by Annie Dalton
‘Meg! You know that’s not your chair,’ Roop said mock-sternly. ‘Dogs!’ he said to Anna. ‘Give them an inch!’ He went to throw a couple of logs on the fire. The room with its uncarpeted stone flags was not particularly warm but it seemed rude to keep her coat on, so she took it off, keeping on her scarf as a comforting extra layer, and slipped her phone into a trouser pocket in case Jake called.
‘I always love that smell of wood fires.’ Anna could hear herself making polite conversation.
‘We get a free supply of logs. Goes with the cottage,’ he explained. ‘Sit anywhere you like. Sorry, I should have said.’
Since Meg was occupying the armchair there was a choice of a small sofa or one of two blue-painted kitchen chairs on either side of Roop’s table. Anna took one of the chairs. The small gate-legged table was partially covered with a pale tablecloth embroidered with flowers and leaves formed in tiny cross-stitch. ‘This looks Chinese,’ Anna said.
‘Does it? I think I got it from a car boot. Pretty much all my furnishings came from charity shops or car boots.’
‘“Upcycling”, people call that now,’ she said with a smile.
‘Necessity, I call it.’ Roop’s smile faded. ‘Sorry, Anna, you must think I’m a terrible host. Bit out of practice. Would you like a proper drink, or would you prefer to just have a cup of tea? I don’t mean to be plying you with drink!’ He looked flustered as if he’d only just realized the implications of inviting her back. ‘I haven’t got much of a selection. I’ve got whiskey. Someone gave me a bottle of ginger wine. Disgusting stuff in my opinion; only good for making Whiskey Macs but you need ginger ale for that. I do have a very pleasant dry sherry.’
‘I’ll have a glass of dry sherry then,’ Anna said. ‘Have you got a piece of paper? I can write down the book title for you.’ Roop found her an old envelope and a pen and watched her write it down. ‘I’ll ask them to get it in for me at the library,’ he said.
‘It’s a really good book,’ she said.
‘I’ve always loved dogs,’ Roop confided. ‘I wasn’t a very assiduous reader as a boy but if anyone gave me a book with a dog or a horse in it, I’d be awake all night reading under my covers! It was a great day when I discovered Jack London,’ he added. ‘Ever read him?’
She shook her head. ‘But my friend Jake raves about The Call of the Wild.’
Roop gave a delighted laugh. ‘He has good taste. It has everything a boy needs in a book: the Gold Rush, Alaska, sled dogs. I must have read it a thousand times and it never gets stale.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ll stop talking now and organize our drinks.’
She could see him through the half-open door, moving about the tiny green-painted kitchen. She heard him briefly running taps, possibly rinsing glasses. ‘We can still talk,’ he called. ‘Tell me about your dog. You said she was a rescue dog?’
‘Yes, Jake, the friend I was telling you about, rescued her in Afghanistan. She’d survived a bomb blast and god knows what else. She’s still got lots of tiny scars.’ She didn’t tell him that Jake had had to coax a badly injured Bonnie away from the body of the small boy she’d been guarding (he’d told Anna he’d had to bribe her with chicken sandwiches), so that the child’s body could be taken away for burial.
‘I’ve got some Japanese cracker type things somewhere,’ Roop said. ‘They’re not unpleasant, if you want to risk them?’ He began hunting through the kitchen cupboard.
Anna was starting to feel too much like a Jane Austen character sitting on the straight-backed kitchen chair, so she wandered over to investigate Roop’s bookshelves. She was touched to see a battered copy of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild crammed in with several other well-thumbed books that she guessed had formed his childhood reading. She thought of Jake finding his treasured copy of the same book in a yard sale, and reading it until it finally fell to pieces. She opened it to the flyleaf where someone had glued an old-fashioned bookplate, smiling to herself when she saw that the young owner had laboriously written his name and address exactly as she remembered doing when she was small; probably Jake had done the same.
Alec Rupert Faber, The Old Manor, Laundry Lane, Bruisyard, Saxmundham, Suffolk, England, Europe, the World, the Universe …
Her eye went back to the name. Alec Rupert Faber. Rupert. Roop.
The young man from the Foreign Office whose life had been ruined by the Oxford Six.
Roop came in with their drinks and a plate of Japanese crackers on a tray.
‘You changed your name.’ The words seemed to speak themselves and Anna should probably have regretted them the instant they were out of her mouth. She could have closed the book and pretended not to have seen. She could have had her drink and left, and she might have, if she hadn’t seen Isadora bleeding and bruised in her hospital bed.
‘Sorry?’ Roop didn’t seem to understand.
Anna swallowed against a wave of nausea, as the full horror of her situation started to sink in. ‘This is getting to be a really bad habit,’ she said half to herself.
‘Habit?’ Roop’s expression was growing puzzled.
‘Drinking with murderers,’ Anna explained. Her voice sounded strange in her ears. She wasn’t visibly shaking, not yet, but she could feel tiny vibrations of fear starting deep within her muscles. ‘I know who you are,’ she said. ‘You’re Alec Faber.’
His smile vanished. It wasn’t just his expression that changed, it was as if, by saying his true name, Anna had broken a spell, allowing James Lowell’s killer to throw off shy softly spoken Roop like a tired old coat.
‘That’s unfortunate. For you, that is.’ Alec Faber occupied space more confidently than Roop. He looked taller and straighter and several years younger. Even his faint hint of an Oxfordshire burr had vanished. Alec Faber’s real voice was more obviously educated and nothing like so warm.
‘My friends will come looking for me,’ Anna told him, swallowing down her panic. Roop had told her he didn’t know anything about mobile phones. She hoped Alec Faber didn’t either. Surreptitiously slipping her hand into her trouser pocket, she swished her finger across the screen of her mobile to unlock it and dialled the last number she’d called: Jake’s. He would hear everything she and Roop – Alec – said; if the call went through.
‘By the time your friends come, if they come, it’ll be too late.’ Alec reached behind the worn tapestry cushion on Meg’s armchair and withdrew an ancient-looking pistol. Anna was so astonished that she almost laughed.
‘Do they sell guns in charity shops now?’ she asked, for Jake’s benefit.
‘Get moving,’ Alec told her.
‘What are you going to do to me?’ she asked.
‘I’m going to take you with me,’ he said.
He was taking her hostage. He had a gun. He could take her anywhere he wanted.
‘I knew the police would be sniffing around soon,’ he said. ‘I’m just advancing my plans, that’s all.’
‘You’re going to leave the country?’ she said.
‘In a way.’ Pressing the gun into the small of her back, Alec Faber pushed her towards the door.
She tried to turn back. ‘My coat.’
‘You won’t need it.’ He shoved her out into the night.
Anna glanced back to see Alec’s little spaniel watching her master’s departure with a bewildered expression. ‘Aren’t you going to take your dog?’ she asked. But it seemed that Roop’s dog had been abandoned along with his harmless gardener’s persona because he snapped, ‘Just walk!’
Nervous about stumbling with a loaded gun at her back, Anna obeyed. She remembered that guns had safety catches, but was Roop’s on or off? They were retracing their steps back to the Buttery. The security lights flared and she had a wild hope that some hard-working research fellow might look up from his or her books in time to see the startling tableau of a man pointing a gun at a woman. But then the lights died and she was alone with a killer in the dark. Apart from her and Roop’s breathing, everything inside the college wa
lls was silent. Outside the college, the city seemed to be having one big riotous party. Anna could hear yells and shrieks of laughter, and at least three clashing sets of music as the New Year celebrations got into full swing.
‘Where are we going?’ Anna asked.
‘To see the fireworks,’ he told her.
Alec’s words triggered a new surge of adrenaline. ‘Why waste time with fireworks, if you’re just going to leave?’ she asked. But she was afraid she already knew the answer. You’re leaving the country? In a way. Alec Faber was taking her somewhere so he could kill them both.
He answered her question with a grim laugh. ‘Why? Because I’ve been a bloody failure all my life and you’ve given me my chance to go out in one final blaze of glory!’ She felt the barrel of his gun pushing painfully into her spine through the fragile fabric of her blouse.
They had arrived at the cloisters by the college chapel. In the darkness, Anna could make out the outline of a door. Reaching past her, Alec pulled it open, revealing only a deeper, more impenetrable darkness. Afraid, Anna stopped in her tracks. Anything could be in there. A dungeon. A bottomless well. ‘Climb!’ he ordered.
‘I can’t see,’ she protested.
Again he reached past her and clicked a switch. A harsh yellow light fell on the first five or six narrow steps. The walls were rough-hewn stone. A sharp bend hid the rest of the staircase from view. ‘Climb!’ he repeated, in a harsher voice.
‘I’m not very good at heights,’ she said, hoping against hope that Jake could hear.
‘You won’t be up there long.’ Alec’s voice was cold.
She felt another twist of terror. The crude stone steps had been designed for medieval feet. Anna had to turn hers to the side so as not to lose her footing. Medieval people must have had thigh muscles like mountain goats, she thought.
As she climbed, she had a mental image of Meg anxiously looking up from the chair as her master disappeared from her life for ever. It was stupid, but part of her still believed that Alec was the impostor and Roop was the real authentic person. Roop, she thought, would have been incapable of abandoning his old dog.
She thought of her grandfather and of Tim and his wife, Anjali, who she’d planned to meet after New Year. She pictured Tansy and Isadora clinking glasses, while she climbed with a murderer’s breath behind her, and his gun pressing into her back. As it turned out it wasn’t Isadora who needed hunky bodyguards but Anna.
Jake might not have his phone switched on. Even if he had overheard her and Alec’s conversation, what were the chances anyone could find her in time? Jake didn’t know the college. There’s no way he could know where Alec was taking her. She daren’t risk saying something obvious like, ‘Oh, my God, you’re taking me up to the roof!’ in case her captor realized what she was doing and shot her. All she could do was try to buy some time.
‘I don’t understand why you’re doing this,’ she said. ‘I assume you’re planning to kill us both and I don’t even know why.’
They had reached the top of the stairs. There was a small door at the top, hardly more than a hatchway. ‘Go through,’ Alec ordered.
She leaned her weight against the door and it opened letting in bitterly cold air. Anna clambered out shakily on to a mercifully flat piece of roof. ‘How will it change things if I tell you why?’ Alec had appeared beside her.
‘You implied that you don’t want your life to be meaningless,’ she said. ‘“Going out in a blaze of glory”, I think you said? Well, I’d prefer my death not to be meaningless.’
Antiquated stone chimneys rose up on either side of them, bristling with electrical antennae. Anna felt the bitter cold striking up through her slipper-like shoes. Directly in front of them were steeply sloping Italianate roof tiles. There had once been iron safety railings between the flat and sloping parts of the roof, but several railings had corroded away. Anna vaguely remembered memos going back and forth to the maintenance department. As a temporary measure, someone had put traffic cones and a stretch of red-and-white tape warning people to keep away. Anna risked a dizzying glance over the edge and felt sick at the sight of mellow stone buildings turned red-gold by the orange street lights and much, much too far down. ‘I don’t get why you think your life was such a failure,’ she said.
Alec gave a bitter laugh. ‘You liked poor old Roop.’
She didn’t deny it. ‘Tell me you didn’t like him, just a bit?’
‘Do you know who I was?’ he demanded. ‘Do you have any idea who I was supposed to be?’
Anna wanted to say, I was supposed to have two parents and three living breathing siblings. Aloud she said, ‘I know you lived in a manor house.’
‘That house was supposed to be mine,’ he said. ‘The house, the estate, another house and a loch in Scotland.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘All gone to my younger brother.’
She thought of the tiny gardener’s cottage, carefully furnished, Anna had imagined lovingly furnished, from car boots and charity shops. ‘Someone told me they saw you living on the street.’
‘Did they?’ he said, without much interest.
Alec had gradually moved out from behind her while they’d been talking. He was directly in front of Anna now, pointing his gun at her chest and blocking her terrifying view of the gap in the railings. Logic told Anna that she was standing on a completely flat surface, yet she felt as if her thin-soled shoes were being pulled ever closer to the edge of the roof.
‘Did you have to live like that for very long?’
‘Long enough.’ Alec jammed his free hand in his pocket. Anna and Alec were both shivering violently now.
‘She saw you with a dog on a piece of string. Was that Meg?’
He looked at her and she saw cold anger in his face. ‘Don’t try to make me be Roop.’ His anger scared her, but she knew she had to keep him talking.
‘I don’t think I understand why you had to be Roop in the first place.’
‘Necessity,’ he said. ‘Matthew Tallis and his little cohorts stitched me up between them, then he reported my unpatriotic activities to my superiors – but you know all about that.’
‘I know some of it,’ she said.
‘They hushed it up, but obviously the Foreign Office heard about it and consequently so did my father. In a single day, I lost everything that made up my life. I lost my job. My parents disinherited me, told me they never wanted to see or hear from me again. I lost my fiancée …’
‘Fiancée?’ Anna said surprised. ‘I thought you were in love with Hetty Vallier?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ he said so sharply that she knew Hetty was a sore point even fifty years later.
‘So you lost everything and so you decided to come back to Oxford to take your revenge?’ Her mouth was so dry with fear it felt stuffed with cotton wool.
‘No!’ he said. ‘Not how you’re making it sound. I was living on the streets for – I don’t actually know how long. I started out with all the right Boy Scout intentions, used public washrooms to keep clean, stayed more or less sober, but after a few years and a lot more knocks I started drinking. It was the only way I could get through the nights. Then one summer’s day I was sitting on my piece of cardboard and I saw Robert Keane, walking towards me, all suntanned from his latest holiday, his suit jacket thrown over his shoulder. I’d been beaten up a few nights previously so I wasn’t looking particularly pretty, but he recognized me at once. Robert was stunned. I could see it in his face then, what I’d become. He took out his wallet and peeled off some notes. He said, “There’s a men’s hostel just around the corner. This ought to get you a bed and a hot meal for a couple of nights. Clean yourself up, Alec. Dry yourself out and I promise I’ll be in touch.’
Anna thought of Robert’s self-portrait as a homeless down and out. She thought of how he’d ended up ruined, on the verge of bankruptcy. Had that been guilt over Alec Faber?
Alec’s voice had grown bitter. ‘I was tempted to just blow his fucking money on the h
orses. I used to be a gambler, did you know that? But Robert had left me with this ridiculous little ray of hope. He was going to get in touch. I thought maybe he was going to offer me a job. I don’t really know what I thought. But I went to the hostel like he said. I cleaned myself up. I stayed off the booze. I had a shave and cut my hair, and caught up on some sleep. And on the second morning I came down to find a package waiting at the desk.’ Alec gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Inside, I found five hundred pounds in cash, and a set of car keys with directions to a garage.’
Anna could tell from Alec’s disgusted expression that Robert’s attempt to get him back on his feet had only rubbed more salt into his wounds.
‘I got there to find he’d already had the van filled with petrol. He’d left a message on the passenger seat full of some bullshit about hoping I could make a fresh start. A fresh start on five hundred quid, plus a clapped-out old van! Is that all he thinks I’m worth now? I thought. Well, I suppose he’s right. And I got in the car with Meg and I just drove. It was terrifying! I hadn’t driven for years. And it was like all the times I drove to Oxford to those meetings, hoping I could sneak some time alone with Hetty. I just came straight here like a tired old dog finding its way home. I wasn’t even that old, but I felt old. I felt finished.’
‘You didn’t come here to find James?’ Anna said, surprised.
‘I didn’t plan any of it. I was just surviving day to day. At nights I slept in my van. By day, I started hiring myself out as a jobbing gardener. I’d always enjoyed gardening. I used to help our gardener at Bruisyard. I worked privately for a few years, eventually got myself a bedsit, then a job came up here at Walsingham with a cottage.’ He turned to Anna. ‘I never set out to be Roop. He emerged out of necessity, a sound, straightforward bloke. The kind of man who was content to spend his life mowing grass and spreading muck.’