by T. M. Logan
‘Abbie went with him on Monday, did a shift with him.’
I frowned. ‘She did what?’
‘She went with him to St Jude’s Hospice and had an induction session there.’
I felt some of my certainty begin to evaporate. ‘But . . . I don’t understand.’
‘It’s not rocket science, Ed. She went with him to a session with the manager, to see how it’s all set up, and she’s going back in a couple of weeks.’
‘Ryan told you this, did he?’
‘No. Abbie told me herself.’
‘But I talked to some of the patients, they said they didn’t know Ryan.’
If Claire was surprised, she didn’t show it. Perhaps she had given up being surprised at my bizarre behaviour.
‘You talked to a handful of patients? There are a hundred or more there, and I imagine most of them are fairly preoccupied with other things. So it’s not a surprise that some didn’t know him, is it?’
‘Abbie went to an actual session with him?’
‘Yes.’
My confidence was crumbling away, in the face of hers. ‘Oh,’ was all I could manage.
‘He wasn’t picking anyone up,’ Claire said, her voice hard. ‘Your son-in-law to be was giving up his free time to provide a little comfort to the dying.’
‘He’s been going to a dodgy house on Bestwood Estate.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘I thought it might be a drug dealer. And there’s something weird about his trips to Manchester as well, and then there’s his degree certificate, which looks like a fake . . .’ I tailed off.
‘What? What are you even talking about?’
I swallowed. ‘And the story about the engagement ring, something about it doesn’t add up—’
‘Stop!’ she said, holding up a hand. ‘Just stop, will you? Can you hear yourself? Can you hear how mad you sound? How completely and utterly unhinged this is?’
‘But—’
‘Stop!’ she said again, more forcefully this time. ‘The reason I’m still sat here, when I should be elsewhere? I’m trying to work out whether I can leave you on your own next week, whether you’re going to stop this madness and start behaving like a normal father, a normal person, while I’m away. Can you do that?’
‘Yes,’ I said quietly.
‘Do you want our daughter to be happy?’
‘Of course. I want that more than anything.’
‘Right.’ Her voice was taut with frustration. ‘Of course you do.’
‘I want her to be safe.’
‘Safe?’
‘Yes.’
She stared at me for a long moment, finally breaking off with a sigh and a disappointed shake of her head.
‘Let’s try to enjoy our daughter’s wedding day, let’s just get as far as that, OK? Let her enjoy it, at least. I’m off on the tour on Wednesday and by the time I get back, you need to have sorted yourself out and got your head straight. No more stalking, no more following, no more conspiracy theories about Ryan. Maybe it’s better that I’m going away for a bit. Maybe that’s just what you need, a little bit of time here, on your own, to think about what you’re doing and what you’ve already done. Maybe that’s the kick up the rear end that you need. A dose of reality.’
A dose of reality. I considered. Perhaps I hadn’t found anything concrete because there was nothing to find. Perhaps Ryan was exactly what he looked like, without artifice or pretence, without the hidden darkness I thought I had sensed. Maybe I had got this whole thing backwards, I had misinterpreted the signs and jumped to the wrong conclusion.
Maybe Ryan was just a normal guy, and he had been telling the truth all this time.
‘I’ll try,’ I said.
‘And if you can’t find it in yourself to be nice to him, just stay away from him, OK? Stop taking the crazy pills, Ed, and call a truce with our daughter. Because if you interfere again, I don’t think she’ll ever forgive you.’
38
MONDAY 29th JUNE
‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,’ the registrar began, her voice carrying easily to the back of the flower-lined ceremony room. Sunlight streamed in through open sash windows, the hint of a summer breeze giving scant relief from the early afternoon heat. ‘May I begin by welcoming you all here today to Bridgford Hall for the marriage of Abbie and Ryan.’
I stared straight ahead, fists clenched on my knees, an ache deep in my chest. Claire sat in the high-backed chair next to mine, Joyce in her wheelchair at the end of the row, both smiling broadly in their extravagant wide-brimmed hats. Everyone in the room seemed to be smiling, but my own features were frozen.
Abbie wore a floor-length ivory silk wedding gown, her chestnut hair falling over bare shoulders: she was so stunning it brought a lump to my throat just looking at her. Joyce had helped her choose the dress, and insisted on Abbie having the sapphire teardrop necklace that she had worn to her own wedding. Something borrowed, something blue. Ryan stood tall by her side in a dark navy three-quarter length jacket, complete with embroidered waistcoat, cravat and pocket square.
The registrar, a thin-faced woman in her fifties, took a small book from the table at the front of the room and opened it.
‘Today marks a new beginning in Abbie and Ryan’s lives together,’ she said. ‘And it means a lot to both of them that you, their family and friends, are here to witness their wedding vows and celebrate their marriage.’
We were in the front row on the left, with Claire’s siblings, their partners and children in the rows directly behind us. Behind them were three rows of Abbie’s friends from university and school, so many that they had spilled over into the back row on the groom’s side of the room, which was three-quarters empty. I hadn’t recognised any of Ryan’s half-dozen guests as we filed in, but none looked older than forty or younger than twenty-five. Work colleagues, presumably.
One thought had been bouncing around in my head all day as we got ready, as we answered phone calls and gave directions and welcomed members of the extended family.
Too late. I’m too late. Should have done more, tried harder, been smarter.
I had stood at the front door of our house an hour ago, car keys in hand, thinking back to a guy I had known at university. He had phoned in an anonymous bomb threat to the Vice-Chancellor’s office on the first day of his final exams to buy himself a little extra revision time. He was caught, of course, suspended and had to drop back a year. So it had kind of worked, in a way – he bought himself a breathing space, of sorts. And if something like that happened today it would take weeks, probably months, to get another wedding date in the diary. Maybe in that time Abbie would realise she was making a—
‘Ready to go?’ Claire had come down the stairs at that point, almost as tall as me in her heels, breathtakingly beautiful in a powder blue sarong dress that I had never seen before.
‘Ready,’ I said.
Somewhere behind us in the ceremony room, a baby grizzled and was shushed by its mother. The registrar paused a moment to wait for it to settle, offering an indulgent smile before continuing to read from the small book in her hands.
‘You are here to witness the joining in marriage of Ryan Wilson and Abbie Rose Collier. If any person present knows of any lawful impediment why these two people may not be joined in marriage, he or she should declare it now.’
No one spoke into the silence that followed. Claire took my hand in hers and gave it a firm squeeze, her whole body tensing beside me.
I couldn’t look at her. I could only stare straight ahead, swallowing hard. Feeling something deep inside me start to shift and tear, as if my heart was being wrenched from my chest.
The registrar glanced briefly around the room, before returning her gaze to the couple standing in front of her.
‘Now the solemn moment has come for Abbie and Ryan to contract their marriage before you their witnesses, families and friends – so can I ask you all to stand please and join togethe
r for the celebration of their marriage.’
We all stood.
‘Abbie,’ the registrar continued. ‘Will you take Ryan to be your wedded husband, to share your life with him, to love, support and comfort him, whatever the future may bring?’
Abbie took Ryan’s hand in hers. Turned her smiling face up to his, her eyes shining.
‘I will.’
PART II
THE SON-IN-LAW
39
There was a strangely pungent smell in the kitchen, a mixture of gone-off food, unwashed dishes and Tilly’s overflowing litter tray. I made a mental note to sort the kitchen out tomorrow, when I had a bit more time. Now I sat in my study surrounded by empty mugs and plates, my iPad and mobile, notebook and pen, books and papers and computer printouts covering every available surface and half of the floor too.
Claire had been gone for five days.
Abbie had been married for a week.
I had failed.
In Claire’s absence, I had abandoned the daily pretence of going to work, throwing myself instead into the full-time investigation of my son-in-law. On the PC screen in front of me was a list of Grand National winners from the last forty years. I stared at it, searching my memory for Ryan’s anecdote about the engagement ring that he’d inherited from his grandmother.
She always used to talk about how my Grandad Arthur bet his whole month’s salary on Well To Do to win the Grand National. He knew nothing at all about horses but just liked the name and fancied being ‘well to do’ himself. The horse came in at 14-1 and he blew most of his winnings on this ring.
Something was off about the story but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. My father had been into the racing, and he had always talked about this horse and that horse, the famous winners and the rank outsiders who had surprised everyone. I’d heard of Red Rum and Foinavon, Aldaniti and Corbiere. But I’d never heard of Well To Do. Presumably he was a winner in the late 1940s or maybe the ’50s, if Arthur was a young grandparent before he was married.
I found the page, scrolling down to the history. Originally the horse had odds of 33-1, but this had been backed down to 14-1 the day before the race, making him joint fourth in the betting. Only nine horses out of more than forty actually finished on the day he won.
Tilly limped slowly into my study, her stitches gone now but the cast still on her back leg. Since we’d been on our own in the house, I had been giving her a VIP diet of tinned tuna, cat treats and a daily dish of single cream, and she was starting to thicken a little around the middle. But she was recovering well, and that was the main thing. She sat by my chair, blinking up at me with her big green eyes, until I lifted her carefully onto my lap. I scratched each side of her chin for a moment, listening to her rumbling purr.
I scrolled back to the top of the page. Well To Do only ran in the National once, the year that he won it – 1972. But Ryan was thirty-three, he was born in 1986, a mere fourteen years afterwards. So how could it have been his grandfather who proposed with this ring?
The chronology didn’t work.
Then again, maybe it was just one of those family stories that was handed down over the decades and got slightly mangled in the process, Chinese whispers with an embellishment here, an extra detail there. Maybe Ryan was just mistaken. Why tell a lie that was so easily uncovered?
I thought I might know the answer: because lying was what Ryan did. Because his whole story was a fiction. Along with the first-class degree and the army career and the medal for bravery.
I switched to email and checked to see if there was anything from Farmer. Still nothing. I fired off an email asking for an update and pulled up Facebook to check Ryan’s feed. Above the wedding day pictures there was a new post about the 10K run he was doing with Abbie, and a link to their JustGiving page. I clicked on it. Their fundraising total was up to £4,390, not far off their target, and near the top of the donation listing I could see why – a £1,000 donation from George Fitzgerald a few weeks ago with the message ‘I always said you were amazing, Abbie. Wishing you all the luck in the world. G xxx’. Wow. I knew George was loaded but hadn’t anticipated he would go quite this far. His donation was the biggest single gift by some way, three times more than I had pledged. I realised I hadn’t thought about him in a while, not since the day Abbie had told me he’d gone off the radar. When did he reappear, and what was his story? A search for his name brought up a Facebook page full of desperate posts and messages of support from friends and family. An offer of a reward for information, a police number to ring.
George had not resurfaced. He had been gone more than three weeks now, and he was still missing.
My phone vibrated with a text.
Jason:
Fancy a pint?
I sighed and looked at my watch. It was 9 p.m. and I probably needed to eat something. I made a quick promise to myself to start making proper meals again, picking up my phone to deflect the offer with a quick reply.
Cheers mate but probably going to have a quiet one tonight.
I was scrolling through more posts from George’s family when my phone vibrated again.
Wrong answer ☺ Look out your window.
I lifted the cat carefully off my lap and went to the front room, pulled a gap in the curtains and saw Jason on the drive, phone in hand, grinning.
‘What’s going on?’ he said as I opened the front door. ‘You all right, mate?’
‘Hey, Jason.’
‘Blimey. You look like you’ve been on a three-day bender with Oliver Reed.’
I looked down at my clothes, the crumpled shirt and grubby jeans, as if seeing them for the first time.
‘Been busy.’
‘Too busy for a pint with your best mate?’ He peered over my shoulder at the mess in the hallway and the kitchen beyond, rubbish bags by the back door, unwashed pans on the hob, dirty dishes stacked by the sink. More quietly, he added: ‘Everything all right, Ed?’
I rubbed at the five-day stubble on my chin. ‘Yeah.’ I said. ‘No. Don’t know, really. Do you want to come in for a minute?’
Jason stayed where he was. ‘Looks like you could do with a change of scenery.’ He leaned against the doorframe, his face creasing with concern. ‘What’s going on, mate? You look really tired.’
‘Things have been a bit . . . complicated, these last few weeks.’ I leaned closer to him, lowering my voice. ‘Listen, have you ever had that feeling like someone’s been in your house when you were out?’
‘Yeah,’ he grunted with laughter. ‘When I got burgled.’
‘No, I mean, someone has been in here, in my things. I came back early the other day and I could just tell things had been moved.’
‘Seriously? What did they take?’
‘Nothing. They didn’t break in but it’s like I can tell they were here, I can sense it. Like a presence in the rooms, I came in the other day and I got this tingling sensation at the back of my neck, like, I don’t know . . . ’
‘Have you spoken to the police?’
‘I didn’t think they’d believe me. Or be able to do anything about it.’
Jason came into the hall, closing the front door behind him. ‘You know what?’ he said slowly. ‘I’m a bit worried about you, Ed. You’ve not been answering my texts or my calls, you’re being very elusive.’
‘I’m not that bad,’ I said, scratching at my cheek again. ‘Had a lot on my mind, that’s all.’
Jason peered up the stairs. ‘I take it Claire’s away at the moment?’
‘Yeah, she . . .’ I searched for the right words. We had patched things up before she left on the understanding that I would stop investigating Ryan. ‘She’s on tour with the play, a couple of weeks in Ireland and Scotland. Ten shows, twelve nights.’
‘So what are you waiting for? No one to stop you, it’s a free pass.’ He leaned in, conspiratorial. ‘Come on, I’m buying.’
I tried to think of an excuse but I was tired, so tired, and I couldn’t come up w
ith anything remotely good enough. Maybe it would be good to talk about it all. To talk to someone who might understand.
‘Wait there a minute,’ I said finally. ‘I’ll get my shoes.’
40
I was blind.
Painfully, achingly blind. But instead of being black, everything was pure white, nothing but stark whiteness piercing my eyelids like nails being hammered straight through my retinas down into the base of my skull. I lay still for a moment, taking stock. My head felt like a bowling ball full of cement and there was a gritty, grimy feel in my mouth. I forced myself to sit up, swinging my feet to the floor, and discovered I was fully clothed. I was in my bedroom with the curtains open to the morning sun. I must have come in here and passed out.
I felt a little stab of unease, a twist of uncertainty in my stomach, as I realised I had absolutely no idea how I’d got home. I remembered being in the pub, Jason bending my ear about what we should do with Ryan, and then . . . nothing. I dragged my phone out of the pocket of my jeans to send Jason a text. I squinted down at the screen as I typed.
What did we drink last night?
I had been cutting back recently and my alcohol tolerance was way down; five pints with Jason had been at least two pints too many. Not to mention the shots or whatever it was we must have had at the end of the night. But with my job gone, my wife away, my daughter moved out, there hadn’t seemed a good reason to call it a night.
I showered, made a pot of strong black coffee and was sipping it at the kitchen table when my phone rang. But it wasn’t Jason. It was Claire.
‘Hey,’ I managed, clearing my sore throat. ‘How’s Ireland?’
There was silence for a moment before she replied. ‘Fine,’ she said, a sharp tone in her voice that was either anger or disappointment, or maybe something between the two. ‘So when exactly were you going to tell me?’
I quickly ran through the list of secrets I had been keeping from my wife, but it was growing all the time. Did she mean that I was continuing to snoop on my new son-in-law? Or maybe getting blackout drunk last night? Or even Rebecca? I decided – against everything that twenty-seven years of marriage told me – to play dumb.