The logical thing would have been to go back to Mari’s, but we couldn’t – Alex was too terrified of anything else happening to his family.
Becky said she was going upstairs. When she didn’t come down I checked on her. She was fast asleep. I went back to the kitchen, where Alex was busy screwing the cupboard doors back on. I sat at the table and watched him.
He said, ‘It’s always been like that with Simon. Do you think it’s bad that I can’t stand my biological father?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It seems to me you have a great stepdad, that’s a plus. And at least you know who your dad is. I’ve never met mine.’
‘Tess shouldn’t have tried to blame you.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘My mum blames me for most things – I have tough skin. I come from a dysfunctional one-parent family so I’m used to our lives being laid into by newspapers, politicians and the righteous. That said, I’m glad I have you as a friend.’
Alex looked at me and in that quiet way he had, said, ‘I want to be more than that.’
My heart flipped. ‘You mean it?’
‘Course I do. You’re special – come here,’ he said.
‘What are we going to do?’ I said, and he kissed me.
It was only as it was beginning to get dark that the house once more felt uncomfortable, as if every bit of furniture and every curtain was holding its breath, waiting.
‘We can’t stay here,’ said Alex.
‘We can’t leave,’ said Becky coming sleepily down the stairs.
‘Why not?’
I spun round. It was Icarus, standing in the hallway.
He took one look at Becky and said: ‘Why in the name of Ishmael did you let Doubleday out?’
Icarus listened to our story, then asked to see the cards the two creeps had left.
‘Do we call them,’ I asked, ‘if we see this Doubleday again?’
‘No,’ said Icarus. ‘You mustn’t do that.’
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Who are they?’
‘They work for an organisation that monitors all UFO activity. Their job is to make sure that the public never hears about alien contact. Doubleday was a part of Darkstar’s flawed experiment with artificial intelligence.’
‘How do we know,’ I said, ‘that you’re telling the truth? Who do we trust, in other words? You, who’s been convicted of murder? Or a crazy cyborg? Or two sinister guys in dark suits and mirrored glasses?’
I was really getting into my stride when lights came on in the garden. They only do that when there’s someone out there.
He was watching us, the barefooted, red-eyed man. Mr Doubleday himself.
Icarus saw him and said, ‘All of you, get out now!’
Becky was glued to his side, not moving, watching as Doubleday pushed his face against the glass as if it was water, and walked through it.
Alex and I grabbed Becky. She picked up her rucksack as we pulled her out of the house and we began to run towards The Jolly Sailor. I was thinking, what if Doubleday should kill Icarus and burn the house down?
‘Perhaps,’ I said, stopping, gasping for breath, ‘it would be best to call those two creeps, get them to sort out this mess.’
I could see Alex was thinking the same thing.
‘No, don’t,’ said Becky. ‘If they come they might take Icarus too.’
Alex said, ‘You’re right – we need to think before we act.’
It felt good when we arrived at the pub – just hearing people talk, doing everyday, normal things.
The barman said, ‘Heard the police were called to your house the other night.’
‘Yes,’ said Becky. ‘We thought we saw someone in the garden.’
‘How do you know about it?’ Alex asked.
‘Old John used to work up the local police station when it was in Sudbury. He told us he had heard that it was a lot of fuss about nothing, most probably badgers.’
‘Excuse me?’ said Becky.
‘They can make a hell of a lot of noise. Mrs Fawkes, you know, who works up at the post office, once had a badger come into her cottage through the cat flap. Thought it was a burglar.’
If only, I thought.
We sat in the pub garden. After a while Alex said he’d go back to the house to see if Icarus was all right. That seemed like the stupidest idea I’d heard in a long time.
‘You aren’t serious?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not. But we can’t stay here.’
‘This is a nightmare,’ I said.
‘You can say that again,’ said Alex.
I did.
Alex suggested that he call for a minicab to take us to his boat. Much to my relief, Becky agreed.
We waited outside the pub for about half an hour. When the minicab turned up, it was Mr Seen-It-All Art Lover – just who we didn’t need.
‘Hope you’ve got the right money on you this time,’ he said.
If I’d been in London I would have told the git to get lost. At least he didn’t start on again about Rex Muller.
The road out of Orford wiggles and twists, and then you turn left and head for Woodbridge, past the thatched cottage that I always thought of as the witch’s house. After miles, or so it seems, of winding roads, you come to a straight bit and this is Rendlesham Forest. It’s really spooky, one of those places you think you wouldn’t want to break down in on a dark night. I was always reading in the local paper about a car being written off due to a collision with a deer. They’d never say the deer was a write-off, just the car.
I was thinking this when a man appeared up ahead, our headlights beaming straight onto him. He was in the middle of the road, bent double, no shoes on his feet. He was covered in blood. We all saw him and we all knew who he was. There could be no mistaking Doubleday.
‘Don’t stop,’ Becky screamed. ‘Drive on!’
But Mr Know-It-All took no notice and slowed down.
‘I’m not going to leave someone in distress. You young people today, you’re all the same – all you ever think about is yourselves. You disgust me.’
‘Please – don’t stop,’ shouted Alex.
Too late. Mr Pomp-and-Pride pulled up and climbed out of his car. To make his point, he slammed the door. Mr Jones, what happened next wasn’t from the magic box of cinematic tricks. And I couldn’t not look.
The minicab driver walked up to Doubleday. The driver must’ve known he’d made a terrible mistake. He stopped in his tracks and took off his glasses. Perhaps he thought he was seeing things. We’ll never know, because Doubleday lifted him off the ground and threw him across the road. He lay sprawled there. We watched as he crawled to his feet and started to run down the road towards us. Doubleday appeared behind him, put his fist right through him as if he was made of butter. I will never forget the way that minicab driver looked at us, eyes bulging with disbelief.
We scrambled out of the car and ran as fast as we could into the forest, terrified Doubleday would come after us too. He looked in our direction, then climbed into the minicab and drove off. We tried to phone for help, and, yes, Mr Jones, you’re right. No signal. There was no point going back to see if the minicab driver was OK, because we knew he was dead. Doubleday had driven over him.
Becky insisted there was nothing to stop us going back to Orford – and Icarus. It took us the rest of the night to get there. I tell you, if nothing else had happened, I would have said that walk was dead creepy. We fell over, scraped and scratched ourselves and it took far longer than we thought it would due to the dark, the trees making shapes of men and beasts, and deers’ eyes glinting. By the time we got to the village, the cockerel was awake to welcome us and never had that old bird sounded so sweet.
Afterwards I thought it was for the best that we hadn’t been able to call anyone. The house hadn’t burned down but Icarus was in the kitchen in a pool of blood, messy as any human’s. Becky flipped out and screamed and thought he was dead. She knelt beside him, he took her hand.
; ‘Becky,’ he said.
She held his hand to her face and started sobbing. Alex picked up the landline.
‘We’ll have to call an ambulance.’
Icarus said, ‘No, don’t. Call Mark. He’ll know what to do.’
Alex looked at me.
I said, ‘You mean the chimney sweep?’
Chapter Twenty-Six
I found the card Mark had left. As his phone rang, I was trying to think how to explain the reason for calling him so early.
He sounded fully awake and as soon as I said, ‘Icarus is here and he’s wounded,’ he hung up.
Half an hour later, maybe less, he arrived, very calm. He had his toolkit with him, which seemed strange, and once inside the cottage, he put it down, knelt beside Icarus and examined him.
He looked at Becky.
‘Where’s the stone, Becky? I need the stone.’
‘In my rucksack,’ she said. ‘I’ll get it.’
Mark asked Alex to help him take Icarus upstairs. Becky followed them. I was left to clean up the mess – it took ages – but while I was doing it, I thought again about what Mrs Berry had said.
I’d just finished when Becky came down the stairs with Alex and said, ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if he dies.’
‘Let’s look at that painting again,’ I said.
‘Why?’ she said.
‘Because I’ve had a thought.’
It was in a simple frame, the backing held in place with brown parcel tape. I found a knife and cut carefully along the tape.
‘What are you doing?’ It was Alex. ‘Where did you find that painting?’
‘In Mrs Berry’s cottage.’
Alex looked at me. ‘Is there anything else, Jaz? Anything else I should know?’
‘No … yes. I’d forgotten about the painting.’
I told Alex everything – where we’d found the painting, the odd stuff Mrs Berry had said, and how it was now beginning to make sense.
It was such a relief. I felt twenty kilograms lighter.
‘I fucking wish you’d said all this earlier.’
‘So do I,’ I said.
Becky said, ‘What’s happening upstairs? Is he going to live?’
‘Yes, it appears so. I don’t know what that stone does, do you? No, of course you don’t. How did you get us into all this shit, Becky?’ Alex got a bottle of lager out of the fridge and took a long swig then said, ‘Listen, I overheard Mark talking to Icarus. He said he couldn’t protect him much longer.’
‘Is that all you heard?’ I asked.
‘Yes. That’s strange enough, isn’t it? What are you doing?’
I knew there was something else Alex wasn’t telling us. It was written all over his face.
‘I want to see if there’s anything written on the back of the canvas,’ I said as I eased the backing out of the frame. ‘Mrs Berry said the painting would be Phoebe’s witness, would explain everything.’
On the reverse of the canvas was a label with the artist’s name, Phoebe Berry, and the date – nothing else.
‘Have you spoken to your mum?’ said Becky to Alex.
‘I emailed her to say we’re OK. What would you suggest I do?’
I started to peel away the label. I don’t think I was breathing as I took out a small envelope and unfolded the note inside.
I have it here, Mr Jones. Take it, read it.
If you have found this then you have let him out and heaven help you.
His name is Doubleday. He is a cyborg created by British and American intelligence agencies under the Darkstar Programme to detect the presence of aliens on our planet. Doubleday has evaded his handlers. They had classified him as non-aggressive.
The fools. The utter fools.
Phoebe Berry
Alex was ashen.
‘There’s something else,’ he said.
‘What?’ I said.
‘I heard Mark tell Icarus that we are all in danger, because we know too much and the Darkstar Programme wouldn’t hesitate to have us terminated, as they had his brother and his wife.’
MARI SCOTT
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I spoke to Rex again last night. He told me that after talking to you he had at last been able to untangle the past. He thought it would help me if I talked to you again, Mr Jones, but I doubt it. They say time heals. It hasn’t. After all these years the pain is just as bad. His body was never found, you know. I still hope every day for a miracle, that he will turn up alive and well. I can’t even bring myself to speak his name. He’s everywhere and nowhere, a weight in my heart that won’t stop hurting.
So, you said you’d spoken to Jazmin Little. What about Ruth? Simon?
No, I thought not. Simon had two girls with Tess. Yes, he’s still married to her. They moved to California, reinvented themselves, wiped out the past. He called me about a year ago to say he had ‘found closure’. I bet he has. He’s a man with a different hat for every role he’s played in his life. First, as my husband and father of Alex; second, as Ruth’s husband and father of Becky; third, as Tess’s husband and father of the girls. Between roles he has managed to erase all the inconvenient bits.
As for Ruth, hell’s bells – where do you start with that narcissistic bitch? After a while, I forgave her – just – for taking Simon from under my nose. By then I’d met Tom and we’d had the twins. But how dare both she and Simon walk out on Becky like that? Abandoning her. I don’t give a toss if Ruth was devastated by Simon leaving her. What goes around comes around. She came back for the inquest, loving all the attention, telling the tragic story of her brilliant daughter. Then she got straight back on a plane to India to see her guru.
At the very beginning, I blamed Jazmin Little for everything. I really went for her. We’ve never spoken since. One day, I would like to. Not yet. Maybe that’s progress, I don’t know. What I do know is Simon should never have left Jazmin in charge of Becky in the first place.
Well, Jazmin’s mother couldn’t care less about her. She’d left London and gone to live near her sister in Margate. Mrs Little embellished the truth until the truth was lost. She too relished the publicity, and took the money she’d made selling her story.
I met Icarus, the man in the painting, at a party a couple of months after Phoebe and Frank were killed. He had been living with some travellers in Rendlesham Forest. I recognised him immediately and told him I’d seen Phoebe’s portrait of him. He said he’d sat for her about a year earlier, after he’d met her and Skye on the beach at Shingle Street.
Maybe it was because he’d known Phoebe, but I was instantly attracted to him. We drank a lot, smoked a lot, and when Icarus told me he was from another planet on the edge of our solar system and that he had been sent to earth by his president in order to understand love, I half believed him. He made anything sound possible. He showed me his notebooks full of crazy writing and asked if I understood it.
I told him they were gobbledygook as far as I was concerned.
He said there was a formula for the survival of all species and if it wasn’t followed, everything would eventually die. His own race was in danger of becoming extinct, like the dinosaurs. When I said the dinosaurs became extinct because an asteroid hit the earth, Icarus said if I truly believed that then I didn’t understand the power of love. He said that he was only beginning to, and that love was the most extraordinary force the human race possessed. It marked us out from all other alien species and was the reason for our survival. Without it, he said, we’d be nothing more than dinosaurs.
He’d come up with a formula – it went like this:
Love plus passion equals imagination.
Love plus imagination equals creation.
Love plus creation equals life.
Love plus life equals time.
Love plus time equals death.
But, he said, nothing exists without love. And that’s what his race didn’t have: the ability to feel the most vital of emotions.
That summer I saw a l
ot of him. It was as if he’d hypnotised me. I’d fallen in love with him and told him so.
He said he felt something for me but didn’t know what it was, and then, in September, he left to go travelling. I went to the Slade School of Art to study painting and sculpture and that’s where I met Ruth.
Yes, I did. I saw him once again. This is difficult to say … I haven’t told anybody this before.
Mr Jones, I lied when I told the court the last time I saw Icarus was that September.
Perhaps because I felt guilty. Because if I’d reported what had happened to me to the police, then Lazarus and Skye might still have been alive.
Icarus turned up at the Slade on a warm June day the following year. He said he would like to take me home. I thought he was joking when he took me to St Paul’s Cathedral. I asked if he was going to tell me he was an angel. He said something about transport being unable to pick me up from the ground. I thought, oh, here we go again. Since I’d last seen him I’d grown up and I’d begun to think of him as a bit of a nutcase.
We climbed the 376 steps to the Stone Gallery – it goes all the way round the outside of the dome. He wanted to go higher to the Golden Gallery but I got vertigo and couldn’t move from the door that led outside – I just wanted to get back down. Icarus leaned over the railing and I told him to be careful, he might fall.
He said, ‘I already have.’ He turned finally and looked at me for a long time. Then he said, ‘Mari, I’m so sorry. I wish it could be you.’
I said, ‘You’re mad,’ and I ran down those 376 steps as if I was being chased by the devil. Icarus didn’t come after me. And that, Mr Jones, was the last time I saw him.
He pushed Skye and Lazarus off the Golden Gallery. It was only when I saw his photo on the front page of the newspapers three years later that I remembered that he had asked me to jump with him. I was too ashamed to tell Rex. So I told no one.
My Side of the Diamond Page 10