“In the beginning, it was like a secret vice. Seeing it in the news, knowing it was me. Watching the people around me getting rattled.”
“So you’re hiding from the police? Or your colleagues?”
“Actually, it’s the Russians. Mafia clients of ours. Predictably they aren’t too keen on having their dirty laundry exposed. It’s not that they’re worse than anyone else, only the Russians are prepared to do something about it. To stop the leaks, I mean. They throw people off buildings. Everyone knows it. There were four suicides after the leaks broke. A fixer working for one of our brokers came off a multistory car park. They always say it’s suicide, but I don’t believe it. It doesn’t add up.”
“The broker, was his name Ward Collier? I was there. I saw it.”
“Collier worked for a rival fund. I don’t know how he was involved…” Peter swallowed. His voice was hoarse. “Andy, my phone was tapped. I was followed. After the wedding, I went home and someone had been in my flat. Then there were two men in a black car. I saw them twice. Once outside my building, then the same car with the same men waiting for me in a side street at my work. I knew. I just knew. Did anyone follow you here?”
“How could anyone follow me? No one knows I’m here.”
“You hired a fucking private detective.”
“Yes, but he … he’s a bit useless. Maybe that’s unfair.” I thought quickly. “He might know I’m here. We spoke on the phone yesterday. I can’t remember what I said. But still, I don’t think he’d have broadcast—”
“Small? A bit gnomish? With a beard?”
“Yes.” I thought of Mr. Hutchinson and his hunted eyes with a sudden pang.
“Last seen being bundled into a black SUV. One of the journalists I’ve been working with saw it happen. Somehow your detective had gotten hold of their phone number. It was a number only I knew. He called to arrange a meeting. Only before he could meet them, he got shoved into a car as he came out of the underground. Leo said it happened so fast they couldn’t do anything to stop it. Which means if your detective called you, whoever did it was probably listening.”
“I’m sorry—”
“They’d have come anyway, Andy. Hiding with my mum and dad, it’s hardly Cuba, is it?”
An owl hooted from somewhere in the graveyard and I shivered, remembering a school project on early Britain, how we’d learned the invading Vikings had imitated owls, calling to one another in the darkness as they crept up on the Anglo-Saxons bent on murder and pillage.
“I thought this was about the past. I thought this was about Em’s death, about David and the diamonds. At the wedding, you wanted to talk. I went to see all of them, Rob and Alice. I went to Italy and found David because you’d said you’d seen him.”
“Did you really?”
“Yes.”
“And how was that? How was it seeing David?” When I did not immediately reply, he read my silence. “Really? Still? When I saw him, I said your name. The ripples, Andy. You should have seen them. I actually felt sorry for him. And you with that young man at the wedding. I’d seen that look on your face before. It preyed on my mind, after seeing David in Rome. That I had wronged you both. Telling myself I was doing the right thing, protecting you. But knowing it was a lie. That I was jealous. That I hated you. I went back that night. The day we met David. All the way there on my bike. I was thinking that maybe this was it. That everything was finally going to begin. But when I arrived, you were already there, and it was like you had stolen it from me.”
“So you called the police?”
“Yes. In the end, I called the police. I put on a funny voice and told them a young man called David Graves who was wanted for stealing credit cards was hiding out at the manor.”
“I went to your flat. I found the telephone box.”
“Oh that? When I saw the men at my work, I hid in a shop, one of those tourist shops. In the end I had to get something. So I bought it, then I got pissed and took a lighter to it. Reliving the past, you might say. All the mistakes.”
“It got me thinking too, Peter. About Em, whether it was really an accident.” I told him what Alice had said about the game being fixed. About Em and Marcus. The possibility that we had found the real diamonds. I steeled myself for anything he might tell me. I took his hand but it lay loose in mine. “We were so close once. It was never the same afterward. But maybe it didn’t begin then. David told me—”
“You thought I did it?”
“I don’t know.”
Peter gave a cold little laugh. “Funny, Andy, for a time I wondered if it was you. You were … possessive. Marcus and Em. I saw them, out in the courtyard. It occurred to me you might have too. You were so unpredictable then. When you ran out onto the ice, it was spiteful. That’s what I thought. Spiteful, to try to harm yourself in front of people who loved you. It made me wonder, but if it’s any consolation, I did think it was an accident. In the end. Stupid and tragic and pointless.”
Knowing I’d suspected Peter made it no easier. It made sense in a way. The violence that had always been in me, like a virus I had caught, from my mother, from Joe. But not in Peter, which was why he’d always been such an easy target. How could I ever have thought it was him? I said as much.
“You’re wrong, Andy, I’m afraid. It’s in all of us, given the right circumstances. But no, I would never have hurt Em.” He stopped. “It was so long ago, but speaking about it is still the hardest thing.”
“Tell me,” I said.
And he did.
* * *
It was Joe that Peter had hurt. He had gone to Darren, waiting, ankle-deep in mud by a digger on a half-built cul-de-sac, school bag over his shoulder, till Darren had finished what he was doing and come over.
“We went for a drive in his car, over the Downs, and I told him about Joe, what Joe was doing, how I wanted his help to get rid of him, make him go away and never come back. He thought it was funny at first, that I wanted to step up and protect my little girlfriend. He liked that. Said he’d look into it.”
Only he hadn’t, or nothing had happened, so Peter went back. Kept on at him, backed him into a corner.
“He liked being looked up to, Darren. Liked to be thought a hard man. And I was calling him on it, wasn’t I? Calling him on everything he liked to think about himself.”
So Darren had agreed, only he had insisted Peter went along for the ride.
“We were going to threaten him. Tell him Darren was going to fit him up and fuck him up. There was a vague idea about planting drugs on him, or say that he’d nicked some of Darren’s gear, equipment from the site. But it wasn’t thought through, not beyond the threats.”
They had followed Joe, followed the beat-up black Merc one night after it left my house. Tailgating him across the Downs, till he pulled into the car park at the top of Hackpen Hill.
“I was so scared, but Darren made me get out. I had to say it while he stood there with his arms folded, like a ref. All part of his plan to make a man out of me, no doubt.”
And Joe hadn’t said anything, hadn’t laughed or told them to fuck off, only reached inside his car and came out with a tire iron. Went for Darren first.
“Never seen violence like that in anyone, Andy. It was like a vicious dog being let off a chain. He had Darren on the ground in seconds; all he could do was put his arms up to protect himself.”
The Downs are quiet at night. Peter had stood there, frozen. But no one was coming. No one was ever going to come, so Peter had scrambled round the side of Darren’s car. Perhaps Joe thought he was running away, or perhaps he was just enjoying himself too much to notice.
There had been a hammer on the back seat. Darren’s car was always chock-full of crap, tools and papers and empty sweet wrappers.
Peter hit Joe from behind. He was tall for his age and wild with fear, and so the hammer had a lot of swing behind it. Joe must have seen something from the corner of his eye, because he turned, just slightly, and the first blow caved in his
cheekbone. The second he took to his skull, same side, just above the temple. And that was how it ended. All the films have it wrong, the action movies, the endlessly climactic fights, the antagonist who keeps coming back for more. Peter said Joe went into convulsions, just for a minute, maybe less. Then he died.
They put Joe in the boot of Darren’s car, then they drove the Merc along the Ridgeway and onto a farm track. It was winter, and muddy, but the Downs are chalk, so they’d managed to get it into a copse without getting bogged. Torched it with petrol siphoned from the tank, hoping that when it was found it would be taken for the work of joyriders. Only it wasn’t found. The farmer had no business up there till spring, and the dirt bikes would churn up the mud, obliterating the tire tracks.
“And Joe?”
“Under Darren’s patio? I don’t know. Concreted away somewhere. He said we could never tell you, Andy. That if the police came, or anyone else, you couldn’t know, so you wouldn’t have to lie. They wouldn’t come to us. It would be you and your mum. I wish I could have told you. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to. How hard it was to be alone with you because at any moment it might come spilling out.
“But I’m not sorry. Not after I’d seen the way he was. I’m so sorry, Andy, that it happened to you. I’m still so sorry. But I wish it hadn’t happened, that I hadn’t killed him. I used to try and pretend. But I’d wake in the mornings and there it would be. This horrible, soiling, secret weight. Tons of it. The terror that I would be caught. What it would do to my parents. Having to sit there in church and listen to the sermons. Damned for who I was. Damned for what I’d done.”
I pressed Peter’s hand to my lips. I didn’t have any words.
“Mum got the photos out yesterday. She doesn’t really understand all this. They’ve got so old. The past is safer than the future. There’s a picture of me the summer after it happened. We went to a B&B in Devon. I look like a child, this gangly child, and I looked into his eyes, trying to see it, and I could, so why couldn’t anyone else? But then, there was a picture of you, Andy, a page or two on. That picnic we went to at Alton Barnes, do you remember? And you’re just a little girl, I mean, so small, and so fighty, and you’ve got a big plate of chicken legs and potato salad, and there’s that patch on your scalp you always covered, but you can see it, and the hair’s coming back, and you have this tender, hopeful look. I would do it again, a hundred times. A hundred times a hundred times.”
“Did Marcus know?”
“No. But I told David, but then it was you, not me, he fell in love with. And he wanted to tell you. The way you want to tell people things when you love them, when you don’t want anything between you. I have resented you at times. Things came easy to you, Andy. People always liked you. Didn’t matter how rude or appalling you were. I was never sure if Em and Marcus would have been my friends without you, so I was waiting, waiting for my own someone. For life to begin, for love, for the great reveal, the grand reversal. But it happened to you instead and it was my turn.”
“When you saw him? Did you still love him?”
“No. You make people into what you want them to be when you’re that age. He was just a charming boy who wanted to be liked. Besides, Andy, once you’ve had the real thing, nothing else is ever going to do.”
“The real thing?”
“Love. Sex. David wasn’t disgusted by the fact I fancied him. That was the benchmark back then. I got called a queer from the age of seven. I used to get changed for PE in the corner facing the wall, because if I so much as accidentally looked at someone I’d be in for it. So a bit of kindness from David, a bit of flirtation, I mistook it for the real thing. Only it wasn’t. I found that with Karsten. Later, Patrick and I had it for a while too.”
“And burning down the phone box?”
“I knew you were there. Waiting. I called it and you were there so quickly, your voice so hopeful, and I knew if I didn’t do something, I was going to tell you. I wanted to tell you so badly. Not just about David, but about Joe too.”
* * *
We stayed there till dawn. As it broke, the colors in the stained glass windows emerged like jewels from the darkness. There, in the east window, was the blue-robed bowing figure who I had once chosen as my secret, special friend.
Peter told me more about the leaks.
“Why? It’s not like you suddenly woke up one day and realized what your job was.”
“Do you remember my angel?”
“The one with the book?”
“Yes. For years, I used to talk to him. I don’t know, till about ten, maybe? It was a secret game. I’d talk to my angel, telling him about the things I’d done, good things, bad things.
“Then last year, I was very low. I tried antidepressants but they didn’t work. It was like being very far away, in a boat at sea, alone. And I had rowed to exhaustion. I had nothing left. I couldn’t sleep half the time. In the evenings I would sit there, looking out, and sometimes I would talk to myself. Then I tossed the pills. You’re supposed to taper off, but I just stopped. And I started talking to the angel and the angel started talking back, Andy. But not like I was imagining it, not making up his side of the conversation. I could hear his voice, as clearly as I can hear yours.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“No, no. It was wonderful. He was so angry, and the anger was like this cold, beautiful fire.”
“Angry with you?”
“No. Angry with God funnily enough. Angry with people, with the world. And I wasn’t alone, and it was the best feeling. I didn’t go to work. I cannot remember being so happy. Making plans with the angel about what I was going to do.
“It stopped after a few days. I stopped hearing him. I went back to work and started downloading and making copies of everything. I thought it might come back. I miss it. I miss the clarity. I still talk but there’s no reply. I thought if I did it, if I exposed what I knew, whatever happened, it would be something. I’ve got more now, more files, more documents. They’re going to lose millions. It could bring down banks. It can’t be stopped now, whether they catch me or not. I’ve made sure of it. I’m tired, Andy. I want it to be over. All of it. I’m glad you came. I knew you would, as soon as the bells started ringing.”
There was nothing between us now, and despite all the trouble he was in, my heart was light. We would escape to France on a fishing trawler. Raise highland cattle in the Hebrides. I would never go back to my job. When I said these things, Peter smiled and squeezed my hand.
We fell to talking about the game, about Alice’s insistence that Em had hidden the diamonds somewhere near the front of the manor that morning, nowhere near the temple. But if that was the case, then what had we found? Peter couldn’t add much to what I’d learned about the night Em died.
“I sat in the boot room with a bottle of whiskey petting the dogs. I pissed in Rob’s shoes at one point. Then I went to bed. The room cold and spinning like a merry-go-round.”
“Shall we go see her? Perhaps she’ll tell us what happened.”
We went out. The sun was pale, sending long-fingered rays through the yew trees. Em was some distance away and we ambled down the path together to where the more recently departed were laid to rest. Her grave was well tended. There were flowers less than a week old. A jackdaw cawed.
“He’s waiting for his sandwiches,” I said to Peter, and then, “I wish you could be with us, Em. I wish you were still here.”
Not possible. Not possible …
How thin Peter looked. How careworn. He seemed lost in thought, his brow knitted as it did when he was puzzling over something.
My mother’s grave wasn’t far away. After the funeral, I’d not been back. Now I was surprised to find it neat, neither mossy nor overgrown. Crouching, I traced her name with my fingers upon the headstone. There was no dedication, only her name and the dates. I hadn’t known what to say then. I still didn’t know what to say now, but I was willing to talk to her.
“Hello,” I said. �
�Hello.”
When I turned away, Peter was no longer alone. Two men were standing with him at Em’s graveside. One of them was in the act of stepping forward and taking something from his pocket.
And the girl said NO, and I was running, running toward them. A hissing sound escaped my mouth. The two men turned to me. I saw a look of confusion pass over the nearest one’s face. As I covered the last remaining distance between us, he stopped in his tracks. All three frozen, as I bore down on them, hissing like a gorgon, talons outstretched.
* * *
“No, it’s not … It’s all right, Andy.” The two men had retreated, putting a large marble headstone between us. I advanced. I would give them dearly departed. I would show them resting in peace. “Really, Andy,” Peter said, taking my arm. His lips twitched in a smile. “So small,” he said, “so fighty.”
The taller of the men had been at his pocket again. Now he proffered an identity badge. “John Hollis,” he said. “MI5. This is my colleague David Lamb.”
“You’re not taking him.”
“We’ve just been explaining to Mr. White that he is under no obligation to speak to us whatsoever.”
“What was the name of your private detective, Andy?”
“Mr. Hutchinson. Why?”
“I think you’ll find he’s in the hospital,” Hollis said. He seemed to have recovered himself. The other man, Lamb, kept one hand inside his jacket. “Fell out of a car on the motorway. He’ll be all right though. Eventually. Now, as I was saying, Mr. White, we can only recommend, for your own safety and the safety of your loved ones, that you willingly enter our custody. There are, of course, matters we hope you will choose to assist us with.”
I took hold of Peter’s arm tightly.
“It’s for the best if you come with us straightaway, Mr. White. Yesterday we encountered what you might term hostile parties in the area.”
Before the Ruins Page 24