A Final Reckoning

by Susan Moody

  As for the Hon Clio, I’ve never seen anyone read so much as her, not even you. You can see sometimes that she’s absolutely lost on another planet, and it’s hard for her to shift her focus back into this one. If I need to ask her a question (which I try not to do as I hate interrupting her), she very politely puts her finger in the page she’s at and closes the book on it, but her eyes are still glazed for a second or two, while she readjusts back to the ordinary world. Poor woman: I feel sorry for her. She’s obviously not at ease with herself – or anyone else for that matter. Most of the time she’s perfectly nice, but sometimes I think she can hardly bear to have me in the same room as her, she kind of simmers with repressed rage! Actually, in my opinion, she’s severely paranoid. It’s a bit frightening, actually.

  There’s other staff as well as me, it’s like Upstairs, Downstairs or something: a gardener (Neil), under-gardener (Roy), odd-job-man (Phil), plus two bad-tempered cleaning-women who come in three times a week (Linda and Leslie – the ‘L’s from Hell!) plus a housekeeper, Jill, who occupies a bedsit in the basement. Not so much a housekeeper, I suppose, as a cook-general, I think it’s called. She and I handle most of the cooking between us, though Jill told me that when they have important dinner parties, a catering organization comes in and deals with it. She’s nice.

  Give Mom and Dad my love, as always. And to you too, Sweet Pea.

  Sabby.

  Oh, Sabine, I thought, my funny, lively sister, I have missed you for so long. What could have been in the killer’s mind? After all these years, it was still impossible to grasp. Did the families of victims always feel this way? Such questions were unanswerable now, and always would be. It had seemed incomprehensible to me then, and still seemed so now, that anyone could have been enraged enough to murder her own children, like some latter-day Medea. When it came out that the murderer had had previous psychiatric episodes, and had even been confined to a mental hospital two or three times, I had demanded bitterly of my father why it was OK for employers to require all kinds of references from prospective employees, but nobody expected employers to offer the same assurances.

  Now, up in my room, I drew back the curtains and gazed out at the night sky. The stars were so much brighter here than in London, the darkness more velvety. I could hear the whisper of wind in the poplars which lined the edge of the meadow below the house, and the sound of sheep tearing at the grass.

  Peaceful, idyllic.

  Below me, a door opened and light streamed out of the French windows on to the old stone flags of the terrace. A man stepped out and moved to the balustrade, looking into the black night beyond the wide terrace.

  Seconds later, he was joined by a woman, who said, ‘So, Fingal Adair, what are you doing with yourself these days?’ I recognized Maggie Fields’ voice.

  The man gave a start. ‘Sorry?’ he said coldly. ‘Have we met?’

  ‘Don’t be pompous, Fin. First of all, here’s a whisky for you. Caol Ila; your favourite, if I remember rightly. And, second of all, have the thirty-something years since our university days changed me that much?’ There was laughter in Maggie’s voice, and I drew further back into my room, wondering whether I should close the windows. No way did I want to eavesdrop on what might turn out to be a romantic reunion between two old university friends. On the other hand, I might learn something interesting.

  ‘Univer—’ He stopped. ‘It’s not … not Maggie, is it?’

  ‘It is indeed.’

  ‘Good God above! I thought I’d seen you before though I couldn’t for the life of me remember where.’ He stepped back, away from her.

  Again there was the gurgle of laughter in her voice as she said, ‘Relax, Fin. I’m not going to bite you. And take this whisky. Better still, drink it.’

  He sipped at it. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ he said.

  ‘I’m working here. I’m a freelance cataloguer, archivist, inventorist, call it what you like. Amazing, isn’t it? I never thought I’d be back in this house again.’

  ‘But how did you—’

  ‘I heard via a colleague that they were looking for someone, so I rang David Charteris and convinced him that I was the best person for the job.’ She tilted her glass to her mouth. ‘So what are you doing here, Fin?’

  He hesitated. Sipped again at his whisky. ‘I saw an advertisement for this weekend and I …’ Even in the dark, I could see how he stiffened up. ‘Thing is, Mags, I really felt I ought to come as a kind of farewell to the Clio I knew.’

  ‘And loved.’

  ‘That too.’ He sighed heavily. ‘I never properly grieved when she left me. Not that I ever understood why she did leave.’

  ‘I thought you two split up fairly amicably.’

  ‘She split up. I didn’t. You must have realized that.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  There was a pause, in which I distinctly heard him swallow. ‘When she ended it, I seriously thought I might die,’ he said, his voice low.

  ‘I don’t know what was going on in her head. She adored you.’

  ‘I thought so. Just as I adored her. But she showed up at my rooms one afternoon, middle of the summer term, and said it was over. Just like that. She said she was difficult—’

  ‘You already knew that.’

  ‘We all did.’ He gave a kind of choked laugh. ‘She said that nobody could be expected to live with her, that she would never inflict herself and her problems on anyone, it was better to end it now, right now. And then she was gone, like a … a blown snowflake. Oh God, I was so … so … I was totally devastated. I loved her, Mags.’

  ‘I know you did. That’s more or less what she did to me, her supposed best friend.’

  ‘I watched her out of my window as she walked away down the High Street. And that was that. I never saw her again. She left me a present, and when I opened it, I found an illustrated edition of The Snow Queen.’

  ‘And what did you make of that?’

  ‘I looked at the drawings of this tall figure in her sparkling robes of frost and ice, and her blonde-white hair, and I thought I knew what she was trying to say.’

  ‘The splinter of ice at the heart?’

  ‘Precisely. Except I didn’t believe it for a single minute. When we were … together, there were no splinters of ice, I can assure you. As for what … well, what happened later, it didn’t make the slightest difference to how I felt about her. Not that I could believe what she did, either. How about you?’

  Maggie hesitated. ‘Well … she could get pretty damned enraged sometimes. If those boys really tried to burn her manuscript, I can see how she just might have snapped. Almost see.’

  ‘What,’ Fingal said, ‘did you make of her marrying that art student after she left?’ Behind his voice, I could hear owls hooting out in the fields.

  ‘I was flabbergasted, to put it mildly. About the whole thing. Who was he? Where did he come from? Where did she meet him? Was it here, at the house, or somewhere else?’

  ‘So many questions to which we never got the answers,’ said Fingal.

  ‘Actually, her father was such a nasty piece of work that I’ve often wondered if he’d bribed the man to marry her, though I can’t imagine why he would want to.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have needed bribing.’

  ‘Did you ever meet him? This art student, I mean.’

  ‘No reason why I should have.’

  ‘He didn’t show up at her trial. With his two sons murdered in that grisly way, you’d think the very least he’d do would be to attend.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t know. I understood that he buggered off to Australia when the boys were still quite small.’

  ‘Just walked out on her? Poor Clio.’ Maggie took a deep sip of the whisky in her glass and sighed. ‘She was never a happy bunny, was she? I remember asking her once at Oxford if everything was OK. She was pretty aggressive, actually. Snappy. Said of course it was, why shouldn’t it be? So I said that lately she hadn’t seemed as happy as she usually was.’


  ‘What did she say to that?’

  ‘She gave this terrible smile, almost like a rictus, and said, and I quote: “Happy? I don’t think I know what that means.” So I asked if it was something to do with Fin … with you, and she said, no, it wasn’t – and anyway, that was over.’

  Fin heaved a gusty breath. ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Which was complete news to me, as you can imagine. Over?’ I said. ‘But the two of you always seem so – so completely together. So she gives that ghastly smile again and starts mumbling on about the ethical aspect … you were a tutor, and she was a student. You could get into terrible trouble if the authorities found out.’

  ‘Rubbish!’

  ‘That’s exactly what I said. Rubbish and bollocks.’

  ‘Bollocks describes it precisely,’ said Fin.

  ‘So then she said that, anyway, she didn’t love you any more.And then she walked off, leaving me with my mouth hanging open.’ Another strong slug of the whisky and Maggie added, ‘It was absolutely obvious that she was lying.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Adair said. He covered his eyes with his hand. ‘What in God’s name could have caused her to behave like that?’

  ‘Oh, Fin …’ Maggie put her arms around him. Her voice shook. ‘It was the last time I saw her, too. When I got up the next morning, she’d gone. And then nothing … until this dreadful, dreadful thing with her boys.’

  ‘I’ve gone over and over it in my head, and I still find it impossible to see her wielding a knife. Her own children … killing them …’ Fingal choked on the words.

  ‘So,’ Maggie said, after a pause. ‘Moving on, as one must, what’s your life like these days?’

  I had eavesdropped enough. They hadn’t even mentioned Sabine, but I could understand that. The thing which struck me about their conversation was that clearly, like Gavin Vaughn and myself, they were still carrying the burden of that terrible evening.

  Later, I lay in bed with the lights out. I had left the curtains open and the room was filled with glimmering light. A small night-breeze rustled the leaves of the poplars, and somewhere a mournful bird sang. There were tears in my eyes. I had hoped that by coming here I would find some kind of release, but so far the fact of walking in my sister’s steps was bearing down on me even more heavily than before, rather than setting me free. The initial searing pain of Sabine’s death had long since subsided, but I was conscious now of something new, less immediate, perhaps, yet at the same time more intense. I wanted confrontation with the person responsible, wanted to hurt as I myself had been hurt. But that would never happen, and even if it did, I was not the kind to resort to such primitive action. Much more important was my need to be released from the hatred which blackened the edges of my soul, and had done so for two and a half decades.

  But perhaps the killer already suffered every torture imaginable. I’d like to think so. After all, insane or not, what must it be like to wake each morning knowing that you had hacked your own children to death?

  Tomorrow I would speak to Malcolm Macdonald, explain who I was. The same with Gavin Vaughn. Their faces flitted through my head.

  And suddenly I sat up. I remembered now who Brian Stonor was! He’d been one of the policemen in charge of the case. I frowned into the darkness. It was becoming clear to me that if I could build up for myself a picture of Sabine’s killer, a kind of truth might emerge. And if so, then perhaps I could put her death behind me. Not forget it.

  Never that. But at least accept it.

  I got up early the next morning and made myself a cup of tea which I took back to bed with me, along with another of Sabine’s letters.

  Hi, Chantal:

  Just got time to write you a further instalment. Jill – the housekeeper – was driving in to do some shopping, so I took the opportunity to go into the local town this morning. The boys arrive the day after tomorrow so I shan’t have much time after that. It was market day, so I mooched around, dropped into the local museum to gaze upon some shards of Roman pottery, a couple of trilobites and what might or might not be a fragment of the True Cross, given to a Saxon King, possibly by St Augustine himself. Or so the leaflet said. Who is ever going to know if it’s true, or just a splinter chipped off the nearest tree?

  I was walking past the pens full of sheep and cows, and the farmers’ wives selling home-made jams and cakes, when a man accosted me. He said he was called Trevor Barnard and stated in a way that brooked no argument that I was the new Help up at the Lodge. ‘General factotum, if you please,’ I said, ‘not at all the same thing.’ Straight out of Cold Comfort Farm, he was: all tweeds and checked shirts, and, if I’m not just dreaming this up, a moleskin waistcoat. I mean really – actually made out of dead moles! Can you imagine? Not to mention a penetrating blue gaze and outdoor tan. And extremely handsome with it, I may say. If it wasn’t for Malc …

  ‘Let me buy you a cuppa,’ he said, and because I thought he might be an interesting source of information about the Redmayne/Palliser family, I accepted his offer. You can’t believe how much I learned. First of all, the Hall is from Clio’s side of the family, not Harry’s, which I hadn’t realized from the possessive way Harry showed me round when I first came.

  Secondly, Clio’s family seem like a bunch of weirdos from way, way back. There are more eccentric aunts and mad uncles in her family tree than you can shake a stick at, not to mention daughters running away and never being heard of again, sons cut off without a shilling, sisters getting pregnant by the gamekeeper or the groom, heirs gambling away the family fortune, heirs being banished to Brazil, mental problems, even murders.

  And thirdly, Harry is not the boys’ father, which I hadn’t realized. Apparently Clio was married when she was still very young, a shotgun wedding, according to Trevor, to some art student doing some work for her father. And then he disappeared (no details offered or asked for), leaving her with two young boys to bring up and the Lodge to maintain. Trevor said she was struck dumb, literally; didn’t utter a word for three years! and easy prey for the lusty Harry (which is exactly how he put it), though it was apparently the house he lusted after, rather than Clio. Sounds rather sad, doesn’t it?

  The Lodge passed to her in trust for her sons because the next in line, her two older brothers, both died quite a few years ago. First Clio and the younger brother went skiing in Switzerland, and he fell off a mountain. Went off-piste, or something. Then the elder one – in London, this is – went out for the evening, came back, and disturbed an intruder who bashed him on the head and killed him before making made good his escape, along with some family silver and some paintings worth a fortune which have never been heard of since. And they never got anyone for it. So eventually everything passed to Clio and the boys.

  Intriguing, isn’t it? Like living in one of those crime novels you’re so keen on!

  Much love from your Big Sis

  I cried for a while before I finally got up. I missed her so badly. I always would.

  By the time I got downstairs for breakfast, the dining room was already half-full. Over by the window, Brian Stonor sat alone, and I made my way over to him.

  ‘May I join you?’ I asked.

  He looked at me, face astonished, then shook his head, as though to clear it. He half-rose: an old-fashioned gesture, and oddly pleasing. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I was miles away. Yes, do please sit here.’

  A waitress took my order for a big pot of tea and showed me a menu. Despite having eaten well the night before, I ordered the full English breakfast without the slightest guilt. There was always the gym, and later in the morning I would be walking over to see Desmond Forshawe.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘You seemed surprised to see me.’

  ‘Not surprised, so much as … startled.’

  ‘Startled?’

  ‘You look so like … like someone I … er … met years ago.’

  I knew he must be talking about Sabine. Our likeness had often been remarked upon. I put down my knife and fork, drank some orang
e juice. Nodded. ‘I think you mean my sister,’ I said quietly.

  It was his turn to nod. ‘It crossed my mind,’ he said. ‘Last night … especially seeing you with Gavin Vaugn.’

  ‘You sound as if you saw her … when she was alive.’

  ‘I did. Just the once. Lovely red hair, she had. She was with the three kids one market day when I was visiting my father. I already knew the Palliser boys because, as I said last night, my mother used to work here occasionally and I’d seen them around.’ He looked around for the waitress and ordered more coffee. ‘Is that why you’re here? Because of your sister?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was wholemeal toast and what looked like home-made marmalade. I buttered a slice. ‘I’m not exaggerating when I say my sister’s murder killed my mother. As you can probably imagine, the whole family was damaged. Still is, really.’

  He nodded sympathetically. ‘I can understand that.’

  Looking at him, I thought he probably could. ‘Thing is,’ I said, ‘if I hadn’t seen the ad for this weekend, it would never have occurred to me to come back here. Not for a moment. But I turned the page in some magazine at my work, and there it was. I told myself it was meant.’

  ‘What, are you looking for “closure”, as they say these days?’

  ‘Not entirely. I just …’ Through the window to my left I could see the stone terrace which ran along the back of the house, daffodils bright as lemons, interspersed with urns planted with miniature narcissi, grape hyacinths, tiny crimson tulips. ‘I wanted to see where she spent her last days, I suppose.’ Tears came into my eyes. ‘I miss her so much, you see. It would be like having a bit extra, a bit more of her than we’ve so far been allowed.’