The Convenience of Lies Read online

  The Convenience Of Lies

  Geoffrey Seed

  © Geoffrey Seed 2014

  Geoffrey Seed has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2014.

  Any similarity between a fictional character and an actual person is unintended

  www.geoffreyseed.com

  Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Joan Ruleman

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Acknowledgements

  Credits

  Extract from A Place of Strangers by Geoffrey Seed

  As for certain truth,

  no man has known it… for all is

  but a woven web of guesses.

  Xenophon

  435-354BC

  Prologue

  On the day little Ruby Ross disappeared and her mother became so consumed by fears of death she could barely speak or breathe, it was hot enough for a television weather man to go into the street and fry an egg on a car. He cracked it into pool of cooking oil spitting on the bonnet then prodded away with a wooden spatula till the egg was round and sunny and good enough to eat.

  Ruby thought this silly. Eggs must only be fried in a frying pan, never on a car and she would have shouted this at the TV but something different came on. Army men were firing guns at people running across a sandy beach towards the sea. Then a helicopter flew low over the building where the picture-maker was hiding by a window. There was lots of swirling black smoke and really loud bangs. Some children screamed and the grown-ups were yelling in a language Ruby did not know for this was happening in a faraway place where palm trees grew.

  She was sure this wasn’t make-believe. It was on the news and they only put grown-up things like wars on the news. Violence frightened Ruby. She jumped up from the settee and pushed through the beaded curtain to the kitchen then out into the safety of the communal yard with its bins and bikes and cars with no wheels, all simmering in the summer heat.

  Ruby felt happier here. Mum would be too busy to wonder where she might be or what she was up to. She was still with the man who often came to their flat for a reading. He had pink eyes and a mark like strawberry jam on his neck. Mum called him Mr Ginger because of his hair.

  Ruby always registered those who materialised in the landscape of her closed and very private life. The art was in the seeing. The camera of her mind’s eye ensured those she did not like could never cross into her world - the one beyond the casual cruelties of this world.

  ‘You go and watch television or do your drawing,’ Mum said. ‘I’ve got work to do.’

  Then she’d led Mr Ginger into her bedroom. Ruby heard the key turn and a cassette of wave and waterfall music click on. Mum always took her regulars in there. She would close the velvet curtains then light candles scented like peaches, which glowed behind lumps of amethyst in front of the dressing table mirror.

  So now Ruby could play as she pleased and make herself invisible to the other neighbourhood children. She was glad they didn’t want her at school any more. It only upset her there and gave her angry tempers. They said she was bad so she knew there must be a naughty part of her brain, which made her different. It was best for everyone for Ruby to be on her own.

  She left Linden House and turned into Woodberry Street, lined with poplar trees where she’d seen spiky green caterpillars crawling in the leaves. The air tasted gritty and smelled like disinfectant from the melting road tar being squeezed into folds beneath the wheels of the rat-run traffic.

  It took only a moment for Ruby to be absorbed into a blur of strangers - women in saris pushing prams, men with skullcaps carrying food for Shabbes in blue plastic bags. Few would later recall such a waif of a girl, ghosting between the bleaching sunlight and the dusty shadows.

  Here was a child hiding in plain sight, eyes averted and hugging the wall. Those who might have noticed her couldn’t be sure if they had when police came to question them later.

  For now, Ruby considered going to Café Leila where they gave her milk and biscuits because she weighed no more than a doll and needed nourishing. But she didn’t and that was a tragedy, as Leila would tell the policeman who called.

  ‘Such evil in the world you wouldn’t believe,’ she said. ‘We’re all as the leaves in autumn. We come, we go, we blow away - but not to vanish like this.’

  Ruby made instead for her favourite place in all her world - the reservoir. It would be cool there. She could climb her magic tree and watch for her unicorn and be safe from all she didn’t understand. So Ruby skipped her oblivious way down Park Street, by the carousels of fast drying washing on lawns of beaten earth and as she did, she sang to herself for whom at all the open windows would bother to listen?

  Six little mice sat down to spin, Pussy passed by and she peeped in.

  What are you doing, my little men? Weaving coats for gentlemen.

  Never once did she step on a crack or a sweet wrapper so Ruby’s special rules allowed her passage to the most secret of paths without having to start all over again. But first, she must spin round twice on one leg then bow three times to the guards of the bushes so they might raise their swords and let her through.

  Then Ruby was free to run into the tunnel of darkness ahead. Yet she must be quick for there was danger within. The overhanging laurel twigs caught in her wiry brown hair like the claws of bats and that scared her. But at the far end was the wooden fence where it took only a second to be up and over and into the Promised Land beyond.

  On the far bank of the reservoir was the yellow castle - her castle, reflected on the placid sheen of water, all turrets and towers and bigger than a hundred houses. Here was where the unicorn lived and Ruby reigned, a princess worshipped by each of her subjects and all their animals, for they thought her the most beautiful and wise ruler they could ever have.

  Ruby never needed to actually go inside the yellow castle to know where each log-smoked fireplace was placed, where every brocaded curtain hung and each foot-worn corridor led. These were her hidden places where only Princess Ruby could go for the key to the castle’s iron-studded door was in her head… and no one knew how to get in there.

  So she made for her great horse chestnut tree and its cruck of high branches from where she could gaze across to the battlements of her fortress haven and act out her engagements for another royal day.

  Shall I come in and cut off your threads?

  No, no, Mistress Pussy, you’d bite off our heads.

  But something dar
k moved across her path between the clumps of marsh grass and the snagging brambles alongside. It was only a small shadow, no bigger than a man’s and would soon vanish as the massing thunderheads smothered the sun.

  Ruby stopped singing. Later that night, her mother’s cries would echo back from the sheer cliff face of the castle walls and slip unanswered beneath the inky black waters far below.

  One

  McCall never wanted to be in Oxford that morning, shouldn’t have let himself be bounced into seeing a psychiatrist when all he wished for was to be left alone. The session was the mistake he feared so he’d walked out.

  Three heretics were once chained to stakes and burned like witches near to where he now stood. The martyrs’ sculpted images stared blindly from the whittled stone spire commemorating their tortured passage to heaven. People still held what others charged were false beliefs but they were tethered to couches now, consumed only by their own despair.

  In his heart and in his bones, McCall knew he and his career were fast falling to earth and he’d lost the means to save himself. One is what one does. If there is no purpose to it any more, what fills the void or banishes the shame of that which cannot be put right?

  McCall never truly signed up for the interrogation he’d just quit. He had neither the desire nor the courage to submit to the artful little man in the brown cord suit and lemon bow tie who feigned insight into a world of which he could know nothing.

  ‘Why have you stopped being a journalist, Mr McCall?’

  ‘I haven’t, not really.’

  ‘So when did you last write for a newspaper or research a television programme?’

  ‘A while back.’

  ‘Why might that be?’

  ‘I’ve needed some time out.’

  ‘What about Iraq invading Kuwait only this week? That’s your sort of story, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not anymore.’

  ‘Is that because your wife worries about the risks you take?’

  ‘I’m not married.’

  ‘And you’ve no girlfriend or a partner?’

  ‘No one who goes the distance, no.’

  ‘Do you find commitment difficult, then?’

  ‘No… sometimes.’

  ‘Right, well we can come back to that. Now, the note from your GP says your last assignment was in Africa. I don’t know that part of the world, so where were you?’

  ‘In the north of Namibia, near the border with Angola.’

  ‘That’s a pretty dangerous place, isn’t it? Always a war going on.’

  ‘It’s called the liberation struggle.’

  ‘Or what the South African government calls terrorism?’

  ‘It’s a cliché but don’t they say one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter?’

  ‘I suppose so but what was the story you were after?’

  McCall broke off eye contact then to stare instead at the diorama of tawny-coloured colleges beyond the window, each patinated by age and learning and set beneath the turrets and towers of churches demanding obeisance to an all-powerful God.

  ‘Did something happen out in Africa, Mr McCall… happen to you, I mean?’

  It wasn’t the shrink’s fault - and it was arrogant to entertain the thought - but what direct experience had he of the unquiet world outside his consulting room? Neither his words nor his drugs could ever erase the blurred little cave paintings of memory McCall saw in the dark or absolve him from all the occluded guilt of years spent whoring through the misery of others.

  This was his problem… that and the face of the Namibian boy staring up from the bloody earth at a white man in a blue sky getting darker with every click of a camera. The image drew McCall back again and again to a tiny kraal in a wilderness of thorn bushes. The child’s lips move though he has nothing to say any more. His eyelids flutter, moths at a flame, then are still. All is quiet but for the gathering of flies and the shrieks of scavenging birds circling on a thermal high above.

  How pink human tissue is, how like ivory our bones. And in the sand, amid the shit of animals, the brass casings of bullets glint like golden splinters.

  The boy hadn’t fallen alone that day. But, unlike them, McCall was spirited to safety. Those whose eviscerated lives had little value but to enrich his own were left to bloat in the pitiless heat.

  Yet here was a crime scene. His fingerprints were everywhere should anyone care to look. The proof was in each of his pictures. More powerfully, it was in his head and in the eyes of a child with no name who may haunt him forever.

  But under the psychiatrist’s questioning, McCall knew he was being opened up, slowly and slyly as he, himself, had done so often as a hack to get inside whomever he’d needed to befriend or suborn.

  ‘Look, no offence but I feel a real fraud for coming to see you.’

  ‘Believe me you shouldn’t, not for a moment.’

  ‘No, but I do. You must have far needier patients than me.’

  ‘Possibly, but you require my help too… and you’re here now.’

  ‘But only because I fancied a drive through the Cotswolds.’

  ‘Why do you make so light of what’s affecting you, Mr McCall?’

  ‘Because I don’t want the black dog barking too loudly.’

  ‘Should I take that as a tacit acknowledgement of your depression?’

  McCall had admitted too much already. It wasn’t just political lives which were doomed to end in failure. He rose and moved towards the door.

  ‘Leave if you must but talk to someone, Mr McCall. Anyone, doesn’t have to be me.’

  He went without another word and made no new appointment. Outside, he shielded his eyes against the fierce August sun. He thought of crossing the street for no other purpose than to look more closely at the Martyrs’ Memorial or to see the ancient gate charred by the very flames which were the winding sheets of the heretics.

  But there seemed no point - not to this or much else. His Morgan was parked near the station. He would head home to the Welsh border country, foot hard down as if nothing really mattered.

  Being in Oxford somehow made everything worse. Its cleverness and urbanity were mortared between the stones, cut and dressed and perfectly appointed. Those who studied here had that look of brahminical entitlement to succeed where he had long since failed. It was no longer possible for McCall to be the person he pretended to be. Africa had finally robbed him of artifice and condemned him to wander his own little asphodel meadow.

  He turned by the haughtily gothic Randolph Hotel but was stopped from going any further by a line of metal barriers. Beaumont Street was closed off for the filming of a new episode of Inspector Morse.

  McCall scanned the TV production crew with a casual interest. He’d worked with the sound man fitting a radio mic inside Morse’s jacket and got a surprised but friendly wave. Then his gaze then fell on someone else he knew yet whose coincidental presence in that street at that moment defied all logic.

  On the hotel steps stood Lexie Nadin, his personal Lorelei whose treacherous song he once followed to near destruction. Her hair was no longer the colour of straw but a salty, driftwood grey. Yet that odd conjunction of a child’s smile in a courtesan’s face had barely altered.

  Almost a quarter century had passed since he last woke beside her and saw in those sea-green eyes all the promises she went on to break.

  And now the once stage-struck hopeful who needed drama every day, was preparing to shoot a scene in “Inspector Morse”.

  What confronted McCall was surreal… life conflating with art. How could any of this be? Hurt and bitterness were supposed to fade in time for there is no grave over which grass will not eventually grow. For an instant, he felt again that gravitational pull he’d once been powerless to resist. But that was then. Fragile as he might be, McCall still retained some instinct for self-preservation. He took a couple of steps back into the anonymous crowd of autograph hunters and tourists then vanished before he could be seen. At least, that’s what he thou
ght.

  Two

  At home next morning, McCall re-read the letter from his adoptive mother’s solicitor and knew a melancholy duty could be put off no longer.

  Dear Mac

  I write to say that all the legal formalities conveying Mrs Beatrice Wrenn’s estate to you as sole beneficiary viz Garth Hall near Ludlow, Shropshire, all contents, land, shares etc, are almost complete. I also enclose a note she wrote for you and which has just been forwarded to my office from the care home in Israel where she died.

  It would have been my wish to have accompanied you when her ashes are scattered on Long Mynd as per her instructions. Alas, I must plead old age and infirmity but I will think of you when, in due course, you do so - albeit that I shall have a heavy heart. Beatrice was a most remarkable woman and it was an honour for me to have been both friend and adviser to her and to her late husband.

  Bea’s writing was barely legible. Her sight had almost gone by the end. The multiple strokes she had suffered impaired the ability of this once cinematically captivating woman to walk or talk.

  Yet she had managed to scrawl a final message to the man she helped to mould - however imperfectly - from the mutely damaged little boy whose birth parents died in tragic circumstances.

  Think only of our happy days, Mac. Forgive my failings, please, but I tried my best, poor though it was. I was cursed to live in interesting times.

  There is a line in the Talmud, which I once heard, something about life being a passing shadow, the shadow of a bird in its flight so take heed of this, dearest boy. My most fervent wish is for you to find the peace of mind you have always sought.

  Later that day, McCall paused amid the heather and curlew calls of Long Mynd, a thousand feet and more up its rocky breastbone. He looked over towards the wooded Welsh hills where Bea’s roots were deep laid.

  She’d known the misty flounces of the Mynd, places of myth and legend, battles and sorcery, of bronze-age burial sites and the still-used pathways of Neolithic traders. Bea played games in these ice-gouged valleys as a child, made camp fires, feasted on sweet wimberries and ran herself ragged in a breeze which blew from all the counties at her feet and the world beyond.