‘You can come and see Mary again, if you want to,’ said Leo. ‘But let me know. As I said, there are bad days.’
A few minutes later I was driving home up the A5 and through Lichfield in a daze, trying to digest the story that Parker had told me. The rain had become heavier, veiling the roads and traffic in a stream of water that ran across the Escort’s windscreen. And there was another, more painful, blurring in front of my eyes that the windscreen wipers could never touch.
Perhaps I was right about the diseased Buckley family tree, after all. It certainly looked unlucky. An ancestor disgraced and possibly murdered, another drowned in suspicious circumstances. A son ruined, two brothers forced permanently apart by betrayal and jealousy. One driven to suicide, the other to a renunciation of his Buckley blood. My father, emotionally scarred by his childhood upheavals. And myself, an ineffectual end product of one of those embittered branches.
My Great-Uncle Samuel, it seemed, had been unhinged by his fixation with the past. The man they called the Captain had been all at sea by the end of his life. His brain had silted up and his keel was holed. From the grave he was doing his best to send me the same way, to undermine the mental certainties of the very last of the Buckleys.
I could understand the guilt that Samuel had been devoured by when my grandfather had killed himself. The bigger the breach with someone, the harder it is to cope when they die. And Samuel had been partly responsible for driving his brother to his death, it couldn’t be denied. George’s experiences in the war may have begun the rot, but the great betrayal by the two people he’d trusted most in the world must have kicked the skids out from under a damaged psyche, pushed his reason beyond the limits where normal life became impossible.
Who knew what he had been thinking when he took the money from his clients’ accounts to cover his accounting errors? Had he seriously believed he’d never be caught? Or had he just not cared? Did he, in fact, hope that he’d be found out, bringing an end to a situation that he was powerless to control? With clinical depression, the mind loses all sense of proportion, and small problems can seem immense beyond all coping. George had reached a stage where nothing gave him enough reason to carry on living in the face of betrayal, despair and ruin.
And then there was Mary, the woman right at the heart of everything.
I phoned Laura to reassure myself that she was coming to Lichfield the next day, and to report on my meeting with Leo Parker.
‘And she’s actually still alive?’ she said, her voice rising to an incredulous pitch, the way mine must have sounded when I stood in that room at Leo Parker’s house. ‘It must have been a shock after all these years.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘And so the story is that Mary left your grandfather for his brother while he was away fighting in the war?’
‘So it seems,’ I said. ‘While he was lying injured in a field hospital in Burma, she got bored and decided to find somebody else. That was a fine hero’s welcome for him when he came home, wasn’t it? To find his faithless wife had left him, taking his six-year-old son with her — a son he hadn’t seen for three years, who he must have dreamed about night after night while he was fighting his way towards Singapore. It wasn’t the war that killed my grandfather, it was Mary Parker. The Germans and Japanese damaged him, but Mary destroyed him. That was why he killed himself.’
If I was expecting sympathy from Laura, I didn’t get it. Perhaps it was the distancing effect of the phone that made her sound detached. I felt sure it would have been better if I could have been there with her, to get comfort from her presence.
‘But what about Samuel?’ she asked.
‘Samuel became rich, but he was an old man riddled with guilt, who wanted to atone for it before he died. Now he’s atoning to the tune of fifty thousand pounds. He thinks he can carry out his penance through me,’ I said. ‘This is blood money.’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s true.’
‘And now he’s made me feel the guilt.’
‘Why, Chris?’
I stared out of the window at the houses in Stowe Pool Lane.
‘Because my pride makes me want to turn it down. But I can’t afford to. The fact is — I need his blood money.’
And later I had to explain the same thing over again to Rachel.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked as soon as she set eyes on me. ‘What happened?’
She stared at me as I pulled off my coat and shoes, and collapsed into a chair.
‘I’ve just met Mary,’ I said.
‘Mary...?’
‘Yes, that Mary,’ I said. ‘You were right, she’s still alive. Well, physically at least.’
‘Do you mean she has dementia?’ she said, when I described her.
I realised I hadn’t asked Leo Parker what Mary was suffering from.
‘Yes, I think so. She doesn’t seem to be able to communicate or recognise anyone. She’s living in Hints with her stepson, Leo Parker.’
‘That’s why he was worried about protecting her reputation, then. Not just an interest in the past, but a concern for the living.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘You don’t sound convinced, Chris.’
‘I don’t know. There’s still something not quite right.’
When Rachel heard the story Leo Parker had told me, she was appalled at the thought of the misery that had been caused, and all the grief that had been stored up for future generations.
‘It’s amazing the things that people will do to themselves,’ she said thoughtfully.
It was an aspect that hadn’t occurred to me. ‘Yes, you’re right. Samuel brought everything on himself.’
Rachel looked at me for a moment. ‘That wasn’t quite what I meant.’
But I was following my own train of thought. ‘Samuel’s problem was that he caused trouble for everyone around him as well.’
‘Yes, Samuel,’ she said. ‘It’s an odd thing, this business about him thinking he had a son who was killed in that car crash. An unborn son.’
‘Oh that. I can’t believe that Samuel ever said it.’
‘You think Leo Parker was lying? But you believed everything else he told you, Chris.’
‘Yes. He’s a clever man, of course. I think he slipped a big lie in among a series of appalling truths, in the hope that I’d accept it without question.’
‘But why?’
‘Don’t you see? He wanted me to be convinced that Samuel had become mentally unbalanced since the crash. Let’s face it, there is plenty of evidence pointing that way if you choose to see it in that light. Leo wanted to be sure that I did see it. No doubt he’d like everybody to see it that way.’
‘Ah,’ said Rachel. ‘So that the will could be challenged.’
‘Exactly. On the grounds that Samuel was no longer of sound mind when he made it.’
‘Caroline Longden seems to have been trying hard to give you that impression too. And she’s the one who stands to gain, isn’t she? Not Leo.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s what I’d call a very interesting alliance.’
Back at my desk, I remembered the package Mrs Wentworth had brought. What could Godfrey Wheeldon have been sending to Samuel? Could it be more letters? But if so, why hadn’t he mentioned them?
I ripped open the package and unwrapped the newspaper inside. At first, I almost laughed at what I found. But then I felt more like crying. It was a set of cigarette cards depicting famous cricketers from the 1920s, the ones that Godfrey had told us Samuel was interested in. The cards were a gift from one old man to another. And both of them were dead before the gift had been received.