DEDICATION
This book is for two wonderful women,
Hilary Hale and Gill Coleridge.
Without them, it would never have been written.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Part One
Scene One
Scene Two
Scene Three
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Two
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Frances Fyfield
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
SCENE ONE
Picture: The back of a big, empty house at night, seen from the back through mist and fog: a gloomy scene, with a message about how money doesn’t make happiness. Amateur painting, circa 1890. Not really worth keeping except that it gave such a false impression of the inside of the very house that housed it.
‘Come on Thomas, come upstairs and look at the view,’ Di said. ‘Look at the clouds.’
She hugged him closer.
‘I’ll keep you warm,’ she said. ‘Will you come with me? There’s this painting I want you to see. Thomas?’
The warmth of him, the glorious warmth was fading by the minute. She was sitting in his lap with her arms around him, cradling his head with its shock of thick white hair, talking into it, nuzzling it like a cat. She stroked his profile, a beak of a nose, the handsome, furrowed forehead suddenly smoothed and by that token, the very lift of his face, she knew he was dead. She had known the imminence of his death from the moment he came in, gave her the flowers and then sat in the chair and closed his bright blue eyes: she had known it for months of illness, and all the same, when it happened, it was incomprehensible. Because he was still warm, and she was realising, slowly, slowly, that most of the warmth came from her.
She told herself not to be silly. He would wake up in a minute, give her the smile that lit him like a light from within and then he would start to teach, talk in rhymes or sing. Such a voice he had, such a lovely voice with a light rhythm, as if there was a song already in it.
‘It’ll be alright,’ she said to him. ‘Won’t it, love?’
There was no answer. She continued to speak, stroking his hair, still thick, but so much thinner than it had been. She straightened it with her fingers and touched his ears. Cold, but then the lobes of his ears were always cold, even when she breathed close.
‘A word in your shell-like, darling,’ she said, softly. ‘Do you know, you look just like a bird? All beak and chin, that’s you, not an ounce to spare. You’ve been on the wing long enough, you’re just tired, you are. You know what? That’s good. You’ve lost your voice, that’s all. But you can still hear, so you’ll know I’ll never say a bad thing about you, ever, because there’s nothing bad to say, and I don’t tell anyone anything ever. Any secret’s good with me. You know me, I’m good for that. Can’t talk, can’t tell secrets, except about what a good man you are. Mustn’t swear, you said, a waste of words, innit? Ok, Thomas? Shall we go upstairs and look at the view?’
He lay, sprawled and twisted, his arm holding her because she had curled herself into him, and he made no response.
She began to cry, soaking his jumper. Then she got up and bound his knees with a blanket to keep him warm, backed away from him, got a drink and moved, lurching around her own house like a crippled ghost.
SCENE TWO
I remember, she said to him, shouting downstairs in case he could not hear, it was a filthy night with wind and rain, the night I saw you first.
The steel shutters were ugly, but not foolproof. Ill-fitting, not the best made and thus able to be prised open, from the bottom up. Enough space for a small one to get through.
Crazy Di, aged seventeen, although rumour had her younger, was the size of a shrimp and she could do it alright. She was used to it, and used for it in these parts. Not a virgin in any respect at that time, all skin and bone and pliant as a worm, did anything to please – only they had not reckoned on either her conscience or her eyes, or how she would behave when she was inside. It had to be an empty house. Sometimes she would get jittery and come straight back out; other times, she was obliging, like someone out of Oliver Twist, one of Fagin’s gang, the Judge said, who would steal to order, whisper in the right code and pass through the small stuff, as directed. Just get the phone, like the one in the shop. Look round for jewellery and money if there’s any, take it, but it’s car keys we want. We’re really here for the car, as well as anything else going. Car keys, OK? Just those.
If she did well, (if I did well, the older Di said as she moved round the house) she was cuffed and praised and given stuff. If she got the jitters, she was left by the road. She aimed to please and she stuttered when she spoke. There were gaps in her teeth, and she never minded them laughing at her, those boys and the man who manoeuvred her through the shutters and all the same, for the first time, on that dark night, she knew that it was wrong. She had the morals of a guttersnipe, the eyes of a magpie and intelligence as fierce as fire, only warped for lack of words.
The whole thing was wrong because this time, the house was not empty. It simply looked it from the outside but as soon as she was halfway in, she knew someone was there; she could smell it. She had tried to pull back, but the man in charge urged her on.
I know this house; I’ve been here before. My mother used to clean here. Don’t do it, was what she was trying to say, but the stutter made her incoherent and they stuffed her though the hole anyway and she went in like a rat. They could rely on her for silence and if she screamed inside, let out her weird screech; if she got caught; if she simply failed to come out within ten minutes, they would scarper and Mad Di would never tell. Even if she had the words, it would not have occurred to her.
Car keys, love. Keys for the garage. This old geezer has a vintage.
A what?
Never you mind. Find car keys.
It was dark in here. There was a single light in the vast cellar on the other side of the shutters, a distinctive smell of paraffin, some old heaters to one side and an untidy bunch of kindling wood on the floor. She sidestepped the pile and went on up the stairs, into the house, found herself in a labyrinth facing one corridor that branched into two sets of stairs and felt her way. The old guy will have gone to London, goes there often. She was remembering her route with knowledge they did not know she had. They really had no idea what this house was like: she did. It waved and branched and did strange things, it was nothing from the front, because it was the wrong way round with a yard at the back, and if you went up the stairs, you came into a wonderful room facing the sea. The shutters were shut on that room; that was why they thought it was empty; the old wooden shutters were as foolproof as the newer steel shutters to the cellar downstairs were not, so that you could never see a chink between them.
She remembered it well, Di did. She remembered this room. She had adored this room, with the pictures on the walls and the fire: she had sat here listening to the sea. Her fingers fumbled for the light switch in the wall, still in the same place. The same, big old phone on the desk.
The pictures in the room were lit, rather than the room itself. The paintings on the wa
ll were cunningly illuminated, creating individual pools of light and colour. It was all too warm to be empty. She moved over towards the fireplace, not noticing the glow of the hearth, and looked to find the favourite painting. She shivered and squatted down abruptly on the old carpet that she also remembered; all that softness, all those colours. The painting of Madame de Belleroche, if you please, showed the lady lounging in a chair and showing off a hat, a haunting and commanding figure presenting a crooked finger, saying, come here girl, tell me all. It was a loose oil sketch of a beautiful, languid woman who knew how to talk to a child.
Hello, Di said, clearly, gazing at it. How nice to see you. She sank further back on to her haunches and stared in admiration. She could have stayed here for ever, looking.
Then a voice came from behind her, drifting from the far end of the room. The voice came from where the man sat in an entirely different pool of light, granted reluctantly from a lamp with a green shade. He had a broad forehead sprouting a mass of thick grey hair, could have been one of those pictures himself because he was worth a portrait with his handsome, symmetrical face, sitting very still behind the desk.
‘It would be better if you went,’ he said, softly and urgently. ‘Please go, as fast as you can. You’ve got a minute or two, if you’re quick. Get out while you can.’
The meaning was clear, even if the fine voice was cracked, she could hear how mellow and urgent the voice was. That voice. The light caught tears on his bruised face and the sheen of a scarf tied tightly around his neck. In the distance, from inside the house, she heard footsteps retreating down the other set of stairs.
(I heard. Not she heard. That was me. I couldn’t move.)
She could not go, could not move; sat where she was, staring at the painting for precious seconds, then at him, until she felt the air move behind her. She glanced back and forth between the painting and him, seeing the stillness of his hands gripping the arms of the chair, the scarf round his neck. A door slammed, far away downstairs. She felt the rising tide of fury, recognising a trap and wanting to kill someone for making such fools of both of them. The wind battered against the windows.
‘Go,’ he urged her. ‘Please go. Run. Get away. Run.’
She couldn’t do it. She glanced back at Madame de Belleroche and her kind, haughty face, and realised her own failure. She had not collected any car keys, and she knew, at the first sound of alarm, that the others had gone. She knew a lot of things at that moment and still she could not move. She turned towards him and stared. His fingers were drumming on the arms of his chair. There was something wrong with his immovable hands; he could scarcely whisper through the scarf too tight at his throat. They were coming for him, as well as her. The fingers beat a tattoo.
‘Run,’ he said. ‘Run. Don’t be killed, run. Please, run. Now. You’ve got the wrong night for staying alive.’
She felt for the knife on her belt and sprang towards him. Di was always handy with a knife. She did not hear the sirens because of the storm.
Later: someone made notes on what happened after that.
Despite immaculate legal representation for Ms D Quigly, aka Mad Di, daughter of absentee father and deceased mother, her sentence was severe. She was no longer a juvenile and according to fact, she had been willing to terrorise an old man out of his car keys. She admitted no remorse and apart from pleading guilty to this and other offences, was uncooperative to the point of being obstructive. The girl was a seasoned thief; she had clearly been prepared to strike and she was dangerous. During the course of her lucky incarceration in the safest place she had ever been, she perfected her considerable reading skills with books she was sent and was a model prisoner emerging a great deal more articulate than when she went in. The sentence would have been even more severe if she had actually inflicted injury, or if her father had ever come forward to acknowledge her existence. No other culprits were ever identified.
Raymond Forrest, lawyer.
No word, or the fact, of the knife, was ever mentioned, nor of the gloves on the desk or the footsteps inside the house, or the slamming door. Or the other person running away, or the freakish foul weather that blew up such a storm that night that most of the houses on the front were flooded while the angry sea almost submerged the pier. Nor how, after Di was arrested, everyone rushed away towards the emergency, leaving Thomas alone.
A dark and stormy night: the worst in a decade, and nearly ten years ago.
Diana Quigly, now twenty-seven years old, with a dead husband sitting downstairs, suddenly remembered him and worried about him getting cold. She also remembered there was something she wanted to tell him.
‘You know what, love, you really mustn’t get cold. I’ll warm you.’
She stayed in his arms for another hour. He was as thin as a rail, but his hair was so soft and he smelled so sweet, salty and clean.
Finally, she picked up the phone.
SCENE THREE
Picture: an empty, yet comforting stretch of green, foam-flecked English sea, with half of the canvas composed of a blue sky and gathering clouds. A small boat proceeds with steady obstinacy towards the harbour it is going to reach. Rock pools in the foreground. Adrian Daintrey 1938
When the ambulance arrived, following remarkably coherent instructions, she opened the door to them. She seemed perfectly calm, greeting the policeman, who had arrived at the same time, by name. The girl they saw was dishevelled with bad blonde hair and a body as brittle as ice. The initial impression she gave was not good. Too tiny; too fierce, too nonchalant and way too tough for eating.
‘He’s here,’ she said, unnecessarily. The room was small and ignoring the old man in the armchair by a still-live, though waning fire was like failing to see the elephant. There was a side table by the chair, with a half-drunk drink and a cigar smouldering in a saucer next to it. The girl had brandy on her breath.
‘Is he your dad?’
The first ambulance man went about his business. The room smelled benignly, of booze and cigar, like an old-fashioned pub before the smoking ban. It was otherwise clean, comfortable, ordered and contained sundry medical equipment. A kitchen led off: it was impossible from here to imagine the dimensions of the house. The room off the street was the size of a maids’ parlour, a place where the cook would sit off duty in a period drama, ignoring the grandeur upstairs and the front entrance somewhere else. It appeared as if the Master of the house had died ignominiously in the Servants Quarters. The old man sat in his leather armchair, his hands on the worn arms and his head turned into the leather, as if burying his face in it. He had thick, white hair; his thin legs were crossed and his upper body relaxed.
‘What happened?’
‘He died, what do you think?’
She was diffident, speaking off stage to someone whose question it was. Jones, the interloper, was there, standing next to a man in the police uniform he had once worn himself.
‘Went for his walk, came back, sat in the chair. Stopped breathing,’ she said, almost carelessly. ‘He’s been very ill. I thought he was coming round. Is he really dead?’
They had been shuffling round, testing, moving quietly. An oxygen mask administered to the twisted head, and attempts made to make it breathe.
‘Yes. He’s dead.’
‘Oh, thank God,’ she said. ‘Thank God.’
There was a moment of shocked silence.
‘That his daughter, or what?’ someone whispered.
‘No, his wife.’
‘But he must be … ’
The gurney arrived. The girl turned her back and finished her brandy. The fire in the hearth turned grey and the room turned cold.
There were two of them left when the body had gone. Ex-Sergeant Jones and Mad Di.
‘That went well, didn’t it?’ he said angrily. ‘You don’t say thank bloody God. And what the hell took you so long? Don’t you know how it looks? The fire’s gone out, you smoked two cigars, you waited two hours before you dialled 999. What kept you? Listen, love
, I saw him on the pier and I watched him go. I was there, later, fishing, I thought he was alright.’
She turned a haughty profile.
‘I was talking to him,’ she said. She smiled a brittle and glassy smile that did not enhance her. He thought she was a woman who would only be beautiful when she was older. At the moment, she looked ugly.
‘There’ll be a post mortem, Di.’
‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘Do you want a drink?’
‘Yes.’
She nodded, moved towards the kitchen and came back with a bottle of champagne. Not right.
‘A beer’d do nicely,’ he said.
‘Of course. What are you doing here, anyway?’
‘I followed the ambulance. I was watching, Monica was too. I met Thomas earlier. I saw him go home.’
She swayed back towards the kitchen and he saw the belt, with the pocketknife in a leather sheath, worn at the back, like a hunter.
‘Still got the knife, Di? The one your dad taught you to use?’
‘What knife?’
He drank and paused and shook his head and looked around a small room that he knew led on to many larger ones, the huge cellar he remembered from his own schooldays, beneath.
‘What you gonna do with all this, Di?’
‘All what?’
‘Christ, Di, you never did help yourself much, did you? Or maybe,’ he added, because he was angry, ‘maybe you did.’
He was looking at the big nude, noticing it for the first time and thinking that was perhaps the last thing handsome old Thomas saw before dying in his seventieth year. There were hundred of pictures on the walls in every room of this house. A little smudge of a painting above the nude was hanging crooked on a nail nearly out of sight and he could not understand why it was there.
Di stared at the dead fire and lit another cigar. ‘Thank bloody God he’s out of it. Do you believe in heaven, Uncle Jones?’
Gold Digger Page 1
