The Accomplice

by The Accomplice (retail) (epub)

  But supposing he had not died? Supposing he had been thrown into the cattle truck and survived his beating, the journey to Siberia and fifteen years in the gulag? It was not easy to imagine, but there were those who outlived all these experiences, her own father, for example. Supposing he had been released in the mid-fifties to work as a clerk in a lumber camp, as her father had done, until he finally reached Novoleninsk and found a job teaching languages in the Technical High School. If he had done that, which he could have done, what would Yevgenia’s reaction be to hearing such news?

  It meant, of course, that Yevgenia had never been legally married in England. Xenia could not see that mattered to anyone now. She had no thought of blackmail, for who cared if Yevgenia had lived for thirty years as the bigamous wife of Kenward Loftus, even though the bigamy was unknowing or, at the very most, wilfully unknowing. That aspect was of no importance. What was significant about this story was to lay Xenia’s own claims. Yevgenia might or might not like her; what Xenia had to do was to demand justice, not liking. Who had the greater right to Yevgenia’s money, the child of Alexander Alexandrovich Chornorouky who had lived out his life in Siberia, or the granddaughter of Kenward Loftus who had somehow rescued Yevgenia from the chaos of the aftermath of the war in eastern Germany?

  * * *

  A few days later Zita reported that Naomi had phoned from Tuscany with urgent questions about the building work at Asshe House. She was going round there. Would Xenia like to see it? Xenia accepted the suggestion with every show of pleasure. She was wary of Zita’s efforts to be kind, for she could see no reason for them; they lacked the element of power-seeking which explained Naomi’s benevolence. Xenia had heard from Naomi the story of Zita’s disastrous marriage and this was a comfort to her, making her feel more in control of her own life and feelings.

  It was early evening and the workmen had gone. Zita went around the house making notes of the answers to Naomi’s questions, leaving Xenia to wander from room to room by herself. When she had finished her task she found Xenia on the ground floor and said, “Shall I show you round? I thought you might be interested to see it, because it is a fine example of late seventeenth-century architecture and anyway it is so nice poking about in other people’s houses, don’t you think?”

  They climbed the stairs and went into the drawing room, Zita pointing out the details of the fireplace, the moulding of the ceiling and the plastering of the walls.

  “Who is going to live here?” Xenia asked. “Has Mrs Loftus given it away?”

  “She has given the use of the house to Marcus and Naomi and they are making all these changes, but whether they intend to live here permanently, I doubt. Rosie said she didn’t think they would leave Hampstead in the near future. She couldn’t live in it herself. Perhaps Ivo will. Or perhaps it will just be a weekend place for them.”

  Xenia made a little face to indicate her astonishment that anyone could have such a large house on such a basis. All she said was, “Ivo?”

  “Rosie’s brother. You didn’t meet him when you were staying with Marcus and Naomi?”

  “No. I know he is Rosie’s brother. I meant he doesn’t seem much part of the family.”

  “No, it’s odd isn’t it? I’ve known Yevgenia for years, well, six or seven, and my mother has known Naomi and Marcus for ever and yet I’ve never met Ivo, or at least not since I was five years old in Cambridge.”

  They were walking up the stairs now with the fine curved panels on their left. “I think for a time they were rather ashamed of him. He ran away from Bedales and refused to go to university.”

  Ivo had been a failure, for Naomi and Marcus as much as himself, a sign of a flaw in a perfect household. He had so conspicuously refused to follow in his parents’ footsteps, to take on their academic and social values, that they simply blotted him out of their conversation. Now he was so successful they had, with diffidence and embarrassment, begun to talk about him again. Xenia had evidently assumed the Hampstead attitude to the black sheep.

  “He is a cook, I think,” she said condescendingly.

  “Yes,” said Zita, opening a bedroom door. “Look, this will be the main bedroom. I would adore a bedroom with a fireplace in it. But a very smart cook. Naomi and Marcus are terribly proud of him. Have you ever seen him on television?”

  “No.”

  “I must show you a video. I don’t think he’s been on while you’ve been here. I love his cooking. This will be the dressing room and bathroom, though I have to admit it is rather hard to imagine at the moment.”

  “In Siberia, our whole flat was the size of one of these rooms.”

  Zita turned to her a face so full of interest and sympathy that Xenia immediately saw her opportunity. “What was it like? The way we live must seem like madness in comparison.”

  “Oh, no, the madness is there, not here. So our flat was on the fifteenth floor and the lift was never working. Our front door was padded. I have not seen that anywhere here. You come in here and there is a little hall with a box for our shoes, because immediately you change your shoes for slippers. No one does that here. Then, here is the loo, here is the bathroom, like this.” She stretched out one arm to indicate its confines. “Then the kitchen in which we have a stove, a sink, a little table with one chair. I always sat on a stool, kept under the table. There was not space for two chairs. Then our living room. So it would have been smaller than this, in fact.”

  “But where were the bedrooms?”

  “There are no bedrooms in Russian flats. My father slept in the living room and I in the hall. There was just room to put up my bed for the night.”

  Zita was looking out of the window at the garden. “My mother once told me about the communal flat where she grew up in Moscow in an old apartment block. Do you think yours was an improvement on that?”

  “Moscow,” Xenia said contemptuously. “In Moscow they don’t know they are well off. Even if the flats are bad, they have transport, films, theatre, music, shops. In Moscow life is paradise in comparison with Novoleninsk. It was particularly bad,” she went on, “for my father. He was an old man; he would be in his seventies now, if he were alive. He had grown up in Latvia before the war. He had known different things.”

  “How did he come to live in Siberia?”

  “Oh, he was in the camps for many years and even when he was freed, he was not given a permit to return to Latvia. He had to remain in Siberia.”

  “Did he ever talk to you about life in the camps?”

  “No, never. It was something that you hid and did not speak about. Until a few years ago it was something shameful in your past and in your family’s past. Even though people knew that under Stalin you could be sent to the camps for no reason, they still thought that there was something wrong with an ex-camp inmate, a sort of contamination. It is only now that you can admit it.”

  “Do you know why he was there? I mean, was it a casual round up or was it for some particular professional or regional causes?”

  Xenia shrugged. “I don’t know. My father never told me about it. But I think the name Chornorouky was enough.” They were walking back downstairs now. Zita was holding the house keys in her palm. She was thoughtful, absorbed.

  “My mother has just gone back to Moscow and St Petersburg,” she was saying. “I wonder how she will react. She has always been rabidly anti-Soviet and anti-Russian.”

  Xenia, walking a step behind, did not reply. She was pleased with her evening’s work. She was sure that within the next few days what she had said would be reported to Yevgenia. The information about her father’s youth in Latvia, about his age, would be all the more convincing for being expressed in Zita’s mouth. The mistrust that Yevgenia felt for her, Xenia, would thereby be disarmed.

  As she locked up, Zita said, “It’s Tom’s birthday on Wednesday next week and he wants to go to the cinema with two friends. Would you be free to join us? I shall need some help, you see, as they are all in wheel chairs.”

  Xenia felt a su
rge of happiness and power. She suddenly saw how to clinch it, how to make Yevgenia see she was Xan’s daughter. She would have to do some careful research; she must get her information right. If she were wrong, even by a day, she would ruin everything. If she was right, she could win.

  “Of course,” she replied. “It will be a pleasure.”

  “I’m so glad you’re free. Tom asked for you particularly.”

  Part Eleven

  ZITA

  22

  Zita had heard nothing from Stevens since their visit to the Cresacres. She assumed that, as planned, a police surgeon had visited them in Crawley to take a blood sample and that the DNA testing of the bones was going ahead in the Met laboratories. She had turned her attention to Mrs Hovell, the char mentioned by Yevgenia as the woman who had worked for her in the early fifties, who had previously worked for the tenants of Asshe House during the war. Fortunately, it was not a common name. If she had had to telephone every Smith in Broad Woodham, she might have abandoned her search before she began. As it was, the phone book yielded only five Hovells, three of them in Woodham. Two listened to her request for help with interest and one made co-operative, indeed enthusiastic, suggestions about how the search might be pursued. Neither produced success. The third number rang unanswered.

  On Friday, on her way to her quintet evening, when she turned down a road which was familiar in itself, although she had never before observed its name, she saw the street sign, Hastings Road. At the same moment she visualized the address in the small print of the telephone directory of the last Hovell, whom she had not been able to contact. She slowed down until she came to a halt opposite number sixteen, a Thirties house with an arched, keyhole entrance. She got out and locked her car door, thinking as she did so, this is stupid. She would be late for her music and irritate Georgina Orr, who kept time in everything. The house looked unoccupied and she rang the bell only to confirm that there was no one at home. She was surprised when the door opened so promptly as to imply that someone had been watching her from the moment of her arrival.

  “Mrs Hovell?” she said tentatively. The woman facing her was square, a solid pile of cubes of different dimensions culminating in a square face, highly coloured, contrasting with her jet hair, evidently dyed for the face below it was not young. Zita put her in her early sixties.

  “Yes?” The reply was both affirmation and question.

  Zita stated her name and went on, “I’m looking for a Mrs Hovell who worked at Asshe House in St Michael’s Square during the war and in the fifties. I wonder…” For a moment she was full of hope. The age was right, or at least within the range of possibility.

  Mrs Hovell shook her head. “No, dear,” she said, “not me.” Then she added, “At least not during the war. In the fifties, perhaps. When were you thinking of? I qualified in 1952 and I began work in Woodham in March 1953, so I could have. I mean, I went to so many houses. In those days there were lots of home births.” She saw Zita’s look of disappointment. “What sort of work were you meaning? I was a midwife.”

  “No,” said Zita, “I am looking for someone who was a cleaning lady for a Mrs Loftus and, before her, for a family called Dryburn. And it was over quite a long period, about fifteen years I should say. It’s stupid of me. I can see that you are much too young.”

  This remark had a warming effect. Mrs Hovell released the edge of her door and said, “Why don’t you come in for a moment? It could be my mother-in-law you’re thinking of. I didn’t marry until June 1958 and she wasn’t working then, but she had been before that.” Zita hadn’t asked Yevgenia about the age of her char. She could now see that she could have been a middle aged woman in the 1950s and so, in all probability, dead and beyond her reach now.

  “That would make more sense,” she said. “It might have been her. I don’t suppose she’s still alive?” The idea of a sixty-year-old having a mother-in-law seemed rather far-fetched.

  “Oh, she’s still going strong. Eighty-four she is now. What do you want her for? Do you want to come in?”

  Zita hesitated, looking at her watch, and stepped inside. “It’s a bit gruesome,” she said. “You may have read in the papers about a skeleton found at Asshe House. I’m the solicitor of the owners. I’m trying to find people connected with the house a long time ago who might know about its history, its past owners, any stories about it.”

  Mrs Hovell led the way into the sitting room, before answering. “Well, if that’s what you want, you’ll have a job. Alzheimer’s. You could have a go. I mean, she remembers some things, especially the past. In fact, she lives in the past.” She sat herself down with the solidity of someone expecting a good chat. Zita followed suit more tentatively, placing herself on the edge of the chintz-covered sofa. “And it’s very funny what she does remember,” Mrs Hovell went on. “Often it’s little things, and the really important things have all gone. Last time I went to see her, Sunday afternoon it was, she’d forgotten her husband. Well, I mean. We were talking about her old house up at Hinton, you know, up on the hill; it’s really part of Woodham now. She lived there for forty years. I said to her, ‘You know, Mum, you lived there with Brian,’ that was her husband, and do you know what she said? She goes, ‘Brian?’ as if she’d never heard of him before. She’d blotted him right out of her past. Can you imagine someone forgetting her husband, father of her children? Memory’s a funny thing. And she thinks I’m her grandmother. Well.”

  “Do you think she might be the person I’m looking for?”

  “Could be. She worked more like a maid. She didn’t go to lots of different people’s houses. She went every day to one house, regular hours. She always wore a blue overall and a white apron over it. Like a uniform. It might have been the house you mean. I could ask my husband.”

  Zita looked at her watch again and took out her card. “Would you mind? I wouldn’t want to disturb her if she didn’t work there, but if she did, who knows? She might remember something. So, if you could just check with your husband.”

  * * *

  Georgina was vexed at Zita’s lateness, grumbling acidly that if Zita wanted to remain part of the group she must cultivate greater punctuality. She was eventually soothed by Gerald and by two hours of music-making which enabled her to say goodbye to Zita with better humour. Zita too was tranquillized by the music.

  Yevgenia had been baby-sitting for her, as it was Lynne’s night at the pub and Xenia was already employed for the evening. The two of them drank a cup of tisane together on Zita’s return. Zita wanted to soften Yevgenia towards Xenia, and began to tell her about the Russian girl’s account of her home in Siberia.

  “According to Naomi,” Zita said, “she would hardly say a word about Russia or about her past when she was in London.”

  “Perhaps it’s you, my dear,” Yevgenia said, “I would rather confide in you than in a professional receiver of secrets, like Naomi. What did she say about her father?”

  “He died about three years ago. What happened to her mother, I don’t know; she doesn’t feature at all. The father was an alcoholic and elderly, in his seventies, she said. He spent years in the gulag, though she didn’t know much about his time there. She said he never spoke about it and she clearly didn’t know what he was in for, except that he was a political.”

  Yevgenia was struggling out of her chair with the aid of her two sticks. “I can’t bear it,” she said. “That country. I’m not like your mother, reviling it. I just can’t think about it. The sum of the horror there this century, the injustice, the misery, the individual grief, is unimaginable, unmeasurable. If I thought about it, I would weep.”

  “She said he was never able to go back to where he came from, Latvia, I think. The system of internal passports meant that you were chained to your assigned place like a serf. Extraordinary really.”

  “So, he couldn’t go back. I must go back, I must go back now. Good night, my dear.”

  Looking back, much later, Zita was to think that had been the moment when her ro
le as the accomplice, albeit unwitting at first, had begun and that Yevgenia’s cryptic remark, which she had dismissed at the time as a reflection of the painful business of remembering was, in fact, the point of Yevgenia’s conversion to belief in Xenia.

  * * *

  Mrs Hovell the younger was evidently one of those busy, efficient, interfering people who, once they have undertaken a task and become part of a project, do not rest until their own part is done and so is everyone else’s. She was on the phone the following day to report that her mother-in-law had worked at Asshe House for about eighteen years from the start of the war.