by Diane Janes
Marcus heard her running downstairs and emerged to meet her in the hall, his face anxious.
‘Marcus, you need to do something. Sean has got a knife in his room.’
A crinkle appeared between Marcus’s eyebrows. He regarded his wife uncertainly, rather as he might peer at a mathematics problem which had so far eluded him.
‘He’s been keeping it in the old cupboard he brought back from that car-boot sale. The locked cupboard at the side of his bed.’ It was as much as Jo could do not to grab Marcus’s arm and drag him physically up the stairs. Why did he just go on standing there, looking like that, not saying anything? ‘I went into his room just now and saw him with it.’
‘What sort of knife?’
‘A big one. Like a hunting knife. A dreadful-looking thing.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure! What do you take me for? I went in without knocking and caught him sitting on the bed, looking at this knife.’
‘I thought we agreed not to go into his room without knocking? He might have been getting changed or something.’
‘He was already changed,’ Jo almost shouted. ‘I think we’re getting off the point here, which is about the knife in Sean’s bedroom, not the accepted etiquette for families with teenage boys. Are you going to come upstairs and do something about this or not?’
For an awful moment, Jo actually thought he was going to opt for ‘not’. Marcus certainly hesitated before following her upstairs. At Sean’s door, she stood to one side while he tapped on the panels.
‘What?’ Sean’s voice emerged from within, the usual blend of belligerent boredom.
‘I’d like to come in and have a word.’
‘OK.’
Sean was reclining on his bed with his laptop alongside him, logged into MySpace. He reached for the remote and muted the CD player, as if to facilitate conversation.
Marcus took a deep breath. ‘Sean, do you have a knife in here?’
Sean affected to look puzzled. ‘Mmm – yeah – I think so.’ He raised himself to a sitting position, swinging his feet on to the carpet before gesturing theatrically at the remnants of the previous night’s beans on toast supper, among which lay a knife and fork. ‘Should’ve brought them downstairs – sorry.’
‘I don’t mean that kind of knife,’ said Marcus, patiently.
‘We’re talking about the knife I saw you with a minute ago,’ Jo interrupted. ‘The knife you’ve got locked in that cupboard.’
Sean stared at her blankly. ‘What knife?’
‘I think it would be a good idea if you let us see what you’ve got in the cupboard,’ Marcus said.
Sean looked uncomfortable. ‘There’s nothing in there. Just some private stuff. There isn’t any knife.’
‘All the same, I’d like you to open it up please.’ It was the voice Marcus used if ever there was a problem with one of the hotels. It was excessively polite, but brooked no opposition.
With an air of reluctance, Sean went to his wardrobe and felt around among the shoes he kept in the bottom of it, withdrawing a small key which he used to unlock the cupboard – no bigger than a bathroom cabinet – which stood on the floor by his bed. With another resentful glance at his father, he stood back to reveal the contents: three magazines, which judging from the uppermost cover, had all derived from the top shelf of the newsagents. ‘Satisfied?’ he spat at Jo, before slamming the cupboard shut and turning the key in the lock.
‘He’s moved it,’ Jo said. ‘He must have moved it while I went downstairs.’
‘I don’t know what she’s talking about,’ Sean protested. ‘She came busting in here, going on about stuff in my cupboard. She’s not supposed to come in here without knocking …’
‘Sean.’ Marcus silenced his son with a look. ‘Do you have a knife anywhere in this room – apart from the one on the plate?’
The boy met his father’s eye, unflinching. ‘No, Dad.’
Marcus was already walking away. Jo followed him, remonstrating angrily even as Sean took advantage of their departure to shut himself back inside and turn the music up. ‘You can’t just let him get away with this. A kid his age shouldn’t have a knife like that. If you search his room …’
Marcus stopped dead at the foot of the stairs and faced her. ‘I am not going to search anyone’s room. Do you want him to feel like he’s living in Stalag 97? You’ve been very wound up lately, and you could well have seen something else and imagined it was a knife. I mean, honestly, where do you think a boy of his age is going to get hold of something like that? And now you’ve cornered me into humiliating him, by forcing him to show us his pathetic little stash of dirty magazines. Or is that what you were up to all along? Scoring points because we had a row earlier on?’
‘I don’t try to score points, and we didn’t have a row – just words.’
‘It’s perfectly healthy for boys his age to have a few things like that lying around,’ Marcus continued, ‘and I don’t want you to start making him feel uncomfortable about it. In fact, that’s exactly the sort of reason why you ought to knock before you go into his room.’
‘I saw him with a knife,’ Jo began, but Marcus held up his hand, the gesture subduing her into silence as effectively as if he wielded a physical force.
‘Sean has given me his word that there isn’t a knife. Use your common sense, Jo. There’s no earthly reason why he would be likely to have one. We don’t live in the sort of area where a kid might think he needed to acquire a knife for self-defence. How good a look did you get at this so-called knife?’
‘I just saw it for a second. As soon as I opened the door, he shoved it into the cupboard. I honestly thought it was a knife.’
‘Thought?’
‘I saw it.’
‘A minute ago you only thought.’
‘I’m going to make the dinner,’ Jo said. ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere. By the way,’ she added as an afterthought, ‘it’ll be spag bol rather than lasagne, because Sean’s just eaten the last of the cheese.’ She caught sight of Marcus’s expression as he turned into the sitting room, and wished she had not mentioned the cheese. It just sounded like another petty jab in her stepson’s direction.
CHAPTER FIVE
Jo’s first real opportunity to search Sean’s bedroom did not come for more than a week. First she was away for four nights leading In the Footsteps of Wordsworth, and when she got back, either Sean or Marcus always seemed to be in the house. Only when Marcus left to take care of Border Raids and Battles, and Sean had gone to school, did she have the house to herself.
She was still annoyed with Marcus about the Cornwall trip, but in the interests of avoiding further accusations that she was being self-centred, she had decided to bide her time. Once she had shown Marcus that he had been wrong about the knife, she would be in a far stronger position to raise the issue of who should go down to inspect the hotel in Fowey. Her plan was to locate and confiscate the knife, keeping it somewhere safe from Sean until she could lay the evidence of its existence before Marcus on his return. She assumed that it would be back in the cupboard by now, so it was merely a question of finding the key.
She was not surprised when a thorough search in and among the shoes in the bottom of the wardrobe drew a blank. Never mind – she had all day if that was what it took. For the next ninety minutes she undertook a fingertip search of which any undercover agent might have been proud, taking great care to replace everything exactly where she found it. Trouser pockets, CD cases, the furthest corners of shelves, under the mattress, inside the pillow slips and duvet cover, she probed every possible place, gathering dust from along the top of the doorframe, even feeling along the hems of the curtains, but as she worked her way round the room, it was with the ever-increasing conviction that Sean must have taken the most obvious precaution of all. He had taken the key with him.
When she had tried every possible hidey-hole, she knelt in front of the cupboard and investigated it more closely. It appea
red to be homemade, perhaps the result of some long-forgotten woodwork class. At some stage in its history a coat of gloss paint had been applied, which had faded to the shade of cream left too long in the fridge. There was a narrow gap between the door and body of the cupboard and Jo found that by pushing repeatedly against the door she could make it rattle. If only the hinges had been on the outside, she could have unscrewed them. Damn it, he was not going to beat her! She marched out to the garage, returning with a torch and a large screwdriver. When she shone the beam of the torch up and down the crack, she could make out the dark rectangle of the lock – one small metal obstruction which stood between herself and the contents of the cupboard. She slid the point of the screwdriver into the gap at a point just below the lock and began to lever her improvised jemmy against the frame. The first two or three attempts resulted in no more than a series of ugly marks on the paintwork. At the fourth attempt, the screwdriver jerked out of the crack and she narrowly missed gouging a lump out of her cheek. She tried a slower, steadier pressure, until with an elongated creak of protest, the door finally gave way, a jagged split appearing in the wood from the edge nearest the lock to a point just above the lower hinge. Although the tough little lock held firm, enough of the door could be moved aside to see that the cupboard’s contents were unchanged since Sean had reluctantly displayed them a week before.
Jo sat back on her heels, completely at a loss. Maybe he took the knife with him to school. For a moment she thought of ringing to suggest they search his belongings, but then she thought of what Marcus would say if she ended up getting Sean expelled – which could well be the penalty for bringing an offensive weapon on to the premises. Then again, what if she rang the school and her hunch turned out to be wrong? He might have sold it on to someone else by now. Marcus would be just as furious, the whole episode put down to her overactive imagination again.
There had been a couple of occasions in the past when she had got things very wrong, and she could see now that it had probably been a mistake to confide these episodes in Marcus because they naturally reduced the likelihood of him accepting everything she told him at face value. The worst of these had occurred four years ago, when she followed a woman in a car – the impulse of an instant – because there was a little girl in the back, a little girl who had looked just the right age …
She stared afresh at the mess she had made of the cupboard door. The irony of her earlier cautious search was not lost on her; she might as well have turned the place upside down, because there was no way she could pretend the cupboard had met with some accidental injury while she was cleaning the room. Cold fingers of doubt encircled her neck and crept over her scalp. Without the justification of a newly discovered knife, the cupboard simply appeared to have suffered a violent attack from a random maniac. She saw the screwdriver in her hand with fresh eyes. Suddenly she wanted to put as much distance as possible between herself and the cupboard and screwdriver.
She retreated downstairs, noting that the post had been delivered, probably at the very moment she had been breaking into the cupboard, since she had not heard the letterbox. She collected the cluster of envelopes as she passed, flipping through them to see if there was anything interesting. Halfway down the pile she encountered a couple of envelopes addressed to Shelley and Brian, which had somehow found their way among The Hideaway’s post.
The misdirected mail provided her with a welcome excuse to depart the scene of the crime. She would walk into Grizedale and find something to draw, dropping off the stray letters on her way. In less than five minutes she was striding along the lane, resolutely ignoring the threat of rain in the sky ahead. She had intended to drop into the gallery and hand the letters over in person, but when she got there she found the lights were out and the ‘closed’ sign still displayed, so she backtracked to Ingledene where she opened the wrought-iron gate, advanced up the path and climbed the trio of steps to the front door.
As she gained the top step she was met with the sound of loud, angry voices. With no passing traffic, sound penetrated the wood as easily as if she had been in the next room. It was awkward, but it was too late to go back now. If someone happened to see her, she would still have the letters in her hand, so it would be obvious that she had overheard them quarrelling and was trying to slip away. At the same time she was reluctant to open the letterbox, because the feuding parties might be standing in sight of the door and realize she was there.
She tried the flap with a fingertip but it did not move. It must be held in place with a taught spring – the sort of letterbox which would make a loud noise unless handled very cautiously. She pushed a little harder, levering the flap upwards as slowly and quietly as she could, almost letting go in fright when an angry roar erupted from Brian, in which she could make out the words, ‘Oh, no you won’t.’
‘Let me go, you bastard!’
Who would have imagined that gentle Shelley could conjure up such a harridan shriek? Jo fed the letters in and heard them flop on to the encaustic tiles a spilt second before there was a crash of something heavy hitting the floor. Jo let the flap go with a snap. The occupants were making so much noise they probably wouldn’t hear it. She tried not to be in too obvious a hurry to reach the gate – much better to pretend she had not heard anything.
Pretending – always pretending that there was nothing wrong. That’s what I’m doing now, she thought. I do it all the time, pretending that there is nothing wrong between me and Marcus; pretending that I can cope with Sean; pretending that I’m not thinking about what happened to Lauren, every minute of every day.
She wondered where Marcus was just at that moment. Some itineraries she knew well enough to place him almost to the minute, but Border Raids and Battles was a new addition to their repertoire, so she was not familiar with it. More to the point, where was Melissa? Melissa could so easily join up with Marcus on those nights when she was not booked to be away with a tour herself. Man-eating Melissa, who had already worked her way through two husbands. Not that you could condemn a woman just for being married twice – she had been married twice herself – but Melissa, with her fake fingernails and her two divorces, why, why, why had they ever thought it was a good idea to go into business with Melissa?
There had been room for two firms offering a similar kind of thing: plenty of customers to go round, in fact, and even if there had not been, you didn’t have to jump into bed with your competitors, figuratively or literally. It was not as if she had any definite proof, except that Marcus seemed to have changed recently. He had once been her rock: the one person in the world she could always turn to, the one person who would always be on her side. It did not feel like that any more. When they were at home together they skirted around one another, as if each were afraid of too close an encounter, lest they find in the other what they already feared to be there.
When it began to rain Jo drew up her hood and carried on walking. It was too wet to draw, but she did not want to return to the house, where Sean’s cupboard stood fatally wounded in his bedroom. Her boots sounded out a steady rhythm against the tarmac, although she wasn’t sure where she was going any more. It was like the day after Lauren disappeared, when she and Dom had joined the search, carrying on long after the weather turned against them, refusing to stop when everyone advised them to; continuing to look because there was nothing to do except go on looking. Scouring the countryside, yet hardly knowing what they were looking for, because it was perfectly obvious that Lauren had not wandered off into the fields on her own. Someone had taken her. Someone had wheeled the pushchair down the street towards the sea, then turned aside into the public gardens and from there up on to the cliff path, where they had tossed the buggy – but not Lauren, thank heaven, not Lauren herself – over the edge of the cliff.
Where was Lauren taken after that? In place of the valley bottom, misty with rain, Jo pictured the cliff path, following the shape of the land where it rose in imitation of a round-topped rolling wave, the path sometimes wide eno
ugh to walk two abreast, sometimes narrowing to single file, hemmed in by the gorse which grew there in abundance. She pictured the abductor, a shadowy figure carrying Lauren along the path, further and further away from the village street, which was already alive with rumours of a missing child. Jo began to walk faster in tandem with the figure in her mind, her boots splashing in the puddles, her breath coming harder and harder, but although the figure on the path did not appear to hurry, even encumbered as it was with a child, she could make no ground upon it. The path twisted out of sight and the figure vanished with it. From somewhere down the years, she could hear the voice of a child, fearful, uncertain: ‘Why didn’t you come for me?’
She realized that she was gasping for breath, all but running along the road. She slowed to a steady walk, conscious of the cold perspiration which was running down her back, making her shirt feel damp inside her anorak. It was not Lauren who had asked that question. Lauren had been too young to talk properly when she was taken away. Jo had never heard her speaking in sentences. The voice belonged to that other little girl, standing uncertainly at the kerbside, behind the railings which guarded the William Street School infants’ gate, waiting for what had seemed like an eternity, until someone came to collect her. A car screeching to a halt, the result of last-minute arrangements cobbled together in a hurry, to take care of her until ‘things were sorted out’. That had been the first time they had taken Mum away to the hospital – when she had come home a few days later. Not like the last time. The vision of the wooden garage doors had been growing in her mind, but she pushed it away. ‘No,’ she said aloud. She did not want to go back there.
With a start she realized that she had almost reached Satterthwaite. In her hurry to leave the house she had forgotten to make up her usual flask, but she was briefly cheered by the thought that when she got to the Eagle and Child she could go inside and have a coffee. Alas, when she reached the pub she found it was closed. There was nowhere else to get a warm drink until you reached the Grizedale Visitor Centre, which was at least another mile and a half along the road.