by Nicci French
‘Are you all right?’ Helen asked.
‘I’ve just been to see Luke McCann,’ I said.
‘Where?’
‘At his school in Sparkhill.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘Have you seen the papers? Have you seen what happened with Alan at the ICA?’
Helen smiled thinly. Her pale skin was flushed in the cold and her cheeks were reddening.
‘Yes, I saw that.’
‘It was awful, but I think Alan is right and I feel desperate about it.’
‘You mean about Luke.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s why I went and confronted Luke. I didn’t really know what I was going to say but he seemed shaken.’
‘Isn’t that understandable?’
‘Look, Helen, I know that there’s no scientific way of showing that Luke was the father of Natalie’s baby but I’ve been racking my brains about what you could do to establish a connection. I thought I could go through the party list with you and identify all the people who might have known Luke. He might have said something to them. Have you talked to his parents? They might have something to say.’
Helen looked around.
‘Let’s go in here,’ she said, and steered me into an empty tea room where we both ordered coffee. When it arrived, we sipped it for a moment in silence, cradling our chilled hands round the cups. Helen looked enquiringly at me.
‘Who told you that it was impossible to connect Luke to the foetus?’
‘Claud. He said that you wouldn’t be able to do DNA fingerprinting because the DNA would have decayed and got contaminated.’
Helen gave a brief smile.
‘Yes, he’s right. One of the bases of the DNA oxidises and the strands crumble. And the DNA that was extracted from the recovered bones was 99 per cent contaminated.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘It doesn’t matter. DNA fingerprinting is no use for this case but there is another technique that’s called polymerase chain reaction.’
‘What’s that when it’s at home?’
‘It’s a way of amplifying very small amounts of human residue. Of course, the DNA strands are still broken up but there are a great many repeats in the DNA sequence. And these little repeat sequences are characteristic and they are inherited.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that Luke McCann wasn’t the father of Natalie’s baby.’
I felt my cheeks flush.
‘I’m terribly sorry, Helen. I’ve been stupid.’
‘No, Jane, it was quite understandable. Mr McCann was never arrested or even questioned under caution. So he wasn’t officially released, and so we didn’t announce the results of the test. In the light of subsequent events, we’ve decided to issue a statement this afternoon.’
‘Is the test reliable?’
‘Yes.’
‘God, Luke should have just said. It was my fault, though.’
We drank our coffee. Helen insisted on paying for herself. Then we walked across the square towards the police station. We halted outside and I prepared to say goodbye. Helen hesitated and spoke a little haltingly:
‘You and Theodore Martello, you went out together, didn’t you, that summer?’
‘That’s one way of putting it.’
‘Why did it, I mean, how did it end?’
‘Unhappily.’
‘He talks about you a lot, Jane.’
‘How would you know?’
‘Oh, you know, when I’ve talked to him. I told you before, I’ve talked to him quite a lot. On and off.’
She looked awkward but eager, and a thought – a rather terrible thought – flashed across my mind. I stared at her, and she flushed a bright, hot red. But she didn’t look away. I knew, and she knew that I knew; I wanted to say something, to warn her or tell her not to be foolish. But then, with a grimace, she turned rather clumsily and left me. I had a spare half hour on my parking ticket and used it walking around the centre of Kirklow, entirely heedless of my surroundings.
Fifteen
I found my life slipping – almost pleasurably – into a routine. The solid banks between which all the appointments and obligations and habits flowed were provided by the sessions with Alex Dermot-Brown. They had become as regular and unthinking as sleeping and eating. The morning bike rides along the canal, the weaving through the market to his house were now automatic. The visits accumulated in my memory and became comfortingly indistinguishable.
Session by session, I worked my way through what seemed to me to be everything about my life. I talked about my adolescence and Paul and my parents, but of course the story kept coming back to the Martellos, almost as if the Martellos constituted my story. They had always seemed to be at the centre of what was best about it. I described for Alex the childhood summer games. Other people had nostalgic, mythologised views of their early years: our shared childhood really was golden. I talked of my closeness with Natalie and Theo, and a great deal about Claud, as if I was trying to remake the relationship in my own mind, perhaps in a way that would justify my having left him.
It was hard to tell it as a narrative because our marriage hadn’t so much broken up as faded away. I couldn’t fasten on to any obvious reasons. There was no infidelity, certainly no violence, not even any obvious neglect. That wasn’t Claud’s style. In lots of ways I admired Claud more than I ever had. As I turned him into words, there in Alex’s back room, I felt that I was in danger of making him seem almost irresistible, and of appearing to be talking myself out of what I had already done.
Claud had been in his mid-thirties when he got his consultancy at St David’s and he’d turned out to be wonderful at the new responsibilities, all the committee work. Really wonderful. Apart from surgery, gynaecology is historically the area of medicine most dominated by men and Claud and I had always had subdued conflicts about the issue. But, as he might have said but never did, what could he have done as a senior registrar except make futile gestures and thwart his own career? Doctors who make trouble when they are young are the ones who somehow miss out on promotion. When Claud did become a consultant, this all changed. Of course, being Claud, it all seemed dour and unspectacular and it took time, most notably for his opponents, to see what was going on. What Claud was doing was instituting a committee on the role of female gynaecologists in the profession. When people cottoned on there was a real storm. There was a court case, there was an editorial in the Daily Telegraph or somewhere, but Claud was a match for them all.
When we were children, it was always Claud who knew what wire went where on the plug, and what time the last train left and all the things nobody else bothered about, and he showed the same grasp of detail at the hospital. Other people huffed and puffed while Claud didn’t say very much at all, but at the crucial moment it was always Claud who had talked to the right people on the committee beforehand or who had somehow got the agenda immovably fixed according to some arcane rule that nobody else knew about. The result was that during the past seven years, every single gynaecological appointment at St David’s had gone to a woman. He was a hero. And it was clever as well, because he had caught the mood that wasn’t yet prevailing. He had got the bandwagon moving before jumping on it.
The odd thing was that Claud never once came to me and said ‘I told you so’. He never explained to me that he had been keeping his powder dry all those years so that it could be used when it would be effective. I wish he had, but he was always rational and modest about his achievements, insisting that gynaecology had been wasting its resources and that he was only doing what was efficient. Besides, he said, under the new contract system, the female gynaecologists were more co-operative and flexible. Maybe Claud is the sort of person who accomplishes major reform, an instinctive conservative who admits change in order to save as much of the old system as he can. Maybe. But, in the evenings, there was no detectable difference between the Claud who had swung an entire department behind his
proposals against all the odds and a Claud who had failed. This detachment served him brilliantly over the years but it came to repel me.
Claud’s triumphs were part of what settled my feelings about him. If I felt nothing for him after what he had achieved, then our marriage really must be in trouble, I reasoned. How does a marriage go wrong? I almost wish I could say that I had caught him in bed with his secretary or one of his adoring female house officers. Claud would never have been unfaithful to me and I knew he would be a loyal husband until one of us died, if only because he had been witnessed signing a document to that effect in a registry office on 28 May 1973. It was all just little things and the lack of little things.
Sex, of course. See under ‘Lack of’. When we were first married we had a passionate sex life and Claud was rather elegantly good at it. I don’t just mean tactile manipulation but that he seemed to have the whole thing worked out. More than any man I’d ever slept with (a fairly small number, who could be counted on the fingers of two hands) Claud saw sex not just as an impulse but as a part of affection, friendship, humour, tenderness, consideration. I adored it and him.
For most of my teens, Claud had been what Jerome and Robert used to call a dork. He started wearing glasses when he was about three years old and he was always the serious one, without the charisma that Theo and later the twins displayed so effortlessly. He was dogged, painstaking but never the star. Then, in the awful year or so after Natalie disappeared, when it looked as if the Martello family might be broken up by the pain, we became close. That was dogged as well. Claud set out to charm me and his efforts were so transparent, but they worked. To like somebody is one of the good ways of making that person like you but it can just as easily have the opposite effect. Claud got it right. There was nothing sexual for a long time. I was going out with various boys and Claud became a good friend. We used to write to each other when he was away at medical school, long and interesting letters, and I was surprised to find myself telling him things that I kept from other people. We made no demands on each other, we didn’t show off, and so when I was in my first year at university I was slightly startled to realise that he was my best friend. He started going out with a girl called Carol Arnott – the first proper girlfriend he had ever had, as he told me and told absolutely nobody else – and I was curious to find myself a little jealous.
It was 1971 and I remember it best in terms of clothes: crushed velvet, flares, cheesecloth blouses with dropped cuffs like a medieval minstrel, shades of purple that I wouldn’t dare wear again until the early nineties. I was eighteen and Claud was twenty and I coolly set out to steal him from poor Carol, which I managed with no difficulty at all. Our first night together was in the narrowest of single beds in a bedsit in Finsbury Park which Claud shared with two other medical students. In a process so smooth that it must have seemed inevitable, we managed to decide to get married, which we did at the end of my second year. I wonder if we felt that we were healing the breach in the family. By 1975 I had Jerome and Robert and while still children ourselves we had to be grown up and juggle the childcare with our training and our careers. As I look back on it, I see two decades of frenzy and panic culminating in an autumn afternoon when I drove Robert up for his first term at college. I had a moment to think and the first thought that entered my head was the absolute conviction that I had to leave Claud. No debate, no counselling, no trial separation, just a line drawn under my life.
There. That was what I presented Alex with. That was where I now was, bemused, tearful, out of control. What would he make of it? Although I was anxious to guard myself against it, I already caught myself caring about Alex’s judgement on what I said. Perhaps I was even trying to impress him. I became curious about his life. I noticed his clothing, the differences from day to day. I liked the metal-rimmed spectacles he sometimes wore, always with an air of casualness as if they had been tossed on, and the long hair which he constantly pushed off his forehead with his hands. Sometimes he was strict with me. He surprised me by disapproving of my detective work.
‘I thought you wanted me to deal with facts,’ I protested, a little hurt.
‘That’s right,’ said Alex, ‘but the facts that we’re interested in at the moment are the ones that are inside your own head. There’s plenty of work there, hard work. We need to distinguish between the things you’re telling me that are true and those that aren’t. Then there are the things that are true and are not true that you aren’t telling me. That will be more difficult.’
‘There’s nothing I’m telling you that isn’t true. What are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about this golden childhood stuff. Look, Jane, I told you from the start that I would try to be frank about the way my thinking was going, so maybe I should talk a bit about the way I’m feeling at the moment.’ Alex paused for thought. He always gave the impression of immense deliberation before speaking, not like me, gabbling away. He made thinking seem almost like a matter of engineering, a practical skill. ‘You’ve been saying two contradictory things to me, Jane. You’re clinging on to the happy childhood as if it were a talisman against something. At the same time you’ve been talking of this body that was buried at the heart of it. Now I might just say that the two were independent. Somebody can come from the outside and murder a member of the happiest of families. The world is full of cruel bad luck like that. But that’s not what you say. It’s you who insists that this is impossible.’
‘What are you saying, Alex? What do you want me to do?’
‘You’re trying to hold up two heavy weights and you won’t be able to manage it. You have to let one side go, Jane, and face up to the consequences. You have to think about your family.’
This was one of those moments in the sessions when I felt like a hunted animal. I would find some bit of cover somewhere and feel safe, then Alex would track me down and drive me out into the open again. I described the image to Alex and he laughed and laughed.
‘I’m not sure I’m happy with the idea of you being a beautiful fox while I’m some brutal red-faced squire on a horse. But if it means that I can stop you skulking in some false paradise then I suppose I can live with it. Now, over to you. Even if it’s only an experiment, Jane, I want you to strip away your picture-book account of your family. Start thinking of it as a family in which a murder could happen, and let’s see where that gets us.’
‘What are you talking about? What do you mean, “a family in which murder could happen”?’
When Alex replied, I detected a harder tone which I had never heard from him before.
‘I’ve just been listening to you, Jane. You must take responsibility for what you say to me.’
‘I haven’t talked about any murderer in the family.’ I felt a sour, sick taste in the back of my mouth.
Alex remained firm. ‘It was you, not me, who talked of the oddity of where Natalie’s body was found.’
‘Yes, well it was odd, wasn’t it?’
‘What did you mean by that if you weren’t implicating your family in some way?’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘All right, calm down.’
‘I’m perfectly calm.’
‘No, what I mean is that even if the idea is a shock, you should treat it as an experiment.’
‘What do you mean, an experiment?’
‘It’s simple, Jane. Sometimes these ideas in therapy can be treated like hypotheses. Imagine, if you can, that you didn’t come from this ultra-perfect family that everybody admired and wanted to join. Imagine it was a dangerous family.’
Had I been wanting Alex to say this to me, to say this for me? I made a token attempt to protest but Alex interrupted me and continued.
‘I’m not asking you to make accusations or be disloyal. It’s just a way of re-orienting yourself, to allow yourself a new freedom.’
It was one of those moments when I craved a cigarette as a means of thinking clearly. Instead, I told Alex about my evening at the ICA and the colossal, shaming
, harrowing awfulness of Alan’s behaviour. When you are the daughter-in-law of Alan Martello, a good deal of your work is done. He’s been famous since his twenties and, independently of his own efforts, he has been a free-floating symbol. A youthful radicalism was pinned on him once, now this has been replaced with an equally odd anarchic conservatism. He has been at various times, often at the same time, a little Englander, a satirist, a class warrior, a liberator, a reactionary, a professional iconoclast, a conformist, a rebel, a bore, a sexist exploiter. I sometimes wonder what I would make of him if I were encountering him for the first time, but I’ve always adored him in a mixed-up way. I’ve seen him put himself in the most indefensible positions, I’ve witnessed or heard of behaviour that I totally deplored, he has heedlessly hurt people, especially my beloved Martha, but I’ve been on his side. He was the person who presided over that wonderful Martello household, his vitality fuelled it, he was the centre of it all, its symbol. Was it just because of that that I couldn’t reject him? Even at the ICA, in the middle of all the shambles, I felt a perverse loyalty but that time it really did feel perverse.
Alex hardly followed up the things that I expected would interest him. Sometimes it seemed almost a matter of pride, as if he had to demonstrate his independence. He listened with concentration to the account of my wavering attitude towards Alan but then he went back yet again to my memories, or non-memories, of the river bank on the afternoon when Natalie was last seen. This time I actually showed some impatience. He was insistent.
‘I’ll follow you in whatever you want to talk about,’ he said. ‘But I would like you to indulge my interest in this. Something you said to me very early on interested me. You said, “I was there.’“
‘I don’t remember if I used those exact words, but it’s not such a big deal. All I meant was that I was on the river bank close to where Natalie was last seen. You can’t read all that much into it.’
‘I’m not reading anything into it. I’m listening to you. That’s what you pay me for. “I was there. I was there.” An interesting choice of words, don’t you think?’
