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  About the Book

  Geoffrey Staddon turned his back on the best things in his life. He turned his back on the beautiful house Clouds Frome, his finest achievement as an architect. He turned his back on the woman he loved, Consuela Caswell, and who loved him in return. Twelve years later, amidst the tatters of his career and marriage, he is forced to contemplate the remorse and shame of his betrayal.

  But when he reads that Consuela has been charged with murder, he knows instinctively that she cannot be guilty. And when she sends her own daughter to him, pleading for help, Geoffrey cannot ignore the dangerous lure of the past any longer. He must return to Clouds Frome, and face the dark secret it holds.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Acknowledgement

  Legal Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Robert Goddard

  Copyright

  TAKE NO

  FAREWELL

  Robert Goddard

  Acknowledgement

  I am grateful to Christopher Bennett for advice and information about the architectural profession past and present.

  Legal Note

  Since the period in which this book is set, the laws of England and Wales relating to capital punishment, criminal appeals, intestacy, inheritance and the revocation of wills have all been revised. In particular, significant reforms have arisen from the Administration of Estates Act 1925, the Law of Property Act 1925, the Inheritance (Family Provision) Act 1938 and the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965.

  Prologue

  It snowed in the night. I sat where now I stand, watching the wind scatter the flakes in the haloes of the street-lamps, listening as its high, moaning voice strained among the chimneypots. All night, and all last evening from the earliest tinge of dusk, I sat where now I stand – and waited.

  And now the waiting is nearly over. The sun is up, low in a clear, cold sky and, thrown up from the snow-covered pavement, a strange, reflected half-light creeps across the ceiling of the room. An hour, it signals, to the moment I have long known this day would hold. An hour – or less – to the sombre end of my flight from self.

  What is she thinking, across the city in her crowded, brick-bound solitude? What farewell is she bidding, what leave is she taking, of that meagre portion of this world? When the hour is up, when the time is come, what will I seem to her? What will I seem to myself?

  A taxi-cab has turned in at the end of the mews. It has come to collect me, come to bear me away in answer to a summons I once believed I could evade for ever. Once, but no longer. Not since that day last autumn when I heard her name again after twelve years’ silence and knew – for all my efforts to stifle the knowledge – that an old deceit was about to claim its due. Not since that day, which now, as the cab glides to a halt, black and burnished against the bare white carpet of snow, I relive in my memory. That day, and all the days since.

  Chapter One

  ‘THE CASWELLS OF Hereford. Weren’t they clients of yours, Geoffrey?’

  I may have flushed at Angela’s words, or started. More likely my practised features betrayed no reaction whatsoever, eagerly though she would have scanned them for sign of one. Between my wife and me there existed then, as there had for some years past, a curiously unjustified hostility, a mutual disappointment forever in search of trivial slights that could elevate it to the status of a major grievance. Assuming therefore that she was, as usual, trying to catch me out, I merely raised my eyebrows, as if I had not heard her distinctly.

  ‘The Caswells of Hereford, Geoffrey. More precisely, Victor Caswell and his wife, Consuela. Didn’t you design a house for them?’

  I frowned and set down my cup carefully in its saucer, with only the faintest of clinks. I made to brush a toast-crumb from my sleeve and gazed past Angela towards the window. Tuesday 25 September 1923, according to the very newspaper she had folded open before her. A quarter past eight, by the unreliable clock on the mantelpiece – a gift from one of her aunts. Weather forecast: rainy with bright intervals, one such interval being currently responsible for a flood of sunlight that sparkled on the surface of the marmalade and cast a dazzling aura round my wife’s barely inclined head. It restored the gold to her hair – but could not drain the acid from her voice.

  ‘Clouds Frome, near Hereford. Surely I’ve heard you speak of it. Wasn’t it your first big commission?’

  Clouds Frome. Yes, she was right. First and therefore dearest, first and also bleakest, through no fault of its design or construction, for the fault lay elsewhere. I had not seen its walls – whose every stone and crevice had once been as familiar as the lines of my own palm – for twelve years. I had not even looked at its photograph in that back copy of The Builder whose place in my study I knew so well. I had not wanted so much as to glimpse it. I had not dared to. Because of the name my wife had just dredged from a drowned but unforgotten past. The Caswells of Hereford. Victor and Consuela. Especially Consuela.

  I cleared my throat and looked at Angela and found, as expected, her blue-green eyes trained upon me, her plucked eyebrows raised, one more than the other in a gesture of doubt, her mouth compressed, sharp lines forming – as surely they once did not – about the junction of chin and cheek.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I built Clouds Frome for the Caswells. A long time ago. Before we met. What of it?’

  ‘You didn’t read this article, then?’ She tapped the folded newspaper with the glazed nail of her forefinger as the sunlight vanished from the room and a sudden chill succeeded it.

  ‘No. I hardly glanced at the paper this morning.’

  I could almost have suspected Angela was about to smile. There was a tremor at the edges of her lips, a glint of something in her eyes. Then that false, blank, unrevealing openness which had become the face she most often turned upon me. ‘It’s as well I spotted this, then. Otherwise you might not have known.’

  ‘Known what, my dear?’

  ‘Which could have been embarrassing,’ she disingenuously proceeded, ‘if somebody had asked you whether you thought she was capable of such a thing.’

  ‘Capable of what?’

  Angela looked down at the newspaper, intent, it seemed, on infuriating me, and devoted several seconds to a brow-furrowed pretence of re-reading. Then she retrieved her cigarette from the china ashtray beside her plate, drew deeply on it, and blandly announced: ‘Murder.’ A plume of exhaled smoke climbed towards the ceiling-rose. ‘There doesn’t seem much room for doubt.’

  It is hard now to recall the emotions with which I read that terse, unyielding paragraph, harder still to recall with what few words I dismissed the subject before claiming that I had quite forgotten the time, had an early appointment at the office and must, yes really must, be on my way at once. I do not for a moment suppose that Angela was deceived by my performance. She would have
seen – as she had hoped to see – that I was not merely surprised by what I read, but troubled in the depth of my soul. She would have known that leaving the newspaper discarded on the table meant nothing, that five minutes away, out of sight of the house, I could and would buy another copy from a street-vendor and lean for support against some railings whilst I read again those brief, charged, tolling sentences.

  HEREFORD POISONING CASE

  There was a sensational development yesterday in police investigations of the murder of Rosemary Caswell, niece of wealthy Herefordshire businessman Victor Caswell. Consuela Caswell, Mr Caswell’s Brazilian-born wife, appeared before Hereford magistrates charged with the murder of Miss Caswell, and the attempted murder of Mr Caswell, by the administration of poison at the family home, Clouds Frome, near Hereford, on Sunday the ninth of September. She was arrested on Friday, following a police search of Clouds Frome, during which a quantity of arsenic and several incriminating letters were found and removed. Mrs Caswell pleaded not guilty to the charges and was remanded in custody for a week.

  The Underground that morning was even more crowded than usual, but I was grateful for the press of strap-hangers round my seat, grateful for the privacy they unintentionally gave me in which to re-read incessantly and tease for meaning one small, obscure block of print. HEREFORD POISONING CASE, wedged without ceremony amidst the sweepings of a dozen courts. Drunken brawls. Domestic incidents. Break-ins. Burglaries. And murder. In Hereford. In a family I knew and a house I built. By a woman I … How could this be?

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ The man in the seat to my left was peering at me through pebble-lensed glasses. His face wore an irritated frown. Evidently I had spoken my thoughts aloud and, equally evidently, he was fearful lest his completion of the Daily Telegraph crossword was to be interrupted by a fellow-traveller of dubious sanity. Already I could seem to hear his petulant voice complaining to a long-suffering wife in Ruislip that such incidents were becoming distressingly common.

  ‘Nothing.’ I tried to smile. ‘Nothing at all. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Quite all right.’ He slapped the newspaper against his knee and began to ink in a clue.

  Quite all right? No, it was not that. All was wrong, if the truth be told. All was very wrong.

  I had once loved Consuela Caswell. I had once loved her and she had once loved me. There had seemed for a brief space nothing that could mean more to me than what we felt for each other. But that was twelve years in the past, that was all forgotten, if not forgiven, and so there was no reason – no reason founded on logic or good sense – why this turn of events should have moved me as it did. And yet, and yet … Life grows sadder as we grow older, peppered with wrong-turnings and regrets, weighed down by a creeping awareness of our own worthlessness. When ambition is thwarted and hope blunted, what is there left but to mourn our mistakes? And in Consuela’s case, worse than a mistake: a betrayal.

  My precipitate departure from Suffolk Terrace had left me with time to spare, which was time I badly needed. Accordingly, I broke my journey at Charing Cross and went the rest of the way on foot, along the Embankment as far as Blackfriars Bridge, then through a maze of narrow streets to St Paul’s, there to pause and gaze in wonderment, as I so often have, at Wren’s majestic dome. Thirty-four years in the building and Wren already older than I am now when he began. Where did he find the energy, where the inspiration, where the courage to embark upon such a project? Twelve years ago it was a comfort to me to know that such things were possible, for still then, in my imagination, I could aspire to such achievements myself. But no longer. Daring had failed where originality had faltered. A country house I no longer visited. The ashes of a burnt-out hotel. A rag-bag of mock Tudor villas and utilitarian office-blocks. A failed marriage and a debased profession: all there was to show for a decade of trimming before the wind.

  The crowds swept along Cheapside, jostling and shouting to be heard above the traffic. Car horns and squealing brakes, the news-vendors’ cries and rain beginning to fall. I moved as in a dream, a dream of what might have been if my nerve had been stronger, my resolution greater, my love for Consuela proof against the snares of self-interest. Why did I betray her? It is swiftly explained. For my career. For the sake of prosperity and respectability. Which amounted, it seemed to me that morning, to little more than the grey weeping blankness above my head.

  5A Frederick’s Place has been the hub of my professional life since Imry and I set up there together in 1907. Whenever I climb its rickety stairs, whenever I smell again its aroma of old paper and older wood, I think of Imry and me as we were then: short of work and scarcely able to summon the rent, but young, energetic, richer than now in every way save one, determined to make a show in the world, intent upon building well and being known for what we built. Such are the painful ephemera of youth, for Imry will never bound up those stairs again, nor will I sketch grand designs on discarded envelopes. Life is what we make it and middle age the time when what we have made can no longer be ignored. That morning last September, I eyed the brass plate – Renshaw & Staddon, A.R.I.B.A. – with a curious distaste and ascended the stairs preparing stratagems in my mind to cope with the hours that lay ahead.

  ‘Morning, Mr Staddon,’ said Reg Vimpany, when he saw me enter.

  ‘Good morning, Reg. Where is everybody?’

  ‘Doris will be late. Her teeth, you remember?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I lied.

  ‘Kevin’s gone for some milk.’

  ‘Aha.’

  ‘And Mr Newsom,’ he added with heavy emphasis, ‘is not yet with us.’

  ‘Never mind. Remind me. What’s on?’

  ‘Well, I need to go through the Mannerdown tenders with you. You’ve Pargeter to see this afternoon. And you told Mr Harrison you’d slip out to the Amberglade site at some point.’

  ‘Ah yes. Mr Harrison may have to wait. As for the tenders, shall we say eleven o’clock?’

  ‘Very well, sir.’

  ‘Thanks, Reg.’

  I retreated to my office, well aware that poor Reg would be shaking his head in disapproval of my slackness. He was fifteen years older than me and the only chief assistant we had ever had: dependable, unflappable and content, it seemed, to preserve a certain level of efficiency in our affairs however scant our gratitude.

  Once I had closed my office door, a sense of refuge closed about me. There was time and peace in which to think, an opportunity to apply reason to what little I knew. Consuela had been charged with Rosemary Caswell’s murder. And Rosemary Caswell was her husband’s niece. I could not even remember the girl. There was a nephew, certainly, an unpleasant little boy of eight or nine who must be twenty-odd by now. But a niece? The boy’s sister, presumably. What was she to Consuela? And why the additional charge of attempted murder? Flinging my coat and hat onto their hooks and gazing through the window at the red-bricked flank of Dauntsey House, I realized how much worse than a terrible truth was the hint of half a story.

  ‘Watch’er, Mr Staddon!’ With a theatrical rattle of the door handle, Kevin Loader, our irrepressibly disrespectful office boy, had entered the room. Sometimes I welcomed his jaunty, cocksure breath of vitality, but this was not such a time. He made a spring-heeled progress to my desk, deposited a bundle of mail in the in-tray and treated me to a lop-sided grin. ‘One o’ yer ’ouses in the news, I see, Mr Staddon.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Clahds Frome. Read abaht it in me Sketch on the bus this very mornin’. Murder most foul, seemingly. Ain’t you ’eard?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I believe I did … read something.’

  ‘What’s the truth of it, then?’

  ‘I’ve really no idea, Kevin.’

  ‘Come on. You must know the family.’

  ‘It was a long time ago. Before the war. I hardly remember.’

  He moved closer, the grin still plastered to his gossip-hungry face. ‘This Conshuler. Bit of a looker, is she?’ I shook my head, hoping he would desist. ‘They always are, aren’t
they?’

  ‘Who are?’

  ‘Murderesses,’ he hissed gleefully. ‘Specially the poisonin’ kind.’

  After throwing Kevin out, I sat down and forced myself to smoke a calming cigarette. As matters stood, I was under no obligation to intervene in whatever had befallen the Caswells. No obligation, that is, that the world would recognize. Far less did I have any right to interfere. Such rights as I might have had I had forfeited, long ago. Yet I had to know more. That much was certain. To pretend nothing had happened, to keep a weather eye open for a further report of court proceedings but otherwise remain sublimely indifferent, was beyond me. So, remembering the name of the local newspaper from my many visits to Hereford all those years ago, I telephoned their offices and prevailed upon them to send me copies of their last two weekly editions. I did not tell them why I wanted them and they did not ask. Only my guilty conscience suggested they might guess.

  Where do the lines begin to be traced that lead two people together in this life? How far back lies the origin of their convergent destinies? Some time between disposing of the Mannerdown tenders and tolerating a peroration by the tireless Pargeter on a new range of emulsion paints, I dug out my earliest office diaries and computed, as I had never before, the date and time of my first meeting with Consuela Caswell. It was on my second visit to Hereford, in November 1908, after the commission for Clouds Frome had been settled and the site selected. Tuesday 17 November, as I now learned, around four o’clock in the afternoon. That, at all events, was when I had recorded that I was expected to take tea with Mr and Mrs Caswell, wealthy client and wife. But such precision did not for an instant deceive me. Our meeting was not the rushed contrivance of a diary jotting, but the inevitable product of the innumerable conjunctions and connections that govern all our lives.

  It would be possible, for instance, to settle the responsibility on Ernest Gillow, the charming and tolerant man to whose architectural practice of music halls and taverns I was articled upon leaving Oxford in 1903. Gillow was himself a Cambridge man and took me on as a favour to my father, whose stockbroking services he had often employed. It was to transpire that a contemporary of his at King’s, Cambridge, was none other than Mortimer Caswell, eldest son of the founder of G. P. Caswell & Co., cider-makers of Hereford. When, in due course of time, Mortimer Caswell’s younger brother, Victor, returned from ten or more years in South America with a fortune in rubber behind him and a Brazilian wife on his arm, it was only to be expected that he would deem the construction of an impressive country residence an appropriate mark of his success. Mortimer suggested Gillow as the obvious man to recommend a young and enthusiastic architect, and it was only a year since I had left his practice, so Gillow no doubt thought he was doing me a considerable favour by putting my name forward. As indeed he was, in every sense that he could be expected to understand.