Days Without Number (33 page)

'He was covering his tracks, Irene. He's gone to Venice to confront cousin Demetrius.'

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'He can't have done.'

'But he has. And something I learned from Tom makes me think he could well be in danger.'

'You're going after him, aren't you?'

'Yes.'

'Well, you mustn't. It's as simple as that. For goodness' sake, Nick, this is no time for misguided heroics. If Basil's in some kind of trouble we don't want you getting mixed up in it as well.'

'You don't understand, Irene. I'm already mixed up in it. As a matter of fact, we all are.'

The train reached King's Cross just before six o'clock. Night had fallen in London. A chill, damp rush hour was under way. Nick hurried west towards Euston station, the route he had been following when he and Tom had met by chance the previous October. Nick thought of how carefree Tom had seemed then, of how stressless his life had apparently been. In the space of four months, everything in it had been turned upside down. And then it had ended. Tom was part of the past now. He was over. He was gone. But the things he had done and the reasons he had done them were not over. They had not gone. They had still to be faced.

Milton Keynes's rush hour had passed by the time Nick walked out of the station and got into a taxi. The journey along thinly trafficked dual carriageways felt nothing like the homecoming it technically was. The town somehow defied familiarity. Nick had lived there for eight years without losing a sense of transience. Nothing he had done there had greater durability than a footprint on a beach.

Home was a bigger house than he needed in a prim cul-de sac in the Walnut Tree district. It did not look neglected to Nick as he walked up the drive after paying off the taxi driver. It wore his absence as lightly as it always had his. presence. There was not even a great deal of post to obstruct the 278

opening of the front door. The silent, empty house seemed not to have missed him.

He dumped his bag and the accumulated mail in the kitchen, then went round closing curtains and switching on lights. In a bedroom drawer he found the one thing he had come for: his passport. He put it in his pocket and went back down to the kitchen. There was no sense unpacking. But there was time to put some clothes through the wash. They would dry by morning. He set the machine going, then made some tea and drank it in the dining room that doubled as an office, listening to his answerphone messages, most of which he erased.

Next he sorted through the post, with similar results. His bills were paid by direct debit. His life operated by a set of interconnected administrative arrangements. Personal intervention was not required. Everything was orderly and predictable. At all events, it was here.

He had opened the freezer in search of a microwaveable supper, when the doorbell rang. He stood quite still, frowning in puzzlement at his own reflection in the glazed front of the oven next to the fridge. A neighbour, perhaps, concerned by the sudden blaze of lights? It was hard to think who else it could be, uncharacteristic of the residents of Damson Close though this was.

He looked out into the hall and saw the blurred shape of his unexpected visitor through the frosted-glass panel in the door. He had failed to switch on the porch light, so the shape was altogether too dark and indistinct for him to recognize, even supposing he knew the person. It occurred to him that it might be a canvasser or a charity collector or, worse still, a Jehovah's Witness. He drew back in the hope that they would go away.

But they did not go away. The fuzzy shape of an arm was raised. The doorbell rang, lengthily, insistently. Perhaps it was a neighbour after all. Perhaps they had something important to tell him, something they thought important at any rate. A lost tile, a wrongly delivered parcel. It could be anything. But 279

it would have to be dealt with. Nick marched to the door and
(

opened it. �]

The light from the hall flooded out onto Elspeth Hartley's
! face. 'Hello, Nick,' she said.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

'Will you come for a drive with me?'

Elspeth Hartley was not as Nick remembered. Her hair was shorter and straighter. She no longer wore glasses. She was dressed in a different style as well - black leather jacket and trousers and a black roll-neck sweater; her true style, perhaps. She looked thinner in the face and had her hands buried tensely in her pockets. But, tense or not, she seemed able to brush aside a host of tragedies and deceptions with a breathtakingly insouciant invitation, to which Nick was barely able to frame a response.

'Well, will you? We can't talk indoors.'

'Have you . . . any idea ... of the damage you've done to my family?'

'Yes.'

'Yet you come here like this and . .. calmly ask me to go for a drive?'

'Who said I was calm?'

'I just . . . don't believe it.'

'I know about Tom. I had a letter too.' She pulled a crumpled envelope from her pocket. 'He told me what he was going to do. I didn't really need the police to confirm it. He always did what he said he would. He also said he was going to tell you about Jonty.'

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'Was Jonathan Braybourne your brother?'

'Yes.'

'Which makes you Emily Braybourne.'

'Yes.'

'How did you know I'd be here?'

'Tom wanted to warn you off. But after everything that's happened, I reckoned you couldn't be warned off. You've come back for your passport, haven't you?'

'You're very clever.'

'Not really. Just a good reader of people. I've been waiting for you since this afternoon. I don't think anyone followed you and I'm pretty sure no-one beat me to it. But I'll feel safer in the car. Are you coming?'

'Why should I?'

'Because you want to know the truth. And with Tom gone, I have to tell it to someone. You're the only one I can trust.'

'You trust meT

'Yes. And when you've heard what I've got to say . . . we'll trust each other.'

'Where are we going?' Nick asked, after they had climbed into the Peugeot and started away. He was still gripped by disbelief at the turn of events. He had looked for her, but he had not found her. She had found him.

'We're not going anywhere. I'll just drive round the ring road.'

'While you tell me why you set out to destroy my family. Is that right?'

'No. It's not right. I didn't set out to destroy anyone.'

'You could have fooled me.'

'This is the deal, Nick. I talk. You listen. Are you comfortable with that? Because if not . . .'

'You promised me the truth.'

'And I'll deliver it. On my terms. OK?'

'OK.'

'Good.' She concentrated for a moment on joining the dual

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carriageway that ran round the perimeter of the town, then resumed. 'How much do you know about my father?'

'Very little. According to Julian Farnsworth, my father and your father met during the War, when they were both stationed in Cyprus. But Dad never mentioned a Digby Braybourne to me. All three of them were archaeologists at Oxford. Your father got involved in an auction-house fraud and wound up in prison. That was in nineteen fifty-seven. And that's it.'

'Right. Then this is the rest. My mother worked in the kitchens at Brasenose College. She was a real looker in her youth. My father took a fancy to her and led her on with a promise of marriage. A lie, of course. It would have been unthinkable for a fellow to marry a servant. She got pregnant. Jonty was born just around the time Dad went to prison. When he came out, everything had changed. Now he was more than willing to marry Mum. He had no-one else to turn to. So, they got hitched. I was born in nineteen sixty-six. We lived out at Cowley. A long way from the university, metaphorically as well as literally. Mum pulled some strings to get Dad a clerical job with Morris Motors. But he couldn't stick office work. He started drinking and gambling. When he was drunk, or out of luck with the horses, he used to knock Mum about. He got the sack. Then he left us. And then he came back. And then he left us again. I didn't see much of him when I was growing up, but it was more than I wanted to see of him. It was different for Jonty. Dad could do no wrong in his eyes. He adored him. To do Dad justice, I think the feeling was mutual. He very much wanted to be a father Jonty could be proud of. But he didn't have it in him. In the end, Mum divorced him. By then, Jonty was at Cambridge and he told me later that Dad often went up from London, where he was living, to see him. Mum forbade him to go to the graduation ceremony. But he heard about it later, of course.'

'You mean he heard about me?'

'Yeah. The Paleologus prodigy. According to Jonty, your fall from grace gave Dad an idea. He was over sixty and none

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too well. He wanted to do something for Jonty - and for me before it was too late. He wanted to provide for us. For Mum too. To prove he wasn't a washout. His idea involved your father. In fact, it couldn't work without your father.' 'What was the idea?'

'I don't know. I still don't. I think Jonty knew, though. I think Dad confided in him. But I also think Jonty wrote it off as an old man's fantasy. Anyway, nothing came of it. Whether your father turned him down or he bottled out of approaching him we never found out, because, pretty soon, we stopped hearing from him. We had no address for him. He used to move from one squalid bedsit to another. At some point in the autumn of nineteen eighty, he dropped out of our lives altogether. Mum reckoned he was dead. That's the way I saw it as well. An unidentified body, pulled out of the Thames, or found in a doorway. Something like that. Little by little, we forgot about him. Jonty established himself as an estate agent, got married and had children. That's right. He left a family of his own behind when he drowned in Venice. I went to Cambridge as well, stayed on for my doctorate and started an academic career.'

'You really are an art historian, then?' 'Yeah. On sabbatical from the University of Wisconsin.' 'Do they know what you're doing with your sabbatical?' 'We had a deal, Nick. All you have to do is listen. Mum died in July 'ninety-nine. When we went through her affairs afterwards, we found she had a lot more money in the bank than we'd expected. There'd been regular quarterly payments into her account from a bank in Cyprus. It explained how Mum had been able to live a little better as the years had passed. It was like an extra pension. But who was paying it? The bank wouldn't say. But Jonty was determined to find out. He took Audrey and the kids to Cyprus for a holiday that autumn. While he was there, he hired a local private detective to do some digging. This guy established that the account Mum had been paid from was in the name of Demetrius Paleologus. Know him?'

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'In a sense. I've never met him. He's some sort of cousin. Dad knew him. But he doesn't live in Cyprus.'

'No. Cyprus was his wartime bolthole. He still owns several Cypriot hotels, but he lives in Venice. When our fathers were serving together in Cyprus, though, Demetrius Paleologus was there too. That's when they all met. It has to be. And out of that, Jonty reckoned, came the money-making scheme Dad hatched years later. Jonty never believed Dad had willingly lost touch with us. He believed he'd been stopped.'

'What do you mean by "stopped"?'

'Jonty meant murdered. And since we both know what you and your brother found under the cellar floor at Trennor, murder is what I mean too. It was a body, wasn't it, Nick? Don't deny it. In fact, don't say a word. Just listen. Jonty looked up some old acquaintances of Dad's at Oxford, Julian Farnsworth among them. He also went to see your father, who basically told him to get lost. For Jonty, it all added up. The payments to Mum were conscience money. And Dad's murder was what troubled those consciences. Your father and his cousin Demetrius were in the frame. Jonty may have turned up some real evidence against them for all I know. I last saw him during the Easter holiday last year and by then he was a man obsessed. Audrey was worried about him. With good reason, as it turned out. He went to Venice a few weeks later, alone. He never came back.

'I knew the moment I heard he was dead I'd have to take up where he'd left off. First Dad, then Jonty. I couldn't let it lie. I tried. But I was never going to be able to. That outburst at the inquest was stupid, really. No-one cared. No-one was listening. But it was my vow, if you like. I was going to make people listen. Wisconsin had let me bring my sabbatical forward on compassionate grounds, so I had the time. It was a research project to beat any other. Jonty had accumulated a whole stack of books in the months before his death. I sifted through them. Medieval history for the most part - Venice, Byzantium, the Crusades. Plus a lot of esoteric stuff about Templarism and Freemasonry. I couldn't make out what it 285

amounted to. But the name Paleologus cropped up a lot, as it would. Jonty also had a heap of literature about the archaeology and mythology of Tintagel and just about everything printed on the subject of the St Neot glass, which put me onto the Doom Window mystery, which connected in turn with Trennor, where who should live but Michael Paleologus, Dad's old Army pal.'

'Did it really connect? I know you lied to me about the Bawden letter.'

'It was a small misrepresentation. The "great and particular treasure of the parish" had to be the Doom Window. I'm fairly sure Mandrell, the man named by Bawden as custodian of the treasure, lived at Trennor.'

'Fairly sure isn't certain.'

'All right. I'll tell you what I am certain of. I needed to get inside your family. I needed an ally. I chose Tom because he was the next generation on and therefore less likely to be a party to whatever had happened. I sized him up carefully. I think he was flattered by my attentions, to be honest, then genuinely attracted to me, then, well, infatuated. It was onesided, I admit. I did whatever I needed to do to make him willing to help me and keep him that way. Even so, that was only part of the reason why he went along with it. Your family's a mess, Nick. You must know that. It wasn't so very difficult to turn you in on yourselves. Tom had seriously fraught relationships with his father and grandfather. He felt disapproved of. He felt scorned. And that doesn't encourage loyalty.