There are footsteps in the corridor outside.
‘Don’t move.’ The words are so quiet that even with his mouth against my ear I can hardly make them out.
The footsteps disappear.
We both know they’ll be back.
I was in Thomas’s bed. It was the same evening, still light. Marcus was standing in the doorway. I knew where I was immediately, and in the same instant I recognized that if I moved my head I’d throw up again. The next sensation was panic. What was I doing there? What had I done? I could remember stumbling into the house, holding on to Marcus. The shock of being here. Then nothing but the flashback. Carefully I slid one hand down my body. Still dressed. Relief. No sex. I’d only taken off my shoes before getting into bed. The nausea of the hangover came back and I shut my eyes.
‘Tea?’ Marcus’s voice seemed to come from miles away. From Norway. If not further. I could believe that the grey North Sea and several oil rigs were coming between us. I forced myself to look at him. He was smiling as if he’d been following my thoughts, as if my embarrassment amused him.
‘What’s the time?’
‘Nine. Nine-thirty.’
‘I should phone home.’ I’d told Jess I’d be back soon after lunch. She’d be wondering, worried. It wasn’t her place to worry, but she’d be sending Ray out on a search party if she didn’t hear soon. Even worse, she might phone Lisa.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Tea first.’ He had a mug in each hand. He sat on the end of the bed. I shuffled back so I was sitting upright and felt better, more in control.
Someone had done a seriously good job of cleaning the room. There was a new carpet, cheap grey nylon cord. The wall must have been painted. It was brighter than the others and there were no posters. All the same, it couldn’t have been much fun getting rid of the blood.
‘Sorry,’ Marcus said. ‘I didn’t know where else to put you. And earlier you were in no state to care.’ Again he seemed to have developed telepathic powers. ‘Once the police had finished, my dad paid for a cleaning company. This is my first day back here.’
‘Don’t you mind?’
‘Not a lot that I can do about it. My dad won’t pay for anything else. I suppose I thought the sooner I came home the better. The same principle as getting back onto a horse after you’ve fallen off.’
‘Isn’t your father worried about you staying here on your own?’
Marcus shrugged. ‘The police think Thomas was killed by druggies looking for something to steal. He must have disturbed them. They’re not likely to come back.’ He paused and added, ‘My father’s a businessman. He wouldn’t find it easy to sell the house while people remember the murder. So I’m stuck here. For a while at least.’
But I wasn’t really listening to that. I was thinking the disturbed burglar theory was impossible. There’d been music playing, loud enough to hear from the street. Even someone out of his head would have realized the house wasn’t empty. And then I thought Farrier wasn’t that dumb. Either a different officer with the deductive reasoning of a gnat had been talking to Marcus, or the police were spinning him a line for their own purposes. I felt suddenly uncomfortable, vulnerable.
‘Where were you that day?’ It came out spiky and accusing. Not sensible in the circumstances.
‘At the university.’ He didn’t seem offended by the question. ‘A lecture, then a tutorial.’ He smiled. ‘There were lots of witnesses.’
‘I didn’t mean…’ But then I broke off. Of course I had meant. I’d needed to check that it was impossible for Marcus to have killed Thomas. I still only had his word for it, but I felt too ill to keep up being scared.
‘The police said Thomas wasn’t in work the day he died because he had flu. Was that true?’
‘I don’t know about flu, but he wasn’t well. Some sort of virus. He was asleep when I went out that morning.’
Perhaps that was why he didn’t answer the door when I first arrived. Later he’d woken and put on his music. Had he still been in bed when the murderer came? No, because he’d been wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Had he got up to let the killer in?
Marcus left me to wash my face and hands and then I phoned Jess. I told her not to worry. I’d had a couple of drinks, so I was going to stay the night with a mate. At that point I still hoped to get home, but it was better not to promise. She’d be fidgety all night and she’d wait up. I wasn’t in any fit state to drive. I wasn’t sure I could face public transport and I wasn’t going to cough up for a taxi all the way back.
Marcus was in the kitchen, beating eggs in a glass bowl with a fork.
‘Scrambled eggs OK?’
I nodded, surprised that I felt so hungry.
The kitchen was at the back of the house, small but well equipped and tidy for a student place. I remembered the chaos of boots and shoes I’d seen in the hall on my first visit, the carpet thick with dust, and thought perhaps the cleaning company had been let loose in here too. Or perhaps Marcus didn’t mind muck but he was naturally orderly in the kitchen. I’ve known men like that. It occurred to me, watching him standing there, still dressed in the suit trousers and white shirt from the funeral, that this was the son Kay Laing would have liked. I wondered if she’d known Marcus when he was a child. Dan had described them as school friends.
‘How did you know Thomas?’ I was leaning against the door frame. If I’d gone into the kitchen I’d have been in the way.
He glanced up. He had that clean, scrubbed, wholesome look of well-educated English boys. No zits. Short hair with a bit of curl in it. A skin the colour of pale toast, pink at the back of the neck where the sun had caught it.
‘We were at infants’ school together. The two terrors of the class.’
Like Archie Mariner and Harry Pool, I thought. Still friends sixty years on, though one had made a fortune and the other struggled to live on a pension.
‘When I was eleven my father sent me to King’s. You know, the private place in Tynemouth?’
I nodded.
‘We’d moved up the coast by then anyway, and Thomas and I had already lost touch. We met up again later. School’s less important as you get older. We bumped into each other at parties. Whitley on a Friday night. Everyone you’ve ever met seems to be there when you’re sixteen.’
‘And was Thomas still a terror?’
‘Oh, not so very much. No more than anyone else. The only difference was that he didn’t mind being caught.’
‘Do you know his stepfather?’
He gave himself a chance to think about that, buying time by bending to lift a pan from a low cupboard. ‘I’ve seen him around.’
‘At the Countryside Consortium?’
‘He’s not very active,’ Marcus said. ‘There are lots of supporters.’
It wasn’t much of an answer but I let it go. He had his back to me now because the eggs were cooking and he was standing over them with a wooden spoon, teasing them away from the edge of the pan as they began to stick.
‘How did you get involved?’
‘Through my father. My parents separated when I was six. I stayed with my dad. Later he moved in with another woman. She has land up the coast. She doesn’t farm it herself but she keeps a couple of horses there and she held on to the house. I suppose she’s the enthusiast. He deals in property, a glorified estate agent really, but he considers himself a cut above the rest. He wouldn’t normally touch a place like this with a bargepole, but he could see it would do for me. His interest is in big houses, country hotels. When the landed gentry want to flog off part of the estate, they go to him. I’m not sure how committed he is to the cause. He doesn’t hunt, for example. My stepmother’s horses terrify him. I think he saw joining up as a shrewd business move, a way of keeping in with the right people, networking.’