The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (25 page)

It didn't. Janice came, no fuss, and it worked out better than I'd expected. I'd been worried because Melanie had got used to plenty of hugs and cuddles from Mum, and Janice isn't like that. Her train didn't get in till after ten, and Mum took Melanie down to meet her at the station. When they arrived we had a hot drink and chatted for a bit in the kitchen, and then Mum and I went to bed to leave them alone. I was sleeping in the attic so Janice could have my room, so I didn't hear them come upstairs, but Mum said it wasn't till almost two in the morning.

Anyway the visit went all right. They weren't actually easy with each other at once, but you couldn't expect that. It must have been extremely weird for both of them. But they got on a lot better than I'd expected, because Janice is very prim and proper and has pretty old-fashioned ideas about a lot of things, and Melanie—she'd talked to me about this—had decided not to try and pretend that she wasn't what she was. I don't mean she swore and smoked the whole time, but she did a bit, and she was—well, Melanie, not Melly. The point is that Janice accepted it.

The other thing that happened was that Janice told us she'd found a private detective who could speak fluent French and she was going to ask him to go out to Arles and see if he could find anything out about what had happened fourteen years before.

“It isn't going to be cheap,” she said. “But …”

“I'll go half,” said Mum.

“I wouldn't hear of it,” said Janice.

“Well, let's talk about it later,” said Mum. “Go on.”

“There are two sides to it,” said Janice. “The first is that we can't go on as we are, watching Melly and Melanie the whole time, worrying about them and so on. Something's going to give, and give soon. We can all feel it. Besides, Melanie's my daughter. I want her to be able to come and live with me like a normal daughter. And I'm quite sure that the more we know—the less of this beastly mystery there is—the more chance we have of getting things right. I don't know how much this man will be able to find out, but he should at least be able to look up the birth records and so on. The French are very strict about records. I'm not insisting that Melly and Melanie are twin sisters, because they're both so determined that they aren't, but it's still the only explanation I can understand. That's one side. The other side is about me. Suppose I'd always thought Melly was my only daughter, and somebody told me that actually I'd had twins but one of them had died soon after she was born, it would still be very important to me to know if that was true. And since Melanie is here, and alive and well, and what's more since she's so obviously my daughter and no one else's, I really have got to know how it happened. I don't see how we can get things right between us until we know. That's what I mean about it being a beastly mystery. I don't like mysteries anyway, but this one's going to ruin our lives if we aren't careful. Isn't it, Melanie?”

“Too effing right it is,” said Melanie. “Sorry, Ma. And we're never twins, but we've got to know, still.”

The detective's name was Eddie Droxeter. You'd never have known he was a detective to look at. “Some kind of third-rate poet with indigestion,” Mum said. He had a long, pale face and a big mouth and sad eyes and he was tall and thin but he wore baggy clothes and stooped as if he was trying to make himself look shorter and less skinny. He was expensive, all right. Over a thousand pounds for a week, all in. Janice only had what she earned—she was a buyer for a small chain of clothes stores—so that was a lot for her. Mum told me she hadn't been able to persuade Janice to let her pay Melanie's share, and she hadn't pressed it too hard because she didn't want Janice to feel she was trying to take Melanie over, but she'd got her to accept an interest-free loan of half.

I liked Eddie. I may have made him sound a bit of an ass, but he was obviously pretty bright. He came up to Scotland to talk to Melanie about the circus, because she'd known it till only four years ago, and been part of it, while Janice had always been an outsider. To cut costs he came to Glasgow on one train and went back on the next, and I took Melanie down to meet him in the station tea room, with other passengers hurrying in and out around us and the announcements booming away overhead.

He wanted everything she could remember, especially the names of anyone who might be persuaded to tell him something.

“There's none of them will talk to you,” Melanie said.

“Story of my life,” he said. “Not being talked to. I'm expert at it. Seriously. This guy won't talk because he's an obstinate cuss, and this guy doesn't know anything, and this guy's scared, and this guy's got something to sell but wants to up the price, and this guy just wants another drink … All right, it's a circus, so there'll be acrobats. Let's make a list …”

It was interesting to watch how he really got Melanie going, and coaxed her on without wasting any time but without hurrying her either, getting her to talk about the people, not just the names, but what kind of character they were, and remembering always that she'd been only ten when she'd left. I'd thought a thousand pounds plus was a lot of money for a week's work and he probably wasn't going to be worth it, but now I realized he might be.

At one point Melanie went off to the toilet and I asked him if he thought the girls were really twins, or something else.

“They've got to be,” he said. “I go along with the theory that the father concealed the birth of one child, for some reason, and when the mother ran off with the one he regarded as
his
daughter he came and took her away and brought back the other one.”

“What about things like the scars on their arms?”

“That sort of thing happens with twins. I can't explain it. But, for instance, I was reading about twin brothers in America who'd been brought up separately, and when they finally met they were doing very similar jobs and wore almost identical clothes and their wives even had the same name as each other.”

“Weird.”

“There's a lot of weird stuff about twins. Now, before Melanie comes back, what can you tell me about the father? He's the obvious person for me to talk to, and barmen are used to strangers wanting to chat, but I'm leaving it till after Arles in case he smells a rat and alerts the people out there. He's not entirely sane on the subject of his daughter, right?”

“He's crazy,” I said, and started to tell him, but then Melanie came back and they went on with stuff about the circus until it was time for him to catch his train.

Eddie'd come up to see us the day before end of term. It was lucky it wasn't any earlier, because Melanie went through a bad patch while he was away, and not having to go to school meant I could be with her all day long. I don't mean that she was miserable, just incredibly wired and jumpy. Twanging from the moment she got out of bed till long after midnight, when Mum and I were dropping. She said her dreams were like that too, hurtling her along, strange and buzzing. She tried another of Mum's tranquilizers but it scared her.

“I came kind of loose,” she told me. “I felt I was going to slip away out of myself, and wouldn't ever come back. I'd be in that empty place, other side of the wee door.”

Then sometimes she'd go into a kind of daze, for a couple of hours at a time. I took her out bird-watching with Ken once, and she had a great time making out she was a French hussy—Ken's so shy and proper he makes
me
look wild. He was interested in a pair of sparrowhawks whose brood was almost ready to fly and he wanted to see it happen, and this meant lying still on a grassy ledge, where we could see the nest, for hours and hours. I didn't expect Melanie to stick it for more than ten minutes, but she barely stirred all afternoon. I nudged her when anything interesting happened at the nest, and she looked at it through Ken's binoculars in a dazed kind of way, but I wasn't sure she knew what she was seeing.

“Where've you been?” I asked her as soon as I could talk to her alone.

“Away,” she said. “With Melly.”

“In Coventry?”

“Aye. No. She was here too. The place was nothing. I can't explain.”

“Was that … safe?”

“Aye. Like that. No problem.”

But mostly, like I said, she twanged, and it wore her out. When I'd first seen her she'd been exactly like Melly, and like Janice must have been when she was a kid, not fat, but a bit pudgy. Now she'd lost so much weight that you'd have said she was skinny, and her eyes were sunken and had that bruised look round them, but the eyes themselves glittered as if she was on speed or something, which she wasn't, of course.

It was a great relief when Janice rang to say Eddie was back and he'd got news.

Now that school was out and I was home all day Mum had gone back to normal working hours, so we all got together in the evening.

The first thing Eddie had done was go to the
mairie
and look up the births register. He knew the exact day, so it wasn't difficult, and he found that one baby, Melanie Perrault, had been recorded. That didn't prove anything because M. Perrault might have registered the other one under a different name and there were a couple of other girls born around then who might have been the other twin, but he did a bit more research and found that they were both real people and still alive.

Next he looked for the circus. It was on the road, so he hired a car and tracked it down in a little town up the Rhone valley. He went to a performance, and after it he asked to see the proprietor and said he was a TV researcher who was doing preliminary work for a program about traveling circuses, and could he hang around with them for a day or two and talk to people? (Eddie had cards with the name of a bogus TV company on them—he said they were very useful sometimes.) He told the proprietor there'd be money coming if the program was made, so of course he was interested. He was married to Melanie's aunt Sylvie, by the way.

So Eddie did what he'd said, and hung around, and took photographs of everything, and asked questions, and stood people drinks, and so on. He was very careful about the questions he asked, to make them seem natural, but he pretended to be specially interested in the animals, and because there weren't any lions it was OK to ask if they'd ever had lions, and then why had the lion tamer left, and where was he now, because he might be interesting to talk to. Several people told him that M. Perrault had suddenly sold his lions and cleared out, and they didn't know why, or where he'd gone.

“I was careful not to press it,” Eddie said. “That first day all I was hoping to do was suss out which of them to try and go a bit further with. It wasn't going to be easy—I've come across professional criminals who were freer with information than that lot. But on the whole I thought I was getting along as well as I could hope, so I wasn't really ready next morning when this fellow turned up. I was having breakfast in my hotel and going through my notes when he came up to my table and pulled out a chair and sat down without so much as a by-your-leave.

“I said good morning, but he just sat and stared at me. I asked if there was something he wanted but he didn't say anything. I'd just about decided he was a nutter when he said, ‘There are these two girls, identical, now fourteen years old. They have learnt of each other's existence and now desire passionately to meet, but they are also afraid to do so. Correct?'

“He'd got me right off balance, but I managed to say something about it being an interesting story, and was there any more?

“‘They do well to be afraid,' he said. ‘They will have their desire very soon. You cannot prevent them. And when they meet they will die.'

“He hammed it up by snapping his fingers when he said that, and that helped me get him placed. Melanie had described him to me, but I hadn't made the connection and I hadn't seen him at all around the circus. But I'd watched his performance. He was one of the clowns, and his act was to do bogus conjuring tricks which always went wrong—you remember Tommy Cooper?—that sort of thing …”

“Monsieur Albert,” said Melanie.

“That's right,” said Eddie, “but he called himself Albertus Magnus for his act, and at the critical moment he'd snap his fingers the way he'd just done. By now I'd got my wits about me enough to pretend I thought he was trying to interest me in a story for my TV company to produce, so I told him I'd need more, a lot more, before there'd be a hope of selling it to anyone. We beat around the bush quite a bit, and that allowed me to get a bit of a line on him. I put him down as a charlatan, but he obviously knew something and he was prepared to sell it to me if the price was right. Tentatively I decided that he had probably helped in the original abduction …”

“No,” said Melanie. “Papa couldn't abide him.”

“But Janice told me that he and your aunt Sylvie were friends,” said Eddie.

“Not anymore, they weren't,” said Melanie.

“That's very interesting,” said Eddie. “Suppose he had helped with the abduction, he might then have tried to blackmail your father. That would account for a change of attitude. We still have to account for his knowing so much about you. Now, I think I was told that when you last saw your father you started to accuse him of what he had done to you when you were a baby. Did you actually tell him then that you knew about Melly's existence?”

“That I did,” said Melanie.

“Then he will almost certainly have guessed that you learnt about it from meeting Trish and Keith,” said Eddie. “And also that they must know Janice, and tell her, and that she would very likely want to know more. So he could well have written to his sister warning her that somebody might be making inquiries at the circus, in which case Monsieur Albert might also have learnt of it and decided to cash in on his knowledge. Most of what he said to me can be accounted for like that.”