She takes a look at the screen, and her heart sinks. The caller is Mum.
Robert Lacey has a mother. Of course he does. Why wouldn’t he? A woman, a real person—who adores her son presumably; most mothers do—is trying to make contact with him right now, right at this moment. Mum. She will have seen Tuckbox Café on the news. She’ll be so worried.
The noise stops. The screen darkens. Abi stands for a time, weighing the phone in her hand. There’s a pattern lock on the screen. Pity. There are a hundred things she could do with a phone right now. She tries a few of the obvious patterns: an ‘L’ shape, a square, diagonal lines. No good. On the next try, she’s locked out.
Something—a quiet sound, almost inaudible—makes her swing around to peer into the room.
‘Nicola?’ she whispers.
Sure enough, there’s someone under the sink. She’s making agitated movements with both hands, shooing Abi back towards the café door, mouthing, ‘Go away, go away.’
Abi crouches down beside the cupboard. She can only just see the pale face.
‘Look, you must be bloody uncomfortable in there. Don’t you want this to end? He won’t give himself up until you’ve come out and talked to him.’
‘No! No way!’
Abi’s not impressed. She’d dearly like to call Sam into the room. That might be the quickest way to cut through all this. If Nicola plays her cards right—and surely she knows how to do that?—their tiff could end in kissing and making up before Sam is carted off in handcuffs.
Then again, it might not end so well. It didn’t end at all well for Robert.
‘You’ll have to speak to him sooner or later,’ she hisses.
‘No.’
‘He’s the father of your child.’
‘I’ve nothing to say to him.’
‘Nothing to say? Even though this whole thing seems to be because of you?’ Abi shakes her head as she straightens. ‘Well, you’d better start thinking of something.’
THIRTY-ONE
Sam
Abi looks poleaxed when she returns from the storeroom. She hands Sam Robert’s phone without a word. When he sees who was trying to get in touch with the dead man, guilt takes a hefty swing at Sam and punches him in the stomach.
What’s Mrs Lacey’s name? Sheila. He met her a handful of times: a neat, energetic woman with sad eyes. She’ll be about eighty by now. She brought up two boys by herself. She doted on Robert. Sam will have broken her heart today.
Someone’s turned off the radio. Good. He doesn’t want to hear another news bulletin about the hostage situation in South London. Poor Sheila. He imagines the old lady sitting by the phone, waiting for news.
‘This Nicola,’ says Abi suddenly.
‘What about Nicola?’
She’s tapping her fingernails, making weird shapes with her mouth. She’s jittery—or is she fuming about something? She reminds Sam of himself.
‘What about Nicola?’ he asks again.
‘Dunno. Just strikes me that Robert’s dead and we’re all stuck in here, in fear of our lives, because of a mythological figure. The face that launched the incident in Tuckbox Café. Must be a hell of a gal to cause all this fuss. I’m just wondering who the heck she is.’
•
He didn’t know that summer evening was going to change everything. Twenty-one years old, in his shirtsleeves, riding his old Honda along the narrow lanes to the Wheatsheaf. He’d been haymaking on the farm where he worked, and they’d had a perfect week for it.
He left home at seventeen, when Robert bought Tuckbox. He had to. Tyndale farmhouse was rented out and there was no way Sam was going to move to a small flat in London with Robert and Mum. Over the next few years he jumped through all the hoops Robert held up for him: worked on a variety of farms around the country, managed one of them single-handed, scraped through a course at agricultural college. He never had trouble finding work. The darkness was always there, always lurking somewhere inside him, but he kept himself going with the promise that one day he would get back to Tyndale. When Tim Appleton announced that he was retiring and would be giving up the land, Robert couldn’t find an excuse to put him off any longer. In a few months’ time Sam would take over the lease. He was coming home.
He felt as though he was overflowing as he turned in at the Wheatsheaf. Midsummer evenings in Sussex always stirred him up. The happy scents of hay and clover, the lilac haze of dusk, the wrongness of blue lights through his curtains, the darkness swallowing him. It all seemed to be happening again, right now. Sometimes it only took the smell of newly mown hay to send his heart thundering into overdrive.
His clay bird club mates were already drinking in the beer garden. He could hear the noisy sods as soon as he took off his helmet. He stepped into the pub through the front door—stone flags, dark wood—and stopped at the bar to get himself a pint. And there she was.
He didn’t believe in love at first sight; didn’t believe in love at all, really. Dad had loved Sam and Mum, but not enough to stay alive. Robert was a monster who twisted love to make a net in which to entangle people. Sam looked at the new barmaid with her blonde boy-cut and her tight jeans and his first thought was that she was sexy. He had no interest beyond that. There had been a series of girlfriends since Donna Davies at the youth group picnic: one at agricultural college, another who did the accounts for a farm where he worked in Norfolk. He kept moving on. So did they.
He watched the barmaid stretching to get something off a shelf, chatting over her shoulder to a couple of middle-aged suits. A cropped T-shirt revealed a lot of flat stomach and a glittering green gem in her naval. She wasn’t from around here, she told the suits. They said something cheeky about her being better-looking than Alistair, the grumpy landlord, and she hurled banter back at them while she took their money. She was nearly as tall as Sam and twice as confident. A tattoo of a vine wound all the way from her wrist to her shoulder. She caught him staring at it, and smiled. There was something about her smile, a gleam in the slate-grey eyes, as though she was thinking about some private joke.
While she was pouring his pint she asked if this was his local.
‘No. Sort of. Yes.’
‘No, sort of, and yes?’
‘I’m here to meet some guys. The clay bird club.’
She raised her eyebrows, pointing with her chin towards the beer garden. ‘That bunch of clowns?’
He nodded, feeling like a clown himself. She set the beer down in front of him.
‘But you live round here?’
He rested his helmet on the top of the bar. Within a couple of minutes he was telling her all about how he’d soon be taking over his family farm. She walked around the tables, gathering glasses, asking where exactly was Tyndale, and why weren’t his parents there now? That led to him explaining about Dad.
‘Hey!’ She came closer, resting her fingertips on his arm. ‘That’s something we’ve got in common. I lost my mum when I was nine.’
Maybe that was what first drew them together: the shared experience of learning at a young age that parents weren’t immortal, and death was really real. Bereaved kids think differently to others.
The Wheatsheaf was pretty quiet that evening. Most customers were in the beer garden, buying drinks from grumpy Alistair through a servery window. Whenever she had a free moment the barmaid gravitated back to Sam. He learned that her name was Nicola. They talked about the year she’d just spent as an au pair in France, her ambition to train as an early-years teacher. He heard about her feckless kid of a father, whom she despised. When he asked what had brought her to the middle of nowhere, she laid a hand on her chest. Long fingers.
‘Running from a broken heart. And this job, and a cheap place to live above the pub while I get on my feet. Alistair was in the army with my uncle. He’s driving me spare.’
Sam felt as though he’d been reunited with a childhood friend. A couple of clay bird mates came in from the garden to use the toilets and spotted him, but once they’d worked
out he was chatting up the new barmaid they winked and left him to it.
Sam and Nicola were still talking when Alistair called time, ringing the brass bell and bellowing like a bull: Time, ladies and gentlemen, please! It was the jolliest he’d been all evening, miserable sod. The man was a natural spoilsport.
Sam picked up his helmet. ‘Well,’ he said.
That gleam in her eyes. ‘Well.’
‘I’d better be off.’
‘You know where to find me.’
‘You’re not going anywhere?’
‘I’ll be right here.’ She made a blah face, sticking out her tongue. ‘In my garret room. Come and rescue me, Sam Ballard.’
•
He was back two nights later, and then again, and again. The Wheatsheaf had become an irresistible magnet, and the summer obliged by providing one balmy evening after another. One night, as the pub closed, Nicola said she’d love to go for a blast on the back of Sam’s bike and see where he grew up. So he lent her his helmet and blast they did, pelting through the fragrant darkness with her arms around his waist. The hedgerows gleamed white with elderflower and old man’s beard.
It was midnight when Sam stopped at the top of the hill on the border of Tyndale Farm. They perched side by side on the five-barred gate leading into Sundance’s field, sharing a bag of pork scratchings from the pub, while a full moon rose above sleeping woodland on the other side of the valley. The tawny owls were hunting. One swept close overhead with a whirr of wings, startling Nicola.
Sam could see the place where Dad’s ashes had been scattered. A mare and her foal lay dozing by the very same trough where Mum washed the urn. He kept shtum about that. Bit of a passion killer, and he didn’t want to spoil his chances by doing or saying anything stupid. The blackness inside him had lightened just enough for him to hope for the coming of day.
Instead, he pointed out Tyndale’s boundaries to Nicola, naming the fields: Beacon Meadow, Weston’s Laine, Poverty Bottom and the others—sheltered pastures bounded by hedges and copses, rolling swathes of maize and wheat and yellow oilseed rape. He knew every inch, every gate, every trough; the composition of the soil, what would best grow where, which corners were badly drained or awkwardly shaped or steep. They were as familiar to him as his own family.
The farmhouse lay just a couple of hundred yards off, tucked among the trees. A light shone from his old bedroom. A dog barked. Time rolled back: Dad was in the shed, Bouncer and Snoops were mooching about, Mum was doing the farm accounts at the kitchen table. Sundance dreamed in his stable, Granny in her doll’s house. All was still well.
As they talked in murmurs, Nicola and he kept edging closer and closer together on the gate. Awkward but promising.
‘And you’re really going to come back and run this farm?’ she asked.
‘I am! In the New Year.’
‘Don’t you feel a bit suffocated by all that family history?’
‘Nope. I feel suffocated without it. This is my home.’
She looked across the valley, towards the spire of Holdsworth church. ‘Must be nice. Knowing where you’re going.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘I left my heart in Paris,’ she said, sighing. ‘He’s an older man. Much older. Could be my dad. That isn’t the problem, though. The problem is that he’s married.’
‘Oh.’
‘But he’s in love with me. I was au pair for their children. In the end I had to leave. He had to put the children first, which meant saving his marriage.’
Sam was shocked by this revelation. He wasn’t sure how to react.
‘Unhappily married,’ she added, sounding defensive, so he muttered something about how that was fair enough and it wasn’t for him to judge. Privately he thought the man sounded like a real prick. Slept with the pretty nanny, sacked her when it suited him. He sounded a lot like Robert.
After a while the dozing horses rolled to their feet and came over to say hello. Sam hopped off the gate to greet them. The foal kept nuzzling against his mother, tottering on spindly legs.
‘So what’s this spot called?’ asked Nicola.
‘Sundance’s field,’ replied Sam, stooping to pull up handfuls of lush grass from through the gate. ‘On the farm map it’s labelled “Frontacre”, but nobody calls it that anymore. Sundance Kid was a horse who lived here for years.’
The mare snorted as she ate the grass. He felt the warmth of her breath on his palm. It was like his dream, when Dad became a cloud.
‘My stepfather had Sundance shot,’ he said.
‘No! Why?’
‘He claimed he had colic and was in agony and there was no choice, but he was lying. Of course the vet would have offered options. Robert went for the final solution.’
‘He didn’t like Sundance?’
‘He didn’t like my grandmother. Sundance was her horse.’
The moonlight made Nicola’s hair seem luminous as she swung down from the gate. She put her arms around Sam’s neck.
‘Poor Sundance,’ she said.
He took her hand and led her along the hedge, away from the trough and the spinney and the memories. She didn’t ask why. They stopped in a sheltered corner of the field, where the gloom was splashed with glowing patches of buttercups. For a time he forgot everything else.
As he dropped her back at the Wheatsheaf, a world-beating dawn chorus was bursting from every copse and hedgerow—bursting from somewhere in his chest too. He felt light. He felt free. Something broken inside him had clicked into its rightful place, back there among the buttercups.
•
‘She mended me,’ he tells the listeners in the café. ‘I was happy! We were happy. We went on holiday to Casablanca. Our friends started calling us Samola. You know, like Brangelina.’
‘Please God, no,’ mutters Abi.
‘Yeah, yeah, sickening, but I was kind of chuffed. That was our first and last proper holiday. At New Year the great day came, the moment I’d been waiting for all my life—literally all my life. I took over the lease at Tyndale. I hit the ground running because I knew Robert would dance a bloody jig if I bombed. Tim Appleton was a big help with the business side of things. I knew a fair bit about land management and could fix just about any bit of machinery that broke down, but there was a hell of a lot still to learn. I’d be out all day and up half the night, trying to get on top of the paperwork: accounts, bills, massive bureaucracy every time stock was moved on or off the place, hundred-page applications for subsidies. I was working sixteen-hour days when Nicola found out she was three months pregnant.’
‘Oh dear.’ Neil grimaces. ‘Bit of a shock, I bet.’
‘You can say that again. She wasn’t going to tell me—she’d even booked herself in for an abortion—but one night she came out with it; said I had a right to know. We panicked and talked and panicked and talked, and finally decided to give it a go together. She moved into Tyndale. We got a collie puppy called Toby. I wanted my child to have a friend, like I had Bouncer and Snoops. I went along with Nicola for the scan. I saw that funny little shadow on the screen, and it was like being hit by a baseball bat, and I just …’
He can’t finish the sentence. He can’t. He’ll start blubbing. This whole story is leading to Julia. The last time he kissed his little girl, she’d had her bath and was all tucked up and giggling under her dinosaur duvet in his old bedroom. Blue pyjamas and rosy cheeks. He sat on her bed while she snuggled up to him, just as close as she could possibly get. They read her favourite story, The Tiger Who Came to Tea. She was sucking her thumb. She was warm and soft and smelled of baby shampoo.
‘I’d do anything for Julia,’ he says. ‘I’ve never known love like it.’
Mutesi smiles at him. ‘There is no love like it.’
The nurse seems older than she did earlier. Her eyelids are drooping, her cheeks seem to sag. She came off a night shift this morning, he remembers, so she’s been awake for … well, not as long as he has, but a very long time. Seeing him so upset about Jul
ia seems to have knocked her. He wonders why. He wonders who she is, really.
Neil’s still sitting on the floor with one outstretched leg across the other, head tilted back, staring at the ceiling. Abi has thrown herself into another armchair, turning it around so that it’s facing Sam. They’re all exhausted. Sam doesn’t think any one of them is seriously frightened anymore. Not really. They’ve got the measure of him. They’re stressed, they’d like to get out of here, for sure—at least the women would, he’s not so sure about Neil. After all, he and Buddy haven’t got anywhere else to go.
Silence is a funny thing. It can be throbbing with silent screams. It can be awkward as all hell. It can be companionable, like this one. Perhaps he’s beginning to hallucinate. He’s been doing that a lot lately. He’s in some kind of weird prayer meeting with his three oldest friends in the world: Mutesi, Neil and Abi. He’s pretty sure there’s no afterlife; he doesn’t believe in a spirit world. He really doesn’t think there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. And yet at this moment he has an overwhelming feeling that his parents are very close by. They’re waiting for him. He can hear Dad humming over the rumble of the tractor: pom, pom, pom. He can feel his mother’s sadness. Perhaps it’s time to pluck up the courage and join them? He’s done enough damage here. He’s really trashed the changing room this time.
Of course the downside could be that bloody Robert’s somehow talked his way in. Sam will be seriously pissed if he gets to the pearly gates and spots that toothpaste smile ahead of him in the queue. He’s picturing getting off a train at a celestial version of Victoria Station to see Mum and Dad standing side by side on the other side of the pearly barrier. Mum’s wearing her patched jeans, Dad his overalls and canvas hat. Robert’s waving as he waits for his ticket to get checked. Yoohoo! Meanwhile Sam is struggling along at the back of the queue, desperate to get his story in before that conniving bastard tells his parents that Sam murdered him.
The Secrets of Strangers Page 24