The three of them had arrived at Yoxhall, the town outside the Priory, just the day before Cale and Sister Wray’s trip up Biggin Hill. For a hundred years Yoxhall had been a spa town where the reasonably well-off came to take the waters and visit their relatives in the Priory, which had grown up there in the belief that the local hot spring was beneficial in the treatment of those suffering from ‘nerves’. It was out of season and easy to get lodgings with a view of the main gate of the Priory. It wasn’t possible to arrive at an exact plan until they’d thoroughly examined the site and laid out a strategy or two for escaping. While they were eating breakfast early that morning, an excited Kevin had rushed down from overlooking the gates to report that Cale, and some sort of strange nun he’d seen about the place a couple of times when he was incarcerated, were headed towards Biggin Hill. They followed, realizing that more suspicious good luck was offering them a golden opportunity even though the Two Trevors didn’t believe in golden opportunities. It was clear Cale and the nun were heading for the top but they kept stopping to rest so the three of them were able to get well ahead, even though they had to take a much steeper route to scrutinize the cut in the hillside that Kevin assured them would be an excellent place for an ambush. He turned out to be right – he was ugly and offensive but not stupid. In fact, when he wasn’t boasting or making people uneasy he was astute in a distastefully coarse way.
In addition to their dislike of unexpected good fortune, there was also the problem of the nun or whatever she was. It was more than just a professional reluctance to kill someone they hadn’t been paid to, but a moral uneasiness. The Trevors weren’t deluded enough to believe that everyone they killed had got what was coming to them, though it was usually true. Indeed it was probably always true. Why would anyone spend the huge amounts needed to hire the Two Trevors on someone who was innocent? But however ideal a place this was to slaughter Thomas Cale – who unquestionably deserved what was coming to him – there was no way they could leave either a witness or someone to raise the alarm. Therefore it was with peculiar mixed feelings that they watched as Cale and the nun turned back. There were no mixed feelings from Kevin Meatyard: he punched the ground with frustration and swore so loudly that Trevor Lugavoy told him to shut up or he’d be sorry. They waited an hour and then made their silent and bad-tempered way back down the hill.
The Trevors were not the only observers that day. Watching from a beautifully kept maison de maître at the bottom of Biggin Hill were Daniel Cadbury and Deidre Plunkett.
Their late arrival that morning in pursuit of the Two Trevors meant that it was only when Cale and Sister Wray returned, followed an hour later by the two men and their lumpy companion, that Cadbury realized he’d come close to failing to protect Cale. Either something had gone wrong or for some reason the Two Trevors were following Cale but were not intending to kill him. But what could they be up to if it wasn’t a killing?
Even though it was off-season for Yoxhall there was enough business from the families of the wealthy mad to keep things ticking over. Cadbury didn’t want to risk going into the town and stumbling into the Two Trevors so he decided to send Deidre instead. They had, of course, seen her briefly when he brought them back to Spanish Leeds but she’d been dressed in her usual sexless serge outfit. Something could be done about that.
Cadbury ordered the bumpkin who looked after the house to fetch a dressmaker.
‘You do have dressmakers?’
‘Oh yes, sir.’
‘Tell him to bring a selection of wigs. And keep your mouth shut, and tell the dressmaker to do the same.’ He gave the bumpkin two dollars, and five for the dressmaker.
‘Do you think five dollars was enough?’ he said to Deidre when the old man had left. He wasn’t interested in her opinion concerning the hush money, he was just trying to get her to talk. He needed to find out if she was aware that he had murdered her sister. The more time he spent with this woman, who was even more peculiar than the late Jennifer, the more it preyed on his mind. Deidre rarely said anything much. But whenever he asked her a direct question she would reply with some gnomic saying – or what seemed like one. Whatever she said was delivered with a faint smile and in a tone so laconic that it was hard not to think that she was mocking him. At times she seemed as silently knowing as a smug Buddha. But what was she wise and silently knowing about? Was she just biding her time?
‘Enough is as good as a feast to a wise man,’ she said, in reply to his question about the money. Was there a glint of scorn flickering in the depths of those flat and unresponsive eyes? And if so, what did it mean? Did she know and was waiting? That was the question. Did she know?
As there was nothing else to be done until the bumpkin reappeared, he tried to read. He brought out his new copy of The Melancholy Prince, the old one having fallen apart during a visit to Oxyrinchus to arrange for the removal of a corrupt official responsible for the city’s rubbish tips. He was corrupt in the sense that he was holding back on Kitty the Hare’s share of the profits, owed to him by virtue of the fact that it was Kitty the Hare who had paid the bribe to put him in charge. When he sadly decided to throw away his crumbling copy of The Melancholy Prince – so many memories – he was intrigued to see that his soon-to-be victim had rather cleverly divided the local bins into different ones for food, miscellaneous trash and paper. According to his contract with the city he was supposed to take the paper to Memphis, where he claimed it could be sold to offset the cost of disposal and hence explain why his bid for the contract was lower than that of his rivals. This was a lie. In fact he took the paper out into the nearby desert and buried it.
Now Cadbury opened his new copy and began reading, but though it was pleasurable to read again the familiar words (‘Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remember’d’), Deidre’s silent presence put him off.
‘Are you much for books at all?’ he asked.
‘Of making many books, there is no end,’ she replied. ‘And much study is a weariness of the flesh.’
Was there a smile there? he thought. There was definitely a smile.
‘You don’t think that knowledge is a good thing, then?’ Cadbury’s tetchy sarcasm was not at all in doubt.
‘He that increases knowledge,’ she said, ‘increases sorrow.’
This actually did annoy him. Cadbury was an educated man and took his own learning, and the learning of others, seriously.
‘So you don’t take the view that the unexamined life isn’t worth living?’ More sarcasm.
She did not say anything for a moment, as if allowing his outburst to land in the dry air of the room, dusty with motes in the shafts of sunlight coming through the small windows.