by Annie Dalton
She opened the window. Needing air. Needing something, anything, real. She could smell diesel fumes, scorched rubber and a shocking, sweet whiff of wild honeysuckle: But I swear to you, Anna, I would never, I have never …
Anna saw the exit for Services at last and almost wept with relief. Being with Dominic after so many years, covering too much ground, too fast, too intensely in too short a time, had suddenly overwhelmed her; she wasn’t safe to drive: I swear to you, Anna, I would never …
She signalled, changed lanes, signalled again, turned off the motorway and found her way to the vast car park, doing everything as slowly and deliberately as if her old driving instructor was sitting beside her. She locked her car and walked unsteadily towards the stark, white lights of the service station, feeling as if she was floating, scarcely tethered to the earth.
Inside the single-storey building, fighting the urge to flee back to her car, she was assailed by confusing signage, fast food smells and the babble of strangers in transit. Eventually she spotted the familiar, Starbucks logo and somehow made her way to the counter, where she found herself queuing behind some young women, who were obviously returning from a hen party. With their elaborate hairdos slipping undone and gold and silver eye make-up running, they resembled exhausted mermaids bewildered at finding themselves washed ashore. Anna ordered a large coffee and, dimly conscious of her plummeting blood sugar, a piece of lemon drizzle cake. Feeling like a ghost trying to pass unconvincingly among the living, she found a table, numbly unwrapped the square of dry sponge cake: I swear to you, Anna …
A large Punjabi family had spread themselves over three tables at the Burger King concession opposite. An elderly Punjabi woman, wearing colours as improbably vivid as the sunset, distributed shocking pink and lime green sweets to a flock of dark-eyed, silk-clad little children.
I’ve done terrible things, shameful things but I swear to you, Anna, I would never, I have never killed another …
Glancing down, Anna was puzzled to see that she’d taken out her phone. Grief sliced through her as she realized who she’d wanted to call. It was the first time in sixteen years, if you discounted her weeks in the psych ward, that she’d even momentarily forgotten that her father was dead. The jolt of loss was chilling and final. Nothing and no one could ever make this better, except her diffident, painfully private dad, but Anna would never see, touch or talk to him again. She had thrown herself into a whirlwind of activity, jumping on planes, trains, changing countries, but Julian, Julia and Anna’s brothers and little sister were still dead. Anna still didn’t know why they’d been murdered or if it had anything at all to do with her father’s auction house or David Fischer’s Vermeer. All she knew was that she was no longer entitled to hate Dominic Scott-Neville. Hunching over her table, she desperately swallowed down sobs, waiting for the shockwave to pass. Dominic’s words replayed in her mind: When I got to Argentina I wrote you all these mad letters, Anna. I wanted to tell you how sorry, how bloody sorry …
Three of the little Punjabi children raced past shrieking, high on their own excitement and too much sugar. One little girl, a tiny princess in gold earrings and sequinned green silk pyjamas, tripped, fell sprawling and began to howl. Her father, a tall bearded Sikh, calmly went to her and swept her up in his arms. Anna had to clench her jaws against the pain. The yearning to be small again, to feel her own father’s arms around her again, was intolerable.
What do I do now, Dad? She asked her dead father. What the hell do I do now? For sixteen plus years she’d had an enemy. A mission. A spar to cling to in the wreckage. A reason to keep living, to keep on hating. Sitting up at night trawling the net. Living for the next google alert. She’d told herself it was the drive to know, find answers and get justice for her parents and her siblings. But deep down she’d always been chasing the shadowy figure of Dominic Scott-Neville. A ghost chasing another ghost, she thought. That, essentially, had been her life until she’d got Bonnie.
Oh, God – Bonnie! Anna was guiltily startled back to her responsibilities. She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten to call Tim! She quickly sent a text.
Not just a bad sister but a terrible dog owner. So sorry, on my way to you now.
Tim’s reply popped up moments later.
Anna, post Edie, (the child who never sleeps) I can guarantee that one of us is ALWAYS awake. Bonnie has been a star. She reminds me of our old dog Rook, do you remember him?
Tim had apparently forgotten that she’d never known Rook when he was old and presumably slightly less bonkers. But Anna was surprised to discover fond memories of him as a mischievous puppy, a glossy, black, working cocker crossed with equally hyper-active Border collie. One day on the shore at Dunwich, Rook had rashly sampled seawater and gone racing up the pebble beach to some dismayed picnickers, where he had gulped down a small child’s orange squash in his desperation to rid himself of the taste. Anna’s brother – Dan – who, like Anna, had secretly longed for a dog of his own, had said: ‘I don’t see why they were so mad. I thought it was really smart of him!’
Anna’s phone pinged. A follow-up text from Tim.
You Ok?
She sent him a smiley face. The disturbing feeling of being out of her body was beginning to ebb away.
A small gang of boys and girls, Anna thought they were maybe aged seventeen or eighteen, came to take over a nearby table. The boys impossibly rosy-cheeked with floppy public school fringes, the girls repeatedly tossing back their silky hair like so many moorland ponies; and every single one of them secretly starring in their own private movie, Anna diagnosed ruefully. Just like her and Natalie and Max and Dom. They’d acted so confident, thought themselves so outrageously decadent. But they’d just been babies, clueless little babies.
‘God, I’m so sorry, Anna.’
Those were the first words Dominic said to her, after Thomas Kirchmann had tactfully remembered another engagement and left them alone together.
Inwardly panicking, unsure what exactly he was apologising for, since it was unlikely that he was confessing to murder, Anna had said in a strained voice, ‘Why are you sorry?’
‘For not getting in touch after what happened to your family,’ he explained. ‘Not to mention acting like a prat outside Taylors. But how do you apologise in the street to someone you haven’t seen for what feels like a hundred years? I just went to my default position which, thanks to my patrician upbringing, is banal, public school dick.’
Anna had startled herself by saying drily, ‘well, that’s certainly true,’ and he’d laughed. Then he’d said, ‘would you mind if we went somewhere else? Somewhere we can talk?’
They’d walked through the streets until they found the strange bar which, like the magic toy shop in a children’s story, Anna suspected she might never be able to find if she ever tried to return. And there, in the violet twilight, clamping his own wrist in a vice-like grip, Dominic had begun to talk: about his near-fatal overdose, about being bundled on to a plane by his father barely two weeks later and how, in his self-loathing, he had continued to court death. At his lowest ebb, he’d been picked up by the police in some nameless Argentinian town, been thrown in jail and later bailed out by his uncle and aunt on the condition he went into rehab.
‘In Argentina?’ she’d said, surprised.
He’d shaken his head. ‘Some fancy clinic in New York State. Snow everywhere. When I got off the plane, I thought I’d die of cold.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Not to mention heroin withdrawal.’
‘But you got clean?’
‘Eventually. Thanks to Ghislaine.’ Dominic had told her. ‘She saw something in me apparently.’ He gave a self-deprecating laugh. ‘Whatever it was, it had to be buried pretty deep!’
Ghislaine, former super-model and New York socialite, Anna remembered, who was now Dominic’s wife.
‘Where did you meet?’ Anna had expected him to name some glitzy location frequented by celebs.
He’d explained patiently, ‘I thought I’d told you – in r
ehab. Ghislaine was on her way out, having successfully completed the programme. I was on my way in, but secretly plotting to go over the wall and shoot up the first chance I got. She told me to call her as soon as I was well again and she’d come to fetch me. I didn’t believe – I didn’t dare to believe – she meant it. But in the end, I did call her and she really came.’ Shaking his head in apparent wonderment, Dominic had added casually, ‘I say Ghislaine saved me, but I should give God some credit for giving me a solid gold reason to get through the nightmare of rehab.’
Anna stared at him. ‘God?’ She’d thought she’d misheard.
He’d laughed. ‘Didn’t I mention the finding God part? Oh, if you knew how hard I fought it, Anna! It was almost comical. If, you know, it wasn’t my life that was on the line! You see I knew how to self-destruct! I’d been doing it since I was twelve, but getting well, now that terrified me!’
‘Why do you say it was God?’ She’d asked. ‘And not – I don’t know – some other healthier part of you?’ Lulled by the smoky violet intimacy of the bar, by her sense that she and Dominic were not their normal daylight selves, Anna had forgotten that no one in their group had ever challenged Dominic’s version of events. She belatedly braced herself for the inevitable retaliation.
But he’d just shrugged. ‘Because, at that time, any part of me I could access would have immediately let me off the hook. God, on the other hand, asked me to do ten uncomfortable, sometimes frankly impossible, things a day and still does.’
‘So, would you say He was worth it, I mean, ultimately?’ Anna was the last person to kick away a drowning person’s life raft, but she couldn’t quite hide her scepticism.
He’d laughed. ‘You mean do I think I’ll get my heavenly reward? Anna, I don’t even care! Because God – or whatever you want to call a power greater than ourselves – showed me that I didn’t have to turn into a newer but equally disgusting version of my father. I was free to become my own person.’
‘Does Ghislaine feel like you?’ She really meant was; has Ghislaine been born again?
‘She does. We’ve both been given so much and, for our different reasons, our reaction was to piss it all away. Now we want to give something back. We’ve bought this monstrosity of a country house which we’re planning to turn into a women’s refuge.’ Dominic had left a long pause before he’d added quietly, ‘you see neither my mother or my grandmother ever had anywhere to go.’
Before they’d left the bar, before its twilight spell could wear off and she lost her courage, Anna had told Dominic, ‘a few months ago, on New Year’s Eve, a man killed himself. He tried to take me with him. He told me he was … somehow connected to your family.’
If you think I’m a monster, Dominic is the devil.
Dominic had steadily returned her gaze. ‘I think you’re talking about Alec Faber?’
‘Yes.’
He’d nodded soberly. ‘His brother was one of my godfathers. Alec was the black sheep of the Faber family. Did brilliantly at Oxford, but then lost his job at the Foreign Office; I never knew why. My dad always said he was a failed gambler, failure being the ultimate sin in my father’s eyes, next to getting caught. Alec’s family had disowned him. His fiancé had broken off their engagement. Years later my father and I were in London – I would have been in my early teens – and we passed Alec sitting on a bit of old blanket, with his dog on a piece of string.’ At this point, Dominic had interrupted his story. ‘I need to give you a bit of background. In the usual way, my father barely noticed me. But, once a month, we had this surreal father-son ritual, where he’d take me to London and we’d have an excruciatingly uncomfortable dinner at his club, where he’d interrogate me about my many failings. I suspect that my mother had asked him to make more of an effort with me and this was his bizarre solution. I was desperate to impress him, Anna, and at that age the only way I could think of was to be just like him. So, like I said, we saw Alec on the other side of the road, and my father reminded me that this was someone who’d got a first at Oxford and had once been a member of my dad’s club. “This is what happens to weaklings and failures. It will happen to you too, Dominic, if you don’t buckle down to your studies.” Then I did something unthinkable.
‘I interrupted my dad. I said, “I’d like to talk to him.” My father was appalled. Why bother with this piece of human detritus? But I told him, “I know what I’m doing, Dad.” We crossed the road and I was almost sick with excitement. I introduced myself to Alec and told him we were going to have dinner at his old club. If he could get hold of a tie somewhere, tidy himself up, he could join us as our guest. “We can feed you up, maybe help you out.” He must have been half insane with hunger, poor guy, because he glanced at my dad who hadn’t said a word, didn’t even acknowledge him, and I could actually see Alec’s desperation overruling his common sense. Maybe I was different to my dad and the other Scott-Nevilles? Maybe his luck had changed at last? I told him what time he should come and we walked away. My dad started to protest. “People like Alec are weak, they’re vermin.” “I know that, Dad!” I told him. “And after tonight, so will Alec, trust me!” And I saw my father’s eyes light up, as if he was thinking that maybe I wasn’t such a waste of space after all?
‘So, that evening, my dad and I are sitting at our usual table when the maître d’ comes over to tell me that the person I’d warned him about had showed up and was asking to see us. I said grandly, “Show him in.”
‘I could see that Alec had made a pitiful attempt to tidy himself up. He’d managed to acquire a tie and combed the tangles out of his hair, though he was still smelly and unshaven. He gave me a pathetically grateful smile, went to pull out a chair and, quick as a flash, I said, “you didn’t seriously think we’d invited you to dine at our club?” As you can imagine, the dining room suddenly went deathly silent as everyone watched this little drama play out. I said, “What I meant was, if you go around to the bins at the back, I’m sure you’d find the kitchen staff quite charitable.”’
When Dominic reached this part of his story, he’d forced himself to look Anna in the eye. ‘Then I saw Alec’s humiliated face and almost threw up with shame. I’ve done some shabby things in my life, but that moment will stay with me until I die.’
Anna hadn’t known what to say. It was a horrible story and she absolutely believed it had happened exactly the way Dominic said.
‘Oh, it gets worse,’ Dominic told her. ‘Some of the diners started to snigger. Alec went stumbling from the dining room, knocking into a waiter on his way out and sending a tray of drinks flying. Then my father did something unprecedented. “Nicely done, my boy!” he said, with real pride. “Well done! Never show weakness!” And he slapped me on the back.’
After that final humiliation, Alec Faber had clearly been left with nothing to cling to but thoughts of revenge. Even as he’d prepared to plunge to his death, he’d felt compelled to pass on that last drop of poison. If you think I’m a monster … and because it had fitted her narrative, her version of Dominic Scott-Neville, Anna had swallowed the lie.
She drove back to Abingdon, with Bob Marley turned down low, still trying to process her thoughts about her evening.
Did she believe Dominic had found God? Anna didn’t really think that was any of her concern. To quote Isadora Salzman, quoting John Lennon; ‘Whatever gets you through the night.’ Did she believe Dominic was genuinely trying to make amends for past mistakes?
Yes, she thought. Yes, I do.
But despite all these revelations, she was no nearer to knowing who had killed Lili Rossetti or if David Fischer had been murdered. She no longer believed that Thomas Kirchmann was involved, but suspected that neither he nor Alexei Lenkov had told her what was really going on at the auction house. ‘Things have not felt right at Hempels.’ He’d said. ‘Alexei and I are doing our best to get to the root of it.’ Alexei’s explanation for firing Alice Jinks didn’t ring true. Though Alice had arrived on her doorstep in – for Alice – a dishevelled sta
te and in obvious distress, there had been a distinct element of performance. Like Anna, Alice Jinks was first and foremost a survivor, but she was also a strategist. Anna simply couldn’t imagine the cool, calculating Alice stepping out of her perfectly polished role as Kirchmann’s PA so far as to start insulting clients unless, Anna thought, she felt spectacularly threatened in some way.
Shivering with tiredness, Anna turned into Tim’s badly-lit estate, peering at street names and wondering irritably why they’d all been given the names of ridiculously obscure wild flowers, when she thought of something else to add to her catalogue of failures. She had never asked either Kirchmann or Alexei Lenkov what had really happened to Alice’s grandfather, Lionel Rosser.
Next morning, Anna was awake at 5.30 a.m. To Bonnie’s delight, she immediately sat up and went downstairs in her PJs to make herself a pot of tea. The feeling she’d had last night with Dominic that normal reality had been suspended, of being under some mysterious yet kindly dispensation, an alternate, more complete version of herself, still lingered.
When she’d arrived at Tim’s, Anjali had been upstairs giving Edie her last bottle of the day. She’d briefly come down in a pretty, cotton kimono, to say hi, holding her sleepy baby in her arms, before disappearing off to bed. Anna had intended to leave then, but she and Tim had both found a mysterious second wind. They’d stayed up reminiscing for almost two hours, about Rook, their childhoods and her brothers. She’d given him a shortened version of her conversation with Dominic. Second wind or not, Anna had been aware that underneath they were both exhausted, to the point that they’d become slightly giggly and trippy, but it had felt – to both of them, Anna thought – that this opportunity to recapture their old easy dynamic, was too precious to waste.
The thought made Anna smile to herself, as she poured tea into her midnight-blue mug. She looked out through her open French doors into the garden, where Bonnie was nosing about in the silver-grey light of dawn. The early-morning air felt cool and fresh.
