‘Chad was here yesterday,’ Virginia said.
‘The vicar?’
‘He pops in from time to time.’
‘Does he think he’ll convert you?’
Virginia smiled, shook her head. ‘He knows me better than that. I wanted to apologise to him. I deceived him, you see, I almost told him, two or three times I was on the point of telling him, but it was too big a story, I didn’t know where to start… And the strange thing is, he doesn’t seem to mind. It’s like he doesn’t judge me. I said to him, doesn’t it say in the Bible, an eye for an eye. Shouldn’t it be a life for a life?’
‘And what did he say?’
She smiled. ‘He said that what his faith allows him, is a kind of trust – that justice will be done without a human being having to make that kind of judgment.’
‘However crap the courts are,’ Berenice said, ‘I’d rather have their judgments in this life, not the next. When I was a kid, they’d tell me about hell. I don’t want no dealings with the devil now I’m grown.’
Virginia shook her head. ‘I can’t imagine he means hell. He’s so jolly these days. There’s a lightness of step about him, you wouldn’t recognize him. And you know what it is? He told me his wife’s expecting, he said. A miracle baby. He said he wasn’t sure it was his to start with, but it is, apparently, definitely. Early days, I told him he should wait for three months, before he tells people that kind of news…’
Berenice stared at her.
Virginia bent to her pockets. ‘I showed him these. The ones you gave me back, the pages from the back of Murdo’s book. He told me his wife took them out, she was crazy, you see, but now she’s not.’
‘The stuff that Amelia wrote…’
Virginia nodded. ‘Her daughter, little Grace, she’s buried up at the old church on the marshes, you can see the grave if you know where to look. Anyway, then Amelia disappeared. No one knows what happened to her after that. These pages end with her terrible sorrow, but maybe that’s not the end of the story.’
The bell rang for the end of visiting hours. Berenice reached across and touched Virginia’s arm. ‘I’ll come and see you again.’
‘Thank you. That would be nice.’ Virginia was calm, composed, as if she’d just invited her to tea. She folded Amelia’s pages back into her bag, and allowed the warder to lead her back to her cell.
Amelia put down her pen. She blew on the paper to let the ink dry. Then she re-read her words.
‘This is not the end,’ she’d written. ‘I will not say, this is the ending of my story. Dear Gabriel,’ the letter went on, ‘as you well know, when I left you, I had no idea where I was going. I couldn’t see beyond my grief. Our grief, I should say. Now, all this time later, I can acknowledge that you too were in pain, the pain of a father whose child has died.
‘I do hope you get this letter. I’m concerned not to have heard from you for so long. I hope you got my last letter, thanking you for sending my brother’s crucifix. I am so very grateful for it, the more so in that I know it to be yours. Guy would have wanted you to have it, but in turn, I must thank you for making it a gift to me. I was glad to get your news from Berlin. I’m glad your science is going so well, and that you have found happiness. If Ernst is also a scientist, you and he must have much in common. As I have said before, who would have imagined these chapters of our stories? Who would have thought that I would find such happiness with my dear William?
Yet even now, we cannot know the ending of our stories. Distant as it is from Philadelphia, we are all concerned to hear that Europe is on the brink of another war.
‘I do hope we meet again. Germany seems so far away. I was concerned at the fear you expressed in your last letter, that people such as you are no longer welcome there. I hope I hear from you soon, dear Gabriel. Guy would have been so happy to know that we are friends.
‘Well, I must go now. And here’s my darling daughter, Clara, coming to tell her Mother to put down her pen and to ask Cook if there’s cake for tea.
‘With every good wish,
‘Your loving friend, Amelia.’
Piano notes. Sunlight pours through the studio windows. Helen, alone, is practicing. Jetée, coupé, pas de bourée…
He opens the door, almost silently. He begins to follow her, watching her feet, a step here, a step there, an attempt at a pirouette. He almost falls, and she reaches out to steady him, and starts to laugh, and Chad laughs too, holding her, her crimson dancewear bright against the pale walls. She clings to him, still laughing, and he places a hand on her rounded belly, in wonderment at the new life growing there.
In her cell, Virginia sits, alone. She holds a photograph. It shows a boy, blond and sweet-smiling. She smiles too, gazing on his face.
His story, she thinks. His conception, his adoption, the web of lies that entrapped us all, that cost two men their lives, that cost me my freedom. But he is free, this child. He is beyond this realm, the ties that bind us here.
She gazes upwards, at the tiny square of light with bars across it. I brought this on myself, she thinks. There was chaos, and disorder. There was a father, ousted from the truth, who met his end…
Who met his end at my hands.
I deserve my fate.
In her mind he’s falling, falling, turning, spinning, the splash of the sea loud against the stones, deafeningly loud.
Chaos and disorder.
She thinks of the lab, the particles colliding, turning, spinning, smashing, falling.
Falling.
She breathes, in, out. But now, there is peace. It is over. Out of the collidings, there is meaning. Out of the chaos, there is truth.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be…
She stares again at the photograph. She smiles, at his beauty, at his innocence.
It is enough, that he lived.
She breathes his name. ‘Jacob…’ However it was you came into this world - I was the woman you called mother. I raised you. I had that place. You loved me as your mother. And I loved you.
A whisper, again, of his name.
I love you still.
It is enough.
Acknowledgments
Many people have helped me with this novel. My visit to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was compellingly fascinating, and I would like to thank Steven Goldfarb of the ATLAS experiment there, and also Ariane Koek and Renilde Vanden Broeck for making me so welcome. I would also like to thank Steve Lloyd and Adrian Bevan of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Queen Mary, University of London.
I also wish to thank Detective Chief Superintendent David Gaylor, retired, formerly of Sussex Police, and Glenn and Liz Stone of Kent Police.
Thanks are also owed to The Royal Literary Fund Fellowship Scheme, and to my agent, Vivien Green, for her unwavering support.
Over the time of writing this novel, I have had various physicists explain their work to me in great detail. I fear they will shake their heads at just how little I really understood. Were this a work of physics, my mistakes would be unforgivable, but this is a novel, and in my defence I would say that my aim was always to describe the poetry of physics as much as its mathematics.
Lastly, I wish to add that without the faith and encouragement of my husband, Tim Boon, this book would never have been written. I dedicate this book to him with gratitude and love.
If you enjoyed Dying to Know by Alison Joseph, then you may be interested in Philosophical Investigations by Steve Attridge, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from Philosophical Investigations by Steve Attridge
Chapter I
‘When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you.’
Nietzsche
I walk around the supermarket, dividing things into three categories: fatal, near fatal and tasteless. I also plan the murder of my best friend, David, and invent a new illness to avoid going to work. I call it moroniphobia – a fatal aversion to idiots. My head of department, Jeremy, a man of few parts, n
one of them working, will use it as another spanner to try and lever me out. It’s hard to sack an academic, especially one who does so little, like me – how can they find fault with what doesn’t exist? Our horns are locked and I am now determined he will fail which will drive him closer to the breakdown he so deserves, and even this will be an indifferent, mousey affair. Travel back with me three months and you’ll understand the vehemence of my Jeremy project. He asks me to resign. I refuse. A week later I am summoned to a disciplinary hearing where Jeremy accuses me of propositioning a young female student. She is so anxious, he says, growing dewy eyed and sincere, that she does not wish to appear herself, or even be named, and as Head of Department, he must protect her confidentiality. Of course, she doesn’t exist. I am given a formal warning, nothing more, but mud sticks, as Jeremy knows. That was the moment I decided to destroy him.
I am not naturally bleak; it’s a view I worked hard to attain and constantly fine tune, a view emanating from a settled conviction that the darkest thinkers are the most joyful: we have no illusions and can gleefully dissect the world with our cynical little scalpels. I settle on a bottle of Rioja, another of Famous Grouse and some Applewood cheese and grissini. At the checkout a bleached angel with bad skin, a lip piercing that makes her look like a hooked herring, and a nametag that says her thin chest is called Stacey, asks if I need help.
“I think I’m beyond it,” I say.
“With packing,” she says, no flicker of irony or recognition.
I know what she is looking at. A middle aged man with circles under his eyes, scuffed leather jacket, tallish, thin. I could add: rakishly attractive, enigmatically self destructive, oozing sex, but even I wouldn’t believe it. Some things I am very good at, but they don’t endear me to the human race. Then I get a call that distracts me from my self obsessing. Not just any call, but from the most dangerous man in England. Psychotic, unwired, voice like a South London box of pins, the charm of a tarantula in a children’s party hat. God is in his coffin and all is wrong with the world. His name is Tony Steele, or Tony the Blade as he likes to be called, and he is a son in the principal crime family in South England. They make the Borgias look like soap fairies. Tony once nailed an enemy to motorway tarmac. It was the only corpse in police records to be found in three different counties.
“Five o’clock. The Castle. Directions follow in an email. Don’t be late. It’s about an hour away from you.”
Leave at four. That means cutting my three o’clock seminar down to half an hour. Bliss. On the drive into the discount warehouse that thinks it’s a university I ponder what the Steeles would want with me. No point in wondering if it is safe to go to the Castle, their family home; that would be like asking if it is safe to invite a pyromaniac to a firework party. You need to know why they would even ring me in the first place – a disgruntled, self pitying middle aged man lost in the past and drowning in the present, more inert coward than action hero. I am like a bat: my real life is in the dark. I am ostensibly a disgruntled philosophy lecturer, but I am also Rook Investigations – a private investigator. Look me up in the Yellow Pages and you won’t find me. I only work for those who don’t want the police involved, and that usually means criminals, or at least people with secrets. But here’s another contradiction – I am addicted to danger. It is one of the side effects of a path I chose some years ago. Nothing comes for free. I thought that by becoming a shadow in the underworld I would find someone I desperately need to meet – my father – but so far I have only found other shadows, and like reaching for the bottle I need a constant fix of danger. An odd and pathetic addiction for a coward, but then consistency was never my forte. Perhaps that’s why my wife Lizzie skewered my love on a kebab stick. I shouldn’t blame her, but I do. It’s easier.
I finish the seminar early by upsetting a student – always a good ploy. On the whiteboard I scrawled “GOD IS MY FAVOURITE FICTIONAL CHARACTER” and asked who said that. No one got it. Homer said it. Homer Simpson. A girl with a pinched face and a mouth like a hairpin looked upset, and asked why I said something derogatory about Christianity every week. I said that I must be slipping if it was only weekly, and that if God was upset with me then he should complain in person and not send sad teenage envoys. It isn’t Christianity that upsets me; it is religious piety that makes me want to gun down baby ducks.
“Do you want to be a myrmidon all your life?” I ask her.
“I don’t even know what that means,” she says, her neck flushing behind her silver cross.
“Then spend less time in church and more thumbing through a dictionary. It’ll do your soul more good.”
I am being a complete bastard but it has to be done. Ultimately it’s an act of Mercy. The atmosphere soured and I sent everyone off to the library, which means they’ll all sit in the refectory gawping at apps on their smart phones.
Only one student remained. I suppose she had a right to. She’s my daughter, sometimes my keeper. The lovely, impossible, annoying, full of light and razorblades, Cass. My soon to be ex-wife Lizzie also looks out of her cornflower eyes, which squeezes my heart into a tight ball of madness. Lizzie is a sitting tenant in what used to be my mind.
“Why do you do it?” She asks. “If you get sacked you’ll be even more miserable.”
I smile and start to pack up. Was it just due to serendipity that I was teaching my own daughter? Did she really forget to sign up for her Phil 1 options and be forced to take mine – “Fictions of Evil” – thankfully the least popular course in the whole department? Less essays, less students. Or is she up to something?
“I saw Mum last night.”
She was up to something.
“Sharpening her broomstick? Putting pins in my effigy?”
“Dad, that is so childish.”
She was right. I am ridiculous, but unlike most, I know it. The elephant in the room is David, MP for Nuneaton. Idealistic, intelligent, now humping my wife on a regular basis. When I imagine them – as I frequently do – my mind feels like a blister. Much of my dreamtime is spent on exactly how I can arrange his death. It’s possible. I know a lot of strange people who need money and like the action.
“I wish I didn’t feel so anxious about you,” she said.
“Read your Heidegger. ‘Mere anxiety’ is at the source of everything.”
“I hate it when you’re smug.”
“I love it when you’re annoyed,” I said, and kissed her cheek.
In the car park Jeremy flounced up to me, with florid cheeks and waving a piece of paper. He looked close to a heart attack.
“What the hell is this?” He hissed.
“Piece of paper, Jeremy.”
“It’s your assessment form. Your bloody assessment of the Faculty, which means of me. The Vice Chancellor was on the phone to me at eight o’clock this morning. Wanting to know if any of it was true.”
“And is it?”
He purpled. Surely the pump would give way any moment now.
“You wrote the bloody thing. The VC wants to know why a member of this faculty would say I am a practicing Druid and that I am not...”, and here he read, “...in principle, against either bestiality or incest.”
“Very liberal of you, Jeremy.”
“Your juvenile lunacies have gone far enough. I would like you to resign.”
“I can’t. I need the salary. I suggest you go home, get Mrs. Jeremy to pour you a nice big glass of supermarket sherry, and listen to your Bobby Crush tapes. You need to relax.”
He wanted to kill me. How far must I go before he actually tries? As an experiment it was almost interesting. He’s not a formidable opponent, but he will be good practise and he’s a bully. Worse still, he’s mediocre.
Time to go. I had a date with a different kind of devil.
Chapter II
‘There are certain clues at a crime scene which, by their very nature, do not lend themselves to being collected or examined. How does one collect love, rage, hatred, fear…? These are things t
hat we’re trained to look for.’
James Reese
The Steeles were old school. Pop Steele had been a South London crime gang soldier – gambling, protection, robbery, but unlike most criminals, he could see the big picture and planned for the future. Worked his way up inch by inch, blow by blow, pound by pound, deal by deal, risk by risk, matching streetwise savvy, natural flair and an instinct for survival against rivals and what are dizzily called the forces of law and order. Before anyone knew it he had an empire. You can’t build an empire without drugs, that’s where the big money is, but Pop was clever enough to keep it all at a distance and pay others to do the deals, take the risks. It was a calculated payoff and it worked. Now his legitimate business interests were so bound up with his criminal ones that it would take a galaxy of criminal lawyers to unpick them. As he once said when he’d eeled his slippery way out of an injunction: “There’s only the business of crime and the crime of business.”
Little did he know that the enemy was always within. Pop had carefully planned how to keep outside threats at bay, but his world was in turmoil because of those closest to him – his children. They were a national soap opera, much to Pop’s chagrin: Jimbo, clever but burnt out and wired, Tony the psycho, Philly the wayward daughter, a son who died in a car crash years ago, and Danny, recently murdered, though details had been withheld. I suspected that’s why I’d been summoned. The Steeles would not embrace a police investigation. At an age when Pop was doubtless hoping to enjoy good wine and afternoon naps he was trying to control this wayward bunch and stop his world imploding. His wife, Ma Steele, a bulldog of a woman who showed that you could take the woman out of a Bermondsey slum, but not...you know the rest, protected Pop in her own inimitable way, but some thought family cracks were spreading fast. I’d soon be able to decide for myself.
Dying to Know (A Detective Inspector Berenice Killick Mystery) Page 31