At that moment, I didn’t care what it was: all I knew was that the man who had tried to kill me was dead, that my unforgettable lover, my ex-husband, was dead, that Tom’s father was dead. I cried for two days, and very little of that was out of relief.
Briefly, I thought about getting a flight home to Scotland and turning up at the funeral, which I knew would take place in Anstruther, his home town. Again, it didn’t take me long to abandon that idea; it would have caused a sensation, and been desperately cruel to Susie, Oz’s widow, and to the rest of his very nice family. Also, it might just have got me arrested if it had led to someone finding out that I’d entered the US under a fraudulently obtained passport. So instead I sat tight in Vegas until I saw coverage of the send-off on Entertainment Tonight. Next day, I called my father.
At first, he didn’t believe it was me. He thought I was a malicious caller, until I told him that his middle name was Montgomery, spelled like the soldier, not the golfer, and that he had a birthmark on his shoulder in the shape of the mouse that had scared my grandmother when she was carrying him. When he was convinced, he asked me the obvious question.
‘Because, at the time, being dead seemed like my best option,’ I told him. ‘I think that’s what was meant to happen.’
Dad’s a very clever man. He knew what I was saying to him, not least because of the timing of my call. The line was silent for a few moments, and then he said, ‘When your mother was alive, I became rather used to telling her, “Primavera knows best.” I’ve always believed it too. What are you going to do now?’
‘Come home, if I may.’
Two days later, I flew back to Vancouver as Jan More. I burned her passport, very casually, in an open fire in the Sandbar restaurant, and continued my journey as Primavera Eagle Phillips. I kept the Blackstone passport, but I didn’t want to use the name at that point. Dad met me at Glasgow Airport.
On the way back to Auchterarder, I told him the story I’ve just told you, and much more too; I told him the truth about all of my life with and around Oz. He’s a very slow driver, yet I had only just finished by the time we arrived at the great false-Gothic pile that is Semple House.
He dealt with the Dawn situation, thoughtfully and very well: instead of speaking to her, he called Miles, who was in the US at the time, and told him what had happened. Two hours later my sister phoned back; by that time she had calmed down and didn’t give me too much grief over the pain I had caused them. Miles handled the inevitable American aftermath of my reappearance; he’s a powerful guy, with political contacts, and so all I had to do was sign an affidavit, describing what had happened and saying that I had left the scene in a state of shock, a statement close enough to the truth for me to live with.
My reconciliation with Tom was down to me alone; that was less than plain sailing. The newly widowed Susie went ballistic when I called her at her home beside Loch Lomond. I wondered why her reaction was so extreme until, later, she told me that Oz had been so completely shattered by my disappearance that he had barely spoken to her for the last few months of his life. I could guess why that was, but I didn’t tell her, not then at any rate.
‘I suppose you want to see Tom,’ she said, eventually.
‘I want more than that, Susie,’ I told her, as gently as I could. ‘He’s my son.’
As I spoke, I had visions of an expensive legal battle. But Susie’s a good person, through and through, better than I’ve ever been, and she’s a mother too. ‘Come and see him,’ she replied, ‘and let’s take it from there.’
We did. A month later legal custody passed to me, with the proviso that Tom would always be able to visit his half-siblings, Janet and Jonathan. He moved into Semple House with Dad and me, while I considered where our permanent home would be.
The choice, when I made it, surprised even me.
Early in our travels together, when we had only just started on the road to badness, Oz and I, nouveaux riches, pitched up by chance in a tiny village called St Martí d’Empúries, just along from the town of L’Escala, a fishing village that’s become a family holiday resort. St Martí goes back to the Greeks and Romans, and maybe even before them. It’s like a snapshot of history, and yet it has moved easily into the twenty-first century, catering for northern European tourists in summer and for Spanish weekenders and expats in winter. We were happy there, until he left me. After that I stayed on for a bit, content on my own, until he reappeared and took me back to Scotland. Of all the places I’ve ever been, St Martí is where I’ve been most at peace with myself.
I took Tom out there for a week, in early summer, before the place got too busy; Mrs Blackstone and her son, as we will always be from now on. He wasn’t quite five then, so I had no school problems in Perthshire. We stayed in a hotel near the village; it opens on to a beach and Tom thought that it was paradise. My friends in St Martí remembered me . . . they never forget a face . . . and welcomed me back. After a couple of days I asked a few of them if anything was for sale. Property there is never advertised; the word is put about, that’s all. Someone told me about the house, that it might be on the market, at the right price, and I bought it, there and then.
That’s a couple of years ago now. Tom’s turned seven and he goes to the local primary school; we speak English at home, but with his pals he speaks Catalan, Castellano or both, and he’s retained the French that he picked up when he was in Monaco with Oz and Susie.
He couldn’t be happier, and neither could I . . . even after all that bloody drama with Frank!
Two
Frank? Of course, you haven’t heard of him before. He wasn’t part of my back story with Oz. He’d dropped out of my life five years before the two of us ever met . . . not that he’d ever really been in it, not in any meaningful way.
Frances Ulverscroft McGowan was my cousin, the product of a fleeting union between my mum’s older sister Adrienne and a Japanese deep-sea trawlerman named Kotaro whom she met on a winter holiday in Las Palmas. By the time she discovered that she was pregnant, at the age of thirty-six, she was back in London, at the helm of her successful literary agency, and the unfortunate mariner was at the bottom of the Atlantic, his vessel having foundered in a tropical storm. (Or so the story went: Auntie Ade has always been seen as a tiger in business, but in her younger days she liked drink and men, in no particular order. I wouldn’t put it past her to have made up the sailor’s name after the event, having neglected to ask for it before.)
So baby Frances was born without a dad. I didn’t make a mistake there, by the way: his name is indeed spelled in the girlie manner, his birth having been registered by Auntie Ade’s then secretary, a dimwit who paid for the howler with her job. That’s why he was called Frank from the cradle. He grew up without even a surrogate father, my aunt being a firm believer in short-term relationships, sometimes as short as two or three hours. He was seven years younger than me, a lot when you’re a kid. I remember being mildly excited when Mum told Dawn and me about his birth, but he was a messy three year old when Auntie Ade finally brought him to Auchterarder for the official viewing, and so he registered with the pair of us as little more than the sticky thing on the kitchen floor.
After that introduction we all got on with our growing for a few more years, until eleven-year-old Frank was sent north for a summer holiday. I was eighteen by then, just finished school and getting myself ready to embark on my nursing degree, so the job of looking after our cousin fell mostly to my younger sister, but I did spend some time with him. With his Asiatic features, he was an attractive boy, small for his age but advanced in other areas, or so I judged from the way I caught him looking at Dawn in off-guard moments. He was polite, but self confident and glib-tongued, in the way that prep-school children can be.
I didn’t see him again for another seven years, when I stopped off in London to spend a few days with my aunt, before beginning a contract as a theatre sister at a hospital in Dubai. This time Frank was the one putting his schooldays behind him . . . and ho
w. He hadn’t stretched that much, being no taller than me, but his self-assurance had been boosted by a clutch of A levels, enough to win him entry to Cambridge to study economics. He had become a charismatic lad, and when he flashed me one of the looks he had given Dawn in his prepubescent days . . . let’s just say it was my turn to be caught off guard.
There was something underlying it, though, something about him that I didn’t like. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, but when the trouble erupted, I might have professed shock to my parents, but I can’t say I was surprised.
When it happened, Frank was twenty-six. I was in Glasgow with Oz, helping him get over Jan’s death as best I could and working in the investigations business we had set up together. His court case wasn’t hot news, but it made headlines big enough to embarrass Auntie Ade and my mum. Dad never said anything about it, but he keeps his own counsel most of the time.
Essentially, my cousin’s own ego tripped him up. He had come out of Cambridge with a good degree, a two-one, had done a couple of years as a political researcher in the House of Commons, then schmoozed himself into a job in a merchant bank. From what the papers said, backed up by the account Mum had from Auntie Ade, he had done a Nick Leeson; in other words he had traded without authority in high-risk markets. But unlike Leeson, he had been consistently successful.
So why hadn’t the bank regarded him as a hero, rather than a criminal? Simple answer: he had diverted a proportion of the profits he had generated into a personal account. When his unorthodoxy was discovered he had claimed that he had been risking his own money as well as the bank’s, drawing what he called ‘advances on salary and bonuses’ totalling just over eighty thousand pounds to fund his own short-term investments. Unfortunately for Frank, just as no senior officer had given his trading the okay, neither had anyone approved the advances. The bank, its auditors, the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and ultimately twelve jurors all agreed that they had in fact been theft.
He might have got off with just the sack, and no prosecution, if he had coughed up all the money he had made before the police were brought in. The bank wasn’t thrilled about the publicity that prosecution was going to bring. But he wouldn’t: all he ever returned were the so-called advances, arguing that however he had come by his stake, the profits he had generated with it had been the result of his skill and, as such, were his. By that time they were also well hidden, in an untraceable offshore account.
He was sentenced to nine years, much more than Leeson’s six and a half, as a salutary example to other City slickers, I suppose. I felt a little sorry for him when I heard that, as the bank had made much more from his trading than the amount of the ‘advances’ for which he went to jail. The Parole Board may have had some sympathy too, for they sprang him after only five.
If anyone held a coming-out party for him I wasn’t invited, not least because I’d just emerged myself from a short spell as a guest of the Mountbatten-Windsor Hotel Group, the fall-out from an ill-judged plot against Oz. (I must stop talking about him, or you’ll get the impression that I still love him, that I remember every moment of the last night we spent together, in the Algonquin Hotel in New York, and that there hasn’t been a day since he died when I haven’t shed a mental tear for him. And I wouldn’t want you to get that impression.)
It’s not something I’m proud of, and nobody in my family will ever broadcast the fact that we had two members in the nick at the same time, but looking back I see that time as the start of the healing process that brought me to where I am today. I wasn’t thinking about Frank at that time, even though his mother was the only person who came to visit me in HM Prison, Cornton Vale. I’d forbidden my dad and my sister to come near the place, but I hadn’t thought to extend the ban to Auntie Ade, whom I hadn’t seen in years until my mum’s funeral a few months before. I held myself together pretty well in jail, but when she turned up I did lose it for a few minutes. We didn’t talk about my cousin at all; she didn’t mention him and I didn’t ask, being much too wrapped up in my own situation to be bothered about someone I barely knew.
Not long afterwards, I was out and getting on with my life, with every intention of being a fit and proper mother to my son, even if his father (I’m getting better: I didn’t mention his name) had obtained legal custody during my enforced absence. It wasn’t that easy, though: before long I found myself caught up in the fateful last adventure that led to New York, to that night in the Algonquin and, two days later, to my ‘death’.
Three
There’s one problem about an earthly paradise. After a year or two, it can become a little stale, a little . . . what’s the word? . . . yes, a little boring. (I suspect that’s also true about the Other Side, but I’m in no hurry to check it out, not least because I doubt that my CV would get me past the first interview. As Jim Steinman wrote, and Meat Loaf sang, beautifully, ‘Heaven Can Wait’.)
When we moved here Tom was in the process of becoming five, and looking after him was more or less a full-time job, but once he had started school in L’Escala, things started to change. I had time on my hands during the day, and my recent history indicates that when I’m in that situation I don’t always fill the hours as constructively as I might. That doesn’t mean I drink too much: if I over-indulge in anything, these days, it’s coffee. No, my tendency has been to get myself engrossed in projects, wild schemes that usually lead to disaster.
At first, my intentions were pretty good. I enrolled on distance courses in Spanish and Catalan, so that I could keep up with my son’s developing language skills, but I found pretty quickly that I had already progressed beyond the stage where they could do me much good. I looked into going back to nursing, part-time, and went so far as to enquire about job vacancies at the local primary-care clinic, but I bottled out when I saw a section on the application form that required me to declare criminal convictions. I thought about starting an estate agency, until I looked at a copy of the local Yellow Pages and found that there were almost fifty such businesses operating already in that one small town. I did a few afternoon waitress shifts in one of the four restaurants in the village, but that came to an abrupt end when a fat tourist groped me as I walked past his table and I buried a paella, still in its pan, in his face. (He shouted something from the floor, in French, about suing, until the proprietor called his bluff, and the police, and he legged it.)
My problem, all that time, was a lack of motivation. I have enough money invested to afford my son and myself a very nice lifestyle, without ever needing to work again, and the apartment I sold in London more than paid for the house in St Martí. Looking back, I reckon that my efforts to fill my days fruitfully owed more to my Scottish Protestant (I’m not discriminating here, I just happen to have been born one, so don’t get on my case, okay?) work ethic than anything else. So, after a while, I settled for my new life as a home-maker, and a full-time mum.
The house was spotless. I didn’t have the heart to lay off the cleaner, but everything she did I did over again as soon as she’d gone, and a bit more besides. The rest of my time was spent exercising (swimming in the sea, or running on the country roads), reading, and messing about on my computer. That was when Tom was in school; when he was home I concentrated on giving him the best time I possibly could. He got a bike; so did I. He asked for a PlayStation for Christmas; now I’m a gamester too. Soon we added a dog to the family: my son assured me that we were the only household in the village without one . . . a distinction that was okay by me . . . and kept on raising the subject, until I raised a hand in surrender. His name is Charlie, he’s a golden Labrador retriever and he is, I swear, the only dog I’ve ever known with the ability to frown when he’s puzzled about something, which, being essentially thick, he is quite often.
The one thing I did not go looking for was a man. Tom’s a good boy in many ways, not least in that he doesn’t talk much about his father. Whatever his current level of understanding about death, he knows that he’s not coming back, and h
e’s come to terms with it. I’m sure he was helped by the fact that Oz was only in his life for around a year, but still, he keeps his picture by the side of his bed, and that’s nice. I don’t know if he’s waiting for me to fill the vacancy, but if he is, I’m afraid I’m going to have to let him down on that one. Two people, one dog: that’s our family and that’s how it’s going to stay. Sex? Twice in all that time, and the first time barely counted. Emotionally, I still haven’t left the Algonquin; maybe I never will.
Unlike my auntie Ade; she’s spent her life moving from one ship in the night to another. She passed the seventy mark a couple of years ago, and yet she insisted that the fancy still took her until she hit that number. It may have been all in her mind, but somehow I doubt it.
Her phone call, six months ago now, took me by surprise, and her announcement even more so. My son answered, when it rang: most of the calls we receive are for him. He keeps nagging me about a mobile, but I don’t reckon he’s quite ready for that yet. After a few seconds he switched to English. ‘Yes, this is Tom. Yes, Mum’s in.’ He passed me the handset with the Catalan raised eyebrows and the shrug he’s picked up at school. The boy’s going native.
‘Primavera,’ the voice at the other end boomed.
‘Yes?’ I replied, tentatively.
‘For Christ’s sake, niece!’
‘Auntie Ade? Is that you?’
‘Unless your mother had another sister I’ve never heard of, it bloody well has to be, does it not?’
‘It’s great to hear from you,’ I told her, meaning it at the time. ‘How are you?’ I paused, as a small spasm of dread gripped my stomach. ‘This isn’t bad news, is it?’
‘That depends on you. Does that house of yours have a spare room?’
Inhuman Remains Page 2
