Pictures of Perfection

The aproned chatelaine remained in place.

‘Your friends have gone to the Hall, God preserve them,’ she said.

‘Amen, but I’m not with them,’ said the solitary.

‘He that toucheth pitch shall be defiled therewith,’ said the woman. ‘No bikers. No hippies. Not even if they’re old enough to know better.’

The biker looked slowly round as though in search of help. The convoy had already vanished up the hill beyond the church. A cyclist appeared from the bottom end of the High Street and passed rapidly and silently by. The rider was a pale-faced young man wearing a forage cap and fatigues. The bike had panniers and along the crossbar was strapped a shotgun. He could have been a youngster who’d lied about his age in 1914 to join a bicycle battalion. But slight though his build was he drove the machine up the hill past the church with no diminution of speed.

In the doorway of the Eendale Gallery directly opposite the bookshop a youngish woman watched his progress, her face as coldly beautiful as a classical statue.

The biker, finding no hope of relief, returned his attention to Dora Creed and said, ‘This Hall that lad mentioned. Have they got a tea-room there?’

He saw at once he’d touched a nerve. She drew herself up and said, ‘They have made it desolate, and being desolate, it mourneth unto me; the whole land is desolate, because no man layeth it to heart.’

‘I’d not argue with you there,’ said the biker. ‘But there’ll be another election some time. Meanwhile, this Hall …? I’m parched.’

Suddenly she smiled with a charm reminiscent of Master Guy’s but lacking his contrivance, and for a moment the biker thought he’d got inside her principles. Then she said, ‘Carry on up the hill past the church. You’ll see the estate wall on your right. There’s a big set of gates and a lodge after about two furlongs. That’s Old Hall.’

‘Thank you kindly,’ said the biker.

He replaced his helmet, restarted his engine and set off at a sedate pace up the High Street.

The church which dominated the village from the first plateau of the rising ground to the north had a curious feature which might have tempted some men to pause. The tower looked as if it had fallen out with the nave and was leaning away from it at an angle disconcerting to the sober eye and probably devastating to the drunk. But the biker was not in a mood for archaeological diversion. A cup of tea was what he craved and he doubted if old traditions of ecclesiastic hospitality still obtained in rural Yorkshire.

Beyond the church, as promised by Miss Creed, a high boundary wall reared up to inhibit the vulgar gaze. But after a quarter-mile a large sign advertising the imminence of Enscombe Old Hall suggested the vulgar gaze might no longer be considered so unbearable.

A little further on the wall was broken by a massive granite arch fit to harbinger a palace. In the headstone of the arch was carved a bird, with a long thin neck perched on a heraldic shield whose quarters variously showed a rose, a sinking ship, a greyhound couchant, and what to the biker’s inexpert eye appeared to be a dromedary pissing against a Christmas tree. Beneath this dark escutcheon ran the equally obscure words: Fucata Non Perfecta.

On the gate columns, however, had been hung signs of compensatory clarity which in a style and colouring designed to catch the motoring eye advertised the delights on offer at Old Hall.

For a mere £5.50 you were invited to tour this fortified Tudor manor house, the home of the Guillemard family since the sixteenth century. Or for £2 only you could explore the extensive grounds (except when the red flag was flying which meant they were being used for ‘skirmishing’ – details on application). In addition, the visitor too frail to skirmish, tour or explore could seek care and perhaps cure in the new Holistic Health Park centred on the refurbished stable block, where it was proposed to offer acupuncture, reflexology, aromatherapy, metaplastic massage, and Third Thought counselling.

Only one word in this multifarious menu really registered on the biker’s brain. It was Refreshments.

Strictly observing the five-m.p.h. speed limit imposed by yet another sign, the biker passed beneath the arch into a greening gravelled drive curving out of sight between high banks of rhododendrons in need of pruning.

To the left just inside the gateway stood a square single-storey building, presumably the lodge, its rather forbidding front made gay by window-boxes full of daffodils. The biker glimpsed the figure of a man standing in one of the windows and he gave a friendly nod. In that brief moment of distraction, a girl of five or six came hurtling out of the shrubbery to his right, hit the front wheel of the bike, bounced off, and sat down on the gravel.

‘Bloody hell,’ said the biker. ‘You all right, luv?’

She put her hand to her mouth and let out a strange noise which it took his tear-anticipating ear a little while to identify as giggling.

Then she rose, dusted herself off and ran past him into the porch of the Lodge where she turned to look back and wave.

He watched her easy movement with relief till a strangely situated knocking sound made him turn his head, when he found himself looking into the face of a uniformed policeman who was rapping his knuckles against his crash helmet.

Correction. Almost uniformed. He was wearing tunic and trousers but was hatless, his vigorous red hair tousled by the gusting wind. Even the serious expression he was wearing and a fading bruise high on his right cheekbone couldn’t disguise how young he was.

He brought his face close enough for his breath to mist the biker’s plastic visor and demanded, ‘Can’t you read?’

The biker sighed at this further aspersion on his literacy.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can read.’

‘Then you’ll know the sign back there says five miles an hour.’

‘Aye, I noticed, and that was what I were doing.’

‘Oh yes?’ sneered the young policeman.

Slowly he began a circumambulation of the motorbike. He moved with an easy grace, like a man who was proud of his body, which to the biker’s keen eye, with its breadth of shoulder and narrowness of waist, looked a body to be proud of.

His circle complete, he halted, and with his eyes still focused on the machine as though by sheer force of will he could create a fault, he thrust his left hand under the biker’s nose, snapped his finger and said, ‘Documentation.’

The biker examined the outstretched hand which had half a dozen stitches, perhaps more, in a cut which ran from the thumb-ball along the wrist under the shirt cuff. Then, with another sigh, he unzipped his jerkin, reached inside and came out with a wallet.

‘Any particular reason I should show you this?’ he asked mildly.

The constable’s handsome young face slowly turned.

‘Because I’m asking you, that’s one particular reason. Because I’m telling you, that’s another particular reason. Two enough?’

‘Plenty. As long as you’ll be putting ’em in your report.’

‘What I put in my report’s got nothing to do with you,’ said the constable.

‘You think not? Here,’ said the biker. He handed over the documents he’d removed from his wallet, then slowly removed his helmet.

The youngster looked from the documents to the face, then back to the documents, like a soldier trying not to believe a dear-John.

‘Oh hell,’ he said unhappily. ‘You might have let on.’

And Detective-Sergeant Wield said, ‘You need documentation to get treated politely round here, do you?’

‘Yes, I mean, no, of course not, only you’ve got to keep a sharp eye open for strangers out here …’

He was nobbut a lad, thought Wield, noting how the embarrassed flush blended in with the rich red of his windblown hair.

He said abruptly, ‘Worried about strangers, are you? Seems to me that come Easter, you’re going to have a lot more to worry about, and from that sign on the gate, some of ’em will be very strange indeed. You got a hat, lad?’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry, Sarge, it’s back there … in the car …’

‘Wear it.’ Wield’s brain, which his CID Chief, Andy Dalziel, opined should be pickled in strong ale and sold to IBM after the Sergeant’s death, had been punching up references to Enscombe.

He said, ‘Post Office here got done, twice, wasn’t it? Once before Christmas, once just after. We never got anyone, as far as I recall. That’d be strangers too, I suppose?’

‘I expect so, Sarge.’