by Tom Bradby
Beside the front door, he hesitated, then knocked.
There was a long wait.
He heard someone descending the stairs, then looking through the spy-hole at him for a moment, before the door was pulled open. ‘Mac!’
Caroline Havilland was wearing a dark green silk dressing-gown, her hair tumbling over her shoulders.
‘Mrs Havilland …’
‘Caroline, as I’ve told you so many times. Come in.’ She took a step back, flicking on the light in the hall beside her. ‘It didn’t take you long to locate her.’
‘I’m so sorry, I know it’s …’
‘Don’t be silly.’ Caroline was smiling, intimating that she understood his feelings more clearly even than he did himself. ‘I’ll get her for you,’ she said, turning and disappearing, as if his arrival at this time of night was perfectly natural and before he could offer any qualifying explanation for his presence.
Mac ducked under the doorway as he stepped in, then ran his hand through his hair, trying not to look at himself in the mirror opposite as he heard the thump, thump of Julia’s footsteps on the stairs. A second later, she was rounding the corner, dressed in faded blue and yellow pyjamas, her long hair, like her mother’s, falling down over the front of her shoulders. ‘Mac!’ she said, before he could say anything, moving swiftly to close the last few paces and hugging him, her hair in his eyes, the intoxicating smell of her skin filling his nostrils, so that he gripped her harder than he meant to.
She let go, taking a pace back, still smiling. Perhaps it was his imagination, but her eyes seemed red and puffy, as if she’d been crying.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘I know …’
‘Come in.’ She tugged at his arm, leading him around the corner to the kitchen, flicking on the light, almost tripping over the dog before moving to the Aga and pulling across the kettle.
‘Coffee, or something stronger?’
‘Coffee.’
‘I’m sorry …’ She looked at him. ‘You’ll have to excuse the pyjamas …’
Mac smiled, taking off his jacket, putting it over one chair and pulling back another. As he sat down, looking at her bare feet and hands, he wished suddenly that he did not have to explain why he was here and wondered if he could get away without doing so.
‘I heard you were back,’ he said.
‘And somehow you’ve found yourself on my case.’ She was looking at him. ‘Okay, that’s a good guess. There’s no point in looking crestfallen, Mac, I’m sure it’s not your fault. It’s the inevitable sod’s law – I knew it as soon as they told me your unit was going to be handling the investigation.’
He wondered if he should tell her he had chosen to be involved.
‘You’ve come to arrest me.’
‘No, of course …’
‘I only accept golden handcuffs.’
She was smiling at him. He relaxed a little. ‘You've hung on to your sense of humour.’
‘Just about.’
Julia moved slowly over to the table, reaching across and taking hold of his wrist. ‘You don’t have to look so worried, Mac, it’s all right.’
‘I want to help you,’ he said simply.
‘Don’t worry …’
‘I’m not, but …’
‘I don’t want any help.’
‘I know, Julia, but …’
‘I won’t accept any. It won’t do any good, so just do what you have to and forget that you’re my friend.’
He looked at her, but she was staring at her feet.
‘Julia, of course I’m not going …’
‘Mac.’ She looked up, her face more severe. ‘Please, I don’t want any help or special favours. It won’t do you any good either. If you have been forced to be involved, then just do what you would normally do.’
‘Well … At some point, I am going to have to talk to you about it.’
‘No you’re not, because I have nothing to say. I don’t dispute the statements and I’ve nothing further to add.’
Mac waited. ‘Julia, you’re my friend. Of course I’m going to help you in any way that I can, but … it doesn’t have to be a confrontational thing.’
As he’d been speaking, Mac had watched the aggression and anger draining out of Julia to reveal the brittle, vulnerable girl he’d seen in the log cabin in Norway.
He leant forward, but she didn’t move.
‘You know,’ she said. ‘Once you let emotion get in the way then … you know, then it’s over. That’s the point.’
Mac looked at her for a long time, trying to resist the temptation to reach over and give her the affection that he thought she wanted but seemed determined not to accept. ‘No human being can shut out emotion for ever and remain human,’ he said. ‘And, although you will feel it is not my position to say, I think you are too hard on yourself.’
Julia shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’
The kettle was boiling and she stood, taking down a coffee pot and two mugs from the cupboard. Neither of them spoke as she brought the coffee to the table and went to the larder to get milk, sugar and a packet of digestive biscuits.
She sat opposite him and filled the two mugs, pushing one towards him. ‘Do you ever think of your father, Mac?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why not?’ He breathed out heavily, staring at his coffee. ‘When I realized, aged about fourteen, or fifteen, that I was going to be … you know, tall, I remember being pleased because it meant that, in the unlikely event that I ever met my father again, I would be able to beat him into very tiny pieces.’
Julia’s face was thoughtful. ‘You hate him because he abandoned you?’
‘Abandoned all of us.’ He paused. ‘For someone he met on a train.’ Despite the fact that he was used to this history, Mac felt his face colouring with anger again. ‘That was more than twenty years ago and I’ve not heard one word from him and neither has my sister.’
Mac filled his coffee to the brim with milk and put in two teaspoons of sugar. ‘Why do you ask?’ he said.
‘It just seems … odd, that’s all, him being alive and … it would feel odd to me.’
Mac thought that another woman might have pursued this with more tact, but Julia had a relentless, almost naïve honesty in the way she approached everything.
‘Do you think of your father?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘Every day.’ Julia sat up straight, leaning on the table. ‘I can still …’ She smiled at him. ‘You’ll think I’m a nutter.’
‘No I won’t.’
‘You already think I’m a nutter.’
Mac smiled. ‘You are.’
Julia’s face grew more serious. ‘I can still feel his arms around me sometimes … the strength of him … the feel of his scratchy face and jumper. And … almost as if he were here, I can hear him say, “Hello, champ.” Do you think that’s odd?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? It’s been such a long time and sometimes I can feel it – his presence, I mean – more strongly than I could ten or fifteen years ago. That’s odd … don’t you think that’s odd?
Mac did not know what to say. Julia was looking out of the window above the Aga, her face solemn, and he had to restrain himself now from reaching out and putting a hand on her shoulder, or touching her cheek.
‘I guess,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s no loss without love. And with love, loss doesn’t necessarily fade.’ She turned to face him. ‘It’s harder for you,’ he said.
‘No …’
‘Yes. I have hatred to sustain me, but you still feel the loss.’
She hesitated, as if about to say something else. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You know, even after all this time, I still often think, why me? Why me, what did I do wrong?’
Mac had never heard Julia be so intimate or open about the past and he didn’t want to do anything to break the spell.
‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘as I grow older and time and events pass
by I think about all the conversations that I could have had with him – probably wouldn’t have done, but … why has that been denied me? I just wanted to be an ordinary teenager and instead …’
Mac nodded.
‘I hate it that I can’t be with him, adult to adult, and that … he can’t see how I turned out, you know …’
Mac reached forward to touch her arm. ‘It’s okay.’
Julia stared at the table. ‘I suppose I should be glad he can’t see me now.’
‘That’s a stupid thing to say.’
‘I wish he hadn’t been so perfect.’
‘I’m sure he wasn’t.’
Julia cleared her throat, straightening, recovering herself and apparently suddenly embarrassed by the display of emotion. ‘You’re right. Of course, you’re right.’
‘The difference between us,’ Mac said, ‘is that I can always resolve these issues if I want to and you can’t. For you, it’s just unfair, there is no other way of looking at it. Your father … he sounds a good man, and dying in such a tragic, heroic way … it places an impossible burden … just remember that. So … don’t punish yourself.’
‘I’m not.’
Mac waited until it became clear that Julia didn’t want to talk any more about this, then looked at his watch and stood. ‘I should go.’ He rounded the table slowly, until he was close to her, but she did not move, so he passed beyond her.
She stood. ‘Thanks, Mac.’
He stopped and turned around.
‘Thanks for coming.’
‘Julia, I …’
‘No, don’t. Please. You probably think you can help me, but you can’t.’
CHAPTER THREE
JULIA WOKE EARLY and left the house before her mother was up driving across the border from Hampshire to Sussex, through undulating fields of wheat and over the rolling hills of the South Downs to the seaside beyond Chichester. It was warm again, so she kept the windows of the Golf open, one forearm sometimes hanging down, fingers drumming on the side of the door.
She reached Professor Malcolm’s house with her hair a tangled mess and her stomach protesting, wishing she had eaten something before leaving home.
Professor Malcolm swung the door open and looked her up and down reprovingly. ‘The prodigal returns.’ He stepped back to allow her to enter.
Walking in, she pointed to the sofa, which was covered by a white dust sheet, and asked if she should sit there. He nodded, and she noticed a suitcase standing by the door. It looked out of place.
He sat opposite her. The route between his seat and the french windows was mapped by eight or nine pieces of carpet tile, placed in a row. Another line went towards the door in the opposite direction. They matched the new carpet beneath, roughly, and she assumed they were there to protect it.
To say he lived alone really didn’t do justice to the sense of it. This room was unloved and felt unlived-in. The television dated from the seventies, or before, a large square box with big pushbutton controls. The curtains were old and made from a thick, faded green fabric. Only the morning sun streaming through the window on to a glass coffee-table prevented the atmosphere from being gloomy. There was a picture on the wall above the fireplace – a watercolour view of a beach seen from a cliff-top with a silhouetted figure walking down the middle of it, but there were no photographs on the mantelpiece. A bookcase ran the length of one wall with bundles of the Journal of Clinical Psychology stacked unevenly; some had fallen on to the floor and Julia began picking them up and rearranging them.
‘How long are you home for?’ he asked.
She cleared her throat. ‘I don’t know.’
There was a side-table next to the bookshelf, and she took a small white paper bag from the middle of the blue pot on top of it and examined the contents. It was half full. ‘Still at the jelly babies?’
‘Every man must have a weakness.’
‘Like Ron Reagan.’
‘He ate jelly beans. Not the same thing at all.’
Julia looked at the curve of his stomach and the slack line of his jaw and remembered him telling their tutorial, in a discussion about the psychological impact of bullying, that his nickname at school had been ‘Bunter’. This information had been offered without explanation or embellishment and was the only personal thing she could ever recall him sharing.
He stood. ‘This may seem eccentric,’ he said, ‘but I was about to go for my morning swim.’
‘That is eccentric,’ she said.
While he got changed Julia went outside to stand at the end of the lawn in front of the knee-high palisade that separated it from a dirt path and the beach beyond. The garden had been transformed since her last visit. Once unkempt and neglected, it was now almost too ordered. It was no bigger than a badminton court, but the grass was neatly clipped and bordered on three sides by flower-beds, mostly filled with roses.
He emerged from the house in a florid dressing-gown, thinning hair scraped back across his head, highlighting the Roman curve that ran from his forehead to the tip of his nose. He was wearing white plastic sandals good for swimming off pebbly beaches such as this.
It was windy, the gate in the palisade swinging on its hinges. Professor Malcolm walked through it, she followed, and they crossed the path in tandem.
At low tide, it was possible that this was a sandy beach, but now there was no sand in evidence, the shingle held in place by the breakwaters that stretched almost to the end of the bay.
He removed his dressing-gown and strode forward into the sea, a great white whale in blue and green check shorts and plastic shoes.
Professor Malcolm didn’t hesitate, or shout, but advanced into the water as though it were the Caribbean. Julia took ten or twenty paces to her right and picked up a handful of stones, discarded all but the flattest then skimmed them out across the top of the waves.
He was swimming. Not flapping or splashing or kicking, just making stately progress towards the line of the nearest breakwater and she wondered what the tides were like because he seemed to be drifting further out than she had expected. She asked herself at what point she should worry, but just as she was growing alarmed, he turned back towards her.
Looking at him face on, his head rising and falling with the incoming swell, Julia wondered if he was engaged in the uncomfortable process of mentally cleansing himself of all the darkness that, as one of the country’s foremost psychologists, he had witnessed, investigated and studied. She did not see how anyone with his experience of the dark side of humanity could live comfortably with it.
Professor Malcolm waded out of the sea. Beside her, he picked up a towel, shook his head and cleared the water out of his ears. She wondered if anyone else came here and was part of this ritual, but concluded not. He dried his face carefully, before putting on his glasses.
‘You’ll catch a chill,’ she said.
He dried the rest of himself and put on his dressing-gown, without removing his wet shorts. His dressing-gown looked new and she wondered where he had bought it. The idea of him shopping was vaguely disconcerting.
Julia slipped back through the french windows ahead of him and was careful to follow the tiles across the carpet to the galley kitchen at the back. ‘I’ll make a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to cook you something?’
He disappeared without answering.
The kitchen was the antithesis of the rest of the house. To the left of the door, there was a bookcase that ran from floor to ceiling, full of cookery books. There was a wooden block with ten or more new-looking knives in it, and the first cupboard she looked in was full. On the top shelf, there were bags and bags of Barilla pasta of different shapes and sizes; below, there was a jar of porcini cèpes, three of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, alongside cans of pitted olives and smoked mussels. There were two pots of rock salt and three different types of olive oil. In the middle, there was a white bag with a handful of congealed jelly babies inside it.
Julia located the tea-bags and flicked on t
he kettle. In the fridge, she found sweet mango chutney, sun-dried tomatoes, butter, eggs, cheese and Japanese horseradish, but no milk.
She moved to the side and glanced over the cookery books, thinking how effectively his forensic, clinical manner obscured his passion for fine food.
Fine food and jelly babies.
She made him a cup of tea and brought it into the living room, placing it beside his chair. The room seemed unnaturally bare and she recalled that this had been her overwhelming impression of it on her first visit many years ago. There was not a sign in this house of any form of private life: no pictures of relatives, or friends, no holiday snaps left casually on the side (did he take holidays? She could not imagine how, when, or to where). This room told of a life lived lean, but she did not believe this could be the case, because that wasn’t possible, surely, even for him. She wondered if he had deliberately stripped his surroundings of his past.
When he emerged, he wore a rusty brown sweater and green corduroys. ‘You’re still busy?’ she asked, as he sat down heavily in his chair in front of the television, which she knew he rarely watched.
‘None of my other visitors,’ he said, as she handed him the cup, ‘make me tea.’
Julia pondered the notion that he had other visitors. ‘It’s all police work, no teaching?’
‘I don’t miss university departmental politics.’
She sipped her tea, grateful for something to take the edge off her hunger. ‘There’s no milk, by the way.’ He looked down at the mug in his hand, without comment. His face was more lined than she remembered. ‘You should slow down,’ she said, ‘relax more.’
‘I’m touched by your concern, but it’s difficult to say no.’
‘Isn’t it arrogant to assume you’re the only one who can help?’
‘Possibly. But while they ask, while a crime remains unsolved and a diseased criminal mind out there, and while there is even the smallest chance I might make a difference, it is hard to turn them away.’
Julia recalled how he had once told her that he had never forgotten a face – not of the dead, for a corpse is lifeless, but of those who stared out from pictures stuck to the walls of investigation rooms. Photographs of victims.