confront. She's so like her father, Nan's inner voice whispered. But no, but
She climbed the stairs to the private floor of Maiden Hall. She found her husband in their bedroom, sitting in the armchair in the darkness, his head in his hands.
He didn't look up as she closed the door behind her. She crossed the room to him, knelt by the chair, and put her hand on his knee. She didn't say to him what she wanted to say, that Christian-Louis had accidentally burnt pine nuts into tiny lumps of charcoal weeks ago, that the ground floor took hours to lose the acrid scent of the burning, and that he-Andy-hadn't mentioned the odour because he hadn't noticed it in the first place. She didn't say any of this because she didn't want to consider what it implied. Instead, she said, “Let's not lose each other as well, Andy.”
At that, he looked up. She was struck by how the last days had aged him. His natural vibrancy was gone. She couldn't imagine the man she saw before her jogging from Padley Gorge to Hathersage, skiing hell for leather down Whistler Mountain, or tearing along the Tissington Trail on his mountain bike without raising a sweat. He didn't look as if he'd make it down the stairs.
“Let me do something for you,” she murmured, a hand at his temple to smooth back his hair.
“Tell me what you did with it,” he replied.
Her hand dropped. “With what?”
“I don't need to spell it out. Did you take it with you onto the moor this afternoon? You must have done. It's the only explanation.”
“Andy, I don't know what you-”
“Don't,” he said. “Just tell me. And tell me why you said you didn't know she had one. I'd like to know that most of all.”
Nan felt-rather than heard-an odd buzzing in her head. It was very much as if Nicola's pager were somewhere in the room with them. An impossibility, of course. It lay where she had deposited it: deep in a crevice created at the juncture of two pieces of limestone on Hathersage Moor.
“Dearest,” she said, “I really don't know what you're talking about.”
He examined her. She met his gaze. She waited for him to be more direct, to ask with an explicitness of language that she couldn't avoid. She had never been a particularly good liar; she could feign confusion and act ignorant of the facts, but she could do little else.
He didn't ask. Instead, he let his head sink back against the chair, and he closed his eyes. “God,” he whispered. “What have you done?”
She made no reply. He'd been invoking God, not her. And God's ways were a mystery, even to the faithful. Yet Andy's suffering was so excruciating to her that she wanted to give him an anodyne of some sort. She found it in a partial disclosure. He could make of it what he would.
“Things need to stay uncomplicated,” she murmured. “We need to keep things simple as best we can.”
CHAPTER 14
Samantha came across her uncle Jeremy in the parlour when she was making her final rounds of the night. She'd been checking doors and windows-by virtue of habit rather than by virtue of the fact that the family had anything of value worth burgling at this point-and she'd marched into the parlour with the intention of seeing to the windows in there before she realised that he was present.
The lights were off, but not because Jeremy was sleeping. He was, instead, running an old eight-millimeter film through a projector that clacked and whirred as if on its last legs. The picture itself flickered not on a screen, because Jeremy couldn't be bothered setting that up. Rather, it moved against a bookshelf, where the curved backs of mildewing volumes distorted the figures whose images had been filmed.
He was reliving what appeared to be a long-ago birthday. Broughton Manor rose in the background-long before the building had fallen into ruinous disrepair-while in the foreground a floppy-hatted clown played the Pied Piper to a group of little children wearing party hats. The clown led them down the slope to the ancient footbridge that provided access to a meadow beyond the River Wye. And in that meadow a pony stood waiting, its reins in the hand of a man whose resemblance to the adult Jeremy told Samantha that she was looking at her maternal grandfather as a very young man. As she watched, the little boy her uncle once had been ran across the meadow and flung himself ecstatically into his fathers arms. He was lifted onto the pony's back as the other children- Samantha's own mother among them-clustered round and the clown danced a jig to soundless music.
The scene shifted in the way of home films, and they were under a tree where a table had been laid with a birthday cloth and decorations. The same children bobbed and squirmed on either side of the table, and a woman carried into the picture a cake on which five candles burned. The child Jeremy stood upon his chair to make his wish and extinguish the candles. He lost his balance and nearly toppled, to be saved from the fall by his mother. She laughed, waved at the camera, and dropped her arms to hold her son safely on the chair.
“Dead in less than two years,” Jeremy Britton said without turning from the picture that undulated against the backs of the books. His words were only mildly slurred, not nearly as incomprehensible as they usually were after a day of drinking. “She was counting out change to buy me a packet of crisps in Longnor, Mum was-Jesus, can you credit that?-and she dropped dead at the till. Gone before she hit the floor. And I said, ‘Mum, what about my crisps?’ Jesus have mercy on us all.” Jeremy lifted his glass and drank. He replaced it with such precision on the table next to his chair that Samantha wondered what he was actually drinking. He turned his head and squinted in her direction as if the light from the corridor were too bright. “Ah. It's you, Sammy. Come to join the resident insomniac?”
“I was checking the windows. I didn't know you were still up, Uncle Jeremy.”
“Didn't you.”
Jeremy turned from his scrutiny of Samantha, giving his attention back to the film. “You lose your mum, and you're marked forever,” he murmured, taking up his glass once more. “Did I ever tell you, Sammy-”
“Yes. You did.” Numerous times since her arrival in Derbyshire, Samantha had heard the story that she already knew: his mother's untimely death, his father's rapid remarriage, his own banishment to boarding school at the tender age of seven while his only sister was allowed to remain at home. “Ruined me,” he'd said time and again. “Robs a man of his soul, and don't you forget it.”
Samantha decided it was best to leave him to his musings, and she began to depart the room. But his next words stopped her.
“It's nice to have her out of the way, isn't it?” he asked with absolute clarity. “Opens things up the way they should be opened up. That's what I think. What about you?”
She said, “What? I don't… what?” and in her surprise she feigned misunderstanding in a circumstance where no misapprehension was really feasible, especially with the
Jeremy was watching the film, a smile playing round the corners of his mouth as if he found amusement in the sight of his five-year-old self skipping along the path in one of the gardens, dragging a stick along the edge of what was then a well-tended herbaceous border. “Sammy, my angel,” he said to the screen, and again his voice was remarkable for the unusual clarity of his enunciation, “how it happened isn't the point.
Samantha made no reply. She felt unaccountably rooted to the spot, both trapped and mesmerised by what could destroy her.
“She was never right for him, Sammy. Obvious whenever they were together. She held the reins. And he got ridden. Whenever he wasn't riding her, of course.” Jeremy chuckled at his own joke. “P'rhaps he would've seen the wrongness of it all at the end of the day. But I don't think so. She'd worked herself under his skin too deep. Good at
