Ralph’s Children

by Hilary Norman

  Another member of the group rose, ready to speak about his own depression following the loss, five months earlier, of his sister.

  Kate began to relax again.

  Until the speaker sat down.

  ‘Another question for Kate.’ This time, Sandi remained seated. ‘I was wondering if you’re planning on going to Laurie Moon’s funeral?’

  Kate could hardly believe her ears.

  ‘I don’t think –’ her voice was shaky with anger – ‘that’s any of your business.’

  ‘I hope you’re not experiencing much guilt over her death,’ Sandi persisted.

  ‘Didn’t you hear Kate’s answer?’ asked Bel clearly and crisply.

  Kate managed a swift sideways smile at her mother.

  ‘Do you know yet –’ Sandi was like the worst kind of bludgeoning reporter, the sort that gave Kate’s own profession a bad name – ‘why those people picked on you?’

  ‘Are you deaf and stupid,’ Kate asked, ‘as well as insensitive?’

  Composure gone now.

  ‘Change of subject, please,’ someone said.

  It was the organizer, a woman named Mary, to whom Bel had introduced her earlier, and now Kate cast her an appreciative glance as the older woman deftly and firmly turned the focus away from Kate, silencing Sandi and setting in motion a general group discussion on the pros and cons of cognitive therapy. Which rolled along quite engrossingly until another minor skirmish occurred between two other members, and a white-haired man named Charles brought that under control.

  Sandi waited for the next pause.

  Too many chiefs,’ she said and smiled, looking straight at Kate again.

  The word sent a sharp ice sliver through Kate’s head.

  Bel saw her reaction. ‘Darling? Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ Kate answered mechanically.

  Not fine at all.

  ‘Want to leave?’ asked Bel.

  ‘Sorry,’ Kate said, ‘but I think I do.’

  Not wishing to be party to another murder.

  ‘If it didn’t mean anything,’ Kate said later to Rob, ‘why did she look at me that way when she said it?’

  ‘Probably just miffed because you’d had a go at her,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you think I was entitled?’

  ‘Very much so.’

  ‘Are you placating me?’ Kate was starting to bristle again.

  ‘Not at all,’ Rob said. ‘I think Sandi was incredibly out of order.’

  ‘But you do think I read too much into that last remark.’

  ‘I do,’ he said unequivocally.

  Which calmed her, almost settled her, certainly enough to leave it alone, telling herself that Rob was probably right. ‘Too many chiefs’ was a perfectly ordinary phrase, nothing whatever to do with what had happened to her.

  And face it, if she was going to start playing her own harebrained ‘game’, imagining gang members around every corner, she’d have to come up with someone a damned sight more probable than Sandi West.

  * * *

  The following Monday, four days after the meeting, she was coming home after a sandwich and chat with Fireman at the paper when she heard it – less than a second after the front door had closed behind her.

  Coming from the living room – from the telly.

  A voice so horribly familiar it gave her chills.

  She flew into the room, and there was Rob, work spread across the table in front of him, holding out the remote control, channel hopping.

  ‘The woman just speaking –’ Kate’s voice rapped out sharply – ‘did you see her?’

  ‘Who?’ Rob looked blank.

  ‘The woman who was just speaking, about a second ago.’ She knew she must seem mad to him. ‘On the TV.’

  ‘You OK?’ Rob put down the remote, stood up. ‘Problem at the paper? How was Fireman?’

  ‘He was fine.’ Kate fought against impatience. ‘Rob, this is terribly important. I heard a voice as I was coming through the front door – I have to know who it belonged to.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Rob said. ‘I can’t help you.’

  ‘Try,’ Kate insisted. ‘What was on?’

  He shrugged. ‘Ads, maybe. I wasn’t listening, just taking a break, trying to find something halfway decent to watch.’

  Kate looked at the homework strewn over the table and sat down heavily in an armchair, feeling sick.

  ‘It was Roger,’ she said.

  Comprehension dawned on Rob. ‘You mean it sounded like Roger.’

  Bloody teacher.

  ‘It was her,’ Kate said.

  ‘OK,’ Rob said. ‘Maybe. What was she saying?’ He sat down on the sofa, facing her. ‘Maybe I heard it without registering. Was it an ad, do you think, or a programme or a continuity thing? Can you remember what she was saying, selling maybe?’

  Kate closed her eyes, felt the world spin, fought to remember, could not.

  ‘Shit.’ She opened her eyes again. ‘Shit.’

  Rob said nothing, giving her time.

  ‘You don’t even know what channel it was?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said again. ‘Chances are it wasn’t her at all, you know.’

  ‘I think it was,’ she said.

  ‘Then the best approach has to be to try not to dwell on it,’ Rob said rationally. ‘That way it’s more likely to come back to you later.’

  ‘If it was an ad,’ Kate said, ‘we could track her down.’

  ‘If,’ Rob said.

  Over the next month, Kate became obsessed, aware on one level of the probable futility of her search, but wholly unable to stop. If she could just hear the voice again, she told herself, even for a moment, just long enough to note the time or the commercial or programme, she could stop listening, stop tormenting herself, just pass it on to Helen Newton, leave it to the police, whose job it was, and once they had Roger, it would be only a matter of time till the other two were locked away as well.

  She watched as much TV as was humanly possible, and a great deal more than was tolerable. She became angry with herself at times for watching instead of just listening, for losing concentration or even, on occasions, for falling asleep, because this wasn’t just for her, it was for Laurie and her family. Rob became seriously concerned and spoke to her father about what was happening. Kate knew this, because Michael began phoning her more than usual, and when she visited him one morning, Delia switched on the television and passed a remark about keeping the volume turned up so Kate wouldn’t miss a second.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Kate said, ‘if you all think I’m losing it.’

  ‘We don’t think that at all,’ Michael said.

  ‘I suppose you can’t even just tape everything so you could whip through,’ Delia said, ‘because then you wouldn’t hear the voices, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Kate snapped.

  She was beginning to wonder, in fact, if she might actually be losing the plot, knew that the fact that Laurie Moon’s funeral was now imminent and preying on her mind was not helping.

  Roger’s voice perhaps a kind of distraction from that.

  Bel had suggested just the other day that, since she’d heard the suspect voice at around five on a Monday afternoon, she might as well restrict her listening to that same daily time slot.

  ‘They seem to run the same programmes and ads over and over again on some of those channels, don’t they?’

  Sensible advice, Kate had agreed and meant to heed, but she had not stuck to it, and now she’d even taken to having the radio on in the bathroom and in the car, concentrating on voices instead of the road.

  ‘If I’d been through your ordeal,’ Delia said now, ‘I’d be a wreck too.’

  ‘Gee,’ said Kate, ‘thanks for that.’

  ‘Take it easy,’ Michael intervened. ‘She’s only being sympathetic.’

  ‘I don’t need sympathy,’ Kate told him. ‘I need to find Roger.’

  ‘You need to relax,’ Delia said. ‘Have some
camomile tea.’

  ‘And you,’ Kate said, ‘need to mind your own business.’

  So much for trying her best around her dad’s partner.

  Laurie

  ‘I wish to God,’ Shelly said to Pete on the last Saturday morning of February, the day of their daughter’s funeral, ‘she would stay away.’

  Pete knew, of course, who she was talking about. Felt the same way.

  Kate Turner.

  Without whom, they both believed – however often they had been told otherwise – Laurie would still be with them. Would not be dead and, within a matter of hours, soon to be lowered into her grave.

  It had taken long and incredibly painful weeks to arrive at this day. Forever, and yet fast as the blink of an eye. Or a drop of lifeblood. The world going on, yet seeming to have remained almost motionless around them. Every damnable cliché in the world, many of them true.

  They knew, in their more rational moments, that they were probably being unfair to the journalist, their daughter’s fellow victim, but they could not seem to help themselves. It had happened in her home. She had been taken first by those people. Her sin – according to her own bizarre account – a million miles worse than Laurie’s.

  Which was, of course, their sin, not hers at all, but that was another story, one too unbearable for them to cope with now, if ever.

  Easier – if anything could be easy – to blame Kate Turner.

  When Shelly remembered her final conversation with Laurie, she wanted to die. Those foolish, petty recriminations against her daughter about not mopping up their kitchen, followed by stony silence. Her very last chance, and she’d wasted it, had thrown away her final opportunity to hug her child and tell her that she loved her.

  Pete had told her about his late-night visit to Laurie’s room, about their brief conversation and the small warming between them that had become his most precious memory, something to hold on to. Shelly had been so jealous when he’d told her, that for a time she had literally hated him; but then she’d come to see that he had only shared it with her because he’d wanted her to know that Laurie had left home more happily than she might otherwise have thought.

  ‘Not your fault you were asleep, Shelly,’ he had said.

  ‘Not that, perhaps. But everything else.’

  ‘Mine too,’ Pete had said.

  Their shaming had been abject enough before Angela had arrived from Provence and made it absolute.

  Grieving alongside them without condemnation until, with a few choice words, Shelly’s sister had targeted their hearts with perfect and vicious accuracy.

  ‘Whatever you decide to tell people about Sam, I’ll back you up.’

  They had looked at each other and said nothing.

  ‘If you want to pretend it was Laurie who couldn’t cope, I won’t tell anyone different,’ Angela said. ‘It’ll make no odds to her now, after all, poor little love.’

  Leaving them no real choice at all, not with nine years of guilt rising up to choke them anyway. Growing worse with every passing day.

  ‘What are you going to do about Sam now?’ Angela had asked a day later.

  ‘We’ve been thinking,’ Pete had said.

  ‘I thought you might,’ Angela said.

  Andrew, their son, losing his hair, gaining weight instead, was present but silent as usual on this subject. Angela had asked him once, long ago, for his feelings on the subject of the enforced separation of his sister and her son, and he’d fobbed her off, leaving his aunt uncertain if he was simply a chip off Pete’s block or too mortified to share the truth with her.

  ‘We were wondering,’ Shelly had said, ‘if we should bring him home.’

  ‘Should,’ Angela had echoed. ‘Bit late for should, don’t you think?’

  The look in her eyes had crucified them both.

  ‘We want to do what Laurie would have wanted,’ Pete said.

  ‘What Laurie wanted,’ Angie said, ‘was to have Sam with her while she was here, while she was alive.’

  ‘Still, for him, we thought,’ Shelly said wretchedly, ‘maybe better late than never.’

  ‘You really are a pair of tossers, aren’t you?’ said Angie.

  ‘Stop it, Aunty Angie,’ Andrew had said, flushed. ‘There’s no need for—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Pete had said.

  ‘I suppose what Angie’s saying –’ Shelly had tried not to start crying again – ‘is Sam might be better off staying at the Mann, now he’s used to it.’

  ‘Better off there than with you two, is what I’m saying,’ said Laurie’s aunt.

  She remembered all the days and nights of her sweet niece’s exiled pregnancy too well, her unforgiving impulse now to be cruel to the two people who had decreed it.

  The crueller the better, so far as she was concerned.

  Shelly wasn’t sure which had been more unbearable, seeing Laurie in the mortuary two months ago, or this.

  Her daughter’s coffin going down into the ground.

  At least in the mortuary she’d been able to see her. Laurie had been there, just feet away, appearing to be still in the world. Not in a box, with the terrible sound of earth thudding on to its lid.

  She looked up, abruptly, and saw Kate Turner, standing a decent distance away, as if she realized that her presence might be hurtful to them.

  She didn’t have a clue.

  Sam was there, standing between Pete and a woman from the Mann who had one arm around his shoulders, which he seemed to like.

  He wept for a few minutes when they began to lower his mother’s coffin into the grave, as if he understood what was happening, and the woman gave him a hanky and he blew his nose with it.

  The woman spoke to them afterwards.

  ‘We all love your grandson at the Mann,’ she said.

  Sam gave Shelly a lovely smile, but she knew there was nothing meaningful in that, not for her as his grandma, and how could there be? If he ever learnt the real truth about what his grandparents had done to him and his mum, and if he had the capacity for hate, he would despise them forever.

  Shelly was conscious of people watching them with Sam, felt vaguely surprised by the fact that she did not seem to care, after all, what they thought. Which made her hate herself even more because if that was true, it meant they could have let Laurie bring him home years ago, and it might have been difficult, but they would have been a proper family.

  And Laurie would be alive.

  Would not have suffered for years, or died in terror.

  ‘Do you like horses, Sam?’ Pete asked his grandson.

  Sam looked at the woman with him, as if she could supply the answer.

  Which she did: ‘You love horses, Sam, don’t you?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Pete went on, ‘you might like to come to the stables then?’

  ‘That’s where we keep horses,’ Shelly said.

  ‘I know,’ Sam said.

  Putting his grandmother in her place.

  ‘I couldn’t really grieve,’ Kate said to Rob later, ‘because, of course, I didn’t know Laurie. All I could think about was how terrified she was that day, which I’m sure she would hate.’

  ‘You went out of respect,’ Rob had said. ‘It was the right thing to do.’

  ‘Her parents blame me.’

  ‘I imagine they associate you with it,’ he said, ‘rather than blame you.’

  ‘I wanted to speak to them,’ Kate said, ‘but I thought it might make it worse.’ She’d written to them some weeks back, a letter of condolence, trying to say something of comfort, but had found nothing, and then her failure to find Roger’s voice again had seemed to load her with extra guilt.

  ‘At least,’ Rob said, thinking of the funeral, ‘it’s over.’

  ‘I wish,’ Kate said.

  Kate

  The decision to put Caisleán up for sale had been something that Kate and Rob had both agreed on unequivocally. When it came to showing it to a couple of local estate agents at the end of March, how
ever, Rob tried hard to convince Kate to let him go alone, hoping to spare her, but she felt compelled to go back.

  ‘I think I need to face it,’ she said. ‘It’ll be fine with you there anyway.’

  ‘If you’re quite sure,’ Rob said.

  Not sure at all.

  It was no better than she’d thought it would be.

  ‘It’s strange, though,’ she said. ‘It feels so unreal.’

  She felt unreal, disconnected.

  ‘None of it happened to me,’ Rob said, ‘but even I don’t want to spend one minute more than necessary here.’

  ‘All your hard work. Such a waste.’

  Kate tried to look around without remembering that last day, but in her mind Simon’s body still hung from the hook and Laurie still lay, freshly murdered, on their bed. And the truth was, she wasn’t sure now that she’d feel even a glimmer of sorrow if she heard that the barn had burned to ashes.

  ‘We can always do it again,’ Rob said, ‘somewhere else.’

  ‘Maybe we should stick to hotels when we want a break.’

  Kate said that lightly, so that maybe he wouldn’t realize quite how terrified she felt at the prospect of staying in any weekend cottage anywhere, ever again.

  ‘You don’t have to pretend with me.’ Rob was gentle. ‘About anything.’

  ‘No,’ Kate said, with relief. ‘I know I don’t.’

  They took their time on the way home, enjoying the sight of a few early lambs in the fields, then taking a detour to the west for a long lunch at a restaurant near Pangbourne. The food was delicious and the room relaxing, but Kate felt that even if they’d stopped for a sandwich at a pub on that particular day, they’d probably have felt the same special pleasure.

  Closer now, the two of them, than ever before.

  Contentment still lapping over her as they drove towards their cottage.

  Still in place as Rob unlocked their front door.

  Gone in an instant, as they both realized they’d been burgled.

  Nowhere safe, after all.

  Just another statistic.

  Not the worst kind of robbery by any means, in that they had not been home at the time, and the intruders had not been vandals; they had, in fact, been methodical about removing two televisions, the DVD, the PC and laptop computers, and had made minimal mess as they’d apparently searched for jewellery and cash in wardrobes and drawers.