The Taxidermist's Daughter (23 page)

Chapter 38

Blackthorn House

Fishbourne Marshes

Three o’clock in the morning.

Connie was sitting in the same armchair, listening to the rain battering against the window. Heavy and relentless and steady. The wind howled and gusted, chased down the chimney, bringing cold, damp air into the drawing room. A half-moon, silver, cast its ghostly light over the rough waters surging into the creek in the rising of the tide.

She looked around the room. Davey was asleep, curled up on the settee with his thin arms across his face. Mary was dozing on an upright chair set beside the day bed, where Gifford lay peacefully and quietly. For the time being at least, he was free of his troubled, tormented past.

Connie removed the pins from her hair and let it fall loose. She wanted to rest, but her agitated thoughts would not leave her in peace. She was cold, too, though she suspected it came from within rather than because of the temperature in the room. Mary had lit a fire, but it had long since burnt out.

She listened, and heard a growl of thunder in the distance. The rain grew heavier and a violent gust of wind hit the corner of the house, making the building seem to creak and sigh around her. In the distance, out at sea, a flash of lightning.

Connie was waiting for the night to reveal itself. She was listening for the truth of whatever was hiding in the darkness.

*

Half dozing, she’d suffered the nightmare she’d had once or twice in the past. Except now she knew it wasn’t a nightmare. Not imagination. It was true, a memory of something awful and real that she had witnessed.

White skin, blue lips, hair the colour of autumn fanned across the wooden floor.

Blood, skin, bone.

A room of glass, candlelight flickering, reflected and refracted. The scent of perfume and male desire and cigar smoke.

Black masks; one black and white: jackdaw, magpie, rook, crow. A place of glittering glass and sequins, feathers and beads and the scent of sherry spilling on the old wooden floor.

Something else too, a crescendo of noise and smells and wildness.

The heat and the slip of blood on the polished wood. A possession. Flesh on flesh. Forced and brutal, violent.

Connie could remember her twelve-year-old self, understanding yet not understanding. Looking down through the banisters at a dark crescent, a semicircle of coats and men’s backs. Dress shoes and patent leather. Cassie shouting, her hands hitting against the air, trying to stop them doing what they were doing.

The violent, sudden silence of a life extinguished. Choked. A yellow ribbon in a man’s hands.

Fear becoming anger. Connie knowing it was wrong, that she had to help. Had to save her friend from the black brows and the beaks and the yellow ribbon pulled tight around Cassie’s neck.

Skin, bone, blood.

Shouting and running. In the darkness, falling and falling and falling through the air. Free, for an instant, flying and flying. Weightless.

Her head hitting the stone floor at the foot of the stairs. Nothing. Everything gone in an instant.

Innocence, love, home, safety. All gone.

*

Connie found herself on her feet. Without warning, she was doubled over by grief. Crippled by the memory of Cassie, her friend and teacher. The knowledge that she had once been cared for and cherished and looked after. An understanding, now, of what she had lost. What had been taken.

After light, darkness. After love, silence. Only the lonely beating of her child’s heart left alone. She hugged her arms tight around her. These feelings of loss were habitual. Often they crept up on her in the small hours, taunting her with a vision of what life might have been. She had always thought that it was, perhaps, because she had never known her mother.

Now she knew it was Cassie she grieved for.

How cruel it was, after all these years, to finally remember. To remember, only to understand how much she had lost.

Cassie was dead. Murdered in front of Connie’s eyes. Had been dead for ten years.

‘Are you there?’

She jumped at the sound of Gifford’s voice, loud in the sleeping room. Outside, the storm was gathering force. Cracking and pushing at the house, surrounding them and rattling the windows. Connie went immediately to his side.

‘It’s me, Gifford,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s only me.’

His vague eyes danced around the moonlit room, then came to rest on her. To her horror, she saw tears.

‘You’re safe,’ he said, breathing out the words with a sigh. ‘You’re a good girl, Connie. A good girl. You look after your poor old dad. You never left me.’

Connie wanted to remain in the past for a while longer. To stay with Cassie. To remember more of their shared life, without giving in to grief. But, as she had done so many times before, she locked her private emotions away the better to tend to her father instead.

‘Can you remember what happened? You went into the storeroom to look for something and perhaps you fell? Hit your head? Do you remember?’

‘Proof,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose. ‘Names, evidence. I kept my word, girl. I didn’t talk.’

‘The Corvidae Club. That’s right, isn’t it? You made a display case. It’s beautiful, I saw it. Is that why you went into the storeroom?’

But Gifford was lost in his own thoughts, not hearing hers. He started to shake his head.

‘Made no difference in the end. She’s dead. All of it for nothing; she died all the same.’ He suddenly raised his head and looked her in the eye. ‘Cassie’s dead, you see.’

She nodded, both of them grieving, finally acknowledging the loss that had kept them separate from one another for ten years.

‘I know, I remember now. I remember her.’

‘All these years.’ He was shaking his head from side to side. ‘All these years, I kept my word. Said nothing. Tried to do right by her. And now?’ He gave a shrug, arms and hands flapping at the air. ‘Dead. They haven’t even told me about the funeral. Why won’t they tell me? Don’t I have the right to know when they’re putting her in the ground?’

Mary suddenly woke up, sitting bolt upright on the hard chair. Davey stirred too. Without speaking, Connie gestured to them both to slip away. Looking anxious, Mary gathered the boy to her and guided him out of the room.

Connie put her hand on Gifford’s arm. ‘Don’t distress yourself.’

‘I thought I saw her. In the churchyard. Her hair, blue coat, thought it was her.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘A ghost.’

He suddenly howled. The sound, so full of pain, chilled Connie to the bone.

‘It wasn’t a ghost,’ she tried to explain. ‘It was a real woman. Vera Barker, she looked like Cassie. At least, I think she did.’

‘Ghost,’ he said. ‘Knew it couldn’t have been. They told me. Wrote to me. Been dead a week.’

‘Cassie’s been dead longer than that, Father,’ she said as gently as she could.

‘April it was, just when we were ready. Prepared.’ Again, in the midst of his muddled ramblings, he suddenly looked Connie clearly in the eye. ‘Influenza, the letter said. Why won’t they tell me when she’s to be buried? I have the right, don’t I, Connie? I’ve got the right to know.’

She could see Gifford was working himself into another state. If that happened, nothing she could say or do would get through to him.

‘Of course you have the right,’ she said, trying to pick her way through his incoherent comments. ‘I’ll tell them.’

He nodded. ‘You do that, you do that. All these years waiting. I paid the bills. Hospital has to tell me. I have a right.’

Connie turned cold. ‘Graylingwell Hospital?’

Gifford suddenly gave a bark of laughter, then put his finger to his lips and shushed. ‘We kept it secret,’ he said, leaning towards her. ‘It’s what they had to believe, to keep her safe. We kept it to ourselves.’ He reached across and put his finger on Connie’s lips instead. ‘Not even Jennie knew.’

‘Jennie?’

But his eyes were clouding in confusion. The moment of clarity, of transparency, had gone. He dropped his thin hand on Connie’s shoulder.

‘Had to keep you safe too.’

Chapter 39

North Street

Chichester

Four o’clock.

The rain was drumming on the roofs of the houses in North Street, ricocheting off the red tiles and the grey slate, washing everything clean. The Pallants and Little London, Lion Street and Chapel Street.

Harry couldn’t sleep. For hours, since he returned home, he’d been pacing up and down, listening for the sound of his father’s latch key in the lock. Wondering where he was, if he was all right, what tomorrow might bring. The sight of Lewis’s face when he’d arrived home, the way it seemed to collapse in upon itself when he saw it was only Harry, not the old man, had been heartbreaking in itself. The butler had heard nothing, seen no one. The only thing that had happened was that a personal note for Dr Woolston had been delivered.

Harry lit another cigarette, letting his thoughts return to Connie. It had been awful to leave, though he could hardly have stayed. His presence in the house at night would certainly have attracted comment.

Then to have been obliged to keep up a stilted conversation with Crowther as they rushed along the sodden footpath towards Mill Lane, when all Harry could think about was what had happened to his father. That had been difficult too. A decent man, Crowther – and very charitable of him to send Harry back to Chichester in his own carriage – but at the same time, there was something about him that made Harry think he was always observing from the outside, rather than being part of it.

He stared blankly at the canvas again. Then, unable to face the evidence of his failure any longer, he went to his easel and turned the picture to face the wall. He’d start something new in the morning.

He shook his head.

No, not tomorrow. Today. Today he and Connie would meet and share what new information they had garnered. Harry had nothing to offer, but perhaps she would. He would speak to Pearce. Ask him what the devil he was playing at speaking to Pennicott.

But then, if there was still no sign of his father – of Connie’s, either – they would go to Pennicott themselves. Lay everything before him and ask for his help. Neither he nor Connie wanted to involve the police, but with each hour that passed, the knot of cold fear in his stomach grew stronger.

Harry looked at the rain streaming down the window panes and, in the distance, heard a first rumble of thunder. He wondered what Connie was doing. Was she sleeping? Was she awake and anxious like him?

Would she come? Or in the grey light of day would she think better of it? Would she think his fears were ridiculous? These sorts of things simply didn’t happen in a place like Chichester. It was absurd, all of it. Or would be, except for the fact that two men were missing and a young woman was dead. Murdered, if Connie was right.

Harry poured himself a nightcap. The bells of the cathedral struck the quarter hour. Then, suddenly, he realised what he had to do. There was only one way to fill the hours until Connie arrived at ten o’clock.

He found a blank canvas, about ten inches by eight, and flung the old one on to the armchair. Not even stopping to put on his painting smock, he took a brush from the jar, wiped it on a cloth, then prepared his palette. He didn’t need a sketch, he didn’t need her sitting in front of him. In his mind’s eye, he could picture every inch, every shade of her changing expression, the way she held her head. He closed his eyes, remembering how her brows furrowed when she was thinking, bringing to mind the colour of her hair, the tint of her skin.

Her image clear, he opened his eyes and began to paint.

Little by little, Connie’s features began to emerge. Soon, she was looking straight out of the painting at him, with the jackdaw held gently in her hands.