The hardest thing of all, on that long car journey north, was dealing with my own feelings about Henry.
I recalled that little boy shut in the cupboard with Reynard – the sick fear as their predator/prey dominance swapped over, then swapped back again. No wonder Henry had become what he had become. Then I would remember the red robe and his words: I’ll be all right. I’m one of them. I was more confused about Henry than ever. He was, undoubtedly, one of the DOGS. I had been tried and branded for his murder, they had named him as one of their number and his name was on the family tomb with the other DOGS.
But.
He’d taken me to see the Red Mass and allowed me to overhear their terrible plans. Was he turning good? Could a baddie also be a goodie? Was Henry like Leon, a cold-blooded assassin, but a good guy inside?
Then there was the guilt and the grief – even now. If Henry was alive, then I shouldn’t be feeling either, right? But I’d been carrying those twin burdens for a year, and it turned out they were hard to set down. You couldn’t just switch feelings off, any more than you can stop loving someone if they die. Anger was also added to this perplexing mix. If Henry had swan-dived off Conrad’s Force and secretly been living the high life quite happily for a year at one of his many houses, how dare he put me through all that bereavement and regret? Then at other times I would feel the creeping certainty that I had killed him, and that I had somehow, through the performance of The Isle of Dogs, brought him back. Because if I hadn’t killed him, why had I been tried as a Manslayer by the DOGS? And if I believed that, then that made me, surely, crazy.
I felt like I needed some time to myself, like Tom Hanks in Cast Away, just to work out what I felt about it all. But that wasn’t to be. I had to come to terms with everything in a brand-new Mini Cooper with my best friend and my boyfriend. I had to face it all through talking, and there was plenty of time for that.
Shafeen’s reaction to the story of what had happened the night before was, perhaps predictably, disbelief. Shafeen the pragmatic, the practical, the prospective med student, just could not bring himself to accept the return of Henry de Warlencourt.
‘I’ll believe in him when I see him.’
‘Then what’s your explanation?’ I demanded.
‘That you were having a dream. A very vivid dream.’ He half turned from the passenger seat so that he could talk to me where I was sharing the backseat with our bags. ‘Think about it in filmic terms. The setting for the scene came from earlier in the evening when you’d been to the Christmas Mass at the London Oratory. The throne was the chair from the STAGS Club. The actors – the only people who spoke in this scene – were what we might call “established characters”; Rollo, the Old Abbot. And the only people they mentioned – Ty, me – were also known to you.’
‘There were two guys with a book,’ I protested. ‘And about fifty guys in robes.’
‘Did they speak?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I admitted.
‘So they were, effectively, extras. And you have been harbouring, self-evidently, buried trauma from your trial,’ he finished.
‘I suppose you think that was a dream too, Dr Jadeja.’ I muttered resentfully.
‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘You have the brand. That’s empirical evidence. But there’s no empirical evidence to prove that Henry is alive, so I happen to think that he’s gone.’
‘Think? Or hope?’ I said, rather unfairly.
‘Let me ask you something else,’ he said, ignoring my jibe. ‘What did you find out? Something we already know. Aren’t we sure there’s a bigger conspiracy to do with a fox or a Fawkes or whatever? But what did you learn from this “Mass”? That Ty was going to be hunted on Boxing Day, and we’d figured that out for ourselves. That can’t be the whole plot. It’s going to take a while to get rid of all of us non-whites if they do it one at a time.’
‘What is this, Groundhog Car?’ I grumbled. ‘I’m getting used to not being believed in this Mini. OK, so what about the “fox in a box” incident? The story of Henry and Reynard in the cupboard?’ I’d had to give it a trivial name because I found the notion of Henry locked in the box room with Reynard completely horrific.
‘You dreamed that too,’ said Shafeen simply. ‘Foxes are all we’ve been thinking about for the last few days. Your mind has constructed a way to explain away Henry’s horrible character, and a reason for Cass’s dislike of the earl and countess.’
‘And the flower by my bed?’
‘Rollo and Caro had just been to Longcross,’ he said. ‘They could easily have brought one back. There were flowers in my room too. Yours, Nel?’
‘Yep,’ Nel, eyes on the road, confirmed.
‘Dog roses?’ I asked.
‘Well, no, but –’
‘It’s not about who put the flower in my room. It’s about who brought them to the hospital.’
‘Cass,’ said Shafeen.
‘Who hadn’t arrived by then. Henry was my first visitor.’
For the first time, Shafeen’s assurance slipped a little. ‘Well, that I can’t explain. But I’ll bet the Longcross Estate isn’t the only place you can get those particular roses in Northumberland.’
Everything he said made a certain sense – that was what was so irritating about it. I appealed to Nel. ‘Nel? What do you think?’
She almost met my eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘Well … Shafeen does have a point.’
I didn’t reply but looked out of the window at the speeding motorway. I knew I was right about this. But I knew I was right about something else too. I was certain that Henry would make an appearance at Longcross. Then Shafeen and Nel would have to believe me.