by T. M. Logan
“Who?”
“Ben. Did he say where he’s been the last few days?”
“I didn’t get a chance to ask.”
“Oh,” she said, trying hard to keep the disappointment out of her voice. “But you saw him?”
“Listen, I’m busy right now. I have to go.”
“Are you sure you’re OK, Joe? Your voice sounds a bit strange.”
“Just tired,” I said. This last week I had become a stranger to myself.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Look after our boy.”
“Of course. You would tell me if there was anything else, wouldn’t you?”
The taxi turned a corner and pulled to a stop by the side of the road.
“Got to go.”
“I love you, Joe. When will you—”
I hit End, cutting her off.
The taxi had stopped on a broad, well-kept street of smart Victorian houses. I paid the driver and got out, checking up and down the street. No police. No Ben. It was 8:51 A.M.—just getting to a time when I could reasonably knock on the door of a complete stranger.
The garden of number 33 was immaculate: neatly cut lawn, trimmed edges, shrubs pruned back away from the path. A spotless cream Mercedes A-Class sat on the driveway, latest license plate. Just a few months old. The front curtains were open, upstairs and down. I rang the doorbell and stood back from the door. She was a widow who had lived alone since Ben’s dad died of a heart attack a couple of years ago, and I didn’t want to freak her out before we’d had a chance to talk.
A figure approached down the hallway, outline blurred through the frosted glass, accompanied by the yelping and yapping of small dogs. For one mad moment I wondered whether it might be Ben walking down the hall toward me. Or maybe I’d walk in and find him sitting on the sofa in his pajamas, munching a piece of toast, watching Jeremy Kyle with eight days of beard on his face. After all, what better place was there to lie low than in your mum’s spare room, 250 miles from London? Maybe he’d been here all week, monitoring everything via social media.
The door opened, and a thick security chain snapped taut.
71
A woman looked at me through the gap.
Not Ben.
She was in her midfifties, younger than I’d expected, trim and tanned and dressed in white jeans and a long gray woolen cardigan belted at the waist. She had the same oval face shape as Ben, the same eyes, deep dark brown—eyes that narrowed now at the arrival of a stranger on her doorstep. There was a scramble of growling and jumping at her feet as two Jack Russell terriers tried to get through the two-inch gap allowed by the door chain.
She looked up at me without saying anything—studying me like a headmistress awaiting an explanation.
“Mrs. Delaney?” I said.
“Yes.”
“I’m a friend of your son’s. A friend of Ben’s, from London.”
Her expression changed immediately, lines of worry appearing on her brow. “What is it? Have you heard from him?”
“I was going to ask you the same question.”
She shook her head. “The police say he’s a missing person.”
“Could I come in and talk to you for a minute, Mrs. Delaney?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Maybe the idea that Ben’s been hiding out here isn’t so crazy.
“Just for a moment?” I said, keeping eye contact.
“Who are you?” Her soft Sunderland accent was tight with tension.
I was about to tell her my real name, but instinct told me not to. A colleague’s name came to mind.
“My name’s Sam King. One of Ben’s poker friends from London.”
She studied me for a moment, her eyes on my face. I realized she was looking at the bruises from last night’s beating. The dogs continued to paw at the door, half whining, half growling, one trying to climb over the other as their blunt claws clicked and scraped down the doorframe.
I added, “I was wondering whether you’d—”
“Maisy! Billy!” Mrs. Delaney spoke sharply to the two terriers, ignoring me. “Go to your bed. Go on now!”
The two dogs whimpered but trotted off obediently down the hall, tails down, claws clicking on the wooden parquet flooring. She returned her gaze to me, more inquisitive now.
“How did you get my address?”
“Beth gave it to me.”
“My daughter-in-law?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been worried about Ben,” I said. “We all are. Trying to find out whether he’s OK. I’m at a conference in Sunderland this weekend, and I’ve been going to a few of his favorite places to see if anyone’s seen him.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“You’ve come all the way from London to do that?”
“I was here anyway, thought I’d try to help. Have you heard from him recently?”
“Not this week. But I told everything to the policeman who came around on Tuesday.”
“Is he here?”
“Of course not. Why would he be here?”
There was the tension in her voice again. Her anxiety was palpable—but was it the despair of having lost her son, or the strain of lying to protect him?
“Has he been here at all this week?” I said.
She ignored the question, indicating my bruises with a slender index finger.
“What happened to your face?”
“Last night I was at a casino in town looking for Ben. The bouncers took exception to me asking questions.”
“Clearly. What do you know about my son?”
“Could we talk inside for a couple of minutes?”
She crossed her arms, and her voice took on a harder edge. “I’m not sure you realize quite how odd it is, Mr. King, you just turning up here out of the blue—no phone call, no warning. Just arriving on my doorstep asking about my Benjamin.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Everything was a bit rushed, there was no time to call a—”
“It’s not normal behavior.”
“This is not a normal situation.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I’ve no idea who you are. You could be anyone.”
“I’m a friend of Ben’s.”
“So you say. How do I know it wasn’t Ben that gave you those bruises?”
That’s uncomfortably close to the truth. I held my hands up.
“Listen, Mrs. Delaney, I just want to make sure that your son’s all right. He’s a great guy and I know he’d do the same for me if I went AWOL. That’s all.”
She peered at me then, a little less certain. “Do you think he’s in some kind of trouble?”
“He’s been out of contact, which is unlike him. He’s not answering his phone, and…”
“And?”
I checked up and down the street again, in case anyone else was in earshot. “He and Beth are having some … issues.”
“So the police said, but I don’t believe it. Not my Ben.”
“It’s true. I wish it wasn’t.”
She stared at me, sizing me up, concern for her own safety tempered by fear for her son. She seemed torn between the prospect of letting a complete stranger into her house and the worry for her boy and his situation. I wondered whether she would be guided by her head or her heart.
Finally, her concern as a mother won out. She called the dogs back to her side and unhooked the door chain.
“Why don’t you come in for a minute?” Her voice softened a little. “Since you’ve come all this way.”
72
Mrs. Delaney showed me into the immaculate living room while she busied herself in the kitchen making a fresh pot of coffee. The wall and mantelpiece were decorated with pictures of the Delaney family. Holidays in Sydney, Rio, Florida, and Egypt among them. Many of the pictures I recognized from Ben’s own study back in Hampstead.
Mrs. Delaney appeared again, both dogs trotting alongside her. She handed me a coffee in a bone china cup and saw the picture I was
looking at, teenaged Ben with his prefect badge.
“That was the year our Ben got the school prize,” she said. “Such a clever boy.”
I sipped my coffee. It was good, smooth and strong, an expensive blend.
“His school looks a bit posher than mine.”
“Top three in the northeast.”
“Your daughter-in-law said he didn’t go to the local comp.”
“Brayfield? God no, pet. I’d rather have homeschooled him than sent him there. Terrible place, full of all the wrong sort. And it’s even worse now than it was when Benjamin was a lad.”
She gestured toward an armchair at the end of the living room and asked me to sit down. I liked her, liked the fact that she had listened to me, let me into her house, given me the benefit of the doubt when most people would have slammed the door in my face. She seemed genuine, and the worry on her face was clear to see.
“My name’s Ruth, by the way.”
“Thanks for letting me in.” I sank back into the deep leather armchair. “Can’t believe that Ben’s been out of touch for this long. You must be worried sick.”
“I’ve barely slept. A few hours a night.”
“When did you last hear from him?”
“He was never the best at staying in touch, to be honest. Normally every other weekend, sometimes every third weekend depending on what he had going on at work. He was so busy with his business, he wasn’t in touch the weekend just gone.”
“I think he came up here from London last night,” I added. “I thought he might have dropped in to see you.”
“Benjamin’s not been to visit me since the summer,” she said slowly.
My cell phone rang. The display showed a cell phone number that the phone didn’t recognize. Probably junk. I rejected the call.
“Sorry about that.”
“Tell me more about the … woman they say he’s involved with,” she said. “A friend’s wife, the policeman told me?”
“Don’t really know her that well,” I lied. “Apparently, they’d been having a fling for a few months, but she wanted to break it off.”
“Probably realized she couldn’t get her hands on his money. Trollops like that are always after something.”
I felt myself stiffen involuntarily. “I’m not sure that’s quite how it happened.”
“Really?” she said slowly, her tone changing. “So how do you think it happened?”
“From what I heard, it was more of a mutual—”
A flickering in the glass-framed pictures on the mantelpiece caught my eye. Pulses of reflected light.
Flashing lights. Flashing blue lights.
There was a police patrol car outside the house, blue lights revolving. As I watched, both doors flew open and a pair of uniformed officers jumped out.
And now Ruth Delaney was on her feet, a kitchen knife in her hand—the blade up and pointed toward me.
“You’re him, aren’t you?”
“Who?”
“Her husband! The husband of the woman who threw herself at Benjamin. I knew it the moment I saw you.”
“You called the police.” I couldn’t quite believe it.
“They warned me about you!” Her voice was suddenly as hard as stone.
I stood up quickly, adrenaline jolting me upright. The police officers were across the road, one of them talking into his radio.
“What? What do you mean?”
“The police said you might come here. And I should call them if you did. And now you’re going to stay right here and tell them the truth about what you did to my boy!”
The sound of boots crunching quickly up the gravel drive to the front door. I moved toward the hallway. I had only seconds.
“Mrs. Delaney, I had nothing to do with—”
“Don’t come near me!” She jabbed the knife in my direction, and the dogs picked up her fear instantly, their hackles raised, mouths drawn back in a snarl to show rows of teeth.
I held my hands out as I edged past her. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
One of the Jack Russells leaped forward and locked onto my ankle with a growl. I stumbled backward into the hall, dragging the dog with me, its teeth like a line of needles in my flesh. There was a hammering on the front door and shouts from the two police officers, dark shapes through the glass.
Got to get out of here.
The dog continued snarling and biting down, and I half dragged it down the hallway with me as I headed for the kitchen, feeling its hot breath on my skin, blood in my shoe. Finally, I shook it loose, turned, and ran as Ruth Delaney started screaming.
“This is your bitch wife’s fault! God help you if you’ve hurt Benjamin, you bastard! I’ll kill you myself, I swear it!”
I turned right into a conservatory, sent a wicker side table flying, and burst through the open French doors, sprinting the length of her garden without looking back. I could still hear wild barking and screaming as I smashed through a trellis panel and dived headlong over the wall into her neighbor’s garden.
I kicked through a panel in the next fence and kept going.
73
There were seven splinters in the heel of my right palm from the variety of fences I had vaulted, climbed up, and heaved myself over as I ran from the police. Four of the tiny wooden shards came out, but the other three were lodged too deep, and the more I tried to wheedle them out, the deeper they went. The harder you push, the more you struggle, the deeper the barb is buried.
I had pushed too hard, and now it was me that was about to be buried.
With the hood of my sweatshirt pulled over my head, I sat on a bench at Sunderland train station, near the end of the platform. As far away from other people as I could get. I had dodged a slack-looking young policeman on the way in and was keeping an eye on him as he checked slowly up and down the platforms. Looking for someone.
My right arm ached from where I had jumped a wall and landed badly. The wound from the dog bite on my left ankle had bled down into my shoe, four distinct punctures on each side of my leg, and was now a low throbbing ache stiffening the joint and making it painful to walk on. I flexed my ankle, rotating it, teeth gritted against the pain. It had never been great since metal pins were put in it more than ten years ago, after one drunken night that had wrecked my sporting career.
I dialed Larssen’s number, and he picked up after the first ring.
“Joe, your phone’s been off. What have you been doing?”
I touched the bruise by my eye socket. “This and that.”
“Are you OK? You sound terrible.”
“I’ve been worse. Can’t remember when, but hey-ho.”
“Where are you?”
“Waiting for a train.”
“You’re coming back to London?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We need to talk about your options.”
I tensed, anticipating another sucker punch, unsure how it was possible to make things any worse at this point. “Options?”
“As in what we do next. Your best course of action at this point.”
I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Turned my head slightly so I could track the progress of the young police officer. He’d moved to the next platform over and was talking to a fluorescent-jacketed member of the station staff.
“So what do you think I should do? What’s your advice?”
“Well, Joe, the police have your admission that you were at the scene of the incident, backed up with forensic evidence, they’ve found your cell phone at the supposed burial location, plus Mr. Delaney’s blood in the trunk of your car. They also have suspicious internet searches on your cell phone and metadata that looks like you were sending messages using his phone to mislead the police. They have forensic authorship analysis indicating that he was not the author of messages posted. And underlying it all, of course, is the fact that your wife was sexually involved with Ben Delaney.”
He said nothing for a moment, letting the news sink in. All I could think
of was Ben’s grinning face.
Game, set, and match, big fella.
The bright steel railway tracks were only a few feet in front of me. I sat forward on the bench and stared at them. How much pain would there be if you got hit by an intercity doing a hundred miles an hour? Probably nothing at all, or maybe just for a second. It would be too fast. One second you’d be there—living, breathing, thinking. A functioning member of the human race. The next second scattered, extinguished, destroyed. Gone.
Larssen said, “Joe, are you still there?”
“I’m fucked, aren’t I?”
He paused before answering. “We need to sit down and talk about this properly, Joe. Face-to-face. No more phone calls, no more getting on trains and running around the country. That’s my advice.”
“Are you still representing me?”
He hesitated again, more electronic silence hanging between us. “If we start doing things my way.”
“Does that include walking into a police station and giving myself up?”
“You make it sound like you’ve been on some kind of crime spree.”
“Just asking the question.”
“The advice I gave you yesterday still stands, yes.”
The phone was hot against my ear.
“So this is it, then.”
“How do you mean?”
“Police, a murder charge, bail if I’m really lucky.”
“Nothing’s certain at this stage. But we need to start being smart about all this.”
“Do you think I’ll get bail?”
Once again, he avoided my question. “Are you on your way back to London?”
“Due back in about three and a half hours.”
* * *
I agreed to get a taxi from King’s Cross and go straight to his office as soon as my train got in—no detours, no visits, no unscheduled stops—for 3:00 P.M. He and I would prepare and discuss strategy for an hour, and he would send one of the firm’s young associates to my house to pick up a suit for me to change into. Then he would drive me to Kilburn Police Station, and I would give myself up to DCI Naylor before the end of the day. Except Larssen didn’t call it “giving myself up”; he called it “making myself available for further questioning.”
It was 10:55 A.M. A week and a day ago, at this very moment, I had been standing in front of a tenth grade class discussing Of Mice and Men. Eight days ago.