Next of Kin (62 page)

Stella stood at the parapet, resting a hand on it, trying to steady herself. The tears stopped. A million thoughts ran through her mind, each one more outlandish than the last. Finally they dispersed and clarified and the fragments settled into one perfectly distilled thought. She stared at her cousin and spoke quietly to him.

‘You killed Raymond, didn't you?' she asked. ‘It was you.'

Montignac looked away for a moment and laughed, as if the idea was totally absurd, but then looked directly at her, fixing his gaze on her eyes. She was all he could see now. A decade's pain seared through him, and his mother's pain, and his father's pain, their pointless deaths. Caused by her family.

‘He was no good for you,' said Montignac. ‘You needed me, not him.'

She gasped and her face grew pale. She felt she would be sick. Her legs seemed to buckle beneath her.

‘It was you,' she said. ‘It was you all along. And you framed Gareth Bentley for it. I should have guessed.'

‘I saved him in the end, didn't I? And Stella, it's over now,' he beseeched her, although he knew this would fall on deaf ears. In a few minutes the work of a lifetime had been undone. There would be no piecing it back together now. He had no choice. He offered her a final chance. ‘We can be together, like we always said we wanted to be. It's up to you.'

She stared at him and shook her head. ‘After I went to Geneva,' she said in a clear voice, ‘I cried over you for a few months. And after six months, I met someone else, just someone who passed through my life. No one special, just someone who made me forget about you entirely. And in all the time from then until now, I've never given you more than a second thought. You meant nothing to me. Nothing at all.'

He inclined his head a little to the left.
You meant nothing to me
. He wondered whether a day had gone by over the previous ten years when he hadn't woken up with her face in his head, whether he'd ever once fallen asleep without imagining her lying there beside him. Whether an hour had gone by when he hadn't wondered where she was, and what she was doing or who she was with. The hundreds of letters he had written her, the tens of thousands of words, all crumpled up and thrown in the wastepaper basket rather than sent. The well of emotion.

‘Nothing?' he asked, unable to conceive that she could be telling the truth. ‘Nothing at all?'

‘Not so much as this,' she said, clicking her fingers together in the air.

He nodded his head slowly in acceptance of a life wasted, a decade thrown away, and then—as he had done so many times when he was a child—lunged towards her, right foot stamping the ground like a bull ready to charge, left foot rooted to the stone beneath him. The sudden movement achieved its desired result. She gave a brief scream and sprang backwards as her feet caught in the hosepipe that was lying beneath her and she lost her balance, falling over the parapet and crashing suddenly—one moment before him, one moment gone—to the ground below, where she lay broken, her arms and legs stretched out at irregular angles from her body, the last of Peter Montignac's heirs, dead in the grounds of Leyville, the Montignac estate.

His estate.

10

IT WAS A FEW
days later—after Margaret Richmond had discovered Stella's body on the stones near the west wing of the house, after the frantic phone calls to London to summon her cousin Owen Montignac back home, and after the police had completed their initial investigation—that the note written in Stella's handwriting was discovered in the top drawer of Peter Montignac's desk:

Living without

Raymond

is too painful

Margaret had broken down in tears when she saw it but acknowledged that it was Stella's handwriting. No one, however, had seemed more surprised by it than Montignac who had to be helped into a chair when it was first shown to him and started to shake so hard in his grief that for a moment the officers thought that he was laughing.

The funeral was a much quieter affair than that which had been held for Peter Montignac earlier in the year. There were no crowds of old family friends, no dozens of wreaths and cards to dispose of later, and certainly no invitations for anyone to return to Leyville afterwards for tea and sandwiches.

Those guests who did attend took note of Montignac's polite eulogy but felt it wasn't in the same league as the poetic tribute he had paid to his uncle earlier in the year; but then that was only natural. He could hardly be expected to out-perform himself at every funeral he attended and this was a little too soon since the last one, and there had been so much death and unhappiness visited on the family during 1936 that no one could blame him for wanting to keep the function as quiet, quick and private as possible.

‘We discussed a will,' said Sir Denis Tandy when he met with Montignac in the study a week or so later, ‘but Stella wanted to wait until the paperwork had been completed for the handover of the house to the National Trust before tackling it.'

‘You've informed them of everything, as I asked you to?' inquired Montignac.

‘Yes, I went to see them yesterday. They were bitterly disappointed, of course.'

‘I have no doubt of it.'

‘It was your cousin's wish, you know. She was very specific about it.'

Montignac shook his head as if the whole thing was neither here nor there. ‘Oh I don't think she would have gone through with it in the end,' he said. ‘Leyville is the Montignac family home, you know. It represents something. It's our birthright.'

‘Yes, but she made it clear to me—'

‘Let's move on, Sir Denis. I have the London managers coming to see me in an hour or so. You were saying about the will?'

‘Yes, well she had intended writing one but unfortunately hadn't got around to it yet. So as she died intestate, naturally the estate goes to her heir.'

‘Me?'

‘Just so. As she had no children, you are her closest relative.'

‘And when you say the estate, you mean—'

‘The house, the land, all the land around London that's part of the Montignac portfolio, the bank accounts, the investments, sundry business holdings. I will prepare a more detailed analysis for you over the next few days.'

‘Yes, I'd like to see that. And I'm not bound by the terms of Uncle Peter's will, am I?'

Sir Denis shook his head. ‘No,' he said. ‘The rules regarding sale of property were there purely for Stella's benefit. I daresay he hoped that she would have a son and then he would inherit—'

‘Well she didn't have a son,' said Montignac, curling his lip slightly. ‘So there we are. Thank you, Sir Denis. I'll look forward to receiving your report shortly.'

The lawyer nodded and stood up, packing his belongings in his briefcase.

‘You're not thinking of selling Leyville, are you?' he asked.

Montignac shook his head. ‘Not in a thousand years,' he said. ‘It was built by my ancestors, passed down by them. It belonged to my father, you know, although he never had a chance to bring his family up here. But it belonged to him by rights. No, I'll never sell Leyville. It stays in the family.'

Sir Denis nodded; he was glad to hear it. ‘I'll speak to you next week,' he said, closing the door behind him and leaving Montignac alone.

*   *   *

HE HAD NEVER SLEPT
in the master bedroom before but he did so that night. The room was a little chilly but he didn't mind; he made a mental note to tell Margaret to light the fires around the house the next day before she began interviewing staff. (He was in need of a full-time cook, a butler, a few serving-girls and a valet. Plus someone to take care of the apartment in Kensington for when he visited London.)

He stepped across to the enormous bay windows to pull the curtains and looked out at the grounds below. There was a full moon in the sky and it lent a silvery sheen to the tops of the trees and the lawns which, he had realized earlier, really could do with some landscaping. He would hire someone for that too; someone from the Royal Horticultural Society perhaps. He was sure they would do an excellent job.

The bed was enormous but comfortable; the new sheets smelled clean and fresh, like a life had just begun. For the first time since he had been brought to Leyville as a five-year-old child, he felt that he truly belonged there. He could close his eyes and sleep as the master of an estate and fortune that were rightfully his and that he had come to reclaim.
I've done nothing wrong
, he thought to himself.
I've taken nothing that didn't belong to me
. He lay there, determined that he had nothing to feel guilty about.

But still, sleep wouldn't come.

ALSO BY JOHN BOYNE

The Thief of Time

Crippen

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
.

An imprint of St. Martin's Press.

NEXT OF KIN
. Copyright © 2006 by John Boyne. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Boyne, John, 1971–

Next of kin / John Boyne.—1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35797-9

ISBN-10: 0-312-35797-4

1. Aristocracy (Social class)—England—Fiction. 2. Disinheritance—Fiction. 3. Gamblers—England—London—Fiction. 4. Debtor and creditor—Fiction. 5. Great Britain—History—Edward VIII, 1936—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6102.O96N49    2008

823'.92—dc22

2007040849

First published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books

First U.S. Edition: February 2008

eISBN 9781466852310

First eBook edition: August 2013