Killing a Unicorn Page 5

  His headlights picked out the sign for his turn-off. He peeled off at the slip road, negotiated the roundabout then reached for the music switch. Quadraphonic sound drifted from all corners of the car: his brother’s latest recording, the deep, plangent notes from the Elgar cello concerto. Bibi must have put the cassette in, it wasn’t at all Chip’s music of choice, way above his head to be honest. More of a jazz man, himself. He dimly remembered Bibi reading out from the newspaper, when this particular recording came out, what some critic had written: ‘How can anyone comment on any recording of this piece without failing to compare it with the Jacqueline du Pré version? Yet Jonathan Calvert manages to extract another dimension, blah, blah, blah …’

  He’d almost forgotten old Jonners would be home when he arrived. He’d never been as close to Chip as Mark, piggy in the middle, had been to either of them, there was ten years in age and a whole cultural divide between them. He was fond of him, naturally, as family, as his kid brother - but cello playing as a career, good God! That was going too far by half for Chip, especially when he remembered the caterwauling they’d all had to endure when the young Jonathan was practising. You had to allow his success, though — music scholarship to Cambridge and now — amazing, really, how many people one knew who’d heard of him. Deep down, Chip was quite proud of the relationship, and not a little impressed, while trying not to stand in awe of his brother’s achievements by remembering him as the snotty-nosed little sprog he’d once been. In actual fact, he was much prouder of the thing which had redeemed him for ever in his eyes, almost made him able to forgive Jonathan for the cello: that century he’d knocked up when batting for the school eleven in his last year.

  All in all, though, he was glad to think he’d be there, at Membery. He wasn’t Mark, but he could be relied upon to be supportive of Chip who had — so natural to him he never thought about it, or even realized he had it — a sense of responsibility to those close to him: he’d done his best to act like a father to Jonathan after Conrad had died.

  Yes, it would be good to have him there, Chip reflected. At least, he wasn’t going to find himself the sole male in a house full of women, and that included Humphrey, if he was back.

  Alyssa had murmured something horrified about the police requiring identification, an inquest. Another thing he’d have to face. Christ, this business could drag on for ever! While he had affairs waiting to be dealt with, things that couldn’t be left to his subordinates — or rather, things that he wouldn’t leave, wasn’t prepared to chance, in particular one certain risky operation that was at a crucial stage. He was as sure as he could be that everything in that direction was sewn up as tight as a nun’s knickers — all the same, he was uneasy, as he increasingly was when something like that was brewing.

  And suddenly, without warning, he broke out into another of those cold sweats that had lately been coming over him, all his hidden doubts and fears coalescing and refusing to be ignored. All too often recently, usually in the wee small hours, it had occurred to him that he might not be cut out for this lark. Without doubt, he enjoyed the rewards that a bit of fancy footwork brought in, but he was dimly beginning to see that he wasn’t made to live permanently on the edge, he didn’t relish danger as some of his acquaintances obviously did, even though he put a good face on it, pretended he did, tried to speak the same language. But maybe it wasn’t in him to feel truly easy while keeping a dozen irons in the fire all at once, trying to live as though his right hand didn’t know what his left was doing. He would wake up trembling, in a mucksweat that he’d be found out, and exposed. He tried to tell himself there was no disgrace in what he was doing, half the Establishment was at it — the disgrace was in being found out, a cardinal sin that would never be forgiven.

  Only the truth was, he was mortally afraid this last eventuality might well be possible. He wasn’t a nit-picker, never had been, the fine print was something you paid the lawyers to read for you, but all the same, there’d been too many times for comfort when he’d discovered in himself an alarming capacity for overlooking essential details, and a feeling that one day this would be his downfall.

  Bloody fool, he told himself, able to be honest for once, shaken by the realization forced upon him that if the unthinkable could happen, if Bibi could die, just about anything was conceivable. Should’ve known himself better, realized he wasn’t a natural risk-taker, even when Membery was at stake, the main reason he’d got himself into this hole. Well, it wasn’t too late, even yet, he wasn’t in so deep he couldn’t dig himself out, he thought, the more sober side of his nature beginning to assert itself.

  Try to be too clever and you got yourself right up the spout. ‘Sailing a bit too close to the wind, aren’t you, old lad?’ Mark had commented only the other day, when he’d hinted that he could put him on to something big.

  Damn Mark. He saw too much, always had. And why the hell did he have to be away now — of all times? They’d had wild times together when they were younger, though Mark had always seemed to stand one pace back, viewed events sardonically from the sidelines, so to speak, even when he was included. And then, after he’d met Fran, the laddish times had ceased altogether. All the same, without any doubt, Chip knew that Mark would instinctively know how to take charge of a situation like this. Clever bugger, he’s always pipped me to the post, Chip reflected ruefully, without rancour. Except in one thing. And now, even that had been taken away from him.

  Chapter Four

  Bibi used to claim she could see people’s auras, and kept on saying she was worried about how much dimmer Fran’s had become of late. She’d advised her to get free of negative influences. She’d talked about Indian head massage, feng shui analysis, positive energies, destinies. Maybe she really had believed it all. It was a dreadful thought that maybe she had actually been able to sense that terrible events were overshadowing her own life.

  Certainly Fran has felt at odds with herself recently, but that’s nothing to how she feels now, positively weighed down with a heavy sadness. She’s restless and strung up, unable to settle, and she knows sleep will be impossible tonight. She pokes the remote control at the television, zaps from channel to channel but chat shows and soaps, or anything else for that matter, are unlikely to hold her attention. She wanders around the house like a lost soul, and finally ends up in her workroom. Without thinking, she begins sorting out the contents of a battered old toffee tin, once green and gold, a receptacle for old buttons, unwanted keys and other oddments that she’d bought last week at the village jumble sale. It’s something to do. Even so, she finds that although she can will her hands to perform mechanical tasks, she can’t stop her mind from squirrelling around, or remove the sense that she’s plunging permanently, ever deeper, into an abyss.

  Compared with the rest of this orderly house, her workroom is a mess. Or ordered confusion, depending on your point of view. In fact, she knows just where to find anything she needs — wools of different colours, skeins of silk, bits of fabric, in any of the dozens of baskets or the random boxes and drawers filled with scraps of anything she’s picked up and found interesting. Mark raises his eyebrows, but all the same, he encourages what Alyssa, without any intention of being condescending, refers to as ‘Fran’s little hobby’, or sometimes ‘her labours of love’. Labours they certainly are, in a very literal sense. Depending on the size, they can be heavy, and physically tiring to work with as well as being mentally taxing. This one, for instance, a sort of moonscape for want of anything better to call it, is two metres by one and a half, and hangs on the wall the better to work on it. Sometimes she needs to perch on a stool, sometimes she kneels on the floor, sometimes she has to use a stepladder. Either way, making it has been no picnic. She’ll finish it, now she’s got so far with it, but will she ever do any more?

  Alyssa is wrong about Fran doing these hangings simply for love, since she has no idea what they fetch when they’re sold. Not a fortune, admittedly, but a respectable price. She’d find it difficult to believe
if she was told — they were only bits and bobs melded together on a background of beautiful or interesting fabric after all, weren’t they? Interspersed with the embroidery Fran has found, to her own bemusement, she can do easily and well. This last takes some accepting, even by her. Fran, the girl in the needlework class at school with ten thumbs, doing old-lady embroidery!

  All the same, she can see Alyssa’s point of view: even to her, it’s inexplicable what people will shell out for something like this, and Alyssa’s opinion of them pretty much coincides with Fran’s own, anyway. Their appeal has to be transitory, she tells herself, nothing more than a fad of the moment, a craze that won’t last, but still, if people are well off enough — or mad enough — to throw their money away, there seems no reason why she shouldn’t get what she can for them while the mood lasts. Mark disagrees, he thinks they’re worth their price and says he’s shocked by her cynicism, but is it all that far removed from the way he regards his own work, she asks, rather sharply? So far, he’s sidestepped that issue.

  There had, however, once been a time when she’d seriously considered giving up her work at O.S.O.T. and making a full-time job of this sort of work; she’d thought it could prove to be a useful income supplement when she eventually did have a family. But since the subject of children has become an issue — or non-issue — between her and Mark, she’s dropped the idea, convincing herself it wasn’t a very practical suggestion in the first place. She hadn’t taken into account the fact that the hangings take her ages to do. Despite what they’re sold for, if she were paid by the hour, she’d soon be into penalty time. And for another — the hassle of travelling up to the city every day is a bind, sure, something she could turn her back on without regret, but abandon her regular job? The truth is, she loves her work at the agency, and she’s achieved a satisfying status, as Art Director. It’s what she’s become, what she’s made of herself, what she wants to be. Her job is, moreover, well paid, and she likes the people she works with, the easy-going, larky atmosphere, the Irish bull. And if she did resign from the agency, gave them the push, how would they live? Precariously, is the answer. Mark’s income is an uncertain, wavering concept at the best of times, dependent upon the haphazard arrival of commissions which he might, or might not, feel disposed to accept.

  ‘Of course, you wouldn’t have to face all that commuting if we found ourselves somewhere to live in London,’ he’d thrown out a couple of weeks ago. The thin end of the wedge? He loves cities, the bustle, all life being there. Fran loves them too, but more moderately. For the present, working in London, living here, is like having your cake and eating it.

  This moonscape she is currently working on is unlike her usual vibrant, glowing work. It’s all silvery, neutral colours, with pearl beads sewn in and pieces of mirror glass and lengths of decorative silver chain incorporated into it, stitched on to a background of gunmetal tussore silk, backed by canvas. And too gloomy by half, she thinks, inspecting it critically. In the jumble sale tin, she’s found treasure trove: some antique, iridescent buttons, shimmering like opalescent Lalique glass, which might lighten it somewhat. They run through her fingers like rain, and one falls into the saucer of French chalk she uses to pounce designs through pinpricked holes on to dark cloth. Picking it out, she feels the chalk’s slightly greasy texture, like that of the residue the owl left on the looking glass. With a shudder, she drops the button, rubs her fingers and pushes back her chair, goes to the window. The glass as she rests her forehead against it is cool. She pushes it open wider and leans out into the warm evening. The sky is dark and starlit, the moonlight soft and mellow as a pear.

  Jonathan is there, hurrying across the clearing. He must have come down from Membery directly through the woods, where there’s no proper path, slithering and sliding, picking his way through the brambled undergrowth, bypassing the route by the waterfall, which the police have cordoned off with blue and white tape. She’s struck by his physical resemblance to Mark, although he’s not so tall and loose-limbed. He walks more deliberately, without Mark’s lank, casual grace. In character they’re not at all alike. None of the brothers are, their make-up is totally different, almost as though they possess different sets of character genes. Her initial glimpse of them, that day when she’d first seen them together at Henley, that certain facial similarity, gave her the wrong idea entirely.

  Jonathan wasn’t normally very demonstrative, but he threw his arms wide now as she opened the door for him and hugged her close, and for a moment or two she allowed herself to stay there, cocooned in his brotherly comfort. ‘I guessed you wouldn’t have obeyed doctor’s orders and be in bed. Couldn’t sleep, eh? No wonder. Was it very terrible?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t exactly a birthday treat!’ she said, disengaging herself, speaking in the sharp, often too sharp, way she had. Words she was invariably sorry for having spoken, as she was now, when she saw his immediately chastened face, plus a secret look that slid over it and was immediately wiped off. ‘I’m sorry, that sounded … I know what you meant.’ She squeezed his arm. ‘It was pretty ghastly, Jon, but I’d rather not talk about it, for now.’

  Would she ever forget it, though? The slow recognition that the thing circling round and round under the waterfall, the draperies lifting and sinking from the water, the hair floating like pondweed, was human, was a woman, was Bibi? That it was already, by a long chalk, too late to save her? Even if there had been the remotest possibility that Fran, by herself, could have manoeuvred her up out of the water and over the rocks on to dry land?

  Nevertheless, she’d tried to, oh heavens, how she’d tried! She’d lain down on the rocks and stretched desperate hands down to grasp — anything, the floating dress, the sodden hair, before admitting the impossibility, nearly falling into the water herself in the process. She’d stumbled back to the house to dial 999 and told the calm voice at the other end what had happened. After what seemed like for ever, they arrived, an ambulance, paramedics, a nurse — and a police doctor who told her that Bibi must have been dead for nearly an hour before she’d been found. Still numb with shock, Fran had allowed a police driver to take her up to Membery, to give what support she could. Alyssa had wanted her to stay the night but, certain that Jane would stay with Alyssa until Jonathan and Jilly arrived, she’d managed to put her off by saying she wanted to be at home in case Mark rang. The truth was, she had simply needed to be alone. Alyssa wouldn’t have understood her need for solitude, especially after such a shock, but she accepted Mark as an excuse, after making Fran swear to take the pill the doctor had left, and then go straight to bed. Fran hadn’t taken the pill, she didn’t intend to. She knew the effect sleeping pills had had on Bibi and she didn’t want to feel disorientated, the way she’d said she felt, the next day.

  Jonathan said, ‘Have you had anything to eat? Thought not. I’ve brought some food.’

  He’d raided the kitchen up at Membery and there was a feast: an eclectic mixture of smoked salmon, olives, avocado, watercress, garlic sausage, Parma ham, Brie. Party food, ordered by Alyssa for his homecoming. He sat her down in the kitchen and warmed ciabatta in the oven, put out a little dish of virgin olive oil for dipping the bread into, disregarding her protests that she couldn’t eat. She watched his delicate musician’s fingers slicing tomatoes, fastidiously fanning out avocado, laying out bread and cheese, all on a huge platter. This was a side to Jonathan she’d never seen before, and she was amazed. He opened a bottle of Beaujolais. She’d already had more than enough alcohol tonight, but perhaps the wine might help her to sleep. She drank obediently and when the food was ready, despite her protests, found she was hungry and ate ravenously.

  Jonathan joined her at the kitchen table but said little as they plucked food at random from the platter and ate, and when they’d finished, she did feel better.

  The telephone rang. She rushed to answer it, but it was only a wrong number. ‘I thought that might have been Mark,’ she said dispiritedly, returning to find Jonathan clearing the plates and p
utting them in the dishwasher, very domesticated. ‘I wish I knew where to contact him.’

  ‘Hasn’t he left a number?’

  ‘He must have forgotten.’ Jonathan raised his eyebrows. Mark wasn’t a forgetful, nor an inconsiderate man, as they both knew. ‘He left in a hurry,’ she added, a little lamely.

  Jonathan carried the coffee tray into the big room, put it down on the glass-topped table where the oranges had been and looked around for somewhere comfortable to sit. ‘It’s as bad as Membery, this place,’ he remarked with a shade of irritation. ‘Nowhere nice and soft to relax. It’s all ideas.’

  Fran smiled slightly. It had been said before. ‘You’ll find that chair’s OK. I’ll pour.’

  She knelt on the Berber rug while he sank into the Swedish leather sling chair which was, contrary to appearances, very comfortable. How long was he here for? she asked, as she handed him his coffee. Theoretically a week, he answered, meant to be a holiday, which he had to take when and where he could. But already he could see it dwindling: he had rehearsals at the Wigmore Hall beginning in a few days’ time, for a recital which would take place on Tuesday, when he was to be the guest cellist with a renowned string quartet for a performance of Schubert’s Quintet, marvellous but notoriously tricky. After that, Berlin, then Philadelphia, the merry-go-round starting up again.

  She sat back and drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them, studying his tired face. He’d been working in various parts of Central Europe for the last few weeks and his skin was tanned to a dark, coffee brown. He was thinner. He looked tired, his eyes shadowed. ‘Thanks for coming down, Jonathan, but I think you should go home, now, I’ll be OK. You’ve had a heck of a day. You look gutted.’

  ‘Forget it. Nothing I’m not used to.’