With a flourish, he pulled out a heavy Le Creuset pan of exactly the right proportions.
‘I find that hard to believe,’ he said. ‘But your studies do surprise me. How on earth did you get into something like that?’
‘Can you find a match or something to light the gas?’
He remembered where he’d seen the matches earlier. A box was sitting on a biscuit box on the side opposite the cooker. He took out a match and lit a gas ring. He slipped the box into his pocket, and went off to look for candles.
Sarah took the pan, then filled a kettle with water. Ethan returned to his seat with two table candles and small glass holders to put them in. While the water heated, Sarah chopped the onion, her hand moving economically as the knife jumped up and down. The water boiled. She poured it into a large glass jug, and crumbled chicken stock cubes into it, then set it aside. Wiping her eyes, she sliced through a fennel bulb and several cloves of garlic. He noticed how her hands moved, how her fingers clasped the knife, how the sharp blade slid effortlessly through the flesh of the vegetables.
‘You mean, what’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like that? It all started with Great-Granddad. It was a great interest of his. Surely you knew that?’
‘Well, yes. He mentioned it a couple of times, something about the Bible, ancient Israel, the life of Jesus. I can’t really remember any detail. And he went to Israel several times, I know that. Jerusalem, mostly. All the same, I never knew it was any sort of big thing with him.’
‘Have you never looked through his library?’
‘I’ve glanced through it a couple of times.’
She gave him the sort of look a woman gives a man who is proving not quite with it.
She took the skillet and started to heat olive oil on top of the gas ring.
‘And you’re telling me you never noticed his books about biblical archaeology?’
‘Maybe, I can’t remember. I was only interested in fiction. I wanted ripping yarns to read on my hols, that’s all. And when I was in my teens I sometimes wondered if the old dog had any…well, off-colour stuff.’
The look again.
‘Don’t say anything more. I don’t want to know about your taste in porn.’
‘It wasn’t exactly… I was a spotty teenager. Anyway, I never found any.’
‘I shall have to keep a very close eye on you, Ethan. Perhaps I won’t marry you after all. Now, as I was saying, Great-Granddad built up a remarkable collection of books on the subject. Taught himself some Hebrew and Greek, messed about with Latin. The collection isn’t very systematic, but it’s full of good things. I used to pop over here a lot when I was an undergraduate.’
The rice went in, along with the onions. A warm smell rose from the pan.
‘I never bumped into you.’
‘I kept away from you. I had a strong feeling you were a lecherous old man, and now I know I was right. Now, keep quiet and let me get on with this.’ She paused. ‘What was I saying? Yes, when I was in my teens, he talked to me about his interests and started suggesting that I might study languages and maybe study Hebrew and some archaeology. He even paid for me to go on visits to the Holy Land. Took me with him once.’
‘I knew about none of this. He never talked of it.’
She added some wine, then two ladles of the stock. As the rice started to absorb the liquid, the mixture began to look like a risotto.
She turned to him, a pensive look on her face.
‘Never?’
‘Not to me. Maybe my father, maybe someone else. But I’ve only heard about it now. I knew you had a degree from Oxford, and a PhD and so on, but that was the full extent of it. I’m sorry I wasn’t more curious. You must think I’ve been negligent.’
She shook her head, and her expression changed, for her flippancy in finding him slow on the uptake had passed, and with it the little impatience she had felt. She had just started her degree eight years earlier, only a month or two after her aunt Abi had been killed. How on earth would he have found time or a space in his mind to enquire after the doings of a niece to whom he had never been particularly close? Their families had had a falling out years earlier, Ethan’s brother James – Sarah’s father – had argued with their father and things had festered.
‘You weren’t to blame,’ she said. ‘There was the feud, then…what happened to Aunt Abi. Actually, if I’m to be honest, I didn’t try to see you back then. I was just nineteen, and I was afraid of you. Because of what happened to Abi. What happened to her frightened me a great deal. I thought you might have taken it badly, that you might not be someone I could cope with. I heard of you from time to time, and I thought you might be bitter. I let a lot of time go by. We just have to make up for that.’
He nodded, but said nothing. Sarah had been right. He hadn’t added things up until now, but his life since Abi’s murder had been a blur, not quite a life in any real meaning of the term. He’d relearnt the basic skills of meeting and working with people, but for most of the time he’d been a recluse, leaving work for an empty flat and a takeaway, falling asleep in front of the television most nights, avoiding the constant temptation to drown his sorrows in drink. His colleagues regarded him as a loner, good at his job, but no use for a night out in the pub. Even after eight years, a dark depression could descend on him out of nowhere and cripple him for days. Last night and today were the first occasions he’d talked to anyone properly in all that time. Suddenly, the thought of Sarah leaving filled him with a puzzling dread.
‘Apart from being brainy,’ he went on, ‘is there anything else in your life? Books, music, men?’
‘You’re trawling. All of them, if you must know. Well, not so many men, as it happens…’
‘You must get plenty of offers.’
She frowned.
‘Offers? Yes, I suppose so. I turn them all down.’
‘Please don’t tell me…’
Her frown deepened, but she shook her head.
‘No, it’s not that. I like men. I’d like to get married one day and have children and all that. It’s just…’
She hesitated, and he sensed that she didn’t want to be pushed, that he’d have to wait for her to say whatever it was she had difficulty in saying.
‘After I graduated, one of my lecturers asked me out. Dr Gardner. Jeremy Gardner. We…got involved. At first it was just sex, but as time went by it turned into a proper love affair. He was ten years older than me and married, but unhappily. It lasted over two years, and he was talking seriously about getting a divorce and marrying me. It turns out, he did file for divorce, but that…’
She stopped talking and took a slow breath.
‘It’s all right,’ said Ethan, ‘you don’t have to go on.’
She looked directly at him, and he saw something troubled in her eyes. As if she was haunted, as if she could see ghosts.
‘It’s all right. I’d like to tell you. But keep it to yourself. Nobody else in the family even knows I had a lover, let alone… Something happened. Jeremy was a climber. He would go away for a month or more at a time, climbing one peak after another, each one higher and more difficult than the last. That year, the team he was with chose Nanga Parbat in Kashmir. He was about halfway up when a piton broke and he fell onto a ridge and broke his back. I didn’t hear about it at first. He’d kept me secret. I didn’t even get to go to the funeral.’
She came to a halt. All the time she’d been speaking, she’d been stirring the rice. Now she added the prawns in generous spoonfuls; they were large and pink. The cheese, which looked like cheddar, added a final touch of flavour. She grated it into thick yellow ribbons and spooned them into the risotto. As they melted, she stirred them softly until they vanished into the soupy mixture.
While the risotto settled, Ethan laid two places at the table, using Christmas plates that had already been set out for the lunch that had not taken place. He found a bottle of sparkling white wine and two fluted glasses to go with it. And he lit the candles.
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When he finished setting the table, Sarah had already conjured a light green salad from the fridge and sprinkled it with an Italian dressing. She put the bowl in the centre of the table, and Ethan hurried off to find servers. Finally, the risotto was lined up alongside the salad, and all was ready.
With one mouthful he was smitten.
‘This is delicious. A pity I’m your uncle and you’re my niece.’
She gave him a curious look, as if what he’d just said was not quite what it should have been. Then she smiled.
‘You’ll just have to live with it,’ she said, and spooned more risotto into her own mouth.
She wondered privately if she should tell him the truth. They were both grown-ups now, after all. The truth wouldn’t have hurt him, but she knew it would bring acute embarrassment to her relatives. Ethan was not her uncle, she was not his niece. To be exact, they weren’t even remotely related. She and her mother were the only ones who knew that, and what her mother had told her on her deathbed had been said in strict confidence. In the end, she decided against telling him, for now at least. What harm could it do to let him go on believing they shared the same bloodline? The rest of the family thought so, and she did not relish the thought of disenchanting them.
About halfway through the meal, after Sarah had put second helpings on both their plates, she put her fork and spoon down and looked directly at Ethan.
‘Ethan, what will happen to Great-Granddad’s will? I mean, now there’s this murder inquiry taking place.’
He frowned and put his implements down as well.
‘I’m not quite sure,’ he said. ‘The study had been ransacked. Someone had spent time in there looking for something, maybe money, maybe something else. It’s far too early to say. If the will was still in there, it’s probably in the hands of the police. If not, it may have been among the things that were taken by the intruder. Or intruders, it’s too early to know anything definite. It’s not really important, though, not until the investigation’s fully under way. I don’t think anyone much wants to think about their inheritance at the moment.’
She blinked and picked up her fork, only to play with the food in front of her.
‘It was just…’ She paused, as if trying to put some thoughts together. ‘Ethan, did he ever mention his will to you?’
He shook his head.
‘Not that I remember. I wouldn’t worry about it, though, Gerald was always pretty careful about that sort of thing. He had good lawyers, as I remember, some firm over in Gloucester.’
‘Markham and Pritchett. They used to handle stuff for my father.’
He smiled.
‘Mine too. I think they were solicitors for the whole family. I’ll get in touch with them after the break. They’re bound to have at least one copy in their offices.’
‘The thing is, Ethan, Great-Granddad said something to me about three years ago, when I was still working on my PhD. He said that if anything happened to him, I had to find his will, that there was another document with it, a letter to me. He showed it to me once, but it was folded up so I could only see the outside. He wouldn’t say what was in it, but I gathered it wasn’t to do with an inheritance. It was important, though, he made a point of stressing that. He said I had to get hold of this letter the moment anything happened, that it contained instructions.’
‘Instructions? What about?’
‘That’s what I don’t know. Look, I’m probably not even in the will, or if I am I must be pretty far down the pecking order. But I have a funny feeling about this.’
‘Funny?’
‘Funny peculiar. I didn’t take it too seriously at the time, but when I think back, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t referring to his inevitable death a few years down the line. There was something in his manner, in the tone of his voice: as if he was worried that something unnatural might happen to him. And…well, it has done, hasn’t it? I think we should look for it. I think we should do that right away.’
6
Voices from the Dead
Over the next hour, Ethan made several telephone calls. He spoke to his father, to his uncles, to Bob Forbes at police headquarters, and to his grandfather’s solicitors. A copy of the will was with the solicitors, but no letter for Sarah. The police had found neither a will nor a letter in Gerald’s study.
Ethan found Sarah and explained that he’d drawn a blank.
‘Then it has to be somewhere else,’ she said. ‘Any ideas?’
He shook his head.
‘What about the library?’ she asked.
‘The library?’
‘You know, the room with books in it. Along the walls. On shelves.’
‘Oh, that room. Sounds more like your preserve than mine.’
‘Exactly. All I want is an hour or two in there, Ethan. Half an hour. I think the letter may be important. Your police friends won’t know what to look for, but I may be able to recognise it.’
It took an hour to persuade him to take her to the hall, help her slip beneath the yellow and black crime scene tape, and open the door with his personal key.
‘This is very irregular,’ he said. But she had piqued his curiosity. The letter just might hold something of relevance. So long as they kept away from the study, there was little risk of disturbing anything; the house had been filled with people for two days, and the crime scene officers had concentrated their efforts around the room where the murders had taken place.
They started with a stack of box files filled with journal articles, newspaper clippings, and an occasional letter. Ethan had to nudge Sarah every few minutes when, finding something of interest, she would stop searching and start reading. They moved on to two tall filing cabinets. The first contained records of book purchases, letters from antiquarian and modern booksellers, and correspondence with authors and editors. Ethan glanced through these, stunned to find his grandfather so assiduous in his studies. The second cabinet was stuffed with objects of an archaeological nature. Sarah’s eyes opened wide as she took in the range of them. Ethan almost had to drag her away.
‘Sarah, there’s nothing here, nothing addressed to you anyway. Wait till the will is opened, it may say something in there about it.’
‘Rubbish. You spoke to Markham from the solicitors, and he knew nothing about it. Either it’s in the study or whoever killed Great-Granddad and his friend took it. By the way, has anything been done to contact his family? The other man, I mean.’
‘Max Chippendale? Yes, I told Bob Forbes all I knew. He has Max’s bags, and he’s made enquiries. None of us knew anything about the man, except that he’d served in the war with Granddad. Tough old birds that lot. Desert Rats or something.’
‘Long Range Desert Group. You should know that. Tougher than the Desert Rats. Harder than the SAS. No wonder the ones who got through lived long lives.’
It was cold, and they decided to go back to the lodge for coffee and a plate of Mrs Salgueiro’s home-made cranberry shortbread. Ethan had lit a log fire earlier in the drawing room. While he tended it, Sarah made a coffee for him and a strong hot chocolate for herself. The shortbread was in an old tin with a tartan pattern. She remembered it from childhood visits.
‘We’re getting low on milk,’ she said, putting down the tray. ‘We’ll have to get some in the village tomorrow. Or drive into Gloucester.’
They sat in front of the fire, watching the flames lick through the beech logs, their appetite unquenchable. They talked again, less animated now after their lack of success in the library, but more deeply, more intimately than before. He spoke of how he’d met his future wife Abigail, the shortness of their courtship and the brevity of their life together, of the sleepless nights and empty days, of blind dates organised by well-meaning friends, none of which had gone to a second innings, of his steady recovery of a life of sorts, a life without a soul.
And she spoke of loves lost, of a life lived through books and periodicals, of academic colleagues who had never become companions, of sexual a
dventures that had drifted into animosity in a matter of weeks, of a heart that longed for something more than parchment or ink or voices from the dead.
It seemed only right to speak of love, or the absence of it, or the longing for it in the face of wilful death, on a day of ruined festivity, on the verge of what might have been a great celebration of a great man’s life. They spoke at length of Gerald Usherwood, his military service, his work for the government, his charities, and his passion for the Holy Land and the mysteries of its past. They laughed, they shed tears, they sat for long minutes in silence; Sarah decided it was time to explain how things really stood.
She said nothing right away, but shook her head gently, as if trying to dissuade herself. Once she crossed the line, there would be no turning back. She couldn’t guess where it might lead. For several moments, she stared directly into the copper flames. The golden light was reflected off her face, gilding her like the goddess of some long-forgotten Greek cult. He was silent beside her. The moment might not come again, she thought, or, if it did, might be ruined by matters out of her control.
‘Ethan,’ she said, ‘there’s something I have to tell you. It has to be between us. No one else in the family must know.’
‘This sounds serious,’ he said.
‘It is serious.’ She bent down and used the long poker to push a log back into the flames. Sparks rose like fireflies, sudden and flame-forged.
‘It’s about my mother,’ she said, still hesitating. ‘About something she told me three years ago on her deathbed. Her long-kept secret. Her long-hidden love. She had an affair about thirty years ago, an affair that lasted up until her death. I’m the result, though my father knows nothing of it. She told me who my real father is. He’s still alive, but I’ve never met him, though I’ve often thought of turning up on his doorstep: Hello, Dad, it’s your long-lost daughter. I knew his name long before she told me, though. He’s an eminent academic, a historian.’ She stumbled to a halt. ‘I’m sorry, I should have told you before this.’
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