Betrayal (47 page)

I didn’t attempt to sleep when I got back to Melton. After going up to check on Ginny I shut myself in the study to sit out the remains of the night in silence and darkness, with a brandy at my elbow and misery in my heart.

The more I tried to make sense of the thoughts that bumped and veered around my mind, the more the few remaining certainties of my uncertain life seemed to trickle away, and I had the sensation of slipping headlong towards more appalling upheavals and calamities. On leaving Hayden I had been dazed by disbelief and a smarting sense of betrayal, as though on the subject of duplicity I had anything to be proud of. But now in the long quiet hours of the night the incredulity had begun to fade and, coming to terms with Hayden’s revelations, I was left with the most terrifying uncertainty of all: What had I really stumbled across? David had been Sylvie’s lover, David had deceived me and, it would appear, everyone else: this much seemed inescapable. But what did it mean? It might mean nothing; it might mean everything. It could be nothing more than an extramarital affair, or something so frightening that I couldn’t begin to imagine where it might lead without pulling up in an agony of doubt.

Out of long habit part of me rose to David’s defence. David, who had suffered my father’s disapproval for so much of his life, who had increasingly felt the bitter dissatisfaction of his own failures; David, the eldest but second son, who had somehow never quite managed to pull his life together. Pa had always judged him harshly, and I did not want to do the same. I told myself that nothing terrible had happened, that, like me, he had simply snatched at temptation; that, like me, he had been used and discarded by Sylvie. These were not heinous crimes, yet for David with his thorny pride, they would be enough to account for his silence. I told myself that this was all there was to it. Now and again I even managed to convince myself. But I couldn’t entirely rid myself of hideous black thoughts which came screeching at me out of the darkness, like birds out of the night, and then I was seized by such a combination of misery and dread that it was all I could do not to pick up the phone and call David there and then.

At about six I showered and changed and, leaving a note for Ginny, set off into the gloomy dawn.

The road was clear, I was through Totnes just before eight. I did not stop at Furze Lodge but went straight on to Dartmouth. David’s car was not in its place outside the surgery, but the receptionist told me he was due in at nine and had a steady stream of appointments until eleven. I left him a curt note, saying I needed to see him urgently, and drove slowly to Dittisham to wait.

Drawing up outside the house I sat in the car, absorbing the silence, wishing it would last. At nine my mobile began to ring: George on his first call of the day. As soon as he had given up I phoned Julia and told her to keep everyone at bay for the morning.

‘Do you want me down at Melton?’ she asked.

‘I think Ginny’s all right.’

‘Shall I check?’

‘No, I’ll call her myself.’

‘If you’re sure.’

Ginny didn’t answer the first time I tried, nor the second, and then the line was engaged for a while, and then it didn’t answer again. Reading more into this than was good for me, I called Julia back and asked her if she wouldn’t mind going down after all.

For a time I sat in the quiet again, then, breaking free of my trance, got out of the car and, taking the key from its ledge in the porch, let myself into the musty hall. I made my way slowly through the house, examining each room with a new and jaundiced eye, as though it might contain traces of the past which I had not previously had the wit to see.

If David had brought Sylvie here, then it must have been soon after Pa’s death. No qualms about that then.

Pausing outside the kitchen I remembered how Sylvie had made her way here unhesitatingly, how she had known where to find everything. Had they drunk coffee here together, kissed, made love? I saw them making love everywhere, on floors, on sofas, upright, naked, clothed.

And the study: I remembered the way she had appeared at the french windows, as though she were used to coming through the garden and arriving unannounced.

These fragments of proof gave me great bursts of misery but also a kind of masochistic satisfaction and, unable to stop myself, I trudged up the stairs and stood on the landing, taking mental measurements of the distances to the various doors. Had Sylvie pulled me into David’s room because it was fractionally the closest, or out of some perverse desire to take a second brother to the same bed?

I glanced over the shelves by the bed, I opened the drawers of the bedside table and angrily closed them again, not even wanting to think of what I had expected to find there. I stood at the window and looked down the river to where
Samphire
lay at her mooring, and felt an unexpected gratitude to Hayden. At the end of the day, knowledge, however bitter, gives you some sort of grip on the future.

Returning to the study, I remembered the night when Sylvie and I had made love with the curtains undrawn, and the sound I had heard from the terrace, a memory which until last night I had pushed from my mind. Trying to give the sound substance now, it seemed to me that it was a garden chair being accidentally bumped across stone. In a trick of the imagination I saw not Ginny but David stumbling across the chair in the dark.

hearing a car in the drive, I opened the front door and watched David get out and walk towards me. Looking up, his face darkened and he paused in front of me as if to demand what was going on before changing his mind and passing silently into the house. Automatically he made for the study, the room which he, more than anyone, associated with inquisitions and retribution.

I sat at Pa’s desk while David pulled a chair away from the wall and, placing it by the french windows, settled himself warily. ‘What’s up then?’

Now that the moment had come I could only say, ‘You and Sylvie.’

In the pause that followed his mouth twitched but his eyes were steady. ‘Yes,’ he exhaled abruptly. ‘So.’

‘You don’t think you should tell me about it?’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything.’

‘I don’t think you mean that.’

‘Don’t bloody tell me what I mean!’ I blazed with sudden anger. ‘Don’t bloody talk
down
to me, David. For once, for
once
’ – I splayed a furious hand at him – ‘just tell me the bloody truth!’

If my anger had taken me by surprise, David met it impassively. Looking away towards the river, he began in a dispassionate voice, ‘I met her about a year ago, down on the quay. Pa wasn’t too well, I’d been out to look at
Ellie
. I was stacking the dinghy when Sylvie walked up and said, ‘‘You’re David.’’ That was it, really. We went for a drink. It started from there. We met at weekends. She was living in Bristol. She’d borrowed this cottage near Totnes – Hayden’s cottage. Then in March she moved down to Dittisham, rented a place—’ He glanced towards me, ‘Well, you know about that. Then she broke it off in, oh . . . about May, I suppose. We got together again briefly, but . . .’ His shrug indicated that it hadn’t worked out. ‘I didn’t know about you, I promise. Well, not for a long time. Not until I saw you together on
Ellie
. Can’t remember when that was – August some time? But until then I had no idea. Really.’ He gave a caustic smile. ‘Otherwise I would have warned you.’

Another pause, like darkness. David lifted a shoulder as if to say: Well, that’s it.

‘Haven’t you left rather a lot out?’ I said.

He examined my face in the sombre light, searching for my meaning. ‘Ahh,’ he said heavily. ‘You mean, our arrangement?’

‘The prescriptions.’

He nodded stoically. ‘This was Hayden, was it?’ Immediately he dismissed the question as of no importance. ‘Yes,’ he said with a long sigh, ‘it’s amazing what one does when one’s – how shall I put it? – not thinking too cleverly. Enough to get me struck off ten times over, and then some. At first it was just to
help
her, you understand. One last fix, and then she was going to take the cure. She’d been on a cure just that summer, but it hadn’t lasted long. She thought she could control it, you see. Take a hit now and again. You can’t, of course – control it. Also she had no real will to stop. She never believed it was doing her any harm. They never do. She didn’t think about the future. She thought she could just go on—’ He broke off suddenly and his mouth turned down. ‘Anyway . . . one thing led to another. She kept asking for more. And I kept handing out. The risk was ludicrous. I got calls from chemists a couple of times, thought there’d be trouble, but somehow nothing ever came of it. Sheer luck. I knew it was madness.’

‘So why didn’t you stop?’

He raised an eyebrow, and his expression seemed to say: Are you sure you really want to hear this? Reading my determination, he announced bluntly, ‘Because I wanted her. It wasn’t that I couldn’t stop – it was that I didn’t want to.’ His eyes glittered at the memory. Catching an echo of some powerful and voracious emotion, I felt a tremor of jealousy.

I said sharply, ‘And Mary?’

‘What about Mary?’

‘For God’s sake – did she know?’

‘If she did, she never mentioned it to me.’ He added casually, ‘She’s never said anything to you?’

‘No.’ And now I had the feeling he was trying to deflect me. ‘You got together again, you said, Sylvie and you?’

‘What? Oh yes . . . June. July. She wanted some more scripts. But by then it was what you might call a business arrangement.’

‘Business?’ And suddenly I was having trouble with my patience again. ‘Spell it out for me, David.’

Once more he gave me the do-you-really-want-this look, the raised eyebrow and the down-turned mouth. ‘She wanted some drugs, I wanted a good lay. I think that more or less sums it up.’

I couldn’t work out if this harsh judgment was designed to punish me or himself. Whatever, there was something in his manner that rang false, and I thought I caught a hint of bitterness.

I asked, ‘And this was all the way through June and July?’

‘No, no,’ he exclaimed, irritated at my dull-wittedness. ‘We managed without each other very well, believe me. Sometimes I didn’t see her for weeks.’ He retorted, ‘Really.’

I recognised this display. He was using the blend of intimidation and defiance that he had always employed as a child to try to bluff his way out of trouble. I suspected him then. I suspected that he was lying.

I said tersely, ‘You were still seeing her when she died.’

There was a pause while we stared at each other across the expanse of the window. ‘No, Hugh,’ he said very deliberately. ‘And I didn’t kill her either.’

‘Come on,’ I argued with a semblance of control. ‘She was going to the boat to meet someone. It wasn’t me, so it seems fairly obvious that it must have been you. Because when you think about it, there wasn’t anyone else it could have been. You couldn’t use the house any more, could you, because I was always turning up there. You couldn’t go to her cottage – too many people to see your car outside and Joe hanging about all the time. Too far to Hayden’s place. So it had to be the boat, didn’t it?’

He watched me gravely without attempting a reply.

‘Well? Have I got this wrong?’ I demanded stiffly. ‘I mean, where did you meet?
Tell
me.’

He looked away again, and still he was silent.

‘The boat.
The boat
,’ I chanted back at him. And for a moment my throat seized, I couldn’t speak. And still he said nothing. ‘
Christ
. . .’ My eyes had misted up, my lips were trembling. ‘What happened – did Sylvie try to blackmail you or something? Did she get nasty? Did she go mad? Did
you
go mad? Tell me!’

He was looking out at the river, his eyes screwed up against the light. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ he murmured.

‘
Well?
Tell me what it
was
like, for Christ’s sake. Tell me something –
anything
.’

He made a mildly dismissive movement of his head, as though any comment would be a waste of time.

I shot to my feet and stood over him, and now I was shaking with rage. ‘Tell me why the hell I shouldn’t go to the police! Give me one good reason! Just
one
, you bastard.’

He considered this with an air of great weariness. ‘For one thing it would be a mistake, because I didn’t kill her. For another, it would destroy my career.’ He added ironically, ‘For what that’s worth.’

‘I don’t give a stuff about your career,’ I exploded again. ‘What’s your goddamned career compared to
Ginny!
’

He looked up at me. ‘I’m sorry it’s got this far with Ginny, I really am.’

I gave an ugly shout. ‘Well, I tell you something – Ginny’s not going to prison to save your miserable neck.’

He stood up with an air of infinite dejection. ‘I didn’t kill her, Hugh.’

‘And I’m meant to believe you?’

He gave a distracted nod. ‘Yes.’

‘Jesus.’ I sank back on my seat.

‘But listen, Hugh – I’m not sure yet, but I think there’s something I might be able to do to help Ginny.’

‘Excuse me,’ I jeered, ‘
something you can do?
’

‘Yes. But I’ll need a bit more time.’

I was momentarily incapable of speech. In his more imperious moments David had always had this ability to reduce me to a state of mute frustration.

‘Just give me a bit more time,’ he repeated solemnly.

‘More time – for
what?
’ I burst out at last. ‘The only
help
she needs is to get off, for Christ’s sake.’

‘That’s what I meant.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake get out of here!’ I cried, overtaken by a new wave of anger. ‘Just bloody get out of my sight.’

T
O JUDGE
by the seating arrangements, the Cumberland board were not expecting a massive turnout. No more than two hundred chairs had been set out in short rows at the far end of one of the hotel’s larger conference rooms, giving the effect of emptiness and insignificance, while stacks of spare seats stood idly at the periphery, in the unlikely event of a sudden rush.