The Colonel nodded. “You went looking for Cessie. That was very good of you.”
I didn’t correct him, but in fact at that point we’d begun to assume that Cecilia had died in the conflagration. So we’d driven down to Canterbury with a cat carrier in the car for what we assumed was the now-orphaned kitten named Nevada. Appalling as it may sound, our main worry at the time had been how Fanny and Turk would adjust to another cat in the house.
“But when we arrived,” I said, “Cecilia was already there. She’d beaten us down to Canterbury. Despite the fact that she had hitch-hiked.”
“She seems to have a knack for it,” said Nevada.
“Cecilia didn’t volunteer any information about exactly what happened between her and Osterloh in the house, and we didn’t press her on it.”
“So what did you talk about?” the Colonel asked.
“We promised to bring her back her record collection. All her classical LPs. The Trevertons had them in storage. And I’ll set up a system for her to play them on.” I’d chosen some good bookshelf speakers, a solid-state amp and a semi-automatic turntable with a decent budget Ortofon cartridge. Not a bad little system.
The Colonel frowned. “Wouldn’t she be better off with a CD player?”
I said, “Nobody’s better off with a CD player.” Under the table Nevada nudged me. We were getting off the topic here.
Suddenly Lucy gave an elaborate shudder. “That’s so dangerous.”
We all looked at her. “What’s so dangerous?” said Nevada.
“Hitch-hiking,” said Lucy.
The Colonel gave her a disgusted look. “Hitch-hiking? Cecilia had a confrontation with the psychopathic murderer who killed our sister, and you think the dangerous part of the evening was hitch-hiking?”
“I was just saying…”
“Well, don’t,” said the Colonel. “Don’t say anything.” He turned to me. “Why didn’t you tell us all this right away? When it all happened?” His alert, intelligent eyes glinted in the dimness of the bar. “Instead, you waited a few days.”
This was true. We had seen both the Colonel and Lucy, separately, since the incident and had drinks with them and had deliberately said nothing. “I’ll get to that in a minute,” I said. “First I need to tell you about Cecilia’s promise.”
“Her promise?”
Nevada nodded. “She said that if we could find her sister’s killer—”
The Colonel nodded energetically. “Which you have done. And for which you have my thanks.”
“You have closure,” said Lucy.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” The Colonel glared at her. “I thought I told you not to say anything.” He leaned aggressively towards her as he spoke, and I realised that the only time they grew close physically was when they argued.
Lucy started to say something, but Nevada hastily intervened. “Cecilia said if we found the killer she would tell us what happened to Valerian’s child.”
That shut both of them up. They turned to look at us. The Colonel spoke softly. “She knew?”
“Yes.”
“All these years?”
“Yes.”
“And kept quiet about it?”
I shrugged. “I suppose she didn’t feel she had anyone to tell. Until now.”
He stared at me, his gaze drilling into me. “And you know now? What happened to the little boy?”
“Yes.”
He sighed and sank back in his chair. Then he leaned forward again and I could see him literally bracing himself, as if for a physical impact. “All right,” he said. “You can tell me. But first I want to say that I know that it’s going to be bad news. I’m not a fool. But also I want to say that every cloud has a silver lining.” He glanced at Lucy. “At least now I’ll be rid of you. Now that it’s over I’ll never have to see you again.”
“Likewise,” said Lucy. “The feeling couldn’t be more mutual.”
Nevada and I looked at each other. I cleared my throat. I didn’t quite know where to start. I said, “You remember how your father disowned your sisters?”
The Colonel nodded. “He swore he’d never speak to them. And not long before that, he’d made the same declaration to me.” He gave a little smile. “In my case he kept his promise.”
I said, “Valerian professed not to be too bothered by the arrangement. But Cecilia was deeply upset by it. She couldn’t stand being estranged from her father.”
“She always was a daddy’s girl.”
“So when Valerian discovered that she was pregnant, at first they thought it would drive the old man even further away, make him even more angry at them.”
“If that was possible,” said the Colonel.
“If that was possible,” I said. “But then Cecilia realised that the child could actually be an asset. If he was a boy, suddenly they would have a route back into the old man’s affections.”
The Colonel chuckled dryly. “He had a big thing about wanting a male heir. And I no longer counted, of course.”
“It was a good plan,” I said. “It was such a good plan that they decided to go ahead with it even when they discovered that the baby was a girl.”
They stared at me.
I went on. “That was why, when she discovered she was pregnant, Valerian got rid of her au pairs and insisted on looking after the child herself. Which in practice meant Cecilia doing a great deal of the work and Valerian occasionally helping. But it also meant, during the first two years of her life, it was easy to maintain the fiction that the child was a boy. After all, your father was hardly the type to change a nappy.”
The Colonel gave a humourless bark of laughter. “Well, that’s certainly true.”
“Anyway, the old man loved the kid. So Valerian and Cecilia figured that by the time he found out about their ruse, it would be too late. It wouldn’t matter.” I looked at the Colonel. “As it happened, no one ever found out about the ruse. Until now.”
He nodded. He was still braced like a man getting ready for a physical blow, but he was brisk, businesslike. “So it was a little girl instead of a little boy. What happened to her?”
“Okay,” I said. “As we suspected, it was a custody snatch. The father took her. He wrote a letter to Cecilia confessing what he’d done. And by then, with everything that had happened and Cecilia out of the picture one way or another, it seemed as good a place for the child as any. So the man and his girlfriend, later his wife, then raised the child as their own and no one ever knew. Even the girl herself, since she was too young to have any memories of her early life. Things were simplified by the fact that they left the country. And, it being the 1960s, it was relatively easy to pass a child off as their own and acquire the various documentation. Crossing borders was a lot simpler then than it is now, and it helped that they set up house in Morocco.”
“Morocco?” said Lucy.
I nodded. “The girl’s father was Monty Tegmark—your father.”
It took a moment for the implications of this to sink in. Then Lucy and the Colonel looked at each other. “Wait a minute,” said the Colonel in a strangled voice.
“Lucy,” said Nevada, “meet your uncle. John, meet your niece.”
They stared at us with identical aghast expressions. It was easy now, with the benefit of hindsight, to see all kinds of family resemblance.
“There must be a mistake,” said the Colonel.
“That’s why we didn’t tell you right away,” I said. “We had to be sure. So we invited you both around for drinks, on separate occasions. And pretended it was a purely social occasion.”
“Sorry about the deception,” said Nevada.
“And I’m sorry about what else we did,” I said, “but I had to be sure before we told you. So we kept your drinking glasses and took DNA samples and got them tested. It’s definite.” I didn’t mention that I’d also be sending him an invoice for the tests, which hadn’t been cheap.
Lucy and the Colonel stared at me. And then at each other.
<
br /> I could have gone on. I could have said that as a journalist writing a book about the band and touring with them, Monty Tegmark had plenty of access to Valerian—in every imaginable sense. She and Monty must have had a longstanding affair. Certainly they had been close enough for him to be certain that the child was his—a fact easily verified later in life by the resemblance I’d seen in photographs.
And close enough for Monty to be able to snatch the infant Lucy shortly after her mother died.
But I don’t think either of them wanted, or needed, to hear any of this. They were still staring at each other. Disbelief was beginning to be replaced by some dawning emotion. I wasn’t sure I wanted to stick around and find out what it was.
Evidently Nevada felt the same way. She cleared her throat and we stood up. “We’ll leave the two of you to get acquainted.”
We walked out of the hotel through a revolving glass door, into the bright, autumn day. We turned towards Green Park Tube station. The sun was shining but it was bitingly cold. Winter was approaching at speed. We were walking into a chill, driving wind. Nevada took my arm and huddled beside me.
“I brought their bill with me,” she said. “But somehow it didn’t seem like the right moment to present them with it. Never mind. I’ll attach it to an email.”
EPILOGUE
That was the end of it, except for three small incidents.
Some months later we were just finishing dinner when we got an excited phone call from Tinkler. “Turn on your television. Right away.”
We went into the bedroom and switched on the designated channel, then we settled on the bed. The cats came in to join us. We turned up the volume on the remote, providing sound for what turned out to be the annual British Academy of Film and Television Arts award ceremony.
The award for Best Documentary was being presented, and receiving it was Stinky Stanmer, managing to look badly dressed even in a very expensive and no doubt tailor-made tuxedo. He accepted the statuette and made his speech—all bulging eyes, moist fish lips and feigned sincerity. “Making In Search of Valerian was a deeply moving experience,” he said.
Nevada got off the bed, disturbing Fanny who had curled up beside us, and began restlessly pacing the room in front of the television, periodically cutting off my view.
On the screen Stinky was saying, “It’s hard to express the poignancy of what happened to the Drummond sisters and the universal message it conveys to all of us. It’s a modern fairy tale, about a schoolgirl full of dreams who sets out into the big world, travelling to every corner of the globe, but who finds that dream turns into a nightmare and then, ironically, ends up back in the same small town she came from, forever. As if nothing ever happened. As if she never went away.”
He gave his serious look, which made him look like a dairy cow receiving the abrupt attentions of a bull, but there was thunderous applause from the audience of assembled dignitaries. There was, of course, the added emotional dimension of the award-winner’s recent well-publicised battle with, and presumed conquest of, his cocaine addiction. All the more reason to pour on the plaudits.
By this point Nevada was getting so agitated that I thought I’d better switch the television off, before she put her foot through the screen. I pressed the button on the remote, and the image died. She turned and glared at me.
“That was our idea! That was exactly our idea! Yours and mine. Virtually word for word. How did the bastard even know about it?” She snapped her fingers. “I know. I told his office about it so they’d know what we were telling people. So that if anyone checked up on us, their cover story would match ours. And they stole it. They told Stinky and he stole it. The bastard stole our idea and made our documentary.”
“Well, it wasn’t really our documentary.”
“Yes it was. And now he’s getting awards for it. And is he giving us any credit?”
“Knowing Stinky,” I said, “I suspect not.”
“He stole our idea and didn’t give us any credit!”
“That’s Stinky,” I said. “Come back to bed.”
* * *
The next development was rather more pleasant. We received a letter from Lucy, written in a somewhat florid hand and overheated prose style. In it she told us she’d had an ultrasound and the baby was fine. And he was a boy. When I read this I couldn’t help thinking that the Colonel—the real Colonel, the crusty old patriarch—had somehow triumphed after all. I said, “There’s going to be a male heir at last.”
“And that’s the main thing,” said Nevada.
The last incident began soon after the death of Dr Osterloh.
Somewhat forgotten in recent years, Osterloh had apparently been well known in the 1960s as a celebrity shrink. So the obituary writers suddenly discovered that they had quite an interesting figure to resurrect, an angle to exploit, and lots of material to examine.
I don’t know who was the first to get hold of his self-published book, but there was certainly no shortage of copies. Maybe they found it in a charity shop. In any case, they actually read it and decided to argue that it was, like its author, unjustly neglected. Excerpts were printed in one of the Sunday papers and then a proper publisher decided to release a new edition, with an introduction about Osterloh and his tragic demise. Then Radio 4 ran a serialisation of the book and it began to pick up momentum. Now judged a forgotten classic, it was reprinted, then reprinted again, then again, triggering its inexorable climb up the international bestseller lists.
I began to wish I’d bought a signed first edition after all.
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1. HIDDEN TREASURE
We were in the kitchen. I was making coffee and Nevada was feeding the cats, when suddenly she looked out the window and said, “There he is now. At last.”
“Who?” I said, measuring the ground beans as I poured them into the filter.
“Your friend Tinkler.”
“I see,” I said. “So he’s my friend now.”
“Finish feeding these two, would you? I’m going to deal with him.” She wiped her hands and hurried out of the kitchen just as the front gate clanged, signalling Tinkler’s arrival. Nevada had been waiting for days for just this moment—her chance to pounce—but now it had arrived, she played it very cool. Opening the door before he had a chance to ring the bell, she was as nice as pie. “Tinkler! Hello.” There was the sound of her smooching him on the cheek and then she led him into the kitchen, her arm twined around his. “Darling, look who’s here.”
She was laying it on a bit thick, I thought. But I knew what she was up to.
“Hello, Tinkler,” I said. I’d finished giving the cats their breakfast—Aberdeen Angus ox cheek, served raw and laboriously chopped up with the kitchen scissors while Turk tried to snag pieces from me, with her razor sharp claws and great dexterity, and Fanny merely contented herself by getting underfoot and making lots of imploring noises—and returned to making the coffee. “You want some coffee? It’s the good stuff.”
“I’d expect nothing less,” said Tinkler. His face had an unaccustomed touch of suntan and he was grinning happily. He had no idea what was in store for him.
“How was France?” said Nevada.
“Great. It was just Mum and Dad and Maggie and me in this huge gite. That’s a kind of farmhouse—”
“Of course it is,” said Nevada, who was fluent in more languages than Tinkler had had hot baths. “But why don’t you come in and sit down and tell us all about it?” Tinkler made a move towards a kitchen chair, but Nevada steered him away from it. “No, come into the sitting room,” she said.
Here it comes, I thought. She took him by the arm again and guided him out of the kitchen. He was beaming, enjoying all the attention, the poor sap. “And while you’re at it,” said Nevada from the next room, still at this point appearing to
be the sweet voice of reason, “perhaps you can tell us what the fuck this is.”
I left the coffee and hurried through. I wasn’t going to miss this for the world.
Nevada and Tinkler were standing there looking at a tall black object that dominated the room.
It was taller than an upright piano, and deeper. A vast, grim-looking box of unvarnished wood painted a matte, obdurate black, its top third consisted of a broad rectangular opening. It completely dominated the lounge, taking up most of the space between the dining table and the sofa and blotting out a great swathe of light from our high, sunny, south-facing windows.
The object was almost as tall as I was. It was big, and it was ugly.
“What is this thing?” said Nevada. “And what is it doing in my living room?”
But if she’d expected contrition or remorse from Tinkler, she was out of luck. He stared at the black monolith and sank down on his knees before it, like one of the hairy humanoids in Space Odyssey, a look of beatific satisfaction on his face. “It came,” he murmured, almost prayerfully. “It’s here.”
“Of course it bloody came,” said Nevada. “Of course it’s frigging here. The question is, why did it come? Why is it here? As opposed to being around at your place. Taking up all the room there.”
“It had to be delivered while I was away,” said Tinkler. He had risen from his knees now and was standing beside the huge black box, caressing the side of it as if it were the flanks of some monstrous black horse. “And somebody had to be at home to accept it and sign for it. Which was you guys. I told you to expect it.”
“Actually,” said Nevada, “you told Agatha to tell us to expect it.” It was an index of her anger that she was using Clean Head’s real name here. “And she duly told us.”
Tinkler looked at us, all innocence. “So what’s the problem?”
“So the problem is that she told us to expect a small package which was being sent here for you. Which we were more than happy to do. A small package.” Nevada’s extravagant hand gesture in the direction of the black behemoth was entirely redundant.
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