His mother opened the door as he inserted the key.
‘Alec! Naomi phoned a couple of hours ago, she thought you might be here. Your mobile was off,’ she chided. ‘And you might have let me know sooner, then I could have made up a bed. I’ve done it now anyway.’
She stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek and Alec hugged her back. ‘I switched the phone off because the battery was low,’ he explained. ‘But I should have called. Watch the ribs they’re still sore.’
‘Yes, Naomi told us about that too. Alec, what were you thinking and why didn’t one of you let us know? We’d have been right there, you know that.’
‘I know, I know. Is Dad still up?’
‘Well yes, we thought we’d give you another half hour and then go to bed. Come on in, come in, do.’ Smiling, she reached out to take his hand. ‘What on earth do you have there?’
He opened his hand and held out the locket. He noticed the sudden rigidity that took hold of her shoulders. ‘Alec …’ Then she managed a laugh. ‘Good Lord, where on earth did you find that?’ She had blanched, her cheeks suddenly pale in the harsh light of the hallway. Then she flushed as though embarrassed or ashamed. Alec did not know what to say.
His father appeared in the living-room doorway. He was dressed in striped pyjamas and a deep red dressing gown. His comfortable dressing gown, Alec remembered. His favourite. Baggy and soft from years of washing and wearing and faded in patches as though the dye had been unevenly exposed to the light.
Alec folded his hand around the gold locket suddenly unwilling to ask questions that his mother’s response had already told him the answers to. But it was too late by then. His father, always sharp, always observant, had seen.
‘Rupert had it then,’ he said.
‘In a box upstairs. I didn’t remember at first where I’d seen it, then I knew. The photograph of us all at Fallowfields.’ He looked at his father’s face and invented a lie, one they could all retreat behind. ‘I guess Rupert must have found it and forgotten to give it back. Then when you all stopped talking …’
‘That must have been it,’ his mother said eagerly, then she met her husband’s eyes and shook her head. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘Does it really matter now?’
Alec sat in his parents’ front living room, and listened. They were together on the sofa, sitting close, holding hands as though for moral support and suddenly, to Alec’s eyes, they looked very vulnerable and oddly young.
‘You were seven years old when we lost Sara,’ his mother said.
‘Sara?’
‘She would have been your sister.’
‘My sister? I don’t even remember you being pregnant.’
‘You remember I was ill. In hospital for a time. You went to stay with Aunt Liz and …’
‘And missed most of it,’ his father continued. ‘Sara was stillborn. It was all a mess. Your mother was depressed after and I hid in my work. We just didn’t seem to know how to get along for a while.’
‘That summer we went to stay with Rupert,’ Audrey, Alec’s mother picked up the story. ‘Rupert was kind and … well, it never actually came to anything, but it was a close call. I didn’t tell your father for quite a while. In fact, it was Rupert that let it slip.’
‘I wasn’t quite that naïve,’ Arthur went on. ‘I suspected something. And to tell the truth I deserved for something to happen. I’d just shut myself off there and didn’t know how to cope. It wasn’t just Sara. My father died around the same time, if you remember, and then Mum was so ill and it all got a bit too much, I suppose.’
‘So …’ Alec wasn’t quite sure how to put this. ‘What did happen? Between you and Rupert, I mean.’
Audrey shrugged sadly. ‘Not a lot, if you must know. We kissed then we both came to our senses, or so I thought.’
‘But we still visited Rupert, right up to when I was about ten. I remember the visits.’
She nodded. ‘We did and if I’d had my way one stupid moment would have been one forgotten stupid moment. I was very careful not to be alone with Rupert and to make clear to him that it was your father I wanted to be with.’
‘But Rupert wouldn’t let it go. It seems he was quite besotted and one day he said so. I didn’t know how to react and we had a big row. I told your mother to pack and we left. I never did get around to making up with him, at first because I felt betrayed and hurt and angry, and then later … well, later was just too late. You know how these things can be? If it had been anyone else but my brother …’
Alec closed his eyes and sighed deeply. He wanted to sleep, but he had other questions to ask, more relevant to now, and he knew he would want to leave early the next day and be back at Fallowfields as soon as possible.
‘I’m sorry, Alec,’ his mother said.
‘Why did you never tell me about Sara?’
They looked at one another, his father and mother, these adults who had raised him and done a good job by and large. These adults who had twenty plus years experience ahead of his and he saw only bewilderment on their faces.
‘I don’t know,’ Audrey said at last. ‘At first I couldn’t bear to talk about it and then it just never seemed to be the right time.’
Alec laid the locket down on the arm of the chair. His father’s chair. He let it lie, not quite knowing what to do with it. It was odd, he thought, just how quickly the story had emerged once given the right prompt. They must have talked about it in the days since Rupert’s death. Or if not talked, both thought so much about those days that their memories transmitted one to the other by some strange osmosis so that when the right stimulus was applied they both knew exactly what to say and that this was the time to say it.
‘I’ve got to ask you something else,’ he said. ‘There’s no easy way to put this, but did you ever suspect Rupert might have been involved in anything illegal?’
That shared look again. Alec’s heart sank. Something else they did not talk about?
‘He got fired from a job,’ Alec’s father said. ‘He was working for a firm of accountants. They also handled stock portfolios, insurance, all of that. I suppose they were more financial advisors than accountants in the true sense … Anyway, he was sacked, accused of what we’d now call insider trading. Seems a client had given him some kind of tip-off about a takeover. I don’t recall the details. I’m not sure I ever knew them, but Rupert was able to sell rather quickly on behalf of several of the firm’s clients and, it seems, saved them quite a packet.’
‘So they sacked him?’
‘It came out that he might have had inside knowledge and they could not be seen to encourage a technical fraud. Rupert was quite bitter about it, I believe.’
‘When was this?’
His parents thought about it. ‘You must have been about nine or ten. It was around the time we had our falling out, so 1980 or maybe 1981. I can’t be sure. Sorry Alec, it was quite some time ago.’
‘So, he was already living at Fallowfields.’
‘Had been for some years by then. He bought it for little or nothing. I remember telling him, “Rupert, I wouldn’t touch that place with a bargepole”. It needed a new roof and electrics and all the plumbing ripping out. There was no heating. It was just a shell of a place but he said he liked the location. His job wasn’t local to Fallowfields, though. He was just travelling up for weekends then and still had his flat in London. So far as I know he still did. Wasn’t it mentioned in the will?’
Alec frowned. ‘I’m not sure. The solicitor gave me a whole folder full of stuff. It’s in the car, I wanted to go through it with you but I don’t recall anything about a flat in London.’
It all fitted time wise though, didn’t it, Alec thought. The robberies, the annoyance at being sacked. Was that what had triggered Rupert? Some kind of revenge against the financial community at large? His parents clearly knew nothing about that and for the moment at least he thought he would keep it that way. Alec gave up on trying to figure out the motivation. He had another question and this was, on a personal level, the most important.