“It does seem a strange set of contradictions,” she summarised after a few minutes. “And I can see why it has you puzzled. If what Dr Brinsley says is true, he has extracted a terrible revenge on the men who murdered his wife. And if true, it really would be terrible and a crime beyond description. But I am encouraged that in his story he seems to have gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that no innocent individual would be damaged by his actions. He took great care to protect his students when making his chemical, working only at night and alone so they should not come in contact with it. He was equally careful to dispose of any that was left in his bottle of whisky after he had completed his plan. He emptied the bottle and then smashed it so that not even an alcoholic tramp could inadvertently sample it. It would seem that, even after everything that had happened to him, there remained a considerable amount of humanity still left in him. That leads me to doubt his story is true.”
She flinched as what felt like a hand grabbed her left shoulder. She turned to look but there was nothing there. She moved her arm to release the pressure.
“Gerard, dear boy, you knew your friend Mark Brinsley as a kind and caring man,” she continued. “If it is any guidance to you, I can say that in my experience a leopard does not change his spots. If your friend was kind and caring when you first met him then that is what he will always be. There is no doubt his wife’s murder affected him badly and I don’t think you could expect it to do otherwise. But fundamentally, he will not have changed.”
“Maybe not,” muttered Gerard. “But I still haven’t finished my story.”
“You haven’t?”
“No,” he confirmed shortly.
The hand did not let go its grip on her shoulder, and somewhere in the distance Aunt Gwendoline heard what sounded like a lorry passing in the street outside. Or maybe it was the engine of a biplane revving somewhere out of sight, readying itself to come up unexpectedly behind them and frighten them with its power.
“Aunt Gwendoline I am not sure that I ought to say any more,” he resumed.
The engine noise was louder and she did not need Rani to confirm it for her.
“So, I will preface what I am going to say by saying that I have no reason whatsoever to believe it is anything more than vivid imagination on my part,” he added quickly.
She looked at her grand-nephew reprovingly while trying not to wince at the pain she felt.
“But I want to say it anyway, just to get it out into the open. Then I can dismiss it as nonsense and forget it. Does that make sense?”
“I think I follow you,” she replied.
He hesitated, having difficulty knowing how to start. Aunt Gwendoline’s smile was encouraging, although he noticed there was some tension in her face. He saw too that Rani was standing beside her but looking at some point far in the distance, sniffing the wind as if sensing something. It struck him as odd.
Chapter 53
“After Mark left, I made some effort at clearing up the remains of the dinner party although I didn’t get very far,” he resumed. "It was past dawn and I was very tired, so I went to bed for a couple of hours and ended up going late into work. I came home mid-afternoon because I couldn’t concentrate on anything, and had an early meal and was in bed by eight o’clock. That was last night. I was absolutely bushed. I slept the clock round and didn’t wake up until after seven thirty when I made the final effort to clear up the remains of the dinner party mess. As a result, it was approaching ten o’clock by the time I was showered and ready to face a day amongst the students.
“I wondered whether I should call Mark to see if he was all right, but then I didn’t know how I would deal with him if he answered. As I pulled open my front door to leave, a small package with a card attached to it fell inwards on to the doormat. The card read: ‘Dear Gerry, Thanks so much for the superb dinner and thanks for listening to my ramblings. Don’t take them too seriously. Cheers, Mark’. Inside the wrapping was a small box of rather expensive chocolates.”
“It sounds like a nice gift,” observed Aunt Gwendoline.
“Maybe so,” Gerard continued. "But I was immediately puzzled by it for several reasons. Firstly, Mark and Janet had never given Sue and I a thankyou gift after a shared dinner, any more than we had ever given them one. Certainly, I usually took a bottle of wine and Sue took a small gift, often chocolates, for Janet when we dined with them, and they reciprocated when they came to our house. But these were gestures given at the start of an evening, not afterwards.
“Secondly, I was puzzled that Mark had simply dropped off the gift at the front door and had not knocked and waited for me to answer as I would have expected him to. It may be that I didn’t hear him. I have no idea what time he called so I could have been fast asleep or else clattering around in the kitchen making too much noise. But it did seem strange that he, as a close friend, should just leave a parcel at the front door and walk away.”
“It shouldn’t surprise you over much,” commented Aunt Gwendoline. “Dr Brinsley had come through an extraordinary storm in his life and, by his own account, he did so with your help. A small gift is not unreasonable under the circumstances.”
“I’ve thought about that,” Gerard countered. “But then I was puzzled by the gift itself. It was a small box of chocolates, containing no more than a dozen, expensive, individual sweets. It’s not the sort of gift one man gives to another, not in our culture. A man might give it to a woman or a woman might give it to a man, but a man does not give a box of chocolates like that to another man. In our culture men don’t work like that.”
Aunt Gwendoline sat still in her chair. She felt icy. The large knuckled hand upon her left shoulder gripped her with all the strength won from a lifetime of scrubbing floors and kneading bread. She watched Gerard stand up and walk over to the aspidistra. Perhaps he was not so insensitive after all. Something had warned him to be wary of Mark Brinsley’s gesture. The strange gift that Mother had bequeathed her could have passed down her sister Lizzie’s line to him.
“And that is what started me thinking,” she heard him say. “I’m Mark’s friend. If he had done what he claimed and he felt the very human need to tell someone about it, then I can only believe it would be me he would tell. So, what if the story he told me on Sunday night was true? Perhaps he had met the Craters and spiked a bottle of their favourite scotch with that god-awful PNA chemical and got them to drink it. On the back of our friendship, he extracted no promise from me not to tell anyone else about it. But if you had done such a thing, would you want anybody else to know? And after he had told me he probably expected me to be more sympathetic and understanding. But in the end, I wasn’t and I couldn’t be. He was talking murder, no matter how he rationalised it, and by a method too horrible to think about. So when I didn’t react in the way he expected, he began to doubt his own wisdom in telling me about it. He gave me a box of chocolates, Aunt Gwendoline, and blokes don’t give other blokes boxes of chocolates.”
His distress was sweating out of him. She watched him closely as he turned and stroked one of the aspidistra leaves between his thumb and forefinger while the sound of the biplane got louder in her ears.
“I hear you,” she sent out to the distant flying machine. “I know you are coming and I know you are coming in the colours of a friend. But you are unable to be a friend, are you? Too much has been done to you. But we, Gerard and I, know you are coming. We can hear you.”
“I suppose that what I am coming to terms with is the possibility that Janet’s murder might have changed Mark far beyond what I could ever have imagined,” Gerard continued. “Janet’s killing was bloody and violent and she was immeasurably his world and his life. The failure of our legal system to call her killers to account could have turned him into someone that none of us, even Janet herself, would recognise. I don’t want to think of that, Aunt Gwendoline. I want to hold on to the idea that, as you said, a leopard doesn’t change his spots. But I keep coming back to the questions of why a gift at all,
why leave it on the doorstep when he knew I was home, and why chocolates? He could have bought me a beer next time we were in the staff club at the university. But he didn’t, he gave me a box of chocolates. He knows I’m a chocoholic, Aunt Gwendoline. My enthusiasm for the stuff was often the subject of jokes when the four of us were together. He knows that if he gives me chocolates I will eat them. And if he does regret telling me about that obscene chemical and how he gave it to the Craters, then what better way of ensuring my silence than to deal with me in the same way, by spiking a box of chocolates with PNA?”
He swallowed hard and gave a massive sigh of relief. He had said the words giving his doubt sound and shape.
“I don’t know what to do, Aunt Gwendoline,” he cried, returning to his chair. “Mark is a friend and he is still in an awful mess. My friendship might be all he has to hold on to while he sorts himself out and if I doubt that friendship then he could well be lost. I may be doing him a huge injustice but, either way, I need to find out whether or not he has doctored those bloody chocolates he gave me. I thought about leaving them out accidentally on purpose for the neighbour’s dog and then waiting to see what happened. But I could not in all conscience do that to a dog if my suspicions are correct.”
“I would hope not,” agreed Aunt Gwendoline, looking down anxiously at Rani.
“I thought about accepting Mark’s gift in complete faith and eating them,” he continued.
“No!” Aunt Gwendoline interrupted sharply. “No. You must not do that. You haven’t done that, have you?”
“No, I haven’t,” he assured her, thrown back by her vehemence. “I thought that if I did eat them and nothing happened then all would be well. But then again, if after a few months I began to feel a bit off colour then what would I do? If I went to the police and told them what Mark had said there would be no evidence to support my story. According to Mark, PNA is untraceable in the body eight hours after swallowing it. His laboratory would be scrupulously clean. I cannot imagine the Craters admitting to anything, and any tainted scotch that was left over after his last meeting with them was poured out over the grass in the park and the bottle smashed. My story would more than likely take me straight to a psychiatrist’s couch. And if the chocolates are poisoned and I don’t eat them, and nothing happens to me as a result, then Mark will know I’m suspicious and our friendship will be destroyed anyway. I haven’t got a way out, Aunt Gwendoline. I don’t know what to do.”
Aunt Gwendoline leaned back in her chair. The image of the burning Zeppelin formed in front of her, twisting as it did in the sky above Low Felderby and shedding its fiery stars. She counted down Janet Brinsley’s star until it fell to oblivion behind the backlit silhouette of the buildings of Felderby Iron Works on the opposite side of the valley. She counted down the three flailing stars of Frank, Billy and George Crater and watched them as they flared prematurely to extinction against the blackness of the sky. And she looked up at the last two stars just beginning their fall. At that moment, the grinning image of the scarred young pilot with the emotionless eyes flashed in front of her and the roar of his biplane’s engine accelerated painfully to a crescendo and cracked in her ears.
“And I know all of this because Miss Susan smashed our Alice’s vase,” she murmured.
Instantly, the hand let go of her shoulder and she could hear clearly again.
“What was that, Aunt Gwendoline?” asked Gerard.
“You must go home and do nothing,” she answered firmly. “You must take your box of chocolates and put it away in a cupboard where you cannot find it. Do not even unwrap it, and under no circumstance whatsoever must you eat the chocolates inside. Do you understand me? This is very important. Under no circumstances eat those chocolates.”
He nodded his agreement although completely puzzled by her tone.
“I’ll do that, Aunt Gwendoline,” he agreed.
“Good,” she replied. “Now off you go. I have things to do and I am sure you have as well. Off you go and remember, do not eat those chocolates. At least not until I have had time to think about them.”
She gave him only the briefest of waves as she pushed him unceremoniously out of her front door, then she leaned heavily against its solid timbers and forced herself to try and take some deeper breaths.
“Mother,” she appealed into the empty air of her hallway.
She looked up into the face of her oak-cased grandfather clock and shook her head as tears welled in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks.
“Help me, our dad. Help me bring our Gerard home. Help me catch his star and bring him home.”
Chapter 54
“Quick, our Gwen, wake up. Come and see the skyfire.”
Alice was calling her.
“It’s a great big vase and it’s all on fire. It’s getting all broken up. You must come and see it or it will all be gone.”
That was not right. She made the dream restart itself.
“Quick, our Gwen. Quick, wake up. Come and see the fire in the sky.”
That was better.
“Come on, look sharp now. We’re nearly there.”
Granddad’s tall figure was up ahead leading the way, lantern in hand, shepherding them all in the direction of the dugouts.
“Everyone here?”
“Ay, Mr Penderrick. All here.”
Alice was ahead in the dark and she could hear the creaking in Mother’s chest as she laboured to keep her feet from slipping on the uneven path.
“Come back, our Alice. And keep hold or you’ll fall.”
Over Mother’s shoulder she could see the anxious shapes of the other village women and children as they stumbled in a gaggle past the three black ponds near the allotments at the top of the village, and onwards up the hillside path above Low Felderby. Above her the skyfire filled every black corner of the sky, and it crackled and roared and rose and broached and broke as it burned.
“Here we are,” Granddad called. “Away now, in you go.”
He paused at the entrance and held up his lantern to light the way in.
Sparks flew across the blackness of the sky and explosions ripped through the fabric of the skyfire while the guns popped from the hills all around them. And from the tail end gondola came the stars, two of them, faint and falling. Two five-pointed stars were waving to her and calling out to her as they fell. In an instant she reached out her hand from under her blanket and stretched it out over Mother’s shoulder towards them.
The ceiling edge of the dugout suddenly cut off her view as Mother carried her in to safety. She twisted and stretched out even more.
“Easy, my bairn. No need to fret.”
Just in time she saw them, both stars falling towards her hand. The first one touched her fingers and she closed her fist around it, holding it hard so it should not escape, but the other star slipped past her dimpled knuckles and continued down towards the horizon made broken by the ragged shapes of the Works’ buildings. She gave out a cry. She wanted to catch that one too but she dared not open her hand in case the one she held slipped from her grasp. Then the lantern light splashed on the walls and ceiling of the dugout and she was set down on a wet sandbag.
Even as she felt the hard coldness against her back she held her fist closed, never opening it until Mother picked her up again and began jigging to comfort her. Then, and only then, safely back in the warmth of her blanket in Mother’s arms, she looked down and released her grip. Her hand was empty. There was no star, yet she was sure she had caught one. She started to cry.
“Hush, my bairn. It was only a wet sandbag. Hush, they’ll not come and get you. Our boys will see to that.”
She turned and looked back out of the dugout entrance again. She stared at the black outline of the Works’ buildings on the horizon where one star was finishing its descent. But she was sure she had caught the other one.
Rani pricked her ears and stared into the darkness to where a faint murmuring sound came from her mistress’ bed. There were no commands she
could recognise, so she waited watchfully while her sleeping mistress tried to get the child Gwen to rewind the dream and play it again, but it would not restart.
Instead, she found herself on the hillside above Low Felderby with the village behind her and the sparkling sea stretching out in the distance to a calm horizon. She could feel the morning sun warm her as she walked. She was older now and was on her way to school. The War was over and her dad was home again and the dugouts had started to fall in under the scampering feet of the village children who now used them for play.
For the moment, she was alone high up on the hillside overlooking the valley and the sea. There was a hospital in the valley where soldiers, men from the War, lived. Some sat around in wheelchairs while others stumbled with a nurse’s help to one of the seats scattered around the lawns. Yet others remained in their beds as they were pushed out into the gardens to enjoy the warmth and freshness of the day. She knew the hospital well. She and the other children from school sometimes went there with their teacher to sing songs to the soldiers in their blue pyjamas. Their teacher played on the piano. It upset her to see the soldiers crying while they sang to them and she wondered why they cried so much and so quietly, and she hoped their singing made them better.
The wind off the sea caught the folds of her pinafore and flapped them gently as she shaded her eyes against the low morning sun, and in the shade of her hand she suddenly saw it, a huge, long, silver cigar floating gently out over the valley. On its nose were the red, white and blue circles of the Royal Air Force and painted on its side were the numbers R35. It was a beautiful thing with the sun shining on it, sending bright flashes from its entire length into her eyes as it eased its way round to head out over the sea.
She watched it transfixed as it floated past her, high above the valley but seemingly at eye level with her where she was standing on the hillside. She spread wide her arms in imitation of a bird, and suddenly she was not standing on the hillside any more but soaring up into the sky level with the great and beautiful beast, closing in upon it and sailing with it in the free air above the valley.
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