‘I would imagine so. I would imagine Pritchard will turn up again. At first he was just pestering me because he thought I knew where Max was; he thought I’d lead him to Max. But now he’ll be smelling a rat. Oh, he’ll be back: don’t you worry. He’ll be back. Everything was all right, Kate. I had everything all sorted, until Sophie went and wrecked it all.’
‘Everything was all right? You murdered Max, and you’re telling me everything was all right?’
‘I didn’t murder him,’ I hiss at her. ‘I keep telling you: it was an accident.’
She shakes her head again. Her eyes are fixed on some point on the floor, and she’s hugging herself in a strange way. She doesn’t stay for long, which I suppose is not surprising.
‘I need to get used to this,’ she says, her voice breaking. ‘You’ve got to give me time.’ She scurries out the door, dabbing her eyes, giving me a nervous sidelong glance as she goes, as if she thinks I’ll take a swipe at her on the way. It’s not out of the question.
Well, she was the one who wanted it. She was the one who wanted to come around and have a comprehensive talk about everything. It was her fault, anyway. Well, you could argue that it was her fault. None of it would have happened if she’d stayed out of my husband’s bed.
And she’s offered no sympathy at all. Nothing like: Oh, Mum, how awful it must have been for you. Living with that, all these years. Nothing like that.
I pull myself back, at that point. It might be a little much, to expect Kate to be sympathetic right away. It’s been a shock for her, I can see that.
Still. Haven’t I been brave, and lonely, too? Aren’t I to be pitied?
For a couple of days, nothing happens. I worry about Sophie, but I’m still so angry with her that I think it’s better to let the whole thing die down, to wait until I can be calmer about it, to wait until … Until what?
I realise that I’ve frightened her; I realise, too, that she did, as Kate says, mean well. I resolve to fix things up between us. But not yet. I can’t do it yet.
All I can think of is the knock on the door.
It takes three days. And then, in the evening, it comes, and there he is.
‘My God,’ I say, trying to sound spontaneous and cheerful and innocent. ‘Inspector Pritchard, as I live and breathe. Where have you sprung from, Frank?’
I’ve been thinking, thinking, thinking about this.
He grins, a bit foolishly. I’ve always thought Frank’s foolish grin is a deliberate ploy. It’s a good one. He indicates his shoulder and the stuff on it in a gesture which at first I don’t understand.
‘Superintendent, actually.’
‘Wow,’ I say, hoping it doesn’t sound perfunctory.
And then, when we’ve got past the civilities and I’m pouring a cup of tea, he says: ‘You’re probably surprised to see me again?’
‘Well. Not entirely. I think you’ve been talking to my daughter and my granddaughter, haven’t you?’
I say this with the utmost composure. The stream of tea from the teapot’s spout doesn’t so much as quiver.
‘Well,’ says Frank. ‘Your granddaughter’s been talking to me.’
‘She’s such a romantic,’ I say, brightly, offering Scotch fingers.
Frank is watching me. He’s not going to make it easy. ‘A romantic?’
‘Goodness, yes. Couldn’t you tell?’
‘I’m not sure. She seemed a truthful child to me.’
He still has that rather ponderous way of speaking; still surveys his flat fingertips while he chooses his words. But then he looks up, and his eyes search me.
I try to look intelligent and unconcernedly interested. Alert, not anxious.
‘It seems Mr Knight is dead?’
‘Ah,’ I say, shaking my head in a manner that implies a world of unspoken stories, unexplored explanations.
‘So Mr Knight’s not dead?’ asks Frank, politely.
‘You’re going to think this is a bit weird, Frank. I’m almost embarrassed to tell you.’
He chuckles, reassuringly. I almost expect him to lean over and pat my knee, so fatherly is he.
‘Try me,’ he says. ‘You wouldn’t believe the number of weird things I’ve heard in my time.’
‘Well, Frank. Sophie’s very romantic.’
‘You said that, yes.’
‘Kate and I — Kate’s Sophie’s mother, remember: you once met her here — Kate and I have been a bit worried, you see. Sophie has this tendency to fantasise, and lately she’s been getting a bit fixated on Max.’
‘Fixated?’ says Frank, interested.
‘Yes. Well, that might not be quite the right word. But for some reason she’s been looking at old photographs, and poring over them, and it seems she’s created quite a little story for herself, out of Max.’
‘A story. Well, well. Kids!’
I take heart from this. ‘Of course, Max was a handsome man.’
‘A very handsome man,’ says Frank, generously.
‘And a bit of an adventurer, I suppose.’
‘Indeed.’ Frank’s tone is dry.
‘Well, from her point of view, I mean. Of course, she doesn’t know the things you’ve told me. I can’t tell her those. But it does seem as if she’s been — well, romanticising him. Daydreaming. And Kate and I were both a bit worried about it.’
‘Kate knows about her stepfather’s — er — adventuring tendencies?’
Oh, nice one, Frank, I think.
‘Oh, yes. Of course, I’ve told Kate what he was really like. What he was really doing.’
‘Of course.’
‘Anyway. So I thought, perhaps best to give the whole thing a smart knock on the head. Sophie had been carrying on, saying how he might come back, saying how she was sure we still loved each other. You know what teenage girls are like?’
‘My word, yes,’ says Frank.
‘So — I suppose it sounds a bit silly, but honestly we were getting quite concerned — I told her he was dead. Just to put it all to rest, get it all out of her mind. And of course, it might well be true by now anyway.’
‘And the grave …?’
‘The grave?’
‘Your granddaughter — nice little girl, isn’t she? — she said you’d visited the grave.’
‘Well. That was a bit of extra information designed to … um … make it all a bit more convincing.’
‘Corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative?’ suggests Frank, helpfully.
I’m not sure where Frank is coming from, with this. It rings a bell, but for the moment I can’t quite place it and decide to ignore it.
‘I guess so. The point is, we needed to find some strategy to divert her, to stop her carrying on. So we thought the best thing to do was just to say, well, he’s gone.’
‘Good thinking.’ Then Frank pauses, apparently puzzled. ‘Then why would you have told Sophie not to tell her mother? If you and she had cooked this up between you?’
It’s my turn to look puzzled, concealing my anger and panic as best I can. Why in God’s name did Sophie have to pass on this sort of minutiae?
‘I told her it was our secret, certainly. But not to tell Kate? No. Sophie’s obviously got confused on that one.’
‘Ah,’ says Frank, pensive now. ‘Such a smart-seeming kid, too.’
I try not to glare at him. ‘Well, that’s how it happened.’ It does sound a bit lame.
Frank nods affably. ‘And what do you think?’
I’m at a loss. Think? What am I supposed to be thinking?
‘What I mean is, do you think Mr Knight really is dead?’
‘Well, I guess we have to accept that it’s certainly possible.’
‘When we last
spoke, you didn’t think he was dead. In fact, you were sure he wasn’t.’
‘Years have passed, Frank.’
‘During which something has happened to change your mind? I can accept that, but I’d like to know what.’ His tone alters. ‘Or perhaps you weren’t telling the truth earlier? Perhaps you knew then that he was dead? Perhaps that’s something you’ve known all along?’
This is suddenly more confrontational than I’m expecting. I keep my voice low, reasonable.
‘Frank, it was years ago. I knew nothing then and I know nothing now. But, as time goes by — well, we have to think it’s more likely, don’t we?’
He is silent, and I think perhaps it’s time to bring the battle right up to him.
‘Frank,’ I say, hurt. ‘All those years ago, when you came to see me, when I kept telling you I didn’t know where Max was and you wouldn’t believe me — did you think then I’d had something to do with his disappearing like that?’ I pause, then I think it’s safe, perhaps advisable, to say the unsayable, to approach the unapproachable. ‘Did you think I’d killed Max?’
‘Well, no, actually. We didn’t think he was dead, you see. We were thinking, he’s gone to ground, and sooner or later he’ll pop his head up above the parapets, and then we’ll nab him. But he never has, you see. And there was a rather large amount of money he could have got his hands on, without too much trouble at all, and he didn’t. And there hasn’t been one reliable sighting, here or overseas. Also, some items came to light.’
‘Items?’
‘Items from a suitcase.’
I’d always wondered about that suitcase. I do the baffled look.
‘By the time we got to it, it had been gone through pretty thoroughly and I imagine some of the contents had gone missing. But a few remained, and one of them had Mr Knight’s name on it. A medication, it was. But what it looked like to us, you see, was that Mr Knight was still manufacturing his own disappearance, perhaps with a little bit of help from you, not that he actually had disappeared.
‘But it didn’t make sense, you see. We had it from you that Mr Knight had taken his car, so we couldn’t see what he’d be doing leaving a suitcase in a railway station locker. It didn’t add up, not really. So at that stage, no, all I thought was that you knew where he was and you weren’t talking. I wasn’t even sure of that. We had nothing to go on. But I did notice, and I did make a note at the time, that you tended to talk of Mr Knight as if he were in the past. He was, not he is. He did, not he does. And I’m puzzled, Mrs Knight. Ms Weaving.’
‘Isabel. You used to call me Isabel, Frank.’
‘Isabel. I’m puzzled, Isabel. You see, I tend to believe that Mr Knight is dead. I tend now to believe that he was dead even when we were looking for him, twelve or so years ago. And now — yes, now I think you knew he was dead. I’m not sure what was happening to you back then. I don’t know whether you’d been blackmailed or bribed or bullied. Or none of the above. But I’d certainly like you to tell me.’
I stare at him with absolute blankness. It seems to me my responses here are really important. He’s flying a kite, I can see that. He’s doing his old thing of trying to unsettle me, catching me off guard. I don’t want to give him even the faintest sniff of anything untoward.
It doesn’t matter what he thinks or suspects or wonders about. What matters is that I don’t open the door to him, that I don’t open it even a crack, even a skerrick, that he remains entirely ignorant of all the goodies I’m hiding, the veritable treasure chest of what he would call relevant material. He can suspect and wonder all he likes, so long as he isn’t certain, so long as he doesn’t know.
On the whole, I don’t think I handle it badly. I’m shocked and astonished and, yes, hurt; but mainly I’m just tired. It all happened so long ago.
‘For Christ’s sake, Frank. You’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel, aren’t you?’ I say this wearily, heavily aware of his eyes resting on my face (they’re small eyes, rather too close together: my mother would have said he wasn’t to be trusted), affability forgotten, the bloodhound gene taking over, his body fairly trembling with alertness and suspicion and mistrust. I maintain my fatigue, my incredulity.
I’ve never been so pleased, to see the back of him. When he finally goes I’m limp with exhaustion and damp with sweat. I’d thought it was all over. I’d thought he’d lost interest, that I’d fought him off, that I could relax. But I’m right back in it again now. Thanks to Sophie, I can’t stop worrying, not yet.
The knock — the final knock, I mean, the knock that tells me it’s all over, red rover — is still out there somewhere, waiting to happen. It’s like the iceberg, bobbing around in the Atlantic (well, really big icebergs probably don’t bob; they probably just mooch along, heavy and full of destiny), patiently expecting the Titanic to happen. And then: Wham!
The next time I see Kate, I draw her aside.
‘Pritchard’s been,’ I say.
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘Does he know?’
‘He doesn’t know. Not yet.’
‘But he suspects? Because of Sophie, he suspects?’
‘God knows what he suspects,’ I say. ‘He certainly thinks something odd has been happening.’
Kate looks unhappy, as well she might. I don’t suppose anyone really wants their mother convicted of murder.
I couldn’t bear to stay at home: I was too edgy. I went to a couple of movies, but that was hopeless as a strategy for self-distraction. I couldn’t have told you what they were about, not even two minutes after I’d walked out of the cinema.
So I went to work. The arrangement I had with Bea was that I would work two days a week. She gave me a narrow look, one morning.
‘This is the fourth time you’ve turned up this week, Izzie.’
‘So?’
‘The practice can’t afford to pay you extra, you know that.’
This was manifestly untrue, in fact. Bea was making so much money she didn’t know what to do with it all. I didn’t care, though.
‘I’m restless,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to pay me. I’m happy to put in a few extra hours. That new job’s got a couple of tricksy bits. I’m just ironing them out.’
She raised her eyebrows.
I wandered into my office and worked, sitting under the same skylight where I had sat when I first saw Max — how long ago? Nearly twenty years.
I doodled at my sketches for our latest project, a vast old mansion in the hills that someone with more money than sense wanted to convert into a health resort. I wanted to tell him to knock it all down and start from scratch. He was set on old-world charm and what he called art-deco flair. The place wasn’t remotely influenced by art deco, and I’d tried to explain that to him, too, but eventually I’d given up: when a client doesn’t want to hear something, it’s no use telling them.
Inspiration wouldn’t come. It was a huge, leaden manor with cold corridors, small windows, tiny attics and antiquated plumbing. Nothing would save it. I was running behind schedule on it, and starting to loathe the whole project. Bea agreed with me that it was hopeless, but pointed out that it was worth a heap to us. The incentive didn’t seem enough, somehow.
There’s a knock on my door. Not here, I think, suddenly panicking.
But it’s only Kate.
‘Hi,’ she says, cheerily, presumably for Dawn’s benefit. ‘I was passing.’
‘Hi,’ I say.
She comes in, closes the door behind her, sits down. ‘I was going to ring. Then I thought, might they be tapping your line?’
‘I can’t imagine they are,’ I say, although in fact I have privately canvassed this possibility and concluded it is highly likely. ‘Anyway, you could have rung my mobile.’ I’d often thought how Max would have loved mobile phones — their conv
enience, their glitziness, their whizzbangery.
‘They tap mobiles, too.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They do,’ said Kate, definitively. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter if they are or they aren’t: I just thought, we have to talk.’
‘I don’t see why.’
‘Mum, I’ve got an idea.’
These are not words to fill me with confidence, not from Kate, but it’s clear I’m not going to be able to stop her.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she says. She has an odd look on her face. ‘I’ve got a plan.’
And she tells me what it is.
‘What I thought is this. I’ll go to see Superintendent Pritchard.’
I stare at her. She’s leaping right into the lion’s mouth?
‘It’s a natural thing to do. I’m Sophie’s mother, after all. I’m the mother of the child who has been telling him things, asking him to do things. We’ve talked already. I’ll ring him up. I’ll say I want to see him, want to talk some more.’
‘But why?’ I ask, dazed.
‘You’ll see.’ She pauses, thinks. ‘You may not like what I’m going to do. But it’s the only thing I can see to do. I think it might work, so please, Mum, just consider it. Okay?’
I look at her, mutely. My mistrust is profound. First Sophie meddles in my affairs; now Kate. What in God’s name is she hatching?
‘So,’ she says. ‘I go to see Pritchard. I’ll be rather cool, you know. I’ll say, he should have contacted me earlier about Sophie. I’ll say, I could have saved him a lot of trouble. Sophie is an emotional child and she’s got a bee in her bonnet. I’ll say, she’s got the wrong end of the stick, and if he acts on anything she said, he’ll find himself in trouble. Up the creek without a paddle. Chasing mares’ teeth.’
‘Mares’ nests,’ I say, automatically. ‘Hens’ teeth; mares’ nests.’ The thought of Kate thinking she can threaten Pritchard is making me physically ill, the bile rising in my throat.
‘Whatever. So then he’ll ask why. So I’ll say, I don’t really understand what his interest in my stepfather was, and you won’t tell me. And he’ll say, why not? And I’ll say, there were reasons why you won’t talk to me about Max. And he’ll say, what are those reasons.’ She pauses.
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