Death of an Innocent (Richard and Amelia Patton)

by Roger Ormerod

  He looked round, staring at me in appeal. He meant it as a question, and addressed it to a fellow male, as most likely to understand what he meant.

  I obliged. ‘You’d brought it on yourself, lad. You’d made yourself indispensable to her. I reckon you like that part of it —well, this was the pay-off. And I suppose you agreed?’ I knew he had.

  It was at this point that he showed reluctance. Up until now it had flowed freely. What he had had to relate had reflected on him kindly, on the whole. He had done what he could for Nancy. There had been no self-justification to put over. In fact, he had spoken with an underlying pride. Now he didn’t want to go on. I had mentioned having spoken to Philip, and it was possible that no pride in his performance in that house was possible for Mark. Here, he would have to work harder to maintain our sympathy.

  ‘I didn’t have much chance but to agree,’ he said moodily. ‘Of course I had to do it. I wasn’t going to sit there all day arguing. So I walked up to the house and a man answered the door. Yes, it was Philip. I thought he was insane at first. He seemed to think I was up to something...something nasty. Tried to throw me out, he did. I wasn’t having that, I can tell you. How was I to know she was a famous author? He didn’t say. He just assumed I’d dug up some damned murky secret or other, and was on the make. Anyway, I reckon we made a bit of noise. She’d been in the place where she does her work, and she came out. “How can I do a stroke with all this noise, Philip?” And: “Who is this, anyway?” And that was where it all went wrong.’

  Mentally, I had to agree with him. Everything went along with what I’d heard of Nancy — by way of Larry — and from Philip. Until Olivia came through that door. Mark wasn’t proceeding with his narrative, was standing there, having levered himself away from the table, with his face shadowed deeply by concern and uncertainty.

  ‘And she went into hysteria?’ I asked.

  He hesitated a long while. But he had to assume, from what I’d just said, that I already knew it, and this was his chance to present his own point of view, unsullied by other tongues.

  ‘You could call it hysteria, I suppose,’ he agreed ruefully.

  ‘She went into something, but I ain’t so good at words. I can remember it in detail, though. I’ll never forget it. Every blasted detail.’

  I glanced at Amelia. She had felt it too. There had been a change in his voice.

  ‘Every detail,’ I prompted.

  ‘The way the light was slanting into that hall, the sun across her feet, and how it kind of walked up to her face as she came towards me. And what she said. Every word. First of all: ‘But it can’t be...’ Just that. Kind of sucking her breath in. Then she got a bit closer. The sun was cutting her off at the waist, I remember. Then: ‘Oh my God, no...it is! Say it is!’ It was all nonsense to me, but she was closing in on me fast and I couldn’t do anything but stand there like a fool, and she just flung her arms round me and kissed me, and then held me away with her hands on my shoulders, and her face was all kind of crinkled up and swollen at the same time, and even through the tears I could recognize Nancy in her eyes and her mouth, and she said: ‘Oh, my dear son, you’re the image of your father.’ And that...that’s what happened,’ he finished weakly. His story, having flowed like a racing stream, had spent itself in calm and murky shallows.

  Amelia took in a great gulp of air, as though she’d been holding her breath. The sound she made was close to a sob. Still trying to absorb it and its implications, I was at a loss as to what to say. Yet Mark could not have invented this, and there was a certain validity to Olivia’s reaction, as described. As a professional writer, she would have had to keep in touch with any legal change that might offer her a new twist in her fiction. As such a situation would. So, perhaps subconsciously, she could have been prepared for some such approach. Prepared or not, the outpourings of suppressed emotion would have been more than the stolid Mark could handle. It had undermined him. In the telling, he seemed to have become bashful and uneasy.

  ‘It would,’ I suggested, ‘have been very difficult to come out with the truth.’ I offered this to encourage him.

  ‘I couldn’t come out with anything,’ he admitted miserably. ‘But surely you tried. That was the time —’

  ‘What the hell d’you think I am!’ he burst out. ‘Ain’t you got any imagination! How’d you like to stare into that face, and say: “It’s not true, I’m not your son.” Could you do it?’

  ‘All the same —’

  ‘Richard!’ Amelia cut in. ‘Be sensible. There was the other thing. Isn’t that so, Mark?’

  He turned to her, giving her a brief flick of a smile. I looked round from one face to the other, struggling to understand. ‘The other...’

  Mark stabbed at my shoulder with his hard finger. ‘Don’t you see!’ he shouted, his voice nearly breaking. ‘In that second she told me my father was also Nancy’s father.’

  ‘Of course. I understood that. But you need only have said —’

  ‘Said! Said!’ he cried, waving his arms. ‘I’d walked in there, just to get things off to some sort of a start, lay things on, then get out quick. And that was thrown at me. I was dumb, you stupid clown. Numb. My mind was whirling away...it was as though everything had gone flying off in all directions. It’d chopped the legs right from under me.’

  I couldn’t deny his sincerity. It shone from him, from every line of his earnest and strained expression. But surely he was indulging himself in too violent a stream of emotion to fit the circumstances involved. I turned to Amelia for guidance.

  She was shaking her head at me in sorrow for my stupidity.

  ‘Richard, you dear man, it’s so obvious. Mark as good as said it. The fact is that Olivia had projected herself straight into the middle of just the sort of emotional conflict that she uses in her books. It’d be amusing if it wasn’t so tragic. She spends her working life coldly and practically, creating and exploiting these set-ups, and when one of them enters her own life it completely breaks her up. And poor Mark! She could hardly have understood — any more than you do — what it meant to Mark.’

  I stared at poor Mark, and he read me accurately.

  ‘Don’t you see! You’re too bloody stupid for words. We grew up together. Me an’ Nancy. Close. And we both knew she was adopted. I told you how close we were, damn it. And it wasn’t simply brother and sister. Of course not, ‘cause she wasn’t my sister. But I heard the other kids at school, talking about their sisters. Nobody could be uglier and less wanted than a chap’s sister, and anybody who fancied them must be mad. I didn’t understand that. But Nancy was adopted, and that made the difference. It was all right if it wasn’t a blood relationship. You know. And I wanted her. Oh, make no mistake, nothing was ever said. I thought it was kind of accepted. We’d getting married. That was what I thought — assumed. No word or gesture. I liked it like that. An understanding. Because she was adopted. And then, this woman...this Olivia Dean, she was telling me that Nancy was my own father’s girl! It meant we were blood relations — and everything was snatched away from me. That was what hit me between the eyes. That was what I was struggling to take in and understand, when you say I ought’ve spoken out. Spoken! When I was near choking, and she thought it was because it was the same feeling as hers, and crying and weeping and saying where have you been hiding yourself and telling me that oh we’d got so much to catch up with. What the bloody hell d’you think I am?’

  What I thought was that he was a frightened and disturbed young man, who had seen the chance to reveal his actions in all their long-suffering glory. He was sincere in that he genuinely felt this, that he’d martyred himself to Olivia’s sentimental obsessions. We were the outlet for the self-justification he’d been feeding himself for...how long? For well over a year. As I was wondering how to go on, because this wasn’t an end to what he had to tell by a long way, Amelia again rescued me.

  ‘But Mark,’ she said gently, sorrow for him hampering her voice, ‘you were wrong in any event.’ And b
ecause he did no more than stare at her, she continued, ‘You couldn’t have married your adopted sister, anyway. I know it’s not in the religious list, but it’s a social thing. It is not allowed.’

  ‘Don’t I know it!’ he flung at her. ‘Don’t I know it now! I found out. I went and saw a solicitor, and he looked it up. Showed me in a legal book. But I didn’t know then.’ His voice eased from its pitch of intensity. ‘Probably Nancy always knew it. Maybe she never gave it a thought, and never thought much of me, in any event. I was just a brother to her.’

  He stared at us defiantly. He’d risked a criticism of Nancy.

  ‘But you allowed it to go on,’ I pointed out. ‘And you lied to Nancy.’

  He answered as to a mentally retarded child, using heavy precision.

  ‘At that time I hadn’t found out. I assumed she thought we could marry. I thought it’d be as big a shock to her as it’d been to me. I had to have time to think, damn it.’

  His motivations were clear, but in no way satisfactory. He had continued to deceive Nancy. Didn’t he realize what he’d done to her?

  ‘You were at the house for an hour,’ I reminded him.

  He sagged. The critical point had been passed. ‘Yeah. Couldn’t get away. You can imagine. All my life to go through, and how we were going to catch up with what we’d missed. I was caught, making promises that were all tying me up in knots.’

  ‘What sort of promises?’

  He stared at me as though I was a stranger. So far, it had burst from him like seeds from a dried husk, but his internal drive had now cooled. He spoke with renewed, but forced, anger.

  ‘What’s it to you? I ain’t sayin’ another word.’

  ‘It’s all the same to me, Mark. I can work it all out from here.’

  ‘Work what out?’

  ‘How you tricked Nancy —’

  ‘Tricked nothing! I hadn’t got any choice.’

  ‘It seems to me you had. But of course...’ I gestured dismissal, and half turned away, ‘if that’s the way you want to leave it.’

  ‘If you only knew.’

  ‘I would if you told me.’

  He wiped his hand over his craggy face, smoothing out the exasperation. ‘There isn’t much more. She was all over me, Olivia was. When could she see me again, and all that. Oh - such wonderful plans. There was even — and I could see it coming — even the idea that I’d go and live there.’

  ‘That which was lost and is found,’ I said softly.

  ‘What? Oh yeah. That sort of thing,’ he agreed.

  ‘And Philip?’ I asked. ‘What was he doing while all this was going on?’

  ‘Oh...him. Sitting there. We were in their lounge by that time. He was just sitting, like a ghost at a wedding, saying nothing. Not a damn word. And...well, the way it ended was that I had to promise to meet her again, away from there because Philip was giving me the gripes, and I had just two minutes to think what to say to Nancy, on the walk back to the pick-up.’

  ‘So you stalled? Anything so that you wouldn’t have to tell Nancy the truth.’

  ‘What else could I do? I told her Olivia had had hysterics, which was as near true as dammit, and didn’t want to see her, which was true, and I thought that’d give me time to sort something out later.’

  ‘But you never managed to?’

  ‘I tried. You don’t know how I tried! My mind got tangled up with all the ways I could do it. Dad thought I’d gone funny. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, and made a right balls-up of everything I touched. And Nancy went quiet about it. Didn’t say another word. I thought that let me off the hook a bit, and there was only the other end of it to worry about.’

  ‘The other end being Olivia?’

  ‘That got worse. She was...well, she kind of took over. I had the idea, when I met her — it was in Great Yarmouth that first time — I thought then that she’d have got over it, somehow. You know, might’ve looked at it all calm-like, and I’d be able to tell her the truth. Lord...how wrong I was! It was worse. I was her little boy. Yes. Little boy. You can laugh if you like. She wanted to gobble me up, like one of those sticky cakes we were eating. Looking at her, leaning forward over that café table, I remember thinking: how was I going to get her home if I told her the truth. She’d fall apart. It’s a fact. She was all sentiment, and couldn’t stop touching me. Enough to make you sick.’

  ‘You were certainly in a fix,’ I agreed.

  ‘And it went on and on from there...’ He was wearied of it, of the remembrance and the telling. His mouth sagged.

  ‘When was all this? I mean, fifteen, sixteen months ago?’

  ‘Sure to be. I remember we met — every damn week and maybe more often — met all through the summer. The summer before the one we’ve just had.’

  I nodded. It would have to have been. ‘And Nancy? Nothing more about it from her?’

  ‘She’d decided to go to college. Somewhere different, she said.’

  ‘Birmingham is different.’

  ‘It took a bit of a load off me.’

  ‘Her going?’

  ‘She started in the September. More’n a year ago. Then it got worse for me. I mean...’ He waved his hand around to encompass the tatty office. ‘All this. Nancy’d done it all, and I had to take over. It’s been bloody hell. I’m no clerk.’

  ‘I can see that.’ I waited, but he seemed to think he’d finished. ‘And the other business — Olivia — that progressed?’

  He was sullen. I’d made it sound as though any progression might have had his assistance.

  ‘I think you’d better leave,’ he told me, no force in it.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk any more about Olivia.’

  I glanced at Amelia for guidance. She took it up, seeming to understand him better than I did. ‘But Mark, Olivia is my friend. All three of us, four counting Philip — your father, Olivia, me — we were friends. How can I meet her and talk to her, if I don’t know what to say? What not to say, really. You must help me in this.’

  ‘I haven’t seen her for ages. Since...well, since Nancy died.’

  ‘You make it sound as though it was a great relief,’ Amelia said, smiling him on.

  ‘Yeah. Well, it was. Sort of. Though I was getting used to the idea by that time.’

  ‘What idea?’ I asked, feeling he was about to dry up.

  ‘You’ve only got to use your head. Nancy’d gone quiet, as I said, but she didn’t drop it altogether. Not Nancy. So I was all poised, waiting for the top to blow off. Every time I met Olivia, I didn’t know what to expect. But it was always more of the same, only getting worse.’

  ‘Don’t you mean better?’

  He moved closer to me. I could see the sweat on his upper lip, and his brows were drawn together. ‘I mean worse. For me. I was her little boy — didn’t I tell you that! There was nothing she wouldn’t do. Presents all the time, that I had to hide. And from wanting me to go and live there she switched to another tack. I nearly went mad, trying to stall that off.’

  ‘Something interesting?’

  ‘She’d heard from me all about the yard, and all about dad’s wild dreams of expanding. She offered to finance it. Now how the hell could I cover up a thing like that? She said she’d give me the money. I didn’t want the damned money. That really worried me. She seemed to think dad knew all about it — about us. I mean, where were we going to get it? She said she’d give me this money in bits, if that was how I wanted it. Wanted it! I didn’t bloody want it. She said I could fake the accounts, pretending it was profits.’

  I laughed easily, dismissing it as farcical. ‘Like an inverted fraud?’ But the laugh didn’t take my eyes from his face.

  ‘Like that. But how could I, when Nancy was doing the accounts at that time? This was her office. So I had to tell Olivia I’d got a sister, and that really got the hair prickling on my neck, but she didn’t react. I was weeks persuading her it wouldn’t work. She was almost in tears, because she couldn’t do mor
e for me. And gradually she was taking me over. Beginning to be a bit bossy. Momma’s little boy, for Chrissake! I don’t think she was right in the head.’

  He stared blindly at the picture of the motor cruiser.

  ‘But in the end,’ I told him, in a tone indicating I didn’t think he knew, ‘Nancy did contact her. By letter.’ I thought he hardly needed to know how Philip had intercepted the letter. ‘Did she tell you about that?’

  He didn’t turn to face me, and answered in a jumbled mutter. ‘Pardon. I didn’t hear that.’

  He raised his voice. ‘She phoned me. From her college. Yes, she said she’d done that. I knew it was all over, then.’

  ‘She phoned, and she said she’d got an appointment?’

  At last he turned. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did she say where and when?’

  ‘Not exactly. It was kind of a hint. She told me she might see me at Potter Heigham, on the Saturday.’

  ‘Which Saturday?’

  ‘The Wildlife collection Saturday. She knew I was doing that pitch, round the bridge area. And I guessed she’d fixed this appointment somewhere in the area.’ He stared from one to the other of us. ‘To see me,’ he explained impatiently. ‘When it was over.’

  But if she’d kept the appointment, would she still have wanted to meet Mark? ‘Of course,’ I agreed equably. ‘She’d see you around, collecting.’

  His face was crumpled, his eyes blurred. ‘It was the day she died.’

  ‘Was it? The police don’t seem so accurate.’

  ‘Well, it must’ve been.’ He was impatient. ‘It was the day she went there.’

  ‘Do you know for certain she went there on that Saturday? Did you see her?’

  He shook his head violently, his hair falling all over his face. ‘I don’t know anything. I didn’t see her. She wouldn’t tell me anything. She said I’d tried it once, and now it was her turn. I didn’t see her. I wanted to get to her first, if I could, to kind of prepare her. Oh Lord...I don’t know. Maybe I’d have told her the lot, if I’d had the chance. But she had to turn up.’