Close Call (29 page)

Jack took a deep breath and said, ‘You can have the latest Harry Potter. I'll finish it later.' He had never known that being a saint would sit so uneasily on his shoulders. He felt sainthood pressing on his back, like a very heavy rucksack.

The thin head with its wispy strands of fair hair shook as though it belonged to an old man. ‘I'm not up to reading much just yet, bro. You finish it. Let me have it then. Let me know what you think of it.' Luke smiled wanly, feeling the determined, unnatural politeness towards Jack dropping stiffly from him. Everything felt strange and new, including this elder brother he had not seen all week. He stood, awkward and gawky as a new-born foal, in the hall of the house which he had inhabited for all but the last week of his twelve years.

Eleanor Hook had to control an impulse to burst into peals of laughter as she watched this strange little tableau. She wanted to put the boy into his own bed, to bring him whatever he needed, even to lie down beside him and feel the living, vibrant warmth of him. She did nothing of the sort, of course. She said carefully, ‘Perhaps you should go and sit down with the telly for a while, Luke. Watch the cricket and build up your strength.'

She had no idea whether there was any cricket on. But her luck held. It was the third day of the test match, and Luke allowed himself to be led, docile as an old dog, to the armchair, which was much too big for him. When Eleanor Hook brought him a sandwich with the crusts cut off five minutes later, the small white face was staring intently at the winking screen.

It was a full hour later before the parents heard the first argument about switching channels, the first sounds of their boys' voices rising in querulous debate. They looked at each and smiled the congratulations they could neither voice nor understand, while the dispute in the adjoining room grew shriller as its ritual was played out.

Normal family service had been resumed.

On Saturday afternoon, the first clouds in almost a fortnight drifted over Gurney Close.

Jason Ritchie, who had needed a pick to break up the baked and compacted ground he was levelling behind the first house in the little cul-de-sac, looked up at the sky with the practised eye of the outdoor worker. He calculated that he had probably no more than an hour before the rain coming in from the Atlantic would stop work for the day and bring the first, welcome downpour to the rudimentary gardens of the new community.

He worked hard and methodically, turning the clay swiftly and expertly with a fork, calculating that he could complete the rectangle that he had planned before the rain came, using the steady rhythm of the labour to distract him from other, more disturbing concerns. He caught sight of Lisa Holt's face at the window, but she turned quickly away, embarrassed as she would never have been a week ago to be caught watching him. For his part, he carried on with his work without a flicker, refusing to acknowledge that he had ever been aware of her attention.

Twenty minutes later, Lisa brought out two big beakers of tea and stood awkwardly beside him. She did not want to go back into the house without a conversation, yet she was wondering how to summon the will and the words to sustain one. Feeling how ridiculous this estrangement was between them, she eventually sat herself down firmly on one of the garden chairs beside the plot. Jason went on working determinedly, until she said, ‘You should sit down to drink your tea. You've earned a rest.'

He hesitated, then came and sat down beside her, very carefully, as if they were patients who did not know each other in a doctor's waiting room. After a moment he said, ‘You'll need compost of some kind. Some farmyard manure would be ideal. Most of the topsoil seems to have disappeared, and the builder's vehicles have made this clay like concrete.'

It was the kind of language he would have used with strangers who were employing him to make a garden, not to Lisa. He was sure in any case that he had already given her this advice when he had last worked in her garden, when they had been open and easy and humorous with each other. When Robin Durkin had watched them from that other house in the close.

Jason sat and looked at his handiwork, trying to think of other and better words as he sipped the hot tea. He did not want to look into Lisa's face. Instead, he looked down at her thighs and the slim, delicate, vulnerable feet beneath the aluminium frame of the chair. He was conscious without looking at her of the curl of her hair against the nape of her neck, of the soft curve of her breast a foot from his arm. He wanted her, with a simple, uncomplicated lust that had nothing to do with love. A week ago, he would have suggested quite simply that they went inside the house and made love. At this moment, he felt that nothing between them would ever be simple again.

Jason said the only thing he could think of to say. ‘The police gave me quite a going-over on Thursday. That Detective Sergeant Hook and a woman sergeant I'd never seen before. They knew all about my dealing drugs; about the hold Durkin had over me; about his threats to land me in trouble with the law.'

Lisa Holt could no more look into his face than he into hers. She stared hard at the big lumps of dry clay he had not yet broken up with the fork, watching a robin hopping nearer and nearer to where they sat. She said dully, ‘We've all been having our secrets picked over by the police in the last few days.'

‘Yes. Someone shopped me to them, I think.'

‘That was me, Jason.' It was a relief to have it out. She had been wondering how to tell him. But the words of explanation which would normally have come easily to her were elusive now. She said clumsily, ‘They warned me we couldn't keep any secrets from them. That we'd be suspected of murder if we held anything back.'

‘So you sent them after me. Thought you'd get them off your back by sending them after a man who already had a criminal record.'

‘It wasn't like that. And I'm sure they knew all about your criminal record and would have followed it up without any prompting from me.'

He found himself nodding when he hadn't intended to. ‘I quite like that Hook bloke. But perhaps that's what they intend. Perhaps that's the way the CID operate.' He looked up at the sky, seeing the last big tract of blue giving way to the approaching cloud. ‘I thought it might be you who'd put them on to me.'

‘I have a child, Jason. I couldn't afford to leave him without a mother.' It sounded melodramatic, unreal. That was natural enough, Lisa thought ruefully, since that was exactly what it was: she hadn't really thought she was avoiding arrest by implicating Jason.

Jason said, ‘He's a good lad, George. Your divorce doesn't seem to have affected him much.' It had seemed a safe thing to say, but he could think of nothing to continue the thought, to bring him back closer to the boy's mother.

‘Martin was always a good father. We didn't fall out on that score. I bet he's spoiling George somewhere at this very moment. I'm not going to make any difficulties about him having access.'

Jason was silent for a moment, considering this other part of her life which was closed to him. Then he said quietly, ‘Do you think I killed Durkin?'

‘No, of course I don't.' But there had been just enough pause before she replied to tell him about the nightmare scenario that started to dance in her imagination earlier in the week. ‘It's just that we were all under pressure, all trying to protect ourselves.' He didn't reply, didn't say anything conciliatory as she'd hoped. She forced herself to say the words she had never intended. ‘Didn't just a little bit of you think that
I
might have killed him?'

He smiled slowly, still without looking at her, and shrugged those big, familiar shoulders. ‘More than a little bit of me, at times! I knew how bitter you felt about what he'd done to Martin and about the way he wrecked your marriage.'

It was his smile, not what he said, that broke the invisible barrier between them. She let a few seconds go by before she said. ‘We've been a bit silly this week, haven't we?'

He nodded happily and drained his beaker. ‘Throws things out of perspective, murder does.'

She inched a little nearer to him on her chair, then put her small hand on top of his much broader one. ‘We could go inside, if you want to, Tiger.'

Now Jason Ritchie turned to look at her full in the face, for the first time in days, and they grinned at each other, ruefully and happily. It was the first time she had used that pet name since the murder. He reached out awkwardly and put his hand round her slim shoulders, pulling her briefly and perilously against him as the lightweight chairs threatened to collapse. She thought he was going to kiss her, but he said, ‘I'd better finish this job first, before the rain comes. Don't want my mistress saying I neglected duty for pleasure, do I?'

Lisa Holt picked up the beakers and took them back into the house. She paused at the door and bestowed upon him a look which held promise of delights to come. ‘I like a man who's full of surprises!' she said.

In the second house in Gurney Close, neither of the occupants was concerned with the garden.

Philip Smart was sitting in an armchair and wondering how he could convince his wife of the seriousness of his determination to reform. He was a much chastened man. Like most libertines, he had made numerous vows over the years to mend his ways. Yet he had never been so resolved upon amendment as he was on this sunny Saturday, sitting in the conservatory of the house which was still so new that it felt strange. He just hoped it wasn't too late.

‘They think I did it, Carol,' he said to his wife nervously. And when she said nothing, he followed up nervously with, ‘Killed our next-door neighbour, I mean. Killed Robin Durkin.'

He was looking for reassurance: Carol Smart saw that. And paradoxically, it was because she read him so well that she could not give him that reassurance. Perhaps that was part of being a wife, she thought wryly: you saw things so clearly in a long-term partner that you also saw the comfort they wanted you to offer as banal, even hypocritical. Or perhaps it was merely that when words were obvious and expected, it was not easy for you to offer them. A waspish impulse took her by surprise and she said, ‘And did you do it, Phil?'

‘No, of course I didn't!' He essayed a little laugh to show how ridiculous the idea was. It emerged as a strangled groan, a most peculiar sound, without a hint of hilarity in it. ‘But I wish that I hadn't tried to conceal things from them in the first place. I feel they don't trust anything I say now, that they feel I'm trying to deceive them even when I'm telling the truth.'

‘You're not good at concealing things, Phil. You never were.' Despite the harshness of the thought, she found herself speaking for the first time in hours with real affection.

They had sat up far into the night, engaging in the drama, the agonies and the reliefs of confession. Phil had wept as he had not done since he was a boy, seemingly as much at the shame of his own revelations as at the pain of hers. Now he said, ‘You saw through a lot of my lies, didn't you, even at the time?' His sad shake of the head took in the paucity of his efforts, the pathos of human sexual aspiration, and the feebleness of men's attempts to conceal it.

She nodded. ‘I saw through most of them, I think.' She had almost said ‘all of them', but something told her that that might be a foolish and pointless boast.

‘Whereas I hadn't a clue about you. I'd no idea you'd been carrying on with Rob Durkin.' Phil's comfortable, florid, fifty-one-year-old face creased anew with pain; he was not at this moment sure whether that pain came from the images of his wife rolling in bed with a hated younger man, or from the thought of his own crassness in being unaware of it.

Carol didn't like that ‘carrying on', but to protest that her feelings had been more serious or aspirational would only hurt him more. And she had hurt him quite enough last night. It was curious how her one serious transgression had been more shocking and much more hurtful to him than his long trail of rather desperate womanizing had been to her.

At least he had not come up with the old line about monogamy not being a natural state for men, though she had an awful feeling that she might have agreed with him if he had. Now she threw him an old line herself, realizing as she delivered it that she was anxious to get it out before Phil came up with it. ‘It's best to have things on the table. Perhaps our marriage will be all the better for these things, in the long run.'

‘Yes.' He paused, remembering his tears in the garden behind their house when he had gone out there alone in the small, impossibly silent, hours of the morning. So quiet had it been that he had been able to hear the movements of unseen creatures in the waters of the invisible River Wye, eighty yards away behind the high, still trees. Then he said with more conviction, ‘I really want it to work, you know. And not just because of the girls. I want you, Carol. I told you everything there was to know about my women last night.'

Carol smiled, looking unseeingly at the picture she had never really liked upon their wall. He probably thought he had made a full confession to her, though she'd stopped him from delivering the gory details of his womanizing as soon as she could. And he probably really believed now that his contrition was all that was necessary for their union to be restored to a full vigour. His naïvety was quite touching in one of his years; she felt a warmth for that quality in him, a warmth which was possibly going to be a great help in the years to come.

She was fairly confident now that there were going to be years together in their future. She had been surprised in the various crises which had beset them in the last week to find how much she cared for this venal, ridiculous figure who sat alongside her. She might even prevent him from turning into the ridiculous old roué he had promised to become and turn him into a dull and affectionate husband, if she worked hard at it. And she realized now with a little, not unpleasant, shock of self-knowledge that she wanted to work at it. She said, ‘The police suspected me too, you know. Probably still do, for that matter. I don't think they found me fully convincing when they spoke to me at the school last night.'