Jon Grimwood - End of the World Blues

That was the flat—a bedroom, a kitchen, and a shower room. Neku had expected something bigger. A frosted-glass door across the landing had bolts above and below its glass, with an old key sticking from a battered lock. Since the note asking people to keep this door shut was signed Mary, and that meant its secrets had to belong to flat 7, Neku yanked back the bolts, twisted the key, and found herself on a small roof garden.

Roof ex-garden, really. Dead lavender spiked from a terra-cotta pot. An old ceramic sink had been filled with peat and planted with…“Mint,” Neku decided, dropping crumbled leaves to the floor.

It was pretty, the garden; walled and elegant and not really overlooked, unless you included an office block three streets away and the Post Office Tower. What was more, it had a tiny wooden shed built against the far wall. She could sleep there, Neku decided. In the meantime she might as well clear up.

“Look,” said Patrick Robbe-Duras. “Have you any idea how badly you hurt Mary?” Liver spots covered the backs of his hands, which were so thin that his fingers looked like twigs wrapped in wet paper. Never the less, Pat shook off Kit’s attempt to take the tray with an abrupt shake of his head.

“Well?”

There were those who said Pat was the brains behind the move to unite half a dozen areas of London into one rigidly controlled fiefdom. They were usually people who’d never actually met his ex-partner.

“Yes,” said Kit. “I have. It was unforgivable.”

He waited while Pat put a tray on the table, and waited some more for Pat to remove two cups and place them on slate coasters. Kit was having trouble reconciling this cardigan-wearing old man with the dapper, tweed-coated figure he remembered from his childhood.

“I’m glad you know that,” said Pat. “If you’d denied it, I was planning to get very cross.” They sat at a pine table in a long kitchen, with low ceilings and leaded windows that stared out across sloping lawns towards the stump of an old cherry tree and a silver twist of river beyond.

For all that he’d been born in Dublin and shared most of his adult life with Kate O’Mally, the man quietly sipping tea had obviously become a Londoner at heart, with a Londoner’s dreams of retiring to a little cottage in the country.

“You don’t approve?”

“A little too pretty for me.”

“You and Mary both,” said Pat. “She hated this place. Too chi-chi, too neat, too everything really.”

“Still, you like it. That’s what matters.”

“Actually,” said the man, “it leaves me cold. That was what made Mary so cross.”

“So why buy it?”

Pat sighed. “You visited Seven Chimneys,” he said. “Damn it, that was probably where…No,” he said, “let’s not even go there. You visited the house. So you must know why I bought this.”

“Because it couldn’t be more different?”

“Story of my life,” said Pat. “You should have seen my first wife.”

“Quiet, discreet, understated?”

Pat Robbe-Duras nodded. “It was a disaster. She took my surname, so Katie wouldn’t…my family hated that. Not that Katie could have children, as it turned out.”

Kit looked at him.

“Mary was adopted,” said Pat. “Surely she told you?”

“No,” Kit said. “Never. You don’t regret not…”

“I adored Mary,” said Pat. “And Katie is the love of my life.” He looked at Kit, and shook his head, almost gently. “We separated only because I insisted,” said Pat. “I’m dying. I’d have thought that was obvious to anyone. Come on, let me show you the garden.”

The lawns were cut by a boy who came in on Wednesdays. A woman came in from the village to clean the house on Mondays and Fridays. Dr. Porteus tried to drop by on Tuesdays and, if possible, on Thursdays as well. Mary used to come down some weekends. The police drove by a couple of times a week to check that everything was okay and the farmer who owned the fields next door kept half a dozen Charolais cattle in Pat’s paddock, and was around every other day.

“So you can see,” Pat said, as he stopped by the stump of the cherry. “You’re lucky to find me alone.” He nodded at a battered oak bench, indicating that Kit should sit. “There are a couple of questions I’d like to ask you.”

“You can ask,” said Kit.

“The first,” said Pat, “is why you hung up on me in Tokyo.”

“I was busy being sick,” said Kit, which was close enough to the truth to do. He’d have hung up anyway, probably.

“But you’d already been told that Mary was dead.”

“Yes,” Kit said. “But not when it happened.”

Pale blue eyes hooked into his. Watery and old, framed by lower lids that drooped and brows so low they must limit what Pat Robbe-Duras could actually see. It wasn’t a cold or even angry gaze, more curious, as if the man had moved beyond extremes, despite his earlier threats of anger.

“The date matters?”

“Mary wrote,” said Kit. “She sent me a postcard.”

“When?” Such a simple word.

Kit took a deep breath. “The week before she killed herself.”

“Are you going to tell me what it said?”

“No,” said Kit, shaking his head. “But I promise you one thing. It didn’t mention suicide or give a reason for doing what she did.”

“Assuming she did.”

“I thought you were the one who…?”

Pat leaned back on his bench and stared at a twist of silver river. A willow draped its branches into the water and a flotilla of baby coots were chirping their way around rushes on the far bank. It looked idyllic, if you liked that sort of thing. When Pat finally spoke his voice was flat, stripped of all emotion.

“Mary’s dead,” he said. “I’m just not sure it was suicide…That’s what I wanted to see you about. Let me be honest…I never expected Katie to find you. But telling her to keep looking beat having her disturb the police with mad theories about what was really going on in Mary’s life.”

“Which was…?”

“What you’ll find out for me,” said Pat, reaching for Kit’s wrist.

Kit unpeeled the old man’s fingers. “People can do things without reason,” he said.

Standing up, Pat said, “You’re wrong. Everything has its own logic. If Mary killed herself I want to know why. Which brings us to my final question. Why would someone like Katie, who believes you ruined her daughter’s life, ask Kit Newton for help?”

“Because,” said Kit, “she’s desperate.”

“Thank God,” the old man said. “At least you understand that much.”

They ate cold chicken in a small dining room with oak boards and a granite overmantel carved in a flat, almost stark style. A huge gilded mirror had been fixed to the wall with its base resting on two wooden blocks that, in turn, rested on the mantel below.

“Too heavy to hang properly,” said Pat. “But the room needs the light.”

A couple of early Victorian oil landscapes adorned one wall, above a silver jug which was tarnished with lack of cleaning. The table had wooden pegs in place of screws and a Persian rug covering the floor had a hole in one corner. Kit found it impossible to know if he was looking at discreet poverty or a priceless collection of antiques he was too ignorant to recognise.

“You know,” said Pat, “I’m grateful you came. I wasn’t even sure Katie would pass on my message.”

“It was a close run thing,” admitted Kit. “She almost forgot.”

Pat snorted. “Katie has a memory like an elephant,” he said, reaching for his white wine. “She never forgets and rarely forgives. If you only understand one thing about Katie O’Mally, understand that. She believes Mary is alive, I don’t…I do, however, want to know why my daughter killed herself.”