The Stranger House. Reginald Hill

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СКАЧАТЬ was sitting at a table with a double espresso and a chocolate muffin which was far too sweet but she ate it anyway. She glanced up to see Madero passing with a cappuccino and a cream doughnut. Though he wore no clerical collar, there was something about him—his black clothing, the ascetic thinness of his face—which put her in mind of a Catholic priest, and she looked away. For his part all he registered was an unaccompanied child whose exuberance of red hair could have done with a visit to the barber, but most of his attention was focused on maintaining the delicate relationship between an unreliable left knee and an overfull cup of coffee.

      She left five minutes before he did and they spent the next hour only a couple of miles apart in heavy traffic. Then a van blew a tyre a hundred yards behind her and spun into a truck. Miraculously no one was seriously hurt, but as Sam’s Focus sped merrily north, Madero and his Mercedes SLK fumed gently in the accident’s tailback.

      From having time to spare for his two o’clock appointment in Kendal, he was already half an hour late as he reached the town’s southern approaches.

      On the map Kendal looked to be a quiet little market town on the eastern edge of the English Lake District, but there seemed to be some local law requiring all traffic in Cumbria to pass along its main street, which meant it was after three when he drew up before the chambers of Messrs Tenderley, Gray, Groyne, and Southwell, solicitors.

      Knowing how highly lawyers price their time, he was full of apology as he was shown into the office of Andrew Southwell.

      ‘Not at all, not at all, think nothing of it,’ said Southwell, a small round man in his early thirties who pumped his hand with painful enthusiasm. ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. Dr Coldstream speaks very warmly of you. Very warmly indeed.’

      ‘And of you too,’ said Madero.

      In fact what Max Coldstream had said when he mentioned Kendal was, ‘You’re in luck there, Mig. Chap called Southwell, Kendal solicitor, and mad keen local historian. OK, so he’s an amateur, but that can be an advantage. Professional historians on the whole are a deceitful, distrusting, conniving and secretive bunch of bastards who would direct a blind man up a blind alley rather than risk giving him an advantage. Enthusiastic amateurs on the other hand may lack scholarship but they often have bucketloads of information which they are eager to share. Painfully eager, if you’re in a hurry!’

      It only took a couple of minutes for Madero to appreciate Coldstream’s warning.

      ‘That’s fascinating, Mr Southwell,’ he said, interrupting a potted history of the chambers building. ‘Now, you will recall from my letter I’m on my way to talk to the Woollass family of Illthwaite Hall in connection with my thesis on the personal experience of English Catholics during the Reformation. By chance I came across a reference to a Jesuit priest, Father Simeon Woollass, the son of a cadet branch of the family residing here in Kendal. I thought it might be worth diverting to see what I could find out about him. A priest in the family must have made the problems of recusancy even greater, as perhaps your researches have already discovered.’

      This was the right trigger to pull.

      Southwell nodded vigorously and said, ‘How very true, Mr Madero. But I know you chaps, hands-on whenever possible, so let’s take a walk and see what we can find.’

      Next moment Madero found himself being whizzed down the stairs, past the receptionist who desperately shouted something about not forgetting the partners’ meeting, and out into the damp afternoon air, where he was taken on a whirlwind tour.

      ‘It’s curious,’ said Southwell as they raced from the library to the church. ‘What really got me interested in Father Simeon wasn’t you, but this other researcher who was asking questions, must be ten years ago now. Irish chap, name of Molloy. Poor fellow.’

      ‘I don’t recognize the name. Did he publish? And why do you say “poor fellow”?’

      ‘He did a few things, pop articles mainly. Not a serious scholar like you, more of a journalist. But nothing on Father Simeon. Never had the chance really. He was something of a rock climber, took the chance to do a bit while he was up here, by himself, very silly, and he had this terrible accident…are you all right, Mr Madero?’

      ‘Yes, fine,’ lied Mig. Twinges in his still unreliable left knee he was used to, but the other injuries he’d suffered in his own fall rarely troubled him now. This lightning jag of pain across his head and down his spine had to be some kind of sympathetic echo. In fact during his own fall he couldn’t even remember the pain of contact…

      ‘You sure?’ said Southwell.

      ‘Yes, yes,’ said Mig impatiently as the pain faded. ‘And he was killed, was he?’

      ‘Died as the Mountain Rescue carried him back. He wasn’t so much interested in the background as in what happened when Father Simeon got captured. The book he was writing was actually about Richard Topcliffe—you know about him, of course?’

      ‘Elizabeth’s chief priest-hunter, homo sordidissimus. Oh yes, I know about him.’

      ‘Well, it was Topcliffe’s northern agent, Francis Tyrwhitt, who captured Simeon and took him off to Jolley Castle near Leeds to be interrogated. That was Molloy’s main interest, torture, that kind of stuff. Ah, here’s the church. Note the Victorian porch.’

      It was clear that, despite his conviction that academics preferred to do their own research, Southwell had already dug up everything there was to dig up about Simeon and recorded it in the folder he carried. Madero was tempted but too polite to suggest that a lot of time could be saved if he simply handed it over. Happily after a couple of hours the man’s mobile rang. He listened, then said, ‘Good Lord, is it that time already?’

      To Madero he said, ‘Sorry. Meeting. Lot of nothing, but old Joe Tenderley, our senior partner, tends to get his knickers in a twist. Look, why don’t we meet up later? Better still, have dinner, stay the night. Meanwhile you might care to browse through my notes, see if there are any gaps you’d like me to fill.’

      Madero waited till he’d got the folder firmly in his grip before thanking the man profusely but refusing his kind offer on the grounds that he was already engaged in Illthwaite, which if a bed-and-breakfast booking could be called an engagement was true.

      Back in his car, he rejoined the tidal bore of traffic, intending to retrace his approach to the town and take the road which Sam Flood had followed some hours earlier around the southern edge of the county, but somehow he found himself swept away towards somewhere called Windermere. He stopped at a roadside inn, brought up a map of Cumbria on his laptop and saw he could get across to the west just as easily this way. Feeling hungry, he entered the pub and ordered a pint of shandy (England’s main contribution to alcoholic refinement, according to his father) and a jumbo haddock. As he waited for his food, he took a long draught of his drink and opened Southwell’s folder.

      Out of reach of the solicitor’s voice and with the evidence of the man’s hard work before him, he felt a pang of guilt at his sense of relief at parting company. For every sin there is a fitting penance, that’s what he’d learned at the seminary. It would serve him right if his haddock turned out stale and his chips soggy.

      It had been a stroke of luck that the man he was interested in had been closely linked to one of Kendal’s foremost merchant families during the great period of the town’s importance in the field of woollen manufacture which was Southwell’s special interest.

      Simeon Woollass СКАЧАТЬ