“Gaby,” said Jude, when they reached the landing of their small hotel, “I want to talk.”
The girl looked at her watch. “I was just about to call Steve, but we’re an hour ahead, he’ll be up for a while yet. So, fine.” And she meekly followed Jude through into her bedroom. Her manner suggested that she’d been expecting this, that she’d enjoyed their wonderful meal in the knowledge that it was an oasis in the bleak landscape of reality, and that they could only stay there for a limited time.
She sat on the bed, and looked across as Jude closed the door and lowered herself into a wicker chair.
“What is it then?”
Jude looked her straight in the eyes. “Gaby, how long have you known that Howard Martin was not your father?”
Gaby put her hands to her face, then swept them back and upwards, as though she were wiping it clean. But she wasn’t crying. Her voice was steady as she replied, “I think I’ve always had my suspicions. Particularly growing up with Phil. We were so different physically, apart from anything else. People at school kept saying, ‘I really can’t believe you two are brother and sister.’ And I always said, ‘Well, we are.’ Because then I thought we were.”
“And when did you know for certain that you weren’t?”
“Seven, eight years ago.”
“When Howard had the bowel cancer.”
Gaby nodded. “I was desperately worried about it. You know, cancer. The Big C. I read up quite a lot on the subject, and the evidence was there in black and white. Something called HNPCC, I particularly remember. Stood for Hereditary Non-Polyposis Colonic Cancer. But basically, if there’s a family history of bowel cancer, then the chances of getting it go up by some horrendous percentage.”
“So you told your mother about your anxieties?”
“Yes. And she saw the state I was in, and she knew that she could remove my anxieties instantly. So, rather than let me suffer any more, she swore me to secrecy, and divulged the secret she had kept for more than twenty years.”
“And did the knowledge change your attitude to your father – to Howard, that is?”
“No. In a way, it made sense of a lot of things. He had brought me up like his own, and he loved me – in the rather undemonstrative way he had of loving. In many ways, it was good for me to know. I stopped feeling guilty about the lack of instinctive closeness I felt to Howard – and to Phil, come to that.”
“That, of course, was the other thing that told me you weren’t Howard’s child.”
“What?” asked Gaby.
“It was something Stephen reported to Carole. And then I checked it with you yesterday.”
“Did you? I didn’t realize I was being checked out.” But she didn’t sound too affronted.
“When your father – or rather Howard’s – body was found, there was talk of it needing to be identified by a DNA match.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“And you said that might have been a problem because that night Phil had gone missing. You never even thought that you yourself might be able to supply a sample, because you knew that you and Howard didn’t share any DNA.”
“Ah.” Gaby clapped her hand across her mouth in mock-horror. “What a giveaway. Dear, oh dear. Thank God I’m a theatrical agent, and have no aspirations to be a criminal mastermind. I’d be really crap at that.”
Jude grinned, not so much because the joke was funny, more to put the girl at her ease, before she asked, “Do you know if Howard knew you were not his?”
Gaby screwed up her lips in doubt. “I’ve really no idea. It all goes back such a long way. And the subject wasn’t one that was going to spring up spontaneously in that family set-up. You’ve no idea how uptight my mum can be. It was very rarely that we talked about family matters, and as soon as she’d given me one scrap of information, she’d clam up.
“Still, I have no complaints. Howard Martin was a good man. And, in a way…this sounds an awful thing to say, but it’s true, so I’ll say it.” She looked defiantly at Jude. “The fact that Howard was not my father has made the last few weeks easier, you know, since his death. I mean, I’ve felt shock and all that – and pity for what happened to him – but I haven’t felt as emotionally bereft as I would if he really was my birth father.” She seemed to have shocked herself by what she’d said. “Maybe the impact just hasn’t hit me yet. I don’t know. But, in all the ghastliness that’s been going on for the past few weeks, I haven’t really missed him.”
Gaby grinned, as if levity could somehow take the seriousness off their conversation. “Of course, it casts an interesting light on my mother, too, doesn’t it? Puts rather a big question mark over her, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes. There is another thing too, Gaby…”
“Oh God, I don’t know how many more ‘other things’ I can take. I’ve had a bellyful of ‘other things’ over the last few weeks.”
“You know you were born premature?”
“Yes. Of course I do.”
“Have you ever looked at that photograph on your grandmother’s dressing table, of you as a baby with your parents, outside your house in…Worcester, I suppose.”
“Well, obviously I’ve seen it, but it’s been part of going to see
“When you came to see me about your back, Gaby…”
“Yes?”
“…you gave me your date of birth.”
“Twenty-fifth of March 1974.”
“Exactly. But that photograph of your grandmother’s says you came home from hospital on the twenty- seventh of May 1974”
“OK. Two months in the premature baby unit – that’d be about right.”
“Except that wasn’t what had originally been written on the photograph.”
“What?”
“A little piece of paper has been stuck over the month after the first two letters – ‘M’ – ‘A’. I’d put money on the fact that under the paper you’d find the ‘R – C – H’ of ‘March’.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Yes. Your grandmother’s eyesight’s so bad she would never have noticed the change to the date. But what it means is that that photograph was taken two days after your birth.”
“No!” This revelation had been news to Gaby, and she was slowly trying to piece together its implications. “So…?”
“So when you were born, you were a healthy, full-term, baby. The story of you being premature was only put about to explain the length of time between Marie and Howard’s wedding and your birth.”
“Just a minute, just a minute. You’re going too fast. So what have I got here? Not only was Howard not myfather, but also my mother was pregnant by another man when she married him – is that right?”
“Yes, Gaby. That is exactly right.”
? The Witness at the Wedding ?
Thirty-Four
It was dark but still warm when Carole took Gulliver out through the back garden gate on to the scrap of rough ground behind her row of cottages. When they went by this route, the dog was always gloomy. He knew that the excitement of lead-rattling was not the precursor of a proper walk, just a quick functional trip out for him to empty his bowels.
This he did with quiet efficiency, and Carole was about to take him back to High Tor when a tall figure stepped out of the shadows between her and her garden gate.
“Sorry to interrupt you.” The voice was rough and unmistakably familiar.
“Excuse me,” said Carole, in a voice of steely gentility. “Could I please get back to my house?”
“Yes. But only to leave the dog. Then I’m afraid you must come with me.”
Carole just had time to register that she was talking to someone who knew about dogs. If Gulliver was left
