Missing Christina

by Whitford, Meredith

  “I suppose so.”

  But as we neared the house Lady Hyde-Howard came out, looking grim and businesslike enough to warn us.

  “He’s gone?”

  “Yes, poor old fellow. I’ve cancelled the vet.” She glanced at the dirt on our clothes and hands and said approvingly, “You’ve already dug the grave? Good. Best to get it all over quickly. Oh dear, one gets so attached to one’s pets but one mustn’t wallow. I prefer cremation but Jon won’t have it. Go and have a wash, then go to your father.”

  We did so. We hugged Dad, patted Kingsley, kissed Silvia and Gran, then said, not sure if it was the right thing, that we’d prepared a grave. Dad nodded, then with the dog’s body bundled in his rug marched outside and down to the graveyard.

  “Do you want to, er, say something special?” Dawn asked.

  “No. Just... he was a good dog.”

  That made Silvia cry. Hugging her made me cry. Hugging Gran made Toby cry. Even Lady Hyde-Howard was a little damp-eyed. Dawn was clearly at a loss, although she was watching Dad carefully as he filled in the grave and patted down the earth.

  “We’ll get a marker for him made later,” Dad said. “For now, that’s it. Sad, but inevitable. Though I must say I could use a drink.”

  We all could. We were hungry, too, although no one quite liked to say so, but Dawn slipped away and had a word with Yvonne, and soon there were plates of sandwiches being handed around. Lady Hyde-Howard shook her head, saying she was on a diet, and anyway should go.“Get another dog soon,” she said to Dad.

  “Don’t want one.”

  “For the other one’s sake. He’ll pine, alone. Dogs do, you know. Go to Battersea Dogs Home and get a rescue dog. Or if you want a pure-bred, I can –” Dad interrupted her by jumping up and going to the front window to stare at the car lurching and kangaroo-ing up the drive. It fishtailed to a gravel-spraying halt just by the front door, and Quentin leapt out and ran up to the front door.

  “No!” Dad said; shouted in fact, as the door bell pealed. “Not Quentin, not today. Go and get rid of him! Tell him – what the hell?”

  Coming up the drive, sedately but quickly, was a black London taxi. We all stood there at the front window, gaping. A London cab, here? It stopped. The driver, a lean middle-aged man, got out and opened the passenger door. Out climbed a blonde young woman with blood trickling down her face. She fell, and the driver helped her up.

  “That’s Marian!” I raced for the door and outside, running to Marian, pulling her into my arms. Dad and the taxi driver were grappling with Quentin, who collapsed sobbing onto the grass.

  “Whatever is going on?” Dawn demanded. “That man’s drunk,” she added, and Quentin proved her point by vomiting copiously. I could smell the whisky from yards away. Dad and Toby hauled him to his feet and into the house.

  Marian was crying now too. I held her, rocked her, and finally said, “What is going on? And why a taxi?”

  “I’ve always wanted to be told 'follow that car’,” said the cabbie. “So I did. The young lady’s hurt. And she gave me fifty quid but there’s more on the clock now. I wouldn’t’ve come all this way but she was hurt. And now I’ve got a story to tell. But I’ll need paying.”

  “I only had a fifty,” Marian said. “Mr Herne took my laptop bag and my wallet’s in it, I had the fifty in my pocket.” It was Lady Hyde-Howard who mutely held out a handful of notes. Somehow there was no question of the driver giving her any change. He left, looking amused.

  Then we were all inside, and Dawn was cleaning the blood off Marian’s face and dabbing on antiseptic.

  “Could someone please tell me what’s going on?” Silvia asked plaintively.

  Quentin looked up and said, “That girl there, that one you brought to see me, told me a horrible, ridiculous story about Tia. I should have called the police at once, but she upset me. I had to come and tell you so you can get it stopped. I don’t know why she’s here. How dare she follow me?”

  “You hit me and ran off with my laptop bag,” Marian said. “My phone was in it so I couldn’t ring. The taxi driver tried to but no one answered.” Then, to me, she added, “He just turned up at your house this morning. He had some old photo albums. I didn’t see why I shouldn’t let him in, despite what – what you said. And he just pushed past me into the sitting room and he saw all the Belinda Tate stuff on the table, and my laptop was open at some photos. He saw enough that I had to tell him. I thought he might know more than he’d told us, or if he didn’t, he should hear it alone. It’s different for him, I thought. But he didn’t know and he got – I was a bit frightened. Then he hit me and grabbed my laptop and ran off.”

  “Still none the wiser,” said Silvia, speaking for most of them. And who are you?”

  “She’s a lying, blackmailing whore!” shouted Quentin “She’s taken advantage of Jaques when he’s still insane with grief about his mother, she’s cooked up some incredible story. I had to come and tell you, Jon.”

  “Oh Christ,” Dad said on a long sigh. Our eyes met. We nodded. “I suppose we might as well tell you now, most of you are here. and you have to know soon. I didn’t think it would be like this, but let’s have it out. Jaques, you do it.”

  So I did. The whole thing. I seemed to have been telling it for years. I’d turn into the Ancient Mariner, boring everyone I met with the story.

  When I’d finished there was dead silence for a while. Then Granny said, “So that was it. I always knew there was something. Oh, poor Tia. I wish she’d been able to tell me.”

  “She loved you and didn’t want to distress you,” Dad said. “Also it was so far in the past, for her. She wanted to forget it.”

  “Poor old Mum,” Silvia said. “And you – sorry, I’ve forgotten your name –”

  “Marian Elder.”

  “You’re going to write a book about it?”

  “Yes. I’ve almost finished it, in fact.”

  “And it’s all real? You’ve got proof of it all?”

  “Yes.”

  “I say, there’s going to be a fuss, isn’t there.”

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  “But you’re not saying any of it’s true!” Quentin burst out. “Jon? It’s all lies, don’t you see? She was my cousin, I would have known, she’d have told me!”

  “But you see,” I said, myself seeing it for the first time, “she didn’t want to upset your family – her aunts and uncles and cousins. They accepted her. You said some of them felt guilty that her mother had had to give her up. That was bad enough without you all knowing just how bad a life she’d had because her mother couldn’t keep her.”

  “But it can’t be true! She wasn’t like that! And she would have told me!”

  “No she wouldn’t,” said Granny. “You were just a child when you first got to know her. And although she was fond of you, you really were rather a nuisance when you were young.”

  “I was not! I loved her! I would have done anything for her! In fact I...”

  He caught himself up in time. He stared blankly, his mouth pulling down. I said quickly, “Dawn, could you give him a sedative or something? I think he should be in bed, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” She gave me an odd, sideways glance. “Come along, Mr Herne. Toby, perhaps you’ll help me?”

  “Of course.” Between them they got Quentin out of the room. Once again there was a long silence before I remembered to ask Marian what had happened today.

  “Didn’t I say? I thought he might after all have known it all. If he didn’t, I thought he should hear it alone. Because of his family and what you said just now. It was because of his family that she had that horrible life.”

  “But –”

  “I know. I interfered. But I didn’t believe you. Now I do, for he went for me. He hit me, and ran off with my bag. His car was outside the house. He just ran for it and drove off. I don’t think he’s quite sane. So I thought I’d better follow him. And that taxi came along. The driver thought I was off my rocker but I explaine
d well enough. He thought it was a huge laugh – 'follow that car’. I didn’t know Mr Herne would come here.” Miserably she added, “I did try to ring up on the driver’s phone but no one answered, and your landline’s ex-directory.”

  “We’d turned our phones off because of –”

  “Oh yes, the dog. I’m so sorry, Lord Randall.” Then she began to cry again.

  Lady Hyde-Howard said vaguely, “I remember Adrian Randall. I had a crush on him for years when I was a girl. Well, good heavens. What a story. What a story. But really I think you should let it lie. It’s ancient history.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Oh well, up to you, of course. And you can count on our support. As long as none of this upsets Silvia, in her condition.”

  “I’m not upset,” Silvia said. “I think it’s interesting. I want to know all about it.”

  They all did, they wanted every detail. No one knew what Quentin had done with Marian’s laptop (run over it, we later discovered; it was mostly OK) but I had all the details, all the documents. And as we went over it again and again I realised I no longer cared much; it was interesting, yes, but no longer shocking, it no longer made me think differently of my mother. I was going to have to face telling the world, putting up with the media, but so what.

  But there was one other thing, of course. That night, when we’d talked ourselves out, and had eaten, and Marian was tucked up in my bed, I heard unfamiliar steps, furtive steps, in the passage, and the creak of the stairs. I went out, and followed Quentin down the stairs and into Dad’s study. He was using a torch, and I think he almost died of fright when I switched on the lights. For a moment we stared at each other.

  “You thought you were saving her,” I said.

  He understood; he knew it was no time to ask what I was talking about. “I thought he didn’t deserve her. Took her for granted. I wanted to set her free. I didn’t know she loved him!”

  “You were too young to understand.”

  “That’s right,” he eagerly agreed, “I was too young.”

  “And in love with her.”

  “Oh no. No. Well, perhaps a little. No, she was my cousin.”

  “When you told me, at Silvia’s wedding, of how he wouldn’t let her answer the door or the phone, you didn’t realise she was always afraid those people, the ones who adopted her, would find her. Adrian was protecting her, but you didn’t know that. You didn’t understand.”

  “I didn’t understand,” he repeated.

  “And those other men had been attacked in the streets nearby – or did you attack them too?”

  “Oh no, no.” His eyes were too bright, and I moved backwards as he flung out his hands in a gesture of explanation, or a plea for more understanding. “Don’t do that,” he said. “I’d never hurt Tia’s child. Or Jon. I did think that woman of Jon’s should go – I hated seeing her at the wedding, queening it in Tia’s place, but somehow I couldn’t. Only Adrian. I had nothing to do with the first three men who were attacked. The one after Adrian, yes, that was me, so it wouldn’t be so obvious. I mean, I thought it would look suspicious if it stopped with Adrian. But of course I didn’t kill that one, I just wounded him a bit.”

  He was mad, of course, stark barking mad, and although my skin was crawling I didn’t feel afraid of him, and I had to keep this Alice in Wonderland conversation going. “That gave you the idea, though, those other men being attacked.”

  “Yes. Yes of course it did. All I had to do was to wait for him to come home from – well, I was sure he’d been at that club for perverts like him – it was that winter of oil prices going up and people turning their lights off, the telly stopping early in the evening, people working and shopping by candlelight, the three-day week – no, that was after Christmas, I think – so dark, you see. It was easy in the dark.”

  “And you had to stab him so it would look like the attacks on the other men.”

  “That’s right! And really I had to laugh when he gave me a pocket-knife for my birthday, it cost a lot but it was a child’s present, I thought. Not that I actually used that one to kill him, that wouldn’t have been right and what if someone remembered he’d given it to me and asked to see it? Besides, the newspapers said the other men had been stabbed with quite a different sort of knife. So I bought one in a big shop, a busy place where no one would remember me.”

  “Very sensible of you. And, what, you just waited in the dark until you heard him coming home, and leapt out and stabbed him?”

  “I’d done a lot of hunting, you see, in Canada, with my father and his friends. I thought it wouldn’t be so different, except that I didn’t shoot him first. But I thought I knew how to do it, where to cut him. He was stronger than I’d expected but I’d taken him by surprise. I stabbed him in the back and he turned around so I cut his throat. I had to run, then, because someone in a car came in at the other end of the square. I’d worn black, you see, black all over, gloves and a mask and a balaclava and the lady in the car told the police she’d seen a 'coloured’ man attack Adrian. That’s what people said in those days, 'coloured’ or 'Negro’. Things were different then,” he said as if he was giving me news. Then, with a double-take, he said, “But how did you know it was me who did it?”

  “Adrian told me.”

  I saw pure, superstitious horror in his eyes. “He’s dead.”

  “Yes. You killed him.”

  “I did, didn’t I. So what do you mean, he told you?”

  “Why don’t we sit down while we talk about it?” I suggested as casually as I could. Quentin’s back was to the doorway, and I didn’t know who it was I’d seen move out there in the darkened corridor, but I hoped whoever it was had the sense to keep still and quiet. “We could have a drink?” I added. “Whisky’s your favourite, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Thanks.” To my relief he sat down, his back to the door, and I poured two drinks as if I were in a Noel Coward play. “I was sure no one knew,” he muttered into his glass. “No one suspected me at the time.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “I just ran back down the side street, threw the knife down a drain – oh and his watch too, I’d pulled that off his wrist to make it look like a mugging. Then down the mews and in through the back gate, I’d left that open a bit, and I’d left the back door propped open, and all I had to do was run inside and up the stairs to my room and get into bed and pretend to be asleep. I always used the backstairs, you see. Tia said it made a sort of private flat for me, with my room up on the top floor at the back. I took off the black clothes before I ran inside and put them in a bin liner and hid it.”

  “Where?”

  “I threw it up onto the roof by the chimney of the house next door. No one ever thought of looking there.”

  “Clever of you.”

  “It was, wasn’t it.” He preened for a moment. “Oh and I risked turning on the light in my bathroom so I could make sure I’d got no blood on me. then I got into bed and pretended to be asleep when the housekeeper came to wake me, to tell me.” He’d finished his drink, and held out his glass for more. I didn’t know what sort of sedative Dawn had given him, or what else he might have taken, but I wanted him passed out as soon as possible. Accepting the freshened drink he seemed to remember what we’d said before, and peered at me as he asked, “But how did you know it was me? Adrian couldn’t have tol’ you. No one knew.”

  “Dad told me how Adrian died. He talked of all the blood and he said that Adrian had managed to drag himself the last few feet to the steps of the house, and that he’d drawn a little heart in his own blood, for Mum. All very sweet and sentimental; and Adrian always signed off his letters to her with a little heart. But he knew she knew he loved her, so why bother being sentimental with what was probably literally his last breath and bit of consciousness? He sounds a practical sort of chap from what I’ve heard of him. So it wasn’t a heart, it was a capital Q. Q for Quentin. To tell Mum – to warn her.”

  “Don’t – believe you..
.”

  “You would if you’d looked properly at all those papers and things I brought to show everyone. There’s a nice clear police photo of Adrian dead on the steps, and his hand, and what Mum and Dad thought and probably told everyone was a heart. But it was the start of a capital Q. Adrian had quite neat writing and he always did big lavish capital letters – and he used that old-fashioned sort of Q that’s like a big number two. Like this.” I took a pencil from the desk, and a sheet from the phone message pad, and as best I could showed him what I meant. We both stared at that large, confusing letter. “He’d recognised you, you see, when you attacked him. He must have died almost instantly, but he had to warn Mum.”

  After a while Quentin said, almost meekly, “Are you going to tell anyone?”

  “No. How can I? Who can I tell? Granny, and upset her? Dad, who’s gone on being fond enough of you all these years? No point in telling the police, they’d laugh at my 'evidence’.” Though not at the recording I hoped my phone was still making of this conversation; I’d turned it on when I followed Quentin into this room and I had no idea how long a phone went on recording. “There’s no one to tell. It’d serve no point. We don’t need more scandal.”

  “So wha’ y’ gonna do?”

  “Nothing. Except that I think it would be a good idea if you didn’t come here any more. Go back to Canada. Or – after it happened, after you killed Adrian, you had a sort of breakdown, didn’t you?”

  “Sor’ of. M’ parentsh came and took me home to Canada. I saw a doctor quite a lot. Had nightmares. My parentsh thought that nashural, given what’d happened.”

  “So perhaps you should see another doctor. But I think you should go away from here. You were going to kill yourself, weren’t you. That’s why you came down here to Dad’s study, to get the keys to his gun cabinet.”

  “Yes.”

  “Causing a lot more trouble and mess for everyone. Not that it’s easy to kill yourself with a shotgun. Once, when you were a silly kid of seventeen, well, one can understand that, but not again now. You can’t be a thoughtless bastard all your life. And if you really loved Christina you can’t hurt the people she loved.”