It was at the very abyss of that year - the point at which the unending reality of Eva’s absence had finally hit home - that Isabel Morgan had unexpectedly turned up. Christmas could only have been some ten days away. Robbie and he had decorated the tree together and the boy had said to him in a flat little voice that it wasn’t half as good as when mummy did it. Then his grandmother had whisked him away for a weekend of shopping and adventure.
Daniel was sitting in front of the less-than-perfect tree and nursing a solitary whisky when the doorbell rang. Already awash in the self-pity the scotch so skilfully encouraged, he was in no mood for contact with the living world. But the ringing was insistent. He had lifted himself heavily from the fireside chair and, with a curse at whichever friend of Martina’s it was who didn’t know she had gone home for the holidays, he had at last opened the door.
On the threshold, Isabel had looked like an apparition, a present delivered by some beneficent Scandinavian Santa. Her hair bounded from beneath a tiny embroidered toque. Her cheeks were glowing, her eyes as electric as her hair. She was wearing a long suede coat in recreated hippy fashion, tight at the waist and trimmed in some flurry of wool which moved with her. And she moved quickly. She was in the house before he had uttered a word, her coat flung on a chair, a bottle of wine proffered.
‘I was in the mood for a friend. And in retrospect you felt like one.’
He couldn’t quite read whether the irony in her face was directed at him or at herself. Maybe he wasn’t paying enough attention to her face. But for its abundant roll of a collar, her dress was minuscule, a black second skin above an infinity of leg. He had forgotten how striking she was or maybe the limits of the consulting room had provided a small measure of immunity. Now, he felt like rubbing his eyes.
‘Wine would be nice,’ she pointed to the bottle he was still holding, and walked around, pausing at objects and pictures. ‘Whisky’s fine too, if that’s what you’re drinking.’
He found a glass in the cabinet and poured her one. He hadn’t seen her since that session in September when she had walked off without telling him she wasn’t intending to return. That terse message had come in a phone call. And now she was sitting in the chair on the other side of the fire, her legs lavishly crossed. He didn’t quite know how to handle the situation.
‘It’s nice here. Warm,’ she said in a low voice. Perhaps he didn’t respond quickly enough, for she then added. ‘Now don’t get all rule-bound on me, Daniel. Life is too short.’
He had eased himself back into his chair and swallowed a large glug of his topped-up scotch.
‘That’s better.’ Her smiled teased him. He returned it a little wistfully. So her next comment took him by surprise. ‘Why didn’t you tell me your wife had died? You should have told me.’
‘Should I?’ He shrugged, considered. ‘It didn’t feel appropriate. And then there was the summer break. And then you left.’
She let out a noisy guffaw. ‘Appropriate! I had to find out from Paola. I’ve just found out.’
‘You talk to her about me?’
‘Not much. Only when it’s appropriate.’ She mocked him.
He tore his eyes away from her and gazed into the fire. The flames were golden, then tipped with blue. They leapt and crackled in the stillness. Like her. ‘How have you been?’
‘Up and down. Quite a lot of the latter. She’s one tough woman.’
‘I don’t really want to know.’
She was suddenly out of her chair and standing behind him. ‘No. But I know that I need to make amends. Need to.’
It was the way she said that word, a low hoarse sound, like the sound of need itself. It awakened his own, made him aware of a dark gaping hole somewhere inside him. The brush of her fingers and lips on his neck acted like kindling. She could burn darkness away.
After that the need took over. It made them anonymous. Any man and any woman clasped together on a rug in front of a fireplace, their limbs moving, their backs arching, their lips and fingers enmeshed in a dance of hunger which grew with the eating. She was so beautiful, her skin tawny, her eyes lit by fire. And he was alive with desire. The depth and extent of it astonished him, as if he were an untouched youth again, free of the burden of second thoughts.
Later when they were dressed, it was more difficult.
He felt she was eager to leave, nor did she want him to see her home. She rang a cab for herself. ‘You’ve made ample amends,’ he said to her at the door.’ Maybe he said it too stiffly, because she gave him a peculiar look, as if she had no recollection of her own words. Or perhaps the giving of herself wasn’t what she had meant by them. Then she was off into the waiting car with a little wave of the hand. Cinderella disappearing into the night, with not even a dropped slipper to mark her passage.
He was left with the sense that what had passed between them wordlessly bore no relation to any words they might exchange. He thought about her for the rest of the night. His mind was a ring of wrestling emotions. He tried to understand what, if anything, had happened between them. At one point he told himself he might have experienced a hallucination. But his sense of having committed a wrong increased with each passing minute. More than a wrong. It felt like sin. He had never committed this particular one before.
At lunch time, the following day, he rang her only to be answered by a machine. He asked her to pick up, if she was there. When she didn’t, he made a little speech which sounded far too dry and stumbled along ineptly. ‘You were generous last night, Isabel, thank you. If you want to talk, I’m here. But I know, as you do, that it was a one-off. Unrepeatable. Like a miracle. And a grave wrong in my small world of rules. For that I’m sorry.’
Her response didn’t come until a few days later. It too was a message, light-hearted to begin with. ‘There’s nothing to talk about. No significance. No heavy meanings. I was curious. Simply that.’ And then the voice changed, took on a steely, malicious edge. ‘You should know that I’m writing two books at the moment. The first won’t interest you. The second might. It’s called, ‘On being a patient.’
The slam of the receiver wasn’t recorded, but he heard it. Its menace reverberated through his days like a guillotine poised to drop. He felt angry and helpless by turn. And though rationally he recognised the fault was all his, her vengefulness ignited his own. The fitful pendulum logic of an eye for an eye infested his dreams.
And now this Leonora Gould had turned up to reactivate the threat. A part of him was distinctly ambivalent, he noted, about the need for locating Isabel Morgan.
Leo walked. She walked across the leafy green slopes of the park, skirted the ponds with their mirrored shrubbery and ever-hungry ducks. She walked with no sense of destination. There were hours to kill before she could hope for Norfolk’s return to the loft. She needed to talk to him. The contending voices in her head had grown too noisy.
Daniel Lukas hadn’t denied her accusation. He had merely deflected her. That must mean he really had engaged in some kind of murky affair with Isabel.
But what difference did it finally make? And why was she so intent on knowing, since it seemed increasingly likely that, whatever her inner state, Isabel’s disappearance was somehow linked to the savage secrecy of rapacious multinationals who had chauffeurs at their disposal? After all, the respected Dr. Gould had slept with her mother and she had neither suffered a breakdown nor vanished into the ether. That was different. He had married her. Yet Isabel was not the marrying kind. Still, she had wanted Daniel to know that whatever had happened to Isabel, Leo, for one, knew he was implicated. Guilty by implication.
She could hear him turning it all round for her, landing her in another place, telling her that he was a mere standin for Jeff or her father, men she wanted to implicate in her own plight and hadn’t dared, so that she could more easily and eventually live in her own skin, not Isabel’s reckless one. The man had her hooked.
Leo paused with a sigh in front of the ivy-clad fence which separated the park from th
e cemetery. If she stood on the ledge, she could see the tip of Karl Marx’s bulbous stone head amidst a sea of leafy growth and ornate, crumbling tombstones. Her eyes roamed through dappled light and deep shadow and stopped abruptly. Lying next to a stone with a broken-winged angel at its crest was a man. His head was a mass of long curls, as tangled as the ivy and as grimy as the earth beneath him. He was wearing an ancient chequered jacket and beneath it a ragged pullover. Baggy cord trousers, tied at the bottom with rope, covered his legs. Only one foot had a shoe on it.
A wave of nausea attacked her stomach. Dead, but unburied. A destitute old man. She had to alert someone. She gripped the iron railings and closed her eyes for a steadying moment. When she opened them, the man was upright. He was pissing onto a neighbouring grave, whistling tunelessly as the great arced stream fell on stone, splattering leaves and gathered grit. The gesture was so anarchic, so free, that Leo felt a laugh of relief rise to her throat. At its sound, the man turned and waggled his penis in her direction with an inane smile.
She strode off purposefully. The old man had given her a brief respite from the prison of her mind with its bevy of chattering monkeys who could only ask questions, cast doubts and dialogue endlessly to no avail. For all her mental juggling, she really moved as blindly as a mole, driven to dig and tunnel because there was nothing else she could do.
Maybe the old man was a sign. Isabel would arise, just as he did, from the death into which Leo’s imagination over these last days had too often cast her. She would return to her loft on the very day she had been intended to return from their journey across the States. Isabel had simply gone East rather than West. Her mother’s death had scratched old scars. She needed to pour native balm on them. Alone. Privately - as she had intimated to that Pippa woman. Once back, her and Isabel’s lives and diaries would once more be enmeshed. They would travel together, explore unfinished matter, make amends.
Leo let the fantasy buoy her up. It grew as brightly coloured as a vast balloon and exploded into shreds the moment she reached home.
14
The light on the answering machine flashed red. With a tremor of anticipation, Leo pressed the messages button. Norfolk’s voice boomed out at her.
‘Holland? You not there yet? OK, here’s the lowdown. Isabel’s almost definitely down here somewhere in the South-West. I met up with these Greens in Exeter who talked to her at that hotel we stayed at. They’re engaged in some mutual muck-raking.’ He paused for a little too long. ‘The thing is they’re worried about her now, too, ‘cause she hasn’t reported back. She said she’d be staying with a cousin in the area. They don’t have a contact. I won’t be back tonight. Need to do some more exploring. I’ll go straight to Heathrow in the morning. I’ll try and ring in later. Miss you. Oh yes. That aunt’s number has come through on the Aussie e-mail. Here it is, code and all.’
Leo reached for a pen and jotted down a long row of digits. No sooner had she finished than a new voice came on.
‘Ms Holland. Faraday here. We need to talk. I’ll drop in on you about 9.30 on Saturday morning, unless I hear that isn’t convenient.’
Faraday’s voice was clipped. He wasn’t happy about something. She ran through the two messages she had left for him, one about Jill Reid, the second about the hotel in Lynton. She wished she could speak to him immediately, but it was already after eight. She had been anticipating a late dinner with Norfolk. The groceries she had picked up were still standing in their bags in the kitchen, next to the two tiny potted plants Isabel had left at the Lynton Arms. Why had she left them behind if they were in any way significant?
A voice she didn’t recognise interrupted her thoughts. ‘Isabel, dear one. You must be angry with me after our last conversation. You said you’d write. But nothing’s come. Not for weeks. I’m sorry if I did the wrong thing. Do please phone. Even if it’s just to shout at me.’
Leo replayed the message. The voice which didn’t identify itself had an Australian lilt. Its tone was intimate.
Without pausing to think, Leo dialled the number she had taken down from Norfolk. It was only as she heard the tone, that she realized she didn’t know the woman’s full name. It wouldn’t be Morgan. Nor had she calculated the time it would be in Australia.
The voice that answered her held a muffled, sleepy note.
‘Is that Martha?’
The question played itself back in Leo’s ear, jumping off satellites.
‘Yes, who is it?’
‘My name’s Leo. Leo Holland. I’m a friend of Isabel’s. I hope I haven’t got you too early.’
‘No matter. How is she?’
Leo could feel anxiety battling with hope in the woman’s tone.
‘Well, that’s just it. I can’t tell you. I thought you might be able to tell me. You see…’ Leo censored the word ‘missing’. ‘None of us know where Isabel is. Where she might be.’
There was a long silence interspersed by crackle and what Leo sensed was a judder of breath.‘How long has it been since you’ve seen her?’
‘No one has seen her for at least three weeks.’
The breath was audible now.
‘Where are you phoning from?’
‘I’m in Isabel’s flat in London. She hasn’t been in Australia in that time?’
‘Not as far as I know. And I’m sure she’d contact me. Yes, of course she would.’
‘The last place at which she was seen, she was using the name Iris Morgenstern.’
‘What?’ The woman’s voice caught and Leo repeated what she had said.
There was a long pause. ‘Look… I’m going to fly over. I’ve been so worried. I tried ringing. But there was no answering machine. Not for weeks. And then I had to… never mind. Where can I reach you?’
‘I’m staying in Isabel’s apartment.’
‘Tell me your name again. Of course. Isabel talked about you. Yes. I’ll let you know as soon as I have my flight fixed. I might be of some help.’
Inspector Faraday paced the loft and gave Leo the full force of what she could only call a polite scowl. She decided she wouldn’t like to see it without the constraint of politeness. As it was, poised here with a strip of sun beaming down on her, she felt she was in an interrogation chamber. She stirred herself to pull down the blind.
‘I warned you that this could prove dangerous, Ms Holland. I don’t want you interfering in our investigations. We have one woman dead…’
‘So you’ve concluded Jill Reid’s death was no simple accident?’
‘There were drugs involved. We’re not sure of their source yet. They might have been self-inflicted. But that really is no concern of yours, Ms Holland. Nor is it any business of yours to trespass on private property.’
Leo was about to interrupt, but he stopped her.
‘Yes, yes. Of course, I know you’ve been exploring those map sites. We’re not fools.’
‘But your men didn’t trace Isabel to the Lynton Arms, did they?’
‘No.’ He had the grace to look a little abashed. ‘But we have now located the car she hired.’
Leo reached for a cigarette, then stopped herself from lighting it. She poured coffee instead. ‘Where?’
‘In the Lynton car park. Yes, yes. As you suggested. Where is Mr. Norfolk?
‘In Amsterdam, by now, I imagine. Or on his way. Why?’
‘Don’t you find it just a little convenient that he was the last person we know to have seen Jill Reid as well as the man to identify her?
‘Convenient? What are you suggesting, Inspector?’
‘I must ask you again, Ms Holland, how well do you know Christopher Norfolk?’ He had stopped directly in front of her and was peering at her as if she were in a line-up.
Leo sat up straight. ‘Well enough, I imagine.’
‘Well enough.’ Faraday echoed her with a growl. ‘Do you have any objective confirmation that he’s a friend of Ms Morgan’s? Do you know where he got the keys to this place?’
‘No, but…’
/>
‘No. Can you tell me how he knew to go precisely to Plantagen where Jill Reid worked?’
Leo shrugged. ‘I think Isabel…’
‘You think. You don’t know. You probably don’t know where he was on the day Jill Reid died, either.’
‘When was that exactly?’
He didn’t answer. Nor did his eyes leave her. Where can I find Mr Norfolk in Amsterdam?’
Leo got up. ‘I didn’t know I was on trial, Inspector. Nor do I have a contact number.’
She said it coolly enough, but she could feel the tears pricking at her eyes. Faraday was right. She knew nothing about Norfolk except that she liked the pressure of his arms around her. Could she really have allowed herself to be duped like some hapless girl, avid for adventure. No, more like an ageing, besotted spinster, all too grateful for advances that bore the semblance of passion. Luckily she hadn’t allowed too many emotions to follow in her body’s witless path. Or had she?
The coffee scalded her tongue. Pain jarred her back into a semblance of reason. She had to trust her instincts. Faraday was on the wrong track.
‘Shouldn’t you be concentrating on finding Isabel, Inspector. I’ve told you what I discovered. If I had your resources, I wouldn’t be chasing after a friend of hers now. I’d be interviewing all the chauffeurs in hitting distance of the northern coast. Maybe even further afield. I don’t have to do that myself as well, do I? When Norfolk phones, I’ll tell him you want to speak to him.’
‘That would be kind, Ms Holland.’ He inclined his thin body slightly in a mockery of a bow. ‘There isn’t anything you’ve omitted to tell me, is there?’
Leo considered. ‘I spoke to Isabel’s aunt in Australia. She’s flying over.’
‘Good.’ He gave her a quick smile. ‘It will relieve me to know you’ve got suitable company here.’
‘You might as well take these, too, Inspector.’ Leo strode into the kitchen and brought out Isabel’s two plantlings. ‘Isabel left them at the hotel where she was last seen.’ Leo frowned. ‘I can’t imagine what they’ll reveal about her whereabouts.’
Sanctuary Page 25
