Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

Graham had run until he felt his lungs about to give up the ghost. He was no fitter than many of those he treated. Those whose hearts were marbled with creamy lines of fat, like cheap off-cuts.

He dropped down on to a bench to recover, to reflect on what had happened in the woods. To consider his rotten luck. If that man hadn’t come along when he had… A young woman with Mediterranean features was waiting to cross the road a few feet from where he was sitting. She was taking keys from her bag, probably heading towards the flats opposite.

She glanced in his direction and he dropped his elbows to his knees almost immediately. Looked at the pavement. Made sure she didn’t get a good look at his face.

The next High Barnet train was still eight minutes away.

Rachel stood on the platform, her legs still shaking, the burning in her breast a little less fierce with every minute that passed. The pain had been good. It had stopped her thinking too much; stopped her wondering. She sought a little more of it, thrusting her hand into her pocket until she found her wedding ring, then driving the edge of it hard against the fingernail until she felt it split.

Alan had thought it odd that she still took the ring off even after she’d told him the truth, but it made perfect sense to her. Its removal had always been more about freedom than deceit.

An old woman standing next to her nudged her arm and nodded towards the electronic display.

Correction. High Barnet. 1 min.

‘There’s a stroke of luck,’ the woman said.

Rachel looked at the floor. She didn’t raise her head again until she heard the train coming.

A discrepancy which often struck me in the character of my friend was that, although in his method of thought he was among the most well ordered of all mankind and in his manner of presenting an argument or pursuing an argument or pursuing a case or theory he was impeccably efficient, he was nonetheless in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a colleague to distraction. His disorderly study was strewn with manuscripts, books and periodicals. Scattered about the room were knives, forks, cups with broken rims, Dutch clay pipes, discarded pens, even an upturned inkpot. He kept his cigars in the coal scuttle and his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper. His unanswered correspondence was transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece. Everything was, one might say, ‘topsyturvy’.

His rooms reeked with the odour of the cheap tobacco that he had purchased from a small shop in Holborn, in the spirit of one of his more obscure economic inspirations. He had been taken by the slogan in the shop front that promised that ‘the more you smoke the more you save’ and had pointed out to me that by switching to this inferior brand he could save one shilling and sixpence a pound and, if he forced himself to smoke enough of the wretched stuff he might one day be able to live on his ‘savings’. I had long since given up trying to point out the absurdity of the ‘logic’ to one of the greatest materialist thinkers in Europe, just as I had also given up complaining about the downright untidiness of his domestic affairs. I have become familiar enough with them to no longer take much notice of these strange habits and idiosyncrasies, but in the process of introducing the young Lord Beckworth to him on that fateful afternoon (the intercession of a complete stranger forces you to renew what the first impressions are of an old friend), I confess that there was a brief moment of embarrassment on his behalf.

Yet if the young nobleman was at all taken aback by the odd circumstances of the great man, he showed it not one jot. Perhaps in deference to my colleague’s reputation for mental prowess, he simply overlooked this disordered clutter, or quietly acknowledged it as one of the vagaries of genius. I do not mind admitting my own deference to my old friend as a thinker, and resent not that his powers of reasoning and deduction far outstrip my own. I am resigned to the obvious fact that he is the dominant one in our partnership and see it as my duty to assist and support his great mind without complaint or jealousy, or even much thanks from the possessor of it. Indeed, it merely falls to me to facilitate, from time to time, the practicalities needed for this prodigious consciousness to bear fruit and to keep a sober eye on the mundane matters that he all too often neglects, his thoughts, as they say, being on higher things.

It was to this end that I had, in the first instance, invited the young Lord Beckworth to my friend’s lodgings. Lord Beckworth had expressed to me, when we had met earlier that year, at the house of a common acquaintance, a progressive Manchester manufactory owner, his great admiration for the work of my colleague and, more importantly, his desire to support, or even to sponsor, the continuation of his endeavours. My old friend was, at first, reluctant to be beholden to any third party in the way, convinced as he is of the need for independence in all matters. However, I managed to persuade him that he would be in no way compromised by any arrangement with this enthusiastic nobleman, and that the work itself was important enough for him to seek help from the most unlikely of sources.

Beckworth had his manservant with him, a dark, handsome-looking fellow called Parsons. The conversation that afternoon started out amiably enough with the character of a harmless politeness, but very soon it became strangely weighted with a darker and more sinister nature. Formalities had been observed with a certain jocular awkwardness. My colleague made a seemingly harmless remark about social class, I think it was an attempt to include Beckworth’s butler, when Lord Beckworth announced, one could almost say blurted out, as if wishing to unburden himself of a dark and terrible secret: ‘Privilege, sir, is a curse!’ My friend nodded and gave a vague and expansive gesture, as if agreeing that this ‘curse’ extended to us all, but the visitor shook his head vigorously and continued:

‘No, sir, I speak not of a general curse, but a very specific one! The hereditary principle, the very fact of primogeniture that one might call a bane on the world of men, is for me a very personal scourge.’

‘What?’ My friend retorted, frowning.

‘It is a matter of bad blood, sir. Parsons here is forever entreating me to deny the blight on my family name, but I cannot, sir.’

Beckworth looked for a moment at his manservant, who shrugged.

‘Well,’ said the butler slowly, ‘I have always wanted my lord to find blessings in life, also.’

Beckworth smiled briefly at this, then his mood darkened once more. And, as the early evening light faded, with a foreboding he recounted, the ‘curse’ of the Beckworths. It was related to us that the first lord of this unfortunate house was a certain Ralph Beckworth, of yeoman stock, who had found employment in the household of James I. He was, by all accounts, a good-looking youth and he soon became one of that king’s many ‘favourites’. He gained his title and no small fortune, but did so without merit or breeding but rather from an exploitation of the baser instincts. Ambition, lasciviousness and a general moral incontinence that had secured him an elevated station in society, all conspired to corrupt him fully once he had attained his rank. His were the temptations of power, without the necessary moderations of genuine nobility. His debauched revels became legendary and culminated in a terrible scandal. It seems that in 1625, the first Lord Beckworth, now grown ugly and malicious in appearance, had taken a shine to a young footman in his employ and no doubt wished to make him his own ‘favourite’, just as he had himself been despoiled as a young man so many years before. The footman, however, was not as compliant as his masters had been, but despite defending his honour with vigour, found himself imprisoned by that degenerate peer in an upper chamber of his Great Hall. Lord Beckworth and a crowd of flatterers and hangers on sat down to a long carouse, as was the nightly custom. The poor youth upstairs was likely to have his wits turned at the singing and shouting and the terrible oaths which came up to him from below, for they say that the lightest words used by Beckworth, when he was in wine, were such as might damn a man who used them. As it was, that evening there were loud declarations that he intended to exercise upon his unfortunate servant a droit de seigneur of the most appalling and perverse kind. The hapless footman, no doubt in utter despair at his fate, threw himself out of the upstairs window to his death on the cobbled courtyard below.