by Annie Dalton
He gave an apologetic laugh. ‘Sorry, I just haven’t seen you since that summer, and you look so uncannily like your mum. Even that little thing you do when you’re nervous.’
‘What little thing?’ she said immediately suspicious.
He touched his hand to the back of his neck. ‘That little thing.’
Anna, who almost never cried, for a moment felt close to tears. Her grandfather was the only other person left who knew her from that time and he had never said outright that she looked like his daughter Julia, her mother. She swallowed. ‘You also look uncannily like your mum,’ she told him. ‘Neither of us looks anything like our dads.’
Tim went to stand by the French windows, looking out into the rainy courtyard. She wondered if he’d noticed the empty dresser shelves and what he’d think if he knew how near Anna had come to joining her brothers and sister wherever dead people end up. ‘So do you live here alone?’ he asked.
‘I did for a while. Now I’m sharing with a friend, just until she finds a place of her own.’ Anna carried their mugs over to the table. ‘I don’t know if you take sugar.’ She let out a nervous laugh. ‘I seem to remember you used to pig out on Flying Saucers and jelly beans.’
Tim came to join her. ‘And you used to be able to fit five cream crackers in your mouth at once,’ he said with a grin.
‘Dan always beat me though,’ she said. ‘He had jaws like a hippo, that boy!’
It hit them both at the same moment that she was joking about her murdered brother.
Tim picked up his mug and took a rapid swallow of his too-hot coffee. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you with my phone call the other day. I feel especially bad about it, because I kind of schmoozed your number from your grandfather, talking about all the good times my brother and I had with your family. He thought – well, bless him, he said, he thought it might be good for us “young people” to talk.’ He flashed Anna a humorous look. ‘I guess we must still seem quite young to someone who’s almost ninety?’
‘You are still young,’ Anna said. ‘You’ve hardly changed, except for the stubble.’
‘Ditto,’ he said, ‘apart from the stubble obviously! Though, in my earliest memories of you, you’re always upside down.’ It was Tim’s turn to give a nervous laugh. ‘Seriously! You were either standing on your head or dangling from a tree branch. And then you grew up and became the coolest girl at Cherwell.’
‘I might have made it into the cool set. I doubt if I was ever the coolest girl,’ Anna objected. ‘Plus, how would you know how cool I was? You were miles away at Marlborough.’
‘Being a swot and a nerd and counting off the days till the holidays.’ He took another gulp of his coffee. ‘And there’s Dad telling me these were the happiest days of my life, Jesus! Running the school newspaper was about the only thing that kept me sane.’ Tim shifted in his chair. ‘I’m really sorry to just turn up on your step like the Ghost from Christmas Past. But you didn’t reply to any of my thousand and one emails and I just didn’t know what else to do.’
They’d stopped circling around each other now. Anna felt a flicker of fear. Now Tim was going to tell her why he was here.
‘My wife suggested sky writing.’ He flashed a nervous grin. ‘I thought that was a bit too Spike Jonze.’
‘That’s why you’ve been emailing, because you found Max?’
‘Actually, he isn’t Max Strauli these days,’ Tim said. ‘He’s into shamanism now. On his first shamanic journey he was told he had to pick a new name for his new life, so now he goes by “Dagon”.’
Anna stared at him. ‘“Dagon”? You’re sure he wasn’t just joking around?’ Max had been an outrageous, not to say cruel, joker.
Tim shook his head. ‘Nope, he was deadly serious. It’s the name of a Babylonian fertility god. I looked it up on my phone when I got back into my car.’
Anna tried to imagine what heavenly thunderbolt could have turned egotistical upper-middle-class Max into the kind of person who went on shamanic journeys.
‘So he’s just – Dagon now? He doesn’t have a last name?’
‘I don’t think you need a last name do you, if you’re a god?’
Anna felt a hysterical fit of giggles fighting to escape. ‘So I’m guessing he’s not working for Microsoft then?’
‘He’s not working full stop. No computer, no mobile phone. He’s living in a van with a New Age Traveller community in mid-Wales. Permanently stoned, as far as I can tell.’
‘And he sees himself as some kind of fertility god?’
‘There were crowds of little feral kids in and out of his van. I don’t know if any of them were his. There was a pretty girl hovering silently in the background, or she would have been pretty if someone would give her a few vitamins. She didn’t look more than sixteen.’
Anna felt an all too familiar rush of fear. ‘And Max told you about – about the night my family …’
‘He didn’t tell me much,’ Tim said quickly. ‘But he did say that he was completely off his face the night it happened. He told me that someone called Dominic—’ He noticed Anna flinch. ‘You knew him, yeah?’
She gave a tight nod. ‘Yes, I knew Dom.’
‘He said Dominic had given him an eighth of black and a wad of cash to take you out for the night, get back in your good books, whatever that meant.’
‘We’d broken up,’ Anna explained. ‘He’d dumped me, just a few days before.’ That’s what they’d fought about in his Ford Fiesta. It had ended with her jumping out of his car, and walking all the way back to North Oxford in the early hours. Stoned and drunk, filled with raw teenage hurt and rage, it had seemed to Anna that her life was over. She closed her eyes wishing she could go back in time and shake some sense into that silly self-absorbed girl.
‘Anyway, Max – sorry, “Dagon”,’ Tim corrected, ‘commented that he’d never known Dom to be generous with his drugs and he thought that was just a little bit suspicious, or at least he did once he’d sobered up.’ He slid an anxious glance at Anna. ‘So did you know that Dominic’s back in the country?’
Anna gave another tight nod. ‘I’ve known for a while.’ It was before she’d cancelled all her Google alerts. The trail had gone cold. Max had apparently dropped off the grid. Dom had allegedly disappeared to Argentina to work in his uncle’s vineyard.
And then, in a peaceful Oxfordshire churchyard, a few weeks after she and Bonnie had almost lost their lives, her phone had sounded that heart-stopping ping. Fighting for calm, she’d gone straight to the nearest newsagent to buy a copy of Tatler. Back home, she’d frantically scanned pages, until she found the three-line news item tucked away in ‘Bystander’, the Tatler’s gossip column.
Anna had ripped it out and run with it into her study. Half blind with distress, she struggled to fit the key into the lock of her armoire for what must have only been seconds but had felt like a screaming eternity.
That had been a bad night, her worst since she’d got Bonnie. Almost the worst part about it was that she’d half-convinced herself it was all over! She was going to be like Naomi Evans. She was going to embrace life and possibly fall in love! But that single ping on her phone had been enough to send her hurtling back into the dark …
‘So have you spoken to him?’ Tim said.
‘Dom? I can’t get anywhere near him,’ Anna said. ‘I don’t know how much you know about his family, but Dom’s always been pretty much untouchable.’
Tim drained his coffee. ‘He does seem quite disturbingly well connected.’
Anna was still trying to absorb what he’d told her. ‘I was surprised when Max was suddenly so desperate to see me again,’ she admitted. ‘I mean, seeing as he’d been so keen to break up just a few days previously.’ Surprised and flattered, she thought, not to mention smug in that way of sexually confident teenage girls. He still wants me. Now it seemed Max hadn’t wanted her at all. He’d just wanted his eighth of black. What had Dom wanted though?
She glanced across at Tim. He rem
embered her dangling upside down from trees. She remembered him patiently teaching her his dance moves. For years they’d been inextricably part of each other’s worlds. But that was long ago and in another lifetime. Unlike Anna, Tim still had the parents and sibling that he’d started out with. And now he had a wife and a successful career in journalism. For the first time it occurred to her that he might even have children.
Without realizing, Anna folded her arms defensively across her chest. ‘Why are you actually here, Tim? Why are you raking up all this stuff after all these years?’
Bonnie picked up on the new edge to Anna’s voice. Stepping out of her basket, she silently placed herself between Anna and Tim.
‘It’s OK,’ Anna told her. ‘Tim’s not going to hurt me.’ But Bonnie kept her eyes warily fixed on Tim.
Tim was dismayed. ‘Why would she think I was going to hurt you?’
‘Some men broke in to my flat,’ Anna told him. ‘They – hurt us both. Since then Bonnie has been a bit distrustful of strangers.’
‘Fucking hell, Anna, I should think that’s all you bloody needed!’ Tim’s voice was husky with emotion. ‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea.’
‘So why exactly are you here?’ Anna repeated.
‘I was just going to get around to that,’ Tim said. ‘It kind of has to do with Alice.’
‘Is she your wife?’
He shook his head. ‘Alice was my girlfriend. We met on our first day at Bristol Uni. It was wonderful. She was wonderful. We were inseparable all that first term. And then Alice found someone else. Someone she found more – exciting, intriguing, challenging; I think those were the words she used when she dumped me.’
‘That must have been quite crushing,’ Anna said, privately wondering where Tim was going with this.
‘It’s much, much worse than you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘Three months after Alice left me, she was found strangled.’
‘Oh God, Tim.’
‘She’d been thrown down into the Avon Gorge, you know under the suspension bridge?’ Tim swallowed. ‘Anyway, it was just two years after your family …’ He passed his hands across his face. ‘Given what you’ve been through, Anna, I don’t want to do a self-indulgent song and dance about how your family’s murders affected me. But they did have – quite an effect. And then, what happened to Alice, and the disgusting self-serving web of lies and false alibis her killer wove to keep anyone from finding out the truth … well, I suppose it made me quite – angry!’ He gave a grim laugh. ‘And I thought, I could either let this anger corrode me from the inside and turn me into a complete nutjob, or I could become the kind of person who tries to find out the truth.’
‘It was the exciting new boyfriend who killed her, wasn’t it?’ Anna said.
Tim nodded. ‘It took a long while to prove but in the end it all came out, that he’d attacked two previous girlfriends and badly frightened several other girls with his mood swings.’
Anna felt a pang of guilt. If she’d stayed in touch with the Freemantles, she would have known about this harrowing time in Tim’s life. She could maybe have helped. Unlikely, she reminded herself. Anna couldn’t even help herself back then. But that didn’t stop her feeling ashamed.
Tim ran his hands through his hair. ‘So, to answer your question, I’m not here to stir things up, or to get a sensational story. I suppose what I really want is your blessing. I want to help you solve this mystery that screwed up your life – and, to some extent, mine.’
For the first time Anna felt a flicker of irritation. Exactly how had Tim’s life been ‘screwed up’?
‘Anjali, that’s my wife, thinks I’m “crazy-pants”.’ He made quote marks in the air. ‘She said I should let sleeping dogs lie – if Bonnie will forgive the phrase.’
‘Your wife could be right.’ Anna took a deep breath. ‘Tim, we’ve been out of touch a long time, so you can’t even begin to know what it – what my family’s murders – did to me. I’ve driven myself almost mad trying to find out who could have broken into our house that night, I actually accused a completely innocent person and had a restraining order taken out on me. I’ve spent time in mental institutions. I put my entire life on hold, while I tried to track their murderers down, and – it damaged me, Tim. It’s taken me over sixteen years, but I’ve finally reconciled myself to the fact that I may never know if Max or Dominic were involved. I just can’t let myself go back to that bad, obsessive place, I just can’t!’
Tim didn’t answer her for a moment. ‘I can see that,’ he said at last, ‘and I wouldn’t ask it of you. What I’m asking is for you to let me do the tracking.’
After Tim had gone, Anna put their mugs in the dishwasher then she mopped the floor, erasing Bonnie’s muddy paw-prints. It had been surprisingly pleasant and heart-warming to spend time with Tim. But some instinct told her he hadn’t been entirely straight with her. She wished Tansy was home so she could run her and Tim’s conversation past her. She tried to call Jake but his phone was switched off so she left him a voicemail. Then Anna went upstairs, shut herself into her study and unlocked the armoire that functioned as her murder cupboard.
She opened out the two doors, and ran her finger along one of the taut red strings that criss-crossed countless photographs, witness statements, newspaper cuttings, until she found the scrap of paper she’d torn from the gossip column in Tatler.
‘After an enviable life trajectory which has taken him from the highlands of Argentina to high-energy New York, Dominic Scott-Neville has brought his beautiful wife, former model and well-known socialite, Ghislaine, back home to the family estate in Oxfordshire, following the sudden death of his father, Ralph Scott-Neville.’
EIGHT
At six thirty a.m. the next day, Anna was making coffee in the chilly kitchen, moving around as quietly as possible so as not to disturb Tansy, when the phone shrilled, startling her out of her wits. She threw herself at it, knocking it out of its cradle. ‘Grandpa?’
‘Oh, Anna, I’m so sorry, how thoughtless of me. I didn’t mean to give you a scare at this unearthly hour. I honestly didn’t think you’d pick up. I only meant to leave a message.’
It was Isadora. Anna’s knees went weak with relief. She knew that one day the phone would ring at some weird time of day, and it wouldn’t just be a friend wanting to leave a message. She took a long breath. ‘That’s fine, Isadora. I’ve actually been up a while. Are you OK?’
‘The police came to see me late last night,’ Isadora said. ‘Robert Keane committed suicide.’
Barely awake after a turbulent night, it took a few seconds before Anna’s brain caught up. Oh, fuck, she thought, Robert Keane. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said, stunned. ‘What an unbearably crap few weeks you’re having.’ She recalled his words at James Lowell’s wake. My ex-wife finally left me. My children hate me. But life goes rolling merrily on, ha ha ha. Now another member of the Oxford Six was dead.
‘I don’t know what to say either – or what to think.’ Isadora gave a bewildered laugh. ‘At the moment, I think I’m in that state of shock – which you will recognize only too well, Anna – when the only way one can keep afloat is by doing mindless physical tasks.’
Anna heard the boiler make its familiar wumph as the heating finally kicked in. Her bare feet were freezing. She should have put socks on. She’d been in too much of a hurry to put some distance between herself and her bed, herself and her dreams.
‘Have you been awake all night?’ Anna watched Bonnie nosing hopefully in her bowl, hoovering up tiny specks of yesterday’s kibble.
‘Not all night,’ Isadora said. ‘I knocked myself out with a couple of diazepam with a whiskey chaser. Then I got up and scrubbed the tiles in my bathroom. Now I’m making bread.’
‘Tansy and I will come over,’ Anna said.
‘Darling, you know I always love to see you both, but I’m honestly not asking you both to leap into action. I just wanted to let you know as you met Robert at James’s wake. I’m really fine.
I’ve thrown out the last of the tobacco.’
‘I can hear that you’re fine,’ Anna said truthfully. ‘But we’ll come over anyway. You can give us breakfast.’
An hour later, Anna, Tansy and Bonnie were in Anna’s Land Rover heading for Isadora’s house. Groggy from her rude awakening, Tansy was still struggling to piece the sequence of events together. ‘What were you doing up at that hour though? It’s your day off.’
Anna kept her eyes on the road. ‘Bad dream,’ she explained briefly.
It had started innocently enough with Tim and Anna watching their younger selves down by the seashore. Then Tim had nudged her with his shoulder. ‘Do you think we ought to tell them? It seems so wrong that those little kids don’t know what’s up ahead.’ And suddenly Anna was outside her family home, struggling to open the front door with a key that kept splintering into ever smaller pieces, as her little sister, Lottie, screamed and screamed on the other side of the locked door for Anna to come in and save them.
‘Dreams are bastards, aren’t they,’ Tansy said sympathetically. ‘The really bad ones leave this kind of evil residue that haunts you all the rest of the day.’
‘They do.’ Anna glanced across at her flatmate, still sleepy in her fleece-lined parka, her curls pulled up into a kind of messy fountain. After a late date with Liam, Tansy had been dead to the world when Anna knocked on her door, yet the instant she’d grasped the situation she’d sprung into action.
‘So how did Isadora seem?’ she asked, yawning.
‘Eerily calm,’ Anna said, ‘given that her old friends are dropping like flies. She’s making bread apparently,’ she added a little uncertainly.
‘Oh. OK.’ Tansy gave a small shrug. ‘Whatever gets you through the night.’
In the long minutes it took Isadora to answer the doorbell, Anna couldn’t help wondering which version of Isadora Salzman they’d find inside. Had she been making bread in her pyjamas, her hair in uncombed witch-locks? But when Isadora eventually opened the door she was dressed in a pair of well-cut trousers and a pretty Fair Isle cardigan that Anna hadn’t seen her wear before. Her hair had been brushed and tied back with a jade silk scarf. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ she said slightly breathlessly. ‘My hands were sticky with bread dough, and I had to sluice them off. Come in, it’s blissfully warm in my kitchen.’