Bloodline

‘Surrey,’ the policeman said to his colleague with obvious displeasure. ‘We’ll have to contact Guildford.’

‘It’s only five miles away.’

‘Still outside our patch,’ said Constable Davis. ‘What address in Oxted?’

‘I’ll go and tell them,’ I said.

‘Fine, sir. But I will still need their address as they will have to be officially informed. There are procedures to follow.’

‘Yes, of course.’ I gave him the address and he wrote it in his notebook as well as relaying it through his personal radio. ‘Tell them to give me time to be there first.’

He spoke again into the radio but I couldn’t hear the reply.

‘The Surrey Police will be in no hurry, sir,’ he said. ‘They will probably visit your parents later in the morning.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. I bet the Surrey Police would be delighted not to have to perform what must be a dreadful duty. I certainly didn’t relish the task. ‘I’ll go and see them right away. I’d also better call my two brothers and my other sister.’

‘I would recommend that, sir. The incident is already being reported on the BBC radio news and it will only be a matter of time before Miss Shillingford’s name is mentioned, her being something of a celebrity and all.’

‘You’ve heard of her, then?’ I was pleased.

‘Oh yes, sir. I follow the horses a bit. Like to have a flutter now and again. And I’ve watched you on the telly lots of times. I saw you last Saturday on Channel 4.’

Last Saturday suddenly seemed like a long time ago.

‘Will you be all right now, sir? We can stay a while longer if you’d like.’

‘No, thank you. I’ll be fine. I’ll get dressed and drive over to Oxted.’

It was the worst journey of my life. Afterwards I could hardly remember a single yard of the five miles from my flat to my parents’ house.

Lots of questions struggled to get a hearing in my consciousness.

What was she doing in a Park Lane hotel in the first place when she’d told me she was going straight home to Newmarket? Had our row at Haxted Mill somehow caused her to change her plans? Had she gone to the hotel to meet someone? How could she have fallen from a balcony? Why? Why? Why?

I couldn’t get out of my head the image of her driving off from dinner without even a glance at me. I didn’t know whether to be angry or sad.

And then there were the phone calls I had ignored.

Had she been calling me for help?

I should have answered them, I thought. What had I been doing? She was my sister, for goodness’ sake, my darling twin sister. And she had needed me.

The tears started and I had to pull over as I couldn’t see the road. I sat in the driving seat of my trusty old Ford and sobbed.

How could she be dead? She had been more full of life than anyone I had ever met. It must be a mistake.

I had sat there for a full fifteen minutes before I had been able to continue but it was still just before four when I pulled my Ford through the gates and down the sweeping driveway in front of the familiar Jacobean pile on the southern edge of Oxted.

My parents had moved here when Clare and I had been babies, my mother inheriting the place from her parents, but they had never had the money to decorate and furnish the house in the manner that its architectural grandeur demanded.

Dad had been a banker before his retirement. At least, that is what he regularly told everyone. In fact he had spent his working life in the accounts department of a City of London investment bank, doing the paperwork for all the deals that other people had made.

I sat now in my car and looked up at the imposing façade lit only by the glow from the streetlights on the road at the far end of the drive. I suppose I must have had some happy times here, when I’d been a young boy, but all I could remember were the rows and fights of my teenage years.

By then, Dad had been in his late fifties, but he had somehow seemed much older. In spite of him having been only twenty-five at the start of the Swinging Sixties, pop music had passed him by, and he had regularly shouted at Clare and me for playing it at anything above a whisper, even in our bedrooms with the doors closed.

The thought of having any of our school friends around for a bit of a party was completely out of the question. For a start, he’d say, they would then know what we had in the house and they would send the burglars round when we were away. The fact that we had nothing much in the place that anyone would want to steal anyway had been beside the point.

By the time Clare and I had moved out to the flat in Edenbridge, which we had done in secret one day when Dad had been in London for a reunion lunch at his bank, I had come to hate this house so much that I’d not returned to it for the next five years.

But I suppose, as time moves on and we grow older, family ties become more important. Or maybe it’s that our unhappy memories fade. Either way, I was now a regular visitor here, helping in the battle against dry rot and damp inside, and organizing a man to assist with the garden outside.