A Game of Ghosts: A Charlie Parker Thriller: 15. From the No. 1 Bestselling Author of A Time of Torment by John Connolly

Author:John Connolly [Connolly, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2017-04-05T18:30:00+00:00

51

Philip watched Mother pour herself another cup of tea. When she eventually died, and the flesh rotted away, he believed that her revealed bones would be stained brown.

He loved his mother.

He hated his mother.

Although not as much as he hated his father.

‘I have a job for you,’ said Mother.

Philip did not bristle, even though she spoke to him as if to a messenger boy. He had worked hard to develop an exterior that would not show emotion. Whenever it failed him, as it had when Parker mocked him about his parentage, he felt an intense disappointment with himself. He had not slept well the night before, his mind tormenting him with alternative permutations of his confrontation with the detective and his friends, each ending with them on, or in, the ground. Every display of weakness made it harder for him. If he wanted to be a leader, he would have to learn to behave like one.

‘Of course, Mother,’ he said. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I want you to go away.’

She was working her way through a sheaf of documents: annotating some, adding colored adhesive notes to others, and laying aside a handful to be shredded. He fought the urge to wrench the papers from her hands. This was his future being divided up and disposed of before his eyes, and she did not have the decency to consult him about it. She even appeared to take a certain pleasure in making it clear that she was excluding him from these decisions by working while speaking with him, when she could just as easily have taken care of business matters in the privacy of her own small office.

But now Philip was confused.

‘What do you mean by “go away?”’

‘I’m concerned that the final disposition of—’ The pause was barely perceptible, but Philip had spent too long in his mother’s company not to notice.

Go on, he thought, say it, even if only once: my father.

But Mother, as always, refused to acknowledge her son’s male progenitor. It was a strange game they played. Ever since he was a boy, he had suspected that Caspar Webb was his father, even though the man showed him no particular affection and displayed little interest in his activities, present or future. For much of his life, he and Mother occupied a wing of the house on Block Island, but it was only in his midteens that Philip came to understand that Caspar Webb, the man for whom Mother acted as secretary, was something more than a wealthy recluse.

Philip suspected that his conception had been the result of a brief liaison, a moment of weakness and lust on the part of Mother and Webb. He did not believe he was the product of rape, because his mother’s devotion to Webb made no sense in that context, but he could not recall witnessing a single moment of intimacy between them.

As he mused, Philip found himself cradling his malformed fingers as though to conceal them. They were, for him, an outward manifestation of his blighted pedigree, a physical symbol of his failure.

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