The King's Shilling

by Fraser John Macnaught

  “What’s this?”

  “Transcripts of telephone calls between them.”

  Paul looked at him.

  “From an undeclared phone?”

  Dave nodded.

  “Well I never… hard to believe.”

  Dave gave him a withering look.

  “But you got these?”

  “Actually, we didn’t. There was an investigator, hired by a number of tabloids, who had some equipment set up, monitoring Calderwood Hall. He recorded some stuff, but it was all encrypted and he didn’t have the software. We’ve only just got them decoded.”

  “Thank God for the free press.”

  “Right.”

  Paul read the transcripts.

  “They’re not very explicit.”

  “Every little helps.”

  “I don’t get it”, Paul said. “If they just wanted to switch Kristel for Sarah, why didn’t they just… bump her off in private, and get rid of the body, and then Kristel could step in as Mrs Neil Morgan?”

  “I think you were right when you said he was a ham. He craves attention, he wanted the world to watch, and to be able to laugh at everyone because he was so brilliant.”

  “It’s insane.”

  “It nearly worked.”

  Chapter 49

  Uncle Frank was wearing new glasses and a smart tweed jacket. He’d brushed his hair and shaved and looked ten years younger.

  They were sitting outside the White Hart at a table overlooking the canal.

  “Your Mum had cancer, Paul.”

  “When?”

  “They’d told her just a couple of months before… but she didn’t tell Alan till… well… till just before….”

  “She didn’t tell him? Why the fuck not?”

  Frank stared at his beer and blinked a few times.

  “I think she knew she was dying… a few months she had, that’s all… she didn’t want to burden him…”

  “Burden him?”

  “She’d always felt guilty, your Mum…”

  “Guilty? About what?”

  Frank hesitated.

  “Greville.”

  “Greville? What about Greville?”

  “Greville was… infatuated with Joanne… with your mother… in love with her maybe… crazy in love… violently in love… he told her she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known.”

  “What?”

  Paul felt bile rise in his throat and an emptiness as if all the air had been sucked from his lungs.

  “From the beginning… since… way back…”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Alan told me… in a letter… he wrote to me… that day… I got it the next day… the day after.”

  “A letter…”

  “Yeah.”

  Paul closed his eyes and held his head in his hands wishing he was somewhere else and that this wasn’t happening.

  “When she told him, about the cancer… it was the end, she knew it… and she had to say what she had to say… what she’d been holdin’ back… I mean, he knew part of it… he knew Greville had… had his way… had forced her… he’d been rough with her, and he’d…

  “He fucked her? He raped Mum? And Dad knew?”

  “He didn’t know at first… he didn’t know until later…”

  “When later?”

  “A few years later…”

  “Greville raped Mum!”

  “I don’t think she had a choice, Paul. I don’t think she could have said no…”

  “Greville Hartley raped Mum?”

  “More than once.”

  Then Paul could hear the Boomtown Rats singing ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’. The live version, from Wembley Stadium, with the crowd singing and clapping along… and the music’s coming from a car on the lane behind him… He’s five years old and he’s standing outside the Cottage, hearing cries and yells and animal sounds from inside, and he’s thinking his father’s doing something horrible to his mother. But his father isn’t there that day… he’s serving drinks and waiting tables at the social club for the Live Aid broadcast, and he’s singing… he’s singing like he’s never sung before or since… while the King fucks his wife…

  “He would have pressured her… saying they’d lose their jobs, saying they’d be kicked out, with nowhere to go…”

  “I don’t fucking believe this… and he leaves me the Cottage?”

  Frank stabbed a finger at him.

  “You know… that’s the weird bit for me… with Greville, and with your Mum and Dad, in a way…”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The way they changed tack… the way they could be all wrong one minute and all righteous the next… him being violent and lordin’ it and then givin’ them pay rises and presents… and them protestin’ and cryin’ but takin’ his money…”

  The blood money.

  His parents’ mood swings and the gifts, Greville’s apparent generosity and kindness, and his power and his threats and his violence… all of it based on fear… the fear of the truth… the fear of being found out… the fear of admitting certain unspeakable things… And so some of it made sense to Paul now, but not all of it.

  “When did it happen, the first time?”

  “It was over you that it started, I reckon…”

  “Me?”

  “Greville was obsessed… about havin’ a son… an heir…”

  “I know.”

  “He could think of nothin’ else. The Hartley’s had to go on. He needed a boy, someone he could give his name to…”

  “So what’s that got to do with me?”

  Frank coughed and found a dirty tissue in his pocket and spat into it.

  “He wanted to buy you…”

  “Buy me?”

  “When you were born, you were a big, strappin’ baby, and your parents showed you off to Mr and Mrs Hartley and I reckon summat went off in Greville’s head and he offered your parents a fair whack of money… to buy you… to adopt you… to become the next in line…”

  “I don’t believe this…”

  “I know, son, I know…”

  “So… what did they say? What did they do?”

  “I remember at the time… your Dad told me about this way back then… He couldn’t believe it either. He was in a right state. He was cryin’… and I’d never seen Alan cry… and he said: “I’m not takin’ the King’s fuckin’ shillin’ for my son!”

  Paul rubbed his eyes, but it didn’t help. His cheeks were wet now.

  “So they refused?”

  “Of course they fuckin’ refused! I’ve told you before, your parents loved you! You were their son, they were proud of you, they loved you!”

  “So what did Greville say? How did he react?”

  “It was like a business deal for him… no more, no less… they said no, they turned him down, they refused his offer… he seemed to accept it… I mean, he didn’t punish them or anythin’… well, not directly…”

  “He just forced himself on Mum…”

  “He was mad about her…”

  “And how long did this go on? Even after… the accident?”

  Frank looked at him for a long moment.

  “It wasn’t an accident, Paul.”

  “What do you mean? She was pushed through the green-house door?”

  “There was no green-house…”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m sayin’ Greville stopped after the ‘accident’ as you call it…”

  Frank stared at him, hoping he would make the connection himself.

  “Mum cut herself?”

  “No.”

  Paul shook his head, bewildered.

  Frank took a deep breath.

  “Your Dad woke up one day and realised he had something, and he went to the doctor and the doctor told him he had VD. This was when you were coming up for six, maybe…”

  Paul cut him off.

  “And this was when he knew Mum had been… sleeping with s
omeone else… with Greville…”

  “Aye”.

  “So it was him that cut her face? Punishing her… and so that Greville wouldn’t think she was beautiful any more?”

  Frank said nothing. Paul looked up at the ceiling but didn’t see anything. He was thinking about Cracker Booth and what his father had done to deserve a favour. His dark side. The headaches… The retribution.

  “I don’t know what to say, Frank… I don’t know who I am any more. I don’t know these people you’re talking about. They were my Mum and Dad and I lived with them for 16 years but I don’t know who they are any more. They’re strangers…”

  “They were always your Mum and Dad and they did right by you…”

  “Jesus… What about Rebecca, Sarah’s Mum… what did she know?”

  “She was always a strange bird, Rebecca, according to Alan…”

  “But she must have known?”

  “I suppose so… she can’t have been blind… and she knew Greville.”

  “Mum wasn’t the only one?”

  “Well, Rebecca… she was a no-go… maybe a bit frigid, I don’t know… but she’d been infected… Greville had a been a fuckin’ whore-monger for years and he’d given his wife the clap… gonorrhoea, and she never knew what it was, just that she was ill all the time, and the clap stayed with her and caused her to be poorly and she kept gettin’ all kinds of ailments and whenever she got pregnant she had a miscarriage and Greville was gettin’ impatient… Rebecca was gettin’ on, in her late thirties… “

  “So they sent her to the South of France?”

  “You what?”

  “The doctors advised her to spend her pregnancy in warmer climes… on the Riviera…”

  “I think you’d better get us a drink, lad, there’s summat else you should know…”

  “I know about the twins.”

  “The twins?”

  “Yeah… Sarah wasn’t an only child. There were two girls, identical twins. Sarah came back here and her sister was adopted by a couple in Holland.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I went to France… among other things…”

  Frank was staring at him, trying to work out if he knew it all.

  “What else did you find out?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Frank shrugged. Paul leant towards him.

  “There’s more?” he said.

  Frank nodded.

  But he didn’t need to say anything.

  Paul suddenly understood a lot of things about his parents and about himself and about Greville and about everything that had happened and why and he knew that all the times he had looked for words and tried to fill the hole in his head with something that made sense he had sometimes come very close to a form of understanding that was visceral but not quite admissible and that perhaps he had always stopped himself from actually putting his finger on it and ruining everything.

  He pulled out a photograph from his pocket.

  A stolen photograph.

  And he turned it over and saw what it meant.

  “When did Mum tell Dad?”

  “When she told him about the cancer.”

  “And he’d never known? Or guessed?”

  “Never.”

  “He told you this in the letter?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So the car accident wasn’t an accident…”

  “Your Mum was goin’ any way… they decided to go together.”

  “Thus the drugs and the booze.”

  “And the weird thing is, that’s where Greville stepped up again.”

  “Greville, how?”

  “He managed to convince the police to lay off the drugs and booze angle, and the suicide, and the official report played that down… otherwise the insurance wouldn’t have paid up.”

  “How did he do that?”

  “It was your mate Dave Middleton’s Dad, Derek Middleton… he reckoned he owed you a favour an’ all, and he was the one who fiddled the paperwork… so you got your fifty grand or whatever…”

  “Sixty-three… And you knew all this back then, at the funeral?”

  “Most of it.”

  “And you never told me?”

  “Why would I?”

  “I remember you going on about “what I know and what I don’t know”, and “what I can say and what I can’t”… and you knew, and I knew you weren’t telling me something… I had a right to know!”

  “Listen son, I’m tellin’ you this now because I suppose you do have a right to know and in the circumstances, I reckon you have to know… but back then, can you honestly tell me it would have made your life any better to know all this stuff? It would have fucked you up, good and proper!”

  “You should have told me.”

  “No. I don’t feel bad about not tellin’ you. You don’t stand over a body bein’ buried, two bodies, and tell the nearest and dearest that his Mum had been ravaged by a bloke standin’ not ten feet away and that his Dad had cut her up and that they’d committed suicide… and all the other stuff. I don’t regret not tellin’ you..”

  Chapter 50

  For some reason, I’m seeing and capturing and registering all manner of insignificant details… I feel like a tourist in an idyllic setting, carefully and deliberately recording mental images and sensations for future reference, gazing round for one last time before the holiday comes to an end when the blue sky and the palm trees and the turquoise waves will disappear for ever and be nothing more than fading memories… But this is not deliberate…

  I see a penny and half a brown shoe-lace on the bottom step leading up to the clinic door… A man passes me and he’s wearing a dark green tweed jacket with worn grey elbow patches and a pale, yellow tie over a beige shirt and he smells of pipe smoke and Old Spice, like my father used to wear… and he’s talking into a mobile phone and he says “13, Cumberland Avenue” and then he’s gone, but I remember the address and I wonder where it is and who lives there. But this isn’t the end of a holiday and I’m not storing up images for some mental slide-show on a dull winter’s evening in the years to come… it might be the end of something, but it’s not a vacation on a desert island… and it may even be the beginning of something, but I’m not sure of what…

  And yet the details of my surroundings are all still being recorded and noted…

  The clinic door itself has been painted recently, with white satin paint, not matt or gloss, I notice, and it’s a professional job because the brushed steel handles must have been removed, there are no traces of paint on them, and I recall a hasty paint-job I did myself once when I’d not been so thorough and I don’t know why I’m thinking about all this right now… but the images keep coming.

  I open the door and I walk into the clinic and there’s a sucking sound as the door closes behind me and I wipe my feet on a black mat. An announcement is being made over a PA system, and I glance up at a speaker attached to the top of a wall and I can see the make of it, Behringer, and a scratch and a dent on one corner, and a piece of wire held together by blue plastic tape and below it on the wall are three Turner prints, The Grand Canal in Venice, and Rain, Steam and Speed and Crossing the Brook, and I remember that Turner was born in 1775 and died in 1851 and that his last words were “The sun is God”.

  The message over the PA is for a Mr Patel who has to contact the administration office and the voice of the woman speaking reminds me of Judy Dench and I can see her dying in Skyfall and hear Adele singing. I make a conscious effort not to see and hear all these things and to think about what I’m going to say and what the reaction will be and how I’ll react and what’s going to happen. But it’s no use…

  A doctor smiles at me, with what may be a grimace of sympathy or understanding, as if he knows where I’m going and why.

  There’s a man waiting to my left, sitting on a brown plastic chair, and he has striped grey socks and new-looking desert boots and I look at his face and I see Greville Hartley. But it’s not Grevill
e Hartley, he just looks vaguely like him but I see Greville’s face and his golf clothes and then a blackbird hopping across the grass at the Castle and I can hear the swoosh of a baseball bat…

  A woman is on a telephone at the reception and she’s spelling something, using the international aviation alphabet… “Delta, Alpha, Whisky…” she says and suddenly I can taste and smell whisky and smell cheap talc and cigarettes and breath mints and feel a sharp stone digging into my back as Tracy Booth slaps my face…

  I feel like I’m having a panic attack or something, so I step into the toilets off the corridor and I go to the sink and I splash water on my face and I look in the mirror and I wonder if I’m still a shadow and I don’t know why I’m having all these flashbacks, like a man drowning… everything’s going to be all right, I say to myself… but is it?

  And then I smell bleach, or chlorine, which reminds me of a swimming-pool, and I’m drowning again… and then I’m swimming in a lake and someone screams…

  I go back into the corridor and there’s another man waiting on another brown plastic chair and he’s reaching into his trouser pocket and as he pulls out a handkerchief a coin drops onto the grey lino floor and it rolls and spins across the corridor and hits my shoe and stops. I pick it up and give it back to the man who says thanks, and it’s a 10p piece… a shilling… and I feel in my pocket for a moment and I think of Sarah.

  As I turn towards the lift, two people are standing there… the man is pressing the button and the woman is about to leave. “See you later”, she says and she’s wearing a light green jacket and I smell vanilla… The woman leans forward and kisses the man and it makes a kiss sound and I think of silent kisses and of Sarah’s lipstick.

  And then without knowing it I’m standing in front of a door, and I don’t remember anything about the last minute or so when I was in the lift because I was thinking about Sarah and I push the door open and I walk into her room.

  Chapter 51

  “Poison”, Dave had said.

  “Kristel poisoned her?”

  “Morgan knew, but he was in London. She couldn’t bring herself to do anything more brutal… A serious dose of beta-blockers. Would have been lethal much sooner if she hadn’t vomited some of them up… So the body went into like a self-induced coma, there’s a medical term for it… I’ve forgotten. Extremely low heart-rate, breathing down to a minimum…”