‘Thanks, mate.’
‘And I can keep an eye on things here. Look after Serena and the children.’
‘Appreciate it,’ Ben said, stopping now to lean on his stick and look up at the clearing sky. ‘We were so grateful you took care of Cosima after all that … nonsense.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
I looked up too, following his sightline. A hawk circled in the sky above us.
‘She’s in Bali now, you know?’
I made a non-committal sound of surprise.
‘Just thinking of what happened to Fliss out there makes me so—’
His voice broke. I gave him a pat on the back. He still didn’t fully seem to connect what had happened to Fliss with his own actions. Ben had always possessed the ability to blame others for their flaws while interpreting his own as necessary strengths.
We pressed on through the trees and then cut westwards along anarrow path, emerging on the edge of the lake. Ben had insisted on a lake being dug out as soon as they moved to Tipworth. He wanted something that reminded him of boyhood swims in the dappled waters of the Lower Lake at Denby Hall. It had taken two years to build this one and it was a failure. The water was silty and stagnant. The natural vegetation had not yet grown back, lending the area a post-apocalyptic feel. We stood on a mound of dirt and stared across the lake’s surface and Ben told me they were putting trout in next week and I could find nothing to say in response. I had no interesting freshwater fish facts to draw upon. We lapsed into silence. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
‘Well, LS,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’ve come today and I’m glad we’ve had this moment to ourselves because there’s something we need to talk about.’
Fuck.
This was it, I thought to myself. The moment of uncovering.
I contemplated scarpering. Absurd, of course. I knew I wouldn’t get far with my blister and my oversized wellington boots. Besides, where would I go? The Tipworth estate ran to 400 acres.
‘I owe you an apology.’
I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly.
‘I’m sorry, what was that?’
‘An apology, LS. For everything that happened in the past. I took your loyalty for granted. I treated you abominably. And the only way I can explain it is to say that I had someone dripping poison in my ear throughout. I fear this person completely warped my view of you and made me feel you were the viper in the nest when, in fact, as we now know, it was him.’
A thundering sound in my ears.
‘I don’t quite follow …’
‘Jarvis,’ Ben said. ‘He was the only other person who knew everything, who knew where all the bodies were buried. He knew about the payments, what happened with Vicky …’ At the mention of her name, Ben’s voice slurred. ‘All of it. And because he had so muchfucking money, and I was so in debt to him, I had to keep him onside. I hushed up what he did to Fliss … my own sister, LS! That’s what he made me do. He told me it was consensual. Said she came on to him: “She called me, mate, out of the blue” – you know what he’s like …’
I nodded. He does a rather good impression of Jarvis.
‘Said if I didn’t help him out, then he’d stop funding the campaign and he’d tell everyone what we did to cover up the truth about Vicky. Said I needed him, that he’d been a true friend to me and that this was the one thing he had ever asked of me. And I believed it all, LS. All of it. He’s a monster. A fucking monster! He even slept with my wife!’
Ah. So that particular penny has dropped.
‘He betrayed me in every single way he could. I see it now. I feel sick when I think about it. Sick. What he did to Fliss … I can’t even …’
He covered his mouth, as if trying to keep the words stuffed inside.
‘I just thought I could trust him,’ he said, his tone pleading. ‘I thought he was my friend.’
I focused on a spray of reeds about 2 metres in front of me, paying careful attention to their outline, the detail of their brown-green shading. I couldn’t bring myself to speak in case I said something that gave me away. Every word that Ben uttered was simply too glorious, too perfect to allow myself to believe in fully. Could this really be happening? I hadn’t even planned it this way, but it all felt so right. It felt just.
‘Well,’ Ben said. ‘He’s dead to me now.’
A leaping in my heart, like the flicker of a trout swimming through lake water. Jarvis! The person who had once outwitted me, the pernicious school bully who’d blundered his way into the heart of the establishment, the Fitzmaurice confidante I had always desperately wanted to be, admitted without question into the family’s inner sanctum. The sainted Andrew Jarvis, canonised by his own money, insulated from retribution because of what other people owed him. At last. He was dead to Ben. His reign was over.
