The Unburied Past

by Anthea Fraser

  Adam stared at him, his eyes narrowing. ‘You mean no one was ever caught?’

  Lynne and Harry shook their heads.

  ‘Well,’ he continued after a moment, his voice brittle, ‘this opens up a whole new area for my family research. Considering all the scientific advances since then, I should have better luck.’

  ‘God, Adam!’ Harry stared at him in horror. ‘You’re not thinking of taking it up yourself?’

  ‘Obviously someone needs to.’

  Lynne’s voice shook. ‘Is this your way of punishing us for not telling you sooner?’

  ‘No, it’s a son’s natural desire to avenge his parents, and nothing you say will stop me.’ He stood up suddenly. ‘Right, I’ve enough facts to begin my research.’

  He started towards the door, then stopped and turned. ‘I presume my sister’s also been kept in ignorance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And on learning I’m off to the UK, you panicked and alerted the Marriotts?’

  Harry nodded. ‘It was agreed you should both be told this week.’

  ‘Well, it will be interesting to hear her reaction,’ he said and, turning on his heel, left the room. Minutes later they heard his car start up and drive swiftly through the gates.

  Lynne and Harry, who’d also stood up, looked at each other in despair. He put his arms round her, feeling her tremble.

  ‘He’s in shock, hon,’ he said gently. ‘Give him time.’

  ‘He might never speak to us again,’ she said.

  FIVE

  It was the twenty-fourth of June, a date whose aura of loss and tragedy hadn’t lessened over the years, and since it was also a Sunday – and therefore an especially poignant anniversary – Marilyn had been to church after visiting the cemetery, thus providing Dean, a non-churchgoer, with an excuse not to accompany her.

  Not that he ever did. Though he’d often promised to come, at the last minute something always prevented him. Possibly he was embarrassed to visit the grave of his predecessor; perhaps jealousy came into it, but whatever the reason she no longer expected it.

  Although it was wet he’d gone to golf as usual, and she returned to an empty house. The rain was driving hard against it and she hurried to close the drawing-room window, pausing to gaze at the mountains above the town, now partially shrouded in cloud. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, they had sung earlier. The cemetery had been particularly bleak this morning, its gravestones dark with rain, its floral tributes drooping with the weight of it.

  Twenty-six years, she thought in wonder. Impossible to believe Tony had been dead that long. The date was necessarily approximate, commemorating the day she’d last seen him, though if he’d been alive at the end of it he’d have surely come home. He’d had something to work out, and hoped a day’s fishing would help him resolve it. And to compensate for her lonely Sunday he’d promised dinner at the George that evening. Little had she dreamed it would be but the first of many lonely days.

  Six agonizing weeks had passed before his body was retrieved from the lake, and by then, battered by rocks and shudderingly mauled by the fish he’d hoped to catch, there’d been no way to establish how he’d died. His boat had been found weeks before, floating some way down the lake, and the consensus was that he’d overbalanced while reeling in a fish. If, in doing so, he’d somehow banged his head, it might explain why, although a strong swimmer, he had apparently drowned.

  Dean had been his business colleague, and had proved to be her rock during those first traumatic months. At the time he’d been divorced for two years and, with no family of her own, she’d come to lean on him. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that as the months passed they grew closer and, lonely and vulnerable, she’d accepted his proposal within the year.

  Sometimes she wondered if he regretted his precipitous courtship; if, perhaps, it had been motivated by pity. She wasn’t clever like his brother’s wife, Vivien, who was a chartered accountant and sometimes helped in the family business. She’d never discussed work with Tony and nor did she with Dean, but then it wasn’t for her brains that they’d married her; it was, as she well knew, because she was pretty and vivacious and she made them laugh.

  This second marriage hadn’t been a love-match but it was happy enough, despite the non-arrival of children. Dean himself had two sons, and during the early years the visits of the little boys had been a highlight in Marilyn’s life, as if Fate, relenting, were allowing her motherhood at one remove. Though they were now partners in the family firm, the closeness had thankfully endured.

  She turned from the window with a sigh. Dean would be home for lunch soon, and she felt a stab of sympathy, knowing that even though spared the cemetery, he dreaded this day almost as much as she did, in particular dinner at the George, during which Tony’s memory would be toasted. But this was a tradition she clung to and had no intention of relinquishing. In some obscure way it seemed an honouring of his last wishes.

  ‘You come first all the rest of the year,’ she’d told Dean. ‘Don’t begrudge Tony his day of remembrance.’

  She could only hope he’d abide by that.

  Leaving the outskirts of Westbourne behind her, Kirsty Marriott settled down for the half-hour drive home.

  The twenty-fourth of June, she thought glumly, the anniversary of her parents’ death. She wasn’t looking forward to the visit, which would entail a trip to the cemetery where her aunt unfailingly succumbed to floods of tears. Though not unsympathetic, Kirsty would have expected, after all this time, that she’d have come to terms with the loss of her sister. For her part, never having really known her parents, she felt sadness at the shortening of their lives rather than a sense of personal loss. It was tragic that Emma was only twenty-nine when she died, but sadly such tragedies happened every day, and wasn’t time supposed to be a healer? Still, since her aunt’s grief was obviously still raw, the least she could do was spend the day with them both, knowing that at the end of it she could escape the gloom and return to the house she shared with Angie.

  And that in itself had been a battle, she reflected; Aunt Jan had done her best to persuade her to live at home and commute daily, but fond though Kirsty was of her adoptive parents, Jan’s clinging love could be stifling and, having made the break, she firmly resisted the plea to return each week for Sunday lunch.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she’d assured them, ‘I’ll be popping back all the time, but let’s not make any hard and fast rules.’

  Thankfully, her uncle had backed her and Jan, used, as head of the local primary, to her wishes being obeyed, had been forced to give way.

  Thank God for Angie! Kirsty thought now. They’d met five years ago on a Cordon Bleu course and, finding they had similar ambitions, decided to go into partnership supplying handmade cakes to patisseries and coffee shops around Westbourne. They’d invested in a house near the main shopping area and converted the ground floor to business premises – office, packing room and a kitchen conforming to Environmental Health standards – and made their home on the floors above, thereby avoiding overheads. Though they’d become fairly well known and received enquiries from around the country, they were determined to remain a local company, restricting their customer base to a ten-mile radius and keeping their output to a manageable level for the two of them.

  Before she’d set off that morning, Angie had asked if she was curious about the parents she couldn’t remember. ‘Not really,’ she’d replied. ‘There are photos all over the house, and with Mum being Aunt Jan’s sister and Dad the brother of my aunt in Canada, I feel I know them quite well.’

  Angie, with a large and close family of her own, hadn’t seemed convinced. Nor could she understand how Kirsty could have no feelings for her brother, adopted by the other side of the family and immediately whisked off to Canada. Kirsty had met him a couple of times when the family came over to visit her grandparents, and had thought him obnoxious.

  And now she was approaching Spellsbury, the market town where she’d grown up.
Her hands tightened on the steering wheel and she spared a quick glance to check that the flowers hadn’t slipped to the floor and the cake box remained upright. Oh, God, she thought, I wish it was this evening!

  Arranging a suitably sombre smile on her face, she turned into her relatives’ driveway.

  It was immediately apparent that her aunt was even more tense than usual. Her welcoming hug was more prolonged, her smile tighter, and Kirsty felt a flicker of alarm. Hoping to ease the problem, she handed her the cake box. ‘Your favourite,’ she said with a smile. ‘Chocolate and orange, with pieces of pineapple.’

  ‘Lovely, darling, thank you.’ But she sounded preoccupied, and Kirsty’s worst fears seemed confirmed when, instead of immediately setting off for the cemetery as usual, her uncle took her arm and led her into the sitting room.

  ‘Come and sit down, sweetie,’ he said quietly. ‘We need to speak to you.’

  ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked anxiously.

  He didn’t answer, simply motioning for her to sit down and seating himself next to his wife on the sofa. They exchanged a look, and Janice gave a minute nod.

  ‘Although we’ve always spent this anniversary together,’ Roy began, ‘there’s something we’ve never told you, and that is how your parents died.’

  Kirsty frowned. ‘But surely, the car crash …?’ Her voice tailed off as he shook his head.

  He leant forward, clasping his hands between his knees. ‘Please believe me, sweetheart, we thought we were acting for the best in keeping this from you. In the early days, of course, we were, but—’

  ‘Uncle!’ Kirsty broke in and he nodded, lifting a hand in acknowledgement of her impatience.

  ‘The truth is that you were all on a self-catering holiday in the Lakes, and at the beginning of the second week we received the most terrible news.’

  Bracing herself, she waited as he swallowed nervously.

  ‘Early that Monday, a milkman on his rounds noticed Mark lying in the driveway of the cottage. He hurried to his assistance, but to his horror found that he was dead.’

  Kirsty gasped, her hands involuntarily clenching. ‘But—’

  ‘He could hear a child crying inside,’ Roy continued doggedly, ‘so he pushed the door open and went in to find Emma lying dead at the foot of the stairs with Adam bending over her, and you yelling your head off in your cot upstairs.’

  Kirsty forced herself to speak, though the words came out as a croak. ‘What … had happened to them?’

  Janice gave a strangled sob. ‘They’d been murdered, darling! Hit over the head with a rock of some sort, and to this day we don’t know why!’

  Kirsty felt blindly for the arms of the chair, trying to anchor herself in the familiar. ‘But who …?’

  ‘We don’t know that, either.’

  ‘You don’t know?’ she echoed unbelievingly. ‘After all this time …?’

  ‘Officially the case is still open,’ Roy said, ‘but since despite intensive enquiries at the time the police got precisely nowhere, there seems little chance now of finding the culprits.’

  ‘Culprits? There was more than one?’

  ‘It seems so; there were two sets of muddy footprints at the scene.’

  Kirsty’s mind whirled, trying to find some explanation. ‘Could the milkman …?’

  Roy shook his head. ‘He was thoroughly investigated, of course, but the timing was all wrong. He was just being a Good Samaritan.’

  ‘Each year when we visit the graves,’ Janice whispered, ‘I make a promise that their killers will be caught. And each year we have to let them down.’

  Which, Kirsty realized, accounted for the tears. Her eyes raked their strained faces. ‘Why are you telling me now?’

  Roy said flatly, ‘Adam’s coming to the UK on a year’s sabbatical.’

  She looked from one to the other. ‘I … don’t see the connection.’

  ‘While he’s here, he’s intending to research the family, which will involve obtaining death certificates and so on.’

  ‘You mean he doesn’t know the truth either?’

  ‘He didn’t, until Friday. It was agreed at the outset that you should be told at the same time, so when Lynne and Harry knew he was coming over they contacted us and we discussed it on Skype. It was decided that we would tell you both straight away.’

  ‘I’m having difficulty taking all this in,’ Kirsty said slowly. ‘My parents were murdered and my brother, whom I’ve not seen for fifteen years, is going to spend a whole year in the UK.’

  ‘Not only in the UK,’ Janice said grimly. ‘He’s coming to Westbourne College, no less.’

  Kirsty’s eyes widened. ‘Why here? He doesn’t even like us!’

  ‘The college is highly rated,’ Roy replied. ‘It will look good on his CV. Harry thinks the family research idea was an afterthought. He could never have imagined what alarm bells it would set off.’

  But Kirsty, following her own train of thought, had stopped listening. ‘There must have been some clue as to motive. Were they robbed, for instance? And why was my father outside and my mother in the house?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Roy said, ‘and as regards robbery, the only thing missing was Mark’s camera and its case.’

  ‘His camera?’

  ‘He was a keen photographer – we told you that – and according to his friend, Graham Yates, he was about to enter a competition.’ He paused. ‘All we could think was that someone didn’t like being photographed, and took the bag with the camera containing the last film.’

  ‘It’s a bit extreme to kill him!’ Kirsty objected. ‘And why Mum?’

  ‘Perhaps she saw something too.’

  After a moment’s reflective silence, Kirsty mused, ‘I wonder what Adam’s reaction will be to all this.’ She stood up and, walking to the piano, picked up her parents’ wedding photograph, studying it more closely than she had in years. And as her eyes lingered on her mother’s face, young and radiant, she experienced for the first time an agonizing sense of loss.

  Behind her, Roy said quietly, ‘Ready for the cemetery?’

  Kirsty traced a gentle finger over the happy young faces. ‘I suppose so,’ she said.

  It was an emotionally draining day; knowing what she now did, she had felt genuine grief when laying her flowers on the grave, and her heart ached for her aunt’s anguished tears. The lunch that followed was subdued, with Kirsty repeatedly asking questions as they occurred to her, though few of them could be answered. Though ashamed of the fact, she was counting the minutes until she could leave.

  ‘Has Lance been in touch?’ Jan enquired at one point, attempting to steer their thoughts away from the tragedy.

  ‘No, and he won’t be. It’s over, Auntie.’

  Kirsty had recently broken off a two-year relationship, but the question called to mind the mysterious email she’d received the day before. It had been sent to her business address – kirsty@gateauxtodiefor.co.uk – and read simply, Have you any idea how lovely you are? Unsigned, the sender’s name was given as xyz@hotmail.com – not much help. Briefly, she’d wondered if Lance had sent it – though surely he’d have used her private address and anonymous emails were hardly his style, especially, in his present mood, flattering ones. She’d concluded it was spam, but though she’d deleted it from her screen, it still lingered in her head.

  Tea was served, the chocolate orange cake in pride of place. But no one had any appetite and when, soon after it was cleared away, Kirsty said she should be going, neither of them tried to detain her.

  ‘I know it’s been a difficult day, sweetie, and I’m sorry,’ Roy said, ‘but at least Adam won’t be here for a couple of months, so you’ll have time to get used to the idea. Harry says he’s taking the opportunity to tour Europe before term starts.’ He hesitated. ‘As to the rest, you do forgive us, don’t you? For keeping the secret so long?’

  She smiled wryly. ‘I just wish you could have kept it a bit longer,’ she said.

  She had driven
only a few yards down the road when her mobile shrilled and, glad of the diversion, she pulled in to the kerb. The number on the screen was unfamiliar, as was the man’s voice that greeted her.

  ‘Kirsty?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Nick. Nick Shepherd. We met at Johnnie and Lois’s wedding a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Vaguely she recalled a tall, attractive man in his thirties with whom she’d chatted at the reception.

  ‘If you remember, we had an interesting discussion on the pros and cons of Shakespeare in modern dress. I see Hamlet’s coming to the Criterion next week and I wondered if you’d care to see it?’

  Kirsty raised an eyebrow at herself in the rear-view mirror. Her first date since the break-up! Well, as far as she remembered he was personable and good company, so why not? A spot of light relief would be more than welcome.

  ‘It’s in modern dress,’ he added, when she didn’t immediately reply.

  ‘That sounds very interesting. Thank you, I should like to.’

  ‘Great. It starts quite early – about seven, I think – so I suggest we have a meal afterwards to round off the evening, if that’s agreeable?’

  ‘Sounds lovely,’ she said a little cautiously.

  ‘Right; I’ll be in touch when I’ve sorted things out, and we can arrange a time to meet. Speak to you soon.’ And he rang off.

  She restarted the car, almost immediately regretting having accepted the invitation. The call had caught her off-balance while her mind was churning with the ramifications of the day’s disclosures, but on reflection she knew she wasn’t ready to start a new relationship, if that was Nick Shepherd’s intention. The break-up with Lance had been bruising, but there was a certain freedom in being ‘single’ again. Added to which, she realized belatedly, she knew nothing of this man she’d committed herself to spending an evening with. He could even – a disturbing thought – be the sender of that email.

  She frowned, thinking back to their meeting, sure she’d not given him her mobile number. Why hadn’t she at least prevaricated, told him she’d have to check her diary? That way she could have thought more clearly about the implications, while any attempt to back down now would be an all too obvious excuse.