‘And you, lass,’ he said to me when he asked what I was drinking, ‘how did you know the boy?’ He seemed not to remember my visit to the yard. It wasn’t surprising. I’d just been one of a crowd of reporters.
I was going to say I knew Thomas’s father, but stopped myself just in time. Whatever my views on the matter, it wasn’t fair to Kay to spread around information about Philip.
‘I didn’t really,’ I said. ‘More a friend of the family.’
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Like me.’
So we sat down at the tables and at first we looked awkwardly at each other, not speaking. Dylan’s ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ was playing on the jukebox. It seemed to be playing all afternoon. Harry Pool came back from the bar with a tray loaded with drinks. I remember that Ellen was drinking whisky. That surprised me. The rest of us were on the beer: the lads on bottled lager, everyone else on hand-pulled bitter.
‘I think we should drink to Thomas,’ Harry said. He was still standing, leaning forward onto the table as if he needed the support. ‘No one deserves to die like that. Specially not someone with his whole life ahead of him.’
We all raised our glasses, solemnly, like a toast at a wedding. ‘Thomas,’ we said. One of the lads stifled a nervous giggle. If he was mentioned after that it was only in whispered conversation between individuals.
It seems now that I was drunk after the first pint. Perhaps it was the strangeness of the occasion. Perhaps it was a mistake to mix the alcohol with my medication. I can remember snippets of conversation freeze-framed like in a home movie, but in my memory the background’s always blurred, and I don’t know the order in which the discussions occurred or their context.
At one point Ellen was talking to me. It must have been close to the beginning of the session, because I was still sitting next to her. There were empty plates on the table. I think Harry must have ordered sandwiches for us all, though I don’t remember eating. I looked at her mouth moving. She was wearing scarlet lipstick, which had leached into the face powder around her lips. The effect was geographical – tributaries feeding into a lagoon in the desert, with her mouth as the lagoon. I was still staring when I realized she was waiting for an answer to a question I hadn’t heard.
‘Sorry?’ I said. Dylan was knock, knock, knocking in my brain.
‘We need to talk. Thomas was special.’ Even though I was focusing on her, I had to strain to make out the words. She didn’t want to be overheard. It was one of those secret Thomas conversations. ‘He was troubled.’
‘I was going to write something.’ By this point I was expansive. The fiction that I was a journalist seemed a huge joke. ‘An article.’
‘Yes, yes.’ The words came out as a double hiss. She gripped my arm with her hand. ‘Come to Absalom House. Any time. I’m always there. We’ll talk.’
Then she whirled away and the next time I noticed her she was at the other side of the table, smoking a cigarette, holding it in a stagy way between two fingers, her head slightly tilted back, looking at Harry Pool through the smoke.
Nell and Dan sat together throughout the afternoon, but they never seemed to be speaking to each other. A few times Nell looked at me with that intense and piercing stare which she seemed to have adopted as part of her style, like the chopped hair, and once, when we met outside the Ladies, she asked, ‘Who was that man in the church who winked at you?’
I’d forgotten about Farrier. He must have disappeared immediately after the service, or perhaps he’d been invited to the crematorium with the family. I could imagine him being a source of comfort to them.
‘He’s the detective in charge of the murder investigation.’
‘Do they know anything?’ Her voice was as urgent, as pressing, as Ellen’s grip on my arm had been.
‘They’ve accepted I had nothing to do with it. That’s all I care about.’
‘No,’ she spat back. ‘It’s not all you care about. It can’t be. I can tell. We have to know why he died. Don’t we?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. She made her way back to Dan so carefully, her body so upright, that I know she was pissed too.
Harry’s lads were less demanding in conversation. One must have been older than he looked because he’d just got his HGV licence and was already talking about the trips to Europe for the firm. He was excited at the prospect of the long drive alone, but nervous too. He’d already been on some of the usual routes with a more experienced driver – Spain, he said, and Poland. I asked him what he carried back from Poland. Vodka, I wondered, jam, fruit? But he seemed unsure about that. Everything was in containers, he said. How could he tell?
The last encounter I remember was with Marcus. He approached me, carrying a drink for us both, and sat beside me on a padded bench which ran along the wall. He had taken off his tie. One end of it flapped out of his trouser pocket. He was playing at being drunk but even then I didn’t think he was. I could see through the act with the sudden flash of perception you sometimes get even when you can hardly stand. He rested one arm along the window-sill behind me, not making contact with my shoulders but very close.
‘I recognize you. You were at Wintrylaw.’
I don’t know why, but I pretended not to understand what he was talking about. Perhaps it was just too much effort. Anyway, I didn’t answer.
‘I was the bear,’ he said. He formed circles with the thumbs and middle fingers of each hand and held them to his eyes. ‘I wore the mask. You were going to join up.’
‘The Countryside Consortium.’ As if it had all just come back to me.
‘What are you doing here?’ He leaned forward diagonally across the table so our faces were almost touching. ‘Did you know Thomas?’
‘I found his body.’
He jolted away from me, but I didn’t know how much of a shock that actually was. Because he was playing at being drunk, I didn’t trust the reaction.
It was at that moment that Harry Pool stood up. He said he was going to call it a day. He had his wife to get back to. She’d been stuck with the grandchildren all day. And we followed him out. He’d brought us together and we couldn’t continue without him. Marcus and I were last out. I found his arm round my shoulder, his hand resting gently on my neck. I didn’t have the energy to push him away. And anyway, I really quite liked it.
We stood on the pavement to wave the others down the road. The next thing I knew I was in a taxi on my way to Seaton Delaval, to the little house where Thomas had died. I don’t remember there being any discussion about it, but perhaps that’s not fair. There may have been. I do remember standing with Marcus on the doorstep, watching him grope in his pocket for a door key. When he couldn’t find it he tipped the plant out from the pot on the window-box and took the spare key from the bottom. And I remember being violently sick in the gutter.
Chapter Twenty-four
Still holding the point of the knife against my skin, Nicky reaches out and switches off the light. Suddenly it’s dark. I feel my pupils widen in response, but there’s nothing to see. There are security shutters on the window. I’ve always been scared of the dark.
He puts an arm around my chest and pulls me down so I’m lying on the bed. He’s lying beside me, very close. I can smell him. One hand presses me against his body, the other holds the knife. He’s whispering into my ear. His lips brush the lobe and the touch makes me start. He’s telling me what he intends to do with me. I try to block out the words. As he speaks I feel his erection through the cotton of his sweat pants against my thigh. He unbuttons my shirt, fumbling in the dark, one-handed, then he moves the blade of the knife towards my breast, lightly scratching the skin, not drawing blood.