As it was, my attacker went down with a crash, overturning a chair. One of the dogs – probably Beezer – finally began to bark behind the kitchen door, frenzied little yaps that sounded neither big nor menacing. More’s the pity.
I flicked on the lights in the hallway and found that my intruder was a young man with longish dark hair, wearing a T-shirt and bike leather trousers. He’d been carrying a backpack that he’d dropped when he’d fallen and he was currently trying to clutch at all the points I’d hit with the hand that still worked. I waited until he had the breath to speak. At least I’d brought something to read.
“Fuck me,” he gasped eventually. It was more of an exclamation than an instruction. There was the faintest trace of an Irish lilt to his voice and something about his face was familiar, but I couldn’t place him. Certainly not enough to be able to justify him creeping about in Jacob and Clare’s house in the middle of the night, that’s for sure.
“Who are you?” I said.
“Fuck that!” he countered hotly. “Who the hell are you?”
“If you’d just answer the question,” I said mildly, rolling the magazine up again, “we’d get along a lot better.”
“You could be anyone,” he said, wary, rubbing at his throat and not taking his eyes off what I was doing with my hands. “I’m not telling you anything until I know what the hell you’re doing here.”
I sighed. If there was one thing my time in the States had taught me, it was how to communicate with stroppy teenagers in terms they’d understand. This one looked twenty at a push, but I’d be willing to bet he wouldn’t be allowed into a nightclub without having to show his ID.
“Tell me what I want to know,” I said, conversational, leaning over him, “or I’ll hit you again.”
He reared back, shocked, then a gleam of laughter appeared and a big grin broke through his natural mistrust. His shoulders came down a fraction.
“Well if you’re a burglar, you’re the prettiest thief I’ve seen in a long time,” he said. “OK. My name’s Jamie – Jamie Nash.”
“Nash?” I repeated, confused. Jacob’s name was Nash. “But—”
He nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “Jacob’s my dad.”
***
I put the coffee down on the kitchen table in front of Jamie and sat opposite, picking up my own cup. He smiled in thanks and, now I knew the connection, I could see Jacob’s smile there, Jacob’s eyes.
The family resemblance was clear, but Jacob had never mentioned having any children. He rarely talked about his ill-fated marriage to Isobel but I suppose it wouldn’t have been kind to do so in front of Clare.
“How’s the arm?” I asked.
“I may play the piano again,” he said, rueful, flexing it gingerly, “but I wouldn’t bet on it. Where did you learn to hit people like that? With a rolled up magazine, for Christ’s sake.”
“Self-defence classes,” I said shortly and didn’t add that I’d been the one teaching them. “It means I’m classed as having had training and if I’d beaten you up with a chair leg they’d have thrown the book at me.” I smiled at him as I took a sip of coffee. “This way you’re the one who gets laughed out of court.”
He snorted. “Remind me never to ask you to housetrain a puppy,” he said. “You’d beat the poor little bastard to death inside the first week.”
“So you don’t know whereabouts in Ireland your dad might be?” I asked.
He’d just taken a drink of his own coffee and he shook his head vigorously and swallowed before he spoke. “Didn’t even know he was away,” he said. “Ironic, isn’t it? He’s over there and I’m over here.”
Beezer jumped up onto Jamie’s lap and bounced up and down a few times, trying to lick his chin. He stared at the terrier without really seeing her, ruffling her ears in a reflex gesture. “Shit this is bad,” he muttered. He glanced at me with an almost fearful curiosity. “About Clare, I mean. How is she?”
I repeated my father’s diagnosis, such as it was. “Do you know her well?”
His gaze passed over me briefly, then slid away. “Not really,” he said with an awkward shrug. “I haven’t really seen that much of Dad since he and Mum split up.”
Difficult to know how he’d be expected to feel about his father’s girlfriend, I suppose. Particularly as she was far closer to Jamie’s age than to Jacob’s.
I’d told him only the bare bones of the story. That Jacob was away somewhere in Ireland and that Clare had been in a bike accident in which another biker had also died. I didn’t tell him the rumours about what might or might not have been going on between Clare and Slick. As it was he’d taken the news in pale silence.
“So,” I said, sitting back. “Your turn. What were you doing breaking in to your father’s house at half-two in the morning?”
Jamie grinned. “Got in to Heysham earlier this evening and went round the town with a few mates after we got off the boat,” he said. “Then—”
“Boat?”
“Ferry,” he explained. “From Ireland.” And when I still looked blank he added, “That’s where my mother’s family hail from, so that’s where we went back to. Just outside Coleraine. In the north.”
I reached for my coffee cup again and waved him on.
He shrugged again, still fussing with the terrier. “Well, I was supposed to be meeting someone but they didn’t turn up,” he said, pulling a face, “so then I didn’t have any place to stay.”
A girl, I surmised. And he’d been hoping to get lucky. “And?”
“And nothing,” he said with the same kind of easy smile that Jacob was master of. “I suppose I just thought why should I shell out for a hotel when my dad’s place was just up the road, so I thought maybe I’d come and crash here.”
He hesitated, possibly realising that use of the word “crash” was not the best choice in these circumstances.
“So you bypassed the drive alarm and broke in through the study window,” I said dryly, draining my coffee cup and standing. “Don’t they have doorbells in Ireland?”
“I didn’t want to wake anyone,” he said, smiling easily. “I helped Dad dig that sensor in one summer when I was about ten. And the study window’s always had a dodgy catch on it.” He tipped the terrier back onto the floor and got to his feet, too.
“Besides,” he added, following me out into the hallway, “when I saw the car and the bikes were all here I wasn’t expecting them to be away – or that I’d be jumped by Lara bloody Croft on the way in.”
I led the way upstairs, turning off lights as we went. At the airing cupboard on the landing I dug out sheets and pillows and thrust them into Jamie’s arms, ignoring his surprised expression. I think he was probably hoping I’d offer to make the bed up for him. His mother, I reckoned, had a lot to answer for.