Name To a Face

FIFTEEN

It was not what he had expected. Not exactly, anyway. She had asked him to stay. She had not wanted to be alone. Nor had he. At first she had only asked him to hold her and he knew enough about her past to do no more than that. Soon enough, though, they had made love, once in the small, still, silent hours, then once again as dawn crept in greyly around them.

It did not feel like a betrayal of Carol. Indeed, it set his affair with her in its proper context. Sex by appointment, during engineered afternoons, at his apartment in Villefranche, had never been like this. He wanted to cradle Hayley in his arms, he wanted to caress and protect her, far more than he wanted to savour the moment when she stared up into his eyes and he could hold back no longer. This he remembered and recognized as the beginning of love.

“I can trust you, can’t I, Tim?” she asked as they lay together in the serenity of early morning.

“You can, yes,” he assured her.

“Why does this feel so right?”

“Because it is, I suppose.”

“A lot’s gone wrong in my life.”

“I know.”

“I need that to change.”

“Maybe it just has.”

“You won’t let Nathan find me, will you-you won’t lead him to me?”

“Of course not.”

“And you won’t go looking for him while you’re in London?”

“No. I won’t.”

Late the previous evening Hayley had called Ann Gashry and asked if she would meet Harding and tell him whatever he wanted to know about the ring. Ann had agreed, while making it clear to him when he had taken the phone that she was doing so for Hayley’s sake, not his. She had sounded precise and calm and cautious-the ideal person to keep a secret. They had made an appointment for five o’clock the following afternoon, Harding reckoning it would take him most of the day to travel to Dulwich. But he was no longer sure now that he wanted to go at all.

“I won’t go near him, Hayley. I promise.”

“Good.” She kissed him. “You’re still going to London, though, aren’t you?”

“I think I have to.”

“Is it really the ring you’re looking for? Or is it Kerry?”

“I told Barney I’d do my best to find out what’s going on. So, I have to speak to Ann Gashry. It’s as simple as that.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“You must have wondered, though. If the person you’re certain you’ve met before isn’t me, but Kerry.”

“How would I have met her?”

“If the diving expedition hadn’t ended in disaster, you might have bumped into each other in Penzance in August 1999.”

“But it did. And we didn’t.”

“Are you sure? I was reading a book recently about the latest ideas in cosmology. The Universe Next Door. Part of Gabriel’s library. Strictly speaking, it should be in the auction. Technically, I stole it. Anyway, cosmologists apparently think there’s an alternative universe out there somewhere for every alternative reality. Which means, in one version of this world, you did meet Kerry. Perhaps that’s what your mind’s trying to tell you.”

“By that rationale, there’s a version in which you and I met before as well.”

“And one in which we never meet at all.”

“I guess so.” He looked into her eyes. “But let’s not go there.”

He left reluctantly and hastily, while it was still too early for Isbister’s crew to arrive and start preparing for the auction-an auction from which Lot 641 would now be omitted. The postman was making his rounds, but no one else was about as Harding hurried along Polwithen Road through a chill grey morning, with the taste of Hayley’s farewell kiss still lingering on his lips and the joys of the night still alive in his mind.

He spent no longer at the Mount Prospect than the few minutes he needed to pack his bag and the few more minutes it took to check out. He should have phoned Barney, of course, and told him what he was doing. But he phoned no one. Neither Barney nor Carol would be able to contact him now, since they had no way of knowing he had recovered his mobile. And that was how he wanted it. Whatever the future held, the present was a tangle of unanswered questions and conflicting obligations. He believed his life was better for what had happened between him and Hayley but he knew it was no easier. Far from it.

Pursuing the possibility that Ann Gashry knew who had stolen the ring was partly an evasion. Harding acknowledged as much to himself as the train pulled out of Penzance station and began its five-hour journey to London. It meant he could be said to have done his best by Barney, if scarcely by Carol. It spared him the need, at least for a while, to confront the consequences of his actions. When he eventually returned to the Côte d’Azur, he would not be going back to the life he had lately been leading there. That was over. What would take its place was unclear. He and Hayley would have to decide that between them. They would have to discover what they really meant to each other. And then…

He booked himself into the Great Western Hotel for the night when the train reached Paddington, knowing it was unrealistic to think of returning to Penzance until the following day. He phoned Hayley and left her a message reporting his arrival. She had said she would make herself scarce during the auction, so he was not surprised by her absence. He had been surprised, however, to discover she possessed no mobile, but it was only one of the many oddities that made her the bewitchingly elusive person she was. Comfortably on schedule for his appointment with Ann Gashry he headed down to the Tube.

A steely rain was falling in Dulwich, inducing a premature dusk. Harding made his way along Bedmore Road, a broad, straight thoroughfare of robust inter-war family homes, wondering which house the Foxtons had lived in, before arriving at Ann Gashry’s door.

The interior felt more Victorian than twentieth-century, with lots of heavy curtains and ponderously ticking clocks. He was admitted by a small, round rubber ball of a woman and led into a fustily decorated drawing room, accompanied along the way by a mildly curious King Charles spaniel. The woman called up the stairs for Ann, made him an offer of tea, which he accepted, then vanished, her status in the household-servant, companion, relative-left unclarified. The dog followed her at a leisurely pace.

Harding had only a minute or two in which to inspect various silver-framed photographs on the mantelpiece before Ann Gashry arrived. She looked remarkably similar to a Flapper-era woman whose picture he had just been studying, though the similarity did not extend to dress. His hostess was kitted out in twinset, pearls and calf-length skirt. A Home Counties bob and librarian glasses completed the dowdy effect, but her piercing, damson-eyed gaze hinted that he should not judge her by her appearance.

“Mr. Harding.” They shook hands. “Did Dora offer you tea?”

“Yes, she did.”

“Good. Shall we sit down?”

“Thanks.” They settled either side of the fireplace. “And thanks for seeing me.”

“As I explained on the phone, Mr. Harding, you have Hayley to thank for that. The way my brother’s behaved towards her…” She shuddered. “I sometimes find it hard to believe Nathan and I are the same flesh and blood, but there it is. Our parents divorced and I stayed with Father while he went with Mother, so we’ve had… different upbringings. He’s a good deal younger than I am as well. But even so…”

“It can’t be easy for you. Holding out on him about Hayley.”

“I hardly ever see him, actually. It really isn’t that difficult.”

“The Foxtons lived nearby, I gather.”

“Just a few doors away. I miss them. Such nice people.”

“What happened to Kerry was… tragic.”

“Indeed. She had such… charisma. Her death was an irreparable loss to all who had the good fortune to know her. A tragedy, as you say. Also a mystery. And I believe it’s the mystery rather than the tragedy you’ve come to discuss.”

“Yes.” He smiled. “It is.”

“But I don’t quite understand your interest in the matter. Hayley said you were acting on Barney Tozer’s behalf.”

“I was.”

“And now?”

“I want to find out the truth. For everyone’s sake.”

“A noble but perilous ambition.”

“Why perilous?”

“I don’t know. But you have Kerry’s sad example to tell you that it is.”

“It might have been an accident.”

“I don’t think so. Nor does Hayley does she?”

“Not since the burglary no.”

“Ah, yes. The burglary.” She looked round, catching some noise from the hall. “Here’s Dora with the tea, I think.”

It was indeed Dora. Ann switched adroitly to a recommendation of the latest exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery while tea was delivered, lingering on the subject until Dora was long gone and they both had a cup in their hand. Then she swiftly reverted to the question of the ring.

“I’m both surprised and unsurprised by news of its theft. Surprised because such an act seems, on the face of it, inexplicable. Unsurprised because its history is riddled with similar incidents.” She sipped her tea and paused to order her thoughts, then said, “As you shall hear.”