Even as she reached for the door, Josephine knew that the sensible decision would be to turn around and leave, but it was too late: carried forward by her curiosity and her concern for Lydia, she committed herself to the scene before weighing up the consequences. Inside the room, Marta stood next to Lydia’s small piano, 250
talking to a man who reclined on the low divan in front of her. He had his back to Josephine, but she could see his face reflected in a full-length Venetian mirror; he was handsome, although his features were marred by a sulkiness around the mouth which matched his voice, but what struck Josephine most was how unperturbed he seemed. Marta, on the other hand, had clearly been crying, and her tears seemed to bear out the vulnerability hinted at in her exchange with Lydia the night before.
‘Josephine! What are you doing here?’ she asked, her expression suddenly filled with horror.
Josephine ignored the question. ‘What’s going on, Marta? What have you got to tell Lydia? And who’s this?’
Marta hesitated and tried to compose herself, but the fear in her voice made the attempted casualness of her next words sound absurdly false. ‘It’s Rafe Swinburne. He’s from the theatre.’
Josephine recognised the name of Terry’s choice for Bothwell in Queen of Scots but, before she could speak, Swinburne leapt to his feet and walked over to her.
‘There’s no need to be so coy, surely,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Stage names are for strangers, and Josephine’s practically a friend of the family.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m Rafe Vintner,’ he said. ‘I believe you knew my father.’ He noticed the flower she was holding and turned back to Marta. ‘I left that at stage door for you. I’m quite hurt that you should have given it away already.’
‘You left it? Why?’ Marta looked astonished, and Josephine could see very clearly who was in control of the alliance – whatever the alliance was. She remembered what Archie had said about Vintner’s son, and realised the danger she had put herself in. How could she have been so stupid?
‘I don’t know why I left it, really,’ Vintner was saying. ‘Let’s call it filial affection, shall we?’
‘Rafe, don’t – not in front of . . .’ but Marta was interrupted before she could finish.
‘Oh, the game’s up, Mother,’ Vintner said. ‘It’s a shame, I agree –
my career was going rather well and I really did want that part in Queen of Scots. But it’s time we called it a day. You see, I happen to 251
know that a little bird’s just flown down from Berwick-upon-Tweed to spoil the fun we’ve been having. In fact, she’s probably doing it as we speak. That’s why I’m here now – to tie up a few loose ends.’
Marta looked at her son as though he had gone completely insane, but Josephine was piecing together the most terrible of pictures. When she had considered a connection between Marta and Elliott Vintner, the stumbling block had been Marta’s lack of grief for Elspeth; could the explanation for that really be that she was somehow implicated in her murder? Like most people, Josephine was reluctant to believe that a mother was capable of harming her child, and she stared at the woman she thought she had been getting to know in utter disbelief. What sort of monster would con-spire with one of her children to destroy the other? Marta looked back in desperation, as if pleading with Josephine not to judge her, but suddenly her expression changed to one of pure fear. Turning round, Josephine saw that Rafe Vintner had placed himself in between her and the door. He had removed a scarf from a battered leather holdall and was now carefully unrolling it. Inside was a gun.
‘Don’t Rafe, please!’ Marta cried, but Vintner was already moving back towards Josephine. Before she had a chance to register what was happening, he had grabbed her arm and turned her roughly round and she felt his breath on the back of her neck. The barrel of the gun was pressed hard into the small of her back and, in that moment, she understood what it meant to know true fear.
She had written about it many times and, in the past, had been afraid for others – for Jack, of course, and for her mother as she lay dying – but this blind terror was something altogether different. It was a selfish, humiliating emotion, stronger than anything she had ever known.
‘Don’t you think it’s a little late for such a sudden change of heart, Mother?’ Vintner said, emphasising the last word in a way which scorned the relationship. For a second or two, he removed the gun from Josephine’s back and used its barrel to trace the contours of her face. The steel was cold against her cheek and she tried to fight back the tears of anger and frustration, but in vain.
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Vintner laughed quietly. ‘So this is the great but elusive Josephine Tey,’ he said. ‘You know, Mother, she’s not at all like the woman you described to me at the railway station when you were trying to tell me who to kill. How could you have got it so wrong? Still, there’s always a second chance.’ He turned back to Marta. ‘You believe in second chances, don’t you Mother? That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Being a family again after all these years. So don’t go soft on me now – we started this together and we haven’t finished yet.’
This time, the shock served to strengthen Josephine’s resolve rather than destroy it. ‘You told him to kill me?’ she asked, looking incredulously at Marta. ‘Why the hell would you want to do that?’
Marta stayed silent. ‘Perhaps I was being a little disingenuous there,’ Vintner said. ‘It was my idea. After what you did to my father, you surely can’t wonder why I would want to kill you?
Mother just offered to help me out. We’ve been estranged for a while, you see, and she was so pleased to see me that I think she’d have agreed to anything.’ Marta opened her mouth to speak but he interrupted her. ‘There’s no need for secrecy now, not with our little friend here,’ he said, gesturing with the gun. ‘And I’m sure Josephine would like to know that you weren’t exactly opposed to the idea of bumping her off.’ He put his mouth closer to Josephine’s ear. ‘In fact, it was her idea to do it in a crowd – she thought it would be a nice tribute to your little crime novel. And she had her own reasons for wanting you dead. It’s a shame you don’t have time to talk to her about them.’
‘But you killed . . .’ Josephine began, but Vintner put his hand quickly over her mouth. ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘I see you’re a few steps ahead of us, but all in good time. It’s a shame to rush a good story – you should know that.’ He paused. ‘Where was I? Ah yes –
your murder. You see, Mother was supposed to point you out to me and make herself scarce. The thing is, she was a little bit hasty in getting out of the way. She didn’t wait to meet you properly and confused you with someone else, so she gave me the wrong information. Before you got here just now, she was even blaming Lydia 253
for saying something about a hat.’ He shrugged his shoulders and added sarcastically, ‘A tragedy.’
With a mixture of horror, incredulity and pity, Josephine realised that Marta had no idea who her son had killed at King’s Cross. As if to prove her right, Marta spoke again.
‘You’re frightening me, Rafe. This is not what the plan was.
We’re no nearer to finding your sister now than we were when I agreed to help you, and you promised we’d be a family again. I thought you wanted that as much as I do.’
‘Aren’t I enough for you then?’ Vintner spat the words out, and the bitterness in his voice was almost as palpable to Josephine as the gun which rested in her back. She could not see his face, but she could tell from the growing fear in Marta’s that the agreement which she had believed to exist between them was gradually being exposed as a lie. ‘Do you have to have your bastard daughter to play happy families?’ he continued, and Marta flinched as if the blow had been a physical one. ‘Anyway, if you want to talk about promises, what about your promises to me? Like the one you made to add a little something to Bernard Aubrey’s whisky. Thank God I didn’t trust you to carry that off.’
‘I couldn’t do it – we’d already made one mistake.’ Marta was crying again now. ‘And he didn’t need to die.’
‘Oh he did, you know. He was far too close to the truth about everything, so it’s just as well I made sure, isn’t it? That’s one broken promise. Then there are the promises you made to your husband, of course. You didn’t keep those for very long, did you?’
‘We’ve been through this time and time again. Your father was an evil man.’
‘How the hell would you know? You turned your back on him after five minutes of marriage. He went off to fight for us, to fight for his country – and what do you do? Jump into bed with the gardener. I wasn’t even five years old, for God’s sake – what sort of effect do you think that had on me?’
‘But you didn’t know anything about it. I kept you out of the way.’
‘Children wander, Mother. They’re curious.’ Vintner pushed 254
Josephine over to the divan and made her sit down next to Marta, while he took his place on the piano stool opposite them both. He rested the gun on his knee, and Josephine watched his fingers moving lightly over the trigger as he talked. ‘I wonder if you remember my fifth birthday as clearly as I do? You gave me a kaleidoscope, and it was so beautiful I couldn’t tear myself away from it. It was hot, and we had all the windows open in the house.
You’d left me playing in my room and gone out to the garden for a while, and then suddenly I heard a man’s voice and you were laughing. I thought it was Father, come home for my birthday, and I ran down to show him my present. I couldn’t see you at first, but then I noticed the summer-house door was open. It was always your favourite place, remember? You went there to write and I was never allowed to go in, but I thought you wouldn’t mind on my birthday and I knew you’d want me to come and see Father.
Except it wasn’t Father, was it? He was still choking on dirt in the trenches while you made other arrangements. One present for me and another for yourself, except your birthday came more than once a year. I remember standing outside the summer house, looking in at the window through all those fucking flowers you’d planted, and I was so frightened. That man had you pressed up against the desk and at first I thought he was hurting you, but then you cried out and I knew, even then, that it wasn’t a cry of pain.
So I ran away. Neither of you saw me, of course – you were too engrossed in each other. I went back upstairs and smashed that kaleidoscope so hard against the floor that it broke. You found me crying not long after, and you thought it was because I’d broken my present, so you put your arms around me – still smelling of him – and promised to get me a new one. You did, as well, I’ll give you that, but of course you could never replace the thing that I really lost that day. I thought I was the most important thing in the world to you, and suddenly I realised I wasn’t. After that, I noticed how many times you brushed me aside, how often you pretended to listen to what I was saying when you were really thinking about something else. And how often you went to the summer house, of course.’
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‘I’m so sorry, Rafe, but you don’t understand what it was like for me.’
‘Oh, I understand all right. Father sat me down and explained it to me. When he finally came back on leave, he wanted to know why I was so upset and I told him what I’d seen. I thought if he got rid of the other man you’d spend time with me, just like you used to. He didn’t say anything at first, and then he made me repeat it to him, over and over again, every detail, asking about things I didn’t understand. But he did nothing about it – not straight away, anyway. Eventually, he explained that he’d had to send you away and I thought that was my fault. I suppose, in a way, it was. After you’d gone, he’d sit in that summer house and brood for hours on end. It was your special place.’ He seemed to make a conscious effort to drag himself back into the present, away from his memories. ‘Still, I don’t think you’d like it as much these days. The décor leaves a lot to be desired since Father blew his brains out there.’
Josephine knew her presence had been all but forgotten in the recriminations between mother and son. She looked at Marta, and was surprised to see that she seemed to be growing calmer as the exchange went on. Now, she leaned forward and put her hand on Vintner’s shoulder. ‘I wanted to take you with me more than anything in the world, but your father put me away and made sure I couldn’t see you,’ she said. ‘You’ll never know how it destroyed me to lose you, and I swear I’ll make it up to you, but we need to stop this now. There’s been enough violence.’
Vintner shook her off. ‘You could never make it up to me. We could spend every day together for the rest of our lives and it wouldn’t make up for those years of not having you. There was a time when I longed for you to reach out and touch me, but not any more.’ He met her eyes, his own filled with hatred. ‘As it happens, though, I have kept my promise to you. I’ve managed to trace your daughter. In fact, I’ve known who she is for some time. I was with her just the other day.’
Josephine would have given anything not to have noticed the small flicker of hope that passed across Marta’s face before she 256
walked into the trap her son had set for her. ‘Why didn’t you say?
Where?’
‘She was on a train,’ Vintner said and sat back, waiting for the horrific truth to sink in.
Marta had gone a shade of white which Josephine had always believed to exist only for the dead. Her own sense of grievance had, she realised, all but disappeared in the face of this torture: whatever Marta had done, she did not deserve to be played with like this. Josephine reached out and took her hand. She was convinced the two of them were going to die very shortly anyway, so what danger was there in a little compassion? ‘The girl who died on the train was called Elspeth Simmons,’ she said and then, when Marta showed no sign of recognition, ‘She was your daughter.