A Ghost at the Door (23 page)

‘Not particularly,’ he said, very slowly.

‘Why not?’

For the first time he began to sense that this wasn’t just about him, or Ruari, or Delicious, that she’d done something he desperately wouldn’t like. He didn’t want to
think what. But he couldn’t forget that Delicious had died and it was his fault. That choked his soul, so that right now he didn’t have any room left inside to be angry with Jem,
too.

‘Why not?’ he said, repeating her question. ‘You know why, stupid.’

There were tears now, of that he was in no doubt.

‘Neither of us are teenagers, Jem. We’ve both got enough previous to ask for any number of additional offences to be taken into consideration, but so what? We both know we can live
without each other. I just don’t want to. Ever.’

She didn’t reply. Her lips trembled as though trying to speak but not a word emerged. Instead she stripped off her T-shirt and dropped it alongside the discarded laundry. Her body swayed
as she crossed to him, naked from the waist up. She took him in her arms, made sure he felt both her body and her tongue against his. Then she led him to the sofa. He was wearing a shirt that was
sticking to him in the heat; her fingers tugged and twisted until they had undone every button, not hurried, as if they had all the time in the world. She stripped the shirt from his back like the
peel of an orange, pulling it over the cast on his arm, then kissed him again. A breeze had begun to waft through the window, spilling over their bodies, joining in with them, and he could feel
that her breasts had caught fire. She stripped him of the rest of his clothes, her fingers deftly manipulating every belt and button, falling to her knees in order to free his feet from the tangle
of clothes and leave him naked. She looked up, wide-eyed, like a penitent. She kissed both his knees, then worked her way up, slowly, deliberately, lingering at every stopping place, until their
eyes met once again. She pushed him down onto the sofa. She had taken complete control.

When he was stretched out there, his head cushioned, she discarded what was left of her own clothes, throwing them carelessly to one side. She knelt beside his head, kissed his brow, each eye,
very softly, the merest brush of her lips, then the tip of his nose, his cheeks, chin, in a ritual that finally led once more to his lips.

Many months before, when they had first started sleeping with each other, they had spent an evening when she had gone over every inch of his body, examining the scars, the marks of his previous
life, and he had told her a little of their history. The severed ear, the scars of bullets, and knife blades, and burns, the stitch marks left after a tumble from a motorbike in the Indian
Himalayas had opened up a six-inch wound on his outer thigh, the creases of skin left by the passage of shrapnel, and some marks he simply couldn’t remember how they had been caused. She had
marvelled how they had healed in different ways, the surgical scars that had faded almost to memory, the new flap of ear that was totally without sensation, the wicked purple mound of flesh on his
back left by a bullet of the Iraqi Republican Guard that would have killed him had it been a finger’s width closer to his spine. The flesh around that wound still seemed angry, refusing to
settle. These marks were Harry – not all of him of course, but she had realized from the very start that he was not and never could be like any other man she had known. Now she went to every
one of his old wounds, brushing them with the gentlest of touches, smoothing away their creases with her lips and her fingertips, as though to heal them and chase away any lingering pain.

Then she climbed astride him. Settled herself on him, and made love to him with a tenderness they hadn’t shared for months. Not a single word. A rivulet of sweat trickled down between her
breasts, through the blonde downy hair of her navel and onto his, binding them as one. Then she brought her feet forward alongside his chest, leaned her own body back, rocked to and fro, and
moments later gave a small cry. They were done.

They didn’t hurry, not even their parting. But as soon as she got to her feet she scooped up her clothes and began climbing back into them, struggling with the damp, clinging T-shirt. When
she spoke the tenderness was gone, the voice very practical, stripped of emotion.

‘I’d like you to pack a bag, Harry.’

‘What?’

‘I want you to go.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Like you, I need some time.’

‘Come on, Jem, what for?’

‘To think.’

‘About what?’

‘Us, of course.’

‘And how long do you think this might take?’

‘I don’t know!’ she shouted, her composure slipping. Then she added, very softly, ‘Fuck you, Harry.’

‘But we just—’

‘That . . .’ She waved an animated finger at the wreckage of the sofa. ‘That was to see if we still had it, if we had something to build on. It’s been so long, I needed
to be reminded. I was. And now I need to be by myself. You can phone me, if you like. But not too often.’

‘Are you sure about this?’

‘Very.’

He felt cheated, almost deceived, but he didn’t argue. He knew it would have no purpose, that he could never badger her into changing her mind. He’d asked for time, so now she
demanded her share of it, too. He took a shower, trying to scrub away his feelings of resentment along with the lingering reminders of sex, then packed a few things while Jemma began tidying her
apartment, filling the time with mindless activity, retrieving underwear and bed linen and folding them into neat piles. There was no anger, no hostility on her part, just emotional blankness as
she struggled to keep her knees from shaking.

Harry was being thrown out. Yet, as much as he might want to rage against the powerlessness of it all, there was also a considerable chunk of sense in it. He knew what he was doing was hurting
Jemma. He also knew he couldn’t stop. He had to carry on. That was what Harry Jones always did, which was why he had so many bloody holes in him. He couldn’t stop now. He owed that not
only to himself but even more to Delicious. His fault, no one could tell him otherwise. Yet too many people connected to Susannah Ranelagh had died and he knew there was every chance he might be
next in line, which meant that anybody standing beside him was in danger, too, let alone anyone sleeping with him. Jemma. It was right to get away. For her sake.

‘I love you,’ he said, hovering at the door.

‘Bye, Harry,’ she said, not daring to look up.

He turned away and the door closed behind him.

Temporary accommodation was never going to be much of a challenge for a man like Harry. His years in the military and in politics had left him with a wide network of friends.
And the timing was right at the start of the summer: Parliament had just gone into recess and many of the boltholes used by politicians as their London bases were now empty. It took him only a
couple of phone calls to find somewhere, and it proved to be exceptional – a houseboat moored on the river at Chelsea just off Cheyne Walk. It belonged to a Scottish hereditary peer, Lord
Glenmartin. ‘Make yourself at home, dear boy. No maid service, no milk in the fridge and the claret’s pretty disgusting, but it’s yours until October, if you want.’

‘You’re a pal, Angus.’

‘But what is it, Harry, woman trouble?’ The Scotsman sighed. ‘Not again. I’d lend you my sister but, well, you’re a friend and she has this terrible habit of
wanting to marry every man she sleeps with.’

‘The keys and the claret are more than enough.’

‘I’ll give the security chaps a call, let them know you’re coming. Ah, spare key. Unimaginative, I know, but it’s in one of the flowerpots. Third on left.’

The houseboat turned out to be forty-six feet of old pine panels, book cases, narrow beds and Spartan cooking facilities, with an old solid-fuel stove in the middle of the main cabin and the
paperwork that marked the paraphernalia of a parliamentary life piled on almost every conceivable surface. It was south-facing, almost stifling in the sun, and he threw open all the windows and
hatches to catch the breeze. He found the claret, a case of ageing Saint-Julien that only Angus would dare call disgusting but which was in dire need of rescue from the heat before it turned into
cooking wine. The faint aroma of cigars hung in the air and dying stags stared at him from every wall. He found fresh linen in the closet, where Glenmartin had directed him, restocked the fridge
and tidied the papers into orderly piles. When he had finished he took himself up to the sun deck at the bow, overlooking the river, and started on the first bottle of claret. The cork crumbled but
he dug it out patiently. Beside him was a large flower pot that had been commandeered during the spring as a nesting site by a family of ducks. On the river swam bobbing moorhens; along it flew
cormorants in search of elvers. His iPhone sat beside him for company and he kept staring at it, wondering if she would call, and debating whether
he
should. The light was beginning to
fade, the noise of the water fading to a gentle murmur of the ebbing river. Still she hadn’t called, and he knew she wouldn’t. He sighed. He knew he shouldn’t bother her but
picked up his phone anyway.

‘Hello, Alex. You said I should call.’

‘But of course, Harry,’ the now familiar voice replied. ‘How are things? How’s Jemma?’

‘I guess we’ve been better. Taking a bit of a holiday, truth be told.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Things have got a little confused, what with my father, Susannah Ranelagh. I even managed to get myself arrested.’

It took McQuarrel a moment to take in this news. ‘You ran a red light or something?’

‘There’s a Bermudan police officer, came over here to investigate the Ranelagh disappearance. Somehow she got herself murdered.’

‘Good grief!’

‘For a moment they thought I’d done it. I think they still do.’

‘But, Harry, this is appalling.’

‘Jem agrees with you.’

‘Harry, please, tell me, how can I help? Anything. I have a few good friends in the law, or if it’s money—’

‘No, just the bishop. The Bishop of Burton. I’d like to have a word with him, see if he has any insights. Can you help?’

‘I’m not sure I can, Harry. I’m not sure he’s even a bishop any longer. They have mandatory retirement at seventy, don’t they? And he must be all of
that?’

‘Oh, I thought that you and he . . .’ Harry couldn’t hide the disappointment in his voice.

‘Randall Wickham and I pass like ferries in a fog, no more than that. Had a bit of a falling-out, actually, some years ago. Over the bloody Arabs. Typical Senior Common Room banter, you
know what these things are like. He wanted to bomb them with bibles. I thought it a rather silly idea and he took offence. Well, you know, High Table should be a bit of a battlefield, there ought
to be casualties. After that we rather avoided each other, opposite sides of the fireplace in the Senior Common Room.’

‘That’s a pity.’

‘I suppose I’ll bump into the man at some point, pontificating at High Table, but at the very earliest that won’t be until the start of Michaelmas term in October.’

‘Bugger.’

‘But if you don’t mind my asking, what do you need him for?’

‘He knew my father and Susannah Ranelagh so I was, you know, sort of hoping he might . . .’ It sounded confused, and was. The claret wasn’t helping.

‘Harry, it’s not for me to interfere.’

‘I called you, remember? That makes it a sort of invitation.’

‘Where’s all this taking you? With the police. Your relationship with Jemma.’

‘It’s become a pain in the butt, hasn’t it?’

‘So why bother? Why carry on?’

‘The Father Thing, I guess. Chasing ghosts.’ Harry looked deep into his glass as though he might find the answer there, but it was no help. He sighed. ‘You know, Alex,
I’ve been struggling to remember the last thing we said to each other. I can’t. Some unkind word, some intended slight, I suppose. I keep wondering if it was about my mother. I was
barely a teenager when she died. I never really knew her.’ He was growing maudlin.

‘Oh, Harry, but I knew her! And one day I’ll sit with you and it will be my pleasure to tell you everything I knew of her. But don’t damn your father simply because she was
unhappy in her final years. I know he tried.’

Harry struggled in silence with the idea as a wisp of breeze off the river tussled his hair.

‘I know you want to take sides, Harry, but that’s not a good idea. They are both dead, you can’t change a thing. Better to let it lie.’

‘I suspect that’s good advice.’

‘Then take it.’

‘I can’t, Alex. I’m their son. When they made me I think they forgot to include a pause switch.’

‘I hope you won’t live to regret that.’

‘You know, there’s something I do remember him telling me,’ Harry said, dredging the memory up from deep within his glass. ‘He always had a saying of some sort, eternal
wisdom, like a bloody Christmas cracker. “Regret only what you don’t do.” That’s what he said. Perhaps that’s why he died never regretting a thing – he left that
to everyone else. Johnnie the Chancer, Johnnie the Cheat, Johnnie the Cynic, the Irreverent, the Utterly Irresponsible,’ he said caustically. Some thing else Harry remembered his saying:
‘Never fall in love with anyone but yourself: it only leads to disappointment.’ And, as he remembered, Harry reached once again for the bottle.