Angel With Two Faces (38 page)

‘It’s possible, though.’

‘Yes, it’s possible, but even you don’t sound very convinced. I think there’s something you’re not telling me, Morveth, so I’ll ask you again. But first, let me tell you something: a clerk from up country was reported missing several weeks ago,’ he said, repeating what Fallowfield had told him. ‘He came down here on holiday and hasn’t been seen since. I’d put money on the fact that he was the man who got in Harry’s way that night, and that he has a family and friends who are worried sick and waiting for someone to knock on their door with the worst possible news. Can you look me in the eye and tell me that you feel no sense of responsibility for what those people have been going through? Do I have to fetch Jago Snipe and get him to tell you how it feels not to know what’s happened to your son before you’ll be completely honest with me? All right, so they’re strangers to you but they’ve done nothing wrong and they have a right to any help you can give – a right, I might add, which Harry Pinching forfeited the moment he took another man’s life.’

‘You make it sound so easy, Archie,’ Morveth said sadly. ‘I
wish I still had your certainty. I only ever wanted to protect them.’

‘Morwenna and Loveday?’

‘Yes – and Harry, too, I suppose, even after everything he’s done. I’ve looked out for them all their lives – it’s hard to break the habit. But you’re right – that other family’s grief is on my conscience, and more besides, and I don’t trust myself to do the right thing like I used to.’

‘Then I’ll appeal to your conscience now,’ Archie said, more gently this time. Morveth was one of the proudest women he had ever met and, whilst he recognised the truth in Josephine’s opinion of her, he sympathised with how difficult it must be for Morveth to acknowledge her own fallibility – to him but more especially to herself. ‘I’m here to investigate Nathaniel’s death but things have been going wrong in this community for much longer. Please tell me anything you can that might help me piece it together.’

‘All right, but you have to understand – I don’t know anything for sure. I can only tell you what I think – although it’s actually what I’ve been trying
not
to think.’

‘Go on,’ Penrose urged.

‘It’s going to sound ridiculous, but the longer all this goes on, the more certain I am that Harry didn’t die after all.’

For the first time in many years, Morwenna was afraid. It was an emotion which she always associated with the early days of her relationship with Harry; back then, the fear that someone would discover their secret had been mixed with excitement; now, she felt it in its purest form – paralysing rather than exhilarating, and stripped of all the heroic illusions that had fooled her when she was young. ‘What else have you done,
Harry?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice level. ‘Not Nathaniel – please, tell me that wasn’t you?’ As he continued to say nothing, refusing even to look at her, her plea became a scream. ‘Tell me it wasn’t you, Harry.’

‘I had no choice,’ he said, his words barely audible. ‘I’d already killed – what difference could it make?’

Morwenna stared at him in disbelief. ‘How can you say that? There’s no comparison. The other man was a stranger – and anyway, he provoked you. Nathaniel’s death was cold-blooded murder, something you must have planned – why would you do that?’

‘I don’t know – nothing made sense any more. I did it for us – so we could be together.’

She slapped him, hard, and tried to focus on the stinging in her hand to keep herself from losing all reason. ‘No, Harry – you got away with that when you killed our parents but it’s not good enough any more. Don’t pin this on us – you owe me more than that, and you certainly owe Nathaniel something more. He was your friend, for God’s sake – he loved you. And you’ve just exchanged his life for a fantasy – wiped him out because he got in your way. What’s happened to you? If you can do that, you can do anything. Where’s this going to end?’

‘Oh stop pretending, Morwenna. You’ve known what I’m capable of since we were eighteen. It didn’t bother you then, when it was our parents, so why all this grief now? You didn’t even particularly like Nathaniel, so why choose his life over mine?’

‘It’s not a choice. Why is everything so black and white with you? What you did to our parents was an act of despair, Harry – you wanted oblivion for yourself, and you didn’t care who you took with you. I understood that, and I can understand
the type of rage that led you to go too far with a stranger who was stupid enough to push you. But Nathaniel wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time – what you did to him was pure hatred. Can’t you see there’s a difference?’

‘All I can see is that I couldn’t be parted from you, and Nathaniel was in the way. He knew too much – we could never have been happy.’

‘Like we are now, you mean?’

‘Don’t mock me, Morwenna,’ he said angrily. ‘I did hate Nathaniel – and with good reason. I hated him just like I hated that man when he hurt Shilling, only this didn’t pass.’

‘But why? Nothing that’s gone wrong between us was Nathaniel’s fault. He didn’t ask to be told about the fire, and we’ve been perfectly capable of tearing each other apart without any help from him.’

‘How can
you
say
that
? I’ve been watching you, Morwenna…’

‘What do you mean? How could you have been watching me? How long have you been back here?’

‘A few days. I read the announcement in the paper, and I could hardly miss my own funeral, could I?’

The sarcasm sounded strange coming from Harry, and the realisation that he was capable of shocking her hurt Morwenna far more than anything he had to say. ‘Where have you been hiding?’ she asked.

‘There’s a tunnel under the church that no one knows about. I’ve been there most of the time, but I had to see you, even if it wasn’t safe to let you know. So yes, I watched you and I saw what it had done to you – the belief that I could forget you and turn to Loveday, and everything else that had happened. All the life in you had gone.’

‘But what’s that got to do with Nathaniel?’

‘No matter what you say, you’d never have believed that of me if he hadn’t put it in your head. You know, I stood under that church, listening while he stumbled his way through that pathetic eulogy, and all I could think about was how none of this would have happened if it weren’t for him – we could still be together. You talk about love, but he was a coward and a hypocrite. Yes, he loved me, but not in the way you think; he wanted me just like I want you, and he couldn’t deal with it. I went out of my way to be friendly to him, to show him that it made no difference, and it really didn’t – not until he had the nerve to preach to you about forbidden love and tell you that I was fucking my little sister.’

‘Harry, he…’

‘Don’t try to defend him, Morwenna. Why would he make up those lies about me? Was it some sort of spiteful revenge for everything he couldn’t have or was he just worried about my soul? If that was it, he should have saved his counsel for himself, because I showed him what damnation really means. I showed him that dead men do come back – and they get what they’re owed.’

‘Listen to me, Harry. He didn’t put anything in my head. I told you why I jumped to the wrong conclusions about you and Loveday, and it had nothing to do with Nathaniel.’

‘But that night, when we were arguing – you accused me of turning to her and never really loving you. Then when I was leaving – when I’d hit you and I couldn’t bear to stay – you called after me. You said that Nathaniel knew everything anyway and it was only a matter of time before he said something to someone else.’

‘I was talking about the fire.’

‘What? You mean he hadn’t talked to you about Loveday and me?’

‘No, of course not, and I would never have said anything to him about it – I was too ashamed.’ The horror of Harry’s misunderstanding hit Morwenna like a physical blow. She got to the stable door just in time and, as the sour smell of vomit rose from the hard earth, she retched again, as if she could somehow empty herself of her grief and her guilt. She felt Harry’s hand on her shoulder. ‘What have we done?’ she asked eventually, turning to look at him. ‘What have
I
done?’

Her devastation was reflected in Harry’s face. ‘I thought he’d lied to you to spite me,’ he said. ‘I was so sure.’

‘He’d never have done that – not to you, no matter what he felt. He would never have talked about you behind your back.’

‘But he came to you about the fire.’

‘That wasn’t spite, Harry – that was sorrow. Couldn’t you see that in his eyes? He didn’t want to believe it and he hoped you’d tell him it wasn’t true. If you’d denied it, he’d have let it go – even if, in his heart, he didn’t believe you. But you wouldn’t deny it, so he came to me.’

‘The look on his face, Morwenna,’ he said, and she could tell from his eyes that he was reliving that moment with a new sense of horror. ‘I didn’t even have to push him, for goodness’ sake. He was so frightened when he saw me – all I had to do was take a couple of steps towards him.’

‘He thought he’d driven you to suicide,’ Morwenna said quietly. ‘I put that in his head – I was so angry with him.’

‘After everything he’d been through, all the confusion over what he felt and what he knew – he must have thought a dead man had come to take him to hell. It’s what I wanted him to
think. What must that be like when you believe what Nathaniel believed?’

Throughout the misery of the last few weeks, Morwenna had, she realised now, been nurturing a vague, elusive hope that there was a way out of the wretchedness, and, as she looked at her brother, she saw it with a clarity which both frightened and astonished her. ‘You’re right,’ she said calmly, knowing that her certainty would reassure him. ‘We do have to go away – I see that now. We’ve got no choice.’

‘Really? But how can we after…’

The look of hope in his eyes almost made her waver. She had always wondered if a day would come when she would destroy him completely, and she realised now that this was it. ‘Don’t argue, Harry,’ she said, putting her finger to his lips. ‘We both need to be strong. We’ll go away, the three of us, and start again, but you need to rest first. You’re exhausted. Let’s go inside and get you something to eat, then I’ll go and find Loveday and tell her what we’re doing.’

At the thought of her sister, Morwenna felt a stab of regret but she pushed it quickly from her mind and led Harry back into the kitchen. She built the fire up and made him sit down next to it, then went into the pantry to fetch some food. When she came back, he was unlacing his boots, wincing with pain as he did so. ‘Here, let me,’ she said, bending down to help.

He smiled gratefully at her. ‘They’re not my boots,’ he explained.

‘They’ll have to do for now,’ she said. ‘We buried your best ones with you.’ Gently, she washed his feet while he ate, noticing how badly blistered and cut they were and trying not to think about the man whose boots had done such damage. ‘Go to bed and rest now,’ she said when she had finished. ‘I’ll bring
you a drink up. I think there’s some whisky left over from the wake – it doesn’t seem right that you missed it.’

When she took the glass upstairs, Harry was standing in the doorway to his room. ‘You’ve cleared my things out already,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing left. It’s as if I never existed.’

‘It was all I could think of to do,’ she said, wishing she’d told him to take her bed. ‘The one thing I could control in the middle of so much that I didn’t understand. I’m sorry.’

He shook his head. ‘Don’t be – it’s all right. After all, I don’t exist any more, do I? Harry Pinching’s dead. Neither of us can be who we were before.’

‘Use my room,’ she said, opening the door. She watched as he undressed and got into bed, then sat down next to him and handed him his drink. ‘This will help you sleep.’

He downed it in one. ‘God, that’s good. You’ll come back as quickly as you can?’

She took the empty glass from him and went over to the door. ‘Of course. You won’t even know I’ve gone. Then the three of us can leave.’

‘Do you know where you’d like to go?’

‘I don’t mind. As far away as possible, as long as we’re together.’

‘And you’ll fetch Shilling?’

‘Yes, I’ll fetch Shilling.’ She turned to go, but thought better of it and went back to the bed. As she bent her head to kiss him, the taste of the whisky on his tongue – mixed with the familiar feel of his hand on the back of her neck – almost overwhelmed her. ‘You do know I love you, don’t you?’ she asked, when she eventually pulled away.

‘You wouldn’t be doing this if you didn’t,’ he said, and smiled.

‘You’re right,’ she said sadly. ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘So it hasn’t all been for nothing?’

‘No, Harry – not for nothing,’ she said, and left him to sleep.

Loveday listened as her sister moved about downstairs. She had been furious when Harry and Morwenna went outside, leaving her alone in the cottage, unable to hear what was going on. Her anger had soon disappeared when they returned, however: at last, it seemed as though everything she had ever wanted was about to be hers. Harry was back, and the shouting had stopped. Perhaps the three of them could be happy together after all. She would miss the Loe estate – and Christopher, of course – but going away would be an adventure. The adventure that Harry had always promised her.

She sat down on the narrow bed, feeling suddenly quite tired. If she were honest, Morwenna was right – she still wasn’t completely better. Like Harry, she ought to get some rest. Quietly, Loveday crawled between the sheets and waited for Morwenna to fetch her.

There was a long silence in the room. Archie looked at Josephine and saw the shock and disbelief in her face. Rather than share her surprise, though, he felt that something had suddenly fallen into place which would explain everything. He could not begin to imagine yet how Harry had achieved such a complex illusion, but his instinct was to believe that Morveth’s suspicions were correct. ‘You’re saying that Harry put the other man’s body in the Loe Pool to fake his own death?’ he asked.