by Barbara Vine
There followed some biographical details about Hebe, substantially accurate except that her son was referred to as Jason, but no speculation as yet as to why anyone would kidnap her. That came later. Reporters must have been to Gerry Furnal's house to get the photograph they had used of Hebe. It was a nice photograph, not a studio portrait but a shot of her on a beach playing with her little boy.
I hadn't finished reading it before Iris was on the phone to Ivor. The phone rang half a dozen times and then it went on to message. She didn't leave a message—what could she have said? We kept trying to get hold of Ivor throughout the morning and at midday Iris said, “I think we ought to go back.”
We went back and, without bothering about lunch, drove straight to Old Pye Street. Iris had just stopped breastfeeding Nadine, so we'd parked in a lay-by on the A12 to give her a bottle and some tinned stuff and she had slept contentedly ever since. (I know this should be about Ivor, not me, and that I say too much about my daughter. I shall watch it in future but can't promise anything.) So to Ivor. He was in. Yes, the phone had rung and rung, but he hadn't answered it because he was sure it was Hebe with excuses for why she hadn't turned up and he was still too angry to speak to her. At lunchtime he had gone out to buy a paper and he'd bought the one we had seen.
Ivor's flat was very elegant, full of good early Victorian furniture and quite valuable paintings. He had a private income—a great-aunt had left him a house to sell and a considerable sum of money when she died ten years before—and he had indulged himself. A compulsively tidy man (anal, said Iris, but fondly), he was in the habit of having a place for everything and he put everything back in its place. There wasn't even a cup or a glass about.
Iris threw her arms round him and held him close. “I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry,” she kept saying.
I asked him when he knew.
“Not till about an hour ago. I don't bother much with bloody scandal sheets at the weekends, get too much of them all week. I read it in the paper shop. Christ, I had to go outside and sit down on a wall.”
It was then that he told us. It took a long time, but I think telling us did him good. Halfway through he wanted a drink, said he'd had a brandy when he got back to the flat after buying the paper, but Iris stopped him having another. She fetched him a glass of water and made him drink half of it. When he got to the end, to his coming back here and going to bed, still furiously angry, he looked up and said, “God, poor little Hebe.”
Those weren't quite the only words I ever heard him utter which might be construed as expressing grief but they almost were. I asked him what he had done. Presumably, he had told the police.
He looked at me and there was a strange expression on his face. Secretive, certainly. Covert? Incredulous that I should have asked? Perhaps all those things.
“Well, no,” he said. “I haven't.” His voice rose, was suddenly indignant, almost angry with me. “How can I? For God's sake, how can you fucking ask?”
Iris had been kneeling down by Nadine's car seat. She had wiped Nadine's mouth with a tissue and given her a quick kiss on the forehead. She got up.
“Ivor,” she said, “I'm not hearing this.”
“What aren't you hearing?” His face was very set and his voice was sharp.
“You must tell them. How can you, you say. How can't you? Everyone thinks she was really abducted, the police, her husband—her husband, Ivor—do you ever think of him? You have to tell them it was you, you set it up.”
“Look,” he said, calming down, “of course I've thought of the police. If it had been the accident only and nothing about their taking the pretend kidnap seriously, I'd have gone straight to them. I'd have told them and never mind the consequences. There's no doubt about that, I wouldn't have hesitated.”
“What do you mean, consequences?” Iris said.
“Gerry Furnal, for starters, and a snide little paragraph in the Mirror for another.”
I asked him what was different now.
“It wouldn't be a snide little paragraph,” Ivor said. “It would be a front-page scandal story. MP stages kidnap of charity chief's wife. Besides, it's too late.” There was a clock on the mantelpiece and a watch on his wrist but still he asked me, “What time is it?”
“Just gone four.”
“This has been news since—when? Last night probably. First thing this morning. All over the papers. On TV, I expect, only I haven't watched any. They're going to ask me, the first thing they're going to ask me is why I've only just told them. I can't tell them, Rob. It's too late.”
We stayed with him. Well, I did. Iris went out and bought a loaf and some smoked salmon and made sandwiches for us. Ivor ate nothing. We turned on the early-evening news and of course it was the lead story, with more pictures of the crash and photographs of Hebe and a lot more about a kidnap attempt going wrong. They put Gerry Furnal on, a shattered man in tears, the tears actually streaming down his face, who said he didn't know why anyone would kidnap Hebe as they must have known he had no money for a ransom. There was speculation about someone they called a “mastermind” behind the abduction. When he heard that bit, Ivor put his head in his hands and muttered, “Turn the fucking thing off.”
A good deal later we took Nadine home. Iris was very tired but still we talked a lot that evening about Ivor's decision not to go to the police. I suppose neither of us could understand it. Iris said that if only he'd gone to them as soon as he'd read that newspaper at lunchtime everything wouldn't exactly have been all right, but a lot better than it was turning out to be. That news story we had seen on the TV would have been very different and there was a good chance his name wouldn't have been mentioned. Without the abduction element it wasn't much more than an ordinary road crash, the kind of thing that happened all too often and does even more now.
“You don't think some journalist would have found out he was behind it?” I said.
“Possibly, but even if someone had and had printed it, the only blame which could be attached to him was—well, having an affair with a married woman. He'd have had to give the newspaper an interview saying he deeply regretted what he'd done. The death of one of those men was a tragedy, et cetera, et cetera, he was broken-hearted over Hebe Furnal's death—he's not though, is he?—and he was very sorry for the whole business. The main thing would have been to establish that there was no abduction. It was a game, a setup, and a private matter. If he'd done that, don't you think it would have blown over in a couple of days?”
“It would have damaged his political career.”
“Not much, though. Not for long. His chief whip would be cross—I think. Would he, though? Men laugh about that sort of thing. I mean, it's no laughing matter now because two people are dead, but it would have been. Still, I don't think Ivor would have been blamed much. Gerry Furnal seems a meek sort of man, awfully wretched, poor thing. Those tears were dreadful, weren't they? He wouldn't want to fight Ivor. The worst he'd do is fix up a meeting with him and make a big scene. Couldn't Ivor have weathered all that?”
“Apparently not,” I said. “I've never seen him so afraid. He was a different man.”
NO ONE EVER attempted to blackmail Ivor. Yet almost from the first he was blackmail material. Of the few people who knew about the birthday present, not one of them knew it all. Each of them knew some of it, from one aspect or another, but they could all have asked him for money, a large sum of money or a guaranteed income to keep silent, but none of them did. I'm sure this wasn't because of their loyalty to him or fondness for him which held them back, but it may have been fear. Or even a kind of diffidence. I wonder how many people there are who would try demanding money with menaces, as the legal definition has it, but for their reluctance to appear quite so base and low in their victim's eyes. Perhaps I'm being naïve. The fact remains that Ivor was an MP, a respectable man, a rich man on his way to getting richer, who had set in motion a train of reprehensible events that he very much wanted to keep secret. Still, an independent observer might have s
aid that none of it was really his fault. Not at the beginning, at any rate.
6
We always think first of saving our own skin. I did when Gerry phoned. I was having a lie-in. Not that I had been out the night before. As usual. I'm tired at the end of the week and on Fridays I'm usually in bed by ten. Like an elderly person, as Mummy used to tell me before Callum came on the scene and she was scolding me for not finding a husband or even a boyfriend. I still like to lie in bed on Saturdays a bit later than my usual seven a.m. rising time. The phone rang at eight-thirty and I thought it was Mummy, trying to catch me because I hadn't answered when she called the night before. I was still in bed. I reached for the receiver, picked it up and heard a man say, “Jane? It's Gerry.” I didn't recognize his voice. It sounded like someone had tried to strangle him. “You won't be surprised it's me. I should have called you before, I'm sorry.”
Caution, self-protection, whatever you like to call it, is a wonderful thing. I knew something was very wrong before he spoke again.
“You must have waited hours for her.”
How did I catch on so fast? I did, or partly. “I did for a while,” I said, wondering what was coming next.
“She's dead,” he said. “I ought to break it more gently. The police were gentle with me. But the very fact that they were police was enough, standing there on the doorstep. They didn't need to say anything. It was a car crash. God knows what she was doing, walking somewhere. She should have been in the tube going off to meet you. Still, it doesn't matter.” He drew a long, shuddering gasp. “Nothing matters now.”
I don't know what made me say it. I don't offer to help people. No one helps me. “Shall I come to you? I could do things.”
“It's very kind …” he began, then, “Yes, please—would you?”
I got up and dressed, went round the corner and bought a paper, staring at the headline. Gerry hadn't said anything about an attempt to kidnap Hebe. The paper said she was handcuffed and gagged, the two men were hooded, and the car had tinted windows. It was a real drama I'd got myself into and it excited me. I don't get much excitement in my life. Ivor Tesham's name came into my head and I tried to remember what Hebe had told me about the plans for this birthday present. She was to walk along the Watford Way, where she'd be picked up by a car. Driven by Tesham or by his driver? She didn't say, perhaps she didn't know. A car had picked her up but it wasn't Tesham's. This was a real kidnap, a coincidence maybe, but nothing to do with him. He would have waited for her last night like I was supposed to have waited for her but she never came.
Driving up to West Hendon and Irving Road, I thought about the alibi I'd given, or been prepared to give, to keep Hebe from being found out. I had already lied to Gerry. The idea struck me like a splash of cold water that I might be questioned by the police and have to lie to them. Have to? Or was I to come out with the truth as to what Hebe had been up to? There wasn't much traffic about, there never was on a Saturday morning. I would be there in ten minutes. I knew I must make up my mind exactly what I was going to say when Gerry questioned me about the previous evening. It was then that I realized I didn't even know which theater was showing Life Threatening. I pulled off the A5, parked and consulted the paper I had bought. The Duke of York's—where was that? St. Martin's Lane, I guessed. I would have to say I hung about in St. Martin's Lane until it was too late to go in. Why hadn't I phoned to find out where Hebe was? I would have to think of something to explain that. It was then, as I started the car once more, that it hit me. At last it hit me. Hebe was dead. We'd met at university and been friends ever since. I'd been her bridesmaid and was Justin's godmother, though God didn't come into it much. I'd never see her again. She was gone. She was dead. I stopped the car again and switched off the engine.
I ought to have been heartbroken but I wasn't. Of course I would pretend I was when I got to Gerry's. My best friend, we saw each other at least once a week, not to mention going to all those cinemas and out for meals together. That's where she was going, he would have told the police, off to the theater with her best friend. How sweet and proper it sounded, chastely going to see a play with another girl. The paper hadn't said how she had been dressed when they found her body but maybe they didn't know, maybe the police wouldn't tell them, and I thought about how she said she might go off on her date wearing nothing under her big coat. I ought to have been sad—why wasn't I? Because, though she'd been my “friend” all these years, I'd never liked her. We call people our friends without thinking how we really feel about them, that actually we fear them or envy them. How could I have liked a woman who had everything I've never had? Did she like me? Probably not, but she liked me being plain and dull and awkward while she was such a star.
I was the more intelligent one, that's all. She wouldn't have cared about that. She had had beauty and self-confidence, a husband, a child, a lover, and no worries. She had never had a job, so she didn't have the fear of losing one always hanging over her. She didn't know what it was like to be me, working for an outfit that was always threatened with closure or at any rate being severely cut in size. Her husband might not earn much but he did earn it and it would go on, he would keep her for the rest of her life and to avoid working herself all she had to do was keep having babies. I realized then that he wouldn't and she wouldn't, because she was dead. All the beauty and the charm and the unearned income were over for her forever. I asked myself if I cared and I knew at once that I didn't. I was glad. I was relieved. I ought to feel happy, because all I had to worry about now was keeping the way I felt from Gerry, and keeping the truth from him too.
I drove the last mile or two and turned into Irving Road. It was one of those streets of terraces, about a hundred years old, I suppose, all the houses exactly the same, gray brickwork, slate roofs, a gable at the top and a bay window downstairs, nothing green, drearily ugly. Once, about a year before, I was driving Mummy up there to see a friend in Edgware and I pointed out Hebe's road to her, deserted but for a van driver delivering something. The place looked a uniform gray in the drizzling rain. Mummy is so out of touch she thinks young married couples all live in lovely detached houses in leafy suburbs. “He's not doing very well, is he?” she said. “That's the sort of street your grandparents lived in when I was small. Of course, it didn't last long. We moved when I was seven.”
It wasn't deserted that Saturday morning. A crowd stood outside Gerry's house, filling the tiny front garden, spilling all over the pavement, people with cameras and a single policeman. It took me a moment before I understood. This was the press. As I parked at the curb, as near to the house as I could get, reporters and cameramen swarmed up to the car and a flash went off in my face. I tried to push through the pack, their voices shouting at me, “Who are you?” “What are you doing here?” “Are you Hebe's sister?”
The normal reaction is to cover one's face even if one has nothing to hide. I picked up the scarf that was on the seat beside the paper, held it up ineffectually to my mouth and nose and got out of the car. “I'm only the babysitter,” I said.
“Would you call yourself a family friend?” someone asked.
“If you like,” I said, “but I don't know anything.” I'd have loved to talk to them, tell them the truth about Hebe and Ivor Tesham, but I knew that would be just for the momentary pleasure of it. I had an interest in the long term and I needed to remember that. I elbowed my way through the crowd to Gerry's gate, shoving aside cameras they stuck in my face. “Please let me get to the door.”
Gerry must have heard some of this, because he opened it just as I got there. The cameras homed in on him, their flashes blinding. He grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. The slamming door shook the house.
“Where's Justin?” I said with just the proper air of concern.
“My mother's been here and taken him home with her. I feel guilty about that. He ought to be with me. But he just walks up and down saying, ‘Justin wants Mummy' and it's unbearable.”
I thought he'd take me in his
arms and hug me, it seemed the natural thing to do in the circumstances, but he didn't. He'd been crying and his eyes were swollen. I went into the kitchen and made us both tea. I carried it into the living room on a tray and drew the curtains to shut out the faces pressed against the glass. All the time I was telling myself, don't let it show that you're enjoying yourself, don't let him see you're excited.
“There's a police officer out there,” Gerry said, “but he says he can't do anything unless any of them breach the peace, whatever that means, or do criminal damage.”
The noise they made, a kind of threatening hum, punctuated by shouts, reminded me of the sound of distant battle I'd heard in war programs on television.
“Was it really an abduction?” I asked him.
“The police say so. It must have been. She was handcuffed, Jane. She had a scarf tied round her face. I don't really know much more, only that one of the men is dead and the other is in a very bad way in intensive care. He's unconscious and has been since it happened.”
“The lorry driver?”
“It seems not to have been his fault. He's uninjured apart from cuts and bruises. I mean, the lorry was so big and the car so comparatively small. They haven't said, of course they haven't, but the general idea seems to be that it was the fault of this man Dermot Lynch. He was the driver of the car.” He thought he was changing the subject. Maybe he thought the idea was to spare me atrocious details. “How long did you wait for her at the theater?”
