Willing Flesh (31 page)

His phone vibrates against his chest. It is Josie.

‘You need to come in, David,’ she says, clearly upset.

‘I can’t. I’m on surveillance.’

‘You have to,’ she says.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Blears has killed himself. Come now.
Please
.’

*

Staffe walks towards the minicab outside the Signet and Rosa says, ‘We’re not calling Thomas? He’d take us.’

‘Let’s leave our friend to his own devices. See what he gets up to.’

‘What do you mean?’ says Rosa, wrapping a pashmina around her neck. It is aquamarine and flows like water.

Staffe ushers her towards the minicab, says, ‘This is Gerald.’

Gerald Holt makes a fuss of opening the door for the lady, saying to Staffe, ‘The Ridings, you say?’ He is clearly impressed.

‘You’ll have seen some comings and goings up there, these last few days,’ says Staffe. ‘Roddy and Arabella are back up for Christmas, I take it.’

‘I don’t think anybody’s home,’ says Gerald.

‘How can you be sure?’ says Staffe.

‘I usually see them, when they’re here.’

‘Nobody’s supposed to know she’s home. I hope I can count on you for your discretion,’ says Staffe, patting Holt on the shoulder.

Gerald clearly thinks it odd, as they approach The Ridings on this bitter eastern night, that Staffe wants to be dropped at the end of the driveway, but Rosa comes in on cue, complaining she feels sick, needs some air. Staffe tells him to call by in, say, an hour. But to stay on the main road.

The drive is a hundred yards long and halfway up Staffe stops, listens to the sound of Gerald’s taxi peter absolutely to nothing. Soon, another sound replaces it and Staffe smiles to himself, glad to have got something right, belatedly. But he wonders just how sinister it might be – the percolating diesel of Thomas’s London hackney carriage in the Suffolk night.

It is plain to see that nobody is home. No cars parked, just a couple of outside lights on and the two-storey stairwell and landing lit up, presumably on a timer. Poor Howerd. Could it be that money got so tight the domestics have been laid off? Or simply not required in these interesting times.

He immediately goes round the back of the house, looking for signs of alarms. There are none. The garden is formal but overgrown, and the bay-lined square around the fountain is thatched with weeds. The lawn, giving onto a ha-ha and the fields beyond, is half a foot high. In the full moon, the house seems gothic: a modest Jacobean seat with a Victorian addition jutting perpendicular, but somehow timeless, the sum of all the ages.

Staffe can see there are blind cellars beneath the main house and he tries the door to a conservatory, which itself has a door into the main house. It doesn’t budge, so he pulls the sleeve of his jacket down over his hand, punches a pane out and reaches in, unlocks the door.

Glass crunches as he works his way round, picking up pots and urging Rosa to be careful. The house key is under a dead tomato plant.

The house smells of centuries. He tries all the doors off the main hallway, soon coming across the entrance to the cellar. Before they get halfway down the worn stone steps, they smell life.

‘Someone’s been down here,’ says Rosa. ‘A woman. I can smell her.’ There are three low-ceilinged, vaulted cellars, one with a few bottles of wine and lines of empty racks, one with bicycle skeletons, wooden skis and hickory golf clubs. The third has a padlock hanging like chunky jewellery from its handle. On its floor, a blanket, sack and vestiges of food.

‘She was here all right,’ says Staffe.

They make their way through the ground floor by the stair lights and, once they find Howerd’s study, which has double-aspect shuttered windows to the front and side of the house, Staffe looks around, picturing what a wonderful place this would be – to escape. Staffe hands Rosa a torch. ‘I’ll take the bureau, you go through the desk.’

‘What am I looking for?’

‘Anything financial, or letters. Just make a pile of whatever seems interesting.’

In the large middle drawer of the Dutch walnut bureau, Staffe finds a postcard. It feels rough and the edges are uneven. He holds it up to the torch and sees it is a watercolour of a shore, as if painted from the sea. From the palette employed, he immediately recognises the artist. He squints, studying the image of lilacs and pale blues and yellows, and can see a minaret rising from a village in the mountains beyond the shore. ‘Imogen,’ he whispers.

‘What?’ says Rosa.

Staffe turns the hand-painted postcard over. All it says is: ‘My darling R. Be safe. Be extraordinary’. The unceasing tide of a mother’s love.

‘This is Imogen, too,’ says Rosa, approaching Staffe. She hands him an invoice from the Warblingsea Chandlery. It is a bill for
£
9,700 – a second reminder for unpaid repairs to the mast and bilge for a vessel named
Imogen II
.

On top of the pile of papers Rosa has made is a small ream of travel documents from the last ten years or so. He can see why Leonard keeps them. It is quite a log and relates the travels of a man for whom the world is not large enough: Nairobi, Auckland, Lima, Vancouver, Buenos Aires, Rangoon, Phnom Penh, Lima again – the last time – and Istanbul. Istanbul once, twice, thrice, all within a year. The year before Imogen died. The year before Taki Markary moved to England.

‘Stay here, I’m going to look around,’ says Staffe. He makes his way from room to room, the boards creaking, the doors squeaking. It is a house only used for weeks in the summer, he suspects. As he rises from landing to landing, up into the heights of the house, a sliver of moon is seen, here and there. On the second floor, he looks towards Aldesworth, can see the outline of a crane, which makes him sad.

The house is as old as the Howerds, older than the town house in Mayfair, and Laing’s, and the Colonial Bankers’ Club. Yet you can see the new money from here. He can’t imagine Leonard not being ashamed and can’t comprehend what you might do to preserve this, against a tide that comes and comes and comes.

He hears a creak on the stairs, turns off his torch and leans flat to the wall. The moon catches a photograph.
Ampleforth Leavers, 1974
. Somewhere, there will be Leonard – in this same life, unrecognisable.

Another creak, closer this time. He wants to call out for Rosa but knows he can’t give himself away. He holds his breath, hears another stealthy tread, another board betraying its age. He clenches his fist, looking at all those boys, in subfusc, so long before their time.

Staffe breathes out, slow, feels his pulse release as he steps out, raising his hands above his head, smelling – in the musty curtain and rug and dusty wood – the scent of Rosa. Her eyes are wide and he looks beyond her. Sees only dark.

‘Are you alone?’ he says, afraid.

‘There’s no one here, is there?’ she says. ‘I was frightened. And I found this. It doesn’t seem to fit.’

She hands Staffe a photograph of an infant boy with a straight nose and dark skin. He is naked and has a serious look on his face, holding a bucket and spade up to whomever is holding the camera. Staffe takes it from Rosa, puts it in his pocket and holds Rosa’s hand, leads her down through the house.

Outside, her eyes are large, watery in the bold, silvery light from the moon. ‘Do you think they killed Arabella?’ she says.

Staffe shakes his head. ‘Quite the opposite.’

Twenty-six

Leonard Howerd puts down his mobile telephone. He doesn’t say ‘thank you’ to Gerald Holt, nor even goodbye. He blows out his cheeks and sighs.

‘Is he at the house, Father?’ says Roddy, carrying charts from the aft berth, nimble and alert at the prospect of setting sail, instinctively stooping so as not to bang his head on the ceiling of the boat’s galley. He appears to be completely at home.

‘Holt dropped him off half an hour ago.’

‘Do you think he’ll come?’

Leonard ignores his son’s question and sits opposite a third man. Younger, lean and dressed head to toe in black, he has a ruddy face with a stitched cut across his head. ‘I want to see her,’ says Leonard.

‘You agreed not to,’ says the Younger. ‘We’re not fucking about here.’

‘Do you have children?’

‘That’s no business of yours. You don’t need to know anything about me – except I’m on your side.’

Leonard says, ‘I don’t suppose you can stop me, if I insist on seeing her.’

The Younger shakes his head. ‘I know my place.’ His face assumes an extra furrow of sadness.

‘She is blindfolded.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘You should wait, Father,’ says Roddy.

Howerd gives him a scolding look, as if he has talked out of turn, in company. He says, to the Younger, ‘Give me your aftershave, whatever you wear.’

‘Watch yourself. This could still go wrong, and then we’d all be in the shit,’ says the Younger, handing him a bottle.

Howerd holds it to his nose. ‘This stinks.’

‘It’s everyman. That’s what they say.’

Howerd dabs the scent on his wrists and onto his index finger, applying it to his temples and behind his ears. Its aroma is abrasive, makes him splutter.

‘What’s to be gained?’ says the Younger.

‘I am tired of losing people.’

The Younger pulls across a curtain to reveal a sheet of plywood cut to fit the cross-section of the hull. Within the plywood, a door has been made and this is padlocked, top and bottom. Once this door is opened, another door, the original, leads to the bow berths.

Howerd takes a deep breath. The smell claws his throat. His daughter has been here just a few hours, but the ingrained stench of days weeps, thick.

He knows why it has to be this way, knows that undue tenderness will scupper the deception. But even so …

A brace of tears break and he is taken aback. For a brief snatch of time, he feels liberated; likes himself a little more. He didn’t weep when Imogen went; told Arabella not to cry when he said, ‘Your mother is dead.’

Leonard crouches down and his bones creak. He could reach out and touch her. He wants to pull away the scarf that is wrapped around her head, binding the rags that keep the sounds of this small world from her. He wants to pull away the blindfold and see what her eyes reply when he tells her that he is sorry, for everything. He wishes it had been possible simply to love his daughter at all costs and to protect her – nothing more.

‘Who’s there?’ she says, her voice muffled and hoarse and mostly lost in the gag. She sniffs like an animal and tries to reach out but her arms are bound and she falls off balance.

Instinctively, Howerd reaches for her and catches her. He holds her for the longest second and pushes her upright again.

‘Who is it?’ she says, muffled.

He sits back on his haunches, weighing up the pros and cons if he held her.

‘Daddy?’ she says.

And he knows that one lapse has been sufficient. He should have known better, after all his years of doing the right thing. Too late, now. Slowly, uncertainly, he pulls himself together, reaches out, pulls off the hood and sees, in the gloom, the unadulterated relief that flickers when she sees him. Then goes off, like a concussion.

*

Gerald Holt is back at the bottom of The Ridings’ driveway. He has drunk his flask of tea and figures the inspector will want the lift back to town on a night like this. In his position, Gerald must do what is asked of him.

The heater is on high, but icy white hexagon flowers have formed on the wing mirrors. He will be glad when his favours are all evened out but to console himself, he pulls out the brochure from the glove compartment and treats himself to a peek at the artist’s impression, the floor plans of his promised land.

A tap on the window makes his heart thud and he throws the Aldesworth Country Town brochure to the floor.