The Wolf in the Attic (17 page)

‘That’s enough now Anna,’ Miss Hawcross says to me. ‘Say your goodbyes, and come with me.’

I look at Pa one last time. I think of the day Mama was taken away, the day we stood on the burning quay with everyone wailing and dying around us. All that, he survived, only to lie here like this on a floor in Oxford, on a snowy Monday morning.

How pointless, all of it. I wish he and I had died that day too, in our own country, in the middle of family and people we knew.

I wish I was dead. If there is a God, then he has a heaven, and all the people I loved are in it together now, and they have left me alone down here on earth.

‘
Herete
,’ I say to Pa, remembering that word from an age and a world ago. Then I let Miss Hawcross tug me to my feet, and out the door.

D
AYS PASS, AND
they are at once agonising and slow, and a mere blur.

They take Pa away in a black van with double doors at the back, and the police go over the house, but they do not find the way into the attic.

Things are kicked over and left to lie, and there is wet on all the floors with the feet coming and going, and the fire is never lit, and at night Miss Hawcross stays in the box-room across the landing and she makes sandwiches and tea for everyone, but I cannot touch any of it. I spend most of my time curled up in bed with Pie, staring at the white light beyond the windows.

The snow melts slowly, and Christmas comes and goes without anyone noticing or caring. I lie in bed and listen to the bells of Oxford ringing out as though nothing has changed, as if the world is all the same.

Men in top hats and black coats swoop in and out with papers under their arms, one with pince-nez spectacles who looks me over as though I were a dog in a pet shop. I catch phrases here and there as they conduct conversations on the landing.

‘Tragic, absolutely tragic.’

‘Well, he made no provision…’

‘The gambling ate it all up.’

‘And then there were the women.’

‘A foreigner. He made a decent fist at being an Englishman, but these Mediterranean types you know –’

‘Yes, completely untrustworthy.’

‘The committee funds…’

‘All gone, every farthing. If he hadn’t been nobbled he would have done the deed himself. He was an inch away from having his own collar felt.’

‘The blackguard. And the child is nothing more than a pauper now.’

‘Yes. Tragic. Absolutely tragic…I cannot make sense of them and I do not even try. There is only me and Pie in the world now, and everything else means nothing, counts for nothing.

12

I
MANAGE TO
sneak up to the attic one afternoon when Miss Hawcross has popped out to do some shopping. With the daylight, it does not seem strange and menacing at all, just a dim, dusty space full of junk.

I find my old coat lying there with a crust of brown blood on the sleeve. The cheese is gnawed down to the rind, and there are mouse droppings around it. I look up at the skylight and wonder where Luca is right this minute, and if he ever thinks of me. I could have given him more clothes, even some shoes. Pa will never miss them now.

I do not believe Luca had a hand in Pa’s death. But I do not know if the world he revealed to me had any part of it either. What he said to me of the Roadmen keeps coming back, like the endless scratch of a gramophone record which has finished but is still spinning. And I do not trust the police, either.

And as for Matthew Bristol, I should like to stab him myself.

T
HE LOWER ROOMS
are being cleared out bit by bit. We did not possess much, Pa and I, but such as there was is being pawned by Miss Hawcross on my behalf. She has given me half a crown. The rest, she says, goes on expenses. Food, lamp-oil, coal. I could not care any less. I still have Pie, and a few treasured books in my room, and I cannot imagine wanting much else. With Pa gone, it all seems rather silly, worrying about pennies and shillings. But I suppose these things are important. Because the pennies and shillings will decide what happens to me in the end.

Once the police and the coroner finish their examinations, they come to the conclusion that Pa had been stabbed to death in the early hours of the 22nd December by person or persons unknown. How clever of them.

The murder weapon was not found, and though the study had been ransacked, very little was deemed missing except for a Breguet pocket-watch.

The investigation will go on, of course, and the police will keep the file open. But there seems little more to add. Little that truly matters. I know that I should feel the need for justice, for revenge, but I do not. Pa’s death seems like the end of some unfinished business which began long ago, in another country.

W
E BURY HIM
in St Sepulchre’s Cemetery on Walton Street. There is Miss Hawcross and me and a few of the old Greeks there to see him laid in the ground. It is a plain plank coffin, and he has no headstone because there is no money to pay for one. I remember from somewhere that there should be a flower on the coffin, and I pull away from Miss Hawcross as the priest is mumbling out the words over it and the gravediggers stand by with their caps in their fists.

‘“Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upwards…”’

There is nothing blossoming in the graveyard, which is Midwinter-bare. But in one sheltered corner I catch a glimpse of scarlet, and in the hedge there is a holly tree, heavy with berries. I break off a spray, the leaves scoring my hands red, and set it on Pa’s coffin just as the priest finally finishes.

And I feel that, more than anything, is goodbye, and I have to hide my face in my hands while Miss Hawcross grips my shoulder.

The gravediggers lower the coffin down with ropes, and then cover the open grave with a tarpaulin. As I wipe my eyes I hear them tell Miss Hawcross that there is an old tramp to be laid in on top of him that afternoon. The Sepulchre is full to bursting, they say, and the paupers, they are stacked four deep.

Pa was buried like an Englishman, but an English beggar. There is nothing Greek about it at all. The Priest is Anglican, and keeps blowing his nose, and he wears mittens against the cold.

I cannot believe that my father is in a box, and that they put him in the ground and left him there. It seems the most callous thing.

Those Committee members who have turned up do so with grim and angry faces. I catch them looking at me over the grave, and can’t understand why they seem so hostile. When Miss Hawcross tries to talk to them most turn their backs on her at once and walk away. It makes me wonder why they turned up at all. Only Mrs Gallianikos meets my eyes, and she smiles a little, and when she is leaving she touches me on the arm and says something in Greek I do not understand, but to Miss Hawcross she is as frosty as the morning.

I think Pa did something wrong before he died. Maybe it was his investments – he would talk about them from time to time as though they were vegetables in a garden. They would be thriving and blooming all the time. I was not entirely sure what that meant, but we still lived on bread and dripping for a week of every month, and it seems even to me that something was wrong about that.

I think he may have mislaid some of the money that the Committee entrusted him with, and they cannot forgive him for it. That is why the Greeks would not let us have the service at their church. He should have stayed there the night before the funeral, with the coffin open so everyone could see his face and say goodbye. The
Trisagion
, they call it.

But instead he ended up in the pauper’s corner of a country which was not his own, with the black ground stone-hard in the frost, and not a patch of blue to be seen in the sky above.

B
ACK AT THE
house, I go up to my room at once; for Mr Bristol is here, sitting in the front room as if he owns the place – well, I suppose he does – but it seems he is here nearly all the time now.

He and Miss Hawcross have taken to sitting in the front room, which is the only place a fire is ever lit, and they talk endlessly together, and once or twice the Inspector in the trench-coat has joined them. Because the file is still open I suppose. Whatever he has to say, it is nothing which has reached me. I talk more to Pie than anyone else, and if they had caught Pa’s murderer, I’m sure they would let me know.

The strange thing is that I don’t greatly care. It as if my head has been wrapped in black wool, and everything is at a distance. After Pa’s funeral I feel like something inside me has changed, changed in quite a huge way. It began with meeting the Romani in the wood, and placing the holly on the coffin set the seal upon it. But I cannot say what it is.

I do have this sense of premonition. The world has been turned upside down, but the turning has not finished yet. New Year is coming, and I cannot help but feel that with the new decade everything I have known will melt away.

They are discussing me, down in that front room. I will be twelve in a few days, but I am still a child to them, and so they close the door on me and the murmuring goes on behind it.

I go and sit in the study when that happens, and look at the bare shelves where Pa had his books, and the empty tobacco jar – even his pipes are gone. I set my hand on the bare boards where he lay – they took the carpet away – and I try so hard to imagine him walking through the door. He would have Mr Bristol out on his ear in a second, and would bark an order at Miss Hawcross which would leave her fluttering like a frightened pigeon.

And I cry, when I know they are not watching and cannot hear me. It is all right to cry when your father dies. It is not childish at all. I bite my own arm so I do not make too much noise, and hug Pie until she creaks.

I
T IS NOT
right or genteel to eavesdrop, but no-one tells me what is right and wrong any more and I have decided that gentility is not for me. So when I hear the voices in the front room rise louder I cross the hall quietly, raise a finger to my lips at Pie, and carefully lay my ear against the door.

‘– out by the end of the month.’ It is Mr Bristol. I can just imagine his sharp-angled face, and the way his pale eyes turn into slits under his bowler when he is agitated.

‘This is charity now, nothing less, and charity is not something that sits well with me when I am doling it out to the thieves that robbed me. Near two months rent I am owed, Miss Hawcross, and the house is sitting empty when I could have half a dozen lodgers in it. It’s nonsensical, is what it is. The girl must go. I give her until New Year.’

‘Surely you could let her have just one room Mr Bristol,’ Miss Hawcross says, so quiet I have to strain to make out the words.

‘That won’t work. She’s a child. She can’t stay here on her own. There’s no-one to look after her, and I know you have done your bit too, more than anyone maybe. But you got a job to keep too Miss Hawcross, and I know for a fact he didn’t pay you since halfway through November. Charity, that’s what it is, and it isn’t our place. The girl is not our responsibility. You’ll back me up here Inspector.’

A new voice. It is the policeman in the trench-coat. I can smell his cigarette through the door.

‘She’s a ward of the state, legally speaking Mr Bristol. We’ve been able to trace no living relatives, and the Greek community here have washed their hands of the matter. Francis took them to the cleaners. First there was the pyramid scheme, then the shares in the steamship company that never was. He had them eating out of his hand – apparently he was quite the entrepreneur on his native heath, but his luck turned bad the last year or two. The girl has nothing coming to her but debts and writs.’

‘What will happen to her?’ Miss Hawcross asks.

‘She’s not of an age to enter domestic service. She’ll go to Headington Workhouse. At fourteen she can begin proper employment, so it’ll only be for a couple of years.’

‘The workhouse!’ Miss Hawcross exclaims, and the word itself makes me feel cold and sick.

‘Unless you want to take her in. You know her better than anyone.’

‘I... I can’t Inspector. My circumstances will not allow it. I live with my sister and her husband. The house is chock-full already.’

‘Well, there you are then. The workhouse is not so bad – you can put all those Oliver Twist ideas out of your head. I know the Master, Guy Weatherforce. He is a hard man, but fair, and his wife, the Matron, she’s a good woman. It’ll do the girl good to mix with other children. From what I hear, she’s been alone in this house most of her life.’

‘She has an insolent manner I never cared for,’ Mr Bristol says. ‘Probably got it from the father. The pair of them put on such airs and graces, you would think they were royalty.’

‘We’ve been making enquiries in London,’ the Inspector says. ‘It seems George Francis was once a wealthy and influential man, before the fall of Smyrna. He had friends in all sorts of places, but they have withered on the vine. He banged on their doors too loud and too long it seems. The Colonial Office stopped hearing from him over a year ago. He had been trying for years to get some kind of compensation for the Greeks, but he was rebuffed at every turn, and he had, as you say Mr Bristol, a rather high-handed manner at times.