Simon Tolkien Inspector Trave Trilogy: Orders From Berlin, The Inheritance, The King of Diamonds. Simon Tolkien
a doctor. She turned away, biting her lip to contain her irritation. Everything about her husband seemed to grate on her these days.
She looked around, scanning the faces of the mourners. There were some she recognized – Mrs Graves and several other neighbours from Gloucester Mansions, her father’s solicitor, and a cousin of her mother’s – but many of them were new to her. She wondered who they were. Old work colleagues of her father’s, she assumed, come to pay their last respects. It hurt her to realize how little she’d known him and how much he’d kept from her. She’d been aware for as long as she could remember that her father worked in the City. Every day he would leave the house in his pinstripe suit and bowler hat, carrying a briefcase with a brass lock, and a black umbrella in wintertime, and every evening he would return, although sometimes late, when she had already gone to bed and would be lying awake in the dark, listening for the sound of his key in the door.
Ava knew that men who worked in the City did things with money, so she had naturally always assumed that her father was a businessman of some kind. And as she knew nothing about finance, she’d never asked him about his work and he had never volunteered any information. And so it had gone on year after year, until the day he died.
But now Ava regretted her lack of curiosity. She wished she’d asked him questions, although she suspected that he wouldn’t have answered them even if she had. Their lack of connection had been a two-way street.
She thought of the still-uncleared flat in Gloucester Mansions and all her father’s books piled up in tottering towers around his desk. She realized with a jolt that she’d never really considered the titles on the spines. She’d thought of them more as objects, physical barriers that he put up to protect his privacy. But she remembered enough to know that most of them were about politics and history and subjects like that; hardly any of them were about money. The books were too many to be a hobby. She realized now that they were a clue to who her father was – someone more interesting than a stockbroker; a diplomat, perhaps, except that he rarely travelled; or someone who worked for the government in some secret capacity that couldn’t be discussed. Maybe there had been an official reason for her father’s silence, an explanation beyond his natural reticence. She’d have preferred that. It would make the failure of their relationship a little easier to bear.
Alec Thorn would have answers to her questions, but he probably wouldn’t tell her them even if she asked. He was the only one of her father’s work colleagues she’d ever met. Why had her father made an exception for Alec? she wondered. Why had Alec been permitted into the house? It had to be because he was the only one of them her father trusted. Ava remembered how her father and Thorn would stop talking sometimes when she came into the room. Closing her eyes, she could see them now, sitting on either side of the fireplace in the evening with glasses of whisky in their hands, their faces lit up by the firelight, leaning forward towards each other so that their foreheads were almost touching – like conspirators in a Rembrandt painting.
As a little girl, she’d learnt how to move softly, how to glide around people. Her father had hated any kind of disturbance, and her mother had been nervous, for years a semi-invalid suffering from the weak heart that finally killed her. So Ava would sometimes be practically standing beside her father and Alec before they noticed she was there. She remembered how her father would look up with surprise and irritation and how Alec would be surprised too, but also pleased, reaching out to stroke her hair. For years Alec had been a favourite uncle who asked her questions about school and brought her expensive gifts for Christmas and her birthday, and then later, much later, she’d sensed that he liked her in a different way.
They’d been eating dinner one summer evening and Alec had got up to go home. But Ava’s father had been in an unusually expansive mood. He’d pushed his guest back down in his chair, poured him another glass of wine, and told him that he was looking thin and pale and that he needed ‘a good woman’ to take care of him. Alec had shaken his head, said he wasn’t the marrying kind, but Ava’s father wouldn’t let it go. ‘There must be someone,’ he’d said. And Alec had looked away, flushing red with embarrassment, and had caught Ava’s eye as she got up from the table to clear the plates. And in that moment she had known. He hadn’t said anything and her parents missed the exchange, but from that moment her relationship with Alec changed.
He came less, and he was awkward with her when they met. Once or twice when they happened to find themselves alone, he’d hesitated, clearing his throat as if he had something important to say; but someone had always come in at the critical moment, or he’d lost confidence and turned away. The nearest he’d got to a declaration had been after her mother died – the last funeral she’d been to before today. It had been a different church, but the same cold wind had been blowing the brown leaves off the trees, and inside, her father had stood bolt upright beside her in the pew, looking straight ahead at the pulpit as if he were participating in a military inspection rather than his wife’s funeral. And Thorn had come up to her afterwards when they were walking back from the grave to the lych-gate. He’d had no umbrella, and she remembered his thinning hair plastered down by the rain and the look of mute appeal on his careworn face.
‘I’m so sorry, Ava. If there’s anything I can do … anything,’ he’d stammered.
She’d thanked him, expecting that would be the end of it, but he’d leant forward and taken hold of her hand.
‘You’re very important to me, you know,’ he’d said, looking her in the eye. And she’d felt sure that he was going to say more, but her father had come up and taken her arm, in a hurry to get home and ‘get the damned thing over with’, as he’d confided to her in the car.
And that had been the end of it. Five months later, she’d married Bertram. Alec hadn’t been at the wedding. He’d made some excuse and sent an expensive present – a dinner service that they never used – and after that, he’d seemed to fade from their lives. It had to have been six months or more since she’d last seen him, but he was here now. He had to be: Albert had been his best friend. Standing on her tiptoes, Ava searched the crowd and caught sight of Thorn standing alone, smoking a cigarette. He was a little way further up the pavement, keeping his distance from the rest of the mourners. He looked the worse for wear – less hair and more wrinkles, a shadow of the man she’d first met twenty years before. But then the war seemed to be ageing everybody, not just Alec.
It was time. The coffin had passed through the crowd and been set up on a table in front of the altar, and Bertram came and took Ava’s arm and led her inside. The church with its permanently blacked-out windows made her feel claustrophobic. Sitting in the pew at the front beside her husband, she felt the eyes of the other mourners fixed on her back. She knew what they were all thinking about – not her father, but the manner of his death. The cold-blooded English liked nothing better than a good murder to puzzle over, to discuss back and forth over their Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in the morning. Who had pushed him? Was the killer here with them in the church? Would he kill again? It didn’t help that the young policeman from the night of the murder was here too, standing at the back, watching. She’d seen him as she came in.
And the presence of Bertram next to her, clasping his hands in prayer with a pious look on his face, infuriated her. He’d chosen all the hymns and now sang them with gusto in an excessively baritone voice that made her squirm with embarrassment. She wanted to get out, to run back down the aisle away from Bertram and away from her father’s coffin with its brass plaque screwed into the top, bearing his name and dates in a style of lettering that Bertram had spent a considerable time picking out from a catalogue at the undertaker’s office several days earlier.
She tried to concentrate on the service. ‘In the midst of life we are in death’ – yes, that was true. Bombs were raining down from the moonlit sky night after night. Albert Morrison was lucky to even have his own funeral. Ava had read in the newspapers about mass burials of bomb victims. She’d seen the pictures of the trenches dug by mechanical diggers, the lines of coffins draped in Union Jacks, and the ranks of the bereaved stretching back into the grey distance. Life was cheap. Tomorrow she too might be dead. Something about the thought jolted her – like a charge of electricity. She needed to live, to take risks, to be herself for a little while before it was too late.
Outside