by LK Fox
I followed him, but I started to wonder how much longer my patience would last. If this didn’t work, I would have to give it up. One more push, Nick. Sort it, or end it. Scrolling the map on my phone, I could see that the entrance to the charity’s headquarters was situated in an avenue somewhere off to the south side of Euston Road.
As I turned into the street, I saw the building I’d seen sketched on the letterhead in his room. It stood behind a row of dense cherry trees, set back from the pavement. Parking the car, I approached the main gates on foot and checked the grounds for lights and cameras. I couldn’t see Buckingham anywhere. The wind had risen, and the branches above my head were thrashing out the last of the rain. Looking through the bars of the locked gates, I could see that the entire front and right-hand sides of the building were covered in scaffolding. I thought it might be useful more as an escape than an entrance.
Access to the building itself was effected by swiping a key fob across the steel plates at the base of the main glass doors. Climbing the main wall was easy enough. I needed to stay in the treeline around the property. The deep plant beds looked attractive but were a security joke, because they allowed me to circle the entire property without being seen.
I made a mental grid of the area, but my hopes of gaining access from the back of the building disappeared when I saw the single exit door with the sensor light above it, probably attached to an alarm within the building. There was likely to be a guard on the premises – a bright light showed in a small window on the second floor. It wasn’t the kind of place that housed a state-of-the-art bank of monitors. There was probably a bored Asian kid in a uniform two sizes too big drinking coffee from a flask and watching porn on his smartphone.
The scaffolding was unalarmed. I could see a pair of what looked like toilet windows, too small to climb through. But thanks to the scaffold crossbars, you could easily stand on their concrete sills and reach up to the floor above. My core balance wasn’t as good as it should have been but I thought even I could manage that.
I considered the situation for a minute. If Buckingham was coming here, I must have overtaken him. I could wait for him to turn up, then follow in behind. Not a very professional approach, but it had to be better than trusting muscles I hadn’t used in years. I’d already broken into one building this week and didn’t trust my luck to hold out a second time.
If you’d have asked me right at that moment what I thought I was doing, I wouldn’t have been able to answer.
In hindsight, a court of law would have been able to define my actions better:
Taking revenge on your son’s killer.
Ella
This time I really did leave, for good.
Away from Ashton and off into the West Country, taking three trains and telling no one where I was going – not that there were many people to tell. I thought if I was further away I wouldn’t be tempted to think about Gabriel any more.
I didn’t even tell Buck where I was headed. I didn’t want him to come looking for me. What were we to each other, anyway? Little more than a pair of misfits clinging together for warmth.
I arrived in Bristol and immediately began looking for a job as a waitress, which seemed the most likely option around there. I knew that in a university town I would be surrounded by bars and cafés, and work would be easy to find, even if the pay was rubbish. It was how I ended up in a place called the Tequila Sunrise Café. It was the kind of fake plastic American diner that appealed to students who had no idea how horrible Key Lime Pie could be.
I worked long hours and late shifts and tried not to imagine Gabriel’s life any more. But at night, when I looked up through the skylight at the stars above the hills – they were real stars, not city ones, sparkling across the void like sea salt spilled on black velvet – his face always returned to my mind. I lay in the tiny top-floor bedroom I had rented, and his smile appeared in my dreams.
I spoke to Aunt Charlie, who told me why Marleena had left her job. She had pancreatic cancer. I made a tentative effort to get in touch with her through Facebook, but her page hadn’t been updated in ages. I sent a message, leaving a number where I could be contacted, but she never called. She had tried so hard to help me, and I had repaid her generosity by being a total bitch. With that in mind, I set about making amends for my past.
I applied for a number of part-time courses and, while I waited for my enrolment to be approved, I spent my spare time learning about theatrical design and production finance, but knew I would probably have to take something that paid a living wage. Making friends of my own age was all but impossible. I’d been invisible for so long that shyness now crippled me. History held me back; I couldn’t let go of the past.
As I walked around the harbour on a sunny, breezy summer morning, stepping between the groups of students who lounged around, reading, drinking and laughing together, I felt lonelier than I had ever felt before. I moved through these happy people like a ghost. There was nothing left of me for them to see.
How much time had I wasted as the result of a few minutes drunkenly passed in the back of a run-down pub? I didn’t want to suffer a ruined life for a single error of judgement. Kate Summerton’s death was more problematic. An attempted suicide had turned into manslaughter. Forget what her husband had said about her bad driving and the ice and an accident waiting to happen, that’s what it really was – I had caused her to turn around and come home, had waited on the road she took, a route hardly used by anyone, and I had killed her. I had to make a clean break now, or find a way to forgive myself and move on.
I looked out across the sparkling water and I could hear an old Groove Armada song, ‘By the River’, playing on someone’s phone. Behind me, two girls laughed at something one of their classmates said. There was a snack stand and everyone was sitting around it, eating hot caramel crepes, laughing, flirting, sharing stories, making plans.
I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be normal. Yet another birthday had passed without being marked by so much as a card. I wanted friends and light and happiness to enter my life. I wasn’t too old to reinvent myself. Get a different attitude and make something good happen, forget about Gabriel and all the misery that had followed.
I decided to find a secretarial job, start saving some of my salary and eventually use it to set up some kind of theatre business of my own. I’d find a way to make it pay, build a real future, not spend all my time on the margins of other people’s lives. To end my watching and waiting, and start participating. If I just stopped thinking about the past, I could finally make something of myself, find something I could take some pride in. I knew there would have to be sacrifices; I would never see my family again, or anyone from that miserable time. Harry could live happily ever after with Karen. I felt no sentimentality or nostalgia for them.
I sat by the pump-house where the estuary widened, and remained there until the sun went down, making plans in the dying golden light.
When I walked back home and climbed the stairs to my top-floor flat, I pulled out the cardboard box I kept under the bed and tore up every scrap of paper, every note, photograph, letter and clipping I had saved over the years, even the baby photos of Gabriel. Then I put them into a black plastic bin liner, carried it downstairs and threw it all out.
I felt sure now that Gabriel would have a full and happy life. His father would probably remarry someone nice who would prove to be a proper mother. There was just one thing I had to do in order to put my past behind me. One final act of closure. I needed to find out what had happened to Ryder.
I just wanted to look at him from a distance, one last time. I wouldn’t speak to him or interact with him in any way. I wouldn’t even go near him. I wanted to feel nothing at all for him. Then, with everything placed safely behind me, my new life could finally begin.
*
Finding him turned out to be harder than I’d expected. He seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. To be honest, given his lifestyle, I thought he was probabl
y either dead or living in America. The band was washed up and his agent no longer listed him on her crappy off-the-peg website. The years of drugs would have taken their toll. I spent the next couple of days chasing a long line of contacts, and at last came up with a woman called Julie Towns who had apparently once worked for the band, handling their finances.
‘Ah, yes. The man. The legend.’ Towns sounded as if she smoked sixty cigarettes a day. ‘We lost touch with them all. There might be an official Facebook page, but I very much doubt it.’
‘Where do you send the royalty statements?’ I asked. ‘To his manager?’
Her laugh turned into a cough. ‘What manager? What statements? They couldn’t afford a proper agent so I did everything short of wiping their asses. Ryder never earned enough to make any royalties. I was in charge of his so-called accounts, I should know.’
‘But he was a star.’
‘Honey, he wasn’t even a one-hit wonder. He split from his backer—’
‘Baby.’
‘Yeah, Tina. She overdosed in LA. She was found dead in the restrooms of the Chateau Marmont. A good career move, if you ask me. He went off the rails big-time.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Who knows? He’s probably lying in a council flat and nobody’s found the body yet. Maybe he got more tattoos and rented himself out to a circus.’
‘You needn’t be so mean.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. He never thanked me or paid me. He probably wasn’t even aware he ever had an accountant, did I mention that?’
‘Well, I want to find him,’ I said. ‘I’m writing an article. Kind of a “Where Are They Now?” thing for Music Week online.’
‘Really? You must be new.’
‘I’m an intern.’
‘I may have an old address. Wait a minute.’ She put the phone down, clumped away and returned a few minutes later. ‘You could try this: Six Trees Farm, Pottery Road, near Fareham in the south-west. It’s a couple of years out of date, but worth a try. I think it might have been his summer place. Then again, he could be living there in a barn or something, training owls or making cheese. The countryside is full of old rockers, mostly surviving in caravans.’
‘Is there a telephone number?’
‘There is,’ the PA said, ‘but I’m not going to give it to you. He never made me a penny but I’m still not handing his phone number out to a possible stalker. If you’re really from Music Week I’m sure you’ll be able to figure it out.’
*
I did better than that. I went in person.
Buck turned up one evening and offered to come with me. He said he had a few days’ holiday owing and agreed to accompany me.
It took forever to get there, and when I got away from the bigger towns I found the narrow, high-hedged country roads tricky to negotiate. We kept getting stuck behind tractors and I wasn’t confident enough to overtake them. I stayed behind one for eight miles.
Six Trees Farm was easy enough to find, though. A cluster of low redbrick buildings surrounded by half a dozen battered chestnut trees, outlined beneath a raw coastal sky. Not a working farm; it looked too neat and clean to have actual animals on it.
‘You’d better leave me here,’ I told Buck. ‘There’s no point in us both taking a risk. Why don’t you go back to the village and wait?’ He shrugged and set off without complaint.
Hiding and watching had long been second nature to me. I walked to the farm ‒ there was a muddy rambler’s path that ran beyond the edge of the dry-stone wall marking Ryder’s property. I sat down behind some low thorn bushes, preparing to wait for however long it took. I didn’t notice the cold any more. It felt as if I’d been living outside for years. I had the year-round tan of a hobo.
But, for once, I was lucky. After just over an hour, the front door opened and out stepped a man I barely recognised. Ryder was dressed in a heavy brown jacket and green wellington boots. He’d grown out the bleach in his hair and cut it, and he had a matching dark beard. It was hard to tell at this distance, but his face appeared to have filled out and he even looked more handsome, as if he had finally matured and started eating healthily. A young Alsatian with huge paws sprang about behind him and began barking wildly. The dog headed in my direction. It knew a stranger was on the land. I was forced to get out fast and settle for an alternative plan.
I’d been going to turn around and head back to Bristol once I had seen him, but spying on Ryder hadn’t produced the expected emotional result. I thought maybe there was an opportunity to observe him in more detail. I made myself promise that I would not initiate a conversation. I just wanted to see him up close one more time. I wasn’t going to do anything stupid.
Ryder was bound to go into the village for supplies, I would see him there. I checked in to the Victoria Inn, a dull granite box beyond the last of the shops with a single saloon bar, and tiny, overpriced bedrooms on the only other floor. The handful of drinkers inside were all about ninety. The landlord was uninterested in my carefully constructed explanation for visiting the area, although he did try to look down my top a couple of times.
Buck seemed quite happy to amuse himself while I settled in to wait for Ryder to arrive. He was even better at waiting around than I was.
I figured Ryder would drive into town in a battered, mud-spattered Range Rover and would stop at the local store to get food for his dog. I guess I still had this image of him as a rock star in retreat. There would be moments when sadness was etched on his face, a regret for his past, an acceptance of his new, reduced life in weather-beaten rural isolation. It made me happier to think that he had suffered.
I never thought of myself as doing anything inappropriate – I was just putting the last piece of the puzzle in place, the bit that could explain why my life had turned out the way it had. I knew I wouldn’t be doing it if I was happy, but I had nothing left except the past.
I hung around the high street, trying not to look conspicuous. I was such a fish out of water here; the air smelled funny, the horizon was too flat and it was too damned quiet. I watched and waited.
On the second morning, I glanced up and there he was, walking out of the sun towards me. I froze, trying to see where I could hide. But as the man drew closer I could see it wasn’t him after all. Country people all look the same to townies; it’s the many-shades-of-brown wardrobe. And sometimes it was hard to sort out memories from fantasies. What did I recall about him, really? An image, an attitude, mostly clouded by my infatuation.
I knew he had to turn up sooner or later, though. I had this idea about what would happen when he appeared. I would see him smile at a shopkeeper, lonely but dignified, sorry for the terrible mistakes he had made in his life, immured in the routine of his simplified existence. Then I would turn and leave, and my new life would begin. I decided I might even permit myself a small laugh at his expense.
But Buck didn’t agree with me about Ryder. He felt that what I was really there for was revenge. He had all kinds of ideas about how I could get it, too. Some of them were pretty extreme, but he said it was no more than Ryder deserved. He said he would help me do whatever it took to make my life whole again.
But, for now, I decided to watch and wait some more. I think I was waiting for something to happen.
For some dumb reason, I thought I was in charge of the situation.
Nick
I still had the sketch of Gabriel in my pocket, although the creases were becoming worn through with constant folding. I took it out now and studied it again.
I returned to the front of the building and settled into the bushes to wait. A few minutes later, Buckingham’s BMW cruised up to the gates. He used a remote to open them.
I slipped inside easily enough – the gates opened wide and closed slowly. Buckingham kept his hood up and his hands thrust in his pockets, looking as if he was about to commit a burglary. He approached the front door and removed a key fob from his jacket, rubbing it against the steel plate in the door. Inside, he punched a
code into a wall-mounted steel box, turning off the alarm, and headed for the stairs.
I figured I had around five seconds to follow him inside before the door reset its lock. Luckily, he hadn’t turned on the lights and I was able to run across the flagstone patio and slip between the doors without throwing any shadows.
I followed his back at a distance of about thirty yards, waiting until he turned each corner, being careful not to alter the light falling in his direction. It wasn’t enough to stay beyond his sight; some people always sense when they’re being followed – a displacement of air, a shift of tone. Others you can walk behind playing a trombone without them noticing a thing.
Buckingham was moving uncomfortably, favouring his right side. I guessed his stomach ulcer was sizzling again.
The corridors were maze-like, but he didn’t seem to know where he was going. If he worked for the institute, he would probably be familiar with the layout of the entire building. What was going on?
The hall in front of us opened out into a marble-floored atrium lined with heavy upright sheets of engraved aqua glass, freestanding display cases that explained the history of the charity and its works around the world; we had reached the visitor centre. The walls were dark wood, partially covered in dustsheets and scaffold rigs; it looked as if they were in the middle of refurbishment, which was good, as it meant there were no CCTVs yet in place on the freshly cladded walls. They were adding a gift shop and coffee bar. God forbid any of us should go without soft drinks for more than ten minutes anywhere in the city.
Buckingham crossed to the far wall and flicked on a pair of low blue uplighters. They threw a little cold light on several tall rows of brushed-steel cabinets. Most of the room remained in darkness; he wasn’t taking the risk of being seen from anywhere else in the building. I realised that the files probably contained all the paper correspondence with other branches of the charity, some of which might only recently have started conducting their transactions online.