by Roberta Kray
Eve sat down on the bed, removed the two folded sheets from the first envelope, and started to read. She hadn’t got further than the first line, My darling Martin, when the phone began to ring again. Should she leave it? It was probably Patrick, all geared up with another round of questions that she wouldn’t be able to answer. But she felt too guilty to ignore him. It was her fault, after all, that he’d got home to find his flat in ruins.
Reluctantly, she walked back into the living room and picked it up. ‘Hello.’
‘Eve?’
And surprisingly, it wasn’t Patrick’s voice at all, but Henry’s. ‘Hey,’ she said, relieved. ‘Guess what?’
‘Is everything all right?’ Henry never had been good at guessing games.
‘Yes, fine. But I’ve just opened the boxes and there’s nothing in them. Well, I don’t mean nothing exactly but nothing nasty, only personal stuff, letters and things.’
‘That’s good … isn’t it?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘So?’
‘So?’
‘So what else has happened?’
Eve smiled. What Henry lacked in guesswork, he made up for with an uncanny instinct for reading her mood. She spent the next few minutes explaining about the latest incident with Patrick. After she’d finished there was a moment of quiet from the other end.
‘Have you thought any more about what we discussed?’
‘I don’t want to go the police. Not yet.’
‘I think you should. I know you’re worried about Terry but you’re not going to be much use to him if …’
He didn’t need to finish the sentence. She knew exactly what he meant. If she was lying in a hospital bed or, horror of horrors, somewhere much worse. The same place Ivor Patterson was languishing right now. ‘I just need a bit more time. A few days.’
‘You won’t have to talk to Shepherd,’ he said, still trying to persuade her.
And Eve was glad of the opportunity to change the subject. ‘I can’t stand that man. He’s such a creep. I’ll be happy if I never have to set eyes on him again. The other day, when he was leaving, he said he was sorry to hear about my father – as if he really gave a damn.’ She snorted. ‘Then you know what else he said? That the way he’d died was very Virginia Woolf– whatever that’s supposed to mean.’
She waited for him to respond with an equal measure of contempt and bafflement but instead, as if he was thinking about it, he paused for a few seconds and then murmured, ‘I suppose he had a point.’
Eve frowned down the line. ‘Did he?’ she said, peevishly.
Fortunately, Henry was never quick to take offence. He heard the irritation in her tone but kept his own voice soft and patient. ‘She put stones in her pockets too before she walked into a river and …’
‘Oh, I didn’t realize.’ She felt instant remorse for having snapped at him. Her nerves were so frayed, it had become something of a habit recently. Then she barked out a laugh. ‘How strange! You know, he couldn’t stand Virginia Woolf. He was always going on about her. He used to say she was a self-important, arrogant prig.’ Actually, he had used a set of far more colourful words but she didn’t want to make Henry’s ears turn pink. ‘Although he still read her books. He claimed that you didn’t have to like an author in order to respect their writing.’
‘True enough.’
Eve rubbed at her temples again. ‘Although it is odd, isn’t it? I mean, that he should do that, choose to … to die that way, in exactly the same way as someone he so clearly disliked. As if …’
‘As if?’ Henry echoed.
‘I don’t know.’ She felt a smile creep on to her lips as an idea occurred to her. ‘Perhaps it was some kind of final gesture, putting up two fingers at the world, at her, of showing that there wasn’t that much of a difference between them, that it didn’t take a genius to die that way.’ She stopped and laughed again. ‘Or am I reading far too much into this?’
‘Not necessarily. It was rather a love/hate relationship, perhaps.’
‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘Perhaps it was.’ She was still thinking about it when, in the background, she heard the knock on his door.
‘Could you hold on,’ he said.
She heard the door open. There was a female voice, slight and rather hesitant. Probably his new secretary. ‘Mr Evans is here. Should I show him in?’
Henry must have placed his hand over the receiver because the rest of the conversation was muffled. Eve waited, faintly wishing that she was back in that office again, safe and unafraid, her only worry that she might not get all the typing done by the time the clock struck five. There was a lot to be said for the mundane routine of office life, especially when compared to her current situation. She had never really been a nine-to-five kind of person – a few years ago the idea would have thoroughly dismayed her – but was starting to appreciate its advantages: a monthly pay packet, a decent employer and a mighty slice of security. She wondered what the new secretary was like. Louise – wasn’t that her name? She probably knew her by sight but couldn’t bring her face to mind.
‘Sorry,’ Henry said, coming back on the line. ‘I have to go. I’ve got a client waiting. Can I call you back later?’
‘Sure. That’s okay.’
‘But promise me you’ll think about it, about what we mentioned, about talking to someone.’
‘Of course,’ she replied, without committing herself to anything.
They said their goodbyes and she put down the phone. The letters were still lying on the bed but she wasn’t certain now if she should read them. Perhaps there had been something fateful about Henry ringing when he did, a kind of divine intervention. They were private after all, a dead woman’s thoughts and feelings, only meant for one other person’s eyes – and that person wasn’t her.
Anyway, she needed a coffee and a cigarette. She needed to get her head together. All this talk about her father, about the manner of his death, had sent her thoughts spiralling off in a completely different direction.
She went through to the kitchen, put some water in the kettle and sat down while she waited for it to boil.
The fact that Shepherd had made a connection that she hadn’t, that he had been the one to tell her something she should have already realized, made her wince. How many times had she listened to her father going on about Virginia Woolf? Except that was precisely the point – she never really had listened. Groaning, she lowered her head into her hands. How often had she switched off while he was talking to her, choosing to think instead about some minor problem of her own? She covered her face. She couldn’t describe how she felt, even to herself. It was something beyond guilt, beyond grief, beyond anything she’d experienced before.
Eve wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. There was no point crying about it. What was done was done and could never be changed. She should have realized, should have picked up on the connection but she hadn’t. There had been something important about the way he had chosen to die – she was sure of it now – but she had been too preoccupied to see it.
In a hiss of steam, the kettle boiled and turned itself off. She got up, threw a teaspoon of instant coffee into a mug and poured hot water over it. She gave the contents a fast stir, added some milk, and sat down again. Lighting a cigarette, she looked around. She stared at the cupboards, at the walls, at the drab chipped paint. There was nothing inspiring about what she saw.
Had he hated living here? She didn’t know. She’d never thought to ask. They’d lived in worse places but they’d lived in far better too – in smart Mayfair flats, in fancy hotels, even in the occasional country house. In her childhood, like a pair of exiles, they’d roamed from one place to another, sometimes welcome, often not. It couldn’t have been easy for him to have ended up here – everything lost, all his dreams in ruins.
She should have spent more time with him. Especially after he’d found out about his illness. Even now, she could hardly bring herself to say the word out loud. It made her sto
mach twist. Cancer. God, she had so many regrets. There were so many things she should have done, should have said.
And why had he lied, pretending that it wasn’t so bad, that there was still plenty of time for them to spend together? She could almost see him smiling back at her. To try and make it easier, to spare her the trials of obligation – and to spare him the agonies of a pity he could bear neither to see nor to hear.
And then, like a lightning hit, it suddenly came to her – the meaning of those tiny squares of paper, the letters and numbers on the notes she had found, one of which she’d thrown away, the other she had accidentally put through the washing machine and then rescued and hidden in the toe of her winter boots. W1 – wasn’t that what he’d written? Not a reference to a London district, perhaps, but a surname. Woolf. Was it all to do with her? With the woman he loved to hate? W1. Not a postal district but a reference to her first book, perhaps. What was her first book? Eve didn’t have a clue.
She jumped up and almost ran back into the living room. Quickly, she scoured the shelves, pulling the paperbacks out – Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, The Voyage Out, Orlando – while she as smartly dropped them back down on to the desk. Picking one up at random, she examined the complete list of Virginia Woolf’s works. The Voyage Out was at the top.
She hastily picked it up again. For a moment, as she held the novel in her hands, she tried to recall the numbers that came after W1. Two hundred and something. Two hundred and what? She thought she had memorized it but her mind was a blank. She flicked through the pages but nothing caught her attention. Dashing into the bedroom, still holding the book, she pulled out her brown leather boots, fumbled in their toes and eventually found the hidden scrap of paper. She quickly unfolded it. W1/267/32/BC/8PR.
Sitting down on the floor, code in one hand and book in the other, she turned to page 267 and began reading from the top of the page. There was something about vagueness, about dogs and a garden and a woman called Rachel. What? No, this didn’t make any sense. She glanced at the note again. The number 32 came next. She counted through the first thirty-one words then found herself staring at the word asked. Well, it wasn’t entirely inappropriate but it hardly helped. She put the book down and sighed in frustration. She’d got it all wrong. She must have. What was she doing? Just chasing after rainbows, searching for clues that didn’t exist.
Unless it was thirty-two lines …
She closed her eyes and slowly opened them again. And then, speaking aloud – as if the surrounding silence might be her witness – she carefully counted them off, her finger sliding down the page. One, two, three …
She expected the outcome to be as disappointing as the previous one but as her gaze rolled down, as it finally came to rest on the line she’d been searching for, she stared at it in shock and amazement.
Helen turned to her. ‘Did you go to church?’ she asked.
She ran her finger across the line, reading it again. A shiver ran the length of her spine. Helen – the name of her mother. Churches – her father’s obsession. Was that just a coincidence? A pair of coincidences? She read the line again. No, it couldn’t be. It had to mean something.
And there was only one church around here that he’d frequented. Although it wasn’t a church so much as one almighty towering cathedral …
She could feel her heart start to race, her mouth turning dry, as the truth began to dawn. All the madness of the last few weeks had nothing to do with Martin Cavelli or Terry – and everything to do with her father.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Eve pushed the square of paper into her pocket, snatched up her jacket and rushed out of the door. She took the stairs two at a time, spinning round the corner of the banisters on the first floor, stumbling, almost falling until she reached the flat ground of the foyer, covered it in six fast steps and burst out breathless on to the street.
Turning right, she shrugged into her jacket as she walked. It had started to rain again, a fine but penetrating drizzle that soaked into her hair and clothes. If she kept up the speed she could make it in fifteen minutes. Or she could take the car. No, the evening traffic would be building up; quicker to go by foot.
She cursed herself as she headed towards Tombland. How had she been so bloody stupid? He had left the notes for her to find, confident in her ability to make the connection. Well, he’d overestimated her intelligence. If it hadn’t been for that creep Shepherd, for Henry, she might never have caught on. But then she sighed with exasperation. Why had he left so much to chance? If there was something he had wanted her to know, something so essential, why hadn’t he just told her? There was no doubt in her mind now that whatever was hidden in the cathedral was the cause of all her recent troubles. And not just hers – if Ivor Patterson had been the man in the car …
She tried not to think about it, about the way the private detective had died. Now wasn’t the time to start losing her nerve. But even as she pushed the thought aside, it was instantly replaced by the image of the hangman’s noose emblazoned on her door. Damn! What had her father got involved in? And whatever the object was, whatever he had found or taken, why hadn’t he simply returned it? There was only one possible answer: that to return it would be as deadly as to keep it.
But that still didn’t account for why he hadn’t warned her. Not even a hint. Surely, he must have realized what would happen? Once he was gone, they’d come after her and then … A wave of resentment rose in her breast. He wasn’t a fool, far from it, so why place her in such a position? But the moment the question formed in her head, she felt guilty about it. He would never put her in deliberate danger. Something must have gone wrong. Something must have occurred to make him change his plans, to act more quickly than he’d intended. Had he tried to call her? Perhaps he had. She frowned, pained by the idea that she might not have been there when he needed her. But he could still have left a letter. Then again, if he had, he might have been worried that someone else would find it first – the people who were pursuing him or even the police. It would have been too much of a risk. Although he could have posted it. Perhaps he hadn’t had a stamp. Or perhaps, like her, he suspected he was being shadowed and that anything he mailed would be instantly recovered.
Which promptly reminded her: what if she was being followed again? She forced herself to stare straight ahead, to ignore the impulse to glance back over her shoulder. If there was someone there, and they realized she was on to them, it would be twice as hard to lose them later.
Although her mind was still racing, she slowed her pace a fraction. She didn’t want to look as if she was in too much of a hurry. Weaving her way along the busy pavement, she tried to figure out if she could feel another person’s scrutiny, but wasn’t sure one way or another. Her instincts, usually pretty good, had been thoroughly scrambled.
As she crossed the bridge, she paused to stare down towards the grey water and then casually glanced to her left. A group of laughing teenagers, three boys and two girls, cruised by her. Nothing even slightly suspicious there. Next came a solitary male, mid-fifties, in a suit and clutching a briefcase. She waited until he’d gone a few yards before turning her head to look at him again. But he was strolling on relentlessly, eager to get home. A young woman came next pushing a pram, and then two older women. She lingered for a few minutes more, waiting and watching, letting a steady stream of people pass her by until she was fairly certain that the only person interested in what she was doing was herself.
Eve checked her watch: it was going on four fifteen. Did cathedrals have a closing time? Not in the old days perhaps but these days were different. The world was full of irreverent thieves and unless there was a service going on, she was sure that they’d be locking the doors before the light began to fade. That deadline was enough to urge her on. She couldn’t wait until tomorrow. If there was something to find, she had to find it today. She couldn’t take another sleepless night.
Completing the rest of the bridge, she dodged the traffic on the road, and
crossed over to Erpingham Gate. As she stood at the entrance and gazed up at the cathedral, at its towering and imposing spire, she tried to recall the last time she’d been here – six, nine months ago? She had stood here with her father and he had told her about the riots, about the thirteenth-century conflict between the church and the city. It had been something to do with tolls, with taxes, with the eternal battle between the rich and the poor. She couldn’t recall the details, she hadn’t been listening closely enough, but she knew there’d been fighting, violence, and that William de somebody had let his monks take their bloody retribution.
As she walked towards the entrance, she turned again to look behind her. The path was empty. If anyone was following they were keeping their distance. Or maybe her pursuers were all too busy trashing flats in London.
At the door she shook the rain from her hair and took a deep breath before advancing inside. Instantly, as if a heavy curtain had been drawn behind her, all the sounds of the city were silenced. Moving forward into the long narrow nave, she became immediately aware of the vaulted ceiling, of its immensity, its height, and of her own comparative smallness. She was flanked either side by a series of pale stone arches. Overwhelmed, she took a step back. How would she find anything in here?
It would help if she knew what it was. She could only take a guess: something small, easily hidden, slight enough not to be accidentally discovered. She dug into her pocket and glanced at the scrap of paper again. The remaining part of the code was BC/8PR. She pondered on the BC – Before Christ? Well, that wasn’t going to make it any easier. There must be endless images of Christ in the building. It would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Trying to think back, to recall anything her father might have said, she slowly advanced again. She inhaled the smell, dense and musty. The air felt heavy as if it strained beneath the weight of too much history. She wasn’t alone; other visitors, tourists, wandered here and there, constantly stopping to view some item of interest, to refer to their glossy guides, before shuffling on, their broken footsteps giving the impression of hesitancy, their voices reverentially low. Only the people who worked there moved with any speed, their briskness vaguely startling as they swept past.