losing Staplefield, and finding out my whole childhood was a lie (I mean my mother's, but it feels like mine) and now this, you must understand why I need to hear your voice now, not 'very soon' but now.
I'll wait for an hour to see if you've read this before I ring the hospital…
From: [email protected]
Subject: None
Date: Wed, 11 August 1999 20:29:53 +0100 (BST)
I didn't tell you because I wanted it to be a surprise, but I've already left the hospital. I'm having a last lot of physiotherapy, in a clinic in St John's Wood, and I'll be with you in three more days, maybe sooner. There's nothing I want more in the world than to pick up the phone and pour out everything I feel. But we might regret it later. We mustn't have a conventional beginning, hi how are you, nice to speak to you at last. I think of you as my questing knight, facing his last ordeal.
And it is a terrible ordeal, but you mustn't lose hope yet, about your mother. I think you did go into some sort of trance and write that message, but it doesn't have to be either/or, either you wrote it or Anne did. I think Anne was trying to speak through you, only the fear that was preying on your mind took over the pencil. Houses, especially old houses, hold the impressions of people very strongly, and you're so attuned to her.
We'll be together very soon
Your invisible lover
Alice
As soon as I had read Alice's message, I took the lift down to the foyer and joined the crowds heading west along Euston Road towards the last of the sunset. The roar and stench of traffic was comforting; it stopped me from thinking. Just beyond Tottenham Court Road I found an entire street full of restaurants. I chose the noisiest, ate something vaguely Middle Eastern and drank a bottle of bad but expensive red, a thick metallic wine heavy with sediment. On the way back to the hotel I stopped at an off-licence and bought a bottle of whisky.
I woke at ten the following morning with a slow, thudding headache, which accompanied me down Kingsway to Somerset House on the Strand, where I intended to look up Iris's will, only to be told that wills were no longer kept there. I was sent back up to First Avenue House, a featureless modern building with airport-level security, in High Holborn. There were only two other people in the registry, and it took me all of three minutes to establish, from the probate registers, that Viola's estate had been valued at ?12,989; Iris's-she had died on 6 October 1949-at ?9,135.1 applied for copies of the wills, was told there would be an hour's wait, and went back to the registers.
George Rupert Hatherley, my grandfather, had died intestate in Prince Alfred Hospital in Brighton on 13 August 1929, leaving effects to the value of ?724.13.9. Violas husband, Alfred George Hatherley, had died not at Ferrier's Close but at 44 Ennismore Gardens Knightsbridge, on 7 December 1921, leaving just under six thousand pounds. So Viola had presumably inherited money, as well as Ferrier's Close, from her own family. Then I thought I might as well search forwards from 1949, just to make sure that Anne Hatherley hadn't died without Miss Hamish's knowing about it; I had got as far as 1990 before I remembered that as Anne's executor, Miss Hamish couldn't
My copies arrived just as I was leaving. Viola had made her last will on 10 August 1938, leaving everything to Iris with the proviso that if Iris should die before the will was proven, the estate should be divided equally between 'my granddaughters Anne Victoria and Phyllis May Hatherley, both of Ferrier's Close Hampstead in the County of London'. Her executor was 'Edward Nichol Pitt of 18 Whetstone Park Solicitor'. Iris's last will, signed on 4 October 1949, two days before she died, was even simpler. It left everything to 'my dear niece Anne Victoria Hatherley'. Pitt the Elder was again the executor; Phyllis wasn't even mentioned.
Surrounded by people shouting into mobiles through the clatter of cups and the hiss and roar of the coffee machine, while the traffic outside negotiated High Holborn in a series of kamikaze rushes, I felt almost certain I didn't believe in spirit messages. Of course I had written those words myself. If only I could
Some time later I realised I had been doodling. Above a heavily inscribed 'A' I had drawn a small pig with wings, an imbecilic smile, and a halo.
At least it showed I could have written that message.
AT SEVEN THAT EVENING, I WAS SITTING IN A VAST BEER garden at the foot of Downshire Hill. Evening sunshine slanted across the grass. Still plenty of daylight left.
From Holborn I had walked slowly back up Southampton Row, intending to call in at the new British Library and try another search for more of Violas stories. Instead I had gone straight back to the hotel and slept until half-past five. The headache had gone when I woke, but the knot in the pit of my stomach was still there. Hunger, I told myself. A good meal will settle it.
Yet in spite of the roast lamb, and the beer, and the roar of several hundred conversations, the knot had refused to unravel.
And what would we be talking about, sitting here on the terrace, watching the sun go down? Whether Phyllis had murdered her sister as well as sleeping with her fiance? I loved Alice for defending my mother to the bitter end, but I couldn't agree with her. On the evidence of Anne's diary alone, Phyllis May Hatherley was guilty unless proven innocent. And to prove it either way, I would have to find out what had happened to Anne.
I found that I was on my feet and heading for East Heath Road. The shadows had lengthened noticeably; the sun was only just above the treetops on Rosslyn Hill. All I needed to do this evening was check the library and confirm what I already knew: that the planchette would be sitting exactly where I'd left it, beneath the question I'd scrawled on my way out, in a moment of nervous defiance-if you're so smart, answer
I took the path that ran past Hampstead Ponds, now crowded with swimmers, and across the Heath towards the eastern end of the Vale; the path I had taken on that wintry day thirteen years ago. Half of Hampstead seemed to be out walking or cycling. My mother and Anne, and Iris and Viola had walked these paths hundreds of times-all those coats and scarves and boots and galoshes by the front door-they would have been a familiar sight. Anne must have had friends; she'd lived here all her life. The life excluded from the diary. Apart from Miss Hamish, I didn't have a single name to pursue.
Except Hugh Montfort. I'd been so preoccupied with my mother and Anne, I'd hardly given him a thought. Had he and Phyllis run off together? Wouldn't the police have wanted to question him as well? He might still be alive, in fact-he'd only be in his seventies. It would certainly be worth trying to trace him: if not through public records-and I hadn't even checked the London residential phone book yet-I could try another advertisement in
As I approached the pond that lies between the Vale and the open Heath, I kept trying to identify Ferrier's Close. There were several possible candidates lurking behind dense stands of trees on a rise away to my left, but the geography of the Vale was so deceptive, I wasn't even sure I was looking in the right direction. Back in Mawson, I had skimmed through a massive history of Hampstead and the Heath: in the 1870s, the Vale of Health had been a rowdy pleasure-garden with its own gin palace; before that, it had been mainly cottages and a handful of larger houses, of which Ferrier's Close must have been one. I wondered how the bachelor uncle had felt about the gin palace.
Now gentrification had triumphed: the only remnant of commerce was the fairground on the eastern fringe of the Vale, an incongruous stretch of wasteland crowded with run-down mobile homes, derelict cars, mounds of
