The deadliest legacy, p.5
The Deadliest Legacy, page 5
‘You’d better slip this on, Miss Day,’ he instructed, helping her do so before escorting her to the car, which he had somehow managed to park closer to the entrance of the marquee than anyone else.
He settled Delia into the back seat and did whatever it was you did with electric cars to get them to move forward, proceeding to glide slowly and silently over what she suspected was becoming a thoroughly muddy field. Just as they reached the exit, Michael had to swerve to avoid two scurrying figures, presumably half blinded by the weather and the hoods of their anoraks, pulled down low over their faces. In spite of that, Delia knew at once who they were. They were each dragging a suitcase. One of them, finally becoming aware of the presence of Delia’s vehicle, attempted to half throw herself out of danger, and would have fallen to the ground had she not been held more or less upright by the other.
The two sorry creatures failing so dismally in their battle with the elements were, of course, Tina and Tilly Tucker. And they really were in a mess. Totally against her better judgement, Delia decided that she should offer assistance.
‘You’d better stop, Michael,’ she said.
He did so.
Delia wound her window down.
‘Tilly, Tina, what on earth are you doing?’ she asked. ‘Where are you trying to get to?’
‘We’re trying to get to our Airbnb. It’s on the other side of Appledore, but …’ said one of them.
‘… there aren’t any taxis, so we thought we’d just have to brave it and walk. There wasn’t anything else we could do,’ continued the other.
‘… we tried to get an Uber, but that didn’t work …’
‘… it’s the weather, you see …’
‘It certainly is,’ agreed Delia. ‘And I suspect North Devon isn’t big on Uber somehow. C’mon. You’d better get in. Is that all right, Michael?’
‘Of course, Miss Day,’ replied Michael promptly. Although possibly not with the greatest enthusiasm.
Delia didn’t blame him. He was wearing a lightweight raincoat over his grey suit, but Delia didn’t think it would give him much protection against the near hurricane sweeping along the coast. All the same, he climbed out of the car with apparent good grace, then loaded the twins’ baggage into the boot and them into the car – one in the front and one in the back next to Delia.
Tilly and Tina appeared somewhat overwhelmed to be given a lift by the woman they had followed over most of the UK for so long. Delia just hoped she wasn’t making a big mistake. The twins and their devoted attention had never previously given her a moment’s concern, but everything seemed to be making her anxious that day.
The drive to the Airbnb, in one of the new builds on the outskirts of the village, only took three or four minutes. Which came as something of a relief to Delia, because the twins gabbled non-stop throughout the brief journey.
‘This is just wonderful …’ began one.
‘… and so kind. We would never have presumed …’ continued the other.
‘… that you would bother with us …’
‘… we are just nobody really, and we are so grateful …’
‘… particularly with the weather being so awful …’
The only good thing about this monologue crossed with a duet was that Delia didn’t have to even attempt to make conversation. Michael decanted the twins right outside their accommodation and even lifted their baggage out of the car boot for them. The rain had yet to appease and a gale was still blowing, and he looked more than a tad bedraggled when he climbed back into the car. But he didn’t grumble.
‘I’m really sorry about that,’ said Delia. ‘I didn’t feel I had any choice. I couldn’t just leave them there, annoying though they can be. You got another soaking too …’
‘No problem, Miss Day,’ Michael replied. ‘Always pleased to help damsels in distress.’
Delia was beginning to think that, so far, this young man was undoubtedly the best thing that had happened to her in North Devon. She liked to have her drivers on her side. She decided to make small talk, asking him where he came from and how long he’d been doing this job.
‘I’m a local boy,’ he told her. ‘And I’ve been doing this job for five years now, ever since I left the army.’
So he’d been a soldier. That made sense to Delia. Michael was of average height or thereabouts, but she’d noticed that he was a well-made young man. And he looked fit.
‘More peaceful, I hope,’ she remarked.
‘Usually, ma’am,’ he replied. ‘But not always. I’m still getting over the time I was hired to drive half a stag party around back in the winter. I had the big people carrier I get on loan sometimes. Six of them in the back. Intent on getting as drunk as possible. Got worse as the night progressed. Three of them launched themselves into some sort of a punch-up in the back. I had to hose the whole motor out the next day. At least a couple of them had thrown up. Never again.’
Delia chuckled.
‘I shall try to behave myself,’ she said.
Michael turned briefly and flashed her a big smile over one shoulder.
‘I don’t mind a bit if you don’t, Miss Day,’ he said.
She didn’t reply. He couldn’t possibly be flirting with her, could he? Apart from any other consideration, she was certainly more than twenty years his senior. Her head was not turned, though. It came with the territory, after all. And she suspected that if she appeared at all receptive to Michael’s mild flirtation, he would run for his life. She responded only with a small modest smile back. Or at least she hoped that was what it looked like.
Michael drove her swiftly and smoothly to the Imperial and rushed to open her car door for her.
‘Is there anything else I can do for you, Miss Day?’ he asked.
Delia wondered fleetingly if he might not run as swiftly as she had thought. In any case, she decided enough was enough. She certainly wasn’t going to venture into the dangerous territory of double entendre. She would take her driver’s remark entirely at face value.
‘No, thank you, Michael,’ she said, her voice level and without expression. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Not sure what time yet, so I’ll call you in the morning.’
‘Of course, Miss Day,’ replied Michael smartly.
She was halfway to the hotel front door when she turned, just as he was about to get back into his car.
‘Do you have a family to get back to, Michael,’ she asked.
‘Oh, yes, ma’am,’ he replied. ‘I have a wife and two little boys, the second one just three months old.’
Michael’s face lit up with pride as he spoke. He was positively beaming.
Delia feared she had misunderstood the young man. She sent herself a warning. In danger of behaving as if you are still attractive, dear, she muttered under her breath as she hurried into the hotel.
But Michael did not go home to the little terraced house in Bideford’s East-the-Water which his wife had made so comfortable. It was a pretty house too. He had been responsible, soon after they moved in, for painting its rendered walls white and the front door and window frames a carefully chosen pale blue. But his wife had done everything else. She looked after the two gardens, a tiny patch in the front and one just a little bit bigger at the back. Indeed, his wife looked after almost everything. And Michael could only marvel at how she found the time to do it all whilst looking after a baby and a toddler.
But that was Rosie for you. She was so capable. So cool. He adored her, and had done, it seemed, for most of his life.
They had been childhood sweethearts, parting only due to logistics when he joined the army. The Parachute Regiment. He would have married her then, but she was only seventeen and her parents wouldn’t hear of it. Which the nineteen-year-old Michael had actually understood.
And once he began his military training and embarked on a soldier’s life, he had decided that marriage was no longer for him. Certainly not for as long as he remained in the military.
He had fitted in well, which for all manner of reasons he had not expected. He’d always been a rather awkward boy. Or that’s what he thought anyway. He’d had few friends and even fewer girlfriends. Only ever the one really. Rosie. But Michael had been an extremely physical, athletic lad, strong and muscular. And he possessed possibly the most valuable asset of all for a professional soldier. He rarely experienced physical fear. It wasn’t that he was brave exactly. Just confident that he could overcome any level of physical threat.
Ultimately, Michael’s soldierly skills reached a level where he was invited to apply for the SAS. He then had to complete what is generally regarded as the most arduous and rigorous selection processes in the British army over a period of several months. Only a very few, considered the cream, are ultimately selected every year. Michael was one of them. The day he became a Blade and was presented with his beige beret remained the proudest of his life. And his time with the SAS completely overwhelmed any prospect he might have had of sharing his life with anyone. He certainly completely dismissed any thoughts of marrying Rosie. Not with that job. It was, of course, highly dangerous and challenging. It involved very nearly leading a double life, certainly not revealing to anyone, except perhaps very closest family, what you did for a living, and travelling all over the world, sometimes for quite long periods of time, on top-secret assignments in the world’s most hazardous trouble spots. But Michael loved it. He joined the SAS as a corporal, and as such there was no statutory limit on his term of service, whilst officers were limited to two tours of three years each, although most SAS men and women served only a few years at most. But Michael had intended to remain in the unit for the rest of his military service, if possible. It gave him everything he needed. Excitement, discipline and an extraordinary level of comradeship. Also, a perhaps unlikely tolerance of an individual’s idiosyncrasies. Of men and women who were different. Michael was different and had always known that he was. In the SAS, nobody cared as long as you could do the job. And boy, could Michael do the job.
Then suddenly his world caved in. During a routine medical, it was revealed that he had a heart murmur. Further investigation showed that one of Michael’s four heart valves was no longer working at its full potential. This had yet to cause any problems that he knew about but would need careful monitoring and, more than likely, surgery at some point in the future.
In the present, however, that was the end of the SAS for Michael. And indeed the end of active service of any kind.
In view of the respect with which he was held within his unit, and the service he had already given, he did not face discharge from the army. And he could return to his regiment. But only in a desk job.
He told himself that it was better than nothing. That he was still a military man. That he still had the comradeship and the lifestyle. But he was devastated. He could barely see the point in continuing. But he did, for a bit. As much out of habit as anything else.
Then, whilst at home on leave, he met Rosie again. She had married some years after Michael went out of her life, but disastrously. A cheating husband and – thankfully, under the circumstances, she always said – no children, even though she had wanted them desperately. She was by then divorced.
Michael quickly came to remember how much she had meant to him. Before the army, before all the other realizations about himself. He had always imagined a family life one day. A wife and children. And there was nobody he could imagine wanting to share that life with more than Rosie.
He supposed he loved her. No, he knew he loved her. He supposed that he had always loved her.
The SAS would always be at the core of his soul. He could never forget what he had seen and what he had done. And that was just one of the many facets of his character that he realized did not necessarily make him good husband material.
Nonetheless, he had suddenly wanted desperately to marry her, was determined to do his best and was overjoyed when she accepted his proposal. He promised her and himself that he would make her happy.
He quit the army at once. He was thirty-six and she was thirty-four. They didn’t want to waste a moment.
The two children came in quick succession, even though they had both wondered whether that would happen, in view of Rosie’s childless first marriage and her age.
Michael continued to try his absolute best to make Rosie happy, in every possible way, and he intended to devote himself to the happiness and well-being of his children for the rest of his life.
Nonetheless, instead of taking the town bridge over the Taw to take him back to East-the-Water, he turned the other way as he left the Imperial, heading for a Barnstaple town centre car park.
On the way, he called Rosie.
‘I’m sorry, darling, I think it’s going to be a late one,’ he told her. ‘I’ve just driven Miss Day out to a late dinner with friends in Ilfracombe. And I have to pick her up. Not worth me trying to come home in between. I’ll be back as soon as I can. But don’t wait up. Love you.’
Rosie took the news cheerily enough. Michael knew she had feared that she’d agreed to marry a long-serving soldier and had been unsure if he would keep his promise to quit the army. But he did. And under the circumstances, he knew that she found his intermittent late nights, when she believed him to be driving a taxi around North Devon, imminently preferable to the life of an army wife.
‘I shall watch TV in bed,’ she said. ‘But I’d rather you were here.’
Michael made kissing noises down the phone and told Rosie how very much he would prefer to be there with her.
It wasn’t true, though. Not that night.
Michael had places to be and things to do. He couldn’t go home.
It was nearly midnight by the time William got home, having dropped Aunt Amelia in Bideford after she and his grandfather had eventually finished talking.
Their voices had been raised. Their conversation had not been friendly. His great-aunt had sounded furious.
He had rather hoped she might choose to confide in him. But no. She had maintained a stony silence all the time she had been in his car. William had asked her if she was feeling all right.
‘When I want you to know how I’m feeling, young man, I’ll tell you,’ Aunt Amelia had snapped. Which was unusually tetchy, even for her, William had thought.
And when he’d walked her to her front door after dropping her off, he’d seen by the light of the hall that her pale-blue eyes had turned to ice. Just as they always did if anything threatened her or her family. Or, sometimes, even if something just displeased her.
He so wished she’d confide in him. Let him help her. But there was little chance of that, was there? After all, she thought he was stupid, didn’t she? William really wished he could change her mind.
Aunt Amelia always seemed so strong. She never looked as if she would be shocked or upset by anything, although he was quite aware that she had been. Aunt Amelia had known tragedy in her life. But she had come through it, of course.
Most people he knew, certainly of around his own age, had encountered Aunt Amelia as a schoolteacher. Including him and his brother. And she treated all of them in adulthood, again including him and his brother, almost the same as she had then. As if they were big, overgrown children.
But William knew how kind she could be too. When she wasn’t in a fury, as she was that night. On a really bad day, Aunt Amelia treated almost everyone as if they were stupid. But she had always looked after William. Indeed, it was Aunt Amelia who had stepped in when his parents had moved away from North Devon. He knew that his father had always wanted to leave. He was one of those for whom the sea and the beautiful countryside had never been quite enough. But when circumstances had required that he stay at home, where he was needed, he had done so. He’d turned down the chance to go to university, married a local girl and stayed close. Only when his boys were grown had William’s father, Arthur, asked his wife if she’d like to move somewhere else. Indeed, to make a new home overseas. Mavis had agreed with alacrity. The tragedy that haunted the family she had married into had come to haunt her too, and she’d had quite enough of it. Their two sons had been in their early twenties by then; they could make their own choices, and stand on their own two feet.
And so Arthur and Mavis had emigrated to New Zealand.
It had been fine for William’s brother, of course, just a year older, but already out there in the world building his own life. William was a very different sort of chap. He had no idea how to stand on his own feet. He’d always lived with his mum and dad, and had more or less assumed that he always would. Which was an example of him being stupid, he supposed. They had said he could go with them to New Zealand if he liked, although, in his blackest moments, William had allowed himself to believe that part of the reason for their departure was to leave their bothersome second son behind. A part of him still believed that, too.
In any case, he couldn’t imagine living anywhere except North Devon. It was home. He had a job he loved, certain aspects of which he found fascinating. So much so that he had turned them into a kind of hobby. And a boss who seemed to be one of the few people in the world who rated him and treated him as if he had at least some worth.
And so he had transferred all his affections to his grandfather and Aunt Amelia. They were his substitute parents. Aunt Amelia did treat him a bit like a servant and could be hard on him, but he knew she would always look out for him. And William liked that. He liked that a lot.
His grandfather had looked out for him, too, and had given him a home when William’s parents first took off to New Zealand. Grandpa Harry had nurtured and supported William. Eventually, he had found for him the isolated and somewhat dilapidated cottage out towards Buckland Brewer, which was still his home, rented for a pittance from a farmer who was just glad to have someone living there to stop it from totally disintegrating. William had always wanted to live in the country, without people all around him, and to be independent. Which was paradoxical considering his distress at being forced to part company with his parents. But he couldn’t have imagined he’d ever have the strength to do it. However, Grandpa Harry had encouraged William and helped him settle into some sort of life of his own. In the early days, he even stayed with William overnight to make sure he was all right.
