A Dark Dividing (30 page)

T
WO DAYS AFTER the meeting at the wine bar, Roz phoned Harry at his home.

She apologized if she was disturbing him, but he had given her his home phone number, and she had thought—Well, the thing was that she might have found out something for his research on the Anderson twins. She did not know if it would be of any use, but perhaps they might meet, so that she could explain. What she had thought—and it was only an idea—was that she might repay his hospitality at Giorgio’s by inviting him to a meal at her house. Nothing grand, just a bite to eat and a glass of wine. Then she could give him the information she had turned up.

Harry heard himself saying that he would be very interested to know what she had unearthed, but he would not dream of putting her to the trouble of cooking a meal—Oh, her aunt’s house? Well, then perhaps—Well, yes, if she put it like that, he would be happy to come out to her house for a bite of supper. Tonight? Yes, tonight would be fine, but please not to go to a lot of trouble—No, he did not have any dislikes or allergies whatsoever. He could eat anything that was put in front of him, and he would see her around half past seven.

She lived in a rather depressing house fairly near to the hospital. Harry approached it with a twinge of apprehension. There was no discernible reason for this; it was just that he had thought he detected a slight over-eagerness in her voice on the phone when she invited him to eat with her, and it had sounded a faint alarm bell. (Oh yes? Think yourself irresistible to all females now, do you?) But the mention of an aunt had been reassuring; he visualized some nice, unmarried lady in her seventies: someone who would fuss at having a Man to supper. An older version of Rosie herself: she had unmistakably spinsterish traits—that reference to keeping letters and old Christmas cards, for instance.

It was disconcerting, therefore, to find himself ushered fussily into a small dining-room, made dark by overgrown shrubbery outside, and to find that there were only two places laid at the claw-footed mahogany table.

‘Isn’t your aunt—?’

‘Oh, my aunt’s been dead for years,’ said Roz, apparently surprised that he should have thought otherwise. ‘She died twenty years ago.’

‘Ah. I must have misunderstood you.’

‘I lived with her all my life, though. My parents were killed in a car crash when I was a baby, so I came here. She left me the house and all the furniture. Would you like a drink?’

‘I would. I brought some wine.’

‘Oh, how very nice of you, although quite unnecessary—I’ll get a corkscrew. Or you could have a glass of whisky, if you like. Most men like whisky, don’t they?’

Harry did like. He accepted the whisky, and asked about the information she had found on the twins.

‘I thought I’d save that until we’ve eaten. I do dislike discussing business things while eating, don’t you?’

She was expecting him to seduce her—no, she was
hoping
for him to seduce her. Harry was not sure how he knew this so definitely, but he did know it and he found it deeply worrying. It was only faintly apparent while they sipped their drinks before eating, but it became embarrassingly apparent throughout the roast lamb with mint sauce, and the fruit crumble with cream. (‘The apples are from my own garden: I do like fresh food, don’t you?’)

It became blazingly obvious over the coffee, which was served in the small sitting-room after the meal—‘Now do have a
petit four
with your coffee: I made them myself’—and there, sadly and clumsily, was the brush of her hand against his thigh as the plate was passed to him, and there, pathetically and too-obviously, was the soft press of a breast as she reached across him for the sugar bowl.

Harry was not unaccustomed to being on the receiving end of seduction, and he was certainly not unaccustomed to exerting the technique on his own account, either, but he found Sister Raffan’s attempts disquieting in a way he could not analyse. Because she was so much older, was it? Yes, partly that. But it was also something to do with the cloying atmosphere of the room, which was crowded with old-fashioned ornaments and china figures on elaborate side-tables and framed photographs, and with the way she sat by him on the old-fashioned sofa with the cream lace arm-covers.

He set down his coffee cup firmly, and said, ‘Rosie, this stuff you found on the Anderson twins—’ And hoped her claim to have found information had not merely been a ploy to get him out here, because it would be so infinitely sad, it would be toe-curlingly awful, to have to watch and listen to her trying to explain or make something up.

It had not been a ploy, and she did not have to try to explain or make anything up. She smiled at him and set her own cup down next to his, and said that although she had not found anything of any help in any of the boxes of letters and photos, she had made one or two inquiries at the hospital. ‘I was very discreet, of course,’ she said. ‘I used your article as a springboard, as a matter of fact—I said, Goodness, wasn’t this one of the Anderson twins, and, Dear me, it doesn’t seem twenty years since they were born in our own maternity unit. That kind of thing.’

‘That was tactful of you. And did anyone remember them?’

‘Yes, several people. And one of the managers—she was a secretary in those days, but they’re all called managers or account executives these days, and she’s always been by way of being a friend of mine—she said how nice to see that at any rate one of the twins had done so well—’

‘“One” of the twins?’

Roz paused, leaning forward to pick up her coffee cup. ‘Yes. She said she had always thought it such a tragedy that both twins hadn’t survived.’

There was rather a long silence. Then Harry said, ‘So after all, Sonia’s dead.’

‘Yes,’ said Roz, watching him over the rim of her cup. ‘Sonia’s dead.’ She reached for a small envelope on a side table. ‘This is quite against the rules, but I got this for you.’

It was a photocopy of a newspaper cutting, quite short, dated about seven months after the twins’ birth. It simply said that the operation to separate the conjoined Anderson twins born earlier this year in St Luke’s Hospital, had been performed in Switzerland. The newspaper understood that, very sadly, the younger twin—Sonia—had died shortly afterwards from complications following the surgery.

‘It was in the old file on the twins,’ said Roz. ‘I had to ferret around in the records office for ages because it was packed away with the archives but nobody asked any questions. It’s not actually an official announcement, is it? But it sounds fairly definite.’

‘Yes, it does.’ Harry read it again. ‘I wonder why Switzerland?’

‘Well, as to that I can’t say for sure. But I do remember that the family found all the press interest very intrusive.’ She gave him a small, rather cloyingly intimate smile. ‘They may have gone abroad to try to escape it.’

‘It would explain why I didn’t find any mention of Sonia anywhere,’ said Harry. ‘If she died abroad it probably wouldn’t be registered in this country.’

‘Yes.’ Roz paused, and then said, ‘I suppose this means there’s no story.’

Harry said slowly, ‘No, I don’t think there’s a story.’

‘Oh, what a pity.’ The smile was still there. ‘More coffee, Harry? And—perhaps a glass of brandy with it?’

‘I don’t think I will, thanks all the same,’ said Harry. ‘You’ve been enormously helpful over this, Rosie, and I’m immensely grateful. But it’s very late, and I’ve got an early start in the morning—I think I’d better say goodnight. It’s been a great evening.’

Somehow he got himself out of the smothering room, and somehow he got himself down the narrow path with the dark shrubbery pressing in on both sides, and somehow he found his way to the main road and saw, with relief, the light of a tube station at the far end.

He was beginning to wonder whether the game was worth the candle.

It did not really matter that the bed-thing had not come off with Harry Fitzglen; in fact on balance Roz was rather glad it had not, because she did not really find it especially pleasurable. But she had been prepared for it tonight if it would get her closer to Harry and make it easier to keep tabs on his research.

What did matter was that Harry had accepted the facts in the newspaper cutting, so diligently searched for and found in one of Roz’s stored-away boxes, artfully photocopied so that it could be presented as part of hospital records.

It had been worth the expense of the meal—a whole joint of lamb it had been and fresh vegetables. Vegetables were not expensive, but they took ages to prepare. ‘Fresh peas?’ one of the other sisters had said, seeing Roz’s lunch-time shopping stored in the locker room. ‘Good heavens, I didn’t think anyone bought fresh peas any longer. Frozen, that’s what my family always eats. Far quicker and easier.’

But Roz had not minded shelling the peas, or scraping and slicing carrots. She had made fresh mint sauce as well, cutting the leaves from the little herb garden near the kitchen window, and diligently chopping them. The fruit for the crumble had come from her own little deep-freeze; Roz and her aunt had always grown their own apples, and stewed the cookers for freezing each autumn. She had used a whole tub of apples for the crumble tonight. (And she had bought condoms on the way home from a large, anonymous chemist, doing so briskly. She was not so oldmaidish about buying them these days, and there had been one or two men since Joe Anderson. Never anything really serious, though. It was better, really, to be alone.)

After Harry had gone she felt better. She was as sure as she could be that she had put paid to any disinterring of the past for an article, and she thought she could focus now on the knowledge that after all these years she had found Melissa Anderson—at least, she had found the bitch’s daughter!

She could start to lay plans once again.