Long Time Coming - Softcover

Goddard, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552160245 ISBN 13: 9780552160247

Verlag: Corgi, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

The new thriller from the 'master of the clever twist'

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Goddard was born in Hampshire and read History at Cambridge. His first novel, Past Caring, was an instant bestseller. Since then his books have captivated readers worldwide with their edge-of-the-seat pace and their labyrinthine plotting. His first Harry Barnett novel, Into the Blue, was winner of the first WHSmith Thumping Good Read Award and was dramatized for TV, starring John Thaw.

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Eldritch Swan is a dead man. Or at least that is what his nephew Stephen has always been told. Until one day Swan walks back into his life after thirty-six years in an Irish prison. He won't say why he was locked up - only that he is innocent of any crime.

His return should interest no one. But the visit of a lawyer with a strange request will take Swan and his sceptical nephew to London, where an exhibition of Picasso paintings is the starting point on a journey that will take them back to when the pictures were last seen - on the eve of the Second World War.

Untangling the web of murky secrets, family ties and old betrayals that surrounds their mysterious reappearance will prove to be a dangerous pursuit for the two men. Because watching their every step is a sinister enemy who will do whatever it takes to stop the truth emerging...

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Chapter One


My mother surprised me when she announced that my uncle was staying with her. It was the first of many surprises that were shortly to come my way. But of all of them it was probably the biggest. Because I’d only ever had one uncle. And I’d always been told he’d died in the Blitz.

I’d phoned her from Heathrow, to give her an idea of when I’d be arriving. I didn’t have the change for a long call. “We’ll have to make this quick,” I said. Maybe that was what prompted her to spring it on me. We’d spoken a couple of times over the previous week, while I was still in Houston. She’d said nothing about Uncle Eldritch then. Maybe her nerve had failed her. Maybe she’d doubted if I really was abandoning what she regarded as my glamorous existence in Texas. If not, I could be spared the revelation, at least for a while, that the old man wasn’t dead after all. But I’d gone ahead and left. So now I had to be told. And the lack of immediate opportunity for cross-questioning was a bonus.

“I ought to have mentioned it sooner, dear. Your uncle’s come to stay.”

“My uncle?”

“Eldritch. Your father’s elder brother.”

“But . . . he’s dead.”

“No, dear. That’s what your father always insisted we should pretend. But Eldritch is very much alive.”

“How can he be? Where the hell’s he been all my life?”

“In prison. In Ireland.”

“What?”

“I’ll explain when you get here.”

“Hold on.” But already I was talking over the pips. “Let’s just—”

“See you soon, dear,” my mother shouted. And then she put the phone down.

Perhaps I should have been grateful. But for Mum’s bombshell, I’d probably have spent the journey down to Paignton, as I had the overnight flight from Houston, wondering just how I’d allowed a disagreement with the corporate finance director at Sanderstead Oil to become a resigning issue, with disastrous consequences for my engagement to his daughter. “Because I’d wanted to” would have been the honest answer. Because the job and the engagement were both too good to be true and I was young enough to find worthier versions of both. But naturally I had my doubts about that. Part of me was gung ho and optimistic. Another part reckoned I’d been a damn fool.

I was pretty confident, nonetheless, that I’d be able to get back into the oil business whenever I chose. With the North Sea fields coming on-stream, there were plenty of openings for a geologist with my qualifications. First, though, I planned to spend a few weeks in Paignton, unwinding and taking stock. I hadn’t seen as much of my mother as I should have in the two years since my father’s death. The guesthouse kept her busy, at least in summer, but I wanted to reassure myself that she was coping as well as she claimed.

After the news of my uncle, all such thoughts went out of my head, of course. My mother’s matter-of-fact tone couldn’t disguise the enormity of what she’d actually said. Eldritch Swan of the exotic Christian name and raffish reputation had not been among the thousands of Londoners killed by the Luftwaffe in 1940. His death was a lie. And it soon occurred to me that his life might be a lie too. Nothing I’d been told about him accounted for several decades of imprisonment in Ireland. Evidently my father had decided I was better off not knowing the truth about his brother.

Or maybe he’d decided he was better off by my not knowing. A dead relative is more socially acceptable than an imprisoned one. I might have shot my mouth off to the neighbours about dear old banged-up Uncle Eldritch. And that would never have done. Grandad might have insisted on blanking his son out of the family, of course. That was a distinct possibility. But he’d been dead for more than twenty years. And the record had never been set straight. Until now.

My paternal grandfather, George Swan, was an engineer who rose to the higher echelons of management with the East African Railways and Harbours Administration, first in Kenya, then Tanganyika. His eldest son was christened Eldritch on account of his mother’s maiden name. His second son, my father, received the more conventional Neville as his label in life. The difference turned out to be prophetic, since Eldritch “racketed around Europe,” according to Dad, until the outbreak of war forced him to return to his homeland, only for a German bomb to score a direct hit on the Mayfair gambling den where he happened to be hunched over the baccarat table one night in the autumn of 1940. Meanwhile, my father, favoured, he’d often point out, with a less expensive education than his brother, worked for a shipping agent in Dar es Salaam and fought for his country with the Eighth Army in North Africa and Italy. At the end of the war, he transferred to the agent’s London office, where my mother was working as a typist. Courtship, marriage, parenthood, and suburbia duly followed.

My earliest memories are of our house in Stoneleigh. It backed onto the railway line, and on fine mornings Mum would take me into the garden after Dad had left for the station so we could wave to him as the Waterloo train rumbled past. The scene changed for good when Grandma and Grandad died within a few months of each other the summer I was eight. Dad inherited what he’d never describe more specifically than “a tidy sum.” It was enough for him to quit the shipping business and buy a guesthouse in Paignton, the seaside resort where we’d spent several summer holidays. He needed a lot of persuading by Mum to take the plunge, though. She was always the more enterprising of the two. My father was a cautious man, fretful with the slightest encouragement. But deceitful? I’d never have said so. Until now.

Paignton was a wonderful place to be a child. Zanzibar, as Dad named the guesthouse, was only a few minutes from the beach. Sun, sea, and sand were my summer-long companions. The sideshows on the pier; travelling fairs on the green; open-top bus rides to Torquay; rock-pooling at low tide: The real winner from the move to Devon was me.

Ordinarily, I’d have needed to fix that thought firmly in my mind when I got off the train in the middle of a chill grey March afternoon. Torbay Road, running between the station and the Esplanade, is a depressing drag to the adult eye of bucket-and-spade shops and slot machine joints. A walk along it, rucksack on back, suitcase in hand, had promised to test my spirits. Never were the oily charms of Houston likely to seem more bountiful.

As it was, though, I barely noticed my surroundings as I made my way towards the seafront. A dead uncle was waiting for me at Zanzibar. And a mother with a lot of explaining to do.

Zanzibar started life as one of a terrace of Victorian houses in a cul-de-sac off the Esplanade. Like most of its neighbours, it subsequently acquired the standard trappings of the local tourist trade: dormer window in the roof, striped awnings over the other windows and porch, palm tree out front (supplemented in the season with pot plants and hanging baskets), AA and other accreditations prominently displayed, illuminated Vacancies sign suspended in the ground-floor bay. It had been my home from the age of eight to eighteen and in many ways still was. It was stuffed full of memories. It held a part of me, however far or long I strayed.

The awnings were currently retracted. The palm wore a weatherbeaten look. And the fully lit Vacancies sign did not signal brisk business. But...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Corgi
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0552160245
• ISBN 13: 9780552160247
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 544
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar