by Liz Byrski
‘That’s a shame. I was planning on asking you both over for dinner. Next time she’s here, perhaps? James and I liked her a lot.’
Ellis nodded and it didn’t escape his notice that, although he’d known James and Leah for several years, he’d never before been asked to dinner and he wasn’t actually being asked now, only in the company of Heather, when she was available. But at the same time he felt a pleasant glow at the thought of going there with her as a couple. ‘She’s a very special person,’ he said with a smile. ‘Very special.’
‘So, come on then,’ Leah persisted. ‘What were you thinking about, standing here in the water at six in the morning talking to yourself? What is it that you deserve?’
‘Heather,’ he said, surprised that he felt quite an emotional lump in his throat as he said her name. ‘I was thinking how lucky I am to have found her again. And then I thought I deserve it, I must deserve it or it wouldn’t have happened.’
Leah laughed and reached out her hand to touch his arm. ‘I’m very happy for you, for you both,’ she said. ‘But it’s no good her being stuck in parliament or her office. You’ll have to persuade her to come here, Ellis.’
Ellis kicked his foot in the water and watched the droplets scatter in a sparkling arc. ‘I have every intention of doing that,’ he said, ‘preferably as soon as possible.’
The meeting had run longer than Heather had anticipated and had proved exceptionally boring. She wished she’d asked Shaun or Diane to come with her because at one point she simply lost concentration and wasn’t sure whether she’d missed something essential. It was past five thirty and she felt like going home, having a shower and curling up on the settee with a drink and a good book. But she needed to pick up some work for the weekend. As if to confirm her decision, her phone bleeped and, steering with one hand and with one eye still on the road, she read the text from Shaun: Are you on your way?
Less than ten minutes later, as she let herself in, her heart leapt at the sight of Alex and Vince sitting in Shaun’s office. It means nothing, she told herself, calm down, Heather, don’t get carried away again. ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘are you waiting for me?’
‘We are,’ Alex said, and Heather noticed that this time he looked different. Not as though he were dreading having to tell her there was nothing new. As if it might, after all, be okay to ask the question again.
‘You mean . . . do you have . . . ?’ she began, her heart thumping against her ribs, her face flushing with anticipation.
‘We might be getting somewhere,’ Alex said with a smile. ‘If we can go into your office?’
She led them through and saw Shaun turn and head back to his own room. ‘Come on, Shaun,’ she called.
‘We talked with Shaun earlier,’ Alex said. ‘Now we need to talk to you.’
Heather shrugged and closed the door, gesturing to them to sit down. ‘So what is it? What have you got?’ she asked, barely able to contain her excitement.
‘First off,’ Alex said, putting a photograph on the desk in front of her, ‘can you tell me if you know this man?’
Heather looked carefully at the picture and shook her head. ‘I’ve never seen him before. Who is he? Is this the man who shot me? Have you arrested him?’
‘Whoa!’ Alex replied, holding up his hands. ‘We’re not there yet. You’re absolutely sure you’ve never seen him or had anything to do with him?’
‘Positive,’ Heather said. ‘For heaven’s sake, Alex, just tell me what’s going on.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘this morning . . .’
She’d heard about Charlene’s former boyfriend before, of course, on the day that Shaun had come into the office with a hugely swollen and weeping eye and the side of his face turning various shades of purple. And so now he was dead, but she couldn’t see what it had to do with her.
Alex held up two evidence bags. ‘This one,’ he said, ‘is the bullet they took out of your shoulder. And this one was taken by our pathologist from the body of Danny Muswell this morning. Forensics have just confirmed that they were both fired from the same gun.’
Heather clapped her hand over her mouth in shock. ‘The same gun! But why . . . I mean, how . . . what does it mean?’
‘We’re not sure yet, Heather,’ Alex said. ‘But it does mean that we now have something to go on. We have another bullet, the weapon, a man who’s been shot and we know who he is. And we have, in the hospital, a witness to this morning’s shooting who, when he comes around from the anaesthetic, may be able to tell us something. It’s a hundred per cent more than we’ve had at any time since the night you were shot.’
‘So,’ Heather said, walking into Shaun’s office when she’d shown them out, ‘progress at last, thank god. I was beginning to think this would never happen, that it was just going to be one of those unsolved crimes that goes on so long that everyone forgets about it. Everyone except me. What do you think? It’s a great breakthrough, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ Shaun said. ‘It’s the breakthrough we’ve all been waiting for. But, Heather, as you know, I do, or rather did, know Danny Muswell, so did Charlene and, of course, Diane. And there’s some stuff I need to tell you that maybe I should have told you before.’
NINETEEN
Adam woke early and lay for a while, watching Jill sleeping soundly beside him as the morning light seeped through the blinds, casting horizontal stripes across the bed. He leaned over and kissed her lightly, and she murmured, shifted her position and slept on. Moving cautiously so as not to disturb her, he got up, went through to the back of the house and sat down on the back doorstep. The garden smelled of newly cut grass and the huge clump of sweet peas that Jill had planted weeks earlier now swarmed against the side of the house in a mass of rainbow colours.
What a difference a couple of weeks could make, he thought. He had sat here alone the morning that Jill left, wondering anxiously where they were heading and whether this time apart would help sort out the mess he’d created. On the second day, feeling a little more energised, he began to flex his muscles in the house, to take advantage of the fact that he had the place to himself and could do what he wanted.
Jill, just like his mother and Yvette, and to a lesser extent Heather, was a domestic diva. She liked things done her own way. Similar, Adam thought, to conductors with their highly individual interpretations and expectations that no member of the orchestra would ever question in their presence. Adam admired this sort of organisational masterminding, as well as the speed and skill with which it was executed, but it left him feeling surplus to requirements – as though his contributions to domestic life were unnecessary. The best plan was to withdraw, stay out of the way and let them get on with it. In a practical sense it made life easy, but at another level it was limiting – like eating a good meal but regretting that you’d had no choice about the menu.
He’d begun, that second day, by sorting the old newspapers, bottles and cans for recycling and then started on the kitchen, cleaning and tidying cupboards, chucking away out-of-date items from the pantry and freezer. By lunch time he was in full swing and by the time Daisy and Toby got home from school, the living areas looked as though they had been attacked by a team of flying domestics.
‘You can have something to eat and then it’s room cleaning,’ Adam said, brooking no arguments and promising a choice of takeaway in return for a complete overhaul.
Ignoring Toby’s disgruntled silence and Daisy’s tears and whining, he worked with them liberating a rotten apple, a couple of fossilised sandwiches and a selection of socks that smelled like dead animals from the bottom of Toby’s wardrobe. Despite Daisy’s protests, a collection of Jill’s discarded cosmetics, covered in dust and scattered with a few ancient sticky M & Ms went in the bin, along with a vast collection of pictures torn from magazines, old drawings, and junk mail that she’d hoarded from the letterbox.
The next day he started on the windows, the laundry and the bathrooms, relishing the physicality of it, the satisfaction of im
mediate results, and most of all the feeling that he was reclaiming something, exercising a part of himself that had been lost. It was only at the end of the first week that it occurred to him that Jill might be offended, that she might see this domestic blitz as some sort of criticism, but it was done now and he felt better for it.
‘But why?’ she’d asked him, looking around in amazement as he led her back into the house.
‘Because I wanted . . . no, I needed to,’ he’d explained. ‘I need to have a part in this.’
‘I’m a control freak, aren’t I?’ she’d said, sighing.
‘Well . . .’ he started, and then decided to abandon caution. ‘Yes, you are a bit. And, of course, it’s wonderful that you take everything on, but at the same time I see you struggling, and I see things not getting done, things I could do, but you won’t let me near them. We need to work out a division of responsibility and then get out of each other’s way.’
‘I thought I’d be coming home to chaos,’ Jill said. ‘I was dreading that part but this, it’s weird, like I don’t own it anymore.’
‘You don’t,’ Adam said abruptly, and he saw her start. ‘We own it together. I’m just exercising my share of ownership. I haven’t done that before.’
Adam got up from the step and strolled across the cool grass to break a couple of dead heads from the roses. So they were over the domestic hurdle. Reclaiming a role in the house had given him a new sense of himself and his place in all their lives. But there was still a way to go.
The night he had sat on Barbara’s sofa and wept, Adam had felt as though some ancient rusty coil were unwinding inside him. The confession that he had vowed he would never make to another person had forced its way out of him, triggered by her innocent question about pawning his cello. For the rest of that day he had struggled to hold himself in check, to organise the shed cleaning, to share a glass of wine with George, then dinner and finally to get the kids to bed. But all the time he had felt the unwinding, felt it cranking and shifting, and finally he couldn’t hold on to it any longer. As the words spilled out in pools at his feet he could hear his father’s rhetoric, the horrors of sin, the threats of damnation, of hellfire and the impossibility of redemption. And as they dropped away he heard himself as if he were an outsider, heard himself and was shocked by the punishing, unforgiving, blind intensity of something he no longer believed and had not believed for a long time.
‘It’s the past, Adam,’ Barbara said. ‘It’s not a part of what you believe now. Don’t let it ruin your life and your relationships just because you and Heather made a pact not to talk about it.’
‘I know,’ he’d said. ‘It’s the stumbling block that constantly trips me. It’s not just the promises Heather and I made, it’s because I let Dad down, and all of you – you, Mum, Heather, I let you all down. I was supposed to look after you, it was the last thing he ever said to me. It was my responsibility and I failed miserably. I let Heather convince me that it was what she had to do, but I was dying inside. And when it was over I was terrified, I thought she would die and we’d both go to hell. The one thing he asked me to do and I failed him and let everyone down.’
‘But you did look after Heather. How would she have coped without you? You looked after her at great emotional and spiritual cost to yourself. Not in the way Roy would have wanted but in the way that she needed. Roy laid a really unfair burden on you, but he loved you and it was his way of trying to make you strong. It really is time to put that burden down.’
Adam tossed the dead rose heads onto the ground and with his bare foot pushed the earth over to cover them. It was inexplicable to him now that he hadn’t talked about it before, that he hadn’t been able to see the unreasonableness of his father’s words, the old men’s rules of manhood that had gripped him. For decades he had worn his own crippling badge of failure, binding himself to the past, to something he thought he had long ago rejected, and when Heather was shot he had added another layer of guilt and shame, as though he could somehow have prevented it. He reminded himself of his distaste for the formal act of confession; how he had despised it, called it a ‘get out of jail free’ card. How superficial that seemed now, now that he knew that confession was one of the hardest and the most liberating of acts. Rather than offering a free pass out of guilt it opened up the chance of forgiveness, the chance to forgive himself, the chance to know himself in a different way.
There was a faint sound from inside the house, and he saw that Jill was up and opening the blinds at the bedroom window. She waved to him, and he waved back and strolled up the garden to the house. He had made a great leap while she was away and now he must make another; somehow he must find a way to tell her about the past, and the strange and crippling hold it had had on him for decades.
Shaun was watering the garden when the phone rang.
‘What are you doing?’ Heather asked, and he immediately felt guilty, because he’d been standing there with the hose, thinking that if Alex made an arrest in the next few days, it might make it easier for him to do the dastardly thing and tell her he was going to resign. She had been amazing when he told her about Charlene and the drugs.
‘I do wish you’d told me earlier,’ she’d said. ‘But at the same time I can see why you didn’t. Anyway, it looks as though you and Diane came up with an excellent solution. Poor Diane, she must have been worried sick.’
They’d talked then about Charlene, and how well she seemed to be doing and agreed that it was best to say nothing about it to the police. At least, not yet.
‘I’m watering,’ he said now. ‘Woke up early and couldn’t go back to sleep, too restless.’
‘Me too,’ Heather said. ‘I’m walking. Have been for nearly an hour and don’t know what to do when I stop. I suppose you haven’t heard anything from Alex?’
‘No, but I think it’d be you he’d call first.’
‘I suppose so. I thought we might have heard something last night, after he got to talk to the witness.’
‘Maybe he didn’t,’ Shaun said. ‘You know what hospitals are like, and the bloke might still be sedated.’ He paused. ‘Look, I was thinking of having a shower and then distracting myself with a large breakfast. We could go together, if you like.’
‘Oh yes! A lot of bacon could make a big difference to my state of mind. Where do you want to go?’
Shaun turned off the outside tap, wound the hose onto its reel and went through the house to the bathroom. It was strange, he thought, that Heather hadn’t started talking about revving up after Christmas, nor about who they should get to do what on the campaign committee. It made it easier for him, of course; he would have felt terrible having to talk about that while still trying to decide when and how he should go.
The least he could do, he thought as he finished shaving, was to find someone decent to take over, but he couldn’t start asking around for possibilities until he’d told Heather. The minute he started putting out feelers she’d hear something and he needed it to come from him. Christmas was the time, he decided. Sometime over the Christmas break he’d pick the moment and tell her.
‘This was a brilliant idea,’ Heather said, looking with relish at the large plate of scrambled eggs and crispy bacon. She picked up a golden rasher in her fingers and sampled it. ‘Oh my god, this is to die for. Taste it, Shaun.’
He shook his head. ‘No thanks, I’ve got this thing about dead pig. Can’t handle it.’
‘But you’ve got sausages,’ she said.
‘Chicken sausages.’
‘So dead bird is okay?’
‘I never claimed to be logical,’ he said with a grin. ‘I’m just rather fond of pigs. I once had a holiday job on a pig farm.’ The waiter put their coffee and a large plate of toast on the table and took away the menu. ‘Maybe a huge quantity of food will have a settling effect,’ Shaun said, picking up his cutlery.
‘Settling straight on my hips, I suspect,’ Heather said. ‘But who cares? Have you spoken to Diane?’
; Shaun nodded. ‘Last night, and then again this morning. She’s very agitated, more even than I imagined she’d be. I think she’s very worried about Charlene. She’s in Morpeth with Barbara.’
‘With Barbara?’
‘They’ve been seeing a bit of each other since the party.’
‘Really? I didn’t realise. That’s nice for Barb. Diane’s turned out well, hasn’t she? Not so long ago I thought she was a pain, but now I really like her and she’s doing a great job.’
Shaun kept his head down and concentrated on his breakfast, intent on avoiding any discussion about the office. He was saved by his mobile ringing; they exchanged looks across the table.
‘Alex?’ Heather said.
‘He’d be calling you if he had anything new,’ Shaun said, opening his phone. His eyebrows shot up. ‘It is him. Hi, Alex.’
‘Need to have a word, Shaun,’ Alex said, and Shaun felt the same wave of nausea he’d experienced when he knew he had to tell Heather about Charlene and the drugs. ‘Where are you?’ Alex asked.
‘Having breakfast with Heather in Beaumont Street.’
‘Good. Mind if I join you so I can talk to you both together?’
‘He’s on his way here,’ Shaun said, hanging up.
Heather’s eyes widened. ‘That’s it, he’s talked to the witness and he knows something. This is the end of it, isn’t it, at last. Oh my god, I hope he hurries up.’
‘Hang on, Heather, he might just have more questions, or maybe the witness told him what Charlene was up to.’
‘I suppose so, but on the other hand . . .’
‘Let’s just cross our fingers and eat our breakfast,’ Shaun said. ‘Eat up – he won’t be long and he might take a fancy to your bacon.’
She laughed and Shaun wished that he felt even a little bit as relaxed as he was trying to sound.
There is no right way to do this, Jill thought, no perfect time or place, I just have to tell him I know and see what happens. They were walking, at Adam’s suggestion, along a path that followed the line of the lake, close to the cycle route that he and Kirsty took each week. Toby had gone skateboarding, and then on to Bree Adams’s house, and they had been suddenly and unexpectedly relieved of Daisy’s company, by virtue of an impromptu invitation from the mother of her new friend.