I nodded to indicate that I was too, but I didn’t say anything. Much as I had basked in the attention he had paid me, I needed him to keep going about himself.
He closed his eyes again.
“In my parents’ eyes my life was already more or less mapped out. I’d be sent to prep school, then Harrow, and then university. And along the way I’d find a suitable bride, the daughter of people just like them. I’d meet her at York Races or out foxhunting or grouse shooting and I’d woo her at a debutantes’ ball—and she’d probably turn out to be someone I’d known since I was five years old.
“And I did go to prep school and Harrow and I was about to go up to Trinity, Cambridge. But I never made it because I met the girl I was going to marry and it wasn’t a girl from one of the families who’d been there since the time of William the Conqueror.
“It was Angie.”
I waited for him to continue but he didn’t.
Suddenly he stood up and I was jolted out of the virtual reverie into which I had fallen, mesmerized by the sound of his voice.
“I’m afraid that’s all I’m going to give you for today. I’ve changed my mind.”
I must have frowned in disappointment because he reached out and touched my shoulder to placate me.
“Talking about Angie is going to be painful,” he said, looking me straight in the eye, “and I think I need to sift through everything I have to tell you first. Don’t be alarmed, I’m not going to hold anything back. Far from it. But I keep thinking about Sean and then I start to feel emotional and we can’t have that. Upper-class Brit with a lump in his throat and all that. That would be letting the side down. My mother would turn in her grave.”
“Well, could you show me where I can transcribe the tapes?” I said. I felt a little uncomfortable seeing him so disturbed. What would happen as he probed deeper into his past? On the one hand I felt he was being far too tough on himself by insisting on tackling the book while he was still grieving, but on the other I was anxious to get to work. “If I could set up the workspace you mentioned, then maybe I can go straight there each time we finish a session.”
“Great idea!” He seemed relieved to have a practical task to perform. “Come with me.”
He led me out into the hall and up the Jacobean staircase. At the far end of the gallery he opened a door and I found myself in a small wood-paneled room. There didn’t appear to be any windows and the only light came from a computer screen glowing in the corner.
“Sean set this up for me,” Shotgun said, switching on an Anglepoise lamp. “I know he thought of me as being hopelessly out of touch and he insisted way back when that I become computer literate. I’m really glad he did. He had a laptop over in his room above the stables and we e-mailed each other. I suppose it says everything about the state of our father-son relationship. We lived within yards of each other but communicated by e-mail. Anyway, will this work for you?”
I thanked him and set about familiarizing myself with his computer and starting a file for the transcriptions.
It didn’t take me long to transcribe the small section of the tape he had recorded and when I’d finished, I stepped out onto the gallery and tried to figure where he’d gone. I wanted to say good-bye and fix a time for the next session.
Across the gallery a door was open and coming from the room was Shotgun’s voice punctuated at intervals by the plaintive sound of an acoustic guitar.
“Went to bed last night, found the blues in my bed
Woke up this mornin’ about half past four
Those blues they were a-knockin’ on my front door.”
It wasn’t really singing, I thought to myself, it was more like moaning. I listened as he continued the song, marveling at the way he could transform his cultured British accent into the voice of a downtrodden sharecropper from the American South with such conviction.
But then the singing stopped abruptly and I heard another sound that propelled me down the stairs and out of the house as fast as I could travel. It was the sound of Shotgun sobbing and there was nothing stiff upper lip about it. Wrenching mournful wails followed me as I made my getaway. Instinct told me that I was intruding on his grief and that he would be hugely embarrassed if he knew I had heard him. And I wondered, not for the first time, if there was anyone to whom he would feel comfortable turning for consolation or whether he was destined to live a life of unutterable loneliness holed up inside Mallaby.
On impulse, when I arrived at the dirt track off Cranberry Hole Road, I got out of the Jeep and studied the tire tracks in the sand. The Jeep’s were pretty distinctive so I was easily able to distinguish them from the other set of tracks. I followed them up the sandy road to the clearing where the cabin stood. I saw the ones where the car had come up and parked halfway and the ones where it had come up and turned around. And I was convinced that I could make out a fresh set that went all the way to the cabin.
And then my heart began to beat really fast because leading from this third set of tire tracks were footprints.
CHAPTER 8
THEY LED ALL AROUND THE CABIN AND UP TO ONE or two of the windows, as if someone had stepped up to peer in. They went to the door and then away again.
I walked slowly back up the dirt road to get the Jeep, taking deep breaths and telling myself that the footprints could belong to anybody. Rufus could have stopped by at some point to see if I was there.
But Rufus wouldn’t have peered in through the windows.
I reasoned with myself. I was someone who was used to living on her own. This was the life I had chosen; having the cabin to hole up in was a golden opportunity. The fact that it was so isolated was a plus.
But the truth was I was terrified. It was all very well relishing the life of a hermit in the middle of London where in addition to the criminals I knew were waiting to get me, there were also neighbors I had known since I was a child.
Yet Rufus was close by in the pool house, I told myself. Okay, so he wasn’t there all the time but he came home every night. And right now the sun was shining, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and I had absolutely no reason to feel nervous.
I think I had been pretending to myself that now I was in America I was going to become a different person overnight. I was doing well in the social department. I had opened up—pretty quickly for me—to the Phillionaire and then to Rufus and I didn’t regret it for a second. They seemed to understand me. I had made a tentative friend in Franny although of course I hadn’t as yet extended any invitations toward her. It was much too soon. I relished my privacy. It was as simple as that. I didn’t like people in and out of my home all the time. I needed my space, as everyone in London who knew me well was always telling me, rolling their eyes in mock exasperation.
Well, now I had found my private space on a beautiful deserted beach but there was something missing. I needed someone there to shield me from the person who parked their car at night and watched me and sneaked around the place by day when I wasn’t there.
I needed Tommy—because he had been the person who had always shielded me before. But had I not vowed to stop using Tommy in this way?
I let myself into the cabin, selected my favorite mug from the Phillionaire’s collection of hand-painted Breton pottery and made myself coffee. I turned CNN on low and glanced every now and then at the news crawl running along the bottom of the screen. I was a little ashamed to admit that I found it hard to listen to the presenters talking and follow the crawl’s headlines at the same time. I’d read somewhere that other people complained about this problem but on closer examination I had discovered they were seniors. Clearly I was precocious in my senility.
Oh Tommy! He had never called me back. What else could I do to make him understand that I really did want to reach out to him?
I could, I decided after a moment or two’s thought, write him a letter. That was what I should do. I could lay it all out, calmly and rationally.
But exactly what was it that I wanted to say? That I w
as sorry he had lost his job? That it didn’t make any difference to us? That no matter how different we were I would always love him? This was beginning to sound suspiciously like a kiss-off letter, which was somewhat ironic given we were already separated. Clearly I would need to give it some thought.
I went out to the Jeep to get a notepad I had stashed in the glove compartment and that’s when I found the paper bag Scott Abernathy had given me. Bettina’s notes! I’d brought them home and forgotten all about them.
Scott hadn’t been exaggerating when he said she used whatever she could get her hands on to make notes. When I tossed the contents of the bag onto the kitchen counter I found old prescriptions, bills, a couple of menus, coasters, paper napkins, even toilet tissue as well as numerous indiscriminate scraps of paper torn from other sources.
I laid them out in a line and pieced together the snippets of mean, spidery writing. It was like trying to do a jigsaw. I was faced with a mass of seemingly random thoughts but after about ten minutes of fiddling I managed to shape them into some kind of disjointed narrative.
Shotgun’s people being evasive. Get Sean to persuade his father I’m right for bk.
Sean says he doesn’t understand why his mother suddenly got in touchmidwith him but not going to query it. Overjoyed.
Angie Marriott alimony situation? No alimony as no divorce but does he support her?
Meet Shotgun at house Sept 10. 7:30.
P/up Sean 8:40 jitney. What if I’m still with Shotgun? Has Sean told Shotgun he’s talking to me? How close Sean and Shotgun?
Sean says Shotgun did kill groupie in London.
Speak Genevieve re deal for unauthorized biog Shotgun if he won’t speak to me—from Sean interviews.
Call S to explain about Shotgun canceling & Scott—apologize re missing jitney.
M saw Sean w/shotgun in woods night before Sean killed. Must have been before I took him to jitney. Where were they going?
M saw something. Meet M Mallaby beach at 9.
That was it.
Right, so what did I have here? “S” was presumably Sean.
Her note about her meeting with Shotgun, scheduled for seven thirty on the night Sean was killed, was important. As was her subsequent note to remind herself to call Sean and apologize for not picking him up from the jitney because Shotgun had canceled and she’d gone out with Scott. It confirmed what I’d already heard from Shotgun but I was further intrigued to learn that Bettina had been Sean’s original ride to and from the jitney.
But the most explosive things in the notes concerned someone whose name began with “M.” M had seen Sean and his father in the woods together the night before Sean was killed. In fact, according to Bettina, M had seen something and she had been going to meet M at the beach near Mallaby at nine. Nine when? The night she was killed? Was M the murderer?
“M” for Marriott? “M” for Mallaby? “M” for Morrison?
She’d say Shotgun, not Marriott, if she meant him. Mallaby was a house. That left Morrison.
Detective Morrison was a shoplifter but did that automatically make him a murderer? And would he investigate a case where he was the perpetrator? And why was I even imagining that a cop could be a murderer? Because I was paranoid, that’s why, and it was high time I stopped speculating like this.
I pulled the notepad toward me to begin drafting my letter to Tommy. But before I could write anything the phone rang.
“I’m sorry I sent you away so abruptly,” I heard Shotgun say, “it was just getting to be more than I could handle but I think I’m okay now. Why don’t you come back and I’ll make us a late lunch, then maybe we can have another session and I can tell you about Angie. If you’re up for it, that is?”
I said “Yes, that’s fine,” flung on some jeans, and made a mad dash in the Jeep to the supermarket where Franny had told me to go to stock up on some provisions. I decided to play it safe and bought a large quantity of things like toilet tissue, paper towels, and dishwasher detergent, on the assumption that my work with Shotgun would keep me at the cabin for the long haul.
The massive front door to Mallaby was ajar when I arrived and I found Shotgun padding about the kitchen in shorts, a tee, and bare feet.
“I’m making us an onion tart,” he said by way of greeting.
“How impressive,” I said. And it was. The effort he was making for me at any rate, not to mention the fact that he appeared to be a dab hand in the kitchen.
“Not really.” He gestured to a large skillet on the hob. “Just onions softened in butter and then I’ll add some eggs and some grated Gruyère and we’ll be laughing.”
“No, it’s the pastry that’s earned my respect.” I pointed to the empty pastry case.
“Oh, I cheat,” he said. “It’s frozen. Would you like to wash a lettuce for me and toss a salad?”
As we ate, perched on high stools at the counter, I told him about Bettina’s notes.
“Did you know Angie was in touch with Sean?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer. In fact he didn’t say anything until I told him that Bettina had noted her meeting with him on the night Sean was killed.
“Maybe I should have seen her,” he said suddenly. “Sean set it up. He wanted me to see her, became quite obsessed about it, I don’t know why.”
“So you knew he was talking to her?”
“Well, obviously. He was going to New York but he told me it was all arranged. She’d be coming here around seven thirty that night.”
“But he didn’t know you canceled her?”
“Sean? No, I don’t see how he could have unless she told him. I didn’t even know when he was due back.”
When I remembered the next note—Sean says Shotgun did kill groupie in London—I lost my nerve. I couldn’t ask him that straight out. Not yet. Instead I said: “There’s a note that says you and Sean were in the woods together the night before Sean was killed.”
He looked at me, bewildered.
“Now you’re talking nonsense. Sorry, but you are. I wasn’t even here the night before Sean was killed. That was a Thursday, right? I was in Connecticut. I drove to the North Shore on the Monday, took the ferry from Orient Point to New London. I didn’t get back till Friday morning.”
“What were you doing in Connecticut?”
He stared at me for a second. “All these questions. Not working for Evan Morrison by any chance, are you? I went through all of this the first time he interviewed me. I was visiting a guy I know who’s written some pretty good songs. We were working on them together. There’s just a chance—and I don’t want this going in the book until I’m good and ready—there’s just a chance that I may get back to recording.”
He cleared my plate away and stacked it in the dishwasher.
“So I wasn’t in the woods with Sean. Not exactly something we did together, go for father-son walks. Not our style at all. So I’ll make us some coffee and then we’ll get started, right?”
I had wanted to ask him who M might be but he had made it clear he didn’t want to dwell on Bettina’s notes anymore. I found this strange considering he wanted so badly to find out who had killed his son. I followed him into the little library and we resumed our positions on the sofa.
“So, Angie.”
He had begun talking—eyes closed, seemingly off in another world—before I’d barely got the tape recorder set up.
“Actually I met her for the first time when I was about twelve. She was the daughter of Jack Braithwaite and if ever a man was anathema to my parents it was he. He was a mill owner, Jack Braithwaite, and he had brass, lots of brass, but it was totally unacceptable to my parents because it was new money.
“I’ll never forget the one and only time my parents went to the Braithwaites whose house was brand-new and built specially for them. I have to admit it was a monstrosity—red brick, multiple garages, a swimming pool—a real eyesore that didn’t sit at all well with the harshness of the moors. But it was spotless and it was warm because it
had central heating, something I’d never encountered before. The living room had wall-to-wall shag carpeting and a coffee table. Well, it was too much for my parents. They never accepted another invitation. My mother dismissed them as nouveau riche when we were only five minutes out the door and we rushed home to embrace the freezing cold dilapidated chaos that was Mallaby, stinking of dogs and my father’s whiskey fumes and held captive to the vagaries of outdated and malfunctioning plumbing.”
I sat there beside him thinking that nowadays we looked back to the precomputer age and thought that was barbaric. I found it truly amazing to think that people like Shotgun—and indeed my parents, inhabitants of the twenty-first century like myself—had spent a large part of their lives without any of the appliances and modern conveniences that we take for granted today.
Shotgun downed a glass of water and closed his eyes again.
“But when I was about fourteen I learned of the existence of the guitar and then there was no stopping me. Once I escaped from the confines of Mallaby and went down south to school, I managed to save up my pocket money and buy a little turntable of my own. Then at Harrow I applied for guitar lessons and I lucked into a teacher who was a closet blues fanatic. He introduced me to Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy. I did the unthinkable as far as my parents were concerned. I sold a Parker pen they had given me for my birthday for twenty pounds, a massive amount of money in those days, and with it I bought myself a Spanish acoustic guitar and a little transistor radio. The good thing about Mallaby was that it was so vast that no one could hear the agonizing guitar practice going on in my room and the stone walls were so thick they masked the rock ’n’ roll blasting out of the radio. Even when I had it at full volume, which I frequently did.
“Jack Braithwaite had big plans for Angie. He was determined to spend a large part of his money launching her into society. She was sent off to do the debutante season and during the course of it, as she would later tell me, our paths crossed several times. As the only son of good Yorkshire stock and landowners to boot I was prime husband material. But I wasn’t your basic chinless wonder like a lot of my peers. I was a rough diamond in many ways and not just in my looks.”
How to Marry a Ghost Page 14
