‘Drink?’ he asked.
This had been the latest improvement. The doctors said she could take small amounts of liquid directly rather than through the pipes. Dryden retrieved a drinking funnel from beside the bed and poured a half inch of the wine into the bulb, placing the flexible pipe beside the suction connection already looped over her lip. He held her hand as the level dropped in a series of barely perceptible retreating tides.
‘POWS?’ she prompted.
Dryden looked for a moment at the printout before he understood: ‘Yup. Italians apparently – at least for most of the war. But there’s something odd: the bones they found, it looks like he was crawling in, not getting out. Work that out, I can’t. Who was this guy?’
The COMPASS laboured and Dryden could see the sweat breaking out on her forehead. ‘I COULD FIND OUT ID.’ The sentence had taken her two minutes to type.
Dryden nodded, pressing her hand. ‘OK – please. See what you can do.’
Laura craved these tasks, he knew. Sometimes she would retrieve data for him from the internet, tracking down background details for the stories he worked on for The Crow. But more often she’d simply forget the question, as if it had never been asked.
‘There’s an association – I’ve got the website address. And there must be records, I guess with the MoD. They must know if someone escaped. See what you can find.’
Dryden retrieved the website address from his notebook and typed it into a document on the PC.
‘HAIR?’ she asked.
He edged onto the bed and felt the warmth in the sheets as he lifted her head from the pillow and held it against his shoulder. Then he picked up the brush from the bedside table and began. ‘We should set a date – for Lucca. I talked to the people here about the trip and they said you’ll be fine for up to six hours off the machine. We can book a scheduled flight from Stansted – if there are delays we’ll just come back. Your dad said they can pick us up at Pisa.’ He brushed for a minute silently: ‘We could sit in the sun.’
They’d honeymooned in Greece but on the way home they’d flown to Lucca to see the family home. It seemed like another lifetime now, the two of them walking the hills, seeking out the deep shadows in the church below the villa, at Santo Stefano. The house, refurbished in the 1980s with cash from the café business in London, had stood above an abandoned vineyard for a century or more. The woodwork was dark and polished, the walls whitewashed. Inside, over the extravagant brick fireplace, hung the inevitable hunting gun and a faded picture of Laura’s father, Gaetano, standing by a military lorry in some sun-drenched North African square, his soldier’s tunic open at the neck, beaming. The buttons on his uniform caught the sun, as did the cool black barrel of the gun he held.
George Deakin watched his blood ebbing away, spilling over the first step where his head lolled, then edging towards the second, then down, by degrees, to the landing below, where it pooled into a kidney-shaped lake in the centre of which sailed the reflection of the full moon. He would die, he now knew, enjoying that double vision: the moon beyond the staircase windows, moving between the mullioned glass panes, and the moon on the mirrored surface below, where his lifeblood lay: a colourless moonlit scene, like the paintings on the walls above.
It was an odd place to die. At the top of the stairs on a moonlit night, with a stomach full of the dining hall’s sumptuous leftovers, and dressed in his favourite, freshly laundered, underbutler’s jacket. Had he survived the Somme, the mud-caked horror of those three endless days, for this? He licked his lips and tasted illicit brandy, thinking of his mother pouring cool water from an enamel jug.
He felt a fool, dying like this, on the wide polished floorboards of the Long Gallery. All his life he had let superstition guide his hand, except tonight. He’d been watching the moon rise after serving dinner, standing alone on the far side of the bridge over the moat, enjoying a cigarette before locking the doors, when the unexpected memory of the trenches had returned: the sound of the bayonet slicing through the brown army uniform and grating on his ribs, and the warm rush of the blood over his chest, and down into his breeches. He’d not relived the moment for nearly a quarter of a century, but it had come then, on a moonlit night in Norfolk. The day he should have died: 2 July 1916. And now, the day he would die: 10 August 1944. He looked at the hall clock as the hour chimed 3.00am.
By 1.00am the house had been silent, a dog in the village barking on the breeze. He’d locked the main gates, the downstairs stairwells, and the watergate. Then, the keys grating at his thigh, he’d climbed to the Long Gallery to lock the door out onto the roof. He’d learned to walk silently in the house at such times, past the bedrooms of the sleeping guests, up the central staircase to the upper storey. A life of service unseen. So he’d heard their whispered voices from the landing, but had climbed on, pooled in the light of the silver candlestick with the black ebony ring which he held at head height. And when his footfall creaked on the final step they’d frozen: half the pictures already down and one thief kneeling, running a penknife around the edge of an oil canvas to free it from the heavy gilt frame.
Stupidly he’d walked forward, outraged ‘You’ve no right,’ he said, placing the candlestick down on the table by the door and moving to the centre of the room. When the blow struck from behind, and the candlestick fell to the floor, he turned and saw the horror in the eyes of his assailant, a look he’d seen before in the trenches. He felt the deep-seated, internal impact – like the sound of rocks being rolled by the tide. There was no pain, just a sensation on his left side as if he’d been sitting, half-turned, in front of an open fire: a tingling warmth and a deep numbness.
Still standing, but skewed now, with his weight on his right foot, he edged round to face his assailant and remembered thinking that such dark oiled hair was already a cliché, even out in the wilds of Norfolk. And did he know the man? Surely he’d seen him out on the Home Farm, perhaps that harvest time? The man had blood on his raised hand, and George thought how thick and sticky it was, to hang like that in gouts. Then something flooded into his eye and he pushed it away and examined the blood, still black in the monochromatic moonlight, as if it belonged to someone else. He went down then, his spine collapsing as his nervous system shorted out.
They’d been gone an hour now. He had tried to cry out but the effort had produced nothing, a whimper perhaps, barely audible. Mabel would be asleep by now, she’d been working in the kitchen at dawn preparing the feast, so she wouldn’t miss him until sunrise. There was still no pain, and he wondered if he could live without blood long enough to see her again.
His head was on its side, the blood not yet quite dry. He’d never liked Sir Robyn’s collection, and he was perversely pleased to know that if he was going to die, at least the thieves had got away with everything. Those dreary moonlit scenes, so lifeless – except for one, the one with the shepherd and the swirling nightclouds. That had been his favourite, the one that gave him pause each night at the end of his rounds. How pleasing that this, the last scene of his life, should be moonlit too.
The pool of blood had reached its fullest extent. His body, bloodless, shuddered. And in the final seconds of his life he remembered what he should have seen: the still-wet footprints by the Watergate.