The Pure in Heart (4 page)

Now, mug of coffee in hand, he went to three of his own drawings framed and hanging on the wall to the right of the tall windows. He had done them on his last visit to Venice and he saw at once that they were better than anything he had produced during the previous few days there. He had not worked so well for
a long time, unsettled as he had been by the events of the previous year. The murder of Freya Graffham had hit him hard and not only because the death of a fellow officer was always a blow from which it was tough to recover. No, he said, and went briskly back to the kitchen for more coffee. Don’t go there, not again. He dressed in jeans and sweatshirt and took the canvas satchel he used to hold
his drawing things. The offices were opening, voices came through half-open doors, kettles boiled in cubby-holes. Strange, Simon thought. The building felt different, no longer his. Strange. Strange to be wearing jeans instead of a suit on a weekday morning, strange to be here instead of overlooking a back canal in Venice. Strange and disorientating.

He drove fast out of Lafferton.

The hospital
might have been a different place too. He had difficulty finding a parking space, the foyer streamed with people on their way to outpatient
appointments, porters pushing wheelchairs, gangs of medical students, flower deliverers, two women setting up a charity stall. Down here the smell of antiseptic was barely detectable.

The lift was full, the wards were noisy. Somewhere, someone dropped a bucket
and swore. But in Martha’s room, nothing had changed. The monitors blipped on, the fluorescent green wavelets rippled across the screens, the liquid in the plastic bag above her head drip-dripped. At first he thought that his sister looked the same but when he went closer, it seemed to Simon that the colour of her skin had darkened slightly. Her hair was damp, her eyelids tender as the soft
skins of mushrooms.

He wondered, as he always did when he saw her again, how much went on in her mind, what she recognised and understood, whether she thought and if so how deeply. That she
felt
he was in no doubt. Her feelings had always moved him for she expressed them as a baby, crying and laughing as readily and absorbedly, ceasing as quickly, though he had never found it easy to make out
what might have stimulated her emotion or whether the response was to something external or inside herself.

Her handicap so affected her features that it was hard to detect any family resemblance there but to Simon that only made her more completely, uniquely herself.

He pulled the chair up close to her bed.

He was too absorbed in his drawing to notice the door opening. He wanted to catch
the spirit of his sister by freeing her, on paper, from the medical apparatus that surrounded her and as he looked at the hairs on her head, the curve of her nostril beneath the wide nose, and the eyelashes, like the hairs of a fine paintbrush on her cheek, he saw that she was beautiful, as a child is beautiful, because neither time nor experience had in any way marked her face. Drawing her eyelids
with the finest pencil lines, he almost held his breath.

‘Oh, darling …’ The front of her hair glittered with raindrops. ‘Cat told me you’d come back.’

They looked at the still, oddly flattened figure on the bed.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You mustn’t be.’

‘Every time I come in through that door I feel torn in two,’ Meriel Serrailler said. ‘Afraid she will be dead. Hoping she will be dead. Praying but
I don’t know who to or for what.’ She bent now and brushed her lips against Martha’s forehead.

Simon pulled the chair back for her.

‘You were drawing her.’

‘I’ve been meaning to for a long time.’

‘Poor little girl. Have the doctors been in yet?’

‘Not this morning. I spoke to Sister Blake last night. And Chris was here.’

‘It’s hopeless either way. But none of them will say so.’

He put his
hand on his mother’s arm but she did not turn to him. She sounded, as she always did
when she spoke about Martha, cool, detached, professional. The warmth in her voice, familiar to the rest of them, seemed absent. Simon was not deceived. He knew that she loved Martha as much as any of her children but with an entirely different kind of love.

His drawing lay on the bedcover. Meriel picked it up.

‘Strange,’ she said. ‘Beauty but no character.’ Then she turned to face him. ‘And you?’ She looked at him with disconcerting directness. Her eyes were Cat’s and Ivo’s eyes, very round, very dark, not his own blue ones. She waited, still and quite composed. Simon picked up the drawing and began to cover it with a sheet of protective film.

‘I wish your father hadn’t rung you. You needed a holiday.’

‘I’ll get another. I’m going for a cup of tea. Shall I bring you some?’

But his mother shook her head. At the door Simon glanced round and saw that she was stroking her daughter’s hair gently back from her face.

‘Come over here … have lunch with me.’

‘Maybe tomorrow.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m going to Hylam Peak … it’s a good walking day. I’ll get a pub lunch.’

‘Brooding?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘I’ll ring you later.’

Simon put the phone down. His sister knew him too well. Brooding? Yes. When he felt like this he was not good company, he needed to put distance between himself and home and, as Cat herself had once
said, walk the brooding out of his system. It was everything – having to break off his time in Venice, Martha, and still the hangover from last year. The following Wednesday he would be back at work. He needed to brood now.

Hylam Peak was one of a chain of hills that ran thirty miles to the west of Lafferton, approached by a twisting road that climbed across open moorland. A few damp villages
huddled in the shadows of the
steep dips between the peaks. In summer the tracks were bright with slow-moving trains of walkers, climbers hung like spiders from ropes attached to the rocky outcrops. These peaks were Bevham’s playground. People got out of the city to fly kites and microlights, hang-glide and race mountain bikes.

For the rest of the year, especially in bad weather, no one came.
Simon liked it best on days like this, when he could sit at the top of Hylam Peak among the cries of the sheep and the soaring buzzards and look across three counties, draw, think, even sleep on the dry patchy grass, and speak to no one.

He wondered how people survived in families and crowded places of work, buses, trains, busy streets day in, day out, without a solitary escape to wild empty
places.

He was the only one in the roughly fenced-off area that served as a car park. He took out his canvas satchel, immobilised the steering wheel and zapped down the locks. Nothing at all was left in the car apart from an old rug and neither radio nor CD player was fitted. The park might be deserted now but places like this were easy targets for thieves whatever the season.

An hour and a
half later, he sat alone on the rock slab at the summit of the Peak. The March sun chased shadows like hares across the landscape below him. The air was clear and filled with the melancholy bleating of hundreds of the native long-fleeced sheep scattered over the hills.

He felt idle. He had been up here times without number and drawn the peaks and the cloudscapes over them as well as the sheep
in every season, every weather until, at least for now, there was nothing left for him to put his pencil to.

Brooding, Cat had said. But now that he was up here he felt light-headed in the cool spring air and he did not brood. The sun was on his face. He rolled on to his back and crossed his hands behind his head. A single lark spiralled up into the blue sky and higher, to the whiteness beyond.

Its trail of song was sliced into and drowned by the judder of a helicopter and its shadow fell across Simon’s face, blotting out the sun. He sat up, shocked. The thing was skimming the peaks in a whirl of metal blades. He saw its undercarriage, so close he might have reached up his hand to touch it and as he watched it cross the valley, going east, he could make out the outline of two of the
figures inside. It was neither the air ambulance nor a police helicopter but, so far as he could tell, a private one.

As it moved across the landscape the terrified sheep fled up and down the slopes in all directions, trying to get away from the noise and the slipping shadow. The machine itself was well out of sight before the silence came down again.

The lark’s song was severed.

Simon pulled
himself to his feet and slung the canvas bag across his back. The intrusion of ugly sound and sight had fractured his peace and sense of
ease as it had unsettled the sheep and silenced the bird.

He took the path that led steeply down the Peak, following the fingerposts to Gardale.

The bed was stripped, the mattress bare, the sheets and blankets piled by the door. There were pale shapes on the walls where his posters and calendar and photographs had been. His bag was by his feet, packed, zipped. Ready.

He was ready.

He’d been ready since six.

Only he wasn’t ready, Andy realised. He was panicking. His stomach had dropped into his bowels twice and he’d had to make
fast for the bog.

He thought of the days and nights spent imagining this morning, planning for it, dreaming about it, counting the hours to it. And it had come and he was shit-scared of it.

He understood why so many of them went out and chucked a brick through a shop window or grabbed a woman’s handbag. Anything to get back to safety, like racing back to touch ‘home’ in the playground when you
were a kid.

It was different when you had people waiting for you, kids to rush up to you, a wife desperate for
you, you wouldn’t be able to see the back of this place fast enough then.

He shook himself, got up and did thirty press-ups. He was fit; working out in the kitchen gardens and playing so much soccer and basketball had seen to that. Sweating, he lay back on the thin mattress. Right,
he said, OK, you’re fit, and you’ve got a future out there.

You hope.

He rolled over on to his side and went back to sleep.

The streets were awash and the gale was blowing so hard he could scarcely stand against it on the station platform. He went back inside the steamy buffet. The train was announced as running forty-five minutes late. Flooding on the line.

People were talking about it. He
got another mug of tea and a doughnut.

An hour ago, he’d walked out of the prison gate carrying his bag, him and two of the others, but he’d got away from them fast; besides, they had people waiting for them. Families. He hadn’t expected ceremony but still he was shocked how quickly it had all been over. The things they’d been holding for him were spread out on the counter, gone through and signed
for; he was given his money, his train pass, waited in the passage with the others and then across the strip, and out through the gate. The jangle of keys for the last time.

Rain, driving into your face and a gale knocking you almost off your feet.

‘They’d a car completely overturned in Simpson Street.’

‘Eight trees down somebody said.’

‘Can’t have been, there ent eight trees in the bloody
town!’

‘Kids haven’t gone to school, too dangerous.’

‘St Nicholas church roof was ripped half off.’

Andy sat holding the mug between his hands. He felt unreal. People talked and got up and sat down and came in and went out through the buffet doors and no one took any notice of him. No one knew where he’d just come from.

What would happen if they did?

It wasn’t being out on his own, buying
a mug of tea and a doughnut, waiting for a train, none of that fazed him. It was nobody watching him, nobody taking any notice. He hadn’t been invisible for four and a half years but he was invisible now.

The gale hurled itself suddenly at the doors swinging them wide open, crashing an empty chair on to the floor. A child in a red anorak screamed.

He remembered his mother. She’d only been to
see him half a dozen times, scurrying into the visitors’ room, head bent and eyes on the floor for shame, and after that she’d been in and out of hospital, then too ill. He didn’t think of that crumpled-looking person as his mother, he thought of the one he had run to when friends of Mo Thompson’s had slammed his fingers in the door
for fun and the one who had finally found him when they had taken
him down the Wherry to one of the sheds and locked him there in the dark, but not before telling him that the scratching sounds in the roof were rats. That had been his mother, with thick arms and red hands ready to beat the lights out of his tormentors and a voice like a foghorn you could hear three streets away. She had shrunk. There had been grey stains on her coat and dirt in the folds of
her neck. When she had leaned over the table between them in the visitors’ room she had smelled.

The woman behind the buffet counter was trying to wedge one of the doors with newspaper but it kept coming away from her hand and now the rainwater was sloshing under it and over the brown linoleum floor.

Three men went to help her. She fetched a mop and plastic bucket and started to try to push
back the tidal wave of rain water.

The child was eating a chocolate bar and screaming at the same time as the windows rattled in the gale.

Andy wanted to go back. Here it was unsafe, the ground seemed to be moving beneath his feet and the fact that nobody knew his name scared him.

Somewhere outside, part of a tin roof sheared off and crashed on to concrete.

Mam, Andy Gunton muttered under
his breath, and it was the woman with the strong arms and red hands he was talking to, Mam.

A confused echo came out of the speakers, possibly announcing his train, possibly announcing the end of the world.

The lights went out then and for a second everyone froze, everyone was silent, even the child.

The weather had caught them out. Heavy rain and high winds had been forecast but not a virtual
hurricane, bringing such damage and chaos at the height of a Monday morning. The electricity did not come back on in the station buffet and the trains did not run again until the middle of the afternoon.