‘But, madam, it is the credit card company itself which insists we obtain sufficient proof of identity before handing the cards on. You’ll be aware, I’m sure, of the huge increase in the fraudulent use of credit cards, particularly at the Christmas season.’
‘That is my credit card you have there. My name on it. You have a letter of identity from the American Embassy. What more do you want?’
From behind her a querulous female voice was complaining in deep rural tones that she only had a forty-minute lunch break, was already late back and still had Alf’s tea to buy. Izzy was beginning to feel marginally less acceptable than an outbreak of head lice.
‘It’s very difficult for us here to deal with these sort of problems. It would be better, much better, perhaps, if you were to attempt to sort this out in London.’
‘Even better back home in America,’ came the voice behind.
‘What in God’s name …?’ Izzy began, before checking herself. She was more than willing to raise her voice and lower the level of gentility if that helped, but in this case she felt sure it wouldn’t. Another overwrought, hysterical woman, they would say. Just like the doctors. And Benjy, seated on the counter beside her, was sensing the tension and beginning to fret.
‘Let me get this straight. You suggest I go to London to sort this out.’
‘That would be best.’
‘But without my credit card, how do you expect that I should get to London?’
‘To my regret, we run only a bank, not British Rail.’
‘This is ridiculous.’ The blood was rushing now.
‘Perhaps your husband could help?’
Izzy snapped, voice rising. ‘Get me the manager!’
‘Madam,’ pinched lips offered in reply, ‘I am the manager.’
She had run out of patience and perseverance, as had those in line behind her. Then Benjy was in tears, tugging at her. A bladder problem. Got to go. Their weapon of last resort had won.
‘Is it because I’m an American, or a woman?’ she spat, trying one last time.
Her only reply was a blank expression.
‘You’re a truly wonderful bunch of people,’ was all she could manage to say as she swept up Benjy and left.
Behind her, someone sniggered.
As she disappeared, the banker smiled tightly, first to himself and then at his customers. He insisted on serving the next two himself, offering apologies as though it were his fault the irascible foreign woman had caused such a scene, before relinquishing his post to the teller. He retired to his office, where he closed the door and lifted the phone.
‘Yes, she was here. Just as you suggested.’
A pause while he listened.
‘Quite emotional, indeed almost aggressive. But then these American women are.’
Another pause.
‘Of course. No need for thanks. As a banking official it was my duty. And as a friend, my pleasure.’
He replaced the receiver, straightened his uniform, pulled the gold watch from his waistcoat and decided it was time for lunch. Roast turkey. With seasonal stuffing. He felt he’d deserved it.
Izzy’s mood, desirous of drawing blood, did not improve when she discovered Daniel outside the bank, stretching like a contented cat in the unseasonable December sunshine, sharing both a bench and his opinions with an attractive young woman who was in possession of a large, unavoidable chest.
‘You’re supposed to be helping me, Mr Blackheart, not helping yourself,’ she muttered, even as she chastised herself for succumbing to the tug of – impatience? Jealousy? No, surely not jealousy, but he was the only thing approaching a friend she had in this hostile place and she felt in urgent need of his attention. She was grateful when the new arrival was promptly detached and his attention was hers once more.
‘Do I need a drink,’ she exclaimed. ‘Trouble is, I can’t afford to buy you one. Those slimeballs won’t let me have my credit card.’
‘A drink is the easiest problem in the world to solve,’ he said soothingly, and soon they were sitting in the gravel courtyard outside an inn whose cob walls were clad in ancient lichen and mosses. The Thomas Hardy were premises where the great writer was, according to the legend inscribed above the door, supposed to have slept and supped, but the original rutted cart track that ran alongside it had long ago been turned into a busy public road.
While he drank orange juice, she outlined her story. She held nothing back, not even her more lurid impressions about Devereux’s daughter; she was too downhearted, too frightened to dissemble.
‘Do you know Paulette Devereux?’ she probed. But her hopes were quickly dashed.
‘To be honest, I wasn’t even sure he had a daughter, certainly doesn’t feature in the Chronicle. But why would she, why would anyone, want to take your baby?’
‘If I knew that I wouldn’t be here. I keep hoping it’s all no more than a mistake – perhaps even my mistake, that there is no mystery. But every time I ask, I feel as though they’re building a brick wall around me. Every direction I look, another brick is dropped into place, shutting me in prison. Do I make any sense?’
‘They’re not shutting you in, Izzy, they’re shutting you out.’
‘What do you mean? And who are “they”?’
‘“They” is this place, Weschester, and the people who matter here. You’re an outsider, a foreigner. Even more of a bloody foreigner than I am. You’re causing trouble, stirring things up, disordering their lives.’
He leaned across and touched her arm. He was a very tactile person; she was glad of the contact. She desperately needed reassurance.
‘This is a fine place,’ he continued. ‘In the four months I’ve been here I’ve found the people warm and friendly, exceedingly generous. But they live life at their own pace, a pace they’ve been used to for generations. It makes them suspicious of pushy strangers. It can also make them seem insensitive, blind.’
His gaze was earnest and steady, almost uncomfortably so. She sipped her glass of wine; it was revolting, poured from a box.
‘Look at it from their point of view. You arrive here, uninvited, accept their hospitality and their healing. Then you go and create trouble for the hospital, the police, the local newspaper, the social services, even the local MP. You’re rocking their boat, and in a rural community like this they all row in it together.’
‘So what are you telling me to do? Forget it?’
His grip on her arm tightened. ‘Of course not. But you have to understand what you are up against. Know the opposition. And know yourself, too, Izzy. Know that it’s possible – probable, perhaps – that there is no mystery. That, sadly, your child is dead. You realize that, don’t you?’
‘I also realize that if you were certain of that, you wouldn’t be here. You’re not just a Good Samaritan taking care of an emotional cripple.’
‘Maybe I’m here because I was captivated by you as you swept through the office yesterday.’
‘And maybe you’ve forgotten that I’m married with enough years behind me to be … well, at least be your considerably older sister.’
They exchanged a warm glance, grateful for the temporary distraction.
‘I’m also a journalist,’ he continued, ‘like you. Not much of one, I admit, not here in Weschester, covering scoops like the development of cracks in the ceiling of the public library and the outbreak of rain at the Mayor’s garden party. But … it wasn’t always Weschester, may not always be Weschester for me.’ His voice held a touch of wistfulness, the bruising behind his eyes momentarily more apparent.
‘Why did you decide to help me?’
‘Oh, many reasons. You needed help. Isn’t that enough?’
‘No. That’s pretty much what Paul Devereux told me.’
‘And because, shortly before you arrived in the editor’s office yesterday, he received a telephone call. I don’t know from whom, but it mentioned your name.’
‘That’s impossible! I told no one I was going to see him.’
‘Nevertheless, someone was warning him off.’
‘Damn.’ She downed the dregs of the wine, lips pursing on acid. ‘And it’s not been just the editor. There was the hospital. The police inspector. Big Brother at the bank. The social services …’
‘Male prejudice? People not willing to take you seriously?’
‘Not in the case of Katti at the social services.’ She was staring blindly into the distance, her mind swarming with fresh insight and innuendo, mentally scrambling up the brick wall they had built around her, starting for the first time to peer at what might lie beyond. ‘And, dammit, the police inspector knew I intended to stay on. No one knew that, no one …’ She caught her breath. ‘Except Paul Devereux.’
‘Your host.’
‘Or maybe jailer.’
‘But did you tell him you were going to see the police?’
‘No, no, no,’ she insisted. ‘He couldn’t have known.’ Even from her new vantage point atop the wall, all she could see was a maze. Dead ends.
‘Then perhaps all you have is rural insularity, a local community instinctively closing ranks.’
She shook her head emphatically. ‘The police inspector knew about me even before I’d arrived. Your editor, too. Someone told them.’
Their conversation was temporarily drowned by the bellow of a passing heavy goods vehicle, its diesel fumes stinging their nostrils, their glasses vibrating. In the background a telephone rang, insistent but unanswered.
‘That’s it!’ she exclaimed with fervour, diving into the maze. ‘The telephone. Daniel, I arranged to see the inspector by telephone.’
He rubbed the cleft in his chin, ruminating, trying to catch up with her.
‘And your esteemed editor,’ she continued.
He was almost there. ‘And I’ll bet you arranged a new credit card – a card which all of a sudden you can’t get – by telephone.’
‘That’s how I tried to get hold of Katti, too.’
‘Which telephone?’
She had turned a corner and at last the way ahead began to clear.
‘In Devereux’s study,’ she responded, ‘The one he insisted I use.’
Suddenly the sun had lost its warmth.
‘Could Devereux do it, Daniel? Stitch me up?’
‘Stitch you up? That man could embroider an entire tapestry, so he could. The Member of Parliament. A power not only here but throughout the country. One of Wessex’s most famous families. His father a Government Minister. Around here the Devereux name is the social equivalent of God. And it just so happens that Paul Devereux is a personal friend of my editor. Would be bound to know the police inspector. And almost certainly the bank manager, too.’
‘But not Katti.’
‘No, not Katti. Somehow she doesn’t fit.’
‘Sheeee-it!’ The oath was drawn out, stretched to its limits, full of frustration. She pounded the wooden table, sending her empty glass flying and waking Benjy, who had been dozing peacefully in her lap.
He mocked her lack of restraint. ‘I read somewhere that you Americans have at least thirty different ways of pronouncing that word …’
‘Daniel, what have I done?’ It was her turn to lean across and grasp his arm. ‘The arrangement we made? To meet each other this morning? It was on the same phone. Devereux’s.’
His flippancy subsided rapidly. ‘That might be inconvenient. I told his good friend, my editor, I was going to interview the august chairwoman of the local WI about their forthcoming flower show.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’
A breeze ruffled her hair and she pushed it back into place. Benjy, released both from sleep and her arms, slipped from her lap and began playing on the gravel, trying to fill her shoe with stones. She shooed him away.
‘You seem … very detached about a lot of things, Daniel. Your job. Your life here. People.’
‘Had a lot of practice. At times it’s necessary to be detached, even from yourself. Particularly from yourself.’ For a moment she thought she saw the bruised soul once more, twisting in the winds of memory, before he rescued himself with a shrug and a self-deprecating smile which lit his face. He had a very fine smile, she decided.
‘Anyway, I hope you don’t mind me attaching myself to you, Miss Dean?’ His gaze was direct, upon her, more than the Good Samaritan, much more than a younger brother. She ducked.
‘So fah, so very good, suh,’ she mimicked in drawling tones.
‘I’m glad. To work, then. What do we do next?’
‘Figure out how Devereux knew who I was talking to on the phone.’
‘An extension? A tape machine, perhaps, tapping his own phone? That’s easy enough.’
‘But Devereux’s been hundreds of miles away. Yesterday he was in Scotland, visiting some nuclear submarine base. I saw him on the news last night.’
‘So how does he keep his finger on the pulse?’
‘… around my throat?’
Suddenly her thoughts were swamped by instinct, telling her all was not well, to be alert, that danger called. She could no longer hear the sound of Benjy throwing gravel. Instead there was traffic, the sounds of a country road abruptly grown busy, of heavy speeding tyres on tarmac. Of rapid, careless footsteps.
She turned to see a dust-smeared farm lorry, saw too the anxious and tormented face of its driver as he reached simultaneously for brakes and horn, and then she could see Benjy’s heedless meandering from forecourt to gutter that led directly into the lorry’s path. The noise of the horn blaring out its warning fused with her own cry as brakes protested and tyres left a smouldering path along the road. Benjy, at last aware of danger, turned, faced the oncoming juggernaut, transfixed.
Nightmares are made up of such pieces. The tendency is to freeze, to cower beneath the bed-clothes in fear and impotence, to wait until the awful dream has passed. It is how many men and women have gone to their deaths, refusing to believe the testimony before their eyes, praying the moment will pass, unable to react, even to protest.
It seemed inconceivable that she could have beaten the lorry to the spot where Benjy waited, that in a stride she could have pushed him from danger’s path and still been able herself to avoid the desperate advance of the lorry, but mothers possess a capacity to be more than mortal. As she stood, trembling, clutching her son in exultation, seared by the knowledge that she had let him stray and that she alone was to blame, she knew for the first time the true depths of her plight.
She knew, if she had ever doubted it, that she must persevere, that she would be unable to find peace without first knowing the truth about Bella. Simply, she could never live with her guilt.
Yet there were many sides to her guilt, other risks which she now had no choice but to recognize. She had just seen one of those risks, only by some extraordinary chance averted it. The risk was to Benjy, placed in peril while her attention was elsewhere. Even as she chased after the shadowy truth about one child, she was dragging her other towards danger. Could she live with that guilt? Was it to be Benjy? Or Bella?
There was something else she knew as she stood sucking the breath back into her lungs and soothing Benjy’s alarm. For a fleeting moment before it disappeared back behind a protective curtain, through the window of a tea room which stood at an angle across the road from The Thomas Hardy, she saw a face.
The dark scowl of Chinnery. Spying on her.
Now she knew how Devereux had been aware of her every move.
FIVE
The room was shrouded, lit only by a table lamp on the great mahogany desk and the reflection from the city lights which penetrated through the uncovered windows. It was how the Prime Minister liked to work, to concentrate in the solitude of his study in Downing Street. Richard Flood was gazing through the centimetre-thick glass, trying to scratch away a mark with his thumb nail, slow to realize the imperfection was buried in the multi-layered and mortarproofed pane, when Devereux walked in.
‘Paul, good evening,’ h
e offered without turning round. ‘You know, the garden looks a mess. I really must get it cleaned up.’
‘Mmmm,’ Devereux muttered, not sure quite why he had been entrusted with such crucial information and wondering whether the Prime Minister, who was gaining something of a reputation for his eccentric behaviour under pressure, was going to ask him to roll up his sleeves and fetch a spade.
‘How’s Bizzie?’ he offered.
‘Oh, Elizabeth’s fine, the little lady’s just fine. Never better, thank you,’ Flood muttered distractedly, as though Devereux had asked after the time of day rather than the Prime Minister’s wife.
Fool, thought Devereux. Three years in Downing Street had turned the man into a puppet of formality, a hive of hidebound inactivity who seemed even to have forgotten how much his wife hated her full name. He’d forgotten much else about her, too.
Flood spun on his heel. ‘Paul, I wanted you to be here to share it. Remember, our evening at the American Ambassador’s the other night? When I twisted his arm about the UN and Cyprus and things?’
‘Ah, yes, Dick,’ Devereux repeated, clearing his throat of the sour humour which the Prime Minister’s words had caused. ‘A wise move, I’m sure.’
‘Not just wise, Paul. Brilliant! I heard this afternoon that they’re going to agree. To everything. Absolutely bloody everything. Wonderful, eh? The President’s due to telephone in a few minutes to put his personal seal on things and I thought you might like to share the moment with me. Couldn’t have done it without your support, you know.’
Devereux shook his head in what he hoped did not betray his feelings of scorn but appeared more a gesture of self-deprecating denial.
‘They’ve really crammed this deal through, the President must need it more badly than we realized,’ Flood continued. ‘Maybe we let them off too lightly. What do you think, Paul? Should we tweak ’em for a little more?’
‘The cows have been well covered. Let’s not exhaust the bull with too much pleasure.’
They were interrupted by the warble of one of the three telephones on the desk. Within seconds the connection was made.