A Place Of Strangers (13 page)

The little girl threw a shadow across the earth where she
waited. That was all she would ever be.

That is what she had understood.

*

A sudden faintness welled over Bea. She rose unsteadily
knowing she must get back to the house. Her heart was thumping out of her
chest, her legs ready to buckle. She opened the gate onto the orchard lawn and
heard Mac’s car. She cried out and McCall came running with Evie close behind.
Bea fell then, unable to stop herself folding beneath the apple trees as surely
as if she had taken a sniper’s bullet.

McCall was with her in a moment, full of guilt and remorse
at his anger but aware he could yet be cheated out of the truth.

‘No, Bea – please. Not now.’

‘For Christ’s sake, leave it, Mac. I’ll go and phone an
ambulance.’

‘Bea? Bea? Listen to me.’

But she was slipping from him, seized by the same fear of
those forever condemned to die with her on the grass where she lay.

Chapter Twenty Two

Garth Hall was hidden behind scaffolding and long drapes of
protective blue plastic, waiting for the builder to start work on the roof. A
slight wind ruffled the sheeting and waves of aquamarine-tinted sunlight lapped
through every window. It seemed to Evie as if the house was sinking to the
bottom of the sea.

McCall still was not back so she was alone in this lost
world of other lives. Going from room to room, she experienced again that
feeling of being gathered by the spirits in this place, even before those of
Bea and Francis had departed. Evie did not believe in a god’s will theory of
pre-ordination. That denied all human choice in the infinite randomness of
existence. Yet everything happening to her now simply felt as if it was meant
to be.

She sat at Bea’s dressing table, a trespassing child trying
on a brooch of Baltic amber then spraying her neck with perfume from a cut
glass globe. The room filled with the warm summer scent of azaleas. And as she
breathed it in, so Evie caught the memory of another’s face, imprisoned within
her own in the mirror.

She had thought her mother beautiful, back-combing her
Titian hair, reddening her cheeks with lipstick. Then it would be a kiss and a
smile and she would disappear, a painted moth drawn by the arc of light over
the port of Liverpool which glowed like the setting sun in the night sky. Evie
imagined her in a ballroom, its arched windows swagged with velvet, an
orchestra playing and handsome men turning as she glided by. She could be gone
for days, to sing and dance who knew where and without a thought to all the
love she had left behind.

Evie raised the lid on Bea’s little ivory musical box and
listened to its tinny, sad song.

Good night, go to sleep.

Bea must not die. It was not only McCall who didn’t know her
well enough yet.

*

Bea survived her blue-lit ride to hospital but the stroke she
suffered weakened her entire right side. Her speech might never fully return.
They gave her a pad and pencil and she had already summoned her solicitor,
Edgar Fewtrell. McCall was to have power of attorney over her affairs.

He got his anger under control though Evie knew it still
blew about his head. But the sight of Bea being fed and washed like the infant
Francis across the corridor was the cruellest of images. The socialite and the
spy, locked inside themselves with all they knew.

McCall went to Mr Fewtrell’s house in Mill Street. It had a
fine eighteenth century brick façade hiding a much earlier building framed in
oak gone silver with age. They sat in Fewtrell’s ordered study drinking dark
aromatic tea from Africa without milk or sugar. Fewtrell had a venerable
presence but the impatient directness of a don.

‘Upsetting for you, Mac... seeing them the way they are
now.’

‘It’s very painful, yes.’

‘But are you coping with it?’

‘I’m trying to.’

‘It’s like being inside a collapsing tent, when one’s mother
and father die.’

‘Oddly enough, it’s making me think more about my natural
parents.’

‘Why is that odd?’

‘Because I haven’t done much of it before, I suppose.’

‘We all need to know who were are, where we’ve come from.’

‘I was never sure that applied to me.’

The hour chimed from a long case clock with a painted face
of fruit and roses.

‘Francis always told me about the scrapes you got up to, out
in war zones and such.’

‘Nothing I’ve ever done compares to his, I suspect.’

‘He was always so proud of you, Mac... never forget that. I
doubt if your natural father could’ve loved you more.’

Fewtrell poured himself another cup and held the saucer
below his chins so nothing spilled on a waistcoat that would not fully button
up anymore. McCall steered him back to what he really wanted to know.

‘Why can I find no paperwork about how the Wrenns become my
guardians?’

‘Fewer forms and regulations back then, I suppose.’

‘You mean orphans could just be handed out, no questions?’

‘Not exactly but why do you ask?’

McCall sensed Fewtrell’s guard going up.

‘Because I think there’s more to what happened to me than
I’ve been told.’

‘What makes you say that, Mac?’

‘I believe Bea and Francis could have misled me about my
parents.’

The old solicitor’s wire wool eyebrows drew together. He put
his cup and saucer on the desk with some delicacy.

‘Misled you? In what way?’

‘Oh, little things... would you believe like when they died,
where they died, maybe even how they died?’

‘I must sat that doesn’t sound like them at all in my
experience. Are you sure?’

‘I’ve been looking through the public record.’

‘And what have you found?’

‘That there’s a year’s missing from their account of my
early life.’

‘But what possible motive could they have to mislead you
about such a matter?’

‘I was hoping you might know.’

‘Well, I don’t and that’s a fact.’

Another hint of unease passed across Fewtrell’s unblinking
eyes. McCall pressed on instinctively. It is rarely the lie which sinks the
guilty. Damage is more often done by the cover-up.

‘I now know Francis was sending cheques to my mother every
week from when I was born until the time she and my father were supposedly
killed. I think that’s curious, don’t you?’

Fewtrell stood up, suddenly every inch the advocate
in court. He became at once the Wrenn family’s legal adviser, not simply their
friend.

‘You should take great care in this matter, Mac. The
situation demands nothing less.’

‘What situation?’

‘My advice is to do
nothing
to jeopardise your
position as sole heir and beneficiary.’

‘I don’t follow. I’m only trying to find out what really
happened to my parents.’

‘I’m sure you are but let nature take its course.’

‘You mean let Bea and Francis die first?’

‘That’s precisely what I mean.’

‘But why?’

‘I can’t know the accuracy or otherwise of what you may or
may not have discovered but I do know that were Beatrice or Francis to get wind
of it, however unlikely that might seem, it could cause them untold upset when
they are no longer in a position to speak for themselves or explain what may or
may not have happened years ago.’

The phone rang in the hall and cut short his submission for
the defence. He excused himself and limped away to answer it. McCall scanned
Fewtrell’s study with a hack’s eye for anything interesting. A photograph on
the mantelpiece showed a group of unsmiling men on the steps of a sombre
official building. The caption read:
United Kingdom Legal Team, War Crimes
Tribunal, Nuremberg 31st August 1946.

He immediately recognised the patrician gaze of Hartley
Shawcross, Britain’s chief Nazi prosecutor. And three places to his right stood
Fewtrell, younger, thinner but with those same uncompromising eyes.

McCall had never figured out why Francis’s unorthodox
affairs were handled by a country town solicitor and not some whiz of a firm in
London. Here was a clue. This inconspicuous, crippled man had helped to put a
rope round the necks of Hitler’s willing executioners.

There was more to Edgar Fewtrell than anyone might guess.

*

McCall was aware of Evie watching him from a landing window.
She had wanted them to walk down to Garth Woods together, not for him to be on
his own. But solitude was exactly what he wished. He was in mourning – but
whether for the dead or those about to die, he was no longer sure. His loves
and loyalties were never more confused. He thought ahead to autumn, to when
this trial might all be over and the leaves would drift to earth once more as
they had when he first arrived at Garth Hall.

*

‘Do you think he’ll ever grow to like us?’

‘Give the poor little blighter a chance.’

‘He looks like the wind could blow him over.’

‘Then we’d best hold onto him, hadn’t we?’

*

He might be witnessing his own delayed birth, emerging fully
formed from a long gestation into a world of colour where everything was new
and he could run and climb and do anything he might wish. So in these early
years, McCall comes to exist in his head, to star in the stories he tells
himself.

Agent M is hiding under the bridge across Pigs’ Brook. The
Germans are combing the countryside for him. They have guns and dogs with sharp
yellow teeth and orders to kill on sight because Agent M has uncovered top
secret information. It is so important, it will save lots of lives. He has to
get a message to London. He crawls on his belly through the thick undergrowth
to where his transmitter is hidden.

Agent M reporting in. Stop. Nazis have put special
device in Daddy’s plane. Stop. Will explode over water. Stop. Warn Francis
repeat, warn Francis. Stop.

He tortured ten Nazis for this now they are bent on revenge.
The stream will put the dogs off the scent but Agent M slips on the pebbles and
his sandals get soaked. But it doesn’t matter. Daddy must be saved. He has
never been in so much danger.

Agent M pushes on through nettles and thorns then scrambles
into his camp under the big holly bush. He hears voices. Two voices. Real
voices. One of them is Bea’s. The other belongs to a man.

‘It won’t be easy, Beatrice. He’s got protection at every
level.’

‘Our friend thinks it’s almost certainly Cologne.’

‘But we’ve got to make sure of it.’

They pass by, not six feet away and Agent M hears no more.
He cannot see the stranger’s face but he must be one of Bea’s best ever
friends. They are holding hands.

*

McCall watched a nuthatch pecking for insects in the rot of
a shallow-rooted beech, felled by winds two winters before. The composting
trunk gave off an earthy smell of decay. Unseen and deeper into the trees, owls
waited to hunt, foxes sniffed the late afternoon air for prey. Here was the
inescapable natural order of things – an unforgiving cycle of life, death and
renewal, lacking all sentiment or regret.

He unlocked the dacha and sat in Francis’s ripped leather
chair, unconsciously assuming primacy. At the hospital last night, McCall broke
a bar of chocolate into tiny pieces and gently put them between Francis’s lips.
He took them into his mouth in some latent instinct to survive. His misted eyes
never left McCall’s face though the clouds did not part this time. There was no
sunshine of recognition, no words uttered...
 
just the taste of sweetness remembered.

McCall now crumbled the last of his Lebanese Black into a
joint and wished he could sue for peace with his parents for getting killed,
with Bea and Francis for lying.

But these were new sores... more salt into the open wound
left by Helen. Yet Fewtrell’s advice about McCall’s chimerical parents was
sound. Nothing would harm if their son waited a little longer to find them. So
he put a record on Francis’s gramophone and remembered how the music of Elgar
and Beethoven and the voices of Callas and Caruso would come through the woods
as he skimmed stones across the brook or lay on his back watching the clouds
being ripped to shreds by the branches of the mile-high trees.

McCall listened now as he once had and wanted only to
understand and to become whole again.

*

The four photographs Bea dropped when she collapsed were
spread out on the dacha table. She and the unknown dark-skinned man on
Westminster Bridge were dressed in the styles of the late forties, early
fifties. Why Bea had pictures of Nazi soldiers and concentration camp victims,
McCall could not think – unless they were mementoes from Fewtrell’s war crimes
trials. He wondered if that was where the Nazi armband came from, too.

McCall set up the Eumig to go through the remaining footage
from Fewtrell’s box files. He watched sequences of Bea cleaning the Alvis,
another of arty shots of sunlight streaming in through the stained glass
windows of St Mary and All Angels and even a reel of McCall in a cowboy outfit
in Garth Woods, firing a toy six-shooter at the camera.

Bang! Bang! You’re dead.

He was lacing up the last cassette when Evie knocked and
came in.

‘I’ve made some supper for us.’

‘Shan’t be a minute, just watching this.’

The picture wobbled up from Francis’s shoes, across an ill
kept, muddy garden to reveal a place McCall could now never forget.

It was Mendip Cottage – his first home.

‘God Almighty – ’

The roof bellied in and the walls bellied out. Some of the
windows were broken and the kitchen door was half off its hinges.

‘– look, Evie. It’s my house.’

A woman emerged into shot, carrying a child not yet three
years old.

‘And that’s my mother.’

The camera moved in closer and Elizabeth’s pride filled the
screen with a smile so much more pretty than in the still picture he had seen.
The child overcame his shyness and turned to face the visitor. Elizabeth hugged
her precious boy.

‘That’s me, Evie. Me and my mother.’

These silent images mesmerised McCall. This was who he had
been, where he had come from... and in his mother’s arms. And yet this had all
been kept from him.

But why?

The shot panned from Elizabeth, across a few scratching
chickens to establish another female figure smiling, almost coyly. It was Bea –
Bea who said she did not know Elizabeth and hadn’t had contact with her. Here
was proof of yet another lie. McCall waited for his father to appear. But he
didn’t.

A different man walked into frame instead. Elizabeth handed
her son to him. He lifted McCall up onto his shoulders and beamed at the
camera, full face. Then the screen went blank. McCall could not move.

The man who held him was the man in the photograph... Bea’s
foreign looking friend on Westminster Bridge.