Bloodline

3

‘Dead?’ I said, my voicebox seemingly detached from my body.

‘Yes, sir,’ said PC Davis. ‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Where?’ I asked in a croak.

I felt weak and swayed somewhat.

‘Shall we come in, sir?’ he said stepping forward and supporting me by the elbow.

There were two of them, the other was a female officer, and they guided me into my sitting room and down onto the sofa.

‘Liz, get some sweet tea,’ the policeman said to his colleague.

I watched as she went over to the kitchenette and opened cupboards, looking for mugs.

‘Top right,’ I said automatically.

Time seemed to stand still as the kettle boiled and a cup of hot tea was pressed into my hand.

‘Drink it, sir,’ said the constable. ‘It will do you good.’

I took a sip and winced. ‘I don’t take sugar.’

‘You do tonight, sir. Drink it.’

I drank some of the sweet liquid but it didn’t make me feel noticeably better.

‘Where is she?’ I asked.

‘Sorry, sir,’ he said, ‘what do you mean?’

‘Where is she?’ I asked again. ‘I must go to her.’

‘All in good time, sir. We need to ask you some questions first.’

I just looked at him.

‘Are you, in fact, Miss Shillingford’s next of kin?’ the female officer asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Her parents — our parents — they’re still alive. Does that make them the next of kin?’

‘No husband?’ she asked. ‘Or children?’

‘No.’

I drank some more of the tea.

‘How did you find me?’ I asked.

The two police officers looked at each other.

‘We had your address, sir,’ said the man.

‘How?’ I asked again.

‘It was amongst Miss Shillingford’s possessions,’ he said.

‘Where was she killed?’ I asked.

‘In central London. In Park Lane.’

I looked up at him. ‘How odd.’

‘Why odd, sir?’

‘She wouldn’t normally drive up Park Lane going from here to Newmarket.’

‘Was she here this evening?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, she was at Haxted Mill down the road. We had dinner there together.’

The policeman made a note in his notebook.

‘But she didn’t drink and drive, if that’s what you’re thinking. She only had fizzy water.’

‘What time did she leave?’ he asked.

‘About ten past nine,’ I said. I thought back to her spinning the wheels of her sports car as she left the car park. ‘I always said that bloody car would be the death of her.’

‘Oh no, sir,’ said the female officer. ‘It wasn’t a car crash that killed her.’

I stared at her.

‘What, then?’ I asked.

The police officers looked at each other once more.

‘It appears that Miss Shillingford may have fallen from the balcony of a hotel.’

I sat there with my mouth open.

‘Where?’ I said finally. ‘Which hotel?’

‘The Hilton Hotel on Park Lane.’

‘But, when?’

‘At half past eleven.’

Oh God! She had tried to call me twenty minutes before that.

‘How are you sure it was her?’ I asked in desperation. ‘It must be someone else.’

‘I am told, sir, that it is definitely Miss Clare Shillingford.’

‘But how can they know for sure?’

‘I don’t know that, sir. But I am told it’s one hundred per cent certain. Maybe there were witnesses.’

‘But it was an accident, right?’ I asked forlornly.

‘The incident is still under investigation. It will be up to the coroner to determine the cause of death.’

There was something in the way he said it that gave me no comfort.

‘Are you implying it wasn’t an accident?’

‘As I said, sir, that will be a matter for the coroner.’

‘But what was she doing at a hotel anyway?’ I asked. ‘She said she had to go straight home to Newmarket.’

‘I can’t say, sir,’ the policeman replied. ‘The investigating officer will no doubt look into that.’

I sat on my sofa not knowing what to think, or what to do. How could Clare be dead? It didn’t seem real. She had been so alive just a few hours ago. I found I couldn’t even cry. There were too many unanswered questions in my head.

‘Now, sir, do you have the address for Miss Shillingford’s parents? As next of kin, they need to be informed. There will also be a need for an official identification.’

Oh God, I thought. That would kill my mother.

‘How exactly did you have my address?’ I asked.

‘Apparently it was written on an envelope found in Miss Shillingford’s hotel room.’

‘What was in the envelope?’ I asked, perhaps not wanting to know the answer.

‘I can’t say, sir.’

‘Can’t or won’t?’ I asked.

‘Can’t,’ he said. ‘I was not at the scene and was simply informed about the presence of your address on the envelope. My colleague and I are not from the Metropolitan Police, we’re from Kent headquarters at Maidstone. Now, where do your parents live?’

‘Oxted,’ I said.

‘Surrey,’ the policeman said to his colleague with obvious displeasure. ‘We’ll have to contact Guildford.’

‘It’s only five miles away.’

‘Still outside our patch,’ said Constable Davis. ‘What address in Oxted?’

‘I’ll go and tell them,’ I said.

‘Fine, sir. But I will still need their address as they will have to be officially informed. There are procedures to follow.’

‘Yes, of course.’ I gave him the address and he wrote it in his notebook as well as relaying it through his personal radio. ‘Tell them to give me time to be there first.’

He spoke again into the radio but I couldn’t hear the reply.

‘The Surrey Police will be in no hurry, sir,’ he said. ‘They will probably visit your parents later in the morning.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. I bet the Surrey Police would be delighted not to have to perform what must be a dreadful duty. I certainly didn’t relish the task. ‘I’ll go and see them right away. I’d also better call my two brothers and my other sister.’

‘I would recommend that, sir. The incident is already being reported on the BBC radio news and it will only be a matter of time before Miss Shillingford’s name is mentioned, her being something of a celebrity and all.’

‘You’ve heard of her, then?’ I was pleased.

‘Oh yes, sir. I follow the horses a bit. Like to have a flutter now and again. And I’ve watched you on the telly lots of times. I saw you last Saturday on Channel 4.’

Last Saturday suddenly seemed like a long time ago.

‘Will you be all right now, sir? We can stay a while longer if you’d like.’

‘No, thank you. I’ll be fine. I’ll get dressed and drive over to Oxted.’

It was the worst journey of my life. Afterwards I could hardly remember a single yard of the five miles from my flat to my parents’ house.

Lots of questions struggled to get a hearing in my consciousness.

What was she doing in a Park Lane hotel in the first place when she’d told me she was going straight home to Newmarket? Had our row at Haxted Mill somehow caused her to change her plans? Had she gone to the hotel to meet someone? How could she have fallen from a balcony? Why? Why? Why?

I couldn’t get out of my head the image of her driving off from dinner without even a glance at me. I didn’t know whether to be angry or sad.

And then there were the phone calls I had ignored.

Had she been calling me for help?

I should have answered them, I thought. What had I been doing? She was my sister, for goodness’ sake, my darling twin sister. And she had needed me.

The tears started and I had to pull over as I couldn’t see the road. I sat in the driving seat of my trusty old Ford and sobbed.

How could she be dead? She had been more full of life than anyone I had ever met. It must be a mistake.

I had sat there for a full fifteen minutes before I had been able to continue but it was still just before four when I pulled my Ford through the gates and down the sweeping driveway in front of the familiar Jacobean pile on the southern edge of Oxted.

My parents had moved here when Clare and I had been babies, my mother inheriting the place from her parents, but they had never had the money to decorate and furnish the house in the manner that its architectural grandeur demanded.

Dad had been a banker before his retirement. At least, that is what he regularly told everyone. In fact he had spent his working life in the accounts department of a City of London investment bank, doing the paperwork for all the deals that other people had made.

I sat now in my car and looked up at the imposing façade lit only by the glow from the streetlights on the road at the far end of the drive. I suppose I must have had some happy times here, when I’d been a young boy, but all I could remember were the rows and fights of my teenage years.

By then, Dad had been in his late fifties, but he had somehow seemed much older. In spite of him having been only twenty-five at the start of the Swinging Sixties, pop music had passed him by, and he had regularly shouted at Clare and me for playing it at anything above a whisper, even in our bedrooms with the doors closed.

The thought of having any of our school friends around for a bit of a party was completely out of the question. For a start, he’d say, they would then know what we had in the house and they would send the burglars round when we were away. The fact that we had nothing much in the place that anyone would want to steal anyway had been beside the point.

By the time Clare and I had moved out to the flat in Edenbridge, which we had done in secret one day when Dad had been in London for a reunion lunch at his bank, I had come to hate this house so much that I’d not returned to it for the next five years.

But I suppose, as time moves on and we grow older, family ties become more important. Or maybe it’s that our unhappy memories fade. Either way, I was now a regular visitor here, helping in the battle against dry rot and damp inside, and organizing a man to assist with the garden outside.

Not that Dad and I had become close. He still liked to boss me around. The difference was that now I took no notice of him, and went home when I could stand it no longer. Nowadays, instead of rows, we simply had long periods of non-communication. Clare had been right when she had said I’d rather put my head in the sand than do something more constructive. I had found it to be the recipe for a quieter life.

Well, now I had to do something, although I would have happily found some sand-hole in which to hide my head.

I turned on BBC Radio 5 Live and listened to the four o’clock news bulletin. Clare was the lead story, but they didn’t mention her by name. ‘Police are investigating how a thirty-one-year-old woman fell to her death from the balcony of a central London hotel late last evening.’

I clicked off the radio and got out of the car.

I decided that standing on the step battering on the great oak front door, as I had done with Clare all those years ago, was not the right approach. Knowing my father, he would probably think I was a burglar trying to get in and call the police.

Instead, I used my mobile to call their number.

I could hear the phone ringing in the hallway and, presently, my father answered it in the bedroom.

‘Yes,’ he said, sounding very sleepy.

‘Dad,’ I said, ‘it’s Mark. I’m outside. Could you come down and let me in?’

‘What do you want?’ he asked, clearly irritated.

I could hear my mother in the background asking who it was.

‘Dad, just come down and open the front door.’

‘It’s Mark.’ I heard him telling my mother. ‘He’s outside and he wants to get in.’

I didn’t hear her reply but he came back on the line. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’m coming down.’ He had that tone which implied he was doing me a huge favour.

If only he knew.

How, I thought, am I going to tell him that Clare was dead?

I used the policeman’s trick and made them both hot sweet tea.

My mother sat in an armchair and wept, rocking back and forth with a tissue pressed to her nose while my father expressed any grief he might have with anger, most of it directed towards me as if abusing the messenger could somehow change the message.

‘How did this happen?’ he demanded, standing full-square in the middle of their drawing room.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Well, you bloody well should know,’ he bellowed. ‘Why didn’t you ask the police?’

‘I did,’ I said. ‘But they couldn’t say.’

‘Nonsense,’ he shouted at me. ‘You just didn’t ask them in the right way.’

‘Would it make any difference?’ I shouted back. ‘Knowing exactly what happened won’t bring her back.’

My mother uttered a whimper and I went over to comfort her as her stupid fool of a husband marched round the room bunching then relaxing his fists. I suppose grief affects people in different ways. He clearly wanted to lash out at something — to have someone to blame, someone to hit.

In truth, part of me felt the same way.

‘We had better call James, Stephen and Angela,’ I said. ‘Before they hear it on the radio.’

‘You do it,’ my father instructed.

Oh, thanks, I thought.

‘I’ll ask them all if they’d like to come here. Is that OK?’

‘Yes,’ my mother said between sobs.

I thought my father was about to say something, but he obviously had second thoughts and kept quiet, just nodding.

I went into his study and used the phone on his big oak desk in the bay window to pass on the bad news to our siblings, waking each one in turn.

‘Oh, God, Mark,’ said James, my elder brother, ‘I’m so sorry.’

He made it sound like it was more of a loss for me than for him, which, I suppose, was true. Losing one’s twin, I was discovering, was like losing half of oneself.

They all agreed to come to Oxted although, in Stephen’s case, it would take all day to get there as he and his wife, Tracy, were on holiday near Saint-Tropez in the south of France.

‘Just come as soon as you can. We all need to be together.’

I wondered why I had said that to him. Did we all need to be together? We had hardly been together in the past. Other than Clare, Stephen was the youngest of my siblings but he was still some sixteen years older than me. I had no memory of him living at home because he had also flown the nest as soon as he’d been able, just as we all had.

Once or twice over the years we had gathered together for Christmas but they had never been great social successes, mostly descending into bitterness and recrimination rather than uplifting us all into happiness and goodwill.

The last time all five of the Shillingford children had been under the same roof had been at a London hotel where we had gathered two years ago to commemorate my parents’ golden wedding anniversary.

Now we would never all be together again.

I sat at my father’s desk and was again close to tears. But I made one final telephone call, to Lisa, the producer of the Morning Line, the Saturday-morning racing programme on Channel 4. I knew she wouldn’t still be in bed. She would be already at Newmarket racecourse getting ready for the live broadcast that started just before eight o’clock.

She answered on the second ring. ‘Lisa here,’ she said.

‘It’s Mark,’ I said.

‘My, you’re up early,’ she said. ‘And you’re not even on the show. Aren’t you at Newbury today?’

‘That’s partly why I’m calling,’ I said. ‘Can you tell Neville I won’t be able to make it to Newbury today?’

‘You tell him,’ she said with some humour in her voice.

‘Lisa,’ I said. ‘My sister’s been killed.’

‘Not Clare?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Have you heard the radio news this morning?’

‘Yes,’ she said slowly.

‘Clare was the woman who fell from the hotel balcony.’

‘Oh my God!’ She paused. ‘Can we use it?’

Always the journalist.

‘Yes,’ I said. Why else had I rung her?

‘Any details?’

‘No, nothing other than you’d know from the news. And be kind.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Mark, I’m so sorry. And leave Neville to me.’

‘Thank you, I will. And Lisa, no one else knows.’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

A policeman arrived at the house at eight o’clock but he wasn’t from the Surrey constabulary, he was from the Met.

‘Mr Shillingford?’ he asked when I opened the door.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Detective Sergeant Sharp,’ he said, holding out his ID card.

‘Detective?’ I said.

‘Every unexplained death is investigated by a detective. Can I come in?’

I took him through into the drawing room where my mother was still sitting in the same armchair wearing her dressing gown. My father had been upstairs to dress and we had also been joined by Angela, my elder sister, and her husband Nicholas who had arrived from their home in Hertfordshire. I made the introductions and the sergeant sat down facing us.

‘I am very sorry for your loss,’ he said to the five expectant faces. ‘Can any of you suggest why Miss Shillingford would take her own life?’