‘I was afraid. The police came and told me there’d been a fire and that Patrick was dead. They didn’t mention you. But I thought… when they heard about you and the bullets and everything, they’d blame me. They’d think I killed them. You know what they do! You know how they falsely accuse people and ruin their lives.’
She was right. There had been a rash of cases of just that kind lately, affecting people of all classes and walks of life. My own insecurities derived from problems within the law enforcement structure.
‘I was so scared,’ she said. ‘I came to Robert and asked mother to help. She told me about Karen when the police told her. That made me even more frightened. I tried to get in touch with you but your phones didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to do, so I just hid here. Robert’s the one who’s held this crazy family together. The only one!’
Robert came back bearing a wooden platter with five different varieties of cheese, dry biscuits, sliced salami, black olives and a bottle of Wolf Blass red.
‘Will this do?’ he said.
I ate and drank, fuelling up, and didn’t say anything at all for a few minutes. Robert and Verity sipped their wine and nibbled.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I was running on empty. D’you know who shot Phillip Wilberforce?’
Both shook their heads.
Robert said, ‘Verity was getting edgy about just… hiding. She thought he might be able to help her to deal with the police, you know? But he was in hospital for quite some time. We waited until tonight to visit. Then we saw you.’
A lateral thinker.
‘Who shot him?’ Verity said.
I took a swig of Wolf Blass. ‘Paula.’
Verity almost dropped her glass. ‘God, does that mean she…’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Had anything to do with Patrick and Karen’s deaths?’
‘Big jump,’ I said. ‘You’d like that, would you?’
Robert put his glass on the table. ‘Hardy…’
‘Shut up. I’ve been hired by your sometime stepfather to find Paula.’
‘That’d be right,’ Verity said. ‘She was the only fruit of his loins. The only one of us he ever cared a fuck about.’
‘Verity!’
‘Shut up, Robert.’
‘Happy families,’ I said. ‘Let’s look at some snaps.’ I opened the first of the albums. Our three heads craned forward as we examined the first page. Four photographs were carefully mounted by means of the old stickdown corners method. The pictures were of children, in twos and threes, grouped around a birthday cake. Robert pulled back sharply.
‘What’s the point of this?’ he said.
I began to flick over the leaves as Verity gazed, rapt. ‘I don’t know. To try to spot something that might suggest where Paula is, or what she might do next.’
Verity laughed. ‘If you really knew Paula you wouldn’t even think that.’
Robert grabbed the second album. ‘I’ll show you something. If there was anyone she wanted to kill it was Verity. Where are they? Yes, here.’
He opened the book at a double-page spread of ten photographs, all of the same subject-a dead dog.
Verity gasped. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t mean to kill him.’
‘He was a nasty vicious brute,’ Robert said. ‘The rest of us were glad you did.’
The dog was a whitish bull terrier. It lay on its side with its tongue hanging out. There was a dark, gaping wound the size of a fist in its neck.
‘It happened at this place in the country we used to go to. I found a shotgun in a shed. It was old and very rusty. I pointed it at Rudi and it went off. I was terrified by the noise and the gun hurt me when it fired. I was terrified of Paula, too. Rudi was her dog. She came running up. She grabbed the gun and I think she would have beaten my brains in with it if someone hadn’t stopped her.’
‘Mummy,’ Robert said, which, under the circumstances, wasn’t very enlightening.
‘Instead, she took dozens of pictures of Rudi. She used to leave them on my bed, put them in my books. It was sickening.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘You all used to hang around together, even after the divorces and so on?’
Robert nodded. ‘It was horrible. The Brady Bunch was on TV then. Verity and Nadia and I used to look at it and laugh. Our lives weren’t anything like that.’
Verity turned the page. ‘I suppose they were trying to make some sort of family life, even though they’d screwed up their own lives. I mean Paula’s father and my mother and Robert’s.’
‘Is that what you called him-Paula’s father?’
‘I didn’t call him anything to his face,’ Robert said. ‘I just couldn’t. I never saw my own father after they divorced. It…’
He retreated to a chair and sat down. ‘God,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’ve never married. I never wanted to put anyone through any of that. The fights they had, the savagery. It was all lawyers and courts and houses being sold.’
Verity was crying now. ‘And kids being put in boarding school. I hated boarding school.’
I turned over the pages of the albums, occasionally asking for an identification or a date, which one or the other of them gave me indifferently. They were both sunk in depression induced by memories of childhood. It was sad to see but I had work to do. Eventually I accumulated pictures of all the wives and kids. A tall, dark girl with a gypsy mane of hair was identified by Verity as Nadia.
‘She’s dead,’ Robert said. ‘She had an accident.’
‘What sort of accident?’
He thrust out his underslung chin, ready to take another unhappy memory on it. ‘She was washed off some rocks in Queensland. She drowned.’
I grunted sympathetically and made a note. ‘No pictures of Paula herself. Why’s that?’
‘Paula never let anyone touch her camera,’ Verity said.
‘There must have been other cameras around.’
Robert shook his head. ‘Paula never let herself be photographed. She wouldn’t even sit for the school photograph session. I remember we once tried to force her
‘Who’s we?’ I said.
‘Nadia and I. I tried to hold her while Nadia took the snap. Paula fought like a tiger. I couldn’t hold her. She scratched Nadia’s face and broke the camera. No-one tried again after that.’
‘What was Paula’s attitude to you?’
‘She despised me, as she despised all men.’
‘What about her and Karen?’
They exchanged looks as if considering cooking up a story. Then Verity shrugged. ‘She and Karen got on fine. Karen was the only one of us Paula had any time for.’
‘It was strange,’ Robert said. ‘Karen wasn’t his child any more than the rest of us, although Paula said she was. They looked rather alike, but Karen’s mother had been such a slut anyone could’ve been the father. Paula called Karen her real sister, but I think it was just because she shared her liking for dogs.’
I was drawing lines on the page of my notebook, connecting names. ‘I don’t get it. You were just kids. You couldn’t have known anything about…’
‘We did!’ Verity snapped. ‘We knew all about it. They never talked about anything else except who was screwing who, and who had whose nose and eyes. It was sick.’
‘It was baronial,’ Robert said. ‘He liked to accumulate the women and children and dogs and cats around him like a medieval baron. Actually, I think the Wilberforces ran cotton factories or something.’
‘Barons need acres.’ I tapped the photograph I’d detached of the dead dog. ‘This place in the country, Does Wilberforce still own it?’
