The Candle Man (9 page)

‘P
rovided there are no problems, no complications, I would say he could be discharged by the end of this week. But you must understand: Mr
Argyll suffered a severe blow to his head. Beneath the skull, a degree of haemorrhaging occurred which—’

‘Hemmer . . . ?’

‘Internal bleeding, Miss Kelly. The blood wasn’t able to find a way out and was thus causing a build up of pressure inside his cranium . . . his skull. It’s this pressure that
I believe has caused significant damage to his brain.’

Dr Hart could see the poor young woman was hoping to hear a more positive prognosis than he was giving; an assurance that the man’s memories would all come flooding back fully-formed in
one moment of blinding epiphany. But the truth was there were absolutely no assurances he could make. He’d seen enough cracked and caved in skulls to know that the damaged brain behaved in no
predictable way. A man might receive a tap on the head and be reduced to a vegetative state for the rest of his life; another might be bludgeoned until his head looked like a misshapen potato and
yet still walk away proudly sporting stitches that would one day make a scar worth boasting about.

‘I’m sorry, my dear, there really is no knowing for sure how much of a recovery he will make. Or how soon. If, indeed, ever.’

‘But will he be able to walk properly again?’

John could manage a stilted shuffle. His right leg seemed to operate perfectly normally, but his left appeared to exhibit signs of partial paralysis.

Dr Hart pressed his lips together. ‘My hope is that it will get better as his mind knits the damage that has been done. From my experience, the harder he works to recover, the better the
chances are for him that he will make a full recovery, in time.’

She sucked in a breath. ‘Then I’ll have to be a hard taskmaster,’ she said with a firm nod.

Dr Hart smiled encouragement. ‘That’s the idea.’

He looked out of the window of his consultation room at the ward across the passageway. He could see Mr Argyll playing chess with another patient. ‘So he’s an American? Is that
right? Is he visiting London? A business trip perhaps?’ The exotic twang of the former colonies was certainly somewhere there in the calm, deep drawl of his voice.

‘Uh . . . yes, that’s right. Yes, he is American.’

‘How did you both meet?’

Mary Kelly’s cheeks prickled with crimson. She looked flustered. ‘I . . . well . . . it’s . . .’

Dr Hart waved his hand. ‘I’m sorry. Very nosy of me.’

‘No, honestly, that’s all right. We met in . . . Covent Garden.’

He smiled. ‘I see.’

He suspected Matron was right about one thing: Kelly was a working girl. No doubt about it. It was in her diction. So careful and deliberate in the way she talked. But every
now and then she let slip and missed a consonant, or dropped an ‘h’. A girl quite obviously working very hard to disguise it.

Matron’s instinct at the beginning of the week was to suspect this girl was on
the make
somehow. Some scoundrel looking to hoodwink the unfortunate chap. She’d told him about
a story she’d once read in one of the penny papers about a scurrilous housemaid who’d hoodwinked her way into the will of a senile old millionaire, convinced him he had no living
relations or heirs, that he was entirely alone. With a cautionary cocking of an eyebrow, she’d alluded that perhaps ‘that girl who keeps visiting our Mr Argyll’ might be up to
similar tricks. But then there was no one quite so cold-hearted and cynical as Matron. And even she was now prepared to admit that perhaps she’d probably misjudged the poor girl.

Dr Hart liked to think he had a fairly good measure of people; after all, he met and fixed up all manner of people here who drifted into St Bartholomew’s at every hour of night and day.
And Mary Kelly, to his eye, looked very much like a young woman hopelessly in love.

And why not? It irked him so that his parents’ stuffy generation still invested so much stock in a person’s class. That a person should be condemned to never better their station
because of an accident of birth, an accident of accent and diction. What with Mr Argyll being an American, he was certain something as old-fashioned and uniquely English as
class
meant
absolutely nothing to the man. Dr Hart sometimes rather fancied he’d be more at home in a country like America, where a person was a measure of what they actually achieved rather than merely
being the sum of their manners and bearing.

An American gentleman and a working-class English girl in love? Good grief, the world was full of far more unlikely things.

‘I suspect you will make a first-rate nurse for our patient when you get him home, Miss Kelly. First-rate.’

‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘I’ll have him back to his old self, so I will.’

‘I’m certain you will. He seems a very resilient gentleman, does Mr Argyll. And, I suspect he’s a jolly lucky man to have someone like you to care for him.’

Mary sipped tea from the cup. Fine china and a slender handle that allowed only a couple of fingers through its eye. She spread her little finger out, like the other ladies in
the tea shop were doing.

What now?

Dr Hart thought John was almost ready to be discharged from the ward. He’d even asked her if Mr Argyll’s home had suitable access for a wheelchair, as initially he would need
one.

She’d nodded, but in actual fact her mind had been racing. The lodging house? Her room? No. She couldn’t take John back to that squalor. Even his befuddled mind would instantly work
out that they couldn’t possibly have been living together there.

A hotel? She had the money.

No, that wouldn’t do. She’d let slip to John they had a
home
together. A foolish bloody slip. But there it was; she’d said ‘home’. She had only two or three
days left now and then they were going to discover there was no home, that she was an imposter, a charlatan.

I should run. Right now.

She toyed with that idea as she carefully forked at the cake on the plate before her. She could take that money of John’s and disappear. It was back home, under her bed. She could go back,
grab it and run away. Another city, another country, another life. But she dismissed the notion without even being sure why.

Yes . . . why?

She fished for an answer to that question. And the answer came back surprisingly easily.

‘He needs me,’ she uttered softly, then immediately scoffed at her own fuzzy-headed sentimentality.

He’s not your child, your lover, or your husband. He’s NOT your responsibility!

Mary chided herself for being soft and foolish. She should have been long gone by now. Like that starling, swooping off to some far-off hot country. He was a grown man and whoever had jumped
him, beaten him, knifed him,
they
were the ones who should carry any burden of guilt. Not her. Anyway, she had to look out for herself, since no one else was going to. She was in the
position she was in – whoring, thieving in order to pay the rent on that piss-stinking room – because she’d been stupid and naïve enough to let her heart rule her head.

That wonderful plan of hers. That plan that seemed like a lifetime ago. As it happened, she’d found work not as a piano tutor, as she’d hoped, but as an au pair. A nanny for a
wealthy family – Mr and Mrs Frampton-Parker and their two boys – living in a beautiful, crescent-shaped drive in Holland Park. Such a lovely place. They had another home in Italy they
went to in the winter months. Six months abroad, then returned for spring and summer. They were
that
kind of rich.

Mr Frampton-Parker, a man fifteen years older than her, married to a woman ten years older than himself. Quite clearly a marriage for money. His eyes wandered; of course they did. And
they’d very quickly rested on her. Eighteen then, just turning nineteen. Still a child, she realised now. So she had wholly believed him – stupidly believed him – when he said he
was going to announce to his wife that he had fallen out of love with her and was going to instigate a divorce. That they would be free to be together and could live just fine on his half of the
divorce settlement.

But then, of course, one day not too long after they’d ‘started’, his wife caught them out. A careless tryst in a dark corner of the large house and the man, in a blind panic,
had turned savagely on Mary. Blamed her for everything, for flirting with him, throwing herself at him. That he’d succumbed to a moment of weakness in the face of Mary’s relentless
campaign to steal him away from his wife.

She wasn’t going to get any work like that again. She wasn’t ever going to get a job like that again. It was the need for a reference that finished her chances. Even chasing jobs as
a shop girl, they wanted to know her life story. She did actually manage to get work on a stall in the Covent Garden market for a while, but the money wasn’t enough. Nowhere near enough. The
other girls who worked on the stalls there lived with their families still; their money contributed to a family pot. Mary’s money was all she had.

And that was where her slippery slope began.

She placed a forkful of a gloriously light sponge topped with thick cream and jam into her mouth and savoured it with eyes firmly closed. Luxury she hadn’t enjoyed in over four years. Not
since she’d packed her bag and been escorted out of that house by the Frampton-Parkers’ cook and valet.

I could make a home for us.

Mary opened her eyes. The idea had popped into her head from nowhere. But she could; she actually, really could. The Frampton-Parkers left their home for Italy at the beginning of September,
didn’t they? Like bloody clockwork. Every year. It would be closed for the winter, the furniture dressed in dust sheets, the window drapes drawn. And it remained like that until late
February, a week before they returned, when their staff came back and dusted, cleaned and aired the property, and fired-up the coke-burning boiler in the basement ready for their return.

She knew Mr and Mrs Frampton-Parker left the keys to their home with a property letting agent in the hope that a convenient and ‘acceptable’ short-term tenant could be found. But
they bemoaned the fact that the agent had been unsuccessful thus far in generating some income from their empty house.

Mary smiled.
I really could
.

She knew the house well. She knew where she could break in without alerting anyone. Or better, if she had the brass nerves to do it, she could walk right into the letting agent’s office
and place six months’ rent right there in his hand. He wouldn’t know who she was – the scurrilous au pair who’d ‘tempted’ Mr Frampton-Parker. That was three
years ago, anyway. So long as all the money was up front and she appeared to be suitably well-mannered.

I can do that.

There was something in that idea that provided a unified solution to variously conflicting dilemmas. Yes, she could run with this money – but she realised she didn’t want to. Her
wiser, older self rationalised that quite reasonably: ‘John’ might just be a businessman, as Dr Hart had suggested. A businessman with significantly
more
money back in America.
Who knows? A business empire of some sort? Factories? Warehouses? Ships? Her wiser, older self calmly explained that she didn’t want to run because there was, quite possibly, much more money
to be made from this poor lost soul than the five thousand she’d found in his satchel.

But another part of her also couldn’t help suspecting she didn’t want to run because, well, truth be told, she was rather fond of John Argyll. There was something about him. A
gentleness. A kindness. An innocence.

Oh, Mary. Get a grip!

She looked at the sponge cake, her appetite suddenly gone. Her stomach lurched and churned with butterflies. Nerves. If she was going to do this, she was going to need to be smart and calm, and
not play around with childish fantasies and dreams of romance.

John’s my investment. Nothing more.

‘T
his has become very dangerous. Very dangerous indeed.’

The others present nodded in agreement as they watched the crackling fire in the grate send phantoms dancing across the oak panelled walls of the Barclay Room.

‘George, how the hell did this happen?’

Warrington stirred in the winged-back armchair, worn leather creaking beneath him. ‘I used a local thug to deal with the matter. Local and not particularly well-connected. Awful scoundrel
wouldn’t have been missed by anyone.’

‘But now this scoundrel appears to be
blackmailing
us?’

Warrington shifted uncomfortably under the gaze of the others. ‘He claimed to have something in his possession. A memento, a keepsake. Some sort of damned locket. I would have given our
chaps the nod to . . . deal with him then and there. But, I just thought we need to be sure if he’s telling the truth or not. He could be trying to play us for silly buggers. Or he really
could have found something.’