The Four Last Things Read online

‘My mother’s been in your room.’

  ‘That’s nothing new.’

  Eddie snatched at the diversion, a temporary refuge. ‘You knew?’

  ‘She pokes her nose in there most days. I leave things so I can tell. Now, what is it?’

  He felt hot and embarrassed: he hoped she did not know that he too had sometimes been in there. ‘She found something in a tin box.’

  Angel wrapped her hand around his arm and squeezed so hard that he yelped. She was pale under the make-up, and she pulled her lips back and the wrinkles appeared, just as they had done on Parliament Hill. ‘It was locked.’

  ‘She must have found the key. Or found one of her own that fitted. Or maybe for once it wasn’t locked. I don’t know.’ He stared miserably up at her. ‘She’s got the passport. She’s going to show it to your boss at the agency. And maybe the police.’

  At this point there was another broken link in the memories. The next thing he knew they were deep in Soho, in Frith Street, and he was following Angel’s shining head down a flight of stairs to a basement restaurant whose sounds and smells rose up around him like a tide. They sat at a table in an alcove, an island of stillness. A single candle stood between them in a wax-coated bottle. Eddie could not recall what they ate, but he remembered that Angel bought first one bottle of red wine and then another.

  ‘Drink up,’ she told him. ‘Come along, you need it. You’ve had a shock.’

  The wine tasted harsh and at first he found it hard to swallow. As glass succeeded glass, however, it became easier and easier.

  ‘Can you keep a secret?’ Angel asked when they had finished the starter. ‘No one else knows the truth, but I want to tell you. Can I trust you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Angel, you can always trust me.

  She stared into the candle flame. ‘If my mother had lived, everything would have been different.’

  Her mother, she told Eddie, had died when she was young, and her father had married again, to a wife who hated Angel.

  ‘She was jealous, of course. Before she came along, my father and I had been very close. But she soon changed that. She made him hate me. Not just him, either – she worked on everyone we knew. In the end they all turned against me.’

  Desperate to get away, Angel found work as an au pair, at first in Saudi Arabia and later in South America, mainly in Argentina. Then she became a nanny. Her employers had been delighted with her: she had stayed with one family for over five years. Finally, she had been overcome by a desire to come back to England.

  ‘It gets to you sometimes: wanting to go back to your roots, to your past. Then I met Angie Wharton. She was English, but she had been born in Argentina. Her parents emigrated there after the war. Angie wanted to come home, too. Not that she’d ever been here before.’

  ‘How could this be her home?’ asked Eddie owlishly. ‘If she hadn’t been here, I mean?’

  ‘Home is where the heart is, Eddie. Anyway, Angie was a nursery nurse – she’d trained in the States before her parents died. We thought we’d travel home together, share a flat and so on. It’s thanks to Angie that I know Mrs Hawley-Minton. Poor darling Angie.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘It was terribly sad.’ Angel’s eyes shone, and an orange candle flame flickered in each pupil. ‘It hurts to talk about it.’ She turned away and dabbed her eyes with a napkin.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Eddie said, drunk enough to feel that he was somehow responsible for her sorrow. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘No. One can’t hide away from things. It was one of those awful, stupid tragedies. Our first night in London. We’d only been here a few hours. Oh, it was my fault. I shall always blame myself. You see, I knew that Angie was – well, to be blunt, she was a lovely person but she had a weakness for alcohol.’ Angel topped up Eddie’s glass. ‘Not like this – a glass or two over a meal. She’d go on binges and wake up the next day not knowing what had happened, where she’d been. It was terrible.’

  Eddie pushed away his plate. ‘What was?’

  ‘It was on our first evening here,’ Angel said, her eyes huge over the rim of the wine glass. ‘Life can be so unfair sometimes. She’d been drinking on the plane. One after the other. When we got here, we found a hotel in Earl’s Court and then we had a meal. Wine with the meal, of course. And then she wanted to carry on. “I want to celebrate,” she kept saying. “I’ve come home.” Poor Angie. I just couldn’t cope. I was fagged out. So I went back to our room and went to bed. Next thing I knew it was morning and the manager was knocking on the door.’

  The waiter brought their main course and showed a disposition to linger and chat.

  ‘That’ll be all, thank you,’ said Angel haughtily. When she and Eddie were alone again she went on, ‘I hate men like that. So pushy. Where was I?’

  ‘The manager knocking on the door.’

  The irritation faded from Angel’s face. ‘He had a policewoman with him. Apparently Angie had gone up to the West End. Drinking steadily, of course. Somehow she managed to fall under a bus in Shaftesbury Avenue. There was a whole crowd coming out of a theatre, and people coming out of a pub, and a lot of pushing and shoving.’ Angel sighed. ‘She was killed outright.’

  ‘How awful.’ Eddie hesitated and then, feeling more was required, added, ‘For you as much as her.’

  ‘It’s always harder for those who are left behind. No one else grieved for her. And then – well, I must admit I was tempted. I mean, who would it harm if I pretended to be Angie? Without a qualification I couldn’t hope to get a decent job. It was so unfair – I knew more about the practical side of nursery nursing than she ever did, and I could easily read up the theory. And then she had this ready-made contact in Mrs Hawley-Minton, who’d never met her. So I told the police that Angie was me, and I pretended to be her.’

  ‘But didn’t they know her name? From her handbag, or something?’ Sensing Angel’s irritation at the interruption, he added weakly, ‘I mean, they knew the hotel where she was staying.’

  ‘She didn’t have any identification on her – just cash, and a card with the name of the hotel.’ Angel smiled sadly. ‘She’d left her passport and so on with me, in case they got stolen.’

  ‘Oh yes. I see now. But surely the passport photo –?’

  ‘I had an old one in mine. And physically we weren’t dissimilar.’

  ‘There must have been an inquest.’

  ‘Of course. I didn’t tell any lies. I didn’t want to. There was no need to.’

  ‘Didn’t they ask your father to identify the body?’

  ‘He’d gone to work in America years before this happened. We’d lost touch completely. He simply couldn’t be bothered with me.’ Angel leant closer. ‘The point is, Eddie, I know Angie would have wanted me to do what I did. Just as I would have wanted her to do the same if the positions had been reversed.’

  ‘I think you were right.’ Eddie’s voice was thick and his tongue felt a little too large for his mouth. ‘I mean, it didn’t hurt anyone.’

  Briefly she patted his hand. ‘Exactly. In a way, quite the reverse: I like to think I take my job very seriously, that I’ve made a difference for a lot of children.’

  ‘What was your real name, then?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I gave it to Angie, and it’s buried with her. Look forward, that’s my motto. Don’t look back. After the funeral I just waited until the dust had settled, and then I wrote to Mrs Hawley-Minton. And from there everything’s gone like a dream.’ She broke off and rested her head in her hands. ‘Until now.’ Her voice was almost inaudible. ‘It’s such a shame – just as everything was going so well.’

  ‘I’ll talk to my mother. I’ll make her see sense.’

  ‘You’re a darling. But I don’t think you’ll succeed.’

  ‘Why not?’ He was almost shouting now and heads turned towards him.

  ‘Hush, keep your voice down.’

  ‘She wouldn’t like us both to go away. She’d be lonely.’ />
  ‘She’s jealous of us. Don’t you see? I wish I were richer – then we could get somewhere together, just you and me. As friends, I mean, just good friends. Would you like that?’

  ‘Yes. Oh God, yes.’

  There was a long pause, filled with the noise from the rest of the restaurant.

  Angel picked up the bottle. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

  Eddie said, elaborately casual, ‘What sort of children do you look after? You could always bring them to the house if you wanted. For tea, I mean. Make a sort of treat for them.’

  ‘They often want to see where I live. But I don’t think the idea would go down very well with your mother.’

  Another silence stretched between them, heavy with silent suggestions and questions. Angel refilled their glasses.

  ‘Drink up.’ She held up her glass and clinked it against his. ‘This may be our last chance of a celebration, so we’d better make the most of it.’

  They finished that bottle before they left. By now Eddie was very drunk. Angel had to support him up the stairs. In Frith Street the fresh air made his head spin and the light seemed very bright. He vomited partly into the gutter and partly on the bonnet of a parked car.

  ‘There, there,’ Angel said, patting his arm. ‘Better out than in.’ Later he heard her calling out in her patrician voice: ‘Taxi! Taxi!’

  Eddie remembered little more of the evening. Angel took him home. He could not remember seeing his mother – it was very late, so perhaps she was asleep.

  ‘Come on,’ she said when they got home. ‘Up the wooden stairs to Bedfordshire.’

  In his mind there was a picture of the palm of Angel’s right hand extended towards him with three white tablets in the middle of it.

  ‘Take these. Otherwise you’re going to feel terrible in the morning.’

  He must have managed to swallow them. After that he fell into a dark, silent pit. The first thing that made an impression on him, hours later, was the pain in his head. This was followed, after an immeasurable period of time, by the discovery that his bladder was extremely full. Later still, he realized that if anything the headache was worse. He dozed on, reluctant to leave the peace of the pit and physically unable to cope with the complicated business of getting out of bed.

  The next time he woke the light on the other side of the curtains was much brighter, and the sight of it made his headache worse. Someone was shaking him.

  ‘Eddie. Eddie.’

  Shocked, he turned over. As far as he knew Angel had never been in his room before. What would his mother say when she found out?

  Daylight poured through the open door. Angel shimmered so brightly that he could not look at her. She was wearing her long white robe and, though her face was immaculately made up, her hair was still confined to its snood. His eyelids began to droop.

  ‘Eddie,’ Angel called. ‘Eddie, wake up.’

  7

  ‘… we are somewhat more than our selves in our sleeps, and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul.’

  Religio Medici, II, 11

  Sally had not expected to sleep on Saturday night, the second since Lucy’s disappearance. Part of her was determined to stay awake in case Lucy needed her. When David Byfield rang with the news that Michael was safe, however, tiredness dropped over her like a blanket.

  Judith, the policewoman who had been on duty on Friday, and who had relieved Yvonne in the early evening, took advantage of this weakness. She persuaded Sally to go to bed, brought her a cup of cocoa and cajoled her into taking another sleeping tablet.

  ‘It’ll just send you to sleep,’ Judith said, her Welsh voice rising and falling like a boat on a gentle swell. ‘It’s not one of these long-term ones that knock you out for ages. There’s no point in you flogging yourself to keep awake.’

  ‘But what if – ?’

  ‘If there’s any news, I promise I’ll fetch you straightaway.’

  Sally took the tablet and drank her cocoa. Judith lingered for a moment, her eyes moving round the room.

  ‘Do you want something to read? A magazine?’

  ‘Could you pass me the books over there? The ones on the chest of drawers.’

  Judith brought them to her. ‘I’ll look in a little later. See how you’re doing.’

  Sally nodded. The door closed behind Judith and she was at last alone. Lucy. Her eyes smarted with tears. She wanted to bang her head against the wall and scream and scream.

  Miss Oliphant’s books lay before her on the duvet: unfinished business that would normally have nagged Sally until she had dealt with it. She touched their covers one by one with the fingertips of her right hand. The Bible. The Prayer Book. The Religio Medici. The first two were bound in worn black leather, dry with age, their spines cracking and in places breaking away from the covers. Sally knew without looking that the paper would be so thin that it was almost invisible, and that the type would be so small that even someone with 20:20 vision would have an effort to read it. The Religio Medici had a larger typeface but the book was as battered as the others. All three smelled musty: tired, repulsive and unwashed. Sally shivered, reluctant to open any of them. Each book might be a miniature Pandora’s Box full of unexpected evils.

  ‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ David Byfield had told her on the telephone.

  ‘Then who else do you suggest? God?’

  There was a silence at the other end. Then David said dryly, ‘The person who took Lucy, perhaps.’ He had overridden her attempt to interrupt. ‘Concentrate on this: you mustn’t worry about Michael. He’ll sleep it off tonight and be with you tomorrow. You mustn’t blame him, either, or yourself. Do you understand, Sally? It’s most important. Nor must you stop hoping and praying.’

  ‘I can’t pray.’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘Listen,’ Sally began, ‘I don’t like –’

  ‘Don’t argue. Pray, go to bed and try to sleep. That is the best thing you can do.’

  David Byfield’s voice had sounded unexpectedly youthful over the phone. Like Derek Cutter, the old man had been in full pastoral mode, but his technique differed completely from Derek’s: the former’s had made her squirm; David’s infuriated her. Talk about arrogant, Sally thought. What did he know about losing a child? The autocratic, patronizing bastard: who had given him the right to give her orders? She glowed with anger at the memory. Only then did it occur to her that David might have intended to achieve just that effect. He was a clever man, she conceded: an old fool, but still clever.

  Her eyelids drooped, she slid down the bed. Endowed with a life of their own, her fingertips continued to stroke the binding of the three books. Audrey Oliphant, she thought sleepily: that’s a strange name. Oliphant sounded like elephant. Had there once been a saint called Audrey? Then, as sudden and as violent as a flash of lightning, the knowledge that Lucy was not there slashed across Sally’s mind. She sat up in bed and screamed. But the sound which came out of her mouth was no more than a whimper. She sank back against the pillows.

  The movement had dislodged the books. The corner of a piece of card protruded from the Religio Medici. Sally pulled it out. It was a postcard of the west front of a great church, an old-fashioned colour photograph bleached with age. The building was familiar, but for the moment her mind refused to produce the name. She flipped the card over: Rosington Cathedral. There was writing, too. She squinted at the postmark. April 1963? 1968? It was addressed to ‘Miss A. Oliphant, Tudor Cottage, The Green, Roth, Middlesex’. The name Roth was faintly familiar. Somewhere west of London? Near Heathrow Airport? She tried to decipher the message.

  Too many tourists and more like Feb. than April but choral evensong was super. Our mutual friend still remembered. Small world! See you on Tuesday. Love, Amy.

  A glimpse of other lives, Sally thought, of a time when Audrey Oliphant had perhaps been happy. Why do we even bother to try?

  The card slipped from Sally’s hand, and she sank into sleep. Than
ks to the tablets she lay there for what she afterwards discovered was almost seven hours. For much of the time she moved restlessly through the dark phantasmagoria of her dreams, searching for Lucy. This must be hell. When she awoke, she swam up from a great depth, painfully conscious of changing pressure and a desperate need to reach the surface.

  Lucy.

  Still with her eyes closed, she made an enormous effort and gathered together the pain, the fear and the anger. She made a ball of it in her mind and kneaded it like dough. The ball was streaked with colours: red, brown, green and black, the colours of the emotions. She picked it up and threw it over her shoulder. Then she found the strength to open her eyes.

  The bedroom was in darkness, apart from a band of light from the streetlamp slipping between the curtains and the red digits glowing on the clock display. Her pulse was racing, her mouth was dry and her eyelids were swollen and sore.

  No Lucy, she thought, and no news of her either: they would have woken me.

  Something had driven her awake. She had fled to consciousness as if to a refuge. Had something down there been even worse than this waking knowledge of Lucy’s absence?

  It was six-fifteen. She switched on the bedside light. Judith must have come in to turn it off last night. Miss Oliphant’s books were in a neat pile on the bedside table. Sally lay back on the pillows, fighting the despair that threatened to overwhelm her. She tried to pray: it was no use – the lines were down, the airwaves jammed, or perhaps no one was bothering to answer at the other end. Pray, David Byfield had told her; pray and hope. She could do neither.

  Gradually, fragments of her dreams slipped into her conscious mind. She glimpsed Miss Oliphant, attired in episcopal robes, standing in front of the high altar of a great church, which Sally knew must be Rosington Cathedral. Miss Oliphant was reading the Service of Commination from the office for Ash Wednesday in the Book of Common Prayer. Is that why they’ve taken Lucy, because we were cursed? But there are no woman bishops, Sally remembered thinking in her dream, not in this country. Have they changed the rules and not told me? In the dream world this possibility had been far more unsettling than the sight of Miss Oliphant, last seen dead in a hospital bed, apparently alive and well.