‘Why do you think?’ He set his glass down and leaned forward across the table. ‘Because there’s no evidence, Miss Ladram. Not a shred. I know what your brother’s done. And so do you. But I can’t prove it. I can’t even suggest it without …’
‘Without what?’
‘Never mind.’ He waved away a gnat and took another gulp of beer. This glass, too, would soon be empty. ‘Your brother’s in the clear. And so are you. What more do you need to know?’
‘Why do you say I’m in the clear?’
‘Because, without evidence of his guilt, you can pretend he’s innocent, can’t you? And benefit from his crime.’
‘Benefit? In what way?’
‘I assume some element of the royalties goes to you.’
‘You assume wrong.’ Charlotte felt herself flush. ‘My mother bequeathed all her royalty income to Maurice. As did Beatrix.’
‘Wonderful.’ He smiled humourlessly. ‘That salves your conscience very neatly, doesn’t it?’
‘It doesn’t need salving.’ But Charlotte knew otherwise. Fairfax was right. Indirectly, she was bound to benefit in some way. Perhaps she already had, for Maurice had never pressed her, as he reasonably might, either to sell Ockham House or to buy him out of his share of it. The sale of Jackdaw Cottage might solve that problem, of course, but it would not be Charlotte’s to sell if Beatrix were still alive. ‘What do you want me to do, Mr Fairfax? As you say, there’s no evidence to support your theory.’
‘What if there were?’
‘That would be—’ She broke off, reminding herself that Fairfax did not know – and must not know – why Maurice needed the royalties to continue. ‘But there isn’t,’ she said with stubborn finality. ‘And there can’t be, because Maurice didn’t do what you seem to think he did.’
‘You have to say that, of course. But you don’t believe it, do you?’ His eyes were fixed on her in open challenge.
‘I most certainly do.’ She glanced away, knowing what he would conclude from her inability to face him. ‘I think Emerson McKitrick stole the letters from Frank Griffith and destroyed them in order to protect his account of Tristram Abberley’s life. I’ve told Frank so. And now I’m telling you.’
‘How did Frank react?’
‘I didn’t—’ She forced herself to look back at him. ‘I haven’t spoken to him. I left a note at Hendre Gorfelen when I drove there yesterday. He wasn’t in.’
‘Couldn’t you have waited?’
‘I suppose so. But it’s a long—’
‘You didn’t want to wait, did you? You were glad he wasn’t there.’ He quaffed some more beer. ‘Perhaps you should have left me a note as well. It’s so much easier on paper, isn’t it? So much more … convenient.’
The truth of his words and the falseness of her own struck home at Charlotte. If she remained, she would either compound the lie she had told or confess to it and all she could be certain of was that she must do neither. ‘There’s nothing more to be said, is there?’ She stood up. ‘I think I’d better leave.’
‘So do I.’ Fairfax drained his glass and rose to confront her across the table, his glare crumpling suddenly into something forlorn and appealing. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. I realize you’re in an invidious position. But it’s a great deal better than my brother’s position, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. And—’ The look that passed between them in that instant carried with it a disturbing quality of self-recognition, as if each saw clearly their own frailties reflected in the other. ‘I’m sorry too. But sorrow doesn’t help, does it?’
‘Not a scrap.’
‘Goodbye, Mr Fairfax.’ She was tempted to offer him her hand, then decided that any suggestion of agreement between them – of unity of purpose – was best suppressed.
‘Goodbye, Miss Ladram.’
She turned and walked quickly away across the garden. When she reached her car and glanced back, she saw he was already heading towards the doorway of the pub, head bowed, empty glass suspended in his hand. They would not meet again. If they did so by chance, they would pretend not to know each other. This was the end both of them had feared from the moment Frank Griffith had agreed to share his secret. This was knowing the truth and knowing it could not be changed.
20
Tarragona,
20th February 1938
Dear Sis,
I don’t know what reports have reached you, but I hope this letter will reassure you that your little brother’s still in the land of the living, though not exactly up and about. I am, in fact, recovering well from a bullet-wound in the left thigh despite – rather than because of – the rough-and-ready techniques of the doctors who tend us in this large and cheerless hospital.
How did it happen? Well, to be honest, I’m not sure. My company was involved in a fairly desperate action to prevent the Canadian Battalion being cut off in the hills outside Teruel. In the course of it, we were exposed to rifle fire from a superior position and I was hit. All very random, you see. Nothing personal or even vaguely vicious about it. Just a misfortune of war.
And it may not have been such a misfortune. A friendly orderly brings me English papers when he can, so I know you’ll be well aware how badly – and predictably – wrong the Teruel operation went. Rumour has it that the final battle for the city has already begun and, frankly, there can only be one result. So you’ll understand that I’m more worried about my friends and comrades still stuck there than about my own condition, which seems to be a great deal better than I’ve any right to expect.
Frank Griffith and Vicente Ortiz both knew the generals were putting our heads in a noose at Teruel and, in many ways, I wish it could have been they who slipped out of it with nothing worse than a flesh-wound rather than I who was always thirstier than them for action. How they’ve fared since I was evacuated I dread to contemplate. I can’t help wondering whether I’ll see either of them again. If not, it won’t be the end of the matter, because— But let that pass. Suffice to say my thirst for action has been well and truly slaked. Whatever happens after this, I aim to call it a day as far as the International Brigade’s concerned. What follows I don’t know. When I volunteered last year, I wasn’t looking far ahead and I still can’t. But it seems I’ll be back in England before many months are out, with a limp to add to that albatross of a poetical reputation, facing the future with far from starry eyes.
I don’t know what sort of an impression my letters have given you of the seven months I’ve spent in Spain. Inaccurate and patchy, I dare say, as gauche and ill-formed as those sketches of poems you used to shape so adeptly into the real thing. When we can sit down together and talk it all through, you’ll have the true picture, of course. Then I’ll be able to tell you everything, including things which can’t be entrusted to the mail. And then you’ll understand, I promise. Then you’ll see it through my eyes.
Life’s pretty uneventful here, as I’m sure you can imagine. For once, it’s all going on somewhere else. And for once, I’m grateful. But, as soon as there is something to report, I’ll be in touch. Or maybe I’ll see you first in person. Who knows? The future’s a slippery commodity. You think you’ve grasped it, then it’s escaped you. Perhaps we’d better just await what it brings.
Much love,
Tristram.
Interlude
IT IS A late August day in the year 1928. Beatrix Abberley is reclining on a cushioned wicker sofa in the conservatory of her father’s house, Indsleigh Hall in Staffordshire. She is a twenty-six-year-old spinster of plain but uncompromising looks, whose hair-style – centre-parted and coiled over the ears – and dress – square-necked, short-sleeved and ankle-length – are a few crucial years behind the fashions. Yet it is obvious from the jut of her chin and the intensity of her gaze that she is a woman of vigour and intelligence. Indeed, she has frequently expressed her impatience with the ways of the world and the place allotted to her in it.
Beatrix believes – and few could deny – that h
er abilities are wasted in the roles she has dutifully if reluctantly filled since her mother’s death twelve years ago, those of housekeeper to her father and governess to her young brother, Tristram. She yearns to cut a figure on some wider stage, but knows the opportunity to do so – if it ever existed – is already past. Politics or literature would, she is certain, have proved more receptive to her talents than domestic economics and the limited society of rural Staffordshire. But both realms are closed to her and are likely to remain so.
To pile frustration upon unfulfilment, her hopes of finding consolation in her brother’s career are beginning to fade. Tristram has enjoyed all the social and educational advantages she has been denied. Since his boyhood, she has encouraged him to develop as independent and perceptive a mind as she herself possesses, to examine the world critically and impose himself upon it. But now, during the interval between his second and third years at Oxford, it is no longer possible for her to believe she has succeeded. For Tristram, though a quick and ready thinker, is cursed by indolence and superficiality, two traits which Oxford, or, more particularly, the company he has kept there, have only exacerbated. His eagerness to impress has become a willingness to please. His opinions have become prey to his audience.
A case in point is the document, folded in three, with which Beatrix is fanning herself at this humid and uncertain mid-point of the afternoon. Tristram has drifted into a circle of poets and poseurs during the Trinity term just passed. More poseurs, in Beatrix’s judgement, than poets, if the selection of their work Tristram has shown her is a fair one. The poor boy has fancied he might emulate them, has put diffident pen to speculative paper during the dog-days of an idle summer and has now sought his sister’s dispassionate assessment of what he has produced. He will shortly return from the croquet lawn, where she can hear him running a few aimless hoops, to receive it. And she does not know what she will say. The truth will offend him, but blandiloquence is against her nature. Therefore the truth it will have to be. Unless—
She unfolds the sheet of paper and casts her eye once more over the lines of verse. Gauche and ill-formed though they unquestionably are, they are not altogether without promise. Tristram has the ability to snatch a fitting image from the air, though a regrettable tendency to drain it of poetry while setting it down on the page. And the piece lacks purpose as well as elegance. Its starting-point, a nameless man facing execution in a nameless country, is strong, but its development is weak. The last verse needs rewriting in its entirety and the rest require substantial revision. Subject to all of that, it might be quite a neat and pithy dart at political complacency. Indeed, had the idea been hers, she could, she suspects, have made something of it.
Beatrix leans her head back on the cushions for a moment. She frowns in concentration, opens her mouth slightly and runs her tongue along her front teeth. Then she reaches across to a low table beside the sofa and picks up the pencil with which she earlier completed the Daily Telegraph crossword. She re-reads Tristram’s poem once more, rocking the pencil between index finger and thumb as she does so and reciting the words beneath her breath. Then she smiles faintly, raises the pencil and strikes out the title. ‘The Firing Squad’ is altogether too specific. Something more metaphorical is called for. In bold capitals, she writes the title she would have chosen. ‘Blindfold’. Then she pauses. Why not go further? Why not rewrite the entire poem? It would not be difficult, now Tristram has done the groundwork. He may even enjoy the joke, since egotism is not one of his faults. Yes, why not indeed? It is no great matter, after all, merely a brief lighthearted indulgence. In such a spirit, Beatrix sets to work.
The same day, transplanted by almost sixty years. Far from Staffordshire, in an air-conditioned bedroom high above New York’s Fifth Avenue, Beatrix Abberley’s nephew, Maurice, wakes from a post-coital doze to the cooling caress of silk sheets and a glimpse of his own face reflected in one of the many mirrors his mistress has installed to ensure her beauty need never be overlooked.
He is alone, though he does not expect to remain so for long. He can hear a faint hissing from the direction of the bathroom that tells him Natasha is taking a shower and will soon return, refreshed and receptive to whatever he may have in mind. Glancing down at the floor, he notices one of her black stockings, lying where it must have fallen after he peeled it from her leg and tossed it aside. He smiles, in anticipation as well as recollection. A second bite at the cherry – so to speak – may be even more enjoyable than the first – and certainly more leisurely. After an absence of several weeks – much of it spent enduring Ursula’s sarcastic smirks and ambiguous asides – he was no sooner inside the apartment this afternoon than he was urging Natasha towards the bedroom and the frantic coupling from which he is only now recovering. They have expended a good deal of breath since his arrival, but none of it on what could be called a conversation.
As a result, Natasha has yet to hear Maurice’s confident assertion that all obstacles to the success of his plans have been removed. Stretching deliciously beneath the sheets, he reminds himself of what he has achieved. Fairfax-Vane has been framed and his brother silenced. Spicer has been paid off and McKitrick sent packing. Charlotte has been deceived and Ursula appeased. While Beatrix, reaching out from beyond the grave to defy him with her posthumous ploys, has been defeated. She was better prepared than he expected, more devious than he ever anticipated. Yet still she was no match for him. It was a relishable contest, but really the old girl should have known better than to embark upon it. She should have accepted the terms he offered her last Christmas and been grateful.
At moments of self-satisfaction such as this, Maurice is able to acknowledge that greed was not the only reason why he was determined to outwit his aunt. Certainly the royalties will help him to maintain Natasha in the luxury she demands, but there was always more to it than that. It was a question of pride, a simple matter of not being prepared to take no for an answer. Beatrix had no right to refuse him, especially not when her reasons for doing so amounted to nothing but selfishness and spite. In the circumstances, he cannot help wishing she knew how futile her resistance has proved to be.
In an act similar to one he has performed frequently over recent weeks, Maurice extends his arm to his jacket where it is draped over the back of a chair and lifts his wallet from the inside pocket. Holding the wallet in front of him, he slides a tightly folded sheet of paper from one of the interior compartments. It is a banker’s receipt for a sealed packet consigned to safe deposit during Maurice’s last visit to New York. The time to collect has not yet come and will not come for many months. Until it does, this thin pro forma document must serve as the only token of his victory. But it is sufficient, for patience has always held his greed in check. Besides, less flimsy consolations are on hand. Indeed, if the suspension of hissing in the bathroom is any guide, they will shortly be in hand. Maurice grins at himself in the mirror, slips the receipt back into his wallet and stretches out to replace it in his jacket.
At the same moment, on the other side of the Atlantic, in his office at Fithyan & Co.’s premises in Tunbridge Wells, Derek Fairfax is also inspecting a document, though with exactly the opposite emotion. It is a copy, sent to him by Albion Dredge, of a private detective’s report on the whereabouts and activities of Brian Andrew Spicer, chauffeur, until the end of last year, to Maurice Abberley. And it does not make rewarding reading.
Spicer gave a week’s notice to his landlady in Marlow on Christmas Eve and moved out before it expired. He did not leave a forwarding address. He said he was going to join a former fellow Royal Marine in a limousine hire business in Manchester. This seems to have been a lie. There is no indication that he has worked as a chauffeur since then. None of his known friends have heard from him. He has, to all intents and purposes, disappeared.
Derek sighs and turns back to Dredge’s covering letter. Brief and neutrally phrased though it is, the solicitor’s opinion is clear enough.
The question arises as to whether you
wish these enquiries to continue in view of the lack of progress to date and the costs incurred (see interim account attached).
Derek lets letter, report and interim account flutter to rest on his blotter, then leans back in his chair, removes his glasses and slides one hand down over his face. This, he supposes, is where his efforts on his brother’s behalf stumble to their overdue and unavailing conclusion. This is where he decides that enough is enough. He has done all Colin could reasonably have expected of him and now is the time to call a halt. Replacing his glasses, he seizes a sheet of scrap paper and begins to draft a reply.
Dear Mr Dredge,
Thank you for your letter of 26th August. I have considered the position very carefully and have concluded—
He breaks off and glances across at the window, where sunlight is streaming through the grimy pane. If there were anything he could usefully do for Colin, he would do it. Of that he is certain. But Colin is not. And now he never will be. Of that too Derek is certain. He looks down at the sheet of paper and raises his pen.
I have considered the position very carefully and have concluded that no purpose would be served by taking this matter any further. I should therefore be grateful if …
Even as Derek Fairfax writes what he would much rather not, a door opens a mile away for the first time in a fortnight and Charlotte Ladram makes a reluctant homecoming from a less than successful holiday. She is tired, hot and burdened with luggage, but none of these conditions is what prompts her to lean heavily against the wall in the entrance porch of Ockham House, to close her eyes and to sigh despondently.
An old schoolfriend, Sally Childs, now Sally Boxall, had often asked Charlotte to visit her and her husband, a high-powered form of Eurocrat, at their home near Brussels. Charlotte had taken up the invitation on this occasion because it offered her a bolt-hole when she was badly in need of one. She had hoped two weeks of sightseeing and girl-talk in a country of which she knew nothing would drive thoughts of Beatrix and Maurice and Derek Fairfax from her mind. But her hopes were not fulfilled. Nor, she now realizes, were they ever likely to be. Sally’s endless monologues on Belgian chocolate, her husband’s career and the marriages and motherhoods of a dozen half-remembered old girls had succeeded only in casting Charlotte’s preoccupations into stark relief.
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