Rest Assured

by J M Gregson

  Matt and Freda Potts were climbing in the Brecon Beacons. She’d been surprised when he’d suggested it, but she’d gone along with the idea readily enough: anything that would take her away from Twin Lakes and the way Matt was brooding darkly was fine by her.

  The pair didn’t speak much as they drove the fifty miles through the Welsh hills to where they planned to begin their climb. Freda made occasional remarks about the spectacular scenery, but most of them met with nothing more than monosyllables from her husband. He was not exactly surly, but he seemed to be preoccupied with greater concerns than her nervous prattle. She hoped that the high spaces and clear air of the Beacons would eventually change his mood.

  They were on the lower slopes of the hill, a mile away from the car, before Matt offered his first conversational gambit of the day. ‘We used to train on these hills, when I was in the army. The officers used to time us, over the top and down the other side. We got points for each minute by which we bettered the target time.’

  That was the SAS, she knew, though he never used that term, even now, unless it was wrung from him. Secrecy had been bred into him, had become a way of life then. SAS men hadn’t been allowed to talk about their missions, hadn’t even known where they were going nor what they were to do until the last minute. Action was the keynote: you used as few words as possible.

  Today was a sort of mission, in Matthew Potts’s mind.

  Freda panted behind him, anxious to make the most of the nearest thing she would get to a conversational opening. ‘This is a pretty steep climb, isn’t it?’ She gazed ahead at the steeper slopes awaiting them. ‘You’re pretty fit now. You must have been a really hard man then.’

  ‘We were carrying heavy packs. You should try taking this at a run with half a hundredweight on your back.’ Some unspoken memory twisted the grim line of his lips into a momentary smile.

  He set off ahead of her, moving his compact, powerful frame forward with rapid strides, his feet seeming to the woman behind him to race as swiftly as a dancer’s away from her. She was sure that she was a healthy and fit thirty-five-year-old. She power-walked, whenever she had time for it, and she played tennis every week, being always prepared for a strenuous singles as well as the less demanding and more sociable doubles. And young Wayne Briggs would certainly have said she was athletic … She thrust that thought angrily from her mind.

  She couldn’t catch Matt to extend the conversation. He climbed swiftly and relentlessly ahead of her, moving over the rough stones and steep rises of the path as if he had been jogging on smooth and level ground, leaving her further and further behind him without a backward glance. After each half-mile of strenuous climbing, he paused and waited for her to rejoin him. And after each half-mile she rejoined him breathless and with aching limbs, planting her backside firmly on the nearest flat boulder to recover herself.

  When her heart resumed its normal beat and she could summon the breath for conversation, she commented on the view below them and the lonely glory of their day on the hills. His only reaction was to nod briefly or to offer her the monosyllables she had received in the car. She tried challenging him directly with a jocular, ‘Who’s being moody today? Remembering old times in the Brecons, are we?’

  This prompted no reaction beyond a minimal raising of his chin and a sniffing of the cool mountain air. Then, before she could attempt again to dispel his coldness, he was away. All she saw were his strong thighs and powerful back muscles above her on the path, growing ever smaller as his moving figure pressed on and away from her, towards the blue sky and the racing clouds above them. She gave up the effort to keep up with him, even to stay anywhere near him, and concentrated upon the increasingly steep and twisting path beneath her feet, bending low to assist her progress, even using her hands for balance and speed in one or two more tricky spots.

  This was the longest stretch Matt had climbed without stopping and waiting for her. She began to wonder whether he had climbed up and over the summit and was now moving swiftly down the other side, as he had done in the days of his SAS training. Was he trying to detach himself from her? Did he wish to leave her alone on the high and lonely slopes of the mountain? She wasn’t physically frightened; she was a perfectly competent walker and mountaineer. She would simply return the way she had come, if that was what was most sensible. There was no danger from the weather today, as there often could be in the mountains.

  But what was Matt up to? What was upsetting him and making him act so out of character? He had never behaved like this to her before. It was almost as if he wished to punish her. Or perhaps simply to be out of her presence. He hadn’t recovered from last night and the brawl after the staff dinner: she was sure of that. She’d known from the start that it was a mistake to take him there. It was Matt who had insisted upon it.

  He hadn’t abandoned her. He was sitting with his back against the low wall beside the cairn which marked the summit of the mountain. The wall provided minimal shelter against the winds which howled round this peak on over three hundred days of the year. Today there was no need for shelter, but Matt Potts had taken it automatically, after long experience of fighting the elements here and in much harsher places.

  Freda studied him for a moment, then moved to sit on the low slab beside him. She felt Matt move minimally to his left. She could not be sure whether he was retreating from the touch of her flesh or merely making room for her to sit. She reached for the small rucksack he had flung five feet away from him and produced the pack of sandwiches and the thermos flask she had prepared what now seemed many hours earlier.

  She thought for a moment that he was not going to accept what she offered, but perhaps he was merely preoccupied. He was gazing towards the track far below him, where three tiny, ant-like figures were ascending the route he had covered so rapidly. Eventually he took his sandwiches with a grunt which might have been thanks. He bit into them savagely, as if they had done him some personal injury and he wished them to be swiftly gone from his sight.

  They ate the sandwiches and the apple she had put in to follow them. They drank the coffee; it cooled swiftly in the rarefied air of the summit. Freda said nothing, recognizing that the best way to respond to his silence was with one of her own. The tiny figures on the path so far below them were no doubt toiling hard on their ascent, but they looked no closer than when she had first seen them.

  Suddenly Matt growled without warning, ‘You’ve fucked me about, Freda!’

  He’d never used the word like that before, not to her. No doubt he and the other men used it often on the rigs. Language always deteriorated, when men were shut up with each other. It was Matt who’d told her that – she couldn’t remember when. Freda spoke as though she was voicing someone else’s words. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  She couldn’t think the crisis was going to happen here, in this high and lonely place, with a summer sky above them and mankind and its concerns seeming petty and transient. But she knew now that it was going to happen here, as certainly as if Matt had already voiced his thoughts. He stared out towards the other peaks and towards the invisible Twin Lakes fifty miles beyond them. And then he said, ‘You couldn’t even choose an ordinary bloke. You had to go and fuck a kid.’

  He bludgeoned her with the word. She had welcomed it often enough, in her love-making. Now it had never seemed so coarse and abrasive. It was his own hurt he was voicing. She understood that, but she could do nothing to comfort him. She would have given a great deal to be able to deny what he said. Instead, she said lamely, ‘I’m so very sorry, Matt. I’ve been a fool.’

  ‘You’ll be drummed out of teaching. And I’ll be a laughing stock. Cuckolded by a kid! That’s what they call it, isn’t it? Cuckolded.’ He dwelt on the old, obsolescent word and its harsh consonants, as if he wished to insult her academic pretensions as well as her morals by his use of it.

  She said, ‘It needn’t come to that, surely.’ It was the nightmare she had always had, even as she had turned and twisted in he
r nakedness with the eager young Wayne Briggs.

  ‘Your precious bloody colleagues will be delighted. “That stupid bloody husband of hers who was crazy enough to argue with us at the dinner was a cuckold! Whilst he was away at sea, she was fucking a kid she taught. Ha! Ha! Ha!”’

  She reached out and put her hand tentatively upon his, but he flung it away, as she should have known he would. She said, ‘I won’t be seeing him again. It’s over and I wish I’d never done it. I was lonely and I suppose I was looking for something dangerous and daring.’

  ‘Well, you found that all right! Dangerous and daring, was it? So you looked for some bloody kid with pimples and a big dick who would fuck the arse off you!’

  His bitterness and frustration poured from his venomous tongue in this isolated place. It was worse because it was so near the truth. She’d enjoyed Wayne’s youth and testosterone, enjoyed the reassurance which came from the fact that at thirty-five she could still couple frenziedly with a sixteen-year-old and bring his raw passion to a climax. But she couldn’t admit that to Matt. She couldn’t even try to explain herself without increasing his pain. She said again in what was scarcely more than a whisper for the breeze to carry away, ‘I was lonely.’

  ‘And do you think I’m not lonely? Battered by waves in freezing temperatures with a lot of hairy men who talk nothing but sex and football? Of course I am. Bloody lonely, at times. But I don’t grab the nearest under-age floozy and shag her stupid, do I?’

  You don’t have it to hand, she thought. You’re not surrounded by it day after day, with lads getting erections as soon as they look at you and panting to take your knickers off. But she couldn’t tell him that. Couldn’t tell him anything. She muttered again, ‘I’m sorry. I was very, very stupid.’

  Matt said nothing, staring unseeingly at the dramatic landscape and feeling only an increase in his misery.

  She roused herself to try to move on, to offer something at least that would mitigate his anguish. ‘We can work this out. It’s between us. No one else needs to know about it.’

  ‘You little fool!’ It was so vicious that it felt like a blow in her face. ‘People know already. That chemistry teacher who had the run-in with me last night knew. Debbie and Wally Keane knew. God knows who else knows! The pair of us are probably a laughing stock at Twin Lakes and everywhere else.’

  She’d thought he hadn’t known about Wally. She’d thought no one at school had known about it, that she’d been discreet. Matt was right: she’d been an utter fool to think that she could get away with it. Probably Wayne Briggs had boasted to his friends about bedding the Head of History, about what that staid lady was like with her clothes off. She’d been blinded by passion – no, not even that. She’d been blinded by sex. She’d thought all might now be well, after Keane had died. But instead it was all worse than she’d ever imagined it could be.

  Freda Potts said limply, ‘I’ll make it up to you, somehow, if you’ll give me the chance.’

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘We’d prefer to speak to you together, wouldn’t we, Mike?’ Geoffrey Tiler was uncharacteristically diffident as he ushered in the two CID officers. ‘Though what more either of us will be able to tell you, I’m not at all sure.’ He glanced at his partner and gave a nervous little laugh.

  Michael Norrington tried to take the initiative. It didn’t come naturally to him, but he wanted to seem confident. Confidence could mask all sorts of things, he believed. ‘Do come in, Chief Superintendent Lambert. You and DS Hook are very welcome to inspect our humble abode, although as Geoffrey says I can’t think that we shall be able to enlighten you about anything which bears on Wally Keane’s unfortunate death.’

  A warning glance from Tiler told him that he was in danger of overdoing things. It was noted by the watchful visitors, but Geoff wasn’t certain whether it had registered with his partner. Norrington led them into the living room and indicated the sofa as the place where Lambert and Hook should sit. When they did not immediately speak, it was the nervous Norrington who felt compelled to break the silence. ‘Well, I hope you’re getting near to an arrest. The site is agog with gossip about your actions, as you’ll probably be aware. We’re all very sorry about Wally, of course, but I can’t deny that it’s brought a certain frisson of excitement to the place. We’re a pretty staid lot here normally, but murder changes things. But then I expect you’re well used to all that. And I’m sure you’ve been far too busy to take any interest in what people are chattering about here.’

  ‘We’re making progress.’

  ‘Oh, good! But isn’t that what you always say, when the press claim that you’re baffled?’

  Lambert gave him the ghost of a smile. ‘It is, yes. That or something very similar. It’s also the phrase we use when we want to convey that our enquiries are confidential – that we have found out certain things about people but don’t wish to make them public property.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure you have to be discreet, don’t you? Especially these days, when people are prepared to sue for defamation of character at the drop of a hat.’

  Geoffrey Tiler had been trying to catch his partner’s eye to shut him up. The less said the better, he’d asserted beforehand, and he’d thought Mike had agreed with him. He seemed to have forgotten it now. Geoff said, ‘Of course anything you discover has to remain confidential. We understand that.’

  ‘Unless of course it proves to have a bearing upon a murder investigation. In which case it may well become evidence in a criminal trial and thus available to anyone who takes an interest in such things.’

  ‘Of course. It passes outside your control at that point, as any sensible person would appreciate. We don’t expect to be told anything you’ve discovered about our neighbours here. We wouldn’t even wish to hear it. It’s none of our business.’ He addressed his words to Lambert, but his tone indicated that they were intended for the man at his side rather more than the police.

  ‘We discover all sorts of things when we concentrate our attention upon the people involved in a murder investigation. Most of it eventually proves irrelevant to the case. But until we know that it is so, it has to be followed up. That is why we are here for a second time.’

  Lambert let the words fall into a silence which seemed more significant as it stretched. Norrington had taken the message from his partner that he should shut up and listen carefully rather than talk, but it was costing him an effort. Whereas the thickset Tiler was sitting back in his armchair, his brown eyes keenly observant, Michael Norrington was leaning forward on the edge of his comfortable seat, his very black hair a little tousled and his blue eyes flicking from one to the other of his police visitors in search of enlightenment.

  It was Bert Hook, who had not previously spoken, who now said with a deliberate formality, ‘Information has come to light which means we need to put certain questions to you, Mr Norrington.’

  ‘How very exciting!’ Michael clasped his hands and rocked a little on the edge of his chair. ‘If it wasn’t for the thought of poor Wally lying dead in the mortuary, I’d really be finding this quite intriguing. Don’t you think so, Geoff?’ He turned suddenly at right angles so as to speak to his partner, his movement as abrupt as his speech pattern was brittle.

  Tiler spoke sternly, almost as if checking an impetuous child, ‘I rather think we should concentrate on being helpful rather than excited, Mike.’

  Hook moved in quickly on that. ‘And you’re the one who can help us, Michael. Tell us about Michael Clark, please.’

  Norrington’s eggshell-thin confidence dropped away from him like a snake’s dead skin. He glanced at Tiler with something near to panic on his face, then spoke to him, not Hook. ‘You told me this would happen.’

  It sounded more like an accusation than an admission. Tiler said softly, ‘Tell them, Mike. I’m sure they know everything. You’ve nothing to lose now.’

  Norrington glanced at Lambert, then returned his attention to Hook, as if accepting the easier of two difficult optio
ns. ‘I changed my name. I used to be Michael Clark, many years ago.’

  ‘Yes. But not officially: not by deed poll. That’s why it took our records boys a little while to trace it.’

  ‘I moved to a different place. It seemed a good thing to use a new name in a new town. I never got round to doing the deed poll thing.’

  Tiler came in, leaning sideways in his chair so that he was almost touching his partner. ‘It’s not illegal to call yourself by a different name. And we’re going to get married in September, as the law of the land now allows us to do.’ It was a declaration of his support rather than a useful piece of information.

  Hook did not take his eyes off Norrington’s face during Tiler’s announcement. He said simply and persuasively, ‘Why did you feel the need to change your name, Michael?’

  ‘I was trying to begin again. But you know that.’ The man who had opened so expansively was tight-lipped and cornered now.

  ‘I’d rather hear it from you. The bare facts are scarcely flattering. I thought perhaps you’d like to give us your version of how these things happened.’

  The man was fifty-three, but he had the tortured, helpless face of an adolescent. Perhaps that was because he was being made to relive his sins, or at least to confront them and account for them once again. ‘I was twenty-four at the time. And I suppose I was young for my age. Geoff says I still am.’ He gave a sudden violent laugh which showed how near to hysteria he was. ‘I got a job teaching in a Catholic seminary in Lancashire. Instructing boys and young men who were training for the priesthood.’

  ‘But you weren’t a cleric yourself?’

  ‘No. I had a degree in Theology and Philosophy. The bishop thought it very enlightened to bring in someone from the laity to assist the men of the cloth. I think that they all thought I would take holy orders and become an anointed priest in due course. But I let them down, didn’t I?’