Chapter 17
What Helen Said
He took the letter to Rookhill on Saturday afternoon, in his breast pocket, folded in three. For the whole length of the lime drive he hadn't decided whether he was going to give it to her.
The house was less brilliant by day. In the pale flat light its windows were just windows, and the stone had a damp bloom on it, green in the corners. The great front door stood a few inches open on a hall that smelled of lilies and floor polish. Mrs. Pym let him in. She took his coat without a word and laid it over her arm and looked at his face with her small gray eyes, and then, unexpectedly, touched his sleeve. In fourteen years she had never done such a thing.
"Mrs. Marlow's in the conservatory, sir," she said. "She's been expecting you."
"Did she say so?"
"She doesn't need to," said Mrs. Pym.
The conservatory ran along the south side of the house, a long vaulted room of white iron and glass full of citrus trees and the rich, drowsy smell of damp earth. Helen sat at the far end in a basket chair, in a gray cardigan, with a rug across her knees and a book face-down on the arm beside her. A tray stood on a low table. Two cups. A silver pot. She was looking out through the glass at the sodden lawn. He walked the whole length of the tiled aisle between the lemon trees and the stephanotis before she turned her head.
"Dear boy," she said. "You look worn out."
"Were you expecting me?"
"Verity rang." She smiled, a small, grave, sorry smile. "I'm told you had an adventure at a railway station."
"I did."
"I'm so sorry. It must have been dreadful." She pointed to the chair opposite. "Sit down. Have some tea. It's lapsang; I know you dislike it; I had Mrs. Pym make you a pot of the other."
He sat. He didn't take the cup.
She watched him with her head slightly tilted, in the soft green light among the trees, with the rain-wet glass behind her. She looked older. He saw it in the shadowed light, the way you see a crack on a good plate. There was a looseness at the jaw that hadn't been there in November, and a fine tremor in the hand that held the saucer. And yet her eyes, gray and level and measuring, were as they had always been. They took him in from collar to shoes as if she were listing him for sale.
"I'll tell you what I think," said Helen. "And then you can tell me I'm wrong. I think you've had a dreadful six months. I think you've done very well. I think you went to Carrow in a state of great kindness, and you saw a woman with a look of Isabel, and for a moment the whole of your grief turned into hope. And then it broke." She laid a hand on her breast. "I know. I felt it too. I used to see her at the foot of the stairs."
"You did?"
"For weeks." The gray eyes didn't waver. "I'd come down in the morning and there'd be a girl in a yellow scarf on the bottom step, and I'd say her name, and it would be the coat on the newel post. It's the cruelest trick. I wouldn't wish it on anyone." She looked at him steadily. "But I think you must let it be a trick, dear. Or it will become something else."
"I had a letter," said Callum.
He hadn't meant to say it. It simply left his mouth in the warm green quiet and hung there.
Helen's face didn't move.
"A letter."
"It came through my door on Thursday night. Typed. Unsigned." He took it out of his pocket but didn't hand it across. He held it on his knee, like something that might spill. "It says that Nora Albright is Isabel's half-sister. That Gerald had a second family in Carrow. That you've known since 1991."
Silence.
It lasted five seconds. He counted them. The conservatory dripped. Somewhere under the floor the great old boiler gave a small, shuddering cough.
Then Helen Marlow laughed.
It was a low, light, dry, breathless sound, nothing like her usual laugh. It startled him. She put the back of her hand against her mouth and shook quietly with her eyes shut for the best part of half a minute. When she lowered her hand there were tears on her cheeks, bright and unashamed, running down through the powder.
"Oh, my dear," she said. "Oh, my poor dear. Gerald?"
"I'm only telling you what—"
"Gerald Marlow didn't have a second household. Gerald Marlow didn't have a first. He was the most faithful, the dullest, the most hopeless man who ever lived. He was frightened of waiters." She dabbed at her eyes with the corner of the rug. "He collected maps. He knew the contour lines of every coast in Britain and couldn't have found the bathroom in a hotel. If he'd ever tried to deceive me I'd have known at once, because he'd have gone red to the ears." She drew a long unsteady breath. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It isn't funny. It isn't funny in the least. Whoever sent that to you is a wicked person. Do give it to me."
He held it out.
She took it between two fingers, the way you take something from a stranger, and read it through once, quickly, without any change in her face. Then she folded it again along its creases and laid it on the tray beside the teapot.
"Typed," she said.
"Yes."
"On a machine."
"An old one."
"How very sinister." Her mouth twisted. "Callum. Listen to me. There's a sort of person in the world who watches a family like ours. They see the money and the house and the name and they think, there's a lever here. They wait for a death. And when there's been one, they write." She leaned toward him. Her voice was low and warm and level. "Someone has found out that you're grieving. They've found out you went to Carrow. They've found out about the woman. And they've written you a story. A tidy one. One with a villain and a secret and an answer." She sat back. "I'd give it to Tobias, if I were you. He's very good at this sort of thing. He was in the police for years."
"He drove me home on Friday."
"I know. I asked him to." She smiled. "I was worried."
"He took the long way round the bridge."
"It's shut."
"It's been shut since November."
"They're slow." She shrugged lightly. "Councils."
She took up the pot and poured the tea, which was lapsang after all, in a thin smoky thread, and held out the cup. The steam rose between them in a small gray column. He looked at her hand. It was quite steady. He looked at her wrist, the left one, where the fine pale line still showed, the ghost of the old support. The gold watch had been moved, once more, to the other arm.
Why do you do that? he thought. Why do you keep moving it?
"Helen," he said. "Why did you cancel Isabel's phone?"
The cup stopped in the air.
"I'm sorry?"
"Her line. The sergeant told me. In December. It was cancelled, as a courtesy, he said. Just after the inquest was opened."
"Was it?" She set the cup down with great care in its saucer. "I don't remember. I expect I did. I expect it was Verity. It was a dreadful time. One signs a great many papers." Her gray eyes rested on his face. "Is it important?"
"I don't know."
"Then I should leave it."
"The call she made on the fourteenth. The last one. To a number in Carrow."
"A wrong number," said Helen gently.
"For six minutes."
"Dear boy." She laid her hand over his for a moment, cool and dry and light. "She was in a state. She was crying, I think. She'd been low all week. She rang a hundred people that month. She rang me twice from the car, in tears, and I couldn't make out a word." She took her hand away. "She'd got something in her head. Some guilt. She wouldn't say what. I think it had to do with the baby she lost."
He stared at her.
"What baby?"
"Oh." Helen's face changed. For a fraction of a second, so quick that he might have imagined it, something crossed it, a brief bright flick, like a bird against glass. She put her fingers to her lips. "Oh, my dear. I'm so sorry. I thought you knew."
"We lost one. In 2020. At eleven weeks."
"Yes. Yes, of course. That's what I meant." She breathed out. "Of course. I'm confused. It's the shock, you see, I've been so tired. Do forgive me." She took up her book and set it down again. "Do have your tea."
He didn't drink the tea.
He met Esme on the stairs.
It was a quarter past five and the light had thickened to the color of old honey. He had politely refused dinner and walked out of the conservatory into the long hall under the portraits with his coat over his arm and the feeling of having been shown, very politely, to a door. At the foot of the great staircase he stopped to put on his coat. A voice above him said, low and quick:
"Uncle Callum."
She stood on the half-landing in her school uniform, in the stained-glass light, with a book against her chest. She had been there, he thought, for some time. She was pale and very intent, and her gray eyes in the gloom had the wide look of someone who has been listening at a door.
"Esme."
"Is it true you saw Aunt Isa?"
He looked up at her. "Who told you that?"
"Nobody. I heard." She came down two steps and stopped. "Mummy and Granny were talking. In the library. Mummy said you were seeing things. She said you'd gone to the north to look for a ghost." Her chin lifted. "I don't think you're seeing things."
"Esme, you mustn't—"
"She told me once," said the girl in a rush, softly, glancing back up the stairs, "that she had a friend who looked exactly like her. Aunt Isa. When she used to come and see me. She said her friend was like her mirror, only the mirror was the one who was real, and she was the reflection." A swallow. "I thought it was a joke. I thought she was being funny. But she wasn't laughing when she said it. She had her sad face on."
Callum went absolutely still.
"When did she say that?"
"At the lake. In the summer. We had a picnic." The words came faster. "She said her friend's name was Nonie. She said Nonie was the cleverest person she knew, and that she'd done a terrible thing to her once, and she was going to put it right. And then Mummy came, and we stopped."
"Esme."
"Esme!"
The voice came from the top of the stairs. It was sharp and clear and cold. Verity stood at the head of the flight in her charcoal suit with one hand on the banister and her face quite white, looking down at her daughter and then at Callum with an expression he'd never seen on her, a hard bright terror, like a woman looking down a well in which something has moved.
"Come up here."
"Mum, he—"
"Now."
Esme looked at him. It was a swift, grave, level look, full of apology and something else, something fierce and urgent he couldn't read. Then she turned and went up the stairs with her head high and the book clutched to her chest. Verity put an arm round her shoulders, hard, and steered her into the shadows of the gallery without looking back.
At the corner she stopped.
"You'll leave my daughter out of this," said Verity quietly, over her shoulder.
"I didn't—"
"You'll leave her out." She turned her head. "I don't care what you think you're doing. I don't care who you think you saw. I'll go to the police. I will, Callum. I'll have you served with an order. If you speak to her again, I will end you."
The door of the gallery shut.
He stood alone at the foot of the staircase in the honey-colored light with his coat half on and his heart going slow and hard in his chest. Above him, from a long way off, he heard a murmur, a voice raised and lowered, the sound of a girl saying but Mummy. Then the closing of another door.
And he knew, quite suddenly, the way you know in a dream that the floor isn't there, that Verity's terror hadn't been for him. It hadn't been for her sister's good name, or her mother's. It had been for Esme. It was a mother's fear, naked and pure and immediate: the look of a woman who has seen a stranger walk up to her child with a lit match.
What are you afraid I'll say to her? he thought. What are you afraid she'll say to me?
He finished putting on his coat. He let himself out of the great front door into the dusk. As he went down the long drive between the limes, with the lit windows of Rookhill at his back, one by one, like a liner leaving, he heard behind him the soft dry crunch of tires on gravel, and turned.
A long black car stood at the foot of the steps with its lights dipped. A man sat at the wheel, lean and gray, with his gloved hands at ten and two. He wasn't looking at Callum. He was looking straight ahead through the windshield, up the drive, at the lit house.
He sat so still that it was only when the headlights came up slowly to full that Callum knew he had been watching all the time.