But the words hover there unanswered.
She is asleep now, more or less, on the lilo she finally agreed to use, under the pink and green blanket she was glad of in the end. The story came to nothing, and he rues the lack of tranquillisers and truth serums, things to erase the will and salve the conscience. He comes in close and puts his ear to her chest. Her breath is coming fast and shallow. Jess has an inhaler. He’s sure he’s seen one somewhere. But whether one inhaler is the same as another, he has no idea. It is dark now and even with his headphones off it is completely quiet. At this hour there are none of the normal sounds of the Common – the punt of a ball, the dry sirocco of traffic in the distance. For a while earlier, there was a helicopter overhead – a burglary, an escapee, a missing woman? But everything is quiet now. He has peeled back a corner of tarp, and there is a strange light around.
When he leaves the cottage and barricades the door behind him, the moon is shining, its ghost reflection hovering. It has shrunk and reddened now, more nut than disc, a red marble skelped by a scrape of white along its left curve. As he stalks through the black field of the Common, he hears the helicopter return. Its hollow drone drills into the back of his head, its stuttering searchlight seeks him out, but he ducks and weaves as it passes beyond him and over towards the bandstand where it hovers as if pulled there by a magnet. The stars are still out, hordes of them, jostling for position with the unblinking satellites. A bird, or perhaps a bat, crosses his line of vision. It is gone in an instant, flickering into the trees. Just as he’s about to step into the road, he glances back. The far trees seem to have advanced, their outlines clearer than before. It’s as if the whole Common is shrinking in on itself. When he sees the arc lights in the copse, he realises that they were the source of the strange light he noticed earlier. He knows then that they have found the slug. He quickens his step because a sick, unwilling mother in the cottage doesn’t seem so smart now that they are almost on to him. He is glad he thought of the gag. It’s only when he reaches the road that he realises there are police cars parked up all the way as far as the school. Riverton Street itself appears to be blocked off, and for a moment he panics until he remembers that it is always better to stride boldly than to mince or cower or creep.
He accesses Jess’s house from an adjacent road. The blinds are still down, the plantation shutters closed. He moves as if his trainers barely touch the ground, and the silence clogs his ears. Time and the sky are on the move. Tick tock, tick tock. He slides in his key, slips quietly into the house, and makes for the medicine cabinet Jess keeps below the vegetable racks. It’s an impeccable archive of pillboxes and blister packs, but there is nothing that could possibly be inhaled. He swipes it all, shovelling it into his pockets because, as Auntie Rae would say, you never know the hour or the day.
It’s only as he turns to go that he sees the men sitting smoking in Jess’s garden, their backs to the bifold doors, surrounded by water bottles and cans of Red Bull. Remembering the undesirability of sudden movements, he edges his way very slowly along the breakfast bar that is littered with half-drunk cups from Costa and Caffè Nero. He slips silently past a man who is snoring faintly, his crossed legs ending in scuffed white trainers, and out the door.
As he moves back on to the Common, he knows it’s over.
The blue light of an ambulance circles in front of the cottage, and three cop cars are parked up on the grass around it like white rays from a blue sun. The thought that maybe she has died should break his heart, but it doesn’t. Because he is sure now that this is not his mother. No mother could abandon him twice.
With his pockets full of options, he turns his back on Maya Hallström, on the blue light and the cottage and the body laid out on its funeral pyre in Jess’s sleeping bag. And as he walks away, he soars up, high above the Common, until it’s all so much smaller than a sparrow’s wing.
Around dawn, Jess feels certain that Ro is near. She straightens herself and gallops down the stairs. The front door is open, which puzzles and irritates her in equal measure. As for the police, there are more of them than there were before, and they seem to have commandeered the kitchen as an incident room.
‘Where is he?’
The man she addresses looks up at her as if she’s being hysterical.
‘Where’s who?’
‘My brother, of course. Where is he?’
‘Well, you’re hardly likely to find him in the lions’ den, are you?’
He doesn’t look like a lion to her.
Crowe arrives with a bounce in his step, like a man who has been given a last-minute reprieve. ‘She’s in the ambulance now, being treated for an asthma attack.’
Jess’s eyes cloud over with relief, her heart thudding for love of Ro.
‘And my brother?’
‘She hasn’t identified him.’
‘Sorry?’
‘She said it was just some poor devil, that she didn’t see the man’s face. But that’s not to say—’
‘Sparrow isn’t even there?’
‘She’s still quite poorly, Jess. We haven’t had a chance to talk to her properly yet. The medics have priority right now.’
The lawyer in her sees the opportunity and takes over. ‘So you have created an entire scenario based around my brother, who, it now appears, had absolutely nothing to do with this.’
‘You can hold it right there, Jess. Just so you know, that place is full of stuff that Sparrow must have picked up somewhere or other. If he’s been in there, we’ll find his DNA all over it. We’ll get him whether you want us to or not.’
She knows for sure now – the stained pillows, the pink lilo – and her eyes water.
‘Talking of DNA, he can ditch the notion that Maya is any relative. There’s no match whatsoever. She really is a Swede, from Uppsala actually. Nice, unremarkable background. Father a pastor, mother a teacher. Married once, divorced once, two children, six grandchildren. Nothing out of the ordinary at all.’
Part of her still wants to take Ro by his hand, to lead him towards normality and convention and teach him his seven times table. A tiny bit of her still believes some of this is possible, even now.
‘I think he did it, Jess. And what’s more, I think he killed Mags Madden. You think that too, Jess. I know you do. Surely you realise your brother’s sick.’
‘Sick?’ The word offends her.
‘Unwell. You need to think very hard about where he might have gone.’
As he walks away she knows. She runs upstairs and pauses at her bedroom door to watch her husband sleep. And in that moment she can feel her fear of life after this marriage and this house begin to fall away. It is simply a matter of lowering a shield, and she doesn’t know why it has taken her this long to realise that. She kisses the small orange bundle that is Ruby, curled on the other side of the bed, and slips back down the stairs.
The press have returned. It is not just a single journalist now. Outside, there are photographers, five or six at least. If they spot her, her chances of finding Ro are zero. The police have congregated in the drawing room. The door is closed, but she can hear Crowe’s voice addressing them.
She hurries into the garden, out through the gate and onto the Common. The first dog walkers are out already as she passes the scaffolded bandstand and the shuttered café. Although she hasn’t looked for it since they were children, she finds the place without difficulty. Behind the café, a row of black bins conceals the entrance to a narrow, roofless corridor where the back wall of the café is tracked by another wall, perhaps the beginnings of an outbuilding that was never constructed. She isn’t even sure the place is still accessible, but when she notices that a bin has been shunted aside, she slips in behind. The space is narrow, no more than a metre wide. No sunlight reaches here; it smells of damp and rot. It feels like the past, and she has to force herself to enter it.
When she finds him, he looks as if he’s sleeping. With his knees pulled right up to his chin, he occupies all the available space,
wedged between the walls, trapped in his own secret place. His head is resting on the crook of his arm and there is a feather clutched in one hand. She calls out to him, but the sound is dampened, swallowed by the narrow walls. She calls until her voice escapes from her and becomes a kind of wail. She moves sideways along the narrow passage, her feet crunching over plastic pill bottles and countless empty blister packs, then sinking into mulch. She can hardly see for the blur in her eyes. When she gets right up close, she doesn’t try to rouse him. There will be no happy-ever-after now. It is better to let him sleep. And though he looks as if he might wake at any moment, she knows that Sparrow has already gone.
In the narrow, lightening strip of sky above her head, there are whirling shapes that could be birds or ghosts or discarded theories spiralling away and out of reach. But as her eyes clear, those shapes begin to thin and fade until they are nothing more than scudding clouds.
The yelp of a nearby siren catches her attention. They will have followed her, she is sure. She will stay with Sparrow until they take him. She will hold his hand, and keep it warm. And as she waits for them to claim him, she squints against the breaking sky and all the wisps of possibility beyond her gravelled garden, its high walls and locked gate.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my agent, Zoe Waldie, for her keen insights and unfailing support, to my editor, Emma Mitchell, for making a round of edits such an enlightening and positive experience, and to all the other people at Hutchinson and Windmill who have helped The Orphans along, especially Jocasta Hamilton, Laura Brooke, Laurie Ip Fung Chun, and Laura Deacon.
As ever, I appreciate the friendship and support of many writer friends. Special thanks go to Elise, Anne, Roger, Jude, Gavin, Oana, Vicky, Clare, and Sue. It would be a lonely road if we couldn’t share the joys, the woes, the travellers’ tales.
Thanks to Café la Baita on Clapham Common for inspiration and sustenance, to the wonderful Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, where a section of this book was written, and to Sara Cohen for her expert advice.
Finally, heartfelt thanks to my family — to my sons, Patrick, Conor and Rory, and to Mike, my love and my greatest friend.
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Epub ISBN: 9781473535268
Version 1.0
Published by Hutchinson 2017
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Copyright © Annemarie Neary 2017
Cover images: Arcangel (common), Shutterstock (figure)
Cover design: Natascha Nel
Annemarie Neary has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published by Hutchinson in 2017
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780091959289
The Orphans Page 27