The Invitation

by A. M. Castle

  ‘Did you ever ask yourself why? Why Rachel, who was always off to New York for this fundraiser or that, and who had just lumbered herself with this project.’ She gestures out of the window, where the storm clouds are still banked high. I take it she means Castle Tregowan, and all who sail in her. ‘Why would she keep on dragging herself to the suburbs to see our teenage daughters?’

  ‘And Ruby,’ I tack on. She glares at me for my pains and I stumble on. ‘No, I mean, she’s … she was Tasha’s godmother … I thought you wanted her to be involved. Didn’t you think it might be good for their careers, or something?’

  Gita sighs. I’ve got her there. She was always obsessed with Rachel’s celebrity status, not that she’ll admit that. And she was keen for some of that stardust to rub off on her children. An internship for Tasha at the Cadogan Foundation, for instance. Her art career would be made.

  ‘What about Rachel and Nessie?’

  I shrug. ‘I mean, I’d say they got on OK … Rachel was never really focused on kids, though, was she?’

  Gita pounces. ‘Right. Exactly. You said it. So why was she suddenly hanging out with ours?’

  Sometimes it’s better to concede defeat. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Because she was hiring Nessie.’

  She’s got me now. ‘What are you on about? Hiring her for what?’

  ‘As a rent-a-womb.’

  We both sit there, Gita fixing me with her huge chocolate eyes, me staring back like an idiot. I suddenly become aware of the drumming of the rain outside.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s paid her to be her surrogate.’

  I look at her blankly.

  ‘Her surrogate. Her surrogate mother,’ Gita is yelling again now.

  ‘You’re kidding?’ Christ. Christ. That bloody, bloody woman.

  ‘Kidding? I only wish I were,’ says Gita, and suddenly there they are. The tears. Streaming down her face, and I do the only thing a husband can. We both stand up and I take her in my arms. Behind her back, my face darkens in anger. I can’t believe this, I can’t. Even from beyond the grave, Rachel is still fucking with us.

  That bitch.

  Chapter 66

  Tom

  Mount Tregowan, 1st November

  It’s a theatrical touch, calling everyone to drinks. All right, it’s a bit early to start, nowhere near 6 p.m. yet. But I reckon we need a stiff one. And, as everyone’s been in that room all day, it’s just a question of exchanging teacups for booze. I’d imagine it will be welcome. Particularly to Vicky.

  I think I can safely say I’ve cleared things up. A lot of truths have come out.

  I’m still reeling from Gita’s revelation. How Nessie could be so naive, I just don’t know. But Rachel dangling the money for her to study drama at Julliard in New York, board and lodging paid, was enough to sign her up. I didn’t even know she was interested in acting. Yes, the whole bloody thing is illegal – you can’t pay a surrogate in the UK, only cover their expenses. And we don’t even know if the foetus is Ross Tregowan’s. God, I hope it isn’t. He doesn’t seem to have known a thing about the whole revolting idea.

  It’s a mess. Nessie doesn’t know what she wants to do next. Being a single mum in suburbia is not the same as dropping Rachel’s spawn and, as Gita puts it, ‘prancing around Manhattan in leg warmers’.

  Anyway, shelving that for the moment – we still have five months to work it out – my job is to reassure people that it’s all over. Rachel and Penny are dead, and Raf is almost certainly sadly gone now too. End of story.

  It’s not pleasant, but it’s tied up with pink ribbons, at least. And all we have to do is wait for deliverance, when we can wheel our cases down that causeway, to the rest of our lives. Sure, we’ll have to make some statements to my colleagues, the local boys in blue, but we know what we’re saying. And what happened.

  We can all drink to that.

  I lift my own glass in a toast, and look round. ‘To absent friends.’ Everyone murmurs, but the atmosphere is subdued. Vicky downs her drink in one and holds it aloft. ‘I need another to take the taste away,’ she says. I come round and top her up, exchanging a glance with Gita. I’m glad we’ve got onto the same page again, more or less, my wife and I. Nothing like a massive crisis to get the family pulling together.

  Nessie is huddled, looking like a baby herself, not Rachel’s bloody baby-mother-to-be. Tasha has violet shadows under her eyes. Ruby looks a fully-fledged teenager, now. Roderick sags in his chair, keeping an eye on his father. Ross, meanwhile, is sunk in gloom, looking as old as Methuselah. Jane and Geoff sit on the banquette by the window, silent, but I see they’re holding hands. Looks like they will come out of this stronger.

  The atmosphere in the room is more settled, even though the storm is really getting up outside, the wind cracking and moaning and sounding like feet on the march. It makes it all the more cosy, here by the fireside. It feels as though we’ve come through the worst. As though we’re turning a page, on Rachel and all her doings.

  At last.

  Chapter 67

  Jane

  Mount Tregowan, 1st November

  As Tom holds forth by the mantelpiece, telling us all his conclusions, I realise it’s the first time this weekend – maybe ever – that I’ve had licence to just sit and look at him. It’s always been hurried glances before, with me desperate not to catch his eye, show him I’m still intrigued. And I’ve been in hiding from Geoff, too. The last thing I wanted was for him to guess there was something between Tom and me, and then to realise what it might be.

  But all that’s over now. Geoff knows the truth. Everyone else in the room probably does too, Vicky and Rachel were so indiscreet. Well, I don’t care anymore. Even Gita, who’s lorded it over me with her Madonna pose for twenty-odd years, no longer seems like such a perfect mother. One daughter has been committing incest, the other is apparently a teenage pregnancy statistic (I haven’t missed all the shouting in corridors or the fact that Nessie has suddenly stopped hiding her little bump and is now sitting proudly cradling it) and the youngest is so neglected she went missing for hours yesterday. That’s nothing to post about on Instagram, is it, Gita?

  I turn back to Tom. His arm is relaxed, lying across the marble mantelpiece. Those biceps are certainly impressive.

  His gaze sweeps past me. No change there. Today, however, he doesn’t have such a huge audience to draw on. His eyes drift to Gita, via Geoff and Roderick. His daughters are deep in their phones, no doubt regularly bored to tears by Daddy’s little chats.

  I realise, suddenly, that this is a hard crowd for Tom to play. He’s always at his best with strangers. Well, let’s just say it – women. For them, he pulls out the stops. But he’s already slept with all the adult females here who aren’t actually dead. And while I think we can rule out Penny, who really knows about Rachel? Gita is the only one of us getting repeat performances. Looking at her now, she seems a tad weary. I can’t say I’m surprised.

  In the absence of willing fresh flesh to manipulate, Tom is having to branch out and try to appeal to the men instead. Neither Roderick nor Geoff seem to be lapping it up in quite the way he’s used to.

  ‘That’s all very well,’ says Geoff in his driest and most lawyerly voice. ‘But until we get the toxicology reports, we won’t really know if Penny was in the habit of taking antidepressants, will we?’

  ‘She certainly was not,’ pipes up Roderick. ‘I know my sister and in recent years she’s made stringent efforts to get off her medication,’ he says, sitting forward.

  ‘And how was that going for her?’ says Tom rather cruelly, looking down on Roderick. It seems to rub the little man up the wrong way. He stands and marches over to Tom. But it’s no contest. Tom is tall, taut, and looks ready to spring into action, whether that is delivering an uppercut to Roderick’s quivering jaw or slapping on handcuffs.

  Roderick backs away but carries on. ‘I don’t understand where that medication came from, that stuff she … took. She di
dn’t use painkillers – she didn’t need them – and we got rid of the Sertraline ages ago.’

  ‘She probably didn’t tell you everything. What sibling does?’ Tom glances at his own daughters for a second and Tasha colours. She has sworn blind she didn’t know a thing about Nessie’s pregnancy – but then I heard her tell Gita she saw her sister and Rachel deep in conversation yesterday afternoon.

  ‘All the same …’ blusters Roderick.

  ‘Look, she had a thing about that accident with her mother. And she hated her stepmother,’ Tom says in a voice of exaggerated reasonableness.

  ‘But we need to keep an open mind about Penny, don’t we?’ I say, surprising myself. ‘The police will be doing a proper investigation, after all.’

  Tom whips round. I flinch, but he just laughs. ‘Sure. Just stating the obvious.’

  I swallow, but I stick to my guns, for once. ‘But is it really so obvious? I don’t know. I’m not sure we should prejudge the situation …’

  Geoff, bless him, chimes in. ‘Jane’s right. We need to present the police with the facts, when they come. Let them draw their own conclusions.’

  ‘I … agree,’ says Vicky, slurring even more than usual.

  Tom shrugs. ‘You’re quite right. You’re all right,’ he says. ‘Let’s just wait for the reinforcements to deal with everything. After all, we’re all in this together, aren’t we?’

  There’s that charm again, and I horrify myself by feeling a twinge of desire.

  I might as well admit it: I still find Tom irresistible.

  Chapter 68

  Geoff

  Mount Tregowan, 1st November

  I suppose you see it all, as a country lawyer, a community lawyer. Some people like to dismiss us, look down on those of us who are content to stay below the radar, instead of prancing around in the big city. But there’s a place for everyone, in this venerable calling, upholding the rule of law. I certainly like to think my work has made me something of a student of human nature.

  I’m not going to bore my fellow guests with all my thought processes this weekend. That would not be my wont. But it’s been abundantly clear, from the very outset, that something has been awry. ‘Out of whack,’ I suppose Gita’s delightful daughters would say.

  At first, of course I looked to Rachel, the cause of so much mayhem over the years. If anyone had the potential to kill in cold blood, it would be she. Gita is the one who sullies herself on that ghastly tabloid paper, but it was Rachel who really delighted in muckraking, with her love of gossip and her refusal to acknowledge boundaries. I’m afraid I have first-hand experience of the seamy side of her interests.

  Her manic gaiety that fatal night was, I felt, leading up to rather more than an announcement about the arrival of a new heir to the baronetcy. Not to put too fine a point on it, so to speak, she was dying to plunge the knife into someone. It might even have been my good self. But then she rather spoiled my thesis by turning up dead. I remember the light shining off that skewer, when the chandeliers went back on again. You couldn’t often say it about Rachel – fine figure of a woman if nothing else – but she was not, then, a pretty sight.

  There’ve been one or two shocks since then, all right. Not least in the matrimonial department. I suppose I should know that spouses can lead very separate emotional lives. I’ve brokered enough divorces over the years. But I had no idea that Jane has been hiding so much. To be blunt, the fling with Tom. I suppose I can forgive her poor taste – and at least it predated his relationship with Gita. Vicky, of course, cannot say the same.

  As for the thorny issue of the abortion, and the subsequent miscarriages. Well, all I can say is I wish she’d told me sooner, and that I hadn’t had to hear it third-hand. We could have saved ourselves a world of pain and trouble. And I could have told her a little secret of my own.

  I have no desire for children. Never have had. There, it’s said. I bought into her plans, long ago, the preparation of the baby’s room, all the folderol that went with it. That’s what the ladies want, isn’t it? But I never really warmed to the idea of losing my wife to maternity. Chaps get sidelined by their children; it’s behind half the splits I see. I didn’t wish to play second fiddle to some little usurper, no matter how adorable the outfits Jane lavished our funds on. I rather rejoiced at the negative tests that piled up in our rubbish bins. And I’ve enjoyed the fact that she’s poured so much love into her rodent friends instead. I’ve even tolerated those mutts of hers, Dolly and Molly, biting my ankles and trying to trip me up.

  Next step is to tell Jane. I’m biding my time; she’ll be astonished, to say the least. I’ll find a moment, when she is a little calmer. Dear old thing is terribly overwrought. Understandably.

  Possibly more pressing, presently, is the question of the murderer in our midst. I’m going to allow myself a dry laugh at this point, though levity may seem out of place.

  Does anyone still believe that Penny, that pathetic specimen of a menopausal neurotic, could possibly have planned an execution? Bringing about the preceding blackout alone would surely have been beyond her.

  No, there is a much more obvious candidate available to us, if we only choose to look. Someone who certainly has the ‘smarts’ to accomplish such a deadly deed. And who yet remains the last person one would suspect.

  It’s not a conclusion that I relish, it is a matter of simple deductive reasoning. We were all provided with murder weapons and disguises by our hostess herself, in the shape of the skewers and cloaks. And we all had ample scope, when the lights went down, to pounce on her bare flesh. Each of us, barring perhaps Gita’s younger two offspring, had a pressing reason to wish Rachel Tregowan was out of the way.

  I include even her widower in this. He cannot have been unaware of the way his bride was spreading talk of his first wife’s unfortunate demise, and her daughter Penny’s role as inadvertent murderess. A secret that had been closely guarded for thirty years, a coroner’s verdict that had perhaps been procured by underhand means, all were being exposed to scrutiny thanks to Rachel’s habitual indiscretion.

  It was the same inability to keep a secret that led to my own contretemps with Jane, and then the revelations about Raf. Even young Nessie might have been infuriated when Rachel seemed to be making their infernal deal public, without acknowledging the vital role of the girl’s own uterus in proceedings. Who knows, anger at being written out of the story might have outweighed financial considerations, for a hormonal teenager. Nor was there any love lost between Rachel and her stepchildren, while Gita and Tom both had equal cause to want to protect his professional reputation.

  Looked at like this, the wonder is that Rachel was not bristling with skewers like a moribund porcupine at the end of that tragic meal. But only one of us took, if I may be forgiven for putting it this way, the plunge.

  There is, indeed, only one amongst us who, in common parlance, ‘ticks all the boxes’. And I am now confident I know their identity.

  I may look inert, I may have been side-lined by some on this weekend’s guest list as the little lawyer from the sticks, but inside, I am a coiled spring. Ready and waiting for my moment.

  Oh yes indeed, murderer in our midst. I have my eye very much upon you.

  Chapter 69

  Vicky

  Mount Tregowan, 1st November

  I’ve been thinking, while Tom’s been chuntering on. I’ve got my eyes shut, so everyone will assume I’ve passed out again. ‘Poor Vicky, she’s a hopeless drunk, you know.’ Little do they all realise, I’ve got my wits about me, for once.

  Because there are some aspects of this whole business that I just don’t buy. All right, the Rachel/Penny axis, that makes a sort of sense. It’s neat. But Raf? The way people have started looking at me, in a pitying way. It’s like they’re implying my lad knew when he set out that he couldn’t make it. That just isn’t right.

  I’m not denying there are reasons why he might feel, well, despairing. The incest. I mean, Christ. And even the idea that To
m is – or could be – his father. It’s bad. But it’s not that bad. Not when you’re twenty, with the world at your feet. No, Raf is a lad with inbuilt confidence so strong it’s like his own personal life jacket. Or is that just his mother’s desperate wish?

  I’ve started to develop some suspicions of my own. I just can’t see Penny, twiglet-thin and nutty as she was, running down to the pier in the middle of the night and knocking massive holes in that boat. So who did it, and why?

  So for a while, my money has been on – tah-dah – none other than Ross Tregowan himself.

  When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. He’d decided things weren’t working out with Rachel anymore, but he’d still like her dosh, thank you very much. So he fitted up Penny, and got rid of two birds with one stone. He seemed to find Penny’s personal struggles nothing but an embarrassment. The way he’d hushed things up about his first wife wasn’t secret anymore. That gives him another juicy motive. Besides, no one watching him today would believe he was inconsolable about his poor daughter. As for the boat, I’d say he wanted to keep us here while the evidence trail went cold. He’d know exactly where it and a handy hammer were kept. His type always think they’re above the law.

  Except that, last time I went to the toilet, I found him. Ross Tregowan, standing right outside this room, with a lost look on his face and tears running down his wrinkly cheeks. It was a horrible sight. It wrung my heart. I couldn’t quite hug him but I patted him on his lord-of-the-manor tweeds, and he scuttled off to his room. Whether it’s Penny he misses, or Rachel going that’s blown a massive hole in his life – a hole as big as the one in his boat – his upper-crust front has well and truly gone soggy. Poor old bloke. His secret’s safe with me.

  But, no sooner than Ross has disappeared from the frame, someone else has popped into my mind. And this time, I really think it’s a runner.