Eden in Winter Read Free Page B

know why you did.’
    ‘The reasons are my own, and you’ve got no right to know them.’ Adam caught himself, voice still husky with emotion. ‘There were times, growing up, when I wished you were my father. Now I wish you’d been as strong as the man who pretended I was his son. But for better or worse, I absorbed Ben’s will, his nerve, and his talent for survival. Along the way, I learned to trust absolutely no one – a useful trait in a family like ours.’ Adam paused, then finished with wearyfatalism, ‘On balance, I suppose, I’d rather have you as a father. Yet, right now, I look at you and Mother, and all I want is to vanish off the face of the earth. But I can’t, because the two of you have created a mess I plan to straighten out.’
    Jack cocked his head. ‘What do you have in mind?’
    ‘We’re starting where you and Ben left off,’ Adam responded coldly. ‘Tell me how you killed him, Jack.’
    Jack hunched a little, hands jammed in his pockets. ‘So now you’re the avenging angel, or perhaps the hanging judge. Whatever you’ve done in all those foreign countries, and whoever you’ve done it for, you seem to have developed the soul for that.’
    ‘No doubt. But not without help.’
    Jack seemed to flinch. ‘Maybe I deserve that. So yes, I’ll tell you what happened that night. But before you judge me, listen.’

TWO
    Taut, Adam waited for George Hanley’s next question.
    With an air of casual interest, the prosecutor asked, ‘Did you know that your brother had executed a new will, leaving almost everything to Carla Pacelli?’
    Jack folded his hands in front of him. ‘I did not.’
    That much was true, Adam understood – Jack had believed that a new will was a threat, not an existing fact. Had Jack known the truth, Benjamin Blaine might still be alive. But Hanley raised his eyebrows. ‘Then for what reason,’ he enquired, ‘did you go looking for your brother?’
    Jack seemed to steel himself, as though against the distasteful necessity of revealing family intimacies. ‘Clarice had called me, obviously upset. Ben had been drinking, she said – not an unusual event. Even so, it seemed that he had been unusually abusive.’
    ‘Was Mrs Blaine more specific?’
    ‘She was too distraught to be entirely coherent. But as I understood her, he was flaunting his relationship with CarlaPacelli – taunting her with it, in fact. I’m very fond of my sister-in-law, always have been. I thought Ben had subjected her to enough.’
    Sitting beside Adam, his mother bowed her head, a silent portrait of gratitude and shame. ‘In Mrs Blaine’s account,’ Hanley asked, ‘had her husband mentioned that Ms Pacelli was pregnant with his child?’
    Jack shook his head. ‘No. But Clarice’s humiliation – public and private – had gone on long enough. I knew my brother too well to truly believe that I’d persuade him. Still, I could damned well try.’
    Delivering this answer, in Adam’s mind Jack evoked James Stewart in a classic movie from the 1940s – a decent man befuddled by circumstance, but resolved to wage an uphill fight for goodness. With willed detachment, Adam replayed Jack’s lies in his head, listening for what another man would have taken for sincerity. In this moment, Jack was too good at it for comfort.
    Perhaps sensing this, Hanley paused. ‘Why don’t you just tell me, in your own words, what happened that night?’
    An open-ended question, Adam saw at once – verbal rope for Jack to hang himself with. For a superstitious instant, he imagined Jack repeating what he had told him that night. The truth, at last.
    *
    Jack had found his brother sitting slumped on the rock, his eyes bloodshot, his gaze unfocused. With terrible effort, Ben sat straighter. ‘I’m taking a rest,’ he said tiredly. ‘I can only assume she called you.’
    Jack knelt by him, staring into his face. ‘You can’t do this to her,’ he told Ben. ‘Not after all these years.’
    Ben’s face