The Colonel's Daughter (5 page)

*

Detective Inspector Pitt and WPC Verna Willis have carried Garrod to a bedroom which he, yet not they, recognises as Colonel Browne's own bedroom. In this lofty bed, the old man is becoming for the second time in his life the returning war hero, the lad who showed courage and initiative, the lad who came through . . .

‘Sailcord,' he says in a disdainful, tired voice, ‘she tied me with sailcord. There's give in sailcord, you see, Sir.'

The ambulance has been called. WPC Willis, who did a year's nursing training before she joined the force, has taken Garrod's pulse and listened to his heart and both these manifestations of life are fluttery and feeble. She looks concerned as Pitt ploughs on with his questions.

‘Did you recognise the woman?'

‘No, Sir.'

‘We have reason to believe the woman was Colonel Browne's daughter.'

‘I never met the daughter. I came to this house in '76. She was on the television that year or the next. Some demonstration. She had red hair. But I never met her.'

‘But this woman was about her age, was she?'

‘I don't know, Inspector. Her face was covered. And the hair.'

‘How had she got into the house?'

‘Well. She walked in. There wasn't any noise.'

‘So she had a key to the front door?'

‘I reckon.'

‘The door wasn't bolted?'

Garrod winces. Now the returning war hero remembers the unfastened safety catch on the rifle, the puncture in the spare tyre of the jeep . . . The circling bird begins its far off turning and Garrod is silent.

‘Mr Garrod? Was the front door not bolted?'

Garrod's head lolls. He whispers: ‘Dunno how she could have known . . .'

‘Known?'

‘I've been ill, Sir. Laid up.'

‘And you believe the woman knew this?'

‘Or I would have remembered the door . . .'

‘The bolt?'

‘Yes. I would have remembered the bolt.'

Detective Inspector Pitt looks at WPC Willis, who has turned on a little green-shaded lamp in the darkening bedroom. Pitt has, in twenty-two years with the police, never felt comfortable with remorse. His look is a signal for Willis to take up the questioning.

‘How long has Colonel Browne been away, Mr Garrod?'

‘Oh. A fortnight. Thereabouts. They've gone for three weeks – to Switzerland.'

‘And is it possible that Miss Browne was told about their holiday?'

‘I don't think so. She wasn't told what they did.'

‘Perhaps they go away every year at this time, do they?'

‘Now abouts. Lady Amelia loves the Alps. In summer.'

*

And Garrod is right. Amelia Browne does love to gaze, as she gazes now, at the first stars peeping through their light years at her scented body on the hotel balcony and sense the now unseen presence of the mountains shouldering off the sky. She has dined well. At dinner, Duffy made a very un-Duffyish little speech about companionship and love, and his reassuring large presence at her side, coupled with these resonant words, have helped to quell the flutter of anxiety she had earlier struggled with. She has made no attempt, although it occurred to her to do so, to talk to Duffy about Charlotte. In spite of her protected life, Amelia Browne is like a patient birdwatcher of suffering. She detects it where others detect nothing. And in the spreading woods and rambly thickets of her husband's contented life she has often seen it, the camouflaged frail body of the bird, suffering. It has built nests in the once radiant part of him, in foliage the colour of her daughter's hair. But he isn't a wordy man. Duffy and words seem to be locked in a lifelong struggle – an iguana fighting with the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. So he has never been able to say that Charlotte has made him suffer, nor how, nor why. ‘I just don't think about her, Amelia,' he once snapped into his glass of port. Then drained the glass like a bitter draught. And Amelia saw it: some cuckoobird quite alien to him, yet lodged there, and in certain seasons repetitively calling.

Now he lies in the hotel bed, reading a new book about the Falklands War and waiting for Amelia to come in off the balcony. Slightly over-fed, he is content and sleepy. He admires Amelia for admiring the stars. He is indifferent to stars. He is beginning, lazily, to wonder what gulfs of the spirit still separate him from Amelia when the telephone at his elbow jolts him into concerned wakefulness. He picks up the receiver. Amelia's face appears at the window and stares at him. From far away under the mountains, a dry English voice speaks in a tunnel of silence:

‘Colonel Browne?'

‘Yes.'

Amelia slips into the room. She presses a thin hand to her top lip.

‘Detective Inspector Pitt, CID, here, Sir. I'm calling from Sowby.'

*

It is morning. Doyle has slept well. He congratulates himself on his refusal to dream about Margaret. He feels well in his new blood.

He hears nurses' voices whispering together over their dispensary trolley. He hears the words police . . . revolutionary . . . press . . . story . . . His scriptwriter's heart pauses in its pumping to let these words stream through him like plasma. He feigns sleep. The nurses' hands continue to measure out pills in little beakers. But over this measuring comes the almost inaudible conversation, patchy, like the shading of a face before the features are pencilled in:

‘Someone . . . hospital . . . told the newspapers . . .'

‘Sister Osborne . . . night duty . . .'

‘The same policeman?'

‘Yes.'

‘. . . in Alexandra Ward . . .'

‘Yes?'

‘Charlotte Browne.'

Now they are at Doyle's bed.

‘Mr Doyle . . .'

He opens his eyes and smiles at the nurses.

‘Sleep well, Mr Doyle?'

‘Yes. I didn't dream, thank heavens.'

A thermometer is stuck into his mouth. One of the nurses examines the chart at the end of his bed, looks at Doyle, looks back at the chart. Doyle, silenced by the thermometer, wants to compliment them on the quality of the new blood they have given him. He has been replenished with curiosity.

The thermometer is taken out, held, shaken, replaced in a glass of disinfectant. Doyle awaits pills in a red beaker, but he's given none and the nurses pass away from him, still whispering.

When they leave the ward, Doyle gets out of bed and stands up. In the bed next to his, a bald man who has dreams of tap-dancing is inserting his morning teeth. Doyle walks quietly over the lino to the swing doors of his ward, then out into the wide hygenic corridor where an Indian woman is polishing the floor.

‘Alexandra Ward?' he asks.

The Indian woman, with a jewel-pierced nose, is a stooped and slow person. She examines Doyle's bandaged arm, his hospital nightshirt, his hirsute legs beneath.

‘Left,' she says blankly.

Doyle nods, turns left into an identical corridor. No one sees him yet. He comes to a waiting area, where plastic chairs of the kind which creaked under the pelvis of Sergeant McCluskie are lined up in two rows. To his left, now, he sees a green and white sign saying Alexandra Ward, Princess Anne Ward, Edith Cavell Ward. He has come to the women's territory.

He hears footsteps approaching the reception area. Without hesitation, he opens the swing doors to Alexandra Ward and finds himself in a shadowy room, where the patients are still sleeping.

But at the far end of the room, he recognises her – the only one awake and staring at the window. He knows the name, the voice, the profile. He has even read her book, with its preposterous title,
The Salvation of Man.
The minute he sees her, he feels excitement stir, shamefaced, under the ludicrous night garment. He moves gravely towards her. She is, he summarises, one of the stars of dissent.

Still no one discovers him. The pink woman sleeps with her cherub mouth wide and her knitting folded on her feet. All the other Alexandrine women sleep, rasping through the discomforts of the short night. Only Charlotte sees him now, ridiculous in his gown, unshaven, pale and wild. She isn't afraid. Charlotte is seldom afraid. She wants to laugh. He reminds her of a younger Jack Lemmon. Any minute, she knows, he will be carried off by the day-shift nurses beginning duty.

But the day-shift nurses allotted to Alexandra Ward are busy elsewhere. Burn victims of a tenement fire are being wheeled, screaming, into the hospital. Nurses are running, surgeons are hauled from sleep, lights are going on in anterooms and operating rooms, vents hiss and blow, in the sluice rooms water gushes. And so it is because of a fire, in which two people will have died, because of Sergeant McCluskie's need to open his bowels after his dreary, caffeinated night, that Franklin Doyle is able to walk out of his ward and into Charlotte's ward and sit on her bed for four minutes before McCluskie returns, sees him and hauls him away.

‘You're Charlotte Browne . . .' he whispers lamely.

She nods, lazily. In this one, unfrightened gesture, she has accepted the stranger on her bed.

‘Franklin Doyle,' he states hurriedly, ‘scriptwriter, film-maker, bum . . .'

She smiles. In the grey light, she is superb.

‘I dare say that policeman will remove you.'

Doyle ignores this, hurries on: ‘Why are the press interested this time?'

‘Are they?'

‘I heard the press are here.'

‘They may be. They're always interested.'

‘What have you done, Charlotte?'

‘Something. So I'll do a stretch this time. Long.'

‘Want to tell it to someone who gets it right?'

‘To a bum?'

‘Sure. Who better?'

‘Then you find Jim Reese for me.'

‘Jim Reese.'

‘He might be in Brighton. Look there first. He's a drummer, or was. Thirty-seven. Dark. Very thin. Wearing a vest probably. I expect there's a warrant out. Try to find him first.'

‘Okay. Sure . . . I . . . who is he to you?'

‘No one any more. But if you find him, tell him love is probably stronger than springs.'

‘
Springs?
'

‘Yes.'

‘Spring as in the season?'

‘No. As in a coil of wire.'

‘With what significance?'

‘Just tell him – if you find him. And then,' she looks away from him at the day beginning at the window and yawns, ‘you can tell everyone else the story, I suppose: I stole, but I stole nothing of true value. The true value of what I stole would have appeared in the currency I was going to convert it to. The owners of these so-called valuables are my parents. Neither of these people, my parents, have
ever
offered anything of themselves for the good of anyone but themselves. Even now, their selfishness is intact, so I've taken nothing from them. I carried a gun – my father's, used to kill game for sport – but I wounded no one. Only myself. My sense of obedience which I tried to extinguish long ago had refused to die utterly, until now. I think it's dead now. Yet its death wounds. Do you see? In a newly ordered world, I would be obedient to the law. I am, always have been, obedient to love. In a peaceful world, I would keep the peace.'

Charlotte pauses, looks away from Doyle, who is trembling.

‘Do you expect to be understood?' he asks.

She smiles. The smile is gentle and sad. ‘No.'

‘By a few?'

‘Do
you
understand?'

‘Why did you need the gun? If it was your parents' house . . .?'

‘There's a servant there. He wasn't harmed. He has the key to the safe.'

‘And your headwound?'

‘Nothing. I fell down some basement steps.'

‘Did the servant try to defend the house?'

‘No.'

‘Did you act entirely by yourself?'

‘Oh yes.'

‘Jim Reese wasn't part of it?'

Charlotte turns away again and stares at the cracks of light in the blinds. The day will be hot again. A heatwave is coming. As Charlotte, child, she climbs to the orchard at Sowby. The ancient gardener with his black-creased hands lifts her high into a plum tree. The plum she choses with her chubby hand is half eaten away by wasps.

‘What organisation are you working for now, Charlotte?'

‘Many.'

‘Is Jim Reese part of an organisation?'

‘No.'

‘Jim Reese is not working with you?'

‘No. He needed my help. I thought he did.'

‘With what? With a political set-up?'

‘No. He just used me as a shroud.'

‘A
what
?'

‘Over his past.'

Disturbed by the voices, the pink woman has woken. She is gawping with round scared eyes at Doyle and Charlotte and pressing her buzzer that will summon a nurse. Doyle feels dismay as acute as grief at the ending of this meeting.

‘Charlotte. Can I come and see you in prison?'

‘You won't be allowed.'

‘If I find a way?'

She smiles again, touches his hand lightly. Then, with loathing, she whispers: ‘It might be ten years.'

‘No. No one was hurt. It won't be . . .'

It takes Sergeant McCluskie and Staff Nurse Beckett less than ten seconds to cross the ward and seize Doyle by his arms. In their zeal to remove him, they forget the deep wound in his right arm, and as they lead him back to his ward it begins to bleed afresh.

*

In brilliant early morning sunshine, the hired car takes Colonel and Lady Amelia Browne down and down the mountain to the waiting plane. Neither has slept for long. They wear their sunglasses and sit in silence behind the Swiss chauffeur who drives with ease and politeness, trying not to jolt his passengers from side to side on the sharp corners.