Death in Disguise Read online

  ‘Danton? You must come over—right away… No—Now! This minute. Something incredible has happened.’

  The loudest sound in the Corniche convertible now inching its way round Ludgate Circus was the bump lurch stagger bump of Guy Gamelin’s heart.

  The calming technique of deep breathing suggested by his man in Harley Street had been impatiently and sketchily resorted to as had the muscle-relaxant drill. Neither had much effect. Guy performed both routines with a deep grudging resentment and then only because he could not bear the thought of paying for advice and not taking it. The fact was he refused to admit that such protective exercises were at all necessary. He was as vigorous now as he had ever been. At forty-five, still shaking hands with youth.

  There was a flutter in his chest. An extremely delicate oscillation like a vibrating feather. Guy rested his fingers against his inside breast pocket feeling the outline of a brown glass bottle without which he had been told never to travel; not even from the bedroom to the loo. He swung out the walnut drinks cabinet, poured a dangerously generous ice-cold Tom Collins and placed a tablet on his tongue. Soon the fluttering ceased and although Guy didn’t relax—he never relaxed—he sat a little more easily on the puffy upholstery. Then he disconnected the phone and let his mind go. Immediately it started to write anticipatory scenarios for the evening’s confrontation, now only hours away.

  Normally when riding out to face an adversary, Guy’s blood would be fizzing with exhilaration. For, more than anything else, he loved a fight. Embattlement was his normal state of mind. He woke each morning from dreams of bloody conquest ready to charge through city boardrooms leaving a trail of wounded enterprises in his wake. Caparisoned by Savile Row, laved and barbered by Trumpers, he saw himself as a twentieth-century merchant prince. In truth he was a robber baron although his lawyers would have crucified the first man bold enough to say so.

  Guy could not bear to lose. He had to be the best at buying and selling; the best at laying waste. His horses must run faster, his yacht be the most splendid. The racing cars he sponsored only came second under his patronage once. ‘Show me a good loser,’ he would bawl into the driver’s sweating, oil-streaked face, ‘and I’ll show you a loser.’

  But although he bought and sold men like so many peanuts and bent whole companies and countless women to his will, there was one area in which, up until now, he had not yet succeeded. Even in this instance, though, the word ‘failed’ was never uttered. The love of Guy’s life, and his greatest torment, was his daughter Sylvie.

  Naturally when Felicity first became pregnant Guy had wanted a boy. He was so used, even in those early days, to getting his own way, that the birth of a girl had devastated him. The measure of his disappointment at this insult to his manhood alarmed his wife, her parents, the hospital staff and anyone else who came within singeing distance. For all he knew (too late, too late), it had even alarmed the baby.

  Guy simmered down over the first few weeks but resignation was not in his nature. He despatched someone to glean the latest information on genetic research from scientific and medical journals and bought the best advice available. It seemed from what he had read that the point had been as good as reached when it was possible to choose the sex of one’s child in advance, and he did not intend to be cheated by nature a second time. But, as it turned out, all the gleaning and expenditure, and bullying confrontations with specialists, were a waste of time and money—for Felicity never conceived again.

  Guy had taken his first mistress during his wife’s pregnancy and suspected that Felicity’s consequent wilful refusal to give increase was a deliberate act of revenge. Later, when this point of view became medically indefensible, he was faced with what was, for a man of his sensibilities, an appalling dilemma. Either he went through life the father of one female child or he began again with another partner, thus announcing to the world that his marriage was a failure.

  To understand the absolute impossibility of such an admission would be to understand what an astonishing, breast-beating triumph his capture of Felicity had been in the first place.

  Her family, of course, had seen him for what he was. They had investigated his background and been appalled. She, fresh from a Geneva finishing school, presented with a collection of suitable young and not-so-young men had found them all pallid in comparison to Guy—who had thrilled and alarmed her in equal measure. Aware of this, he skilfully kept the fear quotient at just the right level. High enough to keep her intrigued, low enough for her to believe that he was tameable if the right girl took him in hand. She was wrong and he destroyed her.

  But their life together, if one could so call such an empty baroque extravaganza, must be seen to continue. He would not be bought off and they had all tried. No one would ever say of him he could not hold what he had won.

  His daughter’s childhood held no interest. He hardly noticed her. There had been nannies (one or two deliciously satisfactory), and occasionally other children in the house. Once Guy came home and found hordes of them with balloons and carnival hats and a man in a harlequin suit riding a one-wheeled bicycle. Sylvie had thanked him gravely on that occasion for a magnificently attired four-foot-high doll that he had never seen before. But mainly she did not impinge and how could Guy, who had no imagination, perceive the passionate longing for love and praise or just simply attention that possessed his daughter’s lonely heart?

  And then, just after her twelfth birthday, everything changed. He remembered the day and time almost to the minute. She had been asked to play something on the piano. Music was on the curriculum at her very expensive boarding school so music she had to learn. Sylvie had no talent for the subject but, compelled to have lessons and practise during term time, had inevitably acquired a rudimentary technique. She had chosen ‘The Robin’s Return’, an old-fashioned, tinkling, rather sentimental tune. Guy had been leaning on the mantelpiece wondering if he had been right in sensing a wind of change in Blue Chip Trusts when he glanced across at the white Steinway and saw, as if for the first time, his daughter’s face.

  Pale, intense, rigid with anxiety. She was frowning and her lips were bitten together in a narrow line of concentration. Thin arms arched high over the keyboard, her shining brown silky little girl’s hair was caught back from her face in a velvet-covered slide. She had been wearing a blue and white striped dress with a large white collar and bow that had fluttery, dark blue streamers. All these things appeared to Guy with such vivid and dazzling clarity that he might only that second have been awarded the gift of sight. And then, before he could become even slightly familiar with this almost hallucinogenic prospect, a second and even stranger thing occurred.

  He became overwhelmed by a torrent of extraordinary emotion. Drowning in it, swept away, he gripped the mantelpiece, deeply alarmed. He thought he was ill so violently did his body react. His heart felt as if it were being squeezed, his guts looped and tangled. And more, and worse. For when this wave of feeling ebbed away it left behind a terrible residue. It left him with the gift of understanding.

  He received and appreciated, compressed into the briefest space of time, all of his daughter’s despair, her aloneness, her desperate hunger for love. And then knew an immediate agony of protective tenderness towards her. The newness and strength of this pain, that any father could have told him was par for the course, pierced him like a knife. He drank in her downbent serious face and realised how rarely he had seen her smile. (How could he not have noticed that?) He felt unbearably moved at this revelation of her sadness and then consumed by a desperate need to make amends. To offer all his love.

  Yes—he recognised the emotion, even though he had never received any himself, for what it was. He vowed to give her everything. Find time to do all sorts of things, to make up for the lost years. When the music faltered and, after a few more hesitant notes, stopped entirely, he applauded, striking his hands together too loudly. Felicity stared, amused and disbelieving.

  ‘That was very good, Sylvie. Marvel
lous, darling! You’re coming on really well.’ He was surprised how naturally the words sprang from his mouth. He, who never praised a living soul. He waited for her response, indulging in a little fatherly contemplation, imagining her pleasure at this enthusiasm. She closed the piano lid gently, got up from her stool and left the room. Felicity laughed.

  Guy had pursued his daughter from that moment on. He took her away from boarding school so he could see her every day. Each weekend he devised outings that he thought might please and entertain. He poured presents into her lap or hid them in her room or rolled them up in the napkin by her plate, sick with apprehension lest they should not find favour. She rejected all these attempts at gaining her affection not harshly or vigorously—he could have handled that, there would have been an opening to build on—but simply turning from them with an air of quiet, well-mannered resignation. Occasionally she would look at him and her eyes were like pale blue stones.

  Only once did she respond with any show of emotion and that was when, in a renewal of remorse at the years of neglect, Guy had struggled one day during an outing at the zoo to put his shame and regret into words. To unload perhaps, however unfairly, a fraction of the guilt. He had hardly started to speak when she turned on him shouting: ‘Stop it, stop it! I don’t care.’

  He had desisted of course and they had spent the rest of the afternoon silent and apart although, he reflected painfully, no more apart than usual. Everywhere he looked that day there seemed to be fathers holding their children by the hand or carrying toddlers shoulder-high. One boy who looked no more than sixteen wore a canvas sling cradling a tiny baby. It was asleep, its scarlet crumpled profile resting on the boy’s hollow chest. I could have done that, thought Guy, looking down in anguish at the narrow parting of his daughter’s hair. Christ—I don’t even remember picking her up.

  He never again attempted to burden Sylvie with a declaration of his feelings although he had once struggled to put them in writing. He had not given her the letter of course, just locked it away in his desk drawer with a lock of her hair, some photographs and school reports. As the months and then the years went by his bitter regret inevitably, given her continued indifference, became less sharp. He could not ease up though. Doggedly he conversed till his throat ached; asking questions, making suggestions, commenting on day-to-day affairs. Once he had got the idea that it was Felicity’s presence that was causing the child’s restraint. That if he and Sylvie lived just with each other, they would by some happy miracle of familial osmosis breathe warmth into each other’s lives and hearts. He had suggested it to Sylvie, not caring by that stage that such a move would broadcast to the world the failure of his marriage. She had appeared puzzled, frowned and pondered for a moment then said: ‘But why would I want to do that?’

  Then five years ago everything changed again. On the morning of her sixteenth birthday Sylvie disappeared. Walked out of the house as if going to school, never arrived, never came home. Guy, mad with terror, was convinced she had been kidnapped. Then, when no ransom call was made, he concluded that she had been the victim of an accident or murderous attack. He had contacted the police who, once they had been given Sylvie’s age, were irritatingly unalarmed and said she was probably staying with friends or just wanted to be on her own for a bit.

  Knowing this could not possibly be the case, Guy had visited the school and asked if he could talk to anyone with whom his daughter was particularly close. He could not give a name for Sylvie had never discussed her friends nor, for many years, brought any of them home.

  A tall girl with narrow, supercilious eyes had been brought to the principal’s office. She informed Guy that Sylvie had always said she couldn’t wait to be sixteen so that she could leave home. ‘She told me,’ said the girl with feigned reluctance, ‘she’d always loathed her parents.’

  That night Felicity, home after her third cure and already over the yardarm, heard out her husband’s pain-filled revelation and said: ‘God, you’re so dense about everything except making money. She’s hated us for years.’

  Guy had tracked Sylvie down fairly quickly. She was living in a squat at Islington. Quite decent as squats go. Water, electricity, off-cuts of carpet on the floor. He had gone round with the bloodstock papers relating to the three-year-old racehorse that was his birthday gift. She had appeared in the doorway and immediately started to shout and yell abuse at him, almost spitting in his face. After the years of bloodless unresponsive introversion it had been like receiving an electric shock. He had stepped back alarmed, amazed and—yes, he had to admit it—exhilarated. Then she had flung the papers over the basement railings and slammed the door. They must have been picked up later, though, for the horse was sold the following month for two-thirds of the original price.

  Oddly enough, after becoming almost resigned to what was virtually a non-relationship, this brawling encounter reawakened in Guy all his previous yearnings. He could not believe any of the half dozen sponging troglodytes smirking behind her in the open doorway gave a damn for her wellbeing.

  Over the next few years she moved around a lot, Guy employed a firm of private detectives, ‘Jaspers’ in Coalheaver Street, and always knew where she was. She never lived alone, sharing sometimes a mixed flat and occasionally with just one man. These liaisons, if such they were, never lasted long. Guy wrote to Sylvie regularly, asking her to come home, always enclosing a cheque. A very large cheque at Christmas and birthdays. She never replied to the letters but the cheques were always cashed so at least he was still good for something. Once she was twenty-one and could draw on her trust fund, even that small usefulness would be denied him.

  Of course she was getting her own back, he thought. She has bided her time. She has waited and waited until she could humiliate and reject me as I, for years, did her. He recognised with an almost elated surge of recognition: She is just like me. And then, with a terrible falling back, And I would never forgive.

  He wondered sometimes, to comfort himself, if perhaps her mind had not devised some cold and cruel symmetry. Could she mean this punishment, this banishment to last for precisely twelve years as his had done? She’d be twenty-eight then. Married, perhaps, with children of her own. She might be living anywhere. Abroad even. Thinking this, Guy had the shameful and traitorous notion that he could have borne it better if she had died.

  He took to hanging around near her current apartment, discreet and self-conscious, like a thwarted suitor. Once, getting into a cab, she had spotted him in a doorway and gestured with crude and vigorous panache like a lustful navvy. Another time—and this was much worse—he had seen her come out of the building hanging on to the arm of a bored-looking man in a tweed jacket. She had been chattering brightly, laughing up into his face, her whole posture that of someone desperate to please. Half way across the road the man shrugged her off and Guy, even whilst appreciating the irony of the reaction, could have killed him.

  Then she disappeared for the last time and much more thoroughly. In receipt of this disturbing intelligence Jasper himself took on the task of trying to trace her. Posing as a debt collector he had called at her last place of residence only to be thrown down the stairs by an Amazonian domestic. A female operative was then employed, at first with equal lack of success.

  During this time Guy was in a pit of despair. Until he found himself totally ignorant of his daughter’s whereabouts, he had not appreciated how crucial this knowledge was to his peace of mind. Bitterly estranged from him she might be but at least he had known she was ‘all right’ in the most basic sense of the words. After she vanished he became aware in his days and nights—and especially in his dreams—of a great yawning darkness that, in unguarded moments, threatened to engulf him.

  Once when these fears seemed to be almost eating him alive he had briefly thought of talking to the Press. They would find her. ‘GAMELIN HEIRESS VANISHES!’ They had photographs a-plenty on their files, she would be hunted down and flushed out. Someone, somewhere knew where she was. But although such
action could hardly damage the father-daughter relationship further, it would surely tip the balance against the chance of any future reconciliation. An eventuality in which Guy, hope triumphing wildly over experience, still unreasonably believed.

  Sylvie had been gone about three weeks when the distaff side at Jasper’s picked up a crumb of information. The investigator had the bright idea of booking an appointment with Sylvie’s regular hairdresser. Seated there, her wide-eyed and gushing assumption that Felix and his rollers must be privy to half the top-society secrets in London flattered the stylist’s tongue into looseness. Once he had determined that no one sporting such a ghastly home-made jumper and suburban haircut could possibly be writing a gossip column, he gladly dropped the odd name and juicy titbit for her to take away and thrill her boring little chums with in Ruislip or wherever.

  Two of the items related to Sylvia Gamelin. Apparently she was sick of Hammersmith (‘and who wouldn’t be, darling?’), and was moving somewhere quiet, clean and peaceful. Pressed as to the possible place of relocation, Felix replied, ‘She just said the country. And we all know how big that is don’t we? She may not even have meant the Home Counties.’ Snipping scissors faltered at the enormity of such a prospect.

  ‘She did say she’d met a marvellous man, tho’ whether the two things are connected…’

  Although these fragments of information yielded naught for his comfort Guy, starving, fell on them and instructed Jasper’s to fan out and redouble their efforts. But no further lead could be discovered and six more sterile months dragged past, affecting Guy adversely. The fierce relish he had once obtained from the grab and grind, and cut and thrust of the market place became transmuted into a numb unfocused longing to inflict pain. This in turn affected the clarity of his judgement. He bought and sold clumsily and, for the first time in twenty years, started to lose money. Then, a few days ago, the letter had arrived.