No Escape (44 page)

Angela came upon Lizzie, early on Saturday evening, at the bottom of the garden, finally weeping.

‘That’s good,’ she said quietly.

‘I’m not crying for me,’ Lizzie said. ‘Or for Christopher.’

‘For the children,’ Angela said.

‘God, yes,’ Lizzie said.

Her mother held out her arms, and Lizzie came into them.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘if Jack will bear this.’

‘I think he will,’ Angela said. ‘He is a remarkable person.’

The letters were not found for several more days. Lizzie agonized about whether or not to give the children theirs, since to both Edward and Jack, and probably Sophie too, they
would be clear proof of their father’s suicide, a fact which had not, to date, been discussed.

‘It’s too much,’ she said to Angela.

‘I think the boys already know, more or less,’ her mother said.

‘It’s too big a burden,’ Lizzie said. ‘We could invent something credible.’

‘More lies,’ Angela said, without condemnation. ‘Catch up with you eventually.’

Sophie, presented with her letter, appeared afraid to touch it, asked her mother to read it to her, then snatched it from Lizzie and ran sobbing to her room.

‘I’m not sure,’ Edward said, a bit later, to Lizzie, ‘if I’m going to read mine yet.’

‘When you’re ready,’ she said. ‘It’s up to you, my darling.’

‘Have you read yours?’ he asked her.

‘Yes, I have,’ Lizzie replied.

‘Was it awful?’ Edward asked.

‘No,’ she answered. ‘Not awful at all. Filled with love.’

‘Like Dad,’ he said.

Jack, who had by then emerged from his self-imposed isolation, found Lizzie in her study and offered her his letter.

‘I thought,’ he said, ‘it might help.’

‘Are you sure?’ Lizzie asked. ‘Isn’t it private?’

‘I think I’d like you to see it,’ Jack said. ‘If you don’t mind.’

Her tears came again while she was reading it, holding the paper between the two good fingers of her right hand.

‘It’s rather beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said when she’d finished. ‘Just very, very sad.’ She looked at Jack. ‘Did it help you at all?’

‘A bit.’

She had the sense, then, that he wanted, at last, to talk to her.

‘It’s terribly hard, isn’t it, my darling?’

Jack nodded, hesitated. ‘It’s all of it,’ he said.

She knew he was remembering the last night, waited for him to go on.

‘I keep feeling . . .’ He stopped.

‘What, my love?’

‘That it’s my fault.’

‘Of course it isn’t,’ Lizzie said, appalled.

‘But he left because of me.’ His mouth worked. ‘I made him go.’ He shut his eyes, and tears squeezed between his lashes and rolled down his cheeks. ‘If I
hadn’t gone for him like that . . .’

‘No.’ All Lizzie’s anger with Christopher returned full force. ‘Absolutely not, Jack, do you hear me?’

He opened his eyes. ‘But it’s true, Mum.’

‘It is
not
true,’ she told him, hating Clare Novak for depriving her of the ability to properly hold her son when he needed her most. ‘Jack, you have to listen to me on
this, you have to believe me.’

‘But don’t you blame me?’ he asked her.

‘How could I possibly blame you for trying to protect me?’ Lizzie picked up the letter again. ‘Even your father felt proud of you for it – he knew you were
right.’

‘But that’s only because of how I am,’ Jack said. ‘Because of
this
.’ He looked down at the chair, at his useless legs, and the tears were angrier now,
fiercer.

‘Please tell me you don’t mean that,’ Lizzie said quietly, all her pain gathering in a hot ball in her chest. ‘Jack,
please
, I mean it – tell me you know
that isn’t true.’

‘He said he supposed it wasn’t,’ Lizzie told her mother later that night. ‘But I think he was saying that just to make me feel better.’ She
paused. ‘I get the feeling that Jack wants to know, to really try to understand what happened that night.’

‘And all the other nights,’ Angela said quietly, still shattered by what Lizzie had finally, after so many years, shared with her about Christopher, her perfect son-in-law.

‘I won’t tell him that,’ Lizzie said decisively. ‘Not now, or ever.’

‘What about Edward?’

‘I don’t think Edward will want to know,’ Lizzie said.

‘But if he does?’

‘I don’t know.’ Lizzie paused. ‘Perhaps, if he asks me when he’s older.’ She looked at her mother. ‘Jack’s only ten years old,’ she said.
‘God knows he’s been robbed of so much already, has more than enough suffering ahead of him.’

‘I know,’ Angela said, gently.

‘I’ll be damned if I’ll allow every last fragment of childhood to be stolen from him,’ Lizzie said passionately.

‘No,’ Angela said.

‘You do agree with me, don’t you, on this?’ Lizzie asked.

‘Of course I do,’ Angela said.

Christopher’s funeral, on the third Monday in November, a day that dawned foggy, then cleared into an almost perfect late autumn afternoon, was small and private, but
deeply moving, having been arranged by Lizzie and Guy Wade, in consultation with the children. ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, chosen by Sophie; ‘Jerusalem’, by Jack,
because he knew his father had loved it; and a reading by Guy, of ‘Funeral Blues’ – Edward’s choice, because he and Christopher had both wept right through it in
Four
Weddings.

‘I expect you’ll be organizing a memorial service in a while,’ Dalia Weinberg said afterwards, back at the house.

‘I’m not sure yet,’ Lizzie said.

‘I think you may have to,’ Dalia pressed. ‘So many people are going to want a chance to pay their last respects.’

‘They’ll have to wait—’ Guy came to her aid ‘—depending on the children.’

Guy had been a rock to Lizzie after she had, at last, decided to confide in him over his brother’s weaknesses.

‘I remember him telling me once,’ he’d said one afternoon while Moira was rehearsing for a concert in London, ‘about some dope-induced romps at university. But I never
guessed for a second that he had any kind of real problem.’

‘It’s all just conjecture now, isn’t it?’ Lizzie said.

‘I do know one thing for certain,’ Guy said. ‘His love for you and the children was utterly real, Lizzie. Knowing he was hurting you must have tormented him.’

‘Maybe if I’d left him long ago,’ Lizzie said, ‘it might have been better for him.’

‘I’m not sure he could have stood that,’ Guy said. ‘And we both know why you felt you had to stay.’

‘Yet now the children have to go on without their father anyway.’

‘His fault,’ Guy said. ‘Not yours, Lizzie.’

‘I know,’ she said.

‘You do believe that, don’t you?’ Guy asked her.

‘Sometimes,’ Lizzie said, and smiled at him.

Ten days after the funeral, at lunchtime on a school day, Allbeury came to call. Others had visited in the past few days; Susan Blake and Howard Dunn, and the Szells, and a couple of the
children’s friends, and, on official business, Jim Keenan.

But Allbeury had stayed away till now.

They spoke, for a while, in the drawing room filled with memories of life with Christopher, about the children and how they were coping, and Lizzie told him it had been Jack’s eleventh
birthday at the weekend, and Allbeury said that he couldn’t begin to imagine how rough that must have been for him.

‘Beyond rough,’ Lizzie said.

‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘How are you doing?’

She raised her plastered arm and fingers. ‘Not easily.’

‘And otherwise?’

‘Thinking about the children helps a lot,’ she said.

He asked, a while later, how much she had been told about Clare Novak and the prequel to what had sent her plunging into that lift shaft.

‘Not too much,’ Lizzie said, ‘because I may have to testify against her – if they feel she’s fit to stand trial.’ She paused. ‘Detective Inspector
Keenan came to see me. With a woman detective.’

‘Helen Shipley?’

‘No,’ Lizzie said, with a wry smile. ‘No broken leg.’

She knew now, of course, how close her brush with death had been, knew at least a little more about the two women with whose murders Clare Novak had now been charged. And she knew, also just a
little, about Allbeury’s links with those women.

‘DI Keenan said you’d been trying to help them.’

‘Much good I did them,’ Allbeury said quietly.

‘He said they were both in marriages with violent men,’ Lizzie said. ‘Marriages they felt trapped in.’

‘That’s right.’

Like me
, she thought, but did not say.

‘He said he thought you were trying to help them escape.’ She paused. ‘He’s under the impression it’s something you’ve already done for other
women.’

The room was silent but for the faint ticking of the carriage clock on the mantel.

‘Why?’ She knew this was one of the questions she needed answered, if their friendship was to continue. ‘Why do you do that, Robin? Why do you
want
to do it?’

Allbeury sat for a moment or two, then took a breath. ‘A number of people have asked me that over the years,’ he said. ‘But you’re the first I’ve wanted to
answer.’

Lizzie said nothing, just waited.

‘My mother committed suicide when I was twelve,’ Allbeury said. ‘Because she felt she had no alternative. She thought she was beyond help, that because most people thought my
father a decent man – which he was not – no one would believe she had a right to be unhappy.’ He paused. ‘She had no real life of her own, no career, no money to speak of.
No escape.’

Still, Lizzie did not speak.

‘She told me all about it in a letter. She left me feeling that I ought to have known, to have found a way to stop her, help her.’

‘You were twelve,’ Lizzie said. ‘You couldn’t have helped.’

‘I know that now, but not then.’ He paused. ‘It did some damage, I suppose, perhaps even stopped me marrying. I’m not like my father, thankfully, but that hasn’t
prevented me from being afraid I might possess the potential to wound, as he did.’ He shrugged. ‘It did some good, too, I hope. Years after my mother’s death, after I’d
become successful, made more money than I needed and learned a few things about power and influence, I found myself in a position to try and help women like her.’

Lizzie sat very still for a second and then said: ‘Like me.’

‘In one sense, perhaps just a little like you.’

‘Is that why you befriended me, Robin?’ she asked. ‘Did you think I might want to escape?’

‘I thought it, yes,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t what drew me to you.’

‘Are you?’ Lizzie asked. ‘Drawn to me?’

‘Very much so,’ Allbeury replied.

‘I can’t help wondering,’ Lizzie said, ‘what you think of me, for staying in my marriage.’ Her head was aching, and she rubbed her right temple with her two good
fingers. ‘I have enough money to be independent. I could have left.’

‘You stayed because of the children,’ he said.

‘I did,’ Lizzie agreed. ‘And see where it’s got them now.’

‘You couldn’t have known,’ Allbeury said.

‘Couldn’t I?’ she asked him painfully. ‘Clare Novak told me she’d killed other women “
like me
—” ’ that phrase again ‘—and
isn’t this what she meant?’

‘Clare’s very sick,’ Allbeury said. ‘Very disturbed.’

‘Of course,’ Lizzie agreed. ‘But wasn’t it surely always on the cards that my children would find out the truth about their father one day, regardless of my
lies?’

‘Maybe,’ Allbeury said. ‘But you were only hoping to protect them from the pain for as long as possible.’

‘I think,’ Lizzie said, ‘I’ve been a dreadful coward.’

She waited until they were in the entrance hall as he prepared to leave before she asked one of the other questions gnawing at her.

‘Why were those things about us on your computer, Robin? For Clare to hack into, to steal?’

‘I did some research into you,’ Allbeury said simply, ‘because I liked you, and you intrigued me, and I’m a curious man, and I wanted to know more about you.’ He
paused. ‘And then I found that I was worried about you. No other, more sinister reason.’

‘What about Christopher?’

‘That was different,’ Allbeury admitted. ‘I’d sensed that something was amiss with you both, and, frankly, I suddenly realized that I didn’t trust him.’

Lizzie said nothing, still too shaken.

‘I’m so sorry, Lizzie,’ he said, softly. ‘I know very well that if I’d minded my own business, Clare might scarcely have known of your existence.’

She had to wait another moment before she felt steady enough to speak.

‘If I hadn’t asked you that,’ she said, ‘would you have told me?’

‘I think so,’ he said, ‘in time.’ His smile was small, wry. ‘Maybe only because I knew it would probably all come out in due course, anyway.’

‘That’s honest of you, at least.’

‘I suspect,’ Allbeury said, ‘that if I weren’t honest with you, Lizzie, I could have no hope of any long-term friendship with you.’

Lizzie looked straight into his face.

‘You’re right about that,’ she said.

Allbeury went to visit Shipley – still on sick leave – took her flowers, pleased by the warmth of her smile when she accepted them and somewhat touched by the
rather embarrassed way she limped about her small, chaotic flat hunting out a vase in which to put them. Over a pot of tea and chocolate finger biscuits, he learned from her that John Bolsover had
now been released, but that, however devoutly Shipley and Lynne’s sister, Pam Wakefield, might hope for him to be rearrested for his true crimes against Lynne, that would not now happen.

‘I gather,’ she told him, ‘he had a fairly grim time inside.’

‘Some small comfort for Lynne’s sister,’ Allbeury said.

‘She says she’s going to go on keeping a close eye on the kids,’ Shipley said. ‘And at least, from what she’s told me, it seems he never laid a finger on
them.’

He asked her what she had heard regarding Clare Novak.

‘Is that why you came?’ Shipley asked. ‘I did wonder.’

‘Not at all,’ Allbeury said. ‘I rather enjoyed our spats, your conspicuous dislike of me and your tenacity.’