Nine Lessons
Page 28
He ignored the question and stared back towards the lights of the town, faint and indistinct against the mist and the past. ‘Monty talked about this place a lot,’ he said. ‘His grandparents lived in Aldeburgh and he spent a lot of time here as a child. He once told me it gave him so many of the things he most loved—the first stained glass he ever saw, the first organ he ever heard, the first voices raised in song. He came back every year, right to the end of his life. For me, the only place that was ever that special was Cambridge. I’d never been happy with my family. My father was a military man and my mother was a military man’s wife, and they moved about a lot. When they sent me away to school, I felt as if I’d finally come home. It was the first time I had friends, the first time I knew kindness, and when you’re a little boy and you walk into that chapel and hear the music—well, you think you’ll never want to be anywhere else.’
‘But you had to give all that up after what happened to Ellen. You felt you couldn’t stay.’
Webster nodded. ‘Suddenly all the good memories disappeared. That’s the difference between what Aldeburgh meant to Monty and what Cambridge meant to me. He wrote the stories he wrote because his own ghosts were happy ones. Mine were malevolent to start with, so I ran away from them.’
‘But you still went back. George Clough told me that you’d asked to be transferred to Cambridge.’
‘Yes. I never stopped missing it, and—like you said—so many years had passed. I thought I could put it behind me. It worked for a while.’
‘So what happened to change that?’
‘Two things, really. Monty died and I went to his funeral, and that’s when I saw them all again—Moorcroft and Westbury, Frost and Swayne. All important men now in their own right, and yet I watched them and they hadn’t really changed. They were still spoilt little bullies who got their own way, no matter what it cost.’
‘Did they know who you were?’
‘No, not at all. I shook Moorcroft’s hand and looked him in the eye, but he brushed me off like a college servant. It’s funny, isn’t it? One moment that changed my whole life and they had no recollection of me at all. Even so, I probably could have coped but then the rapes started in the town and it was like living through that night all over again, each and every time it happened. All those poor girls—the shame and the violence and the fear, and still no one really cares. It’s more than twenty years later and we’ve come through a war, yet nothing’s changed. The men I work with don’t take it seriously, any more than the men in the Cambridgeshire force bothered about Ellie. They wrote her off as if her death counted for nothing, as if she’d asked for it. And perhaps in hindsight Ellie was the lucky one—she didn’t have to live with the shame. These women do. Their lives are destroyed.’
‘And what about all the lives you’ve destroyed? You’re a decent man. You can’t think that was right.’
‘Of course it wasn’t right, but it was necessary. How else would they have paid?’ Penrose had no answer, so he let Webster continue to talk. ‘I went to see Monty when I heard he was dying.’
‘He must have meant a lot to you.’
‘He meant a lot to everyone. I doubt there were many boys or undergraduates who passed through King’s during his time and didn’t think of him as a father or a friend. He’d been back at Eton for years by then, and he was confined to his rooms and very weak, but he remembered my name immediately. And he remembered that he’d found me crying on the steps of the chapel one Christmas Eve. That’s why he didn’t finish writing a new story that year—he was looking after me.’
‘The current Dean told me that Monty had tried to help you. He was chaplain at the time and Monty wanted you to talk to him about what was troubling you.’
‘Yes, but I couldn’t. I was too frightened, and too ashamed.’
‘And too grief-stricken. You’d lost the first person you loved. That’s hard at any age.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
‘Did Monty have any idea why you were so upset?’
‘No. I told him I was missing my family at Christmas, but I don’t think he believed me. He took me back to his rooms to cheer me up. It would have been such a treat at any other time, because only his friends and a handful of undergraduates normally got to hear him read a story, but it just made things worse. All the choral scholars were there, and I had to face them. It was only a few hours after Ellie had died and already they were behaving as if nothing had happened, drinking Monty’s whisky and enjoying the story. He chose an old one to read—“The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance”, I remember that. It’s the only one I can never bring myself to read. Moorcroft and his friends lapped it up, as if terror were something to relish, something that only happened in stories.’ He looked Penrose in the eye for the first time since he had begun talking, and the sadness in his face was replaced fleetingly by a steely determination. ‘I wanted to show them that it wasn’t.’
‘How long did you stay at the college school after that?’ Penrose asked.
‘I left on Christmas Day. My parents came to collect me after the morning service, and I never went back. That was the last time I saw Monty until I went to Eton last year. He’d hardly changed at all, you know. He still had that sense of fun. Some friends of his had sent him a gramophone to cheer him up during his convalescence, and it was all a great adventure. I told him then what I should have told him twenty-four years ago, but I wish I hadn’t. It wasn’t fair to burden him with so much sorrow at the end of his life.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He told me that I knew what I had to do. He said I was a man now and not a boy, and I had to find the courage from somewhere to do what was right.’
‘But he didn’t mean . . .’
‘No, of course he didn’t. Monty didn’t have a violent bone in his body. He wanted me to go to the police—to my colleagues—and tell them what had really happened.’
‘So why didn’t you?’
Webster stared at him scornfully. ‘Why do you think? There wasn’t a shred of evidence, and look what those men had become. No one cared about Ellie when they thought she’d been killed by a beggar off the streets, so why would she suddenly be more important than the lord of the manor or a barrister like Westbury? You know I’m right.’ Penrose conceded the truth of his words with a nod. ‘Monty never understood evil, not really. He liked to keep horror at a distance, even in his stories, and he certainly couldn’t cope with it in human form. He would never have turned a blind eye to what they did, but he was naive. He always thought that things worked out for the best, and he never once lost his faith—in this world, or the next.’
‘I envy people like that, but I’m afraid I’ve never been one of them.’
Webster smiled. ‘No, nor me. I haven’t forgotten what he said to me, though, when he was trying to comfort me about Ellie’s death. He was talking about a friend of his who died suddenly of a perforated appendix, and he said that it had been such a relief to him at the time to know that there were people there to meet him. He said it as matter-of-factly as if his friend had simply gone to stay with friends at an unfamiliar house, and I so desperately wanted to believe like he did that Ellie was somewhere better.’
‘But you couldn’t.’
‘No. I argued with him, but he just smiled at me as if I were still a child who had so much to learn, and then he said: “What is all this love for if we have to go out into the dark?” They were his last words to me, and for a while they made me feel better.’ He took his warrant card from his coat pocket and looked at it for a long time before throwing it over the wall into the water. ‘I joined the police because I wanted to do some good,’ he said, ‘but it’s really just made it easier for me to be as evil as everybody else. I ran out of time, sir. I failed those women in Cambridge just like I failed Ellen. I suppose you know I caught the wrong man?’ Penrose nodded. ‘So I’m still that helpless little boy, standing on the sidelines watching, never saving anyone.’
H
e picked up the gun, and there was something both chilling and inevitable in the way that he handled the weapon, as if it were the only answer to his pain. ‘That isn’t true, Tom,’ Penrose said firmly. ‘Those women you say you’ve failed—don’t you see that each and every one of them finds it easier to cope with what she’s been through because you’ve made her feel that it matters, that someone is taking her story seriously and doing all he can to help? This isn’t finished yet. Don’t just give up.’
‘I hope you never know what it’s like, sir, this rage that won’t go away. All I’ve ever wanted since I was ten years old was to make those men suffer. I told myself it was for Ellie, but it was more selfish than that. I hated them because they destroyed my life, as well as hers. I know what I’ve done, and so do you. You’ve seen it for yourself. I’m just like them.’
‘But what about Swayne and Moorcroft?’ Penrose demanded, desperate now to prevent a final tragedy. If he had sensed a bond growing between himself and Webster, he knew now that it was slipping away. ‘They still haven’t paid for what they did, and they never will if you’re not here to testify.’ Webster hesitated, and then—to Penrose’s huge relief—threw him the revolver. ‘I’ll help you, Tom,’ he promised. ‘I’ll do everything I can to get justice for Ellen. Let’s go back inside.’
He held out his hand, but Webster just smiled. ‘That’s not how it ends, sir. Remember the story.’
In that split second, Penrose knew exactly what he was going to do but it was already too late to save him. Like James’s doomed protagonist, Webster let himself fall back over the edge of the parapet and Penrose heard the sickening thud of his body hitting the ground forty feet below. He ran to the wall and looked down from the tower, but in the darkness and the stress of the last few hours, the reality of the scene fused with images from that prophetic story until he found it hard to separate fact from fiction. Webster’s body lay smashed and broken on the rocks. He only glanced once at his face.
23
The pleasure of Mrs Thompson’s company on a Saturday morning was something that Josephine could well have done without, but, when she heard the clatter in the hallway just after nine o’clock, she resigned herself to the fact that this must be ‘every other weekend’ and hurriedly pulled on some clothes. ‘What a dreadful situation,’ the daily woman said, picking up last night’s paper while she waited for the kettle to boil. ‘Fancy arresting the wrong man. Now everyone will start to panic all over again, and I’ll never see my husband. He’ll be out at all hours, making sure those girls stay safe. You’d think the police would have more consideration.’
Josephine doubted that they had made a mistake deliberately to inconvenience the Thompson household, and she didn’t quite understand why fitting locks was suddenly a nocturnal business, but she was too worried about Archie to argue. She had telephoned the police station repeatedly the night before, but no one would tell her anything except to offer a half-hearted reassurance that the inspector from Scotland Yard was ‘perfectly all right’, and in the end she had given up. Perhaps she would have more luck this morning.
As if on cue, the telephone rang in the hallway. ‘I’ll get it,’ Mrs Thompson said, and the peal of the bell was duly cut off in its prime before Josephine had a chance to argue. She hovered in the doorway, feeling like an eavesdropper on her own conversation, and listened while Mrs Thompson tried to make sense of whatever was being said at the other end. ‘Hello? What was that? I beg your pardon? Who is this, please?’ There was a long silence, and then Josephine heard her voice again, clipped to the point of rudeness. ‘I see. Just one moment.’ She held out the receiver, her face scarlet. ‘Miss Fox would like to speak to you,’ she said.
Josephine took the telephone and waited while her messenger went upstairs. ‘Who the hell was that?’ Marta asked, her words distorted by distance and a bad connection.
‘Your new daily woman. I did explain in one of my letters, but you obviously haven’t got it yet. What on earth did you say to her?’ She listened while Marta repeated her greeting. ‘Well, I suppose there’s only one way to interpret that,’ she said, scarcely knowing whether to laugh or cry. ‘At least it’s so explicit that she’s unlikely to repeat it to her aunt in Inverness.’
‘She hasn’t really got an aunt in Inverness?’
‘So she says.’
‘God, Josephine—I’m sorry, but this line’s bloody awful and I never dreamt it wasn’t you. All I could hear was a Scottish voice saying hello. And I have missed you. Is it any wonder that I was a little enthusiastic about where I’d like to be right now?’
‘The feeling’s mutual, but I’m not quite sure how either of us is going to assert any domestic authority after that. Anyway, what are you doing up at this time? It must be the middle of the night over there.’
‘It is, but I couldn’t sleep without talking to you.’
‘Why? Is something wrong?’
‘Not wrong, exactly, but there’s something I need to ask you. The Hitchcocks are staying on longer than planned—will you come out and join me?’
‘What?’
‘Just for a couple of weeks. We could spend Christmas here and then travel back together.’
‘Marta, I can’t just drop everything and leave for Los Angeles.’
‘It would be New York, not Los Angeles. That’s why the trip’s been extended—to fit in some meetings there.’
‘Even so . . .’ There was a loud knock at the door and Josephine waited to see if Mrs Thompson would come downstairs to answer it, but there was no sign of her. ‘She’s probably had to have a lie down. I’ll just ignore it.’
The banging came again and Marta’s sigh almost rivalled it for volume. ‘Go and answer it. I’ll hang on.’
‘Are you sure? I won’t be long.’ She opened the front door and found Archie standing outside, looking exhausted. ‘Thank God—I was getting worried about you,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t speak to you last night, but everything happened so quickly that there just wasn’t time to call.’
‘Don’t worry about that. You’re safe—that’s the main thing. Come in. I’m just on the phone to Marta.’
‘I don’t want to interrupt. If now’s a bad time, I can come back later.’
‘Don’t be silly. Go up to the sitting room and make yourself at home, but don’t upset the daily woman—she’s had enough shocks for one day.’
He looked bemused but did as she suggested, and she went back to the telephone. ‘Sorry about that. Archie’s here.’
‘Does he know yet?’
‘No. Things have been a bit busy, and Bridget’s only just got back.’
‘Well, you obviously can’t talk about that in front of him, but you were about to tell me all the reasons why you can’t spend a fortnight in America.’
There was an edge to her voice and Josephine hesitated. Marta was right: she had been about to give a list of habitual excuses, the list which tripped automatically from her tongue whenever it suited her to turn down an invitation. But this was different, and she was surprised by how desperately she wanted to go. ‘Give me a couple of days to think about it,’ she said instead. ‘I’d love to come, but I’ll need to make some arrangements here first.’
‘Really?’
The surprise in Marta’s voice gave Josephine pause for thought. ‘Yes, really. It’s about time I stopped saying no to things just because I’ve always said no to them. And I can think of worse places to spend Christmas than with you in Central Park.’
Marta laughed, and Josephine felt the double-edged miracle of a telephone line which made her seem so close. ‘You might not have any choice after the domestic’s phoned her aunt. I love you, Josephine.’
‘I love you, too. Now go and get some sleep.’
She rang off and took Mrs Thompson’s abandoned tea tray up to the sitting room, where she found Archie waiting discreetly like a doubtful suitor. ‘Sorry about that. Just let me go and give the daily the rest of the day off and
we can talk properly.’
‘She’s obviously upstairs. There’s been a lot of banging.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me.’ She found Mrs Thompson in her bedroom, holding a duster and a photograph which Josephine could have sworn had been tucked away in a drawer. ‘Is there a problem?’ she asked, determined not to be intimidated.
‘I’m really not comfortable with this,’ the daily woman said, gesturing towards the bed. ‘I’m not comfortable with this at all.’
‘I was rather hoping you’d make it, not sleep in it.’
‘That’s not what I meant, and you know it. I meant I’m not comfortable with this . . . well, with this arrangement you seem to have, for want of a better word.’
Whether it was tiredness, the exhilaration of speaking to Marta, or simply irritation, Josephine found it impossible to keep her temper. ‘Try love,’ she said angrily.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The word you’re looking for—it’s love.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re two grown women and you ought to know better. I’ve never heard anything so—’
‘Mrs Thompson,’ Josephine said, holding up her hand to interrupt. ‘I really don’t give a damn about what you may or may not be “comfortable” with. From the moment you walked into this house, you’ve been fumbling around in my life, putting two and two together to make five and jumping to conclusions based on nothing but your own unpleasant prejudice. You have no understanding of who I am, and you never will have. How I choose to live is my business—it has nothing whatsoever to do with you, with your aunt in Inverness, or even with my own family.’ She snatched the photograph from Mrs Thompson’s hands and pointed to the door. ‘Now get out.’
‘What? You can’t possibly speak to me like that.’
‘I think you’ll find I just did. Go and pick on a house you’re more comfortable with and leave the rest of us in peace.’
Mrs Thompson opened her mouth to argue, then thought better of it. She turned and hurried down the stairs, and Josephine took great satisfaction from the expression of uncertainty that crossed her face when she turned back and saw Archie on the landing. ‘The agency will hear about this,’ she offered as a parting shot.