Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Gazing from the poorly-printed image, Hervey might be taken for a magistrate saving the lack of judgement in his calm, still eyes; saving the faintest twitch of humour at one corner of the primly pursing lips. The contour hatching that defines the village rector’s pleasant features, razor sharp lines eaten into steel by aqua fortis, breaks down to a pointillist particulate in the blotched reproduction although the fine details of complexion remain visible. What seems to be a wart is artfully positioned at the outer edge of the left eye, a feature Studs feels is a mark of some distinction in a man, while riding the right cheekbone is a mole or, judging from its perfect Monroe placement, some kind of cosmetic artificial spot. Given the almost prideful lack of vanity displayed in Hervey’s choice of resting place Studs feels this latter possibility is something of a long shot, although there remains a certain prissiness or femininity to Hervey’s face which makes the beauty-mark hypothesis seem almost plausible. It’s more than the peruke or periwig or whatever the hell it’s called that Hervey’s wearing in the picture, it’s the air of gentleness and receptivity the man exudes.

Studs thinks back to a passage from his recent readings upon Hervey’s time in Oxford, where the fledgling preacher had become the close friend of another Holy Club inductee, one Paul Orchard. Even the guy’s name was fruity. During one of Hervey’s intermittent bouts of ill health in his middle twenties, he went down to live with Orchard for two years at Stoke-Abbey in Devonshire, where the two men drew up a contract vowing to watch diligently over one another’s spiritual wellbeing. While this isn’t as suggestive as, say, Jeremy Thorpe’s billet-doux to Norman Scott, it seems to speak to a male friendship that went some way beyond hanging out and taking shots at beer cans. Taken in the light of Hervey’s lifelong bachelor existence, dwelling with his mother and his sister right up to the early, breathless end, Studs gets the picture of a man with certain leanings that could never have been expressed physically and so were sublimated in a somewhat overheated love of Christ and Christian fellowship. It would seem safe to say that in his general manner just as in his florid literary style, James Hervey was a touch theatrical.

This only leaves the Boys School scuttlebutt, the casual afterthought material, which is predictably where Studs at last gets his transcendent roulette moment. The astonished croupier gasps “Incroyable!” and as Studs is sauntering away from that last chip he’d tossed dismissively onto the table he’s called back and laden with his unexpected winnings. He is studying without enthusiasm an unprepossessing summary of the establishment when the detail that’s been right under his nose the whole time reaches out and hits him in his face until it isn’t even ugly anymore. It’s what’s been gnawing at him ever since his earlier drive-by reconnaissance of the imperious brick building on the Billing Road, and it’s there in the printout’s second line, just underneath the recently-adopted smug school motto promising A Tradition of Excellence , where it says Established1541.

Northampton’s School for Boys was nowhere near the Billing Road at its inception. Founded by Mayor Thomas Chipsey as the ‘free boys grammar school’, it had initially been some way further west and situated in a street to which it had, Studs realises belatedly, given its name: in Freeschool Street, Ben Perrit’s erstwhile home down on the Boroughs’ edge, where the eponymous school was located for some sixteen years. Erected when Henry the Eighth was on the throne it had been moved in 1557 to St. Gregory’s Church, which at the time extended into Freeschool Street, suggesting that the relocation wasn’t too demanding. Situated in the same place until 1864, this would have been where Hervey studied from age seven to age seventeen back there in the 1720s. A stray comment which Studs must have skimmed somewhere amongst the other evidence comes back to him, a casual pronouncement by John Ryland, a contemporary of Hervey’s and his earliest biographer, to the effect that Hervey’s childhood place of education had been little better than a down-at-heel charity school. Studs nods, grave and perversely photogenic. Given that it was down in the Boroughs it’s unlikely that it could have been anything else but a well-meant attempt to generally improve the district’s juvenile unfortunates, even back in the rowdy sixteenth century. Northampton, with the ancient neighbourhood that once was its entirety, would have been some few hundred years into a somehow purposeful decline by then, punished and scorned by earlier Henries. For his own part, Studs suspects that the blacklisting of the town goes back much further, possibly to local anti-Norman insurrectionary Hereward the Wake, a figure not unlike the locally connected Guy Fawkes in that he’s been banished from the history lessons just as surely as the town itself is banished even from regional TV weather maps. If the grandfather of the Gothic movement had to spend his formative years somewhere then the Boroughs was undoubtedly the perfect cradle, full of lice and fatalism.

Studs has found the smoking gun. He levers his numb carcass from the grass like someone opening a bone umbrella. Brushing irritably at the ghost-green trimmings clinging to his leather jacket he retraces his steps through the sparsely populated cemetery and in passing notices the yokel-noir effect of pinstripe shadows falling onto sunlit paving through a churchyard gate. A black smudge on the lens of afternoon he makes his way back to the baking Coupe de Ville, air shimmering over its hardtop in a layer of hot jelly. Clambering inside he hums the windows down to cool the mobile oven off before he roasts, and once more fails to come up with a hard-boiled way of buckling his seat belt. Maybe if he spat contemptuously on the dashboard halfway through the operation, or perhaps coined some particularly pungent simile for how it’s often difficult to get the metal fastening into the plastic slot? Like “it was harder than a twenty-stone Samoan drag queen doing Chinese calculus in … some …” He’ll work on it.

Remembering that he still has his reading glasses on, Studs carefully removes them and returns them to an inside pocket before firing up the engine, whereupon the smoke-grey Duisenberg roars out of Weston Favell, a land-bound torpedo heading for the distant heat source of Northampton’s centre by the shortest route available. The hamlet’s still-deserted streets are an abandoned set, their ochre stonework only painted background flats that are now folded up and put away into the compact space of a smeared rear-view mirror. Thundering along the Billing Road he screeches past the modern incarnation of the Boys School, non-existent prior to 1911, and his self-recrimination at not tumbling to a solution sooner has the sour taste of brass knuckles in the teeth of victory. For a noir private eye like Studs, of course, this is the perfect outcome. Unadulterated triumph is unthinkable when the real satisfaction of your chosen occupation lies in ethical, emotional and physical defeat; in the acknowledgement, with Hervey, that all cases closed or mortal glories are made insignificant in their comparison with the big sleep.

An afternoon sun left too long to steep has stewed the light so that it has more body and a slight metallic aftertaste as it pours, off the boil, on the asylum and the cemetery’s untidy marble overgrowth, onto the hospital that Hervey had helped Philip Doddridge and John Stonhouse to establish. Executing a left turn at the unhurried traffic lights beside Edward the Seventh’s stained bust with its birdshit coronet, Studs coasts down Cheyne Walk past the hospital’s maternity facilities, his progress halted by another set of lights down at the bottom of the hill near Thomas Becket’s drinking fountain. Childbirth, martyrdom, twisting together in the dull steel spines of Francis Crick’s half-hearted Abington Street monument, the sexless superheroes spiralling up in genetic aspiration under undecided weather, flight frustrated and their heels forever rooted in the monkey street. A light descends in stages through the signal’s pousse-café, from grenadine to crème-de-menthe, and Studs is gliding on Victoria Prom with Beckett’s Park and the generic supermarket forecourts that are understudying an unwell cattle-market, smearing by him on his left. Once past the Plough Hotel at Bridge Street’s lower end, down in the Saturday night blood-sump, he negotiates an unexpectedly byzantine series of right turns before arriving in the parking area which backs on to the Peter’s Place arcade in Gold Street. Once again he pays, displays, and leaves his possibly gang-tagged Corvette hunched on its chewed-up asphalt slope beneath the big bowl full of valley sky. Removing from the vehicle enclosure through its lowest exit, narrowly surviving a traverse of the dual carriageway there at Horsemarket’s rank monoxide foot, he skulks around the slow curve of St. Peter’s Way towards the raised and unkempt patch of grass that had once been the western reach of Green Street, where he clambers two or three feet from smooth pavement onto ragged turf and takes the Boroughs from behind.