Martin Edwards - The Cipher Garden

‘Me too.’

‘All right, fire away. The suspense is killing me.’

‘Don’t get too excited.’ He licked his lips. ‘Actually, this is very difficult for me.’

‘We go back a long way. No need for any secrets between us.’

‘You may change your mind once I’ve had my say.’

‘Don’t worry. By now I ought to be unshockable.’

He bowed his head. ‘I suppose you’ve guessed already.’

Hannah took a breath. The fan was whirring sluggishly, exhausted by its losing battle against the heat. ‘This is about your relationship with Roz Gleave?’

‘Oh, no.’ No mistaking the astonishment on his clean-cut features. ‘It’s about my relationship with her husband. You see, Chris and I were lovers.’

The grey heron stood motionless by the edge of the water, head resting between its shoulders. It surveyed the tarn and the tangled grounds at the foot of Tarn Fell, as if contemplating Jacob Quiller’s testament to shattered faith. Daniel and Miranda paused on the winding path, not wishing to disturb its reverie.

‘It’s as mystified as you and me,’ she whispered. ‘Daniel, isn’t it time to give up on trying to make sense of the garden? This place is so lovely, let’s just appreciate what we see.’

‘You’re right.’ He put his arm around her slim shoulders. ‘I’ve been making the historian’s mistake. Conjecturing too much about the past, not making enough of the present.’

‘Life’s short.’ She trembled under his touch. ‘I dreamed of Kirsty again last night. Watching her fall in slow motion, unable to do anything to save her.’

‘There was nothing any of us could do.’

‘What could make her so unhappy? What was so bad that she couldn’t bear to carry on any longer? If only I’d talked to her more at the restaurant, perhaps I could…’

‘You can’t blame yourself. It’s crazy. We didn’t know her, didn’t have a clue what was going on inside her head.’

‘It was such a lovely evening,’ Miranda said. ‘Louise was good company, I’m sorry I was mean about her. As soon as she said she was leaving, I realised I’d been selfish.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

She cleared her throat. ‘There’s something I wanted to tell you.’

The air had chilled and at last you could believe that the heatwave might be drawing to an end. He slipped his arm off her.

‘What is it?’

‘Wipe that frown off your face, you ought to be pleased after all your nagging. I’ve decided you were right. We all need to be sure of our roots. I must set about tracing my birth mother.’

‘Seriously?’

His voice rose in surprise. As if alerted to their presence, the heron drew back its long neck and took flight. Within an instant it had disappeared among the trees.

‘Yes. It’s ridiculous, this fear of rejection. If she doesn’t want to know me, fine. I’ll survive. But I’d hate to think she was yearning to hear from me, and I froze her out of my life because she made one mistake a long, long time ago.’

‘Why the sudden change of heart?’

‘There’s a bond between parent and child, it’s unique.’ Her voice was dreamy, her eyes far away. ‘The blood-tie.’

This was precisely how he felt about his own father, and why he needed to learn more about the man’s life, what he was really like. Yet her words didn’t ring true. Whenever they’d talked about this before, Miranda had been resolute. The words, the sentiment, didn’t seem to belong to her. She’d been talked round. But not by him. And certainly not by Louise.

A phrase of Miranda’s came back into his mind as they set off back to the cottage. We have things in common.

‘You’ve talked to someone about this?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I’m interested, that’s all.’

‘As it happens, I have had a conversation…’

‘With Oliver Cox?’

She stared. ‘Right first time. How on earth did you figure that out?’

‘You were chatting with him in the bar at The Heights. He persuaded you, but what I’m wondering is — how did he manage it?’ He closed his eyes, breathing in her perfume. ‘Was it because Oliver was adopted too? He understood the dilemma better than the rest of us.’

‘He didn’t want to talk about it to begin with. I found it so encouraging when he urged me to trace my mum that I asked him outright if he was adopted. Typical, huh, putting my foot right in my mouth?’

‘What did he say?’

‘At first he backed right off. He’s lovely, but he’s easily knocked off balance. He actually denied it, would you believe? Said I’d put two and two together and made five.’

His face was very close to hers, but he’d shut his eyes. He was picturing her at the bar, determined not to let Oliver off the hook. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, I’d had a couple of large glasses of wine and I’d talked him into having one himself, even though he said he never drank on duty because it soon went to his head. I suppose the booze loosened both our tongues. He tried to brush me off, change the subject, make a joke of the whole thing. But I begged him to be straight with me, told him how much it mattered.’

‘And in the end he gave in.’ That was what people did with Miranda. It was always easier to surrender than to fight.

‘Yes, he finally admitted he was adopted. Even then he said he didn’t want to make it out to be such a big deal.’

‘Did he tell you about his own experience?’

‘I dragged it out of him. He said he was riven with doubt about tracing his blood-family. Once he’d dropped out of uni, he hadn’t been able to settle to anything. As a last resort, he decided to look for his real mother. He was frightened of how she would react, his dread of rejection was as intense as mine. But when at last he found her, it changed his life. No question, he told me, it was the best thing he’d ever done.’

‘Where did he meet his mother?’

‘No idea. He clammed up after that and I didn’t want to make any more of a nuisance of myself. I was grateful for his honesty.’

They were taking a short cut across the grassy area that he’d cleared. Leaving behind the yew and the monkey puzzles and the weeping willow. He was determined that they shouldn’t become trapped in the maze of the Quillers’ despair. As he walked, he was delving into the undergrowth of useless information in his mind, striving to make out what lay beneath.

He wasn’t sure of the precise chronology, but from what Hannah and Bel Jenner had told him, two things had happened shortly before Warren Howe’s murder. Oliver Cox had turned up in Old Sawrey, and Chris Gleave had disappeared. What if a young man turned up on their doorstep one fine morning and announced that Roz was his mother? If so, then judging by her age, she could only have been fourteen or fifteen when she gave birth. Chris and Roz didn’t have kids; if Chris was incapable of being a father, how might he react if a stranger blundered into their cosy little marriage and revealed something his wife had never got up the nerve to mention? He was a sensitive soul, self-consciously artistic. Perhaps he might run away and hide.

‘What do you think?’ Miranda asked.

‘Sorry?’

‘You’re miles away, aren’t you, darling? Not very flattering. I was saying, if we’re going to ask those garden designers to give this place a makeover, perhaps we should take a few photographs so that we can remember how it used to be. Before and after shots.’

‘I want to keep the basic layout intact. The garden’s odd, but…’

‘You like it as it is?’

He groped for the right words. ‘It deserves…respect.’

‘Darling, it’s a garden, not a shrine.’