A Final Reckoning Read online

  Dad and I tried to take up our lives again. He took early retirement, and began turning his love of book-collecting from a hobby into a serious profession. Together we decided to sell up and move to Rome, where I finished my schooling at the Lycée.

  I didn’t get any taller after that year: I’ve often wondered if the sudden shock inhibited my growth. After taking a first degree (at Pomona, of course, like my sister) and consulting with my father (‘It won’t bring her back again,’ he said, looking at me over the tops of his half-moon glasses), I applied for the same courses at Edinburgh University as Sabine had been taking. Scotland was the coldest place I’d ever been, but even so, I enjoyed my years in the chilly city. There was a kind of melancholy about the country’s history and culture which perfectly harmonized with my own deep-rooted sadness. And I made some good friends, particularly Brigid Frazer and her brothers Douglas and Hamilton.

  After graduating, I spent a year at the Institute in Rome, to be near Dad again, then eighteen months in Copenhagen, at one of their art schools, concentrating on Nordic painters. During that time, I had a short-lived but passionate affair with a handsome Danish guy I met at a party at the American Embassy. Magnus Jenssen (or possibly Jens Magnussen – I can’t now remember which) was blond and tall and very social; although he spent most of his time in London working for an architectural company, he came over to Denmark almost every weekend and seemed to know everyone in that small country who was worth knowing.

  Back in Rome in my father’s apartment, I began casting around for jobs in a leisurely way, enjoying doing nothing after so many years of study. One evening, while Dad and I sat reading in peaceful silence, there came a call via the entryphone. A strange tinny voice, at first incomprehensible until I realized he was speaking with a rich Scottish accent, announced that it was Hamilton Frazer, the elder of Brigid’s brothers. I buzzed him up, suddenly gladder than I had felt for some time, Magnus (or Jens) notwithstanding. He stood in our apartment, tall as a tree, smiling a Cheshire cat smile, while my father poured him a whisky and watched benignly as he and I took up more or less where we’d left off more than two years before.

  ‘It’s so good to see you again, Chantal,’ he said, holding both my hands in his, and the possibility of love shifted weightily inside my heart. Not the fiery kind of passion which had Magnus and me tearing each other’s clothes off (consuming each other, drinking champagne at three o’clock in the morning while standing naked on the balcony of his flat, both aware that together we were going nowhere, that this was a strictly here-and-now affair, to be enjoyed like an ice-cream on a hot day or champagne in the early morning) but something far more valuable. In that moment, as I looked into Ham’s good face, his honest brown eyes, I knew that we would be happy together.

  As, indeed, we were. After our wedding, we moved to London, where Ham worked for a large legal company dealing mainly with maritime law. We did all the newly married things: had friends round for supper, were invited out in our turn, haunted the flea markets and second-hand shops, putting together an eclectic mix of junk and genuine finds, going to the theatre and the pub and – very occasionally, when we could afford it – the opera. We were young and in love, in a quiet comforting way. Sometimes it occurred to me that quiet and comforting was somewhat staid for people of our age, but I only had to see Ham smiling at me to know that it was exactly right. We spent Christmases in Rome or with Ham’s parents in Scotland.

  The years passed happily, despite the fact that there were no children. But we told ourselves there was plenty of time. Ham was left a substantial inheritance by a godmother and we bought a large three-bedroomed flat in South Kensington. I interviewed for a job at Chauncey’s, a small but prestigious auction house in Bond Street. My sister had always envisaged working for Sotheby’s or Christie’s: in a way, I felt that I was taking over the life she had been deprived of. It would be quite a while before I began to question just how healthy that was. As my father pointed out, I ought to be forging my own pathway, not stepping along hers. My new job was very poorly paid but was excellent experience – or so Ham and I told ourselves – for the future. I don’t know what we envisaged this future consisting of: me taking the art world by storm, I think, maybe fronting some arty TV programme and wearing significant spectacles, or writing a book to be hailed worldwide by the cognoscenti of the art world, while Ham made potfuls of money in the background.

  But the future never materialized. At least, not the particular one we had in mind.

  On his thirty-second birthday, after we’d been out to celebrate at our favourite little restaurant round the corner from the flat, Ham complained of stomach pains.

  ‘I ate too much,’ he said ruefully. ‘I feel completely bloated.’

  I wasn’t as sympathetic as I should have been. ‘You’re always moaning about stomach ache,’ I said. ‘Take a couple of antacid tablets. You’ll be fine in the morning.’

  And so he was. Until about a week later when he began vomiting blood. We went immediately to the A&E department at our nearest hospital. A few days after that, he was diagnosed with advanced and inoperable stomach cancer. They did the usual things, chemo and radio and so on, but not with much success. When he could no longer work, when he finally had to retire to bed, I took extended leave from Chauncey’s to stay at home with him, forced to watch my darling Hamilton growing ever more yellow and shrunken. His family came down from Scotland as often as they could, and we had some wild parties around his bed, pretending to be enjoying ourselves, every now and then leaving the room to mop up tears or swallow the lumps in our throats. Within three months, Ham was dead.

  Standing with his parents and his siblings in a windy graveyard in the little village outside Edinburgh, where he’d grown up, I reflected that for a woman so young, I’d had more than my fair share of death. My sister, my mother, and now my husband and dearest friend. There I was, an only child, a widow and still only thirty-three. Squeezing Brigid’s hand tightly in my own, I wondered what dark angel had presided over my birth.

  So here I am, back – in one sense – at the beginning of my story. Ready to take it up again where it left off. Since Sabine’s death, twenty-three years had slipped by and I had barely noticed the passing of time. Ham had died two years ago and I had spent most of my time since then either at work, or thinking about work.

  It was a Friday, a cold grey afternoon in Bond Street, and I had begun to consider the idea of going home to my empty flat, and beyond that to the weekend. I had no real plans. The possibility of an exhibition at Tate Modern, a film I wanted to see playing at one of the arts cinemas, maybe meet up with Lorna, my closest friend and colleague, who worked in Chauncey’s manuscript department. Dull stuff, I suppose – but then I was dull. Or had become so in recent years.

  Thinking that even for a Friday, two thirty-five was possibly a little too early to be making tracks, I idly flipped open a glossy art magazine, one of a pile I wanted to look through, just in case something germane to my job should show up. And there was an advertisement for a new country hotel.

  My eyes passed over it, barely taking it in.

  WESTON LODGE HOTEL

  After extensive refurbishment, historic Weston Lodge, set in the heart of the Cotswolds, is launching itself as England’s most luxurious premier boutique hotel.

  GIVE IN TO TEMPTATION!

  A new concept in luxury. Take advantage of our not-to-be-repeated

  Special Introductory Offer

  to celebrate the three-day Bank Holiday Weekend at extremely favourable rates.

  GO ON, SPOIL YOURSELF!

  and enjoy gorgeous views, gourmet meals, vintage wines, salt-water swimming pool, spa, massage, aromatherapy gym, squash and tennis courts, or stroll through our extensive gardens, or simply relax in the comfort of our well-stocked library.

  EVERY COMFORT

  is yours for as long as you wish to stay with us. Hurry to make your booking as numbers are limited. A weekly rate is also available.


  At first the name didn’t register. What caught my attention was the idea of complete freedom from responsibility. The spring bank holiday was still three weeks away and so far I had no plans beyond a vague thought of flying over to see my father. I imagined myself ploughing up and down the salt-water swimming pool. I thought of vintage wines and gourmet meals, of a masseuse easing the knots of tension from my shoulders, of strolling through the extensive gardens as dusk fell and the moon began to rise, of relaxing in the library.

  And then, as though a fist in a boxing glove had suddenly burst from the page and caught me between the eyes, I looked again. Weston Lodge. Weston … It had to be the same place. Faced with the name, offered this bolt-from-the-blue opportunity, without further thought, I called the numbers provided at the bottom of the advertisement and booked myself in for the Special Introductory Weekend.

  After that, I telephoned my father and told him what I had done. He was silent for a beat longer than he needed to be. I could so easily imagine him looking over the top of his half-moon specs, which he didn’t need since he had better sight than an eagle, but which he believed enhanced his gravitas.

  ‘Whether it’s antiquarian books, business deals, or men, always hold back a bit,’ he said finally.

  ‘Thanks for the advice, Dad, but what’s it got to do with anything?’

  ‘You’re being too hasty.’

  ‘Too late now: I’ve paid.’

  Another pause. Then he added, as he had many years earlier, ‘It won’t bring her back, Chantal.’

  ‘I know that. I’m well aware. But actually going there, to the place where she … where she died – it’s a sort of homage, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I know precisely what you mean, honey. But I’m afraid that it could all be too much for you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You can’t possibly know what effect it might have.’

  ‘I’m not the heroine of one of your Victorian novels,’ I protested. ‘I shan’t faint or have a fit of the vapours.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting you will. I’m just warning you that you could find yourself in a very bad place, Chantal, a place you really don’t need to go.’ He sighed. ‘It’s long gone, darling. Much as we wish none of it had happened, it was a long time ago and it’s over.’

  ‘Not for me,’ I said.

  ‘What do you expect to come out of this?’

  I didn’t know. Possibly, there was more to my decision than a connection to my lost sister. Ever since her death, I had speculated obsessively about her murderer. What kind of person, however enraged, could possibly butcher her own children and slaughter an innocent bystander? What circumstances in that person’s life could have led to such an unjustifiable deed? Maybe by going to the place where it all happened, I might be able to get some kind of a handle on an otherwise incomprehensible act of violence.

  Perhaps, more importantly, I might somehow begin to understand and, by understanding, loosen the black tar-ball of hatred which lay inside me like a consuming cancer. I did not say any of this to my father. I think he believed I had got over it and was leading a more or less normal (what is normal?) life. I had never disillusioned him on that score. That afternoon, we argued it back and forth for a while, before moving on to discuss a convention he’d just attended in Oslo, and the cruise he and the forcible contessa – a rich Swedish widow with whom he was keeping company, the owner of an antiquarian bookshop near the Spanish Steps in Rome – were planning to take round the Mediterranean.

  When we finally finished chatting, I sat in my office staring out of the window at London’s Friday afternoon bustle, seeing nothing. Dad might be elderly now, but he was still on the ball. And maybe he was right. Even though more than twenty-three years had gone by since Sabine’s death, it was possible that the shock of being right there where it happened could hit me so hard that I would break down, as I had done in the past. In one sense, I had no wish to explore the minefields of my memory, never knowing when something would detonate and send me into explosive mode. Nor did I want to relive those terrible years. And yet … to be where Sabine had been, where she had ended her life …

  Back in my flat, I opened a bottle of white wine and poured myself a glass. I sat down at my desk, dealt with bills, answered some email (I said I was dull). Out of my windows I could see part of the red-brick frontage of the Science Museum and, further away, the glass tower of the Royal College of Art and the trees of the park. Above my desk was a cork-board on which I pinned items of interest: snippets from the newspapers, amusing cartoons, invitations, gallery openings. There were a couple of snapshots of the four of us, Mom, Dad, Sabine and me, before she went to Edinburgh. My favourite pic of Hamilton, in a white Argyle sweater and a kilt. A photograph of Sabine laughing in Californian sunshine, her long red hair blowing about her face.

  Now, contemplating my impetuous hotel booking, I felt snails of unease, even of fear, slowly slithering around my gut. However much I wished to escape it, that sunny California afternoon, and the phone call which had unequivocally changed my life forever, were still with me, welded on to my memory, merged with my DNA. And gazing down at the bustle of the street below me – groups of foreign students, girls in horizontally striped stockings, couples heading for the nearby Italian restaurants or something more upmarket in the King’s Road – I found myself wondering, as so often before, at what point Sabine had realized that there was no escape, that she was going to die, and what her last thoughts might have been as the murderer came at her with a knife. Did she think of Dad, of Mom, of me? Or of the guy she’d told me about – Malc, she called him – met through a university drama group?

  Dad was right. It was an insane decision on my part to go to the place where she’d died, when I’d already shed so many tears over her, all the bright promise of her life ended, all her plans done for, her stories finished, the lovely things broken, the colours and the music, the babies who now would never be born, all that once had been, all that now would never be.

  Two

  Damn, damn, damn! I stood beside the car and kicked at the front tyre. Luckily I’d had time to pull over as close to the hedge as was possible before the engine stopped. Stupid damn thing. Like everybody who had grown up in the States, I’d been driving since I was fifteen or sixteen, but I knew absolutely nothing about the interior workings of a car. What was I supposed to do now, stuck miles out here in the country, surrounded by sheep and cows with not a building or another human being in sight? I could lift the bonnet and peer at the car’s innards, but even if I did, they wouldn’t mean anything. I’d just have to wait until someone came by. Some man …

  I ought to be able to fend better for myself; I had learned very early not to depend on other people. Not for the first time, I thought about enrolling in an evening class on car maintenance, but I knew I would never get round to it. For a start, fingernails full of immovable black grease was not a good look when showing Edwardian watercolours or cut-glass claret-jugs to prospective clients.

  How far was I from Weston Lodge? Close enough to walk? Near enough to telephone, see if they’d send someone to pick me up? I sighed. I’d been regretting this trip ever since leaving London. I feared Dad was right and it was all going to be more than I could cope with. Even now, Sabine’s death was still too painful to contemplate with any degree of intensity; it had been easier to lock it into some box inside my head and get on with the here and now.

  Standing in the spring air with trees budding all around me, and willows marking the line of a distant river, their spindly yellow branches strung with delicate green, I asked myself why I would want to go back, when I’d spent so much of my life struggling to go forward. What impulse urged me to visit the scene of the crime? Was it because I knew that mental images could be far worse than reality? Was it precisely because I wanted to make real that which I’d previously left to the imagination? Or was it because I felt Sabine was due at least this much, that because the Fates had intervened in the form of the
advertisement for the Weston Lodge Hotel, I owed her this … pilgrimage?

  I’d often visualized the house as it might have looked the night she died, decorated with piney boughs, great swags of holly, the mantel at one end of the drawing room a mass of ivy and greenery with tall church candles embedded among the leaves, mistletoe hanging from a central light-fixture, and candelabra blazing on the embrasured window-sills. From Sabine’s letters home, I knew there’d have been a Christmas tree in the big hall, presents piled underneath, a turkey sitting in its enamelled pan in the stone-shelved larder, brandy butter for the plum pudding waiting in the icebox, the pudding itself tied up in a muslin cloth, like someone in the olden days with a bad toothache. I’d added further details gleaned from my eclectic reading, from Dickens and Thackeray, from historic accounts written by diarists, plus an amalgam of all the Christmases I’d seen featured in Style & Living-type magazines. It was springtime now, and everything would look very different when – if – I got there.

  A car was coming slowly down the lane. I stepped forward and held up my hand. The approaching car looked to be in even worse shape than my own, but at least it was moving. And there was a man behind the wheel! As he came nearer, I could see that he was on the elderly side and looked as though a puff of wind might blow him away. Still, white knights don’t have to be wearing shining armour and carrying a sword. He slowed down when he saw me and wound down the window.