Jasmyn

by Alex Bell

  ‘When the undertakers gave me his effects,’ I said, ‘I found a little metal knight with a nail shoved through its head.’

  ‘And?’ Ben prompted when I didn’t go on.

  I shrugged. ‘That’s it. I just thought it was odd.’ Even though it seemed highly doubtful, I couldn’t help going on, ‘Perhaps that’s the object you’re looking for.’

  ‘It’s not,’ Ben replied at once.

  ‘How do you know?’ I replied, rather annoyed by his instant dismissal. ‘You haven’t even seen it.’

  ‘You said it was in Liam’s pocket the day he died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then it’s not the object from Neuschwanstein. Liam would never have been stupid enough to carry it around with him. He would have hidden it very carefully. I doubt it’s even in England.’

  I sighed. ‘Well, what are we going to do once we’ve worked out where Liam’s been over the last year?’

  ‘I’ll retrace his footsteps.’

  ‘You mean we’ll retrace his footsteps, don’t you?’

  ‘We?’ Ben repeated, looking startled. ‘Oh no, you’ve got to go back home.’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ I said flatly. ‘Very funny. Don’t look so horrified, Ben. You drop this bombshell on me and then expect me to quietly catch the next flight home? Come on! He was my husband and I loved him and if there was something going on that he kept secret then I want to know what it was and why he didn’t tell me. There’s no way I can possibly get on with my life with all this hanging over my head unanswered.’

  ‘I’ll share any information I get with you,’ Ben offered stiffly.

  ‘Nice try. But not good enough. I can’t sit around at home waiting, not knowing what’s going on, worried that black horses or swans or murderous photographers might turn up at my house at any moment. If you want my help then you’ll have to accept that I’m involved in this now, and I’m coming with you.’

  ‘Highly inadvisable,’ Ben said coldly. ‘But if you can’t be dissuaded then I suppose I have no choice.’

  ‘Good, I’m glad we’re agreed,’ I said, standing up and pointedly ignoring his sullen look. ‘I’d better go and book a cabin for the night. When and where do you want to meet in the morning?’

  Ben shrugged. ‘We might as well meet in the restaurant for breakfast. But like I told Laura, I’ve already booked you a cabin.’

  ‘You have? I thought you made that up to reassure her.’

  ‘No, I booked you a room before I met you on deck.’

  ‘That was a little presumptuous, wasn’t it?’ I asked, irritated, for some reason, by his action.

  Ben shrugged as he drew the room key out of his pocket and dropped it on the table. ‘There’s the key,’ he said. ‘You can use the room or not as you like. It hardly matters to me.’

  I ignored his words and narrowed my eyes suspiciously at his right hand, still resting on the table, as I noticed for the first time that it was a mess. There were fresh cuts on his knuckles, only recently scabbed over, with ugly bruises mottling the skin there and around the plain black ring he wore on his index finger.

  ‘What happened to your hand?’ I said.

  He looked down and then quickly stood up, burying his hand in his pocket. ‘Nothing,’ he said shortly.

  ‘You’ve been fighting with someone,’ I said accusingly.

  He gave me a withering stare. ‘Do I look like I’ve been fighting with anyone?’ he asked.

  I had to admit that, apart from the scarred knuckles, he didn’t. There wasn’t so much as a scratch on his face and he didn’t move with any hint of stiffness. I shrugged it off. What did it matter to me what he’d been doing anyway? I snatched up the key and said irritably, ‘How much is this going to cost?’

  ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow after we’ve checked out.’

  After everything Ben had told me that night I could hardly bear to look at him, so was glad to disappear into my cabin when we reached it and leave Ben to go into his next door, relieved to be alone at last.

  It was lovely inside - decorated in 1930s style in keeping with the rest of the ship and a porthole looked out at the lights of the nearby shoreline. I sat down on the bed and ran my hands through my hair. I wished that I could just ask Liam about all this. That I could just go home and into his study to find him sitting behind his desk as usual, and then I would ask him about what had happened at Neuschwanstein and why he had lied to me about going there. He would have had a reasonable explanation for me. I was quite, quite certain of that. He might have been a thrill-seeker, but he was not a criminal. He was not a bad man. If I could only ask him then he would be able to clear this whole thing up at once. But I couldn’t. I would never be able to speak to Liam about any of this and that squeezed at my heart far more than the fact that he had lied. Liam was gone and the only person I could look for answers with now was cold, aloof Ben who looked so similar, but was so unlike Liam in every other way.

  I had seen him be perfectly pleasant with Laura and her boyfriend so I knew that he wasn’t acting this way with me merely because he was Ben - he was acting like this because he simply didn’t like me, just as his parents and the rest of his family had disliked me from the moment I married Liam. The reason for this dislike was a total mystery to me for, as far as I knew, I had never done a single one of them any wrong and before our engagement was announced we had all got on well. But then several of them - including Liam’s mother and Ben himself - had promptly come up with excuses as to why they could not attend the wedding just two weeks before it was about to take place. It was my albinism, it had to be . . .

  Liam continued to laugh it off when I voiced my insecurities to him, saying, ‘They’re a strange lot, Jaz. I don’t pretend to understand them. I expect they’re just jealous because you’re so pretty . . .’

  Before I went to sleep I sat on the bed for some time, hugging the pillow to my chest in the soft glow of the bedside lamp, trying to digest all that I had learned that evening and the extraordinary spectacle I had witnessed with Ben on deck. How I wished that Liam was here with me instead.

  8

  Adrian Halsbach

  I was woken up the next day by someone banging on my cabin door. I staggered out of the bed, dragging the sheet off to wrap around myself before answering it to find Ben on the other side.

  ‘I’m going down for breakfast,’ he said. ‘Are you coming?’

  Everything that had happened last night came flooding back into my mind, making me wish I could crawl back under the sheets and stay there.

  ‘Yes,’ I sighed, rubbing sleep from my eyes. ‘Just give me a moment to get changed - oh—’ I broke off as I remembered that I had no clothes and that was why I was currently wearing nothing but a sheet. ‘I haven’t got anything to wear,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t you just wear the dress you wore last night?’ Ben asked, his eyes flicking to where I had carefully hung it up on the wardrobe door.

  ‘I can’t wear a long evening dress into breakfast!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Why not?’ Ben asked stonily.

  ‘I just can’t,’ I replied, resisting the urge to roll my eyes.

  I glanced round the cabin as if expecting to see something respectable I could put on and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, causing me to cringe and the blood to rush to my face. My bare arms and shoulders were terrible. They were so white! And quite a lot of leg was on display too. Only Liam saw me this way, not other men. I practically closed the door in Ben’s face, leaving it open a mere crack as I peered through it at him and said, ‘Can you go and buy me a tracksuit from the shops, please? I saw them there in the window last night. Get me a pair of flip-flops too.’

  He started to protest but I grabbed my purse from the table beside the door and thrust some money at him. ‘For God’s sake, I’m not asking you to drive to a mall. Just go upstairs and get me something. I’m not leaving until I have some clothes.’

  And I shut the door, aware that I was being a little short with
him but finding it too early in the morning to care. I only realised after Ben had left that I hadn’t told him my size, but he returned a few minutes later with a tracksuit that fit.

  ‘I didn’t know what colour you wanted,’ he mumbled, holding the bag out to me awkwardly. I took it from him and looked inside. He had chosen the pink one. Not my favourite colour but at least it didn’t clash horribly with my white skin and hair. Liam had always liked it when I wore pink . . .

  ‘Thanks, this is fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll just be a second.’

  I closed the door and put on the tracksuit. It was velour with a Queen Mary insignia on the shoulder and hip and felt velvety soft against my skin. I combed my hair back into a ponytail and then pulled on the flip-flops before walking upstairs in silence with Ben into the restaurant where a large buffet breakfast had been laid out. Despite the fact that the food looked very good I found I had no appetite and would have preferred to skip breakfast altogether and get straight down to business. But Ben clearly did not feel the same way. After we were seated at a table by the window, he went up to the buffet and returned with a plate piled high with food. I don’t know why that made me feel resentful. I suppose I just felt that he should be as distressed by all this as I was. He shouldn’t be able to eat.

  He hardly looked at me all through breakfast, much less spoke to me, and I wondered if he was still angry about my refusal to return to England. As I didn’t have the spirit or the inclination to try to make conversation, we just sat there in silence; him tucking into his fried breakfast and me drinking a cup of black coffee. It was good coffee. It was a nice restaurant and a lovely setting. Under any other circumstances I would have been enjoying myself immensely on the ship. When Ben at last finished eating we moved to one of the lounges, which was quiet at this time of day.

  ‘All right,’ he said, calmly taking a pen and piece of paper out of his pocket and sliding them across the table to me. ‘There’s a list of the places Liam visited over the last thirteen months. Read through them and mark the ones he lied to you about.’

  I cringed at the blunt way he said it, wishing he could have phrased it a little more tactfully. Liam had gone away on short business trips seven times since we’d been married - once to Bermuda when he’d been researching the Bermuda Triangle, four times to Scotland to write about Scottish ghosts and the Loch Ness Monster and twice to Peru when he’d started work on the Nazca lines. Or so I’d thought . . . But, in fact, there was just one trip to Bermuda and one to Peru on the list before me - nothing at all to Scotland - and two entirely new places: Munich and Paris. As far as I knew, Liam had never been to Paris and had only been to Munich once with me before our wedding. But it seemed from Ben’s list that he had visited Paris thirteen months ago, a couple of weeks before we were married, and had been to Munich a total of four times, not including the trip Ben had already told me about. These trips had been spread fairly evenly across the ten months of our marriage. Indeed, if Ben’s information was accurate then Liam had returned to Munich just two weeks before he died. He’d told me to my face that he was going to Peru to look at the Nazca lines. He had even brought back photos of them.

  I slid the piece of paper across the table to Ben and leaned back in my chair, eyeing him doubtfully. He was Liam’s brother, but how well did I really know him? It seemed absurd that Liam had been in Munich rather than Peru. I simply couldn’t imagine him lying to me like that. Think of the effort it would have involved: hiding his real travel documents from me, getting photos of the Nazca lines from somewhere, blithely telling me all about them, brazenly lying to my face. I couldn’t imagine him doing it. Why on earth should I trust Ben’s word over my husband’s?

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe Liam went to Munich so often and didn’t tell me, never mind Paris.’

  ‘Fine.’ Ben shrugged, running his eye down the list. ‘I’m making it all up. Go back home to England.’

  I scowled at him. ‘Don’t you have any proof you can show me?’

  He glanced up with a scowl of his own. ‘I have no intention of trying to prove all this to you. It would be impossible anyway. You can believe me or not as you like.’

  I curled my hands into fists, my nails digging into my palms, resisting the urge to shake him. Couldn’t he see what he was doing to me? Couldn’t he see that he was making an unbearable situation even more intolerable? It was bad enough that I’d lost Liam without having to doubt him like this as well. It was bad enough that I was a twenty-seven-year-old widow, without having to always wonder if these things Ben had told me were true or not. If he wasn’t prepared to prove it then he shouldn’t have said anything to me in the first place. At least knowing for sure would be better than all this doubting.

  ‘You’re being such a bastard, Ben!’ I said quietly. ‘Can’t you see how awful this is for me?’

  He sighed and spread his hands on the table between us. ‘What do you want from me, Jasmyn? I’ve told you what I know. I’m sorry if you don’t like it or you can’t accept it. I know you want to think that Liam was perfect but that’s not true and that’s all there is to it. For the most part I’m as much in the dark as you are.’

  ‘But how do I know you’re even telling me the truth?’ I asked outright, abandoning politeness in my desperation.

  Ben scowled. ‘Don’t you trust me?’ he said bitterly.

  He was Liam’s brother and for that reason alone I wanted to trust him. Ben looked like Liam; he even sounded a little like him. And because of that I wanted to be near him even though he was not the man I had loved and married. But although he was my brother-in-law, we had never had much to do with each other. When I’d visited his house as a child it had been to play with Liam. Ben had always been closeted away in his own bedroom. And as adults I had seen very little of him even before his argument with his brother. It would therefore be stupid of me to blindly trust every word he said.

  ‘Why would I lie to you about all this?’ Ben asked coldly. ‘What exactly is it that you think I’m hoping to achieve?’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry if I offended you,’ I said, ‘but you say Liam went off all over the place without telling me. Either Liam lied to me when he was alive or you’re lying to me now. You can’t blame me for wanting to believe that my husband was the one telling the truth.’

  ‘Fine,’ Ben replied. ‘Believe what you want. But I can show you the report I have from the private investigators I hired if that will make any difference to you.’

  And he reached into the bag on the floor by his feet, rummaging around in it for a moment before dropping a brown file on the table between us. Inside it was a very official looking report containing the list of places Ben had already showed me, as well as flight numbers. There were even a couple of credit card statements, which had obviously been retrieved from a rubbish bin for they were creased and stained, but payments to a travel agency had been highlighted on each one and it was the same agency that had sent the plane ticket to Munich to my house shortly before I left.

  It seemed that Ben had been telling the truth after all. Liam had gone to Germany and France whilst we’d been married and yet he had never said so much as a word about it to me. He had lied about where he was going and he had done so consistently and convincingly. It was utterly devastating and even now with the evidence before me I struggled to believe it.

  ‘Satisfied?’ Ben asked calmly, holding out his hand for the file.

  ‘What are we going to do now?’ I asked as I handed it back, making an effort to keep my voice level.

  ‘Go to Germany. That’s where all this started.’

  ‘You mean go back to Neuschwanstein?’

  ‘No, not Neuschwanstein. Not yet, anyway. I want to go to Munich first.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To find Adrian Halsbach.’

  ‘Is this the same Adrian that Jaxon mentioned to me?’ I asked, narrowing my eyes as I remembered this was another name Jaxon had thrown out as a possible candidate for murder
ing my husband.

  ‘Yes, Jaxon knows him. He told me where to find him. He’s a scientist so I’m not sure how he’s involved in all this, but they all seem to have spent a fair amount of time in Munich together, so perhaps he can tell us a little more about what Liam was doing there - and why he turned up at my flat the second time.’

  Ben and I got a taxi to the airport, going via Laura’s house so I could pick up my suitcase and violin and apologise for leaving earlier than planned. I was sketchy on the reason, just saying vaguely that Ben was going through some stuff and I would be staying with him for a while.

  ‘Oh, Jasmyn,’ Laura said quietly. ‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’

  I had expected her to be disappointed that I had to leave, but I was a little surprised by the undertone of disapproval in her voice.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Well . . .’ She hesitated, then said, ‘It’s none of my business, but I would have thought you’d want to stay away from Ben for a while.’

  ‘I do want to stay away from him,’ I replied. ‘He’s irritating the hell out of me. He’s rude, arrogant, tactless and cruel. But he’s Liam’s brother and he needs my help so I haven’t got any choice.’

  Laura didn’t say much else but she seemed distinctly withdrawn as she said goodbye and I wondered if I had offended her by cutting the trip short. I was sorry if that was the case but it was out of my hands. I couldn’t stay. I had to go with Ben and that was all there was to it.

  It was just over an eleven-hour flight from Los Angeles International Airport to Munich and I was not relishing the thought of being stuck with him for so long. For the most part we simply didn’t talk to each other. Ben seemed completely unaffected by the awkward silence and made no attempt to fill it and I was too preoccupied with everything I had so recently learned to attempt to do so. As soon as we got onto the plane Ben put his earphones in, leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, putting an end to any further questions I might have thought of asking him.