The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9 Part 30

"But I would lose the whole caboodle if I didn't agree to live there and keep his things?"

"In the event that the condition of the bequest fails to be satisfied," Beazell said, refusing to recognize caboodle as a legal term, "the estate pa.s.ses to charities supporting the homeless."

I'd never thought of Rafe as a charitable donor. He must have expected me to toe the line. "Is that legal? To force someone to live somewhere, I mean?"

"There is no compulsion, the choice is yours." Beazell swivelled in his chair. "I may not specialize in the drafting of wills, but I can a.s.sure you that challenging your grandfather's testamentary provisions would be a costly exercise, and litigation is always fraught with uncertainty."

"What field do you specialize in, may I ask?"

"Criminal law." As if to remind me that his time was money, Beazell consulted his watch. A fake Rolex, I suspected, possibly supplied by one of his clients. "Indeed, I am due to appear at the magistrates' court in half an hour. Perhaps you would advise me by the end of the week whether or not you will undertake to accept the condition of the bequest?"

"No need to wait," I said. "My grandmother was right. I once heard her say that whatever Rafe wanted, he got. I'll take the house, and all his clutter."

"This is an adventure," Hong Li said, as we turned off the motorway.

"I hope you'll like the place ..."

She fiddled with the silver bracelet I'd given her after our first night together. "I'm sure I shall love it. Life in the English countryside! I can't believe this is happening to me. Six weeks ago, I was working s.h.i.+fts in a chip shop in Stafford for half the minimum wage, now ... my only worry is, how will the people in the village take to me?"

"Rafe never worried about other people, and you shouldn't, either. Besides, the village is little more than a shabby pub and half a dozen cottages a mile's walk from Brook House."

"Sounds idyllic." Her voice became dreamy. "So tell me more about Rafe."

"My grandmother never had a good word to say about him. According to her, he didn't really want a wife, but a servant at his beck and call. He and I didn't even meet until after my parents died. What I'd heard about him made me curious."

"He sounds rather s.e.xist."

"I prefer to think he was just a product of his time. Neither Grandma nor my father talked much about him. They blamed him for the marriage breakdown, though I never found out precisely what caused it. It was as if they wanted to air-brush him out of our lives. I could understand their bitterness. Even so, the degree of their hostility seemed unfair."

"You like to see the good in people."

"Why not? I wanted to find out what he was really like."

"And did you?"

"Sort of. He was a small man, bald with dark gleaming eyes, rather charismatic. Yet I found him almost ... scary. When we talked, he always seemed to be enjoying a private joke. He inherited the farm from a bachelor uncle when he was in his twenties, but he had no interest in farming. He sold off the bulk of the land and lived on the proceeds for the rest of his life."

"After your grandmother left him, he never married again?"

"No, but he cohabited with various women he called housekeepers. He had a rather old-fas.h.i.+oned att.i.tude towards what he liked to call the fair s.e.x."

Hong Li raised her eyebrows. "Actually, you're not exactly a new man yourself."

I chose to ignore this. "The first time I visited him, someone called Ramona was looking after him. Paraguayan and voluptuous, with a low-cut top and a spangly brooch on her bosom."

"So he didn't recruit her simply for her housekeeping skills?"

"Even he described her as s.l.u.ttish, though he made it sound like high praise. The house was such a mess that it would send anyone who was remotely house-proud into a tailspin. He never believed in putting things away he used to say he liked to have everything handy. Every cupboard and every drawer overflowed. Shelves buckled under the weight of books, ornaments and knick-knacks. The floors were covered with his things. I suppose it's no real wonder that his marriage fell apart."

Hong Li frowned. She'd come from Canton to England three years ago, and she wasn't supposed to have stayed here so long. The immigration laws are draconian; they don't give such people a hope of staying if they play by the rules. So they lurk in the twilight, taking work where they can to make ends meet. We met when I called in her shop for a bag of chips, and was smitten at first sight. Hong was not only a perfect model for any photographer, she also spoke better English than most people born and bred here. I felt a yearning for a pa.s.sionate woman, and my only complaint was that her pa.s.sion extended to tidiness. She was worse than my grandmother, whose mantra was a place for everything, and everything in its place. Hong enthused about feng shui, and tried to persuade me there was more to it than an aesthetic approach to interior design. Given half a chance, she would chatter for hours about discovering correlations between human life and the universe, and energizing your life through positive qi. For her, clutter was a metaphor for negative life circ.u.mstances. She wouldn't have suited Rafe, that was for sure.

"When did you last visit Brook House?"

"Four years ago, before I left for France. Ramona had moved on, and he'd installed a Thai girl he'd met through the internet. She wore thick spectacles and seemed very earnest, but he hinted that when she let her hair down ..."

"I really don't think I would have liked Rafe," Hong said.

"But he was generous to a fault. He paid to bring these women to England on extended holidays, and looked after them well. He was just ... idiosyncratic, that's all."

"It did him no good in the long run," she said. "What about the girl he was with when he died?"

"From Turkey by way of Berlin, according to Beazell. Poor kid, she called the emergency services when Rafe keeled over, and her reward was to be put on the first plane out of Britain."

Hong murmured, "You won't tell anyone about my situation, will you? I know I must get things sorted. I want to have the right to live in England, but it takes time to tick all the boxes."

"No need to worry," I said in a soothing tone, hoping she wasn't about to drop another hint about marriage. I might have promised to live in Brook House, but there's a limit to how many commitments a man can take on. Hong Li was the most accommodating model I'd worked with in ages, and I understood why, after the long and difficult journey from Canton, she felt a need to create order out of the chaos of a life in the shadows. But sometimes chaos is impossible to avoid. "There's no way the authorities will come looking for you here."

"This is such a weird place," she said that evening, as we lay together on the sofa, in front of a roaring fire.

"I was afraid you'd loathe it," I murmured.

"Because of all the rubbish?"

There was no escaping Rafe's clutter. Since my last visit, he had spent another four years acc.u.mulating stuff. You could barely move in any of the downstairs rooms for junk. It wasn't only the discarded lumps of stone, the incomplete bits of sculpture that he'd abandoned whenever he chiselled off one chunk too many. He collected indiscriminately. Stacked next to the sofa was an early run of copies of Playboy from the fifties, side-by-side with a pile of P. G. Wodehouse paperbacks and a dozen bulging postcard alb.u.ms. He'd indulged in philately for years, but seemed to have become bored with the hobby in recent years, since countless unopened packets of gaudily coloured stamps from all four corners of the world were stashed away in cupboards and in between the elderly encyclopaedias crammed on groaning shelves.

"I know you can't bear mess."

"Come on, sweetheart. Mess is too mild a word, you must admit. There's so much negative energy here. We really have to start clearing up tomorrow."

"It won't be easy. It's a big house, but there isn't much room left to put all this stuff away."

"We drove past a waste disposal site on the way here."

"You can't be serious," I protested. "Remember the terms of his will?"

Hong s.h.i.+fted on the sofa, edging away from me. "You don't have to take everything so literally."

"It's a legal requirement. You wouldn't want me to lose my inheritance, would you?"

"n.o.body would notice if you carried out a bit of ... what's the right word? Rationalization?"

"Don't you believe it. Councils hide cameras on wheelie-bins these days, they spy on folk who put electrical goods in containers meant for cardboard, it's scandalous."

"Out here in the middle of nowhere? You're making feeble excuses."

"Not in the least. It's a nightmare to dispose of anything. So easy to infringe some by-law or environmental regulation."

"That evening we first met, when I told you my story, you said laws were made to be broken."

"It was a figure of speech."

"Look!" She ran her finger along the arm of the sofa, showing me the dust. "Dirt interrupts the flow of natural energies. And the springs in the sofa have gone, it's so uncomfortable, we really must replace it."

"But it's flammable. Even if I wasn't bound to comply with Rafe's will, it would be impossible to chuck it out without a fistful of licences and bureaucratic permissions."

She sighed. "This house needs some positive chi."

I put my arms around her, not bothering to argue. Better prove that I had all the positive chi she needed.

Brook House stood on a winding lane in a quiet corner of Lancas.h.i.+re, surrounded by tumbledown sheds packed with misshapen sculptures and rusting cars that Rafe had driven into the ground and then abandoned. A preliminary reconnaissance indicated that he'd never got rid of a single thing. There wasn't another house in sight, which suited Rafe, who was not gregarious by nature. It suited me, too. The land that once belonged to the farm was now occupied by a business that hired out plant and machinery. A row of huge skips lined the horizon, but, as I'd made clear to Hong, it would be unthinkable to use them as a dumping ground for Rafe's possessions. It wasn't simply about complying with legal niceties; to flout his wishes would be a betrayal.

I've never cared for an excess of noise and chatter, but it was bound to take Hong longer to adjust to a new life. She came from a large family, and loved to socialize. Unlike me. During my years in Europe, I'd had a number of relations.h.i.+ps, but none of them worked out. At least I'd got the wanderl.u.s.t out of my system. When I admitted I was an old-fas.h.i.+oned chap at heart, and felt it was time to settle down, Hong took it as a precursor to tying the knot. Which was not what I meant at all.

"Lucky that girl was with him when he had his heart attack," she hissed, glaring at a tower of boxes full of Rafe's correspondence from the past thirty years. "If he'd died alone, it might have been weeks before his body was discovered. Imagine being buried under a load of magazines, broken toasters and old s.h.i.+rts. Do you have any idea how many ancient sinks are outside the kitchen? Not one, but two!"

"Let's recycle them," I suggested, in a spirit of compromise. "They make ideal planters."

"And this whole house smells," she complained, throwing open the windows in the living room. "Musty books, old pairs of underpants. It's unhealthy."

"Hey, we'll freeze if you're not careful," I said. "Let me build up the fire."

"With some of those old yellow newspapers in the scullery?"

"No way. They go back twenty years. Some of them might be valuable."

"You must be joking. And what about this?" With a flourish, Hong produced a tin box and fiddled with a small key to open it.

"You found the key!" Extraordinary. Two whole drawers in the sideboard were packed with keys of all shapes and sizes, none bearing any tag to indicate to which lock they belonged.

"It took an hour and a half of trial and error, and now I've broken in ... well, see for yourself."

She lifted the lid of the box to reveal half a dozen locks of hair. Red, fair, and black, wavy and straight.

"Who do you think they belonged to?"

"Old girlfriends, some of the housekeepers, who knows? Rafe must have had a sentimental streak, hence not wanting me to dispose of his clutter. I guess he kept snippets of their hair long after they'd moved on."

"They spook me." She pulled a face. "For pity's sake, be reasonable, sweetheart. We have to clear this c.r.a.p out, it makes me ill just to look at it all."

I picked up one of the dark strands of hair. "I bet this was cut from Ramona's head. It's precisely her shade."

Hong s.h.i.+vered. "Creepy."

"You don't understand. They are keepsakes. It's touching that they meant so much to him."

As I spoke the words, I knew instinctively how Rafe had felt about his souvenirs. Our possessions define us. Throw them out, and you throw away your history, your personality, the very life that you have lived. When we are gone, our possessions remain; they give our loved ones something to remember us by.

"You're right," she muttered, "I don't understand."

The next day I continued to sift through the endless clutter. Hong set out for a long walk, much to my relief. I'd been afraid that she might embark on a clear-out when I wasn't looking. I dropped in on the pub for a snack lunch, and found myself chatting to the Russian barmaid. Anya was a pretty student, on a gap year. Something prompted me to ask for her phone number, and she wrote it down for me with a coquettish smile.

When Hong returned late in the afternoon, she was sneezing and out of humour. I pointed out that opening windows on a damp winter's day had been unwise, and she stomped off to bed with a gla.s.s of whisky and a paperback of Zuleika Dobson that she'd found under a pile of coffee filters in a kitchen cupboard. She was a voracious reader of English fiction, one of the reasons why she had mastered the language, and I said she ought to be thrilled to live in a house containing as many novels as a public library. She sniffed and headed upstairs without another word.

As the bedroom door slammed, I picked up the phone, and dialled Beazell's office.

"How did you come to meet my grandfather?"

The solicitor hesitated. "Why do you ask?"

"You're a criminal lawyer. Did Rafe do something wrong?"

"Certainly not." Beazell sounded as if I'd impugned his integrity. "Innocent until proven guilty, that's the law of the land."

"But he was accused of something?"

"He was a man of certain ... tastes, shall we say? His lifestyle was by no means risk-free, his untimely demise is evidence for that."

"What happened?"

Beazell sighed. "He is dead now, so I am not breaching a confidence. A young Filipina accused him of whipping her black and blue; she claimed he was a s.a.d.i.s.t. He insisted that the, um, acts in question were consensual."

"Was he prosecuted?"

"A summons was issued, but the complainant dropped the charges and refused to testify. The case collapsed."

"A change of mind? Or did he buy the girl off?"

"I will not dignify that question with an answer." I pictured Beazell puffing out his sallow cheeks. "Suffice to say that I gave my client certain advice as to his future conduct. He went to his grave without a stain on his character."

I put the phone down and stared at the contents of the casket I'd discovered under Rafe's bed after returning from the pub. It wasn't covered in as much dust as the rest of his possessions, and I suspected that he regularly inspected its contents. When I grew frustrated after trying a couple of dozen keys in the lock, I took a hammer he'd kept in the dining room and smashed open the lid. Inside the casket were photographs, some of which I recognized. A portrait of Ramona was among them, another showed the girl from Thailand in the nude.

But it wasn't the photographs that made me catch my breath, but the spangly brooch that once adorned Ramona's prominent chest, the little round spectacles worn by the Thai girl, the heart-shaped locket containing a picture of a Slavic woman. Hooped ear-rings which I recognized from another woman who posed for one of Rafe's photographs. And a whip streaked with dark blotches.

In my head, I heard my grandfather's silky tones. A conversation I'd forgotten until this very moment.

"You may consider it strange that I surround myself with so much ephemera, but the most precious of my possessions make me feel more real. Tangible reminders of the life I've lived, and those with whom I've shared it. Memories of the highs and the lows, the ups and downs. These are things to be cherished, not tossed away as if they never mattered."

"I think I understand," I'd said, although, until now, I had not. He'd smiled and said, "Well, well, my boy. I believe you do."