The Love Letter (59 page)

She now felt so repulsive she scuttled back towards the bed like a slimy toad to its familiar rock.

‘In that case, perhaps I’ll make a couple of calls instead,’ she told him fractiously, voice croaking ever-deeper. ‘Do you know where my phone ended up?’

‘Probably still in your car with the rest of your stuff.’

She felt further aggrieved that for all his immaculate bedside manners, he hadn’t thought to bring in her bag. It was no wonder she had to resort to pilfering clothes from the wardrobes when her own personal items were denied her. She was experiencing that unpleasant sense of being kept prisoner again. She longed to escape, but didn’t want to appear ungrateful, and after yesterday’s escapade she was acutely aware that she had the stamina of a gnat.

‘I’ll go and have a look for you.’ He loped off.

She watched him leave, feeling ungrateful. Heaving herself out of bed again, she went into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. Her reflection stared back more wraith-like than ever, her filthy hair a limp mass of greasy rats tails tipped by frizzy ringlets after all Francis’s brushing.

He’d been so attentive, she thought wretchedly, and so forgiving. She should be indebted to him for nursing her through illness, not itching to run away like this. Kissing him had been blissfully nostalgic, after all. Perhaps the magic was still there. There had been moments in recent days when she’d felt genuinely adoring. They shared so much history. Now that she was getting stronger at last, she could try to work things through with him. If she felt clean and healthy again she might start to feel sexy too.

Unlike the window in the bedroom which looked out across the lawns to the sea, the bathroom window was angled, overlooking the courtyards. She could see the converted coach-house that now housed the festival offices, a hive of activity this close to the event, with figures racing around behind the windows, white vans galore parked outside and huge banners propped up against the walls ready to be raised above the marquees when they were erected.

There was her little silver Tolly car still abandoned on the cobbles where she’d parked it a fortnight ago, horribly dented from its prang with the Farcombe gatepost.

She saw Francis walk up to it, so handsome and kind. He peered inside, kicked a tyre, and walked away.

She then cleaned her teeth for a long time, wondering if kissing was fate’s way of keeping your tongue tied.

To her shame, she could only think about kissing Byrne and how amazing it had felt, knowing that it had blown her away so much she was utterly spoiled for Francis now.

‘Your car keys are locked inside,’ he reported back a few minutes later, sitting back on the bed beside her and drinking a cup of strong Arabic coffee, the smell of which made her both crave caffeine and feel queasy. ‘I can break in if you like.’

‘No! I love Tolly.’ She was Don LaFontaine with laryngitis now, deep voice crackling its way out. ‘I’ll get out the AA or something.’

He shrugged and sipped his coffee. ‘What happened to your old red car by the way? I thought you loved that like no other?’

Legs stared at him wide-eyed, then rasped: ‘Don’t you know?’

He laughed fondly, eyebrows lifting questioningly. ‘All I know is that you kept banging on about how much you loved it, then you turned up here close to death in a racy silver number. You are
so
contrary, darling Legs. Marriage will never be dull.’

She was too shocked to speak, then started coughing too much to speak.

He rubbed her back, reaching for the Galpodine bottle. ‘Poor darling, you must let your body recover. I have to drive into Barnstaple this morning to meet with the insurers. There’s some fuck up about public liability for the festival. Then I have to – well, there’s other business to attend to.’ He looked strangely shifty. ‘Will you be OK while I’m gone? Do you want anything to read?’

‘The letter I wrote to you,’ she managed to splutter.

Laughing fondly, as though she’d just kitten-clawed him with playful ironic wit, he gave her a plate of fruit and a copy of James Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Then he kissed her on the lips, breathing ‘Stay here. No dressing up this time. Don’t let me down.’

Legs’ squeaky clean teeth stayed clamped together as his lips formed a seal with hers.

Her hand was under the pillow before he’d even closed the door, extracting the leather notebook. She was going to go and see her mother and Hector, and she was going to get some answers. If she happened to see a basset hound on the way, she’d follow it wherever it went.

As soon as she heard the Land Rover start up in the courtyard, Legs raided the moth-bally wardrobes again, this time pulling out a long olive green velvet dress which was outrageously Maid Marian but at least looked warm, and a man’s black tailcoat with frayed piping and a few trails of party streamers still clinging from its wide shoulders. She slipped the little notebook into a pocket.

Putting them on over her nightie, she stole out of the room and along the landing to the back stairs. She still had bare feet, but had already planned ahead and, sure enough, lined up by the gun room door were several pairs of sturdy walking boots. She stepped into the warmest looking pair. Then, stealthy as a daylight raiding fox, she crept outside and stole across the gravel into the topiary maze, where she ducked and dived behind the cover of clipped green geometry to the parterre, dashing across that, through the rose garden, behind the kitchen garden walls and over the rails past the lake until she finally reached the safety of the woods, Spywood in her sights.

When Legs finally trailed along the track to Spywood, ragged with exhaustion, she found her mother’s little car missing and the cottage locked up.

She knelt on the doorstep and felt like weeping. It had taken every ounce of energy to get there. Her chest was roaring, and coughs ripped though her like machine gun fire. She could hardly breathe. Her legs were wrung-out rags, her head mush. And her mother wasn’t here.

Worse of all, the spare door key was missing from its hiding place. Lucy was always mislaying hers and borrowing the spare, then forgetting to put it back. It drove the rest of the family mad.

On behalf of the rest of the family, Legs was now very mad indeed, and very frightened. She didn’t want to go back to the hall, but she had nowhere else to turn. She could hardly ramble down to the village – even supposing she had the energy to walk another mile, which right now she didn’t – and wander into the Book Inn wearing one of Poppy’s old ball dresses and Hector’s tailcoat asking to be saved. This was Francis’s home turf, his future life. She’d make a total fool out of him and herself by making a scene. It wasn’t as though he’d done anything wrong. She’d been nursed lovingly in the past few days, after all, waited on hand and foot, adored and idolised by the man the entire village wanted her to get back together with. She should have no complaints. She had to see this through like a grown up.

But Legs didn’t want to be a grown-up. She wanted her mum.

She buried her face in her shaking hands for a moment, fighting to breathe. Then she remembered the old-fashioned red call box in the village. She’d phone Daisy! Of anybody, Daisy would understand and help. But what was the number? She and Will were bound to be ex-directory. And Legs had no money to even call directory enquiries to find out.

She groped in the tailcoat pockets and found a clutch of raffle tickets, an expensive petrol lighter and several bassoon reeds, along with a roll of many thousands of Italian lire, which told her just how long it had been since the coat had been in active service. There was also the little leather notebook.

She flipped through it again, waiting for her lungs to stop burning. Page after page of codes floated past, all in neat columns. There was something vaguely familiar about the numbers and abbreviations. Then it struck her. This was a betting system, a record of every horse Hector had laid, its odds and its outcome. In that distinctive spiky hand, he had made a note of the name, date, course, handicap, race odds and initials of the jockey along with his stake and outcome. The sums involved were astonishing, seldom less than five thousand, often ten times that. He bet mostly on favourites and he often saw his money returned which, given the sums involved, meant doubling or trebling the investment. Far from being a hapless gambler, he’d made a decent profit. There was a final column on the far right of each page which he’d only filled in after a win and was made up of acronyms she didn’t understand, ICA, BDRS and NYO amongst them; she assumed it had to be something to do with the ground or whether the horse ran the race from the front or behind.

The record stopped abruptly with an entry that read
Thelonious Monk, 15/02,W’canton, 2mH, 10st, 10/11, BK £75K. Fell.
There were no more entries after that.

She stared at it for a long time. Byrne’s father’s fall had been at Wincanton. BK had to be Brooke Kelly. If so, Hector had bet on him to win; he couldn’t have had anything to do with fixing the race for the opposite outcome; it was his biggest cash bet to date.

Looking back through the list of horse names, she let out a snort of recognition. His system was very simple. Not only did he bet on favourites, but they all had a musical or jazz association in their name – Bass Clef, Gershwin’s City, Bebop, Scott Joplin, Trumpet Solo and so on. No wonder he’d placed such a huge lump on
Thelonious Monk, a genius of jazz improvisation and one of Hector’s all-time musical heroes.

She closed the book and pressed its spine to her lips, knowing this changed everything. If Byrne had really grown up believing that Hector was a part of the gambling ring that was responsible for his father’s accident, he had to want reparation. They had already had one furious row, and now Hector was once again on the rampage. If their paths crossed, it could spell disaster.

Pocketing the book once more, she pulled out the lighter and sparked it, so amazed when it burst into flame that she almost dropped it. She flicked its lid shut disconsolately, realising she would have to go back to the hall. With any luck, nobody would have noticed she’d been gone this time. It seemed imperative that she avoided alerting suspicion; she’d stolen the notebook, after all, and asking Poppy seemed the only way to find out where Byrne was. All paths led back to Farcombe Hall.

She should be grateful Francis hadn’t tagged her ankle, she reflected, the feeling of being a fugitive returning. Chewing her nails in angst, not realising the lighter was still aflame in her hand, she almost burned off her nose.

She knew she had to start back again if she stood any chance of her flit going unnoticed.

But still she waited on the Spywood doorstep, hoping to hear her mother’s car engine on the track. Another half an hour, maybe more, passed. She had no watch to judge the time. She’d never asked for it back. Time had stopped mattering this week.

‘Go back,’ she groaned to herself, raking her foul, greasy hair. ‘You have to face this.’

When she stood up, her legs felt like burned-out tapers. In the depth of the woods with no sunlight on her, she couldn’t stop shivering. Instead of retracing her steps, she took the lower path through the deepest old forestry of Spywood to call past on an old friend.

There it was, the gnarled old oak with a trunk as broad as a
double bed, shaped like a tuning fork at its first intersection, with a perfect seat for a first kiss, then higher up on the left, a cradle of equally weighted starfish branches for the most democratic of secret friendship pact meetings; on its right, two parallel branches hidden deep within the canopy of foliage where young lovers had once traded truths.

Standing at its base, she sank the knuckle of her forefinger into the gouged outline of the heart that encircled hers and Francis’s initials.

A branch snapped behind her. Something panted.

Pressed motionless against the hefty trunk, she watched as a figure moved closer, a long-eared, short-legged dog breathing hard at his heels as it snorted into the undergrowth. Byrne was pulling up fallen branches and gathering them under one arm, his ragged grey T-shirt covered in bark chips and lichen. His wide shoulders twisted down as he pulled the dry timber from the bracken and bilberry, separating the rotten, louse-pulped wood from recent fallen branches.

He moved closer, focused on his task, head bowed in concentration.

Legs stayed utterly still, heart racing as fast as a wren’s. A weak sun was threading dusty amber fingers through the woodland canopy, barricading the undergrowth between them with tightly focused light-beams that she felt sure would set off a loud alarm as soon as he crossed them. But cross them he did, closer and closer, crouching and sorting.

Then, inevitably, he saw her, spotting the boots first – those borrowed clodhopping size eight crag-climbers. He studied her boots for a long time.

Thud, thud, the firewood fell from under his arm as he straightened up. Thud, thud thud-thudthudthudthud.

Up his eyes trailed, past the mothball velvet the same muted green as the bracken, the frayed tailcoat, to the pale, anxious face.

Very slowly, he tilted his head, his big dark eyes shifting right for
a moment, thinking hard, muttering under his breath, ‘Now I’m really bloody seeing things.’

She opened her mouth to point out that she was real, then closed it again, remembering she had two-week filthy hair, greasy skin, a face as grey as a gull’s wing and a voice like Linda Blair possessed by Satan. She suddenly wondered if it might be better to stay quiet and let him think she was some sort of apparition? This way, she could hand over the notebook before floating off into the trees in a mystical, willow-the-wisp fashion. It could be straight out of the pages of a Gordon Lapis fantasy adventure.