Written in Red

by Annie Dalton

  ‘Any further leads about the attacks?’ Jake asked.

  Tansy shook her head. ‘None.’

  ‘I’m not sure how much credibility I’d give anything Tallis says,’ Anna said, ‘but he and Catherine both mentioned someone from the Oxford Six days who they thought might be nurturing a grudge.’

  Tansy made a face. ‘It doesn’t seem very likely. If you’ve got a murderous grudge, why wait fifty years? I mean, that’s, like, serious festering! Wouldn’t you be more likely to attack while your grievance was still fresh?’

  ‘The trouble with amateur detecting is you start suspecting everyone,’ Anna said. ‘I was starting to have my suspicions about Sabina’s dad!’

  ‘I’d bet good money he got that injured hand aiming a punch at someone or something,’ Jake said.

  ‘I might be a suspect,’ Tansy said cheerfully. ‘You never know.’

  Anna laughed. ‘Tansy, you couldn’t even swat a fly! You can’t even eat a sausage unless it’s an accredited happy sausage!’

  ‘Or maybe that’s just what I let you think!’ Tansy gave them her most sinister smile. ‘Maybe I have mysterious blackouts, like characters have in soap operas, and keep running amok but afterwards I totally can’t remember!’

  ‘You’re in a suspiciously good mood, Tansy Lavelle,’ Anna said accusingly. ‘You wouldn’t be back on lovey-dovey terms with Sergeant Goodhart by any chance?’

  Tansy looked demurely at her fingernails which had been freshly repainted with rainbows. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Maybe just a little bit lovey-dovey. Helped by the fact that Liam was forced to confess to a most heinous act!’

  ‘What on earth did he do?’ Anna was prepared to be shocked, though it was hard to imagine the upright Liam doing anything terribly heinous.

  ‘He secretly posted my fucking Christmas card to my dad, didn’t he!’ Tansy had assumed an expression of extreme outrage.

  ‘He didn’t!’ Anna said.

  ‘He did. Even worse, he lied when I told him I thought it must have been thrown away by accident. I said I thought it was a sign from the universe that Frankie wasn’t supposed to be part of my life.’

  ‘What a shitbag!’ Anna couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘I know! I was all set to kill him, until I calmed down and realized what it meant.’

  Anna was lost. ‘What did it mean?’

  Tansy gave her a beatific smile. ‘He accepts me! He accepts everything about me. My past, my dodgy criminal dad. How can I stay mad with him after that?’

  They sat chatting over coffee, mulling over the events of the past few days. After a while, Anna realized she was flagging. She enjoyed having Tansy for her flatmate. She loved that Jake had magically become part of her life. But she’d been in close proximity with other people, it felt, for days now without respite, and she was talked out.

  ‘I’m going to take the dogs out before it gets dark,’ she said abruptly.

  Bonnie and Hero immediately came to sit by her feet having learned that the words ‘dogs’ and ‘out’ used in conjunction generally referred to them.

  Jake just gave Anna a grin. ‘OK, have a nice walk.’

  ‘Say hi to Mr Darcy if you see him,’ Tansy said. ‘Mind if I look through your Ottolenghi cookbook while you’re gone? I fancy cooking something lovely and veggie tonight.’ She puffed out her cheeks. ‘That night I crashed at Leo and Nick’s they fed me so much Christmas food, I feel like I might start sweating pork fat out of my pores!’

  ‘I’ll be your sous chef if you like,’ Anna heard Jake say as she ran upstairs to get her coat, followed by two excited dogs.

  Outside the house, Anna took a welcome lungful of cold winter air and found herself mentally adding one more item to her growing list of Good Reasons to Own a Dog. When you have a dog, you can say, ‘I need to go out and walk Fido now’, and nobody thinks you’re strange. Whereas saying ‘I urgently need to be by myself in order to process some of this weird shit that’s been happening’ made you sound as if you were somewhere on the spectrum. Except, with Jake and Tansy, she thought she probably could say, ‘I need time to myself, bye!’ and they’d just say, ‘OK, see you when you’ve decompressed!’

  She’d almost reached the end of her street, when she saw Tim walking towards her. His face was unusually grim, as if he was about to perform some unpleasant duty.

  She tried to hide her dismay. ‘Hi. Were you coming to see me?’

  ‘I was actually. I really need to talk to you. Sorry if it isn’t a good time?’

  Anna had a brief struggle with herself. Tim had proved that he was still her friend. After years of radio silence from Anna he had leapt into action on her behalf. He had not only tracked down Catherine, he had gone with Anna to see her at the hospice. There had been very little in it for him that Anna could see. And whatever it was Tim needed to say, it was terribly important to him, she could feel it.

  Instead of answering, she handed over Hero’s lead. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘We’re going to Port Meadow.’ Hero immediately craned around to glower at this new interloper.

  ‘That’s Isadora’s dog, Hero,’ Anna said.

  ‘From Much Ado, right?’ Tim said.

  Anna just nodded.

  ‘She doesn’t seem too impressed with me,’ Tim said, as they continued down the street.

  ‘Hero doesn’t really do “impressed”,’ Anna said. ‘She’s more into “quietly appalled”.’

  ‘Or even “comically aghast”,’ Tim suggested, as Isadora’s little dog fixed him with her glassy brown stare.

  By the time they reached Port Meadow, the midwinter sun was slowly slipping down towards the tops of the trees. They let themselves and the dogs in through the wooden gate. The bitter winds of the morning had dropped and the meadow, with its faintly rising mist, looked and felt calm and peaceful. Anna unclipped Bonnie’s lead but decided they should keep Hero on hers. She could easily imagine the little dog taking off across fields and major roads, following some mysterious canine GPS as she stoically made her way back to her beloved Isadora.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve got a dog. You always wanted one.’ Tim’s voice sounded strained.

  ‘How amazing that you should remember that,’ Anna said. ‘I only remembered after I’d actually adopted Bonnie.’

  ‘I remember all kinds of things.’ Tim quickly looked around, making sure there was no one within earshot. He took a sharp in-breath. ‘I’ve got something quite big to tell you. I almost feel like you should be sitting down in case I … oh, shit!’ he said angrily. ‘I had this all planned out and now I’m going to make a total bollocks of it!’

  Anna touched his arm. ‘Who cares if you make a total bollocks of whatever it is? Just say it! Neither of us is going to die from it, Tim.’

  ‘I’m your brother,’ he said harshly.

  She froze in the middle of the path. For a moment she couldn’t move or even think. It was clearly impossible, so why didn’t it feel like a lie?

  ‘Say that again,’ she managed at last.

  ‘Now you see why you should be sitting down.’ Tim sounded despairing. ‘I knew I should wait. It’s just I’ve known about this for over two years and I—’

  ‘How?’ she interrupted. ‘How can you possibly be my brother?’ Even as she asked the question, something inside told her that Tim was telling the truth.

  He took another sharp breath. ‘Chris had an affair with your mum, with Julia.’ Tim had always called his parents by their first names. It was part of their laid-back style of parenting. ‘Your mum and dad were going through a bad patch and …’ He gave an unhappy shrug. ‘I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out.’

  ‘You’re saying Chris is actually my dad – he’s both our dads?’

  Across the meadow, Anna recognized the familiar figures of Blossom and her owner. She could see bare winter trees with a red-gold sun starting to slip behind them. ‘Holy fuck!’ she whispered, then gave a slightly hysterical laugh. ‘You’re absolutely sure?’

  Tim no
dded, embarrassed. ‘I read his diary.’

  ‘You read his diary! Shit, Tim!’ Hero and Bonnie were staring up at her, sensing something was going on. ‘Something must have tipped you off though?’ Anna said. ‘You didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to go poking around in your dad’s private life?’

  He looked horrified. ‘Of course not! Jane asked me to do it.’

  ‘Your mum asked you to spy on your own dad?’ Anna felt a flash of dismay. ‘Did she have suspicions about my mum?’

  Tim shook his head. They had resumed their walk, keeping their voices low. ‘This was only about two years ago. Chris’s behaviour had become a bit – erratic. Jane said she never knew which version of my dad was going to come home from work. One minute he was bad tempered, the next weepy. Then there was a period when he’d vanish for hours without explanation. Jane tried to get him to tell her what was wrong but he insisted nothing was. She was scared he might be having some kind of breakdown. She was genuinely worried for him. So she asked me to investigate.’ He yanked Hero back on her lead and Isadora’s dog gave him a huffy look. ‘She really pulls, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Like an express train,’ Anna said. ‘She’s better in a harness but I left it at Isadora’s.’

  Tim resumed his story. ‘So one day when my dad was at work, or supposedly at work, I went through his study looking for anything that might shed some light on his alarming weirdness. In the process, I came across one of his old diaries from the mid-eighties. Inside was a letter from your mum, breaking off their affair. “We have to stop this before too many people get hurt, but you will still get to see your beautiful daughter, et cetera, et cetera.”’

  Anna was still reeling. ‘Did you tell your mum?’

  ‘No!’ Tim was horrified. ‘How am I going to tell her something like that? She and your mum were always such close friends!’

  ‘What about your dad? Does he know you know?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s not just cowardice. I found out what was wrong with him. He’d had a cancer scare and was having a hard time facing up to it.’

  ‘You told your mum about that presumably.’

  ‘Of course, and as it turned out it was a false alarm, but then it just got harder and harder to confront him about, you know, my secret half-sister.’

  Though he had put invisible air quotes around the words, Anna felt a little thrill. She was Tim’s sister. Everything she knew about herself had blown up in her face, leaving her with this one extraordinary fact. ‘But you intend to?’ she said. ‘Confront him, I mean?’

  ‘That’s one reason I needed to talk to you, Anna, to find out what you want to do. I know this must feel like a lot to take in. I’ve had two years to get used to the idea.’

  The rising mist made the figures of distant walkers seem to be moving ankle-deep through dry ice. It was like a dream, or the cover of a fantasy novel, yet Anna felt more real than she’d ever felt in her life.

  As she and Tim continued to talk, her mind was working overtime. She remembered her mother’s hyper-vigilance about never leaving Anna and Tim alone after they’d hit puberty. They had seen this as one more example of bizarre adult behaviour. There was never the slightest risk of romantic involvement between her and Tim. It would have been like when Anna was eleven years old and decided to get in some practice at kissing by experimentally kissing her own arm. It’s like we’ve always known, she thought.

  So many things were starting to make sense. Though Anna had been the eldest child in her family, she’d never been through that period of being her parents’ little princess. She’d always been the difficult cuckoo in the nest. She’d sensed that something was wrong and had always assumed that this something must be her. She’d loved her dad, but she’d never felt particularly loved by him, not in the way she longed for and needed. Her mum, on the other hand, had loved her but it hadn’t been an accepting kind of love. Anna had always felt as if her mother was silently criticising everything she did – everything she was. It got so she couldn’t be in the same room with her mum for ten minutes without wanting to scream from the tension.

  It wasn’t my fault, Anna thought suddenly, and it felt like an immense weight rolling away. It had never ever been her fault. She had just been a confused little girl caught up in a situation that she wasn’t remotely equipped to understand.

  ‘Did you ever suspect anything was going on?’ she asked Tim.

  ‘I wouldn’t say I suspected,’ he said. ‘I do remember walking in on them once and feeling some kind of – I don’t know – odd vibe.’

  ‘Was it at that farmhouse in Pembrokeshire?’ Anna said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, surprised.

  ‘I remember that too.’ Anna immediately flashed back to that puzzling midsummer’s evening. She and Tim had been nine and eight years old respectively. It was their first evening at a dilapidated farmhouse their parents had trustingly rented unseen. Anna and Tim had been exploring outside and had gone rushing back into the kitchen to tell the adults about the stream they’d found at the bottom of the garden. At the moment that Tim and Anna burst in, Chris and Julia were not touching each other, but there had been a strange electricity in the air that had made the children stop in the doorway. Anna’s mother’s eyes had been red and swollen as if she’d been crying. Anna had immediately wanted to run back outside into the honeysuckle-scented evening and away from that ominous kitchen with its smell of drains mixed with a more potent reek that Anna’s father had decided must be damp.

  The true source of the smell was discovered next morning when Tim’s mum went downstairs to make breakfast and discovered an enormous rat sitting calmly on the kitchen table and two more in the larder feasting on the bread and cheeses they’d brought with them. Within the hour, both families had packed up and left and somehow the horror of the rats had eclipsed that bewildering moment in the kitchen. Anna had just stored it away as one more of those inexplicable childhood memories.

  ‘Does your brother know?’ Anna asked. Tim had had an annoying younger brother called Rob, presumably the father of the Machiavellian little girls.

  Tim shook his head. ‘He moved to Vancouver a few years ago. He and his wife just came over for Christmas so we could finally meet the twins. The truth is, Rob and I never did have a great deal to say to each other. Maybe the time will come when I feel I have to tell him, but right now it doesn’t seem right to upset his picture of our dad, you know?’

  ‘So you’ve had to carry this all by yourself,’ Anna said.

  ‘Obviously I told Anjali,’ he said. ‘But the person I was really desperate to tell was you! Now you know why I was so keen to get in touch,’ he added wryly. ‘I needed my big sis for backup.’

  Anna saw a familiar figure approaching through the now almost knee-deep mist. It was the man with the elderly spaniel. As they drew level, the little spaniel hobbled right up to Bonnie, wagging her tail. Anna’s dog immediately responded to her friendly overtures, sniffing the old spaniel all over, wagging her own feathery white tail the whole time. Hero, however, went stiff-legged with suspicion and wanted nothing to do with this intruder.

  ‘Now, Meg,’ the man said quietly. ‘Don’t make a nuisance of yourself.’

  ‘She’s fine honestly,’ Anna reassured him. ‘Hero’s just a bit touchy at the moment.’

  ‘And why shouldn’t she be touchy if she likes?’ he said with a smile. ‘Dogs have their preferences just like we do.’

  Anna smiled and agreed, expecting Meg’s owner to go on his way, but he lingered on the path. ‘I’ve seen you before at Walsingham College. Do you work there?’ His manner was tentative, almost shy.

  ‘Yes, I work in the admin office,’ she told him.

  ‘Then you’ve probably seen me working in the gardens.’ He gave her a shy smile, and for the first time she put two and two together.

  ‘Of course – I’m so sorry! I probably didn’t recognize you without your lovely dog!’ This must be the mysterious Roop whose dog Tate had coveted.
Anna had seen him several times at work in the gardens but failed to make the connection. ‘You must have thought I was so rude,’ she said. But she’d already seen his expression soften at the words ‘lovely dog’, and knew she’d been forgiven. She could feel Tim amusedly watching this exchange, and realized that she’d been performing, just slightly, for his benefit.

  ‘These days I’m better at identifying people by their dog than by their faces.’ Roop had a faint Oxfordshire burr. ‘My eyesight isn’t what it was, that’s for sure!’ She saw now that he had the weather-beaten appearance of someone who’d spent most of their life out of doors.

  ‘Well, now I shall know who to thank for Walsingham’s fabulous roses when summer comes,’ she said. ‘I’m Anna, by the way.’

  He shook her outstretched hand. ‘People call me Roop.’ He gave a curious glance at Tim.

  ‘This is my brother, Tim,’ Anna said for the first time in her life. She would have liked to tell the world. Aglow with her new knowledge she felt giddy, almost euphoric.

  ‘Are both these dogs yours?’ Roop’s voice was quiet as if he didn’t get to use it much.

  ‘The little one belongs to a friend,’ Anna said. ‘Bonnie, the White Shepherd, is mine.’

  ‘Beautiful dog,’ Roop said. ‘She looks young still.’

  ‘I don’t know how old she is,’ Anna admitted. ‘She was a rescue dog.’

  ‘Meg’s getting old now.’ Roop looked down at his dog with a sort of pained affection. ‘She can’t walk very far these days but she’s such a stoic old girl. I think she only comes out with me to keep me company. She doesn’t want to let me down.’ Hearing her name, Meg had come to sit at his feet. Anna had never thought of old dogs as beautiful, but Meg’s face had so much nobility and character it seemed as if her whole heart was shining out of her eyes.