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Authors: Jo Bannister

Changelings (22 page)

BOOK: Changelings
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It took four, and Turner arrived knowing what the situation was. There was no need for explanations. So
they'd talked about this, discussed what they'd do if they couldn't keep the truth from him.
Turner said brusquely, ‘Come into the study. I don't want anyone walking in on us.'
He sat down behind his desk; Sarah took the chair by the window. Donovan stayed on his feet. All this was taking its toll on him, he'd have to rest soon, but he thought that if he sat down now he wouldn't be able to get up again quickly enough if the need arose.
‘This is about Rosemary,' Turner began.
‘Yes.'
‘You think she's dead?'
‘Yes.'
‘She isn't. The last time I saw her she was in London, packing to leave for Boston. She was in perfect health.'
‘I'm supposed to take your word for that.'
‘I may be able to contact her. I know the firm she was working for: even if she's moved on they may have a forwarding address.'
‘And it might take some time to find out whether they have or not,' said Donovan sceptically. ‘When it comes to delaying tactics, this family could play for England.'
A note of desperation was rising in Turner's voice. ‘What more can I tell you? You suspect a woman was murdered here. I've told you you're wrong and I've offered to prove it: what more do you expect of me?'
‘You could prove it back in Castlemere. I dare say my superintendent could get an answer from Boston rather faster than you could.'
Turner hesitated. Donovan showed his teeth in a feral smile. ‘Yeah, right.'
‘No,
listen
will you?' insisted Turner. ‘Make this official and you're going to destroy my family; and for nothing. Nobody hurt Rosemary. Unless you count me.' He forced a grim chuckle. ‘I wasn't the man she took me for. But she left here because she wanted to. Rosemary always did what she wanted.'
‘You're doing it too,' said Donovan. Turner looked puzzled. ‘Talking about her in the past tense.'
‘These are past events we're talking about! It's more than six years since I saw Rosemary last, eight since Mum did. She went out of our lives, by her own choice. And she chose not to keep in touch.'
‘Not even with her daughter?'
‘Elphie's my daughter,' he said softly, obscurely.
‘I know.' Donovan frowned. ‘What do you mean?'
‘What's wrong with Elphie,' Tuner said quietly, ‘it's my fault. Not Rosemary's; not even just bad luck. It could have been avoided. It happened because I wasn't honest with her. She never forgave me for that. I think she thought leaving Elphie with me was … not exactly a punishment, perhaps just deserts.'
‘How the hell can you be responsible for something like that?'
‘Please – just take my word for it.'
‘I can't!'
‘If you don't, you're going to destroy us all.'
Donovan shook his head crisply. ‘Then you have a big problem, because nothing that's happened so far makes me willing to take your word for anything. You've lied to me from the moment I woke up. You
didn't move my boat out of your way, you moved it to keep me here. You say you took it to Posset but that isn't true either: you didn't want anybody to know I was here and George Jackson was bound to ask. And what about my dog? You said he was all right, that he was being cared for; but if
Tara
isn't at the Posset Inn you didn't leave him with George. What's happened to him?
‘You cut off the phone. You didn't want me calling George, and you certainly didn't want me calling my nick. That car I heard in the yard last night – that was someone looking for me, wasn't it? Nobody round here uses a car, you live too close to one another. Somebody came here looking for me, and you sent them away. You told them you hadn't seen me.
‘And now all at once you don't want to keep me here any more, you want me to go – and you still haven't told me why! If I'm wrong about your sister,' he demanded of Sarah, ‘what is it you're so desperate to hide?'
Turner and his stepmother traded a fast glance. For a split second it seemed they wavered on the precipice of the truth; but then Simon looked down and saw the rocks. His voice was thick. ‘We saved your life, Sergeant Donovan. You owe us something for that. I'll tell you what it is. I'll get the Land Rover and drive you out of here right now. I can drop you at Posset, I can take you to the Sinkhole engine house: you can call for transport from either of them, you'll be in Castlemere within the hour. What you do after that is your decision. If you want to come back here
with sirens and flashing lights there's nothing I can do to stop you.'
Obviously there was something he hadn't yet said, the hook beneath the bait. ‘But … ?' Donovan prompted heavily.
Simon Turner looked like a man forced to choose which arm to have ripped off. His round face was not designed for deceit, and he was no better at hiding the pain of this than the fact that he'd been lying for the last three days. ‘I want you to take my daughter with you.'
Sarah lurched to her feet, a hand flying to her mouth, a cry of ‘No!' torn from her as if by torture. They hadn't discussed this. Was this what she saw and dreaded when she looked in Donovan's face: the breaking of her family?
Simon came round the desk and grasped her wrists in both his hands. ‘I have to. Don't you understand? – I have to. She isn't safe here any more.'
‘Why not?' demanded Donovan, confusion turning to anger because everything they said, everything they did, far from helping him to understand only compounded the mystery further. ‘Why is Elphie in danger? Whatever happened, it wasn't her fault. She's a child: when Rosemary – left – she was only a baby …'
And that was it. He saw it in their faces. He wasn't sure what he'd found, but he knew it was the answer. The dominoes were all standing there, ready to fall: he just needed to set the first one in motion. He backed up a pace or two. Elphie: she was only a baby
when all this started. And it was Simon's fault she wasn't like other people's babies …
The photograph. The Turners' wedding photograph: he knew what was wrong with it. Glencurran folk were great marriers: he'd seen enough wedding snaps in his time to know what they should look like. His aunties, the last repository on Irish soil of the Donovan family history, practically papered the front room with them. And they all looked the same: bride and bridegroom arm in arm, his family grouped on one side, hers on the other.
A domino teetered and fell. He called her Mum. But this boy was in his mid-teens when his father remarried: why didn't he call her Sarah?
He was standing beside her in the photo, a happy smile on his young face, looking forward to the future. A new home, more money than perhaps they'd been used to, the chance to join a man he liked in a business that interested him.
But the other boy, dark and wary at the bridegroom's side, had as much to lose as his stepbrother had to gain. He was going to have to share his home and his father with strangers, and he was pretty sure he'd have to share his inheritance with them too. Alienated, disenfranchised, he packed his bags and hit the road as soon as he was old enough.
Looking up, hollow-eyed, Donovan couldn't believe how stupid he'd been. Damn it, they even looked alike – the same fair hair and light eyes, the same open expression. Call himself a detective? – a child could have seen the family likeness in all three
of them. In fact, a child had. Sarah Turner, her sister Rosemary – and her son Jonathan.
‘Now
I understand,' he breathed. ‘It wasn't Rosemary who died, was it? It was Simon.'
The man Donovan had known as Simon Turner exchanged a fast, desperate glance with the woman who was – now – so obviously his mother. Clearly it was in the minds of both of them to deny that too, to maintain the deceit until the DNA results turned an inspired guess into a scientific fact.
Donovan panted at them in frustration. He'd known a lot of criminals in his life – sometimes he seemed to know no one else – and a number of murderers. The Turners — for lack of a better term – didn't fit any pattern he was familiar with. It wasn't just that they'd been kind to him, they seemed genuinely decent people. Except that at some point in the last twenty years a young man had died and been supplanted, in every particular of his life, by his stepbrother. Everyone in this village must know it, and none of them had done anything about it.
‘I don't
believe
you people!' he spat. ‘You move into this man's home, you accept his protection and his generosity – and when he dies you murder his son so you can keep control of his business! The poor bloody kid might well have looked sour at the wedding. He must have had the second sight.'
Sarah reached for his sleeve. Tears were streaming down her face: he wasn't sure whom she was crying for. ‘Cal, I promise you, it wasn't like that. It was an accident …'
Jonathan threw up a broad hand in despair, but after that there was no point in lying further. They could tell him the truth or they could tell him nothing, but there was no longer any mileage in claiming that Elphie's father was Simon Turner.
Elphie …
Donovan sucked in a sharp breath. ‘
That's
why Elphie's how she is. Rosemary thought you were Robert's son. But you aren't, you're Sarah's – Elphie's the product of an affair with your aunt! Jesus!' he said then. ‘It was only an affair? You didn't actually marry her?'
Jonathan shut his eyes. Then he shook his head. ‘No. Even my stupidity knew some bounds. It was hardly even an affair – not much more than a one-night stand. But as you say, there were consequences.'
‘Tell me what happened.' Then, remembering what it was they were talking about, he added, ‘You do not have to say anything. But I must caution you that if—'
Jonathan cut him off with a wave of the hand. ‘I know my rights. And if you're expecting a confession to murder you're going to be disappointed. But I will tell you what happened. Only, to understand, you have to go back twenty years. To when Mum and Robert were married.'
 
 
The day at the church was filled with such promise. Two lonely people had found one another and the auspices were good. Sarah said it was love, and the beam on the man in the picture said she could well have been right.
More than that, two teenage boys who had been managing on one parent each would now have a full set as well as built-in companionship; and the business with which a widower had struggled alone would benefit from new hands and fresh ideas.
And for six years the portents were justified. The marriage was happy, the business throve. Sarah's son Jonathan flourished under the tutelage of his stepfather and at eighteen went off to horticultural college in France. The plan was that when he qualified he could assume more and more responsibility for The Flower Mill until Robert was ready to retire and install him as manager.
The only discordant note was the life Simon Turner chose for himself. He had never had any interest in the business, nor was the extended family to his liking. His father put it down, probably correctly, to his age and facilitated his desire to travel instead of grow bulbs. He continued to hope, even as the years stretched and the postcards came less and less often, that one day Simon would come home.
Fourteen years ago, said Jonathan, aged twenty-one, he returned to The Flower Mill with a newly framed diploma and a heart full of ideas for improving the business. But six weeks later, sitting on a straw bale to catch his breath, Robert Turner succumbed to a stroke. He was dead before the ambulance arrived.
Their first thought was that when the shock and grief subsided, life in East Beckham would go on much as it had. They were fortunate that Jonathan had chosen to follow in Robert's footsteps when his own son had not. The transfer of power would be as smooth as could be hoped for.
The first indication they might have presumed too much came with the reading of Robert's will. Naturally he provided, and generously, for his widow and stepson. But The Flower Mill was a family business, built up by Turners before him, and he left it to his own son – expressing the perhaps naive hope that the returned wanderer and the qualified plantsman might together forge a team strong enough to carry the Mill into the next millennium.
It wasn't what Jonathan had hoped for, but he was too honest a man to deny Simon's entitlement and he readied himself to work with and if necessary under him.
But Simon had no more interest in owning a bulb field than living on one. He returned to arrange for the sale of The Flower Mill. Not the house, which was Sarah's, but the fields and the sheds and all the paraphernalia of a successful business.
 
 
Sarah took up the story. ‘I begged him, pleaded with him. Not for my sake, I was secure and always would be. Not even for Jonathan: he could have had a good job in any nursery in the country. It was the village people I was concerned for. The Flower Mill was and still is the only employer. If Simon had sold it as a
going concern it would have been something. But the best offer he was getting was from a leisure consortium that wanted to build a golf club. There'd have been a few jobs on the domestic side, they'd have needed a couple of groundsmen, but generations of experience growing bulbs would suddenly have been worth nothing. It would have been the death of East Beckham.'
‘We tried to buy him out,' said Jonathan. Fourteen years later it was in his face and his voice that this was important, that he wanted Donovan to understand they'd tried to do things properly. ‘People in the village were going to put money in too, we'd have run it as a co-operative. But we couldn't match what the leisure people were offering, and Simon hadn't a sentimental bone in his body. He was never happy here, he didn't reckon to owe the place or the people anything. He just wanted the most money he could get for it, and we couldn't compete.'
He fell silent, sombre and pensive. This time Sarah made no effort to continue the tale. Donovan supplied an ending. ‘So you killed him.'
‘No!' insisted Jonathan, his head coming up with a jerk. ‘It was an accident. A tractor turned over on him. He wasn't familiar with heavy machinery, he shouldn't even have been driving it.'
‘Why was he?'
Jonathan shrugged. ‘We don't know,' murmured Sarah.
‘OK,' said Donovan ruthlessly, ‘so what makes you think he
was
driving it? Did you see him?'
Sarah shook her head.
‘Damn it,' snarled Jonathan, ‘it was on top of him in a ditch when we found him! It seemed a pretty safe guess that was what happened. Maybe he saw it as his last chance to play with his father's toys – I don't know. But he turned it over and it killed him.'
For the moment Donovan was prepared to leave it at that. Now they were talking he didn't want to break the flow. There'd be time to go into the details later. Besides, he really needed to sit down. He gestured at the spare chair. ‘Do you mind?'
Jonathan shook his head. ‘Of course not.'
Sarah said, ‘You're really not up to this yet.'
Donovan chuckled weakly. ‘Don't worry about me. Just – let's get this sorted out.'
Turner — except his name wasn't even Turner — gave an uneasy shrug. ‘I don't know if we've time for all this.'
Misunderstanding, Donovan raised an eyebrow. ‘I'm not going anywhere. Do you have more pressing business?'
‘I meant – ' But he didn't explain what he meant. ‘All right. Where were we?'
‘Simon had conveniently killed himself in a tractor he'd no reason to be driving,' Donovan said, deadpan.
 
 
It was hard to remember, this long after, who first put it into words. The same idea occurred to several people more or less simultaneously: they could see it in one another's eyes. Finally somebody said it out loud.
‘They'd both been away, you see,' Sarah said softly.
‘Jonathan in France, Simon all over the world. Outside East Beckham there was no one who'd recognize either of them. It was feasible, if we all agreed.'
‘To switch identities. To bury Simon Turner as Jonathan—' Donovan realized he didn't know her previous name.
‘Payne. Yes.'
There wasn't much time. They could leave it overnight, pretend it was morning before they found the tractor in the ditch with the body underneath, but that was about all. They couldn't discuss it for a week and still expect to be believed. It had to be done quickly if it were to be done at all.
‘We sat round that table in the kitchen and talked till three in the morning,' Jonathan remembered. ‘It was so difficult – it seemed terribly wrong, to take a man's name in order to get your hands on his inheritance. I kept thinking how hurt Robert would be. But the fact was, Robert was gone; and so was Simon. We weren't actually hurting anyone – unless you count a leisure conglomerate none of us knew or wanted to. We were protecting a community, a way of life, my stepfather thought the world of. We couldn't bring Simon back by telling the truth. And we didn't know who'd inherit, who'd have the last word on whether the Mill was sold.
‘Whereas if Simon was still alive, he could change his mind. Nothing had been signed. I had it in my power to look after all these people, my mother included. I could have refused. They couldn't have gone ahead without me. But the more we talked about it, the more selfish that seemed.'
‘You can't blame Jonathan for the decision we reached,' Sarah interjected, stern in defence of her cub. ‘He was twenty-one years old – he was a boy. We put him in a position where he had to choose between our future and his honour. Since then, of course, we've all had our regrets. But Jonathan made the biggest sacrifice for the smallest gain.'
‘So you called for an ambulance and told the authorities your son was dead.'
She nodded, her eyes tight shut. ‘You have no idea how difficult that was. Identifying the body, making the funeral arrangements. We had him cremated, it seemed safest. I thought I'd have to try and cry, to make it look right. It was no effort at all. I never knew him well, and the last time we spoke we were shouting at one another because what he wanted was going to destroy what I wanted. But he was Robert's son, and he died in a ditch, and he wasn't even getting the respect of burial under his own name. I was ashamed. Crying came naturally.'
‘Then you went home and called off the deal with the leisure company.'
Jonathan nodded. ‘I thought that was where it would fall apart. Simon had met these people, shown them round. If they came back they'd know I wasn't Simon Turner. I wrote to them in the first instance, told them the recent death of my stepbrother made it impossible to go ahead at this time, that my stepmother couldn't be asked to cope with any more.
‘I expected they'd make a fight of it – come over and try to persuade me. They'd already spent money on a feasibility study, it was going to be wasted for
what was not much more than a whim. And anyone who knew him, even slightly, would know Simon wasn't sentimental.
‘In the event that worked for us. The conglomerate realized it was an excuse, but they thought I was trying to push the price up. They played it cool and said they understood perfectly, I should contact them again when I was ready to proceed. They warned that, of course, by then they might have lined up another deal … Plainly they expected me to call them back inside twenty-four hours. But I didn't, and apart from a rather cool follow-up a month later, which I also parried, they weren't going to beg. They thought it was about money and they weren't going to up their offer. The thing was laid to rest with much less trouble than I'd been anticipating.'
‘A bit like Simon,' observed Donovan brutally.
Indignation sparked in Jonathan Payne's eye. ‘You reckon? Simon's been dead for fourteen years. In that time he's been back to haunt us twice.'
If Donovan himself represented the second manifestation then the first was … ‘You're talking about Rosemary.'
Payne nodded, then looked away. He was sorry about what happened to Simon. He was ashamed of what happened to Rosemary.
 
 
It had been eleven years since the wedding. They had met for the first time outside the church, parted the next day. In all that time Jonathan Payne might have addressed three remarks to his Aunt Rosemary. He
just about noticed she was a lot younger than his mother, a bare five years older than himself. She noticed that he'd grown since last time she'd seen him, but since that was his Christening she was hardly surprised. Five years is still a lot at that age.
BOOK: Changelings
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