‘Oh, well. I’ve just got a bit of time on my hands. I could do some looking.’
‘You like Heather, don’t you?’
It wasn’t hard to sound convincing. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘I’m very fond of Heather. She’s like – well, I wouldn’t know what it’s like to have a daughter, but I certainly think of her as a niece.’
Johnny understood it as some sort of warning, given in a lighter tone than it deserved.
He cradled his whisky glass and a silence fell between them and when he broke it, it was with a question that maybe the moment or maybe the whisky made him ask.
‘You said you didn’t really have children. I wondered what you meant.’
It seemed to him that Sir Michael looked at him for a long time.
‘I was married before. A long time ago and only for a year or two. We had a boy. She took him with her. That’s all I meant.’
Johnny’s room was simple and comfortable. He sat in the bed against fat pillows, switched on the bedside light with its tasselled floral shade and opened the pink file. He read the statements and the medical reports and a detached part of him was capable of showing surprise at the anger it stirred up in him. He made a note of the doctor’s details: Caroline Beevor, with her last address in Leeds. He put it down and switching out the light, heard an owl screech somewhere out in the night. His head was full of swirling words and sleep was not going to be easy. Making a black central shape in his mind’s eye, images kept creeping in, the study, the whisky, the desk. He pushed them out, tried to suppress Sir Michael’s voice but the images persisted.
I’ve seen some things recently… things those women have shown me.
It leapt into his mind as clearly spoken as if the man had been standing at the end of the bed. The image of the desk followed hard on its heels. Sir Michael rooting through the drawer for the pink folder. Sir Michael who had been advising the women. Sir Michael who would naturally, if confronted by the Rage documentation, think first of turning to the Hurst Inquiry, to people like him with a sense of honour, people who would bring it all out into the open.
They would have shown him the papers, surely they would and down there, down in that stuffed desk, who knew what might still be around.
He found a book in the bedside table, an old dog-eared Agatha Christie and started to read it. Perversely, as soon as he needed to stay awake, he began to feel extremely sleepy. He got out of bed, opened the window wide and stuck his head out into the fresh night air. To his right, at the extreme end of the house, another window glowed yellow through muffling curtains. He sat on the hard chair by the basin, reading, and in five minutes when he looked again, the other light was out. That was a Godsend. It told him Sir Michael’s room was well away from the stairs down to the hall below. He looked at his watch, set the timer for an hour, lay on the bed and was instantly asleep.
When the bleep of the alarm woke him, he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, stretched and checked out of the window again. Everything was dark and quiet. He opened the door, moved quietly across the landing and down the stairs, keeping to the sides of the treads and taking up his weight gently and slowly on each foot. In the hall he took one of the torches and played the beam around the room looking for any evidence of infrared detectors or other alarms but, as he expected in this gracious, dilapidated old house, technology of that sort had never crossed its owner’s mind.
He stepped softly through the kitchen into the study, shut the door behind him and considered turning on the light. The window, after all, faced the opposite way to Sir Michael’s bedroom. Caution won and he stuck to the torch. On the top of the desk a framed photo caught his eye, Sir Michael, twenty years younger, a fit looking fifty-year old, with his arm round a smiling, sweet-faced woman of the same age. The second wife, clearly.
He pulled the top drawer open. At first glance it didn’t look likely to be a quick job because there was so much in it, but he soon found out there was order to it. Sheaves of bills, all clipped neatly together in subject groups – a typescript of some sort, occupying a large chunk of space underneath. He passed a quick eye over it. Memoirs? No, some sort of literary critique. E. M. Forster’s influence on someone or perhaps it was the other way round. It took half an hour to be sure there was nothing in the drawer of relevance and only slightly less time to perform the same check on the second drawer.
That left the pigeonholes. He leafed through credit card statements, bank letters, a proposal from a publisher, instructions for an electric hedge-cutter and an envelope of certificates: Michael George Parry, born Broadstairs, May 3rd. 1924. Elizabeth Bettina May Maxwell born Worthing, May 19th. 1928. Elizabeth Bettina May Parry, died Leeds… He felt suddenly intrusive, put them away and reminded himself that his job obliged him to do this. It didn’t feel quite the same when you could no longer invoke the protection of the power of government behind you.
He found it in a plain, white envelope – photocopies of two sheets of paper from somewhere in the run of a multi-page document. It started halfway through a sentence.
…such quantities as you may require. An instructor will accompany the first shipment to direct your men in the calculation of the timing and size of doses. You will discover that CN512 is an extremely effective product for stimulating short-term extreme aggressive behaviour. When properly used with well-prepared troops with a clear strategic objective, results are quite exceptional. From the start of testing of the CN512 compound, its effect in suppressing normal pre-combat anxiety has been found to be virtually independent of personal characteristics. Now marketed as ‘Rage’ in handy disposable drink packs it is not even necessary, on first use, to tell combat troops what they are drinking. So long as strong unit identity and loyalty has been developed within the group and a readily identifiable outside threat exists, there will be a quantifiable and well-directed augmentation of the kill-capability of your unit.
It went on to give a list of prices.
Johnny saw that across the top of each page was a boxed-off section. It looked like some form of coding put on – he presumed – by the computers at Ramsgill Stray. He read ‘2 of 4’ and ‘3 of 4’ and a string of numbers which he carefully copied down before he replaced the papers in the envelope and put it back in the pigeonhole.
He didn’t want to leave the desk without checking for anything else and so it was that ten minutes later, getting near the end of the search, he pulled out an old brown envelope and found inside it some photos. A baby in christening robes, arranged in a crib by itself, and then another with the baby being held by a slim woman who looked more determined than pleased. Lady Viola and therefore, by extension, Johnny himself, although he had never seen the photo before. He stared at it in shock but that was nothing compared to what was to come. Under them, he saw a third picture and this was newer. It showed a twelve-year-old boy, holding a cricket bat and a cup proudly. He knew exactly when it had been taken, a June Saturday when he’d captained his prep school First XI to victory against Winsham Manor. He remembered the circle of masters and parents snapping away as he held up the cup, remembered wishing his mother had bothered to come. He certainly didn’t remember anyone who could have taken this photo. There were two old cuttings with it. One was from the school magazine. John Kay led the team to a fine victory in the annual Winsham match, scoring a season’s best of 86 before giving up his wicket to a marginal LBW decision.
He’d thought his paternity was a dead issue, a fossil of a relationship, existing only briefly and a long time ago. He couldn’t think that any more. This pushed the boundaries back. Twenty years ago, his fossil father had been interested enough to procure and keep a photo.