by Kate Fulford
“Yeah, each other, that’s all we’ve got,” he continued. “I have your back and . . .” and you’ll stab me in it if it suits your purposes, I thought as he looked at me with his soft brown eyes. I have been guilty of giving Dominic the benefit of the doubt far more times than I care to remember and so I am partly responsible for his shortcomings as a human being, but even so he’s bloody annoying.
“We have each other’s backs and no mistake,” I said, “which is why I’m here. So,” I continued, “it seems that Sophie is quite prepared to say that you’re not Pixie’s father if it means it will help her case against you. I just felt that I had to tell you.” I looked deeply into Dominic’s eyes, making sure that he could see that mine had become quite moist, tearful almost. “And if she says Pixie isn’t your daughter, then it follows that she’s not my niece. And I couldn’t bear . . .” I chose not to make what it was that I couldn’t bear explicit. Dominic could imagine whatever he wanted. “I know we’ve had our differences over this,” I concluded, “but I just thought you ought to know.”
“I don’t believe it!” Dominic exclaimed, slamming his arms down on the arms of the chair, and sending up great clouds of dust as a consequence. “That is utter crap!” He conveniently forgot that he had, on more than one occasion, suggested the very same thing. “She can’t get away with this. What should I do?” He looked at me, his face that of someone who hasn’t the faintest idea how to proceed.
Dominic is chock full of conspiracy theories about virtually everything from Roswell to the death of Diana. He justifies these beliefs on the basis that he has worked out what no one else (except for every other nut job conspiracy theorist with access to the internet and too much time on his hands) can see. But, at the same time, he is totally incapable of thinking for himself, but then again perhaps the two things may not be as unrelated as they appear.
“I think you should do a DNA test.” I said. “Just to make sure you don’t lose your rights completely.”
“Too right,” he said, leaping up in a fever of self-righteousness. I couldn’t help noticing that there was a pizza box where one might have more reasonably expected there to be a cushion on the chair from which he had just leapt. “I bloody should. In fact,” he continued, “I will! That’ll show Sophie. She won’t like that!”
“No, I’m sure she won’t,” I agreed. “If you call her bluff by proving you’re Pixie’s father then she’ll have to respect your rights, won’t she?”
“So, where do you get a DNA test from?” he asked. I frequently have to remind myself that my brother is a teacher. He is allowed to teach children, children who might one day be adults (he works at a very rough school). He is responsible for shaping young minds. But then I further remind myself that he teaches geography and even he can’t do much harm when all he has to do is tell young minds about deserts and rivers. And glaciation. That was all geography seemed to be about when I was at school and I don’t suppose it’s changed all that much. Geography doesn’t, does it?
“I’ve got one right here as it happens.” I said. Knowing that if the DNA test were to be taken I needed to strike while the iron was hot I had brought one with me. Dominic is possibly the most indolent person ever to have lived. Left to his own devices he would get all fired up about taking the test and then not bother to do it because he had got side tracked by a mole on his leg that he hadn’t noticed before and which might be a melanoma, or a listening device placed there by the government (this has actually happened before, his believing such things that is, I am not making this up). Luckily one can obtain DNA tests very easily over the internet and although they cost a few quid it was, I thought, money well spent.
“Brilliant!” Dominic exclaimed as I handed him the device, which looked rather like a pregnancy test kit. “What should I do?” he asked. “Pee on it?”
“Best not as you have to use it to take a swab from the inside of your mouth.” I explained. “The instructions are here,” I handed them to him. “I’ve filled it all in for you. You just need to take a swab and I’ll stick it in the post on my way home.”
“What about Pixie though? How will I get a sample from her?” he asked.
“You don’t need to worry about that,” I replied. “Just leave everything to me.”
“You are the best sister ever,” he said, giving me a big hug. Aren’t I just?
CHAPTER 28
Christmas was coming around again and the weather was bitter. It had begun snowing unseasonably early and it had settled, causing London to come to a virtual standstill. Puddles froze over, pavements became impassable, and snow lay in dirty great heaps all over the place. A Frost Fair on the Thames began to seem like a distinct possibility. I was therefore already feeling cold to my bones even before Gideon sent a bitter wind through to my very marrow.
“Dinner at Mum and Dad’s tomorrow, OK?” he said cheerily, wandering into the sitting room where I was watching the Breaking Bad box set I’d bought for Dominic the year before, and which he had left behind. It was quite good as it happens.
“OK,” I replied, non-committally. I knew I was going to have to see Marjorie again, but I had assumed that she would be as reluctant as I to have a cosy family get together so soon after our last conversation. Marjorie was obviously playing this very differently to me, but I supposed it had to be done as, as far as Gideon was concerned, everything was hunky dory, tickety-boo, top hole, so what possible reason could there be for not dining with his parents?
“This looks . . .” Even Gideon couldn’t summon up a suitable complimentary adjective for the dish his mother had thrown down (or possibly up, it was that bad) in front of us that evening. It was, according to Marjorie, a vegetable curry with paneer. Never having used paneer before, Marjorie had grated it over the curry, much as one might grate parmesan over pasta. It looked, if one was being kind, like a cowpat crawling with maggots. The truly astonishing thing was that it looked better than it tasted.
“Wow, that’s . . .” Gideon was again lost for adjectives. It tasted of chilli, lots of chilli, and had the consistency one might expect from an actual cowpat if one was ever desperate enough to eat one. Malcolm, Gideon, and I soldiered on, but I noticed that Marjorie ate very little of hers. She also spoke very little.
“The Palmers are moving out,” she announced at one point. “Downsizing,” she hissed, as if this was akin to having been convicted of people smuggling. “They can’t afford to stay. No pension,” she pursed her lips into a censorious sneer, “but she would have that yacht, well it was more of a dinghy really, even though it gave her terrible seasickness. I expect she’s feeling pretty sick now!”
“Who are the Palmers?” Gideon asked ignoring, or perhaps not noticing, the hoot of unpleasant laughter Marjorie had just let out.
“You know the Palmers. Eric and June.” Marjorie snapped.
“Never heard of them.” Gideon replied.
“Of course you have.” Marjorie said categorically.
“If he says he’s never heard of them, he’s never heard of them.” Malcolm chipped in. I have always wanted a family, but this one? Perhaps I had been very bad in a previous life, and the Buddha had decided that this should be my reward.
We all munched on in silence (not that the curry offered much resistance, being essentially mush) until Gideon decided, bless his heart, to draw attention to the elephant that only he, it transpired, was unaware was in the room.
“Where’s your ring Mum?” he asked, possibly to give himself a few moments break from the slurry on his plate.
“Well,” said Marjorie, putting down her knife and fork in such a way as to indicate that she had finished eating, “there’s a funny story behind that. A few weeks ago,” she continued, “your father and I went to a do at the golf club and I noticed once we were there that I hadn’t got it on. I was worried that I had lost it as I couldn’t remember having taken it off. So we went home early, which was no loss as they have let some very odd people join that club recently.” Sh
e mouthed the word ‘immigrants’ while quite deliberately catching my eye. I looked back at her, my face a mask. She was getting nothing from me. “So I looked by my side of the bed,” she continued, “which is where I would have put it. It’s always been perfectly safe there, and we have an alarm, so no one could possibly get into the house. Unless, of course,” Marjorie looked meaningfully at me, “it was someone who had keys and knew the alarm code, but, apart from your father and I, who could that possibly be?” I always inwardly sneer when people pretentiously say ‘and I’ when it should be ‘and me’. It shows that they are both snobbish and ignorant, which summed Marjorie up perfectly. “But it wasn’t there!” Marjorie threw her hands up as if to illustrate how very mysterious the ring’s absence was.
“So it’s been stolen?” said Gideon, aghast.
“Well, no, not according to your father.” Marjorie now directed her gaze at Malcolm. “I looked everywhere I could think of for it. It was only when I told your father that I couldn’t find it that the mystery was finally solved. Wasn’t it Malcolm?”
“Wasn’t what?” Malcolm either hadn’t been listening or was feigning deafness.
“The mystery of my ring, Malcolm,” Marjorie said as if talking to a particularly dim child. “Do keep up. It was only solved when you told me what you’d done, wasn’t it?”
“Err, yes, I suppose it was.” Malcolm looked at me. Nothing in his look betrayed his feelings, but I could imagine.
“Your father had, you see,” here Marjorie waved a hand towards Malcolm as if to ensure that Gideon knew who she meant, “taken my ring to be cleaned. Thoughtful of him, don’t you think, Eve?” Marjorie gave me a penetrating look. “How many husbands would notice that their wife’s ring needed cleaning? Not many, I’m quite sure.”
“Why didn’t he mention this when you said you wanted to go home to find it?” Gideon asked, not unreasonably.
“Ah, well,” said Marjorie, “he misheard and thought I’d lost my. . . . thing.” How had this hopeless creature managed to create such havoc in so many lives? She gave lying a bad name.
“So where is it now?” Gideon asked, ignoring the ‘thing’ comment.
“It was, so your father assures me, so filthy that it needed to be sent away and it still hasn’t returned. Has it Malcolm?” She placed her hands, palms together and fingers lightly touching, just above her plate and gave Malcolm a penetrating stare. I had a sudden déjà vu, but a real one. I remembered back to that very first lunch when I had momentarily thought she was going to say grace. Whatever I had thought of her that first day, I really hadn’t seen any of this coming. For the best really.
“You must be pretty annoyed, having it gone so long,” said Gideon, snapping me back into the present. He couldn’t seem to shut up about his mother’s bloody ring.
“Oh, I am,” said Marjorie. “I adore that ring and if I don’t get it back soon, very soon, heads will roll, believe you me, heads will roll.” So now she also knew, or at least suspected, that Malcolm was in cahoots with me. On the one hand this was not good, but on the other, did it really matter? She had been blackmailing Malcolm to do as she wished for nigh on half a century, how much worse could her behaviour get? It was when Gideon and I returned home that I found out.
“What is that awful smell?” I asked as I entered the bathroom.
“What do you mean?” Gideon asked.
“The bathroom smells funny. It’s like damp, but worse.”
“Haven’t you ever smelled that before?” he replied.
“No, what is it?” I waved my hand under my nose in an attempt to dissipate the unpleasant and unfamiliar smell.
“That, my dear, is asparagus wee.” Gideon explained. I have since learnt that not everyone’s wee smells this way after ingesting asparagus. Mine never has which is why I had no idea what the smell was or where it was coming from. “We must have eaten asparagus,” he continued. “There must have been some in Mum’s curry, not that you could taste it, or see it for that matter. That was bad wasn’t it, even by my mother’s standards.”
My pleasure at the fact that Gideon had at last acknowledged that his mother was a rotten cook, and therefore not perfect, was rather tempered by the knowledge that she had just tried to murder me believing, as she did, that I had a deadly allergy to asparagus. This was not a turn of events that, I must confess, I had anticipated.
CHAPTER 29
I awoke the next morning from a fitful night’s sleep, during which I had struggled with a mixture of thoughts and emotions. My life has not been without incident and I have found myself in some difficult and even dangerous situations on occasion. To my knowledge, however, no one had ever tried to murder me before. It was a new and wholly unpleasant experience. I was unsure how to proceed. What does one do when someone has tried to murder one and yet one is still alive? Does one simply wait around for the potential murderer to try again? Does one try to turn the murderer into a murderee (there’s no such word, but there should be)? Or does one simply hope that the potential murderer has got it out of their system and one is now safe?
In addition to worrying about my own safety, I was also mystified as to why Marjorie should make an attempt on my life right now. She wanted her ring back and she thought I had it. Why get rid of me when I offered the only hope she had of seeing her ring again? I was still pondering these questions when, around midday, I got the answer to one of them at least.
“She knows I’ve got it.” Meg hissed down the phone. She had quite fallen in love with the mobile I had bought her when we had carried out The Great Inheritance Fail as I had come to think of it, and had even gone so far as to suggest that everyone should have one.
“How do you know she knows?” I hissed back.
“She was just here.” Meg explained. “At my flat.”
“What happened?” I enquired.
“I can’t tell you over the phone,” Meg said. “But we must meet. And soon.”
“Yes, I suppose we must.” I replied. “But I have to work this afternoon.”
“We must meet today,” Meg insisted. “We have to stop her, or who knows what she might do.” She might try to kill me again, I thought.
“All right. All right,” I acquiesced. “How long would it take you to get to Richmond Park? I will be going through there on my way to work in a couple of hours. We could meet there and then I could head off.”
“It’s a bit close to Mar . . . her house, don’t you think?” Meg said.
“She never goes there,” I assured her, “she told me. She has literally never been to Richmond Park even though it’s just around the corner from her house.”
“How strange,” said Meg, “I’d go there all the time if I were her.”
“Mmm,” I said. I wasn’t terribly interested in Meg’s feelings about Richmond Park. I was more worried about the risk we were taking. But Meg had handled Melissa’s grandmother so well, and the situation was so desperate that I decided it was a risk I would have to take. Marjorie clearly knew that Meg and I were in this together, and had already made an attempt on my life, so being seen in a public place with Meg would hardly register on the riskometer right now.
“All right then,” said Meg, “I’ll see you there in an hour, by the White Lodge.”
“She tried to kill me, the . . . the . . .” Meg seemed more annoyed than scared as she related her encounter with her murderous sister. I had not even got off my bike when she launched into her story.
“What a coincidence, she tried to kill me too!” I replied. Two attempted murders in as many days. Marjorie was obviously quite angry. “What did she do to you?” I asked.
“She tried to throttle me, but I managed to fight her off.” Meg explained. “She just kept screaming at me to tell me where her ring was. ‘Give me my ring, give me my ring,’ she bellowed as her hands tightened around my throat.” To ensure I understood exactly what she meant Meg grabbed her own throat and made a croaking noise, as if she was being throttled. “It was very unpleas
ant. Look.” Meg pulled the neck of her coat back to reveal some light bruising. It didn’t look that bad. “How,” she asked, “did she try to kill you?”
“With some asparagus.” I replied.
“Really? Asparagus?” Meg looked puzzled. “That doesn’t sound very dangerous. She had me by the throat and . . .”
“Yes, I know,” I said as Meg began miming being throttled again.
“Unless it was in a tin. Was it in a tin?” Meg asked. “Did she bash you over the head with a tin of asparagus?”
“Of course not.” I replied. “She thinks that I’m allergic to asparagus. I once had reason to tell her that it might kill me if I were to eat it.”
“So why did you eat it?” Meg asked.
“I’m not actually allergic to it.” I explained. “And anyway she had hidden it in some horrid . . . look the details don’t matter. She thinks asparagus could kill me and she fed it to me in disguise. That’s pretty damning, don’t you think?”
“Yes, yes I suppose so,” Meg reluctantly conceded, “but she didn’t actually attack you.”
“This isn’t a competition Meg.” I said. It was a competition and I had clearly won it. Marjorie’s attempt on Meg’s life was very half hearted, and Marjorie would have known she couldn’t get away with it. I was pretty sure it was only a feint. Her attempt on my life was an altogether more serious affair. “Marjorie has tried to kill both us,” I continued, mainly to mollify Meg. “What we have to do is work out how to deal with it.”
“We have to stop her.” Meg slammed a fist into the palm of her hand.
“Duh oh!” I exclaimed. “I’m not about to let her finish me off, and I don’t suppose you want to die either. What she wants is her ring and she knows that you have it. What we have to do is use it as a bargaining tool. There’s a cafe over near Roehampton Gate. Let’s go there and warm up, and perhaps we can come up with a plan.”
The bitterly cold weather had continued and there was still a lot of ice and snow on the ground as we made our way across the park. I had the extra problem of having to wheel my bike across the rough ground so it was some time before I could wrap my frozen hands around a warming mug of tea.
