“Turkey Twizzlers,” he said cheerfully, “and I’ve brought some with me. They must be in here somewhere.” He started burrowing again until I leaned over and gently closed the lid of the suitcase. “Oh,” he said and looked at me in slight reproach for a second. Then he bounced back. “So what’s it like in winter?”
“I doubt I’ll ever find out,” I said. I hadn’t actually got as far as working out what use I was going to make of the cabin from now on. But I was beginning to get the distinct feeling that Tommy thought we were going to move here lock, stock, and barrel. Quit London. Set up home—and office—together in a tiny beach retreat, and act as if nothing had happened. And the very thought of it terrified me.
What was the matter with me? Only a few weeks ago I had been miserable because Tommy had pulled the plug on our impending marriage. Now here he was seemingly ready to re-ignite the relationship and I was the one getting ready to balk.
“Why’s that?” he asked. “Where are you going in the winter?”
“Well, it all depends where we find work,” I said, silently congratulating myself on both answering his question and evading it. “Tommy, I really am sorry about you losing your job. Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“Oh, it really wasn’t an issue. It was high time I moved on. They did me a favor actually. I was totally ready to do something else, totally ready.” Now he was the one being evasive.
“Like what?”
“Like coming to be with you in America and getting a job. What sort of work can you pick up easily round here?”
“Fishing maybe. Cooking, waiting tables. Bar work. Real estate, landscaping, construction. You’re not exactly fit, Tommy. I’m telling you, the men I see round here are unbelievably strong. I saw the guy who came to pick up the garbage at the Old Stone Market and I realized the true meaning of the phrase ‘single-handedly.’ He emptied two garbage cans and lugged three hefty bags to his truck with one hand while talking all the while on his cell phone.”
“Who says I want to collect garbage?” Tommy shook his head at me. “But I’d make a terrific landscaper.”
“A window box in the middle of London with a geranium that died because you didn’t stop watering it for twenty-four hours does not exactly constitute landscaping, Tommy.”
“So maybe I’m a bit green about the gills instead of the thumbs. Don’t start nagging, I’ll find something. You’ll see. And I may not be as fit as I once was but what makes you think I’m not strong?” And he wrapped his arms around me and lifted me bodily off the ground.
I had to admit it felt good. I could always be reassured by the sheer bulk of Tommy’s body but there were moments when I wondered what it would be like to inhabit his world. A strange thing for someone’s partner of eight years to speculate on maybe, but we were so different I never ceased to marvel at his insouciant attitude to life. Tommy’s world was like a child’s, constantly reduced to simple things. His biggest problems in life appeared to be Chelsea losing on a Saturday afternoon, and running out of Marmite. In a nutshell, he was rarely anxious.
Anxious was my natural state of mind. Or fretful, as Tommy called it. “Don’t fret,” were probably the two words he had used most in my presence during our eight years together. Or rather not together, living at opposite ends of London while I refused to commit to marriage. Until it was too late.
The difference between Tommy and me was that he woke up every morning anticipating a carefree day whereas I opened my eyes and immediately started counting imaginary problems. “What would I do if I didn’t have problems?” I had asked Franny only the other day. “I guess you’d have issues instead,” she’d replied with a wry smile that showed she was beginning to get my number. And she was right. I created problems. Right now, I could feel the anxiety as to how I was going to deal with letting go of Shotgun’s book rising to the surface—not how quickly would I find another job although that would undoubtedly materialize at a later stage. Nor did I seem to be worrying about the abrupt severance of my relationship with Shotgun. I liked Shotgun, admired him even. He was charming and it was a genuine charm, not put on for my benefit. And for a split second I had found him physically appealing. But there was also something creepy about the way he holed himself up in his reconstituted moorland castle. However romantic it appeared from the outside, there was a gloom that pervaded the interior and I suspected it was perpetuated by Shotgun himself—and for good reason. Yet I sensed that there had been an undercurrent of sadness permeating Shotgun’s life long before the death of his son. And although I’d never met him, I felt sorry for Sean. Now I was forced to distance myself from life at Mallaby I began to understand why he had retreated to a room above the stables and escaped to Manhattan whenever he could.
No, what was beginning to bug me was that my work on the book was being cut off before I was ready. I hated unfinished business and where Shotgun’s book was concerned I felt totally unfulfilled. It wasn’t my fault but I felt I had failed. He had ended it but I couldn’t understand why and I knew that until I discovered who had killed Sean Marriott and Bettina, my assignment would not be completed and I wouldn’t be able to go on to another job, no matter what Genevieve came up with.
And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that like Bettina before me, I was determined to write Shotgun’s book whether he was involved or not.
CHAPTER 15
BUT HOW COULD I EVEN THINK OF WRITING A book with Tommy constantly under my feet? That was the question that presented itself time and again over the next few days as I picked up various items of clothing off the floor and attacked the piles of washing up he left in the sink. At night, he always managed to redeem himself by holding me in his arms and gently stroking my hair as if I were an agitated dog until I relaxed.
It had always been like this. He seemed to know just how to drive me to distraction and then wait until my resistance was low enough that he could totally disarm me.
Just as I was at my wit’s end the problem resolved itself in a way I would never have envisaged. Tommy and Rufus became instant best friends. They were introduced—on the beach where we ran into him and Franny—and within minutes they had disappeared together.
“It’s a bit like we’re their mothers and we’ve brought them together for a playdate,” said Franny. “Now we can relax because they’re going to play well together and we won’t have to entertain them.”
I didn’t say anything for a second. I was too busy wondering if that was how Franny felt most of the time—like Rufus’s mother. And if Rufus might somehow be more comfortable with people older than himself because Tommy had to be at least fifteen years older than he. But the friendship between them developed so fast I began to wonder if I ought to call Shagger and warn him that he had competition. Over the next couple of days Rufus appeared to take Tommy to every bar on the East End as well as to a Mets game at Shea Stadium, clamming in the bay, and windsurfing. When there was talk of skydiving farther up the island, I put my foot down.
“I doubt there’s a parachute that will hold you up,” I told Tommy. He glared at me but I could tell he was relieved about the skydiving ban. Frankly I was amazed that he’d got it together to go windsurfing.
But the unlikely bond between them developed beyond the personal to a professional relationship.
“Rufus is hiring me as his mate,” Tommy announced one day, “heavy lifting and that wherever he’s working. See, I told you I’d find a job.”
When he proudly presented himself the next morning in a pair of rather snug shorts and a brand-new tool belt strapped around his hips, the maternal instinct Franny had alluded to washed over me in waves. He had a baseball cap perched jauntily on his head and a pair of strapping work boots on his feet and he could hardly contain his excitement. As I made him a couple of rounds of Marmite sandwiches and packed them in the lunch box with the Stars and Stripes on it that he’d picked up at the hardware store, I felt like a mother preparing to send her son off for his first day at sch
ool.
“Just remember, Tommy, you may be strong but Rufus is in far better shape than you,” I warned him. “Be aware of your limits. Don’t do anything stupid and land yourself in the hospital. We neither of us have health insurance over here.”
But in fact the only stupid thing he did was to take his T-shirt off and allow his pale flabby skin to get disgustingly sunburned so that if I accidentally brushed against him in bed, he screamed in agony.
In American.
His accent seemed to become more transatlantic by the hour. He began to answer virtually everything I said to him with snappy phrases like “Got it!,” “Gotcha!,” or “You betcha!” He began to bore me to distraction by drawing my attention to the difference between English and American.
“They say ‘aloominum’ instead of ‘aluminium.’ And ‘trunk’ instead of ‘boot.’ ‘Zookini’ instead of ‘courgette.’ ‘Shrimp’ instead of ‘prawn.’ I mean, that’s not right, is it? Shrimp are tiny and prawns are big, that’s how you tell ’em apart.” I couldn’t help noticing most of his examples were food related. “But even if the bleedin’ word’s the same, they pronounce it all wrong,” he complained. “They say ‘depot’ to rhyme with ‘deep’ instead of ‘death.’ And the one that really gets me is ‘clerk.’ They rhyme it with ‘jerk’ instead of ‘ark.’ And if it’s words of more than one syllable, they put the emphasis in the wrong place. They say ‘insurance’ instead of ‘insurance,’ ‘dee-fense’ instead of ‘defense.’ Someone ought to set them straight.”
“Well thank God you’ve arrived to do just that, Tommy.” I had forgotten his ability to soak up language like a sieve. I recalled how astounded I had been when I had discovered he spoke French fluently with no trace of an English accent. I had been less impressed by the discovery that this had come about via an affair with a French woman working at the BBC. Still, this constant ability to surprise me had been one of the things that had made me sit up and decide that I should marry him before someone else did.
But his instant American makeover was a little too sudden for me. I couldn’t quite cope with him becoming Tommy the Marlboro Man overnight. Rather grudgingly, I noted that he did have rather a good American accent—Franny said he sounded New Jersey and rather late in the day I realized he was aping one of his heroes, Bruce Springsteen—but I found I missed his guttural North London mumbling.
Anglo-American language was on my mind. To avoid having to deal with the void left in my life by the absence of work on Shotgun’s book, I had decided to read Martha’s manuscript. One of the first things I noticed, before the real horror of the story hit me, was that as well as setting her story in a 1960s English boarding school, Martha had adopted English spelling. “Neighbour” instead of “neighbor.” “Travelling” instead of “traveling.” “Centre” instead of “center.” I reveled in it—or rather I revelled, being an English woman—because when reading American books there was always a split second when I thought that U.S. spelling was an annoying misprint before I remembered it was correct American usage. And I marveled, marvelled, at her consistency. But wait a second. When she had read her first chapter out loud to me she had done so in an impeccable English accent. Had Martha spent time in England? And wouldn’t she have mentioned it if she had?
Her novel was narrated in the first person and the shy, tentative voice was that of Kit, a fourteen-year-old girl from a quiet unassuming background. She was the daughter of a schoolmaster and his librarian wife, academic bookish clichés, strapped for cash, and anxious that their only child should receive the best education. So when Kit’s wealthy godfather offered to pay for her to be sent to an elite little academy in twenty acres of Sussex parkland they accepted with alacrity. There Kit found herself a forlorn and indigent duckling amidst the other students arriving in Daimlers and Rolls-Royces when her parents drove up in their chubby little Austin A30 and deposited her in the car park on the first day of term.
She was thoroughly shunned and derided by her snotty classmates and just when she was on the point of begging her parents to take her away from St. Mary’s, Martha gave her Iona.
It was a cloudless day and because it was also completely still, with not a speck of wind to blow away the pages, I was reading on the beach. Every two or three chapters, I anchored the manuscript with a rock and wandered into the clear glasslike water that was blissfully warm even though it was the end of September. I didn’t swim because I could wade halfway across the bay and still not be in above my waist. The tide had furrowed the seabed into row after row of sandy ridges that fitted snugly into the instep of my bare feet and I decided wading in the water was the perfect workout.
Iona Crichton Stuart didn’t arrive until after half term because she had been away on a cruise with her parents in the Caribbean. Her family, Martha informed us, divided her time between a six-bedroom Belgravia town house in London and a vast estate in Scotland. I scrabbled around in my beach bag for a pencil and began to scrawl frantically in the margin because although she mesmerized the reader the second she appeared on the page, Iona’s over-the-top character, as depicted by Martha, was in danger of becoming a caricature.
When she first arrived, Iona treated Kit with disdain. In the dormitory she was given the bed next to Kit’s and dispatched her to run errands like a slave. Make my bed for me, will you, while I clean my teeth. Can I crib your French prep? I’ll never be able to finish it and play tennis. If you get me an A+ I’ll let you wear my angora cardigan. And by the way, I’m sorry but I finished that fudge your mother made. Can she send you some more?
Not that she treated the rest of the girls any better. Iona seemed to regard herself as being a cut above everyone else and it was with a certain amount of satisfaction that Kit observed her classmates vying in vain for the newcomer’s attention.
So when she became the Chosen One, selected by Iona to be her pet, Kit’s world exploded into a galaxy of unadulterated bliss. One rainy afternoon she was the helpless little field mouse on which Iona pounced out of sheer boredom, offering the callow girl her first cigarette, taking her through the steps for the latest dance crazes, the twist, the Madison, and the hully-gully, and showing her the juiciest passages in a well-thumbed unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But, as I noted in the margin, we did not see Kit’s reaction. Nor were we party to what must have been her agony when Iona ignored her for the next four days before returning to toy with her again.
“Let’s hear the dialogue between them during their burgeoning relationship,” I wrote, “and how does Kit describe Iona to her parents when she writes to them? What is their reaction to the growing influence of this exotic creature on their precious daughter? Will their concern hint at the corruption that will follow?”
Martha plunged her novel into more sinister waters without warning. A bizarre scenario unfolded one morning over the breakfast table where a hundred and fifty girls erupted in raucous clamor until they were silenced to listen to the eight o’clock news on the radio turned up to full volume to reach the entire length of the cavernous dining hall.
A man was to be hanged at two minutes past eight at Bedford Prison. James Hanratty had been given a sentence of execution for the murder of a man in a parked car on the A6 road in Bedfordshire, although he bore little resemblance to the picture of the alleged killer. Two cartridges from the murder weapon were found in a hotel room used by Hanratty the night before the murder.
Martha timed the scene to perfection with the girls half-listening to the broadcast until suddenly the airwaves went quiet and they realized this was the moment he was being hanged. And Iona, sitting beside Kit, began to whisper in her ear.
“The noose is covered in leather.” She said it so quietly that Kit was not even aware that Iona was talking to her until she felt the gossamer touch of Iona’s fingers on her arm. “They’re putting a cotton hood over his head while they adjust it around his neck.” There was a pause and Kit held her breath. “Now his legs are being pinioned with more leather straps. A
nd now”—Iona gripped Kit’s shoulders tightly—“the executioner is removing the safety pin from the base of the lever and he’s pushing it away from him to open the trap. It’s too late to stop it now, Kit. Hanratty’s legs are dangling, his feet are twitching and he’s dying, Kit, he’s dying.”
By now Iona’s hand had moved up to caress Kit’s neck and—
Kit screamed and so did I. A mosquito had attacked my left forearm but it could just as easily have been because of what I was reading. Hanging had been abolished in 1964 just before I was born but I knew about the Hanratty case because it was thought to have been a miscarriage of justice. Another man, who had rented the room where the shell casings were found the day after the murder, had subsequently confessed.
And then it was the end of term and the girls dispersed to their various homes for the holidays. Martha had Iona register shock at Kit’s nervous invitation to accompany her home to meet the schoolmaster and the librarian. Instead she turned the tables and steamrollered Kit up to Scotland with her, thrusting her headlong into Highland society and lending her appropriate clothes for every occasion. Now it was Kit’s turn to be the caricature—the plain Jane struggling to keep up with every snotty nuance.
But she was also the observer and what she witnessed over that summer, on the grouse moors and in the ballrooms, prepared the ground for the horror that was to follow. Iona set her cap at a boy who stubbornly resisted her temptations. Instead he was besotted with another girl who, as luck would have it, was also a student at St. Mary’s. Back at school for the autumn term, this girl wasted no time telling everyone about Iona’s humiliation, flaunting the letters the boy wrote to her at every opportunity.
And that was when Iona murmured casually to Kit as they were walking into the gym one day, “Of course you don’t have to cover the noose in leather. All you need to hang someone is rope.”
Martha didn’t explain how—or indeed why—Iona came to know so much about hanging and I scribbled more notes in the margin. However, in the buildup to the book’s grisly and melodramatic outcome, Martha handled Kit’s mixture of sheer terror, blind submission to Iona’s malevolence, and growing excitement with brilliant sensitivity. Through Kit’s eyes the reader was led through every harrowing step as the girl who had stolen the object of Iona’s affections was lured to the gym on the pretext of a midnight feast, intoxicated, and hanged.
How to Marry a Ghost Page 25
