by Jo Allen
‘Did your therapist come up with that?’
Geri snorted. ‘That’s far too sensible a line of reasoning. I worked it out for myself. The therapist was hung up on my romantic relationships, but that’s all a reaction, too. Neither of my parents has ever looked at anyone else since they met.’
‘And yet you’re back when your mother needs you.’
‘Yes, but family. Family comes with obligations you can’t shrug off.’
Or did it? Jude couldn’t shake off the responsibility for Mikey but his father had succeeded without much trouble. It reminded him. It was time for yet another in his regular and futile attempts to bring the two of them back together again. Maybe the fevered sense of fear in the Eden Valley would be enough to prompt some kind of rapprochement. ‘I can’t argue with that.’
‘I bought a house here because I could see this happening. I’ve tried to persuade my parents to move into it for the sake of Mum’s health, but of course they won’t. I’ve tried to persuade her to get treatment. I’ve probably tried too hard, pushed her too far. She won’t budge. Now I’m here I’ll stay for as long as it takes. I can get to Oxford easily enough on the train if I need to.’
‘And your son?’
‘He’s off to Exeter uni at the end of the month to study computing, so he’ll spend some time with me and his grandparents. If I can get him away from his computer to spend any meaningful time with them, of course.’
Another car drew up, another dog walker got out, acknowledging them before heading off down towards the riverside path. ‘I’ve grown fond of your mother.’
‘She mentioned you a couple of times. I think she likes you. You amuse her. But of course, you’re a very handsome man, and she’s as susceptible to good looks as I am.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’ He’d been standing a good three feet away from her, but he shuffled a little further away.
‘Are you married?’
‘No, but I have a partner. And I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to flirt with a detective when he’s pursuing his duty.’ But his lips twitched into a smile.
‘Pursuing your duty? I thought you were just out for a walk.’
‘I’m always on duty.’ Becca had hated that about him.
‘It shouldn’t matter. We should all get back to nature and mate when it suits us. You should come around for dinner and we could discuss sexual morality over a glass or two of wine.’
‘That would be entirely inappropriate.’
She laughed. ‘If you change your mind, do call. And if you need any more information, you know how to get hold of me.’
‘One more thing,’ said Jude, as casually as he dared.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. Just totally off topic, but I wondered if you’d come across someone called Adam Fleetwood?’
‘Adam? Oh, yes. He’s with a charity I do some work for. A bit of a charmer, I think, but as I say, I’m a fool for a good-looking man. Is he a friend of yours?’
‘Yes, from way back.’ Jude headed for the Mercedes and made good his escape.
Fourteen
Eden’s End nursing home was less than four miles from Cave Wood, linked to it by the sinuous rope of the River Eden. When Becca passed through the lounge on the way back from dealing with her patient, she wasn’t surprised to find it still buzzing over the latest tragedy. She thought the tone had shifted from the shock of the first few deaths; there was a definite sense of black humour peppering the staff’s chat.
‘Better take care if you’re going out in the woods,’ Ellie called to her as she passed. ‘Want me to walk you to the car to make sure you’re safe?’
‘We’re all too old to die like that,’ someone chirped up from the back. ‘Doomed to live a long life. Death’s a privilege for the young folk, not for us old fossils.’
Becca thought this disrespectful, but it didn’t do to look too po-faced. Whom the gods love die young, she remembered, from some distant corner of a past English lesson. She shook off the laughter that followed these remarks and made her escape. At least when she’d spoken to Mikey the previous evening he’d seemed cheerful enough.
It was a brave, blue-skied September afternoon in the Eden Valley, a day with one foot bracing for autumn and the other keeping a toehold in summer. On the front lawn of Eden’s End, Leslie Chester was sitting deep in the shade of a chestnut tree. A cow stood by the fence, looking on with interest and swishing its tail against the flies but Leslie, who was normally alert to everything around him and never let Becca get past without a word, stared at her without seeming to see. He had a brown square in his hand.
The envelope, again. Becca took a swift look around to see if anyone was there to pay him some attention but the staff member who was out in the garden was picking up the knitting that one of the other residents had dropped, brushing dead leaves off it and laughing. Becca stepped off the gravel and onto the soft green grass.
‘Are you all right, Mr Chester?’ Yes, it was a brown envelope, but larger than the one he’d had before. She understood. ‘Is it Nicholas?’
He nodded but said nothing, taking a photograph from the envelope and thrusting it towards her. She’d expected the same picture, Nicholas and his sister in the garden, but this was a class photograph that must be forty years old. The colour had faded in the same way it had in the snapshot he’d shown her previously; the clothes and hairstyles were as ludicrously dated, the smiles and scowls the same as those of any class of teenagers, fooling about instead of taking this matter of record as seriously as it deserved.
She scanned the photograph. There would certainly be people there she knew, even if she didn’t immediately recognise them, links to the present in this picture from the past. It was why these deaths touched so many people in the Eden Valley and it was why Nicholas Chester deserved to be remembered. He must be in that picture. Her parents would know which one he was; they’d been at the same school, at around the same time. She took a wild guess, pointing to the figure at the end of the row. Sandy hair, glasses. He looked nothing like Leslie but there was a lack of shine on the picture, as if his father’s finger had touched him, over and over again, in an attempt to reach into the past and bring him back. ‘Is this him?’
‘Yes.’ Leslie’s voice shook a little. ‘He’s dead. They’re starting to die now, do you know that? I don’t know why I have to live on. Maybe I have to survive until they’re all gone.’
Becca disliked the idea that her parents’ generation was starting to shuffle off, one by one. Dropping off the perch, her mother used to say about her grandparents’ friends, and now the same was happening to their generation. In time it would come to her. ‘He looks a lovely young man. You must have been very proud of him.’
‘Aye. I was. He wanted to be a musician. He played the violin, so well. He was such a talent. He wrote it all in his diary.’
‘Dad!’
Becca hadn’t noticed the car draw up and the woman get out, but she was glad to see a woman she recognised from the local paper as Vanessa Wood, striding across the lawn as if there was some urgency. ‘It must have been such a comfort for you,’ she said, preparing to cede the conversation to the newcomer, ‘having that to read.’
‘I kept the diary,’ Leslie said, wiping a tear from his eye. ‘I have it still. I read it every day. I look at his picture every day. I think of those poor young people in the papers and I know what their parents are going through. It’ll never leave them. They’ll suffer, like I’m suffering, to the end of their lives. It’s a curse, to outlive your children.’
‘Dad.’ Vanessa had reached them. ‘Put the picture away, now. It won’t do you any good looking at it. And I’m sure—’ she snatched a glance at Becca’s name badge, ‘Becky’s got plenty of other things to do. She doesn’t have time to talk to you.’
Becca was about to protest, but there was a grain of truth in what Vanessa said. She was a nurse not a psychologist and surely there could be no-one better for Leslie to have a
s a visitor than Vanessa. Becca hadn’t known they were father and daughter but when you saw them together the relationship was clear. Thanking her stars at the timely intervention, she made a graceful exit. ‘I’m never too busy to talk, Mr Chester, if it helps.’
‘I’m sure he really appreciates the offer. Thank you so much for taking the time.’ Vanessa was smiling at him but as she did so she tweaked the picture from his fingers and looked down at it. ‘Put that away just now, Dad. I’ll see if someone can get us a cup of tea and we can talk about Nicky if you want. Or we can talk about something different. Whatever makes you feel better.’ Then she twitched the envelope away and the three rows of semi-familiar faces disappeared from Becca’s view and into the flap.
She walked to her car and slid into the driver’s seat. These days Eden’s End, the scene of a murder inquiry the year before, always reminded her of Jude and she paused for a moment to think of him when they were together, folding himself into the passenger seat of her Fiat 500, his head almost touching the roof. Maybe it was time to catch up with him, have a chat about Mikey. Talk to him about the photograph.
She dialled his number. In the shadow of the tree, Vanessa was sitting next to her father, holding one of his hands while the other one pointed to the photograph. The two of them were smiling together. Forty years dead, Nicholas could still make his father laugh or cry as a living child might do. It was a gift, to tap into those precious memories. Lucky man, to have Vanessa. ‘Jude. Hi. Are you busy?’
‘As always.’ He never used to be a man to answer personal calls at work unless they were from Mikey, to whom he was always available, but over the past year or so he’d loosened up. These days, on the rare occasions she felt the need to call him at work, there was a fighting chance that he’d answer, even if all he did was put her off until later. ‘Anything I can help you with?’
‘I don’t know. It’s this suicide thing. I’ve no idea what’s going on.’
‘Neither have I.’ She sensed tension.
‘It’s not Mikey,’ she said, hastening to reassure him. ‘But I’ve been thinking. And anything might help, right?’ It wasn’t as if she had children, let alone teenage ones, or even any prospect of them at thirty-three and with no man on the horizon, but she was a soft touch for other people’s grief.
‘We always encourage people to come forward with any information, even if they think it’s irrelevant.’
She tried to imagine him saying it, knew he was mocking himself and that he’d be smiling. ‘I’m pretty damn sure what I’m going to say is irrelevant.’
‘I can’t talk now. Can I come and see you this evening?’
‘I don’t want to put you out at all.’
‘You aren’t. It’ll give me an excuse to pop along and see Mikey. I don’t want him thinking I’m obsessing about him.’
‘Are you?’
A pause. ‘Yes, probably. I’ll see you later. I don’t know when I’ll get away.’
‘Becca, eh?’ said Ashleigh, as she and Jude parted in the car park at Carleton Hall. ‘Interesting.’
‘Not Becca at all. At least, yes. I’m going to see Becca. It’s because she has something to tell me.’
‘Something she couldn’t tell you over the phone?’
That irritated him. Ashleigh was the one who took calls from the ex-husband she swore she no longer had anything to do with and, he was sure, occasionally met up with without his knowledge. Now she was questioning him about his relationship with Becca when it had long ago evolved into friendship and any meaning it had ever had was long dead. He still loved Becca, after a fashion, but he accepted it meant nothing and Ashleigh knew it. Jealousy became nobody. ‘I’m sure she could have told me over the phone. I suggested meeting up so I can call in on my mum at the same time. It’s a good excuse.’
‘You need an excuse to go and see your mum?’
‘You know what I mean. It’s about Mikey.’
‘It always is.’
He got into the Mercedes and watched her heading off to her own car, with a shuffle that was almost a flounce, but he let her go without calling her back to explain. There would be plenty of time later to kiss and make up, and he was already running later than he intended.
He drew out of the car park and headed the six miles or so southwards, through Askham and down onto the Haweswater road. To his left the brow of Lowther Fell shone with bracken in the evening sun and the curling, swirling snake of the river sparkled below it. Sometimes it was a wicked world, but it remained full of promise. Why had so many young people, with so much to look forward to, chosen to leave it behind them, so many in such a short time? What was it in that area, at that time, that drove them on? And who else would fall victim to it?
Becca was looking out for him. He got out of the car, as casually as he could in case anyone got the wrong idea, and turned to the gate, but she came down the path as she had done before and met him half way. From a shrinking pool of sunlight on the far side of the garden, Holmes watched them with disdain. ‘Jude. Good of you to pop by. But as I say, it’s probably nothing.’
‘Yes, probably, but it costs you nothing to tell me and it costs me nothing to listen.’
‘True. Okay. Did you know Vanessa Wood’s father is a resident at Eden’s End?’
‘I didn’t, no.’
‘His name is Leslie Chester. I was talking to him earlier. He must be eighty if he’s a day. I know these suicides have got people on edge locally, but it’s so awful for him. His son died young. Forty years ago or so, and it’s brought it all back.’
‘Suicide?’
Almost irritably, Becca poked a strand of hair out of her eye. ‘No. It was an accident. He was playing about on the viaduct at Eden Lacy and a train came along, and he fell. My heart breaks for him.’
He nodded. That would explain Vanessa’s mission. He’d seen something in her eye, a cold determination to pursue a quest to the very end. Perhaps her father’s misery had mapped out her career path for her. No parent should have to mourn a child, she’d said. In his job Jude saw many people pursue vengeance with just such steel, but others, like him, preferred to pursue justice or restitution. It was better to put the world right than add to its wrongs. ‘Poor bloke. God help him.’
‘He has Vanessa, I suppose, so he’s in good hands. But it breaks your heart. He was showing me the boy’s picture. A class photo. He was at the grammar school, and he’d have been there with a lot of people we know.’
‘Forty years,’ Jude said, thinking about it.
‘I was thinking. Maybe these things come back to haunt a place. Not literally. I’m not that superstitious. But maybe there’s a pattern. And there was another thing about it.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Did anyone tell you how much you look like your dad?’ She dimpled a smile at him.
Mikey never stopped going on about that, especially when he was annoyed. You look like Dad, you sound like Dad. Then he’d storm off. ‘Sometimes.’
‘It’s you in the class photo, to the life. Your dad was in Nicholas Chester’s class at school. That was what made me think of mentioning it to you.’
Jude’s father, David Satterthwaite, might have known Nicholas or Vanessa, though what they might learn from an old story was open to debate. ‘Thanks. I might follow that up. I’m going to the football with Dad on Saturday. I’ll see if he’s got a copy of it.’
‘It’s almost certainly nothing.’ Becca turned up the path and flipped her fingers at Holmes, who ignored her. ‘I’ll see you later.’
‘See you. He turned his attention to other matters, rapping on the door of his mother’s cottage, which was unlocked, and pushing it open, which was unlocked.
‘Oh, it’s you.’ Mikey was coming down the hall, his dark hair spiky with damp. ‘Timing perfect as ever. I’ve just been to the gym and I’ve got pizza. Want some?’
‘If there’s any spare.’
‘I’ve got no-alcohol beer, too, if you’re in the mood to live a lit
tle. Though I’m having the real stuff.’
Jude followed Mikey through to the kitchen and out into the garden, lifting a can off the worktop on the way past. In the light he could see a bruise blooming on his brother’s cheekbone. ‘What were you doing at the gym? Boxing?’
‘Not intentionally, no. But there was a bit of a bust-up.’ Mikey shrugged.
‘Oh?’
‘Yeah. Some kid in there. I didn’t know him but some of the others do. Apparently he comes in from time to time. One of the guys called him a dirty gippo. Me and a couple of others had to break it up.’
Jude sat down with his back to the house and watched the light on the fell, changing every minute as the sun dipped and the shadows lengthened. ‘Too much testosterone, eh?’
‘Something like that. He’s not a bad kid. He belongs to the New Agers up at Long Meg, except he doesn’t. A grandson, I think.’
‘Josh Foster?’
‘I don’t know his name. He can look after himself, anyway.’ And Mikey ripped the ring off a can with a satisfying pop.
Fifteen
‘I know it feels like every conversation I have with you is about men, and I know this isn’t how female friendship is supposed to work, but if you listen to me just this once, it’ll be done. We can move on and discuss stuff like folklore and the cost of living and who’s going to win the Costa Book Prize. And after that I don’t want to hear you talk about him ever again.’
Lisa had taken up the confrontational stance that was her instant reaction whenever Scott’s name popped up in the conversation. Used to it, Ashleigh was comfortable enough to be amused. ‘All I said was that I wonder how he’s getting on.’
‘You don’t care how he’s getting on. Remember? Shall I quote it back to you? You said just because he’s only a few miles away doesn’t mean I have to see him. I don’t need to know what he’s up to.’