Account Rendered & Other Stories Read online

  ACCOUNT RENDERED

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

  This eBook published by AudioGO Ltd, Bath, 2012.

  Published by arrangement with the Author

  Epub ISBN 9781471310614

  Copyright © Whole collection Marjorie Eccles 2003

  The right of Marjorie Eccles to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved

  Jacket illustration © iStockphoto.com

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Peter Lovesey

  Remembering Kazarian

  Murder in a Time of Siege

  The Search for Otto Wagner

  Anne Hathaway Slept Here

  Peril at Melford House

  Frescoes

  The Un-dear Departed

  Time’s Wingéd Chariot

  Journey’s End

  Account Rendered

  Portrait of Sophie

  The Egyptian Garden

  FOREWORD

  by Peter Lovesey

  One of the joys of writing short stories is that you can be bold and explore settings and themes outside the limits of your novels. With one bound she was free!

  Marjorie Eccles is known for her intricately plotted police procedural novels featuring Superintendent Gil Mayo and Inspector Abigail Moon, set in the fictional Black Country town of Lavenstock. But in her short stories she ventures further afield, into Egypt, France, Armenia, Austria and South Africa. As always, she writes from a secure knowledge of each location; we can tell at once that these are places she knows well, and not merely as a tourist. The intensity of The Egyptian Garden speaks of an intimate knowledge not only of gardening, but also of the daunting challenge of making a garden in Cairo

  You will find much in these pages that is familiar territory in Marjorie’s writing. Her fascination with family loyalties put under strain by the prospect of inheritance is central to Peril at Melford House and Portrait of Sophie. In case that is too confining, she gives us stories set in the walking-country of the Pennines and the Scottish Highlands. Yet a word of warning is necessary: you may well find yourself ambushed by something you haven’t ever encountered in a Marjorie Eccles novel. You will time-travel to the Siege of Mafeking. Or to the Second World War. You’ll get the strange thrill of the supernatural. Just when you think you know how a story will come out, you’ll be hit by a double whammy—surprise on surprise.

  The one thing I can safely predict is that you will get the sense of completion, of justice done, that is the hallmark of every Marjorie Eccles story. She can bring the most tangled plot to a satisfying conclusion.

  Now, why don’t you enter her world? With one bound you are free!

  REMEMBERING KAZARIAN

  Murder is never an end in itself. It is, on the contrary, only the beginning of things.

  At any rate, that was what Kazarian said, and he should have known. He was Armenian by birth, and if anyone knows about murder, it is the Armenian nation—or what is left of it, after the genocide of 1915: that mass slaughter, when nine-tenths of the nation were driven into exile, scattered to the corners of the earth, or driven by the Turkish janissaries into the desert and left there to rot, unburied, so that their bones whitened and are said to give off a phosphorescence in the dark, even yet.

  Blood has watered the sparse soil of Armenia. Murder is written on its stones. Murder can never be forgotten, or forgiven. That was what Kazarian said.

  Murder is what has brought Paul Enderby, a London lawyer in his mid-forties, here to the capital of Armenia. It is why he is sitting on a wooden bench under a fig tree in a shadowed courtyard in Yerevan, too hot to do anything more than swat flies, drink strong wine and watch the old men playing nardy, while he waits for Zarouhi. It is supposed to be the cool of the evening, but the stones of Yerevan hold the heat of the day. The city is a dust bowl between the bare hills, a city older than Babylon. Now magnificently resurrected from the ashes and ruins of its former self, it has wide main thoroughfares lined with grandiose buildings and monuments to Soviet power, constructed in Armenian tufa, basalt and marble—blue, black and rose-coloured, some of them splendid. Away from the main streets, concrete tower blocks of apartments dwarf the old, traditional, flat-roofed houses, which theoretically should have been swept away long ago on the tide of modernization and reconstruction. But, as always in communist-dominated cultures, reality overcame the intention. The long proboscises of countless building cranes still pierce the skyline, the endless mess of construction work goes on as it did ten years ago, and much of the city remains an unfinished building site. I shall be sorry, thinks Paul Enderby, if ever the old Yerevan disappears entirely, but I shall believe it when I see it.

  Zarouhi works as a translator. She is attractive, almost as beautiful as was Paul’s wife Arus, with that slender, dark-eyed grace which characterizes the young women of Armenia. But she is of a different generation, and where Arus was gentle and compliant, Zarouhi is vigorous and liberated. She has been to the State University, and will not waste her time learning to cook and knit and bring up a family. Paul met her the first time he came to Yerevan, after Kazarian, who was distantly related to her, died. She was fourteen, and at the peak of her sexuality, for Armenian women mature early. She knows that he was charmed by her then, that he is now free and unencumbered by a wife, and hopes she is the reason he has been drawn back again, after ten years. But everyone speculates as to why he is here—not least, Paul himself.

  The first time he came, he had done what his friend Kazarian had asked of him in the event of his death: he had taken the pouch containing dry, gritty soil from the homeland, cherished by Kazarian’s family for seventy years and kept inside the polished copper urn in the niche beneath the sacred icon; he had scattered a handful over the coffin so that Kazarian, like his father, and his grandfather before him, was symbolically laid to rest in the native soil of his ancestors. Then, to those of his family who had miraculously survived the holocaust, or who had returned from exile after union with Russia made life possible again, Paul had transferred what their kinsman had left them what was to most of them a fortune, but was in truth shamefully less than might have been expected, Kazarian’s affairs being as they were at the time of his death. Finally, he had brought back to Yerevan the rusty key with which Kazarian’s grandfather had locked the door of his house before being driven into exile.

  It was the least he could do.

  The counters click faintly as the old men move them across the board. The little fountain—there is always a fountain, that symbol of life, somewhere in Yerevan—tinkles coolness into the air. A fan of white doves clatters across the sky. From inside one of the houses, a caged bird sings its heart out against a background of raucous pop music. The Tataryan brothers, Stepanos and Ezras, heat the grill in the corner of the courtyard and prepare meat to thread on long, swordlike skewers for the shashlik. An aroma of spices and burning charcoal fills the air. Children shriek and play the same sort of games children play everywhere. The women sit under the trees, knitting and gossiping.

  Zarouhi is late, as she often is. She will arrive in a great rush of apologies, smart as a whip in her silk shirt and jeans, and toss her head at the disapproving looks of her mother. Her mother does not feel that her daughter’s education has done her much good. Be that as it may, Zarouhi is naturally quick and intuitive, and if nothing else, has learnt persistence. She knows what she wants and she is determined she will get it, one way or another. She will not leave Paul alone for instance, probing and questioning and making assumptions that are sometimes uncannily accurate.


  He feels uneasy at the thought, and wonders once again at the compulsion that has made him return to this small, rocky country.

  The first time he came was in springtime, when the air was mild and benign, and wild flowers bloomed on the mountains—pale yellow and mauve everlasting flowers, stiff and dry and wiry, conditioned by the lack of moisture in the thin soil. In the city, the apricot trees blossomed against rosy-domed churches; dark-robed, tall-hatted priests flapped past the fountains playing in Lenin Square. Now it is summer, the city is dust-clogged, and everything vibrates and shimmers in the dry, burning heat. On the mountainsides, little grows in the parched earth except bitter wormwood, the wild aromatic absinth. The very rocks are scorched almost to vitrification.

  Only Mount Ararat is eternally the same: cool, blue and remote, glimpsed at every vantage point, a perfectly symmetrical, snow-capped peak suspended against the pinkish sky, where the Ark is said to have come to rest after the Flood and from whence Noah sent the dove across the waters, to return with a sprig of olive in its beak. Once part of Armenia, but now on the other side of the redrawn borders, Ararat belongs to Turkey, the old and not forgiven enemy, a potent symbol of all that was lost. Symbols and historical associations are part of the very fabric of Armenian life and culture. The sight of Yerevan’s eternal flame, burning high above the city for the million lost souls who perished in the massacre, never fails to bring tears to Armenian eyes. Simply the thought of it made Kazarian weep, though admittedly he wept easily.

  He was a big, ebullient man, with a deep bass voice, a huge rumbling laugh, and liquid brown eyes, which Paul’s secretary said reminded her of Omar Sharif’s. He had the same ability to turn women’s heads; they went down helpless before his smile, willing to be seduced, although knowing he had no intention of marrying them. He was always larger than life, even when he and Paul were at school together, in the East End of London. A handsome lad, not clever, but sharp in the ways where money was to be made. He was as wily as a monkey, but his charm, or an adroit lie, invariably got him out of trouble.

  His father had worked as a porter in one of London’s leading hotels, and was killed when a luggage trolley, overburdened with some VIP’s expensive leather suitcases, toppled over on top of him, rupturing his spleen. His mother quickly remarried and departed elsewhere, leaving Kazarian to be brought up almost entirely by his grandparents within the refugee, immigrant community which had formed a small enclave in the district where Paul lived. From the day they were placed at adjoining desks at school, there was an immediate rapport between the two boys, despite—or perhaps because of—the differences in each one’s temperament and upbringing. They spent most of their spare time together as they grew into their teens, at discos and football matches, experimenting with smoking, lager-drinking and girls. Later, their paths began to diverge: Kazarian grew streetwise and successful, while Paul found it necessary to opt for the more boring, but safer, path of serious study. Even then, he was a conformable young man.

  He never completely lost touch with Kazarian, however. As his friend, Paul had always been welcome to join in any gathering or celebration in the community of exiles, to drink with them the inevitable thick, sweet coffee and imported Armenian brandy, and he continued to see them, having none of Kazarian’s impatience with the old men’s reminiscences and yearnings for the homeland, none of his scorn for songs and poetry mingled with tears. On these occasions he was transported to another world from the drab, high-rise flat where he lived with his parents and sister. He fell in love with the idea of Armenia and its fiery history before he ever saw it.

  ‘Tell me about London,’ says Zarouhi now.

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Again and again!’ Her eyes are hungry.

  They have driven out to this restaurant in the coolness of the mountains, out of the traffic-jammed streets, away from the smothering dust and the heat and noise of the city, whose lights wink far below in the darkness. They have eaten spotted trout, chargrilled meat and red caviar, and Paul has, after the first mouthful, avoided something spongy and pale pink, some unspecified, processed part of an animal, said to be a delicacy. They have brought their glasses of brandy and tiny cups of coffee out on to the terrace. Zarouhi perches nonchalantly on the narrow parapet built above the vertiginously plunging ravine, its sides clothed with stunted oaks whose stubborn roots have somehow managed to find nourishment between the rocks.

  Kazarian used to perch in just the same insouciant manner on the rail of his flashy cabin cruiser, glass in hand, careless of his safety though he could swim only a few strokes. But then, he always thought he had a charmed life.

  Zarouhi puts a red-nailed hand on Paul’s arm and repeats her request.

  It is her one desire to leave Yerevan and go to London, which she imagines to be the acme of Western civilization. Yeraz means dreams, and her head is too full of them, as her mother constantly tells her, to no effect. But it would not be so easy, even in these post-glasnost days, to find the means, or to cut through the red tape of bureaucracy and uproot herself. In any case, where would she, a foreigner, find work in London, Paul has several times asked her, among the thousands already unemployed? He reminds her about Kazarian’s grandparents, arriving there during the Depression, via New York and France, after failing to make a new life in either place, and being forced to take the most menial jobs in order to survive . . . for what else was there for a wine-grower and a carpet-weaver, however skilled?

  ‘Pooh!’ she says, waving aside objections. He knows that she thinks he could help her, that he is rich—as, by her standards, he is. And there are other, unspoken thoughts hovering on the air. That her slim, olive-skinned body is his for the taking, in exchange for the promise of what he can do for her. Not, he is certain, a virginal sacrifice. All the same, he is sorry for her, caught in a situation she can’t change, but she is not, and never can be, Arus, and he says nothing.

  After a waiting silence, she sighs and then returns to the attack, pointing out persuasively that, after all, Levron Kazarian, too, had once been poor, before he became wealthy beyond the imaginings of his kinsmen. Paul wishes she would change the subject.

  He finds it impossible to explain Kazarian to any of them here, especially to Zarouhi, to convince her that his money was made as wildly and extravagantly as it was spent, that he came by it dishonestly, or at least by suspect wheeler dealing, sailing always on the windy side of the law, and that if he had not died when he did, he would most likely have ended up in prison. She would not believe what she didn’t want to believe. And she would wonder why Paul, as his friend and semi-official legal adviser, had done nothing to prevent it—and perhaps with some justification.

  Loyalty to an old friendship had in fact made him try, only Kazarian wouldn’t listen. He was on a tide of success, everything he touched was turning to money, he simply turned his back on the idea of inevitable retribution. And that was when they had to part company, in a business sense. Paul had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, he was one of the few from their comprehensive school who’d obtained a university place, and he was now a respectable and moderately successful lawyer. He intended it to remain that way. He couldn’t afford to involve himself in dubious dealings that meant keeping his mouth shut, however generous the rewards. He had not only himself to think of—by then, he also had Arus.

  As with most of the important things in Paul’s life, it was through Kazarian that he met Arus. Kazarian had, in fact, taken her out himself once or twice before they met, but when Paul made a beeline for her and Arus, flattered by his persistence, began to respond, Kazarian gave in gracefully enough. There were, after all, always plenty other fish in the sea as far as he was concerned, though Paul noticed that whenever they met, Kazarian couldn’t keep his eyes off Arus for long.

  Whilst her parents would have preferred her to marry one of their own countrymen, they loved their only daughter too much to deny her anything, and as soon as Paul was able to provide her with a reasonable home, they were
allowed to marry. They had an Armenian-style wedding, with a great deal of drinking and feasting after a solemn ceremony according to the rites of the Orthodox Church. The guests threw sweetmeats for good luck and pushed paper money between Arus’s fingers, pinning more on to her wedding dress as she danced with Paul, at once graceful and sensuous, to the haunting, evocative music of the Motherland. Kazarian gave them a handsome wedding present and wished them luck.

  Their marriage, it seemed to Paul, was perfect, but it never does to be too complacent. Life has a habit of turning round on you when you least expect it, as he found when Arus died giving birth to the child she had wanted so passionately, for so long, and the child with her. It is something he cannot contemplate, even now, without pain, overwhelming guilt, and despair.

  Zarouhi drains her brandy and asks for another. She has drunk too much, so Paul pretends not to hear her request. Equality is still an ambivalent concept in this traditionally male-dominated society: to see a man drunk on wine, brandy or vodka, or a combination of all three, is scarcely uncommon and is regarded with amused tolerance, but women are a different matter, and she has already attracted the unspoken but very evident disapproval of the waiters and too much attention from the other diners. Her mouth becomes sulky at his refusal, so he sits beside her and smiles at her. He is a little unsteady himself.

  The Armenians are a tenacious people, as witnessed by their struggles over the centuries against their innumerable enemies, from Assyrians and Turks, to Tsarist Russians and Azerbaijanis, and Zarouhi is nothing if not true-born Armenian. But this tenacity is becoming somewhat tiresome as, once again, she harks back to Kazarian, citing him as the shining example of success, with his lavish lifestyle, his Mercedes, his Thames-side apartment, his glamorous women. News of all this reached even here, and his name became a byword for munificence: on the rare occasions he visited his relatives, he would arrive laden with gifts and spend money like water. The fact that he never invited any of them back to London to share his good fortune never seemed to have occurred to them. But to Paul he remarked scornfully that he found them backward and naïve: the truth was at once harsher and more subtle, and Paul was angry at his contempt and lack of understanding. He recalls this as Zarouhi begins yet again to ask about Kazarian’s boat, and that last trip they took together, a topic which endlessly fascinates her and arouses her curiosity, and because this is something he doesn’t want to talk about, he makes the mistake of saying shortly that Levron Kazarian had not been the plaster saint everyone thought him. And before he can stop himself, he adds bitterly that some people might have thought he had it corning to him when he fell off the rail of that floating gin palace he called a cabin cruiser.