Next of Kin

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘Then don’t you think for a moment that I wouldn’t do everything in my power to defend mine. If they want to hang him, they’ll have to hang me too.’

  He sat back and took the napkin off his trousers and laid it on the table, standing up.

  ‘I’m going back to court now, Jane,’ he said, barely able to look at her; she seemed like she was losing her reason entirely. ‘Because I have known and respected your husband for so many years I will do you the courtesy of pretending that this conversation never happened. However, if you ever broach this topic with me again I shall resign from the case and will have no alternative but to report my reasons to the judge. Do you understand me?’

  She stared at the table, no tears now, just a sense of total and utter impotence, unable to control what was going on around her. The frustration of seeing her life disappearing, her son’s life on the point of extinction. He, on the other hand, refused to budge until she confirmed it.

  ‘Do you understand me?’ he repeated and then a third time.

  ‘Yes!’ she said quickly and angrily. ‘Yes, yes, yes. Yes, I understand you. What do you care anyway? You get paid no matter what happens, don’t you?’

  She turned and looked at him and he shook his head and left the bar, leaving her alone in the seat. The fact that she was unable to do anything to save her son felt like a ticking time bomb inside her and it was all she could do not to overturn the table and scream as loudly as possible; it was what she wanted to do. Scream and scream and scream until they came to take her away and lock her up and fill her full of enough medication that she would forget about all of this and be transported back to a time when the only things that mattered to her, the only things of any importance, were securing invitations to garden parties at Buckingham Palace and finding the right hat to wear to Ladies’ Day at Ascot.

  6

  HE FOUND HER SITTING in the roof garden, reading a travel guide to America; it was a beautiful day and she was wearing a sleeveless dress, dark sunglasses and had a glass of white wine on the table beside her. She looked for all the world like a woman without a care or concern. She was luminous, Montignac thought. The most beautiful woman he had ever known. On a whim he re-enacted that favourite game of his from when they were children; he stood silently for a moment, then stamped his right foot forwards loudly and she jumped in her chair, dropping her book as she let out a small cry of alarm.

  ‘Hello,’ he muttered, his voice barely carrying.

  She looked towards him, laughing a little as she did so. ‘I didn’t hear you arrive,’ she said, reaching down to recover the book. ‘Actually, I think I’d drifted off into some sort of trance.’

  ‘I took the lunchtime train,’ he said, sitting down opposite her and wishing he had a pair of dark glasses too, not just to ward off the sun but because he felt she suddenly had an advantage over him by being able to see his eyes when he could not see hers. She glanced at her watch.

  ‘It must have come in late, did it?’ she asked. ‘When you weren’t here by two thirty I thought you weren’t coming at all.’

  ‘I got delayed,’ he explained, not wishing to recount how or why he had got off the train two stops early and walked the remaining six miles to the house.

  ‘Well you’re here now and that’s what matters. Would you like some wine?’ she asked, lifting the bottle and holding it over the glass she had set out for him. He nodded and she poured one for him, which he tasted carefully, allowing it to linger on his palate for a few moments. ‘It’s from Father’s cellar,’ she said as he looked impressed. ‘I decided to start trying some of it rather than just letting it go to waste. I have no idea how many bottles there are down there but there’s an awful lot of them. They go back to our great-grandfather’s day, some of them.’

  ‘There’s almost four and a half thousand,’ he said quickly and she looked at him in surprise.

  ‘Really?’ she asked.

  ‘Really. Less whatever you’ve managed to get through, of course.’

  ‘I haven’t gone through that many. Don’t worry. How was your journey anyway?’

  Montignac sighed; he was in no mood for small talk. ‘I’m sure you didn’t ask me here to talk about the train trip,’ he said.

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘How have you been anyway?’ he asked, not wishing to sound aggressive from the start. ‘I wondered whether I would see you in London during the week.’

  ‘For the trial, you mean?’ She shook her head. ‘I thought about it,’ she admitted. ‘But in the end I couldn’t see the point. It seems like a foregone conclusion that he’s going to be found guilty, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it does,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ she asked, taken aback.

  ‘Well it’s a tragedy for all concerned, isn’t it? Raymond’s family, Gareth’s family. Gareth himself. You.’

  ‘And Raymond,’ said Stella harshly. ‘Let’s not forget him. He was the victim here, remember?’

  ‘Of course,’ he replied quickly. ‘I meant alongside Raymond.’

  ‘Well forgive me if I don’t have a lot of sympathy for your young friend—’

  ‘He’s not my friend, Stella. He simply worked for me, that’s all. And he didn’t even do very much of that.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ she said sadly, shaking her head. ‘Sorry, Owen. I didn’t mean to imply anything by that. You could hardly have known that things would work out the way they did. He came from such a good family too.’

  ‘I’m giving up the flat in Bedford Place,’ he said. ‘I didn’t tell you that, did I?’

  ‘No,’ she said, a little surprised for he had been there for about four years and it was convenient and comfortable. ‘When did you decide this?’

  ‘A week or so ago. I told my landlord I’d be moving out in about a month. I couldn’t stay there any longer. I didn’t feel that it was appropriate to stay any longer after what happened.’

  Stella found herself touched by his decision and had an urge, which she resisted, to reach across and squeeze his hand. ‘I think that’s very kind of you,’ she said. ‘Do you know where you’ll go yet?’

  ‘Not really. I have to start looking. I dread it.’

  An idea came into her head. ‘What about Father’s apartment?’ she asked. ‘The one in Kensington? It’s all bought and paid for and there’s no one in it at the moment.’

  ‘Father’s apartment, as you put it,’ he said, ‘is your apartment now, remember? He left it to you.’ He resisted the urge to add the suffix: along with everything else.

  ‘Yes, but I’m not using it. Oh, Owen, you should take it. It’s so beautiful there and you’ll have three times as much space.’

  He shook his head. ‘He left it to you,’ he repeated. ‘He obviously didn’t want me to have it.’

  ‘But it’s not his to decide about any more,’ she said.

  He looked away and stared out over the grounds of Leyville. ‘Do you remember when we were children and we used to come up here to hide from Margaret or your parents?’ he asked with a smile. ‘And then we’d get into worse trouble because they were always afraid we’d fall off and kill ourselves. And your mother wanted to put up a railing so that couldn’t happen but Uncle Peter refused, he said it would destroy the view.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Stella.

  ‘I think the only reason why they didn’t want us up here was so that it could be their own refuge. All the little lunches they had up here with their friends. The wine receptions. They didn’t want us interfering with them.’

  ‘Well we’re here now,’ said Stella.

  ‘Yes, we are.’

  ‘And no one can stop us any more.’

  ‘No.’

  He seemed to be drifting off into his own thoughts and she snapped him back to her. ‘Owen, I’m glad you came down. I wanted to talk to you about something.’

  He looked across at her and took another sip of wine. ‘Go on,’ he sai
d.

  ‘Well it’s about Leyville. What’s to become of it.’

  He sat back in surprise. ‘What’s to become of it?’ he asked. ‘I don’t follow you. Why, what are you thinking of doing to it?’

  ‘I’m not thinking of doing anything to it as such,’ she explained, a little nervously. ‘But I’ve decided I don’t want to live here any more.’

  The news could hardly have surprised him more. ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  ‘After Father died, and particularly after Raymond died, I just started to think that the place was no good for me. I had this vision of myself hiding away for the rest of my life, only rising above the parapet for food and water, and dying surrounded by a hundred cats, not being discovered for weeks on end. Don’t you think this place has caused only trouble for people?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said with certainty. ‘I love Leyville, you know that. My father loved it too. Our grandfather—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know they did. But I don’t. Isn’t that strange? After all these years to suddenly feel like you don’t belong in your own home? No, I’ve decided I don’t want to stay here any longer. I’m thinking of going travelling in fact.’

  ‘Hence the book,’ he said, nodding towards the travel guide on the table.

  ‘Exactly.’

  He frowned; he found it extremely difficult at times to be around Stella but the idea of her being elsewhere, in another country or continent, a place where he could not keep track of her and the lowlifes who tried to get close to her, was anathema to him.

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ he said.

  ‘I’m perfectly serious.’

  ‘And what would you do with the house? Just close it up?’

  ‘Well that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,’ she said, a little irritably he thought. ‘I had an idea about donating it. To the National Trust. Letting them make a sort of museum out of it. A place that the public could come to visit. What would you think of that?’

  His mouth dropped open in surprise. The public, those millions of nobodies with mud on the soles of their shoes and cigarettes dropping ash on the floors, marching through his ancestral home, searching for a coffee shop or a convenient bathroom; his father’s birthplace, the birthright that was stolen from him … the idea was too much.

  ‘I think it’s obscene,’ he said. ‘And I don’t for a moment believe you mean to go through with it.’

  ‘Obscene?’ she asked, a little taken aback by his choice of words. ‘I don’t see what—’

  ‘Your father did not leave you Leyville in order to see you throw it over to the government or the crown,’ he said, pointing a finger at her. ‘Good God, if he thought you were going to do that he never would have cut me out of the will.’

  Now it was her turn to look surprised. ‘I can’t believe you just said that,’ she said.

  ‘Well, believe. And anyway, I don’t think you have the right to do any such thing. The will made it clear that you couldn’t sell any of the land or estate, that you had to live off the income and only your heirs—’

  ‘Actually, I’ve already spoken to Denis Tandy about that,’ she said defensively. ‘It’s true that I’m not allowed to sell Leyville, but I can give it away. I can create a trust whereby the house becomes the property of the nation with a board to oversee its activities over which I would preside. And I had very much hoped that you would want to be a board member too.’

  ‘Not if my very life depended on it,’ said Montignac.

  She stared at him, truly surprised by his attitude. ‘I don’t understand you, Owen,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think you’d react like this at all. I thought you might be sad at my going away but—’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Stella. You may go to the Arctic Circle, the Kalahari Desert or the North Pole for all I’m concerned but if you think I am going to allow you to sell my birthright out from under me to a bunch of overpaid politicians and a man who’s ready to throw in his country for some tart from Maryland then you’ve got another think coming. Grandfather may have done that to my father, and your father may have done it to me, but I won’t allow it to happen again. The theft stops here, all right?’

  ‘My father took you in,’ she insisted, standing up and raising her voice. ‘When you had nowhere to go, he gave you a home. He educated you.’

  ‘And he had the money to do so because he had stolen it from my father. After Grandfather died, why didn’t your father seek to bring mine back into the family again then? Why did he wait until after he had died to bring me here?’ Now his voice rose in anger. ‘Because he didn’t want to give up what he had, that’s why. For all his faults, he valued this place at least. And if he knew that you were considering such a thing, he’d be rolling in his grave right now.’

  She stared at him and breathed deeply, counting to ten in her head. She could feel something inside of her ready to let rip at him but wanted to control it.

  ‘Well I’m sorry you feel that way,’ she said. ‘But I’ve made my decision.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘I can and I have. I’m sorry, Owen, but there we are.’

  ‘This is being done purely out of grief,’ he said, protesting. ‘You’re still missing Uncle Peter, you’re grieving over Raymond—’

  ‘Leave Raymond out of this.’

  ‘You brought him into it, Stella. You’re the one who said that Leyville only had bad memories and he was one of them. Well he’s a bad memory for me all right.’

  ‘Don’t you talk about him like that.’

  ‘Oh please,’ said Montignac. ‘We’re all better off without him. Let him prune the rose gardens in Heaven and leave the grounds of Leyville alone.’

  She narrowed her eyes and walked past him towards the door that led back inside. ‘I won’t talk to you while you’re in this mood,’ she said. ‘I asked you here today out of courtesy, I told you my plans out of courtesy, I wanted you to be part of them because your last name is Montignac too. But if you think I am going to allow you to sit there and criticize my father and my fiancé just because you feel that things went wrong between us—’

  He leapt from the seat, lunged towards her and slapped her face. A white mark appeared across her cheek, almost as white as the hair on his head. Stella stood there, frozen to the spot, and he stared at her, biting his lip for a moment before returning to his seat and finishing his glass of wine in one mouthful. When he turned to look in her direction again, she was gone.

  7

  JANE BENTLEY FOUND HER husband, Roderick, sitting alone in the living room with only a table lamp switched on, not reading, not listening to the wireless, just sitting and drinking a whisky.

  ‘Roderick?’ she asked, stepping forwards nervously. He was sitting in his chair without moving and for a moment the thought went through her head that he was dead, that the stress of recent events had finally got to him and he had suffered a stroke or a heart attack. She could barely breathe through nervousness. ‘Roderick?’ she repeated. ‘Roderick, are you all right?’

  After a moment his head gave the slightest nod and she realized how tensely she had been holding herself in too and breathed a sigh of relief, exhaling loudly. She switched on a second lamp and the room became bathed in the pale cerise light of the shade.

  ‘What are you doing sitting here all alone?’ she asked. ‘You gave me a fright when I came in.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. He looked up at her and was pleased that the light was so poor in the room; it meant that he could imagine the beautiful, youthful woman he had been married to and loved for almost thirty years and not the frightened, pale and drawn lady she had turned into in recent months. ‘I couldn’t stay there any longer.’

  ‘When you didn’t come back after the recess I thought perhaps you’d arrived late and had just taken a seat at the back,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I couldn’t take it any more. I couldn’t hear them talk about him like that for another moment.’ He leaned forwards and although she was
still a few feet away from him she suddenly realized that he was crying quietly and she went to him, kneeling on the floor beside him and taking his hand in hers.

  ‘Oh, Roderick, don’t,’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t. Not now. I can’t get through this if you’re not strong.’

  He nodded and breathed heavily and managed to contain his tears for now. ‘Well?’ he asked after a moment. ‘What did I miss? Did it get any worse?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘There wasn’t too much of note in the afternoon. They called Maud Williams to the stand, of course.’

  ‘Who?’ he asked.

  ‘Maud Williams. The lady who called the police that morning. She lives in the flat two floors up from Owen Montignac and was coming down the stairs to leave for work when she saw the door half open and peeped inside.’

  ‘Prying neighbours,’ said Roderick, only too familiar with the curse of them.

  ‘She seemed like a sweet old thing actually,’ said Jane. ‘Still quite traumatized by … by what she found.’

  ‘Did she make things worse?’

  ‘Not especially,’ said Jane. ‘She was only reporting on what she saw and that had already been established. Quentin tried to discredit her a little by suggesting that she was entering a residence that she had no business entering but he gave up after a few minutes. It was clear that the jury had warmed to her and he was doing more harm than good.’

  She stayed in her position on the floor and rested her head against her husband’s lap and he allowed his hand to stray to her hair, smoothing it down with tenderness and affection. Her own day had been so traumatic, so difficult, that a moment of peace and respite like this was worth a thousand sunshine holidays. First there had been the destructive elements in Gareth’s school friends’ evidence and then her disastrous lunchtime conversation with Sir Quentin Lawrence. It was only fair, she thought, that the afternoon should provide a little relief.

  ‘What made you change your mind anyway?’ she asked. ‘Did something happen at chambers over lunch?’