‘It was a Mr Gillespie, Raymond Gillespie.’
‘What’s his company called?’
‘It’s a trade union, actually – the Association of Federated Trades.’
‘Is he a regular at Rules?’
‘No, not that regular but I’ve seen him here before.’
‘On his own, like today?’
‘No, with the gentleman at your table.’
So an ambitious Conservative MP knew a trade union official. It was no big deal yet something about what he’d just witnessed didn’t quite add up.
Seventeen
Lexie could only applaud the duty clergyman’s acting skills at Etta’s funeral. With barely a script and no rehearsal, his performance suggested genuine warmth for the stranger in the box.
Etta’s three mourners heard she was the best of mothers, the most dutiful of sisters and that her tragic passing would cause sorrow to friend and neighbour alike. Lexie, McCall and Hoare could tell a different story. Each had seen inside the paragon’s bedroom.
Lexie rejected the religious music offered by the vicar and chose a tape of The Lark Ascending instead. For her, this was the ultimate evocation of lost innocence.
As children, Lexie and Etta never understood why their mother wept whenever this was came on the wireless.
A button was pressed and the coffin moved forward. The first virtuosic notes of a violin rose ever higher between the bare brick walls of the crematorium as the lark sang Etta out of this world and all its temporal ills.
*
The birth of Etta had coincided with the Queen’s coronation. Streets nearby were hung with Union Jacks and patriotic red, white and blue bunting. People bought televisions on hire purchase and invited neighbours in to watch the young Princess Elizabeth take the throne of England and all its dominions.
But Lexie sensed something interesting happening at home, too. A district nurse arrived on a bicycle. Mum was still in bed which was unusual. She began screaming and Lexie thought murder was being done. Then the nurse came down looking for clean towels and caught her listening at the stair door.
‘Away off and play or you’ll get what’s for when your Dad comes home.’
That much she knew only too well.
*
Lexie tightened her grip on McCall’s arm. Another family waiting to mourn parted on the steps outside and let them through. In the memorial garden opposite, McCall thought he glimpsed a man with something like a camera around his neck. But the sun was in his eyes and he was too preoccupied to think any more of it.
The shadow of the crematorium chimney lay across the car park and a reflection of its hazy gasses shimmered on the asphalt beneath their feet.
‘I need a steadier,’ Lexie said. ‘There’s a pub across the road.’
Inside, wet-eyed women sat drinking spirits, self conscious men stood apart, pint pots in their fists, ill-fitting suits on their backs. McCall bought Lexie a brandy and asked to hear more about Etta.
‘I still haven’t got a clear picture of her.’
‘Bit of a lost soul, really… lacked direction, hadn’t much self-confidence.’
‘Why would that be, do you think?’
‘Our upbringing, I suppose. Everything goes back to childhood, doesn’t it?’
‘Wasn’t your home life very happy, then?’
‘No, not really… not looking back.’
‘Would you rather not talk about it?’
Lexie thought for a moment and asked for another brandy. Then she lit a cigarette as if to delay her answer a little longer.
‘Families,’ she said. ‘No one knows what goes on inside them… not truly, they don’t.’
‘That sounds pretty heartfelt.’
‘Etta had it worse than me… wasn’t as strong-willed as me.’
‘Had what worse than you, Lexie?’
‘Dad… Dad and his cuddling. That’s what he called it. Cuddling.’
‘You mean - ’
‘At that age, you don’t know what’s right or wrong or what’s normal, do you?’
‘Couldn’t you tell your mother?’
‘She knew, I’m sure she did but she was as afraid of him as we were so she chose to see nothing, didn’t she?’
McCall would’ve carried on gently probing but Malky Hoare joined them. He’d collected Etta’s ashes from the crematorium office as a favour to Lexie. It was his day off but even if Benwick hadn’t ordered him to attend the funeral, he would’ve done so. He wanted to keep track of a story which had far from run its intriguing course. Lexie went to the loo so McCall had chance to quiz Hoare.
‘The possibility of Etta being mixed up in Ruby’s disappearance, all that black magic crap and her being on the game, is any of this likely to come out at the inquest?’
‘I wouldn’t think so. There’s no hard evidence against her, just suspicion.’
For Lexie, her sister’s suicide was hard enough to take. Any official hint, however oblique, that Ruby’s disappearance involved a background of sex and Satanism and the tabloids would start their own witch-hunt.
Etta’s death had affected Lexie more deeply than she would admit. She was showing a quiet vulnerability which McCall had never noticed before. It engendered an urge to protect her from more harm.
Lexie came back and said they should leave to miss the afternoon traffic. They had a long drive ahead, out of London and to life as it had once been.
*
Lexie and Etta were raised in Upton, a gossipy little town by a bend in the Severn, adrift between the whale-backed hills of Malvern to the west and Bredon Hill in the east. It was set on a marshy plain of brooks and ponds and pollarded willows where cows stood steaming in the early morning mists. Here were idyllic half-timbered cottages, bluebell woods and the bridal blossoms of orchards marking the coming of every spring.
They parked and walked for a while. The softly coloured counties around them were theatrically spot-lit here and there whenever the clouds blustered apart and let snatches of sunshine slip through.
‘What did your Dad do for a living, Lexie?’
‘He was a station porter… only became an important man when he got home.’
‘This abuse you suffered, it must have had a bad effect on you and Etta.’
‘It scarred our childhood, that’s for sure. Psychologically, long term, who knows?’
‘Did that have a bearing on you both moving to London?’
‘Yes, just as soon as we could get away but then Etta fell pregnant by the first no-hope loser she climbed into bed with.’
‘How did your parents handle that?’
‘Dad disowned her. Can you credit that? Such hypocrisy. I just couldn’t believe it.’
A wind was getting up. Larches on a hillside beyond began swaying before the storm to come. These forces of nature had inspired Edward Elgar to wonder once if the trees were singing his music or if he’d just composed theirs. McCall and Lexie ran back through a headland of spiky bracken to the Morgan.
The sky darkened and rain drum-rolled on the car’s hood. But the downpour stopped as quickly as it started, leaving the faintest of rainbows above all that Lexie was loathe to remember.
‘Right, drive me to the river,’ she said. ‘If I don’t do it this minute, I never will.’
*
McCall left Lexie clambering down the far bank of the Severn with the box containing her sister’s ashes. She was still in her black trouser suit and coat from the funeral and wanted these last minutes to herself. The river slid by in silence, broad and powerful on its way from the mountains to the sea and spinning with the fallen leaves of autumn.
A church once stood close by but only its pepper pot of a bell tower remained. McCall sat on a bench beneath it. Soldiers of the English civil war marched by this place three centuries before, leaving their bones and blood in fields thereabouts.
As here, so in Africa. McCall’s mobile rang and returned him to the present. It was Evan.
‘Whatever i
t is you’re up to, Mac, watch your step.’
‘Why? What’s going on?’
‘You’ve just pinged on someone’s radar. That’s all I know. Can’t say any more.’
McCall was puzzled. Why would anyone be remotely concerned with he was doing? Namibia was months back, his very own private Gehenna. No one knew he’d spiked his own story out there, still less why. His only press work since was researching Ruby’s disappearance. Yet Evan must know something McCall didn’t or he’d not trouble to make contact.
He looked up; unaware Lexie was standing close by. She asked who had phoned him.
‘Just a contact with a tip-off. Nothing important.’
Eighteen
For McCall, the following morning was as surreal as it was cathartic. Lexie phoned her business partner from Garth before breakfast and was reminded of an unbreakable appointment in Bristol that afternoon. She tossed a travel bag into her Volvo, touched cheeks with McCall and drove off.
Hester observed this hurried adieu from the kitchen window.
‘Looks like your friend’s got a lot on her mind.’
‘She’s still in shock about her sister.’
‘No, I don’t suppose that’s run its course, yet,’ Hester said. ‘Lexie meant a lot to you once, didn’t she?’
‘She still does.’
‘But she hurt you real bad… years back, I mean.’
‘It’s that obvious, is it?’
‘When we’re young, we never realise how fragile we all are, how easily we break.’
He nodded in agreement but didn’t want to go where this was heading.
‘But you’ve made your peace with her… promise me, Mac.’
‘I’m getting there.’
‘Good. Remember what the Chinese say… he who does not forgive digs two graves.’
McCall made for Garth Woods as others had done before. This was where they retreated in times of reflection and worse. In this - as in much else - he would forever walk in the shadow of a man he’d loved and still mourned.
He paused by Francis Wrenn’s rusting tin dacha but hadn’t heart enough to go inside. It had been cleared of the two leather armchairs in which they’d so often sat and talked, all the Whitehall papers he should never have kept - and his beloved gramophone.
Those irrecoverable days of childhood were played out to the sound track of Francis’s records of tenors and sopranos and medieval plain song, drifting from the dacha and through the timeless woods to all the secret places only a boy could know.
Such voices hung in McCall’s mind still, carrying on the air with the wash of water over pebbles and the sighing of wind through leaves. Cleanse me from my sins for I acknowledge my faults… deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God.
But where was the deity who could absolve McCall of his?
Sitting alone on the bench by the Pigs’ Brook, without the diverting presence of Lexie, that same sense of self-doubt which unnerved him after Africa, threatened again. It was a fear of failure, of his judgement being unequal to the implications of all he now faced - as a hack and as a man. No one could gauge the eventual fallout from Etta’s suicide or Ruby’s disappearance, still less her possible murder.
The oddly coded warning from Evan only added to the sum of McCall’s uncertainties. He heard twigs being trampled in the dried-up undergrowth behind him. It was Hester who knew exactly where he would be - and why.
‘Come on, Mac. Staring into the stream won’t solve anything.’
‘It’s OK… I’m just thinking about things.’
‘Yeah, sure you are. Now listen, I want to take you some place.’
‘No, I’d rather not. Today’s not good.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong, mister. You’re gonna to snap out of it and come on a picnic with me.’
*
An hour later, they were hiking across a moor, high in the Shropshire hills. Far in the distance were the blueish peaks of Snowdonia and to the south, the Black Mountains, faintly drawn in the warm, hazy air.
Wales rolled out west, all pale fields and dark, mystical forests. Only Lexie’s skylarks could be heard, lost in the heavens where her sister had already gone forth.
‘What are you planning, Hester?’
‘Something magical, you’ll see.’
A grassy track led ever upwards, stamped by the iron shoes of horses and close-cropped by black-faced sheep. On either side were gorse bushes, alive with linnets and speckled gold with flowers smelling of coconut.
Ahead was a clearing and within it, the partial remains of a once great circle of standing stones. Stonehenge it wasn’t but men had gathered here a thousand years before the time of Christ to mark the seasons, administer justice or offer sacrifices to their cruel and arbitrary gods.
‘This is where I come to meditate, Mac… to get rid of all the modern noise we have in our heads till we can’t hear the spiritual truth around us. Peaceful, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
‘I sense something timeless and symbolically charged here. Didn’t Masefield describe landscapes like this as being thronged by souls unseen?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know but then, my inner hippie doesn’t get out much any more.’
Hester smiled and put down her rucksack.
‘I know you’ve always thought I’m a batty old crank so I guess bringing you here just confirms that you’ve given home to a damn fool tree-hugger, doesn’t it?’
‘Of course not but people’s opinions and beliefs usually reflect the lives they’ve led.’
‘But there are other ways of interpreting our world, Mac - ancient ways which we’ve forgotten to remember.’
‘Because science and the enlightenment changed how we think, surely?’
‘Well, if you cared to look, you might begin to understand the significance of these stones and hills which were venerated by people we grandly think of as primitive.’
‘Maybe, but their superstitions gave way to rational thought.’
‘So it’s rational to keep inventing better ways of killing people, is it? To profit from the earth while destroying it and making greed and selfishness respectable?’
She could easily have broken one of her new life’s guiding principles - never to get angry. But Hester turned away, took a pure white tablecloth from her rucksack and laid it on the grass by the tallest stone.
It stood six feet high, smoothed and blackened by animals rubbing against it for millennia. Someone had left a spray of pink carnations at the base as if this were a grave.
Hester brought out a batch of her coarse Celtic oatcakes which they ate with garden raspberries and cream. McCall asked why she’d brought him there.
‘There’s a word in Arabic, sarba. It means a journey leading to a kind of spiritual renewal and I believe this is an ancient site of healing which might help you.’
‘Dear Hester… it’s kind of you to be concerned about me but a ring of stones isn’t going to sort out what’s in my head.’
‘No? Well, neither is denying that you’re a prisoner of your past and always will be until you let go of whatever it is you blame yourself for.’
Not for the first time, McCall wished she would change the subject. He unwrapped the silver foil around a small lump of dope in his jacket pocket and began to roll a joint. Hester wasn’t alone in having alternative leanings.
She opened a bottle of her rose hip wine and poured two glasses.
‘Did you know you can draw dead straight lines between pagan places like this and lots of other sacred sites like really old churches and wells, all across the country?’
‘Ley lines, you mean?’
‘That’s right. I know you’ll mock but there are waves of energy along ley lines and in these stones. I can always feel it… gives me like a strange tingling in my hands.’
‘See if this makes it better.’
He passed her the joint and refilled their glasses. Hester’s wine was never allowed to age so was all the mor
e potent for that. McCall stretched out on his back, feet towards the centre of the circle where who knew what sort of rituals had once taken place.
They finished the joint and a rare inner contentment came over him, an altered state of consciousness brought about by chemicals, hooch and weariness. He became aware of Hester kneeling behind him.
She began to gently describe circles on his temples with the tips of her fingers. He didn’t object for her touch was as tender and innocent as he imagined a mother’s might be.
Her hands moved over his forehead and closed over the pods of his eyes. When she spoke, her voice was calm and seemed to come from the clouds.
‘Listen to me, Mac… I want you to let it go… start to release yourself from whatever happened in Africa.’
He didn’t reply but felt no urge to get up and walk away.
‘I know it won’t be easy but just try… just for me.’
McCall still didn’t respond but remained motionless under the shadow of the stone.
‘Tell me what’s in your head… tell me what’s brought you so low.’
‘Guilt, if you must know… guilt and blood.’
‘Right, OK… but let’s go back to the beginning. To Africa, but where exactly?’
‘Namibia… up north… out in the bush… little settlement of huts.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘Talking to these women whose men had been murdered for helping the insurgents.’
‘Weren’t they taking a risk talking to you?’
‘A priest took me there and asked them to.’
‘Who had murdered their husbands?’
‘A counter terrorist unit called Koevoet, run by the South Africans. I was researching a story about their crimes.’
‘So you’re with these women… what happens next?’
‘The priest leaves on his motorbike and I’ve got an hour with a woman who speaks some English but after a few minutes, she’s becomes afraid.’
‘Why? What made her afraid?’
The Convenience of Lies Page 9