‘You could feel this one comin’,’ he told Detective Inspector Gutkind.
‘You knew there were family troubles?’
‘Everybody knew. But no more than usual. We all have family troubles.’
‘So in what sense did you feel this one coming?’
‘Something had to give. It was like before a storm. It gave you a headache.’
‘Was it something in the marriage that had to give? Did the murdered woman have a lover?’
‘Well who else was that lying with her in those pools of blood?’
‘You tell me.’
Pascoe shrugged the shrug of popular surmise.
‘And did the husband know as much as you know?’ Gutkind asked.
‘He knew she put it about.’
‘Was he a violent man?’
‘Ythel?’
‘Ade.’
‘The place is full of violent men. Violent women, too.’
‘Are you saying there are many people who might have done this?’
‘When a storm’s comin’ a storm’s comin’.’
‘But what motive would anyone else have had?’
‘What motive do you need? What motive does the thunder have?’
The policeman scratched his head. ‘If this murder was as motiveless as thunder I’m left with a long list of suspects.’
Pascoe nodded. ‘That’s pretty much the way of it.’
That night he went alone to a barn dance in Port Abraham. His wife was wrong in assuming he was too lazy to be unfaithful to her.
iv
Densdell Kroplik generously offered to sell the police multiple copies of his Brief History of Port Reuben at half price on the assumption that it would help with their enquiries. Yes, he told Detective Inspector Gutkind, there were violent undercurrents in their society, but these appeared exceptional only in the context of that unwonted and, quite frankly, inappropriate gentleness that had descended on Port Reuben after WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED — see pp. 35–37 of his Brief History. Why Port Reuben had had to pay the price — bowing and scraping and saying sorry — for an event in which it had played no significant role, Densdell Kroplik didn’t see. Nothing had happened, if it happened, here. WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, happened in the cities. And yet the villagers and their children and their children’s children were expected to share in the universal hand-wringing and name-changing. In his view, if anyone was interested in hearing it, the Lowenna Morgenstern case came as a welcome return to form. In a village with Port Reuben’s proud warrior history, people were supposed to kill one another. . Where there was a compelling argument to do so, he added, in response to Detective Inspector Gutkind’s raised eyebrow.
‘And what, in your view, constitutes a compelling argument?’ the policeman asked.
‘Well there you’ll have to ask the murderer,’ Densdell Kroplik replied.
‘And what’s this about a proud warrior history?’ Gutkind pressed. ‘There haven’t been warriors in these parts for many a year.’
Densdell Kroplik wasn’t going to argue with that. ‘The Passing of the Warrior’ was the title of his first chapter. But that didn’t mean the village didn’t have a more recent reputation to live up to. It was its touchy individualism, its fierce wariness, that had gone on lending the place its character and kept it inviolate. Densdell Kroplik’s position when it came to outsiders, the hated aphids, was more than a little paradoxical. He needed visitors to buy his pamphlet but on balance he would rather there were no visitors. He wanted to sing to them of the glories of Port Reuben, in its glory days called Ludgvennok, but didn’t want them to be so far entranced by his account that they never left. The exhilaration of living in Ludgvennok, which it pained him to call Port Reuben, walled in by cliffs and protected by the sea, enjoying the company of rough-mannered men and wild women, lay, the way he saw it, in its chaste unapproachability. This quality forcibly struck the composer Richard Wagner — if you’ve heard of him, Detective Inspector — in the course of a short visit he made to Ludgvennok as it was then. In those days husbands and lovers, farmers and fishermen, wreckers and smugglers, settled their grievances, eye to eye, as they had done for time immemorial, without recourse to the law or any other outside interference. Sitting at a window in a hostelry on this very spot, Wagner watched the men of Ludgvennok front up to one another like stags, heard the bacchante women wail, saw the blood flow, and composed until his fingers ached. ‘I feel more alive here than I have felt anywhere,’ he wrote in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck. ‘I wish you could be with me.’1
Der Strandryuber von Ludgvennok, the opera Wagner subsequently wrote about the village (and dedicated to Mathilde, who had by that time given him his marching orders), was rarely performed; this Densdell Kroplik ascribed not to any fault in the composition but to the lily-livered hypocrisy of the age.
‘All very laudable,’ Detective Inspector Gutkind conceded. As it happened, he had not only heard of Wagner, a composer beloved of his great-grandfather, but kept a small cache of Wagner memorabilia secreted in his wardrobe in fealty to that passion. He could even hum some of the tunes from his operas and went so far as to hum a few bars of the Siegfried Idyll to show Kroplik that he too was a man of culture. Nonetheless, ‘All very laudable but I have a particularly savage double murder on my hands, not a few high-spirited drunks kicking nine bells out of another,’ was what he said.
‘Your point being?’ Densdell Kroplik wanted to know. He was irked that the detective inspector had heard of Wagner, let alone that he could hum him. He wanted Wagner for himself.
He was sitting in his favourite chair by the fire. In all weathers a fire burned in the Friendly Fisherman. And on most evenings Densdell Kroplik, steam rising from his thighs, sat by it in a heavy seaman’s sweater warming and rubbing his hands. He cultivated a take it or leave it air. He knew what was what. It was up to you whether you wanted to learn from him or not.
‘My point being that it gets me nowhere to be told Port Reuben is back to doing what it has always done best.’
Densdell Kroplik shrugged. ‘It might,’ he said, ‘if you understood more about the passion for justice and honour that has always burned in the hearts of the men of these parts.’
‘I doubt that a passion for justice and honour had anything to do with the murder of Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock.’
Densdell Kroplik pointed a red, fire-warmed finger at the policeman. ‘Is that something you can be sure of?’ he said. ‘There was a famous five-way murder here about a hundred years ago. Two local women, their husbands, and a lover. Whose lover was he? No one was quite sure. Am I hinting at pederasty? I might be. All that was certain was that he was an aphid — which makes pederasty the more likely. Buggers, the lot of them. From the north or the east of the country, it doesn’t matter which. Somewhere that wasn’t here. A pact was what the coroner decided it had been, a love pact born of hopeless entanglement. They’d gone up on to the cliff, taken off their clothes, watched the sun go down and swallowed pills. What do you think of that?’
‘What I think is that it doesn’t help me with my case,’ Gutkind said. ‘A pact is suicide, not murder.’
‘Unless,’ Kroplik went on, ‘unless the villagers, motivated by justifiable disapproval and an understandable hatred of outsiders, had taken it upon themselves to do away with all five offenders. In which case it wasn’t a mass suicide but a mob attack in the name of justice and honour.’