Part 2 (1/2)

'I must be pushed before I fall,' he said as Lynn sternly led him up the stairs.

'Is he all right?' I asked Lynn when she came back down, alone.

Lynn was a handsome a.s.sured woman, immaculately turned out in a dark velvet skirt and jacket.

'He's involved in a restructuring of the trust,' she said. 'It's been rather stressful.'

'Sackings?'

'Downsizing,' she said.

I hoped she would elaborate but she started offering sympathy and I lost interest. As soon as I could, I left Lynn and joined Jerome, who was still looking sullen, and Hana. He responded to my questions in monosyllables. I moved across to Theo who was staring into the fire. I touched him on the shoulder and he started.

'Sorry,' I said.

He turned but hardly seemed to see me.

'I'm thinking of the silliest things,' he said. 'When she was younger, eleven or twelve, we used to do cartwheels, in summer, when the gra.s.s was dry. The only way I could ever do cartwheels at all was to do them really quickly. She used to laugh at me and say that my legs weren't high enough. She would do them and her skirt or dress would fall down, over her head sometimes, and we I mean the boys would laugh at her. But she could do them slowly, the way they're meant to be done. Down on your hands, then one leg slowly up, then the other leg following it, like two spokes in a wheel. Then down. They were perfect and we were too proud to tell her.'

'I don't think she minded,' I said. 'She always knew what she was good at.'

'And I remember when she used to sit reading, over there in the window seat, she always looked cross. That was what she looked like when she was concentrating. Cross. It was funny.'

I nodded, unable to speak. I wasn't ready for all this.

'You know that old cliche of coming back from school and finding your little sister has turned into a woman? It was a bit like that when she was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. I'd come back from school in the holidays and she'd be going out with people she used to play with. And then Luke, remember?' I nodded. 'I felt strange about it. Not good, in a way. It was the first time in my life that it had occurred to me that we'd all be growing up. And that I'd see Natalie grown up and a mother and all that and I never did.'

He turned towards me. His eyes were wet. I took his hand.

'I remember that cross look,' I said softly. 'That awful summer when it rained all the time and she said she was going to learn how to juggle and she spent day after day with three of those b.l.o.o.d.y beanbags or whatever they were. She had that cross look and her tongue out of one corner of her mouth, day after day, and she did it.' I was just inches away from Theo now. We were murmuring to each other like lovers. 'I remember her lying in front of this fire. The flames in her eyes. I was next to her, right close up. And we'd giggle if anybody said anything to us. G.o.d, we must have been irritating.'

Theo smiled for the first time. 'You were.'

The spell was broken. Claud was in the background somewhere opening a bottle of port. The thick purple liquid gurgled softly into a trayful of gla.s.ses. He held up a hand and the murmur in the room ceased. 'To the cook,' he said, and smiled ruefully at me across the meal's debris. This dinner suddenly felt like a farewell. I wondered what would happen now, and I felt scared of the future.

'To Jane,' echoed everyone.

'To Alan and Martha,' added my father. I could tell from his voice, which slopped around its normally precise edges, that he was a bit drunk.

'And to Claud who's organised it all,' shouted Jonah above the hubbub.

'To Theo, who found the parasols,' said someone at the back.

The sweet and melancholy spell was broken.

'To us all,' said Alan.

'To us all.'

Four.

My car didn't start at first. The morning was cold and the engine wheezed and died several times before coughing into life. I wound down the window. My sons were there, looking bleak. Robert was coming with me.

'Bye, Jerome, bye, Hana. Ring me when you get back to London. Drive carefully.'

Hana came up and kissed me through the window. I blew a kiss at Rosie, who pointed a finger at me which she then inserted into one nostril. Paul was loading an improbable amount of luggage into their car. I called to him. He waved. Alan and Martha stood side by side to see me off. I leant out and took Alan's hand and squeezed it.

'Alan,' I said, 'shall we meet next time you're in London?'

I felt awkward, as if I were asking if we could keep in touch. He ruffled my head as if I were still a teenager.

'Jane,' he said, 'you'll always be our daughter-in-law. Isn't that right, Martha?'

'Of course,' she said, hugging me.

She smelt so familiar: powder and yeast and wood-smoke. Martha had always managed to be gloriously s.e.xy and rea.s.suringly homely all at once. There were tears in her eyes as she kissed me, and for a moment I wanted nothing so much as to undo everything I had started: the separation from her son, the wretched plans for the cottage which had uncovered the remains of her daughter. Then she squeezed my hand.

'Actually, Jane, you're more a daughter than a daughter-in-law.' She hesitated, then added: 'Don't let me down, my dear.'

What did she mean? How could I let her down?

Claud came out of the house carrying a neat suitcase. He started to walk towards us, then stopped. He would be dignified about all this. He'll not give up, though, I thought as I looked at him: such a familiar figure. I knew where he'd bought his jeans, and in what order he'd packed his suitcase. I knew the music he'd put on in the car, and how he'd keep the needle just under seventy, and I guessed that when he got back to his small new flat in Primrose Hill, he would first of all phone me to make sure I'd arrived safely, and then pour a whisky and cook himself an omelette. Beside me, Robert sat quiet and tense. His pale, smooth face was quite blank. I put a hand on his for a moment, then lifted it to wave at Claud. He nodded.

'Goodbye Jane,' he called, and climbed into his compact car.

We left the Stead together, and for miles, as I drove through the Shrops.h.i.+re countryside, I could see Claud's small blue car and his dark head in my mirror. When we got to the motorway Robert put some loud music on, I put my foot on the accelerator, and we left Claud far behind.

Cigarettes are wonderful. Every morning I showered and went downstairs in a dressing-gown, where I ground some coffee beans, poured fresh orange into a gla.s.s, and lit up. I'd study my plans for my new project with a cigarette. I'd smoke whenever I lifted the phone. I'd smoke in the car G.o.d, how Claud would have hated that. I often smoked in the dark, at the end of a day, watching the glowing tip making lines in the air. I measured out my days in little tubes of nicotine. I smoked each morning when I thumbed through newspapers to see if there were any more references to the discovery of Natalie's body now that she had been identified, solely through her dental record. 'Tragic daughter of Angry Young Man,' said the Guardian. Guardian. 'Martello Tragedy,' the 'Martello Tragedy,' the Mail. Mail. Alan gave interviews, and they were usually accompanied by library pictures of him as a younger and more successful man. Alan gave interviews, and they were usually accompanied by library pictures of him as a younger and more successful man.

I returned to London on the Sunday and at the end of that week I was phoned by an officer from Kirklow CID. They wanted to interview me purely as a matter of routine. No, I wouldn't have to come up to Kirklow, a couple of officers would be in London next week. I arranged a time and the following Tuesday morning at 11.30 sharp there were two detectives sitting in my front room. They were Detective Sergeant Helen Auster, who did all the talking, and Detective Constable Turnbull, a large man with red hair combed flat on his scalp, who sat with an open notebook not taking notes. I made us coffee and Turnbull and I smoked as well.

Auster was dressed in a businesslike grey flannel jacket and skirt. Her hair was light brown and she had startling yellow eyes, which seemed to be focused on something behind my head. She wore a wedding ring and she was young, almost ten years younger than me, I guessed. As we sipped our coffee, we exchanged trivial observations about how big London was. They didn't seem in a hurry to get down to business and I was the first to raise it.

'Are you doing the rounds of the family down here?'

Helen Auster smiled and looked at a notebook. 'We've just come from your father, Mr Crane,' she said. She spoke in a light Birmingham accent. 'After lunch we're meeting Theodore Martello at his office on the Isle of Dogs, then we're going on to the BBC Television Centre to see your brother, Paul.'

'You'll spend most of your day in traffic,' I said sympathetically. 'Do you expect people to remember anything after all this time?'

'There are a few questions we have to ask.'

'Are you treating Natalie's death as murder?'

'It's a possibility.'

'Because she was buried, I suppose.'