Josie, who I expect to correct the girl, just laughs and sweeps her up onto her lap as she takes her place on the sofa. Adrian sits next to her. I take my seat in one of the armchairs opposite. Adrian leans forward and straightens plates and moves beakers into neater lines. I can’t help but wonder if she has spotted his OCD behaviour yet.
He asks her, Josie, if she’d like a coffee and she nods her agreement. Adrian smiles tightly at me, as if to indicate I have overlooked something – the offer of coffee or tea – and have somehow let him down. Embarrassed him. Made him look foolish. One final move of the jug, so its handle is facing towards Josie, and he is up and has gone into the kitchen. He will have to work hard to disguise his OCD from her.
I observe as she pours a beaker half-full with orange squash and passes it to Lily with a stage-whispered, “Hold it carefully.”
Lily takes it and holds it carelessly – almost provocatively – at an angle so the squash sloshes over the rim of the beaker and onto the carpet.
Josie does what looks like a mock glare at the child – as if she feels this sort of behaviour is perfectly acceptable – and gets up to go into the kitchen.
Lily and I sit and look at each other.
I am not sure if she is going to smile or look away.
I smile. She looks away.
Adrian and Josie come back in. He is holding two mugs of hot black coffee, which he places carefully on the table in front of them. They are both matching, but chipped, mugs from the back of the cupboard. From when Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson. I would not have used them. I do not why he is drinking his coffee black. He never has before. She has what looks like six or seven sheets of kitchen roll, far more than she needs, wrapped around her hand and she uses these to mop at the wet carpet.
Eventually, and there is a lot of what I’d call ‘a performance’ from them (acting up the cuteness for my benefit), everyone is settled and so I spread my right arm above and across the food and drink on the table and invite them to “tuck in”.
And they do so with various comments about the “nice choice” and “tastiness” of the spread. I look on, smiling.
Even so, Josie pulls apart two sandwiches, picking bits out, placing them on the side and passing what’s left to the child. Feeding time at the zoo, this is.
Adrian sits there as if it’s perfectly normal. But it is tactless, rude even, to play with food like this especially when you are a guest. I do not comment. I do not reveal my thoughts.
There is a knock at the door again. “Leave it,” I say, “Jehovah’s Witnesses. They’ve been up and down the road all morning.”
Adrian looks flustered. I can see he wants to go and answer the door. The beauty just smiles. Lily looks from one to the other of us. She makes a bbbrrr-innnggg, bbbrrr-innnggg noise as if imitating a door bell.
I sit here, my skin crawling, waiting for a louder, more insistent knock. I know I would have to answer it – otherwise, it would seem peculiar. “Ssshhh,” I whisper to the little girl who is looking at me, “they’ll go away.” And after a long, tense minute, maybe two, they do, whoever they are, and we resume our tea.
We chat generally, Josie and I, about the weather and other inanities, with Adrian looking on and the child picking and fiddling with cakes and her nose and then the cakes again. One way or the other, the child touches every single cake – after poking her fingers in her nostrils – so that no one else would want to eat them. I keep quiet but she really needs admonishing. No one does though. Both Adrian and the child eat the cakes. I do not.
As a (former) tax investigator, I always have clear in my mind, when meeting someone, exactly what it is I want to know, to uncover, to find out. The truth. With this young woman, I want to know what she sees in Adrian and, more importantly, what she wants from him. Clearly, these are not questions you can ask directly but I want to get the answers nonetheless. Fortunately, I have been trained in such matters. And I am something of an expert.
I start by asking if she comes from Ipswich. She replies, with only the slightest encouragement from me, that she had been brought up on one of the nearby council estates by her mother.
She goes on, without prompting, that her father died when she was little. She talks a little of “mum and me” with an almost wistful tone to her voice. I think, but do not press, that the mother has died, but again, quite voluntarily, as if she wants to tell me everything, she adds that the mother had remarried a few years ago and moved to Cardiff for the stepfather’s job.
“So did you not fancy going to Wales with them?” I ask gently. A pause, a shake of the head. A comment about being pregnant at the time with the child. The admittance, in the way she speaks, her manner, that parting from her mother was a tough moment in her life.
And the suggestion, a half-started answer, tailing off, in response to a nod and an encouraging smile from me that the stepfather was a difficult man, unpleasant for sure, perhaps even more. I do not press her.
There is no talk of sisters or brothers or wider family.
I assume that she is, to all intents and purposes, other than the child, alone here.
Just the two of them. Lovely mummy. Naughty daughter.
And then, as the tea eventually draws to a close and Adrian starts his twitching and fiddling again and suggests that it’s time to go and get the bus “before it gets busy”, I ask the question that I know will give me the answer I am looking for. “And, uh.” I pause to show concern. “Do you still see her – a quick look at the child – father?”
A brief silence. And then I have my answer – what she wants from Adrian. He goes to speak, hesitating as he tries to pick his words carefully in front of the child, staring up at him with her big moon eyes.
“He’s not kind or gentle,” the young woman interrupts, smiling and putting her hand on Adrian’s knee. “Not like Adey.” He looks at her – Adey! – and smiles shyly, before glancing at me.
I tut, loudly enough for her to hear, as if to say, “Oh dear, there there.”
As Adrian gets to his feet, signalling that it’s time for them to go, she says, in something of a rush as Adrian shepherds the girl away, “He won’t leave us alone, he’s forever coming round, making trouble, wanting to see Lily… he won’t let me get on with my life.”
And she looks at me, with what I am sure are tears in her eyes as she turns to go.
And for a moment, I almost feel sorry for her.
She tries to smile as she reaches for my outstretched hand but then goes to hug me. Her great big bag swings in the way and so I just pat her arm instead.
Then, just as soon as they had arrived, they have gone. And I am not sure how I feel. Part of me is excited. She is an attractive lady, for sure. Another part of me is anxious. My mind dwells on the child. And things generally. I am not sure what to think.
WEDNESDAY 26 JULY, 7.46PM
It has been two and a half to three hours since they left and I am still thinking about them. In fact, after I had cleared everything away and washed up and had a tidy round and a hoover, I have been sitting here, before resuming my diary, just reworking their visit in my head over and again.
Big, stupid Adrian. That lovely, troubled woman. And the annoying little child. I go over what was said and when, and how and what I said to get them talking and by way of reply. It all unsettles me and I cannot quite work out why.
The truth is, I do not know what I think or how I feel about them. Something worries me, but I cannot think what. So I will, for now, return to my diary and the moment I found out the reality about her and him. It is scratched and torn into my memory.
As a tax inspector – ex-tax inspector, I must remember – I am well aware that many people, both honest and dishonest, are creatures of habit. They are, for the most part, also lazy. When it comes to passwords, for example, people use the same ones time and again – most often, the names of their children or pets or dates of birth, or variations thereof.
Uncover one – and with some online acc
ounts you can simply enter variations endlessly without being blocked – and the chances are that you can then go into most or even all of their other password-protected accounts to see what they’ve been getting up to. With her suddenly going out for a walk one Sunday morning – at least, at the time I thought she was walking – I knew as I slipped into the bathroom and saw her mobile phone she’d inadvertently left on the side that it would have the passcode of 1210. Her birthday, 12 October.
I thought, as I went and sat down with the phone at the kitchen table, holding my breath for a moment, that I had at least the best part of an hour before she returned. Adrian was in his room listening to his music, which he did most Sunday mornings. Clicking ‘phone’ and ‘recents’ I could see the calls made and received. I was able to scroll slowly through them one by one for the past two months.
I saw, among the everyday calls to the bank and to the library and the chemists for her repeat prescriptions, a pattern emerging of calls between her and him before work, 8.30am to 8.45am, typically, and after, 4.15pm to 4.30pm usually. Most of these calls were of about 10 to 15 minutes’ duration.
They got more frequent over the weeks.
Longer too.
I imagined the words and phrases that passed between them.
I then clicked back and forth to find ‘gallery’ and looked through the pictures one by one. I dreaded what I might see. But they were almost all dreary. Endless shots of a black cat that sometimes came into the back garden. A pigeon sitting on a bench by the library, a car number plate that ended 54NTA and what, at first, seemed to be a lumpy smear of sick but, on zooming in, was a home-made pizza. I do not know who made it nor for whom. I imagine it must have had some significance. It is not something I would have photographed, let alone kept. I doubt I would have eaten it, truth be told.
I found only one photograph of him – and her – and that was early on before the phone calls increased in their intensity. It was a photograph that must have been taken of her and her colleagues, including him, at their Christmas party. I remember her saying it was held in a pub over Felixstowe way, in Trimley St Martin or Trimley St Mary, I forget which. No matter, they are both equally ghastly places: two big housing estates of little identical boxes full of dim-witted dockers.
There were about 10 or 11 people in all. Some seated to one side of the table, others, presumably those who had been sitting on this side, crouching and smiling and pulling faces and doing thumbs-up signs in between. She, next to him, was to the left of the picture, sitting there all shiny-faced, with him to her right with a paper hat at a jaunty angle on his head and his arm draped casually around her shoulder. I could tell from her face that she was aroused.
I do not know why.
Short with sandy hair, and pink and fleshy.
He’d win no prizes for his looks.
I turned at last to the messages, where I knew I would find the truth of their relationship, which lay hidden behind the list of phone conversations and that single photograph. The messages stretched back some two months again and I dipped into one or two early ones where my wife wrote a series of, to me, bewildering texts in an unexpectedly girlish manner for a woman of her age. ‘Camembert. Pooh whiff’ was one. ‘Mrs Angle is the angle/angel of death!!!’ was another. These infantile remarks made no sense to me. His responses, ‘Danish blue for me please’ and ‘She’s no angel that’s for sure’ were at least a little more grown up.
I had the sense that she was flirting, chasing him.
That made me so angry.
The thought of her, the local whore.
I scrolled through and noted that, as with the phone calls, these messages became more frequent and longer over the two months. They were, from what I could make out, sent and received in the evenings while my wife was, so she said, having a bath. I could see, going through one text after another, a growing relationship between them as banter turned into warmth and then more besides as smiley-face emojis were replaced by xxx kisses and, finally, hearts.
There were one or two, more recently, that tore at my heart; I cannot write them out because they upset me so much but they were messages of love and of promises about the future. And messages galore on Saturdays and Sundays, which she must have sent while I was close by. And there was one, the final exchange, from moments before she dashed out of the door.
Him to her. ‘I’m free, sweetheart. I can meet you now, usual place. Are you free too? Please come now.’
Her to him. ‘I’m on my way, darling. As quick as I can.’
Him to her. ‘Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! I don’t have long.’
I wondered if they were doing it right then.
I must stop there. Writing this down is not easy; in fact, even now, it is incredibly painful. The GP said that by writing things out time and again, it would be easier to come to terms with it all. I don’t know that I ever will.
At the moment, it almost reduces me to angry tears. That she could do this. Lie. Cheat. Whore herself around. I can tell you this – it took all of my powers of calm and control not to turn on her as she came back from that so-called ‘walk’.
I was in the kitchen and washing a wok that I had in my hand. She came in quite cheerfully, like some giddy teenager, her face beaming. She was almost jigging from side to side. Literally, beside herself with joy. How I stopped myself turning and hitting her full in her stupid fat face with that wok again and again and again and again and again and again and again, I do not know. But I know that from that moment, as she waltzed back to the bathroom to find the mobile phone that I’d put back carefully on the side, that I hated her fat guts.
THURSDAY 27 JULY, 11.26AM
It is another swelteringly hot day today; the barometer in my room suggests it is close to 90. It may have broken. It does not seem to have moved for some days now. Or perhaps I have just not noticed, what with everything. The heat seems relentless, only easing a little at night and then starting up again the next day before breakfast. It is endless. Draining. Exhausting.
Bang. (Ignore it.)
I had a bath before breakfast – I ate alone as Adrian stayed out again last night – and then had another bath a while afterwards. I have since been lying on my bed trying not to sweat and stain the sheet.
Thump.
I have been thinking – trying very, very hard to think – about things; Adrian, Josie and the child mostly. I have concluded that all of this may actually work in my favour. Something’s going to go my way for once. He is out so much that I think Adrian will soon leave and stay at hers, perhaps permanently.
I will not have to deal with Adrian after all. He will not bring the police to my door.
Whatever he does, he will do it there. I will not have to get involved. I will not know.
And I can see out my days here, quietly and anonymously.
There are still things that trouble me. I need to earn some money. My earnings from HMRC are coming to an end. My pension, such as it is, will be inadequate. I can barely afford to live on it. My savings will not last long. I need to find some sort of job somewhere, to keep me ticking over.
Thump again. (I take no notice.)
I do not know where to look for a part-time job. Much of what is out there – working a till at a supermarket, stacking shelves, watering plants in a garden centre, standing among teenagers with a baseball cap on back to front at McDonalds – is beneath me. And I do not want to leave my bungalow, at least not for very long.
I tense, knowing there will be another loud noise any moment.
And there’s that DNA sample the police took when I had my run-in with that girl’s stepfather at the delicatessen. I wonder what they have done with that. I do not like the idea of the police holding the DNA of millions of citizens. Checking. Comparing. Matching. It is like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A police state.
Bang. (Ignore it.)
And now the noise that’s been all around me these past few hours starts to crank up. I can hear the shouts of neighbouring chil
dren, the banging of a ball against the wall of the garage that separates the top of my garden from next door. Then the thump as the ball hits the fence, my fence, over and over again.
I keep myself to myself, me. Don’t want to talk to next door. Have the young woman or her latest boyfriend popping round to borrow milk for the children’s breakfast, asking me questions about her, wanting to know what’s what. Having to know my business.
Bang. (Fucking bang.)
But the banging, the sheer, mindless, thoughtlessness of it, drives me mad. It is all I can do to stay here.
Thump.
I want to go into the back garden, take my broom and bang it in time against the fence, echoing the ball so they get the message. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Take the ball and play somewhere else. Leave me alone. For Christ’s sake, give it a rest.
Bang. (Fucking bang again.)
I am up and at my kitchen window. I open it and slam it loudly, hoping they will hear. I do it again, crashing it shut. Got that? Hear it? Do you fucking hear me?
Bang.
They take no notice, just keep going, a ragged assortment of bangs and thumps as the ball hits the garage wall, then the fence, and the garage wall again.
As I stand there, looking out and listening, the ball comes over.
A perfect arc.
It lands in my back garden, in the middle, in front of the air-raid shelter.
There is silence, blessed silence for a moment. I stand and think, calming now. I do not want to throw the ball back. If I do, the bang-thump-bang-thump-bang-thump-bang will start up again, driving me mad. If I do not, they will be at my door, knocking, ringing, wanting the ball back. If I ignore the door, they will be at the side gate, pushing and pulling to open it. The woman’s boyfriend, the stupid, mindless yob, may even kick it down.
Mr Todd's Reckoning Page 10