Daughter of Riches

by Janet Tanner

  ‘Then what have you got against him?’ Juliet asked directly. ‘There is something, I can see that.’

  Deborah drew smoke nervously, her eyes meeting Juliet’s briefly then flicking away again as if she was uncertain how to respond and Juliet waited, inexplicably apprehensive.

  ‘Did he contact you?’ Deborah asked at last.

  ‘No … I …’ Juliet broke off. ‘Deborah, what is this? So far you seem to be firing one question after another at me and giving me no answers. Can’t you just tell me straight out what it is you are hinting at?’

  ‘All right.’ Deborah stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette and faced Juliet directly. ‘ I’ll tell you. The reason I asked if he contacted you is because about a year ago he contacted me. He telephoned and asked if I would be prepared to talk to him about Louis’s death, said he was very interested in it and thought that as a member of the family by marriage it might be less painful for me to talk to him about it than someone more closely connected. I asked him the reason for his interest. He told me he’d come across the file while clearing out his father’s things and that it had always been a case very close to his father’s heart. I told him I didn’t think I could help – I didn’t marry David until two years after Louis died. But it wasn’t easy to get him to take no for an answer and I couldn’t really understand why he should be so interested. I mean, curiosity is all very well, but this did seem a bit excessive. So I made a few enquiries of my own.’ She paused, extracting another cigarette from the pack and gesticulating with it at Juliet as she spoke. ‘Has he told you what he does for a living, Juliet?’

  ‘He’s a writer, isn’t he.’

  ‘And do you know what he writes?’

  ‘Books about Jersey, I think. He’s very knowledgeable about the history of the island and the occupation and everything.’

  ‘Oh – is he really? Well, I suppose he has to have a sideline. Perhaps business in the sewers is none too good.’

  ‘Deborah, you are talking in riddles again,’ Juliet said, but she had begun to tremble a little too as if she already somehow knew what Deborah was going to say.

  ‘I’m sorry, Juliet but if you really don’t know what Dan Deffains’s main source of income is I can tell you you are not going to like it.’ She flicked her lighter, let the flame burn for a moment and extinguished it again. ‘He used to be a policeman, did he tell you that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And after he got thrown out of the force he turned his talents to investigative reporting. He followed up a drugs story that he’d had a sniff of when he was in the force and made a lot of money out of selling it. After that he honed in on an English businessman who was trying to buy a property over here. Dan wondered how he had made so much money so fast. The result was a case of insider dealing that rocked a well-established British company, caused a scandal in the City and put two men in gaol. Now, it would seem, looking for a new story to help him earn a crust by dishing dirt, Mr Dan Deffains had lightened upon Louis’s death. He remembers hearing his father talk at the time, expressing doubts that Sophia was really guilty and decided to try to rewrite history. Yet another scoop in the bag.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’ Juliet didn’t really know why she had said that. Shocked she might be, yet the facts held together all too well – Dan’s willingness to help her, the way he had tried to persuade her to question her family about where they had been that night twenty years ago, the way he had drawn her gently back to the subject again and again. Besides which there was no reason on earth why Deborah should be making this story up. But Sophia hadn’t raised the slightest objection to her seeing Dan and neither had Catherine; in fact Catherine had positively encouraged her!

  ‘Do the others know?’ she asked. ‘I mean … I told Grandma and Aunt Catherine I was seeing Dan and they didn’t say anything.’

  ‘He uses a pen name.’ Deborah lit her cigarette at last. ‘His position in Jersey would be quite untenable if it was common knowledge that Harry Porter was really Dan Deffains.’

  ‘I see.’ Juliet felt very cold, shocked and hurt. How could he have misled her this way? She didn’t usually smoke but just now the thought of a cigarette seemed comforting. ‘Could I have one do you think?’

  Deborah passed her the packet and lit the cigarette for her. Juliet coughed slightly on the smoke; it tasted vile.

  ‘I’m sorry if you liked him, Juliet,’ Deborah was saying. ‘I understand he’s very charming. That of course is what makes him so dangerous. But I had to tell you. He didn’t get his story out of me and I suppose he thought he stood a better chance with you. I don’t know what you’ll do about it – I know what I’d like to do – throttle him! Especially when I think what it would do to Sophia having it all raked up again.’ A young woman in tee-shirt and jeans passed the window, laden with plastic carrier bags and a basket of salad, and Deborah put a finger to her lips. ‘Oh, here’s Margot coming to prepare lunch. I won’t say any more now. But be warned, Juliet. And for God’s sake if you do see him again be very, very careful what you say to him.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t be seeing him again,’ Juliet said. Suddenly she was not simply shocked and disbelieving – she was furiously angry. How could he have deceived her this way? He must have thought it was his birthday when she had turned up asking him questions! And she’d thought … she’d actually thought … Her face burned as she remembered the way things had been between them last night. Christ, how could she have been so naive!

  Leaving Deborah to greet the perspiring Margot she stubbed out her cigarette and slammed out of the kitchen. There was a telephone in the study; no one would be there at this time of day. She grabbed it up and dialled Dan’s number.

  ‘Dan? It’s Juliet,’ she said shortly when he answered.

  ‘Juliet! This is a nice surprise!’ Clearly he had not registered the ten degrees of frost in her voice.

  ‘No, it’s not nice. Not at all. In fact I’m spitting mad! I have just discovered your nasty secret, Dan – or should I say Harry? That’s who I’ve been keeping company with, isn’t it? Harry Porter the investigator.’

  ‘Juliet … hang on …’

  ‘No, you hang on! If I’d had any idea of the real reason why you were so-called helping me I’d never have talked to you at all. You knew that, I suppose. That’s why you deceived me. I should have been warned, of course. Raife Pearson tried to tell me, didn’t he? He said everyone was not quite what they seemed to be. And to think I even let you make love to me! Was that part of the investigation too?’

  ‘Juliet – you’ve got it all wrong …’

  ‘Have I? Have I really? You must think I am very stupid, Dan, if you think I can’t see through you. I wanted to stop probing the past. I realised the damage I might be doing and I told you I wanted to stop. So what did you do? You found another way of keeping on seeing me – in the hope I would change my mind, presumably, or even if I didn’t you would still have a link to your next meal ticket. Well let me tell you I think it was a despicable thing to do!’ She broke off, trembling.

  ‘Juliet, will you listen a minute.’

  ‘No! I didn’t ring you to listen. I rang to tell you what I think of you. And also to warn you that if you print one word – one word – about my family I will personally tell the world just what sort of man you are.’

  ‘Juliet!’

  ‘Goodbye, Dan.’ She slammed the phone down. She was shaking now from head to foot and for a moment she stood, fists clenched, as the anger slowly died and a flood of misery began to creep in.

  Oh Dan, Dan, why did it all have to be a charade? How could I have been such a fool as to believe, even for a minute, that we had something special?

  Too late. It was over now. Please God she hadn’t given him anything he could use for his despicable exposé or whatever he called it. Please God the only person she had hurt was herself.

  Deborah carried her small overnight case to her top-floor apartment, closed the door after her and leaned hea
vily against it.

  She had hated having to tell Juliet about Dan Deffains but there really had been no alternative. The man was a menace, worming his way into her confidence, and Deborah was worried as to what he might already have managed to find out.

  She pressed her hands to her face, closing her eyes behind her fingers. She had known, the moment Juliet had mentioned the Jersey Lily Nightclub, that someone had been talking to her. It was not the sort of place Juliet would have been likely to visit alone. She was too well brought up, discriminating without even realising she was doing so because of her breeding. With Juliet the veneer was not skin-deep, she had been born into affluence, raised to have confidence in her own worth and her God-given right to certain privileges. Deborah felt a thrust of envy. She had lived the grand life now for almost twenty years and still, deep down, she was insecure. She didn’t make stupid mistakes of etiquette any more, she always said and did the right things, she appeared poised, elegant, sophisticated and totally self-assured. But she had always been an actress though she had never set foot on a stage; always been able to hide her true feelings. These days her insecurities were buried deep; living the part she had been playing all these years had helped her almost to become it. But scratch deep enough and the old fears of rejection were still there as real as ever, and perhaps the more sharp because now she had more to lose.

  Deborah shivered. After all this time she had come to believe the secrets of her past were safe; now she could see how really very easy it would be to blow away the layers of illusion and reveal the truth beneath. Dan, helped by Juliet, was digging into the past to try to solve a murder. In doing so he might very easily unearth the secrets of a past that Deborah had tried so hard to conceal, secrets that would shock a parochial Jersey and embarrass the family of which she was now a part.

  She straightened, slipping out of her jacket and hanging it up in one of the wardrobes that ran the full length of one wall. The door was mirrored; as she closed it she caught sight of herself and the haunted, hunted look in her eyes. She had to pull herself together – that look alone was enough to announce to the world that something was very wrong – but she really did not know how any more.

  A sense of utter helplessness powerful and fluid as a tidal wave was threatening to engulf her and carry her back through the years. The image looking back at her from the mirror seemed to mutate and change, the features becoming younger and sharper, the eyes more wary, not smudged with soft pinks and browns as they were nowadays but outlined in black and fringed with spiky lashes, the mouth softer and fuller but palest pink not warm peach. She touched her hair, seeming to feel the brittleness that comes from constant peroxiding instead of the salon-induced conditioning, and half-expected to see her expensive couture designer clothes tum, like Cinderella’s at midnight, to a cheap mini skirt or pants in the psychedelic prints of the early seventies.

  In that moment it seemed Deborah Langlois ceased to exist. In her place was Debbie Swift, seventeen years old, frightened and alone. She had thought she knew everything, that girl, been quite certain she was grown up enough to handle life in the fast lane. How wrong she had been! And now it was all beginning again, whirling past her like a hurricane and dragging her, helpless and afraid, with it.

  Deborah closed her eyes, trying to shut out the images, but it was too late. The past that she had tried so hard to forget was all around her. And she was as much a part of it now as she had been then.

  Chapter thirty

  London – 1971

  ‘Hey there, you wake up now! You can’t go to sleep in here!’

  The hand on her shoulder was insistent though not unkind, the voice world-weary with an accent part West Indian, part Cockney.

  Debbie opened her eyes and lifted her head carefully from the coffee-stained formica counter. Her neck felt stiff and achy and there was a stale taste in her mouth. The hand shook her shoulder again.

  ‘Come on, now, you either have another coffee or you got to go. That’s the way it is round here.’

  Debbie looked up into the black face beneath the tightly pinned down black hair and the incongruous little starched gingham cap that went with the uniform of main line station buffet attendant.

  ‘Couldn’t I stay just a bit longer – please? I won’t go to sleep again, I promise.’

  ‘You want another coffee?’

  Debbie cudgelled her sleep-fogged brain trying to decide if she could afford such a luxury. She had a little money in the cheap plastic shoulder bag that she had slung around her neck for safety and the rest of her savings tucked away in her shabby hold-all, but she did not know how long it was going to have to last her. If she was able to get a job straight away maybe it would be all right, but she couldn’t be sure of getting a job straight away. No, better not spend any more of it now, on her very first night in London.

  She slid down from the stool and picked up her hold-all.

  The waitress shrugged and watched her cross to the door, a slender waif-like girl in an imitation leather jacket and mini skirt, teetering slightly on three inch heeled sandals, just another of the runaways come to London in search of the glamorous life. Fools, she thought scornfully, silly empty-headed little fools. God alone knew what became of them – she did not want to. She shrugged again and turned to load the dirty coffee cup and used ashtray from the counter.

  On the station concourse Debbie stood for a moment uncertain what to do next. There were not many people about at this time of night and the display boards announcing arrivals and departures above the platform approach were still. Out here, away from the claustrophobic heat of the buffet, it was cold, a chill wind blowing the odd paper cup or cellophane food wrapper. Debbie crossed to a wedge of plastic bucket seats and curled up in one, pulling her imitation leather jacket around her.

  If only she had arrived earlier, she might at least have been able to find somewhere to sleep, but she had not really planned to come today. Perhaps she hadn’t really intended to come at all – it had all just been a lovely dream, something to make life at home in Plymouth a little more bearable. Debbie had read every article and feature she could lay her hands on describing high life in London. – the clubs and the restaurants, the shows and the parties. London was where ‘it was at’ and she wanted to be part of it. She had fantasised and dreamed and planned, imagining she was the girl on the arm of this pop-star or that celebrity, dressed in Mary Quant or Biba, with the flash bulbs popping all around. She was as pretty as any of them, she knew – her looks were the one thing Debbie was sure of – and sometimes she stood in front of the fly-blown mirror in her bedroom wearing nothing but her bra and panties, holding her hair away from her lovely heart shaped face and imagining she was posing for a glamour photographer or charming a minor Royal. One day she would leave her sordid existence behind forever, Debbie promised herself. One day she would have wonderful clothes and real gold jewellery, have her hair styled by John Frieda or Vidal Sassoon, drink champagne and dance until dawn at Annabels. One day, one day … But she had not expected that day to come quite so soon. Only this morning when Barry, her mother’s boorish live-in lover, had made yet another pass at her had she decided: that was it. Enough.

  She had been in the kitchen making herself a late breakfast and he had come in, grabbing her from behind, sliding his hands beneath her cotton wrap and groping for her breasts. Her heart had sunk and she had twisted away, glowering at him and muttering angrily at him to leave her alone. But he had followed her, trapping her against the sink, smothering her with his huge hairy body and those awful groping hands. Debbie had struggled with him, sickened by the stale beer and tobacco smell of his breath, and the pervasive sweaty odour that emanated from the singlet and shorts she knew he had been sleeping in, alarmed by the hot pressure of his aroused body against her bare legs where he had yanked her wrap open. But she was afraid to scream or even shout at him, because if she did she knew her mother would hear and come in and find them. She would blame Debbie. That was the worst of it
– well, almost the worst.

  ‘Come on, baby, you know what to do.’ Barry’s voice was rough and he was forcing her head down, forcing her on to her knees with one hand while with the other he opened his shorts. The body odour smell was overpowering now, filling her nose and mouth, and she twisted her head, desperate to get away from him, desperate to take in only clean fresh air. She knew what he felt like in her mouth, thrusting at the back of her throat until she gagged, because he had made her do it before, not once, but many times, whenever he could get her alone. Once he had climbed into her bed when she was asleep and she had woken to find him lying on top of her forcing himself into her, but that had been the only time he had actually raped her and she thought that then he had been so drunk he did not know what he was doing. Mostly, in his rather thick-headed way, he had too much sense for that. He didn’t want to make her pregnant. He was too afraid of finding himself hauled up before the court for having sex with a girl below the age of consent, so he preferred it this way. Besides, it had other advantages. She could not scream with her mouth full.

  ‘Come on, come on you silly little bitch!’ His hands were one each side of her head, pressing, so that she felt he was going to crack her skull between them like a nut. He forced himself against her tight closed lips and tears of helplessness stung her eyes. ‘ I don’t want to!’ she wanted to say but she knew the moment she opened her mouth he would be in it. Already she could practically taste him, the taste that meant she could never eat fish these days without wanting to be sick.

  He thrust himself at her harder and as her lips parted she imagined herself biting him, biting with all the savagery of a cornered animal, but she knew she could not do it. Instead she went on to auto-pilot, distancing herself so that it was as if she had flown up to the top corner of the kitchen, high above the dingy green-painted wall cupboard, floating somewhere just beneath the flaking ceiling that was sticky from the residue of chip-pan grease and discoloured by the smoke of too many cigarettes, and looking down on the clumsy uncouth man and the girl on her knees in front of him.