I suddenly remember Conrad’s text message. ‘Oh, yes,’ I say, ‘I knew that.’
‘You knew? Conrad didn’t say anything.’
‘He had a text message and I happened to see it. Everything that’s happened knocked it completely out of my head.’
‘Well, he’s coming on Sunday. I assume it’ll be a flying visit – literally, in his private jet. I’ve no idea how you deal with a bereaved film mogul but I feel, you know, that I should give him my full attention.’
‘I wonder how much he cares.’
‘I don’t know. He’s got half a dozen other children, by various wives.’
‘Still, he is coming himself to take his son home. Or to Oxford, anyway. I wonder why Oxford.’
‘The only place Conrad ever really lived in, I think. His mother took to booze and pills after the divorce; Conrad was packed off to Eton and spent holidays with whoever would have him. He spent a couple of holidays with James, you know, in whatever embassy his father had at the time. Cairo, I think.’
‘The development people in Oxford will be excited. They’ll be hoping for a Wagner College.’
‘So you’ll look after Mrs Forrester?’
‘I will. Come on, Freda. Bath time.’
I feel honour bound to give Freda full value in the bedtime ritual since I haven’t seen her all day, and she milks my guilt for all it’s worth. Settled in bed, finally, read to, sung to and kissed, she declares that she can’t sleep because the room is too messy. When I point out that she won’t be able to see the mess in the dark, she buries her face in her pillow and says she doesn’t like Sophie’s things, and now I look at them, I don’t either, really. Sophie’s stuff is everywhere, crumpled up on her bed, strewn on the floor, draped over chairs, spilling out of her suitcase, and there is something pathetic about these things, something expectant, as though they are waiting for their sad little owner to return. Why haven’t we had any news about Sophie? Has anyone rung the hospital? Annie obviously went there to see Jon not Sophie but will she bring back news?
‘I’ll pack it all up,’ I say, ‘and put it in her case.’
‘And then you can take it to the hospital,’ she says, turning her back to the room and finding her comforting thumb.
I haul Sophie’s suitcase up onto her bed and open it up. It’s a square, old-fashioned, leather case and inside the lid it carries an inscription in red ink, Sophie Jane Forrester, Venn House, Ashenden School, Dorset. Inside is some rather grey underwear and a small, bald, teddy bear wearing a blue knitted scarf. Unmethodically, I start collecting up Sophie’s belongings and packing them into the case. They look as limp, unwashed and forlorn as Sophie looked in the past few days. I survey the grubby bras, the saggy t-shirts yellowish under the arms, the scuffed shoes, the squeezed-out tubes of sun cream and concealer, and the truly filthy brush and comb. I picture the case as it might have looked when it made its first journey with Sophie to her expensive new school. I see name-taped piles of navy blue knickers and grey socks, crisply-folded white blouses and fleecy pyjamas, pleated skirts, a shiny striped tie and, in the corner, the teddy bear, slightly less bald, wearing his blue scarf. Oh, hell, I’m going to start crying. I move briskly over to the dressing table and sweep up the litter of bits and pieces there to put into the case. A square of card flutters to the ground and I pick it up. Conrad Wagner, Christ Church, Oxford it has embossed on the top, and underneath, handwritten, is Ro i Sindet, København and a phone number written European style with crossed sevens. I pile it with the other odds and ends into the case, jam the lid down and stand the case by the door. Then I pick up my laptop, kiss Freda once more, turn off the main light and slip outside.
Out in the corridor, I sit down on the floor and go into my emails. There I find a message from David, sent in the early hours of this very long day and now sadly out of date. Its warnings against getting involved with the murder inquiry and admonitions not to let the police know I think they’re stupid ring with an irresistible tragicomic irony. I would laugh if I weren’t too tired. I ought to reply but I haven’t the energy now to tell him the whole story. If I had a phone I would ring him but as it is brevity will have to do.
Too late, cock! I write. Second incident and I seem to be a suspect so am involved will I, nill I. Would talk but phone is in custody. It just gets better and better. xG
I go and clean my teeth and then I sit back on the floor, lean my head against the wall, close my eyes and wait for a reply. It’s not long before I hear the beep of an incoming message. I could come over, it says. Do you want me there?
Do I want him here? More than anything in the world at this moment I want him here. I want him to jump out of a taxi here, in front of the house, looking tanned and good-looking and grown-up, and sweep me into his arms, laying to rest once and for all any suspicions anyone in this house may have that I’m only here because I’m a sad old bag without a life. Then I want him to sweep into Helsingør police station and do much the same thing there, making it clear, additionally, that I have no reason to be preying on beardless youths. After that, I want him to solve these mysteries with a dazzling display of professional brilliance, leaving Mortensen and Larsen amazed and shamed. And finally I want him to carry me off to the Marienlyst hotel, where we will dine under the stars and make love in a cool, blue room with its windows open to the song of the sea. I settle the laptop on my knees and I type:
No need.
Am coping fine.
But thanks anyway.
G
Then I switch off, carry it into the bedroom, pull off my clothes, climb into Sophie’s bed and weep.
13
DAY SIX
A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye. 1.1
Cycling up a steady gradient with cramp in one’s legs and the sun on one’s back is not conducive to logical thought. Even less conducive is freewheeling down a gradient with the sea breeze deliciously cooling on one’s sweaty arms and face. The ride north along the coast from Helsingør to Hornbæk offers both of these sensations and I’m quite happy, for the moment, to block out thought of any kind. In my sleep, I pursued crazy, repetitive lines of thought endlessly and woke feeling sick and exhausted. The idea of the cycle ride, which I had promised Freda we would definitely do today, seemed impossibly strenuous, but in the end hanging around here, coping with her boredom and disappointment, seemed even worse. So here we are.
I’m not used to cycling so far, and with solid little Freda on the back, but I keep going resolutely, absorbing the intense glitter of the sea and the shimmer of the white houses, which have an almost Mediterranean feeling today but for the clarity of the northern light and the briskness of the breeze that ruffles leaves and flags along the road. There is enough here to stun the senses and daze me into thoughtlessness and I carry on until the point where I feel I might bring us both crashing to the ground and I slither to a halt, climbing off cautiously on cotton wool legs. I lean the bike against a tree, lift Freda from her seat and sit down on the roadside grass for a minute to recover. Then I haul myself to my feet and wheel the bike into the stretch of dark conifers behind us, strung out between the road and the sea. We proceed slowly – I am amazed at the jelly-like consistency of my leg muscles – but soon we emerge again into the sun and reach the sand dunes, where Freda throws herself down in the warm sand and I’m happy to do the same.
We drink cartons of apple juice and we each eat a banana (if I make this, at least, a healthy eating day, I may be able to look Ellie in the eye this evening). Then Freda gets out her bucket and spade and starts transporting buckets of sand from one place to another with an air of serious intent. Since she is happily occupied and I have scanned the area for potential hazards and found none, I am freed for thought, so think I must. First of all, before I get to any of the substantive issues, there is the oddity of what happened this morning at the garage where I hired my bike. When I walked in, who should be at the desk in the office but the young woman in dungarees whom I last saw changing he
r mind about going into the police station? And she was wearing a badge which told me she was Karin Møller, so I think I’m right about her being the Karin that Conrad and James both knew. Anyway, the thing is, she looked as though she’d been beaten up. She had a really painful looking black eye and a vicious graze all down one side of her face. While a man (Karin’s brother, as mentioned by Conrad? His badge says Jonas Møller) went to get a bike for me, I said, ‘You’ve been in the wars, haven’t you?’
She said, ‘Oh, I got knocked off my bike, that’s all,’ and I, being me, didn’t let it go at that.
‘By a car?’ I asked.
‘By a – yes, by a car.’
She was obviously uncomfortable and I should have dropped it but I didn’t. ‘They get too close, don’t they?’ I burbled on. ‘Or they come speeding out of side roads. I’m a cyclist myself. I know how it is.’
She started looking busy with some papers. ‘I hope you reported it to the police,’ I said, and then the chap with my bike came in and said, quite aggressively, ‘She doesn’t need the police. She’s fine.’ And, of course, it went through my mind to wonder whether he had, in fact, beaten her up and the bike accident was just a cover. But they got very businesslike over the hire arrangements and that was that. Still, I can’t help wondering.
And now there’s Sophie to think about. Annie did manage to get some information yesterday, though not directly; there was a police guard on Sophie’s room, apparently, and no-one was giving anything away. Jon, though, had managed to charm one of the nurses looking after him and convince her that he and Sophie were bosom friends. She reported that Sophie was seriously ill but not in danger, so that’s something, though I guess it will be a while before she’s able to say what happened to her.
I came to a view in the night which made sense then, though I’m not sure how it will look in the light of day. Given that I know that I didn’t tell James that Sophie was talking about blackmail in a way that put him back in the frame for Conrad’s murder, and that I didn’t tell him that Sophie was in the castle because I had no idea that she was, I can’t see how James could possibly have been the person who pushed her in the moat. So who did, if anyone? I keep picturing her as I found her in the wine cellar, dressed in her ragged white dress and looking really very pretty with makeup on and colour in her face and her gingery-fair hair in little ringlets round her head. She looked ready, in fact, to pose for any pre-Raphaelite painter as a model for drowned Ophelia. Could that be what she was doing? I didn’t buy her story about wanting to come and rehearse in her costume; it made no sense because, as far as she knew, James was in police custody and there was going to be no play. On the other hand, her despair last night – There’s no-one now – does make sense, now that I know that she was pregnant. Was pregnant or is pregnant? Mortensen said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me that Sophie Forrester was pregnant?’ I couldn’t get him to tell me anything more and I don’t know how to interpret that ‘was pregnant’. My immediate fear was that it meant that Sophie was dead, but then I realised that it might mean just that she wasn’t pregnant any more, and finally I wondered if it might actually just be a grammatical thing – correct sequence of tenses in indirect speech – ‘Why didn’t you tell me’ in the past tense and therefore ‘that she was pregnant’. We are pretty slack in English about following sequence of tenses but non-native speakers tend to be more accurate; it would rather depend on how it’s done in Danish, I suppose.
Well, she was pregnant, and supposing the break-up with James was because of the child? James looks cold-hearted enough for that. Then where did Conrad fit in? As a new boyfriend ready to father the infant? Or as provider of the money for an abortion in a nice private clinic? I try to dredge up what I know about Sophie’s background. Earlier this year, I went to Oxford to see Annie in a strange play about cockroaches written by a student. Sophie was in it too and I was introduced to her mother, up from Sunningdale for the weekend. She was a very quiet woman with a clipped accent that was old-fashioned RP even for Sunningdale. She had an anxious, nervous manner, as though she found the vulgarity of the world too much for her, and she made me feel loud and brash. She could have been a cathedral canon’s widow except that she is, in fact, the widow of an army officer, killed in a helicopter crash when Sophie was quite young. Sophie, she told me, was an only child and her father would have been terribly proud of her. But not of an illegitimate baby, I suppose. Was that enough to have made Sophie actually suicidal about her pregnancy? I can hardly believe that a young woman with an Oxford degree at the beginning of the 21st century could be that desperate, and yet I can’t shake off the sense that Sophie was dressed to be seen, to embody her own misery as the ruined maid of whom Ophelia sings and to go to a watery grave in the person of Ophelia.
And here’s the thing – the thing I haven’t admitted yet – if Sophie was trying to kill herself, how can I not be to blame? She had shared a bedroom with me for four nights and I could see that she was unhappy but I never really tried to find out why. And when she came close to telling me something with her pathetic little cry of there’s no-one now, I fumbled it. Some mother hen I turned out to be.
Conrad’s death I can look at with more detachment, at least, and I have the feeling that last night, at some point, I had the glimmering of an idea about that too. It was to do with that text message on his phone, though now I can’t remember what it was, and it was probably nonsense anyway. There was something Annie said this morning as well, though. It was at breakfast and she had passed on the news about Sophie and then I asked how Jon was, and she said, ‘Oh fed up with being hoist.’ I didn’t know what she meant and she got snappy and said, ‘You know, having his leg held up in that thing. It’s called a hoist, isn’t it?’ So now I’m putting that together with the text message and Karin and the man in the garage and I have an idea. It’s wild, certainly, and I can’t imagine myself telling Anders Mortensen, or even David, about it but the more I think about it the better it seems, so I lie in the sand and watch Freda through half-closed eyes and try fitting everything else in around it until Freda comes and pokes me quite hard with a stick and tells me that she’s hungry and she needs a wee.
I purchased our healthy lunch at the shop attached to the garage and I unpack it now with some pride: ham and cheese in slightly sweet little rolls rather like old-fashioned bridge rolls, sticks of celery and plastic tubs of cut-up fruit, which I usually despise as being there to tempt the idle and profligate but which are perfect for today – and Freda likes the little plastic fork that comes with hers. In fact, Freda likes all of it. She asks rather doubtfully, ‘Do I like cerely?’ but she crunches away at it when told firmly that she does. My self-esteem as a grandmother, at least, begins to rise. And I have provided a treat to round off this sensible meal: a small bar of fair trade chocolate – the only kind I allow myself to buy since I learned that the production of all other chocolate involves an element of labour by trafficked children. Did you know that?
After lunch, we paddle for a bit and then, mindful that Susan Forrester will be arriving, I pack us up and start the ride home. It is less fun that the outward journey because I’m tired and I don’t want to go back to everything that’s waiting for me back in Helsingør, but I get us back to the garage in one piece, hand the bike back to the man who may or may not be Karin’s brother (she is nowhere to be seen) and catch the bus along the coast to the villa.
As we walk in through the gates to the villa, someone is getting out of a hire car from Copenhagen. It is, astonishingly, David. My fantasy scenario of last night (the sweeping into arms et cetera) cannot come to pass, however, for a number of reasons. The most important is that I am in a disgusting condition; I am salty, sandy, sticky, sweaty and smelly, wind blown and frizzy-haired, and wearing a pair of shorts such as no woman of my age should be seen in ever, anywhere. It looks as though David may be going to attempt something like the sweeping thing anyway but I stop him in his tracks. ‘I thought I told you not to come,’ I say, and
I sound more unfriendly than I expected to, even to myself, so he sweeps Freda into his arms instead, where she jigs up and down with delight. A second reason why it is hardly the moment for me to melt into his arms is that he seems to have brought a woman with him. The passenger side door of the car has opened and a woman of about my age has climbed out and is advancing towards me. She has to get quite close before I recognise her as Susan Forrester.
‘David and I met on the plane from Gatwick,’ she says in her hushed, lady-like little voice, politely ignoring my unseemly get-up and bravely putting out a cool hand to shake my hot one. ‘I think we probably got the last two seats right at the back.’ She sounds composed for a woman whose daughter’s life may still be hanging in the balance, but her eyes fill up as she says, ‘David has been so kind, driving me here from Copenhagen. I don’t know what I’d have done without him.’
David looks uncomfortable, as he always does when people are nice about him, and says, ‘I’ll be happy to take you to the hospital as soon as you’re ready.’
She gazes at him with something close to adoration, this polite, kind and competent man. I wonder if he has told her he’s a chief inspector; that would be the icing on the cake. Anyway, she can borrow him for a bit, since her need is greater than mine, but I may have to make it clear at some point that he’s spoken for. In the meantime, I am truly sorry for her and I’m happy to be generous.
‘I am so sorry about Sophie,’ I say, giving her hand a sticky squeeze. ‘Have you spoken to the hospital recently? We haven’t been able to get much information, not being family.’ (I don’t add, and possible murder suspects.) ‘How is she?’
‘She’s in what they call a medically induced coma,’ she says, ‘because of the head injury. But they say she is stable and I can go and see her.’ She looks at David and then at me. ‘Perhaps we could have a cup of tea?’ she asks. ‘And then go?’
One May Smile Page 14