A Final Reckoning

by Susan Moody

  Stonor put his hand over mine but didn’t speak.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Why do you call them the Palliser boys? I seem to remember reading somewhere that their mother had married an art student called – um – Jarvis, I believe it was, who was their father.’

  ‘That’s right, she did. But he left for parts unknown while the youngest child was still in nappies, never to be seen or heard of again. And since she was a Palliser, and the Palliser family had owned the house for generations, I suppose we all just went on referring to them as Pallisers.’

  He waved across the room at Gavin Vaughn, who had just come in, beckoning him over. He began shifting butter dishes and sugar bowls around to make room. ‘You know who he is, don’t you?’

  ‘I recognized his name when he introduced himself.’

  ‘You talked about being haunted,’ he said in a low voice. ‘There’s a man battling demons, if ever I’ve seen one.’

  ‘Don’t tell him who I am,’ I said urgently. ‘I’ll do it myself later.’

  Then Gavin was beside us, pulling out a chair, asking for coffee and going through the business of ordering his breakfast, while Stonor and I watched him in silence. There were shadows under his eyes, and his hair seemed dulled this morning. He looked like a man who had slept badly. Not surprising. I couldn’t help wondering what could possibly have brought him back to this place where he’d experienced so much horror.

  He took a piece of toast, then reached for the butter, over which his hand hovered for several seconds. He seemed slightly disorientated.

  I leaned forward, smiling. I said, ‘“Marmalade is tasty if it’s very thickly spread.”’

  His reaction surprised me. He stared at me, the blood draining from his face. ‘What did you say?’ he managed, after a moment. His expression was a mixture of shock and belligerence.

  I held up both hands as though to ward him off. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘No offence. It’s from A.A. Milne. When We Were Very Young.’

  ‘I know where it’s from.’ He drained his cup of coffee and refilled it from the pot provided, his hand shaking slightly. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered shamefacedly to the tablecloth, after a moment. ‘I’m a bit on edge.’

  Over his bent head, Stonor and I looked at each other. He raised significant eyebrows. ‘All right, son?’ he said.

  ‘Fine, thanks.’

  I wondered just how much of an emotional toll it was taking on him, being back here. After all, he’d been right there when the Honourable Clio went berserk. How could you ever forget something like that? I’d not been able to, and I hadn’t even been present.

  Stonor pushed away from the table and stood up. ‘I’m booked for a sauna and then a massage,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you to it. By the way, I’m off home after supper tonight.’ Keeping his eyes on me, he reached into his breast pocket and brought out a wallet. ‘In case I don’t catch up with you again, you might like to have my card.’

  ‘Might I?’ I tried to hide my surprise. Why should he think I’d want his card?

  ‘You, too.’ Stonor handed out another one to Gavin. ‘I’ll be happy to talk to either of you – or both, of course – any time you feel the need.’

  ‘You sound as though you think I will feel the need,’ I said.

  ‘You know what, Mrs Frazer?’ He bent closer. ‘I’m absolutely certain of it.’

  Gavin and I stared after him. ‘Enigmatic or what?’ Gavin said.

  ‘Both, I think,’ I said.

  When Stonor had left the dining room, I said quietly, ‘Gavin, I know who you are, your connection with this place. I know quite a lot about what happened back then, the murders and everything. That the Honourable Clio was your guardian, while your parents were abroad. That the Palliser boys were like your brothers.’

  He didn’t seem surprised. ‘How did you know that?’ His fingers nervously worried a teaspoon.

  ‘I’ve read the books and the articles.’

  Again, he nodded. Then he said, in a low voice, ‘I was absolutely mad to come back.’ He drank fiercely from his coffee cup. ‘You know how it is when you return to a place you knew when you were a child? Everything seems so much smaller than you remembered it?’

  It was my turn to nod.

  ‘Somehow I thought it would all take on a different perspective, now that I’m an adult. Be less … less looming.’

  ‘And it hasn’t.’

  ‘Not in the least.’ He let the spoon go and looked at me. ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it through the weekend, quite honestly.’

  ‘There’s no reason why you should. Nobody made you come, and nobody can make you stay. On the other hand, maybe if you give it more of a chance, you’ll find things easing up a little inside your head.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘What do I know? But it’s possible.’ I smiled brightly. Little Miss Sunshine. Not, I should say, my usual mode. ‘I’m going to walk over and see Desmond Forshawe this morning. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you came along.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘You might enjoy it.’ I looked out at the pale sunlight. ‘Might clear your head a bit.’

  ‘I’m sure it would, but I’m afraid I have things to do.’

  I’d love to have known what they were. ‘OK. Maybe see you at lunchtime.’

  ‘Maybe.’ As I left, he gave a kind of grimace which, rather charitably perhaps, I interpreted as an apologetic smile.

  Four

  Having asked David Charteris for directions, I set off across the fields towards Byfield Hall, which for many generations had been the seat of this particular branch of the Forshawe family. The going was quite easy. It hadn’t rained for some time, and the narrow footpath bordering the sloping fields was dry. Down below me lay a huddle of farm buildings with fox-coloured roofs, the morning sunshine turning their walls a rich shade of honey.

  Except for birdsong, the swish of grass, the occasional drone of an aeroplane high in the sky, it was quiet. But once into the woods that I’d seen from my windows, there was no sound at all, except the faint pad of my footsteps on the soft leaf-moulded track which ran from one end of the coppice to the other. At first I could see sunshine between the trees, but as I went in deeper, the trunks grew thicker together, blocking out the light. These were mostly coniferous woods, and the green light which filtered through the branches began to strike me as faintly sinister. Anyone losing their way in here could quite easily grow dis-orientated: very soon I found myself looking up for the faint lightening of the green that indicated the sun, which I knew to keep on my right. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might need a compass, even if I’d thought to bring one with me. Even if I’d owned one.

  I came across an overgrown clearing where the remains of a tumbledown old outhouse stood. It was built of rounded stones, roughly put together. The roof had long ago fallen in: nettles sentinelled the doorway, where the planks of a disintegrated door lay scattered. A square hole had been cut into one wall to let in the light. It was difficult to discern its original function, since it couldn’t have been a shepherd’s hut, nor a hide for shooters of pheasant or duck. Peering above the nettles, I could just make out in the gloom a piece of heavily rusted farm equipment and a pile of something mouldering in one corner.

  Behind me, a twig cracked. For a moment I stood rigid, my pulse beating like a drum. Then common-sense asserted itself. It was broad daylight – at least, beyond this wood it was. Murderers, rapists, mad axemen usually plied their trade at night, among concealing shadows. I was perfectly safe. Refusing to turn round and survey the path behind me, I walked on. Impossible for me not to remember my Dante: In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself lost in a dark wood where the straight road had been lost sight of … How apposite. I was thirty-five years old, astray in a dark wood, and certainly I had long ago lost sight of the straight road.

  Another crack, a rustle of leaves. Someone – or something – was definitely following me. I whipped round and caught m
ovement. I told myself it could be a deer, or a bird, a wild boar, a rabbit. I also told myself it could be a drug-crazed terrorist or a rabid tiger escaped from a local circus, even though I knew I was being ridiculous. I quickened my pace, lengthened my stride. The hell with pride – the sooner I was out of these trees, the better. Ahead of me spread the rutted track, and as I walked, a fox emerged from the undergrowth and trotted across the rutted path, his bushy tail with its distinctive white tip held straight out behind. He turned his head to stare at me incuriously with shiny black eyes, then trundled on into the bushes on the other side of the track. Had I really been reduced to jumping out of my skin because of an animal?

  At the same time, the trees ahead began to thin out and show daylight between their trunks. Thankfully, I reached the edge of the wood and emerged into sunlight. Fields spread away on every side. Ahead, there was an unmade track, and to my right, over a long stretch of drystone wall, I could see a fine house, very like Weston Lodge, but more elaborate. A gravelled drive led up to the front door, and sheep grazed in the pasture on either side. Even from here I could see a carved escutcheon over the front doors which stood at the top of a flight of steps flanked by urn-topped pillars. It had to be Byfield Hall. I strode along the track, reached a road and then, after about a hundred yards, some tall iron gates.

  The sun was shining. Feeler safer, I turned and surveyed the woods behind me. Nothing, of course. No drooling man carrying a chainsaw. No saliva-dripping rabid dog. Just burgeoning leaf, bramble bushes, lightly swaying branches. In front of me, two enormous Cedars of Lebanon stood on either side of the house, drooping like green curtains across tightly mown lawns. As I approached, Desmond Forshawe appeared at the top of the steps and waved.

  ‘I actually remembered you were coming,’ he called. ‘I even asked Mrs Derridge to make one of her lemon sponges for elevenses.’

  Elevenses! What could be less menacing than a word so redolent of indulgent nannies, safe childhoods, welcoming servants’ halls? It was a word you rarely heard any more, superseded by coffee-time or tea-breaks.

  ‘Sounds fabulous,’ I said as I came up the steps to shake his hand. ‘Good morning, how are you? How are the hens?’

  His old eyes brightened. ‘In fine fettle,’ he said. ‘Keep hens yourself, do you?’

  ‘Just eat their eggs,’ I said, more or less as I’d replied when he asked the same question at dinner the night before.

  ‘And you are … you’re—’ I could see him racking his ancient brains for my name.

  ‘Chantal Frazer,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you are. Come on in.’

  He led the way into a hall almost as grand as the one at Weston Lodge, but much less kempt. A huge and very beautiful chandelier hung in the centre, its swags and garlands of cut crystal half-hidden beneath swathing cobwebs. Three shabby sofas surrounded the big hearth where a fire of smouldering logs burned. Dogs lay here and there, their tails thumping lazily as their master came in. One big old Golden Labrador creaked to its feet and came over to inspect me. The others didn’t bother. In dog years, I reckoned they were at least as old as Desmond Forshawe. Lord Forshawe, as it happened. Something I’d learned from David Charteris when asking how to get to Byfield Hall.

  ‘Nice old boy,’ he had said. ‘The memory banks occasionally get overdrawn, but otherwise he’s very much with it. And he owns some marvellous pictures.’

  ‘That’s why I’m going to see him,’ I said. ‘We talked about it last night.’

  ‘Interested in pictures?’

  ‘Very much so. I work for an auction house in London.’

  ‘You should have a word with Maggie Fields; the woman who’s inventorying, if that’s the word, the house.’

  Now Forshawe pressed a bell in the wall. ‘We’ll have coffee first, shall we?’ He ushered me into a large drawing room, where another fire was burning. Huge windows at one end opened on to a terrace above unkempt back lawns and overcrowded flower beds. Forshawe walked across to look out. ‘All got a bit neglected since m’wife died,’ he said, waving a hand at the garden. ‘She took care of all that sort of thing. M’nephews fly over from New York every now and then and organize a gardener to come in. Trouble is, old Cotter died last year, and I haven’t got round to finding a replacement.’ He looked at me ruefully, the eyebrow-thickets moving up and down his forehead. ‘Roses are in a dreadful state, poor old things.’

  ‘They are rather, aren’t they?’

  A portrait hung above the fireplace, showing a tall slim woman in ceremonial robes, a necklace sparkling at her throat, one slim hand resting on a plinth of some kind. Two dogs lay at her feet, muzzles resting on paws.

  As he led the way to the comfortable chairs in front of the fire, I said, ‘Is that your wife?’

  ‘Yes. A fine-looking woman, she was, too. And formidable. By God, when she came storming in, you didn’t wait to find out what she was complaining about, just got as far away from the danger zone as you could.’ He sighed. ‘Miss her like the devil, actually.’

  I looked more closely. Fine-looking indeed. And steely as a hatpin. She had the face of a woman not to be trifled with.

  Mrs Derridge appeared with coffee things on a tarnished silver tray. ‘Here you are, then,’ she said. ‘Now don’t you go making a pig of yourself with that cake, My Lord. There’s a nice bit of salmon for your lunch, sent over fresh this morning from Sir Michael.’

  Forshawe winked at me. ‘Right you are, Mrs D.’

  It all sounded charmingly feudal, straight out of a play by Noel Coward, or a lightweight novel of the 1920s.

  While Forshawe poured coffee from a silver pot, I walked over to look at a painting hanging between two of the long windows giving on to a terrace very similar to that at Weston Lodge.

  ‘Is that really a Balthus?’ I said. ‘That is amazing.’

  ‘Isn’t it, though? Jeune Fille Avec Papillon. One of our favourites, that is. We were advised to buy it by our neighbour, Clio Palliser. Lent it to her once.’ He coughed loudly. Once again he turned the bushy eyebrows in my direction, obviously wondering if I recognized the name. ‘She was very knowledgeable about contemporary art.’

  ‘It’s marvellous.’ I looked again at the painting, with its trademark saucy nymphet seemingly unaware of the provocative pose she was striking, her little white knickers showing as she bent over a gaudy butterfly perched on the edge of a glass dish, while a sinister character lurked halfway behind a green drape, watching her. ‘It’s not one of his works I’m familiar with.’ Hoping he didn’t notice what I was doing, I peered more closely at the canvas and could clearly see where the words FUCK YOU had been deleted and the patch of canvas restored.

  ‘Wonderful stuff, isn’t it? A trifle perverted, to my way of thinking, but I don’t hold that against the old boy.’ Forshawe seemed a different person, the vagueness gone, his speech much crisper than previously. ‘Actually, Clio was knowledgeable about so many things. Never could believe what they said she’d …’ He shook his head. ‘Sit down, my dear. Then I’ll take you round the museum, as I call it. Show you some of the family heirlooms as well as the stuff m’wife acquired.’ He laughed. ‘M’nephews always used to accuse the old girl of liking her artworks and her dogs more than she liked me!’

  ‘Your nephews? No children of your own?’

  ‘None. Rather sad, really, but my wife didn’t care for children, so there it was.’

  I balanced a piece of the Derridge sponge on the edge of my saucer, gold-rimmed bone china so delicate that I could see the outline of my finger through it. Should I come clean? Confess who I was?

  While I was deciding, my host put his head on one side. ‘I’m not yet so gaga that I assume nobody else knows what took place across the way there, at Weston Lodge, twenty-three years ago. Are you one of them, hmm?’

  I put down my coffee cup. Swallowed. Looked him in the eye. ‘I know exactly what happened,’ I said. ‘Or is supposed to have—’

  He interrupted me. ‘I knew I�
�d seen you before. Or someone very like. You’re that poor girl’s sister, aren’t you? She told me she had one, back home in California.’

  ‘Yes.’ I barely got the word out.

  He laid his gnarled old hand on mine. ‘I’m so very sorry. She was a really nice girl. And the boys adored her. What happened to her was … well, it was unconscionable.’

  ‘Why did it happen? That’s what we could never figure out. It was such an … extreme thing to do.’

  ‘Poor Clio came from an extreme family,’ Forshawe said. ‘What m’nephews call dysfunctional. I’ve known the Pallisers since I was a child. And m’wife was actually related to them, second cousin sort of thing.’

  Another piece of information, though I had no idea how useful it might be. ‘Really?’

  ‘Clio’s mother died young, do you see? And I’m afraid that after she’d gone, Gerald Palliser let his sons run wild. Clio was basically brought up by the nanny, who was not a nice woman. My own parents always suspected she was one of those suppressed – or even overt, when you think about it – sadists. A lot of locking in coal-holes and whippings with a belt buckle, that sort of thing. And then her two brothers … Bad lots, the pair of them.’ He shook his head. ‘No one knows what goes on behind closed doors, do they? My sainted mama did try to talk to Gerald about it, but he didn’t want to know.’

  ‘Nasty.’

  ‘I’ll say. She stopped speaking at one point. This is Clio I’m talking about, not that wretched nanny. Went completely silent for about five years. I think getting away to university was the making of her …’ His face was sympathetic as he replaced his cup on the tray. ‘Actually, if you ask me, a lot of those so-called posh families were barmy, back then. Probably still are. Totally bonkers. M’wife’s was a case in point.’ There was a pause, during which I hoped he was going to expand on the subject, but instead, he said, ‘More cake, m’dear?’

  ‘No, thank you.’