The Mammoth Book Best International Crime

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “It’s the house,” I said. “I wouldn’t dream of buying a house like this.”

  Will was staying with us at the time of Roger’s death. He often was. In a curious way, when he first met Roger, before we were married, he managed to present himself in the guise of my rejected lover, the devoted admirer who knows it is all hopeless but who cannot keep away, so humble and selfless is his passion. Remarks such as “may the best man win” and “some men have all the luck” were sometimes uttered by him, and this from someone who had never so much as touched my hand or spoken to me a word of affection. I explained to Roger but he thought I was being modest. What other explanation could there be for Will’s devotion? Why else but from long-standing love of me would he phone two or three times a week, bombard me with letters, angle for invitations? Poor Roger had made his fortune too late in life to understand that the motive for pursuing me might be money.

  Roger died of a heart attack sitting at his desk in the study. And there Will found him when he went in with an obsequious cup of tea on a tray, even though we had a housekeeper to do all that. He broke the news to me with the same glitter-eyed relish as I remembered him recounting to the police tales of the little haunted house. His voice was lugubrious but his eyes full of pleasure.

  Three months later he asked me to marry him. Without hesitating for a moment, I refused.

  “You’re going to be very lonely in the years to come.”

  “I know,” I said.

  8

  Never once did I seriously think of throwing in my lot with Will. But that was a different matter from telling him I had no wish to see him again. He was distasteful to me with his pink face, the colour of raw veal, the ginger hair that clashed with it, and the pale blue bird’s-egg eyes. His heart was as cold as mine but hard in a way mine never was. I disliked everything about him, his insensitivity, the pleasure he took in cruel words. But for all that, he was my friend, he was my only friend. He was a man to be taken about by. If he hinted to other people that we were lovers, I neither confirmed nor denied it. I was indifferent. Will pleaded poverty so often since he had been made redundant by his company that I began allowing him an income but instead of turning him into a remittance man, this only drew him closer to me.

  I never confided in him, I never told him anything. Our conversation was of the most banal. When he phoned – I never phoned him – the usual platitudes would be exchanged and then, desperate, I would find myself falling back on that well-used silence-filler and ask him,

  “What have you been doing since we last spoke?”

  When I was out of London, at the house in Somerset or the “castle”, a castellated shooting lodge Roger had bought on a whim in Scotland, Will would still phone me but would reverse the charges. Sometimes I said no when the operator asked me if I would pay for the call, but Will – thick-skinned mentally, whatever his physical state might be – simply made another attempt half an hour later.

  It was seldom that more than three days passed without our speaking. He would tell me the shopping he had done, for he enjoys buying things, troubles with his car, the aboutfailure of the electrician to come, the cold he had had, but never of what he might understand love to be, of his dreams or his hopes, his fear of growing old and of death, not even what he had been reading or listening to or looking at. And I was glad of it, for I was not interested and I told him none of these things either. We were best friends with no more intimacy than acquaintances.

  The income I allowed him was adequate, no more, and he was always complaining about the state of his finances. If I had to name one topic we could be sure of discussing whenever we met or talked it would be money. Will grumbled about the cost of living, services bills, fares, the small amount of tax he had to pay on his pension and what he got from me, the price of food and drink and the cost of the upkeep of his house. Although he did nothing for me, a fiction was maintained that he was my personal assistant, “secretary” having been rejected by him as beneath the dignity of someone with his status and curriculum vitae. Will knew very well that he had no claim at all to payment for services rendered but for all that he talked about his “salary”, usually to complain that it was pitifully small. Having arrived – without notice – to spend two weeks with me in Somerset, he announced that it was time he had a company car.

  “You’ve got a car,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “a rich man’s car.”

  What was that supposed to mean?

  “You need to be rich to keep the old banger on the road,” he said, as usual doubling up with mirth at his own wit.

  But he nagged me about that car in the days to come. What was I going to do with my money? What was I saving it for, I who had no child? If he were in my place it would give him immense pleasure to see the happiness he could bring to others without even noticing the loss himself. In the end I told him he could have my car. Instead of my giving it in part exchange for a new one, he could have it. It was a rather marvellous car, only two years old and its sole driver had been a prudent middle-aged woman, that favourite of insurers, but it was not good enough for Will. He took it but he complained and we quarrelled. I told him to get out and he left for London in my car.

  Because of this I said nothing to him when the lawyer’s letter came. We seldom spoke of personal things but I would have told him about the letter if we had been on our normal terms. I had no one else to tell and he, anyway, was the obvious person. But for once, for the first time in all those years, we were out of touch. He had not even phoned. The last words he had spoken to me, in hangdog fashion, sidling out of the front door, were a truculent muttered plea that in spite of everything I would not stop his allowance.

  So the letter was for my eyes only, its contents for my heart only. It was from a firm of solicitors in the City and was couched in gentle terms. Nothing, of course, could have lessened the shock of it, but I was grateful for the gradual lead-up, and for such words as “claim”, “suggest”, “allege” and “possibility”. There was a softness, like a tender touch, in being requested to prepare myself and told that at this stage there was no need at all for me to rush into certain conclusions.

  I could not rest but paced up and down, the letter in my hand. Then, after some time had passed, I began to think of hoaxes, I remembered how Will had wanted to phone my mother and give her that message of hope in a Frenchman’s voice. Was this Will again? It was the solicitors I phoned, not Will, and they told me, yes, it was true that a man and a woman had presented themselves at their offices, claiming to be Mr and Mrs Piers Sunderton.

  9

  I am not a gullible person. I am cautious, unfriendly, morose and anti-social. Long before I became rich I was suspicious. I distrusted people and questioned their motives, for nothing had ever happened to me to make me believe in disinterested love. All my life I had never been loved but the effect of this was not to harden me but to keep me in a state of dreaming of a love I had no idea how to look for. My years alone have been dogged by a morbid fear that everyone who seems to want to know me is after my money.

  There were in my London house a good many photographs of Piers. My mother had cherished them religiously, although I had hardly looked at them since her death. I spread them out and studied them, Piers as a baby in my mother’s arms, Piers as a small child, a schoolboy, with me, with our parents and me. Rosario’s colouring I could remember, her sallow skin and long hair, the rich brown colour of it, her smallness of stature and slightness, but not what she looked like. That is, I had forgotten her features, their shape, arrangement and juxtaposition. Of her I had no photograph.

  From the first, even though I had the strongest doubts about this couple’s identity as my brother and his wife, I never doubted that any wife he might have had would be Rosario. Illogical? Absurd? Of course. Those convictions we have in the land of emotion we can neither help nor escape from. But I told myself as I prepared for my taxi ride to London Wall that if it was Piers that I was about to see, the woman w
ith him would be Rosario.

  I was afraid. Nothing like this had happened before. Nothing had got this far before. Not one of the innumerable “sightings” in those first months, in Rome, in Naples, Madrid, London, the Tyrol, Malta, had resulted in more than the occasional deprecating phone call to my father from whatever police force it might happen to be. Later on there had been claimants, poor things who presented themselves at my door and who lacked the nous even to learn the most elementary facts of Pier’s childhood, fair-haired men, fat men, short men, men too young or too old. There were probably ten of them. Not one got further than the hall. But this time I was afraid, this time my intuition spoke to me, saying, “He has come back from the dead,” and I tried to silence it, I cited reason and caution, but again the voice whispered, and this time more insistently.

  They would be changed out of all knowledge. What was the use of looking at photographs? What use are photographs of a boy of sixteen in recognising a man of fifty-six? I waited in an ante-room for three minutes. I counted those minutes. No, I counted the seconds which composed them. When the girl came back and led me in, I was trembling.

  The solicitor sat behind a desk and on a chair to his left and a chair to his right sat a tall thin grey man and a small plump woman, very Spanish-looking, her face brown and still smooth, her dark hair sprinkled with white pulled severely back. They looked at me and the two men got up. I had nothing to say but the tears came into my eyes. Not from love or recognition or happiness or pain but for time which does such things to golden lads and girls, which spoils their bodies and ruins their faces and lays dust on their hair.

  My brother said, “Petra,” and my sister-in-law, in that voice I now remembered so precisely, in that identical heavily-accented English, “Please forgive us, we are so sorry.”

  I wanted to kiss my brother but I could hardly go up to a strange man and kiss him. My tongue was paralysed. The lawyer began to talk for us but of what he said I have no recollection, I took in none of it. There were papers for me to see, so-called “proofs”, but although I glanced at them, the print was invisible. Speech was impossible but I could think. I was thinking, I will go to my house in the country, I will take them with me to the country.

  Piers had begun explaining. I heard something about Madrid and the South of France, I heard the word “ashamed” and the words “too late”, which someone has said are the saddest in the English language, and then I found a voice in which to say,

  “I don’t need to hear that now, I understand, you can tell me all that later, much later.”

  The lawyer, looking embarrassed, muttered about the “inevitable ensuing legal proceedings”.

  “What legal proceedings?” I said.

  “When Mr Sunderton has satisfied the court as to his identity, he will naturally have claim on your late father’s property.”

  I turned my back on him, for I knew Piers’ identity. Proofs would not be necessary. Piers was looking down, a tired, worn-out man, a man who looked unwell. He said, “Rosario and I will go back to our hotel now. It’s best for us to leave it to Petra to say when she wants another meeting.”

  “It’s best,” I said, “for us to get to know each other again. I want you both to come to the country with me.”

  We went, or rather, Rosario and I went, to my house near Wincanton. Piers was rushed to hospital almost before he set foot over my threshold. He had been ill for weeks, had appendicitis which became peritonitis, and they operated on him just in time.

  Rosario and I went to visit him every day. We sat by his bedside and we talked, we all had so much to say. And I was fascinated by them, by this middle-aged couple who had once like all of us been young but who nevertheless seemed to have passed from adolescence into their fifties without the intervention of youth and middle years. They had great tenderness for each other. They were perfectly suited. Rosario seemed to know exactly what Piers would want, that he only liked grapes which were seedless, that although a reader he would only read magazines in hospital, that the slippers he required to go to the day room must be of the felt not the leather kind. He disliked chocolates, it was useless bringing any.

  “He used to love them,” I said.

  “People change, Petra.”

  “In many ways they don’t change at all.”

  I questioned her. Now the first shock and joy were passed I could not help assuming the role of interrogator, I could not help putting their claim to the test, even though I knew the truth so well. She came through my examination very well. Her memory of Majorca in those distant days was even better than mine. I had forgotten – although I recalled it when she reminded me – our visit to the monastery at Lluc and the sweet voices of the boy choristers. Our parents’ insistence that while in Palma we all visited the Mansion de Arte, this I now remembered, and the Goya etchings which bored us but which my mother made us all look at.

  José-Carlos and Micaela had both been dead for several years. I could tell she was unhappy speaking of them, she seemed ashamed. This brought us to the stumbling block, the difficulty which reared up every time we spoke of their disappearance. Why had they never got in touch? Why had they allowed us all, in such grief, to believe them dead?

  She – and later Piers – could give me no reason except their shame. They could not face my parents and hers, it was better for us all to accept that they were dead. To explain why they had run away in the first place was much easier.

  “We pictured what they would all say if we said we were in love. Imagine it! We were sixteen and fifteen, Petra. But we were right, weren’t we? You could say we’re still in love, so we were right.”

  “They wouldn’t have believed you,” I said.

  “They would have separated us. Perhaps they would have let us meet in our school holidays. It would have killed us, we were dying for each other. We couldn’t live out of sight of the other. That feeling has changed now, of course it has. I am not dying, am I, though Piers is in the hospital and I am here? It wasn’t just me, Petra, it was Piers too. It was Piers’s idea for us to – go.”

  “Did he think of his education? He was so brilliant, he had everything before him. To throw it up for – well, he couldn’t tell it would last, could he?”

  “I must tell you something, Petra. Piers was not so brilliant as you thought. Your father had to see Piers’ headmaster just before you came on that holiday. He was told Piers wasn’t keeping up with his early promise, he wouldn’t get that place at Oxford, the way he was doing he would be lucky to get to a university at all. They kept it a secret, you weren’t told, even your mother wasn’t, but Piers knew. What had he to lose by running away with me?”

  “Well, comfort,” I said, “and his home and security and me and his parents.”

  “He said – forgive me – that I made up for all that.”

  She was sweet to me. Nothing was too much trouble for her. I, who had spent so much time alone that my tongue was stiff from disuse, my manners reclusive, now found myself caught up in her gaiety and her charm. She was the first person I have ever known to announce in the morning ideas for how to spend the day, even if those notions were often only that I should stay in bed while she brought me my breakfast and then that we should walk in the garden and have a picnic lunch there. When there was a need for silence, she was silent, and when I longed to talk but scarcely knew how to begin she would talk for me, soon involving us in a conversation of deep interest and a slow realization of the tastes we had in common. Soon we were companions and by the time Piers came home, friends.

  Until we were all together again I had put off the discussion of what happened on the day they ran away. Each time Rosario had tried to tell me I silenced her and asked for more about how they had lived when first they came to the Spanish mainland. Their life at that time had been a series of adventures, some terrible, some hilarious. Rosario had a gift for story-telling and entertained me with her tales while we sat in the firelight. Sometimes it was like one of those old Spanish picaresque
novels, full of event, anecdote, strange characters and hairsbreadth escapes, not all of it I am afraid strictly honest and above-board. Piers had changed very quickly or she had changed him.

  They had worked in hotels, their English being useful. Rosario had even been a chambermaid. Later they had been guides, and at one time, in a career curiously resembling Will’s scenario, had sung in cafés to Piers’s hastily improvised guitar-playing. In her capacity as a hotel servant – they were in Madrid by this time – Rosario had stolen two passports from guests and with these they had left Spain and travelled about the South of France. The names of the passport holders became their names and in them they were married at Nice when he was eighteen and she seventeen.

  “We had a little boy,” she said. “He died of meningitis when he was three and after that no more came.”

  I thought of my mother and put my arms round her. I, who have led a frozen life, have no difficulty in showing my feelings to Rosario. I, in whom emotion has been something to shrink from, can allow it to flow freely in her company and now in my brother’s. When he was home again, well now and showing in his face some vestiges of the Piers I had known so long ago, I found it came quite naturally to go up to him, take his hand and kiss his cheek. In the past I had noticed, while staying in other people’s houses, the charming habit some have of kissing their guests good night before everyone retires to their rooms. For some reason, a front of coldness perhaps, I had never been the recipient of such kisses myself. But now – and amazing though it was, I made the first move myself – I was kissing both of them good night and we exchanged morning kisses when we met next day.