Lost Summer

by Stuart Harrison

  ‘Sorry, this compartment is full.’

  The man looked startled and then puzzled by the empty seats. Adam smiled apologetically, though he didn’t move out of the way. ‘I’m sure there are seats further on,’ he said. Eventually the man made a snorting sound and turned on his heel. There was a rustle of paper as Thomas regarded Adam warily, perhaps thinking he was sharing a compartment with a madman. Adam closed the door and returned to his seat. He weighed up the man opposite him. Thomas was heavier, but running to fat. He probably ate lunch at expensive restaurants too often, drank too much. Maybe lately he was drinking more. To help him sleep. If things went wrong then Adam thought he would come out on top. He was younger and fitter, even with a bad leg. He clenched his fist, and unclenched it again and he stared at Thomas coldly. He almost hoped Thomas tried something.

  ‘I want to know what you did with Liz Mount’s body after you killed her,’ he said.

  He saw the reaction in Thomas’s eyes. The sickening fear and perhaps a kind of relief as well. Relief that the demons he’d lived with for months finally had a face if not yet a name.

  When he got off the train forty minutes later Adam went to the police and told them what he knew. He couldn’t give them the name of Liz’s friend who’d told him that Liz had confided that Thomas had once tried to kiss her when he’d taken her home after baby-sitting, and that he’d put his hand up her skirt. He’d said if she told anyone they wouldn’t believe her and she would get into trouble. It wasn’t worth it, she’d said to her friend. She just wouldn’t go back.

  Thomas hadn’t admitted anything, but Adam could guess some of what had happened. Thomas had probably seen Liz on the train that morning and perhaps he’d followed her. When she went back later he’d been on the train with her. Somehow he’d managed to get her to his house without anyone seeing them, though Adam didn’t know how. Perhaps he’d threatened her, perhaps it was just opportunist luck. Maybe he hadn’t even meant to kill her.

  The police would question Thomas, and they would find Liz’s body somewhere near the house, Adam was sure of that, either before or after he confessed. After he left the police station he went to see the Mounts. He sat outside their house for a long time before he finally went to the door. Parents have a kind of extra sense where their children are concerned, especially mothers. He believed in the intuition of women. Carol Mount opened the door and as soon as she saw him she began to cry.

  He found out later that Thomas had tried to assault Liz on the train and when she had resisted he’d pushed her out. Later he’d driven back to the spot where she’d fallen and recovered her body.

  When he finished the story he wrote Adam sat for a long time in the dark. The light on the phone didn’t blink. By then Louise had left him.

  Part Two

  Two Years Later

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Reception area at Condor Publications was self-consciously trendy. Visitors were confronted with a long, curved silver counter behind which sat two young women who might have been part-time models. Having given his name and stated his business Adam was invited to take a seat. There was a choice of three couches, each a different colour. He chose the grape and idly flicked through a magazine, one of Condor’s mass-market coffee-table monthlies.

  The phone call that had brought him here had been slightly mysterious. Karen Stone had managed to avoid revealing exactly why she wanted him to come in, except to say that she wanted him to meet somebody she was certain would interest him. Beyond that she wouldn’t be drawn. He wasn’t busy, in fact wasn’t working on anything at all, and so he’d agreed. He was also a little bit intrigued, he admitted to himself. The past six months had been spent ghostwriting the autobiography of a twenty-five-year-old pop star. He’d laboured to make the accumulation of obscene amounts of money by somebody who was largely uninteresting and devoid of talent sound interesting, and he was relieved to have finished. It had reaffirmed his belief in the notion that there is no justice in the world. The book had been a break from his normal work. An attempt to make some changes in his life. It had been a largely unsuccessful experiment, he decided.

  ‘Adam.’

  Jolted from his reverie he turned to find Karen Stone smiling warmly at him. He stood up and she offered her cheek to be kissed. She smelled of expensive perfume and looked, as ever, fantastic. He tried to remember when he’d last seen her. A month ago? Longer, he thought. Too long.

  ‘You look well,’ she said. ‘Thanks for coming. Come on through.’

  She led the way through a set of doors and along the corridor that housed the various editorial offices.

  ‘By the way, congratulations on the promotion,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks. It’s brilliant isn’t it? I still can’t believe it.’

  He could, however. She was only twenty-nine, but then magazine publishing was a young person’s business and in her field Karen was the best editor he knew. They’d met about a year earlier when he’d first started casting around for commissions. She knew his work and though she’d expressed surprise at his change of direction, she’d been happy enough to give him the odd lifestyle piece. He’d accepted two before he’d decided that writing features about liposuction and country hotels didn’t do it for him. This time she hadn’t been surprised, and though they hadn’t worked together since, they had remained friends.

  They came to a door with a plate bearing Karen’s name and her title of Publishing Editor.

  ‘Impressive.’ He ran his finger over the raised gold lettering.

  She grinned. ‘I think so.’

  ‘So, are you going to tell me what this is all about now? Who’s the mystery person you want me to meet?’

  ‘Her name’s Helen Pierce, she’s an old friend. She came to see me a few days ago to ask for my help and after I’d listened to what she had to say I thought of you.’

  He was immediately wary. ‘What kind of help does she need exactly?’

  ‘I think it would be better if she explained that herself. Come and meet her.’

  He put his hand on her arm to stop her opening the door. ‘I get the feeling I’m not going to like this. Listen Karen, if this is about your friend’s missing child I can’t help. I’m sorry but I don’t do that any more.’

  She regarded him steadily, searching the depths of his eyes. ‘So, what are you going to do? Another hack job on some flash-in-the pan pop star?’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘I just can’t believe you’d waste your energy on something so frivolous.’

  He looked around with mock confusion. ‘Sorry, there must be some mistake. I didn’t realize this was The Times.’

  ‘Very funny. Look, you’re here now. At least come and meet Helen, hear what she has to say. Do it for me, please. She doesn’t know who else she can turn to. And incidentally there’s no missing child. Helen doesn’t have children. In fact nobody is missing.’

  This last part finally convinced him and he gave in, as he was sure she had known he would. ‘No promises though,’ he said.

  ‘Fair enough.’ She squeezed his hand briefly, then opened the door.

  A woman who had been standing at the window turned to face them. She was about Karen’s age and was wearing a dark-coloured suit. She was attractive, he thought, but not stunning. Her suit was well tailored, probably expensive, but not the sort of cutting-edge fashion favoured by most of the women who worked for Condor. She might have been a consultant of some sort, or maybe a lawyer.

  Karen did the introductions. ‘Adam Turner, Helen Pierce. Helen, this is the writer I told you about.’

  As he shook her hand he had the feeling it was his turn to be appraised. Her expression was guarded. ‘Karen’s told me a lot about you, Mr Turner.’

  ‘Don’t believe any of it,’ he joked. She offered a hesitant smile. She was nervous, he thought, and then revised his judgement. She was on edge.

  They sat around a small conference table where Karen held her meetings and wielded her power. On the wall beh
ind her desk were the framed covers of the magazines under her control, including Landmark, which occupied pride of place and was the prize that went with her recent promotion. Condor published mostly gossipy coffee-table monthlies, but Landmark was the exception, mixing arts and social commentary along with the occasional investigative piece. It was the least profitable magazine in the Condor stable, but it conferred a degree of respectability on Ryan Cummings, Karen’s boss and the owner of the company.

  ‘Karen tells me you two are old friends,’ Adam said, breaking the ice. ‘Are you in the publishing business too?’

  ‘Actually, I work for a research company.’

  ‘Helen and I were at university in Exeter together,’ Karen explained. ‘We shared a horrible flat for two years.’ To Helen she said, ‘I told Adam that it would be best if he heard what you have to say first-hand.’

  ‘Alright, though I’m not sure where to begin, exactly.’

  ‘Take your time,’ Adam told her. He felt himself slip easily into his old persona. How many times had he sat with parents who needed his help to find their son or daughter, trying to get them to open up and talk freely about a subject that, despite them having sought him out, was inevitably painful for them. ‘If I need to clarify anything I’ll ask questions.’

  She nodded and dropped her gaze while she composed her thoughts. ‘About a month ago, at the beginning of September, I learned that my brother, Ben, had been killed in a car crash. The fact is that since then I’ve come to believe that his death wasn’t an accident.’

  She paused and met Adam’s eye. She was, he knew, trying to evaluate his reaction. She would have told her story before, most likely to people who hadn’t necessarily believed her, including the police. She would have been listened to politely at every level. Sympathy and condolences would have been offered, but in the end the disbelief she encountered would have become increasingly obvious. Frustration and a sense of isolation would have set in. He knew all this had happened otherwise she would not be sitting at this table now.

  A year ago he had decided that he couldn’t do this kind of work any more. At least not if he was trying to make up for something that had happened seventeen years earlier. After his divorce from Louise he had begun to seriously question the direction his life was taking. Louise wasn’t the first casualty of the guilt he felt about Meg Coucesco. There had been others over the years, all of them eventually driven away. Maybe getting married had been an expression of a subconscious desire to change, as writing the autobiography of a spoiled pop star had been a conscious one. Neither had worked. Besides, nothing was ever that simple. Even now as he listened to Helen Pierce he felt a familiar stirring of interest. He hadn’t felt that way for a while.

  ‘Why do you think your brother’s death wasn’t an accident?’ he asked, conveying no judgement either by his tone or expression.

  She took a visible breath. ‘Ben was killed with two of his friends when their car left the road and rolled down a hill. The police report said that Ben was driving and the autopsy showed that his blood alcohol level was four times the legal limit. But that can’t be right. Ben didn’t drive. I mean he couldn’t drive. He didn’t know how. And he didn’t drink either. At least not to the extent the police are claiming. I’ve never known him to have more than the odd beer.’

  ‘Then how do you explain the autopsy report? Mistakes are very rare.’

  She gave a quick impatient shake of her head, her eyes flashing a brittle defensiveness. ‘I can’t explain it. But I know, I knew, my brother.’

  ‘Tell Adam why Ben didn’t drink,’ Karen prompted gently.

  ‘Since he was a child he’d suffered from epilepsy. It was controllable though he still had the occasional seizure, but he had to take medication every day. Something called Lamictal. Drinking reacted with the drug and made him violently ill.’

  ‘Is it possible he had stopped taking his medication when the accident happened?’ Adam asked.

  ‘No. The autopsy report showed that it was present in his blood.’

  Her point, Adam thought, was interesting rather than compelling. At least from the point of view of a detached third party, which was always the role he forced himself to take, at least initially. ‘How old was Ben?’

  ‘Nineteen. He was studying at London University.’

  ‘You said that he didn’t drive. That’s unusual for somebody of his age.’

  ‘It was because of his illness,’ Helen explained. ‘Legally he wasn’t allowed to hold a driving licence. Even though his medication largely controlled his condition he still sometimes had seizures.’

  ‘So, what exactly made the police so sure he was driving when the accident happened?’

  ‘He was behind the wheel when the car was found, still wearing his seatbelt. Look, I know how it looks. I can understand why the police drew the conclusions they did.’

  ‘But you still think they have it wrong?’

  ‘I’m certain of it. I wish there was some way I could convince you. It’s here, inside, that I know that somehow this is all wrong.’

  She put her hand against her chest. Her expression was intense and her eyes almost pleaded for him, for somebody, to listen to her. He felt instinctively that she was genuine. Not everybody was. Sometimes it wasn’t even intentional, just a kind of self-delusion, a refusal to accept the facts. In the past he had chosen the cases he worked on not because of any revelatory fragment of information he had learned when he interviewed relatives, but because he was moved by their certainty, their instinct about what had happened to their child. Often there was nothing solid to go on. He felt Helen’s instinct was true, but on the face of it the police appeared to have drawn the logical conclusion.

  ‘Tell me this,’ he said. ‘If you don’t believe your brother’s death was an accident, then what do you think happened?’

  The pleading in her eyes turned to defeat, frustration. ‘That’s the trouble. I just don’t have an answer to that question. Believe me I’ve thought about it, I’ve looked at this from every possible angle, I’ve even doubted myself on occasions. I’ve wondered if the police were right, if it was just one of those terrible things, a momentary lapse of judgement. If something made Ben act out of character and he got drunk and then for some reason he got behind the wheel of that car. Sometimes I’ve even half believed that. If enough people tell you that you’re wrong, Mr Turner, believe me after a while you start to wonder, no matter what your convictions are.’

  ‘And yet despite the evidence … ?’

  ‘I still can’t accept it. And I can’t simply stand by and do nothing. I tried to get the coroner to listen to me at the inquest, but he accepted the police version of events. The verdict was accidental death.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell Adam about the protest, Helen,’ Karen interjected.

  ‘The protest?’

  ‘Ben had just finished his first year of an arts degree. Last year he got involved with an environmental group through some people he met at university. They lobby against habitat destruction, the use of pesticides and so on, organizing petitions and protests, that sort of thing. To be honest I don’t think Ben was as committed as a lot of them. He cared about the issues like most of us do, but he was never really a political person. He got involved through a girl he met. Her name was Jane Hanson. She was a year or so older than him, very pretty, very serious type. I met her once when he brought her round to the flat. I think she’d been involved in the protest at Newbury when she was at school, she came from that way somewhere, and she was completely immersed in this sort of thing.’

  Something in her tone struck Adam. Was it a faint trace of bitterness? Jealousy perhaps.

  ‘Anyway, she was taking part in a protest during the summer,’ Helen went on. ‘A group of activists were trying to prevent some woodland being cut down to make way for a holiday camp and Ben decided to go with her. They’d dug tunnels and built tree huts and all that sort of thing to keep the bulldozers out. That was in June. He was suppose
d to come back in September, but he was killed a week before he should have left.’

  ‘There had been a lot of bad feeling between locals and some of the protesters,’ Karen added.

  ‘Some people were beaten up, threats were made, that sort of thing,’ Helen explained.

  ‘Was Ben threatened personally?’

  ‘I think so. He mentioned on the phone that there had been some incidents but it was nothing serious, at least not that I know of.’

  ‘The police knew about this?’

  ‘I imagine they did. Yes, I’m sure they did.’

  ‘Do you think there could be a connection between the protest and your brother’s death?’

  He saw her indecision as she considered how to answer, and guessed that it was tempting for her to say yes, to latch onto anything that might make some kind of sense, but to her credit she shook her head wearily.

  ‘To be honest I just don’t know. I can’t say that Ben ever gave me the impression that there was anything sinister going on. It was just the sort of clashing between groups you’d expect really. It’s possible that he wouldn’t have said too much though. He wouldn’t have wanted to worry me.’

  ‘What about this girl you mentioned, Jane Hanson? Was she in the car when the accident happened?’

  ‘No,’ Helen answered, her mouth tightening. ‘She left the protest a week earlier.’

  ‘Have you spoken to her or anybody else from the camp to see if the threats were any more serious than Ben told you?’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to Jane, but I did go to the camp. Nobody there seemed to think there was any reason why Ben would have been singled out.’

  ‘Helen,’ Karen said. ‘Tell Adam about your parents.’

  ‘Both my parents are dead, Mr Turner,’ Helen said. ‘Ben was my only family. He lived with me ever since he was thirteen, when my parents’ car was hit by a van travelling at eighty miles an hour. The driver was drunk. Both my parents died at the scene but he survived. That’s why when Ben knew he had epilepsy he decided he would never learn to drive. It’s also why I know that it’s inconceivable that he would have been drunk behind the wheel of that car, even if for some inexplicable reason he had decided to drive that night. Ben wouldn’t even be a passenger in a car if the driver had so much as had one drink. He was almost obsessive about it.’