Hilary Norman and The Murder Room

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The Pact

Hilary Norman

Greek mythology tells us that when Pandora, overcome by curiosity, opened the box that she had been forbidden to open, she released from it all the evils and ills that would beset man, leaving only hope within.

Contents

Cover

The Murder Room Introduction

Title page

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Outro

By Hilary Norman

Dedication

About the author

Copyright page

Chapter One

Prologue

Brussels: July 26th, 1995

Olivia Segal sat, with Cleo, her little tortoiseshell cat, on her lap, on the faded Kashan silk prayer rug and looked up at the clock.

Seven minutes past five in the afternoon in Brussels. Seven past eleven in the morning in New York.

She picked up her little black Ericsson phone, ready finally to make her last resort call. The Belgian police had been courteous and kind enough, she supposed, but she knew they hadn’t really believed her story, knew they thought she was crazy, and she had tried and failed again to reach Jamie, and now there was no one left to try but Annie.

Jamie and Annie. Her two dearest friends in the world. Olivia wished, more than anything, that she could have spared them both this – she had tried so hard to handle it alone. But now she was too afraid. She had never considered herself a coward – Annie was always telling her how tough she was – but at that moment, with her left arm broken and the mass of still-darkening bruises flowering over her rib cage and legs, Olivia, all alone in her beautiful but suddenly vulnerable home – about to use a cellular telephone in case her land line had been bugged, for God’s sake – was more than afraid. She was terrified. And not just for herself. For all she knew, Jamie – darling, blissfully unaware Jamie – might already be in danger. And from the moment Olivia took Annie into her confidence, from the instant she shared the long-hidden, dark, monstrous secrets of the box she had opened, Pandora-like, Annie too might be equally at risk.

Olivia considered, for at least the hundredth time, leaving it all alone, trying to push the ugly truths to the back of her mind. Maybe if she stopped now, kept silent now, they might leave her alone, let her try to forget. Let her live. But Olivia knew that was no longer really a possibility. For one thing, her conscience would not allow her to forget; she owed it to the ghosts, to the long-dead victims, to let the truth be told. To give justice a fighting chance.

And besides, she knew they would not let her live.

It was eight minutes past five.

Olivia made the call.

Annie Aldrich Thomas put down the phone, still sitting on the edge of the king-sized bed, and stared around at the lovely room she was sharing with her husband Edward at the St Regis Hotel. It all looked so normal, just as it had a few minutes earlier, before Olivia’s call. Yet nothing, Annie knew, was really the same, not for her. Not any more.

She stood up and walked mechanically into the bathroom, got into the shower and tried to gather her wild, racing thoughts. For one thing, she was due to meet Edward for lunch at twelve-thirty, and now she would have to call and leave word, make an excuse, and she knew that Edward wouldn’t mind too much, but Annie hated lying to him, had told too many lies in her own troubled past. Though this time she had no alternative, because it was Olivia who was in trouble and there were things that Olivia needed Annie to do for her. And Annie knew that Olivia would never have made that call if she hadn’t been desperate, because even though eight years had passed since her own problems, Olivia and Jamie both still had a tendency to protect Annie from bad things.

They didn’t come any worse than this.

She got out of the shower and started drying her hair. In the twenty-something years she had known Olivia, Annie could not remember her ever being really frightened of anything. Calm Olivia. Clever, independent Olivia. The coolest, the most self-sufficient, the boldest of them all. But just now, on the telephone, Annie had recognized actual terror in her friend’s voice.

‘I wanted to keep it from you,’ Olivia had said, breathless and low. ‘But I can’t seem to find Jamie, and there is no one else I can trust, and I can’t go on alone.’

‘It’s all right,’ Annie had said, gently. ‘You don’t have to.’

So Olivia had told her. And now nothing, Annie realized with a sick, awful chill, would ever be the same again.

In his suite at his family’s twenty-five room Ocean Drive ‘cottage’ in Newport, Rhode Island, Jamie Arias was sitting in a comfortable old armchair beneath a Vuillard original of which he had always been fond, re-reading a dog-eared edition of War and Peace, and putting off going downstairs to join the others. He had come for his cousin Michael’s fifty-second birthday celebrations, but Jamie planned on spending no more time at the Arias compound than he had to because it was hard these days – as the others all realized – for him to be around Peter, his older brother, for too long.

Jamie did not intend to allow Michael’s birthday to be ruined by family sniping. He had nothing but respect for his cousin, always had, for Michael Arias had been the head of their family for almost twenty years now, since Jamie’s and Peter’s father had died, and Michael had returned that respect by leaving Jamie to get on with his own life. Yet still, respect aside, they had little in common except blood, and Jamie would be frankly relieved when it was time to get away from the too-large, art and antique laden Newport house, glad to get back to his own place in Boston, back to work at the agency. His own life – modest beside the Arias wealth – but his own.

Sitting now in the comfort of his sitting room, immersed yet again in Tolstoy, Jamie was quite unaware that Olivia had been trying to reach him. Had no idea that she was in danger. If he had known that, he would have been out of Newport and on the first flight to Brussels, family celebrations or not. No matter what.

Anna and Olivia in trouble – especially Olivia, if he allowed himself to be honest – came first with Jamie. Before family. Before everything. They had done for the last nineteen years.

The small black phone on the floor beside her, still wishing she could have reached Jamie but comforted nevertheless by the sound of Annie’s reassuring voice, Olivia remained painfully huddled on the rug on the parquet floor of her Brussels living room. Staying away from the windows, wishing for the very first time that she had chosen a less intimate high-rise instead of her characterful, ground-floor apartment, Olivia was aware that some of the trembling and just a little of the sick, clenched feeling in her stomach had eased.

She had known since leaving London that all she had to do was make two calls and Annie and Jamie would drop everything and come to her. It was one of the unwritten rules of their pact, made so many years before when they had all sworn to be there for each other, no matter how far apart they were living – no matter how heavily committed they might be, to family or to work, to anything.

She and Jamie had been there for Annie eight years ago during her troubles, and three years after that she and Annie had been there for Jamie when he had needed them. Being there for each other was what they were all about, and now that Annie knew what was going on, she was sure to follow Olivia’s instructions, and then she would find Jamie, and they would come to her.

The real question, the truly frightening question, was, would they get there in time?

Chapter Two

Olivia’s Box

The story had lain inside the thick cardboard box, sealed shut with shiny brown tape and locked into the black, airless vault beneath Leadenhall Street in the City of London, for almost twenty years. Its author had been a young man named Anton Rothenburg; its guardian for all those years, one Paul Walter Osterman of Philadelphia. A seeker after justice, Osterman had carried the weight of the Family Rothenburg’s tale of evil for a quarter of a century until, close to death, he had passed the burden to another man who – understanding the enormity of what Osterman had given him – had, in turn, placed it for safekeeping inside the vault.

I never knew Anton Rothenburg {Osterman had written} nor his parents or his two sisters. Their tale was passed on to me by a total stranger, a man taken into confidence by seventeen-year-old Anton when they were both nearing their lowest ebb. It was a tale I never asked or wished to hear, but once the horror had burned its scars into my mind, into my soul, I knew they could never be eradicated.

The story changed me – I can’t say exactly why. I’d heard many other tales, of course, worse tales, of that nightmare period, and was always appalled by them, but the feelings of sorrow and rage had always moved on after a time, had shifted sufficiently – as such things must – to enable me to go on with my own life. Yet when I learned what had happened to that particular family in Nazi Germany, I became so profoundly affected that my own everyday existence seemed to fade into insignificance and never returned into its formerly sharp, clear-cut focus.

I did not know Emanuel Rothenburg, Anton’s father, yet I suppose he reminded me, in some ways, of my own father. He, too, was born in the town of Baden-Baden – though unlike Emanuel Rothenburg he came to live, peacefully, and to die, in the United States. My father, too, loved fine art. I remember, at an early age, watching him standing for the longest time before a beautiful painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, remember the look on his face, the passion in his eyes, as he gazed at it. I think maybe I understand just a little of the depth of emotion that a wonderful piece of art can stir in a human soul. My father died many years ago, of natural causes, with his wife and son at his deathbed, loving him, bringing him comfort. Emanuel Rothenburg died when a bullet pierced his brain. After he had already lost much of what had been precious to him.

Once I had heard and read the story of the Rothenburgs, I knew that I was changed forever. Once I’d learned about that tale of evil deeds, I felt that I had been somehow charged with trying to avenge their memory.

I have failed to do that, and now my own time is almost up. Yet the torch still burns fiercely in my mind, and hope still surges. And so I’m doing the only thing I still can.

Passing on the torch.

Chapter Three

The Pact 1976–1986

They stood together, about halfway up Dukesfield Fell, twenty or so rugged miles south-west of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and ten miles south of Hadrian’s Wall, where it had happened a decade earlier to that very day. It was a little after noon on July 4th, 1986, and they had climbed a long way to reach the spot, yet Olivia, Jamie and Annie all felt chilled to the bone. They said it was the wind, blowing from the east off the North Sea, cold enough, they said, to rip the warmth from the hottest day; but they all knew that the chill came from within, from remembering.

‘Maybe this was a mistake,’ Olivia said.

She looked at Annie’s white face and felt a sharp pang of guilt because she had organized the day, had pushed and harried and prodded them, the way she always did when she believed in something, wanted something to happen, and now Annie looked as if she might pass out and Jamie just looked so sad, so bleak. And it could all have been so much easier, they could all have met up in London and had lunch someplace civilized – the Connaught maybe, eating roast beef and drinking something red and wonderful – and they’d have been warm and ten years past the grief, instead of standing on this lovely, terrible hill and seeing it all again in their minds – and when would she ever learn?

‘I don’t think it was a mistake,’ Annie said, softly, kindly.

‘Nor do I,’ Jamie echoed on her other side.

Olivia felt gratitude and love pass through her, felt a little of the ice inside her melt away along with the guilt. She never felt guilty for long; it was not in her nature, she supposed. ‘I guess maybe we did have to come,’ she said. ‘No other place we could really be today.’

They linked arms, stood still and silent for a while, eyes closed, letting themselves rerun the old images in their minds. They had not been allowed to see the wreckage at first hand back in ’76, but the pictures on television had been graphic enough. The debris had been strewn over a considerable distance, but the main part of the cabin had lain here, beneath their feet. With the bodies.

‘Anyone want to say anything?’ Olivia asked, after a while.

‘I don’t think so,’ Jamie answered.

‘I think we’ve said it all,’ Annie said. ‘They know what we think.’

No one spoke for a time. The wind blew harder, nipped at their ears, tore at the roots of their hair, drove the gentle, summery scents of grass and soil and wild flowers into their faces, brought back again the ugly discordance of that dreadful remembered time when fire and death had scorched savage scars into the hillside.

‘Shall we?’ Jamie said, at last.

‘I’m ready,’ Annie said.

They both looked at Olivia.

‘Livvy?’ Annie said.

Olivia nodded. ‘Yes.’

They walked away slowly, arms still linked until the narrowness of the path forced them to separate, and then they reached the road and the hired car waiting to take them back to Riverdale Hall, a country house hotel near Hexham where Olivia had booked rooms. Restored by hot showers, changes of clothes, one shot of malt whisky apiece – even for Annie, who seldom drank wine and never touched spirits – and a fine lunch of freshly caught wild salmon, the three friends felt themselves coming slowly back to the present, felt the memories slipping and sliding away again, for the original rawness had long since gone, the jagged edges smoothed over by time and life.

‘Ten years,’ Olivia said later, after lunch, as they walked near the river. ‘Who would have thought it possible ten years ago that we could ever be happy again? Ever be normal again.’

‘Yet here we are,’ Jamie said. ‘Annie a mother of three – me an old married man—’

‘Even if it is to Carrie,’ Olivia said wryly.

‘Livvy, don’t,’ Annie scolded.

‘We both know what Olivia thinks of Carrie,’ Jamie said lightly. ‘And you too, Annie, even if you are too nice a person to say it out loud.’

‘Meaning I’m not a nice person?’ Olivia enquired.

‘You’re a very honest person,’ Jamie said, and smiled.

‘I know.’ Olivia kicked at a clod of earth. The sun had broken through the clouds, and it was warm now, the wind just a gentle breeze. Dukesfield Fell seemed a million miles away. ‘I guess I’ll never be as nice as either of you two, which is probably why I’ll stay an old maid.’

‘You enjoy sex too much to qualify as an old maid,’ Jamie said.

‘So now I’m not nice and a slut. And I’m pushy too.’

‘True,’ Jamie said. ‘But we love you anyway.’

‘What you are,’ Annie said reflectively, ‘is a natural leader.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Sure you are,’ Annie said.

‘You’re our motivating force,’ Jamie agreed. ‘You keep us together, no matter how many thousands of miles we drift apart.’ He stopped walking and looked around. ‘This’d be a good spot for some photos.’

The bringing of cameras to each of their reunions was one of their rituals, the updating of the records they had all kept of one another for so long. Whenever and wherever they came together, it always seemed to them as if nothing had changed; they felt the same, their friendship was the same. Only the photographs, pored over later, would record that petite, golden-haired, blue-eyed, exquisitely-turned-out Annie had grown perhaps a little too thin; or that sleek, elegant, worldly looking Jamie’s dark eyes had new care lines around them or that his almost black hair had one or two silvery threads; or that within the frame of Olivia’s dark-brown, bouncing mass of hair, her mobile, expressive, strong face with its not quite perfect nose, its slightly Slavic cheekbones and striking green eyes, a little of the youthfulness – of the carefree, sometimes careless, spark that had always been her trademark – had been rubbed away by passing years.

‘When you say I’m your leader,’ Olivia said later, photographs snapped, ‘what you really mean is that I bully you.’

‘True,’ Jamie said.

‘I prod you, I nag at you. I drive you both nuts until we find a way of getting back together again.’

‘Every time,’ Annie said.

‘And we love you for it,’ Jamie added, warmly.

‘It’s why we’re here today,’ Annie said. ‘You’re why we’re here.’

‘That’s not true,’ Olivia said. ‘We’re here because of what today is.’

‘Not entirely.’ Jamie shook his head. ‘Perhaps not at all. If it hadn’t been for you, Annie and I would probably have let the day go by – oh, we’d have called each other, and I guess we’d have raised a glass or two to them, but we wouldn’t have climbed up to Dukesfield Fell. And, more importantly, we would have been apart.’ He paused. ‘Mostly because we’d have chosen not to face up to it. We’re not as brave as you are, Olivia.’

She flushed. ‘That’s nonsense.’

‘It isn’t, Livvy,’ Annie argued. ‘I’m a dreadful coward.’

‘You’ve had three babies,’ Olivia reminded her.

‘Having babies is the easy part of life,’ Annie said.

‘You and Jamie have both had the courage to make commitments.’

‘You’ve had the strength to stay alone,’ Jamie told her.

‘I’m not alone,’ Olivia said, softly. ‘I have you two.’

Other people, outsiders – like Edward Thomas who had married Annie in 1981, and, a few years later, Caroline Beaumont, who had become Jamie’s wife – tended to assume at first that the pact between the three friends had been sealed during their schooldays. It was a natural enough assumption for them to reach, for it seemed the kind of passionate covenant usually entered into by emotional adolescents and, after all, Olivia, Jamie and Annie had attended that enclave of the United States in Britain: the American School in London’s leafy St John’s Wood, a coeducational day school committed to helping young Americans away from their homeland ease into and grow in their new environment.

It was certainly true that Jamie, Annie and Olivia had developed a fairly close friendship at the school and that their parents, too, were acquainted with each other, but there had been nothing overly intense about the friendship back then. They had shared classes and outings and gossip; Olivia and Jamie had played basketball and watched Annie play violin in the chamber orchestra; they had gone on field trips together and had liked each other very well, but they’d all had other friendships too. Thanks to their good fortune, none of them had ever felt like insecure foreigners tossed into an alien or hostile environment. Like many of their contemporaries, Olivia, Jamie and Annie all hailed from secure family backgrounds, their lives, either temporarily or permanently, being lived in England instead of back home in the United States. Annie’s father, Franklin Aldrich, was a partner in an old and trusted international law practice and, at that time, heading the London office, and their English home was a splendid mews house near Belgrave Square immaculately organized by Grace Aldrich, Annie’s mother. Jamie’s father, Carlos Arias – a widower of distinguished Spanish descent left with two sons of his own and the care of the son of his late brother and sister-in-law – headed the venerable Arias shipping empire from their Pall Mall offices and ruled, with gentle command, their sumptuous Regent’s Park apartment. And Olivia’s mother, Emily Segal, was a cardiac consultant at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, while her father, Arthur Segal, worked from their house near Kenwood in Hampstead collecting art and antiques and raising funds for numerous charities that encompassed Simon Wiesenthal’s Nazi-hunting centre in Vienna and other Jewish charities, as well as UNICEF and whichever current, needy appeal captured his sympathetic eye.

At eighteen, just graduated from the High School, Olivia Segal, Jamie Arias and Annie Aldrich had been secure, confident, successful and contented young people. With the exception of Jamie’s mother’s sudden death from cancer nine years earlier, nothing grievous had ever befallen any of them.

Until the Fourth of July that year, 1976.

Years later, they all remembered where they were and what they had been doing immediately before they heard the news. That was, of course, what people always said about President Kennedy’s assassination, but Olivia, Jamie and Annie had been just five years old at that time and had, therefore, no true memories of their own, just the awareness, passed through to them later, of a vast, daunting, adult, collective grief. What happened to them on Independence Day of 1976 was so entirely personal, so infinitely and intimately shattering, that their memories of that day were etched, and would be forever, like deep, sharp, painful carvings, upon each of their minds.

They had all just arrived at David Orbach’s party in Dulwich. The Orbachs had a big house in several acres of garden with a swimming pool and tennis courts, and their Fourth of July parties were famous both for their lavishness and for the shenanigans reported by all those fortunate enough to attend them. Jamie had gone the previous year and had come back to school to tell Annie – whose parents had not let her go – that contrary to popular myth no one had swum nude, but any number had dived into the pool with their clothes still on; and he’d told Olivia – who hadn’t been able to go either because her parents wanted her at their own party at home – that he’d seen not a single sign of a real-live orgy, though he’d seldom seen so much unabashed necking in an arena where parents were present.

This year they were all going partly because they were eighteen, but mostly because all their parents were flying up to Scotland for an Independence Day celebration in aid of one of Olivia’s father’s charities. That, of course, meant there would be no arguments about what they decided to wear, no curfew that night and no repercussions next morning if they showed up long after breakfast and with hangovers.

‘What are you wearing?’ Olivia asked Annie on the phone at five o’clock that afternoon.

‘A dress my mother bought me in New York last month.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘White crepe, with a halter neck.’

‘Long?’

‘Yes.’ Annie sounded suddenly uncertain. ‘Is that all right, do you think?’

‘It sounds gorgeous. You always look lovely,’ Olivia said, meaning it.

‘What about you?’ Annie asked.

‘I’ve been shopping. You’ll hate it,’ Olivia added with relish.

‘Why should I hate it?’

‘I waited for Mom and Dad to leave,’ Olivia said, ‘and then I went right over to this little boutique off Heath Street – I’d already asked them to hold everything for me.’

‘What did you buy?’ Annie was intrigued. Olivia Segal came from a family not quite, but almost as conventional as her own, yet Annie thought Olivia the most exciting person she knew.

‘I’ve gone punk – well, kind of punk, anyway.’

‘You haven’t.’

‘Would you believe black Bermudas and a black silk camisole?’

‘You’re kidding.’ Annie was half aghast, half impressed.

‘And I found this really wild studded belt and a pair of those wrap-around sunglasses we saw in Vogue. And a dog chain necklace.’ Olivia stopped short of telling Annie that she’d had scarlet streaks sprayed into her dark hair.

‘It sounds – lovely.’ Annie hesitated.

‘But?’

‘Isn’t it black tie tonight?’

‘I forgot to buy a tie.’

‘I didn’t mean that, Livvy.’

‘I know you didn’t, Annie.’ Olivia liked teasing Annie.

‘What if they don’t let you in?’

‘They will. Jamie said that some people were dressed pretty wildly last year.’

‘Still, a dog chain—’ Annie was lost for words.

‘David Orbach has a German shepherd,’ Olivia said confidently. ‘I can always take it off and pretend it was a present for him.’

The party was due to begin at eight-thirty, and Annie had told Olivia that she and Jamie had arranged to get a lift with Jenny Lee Barnsworth, another student from the American School, and there was plenty of room in Jenny’s car if Olivia wanted to join them; but Olivia had already made plans to go with Bill Murray, who lived in Highgate, much closer to the Segals than either the Aldriches or the Ariases, and she and Bill were probably going to have a drink somewhere en route to Dulwich, and no, she and Bill were not an item, but he was an okay guy, and it was a long drive, so she might as well enjoy it.

By the time Olivia and Bill got to the party, the driveway and the street were jammed with cars, and Bill, a gentleman, let Olivia out at the house while he went off to hunt for a parking space. Her gift for David Orbach in her right hand, her small black bag swinging from her left shoulder, Olivia headed jauntily across the big gravel drive towards the brilliantly lit house.

She saw Jamie almost immediately, standing in the entrance hall, saw that his face was ashen and that he seemed to have been weeping, and that David Orbach, close by, was looking at her strangely.

‘What’s wrong?’ Her voice caught in her throat. ‘Jamie, what’s happened?’

He looked so strange, so perfectly, immaculately dressed in his tuxedo and black tie – Jamie was always such a lovely mix of slenderness and strength – yet at the same time he looked somehow, Olivia thought with a sudden and terrible fear, destroyed.

‘Our parents,’ he said, in a whisper.

‘What about them?’ Olivia found she still had David Orbach’s gift in her hand, and she pushed it at David and reached out to seize Jamie’s left arm. ‘What’s happened, Jamie?’

He shook his head.

‘Jamie, what? Tell me.’

Behind her, Bill Murray came through the door, laughing at first, then going very quiet as someone hushed him, drew him away, pulled him and another pair of late arrivals out of the entrance hall and into the first of the music-filled rooms.

‘They’re dead,’ Jamie said, tonelessly, his dark eyes beseeching Olivia’s, as if he hoped that she might put him straight, tell him that he was wrong, that he was crazy.

For a long moment, Olivia said nothing.

‘What did you say?’ she asked, very quietly, at last.

‘All killed,’ he said.

Someone put a hand on Olivia’s arm and she jumped as if they’d burned her.

‘It’s true, my dear.’ Mrs Orbach, David’s mother, stood beside her. ‘I’m so very sorry.’ Magnificent in black Chanel, she looked compassionate and afraid and deeply uncomfortable all at the same time, and Olivia realized in a flash of instinct that, as shocked and sympathetic as their hostess clearly was, she wanted, more than anything, to get her and Jamie out of her entrance hall – if possible out of the house and away from her party.

‘Your friend’s waiting upstairs,’ Mrs Orbach said, gently.

‘Friend?’ Olivia felt confused, disorientated, almost dizzy.

‘She means Annie,’ Jamie told her.

‘Why?’ Olivia stared up at him. ‘What’s happened to Annie?’

‘It’s all of them,’ Jamie said. ‘On the way to Scotland.’

And finally, Olivia understood.

‘The helicopter,’ she said.

Annie was in a bedroom on the first floor, away from the noise. She was sitting on the floor, on a white rug, all curled up, partly camouflaged by her white crepe dress. She, too, had been crying, but now her eyes were dry and she looked shocked, almost absent. A moth, drawn by the light through the open window, fluttered close to her blonde hair, but she made no move to brush it away.

Olivia and Jamie came into the room. Jamie got down on the floor beside Annie, put one arm around her, and Olivia, her legs suddenly weak, sat on the edge of the big bed.

There was a cheval mirror facing her from across the room. She saw her reflection, saw the black Bermudas and the silk camisole that had seemed so daring and sexy, saw the crazy, idiotic wrap-around sunglasses pushed up into her scarlet-streaked hair, saw the bizarre dog chain around her neck – and abruptly that seemed so offensive, so revolting, that she tried to pull it off, but it was too tightly fastened and she was hurting herself, didn’t know that she was making small, choking, whimpering sounds until Jamie’s hands were on hers, stopping her from dragging at the thing around her neck.

‘Let me,’ he told her, gently. ‘Let me, Olivia.’

She let him, watched the chain hang loose from his hands, watched him lay it on the bedspread. She stared at him.

‘Are they really all dead?’ She sounded incredulous, like a child.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Annie still sat curled up on the floor, saying nothing. The moth was resting on the skirt of her dress now. Jamie took Olivia’s hand and drew her off the bed and down onto the rug, and they were all three in a row, him in the middle.

‘It happened this afternoon,’ he said, very softly. ‘Somewhere near Newcastle.’

‘How?’ Olivia asked.

‘They crashed. That’s all we know.’ Jamie paused. ‘There’s a man downstairs, waiting. My cousin, Michael, sent him. To take us all home.’ He paused again. ‘We wanted to wait for you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Olivia said. ‘I was late, wasn’t I?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jamie said. ‘There’s no hurry.’

‘No,’ Olivia said. ‘I guess there isn’t.’

The wheels of death ground into motion. They were none of them young children, to be protected from reality or shielded from harsh formalities. Postmortems were conducted, funerals were arranged, inquests were held in conjunction with the main accident enquiry which found, in due course, that the helicopter had crashed because of a mechanical failure. No human error, no suspicious circumstances, no violent storm. Just some hunks of steel and electrical circuits failing to keep the machine in the air. Olivia, Annie and Jamie flew to their respective family homes in the United States for the funerals, fumbled their way numbly through the interments and various rites – the Segals’ Jewish service in New York, the Aldriches’ Protestant burial in San Francisco and the Ariases’ Roman Catholic Mass in Rhode Island – and then returned to Britain for what seemed, to each of them, the most harrowing, the most inescapably tangible part of the ritual, the clearing up of their parents’ homes.

There was plenty of help available for the packing up and removal of the large objects, but as with all deaths there were wardrobes to be gone through, and dressing tables, and cabinets and desk drawers. In Jamie’s case, there was his older brother, Peter, to help, and Michael, their cousin – the son of Carlos Arias’s late brother, Juan Luis – came through for them magnificently well. Michael was, as he pointed out to Jamie, almost twice his age, and as the new head of the Arias family it was his duty to take over the dismal tasks involved with closing down the Pall Mall office and Regent’s Park house and transferring their belongings to the main family residence in Newport and the New York offices, from where Michael intended to rule. Annie, still seeming less able to cope than the others, began the process of trying to sift through Franklin’s and Grace’s personal files by herself, but all too swiftly crumbled and gave up, asking Richard Tyson, her father’s London-based partner, if he would mind having all the papers in the mews house – unsorted for the moment, perhaps forever – packaged up and laid to rest in the archives of her father’s London office.

Olivia tackled her own task head on, the only way she could, the only way she wanted to. In her mother’s case it was, in a sense, straightforward. Grief and loss, both accentuated by the sight and touch and smell of Emily’s belongings. But Emily Segal had been orderly and not over-burdened by sentiment, a thousand miles away from the average Jewish mother. Arthur, on the other hand, had been both disorderly and an unabashed nostalgia collector. Immersed as he had been in so many diverse fields, with his art collection and his numerous charities – which would from now on be administered by the Arthur Segal Foundation – proud as any archetypal Jewish husband and papa of his beloved wife and only daughter, fervent as he had been to hold on to his past and to as many shreds of his heritage as possible – Arthur’s wardrobes and drawers and filing cabinets, once opened, seemed almost to seethe with scrapbooks and photograph albums and diaries and other keepsakes.

And the correspondence! Once released from the cabinets and boxes that had until now held them in check, Olivia found a veritable mountain of her father’s letters. Much of it was commonplace, dull business communications that could now, without question, be consigned to black rubbish bags, and old postcards from friends, including three from Max Wildenbruch, the art dealer, on holidays in Tuscany and France; but hidden amongst all these were other things of infinite value. The skullcap Arthur had worn for his bar mitzvah, neatly labelled by his mother. Every birthday card Olivia had ever sent her father. Ancient school reports: Arthur’s own, describing a boy to whom friendship had clearly always mattered more than studies. Emily’s, the kind to make any parent glow with pride; and Olivia’s, every single comment from first grade upward, good or bad or someplace between, preserved. And love letters, simple but intensely moving, that Olivia read unashamedly and wept over, then carefully folded again, keeping to each original crease, feeling she had drawn a little closer to Arthur and Emily with every word.

On the third day of her delvings and sortings, Olivia found in her father’s study an old battered pigskin briefcase he had continued using from time to time in preference to the more handsome black calf attaché case that Emily had bought him from Asprey for his birthday two years before. Like just about every single container in the house used by Arthur, it seemed to contain papers, but it was locked and Olivia could find no key. She looked for a while at the tiny gold lock, and thought it would be an easy matter to force it open, but the idea of breaking into something her father had locked seemed somehow offensive to her. Which makes no real sense at all, she thought, when I’ve just spent the last few days reading his private mail.

Olivia wondered abruptly, guiltily, why people assumed that death made them privy to everything about those who had died. She had told herself that her own invasion of her parents’ privacy was a means of bringing them closer again, of drawing them back, temporarily, from the void. She thought, on reflection, that she had truly felt that, and it was done now, anyway, their intimate words had bled into her mind, were part of her now, and there was no going back and no point in feeling guilty. Jewish though she was, Olivia had never been big on guilt.

She fetched a small, sharp, black-handled knife from the kitchen, returned to Arthur’s study and worked at the lock until the pigskin case was open. It was enjoyable work, had a rather satisfying edge of petty villainy to it, and she wondered idly if that, perhaps, was one of the attractions of burglary, the small battle to pick the door lock or quietly break the window, all the while anticipating the opportunity of trespass into another person’s private world.

More letters. One from Coutts, the bankers. Two from a firm of insurance brokers. An invitation, on thick white card, to a dinner at the Israeli Embassy, the date already past; another, to the opening of an exhibition at the Hamilton Gallery. And a strange, brief note from Jamie’s father, dated June 4th, one month before the helicopter crash, hand-written with a fountain pen and curiously worded in a hurried, uncomfortable, almost telegraphic style.

Dear Arthur,

Deeply shocked and dismayed to learn that your suspicions are not, after all, unfounded.

We must meet soon.

Carlos Arias.

Olivia told Annie about the note on the telephone later that evening.

‘It sounds important. Do you suppose it is?’

‘You mean, should you ask Jamie about it?’ Annie was calm tonight, partly, perhaps, because she’d taken one of the tranquillizers a cousin had given her before the funeral, but then again she thought that she had been feeling a little better, a little easier, ever since Richard Tyson had agreed to house all the Aldrich papers in their office archives.

‘Should I?’

Annie paused. ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it could mean anything at all, and there’s nothing Jamie can do about it now, and it might just worry him.’

‘You’re right,’ Olivia said. ‘I guess.’

‘But you’re not sure,’ Annie said.

‘Not quite,’ Olivia admitted. ‘There I was prying into my own parents’ private affairs, and suddenly there was Jamie’s dad, and I’m not sure I have the right to keep it from him.’

‘Keep what, Livvy? It’s just a note. It’s nothing.’

‘It doesn’t sound like nothing.’

‘Not when it was written, maybe,’ Annie said softly. ‘But it is nothing now.’

Olivia had said nothing to Jamie, and the note was long forgotten by the time the three friends next saw each other at the communal, non-denominational memorial service held at the end of August at All Souls Church in London, a thanksgiving for the lives of all those who had died in the helicopter crash: the pilot, an Edinburgh man named John Wilkes; Carlos Arias; Arthur and Emily Segal; and Franklin and Grace Aldrich.

There were colleagues, business partners, cousins, uncles and aunts, but both Olivia and Annie were only-children, and the only close blood relatives present were Peter and Michael Arias.

‘I’ve never seen them before, have you?’ Olivia said to Annie, as they were preparing to file out after the service.

Annie shook her head. ‘They’re both very handsome, aren’t they?’

Olivia studied the two men as they stood either side of Jamie. ‘Michael’s very distinguished, isn’t he, in a piercing kind of way?’

‘Peter’s even better looking than Jamie,’ Annie whispered, a moment of foolish gossip infinitely welcome after the sorrow of the service. ‘A bit like Alan Alda, don’t you think?’

‘He’s too smooth,’ Olivia said. ‘Look, they’re both putting their sunglasses on while they’re still inside.’ She quelled a sudden, inappropriate urge to laugh. ‘They look like Spanish Mafia.’

‘Yes, they do.’ Annie gave her black cloche hat a little pat in a gesture of tidiness inherited, unconsciously, from Grace Aldrich. ‘Jamie doesn’t though, does he?’

Olivia shook her head. ‘Jamie’s more elegant. More like Carlos.’ She’d thought, for a while now, that she might be attracted to Jamie Arias, but he was such a warm, easy-going, friendly guy, was that way with just about everyone he came into contact with, that it was impossible to tell if he felt the same way about her. Now, she supposed, with all the brightness and normality gone, and with all of them going their separate ways, she would never find out.

They walked a little further towards the exit, were spoken to by a number of people, had their hands shaken, their cheeks kissed, and Jamie came and walked out with them into Portland Place, into the shock of sunlight and traffic and the rest of the world going about its business.

‘I felt so sorry for Mrs Wilkes,’ Jamie said, suddenly.

‘Who?’ Olivia asked, stupidly, confused.

‘The pilot’s wife,’ Annie said.

‘Oh, yes. Of course.’

‘She looked so sad,’ Jamie said, ‘and so guilty.’

‘No one’s blamed him, have they?’ Annie asked.

‘Not at all,’ Olivia said. ‘Mechanical failure. Not his fault.’

‘But still,’ Annie said. ‘Poor lady.’

Olivia glanced at her, realized how extremely white her face was, remembered how she had been that night at the Orbach party, how utterly silent and remote.

‘Annie, are you okay?’ she asked, softly.

‘Not really.’ Annie’s voice was flat. ‘Are you?’

‘No,’ Olivia said. ‘I guess not.’

‘How can we be?’ Jamie said.

Olivia hesitated for a moment.

‘Are you both free the day after tomorrow?’

‘I am,’ Jamie said. ‘I don’t leave till next Monday.’

‘Annie?’

‘I have nothing special,’ Annie said.

‘I think we should go up there,’ Olivia said.

‘Up where?’ Jamie asked, though he thought he knew.

‘To where it happened.’ Olivia paused. ‘Just us. I want to be there. I want to say goodbye.’ She paused again. ‘I think it might do us all some good.’

‘I don’t know if I could bear it,’ Annie said, slowly.

‘It would be a fair climb,’ Olivia said.

‘We’d need boots and hiking gear,’ Jamie added. ‘It’s quite a way up.’

‘You don’t have to come, Annie.’ Olivia said. ‘It’s just an idea.’

‘Can I think about it, please?’ Annie asked.

They all travelled north two days later, having extricated themselves from well-meaning relatives and acquaintances. They took an Intercity train to Newcastle, rented a car, picked up a local road map, drove as far as they were able and then hiked the rest of the way up to Dukesfield Fell. Both Jamie and Olivia kept a watchful eye on Annie, conscious that of the three of them she was the most obviously fragile emotionally, but she seemed perfectly in control today, as prepared for whatever awaited them as they were.

There was very little and yet there was everything. Of the wreckage and debris, not the tiniest scrap remained; if blood had been scattered, it had been washed away, either by officialdom or by nature. But the crater made by the body of the helicopter falling from the sky was there, roped off for safety, and there, too, was the wounded earth, scorched and gouged and ripped.

It was August, the height of summer and a clear day, yet up there it seemed to Olivia and Jamie and Annie that no birds sang, that it was cold and bleak as November, and their losses weighed down on them more heavily there, were suddenly rendered far more real than they had been. For when they had seen the pictures on their television screens, and when they had listened at the inquests and sat at the memorial service – even when they had stood at the gravesides and watched the coffins lowered into the ground – the harsh, unrelenting truth of their parents’ deaths had never quite come home to them. But here was where they had fallen, here was where the life had been crushed out of them, where the fire had half-consumed their bodies before the Northumbrian rain had put out the flames.

‘I’d like to go down soon,’ Annie said, after a while.

‘All right,’ Olivia said.

‘I can go by myself, if you and Jamie want to stay.’

‘No, you can’t,’ Jamie said quickly. ‘We have to stick together. I’m ready to leave, too.’ He looked at Olivia. ‘How about you?’

‘I wouldn’t mind another minute or two. You two go ahead.’

‘Just a little way,’ Jamie said. ‘Will you be okay?’

‘Of course,’ she said.

Olivia waited until they were some distance away, and then she sat down on the ground. She was glad they had come with her, but now she was glad to have been left alone. It had felt too much like the memorial service with them beside her, that sense of having to stand still and behave well for the sake of others, when what she really wanted to do was to get down on the ground, get as close as possible to where her mother and father had died, and say goodbye to them properly.

She put her hands, palms down, on the cool earth, and shut her eyes. She thought about her parents: about Emily Segal, doctor, wife, mother and individual; about Arthur Segal, philanthropist, husband, father, collector of memories and beautiful things. They had always been such busy people, their lives had been so full, yet they had always found time for each other and for their daughter, had given her so much, all that she’d needed and more, all the love, comfort, sound advice and friendship. It was cruel, Olivia supposed, that they had died so young, when they still had so much to do, so much to give, and yet, she realized suddenly, there at the place where they had died, at least they had had little time to be afraid, and at least they had gone together.

They stayed at an old hotel in the village of Blanchland in the Derwent Valley that night, in no rush to return to London, for they would all be leaving England for the foreseeable future within the week. Jamie and Olivia had both always planned to leave before September in any event, though Annie had intended to remain with her family a while longer. Now there was no longer any alternative. The process of closing down their London homes was almost complete and their lives, as they had formerly known them, were at an end. Jamie was to go to Harvard Business School, where he would be within about sixty miles of the magnificent, art-filled Arias family estate in Newport; Olivia was to go to Paris to study French at the Sorbonne; and Annie, at a complete loss, was going home to lick her wounds at the Aldrich house in San Francisco. This, they suddenly realized with an unexpectedly acute sense of fresh loss, would be their last chance to be together for a long time.

They had dinner in the restaurant, drank a lot of wine – even Annie had a glass – and adjourned to Olivia’s bedroom, the biggest, where Olivia and Jamie drank some cognac too, to which they were unaccustomed, and began to talk, honestly and openly, about their feelings and their fears. Nothing, they had all become aware, would ever be the same again. Their frames of reference had been irrevocably distorted; the bedrock on which their personalities had been formed was all broken up; the very people who would, they all knew, have done anything in the world for love of them, had disappeared.

‘We had a fight,’ Annie said, suddenly, from her chair.

‘Who?’ Olivia asked, startled.

‘My father and I.’

Annie’s chin came up, abruptly, and they saw that her blue eyes were filled with anguished tears, and Olivia realized then that Annie was the only one of them who had, until then, said hardly anything at all about her personal feelings.

‘The last time I saw my father,’ she said, ‘we had a terrible fight.’

Neither Jamie, on the bed, nor Olivia, sitting on the floor, said anything, both sensing that this was not a moment to interrupt her, that Annie needed time.

‘It started about the party,’ she went on. ‘Just a silly argument, really. He didn’t want me to go, but I told him I was eighteen and he couldn’t stop me, and he gave way and I was so glad, because Daddy and I never fought, or hardly ever, but then he started making all kinds of rules, about what I should wear and how I should get there and when and how I should get home.’

‘All fathers do that,’ Olivia said, putting down her cognac glass on the carpet.

‘I know,’ Annie said. ‘I knew it then, too – and I’d never really minded before, and I don’t know what was wrong with me that day, but it just seemed to get to me, and I couldn’t seem to stop arguing with him. Even when he said things that I knew made perfect sense, I argued.’

‘I expect he understood,’ Jamie said.

‘No,’ Annie said, and the tears were really flowing now. ‘He didn’t understand at all. I saw it in his face. He looked so hurt, and I knew I’d hurt him, but I just told myself it was my fault for always having given in to him about everything – for having always been such a good little girl – and it would do us both good if I made a stand once in a while.’

They waited for her to go on.

‘And you didn’t get a chance to make up with him,’ Olivia said, at last.

Annie shook her head. ‘My mother came home from the hairdresser’s, and she heard what we’d been arguing about, and she smoothed things over a little because she could see it was all a storm in a teacup, nothing we wouldn’t both get over.’

‘She was right,’ Jamie said. ‘You would have.’

‘But we didn’t,’ Annie whispered. ‘He still looked so hurt, and I just left the room, and my mother asked him to go and help her with their packing, and when it was time for them to leave for Scotland I was in the bath – and I could have gotten out and gone to kiss him goodbye, but I didn’t. My mother stuck her head around the door and blew me a kiss and told me to enjoy myself, and that was that.’

Olivia looked up at Jamie, then back over at Annie.

‘And you’ve been tormenting yourself about that all these weeks.’

‘Yes.’ Annie took the handkerchief Jamie reached across to offer her, and wiped her eyes. ‘Of course.’

‘Then you’re a bit of a goose, Annie Aldrich. I guarantee your dad forgave you – probably forgot all about it – before they even got into the helicopter.’ Olivia paused. ‘He knew you loved him, didn’t he?’

‘I guess so.’

‘You know so.’

‘Olivia’s right,’ Jamie said. ‘Your dad would hate to think you were making yourself crazy – that’s the kind of fight all kids have with their fathers.’

‘I know,’ Annie said.

‘Your lips say that,’ Olivia said, gently, ‘but your eyes don’t look so sure.’

Annie bit back the tears that were threatening again. ‘I’m just so sad, you know?’

‘We all are,’ Jamie said. ‘I guess we’ll all be sad for a long time.’

‘At least,’ Olivia said, ‘we have each other.’

‘Not for much longer,’ Annie said, miserably. ‘You’ll be in Paris, Jamie’ll be at Harvard. I’ll be thousands of miles from you both.’

‘That’s just distance.’ Olivia got up from the floor, bent to pick up her glass and poured a little more cognac for herself and Jamie. ‘We can write letters and phone and visit each other. We’re none of us short of funds – we can get on a plane pretty much whenever we want to.’

‘It’s not the same as being in the same city, though,’ Jamie said. ‘I know I’m going to miss you both like hell.’

‘It’s strange, in a way.’ Olivia joined him on the bed, glass in hand. ‘We were friends in school, but we weren’t all that close, yet now I feel this really strong bond with both of you.’

‘It’s not so surprising,’ Jamie said, ‘given the circumstances.’

‘Grief, you mean,’ Annie said.

Olivia shook her head. ‘It’s more than grief, Annie. I think it’s that we all realize that no one else in the whole world will ever be able to comprehend better than us what we’ve been through – the way the crash has changed our lives, has already started to change us.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Jamie agreed. ‘This afternoon, standing up on Dukesfield Fell, there was such a strong connection between us – I felt it, I mean I really felt it, tangibly. I knew – or I thought I knew – what you were both thinking – I don’t mean I was reading your minds, but—’ He shrugged, unable exactly to express what he wanted to say.

‘I think I understand, too,’ Annie said, quietly. ‘Though I’d be lying if I said I’d felt it up on that place – I was too wrapped up in my own misery, I don’t think I was paying much attention to either of you.’

‘We were all pretty wrapped up,’ Olivia said. ‘That was why I wanted to stay behind on my own for a few moments.’ She paused. ‘But I still knew that you were both there for me, and it helped a lot.’

They all fell silent for a time.

‘Do you think we will all write regularly?’ Jamie asked. ‘I mean, when we all get hooked up in our new lives – I’m not saying we won’t intend to write, or that we won’t want to, but—’

‘But you’re just being a realist,’ Annie said.

‘It doesn’t matter if we write letters or not,’ Olivia said. ‘What matters is just that we keep in touch somehow. Knowing me, I’ll pick up the phone more often than a pen, or I might send tapes—’

‘Good idea,’ Jamie said.

‘And Livvy’s right about paying visits once in a while,’ Annie said.

Olivia took one more sip, then put down her glass. ‘But none of those things,’ she said slowly, thoughtfully, ‘are what really matters when the chips are down.’

‘What do you mean?’ Annie asked.

‘I mean that what really counts is what we’re going to need the most.’ She paused. ‘And that’s being there for each other. When things get rough – really rough, I mean – for any one of us. Which they will, some time. By the law of averages.’

‘So what are you saying?’ Jamie asked her.

Olivia stood up. The mix of cognac and wine was buzzing in her veins, yet her mind felt curiously clear and resolute. ‘I’m saying that we all take a vow – make a pact, I guess – to always be there for each other when we’re needed.’

Annie, still in her chair, took a breath. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’d like to do that very much.’

‘Jamie?’ Olivia looked down at him.

‘Sure.’ He smiled at her. ‘You want to do this properly? Swear to stay in touch, swear to do all we can for each other?’

‘No.’ Olivia shook her head. ‘Not just “all we can”. People always say that – it’s like having a get-out clause all neat and ready in case we have something better on. I’m talking about a real pact, a solemn promise that if any of us gets in any kind of a serious jam, and needs help, then the other two will drop everything and be there to see them through.’

Annie stood up. ‘Like family, you mean.’

‘Just like family,’ Jamie said, getting up, too. ‘The way our parents would have been there for us if we really needed them.’

‘In loco parentis.’ Annie smiled. ‘My father would have liked the sound of that.’

‘They all would,’ Olivia said, softly. She felt a new warmth that had little to do with liquor coursing through her, a renewed strength and sense of hope.

‘We need our glasses,’ Jamie said. ‘One more toast to our pact.’

They found them, came to stand close together, and raised them.

‘To always being there,’ Jamie said.

‘No matter what,’ Annie added.

‘Come hell or high water,’ Olivia said, and drained her glass.

For the next ten years, as they grew and worked and lived their separate lives, the friends exchanged letters and phone calls and got together mostly for the odd vacation. They reunited, too, for Annie’s wedding, in London in 1981, to a banker named Edward Thomas, and the following year Annie and Jamie went to New York, where Olivia was living, to celebrate her engagement; five months later, they returned to commiserate with her on her split from her fiancé – only to find that she felt she’d had the luckiest of escapes and needed no commiserations. In 1985 – by which time Jamie and Olivia had attended the christenings of Sophie, William and Liza, Annie’s and Edward’s children – they were all together again in Boston for Jamie’s marriage to Caroline Beaumont, a rising star in the advertising world. And on the Fourth of July, 1986, they all climbed Dukesfield Fell again to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the helicopter disaster.

None of those reunions – not even the last, they all agreed – came under the category of ‘being there’ for each other; they were simply moments of importance, of substance in their lives, snapshots in time when good friends wanted to be together. They had been lucky in those ten years, had had no real need to call for help.

But those times would come. They had all gone on with their lives determinedly, courageously and successfully, yet those grievous losses, that massive body blow to normality, could not be sustained without some damage. They were all strong in their own ways, yet like the rest of the human race they all had their Achilles’ heels too, and it was, perhaps, to be expected that the violent, untimely deaths of their parents would exacerbate those weaknesses.

In Annie’s case, it was her fear of admitting that she was not always able to cope perfectly with everything life threw at her. With Jamie, it was his need to live up to the memory of the father he had lost. And for Olivia, it was, more than anything, her compulsive passion for truth.

Three times in the next decade, still stirred by the distant but unfailingly dark backwash of the helicopter crash, those vulnerabilities would threaten each of them, and on each occasion, the strength of their pact of friendship would be tested to the limit.

The first call for help would come from Annie.