She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Tell me why you’re here, Michaela.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.” She made to move past me, but I put out an arm to block her path. “Get out of my way,” she said, staring at me coldly.
“Not until you’ve heard me out. You see, I think I know why you’re here. It’s because Considine’s dead, isn’t it? So it’s safe to come home at last. To open the door with the key you’ve kept all these years and walk into the house where you spent your childhood. However much of a childhood that was with Considine for a stepfather.” There was a flicker of shock in her eyes as the remark registered. “It was him you were running from, wasn’t it? Him and the things he did to you. But running away meant you had to leave Nicky to cope alone and to believe you were dead. You didn’t set out to hurt me and my family just because we had what you and Nicky should have had. You did it to ease your conscience for deserting him. Isn’t that right?”
“You know nothing about it,” she said grimly.
“What did you think when you heard me moving about downstairs? That I was Considine come back from the dead to torment you? Is that why you were too frightened to make a run for it?” I saw her shudder and glance away. It took a lot to rock her self-control, but even in death Neville Considine could do it. The thought made me feel suddenly and vastly sorry for both his stepchildren. “Did Nicky know Considine abused you, Michaela? Did your mother? Did she have any idea what kind of man she’d entrusted you to?”
She eyed me narrowly. “Who told you?” she asked, her voice low and suspicious.
“Emma Moresco. Your impersonator. And who told her? Why, Considine, of course. Who else?”
That can’t be.”
“But it is. And there’s more. Ask yourself this. Why would I kill Considine? What possible motive could I have? And if I had killed him, why would I come here in broad daylight only a few days later?
What kind of sense does it make? Unless Emma Moresco killed him and saddled me with the blame. Unless I’m here because I’m hoping Considine hid some clue to her identity in this house. Unless, in other words, I really am speaking the truth.” I slowly dropped my arm, but she made no move. “Go downstairs and phone the police if you like.
I won’t stop you. Or stay and listen to what I have to say.”
“Why should I?”
“Because you’re her victim too. If you let her get away with it.”
“How do I know you’re not making all this up?”
“You don’t. But you know Considine’s dead, and somehow I don’t think you still believe I killed him. I need your help, Michaela. I need to find Considine’s most secret hiding place. I need you to lead me to it.”
“What makes you think I can?” I risked a rueful smile.
“Desperation.”
A moment passed. Then she took a cautious step back. Her expression softened fractionally.
I looked at her. “Does that mean you’ll help me?” “It means I’ll listen,” she said levelly. “That’s all.” But that, of course, was all I’d asked.
She heard me out in silence, sitting on the bed, her arms clasped around her, rocking slightly back and forth, while I stood by the window, nervously scanning the street as I described the sinister dance Emma Moresco had led me. I told her everything, just as I’d told Emma everything, and for the same reason. Only this time I knew the risk I was running. She could refuse to believe me and telephone the police.
She could even accept the truth of what I said and still telephone them. Emma, after all, had avenged Nicky more completely than his real sister had dreamed of doing. Why should Michaela side with me against Considine’s executioner? Why should she want to help someone she’d earlier tried to ruin? Why should she lift a finger to save a member of my family from injustice after what we’d done to her father?
In the end, when I’d said all I had to say and she knew every one of the discoveries I’d made, it was she who told me why.
Still sitting on the bed, her face averted, she spoke in a strange low voice that was scarcely her own, clogged with a kind of exasperated ferocity. “I’d have thought I could happily turn my back on you in a situation like this. I ought to hate you now you’ve admitted Nicky was right all along and your own grandmother faked some of the evidence that hanged our father. I ought to throw you to the wolves and hope your whole family gets torn apart in the process. But I can’t do it. I find, of all the supreme ironies’ and here she paused to look over her shoulder at me ‘that I actually feel sorry for you. It seems Nicky didn’t choose his friends as badly as I thought.”
“I should have searched out the truth a long time ago, Michaela.”
“Yes, you should. But then I should have done, openly and honestly, what Emma Moresco did so cunningly in my place, shouldn’t I? I was just too angry to see it. And frightened as well, I suppose, after all these years of leading another life. The result is that a woman I’ve never met has made a fool of both of us. But she’s also made one crucial mistake.”
“Which is?”
“She’s been greedy. She embarked on this assuming I was dead and she hasn’t allowed herself to be deflected by learning that I’m not. She thinks she can still get away with it. And so she might have done, if she’d been content to split the proceeds with Considine. But she wanted it all. Or maybe Considine left her no option. Either way, she’s gone for broke. And it isn’t going to work.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re right. Considine was a great one for secrets. He loved to hoard them like trophies. That’s why I came here today. To collect… his trophies of me.” She bent forward and pulled a leather attache case out from beneath the bed, where it had been obscured by the dust sheet. It was worn and scuffed with age. The initials N.F.C.
were stencilled on the lid. “He planked out the loft and set it up as a darkroom for his photographic hobby. But photography was just an excuse to keep himself locked away.” She stopped and took a long calming breath, then went on. “And sometimes me with him.” She swallowed hard. “I remember the very first time he opened this case and showed me the pictures and magazines he kept in it. I didn’t understand. I had no idea. Later … there were pictures of me in it as well. They were his guarantee I’d never tell Mum what he did to me.
He said she’d think I’d led him on and the pictures would prove it and I was stupid enough to believe him.”
“You don’t have to tell me this, Michaela.”
“No, I suppose I don’t. But it’s why I could never come back before, you see. I was always afraid Considine would die and Mum or Nicky would find this and open it and see me and …” She gave a long shuddering sigh. “So much fear, for so long and for nothing, now they’re all dead. Mum and Nicky … and Considine too.”
“You came here for the contents of the case,” I prompted mildly, anxious for her to reveal what I sensed lay behind her words, but reluctant to disregard the years of suffering they skated over. “I understand.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “And it was where it had always been, stowed away in a panelled recess in the loft. Not locked, though.” She frowned at the thought and snapped open the catches. “Considine must have stopped locking it once he found himself living alone.” Slowly she raised the lid. “I was worried the police might have taken it away, but it didn’t look as though they’d even been up there. I brought it down here to check that it still contained … what it used to contain. And it did.
But there was something else as well.” She reached into the case, lifted out a buff envelope and handed it up to me, letting the lid fall shut beneath her.
It was a letter, addressed to Considine by hand and recently postmarked. The contents felt thin to the touch no more than a single folded sheet. “What is it?” I asked.
“See for yourself. But for that, I’m not sure I’d have listened to you. It answers your question. And raises a few others.”
I squeezed
the envelope open, slid out the piece of paper inside and unfolded it. I found myself staring at a birth certificate, or rather a copy of a birth certificate, issued only a few weeks previously by a London registrar, detailing a birth back in February 1947 at an address in Stepney. The father’s name was recorded as Edmund Abraham Tully, the mother’s as Alice Jane Tully, formerly Graham. The child was female. Her first name was Simone, her second … Emma.
Michaela’ sMG ate up the miles south-west along the A12 through Essex as the grey afternoon faded rapidly to dusk. We said little or nothing to each other, an undeclared truce putting reminiscence and recrimination to one side until the issue of the moment was resolved.
There would be a time to face the wrongs we’d done each other and those dear to us, but that time was not now.
It was dark by the time we reached the Dartford Tunnel and early evening, cold, damp and Channel-raw, before we were walking back from a parking place near the Palace Pier in Brighton towards Madeira Place.
Alice Graham had lied to me once, but nothing less than the truth would be good enough now.
Yet lies, of course, are only one way to avoid a reckoning. As soon as I saw the closed door and blackened frontage of the Ebb Tide Guest House, I knew she’d resorted to another.
“The birds have flown,” said Michaela, when I rejoined her at the foot of the area steps after several pointless stabs at the doorbell. “It was to be expected.”
“But flown where?” I snapped.
“Her neighbouring landladies might know,” she replied, countering my exasperation with calm logic. “She may have had to farm out some guests if it was a sudden departure.”
“Which it probably was,” I said, feeling a touch more optimistic.
“Exactly. Wait down by the pier and I’ll see what I can find out.”
I did as I was told, skulking around in the anonymous and sparsely populated shadows of the promenade near the pier entrance for twenty very long minutes until Michaela appeared at the bottom of Madeira Place and waved me over.
“Mrs. Beavis at the Rock Pool says Alice Graham went away on a spur-of-the-moment holiday last Sunday. No idea where or for how long.”
“That figures.”
“I said I was looking for Alice’s daughter.”
“And?”
“Mrs. Beavis said she hadn’t seen her in years. But there’s no doubt she exists.”
“I know that.” I sighed. “Sorry. It’s not your fault. The fact is, though, we’re not getting anywhere, are we? They’ve done a bunk. And Emma’s probably taken good care to cover their tracks.”
“She’s not infallible. And remember she goes by her first name: Simone.”
“You’re sure of that, are you?”
“Yes, because I tried it on Mrs. Beavis and she bit. She’s a hopeless gossip. That’s what took me so long. I claimed I’d been to school with Simone, but had lost touch since and was trying to organize a reunion. She kindly supplied the name of the school without realizing it and filled me in on Simone’s subsequent history. Not that she knew much, as you’d expect. Simone’s a bit of a mystery. But when I asked if she’d ever got married, the answer was yes. And divorced. With a son to show for it. The grandmother dotes on him. Guess what he’s called.”
“Haven’t a clue. Does it I broke off and seemed to see her eyes twinkle in the gloom. “Edmund,” I murmured.
“That’s right. He’s eleven or twelve, apparently. Lives with his father.”
“Where?”
“Surrey stockbroker belt.”
“We need to be more precise than that.”
“I know. But Mrs. Beavis is a gossip, not an address book.” “Then an address book’s what we’ve got to lay hands on. I wonder if Alice Graham has taken hers away with her.” “Hard to say.?
True. But we’re going to have to find out, aren’t we?” “Yes.”
Michaela nodded. “My thoughts exactly.”
Six hours later, we made our move. Michaela kept watch while I went down the narrow steps to the front door of Alice Graham’s basement flat armed with a length of scaffolding pipe I’d taken out of a builder’s skip further along the se afront Punching a hole in the glazed panel in the top half of the door seemed to make enough noise to wake the occupants of the local mortuary, never mind the sleeping residents of Madeira Place, but nothing stirred, so I went ahead and reached in to slip the latch, then let myself in. Housebreaking was beginning to agree with me.
Luck was with me, because virtually the first thing I saw by the light of Michaela’s torch was a telephone standing on a small table just inside the door. And on a shelf beneath was a padded leather address book. I picked it up and beat a retreat, reckoning I could always come back if the book led us nowhere, but fervently hoping I wouldn’t have to.
Nor did I. It took a while to find what we were looking for, because Alice Graham had recorded the information not surprisingly under the initial letter of her grandson’s surname, Morrison. There was little Edmund, listed with his father, Ian, and stepmother, Sally, at an address in Larchdale Avenue, Weybridge.
There were no fewer than seven successive addresses and telephone numbers listed for Alice’s daughter, the first elsewhere in Brighton, then one in Horsham, two in London, one in Paris, one in Amsterdam, and another in London. But all of them had been crossed out and I knew better than to think any of them had the slightest value. She would be long gone from anywhere she’d ever been before. But a blood tie was one link she couldn’t break, and there was a good chance it would prove her undoing.
The Paris address, however, stuck in my mind as we drove out of Brighton in the dark and empty second half of the night. I remembered asking, that day we’d met at Battersea Park, if she’d ever been there.
And I remembered her answer. “Paris? Never.” The lie had come, so slickly and swiftly, just as they always had, I suppose. But now she’d begun to stumble. One lie too many, one risk too great, one step too far. We were going after her, and we were going to find her.
We laid up at a large and anonymous hotel serving Gatwick Airport for the rest of that night and most of the following morning. I tried to sleep without much success, resisted the temptation to call Miv for fear her phone might be tapped by now, watched the television and scanned the newspapers for further word of me there was none -and tried to formulate a detailed plan of campaign.
In the end, though, we both admitted we’d have to play it by ear.
Emma’s or rather Simone’s ex-husband wasn’t likely to be in on her schemes, nor disposed to protect her. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine him refusing to help us if we could convince him of the urgency of the case. On the other hand, he was an unknown quantity, and I couldn’t afford to make even one mistake. If he recognized me or took against us, we were finished before we’d even started.
Reluctantly, therefore, I agreed to leave face-to-face contact to Michaela. We booked out of the hotel, drove up to Weybridge and traced the Morrisons’ address to a broad avenue of well-to-do detached houses on the affluent fringe of St. George’s Hill. Theirs was a large double-fronted, red-brick family residence set far enough back from the road to be well screened by the mature garden in front of it. We parked a little way short of the entrance, watched the golden leaves falling from the kerb side trees and waited for Ian Morrison to return from work. There was a car parked in front of the garage beside the house that looked like it could be his wife’s, but there was no sign of her and, even if there had been, we’d ruled out approaching her on her own. Simone wasn’t likely to be a happy memory for either her or Ian.
The best way to trade on that probability seemed to be to catch them together and exploit any embarrassment the memory engendered. We had no way of knowing how long they’d been married, nor whether Sally had been on the scene before the divorce. To us, they were total strangers; nothing more than names in an address book. But they were a vital part of Simone Graham’s past and Emma Moresco’s present.
We did
n’t have to wait as long as we’d expected, because, well before any schoolchildren started trailing home, a stocky fair-haired man of about forty, wearing a dark suit and overcoat and carrying a briefcase, came striding along the road from the direction of the railway station and turned down the Morrisons’ drive. By rights, he shouldn’t have been back from the office so early, but nevertheless there he was.
Michaela gave him a ten-minute start, then went in.
She came out again a quarter of an hour later, walked casually to the car, climbed in and started away.
“Well?” I asked.
“Nice couple,” she said. “Pleasant, ordinary people. He came home early to build a bonfire for their fireworks party this evening. It’s Guy Fawkes’ Night, remember?”
“So it is.”
“Life goes on.”
Beyond Recall Page 34