Black Rabbit Summer (29 page)

The glass doors had opened and four figures were entering the reception area. Two of them were uniformed constables, the other two were Eric and Nic.

They both looked pale and anxious – their heads bowed down, their eyes fixed worriedly to the floor – and neither of them noticed me at first. They were being led over to the reception desk on our left, while Mum and me were heading in the opposite direction, towards the doors, and for a moment or two it looked as if Eric and Nic weren’t going to notice me at all. Which would have been OK with me, because I had no idea what I was going to do if they
did
see me. Should I say something? Was I
allowed
to say anything? What should I say?

But even as I was thinking about it, I saw Nic raise her head and look over at us. Her eyes widened as she suddenly recognized me, and almost immediately Eric sensed her reaction and he looked over at me too. I smiled awkwardly and nodded at them. Nic smiled back – just as awkwardly – but Eric was too
tense to smile. All he could do was stare at me, his eyes burning with silent questions –
what have you told them? did you tell them about me? did you tell them I lied to you?
The intensity in his eyes transfixed me for a moment, and as I stared back at him, his face seemed to take over my mind. It was all I could see. Eric’s face. It was all there
was
to see. And as I gazed into it, I could see that it was changing again – shimmering, melting… the angles shifting, blurring that beautiful ugliness into something else. Only this time, it wasn’t Nicole’s face that emerged from the shimmer, it was a much more angular vision. A lean and chiselled face. Dark narrow eyes, a slightly crooked mouth, a high forehead topped with cropped black hair…

Wes Campbell.

I saw trails in the air…

My throat tightened, I couldn’t breathe.

I smelled gas.

A dark sweetness.

I heard his voice:
You don’t know anything. You didn’t see anything. This never happened.

I closed my eyes.

‘Come on, Pete,’ I heard someone say.

The voice sounded odd – slow and deep, thick and distorted.

‘Pete?’

When I opened my eyes again, Mum was standing there staring at me, Eric and Nic were being led over to the security doors, and Eric’s face was pure Eric again.

‘Are you all right?’ Mum asked me.

‘Yeah.’

‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

∗

I was right about Mum wanting to talk to me about things, and she didn’t waste any time getting down to it. As soon as we left the station, she led me along the pavement to a little grassy area beside some office blocks and sat me down on a bench. It was one of those places with trees and flower beds where office workers spend their lunchtimes sitting out in the sun, eating ice cream and drinking Coke. It was too late for lunchtime now, though, and apart from a few empty Coke cans and a scattering of ice-cream wrappers, we had the place to ourselves.

It was hot.

I was sweating.

My throat hurt.

As the traffic on Westway streamed up and down in the heat, filling the air with a grey haze of exhaust fumes, Mum started talking to me. She said she was sorry I’d had to go through all that, and she was sorry she hadn’t done more to help me. But, she told me, she was also very concerned about some of the things she’d found out.

‘I know you probably don’t want to talk about it right now,’ she said, ‘and I want you to know that I’m not angry with you, and that I’m not going to give you a lecture. But nevertheless…’

Nevertheless.

‘You promised me you
weren’t
taking drugs, Pete,’ she said sadly. ‘And I believed you.’

I looked at her. ‘I’m
not
taking drugs –’

‘Oh, come
on
… you just admitted it to DI Barry. You were in that den of yours, you and the others, drinking yourselves stupid and smoking pot –’

‘It was only a
joint
, Mum. And I only had a couple of puffs. And we weren’t drinking ourselves stupid –’

‘Only a joint?’ Mum said. ‘You think that makes it OK?’

‘No, but –’

‘Is this something you do regularly?’

I shook my head. ‘It was just
there
, you know… someone lit a joint and started passing it round, and when it came to me I just had a couple of puffs and passed it on.’ I shrugged. ‘It happens, Mum. It’s no big deal. It happens all the time. I don’t even like it, really.’

‘But you still smoked it, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah, but it’s only cannabis, Mum. I mean, it’s not like we were smoking crack or anything. It was just a bit of dope.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Didn’t you ever try it?’

She hesitated. ‘We’re not talking about
me
…’

I smiled at her.

She frowned at me. ‘It’s not
funny.
’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But it’s not the end of the world either. Honest, Mum… it’s nothing to worry about. I mean, I’m not stupid – I know what I’m doing. If I’m at a party or something, and someone’s passing a joint round, I might have a couple of quick puffs, but that’s it. I’d never take anything else. And I’ve never
bought
any drugs in my life.’ I smiled at her. ‘I’ve got enough going on in my head as it is. I don’t need to
take
anything to make me feel weird.’

Mum smiled at me then, and I knew she believed what I was saying, but as her smile quickly faded and the sadness returned to her face, I realized that believing me wasn’t enough. ‘It was just so frightening,’ she said quietly. ‘When I saw you on that video… the way you looked… God, you looked
awful
, Pete. It was as if you weren’t
there.
’ She shook her head at the memory. ‘Your eyes, your face, everything about you… I don’t know. It just made me feel really sad.’

We sat there for a while longer, talking about Raymond and Stella and all kinds of other stuff. We didn’t really go into any great depth about anything, and I got the impression that Mum was just keeping me talking so she could check out the state of my mind. It felt a bit odd, actually, trying to behave how I thought she
wanted
me to behave, but I think I convinced her that – all things considered – I was coping with things pretty well.

‘Right then,’ she said eventually, looking at her watch. ‘I suppose we’d better start getting home.’ She glanced across Westway. ‘There’s a taxi rank just over there –’

‘Would you mind if I walked back?’ I asked her.

She looked at me. ‘On your own?’

‘Yeah… I mean, if that’s all right with you.’

‘Well, I don’t know, Pete. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to be on your own right now.’

‘Please, Mum,’ I said. ‘I just want to be by myself for a while. You know, clear my head, sort myself out…’ I gave her a reassuring look. ‘I’ll be fine, honest.’

She frowned at me. ‘
Honest
honest?’

I smiled. ‘Yeah.’

‘And you’ll go straight home?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, OK,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’ll be all right. I need to get some shopping anyway. I’ll walk up to the Sainsbury’s in town and get a taxi back from there.’ She reached into her handbag
and pulled out her purse. ‘Here,’ she said, digging out a £10 note and passing it to me. ‘If you change your mind, or if you get too tired or anything, just call a taxi.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, pocketing the note.

‘Have you got your phone?’

‘Yeah.’

‘All right then. Well, I’ll see you later.’

‘OK.’

I watched her head off into town, and I waved at her when she looked over her shoulder and smiled at me, and then as soon as she was out of sight I started hurrying off to the taxi rank.

It was around three o’clock when the taxi driver dropped me off outside Eric and Nic’s place. I paid him, watched him drive away, and then I just stood there for a while, gazing up at the house. There was no sign of any movement inside. Everything felt still and empty. And, of course, I
knew
there was no one at home – Eric and Nic were at the police station, Mr and Mrs Leigh were still away – but as I opened the front gate and started walking up the path, I couldn’t help feeling that there was something about the emptiness of the house that just didn’t feel right. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it somehow felt as if the house was expecting someone, waiting for someone… and I didn’t think that someone was me.

I didn’t really think it was Eric and Nic either, but that’s what I made myself believe as I stepped up to the front door and rang the bell. The house was waiting for Eric and Nic to come back, that’s all it was.

Nothing to worry about.

The distant
ding dong
of the doorbell faded to silence inside the house.

There was no one home.

The house was empty.

I stepped back from the door and made my way over to a wrought-iron gate at the side of the house. I took a quick look around – glancing down the street, checking the windows of the house next door – then I opened the gate and followed a pathway round to the back of the house. The garden was as ragged and wild as it had always been – tall trees, overgrown hedges, a lawn that looked like a meadow. A bonfire was smouldering at the bottom of the garden, filling the air with a pungent smell of burning plastic and cloth.

I stopped by the back door and wondered what I was doing here.

It was hard to think.

Hard to know.

What are you doing here?

I don’t know.

What are you looking for?

I don’t know.

Are you looking for clues?

I don’t know.

How are you going to get in?

I don’t know… but I seem to remember that Eric and Nic usually leave a spare key somewhere… under a plant pot or something.

Why didn’t you think of that the other night?

I don’t know. I was drunk, screwed up… I didn’t know what I was doing.

What
are
you doing?

‘Christ, it’s hot,’ I said, wiping the sweat from my head.

I was looking around for a plant pot now – a plant pot, a brick,
a garden gnome… anything that might have a key hidden under it. But there were dozens of plant pots, hundreds of bricks, thousands of possible hiding places… it’d take me hours to check every one. And I didn’t have hours. Eric and Nic had already been at the police station for over an hour… they could be on their way back any minute.

‘Shit,’ I said, reaching out for the door handle.

It was a futile gesture, the kind of thing you do when you can’t think of anything better to do, but as I grabbed the door handle and gave it what I thought was a pointless shove, there wasn’t any resistance at all.

The door swung open.

It wasn’t locked.

I stood there for a second, staring stupidly at the open door, then I stepped through into the kitchen and closed the door behind me.

I might not have known
what
I was looking for – although, thinking about it now, I think
part
of me probably knew – but whatever it was, and whether I knew about it or not, there was no doubt in my mind
where
to look for it. So I didn’t bother checking out any of the downstairs rooms – most of which were piled up with packing crates and cardboard boxes anyway – I just went straight up the stairs, straight along the landing, and straight into Nicole’s bedroom.

It hadn’t been all that long since I’d last been in Nic’s room – two years ago, maybe three at the most – but there was nothing about it now that held any memories for me. In fact, I wondered for a moment if I’d got the right room. It felt kind of strange, standing there looking around, trying to remember the room as it used
to be… when I was thirteen or fourteen, when I’d sit around in here with Eric and Nic and Pauly and Raymond, or sometimes with just Nic… just the two of us, me and Nicole, alone together, in her room…

In this room.

But it wasn’t the same room any more.

It
was
Nic’s room, I realized now. There were no cardboard boxes in sight, so she obviously hadn’t started packing yet, and as I gazed around the room I started recognizing some of her stuff: her make-up things strewn all over the dressing table, bottles of perfume, boxes of jewellery, bracelets and necklaces hanging on hooks on the wall. And the clothes, piled in heaps around the floor, they were definitely Nic’s clothes. And the theatre posters, the black walls, the arty ornaments, the bookshelves lined with Shakespeare, Chekhov, Brecht. It was Nic’s room, all right. There was no doubt about that. But it wasn’t the thirteen-year-old Nic’s room. That room was gone for ever.

What are you looking for?

I carried on looking around the room for a while, trying to ignore the pounding in my heart and the skin-tingling jelliness of my legs, then I took a deep breath and forced myself to go over to the dressing table. Nicole has never been the tidiest person in the world, and I wasn’t surprised by the chaotic mess on her table. It looked as if she’d been to a car-boot sale and bought a Variety Box of Girls’ Stuff, then come back home, lifted the box over her head, and emptied the contents on to the table. I knew what some of the stuff was – tubes of lipstick, mascara, eyeshadow – but most of it meant nothing to me. It was just stuff: pots, tubs, bottles, packets, sachets, tins, tiny little boxes… all of it dusted with fine sprinklings of powder. White powder (talcum?), pink powder, sparkling metallic powder. I stood there, looking down
at it all, trying to find whatever it was that I was trying to find… and I suppose I must have known what it was, because after a while I found myself reaching out and picking up a slender glass bottle with a flat black top. It was a small cylindrical bottle, about the size of a cigarette lighter, and it was made from shiny black glass. The word
JOJANA
was written in faint grey script on the front, so I guessed that was the name of the perfume:
JOJANA
.