by Lorna Gray
I slept. When I rose to consciousness, it was to the sound of an urban scene. Somewhere there was music and the sharp tang of tobacco smoke. It was hours later. I was cold even with my coat wrapped tightly about me. The car swung left and right in a maze of turns. We had arrived. It was insane to realise that all these people had expended all this energy over a course of days for the single purpose of carrying me back to Cirencester. Into my head popped that one question dimly remembered from my first encounter with Clarke and Reed. Where is it?
I must have said it out loud. The instant snap of Adam’s voice was sharp. “What did you say?”
Beg him. My mind broke loudly into the silence that followed. Beg him now. I opened my eyes.
Whatever pleas had formed on my lips died unspoken when I saw the town houses by the kerbside. They were very tall, very impressive Georgian town houses and they were typical of the grand white terraces of Cheltenham, not Cirencester. The car drew to a halt at the foot of a short run of steps and the engine died. The sudden silence made me flinch. My eyes dragged themselves jerkily round to Adam’s face. He was staring at me through the inky haze of a street lamp, considering. Then he moved.
I flinched again, violently, but he was only reaching to open his door. The sounds of the busy spa town rushed in with the cool night air and I could hear the distant rhythm of a dancehall.
“Stay here.” His order was curt and didn’t anticipate contradiction. Then he climbed out, shut the door and stepped behind the car to knock briefly at a black polished door set within a tall pillared porch. I could see him if I turned my head.
After a few moments the big black door opened a crack and then wider once the person inside identified their late visitor. I watched as Adam glanced back at me briefly before stepping over the threshold. His return was accompanied by something awkward and cosseted by the woman who had opened the door. She followed them both, talking ceaselessly as Adam descended the few steps to the roadside before reaching in through the driver’s door to unlock the door behind.
The dog. I had completely forgotten about the dog.
Then the rear door swung open and the creature climbed into the back, and my surprise came out as a pathetic jerk of the heart. There had been a whimper as he moved to press the door shut, a small plaintive whine of protest, and it was the sulky complaint of a tired human, not a dog. I twisted in my seat, mind and body in sudden agreement, and saw a child’s face. Then Adam moved between her and the street lamp and cast her into shade.
“Is she ill?” The woman’s voice was distant now, disembodied concern passing unseen outside the car after a brief duck of the head to peer in at me. All I could see were the backs of Adam’s legs where he had moved to conceal me.
“She’s fine.” The reply was terse, dismissive, but then I heard him add in a voice more like his own, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry David’s mother is unwell; I hope she’s feeling better when you see her tomorrow. I’m sorry that I was away just when you were having a family crisis. And I’m truly sorry for this too by the way – for being so late and that she’s been so fractious tonight – I promised her I would be home long before.”
“David’s mother will be fine, I’m sure, old dragon that she is. As will your little one when she gets into her own bed. Having her daddy back again will be enough to set all the world to rights, I should think.”
Daddy. I barely noticed when he made his farewells and slipped in beside me. There was a momentary silence while we watched the woman disappear into her house and then he said, “Here, hold this.” And started the car.
There was no sign this time of the angry corners that had followed us from Wales as our vehicle rolled away from the kerb. There was no aggression either as it picked its way through turns and junctions towards the road that ran up the steep heights of the escarpment. Something soft and warm stirred in my lap and I looked down; and had to wonder if I were lost in some drowning fantasy after all. The fuzzy object moved again, pushing keenly at my hands, and I stared with unbelieving eyes at the living thing nestling against me that was, of all things, a kitten.
I found that somehow the discovery made my throat burn.
A road sign flashed past; Cirencester, and a smaller flaking sign below, Roman Capital of the Cotswolds before being enclosed by buildings. Everything was burning, eyes, limbs, throat and soul when the car drew to a halt against a kerb in a quiet domestic street and Adam silenced the engine.
When he had finished extracting his daughter from the back seat and came round to open my door, I climbed out automatically. It was only then that I remembered that he had given me the blanket sometime after the petrol stop. It tangled briefly about my knees. I’d had the water bottle in my lap too and it fell with a crash. It made a terrible mess. I bent with the kitten cradled in one hand and reached to collect the shattered pieces with the other. My hand was shaking. Somehow it seemed vital that I scrabbled to tidy up. I was sure it was wrong to leave this trace of myself. I heard Adam’s voice behind me, sharply authoritative. “Leave it, Kate.” Then when I didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, I felt his hand reach down to touch mine, briefly arresting. That ordinary fraying leather watch strap was there on his wrist. “Kate,” he said more patiently. He waited until I turned my head. “Leave it. Come along.”
He stepped up the short path to the middle of three matching Cotswold gables set in a terrace. Each was three storeys high and built in dark stone cast by a distant streetlight to dirty grey. The row was set slightly further back from the pavement than the lighter limestone buildings to either side. A sudden burst of light hit me hard in the face and the uneasy peace was shattered by the opening of the front door to be followed seconds later by the noisy bustling of an ageing woman who went past me with a glare.
She hauled my bags out of the boot. He must have collected them as we left the jetty and I hadn’t even noticed. I was still staring when she barged past me again and into the house. Adam was standing in the doorway with his daughter clinging to his hand. He jerked his head at me. He meant me to follow. His expectant look grew impatient when he saw that I hadn’t moved.
“But …” I said weakly. None of this was remotely how I had expected it to be. “I don’t understand.”
His reply was equally flat. “Just as you say.” Then he gave another jerk of his head. “Come on.”
Chapter 21
Inside was the gloom of a long hallway, a quick glimpse of firmly closed doors and then the sudden heat and friendliness of a family kitchen.
“Sit,” he ordered, extending a hand to point out a chair by the heavy wooden table. I obeyed.
I perched there, small in a quiet hunch while he moved about his kitchen, apparently occupied by the hunt for nothing more deadly than a pan in which to warm some milk. The child had her arms about his middle, hampering every step he made. She was probably about eight or nine – I was hardly in the best condition for making guesses about age – she was just tall enough that her arms could wrap about his hips and every once in a while I caught the swift gleam as she glanced at me before burying her head again. Further away, I heard the rough creak as the woman moved up and down the stairs and bashed about in the rooms overhead. Then she appeared again, glowering and middle-aged in the doorway and clearly not very happy at all at having a hostage of sorts in her house. Presumably he would never have brought me here if the lateness of our return and the importance of collecting his daughter hadn’t necessitated it.
“Do you think you could find her something to eat?” The slight tilt of his head was all that indicated he was talking about me.
Having to feed that hostage as well seemed very nearly the last straw but in the end the woman settled on giving a grudging nod as he took himself and the girl up the stairs. I only sat there cowed and quiet, cradling the warmly sleeping kitten on my lap, and waited for someone to show me what they had in store for me. The woman didn’t speak to me; she was fixed upon clattering about her kitchen as she found first a pan for the stove,
then a jar containing soup and lastly a loaf and a bread knife. She was careful to keep the latter very far from me. I wondered what she had been told.
“Give me that.” Her snatch for the tiny creature jerked me out of an unnatural haze and I blinked at her as she shoved the kitten carelessly into a fabric-lined cardboard box and then set a bowl down before me. Then a spoon appeared with a similar crash that jangled the nerves at the back of my mind. After a moment of stupidity, I mustered the intelligence to begin eating.
I couldn’t have actually said that I was hungry, or even that the thick soup tasted of very much but something tenuous began to assemble at the tips of my toes and work its way northwards that can only have been good for me. I looked up. Something of my condition must have penetrated the woman’s displeasure because when I discovered her standing there, supervising me, she almost forgot to scowl. Then she took herself off to crash about bringing the rest of Adam’s bags in from his car.
The house grew quiet. I suspect she wasn’t supposed to leave me unsupervised but she did. The now deserted front door waited only a few yards from where I sat alone in a strange room, blinking while the minutes passed, frozen to the bone even though the stove was well stoked. Waiting was excruciating torture. Between one sluggish blink and the next, I jerked awake to find my face pressed into the corner of my elbow upon the table, the emptied bowl by my hand and a hot cup of tea steaming gently beyond that. It was the sharp bang of the latter as it landed that had woken me.
Uneasily, I pushed myself upright from my childlike sprawl, already aware of who must have come into the room at last and feeling even more off balance than ever. Adam was there, claiming a seat opposite and very deliberately absorbed in the task of consuming his own portion of soup. There was something about the quality of his silence that told me he was relieved to find me still there. His features had returned to how they had looked when I had first met him, if a little worn from his journey, and his eyes were fixed upon the bowl in his hands so that it was possible to believe it was all a simple misunderstanding.
His gaze lifted. It wasn’t a misunderstanding. I blanched and hastily turned my head away as if that was any kind of defence while he pushed back his chair and stood up. I felt the pause when he stared for a moment at my averted face before turning away to carry his empty bowl to the sink.
I saw him stand there, hands resting on the edge of the washbasin and breathing deeply before his lungs suddenly took in a sharp little burst and he turned back to catch me watching and demanded, “So you think I’m going to hurt you now?” Then I heard the clatter as he dropped the spoon into the sink after the bowl. “No, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.”
I kept my head turned away now, feverishly avoiding any fresh contact with that angry grey gaze. I continued avoiding looking at him while the kettle was snatched from the stove, refilled and then set to boil again. I stared fixedly at the floor by my feet as he moved about his kitchen, tidying washed crockery away, and I managed to escape acknowledging him right up to the moment he placed a fresh cup on the table before me.
Then I couldn’t help but turn my head and follow the hand upwards to the fine-drawn face with its hardened jaw to ask my most stupid question of all, “Who are you?”
For a moment, surprise washed his features clear. Then he ignored it. He moved to set his hands upon the tabletop; he was leaning over me, practically forcing the confrontation so that now he was in the position to fire a question of his own. “Do you really miss him that much?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Why didn’t you just say something? Why have you been hiding it, ignoring it, nurturing it all this time when you could have just told me the truth from the start? It needn’t have come to this, you know.” I only stared while he added grimly, “Why did you let me think—?”
He broke off. There was hurt here. Something far more raw than anger; something he was accusing me of that was more personal than anything Clarke or Reed wanted from me. Bewilderment made me say on a disbelieving laugh, “You think I wanted to follow in Rhys’s wake?”
“My dear, don’t even try to take that tone with me.” Adam had himself in hand again and had withdrawn to a calmer distance. Now he bent to rest his forearms on the further corner of the table. Its surface was scuffed and hollowed by years of use. His head turned; an eyebrow lifted. He sounded like he was gearing up to scolding his child, although I couldn’t imagine he would have ever used this tone with her. It was too hard.
He said, “You were attempting to throw yourself into the sea – there’s not much mistaking that, I believe, even if in the event the tide would have probably just washed you straight back in. Are you aware of what might have happened if somebody else had found you first; some person from the town?”
“But—”
“You do know where they would have sent you, surely?” Then he added the answer just in case his meaning wasn’t painfully clear. “You would go to prison.”
“But that’s the whole point,” I said slowly, watching his face for a reaction. He’d straightened his arms again so that he was propped on his hands. It was a posture that implied wearied patience. I told him, “I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I was trying to get away. This whole week I’ve been trying to do that. I’ve been trying to disappear.”
“Oh?” His expression of polite interest was insulting. And it brought with it the first germs of doubt. They were like a wash of cold water. He was already saying, “And that’s why you’ve been crashing about the place like a wild thing all week, is it? I knew you’d been shaken up by his death but I had no idea things had got that bad. Why on earth didn’t you just talk to me? I mean, I know things have been pretty turbulent these past few days but I should have thought you knew by now you could rely on me enough for that. Why on earth didn’t you just tell me …?” The tirade faltered. Then I saw him lift his chin defiantly and add very deliberately, “Why did you have to let me think I mattered if you were only going to fling it all away for him?”
A harder silence. He was angry with me, I could see that well enough, and hurt I think by my refusal to gift him the innermost workings of my mind, but it was all wrong. It was all so absurdly personal. I suddenly grew impatient. “What is it that you want me to say? You’ve got me here now. You can ask me anything you like. Why don’t you just get it over with and ask me where it is?”
Then it hit me with a sudden shudder of realisation. “Unless … unless you’re only waiting for Clarke to arrive so that he can ask me himself?”
It took Adam some time to reply. Then he only repeated in an oddly cautious voice, “Clarke?”
“Oh, didn’t you expect me to discover his name?” I said nastily. I was sitting hunched on my chair by his table, an exhausted wreck of a woman who was bracing herself to meet a final assault that would never quite come. His expression belonged to a man for whom things had just taken a turn for the worse. “I heard you speaking to him on the stairs this morning, showing your two new friends which room I had taken.”
“What two friends? There were none of mine on the stairs, or at least no one that I spoke to.”
“Please, Adam!” I couldn’t imagine what cruelty was driving him to still conceal his plans for me. The sudden energy in my voice startled him. I saw his gaze run up to the ceiling above his head as though warning me to avoid disturbing his daughter. I put a hand up to my eyes. I said in a desperate whisper, “You know I heard you! You spoke to them. You admitted it!”
“I most definitely did not.” He had straightened up again. He was standing there, absolutely, convincingly dismissive as he told me, “I don’t recall seeing anyone on the stairs, unless you count passing that little boy’s father at the bottom. You’re delusional.”
I jumped in my chair like he’d struck me.
Nothing, no one had the power to reduce my self-belief to shreds as that single accusation could. It went through me like an icy arrow. This was the point of this interview. This was w
hy the mention of Clarke had disturbed him. He had no questions to pose here other than these few to test my sanity. “No,” I whispered. Grief made my voice catch as I added, “You admitted it. When I told you I’d overheard this morning, you admitted it … and when they failed to catch me, you seized your advantage and brought me here yourself.”
He stared at me. Then he said very clearly and precisely, “I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing … I spoke to Jim and Dr Alderton in the lounge, not on the stairs and they would hardly need to ask which room was yours. You publicised that for yourself with the drama last night.” He stepped closer to lean over me again. His fingers showed white where they gripped the edge of the table. “That was, in fact, the thing that decided me. You were clearly exhausted and getting worse, and I thought it wise to consult someone who knew about these sorts of things and might know what should be done. I’d just learned I was going to have to cut short my stay and both the doctor and Jim agreed that it could be foolish to leave you friendless. The doctor even went so far as to suggest that it might be helpful to you to come back here; to face your fears head on so to speak. Not,” he finished grimly, starkly innocent at last, “that any of us had any idea of it coming to this.”
“Oh my God.” It was minutes later and it took a moment for me to realise that these words had been forced from my mouth. “Oh God. Face my fears? Do you know what you’ve done?”
My hands were trembling in my lap, in fact my whole body was shivering with an energy that I didn’t know I still had. It was shaking as my voice fought to formulate sound and I made him start in surprise as I hissed, “Jim’s one of them. He’s tricked you, and now you’ve brought me back here – just where they’ve wanted me all along.”
There was silence. I sat there, reduced now and shrunken in my chair while he leaned over me, frozen and not even breathing. But then, instead of looking surprised, or alarmed or any of the other expressions in the spectrum of emotions that I might have wished for, he laughed.