Comeback (37 page)

Toss up the pieces, I thought, and they all came down in a jumble.

Ramsey ushered us out again and locked the doors, although presumably Ken had his own bunch in his pocket and could let us straight in again if he wanted. Ken seemed, however, to find the hospital oppressive and was happy to leave. We stood together by our cars in the car park and Ken said, “What next?”

What happened next was one of those extraordinary flashes of ancient memory, tantalizingly incomplete most of the time but sometimes blindingly clear. Perhaps many different threads had to converge before the right synapse detonated. I remembered my threatening dream and knew I’d once heard my mother say more than she’d told me on the phone.

“Um,” I said breathlessly, “how about if we go to see Josephine?”

“Whatever for?”

“To talk about your father.”

“No,” he protested, “you can’t.”

“I think we must,” I said, and told him in part what I wanted.

He looked upset, but drove to Josephine’s home while I followed.

She lived on the top two floors of a fine big Edwardian house situated in a graceful semicircular terrace in Cheltenham. Her drawing room windows opened onto an iron-work balcony overlooking the wintry public garden in front. It could have been a delight, but Josephine’s furnishings were stilted and unimaginative, as if not changed for decades.

Ken having forewarned her by telephone, she was pleased enough to see us. We had bought a bottle of sweet sherry on the way, Ken saying his mother liked it very much but wouldn’t buy it for herself, repressed woman that she was. The gift, grudgingly accepted, was nevertheless immediately opened. Ken poured his mother a large glassful and two less exuberant slugs for himself and me. He made a face over his, but I could drink or eat anything by that time without showing dislike.

Disregard what you’re actually putting into your mouth, my father had usefully instructed. If you know it’s a sheep’s eye, you’ll be sick. Think of it as a grape. Concentrate on the flavor, not the origin. Yes, Dad, I’d said.

Josephine wore a gray skirt, prim cream shirt and a sludge green cardigan. There was a photograph in a silver frame on a side table showing her young, smiling, pretty. Beside her in the picture stood a recognizable version of the Ken I knew: same long head, long body, fair hair. Kenny in the picture smiled happily: the Ken I knew smiled seldom.

We sat down. Josephine pressed her knees together: to repulse lechers, I supposed.

Beginning was difficult. “Was Ken’s father a good sportsman?” I asked.

“How do you mean?”

“Er . . . did he like fishing? My father fishes all the time.” My father would be amazed to hear it, I thought.

“No, he didn’t like fishing,” Josephine said, raising eyebrows. “Why do you ask?”

“Shooting?” I said.

She spluttered over the sherry, half choking.

“Do listen, Mother,” Ken said persuasively. “We’ve never really known why Dad killed himself. Peter has a theory.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“I think you do.”

I said, “Did he shoot?”

Josephine looked at Ken. He nodded to her. “Tell him,” he said.

She drank sherry. She would be all right once she’d started, I thought, remembering the unlocking of the gossip floodgates at lunch in Thetford Cottage, and so, hesitantly, it proved.

“Kenny,” she said, “used to go shooting pheasants with the crowd.”

“Which crowd?”

“Oh, you know. Farmers and so on. Mac Mackintosh. Rolls Eaglewood. Ronnie Upjohn. Those people.”

“How many guns did Kenny have?”

“Only the one.” She shuddered. “I don’t like thinking about it.”

“I know,” I said placatingly. “Where was he when he shot himself?”

“Oh dear. Oh dear.”

“Do tell him,” Ken said.

She gulped the sherry as a lifeline. Ken poured her more.

If the flash in my memory was right, I knew the answer, but for Ken’s sake it had to come from his mother.

“You’ve never told me where he died,” Ken said. “No one would talk to me about him. I was too young, everyone said. Recently, now that I’m the age he was when he died, I want to know more and more. It’s taken me a long time to face his killing himself, but now that I have, I have to know where and why.”

“I’m not sure about why,” she said unhappily.

“Where, then?”

She gulped.

“Go on, darling mother.”

The affection in his tone overthrew her. Tears streamed from her eyes. For a while she was completely unable to speak but eventually, bit by bit, she told him.

“He died ... he shot himself ... standing in the stream... where it was shallow... some way below the mill wheel... on the Mackintosh place.”

The revelation rocked Ken and confirmed my vision. In memory I heard clearly my weeping mother’s voice, sometime soon after she’d heard the news, talking to a visitor while I hid out of sight. She’d said, “He fell into the mill-stream and his brains washed away.”

“His brains washed away.” I’d stored that frightful phrase in deep freeze as a picture too awful to summon into consciousness. Now that I’d remembered it, the suppression surprised me. I’d have thought it was just the ghoulish sort of thing small boys would gloat over. Perhaps it was because it had made my mother cry.

“Do you know,” I asked gently, “if his gun was in the stream with him?”

“Does it matter? Yes, it was. Of course it was. Otherwise he couldn’t have shot himself.”

She put down her glass, stood up abruptly and went over to a mahogany bureau. From the top portion she retrieved a key with which she opened the lowest drawer, and from the lowest drawer produced a large polished wooden box. Another key was necessary to open that, but finally she brought it over and put it on the table beside her chair.

“I haven’t looked at these things since just after Kenny died,” she said, “but perhaps, for your sake, Ken, it’s time.”

The box contained newspapers, typewritten sheets and letters.

The letters, on top, were expressions of sympathy. The crowd, as Josephine called them, had done their duty with warmth: they’d clearly liked Kenny. Mackintosh, Eaglewood, Upjohn, Fitzwalter—a surprise, that—and many from clients, friends and fellow vets. I flipped through them. No letter from Wynn Lees, that I could see.

Towards the bottom, my heart skipped a bump. There, in her regular handwriting, was a short note from my mother.

My poor young mother, weeping with grief, had had impeccable manners. I put her long-ago letter back with the others and tried to show no emotion.

Turning to the newspapers I found they varied from factual to garish and bore many identical pictures of the dead man. “Well-liked,” “respected,” “a great loss to the community.” Verdict at the inquest: “not enough evidence to prove that he intended to take his own life.” No suicide notes. Doubts and questions. “If he hadn’t meant to kill himself, what was he doing standing in a stream in January with his shoes and socks on?” “Typical of Kenny, always thoughtful, not to leave a mess for others to clean up.”

“I can’t bear to read them,” Josephine said wretchedly.

“I thought I’d forgiven him, but I haven’t. The disgrace! You can’t imagine. It was hard enough being a widow, but when your husband kills himself it’s the ultimate rejection, and everyone thinks it’s your fault.”

“But it was an open verdict,” I said. “It says so in the papers.”

“That makes no difference.”

“I thought there was a fuss about a drug he shouldn’t have ordered,” I said. “There’s nothing about it here.”

“Yes, there is,” Ken said faintly. He’d been reading one of the typewritten sheets with his mouth open. “You’ll never believe this. And who on earth told you?”

“Can’t remember,” I said erroneously.

He handed me the papers, looking pale and shattered. “I don’t understand it.”

I read in his footsteps. It seemed to be a letter of opinion, but had no heading and no signature. It was shocking and revelationary, and in a way inevitable.

It read baldly:

In a shaking voice Ken asked his mother, “Do you know about this tetrodotoxin?”

“Is that what it was?” she asked vaguely. “There was an awful commotion but I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want people knowing that Kenny had done wrong. It was all too awful already, don’t you see?”

What I saw quite clearly was that somewhere among the old crowd the knowledge of the existence and deadliness of tetrodotoxin had been slumbering in abeyance all these years, and something—perhaps the Porphyry fiasco—had awakened it to virulence.

“Kenny!” Old Mackintosh had said joyfully when we’d visited him. “Did you bring the stuff?”

Kenny had, I judged. And then presumably had repented and shot himself—or had decided to blow the whistle and had been silenced.

Scott, the messenger with his mouth shut. Travers, the insurance agent burned to the teeth. Kenny, the vet with his brains in the water and his gun with him, washed clean of prints. Tetrodotoxin, arguably, had been too much for any of them to stomach.

“Oh God,” Ken said miserably, “so that was why. I wish now that I didn’t know.”

“You know where,” I said, “but not whether.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, he left no note. So the question is, did he kill himself in the stream, or did someone shoot him on the bank so that he fell backwards into the water?” Mother and son were aghast. I went on regretfully. “For one thing, how do you aim a shotgun at your head if you’re knee-deep? You can’t reach the trigger unless you use a stick. On the other hand, a shotgun let off at close quarters packs a terrific punch, easily enough to lift a man off his feet.”

Ken protested. “That can’t be right. Why should anyone kill him?”

“Why was Scott killed?” I asked.

He was silent.

“I think ...” Josephine’s voice quavered, “awful that it is, I’d feel he hadn’t betrayed me so terribly if he couldn’t help it. If someone killed him. It’s so long ago... but if he was killed... I’ll feel better.”

Ken looked as if he couldn’t understand her logic, but I knew my own mother, too, would be comforted.

KEN STAY ED WITH Josephine and I spent the afternoon aimlessly driving round the countryside, thinking. I stopped for a while on Cleeve Hill, overlooking Cheltenham racecourse, seeing below me the white rails, the green grass, the up-and-downhill supreme test for steeplechasers. The Grand National was a great exciting lottery, but the Cheltenham Gold Cup sorted out the true enduring stars.

The course, once familiar to me to the last blade of grass, had metamorphosed into an alien creature. There were huge new stands and realigned smoothed-out tracks, and the parade ring had turned itself round and changed entirely. To one side a whole village of striped medieval-looking tents was being erected, no doubt for sponsors and private parties at the big meeting due to be held in less than two weeks. It would be odd, I thought, to walk again through those gates. The long-ago course and the long-ago child were echoes in the wind. The here and now, the new world, would be yesterday’s ghost in its time.

I drove on. I drove past the ugly red lump of conspicuously signposted Porphyry Place and on into nice old Tewkesbury. I stopped by the River Severn and thought of Kenny’s washed-away brains, and I tried to sort out everything I’d seen, everything I’d heard and everything I’d remembered since I’d come back.

The conviction that gradually emerged seemed to have been staring me in the face all along, saying, “Here I am. Look at me.” It was theory, though, more than substance, so I could certainly
believe
but certainly not yet
prove
. Matching the foal’s DNA might be helpful. Porphyry Place might cough up a name. Villainous old Mackintosh essentially knew, as I did, things he couldn’t always call to mind.

Devising a revealing trap seemed the only solution, but I couldn’t so far think of one that would work.

I drove back to Thetford Cottage in the dark and swept Greg and Vicky out to drinks and dinner in the giddy heights of Cheltenham. Vicky, coquettish, said Belinda would be middle aged before herself. Greg smiled amiably. We talked about the wedding plans, which Ken had left to Belinda, and Belinda largely to her mother. There seemed an amazing amount to arrange. When I married Annabel, I thought, we would surely not need so much.