A Ghost at the Door (12 page)

‘We’re supposed to be getting married, Harry. Stop this – please. For my sake.’

‘You must understand, I have to find this woman. To know what happened to my father.’

‘Forget your father. He’s dead.’

‘Jem . . .’ He was about to protest that she’d been the one who had set him on the trail but the pain in her eyes told him there was no point in trying to win the argument with
logic.

‘Harry, it’s you and me. The present. Our future. Damn the past.’

‘You don’t understand, Jem.’

She stood up. ‘Correct. Full marks. Top of the class. I don’t. First fucking thing you’ve got right since you got back!’ She disappeared into the bathroom and made a
point of slamming the door behind her.

There had been a further surprise for Susannah Ranelagh in addition to the arms full of roses.

‘You’re staying with me, Susannah,’ he had announced.

‘I’d thought . . . a hotel. As always.’

‘I wouldn’t hear of it,’ he said as he placed her bag in the back of his Mercedes. She’d arrived with her life teetering on the brink of damnation and yet within minutes
he had brushed the clouds away. As, somehow, he always had.

She had tried to talk of Harry while he was driving the several hours to his home but his hand reached out for hers, squeezing it in comfort. ‘No, all that later,’ he instructed and,
as ever, she had done as he had asked. Instead, they caught up on old times – so many of them and too old, perhaps, but, with every mile along the motorway and through the winding hedgerows
of the country lanes, she felt the years slip away and she was young once more.

As the Mercedes bit into the gravel of the long drive she gazed on the ancient house in awe. His home, set in the cupped hands of the hills behind. It was her first time. She wondered how long
it would take her to climb to the highest point, just as she had used to, at home in the hills of Kerry. He left her suitcase sitting on the tiles of his wonderful, echoing hallway.
‘I’ll take it to my room,’ she suggested but he shook his head. ‘No. Later. Eat. Relax.’

She stretched up to kiss him, on the cheek, nervously, and his eyes filled with surprise, just as they had that first time in his rooms at Oxford after she had dropped her blouse and advanced
upon him.

‘A glass of champagne before we eat,’ he suggested. It had been sherry back then. But he clicked his fingers in correction. ‘No, of course. Forgive me, Susie. You prefer Pinot
Grigio.’ She always had. And the glass was there, with a simple meal not far behind. Smoked salmon. Salad. Prepared by his own hand. She felt sure that a man who lived on his own in a house
of this size would have a cook and a housekeeper but there was no sign of either. Of course, he’d sent them away, so she could be alone with him. Private. Intimate. In the wonderful
oak-filled library he had created. He gave her his antique New England armchair clad in tobacco leather with its view down to the lake. And whiskey in a thick crystal tumbler.

‘Irish,’ he said.

‘The whiskey or the glass?’

‘Both.’

They had always drunk the same, the whole group. One would decide on the drink of the moment and the rest would follow, even the girls. It had been the sixties, no place for feminine weakness.
Drink together, learn together, love together, five young men and three women joined in a conceit and a conspiracy that would last so long as they lived. They hadn’t thought of themselves as
pretentious, just better than the rest, sitting around each other’s rooms in college, propped on window seats or in overstuffed armchairs, honing their minds, scraping away convention while
their less talented contemporaries got drunk on cheap port and threw up in the corner of the quad. They were an elite, dedicated to intellectual outrage. The drink wasn’t the reason why they
had all ended up sleeping with each other but it hadn’t stood in the way, either, oiling the wheels that had taken them along a new and liberating path away from the confines of convention,
and in her case from the Catholic Church – or so she had thought. It was only later that, somehow, her upbringing had reclaimed a goodly chunk of her, dragged her back, made her feel guilty.
And lonely. Not even the wealth she’d gained could prevent that. Mrs Nun, they called her on the island – or was it Mrs None? But only behind her back. Didn’t stop them accepting
her money. Yet sitting here, with him, for the first time in her life she felt that everything could be reconciled.

She raised her glass in silent toast, drank. He was telling her some amusing tale about poor Findlay, one of their group from Oxford, when she began to feel the jetlag kick in. A sudden lethargy
made her mind wander. No surprise, at her age. Bone weary, as only old bones can be, but she thought nothing of it, drifting along on the sound of his voice until she realized she wasn’t
simply drained but couldn’t move. Beginning to find it difficult to breathe. A stroke, perhaps? But she could feel no pain. And still he was smiling.

It was only then that things began to fit into place. At first she refused to believe. Why he had picked her up at the airport. Brought her here. Dismissed the staff. Not allowed her to be
recognized by a single other soul since she’d set foot back in Britain. ‘Why?’ she gasped, but already she knew. ‘Harry . . .’

He remembered – how could he ever forget? – that first time in his rooms overlooking Christ Church meadow when she’d arrived for her tutorial wearing a tight
little frown and a still tighter blouse tucked into her waist that didn’t even pretend to hide the body beneath. She’d ‘sported his oak’, locked the outside door behind her
as she’d come in so they wouldn’t be disturbed. A stifling day of the Trinity term, the ivy around the old sash window rattling in exhaustion from an unseasonably dry summer that left
him sweating inside his woollen suit. He’d asked her if she would like a glass of sherry and she had slipped off the blouse. Desperately earnest, no gentle allure, no foreplay, no real idea.
He’d suspected, and later confirmed, that he’d been almost her first.

The sex had been an academic exercise. It was never going to be sustained: he had too much to lose. So, instead, he led her up another path, where they quickly slipped into a sharing of minds
rather than bodies, flirted with ideas, fondled fantasies and shared these fantasies with the others in the little group he formed. They shared their bodies, too, although she’d made it clear
to him that she slept with the others only because it was what she knew he wanted. Finding oneself through others, he’d called it. Which was precisely what he was doing now.

Killing her was inevitable. The Darwinian conclusion of it all. Survival. His, not hers, of course. She was an irrelevance – a useful irrelevance over the years, he had to admit, but her
purpose had long since faded, like her grey, forlorn hair and skin dried by exposure to too much sun, although the eyes were still bright, full of marmalade and chestnuts, those same eyes he
remembered looking up at him from the front row of the lecture hall, leaning forward, eager. Even then she’d been just that little bit too enthusiastic, like a sheepdog that followed a step
too close. Inevitable she should be trampled.

Like Findlay. He’d killed Fat Finn, too, plied the blancmange of a man with drink to the point of oblivion, then taken him to a point beyond. That had been four months ago and still no one
had found the body. In another while the brambles would have overgrown the path and the cottage would disappear

In his mind he’d almost managed to persuade himself he’d done Findlay a favour, put him out of his misery. No fear, no blood. He hadn’t truly killed Findlay at all in one
sense, merely hastened the process. But now, with Susannah, this was different. There was no escaping his responsibility as he sat watching the woman die, her eyes twitching, widening in alarm as
she began to realize what was happening to her. He was surprised at how calm he felt. He wondered if he would still feel the same in the morning.

Harry had slipped into a world he found impossible to share and it seemed as though Jemma had followed his example. Breakfast had proved desultory; she’d not slept and it
showed.

‘What’s next?’ she asked as she watched him make a mess of buttering his toast with his left hand.

‘Help me?’

She did as he asked and with meticulous care, buttering every corner of the toast before covering it with a blanket of her mother’s homemade marmalade. She did it without either complaint
or conversation, then pushed the plate in front of him. ‘And?’ she whispered, wanting to know whether he had changed his mind.

‘Try to find Susannah Ranelagh.’

He hadn’t. Harry Jones. Always determined. Driven. And, it was beginning to seem to her, inexcusably selfish.

‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ she said. Couldn’t butter his own bloody toast yet still he wouldn’t back off. ‘Mustn’t be late for school. Clean up the
breakfast things. If you can.’ And, before he could finish chewing, she was gone.

The lake. One of his ancestors had built it, shortly after returning from Waterloo when labour was dirt cheap. Took them almost three years. Two centuries later he knew every
bit of bank, every stand of bulrush, every blind spot, and the depth of every reach of the water to the nearest foot. Useful, when you want to dispose of a body.

He stared out from his living room, cup of tea in hand, retracing his footsteps. She’d been light, almost gaunt after all those lonely years, and even at his age he could still manage a
wheelbarrow. It left traces in the dew-damp grass but they would already have disappeared with the rising sun. The spot just along from the willow, with nothing but owls and a foraging vixen as
mourners. She was wrapped in a heavy, rusted chain that he’d found in the old stable block, secured with two heavy padlocks, and that had made it hard physical work. He’d almost lost
his grip as he’d heaved at the handles of the barrow, but he’d managed; not so much survival of the fittest, he’d thought, not at his age, but at least the most determined.
Susannah had cooperated – hadn’t she always? – slipping beneath the dark waters with scarcely a ripple and nothing but a startled moorhen to offer the eulogy. Then it was
done.

He thought he’d avoid that spot by the willow for a while. Go about the rest of his business. He had so much still to do. And his tea had already gone cold.