LITMIR.BIZ

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would have had no patience with any conversation that was not serving a clear purpose. Gossip and its purveyors had drawn his contempt like little else, especially when he knew he was the subject of the tittle-tattle. As to gazing out of a window and wondering how others were faring in the cold, that would have been literally unthinkable two months before. She liked the change, just as she liked the new-found nobility in his profile. Seeing the hidden man revealed gave her faith in her own judgement. Perhaps it was this Estabrook she’d loved all along.

      They spoke for a while more, without returning to any of the personal matters between them, and parted on friendly terms, with an embrace that was genuinely warm.

      ‘When will you come again?’ he asked her.

      ‘In the next couple of days,’ she told him.

      ‘I’ll be waiting.’

      So, the gifts she’d found in the safe had come from Oscar Godolphin. Oscar the mysterious, who’d kept the family name while brother Charles had disowned it; Oscar the enigmatic; Oscar the globe-trotter. How far afield had he gone, she wondered, to have returned with such outré trophies? Somewhere out of this world, perhaps, into the same remoteness to which she’d seen Gentle and Pie’oh’pah dispatch themselves? She began to suspect that there was some conspiracy aboard. If two men who had no knowledge of each other, Oscar Godolphin and John Zacharias, knew about this other world and how to remove themselves there, how many others in her circle also knew? Was it information only available to men? Did it come with the penis and a mother fixation, as part of the male apparatus? Had Taylor known? Did Clem? Or was this some kind of family secret, and the part of the puzzle she was missing was the link between a Godolphin and a Zacharias?

      Whatever the explanation, it was certain she would not get answers from Gentle, which meant she had to seek out brother Oscar. She tried by the most direct route first: the telephone directory. He wasn’t listed. She then tried via Lewis Leader, but he claimed to have no knowledge of the man’s whereabouts or fortunes, telling her that the affairs of the two brothers were quite separate, and he had never been called to deal with any matter involving Oscar Godolphin.

      ‘For all I know,’ he said, ‘the man could be dead.’

      Having drawn a blank with the direct routes, she was thrown back upon the indirect. She returned to Estabrook’s house and scoured it thoroughly, looking for Oscar’s address or telephone number. She found neither, but she did turn up a photograph album Charlie had never shown to her, in which pictures of what she took to be the two brothers appeared. It wasn’t difficult to distinguish one from the other. Even in those early pictures Charlie had the troubled look the camera always found in him, whereas Oscar, younger by half a dozen years, was nevertheless the more confident of the pair; a little overweight, but carrying it easily, smiling an easy smile as he hooked his arm around his brother’s shoulders. She removed the most recent of the photographs, which pictured Charles at puberty, or thereabouts, from the album, and kept it. Repetition, she found, made theft easier. But it was the only information about Oscar she took away with her. If she was to get to the traveller, and find out in what world he’d bought his souvenirs, she’d have to work on Estabrook to do so. It would take time, and her impatience grew with every short and rainy day. Even though she had the freedom to buy a ticket anywhere on the planet, a kind of claustrophobia was upon her. There was another world to which she wanted access. Until she got it, the Earth itself would be a prison.

      3

      Leader called Oscar on the morning of 17 January, with the news that his brother’s estranged wife was asking for information on his whereabouts.

      ‘Did she say why?’

      ‘No, not precisely. But she’s very clearly sniffing after something. She’s apparently seen Estabrook three times in the last week.’

      ‘Thank you, Lewis. I appreciate this.’

      ‘Appreciate it in hard cash, Oscar,’ Leader replied. ‘I’ve had a very expensive Christmas.’

      ‘When have you ever gone empty-handed?’ Oscar said. ‘Keep me posted.’

      The lawyer promised to do so, but Oscar doubted he’d provide much more by way of useful information. Only truly despairing souls confided in lawyers, and he doubted Judith was the despairing type. He’d never met her - Charlie had seen to that - but if she’d survived his company for any time at all she had to have a will of iron. Which begged the question: why would a woman who knew (presuming she did) that her husband had conspired to kill her, seek out his company, unless she had an ulterior motive? And was it conceivable that said motive was finding brother Oscar? If so, such curiosity had to be nipped in the bud. There were already enough variables at play, what with the Society’s purge now underway, and the inevitable police investigation on its heels, not to mention his new major domo Augustine (né Dowd) who was behaving in altogether too snotty a fashion. And of course, most volatile of these variables, sitting in his asylum beside the Heath, Charlie himself, probably crazy, certainly unpredictable, with all manner of titbits in his head which could do Oscar a lot of harm. It could be only a matter of time before he started to become talkative, and when he did what better ear to drop his discretions into than that of his enquiring wife?

      That evening he sent Dowd (he couldn’t get used to that saintly Augustine) up to the clinic, with a basket of fruit for his brother.

      ‘Find a friend there, if you can,’ he told Dowd. ‘I need to know what Charlie babbles about when he’s being bathed.’

      ‘Why don’t you ask him directly?’

      ‘He hates me, that’s why. He thinks I stole his mess of pottage when Papa introduced me into the Tabula Rasa instead of Charlie?’

      ‘Why did your father do that?’

      ‘Because he knew Charlie was unstable, and he’d do the Society more harm than good. I’ve had him under control until now. He’s had his little gifts from the Dominions. He’s had you fawn upon him when he needed something out of the ordinary, like his assassin! This all started with that fucking assassin! Why couldn’t you have just killed the woman yourself?’

      ‘What do you take me for?’ Dowd said with distaste. ‘I couldn’t lay hands on a woman. Especially not a beauty.’

      ‘How do you know she’s a beauty?’

      ‘I’ve heard her talked about.’

      ‘Well, I don’t care what she looks like. I don’t want her meddling in my business. Find out what she’s up to. Then we’ll work out our response.’

      Dowd came back a few hours later, with alarming news.

      ‘Apparently she’s persuaded him to take her to the Estate.’

      ‘What? What?’ Oscar bounded from his chair. The parrots rose up squawking in sympathy. ‘She knows more than she should. Shit! All that heartache to keep the Society out of our hair, and now this bitch comes along and we’re in worse trouble than ever.’

      ‘Nothing’s happened yet.’

      ‘But it will, it will! She’ll wind him round her little finger and he’ll tell her everything.’

      ‘What do you want to do about it?’

      Oscar went to hush the parrots. ‘Ideally?’ he said, as he smoothed their ruffled wings. ‘Ideally I’d have Charlie vanish off the face of the earth.’

      ‘He had much the same ambition for her,’ Dowd observed.

      ‘Meaning what?’

      ‘Just that you’re both quite capable of murder.’

      Oscar made a contemptuous grunt. ‘Charlie was only playing at it,’ he said. ‘He’s got no balls! He’s got no vision!’ He returned to his high-backed chair, his expression sullen. ‘It’s not going to hold, damn it,’ he said. ‘I can feel it in my gut. We’ve kept things

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