Chapter Eleven #2
voice declared him to be, somewhere on the scene of Clara’s
disappearance. Oh, against his will—coerced, at the end of his
father’s long reach, but there, playing a part,
involved…
Lady
Fitzroy moaned and fell back into drug-assisted sleep. Laurie let
go a shuddering breath and buried his head in his hands. A
reprieve, then, for half an hour or so. He should probably stretch
out on the striped satin sofa and try to get some sleep. He had
made it, after all, to one of the East Hill rehearsals, which
Jacobs had put off until the evening to give him a chance. There
would be another tonight.
Laurie
knew he had to go, all other possible duties discharged here. He
had been given this week, out of trust and generosity, but after
that—well, after that Laurie was nothing more or less than a man
with a job, who had to hold that job down, like untold millions of
others, no matter what crises were erupting around him. Half an
hour would give him time to stretch out and cry for his losses,
pick up his sanity afterward, and go out to work.
But the
place in him where tears came from was hot and dry. Everything he
had cried for in his life—everything, he knew, including this
horror over Clara—burned to ashes in the face of losing Sash. There
were no tears for it. He could not even feel his way around its
edges. He knew that, when he had time to take it in, it would
consume him.
The
bedside phone rang. Two tones: an outside line. Laurie made a dive
for it. Gibson was on the alert downstairs to intercept calls, but
she was moving slowly these days, grief putting years on her,
dragging her down. He snatched the receiver and answered quietly,
hoping his mother might still sleep through. He was expecting—what?
John Kucharski, with news of the investigation? Clara’s abductor at
last, with a ransom demand?
Instead
it was his father’s secretary. Laurie knew her well. A nice woman,
patient and efficient. Laurie listened for a few seconds.
Unusually, he was having trouble understanding her. Her normally
crisp Cambridge accent was broken up, choppy. “Ruth,” he said, as
softly as he could. “What on earth’s the matter?”
“Laurie. I’m so sorry, dear…to tell you like this—”
Her
voice dissolved once more. Slowly Laurie understood she was crying.
He eased the receiver under his chin and looked out through the big
sash window of his mother’s room. It opened onto the little square
that lay behind the house. In summer it was leafy and pleasant.
Even now, on what Laurie belatedly worked out must be Christmas
Eve, the branches of the trees made elegant patterns on the sky. He
watched them, sitting on the edge of the bed, running a hand into
his hair. It was possible, he supposed, that news concerning Clara
had gone to his father in the office. That the old man had been—oh,
Christ—too distraught to speak to him, had got Ruth to
call.
“Sorry. To…to tell me what?”
“Your father. It was a massive heart attack. They need next of
kin at the hospital straightaway, or I’d have come around and… Oh,
God, Laurie. He was dead before the ambulance got here. He just
went down.”
Laurie watched the trees. Their infinite fractal branchings
seemed a message to him now, one he could interpret if he just let
go. The bigger they come, the harder they
fall. Drifting from his flesh, Laurie
listened to himself take over and conclude the telephone call. He
was sensible and calm. He got the information he needed—the name of
the hospital—and he reassured poor Ruth that calling him had been
okay, that yes, she’d had to call. Yes, he was all right. He’d tell
his mother. He would go as soon as he could to the Royal
Hospital.
He would
tell his mother. Gently Laurie set the receiver down. Yes, he’d
tell his mother that, out of her family of four, only two of them
were left. That—impossibly; Laurie did not believe it himself—Sir
William was dead. He turned very slowly on the bed. He’d have to
wake her first.
No. She was wide-awake already. She
was bolt upright against the headboard, knees drawn up, clutching
the fine lacy coverlet in both hands. Laurie, who had not seen or
felt her move, stared at her. For once, she held and returned the
eye contact. She said, “Laurie. What’s happened?”
He told
her. Somehow it was possible, while she was looking at him like
that. It had been easy for Laurie to forget his mother was an
adult. She had, over the years, abdicated more and more adult
responsibilities, turning over to Gibson and Laurie the care of her
daughter, becoming daily more like the porcelain French doll she
resembled, tiny and exquisite and dead. She slept in her own room
at the far end of the house from her husband’s. Sir William,
presumably, discharged his sexual appetites elsewhere. Laurie could
not tell what had now caused her to emerge from her cloud of
sedation and gaze at him like this. As if she had remembered she
was his mother.
She put
out a frail hand, weighted down by its diamonds, and took his. “Oh,
my Laurence. What an awful thing for you to have had to break to
me.”
“It’s all right, Ma. Are…are you all right?”
“Yes. He’s dead, then? Quite dead? It’s certain?”
Laurie
shook his head, bemused. The dreadful thing was that he wanted to
laugh. He said unsteadily, “It…sounds that way, yes.”
“Oh, thank God.” Lady Fitzroy clasped together her hands in a
Catholic gesture of absolute devotion. “Que le bon Dieu soit remercié. Thank
you, thank you, God.”
Pity
shook Laurie. How she must have hated him! All those endless days
and nights alone with him, in a marriage that had turned into a
life sentence around her. She was rocking herself a little to the
rhythm of her prayers. He reached out. “Sorry,” he whispered. “I’m
so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Now I can tell. Thank God, now I can tell.”
Laurie
frowned. She was holding him at arm’s length, her fingers clamped
on his shoulders with a surprisingly powerful grip. He said
uneasily, “Tell what, Ma?”
“That poor boy! But it was convenient. I had to do it. You know
what your father is like, Laurence. He would never have let Clara
go. I knew he was going to harm her, and I couldn’t stop it. He’d
have pursued her forever. Never, never let her go. I had to do
it!”
* *
*
Laurie
took the stairs down to the hallway five at a time. The phone
extension in his mother’s room had no memory library, and he didn’t
have the number in his mobile. On his way across the hall, he
almost ran over Gibson, who turned as if in a dream and began to
follow him—afraid of God knew what news, Laurie understood—and he
smiled and held out a hand to her. There was a chair by the phone
table. He told her to sit down. For himself, he knelt.
It took
a long time for his aunt to answer the phone, and longer still for
Laurie to tell her, in his passable but halting French, what had
happened. She was hard to convince. Laurie guessed she had been
coached to be wary of such calls. Eventually she told him to wait,
and there was another long silence.
Then the line clattered to the sound of the receiver being
eagerly grabbed, and a clear child’s voice carried forth from it,
vivid to Laurie as if they were in the same room. Yes, she was
fine. She was a little out of breath; she had run up from the
kitchens, where she and her cousins were making canapés for
their reveillon Christmas Eve dinner. Her only concerns were that she missed
her brother and she could not understand why Tante Elise, who normally allowed her
to roam like a wild goat over her extensive Languedoc estates,
would not let her out of the house.
He hung
up the phone and went back upstairs. He didn’t know what to say to
his mother, who was where he had left her, curled up in the bed,
clutching her lace. It didn’t matter. Gibson pushed past him,
rushed to her side, and seized her in an embrace Laurie knew from
experience would leave bruises, powered by this much
emotion.
The room
was very warm. Laurie hadn’t noticed before. It was stuffy, the
temperature of sickrooms and hothouses. A place where impossible
secrets could grow. He strode over to push up the sash window.
Leaning his hands on the sill, he looked out into the
light.
* *
*
Laurie
had found John Kucharski alone in the Scotland Yard ops room. He
had had some difficulty making it to this point past the security
desks. He supposed he hadn’t made a convincing concerned relative,
shaking finely as he was with reaction and joy. He wondered if
Kucharski was having trouble believing him too. He had sat in
silence through Laurie’s news, staring at him across the desk. This
was why Laurie had come to him directly rather than phoning: to see
his face and let his own be seen, to be, as far as possible,
accountable.
The ops room was lined with images of Clara. Of Sasha too,
although from these Laurie kept his gaze carefully averted. Clara,
Sasha, a handful of other dark-eyed, harsh-faced men he didn’t
know. Stefan Petrica. He fought a painful lurch of his heart. He had to stay calm,
remain in the functional zone he had found between anxiety for Sash
and this wild, unmanning release from fear over his sister. “I’m
sorry,” he said, for he thought the fifth or sixth time. “I…I know
all the trouble we’ve caused. But she’s okay, sir, really. She’s
found.”
Kucharski rubbed his brow. He had in front of him, Laurie
could see, a formidable array of files and photographs, and he
looked tired. He said at length, “All right. I…want to believe you,
Mr. Fitzroy, but I think there has to be a…well, a misunderstanding
at best. This has been an investigation at the highest level.
Partly because of your sister’s vulnerability, of course, but
also—I won’t kid you—because of the men we think are involved.
There just isn’t any way it could have proceeded so far as it has
without basic checks being done on family and…”
Laurie
pulled out his mobile. He handed it across the desk, top flipped