered from his usual stool in the Mercer’s Arms. They met forty minutes later at a Thai restaurant a five-minute walk from the eastern end of the square, which with various diversions and feints took her the full forty minutes.
‘I wonder if I can ask you a few more questions about the inquest,’ she said when she sat down.
‘Are you all right? You look distraught.’
‘I fell over,’ she said. ‘Bruised my ribs and ankle. About the inquest: can you tell me about it?’
‘Off the record, sure.’
‘Why was the hearing held here?’
‘When Lady Eyam decided she’d have the funeral where her stepson lived, it became a matter for the coroner, because he has jurisdiction if a body lies within his district. We were notified that the remains would eventually arrive in High Castle and so the investigation - such as it was - went ahead.’
‘Its purpose being to . . . ?’
‘Establish the cause of death.’
‘Was there any kind of official interest in this case? Pressure from anyone?’
‘What are you asking?’
‘Did anyone try to stop you investigating what had happened in Cartagena?’
He eyed her thoughtfully. ‘You’re asking if I think he was assassinated, aren’t you?’
‘Well, it’s a
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