Set in Stone, page 22
part #10 of Robert Goddard Series
It was a delusion. I understand that now, with dreadful clarity. Ann did not deceive me. But something did, something that resides at Otherways, whether it is occupied or not: a madness of bees and humans; a circular despair. It is there. It will be there for as long as that house stands. It should not be. In all logic, it cannot be. Yet it is. I am the proof of that. I do not expect to be believed. Except by those who experience it for themselves. And not necessarily even by them, for it is surely easier not to believe it. Perhaps one needs to be forced to, as I have been. Then there is no choice. And only one escape.
James Clarence Milner.
I phoned the hospital before leaving the Whipper-in next morning. There was no change in Matt’s condition. He was said to be ‘holding his own’. I imagined Jeremy and his parents would already be there; they were staying at a hotel in the centre of Leicester. It was undeniably convenient for hospital visiting, odd though it must have seemed to them that Lucy couldn’t, or wouldn’t, offer to put them up at Otherways. Whether Lucy was at the hospital with them was less certain; she’d looked very tired the night before. Either way, I was relying on Daisy to have engineered a solitary departure from Maydew House. Once she’d read her long-dead brother-in- law’s confessional, I didn’t doubt that she’d want to see me alone.
It was still a few minutes short of nine o’clock when I crossed the market place. The rendezvous I’d specified, the town pump, was a small roofed structure, sheltered by trees, at the corner of the street, where it swung left towards the post office and Oakham School. A queue had formed outside the post office, waiting for opening time. But there was nobody on the other side of the road, by the pump.
As I approached, a figure detached itself from the queue and moved off at a smartish pace away from me. It was Daisy. She was carrying the envelope in her hand. You might have thought she’d suddenly changed her mind about posting a letter. She glanced back at me, but didn’t stop or slow down. She was heading for the school end of the market place, where a footpath led out past All Saints’ Church. By the time she reached it, I’d caught up.
“I felt rather conspicuous back there,” she said as I drew alongside her.
“You didn’t look it.”
“Good.”
“Are we going somewhere in particular?”
“No. But we can talk as we walk. Won’t that appear more natural?”
“If you say so.” How things appeared seemed supremely unimportant to me. Daisy’s anxiety on the point was a puzzle, but I didn’t spare it much thought. “You read it?”
“Of course.” We stepped through a gateway into the churchyard. “I’ve done little else since you left last night but read.” She raised the envelope in front of her and sighed. “Over and over again.”
“You agree it’s authentic, then?”
“Yes.” We started along the path that circumnavigated the church, the long way round to the gate on the other side of the churchyard. “James wrote it, no question.”
“You recognize his handwriting?”
“No. But the details…Only he could have written it. No-one else called Cedric Ced. And the tennis party, when he met the non-existent guest…” She gave another sigh. “I was there.”
“So it’s all true?”
“I’d forgotten her name, you know.” She shook her head. “All those years, without making the connection.” My question had apparently been disregarded. Perhaps questions weren’t really necessary. “Rosalind, of course. It had to be.”
“If this…confession…had come to light at the time, he might have had his sentence commuted.”
“On what grounds? Insanity? Diminished responsibility? He wouldn’t have wanted that.”
“Because he was determined to pay with his life for what he’d done?”
“Cedric would have understood.” Again my question had been ignored. “He wouldn’t have intervened.”
“Not then, anyway.”
“What do you mean?” The meaning behind my remark hadn’t escaped her.
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?” We were leaving the churchyard now. Daisy frowned at me as she turned into the street, not, I sensed, because she didn’t understand my remark, but because it somehow disappointed her.
“Why was the confession sent to Matt, Daisy?”
“Why do you think?”
“Somebody thought he should be warned of the dangers of living at Otherways.”
“That certainly seems the only plausible explanation.” Her head fell. She knew what was coming next. “I agree.”
“Who?”
“You asked just now if I recognized James’s handwriting, and I said no. That was true. I don’t remember it well enough to say.”
“But the name and address on the envelope?”
“That writing I do recognize.”
“It’s Cedric’s, isn’t it?”
She made me wait for an answer until we’d crossed the road and turned down Dean’s Lane, a narrow, curving street leading west. Then, almost in a whisper, she said, “Yes. It’s Cedric’s.”
“Not dead.”
“No.”
“Nor in Russia.”
“No.”
“But here. In England. Alive and well.”
“Alive, certainly.”
“Living on the Sussex coast.”
“Perhaps.”
“Come on, Daisy.” She stopped and looked round at me, roused from her reverie by my exasperation. “I’ve worked it out.”
“You have?”
“It wasn’t difficult. The extra miles on the clock in Lucy’s car? Matt didn’t imagine them. You didn’t stop at Worcester. You didn’t even go to Worcester.”
“Where did we go, Tony? You sound as if you think you know.”
“The Sussex coast.”
“To see Cedric?”
“Well? Didn’t you?”
“No. Not as such.”
“Then why don’t you tell me what you did do—as such?”
“All right.” She glanced past me. There was a nervous edge to her expression and I wasn’t the reason. Not the whole of it, anyway. I glanced round myself, but the street behind us was empty. “Let’s go this way.”
She crossed to the other side, nodding towards the next turning on the right. It looked as if she meant to circle back to the church.
“Cedric contacted me several months ago. It was a telephone call, completely out of the blue. We hadn’t spoken in all the years he’d been away. It was a shock, as you can imagine. Doubly so when he explained he was back in England and was anxious to meet me.”
“Why did he want to meet?”
“Because we’re both old and don’t have many years left to us. Because there is so much…unresolved…between us.”
“So you agreed to meet him?”
“No. I did not. Some things are better unresolved. Cedric committed treason, Tony. He betrayed his country. He betrayed me. It may be an old–fashioned attitude, but I’m afraid that, as far as I’m concerned, certain actions are unforgivable. I would have preferred him not to have contacted me at all. It would have been easier for both of us. But there it was. Thanks to that phone call, I knew. I couldn’t unknow it.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him I needed time to think. Then I wrote to him, explaining the hopelessness of what he’d proposed, that it was far too late for any kind of reconciliation, or expiation—if that was what he was looking for. The letter required no answer. I wanted none. But he wrote back, saying there were factors I didn’t understand. By then, apparently, he’d been busy researching the history of Otherways, subsequent to his selling it to Major Strathallan, I mean. About that, too, he said there were things I needed to know. He said he’d returned to set certain matters right and hoped I’d agree to help him do so.”
“But you wanted none of it.”
“There’s a reproachful edge to your voice which I don’t deserve. I owe Cedric nothing. I made my peace with the past a long time ago. That he’s been unable to is hardly surprising in view of what his past comprises.” We were heading back towards the church now. It lay straight ahead of us, along the street. “I’d hardened myself to forget him. I didn’t care to be reminded. Therefore I refused to be reminded. I believe I had every right to.”
“Yet in the end you did meet him, didn’t you?”
“As I said, not as such. I ignored his letter, but another followed. Then another. Eventually, I confided in Lucinda. She agreed to meet him face to face and explain that all I required of him was a resumption of the long silence he should never have broken.”
“That was hard.”
“But not unjust, I think.”
“So only Lucy went to see him. You did go to the races.”
“No. I accompanied her all the way. But I waited in the car while she went in to see him.”
“What answer did she come back with?”
“The only answer he could give. Lucinda told him, you see, that if he continued to bother me, I would inform the authorities of his return to England.” She briefly let me catch her eye, and she could not disguise her shame at this. “That was hard, wasn’t it, Tony?”
“Yes. I think it was. But who am I to say?”
“Someone who’s had the benefit, as I now have, of one of the ‘settings right’ he alluded to. But remember this. Others beside me could expose Cedric. His insistence on delving into the past seemed to me positively to invite discovery. And discovery is a threat to me as well as him. The newspapers would have a field day. “Old spy comes home to die.” What about the old spy’s former fiancée? I’d be fair game, wouldn’t I? Especially if the authorities pressed charges. Besides, there was Rainbird to worry about.”
“What’s he got to do with this?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, in all probability.” We’d arrived at the road we’d crossed a few minutes earlier, on leaving the church. But Daisy turned north now, away from its soaring spire. “I wasn’t certain of that, though. It had occurred to me that Cedric might be what Rainbird was looking for, that Cedric was his reason for lodging with me in the first place.”
“That can’t—” I broke off. What I’d been about to dismiss as an absurdity wreathed itself in sudden and disturbing plausibility. “Why would Rainbird be after Cedric?”
“I’m not saying he is. I’m just—” She shook her head. “Lucinda always encouraged me to get rid of him. But I was reluctant to see him gone, because with him under my roof I always felt…” She smiled faintly. “I always felt I could keep watch on him, even if the price I had to pay was that he could keep watch on me. Norman Rainbird is a mystery. Yet the mystery that really troubles me is not who he is, but what he is. I sent him packing. But you could hardly say he’s out of our lives, could you?”
“Do you have any reason to suppose he was aware of your contact with Cedric?”
“None. But if he was aware, I wouldn’t expect him to reveal it.”
“Has Cedric left you alone since your trip to Sussex?”
“Yes. But there’s something you don’t know. When we went to see him…it wasn’t Sussex. He may have moved there since. Or the postmark may have been a deliberate blind. I don’t know.”
“Not Sussex?”
“No.”
“Where, then?”
There was a park on our right now. Daisy crossed the road and started along a diagonal path leading across it. A bandstand stood in the centre. There were a few dog-walkers about and one old man on a bench, reading a newspaper. The dominant sound was of late-rush-hour traffic on the bypass to north and east of us. The sunlight was turning milky. A breeze was getting up. I remember all this so clearly—the trivial details of a humdrum locale—because of what Daisy said next. The shock of hearing her words branded our surroundings on my memory.
“We went to Devon.”
“You went—”
“Yes. Devon. I’d sworn Lucinda to secrecy. And she’s honoured her promise never to tell another living soul. But I see that you must be told. Cedric was—and may still be, for all I know—living in Torquay. How far is that from your home?”
“Fifty or sixty miles. An hour’s drive, if you pushed it.”
“Not far enough for comfort, then.”
“What do you mean?”
“You told me Matthew suspected Lucinda had lied to him about where she was the day her sister died. Now you know she did lie.”
“At your request.”
“Yes. At my request. And I lied, too. Just yesterday, to you.”
“But you’re not lying now.”
“No. The confession—the fact that Cedric sent it to Matthew—leaves me no choice but to face you with the truth.”
“And that’s what you’ve done.”
“Yes. But the truth runs to one more thing.”
She walked ahead, up the short flight of steps onto the bandstand, then she turned and looked down at me from the platform.
“We drove to Torquay. We visited Cedric. Then we left.”
“And drove back here?”
“No. That is, Lucinda put me on the train at Newton Abbot. We travelled back separately.”
“Why?”
“She said there was something she had to do. Alone.”
“What?”
“She didn’t tell me. She said there was no need for me to know. After all she’d done for me, I didn’t feel I had any right to press her on the point. Nor have I pressed her since.”
“What time train did you catch?”
“I can’t recall exactly. Half-past two. A quarter to three. Something like that. It got into Birmingham about six o’clock.”
“And Lucy?”
“She didn’t wait to see me off. She seemed to be in a hurry, as if…” She spread her hands helplessly. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“No. Perhaps because I don’t want to. But you, Tony…” She shook her head at me, almost pityingly. “You have to know. Don’t you?”
TEN
It was just a macabre coincidence. That’s what I kept telling myself. And coincidences happen. You used to say people made too much of them. You know the sort of thing: go on holiday to Fiji and meet somebody you went to school with staying in the same hotel. It’s a random event, nothing more. The odds probably aren’t even that remote.
But the odds didn’t matter. Nor did any amount of reasoning. Lucy had been fifty miles away while you were driving home to do some gardening. Just fifty miles. And nobody except Lucy knew where she’d been going or why. It was a mystery, a blank I could fill with whatever my mind conjured up. Why did you leave Stanacombe that afternoon? Why did you go to Morwenstow? A surprise visit from your sister was a plausible answer. I didn’t want it to be, but it was.
“What will you do?” Daisy had asked before we parted.
“I’m not sure,” I’d replied. “I need to think. I need to…I don’t know.”
“Are you going to try and find Cedric?”
“Yes.” She’d guessed my next move even before I’d acknowledged it to myself. “I suppose I am.”
“Because of the confession?”
“It’s all I have to go on. He’s all I have to go on. If there’s an answer, he’s the only person who’s likely to know what it is.”
“What should I tell Luanda?”
“Nothing. Tell her nothing.”
I left Oakham that morning and started south, following the route Daisy and Lucy must have used that other morning all those weeks before, when you were still alive and our world still revolved on its comfortable axis: cross-country into Warwickshire, down the Fosse Way through the Cotswolds, then the motorway to Devon. Torquay was my destination, just as it had been theirs. But I had no appointment with Cedric Milner, or William Hall—the alias Daisy had told me he was going by—and no strong expectation that he’d still be living at the address she’d given me.
Yet I had to try. There was nothing else I could do, not least because nothing was itself no kind of option. I couldn’t confront Lucy with what was, in all logic, a crazy suspicion. But I couldn’t wish away the suspicion, either. Cedric had sent his dead brother’s confession to Matt as some form of warning. That much I was sure of. But what, or who, was he warning him against? There had to be a way to find out.
Cedric had been living in a boarding house too far inland to count as seaside, even in a seaside town. Hatchmead was about the smartest house in a short and otherwise shabby terrace near the boundary between Victorian Torquay and post-war little-box land. It didn’t look like the kind of place anyone stayed for long. About that I turned out to be wrong. Not because William Hall was still in residence. He wasn’t, according to the landlady, a garishly dressed woman with a smoker’s cough and a face to match. “Been gone, oh, it must be a couple of months.” And without, unsurprisingly, leaving a forwarding address. “I don’t bother asking, dear.” But Hatch- mead wasn’t quite a dead end. “You could ask Wisdom. He’s been here so long he’s nearly a member of the family. He was the only one to get two words out of Mr Hall.”
I never got round to asking whether Wisdom was a Christian name, surname or nickname. The man himself wasn’t in, anyway. But you were likelier to see an iceberg floating across Torbay, apparently, than fail to find him on his favourite bar-end stool come opening time at the Top Hat, the second closest pub to Hatchmead. (He’d fallen out with the landlord of the closest.) I killed an hour out at a headland car park above the bay (no icebergs), then drove back in search of him.
The Top Hat was a small street-corner local, possessed of some secret appeal that meant it was three-quarters full within ten minutes of opening. Nobody had beaten Wisdom to his regular berth, however. There he was, propped against a quart bottle of whisky, weighed down by a pint of pennies, drinking Mackeson and poring over a jumbo crossword puzzle that filled half the page of a newspaper he’d folded open in front of him. I didn’t question his identity for a second. He was somewhere, if not anywhere, between sixty and eighty, dressed in a threadbare old suit, fraying shirt and grubby-knotted tie. He was almost completely bald, with a face as grey as his few remaining tufts of hair and a strange half-smiling expression that managed to mix timidity with obstinate pride.
