HIS OTHER SON (22 page)

           
‘And
this is your daughter?’ he said, turning the book for her to see.

           
Mrs
Gafney
nodded. ‘It was taken the week after she found
out who her father was. I pleaded with her to go away, to put an ocean between
herself
and him. She’d had offers from a Hollywood studio.
She could have gone out to America and started again there. She could have
escaped.’

           
Suddenly
he realised why the girl’s face seemed so familiar. ‘
Finlay
Crawford was her father, wasn’t he?’ he said.

June
Gafney
nodded her head slowly and stared off into
space. ‘I loved that man more than I have ever loved anyone. But the longer I
knew him, the more I began to realise there was dark side to him. He could be
incredibly ruthless… and cruel too. I’d seen
Finlay
reduce a fellow actor to tears, literally to tears, simply because the poor
chap trod on one of his lines during their scene together. There was a terrible
cruelty there… but also a terrible attraction. He drew people to him. He
surrounded himself with his friends.
So many famous people.
Household names all of them.’

           
Gareth
took the folded piece of paper from his pocket and started to read the names
aloud.

‘The
Brotherhood,’ Gareth said at the end of his recital.

‘That’s
what they liked to call themselves.’ She screwed up her eyes, tears pressing
out from behind the closed lids. ‘And believe me, young man, that list of yours
barely scratches the surface. It’s larger than you could possibly know. It
reaches into every part of society – business, politics, the police… even the church.
And the man… or creature… at its head is
Finlay
Crawford. But I didn’t know anything about it when we first met. As I said, I
was young… innocent, and I was bowled over because my lover was
Finlay
Crawford, and I was totally besotted by him.
 
But then one night he took me to a party at
Clifford Stein’s house in Bayswater…’

June
Gafney
stopped talking and sat staring into space,
her glass tilting in her grasp, slopping sherry over her floral print dress.
Gareth leaned forward and gently righted the glass and said, ‘Are you okay?’

She
was lost in the past, buried in the memories haunting her for the last thirty
years. She jerked back to the present day and reality with a small cry, and
stared at Gareth as though he was a total stranger.
‘A
party!’
She laughed harshly. ‘That’s a good one.
An
orgy more like
. People were drunk and drugged, and they were doing
things to each other… well, I’ll let you use your imagination. I just wanted to
go, to get out of there and go home. I told
Finlay
and he was so kind and understanding. “Of course we should go,” he said. “It
was wrong of me to bring you here. Just have one more drink while I finish
talking to Clifford.” That’s what he said, “Just
have
one more drink.” He fetched the drink for me and I, like a fool, drank it while
I waited for him… and that’s the last I remember until I woke up, naked, in the
middle of a stage. I couldn’t even tell you which theatre it was. I was
drugged. I wasn’t in my right mind…’ She shuddered violently and the tears
started to flow once more. She dabbed at them with a crumpled handkerchief.
‘Most of them were there, the Brotherhood, sitting in the front row of the
stalls, watching me… hungry, obscene looks on their faces…
Finlay
was first. The others followed. One by one they came up onto that stage and…’

The
sherry schooner exploded as she crushed it in her hand.

In his Mayfair apartment
Finlay
Crawford threw off his coat and kicked the front
door shut. The news was even worse than he’d feared. He stared at his
reflection in the hall mirror, his fingers pulling gently at the skin beneath
his eyes. There was no mistake. It was no longer as elastic as it was. The skin
stayed pulled for seconds before gradually resuming its former shape and
smoothness. He’d been warned that this would happen eventually, that
dissolution and decay were just as much a part of the cycle as the youth and
vitality that had sustained him for the past decades. But he wasn’t expecting
to see the results so quickly and so dramatically. He’d expected at least another
forty years out of this body. But it was now obvious it was not meant to be.

           
Jefferson
Phillips, his Harley Street consultant and associate member of the Brotherhood,
spelled out his options in stark and unpleasant terms. And he,
Finlay
Crawford, baulked. Damn it! He’d become used to
being
Finlay
Crawford! The character fitted him like
a glove and he enjoyed the lifestyle Crawford’s celebrity afforded him. The
thought of starting again, in another guise, with another body appalled him,
angered him. Life could be so unfair.

           
He
went through to the lounge and stood at the cocktail bar, again studying his
reflection in the mirror that served as the bar’s counter. He poured four
fingers of scotch into a tumbler, threw in some ice from the bucket, and knocked
the drink back, letting the whisky burn down his throat, making his eyes water.
Then he repeated the process.

           
He
flopped down on the leather couch and stared up at the ceiling, his mind
spinning with unpleasant possibilities. He knew he would have to choose well.
He could not afford to be saddled with a specimen anything less than perfect.
And there
had
to be talent there – an innate talent that could not be
taught, but was as natural as the lungs drawing breath. Looks were important
too. Phillips poked fun at his vanity when he raised the subject in the
consulting rooms, but he’d silenced the man with a glare. Phillips knew that
without
Finlay’s
approbation and support, he could
never hope to become a full member of the Brotherhood, and receive all the benefits
that exalted position merited.

           
The
telephone on the coffee table rang. For a moment he tried to ignore it,
preferring instead to be alone with his misery, but after a dozen rings it was
obvious the caller was not going to give up easily. He picked up the receiver
and barked, ‘Crawford!’

           
‘It’s
Clifford.’

           
‘Well?’

           
‘Bad
news, I’m afraid.’

           
Crawford
laughed harshly. Could the day get any worse?

           
‘It’s
Narina
…’

           
Crawford
went cold. He couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to
Narina
. So much depended on that woman – all his dreams and
everything he’d worked for over the past ten years. ‘What about
Narina
?’

           
‘She’s
gone.’

           
For
a moment Crawford was dumbfounded. He shook himself. ‘Gone? What do you mean
gone?’

           
‘She
went out at lunchtime and hasn’t come back.’

           
Finlay
Crawford breathed a sigh of relief and sipped his
third scotch. ‘Then why on earth are you panicking? She’s probably shopping.
It’s one of her greatest loves. Really, Clifford, I’ve had a hell of a day. You
shouldn’t go around scaring a chap like that.’

           
There
was a silence on the other end of the line and Crawford’s relief turned to
apprehension.

           
‘She’s
not shopping,
Finlay
. Martin has gone too.’

           
Crawford
took a beat. ‘What are you telling here? That
Narina
and Martin have run off together?

           
‘That’s
exactly what I’m telling you. Look,
Finlay
, I should
have told you this before, but I knew they were having… well… an affair. I
challenged her on it last night, told her it had to stop, but she just became
hysterical.’

           
‘You
bloody fool,’ Crawford said coldly.
‘As if their affair
mattered.
It would have reached a natural conclusion after the twenty
second anyway.’

           
‘But
that’s the whole point,
Finlay
. Don’t you see?
They’re in love. They don’t want it to reach a natural conclusion.
Narina
wants to live… as
herself
!’

           
Finlay
Crawford swore viciously as he saw his hopes and
plans disappearing like so much dust in the wind.

           
‘There
is one small hope,’ Clifford Stein said during a pause in the tirade.

           
‘Well?’

           
‘They
left a note. It goes on about their love and all that nonsense, and Martin is
making a stand about wanting to be an actor again and pursuing a life on the
stage…’

           
‘You’re
trying my patience, Clifford. Get to the point!’

           
‘They
have the girl.’

           
Finlay
Crawford stared at the receiver as if it was an
alien object, and then he put it back to his ear.
‘Girl?
Which girl?’

           
‘The girl from last night.
The girl you invited for lunch
before you rushed back to London. Meg Johnson.’

           
Crawford’s
puzzlement was genuine. He’d been drunk last night. He could just about
remember the girl and finding her in the downstairs corridor, and he even had a
vague memory of a phone call but… He couldn’t even bring the girl’s face to
mind. ‘What on earth are they thinking of?’

           
‘They’re
offering a trade. If you take no action against them, that is, if you promise
to instruct the Brotherhood to take no action against them, they’ll give you
the girl to use as a substitute for
Narina
.’

           
Crawford
was horrified.
‘A substitute?
Do they think this is
all a game? Do they think that all the hours I spent grooming
Narina
for this moment was just my way of passing the time?
Do
they
…’

           
‘It
could work,’ Stein interrupted him. ‘Nowhere is it written that the
vessel
has to be willing.’

           
Crawford
was silent for a moment. He took another sip of scotch. ‘Go on.’

           
‘I’ve
made some enquiries. Meg Johnson is quite a talent. She has a fine singing
voice, she’s a passable dancer, but according to Brian Topping at Sevenoaks
Rep, she’s a pretty useful actress. It’s everything you need. That’s she’s
pretty too is something of a bonus.’

           
‘I’ll
think about it,’ Crawford said and put the phone down. If Meg Johnson was
pretty, and younger than
Narina
– that would be of
benefit in later life, as he was just discovering. But his anger with
Narina
Dressler
and Martin Stein
was unabated. He might well accept Meg Johnson as a substitute, but
Narina
and Stein would pay dearly for this day’s work.

Gareth wrapped a
bandage around June
Gafney’s
bleeding hand and
secured it with a safety pin. ‘Best I can do,’ he said. ‘I was never much good
at first aid, even in the scouts.’

           
‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said, staring
down at the blood on her dress. ‘I shouldn’t talk about it. Talking about it
killed Mary. If I’d only kept it to myself she might still be here now. But she
would
keep on about it. She wanted so much to know who her father was.
And when she found out the knowledge killed her.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘It was
her twenty first birthday and we’d been out celebrating. It was my fault… I was
drunk. And when she asked for the thousandth time about her father something
inside me just snapped and I told her the story I just told you.

           
‘I neither saw nor heard from her
for weeks after that, and in the end I got so desperate I just had to make
contact with her. So early one Monday morning I went around to her flat. When
she was appearing in a play she rarely rose before noon so I knew I’d probably
catch her in. But this particular day she was up and dressed. She had her coat
on and was about to go out. She was obviously very excited about something. And
then she told me. She’d been spending most her days for the past few weeks at
the British Library, doing some research on
Finlay
Crawford and the other members of the Brotherhood, and she was due to meet with
Finlay
that morning.

           
‘I just went cold. I wanted to keep
her there in the flat. I couldn’t bear the thought of that man coming into my
life again. I tried to persuade her not to go, but she got so angry… furious.
She was screaming at me, accusing me of cheating her out of her birthright. In
the end she stormed out of the flat.