The Graveyard Position (7 page)

The next day he rang Danielle, always seeing her, as they talked, against the background of the Grand Place, where they had first met.

“Things are marching,” he said, after loving preliminaries.

“Really? Are you finding out who you are?”

“Well, maybe. Though I've always thought I've known who I am.”

“You've certainly given that impression. Now I'm not so sure.”

“I'm on my way to getting DNA confirmation as to who I am, which is rather different. But that will mean general, if reluctant, acceptance of me as my aunt's legitimate heir.”

“I suppose I should congratulate you.”

“You better had! We could be looking at the cost of our first flat together.”

“If I agree to moving in with you.”

“You will. Anyway, who I am isn't really the point at the moment. I'm learning about my family, some of whom I can't remember ever having met. It provides a sort of context for me.”

“Belgians always know their families. Perhaps all too well.”

“Italians too. But I think the Cantelos are unusual even by English standards. Most people seem to have liked my mother, but beyond that suspicions and antagonisms seem to reign.”

“Why are you so pleased about getting to know a family like that? I certainly hope you don't find you share the family traits.”

“Oh no, I'm sure I don't. Getting to know them doesn't help me to understand who I am. But I'm hoping it will help me to understand what happened to me.”

“What happened to you when?”

“When I was suddenly bundled out of England.”

“Didn't English families once ship their problem children off to the Colonies? I suppose bundling them off to Europe is the modern equivalent.”

“That sounds plausible enough. But get it into your head, darling: I was not a problem child. I've yet to discover what the problem was, and in what way I was part of it.”

“Bonne chance!”

Merlyn saw Rosalind as he drove along the Headrow. He had gone wrong on West Street, and it had proved impossible to get back into the right lane. So now he was going to have to snake through the nonpedestrianized streets of Leeds to arrive eventually at his hotel car park. He was turning up between the town hall and the library when he saw Rosalind Frere emerging from the Headrow entrance to the library and start toward Briggate. Merlyn immediately rethought his morning. By a miracle he found a vacant place in the Temple Street car park, paid a two-hour fee, then started rapidly but carefully toward Briggate and the Headrow. Standing casually by the corner of Allders store he looked toward the pedestrianized section of Briggate and saw, starting down it, Rosalind's hat.

Rosalind's hat was not large or ostentatious: it was in fact a head-hugging dark green number, with tactful decoration. But he had noticed it on the brief sight he had of her at the library, and he noticed it now. As he proceeded after her, still casually, he noticed that she was almost the only woman he could see who was wearing a hat, and all of the others were pensioners, most of whom looked as if they were on a visit to Leeds center as a special treat to themselves, or from the institution they now lived in. Most fortyish women no longer wore hats except (Merlyn was guessing here) to weddings, christenings, and funerals. Rosalind, apparently, was the last of the hat wearers. She had been wearing a black number with a veil at Clarissa Cantelo's funeral, probably bought joyfully when the occasion offered her the excuse.

He watched her go into Borders and come out with what looked like a paperback in a plastic bag. He saw her look intently at the windows of Harvey Nicholls, then decide against going in. He saw her march determinedly into House of Fraser, as if this was currently Her Shop. His first instinct was not to go after her but to wait for her to come out. Then he remembered that the shop, when it had been part of another chain in his earlier days in Leeds, had had a back door to it. He went cautiously in, lingered about halfway along the ground floor, and established that the back door was still operative. He pored over a display of women's tights and, fifteen minutes and a lot of suspicious looks later, he saw Rosalind sailing down the escalator and making for the back door. He followed her out toward the market, then past the Corn Exchange, and then down toward the Calls. She ended up by Leeds Parish Church, sitting on a public seat, her bags around her, her eyes fixed on the back of a bingo hall. She was, Merlyn concluded, deep in thought.

He casually strolled up to her.

“Hello, Rosalind.”

She looked up sharply, then glared.

“What are you doing here?”

“On my way to the Armouries to be fitted for a back plate.”

She didn't deign to reply. He sat down beside her. This made her give voice.

“I'm not aware that I asked you to sit with me—
or
gave you permission to use my Christian name.”

“Oh, I think you did, at least by implication. It would have been back around 1980, when I was just a snotty-nosed teenager, and you were the female equivalent. We were really quite close at one time.”

“I've no recollection of that. And it remains to be seen whether—”

“I am who I claim to be. I think your impatience should be satisfied in a few weeks' time, Mrs. Frere. You've probably heard that I've put matters in the hands of the Forensic Science Service.”

“Oh, I've heard
that.
” Her glare was unremitting. She seemed to be refraining only with difficulty from uttering the Thurber line about “Mere proof won't convince me.”

“Meanwhile here you are shopping in town, and here is a man who is claiming to be your long-lost cousin, and the world is our oyster. It would simply beggar belief if we didn't have something to discuss. In fact we both know we do. What about a cup of coffee?”

Rosalind looked at him for a moment, as if tempted, then shook her head. Clearly it was a dismissal, but he refused to be dismissed.

“Are you waiting for someone, or just taking in the view?” he asked pleasantly.

“I'm waiting for Barnett.”

“Going somewhere nice?”

“We're going to inspect a school.”

“A school? Then you have children. I didn't know. I expect Aunt Clarissa told me, but I've forgotten. How many?”

“One son.”

“I see. Of school age, then?”

She nodded.

“Yes. He's about to go to boarding school.”

“Oh, I see. About twelve or thirteen then?”

“Eight. It's a prep school.” Merlyn deliberately kept his eyebrows lowered, but continued to look at her, and she seemed to feel the need to supply him with an explanation. “Robin's sport mad, and it's a very good school for sport. And he's been neglecting other things for running and cricket, so they'll give him remedial classes to get him up to scratch for public school.”

“Public school! I say, that's quite a leg up for one of the Cantelos. We sometimes went to private schools—you did—but Eton or Harrow is something else!”

“He'll be going to Burnside. Barnett's old school.”

Merlyn suppressed the query whether Burnside was good for sport. Rosalind might think he was implying it was probably good for nothing else.

“How will you fill your time when he's gone, Ros—Mrs. Frere?”

“The fact that I don't call you Merlyn doesn't make me any the less Rosalind,” snapped his cousin.

“I'm sorry,” murmured Merlyn. “I thought I needed permission.”

“And I shall have no difficulty filling up my time. I do a great deal of charity work as it is. And I expect to have a lot to do going through Aunt Clarissa's possessions and disposing of them. If the house hadn't been sealed off…”

“It seemed necessary to Mr. Featherstone, my solicitor,” said Merlyn, “and I must say I agreed. We couldn't have all sorts of people who thought they would inherit scrabbling around in there. Nothing should be done until the will is granted probate. If I were found to be not Merlyn Docherty, you would probably have problems with the possessions, since half of the estate has to be shared among four of you.”

“Things can be valued if necessary,” said Rosalind, who had clearly talked the matter over with her husband. “I'm sure it will be simple enough with a little goodwill.”

“Perhaps,” said Merlyn. He didn't need to underline the unlikelihood of general goodwill in the Cantelo family. “But this is all quite academic at the moment. Everything is in the hands of the Forensic Science Service. They'll be trying to get specimens from both my parents, but it's all just a question of time before they pronounce on who I am.”

A tiny light seemed to come into Rosalind's eye at the mention of Merlyn's parents, and her voice was firm and dismissive when she said, “They're hardly likely to get a sample from your mother, after all these years.”

“They said it shouldn't be a problem. She died in hospital, and they keep medical samples there for years.” Rosalind's shoulders sagged. “But you say nothing of my father.”

“Should I? Silence is best, I would have thought.”

“I mean, you mention my mother as dead, but not my father.”

“Your mother
is
long dead, before you started worming your way in with Aunt Clarissa. Your father I know nothing about.”

“Except that he's been in trouble with the law. The family knows all about that, don't they? Was it you who spread it around? Anyway, the trouble may help the forensic people, because the police will have kept his samples. I'm getting interested in my father, oddly enough. I don't remember thinking about him more than occasionally after I took off for Italy. Now I do. I wonder what he's been doing all these years. And why the Cantelo family should be interested in him at all.”

“Why shouldn't we? He was married to Aunt Thora. And people are generally interested when someone's in trouble with the police. We're a proud family—”

“But not at all a close-knit one.”

“—so we were bound to talk when he was sent to jail.”

“Ah—he did go to jail, did he?”

“So it said in the paper. I've never heard of him since.”

“Well, he can't still be in jail. He didn't cause a death or anything from what I've heard. I expect he's either gone straight, or he's dead.”

“I don't know how you can talk about your father in that cold way. I loved my own father! He meant everything to me!”

“Really? I don't remember much about him. When I was living with Aunt Clarrie he was already on the way to being a highflier in London in something or other. British Petroleum, wasn't it? I don't think I saw much of him.”

“He was a very busy man. Enormously successful. And of course I was the apple of his eye. I don't know how you can talk of your father as you do. It's not natural.”

Merlyn shrugged.

“I think that depends more on the parent than the child, don't you? I certainly was never the apple of Jake's eye. More the discarded pip.”

“You're so bitter…I'd be worried if I really thought you were Merlyn Docherty. But everyone's told me about Thora. She was a beautiful person. Everybody loved her. You can't be her son.”

“I expect it skipped a generation, this lovability. Maybe I take more after Grandfather Cantelo—”

“Well, he—” Rosalind pulled herself up. “Anyway, I'm quite sure you just took Merlyn's name when you heard of Clarrie's death.”

“You could soon find out that's not true. I've been working at the EU for ten years. I had English, French, and Italian when I joined them, and they put me on to learning Romanian and handling their bid to join the union. That rather fizzled out, but I've been saddled with eastward expansion, investigating human rights in the applicant countries—that kind of thing. Interesting and frustrating in about equal measure.”

Rosalind looked as if she was struggling to understand what he was talking about.

“And you're working there under the name of Merlyn Docherty?”

Merlyn smiled, and nodded.

“Utterly under my own name, yes. Anyone can ring up EU headquarters and check.” He looked her straight in the eyes. “You can do it if you like.”

Rosalind's mouth dropped in outrage. Any passerby, seeing them, might have thought that Merlyn was quoting something. Might even have guessed that he was quoting Rosalind herself, that she had once offered herself to him. But they were just two people, roughly of an age, sitting unhappily together on a public seat.

“Where is Barnett?” Rosalind said, looking at her watch. “We've got an appointment at the school.”

“Where does he work?”

“Just over there.” She pointed back to the little streets between the parish church and the city center. “A
very
good firm. They specialize in property, but he keeps in touch with
all
aspects of the law, and knows the best people to consult on
any
thing.”

“Bully for Barnett. By the way, you talked about my ‘worming my way' into Aunt Clarrie's affections.”

“Well, what else could you call it?”

“Something more generous, perhaps? I'd been without a mother for four years when I first started coming to stay with her, and effectively without a father for long periods. And Clarissa herself was a spinster, childless, of course, and had just lost her own father. She was happy to have me move in a few years later. Affection seems a very natural emotion between the two of us.”

“That's just self-pity. I was without a father practically the whole time of my childhood. He loved me so much, but he needed to earn so as to leave us financially secure.”

Merlyn was puzzled about that. Did her father know he was going to die young?

“You never told me that. But you had a mother. Clarissa was mother and father to me—and entertainer to boot. Staying with her was an end-of-the-pier show, as well as an education.”

“She was a charlatan. You knew that as well as I did.”

“Yes—we talked about it once, didn't we? But I think you can only be a charlatan if you yourself don't believe in what you're peddling. I'm quite sure Aunt Clarissa did believe it.”

“Well, I'm quite sure she didn't, and had a good laugh at all the people she was fooling and robbing.”

“No. No!” Merlyn was becoming heated. He knew Rosalind had fixed unerringly on his aunt's weakest spot. “Clarissa wasn't like that. Yes, she would laugh about clients from time to time, but she never had any doubts she could help them, if they let her.”

Rosalind shrugged. She looked, as she had throughout their talk, to the right, at the cars coming.

“I think that's Barnett…. Yes, it is.”

She gathered up her packages and handbag, and put on her gloves. Gloves? In May? Merlyn thought. She really was, at thirty-seven, a sort of anachronism. Barnett's Mercedes pulled up in front of them. He got out of the car, ushered Rosalind into the passenger seat, then shut the door and looked straight at Merlyn.