Chapter One
Straightening up from smoothing the duvet, Joyce Hetherington paused and became judgemental as she caught the movement of her reflection in the long wardrobe mirror. At eighteen she had spent hours on body, face, hair, eyes and hands, emerging sleek and glistening as a racehorse; in her twenties she had been less obsessive, but still meticulous, applying soft oils, shining lipstick — for a brief, mannered period in the seventies, mauve — subtle traces of exclusive scent. In the early years of her marriage she had been the glossy trophy wife until, seeded first by Annabel’s birth, then Rupert’s, a blight had begun. Time, once plentiful, had become a luxury, snatched minutes to skim Homes and Gardens or Vanity Fair while attending to the ruins of her nails, legs crossed as she rotated each ankle in turn to tone the muscles. But, relentlessly, the house, the children, Ralph’s expectations of domestic perfection and something akin to surrender had increasingly cramped her. Moving to the country had been an important factor. London imposed demands of style and appearance; rural Suffolk granted girls a brief blossom spring before dark leaves of mature summer and fading autumn. What West Kensington would approve, even envy, as ripened glamour, would be dismissed as gaudy in Finch Post Office.
Then had come the first stirrings of private rebellion. She’d given up her career, been the breeding mare, accepted more than her share of the demands of infants, and wanted something back. Ralph had passed from repeated, demanding — and admittedly for a long time mutually enjoyable — sex to siring his brood to obvious boredom with her body, and once The Affair had gone beyond evasion and denial to become blatant and admitted, Joyce had begun to resent what she had allowed to happen, angry at her own retreat. Work would have meant commuting into Ipswich at least, which presented difficulties, but when they had bought Windhover Ralph had been quite happy for her to take over the problems of holiday letting, even though he insisted the income had to be put through his books because of some complicated tax avoidance involving him claiming her as his secretary (she had caustically remarked that unlike several men she knew he didn’t sleep with his secretary). The next stage had been paying more attention to her appearance again, so … She checked the latter-day achievement of forty-four years.
Waist and hips intact, if fractionally tense against her Levis; breasts fuller — going without a bra would be both unwise and more uncomfortable than it had been twenty years ago; ankles and legs still good; corn-gold and burnt-honey highlighted hair, curled and expensively casual; face … She stepped closer. Nothing could harm the bone structure; aquamarine eyes remained clear and the skin had been nourished rather than coarsened by open air; she had always tanned evenly, unexpected in a natural blonde. But what had the salvage operation been for, except personal satisfaction? The nearest she had ever come to making use of it had been at one of David and Paula’s dinner parties. It had been early in the fightback and the reaction had been gratifying; the men positioning themselves to admire, the women — except Fay, who had thoroughly approved — slightly affronted at competition from an unexpected quarter, as though a sparrow had challenged kingfishers. Desmond — predictably; his ego fed on asset stripping and sexual conquests in equal measures — had wondered if she ever got up to town …
‘Sod it,’ she said aloud, with amused recollection. It had been a wry daydream imagining catching a London train from Ipswich, taking a taxi from Liverpool Street, ignoring the receptionist’s discreet intrigued glances as she waited in the enamelled marble foyer of his offices, the civilized, flirtatious lunch … No need for him to return to work … Nothing so sordid as a hotel, but his high, compact flat in Legoland Island Gardens … Gazing down at the sickle sweep of the Thames as he stood behind her at the window, kissing the side of her neck, hands sliding up the front of her dress from waist to … but she hadn’t been ready, so she’d never accepted. Sometimes she regretted it, even though an affair with Desmond would have been the sexual equivalent of accepting a free sample in the supermarket. And now his company had moved him to Singapore. Hey-ho.
Carrying the used bed linen, she mentally ran through her standard checklist as she went downstairs. Kitchen cleaned and everything returned to its place (why could people never remember where they had found things?). Carpets hoovered, meter emptied, flowers in the sitting room a touch of welcome from her own garden, windows polished, space beneath beds examined in case another soft porn magazine had been left behind — it had only happened once, but she would have felt dreadful if an outraged mother had faced her with it — ad hoc paperback collection tidied, noting that the Joanna Trollope had disappeared. The couple who had moved out that morning had seemed so respectable; perhaps it was an oversight and they would post it back. The next visitor had said he would arrive around six o’clock, so … She stopped as his name refused to come. When he had first telephoned it had struck her as unusual, and the fact that she could not recall it irritated her; as Sir Malcolm’s PA, Joyce Carstairs had been able to remember two dozen things at once. It was a make of car. Morris? Ford? Austin? Something more exotic. Jensen … no, Jowett. She’d had an uncle who’d owned one. It was also unusual that he was apparently coming on his own and had booked for five weeks. The cottage could sleep six with the bunk beds, but few holidaymakers wanted to spend longer than a fortnight in so isolated a place as Finch, even at the height of summer. Perhaps he fished or watched birds; they were always solitary types, usually with patient wives who … God, was that the time? Ralph would be back in less than an hour expecting lunch to be ready, and she’d promised to run Annabel over to Suzanne’s. Then Marion was coming to discuss the pageant, which would leave very little time to rearrange the chaos of the flower rota …
New graffiti had been added to the bench by the lychgate of St Matthew’s; mindless vulgarity that riled her. It would be the brats from the council estate again, probably the same ones who had pushed over the medieval Plague Stone, another act of boorishness and spite that caused offence and distress. The parish council had leafleted all eighty homes, but the only result had been complaints from several parents that their children — all, allegedly, little lower than angels — had been singled out for blame and none of the ‘posh houses’ had received warnings. It had exacerbated the situation, climaxing in one teenage girl shouting obscenities at Joyce outside the baker’s, then standing defiant when Joyce had turned to reprimand her.
‘What yer going to do then? Tell me mum and dad? God, I’m shitting meself. And if you bloody dare hit me, I’ll have you for assault, right?’ She had sneered at Joyce’s dismay. ‘Fat cow.’
Better to ignore them, wait for them to grow up and leave Finch, get pregnant, in some cases surely end up in a juvenile offenders’ home or worse. But such jeering insolence was contrary to all her values, her expectations that parents should set examples and exercise control … All the attitudes she had mocked in her own parents before being caught by them herself. And there was the trap of class stereotyping; Mrs Barron, plump, loquacious and shrewd, who cleaned Joyce’s house twice a week and had once returned a l0p piece she had found under a sofa, lived in one of the council houses.
Mother had come downstairs, and was peering round Joyce’s kitchen like a puzzled, inquisitive magpie, lifting random objects to look beneath them, muttering in impatience and frustration.
‘What have you lost this time?’ Noticing that she’d left her hearing aid off again, Joyce raised her voice.
‘My library book. It was a Catherine Cookson.’
‘Well, you’re hardly going to find it underneath the flower vase.’
‘No, but I’ve run out of logical places. I’ve prayed to St Anthony, but he’s not helping.’
‘I’m positive you’ve not brought it down here. Let’s look in your apartment.’
‘It can’t be there.’ The tone said it mustn’t be, because that would mean she had failed to find it in any of the logical places.
‘Perhaps it fell down the back of the bed.’
She had become no
ticeably slower on the stairs, but still managed them, refusing Ralph’s regular suggestions of installing a chair lift. For some inexplicable reason the book was in her bathroom, half hidden behind the curtain.
‘Oh, dear.’ She pulled a face of chagrin. ‘I really am losing it, aren’t I?’
‘Don’t be silly.’ Joyce kissed her cheek. ‘Have you got your lunch sorted out?’
‘Yes thank you, dear. Cold tongue and tomato with some of Mrs Barron’s home-made chutney … Oh, and I think I heard your phone ring twice, but it stopped each time. The machine must be on. Where’s Ralph?’
‘Golf club. It’s Saturday.’
Grace Carstairs smiled, remembering a fragment of contented years as a passive, dutiful wife. ‘Your father enjoyed his golf so much. I couldn’t play for toffee, but why don’t you take it up?’
‘We’ve been through that.’
‘So we have.’ She had obviously forgotten. ‘Anyway, I’m going to watch that Bette Davis film this afternoon. I’ll probably cry as much as I did when I saw it at the old Picturedrome in Salisbury. Ralph’s put the video in for me and written down which buttons I have to press.’
She’d been right about the answerphone — her hearing could be curiously selective. One message was from Marion cancelling and the other was from Ralph announcing he’d been held up, slightly whining, put out that she was not at home to take his call.
‘… anyway, make lunch for about two o’clock. That’s all.’
So we’re not taking it in liquid form at the club today, O Master? But we will doubtless fall asleep in the chair watching whatever European football match you’ve been obsessed with for weeks. Just don’t wake up again full of petulant comments about the times you could talk me into afternoon nookie — can you hear yourself saying that, for God’s sake? What sort of mind is it that can switch off everything that’s happened between us? Do you really despise me so much that you think I’m going to be grateful for whatever you have left over from servicing Gabriella? We found that flat together, our pied-à-terre, when we moved here, so convenient for when we went to the theatre in town, as well as your Monday to Friday base. I haven’t been in it for more than five years and I expect she keeps some of her clothes there now — when she’s wearing any. Meanwhile, you’ve found the perfect gaoler in my mother. I’ll cry my heart out when she dies, but at least I’ll have the satisfaction of soaking you for so much of your precious money you won’t believe it.
Absently humming the duet from The Pearl Fishers, she began preparing cold lamb and salad, another offering without love.
*
Reading the Guardian while they ate was casual sniper fire in the cold war; given the chance, Ralph would have knelt in the mud to kiss the hem of Margaret Thatcher’s gown and constantly dreamt of a Second Coming. The eighties had been his Promised Land, the advertising business floating on a tidal wave of multi-million-pound campaigns; champagne fountains of money to turn round fast, buy and sell shares, take in and out of property — ideal in East Anglia, where prices had remained low for longer, before the glittering, fragile bubble burst. He’d sold like fury in the black October of 1987, screaming down the phone at his broker as the roof fell in, taking every reduction in inflated profits like a personal insult, despite the fact that in many cases he still came out ahead. Before that, at least on paper, he’d briefly been a millionaire, and it was as though he’d been robbed.
‘Did I tell you we didn’t get that pet food account?’
‘I didn’t even know you’d pitched for it.’ She went on reading, emphasizing her lack of interest.
‘Of course we did.’ He rubbed his fist against his breastbone, as if he had a spasm of indigestion. ‘But Maurice landed it. Bastard.’
She turned a page without looking up. ‘I can remember when he was your hero.’
‘Well, he’s a bloody greedy animal now.’
‘Unlike you, of course.’
Such exchanges would once have drawn blood, but there was little left to spill and neither of them had reason to break the brittle ceasefire. As Ralph pushed his plate away and left the table, Joyce frowned at another story about the Dunblane school massacre; evil and senseless, the horror felt all over the world had plucked at terrible memories in Finch, part of a bitter register — Hungerford, Warrington, the cenotaph at Enniskillen. Photographed or faceless, Hamilton, Ryan, hooded IRA bombers and Tannerslade’s unknown murderers were devils who cursed the places they had stalked, their acolytes plagues of rabid journalists and sick tourists who came to stare. It would have been Cheryl’s birthday next week … Joyce shook her head sharply to dismiss the anger and grief that could still torment after six years, and moved her attention to something else. From the living room came the frustrated roar of a crowd and Ralph announcing aloud that some England player was a useless wanker.
She went outside to what was her unstated territory, tacitly off-limits to Ralph whenever she was in it. As the children had begun to grow up and away, and the bleak prospect of a withered marriage had emerged, the house remained shared, but the garden was Joyce’s equivalent of his golf club or the enemy-occupied Camden flat. He had never dared to question how much she had spent on wrought-iron arches, stone seats, chimney pots and immense glazed amphorae filled with flowers, the gazebo and Elizabethan knot garden beyond the rose trellis, all researched and planted at delicious expense. It was her private country, not another battlefield. She rarely hired help from the village, jealously keeping the work for herself to prove she could create something that had value.
Punching numbers into her mobile phone, she juggled the church flower rota. If Jackie filled the gap left by Isobel and Mrs Woodhouse would do two Sundays in succession, then surely she could talk Amy into dealing with the wedding at the end of next month. The Barnards were due back from Vancouver on the eighteenth, so …
Twenty years earlier, the possibility that her life might diminish to the point where such trivia became important would have been laughable. Now it wasn’t funny — but had to be endured.
Chapter Two
For six years Finch had existed only as the place where guilt lived; Jowett could remember nothing from passing through in 1990, shaking with terror, mind seeing only broken bodies and death. He still carried the image of a television report with a church in the background, the horror professionally condensed into a closing soundbite after a voice-over for shots of the farm, cars and policemen, red and white striped tape across the gate they had driven through, stunned villagers, fields and a photograph of Benjamin and Annie Godwin, smiling and alive. ‘… their daughter, Cheryl Hood, and grandchildren, Thomas and Amanda, also died in a crime that has shattered this peaceful village. Martin White, BBC News, Finch, Suffolk.’ For days afterwards glaring headlines glimpsed on newsagents’ shelves had shouted accusation at him until he had run away — only to discover there was no escape.
What he had achieved since had been a constant, growing rebuke that evil could lead to such rewards. But it was the inevitable result of an obsession with work. After a brief period selling insurance, family influence had gained him a position with the Midland’s Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, his lack of degree compensated for by his total commitment. At twenty-seven he was a currency dealer at the Thames Exchange in Queen Street Place, bonuses and commission pulling in more than seventy thousand a year, with only himself to spend it on. And other deaths — torturing his conscience further, the remnants of abandoned faith which had taught him that the dead saw and knew all about the living — had brought him more that he did not desire. A heart attack had killed his father in 1993, his mother had died a year later after an overdose which a sympathetic coroner had decided was accidental, and Jowett and his sister had shared the estate, enlarged by life policies he had sold to his parents. He was envied, independent: a flat in the Barbican’s Lauderdale Tower, an MGF. He tacitly encouraged envious office rumours of a flamboyant secret life to explain his need for privacy. The reality was night
s spent alone, occupying his fearful mind with mental discipline — teaching himself French, memorizing poetry — or indulging in lonely self-abuse, crude fantasies fuelled by magazines that he shamefully hid even though there was no one who might find them, his release bringing with it a sense of humiliation, self-inflicted and squalid.
At the beginning he had grasped at sex, constantly paraded as a panacea for all problems. He had stalked the wine bars and the clubs, stitching on a smile of pleasure, temporarily forgetting as amplified disco drums throbbed in the alcohol-flooded chambers of his mind, groping on packed, strobe-blinked dance floors. There had been Sara, dreaming of hairdressing, in her Gloucester Road bedsit, enthusiastic and giggly; Helen, the law student he had met at a Proms concert, intellectual and intense; Sindy, drunkenly selected one night from the grubby cards displayed in a telephone box near King’s Cross, efficient, bored and cynical; a handful of others who now had no names. But he had always been back in the wilderness when it was over. After that he had explored other standard escape routes. Travel to India and Burma, where philosophical monks had failed him; a brief period of voluntary work that felt as hypocritical as his donations to homeless, starving children or research into ugly diseases, when there was no cure for his own.
Finally he had lain in a warm, embracing bath, a sliver of blue blade held across the artery of his rigid wrist. Shaking with fear he had scratched at the promise of ultimate relief before shuddering and hurling the razor aside, weeping at his cowardice, until the water had grown cold and the cleansing blood sacrifice had turned into a grotesque pantomime of self-delusion.
It was the chance encounter with Giles that had driven him back to Finch. They had met on Moorgate when he was returning from lunch with a client, another anonymous face passing unseen, suddenly recognized, the voice calling his name unnervingly normal, surprised and amused with recognition. Christ, it’s been years. What are you doing these days? How about that? I went into finance as well. Fund manager with Mercury Asset Management. They had moved aside to let others pass. Where are you living? Hey, swish. We’re in Highgate … Yes, I married — a father for God’s sake. Rebecca, nearly three. You? Stay like that; it plays havoc with your social life. Just kidding. It’s great. Anyway, I’ve got to get back. Here, have one of these. Call me sometime and we’ll have a jar. Great to see you. Cheers. He had gripped Jowett’s hand, smiled and walked away, another assured, well-cut professional suit heading towards London Wall. Holding the business card, Jowett had stared after him, keeping him in sight to confirm that the moment so often played in his mind had actually occurred, conscious that he had failed to say any of the things he had planned, that neither of them had even hinted at … that it had been so insanely like dozens of other chance conversations on the crowded City pavements; the casual news and questions, the oblique boasting, the printed oblong of pasteboard from the wallet, the departing invitation rarely followed up.
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