The Other Child (7 page)

‘So, why were you waiting for me here?' he asked, although he knew the answer.

‘Can't you think why?'

‘Frankly: no.'

She looked really hurt, as if he had slapped her. He pulled himself together. ‘Karen … I'm really sorry about last week. If it … if that's why you're here. I'd had a few pints too many. But nothing's changed. Our relationship is over.'

She flinched a little at his words, but kept calm. ‘When you dumped me in July – out of the blue – I just wanted to know one thing. Do you remember? I wanted to know if there was another woman.'

‘Yes, and?'

‘You said there wasn't. That it was just about the two of us.'

‘I know what I said. Why do you have to bring it all up?'

‘Because …' She hesitated. ‘Because I've been hearing from various people that there's someone else in your life after all. In the last few weeks you've often been seen with another woman. Apparently she's not that young and nothing special.'

He hated this kind of conversation. It was like an interrogation.

‘And what if I have?' he retorted. ‘Did we sign an agreement that I can't start something with any other woman after our affair?'

‘One and a half years is not an affair.'

‘Call it what you will. In any case—'

‘In any case I don't believe that you didn't know this … new acquaintance before. You broke up with me on the 25th July. It's the 10th October today.'

‘Yup, almost three months have passed.'

She sat there, waiting. He felt cornered and realised how angry he was getting. With everything he already had on his plate; as if his life were not enough of a hassle already.

‘I don't owe you any explanations,' he said coolly.

Her lips trembled.

Please, God, don't let her cry now, he thought, annoyed.

‘After last week—' she started in a shaking voice, before he immediately interrupted.

‘Forget last week! I was drunk. I said I'm sorry. What else do you want me to say?'

‘Who is she? Apparently she's quite a bit older than me.'

‘Who said?'

‘People who have seen you together. People studying with me.'

‘So what? So she's older than you.'

‘She's almost forty!'

‘And what if she is? Suits me. I'm in my forties, after all.'

‘So there is someone.'

He did not say anything.

‘You've always had such young girlfriends,' said Karen in despair.

Youth. That was all she had to offer.

‘Maybe I'm changing some things in my life,' he replied.

‘But—'

He slammed his briefcase down on the table. He had been holding it all this time.

‘Listen, Karen. Stop putting yourself down. Tomorrow you'll be bitterly sorry. It's over between us. There are any number of men who would walk over hot coals for a girl as beautiful as you are. Just forget me, and don't dwell on it.'

Her first tears fell and she sank back down onto the stool where she had sat and waited for him. ‘I can't forget you, Dave. I can't. And I think … you can't actually have forgotten me either, otherwise last week you wouldn't have—'

‘What? Screwed? Bloody hell, Karen, you know how things go!'

‘Your new girlfriend isn't fit. Maybe you don't enjoy sleeping with her, like you do with me.'

‘That's my business,' he said. He was getting more and more angry, because she had hit upon a sore point. He just could not imagine having sex with Gwen, and he was already fearing the day – or night – when it would be unavoidable. Probably the only thing that would help then would be to get completely plastered and to try to imagine Karen's beautiful body.

Better for Karen not to hear about this plan.

She was crying hard now. ‘And today Detective Inspector Almond came by again,' she sobbed. ‘About Amy Mills.'

Dave took his coat off, resigned. It was going to take a while. Now she had got to the topic that would really bring on the waterworks. At least it had nothing to do with him. A little progress. If only he were not so tired, and did not have so many problems.

‘What did she need to see you again for?' he asked, beaten. And when Karen, instead of replying, just started sobbing more violently, he fetched a bottle of the hard stuff from a cupboard and two more-or-less clean glasses. ‘Here, have a sip.'

She rarely drank alcohol and had always complained when he did, but this time she put the glass to her lips and knocked it back. She let him pass her a second glassful and emptied it as quickly as the first. Then at least her tears subsided.

‘Oh, she basically just asked again about everything we'd already gone over,' she said. She was just as distraught as in July, when Amy Mills's murder had shaken the whole of Scarborough. ‘I'm the only person Amy was even a little in contact with, so she wanted to talk once more about all her daily habits and routines with me. But I don't know all that much about them. I mean …' she bit her lip, ‘I always found Amy a little … odd. So uptight. I felt sorry for her. But I certainly wasn't a close friend of hers.'

‘You can't blame yourself for that now,' said Dave. ‘You did more than the others. After all, you went for a coffee with her once or twice and listened to her problems. She obviously had real issues with making contact. That's not your fault.'

‘The police have no idea who did it. There's not a single lead,' said Karen. ‘At least, that's the impression I get.' She added: ‘Do you know Mrs Gardner well?'

‘You mean …'

‘Mrs Gardner, the woman whose child Amy was looking after that evening.'

‘Linda Gardner. Of course I know her. She teaches languages too, and we've always made sure our teaching matched up. But I don't know her more than that.'

‘She was teaching the evening Amy was murdered.'

The evening he had met Gwen and driven her home. How well, how very well he remembered that evening!

‘Right. That's why Amy was babysitting.'

‘Detective Inspector Almond is looking for people who knew that. Who knew that Amy babysat for Mrs Gardner. She asked me if I knew. I said I did.'

‘You're hardly a prime suspect.'

‘She wanted to know if I knew other people who knew too.' She looked at him, waiting for his reply.

He thought impatiently that she should just say what she was getting at. He hated the way she always beat around the bush.

‘Yes? And?'

‘I didn't tell her that I thought that you knew.'

‘And why not?'

There was something sly about how she waited; at least he thought he sensed that. ‘I … didn't want to make life difficult for you, Dave. It was your evening off. And if you remember, a day later we had a massive fight because you had stood me up and didn't want to tell me what had happened.'

Of course not. Should he have told her of the drive to Stainton-dale? And then be obliged to tell him about everything that had followed on from that?

He forced himself to stay calm, although she was really getting on his nerves. ‘I always had a problem with the way you wanted to control me. Maybe that was a reason why our relationship broke down.'

‘Did you know? That a student used to babysit for Mrs Gardner?'

‘Maybe she did tell me. And? Do you think I was lying in wait for Amy in the park and smashed her head in?'

Karen shook her head. ‘No.'

She looked sad and tired. No doubt this was not primarily because of the fate of a fellow student who had only been a fleeting acquaintance, nor because the police were having obvious difficulties in solving the crime. Rather, because her relationship with Dave had gone wrong. He started to feel traces of guilt, which annoyed him. He did not want to feel guilty.

‘So …' he said.

She reached for her handbag.

‘So …' she said too. Her voice sounded hoarse.

He pulled a face. ‘I'm really sorry about how it's all turned out. Really I am.'

Tears started to well up in her eyes again. ‘But why, Dave? I just don't understand.'

Because I'm crazy, he thought, because I'm doing something completely crazy. Because it's finally time for a different life. Because I can only see one way, just
this one way
, to go.

He knew that she hated it when he answered in clichés, but he did it anyway.

‘Some things you can't understand. You just have to accept them.'

He held the door open for her. A floorboard creaked down in the hall. The landlady, who had been standing at the foot of the stairs the whole time, quickly made herself scarce.

‘I'll come to the door,' Dave said.

She was crying again. He could at least try to treat her politely now, at the end.

3

They were catching up over a bottle of mineral water. Innumerable packets of cigarettes lay on the table. Leslie realised once again that she would never get used to some of the contradictions in her grandmother's character, least of all the fact that Fiona smoked like a chimney – up to sixty cigarettes a day. She seemed completely oblivious to the packets' warnings, which in ever more drastic words and pictures foretold a painful death for those who enjoyed the pleasures of smoking. And yet she refused to drink a single drop of alcohol, or even to have any in her home.

‘So unhealthy,' she would always say. ‘It makes you stupid. I'm not going to willingly kill my brain cells!'

After the long drive up north from London, Leslie would have liked to relax with a couple of glasses of wine, not to mention that at the end of a week which had begun with her divorce on Monday, she would really have liked to numb herself with alcohol. She was peeved because she had forgotten about this eccentricity of Fiona's, and had not brought a bottle or two with her.

The two women sat at a little table by the window in the living room. Outside it was completely dark, but between the clouds over the South Bay a star shone now and then. Sometimes even the moon came out. With its light you could just about see the dark, turbulent mass of the sea.

‘And what's your impression of Gwen?' asked Leslie.

Fiona lit a cigarette, the fifth since her granddaughter had turned up and moved into the guest room with her bags.

‘She seems quite overwhelmed by what's happening. And happy? I don't know. She's tense. I don't think she really trusts her fiancé.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘Maybe she doubts his seriousness. She wouldn't be the only one. Her father does. Me too.'

‘Do you know Dave Tanner?'

‘Know – not exactly. I've met him a few times at the Beckett farm over the last few months. And once I invited Gwen and him to come here. He didn't enjoy that at all. He doesn't like meeting the people around Gwen – not that there are many of us. He's probably afraid that they'll see through him.'

‘See through him? You're talking as if he …'

‘Were a crook? That's just what I think he is,' said Fiona forcefully. She took a nervous drag on her cigarette. ‘We can be frank with one another, Leslie, between ourselves. I like Gwen. She's friendly. Sometimes she's a little too anxious to please people, and that can get annoying, but it's certainly not a sign of a bad character. She's thirty-five and, as far as I know, never yet in her life has there been a man who has had a real interest in her, and we both know why!'

Leslie made as if to object. ‘Well, she's …'

‘She's as plain as it gets. She bores people to death. She sometimes looks like a real country bumpkin. She wears the most unbelievable clothes. She is hopelessly old-fashioned and marked by those trashy novels she always reads. She lives in a world that doesn't exist any more. I can understand why men give her a wide berth.'

‘Yes, but why can't there be someone who can see how she is inside and—'

Fiona gave a scornful laugh. ‘And what would he find there? Gwen isn't stupid, but she hasn't tried to learn anything new since school. She hasn't really been interested in the wider world. Wait until you meet Dave Tanner! I just can't imagine that he could, for long, bear to be with a woman he could practically not talk to.'

‘You mean …'

‘He's educated, intelligent and interested in everything in life. What's more, he's good-looking and would have many doors open to him. But he's made a complete mess of his life. And that, I'd say, is the nub of it.'

‘You mean …' Leslie said again.

‘Do you know how the man makes ends meet? He gives adult education language courses for housewives. But he did A levels and he studied Politics, even if he did drop out. Instead of finishing, he got involved in the peace movement and did a whole lot of stupid things that didn't lead anywhere. Now he's forty-three years old and lodges in a furnished room, because he can't afford anything else. And he's bloody well fed up with it.'

‘You know a lot about him.'

‘I like to ask direct questions. And from the answers I get, and the ones I don't get, I can put together a picture, which is often not too far from the truth. University drop-out, pacifist, eco-warrior, that might all feel good when you're still pretty young. It might be a kick, certainly more exciting than a middle-class life. But at some point things swing around. When you get older. When living in a shared flat and endless protest marches are no longer “you”. I bet you Tanner has been unhappy for a good while, but now he's got a classic midlife crisis on top of it all. He's frightened that he's only got one last chance to settle down to a normal life with a secure and regular income. I'd go further: I'd say he's pretty desperate. Even if he acts cool.'

‘Do you know what you're saying, Fiona?'

‘Yes. And really Gwen should be told too.'

Leslie bit her lips. ‘You can't, Fiona. She'd be … it's just not possible!'