House of the Lost (18 page)

Theo remained, absolutely motionless, in front of the screen. If the opening words had burned into his eyes, the whole dreadful, damning text of the rest of the document had skewered deep into his brain. Where has this come from? This is a confession, and I didn’t write it, I know I didn’t. His eyes skimmed the screen again, and words and phrases danced jibingly before his eyes, like demons with pitchforks.

‘Some half memory from her past waited for her . . .’ The words dredged up the image of two people making explosive love in the middle of a long-ago afternoon, but more vivid was the statement about her hair being draggled with weeds and her flawless complexion stained with river mud, because this was the image Theo had had since she died. People thought drowning a beautiful way to die – the water would just take you, they said poetically – but there was nothing poetic or beautiful about drowning in the foetid waters of the Chet, or being half blinded by the rank slimy weeds . . . For a moment Theo thought the sick dizziness was returning and he sat very still, willing it to go away. After a few moments it passed and he was able to look back at the screen.

‘A triple dose of the diazepam prescribed for me in London . . .’ Who else knew about those sedatives, suggested by Theo’s doctor four months earlier? He could not remember ever mentioning them to anyone.

The dreadful possibility that he might have written this himself trickled across his mind. Was that remotely conceivable? Maybe he was going mad – maybe that was the explanation to all the strange happenings in Fenn House, or maybe he had been harbouring some deeply buried guilt about sleeping with his half-sister. He could have committed the murder exactly as it was described – he could have come to Fenn without anyone knowing, and killed her in the boathouse. But why would he have done that? He had tried to hate Charmery and at times he thought he had succeeded, but he had never really stopped loving her.

And what about that mention of a child? He scrolled back up to re-read it. ‘This morning . . . she wasn’t alone. There was a child with her.’
A child
.

If Theo had been suffering from fifty kinds of madness, he could never have written that – there had never been any hint that Charmery had ever had a child. But could she have become pregnant and gone into a discreet clinic for an abortion? The implication that it had been Theo’s was unmistakable, though. For a moment an image was vividly before him of the child he and Charmery might have had: tip-tilted eyes filled with light like Charmery’s, and hair like beaten bronze in sunlight. Beautiful, thought Theo. Any child of Charmery’s would have been beautiful and filled with her particular charm. But another part of his mind snapped across this and he thought, but nature plays cruel tricks when it comes to inbreeding. More likely it would have been misshapen in some pitiful way, or missing a chromosome and prey to God knows what awful mental condition.

But who would have known enough about Charmery’s and Theo’s past to type that? No one except Helen, and Helen was dead.

His hand hovered over the Delete key but he knew he would not delete this. No matter how damning it might be, he would save it in an obscure corner of the hard-disc drive. He could not simply wipe it out. Not yet. Because of the child, he said to himself, because of the little lost thing, the might-have-been. He created a miscellaneous file, saved the document into it, then with an abrupt gesture shut down the computer. After this he hunted out the briefcase he had brought with him, which contained the documents relating to Charmery’s death. As sole beneficiary he had been regarded as her next of kin and had been sent various papers, some of which had to be signed, others which the solicitor appeared to think he should have for the record. He had not read them all in detail; he had simply glanced through the ones for signature, and returned them to the solicitor, hoping he had understood the complexities and his own obligations.

He shuffled the loose documents out of the folder and began to sort through them. There were letters from the solicitor and from Charmery’s bank; there was the official registration of her death; police and forensic reports. There was the post mortem report, in grisly detail. Theo had not been able to read this, but he forced himself to a scholarly detachment, and began to scan the printed pages.

The report stated that the deceased was a young woman in the mid-twenties, apparently in good health at the time of death. She had been sexually active. Fair enough, thought Theo. I haven’t exactly lived the life of a monk myself. The primary cause of death was given as ‘suffocation due to immersion of the mouth and nostrils in liquid’. It was concluded that the deceased was alive at the time of submersion – there were unpleasant details verifying this, describing froth and blood-tinged foam in the airways and also the presence of silt and weed and large quantities of water in the lungs and stomach. Theo managed to skim over most of this. However, said the report severely, the mechanism of death by drowning was neither simple nor uniform: there were a number of variables. Drowning as a method of murder was uncommon and required either physical disparity between the victim and the assailant, or a victim who was incapacitated by drink or drugs, or had been taken by surprise. The evidence pointed to this latter circumstance, stated the pathologist, and it could be concluded with reasonable confidence that the deceased had been forcibly held down in river water until asphyxiation occurred.

‘She flailed and thrashed wildly, grabbing at the boathook, and there was a bad moment when her hand actually closed round it making it necessary to exert more force . . .’

Theo pushed the words away and went on reading. There was reference to an old appendectomy scar. Reading that, Theo was jerked back to Charmery’s twelfth birthday, when she had complained of tummy-ache and everyone had thought she was simply suffering from too much trifle, until she doubled up with pain halfway through the party and was sick on Helen’s new carpet. She had enjoyed herself afterwards though, languishing on a hospital bed surrounded by flowers and fruit, then convalescing at Fenn.

But it was the last sentence that leapt from the page and etched itself into his mind like acid. ‘Within the last five to ten years deceased had given birth to a child.’

Given birth to a child.
Given birth.

It can’t be true, thought Theo, his mind spinning in disbelief. It’s a mistake. I would have known about it – an abortion could have been done in secrecy, but an actual birth surely couldn’t? And what happened to the child?

He put the report to one side, and went determinedly through the rest of the papers, wondering what he would do if he found a birth certificate for a child born nine months after that enchanted, tragic summer. But there was nothing to be found.

As Catherine helped prepare the day room for Mr Kendal’s talk to St Luke’s patients, she realized she was nervous. She examined this feeling and discovered it was because she wanted Theo Kendal to give a good account of himself. She could not bear it if he was hesitant or mumbly, or – even worse – if his talk was boring. She could not imagine him being boring under any circumstances, but people were constantly a surprise.

He arrived on time, which pleased her, ringing the big old-fashioned doorbell, and smiling when she opened it, saying he had not expected to see her.

‘There’s a rota for door-answering,’ said Catherine, as he stepped inside. ‘But I lay in wait because I thought you might like to see a familiar face. Convents can be a bit disconcerting if you aren’t used to them.’

‘It’s certainly not terrain I’ve ever explored in any detail,’ he said with the mixture of slight amusement and gravity Catherine remembered.

He was wearing an olive-green corduroy jacket over a cotton shirt with a knitted tie. Catherine thought this was what people nowadays called smart casual, but whatever it was called, it was exactly right for the occasion. He had paid the nuns and patients the compliment of not turning up in scruffy jeans and trainers, but had not gone over the top. His hair looked as if it needed cutting, but probably this was how he wore it anyway. It was soft and dark; it would feel like spun cotton if you touched it.

She and one of the other nuns had set out chairs in the big day room, leaving wide aisles for wheelchairs. Catherine had polished the desk that stood in the bay window. It was a nice old mahogany piece with an inset leather blotter, and she had set out on it a notebook and pen, and a carafe of water with a tumbler. The promised flipchart was at one side – they had brought it in from the library; Sister Miriam had agreed to the loan for a couple of hours – with two felt-tipped pens for writing. Mr Kendal said this was really excellent, absolutely ideal, and he hoped his talk would be as good as the arrangements.

‘I’m sure it will,’ said Catherine. ‘I think there’ll be about twenty people,’ she added a bit doubtfully. ‘I expect you’re used to far larger audiences.’

‘I promise you I’m not,’ he said. ‘On rainy nights in small towns, I’m lucky if twenty turn up. Not all writers are celebrities.’ The smile showed again, lighting up his eyes.

‘Dr Innes is coming,’ said Catherine, ‘and several of the other sisters. Oh, and Reverend Mother hopes you’ll have a cup of tea in her study afterwards.’

‘Yes, certainly.’ He prowled round the desk a couple of times, like a cat inspecting new territory, tried the flipchart and nodded, then spread out his notes. Catherine watched him for a moment, then went out to help wheel in the patients. Most of them had wanted to come, pleased at the diversion in their ordered day.

In fact it looked like being a full house. The Bursar came, very alert, carrying a notebook and pen, and Dr Innes followed her. Catherine was pleased he had managed to spare the time because he was always so busy. Sister Miriam came in quietly, and took an unobtrusive seat near the back. Catherine wondered if Sister Miriam had read any of Mr Kendal’s books and if so what she had made of them. Sister Agnes bustled in at the last moment, slightly out of breath, apologizing for her tardy arrival, explaining she had had to finish supervising the washing-up and was sorry if she had brought with her any aroma of cooking. You could not, she said to the room in general, cook chicken casserole for thirty people without it permeating your garments.

Mr Kendal gave her his marvellous smile, and glanced at Catherine. She had the strong impression he was sharing a kindly joke with her, and she suddenly wanted to smile back. This would not be a very good idea, though, so she looked down at her feet. When she looked up again, he was glancing through his notes, and she thought she must have imagined that moment of mental intimacy.

If he was nervous at talking to a roomful of strangers, he did not show it. He seemed perfectly relaxed, and when he began Catherine relaxed as well, because although he was not an outstanding orator, his voice was nice and it carried comfortably to the whole room, and what he said was interesting. Catherine listened, her eyes fixed on him, as he explained how he had started writing sketches at university for Footlights. He talked about the journey a writer took during the creation of a book, and the closeness he developed with his characters, and also a little about research methods, recounting a couple of incidents which had happened during the gathering of material for one of his books. This was done wittily and caused considerable laughter. It’s all right, thought Catherine, they like him. They’re enjoying what he’s telling them.

Towards the end, using the flipchart, Mr Kendal illustrated what he called the unrolling of a plot, making columns for the different plotlines for the various characters. It had not occurred to Catherine that books could be divided up like this, but Mr Kendal explained it very clearly. Then he asked the audience to call out suggestions for characters and backgrounds so they could develop a basic story. There were, he said, only five or six basic plots in the world, just as there were only five or six basic tunes in music.

This went a bit awkwardly at first, because most people in the room were diffident about being the first to speak. But then one of the men made a suggestion about a man injured in a road smash, and somebody else said perhaps the man was a target for a hit-man.

‘Perhaps he was. Yes, that’s very promising. All right, what had he done to make him somebody’s target?’ asked Mr Kendal, and after this the ideas rolled in thick and fast. The Bursar and Sister Agnes both contributed several suggestions, and although Catherine would have liked to take part, she thought she had better not.

‘Terrific,’ said Mr Kendal, scribbling delightedly on the flip-chart. His eyes were alight with enthusiasm and energy. ‘You see what happens?’ he said. ‘One idea leads to another – and then another.’ He stepped back, to survey the results of their handiwork. ‘D’you know, I think we’ve given ourselves the basis for at least three books there.’

‘Three?’ said the Bursar.

‘At least three, unless we could find a Dostoevsky or Charles Dickens to bring them together into one. But you see the basic principle?’ And he went smoothly into a more general discussion, inviting questions from the audience, and dealing with them, Catherine thought, very well and very courteously.