A Species of Revenge

by Marjorie Eccles

‘I know, I know!’ Imogen said, holding up a hand, forestalling comment. ‘I did try to dissuade her, but you know what Hope’s like. They’ve no sentimental value for her – she was never one for dolls.’

  It was obvious to Sarah that she didn’t know what Hope was like. She was stunned by her generosity, but at the same time, appalled. Mainly at the total unsuitability of Allie’s present, which was not a plaything but an expensive antique in near-mint condition, a genuine, simpering Victorian doll with a rosebud mouth, wearing plum-coloured, lace-trimmed silk, and kid boots. But the sight of Allie’s enraptured face, besotted with love at first sight, like a mother with her first-born baby, effectively scotched any possibility that somehow, tactfully, the doll could be returned.

  The one designated for Lucy wasn’t nearly such a thoroughbred, but that didn’t matter. Lucy hardly ever played with dolls. She thanked Imogen politely for the jointed wooden Dutch doll, dressed in national costume, and was playing with it for the moment, introducing the now apparently accepted hamster to it, with the hamster receiving most of the attention. It wouldn’t be long before she put the doll on one side in favour of her new computer game.

  Allie was sitting on the floor with her doll cradled tightly in her arms, covering it with wet, messy kisses, boding ill for the pristine, the pink and white face. ‘Now come along, Angel,’ she announced, prim as a Victorian nursemaid, ‘I’ll read you a story I’ve written and draw you a picture, but then you’ll have to go straight to bed.’

  Sarah exchanged looks with Imogen. Angel? Maybe Hope, even if unwittingly, had done more than she realized.

  Now, Angel having been tucked up in bed beside Allie, and Lucy’s doll, as yet nameless, lying on the floor in the corner of the bedroom with its limbs at all angles, Sarah abandoned the whisky, which she didn’t really care for and, disappointingly, always looked better than it tasted, and escaped from Dermot, if you could be said to escape from someone who barely seemed to know you were there. He was ostensibly immersed in a fat file concerned with the legal intricacies of being a landlord, but he didn’t look as though his heart was in it. Something of greater moment was absorbing his thoughts.

  Out in the garden, the new swing hung loose on its ropes from the old pear-tree branch. Sarah perched on it, absently propelling it back and forth, one toe barely touching the ground. In the dusk, the Welsh poppies which had seeded themselves between the cracks of the old blue bricks of the path glowed like small harvest moons, orange and gold. The deep honey scent of dame’s violet hung on the air. On the other side of the great beech hedge was the wood, silent now, where the sound of men’s voices had rung for most of the day.

  Although Sarah hadn’t known Patti, had barely spoken to her, the poor girl’s murder seemed to add another dimension to the shock of her own discovery of the previous day.

  She’d been putting off thinking about that for too long – ever since yesterday, in fact, when she’d knelt on the floor of her bedroom with the old tin trunk beside her, but no amount of procrastination was going to make it go away.

  The trunk had held the last of Lisa’s personal possessions to be disposed of. The rest – the pretty shoes and slender suits she’d been so looking forward to wearing again after the baby was born – Dermot had donated to charity shops immediately after the funeral. It wasn’t until yesterday that he’d asked Sarah if she’d mind going through the trunk. He simply couldn’t face it himself, he said, and she’d steeled herself to do the task straight away, in order to get it over with, though suspecting it might awaken memories grown neither less painful nor less vivid.

  Lisa, surprisingly for one so much of the moment, had kept more memorabilia from her childhood and adolescence than Sarah had. Perhaps she’d just never got around to throwing them out. Sarah began to sift through the oddly assorted layers – toothily smiling Donny Osmond posters, the ivory-backed prayer book her godmother had given her when she was confirmed, a pair of ballet shoes, a riding crop and hat, old school photographs – one of them with Sarah, taken when they were gap-toothed six- and seven-year-olds. She shook out an acid-yellow mini-dress Lisa had begged and schemed and cried for – just why, wasn’t now clear, and put it on the ‘discard’ pile, before turning to Lisa’s jewellery box.

  ‘I’ve kept her engagement ring myself,’ Dermot had said, ‘and if there’s anything you think the girls might like when they’re older, put them on one side. Anything else, you’re welcome to have for yourself, or to get rid of, just as you think best. There’s one or two things of value, but you know she mostly preferred costume jewellery, though none of that was cheap, as I remember!’ he added, with a wry lift of the eyebrow.

  Sarah didn’t imagine there would be much to her own taste. Lisa had, surprisingly, loved the sort of dramatic costume jewellery that made an impact, as if feeling her personality lacked some definition. Whereas, small and sparkling, full of life, she hadn’t needed jewellery at all.

  Sarah set aside a couple of gold chains for herself, then a heavily laden silver charm bracelet that she was sure would delight Lucy, and for Allie the single strand of cultured pearls, identical to the one Sarah herself possessed, chosen as eighteenth birthday gifts by their father. She gathered up the rest and put them back carefully in the velvet-lined trays to return them to the box. The girls might like them when they were older. It was a large box, covered in ivory leather and lined with red velvet, whose loose, padded bottom had collected a little fluff and dust. Lifting it to give it a brush, she saw a manila envelope underneath. Inside was a photograph. Taken somewhere foreign-looking, hot. Italy? Greece? A blinding light, deep shadows, a café table under a tree. A man with a thin face, smiling into the sun.

  On the back was written: Darling Lisa, as requested. Until I can be there again in person. Ever and always, my dearest, yours. It was unsigned, but dated New Year’s Day of the previous year.

  The face smiling from the photograph wasn’t Dermot’s.

  Sarah found it hard to accept that Lisa, open and honest as the day, could have risked everything – her marriage, her children’s happiness – by carrying on a secretive, underhand affair. That it was an affair, Sarah had no doubt. There’d been no dubiety about the message. Unmistakable. Darling Lisa. A few lines on the back of a photograph, and Lisa’s memory was diminished, tarnished. Lisa, the last person to have done such a thing. Well, she hadn’t been canonized, no one had ever said she was better or worse than the next woman. But – Lisa!

  Perhaps she’d really been in love with him, this ‘yours’. Sarah paused. Would I do that for Simon? Better not think about that.

  Ever and always, yours. Darling Lisa. Who was he, and did it matter now, anyway? Yet Sarah had a sudden sense that it did, a feeling of impending disaster. The hairs on her skin stood on end. Nonsense.

  She slid off the swing and walked to the grainy, splintery wooden seat set under the wall which supported a great swathe of honeysuckle, facing the view over Lavenstock. In the dusk, lights twinkled palely below; in the distance, the hills, blue in the daylight were now dark against a sky the colour of a ‘Peace’ rose. Night insects danced, moths fluttered dustily in the grass.

  Behind the puzzle of why Lisa, of all people, had had this secret, was a plunge of unexplained fear.

  A footfall on the path. Fitzallan, looming tall beside her. A hand on her shoulder, his deep voice: ‘Something wrong? You’re shivering like a leaf.’

  ‘Oh! Oh, Fitz, it’s you.’ She came back from a long way, feeling that she had to make an immense effort. ‘It’s nothing, a ghost walking over my grave.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m intruding.’ But he didn’t go away. Instead, he pulled his Aran sweater from his shoulders and draped it around hers, and sat on the seat beside her, where a warmth that had nothing to do with the sweater presently enveloped her. She’d hoped he would come and join her. Since showing her his paintings in the attic, it was becoming almost a nightly ritual to sit here on the seat before he went home to his house, fifteen miles away. The
y never talked much. He had a great capacity for silence, this man. Quite often, she’d wondered about that house of his, his lonely life since his wife had died.

  ‘Want to tell me what’s wrong?’ he asked.

  That face, the one in the photograph. Undistinguished, a stranger’s face, yet half recognized. No one she’d ever met, she was sure of that, there was no voice that went with the face. A man glimpsed in the street, across a shop counter? A restaurant? Some politician or other in the paper? Not recently, or she’d have remembered – surely ...?

  Fitz would know what to do if she told him. He was that sort of man – partly due, she felt, to having gone through his own personal hell while his wife had been alive, about which she now knew a little – but mostly because that’s how he’d been born. Knowing what to do, and unswerving, once he set his mind to it.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, hoping this didn’t sound as feeble as she felt it did, but she was unused to bottling things up. ‘I would, believe me, but I just can’t.’

  ‘Well, if you start to feel differently – I’m here.’

  He smiled at her, his brilliant eyes lighting up. He wouldn’t press her, she knew, but yes, if anything could have made her feel better at this moment, it was to know that Fitz was there.

  ‘The police came to see me today,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘They’re talking to everyone.’

  She waited but he didn’t say anything more.

  She had a feeling that he was trying to bring himself to tell her something, but she knew him well enough by now to know that he’d only do it in his own time.

  Down at the police station in Lavenstock, those who could were going home. It had been a long, long day.

  Abigail Moon drove home to her cottage under the hill, thought about a glass of wine, thought about having to open a bottle when she only wanted a glass and decided against it. Thought about ringing Ben, then looked at the clock and decided against that, too. Made herself a tuna-fish sandwich, went to bed, thoroughly restless, knowing she wouldn’t sleep, and went out like a light immediately her head touched the pillow.

  Detective Constable Keith Farrar slipped his key into the lock of his front door, let himself in quietly, wiped his feet on the mat and without putting on the light – so as not to disturb Sandra – tiptoed into the spotless, state-of-the-art kitchen, where a corner of the table was set out for one. A meal of unimaginable dreariness awaited him in the fridge. Cutting into the cold lamb and beetroot, he saw the letter on the table, propped against the glass dome that covered a plate of bread spread with healthily polyunsaturated margarine. His heart sank. Another hospital consultation for Sandra. Almost certainly another disappointment. He felt deeply sorry for her, but even sorrier for himself, wistfully imagining a life with a wife who had a baby to occupy her, rather than needing to fill in her time by keeping the house as sterile as an intensive care unit, and nagging him about promotion.

  Martin Kite arrived at his warm, untidy home, as different from the house where he’d interviewed Trevor Lawley that morning as chalk from cheese, just as his wife was going to bed. She saw how tired he was but he surprised her by putting his arms fiercely around her and holding her head against his shoulder, and even more by not uttering a single complaint about Daniel and Davy not yet being in bed and having the television on loud enough to keep half Lavenstock awake.

  Gil Mayo was in that state of wakefulness which even a steady walk home through the dark, sleeping streets of his manor had failed to lull. He was happy on two counts when he walked through the door of his upstairs flat: to find Alex not yet in bed and that he’d missed her sister Lois by about ten minutes.

  ‘Shut up, Bert!’ he said by way of greeting to the parrot, who was resenting the close attention being paid to Alex and was responding in his inimitable way. When he could make himself heard, Mayo asked carefully after Lois and Alex responded just as carefully. Relations between himself and the spiky Lois, he sometimes felt, were rather like that of his cat and his parrot. Correction. His landlady’s villainous-looking grey cat, and his daughter Julie’s parrot, wished on him when she’d decided to leave for foreign parts. Pesky old Moses, who also answered to the name of Go Away, sometimes now managed to insinuate himself into the flat because Alex couldn’t bring herself to boot him out, and with the bars of the parrot cage between them, the two nonhumans regarded each other warily, like Tweetie-pie and Sylvester, like himself and Lois.

  He poured himself a dram of The Macallan while Alex went to prepare him something to eat, sank on to his favourite sofa and put his feet up on the new upholstery, letting a warm feeling of home envelop him. Clean, tidy, stylishly decorated, smelling faintly of polish. He’d once questioned the wisdom of living with someone who was so congenitally tidy-minded as Alex, even fearing it might break up a beautiful relationship, but in fact he’d come to see certain advantages. He now made no objections to having his books alphabetically arranged, or his CDs neatly shelved, and even responded positively to having his socks paired and tucked together, rather than having to search for a mate.

  He sipped his Scotch and began to rehearse variations of the same question: ‘So who was that you were having lunch with?’ – ‘Who was that man I saw you with in the Italian restaurant?’ – ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were meeting a man for lunch?’ Worse and worse.

  A loud clattering was issuing from the kitchen, the volume of which was unfortunately not guaranteed to be commensurate with the quality of what was produced. Farrar’s wife, Sandra, wasn’t the only one who wasn’t interested in cooking, though Alex was learning, having begun to get a grasp of the situation when she’d cottoned on to the number of times Mayo mentioned his mother’s treacle sponge, or one of Julie’s more exotic dishes. Plain, unimaginative food, mostly salad, was the order of the day when it was her turn to cook. Perhaps Julie would come home one day and teach her properly.

  ‘I forgot – letter from Australia on the mantelpiece,’ she said, popping her head round the kitchen door, tuning into that telepathy between them which was still a source of wonder to him.

  Slitting the envelope open, he skimmed it quickly for what he always hoped to read – but his daughter wasn’t coming home, not yet, nor likely to be, he saw as he came to the last paragraph. Since giving up her place at catering college, eschewing meat and opting for a life in faraway places, she’d found an exciting life in Australia and was now planning to start up a restaurant with a friend.

  He went to tell Alex what the letter had said. ‘Vegetarian restaurant in Sydney – wonder what the Ozzies’ll make of that?’ he grinned, hovering hungrily in the kitchen door. ‘Good smell.’

  She waved a fork at him. ‘Go away. You know I can’t do anything properly when anyone’s standing over me. I’m not your Julie and this needs concentration. I’m doing you a steak, with a pepper sauce I got from a recipe in the paper. Don’t mind if I don’t join you? I’m not hungry.’

  Whisky glass in hand, he leaned against the doorjamb, seeing himself reflected in the dark window, relaxed in his shirt sleeves, the whiteness of the fabric making his dark face look all the darker, the slatey eyes under the thick brows watching her steadily, his dark hair crisped with grey. He said the last thing he meant or ought to have said, albeit with a smile: ‘You won’t, not after eating with Lois and stuffing yourself with pasta at lunch-time.’

  She barely missed a beat. Smiling in return, she said, ‘How did you guess I had lunch at Gino’s?’

  ‘I saw you when I was stopped at the traffic lights.’

  There was a short silence, accompanied by a horrid smell of burning. ‘The sauce! Hell’s teeth!’

  Alex grabbed the pan and rushed it to the sink, where she turned the tap on and spent some time getting rid of the ruined sauce before turning round and leaning with her back against the sink unit. ‘So much for that. Plain grilled steak, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You’d better turn it over, then, otherwise that’s going to be charcoal as well.’ He li
ked his steak rare.

  He realized, when he was finally sitting down to what he considered to be a near-cremated steak, that his ill-judged remarks were going to be passed off, as though nothing had been said, but when she’d brought cheese for him, a small slice of hazelnut chocolate cake to satisfy her own sweet tooth and late-night, decaffeinated coffee for both, she sat down opposite and said seriously, ‘Something quite exciting’s appeared on the horizon, Gil. I do want to talk to you about it sometime, I’d appreciate your advice, but it’s not the right time now, not while you’ve got your plate full with this case.’

  Had she really been going to tell him, or had he forced it into the open with his snide remarks, for which he was truly sorry? And had the rug pulled from under his feet? Wasn’t that just like a woman – whet your appetite and then refuse to satisfy –

  ‘Sure you won’t have a piece of this cake? It’s from Dowley’s.’

  ‘No, thanks, and I thought you weren’t hungry.’

  ‘It’s longer than I thought since supper-time. And that pasta I was stuffing myself with at lunch was an omelette.’

  ‘Don’t forget the wine.’

  ‘You saw a lot in a few seconds at the traffic lights. What can I do to convince you that –’

  ‘Try me and see,’ he said, pulling her to her feet.

  PART III

  Hope Kendrick is sitting in her empty classroom, waiting to be summoned to talk to the police in the headmistress’s study. The weight of Patti Ryman’s death feels heavy on her shoulders. It brings back painfully, in a roundabout way, memories she’s striven for years to forget.

  She’d dreamt of him last night, as she regularly does, as she has for more than twenty-five years, though his face is becoming less clear with every year that passes. Sometimes, she can’t remember his face at all, and that really frightens her.

  Well, he’d been tall, had to be, of course. Taller than she is, but even so, not the same height as Francis. A big, blond man with light, Scandinavian blue eyes, broad shouldered and athletic-looking. Not the usual picture of an academic, but Sven had never been what was expected. A brilliant mathematician, he was first her tutor at Cambridge, then her lover. Her face twists. She’s aware that everyone considers her a dried-up old prune, who has never known love, much less sex ... even Francis, perhaps especially Francis, never suspected, though neither of them, Sven or herself, had ever deliberately sought to keep it a secret.