The Archivist Read online

  Once he was on the open road he began to feel more hopeful that he would resolve at least this problem once and for all, but as the drive continued he began to fret. He knew the route to the Hall like the back of his hand, but his distraction caused him to take a wrong turn somewhere outside Oswestry and he spent an anxious twenty minutes travelling through an ugly built-up area. By the time he broke free of the suburbs again, the weather had changed. The sky ahead looked heavy and featureless and the countryside had been devastated by the recent snow which had left pockmarked grey lumps on the verges. He checked the time on the clock on the dashboard, and to his horror saw that it was nearly two o’clock in the afternoon. Then he remembered he hadn’t managed to work out how to reset it last October when the clocks changed. Even so, he was running much later than he intended.

  Eventually he arrived at the Hall. He weaved through the weekend trippers who were scattered around the courtyard and drove on towards the part where Sam had her flat. In his early years he and Patricia had been offered this very flat over the stables, but he had persuaded the land agent to let them have one of the cottages on the north of the estate down by the river walk, which he felt was more fitting to the job he had been appointed to do. He didn’t want to be associated with the staff on the private side who lived in. He wasn’t going to seen as a servant to the earl. Patricia had hated the cottage. It was damp and only saw the sun for a few hours in the morning during the summer. She would have preferred the flat in the Hall.

  He pulled himself out of the car, manoeuvred his stick from between the seats and made his way into the arch and slowly up the stairs. He heard the door above open and Sam leant over the banister to greet him. She was looking crisp but casual – he wasn’t used to seeing her away from work. He couldn’t help wondering what she had looked like when she was young. ‘Come on in,’ she said. He followed her into the flat and caught her scent – fresh shampoo and mint. He found it hard not to gaze at the tight fabric of her jeans as she walked ahead of him, but then he stumbled over the small step into the sitting room a split-second before she said ‘Mind the step’ over her shoulder to him. ‘Can I make you a coffee?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ he said, feeling a little puffed.

  ‘Straight or decaf?’

  ‘Let me see.’ He paused for a moment to give an impression of indecision before he said, ‘Go on then, make mine a belter.’

  Sam left the room to make the coffee and he sank down into the corner of the old sofa to get his breath back. He stretched his leg out to the side of the coffee table – it was more comfortable if he could keep it straight. The fire in the grate had been lit recently and the kindling was still cracking. An ember sparked out and landed on the rug, red hot. BS leant forward and extinguished it by mashing it into fine charcoal with the ferrule of his stick. The smell of burnt wool crept into the room and he scanned the rug to make sure there were no further smouldering pieces. The fire cracked again and he tried to manoeuvre the spark guard across to protect the rug, but he couldn’t do it with his stick. He sank back into the sofa and looked around.

  Sam had made an effort to personalise the flat. There were some new cushions on the sofa, a faux fur rug draped over the back of the armchair, a vase of lilies on the top of the bookshelf, and some photographs of Sam with an attractive young girl – her daughter, he assumed. Then he noticed the letter on the table in front of him. He recognised the type, the short staccato sentences. He could feel his heart beat beneath his rib cage. ‘Is this it?’ he called through to her, surprised at the tightness of his throat.

  ‘Yes,’ came a voice, ‘that’s it. Have a read. I won’t be a sec.’

  With difficulty he pulled himself forward on the sofa and reached out for the letter. Goodness, it was hot in this room.

  Mrs Westbrook

  We understand your boss’s health is not good and will get worse.

  The archive department will face many taxing challenges soon.

  This may be a splendid opportunity for you to leave.

  A wellwisher

  He felt so relieved he almost laughed out loud. It wasn’t bad at all. It was clearly aimed at him, not Sam. It would be a bitter blow to the Hall if she abandoned her work on the exhibition. He would be left to pick up the pieces, and if he was completely honest with himself, he wouldn’t be able to make as good a job of it as Sam planned to do. On a personal level he would be sad to lose her: she was witty and efficient and, he didn’t mind admitting to himself, extremely attractive for a woman in the autumn years of her life. Not that he would have acted on that attraction. He was a man of letters, an intellectual, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t able to appreciate admirable qualities at a baser level.

  Sam came in with two mugs of coffee and sat on the armchair facing him. ‘Horrid, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘What do you make of it?’

  He laid the letter back on the table and stroked it flat with his hands, balancing in his mind the best way to explain. Sam picked up the empty envelope which she had also left on the table and said, ‘You can see that it was franked at the Hall yesterday, and it’s been typed on the Chief Executive’s notepaper. But it can’t possibly be from his office.’

  ‘No, no,’ said BS, ‘of course not. Of course not.’

  ‘I tried to ring his office this morning.’ BS’s gut gave an uncomfortable lurch. ‘But it’s Saturday – no one’s there.’

  ‘He doesn’t need to know,’ said BS. ‘I can assure you it’s nothing to do with him.’ He sounded more abrupt than he meant to.

  Sam looked straight at him. She was frowning. ‘Nothing to do with him? Someone has written to me on his paper, and you think he doesn’t need to know?’

  ‘How are you anyway?’ BS asked.

  ‘I’m fine. You’re the one we should be worried about. But why do you think the CEO doesn’t need to know?’

  BS was beginning to feel annoyed. He must control his temper, keep things calm. On the way over he had convinced himself that with a lot of sympathy and understanding he could persuade Sam that this was some kind of silly prank, and the best possible course of action was to ignore it completely.

  ‘Because,’ he said, ‘it’s probably some kind of silly prank, and the best possible course of action is to ignore it completely.’

  ‘Prank?’ said Sam. ‘This isn’t a prank. It’s a poisoned pen letter.’

  ‘Now look here, dear,’ BS said. ‘You are a very capable, intelligent woman and you know that on a number of issues I will defer to your opinion. But on this occasion I feel very, very strongly that we shouldn’t overreact.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we?’ Sam fixed her gaze on the old archivist and went on, ‘but you’re the one who leaped into his car and raced over here to discuss it.’ BS felt stung, then offended. How dare she be so short with him.

  ‘That’s absolutely no way to speak to your boss,’ he retorted. He could feel his breath coming more quickly as he stared back at her implacable gaze. He saw a tremor crease the lines of her forehead, and then she laughed softly, shook her head and looked away.

  He reached out for the mug of coffee and said; ‘Mustn’t let this get cold.’ The hot liquid went down like prussic acid, and he pressed his fingers into his solar plexus. A flame flared then subsided in the grate and the logs shifted and settled making the fire spit again. ‘Don’t you think we should put the guard across that?’ he said. ‘I’ve already had to snuff out a spark on the rug.’

  Sam looked across at the fire. She got up and dropped a couple more logs into the grate before putting the fireguard in front of it and returning to her seat. She waited for him to continue. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that I may possibly have overreacted but that’s only because –’ he reached forward and put the mug carefully down on the slate coaster in front of him – ‘this is not the first time it has happened.’

  ‘Really? Are you serious?’ He had her back on his side again now.

  ‘Completely, I’m afraid.’ BS paused to gather his thoughts
before continuing. ‘I have to tell you that over the last year or so I –’ he stressed the last word heavily then continued – ‘and, I am sorry to say my wife, have been victims of similarly scurrilous and unpleasant missives which have been – how shall I put it – even more disturbed and vicious in nature.’

  ‘Good heavens! How extraordinary. So who’s writing them? Do you know?’

  ‘In matters such as these it is almost impossible to establish salient issues as absolute facts.’

  ‘I know, but you must have some idea.’ BS had a very good idea. ‘Can I see them?’ she said.

  BS raised his right hand to calm her. He closed his eyes and furrowed his brow as if he was weighing up the pros and cons of her request, when in reality the very last thing he wanted was to have anyone else read those blasted letters.

  When he opened his eyes Sam was sipping her coffee and watching him. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Can I see them?’ She put her cup on the table and picked the letter up again. ‘Look, BS,’ she said, ‘I don’t like this,’ and she flicked the page with the back of her fingers, ‘and I haven’t been at the Hall long enough to guess who could have written it. If you have other letters, we could compare them and narrow down the field. In the meantime, I’ve a good mind to pin this on the staff room notice board. Then the letter writer can listen to your colleagues roundly condemning them.’

  ‘No, no,’ BS said, ‘don’t do that. You really shouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Because ...’ If Sam did make hers public it would force his hand and when he thought of the letters he felt shamed, abused. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘I think you would regret it terribly. After all, you don’t want people to think that you’re the sort of person who would get a letter like that.’

  ‘What?’ And he knew he had explained it badly. ‘With the greatest respect,’ she said, ‘I am not prepared to take this lying down. What possible reason can you have for keeping this thing under wraps?’

  ‘Prudence?’ he tried.

  Sam flung her hands up in the air and brought them heavily back down on to her knees.

  ‘All right, all right. I’ll tell you what we will do,’ BS said in order to placate her. ‘If you can assure me that for the moment this will go no further than these four walls, then I can’t see the harm in you reading them. If I can find them.’

  ‘If? You must know where they are.’

  ‘I do. I think I do.’ He could feel her frustration. ‘The thing is, I didn’t like keeping them at home. Patricia found the whole thing very upsetting. She’s bound to, isn’t she? Someone writing scurrilous letters filled with accusations and lies. Some were sent directly to Patricia at our home address, some were sent to me here, at the Hall. Simon Keane got one too.’

  ‘The CEO?’

  ‘Yes, but about me. I have a copy of that one too, I think. Look, I’m sorry, filing isn’t my strong point, and I haven’t looked through them for months. Why would I? I just kept hold of them in case I needed them for evidence, that sort of thing, but the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to make them public.’

  ‘I can’t understand why.’

  ‘You will when you see them.’ BS stared across the room. His eyes alighted once more on the framed photographs. ‘Is that your daughter? The one who’s in America?’

  ‘Yes. That’s Claire.’

  ‘Pretty girl.’

  ‘The letters.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He pondered a little longer, then said, ‘Why don’t we meet down in the muniments room sometime on Monday morning? I should have rounded them all up by then.’

  ‘And that’s easy to find?’

  ‘Yes, it’s down in the undercroft ...’ and BS paused. Surely she knew where the muniments room was.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine. It’s just that I thought you knew where that was.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  BS could feel negativity rising in him again, soaring to another crescendo of anxiety. ‘Because you’ve been down there?’ he said slowly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how ...?’ He paused again, trying to gauge if his next question would throw them down another bumpy path of speculation, but he had to know. ‘How did you find the inventory?’

  ‘I didn’t. Maureen Hindle gave it to me.’

  - 19 -

  The days were lengthening but on Monday morning that cunning east wind followed BS along the empty corridors and down into the undercroft, robbing him of any sense of hope that summer was around the corner. He was chilled to his core – his internal thermostat had given up the ghost. He had woken before the dawn chorus and lain in bed suffering as his body was swept alternately with shivers as if someone was dripping iced water down the back of his neck, and intense waves of heat which slicked his flesh with a flop sweat. Now that he was up and dressed and limping along the icy corridors in the undercroft, he would have welcomed the return of that heat, but all he could feel was gelid tremors running through his bones. He was seized with a terror that there was, in fact, something mortally wrong with him. Could it be, he wondered, withdrawal symptoms from the caffeine he had been forced to give up? Or had they missed some vital clue about his collapse which would only be revealed when they did an autopsy?

  His morbid train of thought jolted to a stop when he reached the door of the muniments room, unlocked it and pushed it open. He turned on the light, and it spilled out into the corridor and on to the flags of stone where he had lain, clutching his chest, trying to make sense of the bubbling, booming voices washing around him. He was able to recall now with total clarity the woman’s voice he had heard calling for help: Maureen Hindle. It was she who had taken his keys, who had slipped into the muniments room and removed the inventory. What else had that virago done while he lay helpless and dying on these cold flags?

  Collecting the letters hadn’t been an easy task. He had squirrelled them away in various locations. A few turned a few up at home in the attic, the ones that had been sent to Patricia were locked away in their desk. He spent a fruitless afternoon searching the house for the one to Simon Keane (he only had a copy), but eventually tracked it down in the office at the Hall on Sunday afternoon, having concocted another story for Patricia to explain his trip. She would be expecting a spectacular anniversary present at this rate.

  He lumped his rucksack up on to the table and checked his watch to see how long he had before Sam arrived. He hadn’t read some of the letters in over a year and wanted to have a look at them first. He remembered the gist of them, but as he took them from the rucksack one by one and reread them, he was shaken anew by the contents. He had remembered certain sentences in one of them:

  Bull Shit Moreton and his harem of adoring women ...

  Too arrogant and proud to guess we see right through you. Great intellect? You can’t be trusted, shouldn’t be trusted ...

  Man of God? Servant of Satan ...

  and in another:

  Corrupter of flesh. How old was the pupil in Manchester? A lot younger than Donna who has fallen now ...

  and more recently in one addressed to Patricia:

  Do you know he is at it again? Probably not – wives are the last to know. Tired of Donna and on to Sam. He doesn’t care who knows. It stokes his pride that we all know, the great Lothario. Have you found his Viagra? He must need it with you. Or does he just think about the others ...

  He stared at the laid vellum envelopes he had learned to dread, identical to one another except that some had stamps, others had been franked and one delivered by hand. He looked at the pages themselves, these neatly typed pieces of bile which he was about to share with someone else. He knew his own mind was capable of inflicting far greater brutality and judgement than other people’s perception ever was, but the reason he felt so uncomfortable was because deep down he recognised that the letters held more than a grain of truth. He knew he had made mistakes – who hadn’t? But he did his job to
the best of his abilities and he never forgot the privilege he enjoyed as archivist. He had never been unfaithful to his wife – at least not in the last twenty years, he was a good Catholic, but he had on more than one occasion been guilty of the odd impure thought. However, he didn’t feel it was wrong to have an attractive female assistant, given the choice. He liked to put his new assistants at their ease, so he felt the occasional lunch at The Blue Acorn to discuss work was justified. But these vicious letters took his innocent practices as some sort of proof that he was calculating and mendacious, lascivious and manipulative.

  He was startled out of his reveries by Sam’s arrival. ‘Good morning, BS,’ she said. ‘No, no, don’t get up,’ and he sank back down on to his chair. ‘Is that them?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ Momentarily he had the urge to gather them up out of her sight, but as she swung her coat over the back of the chair, she pulled them over towards her. He watched her reading and as she read she shook her head, looked up at BS in astonishment, moved on to the next one and gawped; and the next which pushed her back into her chair.

  Eventually she said, ‘Oh BS, these are just horrible. Horrible for you, horrible for Patricia. Heavens, they make mine seem pretty tame.’

  ‘I believe,’ BS said, ‘that the degree of disturbance in this person’s mind is reaching a serious level. I believe she is a very damaged individual who, perhaps when life becomes intolerably stressful, begins to do this.’

  ‘So you do know who wrote them?’ Sam said.

  ‘I have a good idea.’

  ‘Do I know this person?’

  ‘Yes, you do.’ He felt his heart beating fast.

  ‘Are going to tell me?’ Sam said.

  The struggle in his mind made him shut his eyes, then he opened them and looked up towards the ceiling before his gaze fell once again on Sam. Her expression was one of such tender sympathy that he felt his eyes moisten and he was gripped with an urgent need to share his suspicions.