She led him into the front room wordlessly and he saw that she was not angry any more. There was something about her that was beyond that. He would definitely have preferred anger. He stepped forward, wanting to hug her, but she moved away from him and he could see the tears forming in her eyes.
‘I’m sorry Ma, I never wanted you to know...’ he began.
‘You’ve said that before,’ she responded curtly.
He merely bowed his head.
‘So if you hadn’t been found out it would be all right, Charlie, would it?’ she asked, her voice brittle. ‘Is that the way I brought you up?’
‘No ma, it’s not,’ he replied.
What else could he say? But the truth was that he still was not ashamed of anything he had done. He hadn’t hurt anyone, after all — well not until now, and never intentionally. His mother was actually quite right, as it happened — he had thought it was all quite all right as long as nobody, or certainly nobody in his family, found out.
His mother sat down heavily on the velveteen covered sofa, dark green, matching the carpet and her dress, he noticed obscurely.
‘Charlie how could you?’ she asked, and this time her voice was almost a wail of anguish.
Now Charlie really didn’t know what to say. Maybe this visit was a mistake. He seemed to be hurting her more than ever by being there, and it really broke his heart to be rejected by his mother.
He wanted to tell her again that it wasn’t the way it seemed, it really wasn’t. He had just been trying to make the best of what he was, he had only given pleasure. What was so wrong with that? He wanted desperately to make her understand. There were worse ways of making a living, surely? But to her he knew there probably weren’t. And he just didn’t have the words to explain.
In the end he left almost at once. He could hear her crying as he shut the front door behind him. Elderly Mr Martin, his mother’s next door neighbour, whom Charlie had always considered to be a rather unpleasant old busybody, came out of his house at the same time and burst into snide laughter at the sight of Charlie.
‘Hi, Charlie boy, got any leftovers for an old man?’ he asked.
Charlie had had enough.
‘Fuck off,’ he said, even though it was quite out of character for him to speak to an older person like that and, indeed, to use such a phrase in the first place.
He got into his car, pushed the gear shift into drive and roared away. Once safely into anonymous territory he found a lay-by and pulled to a halt. He slumped back in the driver’s seat and closed his eyes. He felt as if he had nowhere to go and no one to turn to. His near-perfect world had collapsed around him every bit as devastatingly as had Constance Lange’s.
Rose Piper was not the only one who had become obsessed with the Lange case. After all, one way and another, that was the source of all that had happened to him, of all that was still happening. The only difference was that to Charlie, Constance remained Mrs Pattinson, and always would. And Mrs Pattinson was constantly on his mind nowadays. There really was little else.
He went over again in his head, for what felt like the millionth time, the details of his dealings with Mrs Pattinson, all that he had told Rose Piper last night and on so many other occasions. Like her, he had always reckoned that something somewhere did not quite add up. He could not believe that the woman he knew as Mrs Pattinson would want to harm him or any of the boys who had given her pleasure. Apparently she had said she hadn’t sought to harm him — but that call to the Crescent Hotel still looked like a set-up to him, and it was, after all, him who had been set up. Rose Piper had told him the story about Mrs P waiting in the bushes to talk to him, about her having the knife on her by accident, and he didn’t buy it any more than, he suspected, did the detective.
He still didn’t really believe that Marty Morris or Colin Parker had been blackmailing her — they had both considered themselves to be professionals like him. If the truth be told, Charlie reckoned Marty wouldn’t have been bright enough for such a thought ever to have occurred to him, and Colin would have been too bright to do such a thing even if the idea had crossed his mind.
So much of it didn’t make sense to Charlie when he really thought about it. One simple answer was that the woman was mad. Stark staring bonkers. Off her trolley. Out of control. But Mrs P had never seemed mad to him. Nor out of control either — except occasionally in bed. She had always seemed quite normal and rather nice to Charlie — just unusually highly sexed. And Charlie, unlike so many in a world steeped in double standards, saw no particular conflict there.
Suddenly Charlie made a snap decision. On an impulse he decided to drive to Chalmpton Peverill, to see for himself the sort of place Constance Lange came from.
Once he had turned off the M5 on to the succession of country lanes that would eventually lead him to the village, even town-boy Charlie could not help being bowled over by the beauty of the countryside. It was the end of March and a particularly good year for daffodils. It seemed that every hedgerow and every field was full of them. A smattering of early bluebells — a warm sunny March following a wet February, had provided perfect conditions for spring flowers were already in bloom. The Somerset countryside was a picture.
So was the village of Chalmpton Peverill. Charlie drove right through the village at first, taking in the pretty thatched cottages, the shop, the green, the farm he suspected must be the Lange family home, and the neat row of council houses — as well cared for as any of the other properties — on the edge of the village. Everything was immaculate. Some of the lawns had obviously been given their first cut of the season already. The trees and bushes were just bursting into life and several of the village gardens boasted tubs of winter pansies and heathers, as well as vibrant spring flowers. At the top of the village Charlie turned his car around and motored slowly back down, parking in a lay-by he had noticed on his way in.
He locked the BMW and started to stroll up the main street, past the farm which he was fairly sure he recognised from pictures in the newspapers published before Constance had been charged. It was a strange sensation. Charlie wondered fleetingly if he was being over-sensitive but he felt that he could hear the whispers coming out of the hedgerows and seeping through the tiniest of cracks in the garden walls. Since he had gained notoriety Charlie was getting used to being conspicuous — to being pointed out by some and equally pointedly ignored by others — around where he lived. But this was something else. He didn’t think the whispering he could feel in the very fabric of Chalmpton Peverill had anything to do with who he was and what he was involved in — not quite yet anyway, and not before he had closer contact than he had had with anyone so far. He was just a stranger, and, of course, a black stranger at that.
Brought up in St Paul’s, and still living in a highly cosmopolitan city with a large black community, Charlie was unprepared for the reaction caused by his sudden appearance in the village. Rural Somerset remains almost one hundred per cent white Anglo Saxon. Chalmpton Peverill was not on the tourist track and had few visitors and certainly no black ones — ever.
Charlie did not know that the villages were still recovering from being interrogated by a black policeman, nor, of course, that quite a few of them had not been happy about that at all, as it happened.
He kept his stride steady as he walked past Constance Lange’s home — Mrs Pattinson’s home, as he thought of it — peering sideways, not feeling able to stand and stare as he would have liked.
At a glance he took in the quiet splendour of the place, the beautiful well-proportioned old farmhouse, its large perfectly tended gardens with manicured lawns, the impeccable stable block, and the stunning views across acres of open countryside that you could just glimpse beyond. For the first time Charlie found himself wondering why all that hadn’t been enough for Mrs Pattinson. Charlie liked his creature comforts, appreciated beauty, and relished the lovely things that money can buy. He reckoned he could quite happily give up sex for ever to live in a place like Chalmpton Village Farm — as long as you could transpose it into a decent-sized city, of course.