The Silent Stranger Read online

  THE SILENT STRANGER

  Aileen Izett

  © Aileen Izett 2019

  Aileen Izett has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2019 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 1

  My brother killed my father. The papers described it as a tragic accident, but our mother blamed Tom. I saw how she looked at him, with his knobbly knees and baggy shorts, tears welling up in her eyes. I felt so sorry for him, for us. We were cast adrift by our mother’s grief and we clung to each other. For years afterwards, when he cried in his sleep, I climbed into bed to console him. Our mother’s bedroom door remained an oblong of shadow, resolutely shut. I stopped when his legs got too hairy and scratchy for comfort.

  Of course now, older than she was at the time, I understand. She never really recovered from the shock of our father’s sudden death but children don’t see that, do they? They just perceive a lack of love. I looked after my little brother and my brother loved me. I loved my brother.

  Tom was six and I was eight. The loss of our father reverberated throughout our lives, like the hollow sound of an empty drum. It made us who we were — what we were. Tom tried to please and to succeed, and he was successful; by the age of twenty-five he was a millionaire, able to offer his mother a flat in Chelsea. I, on the other hand, had no real ambition although I did become an acknowledged expert in my field. Tom’s success mattered more. It was a vindication of sorts, for our father. He’d been a successful novelist, but we’d never had any money. It was a worry, a recurring theme of our childhood. I was so proud of Tom’s achievements.

  As the years went by, we saw less of each other but on the rare occasions when we did meet, Tom still confided in me. Earlier this year, it must have been February, so eight months ago now, we met at one of the grand be-flagged hotels off Park Lane. I could hear the excitement in his voice and, despite his protestations, I thought he had found another woman so I was surprised when he moved the cutlery to one side and spread photographs of the château across the damask tablecloth. He looked to me for approval, twinkling with the joy of it all. “Isn’t it fantastic?” He wanted me to supervise the renovations for him, and to keep the château secret from his wife. “Please, Sis. I want to surprise Sam and the kids.”

  “How can I?” I said. “I can’t just up and leave. I’m in the middle of a job. And what about Philip?”

  “Oh him,” Tom teased, “he’s just a husband. You’ll only ever have one brother, and that’s me.” He spent months trying to persuade me to go to France and then, one night in June, I changed my mind. Tom didn’t ask me why. Besides, my distress must have been evident in my voice. He said simply that I would find the key inside the fifth urn on the terrace.

  I caught the first ferry out of Dover and when it docked at Calais, I pressed my foot down on the accelerator. I didn’t give any thought to the refugees loitering by the roadside. I drove at a pace, only stopping when I ran out of petrol which happened twice en route down the map of France, once landing me on the edge of a motorway with a long trudge to the petrol station, a few miles back.

  By the time I reached Provence, my little car was protesting, having been driven too fast for too long. The final climb up the steep hill from the village proved too much. The car spluttered to a halt at the gates, except there were no gates, just two crumbling pillars with a couple of stone lions on top, guarding a remnant of an avenue.

  I couldn’t see a house behind the wall of vegetation. I couldn’t hear anything except the screech of insects. I turned the key in the ignition. The engine clicked. I sat for a second or two, slumped with disappointment, listening to the sudden stillness. Then the strum of cicadas started, pounding and invisible. I opened the door. Even though it was evening, the air still pulsed with heat.

  My legs were wobbly after being so long in the car. After a few long deep breaths, I became aware of the sour, dank smell of too many plants in too little light. There was rubbish tangled in the creepers and bushes — a mattress, the frame of a pushchair, a discarded shoe and high up on a branch, a plastic supermarket bag hanging like a deflated flag. I noticed then, the sign for the Château Bellevue, half-hidden by weeds at the base of one of the pillars.

  Someone, recently, had beaten a track through the undergrowth. My heart started to pound. I looked back at the way I had come. I was an adult. I had travelled too far. I couldn’t retreat.

  I took my suitcase out of the car, the thud of the boot causing birds to crash into the sky, momentarily silencing the cicadas. I followed whoever it had been, deeper and deeper into the twilight cast by the trees. I forced myself to put one foot high in front of the other and not to give in to terror. I have a pathological fear of snakes and it doesn’t help that I know that it is associated with that last summer, thirty-six years ago, when our father died.

  *

  We’d been staying in North Devon, in a cottage I called the Gingerbread House. My father was finishing his fifth novel which would be published posthumously to great acclaim, while our mother looked after us, read newspapers and smoked cigarettes in the sun. It was August 1973 and she was riveted by the Watergate scandal in America.

  Tom and I were out from the moment we got up to the moment we went to bed. Our parents were lax about bedtime, sitting in the garden over a bottle of beer until they became shapes in the twilight, still talking. Sometimes they argued but not often, not like at home in London.

  The Gingerbread garden was a gloriously overgrown wilderness. There were bushes with overhanging branches which became dens, trees that were castles and a well which served as the dragon’s lair. I was the bossy princess and Tom my obedient prince, charging to my rescue, a broom between his legs as his steadfast mount.

  If I hadn’t been searching for our stripy ball in the long grass — everything would have been different.

  *

  When I stumbled out of the thicket and into the light, I could have been an eight-year-old princess all over again. Half castle, half manor house, the château reared up before me, a breath-taking concoction of pink stone. Great arched doors s
liced through its middle. Three rows of long opaque windows reflected the setting sun. A carved stone staircase wound up to the double front door, blue paint almost peeled away. In the right-hand corner, a tower with a green roof and a crooked cockerel for a weathervane pressed into the pale evening sky. Above it all, a solitary bird was wheeling.

  The fifth urn on the balustrade was easy to spot. It was the only one with creeper wrenched away. I mounted the steps to the front door, full of trepidation and self-doubt. The key was so long and heavy I needed both hands to turn the lock.

  As soon as I pushed the door shut, a sense of peace overwhelmed me. Maybe it was the solidity of the two foot wide stone walls, or the coolness of the shaded air; more probably it was the fact that, after eighteen hours of driving, I’d reached my destination. The broken loveliness of the stained glass window, lit up by a dying sun, rose up from the central landing of the enormous oak staircase, which divided into two to sweep up to a gallery on the floor above. The great window reached almost to the height of the vaulted ceiling. I let my back slide down the door’s smooth worn wood and stretched out my legs. It was enough for me, for a while. I was simply glad to have arrived.

  There were five doors, three on one side of the stairs, two on the other, either side of an arch which led to a dark corridor. Four doors were shut. I thought I saw a snake which made me nearly pass out — but when I managed to look again, it was a length of thick rope, slung over the only door ajar. The night was closing in, very quickly. I hauled myself up. I snapped on the cheap plastic light switch. A faint pink glow fizzed into the silence from under the chintz shades of twelve pairs of wall lights.

  The château wasn’t the empty space I’d expected. The hall was full of shadow as happens in old houses and there was furniture: two high-backed winged armchairs set in front of the enormous fireplace, a long low wooden chest against one wall and a pile of old mattresses precariously arranged one on top of the other. A crumpled plastic bottle was chucked into the ashes of the huge grate. A broken chair lay overturned in front of the stairs and a rag had been dropped onto the bottommost tread.

  I nearly turned heel and fled when I noticed the set of footprints winding in and out of out of each room and disappearing down the dark corridor. I forced myself to examine the tracks and could tell by the thickness of the dust that they weren’t recent. Still though, I called “hello?” and froze, thinking that someone unseen was in the hall with me, as my echo returned my greeting. Eventually it subsided under the weight of the silence.

  My footfall sounded strange. Muffled. I opened the first door to the left. I tugged on the light pull. A cavernous brown toilet, thick with dead flies in a stained pan. I let the water from the washbasin trickle over my fingers.

  I was too tired to explore the château that evening. I didn’t stray from the hall. I just switched on the lights of the adjoining rooms because unfamiliar surroundings and a darkness without ambient light are uncomfortable bedfellows. I liked the fact that all the rooms were furnished. The huge prints of Andy Warhol and Marilyn Monroe in the salon were so incongruous that they made me laugh out loud.

  Then an old-fashioned sound almost jolted me out of my skin. It came from the dining hall. I couldn’t see a telephone. I couldn’t locate the answering machine which clicked and whirred into action.

  A man spoke into the room. I didn’t understand the French, but his voice was so beguilingly reassuring, he could have been speaking to me. When I heard Philip’s light hesitant voice following the beep, the anger deep inside me scorched my throat like bile. “I’m not sure I’ve got the right place, but I’ve got this number from Tom Braid, my wife’s brother… could you ask my wife to ring me please?”

  If I had phoned anyone that evening, it would have been Tom. “Thank you,” I would have said. “Thank you for letting me come at such short notice. You’re the best brother in the world.” I’d have meant it. He’d saved me from myself.

  I kept the recorded message for a long time — that is, until it became imperative to erase that voice from the face of the earth. I listened to it in the evening sometimes, when I couldn’t think of anything else to do. After Eveline arrived, there was no need. I was no longer rattling about the château on my own in the evening with only shadows for company.

  Chapter 2

  By the time Eveline arrived in August, I had been at the château for two months. All the major work on the house had been done. I had stripped it back to its beautiful bones. Nothing new had been introduced — no kitchens or bathrooms, no fancy heating or plumbing. The house was functioning but rudimentary, just as Tom wanted, not that he had visited to tell me. Dear Tom. He telephoned regularly — ostensibly to discuss the work on the château, but really to make sure that I was okay.

  “Remember, nothing major,” he’d bellow reassuringly. “Just habitable. How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” I’d say, “but…”

  “Yes?” And I would tell him about the latest oddity, like the passport I’d found stuffed at the back of a drawer or the three boxes of tongue scrapers, high up on a shelf in the downstairs cloakroom.

  He’d be cheerfully insouciant. “Get rid of it/them,” he’d say. “Now, tell me how you are,” with a heavy emphasis on the word ‘you’.

  The grounds too had been transformed in that relatively short time, once the fly-tipping had been taken away. The château’s façade shimmered, between clumps of water lilies, across the surface of the ornamental pond. There was a semblance of lawns with their little bits of topiary which I’d refashioned into basic toadstool shapes. The flower borders at the front of the house were rampant with verbena, lavender and poppy. At the back of the house, there was a swimming pool with blue and white marble tiles which sparkled beneath a sheet of tantalisingly clear, clean water.

  Even the avenue had been reinstated to the gates with three hundred and ten loads of gravel all levelled and raked — except that there were still no gates. Tom said the budget wouldn’t stretch to gates. I argued that if he could afford a château, surely he could afford gates. I couldn’t understand what he had against gates.

  I couldn’t have done any of it without Greg, the local English builder. He pitched up at some unearthly hour on my first morning. “Your brother said that you’d be coming. Saw the car at the entrance,” he said by way of explanation when I’d finally managed to haul the front door open. I’d bunked down for the night near the door, on a mattress which I’d pulled off the pile in the hall. Greg could see exactly where I’d slept but he didn’t make a comment and I liked him instantly for it. Besides, he was a friendly figure: a tall, gangly man with a crooked nose, a shock of yellow hair, and a smile which was so huge that it lifted his large ears. I smiled back, my first genuine smile for months.

  “I can’t offer you a cup of tea or coffee.”

  “No worries,” he said, pulling a carton of milk out of one of the capacious pockets in his overalls. “I’ll make one for you.”

  He led me through the dark corridor and down a flight of stairs. I found myself in the kitchen which was enormous and basic with a range and sink at one end, and a long well-worn table and dresser at the other. One wall was lined with cupboards. Greg flung open door after door, revealing shelf after shelf of non-perishable foodstuffs, until he found the stash of twenty or more bags of coffee.

  He rummaged around the dresser and flourished a percolator at me, like a rabbit out of a hat. He was enjoying my surprise.

  “Everything’s been left?”

  “And then some,” he said. “You should see upstairs.”

  “How many rooms are there?”

  “Twenty-one, plus two in the turret.”

  They were his footsteps I’d seen in the dust in the hall. He’d spent several hours at the château the previous week because Tom had asked him to supervise the reconnection of the services before I arrived. “I see,” I said, thinking how prescient Tom had been, as I had no idea that I’d be leaving for France until an hour or so befor
e my departure.

  We inspected the château together that first day. In the clear morning light, there was a sense of abandonment about the place — an air of desolation, of lives curtailed. In the salon, for example, there were magazines five years out of date on the coffee table, a man’s sweater slung over one of the three white leather sofas, and a pair of leather slippers by the hearth. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust.

  It was not a large château, as châteaux go. The ground floor comprised of the entrance hall, a salon, a dining hall, a small library and down the corridor which led to the backstairs for the kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom. The bedroom, with a double aspect, was the most beautiful in the house. To the front, a view of the Provençal hills and to the back, a view across the swimming pool terrace to the woods.

  On the first floor, the sense of dereliction grew stronger, along with another feeling I couldn’t quite place. By then, we’d been silenced by the hush of the house, beckoning each other to come and see bare wires protruding from walls and ceilings, holes in the lath and plaster, water stains where the plumbing had leaked.

  Unlike the bedroom off the hall, none of the rooms had a bed. They were furnished very erratically in varying combinations of wardrobes, chests of drawers, tables and chairs. The rooms on the second floor were completely empty apart from one which was full of gym equipment, its expensive machinery reeking machismo from beneath grey cloaks of dust.

  It dawned on me then.

  Only men had lived there. It explained the atmosphere which lingered in the salon; the cupboards and drawers overflowing with men’s clothing and the bathroom cabinets packed with their toiletries. It was the explanation for the rusty razors in the toothbrush mugs, the pin-up tacked to the back of a door, the odd pornographic magazine we’d seen. It explained the almost barrack-like feel of the place. A sense of the absent male permeated the château, as pungent as the odour of a tomcat.

  “Who lived here before?” I asked Greg. He had his back to me, checking a window frame for rot.