Hemlock and Roses

Chapter 10 The Camel Coat

"I know he didn't." Morrow cut her off. "That's the other thing. Shaw was sitting outside Vane's workshop all night. Bell asked for round-the-clock surveillance after Ashby's statement, because of the Chopin. Shaw had eyes on the only door from eleven last night until you turned up at half six. Vane's light was on all night. Nobody came out. Nobody went in." A pause. "Your piano tuner's got the best alibi in the city, Hale. A detective who wanted to put him away watched him for seven hours straight."

Iris put her forehead down on the steering wheel and breathed.

"Hale? You there?"

"I'm here."

"Listen to me." Morrow's voice changed. Lowered. "Someone knew Ashby was going to talk this morning. Someone knew the time, the hotel, the room. Bell knew. I knew. Ashby's lawyer knew. You knew." He hesitated. "Who did you tell?"

"Nobody."

"Not Vane?"

"He doesn't even know the name of the hotel. I didn't know the name of the hotel."

"Not your father?"

The question hung in the car like a held note.

"I haven't spoken to my father about Ashby," Iris said slowly. "Not once."

It was true. She was certain it was true. She had been so careful.

And then she thought of a phone call at two in the morning, eleven minutes long, that she had no memory of making. You asked me about Linden. About the board. She thought of her father's voice in the dark, saying Rosie.

She thought: I haven't spoken to my father about Ashby. Not that I remember.

"Hale?"

"I have to go," she said, and hung up.

Her father had laid the table for two in the dining room, with the good silver and the candles and the white linen napkins that had been her grandmother's. He had cooked her favourite, coq au vin, the dish her mother had made every birthday until the year she died. The whole house smelled of wine and thyme and old, comfortable things.

He kissed her forehead at the door. He took her coat and smoothed the shoulders.

"You look pale, darling."

"Long week."

"I heard about Victor." He shook his head slowly as he led her through to the dining room. "On the radio. Terrible. Terrible thing. Do they know who-"

"No."

"Poor Victor." He pulled out her chair for her. "He was never a strong man. I always thought that."

They ate. He asked her about her students. He told her a long, funny story about a colleague who had fallen asleep during his own retirement speech. She laughed at the right places. She watched his hands as he talked: long, elegant, sure. She had loved those hands all her life. They had taught her to hold a pen. They had turned the pages of Plato by her bed. They had picked her up when she fell.

When the plates were cleared, he didn't make tea. He poured two glasses of brandy instead and set one in front of her, and then sat down across from her and folded his hands on the white cloth, and for a while he didn't speak.

"I'm going to tell you something," he said at last, "that I promised myself I would never tell you. And I want you to know, before I begin, that I kept it from you out of love. Only ever out of love."

Iris didn't move.

"Your mother," he said, "was not well."

He told her.

He told it slowly and gently, with long pauses, the way you would tell a child that a pet had died. He told her that her mother had suffered from what the doctors in those days called episodes. Periods of time she couldn't account for. Hours, sometimes a whole day. She'd go out and come back and not know where she had been. She'd find things in her pockets she didn't remember putting there. She'd hum to herself, the same few pieces, over and over, without knowing she was doing it.

"She used to hum Chopin," he said quietly. "The nocturnes. All day, sometimes. I'd come home and the whole house would be full of it."

Iris's hands were cold on the white cloth.

"She sat on the Friends of Linden committee, as you know. She was obsessed with that hall. And in the last year, she became convinced that the finances were being stolen. That someone on the board was robbing it. She was quite paranoid about it. She'd stay up all night with the accounts." He shook his head. "I tried to get her to see someone. She wouldn't."

He looked down at his folded hands.

"On the night of the fire, after we brought you home, she went out again. She said she needed air. I was asleep. I woke at one and she was coming in through the kitchen door." His voice dropped very low. "Her coat smelled of smoke, Iris. That camel coat she always wore. I asked her where she'd been and she looked at me as if she didn't know who I was."

The candles flickered. Somewhere in the hall, the grandfather clock struck the half hour, slow and solemn.

"I never asked her again," he said. "God forgive me, I never asked. I told myself it couldn't be. I told myself she'd been walking by the river and someone had a bonfire. And then the inquiry said faulty wiring, and I let it be faulty wiring, because the alternative was-" He stopped. His eyes were wet. "She was my wife. She was your mother. What would you have had me do?"

Iris couldn't speak.

"Victor would have named her this morning," her father said softly. "I'm almost sure of it. He saw her that night. He must have. I couldn't let you hear it from him first, in some police office, from a stranger. I wanted you to hear it from me."

He reached across the table and laid his hand over hers.

"You've been losing time," he said. "Haven't you, sweetheart? Waking up in strange places. Finding things you don't remember. Your mother had it too. The doctors said it can run in families." His thumb moved gently over her knuckles. "And when you were small, you used to have a little friend. An imaginary friend. You called her Rosie. You'd say Rosie had done things. Rosie had broken the vase. Rosie had hidden the keys. Your mother was frightened by it. She thought you were going the way she had." He smiled sadly. "Then you grew out of it. Or I thought you had."

Iris looked at his hand on hers.

It fitted. That was the terrible thing. It fitted perfectly. Her mother, ill and paranoid and obsessed with the finances. Her mother, humming Chopin. Her mother's coat, smelling of smoke, with a key and a matchbook in the pocket. An illness that ran in families, which explained the gaps and the teacup and the call at two in the morning. An imaginary friend called Rosie, which explained the name on the phone. Everything that had been wrong for six days, every piece that hadn't fitted, slid neatly into place in her father's warm, sad, careful voice, like the last pieces of a jigsaw.

It fitted so perfectly that she wanted to weep with relief.

And because it fitted so perfectly, the part of her that her father had trained, the part that never stopped asking, the part that distrusted any answer that arrived exactly when you needed it, sat up very slowly in the back of her mind and began, quietly, to count.

Mum wore the camel coat.

That was his premise. The whole story stood on it. Her mother, in her camel coat, coming in through the kitchen door at one in the morning smelling of smoke.

But Elias had said: A camel coat. Too big for you. You said it was your mother's.

Elias had described a girl of nineteen, running in through a stage door at Linden, every Tuesday for fourteen months, wearing that coat.

And Iris knew, without needing Elias to tell her, that she had worn it all through her second year at university. She had worn it to lectures. She had worn it in the rain. Priya had teased her about it. She had worn it constantly, every single day, until one day she put it at the back of the wardrobe and never wore it again.

Her second year. The year she was nineteen.

The year of the fire.

Her mother hadn't worn that coat that year. Her mother couldn't have. Iris had been wearing it.

She looked up at her father across the candles.

"Dad," she said. Her voice was very quiet and very steady. "Who was wearing the camel coat that year?"

"Your mother, darling. I've just told you."

"No," said Iris. "I was."

The candle flames stood perfectly still.