Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

A maid in uniform opened the door. She was very thin and very young, probably no more than fifteen, and sounded as if she had a cold. Mr Chilvers was at the hospital, she told him, but if he liked he could wait in the drawing room; Mr Chilvers usualy came back for tea. Laurence looked at his watch. He had plenty of time; the train connecting to the Oxford line didn't leave until five-thirty.

'Would you like tea?'

'No, thank you.'

The maid took him into a room with parquet flooring and half-height, varnished-oak paneling. There were some brocade chairs with crimson cushions arranged carefuly on their tasseled corners. He chose the chair nearest the unlit fire with its bright brass scuttle of wet coal. The chair scraped on the floor as he sat down and his foot clanged against the fender. This was a room in which nobody could ever move about silently. The girl went out, sniffing. He gazed out at the desolation of the lawn and wished he had brought a paper.

He was miles away in thought when a woman's voice said, rather breathily, 'Are you al right? Have you come to see George? I don't know where he is, he's usualy back by now.'

Laurence jumped up. The figure in the doorway was slight; a girl, he thought. She looked more surprised to see him than he was to see her.

'I'm Mrs Chilvers,' she said.

She was older than he had supposed. Her figure, voice and bearing were of a young woman but her face, though pretty, was not. Fine lines crossed her forehead and her lips were chapped. She had mousy, straight hair and was dressed in a rather smart, long-sleeved blue dress with a wrapper. He wondered whether she had just come in. Then, as she stepped forward, the fabric dropped a little and, under a string of plump pearls, he could see what looked like an old bruise, yelow and violet, between her neck and her shoulder blade. She sensed him looking and shrugged the wrapper up again, clutching it to her as if she were naked underneath.

Tiny blotches of pink blossomed on her cheeks.

'I'm sorry. I was asleep,' she said. 'George wil be back soon.'

She was stil framed in the doorway, apparently uncertain as to whether to come in.

He put his hand out. 'Laurence Bartram,' he said, in what he hoped was a reassuring tone.

She stepped forward and put out her hand awkwardly to shake his. 'Vera,' she said. 'I'm Vera.'

She was staring at him while keeping hold of his hand. His glance flickered downwards to register long pale scars between the buttoned cuff and her hand as she puled it away.

Almost immediately, and while he was just beginning to wonder whether he could ask Vera about her friendship with John, he heard a car outside. Vera seemed startled and looked behind her to the doorway although there was nothing she could possibly have seen yet. A few minutes later a door slammed and George Chilvers strode into the room. He made no attempt to disguise his irritation at finding her there.

'Shouldn't you be resting?' he asked his wife. 'Haven't you taken your medicine? Where's Rose?'

'I have. I have rested. Rose gave me the new cordial at lunch. Sorry, sorry. I just heard Rose let someone in and I came down because I thought it might be you—'

'Wel, as you can see now it is me. So there's no need for you to hang about.' George raised his eyebrows at Laurence, inviting him to share his amused exasperation. Vera had hardly left them when he said, 'Women, eh? But I'm afraid my poor wife suffers from her nerves. Scared of her own shadow but what can one do?'

He smiled, man to man. Laurence did not smile back.

'I didn't catch your name,' George said, extending his hand, evidently more relaxed now his wife had gone. 'But don't I know you already?' He looked puzzled.

'Yes and no. My name is Laurence Bartram. We met when I came to look round your father's nursing home. But the person you met was, to a certain extent, a fiction.' He had decided to come clean about his original visit. 'I was ostensibly looking for residential care for my brother then. That brother doesn't exist. The person I am now is a friend of the late John Emmett.'

For a few seconds Chilvers looked genuinely surprised, but he recovered fast. 'Of course. I thought there was something fishy about you then. I'd guessed you might be a newspaper journalist but perhaps you're simply a habitual fantasist, Mr Bartram?"

'I represent the family of John Emmett and, to a secondary degree, Mrs Eleanor Bolitho.' Laurence ignored George Chilvers' raised eyebrow. 'It is possible I made a mistake in approaching your father in the way I did but my motives were to clear up some questions that remain over the circumstances of Captain Emmett's death. I'm sorry that I felt it was necessary to deceive him. It was not lack of respect but necessity. As it happens, I thought him a good man doing an important and difficult task. I don't want to have to tel him of my fears that a patient's belongings were misappropriated.'

Chilvers stil looked comfortable. 'Good he may be, indeed, a saint he may be, but a businessman he is not,' he replied smoothly. 'But actualy it's irrelevant. The thing is, my father's dying. He's not likely to see the summer. A large tumour. Quite untreatable in the long term. Wel, in the short term, to tel the truth. Once he dies I might just sel the whole place as a going concern, and go abroad. Or I might let it continue to bring me in a tidy income. Though some things wil have to change. I haven't decided, but either way you running to my father is hardly going to hurt me. It might hurt him, of course. Perhaps that would be satisfaction enough for you, having already led this "good man" down the garden path?'

When Laurence didn't reply, George Chilvers went on, 'The thing about my father is that, despite his strange passion for invisible ilnesses, he's a traditionalist at heart. Takes everybody's story at face value. Gives hours of his time, even now that he is a very sick man. Indulges the deluded, the weak, the malingering, the storytelers: he never discriminates. Has been known to reduce fees for long-term favourites. Al very noble but, in the end, this isn't an order of nursing nuns. And too much coddling makes it far too easy for a man to stay il.

'So, take the matter of suicide, which I am sure you intend to do sooner or later. Almost al the suicides connected with Holmwood have been patients who had been forced out into the considerably less tolerant world outside. It wasn't Holmwood they had a problem with, it was returning to their so-caled nearest and dearest.

Or they loved melodrama, as many of these types do, and simply miscalculated.'

Laurence remembered the description of the young man throwing himself head first over the banisters on to the flagged halway. It seemed al too carefuly calculated to him.

'But mostly they could see eviction from our little Eden looming and couldn't face it,' Chilvers went on. 'After al, they were men who had already proved themselves unable to face adversity in other spheres. I'd include your friend Captain Emmett in this. My father seemed to think he was turning a corner. He was certainly getting restive and becoming a damned nuisance, frankly.'

'He went to London,' Laurence interrupted.

'He went to London and caused us al a hel of a bother. We were responsible for him. Puling these stunts was the sort of selfish act Emmett specialised in. His suicide was al of a piece with this. My father was il in hospital in London. I had to deal with Emmett and keep Holmwood running.'

'What was Captain Emmett doing in London, do you think?'

'I have no idea and, frankly, I don't care. Picking up a tart and taking her to a hotel? Fornicating with another man's wife? His sort preyed on women. He even brought Mrs Bolitho to Holmwood, trying to pass her off as his sister while she slavered over him. He must have thought we were fools. Wel, my father may react like a fool through his own innocence, but I am no man's patsy. Then she had the impertinence to complain about our treatment.'