Patricia said nothing. Then gasped. Then gestured at him to pause and rewind again.
In a rather ungainly manoeuvre for a woman of her age and build, she moved on to her hands and knees and crawled up to the TV. Gordon tried to ignore the stirring he felt at the sight of her generous backside.
‘Is that where I think it is?’ he said.
‘Yes, it is,’ Patricia growled. ‘Get that bloody man Conlon on the phone.’
On Friday night Joan had a get-together with her library book group. She’d been going for a couple of years, and through it she had befriended a more recent member, Ron, a widowed retiree in his mid-sixties.
Joan, who had lost her own husband to a heart attack nearly two decades ago, insisted that a romance was out of the question. That didn’t stop Louis and Dan from indulging in some good-natured teasing, if only to encourage her that the possibility still existed.
‘I’m too old,’ Joan had protested, and when Dan had demolished that argument, she had an admission: ‘If you want the truth, it frightens me. I’ve been on my own so long.’
‘I understand that, but you’d adjust to it.’
She pulled a face. ‘Then there’s you two to think of, don’t forget.’
‘We’re fine. Anyway, we’ll be off your hands before—’
He realised his mistake when he saw the panic dart across her face. They both smiled and pretended it hadn’t been there.
‘Ron was dropping hints about a new film coming out,’ she confided. ‘He told me he’s signed up to that Orange Wednesday thing.’
‘If he asks you, I want you to say yes.’
‘I don’t know.’ Joan sighed, her gaze growing distant. ‘Though it is one I’d quite like to see ...’
****
Dan had texted Hayley, offering to visit her after work. He did so knowing he’d have to take a bus to Newhaven and find a good excuse not to have driven. But Hayley said there was no point. She was still feeling lousy and intended to sleep through the evening.
For once it appeared that Louis wasn’t going out. He was ensconced in his bedroom, his music thudding through the ceiling – music that, in most cases, Dan had introduced and recommended to his kid brother: Kings of Leon, Tribes, Arcade Fire.
At around eight o’clock Dan trooped upstairs and knocked on the door. The music abruptly paused.
‘What?’
‘I’m going to do myself a pizza. Do you want one?’
‘No.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes.’
Dan sighed. He hated these situations, condemning him to the role of disapproving father figure.
‘Come on, Louis. You must be hungry—’
‘I don’t want anything. Leave me alone, okay?’
The music snapped back on, making further conversation impossible.
****
Dan heated up a pepperoni pizza. An evening of inane TV beckoned, with beer to blunt the tedium. Earlier he’d caught news bulletins on all the main channels and he’d checked the Argus website several times, but there was nothing more on the hit-and-run. No sign of the e-fits, either. Dan wondered if that was because of the amendments suggested by Cate.
He thought about calling her, not to invite her out but just to see how she was. Or maybe he could raise the idea of meeting up for a drink. As far as he knew, she was still single following her split from Martin Gilroy.
Dan had always regarded her ex-husband as a bit of a dickhead, though he’d put that down, in part, to his own jealousy. He had never quite recovered from his adolescent crush on Cate. It mystified him now that she hadn’t met someone else. She must be able to take her pick of men.
For a while he sat holding his phone with Cate’s number up on the display. One touch away from making contact. It was a pleasant daydream for as long as he could sustain the illusion that he might actually do it; then a longer period of low-level torment once he’d decided that he would not.
There were plenty of sound reasons why he shouldn’t. She might assume he was willing to cheat on Hayley – and she was bound to take a dim view of that, given Martin’s infidelity.
Then there were the lies, the deceit he would have to maintain no matter how much she challenged him. Because Robbie had been right about one thing: for her own sake, it was essential to keep Cate in the dark about Hank O’Brien’s death.
****
Louis’s music was still thumping away. Dan had another beer and watched some of the comedy shows that he normally enjoyed, but the jokes went right over his head. Had anything really made him laugh since Tuesday night? He didn’t think so.
Growing maudlin, and reluctant for once to fight it, he fetched a photo album from the dining room. Handling it as he would high explosives, he rested it gently on the coffee table and sat back at a safe distance before flipping the cover open.
It had been many months since he’d looked at these pictures. Most were of his parents in the early days of their marriage: pre-children, or with Dan as an infant. He was shocked to discover how little emotion they stirred. He did not recognise this smiling couple, younger here than Dan was now. The baby they held in their arms could have been any baby.
Over time the photos were losing their power to hurt. Dan couldn’t connect to these images – or, rather, to the memories that the images were supposed to nourish. When he tried to recreate important moments he found that his imagination was filling the gaps. His past was becoming fictionalised, to the point where, ten or fifteen years from now, he wondered if he would look back on the events of Tuesday night and find it impossible to believe he had ever been complicit in a fatal road accident.
He closed the album. There were other reliable aids to his memory, of course. For years after his parents’ deaths Dan had insisted that Joan use the same washing powder and fabric conditioner. The scent of a freshly laundered shirt or duvet cover could enable him to create, if only for an instant, the illusion that he was still a child, with a mother and father who would always keep him safe, protect him from the world and the monsters that lurked in the dark.
For the same reason he sometimes drank his dad’s favourite soft drink, Dandelion & Burdock, even though he’d never liked the taste. He sought out reruns of
Blind Date
and
Only Fools and Horses
on obscure TV channels, because those were shows he’d watched with Mum and Dad.
He remembered the troubling cocktail of jealousy and pride when his brother was born. Showing Louis off to his mates, and even, on one occasion, changing his nappy in front of them, to sniggers and noisy derision that masked a grudging respect. This was so far removed from the experience of most twelve-year-old boys that none of them could decide whether it was ‘cool’ or not.
Then he recalled an evening when his exhausted mother had spotted the symptoms of an irrational but very real sense of abandonment. Leaving Louis to cry for a few seconds, she had taken Dan in her arms, nuzzled her face against his and told him, confidentially: ‘You’ll always be my big grown-up boy, Daniel. My hero.’
And now that hero was wondering how long it would take for time to erase the knowledge that he had killed a man.
Jerry arrived at the Blakes in a sour mood. Once again he’d been up at the crack of dawn to get to Sussex. His miserly employees wouldn’t stump up for a hotel, which meant he was spending half his life on the choked-up roads of the South-East. He was going through a small fortune in petrol, and they had the cheek to be funny about it. Wanting to see receipts, as though the price of fuel had passed them by.
Then there was the logistical headache posed by keeping the farmhouse under surveillance when it was on its own at the end of a private lane. Jerry had no choice but to leave the car nearly a mile away, then walk along a succession of muddy, dogshit-splattered footpaths until he found a spot that allowed him a glimpse of O’Brien’s property.
In the afternoon he’d just informed the Blakes about Templeton’s people clearing the house when Gordon called and demanded an urgent meeting. Jerry was buggered if he was going to drive up there, only to be sent back to Sussex afterwards, so he insisted that he needed to stay and monitor developments for another couple of hours.
Jerry couldn’t fathom the Blakes: one minute harassing him to keep a closer eye on the place; the next trying to drag him away. They were pushing their luck, that was for sure.
It was the issue of money that rankled the most. His thirty grand a year didn’t seem so generous now he knew they’d been angling for fifty frigging million. He wondered how much of that would have come his way, had they managed to pull it off.
‘Sod all,’ he kept muttering. ‘Not a bloody nickel.’
****
In the end he rolled up at the Blakes’ place around seven, having stopped off at a Harvester pub and treated himself to a steak. Determined not to be hurried, he’d ignored their texts and calls.
The atmosphere was every bit as unwelcoming as he’d expected. As he stepped into the house Patricia remained in the hall, barring his way.
‘Where have you been?’ she said.
‘Bad traffic.’
Patricia gave a dismissive snort: clearly he was supposed to find a way to float above the gridlock. ‘And is there anything more to report?’
Jerry didn’t care for her tone. It sounded like she knew full well that there was.
‘The sister had a glazier round this afternoon.’
‘Making good after the burglary,’ Gordon commented. If that was intended to mollify his wife, it failed badly.
‘So what’s up?’ Jerry asked, thinking:
I’ve had just about as much as I can take from you, lady ...
Patricia waved towards an open door. ‘This.’
He walked into a living room that he hadn’t been privileged to enter before now. It was cluttered with antique furniture and made gloomy by heavy maroon wallpaper. There was a TV stuck on freeze frame, the image shivering in the corners as if impatient to move on. A DVD box lay on the floor:
Entwined
.
Gordon, who for some reason was chewing on the arm of Patricia’s reading glasses, indicated the screen. ‘Recognise this?’
Jerry crouched down. The man in the shot was familiar: not a bad actor. And the woman was a looker, but she—
‘Bloody hell.’ Jerry stared in disbelief at the room in which the actors were cavorting.
Gordon said, ‘We’ve only been there once, a few years ago. But it looks familiar.’
‘It’s the farmhouse, definitely.’ Jerry’s voice was calm enough, but inside he was thinking:
Ohhh shit
...
Patricia regarded him severely. ‘It’s a forlorn hope, I suppose, to ask whether you can make any sense of this?’
‘Nope. I’m as much in the dark as you are.’
‘But you were paid, Jerry – handsomely paid – to keep tabs on him. As well as your role of intermediary, you were supposed to befriend him, become his trusted confidant.’
‘And I did. But I also took your advice that I mustn’t make him suspicious. “Don’t live in his pocket. Don’t make him uneasy.” Remember?’
Gordon nodded, shamefaced. ‘That’s true.’
‘And while we’re on the subject of money, I wouldn’t call it all that “handsome”, given some of the crap coming my way.’
Patricia made a spluttering noise, as though her outrage couldn’t be funnelled into mere words. Gordon stepped between them, appealing for peace.
‘Rather than fall out, let’s focus on the issues here.’
‘I wish we could.’ Patricia snatched the glasses from Gordon’s hand. ‘But with each development we seem to understand less, not more.’
‘Darling, to be fair, this is such a bizarre sequence of events ...’
Jerry found himself tempted to slip away. As he took a step back Patricia brought her fearsome gaze to bear, jabbing the arm of her glasses in his direction.
‘Three days, and all we’ve had is more questions. More uncertainty. We need
answers
.’
‘I can’t magic up a solution out of thin air.’
‘Then I seriously have to wonder what use you are to us.’
‘Fair enough. I’ll walk,’ Jerry said, hating the petulant tone that always crept into his voice during confrontations. ‘But you’ll have to make it worth my while to keep my mouth shut.’
A stunned silence. From outside, they heard the rumble of a car engine.
‘Are you threatening us, Jerry?’ Patricia asked quietly.
He shrugged. He’d been rehearsing an exchange of this nature for most of the afternoon, but now all the clever retorts had deserted him.
Ever the smarmy diplomat, Gordon said, ‘Stemper’s here. Can I suggest we park this issue for the time being?’
Nobody had to spell it out: Cate knew what a dismal picture it painted of her life, pushing a trolley round Sainsbury’s at seven o’clock on a Friday evening. And not one of the big trolleys, either – which made it all the more obvious that she was shopping for one.
Might just as well write ‘saddo’ on my forehead ...
She couldn’t remember when she’d last done anything remotely exciting on a Friday, let alone had a hot date. And after this she was going to drive home, put the shopping away, eat a low-fat curry and probably drink the best part of a bottle of Pinot, while telling herself there was really nowhere else she’d rather be than here, on her sofa, watching a DVD.
At least, as it turned out, that was what she
should
have done.
****
It was an act of lunacy, but at the time it seemed harmless enough. Leaving the supermarket, she let the Audi drift towards the right-hand lane rather than the left.
The house was in Mile Oak, on one of the many new estates that had sprouted up in recent years. The road layout was confusing. A couple of times she was flashed by the car behind when she slowed to read the road signs.