King Rich (11 page)

‘I'm sorry if…' Annie began but Denise was having none of it, and they went, Vince leading the way through swing doors that gave onto a set of stairs. The doors closed behind them. Denise didn't follow.

‘Jesus,' said Vince.

‘A tube of delight,' he says, sitting back and fitting the cigarette into a crook of his left hand. ‘Not that you approve, eh Friday? But you fit the world better than we do. You're happy here, aren't you, you dumb brute?' And the dog responds to his tone by looking up into his face with eyes the colour of old furniture.

Richard sucks at the smoke with caution. Coughing threatens his bowels. Infirmity he can cope with. But his bowels appal him.

The dog is licking at Richard's calf, persistently, firmly. The flesh tingles. Richard leans forward, holds the dog's head away to one side, and studies the wound of sorts on side of the calf. Not a cut, just a split, like a lipless mouth. It isn't the first time he has noticed it. He doesn't know why it doesn't hurt. He presses the edge with his finger and a bead of thick fluid, maggot-coloured, forms in the heart of the lesion, swells as he presses until the dog licks it away, cleans the wound, the breach
in his flesh. Richard is intrigued, not alarmed. Gently he tries easing the two edges apart. At the top of the lesion the skin is mica-like in texture and it tears suddenly with a little stab of pain and a rivulet of blood follows the path of least resistance down his calf until the dog cleans that away too with a single muscular slurp of the tongue.

‘Good boy,' says Richard. ‘And the women went to wash the corpse…' He giggles to himself, pulls a miniature from his pocket and unscrews the cap and raises it to his lips without looking and he knows immediately from the dirty petrol smell that it is Scotch and he savours the burn on tongue and throat and the sense of calm, the quenching of fires of unease.

He surveys the room. He has achieved little and it has taken hours. To move a single table takes an effort and then a rest, a drink, a regaining of breath and courage. But there is now at least the suggestion of a party, four tables brought together in the centre of the room and covered with starched white cloths, their folds still clearly visible. And Richard knows where he will find the cutlery and stemware, the decorations, the trimmings. But he has done enough for the day. It must be noon or so. He will take Friday to the car park roof and then if it is warm enough he'll sleep there beneath the little overhang, though if the wind is keen he'll go to a room.

‘Here, boy,' he says as he raises the Scotch again to drain it, ‘here, Friday,' and without looking down he feels the dog slide in beneath his left hand, soft fur against hard flesh. He strokes
the dog and tips the little bottle and then he feels the dog stiffen, straightening its frame, suddenly alert. He senses the surge of a growl in the dog's throat. ‘What is it, Friday? What is it, boy?' but even as he whispers he hears the drilling start.

* * *

‘But why was he so upset?

‘Search me,' said Vince. ‘One minute he was holding Annie's hand and telling her when her birthday was and the next he was blubbing like a baby. And that's when she stepped in and shooed us out. Though she'd clearly been dying to do that from the start. Sausages are ready, by the way.'

‘What was all that about “I did what I could”?' said Jess, laying out cutlery and crockery on the garden table.

‘That's what he kept saying, and she kept saying it back at him. Which would seem to imply that it hadn't worked, whatever it was and whatever it was trying to achieve.'

‘Or that he actually
hadn't
done everything he could and was feeling guilty about it,' said Jess, pouring wine into three glasses. ‘So, where to from here? Annie?'

Annie didn't know. She had been touched by Karl's reaction to her visit, by the soft but insistent grip of his hand, by the way he remembered her birthday, by the sheer strength of the emotion that her father's memory had aroused, but she didn't feel she had any right to go back to the hospital and question him further. She didn't like upsetting people at the best of
times and he was clearly in a condition that didn't need more upsetting.

‘If you don't like these, you don't like food,' said Vince, placing a plate of split and glistening sausages on the faux-rustic table. And Annie sensed in him once again a sort of prissiness, a neatness that was both appealing and slightly distancing. It was there in the way the sausages had been arranged on the plate, in the garnishing of parsley tufts from Jess's garden, in the cleanness and softness of his hands, the cut of his trousers. It had even been there, she thought, in those distant school photos. You could tell from the tie at the collar, from the better-ordered hair, that Vince would never quite be the one to let himself go, that he might ride pillion with anarchy for a while but in the end he'd dismount. Her father though, well, that hair of his.

‘As I saw it,' said Vince, ‘the old boy clearly felt that he actually could have done more to help Rich. And she clearly felt he'd done too much. In other words, he liked your dad, she didn't. Agree, Annie?'

Annie thought she did, on balance. But she wasn't sure it got them very far. Nothing much had got them very far. Detective work in real life wasn't like detective work on TV. The pieces of the puzzle didn't arrive neatly and sequentially and nor did they seem to lead to any solution. Indeed any additional piece of information seemed just as likely to complicate the mystery as to clarify it.

‘Do you know anything for sure?' asked Jess. And over the course of a plate of Le Traiteur sausages, a bowl of mixed salad
and two bottles of chardonnay they agreed that the only things they knew for sure were that Annie's father and Karl Hamilton had gone into business together the year before Annie was born, that Richard and Raewyn had got married six months before Annie was born, and, thanks to Vince's research, that the business had prospered throughout the 1980s, employing half a dozen draughtsmen until around 1990, when things started to unravel. Richard had an affair and either left home or was kicked out.

‘Do we even know that for sure,' asked Vince, ‘that he had an affair?'

‘Mum was pretty emphatic about that, and she certainly played the part of a woman scorned.'

‘And since then,' said Vince in conclusion, ‘we know only that he suffered some sort of accident and underwent surgery, that he gave as his address a flat belonging to a prominent local family who claim never to have heard of him and that Karl bought him out of the business some time after that. Since then, nothing. For seventeen years.'

Silence. From over the fence on the warm, thick evening air came the uniquely cracked voice of Gene Pitney, ‘Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa', transparently faked emotion from long before Annie was born.

‘Is he dead?' said Jess. ‘Sorry, Annie, but it's got to be faced.'

‘No,' said Vince. Annie shrugged. She'd entertained the thought, of course. Sixty didn't have to be old – Vince wasn't old. But Vince wasn't her father.

‘Do you want to go on?'

‘I think so,' said Annie. ‘But I'm not sure what leads we have left. I'm going for lunch with the old boy on Park Terrace tomorrow and he's promised to drag Ben along. But if they had anything to tell me they'd have told me by now and if they were trying to hide something they would hardly have asked me to lunch. And I don't think we should really go and upset Karl again. Which leaves Denise. And she clearly didn't want to see us in the first place.'

‘But why?' said Vince. ‘There has to be a reason for feelings that strong. If you don't go and see her, Annie, I will. I've got the address.'

Annie smiled. ‘I'll go,' she said.

‘Have you thought, by the way, of putting a missing person ad in
The Press
, or even talking to a journalist? Someone out there must know something.'

‘Yes, but Mum might see it. Or one of her friends who'd be only too pleased to tell her. And I really don't want her to know I'm here.'

‘I thought you'd say that,' said Vince, smirking. ‘Which is why I kept your name out of it. Is there any more of that chardonnay?'

* * *

The bus went only three-quarters of the way up Mount Pleasant. It was a remarkable journey. Larger and newer houses
had crept up the hill, and the larger and newer the houses the greater the damage: panoramic windows split into vast shards; slab concrete walls thrown to Pisa-ish angles; plaster finishes torn like fabric; breeze-block walls with zigzags through them. On the corner of Oceanview Terrace a house was held up by three wooden buttresses each ending in a free-standing cube of concrete. But from right up there on the outer edge of the Lyttelton volcano you still looked out over the glitter of the Pacific, with nothing but water between you and Chile. And gulls rode the wind.

A vast macrocarpa hedge, trimmed rectangular, and an arch cut through it with a wrought-iron gate. The path led down to the hefty white house, a thing of tilt slabs and plate glass and a triple garage with a swimming pool on top of it. The pool looked to be empty but the house seemed not too badly damaged. Annie made herself not hesitate before ringing the bell. Denise came swiftly to the door. Trousers and shirt again, pearls, expensively cut hair and immaculate make-up.

When she saw Annie her face seized.

‘You,' she said. ‘I thought…'

‘I know,' said Annie, ‘and I'm sorry to trouble you. But I didn't want to upset your husband again and I would like to find my father and clearly you know something I don't, so here I am.'

The living room was as Annie would have expected. Modish spare furniture, plain white walls, a slate-coloured carpet, a magazine-like cleanliness and a floor-to-ceiling window that
overlooked the ocean and had somehow survived the quake. Denise didn't offer a drink. Annie's spine didn't touch the back of her chair.

‘It's none of my business,' said Denise, ‘how your father behaved towards his own family, but I find it impossible to forgive what he did to us. Karl bent over backwards to help him and yet he still…'

‘Please,' said Annie, ‘can we begin at the beginning?'

There followed a series of questions from Annie and answers from Denise, who soon warmed to the task of putting her venom into words. She'd been suspicious of Richard from the outset when Karl had gone into business with him, but business was business and Karl said Richard had flair and anyway she was preoccupied with their children, three of them, all little and there wasn't much money around.

Annie had already noted the portraits on the piano, done in chalk and pastel, the kids' eyes unnaturally bright, the lashes lengthened, cheeks plumped, the easy lure of sentiment. Annie sensed, knew, that if she ever had kids she'd succumb to it too. Those kids on the piano would be Annie's age and more, would be parents themselves by now. Denise had been surprised but relieved when Richard had done the right thing by a noticeably pregnant Raewyn. Karl had been best man. Annie's birth had seemed to put Richard on the right track at last and for half a dozen years in the early eighties business had prospered. Karl had been able to take on staff and all seemed well.

‘Then your father returned to his ways.'

‘His ways?'

‘The stories. It was all over town. It didn't seem to bother him that he had a wife and daughter. And it reflected on the business, of course.'

‘What exactly…?'

‘I'm sorry, Annie, but it's not my job to tell you things about your father that your mother hasn't. I'm not sure that I'd want to anyway. I know it's not fashionable but I happen to hold religious beliefs that say what your father did was a sin.'

Annie was on the point of interrupting but Denise swept on.

‘Raewyn was dead right to kick him out. I begged Karl to do the same, to buy him out if necessary, anything, but Karl said personal life was personal and your father was the creative brains behind the business and so on. For me the firm was tainted after that. And I wasn't the only one. People didn't like it. Clients left in droves.'

A container ship bound for Lyttelton was steaming with infinite slowness across the sparkling horizon. And Annie noticed with a little frisson of shock that Shag Rock had all but gone. The old outcrop of rock that you could walk out to at low tide and clamber over, whose volcanic sharpness would rake your hands with a thousand tiny lacerations that stung in the salt water, had crumbled to almost nothing, levelled by the quake. Annie remembered the shape of it, remembered swimming further along the beach, remembered the dozens of happy dogs that romped there on weekend afternoons. Who
else was in the picture? She could recall neither her father nor her mother. Only the dogs and the sharp scratchy rock and the blinding light on the sand.

The more Denise spoke the further Annie felt she was being taken from the remembered truth, the father who had shown her ducks, who had drawn for her, had held her to the window on a winter's morning.

‘Of course,' Denise was saying, ‘after his accident the writing was on the wall. He couldn't draw any more and that was the only thing he'd been good for. Karl tried to find things for him to do but nothing worked and he drank more and more and eventually Karl bought him out. Very generously, I might add, considering how he'd damaged the business's reputation. If it had been me, he'd…'

‘Have you seen him since?'

‘What do you think?'

‘Thank you for your time,' said Annie. ‘Please don't get up. I can find my way out.' And she did, astonished at her own abruptness.

Sin. The word rang in Annie's skull as she strode down Mount Pleasant Road. What had she meant? Did it matter what she meant?

That her father had had an affair? That he'd had serial affairs? That he'd had a gay affair? Whatever it was it had to be sex. Nothing upset a clenched woman like Denise as much as sex. Or rather the thought of sex. Or rather the thought of people enjoying sex.

Oh, how men screwed up over sex. With women it was the lure of love that felled them, the hope and the delusion of love, but with men, sex. Even her father, it seemed. Fathers were men. And men fell. Had she ever really known him?