CHAPTER 23
He was beginning to think that the bookshop was some kind of magnet for people he knew. This time it was the unmistakable shape of his mother that he saw standing outside with her trusty wicker basket over her arm.
‘You do know they don’t sell cleaning products in there, don’t you?’ he asked, coming up behind her and making her jump. He should stop doing that.
‘Idiot,’ she said, swiping his arm with the back of her free hand. ‘And don’t be so cheeky, I can read. I can even do it without moving my lips.’
He looked into his mother’s basket for some clue to what she might have bought, but was distracted by an A4 envelope with her name on it.
She must have seen him looking. ‘Just been to a meeting with the Secretary of the Show to discuss the Mrs Egremont incident,’ she explained. ‘We’ve all been given new guidelines.’ There was a pull down of his mother’s mouth.
Tom nodded in what he hoped was a sympathetic way.
‘Anyway, enough of that,’ his mother said. ‘I’m meeting Kath in a minute. So tell me quickly, what’s going on with your brother?’
‘In what respect?’
‘Stop playing the fool, Tom. You know what I mean. I understand that he’s worried about Kath and the baby. Why wouldn’t he be? But it seems to have got worse recently. Are you telling me you haven’t noticed?’
Tom found it relatively easy to lie to his mother about the massive things in his life – the state of his marriage when it was dying; why he had brought Hattie north – but he had never been able to lie to her about his brother. It would have felt as if he was betraying the tightly knit, triangular relationship that had been the bedrock of their lives after his dad had died.
He told her about the latest conversation he’d had with Rob, but omitted to say it had taken place in the cemetery, or the comment about ‘talking to Dad’.
Patting things into a less worrying shape didn’t count as lying, did it?
‘I’ll have to have a chat with him,’ she said when he’d finished. ‘Oh, don’t worry, I won’t drop you in it. He’s going to suck all the enjoyment out of this for Kath. I mean, she’s nervous too, but
she
just gets on with it.’
‘To be fair to Rob, he realises that.’
A brisk nod. ‘Leave it with me. Slowly, slowly, khaki monkey.’
She shifted her basket from her left to her right arm as if to underline the truth of that statement and Tom was thinking that was a good mash-up of words, even for his mother, when he noticed that the contents of her basket had shifted too. The envelope had slipped over enough to reveal a steak, all snugly wrapped in its plastic tray.
His mother had been a vegetarian since she was a teenager.
‘You know what we need for Rob,’ Tom said, looking pointedly at the steak, ‘someone with good listening skills. A counsellor, say, or a
vicar
…’
His mother raised her chin and gave the basket a jiggle, perhaps in the hope the steak would get covered up again. It didn’t.
‘They have a good choice of books in the shop,’ she said, turning to look in the window. ‘I might bring Hattie—’
‘Or,’ Tom went on, ‘what would be even better, would be one of those retired vicars who has more time to devote to him.’ He moved so that he was in his mother’s sightline again. ‘Hey, just had a brilliant idea – someone like Rev. George would be perfect. He’s retired, isn’t he? Now … if only we knew how to get in touch with him.’
His mother looked as if she was losing her patience and
then her expression changed to a smug one. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘here’s Kath. Just when I was getting a headache …’ There was a hawk-like stare at him before she was all smiles for her daughter-in-law.
To Tom’s eyes, it seemed as if the baby was ready to come at any moment and there was definitely a trudging look to Kath’s walk, but she said, ‘Playing truant?’ cheerily to Tom and gave him a big kiss on the cheek. Her skin felt hot, even though the sky was mostly overcast today.
‘Hope you’re ready for some serious shopping,’ she said to his mother. ‘I want to get a couple more sleepsuits and take a look in that shop near the estate agent’s. They’ve got some lovely little knitted hats.’
Tom never failed to be touched by Kath’s optimism. He just wished his brother would catch some of it.
‘Sounds expensive,’ he said.
‘It’s my treat.’ His mother put her hand up as if she knew Kath would remonstrate and the basket over her other arm wobbled.
He saw from Kath’s face that she had spotted the steak.
‘That’s really kind of you, Joan,’ she said, ‘but only if you let me treat you to lunch.’ There was a cheeky look Tom’s way. ‘The cafe on the corner does a nice steak and onion pie.’
Tom nodded his head. ‘That’ll get you revved up, Mum.’
He saw Kath press her lips together and look away.
With what she probably thought was a great amount of subtlety, his mother rearranged the contents of her basket so the steak was no longer visible.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, giving them both a sour look, ‘you two talk complete gibbonish. Now come on, Kath, I’m sure Tom has to be back at the office.’
*
Tom was still wondering if his mother’s mangling of words was going to be completely primate-themed from now on, when he pushed open his office door to find Liz sitting in his seat.
‘You’re breaking our agreement,’ he said. ‘It still counts as leaping on me as soon as I get in even if you’re sitting down.’
‘
Verbal
agreement, Tom. And I had my fingers crossed behind my back when I said it.’ She stood up and, with a grin, thrust a piece of paper at him. ‘Thought you’d want to see this as soon as possible. It’ll cheer you up.’
Jamie’s copy. Tom’s irritation slowly changed to surprise as he read. This was good. Interesting. Punchy.
‘How has he suddenly improved so much?’ Tom looked towards the open door where he could see Jamie sitting at his desk, slowly and methodically eating a bar of chocolate and staring at the far wall. The way he was swivelling his
chair made his fringe flop. It suggested he was feeling more light-hearted than usual when faced with a keyboard.
‘You didn’t help him with this, did you, Liz?’
She made a ‘Did I bollocks?’ face. ‘Fran was in this morning. Said she’d had a brainwave about how to make her feature look even better – drop flowers over the page and fit the copy round them. Should have heard Felix and her, like they were going to orgasm together.’
Tom wished Liz hadn’t placed that image in his brain. ‘Not sure where this is going, Liz?’
‘Where it’s going is that after she finished talking to Felix, she came down here. She wanted to do some research about red squirrels. That’s where she is now, up at Slaley Forest, just finishing off her drawing of one of the little buggers. Anyway, I got stuck into something else, and Jamie and her were chatting away, heads together. When she leaves, Jamie hands over the wundercopy.’
They looked out at Jamie again. He was trying to tie the empty chocolate wrapper in a knot. One particularly energetic swivel of his chair brought him round to face them. He saw them looking, might even have seen the paper in Tom’s hand. He was soon eyes front, hands on his keyboard.
‘Guilty as charged,’ Liz said smugly, ‘he knows we know.’
‘Thanks, Miss Marple. OK, we’ll see how he gets on with
his next couple of articles. Right … shut the door after you.’
He settled slowly back to his work, but he was disquieted by an image of Fran and Jamie’s heads in such close proximity, blonde against dark.
When the phone rang, he thought at first it was Kelvin taking the piss with some heavy-duty heavy breathing. Then he realised it was someone panicking and trying to talk at the same time.
‘Tom,’ Fran said, ‘oh, thank goodness you’re there. I’m so, so sorry, I know how busy you are … but I didn’t know who else to trust. I’ve had an accident. A terrible, terrible accident.’
CHAPTER 24
‘Yes, definitely dead.’ Tom stood up and brushed the soil from the knees of his trousers, noting again the way the radiator grille was buckled. ‘That doesn’t look so good either.’
‘I know both of those things, Tom.’ Fran glanced at the body under the wheel. She no longer sounded panicky and he supposed that she’d had time to calm herself as she’d waited for him to arrive.
Through the window of the car he noticed the large sketch pad on the back seat.
‘When Liz told me you were finishing off a red squirrel, I had no idea she meant it literally,’ Tom said. ‘So, did you
get him
before you
got him
?’
‘Tom!’ she said, sharply. ‘How can you make a joke at a time like this?’
Hard to believe someone could open their eyes so wide.
‘It’s a squirrel, Fran. You haven’t mown down a child or a pensioner.’
‘But it was so beautiful. Its bushy tail, its little tufted ears.’ She was bending down to peer at what was left of the squirrel – which didn’t include the tufty ears or very much of the tail.
He gave her a couple of seconds before asking again, ‘Well, did you get it?’
She was still looking down, so her ‘yes’ was only just audible.
‘One way to look at this,’ he said, trying to cheer her up, ‘is that he’ll get a permanent memorial. In paper. He’ll live on in—’
‘Don’t patronise me, Tom.’ She jerked back up straight. ‘If I’d swerved the other way when it ran across the road, I’d have missed it and the tree. I could blame the sun …’ She gave it an accusatory squint. ‘It blinded me at the crucial moment. But really this is no one’s fault but mine.’ Her shoulders rose and fell and he looked at the sun too, slanting through the trees like so many diagonals of light and making the forest seem more secluded and secret.
No sound, not even a breeze in the leaves. Everything at peace.
Especially the squirrel.
He watched how the sunlight caught her hair and brought out the silver, and then he saw her hair move as she shook her head.
‘The poor reds have a hard enough time as it is against those lumpish grey things,’ she said. ‘Fighting over food, getting the pox from them.’
To Tom it sounded like a typical Friday night round the kebab vans on Newcastle quayside, but he kept that joke to himself and offered her the platitude, ‘Accidents happen.’
She looked unconvinced. ‘But the reds are getting rarer all the time, and I’ve made them even more so.’
‘Well, how about you run over a grey on your way home and even things up again?’
Her admonishing look was back. ‘Have you no heart?’
He was about to reply when she became businesslike. ‘No good moping. I’ll just have to report it.’
‘What?’
‘I saw on the Internet that they monitor them – numbers, geographical locations, that kind of thing.’
He could feel his patience begin to stretch. His desk was full of work and standing on the edge of a forest discussing a dead red squirrel with a woman in a floral dress was not on his To Do list. ‘They aren’t pin-point accurate studies,’ he said. ‘They don’t give them names – it’s not a case of “Come in, Red October, your time is up”.’
How could he possibly have entertained the idea that she was in any way normal?
‘But—’
‘For God’s sake, it’s a bloody squirrel – a
really
bloody squirrel. Just reverse off it and drive home.’
She pulled back her shoulders and Kelvin’s comment about her being ‘pert’ drifted across his mind.
‘You know when you were home-schooled?’ he asked, to take his mind off the pertness.
‘Ye-es?’
‘Was it in a cupboard? Totally away from how the world really works?’
Fran was sucking in her cheeks as she had done when irritated by Vasey. When she did speak, it was in a clipped, formal fashion.
‘If you’ve quite finished, Tom, I agree that I believe things matter when they don’t. I can find myself weeping at the sight of a dead cat as I think of its owners, waiting vainly at home for—’
‘We’re not talking family cats here, we’re talking squirrels.’
She studied him. ‘Yes,’ she said, finally. ‘You’re right. All we need to do is bury it.’
‘What! In a forest? Where, unburied, something bigger would simply eat it within minutes of you driving off?’
‘This is not about being practical, it’s about doing the decent thing,’ she said firmly. ‘Oh, and
driving off
? That was
the other reason I called you. The car won’t move. I think I’ve done some serious damage to it.’
‘Not as much as to the fucking squirrel!’ he shouted, his patience finally going ‘ping’.
During the ensuing silence, he realised he had plonked his hands on his hips and quickly moved them.
‘Very funny,’ she said, when he was just beginning to think she was not going to talk to him any more. ‘Very funny, but also quite cruel … and, Tom, I have no idea why a person who
can
be kind is choosing to be difficult. It doesn’t do you justice. And, if you turn your back on me now, well, I’m not sure how our working relationship will survive unscathed.’
Was she blackmailing him – help me bury this squirrel or you won’t get the paper one? He didn’t feel blackmailed, he felt like a naughty boy hauled out in front of the class.
The sun was still slanting down, the forest was still green and dark and quiet. All at once he was aware how big the trees were and how he felt dwarfed by them. Yet standing here, out of his office and out of his car, he was inextricably linked to them. Him, this woman, even that damn squirrel.
He couldn’t look at Fran. Easier to focus on the trunk of the tree damaged by the car.
‘Have you called the car hire company?’ he asked, still looking at the tree.
‘Yes, they’re sending someone out with a breakdown
lorry.’ Fran’s tone softened. ‘But I’d still like to bury the squirrel before they arrive. What do you think, Tom? Help or hinder?’
*
‘I really, really do appreciate this,’ Fran said, looking down at the mound of leaves and twigs that marked the squirrel’s last resting place. ‘I know how hard it was to get anywhere in this soil.’ She looked up at him and there was one of her big smiles. ‘Inspired using the corner of that file as a scraper.’