She’d a shift-worker’s tired face and was cruelly aged. McCall had once sat at the Hoares’ kitchen table, a net judge between her and him as they batted recriminations at each other over debts and burnt dinners and promises never kept. It could only ever be a contest without winners.
On the doorstep now, she took a couple of seconds to remember who McCall was.
‘Malky’s not here anymore,’ she said. ‘We’ve been divorced almost year.’
‘Yes, I’d heard, but can I come in for a minute?’
‘The place is a mess.’
McCall said it didn’t matter. He followed her into a barely used sitting room, musty and stacked with cardboard boxes containing the spoils of Malky’s married life yet to be removed.
‘He’s not answering his phones,’ McCall said. ‘And we need to speak on something quite urgent.’
‘He was here a couple of days ago. He’s off work, not very well. Doesn’t look like he’s taking care of himself but he says he’s starting a new job soon.’
‘Is he, really? Where at?’
‘With some MP, doing his publicity at the next election.’
‘That’ll be interesting. Which MP, did he say?’
‘He might have done but they’re all the same to me.’
‘True enough. So have you any idea where will I find Malky?’
‘There’s a caravan I rent from a farmer. Malky said he needed some peace and quiet because he’s got to sort out something to do with this new job.’
‘And where’s your caravan?’
She wrote down an address in a village in the Oxfordshire countryside then said something which took him by surprise.
‘It’s handy for me because our daughter lives nearby, just across the field, in fact.’
McCall didn’t let on but in all the years he’d known Hoare, no mention had ever been made of him having a child.
‘How’s she doing?’ McCall said.
‘As well as anyone with her condition. But she seems happy enough… well, happier than me, anyway. I get the train across there most weekends if I’m not on duty.’
‘How old is she now?’
‘Twenty-six next birthday.’
‘It can’t have been easy on you… or for Malky, I guess.’
‘No, he took it hard, he couldn’t accept her, you see. Every father wants a perfect baby daughter, don’t they?’
‘Does he visit, like you?’
‘Not for years but then when he came this week, he asked me for a photograph of her.
I’ve never worked him out, you know… shouldn’t have married him, I suppose.’
She had that same vacant look of a woman caught in those grainy wartime newsreels of the blitz, a face glimpsed amid the ruins, bewildered, powerless, unable to comprehend what was happening around her.
*
‘Hester? It’s Mac again. I’m sorry but it’ll be a few more hours before I’m home.’
‘You’re not still in London, are you?’
‘No, but I’ve got to stop off to see a guy who’s really important to what I’m doing.’
‘OK, but listen, Lexie isn’t too well. I think she should see a doctor tomorrow.’
‘Why? What’s the trouble?’
‘Female plumbing but try and get back before long.’
‘Yeah, ’course. Is Ruby all right?’
‘Sure, she seems fine, drawing away in her new bedroom.’
‘Good. I’ve got to go now. There’s a truck driver wanting to use the phone box.’
She went back to the bathroom. Lexie’s sheets were soaking in the bath and needed transferring to the washing machine. Hester pulled the plug and watched the water drain away. It left a blood-red tidemark around the tub’s white enamel sides.
Only after she’d made sure Lexie was still asleep did Hester wonder why McCall kept calling from phone boxes, not his mobile. Then Ruby distracted her with a pencil drawing of Garth.
It was stunning in its precision and execution. Hester smiled with warmth and admiration and told her she was brilliant and talented - words Ruby had rarely heard before.
*
McCall located Mrs Hoare’s caravan early that evening. It had also known better days and was gradually turning a mottled, brownish-green beneath a line of sycamores on the far side of the farmhouse.
Lights were coming on in cottages nearby and those on the low hills beyond. The damp scents of autumn hung in the air - decaying fruit, mist rising from the river, grey wood smoke layering out from the chimneys of sitting room fires, newly lit.
A large, elegant house of Cotswold stone backed onto the far side of the caravan field.
It had been a vicarage but was now a private care home.
The caravan was in darkness. McCall swore to himself in frustration. Hoare could be anywhere. He might have hired a car or taken a taxi to a restaurant for supper. There was no point searching blind for him. He’d give it half an hour then leave a note.
McCall rolled a joint and stood, eyes closed, just listening to the night closing in. Rooks cawed back to their roost in a stand of trees and a tractor mauled along an unseen lane. Someone began playing nursery rhymes on a piano in the big house across the field. McCall thought of Hoare’s daughter and the love he’d denied her. But why - and at what personal cost?
Still he didn’t show. McCall walked to the caravan. The door wasn’t locked. That seemed odd. It took a moment to adjust to the interior gloom and a clinging, leftover smell of fried food.
He put a match to the wick of a paraffin lamp on the table. By it was an empty bottle of Scotch, a large; spiral bound notebook and a Biro. McCall, no less a beggar or thief than any other hack, began reading. Sitting in the dim light, he was astounded by Hoare’s revelations and how they confirmed the heads-up from Roly Vickers.
According to Hoare, DI Benwick was now being hunted as a threat to national security. The MP and possible future prime minister, Guy Inglis - who’d witnessed the recovery of Etta’s body - wanted a confidential back channel opened to the Ruby investigation. He’d even tempted Hoare with a PR job. But the spooks were blackmailing him over the stolen police documents and they, too, wanted to know where Ruby was.
And tucked inside the notebook was the postcard Hoare said he’d received from Benwick. On the back was the most cryptic of quotes.
All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.
Hadn’t Ruby sung something like this after McCall and Lexie got her back to the flat? There were so many coincidences. Hoare must have felt the same.
I can’t say how but the case of the little girl can only be part of a bigger affair and therefore, she could still be in danger. Benwick has to know more or why else has he vanished and why are the spooks leaning on me for information about him?
Still Hoare didn’t return. He’d have to leave him a message. Yet even as he wrote Dear Malky, the silence within the caravan was broken by the urgent ring tone of a mobile phone. McCall started out of his seat. It wasn’t his.
It came from behind the curtained-off sleeping area. He found the phone on the floor and knelt to answer it. A man with a mature, cultured voice spoke without introducing himself.
‘Listen, Hoare. You’re not at your desk or in your flat but don’t forget my warning the other night. You’d be well advised not to go on any travels before we talk again.’
McCall might have ad-libbed a reply had he not stood up at that moment. But he did and saw Malky Hoare, face down on the upper bunk and lying on what looked in the half-light to be a black pillow and sheets.
He reeled back as he realised this was blood, pints of it, soaked into the bedding. It looked like a murder scene but wasn’t. Hoare had succumbed to an alcoholic’s dreadful fate. The blood vessels in his gullet must have exploded.
McCall suddenly had too much to take in to know what to do for the best. A complex situation had just become infinitely more so. He should ring the police or tell the farmer. But
then he’d have to stay as a witness.
The revelations in Hoare’s memo would inevitably become known. McCall didn’t want that so he’d only one course of action. He ripped out all six pages of Hoare’s notes and pocketed the postcard, too. Then he blew out the lamp and closed the caravan door behind him. No one must see him.
He stumbled through the shadows towards the Morgan and could hear music - that piano again and the happy, discordant singing of those who would always be children. McCall now knew the face of one of them.
He’d just seen her picture, a photograph of a little girl in a wheelchair clutched in her father’s bloody hand at the end of this, the most remorseful of days.
Twenty-Five
Hester leaned back in her armchair by the Aga, slippers off, feet on a stool. The hall clock struck midnight and the soft echo of its chimes carried to the far corners of the silent house.
This was a favoured time, her chance to audit that day’s words and deeds against her shamanistic code for living. It was not always easy to match her own ideals. But in Ruby, Hester knew her predestined purpose had been revealed.
She was to provide sanctuary for this singular child and protect her from other kids by home schooling. By doing this, Hester could also foster Ruby’s artistic development. From the moment they met, a bond seemed to exist between them. Why else would Ruby have taken to her so readily and moved from all she had known with hardly a complaint? Their lives were ordained to intersect - Ruby orphaned by tragedy; Hester beginning to understand what all her days of haphazard wanderings about the earth had been for.
She thought back to her own beginnings in Shaniko, a huddle of wind-bleached shacks on the high plains of Oregon where her family grazed sheep to survive. She’d drifted south - to California and beyond, to communes and ashrams, jobs and lovers, most now beyond recall. All those meaningless, childless years, searching for something no god or cult could provide.
Then to the Welsh borders, drawn by that unknowable instinct to return, a memory of a song or a story passed down from those who’d left long ago, left their cottages to fall to ruin stone by stone beneath those green and shrouded hills.
But in this homecoming and in Ruby, Hester could at last see pattern and reason to her existence.
It was late and she was tired. She made her way up the back stairs to the bedroom Ruby had chosen to share with her. Ruby, so slight, so vulnerable, gave out an involuntary sigh as she entered. Ludo stirred, too. He looked up from Ruby’s bed, his eyes saucer-wide and yellow in the momentary spit of light from the landing.
Hester leaned over and kissed Ruby’s forehead as a mother might and was asleep herself soon after.
*
Lexie’s wan face worried Hester at breakfast next day. McCall, unshaven and sleep deprived, was no oil painting, either. He’d arrived home in the early hours and spent the night in a guest room so Lexie wasn’t disturbed. At least he was coming out of his depression by working.
Ruby sat across the kitchen table from them, eating toast and managing her trick of being physically close yet appearing to be somewhere else in her head. She always looked serious, as if about to ask a question though she rarely did. But it’d be a mistake to think Ruby wasn’t absorbing all she saw and heard.
McCall knew this so suggested she give Ludo his breakfast outside after she finished her own. He’d no wish to frighten her with what he had to tell Lexie and Hester.
As Ruby left for the yard, Lexie winced and put a hand to her groin as if in pain. McCall asked what was wrong.
‘Just a bit of discomfort downstairs. I’ll take something for it in a minute.’
‘Lexie, you must see a doctor,’ Hester said. ‘You can’t put this off any longer.’
‘There’s a morning surgery in Ludlow,’ McCall said. ‘I’ll drive you there.’
Hester brought Lexie a glass of water and two painkillers. McCall waited till she’d taken them, anxious to have their attention for what he was going to say.
‘You need to know that I’ve dug up more background on Ruby’s case,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to alarm you but what I’m finding out bothers me.’
‘How do you mean, Mac?’ Hester said.
‘Well, for a start there are people making discreet inquiries about Ruby, like wanting to know where she is now.’
‘You don’t mean those monsters who took her in the first place?’
‘No, what’s strange is that these people are in positions of authority which makes what they’re doing harder to understand.’
‘But the police know that Ruby’s safe with us. We’ve told them.’
‘These people aren’t the police, Hester.’
‘I don’t understand. Who are they?’
‘I’m not entirely sure yet.’
‘Then we’ve got to tell that detective on Ruby’s case.’
‘Benwick? That’s the queerest thing. He’s now gone missing himself and the same people who’re asking questions about Ruby are looking for him.’
‘Does all this mean Ruby’s in some sort of new danger?’
‘We need to make sure one of you is with her all the time,’ McCall said. ‘I’ve got to find Benwick because he’s the guy with all the answers.’
Lexie listened without comment till then but now faced McCall, almost resentfully.
‘I kept telling you Etta was warning us about something,’ she said. ‘But you wouldn’t take any notice, wouldn’t believe me but everything you’ve just said goes to prove it.’
‘What I said was a few tarot cards stuck on a wall wasn’t legal evidence of anything.’
‘No? Well, what’s this evidence of, then?’
She took a tiny screw of paper from her handbag with the words Mr Ginger written on it and told them how she’d found it in an ice cube from Etta’s ’fridge.
‘I’ve no idea why but she must have been really scared of this man,’ Lexie said. ‘No doubt it’ll sound ridiculous and New Age to you, Mac, but Etta was trying to freeze this man out of her life in her own way, in a way she believed in.’
‘So you’re suggesting what?’
‘That my sister killed herself because of whatever hold this man had over her.’
Nothing was said by McCall or Hester which might deride Lexie or her dead sister. Suicide was rarely a rational act any more than leaving a name in an ice cube. But a sense of unease and conflict settled in the room. Hester sought to defuse it by saying she’d taken Ruby to Ludlow Castle the previous day.
‘I tried ever so gently to get her talking about whatever had happened to her while she was away.’
‘And did she?’ Lexie said.
‘No, she still won’t open up. The nearest she came to admitting anything was saying she couldn’t see her unicorn so he must have run away and gone back home, too.’
‘Was she upset about not seeing her unicorn?’
‘No, not at all. And what’s also interesting is that Ruby’s stopped drawing castles now and all she’s drawing is people’s faces… just faces, all the time.’
*
Lexie walked across the surgery car park to where McCall was waiting in the Morgan. Her ashy-grey hair blew about in a wind bearing down from the summit of Cleehill to nudge scraps of litter along the shuts and narrows between Ludlow’s medieval streets. If nothing else, it brought a hint of autumn colour to her pale cheeks.
‘So what did the doctor say?’
‘Wants me to see a gynaecologist.’
‘Because of the bleeding?’
‘Yes… says it’s not good. He’s saying I need an operation… sooner, not later.’
‘But you’ve been having smear tests, haven’t you?’
‘Whenever I can, yes.’
‘Don’t say you’ve missed some. Is this why it’s not been picked up before now?’
‘You mustn’t nag me, McCall… please. It’ll all be all right.’
Lexie withdrew into herself on the drive back to Garth Hall. McCall wondered if the doctor
had actually used the C word and she was in shock - or denial. How quickly, and without warning, can life seem frighteningly unreal.
McCall knew it from Namibia and other conflicts - that primitive fear of an unseen enemy, the possibility of dying. The mind closes down of its own accord to disassociate itself from the bullets above and the bodies below. It is as if it were happening far away and to someone else. Maybe this was how Lexie was feeling.
McCall couldn’t ever fit Lexie - that most vibrantly alive of lovers - into any notion of mortality. Even when he looked at her now, he saw only the mesmerising girl with the dancer’s legs and barley-coloured hair, in that cold, Cambridge street all those years ago.
Age and illness were but rumours then, places far beyond the horizon where they themselves would never tread. Yet the hours pass, seasons change and the tides carry us to the ends of our earth. And what was once so distant comes ever closer.
*
Supper was early and subdued - onion soup with bread Hester baked herself. Lexie asked McCall not to be offended but she wanted to sleep alone for the next few nights. He understood and they walked upstairs together. Each held to the other at the bedroom door. Lexie’s body felt taut, as if everything was being held in, not least her tears. They kissed then McCall was left alone on the darkened landing.
But at the far end, silhouetted by a wall light behind her, Ruby stood motionless in her pyjamas, casting a long shadow on the polished oak boards between them. McCall went to her.
‘Are you all right, Ruby?’
‘I’ve brushed my teeth.’
‘That’s good. I’m going to brush mine in a minute.’
‘Some of your teeth aren’t straight.’
‘That’s true. They’re not.’
‘Hester’s breath doesn’t smell very nice sometimes.’
‘That’s why we all have to brush our teeth, isn’t it?’
‘I can hear people talking in this house.’
‘You mean when you’re in bed and we’re all downstairs?’
‘No, in the night. There are voices in the air, voices talking to me.’
‘And what are they saying?’
The Convenience of Lies Page 13
