The Accomplice

by The Accomplice (retail) (epub)

  “Then what? If it is Eddie Cresacre?”

  “We shall interview the Russian woman again, since she was the owner and occupier of the house at the time of Eddie Cresacre’s death. She’ll still have a lot of questions to answer. Peter Gilling, for example.”

  “Why do you call her the Russian woman all the time? How did you know she was Russian? Even I didn’t know she was Russian until this summer. She is always known as Jean Loftus.”

  He did not reply at first, absorbed in pouring tea. Finally he said, “That kind of thing is routine. Name-age-address-date-and-place-of-birth. I must have written it all down. I was taking the record. We sat in that room of hers, overlooking the garden. And all the time the child was lying there beneath our noses. I try to remember whether the garden was recently dug, what it looked like. But it must have been well hidden. We would have noticed if there were obvious signs of digging.”

  “What’s her being Russian got to do with it?”

  Stevens paused as if he had never thought of it before. “Nothing, I suppose. It just stuck in my mind she was Russian. And I always think of them as very cruel people, harsh and cruel.”

  “Do you? I think of them as emotional, sentimental people. We can’t both be right. National stereotypes are hardly the best ways to categorize individuals.” She put down her mug. It was odd how, with Stevens, she passed so quickly from antagonism to amicability, and back again. “What about the test?”

  “I’ll get someone round there to take blood from Mrs Cresacre tomorrow, the sooner the better. Then it goes to the Met’s laboratory in London.”

  “And how much is all this going to cost? I can’t believe technology like that comes cheap.”

  “My budget will stretch to it, don’t worry. But you’re right. Six hundred pounds? Eight hundred? It depends how difficult the bones are.”

  20

  Stevens’ remarks about Russians made Zita think about Valentina, who was due back from Milan at the end of the week. She was guiltily aware that she had done nothing about her promise to arrange a visit to a concert or a play for her mother. As so often happens, the reactivation of her mother in her mind presaged a phone call. Zita had a sudden vision of Valentina’s white helmet and manic dark eyes as she picked up the receiver.

  “Zita? I wondered if I would get your crazy girl.”

  “Mama, she’s not crazy. She is marvellous with Tom. You mustn’t…”

  “Of course she’s crazy. Tom needs someone much more intelligent, a mathematician. But that’s not what I was calling about. The conference has been very interesting and stimulating. I’m very pleased I came.” Zita hunched her shoulder to hold the telephone against her ear and began to tear open a bag of salad and divide it between two plates; Yevgenia was coming to dinner. “And I bought you a handbag.”

  “Mama, how sweet of you. I know you think I’m frivolous for liking clothes so much.”

  “And a belt,” Valentina went on relentlessly. “I bought waist sixty-six centimetres to make you lose a kilo or two.”

  “What’s the point, Mama. I’m happy as I am. Keep the belt yourself. It’ll fit you.” She was cutting smoked halibut into pieces and draping them over black bread.

  “No. I shall bring them over to you when I get back. But that won’t be immediately. So you’ll have to cancel the tickets you’ve got for us. Or go with someone else. Invite a man. What about Marcus’s son, the chef? He would suit you ideally, two greedy people.”

  “I’ve never even met Ivo, at least since we were children.”

  “Well, take that boorish inspector you told me about. He’s the only man you know who hasn’t got a wife. Forget Oliver.”

  “Mama. Anyway, he must have a wife.” Had he? The house had showed signs of a woman, in the flowers for example, while at the same time its atmosphere was solitary.

  “OK, honey, leave it. Now, I’m not coming back immediately because I met some interesting people at the conference and I’m going on with him to Leningrad.”

  “Leningrad?” Zita said in astonishment.

  “They call it St Petersburg now,” Valentina said, as if Zita did not know where Leningrad was. “There’s a consulate general here and I’ve had the Russian Academy of Sciences fax me an invitation and my visa should be ready tomorrow or the next day and then we’ll go.”

  “Mama, I’m… Well, I’m amazed. You’ve always said you would never go back.”

  “Of course, I couldn’t go back before, but now I think I will. So I’m going to Rome once my visa’s through and I’ll get a flight from there direct to St Petersburg and back in about ten days. I may try to go back to Moscow too. I’ll phone you before I leave and from Russia, if they have telephones that work there.”

  “Right, Mama.”

  “Goodbye, Zita. Kisses to Tom. Forget the bastard.”

  There was much in this conversation for Zita to think about as she set the table, put out the cheese and opened the wine. If Valentina had been twenty years younger she would have thought it was a mid-life crisis. Her mother had always been so contemptuous of her native country, in both large and small things. Russians were so inefficient, so pusillanimous, she always said. They submitted to tyranny and were slaves even in their minds: invalid science and grotesque art was the result. During Zita’s childhood Valentina had been as English as she could make herself, which was not very. Since John Guilfoyle’s death and her move to America she had transformed herself again. She had clearly been meant to be a Californian from the start. So what this sudden return to her roots presaged Zita could not understand.

  Zita asked Yevgenia about it as they sat at the kitchen table later that evening.

  “Something or someone will have raised a question, a reminder of the past,” Yevgenia said authoritatively. “So she will have had to go back. And much better she should go now, while she’s able to, than put it off for twenty years and then not be able to manage it. If you have made breaks in your life, as your mother or I did, you have to face the past sooner or later. If you don't go and deal with it of your own accord, it rises up of its own will, as it has done with me.”

  “That reminds me. Stevens has found the Cresacres. They are going to do a DNA test to find out whether the skeleton is Eddie Cresacre.” Yevgenia looked so vague for a moment that it was clear that she had not followed Zita’s train of thought. Then she said, “Yes, that too, I suppose. That is the past literally rising up in accusation.”

  “How can it be in accusation? The skeleton must surely predate your ownership of the house. How could Petre possibly have buried a child in your garden when you were living there? Could you have been away on holiday?”

  “I forget now what was happening to us at the time. I only remember the unpleasantness of the police interviews.”

  “Interviews? There was more than one?”

  “Oh, yes, the police came back several times. But the significance is this: the finger of the child points at other deaths.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Yevgenia did not reply. Zita turned to the more practical line of approach which she had decided to follow.

  “Did you know the people you bought Asshe House from?” she asked. “The Juxons?”

  Yevgenia submitted to her questioning without protest, although it was evident in her expression that she thought it pointless. “No, I don’t remember meeting anyone. I think someone had died and that was why the house was for sale. And it hadn’t been inhabited since the end of the war. It was in an appalling state. I did to it everything that Naomi is redoing now. I was so proud of my modern kitchen. I felt I had come so far from Maris and our scullery at Kornu with a hand pump over the sink and the great wood-burning range.”

  Zita was afraid that the old woman was going to wander off into a welter of reminiscences about her childhood home, but Yevgenia suddenly reverted to the subject of Asshe House. “There had been some tragedy, I think. No one told me what it was. Kenward probably knew, but he kept it from me. It was the
kind of thing that local people gossip about, whatever it was. I had a char who had worked for the previous people, they must have been the tenants, not the owners…”

  “The Dryburns,” Zita put in.

  “Is that what they were called? They had left long before I came. But the char used to talk about them cryptically sometimes. She called them ‘funny folk’. Though she probably said that about me, too, because as far as I could see their funniness lay in the fact that the wife was a foreigner – a Pole or a Czech – and had an odd religion, Catholic perhaps. So I was just as funny, in those terms.”

  “But perhaps she didn’t realize it in your case, that you were Russian and Orthodox.”

  “No,” Yevgenia said slowly. “She didn’t, of course. I hid it very well in those days.”

  “What was she called, the char?”

  “Oh goodness knows. You’re not seriously going to look for her, Zita?”

  “Why not? But not if you can’t remember her name.”

  “I can. I may be getting on but I can still remember some things. She was called Hovell, Mrs Hovell. I never knew her Christian name. I loved what I saw as democratic politeness in respectfully addressing my cleaner as Mrs Hovell. And talking of cleaning ladies, I have agreed to have Xenia from next week when Lucia goes to Switzerland.”

  Zita allowed the conversation to be turned. She was sure that Yevgenia had nothing to do with the skeleton; it was her business to be convinced of it. To admit otherwise raised a series of horrendous pictures: Yevgenia and Petre; Yevgenia and her husband; Yevgenia alone. And then to live with the body blooming each year in the roses, to see every June the dark flowers of Tuscany Superb blossoming over the bones. She preferred not to imagine it. It seemed to her such a combination of wickedness and sickness that she could not see that anyone could live out their normal life like that. Then she would remember the concentration camp guards who put behind them a long episode of unimaginable cruelty to settle down to life at home or in exile as loyal husbands and devoted fathers, dog lovers and worthy citizens. No. No. Better to think of that odd girl, Xenia.

  “Rosie rang me yesterday and begged me to have her,” Yevgenia was saying.

  “I thought you were not at all keen, originally. Why does Rosie want her to come?”

  Yevgenia cut herself another slice of cheese. “She didn’t say precisely. She simply begged me to let her come here. I told Marcus yesterday that I wouldn’t take her. But I can’t refuse Rosie anything and when she appealed to me like that, of course I said I’d have her. I don’t know whether she just finds the competition intolerable in Gayton Street or whether there’s more to it. I suspect…”

  “What do you suspect?”

  “I don’t like her, you know. She’s both too Russian, and not Russian enough. She is of a generation which has grown up under communism, shifty, saying what they think you want to hear.”

  “That seems a bit hard,” Zita said tolerantly.

  “I saw her with Marcus when we went to Glyndebourne. She was like a spider; she had very delicately wrapped him up and swathed him in silk. He was at her mercy.”

  “Marcus? Yevgenia, you’re exaggerating.”

  “No, no. There’s no fool like a middle-aged man with a pretty girl younger than his own daughter.”

  “You don’t mean she’s sleeping with him?”

  “No, I don’t think I do. I mean something much more powerful which perhaps you rarely see these days: that is, not sleeping with him. So when Rosie phoned I suspected a problem with Al.”

  “You’re turning her into a seductress of epic talents. She’s not even a pretty girl. She seemed to me to be struggling to cope and finding it a bit hard. She had the enterprise to get herself here; she’s obviously very adaptable, just a bit bewildered by everything she sees around her. Do you think she is from your family, by the way, or was that just an excuse to get here?”

  “No, she’s not one of my Chornoroukys: she’s sly.”

  “But that’s not a reason, Yevgenia.”

  “No, and the problem is that she’s Xenia Alexandrovna; her father’s patronymic was Alexandrovich: he was Alexander Alexandrovich Chornorouky.” The words on Yevgenia’s tongue rolled with the heavy Russian stress.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, they’re very common names. Every second Russian is Sasha Alexandrovich, so it proves nothing. But I had a cousin who was Alexander Alexandrovich.”

  “Could she be…?”

  “No, no absolutely not. He died during the war. He was shot by the NKVD. No, I just meant that it was a Chornorouky name. And Xenia too.”

  “Yes?”

  “I had a great-grandmother called Xenia. I never knew her, of course. She died young, I think. She was Xenia Vassilievna Orlova. She hated the Russian climate and lived all her life at a villa in the Crimea, leaving for Egypt or France or Rome in the winter. She had an extraordinary collection of rubies. No wonder there was a revolution. You cannot imagine the pleasure of being innocent English middle class.”

  “So Xenia is transferred to your care, or you to hers. Perhaps you’ll become fond of her while she’s living with you.” Yevgenia depressed the corners of her mouth sceptically. “Anyway, she’s not like you and Valentina, she’s going back to her own country.”

  “I doubt it,” said Yevgenia.

  * * *

  Zita volunteered to collect Xenia from the station on the day of her arrival. Yevgenia had tried to brush away her offer. “Let her take a taxi,” she said. Zita, who had not seen Xenia since the lunch two months earlier when she had seemed a very forlorn creature, had insisted and was surprised at the new Xenia who walked out of the station carrying her shabby Russian suitcase. Her appearance was different, certainly; the slim girl in jeans, T shirt and long cardigan was not any smarter in any conventional way than the skinny creature in a nylon skirt who had radiated a sharp, hostile scent, yet she was so changed that she was almost unrecognizable. It was as if she had gathered up the fragmented pieces of herself into an intensely hard missile that she was about to launch at some objective. What that might be Zita could not guess. She could only wonder what effect this new personality would have on Yevgenia. She no longer thought it likely that the old woman would become fond of her guest and helper. Yevgenia did not give her approval or friendship easily. Zita hoped that Xenia would make herself as adaptable and agreeable in Broad Woodham as she had in Hampstead, but it was certainly a difficult task. Not only was Yevgenia suspicious of her, Xenia had the additional disadvantage of having Rosie’s dislike. Yevgenia was not demonstrative; she had controlled that Russian trait, if she had ever had it, in her assumption of Englishness; but she was, Zita knew, devoted to Rosie, much more so than to Ivo. Ivo’s brilliance of personality and success in his career made him an admired grandson; Rosie’s less showy character (Zita assumed Ivo to be showy from his television appearances) made her the beloved one.

  “I hope you won’t find Broad Woodham too quiet after London,” Zita said to the silent girl beside her in the car.

  “Not at all,” Xenia replied politely. Her English had come a long way in two months. “I shall do different things from what I did in Hampstead. Naomi said there is a bicycle I can ride to see things. And I believe I have more defined duties, so many hours a week to work. At Naomi’s, I really did not have to do anything. I hope, too, you will recommend me to your friends for baby-sitting. I must work, you know, to earn money.”

  Part Ten

  XENIA

  21

  As the date for her departure came into view, five weeks away now, Xenia had the sense that she was walking up a mountain path with a sheer drop on one side, her left. The track was stony, precipitous and progressively narrowing. She could not see whether it was going to take her, at last, to the invisible cliff top that must be somewhere above her, or whether it would eventually peter out in front of a smooth and featureless rock face. Only very careful control of where she placed her feet, intense concentration on the path, prevent
ed her from lurching over the edge.

  For the first time, on her last afternoon in Hampstead, after they had drunk their tiny cups of syrupy black coffee in the garden, she had led Al silently upstairs to her attic room. She had paused three steps below the first landing, placed her finger on her lips, and moved with exaggerated caution past Naomi’s door.

  “Yes,” Naomi’s voice spoke with her habitual calm, encouraging tones, “so how did you feel when that happened?”

  They ran up the next flights, stifling laughter, and shut Xenia’s door crisply behind them, to stand staring at one another. Like many initial encounters, it had been too rapidly and explosively successful. However, Xenia had not been dissatisfied with the outcome which was renewed desire. She could only hope that telephone calls and occasional meetings would sustain and increase it. She was resolved both to maintain her hold over Al and to exploit the opportunities that offered in her exile to Broad Woodham.

  She found at first that she faced a much harder task in her second objective than she expected. She had known from the start that Yevgenia resented and distrusted her. She wanted to find out why and to turn the dislike into its opposite, if she could. She was concerned to find that the evidence of hostility was very strong and hard to live with. Naomi and Marcus had been easy for her, she now realized; they had busy lives and were well disposed towards her. During the few hours of the day that they were all three of them together it was not difficult to please them. Yevgenia, on the other hand, was at home all day long, watching her as Xenia herself had watched her hosts in Hampstead, so that she could not take over the house with the same ease as at Gayton Street.