The String Diaries (20 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Some twenty or so years ago.’

She nodded.

‘So what is it you think he wants?’ Charles asked.

‘He wants Erna.’

‘But she’s dead.’

‘He wants to recreate the life he lost with her. And he doesn’t care who he has to kill to achieve it. Anna Bauer was the image of her grandmother. My mother tells me I look the same. Jakab knew that Anna would never submit to him willingly. He intended to kill her husband, supplant him and slide into her life unawares. Years later, after that attempt had failed, he tried again, this time with my mother. He failed then too, but I think he’s learning, getting better at it.’

She slipped her hand down his arm and interlaced her fingers with his. Charles would have sighed with pleasure had she not looked so thoroughly miserable.

‘What are we going to do?’ she asked.

He knew she addressed the question to herself, but he decided to answer it anyway. ‘We’re going to get some dinner,’ he told her. ‘And then we’re going to get roaringly drunk.’

Nicole laughed, and for the first time that afternoon it sounded genuine. She squeezed his hand. ‘The great Charles Meredith, always thinking of his stomach.’

‘I’ve only eaten a crêpe since getting off the ferry.’

‘Then we must find you some proper sustenance.’ She tugged his hand. ‘Come on. I know a place.’

They ate in a crowded and noisy bistro huddled on a street just off the Champs-Elysées. Charles ordered a smoked mackerel mousse, followed by calves’ liver with bacon and rösti potatoes. The food, when it arrived, was excellent. While he tucked his head down and sated his appetite, Nicole picked at a cod fillet, yielding the plate to Charles when she could not finish it.

‘Something’s distracting you,’ he said, noting again how she scrutinised the diners at other tables.

‘I’m sorry. It’s been a strange day. Seeing you again, here in Paris, after the time we had in England.’

He studied her face. ‘You don’t make it sound a particularly enjoyable experience.’

She smiled, and the weariness in that look made him yearn to hold her, to discover the best way of knocking this senseless superstition out of her head, to stop her ruining her life with it. ‘I’ve loved seeing you again. How could I deny myself the pleasure of your fabulous English pomp?’

‘So what is it?’

‘I can’t be responsible for you. I don’t know why we ended up together like this. It seems like fate and that always worries me. You’re a wonderful man, and I’m attracted to you, but if you don’t believe a word I’ve told you, not only do I lack your respect, I know you won’t protect yourself by taking this seriously. If you lure him, Charles, he’ll kill you. Simple as that.’

‘Nicole, you have my respect, of course you do.’

‘But you don’t believe a word of this
hosszú életek
craziness.’

‘I’m prepared to accept that something decidedly odd happened to Erna Novák and Eric Dubois. And –’ he took a breath, wincing as he heard the lie escape his lips but knowing it was the only way to keep her – ‘I’m prepared to keep an open mind about the rest of the diaries.’

Nicole blinked, tears glittering in the corners of her eyes. ‘You are?’

‘Scout’s honour. I’d still like to read the rest of the extracts you’ve translated.’

‘Of course.’

‘And I’d like to continue my own research.’

‘You’ll be discreet?’

‘I will. And, in return, if we discover anything else that might explain these events, I want you to at least consider it.’

‘Charles, I’d like nothing more than there to be a simple explanation for all of this. I doubt you’ll find one.’

He shrugged. ‘So we’re agreed?’

‘On what?’

‘I’ll keep an open mind. So will you. We’ll both do our research, and we’ll be careful with what we unearth. In the meantime, considering I appear to be risking my very existence in my efforts to continue to see you, we’ll take our pleasures wherever and whenever we can.’

He stopped, aghast at the way the sentence had spilled from his lips. He saw the flush rising on Nicole’s cheeks.

‘Is your hotel within walking distance?’ she asked, raising an eyebrow.

‘Not really.’

She laid her hand on his. ‘Let’s get a taxi then.’

After making love that first night, they lay on the king-size bed listening to the murmur of Parisian traffic through the open window. The moon cast its cold eye on the glass, painting stripes of shadow on to the wall.

They spent the following day immersed in each other’s company, hardly leaving his hotel room except to take a walk along the Seine as the sun flung crimson streaks across the sky.

Charles remained in Paris for another four days before he returned to England. Shortly afterwards he managed to arrange passage for Nicole. This time she stayed for a month.

In the spring of 1980, he proposed. Nicole cried and refused, telling him that she could not take responsibility for him, that she loved him and that was why she could no longer see him. Charles reacted furiously, his anger a mask for his hurt. Over twenty years had passed, he reasoned, since something had happened to Eric Dubois – something that could or could not have been due to Jakab Balázs. Surely the fact that she would be married to him, with a new surname, made the chance of Jakab finding her even more remote. Nicole disagreed and he returned to England, disconsolate.

Three months later, she followed. In the spring of 1981, when he asked her to marry him a second time, she accepted. There were conditions. The ceremony would be discreet, with no official announcement. Charles would continue to lecture at Balliol and record his documentaries, but he would court no publicity, and would say nothing – in public or otherwise – of his wife, except to his most trusted friends.

Nicole moved into his Oxfordshire cottage, bringing a warmth and vitality to the place that had never before existed. She converted the small dining room into an artist’s studio and taught herself how to paint. She picked out new furnishings and renovated the old. Just before the Christmas of ’82, she gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Hannah. Charles grew thicker around the waist, happy in his work and his family. He sold another plot of land to a private developer for a fortune, and invested the money shrewdly. As they reached the end of that decade, it became clear they would not be blessed with more children, but the joy Hannah brought them was more than enough to compensate; the girl’s tenacity and fire, clearly inherited from both parents, was moderated by a selflessness that neither recognised as a quality of their own.

In ’97, Hannah celebrated her fifteenth birthday, Nicole commemorated thirty-nine years since her mother had set fire to the family home where a
hosszú élet
had taken up residence, and Charles celebrated two publishing achievements he would regret for the rest of his life.

The first was his first full-length hardback,
Legacy of the Germanic Peoples
. The book was reviewed favourably by a number of national newspapers, meaning that sales were higher than he might otherwise have hoped. His growing reputation as a broadcaster also helped.

When Nicole opened the book, she was stunned to discover that the inside back cover of the dust jacket featured a monochrome image of herself and Charles posing in his study. The photograph had been taken by Hannah a year earlier. A caption read:
Professor Charles Meredith relaxes with his wife at their Oxfordshire home.

Charles had not been prepared for her fury. He had thought that the years of
hosszú életek
paranoia had ended. So disturbed was he by her reaction that he neglected to tell her of the second piece he had published, an article in a little-known quarterly called
The Mottram-Gardner Journal of European Folklore and Mythology
.

The piece, just over five thousand words, was buried towards the back. Its title,
Hosszú életek: the birth and death of a Hungarian legend
.

Charles was credited as its author.

C
HAPTER
14

Snowdonia

Now

The thunderstorm that had threatened for the last three days had not descended; for now, the heavens had brokered an uneasy truce. Clouds tumbled across the skies, flashing purple underbellies at the valley floor. At their tattered edges, shafts of sunlight winked in and out, transforming patches of landscape into blazing greens and mauves before the thunderheads closed in and the colours bled away.

In the farmhouse, Hannah lit large fires in each of the rooms, determined to chase away the damp before the storm broke. While the house warmed up, she donned gloves and scrubbed the tiny bathroom until the porcelain shone and the steel glinted. She mopped the kitchen floor and bleached the sink, scoured the cooker and stacked the remaining wood Sebastien had brought them into piles by each mantelpiece. In one of the outbuildings she found planks, nails and a hammer, and used them to board up the smashed window in the living room. She burned Nate’s bloodied garments, found spare clothing for him in one of the cupboards, washed and aired it. She ran Leah a bath and washed her hair, then settled the girl in Llyn Gwyr’s
dining room with an Enid Blyton novel.

With her daughter occupied, Hannah counted again the shotgun cartridge boxes and double-checked the contents of each box. She found three new hiding places for the ammunition, fearing each time that it was either not sufficiently close or that it was too convenient for Leah’s curious fingers. She loaded and unloaded the shotgun, decided to clean it with a can of gun oil she found under the stairs, and reloaded it when she had finished. She tried not to think about her father.

Nate watched her, his face unreadable. Three days had passed since their arrival at Llyn Gwyr. She still found it difficult to believe that he could have lost as much blood as he had and survived.

But survived he had. The kitchen sofa by the fire had become his convalescence bed, from which he made steadily increasing requests for food, drink, and empty bottles with which to relieve himself. That morning he had insisted she help him shuffle to the toilet so that he could attend to himself in private. Despite her fear that the movement would tear open either of his two wounds, he managed it. A habitual optimist, that small success spurred him on, and when he playfully swatted her rear three times within an hour as she passed his couch, she knew he was recovering.

Twice she caught herself dwelling on what would have happened, what life would have been like, had he died. Both times her vision swam and her hands shook as she considered how lost she would have been. The prospect of trying to establish a new life for Leah without Nate’s presence was so shattering she found it impossible even to feel around the edges of the thought. Without him, how could she protect Leah against what was coming – a storm far greater than the one that threatened overhead?

She knew that Jakab would find them, felt it at her core. Yet despite her belief that she could not face that confrontation alone, with Nate virtually immobile and her father most likely dead, the burden fell upon her to protect all three of them.

Meet me. Just you, and just me. Anywhere you want. Out in the open
.

The recollection of Jakab’s voice filled her with revulsion. She knew better than to believe a single word of his poison. Bizarrely, even though she knew that Jakab was a monster, a broken mind consumed by its own dark obsessions, she had felt unaccountably pulled by that voice.

You name the place. Just let me see you once. Talk. Explain. There have been so many untruths, I don’t blame you for being confused
.

It disturbed her to admit it, but perhaps after all these years, a tiny part of her was attracted to the thought of relinquishing control, of surrendering herself to fate. She had watched predators hunting in the wild, had been fascinated at the way their prey kept running until exhausted, expending every last trace of energy to avoid capture. Yet when hunter at last brought down hunted, its victim often seemed to relax, accepting its end. Those final moments, while horrific in one sense, were intimate in another. Perhaps when you finally realised you were beaten – that there was really no hope – something was triggered in the mind, allowing you to expunge, accept.

In the farmhouse kitchen, Hannah opened the cupboards and sorted through their supplies. It was only mid-morning, but she would need to feed everyone soon. As she passed Nate’s couch, he stretched out an arm and took hold of her wrist.

‘If you count those shotgun rounds a fourth time, Han, I’m going to have to find new lodgings. Twenty-five in a box. Two full boxes and one box with six spares. That’s fifty-six cartridges plus the two in the breach. Fifty-eight in total. Fifty-eight last time you checked. And fifty-eight the time before that.’

She looked down at his twinkling eyes. ‘I’m going mad, aren’t I?’

‘As a hatter. Drag up that chair,’ he said, indicating the armchair on the far side of the fire. He let go of her wrist and she pulled it over. ‘Sit.’

She complied.

‘Give me your foot.’

Hannah lifted one booted foot and rested it on the edge of the couch. Nate untied the laces, eased off the boot and pulled off her sock. He began to work his fingers into her toes.

She groaned and closed her eyes, arching her back. ‘You don’t know how good that feels.’

‘It’s why you married me.’

‘I can think of a few other reasons.’

‘So can I. But I don’t think these stitches could handle it.’

Hannah opened her eyes and when she saw him grinning at her, she was filled with desire for him. They had always shared a close physical relationship: far closer, she suspected, than that of couples who lived their lives free of the constant threat of loss. Her hunger for him was fuelled by more than simple physical attraction; it took flame also from her trust in him, and the complete understanding they had of each other. Hannah was a product, she supposed, of her environment. Honesty, faith, security: they were the fundamentals of her world. The foundations of her relationship with Nate stood on rock. It was why the prospect of losing him was so utterly inconceivable. ‘You still haven’t told me the details,’ she said, studying his face, pleased at the way its colour had begun to return.

‘There’s hardly been a moment.’

‘When Dad took us into his study, he said he thought we’d been compromised. Someone new at his solicitor’s office not knowing the protocols and handing out information over the phone. That’s all I heard before I went out to look for Leah.’

Nate slid his hands up to the arch of her foot, pressing the tension out of her. ‘Charles said the solicitor thing had happened weeks earlier, which meant it was likely Jakab was already on the farm.’

Her father employed four people to help him run the estate on the outskirts of Chipping Ditton. Nora Trencher, in her late sixties, worked as Charles’s part-time housekeeper. Nora’s husband, Bill, was a regular visitor too, even though he was now too old to do any meaningful work; Leah had grown up around the couple and Charles liked having them there. The final two workers were brothers, and local lads: Tom and Alex Tavistock.

Nate’s eyes wandered from her face, settling on the flames in the hearth. ‘We were trying to figure out who it could be. Who had been acting strangely. I went into the wet room to grab our panic packs. I’d already unlocked the gun cabinet and taken out that old Luger Charles keeps in there. It was in my coat pocket, loaded.

‘Nora came into the room, asking if I needed any help. When she saw our packs and the open gun cabinet, she . . .’ Nate blew out his cheeks, and when he looked at her his face was gaunt. ‘She smiled at me, but I knew it wasn’t her. Those eyes. I’ve never seen anything like that. Never. It was old Nora right down to the mole on her cheek. Except for the expression in those eyes.’

Hannah dropped her head.

Nora Trencher. The woman had shared their lives for six years, had acted like a grandmother to Leah. The odds that she was still alive were almost nil. Her husband Bill, who had built Leah a beautiful doll’s house two summers ago, had started to lose his sight over the last six months. He’d begun to depend on his wife even more. Hannah wondered what would happen to the man, sickened at the thought of him marooned in his rural cottage, blind and alone.

‘I thought I’d prepared for this,’ Nate said. ‘I never expected the reality of it to shock me like that. Seeing her standing there, knowing what she was . . . it only paralysed me for a second but that’s all it took. She was so damned
fast,
Han. I never even saw the knife until after she stabbed me.’ He indicated the higher of his two wounds. ‘Here first. Then here. You know the worst? When she realised I wasn’t going to shout out, she stepped back and just watched me, head tilted to one side like she was trying to memorise my face, my mannerisms. Storing them up.’ Nate shook his head. ‘I keep saying
her
. I should say
him
.
It
.’

He lifted a hand from her foot and passed it through his hair. Sweat had beaded on his forehead and he wiped it away. ‘I managed to pull the Luger from my pocket. And that’s when I shot her. Right in the chest. Should have killed her. The momentum took her back through the doorway. I fired again. Missed with that one. When I finally dragged myself into the hall, she’d gone.’

Hannah watched him in silence.

There have been so many untruths, I don’t blame you for being confused.

This was the reality of what they faced. This was the truth of it. Jakab had killed Nora Trencher. She could not know that for certain, but that he had tried to kill her husband was clear. ‘He said you shot him first,’ she said.

‘Of course he did.’

‘He said he was protecting himself.’

Nate grunted, his disgust evident.

Hannah slid off the armchair, kneeling by the couch. She leaned over and kissed him, closing her eyes as he lifted an arm and held her.

Resting her forehead against Nate’s shoulder, she asked, ‘Did he say anything?’

‘Nothing. Not a word, during the entire exchange. You know, I’ve been thinking about it non-stop. Jakab could have killed me there and then. There were far better ways to do it. I think when he knew his cover was blown and we were escaping, he just lost control and lashed out. I should be dead.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘I’m not being morbid. I think I was lucky.’

‘I’m the one who’s lucky.’

‘Charles employed me to keep you safe.’

‘You married me, didn’t you?’

Nate laughed. ‘Not exactly what he had in mind.’

‘This isn’t a normal situation.’

‘I was trained to handle abnormal situations.’

‘Not like this one, you weren’t.’

‘No. Not like this one.’ Nate rubbed her back, and then lifted her chin so that he could look at her. ‘Hannah, we have to end this.’

‘I know,’ she whispered.

‘He’s like a wounded animal, mad with pain, lashing out at everything that comes near.’

‘Worse than that. A wounded animal isn’t vindictive like this. He’s driven by far darker motives.’

‘We can’t let this spread to Leah. It has to end with us. We need to do whatever it takes.’ He hesitated. ‘I love you. Both of you. I think you know how much. And if it takes my life to end this, I’ll trade it.’

She nodded, her throat constricting. ‘I’ve been thinking exactly the same thing.’

It was too painful to look into his eyes just then and see the commitment he was making. She climbed to her feet, conscious again that she was on the edge of tears, not wanting him to see how much his words affected her.

From the dining room, Leah screamed.

Hannah whirled at the sound, her first thought the whereabouts of the shotgun. On the pantry shelf.

Loaded.

Four spare cartridges tucked into the pockets of her jeans.

Before she moved from Nate’s couch, Leah screamed again and ran into the kitchen. It dawned on Hannah that her daughter was screaming with delight.

‘Horses, Mummy! Horses!’

Hannah went to the girl and crouched at her feet. ‘Leah, slow down. Horses? What have you seen?’

‘Out of the window. Three of them!’

‘OK, scamp. Hush a moment.’

The crackle of burning logs in the fireplace was the kitchen’s only sound. Then something new overlaid it, growing more distinct: the clatter and crunch of hooves on gravel. The flank of an enormous chestnut gelding passed the kitchen windows. Astride it, wearing jeans, boots and a scruffy jacket, sat Gabriel. He wore a battered felt stetson on his head.

‘It’s the fisherman!’ Leah shouted.

Gabriel’s expression was relaxed and calm. The glint of humour crinkled his eyes and tugged at the side of his mouth, as if he contemplated a private joke. A solemn brown mare with a reddish mane followed his horse, roped behind it. The mare, wearing full saddle and bridle, led in turn a smaller grey colt, this one’s head high and jerking at its rope.

‘Don’t move,’ Hannah hissed, her eyes flaring at the girl. She yanked open the pantry door and grabbed the gun from the shelf. Two rounds already in the breech, she thought.

Poking her head around the door, checking that Gabriel could not see into the kitchen, Hannah crossed the tiles to Nate’s couch and laid the weapon alongside him. She dug into her pockets and touched the cold brass caps of her two spare rounds.

What was Gabriel doing here? Why the horses? Her head buzzed as she tried to consider the potential threats, the best way of handling this intrusion. She looked down at Nate. The back of his couch shielded him from the windows. ‘What do you think?’

‘I thought you warned him off.’

‘Doesn’t seem to have worked, does it? I’ll find out what he wants. Then I’ll get rid of him.’

‘Han, wait. Don’t be too short with him. We don’t want to raise suspicions here. He’s persistent, this guy.’

‘Too persistent.’

‘Agreed. But let’s slow down a bit. Can you think of any way that Jakab could have found us yet?’

She couldn’t. And surely he wouldn’t have contacted her, attempting to trick her into revealing their location, if he already knew. Still, something about the Irishman’s presence frightened her. ‘I don’t like it.’