Guy Fawkes Day

by KJ Griffin

  Chapter 30: Oxford: October 29: 11:00 a.m.

  Sophie chained her bicycle to the wall outside Joanna’s house with a sense of relief. She had been poorly prepared for the 9:00 a.m. tutorial, and Ockenden had pulled some uncomfortable faces listening to her lame essay.

  But academic worries were low on Sophie’s priorities. There had been a long and traumatic phone call from Marcus the night before, once she had finally stopped ignoring the incessant succession of missed calls on her mobile. Marcus had never been so passionate in his love for her; Sophie had told him it was all over. After the pleading and the throat-gulping he had grown vindictive, called her a slut. Maybe she was, she had conceded, but at least she could be sure her unknown father had never been a murderer.

  Among the letters in her pigeon hole at college there had been two from the bank. Her hand trembled in disbelief as she read that her account had been credited with an additional ninety thousand pounds, and a hefty legal document the thickness of her wrist clamoured for her signature on every page in the presence of a solicitor, for the deeds of the Folly Bridge mansion were truly about to be transferred into her name.

  The prospect of unimagined wealth should have brought ineffable elation; on the contrary, Sophie felt ever more perturbed and the windfall of sudden riches was almost an unwelcome distraction. If it hadn’t been haunted before, Omar's mansion certainly was now. It was a place of ghosts, inviting her to step straight into the closing scenes of a dark, psychological thriller. Cycling back from college to Joanna’s house, the dark and the mist combined to suggest that she would be caught in increasingly ominous and painful twists of plot.

  She had barely turned the key in the lock when her mobile rang. Mum again. This time she had better answer.

  ‘Oh, hi, Mum,… Yes, sorry I haven’t been in touch for a while. Actually, I was just going to phone you.’

  ‘Sophie, I’ve been worried sick about you! Why haven’t you answered any of my calls or texts? Is it because you moved in with your new boyfriend, Marcus? I'm dying to hear more about him.’

  Sophie fiddled nervously with the tea towel as she was forced to answer the sort of questions Mum usually had the good taste not to ask. And when she told her mum that she was cooling on Marcus, Mum became nosier than ever.

  ‘Well, that often happens, Sophie. But you are being careful, aren’t you?’

  ‘Mum!’

  The unexpected chime of the doorbell came as a welcome relief.

  ‘Hang on, Mum, there’s someone at the door,’ she said, walking down the hallway to check through the gap in the front room curtains that the visitor wasn’t Marcus. It wasn't, but the man waiting in the porch was anything other than a welcome interruption.

  ‘Oh, hello, Mr Talbot,’ she stammered apprehensively, furiously sweeping swathes of chestnut hair from her eyes. There were now two awkward callers; one of them would have to go.

  ‘Listen, Mum, I’ll call you back later. Promise. Only I really have to go now,’ she blurted out awkwardly, looking down the front doorsteps to catch the curious look in Talbot’s eyes.

  She noted Talbot’s uneasiness and watched him turn sharply askance, as if something unexpected had startled him. He was staring away from the house, watching the rain rivulet into oil-slicked gutters.

  But when she rang off he turned to face her again, and the cold smile followed, as malevolent as anything Omar had ever managed.

  ‘You certainly move around a lot for an undergraduate, Miss Palmer. The Warden told me you had gone abroad for a week. Most unusual. And obviously somewhere sunny, too! The tan suits you.’

  Sophie stared back at him warily, blocking the doorway with a black boot.

  ‘Mind if I come in?’ he asked casually. ‘There are one or two things I think we should discuss in private.’

  His persuasiveness overcame her natural hostility and Sophie beckoned Talbot inside towards the kitchen.

  ‘He took you to Ramliyya, I suppose?’ Talbot asked disinterestedly, settling tentatively onto the edge of a stiff wooden chair. ‘Hope you managed to avoid that ghastly execution.’

  Sophie cleared the coffee cups from the table and used Colonel Easterby’s face, staring forlornly at her from the front page of the Guardian, to brush away the cigarette ash that disfigured the white plastic covering. Her initial discomfort at the sight of Talbot had now cooled to a sullen antipathy.

  ‘Actually, I was in Africa,’ she answered haughtily.

  ‘Eritrea?’

  ‘No, Tanzania.’

  ‘Ah, yes, he goes there, too: or so I’ve heard.’

  Sophie flushed, squirming at the matter-of-fact manner in which Talbot felt entitled to allude to her relationship with Omar. And there was something else about this Talbot character - his physical similarity to Omar, perhaps, or his close proximity to Omar’s age - that made her even more reticent.

  ‘So what was it you wanted to ask, Mr. Talbot?’

  The simple question seemed to flummox her caller, and as she caught Talbot’s eyes Sophie thought she caught a fleeting glimpse of dread deep, deep down inside. He had to turn his eyes away again towards the rain-stained windowpane, rummaging as he did so inside the breast pocket of his grey jacket.

  ‘Is this the man who took you to Ramliyya, Miss Palmer?’ Talbot asked brusquely, stabbing a finger at an old colour photo, which he passed into her hands. ‘Or, to put it more accurately, would you say that the man in the photo bears a reasonable likeness to how Prince Omar Al-Ajnabi might have looked twenty years ago?’

  Sophie craned her neck towards the photo. It was Omar, no doubt about that. He was shirtless, his youthful chest looking thinner than she had known it, lying stretched out in a punt with a wine bottle in his right hand, smiling contentedly.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ she shrieked, following the curve of Omar’s arm as it draped across a scantily-dressed young woman lying next him in the punt. ‘Oh, … it can’t be! Wherever did you get this picture?’

  But Talbot couldn’t, or wouldn’t say. He looked as glum as she felt shocked, and they sat facing each other in thunderstruck silence for some time.

  Eventually Talbot reached across the table and removed the offending photograph, pocketing it carefully, as if he were recorking a malicious genie that had slipped its bottle.

  He stood up and made to leave, stopping briefly by the kitchen door.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Palmer, at least you've confirmed my suspicions,’ he smiled acidly. ‘But as far as you are concerned, I’d keep very quiet about this if I were you. And by that, I mean I would advise you not tell anyone about the photo you’ve just seen. Especially your mum.’

  Sophie eyed him incredulously, a torrent of questions now leaping to her mind.

  ‘But hang on, how did you …?’

  ‘No protestations, please. This is going to be a giant mess, young lady, and you're in it more than most. If you want to survive, you'd better start playing my game and answering to me. Do you understand that?’

  Sophie stared back at Talbot's iron stare in disbelief, wishing him far away, wishing she had never set eyes on the wretched man.

  But Talbot didn’t wait for her reply. It was as if he too were anxious to bolt. He rummaged in his wallet for a card and placed it on the table in front of Sophie.

  ‘Call me the minute ‘Al-Ajnabi’ contacts you.’

  ‘You mean you think he’ll be back?’ Sophie stammered. The ill-concealed eagerness in her voice, she knew, would be something that Talbot would recognize and register.

  Her visitor pulled something between a grimace and a smirk.

  ‘Oh, he’ll be back all right, Miss Palmer, don’t you worry. But that’s about as much as we can be certain of for the time being.’

  Seeing himself out, Talbot left the kitchen door open, and Sophie watched his back retreating down the hallway till she heard the front door snap shut behind him.

  There were powerful and conflicting feelings thumping around inside her and they didn’t add up to any
thing she could understand, nor had she any idea who to trust. She saw again the picture of her mum and the man who was obviously then more Robert than Omar. Her immediate impulse was to ring Mum and get the answers she needed from that quarter, despite what Talbot had advised. But then another emotion began to nag inside, gnawing on the coiled convulsions Sophie could feel in her guts. No, she didn't want to hear it from Mum. That would be too awful. Talbot had said that Omar would be back. Fine. It was Omar she wanted to see.

  She guessed she knew now the answer to the question she had asked him in the firelight at Tarangire: she had been chosen because of something that had happened between 'Omar' and Mum. But mixed in with the outraged anger she felt towards Omar, there was a sensation she loathed more than anything else: deep down inside, she was jealous. Jealous of her own mum.