‘Hang on,’ he mutters, and she hears him relay this information to the others. Arthur’s okay.
‘The doctors think he might have died if you hadn’t got him out so fast,’ she tells him. ‘It’s lucky he wasn’t at home by himself, which he would’ve been by lunchtime today. So in a way, what’s happened in Tuckbox may actually have saved his life.’
‘Huh.’
‘I want to thank you, Sam.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Mutesi said it was stress and exhaustion that set him off. So what I actually did was almost kill him.’
‘You made a good decision in the end.’
‘Cut it out, will you.’ He doesn’t sound annoyed; she senses that he’s pleased. ‘I know what you’re doing. It’s like getting the Sunday school prize for “most improved student”. All it means is you were really, really shit to start with and the teacher still hates your guts but you did quite well in the Bible knowledge test so they reckon they ought to give you something.’
Eliza finds herself smiling. After all, it’s true. That’s exactly what she’s doing.
‘Is that what happened to you?’ she asks.
‘Yep. Got some dinosaur stickers.’
‘Nice! In my case it was swimming club when I was twelve. They gave me a certificate: Eliza McClean, most improved swimmer. Most improved! I thought it was downright insulting.’
‘Could you even swim?’
‘Took me twenty minutes to paddle the length of the pool. Everyone else was dressed by the time I got out.’
‘Pathetic.’
‘Oh—and could you tell Mutesi her son Isaac is on his way from Montreal?’ suggests Eliza, hoping to build on this lighter moment.
‘Okay. Montreal.’
‘The Canadian police have been great.’
‘Okay. Right.’ He sounds vague, suddenly. His mind is beginning to lead him down some other, more dangerous path. She needs to bring him back.
‘It’ll be dark soon,’ she says. ‘Have you got central heating? This room I’m in is freezing.’
‘Yeah, we’re okay.’
‘I can arrange to have blankets dropped off. Let me know what you need.’
‘I dunno. I dunno … it’s not … fuck, did I really kill Robert?’
‘Stop,’ she says firmly. ‘Park that thought for now.’
‘I killed someone today. How the hell do I park that?’
He’s going off the air again, spiralling into agitation. She’s getting used to these abrupt changes of mood. Brigitte Uwase saw them at first hand, and her observations are summarised on the white board:
Loose cannon. Mood swings—impulsive/reflective
Capable of compassion. Not a natural killer?
V nervous of attack from street/sniper
Never lets go of gun, seems experienced in handling it Taking pills regularly—speed?
‘I hated Robert Lacey,’ he’s saying. ‘And I had bloody good reason to hate him, and he hated me, but I can’t believe I killed him. He’s got parents. Have you found them?’
‘They haven’t been informed yet.’
‘How are they supposed to get over this? And a brother, I think he’s in Hong Kong.’
‘That’s right.’
‘He’ll be hearing the news any time now. Some twat shot his brother.’ There’s a long pause. ‘I’m getting a bit tired now, Eliza. I’m so fucking tired. I’m taking Ritalin to keep myself awake but Jesus, I’m …’
The sentence drifts into nothing. Paul is already running a Google search on the effects of misusing Ritalin.
‘You’d like to sleep?’ asks Eliza.
‘To rest. D’you think people really rest in peace when they die?’
‘I don’t know. I often wonder. What do you think?’
‘I just hope the hurting will stop. I think it will, because there won’t be any brain activity to feel it. I’m looking forward to that.’
‘Tell me about the hurting.’
‘It fucking hurts.’
Eliza has begun to doodle on her notepad, drawing heavy, straight lines. Bars, bars. Anxious bars. She adds others at right angles to make a blue-ink lattice of bars. A cage. She knows what question must come next, but she always has to steel herself to utter the words.
‘Sam,’ she asks, ‘are you thinking about killing yourself?’
It sounds as though he’s dropped the phone, or maybe he’s just shifting it from one hand to another. After a moment, he’s back.
‘Of course I am. I think about it all the time. I’ve been thinking about it for years. I dream about it, like other people dream of … I dunno, winning the lottery. Every time I get my head above water something comes and knocks me down again. In the end you just get too tired. You’ve had enough. You want out.’
‘Are you thinking about killing yourself right now?’
‘I’ve got a shotgun in my hand.’
‘Is that your plan? To shoot yourself?’
It was Ethan, the ex-pilot, who taught the recruits to ask these questions. Suicide’s the elephant in the room. You won’t tip a suicidal person over the edge by talking about it. If you think it’s on the cards, for Pete’s sake don’t fanny about—ask them straight out. If they say yes, ask them for details. Ask them when. Ask them how. Ask them: What’s your plan? Focus on the damned elephant. Turn a spotlight on that big grey bastard, so it has nowhere to hide.
Then he’d strolled among the group, looking into the eyes of each trainee, insisting that each of them ask him the question out loud.
Are you thinking about killing yourself, Ethan?
Not good enough. You sound shit-scared. Let’s hear it again.
Are you thinking about killing yourself, Ethan?
Better. Yes, I am.
Have you made a plan?
Yes.
Would you tell me about your plan? When? How?
They were disturbing questions to ask, even to a smiling Californian in a brightly lit room at Hendon Police College. One of the recruits—Andy—took three attempts before intoning the words with such wooden insincerity that he had the rest of the group giggling. It was only later that they learned his sister had hanged herself at the age of thirteen. He dropped out of the course.
‘Sam,’ Eliza says now, ‘you and I will sort this out. We can find a solution if we work together.’
‘We can’t.’
‘We can, if we—’
‘Eliza, please don’t give me any more bullshit. Please don’t tell me it’s all going to be okay. It’s not going to be okay. Robert can’t be resurrected. If I walk out of here I’ll be in a cell tonight. I’ll be spending the rest of my life behind bars.’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘I wish I’d never come near Tuckbox. I wish I’d got back in the Landy and driven away. But I didn’t. Killing another human being is a humbling experience.’
‘Humbling?’ Eliza writes it on her notepad—humbling—and immediately begins to scrawl more straight lines around the letters. Her jotter’s becoming cluttered with dark-blue bars. ‘Why humbling?’
‘Because it makes your own life less than worthless. It makes you wish you’d never been born. If I’d never been born, Robert would still be swanning about the place. His mother would still have both her sons.’
‘We’ve made enquiries,’ she admits. ‘I know Robert was your stepfather.’
‘’Course you do.’
‘Can you tell me why you argued with him today? Can we start with that?’
‘What’s the fucking point?’
‘So I can understand why you didn’t get back into your Land Rover and drive away.’
She listens to his breathing, and draws bars. The nib of her biro rips right through the paper.
‘I don’t know where to start,’ he says.
TWENTY-FOUR
Sam
She sounds nice. She really does. She has what Granny would have called a pleasant voice. Scottish, he thinks. Yes, definitely Scottish.
He
knows she’s not really on his side. She’s just doing her job. She’s a professional Nice Person with her Pleasant Voice, and in the background there’s an army of professional Nasty People ready to shoot him less pleasantly if they get the chance. Good cops, bad cops. But she’s making a fine job of pretending to care whether he lives or dies. It’s better than nothing.
There’s a weird kind of peace in Tuckbox now. Mutesi is lying flat on her back in the booth with one arm behind her head. Neil has pushed an armchair over to a radiator and is looking happy as a clam, doodling on a serviette with Emmanuel’s coloured pencils. Those two seem to have decided just to listen and let the negotiator do her job. Not Abi, though. She hasn’t let down her guard for a moment. She’s found a booklet of instructions for the espresso machine and is pretending to flick through them, but he’s noticed her surreptitiously eyeing his gun. She’s thinking up plans to take it off him, and she’ll act fast if he makes a mistake. Can’t blame her for that. I’d do the same in her shoes.
‘I don’t know where to start,’ he tells Eliza.
‘You could just start at the beginning.’
‘A very good place to start?’
She laughs. Pleasant laugh.
It’s a quote from The Sound of Music. Sam once gave Granny the video for Christmas, and she used to chortle about how devilishly handsome Captain von Trapp was. She reckoned under all that singing-naval-officer charm he was a man like any other and probably snored his socks off.
The beginning.
Dad was the beginning. He dredges his memory for snippets of Dad, up to and including the night his heart stopped. He tells Eliza about the blue lights and the Santa Claus devil and that monstrous Blu-Tack; how he sees his father’s dead face often, especially in the middle of the night, and how the death-and-disinfectant fills his nostrils and smothers his breath, and he wakes up yelling at the top of his voice. That’s something he’s never told anyone—except Nicola, of course, though it turned out she was the last person he should have trusted.
Eliza is patient with his rambling on. She mutters the odd remark—did he? or oh no!—but she doesn’t interrupt. Not once. That’s a first. Nobody has ever let him tell the whole story without butting in.
‘D’you really want to hear about this?’ he asks, taking a look at the clock. He’s been talking non-stop for over half an hour.
‘I really do.’
‘I’m kind of imagining Nicola and a load of coppers sitting around with you, taking the piss out of every word I say.’
‘It doesn’t work like that, Sam. This conversation is between you and me. Negotiators stay separate from everyone else. I’m in a small room set aside for negotiation, and right now the only other person in here is my colleague. His name is Paul. Believe me, Paul is the last person in the world to laugh at you.’
‘Okay. Okay. I believe you, dunno why.’
‘So,’ she says. ‘Go on.’
When he comes to the part about running out of the hospital and falling down in the car park, he hears something real in her voice. She’s upset; she’s not pretending. It’s as though she is there in the hospital grounds, watching eight-year-old Sam wetting myself.
‘Sam,’ she whispers. ‘Sam, Sam. That must have been the worst day of your life.’
‘It was like having a bloody great trapdoor open up under my feet. I’ve never felt safe again. And Robert was right there—the caped crusader—ready to swoop down and turn our tragedy into his triumph.’
‘You sound bitter.’
‘I am bitter. Robert Lacey stole my mother and then he destroyed her. It was all a game to him.’
‘A game.’ Eliza’s silent for a moment, perhaps making a note. ‘Tell me what he did.’
‘It’s really hard to explain. He was clever. He didn’t bash us with sticks or starve us or lock us in cupboards. The way he abused people, he left no marks. It was slow, it took years. That’s why nobody ever listened to me.’
‘Well, I am. I’m listening right now.’
There’s so much to tell: all those years of Robert World. To this day, Sam can’t pinpoint exactly when the man got his hooks into Mum. Looking back, he spots subtleties that passed him by when he was a child. The look on Granny’s face, the tiny lines around her mouth. Steady hands, eh?
‘I’m not suggesting Mum and he had an affair back then, when Dad was alive,’ he says. ‘I mean … she wouldn’t. She adored my dad. She would never have done that.’
‘It sounds as though you’re doubting,’ says Eliza.
‘I’m not. I’m sure she was faithful to Dad. And Robert would have hated that. He always had to be the centre of attention. He had to be loved and admired and above all he had to win every battle. There was one thing my dad had that he didn’t.’
‘Your mum?’
‘Got it in one.’
•
By the time the funeral was over, and all the very-very-sad-for-one-day people had stopped hugging one another and scurried back to their own lives, Robert was a fixture. He claimed to have a soft spot for Sam, and was always turning up with presents or treats.
‘I knew he wasn’t real, though,’ he tells Eliza.
‘How did you know he wasn’t real?’
‘You should have seen the expression on his face when Mum wasn’t looking. He wished I’d do him a favour and drop dead too.’
Mum was dreading their first Christmas without Dad. Tammy came to stay at Tyndale but there weren’t any gales of laughter. Robert invited everyone for lunch at his house, including Granny. He cooked a traditional Christmas dinner and Sam had to admit the food was spectacular, especially the brandy butter. He had seconds of everything and felt sick. An awful lot of wine was drunk. Robert proposed a toast—To Angus!—and the four adults clinked glasses. It was one of those times when people make loads of noise but you don’t hear a single genuine, happy laugh all day. Granny and Tammy kept looking at one another with sly little smirks. In the car on the way home, Mum told them both off.
‘He went to so much trouble,’ she scolded. ‘He wanted to help us through our first Christmas without Angus. No ulterior motive.’
‘Yeah, right,’ snorted Tammy. She was slurring her words a bit. ‘And I’m the Madonna.’
‘Why do you two have to be so cynical?’
‘I talked to Connie again. She finally dumped him after she caught him shagging a waitress in the walk-in fridge. She hasn’t got a good word to say about Robert Lacey. She ended up on antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, in psychotherapy. He gaslighted her for the entire five years, made her think she was going mad.’
‘He’s told me all about that. Connie’s a compulsive liar! You can’t believe a word she says.’
‘Pots and kettles,’ said Tammy.
•
One freezing winter evening, Granny turned up unexpectedly. She and Sam went to make sure Sundance was all bedded down in his stable. It was already dark and the air tasted of ice, but the stable smelled of warm horse and sweet hay. It was a happy time.
‘I wish Dad was here,’ said Sam, as they were tugging off their wellies at the kitchen door.
She put her arm around him. ‘We’ve still got each other, Sammy.’
She only dropped in for a cup of tea, but of course Mum asked her to stay for supper. Granny sat in one of the two little yellow armchairs while Mum pottered about. Sam lay on the rug by the Rayburn, doing boring homework and looking forward to mutton casserole. He could smell it in the oven, and his mouth was literally watering. It was tricky to write while lying on his stomach but since his teacher never gave him good marks anyway, he didn’t bother to move. Careless mistakes, Sam. Please copy this out again. Sam, spelling! Sam, this is too untidy. Sam, you must take more care with your handwriting. Sam, Sam, Sam, blah, blah, blah. Silly cow.
The adults were talking about a decision Mum had to make. She’d been offered a full-time job as head gardener for a stately home just outside the village. It was open to the public. She’d have three
people working under her.
‘We could certainly do with the money, but I’m not sure it’s the right time,’ she told Granny, as they laid the table together.
‘Gosh, what a fabulous opportunity!’
‘It is.’
‘The Hamley House garden is glorious,’ said Granny. ‘Prestigious too, always winning awards. What a feather in your cap! If it’s Sam you’re worried about, don’t be. I’ll happily collect him from school.’
‘Robert thinks I should turn it down.’
Granny was rummaging in the cutlery drawer. He can still see it now, that storm-cloud plait hanging down her back, and the way she stopped clattering the knives and forks.
‘Robert,’ she said. Just the one word. Robert. She made it sound empty.
‘Mm, he’s dead against it. Thinks I shouldn’t take on such a big challenge.’
‘You could do that job standing on your head.’
‘He’s worried I’ll get too stressed.’
‘And why, pray, does Robert Lacey’s view have any bearing on this decision?’
‘Oh, Patricia.’ Mum slammed the Rayburn door with her foot. She was holding the casserole dish in her oven-mitted hands, and the smell of it wafted around the kitchen. ‘He’s kind to Sam. He’s kind to me. He’s a genuine friend.’
Granny wasn’t having a bar of it.
‘He’s a pervasive weed. Convolvulus. It looks quite pretty but it takes over the whole garden once it has its nasty roots down. You can’t get rid of the stuff. Chokes all the other plants.’
‘That’s bloody rude.’
Mum didn’t often swear. Sam sat up, silently cheering. Go, Granny!
‘Someone has to tell the truth,’ retorted Granny. ‘Lacey’s winding himself around you. He’s throwing out his tendrils.’
Mum’s cheeks were flushed as she dumped the casserole onto the table.
‘He’s simply a friend.’
‘Ah yes. A friend.’ Granny was chuckling. ‘But what sort of a friend is he, I wonder?’
‘One I can rely on. Are you suggesting we’re …?’
Sam was all agog, waiting for her to finish the sentence. What? We’re what?
The Secrets of Strangers Page 15