A King Among Pawns

By John Trethewey

Orchestral violinist Sebastian Martin is sacked by his orchestra for publicly ignoring the incompetent conductor, thus providing a brilliant solo. His life is invaded by a psychotic fabulist young actress who thrives on a diet of mendacity. Pyromaniacs like fire, kleptomaniacs like thieving . . . I live on lies. I cant live without acting. I simply cant. Id die if I didnt have a lie to live out. When Martin is accused of her murder, his life disintegrates in total chaos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Dec 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491886496

John Trethewey

Born in 1950, the son of grammar school teachers, young John Trethewey promised himself that he would never follow that profession. Although determined to be a composer, he embarked on his first novel at the age of eighteen. Over the following forty years, he has produced ten novels, a five-act stage play, and several major works for orchestra. A gifted linguist, in 1973 he decided after all to take up teaching. He has taught in several schools, with the twenty years leading to his retirement as teacher and director of studies in a Swiss international school. With wide interests, he particularly admires the music of Berlioz, the performances of the late Sir Colin Davis, and the lyrics of singer Al Stewart. This novel, the last in the series The Baines Saga, finally reveals the cosmic element that has increasingly been prevalent in events throughout the saga. It is a powerful dénouement to a long saga.

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© 2013 John Trethewey. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/16/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-8648-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-8649-6 (e)

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Contents

Christmas 1988

Chapter 1   Saturday, December 23Rd 1988, 16.00—20.00

Chapter 2   Saturday, December 23Rd 20.00—Sunday, December 24Th 09.00

Chapter 3   Sunday, December 24Th 09.00—13.00

Chapter 4   Impromptu—The Seeds Of Destruction

Chapter 5   Sunday, December 24Th 14.00—20.00

Chapter 6   Sunday, December 24Th 20.00—21.00

Chapter 7   Sunday, December 24Th 21.00—Monday, December 25Th 08.00

Chapter 8   Monday, December 25Th 08.00—14.00

Chapter 9   Monday, December 25Th 14.00—Tuesday, December 26Th 05.00

Chapter 10   Tuesday, December 26Th 16.00—23.00

Chapter 11   Wednesday, December 27Th 09.00—Thursday, December 28Th 02.00

Chapter 12   Thursday, December 28Th 09.00—13.00

Chapter 13   Thursday, December 28Th 13.30—14.30

Chapter 14   Thursday, December 28Th 14.30—Friday December 29Th 02.30

Chapter 15   Friday, December 29Th 02.30—09.30

Chapter 16   Friday, December 29Th 10.30—14.30

Chapter 17   Friday, December 29Th 23.00—Saturday, December 30Th 03.00

New Year1989

Chapter 18   Saturday, December 30Th 12.00—24.00

Chapter 19   Sunday, December 31St 00.00—09.00

Chapter 20   Sunday, December 31St 09.00—18.30

Chapter 21   Sunday, December 31St 18.30—20.00

Chapter 22   Sunday, December 31St 20.00—22.00

Chapter 23   Sunday, December 31St 21.00—24.00

Chapter 24   Monday, January 1St 08.00—09.30

Chapter 25   Monday, January 1St 10.00—Tuesday, January 2Nd 10.00

Chapter 26   Tuesday, January 2Nd 10.00—Tuesday, January 2Nd 18.00

The Descent Into Hell

Concerto Disperato Ed Agitato

CHRISTMAS 1988

NEW YEAR 1989

THE DESCENT INTO HELL - ACT 5

CONCERTO DISPERATO ED AGITATO

CHRISTMAS

1988

CHAPTER 1

Saturday, December 23rd 1988, 16.00—20.00

Lowering clouds in a darkening sky cloaked the looming stonework of York Minster like a dismal, grey overcoat. The massive central tower was a barely visible pale splash against the wintry sunset. Heavy rain drummed relentlessly on the waiting line of taxis as I turned out of the station. It was bitterly cold. Even in a heavy coat, my head down against the chill wind, I was shivering. It wasn’t only the wind, though, I hadn’t got over the brawl on the train. I had been lucky to get away without a scrap. I am not a man who excels in violence or self-defence. To do with my profession, perhaps. Whatever, I was still shaking.

What a dump, an offensive and violent dump. I picked my way through the abundant dog mess and occasional pools of vomit staining the cracked and uneven paving stones. That anyone should consider this state of affairs acceptable on the eve of the new decade appalled me. I suspected that if I stopped a chance passer-by and shared my thoughts, I would meet with the universal and pathetic ‘But things aren’t as bad as all that’, apathy born of impotence. Or perhaps a mindless pseudo-intellectual, cackling on about the lovely carols last night with ‘so many nice people there’, as if that meant there were nothing wrong. There was a lot wrong.

How blind, I wondered, did one have to be, how many self-imposed lies did a society have to inflict on itself, not to notice what was happening? How many credit card aphrodisiacs and placebos? Not to see that the entire country was moribund, its economy, its cultural heritage and its importance in shaping the world on the brink of extinction. A socio-political compost heap, the ‘multi-cultural society’ in which, for millions, culture was a dirty word.

My feelings were coloured, of course, by the reason for my visit, and the brawl on the train. But not only that. For God’s sake, this wasn’t some backwater valley town suffering from recession and gross unemployment. This was York, a major tourist centre, one of the few cities in Britain where the railway station had signs in four languages. And one of many with dog mess all over the kerb.

Night was falling, and I was feeling less and less secure as I cut across the car park from the railway bridge through the litter-ridden back streets. I hadn’t been to Britain for more than five years, and not to York for much longer, but never in my wildest dreams, nor my summary glances at the ‘Daily Telegraph’, had I imagined that things could have fallen so low.

The key that Mary had given me wouldn’t turn in the lock, and I wondered for a moment whether she’d changed it. Before I could start to apply some force, and I felt very much like it by then, the elderly neighbour came out with the nosiness one often finds in maisonette occupants. On my very infrequent visits I had struck up a superficial acquaintance with the inquisitive Mrs. Lomas.

‘Well! Mister Martin!’ Her face was a picture, her voice very Yorkshire. ‘Blurry ‘ell, tha’ gave me a shock. Wot tha’ doin’ lad?’

‘Trying to get in,’ I said stupidly, conscious that my brittle English accent placed me firmly in the snob bracket for her. Also, I detested being called ‘lad’.

‘Well, why di’n’ thi ring at t’door an’ ask me for’t key, then?’ Her voice was impatient, but that didn’t mean that she felt impatient, she had always talked like that, slowly and with an inbuilt contempt for anyone who spoke differently.

‘I have a key,’ I showed her, ‘but I can’t get it to…’

‘Give it ‘ere, lad!’ She was a large woman in her sixties. The key turned in her hand. It would, I thought. ‘Ah’d’ve thought t’d be thi’ sister that’d coom. Din’ expect ter see thi, that’s fer sure.’

She was a gossipy old bat, and I wanted to get inside and out of the rain, so I said briefly: ‘Sara’s expecting, in fact she’s probably in labour right now. And anyway, she shouldn’t always have to do the dirty work.’

‘That’s reet, lad, she shouldn’t.’ She peered curiously up the darkened stairway to the first floor flat, and sniffed at the musty odour. ‘Ee, it were a bad do. Our Bill found ‘er, dead as a doornail, lyin’ in’t back yard. If t’d ‘appened termorrer, she might ‘ave laid there fer days… Off termorrer night fer a month in’t sun. Tenerife,’ she added proudly. ‘But it were a reet bad do…’ she started again.

‘I know,’ I interrupted her shortly. ‘Sara told me.’ I thanked her for her help with a degree of insincerity that she couldn’t fail to notice, and pointedly closed the front door behind me, leaving her staring after me through the glazed panel.

The place stank. It was years since I had had to do this, the last time had been after the death of my mother. At least then I had known the house, and the area of Cornwall where I’d grown up, it had had some meaning, some memories. And that time there had been a real grief, a loss that Sara and I had shared. There had been few enough things that we had ever shared; Sara was ten years younger than I, which meant that by the time I was sixteen, she was just starting Primary school. You don’t grow up very close like that. But the neighbour, Mrs. Lomas, had been right about one thing; Sara shouldn’t always have to do the dirty work.

Aunt Mary—some people go on being ‘Auntie’ even when you’re going on forty yourself—Aunt Mary had not been good at looking after herself, nor the flat, and there was no sign of the hand of a cleaning lady. Not only did it stink, a quick glance at the kitchen and bathroom showed a thorough disregard for even basic hygiene. I stopped in the living room, sat down in the only armchair and took stock.

The telegram from Sara’s husband had been curt to the point of rudeness. We had a mutual distaste for each other that bordered on open hostility. Pete Rogers was a West-country Yuppie. What Sara ever saw in him was a mystery to me. Our lives had gone very different directions. I had been more than twenty years out of England, and it had long ago fallen to Sara to play the role of dutiful daughter. Normally she would have dealt with Aunt Mary’s estate now, but Sara was nine months pregnant, so Pete had cabled me to come over.

This had presented me with several difficulties. Living in Switzerland, it was inconvenient to leave my work at any time. Worse, the Lausanne Symphony had a full schedule for Christmas and the New Year. By rights I should have been at my desk in the second violins nearly every night from Christmas Eve to the end of January. As it was, I had had to call in a lot of favours very quickly, managing to get three different players to cover my engagements. But the price would be high, for the conductors—we had two—were not the most understanding of people. I didn’t like to think of what might happen if one of my stand-ins missed a rehearsal, or, worse by far, an actual concert.

I pulled out the telegram to check the name and number of Mary’s lawyer. The clock on the mantelpiece had stopped, and my watch was still an hour ahead of GMT. It took me a moment to work out that I might still reach Randall, Randall and Hogg before one or all of them went home for the night. I had completely forgotten that it was a Saturday, and there would be nobody at the office. But I was in luck. Someone was. Randall Junior—’came in specially to wait for your call’—had been expecting me. Could I get a taxi right away? I said I could, and he asked me to bring the metal document case that he said Mary kept hidden under the bed.

I was surprised at Randall’s information, but when I asked him, he expressed a certain impatience. ‘Get on over here, please, Mr. Martin. It’s our job to know these things.’ I didn’t think it was, and I didn’t like his tone. I rang for a taxi.

The sky was quite dark now, and the streets were alight with festive decorations and the yellow glare of car headlights on the black, wet tarmac. Nothing, though, could alleviate the cheap and tawdry Christmas illuminations above the thoroughfares along which we drove.

My taxi driver was a talkative, gum-chewing youngster who looked and sounded thoroughly jaded. ‘Christmas?’ He spat with derision. ‘Fuck off. I’ll be working Christmas Day, and I still won’t have enough to buy the kids anything reet. In this country you either got too much, or sod all.’

‘You’re self-employed, then?’ I didn’t really care.

‘I’m what?’ He laughed unpleasantly. ‘I draw the dole. There’s no money in this racket.’

‘But isn’t that… ?’

‘Probably.’ He guessed what I had been going to ask. ‘So what?’

We drew up outside a concrete monstrosity on the banks of the River Foss, and I gave him a couple of pounds tip, suddenly embarrassed at the strength of the Swiss franc and the man’s predicament. What has been happening all these years, I wondered, for things to have gone so thoroughly down the drain?

Randall Junior was all right. That was my first impression. It didn’t last long.

I had suggested that, as executor of Mary’s will, and given the brevity of my visit, he might take care of the management of the estate. I didn’t realise until much later what the little smile hovering around his thin lips represented, a gold mine in lucrative rake-offs. He even agreed to find a decorator to do the place up.

‘The funeral is tomorrow morning, ten o’clock at the Crematorium.’ He handed me a document from the undertaker. This brought home to me that I ought really to visit the morgue and view the corpse, perhaps even identify the body. But Randall had already taken care of that. ‘Unless you have some particular sentimental reason,’ he said in his reedy, legal, voice, ‘I really wouldn’t recommend it.’ He coughed, a sound more of embarrassment than of winter. ‘The fact is, she has donated her organs to medical research. As executor of the will, and under pressure from the doctors to act rapidly…’ His voice died away and he failed to meet my eye across the desk.

‘I see. No. No, I don’t particularly want to waste my time identifying a skeleton.’ I was shocked at my own words, my former indifference suddenly flaming into temper.

‘Oh, I say, now look here Mister.. euh.. Martin.’ He hadn’t liked the skeleton bit.

‘Well, supposing I had?’ I broke in angrily. ‘Supposing I had had some particularly close relationship with my aunt? Supposing I had wanted very much to take a last farewell… Well? D’you think I’d have been very pleased, to find a cut-up corpse, and half of it missing? Hey?’ I couldn’t remember when I’d last been so angry. Randall took a paper from the dossier in front of him.

‘But Mr. Rogers gave his authorisation.’ He passed across a fax from Sara’s husband, seeming to find my reaction unreasonable.

‘Stuff Mr. Rogers!’ I didn’t even look at the fax. ‘Who’s he to send out authorisations? He is… he was no relation of Mary’s. I think it’s disgusting. But…’

‘What’s done is done,’ he agreed, trying to placate me. I stared at him.

‘True.’ I wiped my face wearily. It had been a long day, two flights in bumpy turbulence, then the airport bus to Piccadilly station, and the awful journey across the Pennines in the rattling, filthy little rail bus. Not to mention the louts with whom I had clashed in the train. They hadn’t liked something about my appearance, and any excuse would do for ‘a bit of bother’.

I turned to Randall again. ‘Well, if you’re prepared to deal with the flat, will you put it on the market when it’s fit to sell, and get the best price available? How much would that be, d’you think?’ I had been out of England for so long that I didn’t believe him when he told me it would easily fetch sixty thousand. ‘For that dump?’ I cried. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Not in the state it’s in now, no,’ he agreed, ‘but with a bit of redecorating… In fact, I think I may very well already have a buyer lined up, and one who won’t quibble at the price.’ He suddenly went off at a tangent. ‘I’ll get a warehouse to store the furniture and belongings. If you would tag any belongings you’d like to come to you, I can draw up a list and send a copy to Mrs. Rogers, for her approval. Do you foresee any conflicts there?’ he wanted to know.

‘With Sara? No.’ I stared at him antagonistically. ‘With Mr. Rogers, yes, probably.’

‘Mr. Rogers has no say in the matter,’ replied Randall stupidly. I handed him back the fax with Pete’s signature, and he had the grace to blush. ‘Ah.’ He put the document back in the file. ‘Are you thinking of staying in York long? Will you need an hotel, or are you… ?’

‘No.’ I stood up. ‘I’d expected to stay four or five days. But now I can probably get a flight back tomorrow. Coming at all was inconvenient,’ I told him, ‘and I didn’t even know Mrs. Haines very well. My aunt,’ I added.

‘I see.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Well, I shall be in touch about the contents of the flat. And a deposit on the property. Will you want a taxi?’ His hand reached for the phone.

I said no, I’d take the bus, and left him, muttering an insincere Season’s Greetings. His brief handshake matched the sideways glance at the clock. He wanted to be rid of me. He nevertheless came down the stairs with me, pointing out the bus stop across the road.

Randall knew his stuff, it was I that was all screwed up. I was almost convinced of that by the time I left him. A bus splashed to a grinding halt beside me, brakes squealing.

I began to wonder again. The vehicle was no more than a battered minibus, in South America they have them everywhere, Porpuestos they’re called, picking up and dropping off more or less anywhere along a designated route. But since when had York been on a par with Bogota or Caracas?

When I had paid and taken a front seat in the miniature coach, I began to wonder some more. Perhaps Randall wasn’t all right after all. Perhaps I wasn’t screwed up, but a lot about Great Britain was.

A well-mounted notice on the bulkhead, well-worded too, advised women that harassment, assault and rape were an immediate problem. There followed a long list of precautionary measures, so comprehensive as to convince me that York city centre by night or day was Jack the Ripper’s playground, and civilisation long since gone to perdition. So much for Christmas.

I reached the flat around six. The stench and the dirt turned my stomach, and although I was hungry, I felt no inclination whatever to cook anything. Nor was there any food in the fridge.

On my way in, I had picked up the local rag that had been thrust through the letter box. A front page advertisement caught my eye. ‘Cinderella.’ Pantomime. It was twenty years since I had been to a panto, but I’d played in enough of them as a teenager, learning my trade as a violinist for a pound a night.

Rather than face the tedium of ploughing through Aunt Mary’s tin box, still less hunting out a few choice antiques for myself, I stared at the advertisement in indecision. I didn’t want to spend the evening in the smelly flat, still less make up a bed there, but I knew the latter was inevitable. On a sudden impulse, I decided to go to the Pantomime anyway. Live music and a laugh. I recalled that at that very moment I was supposed to be playing at Lausanne Beaulieu concert hall, Bruckner’s ‘Romantic’ symphony. I wished to God I had not had to come near York. There was nothing romantic about this parody of Bethlehem and its Miracle plays.

I didn’t find the pantomime fun after all. The audience seemed to, but perhaps they understood the corny jokes and the Ugly-Sister-Thatcher barbs that I found to be in thoroughly bad taste. The so-called musicians were a Limited Company PLC, consisting of two synthesisers and a drum kit. It was scarcely musical and entirely mechanical. If we had played like that back in the sixties, the theatre would have been empty. There appeared to be a total absence of anything approaching discrimination. Of the three theatres in York, I wondered whether I had picked the bottom of the barrel.

Finally, I had forgotten the depths of vulgarity that Panto might plumb. When the man playing Cinderella’s putative mother-in-law appeared with two enormous and sprouting pineapple halves attached as breasts, I decided enough was enough. I left the theatre, drew my coat round me in the chilly breeze, and set off for a long walk that I intended should help me sort out some of my ideas. It did nothing of the kind.

CHAPTER 2

Saturday, December 23rd 20.00—Sunday, December 24th 09.00

The main shopping street in York was a chilling mixture of credit card doorways and nasty clothing emporia. It was the day before Christmas Eve, and a lot of businesses had closed down early. The people loitering in Coney Street that night ranged from spotty teenage couples and the odd window-shopper to a proliferation of lager-louts with a vocabulary limited to three words.

I had left the well-lit streets by now for the darkened path along the bank of the dismal, stagnant waters of the river Foss. I fell to thinking that probably some Roman centurion, on night patrol all those countless years ago, centuries ago, soon after the birth of Christ, must have wondered, as I was wondering, what the hell he was doing in an alien city, far from home, in foul weather. His brother would have stood duty on Hadrian’s wall, fending off the violent Picts, a people as brutally aggressive as any football hooligan now. Nothing had changed in two thousand years.

‘Well it bloody well ought to have!’ screamed an inner voice. ‘It hasn’t,’ replied common sense. ‘Why the hell not?’ shrieked the violin in my head.

The path I was following ran behind some deserted and graffiti-ridden warehouses, their gabled arches and long since disused hauling gear fallen into crumbling disrepair. The only illumination came from a cracked street lamp some fifty metres distant, casting a feeble yellow pool of light on the black and wet riverside path.

There was grass to my left, and clumps of hawthorn that had once been a hedge. It was a pure fluke that I saw it at all, a pale whitish mass half-hidden in the darkness and the dead hedgerow. I stopped when I recognised what it was, my mind suddenly in turmoil, and at the same time revolted.

I looked back the way I had come, and then ahead again. All was still, the only sound the drip of the water from the trees and the strange, breathing, squelch of wet earth that has been drowned for too long in torrential rain. Even at that distance and in the gloom, I could see it was a girl’s leg, naked from ankle to hip, the mass of the body hidden under the hawthorn bush.

I moved quickly towards the body lying sprawled there, suddenly aware that perhaps Aunt Mary had looked like this when they found her, dead, at the foot of the outside back staircase to her flat. With different injuries to be sure, no one in their right minds would have thought of raping an eighty-five year old woman.

But this girl could scarcely be more than eighteen or twenty, although it was hard to tell in the impossible light there. I bent over her, sickened, and sensing that to touch her was not perhaps the right thing. If she were conscious, then any man… And if she were unconscious, or dead?

Her clothes were sodden with rain, what few clothes were left on her, and her naked breasts gleamed wet and cold in the pale light. I tore off my coat and wrapped it round her, for she was conscious after all, and shaking all over. I had never known that a person could tremble so violently.

Her hair was stringy and wet, straggling in strands across her cheek. Her eyes flickered open, moist pools of darkness in the night, and when she finally managed to focus on me, her hands came out instinctively to my face, a pale scream welling in her throat. Fingernails raked my cheeks around the eyes, I flung an arm across my face in involuntary self-protection, and tried to tell her it was all right, I was not the man, not the one who had done this to her. But it didn’t help. I was a man, and she was beyond rationale. I didn’t know then that she spoke almost no English, and so couldn’t understand me anyway. Nor the rest.

There was the abrupt sound of footsteps on the path behind me. Before I could turn to call for help, a powerful hand grabbed me by the collar, pulling me to my feet. I was just conscious of a beer-filled gasp of ‘Fookin rapist bastard.’ Then a single violent blow below the belt put out the lights. The muddy ground came up to meet me, my eyes registered the heavy boot drawing back, and that was the last I knew until the wailing siren of a police car dragged me back to the present.

I had resisted arrest, the police officer said later. I hadn’t, of course, but the bastard was already convinced I was Jack the Ripper, and he had a daughter of her age, so he just let fly. I wanted to bring charges against the bastard, but they pointed out that, in that case, I would have to stay in England for several weeks, and that was the last thing in my mind. After all this I had wanted to be on the first plane out of the pesky dump, and good riddance.

There was a single bare table, one chair on each side. Doors gave onto adjacent rooms to left and right. No windows. No handles on the doors. A singularly frigid police constable dumped me on a chair, then moved to stand by one of the doors. The whole room was brightly lit with a lot of fluorescent light that dazzled me, a constant flickering that would have had an epileptic in ‘grand mal’ within seconds. I guessed there were no epileptic policemen in York.

It wasn’t difficult to piece together what had happened. A ‘decent’ citizen had happened along the tow-path of the river Foss soon after me, seen me bending over the girl in the undergrowth, put two and two together to make a very hasty four, and let his ‘decent’ side rapidly get the better of him. In all truth I did not and do not blame him, for later I got to know him slightly, and I think that in his place I might have made the same assumption. But the police officer…

He told me later that night, apologetically, that the local JP was considered soft on sex offenders, and a lot of the police tended to pre-judge things. I did not forgive him so easily.

They left me there for a long time, it felt like hours, just me and the waxwork figure of the police constable. Blood was oozing from a wound to my head, where the girl’s well-intentioned saviour had placed his boot. Other bruises stabbed through my gut, the result of the sergeant’s summary justice. I was sufficiently worried about the bruising to ask to use a washroom to assess the extent of the damage. The constable’s sole response to all my requests was a meaningless monosyllabic grunt. I think he was happy to see me suffer.

About forty-five minutes after they brought me in, one of the doors opened and a burly plain-clothes detective entered the room. He came straight to the table, a thin folder in his left hand.

He seemed to tower over me, a fit thirty year old with protuberant thyroid eyes and fair hair middle-parted. It was no accident that the folder caught me a glancing blow to the side of my head as he sat down.

‘Sorry,’ he said, his monotone showing no contrition. He had a high, almost feminine pitch of voice, devoid of inflection. ‘So, you’re the man…’ His voice became aggressive, and all I could think of was my teenage television years, and Barlow and Watt, the ‘Z Cars’ characters. You can see how long it is since I lived in England, and why.

‘A lawyer.’ My voice didn’t sound a bit normal, I had to work hard at getting the words out. ‘You think that I… ? No, I want my lawyer, and I want him now.’

‘Name?’ The police detective shot the word at me in the same monotone. I unhesitatingly replied with Mary’s lawyer’s