by Ann Cleeves
‘And you, lass,’ he said to me when he asked what I was drinking, ‘how did you know the boy?’ He seemed not to remember my visit to the yard. It wasn’t surprising. I’d just been one of a crowd of reporters.
I was going to say I knew Thomas’s father, but stopped myself just in time. Whatever my views on the matter, it wasn’t fair to Kay to spread around information about Philip.
‘I didn’t really,’ I said. ‘More a friend of the family.’
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Like me.’
So we sat down at the tables and at first we looked awkwardly at each other, not speaking. Dylan’s ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ was playing on the jukebox. It seemed to be playing all afternoon. Harry Pool came back from the bar with a tray loaded with drinks. I remember that Ellen was drinking whisky. That surprised me. The rest of us were on the beer: the lads on bottled lager, everyone else on hand-pulled bitter.
‘I think we should drink to Thomas,’ Harry said. He was still standing, leaning forward onto the table as if he needed the support. ‘No one deserves to die like that. Specially not someone with his whole life ahead of him.’
We all raised our glasses, solemnly, like a toast at a wedding. ‘Thomas,’ we said. One of the lads stifled a nervous giggle. If he was mentioned after that it was only in whispered conversation between individuals.
It seems now that I was drunk after the first pint. Perhaps it was the strangeness of the occasion. Perhaps it was a mistake to mix the alcohol with my medication. I can remember snippets of conversation freeze-framed like in a home movie, but in my memory the background’s always blurred, and I don’t know the order in which the discussions occurred or their context.
At one point Ellen was talking to me. It must have been close to the beginning of the session, because I was still sitting next to her. There were empty plates on the table. I think Harry must have ordered sandwiches for us all, though I don’t remember eating. I looked at her mouth moving. She was wearing scarlet lipstick, which had leached into the face powder around her lips. The effect was geographical – tributaries feeding into a lagoon in the desert, with her mouth as the lagoon. I was still staring when I realized she was waiting for an answer to a question I hadn’t heard.
‘Sorry?’ I said. Dylan was knock, knock, knocking in my brain.
‘We need to talk. Thomas was special.’ Even though I was focusing on her, I had to strain to make out the words. She didn’t want to be overheard. It was one of those secret Thomas conversations. ‘He was troubled.’
‘I was going to write something.’ By this point I was expansive. The fiction that I was a journalist seemed a huge joke. ‘An article.’
‘Yes, yes.’ The words came out as a double hiss. She gripped my arm with her hand. ‘Come to Absalom House. Any time. I’m always there. We’ll talk.’
Then she whirled away and the next time I noticed her she was at the other side of the table, smoking a cigarette, holding it in a stagy way between two fingers, her head slightly tilted back, looking at Harry Pool through the smoke.
Nell and Dan sat together throughout the afternoon, but they never seemed to be speaking to each other. A few times Nell looked at me with that intense and piercing stare which she seemed to have adopted as part of her style, like the chopped hair, and once, when we met outside the Ladies, she asked, ‘Who was that man in the church who winked at you?’
I’d forgotten about Farrier. He must have disappeared immediately after the service, or perhaps he’d been invited to the crematorium with the family. I could imagine him being a source of comfort to them.
‘He’s the detective in charge of the murder investigation.’
‘Do they know anything?’ Her voice was as urgent, as pressing, as Ellen’s grip on my arm had been.
‘They’ve accepted I had nothing to do with it. That’s all I care about.’
‘No,’ she spat back. ‘It’s not all you care about. It can’t be. I can tell. We have to know why he died. Don’t we?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. She made her way back to Dan so carefully, her body so upright, that I know she was pissed too.
Harry’s lads were less demanding in conversation. One must have been older than he looked because he’d just got his HGV licence and was already talking about the trips to Europe for the firm. He was excited at the prospect of the long drive alone, but nervous too. He’d already been on some of the usual routes with a more experienced driver – Spain, he said, and Poland. I asked him what he carried back from Poland. Vodka, I wondered, jam, fruit? But he seemed unsure about that. Everything was in containers, he said. How could he tell?
The last encounter I remember was with Marcus. He approached me, carrying a drink for us both, and sat beside me on a padded bench which ran along the wall. He had taken off his tie. One end of it flapped out of his trouser pocket. He was playing at being drunk but even then I didn’t think he was. I could see through the act with the sudden flash of perception you sometimes get even when you can hardly stand. He rested one arm along the window-sill behind me, not making contact with my shoulders but very close.
‘I recognize you. You were at Wintrylaw.’
I don’t know why, but I pretended not to understand what he was talking about. Perhaps it was just too much effort. Anyway, I didn’t answer.
‘I was the bear,’ he said. He formed circles with the thumbs and middle fingers of each hand and held them to his eyes. ‘I wore the mask. You were going to join up.’
‘The Countryside Consortium.’ As if it had all just come back to me.
‘What are you doing here?’ He leaned forward diagonally across the table so our faces were almost touching. ‘Did you know Thomas?’
‘I found his body.’
He jolted away from me, but I didn’t know how much of a shock that actually was. Because he was playing at being drunk, I didn’t trust the reaction.
It was at that moment that Harry Pool stood up. He said he was going to call it a day. He had his wife to get back to. She’d been stuck with the grandchildren all day. And we followed him out. He’d brought us together and we couldn’t continue without him. Marcus and I were last out. I found his arm round my shoulder, his hand resting gently on my neck. I didn’t have the energy to push him away. And anyway, I really quite liked it.
We stood on the pavement to wave the others down the road. The next thing I knew I was in a taxi on my way to Seaton Delaval, to the little house where Thomas had died. I don’t remember there being any discussion about it, but perhaps that’s not fair. There may have been. I do remember standing with Marcus on the doorstep, watching him grope in his pocket for a door key. When he couldn’t find it he tipped the plant out from the pot on the window-box and took the spare key from the bottom. And I remember being violently sick in the gutter.
Chapter Twenty-four
Still holding the point of the knife against my skin, Nicky reaches out and switches off the light. Suddenly it’s dark. I feel my pupils widen in response, but there’s nothing to see. There are security shutters on the window. I’ve always been scared of the dark.
He puts an arm around my chest and pulls me down so I’m lying on the bed. He’s lying beside me, very close. I can smell him. One hand presses me against his body, the other holds the knife. He’s whispering into my ear. His lips brush the lobe and the touch makes me start. He’s telling me what he intends to do with me. I try to block out the words. As he speaks I feel his erection through the cotton of his sweat pants against my thigh. He unbuttons my shirt, fumbling in the dark, one-handed, then he moves the blade of the knife towards my breast, lightly scratching the skin, not drawing blood.
There are footsteps in the corridor outside.
‘Don’t move.’ The words are so quiet that even with his mouth against my ear I can hardly make them out.
The footsteps disappear.
We both know they’ll be back.
I was in Thomas’s bed. It was the same evening, still light. Marcus was standing
in the doorway. I knew where I was immediately, and in the same instant I recognized that if I moved my head I’d throw up again. The next sensation was panic. What was I doing there? What had I done? I could remember stumbling into the house, holding on to Marcus. The shock of being here. Then nothing but the flashback. Carefully I slid one hand down my body. Still dressed. Relief. No sex. I’d only taken off my shoes before getting into bed. The nausea of the hangover came back and I shut my eyes.
‘Tea?’ Marcus’s voice seemed to come from miles away. From Norway. If not further. I could believe that the grey North Sea and several oil rigs were coming between us. I forced myself to look at him. He was smiling as if he’d been following my thoughts, as if my embarrassment amused him.
‘What’s the time?’
‘Nine. Nine-thirty.’
‘I should phone home.’ I’d told Jess I’d be back soon after lunch. She’d be wondering, worried. It wasn’t her place to worry, but she’d be sending Ray out on a search party if she didn’t hear soon. Even worse, she might phone Lisa.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Tea first.’ He had a mug in each hand. He sat on the end of the bed. I shuffled back so I was sitting upright and felt better, more in control.
Someone had done a seriously good job of cleaning the room. There was a new carpet, cheap grey nylon cord. The wall must have been painted. It was brighter than the others and there were no posters. All the same, it couldn’t have been much fun getting rid of the blood.
‘Sorry,’ Marcus said. ‘I didn’t know where else to put you. And earlier you were in no state to care.’ Again he seemed to have developed telepathic powers. ‘Once the police had finished, my dad paid for a cleaning company. This is my first day back here.’
‘Don’t you mind?’
‘Not a lot that I can do about it. My dad won’t pay for anything else. I suppose I thought the sooner I came home the better. The same principle as getting back onto a horse after you’ve fallen off.’
‘Isn’t your father worried about you staying here on your own?’
Marcus shrugged. ‘The police think Thomas was killed by druggies looking for something to steal. He must have disturbed them. They’re not likely to come back.’ He paused and added, ‘My father’s a businessman. He wouldn’t find it easy to sell the house while people remember the murder. So I’m stuck here. For a while at least.’
But I wasn’t really listening to that. I was thinking the disturbed burglar theory was impossible. There’d been music playing, loud enough to hear from the street. Even someone out of his head would have realized the house wasn’t empty. And then I thought Farrier wasn’t that dumb. Either a different officer with the deductive reasoning of a gnat had been talking to Marcus, or the police were spinning him a line for their own purposes. I felt suddenly uncomfortable, vulnerable.
‘Where were you that day?’ It came out spiky and accusing. Not sensible in the circumstances.
‘At the university.’ He didn’t seem offended by the question. ‘A lecture, then a tutorial.’ He smiled. ‘There were lots of witnesses.’
‘I didn’t mean . . .’ But then I broke off. Of course I had meant. I’d needed to check that it was impossible for Marcus to have killed Thomas. I still only had his word for it, but I felt too ill to keep up being scared.
‘The police said Thomas wasn’t in work the day he died because he had flu. Was that true?’
‘I don’t know about flu, but he wasn’t well. Some sort of virus. He was asleep when I went out that morning.’
Perhaps that was why he didn’t answer the door when I first arrived. Later he’d woken and put on his music. Had he still been in bed when the murderer came? No, because he’d been wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Had he got up to let the killer in?
Marcus left me to wash my face and hands and then I phoned Jess. I told her not to worry. I’d had a couple of drinks, so I was going to stay the night with a mate. At that point I still hoped to get home, but it was better not to promise. She’d be fidgety all night and she’d wait up. I wasn’t in any fit state to drive. I wasn’t sure I could face public transport and I wasn’t going to cough up for a taxi all the way back.
Marcus was in the kitchen, beating eggs in a glass bowl with a fork.
‘Scrambled eggs OK?’
I nodded, surprised that I felt so hungry.
The kitchen was at the back of the house, small but well equipped and tidy for a student place. I remembered the chaos of boots and shoes I’d seen in the hall on my first visit, the carpet thick with dust, and thought perhaps the cleaning company had been let loose in here too. Or perhaps Marcus didn’t mind muck but he was naturally orderly in the kitchen. I’ve known men like that. It occurred to me, watching him standing there, still dressed in the suit trousers and white shirt from the funeral, that this was the son Kay Laing would have liked. I wondered if she’d known Marcus when he was a child. Dan had described them as school friends.
‘How did you know Thomas?’ I was leaning against the door frame. If I’d gone into the kitchen I’d have been in the way.
He glanced up. He had that clean, scrubbed, wholesome look of well-educated English boys. No zits. Short hair with a bit of curl in it. A skin the colour of pale toast, pink at the back of the neck where the sun had caught it.
‘We were at infants’ school together. The two terrors of the class.’
Like Archie Mariner and Harry Pool, I thought. Still friends sixty years on, though one had made a fortune and the other struggled to live on a pension.
‘When I was eleven my father sent me to King’s. You know, the private place in Tynemouth?’
I nodded.
‘We’d moved up the coast by then anyway, and Thomas and I had already lost touch. We met up again later. School’s less important as you get older. We bumped into each other at parties. Whitley on a Friday night. Everyone you’ve ever met seems to be there when you’re sixteen.’
‘And was Thomas still a terror?’
‘Oh, not so very much. No more than anyone else. The only difference was that he didn’t mind being caught.’
‘Do you know his stepfather?’
He gave himself a chance to think about that, buying time by bending to lift a pan from a low cupboard. ‘I’ve seen him around.’
‘At the Countryside Consortium?’
‘He’s not very active,’ Marcus said. ‘There are lots of supporters.’
It wasn’t much of an answer but I let it go. He had his back to me now because the eggs were cooking and he was standing over them with a wooden spoon, teasing them away from the edge of the pan as they began to stick.
‘How did you get involved?’
‘Through my father. My parents separated when I was six. I stayed with my dad. Later he moved in with another woman. She has land up the coast. She doesn’t farm it herself but she keeps a couple of horses there and she held on to the house. I suppose she’s the enthusiast. He deals in property, a glorified estate agent really, but he considers himself a cut above the rest. He wouldn’t normally touch a place like this with a bargepole, but he could see it would do for me. His interest is in big houses, country hotels. When the landed gentry want to flog off part of the estate, they go to him. I’m not sure how committed he is to the cause. He doesn’t hunt, for example. My stepmother’s horses terrify him. I think he saw joining up as a shrewd business move, a way of keeping in with the right people, networking.’
‘And you?’
He didn’t answer for a while. He was buttering toast. Then he concentrated on tipping out the eggs. Even from where I stood, I could tell they were perfectly cooked, golden and creamy, the curd just firm. He handed me a plate and cutlery and followed me through to the living room. We sat on easy chairs each side of the mantelpiece, the plates perched on our knees. I wondered if he and Thomas had sat like this to eat.
‘For me it was just a job,’ he said. ‘I wanted a year doing something practical. My degree’s in business administration. My fath
er spoke to someone, fixed it up. He’s good at that. And it was useful experience, a year in an office, pretty well running it, in charge of fund-raising at the end.’
‘And what was it for Thomas?’ I asked.
‘Ah,’ he replied. ‘For Thomas it was a crusade.’
‘I don’t get that. I wouldn’t have thought it would be his thing. I mean, he was brought up in the town. Wasn’t he into music, clubs, shops?’
‘Sure. All of those. But he liked the idea of the countryside, the fantasy. England’s green and pleasant land. You know. I told him the reality wasn’t like that, but he had this dream of living in the hills, self-sufficiency, not being bugged by his mother or anyone else.’
I thought it sounded ludicrous, but there was something chilling in Marcus’s description of the dream too. There was a touch of the wild American survivalism in there as well as The Good Life. Patriots and shotguns along with the organic carrots. But perhaps I’d got it all wrong. Perhaps a love of the country-side was in Thomas’s blood, inherited from Philip. That thought moved me naturally to Joanna. I meant to ask if she was one of the Consortium’s supporters, but Marcus got in with a question of his own.
‘Why did you come here? The day you found Thomas’s body, I mean. What brought you to the house?’
‘His family was concerned. They didn’t know where he was living. I’m a social worker. They asked me to trace him. No fuss. Unofficially.’
He accepted my explanation but he said, ‘Ronnie knew.’