by Deryn Lake
“How free I feel,” she said impetuously, and, standing up and pulling her hat from her head, Sarah laughed with sheer exhilaration as the horses sped along.
*
The sleeping park was alive with sounds, the rustle of insects, the call of nightbirds, the ever present traffic from the High Street, and over them all other unidentifiable noises, noises that were just a part of night in London, the vaguely menacing throb of a choking metropolis as darkness covered its many secrets.
Yet though Nigel heard it all, his mind was full of Sidonie and the pleasure that lay ahead when the ecstasy of entry was his. To keep himself high he drank vodka from a hip flask as he proceeded over the green expanse lying in front of the ruined house. It was used for cricket these days, football at the further end, and yet to him, in his drunken state, it seemed like a big lush meadow where he could ride for ever, until time ran out in fact, astride some great black horse that would take him on to the end of the world.
Then suddenly, over all the other sounds, he could hear the creature’s hooves and knew that it was coming to meet him, and was glad. He would arrive at Sidonie’s door on its back and sweep her up into the saddle and take her with him to a place where he need do nothing but make love from morning till night.
“Oh, God,” he murmured, full of violent desire.
The horse was very near now, he could hear its stamp and snort, smell the scent of its harness, its flesh.
“But there are no horses in Holland Park,” said Nigel’s censor.
“Balls,” answered the real Nigel, the powerful Nigel whom Sidonie loved and always would. But for all that he turned to look.
They were upon him, two stallions, jet dark and powerful, great plumes on their heads, and harnesses gleaming like silver moons. A woman drove them, a woman standing where there should have been a coachman, a woman whose black hair streamed out round her head like that of an avenging angel.
Nigel saw her gaze at him, eyes huge with terror; saw a man in a red coat leap to his feet; saw the great high wheels of a carriage. And then there was nothing except darkness and a profound and incredible silence.
*
She was driving like the wind, the two black stallions from Lady Albermarle’s stable racing down the elm drive almost symbolically, as if they epitomised Sarah’s fresh-found energy, her wish to start a new life, her urgent need to escape from all the trappings of the past.
“Go on, go on,” she called, the wind whipping her hair — and it was then that she saw something. A man was standing in the tree-lined avenue, the oval of his face turned towards her, his mouth open like a buffoon’s, his eyes wide and staring.
“Christ!” said Donny and leapt to his feet, snatching the reins from her hands and pulling back the horses with every ounce of his might. The terrified animals swerved to the right but not before the occupants of the carriage felt the sickening thud of impact and knew that the man in the drive had gone down beneath their wheels.
“Oh, God, oh, God,” shrieked Sarah, “what have I done? What have I done?” And she started to scream.
“Control yourself,” snapped Captain Napier, and he could have been addressing a field of raw soldiers. “That won’t do anyone any good. Get a grip.”
There was a grinding crunch as the horses reared to a panting halt, and then Donny jumped down from the box in a leap so swift that Sarah, despite the horror and panic, thought she had never seen anyone quite so agile. Then he was running, away from her and the carriage, back up the drive. With a mighty effort, her heart pounding in great thumps, her legs so weak she could scarcely move, Sarah began to clamber down.
She caught up with the Captain some minutes later, on his hands and knees, crawling amongst the trees, his face ashen with anxiety.
“There’s no sign of him,” he said, without looking up.
“Was he not lying where we hit him?”
“No, nor was there any indication he’d been there. No blood, nothing. He must have crawled into the undergrowth. Search, Sarah, quickly. The poor bastard needs help.”
She dropped to her knees with a will, ripping her dress as she searched through the trees to the east of the drive. But there was no glimpse of anyone and after an hour, during which it grew consistently darker and wetter, Sarah went to look for Donny. He was standing in the drive soaked to the skin, as was she, his hair escaping from its bow, hanging in strands.
“It’s a mystery,” he said, shaking his head, perplexed. “It’s just as if he’s vanished, as if he wasn’t there at all. Yet a man hit as hard as that couldn’t have got far.”
“I thought I’d killed him.”
“To be honest so did I.”
“What should we do?”
“Report the matter to the gate keeper. He can tell them in the big house. They may well want to organise a search tomorrow when it’s light.”
“We’d better stay in the area for a day or two.”
“Quite right,” said the military man. “Now come along, my darling. I can’t have you catching your death.”
She shivered. “Donny, did I kill someone today?”
Again he shook his head. “I simply don’t know. I could have sworn that there was a man directly in our path and yet it would have been impossible for him to disappear like that. Perhaps we both saw a phantom.”
“Perhaps,” Sarah said slowly, “he was an echo of another age.”
*
The danger was over, she knew it. Intangibly, indescribably, the atmosphere in the Garden Flat, the stinging, terrifying fear which had come like darts of electricity, had subsided. Even more, the apartment’s ambience had returned to what it used to be, harmonious and peaceful, before the night of Nigel’s shattering intrusion. Yet in place of Sidonie’s terror there had come an overwhelming sadness and for no explicable reason she had found herself compelled to go to the harpsichord and play the most solemn music she knew.
‘It’s a requiem,’ she thought, but could think of no logical reason why.
She must have fallen asleep after that, for the next thing she knew was that the front door bell was ringing, there was daylight flooding through the curtain cracks, and she was curled up on the sofa in front of the television. Blearily, wondering what on earth the time could be, Sidonie went up the music room stairs to answer the door. Two police constables stood there, one male, one female. She gazed at them stupidly, unable to get her thoughts together.
“Miss Sidonie Brooks?” asked the man.
“Yes.”
“May we come in a minute, please?”
“Yes. What time is it?”
“Eight o’clock. Sorry to disturb you so early but we have some rather distressing news.”
They stood in the hall looking young and Sidonie, catching sight of herself in a mirror, felt old enough to be their mother. She woke up a little. “Nothing’s happened to Dr O’Neill?”
“No, Madam. I believe you are acquainted with a Mr Nigel Beltram.”
“He’s my ex-husband. Why?”
“Well, he was found in Holland Park earlier this morning. There had been an accident.”
“What kind of accident? Is he dead?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Suddenly it was very necessary to sit down, not so much because of the shock but because she had known it, had sensed his going, had played for his passing out of life. The arm of the WPC was round her and Sidonie was sitting in the kitchen, her head between her knees, almost before she knew it.
“How did it happen?” she asked faintly.
Officialdom bristled. “The cause of death has not yet been established, Madam. There is to be a post mortem tomorrow.”
“But people don’t die just like that. Was he mugged?”
“We cannot say at this time. We will keep you informed. You have no plans to leave London?”
This last said very casually but the underlying meaning quite clear.
“No,” Sidonie answered with just a hint of bitterness. “I’ll be
around. If you don’t find me here I’ll be upstairs with Dr O’Neill. We live together,” she added defiantly.
The WPC put her face close to Sidonie’s. “Will you be all right now? Have you got a neighbour you could go to?”
“I have but she’ll be off to work. No, I’ll be fine.” A thought struck her. “You won’t want me to do the identification, will you?”
“No, Madam. We’re asking Mr Beltram’s brother to help with that.”
“Thank God.”
“Yes. Well, good morning.”
She saw them out then crawled upstairs and sat in Finnan’s living room, willing him to return home soon. Finally, tears came, beautiful releasing tears, washing away all bad thoughts about the man to whom she had once been married, leaving Sidonie with only an enormous sense of sadness that anyone who had once been young and unspoiled, who had come into the world fresh and ready for life, should have ended it all in a park, in the darkness, not very well loved, not even very well liked.
“Oh, Nigel,” she wept, “if it was my fault, forgive me please.”
But there was no answer from the silent room, the only sound the noise of the world outside going about its business.
*
“Quite extraordinary,” said the pathologist conducting the post mortem.
“What is?” asked the Detective Inspector assigned to investigate the mysterious death of Nigel Beltram MP.
“Those marks on his body. They look just like wheels.”
“Are you saying this man was run over?” the Inspector answered in surprise.
“Not exactly. The cause of death is pretty apparent. He had a massive coronary brought on by drink and drugs abuse. I’ll get the contents of the stomach analysed but it looks to me as if he’d consumed enough vodka to drown a Russian and he’d obviously been sniffing cocaine. See the state of his nostrils?”
“Then what are the bruises?”
“I’ve no idea. They’re not tyre marks, either car, bicycle or anything else. Yet they certainly do appear to be wheels of some kind.”
The detective, who hated post mortems, steeled himself and leant over the body.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like them. What can have done it?”
“Pass.”
“But you can assure me they are not related to the cause of death?”
“Absolutely. Quite bluntly, the silly bugger killed himself with his own cocktail. The human frame isn’t built to withstand that kind of punishment.”
“Try telling that to the kids on the street.”
“They’ll never learn.”
The detective scratched his chin. “Those marks are worrying me.”
“Well, good luck with them. I honestly haven’t got a clue.”
“I don’t suppose I ever will have either.”
“No, I shouldn’t think so. Fancy a drink?”
“Yes, good idea.”
“Fine, I’ll just get cleaned up here. See you in the George.”
“Right.”
But as the Inspector made his way to the pub, the enigmatic marks on the body of the dead man were still in his mind’s eye. The knowledge that, because they were not a cause of death it was not strictly necessary for him to find out what they were, did not comfort him at all. For the fact was that his workload and general lack of manpower would never allow him the time to make any further investigation into what was obviously yet another drug-induced death.
Chapter Thirty-Five
For the sake of her sanity, for the sake of the rest of her life, the children she might yet bring into the world, Sarah Lennox had tried desperately to put aside the idea that she might have killed a man, albeit accidentally. For though a thorough search of the grounds, extending to the very borders of the park and farmlands, had revealed nothing, the sight of that buffoon’s face turned towards her in sheer and apparent disbelief, still would not go away.
“It was an hallucination,” Donny had said firmly. “We imagined it, both of us.”
“But the impact — how could that have been caused by something that was not there at all?”
He looked puzzled. “That is the one point I cannot quite get over. But then there’s the gamekeeper’s theory that it was a poacher, that we must have sent him flying and that he scrambled to his feet and ran away in fright.”
“Which do you think is right?”
“The poacher.”
“Truly?”
“Truly, my darling. Now put the whole incident out of your mind. If you had killed a man we would have found his body.”
“I suppose so,” Sarah had answered.
But still the memory haunted her until one day, out of the blue, came the idea that the creature, if he were not of flesh and blood, must somehow be connected with her ghost and that Sarah’s original thought that he had merely been an echo was the true explanation. If that were the case then she had done nothing wrong, merely witnessed another strange event amongst all the many others she had experienced in her life.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she had called out to Donny, busy in another room packing his things in preparation for the wedding and the subsequent removal to London.
“No, of course not.” He had appeared in the doorway. “Why, do you?”
“You said when we ran over the man that he might have been a phantom.”
“I meant a phantom of the brain.”
“What is a ghost then?”
“They do not exist.”
“Oh boo,” she said, as he had turned and gone back to his task. “A ghost is a phantom of the heart.”
“What?”
“I said a phantom of the heart, you unfeeling man. And of all the people in the world, believe me, I should know.”
*
For the sake of her sanity, for the sake of the rest of her life, the children she might yet bring into the world, Sidonie Brooks had been forced to put behind her the idea that she might in some way have contributed to Nigel’s death. On Finnan’s advice, fraught and upset as she was, she had gone for counselling and had indeed felt a great deal better for it. Having been assured that only an inadequate personality would have reacted not only to life but to a wife as her ex-husband had done, that if she had not married him it would have been someone else with whom he would have gone on in precisely the same way, Sidonie began to see things clearly again.
“He was obsessional and that kind of person frequently turns to drink, to drugs, to relieve their tensions. They cannot grasp situations, always seeing them through the wrong end of a telescope.”
“Poor creatures.”
“They inflict their own wounds, Sidonie. Nobody else does it to them.”
“But aren’t we all a bit like that? Aren’t we all guilty to a certain extent of being our own worst enemy?”
“In varying degrees, yes.”
She had gone for a walk after that particular therapy session, and her feet had taken her, without her even noticing, to Holland House. Sidonie had stood in silence looking at the mighty fabric that had withstood so many centuries and thought of all the people who had lived there and how they, too, had been prey to obsessions and fears, to folly and to wisdom, to the million and one pitfalls into which mankind falls daily.
‘Nothing changes, nothing ever will,’ she thought. ‘The most we can possibly hope for is to do our best.’
Had another woman stood on this same spot and thought those thoughts? Had her own beloved ghost philosophised just as she was doing now?
“Oh Sarah, Sarah,” whispered Sidonie, “thank you for everything. For introducing me to the Earl of Kelly, for letting me hear how my music really should be played. But most of all, thank you for letting me see you. It has been very special to me.”
*
And Sarah, in the midst of her wedding ceremony, thinking she heard a voice, glanced round at the congregation hoping against hope that she might get a glimpse of red hair. But she saw only old Lady Albermarle nodding contentedly, her sisters Emily and
Louisa weeping a little, the two young Louisas clutching their rose petals and rice ready to throw with a will.
But Donny was putting a ring on her finger and she turned to look up at him, smiling, happy beyond words.
“Lady Sarah Napier,” he murmured, “my phantom of the heart.”
And with that they turned and walked down the ancient aisle of Goodwood Parish Church and out into the August sunshine, the cheers and shouts of their delighted family ringing in their ears.
*
To escape the cruel glare of the publicity surrounding such harrowing events, they had gone to Ireland at the time of the inquest and subsequent funeral, though Sidonie had sent flowers signed with her initials. Then she had done what she should have done long since and let go of the past, helped back into the present by the warmth and hospitality of the delightful O’Neill family. And, as if this were a signal to fate, when she and Finnan had returned to their respective homes it had been to find that everything had changed, that an entirely new path was opening up before them.
Cressida Cartwright, having transformed Rod into an adoring husband, had been as good as her word and made an offer for the Garden Flat which Sidonie was going to find hard to refuse. A letter from one of the barrister’s many solicitor friends was lying on the mat as she walked through the front door. Having read it, Sidonie, somewhat bemused, took it upstairs to show Finnan.
“It’s a fabulous offer.”
“You’ll never see the like again. Let’s open some champagne.”
“I thought you were saving it for the wedding.”
“Plenty more where that came from,” he answered. “Listen, I’ve decided to put my flat on the market too. So, where shall we go to, my pretty Sidonie?”
“Chelsea, Chiswick, anywhere convenient, as long as it’s with you.”
Finnan refilled her glass. “Prepare for a shock. When I was home something happened to me. I had a severe case of roots. Would living in Ireland suit a classical musician?”
“Perfectly.”
“Then I’ll start job hunting. If I’m going to change my entire life I might as well go the whole hog.”