Fault Line - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  ‘Was there anything in the case?’

  ‘Papers, as you’d expect. But the water had turned them to mush. You couldn’t make out what had originally been written on any of them, or what sort of documents they were at all, in fact.’

  ‘If you’re right, Oliver could only have found the case by … diving into the lake over and over again until he succeeded.’

  ‘He was a good swimmer.’

  ‘But why tell no one, not even you, that he’d found it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And why …’

  ‘Kill himself there? You can say it. I never thought it was an accident. And neither did you.’

  I looked straight at her. This was the Vivien I’d known while her brother was alive: vibrant, determined, honest. This was the Vivien I knew it was dangerously easy to fall in love with. ‘Why would he do such a thing?’ I asked, knowing very well there could probably never be a definitive answer.

  ‘He had a reason. I’m sure of that, if of little else. And I sense he wanted me – us – to understand his reason. Mother’s decided it’s best not to try. She’s afraid the most – or rather the worst – we could achieve is a change in the inquest verdict from misadventure to suicide. She wants to avoid that at all costs. Greville agrees with her. So, the consensus in the family is: leave well alone.’

  ‘But you’re not going to.’

  ‘The coroner’s never going to reopen the case, Jonathan. Mother’s worrying over nothing. The verdict doesn’t matter, anyway. I just want the truth. Oliver deserves that, don’t you think?’

  ‘Of course. But—’

  ‘And that’s why I need your help.’

  So. We’d come to the crux. We’d come to what had brought her to me. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Do you still have the pig’s egg Oliver left in your father’s car?’

  ‘Yes. But not here. It’s at home in St Austell.’

  ‘Never mind. You’re sure it’s a Z inscribed on it?’

  ‘No question about it.’

  ‘I think there is, you see. If I’m right, it’s not a Z. It’s the Greek letter zeta. A capital Z and a capital zeta look the same.’

  ‘Greek?’

  ‘Oliver took it at O level. I’d forgotten until I saw the dictionary in his bookcase.’

  ‘OK. Zeta not Z. Does it make a difference?’

  ‘It’s a coded message. I’m certain of it. Zeta is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. The sixth letter of the English alphabet is F. So, maybe the Z on the pig’s egg actually stands for F.’

  ‘And that means?’

  ‘F for Francis.’

  ‘Your great-uncle?’

  ‘He was a Greek scholar in his day. Greats at Oxford, no less. He collects crystals. He knows what a pig’s egg is. And Oliver told you he could explain why a pig’s egg is the key to everything.’

  Yes. Oliver had told me that. And Vivien and I had both seen how taken aback Francis had been when I’d asked him to explain it to us.

  ‘He played for time before he answered, if you remember. In the end, he suggested Oliver meant it as a metaphor for the nature of geology. But I don’t think it has anything to do with geology.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I think Uncle Francis knows. Which is why I’ve taken him up on a standing invitation to visit him and Luisa in Capri. I’m going out there as soon as term ends. Want to come with me?’

  A trip to Capri with Vivien? Had I really heard her ask me along? It promised to transform the summer, perhaps more than the summer. There was no way I’d even try to resist the idea and the watermelon-slice of a smile that was my immediate reaction must have made that abundantly obvious. ‘Of course I want to go with you.’

  She laughed. ‘You’re not exactly playing hard to get.’

  ‘Well, there’d be sacrifices, obviously. I’d planned to give myself a few weeks off before starting a holiday job at CCC and thought I might spend part of the time with Terry and some mates, camping in the Peak District. Capri with you is obviously second best to that, but I can’t let you go alone, can I?’

  ‘Idiot.’ She flicked a dead match in my general direction.

  ‘Seriously, though, won’t your mother have something to say about your choice of travelling companion?’

  ‘There’s no reason why she has to find out about it. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure Francis and Luisa don’t breathe a word to her.’

  Exactly how she was going to do that was unclear to me, but I wasn’t about to demand an explanation. Nor was I inclined to point out the flaws in her theory that Francis knew more than he was telling. He might have been genuinely baffled by the question Oliver had had me ask him. And the Z on the pig’s egg really might be a Z after all. It didn’t matter to me if the trip proved to be a wild-goose chase. Better in some ways if it was. Oliver couldn’t be brought back from the dead. Vivien had lost him whatever we discovered on Capri. But I hadn’t lost Vivien. She was back in my world. And this time I wasn’t going to let her go.

  I persuaded Vivien to delay her return to Cambridge until the evening. We took a boat trip from Charing Cross upriver to Kew and wandered round the gardens in warm June sunshine. We talked about our contrasting slices of student life and gently re-established the rapport there’d been between us while Oliver was still alive. Eventually, over tea, we discussed Oliver himself and the dark thoughts that had engulfed her in the wake of his death.

  ‘I never actually decided to kill myself,’ Vivien said of her overdose. ‘I just wanted to make the … the despair … go away.’

  ‘I badly wanted to help you through that, you know.’

  ‘I do know. And I’m sorry I shut you out. I suppose I blamed you for what had happened, even though I knew you weren’t to blame. It was a terrible time. Not just for me, of course. Mother had to bear her own grief as well as cope with me. Going to Egypt was probably the best thing we could have done.’

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘Ancient. Alien. And indifferent to our … piddling anguish.’ She smiled. ‘Just what we needed.’

  ‘I’m glad it worked for you.’

  ‘The psychiatrist did his bit too. He made me understand I could never have saved Oliver.’ She gazed thoughtfully towards the Palm House. ‘He’d be horrified by what I’m proposing to do now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he said it was important that I accept there was no grand secret behind Oliver’s self-destruction; that I let his … paranoia … rest with him.’

  ‘But you don’t think it was paranoia, do you?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I was sure. But since we found the briefcase …’ She whipped off her sunglasses and looked at me intently. ‘I need to be certain. Or at least to feel I’ve done all I can to achieve certainty. Does that make sense to you?’

  ‘Yes, Vivien. It does.’

  She leant forward and kissed me. ‘Thanks for saying that. You don’t know how good it is to have someone believe in me.’

  By the time I said goodbye to Vivien that evening, we’d laid our plans. Term ended at Cambridge a week earlier than London, so she’d travel to Capri alone and prepare the ground for my arrival. The only money I had to find was for my train ticket. The generous allowance she enjoyed would cover everything else. From my point of view, the prospect was altogether delicious.

  All I had to do in the meantime was back out of the camping holiday and explain to my parents that I was accompanying some anonymous friends to Italy instead, then grit my way through to the end of term. It seemed to take for ever to arrive, but eventually the morning came for me to pack my few essential belongings in a rucksack and head for Victoria station. A postcard had reached me from Capri the day before. ‘Arrived safely and looking forward to seeing you. Phone the villa when you know the time of your train into Naples and I will come and meet you. Love, V.’ The contents hadn’t gone unnoticed by Terry and my other remaining housemate, Robin. Their nakedly envious opinion was
that I was luckier than I had any right to be. And I was inclined to agree.

  That morning, they both rose unwontedly early – well before eleven – to see me off. It was as I was literally opening the front door to leave that Terry snapped his fingers and announced he’d just remembered he had something to tell me that had slipped his mind over breakfast.

  ‘Haven’t got into debt to fund this Mediterranean jaunt, have you, man?’ he asked.

  ‘No, Terry, I haven’t. Why do you ask? Thinking of offering me a loan?’

  ‘’Course not. I’m borassic. You know that. It’s just … well, last night, down at the Builders’ …’ (The Builders’ Arms was our unlovely local, which Terry was keener on than the rest of us.) ‘There was this bloke asking about you.’

  ‘Asking what?’

  ‘Where you were going over the summer. What you were planning to do. I’d never seen him before. Wondered if he might be a … y’know, debt collector?’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I played it cool as ice, man.’ (If only I’d found that easy to believe.) ‘Well, when I say nothing …’

  ‘What?’

  Terry shrugged. ‘I might’ve mentioned you were going abroad with your girlfriend. But that was it. No details.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have told him to mind his own business?’

  ‘I was a bit pissed. Before I twigged what was going on …’ He shrugged feebly.

  I glared at him, little impression though it made. ‘You’re sure you’ve never seen this bloke before?’

  Even certainty on that point was waning. ‘Not that I can recall.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  Another shrug. ‘Like … your average middle-aged square. Not tall, not short. Not fat, not thin. Smoked a pipe. Fussy little ’tache. Never took his hat off, so he might’ve been bald … or he mightn’t have been.’

  ‘Sounds like my dad,’ said Robin. ‘He’s bald as a coot under his trilby.’

  Whatever association the description had set off in Robin’s mind, it meant nothing to me, though whether that was good news or bad I couldn’t decide. It was difficult to resist the suspicion that the man’s curiosity about my plans for the summer had something to do with Vivien’s reappearance in my life. But I was at a loss to understand why.

  ‘D’you know him, then?’ asked Terry.

  ‘I don’t think so, no.’

  ‘But he knows you,’ said Robin.

  ‘Yeah. Well, maybe, maybe not. Look, I’ve got to go or I’ll miss my train. If this bloke turns up again, or anyone else asks about me …’

  ‘We’ll say you’ve joined the Foreign Legion.’

  I sighed. ‘Just say nothing.’

  THIRTEEN

  I DIDN’T KNOW what to make of Terry’s revelation. Nobody had any reason to be interested in my plans for the summer. Yet someone was. The knowledge formed a small dark cloud in the blue sky of my immediate future. It was disturbing, yet also, I’d have to admit, faintly thrilling, as if I’d stepped into an episode of The Saint.

  I was, in truth, far more excited than I was worried. The train to Dover and the Channel crossing were a drab prelude to a journey of delights. Calais didn’t look much, but it was the beginning of abroad. Nothing else mattered. And Paris was Paris, even if all I had time for on my way across the city was a circuit of Notre-Dame and a Brie baguette on the banks of the Seine.

  The sleeper to Italy should have been an ordeal, especially since I didn’t have a berth, but with every kilometre I covered, extra layers of novelty and exoticism added themselves to the experiences I was eagerly anticipating. In Rome, I missed one train to Naples so I could see the Colosseum bathed in stridently clear morning light. It was a moment of magic: a sunburst of understanding that for me, at nineteen, the world’s wonders were open for exploration.

  I didn’t want to explore them alone, though. Paris and Rome were grand and impressive places. But in Naples Vivien would be waiting. I called the Villa Orchis from Termini station, after a titanic struggle with the eccentricities of a Roman pay-phone. The call was answered by someone sounding young, male and Italian, who switched to fluent if heavily accented English when I bawled my name down the fuzzy, crackling line.

  Reassuringly, it was apparent he’d been expecting to hear from me. I assumed he was some kind of servant. He said he’d tell ‘Miss Foster’ the time of my train and wished me ‘Buon viaggio.’

  Three hours later, I was plodding along the platform at Napoli Centrale in a sweaty crowd of disembarking passengers, wishing I’d been able to take a shower at some point since leaving London. And suddenly there was Vivien ahead of me, smiling and waving.

  She looked cool and radiant in a white dress, her blonde hair half a shade fairer than I remembered. Men were glancing at her appreciatively as they passed – and enviously at me, I imagined, as we hugged and kissed. I felt the warmth of her skin through the thin fabric of her dress.

  ‘Naples is a madhouse,’ she said, threading her arm through mine as we headed for the exit. ‘Capri, on the other hand, is paradise. Let’s get you over there.’

  We took a taxi down through the city to the ferry port. The sunlight fell in glaring slabs between deep gulfs of shadow, revealing a jostling chaos of street life beneath laundry-hung tenements that might once have been fine palazzi. Everything was louder and brighter and dirtier than London, but also more vitally human. I opened my eyes and ears to the grubby glory of it all, laughing and shaking my head at our driver’s antics as scooters dodged and weaved around us.

  ‘See Naples and die of nervous exhaustion,’ said Vivien, laughing along with me.

  ‘I can hardly believe we’re on the same planet as St Austell.’

  ‘We’re not. We’re orbiting a different sun here.’

  We reached the port just in time for a Capri ferry and soon, as it chugged out of the harbour, I was able to gaze back at the conical mass of Mount Vesuvius and the wide, languorous sweep of the Bay of Naples. I felt shocked by the abundance of colour and light, as if I was looking at a picture rather than a reality of which I was part. I tried to explain the sensation to Vivien and she said she’d felt something of the same herself on her first visit.

  ‘For some reason, despite all those modern port buildings you can see, it’s easy to imagine you’ve stepped back into Ancient Rome – that Vesuvius hasn’t yet buried Pompeii.’

  ‘It’s amazing.’

  ‘Luisa told me I’d be a different person here. I didn’t know what she meant. I soon realized she was right.’

  ‘Different in what way?’

  ‘Tell me when it happens to you.’

  Capri appeared ahead of us, growing slowly from a hazy blob to a looming chunk of cliff and greenery. The ferry closed in on the harbour at Marina Grande and the passengers, most of them tourists clutching cameras and guidebooks, began massing near the stern. We brought up the rear when they were released on to the jetty. I for one was in no hurry. I wanted to savour every step of my arrival.

  Where the Villa Orchis was in relation to Marina Grande I had no idea, of course. As we ambled along the jetty, Vivien explained that it was on the other side of the island. ‘It’s quieter there and more peaceful.’ That was easy to believe. Ahead of us was a phalanx of crowded cafés and trinket shops. People were already queuing for the funicular up to the main town.

  But for us transport was waiting in the form of Luisa’s car, an elegant old Alfa Romeo cabriolet with white-walled tyres, parked on the crowded harbourfront, where it seemed to occupy a bubble of tranquil privilege. Waiting also was Luisa’s chauffeur-cum-manservant, Paolo. He was the man I’d spoken to on the telephone – young for his trade, handsome and well-groomed, with a mane of dark hair and a dazzling smile. His deferential greeting carried with it a hint of narcissism. He appeared to have been admiring himself in the rear-view mirror as we approached and I didn’t doubt he thought himself superior to me in many important ways that only his employment preven
ted him from revealing.

  The display of fast, expert driving that followed was as impressive as it was probably intended to be. We sped up the steep, winding road towards the heights above Marina Grande, a view of the harbour and the Sorrento peninsula opening up behind us as we climbed. The wind blew Vivien’s hair clear of her neck and, looking at her, I realized once again just how beautiful she was. I gave thanks for the tricks of chance and fate that had landed me there, beside her. With days of her company to look forward to on our very own island in the sun.

  The Villa Orchis lay south-west of Capri town, in the foothills of Monte Solaro, the peak that reared above Marina Piccola, Marina Grande’s smaller, humbler sister on the southern side of the island. The villas hereabouts, viewed from the road, were bright white pockets in a lush green undulating sward, with little of the houses themselves visible behind high, creeper-draped walls.

  But the stone pineapples on the gate pillars of the Villa Orchis symbolized welcome and my first impression was of comfort and homeliness rather than wealth and grandeur. The flagstoned drive carried us through a tunnel of dappled light formed by a fat-columned pergola of luxuriant wisteria to the foot of a short flight of steps that led up to a wicker-roofed terrace and the main body of the house: white-walled like its neighbours, terracotta-roofed, some windows shuttered against the sun, others standing open to the sweet-scented air.

  Francis and Luisa were waiting for us on the terrace, where they were taking tea. I was greeted more warmly than I had any right to expect, like someone they knew well and were genuinely delighted to see again. As Paolo vanished with my bag a small, plump, elderly cook-cum-maid addressed as Patrizia brought out more tea and cakes. All was suddenly ease and good cheer. It was only when I was in the middle of recounting a mishap on the Paris Metro, to my audience’s gratifying amusement, that I was brought up short by a fleeting seriousness in Vivien’s eyes as she looked at her great-uncle. It reminded me of the real purpose of my journey to Capri – the real purpose, that was, from Vivien’s point of view.