Desire Line (35 page)

Replay.

Once he'd tucked her up and joined her inside, the car performed a reckless U turn and exited the scene via the bridge although it was a manoeuvre that had to be completed by your brain. The camera on this side lacked a director's guidance. It stayed trained on Rhyl's distant gleam and by a trick of reflection even the shot you might have banked on straight through the windshield isn't there. Do what you like— zoom, freeze, contrast, reverse— it fails to materialise thanks to that dirty smear of light across the glass. So eventually you let the car proceed on its way. A creepy, deserted Wellington Road is all that's left, the darker strip to its right is land that you know slopes down to the lake. Those scrubby trees (they're taller now) don't offer any obstruction. But this being the wrong angle for Rhyl's signature flash of sea, we could be almost anywhere—

And still I hung on one more time for the closing scene. Held my breath for the dénouement that wasn't going to be provided. When I had to move I stretched, rubbed at my hot eyeballs and yanked Libby's curtains apart, feeling just for a second or two so far out of myself it could be the surface of Mars I'm about to reveal— instead of the good old avenue and an empty sky.

The implication was huge.

I'm not a murderer. I'm descended from a murderer. That's Josh manhandling a female corpse with a lot of effort but not seeming in any hurry. A witness could've turned up any moment, him being stopped on Rhyl's main drag and though it was empty at 1.06 a.m. if a camera was able to record the action, another vehicle from either direction would throw a searchlight on him. But there he was, tucking in. Checking this is OK. Then something else. I actually feel anxious for him as he smoothes the soaked hair away from the face— no the camera couldn't show
that.
But he did. I knew. And he took his time. Love, you'd think, again and again. Tenderness. Also absolute confidence he'd get away with it. Which he had.

Next door my bed's very convincing and I sleep four hours, an unlucky number.

Under the subheading Things We Don't Do Now, Gramps Geoffrey once told me this. Before all our personal messaging systems, to speak to another person you were forced to ring their house. Often they didn't answer. In which case the caller— Geoffrey admitted it was himself— waited a moment and rang again.

‘Why would you—?'

‘Ah-h,' he said. ‘Good question, Yori. Excellent. Because being clever doesn't make you not a silly old fool.'

When I wake around midday as soon as I come to, the Professor's right there. He's solid as that wardrobe. His high-bridged nose, which will always look comic to a Japanese, like something stuck on, is being tapped with one mottled finger. Tap tap tap tap tap.
A silly old fool.
And actually very much not a fool, his expression tells you though he went to his grave afraid he'd acted it over his daughter. I see him and the background is always his white study. He had used Pryorsfield just as the big solid building it was till Sara was taken. His defence against the intolerable? Paint in a shade they could market as SnowBlindness and new glazing. For contrast, matt black gadgets constantly revised. A room with no dark corners and nowhere for dusk to settle. A space he could be master of.

Cruise Control claimed no more sightings of Sara once she'd been dragged from the lakeside but, keeping up family tradition, I ask for one last rerun. Nobody home. No catch— I'm a fisherman reeling in a holed net and feeling just about as sick over it.
And
it was Saturday. No work. I'd slept but felt too leaden to move from the seat.

Tess would have plans or I made up plans for her.

The civil disturbance in East London re: a disrupted water supply is over thanks to Casino Pigalle sending in tankers.

Some ex-friend from Bristol is in hospital in Lima, one leg cast from groin to ankle— he's asking me, and about four hundred others, if we have contacts to help get him to the airport tomorrow?

Tomiko's not in studio but horizontal rain is lashing his window.

Oxford will have 30 degrees plus again today, high for August let alone May.

Kailash has a new man, ‘a Malayan billionaire— u'll no name when u hear.'

In a mad impulse, I send
Hurray! 

Nothing back.

Then there's Josh. But we can't speak. Now. Whoever else saw what I'd seen must have helped him. His colleagues, his friends. How come, otherwise? So never a fool, Geoffrey, you knew the man I thought was Josh was a flicker on a lightboard. Or a shell, maybe, rotted from inside.

I make tea. I wish Libby would come down here and bang on the door and bring her human smell in. (Japanese do not smell and half of me must miss it.) I heat soup. Catch the mug's sulky expression as I choose to drink from a beaker at my desk where I've left Sara's broken necklace lying— Oh and
now
from Kailash a single 
.
Yes!
I
feel
like a bit of bug this morning— you'll get no arguments.

There's no difficult call to make. No arguments here, either. I join the ranks of Josh's anonymous accomplices by starting to pack everything up – and the letter from Fleur falls out. Still in its envelope. Opened and put back. Even if I hadn't recognised Fleur's writing there's the postmark across the commemorative stamp (a man in a comedy hat, labelled Henry 1V). Big clue that, the history stamp chosen for Sara. As well as the smudged ‘Oxford 15.11.08'.

Pryorsfield,

Monday

Dearest Sara

The time you've been away seems to have flown by. Though perhaps on heavier feet for you? I cannot imagine. I do know the date, and what it will be very soon and how you must dread it. I'd say bear up, darling, if it didn't fix me in a previous century! Geoffrey and I are convinced the more we discuss it (and we discuss little else) that either Eurwen will arrive unheralded or one of Josh's enquiries will come to something. He is a clever, resourceful man don't forget, and a father.

Geoffrey, as you know, was already acquainted with Julien Fortin, which helped. His daughters seem truthful and comment made by Henriette (the cleverer, with the alarming haircut?) has stuck in my mind. It was that she had ‘got the idea' Eurwen was wanting to go ‘a different way' and made it very plain (before she left) she had no intention of working for her GCSE's, no interest in A levels and would never consider University. So Eurwen has had her own thoughts. When she returns we can encourage her to share them with us.

But it is you who concerns us darling, perhaps as much as Eurwen. You are not answering our calls. Last night I very nearly decided to turn up on Josh's doorstep, weather the storm if there were one (perhaps I'm misjudging?) and to take stock, to find our next move. Would that have been so bad?

One more thing before I leave you in peace. I can say in a letter what I should have but did not when we were face to face (our lunch at La Croix springs to mind). Your problems, your unhappiness can be made better. I am not so vacuous as to say solved. But among people who love you there can be healing. I'm a great believer in the power of love. I send all of mine now.

Yours, as ever,

Fleur

PS Even the work, darling, we can mend.

On Rhyl-sky-blue paper that no one made any more, Fleur's letter was rational and kind. And posted on Nov 15
th
. Even allowing for a proper postal service operating back then surely it couldn't have arrived in time to be read by the drowned woman? By Josh then? No. Having just proved several times over Josh was responsible for Sara's death, I failed to convince myself he'd open a letter addressed to her. On the reverse side, he was a policeman. By instinct would he turn any information down? No. Yes. I couldn't get over how the letter came from Fleur, a woman he
did
respect, whose intentions he wouldn't go against without— without— ? All this seems trivial to the majority of people. I know.
I know.
But I was right to get hung up on it— just my reasoning was wrong. The organiser/journal still broke off with Sara and Josh in a Rhyl pub joined by Meg who might bounce if dropped. I laid
A First
out all over again in its fat chapters face up. Getting them to this position didn't mean any sort of decision had been made. Turned them over to Sara's side. One good idea was still to burn the lot. Josh had kept his secrets all these years then burst on-screen in the early hours with a body in his arms— nothing put down on paper could blur that. No one but a policeman, my grandfather, could've got away with
that.
He was a violent man at bottom so could've murdered her.

Or, at best, failed to save her.

Did he make the distinction himself? He was letting it kill him either way. But a single action alters your future not who you are. And somewhere deep in the molecules, Josh remained the Josh I'd grown up with.
And
forgetting arguments and counter-arguments, Fleur's letter had been opened and read— and kept. A mistake Josh would never have made.

Chapter 24

16th November, a.m. 2008.
A dream? Perhaps not yet myself, but aware nevertheless, I followed…

…Thomasina Swift's dash through the fields to meet a lover. At fifteen, slim and supple as bamboo and tall for her age they lock glances, their eyes level. Where could the girl's length of bone have originated? One parent a tradesman, the other a housemaid: so from whence came this patrician height and Renaissance mind? ‘The mother Maria, being so tiny her husband could place her on a barrel as a jest, making customers roar to see the doll-like woman beg to be got down. It is probable she never learned more than to sign her own name. Though Jacob Swift was lettered and expert in bills and accounts, before the end of childhood Thomasina could out-compute her father in her head and would do it over and over to win pennies. Turned away by a local clergyman we must assume she taught herself Latin, Greek and some Natural Philosophy since over the course of a single year the innkeeper claimed to have obtained for this prodigy Virgil's Eclogues, some early books of the Iliad (though he was cheated by the seller for it turned out a bastardized, illegible version) in addition to a treatise by Roger Bacon and a tract by Sir Thomas More.'

Of course, in
A First
she was both scrupulous and shy with regards the question of Thomasina's paternity, disproving almost by the way Elizabeth Longford's ridiculous candidature of Samuel Richardson. (The Father of the Novel was otherwise engaged that year getting his eldest daughter well married and writing his will). She, herself, refrained from nominating even when a paucity of evidence made it so tempting, a good story if poor history. It was enough to record one Abram Foley's expression of delight to his brother for ‘those tender treats' provided at the Merman's Tail; he is writing in 1757, late June, the month of Thomasina's conception. So it was enough for her purpose to append here: ‘Abram Foley, (1709–1778), an intriguing and highly attractive figure of the time, always on the edge of great matters; essayist, revelator, scientist and mystic, friend of Benjamin Franklin, supporter of stricken writer Christopher Smart (even in the poor man's
extremis
, at Mr Potter's Madhouse) and a correspondent of the polymath, Swedenborg.'