The Convenience of Lies (15 page)

The
revelations in Hoare’s memo would inevitably become known. McCall didn’t want that so he’d only one course of action. He ripped out all six pages of Hoare’s notes and pocketed the postcard, too. Then he blew out the lamp and closed the caravan door behind him. No one must see him.

He
stumbled through the shadows towards the Morgan and could hear music - that piano again and the happy, discordant singing of those who would always be children. McCall now knew the face of one of them.

He’d
just seen her picture, a photograph of a little girl in a wheelchair clutched in her father’s bloody hand at the end of this, the most remorseful of days.

Twenty-Five

Hester leaned back in her armchair by the Aga, slippers off, feet on a stool. The hall clock struck midnight and the soft echo of its chimes carried to the far corners of the silent house.

This
was a favoured time, her chance to audit that day’s words and deeds against her shamanistic code for living. It was not always easy to match her own ideals. But in Ruby, Hester knew her predestined purpose had been revealed.

She
was to provide sanctuary for this singular child and protect her from other kids by home schooling. By doing this, Hester could also foster Ruby’s artistic development. From the moment they met, a bond seemed to exist between them. Why else would Ruby have taken to her so readily and moved from all she had known with hardly a complaint? Their lives were ordained to intersect - Ruby orphaned by tragedy; Hester beginning to understand what all her days of haphazard wanderings about the earth had been for.

She
thought back to her own beginnings in Shaniko, a huddle of wind-bleached shacks on the high plains of Oregon where her family grazed sheep to survive. She’d drifted south - to California and beyond, to communes and ashrams, jobs and lovers, most now beyond recall. All those meaningless, childless years, searching for something no god or cult could provide.

Then
to the Welsh borders, drawn by that unknowable instinct to return, a memory of a song or a story passed down from those who’d left long ago, left their cottages to fall to ruin stone by stone beneath those green and shrouded hills.

But
in this homecoming and in Ruby, Hester could at last see pattern and reason to her existence.

It
was late and she was tired. She made her way up the back stairs to the bedroom Ruby had chosen to share with her. Ruby, so slight, so vulnerable, gave out an involuntary sigh as she entered. Ludo stirred, too. He looked up from Ruby’s bed, his eyes saucer-wide and yellow in the momentary spit of light from the landing.

Hester
leaned over and kissed Ruby’s forehead as a mother might and was asleep herself soon after.

*

Lexie’s wan face worried Hester at breakfast next day. McCall, unshaven and sleep deprived, was no oil painting, either. He’d arrived home in the early hours and spent the night in a guest room so Lexie wasn’t disturbed. At least he was coming out of his depression by working.

Ruby
sat across the kitchen table from them, eating toast and managing her trick of being physically close yet appearing to be somewhere else in her head. She always looked serious, as if about to ask a question though she rarely did. But it’d be a mistake to think Ruby wasn’t absorbing all she saw and heard.

McCall
knew this so suggested she give Ludo his breakfast outside after she finished her own. He’d no wish to frighten her with what he had to tell Lexie and Hester.

As
Ruby left for the yard, Lexie winced and put a hand to her groin as if in pain. McCall asked what was wrong.

‘Just
a bit of discomfort downstairs. I’ll take something for it in a minute.’

‘Lexie,
you must see a doctor,’ Hester said. ‘You can’t put this off any longer.’

‘There’s
a morning surgery in Ludlow,’ McCall said. ‘I’ll drive you there.’

Hester
brought Lexie a glass of water and two painkillers. McCall waited till she’d taken them, anxious to have their attention for what he was going to say.

‘You
need to know that I’ve dug up more background on Ruby’s case,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to alarm you but what I’m finding out bothers me.’

‘How
do you mean, Mac?’ Hester said.

‘Well,
for a start there are people making discreet inquiries about Ruby, like wanting to know where she is now.’

‘You
don’t mean those monsters who took her in the first place?’

‘No,
what’s strange is that these people are in positions of authority which makes what they’re doing harder to understand.’

‘But
the police know that Ruby’s safe with us. We’ve told them.’

‘These
people aren’t the police, Hester.’

‘I
don’t understand. Who are they?’

‘I’m
not entirely sure yet.’

‘Then
we’ve got to tell that detective on Ruby’s case.’

‘Benwick?
That’s the queerest thing. He’s now gone missing himself and the same people who’re asking questions about Ruby are looking for him.’

‘Does
all this mean Ruby’s in some sort of new danger?’

‘We
need to make sure one of you is with her all the time,’ McCall said. ‘I’ve got to find Benwick because he’s the guy with all the answers.’

Lexie
listened without comment till then but now faced McCall, almost resentfully.

‘I
kept telling you Etta was warning us about something,’ she said. ‘But you wouldn’t take any notice, wouldn’t believe me but everything you’ve just said goes to prove it.’

‘What
I said was a few tarot cards stuck on a wall wasn’t legal evidence of anything.’

‘No?
Well, what’s this evidence of, then?’

She
took a tiny screw of paper from her handbag with the words Mr Ginger written on it and told them how she’d found it in an ice cube from Etta’s ’fridge.

‘I’ve
no idea why but she must have been really scared of this man,’ Lexie said. ‘No doubt it’ll sound ridiculous and New Age to you, Mac, but Etta was trying to freeze this man out of her life in her own way, in a way she believed in.’

‘So
you’re suggesting what?’

‘That
my sister killed herself because of whatever hold this man had over her.’

Nothing
was said by McCall or Hester which might deride Lexie or her dead sister. Suicide was rarely a rational act any more than leaving a name in an ice cube. But a sense of unease and conflict settled in the room. Hester sought to defuse it by saying she’d taken Ruby to Ludlow Castle the previous day.

‘I
tried ever so gently to get her talking about whatever had happened to her while she was away.’

‘And
did she?’ Lexie said.

‘No,
she still won’t open up. The nearest she came to admitting anything was saying she couldn’t see her unicorn so he must have run away and gone back home, too.’

‘Was
she upset about not seeing her unicorn?’

‘No,
not at all. And what’s also interesting is that Ruby’s stopped drawing castles now and all she’s drawing is people’s faces… just faces, all the time.’

*

Lexie walked across the surgery car park to where McCall was waiting in the Morgan. Her ashy-grey hair blew about in a wind bearing down from the summit of Cleehill to nudge scraps of litter along the shuts and narrows between Ludlow’s medieval streets. If nothing else, it brought a hint of autumn colour to her pale cheeks.

‘So
what did the doctor say?’

‘Wants
me to see a gynaecologist.’

‘Because
of the bleeding?’

‘Yes…
says it’s not good. He’s saying I need an operation… sooner, not later.’

‘But
you’ve been having smear tests, haven’t you?’

‘Whenever
I can, yes.’

‘Don’t
say you’ve missed some. Is this why it’s not been picked up before now?’

‘You
mustn’t nag me, McCall… please. It’ll all be all right.’

Lexie
withdrew into herself on the drive back to Garth Hall. McCall wondered if the doctor had actually used the C word and she was in shock - or denial. How quickly, and without warning, can life seem frighteningly unreal.

McCall
knew it from Namibia and other conflicts - that primitive fear of an unseen enemy, the possibility of dying. The mind closes down of its own accord to disassociate itself from the bullets above and the bodies below. It is as if it were happening far away and to someone else. Maybe this was how Lexie was feeling.

McCall
couldn’t ever fit Lexie - that most vibrantly alive of lovers - into any notion of mortality. Even when he looked at her now, he saw only the mesmerising girl with the dancer’s legs and barley-coloured hair, in that cold, Cambridge street all those years ago.

Age
and illness were but rumours then, places far beyond the horizon where they themselves would never tread. Yet the hours pass, seasons change and the tides carry us to the ends of our earth. And what was once so distant comes ever closer.

*

Supper was early and subdued - onion soup with bread Hester baked herself. Lexie asked McCall not to be offended but she wanted to sleep alone for the next few nights. He understood and they walked upstairs together. Each held to the other at the bedroom door. Lexie’s body felt taut, as if everything was being held in, not least her tears. They kissed then McCall was left alone on the darkened landing.

But
at the far end, silhouetted by a wall light behind her, Ruby stood motionless in her pyjamas, casting a long shadow on the polished oak boards between them. McCall went to her.

‘Are
you all right, Ruby?’

‘I’ve
brushed my teeth.’

‘That’s
good. I’m going to brush mine in a minute.’

‘Some
of your teeth aren’t straight.’

‘That’s
true. They’re not.’

‘Hester’s
breath doesn’t smell very nice sometimes.’

‘That’s
why we all have to brush our teeth, isn’t it?’

‘I
can hear people talking in this house.’

‘You
mean when you’re in bed and we’re all downstairs?’

‘No,
in the night. There are voices in the air, voices talking to me.’

‘And
what are they saying?’

‘I
don’t understand them but it’s voices, all right.’

‘All
old houses are like that, Ruby. The timbers creak in the wind and make little noises. It’s nothing to be afraid of.’

‘I
know that, silly. But these are voices.’

He
switched on the lights along the landing and took her into the bedroom. Hester had moved a Pembroke table by the window where Ruby could sit and draw. On it were her pencils and blocks of paper. He asked if he could look at her work.

‘I
don’t care. It’s night time.’

McCall
still found it almost impossible to believe a child could recall such minutely observed details of a building or a face just from memory. Yet he saw her near perfect representations of Garth Hall - front and back elevations, complex roof, dentil mouldings. She’d also drawn Hester and Lexie and people met during trips out.

Ludo
came purring in. He jumped on Ruby’s bed and settled down by her feet. McCall mused on what enigmas they both were, how impossible it was to understand what was going on in either of their heads.

He
would’ve gone back to the kitchen still thinking this had he not noticed the table drawer slightly open. Inside - and as if to be kept private - was a newly started drawing book. Ruby was almost asleep so he flipped through this one, too.

And
as he did, so he had to sit on her bed at the sight of what Ruby depicted - a boy and girl, neither older than her, each naked and pornographically revealed as if posing in some grotesque life class.

She
couldn’t possibly have seen such depravity before her disappearance. This picture was of childhood betrayed, innocence defiled. The inescapable conclusion was that Ruby must have been a witness to - and maybe even a victim of - events she described in the only way she knew how. But where had this happened and for whose perverted gratification?

And
equally puzzling - how had Ruby escaped from those responsible for such wickedness?

He
turned the final few pages. And there was someone he recognised immediately. It was Detective Inspector Benwick, intense eyes, long floppy hair, open-necked shirt. McCall stared at it for a full minute, increasingly confused. He wanted to wake Ruby and demand that she tell him where she’d seen Benwick - and what had he been doing when she did so.

He
then looked at her last drawing - the only one where she’d added colour. It showed the hard, sneering face of a middle-aged man with cropped, gingery hair. But what stood out most was the fierce red birthmark she’d put on the left side of his neck.

Seeing
this, McCall went across the landing to his writing room to re-read Hoare’s memo. And there it was, a reference to the man with a wine stain birthmark who’d spied on Hoare and Inglis when they lunched at Rules.