Some Old Lover's Ghost (36 page)

‘You know I’ve adored you for decades, Rebecca darling,’ said Charles, and I patted his hand, and fished in my purse for my share of the bill.

Charles walked me home. As we turned the corner of the
street, I saw the blue Renault parked beneath a streetlamp. Patrick was sitting in the driver’s seat, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

‘I’ll go, then,’ Charles said tactfully. We said goodnight, and I tapped on the Renault’s window. Patrick followed me into the flat. He looked exhausted: bluish shadows around his eyes, fine white crow’s feet beneath his tan.

He refused my offers of coffee and an armchair. ‘I’ve been driving all day. You left a message on my answerphone, Rebecca.’

I took a deep breath, and began to tell him about Caitlin Canavan’s phone call. He interrupted my first sentence. ‘Oh God. I was hoping she wouldn’t hear.’

‘Patrick – it could be her father …’ I broke off as the implications of his words sunk in. ‘You
know
her?’

‘Of course. The wretched woman’s been a thorn in the family flesh for years.’ He twitched angrily. His restlessness made the room seem too small, too claustrophobic.

‘I thought … I assumed that you’d lost touch with her ages ago.’

‘Unfortunately, no. What did she say?’

My mouth was dry. I searched for a tactful way of framing Caitlin’s accusations.

‘Come on, Rebecca. What did she want?’

‘She’s heard about the discovery of the skeleton. She assumes it’s her father.’

I heard him swear softly. He looked across at me. ‘There’s more, isn’t there?’

There was no tactful way. ‘She accused Tilda of killing him.’

The restless prowling stopped momentarily. ‘Good God.’ Patrick went to the window and placed his palms on the sill, looking out, his back to me. ‘Damn,’ he said softly. ‘Damn, damn, damn.’

Yet again, it unsettlingly occurred to me that his response was one of anger, instead of shock. But I went to him, and put my hand over his, and he turned to me and said, ‘I expect she
was drunk. It’ll have been the alcohol talking. Thank God Tilda didn’t answer the phone.’

I said bluntly, ‘She might do the next time.’

He stared at me. ‘Yes. She could phone again, of course.’

‘How well do you know Caitlin Canavan, Patrick?’

He shook his head. ‘Hardly at all. I just oversee the financial arrangements when my father’s abroad.’

‘Financial arrangements?’

‘We help her out a bit. Caitlin’s been married three times, but none of the marriages lasted. She’s always had expensive habits and consequently a heap of debts.’

‘So you send her money?’

‘Have done on and off since the Sixties.’ His eyes narrowed as he saw my expression. ‘There’s nothing sinister in it, I assure you. Caitlin is family. She is also untrustworthy and hysterical. You can’t believe a word she says. When she moved to Dublin she asked Tilda for a loan so that she could find a house. Tilda stumped up – she never saw the money again, of course – but a few years later Caitlin was back, asking for more. My father – Josh – could see how Caitlin upset Tilda, so he took over the wretched woman so that Tilda wouldn’t be bothered. Dad’s away a lot, so he eventually asked me to deal with things. I just pay her rent, for God’s sake.’

Yet it didn’t make sense to me. Caitlin Canavan’s blood relationship to Tilda Franklin was through Edward de Paveley – Tilda’s father and Caitlin’s grandfather. Hardly a connection for which Tilda should feel any responsibility. Even if Tilda had looked after Caitlin in the years after her parents died, the financial obligations that Patrick had described seemed disproportionate.

I had to turn away, afraid that my face might betray my disquiet. I heard Patrick say, ‘I’d better speak to Tilda, I suppose. Only I’m in the middle of a case, and there’s things to sort out with Jen, so God knows how I’m going to find the time—’

I recalled my brief glimpse of Jennifer Franklin: her sleek dark hair, her magnolia-pale skin. I went to Patrick and put my arms
round him. ‘I could break the news to Tilda, if you like. Tell her about the discovery of the body, I mean.’

There’s no need to say anything else.’ His arms enfolded me, and his mouth caressed the top of my head. ‘After all, Caitlin’s miles away. Maybe she’ll simmer down a bit after she’s had time to think things over.’

I realized I had not told him that Caitlin Canavan was in London. I opened my mouth to speak, and then shut it again. Perhaps Patrick was right. Perhaps Caitlin had been drunk. Perhaps she was mad. There was, it had occurred to me, only one way to find out. I must go and see her myself.

Meanwhile, there was Patrick. As his hands slid from my back to my buttocks, and his palms caressed me, I forgot about Caitlin, about Tilda, about Daragh. ‘Stay the night,’ I whispered.

‘Sorry,’ he said, and kissed me. ‘Can’t. I have to work.’ He drew back.

He left soon afterwards. I opened my desk drawers and began to search through the diaries. Caitlin’s name appeared frequently from the summer of 1947 to mid-1949. After the May of 1949, she was not mentioned in Tilda’s diary. She had been – I scribbled on a scrap of paper – fifteen and a half in May, 1949.
That saint, that angel, threw a penniless fifteen-year-old into the street
. I looked back through the 1947 diary. Max’s name, I had noticed before, appeared only rarely after April. Tilda had implied to me that her marriage to Max had disintegrated largely because his experiences as a war correspondent had exaggerated in him a natural tendency to avoid close human contact. Max had been with the British army when Belsen had been liberated, an experience which had permanently scarred him.

Now I questioned whether Tilda had told me the whole story. Had she edited the truth, as with the episode of the German paratrooper in Holland? In the April of 1947, Max had left Tilda, and Daragh had disappeared. Or Daragh had been murdered. Too many coincidences, Rebecca, I said to myself grimly. Far too many coincidences.

I sat on the bed, wrapped up in the duvet, looking through the diaries. Carefully, this time, reading each entry. The repetitive
action, the small, dull words began to hypnotize me into a sort of languor. I was drifting, fully dressed, into sleep when I heard the footsteps on the path at the side of the house. Crunch, crunch, crunch on the gravel. A small noise, but sufficient to make my heart hammer against my ribcage and the diary slide out of my hand. I couldn’t remember whether the back door was locked.

There’s never a blunt instrument to hand when you want one. I picked up a fat library book about the Fens, and tiptoed into the kitchen. The door was locked, and the light on. The yard and the path were deserted. I told myself that it must have been a cat, out hunting, but I slept badly that night.

On Monday, I told Tilda about the unidentified body in the dike, and Caitlin Canavan’s telephone call.

I did not tell her, of course, about Caitlin’s accusations. Just that Caitlin Canavan assumed the body to be that of her father. Tilda heard me out, her face unrevealing, and then she rose and went to the window. Rain silvered the tangle of rose and honeysuckle in the garden. Damp weather always exaggerated her rheumatism; she moved stiffly.

‘I never believed that Daragh ran away,’ she said. ‘He would not have left his daughter.’

I only realized that I had been holding my breath when I heard the slow exhalation of air. ‘Tell me what happened, Tilda,’ I said. ‘Tell me the truth.’

She turned to me, her features imperious, her brows raised. ‘Isn’t that your task, Rebecca? To distinguish the truth?’ She sat down. Her eyes were half shut, her voice low. ‘People had to start again. Spring crops had to be resown so that the harvest was not lost. Houses washed clean of mud, flood damage put right. But there are some things that cannot be put right …’

The full moon was doubled in the floodwater that still patched the fields. Stars sparked the inky sky, their reflections shifting
with the fitful breeze. A rank perfume issued from the debris caught in fence and ditch: a drowned rabbit, yellowed spring cabbages, a grey rag doll. Daragh, walking around the perimeter of the field, pulled the collar of his coat up to his ears. Nights like this, he hated the Fens. Nights like this, he remembered green hills and seawater lapping a rocky shore, and air so cold and tart and salt it made you drunk to breathe it. He took the hip flask from his pocket, his numb fingers faltering with the screw-top, and swallowed deeply. Nights like this, with his boots clogged with mud, and ruin behind him and before him, he wanted to run, to hide, to start again.

The huge, monstrous army of the engineers’ earth-moving equipment stood not far away, the bulk of the machinery menacing, the angular metal arms reaching out for him. Daragh thought at first that the footsteps that he heard were the rhythmic pounding of his own heart. Then he glanced back, and saw his pursuers like a black cameo against that pale, wavering moon. He hadn’t thought they would come for him here. They were creatures of the city: small and dark and verminous, feeding off black alleyways and city sewers. He began to run. The earth, laughing, grabbed at him, clogging his boots, tripping him, so that he stumbled and slid with a clumsiness unnatural to him. The tower of the church, outlined with silver, and the bright windows of the public house were only half a mile away. Safety. Daragh’s ribs squeezed his thorax, and his lungs gasped for the thin, watery air. The wet furrows slowed his pace, as though he were running in a nightmare. His luck whistled through the hourglass, and he cursed this unforgiving land.

Daragh slipped in the mud and landed hard on his knees. Their footsteps sounded in his ears like thunder. Hands seized the shoulders of his coat, pulling him to his feet. The first blow struck his stomach, the second his chin, and after that he lost count.

At eleven o’clock, Sarah and the children were asleep, and only Tilda lay awake, curled in a double bed that was too big, too
empty, trying to read herself to sleep. The tapping at the door wasn’t much of a noise at first. Owls’ claws on the gutter, mice in the skirting board, and then she thought:
Max
.

She flung a shawl over her nightdress and ran downstairs and drew back the bolt. He was leaning against the porch, black shadows flooding his features, his body bent. She heard herself exclaim. ‘Sorry, Tilda,’ said Daragh. Then he fell forward into her arms.

Most of all, as she helped him into the kitchen, she felt angry. Angry with Daragh for not being Max, angry with herself for believing that Max had come back to her, angry with Max for making her endure this.

In the brighter light of the kitchen, she looked properly at Daragh, and whispered, ‘Dear God,’ and grabbed her coat from the back of the door. ‘I’ll phone the doctor … the police …’

He stopped her. ‘There’s no need for that, Tilda.’

‘Daragh, someone did this to you.’

‘The bastards almost beat me to a pulp. But we had … an arrangement.’ He gave a croak of laughter. ‘Not the sort of arrangement I would care to discuss with the police.’

She stared at him, realizing that he was deeply in trouble. Part of her wanted to tell Daragh to leave, the part that wanted these days to draw away from other people’s pain, because it reminded her too much of her own. But he was shivering convulsively, so she poured him a measure of whisky and folded his cold hand around the glass. ‘There’s a shirt and trousers of Max’s in the wardrobe. I’ll go and get them.’

‘Is Max away?’

‘He’s in London.’ Tiptoeing upstairs, she took Max’s old summer clothes from the wardrobe. When she went back to the kitchen, Daragh had stripped off his shirt and was standing at the sink, sluicing the mud from his torso. His tanned skin was patched with red bruises, and smeared with dirt. She did not want to be needed, yet now Daragh, for the first time in years, needed her. She took a clean flannel and began mechanically to help wash his shoulders. ‘What sort of trouble are you in, Daragh?’

‘Money trouble,’ he said. He grimaced. ‘It makes a change, Tilda. It was always women with me.’

She did not smile. ‘How bad?’ She wrung out the flannel, and thought. ‘I could lend you twenty pounds or so.’

‘It’s a sweet thought, darlin’,’ he said. ‘But it’s a mite worse than that.’

She didn’t really want to know. She had troubles enough of her own, and had no wish to share Daragh’s. He had let her down years and years ago: she owed him nothing. Yet a small voice in the back of her head reminded her that since she had returned to Southam, Daragh Canavan had been a good friend. He had organized the search party when Josh had gone missing, he had cut logs for her, and had checked that she was safe during the flood. He had asked for nothing in return.

‘How much worse, Daragh?’

The expression in his eyes disturbed her. He said slowly, ‘I thought I was a rich man when I married Jossy. That house … the land … But it’s not as easy to be rich as I thought it was. The farm hasn’t made money since the Great War. On a good year it breaks even, on a bad year there’s a loss. There’s been a lot of bad years – wet springs that wash away the seedlings, poor harvests. I tried to sell a field or two, but no one was buying, so I mortgaged the house. We have such expenses – Kate’s school and the servants and labourers and the horses—’

He took Max’s shirt from the back of the chair, and pulled it on. ‘Mortgaging the Hall got me straight for a while. When I couldn’t pay the mortgage, I sold a few paintings and bits of furniture. Jossy didn’t mind: I didn’t sell anything that made much difference to the way we live. I told her that I was selling my motor car because there wasn’t any point having two with petrol rationed, but the truth was that a fellow was threatening to take me to court.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Then I tried raising money in other ways. The horses, mostly. I was lucky at first.’

Now, Tilda thought, after the years of separation, they had something in common. Now they had both watched their dreams crumble. The family that had meant so much to her was dispersing;
the wealth and status for which Daragh had abandoned her was turning to dust.

‘I had to raise another loan. Not the banks, of course – they shut the door in my face. Different sorts of fellows.’ Daragh smiled. ‘I met up with them just now, back in the Fen.’