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“Harry, tell me what’s wrong?”
“It’s the photographs,” he said.
“The photographs? What photographs?
Then I didn’t need him to answer that question, because the answer had suddenly dawned on me. If someone was sneaking about taking pictures of Caroline at his twenty-first, maybe they had something on Harry from that night too. Maybe he had received an envelope of pictures, just as she had.
“Is someone trying to blackmail you, Harry?”
Harry let out a deep sigh, and nodded. “And whoever it is, they want serious money.”
At last it began to make sense, how strangely he had been acting. How frazzled and erratic he had seemed. Despite the mess of the rest of the room, I noted that Harry’s bed had not been slept in. He looked like a man who had not slept properly for months. The question was...
“Harry, what on earth have they got pictures of you doing?”
There was almost a laugh in my voice as I said it, so hard was it to imagine Harry as a straitlaced twenty-one-year-old doing anything worth blackmailing him about more than thirty years later.
Harry sank onto a corner of the bed. He ran his hands over his face, through his tufts of hair. He looked up at me. He indicated with a gesture that I should find somewhere to sit down too.
Then it all came spilling out, in the way secrets will when they have been bottled up and churning around inside someone for decades. “Slow down, Harry,” I kept saying. “Harry, what are you telling me?”
They had been up high on the scaffolding that night, he said, after the fireworks. He and Freddie, smoking, swigging champagne straight from the bottle. They had both been drinking enthusiastically since before dinner. Freddie kept pestering him to do a line of coke.
“It’s your twenty-first, live a little, that sort of thing,” Harry explained. “Don’t be such a boring prick. Eventually I said yes mostly just to see the look on his face.”
Freddie had chopped out the line on the wooden planks, by the light of the flashlight Harry was holding. He had passed Harry a rolled-up five-pound note, mimed what to do next. Harry had hunched to snort the line—and that was when Freddie had whipped out his camera and taken pictures. Flash-flash-flash.
“Of you and the coke?” I asked. Harry nodded.
“And that was the photo someone sent you? A—what—thirty-year-old picture of you with a line of coke at a party when you were twenty-one? You can’t be serious—you’re letting someone extort a fortune from you with that? You’re not even an MP anymore! Who cares?”
Harry shook his head, face ashen. “There was an argument,” he said. “I was furious. He kept laughing. It turned into a proper fight, like when we were kids. You know how he could be, Patrick. You must remember. I was trying to take the camera from Freddie. He kept teasing me with it, waving it above his head, talking about selling the pictures to the papers. Telling me my political career was over before it had begun. Student politician’s drug shame. MP’s son in cocaine scandal.”
“He was just winding you up,” I said.
“No. It was more than that. It was always more than that with Freddie and me because of Longhurst. Because he was bitter, resentful. Because in the normal order of things, the house should have gone to his grandfather, not mine. I didn’t doubt for a minute he was serious about planning to sell that photograph. Not for a minute. And I knew how badly he needed money, because he was always begging to borrow it.”
“What did you do?” I asked him softly.
“I was trying to grab him and his shirt got torn and he lost his temper. He punched me on the side of my head, hard. We started grappling. He got me in a headlock. I kept trying to trip him over, get him down so I could get that camera.”
I asked what had happened next.
“He fell,” said Harry, not looking at me. “I tried to snatch the camera again and he stumbled backward and caught his heel and he tumbled off the scaffolding. We were three stories up. He didn’t even have time to scream, but I could hear the crunch as he landed. We were on the opposite side of the house to the tent, so nobody saw it but me. Or so I thought.”
I did not say anything.
“I scrambled down as fast as I could, but when I got there he wasn’t moving. And there was blood, so much blood, on the paving stones. I could see it spreading, thick and dark and shiny. His eyes were closed. His mouth was open. He wasn’t breathing. I looked around for the camera, feeling around in the bushes behind him, but it must have been thrown from his hand.”
“Jesus Christ! Your cousin was lying dead or dying on the ground and the first thing you thought to do was to look for the fucking camera? It didn’t occur to you to call an ambulance?”
“I panicked. I was drunk, I had done a line of cocaine, and I wasn’t thinking straight. And I did run off toward the tent to get help. Then I stopped running and started thinking. About what was going to happen to me. About the inevitable scandal. About the impact this would have on my parents, the family’s reputation. He was already dead. It was an accident, but he was dead, and there was nothing I could do about it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, trying to get all this to fit together with what I already knew. “They never found a body. The police found the blood, but they never found his body. And his car—if he was already dead, the police’s theory that he drove off drunk and drowned...”
Harry shook his head. “That was me,” he said, barely audibly.
“What was you?”