The White Shepherd

by Annie Dalton

  Bonnie had settled herself under the kitchen table with her head resting on Anna’s bare feet. If she looked, Anna knew she’d see Bonnie’s snow-white rear end sprawled across Jake’s size twelve shoes. Like it or not, she and Jake were connected by this dog, just as surely as they were separated by the Atlantic. It was like some kind of unsolvable riddle. Anna remembered Kirsty’s warning and told herself it was better that way.

  She noticed Jake frowning at her, almost as if he’d read her thoughts. But he just said, ‘So when you saw Laurie the night before he died, you didn’t get, like, an obvious suicide vibe off him?’

  Anna shook her head. ‘Just the opposite. It was like he’d totally accepted everything his life had dealt him, good and bad. He begged me to come back with Bonnie – he loved Bonnie! He said she was one of the seven exceptional dogs. It’s from a book,’ Anna explained to Jake. For a moment she saw Laurie’s face, his amused delight as he wondered why dogs always smelled of peanut butter, and felt a fresh pang of loss. She had to swallow before she added, ‘He was composing a requiem.’

  ‘Oh, lord, not his own, I hope.’ Scooping up some of her sauce on her wooden spoon, Isadora tasted it with a thoughtful expression.

  Anna gave her a wan smile. ‘Laurie made the same joke. He said he’d made up his mind to live long enough to finish it.’

  Tansy came over with a platter of various kinds of meze. ‘I never met Laurie,’ she said, ‘but I’ve been thinking about him a lot since we read those letters. He must have been despairing after Owen died. Didn’t you say he had some kind of breakdown, Isadora? I guess after he lost Owen there was nobody left to turn to. Nobody he could trust, anyway.’

  Anna nodded. It might not have been his intention, but by swearing Laurie to secrecy about their relationship, Owen had effectively separated his lover from anyone else who might be a real friend and equal and therefore a potential threat to Owen. ‘He talked about being the quirky bachelor people invited to make up the numbers,’ she said.

  ‘So he must have been fucking lonely,’ Tansy said. ‘And then finding out he was fatally ill, having to be cared for by strangers …’

  ‘I know all that,’ said Anna. ‘And I could make a good story about how a dying man – a recluse, a secretly gay recluse – finally feels able to cut himself free from the unbearable burden his life has become.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s just that after my evening with him, I can’t believe it.’ She rubbed at her temples. ‘OK, maybe I just don’t want to,’ she admitted.

  ‘People don’t necessarily seem suicidal just before they commit suicide.’ Isadora opened the oven and pulled out an enormous blue tagine, followed by a smaller yellow one. The scent of richly spiced lamb joined the other delicious kitchen smells. ‘I’ve had depressed friends who seemed positively euphoric just before they ended their lives. I suppose it’s partly relief to have resolved that appalling internal conflict.’

  ‘OK, I’m not you, Anna, but if it was me and someone gave me their precious secret papers, and then, almost immediately, you know—’ Tansy did a graphic mime of cutting her own throat. ‘I wouldn’t want to think it was suicide either.’

  Isadora turned off the back burner, then snatched up a dishcloth and removed the lid from the steamer. She tipped a stream of yellow couscous from the steamer into a brown earthenware dish.

  ‘You want me to bring some of that incredible-looking food over here?’ Jake asked, jumping up.

  Isadora gave him a grateful look. Not just for his offer of help, Anna thought, but for diverting their attention away from Laurie’s lonely death to her lovingly prepared feast.

  Tansy was directed to fetch the plates from the warming drawer, and Anna set out place mats while Jake and Isadora carried the food to the table. Isadora swept a last critical glance over her table, checking that everything was present and correct: the mound of fluffy couscous spiked with almonds, raisins and preserved lemon; some kind of stew with meatballs; the two tagines – Isadora had made one with beans for vegan Tansy; and a pile of flatbread keeping warm under a cloth.

  ‘Sit, eat! Eat lots,’ Isadora told them, ‘or poor Hero will be eating couscous for breakfast for the rest of the week. As you see, I am incapable of cooking in moderation.’

  ‘Moderation isn’t really a word I associate with you, Isadora,’ Tansy teased.

  Anna found she was famished. For a few moments everyone just concentrated on their food.

  ‘The last time I ate Moroccan food this good I was in Marrakech.’ Jake gave Isadora his crooked grin. Like their hostess he had opted to bypass his cutlery, scooping up his food with his bread.

  She was delighted. ‘You’ve been to Marrakech?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. A couple of times now.’

  Isadora launched into a description of backpacking through Morocco in the 1960s and how wonderful and unspoiled it was then.

  Anna remembered how Jake had joked that you could drop him out of a plane and wherever he came down he would immediately make himself at home. She stole a look at him, this surprising American, sitting at Isadora’s kitchen table in exotic North Oxford, chatting easily with three totally different women, and he did indeed seem quietly at home. She wondered if you could hope to learn that kind of ease after a certain age; if it could maybe rub off on you, if you were around someone like Jake for long enough. It was a tempting, bitter-sweet thought.

  Jake turned to Anna. ‘You’re looking a better colour for getting a little food down you,’ he commented. He had rested his hand next to hers on the table, and she could feel that effortless male vitality emanating from him.

  ‘I feel a better colour,’ she said, trying to match his easy tone. ‘This is wonderful, Isadora, thank you so much.’

  ‘I love cooking for people,’ Isadora said. ‘I really should do it more.’

  After they’d finished their meal, Isadora brought them mint tea in Moroccan tea glasses. Their talk meandered from a recent incident at Marmalade, involving a health-conscious mother and a food-phobic small child, and then to Isadora’s son, who had always been picky about his food. ‘Now he’s just picky!’ Isadora said with one of her great hoots. ‘Poor Gabriel, I think he was always secretly in training to be an accountant!’

  Jake asked after Anna’s grandfather, and she told him of her attempts to get him to agree to exhibit his work. Isadora wanted to hear more about his paintings, but as Anna launched into a detailed description, she had the feeling that Tansy’s mind was elsewhere. ‘I’m being really self indulgent,’ she apologized quickly. ‘It’s a good thing I’ll never have children. I’d be showing off their pasta collages to strangers on the bus!’

  Tansy looked mortified. ‘You weren’t boring me, Anna! Your grandfather sounds amazing. I just – well, I don’t know if this is a good time to talk about this, but I’ve been doing a bit more research, and I kind of need to tell you guys about it.’

  ‘What does “a bit more research” mean?’ Isadora asked suspiciously, just as Anna said:

  ‘You didn’t chase someone down the Cowley Road again, did you?’

  Tansy turned to Jake. ‘Just to give you some background, I should explain that my first and only attempt at a stake-out turned out to be a major non-event.’

  ‘Who were you staking out?’ Jake asked with interest. Anna could see him rapidly revising his first impressions of Tansy.

  ‘A total nutter who threatened Naomi and Laurie,’ Tansy said, ‘but like I said, it was a non-event of epic proportions. Then suddenly Laurie was dead, and poor Anna—’ Tansy tugged on a loose curl as she struggled to put her thought processes into words. ‘Anyway, I felt like I should be doing more to help,’ she summarized, sounding slightly defensive. ‘So I went online, and I did some digging around about Owen and Audrey Traherne.’ Tansy reached into her tote bag and pulled out a file. ‘I just wanted to see what was out there. Fill in some of the gaps.’ Her hand hovered over the file. ‘This really isn’t the right moment, is it?’ she said anxiously.

&n
bsp; ‘I’d like to see,’ Anna said quickly, though she doubted that anything Tansy had found would give them the answers she craved.

  Tansy took out a few printouts which she had neatly stapled together and passed them around. The information seemed to be a mishmash of old news clippings, mixed up with entries from the kind of literary blogs that specialized in backbiting. She’d found a description of an infamous literary party at the Trahernes where a furious but stone-cold sober Audrey had emptied a jug of rum punch over her drunken husband’s head, whereupon Owen had immediately poured a bottle of red wine over her, ruining the Dior evening dress that he had bought her especially for the occasion. Their fight had escalated until they’d had to be phys-ically separated by some of the other guests. There was a story about Audrey being found barefoot and disorientated in Stoke Newington and taken to a psychiatric unit for assessment. There were stories from Owen’s later years, mostly involving drink. He had been arrested for hitting a man in a Dublin bar. He had publicly insulted a fellow member of a literary panel.

  It made depressing reading, Anna thought. Far from filling in the gaps, these gossipy snippets offered only a lurid caricature of a marriage from which any real truths had been edited out in favour of spite and sensation.

  Isadora obviously felt the same. She compressed her lips together. ‘Owen Traherne was not an amiable drunk,’ she said coldly. ‘But he was not Richard Burton and Audrey was not Liz Taylor, whatever these vultures would like us to think.’

  Tansy placed her two hands protectively on her folder. ‘I brought some other stuff,’ she confessed. ‘But I chickened out about showing you. I still don’t know if I should show you.’

  ‘What kind of stuff?’ Isadora said, still frosty.

  Anna saw worry and embarrassment flit across Tansy’s face. ‘I can’t explain it, really. I just had this feeling that I had to keep digging until I turned something up. So there are these Internet sites? Like, death tribute sites?’

  Jake sat back in his chair. ‘You’re going to have to explain that to a poor southern boy.’

  ‘And to an elderly academic,’ Isadora added with one of her dark laughs.

  ‘I know about them,’ Anna said, feeling the need to help Tansy out. ‘When someone famous dies, their fans get hold of police info, autopsy photographs and reports, that kind of thing, and put them up online as some kind of bad taste tribute.’

  ‘To merit a tribute site, they have to be, like, famous and charismatic,’ Tansy explained. ‘The kind of dead people that myths grow up around.’

  ‘Ah, I get you. Like Tupac the rapper,’ Jake said. ‘Or JFK, right?’

  Tansy nodded. ‘And James Dean, Marilyn Monroe; you get the picture. Well, it seems that Owen was like the rock star of the poetry world and his wife Audrey was beautiful but also incredibly unstable. That kind of volatile combo gets some people incredibly overexcited for some reason. Anyway, I found some material connected with Audrey’s suicide … This is a bad idea,’ she said interrupting herself. ‘Why did I ever think—?’

  ‘I want to see it,’ Anna said.

  ‘Does everybody else agree?’ Tansy said uncertainly.

  Isadora gave a weary sigh. ‘If you must.’

  Jake looked doubtful, but he nodded. ‘Sure.’

  Tansy slid out some grainy black and white photographs.

  Anna felt Jake go very still. Jake McCaffrey must have seen hundreds of dead bodies in the course of his military career, some reduced to little more than shreds of meat. Anna doubted that the crime-scene photograph of this physically intact dead woman would shock him very much, which meant that something else about this picture had jolted him.

  Isadora’s hand went to her mouth. ‘Put them away. Sorry, Tansy, I understand that you only want to help, but I don’t see how we’re helping Laurie or anyone by looking at these dreadful images of poor Audrey. Images nobody was ever intended to see.’

  Tansy’s face crumpled. ‘Oh, shit! I forgot you actually knew Audrey.’ She scrabbled to get the pictures back in her folder.

  ‘No!’ said Jake.

  They looked at him, startled.

  ‘What?’ said Tansy.

  Jake rubbed his hand across his face, and Anna heard the faint scratch of stubble. For the first time she saw that he was tired. ‘Well, like Tansy here, I felt kinda sick about what happened to Anna last night, and so I have also been doing a bit of – research.’ He shot Tansy a comradely grin.

  ‘Why?’ Anna said, confused. This had nothing to do with Jake.

  ‘Hey, it wasn’t a big deal. In my work I have to access all kinds of information. The only difference is this time I asked someone to get me some intel from your Thames Valley police.’

  ‘You hacked the police,’ breathed Tansy. ‘You could get yourself into some serious trouble.’

  He shrugged. ‘I doubt it. My guy is good at getting in and out without anyone knowing. I wasn’t going to tell anyone about it, but having seen that picture of Audrey, well, I feel like I should come clean.’ He went out into the hall for a moment and came back with his tablet. He flipped back the cover. ‘You might not want to look, Anna,’ he said soberly.

  Isadora and Tansy came to stand behind his chair. Anna heard Isadora catch her breath.

  ‘OK,’ said Jake. ‘There are several of these from slightly different angles.’

  Anna made herself look at Laurie’s empty-eyed corpse. Everything in her wanted to deny that it was him; the vital, living Laurie was still so vivid in her mind. There were crumpled sheets of paper on Laurie’s floor, music paper, which someone, a policeman or a paramedic, had trodden on. She could see Laurie’s scribbled notation showing through the dirty prints from someone’s shoe.

  ‘You OK?’ Jake asked her.

  She gave a tight nod. ‘Show me that photo of Audrey again.’

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ Tansy whispered. ‘How weird is that?’

  The similarities were chilling. The invalid’s feeder cup was placed at the same angle as the elegant champagne flute by Audrey’s bed. Stranger still, each corpse seemed to be pointing a lifeless finger, almost accusingly, at an open book.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Isadora said.

  ‘I’d say we’re looking at two possible scenarios,’ Jake said. ‘Either your friend Laurie deliberately staged his suicide to echo Audrey’s, or someone else did it for him.’

  Anna felt her arms break out into goosebumps. ‘Are you saying someone helped Laurie to choreograph his death-bed scene in some kind of weird homage to Owen’s wife?’

  He spread his hands. ‘At this stage, I’m just speculating, throwing some theories around. But it’s not impossible that someone came into Laurie’s house, after the event.’

  ‘Someone he knew, you mean?’ Isadora said. ‘Someone who knew about Laurie and Owen?’

  Tansy’s eyes went wide. ‘You seriously think someone broke into Laurie’s house, found him lying dead and deliberately re-arranged his death bed so it was like a near-perfect echo of Audrey’s? That’s the kind of thing psychopaths do in movies.’

  Jake shrugged. ‘I’m just saying, after seeing those pictures, we shouldn’t rule anything out.’

  Nobody spoke for a moment, then Tansy said, ‘Eve sounds like someone who is mad enough to do something like that.’

  Isadora drained the last of her mint tea. ‘We should go to the police.’

  ‘And tell them what?’ Anna said.

  ‘About the similarities between the pictures.’

  ‘If we went to the police, we’d have to tell them how we got hold of the pictures of Laurie,’ Tansy reminded her.

  Isadora closed her eyes. ‘Catch twenty-two,’ she said softly. ‘The infernal paradox. Just when we really have to go to the police, we can’t go to the police.’

  ‘And I’m responsible for landing you in it,’ Jake said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘There’s no way anyone could have anticipated this.’

  ‘I never thought I’d have
to be involved in these kinds of fucked-up things.’ Tansy was tugging at her stray curl, stretching it out and letting it go. She seemed to have forgotten about Tansy Lavelle fearless PI and reverted to the shocked girl Anna had first met on Port Meadow. She’d said something similar then, Anna remembered.

  ‘It would be different if you could come up with some hard evidence,’ Jake said. ‘At the moment it’s just feelings and hunches. You need something solid if you’re going to take it to the police.’

  ‘What if we could prove that Eve had been threatening Laurie in some way – that she was responsible for pushing him over the edge?’ Isadora said.

  ‘Then surely the police could get her for stalking?’ Anna said.

  Tansy sat up. ‘It’s a shame we can’t access her emails and social media accounts. I bet we’d find a ton of incriminating stuff.’

  Anna shifted in her chair. ‘I could do that.’

  ‘Anna!’ Isadora said.

  ‘Hey, if it gets the job done,’ Anna said defensively.

  Jake shook his head. ‘I don’t want any of this coming back on you. Like I said, I know a guy who can get in and out again without setting off any alarm bells. Seriously, we call him “the ghost”.’

  ‘Suppose we’re wrong? Suppose our feelings and hunches all turn out to be wrong?’ Isadora said. ‘Then we’ve invaded that woman’s privacy for no good reason. Then we’re the criminals.’

  ‘But at least we’d know,’ Tansy said. ‘We could cross Eve off our list.’

  ‘On the other hand we might just end up with a new and more impenetrable mystery,’ Isadora said gloomily. She attempted a laugh. ‘Sorry, darlings, I think I’m getting tired.’

  ‘Me too,’ Jake said. He stood up and held out his hand to Anna. ‘Come on, kid. I’m taking you home. I have a plane to catch tomorrow morning, and you need to get back to normal.’

  They said their goodbyes in the hall. Jake stooped to kiss Isadora on the cheek. ‘Ma’am, your hospitality is out of this world. I’d like to return the favour one day and cook you some real southern-style buttermilk fried chicken.’