Pale as the Dead Read online

  Do something useful.

  She wandered through to the hallway to the shelves of books under the stairs.

  Her books were arranged in loose alphabetical or subject order. She ran her fingers along the spines and spotted what she was looking for. A volume of monographs, The Pre-Raphaelite Dream, one of the books her mother, Ann, had sent down from Natasha’s old bedroom when she was having a clear-out.

  On the gilt-edged cover was an image that had become part of popular culture, adorning compilations of Victorian poetry, greeting cards and posters. A raven-haired girl draped in forest green silk, with dancing eyes and sultry red mouth, a ripe red fruit in her hand with a bite taken out of it. Rossetti’s Proserpine. The model was Janey Morris, neé Burden.

  Natasha turned the pages to find Lizzie Siddal in Millais’ Ophelia. A beautiful, haunting painting, the colours of the dense foliage and Lizzie’s face as realistic as a photograph. No wonder Bethany and Adam had wanted to replicate it. On the reverse was Lizzie as Beata Beatrix, both pictures so different in style to Proserpine. Still sensual, but saintly too, with her face turned to heaven, or her lips parted in song, and her eyes closed as if in prayer or rapture, Lizzie was an icon.

  Natasha turned to the index at the back. There was no listing for a Dr Marshall. She hadn’t really expected there would be.

  She postponed going up to bed until the fire had dwindled to a few embers and a chill had crept into the room. She didn’t stop Boris when he sneaked up the stairs behind her, and she didn’t tell him off when he pushed his luck even further and jumped up onto the bed.

  The last time she looked at the clock it was two-thirty a.m. Which was better than three, as it had been for the last few nights.

  Four

  A COUPLE OF weeks later, Natasha was woken by the post clattering through the letterbox. A mixture of birthday and Christmas cards. She sifted through them quickly. Stamped on her disappointment when she didn’t see Marcus’s handwriting. She’d almost given up hope that she’d hear from him. Almost.

  She opened the cards. It was anyone’s guess whether you’d find pictures of champagne corks and summer flowers or robins and reindeers. That was the problem with having a birthday so close to Christmas. It tended to get lost. But she didn’t mind that at all. Did her best to forget the day, except for one thing.

  She knelt by the black oak coffer that stood at the foot of her bed, lifted the catch.

  It had become a kind of ritual. She only allowed herself to open it on this morning each year.

  She had first seen the coffer about five years ago, in the window of an antique shop in Stow-on-the-Wold. She’d fallen in love with it immediately. It was Jacobean, ornately carved with roses and acanthus leaves and a small unicorn rearing up in the centre panel. She had known it would be a perfect fit.

  She opened the lid and let it drop back against the foot of the iron bed. She lifted out the bundle, removed the tissue paper wrapping. With the tips of her fingers she touched the shawl. It felt cool and soft, like frosted moss or flowers of ice on window panes on winter mornings. She folded back the corner and there was the postcard, a picture of the St Catherine’s window in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, the back blank except for a single phrase, written in blue-black ink.

  ‘We always keep everything that’s left with abandoned babies,’ the woman from the Social Services had informed Natasha with exaggerated sympathy. ‘We give them back when those concerned have been told about their history, when they are old enough to understand.’

  When were you ever old enough to understand something like that?

  Natasha had been eighteen and had known for just a few days that she was adopted, that she’d been left behind in a hospital ward. She had been nowhere near coming to terms with either fact, particularly the latter. Babies were only abandoned in Victorian novels. Foundlings. Not a term that fitted in the 1970s.

  This was not true though, she’d since learned. Doorstep babies, the term they used now, were on the increase, ‘a tragic symptom of society’ the papers said it was. Teenage sex, the lack of family unity and support for unmarried mothers, the widening social divide. Nowadays, in the UK, records showed that one baby was abandoned every week.

  We always keep everything that’s left with abandoned babies. The only history they’d ever have.

  Natasha had signed the release form, taken possession of the little bundle. Then she saw what was written on the piece of card folded inside the shawl.

  Her name is Natasha.

  The memory came to her, swift and destructive as a floodtide. Sitting in the kitchen one Sunday morning, discussing with her adoptive parents, Ann and Steven, what the new baby should be called if it should be a girl. It was Steven who’d suggested Abigail, and Ann had placed her hand proprietarily on her rounded tummy and said that Abigail was perfect.

  ‘Didn’t you choose my name too?’ Natasha had asked Steven.

  He’d glanced down at her, his eyes tender, with a sadness in them that she hadn’t understood. ‘Your mother chose it.’

  She’d wanted so much for him to say yes, but she wasn’t disappointed at all, was gratified, elated. Her eyes flew to Ann, expecting a smile, something. But Ann had turned away.

  That was the truth. A lone truth in all the lies. Her mother, her real mother, had chosen her name. For some reason it had been important to her, that her child should have one name in particular. Natasha.

  And Steven and Ann had honoured that wish, hadn’t done what most adoptive parents did and renamed their baby with their own choice of name.

  She ran her fingers across the letters. How much she wanted to believe that handwriting could reveal a person’s character. The N bold, an arabesque, and the cross of the T, sinuous and spiky, like a leap.

  She tucked the piece of card back under the shawl, folded the tissue paper round it and returned it to its place at the bottom of the chest.

  Natasha. Russian. Short form of Natalya. She knew the entry in the Dictionary of Names by heart. Natalya. Russian. A derivative of the Latin Natalis, meaning birthday, especially Christ’s. Hence the tradition of so naming those born at Christmas-time.

  Perhaps that was all it was.

  * * *

  Later, Natasha walked over the road to the cottage adjoining the Snowshill Arms. A lamb stew was keeping warm on the range and there were candles ringed with holly on the pine table. Mary greeted her with a glass of spicy mulled wine. She was dwarfed by a navy and red polo shirt, James’s presumably, which, despite its size, didn’t quite conceal her protruding tummy.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Natasha asked.

  ‘Oh, fine. For a beached whale.’

  Just over five feet tall and a tiny size eight, the only clothes Mary could usually wear were outfits intended for early teens. She looked way too young to be a mother, still a child herself.

  ‘Four weeks to go.’

  James was checking the stew was done, oven gloves tossed over his shoulder. ‘I can see him arriving on Christmas Day, ruining our lunch,’ he grinned. Clearly he wouldn’t mind one bit.

  Natasha tapped Mary’s bump. ‘You hang on in there as long as you can little thing, unless you want one supposedly bigger present instead of two for the rest of your life.’

  Just as they sat down to eat Natasha’s mobile started ringing. She fished it out of her bag. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Is that Natasha Blake?’

  ‘Yes. Oh hi, Adam.’ Natasha caught Mary’s intrigued grin and pulled a face at her. Not what you think.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ Adam said. ‘It’s about Bethany.’

  Five

  THE NEXT DAY, at Adam’s insistence, Natasha found herself waiting by another river.

  By her guess, he was already half an hour late. She hated rushing for appointments or trains, often cursed the modern day necessity for clock-watching and it wasn’t as if she was never late herself. So she tried not to be too annoyed.

  The infant Thames was running high an
d swift, swollen from the recent heavy rain which had seeped down from hills and was only now reaching Oxford.

  Oxford. It had seemed like a fabled city when Natasha had first arrived, eighteen years old, off the train from Derbyshire, clutching two crammed suitcases and a bag full of books.

  As a student Natasha had often stopped off at the ivy-clad Head of the River pub with friends for a drink, having punted or rowed upstream. The table where she now sat would have had a bright parasol on a pole through its centre.

  She turned and saw Adam strolling down the paved steps towards her carrying his small silvery flight case. He took her outstretched hand with a quick, firm shake. ‘Sorry I’m late.’ He didn’t sound one bit sorry.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s usually me,’ Natasha admitted, slightly regretting how forgiving she sounded. ‘I hate wearing a watch.’

  He gave an uninterested frown and stared down at Boris.

  Natasha gave the dog’s silken copper ears a reassuring fondle, her impatience prickling.

  Adam stuck a cigarette in his mouth without either offering her one or asking if she minded him smoking. ‘Can we get started? I don’t have much time.’

  Well, get lost then! She cursed the fact that she was too well brought up to say it to his face.

  He’d played on her curiosity and sympathy to lure her here, on Christmas Eve, saying it was urgent, and now obviously didn’t feel the need for even basic civility.

  As if he’d felt the little daggers in her dark eyes he glanced away, at the water rushing beneath the stone arches of the Folly Bridge. A girl was pushing through one of the swing doors to the pub and a wave of noise rolled out as she entered. Natasha knew the bar would be packed. ‘Shall we go in?’ she suggested reluctantly.

  Adam took in the deserted picnic benches around them. ‘I don’t mind staying out here.’

  ‘Let’s do that then.’

  She went to buy drinks at the bar. When she came back outside, Adam was on to another cigarette. There was a strong breeze and he had trouble lighting it. As he cupped his hand around the flame, Natasha saw that his fingers were trembling slightly.

  ‘You said you wanted to talk to me about Bethany.’

  ‘She’s gone.’

  Remembering the friction between them, it wasn’t a complete surprise. ‘Where?’

  ‘I need you to find her for me.’

  ‘Hang on a minute.’ Natasha glimpsed desperation in Adam’s eyes. ‘Look. I’d gladly help if I could, but you’ve come to the wrong person I’m afraid. I don’t find people who are alive.’

  ‘You sound like a ghost hunter.’

  She couldn’t help laughing. ‘Sometimes it feels that way I can tell you.’ She looked at him. ‘How do you know she wants to be found?’

  He ignored her, bent down to pick up the flight case, put it on the table, flicked back the catches and lifted the lid. He drew out an olive cloth-covered book and laid it in front of her. ‘I found it on the kitchen table the morning she left. A few days after that shoot you came to. No note, just this and some flowers in a jam jar.’

  Reverently, Natasha picked up the green book. She knew what it was before she opened it.

  The fragile pages were pocked with dull brown spots of age. It was the diary Bethany had mentioned, written in a rough and spidery hand, with numerous crossings out and blots of ink. There was no indication of the year. But it was very old. As Natasha turned the leaves with infinite care, a faint musty smell wafted up, one that never failed to send tingles down her spine. The smell of all old books, of attics and ancient buildings, faded gowns locked up for years in wooden chests, diaries, old photographs and letters. To hold in her hands the intimate records of people and emotions and times now gone, and to imagine the hand that had touched the pages never failed to excite her.

  A few of the more legible phrases in the journal caught her eye. Papa’s patients. Paintings on the academy. She turned back to the beginning, noting the initials inside the front cover – J.M.

  Bethany had left Adam but she had wanted him to have this. Something that had been handed down through the generations of her family, was probably valuable, was precious to her in any case.

  Natasha closed the book. ‘I still don’t see how you think I could help.’

  He reached inside his pocket and handed over a piece of notepaper.

  She unfolded it, saw her own name, address, telephone and e-mail written in blue biro, the writing elegant and italicised, like calligraphy. ‘It was inside the front of the diary,’ Adam explained. ‘It’s almost as if Bethany meant me to contact you, wanted me to ask you to find her. Through the diary I mean. If it belonged to one of her ancestors, it would lead to her, or her relatives? You’d be able to find their address, phone number? We could get in touch with them?’

  ‘Hmm. Unconventional idea to say the least, but it’s just possible I suppose. If she wanted you, or me, to do that, though, why leave in the first place?’

  He crushed the stub of his cigarette in the ash tray. ‘I don’t know.’

  She could understand his need to avoid difficult questions, also how what he was saying might just be true: the paradox of wanting someone’s love more than anything but pushing it away, half hoping they won’t let you, that they’ll fight to win you back. It had crossed Natasha’s mind that she was testing Marcus in the same way. ‘Isn’t there an easier way to find her?’

  ‘She wouldn’t tell me anything about her family or even where she was living. Short of going through every phone book in the UK and telephoning all the Marshalls I don’t see how.’

  She looked away quickly. Should she tell him that wouldn’t work? She’d promised Bethany she wouldn’t say anything about her name. And a promise was a promise. What Bethany had told her proved, surely, that, for whatever reason, she didn’t want to be traced. Particularly by Adam.

  ‘Do you have any idea why she left?’ She watched his face carefully, noticed the way he hesitated, just for a fraction of a second, then didn’t quite meet her eyes.

  ‘None,’ he said definitely. Too definitely.

  ‘In that case, she’s a missing person. The police would have more chance of finding her than me.’

  ‘I can’t go to the police.’

  She felt her heart knocking a warning. ‘Why not?’

  ‘They wouldn’t do anything.’

  ‘Let me guess. She had every right to leave you. You can’t say you have any worries about her safety. Did you by any chance have an argument?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘That generally means yes.’

  ‘It was a stupid argument. I asked her to move in with me and she got really angry. She said I was making her feel claustrophobic, that I shouldn’t rely on her being around all the time.’ He locked eyes with her. ‘You’re probably going to tell me that makes it even more pointless trying to find her.’ He paused. ‘If she hadn’t left the diary, I’d probably agree. But it meant so much to her. And your details inside. It’s obvious what she wanted me to do.’

  Not really. She didn’t have the heart to point out that the piece of paper was probably left there by mistake. ‘How long had you been together?’

  ‘Six weeks.’ There was a flare of challenge in his eyes. ‘I know it seems strange that I know so little about her, but she didn’t volunteer much information and she didn’t like questions. It was easier to stop asking. It drew me to her in a way. Can you understand that?’

  ‘Frankly, no. I’m far too nosy I’m afraid, goes with the territory.’ And if you loved someone you’d want to know everything about them, wouldn’t you?

  There was something else. People who were secretive were not to be trusted. Like another girl who had given a false name and then vanished. She’d walked out of the maternity ward of the Jessop Hospital in Sheffield on the day before Christmas Eve twenty-eight years ago, leaving behind the baby she’d given birth to just six hours before. According to the hospital records, the girl’s name was Catherine Forester. She
said she lived at 9 Troy Lane, Sheffield. Which didn’t exist. Catherine Forester didn’t exist either.

  It had turned colder. Natasha could see the mist of her own breath in front of her face and the skin beneath her nails had turned a shade of bruised violet. She pushed her hands up into the opposite sleeves of her coat, tempted to suggest that they went inside now.

  ‘We did talk, about all kinds of things,’ Adam was saying. ‘It’s surprisingly refreshing, skipping the preliminaries. It’s not necessary to rake over a person’s past to feel you know them. What happened before we met seemed irrelevant, a different life.’ His voice no longer had the sullen edge it had before. ‘Only the present mattered, and the future. Dreams are far more important than memories, don’t you think?’

  Natasha was caught up in his words, so that for a second she forgot that she should respond. ‘I’d be redundant if everyone believed the past wasn’t important.’

  And yet recently, hadn’t she come to think it too? The past could get in the way, a hindrance that stopped you living. So easy to lay the blame on the generations who’d gone before, to avoid taking responsibility for your own personality and actions. Blame it all on genes and upbringing and inherited fate.

  A host of questions sprang to Natasha’s mind. Did Bethany talk of her job, her family, friends, school, or college, where she grew up? She had started assessing the evidence, piecing things together, trying to fill the gaps, as if she’d already agreed to take on the job. But those questions, which disregarded completely what Adam had just said about the past not mattering, seemed somehow insensitive. ‘Where did you meet her?’

  He leant back. ‘In a café near a studio I was using in London.’

  ‘She told me she worked in a florists. Have you tried there?’

  ‘I never knew where it was exactly. I’ve checked at all the ones nearby, with a photograph, but nobody has ever seen her.’