The Accomplice Read online

  The Accomplice

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  The Accomplice

  Dedication

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Part Two

  7

  8

  9

  Part Three

  10

  11

  Part Four

  12

  Part Five

  13

  Part Six

  14

  Part Seven

  15

  16

  Part Eight

  17

  Part Nine

  18

  19

  20

  Part Ten

  21

  Part Eleven

  22

  Part Twelve

  23

  Part Thirteen

  24

  25

  Part Fourteen

  26

  Part Fifteen

  27

  28

  Part Sixteen

  29

  Part Seventeen

  30

  Copyright

  The Accomplice

  Elizabeth Ironside

  To Michael and Sylvia

  Part One

  ZITA

  1

  She had made all the arrangements for her own funeral. She had interviewed the undertakers and ordered her coffin. She had chosen the hymns and seen to the printing of the service sheets, as if she were deciding what clothes to wear. She had decided who would be buried.

  EBГEHИЯ KOHCTAHTИHOBHA ЧOPHOPУKAЯ

  1917–1992

  Zita Daunsey, seated in the second row, moved her eyes from the coffin, resting in the entrance to the chancel, to the Cyrillic letters on the sheet she held in her hand. Who was Yevgenia Konstantinovna Chornoroukaya? Who here knew her?

  The organ died away and the congregation rose to its feet. The service began. The beauty of the words, familiar even to an unbeliever, distracted Zita only momentarily from the other questions that her mind persistently formed. Since she had given up her job in the City and become a partner in a provincial law firm, she had been to many funerals; it was the sort of attention still given to and appreciated by clients in a small town. She had often observed the comfort of ritual to those in the first bewilderment of loss. The calming words covered the rawness of individual grief with a soothing sense of inevitability. Death comes to us all, they said, we are part of a process. And so they smothered rather than answered the inevitable questions, why? why now? why her?

  In this case the questions were not to be denied. She resisted them. There was nothing, she told herself, nothing at all, to indicate that Yevgenia’s death was anything other than a tragic accident. She was elderly, crippled, in pain, and in the last three months she had been tormented by memories that she had successfully suppressed for most of her life. Zita rehearsed the words that survivors use to console one another, to convince themselves as much as others. It was a merciful release; she was glad to go at the end. All the old untruths. We cling to life, in pain, misery and defeat; but we are different. The dead one let go; she died because, secretly, she wanted to. The logic is that as long as we maintain our will to live, we can fend off the darkness, live for ever.

  And yet… and yet. There was something wrong. It was more than an accident: there was a pattern there, if she could only see it for a moment, like a rose window in a turning kaleidoscope. She stared at the stained glass above the altar which, as if her thoughts had received a sharp jolt, seemed to re-form in a new pattern.

  She was, of course, mistaken. No one else saw anything wrong. Dr Flowers had issued the death certificate. She would have died rapidly and without pain, he had assured Zita, a confidence she had passed on to the family. Her view, one pew back, comprehended them all. Marcus, as correct as always in his black suit, and Naomi, whose flowing garments made no concession to the conventions of grief; Rosie, whose exotic neatness in a tight black dress studded with silver was almost a parody of mourning; Al, whose dark suit and tie were only extraordinary to those who knew him well; and, last of all, Xenia, seated beside Zita in her old Russian skirt and cardigan. The question of appearance and what it signified was only one strand in the tangle of Zita’s mind. There was no one who could answer her questions. She should not voice them. It was all settled: Accidental Death. She could do no good; besides, she had no proof.

  They were singing the last hymn, “To be a pilgrim”. Zita fixed her mind on the words. Yevgenia’s pilgrimage had been short and violent, like a rebirth. She had journeyed from one world into another in her twenties; thereafter, it seemed she had eschewed all adventure. She had made her metamorphosis and there was no going back. Or so it had been until this summer, when the past had raised itself again, releasing in her mind memories that had long been hidden. Zita had been appalled by the reliving of the past, the emotions of love and pain re-experienced with all the freshness of the original, but with the bitterness of hindsight, so that knowledge and regrets cancelled out all the careless optimism of the first run. She had heard Yevgenia’s cathartic recall with horror. It was better, surely, for some things to remain buried for ever than to endure such painful purgation.

  The past killed her, Zita thought. An embodied past? I have watched and said nothing. What does that make me? An accessory after the fact? The accomplice to a murder?

  2

  The body buried beneath the roses was not uncovered until later. On the day Asshe House changed hands, when Zita brushed against the flowers and pierced the grass with her heels, she released no more than a fall of petals onto the lawn and a faint scent into the air. No odour of the past or taint of death touched her nostrils. She had been unconscious of the past buried beneath her feet; everyone was self-consciously thinking of the future. It was a moment when time, instead of moving forward imperceptibly, makes a sudden lurch, shifting power between the generations. Asshe House was being handed over from mother to son, or, more accurately, from stepmother to stepson, and Jean Loftus, who had recently moved herself and her possessions out, had arranged to mark her departure by inviting her stepson and his family and a few friends to the deserted house for a farewell drink.

  As Zita had approached, she admired, as she always did, the red brick fagade of Asshe House. It was a house a child might draw, with a door in the middle and two windows on either side; on the first floor five long windows looked out over the gap-toothed green space of the churchyard that formed the centre of the square. This was the heart of the town and Asshe House was the only building that had not been turned into shops or offices. Its paved front garden, loosely hung with honeysuckle and clematis behind its railings, looked human and informal in contrast with the bright colours and stiff borders of the council’s hanging baskets and beds.

  She climbed the dipped stone steps to the front door which stood open to invite her through the echoing house to the garden beyond. The air was thick with the heat of the late afternoon, with the scent of the roses which hid the walls behind the scaffolding of their branches.

  Jean Loftus was seated with her stepson and his wife at the far end of the garden in front of the gothic summer-house, a bottle of champagne and a tray of glasses placed before them on a rusting metal table. Zita had known her since moving to the town six years earlier. She had taken over her file from a retiring partner and had since then acted for her on a number of occasions, including the conveyancing for the recent purchase of her new house. This was only one element in their relationship and, in some ways, a peripheral one, for Marcus Loftus and his first wife, Susie, had been friends of Zita’s own parents and she
was reputed when little to have played with their eldest child, Ivo. Zita thus came into the category of family friend rather than just family solicitor. She had been welcomed as such by Jean on her first arrival in Broad Woodham, cast up there like a piece of jetsam after a traumatic period in her own life, when only work had offered any shape to her existence. Jean’s kindness, her evening telephone calls and weekend lunches, had been the first manifestation of returning normality.

  Now it was Jean who was in need of some support. She had been driven out of her old home by arthritis which made the daily negotiation of the flights of stairs, the uneven floors and dark basement kitchen an impossibility for her. She had at the end been confined to two rooms on the ground floor and had been forced to recognize that she must move. She had bought a modern property next door to Zita’s own on the outskirts of the town and, if she regretted the architectural exchange of the vertical lines, faded bricks and flower-filled garden of her old home for the horizontal and grey banality of a bungalow surrounded by mown lawns, she did not permit herself to show it.

  As Zita approached, Marcus rose to greet her and to pour her a glass of champagne. He and his second wife Naomi lived in Hampstead and it was not clear to Zita what they would do with the gift of a large, beautiful, listed Queen Anne house with a very small garden, cramped in the middle of a prosperous Sussex town. Although it was out of London, it was not a country retreat, and not, surely, what they would have chosen for a second home. However, those lucky enough to be given a house must suppress their natural desire to complain that it is not what they wanted. In Marcus’s and Naomi’s case, the gift was simply an anticipation of Marcus’s inheritance, although Jean had, as yet, done nothing about transferring the property. Marcus handed Zita her glass and sat down cautiously on his ancient chair.

  “Here’s to Asshe House,” he said. “May we live here as long and as happily as you have done, Jean.”

  They all looked across the garden to the house; this hidden facade was as crooked and asymmetrical as its front was elegantly balanced. No window was level with any other; a huddle of extensions and additions of different heights and widths clung to it, trailing off in a hovel of a coal house. “How many years is it?”

  There was a pause. “Forty-three,” Jean said at last, as if she had been counting every one of them. “Kenward and I bought it in 1949.”

  “You’ll have a job to beat that, darling. You’ll be… a hundred and two if you hand it over to Rosie or Ivo after forty-three years.”

  “Oh I’ll make it. I don’t feel any older than I did when I was twenty-five, younger sometimes.’ Marcus leaned back, causing his seat to creak warningly.

  The three women gazed at him assessingly. He had thick grey hair which he wore rather long and the contrast with his features, which were remarkably youthful, made him, in some way, appear younger, because of rather than in spite of his greyness. Marcus was a cosmetic surgeon. He rarely admitted to his branch of the medical profession because women would immediately begin to ask about face lifts and men to eye him with humorous or half-admiring contempt. He resented having to rebut unspoken assumptions about the nature of his work by explaining what could be done for flesh melted by fire or sliced by flying windscreen glass.

  “Will you be living here?” Zita asked.

  “Only at weekends at first; but perhaps when I retire…”

  “There’s work to be done before that,’ said Naomi. “Woodworm in the roof and wet rot in the cellars.”

  “It’s nothing serious,” her mother-in-law protested. She was a tall woman, bent by arthritis. Her long face had an air of weariness, because of the dark skin that encircled her eyes, or because of the pain of her condition. She was smoking a black cigarette which she waved dismissively. “People nowadays make too much fuss about houses. This one has stood up for three hundred years; it’s not going to fall down just because of a little rot in the basement.”

  “I’ve never had the chance to renovate a house or to design a garden before. I just moved into Marcus’s house when I married him.” Naomi had married Marcus soon after Susie’s death. She was a good fifteen years younger than he, but because her principles of life would allow no make-up or dyeing of her wavy dark hair, streaked with grey in the heavy bangs on either side of her high forehead, the difference in their ages was not noticeable.

  “Are there going to be major works here?” Zita asked.

  As the new mistress of Asshe House began to describe what was to be done to the interior, Zita leaned aside to smell one of the roses nearest to her; it was so dark a red as to be almost black. She lived in a modern house which was equipped for function and nothing else. She had never endured the renovation of an old house and would never do so; the account she was half-hearing had, therefore, neither the resonance of recognition nor the interest of anticipation. She thought instead about the extraordinary garment that Naomi had chosen to wear. The sleeves ran seamlessly into the body and hung down in a V shape over her waist, as if she were wearing a camouflage tent. Zita clenched her stomach muscles and smoothed her skirt over her thighs. Whatever else, it was well cut, she thought, with the complacency that only expensive clothes can produce. Jean Loftus was not paying full attention either, for she interrupted her daughter-in-law with alacrity when she saw a figure framed in the doorway of the house.

  “Rosie, at last,” she said, struggling to pull her body up from her chair.

  Marcus got up. “Don’t move, Jean, I’ll find another bottle.”

  “No, I shall come in. I have something I want to give Rosie.”

  Naomi and Zita, too, were standing by now, but did not follow the others into the house. Naomi pursued her account of the planned alterations as she stood between the rose beds. She kicked the sun-hardened lawn.

  “And all this will go.”

  Zita turned her eyes from Jean’s painful progress across the grass. The old woman walked on two sticks, leaning forward on them, heavily, so her gait was rather like that of a great ape, walking on its extended arms.

  “What do you mean? You can’t knock down the summer-house. I’m pretty sure it’s listed as well.”

  “No, no, the garden, I mean. It is going to be redesigned. I have a wonderful plan for a little Queen Anne parterre to match the house, very formal, with box hedges and bay trees and statues and water.”

  Zita could barely conceal her horror. She was no gardener; her own bare plot aspired to no more than suburban neatness and the overflowing roses and lavender of Jean’s garden had always seemed to her the height of horticultural beauty. “But what’s wrong with it as it is?”

  “Oh, Zita, look at the lawn, there’s no grass. It is all moss and daisies and bald patches and these terrible concrete paths which must have been put down in the fifties, all crumbling to pieces. No, no. It’s all got to go. In fact, we’re starting with the garden; the builders are going to dig the pool next week.”

  “A pool? A swimming pool?”

  “Of course not. It’ll be a little strip of water, a sort of mirror for the summer-house. Don’t you think it will be delightful?”

  Marcus and his stepmother, accompanied by Rosie and several other guests, had by now re-emerged from the house. Rosie came swiftly across the lawn to greet Naomi and Zita. Naomi continued to talk to Zita as she nodded in acknowledgement of her stepdaughter’s arrival. Rosie, Zita always thought, could not have been less appropriately named; it was fortunate that her parents had not called her Hope or she might have turned into a manic depressive. She was slight and pale with skin of a transparent whiteness that revealed a mesh of blue veins on the inside of her wrists. It contrasted with her short dark hair cut in a rough urchin style that made her vulnerable to being talked of as a girl, even though she was twenty-five. Zita rarely saw the two women together; whenever she did she was aware of the undercurrent of mutual irritation that flowed beneath the surface of their determined respect. She noticed that Naomi, as she continued to talk, drew herself up fractionally as Ro
sie approached. Naomi was a handsome woman, tall, five foot ten or eleven, Zita estimated, and she made the unconscious assumption of many tall people of the association of height with moral worth and physical attractiveness. However, in spite of her fragile appearance, Rosie was in no need of sympathy; in her covert game with her stepmother the scores were fairly even, Zita reckoned.

  Naomi, conscious now Rosie was listening of the insensitivity of her choice of subject, suddenly abandoned her planned improvements to Asshe House and said to Zita, “Did I hear that Valentina was coming back this summer or did I dream it?”

  The remark had the effect of the beam of a torch in darkness and Zita’s attention came sharply into focus. The subject of her mother was not one she could talk about with half her mind elsewhere. “Yes,” she said. “She is. She arrives this weekend.”

  Valentina, Zita’s mother, was an extraordinary woman; so extraordinary that Zita often felt weak speaking about her, for how could a woman whose life, hewn by nothing but her will and intelligence from the unpromising rock of her circumstances, have produced a daughter so ordinary as herself? Once she had tried to express this feeling to a friend who knew them both well, who had said comfortingly, without any attempt to convince the daughter, that she did, or even one day could, equal her mother. “It’s called regression to the mean: geniuses tend to produce children less brilliant and idiots children cleverer than themselves.” Then she had stopped, as if wondering where that placed Zita in relation to her own child.

  “It must be years since she was last in England. Years and years. Is she going to be here long? I hope she’ll have time to come and see us.”

  “She’s planning to stay until Christmas, so I’m sure she will.”

  “What is she going to do? With Valentina it is impossible to imagine that it is just a holiday.”

  “No. She has a sabbatical from Caltech and has agreed to give a series of lectures in Oxford. Since she’s here anyway, she has accumulated a mass of other invitations to lecture while she is in Europe. And she will dash round and see all her friends.”