by LK Fox
And there was one more thing that had been there a year earlier. I was so shocked I could only stand and stare at the BMW.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Buck was here.
A full year had passed since I’d seen him. It felt as if the present was suddenly telescoping into the past. At first, he pretended not to notice me.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I hissed. ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’
He remained silent, looking straight ahead, the baseball cap pulled low. As usual, he looked calm and completely in control.
I told him he shouldn’t be here. That he had to go right now. I asked him if he wanted to get us both arrested. He told me that everything had gone wrong, that he’d had to disappear.
I begged him to leave. I wanted to ask him what had happened, but there was no time. I didn’t know what to do. I could only stay outside the school and watch in agony as the whole strange drama played out again, as if it had been filmed on a loop.
Nick arrived, waited for a few moments and then went to drive off – but this time, to my horror, he hit the BMW. It seemed as if we were trapped in a film clip that would repeat itself again and again. I saw the nightmare unfolding and was powerless to stop it.
The mothers stopped to watch. I was dying inside – my worst fears had rolled themselves together and were coming true. Nick took a photo of the licence plate on his phone, then got back in his car and both vehicles pulled away. The rainy street was suddenly quiet again.
I ran off. I walked in the drizzle for a while, thinking, then found a café and sat on a stool at the window, swallowing endless cups of bitter coffee.
That was when I realised that Nick was my only hope. I had to trust him to put the pieces together and find out the truth.
He’d seen Buck at the school. It was as if I’d been given a second chance. If only he could make the connection, I felt sure he’d go after him.
I had to pray that things would somehow be resolved. After all that time, I had no way left of understanding my feelings toward Nick. Everything was too close, too over-examined. I wanted him. I hated him. I could never be with him. What hurt most was that everything could have been so different. I should have tracked Nick down and confronted him about what he did – told him about the pregnancy right at the start. I hoped that Ben Summerton had told Nick about the adoption. If he hadn’t, it would mean that Nick still didn’t know he had found and lost his own son.
We had all kept secrets from those closest to us, and I had been the biggest liar of all. I did so many wrong things, and I think trusting Buck was one of the worst. He had pretended to be my friend just to get at my child. Everyone had lied or, at the very least, hidden something of themselves. Ryder had dyed his hair and worn coloured contact lenses that made his eyes appear electric blue. His accent, his look, his red lizard tattoo – it had all turned out to be fake, not who he was at all. I’d changed my appearance more times than I could count. Only Gabriel remained the same, marked by the scar on his left hand. He died in purity and innocence.
And now the only person I could trust to end this was the man who, in his former wreck of a life, had drunkenly raped me.
I had to accept that, sometimes, saviours might come from the most unlikely places.
Nick
I kept checking throughout the day. There was nothing in the news, nothing online about the death, and I wasn’t about to start asking around. As I settled myself in front of my laptop, feeling like I could do with a couple of hours’ sleep, I remembered a lesson from my old job: proving culpability is a lot easier when you aren’t personally involved.
Towards the end of the afternoon, Ben called, cautiously asking me if I was feeling better. It was the first time he’d reached out since his decision to leave. Even though we would never be together again, I suddenly felt sure that I could trust him to keep my secret.
At five, Matthew went to the pub, leaving me to close up the office. I was idly scrolling through the news headlines when my mobile phone rang, making me jump.
There was a low, almost theatrical tone to the voice on the other end. ‘Listen to me,’ it said. ‘Here’s the deal. Take it or leave it. I will tell you the absolute truth about what happened to your son. In exchange, you must bring the soldier with you.’
I was so shocked I nearly dropped the phone. Buckingham was alive, although he sounded as if he’d had his throat cut or was smoking eighty a day.
‘All right,’ I said, without thinking twice. ‘When and where?’
‘You have to promise that you won’t try to hurt me or come after me.’
‘I understand.’
‘I’ll call you again tomorrow and tell you where you have to be. Don’t talk to anyone about this, and make sure you’re ready to come alone.’
The phone went dead. Number unavailable.
This upended everything. So Buckingham was alive, and he knew who I was. I’d been sure I had killed him. He’d been bleeding from the mouth. Wasn’t that a sign of internal rupture? Not if he’d just bitten his tongue, you moron, I thought.
I knew I had to find a way of halting the damage before it could spread any further and hurt someone else. A visit to the police was still an option. I had two pieces of physical evidence that would help to convict him. I could maybe persuade Ben to come along with me and tell the police what happened . . . but Buckingham might disappear and I’d never uncover the truth. If there was one thing I’d learned from my old job, it was to keep things simple.
All I could do was wait for the phone call. I would meet with Buckingham and get to the truth. And then I would decide how he should pay for what he had done.
Gabriel and I had always managed to fill the flat with a ridiculous level of noise and life. I’d start drumming on something, he’d pick it up and start slapping the walls, and we’d get louder and louder, running around the house, finding new objects to bang on. Then we would suddenly hush ourselves and listen to Ben working at his computer. He’d look around the door at us and roll his eyes in exasperation, as if he knew he had to deal with two kids in the flat. He worked most evenings. We didn’t eat together much. I did most of the cooking.
I always knew, if we turned the TV down, we would be able to hear the sound of his keyboard ticking away. Gabriel would say, ‘Let’s take him tea.’
I would say, ‘Let’s bake a pie.’
Gabriel would say, ‘Let’s make lasa-ja’ – he couldn’t say ‘lasagne’ – and we would keep interrupting him, taking him tea and snacks, complaining that we were bored bored bored with watching old science-fiction movies and were waiting for him to come and sit with us. When we sat facing each other across the breakfast table, we would mimic each other’s expressions. It always amazed Ben how close I was to his son. Everyone assumed the boy was mine.
When I met Ben and his son, all the missing pieces of my life finally fell in place. Losing Gabriel was punishment for how I’d behaved when I was younger. At some point, you start to see the shape of your life and strive towards finding a balance. You make your peace. That’s all anyone can try to do before they leave.
So that should have been the end of it, except for one thing. Ray Buckingham was still alive, and he deserved to suffer for killing the most important person in my world. But first, I just wanted him to tell me why he had done it.
I could only assume he harboured some deep-rooted harmful feelings towards children. And then he found something that could calm those inner voices. You have to listen a lot in my present job. The patients can be incredibly articulate about everyday details but grow helpless when you ask them about their honest feelings. It’s my task to overcome their sense of privacy, and reassemble their hopes and regrets into some kind of narrative. Even then, there’s usually a part that gets left out.
And that’s when I started to get the feeling about Buckingham. It must have taken a lot of nerve to park right outside a busy school and abduct someone else’s child in broad daylight. It just wasn
’t something you did on impulse.
At 10.55 the following morning, while I was at work in the office, he called again.
He said, ‘This is what we’re going to do. I will meet you in the park at 4 p.m. today. You must be alone. If you don’t come, you’ll never find out the truth.’
‘Whereabouts? There’ll be people around—’
‘At the back of the terraced garden behind the observatory. There’s a large oak tree standing all by itself on the upper walkway. I’ll wait for exactly fifteen minutes. If you’re late, I’ll leave and you will never hear from me again.’
‘Fine. I’ll be there.’
I wondered if he was planning to turn up with a gun or something, to get rid of me for good. A killing in a park? Such things happened.
I could have walked away from the whole thing right then and never known the truth, but Buckingham’s confidence bothered me. He acted as if he was in complete control when he was the one who should have been afraid. This was a man whom I’d left unconscious, yet now he was treating me as if I was a part of some larger plan of his own. It almost felt as if he was reading from a script. Something wasn’t in the right place. Sometimes you can be presented with all the evidence and still misread the signs.
Turning to the opened Birmingham file on my desktop, it struck me that I was incredibly careful at work but when it came to my own life I was prepared to blunder off into a semi-derelict park to confront someone who might be planning to kill me. If I didn’t get it right this time, I may not have another chance to fix things. I didn’t have any way of protecting myself. I was hardly about to nip into a kitchenware shop and buy a breadknife.
The dragoon guard was still in its plastic bag in my jacket pocket. I thought back to my trips to the museum with Gabriel.
There was a model battlefield of Waterloo that had been made by the same guy who built the famous one in Girona. It had taken him fifteen years to complete them both, and he had donated one to the museum just weeks before he died. It was tucked away at the back of the building, far from the wow-factor stuff. Gabriel liked to go and see the other regiments on Wellington’s side. He had already told me that he wanted to collect Napoleonic figures as well, especially the generals and carabineers. He was a throwback kid, only vaguely interested in cartoons and aliens but fascinated by history. We would look down at the great glass case filled with the Duke of Wellington’s men, at the red-and-white dragoons marching in formation over a hill of green painted balsa wood, little plumes of cotton-wool smoke exploding from miniature cannons all around them.
I remembered him standing before the soldiers, neatly arranged in their Waterloo formations. In my mind’s eye, I saw him running around the case, excitedly pointing out facts he’d collected about the regiments.
He liked old battles for the same reason I did, because they were orderly. You could look down on them from above and see where the campaign’s strengths were, and where the flaws lay. You could finally make sense of all the things that seemed so chaotic and confusing at ground level. I had watched his fingers tracing out the battle plan, an extended artillery bombardment followed by cavalry attacks to force the enemy into square, ready for heavy cannon and musket fire.
I watched him do exactly what I would do. I put myself in his place, looking down through the smudged glass, studying the configurations that lay below. Regiments, plans, maps, layouts, gardens, patterns, people, lives. Haphazard arrangements that revealed logical form only when viewed as a whole from above.
I should have seen it.
Ella
Here’s what happens when you get too independent.
You no longer trust anyone to carry out a job properly. I knew I should just let Nick track him down, but what if he failed?
I found myself near the old flat in Newington Street. I wondered if Buck had kept the place on. For all I knew, he had found another lost cause of a girlfriend and started over.
Just over the road was one of those old-fashioned cafés that still served eggs and sausages and liver and beans for lunch. London was still full of them, and they always made me feel sad. I’d study the other people eating alone and wonder who they were, how their dreams had become so reduced. I never thought I would join their ranks, but here I was. I sat down with a coffee and was just watching a sachet of sugar dissolving the froth when Buck walked in, as if it was the most casual thing and ordinary in the world to do, and sat down opposite me.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, but he just stared at me without replying, then slowly shook his head, as if to say, You know very well. He was wearing exactly the same clothes he’d been wearing a year ago. The red baseball cap was dirty and tide-marked with sweat now. The sleeves of his jacket were pushed up, revealing part of his dragon tattoo.
‘I just want to know what happened,’ I said. ‘What did you do?’
He carried on staring at me in silence, with that pitying look on his face. A feeling of panic was rising in me now. What if Nick had been following him and was pulling up outside?
‘You already have the answer to that, Ella.’ He looked away. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more. Why are you really here?’
‘Nick knows, and he’s going to find you.’
‘I only ever wanted to help you, and to make sure that justice was done. I couldn’t bear to see you suffering, Ella. You knew there was a risk that something could go wrong. You didn’t seem worried about it so long as you got what you wanted—’
‘You didn’t call me! You just vanished!’ The other diners were turning to watch now. ‘Why did you go back there this morning? Why won’t you tell me the truth? I don’t know who you are any more. I’m beginning to think I never did. Was it really chance, the way we met in the theatre bar? Did you follow me there?’
He pulled down the sleeve of his jacket and leaned forward, staring into my eyes. ‘You know, Ella. You’ve always known, because I was around right from the start. That’s why I finally introduced myself to you. I had to try and make you face up to the truth.’
He was frightening me now. I pushed back from the table and toppled my chair. ‘Don’t think you can just run away from me, Ella,’ he warned. ‘This isn’t over until you accept what you did.’
I ran out of the café and out into the rain.
Nick
As I waited for the appointed time, I thought about the many places in the city where Buckingham could meet children: shopping malls, parks, playgrounds, the zoo. Sooner or later, every kid went to the zoo, the traditional haunt of the divorced father. But Buckingham wasn’t divorced; he had a family who had no idea about his secret life.
I wondered what went through his mind when he first spotted his target. A crafty adult, no match for a small boy. All he had to do was watch them for a while to tell what kind of children they were, whether they were feisty, difficult, wary, savvy, or whether they were the other ones, the ones who trusted, who talked to strangers, who wandered off by themselves. The ones who could be taken because they were different.
I thought about the furry yellow tiger hanging in the back of Buckingham’s car, whether that was for his kids or whether it was meant to make other children feel more relaxed. Then I thought no, he wouldn’t have used the car on his recons because someone would have seen it, someone would surely have remembered.
I was familiar with the garden behind the observatory. I’d played in there as a kid. Years later, I had gone there with my band-mates to hammer amphetamines and cheap red wine. I knew why Buckingham had picked it; there was only one way in and out of the place. The steep terraces were dark with trees and bushes and backed with high walls. The centre section was shaped like an amphitheatre so anything happening inside could easily be seen from anywhere in the garden. Plus, the place was usually empty in bad weather. It felt like a trap, but I had no choice in the matter.
I couldn’t sit still. There was no point in trying to be patient. I set off early and drove as fast as I dared. I got there just after 3
p.m. There were restrictions preventing cars from entering the park at certain times, and I was forced to park about a quarter of a mile away from the garden. I felt a huge sense of relief that it was coming to an end, even though I couldn’t be sure of the outcome. I just wanted it to be over, to return to something approaching a normal life.
The trees were in afternoon shadow, and a grey mist was settling above the river like a ghost-flood. As I reached the park, the first drops of rain began to fall, and a distant roll of thunder sounded like somebody emptying coal down a chute. It seemed like it always rained when bad things were about to happen in my life. The light was terrible. Murky, with shades of grey, green and brown.
I needed to check out the logistics of the situation, to lay a mental security grid over the area, as if it was the kind of surveillance job I used to handle. I had every reason to assume that Buckingham was extremely dangerous now that he was, effectively, cornered.
The rain grew heavier with the sinking light. Very few people were left inside the park gates. They knew better than to shelter under the trees in a storm. I passed the observatory, which looked as if it had been cleared of visitors. A couple of old dears in clear plastic rain mackintoshes wobbled past me arm in arm.
I walked on, feeling the icy water pool in my ears, tipping down the back of my neck, and I felt empty inside. I didn’t want revenge or reconciliation. After a year of pain, nothing seemed to hurt any more.
I reached a tall iron gate set inside a curve of railing and pushed it open, slipping inside. Once it was locked for the night, there was no other way of getting in from the top.
The curving path followed the side of the hill that led into the park. The grass fell away on my right, sloping down to the museum and the college. Beyond that lay the reaches of the river. On the far side, I could see the dull grey glass cliffs of the city, severed by low cloud and blurred by the densely falling rain. Gabriel’s and my favourite spot, where we used to sit on warm summer afternoons.