Some Old Lover's Ghost (40 page)

I said, ‘And your mother?’

‘Mummy adored him. She simply adored him. She never looked at another man. It was love at first sight, did you know that? Terribly romantic.’

Jossy remained for me a shadowy figure, her passion for her handsome, fickle husband all that was visible of her.

‘I had such a happy childhood.’ Caitlin’s lips curled into a smile. ‘Horses and parties and trips to the theatre. Daddy always made time for me. When I couldn’t get to sleep he’d tell me stories of his own childhood in Ireland.’

The waitress arrived with the wine. When she had gone, Caitlin raised her glass in a toast. ‘To retribution.’

I struggled to suppress a shiver. Her face had altered, the fleeting impression of youth vanished, her vivacity replaced by cold bitterness. She muttered, ‘Cook’s daughter wrote to me. She still lives in Southam. She always remembers my birthday and Christmas. After I read her letter, I knew that I had to come back. I went to the police a couple of days ago. I want my father to be buried properly, next to my mother.’

I remembered Jossy Canavan’s grave, with its empty flower vase. I said hesitantly, ‘You can’t be sure—’

‘I know
that they have found my father. I told the police that.’ She drained her glass. ‘Though they were very offhand.’ She sniffed.

Something occurred to me. ‘You could find out for certain,’ I said. ‘DNA.’

She looked blank. I explained, ‘They could extract DNA from the remains that were found and compare it with yours. They’d have to take a sample of your blood. Nothing much. Then you’d know.’

‘What a marvellous idea,’ she said. ‘What a simply marvellous idea. I shall take the train to Cambridge tomorrow and
insist.’

The food was served. I didn’t much feel like eating my omelette. Caitlin’s long fingers twisted the shells from prawns, scattering them haphazardly over the tablecloth. Then she said, ‘They told me that he may have been
alive,’
and her face crumpled and she wept into her greasy hands.

I searched in my pocket and managed to find her a reasonably clean tissue. She dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose. ‘I waited for hours,’ she said, ‘and he did not come home.’ The child’s grief at the parent’s desertion echoed in her voice.

I refilled her glass and topped up mine. She gulped the Chablis. ‘He was having an affair with that woman.’ She sniffed and dropped the wet tissue among the prawn shells. ‘I didn’t understand – I was only thirteen, after all. He’d gone to
her.’

‘To Tilda?’ My heart began to beat fast.

‘Mmm. Dame Tilda Franklin.’ Caitlin’s voice was heavily laced with irony. ‘My aunt, if you believe her stories.’

‘You don’t?’

‘She could have been anybody’s, couldn’t she? The girl – her mother – was unstable, of course. Everyone knew that.’

‘When did you find out?’

‘That we were supposedly related? Josh told me, years later.’ She made a dismissive gesture. ‘Such nonsense.’

She returned to the prawns, attacking them with efficient savagery. ‘Anyway – that night. We were to ride to Devil’s Dike the next day, Daddy and I. We hadn’t been out riding for ages because of the flood, and Devil’s Dike was one of my favourite places. I made the picnic myself. Daddy watched me make it. All his favourite things – Gentleman’s Relish and water biscuits and a little flask of tea for if we felt cold.’ She glanced up at me. ‘You see, don’t you, that he would not have willingly broken his promise to me? That he would not have stood in the kitchen and watched me slice bread and wash apples if he had not intended to go with me?’

I nodded. Tilda herself had said that Daragh would not have left his daughter. When I looked at Caitlin Canavan, I saw that her eyes were slightly glazed, and I guessed that
she looked not at the crowded restaurant, but backwards, into a different time.

‘I remember that he was wearing his best clothes. His Egyptian cotton shirt, his tweed jacket, his silk foulard. He looked so handsome. He was wearing cologne – I noticed it when I kissed him. He’d been drinking that day – he let me pour out his whisky and fill up his little water jug – so I suppose he wore the cologne to mask the whisky. We all do it, don’t we, darling?’ She laughed. ‘It was quite late when I finished packing the picnic basket. I saw him leave the house, and I ran out after him to kiss him goodnight. I asked him where he was going. I remember that he laughed and said, “I’m going to net a little bird.” I thought he meant that he was going shooting, though he hadn’t taken a gun. He walked out through the kitchen garden and across the fields to Southam. He couldn’t walk along the top of the bank as he usually did, because they hadn’t finished repairing the breach.’ Caitlin’s hands were fisted on the table, and her voice had become low and urgent.

I said, ‘Did you see him reach Southam?’

‘It became too dark. And even by that route, the short cut, it’s almost a mile.’ When Caitlin looked up at me, I saw that her eyes were burning. ‘But he can only have been going to Southam, can’t he? If he’d meant to go further, then he would have taken the car. He wouldn’t have driven to Southam, you see, because petrol was still rationed.’

I remembered Southam village and its isolation, and I guessed that she was right. An idea occurred to me. ‘Perhaps your father was going to the pub. You said that he’d been drinking. Perhaps he wanted to drink in company—’

She shook her head vigorously. ‘Dressed in his best clothes? Certainly not! He’d have worn his old corduroys to visit the Pheasant. That’s why the men liked him, Rebecca – because he could become one of them.’

Daragh the chameleon, I thought. Daragh who could make himself into whatever it was the other person most desired: one of the boys, or the affectionate father, or the seductive lover.

‘And besides,’ Caitlin added ‘I
know
that he didn’t go to the Pheasant. After my father vanished, my mother engaged a private detective to look for him. I found the report after my mother died. It was in her things.’

I stared at her, my mouth dry. ‘Do you still have it?’

‘Of course.’ She glanced at me. ‘Shall I send you a copy of it, Rebecca? Nobody will believe me – they might believe you. Will you tell the truth for me?’

I nodded, unable to speak. She whispered, ‘I remember that he was whistling “Galway Bay”. He only whistled “Galway Bay” when he was happy,’ and I knew that she had returned to the past again, and that she was a child, watching her handsome father walk away from her for the very last time.

‘When he was seeing another woman?’ I prompted gently.

‘Some people might have thought him immoral, but I think that if you are good-looking and charming and kind and funny, then why not make a lot of people happy? That’s what my daddy was good at, Rebecca. Making people happy.’ She lit another cigarette. ‘My mother was not enough for him. Some men are like that. And my parents never shared a bedroom, of course. Mummy nearly died giving birth to me, and the doctor told her that another baby would kill her.’ She exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. ‘And they were right, and I was left with no-one except Kit, who was hopeless.’ Her face creased again, but this time she did not cry. ‘So I had to go and live with
her.’

Caitlin wiped her hands on the napkin, and beckoned to the waitress. ‘Finished, darling. Is there a dessert menu?’ She smiled brilliantly, and the girl cleared away the plates. ‘The unhappiest years of my life,’ she went on, leaning across the table towards me, her voice penetrating. ‘I’d lost my father and my mother and my home. That woman – Tilda Franklin – took me out of my lovely school and sent me to a council school. She wouldn’t even let me keep my dear little pony. We went to live in that awful house with that peculiar man.’

‘Colonel Renshaw?’ I knew that at the end of 1947,
Tilda had moved to Oxfordshire, to become housekeeper to a retired colonel.

Caitlin nodded, and glanced at the dessert menu. ‘Profiteroles … caramel … so dull. Ah, treacle tart. Custard
and
cream, of course.’

I chose fruit. When the waitress had gone, I prompted Caitlin. ‘So you lived with Tilda …?’

‘Until I was fifteen and a half. Then she threw me out.’ Caitlin poured more wine into her glass; the bottle was almost empty. ‘You do know, don’t you, Rebecca, that her own daughter chose not to stay with her?’

‘Melissa?’

‘She went to live with her father. She couldn’t stand it either. And Josh was at boarding school.’ Caitlin laughed, too loudly. ‘So she may have been an angel with her adopted children, you see, but with her own she was lousy.’

The pudding arrived. I picked at the nice arrangement of cherries and pineapple, but did not yet eat. I was searching for the right words to frame the necessary question, when Caitlin hissed: ‘I want you to tell the truth. I want you to tell the world that she killed my father. She killed him because he would not leave me.’ As she leaned towards me I saw the grey roots of her tinted black hair and the way her lipstick had leached into the fine lines around her mouth. Beneath the expensive cosmetics and the old-fashioned clubbiness, she was an ageing, unhappy woman.

‘He went to see her that night, and he never came back. I waited for him, but he did not return to me because she had killed him and hidden his body in the dike.’

When I parted from Caitlin and left the restaurant, I did not immediately go home. Instead, I sat outside on a bench, watching the fire-eaters and jugglers and street traders, thinking. It was very warm: I slipped off my jacket, and pushed my damp hair back from my aching forehead. Yet when I looked back at the
conversation I had just had with Caitlin Canavan, when I recalled her certainty, I shivered.

Though Caitlin had drunk steadily throughout our lunch, I could not dismiss what she had told me as the fanciful ravings of an alcoholic. Her memories had been too precise, too vivid, to be anything other than the truth. They fitted neatly with what Tilda herself had told me. The flood, the love affair, Daragh’s disappearance. Tilda might not have lied, but she could have left things out.
She had killed him and hidden his body in the dike
. Was it possible? She was capable of killing, after all, and capable of evasion – Leila Gilbert’s story of Tilda’s flight from Holland in 1940 had taught me that. Had Tilda erased Daragh’s death from her story, just as she had erased the death of the German soldier?

A street seller waved a copy of the
Big Issue
in my face, and I fumbled in my pocket for a pound coin. I thought of going to see Tilda, to confront her with Caitlin’s accusations, but dismissed the idea almost immediately. I had to speak to someone, though. I grabbed my bag, ducked around a clown building an invisible wall, and headed for Patrick’s chambers.

London was hot and crowded and bad-tempered. It was half past four by the time I reached Gray’s Inn and confronted Patrick’s superior secretary. ‘Mr Franklin is in a meeting,’ she said repressively. I was hot and sticky and my mouth was dry; glancing out of the window, I saw a wine bar on the opposite side of the road. I scribbled a note, and asked Patrick’s secretary to give it to him as soon as he was available.

I went to the wine bar, ordered mineral water, and sat down at a small table in the corner of the room. In spite of the water, my headache grew worse, not better. The air in the small, windowless room was still and clammy. I tried to think logically through Caitlin’s version of the events of April 1947, to pick out the flaws, but my thoughts congealed, thick and ugly and oppressive.

It was after five o’clock when Patrick appeared, threading through the office workers who had begun to spill into the bar from the City.

‘Rebecca.’ He kissed my cheek. ‘Are you all right? Or is Tilda—’

‘I’m fine, Patrick,’ I said quickly. ‘And so’s Tilda, as far as I know. I haven’t seen her since Tuesday.’

‘Then what is it? Your note said that it was urgent.’

His concern had altered to irritation, and I began to regret my impulse in coming here. But I could not turn back.

‘I’ve just had lunch with Caitlin Canavan,’ I said. ‘She’s staying at the Savoy, Patrick.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘I know.’

‘Did she telephone Tilda again?’

‘She wrote a letter. On headed notepaper, for God’s sake.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I could do with a drink.’ He went to the bar, and returned after a few moments with a bottle of Sancerre and two glasses. He sat down next to me, and poured out the wine.

‘Tilda showed me the letter. Caitlin said in it that she’d been to the police.’ Patrick slung his jacket on the back of the chair, and loosened his tie. ‘I had a word with them. Apparently she was half cut when she went to the police station, so it wasn’t difficult to persuade them not to take her too seriously.’ He paused for a moment, drinking his wine. ‘You had lunch with her? Why, Rebecca? I explained to you the other day that that would be a waste of time.’

My head pounded, and I was angered that he should see fit to tell me how to do my job. I tried to keep my voice level. ‘I need to see all sides, Patrick.’

‘Don’t you trust Tilda?’

‘It’s not a question of trust.’ Tilda herself had told me that it was my task to distinguish the truth.

‘Isn’t it?’

‘No. Not so black and white. Life isn’t black or white,’ I added, blundering into cliché. ‘Two people can remember the same event quite differently, can’t they?’

The wine bar was filling up; Eighties leftovers with striped shirts and red braces were braying their orders. The heat gathered,
making our corner of the room a stifling little cage. Patrick looked withdrawn and impatient, and the silence was punctuated by the sound of breaking glass and loud laughter from the bar.

‘I ran into a friend of yours the other day,’ he said suddenly. ‘Toby Carne.’

‘Toby’s not a friend.’

‘No?’

‘He was a friend.’ I sounded touchy. ‘But he isn’t now.’

‘You mean, he was a lover, but he isn’t now.’

I said angrily, ‘Toby was my lover, but I’ve barely seen him since we broke up last year.’ Though I remembered, too well, that fleeting, unnerving visit a couple of months ago. And I had learned, through Tilda, that though love might transmute to jealousy or hatred, it lingers, a persistent catalyst.