The White Shepherd

by Annie Dalton

  Anna forced herself to replay the scene in slow-motion. It was true Kit had been there in the crowd, but someone else had been between him and Paulette, effectively blocking her view.

  Once again she replayed the memory, watching Paulette break into a reminiscent smile as she caught sight of Laurie’s visitor. Then she played it again, only this time without editing out the person standing next to Kit. ‘God bless that lovely man,’ Paulette had said. Anna had assumed she’d meant the man who had come to Laurie’s house ‘to put things right’. And that had been who Paulette had meant, but she’d also been referring to ‘the lovely man’ who had just spoken so beautifully about Laurie at his memorial. She’d been talking about Huw Traherne.

  Anna felt her heart rate speed up. She had mentally erased him from the crowd. She’d seen him, but immediately discounted him because Huw wasn’t supposed to have visited Laurie. It was Kit who’d gone to see him. Kit had told her that Huw and Laurie hadn’t talked for years. If Huw had lied about that, what else had he lied about?

  She flashed back to Frankie McVeigh at the Jade Pagoda: ‘Sometimes the most obvious solution is the right solution.’

  Anna was sitting on the edge of her bed now, tugging at her hair. She’d allowed herself to be fatally distracted by gangsters and mad personal assistants when all the time she’d just needed to ask herself one simple question. Who stood to gain the most from Laurie’s death?

  This question naturally led to a second and equally disturbing question, one she’d never previously thought to ask. Had Laurie and Owen really succeeded in concealing their relationship from Huw? Laurie believed they had, but how likely was that in the real world? Family secrets are like splinters. Sooner or later they work their way out. Eve had said Audrey had caught Owen and Laurie having sex. Huw’s was a famously dysfunctional family. Who knew what Huw had seen or heard, or what the mentally unstable Audrey might have told her son?

  Anna buried her face in her hands, the light-drenched Turner skies replaced by a succession of images of Huw. Huw at the book launch; in the Duke bar; at the Sheldonian holding Laurie’s concert together, the concert which he had organized and which had left him visibly exhausted. Oddly remote, permanently stressed, beautifully-spoken Huw. Could someone, anyone, let alone a manifestly fragile man like Huw, get up on stage in front of the great and good of Oxford and talk about his old friend with such obvious emotion if he had cold-bloodedly murdered him weeks before? And at Gee’s, that sweet story about Laurie and the hare; Huw had told it with such tenderness that for the first time she’d felt herself almost warm to him.

  If he’d been faking she’d have felt it, wouldn’t she? Unless he was a consummate actor?

  But if Huw was implicated in Laurie’s death in some way, why would he have staged a suicide scene that so closely mirrored his mother’s?

  It was long past midnight, and there was no chance now that Anna would be able to sleep. She put on her flannel robe and her warm socks and went downstairs to make a pot of chamomile tea as Bonnie watched sleepily from her basket. She perched tensely on her kitchen sofa, snatching sips of still-scalding tea. Suppose, just suppose, that for all the false twists and turns and mistakes, Anna’s instincts had successfully led her to the man who had murdered Laurie? Suppose it really was Huw? Then where did Sara Traherne fit in, if she fitted in at all?

  You didn’t need a degree in couples counselling to see that there was something deeply dysfunctional about the Traherne’s marriage, but might they still be acting as a team? Despite her affair with Dritan, might Sara still have a vested interest in shoring up the profitable myth of Owen Traherne as the charismatic Antony to Audrey’s Cleopatra? They stood to make a pile of money if the Hollywood blockbuster got made. But if it got out that Owen had had sex with his son’s under-age school friend, the movie wouldn’t get made, and the Trahernes’ empire and everything Huw had worked for would collapse in ruins.

  The chamomile tea was not having a noticeably calming effect. The more Anna tried not to think about her suspicions, the more she couldn’t stop. She took her mug to the sink and rinsed it. She could go back to bed and listen to talk radio until she fell asleep, which would possibly be never, or she could find some other way to get through the night.

  She’d thought of texting Tansy and Isadora with her discovery, but immediately vetoed this plan. It wasn’t as if she had real proof. It was more like a feeling, a kind of all-pervasive nausea. That ominous slipping, falling sensation she’d felt when they were coming back from London had never quite gone away. What if her sudden obsession with Huw Traherne was a symptom of her returning illness?

  Fetching her iPad she went to sit on the rug by Bonnie. Anna’s dog looked up at her with soulful eyes. Petting her White Shepherd with one hand, Anna did an Internet search for Huw Traherne with the other. She’d searched for information on the Trahernes before, but this time she tried different criteria. At first she just got the usual screeds of PR concerning the Traherne Foundation.

  OK, gloves off, she thought. Deleting her current search Anna entered the words ‘Huw Traherne scandal’ into the box.

  She skimmed through pages where the words ‘Huw’ or ‘Traherne’ or ‘scandal’ were randomly highlighted, such as: ‘The level of support for the arts in this country is a scandal,’ says Huw Traherne, son of famous poet Owen Traherne.

  Halfway down the third page she was surprised to see her search terms pop up in someone’s blog. She clicked on the link because there was no point doing a search if she didn’t chase up likely leads, but as she started to read she let out a moan of protest that made Bonnie sit up in concern. ‘A conspiracy nut,’ Anna explained in disgust. The blogger had ‘proof’ of an elitist secret society of Oxford undergraduates dedicated to drink, drugs, decadence and very likely other behaviours beginning with the letter ‘D’. Then she saw something that made her freeze.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Anna said. She ran her hands through her hair. ‘Shit!’

  NINETEEN

  The coroner’s verdict on Aidan Rose had been suicide, ‘while the balance of his mind was disturbed’. There had been no suggestion that another person or persons might have been implicated in Aidan’s lonely downward spiral. But the anonymous blogger (had he been Aidan’s friend, Anna wondered, or a concerned sibling or other family member?) insisted Aidan had been the victim of a sustained bullying campaign which had led to him taking his own life part-way through his second year. Acknowledging that Huw Traherne was not the only student involved, the blogger was adamant that he’d been the main instigator, stepping up his persecution to such a pitch that, broken and demoralized, Aidan was driven to take an overdose.

  As she read and reread the ugly accusations, Anna felt increasingly light-headed, as if she was being sucked out of the mundane physical world into some horrifying dimension where nothing was too terrible to be true.

  She remembered Isadora confessing, as she drove through the mist, that she’d initially pegged Huw and Kit as the kind of undergraduates who came up to Oxford to join the right societies, ‘not to mention the wrong societies’. But then he’d met Sara and become a reformed character.

  Anna quickly typed Aidan Rose’s name into the search engine, misspelling Aidan three times because her hand was shaking both from excess adrenalin and fear of what she might find. In fact there was pitifully little to show for his nineteen years on earth. There was a heartbreaking photo of a bespectacled Aidan in the college gardens, proudly wearing his cap and gown and a white bow tie. Anna guessed it had been taken in his first term when he was still aglow with his achievement. A working-class boy from Newcastle on Tyne, he had delighted the teachers at his comprehensive school by getting a place at Magdalen College.

  Anna found a brief mention of the tragedy in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. Aidan Rose had also been name-checked in a Sunday broadsheet, one of those perennial articles about the high risk of depression amongst less privileged Oxbridge students and how they should be offered counselling
as a matter of course. That was all. Unlike Huw Traherne, Aidan Rose was not connected to anyone of note, and so he had simply vanished into the statistics of those undergraduates who turned out to be insufficiently robust to cope with the rigours of an Oxbridge education.

  Anna pulled up a photograph of Huw Traherne. Why did she always have that tragic war-poet association? Huw’s father, who was a bona fide poet, had looked like a scruffy countryman, a man’s man, someone with a dog at his heels and a hip-flask in his pocket. But Huw was now in his forties, and his face still had the unlived-in look of a boy whose world had imploded before he’d had the chance to grow up. People interpreted this look as intolerable disappointment and stress – poor Huw. But Anna didn’t think it was either of those. It was something else, she thought, studying his face; something he kept hidden.

  Had Huw found out about his father and his school friend, then swiftly pushed this devastating knowledge out of sight? Then, when Owen died, had Huw found some bizarre relief in promoting the life and work of a largely fictional father, the heroic father Huw had wanted and needed, the father he should have had? Until Laurie shared his and Owen’s secret with Naomi …

  Anna felt her breath catch. For a moment she’d seen another hated face overlaying the pixels that made up Huw Traherne’s image. She tried to tell herself it was just her tired brain playing tricks. But by then it was too late. The old compulsion had been triggered. She saw herself flying upstairs, unlocking the cupboard doors, scrawling her pain across the picture of that other privileged white boy; anything to relieve the pressure mounting inside.

  But somehow this time she was able to make herself wait it out, and when the worst had passed she found that she’d decided to phone Isadora. Isadora had known Huw when he was up at Oxford. She would have heard if he’d been involved in a scandal. Just in time, though, Anna thought to check her mobile. It was only three a.m. What was an OK time to call someone to tell them you had possibly uncovered a murderer? Was eight a.m. too soon?

  Too tired for rational thought, but too wired to unplug herself from the Internet with its addictive allure of instant answers, Anna started doing random searches. She looked up Sara Traherne and discovered that she had also lost her mother, in a car accident in her teens. The daughter of an eminent heart surgeon, she’d been educated at St Paul’s School for Girls and read English at Somerville College where she’d got an impressive first. Had the motherless Sara seen a fellow orphan in Huw? Eve had said she’d hoped Sara’s love might heal him. What exactly had she thought Huw needed to be healed from?

  Anna was going round in circles, and she still had to get through another five hours before she could decently phone Isadora. She suddenly thought of another search she could do to kill time. She could look up the folk tale that had provided the inspiration for Owen Traherne’s perplexing poem, ‘The Tree of Sorrows’.

  She found several versions of this rabbinical teaching story and printed one off to mull over later. It went like this:

  Once upon a time, God became aware that his people had fallen out of love with his Creation. To start with they’d had nothing but praise for the beautiful world he had given them to live in, but now all they did was bemoan their sufferings. So in his infinite compassion, God created a giant Tree where for just one day humans could hang up these same sufferings, like washing left out to dry. The thought of handing them over for even twenty-four hours made everyone dizzy with excitement. People were queuing all night. Everyone wanted to be first to be rid of the oppressive conditions that had dogged them all their lives.

  Miraculously, the Tree had just enough room for everyone’s woes, and for an entire day, everybody felt as peaceful and innocent as humans were originally designed to be.

  But all too soon the day was ending and it was time to shoulder their detested burdens and limitations once again. Seeing everyone’s long faces, God suggested that they should walk around his vast Tree of Sorrows until they found something that suited them better. The people thought this was a wonderful idea. They walked round and round the tree, enthusiastically peering into the branches, determined to find a set of sufferings that were more congenial.

  Next morning, God came by to see how his new arrangement was working out. To his dismay, every single human had reclaimed his own sorrows.

  A therapist could have endless fun interpreting that story, Anna thought grimly as she fled upstairs carrying a litre bottle of mineral water. Did people fall obsessively in love with their sufferings like the unfaithful lover in Owen’s poem, even as they longed to be rid of them? Anna’s sorrows were so much a part of her now. How would it feel if she could just shrug them off like a worn-out coat and hang them up for twenty-four hours – or forever? Who might she be without them? Nobody, she thought bleakly. Owen’s poem had depressed her because it was true.

  Anna pulled sweat pants and a running vest out of a drawer and put them on. Tugging her hair through a scrunchy she went into her study, switched on her running machine and began to run. With breaks for water she ran for the rest of the night. What was the point in asking who Anna would be without her sorrows? This was who she was: this thirty-something woman desperately running from nowhere to nowhere, all because she couldn’t bear the terror that overcame her when she stood still.

  At six a.m. Anna stepped off her running machine, draped a towel around her sweating shoulders and called Isadora’s number. ‘I’m sorry, I know it’s early,’ she said, breathless from fear as much as from running. ‘I hope I didn’t wake you.’

  ‘Not at all!’ Isadora said, as warmly as if her friends phoned her at dawn all the time. ‘Hero already did that an hour ago by throwing up on my bed! Poor little thing, I think she’s got some kind of bug. So I’m up drinking coffee till it’s time to call my vet. So, darling, what’s got you so agitated that you’re up and awake at this appalling hour?’

  ‘I wanted to ask if you remembered an undergraduate called Aidan Rose.’ Isadora must have met thousands of students. Anna anticipated a long pause as she went hunting back through her memories.

  But she said immediately, ‘Yes, I remember Aidan. I didn’t know him personally, but one of his friends was in my tutorial group. It was absolutely tragic what happened.’

  ‘I tried to look him up online,’ Anna said, ‘but there’s hardly anything.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be, darling,’ Isadora said. ‘It was rather hushed up. Quite wrongly in my opinion.’

  ‘You mean the college authorities hushed it up?’ Anna was sitting on the floor in her study. Outside her window it was reluctantly getting light. She swallowed. ‘I found this blog. The writer thinks Huw Traherne drove Aidan to kill himself.’

  Isadora sighed. ‘I’m afraid there might be some truth in that story. This might sound fanciful, Anna, but the first time I met Huw, I felt that he was deeply damaged.’

  ‘Because of his mother committing suicide?’

  ‘My feeling is that Huw’s problems pre-dated her suicide. It’s just that afterwards they became more apparent. He had – episodes. Once he physically attacked one of his tutors because he thought the tutor had said something detrimental about his father’s writing. The tutor was a known drunk though, so Huw narrowly escaped being sent down, despite breaking the poor man’s jaw.’

  Anna heard the surprised trill of a bird as an electric light came on somewhere. ‘Do you know who else might have been involved in the bullying?’ she asked. ‘I mean, was Kit?’ She hated asking, but just now she didn’t feel she dared to trust anyone.

  Isadora sounded appalled. ‘No, no. Never! If anything, Kit was Huw’s Jiminy Cricket, trying to keep him grounded. It was really Kit and Sara together who helped him stay on track. If it wasn’t for them, I doubt he’d have even scraped a pass.’ Anna heard her take a gulp of liquid. ‘What’s this really all about, darling? Why are you digging up these sad old stories?’

  Anna pictured Isadora wrapped in an exotically patterned kimono, bushy hair uncombed, doing her pouncing acad
emic’s look. ‘Oh, you know me, the obsessive midnight googler,’ Anna said carelessly. ‘I’m having one of my insomniac phases that’s all.’

  ‘So this hasn’t got anything to do with Laurie?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Anna assured her. ‘Didn’t Tansy tell you? I’ve officially resigned from detecting. Just one more thing though before I go – why didn’t you tell me about Huw before?’

  ‘About the scandal? I think that would have been most unethical of me, as well as unfair. It was a long time ago. Huw changed, like we all do. God knows I’ve made some terrible mistakes in my time, and I would hate for people to still be throwing them in my face.’ She stopped for breath. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to rant.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Anna said. ‘I’ve got to go now. I hope Hero gets better soon.’

  ‘I was thinking of going into town after she’s seen the vet,’ Isadora said. ‘Would you like to meet for lunch?’

  ‘Another time,’ Anna said quickly. ‘I’ve got rather a lot on just now.’ Promising to arrange something very soon, she rang off and went to shower and change.

  Three hours later Anna walked into the offices of the Traherne Foundation. Her plan, if you could call it a plan, had come into her head as soon as she’d looked up the Traherne Foundation’s website and seen that their head office was in Central Oxford. Once she had this information she knew she had to go there to talk to Huw. She had to know if Huw had gone to see Laurie. The compulsion overwhelmed her need to hide and conceal.

  She found the Foundation’s offices up a smart cobbled alleyway almost backing on to the Museum of Modern Art and at the top of a steep flight of stairs. The building dated back to the Georgian era, but the offices inside were airy and open-plan. Anna could smell fresh coffee and new paint. A low bookshelf was stocked with collections of Owen Traherne’s poems, some translated into different languages. The leather sofas looked expensive and comfortable. As offices went, it was pleasant.