Hand in Glove (22 page)

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landing. Was he afraid that Ursula had appeared, négligéd and casually grinning? If so, he stifled the fear with aplomb. “I don’t know what this is all about, Charlie. Why don’t you tell me?”

Tristram’s letters were more important than the anger and humiliation churning inside Charlotte. She knew that, but the knowledge made her task no easier. “Frank Griffith was robbed last night.”

“Robbed?”

“The letters were stolen.”

“You mean Tristram’s letters?” Was he a good enough actor to fake the quiver of shock that passed across his face? Charlotte could not be sure.

“You took them, didn’t you?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“You wined and dined and flattered and flirted with me until you were sure he still had them, hidden at Hendre Gorfelen.”

“No.”

“Then why else did you spend time with me? Not for the pleasure of my company. I know that now—as I should have known it all along.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why don’t you admit you have them? There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Because I didn’t take them. Maybe I would have if I’d known where they were—or been sure they existed. Either way, if I had, I’d be on a plane back to Boston by now, wouldn’t I? Not waiting here for you to brand me a thief.”

It was a valid point and, for the first time, Charlotte began to consider the possibility that somebody else altogether had been responsible for the theft, somebody who had also murdered Beatrix, somebody whose name and motive she was a long way from discovering.

“Has Frank Griffith admitted keeping the letters?” said Emerson.

“Yes.”

“And has he told you what they contain? What big secret Beatrix wanted him to keep?”

She looked at him and saw then how completely the biographer’s curiosity had taken him over. His expression was more animated than she had ever known it and at last she felt she understood him. Everything he had done since arriving in England had been geared to learning the truth about Tristram Abberley. Nothing else had mattered.

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Toying with Charlotte’s emotions had meant as much as seducing Ursula. And that was precisely nothing. “What did you hope to learn from her?” she said as she stared at him.

He frowned. “From whom?”

Charlotte stepped closer to him and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I know Ursula’s upstairs. And I know why. I heard everything.

Every word.” She closed her eyes, then reopened them. “Every sound.”

Incredibly, Emerson smiled. “Right,” he whispered back. “I understand.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“She doesn’t mean a damn thing to me, Charlie. Believe me.”

“I do. That’s what makes it so contemptible.”

“OK. Maybe it does. But listen. Do you know what was in the letters?” His smile remained, rueful and cynical, not one whit abashed or ashamed. “I have to find out.”

She stepped back, certain now that he was innocent of what she had suspected, just as she was certain of his guilt on almost every other count. “You disgust me,” she snapped.

He shrugged. “It’s an occupational hazard.”

“Get out of my way.” She moved towards the front door, but he stepped into her path and she pulled up. Still he was smiling, with a sparkle of duplicity in his deep brown eyes.

“Shall I tell you what really disgusts you, Charlie?”

“If you must.”

“Still wanting me.” He stretched out his hand and, before Charlotte could stop him, slid it down over her breast. “Perhaps wanting me even more now you know what’s available.”

It was the faint trace of truth in his remark—the incontestable stirring of desire she had felt whilst standing there and listening to what he had done to Ursula—that gouged the deepest. Why did he have to be so loathsome and yet so close to understanding her?

“What’s in the letters? You wouldn’t regret telling me. I guarantee it.”

She pushed his hand away and stared at him. “I’d regret telling you anything. That
I
guarantee.”

“Harsh words, Charlie.”

“But meant. Sincerely meant. Unlike a single one of yours. Now, may I leave please?”

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“Sure. I’m not stopping you.” He raised his palms in a gesture of surrender. “Go right ahead.”

And she did, through the door and up the drive, walking fast without looking back, steeling herself neither to flinch nor falter, holding back the tears till she had reached the privacy of her car and could hold them back no longer. Then, amidst her sobs, she took from her handbag the florist’s card he had sent her that bore his flourishing signature. The first large ominous drops of a cloudburst were falling as she wound down the window and cast out the torn fragments.

Then she started the engine and accelerated away.

C

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FIVE

All the strength and self-assurance Frank Griffith had seemed to possess when encountered on his home territory had vanished in the antiseptic surroundings of the Kent and Sussex Hospital. Looking at him, Derek saw only a frail and wizened old man, propped up on a bank of pillows with deckchair-striped pyjamas fastened stiffly round his neck, barely distinguishable in fact from the dozing and dribbling occupants of the other beds in the ward. His eyes had grown dimmer, his voice more gravelly, since their last encounter.

“I didn’t steal the letters, Mr Griffith.”

“I know.”

“Or pay anybody else to.”

“I know that too. If you had, you’d have realized by now they couldn’t help your brother.”

“Maybe so. I only hope something can.”

“Why? Why do you care?”

“Because he
is
my brother, come what may.”

“I thought I had brothers once. Hundreds of them. Thousands.”

Griffith’s gaze moved past Derek and beyond, it seemed, even the wall behind him. “I should have known better.”

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“But blood’s thicker than water.”

“Not at my age. Not at any age if—” He broke off and looked back at Derek. “What did you say you do for a living?”

“I’m an accountant.”

Griffith nodded. “Balancing the books.”

“Sometimes.”

“Not these books though. They’re long past balancing.”

“Not necessarily.”

“They are. Believe me.”

“How can I, when you won’t tell me what I need to know?”

Griffith fell silent for a moment. A gurgling coughing fit came and went further down the ward, as it had done twice before. Then he said: “What kind of a man is your brother, Mr Fairfax?”

“Colin? He’s an antique dealer, as you know. A bit shady, I suppose. I shouldn’t care to be responsible for his accounts.”

“But what kind of a
man
?”

“Charming. Entertaining. Plausible. Lovable, in a way. Also vain, untrustworthy and thoroughly unreliable.”

“But still you try to help him?”

“Who else would if I didn’t?”

“Would he do the same for you?”

“I don’t know. The situation’s never arisen. Except . . .”

“Except?”

“When we were boys, in Bromley, back in the ’forties, our father built a swimming-pool in the garden. He thought we should both learn to swim. And so we did, though I never much took to it, whereas Colin . . . Well, one day, when Mum and Dad were both out, it must have been the summer I was five, I fell in while larking about on the edge and knocked my head on the side. I must have lost consciousness, because I can’t remember anything after hitting the water. Colin was climbing a tree at the bottom of the garden. A big old oak, it was. He saw what happened, saw me floating face down in the pool, must have realized I was going to drown. So, he scrambled down, raced up the garden, jumped in and pulled me out. He saved my life. But for him, I wouldn’t be here now.”

“So, you see this as repayment of a debt?”

“No. I don’t. That’s not it. I’d be doing this whether or not—” A change of expression on Griffith’s face—a twitch of his eyes to the left—halted Derek in mid-sentence. When he looked round, it was to see Charlotte Ladram walking slowly down the ward towards them.

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Her face was flushed and even to Derek’s eyes it was obvious she had been crying. “Miss Ladram,” he said, rising to offer her his chair,

“what’s—”

“Emerson McKitrick didn’t take the letters,” she said in a flat and strangely matter-of-fact tone.

“Can you be sure?” asked Griffith.

“Absolutely.” She subsided into the chair whilst Derek fetched another for himself. “Please don’t ask me to explain.”

“He’s still here, then?” said Griffith. “In England?”

“Yes.”

“Then I agree. He can’t have taken them, can he?”

“No. If he had, he’d have gone straight back to Boston. He said as much himself.” She sighed. “I’m sorry, Frank. Really I am.” Then she sighed again. “How are you feeling? They tell me they’re only keeping you in as a precautionary measure.”

“For observation.”

“That’s right.”

He grunted. “I don’t like being observed.”

“And you won’t like what I’m about to say. But it has to be said.”

“What is it?”

Derek saw her hands tighten into fists and guessed she had rehearsed this speech long and hard. “I will do everything in my power to help you recover the letters, but unless you tell me what they contain—what Beatrix’s secret was—then there is nothing I
can
do.”

“You’re asking too much.”

“We have to be in this together, on equal terms, or not at all.”

“But you don’t understand the terms.”

“Then help me to.”

“Would it make things easier,” put in Derek, “if I left?”

“Perhaps,” said Charlotte.

But Griffith shook his head. “No. If I’m to tell you, I should tell you both.”

“This is a family matter,” said Charlotte. “Mightn’t it be best—”

“No,” Griffith insisted. “It’s been a family matter too long. Let him stay. Maybe it
will
help his brother for him to understand what Tristram and Beatrix did.”

“Very well,” said Charlotte, glancing at Derek.

The imminence of the disclosure hung around them like an elec-trical charge in the air. They crouched forward in their chairs, as if expecting Griffith to whisper the secret in their ears. But when he 156

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spoke, he did so in an unaltered tone. Now he had resolved to tell all, it seemed he had decided to tell it aloud.

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SIX

Bujaraloz,

7th September 1937

Dear Sis,

I have reached the front. I’ve been judged worthy to share the hazards and privations of active military service in the wind-blasted heat-blistered battleground of Aragon. There’s almost a snatch of poetry in that, don’t you think?

But not enough. Not enough by far. It was ever thus, of course. The thought. The image. And now the act. But never the true and sparkling exactitude of the right and perfect word. Unless it’s a requiem. Maybe that at least I can hope to compose—or perhaps to inspire.

I must choose my words carefully. It’s late to learn such a lesson, don’t you think? But there it is. I can’t, for obvious reasons, say much of what we’re doing here or of how successful our efforts may be. What I can say is that it’s grim and mad and maybe even pointless. But it’s also glorious and wonderful and worthier than anything I’ve ever done before.

The battalion’s been substantially reinforced with Spaniards, yet its British identity remains. At its core are not the officers with their Ruritanian pretensions, their public-school accents and Communist credentials dazzlingly intact.

Oh no. They’re so much candy-floss. What holds this battalion together—what binds its wounds and stiffens its sinews—are the rough tough crude complaining working class. The Glaswegians and the Geordies, the Scousers and the Swansea

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boys who left the dole queues to come here and fight for freedom.

It’s strange and bewildering, sometimes almost embarrassing, to find out what putting principles into practice really means. Not pontification or pamphleteering. Not versifying, either. Nothing so easy or comfortable as any of that. It means marching when you’re thirsty, humping loads when you’re hungry, fighting when all you want to do is sleep. It means finding out what you’re really made of. And not being ashamed by the answer.

There’s a sergeant in my company called Frank Griffith.

Hard as granite. Bright as a diamond. Sure of himself. Unsure of what we’re doing here. Sick of it, in fact. But he’ll never show it. No fool. No hero. But the best and only kind you want beside you at times like these. He won’t cut. He won’t run. He won’t ever let you down.

Do you know what book—what slim little intellectual volume—he carries in his pack? The other fellows told me and I’ve seen it for myself since, though he doesn’t know I have.

The Brow of the Hill
. Yes, that’s right. The rotten Brow of the fraudulent Hill. Doesn’t it make you want to laugh? Or weep?

I’m glad he hasn’t faced me with it. I’m glad he hasn’t requested an autograph or told me “False Gods” is his favourite poem of the century. Because I don’t know what I’d say if he did, I really don’t.

The old lie is redundant here, you see, just like every other preconception. It won’t serve. It’s not enough. It’s less than men like Frank Griffith deserve. I’d gag on the words. I’d choke on the lie I’ve spent ten years perfecting. I simply couldn’t do it.

Pray he doesn’t speak, Sis. Pray for my sake and for yours.

Because, if he does, I’ll have to tell him the truth. I’ll have to tell him who really wrote the poems, every one, every verse.

My dear unworldly neglected sister, who wants neither credit nor fame. Not me. Not the bronzed and burnished simu-lacrum of a poet they call Tristram Abberley. But you. The overlooked twenty-four carat reality of rhyme and reason.

Don’t worry too much. It’ll probably never happen. He won’t speak and neither will I. Our secret’s safe. I’ll go on 158