by Peter James
‘Love to. Congratulations.’
‘Yah, thanks.’
Frannie was secretly pleased at being recognized; it helped her stand on her own two feet with Oliver. Seb showed no signs of moving away and she felt a bit embarrassed about prolonging the conversation. ‘Still in your family business?’
‘Yah, it’s OK. Spend half the time in the States.’ He sniffed. ‘Still see any of the people I’d remember?’
‘Meredith. I stayed with her a couple of weekends ago up in York.’
‘Meredith! Great girl! Really liked her. How is she?’
‘Fine. Very married.’
He grinned, then looked solemn. ‘Hey – remember Jonathan Mountjoy?’
‘Yes.’ She remembered him clearly, a tall, quiet boy, always intensely serious, who never said very much.
‘Poor bugger got shot dead in Washington a few weeks ago.’
Frannie stared at him in shocked silence. Her stomach felt as if a drum of cold water had been emptied into it. ‘What – what happened?’
‘Mugger. Gave him his wallet apparently and the bastard still shot him.’
‘God, poor Jonathan!’ she said. ‘That’s awful. Horrible.’ She shivered, feeling oddly disoriented suddenly.
Seb dug his finger into his breast pocket and pulled out a card. ‘Give me a buzz – come and have lunch or something sometime.’ He gave Oliver a smile. ‘I’ll tell Vic I met you,’ he said, then moved away from the table, hesitated for a moment and turned towards Frannie. ‘Great seeing you.’
‘You too.’
Jonathan Mountjoy. Shot. Dead. Gone.
‘Were you at school together?’
Oliver’s voice startled her. She collected her thoughts and smiled at him apologetically. ‘University.’
A waiter presented them with their cocktails.
Oliver raised his glass. ‘Cheers,’ he said, quietly. ‘It’s good to see you again.’
‘You too,’ Frannie said and sipped the pink-tinged fizzing concoction. It had a pleasant taste of apricots but she barely registered it.
‘I’m sorry about the news – about your friend being killed.’
‘Thanks,’ she said heavily. ‘I didn’t really know him that well – hadn’t seen him since university. But he was nice.’ She hunched her shoulders and smiled more brightly. ‘Doesn’t seem as if either of us are having much good news tonight.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Well – except that you’re here, and that’s pretty good news.’
Their eyes met. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
Someone at Seb’s table was telling a story and a girl was squealing in protest. Frannie felt a chilly draught from the air-conditioning against her neck, then a sudden rash of goose-pimples down between her shoulder-blades. She drank some more of the cocktail, but could not feel any effects from it yet. Oliver Halkin and Jonathan Mountjoy’s death were now intertwined in her mind, as if somehow connected. She tried to control the crazy notion that the news was an omen about her and Oliver. That she should pull out now, while she still could.
A waiter hovered; they looked at their menus and ordered, then there was an awkward silence. Oliver shook a stick out of his packet of pannini, then laid both the stick and the packet down, aligning them carefully so they lay parallel to his cutlery. ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ he said.
‘I was thinking about the coincidence – of bumping into Seb – and that we should both know him.’
Oliver broke a piece off the end of his pannini stick and ate it in silence. ‘Coincidences make me uneasy,’ he said.
‘Why’s that?’
He shrugged, then lowered his eyes to the tablecloth, as if embarrassed by what he was about to say. ‘I’ve had rather too many in the past few years; not very happy ones. I find them bad news. They bother me. Probably sounds daft.’
Frannie smiled back at him, surprised that he was superstitious. ‘They happen to everybody, surely? Don’t you ever have harmless coincidences – like when you’re thinking about someone and they phone you?’
‘I’m not sure there is such a thing as a meaningless coincidence.’
As she watched his serious face, she began to feel excluded, and her sceptical grin faded. ‘What’s happened to make you feel that way?’
He fiddled around for some moments with the pannini packet, then responded in a way that did nothing to make her feel better. ‘I suppose the worst was my wife’s death.’ He moved his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
‘I’m sorry,’ Frannie said. ‘What happened?’ She felt that she needed to know.
He leaned forward, pressed his fingernail hard into the tablecloth, and with intense concentration began to make a straight line across. ‘Almost any sort of coincidence,’ he said distantly, as if he had not heard her question. ‘Bumping into someone like Seb Holland. The same number coming up a couple of times. Anything.’
His expression suddenly changed into a distant smile that seemed to be directed at the universe in general rather than at her. ‘The French mathematician Laplace said that chance is the expression of man’s ignorance.’
‘Is that what you believe?’
He picked his glass up by the stem, cupped the base in the palm of his hand and twisted it round slowly, studying the contents with an air of suspicion. ‘Chaos. All these bubbles firing off in here at random. But the effect works; it tastes good and it’s intoxicating. Order from chaos! See?’ He continued to hold the glass in the air as if in a mood of childish contentment.
‘Perhaps the next coincidence is going to change your luck,’ she said and drank some more.
‘Maybe,’ he said, unconvinced.
An image slipped silently through her mind. Jonathan Mountjoy wearing a battered old greatcoat, standing with his hands in his pockets, staring into space. That was how she remembered him, always slightly out of it, in his own world. Dozy, silent Jonathan, handing over his wallet, then the gun coming up, firing.
Over.
She swallowed, placed her hands on the tablecloth, reached out awkwardly for her glass, then stopped as she realized there was nothing left in it.
I’m not sure there is such a thing as a meaningless coincidence.
‘Mozzarella for the signorina!’ A waiter placed their plates in front of them, then brandished a pepper grinder above Oliver’s minestrone. He gave the handle several sharp, crunching twists.
Another waiter appeared with a bottle of wine, which he ceremoniously opened. Frannie looked at her plate, but her appetite had gone. She wanted someone to tell her that it was quite safe to fall in love with Oliver Halkin. She looked across the table at him. He was tasting the wine, holding the glass with one hand, the other lying on the table, large and solid, the winder of his watch nestling in the hairs of his wrist. The sadness had returned to his eyes and she felt an urge to put her own hand out and touch his, to reassure him, to reassure herself.
Her attraction towards him was growing, but her unease grew with it. Almost as if he were reading her thoughts, he smiled at her.
They talked deeply throughout the meal, which Frannie managed to pick at, mostly discussing their views on the meaning of life, and carrying on their arguments from where they had left off at lunch on Tuesday. She found him challenging to talk to, and he opened her mind further to the world of mathematics and physics. Starting to relax, she told him she had tried to read A Brief History of Time but had abandoned it halfway through, and he laughed and told her he’d abandoned it a quarter of the way through, and talked her through the theories in a way that made more, if not total, sense to her.
Frannie had two Sambucas with her coffee, and was pleasantly drunk as they left the restaurant shortly after one; she felt on safer ground with him now. As she fumbled with the seat-belt she was vaguely aware that it was she who had done most of the drinking tonight. She had not even noticed whether Seb Holland was still there or had left.
Oliver dropped her home and escorted her down the steps to her front door. She hope
d he would not make an advance because she would find it hard to resist him if he did, and she wanted it to be special when they made love, and she was too drunk for it to be like that now. ‘Would you like to come in for a coffee?’ she said.
‘I – ought to get back – it’s pretty late.’ He looked awkward suddenly. ‘I was wondering – Edward’s coming back tomorrow – this is his last weekend at home before he goes back to school.’ In the haze of the street-lighting Frannie could see that he was blushing, and wasn’t sure what was coming next. ‘If – if you’re not doing anything, would you – like to come down to the country for the weekend? He took a bit of a shine to you at King’s Cross.’
She tried to think of the implications, but her heart overruled everything. There was a party tomorrow that she was not particularly looking forward to, and she was meant to be going to her parents for Sunday lunch, but had already been thinking of ducking out of that. After the fracas of last Sunday, she could do without seeing her parents for a few weeks. ‘I’d love to,’ she said.
He looked really pleased. ‘How about if I pick you up at about ten?’
‘Do I need to bring anything?’
‘Some wellies. I don’t know what the forecast is. We’re very informal. And swimming gear.’
‘I’ll be ready at ten.’
He held her gaze for a moment, gave her a light peck on the cheek, walked back up the steps, and stood waiting until she was safely inside.
As she closed the front door and pressed the latch, she felt as if she had been scooped up and put on a pedestal. Her emotions came to the surface so that her earlier fears were buried by a glow of pleasure and a sense of anticipation. The very word country conjured an image in her mind of a ramshackle farmhouse, with a flagstone floor and log fire, acres of fields and woods. She could see them taking long walks, maybe having lunch in a pub garden. Lazing around a swimming-pool, with sheep on the far side of the fence. The boy had taken ‘a shine’ to her. Edward. She was pleased about that, rather flattered.
She went through into the kitchen, switched on the light and stared at Oliver’s flowers in the sink, then hunted for something suitable to put them in. She remembered a plain white vase with a green ceramic bow which she had been given a couple of birthdays ago by Meredith Minns, and retrieved it from behind a stack of bowls.
She carefully arranged the flowers in the vase, feeling wide awake and almost deliriously happy, then carried it through into her bedroom and placed it in the centre of the mantelpiece, spreading out the white and peach carnations, the yellow and orange lilies, smelling their scents in turn, then standing back to admire them.
It was after two when Frannie went to bed, and she set her alarm for eight. After she switched the light out she lay awake for a long time, her brain buzzing.
When she eventually slept, she sank into a sinister dream in which she was running through dark empty streets in a city. Ahead of her she could see Jonathan Mountjoy, silhouetted against a high-rise building. But although he was not moving and she was sprinting, she was not getting any nearer. Footsteps were clacking down an alley. Someone was running towards him holding a gun. She tried to scream at him, to warn him, but her voice would not work. She could see the gun pointing at him, the wild, shaky hand holding it. ‘Jonathannnnnnnnn!’
The shot woke her with a start.
People were screaming. The sirens of the police and the ambulance were wailing. Then she realized it was a real siren, somewhere in the distance. But the shot had been here, in this room. A bang, or a slap.
Someone in here.
A deep chill of fear spread through her. For a moment she was too scared to move. Then slowly she put out her hand, groping for the light switch. Snapped it on.
The darkness leapt back into the walls. She stared around with frightened eyes. Only an eerie silence filled the room. Nothing moved, nothing breathed, but something was wrong. Shadows from the lamp lay across the ceiling; a fly sat directly above her. She stared at her prints on the walls; at the wardrobe. Her throat was parched, her mouth dry. She stared at the mantelpiece. The mantelpiece where she had carefully put the vase with the flowers.
The vase was still there but there were no flowers in it.
She sat bolt upright. The flowers lay strewn across the floor, as if they had been hurled there by someone or something in a rage.
CHAPTER SIX
Oliver turned up shortly after ten, wearing a rugger shirt, baggy red trousers and ancient laced yachting shoes; he carried Frannie’s bag to an elderly mud-caked Range Rover.
‘What happened? Did you put the Renault in a grow-bag?’ she asked.
He laughed. ‘I just use the Renault for hacking around London; it’s so clapped out I don’t think it would survive a long journey.’
The interior of the Range Rover was as cluttered and untidy as his Renault, with the addition of crumpled rugs and an assortment of chewed rings and rubber bones on the rear seat. ‘Captain Kirk’s,’ he said by the way of explanation.
‘Captain Kirk?’
‘Edward’s dog; he treats this bus as his kennel.’
They drove south out of London, through traffic that was heavy and slow at first, but which thinned out on the motorway. The sun beat down ahead of them out of a cloudless sky. Frannie had on a checked shirt, with a thin jumper slung around her shoulders, white cotton trousers and trainers, and she felt cool and comfortable in her clothes. Her thoughts were less comfortable and she felt tired, her eyes sandpapery from the fitful sleep she had had.
The flowers churned in her mind. She had checked the flat, but the windows were shut, the front door was locked and no one could have been in. She had put them back in the vase and in the morning they were still there, and she had begun to wonder seriously whether it had simply been a dream. Or just a household accident to which she’d overreacted.
She asked Oliver more about his farm, trying to build up a picture of it. He told her his manager and younger brother, Charles, was a very committed Green, and the farm was now almost completely organic. They were building up large herds of organically reared cattle and sheep, although both were fraught with problems, and he explained some of them. She learned also that Charles was divorced and had custody at the weekends of his son, Tristram, who was the same age as Edward.
Oliver was not a driver she would have liked to have been following, she thought. He drove well if a bit fast most of the time, but occasionally, when he talked about something that particularly excited him, he would go for several miles oblivious of an indicator he’d left flashing, or forgetting to change up into top gear so that the engine raced, maddeningly. Several times she had been quite convinced he was not going to stop for a red light, and had found herself jabbing her foot down.
Now, cruising on the motorway, everything had settled down. The windows were open and air billowed through the car, batting strands of Frannie’s hair across her face, and she lounged back in her seat, beginning to relax, surveying the scenery through her sunglasses.
As London receded, the disconcerting memory of her sleepless night receded with it. The weekend ahead was full of promise and she was determined to enjoy herself. Her return journey seemed a hundred years away, and she wondered whether she and Oliver would have become lovers by then.
The friends with whom Edward had been staying in France were catching a ferry to Dover this morning and would be dropping him home around midday. The accident on the powerboat had clearly distressed Oliver; he had not talked about the boy very much, yet she had the feeling that Edward had a strong influence on him. She realized how very little she really knew about Oliver. Their conversations had all been about their subjects, their views on life, and they had talked only very sketchily about their families. She had not been able to draw him back on to the topic of his wife’s death and she was curious to know both how she had died, and what the coincidences were that had distressed him so much. But she did not want to be morbid.
The silhouette of the South
Downs, like a huge barrier wedged across the horizon, drew closer, and a few miles on they turned eastwards off the motorway, on to a busy country road. They drove into a heavy stench of manure, but even that she found refreshing after the cloying, greasy air of London.
‘Where does Edward go to school?’ she asked.
‘A place called Stowell Park. A prep school about ten miles away. It’s easy for picking him up at weekends.’
‘Does he board?’
‘Yes.’
‘He doesn’t mind?’
‘No. That’s what he wants to do.’
Through an opening in a hedgerow she glimpsed a flurry of activity at a car-boot sale. ‘Did you board?’ she asked.
‘Yes, from the time I was seven.’
‘How did you find it?’
‘I hated it. I loathed school altogether.’
‘Why?’
He shrugged. ‘I couldn’t do what I wanted, I suppose. And I didn’t care about team games.’ He smiled and scratched his ear. ‘I was only interested in mathematics and aeroplanes as a child. We could only do one afternoon a week of gliding, and that was in summer, and I used to think the maths teachers were a load of bozos.’ He smiled again. ‘I don’t think I was very well adjusted to school. Did you like it?’
‘Yes, most of the time, I loved it. Particularly history, and the classics. I used to long in the holidays for term to start. People probably thought I was an awful swot.’
‘And they all thought I was a lazy bugger who didn’t like being prodded. They were probably right.’
‘And Edward really enjoys it?’
‘Yes,’ he said, then he went silent for a while.
They drove along a bypass, past an old town built over a hill; at the top she could see the ramparts of a castle.
‘Lewes,’ he said. ‘County town of Sussex.’
‘Where Simon de Montfort defeated and captured Henry the Third in 1264.’
He glanced at her quizzically.