Chapter 27
THE next morning I went to visit Lorna and found her at the computer in her sitting room, which was bathed in sunlight. With her wrist still bandaged, she was picking out words on the keyboard at a painfully slow speed. I drew up a chair, but said nothing, aware that I would get none of her attention until she was done. Eventually she hit the “Send” button, gave a final, exasperated sigh, and turned to smile a greeting. Her red hair, always more glamorous than mine, gave her a golden halo where the sun touched her curls. The dressing on her forehead was white on white.
“Lorna,” I dived right in, aware that if I hesitated I was in danger of wimping out, “I want to talk to you about our father. I think you've seen him.”
Lorna's eyebrows flickered upward in surprise, and the smile fell from her lips, but she made no other response. My heart was pounding. To suggest that Lorna had defied, or even betrayed, our mother was to step into a minefield. The silence stretched between us like a wire, and I blathered on.
“I wouldn't blame you, you probably remember more than I or Tanya do about him. So if he got in contact and wanted to see you …”
“I never stopped seeing him,” Lorna said smoothly, “at least when he was around. We've tended to lose contact when he's been in prison.”
I stared at her, and she raised her eyebrows in a challenge. Since her illness began she has learnt to conserve energy even in conversation. She doesn't waste words.
“He's a con man and a thief,” she told me bluntly, “just like Ma's always said. He was a doctor. He did defraud his practice. He did go on the run. He's been doing similar things ever since. He can't help himself.”
My chest tightened, but I forced myself to keep on talking. I would digest this later. For the moment I must not let her stop, I must find out all I needed to know.
“You told him where to find us. Except that you gave him my old address. What's going on?”
Lorna pulled a face. She sighed, looking away from me, and for the first time there was a hint almost of apology.
“A couple of years back he decided to get in touch with you and Tanya, and I gave him your addresses almost without thinking about it. He's a very charming man. He's actually very much like you …” She broke off, then started again, “Then there was your pregnancy, Adam left, Tanya and Patrick were having a bad time financially, and it dawned on me that this was not the right time. Everyone had enough on their plates without Gilbert. Anyway, when I told him he wasn't to see you, we argued badly. He was hurt and angry that I thought you wouldn't want to see him. Then, a few weeks later, he was back on remand awaiting trial …” She looked up at me, and I shook my head slowly in disbelief, and perhaps in rebuke. “Well anyway, I got ill and he's been in prison all this time. I haven't spoken to him since our argument. I suppose he must have finished his sentence.”
“Okay,” I said softly. “Just one more thing and then I'll go. Could he be violent? I mean if Adam refused to tell him where to find me, or something?”
Lorna didn't seem shocked by my question. She wiped away a tear. She gave the question a moment's consideration.
“I don't think so,” she said. “When we argued, he just got hurt and petulant. He is excitable, but really … he's a mild man, not very physical, I can't …” She held the palms of her hands out toward me in supplication.
I nodded for all the world as though I understood.
My mother was waiting for me, her face flushed, playing hide-and-seek with Hannah and William, who were under the table.
“You were in there a good while,” she commented as I entered the kitchen. She put a cup of coffee on the table next to a flapjack on a plate. I sat down, marveling that my new knowledge did not somehow show on my face. Thirty-odd years of secrecy, and still the charade could go on, if I was willing to play the game. I reached for the coffee. My mother stood watching, then pushed a pile of newspapers nearer me.
“You should read what they have to say today,” she said, and I was intrigued to see that she was smiling, really smiling, for the first time in weeks. I pulled the newspapers toward me and turned to the inside pages—Adam's death no longer made the front. Still, tabloids and broadsheets alike all carried a similar story, some smaller, some larger.
In what appears to be a significant breakthrough, the police are for the first time investigating the possibility that a person other than Wills's former lover Robin Ballantyne drove her car when it ran Wills down.
Police sources say that the blood sample voluntarily supplied by Ballantyne has been tested against a bloodstain found inside her car and that there is no DNA match. It is possible, the sources say, that the bloodstain came from a cut caused by a loose strip of metal by the lever that regulates the position of the driving seat. Traces of the same unidentified blood have been found on that metal.
A police source cautioned that the discovery did not mean that another person had been driving the car on the night of the murder, only that another person had at some point been in the driving seat, but he acknowledged that this new evidence did introduce significant doubt into the case against Ballantyne.
I looked up, grinning, at my mother, only to find that she had filled a glass with something that looked suspiciously like champagne and was thrusting it toward me.
I shook my head.
“I'm not going to tempt fate,” I said.
My mother shrugged, smiling.
“Well, I'm quietly confident,” she said, and raised her glass to me.
I stretched my arms above my head. For the first time in weeks the air around me felt light and bright. I toasted my mother with my coffee. What pleased me most about the newspaper article was not simply the DNA evidence, but that the tone of the journalism seemed to have changed. Of course this was not the Chronicle.
“Look,” she said happily, pushing a tabloid toward me, “there's even a little article here saying Harold Wills was once convicted of drunk driving.”
I pulled a face and read through it. It was brief and of course completely irrelevant, but anything that made Adam's grieving parents look bad made me look better. It was an ugly contest. This must all, I thought, be Finney's work. If so, then he was not as spineless as I'd feared. I had hated writing him off.
I had a carefree lunch with my mother and then I tried to track down Father Joe Riberra. I called the church where Paula's funeral had taken place, where I was informed that Father Joe Riberra was not based there. They gave me the number of the office of the theological department of London University. Father Joe Riberra was, they told me, a visiting professor and he had been in the States for the past few days. They could not provide me with his number there, since he was on personal business. He was due back in a couple of days and he would return my call then if I left my number. Which I did. I e-mailed him too, because my faith in people returning calls is shaky.
I tried calling Suzette, but I couldn't reach her at home, or on her mobile, or at her office. Her assistant said that Suzette had gone on a trip, but that she couldn't say where, or when she would return. It was not clear to me whether this was incompetence or secrecy. Then I rang Rachel Colby and asked her the same thing I was going to ask Suzette: What was the last thing they filmed for the documentary before it all fell apart?
“I know where they were,” she said slowly, “I mean geographically I know where they were, but I couldn't tell you who they interviewed last or anything like that.”
“Geographically will do.”
“They were in Penzance. Filming at a drug rehabilitation center that's funded by us, at least in part. I needed to talk to them about something just the other day, but the guy there never called me back. Still, I'll give you his name. Maybe you'll have more luck.”
Shortly after that, and just as Hannah and William emerged from their nap, I had a phone call that seemed like a gift from the gods. Tanya had a friend, a trained nursery nurse, who had just lost her job through no fault of her own. Tanya had explained the situation to he
r and she would be willing to babysit for the children whenever I needed her on an ad hoc basis and at an hourly rate that seemed fair. The downside was that if something better came up, she'd take it and leave me high and dry. Still, I couldn't get any higher or drier, and I liked her already for being up-front about it.
“Are you sure she's trustworthy?” I asked Tanya for the umpteenth time. And she assured me for the umpteenth time that she was.
“She's not going to photograph my children and put our pictures in the newspaper?”
“I swear to you that she will not,” Tanya said. I couldn't ask for more.
I could hear Hannah upstairs, shouting to be picked up. That meant William was awake too. I couldn't face them. Every bone in my body ached with tiredness, the left side of my skull was brewing a major headache.
“Where is she?”
“Right now? She's sitting in my kitchen having a cup of coffee.”
“Okay, tell her she's got a job,” I said. She could take the children to the Common, I told myself, and I could telephone the drug rehabilitation center in Penzance.
“Tanya, don't hang up, I want to ask you something. Am I what you'd call excitable?”
The things Lorna had said about Gilbert were still circling in my head.
“Excitable? What the hell does that mean? If it means do you have a temper, then yes you do.”
“Okay, thanks.”
Tanya's friend, Carol, turned up. She was maternal and confident in a way Erica was not, and the children allowed themselves to be swept along by her warm efficiency. They were tidied up, nappies changed, dressed in cold weather clothes, all before they knew what was happening. They looked a mite surprised to be heading for the door, but they didn't complain, just looked up with curious eyes at this large woman who beamed down at them and marched them out to the strains of the “Grand Old Duke of York.”
“Now get some rest,” she hissed at me between verses, and saluted in farewell.
I went to bed still in my jeans. I slept, then woke as the doorbell sounded. I looked at the clock. They had been gone only twenty minutes. The children must have changed their minds about Carol. Or there had been some accident. I hurried downstairs, almost tripping in my haste to let them in, but it was Finney.
“Oh,” I said, incapable of welcome. It was raining again, pouring, great bombs of rain exploding against the ground. The street was empty. Where were the children?
He gave me a strange look.
“You were asleep.”
“It's not illegal,” I snapped. Finney always managed to wrong-foot me.
He ignored my bad temper and said he wanted to speak to me. I remembered the leaks to the papers. Finney was on my side.
“Of course.” I stood aside, shut the door, and waited for him to remove his raincoat. I caught sight of myself in the hall mirror. My face was pink and puffy with sleep, my eyes huge and tired. My hair was all over the place. Well, I couldn't do anything about it now. I took Finney's raincoat and hung it over the radiator. He watched me, and I could tell he was baffled, but really I did it out of sheer habit. Whenever the children and I came home wet through, we just stripped off our wet clothes and hung them on the radiator to dry, but I was too tired to explain. Instead I went through to the sitting room. Finney knew the way, he could follow me. I sat on the edge of the sofa, curled over, my elbows on my knees, hands supporting my forehead, my body craving the sleep it had just lost. I could still feel the heavy core of it inside me.
Finney came and stood in front of me.
“Are you ail right?” he said.
I twisted my head, looked up at him.
“I should thank you,” I said, “for making all that stuff public.”
He nodded. “My pleasure.”
“I thought you were too scared to break the rules,” I told him.
“It's just that I've done it once too often.” He sat down at my side, leaning forward just like me.
“Facts are facts,” I said, trying to marshal my head into some sort of action. “I still don't understand why you were concealing facts just because they pointed away from me. What difference does it make to the police?”
Finney rubbed his chin.
“Wills's death is very high profile,” he said slowly, “which means the police service is very aware of the public perception of how it is being conducted. In this case I have a superior who has conceived a particular school of thought that says if we reveal contradictory facts it looks as though we don't know which way to turn. The public then feels insecure and starts to bay for the blood of the officer in charge—of course he doesn't put it quite like that. The public wants to see us make progress, so that is what they should see. Of course, this man would say, we'll still follow up every clue, every lead, but if we're more than sixty percent sure we've got the right person in the frame, then let's at least let the public know where we're heading.”
“I'll sue his balls off,” I muttered.
“He hasn't got any,” Finney said, deadpan.
We turned to look at each other. I was half in tears, half laughing. Our faces were so close, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world when Finney leaned toward me and kissed me on the lips. He drew back almost at once to gauge my reaction. I smiled at him, and we kissed again as though we were devouring each other. I felt his fingers in my hair, then on my neck, my throat. We fell back against the cushions, finding each other's hands and weaving our fingers tight. My body flexed against his, heat rose from us like steam, and I thought, inasmuch as I could think at all, that never had a kiss been so much like sex.
The first time his mobile rang we both ignored it until whoever was on the line gave up. The second time even the ring tone sounded more insistent. We drew apart. He rubbed his hand over his face and cleared his throat. He glared at his phone, but when it continued to ring he grunted into it, then grunted again, in response to something.
“I'll be there,” he said. He shoved the offending phone back into his trouser pocket, and we stared at each other. Then he got to his feet.
“We must do this again sometime,” he said, a strained attempt at levity.
I didn't grace it with a response. I watched as he shrugged his suit into crumpled respectability. Then I stood too, and followed him into the hall, where I took his steaming raincoat from the radiator and handed it to him without a word. He put it on, then stepped toward me and we kissed again.
“I'll be back,” he said.
Chapter 28
I awoke the following day to a call from Father Joe Riberra. I'd grabbed the phone in my sleep and it took me a few seconds to work out who was on the line.
“Sorry to call so early,” he said when we had clarified who he was and that he was returning my call, “but I got back yesterday and my body clock is totally screwed. I think this is the opposite of how it's supposed to be. I must have slept too much on the plane.”
“That's okay,” I managed, pulling myself to sit upright in bed and rubbing my eyes. I looked at the clock and saw with a shock that it was eight already. Maybe if I sent the children out for a walk on the Common in a thunderstorm every day they would lie in until eight every morning.
“Plus it's urgent, right?” he said.
“It's urgent,” I agreed.
“Then I'll meet you for breakfast in, say, an hour from now?”
We settled on a café that we both knew, just off the King's Road. Carol wasn't due 'til nine, so I called her mobile to redirect her to Tanya's house. Then, feeling like a total heel, I took the children and my front-door key to Patrick, because Tanya was at work. Patrick, who had just dropped their three off at school and had been looking forward to a child-free morning, looked fed up.
“I'm so sorry.” My guilt provoked me to melodrama. “It's life and death.”
“It always is recently,” he grumbled.
In my rush I had forgotten to bring baby paraphernalia with me. No bottles, no nappies, nothing.
“They don't
drink anything, they won't pee,” he said grimly, and shooed me on my way.
Father Joe Riberra was turning heads. Out of his clerical garb he was cute in a scrubbed all-American way, and he smiled his thanks to waitstaff with huge benevolence every time they did so much as fill his water glass. He stood to shake hands with me, then wasting no time, began speaking as we sat down.
“I heard all about you from Adam,” he said.
“I'm thinking of starting a fan club,” I said.
He smiled, revealing even white teeth. For a moment our conversation was interrupted as we ordered breakfast, then he picked up where we had left off.
“Adam was the biggest fan of all,” he said.
“Adam was a fine man in many ways,” I said, “but let's not rewrite history.”
Riberra nodded, then sat with his hands clasped on his lap. His scrutiny of my face was excrutiating in its detail.
“You are investigating his death,” he said.
“And that of Paula Carmichael. I'm sure they're linked. You knew them both, and I believe that you counseled them both. Is there anything you can tell me?”
“You're afraid I'm going to tell you I can't pass on the secrets of the confessional,” he said, apparently amused.
I nodded, sipping my coffee.
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