Shadows to Ashes

by Tori de Clare

  Henry strode past Naomi in the kitchen and touched her arm. The skin on his nose was beginning to flake. His face was filling out. ‘Alright, petal?’

  She smiled. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Good.’ He headed over to Dan. ‘Hey Dan, got a minute to give me a hand with a crate of bubbly? It’s in the garage and I’m not getting any younger.’

  ‘Sure, Henry.’

  Camilla knocked on the kitchen window and talked to Naomi with exaggerated lip movements and sign language, none of it essential. Naomi could hear her perfectly well. She wanted Naomi to locate Val, Dan’s mum, who’d been desperate for a tour of the garden. After circulating with drinks, Camilla was free now, looking forward to showing her around. Camilla couldn’t see Dan’s mum just out of her view across the kitchen island. Val Stone caught all of it. She smiled at Naomi as she had countless times that day, each smile an apology for the past and a thank you for gaining back her one remaining son. Naomi smiled back, watched Val collect her drink and hurry out into the garden to join Camilla. Which left her with Dan’s dad.

  ‘We can’t decide what to get you as a wedding gift,’ he called across the kitchen. ‘What do you buy the couple who has everything?’

  Naomi laughed. ‘Exactly why we don’t need gifts.’

  ‘That’s what Dan keeps saying, but it doesn’t seem right.’

  ‘You’re contributing to the wedding and you’re coming. That’s more than enough for us.’

  Naomi’s phone began to vibrate against the worktop where she’d set it down. She glanced down. A number, not a name, looked back at her.

  ‘Sorry, excuse me a sec?’

  ‘You carry on,’ he said, waving a hand. His glass touched his lips and he tipped back his head.

  Naomi snatched up her phone and walked towards the kitchen door.

  ‘Hello.’ Her tone was cheery, enquiring.

  ‘Naomi?’

  ‘Yes?’

  She was walking through the hall, passing the portrait on the wall. ‘It’s Frederic Sanders here. Can you talk?’

  Her legs stopped moving. In an instant, a nest of ants was crawling all over her skeleton. She looked about her. The hall was empty. She could hear laughter and the drone of chatter in the garden.

  ‘Vincent?’ she whispered.

  ‘It’s Frederic Sanders, like I told you. Spelt without a k. Vincent Solomon is dead. You killed him, remember?’

  She put a hand to her forehead. Willed herself to move, to get to a quiet room. The ants were scuttling away and she began to feel as light as air. She was full of energy now, felt like letting out a giant scream right down the phone. She smiled instead against the mouthpiece, grabbed the stair rail and spun herself towards the stairs and then launched herself up them two at a time.

  ‘What the hell,’ she breathed at the top. ‘Where are you?

  ‘In the afterlife. There is one after all. Jesus instructed his disciples to feed his sheep when he’d gone, but it’s maybe better that the sheep in your pastures stay decidedly starved of this particular doctrine, if you follow.’

  ‘I follow,’ she confirmed. She’d made it to her old bedroom now. She closed the door then hurried to the bathroom and locked the door behind her. ‘You’re not a Frederic, with or without a k.’

  ‘My passport says I am. If it’s good enough for Chopin, it’s good enough for me. Every time you play Chopin, be reminded of me.’

  She dropped down on the toilet seat because her legs were very weak. ‘Sanders?’

  ‘A family name on my mum’s side.’

  ‘Right.’

  A moment of silence followed. The quality of it was creamy and golden. All the things she wanted to ask him died on her tongue. She couldn’t grasp that he was so close again. Right in her ear.

  ‘I plotted to die, Naomi. You killed me long before the fire. Made it so that it wasn’t feasible to be Vincent Solomon anymore. I was tired of him, doing what he did, the life he lived. And I planned how I’d do it long before Lorie invited me into her bedroom. When I discovered Jimmy’s real crimes, I knew it was time. Lorie made no difference at all. So don’t take too much credit for my death.’

  The relief was making her dizzy. ‘I’ll be sure to give all the credit to you in future. The weight of it was a pain in the rear.’

  ‘I imagine it was. Well, I did promise I’d haunt you when I got to the other side and I always keep my word, so here I am.’

  ‘Here you are,’ she repeated in a daze, pulling a strand of hair from her lips. ‘Where is the afterlife, Vin . . . Frederic?’

  He sighed. ‘The furthest point from where you are, which makes it very un-heavenly indeed. Bright here, but no angels. Just tossers in swimming shorts and a lot of unnecessary flesh.’

  She laughed. ‘At least you’re not in prison.’

  ‘It’s worse,’ he said. ‘For self-torture, I came to the right place. This is a sentence for me. Every suit I ever owned reduced to ashes and now, to blend in with the locals, I’m wearing civil standard uniform: jeans and a regular plain T-shirt. Your average Joe. My very own prison.’

  As soon as he mentioned Joe, she was reminded of Little Joe outside, being pushed around by Vincent’s brother.

  As if reading her mind, he asked in a more serious tone, ‘So how’s our nephew?’ She shook her head. Little Joe was, wasn’t he – nephew to both of them, and to Lorie too. It was unfathomable.

  ‘He’s keeping them awake at night. I look at him when he screams and think that he has the makings of a great conductor. When he’s happy, his smile lights up a room. A face to die for. He’s just divine. He’s healed everyone somehow. Brought us all together.’

  Vincent was quiet on the other end of the phone now. She sensed the atmosphere had shifted. ‘How was the christening?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Annabel posted an open invitation to her friends on Facebook, but no pictures of the little man. I knew you’d all be together right now. With me . . . here. The way it has to be.’

  ‘How did you do it? I saw you in the bedroom. How did you get out?’

  ‘Send me one picture of my nephew and I’ll tell you. Agreed?’

  She thought about that for a moment and couldn’t raise an objection really. Curiosity was too strong. ‘OK.’

  ‘I planned a fire. Who is most inconspicuous in a fire?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘A fire-fighter. I had a suit, a hat and mask. Not hard to get hold of. I used fuel, set the downstairs alight, lounge, cardroom, kitchen. I locked the doors leading onto the hall. The doors were specially made when the house was built, with a steel plate inside slowing the burning of the doors, making the rooms difficult to penetrate. Then you saw me upstairs with a smoke bomb behind me. Easy enough to make, but there was no fire in the bedroom then. I doused the upstairs rooms then waited downstairs. After Kerry had tried the doors, I unlocked the French doors in the library. When the fire crew found a way in through them, I was waiting, close by. By the time half a dozen fire-fighters were clogging up my house, I joined them. No one noticed me. In the back garden, I shooed back the police officers and they scattered to the front as soon as the window blew. I could hear people yelling about it. That’s when I knew that the smoke would obscure the view from the air, leaving the way clear for me to slink to the back of the garden, slip behind the shed, lose the gear, shove it in a bag and hop over the fence. I had a car waiting a few streets away and a bag with essentials. I walked slowly, without attracting attention, and by morning, was getting on a ferry at Dover, my fire-fighter’s gear having been weighed by a brick and dumped in a river ten miles north of Oxford. I laid low in northern France for three days, then I drove to Barcelona and got a flight to Hong Kong, and from Hong Kong to here.’

  ‘But there was a body. No flesh left on it according to reports.’

  ‘He was dead already. Chambers. Went for me earlier that day and someone shot him in the head. Not me. I enlisted the help of two guys from Manchester’s u
nderworld and paid a huge sum of money to have Leon dumped in my control room while I drew the police to that cemetery in Manchester. The control room is a metal box, the perfect incinerator. I left the gun by Leon’s hand and set him alight then locked the doors. I knew it’d take an age for anyone to penetrate that room, by which time, Leon would be cremated.’

  ‘He was. They wanted dental records, to identify the body.’

  ‘Only they’d never find them for me or for Leon,’ he said. ‘My dad never took us to the dentist as kids and when I was twenty, I had all my teeth capped in a private Swedish clinic, making their job rather difficult I imagine. We’re a similar height, Leon and me, though he had 4 stone of muscle I didn’t have. But muscle burns. So the rest is down to statistics and assumption. No one reported missing. Face reconstruction unnecessarily expensive with the public services starved of cash. Who else could it be but me?’

  ‘You’re unbelievable.’

  ‘Thank you. Everything’s down to logic and planning. I know how the police think, so I gave them everything they wanted to fill in their sheets and close the case. A motive, a murder, some drama, a chase, a madman and even a body. If you’d known any sooner, you’d have given me away. I had to wait until the investigation was over. Had to leave you assuming, along with everyone else, the worst. The only way for you to act naturally.’

  The pain of the last few months pulsed through her mind. Without it, she’d never have bought the cottage and she loved it so much. ‘I’m completely speechless.’

  ‘She had to die, you know – Charlie. She wanted the baby, would have stopped at nothing. Even from prison, none of you would have been safe. And when she got out . . .’

  ‘Kerry said amongst her stuff they found a pram, a cot, baby clothes. In her car there was a document, making her the legal guardian of Little Joe, if anything happened to Joel or Annie. Annabel and Joel had signed it apparently, only they hadn’t. Terrifying. Crazy.’

  ‘I told you what she was like.’ A pause. ‘So that’s his name is it? Joe?’

  ‘Joseph Henry Martin. Would have been James Solomon the 2nd, if Charlie had had her way. At least that’s what Kerry told me. She probably shouldn’t have said.’

  ‘Charlie would have got rid of Joel and Annabel in what looked like an accident and made a legal challenge for the boy. I knew she was cooking something big. I could read it in her eyes.’

  There was a natural lull in the conversation. Naomi knew she needed to go, but the part of her that didn’t want the conversation to end quietened her instead.

  ‘You need to go,’ he perceived.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So Annabel knows about Joel?’

  ‘He told her, said he’d been desperate to tell her for a while, but he was terrified of the consequences and had stayed away to protect her. She was furious, obviously. Very hurt and shocked. But I talked to her and Dad talked to her and she had to admit that it answered a lot of long-held questions for her about both of them. Thing is, she loves him and he’s Little Joe’s dad. She couldn’t stay mad for long. They’re living together now.’ Naomi didn’t say where it was.

  ‘Perfect outcome. Did Joel – ?’

  ‘He did. He had the headstone changed. It was ready two weeks ago. I went to see it with Joel and Annabel. Little Joe was in his pram. I’m sure your mum would approve.’

  He received this news without responding. She wondered for a moment if he was still there. Then he said, ‘And Lorie?’

  Naomi sighed. ‘More difficult, that one. My dad went to see her mum. My mum went with him. They talked and tried to come to some understanding and acceptance about what had happened.’

  ‘Lorie might never have come clean. So, I did it for her. Enough secrets.’

  ‘It’s been hard for my dad to accept that Lorie’s mum never told him he had a daughter and that another man raised his child, but it’s brought my mum and dad closer, strangely. Lorie’s gone off travelling alone. No one wanted to press charges against her and she’d helped the police, so the case against her for past crimes was dropped. She’s gone to find herself, or something. She sent me a postcard from Slovenia. Who knows what will happen when she gets back. Maybe we’ll meet up to talk or something. Too soon to say.’

  Dan was calling her now from downstairs. She jumped up from the toilet and opened the door. ‘Just coming.’ Then she closed the door again.

  ‘Dan?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Silence. Then he drew breath. ‘Happy?’

  ‘Very.’ There was nothing more to add.

  ‘OK.’

  Another silence. She found that she was warding off tears now. ‘Vincent? I can’t have secrets from Dan, you know that. This will have to be the last time we speak.’

  He breathed steadily down the phone. ‘I know. Send my picture then I’ll delete you from my mile-long list of contacts.’

  She grinned into the phone. A tear dribbled out of her eye. ‘I’m the only one?’

  ‘Correct.’ She heard him clear his throat. ‘Don’t get tempted to tell Dan about this or you’ll only make him an accessory to something he’s best not knowing about.’

  ‘I’ll keep my mouth shut.’

  ‘You could get into trouble too.’

  ‘I know that. You’re trusting me –’

  He cut in, ‘I’m doing this for you.’ Another quiet moment where she wondered where he was standing. What he was seeing. ‘I could have resisted calling, but you’d have blamed yourself for ever.’

  She nodded. ‘Hmm.’ It was difficult to speak with a clump of cement in her throat. She couldn’t bear to end the conversation, knowing he would slip away for good. ‘Vincent?’ she managed.

  ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘Got my piano. Thank you.’

  ‘Use it,’ he said. ‘Don’t sit on your money and become a doctor’s wife. Finish your degree. Do some concerts. Exploit your talent. The only bounds it has are the lines that you draw within your own head.’

  Her impulse was to minimise his comments, argue that she wasn’t all that good, that there were so many better pianists of her age. But a silence fell upon her ear. The lonely, barren kind of quiet that told her he was no longer there.

  ‘Vincent?’

  Nothing. She sat, lost suddenly, panic clawing at her chest. So many things left unsaid. Dan’s voice floated up the stairs again and she stood, told him she was on her way. She cleared her eyes and looked through her photo album until she found a picture of Little Joe, grinning from his pram, gripping his toes with one hand. Then she sent it to Vincent, Frederic without a k, whoever he was now. She imagined him receiving it, studying it the way that only Vincent studied things. She was hovering in the bathroom, waiting for an acknowledgement, some clue that it had reached him. Nothing came.

  With some reluctance, she deleted the number from her phone, all traces of his call. Vincent was alive. That sliver of knowledge was already hardening into a little gem, a nugget of treasure she’d have to bury now and share with no one. Would it be heavy to carry around? Time would tell.

  She wandered out of her old room and forced herself to bounce down the stairs. Dan was waiting at the bottom.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ he said. No trace of irritation.

  ‘Just catching up with someone.’

  He slung an arm around her shoulder and she looped hers round his waist and immediately felt better. Dan didn’t ask who it was. Instead he said, ‘Group photo outside. Everyone’s been asking for you. My dad said you’d taken a call. Sorry to cut you short.’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’

  He took her hand and led her outside into warm sunshine. The group, already assembled, ruptured into applause.

  ‘Here she is,’ Annabel called. ‘Thought we’d lost you.’

  Naomi smiled. Never admitted that for one small moment up in that bathroom, she had been lost. But that had passed now and she was sure-footed again. She stood in the group next to Annabel, bound in Dan’s arms, hopeful t
hat she could face a lifetime of dreams without the flames licking at her body.

  When the group dispersed, Dan didn’t move. He continued to hold her and she clung to him. They were utterly still. Two rocks in a stream while the current of the little gathering shifted like water around them. Naomi closed her eyes and saw white light and then her cottage down the rough stone drive, the huge tree standing guard. In the lens of her mind, the cottage was shrouded in sunlight just as she was now, and was sitting beneath an unblemished sky. Behind the cottage, the fields climbed and fell in shades of improbable greens until it rose up the final hill and there, met the sky. Topaz on emerald, the sun a great diamond in the sky, too glorious to view. Naomi inclined her head against Dan’s shoulder. One week from now, the cottage would be theirs.

  She opened her eyes and pulled back to look at him. And he looked at her, a question in his eyes – what are you thinking? Impossible to answer really, but she’d tell him later that she was already thinking of going back to college. Of finishing what she’d started when she was just a naïve kid, a girl who knew nothing. Of renting a small place in Manchester and escaping to the cottage with him at weekends, holidays, whenever they needed a haven.

  She’d admit later that something had happened, suddenly and irrevocably. That a new fire had ignited inside her. Not the type that burned into her dreams, leaving her limp and damp, but the type that was capable of powering her limbs, stoking her with a peculiar kind of energy that made anything seem possible. She’d never tell Dan how it had happened. Or why. She’d protect him from the truth.

  Camilla was calling her, shouting her name, waving from the front door. She was standing with Dan’s mum who was looking vaguely apologetic again. Dan released her and they began to walk hand in hand to the door. Camilla kept talking, sending words across the garden, filing a request. She’d slipped into her proud mother tone that she used very sparingly. But today was a special occasion. Valerie Stone wanted to hear Naomi play the piano. Only if she had time, of course, and if it wasn’t an imposition. Dan squeezed her hand. They exchanged a look. They smiled. She had time. It wasn’t an imposition at all. She’d done worse things.