‘Had the former tenant not been a concert pianist, Trevor might still be alive today,’ Veronica said to me, before blowing her nose.
‘He would have found another way. Suicides are extremely resourceful,’ I said in an unconvincing attempt to comfort her.
‘I don’t think that’s true,’ she said. ‘I think suicide is like robbery. Opportunity is as important as motive.’
Trevor had lived in a two-bedroom flat on the first floor of a converted Cheshire lock semi in south Manchester. A former pilot based at Manchester Airport, he had been fired for alcohol abuse. His first officer had raised the alarm when he had noticed, walking behind Trevor to board an early morning flight to Kalamata, that his captain appeared incapable of walking in a straight line. A failed breath test meant Trevor was taken into police custody and subjected to a blood test, which he also failed. He lost his licence, his airside pass and his job, exchanging them for a criminal record.
Trevor’s life had suffered an immediate contraction and diminishment. He would ever after be found in only one of two places, either drunk in his flat or flying a model plane in the nearby park. It emerged that he and Veronica were not old friends, as she had told me, but had encountered each other when she had answered an ad he had placed in the personal columns. She felt sorry for him, she told the police, but of course the truth was somewhat different. She had been looking for a way to move back to Manchester with our children and at the same time had jumped at the opportunity for, as I had crudely put it, a ‘revenge fuck’.
‘I still don’t understand why the police would send two detectives down from Manchester to interview you,’ I said to Veronica, ‘when everything about the case points to suicide.’
‘Apparently,’ she said, ‘he was found in a locked room — his bedroom — and for a suicide verdict you would normally expect an upturned chair or a table or a stepladder. A window ledge if the rope is near the window, which it wasn’t. It was nowhere near the bed either. They’ve got high ceilings those houses. They couldn’t rule out the possibility of him having had help.’
In the end, the coroner recorded an open verdict.
Initially, his death seemed to bring me and Veronica closer to each other. I regained my place in the marital bed. We went out to places as a family. But Veronica suffered very black moods and we would have long, bitter arguments that started in various ways but always came back to the same thing — my affair with Susan Ashton. If I tried to argue that Veronica’s relationship with Trevor had squared things up between us, she became quite violent with rage, throwing things at the wall and hitting me, her fists raining down on my chest like hailstones against a window.
A month later she informed me she had put the house on the market and had started divorce proceedings. In the circumstances — not least that the case would be handled by a friend and colleague of hers — she expected a swift settlement and there could be no doubt that it would be in her favour. Her retaliatory fling with Trevor would be portrayed as merely that, while my two sex sessions with Susan Ashton would be characterised as a premeditated affair, partly conducted in a public car park.
I asked her what were her intentions regarding the children and she told me that she was virtually guaranteed to win sole care of the twins. The most I could legally expect would be visitation rights, but that, just between her and me, she would do all she possibly could to make sure those children never had to see their father again.
I signal to leave the motorway, but Lewis, whom I had assumed to be asleep, suddenly speaks.
‘Keep going,’ he says.
‘I tend to come off here,’ I say. ‘Otherwise I always seem to end up going the wrong way on the A5145. Before you know it you’re halfway to the airport.’
‘I meant keep going past the next junction as well,’ he says. ‘If you don’t mind. We’ve not been for our walk yet.’
I cancel the indicator and keep going.
‘You’ve got a really funny way of getting people to do what you want them to do,’ I say finally.
Lewis just grunts. I think I prefer him being annoyingly chipper.
When we reach junction 24 he tells me to get off on to the M67.
‘We’re going to the Peaks,’ I say. ‘How lovely!’
Half an hour later, somewhere on the A57 between Glossop and Sheffield, he advises me to pull over. I see a layby a little way ahead, so I coast down to that and turn in. The tyres scrunch on the gravel and Lewis opens his door and slams it shut. I can see something white sticking out of the door pocket on his side. I lean over for a closer look. It’s my white cotton hat. I remove it and stow it in the glove locker.
‘How far are we going?’ I ask him once I’ve got out of the car.
He ignores my question and just says, ‘This way,’ leading me over a stile and on to a rough path.
We walk down towards a stream first of all, through a glade of deciduous woodland, and then alongside the stream until we come to another stile and a wooden bridge, which we cross. On the other side we start to climb. On our right is a pine wood; to our left, some way below us, is the river the stream was feeding into. The path diverts this way and that around boulders and rocky outcrops and becomes quite steep for a short distance and then levels off as the pine wood on our right falls away.
Lewis walks in front, not looking back. Presumably he can hear that I’m just a little way behind and keeping up with the pace. The ground vegetation begins to change, dominated now by bilberry and heather, signalling that we are getting on to the moor. The incline flattens out altogether and the path widens. Lewis stops and looks back. I draw alongside, breathing hard, and return his gaze.
‘Ksssh-huh-huh.’
‘What?’ I ask.
He doesn’t reply.
‘Back at the airfield,’ I say to him, ‘how did you get into the car?’
‘It wasn’t locked,’ he says.
‘I always lock the car whenever I leave it for any length of time.’
‘It wasn’t locked,’ he insists, his cold eyes staring into mine.
In the distance the drone of an aircraft can be heard, a jet executing a final turn to join the extended runway centre line.
‘It’s not much further,’ Lewis says and starts walking again.
I sigh with theatrical exasperation and come alongside him. We walk in silence for two or three minutes before he starts speaking again.
‘He was someone I knew,’ he says, ‘someone I trusted. He was older than me, almost a father figure. A pilot. Safe, reliable. So you’d have thought. So I thought. He said he’d look after Mel and the girls while I was away. I didn’t think he meant look after in that way. It would never even have occurred to me to warn her. He didn’t seem predatory. Mind you, I didn’t know about his drinking.’
‘He was a drinker?’ I ask.
‘A bit. Apparently. Not good news in a pilot. Anyway,’ he continues, ‘he must have exuded some fatherly protectiveness or summat, because it wasn’t like he was a great catch. Whatever it was, Mel fell for it. They spent time together. The girls trusted him. Mel trusted him. Ksssh-huh-huh. I trusted him. Big mistake that was.’
Lewis’ trousers make a swishing sound as he walks. Our boots push through the heather that encroaches at the sides of the path.
‘She only slept with him a few times, he told me later. It annoyed me he couldn’t be more precise. I wanted to know. Wasn’t like it made any difference, obviously, but I wanted to know. I think it was that I hit him for, the imprecision, the not knowing, not caring presumably, rather than for the actual act of sleeping with her.’
Lewis looks across at me from time to time as he tells me all this, as if checking I’m listening and taking it all in. I’m listening, all right.