by Sarah Rayne
At eleven o’clock she reached for the phone and dialled the number of Marcus’s flat. There were several anxious seconds when she thought he was not going to answer – that he was not there, or perhaps he was too busy to pick up the phone. But then she heard his voice, and she said, a bit breathlessly, ‘Marcus, I’m really sorry to phone so late, but I think you ought to come home. Right away, I mean. This weekend. Mother’s quite ill and I’m not coping very well.’
‘I can’t possibly come this weekend,’ said Marcus. ‘A deadline’s been brought forward for a client, and I’ve said I’ll go in to the office tomorrow morning to finish things, so the printers can have the final cut first thing on Monday.’
‘But—’
‘Marg, I can’t. I’ve been given sole control of this project, and I’ve only worked here five minutes, so I’ve got to prove my worth. You can understand that, surely?’
He sounded impatient, so Margot said, ‘Oh, yes.’
‘In any case, Ma’s always being not well. What’s wrong with her this time?’
‘She’s had a cold. She thinks it might be flu.’
‘She always thinks a cold’s flu,’ said Marcus.
‘No, I think it really is. And she’s been sick and she’s got stomach pains. The surgery said it would be a stomach bug.’
‘If it gets worse you can call the doctor, can’t you? No, all right, not at this time of night, but aren’t there emergency paramedics or something? There’s no need to panic.’
I am panicking, thought Margot. For pity’s sake, just for once, can’t you understand what I’m feeling! But aloud, she said, ‘Marcus, I really don’t know what I should do. Couldn’t you manage to come? Could you bring the work with you?’
‘I suppose I could bring the laptop,’ said Marcus, a bit reluctantly. ‘Ma’s a sodding nuisance, though. She’ll be as right as rain in a couple of days – she always is. But OK, I’ll collect everything from the office early tomorrow, and drive straight down. Reach you around lunchtime, if the weekend traffic isn’t too snarled-up.’
Tomorrow. Only twelve hours away. Say fourteen. But the entire night to get through, knowing what lay upstairs …
But Margot said, ‘Thanks. I’ll have some lunch ready for you.’ She would not dare leave the house to get extra shopping, but there was food in the fridge and the freezer.
‘How about if I speak to the old girl now? I can usually cheer her up. Take the phone in to her.’
‘No, I won’t do that. She’s fast asleep at the moment, and I don’t want to wake her.’
After she put the phone down, Margot discovered she was afraid to go to bed. Around half past eleven she switched off all the lights, though, because neighbours might notice if lights were shining into the night. People noticed each other’s routines when they lived in the same road. They might notice the lights, and say afterwards that it had seemed a bit unusual, because Mrs Mander and her daughter usually went to bed around eleven each night. So the lights all had to be switched off, and ordinary things like putting out the empty milk bottles had to be remembered.
Margot did all this, trying to be systematic, trying not to forget anything. She was still quite frightened, but it helped to focus on these details. It helped even more to remember the exact conversation with Marcus, and how she had said her mother was asleep. And that phone call to the GP’s surgery – she had asked that anxious question about what best to do for flu, and she had confirmed she understood about not exceeding the dose of paracetamol.
The house was dark and creaky all around her, and she huddled into a corner of the sofa in the living room. Around midnight she went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, trying not to creak the doors, moving as quietly as she could. Turning on the tap sent the water hammer juddering and knocking again. It was important not to wonder if it might be frenzied knocking on the floor from the bedroom above.
The water hammer had a horrid macabre rhythm, and the cold tap started dripping as well, and Margot could not turn it fully off. The hammer would die away, but the dripping tap would go on maddeningly all night. Drip-drip. Like the drip of all those poisoning memories throughout her entire life. Christa Cain. A murderess …
Rain was still lashing against the windows, like frozen finger bones, tapping to get in, and the dripping tap was like a horrid sly voice saying, We-know-what-you’re-doing. You-can’t-run-away. We’ll-find-you …
Marcus arrived shortly after lunch next day, bringing the cold wet morning in with him, setting down the laptop case and a small bag with his overnight things. He threw his jacket over the banister, and said, ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me she’s recovering by now, aren’t you?’
‘She’s asleep,’ said Margot. ‘So I haven’t disturbed her. It’s good to sleep when you’ve got flu, isn’t it? She didn’t even want the curtains opened, so I didn’t.’
‘I’ll go up.’
He went up the stairs, two at a time, as he always had done. Margot stayed downstairs, clenching her fists. What if—
It felt as if centuries passed – as if worlds were born and died – before he came back downstairs. Margot found she was offering up a silent prayer. Please let it be all right. Please …
When Marcus appeared, his face was white, and there was a look of shock in his eyes, but when he spoke, his voice sounded normal.
He said, ‘Phone the ambulance, will you? Now – this minute. Didn’t you bloody realize?’
‘What’s happened? She was asleep—’
‘She isn’t asleep,’ said Marcus. ‘She’s unconscious. I think she’s in a coma.’
SIXTEEN
‘But she only had flu,’ said Margot, after three nightmare days spent in A&E and then in ICU. She had said this several times to the doctors and the nurses, and to anyone who would listen. ‘It was just flu. You don’t die from flu.’
‘We’re so very sorry. Please be assured that we did everything we could, but there was renal failure – liver failure.’
Two men from the coroner’s office came to the house next day, to talk to Margot and Marcus. Margot repeated that her mother had only had flu. She told them how she had made an appointment at the surgery, how she had phoned her brother for advice.
‘It wasn’t flu,’ said the older of the two men. He had a rather severe look; Margot started to feel a bit frightened. ‘We’ll have to wait for the post mortem, but the medics say it’s paracetamol overdose. Almost certainly taken over two, or probably three, days. Staggered dose, it’s called.’
‘But I was so careful,’ said Margot. Her voice was shrill, and after a moment she began to cry. ‘I was giving her the pills, and I knew not to give more than six in twenty-four hours – eight at the absolute most. I was really careful about it.’
The younger man came downstairs then, Marcus at his side. He held out two paracetamol boxes.
‘Two boxes of sixteen,’ he said. ‘Both empty.’
Margot stared at him, then at the boxes. ‘Those aren’t the pills I got,’ she said. ‘The ones I got are on the bedside table.’
‘Yes, we found those. But these boxes were in the bedside cabinet,’ he said.
‘Thirty-two 500-milligram pills add up to sixteen grams,’ said the older man. ‘That’s well over the dose usually considered potentially fatal.’
‘I didn’t know she had them,’ said Margot, crying even harder. ‘And – oh God – I was giving her two anyway, every four hours. I never thought – I should have checked … But there was no reason to open that cabinet.’
The younger man, who had been in Mother’s room, glanced at Marcus then said, ‘We found this, as well.’ He held it out.
‘What …?’
‘It had probably been under the pillow, but it had slipped down on to the floor,’ he said. ‘Mr Mander, will you read it to your sister?’
‘You read it,’ said Marcus. His voice was cold and distant. Margot glanced at him uneasily.
The letter said,
‘My dears. Forg
ive me, but since Lina went and since Marcus left home, I have been so very alone. There seems nothing left for me in my life any longer. I go from one illness to another, and now there is this latest bout of sickness … My life is so empty, so dreary. Forgive me.’
Their mother’s signature was at the foot.
Margot stared at it for a long time, her mind tumbling. What should she say? What should she feel? She twisted her damp handkerchief in her hands, then cried out, ‘But she wasn’t alone. I was here. I looked after her.’
‘I know you did. And I’m sorry we have to put you both through this. But I have to ask you if this is your mother’s writing?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Marcus, quickly. Too quickly?
‘Yes, it is,’ said Margot. ‘I can show you other things she’s written – cards, shopping lists.’ A pause. ‘This means – it means it was suicide? Does it?’
The men in the room glanced at one another, then the older one said, ‘It’ll be for the inquest to decide. But the note’s fairly clear. I’d say it was almost certainly suicide.’
‘Is it my fault?’ said Margot. ‘She said she was depressed, but you get depressed with flu, don’t you? And the sickness exhausted her. It’s horrid being sick anyway. Should I have done something more? I’d booked an appointment at the surgery, but it wasn’t for a few days— Please say I’m not to blame. Please. I couldn’t bear it.’
She looked across the room to where Marcus was standing by the door. He was staring at her, and there was a look on his face she had never seen before – a look that, if it were not Marcus who stood there, Margot would have thought was hatred. Or was it fear?
The inquest was bewildering, full of medical technicalities about hepatic necrosis and liver failure and renal failure, but, at the end of it, the verdict was definite and clear. Suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed. Sympathy was extended to Mr Mander and Miss Mander – especially to Miss Mander who had nursed her mother so devotedly.
The funeral, the following day, was attended by several neighbours.
‘They’re here out of morbid curiosity,’ said Marcus, as they got into the funeral car to go home. ‘Same principle as the Victorians going to view lunatics and watch bear-baiting.’
‘Will you help me to go through Mother’s papers?’ said Margot abruptly. ‘Before you go back to London, I mean?’
He hesitated, then said, ‘Yes, all right. We need to find the deeds to the house, and there’s an insurance policy, as well, isn’t there?’
They spent the evening sorting through the papers in their mother’s bedroom cupboard. There were a few surprises, and the first was the bank statements. The savings account held only two hundred pounds, and the current account held no more than a few pounds. There was a rather puzzling standing order each month to a company neither of them had ever heard of.
‘I don’t know what that is, but I’m not liking the look of it,’ Marcus said, his brows drawn down.
But the first real blow came when they found the insurance policy, and when Marcus read the terms and conditions. It stated, unequivocally, that the money would not be paid out in the event of suicide.
‘It doesn’t matter, though,’ said Margot, a bit desperately. ‘It wasn’t much anyway. There’s still the house.’
But there was not still the house. That was the second blow. There was a rental agreement for the house, made between Lina Mander and the company who were the subject of the mysterious standing order. They were a property company. Clipped to the agreement was a letter confirming an amendment to the original document, transferring the tenancy from Lina to their mother. It was dated shortly after Lina’s death.
‘Oh, God,’ said Marcus, ‘they bloody rented this house. They never owned it.’
Margot said in bewilderment, ‘Mother said Lina had passed the house over to her. But I thought that meant the ownership.’
‘So did I.’ Marcus threw the tenancy agreement and the insurance policy down in angry disgust. ‘No money,’ he said. ‘Not from anywhere. All those sodding years of hoping and waiting, and at the end of it, fuck-all.’
Margot thought: And all the things I did as well, if only you knew.
The following morning, he came into the kitchen where Margot was cooking his breakfast, and said with an air of decision, ‘I’ve been thinking about this all night, and there’s one card left that we might try to play. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’
‘The Lindschoen house,’ said Margot, who had been thinking about it all night as well. ‘That’s what you mean, isn’t it? The property that was held in trust for Lina.’
‘Yes. I don’t know much about the law, but surely when Lina died, if she owned the house by then it would have passed to Mother. And now Mother’s gone, we’re next in line. At worst we ought to have some kind of a claim on it.’
‘We’ve never found out anything about it, though. There was nothing in Lina’s papers or in Mother’s. And you couldn’t trace those German solicitors who wrote to Lina.’
‘I think they’d long since gone out of business,’ said Marcus. ‘And we can’t just go batting off to Lindschoen without knowing exactly where the house is. It might not even be still there.’
‘How could we find out more?’ None of this sounded very promising, so Margot went back to grilling bacon.
‘I think,’ said Marcus, slowly, ‘that we start with Christa.’
Always Christa …
‘Why her?’ Margot lifted the bacon off the grill pan and put it on plates.
‘Because Lina’s childhood – her whole past – is tied up with Christa Klein. God, we had it drummed into us enough times when we were kids.’ He got up to pour coffee.
‘Yes.’
‘And somewhere in that childhood,’ said Marcus, ‘is Lina’s father. The man Christa murdered. He was the one who was given that house, so he’s the one we need to trace – or at least, we need to find out as much about him as we can.’
‘And you think Christa’s past could take us to him?’
‘I think it could take us to Lina’s past, and then to her father. We’ve scoured this house to find out more about him, and there’s nothing except that one photograph.’
The photo of a man with eyes that gave nothing away, and a mouth that might have been sensitive or brutal …
Marcus said, ‘All Lina ever told us was that her father was murdered, and it’s supposed to have happened in Wewelsburg Castle. But that’s all we’ve got. We don’t know where Lina lived as a child, we don’t know who her mother was, nothing. But if we could find Christa – at least find anyone left from her family who might be around – we might find out more. And that,’ said Marcus, ‘could lead us to the Lindschoen house.’
Marcus did not go back to London. He said the company were happy for him to work from this house for the time being. They understood about the bereavement, and anyway, a great many people worked from home these days, with modern technology being so good. You could translate documents and books pretty much anywhere, and most people emailed material these days anyway.
It was lovely having him in the house, and Margot could not believe how protective he had become of her. He seemed not to want her to go out on her own; he often drove her to the office and collected her. On Saturdays he came with her to the supermarket to collect the shopping.
Margot thought she ought to be completely happy now; after all these years she had what she had always wanted – she had Marcus completely to herself. She almost was happy. If only she did not occasionally find him looking at her, with that expression that might have been fear but that might just have been hatred.
The property company who managed the house said they were extremely sorry, but they were not prepared to transfer the tenancy a second time. They wanted to modernize the house and sell it outright, which would be more profitable for them. They gave Margot and Marcus three months to find another place, which they said was being generous. Margot began scouring the local
paper for rented properties they could afford, and phoning estate agents. Marcus said there was no need to panic; he was going to find Christa Klein’s family and from there they would find the Lindschoen house and prove they were entitled to it. He was already searching various sites online for archive material, he said. He had only struck dead ends so far, but he would stay with it.
After a month, he took her to London with him for three days, because he had to go into his office, and there were some promising leads to follow up about the Lindschoen house, and about Christa’s family, as well. Margot did not really want to go, but Marcus said he did not want to leave her on her own in the house – not with all those memories that were there.
The noise and the crowds and the sheer speed of everything in London bewildered Margot, but she tried not to let Marcus see this, because she did not want him to think she was some frightened little provincial who could not share properly in his life. She stayed in the flat while he went out. It was very small indeed. Margot spent the time cleaning everywhere, and she managed to make a meal each evening from the sparse provisions in the cupboards. But on the second night they went out to a bistro. Over coffee, Marcus told her the meal was a bit of a celebration, because he thought he had found Christa’s brother. Margot’s heart leapt with delight, and she said, ‘That’s marvellous. Tell me all about it.’
‘It is good, isn’t it? I didn’t want to tell you until I was sure – well, as sure as it’s possible to be. I recently discovered a set-up called the World Jewish Congress archives. It’s a remarkable organization. They did masses of work helping what they used to call displaced persons – survivors of the concentration camps – and they gave me fairly free rein in their archives. That’s where I found Christa’s brother. He’s living in a place called Thornchurch in Kent – Romney Marshes, in fact – in a house called Greymarsh House. He’s calling himself Cain – Stefan Cain. Lina always said the family anglicized its name, so that would fit. Klein to Cain. He came to England in the late 1940s – he was about thirteen at the time. That fits, as well. I’m almost positive that he’s Christa’s younger brother.’
