The Return of Captain John Emmett (36 page)

Laurence jumped up. The figure in the doorway was slight; a girl, he thought. She looked more surprised to see him than he was to see her.

'I'm Mrs Chilvers,' she said.

She was older than he had supposed. Her figure, voice and bearing were of a young woman but her face, though pretty, was not. Fine lines crossed her forehead and her lips were chapped. She had mousy, straight hair and was dressed in a rather smart, long-sleeved blue dress with a wrapper. He wondered whether she had just come in. Then, as she stepped forward, the fabric dropped a little and, under a string of plump pearls, he could see what looked like an old bruise, yellow and violet, between her neck and her shoulder blade. She sensed him looking and shrugged the wrapper up again, clutching it to her as if she were naked underneath. Tiny blotches of pink blossomed on her cheeks.

'I'm sorry. I was asleep,' she said. 'George will be back soon.'

She was still framed in the doorway, apparently uncertain as to whether to come in.

He put his hand out. 'Laurence Bartram,' he said, in what he hoped was a reassuring tone.

She stepped forward and put out her hand awkwardly to shake his. 'Vera,' she said. 'I'm Vera.'

She was staring at him while keeping hold of his hand. His glance flickered downwards to register long pale scars between the buttoned cuff and her hand as she pulled it away.

Almost immediately, and while he was just beginning to wonder whether he could ask Vera about her friendship with John, he heard a car outside. Vera seemed startled and looked behind her to the doorway although there was nothing she could possibly have seen yet. A few minutes later a door slammed and George Chilvers strode into the room. He made no attempt to disguise his irritation at finding her there.

'Shouldn't you be resting?' he asked his wife. 'Haven't you taken your medicine? Where's Rose?'

'I have. I
have
rested. Rose gave me the new cordial at lunch. Sorry, sorry. I just heard Rose let someone in and I came down because I thought it might be you—'

'Well, as you can see now it
is
me. So there's no need for you to hang about.' George raised his eyebrows at Laurence, inviting him to share his amused exasperation. Vera had hardly left them when he said, 'Women, eh? But I'm afraid my poor wife suffers from her nerves. Scared of her own shadow but what can one do?'

He smiled, man to man. Laurence did not smile back.

'I didn't catch your name,' George said, extending his hand, evidently more relaxed now his wife had gone. 'But don't I know you already?' He looked puzzled.

'Yes and no. My name is Laurence Bartram. We met when I came to look round your father's nursing home. But the person you met was, to a certain extent, a fiction.' He had decided to come clean about his original visit. 'I was ostensibly looking for residential care for my brother then. That brother doesn't exist. The person I am now is a friend of the late John Emmett.'

For a few seconds Chilvers looked genuinely surprised, but he recovered fast. 'Of course. I thought there was something fishy about you then. I'd guessed you might be a newspaper journalist but perhaps you're simply a habitual fantasist, Mr Bartram?"

'I represent the family of John Emmett and, to a secondary degree, Mrs Eleanor Bolitho.' Laurence ignored George Chilvers' raised eyebrow. 'It is possible I made a mistake in approaching your father in the way I did but my motives were to clear up some questions that remain over the circumstances of Captain Emmett's death. I'm sorry that I felt it was necessary to deceive him. It was not lack of respect but necessity. As it happens, I thought him a good man doing an important and difficult task. I don't want to have to tell him of my fears that a patient's belongings were misappropriated.'

Chilvers still looked comfortable. 'Good he may be, indeed, a saint he may be, but a businessman he is not,' he replied smoothly. 'But actually it's irrelevant. The thing is, my father's dying. He's not likely to see the summer. A large tumour. Quite untreatable in the long term. Well, in the short term, to tell the truth. Once he dies I might just sell the whole place as a going concern, and go abroad. Or I might let it continue to bring me in a tidy income. Though some things will have to change. I haven't decided, but either way you running to my father is hardly going to hurt me. It might hurt him, of course. Perhaps that would be satisfaction enough for you, having already led this "good man" down the garden path?'

When Laurence didn't reply, George Chilvers went on, 'The thing about my father is that, despite his strange passion for invisible illnesses, he's a traditionalist at heart. Takes everybody's story at face value. Gives hours of his time, even now that he is a very sick man. Indulges the deluded, the weak, the malingering, the storytellers: he never discriminates. Has been known to reduce fees for long-term favourites. All very noble but, in the end, this isn't an order of nursing nuns. And too much coddling makes it far too easy for a man to stay ill.

'So, take the matter of suicide, which I am sure you intend to do sooner or later. Almost all the suicides connected with Holmwood have been patients who had been forced out into the considerably less tolerant world outside. It wasn't Holmwood they had a problem with, it was returning to their so-called nearest and dearest. Or they loved melodrama, as many of these types do, and simply miscalculated.'

Laurence remembered the description of the young man throwing himself head first over the banisters on to the flagged hallway. It seemed all too carefully calculated to him.

'But mostly they could see eviction from our little Eden looming and couldn't face it,' Chilvers went on. 'After all, they were men who had already proved themselves unable to face adversity in other spheres. I'd include your friend Captain Emmett in this. My father seemed to think he was turning a corner. He was certainly getting restive and becoming a damned nuisance, frankly.'

'He went to London,' Laurence interrupted.

'He went to London and caused us all a hell of a bother. We were responsible for him. Pulling these stunts was the sort of selfish act Emmett specialised in. His suicide was all of a piece with this. My father was ill in hospital in London. I had to deal with Emmett and keep Holmwood running.'

'What was Captain Emmett doing in London, do you think?'

'I have no idea and, frankly, I don't care. Picking up a tart and taking her to a hotel? Fornicating with another man's wife? His sort preyed on women. He even brought Mrs Bolitho to Holmwood, trying to pass her off as his sister while she slavered over him. He must have thought we were fools. Well, my father may react like a fool through his own innocence, but I am no man's patsy. Then she had the impertinence to complain about our treatment.'

Laurence was determined to keep his temper. What he needed was information. He recognised nothing of John in Chilvers' view of him but he remembered Eleanor describing Vera Chilvers' crush on him.

'Treatment?'

'We kept him in the custody of his room. If he couldn't be trusted to respect our boundaries, then he needed to be restrained. It wasn't the first time. He was always challenging our decisions.'

'Restrained?'

'Not a straitjacket, I'm afraid, if that's what you were hoping for. Locked in. Constantly supervised. He cut up about it, of course. For a period of time—a very short period of time—I had to sedate him with veronal. He could get quite violent when crossed.'

'You had the training to make such decisions?'

'I hardly feel I need to justify our regime to a self-confessed liar,' Chilvers retorted, and to Laurence's satisfaction he now appeared to be only just keeping his temper under control. 'Each patient has a broad range of medication and treatments written up by my father at admission, which covers all conceivable possible future requirements. The day-to-day treatment plans are a matter of discussion and we tend to pick and choose from what was prescribed in the patient's file. There can't be a doctor here every minute of the day.

'In this case, when my father returned to Holmwood he reversed the treatment decision. He likened Emmett's troublesomeness to pins and needles in a dead leg when circulation returns. My father's trade lends itself to metaphor. Unfortunately, and foolishly in my opinion, my father always had a soft spot for the man, but you only have to see what Emmett was capable of when he attacked our attendant outside the church. He may well have been your friend, but he was violent, dangerous even. Assault is what saw him admitted in the first place. You would have thought he would have had a better war.'

'You knew him in the war?' Laurence said, attempting to sound surprised. 'I hadn't realised. Were you in France?'

Chilvers flushed. He recovered almost immediately but Laurence knew he'd scored a hit. 'I knew of his war. It precipitated his illness,' said Chilvers. 'Much to my regret I was unable to fight myself; I have a degree of scoliosis.' His hand curved towards his spine. 'One has to accept the limitations it imposes and move on.'

'It must be hard.'

'I fear I'm revealing a side of your friend that you didn't know?'

'I didn't actually know him at all well,' said Laurence. 'I know his sister.'

Something approaching amusement crept into Chilvers' voice but it made him if anything less attractive. 'Ah, yes. Emmett's sister. Or should I say "sisters"? I'm reminded of that little ditty: "The bible says to love my brother but I so good have grown,/ That I love other people's brothers better than my own." So are we discussing his real sister or the one who prefers other people's brothers?'

'If you mean Mrs Bolitho then, yes, I know both women. I count them as friends.' Laurence was still trying to keep his voice under control. 'But at present it is Captain Emmett's possessions I am interested in.'

'All returned to his family, such as they were.'

'Not all, I think. I believe you retained some letters.'

'And your belief rests on what facts?'

'Because Mrs Bolitho tells me you have some correspondence from Captain Emmett to her and possibly from her to him.'

'Well, I hardly think Mrs Bolitho can set up her camp on the high ground. Both of you playing your charades, but I imagine you're aware she's an adulteress, as well as an impostor. A woman full of tales and accusations. I hope she hasn't wrapped you around her little finger, Mr Bartram. Are you a married man?'

'The letters?' said Laurence, crisply. 'They are legally the property of the family.'

He wanted to protest that Eleanor had had no further physical relationship with John once she decided to marry William but sensed that Chilvers would be more gratified than rebuked by any discussion of Eleanor's private life.

'No letters, I can assure you,' Chilvers said. 'Why should I lie? Violet ink and lascivious thoughts are hardly my reading of choice. If there ever were any letters, I can assure you they must have been long destroyed.'

'If there were letters, they should have been put before the coroner after John's death.'

'Indeed? I do have some grasp of the law, including that of defamation. Perhaps you have forgotten, or didn't know, despite the richness of your information, that I am a solicitor?'

'Does the Law Society know of the wills you've drawn up for patients and the bequests profiting you or your father?'

Chilvers shook his head. 'Clutching at straws, I think, Mr Bartram. The few wills I made are all quite in order, I think you'll find. The legal position of lunatics is entirely clear. No wills were made when any testator was of unsound mind. But some legal assistance with all kinds of matters is part of our service to our unfortunate guests.'

'And your wife?'

'My wife? Mr Bartram, are you now going to insult my wife? Or are you simply going to continue to insult me?'

'You drafted her will?'

'I certainly did. And it was witnessed. You are obviously aware she was, for a while, a patient of my father's: a delicate woman, Vera, but, as you can see, she is still very much alive. Because she is my wife, and as we have no children, if she died intestate her property would come to me in any case. However, any will I drafted initially for her was made void by our marriage. I fear I may be missing some point here?'

'You were blackmailing Mrs Bolitho,' Laurence said, nettled that the conversation was not going as he intended.

'That is quite an offensive accusation to make against a professional man. I'll let it pass but I think it is time you went, Mr Bartram. Quite why I would want to blackmail a woman like that escapes me.'

As Chilvers turned away, Laurence said, 'You wanted to blackmail her firstly because you were anxious that your cruelties at Holmwood should not be given any publicity, particularly by an experienced nurse. Even the most indulgent father might think twice about leaving an enterprise that he had built up with care and kindness in the hands of a cruel, dishonest owner. Secondly, your wife's attachment to John Emmett, though unreciprocated except in terms of friendship, might have provided him with evidence of your shabby treatment of a woman you had a duty to protect. Thirdly, and crucially, I believe you had a strong physical attraction to Mrs Bolitho, which you wished to consummate in any way you could. You were yourself a married man at the time. Mrs Bolitho might have needed coercion, even had she not found you repellent.'

He looked steadily at Chilvers, who stepped forward, clenching and unclenching his left hand as it hung by his side. Laurence was willing him to lash out. It was twelve years since he had won his house cup at boxing, but he was leaner and perhaps fitter than the man opposite him. Chilvers may well have made the same judgment, as he stepped back slightly.

'I am not going to stand for one more minute of this. You may have been bewitched by Mrs Bolitho and her bastard child, but I most certainly have not. You have no proof of the existence of any letters. All this is conjecture. Fantasy. I might remind you that the first time I met you, it was you, not I, who were acting under false pretences. Kindly leave my house. If you return I shall call the police.' He rang the small bell on the table.