Written in Red

by Annie Dalton

  At some point, they’d both become too tired to even string a coherent sentence together, and she and Jake must have crashed out next to each other on the sofa. She wished Bonnie and Hero could tell her exactly what had happened next. Had Jake consciously moved to hold her against his chest? Or had they just naturally drifted towards each other in their sleep as the dogs lay snoring at their feet?

  Softly disengaging herself, she’d left Jake sleeping. She’d let Hero and Bonnie out into the garden and gone to wake herself up with a long hot shower. Later, she’d come downstairs to find a barefoot Jake in the kitchen making coffee. When she walked in he’d seemed exactly the same as always. Did he know that Anna had slept in his arms? It was impossible to tell. He must have slept extremely deeply, because the peaceful rhythm of his breathing hadn’t changed, not even when she’d had to free a strand of her hair that had become entangled in the metal strap of his wrist watch. Anna could still feel the surprisingly painful tweak to her scalp mixed with the sweetness of intimacy.

  Her phone beeped. She had a message from Tansy.

  Back at yrs. Crashed at L & N’s. LG still not talking. Thought I’d do a big cook up for Isadora so no worries when she comes home. xxx

  Anna checked the time. There were still a couple of hours to go before she could visit Isadora. She had packed nightwear and toiletries for her and added a couple of novels that she’d found by Isadora’s bed. She’d also taken an entire series of photos of Hero on her phone to prove that Isadora’s little dog had survived her owner’s ordeal unscathed.

  Suddenly feeling chilly, Anna got up to close the window. There were still no sounds from upstairs so she continued to reread James’s letters. Last night, she’d told Sabina, ‘It isn’t true that none of Hetty’s friends helped her. None of her friends knew – except for James Lowell, and he offered to give up everything to marry her and take on her child!’

  ‘You think he loved her?’ Sabina’s face had registered disgust. ‘James didn’t love Hetty! He was like her stalker!’

  James had become obsessed with Hetty, Anna thought as she read, but she didn’t think it was in a weird stalkery way, it was more like a frantic last-ditch need to make things right again between him and Hetty – also to make things right for Hetty. His letters showed that he’d become increasingly worried about her. She appeared to have lost all interest in her studies. She missed tutorials, handed essays in late and if James said anything she just shrugged and laughed. ‘Will the world be a better place if I read Beowulf? No! Will I be a better wiser person? No! I will just have wasted precious hours of my one and only life that I am never going to get back!’ She was constantly disappearing off to London. James didn’t know if it was to do with Tallis or to meet someone he only ever referred to as ‘A’. He was secretly terrified that Hetty had met someone who appealed to her more than James and would be finally lost to him for ever.

  One afternoon, he’d bumped into her on the High. Seizing his chance, he’d asked if he could buy her a drink. They’d found a quiet corner in the Turf and it seemed to James that they were suddenly talking together almost as freely as they had in the early days of the Six. It struck him that Hetty looked happier than she’d seemed for a long time. Encouraged by her sunny mood he reached for her hand and told her that he loved her and would never stop loving her as long as he lived.

  To my dismay, Hetty hastily pulled away. ‘But you have to stop, darling,’ she told me. ‘Oh, dearest James, I really am so enormously fond of you. I just can’t love you in the way you need. The fact is, I’ve met someone.’

  She didn’t seem to notice that she had shattered my heart into pieces, she just went on to tell me about this someone, an American. Sam was reliable, steady, all the things she used to think so unglamorous. She said what she loved about him most was that he was so quiet and ordinary. ‘He makes me feel peaceful, James. I never met a man who made me feel peaceful before. He doesn’t play games. I am so sick and tired of all these games.’ She said after tomorrow she was breaking off all contact with Tallis. She’d agreed to meet someone in London at the Palmeira Hotel, her last ever assignment for our handler. Then she was going shopping for a suit to wear for her first meeting with Sam’s mother. ‘Isn’t that just the most hilarious thing you ever heard?’ she said, laughing. ‘I’m going to be a proper grown up, and I’m going to be quietly ordinary and have a house with a picket fence. I can’t tell you what a relief it is!’

  If James was devastated by the news that Hetty had fallen in love with someone else, he was doubly devastated by her hymn to Sam’s ordinariness. I’d always worried that I was too quiet and ordinary for your mother, he wrote. If she’d said my rival was exciting and witty and wild I’d have understood, but this just felt – wrong. Anna thought of James’s extraordinary beauty as a young man and how Hetty had impulsively seduced him. She remembered Isadora saying that those first golden months with Hetty and the other members of the Six had a quality of Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. Except that Shakespeare’s play ended with a fairy blessing and all confusion happily resolved. But the confusion Tallis had set in motion was still reverberating through people’s lives fifty years later.

  James described how he’d caught the mid-morning train to London, downing several beers in the buffet car and several more in the bar of Hetty’s hotel until he’d finally summoned the courage to go up to her room. At this point James’s handwriting became shaky and harder to read. He hadn’t really thought about how his big intervention was going to work out and was horrified when Hetty immediately tried to slam the door in his face. Fuelled with desperation and far too many beers, he forced his way into her room. He told Hetty that he couldn’t let her go off and marry some numbskull Yank who required her to wear a two-piece suit to meet his mother. ‘I was quite drunk by this time and probably said a lot of things best left unsaid.’

  James said he remembered what happened next in the way people recall nightmares.

  In nightmares, people behave like ugly distorted versions of themselves. More and more hideous events keep on unfolding and you get swept along with them like a matchstick caught up in the tide, helpless to prevent the final horror.’

  Hetty said I had to leave, right now this minute. I refused. She told me that she hadn’t wanted to be cruel but I was being so ridiculous I’d left her no choice but to tell me the truth. She’d taken me to bed because she’d felt sorry for me, that was all. It was one night and it had meant absolutely nothing and I had no right following her around like some whiny little puppy. She started pushing me towards the door, yelling that I was stupid and immature, that I was trying to ruin her life. I said I was there to stop her ruining her life. She said I had no right, no right, no right. She was screaming the words into my face as she kept shoving and hammering at my chest. I tried to push her away and I must have pushed too hard because I somehow caught her off balance, and she fell striking her head on the corner of the marble-topped coffee table. The screaming stopped, everything stopped and there was this terrible silence and Hetty was just lying crumpled on the floor, not moving, blood pooling around her head.

  I must not have closed the door properly, because next minute Tallis walked in. He saw Hetty lying there and me standing over her. He said, ‘What have you done?’ I said, ‘I think I’ve hurt her.’ Tallis knelt down, feeling for her pulse and then he shook his head. He said, ‘You’ve killed her.’ His voice had absolutely no expression. I thought I was going to black out. Tallis said something like, ‘This is no time to be sensitive, James. We have to keep our heads,’ or something equally stiff-upper-lip. He said I was to get the first train back to Oxford. He said I wasn’t to say a word to anyone about what had happened and he would handle everything.

  I was in shock, Iona. I was numb, and so I simply did what he said. I went back to my college and I felt so blank and empty, it felt as if nothing was real. Sometimes even now I wonder if it was all just a bad dream, that none of it really happened. Then in the new
spapers they said your mother was found strangled, but when I left her she was already dead. I still feel sick with shame and horror when I think of what Tallis must have had to do to cover up my crime.

  Iona, I need to tell you that there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about your mother. I know the money I send you can’t make up for what I did, but maybe it will smooth your path in life just a little. I have told you my story now and I am in your hands. I am leaving the next move up to you, just do what you think is right.

  Anna laid down James’s final, most harrowing letter, feeling as if she was emerging from the pages of some dark and brooding novel. She thought of the professor as she’d seen him last, talking to a student in the college gardens. Everyone had spoken of James Lowell’s gentleness, his humility. But what had Isadora said? ‘He burned, Anna. He burned.’ Poor man, she thought, how had he borne so much guilt? How could he go on to live a normal life, let himself fall in love again, after such a catastrophic end to his first love? Part of him had died with Hetty.

  Anna decided she would risk a quick trip to the kitchen. She made a fresh pot of espresso in Isadora’s dented metal pot and rinsed out her cup, still thinking about what she’d read. For the first time she wondered how much the other members of the Six had known about what had happened to Hetty? Had they guessed the unsavoury nature of the work she was doing for Tallis? Isadora had. James seemed to have had his suspicions, though he’d never spelled it out. Had Piers? Had Robert? Anna remembered Catherine’s oddly cool behaviour towards Isadora. Catherine definitely knew something, something that Isadora’s other friends hadn’t been party to. Anna had a bad feeling that it had to do with Tallis.

  She returned to her chair with her coffee, puzzling over Isadora’s enigmatic handler. He was the joker in the pack, she thought. Nobody seemed to know who he was or who he worked for, or what his true agenda was, yet he had somehow got into these young people’s heads, exploiting not just their weaknesses and character flaws but their youthful ideals.

  Her thoughts went back to Catherine. Anna had not liked the little she’d seen of Sister Mary Catherine, and she wasn’t sure if she’d have liked her in her undergraduate incarnation as Catherine Hetherington. Catherine was the member of the Six that Anna had the least sense of. She had infiltrated alleged communist groups for Tallis, gone on shared jaunts in Piers’s London taxi and danced all night at the May Ball, relishing being young and free. If Robert was to be believed, Catherine had also had a lot of sex though apparently not with Robert. Now she was a nun. What had happened in Catherine’s life to cause her to make that leap?

  Anna stood up. She felt her heart thumping in her throat. It had just occurred to her that as one of the only two survivors of the Six, Catherine could also be in danger. Anna was horrified that she had not realized this before. Had she pictured Catherine as immune by virtue of being a nun, not part of the real world? OK, that might present quite a challenge to a possible attacker, assuming that Catherine lived in an enclosed order, but it wouldn’t be impossible if you were filled with sufficient hate. The person who had attacked Isadora and battered James to a bloody pulp had more than enough hate.

  After a few seconds dithering, Anna pulled out her phone and called Liam’s mobile but it went straight to voicemail. She left a slightly incoherent message, explaining that Catherine had also been part of Isadora’s group and suggesting that the police should go and talk to her. She hung up knowing she hadn’t properly communicated her fears for Catherine.

  At some point Anna must have moved to stand by the window. For a while she watched the antics of three acrobatic little birds clinging to the bird feeder. She felt she should be doing more, but what? How the hell did you trace a nun?

  ‘You ask an investigative journalist, you idiot!’ Anna answered herself out loud. Tim Freemantle had managed to find Max Strauli when she had only found the deadest of dead ends.

  She found her phone, punched in Tim’s number and waited edgily for him to pick up. It felt imperative to find and speak to Catherine now; not only to warn her but to get some answers. Maybe Catherine didn’t know any more about Hetty and James’s murders than Isadora. Maybe Anna was clutching desperately at straws. Even so she had to try.

  Why wasn’t Tim answering his phone? It belatedly dawned on her. Shit, it’s still Christmas. Cancel the call, Anna! She had a vivid image of Tim in his mother’s house, eating leftovers and deciding whether to answer. Perhaps it was a genuine flash of telepathy because a moment later she heard Tim’s voice through a babble of TV and piping little voices. ‘Anna, thank you,’ he said fervently.

  ‘For what?’ Anna said surprised.

  ‘You’ve saved me from watching my little twin nieces’ Barbie Tinkerbell movie. They make me sing along to all the songs! It’s like they’re inducting me into their insidious Barbie cult! So what can I do for you?’

  ‘I need you to find someone for me,’ she said. ‘It’s quite urgent.’

  Tim took his phone into another room, away from the sounds of loudly warbling little girls, and Anna told him the few details she knew of Catherine Hetherington’s life. ‘Can’t promise anything obviously,’ he said, ‘but if I do succeed in turning up some info, I’d like to go with you, if that’s OK? There’s something I really need to talk to you about.’

  ‘Tim, I thought I’d explained …’

  ‘This isn’t about your family’s murders. It’s something else,’ Tim reassured her. ‘I’ll be in touch just as soon as I find anything.’

  Before she could thank him, he’d gone.

  SEVENTEEN

  Next morning, Anna woke in her own bed in Park Town. She’d left Jake holding the fort at Isadora’s until Sabina’s father arrived. It was by no means certain yet if Sabina was going to return to London with him. But at the very least she and her dad needed to have a long and hopefully therapeutic talk. Jake had said he thought that Iona’s daughter needed an advocate, someone to stand by her and/or calm things down if things got too emotional with her dad. Anna thought Jake would be the perfect person.

  But though Jake had stayed in Summertown, it quickly became apparent that Anna hadn’t spent the night alone. Feeling a soft tickling sensation on her cheek, she opened her eyes to find Hero peering inscrutably into her face. ‘No!’ she protested. ‘You can sleep in my room, but I draw the line at sharing my bed with you.’ At the sound of Anna’s voice, Bonnie looked up from her basket, with a soft grumbling sound. The meaning of this sound depended on context. If Bonnie grumbled when she was being brushed it meant she was relaxed and happy. On this occasion, it was like a very gentle first cousin to a growl.

  It was strange how dogs were able to communicate their feelings, Anna thought. Unlike humans, their features didn’t really change, yet Bonnie’s expression seemed not so much disapproving as resigned. What can you do? her soulful brown eyes seemed to say. Isadora’s in hospital. Hero’s scared and homesick.

  ‘I know all that,’ Anna told her. ‘But I’m still not letting her share my bed!’ As she firmly returned Hero to the floor it occurred to her that she had become a person who not only talked to her dog but had actual conversations with her.

  After a late breakfast, she and Tansy decided their first task was to take down their Christmas tree. ‘It just feels wrong now after everything that’s happened,’ Tansy said.

  Anna had stayed on at Isadora’s until around midnight when Sabina went to bed, and had got home to find Tansy decanting home-cooked soups and casseroles into sealable containers to take over for when Isadora came out of hospital. Anna and Tansy had both visited her earlier in the day, staggering their visits so as not to tire her. Anna had gone first so Isadora had been able to tell an astonished Tansy who was the real writer of the anonymous letters.

  Anna had only told Isadora the bare facts: that James had accidentally killed Hetty, confessing his crime in his letters to Hetty’s mentally fragile daughter who had then filled her own daughter with thoughts of revenge.


  Tansy had now read the photocopied letters. As she and Anna untangled strings of fairy lights, they kept going back to the tragic accident that had devastated so many lives. Like Isadora, Tansy found it almost impossible to believe that James had caused Hetty’s death. ‘I suppose in some weird old school-tie way Tallis thought he was protecting James by covering everything up,’ she said. ‘But if you ask me he made everything a million times worse.’ She carefully unhooked a large iridescent bauble. ‘I know it was terrible what happened to Hetty, but if James had gone straight to the police and confessed – OK, he might have gone to prison for a few years, but he wouldn’t have lived the rest of his life in the shadow of this – this crippling secret!’

  ‘I think you could be right.’ Anna began to wrap an identical bauble in white tissue. ‘Isadora’s really something, isn’t she?’ she said in a sudden segue.

  ‘You mean, when you told her about Sabina and the letters?’

  ‘Yes! She must have spent about sixty seconds being distraught that she hadn’t suspected that Hetty had been pregnant. Then she was all, “But this is wonderful! This is like my second chance, Anna! Hetty’s granddaughter is living in my house. Oh, this is extraordinary, it’s glorious! I feel as if I’m living in an Agatha Christie novel. I can hardly take it in!”’

  ‘You know what she said to me? “Well, you know, Tansy, some of those letters were quite poetic in places. Sabina has obviously been doing some extremely esoteric reading!”’ Tansy darted a grin at Anna. ‘I had to look up “esoteric” on my phone. I thought it meant the same as “erotic”.’

  ‘It’s possible to be both, I believe,’ Anna said straight-faced.

  Tansy sat down on the arm of a chair, still clutching her unwrapped bauble. ‘I might have missed my chance at being esoteric with my lovely Liam though.’