Donald looked at her in surprise, and I had a vivid impression of his saying soon in his golf club, ‘My brother, the amateur’jockey…’, knowing that if I’d been a professional he would have hushed it up if he could. A real snob, Donald: but there were worse sins.
Debs, Ferdinand’s second wife, had come to the races in a black leather coat belted at the waist, with shoulder-length blond hair above and long black boots below. Her eyelids were purple, like her fingernails. The innocence I’d photographed in her a year ago was in danger of disappearing.
Ferdinand, shorter than Debs and more like Malcolm than ever, appeared to be in his usual indecision over whether I was to be loved or hated. I smiled at him cheerfully and asked what sort of a journey he’d had.
‘A lot of traffic,’ he said lamely.
‘We didn’t come here to talk about traffic,’ Serena said forbiddingly. ‘We want to know where Daddy is.’
Malcolm’s little Serena, now taller than he, was dressed that day in royal blue with white frills at neck and wrists, a white woollen hat with a pompom on top covering her cap of fair hair. She looked a leggy sixteen, not ten years older. Her age showed only in the coldness of her manner towards me, which gave no sign of thawing.
In her high-pitched, girlish voice she said, ‘We want him to settle very substantial sums on us all right now. Then he can go to blazes with the rest.’
I blinked. ‘Who are you quoting?’ I asked.
‘Myself,’ she said loftily, and then more probably added, ‘Mummy too. And Gervase.’
It had Gervase’s thuggish style stamped all over it.
Donald and Helen looked distinctly interested in the proposal. Ferdinand and Debs had of course heard it before.
‘Gervase thinks it’s the best solution,’ Ferdinand said, nodding.
I doubted very much that Malcolm would agree, but said only, ‘I’ll pass on your message next time he gets in touch with me.’
‘But Joyce is sure you know where he is,’ Donald objected.
‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘Do you know that Lucy and Edwin are here too?’
They were satisfactorily diverted, looking over their shoulders to see if they could spot them in the growing crowds.
‘Didn’t Joyce tell you she was sending so many of you here?’ I asked generally, and it was Ferdinand, sideways, his face turned away, who answered.
‘She told Serena to come here. She told Serena to tell me, which she did, so we came together. I didn’t know about Donald and Helen or Lucy and Edwin. I expect she wanted to embarrass you.’
His eyes swivelled momentarily to my face, wanting to see my reaction. I don’t suppose my face showed any. Joyce might call me ‘darling’ with regularity but could be woundingly unkind at the same time, and I’d had a lifetime to grow armour.
Ferdinand happened to be standing next to me. I said on impulse into his ear, ‘Ferdinand, who killed Moira?’
He stopped looking for Lucy and Edwin and transferred his attention abruptly and wholly to me. I could see calculations going on in the pause before he answered, but I had no decoder for his thoughts. He was the most naturally congenial to me of all my brothers, yet the others were open books compared with him. He was secretive, as perhaps I was myself. He had wanted to build his own kitchen-wall hidey-hole when I’d built mine, only Malcolm had said we must share, that one was enough. Ferdinand had sulked and shunned me for a while, and smirked at Gervase’s dead rats. I wondered to what extent people remained the same as they’d been when very young: whether it was safe to assume they hadn’t basically changed, to believe that if one could peel back the layers of living one would come to the known child. I wanted Ferdinand to be as I had known him at ten, eleven, twelve — a boy dedicated to riding a bicycle while standing on his head on the saddle — and not in a million years a murderer.
‘I don’t know who killed Moira,’ he said finally. ‘Alicia says you did. She told the police it had to be you.’
‘I couldn’t have.’
‘She says the police could break your alibi if they really tried.’
I knew that they had really tried: they’d checked every separate five minutes of my day, and their manner and their suspicions had been disturbing.