by Dan Holloway
“But if he swapped the wines, wouldn’t you be able to see the bottle had been tampered with?” Rosie asked.
“No. It’s common practice to have old wines recorked, especially Tokaji. In some cellars it’s recorked as often as every five years.”
“But why would he go to all this trouble to make you think he was murdered?”
“Because he knew the trail would lead me back to Haydn.” He knew the next question. It was the question that bothered him too, but for the moment he couldn’t find an answer. “I’ve no idea why.”
“What are you going to do now?” Rosie asked. Tommy wondered if she thought he should call Emily before he did anything else. It was what he wanted to do, but he knew there was another message he had to deliver first.
“Now,” Tommy said. “I’m going to tell Becky. She asked me to find her father’s killer. She needs to know he killed himself.”
Tommy took out his mobile. “I can’t do it over the phone.” He thought back to the days after he had split up with Emily, unable to look anyone in the eye, unable to connect with them. Why? Was it shame or guilt? Was he frightened because he knew that if anyone looked into him they would see that he had fallen short? Or was it simply that he never wanted to look into someone’s eyes again and be sucked in by their pain? He looked to Rosie for confirmation that it was OK to call her now. She held his hand and nodded.
“Becky, I need to see you now. Let’s meet on the bridge at the end of North Hinksey Lane. Ten minutes?”
“I’ll drive you,” said Rosie.
It was a statement not a question and Tommy was too tired to argue. And the vast grey nothing that was swirling inside his stomach and threatening to damp out any remaining life the moment the last drop of adrenalin leeched from his wrung-out body told him that he would need someone to bring him home afterwards. He could already hear the drumming patter of thoughts, memories, everything he didn’t want to confront rushing like rats towards his consciousness. Whether they reached him first, or whether his defences shut every hatch in time made little difference. He was, as he believed the saying went, buggered every which way.
Tommy couldn’t remember getting in the car as Rosie pulled up in the car park of the school at the bottom of North Hinksey Lane. He didn’t know how to tell Becky that she was wrong. The belief that her father had been killed, and that Tommy would find his killer, was the one thing that had given her direction through her grief. It was the one thing that had given him direction too, for that matter, since he had first set eyes on her listless figure in the basement of the Jericho Café. What would it mean to her that he had killed himself after all? He was getting to know his daughter again after 18 years but hey, the thought of having her back in his life just wasn’t enough to keep him alive. He was thankful that for now his body was running on automatic and he didn’t have to think about such things. Rosie kissed him and he got out.
Becky was waiting for him on the bridge, arms resting on the stonework as she leant back in one of the lovers’ niches. The evening light was playing games of chase with willow shadows on the water behind her, but none of it reflected from her eyes. How did he start?
Before he could answer he found his lips had already begun.
“I know who killed your dad.” He leant back against the opposite wall, trying not to relax his arms too much, trying to fight off sleep a little longer, aware that his body was fighting back against what came next for all it was worth, trying to shut itself down. He watched the midges glinting like Swarovski crystals behind her, felt the acrid burning of the sun on his eyes, looked anywhere but at her.
Over the bridge, into the long, damp, sun-drenched grass. Warmth on his back and searing his eyes. Warmer still the teasing of summer on his hand. Looking down and watching the thin snake of red creeping out of his grasp. Opening his fist, noticing that something was there but not knowing what. Watching his hand as though it were as alien to him as the thorns that were cutting into his skin.
Becky blinked a couple of times but said nothing.
His eyes closed now. “He killed himself.” Tommy waited.
A minute and he heard nothing. A minute more and he opened his eyes, half expecting she would be gone, screwing his eyes into the sun. She smiled. “So you couldn’t wait?”
In the absolute evening stillness Tommy thought that he could hear his head list to one side, his confusion and curiosity audible.
She was still smiling but now the most distant corners of her mouth seemed to quiver with a sadness that was at least something he could understand. Then they were still again.
“To try the wine,” she said. “Couldn’t resist, could you? Dad said you probably wouldn’t be able to. Drink it with Rosie, did you?”
She could have been stringing any words together. He couldn’t pick out any sense in anything she said.
“He said it would come to this. To a choice, Tommy. We’re defined by our choices. That’s what he believed. Not the easy ones like what to have for breakfast or which trashy novel to read next, or where to go on holiday.” For a moment Tommy caught a pause and saw her blink, maybe blinking back a tear. “Not the choices we make all the time, or even the ones we make once a year or so. We’re defined by the fuck-off big choices we make once a lifetime. Maybe twice. If we get lucky. Choices we can never go back on, not ever, because once we’ve made them we’ve changed everything. Not like the butterfly by causing a ripple that grows and grows but by cutting a fracture between two futures right then and there, the moment we even think it.”
Now it was Becky who cocked her head in the silence, looking at him with such intense interest it was as though she had never seen him before and wondered what he was doing there, who he was. Her voice lowered as though she didn’t want to scare off this new discovery, whatever it might be. “What would you choose to do if you could never go back on your word? Well, you can never go back on this, Tommy, but I’m afraid it’s not a thought experiment.”
“I don’t understand.” was all that Tommy could say. “What choice?”
“Maybe you’re not so clever.” She smiled. He thought he saw real affection in it, but probably he was just exhausted and seeing mirages in the sun. “That’s not fair. I know you are.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that Dad planned everything for this, Tommy. Beginning before I was born. Just like it says in the Bible. Before the twins were born, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” She paused, as though to allow him space to take in what she was saying. To digest it, piece by piece. He couldn’t.
“You came up to college just after mum got pregnant, didn’t you?”
“I guess,” he said. Somewhere unconsciously the maths made sense in a way that the words didn’t.
“Why do you think you got such a nice room in college? The only one in the whole place with its own kitchen at the time, wasn’t it?”
That rang a bell. He had heard the question before. Barnard Ellison had asked him.
“He was grooming you for me, Tommy.”
“What?”
“Dad wanted the best of everything for me, and that included you.”
Tommy tried to get his head around what she meant. OK, he thought, keep your questions basic. “If he wanted the best for you why turn his back on you for 18 years?”
“You really are tired, Tommy. You still don’t get it, do you? He didn’t turn his back on me. Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated. Think about it. It’s the key to everything. He turned his back on Becky. He raised me the most loving way any father could, every day for eighteen years.”
Tommy could feel himself going cold, and he smashed his hands into the wall to make his blood pump. What she was saying could mean only one thing, but it was something that made no sense at all. “Carol?” he said, finally.
“Well done, Tommy.”
“And Becky?”
“Becky’s where I left her. In a deep grave in woods little way off the M40, on the way to the airport,
from where she was going to fly to Budapest. I can take you to her grave. If that’s what you choose.”
Tommy focused enough to see something in her eyes. The same look he had seen there less than a week ago as they had talked at his house. She had been talking about her summer in Eastern Europe then as well. She had had a look of the deepest sadness, and suddenly he understood why. She had fallen in love with travel, but it was the only trip she had ever taken. The only one that she was old enough to remember at any rate. She had spent the first eighteen years of her life cloistered away from the outside world, and it was only when she emerged that she had realised what she had missed out on.
He looked at her. She was smiling at him. It seemed to be genuine affection that he saw.
“That’s your choice, Tommy. Mum or me. You’ve got the mould. I checked in the drawer and it was gone. Rosie will tell you it’s her fingerprints on there. Then again, I killed my sister. You could tell her that, and I’ll take you to Becky’s grave. If you don’t choose me of your own volition then what’s the point of pretending, eh?”
He could feel a battering ram in his head. He knew that his mind would be beaten into submission in a few minutes at most. There was no time to think. He looked at her eyes staring out from under her red fringe and saw hollow dead eyes staring up at him. He couldn’t begin to imagine what it must have been like to be locked away for 18 years. Could Shaw really have done everything out of love for her? That was why Shaw waited, waited till she was ready for him. Waited until she was old enough to inherit everything from her mother and father; then he laid down his life and framed Haydn so she could have it all. Things he could only do once. Raise a child.
“But your sister?” was the only thing he could think of to ask. It was one of the things that he had never understood, the bond between siblings, because it had never been something he’d known; but he had always imagined that there was something inexplicable that linked them, especially twins. He knew that siblings could do the most horrific things to one another, but that was like lovers, surely, an anger borne out of a jealousy that was some kind of perversion of that closeness. It didn’t just happen. “Are you saying you just killed her, because it was part of the plan? How could you do that?”
“The choice was made a long time ago. Before I was born, just like the verse from the Bible says. Dad chose me. Not for any reason except that he had to choose one of us and it happened to be me. He pulled the trigger years before I did. From that day on Becky was fucked. It was just a matter of waiting.”
As he tried to think, as he tried to begin to frame questions in his head, Tommy knew at last what Shaw had meant in his book. There was no vocabulary, linguistic, moral, sociological, or religious to describe whether this young woman, Carol, or whoever she was, was a victim or a criminal; innocent or guilty. She was the twin that Charles loved. Those were the only words there were to describe it.
He could feel darkness flooding into him. He was desperate to keep it away for long enough to make a decision; desperate for strength, but there was nowhere left to draw it from. He smiled and crossed the bridge. He held his arms out to Carol and embraced her. Closing his eyes, he saw Emily. He felt her strength. Just enough.
He unpalmed his mobile and pressed the hotkey. From the way he felt Carol tense once, flail, then relax, like an animal stunned by the electrodes at the abattoir, and bury herself closer into his shoulder, he guessed that Rosie had pulled up behind him. Tommy took Carol’s arms and held them out to Rosie who cuffed them. He had no vocabulary to frame the question of Carol’s innocence or guilt. But every word he thought of told him that Haydn was innocent. It felt like he had fallen back on the simple absolutes of a society too tired to fill in the grey. But without them he would have done nothing. He made a note to himself to thank Emily when he was well enough again.
As cars arrived to take her away, Carol looked back over her shoulder. “I’ll wait,” she called to the figure standing on the bridge, quivering in Rosie’s arms. But Tommy was already gone, somewhere a long, long way away.
____
66
It was the last thing Tommy remembered for two weeks. He was ill, but he wasn’t sectioned. Emily gave Rosie compassionate leave to look after him, and some days she visited him herself. After three weeks Tommy was well enough to explain how much the strength of her friendship, and her own, deeper, strength had helped him. A week later he and Rosie went for dinner with Emily and David.
Carol kept to her word; Becky’s body was taken from its shallow grave just off the M40 and interred in St Lawrence’s churchyard in North Hinksey. Haydn had lost one daughter already, and now she faced her loss all over again. When he was well enough, Tommy cooked for her regularly, and Rosie told her stories about her childhood in Hong Kong.
*
Rosie took the remaining plates into the kitchen. Her antennae were tuned well enough to know that Haydn was ready to talk, but only to Tommy.
As Rosie cast a glance over her shoulder she thought that the scene looked like something from Noh theatre, or the ballet, or perhaps from an Orthodox icon. She saw two figures, both with an arm extended, hands intertwined, heads leant in and slightly to one side. The tableau was one of confidants, of survivors both offering and in need of consolation, and yet it seemed that they were no more than stylised characters playing out parts engraved on masks. Their actions, and their words if she could have heard them, were, she thought, both infinitely appropriate and utterly meaningless.
Finally Haydn spoke. “You’ve never asked. Maybe that’s because you still aren’t ready, but I rather think that it’s out of kindness.”
Tommy realised from the jarring sensation that this was the first time he had heard Haydn describe a feeling like kindness, even if it was only by using the noun in passing.
“Kindness is a good thing,” she continued. “But sometimes it gets in the way of the truth.”
“Yes, but often kindness is better than the truth.”
“How very true,” she said. “But not between us.”
Tommy smiled. “That sort of kindness is best left between lovers.”
“But you and I, Tommy, we’re just cold academics.”
Tommy felt as though finally Haydn was peeling away the layers of protection in which she had clothed herself for so many years. So much so that he wondered whether he needed to ask the question now, or whether he would know the answer simply by feeling the way she had locked her fingers in his. But somehow he couldn’t bring himself to try, as though suddenly she was naked and he needed to protect her modesty.
“The truth is,” she said, “I knew the moment she walked in the door. Not because of how she spoke, or how she acted, or how she looked. Charles was quite right – three months away would have explained all of those things. I knew in exactly the same way you know someone, Tommy, the moment you meet them.”
“I didn’t know you.”
“No.”
“Did you know that she’d killed Becky?”
“I guessed.”
“And you said nothing?”
“She killed my daughter.” Haydn paused, teasing a thought out from somewhere. “But she is my daughter. We are defined by the choices we make about our children. That’s what Charles thought, wasn’t it?”
Before Tommy could speak, Haydn carefully removed her hand from his and placed her fingers on his lips, gently silencing him. As soon as she had replaced her hand Rosie, had, as she had sensed, returned from the kitchen.
Rosie stood in the doorway a moment before she came in, but all she saw was two figures acting out a hollow play.
*
After six weeks Tommy decided to get back to work. He began by ordering samples for Farlow Bateson’s gym. He was delighted when they started arriving on his doorstep, and today he was particularly delighted to see the Rome postmark. He took the thick brown envelope upstairs in anticipation. It would be a selection of sports floors from his friend, Gianni.
He sat down
with his abalone letter opener and a smoothie and slit the envelope. Out flopped an auction catalogue. It was for a Sotheby’s Fine Wine auction, dated a week ago. There was a post-it on one page. Tommy opened it. Tokaji. Eszencia 1811. One bottle from the cellars at Mezes Mały. A case had sold in 1991 for £98,000.
He shook the envelope. Out came a sheet of heavy woven paper. He ran the letter opener feverishly down the letter and put it on the table. He fell back into the sofa and heard the familiar voice reading the letter back to him.
You blinked first, Tommy. Johnny Boy really did give you everything you needed.
£98,000. The money, that he had given to Haydn, was £98,000. It was the price of the world’s finest Tokaji. It was clear at once what Charles had been trying to tell him. Why would a man of that wealth drink the second best wine in the world when the best was available? It had been his way of telling Tommy that he was still alive. Tommy had been so obsessed by the two wines he had found at Charles’ house that he had missed the most important thing of all – the wine that wasn’t there.
Jacob I loved but Esau I hated. You obsessed over it, I think, but you never thought about it logically. You never thought what it would mean given the one incontrovertible fact that I was still alive, so you looked at the wrong twins. It was thirty years ago that I discovered I had a twin, at the time I found out I had been adopted. He, however, was never so curious. It was easy to keep tabs on him. I was able to marry my appearance to his, just as easily as I was able to match Carol’s appearance to Becky’s. I mirrored him for thirty years, not knowing at first when it would come in handy.
Everything I told Carol is true. I set out to give her everything, and once I made my choice to do so I never went back on it. I had hoped that you would be part of her future, but I do not hold it against you that you are not. That, after all, is the risk we take when we leave things to choice. I know that I planned everything as fully as I could have done. John, for example – the perfect way to pique your curiosity, wasn’t he? I wonder if you realised why I took him on eighteen years ago. It certainly wasn’t because his legal skills were superior to Henry’s, but Henry, I’m afraid, was just too conscientious with his body. John, however, I was able to groom for ill-health and he actually thought it was a treat. All I had to do was induce the right amount of anxiety and over-exertion at just the right time and you were hooked. And I wonder how difficult you found it to turn your back Carol’s sad eyes when they looked up at you from under her badly-dyed hair. Perhaps I should have expected you’d do it eventually – you’d turned your back once before, after all, hadn’t you? I thought you might have found it harder to do so a second time. In all the years I had you followed, that was the one thing I thought was sure to sway you. You can sleep soundly, by the way – my man acted quickly enough to remove any traces you might have left in the poor girl’s room in Brewer Street, even though you’d just shoulder-charged him in your hurry to leave.