by Kate Fulford
“She told you what?” This sounded more like it.
“She forbad me to see her children ever again.” Meg spoke as if this was perfectly normal sibling behaviour. Perhaps it was in her family, but then again perhaps it was in mine too, it was just the kind of thing Dominic might say.
“And you agreed to this? Why?” I asked.
“Because I have a little . . .” Meg paused. “Hobby,” she finally said. “And Marjorie knows about it and has always used it to get me to do what she wants.”
“And that hobby is . . . Oh!” Of course, Meg was a kleptomaniac. Meg and I looked at each other. She knew that I knew and we left it there.
“So,” I began, determined to dig deeper into the reason for Meg’s banishment from Marjorie’s life. But that was as far as I got when I was interrupted by a voice coming from behind me.
“Why, hello Marjorie,” said the voice, “I didn’t imagine I’d see you in a place like this!”
I whipped around to look at the owner of the voice. It was Melissa’s grandmother, the woman who had spent so much time telling me about her grandchildren at Marjorie’s Burns’ Night dinner. What the hell was she doing at OBVAC? I’d have had her down as more of a John Lewis sort, but I would obviously have been wrong. I flicked my eyes back to Meg, fully expecting to see her looking as dumbstruck as I, but I had clearly underestimated her.
“Why shouldn’t I be here?” Meg demanded to know, suddenly the very living embodiment of her twin. “I’m free to go where I please, you know.”
“Well, yes, of course you are,” Melissa’s grandmother replied nervously. “I . . . I . . . I just meant I was surprised to see you . . . here.”
“We’re leaving,” said Meg imperiously, “so you won’t need to be bothered by my presence any longer.” Why on earth was she being so rude?
“I’m not . . . you can . . . I’m . . .” Clearly lost for words at the extreme reaction she was receiving Melissa’s grandmother simply stood aside as Meg, closely followed by me, swept past her out of the cafe. “And you can take this thing,” said Meg, thrusting Pookie into my arms. “It belongs to your friend after all.”
“What the hell was that all about?” I demanded to know as soon as we were safely out of earshot.
“Good, wasn’t I?” Meg giggled, relieving me of a wriggling, and very smelly, Pookie. Meg really was welcome to the odd little creature. “I was Marjorie to a T, don’t you think?”
“Well, yes,” I agreed. “You were very convincing, but why be so rude to her? I mean what if . . . ?” I didn’t get to finish my question as Meg interrupted me.
“Think about it my dear,” she said, tapping the side of her head, “how likely is that woman to mention to Marjorie that she bumped into her? Would you,” she continued, “bring up an encounter with someone who had been so rude to you?”
“Wow, I must say I’m impressed. I didn’t think . . .” I began.
“You didn’t think I had it in me?” Meg said, a look of immense satisfaction on her face. “You’re not the only one who knows how to use her noggin when she’s in a tight spot, you know.”
While the encounter had unnerved me, it had also given me a new found admiration for Meg. Perhaps she was, after all, just the accomplice that I needed.
CHAPTER 16
“So you don’t have any long term conditions? Nothing you’re on medication for?” Wedding two point zero having been no more successful than its predecessor I had done the only thing I could and thrown myself back into my detective work. Marjorie wasn’t going to get away with manipulating events to suit herself anymore, not if I had anything to do with it. So, with nothing else to go on for the moment, I had decided to make it my business to find out more about Gideon’s mysterious childhood illness.
“Nope.” Gideon replied to my question.
“Have you ever had a condition so serious that it necessitated spending a night in hospital?” I was sitting at the kitchen table hunched over a piece of paper, a pen clutched in my hand as I ticked boxes and apparently wrote down the answers he was giving me.
“Wouldn’t it just be easier if I filled the questionnaire in myself later?” Gideon was in the middle of preparing our supper. He doesn’t have a wide range of dishes in his repertoire but he does make a delicious Thai chicken curry. He prepares it completely from scratch, making the curry paste and everything, which was particularly useful right now as it meant that he couldn’t see that the paper I was hunched over was an application form for an additional parking permit.
“You don’t honestly think that Claire would be able to decipher your handwriting, do you?” I observed. “It looks like a drunken spider with inky feet has wandered across the page. I couldn’t do that to her.” I had told Gideon that Claire needed data for a paper she was writing so, as a fellow academic, he had been only too happy to help.
“And your writing is so much better?” he replied.
“Err, yes!” I exclaimed. “I won a calligraphy prize at school, I’ll have you know.” I hadn’t. There wasn’t a calligraphy prize at my school, half the pupils could barely even write, but my handwriting is, nonetheless, a lot neater than Gideon’s. “Just answer the question.”
“Yes.” Gideon said.
“Go on then.” I replied.
“Yes is the answer to your question,” he clarified. “I have had a condition so serious that I had to stay in hospital.”
“Oh, I thought you were saying yes, you would answer the question.”
“Glad we cleared that up.”
“So am I! So which part of your body was the cause of the condition?”
“That’s a really odd way to ask about an illness.” Gideon was chopping and bashing away over the other side of the kitchen.
“I know!” I exclaimed. “You wait until you hear some of the other questions.” I laughed ruefully while shaking my head in apparent disbelief at the idiocy of Claire’s questions. She would have killed me if she had known that I was destroying her reputation for academic rigour in pursuit of my own aims, but needs must. And she didn’t know. “So, which part was it?”
“I had kidney problems when I was a teenager.” Gideon explained.
“I did not know that.” I was genuinely surprised.
“And why should you?” Gideon turned away from his pan for a moment to look at me. “You don’t know everything about me. It’s good to have a few secrets from each other isn’t it? Keeps the mystery alive.”
“Absolutely.” If only you knew my darling, if only you knew. “So were you very ill?”
“Is that the next question?”
“No,” I said, “I was just asking. Out of, you know, interest, but if you’d rather keep it a mystery . . .”
“I was quite ill. They thought I was going to need a kidney transplant at one point.”
“Oh my, that is ill.” I said.
“Oh my indeed, but I didn’t and I got completely better.”
“Well done you! So,” I continued, “did your illness have any negative effects on your family?”
“No, they were delighted to see me laid low by a life threatening condition.” Gideon replied.
“Really?” I asked. “How odd.”
“Of course they weren’t. It was a stupid question so I gave a stupid answer.” Gideon had started to fry stuff by now, which was even noisier than his chopping. He had to shout to make himself heard over the racket. “How many more questions are there in this thing? I thought Claire was very bright but this seems like a load of nonsense to me. I can’t imagine,” he blathered on over the sound of frying, “what she will be able to do with the data she collects. It’s not even clear,” having got the bit between his teeth he wasn’t about to let up on this one, “whether this is a quantitative or a qualitative study.” He was by now so infuriated that he had all but abandoned his pan.
“That’ll burn if you’re not careful,” I said, not wanting him to come over and snatch the parking permit application from me. “Nearly finis
hed,” I said brightly. I felt that I had pushed this almost as far as I could but I just wanted to squeeze a tiny bit more information out of the exercise. “So, stupid though the question is, what were the effects of this illness on your familial relationships?”
“Let me look at that,” he said, coming over to where I sat and reaching over as if to grab the paper from under my hand.
“Oh no you don’t,” I cried, pulling it sharply away, “you’ll get curry paste all over it. Just answer the bloody question and then it’s all over.”
“It just infuriates me when research is done so badly. There’s so much rubbish out there that gets media attention while real research is ignored, and then people do this kind of worthless nonsense.” This is one of Gideon’s hobby horses. I had wracked my brain for days about how to bring up the illness that Meg had mentioned and this was the best I could come up with, so if Claire was collateral damage, so be it. They barely knew each other so Gideon would, I was sure, be far too polite to draw attention to her rubbish research.
“How about I add your thoughts in the ‘any other comments’ section?” I offered. “But in the meantime please, please just answer the question. I promised Claire, and you know how hard it is to get participants for research studies.” I knew this would appeal to his sense of academic camaraderie even if he thought that the research was, in his words, worthless nonsense.
“OK. I suppose, or rather I know that it was through being ill that I found out what a truly amazing woman my mother is.” There was that word again, amazing. Why, I longed to ask, do you think that that difficult, manipulative woman is amazing?
“In what way, amazing?” I asked, rather more diplomatically.
“Is that the next question?” Gideon looked at me incredulously.
“No, obviously not. That was my question. I just wondered what it was that your mother did, specifically, to make you think, I mean realise she was amazing?”
“Doesn’t everyone think their mother is amazing?” Gideon asked. Many people may well feel that their own mother is very special, but very few people I had met seemed to share Gideon’s assessment of his particular mother.
“I was only asking because it sounded as if something specific had happened to make you see her differently after you were ill.” I replied.
“Oh, well, yes, maybe.” Gideon turned back to his pan. “I know she can be quite demanding, Mum that is, but she only wants what’s best for us.” He took that pan off the heat and turned his full attention to me. “Helen still has quite a childish relationship with Mum and I think that when I was ill I grew out of that. I was quite a rebellious early teen. I knew she hated the name Gideon but I started using it anyway, mainly because it annoyed her.” He came and sat at the table next to me, but I was able to get the paper out of sight in the nick of time on the pretext of saving it from damage.
“Mum wasn’t very demonstrative when we were young,” Gideon went on. “She could seem cold, and I suppose I compared her unfavourably with Aunt Meg. But then when I was ill she was amaz . . . .” He grinned at me. “She was supportive and practical and I saw there was much more to her than I had thought. And Meg disappeared off the scene around that time anyway, so she obviously didn’t care about me as much as I thought she did, so there was only Mum, and we became much closer.
“She and Dad have never had a brilliant marriage,” he continued in the longest speech had had ever made about his family, “and Helen was a difficult teenager. Mum had to send her away to France to save her from getting into real trouble. So I became Mum’s confidante and . . . well that’s just how it is. Is that enough for your survey?”
“It’ll do.” I said. “Now when’s dinner going to be ready? I’m starving.”
What Gideon had said all sounded very plausible, but I just sensed that there must be more that he hadn’t told me, or perhaps didn’t know. He didn’t know, for example, that Marjorie had blackmailed Meg into disappearing, or that she had engineered the cancelling of our wedding on two different occasions (I was by now quite sure that the whole adultery business was a concoction designed for her own ends). I was clearly going to have to work a bit harder to find out what was behind Gideon’s relationship with his mother.
CHAPTER 17
“Please Meg,” I said, “just put it down and get off the table. This won’t solve anything.” I had just shared some intriguing information with Meg and her reaction had been rather more extreme than I had anticipated. I didn’t really know what to do now as I’d never had to dissuade anyone from self-harming before. If only, I thought, I’d lasted longer as a Samaritan, but I didn’t even make it through the training. I’d volunteered on the advice of Claire, who thought that it might help me to understand what I would be up against if I became a counsellor. It turned out that my approach to helping those in a fragile mental state was, according to my supervisor, more robust than he felt comfortable with. I didn’t agree and argued my case quite strongly, which only seemed to make matters worse, I’m afraid. And now the consequence of Derek’s lack of imagination was that I was ill equipped to manage the difficult situation in which I now found myself. Thanks a bunch Derek.
It had all started when, in a moment of clarity, I realised that I had been wasting my time digging around trying to find the cause of Gideon’s attachment to his mother. What did it matter why he was so attached? What I had to do was break that attachment. It is really frustrating when one looks back over events and realises that one (and by one I mean me) has been extremely stupid. The key to neutralising Marjorie had been staring me in the face for ages. All the clues had been there if I only I had been able to see them.
Marjorie, in her own twisted way, loved Gideon, but there was something else that she loved just as much, and that was money. Or to be more precise, the superiority over others that money gave her. Take her recent cruise for example. She hadn’t been motivated by a love of penguins, she had simply wanted to show Meryl ‘bloody’ Streep next door that she could afford to go. She was obsessed by the status that expensive things (in her mind at least) conferred on her. Her car, her ring, her house, all these things meant a huge amount to Marjorie, and in order to have them she also had to have money. Malcolm had, I assumed, bought the house and he had certainly paid for the cruise. But Marjorie had made much of the fact that she had bought the car and the ring with what she had referred to as her money. Where, I wondered (eventually) had that money come from? As she hadn’t worked since having her children, it seemed unlikely she had earned it. She might have saved it from her housekeeping but the sums involved made that unlikely. She could have won the Lottery but, as anyone who regularly buys a ticket will know, that was the most unlikely source of all. So, presuming she hadn’t robbed a bank, the most probable source was an inheritance, and the most likely source of that was her father.
The idea of following the money hadn’t, I admit, come to me unprompted. It was as I was returning from sending Meg a postcard one day that I realised someone was trying to send me a message. I had, however, been too caught up with my own plans and schemes to see what was right in front of me. I had been sending Meg a postcard because, as she had neither a phone nor a computer, it was the only way that I could communicate with her. I would send her the details of a proposed meeting, and she would only need to call me if my suggestion was inconvenient. It was a simple yet effective technique that I had picked up (amongst many other things) from working with Phillipe Merlot. And, as it turned out, it was this postcard malarkey that had alerted me to the possibility that someone, also versed in subterfuge, had been trying to guide my actions. The thing I had imagined I couldn’t quite see when I was at the theme park with Helen suddenly came into view.
Once home I headed straight for the book shelf by my side of the bed. I always have several books on the go and am always in need of bookmarks as I absolutely hate it when people turn down the corners of pages to mark their place. I have broken off friendships, and even dumped a boyfriend (although, to
be fair, it was just the last of many straws) as a result of getting back dog eared books that I had leant out in good faith.
Sure enough, having shaken out five or six books I found what I was looking for. Three postcards, all from Cheltenham. I had assumed that they were part of an advertising campaign, although I had no idea what for as they were extremely cryptic. The first one had caught my interest because it had arrived only a few days after I had moved in to Gideon’s flat, and I didn’t know how anyone could have known at that point that this was my new address. It pictured an enormous ring doughnut shaped building which was, according to the back of the card, GCHQ in Cheltenham, and read Careless talk costs wives. The second, which arrived about two months later, showed the entrance to the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, in Cheltenham again, and read Patients will out. The third, which was of Cheltenham Racecourse, had arrived only a few days before and simply read Follow the money.
Looking at them again I realised that they must be, could only be, from Gideon’s ex-girlfriend Sasha. She had, Helen had told me, moved to Cheltenham after she and Gideon split up, and she was something to do with the government and so could (if Dominic was even a tiny bit right) find out pretty much anything she wanted to about anyone.
The first postcard was, I now saw, telling me to be wary of someone, presumably Marjorie, who would try to cost me my role as a wife. She’d certainly done that so far, having halted two wedding attempts. The second was not misspelled but was telling me to look into Gideon’s illness, but having done this it didn’t seem to be a very useful line of inquiry. The third though, well that was the reason why I was trying to persuade Meg to get off her dining table and put down the large wooden cat she seemed intent on throwing across the room.
“The bitch,” she bellowed, “how could she?” I have no idea what good Meg thought would come from hurling large wooden cats around, and from quite a height, in a small space. We were currently in her home, a bedsit which comprised the former drawing room of a once grand but now rather dilapidated house just off the King’s Road. After the run in with Melissa’s grandmother we had decided it was altogether the safest place to meet. All Meg would achieve by chucking stuff around in here was to damage her own home, and possibly herself. I think she was just so overwhelmed by rage that she didn’t really know what she was doing.