Alan and I weren’t really hungry, but everything smelled wonderful, so for a few minutes we dealt with our curries and biryanis and naan and chutneys, our conversation limited to ‘could I have another naan, please’ and ‘my word, this is good’ and the like.
After a while Elaine said, ‘Oh, I forgot beer. I usually have lager with Indian. Anyone want some?’
I was finding that my scotch went very nicely with curry, and, apparently, Alan was, too. ‘It is akin to blasphemy, however, to drink this remarkable whisky with anything so strongly flavoured as curry,’ he said, looking at his empty glass with something like reverence.
Elaine got up and brought the bottle to the table. ‘I will not allow shibboleths to prevent my enjoying my food and drink in any combination I like. I drink white wine with beef if I want, and red with fish.’
‘Whatever turns you on,’ I said, pouring myself another small tot that I wasn’t sure I needed. But it was really marvellous stuff, even to a bourbon lover.
When we had eaten all we could, and a little more, I helped Elaine clear up the plates, and then we sat down in front of the fire with decaf coffee, except for Alan, who opted for the fully leaded stuff, as he had to drive later.
I mentally girded my loins, took another look at the photos of Tom, and said, ‘He was a really adorable little boy, wasn’t he?’
She smiled fondly. ‘He looks quite a lot like my sister, actually. And he was so well behaved, always. Oh, he got into the usual amount of trouble, as all boys do, but it was just scrapes – stealing apples, falling out of trees – normal boy high spirits. He was a good student, too. He’s always wanted to know about things, everything …’ Her voice trailed off. She put her coffee down; her hand was shaking.
‘He’s going to be all right, Elaine. I’m sure of that. And I’m sure we’ll find him soon. I hope it isn’t painful for you to talk about him, but if Alan and I know more about him, we might be able to come up with some idea of what might have happened.’
‘Yes. I can see that.’ She paused to get herself under control. ‘What would you like to know?’
‘Just tell us about him. He’s your favourite nephew, I take it.’
‘My only nephew. I have only the one sister, and she was never able to have … another child. I suppose she rather spoiled him. Well, she and I together. I admit I’ve always doted on him, and as Ruth’s husband died when Tom was just a baby, he had what amounted to two mothers.’
‘For an only child.’ I smiled. ‘Yes, that could easily have been disastrous for him, but he seems to have turned out all right. From what I can tell, he’s got his head screwed on straight.’
‘Where did he go to school, Elaine?’ asked Alan.
‘Ruth would have sent him to the comprehensive here, but I thought he’d be better off away from his female-ridden existence, so I persuaded her to send him to Perse.’
Even I had heard of the Perse School. ‘Good grief, isn’t that terribly expensive? I thought it was really exclusive.’
‘It wasn’t quite so steep then, and, of course, I helped with the cost. Really, I think it was good for him. They had excellent masters in the sciences, and that’s how he was able to win the scholarship to St Stephen’s.’
‘Is he interested in sports? He’s obviously in excellent physical shape.’
‘Oh, yes, he’s always played rugby. Such a dangerous game, I’ve always thought, and he got his share of broken bones when he was in school. By the time he came up, though, he’d learned enough that he earned his blue without too many injuries. I don’t think he plays much now – he’s far too busy – but I know he keeps in condition.’
‘Was his father athletic?’
An odd expression crossed her face. ‘Not really. Ruth’s husband was a nice enough man, but he hadn’t much energy for anything. Not even living. As I say, he died young.’
‘Heart attack?’ I asked. I was probing, poking here and there as I had in the hayloft, in hopes of finding something.
‘Pneumonia. He caught a bad cold and it went to flu and then to pneumonia. That was over twenty years ago, and they hadn’t some of the drugs then that are effective now. He just drifted away.’
‘And how old is Tom now?’
‘Twenty-three next month.’
‘So he’s been without a father most of his life. What a pity. Still, it doesn’t seem to have hurt him much.’
Elaine shook her head and buried her face in her cup, but not before I saw her tears.
I waited. There was something more to come, I was sure.
‘If only,’ she whispered. ‘If only that were true.’
If only what were true? ‘I’m sorry, Elaine. I’m lost.’
Alan stood and brought the bottle of whisky, and poured a little into her empty coffee cup. She raised her head and nodded her thanks.
‘You said he’d been without a father all these years. I wish that were true.’
I frowned. ‘But you said—’
‘I said that Ruth’s husband died when Tom was a baby. He was not Tom’s father. Nor is Ruth his mother.’
‘He was adopted?’ I was confused.
It was Alan who got it. ‘Tom is your son, isn’t he, Elaine?’
TWENTY-FIVE
Elaine sipped her whisky and then put the cup aside with a thump. ‘No more. I need to be alert tomorrow. Yes, Alan, Tom is my son. He doesn’t know that, and I don’t intend to tell him.’
‘Medical records,’ I murmured, half to myself.
‘I have no interesting medical conditions, nothing he need ever worry about.’
‘But what about his father? Is there anything about him that Tom should know?’
Elaine sighed. ‘He already knows more than he cares to.’
She looked at her coffee cup. Alan picked up the bottle of Macallan. She shook her head. There was a long pause. ‘I suppose,’ she said slowly, ‘I’d better tell you the whole story, now that you’ve guessed part of it.’
‘Only if you want to.’ I felt guilty. I’d wanted to explore this woman’s past, but now it was turning out to be a pretty painful exercise.
‘It would be a relief to tell somebody. I’ve kept it bottled up all these years, and they do say that’s not good for a person.
‘I was just thirty and had been working here in Cambridge for a few years. I’d been concentrating so hard on my job, studying about police work when I wasn’t on duty, that I hadn’t much time for a personal life. And thirty is a dangerous age for a woman.’
‘It is,’ I agreed. ‘Especially for an unmarried woman. You begin to think people are looking at you oddly, wondering why you haven’t found a man, which is obviously the life goal of any woman. And you begin to look at yourself, wondering the same thing. Am I pursuing the wrong goals? Is marriage and family really what counts in life? Oh, I was married in my early twenties, myself, but I saw so much of that sort of uncertainty in friends, fellow teachers.’
‘Yes, and I had reached a stage in my career where I could sit back and take stock, stop running quite so hard. So, of course …’
‘You fell in love.’
She gave a grim little laugh. ‘And “fell” is the right word. Right off a cliff. There was no thought involved, no logic, no weighing of which course to take. He was a solicitor in Huntingdon whom I met over a police matter. He was very nice-looking and well mannered, and he told me he thought I was beautiful. Nobody had ever told me that before – nor since, I might add. I was lost after the first warm glance.’
We waited.
‘And it was all a sham. Oh, there was an idyllic couple of months. We spent almost every minute together. He took me to little out-of-the-way inns. We went for long walks in the fenlands. I thought it was all so romantic.
‘And then I found out why he never took me to local restaurants or fancy hotels. It was when I told him I was pregnant, and wasn’t it lovely, and we could get married quietly and be together the rest of our lives.
‘He was married. To
the daughter of a bishop. She was the one with the money.’ She said it with cool detachment, as if it had happened to someone else.
‘Oh, no! The miserable, cheating …’
‘“Bastard” is the word you’re looking for, I think. Alan, would you mind getting me some water? I daren’t drink any more whisky, and I’m parched.’
‘What did he think you were supposed to do – just vanish off the face of the earth with his child?’
‘He didn’t care what I did, but he wanted the child to vanish. He graciously said he would pay for a private abortion. He was furious when I refused.’
‘Oh, what a sweetheart! So what did you do?’
‘In most circumstances, a woman wouldn’t have had a problem. There wasn’t a lot of stigma attached to an unwed pregnancy by then, not like a couple of decades earlier. But as a member of the police, I had to be a lot more careful. I was having a hard enough time gaining acceptance in the force as a woman. As a pregnant woman – well, I ask you.’
‘Andrews wasn’t chief constable then, was he?’
‘No, thank God. He’d have found some excuse to have me sacked. No, it was old Fenton – did you know him, Alan?’
‘Bill Fenton? Yes, for my sins. I can’t say I cared for him a great deal.’
‘He was an idiot,’ said Elaine, ‘and the most ineffectual man ever to grace that office, but his incompetence worked in my favour, as did my general shape. I’ve never been a sylph, and I favour comfortable clothes, so it was easy to hide the pregnancy till well into the sixth month. I don’t think anyone knew, except my doctor, of course. She was most cooperative. She invented an illness for me that required complete rest for three months, preferably at a seaside nursing home, and Fenton, the old fool, believed every word. Actually, I went to stay with my sister, who lived in Gerrard’s Cross then.
‘Ruth and her husband wanted children so badly, but she had never been able to conceive. My baby seemed to them like a gift from God. He was born at a local hospital, and as soon as I was well enough to go home, I finalized the arrangements for his legal adoption and came back to work.’
‘That must have been a hard time for you.’ Childless myself, and not by choice, I was near tears at the thought of this nice woman having to leave her brand-new son.
‘It was. I wanted that little boy so much it was a physical pain. But at least I could visit him whenever I had time off, and it wasn’t too long before her husband got a job near Cambridge and they moved here. Then it was almost as good as having him with me.’
‘Almost, but not quite,’ said Alan quietly. ‘I remember when mine were small. One never knows when the exciting moments will happen – the first word, the first step, the funny incidents, the near tragedies. I missed most of them, working the uncertain hours of a policeman. You would have, too, if he’d been with you.’
‘Yes, I made myself believe that. And Ruth was so good about letting me be a part of his life. After a while I almost adjusted to the situation. Ruth’s husband died, and the three of us grew even closer. His being at school in Cambridge meant I could see him often, even in term time.
‘So things went along that way. We were quite happy, actually. Ruth was doing a splendid job with Tom; he was thriving. I was rising in the ranks and spending every penny I could spare on his education and so on, and never grudging a penny of it.
‘But then when he was nearly fifteen, his name and picture got into the newspapers in connection with an academic award he’d won at school, and his father saw it, made the connection and wrote me a letter.’
‘What had he been doing all this time?’
‘I didn’t know and didn’t care. He’d changed firms after our pathetic little affair, afraid I’d pester him for child support. I couldn’t find him to sign the adoption papers, but as it was obvious he wanted nothing to do with his son, I didn’t worry about that. I was delighted to see the back of him.’
‘I should say so! He sounds like a real sleaze.’
‘All that and then some. And that letter …’ She clenched her hands on the arm of the chair and then noticed what she was doing and deliberately relaxed them. ‘It seemed he’d been involved with a good many other women through the years, and his wife found out.’
‘The bishop’s daughter.’
‘Right. There was a divorce; I imagine she and her father took a dim view of his philandering. I did mention, didn’t I, that she was the one with the money. The divorce was messy enough that his law firm decided they no longer needed his services. That left the sleaze with very little. So he wrote to me and told me he thought it was time he played a part in his son’s life.’
‘He really wanted money, I imagine,’ said Alan. ‘His kind always does.’
‘And he thought I’d pay him to stay away from Tom. He was right, too. Tom had been told he was adopted, but he’d never shown any real curiosity about his birth parents, and Ruth never told him. As far as he was concerned, Ruth was his mother, and he’d pretty much forgotten her husband. His name was Tom, too – young Tom was named after him.’
‘So you paid up?’ Alan was frowning. ‘I know that, as a police officer, you know it’s always a bad idea to pay blackmail. As a parent, I do understand. But I also know how much the police are paid, and I’d not have thought it was enough to keep a child in a very expensive school and pay blackmail.’
‘You’re right, of course. The school provides some assistance for parents who need it, and Ruth obviously did. She and her husband never had a great deal of money – he owned a garden centre and got along reasonably well, but there was never anything left over. When he died, Ruth went back to the sort of clerical job she’d had before they married, but it paid rather badly. They had owned the house, so she didn’t have a mortgage to worry about, or she couldn’t have coped. I helped her out from time to time when I could, but you got it in one when you said I could ill afford another demand on my resources. And yet I couldn’t have the sleaze interfering in Tom’s life.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked. ‘I mean, it’s none of my business, but I can’t imagine how you dealt with it all.’
‘You won’t believe it, either of you, but I was fool enough to believe him when he said if I gave him five thousand pounds, he’d go away and never trouble me again.’
Alan shook his head. ‘A blackmailer always comes back to the well.’
‘I knew that, but I made myself believe that this case was different. So I sold everything I possessed that was of any value. I had a little jewellery from my grandmother, a painting or two, a few rare books. It didn’t add up to as much as he wanted, but I was able to squeeze the rest out by trimming my expenses.’
‘Did Ruth know about any of this?’
‘Not then; I didn’t want to worry her. I should have known he’d come back. It was almost two years later, just long enough that I’d begun to feel it might be all right.’
‘Of course he did. Another letter?’ Alan’s voice was full of sympathy.
‘No. This time he came to the police station.’
TWENTY-SIX
Neither of us could find anything to say. After a long silence, I got out of my chair. ‘Elaine, I think we all need some tea. Do you mind if I make a pot?’
‘That’s a good idea. Let me.’
I would have protested, but it was her kitchen, after all, and she’d probably be better with something to do. I went with her and we worked together in silence. I was wondering how this woman had been able to function at all with all the pressure she’d faced over the years from her terribly demanding job and the chaos of her private life.
It’s wonderful how the humble ordinariness of a pot of tea can dispel drama. Whoever called it ‘the cup that cheers but does not inebriate’ hit the nail on the head. What could be more normal than sitting around a fire with tea? Elaine had found some chocolate biscuits, too, and although I didn’t need another morsel of food, I wanted the comfort of chocolate.
When we were settled with the
tea things in front of us, Alan said, ‘You know, Elaine, you needn’t tell us any more if it’s too hard for you. Painful stories can always wait.’
‘This one can’t,’ she said firmly. ‘If my ramblings lead you to any inkling of where Tom might be, the pain doesn’t matter.’
‘Very well.’ Alan nodded. ‘So the man came to the police station.’
‘He turned up at a horrible time. He would! I was a DCI then and had just finished a frightful case – a child murder. You’ll remember it, I expect. The baby stolen from the supermarket?’
I felt a chill go through me. I remembered it myself; it wasn’t all that many years ago. The mother had turned her back for a moment, and when she turned around the child was gone from her shopping trolley. After a frantic search lasting almost a week, the police had discovered the little girl in the hands of a demented, childless woman. Although the police had used the utmost tact and their most skilled negotiators, the woman went to pieces and killed both the baby and herself.
‘Yes, I remember,’ said Alan quietly. ‘The worst sort there can be. You would have felt wretched.’
‘It was, I think, the worst time in my life. And then George showed up. By special intervention of all the devils in hell, I was downstairs in the lobby at the time. And Andrews was there.’
‘Oh, dear! Did he suspect something?’ I asked.
‘Of course. He hasn’t worked it out – not so far – but he knows I have a secret, and he hates it.’
‘So that’s why he’s out to get you. Alan and I were sure there was some reason.’
‘That’s one of the reasons.’
‘At any rate,’ said Alan, calling us gently back to order, ‘Tom’s father showed up. You knew him straight away? After all that time?’
‘Oh, yes. He hadn’t changed. Some men age very well, particularly the irresponsible ones. No worries, you see.’ She poured herself a little more tea. ‘He was better-looking than ever, with just a bit of grey at the temples to give him that distinguished look. He smiled, that crocodile smile of his that once enchanted me, and acted surprised to see me. Oh, there’s no point in going into the whole thing. He did it very well: pretended he was there to report a minor theft and asked me out to lunch in a way I could hardly refuse in front of everyone, and then when we were well away from the station, he told me he needed more money. I told him I didn’t have any, which was quite true, and said I’d apply for a restraining order if he tried to see Tom.
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