Ursula's Secret

by Mairi Wilson

  There was a whoosh and a slight stirring of air as the doors slid open and a tall, slim man in a crisp suit stepped up to the reception desk. Steely-grey hair belied the youthful vigour he seemed to project, the purposefulness of his movement. Lexy frowned. There was something familiar about him.

  “Richard Chakanaya. Here to see Daniel Chizumu. Tell him I’m coming through.”

  The receptionist jumped up, came round the desk and all but curtseyed to the visitor. The plane. Hadn’t he been in the First Class cabin? Lexy couldn’t be sure but couldn’t think where else she might have seen him.

  “Of course, Mr Chakanaya. He’s expecting you. Please follow me.”

  Mr Chakanaya, though, seemed to know exactly where he was going and strode down the corridor to the right of the reception desk, leaving the flustered woman no choice but to totter in his wake. So she wasn’t entirely unflappable, then, Lexy was amused to see. Worth remembering. Who did you have to be, though, or what did you have to do, to get away with that? If Lexy tried it she’d be chased round the building by burly men with walkie-talkies. You had to be rich, clearly. Was he a politician, maybe, or a celebrity? Certainly he had the looks of a movie star.

  “Ms Shaw? Christopher Chizumu. Senior Partner. Delighted to welcome you to Blantyre.” Lexy stood and let her hand be squashed and heartily pumped by a pot-bellied man who’d stepped straight out of Dickens.

  “As I’m sure Ms Hamilton will have explained,” he continued, flapping his arms to shoo her down a short corridor to a meeting room of far lesser grandeur than their Edinburgh counterpart’s, “my brother and I represent her firm here and as such have managed Misss Reid’s interests for many years. I never knew her personally, of course, but I admired her greatly. Her reputation, you see, and her generosity to the children over the years. Yes, indeed. Inspiring. May I offer you my sincerest condolences? Do please sit.”

  It seemed Lexy wasn’t required to speak, so she didn’t. She sat where he indicated she should and waited, impressed by the way he transitioned seamlessly from small talk to business.

  Two hours later, she was again being shepherded into the back of that silent car, before the door closed, cutting her off from reality once again. Only this time she was glad of it. She needed an oasis. The noise and the bustle of the streets that she’d found so exhilarating yesterday would have overwhelmed her now. Her brain was jammed. Too full to take in anything more. Christopher Chizumu had been unsettling, particularly there at the end.

  He’d started out much as Lexy had expected he would. He’d been friendly, open, helpful even, but no, he didn’t know the identity of Ursula’s son. Or if he did, he was every bit as practised a dissembler as Ms Hamilton. But he’d still been able to help Lexy fill in some of the other gaps, including in which direction the payments between mother and son flowed, and she’d got one strong lead to pursue, even though she was sure the old lawyer wouldn’t approve of her doing so.

  “An intermediary set up the arrangements, Miss Shaw,” he’d told her. “The payments are made through us to our associates in Edinburgh. Miss Reid herself collects – collected – the money twice a year directly from Ms Hamilton. And I’m not surprised you’ve found no trace of these payments. Cash, you see.”

  “Cash? But surely that’s a little …”

  “Irregular, yes. But not unheard of, even for such a large amount.”

  “How … large?”

  “Five thousand a month, sterling, paid twice a year.”

  “But that’s … that’s a lot of cash. Why? It doesn’t feel quite … well, above board.”

  “I assure you it was, Miss Shaw. We wouldn’t be involved were it not.”

  “Of course, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest—” His raised hand halted her faltering apologies.

  “Not our business to demand explanation from our clients, Miss Shaw. Not perhaps a payment method we would advise, admittedly, but our client was insistent and most particular we follow the instructions to the letter.”

  He’d gone on to discuss her share income, but Lexy had been wondering where all that cash could have gone. Ursula had lived comfortably enough, but not extravagantly. Did she gamble? No. Ridiculous idea. Nothing like that, Lexy was sure. There’d been nothing she’d found so far to suggest Ursula was any wealthier than her pension would have made her, and nothing at all to suggest she had some extravagant secret addiction or indulgence.

  “Mr Chizumu,” she’d interrupted as a new thought surfaced. “This intermediary … Are you able to tell me more about that aspect of the arrangements?”

  “Hmm.” He hesitated a moment, flicked through the papers on the table in front of him and paused to scan a document near the bottom of the pile. “Yes. Yes, I think I can.”

  She’d waited. He continued reading for a moment, then dropped the papers back into place and squared the pile up neatly.

  “Chakanaya. Richard.”

  “Chakanaya? But he’s here. I’ve just seen him come in; he’s with your brother right now. Can we talk to him? I—”

  “Ms Shaw. You have to realise we lawyers must run with the hare but hunt with the hounds.”

  She’d no idea what he meant by that, but it was clear he wasn’t going to introduce her and he wasn’t going to discuss another client’s business either, even obliquely.

  “Suffice to say, Mr Chakanaya has wide-ranging interests.” Lexy was sure there’d been distaste, if not disapproval, in his voice. “Our firm does not represent him in them all.”

  With that, the subject was closed, and he moved on to outline the rest of Ursula’s estate in Malawi. Lexy wasn’t really listening, though. She was thinking about how she was going to engineer a chat with Mr Chakanaya, whether the lawyers would help arrange it or not.

  The meeting rumbled on in legalese she struggled to grasp, although by now she’d have thought she’d be fluent. There were a couple of small legacies left to faithful retainers, housekeeper Adela Kamanga, gardener Joseph Kamanga and so on, donations to the hospital and a generous allowance to a Mission orphanage in the north. That last one sounded more interesting. Lexy had made a mental note to look into that more closely.

  Then things had taken an unexpected turn. As he was winding up their meeting, Christopher Chizumu had closed his folder, opened a French window onto a small roof terrace peppered with pots of jasmine and hibiscus, and invited her to step out and admire the view. They were at the rear of the building, looking down on to a well-tended park.

  “Do you know anything of the flora and fauna of our country, Ms Shaw? Our birdlife perhaps?”

  This conversational gambit had caught Lexy unawares and she shook her head, wondering where the little man was going with it. Already she had enough of a sense of him to feel that the slightly blundering manner was a well-honed front to hide a very deliberate nature.

  “You would find it a most rewarding study, Ms Shaw. Most rewarding,” he’d continued, nodding his grey head for emphasis. “Take the honeybird, for example. An unprepossessing little thing but remarkably adept at survival. Some call it a honeyguide and claim following its call will lead you to honey, but there’s no proof of that, much as we greedy creatures may want to believe it.”

  He’d paused, as if searching for words. “It has a sweet call, our honeybird, and of course a sweet name, yet it is drab and vicious. Like your British cuckoo, it is a brood parasite, leaving its eggs to be incubated in another’s nest. Then as soon as the intruder hatches, it murders its nest-mates, ensuring survival at the expense of all others. It is born with a sharp mandible hook, you see, and even before it opens its eyes, it uses this to stab repeatedly at the shells or bodies of the other chicks, killing them, before the hook falls off after a few days. It always puts me in mind of that riddle of a perfect crime where the victim is stabbed with an icicle, which then melts away: the murder weapon that can never be found.”

  He’d looked back into the building behind him before adding softly, “Beware the honeybird, Ms Shaw. D
on’t follow its song.”

  Back at the hotel, there was a short message for her. Ms Hamilton requested that she call at her earliest convenience. Lexy did, but, predictably, Ms Hamilton herself was unavailable. Let the telephone tag begin, Lexy thought, as she was put through to the lawyer’s assistant instead to leave a message. She was surprised to find herself talking to a young man, but then she probably shouldn’t have been. Not how they did things at Smith & Littlejohn’s of course, or indeed at Chizumu & Chizumu here in Malawi, but the Edinburgh firm was in a whole legal league of its own.

  “I’ll make sure she gets your message as soon as she’s free, Miss Shaw, and I assure you she’ll either call back promptly or brief me to call on her behalf.”

  “Thank you. I wonder, though …”

  “Yes, Miss Shaw? Was there something else I can help you with?”

  “Miss Reid’s property in Ross-shire. I’d like the address and also just wondered if there’s anything you can tell me about it. Did she go there often or … I don’t know, really. Anything.”

  “We wouldn’t know Miss Reid’s movements, of course, although it is rather remote and Miss Reid was getting increasingly frail, so common sense would suggest it is unlikely she’d have visited much in recent years. But if you’ll bear with me, Miss Shaw, I’ll fetch the file.”

  Common sense would indeed suggest. Stupid of her. Of course they wouldn’t know when, or even if, Ursula visited the property. Who would? Jenny perhaps? Another question for the list. Lexy had pulled out her notebook and was tapping it sharply with her pen by the time the assistant returned.

  “Yes, Miss Shaw, I have the full address. We also hold a key should you wish to visit the property. Do you have a pen and paper?”

  Common sense, Lexy thought wryly, would suggest that of course she did. She took down the address, having to ask him to spell out the unfamiliar names. Not a part of the country she was familiar with. They’d never gone further north than Edinburgh on her childhood trips to Scotland.

  “Can you tell me anything else about it?”

  “Well, there are some photographs, and it seems to be an old croft house.” Lexy wished she could see the photos for herself. “Another view shows the sea and some small islands in the distance, and this one seems to be from the other side. There’s a hillside rising up behind it. Quite steep.” Lexy’s frustration grew at his lame descriptions. He wasn’t exactly narrowing the field for her. “That’s odd.”

  “What is?”

  “It seems we prepared a lease for the property some years ago.”

  “Yes, I know. I have a copy.” She took a deep breath. She was sounding snappy and she knew that wouldn’t help her get what she needed. Patience is a virtue.

  “Miss Reid has signed it, but there’s no tenant signature, or name.”

  I know, Lexy screamed inside her head, sick to death with the ponderous ways of the legal profession. Get to the point. “So … ?” she prompted with a restraint that would have made her mother proud.

  “It leads me to believe it’s never actually been put into use. So I’m not sure why we have retained it in the current file.”

  “Just for your records, perhaps?” Lexy suggested.

  “That would be in another file. Our archives, in fact, given how long ago it was drafted. Unless …”

  “Unless?” The end of Lexy’s pencil broke as she stabbed at the doodles that were in danger of obscuring the hard-won address.

  “Well, it’s possible Miss Reid had been planning to do something with it more recently. But I don’t understand why we wouldn’t have just drafted a new one. I find it hard to believe terms and conditions from so many years ago would still be relevant to a tenancy today. Perhaps Ms Hamilton will be able to shed some light.”

  Perhaps, but unlikely, Lexy had thought as she’d wound up the call. Ms Hamilton would have been a child at the time the lease was drafted, no doubt holding mock trials with her Barbie dolls or something suitably career-focused, but hardly likely to have any insight into Ursula’s intentions of over twenty years ago.

  Wishing she’d asked when she might expect to hear back from Ms Hamilton, Lexy decided against a dip in the hotel pool in case she missed the call. She was sure the lawyer wouldn’t leave important information as a message with a hotel receptionist, nor would it be the kind of call Lexy wanted to take dripping wet or lying poolside slathered in protective slime.

  The rest of the day stretched ahead of her and she debated her options, which were limited but all came down to the same thing in the end. More of the paperwork. She opened the desk drawer where she’d stashed the photo albums and papers she’d brought with her and saw the tea-stained folder she’d found beneath the cushion of Ursula’s armchair. She’d been surprised to find it there and would have dismissed it as an old woman’s idiosyncrasy until she saw, written in pencil in the top-right corner, the words For Isobel. That had been enough for her to scoop it up and drop it in with the pile of post and other papers needing her attention.

  She pulled it out and placed it on her lap, swinging the desk chair round to face the balcony doors, now finding herself a little reluctant to open it. It was addressed to her mother. It didn’t seem right, somehow, this prying and peeking into the affairs and correspondence of her elders.

  But it had to be done, whether she felt comfortable doing it or not. It might hold the answer to the identity of Ursula’s son. Although that wasn’t the only reason she had to read it. She needed her own answers, needed to understand what could have happened between Ursula and Izzie to make her mother deceive her. And they were hardly in a position to complain. Ursula had wanted her mother to read it, and if her mother, then why not Lexy herself? Besides, her mother would have shared it with her. Lexy felt a stab of resentment. Well, at least her mother should have shared it. Qualms quashed by the reminder of her mother’s betrayal, she settled herself on the bed, cross-legged, leaning back against the pillows and preparing herself for more riddles.

  The folder wasn’t unduly thick, but contained an assortment of documents and scraps culled from different sources, different times. Lexy flicked through. Torn pages from diaries, letters, handwritten notes and occasional newspaper or magazine clippings, all dated and with brief explanations in that precise writing she had first encountered in the photograph album. She glimpsed names she’d seen in that album too, as she’d suspected she would. With the exception of the first page, everything was dated, again in that same meticulous hand, so it was clear that Ursula had intended it to be read in a particular order. Resisting the temptation to jump ahead, pull out pieces here and there, Lexy tapped the papers together into a neat pile and started at the beginning. She would be patient and thorough in her research, working meticulously, just as she’d seen Danny at work so often in the past, marvelling at his ability to plod on steadily. She was the sort of person who flicked ahead to the last page of a novel, something Danny found incomprehensible. And infuriating when she’d share it with him if it were a book he hadn’t already read.

  She steeled herself when she saw the first page was a handwritten note to Isobel, the penmanship neat, precise, with just the odd tremor evident in some of the longer strokes. Recent, then? The writing of an aging, failing woman, perhaps, but there was no date and no real way to tell when it had been composed. The smoothed sheen of the folder suggested it could have been under that cushion for years. Shuffling herself further back on the bed and rolling her shoulders back and down, she began.

  For Isobel

  I should have told you all this years ago, but couldn’t. Not wouldn’t, as you thought, but couldn’t because it wasn’t my story to tell. And he was still alive, then, Cameron, who, as you will see, had more than a hand in all of this. So much I didn’t tell you, even that awful night. I still don’t know what it was that made you question the truth we’d always lived by. What it was that made you so sure there were secrets. Made you doubt me.

  What little you forced out of me was enough to d
rive you away. I can still hear the harsh slam of the door behind you, as final as a gunshot. What, I wonder now, would you have done if I’d told you all of it back then? Could it have been any worse than not having you and little Alexis in my life these last years? How you’ve punished me! But I couldn’t tell you then, even if I’d dared.

  No more secrets, I promise. No more pretending it was right, what we did, no matter our reasons. It wasn’t just me, you see, although I was at the root of it, and the others only did what they did to help me, despite my stupidity. I haven’t tried to paint any of us in a better light than we deserve, but just to show you how it was. We do not appear at our best, me least of all. My diary will show you what a fool I was, so hopelessly gullible and naive; the letters will show you the true and trusting friends I was blessed to have and who helped me. They suffered too, immeasurably. Such a mess, all of it. My fault.

  I left so much behind when I came back to Scotland. Thought I’d lost everything. Until you came to me. And then when you left, it felt as if it was happening all over again.

  Oh Izzie, I’m so very sorry. How could I not be? I had the joy of you all those years, and yet you were right. There could have been, should have been, so much more for both of us, if I’d been stronger, braver. But I’ve always been a coward, worried about what people think. They say there’s no fool like an old fool, but believe me, there’s no hypocrite like an old hypocrite, either. And that’s worse: much, much worse.

  I’m old now, but still frightened. I’ve been afraid all my life, of something or someone, of my own feelings, and now I’m afraid I’ll die without seeing you again. Without having the chance to explain. To be forgiven.

  But at least I must try. Bear with me, my darling child. At my age it all gets jumbled. That’s why I’ve pulled these papers together. I will do my best to tell you all of this when you’re here and fill in any gaps, but I am afraid the excitement, the joy of seeing you again, of having you beside me, will overwhelm me. I’m afraid that when it comes to it you might yet change your mind and not come at all. Might still want to punish me. So this will be here for you one day, if you ever want it. If I’m gone by the time you do. If you don’t come, I’ll give it to my lawyers to keep safe.