Стивен Бут - Drowned Lives

‘The accepted story was that William had absconded with the missing funds,’ said Rachel. ‘And nothing could be proved, because he was never found, alive or dead.’

‘Until now,’ I said, thinking of the human remains resting somewhere in a mortuary, still officially unidentified.

Rachel met my gaze. ‘The next thing I looked at was the dispute many years later between Edward Buckley’s son Josiah and the other canal carriers over a coal contract. We have William Buckley’s letters. But we don’t know as much about Josiah, do we?’

‘Well, he was a boatman. Josiah and his family lived on the canal. I don’t suppose he wrote letters very much. Perhaps he wasn’t even literate.’

She nodded. ‘Alfred was the child who went on to do well. He was the one who got an education, living on land with the Bensons. The family has gone through some ups and downs.’

‘That’s an understatement.’

‘So you remember Josiah was found drowned in the canal?’

‘Of course. His head had been battered against the wall of the lock when the sluices were opened. They said he fell in, and couldn’t swim.’

‘That’s right.’

I detected some implication in her tone. ‘Are you going to tell me Josiah was murdered by a rival?’

‘Well, I checked on the companies he was competing with. Would it surprise you that one of the companies he beat to that contract was owned by the Parker family?’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘There’s more,’ she said.

‘Really?’ I could see her expression was more serious now. I sensed that her researches had come closer to the present than 1796.

‘Another wedding. This one in 1949. Matthew and Mary.’

‘What about them?’

‘According to the parish register from Stonnall, there was a wedding there between Matthew Parker and Mary Parker, both of Stonnall Court. You see? The interesting thing is that they were not only Parkers after the wedding, they were both Parker before it.’

‘So Mary was calling herself Parker already by then? Before she married Matthew? That’s very odd. Why did she take his name so early?’

‘She didn’t,’ said Rachel. ‘She’d reverted to her maiden name.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Don’t you get it yet, Chris? Matthew Parker was Mary’s second cousin. She didn’t need to change her name to his. She already had it. Mary was a Parker too.’

‘It really didn’t occur to you?’ said Rachel. ‘That Mary was a member of the Parker family?’

I slumped down in my chair. ‘Of course not.’

And it hadn’t at all. My image of my grandmother had been something quite different, a woman who’d made a difficult decision at some time in her life, but had done it out of love. I’d pictured Mary as someone who’d been vilified for an action we would hardly think unusual these days. Yet she’d been a Parker, of all things. It changed the whole picture.

‘It all fits though, doesn’t it?’ I said. ‘It all ties in. Apart from that mention of Lindley Simpson in the manuscript from Kestrel .’

‘That may have meant nothing,’ said Rachel, ‘since we couldn’t read the rest of it. And we know Simpson is connected with Leo Parker anyway. They’re old business associates, and Simpson uses Parker as an advisor.’

I stood up and sat down again, suddenly restless and nervous. ‘What I don’t understand is — did Samuel want me to inquire into the lives of William and Josiah? Or did he want me to investigate his own death? Because there’s no doubt in my mind that he foresaw it was going to happen. He told Frank as much.’

‘But aren’t they all connected?’ said Rachel. ‘The three deaths. William, Josiah, Samuel. What if there’s a link? By answering one mystery, you could be answering them all. Josiah was William’s grandson. Samuel was Josiah’s grandson.’

‘Okay, so there’s a pattern.’

‘And you...’

‘Me? You can’t include me. I’m not Samuel’s grandson.’

‘Oh? Think again, Chris. It seems to me you’re the grandson he never had.’

Her words stumped me. Samuel had produced no son, despite his crazy delusion about Alison being pregnant when she died. Caroline might be expected to produce children one day — presumably by the loathsome Monks. But they wouldn’t be Buckleys, and they’d be far too late for Samuel anyway. But it was irrelevant. The question was, what had Mary been up to? That was what Samuel had asked. It was the question that had tormented him most. Why did she do what she did?

‘It should have occurred to me, shouldn’t it? That Mary was a Parker, I mean. Everything that’s happened to the Buckleys has happened through them. What she did — was it all part of the damn feud?’

Rachel had no answer. I paced across the room, my mind turning, looking for things to distract me. I paused at the carriage clock, opened its glass front and moved the hands carefully to a position that matched the time on my watch. Then I closed it again and brushed some dust off the top with my hand. Rachel watched me as I moved on to the fish tank. I bent to stare in at the fish, counting them as they went by — one fewer now since the neon tetra had died. A small tub of food stood by the tank, and I tapped some of it onto the surface of the water, watching the fish rise to intercept it. I counted them again as they gathered.

As I returned to my chair and sank into it, Rachel was laughing at me.

‘Chris, you’re just like your father. Arthur always did that with the clock and the fish.’

I thumped the arm of the chair so hard with my fist that the coffee table jumped an inch off the carpet and coffee spilled over the edge of a cup.

‘I am NOT like my father!’

Rachel recoiled, staring at me in bewilderment and embarrassment. She’d never seen me lose my temper before, and I knew it wasn’t a pretty sight. I breathed deeply, trying to control the rage that had swamped my mind from nowhere, and attempting to relax the trembling in my arms.

‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ she said quietly.

‘Just don’t say any more, please.’

After a moment I was able to reach out to pick up my coffee, not daring to meet her eyes. The bottom of the cup was wet where it had spilled, and I rubbed ineffectually at a splash on my trousers until the uncomfortable silence had gone on too long. In another minute, it would be too late to repair the damage my outburst had done.

‘I’m sorry, Rachel. I shouldn’t have shouted at you.’

‘I didn’t realise you were so sensitive about it.’

She tried to laugh it off, though she didn’t look convincing. ‘It’s everybody’s nightmare, isn’t it? That they’ll end up just like their father or their mother. At my age, I look in the mirror every morning for signs of it, don’t you?’

‘Not really,’ I said.

But I did. I’d seen my father only this morning, staring back at me from the bathroom cabinet with the frightened, angry eyes of a person who was being driven inexorably to violence. They were the eyes of a man who’d terrorised me throughout my childhood, the father I’d been forced to face up to when I came home from Stafford.

When I returned to Lichfield, it was to a place only half recalled. By the early 1970s the population of the city had doubled with the creation of the first overspill housing estates for the conurbations of the West Midlands. By the 1990s, it had trebled. Yet the existence of these estates had somehow escaped my awareness in the claustrophobic atmosphere of my youth in Stowe Pool Lane. My landscape had been dominated by the cathedral, the Minster and Stowe pools and the seventy-eight acres of Beacon Park, with the shops of the city centre a few yards away.