Thus thought Joanna May, missing Isaac King badly (for he knew what the cards meant, and she could only guess): now, if the four Queens of the Tarot pack, or, as some would have it, the long-lost Egyptian Book of Toth, are seen together, they denote nothing worse than arguments. If reversed, however, the argument might become excessive; fatal, even. In conjunction with the Hanged Man, a card from the Major Arcana, which when reversed denotes selfishness and sacrifice, rootlessness and riot, things don’t look too good. If you laid all at the head of an actual hanging man, murdered, they might begin to look very bad indeed. And, as the Queens of Wands, Pentacles, Swords and Cups could be seen to represent all the women in the world – excepting only the few from the Major Arcana, the High Priestess and the Empress (positions Joanna May and Angela might contend for) or the female half of the Lovers (which might well suit Bethany), these great cards having in their own peculiar way dominion over all the humble folk of the four suits – why then, things might be looking quite appalling for all the women in the world.
Prudently, Joanna spoke none of this aloud. She merely said to Trevor, ‘Gobbledygook. The police will not be interested in what they say is gobbledygook: they will not understand the insult and the threat involved: go and fetch those cards and put them in the kitchen drawer, and don’t even mention them.’
Joanna May called the police. Of course she did. What else could she do? The duty sergeant she spoke to said they would send a police car the moment one was available. He was soothing and competent. He said if she was certain her gardener was dead, leave him where he was and touch nothing. It sounded, from her description, like some kind of inadvertent death by way of sexual perversion, and was at least less messy than a crucifixion. They’d had quite a lot of those lately: a lot of nuts in the homosexual community: they were sending an ambulance, but that might take even longer than the police car. Emergency services were stretched.
‘I don’t think he was gay,’ said Joanna May.
‘Gay, bi, hetero,’ said the duty officer, ‘makes no difference to us. We are not prejudiced. Where did you say? The King’s House? The big place on the island? Wait, that’s come up on the computer recently… yes, here we are… knew I’d seen it. Trevor Hopkins, occupation butler: indecent behaviour. And this one was the gardener, you say?’
‘The charge against Mr Hopkins was not proven,’ said Joanna May. ‘In fact the charge was dropped. What’s it doing on your computer?’
‘You’re quite right,’ said the duty officer amiably. ‘It shouldn’t be there. No doubt it’s on its way to wiping.’
It was an hour before they arrived, and an hour and a half before the ambulance came to take the body to a morgue. The police doctor said there’d be an autopsy but it looked to him as if the young man had had a heart attack while engaging in some kind of kinky sexual activity – there was no evidence of foul play. No end to the things that people got up to: a pity: from the look of his garden he was good at his job. The world was short of gardeners.
‘And of police officers, too,’ said the plainclothes man, hurrying him on. They had another suspicious death waiting. Four men had arrived. They questioned Trevor, but kindly, to his surprise. He told them nothing about the boat, about the bully boys: just that he’d gone out to the barn to take Oliver his coffee: had found him swinging, dead and upside down, and gone inside and just sat, till Joanna came home. If they thought there was more to it, they didn’t say. It would only take everyone into the complex and miserable area of sexual deviance, and Mrs May’s butler had, from the look of him, suffered enough.
‘What we don’t want’, said the police officer, by way of explanation, ‘is copycatting. If it gets into the papers, before we know it everyone’s hanging from their ankles trying to get heart attacks. We have enough to do –’ and they left. The body had already gone, by ambulance.
Joanna May called Angela and told her all about it. Angela offered to come over but Joanna said she was OK. Only quite some time later did she begin to weep.