by Fiona Walker
Then she ground to a halt. There were no flashing blue lights, no reflective silver stripes or uniformed officers, nor any red and white tape; just a big black sky, white stars, and the lion’s share of a cowardly moon hiding its blushes behind the gathering storm-clouds.
She turned in a slow circle, hearing nothing but the wind and the sea.
The weather was on the turn. The wind and the sea were playing together like tussling boys now, angry waves catching elbows and skins of rocks while the foam smiles grew nastier and the howls and hisses became bullying.
Legs looked across at the hall, its lights beaming once more through those deep set, uneven windows, a landlocked frigate fighting its wars below decks. Were the occupants all lined up in the drawing room being grilled by a West Country police detective with a creamy accent and a wily smile, she wondered, knowing she should go there straight away and declare herself alive and well. Yet she had no desire to offer deliverance to Francis yet. Whatever he had written in his unfinished reply to her eighteen ‘I love yous’ had just stolen Byrne away from her. The letter was still in her hand along with the petrol lighter.
It was far too squally where she stood for flamelit reading. The boisterous sea was still slinging insults up at the wind, blowing raspberries as its tide turned, and getting long wolf whistles through the rocks in return.
She remembered Édith jokingly comparing her to Rebecca, whom Maxim de Winter had let die at sea with such relief. For a moment she longed to see Farcombe engulfed in flames like Manderley, but it remained stubbornly twinkly and fairytale-castle rugged, about as combustible as Battenburg cake.
Legs changed her mind abruptly about going there. In a toss-up between marzipan castles and gingerbread cottages, the latter won all the way. She needed her mother’s sweet refuge.
Kicking off her shoes and picking them up, she diverted off the track onto the mossiest grass to cool her aching feet, and padded into the woods towards Spywood Cottage.
Chapter 44
There were cars parked three deep on the track in front of Spywood Cottage’s gate when Legs arrived. She recognised her mother’s runabout, the Farcombe Estate Land Rover and, to her surprise, her sister’s sensible saloon. Lights glowed from all the downstairs windows.
She peered in through the little casement window beside the door. An emotional gathering was taking place at the scuffed table over a pot of tea and a rapidly emptying brandy bottle.
Sitting with Lucy and Ros with his back to her, Francis’s big shoulders were shaking. He rarely betrayed emotion, but he was openly weeping.
She was suddenly reminded of her most self-indulgent, morbid fantasies as an angst-ridden teenager, watching her unappreciative family and friends mourning penitently at her graveside. The reality was not so satisfying.
Before she went in, she unfolded the letter to read in the spilled light.
‘Oh no no.’ She felt tears bubble up instantly as she took in the pure emotion and poetry. Byrne was right. This was written exquisitely. It was breathtaking. It was a letter to fall in love to, to fall back in love, to stay in love. It was a letter written by a man who understood love.
She reread the first paragraph, brows curling at the familiarity of the words.
Squinting to see, she clicked the petrol lighter alight and reread a few lines in its orange glow.
There wasn’t a single phrase of Francis’s own on the page. It was all quotations, mostly from Joyce, cut and patched together like one of the music compilation tapes he’d made in the nineties; some Dubliners here, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man there, a splash of Ulysses elsewhere amid riffs of Eliot and Donne.
She sagged back against the wall and closed her eyes with a groan. Byrne had no idea what he’d just read, she realised. How could he ever compete with the beauty of Joyce in montage? Joyce was a master; he felt through his pen like others feel through mere mortal nerve endings. Francis, meanwhile, was an emotional parrot. She opened her eyes and looked at it again miserably.
A ball of flames glowed back.
‘Aggh!’
The crackling inferno in her hand made her panic and throw letter and lighter up in the air. While one caught the drooping, parched clematis leaves and ignited them, the other landed heavily at her feet to start flame-throwing its wind-dried roots. Slotting her feet back into the clogs, Legs stamped out the blaze underfoot before hurriedly damping out the other against the porch wall with the doormat.
Amazingly, when she looked back in through the window, nothing had changed. Her mother and sister were still hand-wringing and eye-dabbing; Francis’s shoulders were still shaking. Only the level of the brandy bottle had gone down.
When Legs pushed open the door, the universal intake of breath that greeted her seemed to suck the air from the room. The smoke surrounding her added significantly to the impact, along with her smouldering plastic shoes.
‘Hi.’ She smiled anxiously. ‘I’m here. Really sorry if you were worried.’
Her sister and mother both screamed. Francis just sat with his mouth open, staring at her.
‘I’m not dead,’ Legs said brightly. ‘Isn’t that great?’
Ros screamed again. Lucy burst into tears.
‘Is there any more tea in that pot?’ Legs asked apologetically.
When nobody answered, she made her way to the kitchen to fetch a mug.
Minutes later, everybody was talking at once. Lucy, crying with delight, was arguing with Ros about whether Legs should go to hospital, and so completely muddled up in her excitement that she was trying to make fresh tea by putting bags in the sugar crock and pouring boiling water on top.
Refusing to let go of Legs’ hand, Francis managed to be both defensive and contrite at the same time, expressing loud amazement that his ‘extensive search’ of the cliffs hadn’t found her and then taking all the credit for wrestling Liz Delamere away from her hostage.
‘I fell off onto a ledge,’ she explained.
‘Thank goodness for that.’ He was too busy exonerating himself to really care for practical detail. ‘The police are questioning Liz at the hall now. Kizzy’s there too. They’ll both go away for a bloody good stretch, I’ll hazard.’
‘No! We must go there to explain!’
‘It can wait.’ He knitted his fingers lovingly through hers, raising them to his lips to kiss. Spotting her crustily burnt thumb, he hastily diverted towards her little finger.
Legs snatched her hand away. ‘But Liz really did nothing wrong, Francis. I overreacted.’
‘She broke into the cellar via the sea passage.’
‘I left the key in the lock.’
‘Then she tripped all the lights and locked the door from the inside,’ he pointed out, adding: ‘Why were you down in the cellars by the way?’
‘You know it wasn’t Liz who locked the cellar door,’ Legs cleared her throat, glancing at her mother, but Lucy was distractedly pouring boiling water into the tea caddy now. ‘I’d dropped my ring; she wanted to give it back.’
‘She chased you down to the cliffs!’
‘Yes, and when I fainted, she caught me. She saved my life really.’
‘I saved your life. What ring? Not my mother’s I hope?’
‘No. And what d’you mean, you saved my life? You thought I was dead just a minute ago,’ her voice was rising uncontrollably. She suddenly felt hysterical, tears mingling with laughter in a giddy, helium mix.
‘You really must go to hospital to get checked out,’ Ros was insisting bossily as she waved her phone about in search of a signal. ‘You’re obviously still in shock and might well have been concussed. I’ll call you an ambulance.’
‘I’ll drive her,’ said Francis firmly.
‘You’ve had at least a gill of brandy. So have I.’
‘I’ll take her,’ Lucy was putting teabags in the milk jug.
‘You polished off the rest of the bottle, Mum,’ Ros snapped, holding her phone out of the window, the howling wind knocking all the pot
plants from the sill.
‘She needs to stay here with her mother looking after her!’ Lucy bustled up to the table with a teapot brimming with boiling water but no teabags.
‘I’ll be looking after Legs at the hall,’ Francis clutched her hand even more tightly.
‘I’m honestly fine,’ Legs insisted, overwhelmed by weariness. ‘What I could really do with right now is a bath. And somebody really had better tell the police that I’m not dead. Are they searching the cliffs?’
‘They said they were waiting until daylight,’ Francis shook his head. ‘The wind’s just too dangerous to risk launching a boat or flying the chopper, and more storms are forecast.’
‘I’ll get the water running,’ Ros offered, still holding her phone up in hope of a signal as she headed into the little room beneath the stairs.
Lucy bustled back into the kitchen recess and re-emerged with a pot that now contained hot water, teabags, milk, sugar and several biscuits all ready mixed. ‘You can drive up to the hall to talk to the police while Legs is having a bath, can’t you Francis? They can hardly arrest you for drink driving on your own private roads. Tell them Legs can’t possibly speak with them until the morning. But tell Hector I must speak with him urgently.’
Francis reluctantly limped to the door, towing Legs behind him out onto the porch, where he covered her hand with both his and held it against his chest. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ he promised. ‘The police will want to talk to you about Byrne too, but I’m sure it’s just a formality.’
‘Why do they want to know about him?’ She asked, colour mounting on her cheeks. ‘It was Liz who wrote those letters.’
‘The Lucian Freud nude is missing.’
‘I thought you sold it to Vin Keiller-Myles?’
‘I did. He was going to take it home with him tonight, but when I went upstairs to fetch it, it had disappeared. It must have been taken when the lights went out.’
Legs’ laughed incredulously. ‘Why blame Byrne?’
‘He had access and motive. Now he’s disappeared too. It all adds up’
‘What “motive”?’
‘Money, of course.’
‘He doesn’t need money!’ She bit her lip, realising she mustn’t betray Byrne. ‘Are you sure it hasn’t just fallen off the wall? It could be a Freudian slip.’
He gave her a withering look, but then his handsome blue eyes creased with amusement, ‘Darling Legs, you are my light relief at the end of the tunnel. How could I survive without you? I knew my mother’s ring would be safe with you.’ To her horror, he stooped to kiss her. She kept her mouth tight shut and wriggled quickly away.
‘I need that bath.’
‘Of course you do. You must feel like hell. I will dedicate tonight to you, as I will dedicate the rest of my life. I love you. Now don’t you dare go away.’ Kissing her nose, forehead, each cheek and chin before blowing her a kiss from his fingers, he turned to go, then turned back. ‘Why were you in the cellars when Liz came up through the sea passage, by the way?’ he asked again.
‘I was checking on progress on Poppy’s sculpture,’ she bluffed, emotion suddenly wiring her jaws so tight they hollowed like pricked balloons.
‘Much better, isn’t it?’ he smiled fondly. ‘No idea why she tried for that awful Scarfe caricature stuff. Abstract naive is definitely her limit.’ Nodding farewell, he headed off into the gathering storm, Land Rover engine roaring louder than the approaching thunder.
Legs waved him off with relief, wondering if it might have been preferable to tumble over that cliff after all. A life without Byrne was unbearable. She slumped down on the porch step of Spywood, her little haven of comfort, and hugged the oak upright of its porch.
She had to be strong and tell Francis there was no future. But while dumping her motherless, romantic, scholarly first love once looked like misfortune, to dump him twice looked like deliberate cruelty. She raked away mounting tears with her palms.
Now the Land Rover tail-lights had disappeared down the tracks, Lucy appeared at her side on the Spywood doorstep. She was proffering a vast brandy, having raided the Christmas surplus which was stored in the trunk below the stairs. When Legs shook her head, she had a large swig herself. ‘Thank God he’s gone, you’re alive and you’re here. Oh Legs, darling.’ She dropped her voice to a whisper and sat down beside her. ‘Lucian Freud’s nude’s upstairs.’
It took Legs’ overwrought mind a few moments to comprehend what her mother was saying. ‘The painting’s here?’
Lucy nodded, looking frantic. ‘Hector took it – it was hanging up amid my watercolours in the kitchen when Ros arrived this evening. I only spotted it there because she accused me of painting disgusting filth, but I recognised it straight away, of course. It used to hang downstairs by the old butler’s pantry at Farcombe, and Hector would get guests to guess whether it was genuine or not.’
‘Is it?’
‘I very much doubt it,’ Lucy shook her head, art restorer judgement reigning supreme despite her panic. ‘But Hector never let on, and I have no doubt the Protheroes think it is.’
‘Francis has just sold it to Vin Keiller-Myles for a fortune,’ Legs told her, the truth about Farcombe’s financial shortfalls spilling out.
‘Then it must be a fake. Why else would Hector smuggle it here? Vin’s bound to want it authenticated. Hector knows I always liked it enormously. It was no doubt intended to be a noble parting gesture before he goes back to Poppy. But you can imagine the trouble it will cause if it’s discovered here.’
‘Why didn’t you just tell Francis?’
‘We were rather distracted by the thought that you’d just gone over a cliff.’ She started to snivel as the horror of that struck her afresh. ‘Now I just want it gone. It’s another reminder of Hector’s wild flights of fancy.’
‘I’ll get rid of it,’ Legs reached across to hug her shoulders. ‘Francis need never know. If the police really are involved, it must get returned to Farcombe as soon as possible.’
‘But Hector will get in such terrible trouble.’
‘It’s Francis who sold it,’ Legs muttered. ‘He’d do anything to save Farcombe.’
‘Whereas his father would still gamble it away on a whim,’ Lucy sighed, patting her daughter’s arm. ‘He was always sending me into William Hill in Bude with a roll of fifties.’
‘Do his bets still all have musical names?’
‘How did you know that?’
Legs told her about discovering Hector’s old system, the winnings going to charity. Then she found herself confessing that she had worked it all out in a frantic attempt to persuade Byrne his father hadn’t fallen victim to Hector’s cruelty, but rather his legendary and over-effusive philanthropy. ‘Of course, Hector stealing Poppy away from Brooke is rather harder to forgive.’
‘How he could have a son as upstanding and trustworthy as Francis still amazes me,’ Lucy eyed her closely.
‘Yes, Francis lays down the law while his father lays bets and wives.’
‘Poor darling Legs,’ Lucy gripped her daughter’s hand on her shoulder. ‘There was me thinking that you were so lucky to have the son all these years when I was denied the father, but the sins of both have been waged against us. You don’t want to marry Francis at all, do you?’
‘No.’ She hung her head.
Lucy squeezed her hand, ‘We all love Francis, of course, and he’s family to us, but you’re both young. You’ll both find—’
‘Don’t say it. It’s already happened.’ Legs tipped her head against her mother’s shoulder and watched lightning flashing like a distant rave party over the horizon.
‘Jago,’ Lucy sighed, ‘the man with barbed wire round his soul.’
She nodded, breathing in her mother’s familiar scent. ‘I’ve lost my heart to somebody who thinks love is a weapon of mass destruction.’
‘I guessed as much when I saw you together. Such a clever man,’ Lucy sighed again. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ She was
trying very hard not to slur her words, but it was obvious she was struggling to keep focus.
‘Not particularly,’ she apologised. ‘I think only a bath can take my tears right now.’
‘Your father always says that you carry more guilt in your shoulders than the rest of the Norths put together, including your God-fearing sister and all the Catholics on my mother’s side. He used to call you our Madonna child, do you remember?’
‘That’s because I sang “Like a Virgin” into my hairbrush in front of the mirror, Mum.’
‘Was it?’
They stood up, arm in arm, and went inside. Ros had been putting the finishing touches to a bath brimming with Hector’s muscle soak bubble bath. She’d even lit a few candles, and placed a freshly brewed mug of tea between the taps.
While Lucy reeled cheerfully back to the newly opened brandy bottle, Legs stifled a yawn and lent on the door frame as she watched her sister pulling clean towels from the laundry cupboard. ‘This is such heaven. Thank you.’
‘It’s not every day we get you back from the dead,’ Ros said chirpily, testing the temperature in the bath.
It only now occurred to Legs that her sister must have set out from London long before her clifftop drama began. ‘What are you doing in Devon?’
‘I came on here after dropping Nico with his father,’ she said then lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘I think Dad’s about to stage a walkout with Vegan Megan from the antiques shop. I went in there yesterday and she was giving him … head …’ a clap of thunder overhead blotted out all noise ‘… in full public view.’
Legs stepped hurriedly into the bathroom and pulled the door closed, whispering: ‘Did you say “head”?’
‘That’s right. Indian.’
‘Indian head? Is that a Kama Sutra thing?’
‘Massage, Legs. Indian head massage,’ she hissed it as though it was the Kew equivalent of soliciting on a street corner.