Painting The Darkness Read Online Free Page B

night, enough for us each to contemplate the strange, dark, gaping possibility: Norton might be James Davenall after all. Somewhere, across the city, alone in his hotel room, he might be staring at the blank wall that was his family’s reception of an unwelcome prodigal, leaving the Davenalls and me united in one unworthy wish: that he should stay dead. I wanted no ghost of my wife’s lost love to cross our lives, far less proclaim himself no ghost at all. Though never expressed in words, I knew she had accepted me as second-best to a dead man, and that was good enough, good enough just so long as he was truly dead
.
    ‘
I think I’ll get out here,’ I said. ‘I think I’d like to walk the rest of the way home
.’
    Davenall leaned out and gave the order to the driver, then held the door open for me. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t give you what you asked for, Trenchard
.’
    ‘
Unequivocal judgement, you mean?’ I said, looking back as I climbed out. ‘Perhaps I asked for too much
.’
    ‘
I am a lawyer,’ he replied. ‘My profession deals in opinion. What you seek is for judge and jury to decide
.’
    ‘
Will it come to that?
’
    ‘
If Norton continues to make no headway, or if Sir Hugo heeds my advice to buy him off – I don’t think so. But if Norton thinks he can win, or, of course, if he is genuine, then it may do. It may very well do. Here’s my card.’ I took it from his extended hand. ‘Keep in touch. We may need to talk again.’ He slapped the side of the cab and was borne away
.
    V
    Avenue Road was but a twenty-minute walk from where Trenchard left the cab, yet it took him nearly twice that time to cover the distance, walking slowly, head bowed, stirring with his feet the leaves that lay about the pavement, listening to the faint rustle of others falling, dislodged in the tender nocturnal breeze. An owl hooted in the woodland of the park, a distant hansom jingled its fare towards Marylebone. And Trenchard’s mind voyaged backwards, to another mellow autumn ten years before, to Canon Sumner’s drawing-room in Salisbury, where shafts of sunlight split the gloom of Constance Sumner’s mournful vigil. If Davenall had come back then, he would have found her waiting.
    ‘They tell me,’ she had said, ‘that he is dead. Yet to believe that would seem a kind of betrayal.’
    ‘Your refusal to believe it does you credit,’ Trenchard had said. ‘Yet surely he would not have wanted you to turn away from life simply because, for some reason, he has chosen to.’
    At first, she had resisted. When, later, she had yielded to his healing charm, Canon Sumner had pronounced it a truly Christian act and Trenchard had basked in his gratitude. Now, already, Norton had forced him to reappraise that fine and patient courtship. It had always been more calculating than he would have cared to admit, for there had been a vulnerability in her bereavement and he had played upon it. Worse, there had been the pleasure, the secret satisfaction, of winning her from another, a hint of the adulterous in what had been so transparently correct. Without his insidious conquest of her affections, she might have remained loyal to a memory, might have gone on believing the incredible long enough to see it come true.
    He turned into Avenue Road, still absorbed in the resentful flow of his unwelcome memories. He approached The Limes slowly, preparing in his mind the assurances he would give Constance, rehearsing the means by which he would conceal his doubts from her. It was not easy, as is so little that is not honest, and in its difficulty we may find the means to explain a greater error.
    In the shadow cast by the last tree before the entrance to The Limes – a pool of inky black amidst the encircling moonlit grey – stood James Norton, watching Trenchard as he approached. He had taken shelter beneath the tree at sight of the other drawing near but might well have assumed, even so, that he could not escape being noticed. As it