The Black Sheep Read online

  I shook my head. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But it sounds so . . . so . . .’

  ‘So melodramatic?’ Harry nodded. ‘That’s what I thought too. In fact, at first I think he’s joking,’ Harry said. ‘So I laugh. But he doesn’t join in. He frowns and then he says: “I’m serious.” So I stop laughing and ask if he’s told anyone and he says no and repeats that he’d destroyed the two separate notes he received.’

  ‘He never said anything at all to me.’ I drew back. Surely there’s no way that any of this can possibly be true. After all, why wouldn’t Caspian have said something to me? We didn’t live in each other’s pockets but we told each other all the important stuff.

  ‘I know he didn’t tell you,’ Harry said. ‘Like I said before, he didn’t want you to worry.’

  There was a pause. Caspian was always very protective, sometimes annoyingly so, but it’s hard to accept he really wouldn’t have confided in me. Not unless there was a good reason.

  I look up. ‘Go on.’

  Harry shuffled in his seat, looking uncomfortable. ‘So the next bit is going to be hard for you to hear, but I swear it’s what Caspian said. He says: “It’s Paul . . . I think it’s Paul.” ’ Harry glanced up. ‘That’s what Caspian said. Do you know anyone called Paul?’

  ‘No.’ My mind raced. I couldn’t think of anyone either Caspian or I knew with that name. ‘Did he say Paul who? If it was a first name or a surname?’

  ‘No.’ Harry frowned. ‘The only other thing he said wasn’t meant for me at all.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘He said it as he was turning away. Exact words:

  “I think Jayson Carr got Paul to do it, it was Jayson’s Paul.” ’

  I froze. ‘Are you sure?’

  Harry nodded. ‘That’s why I came to you and didn’t go straight to the police.’

  There was no guile in his expression.

  And yet how could what he was saying be true? I realised I was gripping the edge of the sofa and released my fingers. Jayson Carr was many things: a man of powerful personality and strong faith, albeit far less rigid in his beliefs than he used to be; he was a public figure with a string of successful businesses and, in more recent years, his prison rehabilitation charity. He was a good man. A moral man.

  Above all, he was my father.

  3

  Harry’s words catapulted through my head. Could Dad have ordered someone to kill Caspian? No. It was impossible. ‘That’s crazy,’ I insisted. ‘Apart from the fact that my dad adored him, there’s no way Caspian would have told a total stranger my dad wanted him dead. It doesn’t make sense.’

  Except maybe it did, murmured a little voice inside my head. Maybe it explained exactly why Caspian turned to a stranger instead of to me. After all, how could he have told me he suspected my own father wanted to kill him?

  Harry said nothing.

  ‘You must have misheard,’ I protested. ‘Or else . . .’

  ‘I’m not lying.’ Harry met my gaze. He looked sincere, his eyes full of compassion. ‘Think about it. What reason could I possibly have to lie? I just wanted to pass on information, it’s up to you what you do about it.’

  I sank back into my chair. Ayesha poked her head around the door. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. No way was I going to tell her. It wasn’t just my disbelief that Dad could be involved in murder, it was my shame at the discovery Caspian had spoken his fears to a stranger, that he hadn’t felt able to talk to me.

  And my total lack of any clue about what to do now.

  Ayesha slipped away and Harry leaned forward in his chair.

  ‘I understand that you don’t want to believe this, but is there any chance it could be true? That your dad threatened your husband? Got someone to carry out those threats?’

  I shook my head. Quite apart from the impossibility of the idea, I’d never heard my father mention anyone called Paul, neither as a first nor a last name. Which meant nothing, of course. I didn’t know all his friends, let alone all his colleagues. How could I? But Dad was a good, decent man. Too driven and short-tempered when we were growing up, of course, but he’d mellowed since then, especially after Jacqueline came into his life. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even seen him raise his voice. He was surely incapable of hurting anyone, let alone the son-in-law he doted on.

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t misunderstand what Caspian was saying?’ I asked. ‘It must have been noisy in the bar . . .?’

  ‘No.’ Harry met my gaze. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s no way.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘What do you want to do now?’ Harry asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I need to think.’

  ‘Of course. I’ll leave you in peace.’ A few minutes later Harry was gone with a promise to call me later.

  Ayesha bounded in as soon as he’d left, demanding to know what he’d said. I played it all down, making no mention of Dad and stressing I thought Harry was making too much of what he’d heard. We stopped talking about it when Lori and Ruby came home and the four of us sat down for lunch – a typically disorganised Ayesha affair of random vegetarian dishes, finished off with runny ice cream that Lori and Ruby had brought back from Mariner’s and which no one had thought to put in the freezer.

  I took Ruby home afterwards, picking Rufus up on the way. All three of us were on edge. I wasn’t sure why. Ayesha and Lori seemed to have such a charmed relationship, their personalities dovetailing perfectly: Ayesha was flamboyant but too chaotic to be controlling while Lori was docile and biddable, happy to let her mother take the lead in everything. By contrast Rufus, Ruby and I were like three knives in a drawer, constantly clashing. I’d thought when Caspian died so suddenly that the loss would show itself over time in the misery of his absence. No dad there to help with homework or cheer at football matches or offer up behavioural boundaries and hugs. I’d thought Caspian not being there would be a hole that I would have to work doubly hard to fill.

  But it wasn’t like that at all. Or rather it was, but it was so much more as well. Without Caspian’s steadying presence in the house it was as if the magnetic force that kept us in harmony alongside each other had vanished and we were unable to control our interactions. Sometimes this meant we existed too much in isolation, separate and unknowable to each other; or else, to go back to my knives in the drawer comparison, we lived in a clash of metal, taking tiny cuts out of each other as we tangled, all sharp and hard and pointed.

  Right now, for example, I had forced the children to sit down to dinner with me, which had involved tearing Ruby away from her football magazine and Rufus from his computer game.

  In the old days, this would have been a normal and expected occurrence. But now it involved tears and shouting from Ruby, ‘You’re so mean, I just had two pages to go’, and an absolute refusal to engage whatsoever on Rufus’s part. All I got from him were grunts.

  By the time I had wrangled them into their seats at the kitchen table I was exhausted and in no mood for the cottage pie I’d heated up from the freezer. All I really wanted to do was think about what Harry had told me earlier, but the children needed me to make more effort than that.

  Rufus sat glumly, merely picking at his mince and pushing all the potato to the side of his plate. Ruby shovelled in her food as fast as possible, tear tracks glinting on her cheeks.

  ‘So do you still want to start power League, Rubes?’ I asked.

  She looked up at me. ‘Course,’ she said. ‘I think I’m going to be a striker but maybe attacking midfield, it depends . . .’ She chattered on, still munching away. Her earlier hysterics had passed. I nodded whenever she paused for a response, but inside I couldn’t help wondering if she would be so committed to football in another year and, if she was, whether there would be other girls her age eager to play with her. Already the friends she had once been surrounded by were dropping away. I often saw them look at her then turn to each other and whisper and giggle. Was
Ruby aware they thought her odd? Losing her dad had already set her apart from the others. Some, of course, had divorced parents but none of her friends had experienced the trauma of bereavement.

  I knew a little what it was like to stand out. My own father’s prominent role in the Catholic community, combined with his strict rules about our dress and behaviour, caused me no end of frustration as a teenager. But not beforehand, when I was Ruby’s age. Back then church on Sundays was simply part of our normal routine, my faith as familiar and comfortable as the teddy bear I cuddled in bed every night. I certainly would never have flipped out over being called to dinner while I was reading. It was only as I reached puberty that I started to rebel, when I realised not everyone shared my parents’ views on abortion and stem cell research and the rest.

  ‘I’ve finished.’ Rufus’s tone was defiant. And no wonder, he’d left half his plate.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, too weary to fight him.

  Mollified, he hurried off upstairs. Ruby scampered after him. I cleared the table on autopilot. Harry’s words were a splinter lodged under my skin:

  I think Jayson Carr got Paul to do it.

  It was preposterous. And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Could Dad have had anything to do with Caspian’s death? Perhaps there was some connection he wasn’t even aware of? For months, now, I had accepted that Caspian’s murder was a random affair, telling myself that though of course I wanted my husband’s killer punished, simply knowing their identity wouldn’t bring him back just as seeing them behind bars wouldn’t help me accept his loss.

  But now it seemed there was a chance – albeit the slimmest, craziest of ones – that my own father might in some way be linked to the killer. I had to talk to Dad directly, ask him straight out about this Paul person.

  I had to find out the truth.

  It was just past 3 p.m. the following afternoon, Sunday, and the dark sky was threatening rain as I hurried Ruby onto the portico of Dad’s four-storey Kensington house. Rufus hadn’t wanted to come and in order to avoid a big argument I said he could stay home alone for a few hours. As I rang the doorbell my eyes lit on the nick in the brickwork where the old latch used to catch when the door was slammed, as it often was during my teenage years. It was always weird, coming back to the place where I’d grown up but hadn’t lived for many years. A house that both did and didn’t feel like home.

  Lucy still occupied her old bedroom. My old bedroom was now just one of the house’s many spares. Jacqueline had redecorated it of course. She’d redecorated everywhere. Which was fine. I’d have probably done the same thing in her position. Anyway it didn’t matter; Mum was still here, infusing every corner, even five years after her death. She died in this house after passing out from her diabetes and falling down the short flight of stairs from the kitchen to the utility room.

  Afterwards Dad walled in the steps, which meant no more utility room until he moved Jacqueline in less than a year later, which seemed fast to me and Lucy. But then Dad, for all his fiery forcefulness, was the kind of man who was lost without a woman to anchor him. Jacqueline shifted the entire kitchen to a larger, lighter room on the other side of the ground floor. It was a good idea, I had to grudgingly admit, but typical of the way Jacqueline (she hated her name being abbreviated) took over the house, not to mention Dad’s life. She never failed to ask if Lucy and I minded when she removed curtains and painted walls and sold, stored or commandeered furniture, but there was always something slightly haughty in her manner as she did so. She was an ex-lawyer with her own money, super-organised about everything – and the polar opposite of Mum, who was a bit of a dilettante, dipping her toe into all sorts of creative projects, none of which ever came to anything, from novel-writing to life-drawing to dress-making.

  But the biggest change Jacqueline made to Dad, for which I was prepared to forgive her all other transgressions, was to encourage him to be gentler and less rigid in his views. As a result Dad decided to step down from his chairmanship of the prominent pro-life group Shield that had dominated his life for years, ever since he found out about Lucy’s abortion in fact. Instead he took a senior post with a prison rehabilitation charity that was much more suited to his persuasive skills. Instead of arguing the philosophical case against abortion he was able to campaign with all the force of his personality for better facilities for ex-offenders.

  For me, the softening of Dad’s religious beliefs changed everything. It allowed us to reconnect properly after years where we’d been semi-estranged. We’d argued for years over my lack of faith, but at last our different perspectives became an area of our lives where we could simply agree to disagree. As I’d told him many times, there was no way I was going to change my mind on religion. Apart from Lucy’s confirmation, Mum’s funeral and a couple of weddings I hadn’t set foot in a church since the April after my eleventh birthday when I saw on the news that a tropical cyclone in Bangladesh had killed over one hundred thousand people and I solemnly told both my parents I thought if God existed he must be a mean old man to kill for no reason like that. Mum and Dad insisted, of course, that natural disasters were all part of God’s plan and divine mystery but I wasn’t buying what I saw as vague, meaningless claptrap any longer. I pronounced myself an ex-Catholic and, though I never went as far as to call myself an atheist, one of the reasons Caspian was so attractive to me was his absolute and certain disbelief in any kind of deity.

  Jacqueline’s housekeeper let me in and took Ruby through to the kitchen for cookies. Warning them both she wasn’t to spoil her appetite for tea later, I hurried upstairs to find Dad. As I reached the first-floor landing I heard his deep, measured voice coming from the master bedroom.

  ‘You look lovely, darling,’ he was saying. It was impossible to miss the note of weariness as he spoke.

  ‘You say that about everything, but I think this makes me look fat.’

  Great. My dad and his wife were in the middle of a minor domestic. Of the things Jacqueline had a tendency to be controlling about, her own appearance was by far the greatest. Lucy and I had long learned to offer simple statements of support about how she looked, avoiding getting drawn into discussions on the detail of her obsession with her saggy neck and tummy tyre – not that there was much evidence of either.

  I stood outside the bedroom door, my hand raised, hesitant. Part of me knew I should walk away, but I needed to ask about Paul. I wouldn’t be able to rest until I could put Harry’s claims out of my head once and for all.

  ‘Of course you don’t look fat,’ Dad said, his voice now calm and soothing. ‘It’s the perfect choice: smart but demure, and the blue brings out the colour of your eyes.’

  I didn’t hear Jacqueline’s reply, just the low murmur of her voice. Hoping this meant she was reassured I knocked on the door, then walked inside.

  Dad and Jacqueline were standing on opposite sides of the bed. Jacqueline was wearing a shift dress with a beaded trim. It was indeed a beautiful blue – and fitted Jacqueline’s slender form perfectly. She was in her mid-forties, just a decade or so older than me, but she could easily have passed for younger. Sharp-boned and skinny where Mum had been all soft curves, she was as groomed and elegant as Mum had been untidy and free. Dad was knotting his tie – also blue and probably hand-picked by Jacqueline to tone with her dress.

  He looked up and beamed at me. ‘Hi, darling, I didn’t know you were here.’

  ‘Hello, Francesca.’ Jacqueline smiled into the mirror.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Could I have a quick word, Dad?’

  ‘Course.’ Dad walked over and gave me a hug. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘We really don’t have much time, Jayson,’ Jacqueline warned from her dressing table. ‘We’re late as it is. The tea starts at four.’

  Dad winked at me. ‘We’ve got a couple of minutes. Are Rufus and Ruby here?’

  ‘Ruby is.’ I nodded. ‘She’s downstairs.’ I squeezed his hand. ‘Before you say “hi”, I just wanted to ask one quest
ion.’

  ‘Go on,’ Dad said, resuming his tie-knotting.

  ‘Do you know anyone called Paul?’ I asked. ‘A friend? Colleague? Someone with strong anti-abortion views?’

  Across the room, Jacqueline stiffened slightly. Was that because she knew someone? Or just because I was introducing a subject that had once been the cause of such argument between Dad and me? A look of consternation flitted across Dad’s face. Then a blank mask descended and he shrugged. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Why on earth are you asking?’

  I hesitated. Repeating Harry’s claims out loud seemed melodramatic.

  ‘Someone . . . a guy at the memorial service. He said he thought Caspian might have . . .’

  Dad frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘He thought Caspian was being threatened just before he was killed.’

  ‘What?’ Dad now looked appalled.

  ‘For goodness’ sake,’ Jacqueline gasped.

  ‘According to this guy, Harry, he was at the same conference as Caspian in Paris and . . . Caspian told him there were threats.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Caspian have told you if that were true?’ Dad asked, echoing my own initial thought.

  ‘Apparently he didn’t want to worry me,’ I said.

  ‘Jayson—’ Jacqueline began.

  ‘Harry says the threats came from someone you know called Paul.’

  Dad stared at me. He blinked, clearly shocked.

  ‘Do you know a Paul?’

  Dad shook his head. ‘I don’t, darling. I’m sorry but I think this Harry person must have got the wrong end of the stick.’ He took my hand. ‘I know it’s hard, but you have to remember the police did a thorough investigation. If there was a trail of threats I’m sure they’d have found them last year.’

  I nodded, relieved. Dad was right. I should have thought of the police investigation myself. Harry must have misunderstood what Caspian said. It was the only explanation that made sense.