The Vows of Silence (13 page)

Amy Finlayson, Events Manager and Wedding Coordinator for the Riverside Hotel, stood on the lawn watching the gang erect the marquee for the following day. The double doors of the dining room would be open onto the small flight of stone steps, the marquee entrance just below, and with a bit of luck, they could open up the back too so that people could see the lawn
leading to the river and stroll down there later. This lot were having fireworks at ten. The team would set them up in the paddock. She’d earned her bonuses and the extra tips this year. People were generous when a wedding went well, they were lavish with gratuities. By the end of October she’d be taking her holiday in Canada.

“I don’t understand you,” the manager had said. “Why don’t you go for sun and a beach? Why not somewhere like Mauritius?”

“Because Mauritius means one thing,” Amy said. “Bloody weddings.”

From where he stood, concealed behind the thick stump of a pollarded willow, he had the perfect view—the woman pointing, the marquee men. The line of sight was ideal. Up the lawn, through the tent to the open French windows.

He looked carefully around him. Behind, a wooden fence into a field. He could climb over easily enough but the field was fully open to view from the hotel. The footpath beside the river was also open and visible. Only if he went left did he have any chance of slipping away unseen and it was a risk because although there were screening trees and a hedge, both had significant gaps. It was also a long way to the road. Too long. There was nowhere he could safely hole up, either.

No. It would be clear exactly where any shots had been fired from. The patrol cars, especially just at the moment, would be fast on the scene. He had no chance. Unless …

He smiled. Unless.

It was so obvious he could have worked it out as a ten-year-old boy.

What kept you? he thought.

Alison had dreamed of a marquee—the inside had been designed in her head for years, with pink and white ribbons tied round a maypole, a pink and white awning and swags of flowers. It had all come together in the weeks before. Cost a fortune. Her mother paying. Paying for a grand wedding.

It was what she wanted and what she wanted was fine by him.

Alison.

He drove home feeling the sparks of anger, that always smouldered, rekindle and burn hard. When something reminded him, it affected his breathing. He felt a tightness in his chest. Even his vision sometimes changed, clouding a little.

Alison.

He put the car away and locked it, then went out again, a quarter of a mile to the pub he preferred because no one was interested in anyone else, no one behind the bar wanted to chat.

He bought his pint of keg, hating the sweet thick taste of the real ale they tried to push, took it to a corner with the local paper and a biro in case he needed to mark anything out.

It was full of the shootings. Three deaths. No leads. No clues. Lots of blether filling page after page but nothing real. Nothing that troubled him.

Twenty-eight

Simon Serrailler lay on his back on the floor and rolled first to the left and then to the right, left and right, left and right. He was a tall man and his back had been giving him trouble but in the past two weeks he had been working fifteen-hour days and although he knew he should go to the physio for treatment there had been no time.

He rolled over left to right a dozen more times and then lay on his back again, arms behind his head, in the quiet of his living room. Before long the bells would start to ring. Thursday night was full practice night. But for now, only the floorboards creaked occasionally, settling back after he had disturbed them with his exercise.

Exercise also helped to clear his mind. Work he could deal with. He had been in the game too long now to carry it home in his head. Earlier that day he had said, “We’ll get him and I’ll tell you why. Because he’ll
make a mistake. Yes, he is clever and cunning, yes, he is planning carefully. But with firearms there are any number of mistakes he can make and sooner or later he will make one of them and give himself away. I don’t mean we sit and wait for him to do it. We’re being as proactive as possible on this one. But I’m confident that when he does cock up, in however small a way, we’ll be there and we’ll have him.”

He believed it.

He had closed his eyes. Now he opened them and looked around his room, drawing from its calm order. Then he stood up, twisted this way and that a few times, and went to fetch himself a whisky. He was spending the evening in, alone, watching a documentary about Italy and reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography of Stalin. It was time he desperately needed, time he had been looking forward to, limited enough for him to relish every moment. He wanted to go through his sketchbooks of his spring break in the Faroes where he had gulped in lungfuls of crystal-cold air and walked among seabirds and grass-roofed houses and felt both invigorated and deeply peaceful. He had an exhibition next year, half of which would be of these drawings, the rest of portraits, many of his mother. He wanted to sift through them, place them in perfect order which would take a long, careful time.

He stretched out on the sofa. It was not only time which he did not have. He needed a calm emotional sea and he could not see when he might get one.

His brother-in-law had a brain tumour. Simon knew enough to be aware that his chances were slim. He was
very fond of Chris, he would find it hard if he were not around, but it was his sister he had most in his mind and in his heart. Her future, with three young children and a stressful job but without her beloved husband, was unimaginable. She would need Simon. He would need to have strength and time and love for all of them. There was no one else.

The cathedral bells started up. Simon went to the window and looked down on the close.

Not true, a voice niggled, not true and you know it. There is Dad. And now there is Dad and Judith.

Judith Connolly.

She is a nice woman, the voice niggled. She is warm and kind and seemingly straightforward and she will do your father a power of good. What possible reason is there for your being so antagonistic towards her? None.

While work was muddied and turbulent, while Chris was ill and very probably dying, and Judith was in his mother’s place, he could settle to nothing here, could not take pleasure from his drawing and planning his next exhibition, could not relax and simply be.

The phone rang.

“Si?”

Cat.

She was crying.

“I’ll come,” Simon said.

It was another mild night, another day had stretched out the long decline of summer even further. The close was empty, the bells ringing on through the evening.
Simon stood for a moment listening. He was neither musical nor spiritual—he left that to Cat. She did music and God for both of them, she had once said. But he thought about Chris, facing a horrible illness, and a horrible treatment and very possibly a horrible death, and his thoughts were as close to prayer as he ever came.

If a SIFT case came up now and looked like taking him away from Lafferton for any length of time, he decided that he would ask to be left out. He was needed here, not halfway across the country after an elusive and anonymous murderer, though if he wanted one of those, he didn’t have far to look.

As he sped through the narrow town streets, his mobile rang. He ignored it. Right now Cat came first.

Twenty-nine

“Jamie, be quiet and go to sleep.”

He was a good sleeper. If he hadn’t been, Bethan Doyle would have gone off her head. He woke before six but in any case they had to be ready to leave the house at seven so it didn’t matter. She walked to the nursery, then caught the bus to Bevham to be there at eight. Mornings were death but she’d rather that than depend on Foster, rather be independent, rather have no money. Not that she had much money now by the time she’d paid for the nursery and her rent. But she was her own woman. And if her wedding-dress business took off she might even give up the day job.

Jamie wailed. She closed the door and switched on
Corrie
but the wails came through the wall. There wasn’t anything wrong with him.

The television wailed too, the
Corrie
signature tune, drowning him out for a minute. Bethan went into the
kitchen and switched on the kettle, but when she came out, Jamie’s cries were so loud that next door were banging.

She went into the dark bedroom. His cot was in one corner, her bed in the other. Poky little room. She suddenly wanted to throw things around, she hated the pokiness so much. And the street it was in and the people next door and the rest of them all round. She was on the council list but they’d only offered her on the roughest estate in Bevham and she wanted to stay here. Lafferton was a step up and it was away from Foster. When the time came the schools were decent. If she could get a job here so she didn’t have to fork out for fares, it would be even better.

She had plans. It all took so long but she did have plans. Jamie hadn’t been planned, far from it, but he was here so the plans had to be for them both. Children grew up, it wasn’t forever. Her plan was to go to the college, do dress design and business studies and move from sewing at home to opening a wedding shop. Already her ads had brought in some work. She had a beautiful beaded dress on the go now. If she could just go out there and shout at all the girls as easily led by boys as she had been. If she could force them to
see
. But she’d make it. She was sure.

She pushed Jamie’s damp hair back from his forehead. It was close in the room. That was probably why he couldn’t get off.

Bethan drew the curtains back and opened the window a notch. A warm breeze blew in, ruffling Jamie’s
blanket, which hung on the end of his cot, and making him laugh. Blowing in the smell of chips too.

She could have killed for a packet of hot fish and chips but that was another thing you didn’t know about, how you were completely stuck, tied to them. Some mothers would have left their babies, run out to the chip shop a couple of blocks away. Some would stay out for a drink as well. Some would leave two or three kids together with an older one supposedly responsible enough to look out for them, aged all of ten or eleven.

The smell of chips was taunting her.

“Jamie, lie down. Come on, it’s night, it’s sleep time. Lie down.”

He had been on his knees but now he pulled himself up and held out his arms to her, a big fat smile on his face.

“Jamie, come on, lie down. Look, here’s Mousey.”

There was a ring at the bell. Jamie began to bounce up and down waving Mousey with one hand, holding onto the end of the cot with the other.

She wouldn’t go. It would be someone collecting or selling or just kids. Kids were a pain but she didn’t blame them. They were bored.

Jamie was still standing up and now he was banging on the side of the cot. Sometimes he banged his head there which woke her up. That was worrying. Why would he bang his head so hard it must hurt? She had mentioned it to the doctor when she had taken him for his jabs but the doctor hadn’t seemed interested, just shrugged and said, “They do it sometimes. One of mine did it.” Bang bang bang.

Then the bloody bell again.

She left the bedroom door open so that Jamie could hear her. If she closed it he would bang his head and shake the cot bars even more.

The chain was across the door. She was always careful, locked the windows at night, kept the chain on whenever she was in by herself, which was usually.

She shifted the Yale and opened the door the short distance until the chain tightened.

“Hello?”

Silence.

Bloody kids.

She didn’t let the chain off, just put her head out a bit further.

The noise of the shot made Jamie sit down suddenly in the cot. He stared through the bars, to where his mother had been standing in the hall and was now lying there, and then he began to scream.

He screamed for a long time. The front door had been pushed shut and his mother still lay. Jamie banged on the cot bars. No one came. After a time, he sat and looked at his feet, then he crawled across and reached for Mousey and lay down pressing the toy to his face. He shouted once or twice, but Mousey was there, soft and comforting, and at last he fell asleep. The hall light stayed on and after a while it rained in through the open bed room window onto the sill. The child stirred and woke and tried to get under the blanket but sleep came over him again.

He woke twice, and once he stood up and banged
the cot, first with his fists then with his head. He banged for a long time. His mother still lay on the floor and would not come to him and the light stayed on. The rain was heavier now, soaking the curtain.

In the end, the darkness thinned to grey and the child fell across the cot and slept, Mousey beneath his body. He slept past six o’clock and seven, and did not wake until after eight. But nothing was different. The rain beat on the windows and the light was still on and his mother still lay on the floor in the hall and the child began to cry quietly now, realising the point less ness of shouting and banging the cot, hungry and dirty and cold.

But still nothing happened. Nothing changed. No one came and his mother did not get up.

Thirty

Jane Fitzroy drove slowly up the long drive between the rows of swaying poplars whose leaves lay in soft golden heaps on the grass. The convent buildings had not yet come into view. There were just the mown fields on either side, and the trees of the park. The trees, of course, had grown and been cut down and others planted and matured, but in the same places, so that the parkland could not have changed much since the eighteenth century when it was laid out. The main house and a hundred or so acres had been bestowed on the abbey fifty years later and was theirs in perpetuity. Which in itself was a worry, Jane had found out within a short time of arriving there. Once there had been 120 nuns in the community. Even thirty years ago there had been over seventy. Now there were twenty-two and more than half of them well into their eighties. New postulants arrived occasionally and a few made
their vows and remained. But, in ten years, there would not be enough nuns to justify the upkeep of the house and grounds. There probably were not enough now but they had a generous benefactor. When she died, no one knew what would happen to the abbey or the nuns.