The Burning (21 page)

‘I’m sure the last thing you want to do is to talk to me at this stage in the day,’ I began. ‘I really appreciate it.’

Gerald made a sharp gesture. ‘Don’t mention it. Anything that might help.’

‘I’ve been trying to get some idea of Rebecca’s personality by talking to people who knew her well. I wonder – if it wouldn’t be too upsetting – if you could tell me about your relationship with her. What was she like?’

It was Avril who answered me, and if tears were standing in her eyes, her voice was steady. ‘She was like sunshine on a cold day. She was the light of our lives.’

Her husband cleared his throat. ‘We were very proud of her, of course. But she really was special. Bright, funny, popular, loving – everything you could wish for in a daughter. You only have to look at the people who came here today. There were friends of hers from kindergarten and primary school, not to mention her university friends and her colleagues. She was very much loved, you see.’

‘It was very good of the Ventnor Chase people to come down, wasn’t it?’ Avril turned to her husband. ‘Especially when they must be so busy. I mean, they have to manage without her too. Mr Ventnor told me he didn’t know how they’re ever going to replace her.’

So Avril, at any rate, had no idea that her daughter wasn’t working there at the time of her death, and Anton Ventnor had been kind enough to let her go on thinking that. I would have felt one degree warmer towards him if I hadn’t suspected that he had enjoyed the deceit.

‘Did Rebecca ever talk to you about work?’

‘Only to say things were going well,’ Gerald said. ‘She worked very hard. We worried about her, sometimes, because she was out all the time. Always going at a hundred miles an hour, that was our girl. But you couldn’t tell her anything. She had to find her own way. We didn’t expect anything of her, except that she should be happy. And I really do believe she was.’

I mumbled something that might have been agreement, my tongue suddenly feeling too big for my mouth. I should have asked Anton Ventnor for tips on how to lie.

Over the next hour, I learned that Rebecca had been a precocious but polite child who had loved reading, horses and, as a teen, cross-country running. In time she had grown out of the horses but kept up the running and the reading. She had applied to Oxford to study history rather than English because she had thought a history degree was more likely to be useful. Her life was one of privilege but Rebecca had worked hard for what she got, and had been overjoyed to get into the college of her choice at Oxford.

‘She met Louise there – did you get a chance to talk to her? Lovely girl. They were such close friends.’ Avril sounded dreamy, as if she had lost sight of the reason for our conversation in the pleasure of recollecting happier times. The table at Avril’s elbow held a framed print of the same picture of Rebecca and Louise that I’d seen in Rebecca’s flat.

‘Did she like Oxford?’ I asked, thinking of what Tilly Shaw had told me. I still hadn’t managed to work out what had happened to Rebecca to make her think her life was forfeit.

The Haworths looked at me for a moment, then at one another, and there was an uneasiness in the silence that fell before Gerald spoke.

‘She did. But she struggled a bit in her third year. She deferred, in fact – left Oxford three weeks before she was due to start her final exams and had to go back the following year to sit them.’

‘What happened?’

Avril took over. ‘Oh, it was tragic. One of the boys in her year died – he drowned, actually. It happened on the first of May – you know, May Day, during the celebrations that they have every year. And Rebecca couldn’t get over it. She felt things very deeply, you see, and she started having nightmares about him. She couldn’t study, or eat, or anything, so in the end we went up and got her. Her tutor was tremendous – he managed to get the history faculty to allow her to defer, and when she went back the following year, even though she wasn’t able to have any formal tuition, he saw her a couple of times to talk over the papers she was going to be sitting. He was really so kind. Can you remember his name, darling?’

‘Something Faraday. I’ll look it up. I think she has one of his books in her room.’ Completely unconscious that he had used the present tense about his daughter, Gerald got up and left before I could tell him I would find it out from the college.

‘So this boy – was he Rebecca’s boyfriend?’

‘Not officially, as far as I knew, but you know what they’re like at that age. It was all completely innocent, from what Rebecca told us. He was a lovely boy, though – Adam, he was called. The surname was something like Rowland. No, Rowley, that was it. Adam Rowley. It was
so
sad. Really, it was the first shadow in Rebecca’s life. Her grandparents had died, but when she was too little to remember them, so it was really the first bereavement she’d experienced, and it hit her terribly hard. She lost so much weight – just cried all the time. It took her months and months to get back to normal. And when she did go back to Oxford to sit her exams, of course it was terribly difficult and she did wonderfully well considering.’

‘How did she get on?’ I asked, for the sake of being polite more than anything else.

‘She got a 2.2,’ Avril answered bravely. ‘She was on for a first, they said, before she had her trouble with her nerves. But of course we were just delighted that she got her degree in the end.’

I made a note of the name; I would chase it up with Thames Valley CID.

‘Caspian Faraday.’ Gerald came back into the room, slightly out of breath, holding a hardback book.

‘Oh, well done for finding it,’ his wife said.

‘Not difficult. She’d shelved it alphabetically. You know Rebecca, everything in its place.’ The Haworths hadn’t been to Rebecca’s flat much, I surmised.

He handed the book to me. ‘Faraday published this a couple of years ago. We gave it to Rebecca for Christmas when it came out. I don’t know if she ever had a chance to read it, though. It’s about the Hundred Years War. He’s made a bit of a career out of the Plantagenets. Television and so forth. This was a bestseller.’

I flicked through the pages idly, stopping at the back flap where a black-and-white author photograph revealed that Caspian Faraday was not the elderly, bespectacled, tweed-jacket-wearing don I had been imagining, but a seriously attractive, chiselled man in his late thirties with cropped fair hair and piercing eyes that were translucent in the picture. They just had to be bright blue.

The Haworths seemed to be waiting for me to say something. ‘Very interesting.’

‘It is,’ Gerald said. ‘He really knows his stuff. Rebecca worshipped him.’

I would need to talk to Dr Faraday. And if I was going to talk to him and the police who investigated Adam Rowley’s death, I might as well make it a field trip rather than doing it all by phone. As today had reminded me, it was always good to get out of London for a few hours, good to get away from the overheated incident room and the constant jockeying for position that was a permanent feature of Godley’s team.

Rebecca’s parents seemed to have run out of steam all of a sudden. Gerald had sat down beside his wife again and she took his hand, then leaned against his shoulder as if she couldn’t hold herself up any more.

‘I should go,’ I said quickly. ‘I’ve taken up too much of your time.’

‘Rebecca was very good about staying in touch, but we didn’t come up to see her in London much. You’d have to talk to her friends and her workmates to find out about how she lived once she left home,’ Avril said vaguely.

‘I’ve been speaking to them already. They’ve been very helpful.’

‘All we know,’ Gerald said, and his eyes were full of pain, ‘is that she was doing very well. Very well indeed. She was happy. And she had everything to live for. So please, Maeve, do find the person who did this to her, for our sake.’

It wasn’t the first time a victim’s family had appealed to me to deliver justice for them, but it brought a lump to my throat and I had to cough to clear it before I could respond.

‘I’ll do my best. You have my word.’

‘It would mean so much to us,’ he said, and I looked away as his chin quivered, knowing that he would want to seem in control.

‘We wanted more children,’ Avril said, and her voice was heavy with grief. ‘But it wasn’t to be. She was really our world.’ She sat up again, her head held high, dignity intact. ‘So is there anything else we can help you with? Anything else we can tell you?’

I shook my head. She had said all there was to say.