Painting The Darkness (74 page)

‘“Forget Madeleine. Just tell me whether what she told me was true.”

‘“As far as it goes, yes.”

‘“What do you mean – ‘as far as it goes’?”

‘“She doesn’t know everything. She only thinks she does.”

‘“But you did murder Thompson?”

‘“I killed him, yes. To protect our interests.”

‘“And my mother?”

‘“Is that what you’d call her? Your ‘mother’?”

‘“What would you call her?”

‘“I’d call her an obstacle … which I removed.”

‘“When you came to me in San Francisco, you said she was already dead.”

‘“I lied. I took you for the squeamish type and I reckon I judged you right. What difference does it make whether she died with or without a little assistance?”

‘“The difference is that she was my mother.”

‘“That may matter to you, Sir James, but not to me.”

‘I restrained a rush of anger and continued talking in the steadiest tone I could manage. “You were planning this for years before you approached me, weren’t you?”

‘“Yes.”

‘“How could you be so confident I’d agree to play my part?”

‘“It was an offer too good to refuse. Don’t try to blame your own greed on me.”

‘“I might have been rich in my own right. I might have been happy and successful. Then I’d have wanted no part of it.”

‘“But you were none of those things, were you?”

‘“How did you know I wasn’t?”

‘He chuckled. “Because Andrew Lennox’s widow wrote to Sir Gervase from America two years before she died, hoping he would agree to help you. She told him all about the life you were leading, the kind of man you’d become. She even sent a recent photograph of you. It proved that your resemblance to James hadn’t dimmed with the years.
Of
course, what she didn’t know was that James was no longer on the scene.”

‘“And that’s what planted the idea in your mind?”

‘“Not exactly. Sir Gervase planted it in my mind. It was his idea. His last, mad, syphilitic scheme. He hated his wife for bearing a son by his cousin. And what he hated even more was the thought of that son succeeding him as baronet.”

‘Deceived in turn by every false conclusion, I saw him now for the first time. I was within reach of him at last, within a faltering grasp of his shrinking shoulder, and I no longer doubted what I would see when he turned to meet me. His face, rotted through, eaten away by the death he had brought upon himself and his son, sustained by nothing but the mocking grin Quinn had preserved for him: the life he had made for me was the lie he had borne laughing to the grave.

‘“How did you think I came by all that information, Sir James? The dates, the times, the places, the people. The photographs, the letters, the proofs, the means. Who could have given me a copy of James Davenall’s suicide note but the man he sent it to? Who could have equipped me to make you a replica of James Davenall but his own father?”

‘Richard told me once of a dinner he had had at Bladeney House in the summer of 1878, when he had tried and failed to persuade Gervase to have James pronounced legally dead. Gervase’s final reason for refusing had seemed to Richard incomprehensible. “My son lives,” he had said. “And I will stand by him.” Now I knew what his words had meant.

‘“Sir Gervase knew he only had a few years left to him. He made me promise I would track you down after his death and inveigle you into impersonating James. Then he gave me all the evidence he could lay hands on and told me everything about his son that he could remember. At first, I went along with it just to humour him. After his collapse, I dismissed the idea from my mind. I even went
so
far as to sell some of the things he’d given me. That was the pretext his bitch of a wife used to have me dismissed. And that’s when I started thinking. Why not do it after all? Why not see if the old man’s scheme might not actually work?”

‘It had worked. God knows, it had worked better than he could have imagined. I had supplanted Hugo. I had taken what would have been James’s. I had dispossessed Gervase’s hated wife. But victory had exacted a heavy price. There was blood on my hands and murder on my conscience.

‘“To do the old man justice, I must tell you he didn’t expect me to act while either he or his mother was still alive. I was happy to wait the short time he had left, but she was a different matter. On my last visit to him, in the nursing home, I told him she’d died and that nothing any longer stood in our way. He must have died a happy man, thinking of the havoc I’d make you wreak in his family.”

‘“You don’t regret any of it, do you?” I said at last.

‘“Why should I? It’s made me a wealthy man. Sir Gervase’s scheme has given me what his wife tried to deny me: a comfortable retirement.”

‘“But what about me, Quinn? What’s it given me?”

‘He reached out and ran his finger and thumb along the hem of my shoulder-cape. “It’s given you a gentleman’s coat to your back, Sir James.” He slapped me on the chest. “It’s put money in your wallet.”

‘“And for that you expect me to forget two murders?”

‘“I don’t care how you square your conscience, Sir James. That’s your problem, not mine. It was you who insisted on knowing the truth, not me on telling you. I don’t really know what you’re complaining about. The death of a senile old woman and a decrepit old soldier? A small price to pay, I’d have thought, for title, wealth, property – and another man’s wife.”

‘He was right, of course. I had benefited as much as he had, if not more, by Mary Davenall’s death and, whilst I had never condoned her murder, I had been prepared
to
ignore it. But now it was different. Now she was my mother, who had done her poor best to ensure I did not suffer for the perversion of my birth. She was my mother, whose only reward for trying to protect me from the truth was to be murdered in my name so that a lie might flourish.

‘“You should be grateful to me, Sir James. After all, where would you be without me?”

‘Where indeed? Quinn, I did not doubt, had learned early – and never forgotten – that he who cares least survives longest. But therein lay his mistake. For, though I shared his crime, I did not share his ruthlessness. “What would you say, Quinn,” I asked, “if I told you I wasn’t going on with it?”

‘At that, he snatched the cigar from his mouth and stared at me intently. “What do you mean – ‘not going on with it’?”

‘“I mean I’m throwing in my hand. Admitting that I’m an impostor. Making a clean breast of the whole damnable business.”

‘“You can’t be serious.”

‘“Never more so.”

‘He laughed. “You’re mad.”

‘“Yes. Perhaps I am. But I mean to do it.” With that, I made to turn away, but he seized me by the shoulder with sufficient force to stop me in my tracks. When I looked back at him, the lamplight casting shadows across his face, I could not see his eyes clearly nor tell from the shape of his mouth whether he was smiling or in earnest, but still I guessed, before he said it, what his parting taunt would be.

‘“Confess now, Sir James, and you’re more likely to end up in a lunatic asylum, like Trenchard, than a prison cell; but, either way, I won’t be there with you. What evidence there is to link us can be destroyed. And evidence that I murdered Thompson and the old woman just doesn’t exist. So make a fool of yourself, or not, as you please. But don’t think you can take me with you.”

‘Everything he had said was true, and this last was truest of all. By confessing, I could destroy myself and others besides, including the woman I had come to love, but Quinn would do what he had always done: survive. It was the sure and certain knowledge that he would escape whatever fate I willed upon myself that provoked me, as much as the pressure of his hand on my shoulder, as much as the sudden realization that, with the same hand, he had ended my mother’s life. From some deep rebellion within me against the lie he had forced me to live came a surge of violent anger, so engulfing that what happened next is still only a hazy recollection – a glimpse, it seems, of the actions of another man. Perhaps, indeed, they were the actions of another. Perhaps it was James Davenall’s strength, added to mine, that enabled me to overpower Quinn. Perhaps I was his vengeance for the telling of his secret.

‘All I can say with certainty is what I felt in that instant. I wanted to rid my sight of Quinn’s face, my ears of his words, my mind of the knowledge that he would survive me. I wanted him dead. And I had my way. The spasm of violence, the convulsive struggle as I held his head beneath the water, the spluttering and choking, the reaching, clutching, straining hands: they form now no ordered picture in my memory. But the silent seconds after – the body sagging in the trough, the pools of spilt water at my feet, the slowing percussion of drips from the rim, the yellow and black pattern that the lamplight made of what I had done – seem more real than wherever the present finds me. They recur whenever my mind’s determination to resist them slackens. They spring forth if I merely close my eyes for an instant, to paint themselves upon the darkness.’

XIII

Freddy Cleveland was slumped at the top of the dune-bank, staring incredulously at the two figures who had measured out their paces and turned to face each other across a chain of Belgian sand. Only the meticulous, impassively observed formalities which had culminated in this moment could explain the transfixed immobility with which he awaited and thus condoned the final act. He knew he should either try to prevent it or at least deny them the sanction of his presence. But still he sat and watched, aware that Major Bauer, standing beside him, was about to raise the whistle to his lips.

Were those two slim, erect, implacable figures whose coats lay beside them on the sand really Sir James and Hugo Davenall? At this distance, in this strange, stark, unearthly border-zone between sea and land and sky, they could have been two strangers, two characters posed on an unfinished canvas, whose future an unseen hand was about to paint upon the mist that framed and rolled about them.

‘Attention!’ roared Major Bauer. At the word, the two figures cocked their guns and held them towards the ground.

Something was paining Freddy’s right hand, something he had held too long in a grip whose ferocity he had not noticed till now. Opening his hand, he glanced down and saw that the object was the coin he had tossed earlier with Bauer. There was the Austrian Emperor’s head to prove it. As his grip slackened, the coin fell away from the mound of his thumb and settled the other way up in his palm. And there still was the Austrian Emperor’s head – embossed on the other side of the coin.

James had given it to him. And Bauer had called. And it was double-headed. And Bauer was to time the signals. The significance began to hammer at the doors of his brain. And then he understood. But, as he did so, there was a shrill blast on the whistle. And the two figures started walking.

XIV

‘Quinn was dead. There was nothing to regret in that. But his death was as irrevocable for me as it was for him. It ensured that my stolen life as Sir James Davenall must end. As if to declare that it was so, I took from my pocket the cigarette-case Quinn had given me – the silver monogrammed case that had belonged to the real James Davenall – and pressed it into his lifeless hand before fleeing across the fields.

‘I reached Newmarket station in time to catch the last train to London. During the journey, I measured the consequences of Quinn’s death for those I loved and those I had wronged. It was not the charge of murdering him I feared, but what it would lead to. The winding entrails of our whole conspiracy would be dragged into view. Constance, whom I loved and whom I was sworn to protect, who had trusted me when others had called me a liar, who had loved me when she did not need to, would suffer more than I would and would go on suffering, long after my punishment was past. Wherever justice lay, it did not lie down that road.

‘Then it came to me. I could not go on with the pretence, but neither could I rescind it. I could not continue as Sir James Davenall, but I could be remembered as such, for a dead man can neither lie nor tell the truth. Only that way could the justice I desired be served, for only that way could Constance’s trust in me be saved.’

XV

‘Give that whistle to me!’ Freddy shouted, scrambling to his feet. ‘God damn it, Bauer, you’ve played us false!’

The whistle was clenched firmly between Bauer’s teeth, but still he managed a ghastly mocking smile before closing his lips around the mouthpiece and blowing the second signal. As Freddy lunged towards him, he feinted
to
one side, then thrust his right foot between Freddy’s sand-logged stride and swung both arms hard against his shoulder. Freddy was sent toppling, sliding helplessly down the soft and sucking wall of the dune, swinging his head back as he went to glimpse the inverted image of two black-clad figures closing on the white expanse of beach.

There could only be a few yards between them, yet still the third signal had not come. They were homing on each other in the upside-down, double-headed, looking-glass convergence of a treachery he could not understand. No man could miss another at such range. No man, indeed, could fail to kill.

At the foot of the dune, Freddy rolled over and raised himself on all fours. The two figures had stopped walking. There was no space between them, no gap of yards or chance of error. He filled his lungs to shout some warning or protest, but it was too late. The third signal rang out – and was swallowed by the roar of a single gunshot.

XVI

‘Hugo agreed readily to play the part I had prepared for him. He, too, knows the truth now, but he will never be able to tell it, because to do so will be to confess to a murder. He had to be told, because otherwise he would never have trusted me to do what I said I would. But never fear. The secret is safe with him.

‘It seems strange to say it, but I am grateful to Hugo. Had he not challenged me to a duel in the first place, I would never have realized how well such an end would serve my purposes. Well, for what I owe him, he will have his reward. He will have back all that I took from him: the money, the title, the property, the name. He will be restored to his inheritance. And he will be welcome to it.