Death at Dawn: A Liberty Lane Thriller. Caro Peacock
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left the little purse as floppy as the udder of a newly milked goat. I’d had to sell a gold locket belonging to my mother and my grandmother’s silver watch to pay for my journey. It had been a nightmare within a nightmare, going round the streets of Dover trying to find a jeweller to give anything like a fair price for them, with the steam packet whistling from the harbour for last passengers. In normal times I’d have cried bitterly at parting with them but, turned hard by grief and need, I’d bargained like an old dame at market. As I stowed the purse away the clergyman asked, with just a touch of sympathy in his voice, ‘Have you no male relatives?’
‘A younger brother. He is in Bombay with the East India Company.’
I had a suspicion he intended to pray over me, so moved hastily on to the other thing I needed.
‘You must know the English community in Calais well.’ (He did not look as if he knew anything well, but a little flattery never hurts.) ‘Can you tell me if there are any particular places where they gather.’
‘The better sort come to the Protestant Church on Sunday mornings. For the ladies, the Misses Besswell run a charity knitting circle on Wednesday afternoons and there are also a series of evening subscription concerts organised by …’
I let him run on. I could not imagine my father or his friends at any event known to the Reverend Bateman.
I left the house, filling my lungs with the better smells outside – seaweed and fish, fresh baked bread and coffee. This reminded me that I had eaten and drunk nothing since the message had arrived, back in Dover. I was almost scared of doing either. That message had divided my life into before and after, like a guillotine blade coming down. Everything I did now – eating, drinking, sleeping – was taking me further away from the time when my father had been living. I still couldn’t think of eating, not even a crumb, but the smell of coffee was seductive. I followed it round the corner and on to a small quay. It wasn’t part of the larger harbour where the channel packet came and went, more of a local affair for the fishermen. There were nets spread out on the pebbles, an old man sitting on a boulder and mending one of them, his bent bare toes twined in the net to keep it stretched, needle flashing through the meshes like a tiny agile fish. The coffee shop was no more than a booth with a counter made of driftwood planks, a stove behind it and a small skinny woman with a coffee pot. She poured, watched me drink, poured again, making no attempt to hide her curiosity.
‘Madame is thirsty?’
Very thirsty, I told her. It was a pleasure to be speaking French again.
‘Madame has arrived from England?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘A pleasant crossing?’
‘Not so bad, thank you.’
The sea had been calm at least. I’d stood at the rail all the way, willing the packet faster towards Calais but dreading to arrive.
‘Is madame staying in Calais for long?’
‘Not long, I think. But my plans are uncertain. Tell me, where do the English mostly stay these days?’
She named a few hotels: Quillac’s, Dessin’s, the Lion d’Argent, the London. I thanked her and walked around the town for a while, trying to get my courage up, past the open-fronted shops with their gleaming piles of mackerel, sole, whiting, white and orange scallops arranged in fans, stalls piled high with plump white asparagus from the inland farms, bunches of bright red radishes. At last I adjusted my bonnet using a dark window pane as my mirror, took a deep breath and tried the first hotel.
‘Excuse me for troubling you, monsieur, but I am looking for my father. He may have arrived in Calais some time ago, but I am not sure where he intended to stay.’
After the first few attempts I was able to give a description of my father without any trembling in my voice.
‘His name is Thomas Jacques Lane. In France he probably uses Jacques. Forty-six years old, speaks excellent French. Tall, with dark curling hair, a profile of some distinction and good teeth.’
But the answers from the hotels, whether given kindly or off-handedly, were all the same. No, madame, no English gentleman of that description.
It was midday before I came to the last of the big hotels. It was the largest one, newly built, close to the pier and the landing stage for the steam packet, with a busy stableyard. Carriages were coming and going all the time, some of them with coats of arms on the doors and footmen in livery riding behind. It was so far from being a place where my father might have stayed that I almost decided not to try, but in the end I went up the steps into a foyer that was all false marble columns and velvet curtains, like a theatrical set, crowded with fashionably dressed people arriving or leaving.
I queued at the desk behind an English gentleman disputing his account. Clearly he was the kind of person who, if he arrived at heaven’s gateway, would expect to find St Peter speaking English and minding his manners. He was working his way through a bill several pages long, bullying the poor clerk and treating matters of a few francs as if there were thousands at stake. I had plenty of time to study him from the back. He was tall and strongly made, his shoulders broad, the neck above his white linen cravat red and wide as a farm labourer’s. His hair was so black that I suspected it might owe something to the bottles of potions kept by Parisian barbers. He spoke and carried himself like a man accustomed to having an audience and I imagined him as some rural chairman of the bench, sentencing poachers or trade unionists to transportation.
After a while my attention wandered to a young man and woman standing by a pillar and arguing. She was about my age, and beautiful. Her red-gold hair was piled up, with a few curled ringlets hanging down, and a little hat that could only have come from Paris perched on top of it. She wore a rose-pink satin mantle with a square collar edged in darker pink velvet, pale pink silk stockings and pink suede shoes, also Parisian. The man with her was several years older, elegantly but not foppishly dressed in grey and black. He was tall and dark haired with a handsome face and a confident, rather cynical air. They might have been taken for husband and wife, except for the strong family resemblance in their fine dark eyes and broad brows. Except, too, for the way they were carrying on their argument. When a husband and wife disagree in public they do it in a stiff and secretive way, whispers, glances and half-turned shoulders. Brothers and sisters are different. They have been arguing from the nursery onwards and are not embarrassed about it. Although I loved Tom more than anybody in the world except my father, it was the arguments I missed almost as much as all the more gentle things. So it went to my heart to see the way the beautiful young woman frowned at her brother and how he smiled, stretched out a grey-gloved hand and pulled none too gently at one of her ringlets. She batted the hand away. He laughed, said something that was no doubt patronising and elder-brotherly.
‘Stephen, come here.’
The man disputing his bill turned and called across the foyer. I’d been wrong to think his black hair might be dyed because his eyebrows, which joined in a single bar over dark and angry eyes, were just as black. His head could have modelled in outline for one of the Roman emperors with its great wedge of a nose and square jaw, but his lips were thin and drawn inward like a man sucking on something sour. He was looking at the brother and sister. As he turned back to the desk I saw them give each other that rueful grimace children exchange when in trouble with parents, their argument instantly forgotten in the face of a shared opponent. It had been a father’s command, although there was no obvious likeness between the two men. I watched as Stephen crossed the foyer, obediently but none too quickly.
‘Did you really order two bottles of claret on Sunday?’
I heard the older man’s impatient question, saw the younger one bending over the bill, but nothing after that because, shamingly, my eyes had blurred with tears. That look between brother and sister had caused it. I felt suddenly and desperately how I needed Tom and how far away he was. I ran behind one of the pillars to hide myself and bent over gasping as if somebody had punched me in the stomach, hands to my face, rocking backwards and forwards to try to ease the pain.
‘Is … is there anything wrong?’