At times, Master Drew reflected, as he stretched before the fire, it was far better to pretend ignorance than boast his talent for gathering and interpreting the facts.
It was in the early hours of Thursday morning, four days later, that it was announced that Elizabeth of England had passed peacefully to death in her chambers at Richmond Palace. She would, as Sir Robert said, fear no more the heat of the sun, for she had fulfilled her worldly task and gone to receive her heavenly wages. The nation was in mourning. Already, a cortege had left Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh and was heading south into England bearing the thirty-seven-year-old James Charles Stuart, King of Scotland, Duke of Rothesay, Duke of Albany, Earl of Ross, and Baron Ardmannoch, who had now been proclaimed Elizabeth’s successor.
Copyright © 2010 Peter Tremayne
A Dark Reunion
by Kate Ellis
Kate Ellis’s longest running mystery series features archaeology graduate DS Wesley Peterson, who fights crime in South Devon, England. Each entry in the series combines an intriguing contemporary murder mystery with a parallel historical case. More recently, Ms. Ellis decided to create an additional series set in a fictional northern English city whose model is the real city of York. She has made many visits to York in recent years, and it’s there that she takes us in this new story.
Sorry. What did you say your name was?” I asked, looking the man in the eye. He had a broad face topped by a shock of fair hair. And something about his face seemed familiar. If only I could place it.
The stream of tourists, already out in force first thing on Monday morning, parted around us like the incoming tide around a pair of immovable rocks. We were getting in the way, holding up the flow of pedestrians through the Shambles, one of York’s narrower streets. I started to edge away but my companion stood firm.
“How did you enjoy the reunion on Saturday?” His lips turned upwards in a secretive half smile as though he was enjoying some private joke.
Enlightenment had come at last. We must have met at the school reunion but I had no recollection of it. It was clear that he recognised me, but some people, I knew, had a better memory for names and faces than I had. In my work as a writer, I always tended, so my ex-wife used to tell me, to walk through life in an imaginative haze where my creations seemed more real than the people around me.
I stood there trying to remember. The reunion for my year at Semchester High School for Boys had taken place in a hotel just down the road — the Viking Suite of the Royal Boar, all patterned carpets and flocked wallpaper. Being there had reminded me that I would be fifty next year and the slim waistline of my youth was a distant memory, as was most of my hair. But I took comfort from the fact that my former classmates were in the same sorry physical state — paunches and thinning hair seemed as uniform now as our school blazers and ties were back in our distant school days. Time had gnawed away like a rat at all of us, with the possible exception of Sebastian Sitwall. Sebastian had become an actor — he’d even appeared in a couple of TV soaps — and I suspected that he was no stranger to the cosmetic surgeon’s knife. But then, I’d never liked him much.
The reunion — the sight of all those aging bodies I’d last seen as lean, hopeful teenagers — had made me feel a little depressed and I must have drunk more than I normally would. I’d woken the next morning with a roaring headache and, although I remembered the dinner, the speeches, and the raucous singing of the school song, the later part of the evening was a complete blank, which surprised me, as I’ve always been able to hold my drink. Perhaps this was a sign of incipient old age. I remembered that Shakespeare speech we learned in the sixth form — sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
To tell the truth, I had found the reunion — or what I could remember of it — rather a disappointment. My friend Robbie hadn’t been able to make it and I’d found myself stuck with people who had been more acquaintances than friends during my time at Semchester High. Sebastian Sitwall had monopolised me for a time, as though he felt our occupations had formed some kind of bond between us. But I found that I liked him no more now than I had done during our school days. He’d been an arrogant bully then and, although time had added subtlety to his repertoire, I suspected that the unpleasant nature of the schoolboy still lurked beneath the veneer of sophistication.
The voice of the man who’d stopped me brought me back to the present with a jolt. “I didn’t manage to talk to you at the reunion. I think you were a bit out of it later on, then you seemed to disappear,” he said with a knowing wink. “Someone said you were a writer. What kind of things do you write?”
It was a common question, and all writers have an automatic answer. But I was so busy searching the recesses of my mind for his name that I heard myself stutter, “Er, sort of crime. Detective stories and all that.”
“So you get them published?”
I nodded, feeling a little stab of irritation that he hadn’t heard of me... but, on the other hand, so few people had.
I decided to tackle the problem head-on. If I offended this man, what would it matter? I might never see him again in my life. “Look, I’m so sorry but I really can’t remember your name.”
The man’s grin widened. It had been fixed there on his lips since he first greeted me and it was beginning to get on my nerves. It was as though he knew something that I didn’t. “Now I don’t believe that for one moment, Jack. You always did have a sense of humour.”
“Honestly, I don’t remember. You’ll have to give me a clue.”
The man’s smile became more guarded. “You write detective books, so clues are your department.”
I suddenly felt uneasy. It could have been my imagination, but his words sounded vaguely threatening.
I made a great show of looking at my watch. “Sorry. Got to rush,” I said, trying to sound like a busy man. The truth was, I’d just delivered a manuscript to my publisher so I had a precious period of leisure before she delivered her verdict — but I wasn’t going to let him know that. He was still smiling as I raised my hand in farewell and wove my way through a crowd of Japanese tourists, escaping down a side street and through the bustling market.
I hurried home to my flat on Bootham, walking swiftly through the narrow streets filled with ambling sightseers and past the golden magnificence of the Minster, hardly aware of my surroundings. I couldn’t think why the encounter with the anonymous classmate had unnerved me, but there had been something about him that didn’t quite fit in with his story. Or perhaps it was my imagination.
It was when I reached my flat that events really began to take a strange turn. Especially when I found two plainclothes police officers waiting for me by the front door.
I’d never been arrested before and I found the whole process rather surreal. I was taken to the police station and informed that I was being arrested on suspicion of murder before being placed in an interview room facing two detectives, a man and a woman, across a table. I had written about this so many times, but I’d never ever imagined that I’d be on the receiving end, and I must confess that I felt frightened. This wasn’t a story. It was real, and I didn’t understand why I was there.