by Aileen Izett
Her chest heaved with the effort of having had to grapple with him.
She used me, sitting at the other end of the table to her and Tom, as her audience. Her tone was almost conversational.
“Remember yesterday,” she said, bending close to his ear, “when you told me that Claudine had burnt Zachary’s photo? It puzzled me. It didn’t make any sense. Why would she burn it? But I accepted what you said. You were a nice man.”
Eveline looked at me. “And then your sister told me what you’d done — and I thought, why would you do that? I didn’t believe her.”
Tom gave me a look of utter despair.
“I’m sorry Tom,” I said, crying. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“What?” Eveline jeered. “Did you tell her not to tell me?” Viciously, she jabbed a finger in his ear. He screamed with pain.
“To continue,” she said. “I thought then that you simply hadn’t gone to Claudine’s. You’d palmed me off with a lie. I thought that maybe Zachary’s photo was still there. Harry and Serena gave me a lift up to the woods.”
She gave his hair a sharp tug. “I hope you’re listening.”
I was horrified, mesmerised by the cruelty.
“Speak when spoken to.”
“Yes,” he said.
“So where are Harry and Serena?” I asked, hoping against hope, that maybe they were outside in the car, waiting for Eveline.
“On their way to Paris.”
“What about your suitcase?”
“Who gives a shit about my suitcase?” She let the clump of hair and scalp float to the floor.
Chapter 56
We could hear water gushing out of the drainpipe beside the window. With her standing behind him, Tom couldn’t see how all the hatred had left Eveline’s face. I allowed myself a little hope then. It was completely blank, a beautiful blank just as it had been when I first met her. Her hand, though, was still clamped on Tom’s shoulder. Neither Tom or I dared move.
After a couple of minutes, Eveline’s attention returned to Tom.
“But you weren’t lying about the old woman were you? She had burnt it. Destroyed the only photograph of my brother. She didn’t want to be involved.” Eveline’s voice rose, her face twisted with fury. “Because she was in this house, like you were, when they murdered him for sport.”
She jabbed Tom in the neck. “Armistice day. Six years ago. You didn’t stop them. You didn’t report them. You did nothing. Just hid in your room.”
The realisation of what she had said enveloped me, like an icy tide.
He looked at me, shamed, but still I struggled to cling onto his lies.
“Tell her it’s not true!” I screamed. “Tell her Tom.”
He said nothing.
Our mother had died on that day. Tom had been on an unavoidable business trip.
Eveline gave me a glance full of contempt.
“Your brother deals in falsehoods. Haven’t you noticed? Little lies that trip off the tongue.”
Claudine had been telling the truth. The way he clicked his fingers — he’d been doing it as Eveline’s brother died.
My heart broke for the young man — and for the fatherless boy who had grown into a middle-aged man corrupt to the core. I tried to save him. I swear I did. He was still my brother.
“He wasn’t here. On my life. You’ve got Tom all wrong. Telling little lies as you put it is very different to being complicit in murder.”
Tom shifted in his seat. With my support — we were a team again — he would refute Eveline.
“I’m listening.” She let go of his shoulder. She pulled a chair away from the table. She positioned it so that she was sitting about a metre away from both of us and a metre away from the table. It would seem that that was the closest proximity to us that she could bear.
Tom no longer looked frightened. He rearranged himself in his seat, smoothing down his hair and wincing. The imprint of Eveline’s fingers was beginning to fade from his cheek.
Oblivious to the wet, bloody clothes stuck to her body, Eveline folded her arms and crossed her legs. I wondered if she were cold, I remember.
“I don’t know how you can believe the rantings of a mad old woman,” he said earnestly. “I wasn’t here.”
“Do you honestly think,” Tom continued, leaning forwards, like he was trying to reach out to Eveline, to be sympathetic. “That I would witness something like that and not go to the police?” He stops to think. “I mean, why didn’t Claudine go to the police?”
“She had good reason not to.”
Tom pointed his finger triumphantly. “Exactly. And you take her word over mine.”
He smiled over to me, confident for himself. The length of the kitchen table from one end to the other, suddenly seemed enormous. Another world.
All the time, Eveline watched him, her gaze never wavering.
“What was it that made my brother’s life worthless to you?”
Tom looked at me. Looked at her. Hope drained out of him. “You have to understand my position. I did what was best for my employees in that particular company. I ensured their futures. If I hadn’t the company would have gone down the pan. You have no idea what it is like to be responsible for so many lives, so many mortgages, children…” It’s like he had been rehearsing this speech for a court of law.
“So you did business with murderers.”
“We didn’t actually know then…”
“You knew enough.”
“Yes.” His voice was barely above a whisper.
“So what about my brother? Why didn’t you report his murder?”
Tom looked at me despairingly. I shook my head.
“The embargo,” he said. “I was never supposed to be here.”
“So?” Eveline asked.
He took a deep breath. “So,” he repeated.
Eveline and I both waited as he searched for the right words. “So,” he said again, “I couldn’t risk prison. I had to think of my wife and children.”
He saw the look of utter contempt on Eveline’s face.
“For God’s sakes,” he cried. “How do you think the world operates? It’s all compromise.”
“What’s that about compromise?” A male voice asked from the top of the kitchen stairs.
Chapter 57
Colin Wareing hesitated halfway down the flight of stairs. He was looking down on a scene which he couldn’t have expected: three dishevelled people, one of whom was soaking wet, sitting at various distances from a kitchen table on which a meal had been laid for two.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said pleasantly, continuing his descent. “I knocked four or five times before trying the front door.” He tilted his head, waiting for an answer. It was obvious that the journalist thought that his unexpected entrance had struck us dumb.
Wareing laughed, stepping off the bottommost tread. “I’m not gate crashing a party am I? I would have come earlier, but I thought I’d dig up some background info so went up to see a lady… I believe her name was Claudine?”
At the mention of Claudine, Tom stood up with such force that his chair toppled to the floor. My brother lunged at the journalist, trying to force him out into the archway. I found myself between them, trying to stop Tom’s flailing arms. Only when he inadvertently landed a blow on me did he come to his senses. “Christ, Sis, I’m so sorry.” Colin Wareing patted himself down. When he looked up, his expression was sneering.
Tom glanced in Eveline’s direction. She is still sitting in the same chair, her eyes blankly fixed on some point on the ceiling, completely removed from the commotion. Eventually Tom straightened himself up. He ignored Wareing. “Just make sure he leaves the grounds. I’ll handle the situation here.”
Out in the archway, Wareing seemed amused by his treatment. “What situation? Who’s that girl? She was with you last night, wasn’t she?”
“Please leave.”
He followed me out to the front of the house.
“What’s
going on?”
The rain had stopped. There was a slice of blue sky amongst all the cloud.
“You are trespassing.”
At a brisk pace, it took ten minutes to walk down the avenue. Wareing had perfected the art of being a complete irritant. He dawdled. He stopped to look at the chapel. He lit first one, then another cigarette. He seemed to think that if he spent long enough with me, I would let something slip. I maintained a stubborn silence. He would never know how grateful I was for his arrival.
Wareing might as well have been talking to himself. He said that Tom would almost certainly go to prison. “With a good lawyer, he’s looking at three years.”
But when he said that it puzzled him that there were no gates to the property, “given that the château, used to belong to the Kumonos,” I reacted.
“So what?” I said lightly, pleased to have the opportunity to put the odious little man in his place. “Gates don’t keep bad news out. The likes of you will always find a way in.”
He smiled. He had had a reaction. “My gut tells me that there’s more to the Kumonos and your brother than meets the eye…” He stopped for a moment, thinking. The tone of his voice completely changed. “I would have come earlier but I had to deal with the police. You see when I went up to interview the cleaning woman I had the shock of my life.”
A jolt of fear stopped me in my tracks. “Why?”
“She’d been stabbed. I found her dead.”
I started to run, fear propelling me back along the avenue we’d just come.
There was nobody in the kitchen except shadows, floating in a lifeless silence.
“Tom!” I screamed. “Eveline!”
I took the stairs, two at a time, and hurried through the dining hall. I went into the salon. I looked in the library. No one in Eveline’s room. I screamed for Tom. I heard Colin Wareing shouting up at me and I shouted for him to check the basement and outside in the stables.
I flung open every door on the first floor. I ran up the stairs to the second, barely touching the banisters but when I looked down at my hand because it was sticky, I saw it was smeared wet and red. I tried to scream but my throat was choked.
I saw then the splashes on the dark stairs, the smudge of a palm print going up the wall. I fell, stumbling up the last few stairs. I could feel the weight of the château closing over me.
I stood on the threshold of the lower of the two tower rooms. Tom was lying on the floor. He tried to say something but his head fell back. His hands were over his stomach. His chest was covered in blood. His eyes stared at the ceiling.
He came up to the highest point in the house, in a doomed effort to escape.
I knelt in a puddle of his blood. I leant my face into his, like I watched my mother do to my father. There was no breath. I ripped his shirt open, to the chest. I pressed two fingers against his neck. I took his hand. “Don’t leave me Tom.”
I was already bereft.
I heard footsteps then, soft and light, coming down the spiral staircase from my room. They came towards me and stopped, behind my back. I felt the cool steel of a blade pressed against my neck. I was too terrified to breathe, let alone turn my head. I knew too that if I did, I would beg her to spare my life.
“You are as bad as he is.”
I felt the tip of the knife lightly score my skin. I felt the trickle of blood between my shoulder blades. I felt a movement of air, as if she had raised her arm and I stiffened, waiting.
“Isabel!” Colin Wareing shouted from far below. “Where are you?”
She left the room then, stopping for a moment — by the door, I think. “I’ll be back.”
I don’t know what he can have said to her — what she can have forced out of him at knifepoint. She wanted the truth. He never told me the entire truth. I could hear my car churning up the gravel. I heard it roaring down the avenue.
I cradled Tom, my man in the tree, the little boy in the tree who killed my father, my beloved brother, and the château’s shadows kept me company. They grieved with me and then the silence through which they gently moved was ripped apart by heavy feet thundering up the stairs.
They crashed into the room. Another stricken silence. Then Colin Wareing’s voice was soft in my ear. To my surprise, he had tears in his eyes.
“He wasn’t a bad man.” He could never have realised how much that comment meant to me — still means, as the inquiry into Tom’s business affairs continues.
I hope that Tom never knew about the shackled slaves used by the Kumono Mining Company.
My car was recovered at Marseilles, wiped clean of fingerprints.
Chapter 58
So I sit here, at my desk, looking out at Christmas trees twinkling in the windows of tall narrow houses, just like mine. I watch and wait for Eveline. My brother could never have survived. He was stabbed fifteen times, twice through the heart.
I don’t know what will happen when she comes. She’ll notice, of course, my stomach, the burgeoning of new life. Perhaps we’ll have tea. Perhaps Philip will come in after a long day at the office and I’ll introduce him to the woman who killed my brother. Perhaps she’ll try to kill me — but I do hope not, because of the baby. I wonder if he’ll have jug ears, like his father.
I am no longer frightened of the unknown. I know who I am. Besides, I have taken precautions with another life at stake.
I remember Tom. I can see my young brother, with the looks of my father, one eye green and one eye brown. I can feel his hand around my waist and my head resting on his shoulder as we dance, the beat of the music binding us together, lost in the ecstasy of being in rhythm with someone whose heartbeat you know better than your own. Outside it is night and the windows are all open and I’ll remember thinking, all those years ago, how no one and nothing mattered more than the two of us, and then I’ll see Eveline, more beautiful than ever, standing by my study door.
“What about me?” she will shout though no words will come out of her mouth. “How can you live your lives and shut me out? How can you exploit me and my countrymen for your gain? How can you seek to be rich on the backs of others? All this because your father died? People die. My brother died.” I will realise that she is covered in blood.
And I’ll betray Tom again. “But my brother died too, isn’t that enough?”
Whatever happens, I’ll beg her forgiveness with all my heart.
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