‘What if you couldn’t bring yourself to do that?’
‘A girl, is it? Does your loving father know?’
Jason hesitated. Trevor had once worked for his father as a chauffeur and general fixer, and had strengthened the bond by later marrying Lucy. He wanted to keep this matter out of his father’s reach for as long as possible, but he needed Trevor’s help because of his various contacts. Which meant trusting him.
‘Not yet, and I’d like to keep it that way.’
‘This “no parental involvement” thing you have going, will it lead to conflict of interest for me?’ Trevor asked.
They both knew what he was referring to. Trevor was the one who’d let slip, inadvertently, that Jason’s involvement with Cathy had developed into something more than a fling. Derek had put the screws on, then, got the whole story. Jason had tried not to blame Trevor when the whole sordid affair went belly-up, but it had cost him.
‘It shouldn’t do,’ he said. ‘It’s just an enquiry.’
Trevor downed the last of his drink. ‘Okay, so let me get this straight: you’ve met this girl, you like her, she’s lying to you about something, and you want to know what and why.’
Jason nodded.
‘Christ, you don’t ask much,’ Trevor grumbled. ‘Why don’t I discover a cure for cancer while I’m at it? Who is she?’
‘Her name is Helen Stephens, and she’s just moved into my house. Claims she’s been to prison, but I think she’s lying about that.’
‘Why on earth would anyone do that? I mean, the other way around, yes, but …’
‘Beats me,’ Jason shrugged. ‘She said a child died, in an accident. I think she might be telling the truth about that bit, but there’s more to it than that. Perhaps she used to be a nanny or something and is hiding because she’s worried about the family coming after her. I’d like to help her if I can. Except I can’t find any information about her. Do you know how many people are called Helen Stephens in this country? I tried everything, Google, combinations with murder, child, manslaughter, drink-driving, Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy, you name it, but nothing came up.’
‘Maybe she’s the sort who just falls under the radar,’ Trevor suggested.
‘No one falls under the radar, you know that. Not completely. Something would show a connection.’
‘Mhm.’ Trevor’s eyes had slid back to the TV screen. ‘Oh, you twat!’
‘Could you look into this for me?’
‘You’re not giving me much to go on.’
‘That’s all I have, I’m afraid.’ Jason handed him a slip of paper with a description of Helen and a guesstimated age of somewhere in her mid-twenties. ‘And while you’re at it, could you check that she isn’t one of Dad’s spies?’
Trevor put it in his shirt pocket. ‘I’d need to take a look at this bird myself, though.’
‘Won’t be difficult. She hangs around the house at the moment, going in and out.’
They were interrupted by Lucy dressed in an apron with a bikini-clad torso on the front. ‘Could one of you be a real darling and lay the table while I get the roast out of the oven?’
Leaving Trevor to his game, Jason followed his aunt back into the kitchen. The Rottweiler was lying prostrate in the middle of the floor, and as he stepped over the huge lump of a dog to get to the dinner plates, he realised how much he felt at ease here, amidst the noise from the TV, the homely smells and the gentle chaos. He couldn’t recall his own home-life ever having been anything like this, and it gave him a sense that he’d been deprived of something which was both normal and rare.
‘Have you found a job yet?’ Lucy asked, stirring an Oxo cube into the pan of meat juices.
‘I’m still at the Market, and that’s going well. Dad’s finally signed his Acton house over to me, and it needs a lot of work.’
Lucy looked at him sharply, her carefully plucked eyebrows coming together in a frown. ‘He did? That’s a first. Did you hear that, Trevor?’
‘I heard. Good for you.’ Trevor paused. ‘What a load of rubbish!’ he shouted, to the TV.
‘You do know he’ll want to have a finger in the pie,’ Lucy added in a low voice.
‘Actually, he says he doesn’t want to know.’
‘He might say that, but trust me, I know my brother extremely well.’
Jason decided to play it down. ‘Then I’ll just have to make sure I don’t draw attention to myself, won’t I?’
‘Yeah? How?’
‘By staying out of his line of sight.’
Lucy snorted.
‘Naïve, I know,’ said Jason, ‘but I thought once the house was in my name, and since I don’t ask him for money or anything, that I really would be beneath his notice.’
‘Go home, Earth is full!’ Trevor bellowed.
‘You’ll never be beneath his notice. He loves you.’
‘He has a funny way of showing it.’ All of a sudden blue-eyed Cathy and his own fantasy image of the child that never was popped up in his mind. Some loving father. He tried to suppress the memories once and for all. It was in the past, he had to let it go.
‘I wouldn’t know what the right way is,’ said Lucy. ‘I never had children.’
A shadow crossed her unlined face – Botox, and why not? – and he was cross with himself for touching on the one subject which could make his tough, loud-mouthed aunt go quiet.
‘Don’t worry about it, Jason,’ she said, guessing his thoughts. ‘We’re happy as we are, aren’t we, Trevor?’
Having switched the TV off, her husband joined them in the kitchen and was rummaging in a drawer for a carving knife.
‘Happy as Larry,’ came the reply. ‘Or I would be if it weren’t for bleedin’ referees.’
Lucy shrugged. ‘I was quite sad about it a while back, but I got over it. Some people don’t. They become totally obsessed with what they can’t have, and it eats away at them until there’s nothing else that matters. It can make a person very bitter and twisted. We’re not like that, me and Trevor, are we?’
Brandishing a lethal-looking knife in one hand, Trevor smiled and caressed her cheek lightly with the other. ‘No, we’re not, dolly.’
Feeling like an intruder all of a sudden, he admired their quiet resignation. His own sense of loss was nothing compared to theirs, yet he thought he understood. And just like them, he had to learn to accept what he couldn’t change.
Helen left Letitia’s office and stopped outside on the pavement to think about what had just happened. Then she laughed. The look on the secretary’s face had been priceless; the woman clearly didn’t think Helen fit in. Nothing strange about that either, because, in truth, she didn’t.
For her it had never been about money and status. That was Letitia’s world. And Aggie’s. What drove Ruth heaven only knew, but Helen had a feeling she was different.
What little she remembered of Ruth from her early childhood had been drowned out by resentment when the doors to the family had been shut in her face. Back in the office Letitia had hinted it was all Aggie’s decision, and she believed it, but it still angered her that Ruth hadn’t stepped in. Ruth had been her favourite, her husband Jeremy too, even if Aggie thought of him as a ‘disaster’.
They could have been a proper family, the one she never had even when her mother was alive. It could have been perfect. Ruth never had children of her own and desperately wanted some. So why had she rejected Helen?
A series of images flashed through her head. Ruth, angry and wistful, staring at Helen as if she wanted to scoop her up and never let go, yet hating her at the same time. Those images had stayed with her all these years, as clear as day, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t conjure up any real memories of her own mother. In the past she’d had the odd recall, but as soon as she tried to pin it down, it was gone.
Lost in thought, she crossed Berkeley Square and headed for the Tube. It had rained recently, but the sun was shining now. A young woman played catch with a little boy in the dappl
ed sunlight under the large trees. A lady in a Burberry raincoat walked two frisky poodles who kept getting entangled in their extendible leads. On a bench a man in a black suit lit a cigarette and then stared at nothing in particular through mirrored sun glasses.
Helen frowned. The ordinary scene struck her as very familiar, but her mind refused to cooperate.
She reached Piccadilly and stopped for a moment, squeezing her eyes shut. If she squeezed hard enough, perhaps she could force her memories to come back. Nothing happened except for a dull ache in her chest and a feeling of exhaustion. Sighing, she opened her eyes again.
A grey mist rose from the pavement, obscuring her vision. Her arms twitched involuntarily, her fingers tingled. She picked at her clothes, only partly aware she was doing it, and swallowed back a metallic taste in her mouth.
‘Not now,’ she whispered.
Brief, excessive electrical discharges fired in her neurons, a simple partial seizure. Her mind told her this rationally, but powerless to stop it, she was suddenly gripped by terror and a feeling that this was the end of the world. Putting her shaking hands on the wall beside her, she anchored herself so even when her brain switched off, her body wouldn’t continue walking and send her right out into the traffic without knowing it.
The raw stone scraped reassuringly against her knuckles as the seizure took hold of her …
‘Bit early in the day, wouldn’t you say?’
Someone was shaking her gently, an old guy with dark, bushy eyebrows. Helen registered the look of concern, the hand on her shoulder. For a moment she had no idea where she was or what she was doing, but slowly the pieces fell into place again.
He was a newspaper salesman, from a nearby stand. She’d been to Letitia’s office, had thought of Ruth, had become distressed because she couldn’t remember her mother. Then the seizure had imploded inside her.
Her arms down by her sides, she leaned against the wall. The traffic was roaring past, clogging the air with car fumes. The pavement teemed with office workers, tourists and shoppers too busy to notice a person whose brain had just glitched.
Except this guy.
‘S-sorry, I didn’t catch that.’ Helen’s tongue felt enormous in her mouth. Somewhere hidden above her pigeons cooed, a reassuring sound, a sign of normality returning.
‘I said,’ he repeated, slowly as if he were talking to an idiot, ‘it’s a bit early in the day to be knocking them back, innit?’
Another piece fell into place. He thought she was drunk. ‘I’m not …’ she protested but he’d already turned his attention to a customer wanting to buy a paper.
The temptation was there to blurt it all out, to seek comfort, to shock and horrify, anything so she didn’t have to be alone with this secret. She didn’t, of course, never had, never would.
A lot of people thought epileptics were freaks, that the condition was some kind of mental instability which could affect them if they got too close. The same way some people thought you could catch cancer. A stigma was attached to Helen’s condition as if this loss of brain control was voluntary, and that epileptics could stop the seizures happening if they just pulled themselves together.
Some shied away in horror, others wanted to show how tolerant and efficient they were by restraining the epileptic during the seizure or even put something in his mouth, the idea being to stop him biting his own tongue off. Too many myths and half-truths, too little general understanding of the illness drove sufferers underground.
Helen lived in that half-world, like so many others.
‘What business is it of yours?’ she snapped.
The man looked over his shoulder at Helen. ‘Steady on, love. Steady on. I was only concerned. If you can’t hold your drink, you shouldn’t be out and about like this. You should be at home sleeping it off.’
‘Who are you to tell me what to do?’
She didn’t wait for an answer but turned her back on him and headed for Green Park tube station.
‘I’ve got a daughter just like you,’ he called after her.
No, you don’t, she thought as her unsteady legs found the escalator. No, you bloody don’t.
The kitchen rang with Charlie’s laughter when she got home. Ignoring the pull in her stomach at the delicious smells of cooking wafting up the stairs, she headed straight for her room, kicked off her boots and collapsed on top of the bed.
It was dark when a gentle knocking woke her. She ached all over as if she’d been in a boxing match. Before answering the door, she scooped up her packet of tablets which lay on the desk and shoved it in a drawer.
It was Fay holding a tray with a covered plate, a glass of juice and a knife and fork.
Knife. Blood.
The memory was suddenly so vivid Helen swayed.
‘Did I wake you?’
Helen shook her head.
‘I did, didn’t I? Sorry, I just thought you might like something to eat. Charlie heard you come in earlier but we missed you at dinner. May I come in? This tray’s a bit heavy.’
Helen nodded, her tongue still tied in a thousand knots.
Fay put the tray on her desk. The food smelt inviting, and Helen realised she hadn’t eaten anything since … well, nothing all day.
‘You’ve made the room look nice,’ said Fay. ‘I like all the little statues.’
Helen’s eyes were on the tray. She was ravenous, but reluctant to eat in front of Fay in case the food tasted like it often did after a seizure. Fay had gone to the trouble to bring her a plate, and maybe even cooked the food herself. Spitting it out again would be rude, even if she was a murderess.
Fay’s shoulders slumped. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it, then. Enjoy. It’s veggie curry. I hope you like it.’
‘Stay a while.’
Fay must have interpreted Helen’s silence as a brush-off, but that hadn’t been her intention. Besides, she had to get to know Fay so she could find her weak points. That had been her plan all along, so why did it suddenly seem like the most underhand thing in the world?
‘I got the job,’ she said.
‘That’s wonderful! When do you start?’
‘Monday.’
‘And what will you be doing?’
‘Oh, this and that. Starting from the bottom, but I don’t mind.’
‘Everyone has to start somewhere. Who knows, it may be the first step to something bigger.’
Smiling her wary smile, Fay picked up a statue from the mantelpiece, uninvited. ‘What sort of company is it?’
‘It’s an auction house.’ Helen removed the top plate which was keeping the food warm and wolfed down a forkful of curry.
Fay’s smile disappeared as she weighed the little statue in her hand. It was Helen’s favourite. Carved from soapstone and about the size of a man’s fist, it was an Indian elephant with a smaller elephant inside it, and as a test of the artisan’s skill, with an even smaller elephant inside the second one. Like the traditional ship in a bottle scenario it was impossible to imagine how it was made, but you couldn’t dispute the evidence.
‘An auction house? How odd.’ Fay replaced the statue on the mantelpiece. ‘I had a friend who worked for an auction house. She liked elephants too. She used to say that elephants have long memories and would remember every little hurt and kindness that ever happened to them. She said that’s why she liked them so much. Because it made them very human.
‘I gave her a bag with an elephant on it once. A big blingie shopper type bag.’ Fay smiled. ‘She was just like that, a real magpie. Anything that glittered, and she’d be all over it.’
Helen felt a sliver of ice run down her back. A memory sliced through her aching head, ripping open an underbelly of memories and spilling the contents into her brain.
The car, the elephant bag on the back seat, Mimi telling her sternly not to touch anything because it had important stuff in it. Herself disobeying and looking in the bag for the medicine, then the agony that Mummy died because Helen didn’t do what she was told, it was all
Helen’s fault, and she was a naughty girl.
She remembered not understanding what had happened, remembered the immense loss. Emotion pressed at the back of her throat, but she quelled it before Fay noticed. She wondered what had happened to that bag and the rest of her mother’s things. It had never seemed important, not until now. She saw herself as a blank sheet with virtually no history, but Fay had reminded her that she had a history, even if she had no memories of it.
Maybe Sweetman knew where her mother’s things were. But she’d deal with that soon enough. Right now she wanted to get some answers out of Fay without revealing herself.
‘Where’s your friend now?’ she asked.
‘She died a long time ago. She was murdered.’
‘God, how awful,’ she said on autopilot. Awful didn’t begin to cover it, but hearing those words from Fay shocked her.
Her hands tightened around the cutlery. What would happen if she stabbed Fay right now? You could do a lot of damage if you stuck a fork in someone’s eye. And then what? Back to not knowing what really happened? It wasn’t worth it.
‘They say I did it. That’s why they locked me up.’ Fay’s eyes took on a glazed look.
‘And did you? Did you kill her?’
Fay took a long time before answering. ‘Yes, I believe I did.’
Chapter Eight
‘You believe you did? How can you not know for sure? If you’d killed someone, you’d know about it, wouldn’t you? I know I would.’
‘It’s complicated.’ Fay wrung her hands. ‘Would you mind if I sit down?’
It was at the tip of Helen’s tongue to say, yes, I would mind, but politeness forced her to swallow that retort, and she pointed to the bed, which was the only other place in the room you could sit.
Did she really need to hear this? Life was a lot simpler when she was convinced of Fay’s guilt. Now she wasn’t sure of anything. Fay’s kindness had punctured her old certainties, and the air was slowly going out of her metaphorical hate-filled balloon.
The Elephant Girl (Choc Lit) Page 9
