Never Tell

by Seeber, Claire

  ‘Much as I esteemed her, she was weak in the end. Weakness never pays. Look at your great friend Dalziel,’ he sneered.

  Unconsciously I clenched a fist. I remembered the Lucifer debate, I remembered the crackling animosity between the two boys.

  ‘And you, Rose Miller, you need to decide what your path is.’

  I was surprised. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Are you trying to save the world? Or are you just trying to find a story, a headline where there is none?’ He pocketed his keys and stepped towards the house. ‘A terrorist – or an innocent Muslim? A sad drug addict – or an imprisoned daughter?’ He turned away from me, so I could see the beauty spot on his cheek, the elegantly curved nose. ‘A true reporter – or latching on to a cause célèbre? Go home, Mrs Miller. There’s nothing for you here.’

  He was so angry that he no longer looked handsome, his face so taut, pale eyes wide, and I suddenly realised who he reminded me of. I thought of the first cutting in Peggy’s office. I thought of Lord Higham standing behind Alia Kattan in that early photo, their hands brushing.

  I stood watching him as he climbed the front stairs. At the top he turned. ‘You may feel guilty about Huriyyah, though, peace be with her. You may feel that guilt for ever.’

  ‘But I—’

  He slammed the front door in my face.

  Wearily I drove back to Jen’s for the night. Crossing the river, Parliament silhouetted against the night sky, I supposed it was Lord Higham who had sent the note, although I guessed I’d never know for sure. Atoning finally for his sins.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Long is the way

  And hard,

  that out of Hell leads up to the Light.

  Paradise Lost, Milton

  I was sitting in my mother’s garden when Ruth rang to tell me the news. As quickly as it had started, it was over. Three days later, a mistrial was declared. One of the jurors alleged he had been approached by an anonymous source to sway his verdict. At the same time, Saquib Baheev had apparently confessed that he had been coerced to point the finger at James – and suddenly, all charges against James were dropped.

  My husband was coming home. I put the phone down and just sat for a while, watching the children finish their tea on the tartan blanket laid on the lush emerald grass. It was a warm, rather sultry evening, given that it was May.

  ‘You’ve got tomato ketchup on your forehead,’ Alicia was telling Effie. ‘Wipe it off.’

  ‘Where?’ The little girl put her hand up and smeared the sickly red sauce into her hair. ‘I haven’t. Have I?’

  ‘Have I got a forehead?’ Freddie said. ‘Where’s my five-head?’

  I watched them, feeling such incredible love that I could hardly believe there had been a day when I had even thought I could have run away from them, from my life. The madness had truly consumed me for a while, but now I was calm again.

  Calm – but without hope for myself. I had seen hope in Danny, I’d grasped it between my fingers, that was what he had brought me. It kept me going for a while during bleak days, that tiny scrap. But in the end it had got so tattered, so dirty and mauled and torn that there was really nothing left.

  My only hope now lay in the children. My one wish now was that their lives would be carefree and easy for as long as I could make them so. They would be enough for me.

  I sat numbly in the evening sun, knowing now that James would come home and the children would be ecstatic. Gingerly I pressed the small lump beneath my eye, the lump that had never quite disappeared, vestige of the last back-hander James had given me that cold spring day a year ago. Soon I’d have to tell him that I wanted to leave, that I was taking the children too – and how much longer could they be carefree then?

  And all I could think was, tonight is my last night of freedom.

  The doorbell rang. My heart leaped. Danny’s final words stayed with me however hard I fought them. ‘I’ll find you, I promise.’ That tiny shred of hope still flickered then, despite my flat despair.

  I heard voices, excited, and then my father called out, ‘James is here. Daddy’s home.’ The kids stood as one, screaming with excitement and confusion, and went running inside, tumbling over one another to reach their father first, my mother’s dog barking in frenzy.

  For a moment I didn’t get up. I looked down at my hands, at my wedding ring, and I saw the storm clouds reflected in my teacup.

  We went back to the perfect house in the country. All this time I had been running, and now I saw there was nowhere left to go. The children were happy here, settled – and I was about to pull their life apart again. For years I had been championing the outsider without realising that I was deliberately making myself one, and slowly I’d begun to realise, too, that it wasn’t the place as much as me. I was rejecting safety, not location. And my children needed safety; so here, for now, we would stay. It finally felt more like coming home; and although we wouldn’t stay in this house, the children and I would stay in the Cotswolds.

  From the day we arrived back in Gloucestershire, James and I slept in separate bedrooms. He threw himself into his work and I prevaricated about telling him that one of us had to go. It bubbled unsaid beneath the surface: I figured I’d wait until the end of the long summer holidays, then at least the children could have some time as a family before it was finally torn asunder.

  James was different, humbled perhaps. I felt that he too knew that it wasn’t going to work, but he wasn’t going to be the one to broach it. We skirted round the subject of his guilt; I built myself up to confront him finally about it.

  And then one morning the phone rang.

  ‘Let’s just say you’ve got a special friend, darling,’ a woman’s voice said quietly, giving me a time and place to meet. I thought I recognised her but before I could question her, she had hung up.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The light shines in the darkness and the darkness

  has not overcome it.

  John 1:4, 5

  All the way to London, the woman’s words circled round my head like carrion crows. She’d hung up before I could ask more; that silky voice echoing down the years, a voice I was sure I knew and yet couldn’t quite place. One more piece from the nightmare jigsaw the last year had become; one more piece nearly slotted back in.

  Off the motorway, the traffic snaked back solid to the Blackfriars interchange. Frantically I watched the clock, creeping forward incrementally, until I could bear it no longer. Abandoning the car on a broken meter I sprinted through the rush-hour fumes, dodging swearing cyclists and the motorbikes that sneaked down the middle, stumbling over the kerb on Ludgate Hill, until I was falling in panic, unable to right myself. A double-decker bore down on me, horn blaring; a builder in a yellow hard hat snatched me from its path in the nick of time, his calloused hand warm on mine. I was too stunned to do much more than blink at him and run on.

  They were closing St Paul’s Cathedral to sightseers as I finally reached the great stone stairs. For too long now my life hadn’t made any sense; I had to know the truth. Someone, somewhere, had to know the truth.

  Inside, the internal gate was shut.

  ‘Please,’ I gasped at the curate, closing up. ‘Please, I have to – I’ve come so far.’

  That someone might be here.

  ‘You look pretty desperate,’ the jolly curate relented, his chin resting on his collar, waving me through with his walkie-talkie. ‘Last one in. This one’s on God.’

  ‘How do I get up to the Whispering Gallery?’ I wheezed gratefully, leaning on the barrier for a moment to catch my breath.

  It took me ten minutes to climb up, and my heart was banging so hard by the time I’d reached the gallery in the huge dome that I had to sit down as soon as I got there. I’d passed a gaggle of Italian tourists coming down the stairs, but otherwise the space was empty. I thought he hadn’t come, the anonymous writer – and I heard my name said softly, and I turned and saw him.

  They say that w
hen you’re drowning your whole life flashes before your eyes – though it seems unlikely that anyone could confirm it. True or not, I felt like I was falling backwards now, splashing messily through my own life.

  He walked towards me, thin and no longer elegant, wiry-limbed and crop-haired instead.

  ‘Hello, Rose,’ he said and I tried to find my voice.

  ‘I thought,’ it came at last, ‘I thought that you were dead.’

  Lord Higham had let it be known that his eldest son, Dalziel, had taken his own life, permanently scarred by the tragic and sudden death of his girlfriend, Lena. There was never any formal announcement of the death and the funeral was said to have taken place quietly and privately on the family estate in Scotland. And of course, that suited them just fine.

  How could Higham ever admit that, actually, one child of his had attempted to murder another? One child of his, high on the drug PCP – or angel dust – had tried to coerce a ‘friend’ – the bullet-headed Brian – into raping another child, his own half-brother, in front of an audience. One child of his had encouraged his once-girlfriend to use so much heroin and Xanax that she had overdosed and died, gurgling at our feet.

  And so all this time, James believed that he had effectively murdered his best friend after they had tussled with the knives. Dalziel had been removed in an ambulance, bleeding, taken to a private hospital after the horrible scuffle whilst I still lay unconscious. I’d been hospitalised myself; James had been briefly arrested along with Brian whilst the police tried to ascertain what had happened.

  Enquiries I’d made later to the family about Dalziel had been politely rebuffed. They were mourning their dear son; they didn’t want strangers’ eyes on them, and I accepted that. Brian had disappeared into the navy, I found out later. James and I returned to our lives, separated – scathed and saddened but ultimately the apparent survivors. We had been utterly brazen in our ambition to show no one could restrain us – and our ambition had exploded in our faces.

  All these years, James had endured the pain of thinking he’d murdered his friend; that his fatal blow had killed Dalziel. We’d believed that Higham had covered up the death to prevent a scandal; that James had been saved by the lies of the father for the death of the son.

  But Higham had been covering up something very different indeed.

  I sat beside him, staring, staring, and I was eighteen again, back in Oxford. My hands were shaking. I kept looking up at him to check that I hadn’t gone mad.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I said, and he smiled slightly, and I saw a glimpse of the old Dalziel, the boy I had once known. Although now I looked closer, I could see that his beauty was quite ravaged.

  ‘Here and there, darling, here and there. South America, mainly.’

  ‘But how can you have just disappeared like that? You can’t have just vanished off the face of the earth.’

  ‘I can.’ He put his hand in his pocket. ‘Although obviously I didn’t.’

  ‘Well, where—’

  ‘There are plenty of places to hide, Rose, if you don’t want to be found.’

  ‘So your father … ‘ I said slowly.

  ‘Has forgiven me? Just about.’ Dalziel tried to smile, his teeth bared briefly. They told the tale of past addiction and indulgence; no longer perfect and straight and white. ‘As long as I do what my father says, I’ll be all right.’

  He spoke differently, no longer with the louche drawl I remembered, more clipped as if there were no words to spare, and he held himself as if he was so tense he might never relax. Once willowy, now he was wiry, the veins on his arms too pronounced. And he didn’t look well, I thought suddenly. He was too thin and his eyes seemed to be blazing with something, though the dim light made it hard to tell. I felt a shiver. It was hard to imagine Dalziel ever growing old. In my mind, he was twenty-one for all time, gone for ever, having lived fast and died too young. I’d always thought he was like Dorian Gray. He would never age, never grow old or ugly or fat. It is better to be beautiful than to be good: Wilde had written it, Dalziel had lived it. But now, here he was. Severe and somehow rather monk-like.

  Slowly it began to tumble into place. The reason Higham had tried to buy me off. And now apparently, why he had stepped in, involving himself in something on a far bigger scale.

  A little girl in polka dots entered the gallery, dragging her mother behind her.

  ‘You’ve got little ones then, Rose?’ Dalziel watched the couple as the girl leaned precariously over the barrier. I imagined I saw a shadow of something flit across his face. ‘With the lovely James.’

  For the first time, I felt anger flare. ‘You nearly destroyed him, you know.’

  Dalziel bowed his head.

  ‘He still has nightmares now.’ I had never spoken up against Dalziel, not once during the days of Society X, not until that fateful final night, but now I could hardly bear to summon the filthy terror he’d put us through. ‘James thought he’d killed you. He’s been haunted by what happened. How could you let him think that for all this bloody time, Dalziel?’

  ‘I didn’t have much choice,’ he said flatly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He sighed, and the thing in his pocket that he fiddled with rattled. ‘Let’s just say I haven’t been master of my own ship for some time. And I promise you, I’m haunted too. Utterly.’ He slumped back against the bench. ‘I’m ruined for all time. Though I must say, James did have a pretty good go.’

  ‘That’s rubbish and you know it. He just tried to stop you doing –’ I paused – ‘doing whatever it was you were about to do.’

  We sat there for a second in quiet contemplation. Did either of us even know what Dalziel had planned?

  ‘I still bear the scars, you know.’ Dalziel pulled his black shirt aside at the neck to show me the fine puckered line of a wound I’d never seen, a wound that travelled from collarbone to breast, that had missed his throat by centimetres. But James had no intention of killing Dalziel, that much I knew. He was struggling with him when the knife in his hand had slipped and gashed his friend.

  Slowly Dalziel did the buttons back up, right up to the top so no flesh was exposed. ‘I guess it was no less than I deserved.’

  ‘It wasn’t about what you deserved. It was desperation.’

  ‘I was mad, Rose.’ His voice was a monotone. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’

  ‘Christ, Dalziel. Why didn’t you tell us, though? We thought that you were dead.’

  ‘Let’s not bring Christ into it, shall we?’ He tried to smile that confident smile that I remembered so well, but he was hollowed, a shadow of the boy I’d known. ‘That’s where the trouble started, I seem to remember.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I was incarcerated for a while.’

  ‘A while?’

  ‘A few years. A special hospital in Buenos Aires. I have to take a lot of meds today.’

  ‘Medicine?’ I said. ‘For what?’

  ‘Depression. Schizophrenia. You name it, Rose. But I’m fine. Really. Don’t be scared.’

  ‘I’m not scared of you, Dalziel.’

  ‘But you’re angry.’ It was a curt statement.

  ‘No. I don’t know. It’s been so long. It’s such a bloody shock.’

  Two portly Americans entered the gallery and began to search for the Whispering Wall. I thought of how Dalziel had opened up my narrow world. For all his madness and grand designs, he had lent me a lust for life that I hadn’t had before I’d met him, an enthusiasm that had led me to places I’d never have seen if I hadn’t known him.

  ‘Why now?’ Dully I watched the Americans. ‘I mean, why are you here?’

  ‘I came to pay my dues.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘To help get James acquitted.’

  ‘How the hell could you do that?’

  ‘I think that’s a question for James, dear Rose.’

  ‘But James isn’t here, Dalziel. So you’d better tell me.’
/>   ‘I only know the bare facts. She tried to blackmail him, you know.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘I came back to see a doctor a few years ago, at the London Clinic. I spent a bit of time in town before my family corralled me again. I fell into some of my … of my old habits, shall we say. And that girl who had got involved with Charlie recognised me.’

  ‘What girl?’ I stared at him. ‘Kate?’

  ‘The silly waitress who loved James.’

  ‘Yes, Kate. And?’

  ‘And she tried to blackmail my father. Last year. My little brother put her up to it, though, I fear.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My brother hates my father almost as much as I do. And he admitted to Kate – Katya – that I was alive when she asked. She put two and two together: she saw that my father was on the political up and she threatened to expose the fact that his son was a mad ex-junkie, still alive. Amongst other things.’

  So Lana had been right. But that would mean James had known Dalziel was alive … Panic rose in my belly.

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Things she had on my father.’

  ‘How did she know your father?’

  ‘Don’t be dim, darling.’ For a second, he sounded like the old Dalziel. ‘Because she was a whore.’

  So it had been true all along. I thought of the photos of Higham, taken at three in the morning. The pictures of scantily clad women entering the house earlier. Some kind of posh brothel, presumably.

  ‘And then she paid the ultimate price.’ His voice slowed. ‘She died, didn’t she?’

  I realised the thing in his hand was some kind of worry beads.

  ‘Yes. In my house. But it was an accident.’ I tried to keep up with what he was saying.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. It was, definitely. Or, at worst, it was some kind of stupid noble suicide.’ I saw James being hustled out. I saw Charlie Higham chatting up the girls who’d adored him. ‘It wasn’t murder. She fell.’

  ‘I see. Well. That’s one relief, I suppose.’