Authors: Marcus Sedgwick
When Verovkin saw my passport that night in Avignon, he must have seen my profession.
Doctor
. My place of residence.
Cambridge
. That would be enough to know how to find me.
And they’d been here.
In my house.
The phone rang and I dropped my whisky on the carpet.
I stared at the phone for ever before picking it up.
‘What?’ I barked.
‘Oh, Charles,’ said Susan. She was crying. ‘Daddy’s dead.’
Chapter 8
Rome.
The girl. That hot day in Campo de’ Fiori. Two minutes in a foetid alleyway. These things grew; they took on a greater significance. In my mind the phrase
what happened in Rome
repeated itself often, when it would have been more honest to say
what I did in Rome
.
No one made me follow that girl. Arianna. No one, and yet I fell for that trap, for trap it almost certainly had been, easily. Not just the girl, but the whole trip. The real Mazzarino had never written to me. I marvelled at the trouble Verovkin had taken to set me up, fly me there, invite me to a dinner that only my rudeness had prevented me from attending. I marvelled and was terrified in equal measure.
What had been his plan? For me to meet Arianna there and then? Even though I’d cancelled, they’d found me anyway, lured me in, got the photos they wanted.
How pathetic I felt, and never did I stop to wonder how many other men would have behaved differently from me, given such a direct approach from a young, attractive girl. The stuff of male fantasy.
From all the impressions and memories that returned from those fleeting moments in the bar and the alley, the one that always succeeded in rising to the top of the pile was the one of the blood on my fingertips.
No blood, no sex.
She’d pushed my hand on to her breasts too, making me feel her nipples. Made me? I had fumbled them eagerly, and again knew their arousal to be a thing of blood, of the blood inside them.
I said that the sex in the alley was obvious enough, and yes, the details of it were, but for one thing. One thing: this had been my first taste of sex in a very long time, and it would be natural to assume that it overwhelmed me and for a short time at least I thought of nothing else. But even during the act, some part of my mind was elsewhere, making other connections. From nowhere, as I pushed my fingers into the hair on the back of Arianna’s head, an image surfaced in my mind, the image I’d seen in the museum in Saint-Germain in
1944
, of the decapitated woman supposed to be a vampire.
We cremated my father in Guildford, and had drinks at his golf club. Susan and I made small talk with his few friends and colleagues who’d shown up. Hunter was there, for which I was very grateful, but he was always a loyal friend, and had loved my father deeply, something I found mysterious to say the least, as two more different men I could not imagine
I watched Susan forcing smiles at people neither of us knew, nodding frequently to compensate. She seemed smaller to me, younger even.
‘Roger didn’t make it,’ I said, rescuing her from another such conversation and steering her to the bar.
Where before she would have withered me with a taut rebuke, she turned her face to me, looking lost.
‘He’s on a business trip,’ she said, failing to find the lightness she was after.
‘Important?’
‘Yes, very,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t be helped. Of course.’
I got her another Scotch and water and we turned and looked at the handful of mourners.
‘Don’t say it,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘That awful thing everyone says at funerals. “I wonder how many people will turn up for me when it’s my turn.” It’s such a cliché.’
‘Hadn’t crossed my mind.’
‘Liar,’ she said, and I smiled, because she looked a little more herself then.
‘What do we do now?’ she asked.
‘Do?’
‘Now . . .’
‘It’s just us?’
‘Us,’ she said. ‘There isn’t really an “us”, is there? Not these days.’
‘No, maybe not, but you have Roger, and . . .’
‘Yes. Roger. And you . . . have your work.’
‘You make it sound so awful. Yes, you do. That’s OK. It is pretty awful. I was just never very lucky with the love thing.’
‘I feel I was never there. When Sarah died.’
‘You came to the funeral.’
‘You know that’s not what I mean.’
‘What’s up with you?’ I asked. ‘Don’t tell me Dad going has made you all philosophical.’
She didn’t answer, just sipped her Scotch and tried to avoid eye contact with an old couple who clearly wanted to chat. She won and they passed slowly by.
‘Just don’t end up alone, Charles,’ Susan said. ‘That’s all.’
I offered Hunter a lift back to Cambridge but he was staying on in London, he said. So I drove home by myself that night and sat like a stranger in my own house.
I couldn’t shift the feeling that Verovkin, or, more likely, some thug in his employ, had been there, and that very night I determined to sell up and take a little flat somewhere. By the Cam if I could find the right thing.
Susan might not want me to be alone, but I was, and there seemed little point knocking around in the house that Sarah and I had meant to fill with children.
I went through the post that had come since I’d gone down to Surrey, and my hand slowed as I pulled out a handwritten letter from Dr Downey, asking me to pop in and see him at my convenience.
I knew what it was. Despite the informal tone, I knew the way he worked. This meant a dressing-down, an ‘interview without coffee’ is how we described it in the army when an officer was in hot water. I’d been away too much, neglecting my work, and now had no explanation for my absence in Rome, because I dared not admit to the trap I’d fallen into.
Deciding I had better not dilly-dally, the next morning I found myself sitting in front of Dr Downey.
I was wrong.
He didn’t want to give me a talking-to. He wanted to give me the sack.
Of course, that was not how he put it. He mumbled various things about how I must be wanting to look elsewhere for employment, that it was time for me to move on, that references would be written.
‘Are you firing me?’ I said, bluntly, because I was incredulous.
Downey mumbled some more, and then mumbled something about unprofessional conduct, and about the moral integrity of a Cambridge institution, and then I went cold as I realised he knew about the photographs.
Essentially he was asking me to leave before they had to do anything as grotesque as hold an enquiry.
I flushed red in the face and stumbled out of the door as fast as I could, assuring Downey I had no intention of staying any longer than was necessary.
I hurried through the streets, and realised that Verovkin, as I still thought of him, had not wanted to kill me. That he could probably already have done that. That what he wanted to do was destroy me, totally. To humiliate and ruin me, utterly.
In a daze I ended up at Hunter’s, where I was received with a bellow of welcome as usual, but one that faltered a little.
I unburdened my fears to Hunter, and admitted to the Roman affair, and I suppose I thought our friendship was indefatigable, but though the conversation began badly enough, it ended worse.
Hunter seemed not to be listening. Not to what I was saying, not properly. I tried to tell him about Verovkin and that my house had been invaded but he seemed to want to avoid talking about it. He kept returning to the issue of my father’s death.
‘Maybe a holiday would do you good. It’s been a trying time for you.’
I found him patronising and told him so.
He held up his hands, but refused to listen to the stories I had to tell him.
‘It’s just not . . .’ he said, and stopped as I turned the subject back to Marian’s murder.
‘Not what?’ I snapped.
His face clouded.
‘It’s not credible, Charles. I’m sorry but there it is. You’re simply—’
I don’t know what he would have said, because I didn’t stay to listen. I flung some words at him; in fact, I shouted something idiotic about betrayal, and then I left.
Chapter 9
It’s a foolish thing to say that life is anything other than a river. It flows in one direction only and to try and swim upstream is nigh impossible. And I was already far downstream.
I never reported for work again.
The day after I’d met Downey and rowed with Hunter, I returned to Surrey. I drove down in a foul mood, one that was lifted slightly by seeing Susan smiling faintly as she saw me pull in to her drive to collect her.
‘Has something happened?’ she asked after five minutes of one-way conversation.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Do you want to tell me? I know how important work is to you.’
Grimly I smiled back.
‘Nothing worth mentioning.’
We drove on and had the devil of a job finding the office of Father’s solicitor, which was tucked away at the very top of the High Street.
All the while my mind was sinking further and further into a depression. I’d lost my job, and my reputation was probably going to take some time to repair, if that was at all possible. I knew I wanted to sell my house and move but that would take weeks. I had some small savings I could live off for a time, so maybe I should just disappear while I found a way to go on.
The reading of the will changed all that. In fact, it determined the rest of my life, pushed me on, led me to where I have ended, because as the two of us, the entire remaining branch of the Jackson clan, sat in the solicitor’s cramped and dark office, it transpired that my father had not only been a rich man, he had been a very rich man indeed.
He had left it all to the two of us, divided exactly in half. That was the way Father worked; everything was always very, very precise.
We stepped out on to the pavement, a little shell-shocked I think.
‘Did you have any idea . . . ?’
I shook my head.
‘Mother always said he was so tight,’ Susan went on. ‘I see what she means now.’
I nodded, speechless.
‘Why was he living in that house?’ Susan said. ‘He could have lived in a palace and had servants waiting on him, ministering to his every need.’
‘But that wouldn’t have been Father,’ I said. ‘Would it?’
Half an hour later, I drove Susan back to her house. Neither of us said a word the whole way.
As we pulled up, I glanced at the windows.
‘Is Roger . . . ?’
‘Munich. Very important.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said.
‘Do you want to come in?’ Susan asked.
‘Why break the habit of a lifetime?’ I said, easily, and we both laughed.
She opened the door and got out, and was about to shut it when she leaned back in.
‘I’m going to leave him,’ she said.
I wasn’t sure if she was joking.
‘Find a young lover and travel the world. Book a cruise.’
‘Susan,’ I said, ‘think big. You could
buy
a cruise ship if you wanted to.’
‘Good idea, Charles. Listen, thanks for the lift. And for . . .’
‘What?’
She smiled briefly.
‘Nothing. Everything. Listen, whatever it is. Whatever it is that you’re dealing with. Good luck. Be kind on yourself.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I might disappear for a while. Lay low. So don’t worry if you don’t hear from me.’
‘I never hear from you anyway.’
‘That’s a very good point,’ I said. ‘Well, good luck to you too. Have fun on your cruise.’
‘I was only joking.’
‘Were you?’
‘Maybe.’
I drove off, heading back to Cambridge, but I never got there, and neither did I ever see my sister again.
On the way, it began to dawn on me what had just happened. I began to see and feel things more clearly than I had in a very long while. I could see what my life would now be, and I knew what I was going to do, and how I was going to do it.
I grew excited. I felt as if I was alive again after a lifetime of death, and as I drove, I felt a lightness surge inside me, happiness even, and I laughed.
FOUR
Lausanne
May,
1963
On the continent, the disease is universally called haemophilia.
In Germany, haemophilia is also called
Bluterkrankheit
, and individual patients
Bluter
, a translation of the word bleeder, used by the American physicians who first described cases of this disease. In France the disease is now always called
hémophilie
. I am unable to say from my own observation by what writer the name was first used. The word is so barbarous and senseless that it is not wonderful that no one should be proud of it.