Next of Kin

by John Boyne

  Jane laughed. ‘That’s not what you would have done,’ she pointed out. ‘It’s not what you did. You sent that Domson boy to his death. And two others,’ she added, recalling the other murder cases that had led to the death sentence during her husband’s tenure on the bench.

  ‘That was different,’ he said. ‘That boy was no good, he didn’t have a job, he sponged off his wealthy parents, he’d committed a horrible murder…’ His words trailed off; they were both struck by the fact that this was not so very different at all, that the cases were very much alike, and neither wanted to acknowledge it. They drove up towards the courthouse and both their hearts sank when the crowds outside came into view.

  ‘It’s like déjà vu,’ said Jane. ‘It’s like a punishment for what happened before.’

  ‘Stop it,’ said Roderick bitterly. ‘I won’t have you talking like that, do you hear me? Now just keep your head down, hold my hand, and don’t speak to anyone until we’re inside the court, do you understand?’

  She nodded, recalling the last occasion he had used those words to her and how that day had ended.

  * * *

  AS THEY STEPPED FROM the car, Mr Justice Patrick Sharpwell KC finished robing in his chambers and checked his appearance in the full-length mirror, pleased by what he saw. Not as grossly overweight as some of his colleagues on the bench, he always believed he cut a rather fine figure in his red ermine. An experienced barrister and judge, he had woken early that morning too, quite looking forward to the case that lay ahead. Despite the fact that it was frowned upon, he had read some of the newspaper reports of the murder of Raymond Davis and had already formed an opinion on the case. Not that it mattered much; if the boy was found guilty the question of what would happen to him was not entirely in his hands. In that event, he would wait to receive his instructions.

  There was a brief knock on his door and the bailiff informed him that the court was in place.

  ‘Right you are,’ he said, following him out, down the corridor and up the steps to his seat, while the packed courtroom rose noisily to their feet and the case of Rex vs Gareth Bentley was called to be heard.

  2

  WHEN THEY WERE CHILDREN, Peter Montignac’s office was out of bounds to Andrew, Stella and Owen, and even after his death his only daughter avoided the room out of a mixed sense of awe and respect. From as far back as she could remember her father had run his estates and various businesses from that office, flunkies coming to and fro on the morning and evening trains or, for those who could afford it, in their motorcars. He maintained an office in London of course, where his managers were employed, but rarely visited it, preferring to spend his days and nights around the grounds of Leyville and in the company of his wife, children and nephew.

  So Stella’s decision to enter the room to plan her trip came as a surprise to Margaret Richmond who had also rarely set foot inside.

  She had combed the house looking for Stella and couldn’t find her anywhere, not even on the roof garden that she loved so much, and was returning downstairs when she saw the door to the office slightly ajar and went to investigate. She pushed it open, saw the figure sitting behind the desk and screamed.

  ‘Good God, Margaret,’ said Stella, screaming in response and looking up in fright with a hand to her breast as if she feared a heart attack. ‘What on earth are you yelling about?’

  ‘You gave me a shock, that’s all,’ said Margaret. ‘You had the look of your father, when he was a young man, sitting behind his desk. What are you doing in here anyway?’

  ‘I came in to organize some things,’ she said. ‘Do you know, this is the room in the house that I’ve spent the least amount of time in? Except when I was getting a telling-off as a child. Other than that, I’ve almost never been in here.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Margaret, maintaining her position at the door and rubbing her hands quickly up and down her arms. ‘It gives me the chills being in here,’ she added.

  ‘It does?’

  ‘Well I’ve spent forty years in this house and always knew that this was your father’s private place. I don’t feel like I have any business being in here.’

  Stella nodded; she had felt the same way coming inside but the room couldn’t stay sealed off forever. ‘There are so many things here,’ she said. ‘Documents, files, account papers. The London office is always asking for them. I think the thing to do is to get them to come up and organize to move everything down there, don’t you?’

  ‘You’re not going to manage his affairs yourself then?’ asked Margaret in surprise.

  ‘I told you, Margaret. I’m not going to stay here.’

  Margaret sighed; she had hoped that this idea had been dropped but realized now that Stella had been perfectly serious. So serious in fact that she had taken a trip to London the previous day to visit the London office that her father had set up, and had spoken to his—her—manager there and informed him of her plans. He was to take over all the day-to-day running of the business from then on, with an increased salary of course, but he would have access to all the papers that Peter Montignac had previously stored at Leyville.

  ‘You’re serious about this then?’ she asked.

  ‘Perfectly serious. This might come out like a joke, Margaret, but do you have any idea how wealthy I am?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t,’ said Margaret with a sniff.

  ‘Well neither do I,’ said Stella. ‘There’s so much money, there’s so much land, that I simply can’t keep track of it all.’

  ‘What about Owen? Why don’t you ask him to look after some of it.’

  ‘I tried,’ said Stella, shaking her head. ‘I suggested it briefly to him shortly after Father’s death but he turned me down flat. Said that if he hadn’t been trusted enough to inherit it, then he wasn’t going to act as an employee. So I could try to do it myself, which would be a bore, or I could pay professionals to do it for me, and then I could start to enjoy some of my money. Why not, after all?’

  Margaret opened her mouth to protest but found that her conscience bothered her. In truth, she thought, why shouldn’t she enjoy it? If she had had access to a fortune of that size when she was a young woman, wouldn’t she have wanted to travel the world and have adventures of her own and meet interesting men rather than acting as an underpaid nanny to three children who weren’t even her own? Three children who had never shown the slightest amount of gratitude to her for all she had done. Of course she would. But her selfish half, the half that feared being left alone, got the better of her.

  ‘You’re walking away from your responsibilities,’ she said. ‘Your father would never have approved.’

  ‘Then he should have left the lot to Owen,’ said Stella in a distracted tone, who wasn’t to be dissuaded. ‘Rather than to me.’

  ‘Perhaps he should have,’ muttered Margaret.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I just think you’ll regret it, that’s all. The world’s not a safe place at the moment. Why, look at the newspapers every day. All that trouble going on in Spain, the ructions in Germany—’

  ‘Oh come on, Margaret. I don’t know what newspapers you’ve been reading but all I can see when I pick up The Times or The Daily Telegraph are editorials either denouncing the Simpson woman or calling on Stanley Baldwin to keep his nose out of another man’s affairs.’

  ‘And don’t get me started on that harlot,’ said Margaret angrily.

  ‘I don’t intend to. But what I do need you to do is speak to Annie for me.’

  ‘Annie?’

  ‘Yes. We’re going to have to let her go.’

  Margaret’s mouth dropped open. ‘But you’ve already cut her hours to part-time. How am I supposed to explain this to her?’

  ‘There’s no point having a cook on the staff if there’s no one to cook for, is there, Margaret? Come on now. Be reasonable about this.’

  ‘And what about me?’ asked Margaret. ‘Am I to be dismissed too?’

  Stella sighed and came arou
nd from behind the desk. She could see the tears forming in her old nanny’s eyes and felt bad for her. Of the three children she had always had the trickiest relationship with her. Not when she was a child, perhaps. But when she was a teenager, things had changed. It was true that the decisions Margaret made for her might have been meant for the best—in retrospect she didn’t know what she would have done in her shoes had she been faced with a similar situation—but nevertheless it had damaged her and she had never been able to forgive.

  ‘Well you’re not to be turned out of course,’ she said. ‘This is your home, Margaret. It’s yours for as long as you live. And you’ll keep your salary. You’ll be perfectly comfortable.’

  ‘Living all alone in a house this size? Good Lord, when I think back to when you were all children—’

  ‘Which was twenty years ago,’ said Stella with a sigh, returning to her chair. ‘Father’s dead, Mother’s dead, Andrew’s dead, Owen never visits—’

  ‘He is coming, though, I called him.’

  ‘You called him?’ asked Stella in surprise, looking up.

  ‘Yes, you asked me to.’

  ‘He took the call?’ she asked.

  ‘Well he answered the phone and there I was. He didn’t have much choice in the matter.’

  Stella smiled. She knew only too well how difficult it was to get hold of her cousin.

  ‘And what did he say?’ she asked. ‘Is he coming down?’

  ‘Well he made an awful lot of excuses. You know what he’s like. But yes, he said he’d see us in a few days’ time.’

  ‘Good,’ said Stella. ‘Because it’s only fair that I let him know my plans.’

  ‘And what are your plans exactly?’ asked Margaret. ‘Where do you intend on going?’

  Stella shrugged her shoulders. To the right of the desk there was an enormous globe, an old-fashioned one with a wooden base and she twirled it slowly, watching as the multicoloured countries span past her, the blue of the oceans catching her eye as it rotated.

  ‘I thought America,’ she said, as it slowed down. ‘Perhaps New York. That’s where everybody goes nowadays, isn’t it?’

  ‘New York?’ asked Margaret, shivering again. ‘Isn’t that terribly dangerous?’

  ‘No more dangerous than London,’ said Stella in a cold voice. ‘Haven’t you heard? Innocent young men get murdered there all the time.’

  Margaret frowned; she didn’t like to hear Stella speaking like this. She hated the idea of her being turned cold and bitter by what had happened.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘You mustn’t torture yourself so. By thinking about Raymond like that.’

  ‘I’ve lost more important things than Raymond, Margaret,’ she said. ‘And I’ve survived. Or don’t you remember?’

  Margaret felt herself grow angry and turned away just as Stella started to spin the globe again.

  ‘Of course,’ she said after a moment, ‘I could go east rather than west. Perhaps visit old friends in Switzerland.’

  ‘I hardly think that’s a good idea, do you?’

  Stella shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What harm could it do after all this time?’

  Margaret opened her mouth to speak but didn’t want to get drawn on the topic. ‘Well I don’t want to get into all that,’ she said finally. ‘You know what I think. But if you’re determined to make mistakes—’

  ‘I’m determined to do what I think is best.’

  ‘Well then it’s none of my business at the end of the day.’ She sighed in a grumpy way and looked around the room, shivering slightly. ‘It’s so cold in here,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you sit in the drawing room?’

  Stella shook her head. She had been just about to leave in fact but changed her mind when it was suggested.

  ‘I think I’ll stay a while,’ she said. ‘But you go if you want to.’

  Margaret turned and looked at a case of legal books that stood to her left and ran her finger along one of the shelves, examining it afterwards and shaking her head. It was only on the rarest of occasions that Peter Montignac had even let anyone in here to clean. He claimed that he knew where everything was and he didn’t want a single item to be disturbed. ‘And it’s so dusty too,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to get someone in to clean it. It’s been ignored all this time. That bin is overflowing,’ she added, reaching forwards to pick up a wastepaper basket at the side of the desk that was full to the brim and taking it with her. ‘I’ll see you later,’ she said as she left.

  ‘And you’ll speak to Annie?’

  ‘If you’re sure you want me to.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Then I’ll speak to her. But will you do one thing for me? Will you just think about what you’re doing? Or at least speak to Owen about it. You’re still grieving, you know, for both your father and your fiancé and if you only realized that—’

  ‘Thank you, Margaret. I’d like to be left alone now.’

  Margaret opened her mouth to speak again, thought better of it and turned and left.

  Stella sat at the desk for a few minutes, doodling on a pad of paper with a pen. Her mind drifted to her dead fiancé and she wrote his name down in the centre of the page:

  Raymond

  She stared at it for a few moments before writing a phrase on top of it:

  Living without

  Raymond

  She tapped her fingers against the desk and thought that this was what she would have to get used to from now on. Living without Raymond. No one had ever realized just how special he really was, not even—she decided—herself. She picked up the pen once more and wrote three words beneath it:

  Living without

  Raymond

  is too painful

  She stared at it, frowning at the self-pity of the words, and ripped the piece of paper from the top of the pad, crumpling it up to throw in the bin but Margaret had taken it away. Shaking her head irritably, she stuffed it in the top drawer of the desk instead and stood up, shivering in the chilly atmosphere of the room, and went out and locked the door behind her.

  3

  RICHARD SMITH HAD TAKEN over as clerk in the Rice Chambers after the forced retirement of Alistair Shepherd and the position had turned out to be a lot more controversial than he had ever imagined it would be at the outset. In his previous chambers, where he had been a junior clerk, the phone only rang when there was an instructing solicitor on the other end trying to book a meeting with a barrister to represent one of their clients; that, after all, was the business of chambers. Here, however, every second call was from a newspaper editor or a reporter looking for a comment from their venerable head on the murder case involving his son. Richard had quickly learned not to put these calls through to Roderick and told each one in as polite a tone as he could muster that they were not to call back, but it had reached the point where he was beginning to answer the phone in a tetchy manner himself. It was his considered opinion that Roderick should do the decent thing and resign before bringing chambers into further disrepute.

  The first call of that day, however, had been from another senior member of the judiciary, Lord Samuel Keaton, wanting to know whether Mr Justice Bentley would be available to see him later that day.

  ‘His schedule’s a little awkward at the moment,’ said Richard, flicking through the diary where whole mornings and afternoons had been scored out. ‘I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that—’

  ‘The trial of course,’ said Keaton quickly. ‘I know he’s there most of the day but does he pop back to chambers at all?’

  ‘Sometimes on the lunch recess,’ said Richard cautiously, who would not have given this information out to anyone but a judge of Keaton’s seniority. ‘You might perhaps find him here then if you wanted to drop by.’

  ‘Well don’t book any appointments for him today,’ ordered Keaton. ‘I need to speak to him on a matter of urgency.’

  ‘Right you are, sir,’ he sa
id, making a note of it as he rang off and hoped that this employer would not be angry with him.

  As it turned out Lord Keaton arrived at chambers before Roderick and was waiting for him when he came up the stairs, hunched forwards, head bowed, looking like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He walked right past his colleague without even noticing his presence and gave only a cursory nod to the clerk’s desk out of habit; the desk could have been inhabited by a two-hundred-pound gorilla and he would scarcely have noticed.

  ‘You have a visitor, sir,’ said Richard, nodding past Roderick towards Lord Keaton.

  He turned around and seemed surprised to see him there. ‘Keaton,’ he said, not entirely happily. ‘This is unexpected. Did you want to speak with me?’

  ‘If you can spare me a few moments, I would appreciate it,’ said Keaton with a smile.

  Roderick nodded, his eyelids heavy from lack of sleep, and indicated that he should follow him and they walked up the stairs together towards his office.

  ‘I’m sorry to intrude on you,’ said Keaton. ‘I know this is a difficult time. I can’t imagine what you’re going through. How are things developing anyway?’

  ‘Not very well,’ said Roderick as they stepped inside and hung their coats on the stand. ‘Please, take a seat, Keaton.’ He paused and let out a deep sigh as he sat down behind his desk. ‘The prosecution are still presenting their case but it doesn’t look good. Harkman’s doing a wonderful job. He’s making Gareth out to be some sort of combination of Jack the Ripper and Attila the Hun. They’re bringing up the alcohol, events from the boy’s past—’

  ‘He’s a prosecutor,’ said Keaton, not without sympathy. ‘You know it’s nothing personal. He’s just doing his job. You’ve done the same thing in the past.’

  ‘Well it’s very difficult to listen to,’ explained Roderick. ‘To hear your own son labelled in those terms. A boy you brought up, educated, had so many hopes for … You have children, don’t you, Keaton?’