A Final Reckoning

by Susan Moody

  It was my turn to laugh. ‘How long did you go to her?’

  ‘Three years. And I didn’t feel any better at the end of it. Didn’t feel any worse, to be fair, but no better. I suppose I shouldn’t blame her, really, with some thirty-something neurotic constantly banging on about his nightmares. She was probably dying to shout, “Get. Over. It!”’

  ‘I’m sure she wasn’t.’

  ‘You’re probably right, but that’s what it felt like. I know she thought I should get out more. To tell you the truth, leaving Singapore and coming back to England made me feel better almost immediately. And that was only a couple of days ago.’

  ‘I must say I nearly backed out at the last minute from this weekend,’ I said.

  ‘Oh God. Me too. It suddenly seemed absolutely insane to choose to return to the very place which was turning me into a nut case.’

  ‘I was more or less the same. Actually, if I hadn’t put down my deposit …’

  ‘I thought I could always drive back to London if it turned out that I couldn’t handle it.’

  ‘Exactly!’ We grinned at each other. A moment shared.

  And something unexpected happened. For the first time since my sister’s death, I felt the ropes which had tethered me for so long at last begin to loosen. I was no longer alone. Someone else’s ghosts flanked my own ghost. Someone else was beside me, experiencing some of the same nightmares. After so many years, it was an extraordinary feeling. I set my cup back on its saucer, feeling stronger than I had for years. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We have to talk about it.’

  ‘I know.’ He looked at me sombrely. ‘And before you ask, coming back to Weston Lodge after all this time has already cleared some cobwebs from my head. What happened, happened, nothing can change that. Perhaps it’s the same for you.’

  I considered my reply. Eventually, I said, ‘To a certain extent, yes.’

  He leaned back and stuck his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘I feel as if I’ve been carrying poor Edward Palliser round with me for most of my life. He was my best friend, and we used to spend hours planning our lives once we’d left school. Sheep-farming in Australia, panning for gold or herding cattle in the Wild West, diamond-mining in South Africa or exploring the Amazon … You name it, we were going to do it. Living gloriously, free spirits roaming the globe! And when I left university, I felt I owed it to him to do some of that. I even tried some of it, but it wasn’t the same without him and eventually I gave up. Which of course made me feel I’d let him down even more than I already had.’

  I was about to ask what he meant but he carried straight on. ‘Silly of me, really. Life’s paths always prove so different from how we think they’ll be.’

  ‘Gavin …’

  ‘What?’

  I hesitated. Was it fair of me to be posing such a question in the first place, and what might his reaction be? ‘I … I hate to ask you, Gavin, and please please feel free to refuse, but … could you bear to go through that whole … well, tell me precisely what happened that evening? My family, we felt so helpless, living so far away, and though my father came over, we never really … we’ve always wanted to know about Sabine’s last mo— How it all went down, and what you saw or heard.’ I was getting fairly upset myself by now, and Gavin took my hand in his and squeezed it.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact, apart from the police at the time, you’re the first person who’s ever asked me that.’

  ‘Not your parents?’

  ‘Definitely not them. They were terrified that it would ruin my childhood if it was ever brought up, so it just lay inside me like a stone. If I ever mentioned it, my mother would say something really bland, like, “Oh, darling, you don’t want to be talking about that, much better to forget it.” So stupid. As if I could possibly forget it.’

  ‘Have you even wanted to talk about it?’

  ‘No. Not until now. But something’s beginning to change … It’s like an emotional tectonic shift.’ He gave a wry smile.

  I nodded. I knew exactly what he meant.

  For a moment he pressed his lips against his teeth. ‘Yes, that evening … I’d been out to supper with one of the neighbouring families who knew my parents from when they were all young, and they dropped me back about half past seven. I could see Clio through the windows, working at her desk in her study, and I knew all the staff had gone off for a couple of days, and Mr Redmayne wasn’t going to be back from London until later so I sat down at the piano and played for a while—’

  ‘Was it you playing the organ in the chapel this morning?’

  ‘Yes, did you hear me?’

  ‘I listened for a bit but didn’t want to disturb you.’

  ‘Anyway, the boys came down and we sang a few carols and then Sabine appeared to get Georgie, and I played some dance tunes and they all pranced about and then we went upstairs.’

  ‘And Mrs Palliser didn’t join you?’

  ‘I don’t suppose she even knew we were there. Her study was soundproofed, you see, so she wouldn’t have heard a thing.’

  ‘People keep telling me about the soundproofing.’ I smiled at him. ‘I’m so glad to hear about you all dancing about in the hall … that Sabine had fun that evening.’

  ‘So Georgie got into the bath, while Edward and I went to our bedroom – we always shared when I was staying with the Pallisers, because he and I were in the same form at school. Sabine – gorgeous Sabine whom Edward and I, our hormones boiling away, were madly in love with – went back to her room along the passage, saying she was keeping an ear out and we’d better behave.’

  ‘More or less as normal?’

  ‘Absolutely. Up until then, everything was just as usual. Edward and I were working on our Lego model of a monorail transport system and hugging ourselves with the thought that we might get a kit to make a castle or a pirate ship for Christmas. Even aged thirteen or so, we still loved those sets – we were much more naive than today’s kids. And then, just a few minutes later—’ He stopped abruptly.

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Suddenly, Georgie started screaming.’ Gavin held his hands to his face. ‘It was the most ghastly horrible sound I’d ever heard, before or since. He was yelling at his mother, begging her to stop … Edward and I stared at each other – and then we heard Sabine come out of her room again and demand to know what was going on, and then she started screaming too, you c-could t-tell she was in t-terrible terrible pain.’ He dropped his hands and stared at me, his eyes wet. ‘Oh, God.’

  I put a hand on his arm. ‘Look, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to tell me.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ He swallowed. Tried unconvincingly to laugh. ‘Better out than in, as they say. So Edward and I looked at each other and ran to the door of our room—’ He broke off. ‘I don’t know if you’ve been in that part of the house, but there was our room, then Georgie’s room, then the passage turns at a right angle where the bathroom and Sabine’s room were. And we looked towards the bathroom, where Georgie had stopped shrieking his head off, and was moaning, and we could see one of Sabine’s feet sticking out, hear her kind of gasping …’ He looked at me nervously. ‘You did ask …’

  I nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘We didn’t have a clue what was going on, but we could tell it was pretty nasty, so we turned and ran towards the back stairs. And at the bottom, E-Edward fell over and in-instead of stopping to help him, I ran even faster. I could hear him scrambling into the little broom cupboard under the stairs and then … and then …’ He swallowed once, then again. ‘Then I heard Edward screaming, shrieking, begging his mother not to hurt him, please not to hurt him, “Stop! Mummy, please stop!”, he didn’t mean to be naughty, he was sorry, sorry, until his voice died away and I should have turned round and tried to help him, but I didn’t, I raced into the cold pantry and squeezed through the air vent at the back and out into the snow.’ He looked at me with tear-filled eyes. ‘I’ve blamed myself ever since.’

  ‘What o
n earth for?’

  ‘Maybe if I’d stopped and helped Edward, we could both have escaped. But I was too much of a coward. I wanted to save my own skin and the hell with anyone else’s.’

  ‘Come on, Gavin. What were you, twelve years old?’

  ‘Thirteen. Easily old enough to … to behave more … honourably. It was that voice she put on. That’s what really spooked me. A sort of nightmarish whisper.’ He shuddered.

  ‘What was she saying?’

  He put on a voice like something out of a horror movie, which sent shivers crawling over my body. ‘I remember it so clearly: “All the doors are locked, boy. You can’t get away, you can’t get away, you can run but you can’t hide …”’

  ‘But you could hide. You did.’

  ‘True.’ Gavin grimaced. ‘But all these years later, she still comes after me. Over oceans, across continents, through space and time. My God, it was so terrifying. And then I was outside, no shoes, snow beginning to pile up. And I had to duck under the yew tree at the end of the lawn and all I could think of was that moron, Charlie Leeming, telling us in the dorm that yew was poisonous, one touch and you’d shrivel up, turn blue and die.’

  I laughed.

  So did Gavin. ‘Of course I didn’t believe it, not one hundred per cent, anyway, but I always gave yew trees a wide berth. Still do.’

  ‘So then what?’

  ‘I could see lights in Farmer Barnard’s place, half a mile away, but I didn’t dare go there, in case she followed me, pushed into their house after me, killed us all. And then I remembered a kind of little stone shed place in the woods, buried in undergrowth, covered in elder trees and brambles – we sometimes played there – and I made for it, pushed myself into the big catcher of the farmer’s ride-on mower, pulled some horrible bits of sacking over myself. I can still remember the scratch of that filthy straw against my legs and a ghastly stink of old droppings and pee. And rats, the brush of rat-fur on my skin. Ugh, horrible. I couldn’t help hearing Leeming’s voice again, saying that if a rat bites you, you go into convulsions and grow grey fur all over you. I wanted to be sick. I’d seen blood on the carpet of the passage. And …’ He paused and stared at me.

  ‘And what?’

  ‘I shouldn’t say. Not considering your poor sister.’

  ‘I need to know as much as you need to tell.’ I could feel my stomach begin to curdle in anticipation of what he might say.

  ‘Maybe it was Edward’s … It was …’ His voice seized up. He coughed and started again, avoiding my gaze. ‘I saw a … a finger. And … and bits of flesh. Clio must have been completely insane by then. She’d thrown them down the passage, which is why I saw them …’ He pressed his hands together. ‘Oh God …’

  I felt nauseous. Tried to remove the images from my brain before they could settle there. Gritted my teeth and pressed on. ‘What was she like?’

  ‘I always felt a bit sorry for Edward and Georgie. I couldn’t say she was warm. Or maternal. Nothing like my own mother, always giving me a hug and saying she loved me.’ He thought back. ‘But I was – am – an only child, and my mother was just a homemaker, not a high-powered academic writer like Clio.’

  ‘I don’t see that being clever stops you from being a loving mum,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe she’d never learned to be loving. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve heard about her family …’

  Sabine’s letters had mentioned murder and madness, sudden disappearances: the stuff of gothic novels writ large. ‘Looking back afterwards, even allowing for her lack of motherly warmth, were you surprised that she could do such a thing?’ Why was I so insistently asking these questions, as though I were a reporter, or a detective investigating a crime?

  ‘Of course I was. I’d known her all my school life. Prep and public. I’d seen her fly into the most ghastly rages over the most trivial things. And get over them fairly quickly. Given that she never wanted children in the first place – or so my mother told me – she didn’t do a bad job, considering. I mean, the boys were a bit mischievous sometimes, but that’s partly because they were neglected, in my opinion. A sort of negative attention-seeking.’

  There was a long silence, both of us digesting what he’d just told me. Eventually, I said, ‘Thank you for telling me all that.’

  ‘Will you pass it on to your father?’

  ‘I very much doubt it. He wouldn’t want to know about Sabine in such … such detail.’

  He put a big hand over mine. ‘You may not believe this, but I’ve never talked so much about that dreadful evening. Not even to my therapist. And at the trial, I was too traumatized to help much, and nobody wanted to press me too hard. Even Clio’s defence lawyers. Besides, it seemed pretty much open-and-shut.’

  Across the square a man came out of the ironmongers and stood looking about him. Checked shirt, weather-beaten face, corduroys, sturdy shoes: unmistakably a man who lived and worked in the country, rather than the town.

  ‘Isn’t that one of the people who were there last night?’ I said. ‘Terence Barnard?’

  ‘Trevor,’ said Gavin. ‘Farmer Barnard.’

  Barnard looked in our direction, and I beckoned him over. For a moment he hesitated, then came slowly across the cobbles to our bench. ‘I met you at Weston last night, didn’t I?’ he said to me, looking from one to another of us. ‘You too …’ he added, to Gavin.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Gavin.

  ‘Why don’t you join us?’ I said.

  He checked his watch, pulled out a chair, sat down. When he was settled, I said, ‘We were intrigued by David’s potted history of the Lodge last night. He’s certainly turned the place into a charming hotel.’

  ‘I hope it’ll succeed,’ Gavin said.

  ‘So do the locals,’ said Barnard. ‘It would certainly bring the village back to life. Make it more like the old days, when the house was full all the time. Comings and goings, visitors down from London, big orders placed with the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. Good for all of us, really. It was a bad day for this place when …’ He paused. ‘Well, when the household broke up.’

  ‘What happened to the original heirs?’ I asked innocently, though I already knew the answers.

  ‘People died, mainly. So the house came down to the daughter, rather than the sons.’

  Gavin picked up. ‘They must have been young, to die.’

  ‘One of them was killed in a skiing accident. The other was murdered during a burglary.’

  ‘Goodness,’ I said. ‘Did he have a lot to steal?’

  ‘He was something of a collector,’ said Barnard. ‘He wasn’t a very pleasant character. But none of the males in the family were.’ He lifted his teacup, and a signet ring flashed on his fourth finger.

  ‘What did he collect?’ Gavin asked.

  ‘Paintings, mainly. And modern silver.’

  ‘Did they ever find the burglar? Or murderer, I suppose he’d be.’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘It would be interesting to know where those paintings are now,’ I said.

  Barnard frowned. ‘Why are you asking all these questions?’

  ‘I’m in the art trade myself,’ I said. ‘I was just wondering whether they’d ever been offered for sale. That way the police might have been able to find out who killed this guy.’ Again I looked innocent. ‘I don’t suppose you remember the names of any of the stolen stuff, do you? If you did, I could go through back catalogues, see what’s come up over the years.’

  ‘At the moment I haven’t a clue. Something might occur to me if I think about it hard enough.’ He stood up. ‘Someone called Lucian Freud, does that sound right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And I do remember Cl—the victim’s sister saying that he’d taken some stuff of hers, Swedish painters, or Danish, I can’t remember. I have a feeling those were stolen from the brother’s flat too. Anyway, I’m sure the police looked into it at the time – it was years ago now.’

  He ra
ised a hand and turned to go. ‘Enjoy the rest of your time here.’ He pushed aside a couple of chairs in order to get out, then came back. ‘She didn’t do it,’ he said. ‘I know she didn’t do it.’

  Gavin and I stared at each other after he’d gone. ‘Do we know what he means?’ I said.

  ‘I think we can guess.’

  Later I returned to my room to change for dinner. I ran my fingers through my cropped hair, watching the cows move slowly from one side of the field to another and thinking what completely boring lives they must lead.

  Downstairs, in the bar, I stood with a glass of red wine in my hand and examined a small Dutch landscape of leafless willows along the banks of a frozen river, which hung near the door.

  ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ I turned to find Malcolm Macdonald at my shoulder.

  ‘Exquisite.’

  ‘Don’t forget that I’m to show you the armillary spheres, will you?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning after coffee.’

  Later, after another excellent meal, coffee was served round the fire in the hall. Urged on by me, Gavin sat down at the grand piano and started to play, classical stuff at first, then songs from shows, and finally rock and roll numbers which had most people up on their feet. I tried very hard not to think of Sabine doing the same thing, in the same place, never knowing that she was no more than an hour away from death.

  Someone replaced Gavin at the piano. Gavin came over to me and asked me to dance, and we stepped out on to the floor. I’m not a particularly good dancer, but in his arms, I felt relaxed and happy; I felt safe. He towered over me, but when I put back my head, he was looking down at me, a smile on his mouth. It was a small smile but it said a lot. I’d known that some day I’d meet another man I could love as I had loved Hamilton; I began to wonder if, by some extraordinary happenstance, Gavin was the one. As he twirled me around, placed his hand on my waist, drew me against his chest, I thought, Dad, for once you’re wrong.

  It was a good decision to come here. Maybe one of the best I ever made.

  Eight

  I said at the beginning that it was difficult to know where to start with a story such as this. It’s even harder to continue. The characters have been laid out like chessmen, the settings are in place.