The Rom were always very protective of their women. The term ‘communal existence’ didn’t come close; it was a vibrantly crowded life among siblings and parents, grandparents, great-grandparents – eating together, sleeping together, part of the same chattering organism, Al explained.
The point being that young gypsy women did not go for solitary walks. Outside the camp, even outside the vardo, they were always within sight of the brothers and the uncles. Part of the traditional defence mechanism.
So how could Rebekah disappear?
‘I’ll show you some photos of her sometime,’ Al promised. ‘You’ll see the long, coppery hair, the wide, white gash of her mouth as if she’d like to seize the whole world in her teeth. It gives you a small idea of what went wrong.’
No one could explain how Rebekah came to be quite as she was. Poshrat, didekai? No way. Her lineage was impeccable. This was a good family, and Rebekah was deeply grounded in the traditions. Also, she had the sight, had been dukkering from early childhood. Rebekah could read your palm and your very eyes. Rebekah could look at you and know. They used to say a true chovihani was the result of some dark union between a Romany woman and an elemental spirit. Well, everyone knew who Rebekah’s mother’s husband was. But her father?
‘If you look carefully at the pictures, you’ll see the courage and the arrogance. She was not afraid to be out there,’ Al said. ‘She was twenty-three years old, and they all said she ought to have been married.’
When she wanted to go off, for a night or longer, she’d always outwit the brothers and the uncles, who would suffer the consequential tirades from the wizened lips of the puri dai every time they lost her. But lose her they would, whenever Rebekah decided it was time to make one of her forays into the gaujo world.
It was as if something would be awakened in her during the hop-picking season in Knight’s Frome, when the gypsies were as close as they ever came to being part of a larger community. After she went missing, the police discovered she was already well known – or at least very much noticed – in some pubs in Bromyard and Ledbury, also further afield, Hereford, Worcester. A woman of the world, it seemed: two worlds, in fact. Rebekah Smith, once away from the camp, wore fashionable clothes, was never even identified as a gypsy. Where did she get those clothes? Who bought them for her?
It was clear she wanted out, the police said. She wanted the bigger scene. She’d be in Birmingham now, or Cheltenham or London. Or even in America. Wherever she was, she’d have landed on her feet. She was twenty-three years old, said the travellers. She should have been married.
She was dead, said their puri dai.
But no body was ever found.
And the Emperor of Frome, still raging in private over the corruption and defection of his wife? Oh, he was never even questioned in any depth.
Al looked like he wanted to spit.
Sally Boswell said, ‘We look at the 1960s and we tend to think that was not so very long ago. The young musicians now are all influenced by sixties music – the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead and people freaking out on hallucinogens, the voice of youth.’
She leaned forward under the wall-light, as if to make herself more real, her museum curator’s voice taking over. She must have been breathtakingly beautiful back then, Merrily thought.
‘But the sixties were a long time ago,’ Sally said.
Particularly the early sixties, when there was still an almost mystical aura around the Royal Family… when, in the countryside, this was still feudal England… when the Lakes were the squirearchy, clear descendants of the Norman marcher lords. And when their actions were not subject to examination.
Conrad Lake’s friends included MPs and would-be MPs like Oliver Perry-Jones. The Emperor dined and drank with senior councillors, magistrates, chief constables… and this was the time when the senior police would tend to be ex-army officers with medals from the Second World War, men for whom stability meant the preservation of a hierarchy – and the structure – at all costs. When the police knew their place.
‘Conrad was himself a magistrate for a time,’ Sally said. ‘He was also Worshipful Master of the local Masonic lodge. And the gypsies were vagrants, and their so-called culture was primitive. And they lied, of course. And they also had a grudge against Conrad. So when the police were told that Rebekah Smith had been seen getting into Conrad’s car…’
‘And they were told,’ Al said. ‘There was more than one witness.’
‘Uncles or brothers?’ Lol asked.
Al smiled. ‘You see the problem.’
Merrily saw how intense Lol had become, as though he’d channelled his confusion and distress into an urgent need to know.
‘Isabel told me the police finally concluded the gypsies had simply made it up to get back at Lake for banning them from his hop-yards,’ he said.
Sally nodded. ‘That was one suggestion, yes.’
‘But she also thought Stewart Ash had evidence linking Lake to the disappearance. Does that mean he just spoke to the gypsy witnesses who the police chose to disregard?’
‘Oh, more than that,’ said Al. ‘It would have to be more than that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like photographs. She took a very good picture, did Rebekah.’
Merrily stayed quiet. Lol hadn’t told her any of this – not that there’d been time.
‘Especially naked.’ Al’s eyes glinted metallically. ‘Gypsies aren’t the most inhibited of folk, and Rebekah – well, she was not the most inhibited of gypsies. I imagine there would have been times when she had Conrad crawling to her feet.’
‘Conrad took many photographs,’ Sally said quickly. ‘He liked to have photos of his land and the things he owned – or wanted to own. He’d bought all the most expensive equipment.’
‘You sound as if you know that Stewart had pictures,’ Lol said.
‘Well, of course.’ Al extended long hands that bore no signs of arthritis. ‘We know Stewart found some of them when he was carrying out his rudimentary renovation of the kiln. Stored behind the furnace, like a private porn collection. For a long time, Stewart preserved the old furnace. I guess it would be – when?’ He looked at his wife. ‘Early last year? When he decided it was going to have to come out to make more kitchen space.’
‘It was certainly well into the spring when he showed you one of the photographs and asked you if you recognized the woman.’ Sally turned to Lol. ‘When the furnace came out, the builder had found a space at the rear, well away from the heat, where the bricks could be removed. And that was where an old briefcase had been stowed. It contained, apparently, about two dozen photographs. Of the same naked woman.’
‘Though not necessarily the same hop-bine,’ Al said.
Merrily saw Lol flinch slightly. She drew the cardigan around her. She didn’t like where this was going.
‘And those pictures of Rebekah,’ Lol said. ‘They were going in Stewart’s book, right? So where are they now?’
Al laughed. ‘You tell me. He showed me just the one. He said he had the others. We became excited, naturally, that an old mystery might be solved, an old injustice exposed. But I warned him to keep quiet. Obviously, it must not get back to Adam Lake.’
‘And did it?’ Merrily asked. She wasn’t convinced this would have exposed an injustice. What was there to link these pictures to Lake?
‘Well, if it did, it wasn’t us who told him,’ Al protested.
‘If it did get back to Adam,’ Sally said, ‘it was probably through Stewart himself. Consider: Stewart bought the kiln at a knock-down price, after the receivers moved in – Conrad’s death being almost contemporaneous with all this.’