Under a Dark Cloud

by Louisa Scarr

  His head is bowed, his back hunched, and with a start she realises this must be where his mother is laid to rest. She hesitates. It feels wrong to disturb him, but then her phone beeps in her bag and he turns.

  He smiles when he sees her and she lifts her hand in a half-wave, then walks over.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’ he asks. His face is drawn but he doesn’t look like he’s been crying.

  She takes a seat next to him. ‘I didn’t. I was wandering round the village.’

  ‘Not much to see.’

  ‘No. Although you seem to have a lot of community centres.’

  Robin laughs. ‘We do.’

  They sit in silence for a moment, undisturbed except for birdsong and the gentle rustle of wind in the trees. ‘It’s pretty here,’ Freya says.

  Robin nods. ‘Mum always loved the village. Said there was nowhere else she wanted to be.’ He points to a distant grave, and Freya can see fresh flowers have been left by the stone. ‘Her ashes are over there.’

  ‘Do you remember her well?’ Freya asks. She recalls Sandra’s words and knows that Robin’s mum died when he was young, cancer of some kind.

  ‘Bits and pieces,’ he says, but he doesn’t expand, his mouth set in a hard line. Freya senses not to push it.

  After a moment, he stands up. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Can’t sit here all day.’

  They head back over the bridge and towards the playpark.

  ‘I was eight when Mum died.’ Robin’s voice is soft but clear as they walk in the warm spring breeze. ‘She’d been ill for a while, and nobody had visited except the nurses and Josie and Sandra. Nobody else gave Dad, Georgia or I the time of day.’ Freya glances up at him; his hands are shoved in his pockets, his gaze directed at his feet. She stays quiet, silently urging him to keep talking. ‘Then, when she died, suddenly the house was full. People dropping off food, asking me how I was. How did they think I fucking was? My mother had just died.’

  They walk another ten paces or so. ‘And then Finn turned up. Rugby ball in his hand. And he fucking hated rugby, never wanted to play. He couldn’t catch to save his life, probably still can’t now.’ He laughs, but it’s sad, almost reluctant. ‘There he was, ready to go.’ He stops, and they both look out over the playing field. ‘That meant more to me than anything. That Finn knew I didn’t want to talk. Didn’t want to be around all these people. I just wanted to chuck a ball around and pretend everything was normal.’ He shrugs now, and Freya sees him swallowing hard. Then he sighs, a long breath in and out. ‘I just want to help him. Like he helped me.’

  ‘You will, Robin,’ Freya says gently. She has a sudden urge to take his hand, but she suppresses it, pushing her own hands hard into her coat pockets. He glances at her with a forced smile, then looks out to the open green space.

  ‘Football in the winter, cricket in the summer,’ he says. ‘That’s where they had all the candles and stuff. For Jacob.’

  Conversation over then, Freya thinks. ‘Robin,’ she says instead. He stops. She’s been thinking about this, and she wants to share. ‘Do you think Josie would have kept anything from that time?’

  He pauses. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like diaries, newspaper reports. Anything that might explain Finn’s involvement.’

  She can see Robin thinking. ‘His weather notebooks, maybe. Josie mentioned she still has them.’

  ‘How would they help?’

  ‘He recorded all the measurements from his weather station. He had this home-made thing, cobbled together out of wood and random electronics. Twice a day, he’d write them down, without fail. But when we were older, he wouldn’t let me see the notebooks, and I suspected he was also using them as a diary. Thoughts and feelings and the like.’

  ‘Suspected?’ Freya asks, with a smile.

  Robin returns her expression with a guilty grin. ‘I might have sneaked a look. Once or twice.’ He pauses, and Freya can see the conflict on his face. A huge part of him probably doesn’t want to know, but as a cop, it’s a pure bloody-minded urge to find out the truth. She regrets bringing it up.

  ‘It was thirty years ago,’ she says. ‘There’s no way she’d have kept them all. Besides, we can’t search Josie’s house. We can’t get in, for starters.’

  Robin’s still thinking, his gaze set towards the hill and the row of houses in the distance. ‘Josie used to have a broken window lock. Finn and I would use it to get in the back door when he forgot his key.’

  ‘She’d have fixed it by now.’

  ‘Probably,’ he says, almost to himself. Then he looks at Freya. ‘If she has, that’s it. We go home.’

  ‘And if she hasn’t?’

  Robin leaves the question unanswered. Just starts striding away across the green.

  39

  They walk back up the hill, up Daccabridge Road, towards the alleyway at the back of the terraced houses. Robin reaches over the fence and unlocks Josie’s gate, and the two of them go across the tiny patch of lawn to the back door.

  Robin’s not sure what propels him towards this disaster. What does he hope to gain from searching Josie’s house? For something that might not even exist?

  He stands next to Josie’s back door, the window to his right. It looks like the same crappy single-pane glazing, but there’s no way the lock will still be broken. She must have fixed it by now.

  He glances to Freya; she’s looking at him uncertainly. Then he puts his palm on the window and pushes it to the right.

  At first it doesn’t move, but then slowly, surely, it starts to open. He pushes it enough to get his hand through.

  ‘What now?’ Freya whispers behind him.

  ‘Now,’ Robin says, nerves bunching in his stomach, ‘we go in.’

  * * *

  Everything is exactly how he remembers. Even the wallpaper is the same. Freya pushes the back door closed behind her, and they stand in the tiny kitchen.

  ‘Where do you think they’ll be?’ she asks.

  He looks around. Coming here feels ridiculous. Josie has never been tidy, but in the intervening years the mess seems to have raged out of control. There is stuff everywhere. Piles of magazines stacked on the floor. Drawers full to the brim, some open slightly, their contents preventing their closure.

  ‘You start down here. I’ll take upstairs,’ he replies.

  ‘Okay…’ Freya says.

  He knows what she’s thinking, and she’s right. They should leave now. Get out of here, go and do something nice. Freya is supposed to be on a break from this shit, after all. But instead, he leaves her staring at the mess and trudges towards the staircase.

  Upstairs is no more than two bedrooms and a bathroom. Robin’s childhood home was exactly the same, except they’d split the larger bedroom into two, creating precious privacy for both Robin and Georgia.

  He pushes the door open into Finn’s room, his senses immediately assaulted by reminders from his youth. The room hasn’t changed, even down to the same posters of Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins thumbtacked to the wall. The only difference is the bed is now a double and the smell is distinctly more pleasant.

  Robin remembers Finn’s obsession with Kurt Cobain, his long-held conviction that the musician’s death hadn’t been a suicide. Evidence of his single-mindedness was clear even then, although maybe it hinted at the darker side of Finn’s psyche. The drinking and depression to come.

  He can almost see Finn here, lying face down on his bed, his long limbs hanging off the edge. Reading some book or other while Robin bounced a ball in the doorway, desperate for his company. He never made an effort to find a different friend to hang out with, despite their disparate interests. Why would he? Finn was his best mate. What else mattered?

  Looking at the room now, Robin wonders why Josie has never redecorated. Was it a desire to keep a place that felt like home for her only son, to hold onto the past? Or simply a lack of time?

  He stops for a moment, thinking. There’s no way he and Freya can search the whole house. B
ut equally, seeing this – the level of preservation of Finn’s room – Robin has a strong feeling that Josie wouldn’t have thrown any of the diaries out. His eyes drift up to the loft hatch over the landing.

  He reaches up, opening the small square door and pulling down the ladder. It comes out with a shower of dust. He puts one foot in front of the other on the creaking rungs, then pokes his head through the gap. He gropes around for a light switch, clicking it on.

  The light is dim but illuminates enough of the loft for Robin to see. It’s small, but the floor is boarded, and he carefully, awkwardly, pulls himself up into the space.

  He looks around. There are boxes of many shapes and sizes, most of them close to the opening, where he assumes Josie must have just pushed them in quickly. He opens a few lids. One that clearly contains Christmas decorations and another with some old photo albums. He pulls one of them out: even in the dim light he can see sepia prints, faded shots of a tiny Finn being held by Josie. He stops himself getting distracted and puts it back, but leaves the box close to the entrance.

  He shuffles further into the loft, opening and closing the tops of boxes as he goes. Curled-up cables, random crap, old clothes that must have been fancy-dress outfits. And then he sees something that makes him stop.

  An A4 dark red folder. Plastic pages inside, gold writing on the cover. The National Record of Achievement: Robin had one, as did every teenager leaving school in the Nineties. It’s for the wrong time period, but the folder is stuffed, paper poking out of the plastic pages. Robin picks it up, curious. He opens it: it’s full of old certificates and school reports, dates spanning from their first year of secondary to the last. If something else remains from Finn’s time at secondary school, it will be in here.

  He picks it up, and underneath, there they are. Piles of notebooks, of all shapes and sizes, stacked on top of one another in the box. He selects one: MAR–AUG 90 written in block capitals on the cover. Organised and meticulous, that was Finn all over. He puts it back, then selects another few, their dates marked clearly on the outside.

  He hears Freya shout from downstairs. He takes one last look at the chaos in the loft, then climbs down the ladder, hauling the boxes of notebooks and photo albums with him, the red folder resting on top.

  He carries them down to the living room, where Freya is waiting.

  ‘Lunch,’ she says grandly, pointing at two sandwiches, a bag of apples and two cans of Diet Coke.

  ‘You risked going out?’ Robin replies with a frown. ‘Did anyone see you?’

  ‘I went out the back.’ She pauses. ‘I was hungry. You’d rather I starve?’

  He shakes his head, disbelievingly. ‘You’d make a shit burglar,’ he comments, but reluctantly concedes defeat. His stomach is rumbling, too; it’s been a long day already.

  ‘Pass me the cheese one. Since you whinged about the tuna yesterday,’ Robin mutters.

  They sit down at Josie’s dining table; Robin takes a bite of the sandwich, while Freya pulls over the box of notebooks.

  ‘You found them,’ she says, rifling through. ‘What’s in there?’ she asks, pointing to the other box from the loft.

  He drags it over. ‘Photo albums.’

  Freya eagerly reaches forward, notebooks forgotten, grabbing an album from the top. She flicks quickly past the ones of Finn as a baby, then stops, a triumphant look on her face. She turns it round.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Robin groans. ‘What have I done?’

  It’s a shot of two small boys: identical shorts, matching cheesy grins. One is taller and thinner, the other stocky, with a good distribution of puppy fat on his chubby cheeks.

  ‘That has to be you,’ Freya exclaims gleefully.

  ‘Yes,’ Robin says, resigned to his fate.

  Freya keeps on looking through, occasionally giggling, a huge grin on her face. ‘Oh, this makes the breaking and entering worthwhile. Look at you!’ She laughs again, pointing to two small grinning faces poking out of carved holes in a big brown cardboard box.

  ‘Don’t mock our castle,’ Robin says. ‘That took us a whole afternoon.’

  ‘How old are you here?’

  ‘Oh, must have been… about five?’

  ‘So you and Finn really did grow up together?’

  ‘Yeah. Sometimes it was the three of us, see?’ He points to a shot of him and Finn, next to an older girl. ‘Until Georgia would get sick of us boys and find something else to do. We’ve always been close.’

  Robin feels a flash of sadness, knowing that isn’t strictly true. Not of late. As adults, they’ve grown apart, and he wonders how he let that happen. He could blame their different careers, busy lives, his dislike for Sophie, but in reality it’s been a case of simply failing to prioritise the time to see his best friend. He makes a fresh resolve to help now; to do everything he can to get Finn out of this mess.

  Freya has sensed Robin’s change of mood and has put the photo album down, turning to the red folder. She’s been filtering through idly with one hand, her half-chewed apple in the other, but now she puts it down, and carefully pulls an official-looking booklet out.

  Finn’s school report. Dated October 1992 – their first half-term after Jacob’s accident. She passes it to Robin.

  He flicks though. Attendance record, absence for the first three weeks. Scribbled handwriting from Finn’s teachers. A letter: referral to mental health services.

  While Robin’s been reading, Freya’s continued looking through the folder.

  ‘Here, look at this,’ she says and hands him a piece of paper. An article, clearly torn out of a newspaper. He hands her the school report, then starts to read. SCOUT CAMP ENDS IN TRAGEDY, the headline shouts.

  An eleven-year-old boy has died on the way to hospital after severe anaphylactic shock, an inquest opening heard. Jacob Samuel Fraser was at the annual Scout camp of the 12th troop on Wednesday 26 August, when he started struggling to breathe. An ambulance was called and he was on his way to Torbay A&E when he went into cardiac arrest. He was pronounced dead on arrival.

  Jacob was known to have an allergy to bee stings and carried an EpiPen with him at all times. It is not yet known what other precautions had been taken by the Scout leaders to prevent this tragedy.

  A post-mortem gave the cause of death as cardiac and respiratory failure resulting from a severe anaphylactic reaction.

  While investigations are ongoing, initial reports state that his death was not suspicious. The coroner adjourned the hearing, and a full inquest will take place in due course.

  Tributes have been pouring in for the happy and well-liked boy, with an unofficial shrine set up at the cricket pavilion on Kingskerswell village green, near to where Jacob loved to play football.

  Robin stops and puts the newspaper clipping down.

  ‘Why did Josie keep this?’ he asks, but Freya just shrugs.

  Robin turns his attention to the box of notebooks. He carefully takes them out of the container, creating teetering piles on the table. While he searches, Freya picks up a few, opening them up to random pages.

  ‘You were right: he was using them as a diary,’ she says. She shows him an entry.

  At the top of the page are the usual weather recordings. Temp: 18°C, wind speed: 3 m/s, rainfall: 2 mm. And underneath, a few lines. School crap, chosen last in PE. Failing in English, got a B- on Mockingbird report. He smiles at that.

  ‘Only Finn would think a B- was failing,’ he says. He looks back to the box. ‘Oh, here we are,’ he says, pulling the notebook out.

  JUL–DEC 92 it says in block capitals on the cover. Robin places it in front of him and starts to read, lunch forgotten.

  It starts in the same way as the others. The weather was hot that July, temperatures all in excess of thirty degrees, rainfall at zero. Finn’s entries are brief, but consistent.

  Went to hospital with Rob, he’s broken his leg, stupid twat. Now he won’t be able to come to camp. Robin snorts. Nice to know he wasn’t the only selfish teenager around at the time.<
br />
  The next day: Worried about camp. Without Robin there, what?? What, what? Robin thinks. Perhaps I shouldn’t go, it concludes.

  But he had, Robin knows. He flicks ahead to the dates of the Scout camp. The handwriting changes: the weather measurements written in a female script, one Robin recognises as Josie’s. She’d clearly been under strict instructions to keep up the hard work while Finn was away.

  And then, once he’d returned from camp, it goes back to Finn’s. At first, the measurements are written in, but only that. No other comments. And then, there’s a gap. Days pass: nothing.

  He shows it to Freya. ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘You said he had glandular fever,’ she replies. ‘Perhaps too ill to check the weather?’

  Robin shakes his head. ‘No, Finn would have never let it drop. He had flu once, a really bad fever, and he made me go out in the pouring rain to take his notes. He would have made Josie do it.’ Robin stares at the empty pages. ‘It’s like he didn’t care.’

  Freya slowly looks up from the school report. ‘Maybe he was depressed,’ she says, her voice low and careful. ‘It would fit. He sees the death of a friend – that would be enough to spin anyone out.’ She points to the school report. ‘He had a referral to mental health services. And from what Sophie’s said to you, it’s something he struggles with now.’

  Robin frowns. ‘But Josie said Finn didn’t know Jacob,’ he replies. ‘And, more to the point, why would Josie hide this?’ He sighs, closing the notebook with frustration and replacing it in the pile. ‘I need a drink,’ he says, with finality.

  * * *

  They return the house to its previous state, replacing everything perfectly. Robin hesitates over taking the notebook, but concedes that it tells them nothing, and he leaves it with the others.