Past Caring (67 page)

“All right. I’ve found the Postscript, Henry. The document Strafford left, which his nephew discovered. I’m sure your son told you all about it.” I paused for him to respond, but he just twisted in his chair and stared out of the window in silence. “It relates everything that happened when Strafford returned to this country in 1951, up until the day before his death. You know, everything: your father’s bigamy, Strafford’s total innocence, your botched attempts to blackmail him, your abortive breakin at his nephew’s cottage in Devon. All this after you’d claimed never even to have met Strafford, after you’d denounced him as a philanderer, after you’d spent years lecturing me on morality while not even knowing the meaning of the word.”

Henry turned and looked at me with hooded indifference. He seemed unusually self-controlled. “I warned you to spell it out quickly, Radford. Is that all you’ve got to say?”

“Not quite.” I held my nerve. “Unlike Strafford, I decided not 410

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to leave your mother in ignorance of her husband’s and her son’s true characters, so I’ve shown her the Postscript. She knows everything now, you see. That’s why she sent me to see you.” I rose and handed him Elizabeth’s note.

He scanned it briefly, then crumpled it in his hand. “The old man protected her too well,” he said. “Cocooned down there in Sussex in her lily-white world. She understands nothing.” The last word was bitterly emphasized. “So, you’ve fooled an old woman. That’s about your mark, isn’t it?”

“Listen, Henry. Your secret’s out, but that’s not the worst of it. There’s more you don’t know. There’s more that Strafford kept even from your father. There was a son by his South African marriage.”

“You’re trying it on, Radford—and it won’t work.”

“It will work. I’m not relying on the Postscript for proof. Your father’s other son—your half-brother—is alive and well. He hired me to dig into Strafford’s past. It was his appearance in Madeira that prompted Strafford to contact your father again in 1951. And your mother’s now invited him to visit her and meet the family who spurned him.” (I didn’t care to let slip that Henry still had time to prevent the invitation being sent.) Henry jumped from his chair. “This is a bloody lie.” He brought his hands down onto the desk with a crash and stooped over it, face working to comprehend and suborn me. “You’ve cooked up this nonsense to deceive my mother and blacken my family’s name. All because we didn’t let you get away with screwing that little schoolgirl. All because . . .”

“Shut up, Henry.” My sharp but level-toned interruption quietened him. “It’s no good trying to bluster your way out of this. The Postscript exists. Leo Sellick lives. The proof is out in the open at last. You’re finished, unless . . .”

He sank down in the chair behind the desk. “Unless what?”

“Unless you volunteer what we’re going to find out in the end anyway.”

“Which is?”

“The part you played in Strafford’s supposedly accidental death in 1951.”

Henry smirked disconcertingly. “Boy, you just don’t under-

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stand, do you? Do you really think it’s as simple as that? Perhaps you and Strafford have more in common than I thought. My father once told me that fools are dangerous, because they don’t understand what’s in their own interests. You must be a case in point. To think I let you marry my daughter.”

“You weren’t doing me any favours. I was impressed—yes, God help me, actually impressed—by your family: wealth, political connexions, a knighthood behind you. But what does it all come down to? A coward who got lucky, a bigamous marriage, an inflated, bom-bastic life built on a lie. And you—Henry Couchman, industrial baron, government minister, pillar of the establishment—what does that make you? Nothing but the bastard son of a . . .”

He swung his chair round, flanked the desk and grabbed my shirt collar. His face, flushed, contorted and angry, was close to mine. His arm shook with the force of his grip. “Shut your mouth, Radford. You haven’t the right to speak to me like that. I don’t know why I don’t . . .”

“Push me under a train? Help me into a river? Why don’t you try something like that? It seems to be your speciality.”

He wrenched his arm away from me, seemed for a moment shocked by the implications of his action. “So that’s it,” he muttered. “Christ, you really don’t understand.”

“Why don’t you explain then?”

He walked slowly to the window and spoke with his back turned. “Tell me what my mother wants.”

“She wants to know the truth from you about Strafford
before
she meets Sellick.”

“Then she’s a fool. Like you, she doesn’t understand.”

“If you wait until Sellick arrives, it’ll be too late. Believe me, I know the man.”

Suddenly he seemed to cave in, looking at me with a distress that was almost pitiful. “You know already, don’t you? You’re just dragging it out to punish me for ruining you.”

“That’s right.” I pushed my luck. “Sellick has proof that Strafford’s death wasn’t an accident. He’ll be coming soon to nail you.”

“But it was. That’s all it was. A horrible bloody accident.” He put his hand to his forehead.

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“If you can be that sure . . . you must have been there.”

He slid his hand down to his mouth. “He was just an old drunk.” An old drunk? I’d meant Edwin Strafford, but Henry’s admission surely concerned Ambrose. Events slid out of joint.

What did his misunderstanding tell me about either death?

Everything or nothing? I didn’t have time to think while Henry blurted it all out. “Don’t you understand? What does it matter that he drowned a few years before he drank himself to death?

About as much as the fact that it really was an accident.” His look was full of pleading, pleading for me to understand that an obscure death didn’t justify his public ruin, pleading for my tacit consent to the logic of his judgement—which I would never give.

“Tell me about the accident, then.”

“It was like all accidents—sudden, unexpected, unpredictable: over before I could control it.”

“The day we met in Miston, you travelled to Torquay on the pretext of a trade conference.”

“It was genuine, but I only decided to go at the last moment, because it meant I could slip up to Dewford without anybody knowing and take a look around. You’d worried me, with your talk about Strafford’s accusations of foul play.”

“You found Ambrose at the pub in Dewford?”

“I spotted him there, yes—and remembered him from our previous meeting in 1951. I took care he didn’t see me, though.”

“Not enough care, as it happens. He noticed you.”

Henry nodded. “Makes sense, in view of what happened when I went back that night.”

“Why did you go back?”

“Because Timothy phoned me in Torquay and told me about Ambrose’s letter to you. I’d sent him to buy you off. That sort of thing’s his speciality—God knows he must have his uses. We knew you’d been involved with the Randall bitch: Timothy considers he has droit de seigneur over the better-looking incumbents of the Fellowship, but that didn’t mean I trusted her, or him. With Strafford mouthing off, it seemed best just to pay up and have done.”

“But that didn’t work.”

“No, and the letter changed everything, because it meant

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there was evidence to worry about, not just hearsay. I think Timothy actually enjoyed dropping me in the shit where that was concerned.”

“So what did you do?”

“I went up to Dewford again. I made for the pub, to see if the old man was there. If he was, I was intending to go back to the cottage and see if I could find that blasted Postscript.”

“And was he?”

“Oh yes. The worst of it was he was just coming out and met me in the glare of the porch light. He stank of cider. But he wasn’t too addled to recognize me. He remembered me from the pub earlier. And then he remembered me from 1951. Started shouting and swearing—and laughing madly.

“I panicked, the last thing I needed was a row in the street. So I took off, legged it away from the old fool. He followed, but soon appeared to give up. I kept on down the lanes. Inky black they were. Pretty soon I was lost. I came to a bridge over a river and stopped to get my breath back.

“I leant against the parapet, facing downstream, breathing deeply, wondering what the hell I’d got myself into. Then I heard him, panting and cursing.

“ ‘Welcome back, Couchman,’ he snarled. ‘I’ve waited a long time to see you again.’

“I protested that I didn’t know him, but it did no good.

“ ‘Yes, you do,’ he said. ‘We’ve met before. I didn’t know then that you’d kill my uncle and blight my house.’

“I’d had enough. I tried to break away. But he pushed me back until I was bent over the parapet. He seemed to be forcing me back still further. I summoned the strength to push him off, and somehow, in that scramble in the dark, he fell from the bridge, but whether I pushed him or he simply rolled over the edge I don’t know. Whichever it was, I was just relieved to put him safely out of reach. I strained over the parapet for a sight of him but was only too glad that the river and the night had swallowed him. For me, that was enough. I turned and ran. I traced my way by the lights of the village back to where I’d left my car—there was nobody about. So I drove straight back to Torquay.

I had one night in a strange hotel to collect my thoughts and put 414

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behind me the memory of that mad, frightful moment. It wasn’t enough, of course, but, when I got back here on the Monday, I felt able to carry on much as normal.”

“Letty doesn’t think so.”

“Well, maybe she’s right. But I’ve tried to put it behind me.

When I read about his death in the papers, they called it an accident—and that’s all it was. What good would it do to publicize my part in it? Unless, like you, Sellick is just seeking some petty vengeance.”

I controlled my anger at his denial of responsibility, for the sake of leading him on. “Sellick’s got nothing to do with it.”

He looked up sharply. “But you said . . .”

“I said he had proof that Strafford’s death wasn’t an accident.

But I meant Edwin, not Ambrose.”

“You bastard,” he muttered. He set his jaw and inhaled deeply and stood up, brushing himself down as if to wipe away the stain of his recent humiliation. When he spoke again, his voice had more the strength of the Henry I knew. “You unnerved me for a while, but not anymore. Now I know I was right. You really don’t understand—you or this mystery man Sellick: if he exists.”

I stepped back. “Oh, he exists. You’d better believe it.”

Henry summoned a superior smile. “But he has no proof—not about Edwin Strafford. You know about Ambrose now, but it’ll do you no good. I’ll deny everything.”

I tried to retrench. “Hold on, Henry. Not so fast. Deny it if you like, but what happens if your fingerprints are found in Ambrose’s cottage, which you searched for the Postscript after his death?”

He looked genuinely puzzled. “You’re stupider than I thought, Radford. Do you suppose I’d be so foolhardy as ever to go near Dewford again after that madness?”

“You were prepared to go back there after a similar madness 26 years ago.”

“In 1951 things were different, quite different, though I don’t expect your niggling little brain to appreciate the significance of the issues involved. National issues.”

“And personal ones?”

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“Well, of course, Edwin Strafford frightened me. I had a lot to lose with Attlee’s government tottering and a winnable seat there for the taking. I couldn’t afford to have Strafford blackening my name—nor could others. When he threatened me, he threatened my party—because of Churchill’s involvement in what he was alleging. He threatened the conventions and collusions which politics is built on. It was a threat we couldn’t ignore. Even I didn’t realize how emphatically that threat had to be negated.

“I panicked when my warning to the leadership about a mad old political maverick seemed to fall on deaf ears. That’s why I tried my hand at removing the certificate by force. Strafford thwarted me there. But I needn’t have worried, as my father had told me. He always did know how many beans make nine.” His voice drifted away into a murmur.

“So what did happen to Strafford?”

He turned and looked at me, as if surprised that I still needed to ask. “Oh, somebody expert in such matters arranged for him to fall under a train. The powers that be ran out of patience and called him in—his time was up. I didn’t ask for the hows and whys of it. I didn’t want to know them. It was enough that my father and I had brought sufficient pressure to bear in the appropriate quarters. It was enough that Strafford was erased before he could make a nuisance of himself. When the election came in October of that year, I won my seat and the Conservative party won the right to govern. There was no scandal.”

“So the conspiracy of silence continued?”

“Yes. But the knowledge is worth nothing to you. It’s too big for you to tackle. If my mother’s been so stupid as to invite this disinherited South African over, I suggest you persuade her to withdraw the invitation. I suggest you persuade her that politics is more than just banner-waving and hunger-striking.”

“She won’t stop now.”

He walked forward a few paces, turned and faced me. “How about you then, Martin? Will you stop? Let’s forget the crap about you dishonouring my daughter. You know that was a sham. I just wanted rid of your pampered, liberal conscience. Perhaps you reminded me of Strafford. But now we’re not pretending to like each other—or hate each other—anymore.” His political nerve 416

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was regaining strength all the time, his last-gasp, bareknuckle brawler’s instinct for playing on a weakness. “My party’s going to win the next election—you can bet on it. This spineless government is its own worst enemy. I’m on a promise of a seat in the Cabinet. That buys a lot of influence, a lot of power.”