The pale figure disappeared without a word.
‘She’s such a worrier.’ Joanna was pulling her boots off. She dumped them with a pile of others in a wicker basket next to the back door. There was a row of hooks with waxed jackets and green padded anoraks. ‘She misses her father of course. He spoilt her rotten. I should try to make more time for her. Things should be easier now.’
Her feet must have been sweating, because her socks left damp footprints on the stained quarry tiles. I followed them down a long, dimly lit corridor past sacks of potatoes, empty Calor Gas canisters and a couple of ancient hoovers. Then we were in the kitchen and it was another Swallows and Amazons moment. It was just the sort of kitchen I’d read about in the musty, rather worthy children’s books that got donated to the kids’ homes. A scrubbed pine table. A huge bowl of fruit you could help yourself from. An Aga. A wooden frame for drying washing suspended from the ceiling with a rope to lower it. A fat ginger cat in a basket. Paintings which Flora and Dickon must have done years before at playgroup, but which were still stuck to the walls with brittle ancient Sello-tape. A rocking chair, with a patchwork cushion, next to the stove. I had time to take in the details before Joanna lit candles and turned off the central light.
‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Red OK?’
I was going to say I was driving, then I realized I needed a drink as much as she did and I could sort out a taxi. Or stay over. Because it was as if we had that sort of relationship already. Friendship. Lizzie no-name Bartholomew could be invited to stay with the famous photographer Joanna Samson in Wintrylaw House. Or could invite herself to stay. Is it OK if I crash here? I could say that. It probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but it was important. It held out the hope or the promise of security. Like I’d become properly respectable. Real. Not the creation any more of two middle-aged ladies and a collie bitch. I could be a part of a house which had stood for hundreds of years. A part of the family. I could almost believe I was related to Philip and to Dickon.
She got an already opened bottle of red from the larder and poured two goldfish-bowl-sized glasses. We sat on each side of the table.
‘So,’ she said. ‘We have to decide what to do next.’
I didn’t answer. I was enjoying the wine. I mean really enjoying it, the smell and the taste.
‘What should we do?’ She was insistent, pulling me back to the problem. I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted that moment, with the wine in my nose and on my throat and tongue to last. But she couldn’t let it alone. ‘I mean, it’s up to you, isn’t it? You’d be the one to press charges after tonight. You’d be the vital witness.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t grass. Anyway, it’s up to you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Ronnie didn’t kill Thomas.’
‘Not on his own,’ she said. ‘I accept that. Stuart must have been involved. Stuart was pulling the strings.’
‘No.’ And in that word I threw it all away – the chance of being a part of this. I turned away the good wine, winter walks along the beach with Dickon, family Sunday lunches at this table, girlie conversations with Joanna on the phone. All that was on offer. I could tell. Why the scruples? It wasn’t as if I owed Philip anything, as if Thomas had really been his son. I suppose it was pride. It was a dumb time to discover that I had some pride after all. But Joanna had bought everyone else one way or another. She wasn’t going to buy me.
‘Stuart didn’t invent the commission to track down Thomas Mariner,’ I said. ‘He believed in Philip’s illegitimate son as much as I did. It wasn’t Stuart or Philip who invited me to the funeral and offered me money. It was you. You set the whole thing up.’
‘Philip would have been glad you were there.’ She dipped her mouth towards the wine, and her whole face seemed swallowed up by the enormous glass. ‘You had quite an effect on him.’
‘He told you?’
‘Of course. We shared everything. He talked about leaving you some money in his will but he thought you might be offended. “She’s a free spirit. Independent. She’ll remember me anyway. And if she doesn’t, that’s fine. At least the memory won’t have been bought.”’
‘Weren’t you jealous?’
‘Of course I was bloody jealous. But he was dying. What could I say?’
I remembered how Philip had described Joanna in Marrakech. She’s a saint. She denies me nothing. At the time I’d thought it a dry, almost ironic comment, but it had been true. Because of his illness she’d felt obliged to fulfil his dreams. He’d been cruel and careless of her feelings. He’d taken advantage of her.
‘Tell me what happened.’ It might seem ridiculous, but I didn’t feel at all scared during this conversation. Perhaps it was because of where it was taking place. I mean, it wasn’t like the Gothic setting of a windy wood in the shattered moonlight. This was safe, domestic.
She got up and fetched another bottle of wine and a corkscrew. ‘Are you hungry? I think there’s some cheese.’
She wasn’t trying to distract me. Even then she felt some obligation as a host. She put a lump of Stilton on a plate and brought out butter and crackers, still in their wrappers.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘it was all about money. I hate to admit it, but that was what it came down to.’
‘You formed the Countryside Consortium as a money-making venture?’
‘No, not at all. Not at first. I mean, I really believed we were in danger of losing a landscape I loved. There’d been so much change, so much red tape, people from the town telling us what to do. I wanted Wintrylaw to stay as it always had been for Flora and Dickon. I wanted to see my grandchildren play where I’d played.’ She looked up at me. ‘That’s not too much to ask, is it?’
I shrugged. She’d been lucky to have it first time round. ‘I’ve never really believed in inherited wealth.’
‘Oh, God,’ she cried. ‘Wealth didn’t come into it. It was about survival.’
I thought all that was relative. With her good wine and expensive cheese she seemed to be surviving fine. But this time I didn’t say anything. This was her story. Let her tell it her own way.
‘People thought we were well off. We had the house and the land. Philip’s TV series. My photography. But it was all precarious. We weren’t any good at saving. Things like pensions and health insurance seem so tedious, don’t they? You really wouldn’t want to be seen as the sort of person who bothered about that. Then Philip got ill and the telly dried up. He was always freelance, so there was no sick pay. Nothing. And once he knew he was dying there was so much he wanted to do and see.’
‘The Atlas Mountains.’
‘Quite. And I couldn’t tell him it was impossible.’
No. You were a saint. You denied him nothing.
‘So I started taking it from the Consortium. Borrowing it at first. In the beginning I really intended to pay it back. The group had so much money. You wouldn’t believe how generous people were. Not only rich people. Cheques came in by every post. And the committee couldn’t decide what to spend it on. While they were squabbling among themselves about who deserved it most, it just piled up in the bank. Such a waste…’
‘It can’t have been that easy. There must have been an accounting system.’
‘It was a shambles. Really. Everyone was taken by surprise by how quickly the organization grew. There were a few pieces in the Sunday papers and in the glossy country living magazines, and the campaign seemed to capture the public’s imagination. None of us were ready for the success. The whole office was run by a couple of middle-aged volunteers and a schoolboy.’
‘Marcus Tate?’
‘The son of one of our supporters. Because our marketing was very slick, everyone assumed a competent machine to back it up. It wasn’t true. The office looked impressive enough – we were donated some hardware by a business supporter – but no one there really understood what was going on.’ She held her glass with both hands. ‘We were credited with far more power than we actually had. Some journalists thought we were devils, evil landowners who would deny access to common land to harmless walkers. Our supporters saw us as the saviours of every rural tradition – from village schools to the right to hunt. Of course we were neither. We were a bunch of well-meaning amateurs.’