The Antique Dealer's Daughter

by Lorna Gray

  I thought he was reducing the distance we would have to travel without shelter. He was thinking of Abbey and the range of that gun. And in a way I was glad of it. Even the sudden hush as the engine died revived the cringing sensation I got in the nerves at the back of my head whenever I remembered that all the while I had been lying on the ground blinking dumbly at Richard as he shouted out his warning, Abbey had been standing behind me, contemplating the pros and cons of taking my life.

  Richard was waiting for my gaze to find his face. My eyes got distracted on the way by the outrageous bandage on his hand. I said, ‘Would you like me to rebind that?’

  He thought I was evading this again. But I wasn’t. Now I braved his gaze. I even mustered a vaguely reassuring smile. ‘You’ll only have to do it later yourself.’

  He gave a single nod and allowed me to take his hand. ‘But,’ he cautioned, ‘leave the gauze in place, would you? For your sake and mine.’

  While an obscenely unnecessary yardage of bandage unravelled into my lap and I took great care not to hurt him, he spoke again and this time I didn’t interrupt. He said in a hard, decisive tone, ‘I believe you’ve already guessed some of this and since you can’t remotely expect me to leave you on your own while you piece together the rest, try not to blame me. Please.’ An enormous volume of wadding joined the bandage in my lap. Beneath that was the fine gauze dressing and I left that alone. As I worked, he added, ‘I have reason to believe that the gun Abbey was brandishing belongs to my father.’

  I flinched. This was why he’d told me about his father’s guilt. I had to understand that the loss of the gun was another mistake that would be working its terrible shame upon the Colonel. And I had to appreciate the responsibility Richard must be feeling to support him.

  I set my hands to work methodically winding the bandage into a roll. Richard continued, ‘Father kept his old service revolver – a Webley – in his desk in the library and I know I don’t need to describe to you the highly illegal habit old soldiers have of keeping a firearm as a memento. He even concealed it from the police during their search of the house in March. He did at least keep it securely locked away, until, that is, his business brought him back here two days ago. Unfortunately, as I understand it – and he’s a little vague about this point – at that time he reunited it with the handful of ammunition he kept locked away elsewhere and shut them both in the drawer of his desk.’

  I could feel Richard watching me. My hands were making a business out of stripping the wadding into a smaller square. My mind was tiptoeing gingerly through the memory of that first evening at the Manor; the battle I’d interrupted in the library between the old man and a furious melancholy. I was remembering the close chance that had inspired my decision to carry off his brandy bottle while I prepared his dinner. No wonder the old man had taken anchorage with me in the sudden comfort of the warmer, friendlier space of the kitchen. The room had been, and remained, a vital sanctuary from the whisperings of grief and the evil lure of a tool the Colonel had clearly been fighting desperately to ignore, but was inescapably designed only to bring death.

  I wasn’t sure I should tell Richard. Or perhaps it was something he already knew. He’d raced for the train, after all, just as soon as I’d mentioned the name of a man most likely to remind the Colonel of what he had lost.

  Briskly, Richard said now, ‘Father discovered the lot had gone last night while you and I were off on our little sortie to the turbine house. That’s what he had to tell me after you slipped away to reclaim your bed. I think we can safely say that we know who has the gun now.’

  My hands were in my lap, gripping the shreds of discarded wadding. I heard myself ask in a dry, flat little voice, ‘Have you told Detective Fleece about the theft?’

  ‘I have, and I left a note for PC Rathbone earlier this morning when I couldn’t find him. My father and I agreed it was for the best. We think Abbey took it yesterday, just before you chased him from the house.’

  I lifted my head. I’d been crashing about in the doorway of the tithe barn with a man bearing a gun and Abbey hadn’t thought to use it on me then. I said hoarsely, ‘He must have taken it yesterday if it was in the drawer. I saw that drawer myself at that time and it was open and empty of weapons. But what was Abbey doing prowling around your house yesterday in the first place? He can’t have known the Webley was in the Colonel’s desk waiting for him, conveniently liberated after all this time. It must have been an opportune discovery, so what else did he take?’

  Richard stirred restlessly beside me. ‘I don’t know.’

  It wasn’t a happy concession. Then he added, ‘Detective Fleece is set to come to the house shortly for the sake of going through the motions of trying to find out. It’ll be strange to meet him in there. Did you know the detective was part of the investigation into my brother? No? Fleece was a uniformed constable then. Which would be why my father didn’t recognise him. Apparently this detective has been keeping a light eye on the place ever since, in case anything should turn up that might be relevant to the unclosed threads left by my brother. I’d resent the insinuation that those of us who remain at large are still under suspicion, except that I think the man means to find the line of my brother’s criminal contacts rather than evidence that we’re guiltily guarding any more hoards. And I got the impression today that he was as displeased as I was that he will now have to interview my father about that gun. The good news, if we can call it that, is that we can be certain the gun itself is just an innocuous legacy of my father’s career. The Webley ties my father to Abbey’s actions today, but it carries no significant link to my brother. Which brings us back, yet again, to the question of Abbey and what he really thought he was doing today.’

  There was a peculiar steadiness there to the way he’d phrased that. Like a drawing in of breath before he explained just precisely how things were even more dangerous than I thought they were. I took a firm hold of his hand once more. I was winding the bandage laboriously over the much- reduced piece of wadding, beginning with a neat fold by his thumb.

  Richard’s voice was firmly level as he said, ‘You should understand, here and now, that I do not believe Abbey meant to catch me with that bullet. I believe he meant me to know he had the gun and to recognise it for my father’s, and to take it as a warning. Specifically me. You understand?’

  I thought I understood. He was deliberately echoing his words from last night and the snare Mrs Abbey was laying for him.

  I said uneasily, ‘You think this is her blackmail. Still. Even though her husband really is behind those bruises. There was another mark on her today, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t know. But yes.’ It was a rough agreement. ‘Even so.’

  He watched me bind a little more of the bandage onto his wrist before he remarked thoughtfully, ‘And I notice that you’re not berating me for letting it fall to Detective Fleece to go over to Eddington just as soon as he’s marshalled some uniformed men when, by all moral duty, I ought to be personally leading the race over there myself. We can guess that’s where Abbey fled to after all, and we can’t abandon an isolated woman and her three young children to this wretch.’

  I briefly lifted my head. I wasn’t blaming him. Every part of me was dreading that when the search finally did reach Eddington they’d discover something terrible had happened, but I wasn’t foolish enough to believe my part there or Richard’s would be the one we thought it should be. Instead, the anger that had licked though my veins last night was burning again now. Because her fear as she’d sent me racing after Richard today had seemed so real and we hadn’t even got to the part yet where Richard explained just how much my blundering arrival at the pump house had made matters worse.

  And, besides all that, there was also the larger problem of knowing, that just as I wasn’t blaming him, I was sure I ought to know by now that Richard was likewise not the sort of man to lead me through this difficult subject purely for the purpose of berating me. I was just wishing he would, beca
use the sense of being at fault would have followed a nice, safe, normal pattern and I wouldn’t have had to be feeling quite so afraid.

  He was telling me with absolute certainty, ‘Abbey must have been watching today when I arrived with Danny Hannis. He must have watched from the bushes as Hannis left to give the Crofts due notice that we’d found another lair on their land. And Abbey must have waited while his nerves frayed to the limit before attacking with that branch. If he’d wanted to use the gun, he’d have shot me then. But he didn’t. He panicked and tried to disable me with the branch first. I imagine he found himself in the midst of a fight before he’d even really thought about it and then, once he was there, that was the moment he remembered that it would suit him to give me a good look at the weapon he’d stolen.’

  I’d finished my bandaging. Richard reclaimed his hand from me and was running the tip of a finger under the end of the bandage, testing its tension. The injured hand dropped to his lap. He told me, ‘You arrived only moments after he’d pulled the Webley out of a jacket pocket. Which, by the way, makes me wonder who on earth taught him his idea of the safe way to handle a loaded gun. I’d barely seen the thing when you pitched into the scene. And I know you thought you had to act – and truly, in a way, I’m grateful. But I honestly don’t believe that he had any intention of using it until that moment. Not really. Not if I can trust my interpretation of the wild gesticulations of a man who had lately been grappling at my throat.’

  I was sitting very still now, watching Richard’s profile. It was hurting him to acknowledge the moment when Abbey’s harmless posturing had changed to willingness and become focused upon me.

  His voice was deeper. ‘I think the power of the thing took over his mind when he saw you. I watched his face as it contorted into a mask of daring temptation. I’m certain his plan must have originally been to give me a sense that I should tread carefully or else this weapon might find its way into a public scene. I’m sure, then, that their blackmail had hinged upon the idea that the gun could become the tool that would truly distress my father. But your arrival changed it. I thought when I put myself between you and him, it would be enough to remind him of the madness of what he was doing. I thought he’d feel he’d made his point about possessing the weapon well enough. But he treated my shouted cautions of no and don’t do it like a challenge. I think he saw the opportunity to ram his point home, and then he took it.’

  Richard took a breath. The palpable reluctance to continue touched my core to ice. He was only telling me this because he hadn’t the right not to. And because this really had nothing to do with the sort of harm I might do with a bicycle and very little, even, to do with Abbey’s power. This was a confession of Richard’s own sense of wrong.

  Richard’s determination carried him through. ‘We’ve known for a while, haven’t we, you and I, that they’ve been groping about to find some leverage to work their claim on me. This theft of my father’s gun was opportunistic and probably their most effective threat yet because while I don’t fully know what the penalties are for possessing an old service weapon, I do believe they thought I’d act pretty decisively to shield my father from something hard and legal like a threat to leave the weapon at a crime scene. I’m sure they thought that just showing it to me would be enough to enlist me for their schemes regarding Duckett. And it is clear to me that whether they meant use the weapon to finish Duckett and then force me to cover it up again, or to use the threat of the whole to force me into acting decisively myself; either way, it remains grimly clear that they mean Duckett to die and Abbey intends to ensure it happens without risking detection and the gallows himself.’

  He was speaking as if there was a path ahead where Richard might be coerced into performing the sort of second-hand evil that, once begun, would run on and on into our future, weaving new lies and new dangers into every little aspect of life until every part of our souls corrupted and more violence would have to follow just to avert betrayal.

  The path wasn’t real. Richard would never do it. The betrayal lay elsewhere. It lay in Richard’s honesty as he told me, ‘But, anyway, none of those plans remotely take into account the fact I keep making mistakes that involve you.’

  I really was cold now. Ashen, frozen, while everything burned; my eyes, my lips, where they pressed into a tight line, and my fingers curled into balls in my lap. He was already saying, ‘Yesterday I think Mrs Abbey guessed what I felt for you when I took you away from her in my car. Last night we entertained the brief but pointless worry that they meant to incriminate you. But when you arrived today and I reached for you and shielded you, I think I taught that man to think of the value of your life and yours alone. Properly; not just a few idle threats strewn about here and there. And I don’t need to guess now what he’ll think of doing with my father’s gun.’

  ‘I—see.’

  I really did see too. I’d always thought it would be the memory of his brother that did the real damage. Until now, I’d believed in an obscure way that I was helping to shield him from it. But this thing Richard was describing here wasn’t the threat of an old family tie, nor was it the inconvenient impulsiveness of the rescue and counter-rescue that he and I had shared this morning on the slopes above the pump house. This was layer upon layer of guilt – his guilt, and capitalised upon by these people. And while they did it, they were proving that all my fears about daily life being indistinguishable from war were for naught.

  Because this wasn’t war. This unconscionable inhumanity didn’t deserve that excuse. Like an intake of cold air, my voice grew strangely calm. I heard myself observe, ‘It’s happening again, isn’t it? Someone is made to make the sacrifice while I do nothing.’

  There was a bite in those last words. But I wasn’t sneering at the mistake that had made me a target or what Abbey might do now to truly force Richard’s hand. There was no suggestion here that Richard would cede to the blackmail and tamely proceed to do their work for them. Richard knew neither of us would allow that. Instead, the injury Richard was reluctantly committing here was the harm he was causing by ranking his decisions above mine, because my own judgement was inescapably clouded by the fear I had of the protectiveness that had stalked through the nightmare of my adolescence.

  It was no wonder I’d felt altered by the aftermath of the morning’s shocks. I must have perceived the change in his thoughts of me. This was the caution that had curbed my willingness to admit I needed him; this sense that speaking honestly only added to the burden of my claims upon his conscience.

  I ought to have gone to meet the bus on that first day. I ought to run now, except that I didn’t know there was time to run from this. And, besides, they might simply adapt and pick another target such as the Colonel or someone else even more unprepared, and that would be worse.

  I turned to him. ‘Am I supposed to just accept that this … this helplessness is still my part, just because you think you should assume responsibility for this? Because you do know, don’t you, that while you’re deciding these things for me, it matters that you try to stay unharmed and untainted by this thing yourself?’

  I noticed that brief flicker of a frown. This wasn’t another row, but I had surprised him. He’d expected panicked distress but was getting cold, determined argument instead. Now he was saying rather too forcefully, ‘No. But you can’t control the Abbeys’ actions and you can’t control mine. You’re not responsible for any of them, either. Everyone has all sorts of external excuses and motivations for doing what they do. But it is still up to each of us to make our own choices.’

  There was a brutal sense he was cautioning me here to avoid thinking too deeply about what he might be preparing to do now, because he would act. The rest was debateable, but that part was certain. In a way he was as powerless as I was.

  But he did have some choices. And amongst them was the knowledge that while I was stubborn enough where I knew I was right, he certainly had enough power over my care to shame me into accepting almost any point of v
iew just so that I didn’t hurt him. The cringing agony that dwelt behind the acidic rage was because I thought he was preparing to test it.

  But this idea I had that love was just another means of applying manipulation was proof, at last, that I really hadn’t emerged unscathed from that bruising romance with my brother’s friend.

  Because, while my head shook out an urgent rejection, the world swung onto a different kilter that was almost as disorientating.

  Richard was saying on a steadier note, ‘You already know, I think, that I held various ranks during the conflict in North Africa?’

  I interrupted on a bitter note of caution, ‘If you’re building up to telling me that your training as a soldier makes you better fitted to decide my path through this cruelty than I am …’

  He persevered patiently. ‘I held various ranks during the North Africa campaign. When you find yourself abruptly promoted into another man’s newly vacated boots, you suddenly have a very serious job to do and an awful lot of death comes very quickly at close hand to the people under your authority. There are many ways to describe what I witnessed in that last great battle which everyone seemed so determined to talk about last night. But the truth is that my abiding memory is of the sound. It’s the roar of the guns and the shells, and the shouting that was indistinguishable over the volume of all the rest. It was a maddening saturation. It remains so inescapable that somehow it still whines away, even in my dreams. For my father, though, the part that has lodged in his memory is that, as it turns out, it seems I am a good leader of men. For better or for worse, far wiser, older soldiers than I followed me during those days. In the main.’