My heart soared as it always had done in the Isabella at this special time of year. Indeed, until I reached the secluded corner where I had so fatefully encountered Carl I felt almost happy. But as I sat on the same old fallen tree trunk, suddenly it hit me. More of the trunk had crumbled away and the moss covering it was much thicker than before, I fancied, but it was so familiar and so special to me. I half imagined I could feel Carl’s presence. I kept expecting him to step out from behind a bush and comfort me again, to tell me how sorry he was about all that had happened, to tell me, as he had done so often, how all he wanted was to look after me.
Being protected was not what I wanted any more, but I did want to see Carl again. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to hear the full story in his words and I wasn’t going to settle for less. Not again.
The two hours passed very quickly and it was a wrench to drag myself away, both from the beauty of the Isabella on a sunny June day, and from the crazy feeling that if I waited there long enough Carl would appear. Maybe a part of me really had expected him to be waiting for me to turn up at the Isabella, just like he had all those years before.
But it wasn’t to be. I had been kidding myself. I plodded up the path to the car park where my taxi was already waiting and asked the driver to take me to Richmond station where I took the underground again, and easily made it to Paddington with half an hour to spare. I remembered I was hungry and I was also beginning to feel very tired. I nipped into the station buffet and ordered myself an all-day breakfast, my second of the day, it occurred to me only later, then, full of comfort food, I dozed through much of the journey home. But my every waking moment was overtaken with the riddle of where Carl had gone.
I went over everything again and again in my mind and got nowhere. I made a mental list of things I could do. I ought to get myself a passport. I had no way of knowing where Carl might be, but I wanted to be ready to follow the slightest lead. Maybe he had somehow got himself to the States, maybe he had gone back to his past as DC Carter suspected. If so I would go there. I would seek him out.
Meanwhile I would put advertisements in all the major newspapers asking him to contact me, telling him I wanted to see him. I had seen those sad pleas so often, begging missing persons to come home or get in touch, and never imagined myself searching for someone in this way. I told myself that surely he wouldn’t ignore me if he knew I was looking for him. I wasn’t sure of anything except that I had to find Carl.
It occurred to me that my desire to find him could become as obsessive as had been his desire to keep me.
Nineteen
The train trundled into Penzance at half past midnight. Mariette was waiting at the station for me as she had promised, in spite of the hour.
Robert Foster’s money, I assured her, was all mine.
‘How about a celebration, then?’ she enquired typically. Never one to miss out on a party, was Mariette.
I grinned. ‘When I find Carl,’ I said.
She shook her head doubtfully. ‘I still think you’re better off without him.’
‘You may be right,’ I admitted. ‘I just feel I can’t even decide that until I’ve seen him again, talked to him . . .’
‘But where do you start looking?’
I told her I had already started, that I’d checked out Carl’s old flat in Sheen. ‘I kind of believe what DC Carter says, about people on the run having the urge to go back, to go home, or whatever passes for it . . .’
‘From what you’ve told me about him I can’t imagine DC Carter ever being right about anything,’ said Mariette tetchily.
I shrugged. ‘I just have this feeling that something will tell me where I should go to look for Carl, and that if I ever get close to him, I’ll know.’ I paused. ‘I’d like to get a passport as quickly as possible.’
Mariette was a very practical person. Her reply did not surprise me. ‘There’s a man who comes in to the library who knows someone in the Passport Office,’ she said. ‘He sorted things out when Mum was going on holiday to Tenerife once and discovered at the last moment that her passport had run out. I’ll get on to him.’
‘You’re a marvel, Mariette,’ I said. And to me she was. Nothing ever seemed to be problem to her.
‘But why do you want one so fast anyway? You’re not going to run away too, are you?’
I grinned. ‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘I may want to go to America to find Carl, though. Maybe he has found his way back there, that’s what DC Carter thinks.’
‘Man doesn’t have a clue, if you ask me. First of all he thought Carl would come to you, didn’t he? He hasn’t done. Yet. Maybe he still will. Shouldn’t you just stay where you are, wait here?’
‘I’m not sure I can,’ I said. ‘I feel I have to do something. In any case, if Carl were planning to come back to St Ives to find me I reckon he would already have done so. I imagine that he feels rejected by me. I made it quite clear that I wanted nothing more to do with him when I saw him in jail and then I didn’t answer his letter . . .’
My voice caught in my throat.
‘You really are sure you want to find him, aren’t you,’ muttered Mariette resignedly.
I assured her I was.
She sighed. ‘Men,’ she said. ‘Nothing but trouble.’
‘Is that why you have nothing to do with them?’ I asked sweetly.
‘Maybe that’s what it will come to.’
‘And pigs might fly,’ I replied.
‘As a matter of fact there are days when I just can’t wait to get old and past it.’
I could only grin. There she was, radiating vitality as usual, perfect skin, shiny black hair, a woman born to drive men mad if they weren’t already.
But my mind was still on more serious matters. ‘Mariette,’ I said hesitantly, after a short pause. ‘If I did decide to go to America . . . would you come with me? . . . I mean, I’m not sure I could manage on my own and I have the money to pay for both of us . . . and we could try to make a holiday of it . . .’
I wasn’t sure there was actually much chance of that in my frame of mind, but if Mariette suspected as much she did not let on. ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said.
Over the next couple of weeks we prepared for our trip. I took myself off to Penzance to buy some much needed new clothes. This time I travelled alone and I bought garments that suited me, not Mariette, fond as I had become of her. Carl had probably been right about the tarty orange suit episode. I had attempted to turn myself into somebody I wasn’t. That was another thing that was never going to happen again.
We also had to sort out passports and tickets, and car hire. Yet another of Mariette’s many friends, who lived in London, obtained a copy of my birth certificate. I decided that my passport would be in my maiden name. It was simplest and in any case I no longer desired to be either Mrs Foster or Mrs Peters.
I became Jane Adams again, the name I was christened with. At least, according to my brand new passport I did.
Mariette was pensive as she fingered the pristine document. ‘You know, you’re still Suzanne to me. I can’t imagine calling you anything else . . .’
I smiled. ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I guess I’m still Suzanne to myself too.’
Official documents were one thing, but I could never really be Jane again, not inside my head. Too much had happened. And, in fact, the memory of the night when Carl had given me my new name, although tainted by the lies we had lived, remained too vivid. I could not easily discard my name, even though I had thrown away Carl’s records and CDs of the Cohen song from which it had been taken. And, to be honest, I was already beginning to regret that.
Before we left for America I made a final call to DS Perry to make sure that there was no further news of Carl. She had earlier supplied me with all the information she had from the Florida police about Carl and the death of his daughter, including the name of the man who had been the investigating officer at Key Largo when he had been charged with manslaughter.
‘I don’t know exactly what you’re expecting to find over there, but don’t build your hopes up, will you?’ Julie Perry cautioned.
‘I’m expecting nothing but you know what I’m hoping for, I’m hoping I might find Carl, or at least discover more about him,’ I said.
‘As long as you don’t end up wishing you hadn’t . . .’
She didn’t seem quite to finish the sentence, but I thought I knew what she meant.
Mariette and I flew out of Heathrow en route to Miami just fifteen days after my journey to Hounslow. I had a suitcase full of new clothes, a chequebook, a Barclays Premier gold card and, of course, a passport. I thought that was pretty good going. And I must confess that even in my distress my new-found independence gave me considerable satisfaction. In spite of my extraordinarily sheltered past I found that I took to it with surprising ease – although I realised I would not have managed such a big trip so effortlessly without Mariette. Her only previous trip to the States had been a package tour to Disneyworld at Orlando, but she seemed totally confident that this prepared her for almost anything America could throw at her. Nothing much fazed Mariette.
Any notions I had about transatlantic travel being glamorous were well and truly scotched by nine hours in Virgin economy class. I am not particularly tall, about five foot six, but I felt as if I had been wedged in to my seat with a shoehorn. By the time we reached our destination the circulation in my legs seemed to have disappeared and I couldn’t help thinking about the newspaper articles I had read claiming that being cramped on aircraft can cause blood clots and kill.
‘If we were animals,’ remarked Mariette crustily, ‘there would be animal rights protesters, waving bloody great banners, waiting for us on the tarmac.’ I managed half a smile.
As we battled our way through Immigration I became increasingly glad that we’d decided not to go further than the airport Hilton that night. I had heard about jet lag but nothing had prepared me for it. I had never been so tired in my life.
We had a huge room in the Hilton overlooking a runway – almost on top of one, it seemed – and yet we could hear very little aircraft noise through the triple glazing. We both crashed out instantly and woke very early with the morning light. Then we sorted out our prebooked hire car – something the Americans called a compact. It seemed like a limousine to me, but then about the sum total of my previous motoring experience had consisted of travelling around in Carl’s elderly van, which we had never quite afforded to change and every year had nursed painstakingly through its MOT.
Mariette had to do all the driving but the distances we expected to travel were not great – Key West, our furthest destination at the southernmost tip of the Keys, being less than 200 miles from the airport – and she said she was quite looking forward to it. We were on our way before 8 a.m.
Refreshed by sleep and in bright sunshine we navigated ourselves out of Miami without too much difficulty and headed down Highway 1 to Key Largo where Mariette, using an already much thumbed tourist guide, had booked us into a little bayside motel called Neptune’s Hideaway.
For forty-five dollars we rented a spotlessly clean room, which I gathered was small by American standards, but boasted a seven-foot-wide, king-sized bed around which we had to walk sideways while also negotiating the obligatory fridge and TV. I sat on the bed with my feet on my suitcase while I phoned the police station and asked for Detective Theodore Grant. I was told he had retired but the officer I spoke to was helpful and informed me that Theo Grant ran a boat charter company a couple of miles down the coast. I was all for taking off there right away, but Mariette said she wasn’t going anywhere until she had had something to eat.
I allowed her to tempt me into the Sundowners bar and restaurant next door, where we sat on a wooden terrace overlooking the bay while I discovered for the first time what a sandwich means in America.
By the time we had ploughed our way through a mountain of food, which would probably have been presented in the UK as a three-course dinner, I realised I had managed to get myself mildly sunburned. The weather in Florida at the end of June and beginning of July can be stiflingly hot, I had been warned, and the sun very dangerous, but in the Keys a deceptively refreshing breeze blows almost all the time. After we had eaten Mariette consented to drive to Theodore Grant’s boatyard.
Grant was a heavily built man with a head of thinning white hair and a wary look in his eyes, which probably came from years in the police force.
When I explained who I was and why I was there he didn’t seem very happy about it. ‘Messy case. I’d hoped it was ancient history,’ he muttered. But he invited us into a room full of rusting filing cabinets, which apparently served as his office, and even offered us a beer. We sat by a window overlooking the bay and he talked freely enough.
‘One of the nastiest motor accidents we’ve had around here. They found the girl’s body half in and half out of the car,’ he told us, taking a long pull at his bottle of Budweiser. ‘But her head was twenty yards away on the grass verge. Harry was sitting next to it stroking the hair. It took our boys several minutes to get him to leave it and let the medics cart it away along with the rest of her.’
Grant shuddered and had another drink of beer.
‘The accident was completely his fault. That was the worst of it for him, I think,’ he went on. ‘No other car involved, simply going too fast, driving like a madman. Harry blamed himself totally, from the start, but actually being charged with manslaughter was the final straw, I suppose. He took off right after we charged him. I got a lot of shit because I’d not impounded his passport. Tell the truth, it didn’t occur to me Harry would do a runner. I’d known him for years. We were buddies . . . well, till almost the end, that is . . .’
He stopped, but I got the feeling that he hadn’t finished what he had intended to say. I waited for him to continue. He didn’t.
‘What kind of a man was Harry Mendleson?’ I asked.
He looked at me curiously. I had told him I had lived with Carl for many years in England. It must have seemed like a strange question. But this was the first person I had ever met who had known Carl before I did, who may even have been close to him.
After a moment or two Grant shrugged his big shoulders. ‘Mixed up, like the rest of us in this Goddamn country,’ he said. ‘Likeable and weak, that’s the kind of man he was.’
And I’d always thought he was so strong. Strange really.
‘His wife didn’t find him likeable, though. He drove her round the bend. That’s why . . .’
His voice trailed off.
‘She had an affair, didn’t she?’ I prompted him. ‘There was someone else. That’s why she wanted to leave him.’
‘That’s not the only reason.’
He didn’t seem inclined to say any more, in spite of Mariette and me both encouraging him to.
‘Harry was always, you know . . .’ He paused again, as if searching for words. ‘Harry was always . . . different, always a bit of a strange one. After the accident he completely lost it. Still, none of us round here did much to help, that was for sure.’
His tone of voice surprised me. He sounded more than concerned, almost as if he felt guilty. The caring side of the Florida police department or something more? I had no way of telling. It was just that I had begun to question everything in my mind, to look beneath the surface all the time: a new way of thinking for me.
‘Where’s his wife now?’ I asked.
‘Islamarada. Remarried. Wexford Barrymore, a hotel keeper.’ Grant sighed. ‘Loaded, of course. Makes more in a year than I will in my lifetime, I reckon.’
I couldn’t quite see the relevance. I waited patiently until he continued to speak.
‘She’s had Harry declared legally dead. She won’t be too happy about his resurrection, our Claire, you can be certain of that. Wouldn’t be too pleased to see you two, either.’
Like you, I thought. You’re not pleased to see us. None the less I persuaded him to g
ive us the name of the hotel – the Bay Point. Mariette and I checked the mile marker on our map. It was about half an hour’s drive away we reckoned.
We decided to call in there the next day on our way down to Key West.
From the moment we arrived at the Bay Point I could see what Theo Grant meant about its owner being loaded. The hotel was set in extensive, beautifully tended grounds with its own golf course and tennis courts. Accommodation was in a series of individual luxury bungalows and it took us a while to locate reception. Anything as common as an office obviously had to be camouflaged. The place just oozed wealth and I felt ridiculously nervous when we eventually approached the front desk.
If Mariette felt the same way, she did not show it. She strode forward boldly and with apparent confidence addressed a young woman receptionist who was so perfectly made-up and so extraordinarily even-featured that I did not think she could be quite real.
‘We’d like to speak to Mrs Barrymore, please,’ said Mariette in much more cut-glass English tones than she normally used. ‘We have a mutual acquaintance in the UK who asked if we would look her up.’
As the receptionist obediently picked up the phone I stared at Mariette in amazement.
‘Well, it’s almost true,’ she hissed under her breath. ‘A shared husband or as near as damn it has to qualify as a mutual acquaintance, surely.’
A Deep Deceit Page 26
