Kissed a Sad Goodbye

“Women, children …,” Freddie clucked sympathetically, and turned on his heel, pacing again. “Of course, there were pilots shot down, too, and that is rather a shame, wouldn’t you agree?” He stopped near his desk and studied William. “Or perhaps you wouldn’t agree with that, dear Will? Perhaps your sympathies lie elsewhere?” Reaching into his desk, he pulled out a twine-wrapped bundle and brought it over, dropping it on the table before them. “I do think you could spend your time in the attic a bit more profitably.”

William reached out a hand as if to snatch the bundle, but Freddie tapped him on the knuckles with the ruler and drawled, “I imagine Lewis and Irene would like to see what you’ve been doing.” He jerked at the twine, and leaflets spilled out across the tabletop.

Lewis stared curiously, then with growing horror as he realized what they were—pacifist tracts, with a crudely drawn cartoon showing a leering RAF pilot deliberately strafing a fleeing German child.

“I … they sent them to me, this group in London,” protested William. “I hadn’t given them out to anyone.” He reached for them again, but once more Freddie interceded, gathering them back into a bundle.

“I’ll keep these for you,” Freddie said kindly. “Just in case Edwina or any of her friends at the War Office should want to see them.”

Eyes on William, Lewis said, “How could you do such a thing?” He stood up, past caring if it made Freddie angry. “I think they’re … they’re disgusting.”

“I didn’t mean—” William began, but Lewis had pushed back his chair and started for the door. “Lewis, wait!” William shouted after him.

Lewis glanced back, once, before slamming the schoolroom door shut behind him, and the expressions on their faces stayed burned into his memory—Irene, her brow furrowed with concern, her lips shaping his name; William, his eyes dark with fright; and Freddie, the good half of his face stretched into a grimace of satisfaction.

HE KNEW HIS FATHER’S HABITS. LEWIS would leave his office midafternoon to check round the building sites—he never trusted anyone else to get things right; that was one of the things that had made working with him impossible. And so Gordon waited near the gunmetal-gray Mercedes in the Heron Quays car park, smoking, watching the sky darken as heavy banks of clouds moved in from the west. The stifling air smelled faintly sulphurous.

Gordon had given up trying to prepare what he would say. His mind was blank, suspended between fragmented thoughts of Annabelle and a recurring memory of his father lifting him from the waves when he was a child. When he saw Lewis come round the end of the building, he ground out his cigarette with the heel of his boot and moved to intercept him.

“Dad.”

Lewis looked up, hand on the Mercedes’s door. “Gordon! What are you doing here?”

“I need to speak to you.”

“We can go back in the office—”

“No, here. I want to know what happened the night Annabelle died. She came to see you, didn’t she?”

“I never knew until that night that there was something between you. I’d not have kept on seeing her—”

“You couldn’t let me have one thing you hadn’t stamped as yours, could you? You always had—”

“No, it wasn’t like that,” Lewis said tiredly, and Gordon saw lines in his father’s face he hadn’t noticed before. “I never meant to hurt you—I never meant to hurt Annabelle—”

“Then why did you plan to cheat her?”

“How did you know about that?” Lewis said quietly.

“You’re a fucking hypocrite, Lewis Finch. After you spent years drumming the importance of integrity into me, it turns out you’re no better than all the rest. Annabelle told me that night what you’d done—”

“You wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t about Annabelle. It wasn’t even about the business, except as a means to an end.”

“And what end was that?”

“I wanted to take something from him, something he loved as much as I loved Irene, and Edwina, and he always cared more for the business and his bloody family name than he did people. But it’s nothing to do with you —”

“Do you mean William Hammond? Did you kill Annabelle to get back at William Hammond?” Gordon was shouting, past caring if anyone heard.

“What?” Lewis sounded utterly baffled. “What are you talking about?”

“When she came to see you, she told you the deal was off, didn’t she? And she told you she loved me—she said she meant to prove she loved me—and you killed her!”

“You think I killed Annabelle?” Lewis spoke slowly, as if trying to get it clear in his own head, and for the first time Gordon felt doubt. “But I thought you … When she left that night I thought it was you she was going to see.… I was afraid …”

Gordon stared at his father. “Are you saying that all this time you thought it was me?” His throat tightened with a wave of relief he wasn’t sure he could allow himself to feel. “And I thought … they said it was someone who loved her, someone who laid her body out so carefully, and I couldn’t believe that you’d killed her and just left her.…”

“Laid her body out?”

“They said she looked serene.…” Gordon saw that his father was no longer listening.

“I should have seen it from the beginning,” Lewis said softly, his gaze still far away. A gust swirled dust and rubbish round their ankles, and in the west lightning arced from cloud to cloud.

“Seen what?”