Martha paused. She pulled nervously at a button thread. ‘What worries me as much as anything else is that Alexander had a cold side. He could cut off, willfully blind himself to what he didn’t want to see. It could feel brutal. Elinor was right about that. And Isabel…well there was a fragility about her when I last saw her, which I hadn’t noticed before.’
Her voice trailed off. Leo had a sudden sense that the woman was thinking of her sister. She was glad of the silence. Her mind was reeling. Isabel had taken on a teetering depth in time. She couldn’t assimilate everything that Martha had told her. Not all at once.
One thing, however, was clear. What they had to do was get Faraday to run a search on a name change. If she had her computer here, she might even be able to do it herself. Contact a public records office in Seattle. Then do a run on telephone directories throughout England.
But Faraday would have gone home long ago and all this was too complicated for a message. She would ring him early tomorrow morning.
Meanwhile she had to lie down and think. Ever since Martha had mentioned that Isabel’s father was alive, she had been assailed by images of her own father. With them came confusion.
As she settled Martha into Isabel’s bedroom, the force of the revelation her friend had experienced took her over. The shock of finding life and possibility where there had been only the void of death. She could feel her friend’s vertigo, a dizzying sense that one’s entire life had been constructed on false premises. She would feel cheated, betrayed, in the first instance by her mother. The mother she had begun to think was a murderer. There would be rage at both of them over all that needless pain and the realization that the longed-for father had been complicit in a masquerade, had lived a double life somewhere without her, hadn’t loved her enough.
Yet there would be curiosity, too - hungry, rampant, a child’s desire to know, to discover. And hope. A dream of recovered joy. He would explain away his actions, embrace her, take her on his knee. No, not that. Leo wasn’t a little girl anymore. Isabel wasn’t a little girl. Her father wouldn’t know the woman she had become.
A lump rose to Leo’s throat. A lump of disappointment, a kind of visceral bewilderment, as if she had set out ardently on a quest only to have the grail turn to dust in her hands.
She chased away the images.
The thing to focus on, she told herself as she stared at a white expanse of ceiling, the important thing, was that if Isabel was with her father, whatever her emotional state, she was alive. Whether here as her Aunt thought, or in Australia as Leo still believed, Isabel was alive. Not trapped or bruised or beaten or confined in some muddy ditch or wrecked car, nor in any of the other hideous sites Leo’s imagination of disaster had cast her in.
Isabel was alive and safe and soon they would meet, even if it was on the other side of the world.
17
‘Ms Holland. Faraday here.’
Brisk tones chased away the mists of troubled sleep. Leo held the phone closer to her ear.
‘Sorry to wake you. I didn’t want to miss you. Can you get yourself to Lynton today?
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You will when you get here. I’ll be waiting for you at the police station. You can’t miss it. Follow the signs to the town centre. Two o’clock should give you plenty of time.’
‘Isabel’s aunt, Martha Morgan, is here from Australia. Should I…?’
‘Bring her along.’
‘But Inspector Faraday…’
A click signalled the end of the conversation.
Leo shrugged away confusion and woke Martha. A bare two hours later they were sitting on a high-speed train bound for Bristol. Leo described in more detail how Isabel’s trail had led her to the seaside town, how Isabel had been picked up from there by a man who was probably a chauffeur for some biotech multinational.
It came to her as she said it, that the man could just as easily have been someone linked to Isabel’s father, or even Morgenstern himself. A Morgenstern who had been forced into a work-a-day job after the collapse of his foundation. But she didn’t say this aloud. Martha wouldn’t have wanted to hear it. She didn’t look well this morning. She looked frail. And she was stiffly restrained, as if she had given far too much away the preceding evening and now, out of self-respect, had to hold herself in check.
From Bristol, they hired a car. Leo wanted the activity. She drove with the fixed focus of a grand prix racer, vigilantly denying any stray thought. The stark beauties of Exmoor might as well have been a series of car graveyards or derelict badlands.
They arrived in Lynton in good time and found the house which bore the police sign they were searching for, though it looked as unlikely a candidate for the task as the next homey brick structure.
Faraday appeared even before Leo had fully opened the door. His thin face gave away little. It wore a blandly reassuring smile as he greeted them. He commented on the weather which seemed to be clearing after morning rain, then guided them back down the external staircase and along a damp street.
‘It’s not far to go,’ he said.
‘Where are we going?’ Leo asked, so softly that she realized she didn’t want an answer.
Faraday cleared his throat. ‘I think we may have found Isabel Morgan. I’m sorry. Sorry, too, to make you come here. But we need a definite identification.’
A hammer pounded at Leo’s temples, blurring her vision. She put one foot carefully in front of another. Somehow, despite everything, she had already known.
‘An identification?’ Martha stopped mid-street.
Faraday nodded, put his arm through hers. ‘She’s not a pretty sight. I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘Sorry we couldn’t prevent it.’
‘Prevent what?’ Leo’s voice was a scream. Passers-by turned. She wanted him to say it.
‘Two youths found her. Yesterday morning. They were fishing. The body had got stuck between boulders. At the farthest end of the beach. We don’t know how long it’s been there.’
‘The body… ? It … ?’ Leo spat.
‘This way.’ He tugged on Martha’s arm, led them through a lane and down some steps. Abruptly, they were in a room that might have been any other except that it had a bone-numbing coldness and that smell was in the air. That lingering antiseptic reek. A high, sheeted slab of a table stood at the room’s centre. A young woman in nurse’s white hovered to one side of it. At a nod from Faraday, the sheet was lifted.
A face appeared. Not a face. A bloated, mottled parody of a face which looked as if it had been bruised and picked at by a hundred sharp teeth. Dry, tufted hair of a green-gold tinge floated and frizzled round the decaying mask. One eye lay open to stare in blind shock at a distant horror.
Leo turned away as if the seeing would blind her too. She was vaguely aware that Martha had collapsed into a chair. Her hands obliterated her face.
‘Is it her?’ Faraday asked softly. ‘Is this Isabel Morgan?’
Leo met his encouraging gaze. She shook her head savagely. ‘No. No. No. No.’ She was whimpering. This wasn’t Isabel. Isabel was beautiful, alive, animated. Isabel brought beauty into a room with her as certainly as an old master gave it life with oils. Her kind of beauty was a gift. It wasn’t beauty that could be created artificially on page or screen by cameras and make-up and light and extinguished as quickly. Extinguished like this. It was the beauty of a personality through time. The kind of beauty that was life itself. Isabel would always be beautiful. This wasn’t Isabel.
‘Are you sure?’ Faraday directed her attention to the corpse that wasn’t Isabel once more. ‘I was certain it was from the photographs and from your description. I know. The sea, the mackerel, the rocks have done their damage, but do have another look. Maybe the clothes, such as they remain, may help.’
With a single swift gesture, he whipped the sheet off the body and Leo saw the muddy white of a long-sleeved tee-shirt, the rise of a bosom, the flap of discoloured trousers. The fingers of the hand were bitten and gnarled. On
the third, a ring marked the bulge of the flesh. A thick silver band with an oval aqua-marine at its centre. She stared at it, wishing it away. Why was it there? Still there when everything else had been so utterly transformed? She had bought the ring for Isabel. A birthday present. They were in Paris together and, on the Rue St Andre des Arts, they had passed a tiny boutique stuffed to the brim with rings and necklaces, earrings and pins, old and new, artfully crafted and stark in their simplicity. Isabel had chosen the silver band with the aqua-marine. Because she loved the sea.
Leo averted her eyes. ‘It is her,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t want it to be her. But it is.’
Through the blur of tears, she was suddenly aware of Martha. She had hurled herself onto the corpse, covering it with her arms. A piercing wail filled the room.
Faraday lifted her away gently.
She was moaning now. ‘My baby. My baby. Poor baby.’
She wouldn’t leave her.
Faraday urged, tugged, and at last guided her to the door, gesturing to Leo to follow.
She took one long, last look at that disfigured body that was and wasn’t Isabel and then they were out of that chamber of death into a world of high skies and cold wind which clawed at her cheeks.
‘I’m sorry,’ Faraday said again. He led them into a pub, put brandy in front of them, and insisted they drink.
Martha’s eyes were glazed. She was pulling at her hair, muttering beneath her breath. ‘My fault.’
Leo squeezed her hand, held it.
Faraday’s voice reached her ears over a pounding which could only be her blood. ‘You were right to be worried, Ms Holland. I always trust the nearest one’s worry. But we were too late to save her. For whatever reason, she must have wanted to put an end to things. It looks like she jumped. Her neck’s broken. I’m sorry we didn’t find her in time.’
Leo looked at him in incomprehension. ‘You…you think Isabel did this to herself? Never. No, no. She wouldn’t.’
Martha stared up at her, bewilderment in her face. ‘But Leo…’ her voice croaked. ‘She…she loved the sea.’
‘So you think, Miss Morgan, that Isabel had reason…?’
Martha nodded once, brusquely. ‘My fault.’ She began to tell him erratically what she had told Leo the night before.
‘I need a breath of air,’ Leo said and slipped away before they could stop her.
She didn’t know which way she was going, but she had to be alone to let the mounting frenzy of thought and emotion play through her. She walked quickly through zigzagging streets, up a lane and suddenly she was on a beach and there was nowhere else to go except the length of a small, pebbled bay along which the sea heaved its mocking strength.
She gazed at it. The eternal return of the waves had brought Isabel to rest here. She clutched her arms round herself as if to feel the unfairness of the continued existence of her own flesh.
Why was she now so perversely certain that Isabel hadn’t done away with herself? It was one of the thoughts that had haunted her, perhaps the core of the reason she had pursued Daniel Lukas and Paola Webster. An Isabel broken down, picked apart, her will to life destroyed. Yet now, now that Isabel’s fractured body was too clearly in her mind, she refused the possibility of suicide. Was it simply that she couldn’t allow in the stinking slew of self-recrimination which would follow from the reality of her friend’s suicide? She should have been able to prevent it; she should have reached her friend in time; she should have noticed the signs. If she were truly a friend.
Leo walked, kicked a pebble into flight, hurled another into the sea so that the spray landed in her face and mingled with what she hadn’t known were tears.
Or was it that once the reality of suicide took hold, it grew too seductive? Turned into a temptation that couldn’t be resisted. She stared at the waves and blotted out their siren song. The Isabel she knew and loved wasn’t like that. There was too much fierceness in her. Too much sheer love of life, whatever her distress. If she knew anything at all about Isabel, it was that. It was that part of Isabel which wasn’t like Leo, who faltered over the boundless variety of experience.
Leo turned. High above her in the distance, graceful buldings curved and stretched. She must be standing beneath the road which she had walked to reach the Lynton Arms. Isabel had left there. She hadn’t left alone. Where had she gone?
‘Ms Holland…’ Faraday’s voice reached her above the incessant mewl of the gulls. ‘Ms Holland, here you are.’ He gripped her arm as if he were afraid she was about to replicate Isabel’s dying. ‘I’ve left Miss Morgan, it is Miss, isn’t it? I’ve left her at the police station. Did you come here to see where we found your friend? I’ll show you.’ He was deliberately matter-of-fact.
He walked her towards the far end of the strand. Leo started to talk. She talked a tangled tumult of talk, trying to convey her conviction that Isabel would never have killed herself. That somehow her death had to be linked to the investigation she was carrying out. Like Jill Reid’s death. Yes. Had they found out any more? About Plantagen or one of the other companies on the list that had been sent to her. Yes. Why had that list been sent to her? No accidents here. No suicide, but purpose - evil, greedy, covert intent. Norfolk had told her about strange contents in the soil. Faraday must speak to him. And where had Isabel been since she left the Lynton Arms? Had they determined the day of her death yet? There was more to uncover. More about the father she had been seeking out, too. Faraday had to carry on. Had to be thorough. What was the man’s name, if he wasn’t Morgenstern?’
She talked and talked as she gazed at the rivulet between the boulders where the corpse that wasn’t Isabel had been found and when she had talked herself out, Faraday said softly, ‘A thorough post-mortem is being done, Ms Holland. At the moment, we only know that Ms Morgan died between five and fifteen days ago. And that there was a fall. As soon as we have anything more definite, I’ll let you know. By the way, those plantlings you gave me turned out to be ipomoea. Ordinary morning glory.’ He made a noise which wasn’t quite a laugh. ‘That rather scuppered one of my theories.’ He met her eyes.
‘That nice Mrs Donald…’ Leo heard herself say.
‘What?’
‘She must have given them to her. Isabel had asked about her husband.’
Faraday looked as if he was going to question her further, but changed his mind. ‘Try to take it easy, Ms Holland. Do you think you can drive? Only I feel Miss Morgan should be taken home, given some sedation, perhaps.’
Leo stared at him blindly. She shook her head. ‘I’m not going back to London. You can drive her. I’m staying here. Up there.’ She pointed to the cliff. ‘Up there where Isabel stayed. The Lynton Arms Hotel.’
When they returned to the police station, Martha was equally firm.
‘I’m staying too. I’m staying with Isa…with Leo.’ She squared her shoulders so that she seemed to grow several inches to meet Faraday’s gaze.
Faraday shrugged. ‘That’s fine then. If you’re certain. I have the hotel number if I need to reach you.’ He turned to Leo. ‘You won’t do anything silly, will you Ms Holland?’
‘Call me Leo, Inspector. You’ll follow up those leads.’
‘We’ll do our best.’
This time Leo took the track and drove straight up the narrow incline to the Lynton Arms. Pippa emerged from the hotel’s depths to welcome her like a long-lost friend. After Leo had introduced Martha, Pippa drew her aside.
‘Was it her?’ She whispered, her face at once solemn and eager.
For a moment, Leo didn’t know what she was referring to. Then she realized that news must travel more quickly than lightning in this small, out-of-season resort. She nodded once, too abruptly.
‘I’m so very sorry. If there’s anything we can do… You’ll be staying tonight, won’t you? I can give you two rooms with sea views.’ She winced. ‘If that’s…that’s what you’d like.’
Leo conferred with Martha, then followed Pippa up the miniature grand s
taircase. Once they had placed their bags in identical chintzy rooms where the wallpaper swirled with roses, Leo asked if tea was possible. And maps. She needed some Ordnance Survey maps.
‘No lack of those. I’ll bring them with tea. In the dining room. A full tea. You both look as if you need it. By the way…’ She glanced towards Martha then drew Leo into the hall and lowered her voice. ‘I heard something. It made me very sad.’ Her tongue seemed to stumble. ‘One of the guests… She told me that the chauffeur, that big black car… they belong to a clinic, somewhere west of here. She didn’t know the name. I guess your poor friend couldn’t take any more…’ She stopped abruptly as Martha appeared at the door. ‘I’ll get that tea, shall I. And those maps.’ She raced off with a forced smile.
‘You’re plotting something, Leo. I know it. And I’m coming with you.’ Martha’s voice was determined. ‘I won’t weep or babble. That’s a pledge.’
Leo met her eyes, read the plea in them and nodded.
Beneath the arc of the trees, the narrow road was as dusky as if night were poised to fall. Better than fog, Leo consoled herself, her attention glued to the terrain. She was looking for the place where Jill Reid’s car had gone down the incline. If the police tape had been removed from the spot, she might not recognise it.
She had pushed the mileage button on the dashboard when they had set off. She wanted to determine what the distance was that separated the two deaths. Isabel might have died in Lynton. But equally, her body could have been carried by the sea and lain there hidden by boulders for any number of days.
Noticing a narrow break between the gnarled trees, Leo brought the car to a halt. The place looked familiar. She switched off the engine. 3.2 miles, the gauge read.
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