Harry grunted and swallowed the rest of the water. He felt his headache beginning to ease. Time to take stock. The first question was whether Daniel Roberts was all right in the head. Even if he lacked a darker purpose, he might yet prove to be a wandering eccentric obsessed by a ludicrous fantasy. At first glance he seemed sane enough, but if experience had taught Harry one thing, it was that appearances were deceptive. The very notion that his own mother had given birth to this stranger was bizarre. For the moment, though, there was no choice but to humour him.
‘I ran over to the lodge in the dock building where you live.’ Daniel chewed his lip as he cast his mind back. ‘The chap on duty at the desk didn’t waste time. He called the ambulance and said he’d take care of things. I had an attack of cold feet, decided I ought to take my chance to melt away. I’d come so near and yet so far, you see. Needed a bit of time to sort myself out. Besides, there was nothing I could do. You were a hospital case. I told myself the best I could do was to drive back home and then ring up to check on your progress.’
‘You live in Liverpool?’
Daniel shook his head. ‘Cities aren’t my cup of tea. I’ve heard people say Liverpool’s simply an overgrown village, but…’
‘It’s true, you know.’
‘Not my idea of a village, let’s say. I have a tumbledown cottage up on a hillside in Snowdonia. My nearest neighbours are a mile away. You won’t have heard of the place. Even if you did, you’d never be able to pronounce it.’
Harry sucked air into his lungs. ‘I suppose you’d better tell me the story.’
‘About how I came to track you down?’
‘About everything.’
Daniel swallowed. ‘I was brought up in Penmaenmawr. Perhaps you’ve been there.’
‘Uh-huh.’ A little resort on the coast between Llandudno and Bangor. Harry had played on the beach as a kid one holiday when the family had been staying in Conwy. He’d built a sandcastle with the help of his mother. Maria Ellen Devlin, the woman he had thought he knew so much about.
‘My parents ran a cafeteria on the main road. The Druid’s House, it was called.’ Daniel half-closed his eyes, remembering. ‘They were decent people, well respected. Regular chapel-goers, you know the sort of thing. So they were honest with me right from the start. For as long as I can remember, I’ve known that I was adopted. But they made me feel good about it, they explained how they had picked me out. I felt a cut above most of my mates at school. Their parents hadn’t had the luxury of choice, see. As for me, I was special.’
Harry earned his living listening to people who told lies. He’d spent years conducting cross-examinations, but he’d never imagined interrogating someone who claimed to be his half-brother. Better take it gently; no point in treating the man as a hostile witness. No need to hurry. Let him tell his story in his own way, then pore over it for inconsistencies, the bits that didn’t quite ring true.
‘What did they say about - your own background?’
‘Not much. They weren’t trying to protect me, they simply hadn’t been told. I was illegitimate, obviously. Born to a young girl who couldn’t cope with a child in the days before the permissive society got into its stride. That’s really all I knew.’
‘But you wanted to find out something more?’
‘Not for a long time, I didn’t. I was quite content. I went to a local school and that was okay. Then university at Aberystwyth. I read English there. Books always fascinated me, that’s why. My father, Dai Roberts that is, he was a great talker. Marvellous yarn-spinner, the customers loved him and so did I. I wanted to follow in his footsteps and tell stories for a living. But things didn’t work out the way I’d planned.’
‘They usually don’t,’ Harry said.
‘During my second year at uni, he had a heart attack whilst he was cooking breakfasts at the café. Mum struggled on with the café for a while, but it became too much for her. Looking back, I don’t suppose I was much help. She sold the place for a song and married one of the blokes who’d worked in the kitchen. He was a younger man with an eye on the main chance. She was pretty, even in her fifties, but she was soft, too. Gullible, really. He cleaned her out and then he dumped her. Six months later, the week after I did my finals, she had a stroke. I came back and took a job in the town while I nursed her. She recovered, but her powers of speech were limited and she wasn’t able to walk without a frame. All the same, she was a tough old bird. It took eighteen years for her to die. Eighteen years. I won’t pretend it was an easy time.’
‘No.’ Harry had little first-hand experience of serious illness. Perhaps it helped to explain his hypochondria. He was afraid of the unknown.
‘I had thought about training as a teacher, without making any definite plans. I’d enjoyed being a student, wasn’t ready to put down roots or turn an honest penny. I wanted to travel, perhaps do a bit of writing. I’d always had this dream of becoming a novelist. Anyway, Mum’s stroke put paid to that. I worked in a little bookshop for six or seven years until the proprietor went bust. The theory was that it would keep me in touch with literature. Of course you’ll probably tell me it had as much to do with writing a masterpiece as manning the turnstile at Anfield has to do with playing in the Premiership.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Harry had never given much thought to writing a masterpiece although over the years, one or two magistrates had suggested that his speeches in mitigation qualified as classics of creative fiction.
‘After that I had to take whatever came along. I’ve waited on in hotels, served behind bars, sold clothes and hardware in shops on the high street. I wasn’t mobile, you see. I couldn’t move away. Carers can’t. Your life isn’t your own.’
‘So it was around this time that you started to get curious about - where you came from?’
‘That’s right. It began to sneak up on me, this feeling that I didn’t understand the truth about myself. I realised that unless I could put the missing pieces of my personal jigsaw together, I’d always be incomplete as a man. It became a craving, the need to learn about my mother and father. It’s - it’s impossible to explain.’
‘I suppose I can guess.’ An odd idea struck Harry. Perhaps the need to know that had obsessed Daniel was simply another species of the inquisitiveness that he so often succumbed to himself. It might be a family characteristic, for God’s sake. He made a conscious effort to banish the thought. The Welshman hadn’t begun to prove his case yet.
‘You can? Well, maybe. I hope so, at any rate. But I was scared, Harry. What if it turned out that I was the child of a couple of criminals? All sorts of wild fancies cross your mind when you don’t have a clue about your origins. And I was worried about my mum. Mrs Roberts, that is. She’d been good to me, now she was frail and dependent. I felt as though I was dishonouring her, behaving as though what she’d given me for a start in life simply wasn’t enough. So I kept my thoughts to myself. I decided I’d do nothing about it as long as she was alive. Otherwise, it would feel like a breach of trust. A betrayal.’
‘And when she died?’
‘It hit me hard.’ Daniel closed his eyes again. ‘I’d waited for her to go for so long, and when I was finally released, I couldn’t cope. It’s a bit like a long-term prisoner who reaches the end of his sentence and then finds that he can’t come to terms with the outside world.’
‘Bad luck,’ Harry muttered. ‘Takes a while to recover from something like that.’
‘If you ever do.’ Daniel shook his head. ‘I’d always written, all those years tucked away in my little Welsh backwater, I’d scribbled down bits of prose. Weird tales. Sort of cross between Tolkien and Lovecraft, if you can imagine any such thing.’
‘Not my cup of tea. I never picked up The Hobbit.’
Daniel gave him a bleak smile. ‘I suffer from insomnia. I don’t know why, doctors can’t explain it. But I don’t sleep at night. At least it gives me plenty of time for writing. Once or twice I sent pieces to magazines. They always came winging back through t
he post. Quite right, too. With hindsight, I see it. I didn’t realise at the time, but the stuff was pretty feeble. Plagiaristic, too. It didn’t deserve to be printed. But I kept trying. Eventually, I wrote something better. Derivative still, but better. I picked up one or two acceptances. It gave me something to cling to.’
Harry shifted his position on the propped-up pillows. He couldn’t see where all this was leading. ‘You started looking in earnest for your real mother,’ he prompted.
‘Eventually. I sold the house, bought my cottage in the back of beyond and decided to concentrate on writing a novel. I took a job at a truckstop a few miles from where I’d grown up, to keep the wolf from the door while I worked on the manuscript. Whenever I got a spare minute, I began to burrow away for information about my past.’
‘Difficult?’
‘Time-consuming. You don’t need me to tell you that the law entitles adopted kids to their birth records. It’s mainly a question of trawling through masses of information, hoping for a stroke of luck. I made contact with a tracing agency. They help people like me, offer counselling and practical advice. I discovered that Maria Ellen Brady had been seventeen years old. That name was my starting point. I tried to conjure up a picture of her, the young girl who had given birth to me. I guessed she came from a Catholic family, that in those days getting pregnant was a terrible disgrace.’
‘I suppose it was.’
In his mind, Harry was seeing the round, pretty face of his mother. Through the haze of memory, it seemed that she had always been laughing, teasing the old man about his shyness, his self-consciousness in company. She’d died before he’d ever had the chance to know her as a person. He couldn’t picture her as a teenager, lonely and scared of the consequences for her life of the human being that had begun to grow inside her.
‘Next step was to find her marriage certificate. Sure enough, I turned it up. She hadn’t married my natural father, but six years after I was born she became Mrs Devlin. I was excited. At last I was on the track. A bit more detective work gave me an address in Liverpool where that particular family of Devlins had lived. I summoned up the nerve to make a phone call. And then the person I spoke to, someone who remembered the family, broke the news, the terrible news. The couple had died together in a road accident years ago. It couldn’t have been worse. A disaster. I wept for hours on end. All those years, I’d dreamed of meeting my real mother. And now it would never happen.’
‘What about your natural father?’
‘I talked to the social worker who had been given my file from the local authority where I’d been adopted. She gave me his name. He was called Harvey, he was a lecturer. I wondered if Maria was one of his students, though I never checked that out. It all seemed immaterial, because I found that Harvey was dead as well. Cancer. He’d never married, perhaps he wasn’t into commitment. Maybe he enjoyed making free with the girls he taught too much. Whatever. He was only thirty-six when they buried him.’
Harry said quietly, ‘And where do I come into all this?’
‘For a long time, I was too devastated to do anything more. All my efforts seemed to have been in vain. I’d left it too late. I can’t explain how much it hurt, Harry. We all need to know where we come from, get to grips with our own personal history.’
‘Sure.’ And you’re re-writing mine.
‘You see, the simple truth was that I’d never had the chance to speak to anyone who was related to me by blood. Can you imagine how that feels - the isolation, the sense of being abandoned?’
Daniel was leaning over the bed, spreading his long bony arms as if in supplication. Harry wanted to shrink back from him. He was afraid that the man was investing hope in him, as if he believed that Harry possessed a key that would enable him to unlock the secrets of his life.
‘So you decided to seek me out.’
‘Eventually I started to wonder if the Devlins’ marriage had produced any children. After all the searching I’d carried out, the last exercise was the simplest of all. It was easy to establish that a son had been born. It took some time to sink in, that did. I had a half-brother. I made enquiries, eventually discovered that he was a solicitor, practising in Liverpool. Still alive.’
‘If only just,’ Harry murmured.
Daniel laughed. The man in the next bed stirred at the sound; his eyelids flickered, but then he turned over and went back to sleep. ‘I heaved a sigh of relief, I can tell you. I was afraid you might have emigrated to Australia, something like that. Instead, you were practically on my doorstep. I’d come so far, I couldn’t possibly let it go. I had to find you.’
He pulled out his wallet and showed Harry the photograph he’d taken from the old newspaper in the archive. ‘See, I found your picture. Once I knew who I was looking for, the rest was easy. By the way, here’s a copy of my birth certificate. See her name there?’
Harry shifted his position to study the certificate more closely. The movement made his ribs hurt, but he didn’t notice the pain. Daniel’s story had left him numb.
‘I - I don’t know what to say.’
‘You’d be entitled to tell me to get lost. I’ve broken the rules, I guess. It’s quite wrong to do things the way I have. Turning up out of the blue like this.’
‘Not quite out of the blue.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The woman you spoke to at the Legal Group office told me about you. I thought I’d got myself a stalker.’
‘Oh, God, I’m sorry. I should have contacted you through the proper channels. God, what an idiot I am. There’s a protocol for doing these things. Social workers ought to be involved.’
Harry shrugged. ‘At least you spared me that.’
The door opened and the nurse appeared. Daniel moistened his lips. ‘I’d better leave. Here, I’ve scribbled my number down, in case you want to get in touch. It’s up to you, I don’t expect you to say yes or no right now. I’ve given you more than enough to think about. It must all be a hell of a shock.’
Harry took the crumpled piece of paper, put it on the bedside table without glancing at it. The patient at the far end of the ward had woken and the nurse was talking to him. ‘So you’re a writer,’ he said at last.
‘Pre-published, as the Americans say. But that’s how I think of myself, as a writer. Always have done. Sounds better than a truckstop attendant, eh? Mind you, I’m still working on the final draft of my manuscript.’
‘What exactly is it about?’
Daniel coloured. ‘Oh, I don’t have too many literary pretensions these days. I’ve not shown the Journal to anyone yet. It’s meant to be a spine-chiller, actually. All about a man in pursuit of a legend. He’s the grandson of Jonathan Harker and he idolises his grandfather’s mentor, an old professor by the name of Abraham Van Helsing.’
Harry frowned. ‘The name rings a bell.’
‘So it should. Van Helsing hunted vampires. He’s a character who has always fascinated me. You must remember, he was the man who killed Count Dracula.’
‘At least he can’t be after your money, old son,’ Jim said through a mouthful of crisps when he looked in at lunchtime.
‘I suppose he’s harmless,’ Harry admitted, shaking his head as his partner offered him the packet. Worcester Sauce flavour had never appealed to him. ‘And yet there was something scary about him. The way he’d been devoured by this obsession…’
‘Runs in the family, obviously,’ the big man said with a crooked grin. ‘I reckon that proves he’s not having you on.’
‘Everything he said had the ring of truth,’ Harry admitted. ‘But there was so much to take in. I was just glad I wasn’t going to be murdered in my bed. As for this idea that my mum had another kid - well, it’s going to take some getting used to.’
‘She never dropped a hint?’
‘To me, no. Remember, I was - what? - just fourteen when she was killed. Whether my father had any inkling, I can’t even guess. She always seemed so open. A nothing-to-hide kind of woman.’
>
‘We all have skeletons tucked away,’ Jim said and Harry guessed his partner was recalling his brief fling with the policewoman. ‘Usually it’s better for all concerned if they stay out of sight.’
‘Sure,’ he agreed, thinking about Juliet and Casper May. ‘But I can’t imagine why he’d want to make up something like this. Let alone forge a birth certificate. If it’s all a load of hogwash, I’ll be able to prove he’s lying easily enough. No, the more I mull it over, the more convinced I am that he must be right. I have a half-brother I never knew existed.’
‘Another Christmas present to buy, eh?’
‘I always thought I was alone,’ Harry said. He was trying to be matter-of-fact about it, but he couldn’t keep the note of wonderment out of his voice. ‘Then this spooky stranger turns out to be the only flesh and blood I have in the world.’
‘You say he’s a writer?’
Harry sighed. ‘Yeah. And that’s what’s been bothering me.’
Jim frowned. ‘I’m not with you.’
‘Look at it this way. The guy’s obsessed by a vampire hunter. He told me Dracula is his all-time favourite book…’
‘Mine’s The Day of the Jackal,’ Jim interrupted, ‘but that doesn’t mean I’m into assassinating French politicians.’
‘Hang on a moment.’ He was recalling his conversation with Juliet. ‘Ken Cafferty insists there’s a vampire connection between the killings of Symons and Horlock. Suppose Daniel Roberts has some kind of grudge against members of the legal profession…’
‘Forget it.’ Jim stood up. ‘If you start looking for people who fit that particular bill, you’ll be spoiled for choice.’
‘You’re letting your imagination run riot,’ Juliet said that afternoon.
‘Blame it on your dress,’ Harry said, stroking her thigh. ‘Talk about a pick-me-up. When you leaned over to pour the water…’
First Cut is the Deepest (Harry Devlin) Page 23
