The Girl You Left Behind (48 page)

‘You’re one of Mr
Flaherty’s people.’ She stoops a little, as if she is too big for the
doorframe. She has what Paul’s
mother would have called
‘big bones’: they jut from her joints like a camel’s.

‘I’m sorry to land on your
doorstep like this. I wanted to talk to you. About the case.’

She looks as if she is about to turn him
away, and then she raises a large hand. ‘Oh, you might as well come in. But I warn
you, I’m as mad as a cut snake at how you all talked about Mom, like she was some
kind of criminal. The newspapers are no better. I’ve had calls these last few days
from friends back home who’ve seen the story and they’re trying to imply she
did something terrible. I just got off the phone to my old friend Myra from high school
and I had to tell her that Mom did more useful things in six months than that darned
woman’s husband did sitting on his fat old backside in his thirty years at the
Bank of America.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Oh, I bet you are, honey.’ She
beckons him inside, her gait stiff and shuffling. ‘Mom was a social progressive.
She wrote about the plight of workers, displaced children. She was horrified by war. She
would no more steal something than she would have asked Goering out for a date. Now, I
suppose you’re going to want a drink?’

Paul accepts a diet cola and settles in one
of the low-slung sofas. Through the window the sound of distant rush-hour traffic drifts
in on the overheated air. A large cat that he had initially mistaken for a cushion
unfurls itself and jumps into his lap, where it kneads his thighs in silent ecstasy.

Marianne Andrews sits back and lights a
cigarette. She takes a theatrical breath. ‘Is that accent Brooklyn?’

‘New Jersey.’

‘Hmph.’ She asks him his old
address, nods as if to affirm her familiarity with it. ‘You been here
long?’

‘Seven years.’

‘Six. Came over with my best husband,
Donald. He passed over last July.’ And then, her voice softening slightly, she
says, ‘Well, anyway, how can I help you? I’m not sure I have much more than
what I said in court.’

‘I don’t know. I guess I’m
just wondering if there’s anything, anything at all, we might have
missed.’

‘Nope. Like I told Mr Flaherty, I have
no idea where the painting came from. To be honest, when Mom reminisced about her
reporting days she preferred to talk about the time she got locked in an aircraft
lavatory with JFK. And, you know, Pop and I weren’t much interested. Believe me,
you hear one old reporter’s tales, you’ve heard them all.’

Paul glances around the apartment. When he
looks back, her eyes are still on him. She regards him carefully, blows a smoke ring
into the still air. ‘Mr McCafferty. Are your clients going to come after me for
compensation if the court decides the painting was stolen?’

‘No. They just want the
painting.’

Marianne Andrews shakes her head. ‘I
bet they do.’ She uncrosses her knees, wincing as if it causes her discomfort.
‘I think this whole case stinks. I don’t like the way my mom’s name is
being dragged through the mud. Or Mr Halston’s. He loved that painting.’

Paul looks down at the cat. ‘It is
just possible Mr Halston had a good idea of what it was really worth.’

‘With respect, Mr McCafferty, you
weren’t there. If
you’re trying to imply that I should
feel cheated, you’re talking to the wrong woman.’

‘You really don’t care about its
value?’

‘I suspect you and I have different
definitions of the word “value”.’

The cat looks up at him, its eyes greedy and
faintly antagonistic at the same time.

Marianne Andrews stubs out her cigarette.
‘And I feel plain sick about poor Olivia Halston.’

He hesitates, and then he says softly,
‘Yeah. Me too.’

She raises an eyebrow.

He sighs. ‘This case
is … tricky.’

‘Not too tricky to chase the poor girl
to bankruptcy?’

‘Just doing my job, Ms
Andrews.’

‘Yeah. I think Mom heard that phrase a
few times too.’

It is said gently, but it brings colour to
his cheeks.

She looks at him, for a minute, then
suddenly lets out a great
hah!
, frightening the cat, which leaps off his lap.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sakes. Do you want something a bit stronger? Because I
could do with a real drink. I’m sure that sun is somewhere near the
yardarm.’ She gets up and walks over to a cocktail cabinet.
‘Bourbon?’

‘Thanks.’

He tells her then, the bourbon in his hand,
the accent of his homeland in his ears, his words coming out in fits and starts, as if
they had not expected to break the silence. His story starts with a stolen handbag and
ends with an all-too-abrupt goodbye outside a courtroom. New parts of it emerge, without
his awareness. His unexpected happiness around her, his guilt, this permanent bad temper
that seems to have grown around him, like bark. He
doesn’t know
why he should unburden himself to this woman. He doesn’t know why he expects her,
of all people, to understand.

But Marianne Andrews listens, her generous
features grimacing in sympathy. ‘Well, that’s some mess you’ve got
yourself into, Mr McCafferty.’

‘Yeah. I get that.’

She lights another cigarette, scolds the
cat, which is yowling plaintively for food in the open-plan kitchen. ‘Honey, I
have no answers for you. Either you’re going to break her heart by taking that
painting or she’s going to break yours by losing you your job.’

‘Or we forget the whole
thing.’

‘And break both your
hearts.’

Her words lay it bare. They sit there in
silence. Outside the air is thick with the sound of barely moving traffic.

Paul sips his drink, thinking. ‘Ms
Andrews, did your mother keep her notebooks? Her reporting notebooks?’

Marianne Andrews looks up. ‘I did
bring them back from Barcelona but I’m afraid I had to throw a lot out.
They’d been eaten to nothing by termites. One of the shrunken heads too. Perils of
a brief marriage in Florida. Although …’ She stands up, using her long arms
for leverage. ‘You’ve made me think of something. I may still have a bunch
of her old journals in the hall cupboards.’

‘Journals?’

‘Diaries. Whatever. Oh, I had a crazy
idea that someone might want to write her biography one day. She did so many interesting
things. Maybe one of my grandchildren. I’m almost sure there’s a box of her
cuttings and some
journals out there. Let me get the key and
we’ll go have a look.’

Paul follows Marianne Andrews out into the
communal hallway. Breathing laboriously, she leads him down two flights to where the
stairs are no longer carpeted, and a tranche of bicycles lines the walls.

‘Our apartments are pretty
small,’ Marianne Andrews says, waiting as Paul pulls open a heavy fire door,
‘so some of us rent spare caretaker’s cupboards. They’re like gold
dust. Mr Chua next door offered me four thousand pounds to take over the lease for this
one last year. Four thousand! I told him he’d have to treble it, and then
some.’

They come to a tall blue door. She checks
through her ring of keys, muttering to herself until she finds the one she wants.
‘Here,’ she says, flicking a switch. Inside the dim light bulb reveals a
long dark cupboard. One side is lined with metal garage shelves, and the floor is thick
with cardboard boxes, piles of books, an old lamp. It smells of old newspapers and jars
of beeswax.

‘I should really clear it all
out.’ Marianne sighs, wrinkling her nose. ‘But somehow there’s always
something more interesting to do.’

‘You want me to get anything
down?’

Marianne hugs herself. ‘You know what,
honey? Would you mind very much if I left you to dig around? All the dust aggravates my
asthma. There’s nothing there of any value. You just lock up and give me a shout
if you find anything. Oh, and if you find a teal blue handbag with a gold clasp, bring
that up. I’d love to know where it disappeared to.’

Paul spends an hour in the cramped cupboard,
moving
boxes out into the dimly lit hallway when he suspects they
might be useful, piling them up against the wall. There are newspapers dating back to
1941, their pages yellowed and corners missing. The tiny windowless room is like a
Tardis. Its contents pile up in the hallway as it empties – suitcases full of old maps,
a globe, hatboxes, moth-eaten fur coats, another leathery shrunken head, grimacing at
him with its four oversized teeth. He stacks them all against the wall, covering the
head with a tapestry cushion cover. Dust coats his hands, settles into the creases of
his face. There are magazines with New Look skirts, pictures of the Coronation,
reel-to-reel tapes. He takes them out, placing them on the floor beside him. His clothes
become grey with dirt, his eyes gritty. He finds a handful of notebooks, helpfully dated
on the front covers: 1968, Nov. 1969, 1971. He reads about the plight of striking
firemen in New Jersey, the trials of the President. Occasionally there are notes
scrawled in the margins: ‘Dean! Dance Friday 7 p.m.’ or ‘Tell Mike
that Frankie called’. There is nothing relevant to wartime, or to the
painting.

He works methodically through each box,
checking between the leaves of every book, scanning the contents of every folder. He
opens every box and crate, piling its contents up and then replacing them neatly. An old
stereo, two boxes of old books, a hatbox of souvenirs. It is eleven o’clock,
twelve o’clock, half past. He looks down at his watch, realizing it’s
hopeless.

Paul straightens, dusting his hands on his
trousers, keen to escape the airless, cluttered space. He longs suddenly for the bare
whiteness of Liv’s house, its clean lines, its airiness.

He has emptied the whole thing. Wherever the
truth is to be found, it’s not in this overstuffed cupboard just north of the A40.
And then, near the back, he spies the strap of an old leather satchel, dried out and
snapped in two, like a thin slice of beef jerky.

He reaches under the shelving system and
pulls at it.

He sneezes twice, wipes his eyes, then lifts
the flap. Inside are six hardbound A4 exercise books. He opens one, and sees the
intricate copperplate handwriting on the first page. His eyes flick up to the date.
1941. He opens another: 1944. He races through them, dropping each in his haste to find
it – and there it is, the second to last: 1945.

He stumbles out into the hall, where the
light is brighter, and leafs through the pages under the neon strip-light.

30 April 1945

Well, today sure didn’t turn out like I expected. Four days ago, Lt Col
Danes had told me I could go into Konzentrationslager Dachau …

Paul reads on for a few more lines, and
curses twice, with increasing vehemence. He stands immobile, the weight of what he is
holding becoming more significant with every second. He flicks through the pages and
curses again.

His mind races. He could stuff this back
into the far corner of the cupboard, go back to Marianne Andrews right now, tell her he
had found nothing. He could win his case, collect his bonus. He could give Sophie
Lefèvre to her legal owners.

Or …

He sees Liv, head down, battered by a tide
of public opinion, the harsh words of strangers, impending financial ruin. He sees her
bracing her shoulders, her ponytail askew, as she walks into another day in court.

He sees her slow smile of pleasure the first
time they had kissed.

If you do this, you cannot go back.

Paul McCafferty drops the book and the
satchel beside his jacket and starts stacking the boxes inside the cupboard.

She appears at the doorway as he clears the
last of the boxes away, sweating and dusty after his exertions. She is smoking a
cigarette in a long holder, like a 1920s flapper. ‘Goodness – I was beginning to
wonder what had happened to you.’

He straightens, wipes his brow. ‘I
found this.’ He lifts the teal blue handbag.

‘You did? Oh, you’re a
darling!’ She claps her hands together, takes it from him and smoothes it
lovingly. ‘I was so afraid I’d left it somewhere. I’m such a
clutterbrain. Thank you. Thank you so much. Heaven knows how you found it in all this
chaos.’

‘I found something else
too.’

Her gaze slides upwards.

‘You mind if I borrow these?’ He
holds up the satchel with the journals in it.

‘Is that what I think it is
?
What do they say?’

‘They say …’ he takes a
breath, exhales ‘… that the painting was indeed gifted to your
mother.’

‘I told you all!’ Marianne
Andrews exclaims. ‘I told you my mother wasn’t a thief! I told you all
along.’

There is a long silence.

‘And you’re going to give them
to Mrs Halston,’ she says slowly.

‘I’m not sure that would be
wise. This journal will effectively lose us our case.’

Her expression clouds. ‘What are you
saying? That you’re not going to give them to her?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m
saying.’

He reaches into his pocket for a pen.
‘But if I leave them here, there’s nothing to stop you giving them to her,
right?’ He scribbles a number and hands it to her. ‘That’s her
cell.’

They gaze at each other for a minute. She
beams, as if something has been reasserted. ‘I’ll do that, Mr
McCafferty.’

‘Ms Andrews?’

‘Marianne. For goodness’
sakes.’

‘Marianne. Best keep this to
ourselves. I don’t think it would go down well in certain quarters.’

She nods firmly. ‘You were never here,
young man.’ She’s seemingly struck by a thought. ‘You don’t even
want me to tell Mrs Halston? That it was you who …’

He shakes his head, pops his pen back in his
pocket. ‘I think that ship may have sailed. Seeing her win will be enough.’
He stoops and kisses her cheek. ‘The important one is April 1945. The journal with
the bent corner.’