After Clare Page 15

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘I’m not sure. He used to shrug and say it was a job, and I couldn’t get much more out of him than that.’ After a moment he added, ‘To be truthful, Peter couldn’t settle on what he wanted to do with his life. He’d tried his hand at various things but nothing seemed to work. Nothing I suggested filled him with any enthusiasm and that caused a few father and son arguments, as you might expect – unresolved, I’m afraid, as they usually are.’ He smiled slightly, but Novak thought that despite his diffident manner, Edmund Sholto might have been a formidable opponent in an argument. ‘Then Marta Heeren persuaded him to work for her brother. She . . . always took a kindly interest in Peter.’

  Novak wondered if her interest had lain only in Peter’s direction. A widower like Edmund Sholto might well present an attractive prospect to an unmarried woman like Marta Heeren. But he saw his mistake as Sholto went on quickly, his mouth turned down, ‘Too much maybe, she encouraged the wrong ideas in him.’ He didn’t say what these were.

  ‘Working for Stronglove – was Peter himself interested in writing?’

  ‘Good heavens, no – that sort of thing wasn’t Peter!’ He paused. ‘Although you know, I did once wonder . . . He had some old notebooks he was always scribbling in, he was very secretive about them, wouldn’t show them to me and said they were nothing but doodles when I asked. I haven’t found them anywhere so I expect he destroyed them when he joined up.’ All at once he came to a decision and stood up. ‘Come with me, Inspector.’

  Novak followed him out of the back door and down a brick path, through a surprisingly spruce garden. As in other Netherley gardens, sunflowers and pinks flourished among the cabbages and bean sticks, but the rows of vegetables were neat, and there was an arch with a Dorothy Perkins clambering over it. Beside the door a huge patch of rhubarb grew rampant.

  He followed the older man to a large shed. Garden implements were stacked just inside the door, but this was no potting shed. Most of the space was occupied with woodworking equipment: a sawbench and saws, chisels and other tools neatly lined up in a rack, a small lathe, and stacks of new wood leaning against the walls. ‘This was my son’s main interest. I’m not handy – gardening, yes, nothing else. But Peter – this was his forte. The little table and chest you maybe noticed in the house—’

  ‘They’re very professional – and you say they were Peter’s work?’

  ‘Give him a piece of wood and he could do anything with it. That was the talent he’d been given, that he should have been using, but I’m afraid he regarded the idea of making a living using his hands as rather infra dig.’ He shook his head. ‘Such a waste. The boy had so much to offer. If only . . .’

  The saddest two words in the English language, it often seemed to Novak, hung on the air. Fleetingly, the thought of his own two children passed through his mind, little Evie, and Oliver, whose highest ambition at the moment was to be an inventor or, God help him, a detective like his father. How would he feel if they grew up to disappoint him, didn’t take the chances life offered?

  ‘Perhaps he’d have come round to it,’ Sholto said. ‘His interest came from my father – it was his hobby, too, and Peter had his tools.’ He frowned. ‘Actually, I don’t know what’s happened to them. I’ll have to scout around. I wouldn’t want to lose sight of them.’

  ‘He took a great interest in the old furniture at Leysmorton House, I’m told.’

  ‘Did he? I didn’t know that – but he would, wouldn’t he?’ He considered for a moment. ‘I never thought to show your sergeant this shed when he looked at Peter’s things. He might have found this if he had.’ He turned to one side and extracted something wrapped in sacking from behind a leaning stack of wood and placed it on the bench. ‘Go ahead!’ Pushing his hands into the pockets of his woolly cardigan, he stood back to let Novak unwrap the covering.

  The box underneath was about twelve by six, five or six inches deep, with a small, ornate brass keyhole. It was handsomely polished, its lid inlaid with ‘oysters’ of richly whorled, blond-edged, chocolate-brown wood. ‘It’s laburnum,’ Sholto said, reaching out to smooth its soft patina. ‘The dark is the heartwood and that yellow round the outside is the sapwood. It took him weeks to make.’

  ‘It’s quite remarkable.’ It was more than that, Novak thought, a thing of beauty, like the little table and chest.

  ‘Yes.’ Sholto stood looking down at it. ‘I rarely went into Peter’s room. I’d no reason to, and no one else does. I look after the house myself, there’s not much to it, and Mrs Baxter next door takes pity on me and does my washing, cooks the occasional meal. It was only after you told me that the body you’d found was Peter’s that I went into his room, and that was when I noticed this box was missing from the chest of drawers where it usually stood. Unless the house had been broken into and the box stolen when I was not here – which I’d never had any reason to suspect – only one person could have removed it and that was Peter himself. So I came out here to look for it – the only other place I could think of where it might be – and found it hidden behind that timber. I think,’ he said slowly, ‘you should take a look inside. It’s open – I forced the lock.’ Novak gave him a sharp glance as he raised the lid and stood back.

  Inside, the box was crammed with fat brown paper envelopes, unsealed but encircled with rubber bands, and in each was a bundle of crisp white five-pound banknotes, printed in black. Novak made a quick calculation. At a rough estimate, the lot probably amounted to something not all that far off his own annual salary, he thought, stunned. He closed the lid and saw Sholto’s eyes on him. ‘Any ideas about where all this might have come from?’

  ‘I’ve done nothing but ask myself that since I found it. It has me baffled.’ His eyes looked tormented.

  When you turned up stones, ugly things crawled from beneath. And blackmail was an ugly word. This man was intelligent enough to know that his son’s murder had not been a motiveless, random affair – and that this amount of money, one way or another, represented as good a reason for it as any. How else could a young man like Peter have obtained such an amount? Novak looked again at the notes in their separate envelopes. Regular payments. Realistically, it was the only answer – and Edmund Sholto had known this, too, and must have realized how it would reflect discreditably upon Peter. He could have kept his mouth shut about finding it, yet he had not. Novak wondered how many other fathers would have done the same.

  ‘I think this might have been what he came back for that night,’ Sholto said.

  Novak thought so too. But in that case, why had he gone to Leysmorton, rather than here?

  ‘I never saw him after the war ended, you know. He was expecting his release any day, and I was actually writing my weekly letter to him when I heard footsteps on the path. I jumped up, thinking it was him, home at last, but it was the Redcaps looking for him.’ He bowed his head, then raised it and looked Novak in the eye. ‘Find his killer, Inspector. It might be a long haul, I realize that. I don’t expect miracles – but whatever Peter did that he was killed for, find who did it.’

  Novak clasped his shoulder. It wasn’t the first time he’d been asked that and he’d always found it impossible to answer.

  As a motive, it was as good as any. But who was being blackmailed?

  Novak thought of the edginess Stronglove had shown about Peter, and his mind flew back to that first meeting in the library at Leysmorton. He saw again a slim hand fingering an expensive enamelled cigarette case, looks exchanged. Was he correct in assuming a guilty connection between Dirk Stronglove and Stella Markham, and that Peter had made use of it? His instinct told him yes. But would Stronglove – or Stronglove and Stella together – have been willing, or indeed able, to part with such an amount of cash to keep it secret? That might depend on what damage Peter could have done with such knowledge.

  Stronglove was a known ladies’ man, so would another affair with a married woman bother him too much? It was more likely Stella Markham who would have
borne the brunt of such a disclosure. She was in a comfortable niche here, she obviously liked the good things in life, like her daughter – not Rosie, the other one – and he’d be prepared to bet she wouldn’t be in a hurry to give any of it up. But would Stronglove have been honourable enough to stump up to protect her, to avoid their affair becoming public knowledge? In fact, how far would she – would either of them – go to save her marriage? To the point of actual murder?

  Yes, he thought immediately and unfairly. Stronglove would, if something stood in his way. He knew he was not being objective enough, but his antennae quivered whenever the man’s name came up.

  But . . . and here he stumbled on the physical aspects of it. Stronglove was a half-blind man – and in any case had not been living at Leysmorton at the time Peter deserted. And a woman built like Stella Markham? Another aspect occurred to him: Stronglove was published by the Peregrine Press. It would hardly have done his standing as one of their authors much good if there were suspicions of him being involved with the wife of Gerald Markham, whom Novak hadn’t yet met.

  Sixteen

  It was one of those melancholic, end of summer days, cool and grey, very still, the sky flat and colourless, when everything seemed sharply etched and defined, hard-edged against the light. From where she sat, in Hugh’s room at Steadings, Emily could see along the length of the smoothly manicured lawn, a swathe of velvet down to where a maple at the end glowed as if on fire, its leaves already turned a deep, rich red. Fallen leaves scattered the lawn too, and in the regimented flower-beds nearer the house a gardener worked, tossing into a barrow the summer bedding that had gone over.

  She sat to one side of Hugh’s desk, sipping coffee while he put aside the letters he’d been writing and began to leaf through the drawings she had brought over. ‘Take a look at these, will you, Hugh?’ she’d asked as she handed him the large envelope. ‘See what you think.’

  While he gave them his usual careful consideration, she picked up her cup and walked to the window. Beyond the limits of the garden, far off in the Leysmorton grounds, a figure could just about be discerned: Marta, in her green cardigan, stomping purposefully down a path, busy with her own concerns. Absently she watched the gardener at his task, and was suddenly transported to another garden, fifteen hundred miles away.

  ‘Well,’ said Hugh at last.

  ‘Mm, yes,’ she mused as she went back to her seat by the desk. ‘The agapanthus will still be out.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Sorry, Hugh.’ She was embarrassed to realize she’d spoken aloud. ‘The African lilies. In Madeira. I was thinking about them. They grow wild, by the side of the road, an absolute sea of blue and white. Hydrangeas as well. But anything grows in Madeira.’

  Madeira, that small, temperate island of volcanic lava rising from the sea, where her home, the Quinta Miranda, stood, reached only by the road that curled upwards in a succession of hairpin bends, twisting at what appeared to be an almost vertical gradient, with dizzy-making drops to the crashing sea on one side, on the other a series of thickly forested peaks, split with deeply cut ravines. A church with an odd, onion-shaped dome and, clinging to the slope, occasional houses and villas, Portuguese style, softly colour-washed with red-tiled roofs and stepped gardens. Every kind of creeper spilling over walls, roofs and terraces in almost indecent profusion, a rainbow spectrum of scarlet, purple and yellow. Her own garden ablaze with purple bougainvillea, morning glory, feathery palms and a bright stream of falling water above a pool. There, at last, she had found a garden other than Leysmorton that she could love.

  Hugh was looking at her with an expression she couldn’t fathom. ‘Is that the answer I’ve been waiting for? You’ve decided to go back then?’

  ‘No . . . well, I’m not sure, Hugh.’ And really, she wasn’t sure, not at all. For a moment back there, experiencing an astonishing pang of something like homesickness for her island home, she had felt an alien here, a stranger in her own land. More than half a lifetime she had spent longing to be back at Leysmorton, and now that she was, she felt out of place, on edge. The idea upset her . . . she did not want to think she could have become infected by Paddy’s wanderlust. She knew, though, that it was far more than that which was unsettling her.

  ‘If – if I did go back . . . would you . . .’ She took a breath. ‘Would you consider going back with me, Hugh?’

  ‘Ah.’ A huge warmth spread through him, as if he’d been offered brandy and had drunk it unwisely, all in one gulp. But he pulled himself up, and as he looked at her troubled face, he added gently, ‘The world is a wonderful place, Emily, but there is only one home.’

  ‘It was only a suggestion,’ she said, looking down at her hands.

  ‘Yes, my dear, I know that.’ He folded his spectacles. ‘But it’s something that needs thinking about – for both of us.’

  ‘Of course. I don’t see there’s any rush,’ she replied, too quickly, because she had expected a different response. ‘And you’re right. I do need to think about it myself. Meanwhile, what about these drawings of Clare’s? I have to confess, they confuse me.’ She smiled faintly. ‘Actually, it’s rather more than that. I’m not easily bothered by this sort of thing, but as Rosie would say, they give me the creeps.’ An apt enough expression. Gooseflesh crept on her arms whenever she looked at them. Maybe horror.

  He shuffled the sketches together, squared them up neatly in his thin, elegant fingers and put them back in the envelope, precise as always in his movements. If he was disappointed that she had changed the subject, he gave no sign. ‘You’re thinking they might have something to do with her state of mind before she left?’

  ‘Don’t you think so?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I don’t believe one should imbue them with too much significance.’

  She had not included that strangely disturbing drawing of the dark goddess Hecate, and was reminded that after all he knew nothing of Clare’s obsession with the myth and magic surrounding the ancient tree. ‘That sort of thing’s hardly unusual with artists,’ he went on. ‘Look at the Monets we saw in Paris –’ The pause was so brief that she might have imagined it, imagined the taut wire of shared memory that twanged between them, though she hadn’t imagined at all the lurch of her insides that always came whenever Paris was mentioned. He went on, in the same reasonable tone, ‘How many times has Monet painted water lilies, after all? Or the Houses of Parliament, come to that? And he isn’t the only one to paint the same thing repeatedly. Who knows how the artistic mind works? A constant search for something that has significance for them but always eludes being captured in paint . . . some idea or truth behind it? One can only speculate.’

  ‘I don’t know, either.’ She was pretty sure though, that this compulsive repetition had little, if anything, to do with Clare’s artistic aspirations. Emily herself could not for one moment attribute any supernatural powers, evil or otherwise, to the Hecate tree, but Clare, at one time at least, had been utterly convinced of it, which might amount to the same thing: that she had been pursued and haunted by that childish curse and could not forget.

  Although he’d been so cautious in giving an opinion, she knew Hugh would continue to think about it – and about that suggestion she had prematurely and perhaps unwisely mentioned. As he refilled her cup, she said, ‘There’s something else I’d value your opinion on.’

  He raised an amused eyebrow. ‘Not more artistic endeavours, I trust?’

  She took the letter from her bag. ‘When I was looking through her things I came across this as well. You may be able to read more into it than I’ve been able to.’

  He put his glasses on again. The thin paper crackled as he unfolded it. ‘French, hmm?’ After studying it for a moment or two he said, ‘If you want an exact translation, you’ve drawn a blank here, too, I’m afraid. My French isn’t really up to that standard. I can give you the general gist of it, but the language seems rather – convoluted, not to say the handwriting.’

  ‘I’ve got
the gist of it: Clare had some sort of problem – she was asking for his help in something or other . . . that much at least I could gather.’

  ‘So it would seem. Let’s have another look.’ There was silence again as he carefully reread the letter. ‘Yes. It does appear as though she was asking his advice – should she or shouldn’t she? Over what? Well, presumably whether or not she should leave art school. If so, he wasn’t helping much, was he? Do you know who this man is?’

  ‘Yes.’ Hugh wouldn’t remember the tutor they’d had that summer, she said, he’d been away at school, but Christian Gautier had been engaged to teach Clare and herself drawing and speak French with them. ‘Though Mama was not too pleased with his efforts to improve our French. But it was through him that Clare began to be interested in painting. He left and I never heard of him after that.’

  Reading between the lines of this letter, however, it seemed that he and Clare had not only been in the habit of writing to each other, they had also been meeting, in London. And it was clear that Clare had been most anxious – desperate, even – to see him again, and that she had written purposely to ask if he would come to London once more. She had to see him, she must talk to him. If necessary, she would go over to Grenoble.

  His reply – this letter – was definitely off-putting, almost smacking of panic. They had already talked, had they not? He was about to be married, he reminded her, to Marie-Laure, his fiancée of two years. The last time they had met, he had advised Clare what steps she should take, though being a man, it was difficult for him to say what would be the right thing. There was no possibility at all that he could come to London and she must certainly not travel to Grenoble. It would be advisable that she did not write to him again, either. Amicalement. Christian.

  In friendship? ‘He doesn’t sound much of a friend to me,’ Emily said.