‘How could you possibly know that?’ the old man whispers. ‘Who told you?’
‘He did. He said his granddad lived just around the corner from his house and that you’d been in the navy and sailed all over the world, meeting princes and head-hunters.’
Mr Comber leans in while I talk, concentrating on my words. His thumb and forefinger are pinched together and held aloft, like he’s waiting to pluck some detail out of the air.
‘Where did you see him?’
‘At a house in Scotland. He was crying and he wanted to go home.’
Mr Comber stands up and overbalances, putting both of his palms on the table to steady himself.
Christ, don’t have a heart attack!
He shuffles into the next room and takes a photograph from a mantelpiece, before returning to the kitchen and showing it to me. He wants me to hold the picture. It’s a photograph of Patrick dressed in football kit, a white shirt and blue shorts. He’s grinning at the camera, holding a football under one arm.
‘Is that the boy you saw?’
‘Yeah. He was wearing a Nemo watch with seahorses on the strap.’
The old man takes the photograph back and sits down again, cradling the frame in his hands, occasionally running his thumb over Paddy’s face. I tell him the story that I told Cyrus – how I heard Patrick crying and I talked to him through the wall.
‘Was he frightened?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did they hurt him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you prove it?’
I stand up and lean over, pulling up my top and showing him the cigarette burns on my back. Mr Comber only looks for a moment before turning his face away.
‘Why are you telling me this?’ he asks, wiping his wet cheeks. ‘I thought you should know.’
‘I was better off not knowing; believing that he was still alive, trying to find his way home.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, you don’t have to be sorry. You deserve more than being sorry. What you’ve done, how you survived, you deserve more.’
He reaches across the table and takes my hand. I want to pull away from him, but I force myself to hold still. His hand is callused and dry.
‘This man you called Uncle. Does he have a name?’
‘Fraser Manning.’
‘Why hasn’t he been arrested?’
‘It is my word against his and nobody has ever believed me until Cyrus came along.’
‘I’ve met your Cyrus. He seems like a good man.’
‘Yeah, he is,’ I say, finally understanding what that means.
My tea has grown cold and the teabags have turned solid on the edge of the sink.
‘I should go,’ I say.
‘Where?’
‘Home.’
‘Where is home?’
‘Cyrus is letting me stay in his spare room. We get on OK. He doesn’t like me lying, but he lies to me all the time.’
‘What about?’
‘He tells me that he’s pleased to see me, and he likes my cooking, and that I’m getting better at reverse parking. He’s teaching me to drive.’
The old man smiles. ‘They sound like good lies.’
He walks me to the front door and holds it open for me, bowing his head as I pass.
‘Thank you for telling me about Patrick,’ he says. ‘And thank you for being there for him when he needed someone.’
‘Can I come back and see you again?’ I ask.
‘Of course,’ he replies.
It’s a good lie.
69
Cyrus
Evie is in the garden, digging her gloved hands into the dark loam, planting bulbs for next spring. It was her idea, not mine. I didn’t have Evie pegged as someone with the patience for gardening, but she learned about growing flowers at the safe house.
I’m sitting on the back step, nursing a coffee and reading the newspaper, looking for any story that might restore my faith in the goodness of human beings. The news has become relentlessly bleak of late, but maybe that’s my mood.
Evie has been living with me since she legally turned eighteen a month ago. I say ‘legally’ but that date was chosen by the High Court when nobody knew her real name or her true age. September sixth was the day she was found hiding in the secret room in the house in north London.
After the shooting in the Scottish Highlands, Evie didn’t return to Langford Hall, but was kept at a safe house until Lenny couldn’t justify the expense to her superiors. Since then, I’ve taken extra precautions, installing a security system at the house and giving Evie a rape alarm on a keyring and a GPS tracking app on her phone.
She’s back in her old room at the top of the stairs and I know she sneaks Poppy up there when she thinks I’m asleep, but I have learned to pick my battles with Evie. Everything is a negotiation, but even when she’s arguing or being stubborn or calling me names, I know she’s listening. It’s like when she called me a Nazi and I explained Godwin’s Law to her, which states that the moment you evoke the name of Hitler or the Nazis in any argument, you automatically lose.
Evie doesn’t leave the house very often, unless she’s walking Poppy. Sometimes I’ll go with her and notice how she’s always looking over her shoulder, or studying her surroundings, vigilant but not paranoid. And sometimes, late at night, I hear her pushing her chest of drawers across the door of her bedroom, just to be sure.
Each morning I ask her how she slept.
‘Fine.’
‘Any nightmares?’
‘No.’
‘How are you feeling?’
By the third question, I get the stink eye, and she says, ‘Leave my head alone. You are not my therapist.’
I’m teaching her to drive, which will probably end badly. She’ll either steal my car or plough into a queue at a bus stop because she doesn’t listen or slow down. According to Evie, the Highway Code was written by morons. ‘What’s wrong with overtaking on the inside? Who says a bus should have right-of-way? Why have a horn if you’re not supposed to use it?’
She hasn’t talked to me about what happened in Scotland and the aftermath – the interviews and questions, the lack of action, my failures. I made promises to her. I told her the truth would put her abusers behind bars and set her free. I was wrong. Naïve. Culpable.
Evie’s silences are worse than her tantrums. Her feelings are simple, almost linear. When she’s hurting, she lashes out. When she’s frightened, she runs. These are defences, not reactions, but when she chooses not to speak at all, I feel my heart want to break.
What must it be like – knowing when someone is lying to you? We tell lies all the time, every day, every hour. We lie to people we love, to strangers, to friends, to family. I love your new haircut. You’re looking well. Gee, it’s great to see you. That’s so interesting. I’m five minutes away. I only had one beer. I tried to call. I bought it on sale … Lying is so fundamental to our existence; it is wired into our DNA. That’s why babies learn to fake cry before they’re a year old and to bluff by the age of two. By four a child is an accomplished liar, and by five, he or she realises that truly outrageous lies are less likely to be believed.
People usually lie for all the right reasons and with the best possible intentions – to keep families together and to protect relationships and hold on to our friends and make people happy. These are the good lies, not the bad ones.
Knowing all this, I try to imagine how it is for Evie, always recognising the deceit. Three little words like ‘I love you’ have enormous power in any relationship, but what if it’s a lie? It’s the same with ‘I’ve missed you’, or ‘I’ll never leave you’, or ‘you’re beautiful’.
This is why I fear for her; because I know she’ll never have a normal relationship or a true friendship; or make small talk with a stranger; or strike a chord with someone new, because their every utterance, no matter how pleasant and innocent, will carry an extra significance when it reaches Evie’s ears. At that mome
nt, she will know more than she ever wanted to or expected to.
People think they want the truth, but the opposite is true. Honesty is mean and rough and ugly, while lying can be kinder, softer and more humane. It’s not honesty that we want, but consideration and respect.
My phone is ringing. It’s on the kitchen table. Sacha’s number appears on the screen.
‘Are you watching the news?’ she asks breathlessly.
‘No. Why?’
‘Turn on the TV.’
Evie chooses that moment to come inside from the garden and wash her hands in the sink. I press the remote and call up BBC news. On screen there are images of ambulances and police cars blocking a road. The banner says MANCHESTER. The reporter is live from the scene:
‘The vehicle emerged from an underground car park in Deansgate and stopped at a red light where the gunman approached and began washing the windscreen with a squeegee and a bottle of water. He then knocked on the driver’s window and had a conversation with the man behind the wheel before pulling a firearm from his bucket and firing three shots through the open window.’
In the background, police are erecting a white curtain around a luxury car with open doors. The silhouette of a slumped figure is behind the wheel.
‘Earlier the suspect had tried to enter the building in Deansgate, through the below-ground car park, but had been stopped by security before he could enter a service lift. The office block is leased by the Everett Foundation and occupants include a law firm, an investment bank and several charities associated with the well-known foundation, whose chairman is Lord Phillip Everett.’
Evie is standing next to me. I’m still on the phone to Sacha.
‘Who is it?’ I ask.
‘Fraser Manning.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I just had the call from someone on the task force. Manning was pronounced dead at the scene.’
The reporter is still speaking breathlessly from the street corner: ‘One eyewitness filmed police arresting the gunman only moments after the shooting.’
The scene changes to shaky camera footage of people running across the road and along the footpath, some of them screaming. Drivers are abandoning their cars, weaving and ducking between vehicles, joining the exodus. The owner of the phone keeps up a running commentary as he focuses on the luxury vehicle that is stopped at the lights. A lone figure in a tracksuit top and hood is standing next to the car, the gun clearly visible in his right hand.
Someone yells for him to drop his weapon. He turns at the sound and the camera shakes as the owner ducks behind a parked car, taking cover. He raises the phone above his head, blindly filming. The gunman isn’t in the centre of the frame and the image is tilted, but the footage shows him raising his arms, no longer holding the gun.
‘Do you have a bomb?’ yells a voice. The police.
‘What?’
‘A bomb. Are you wearing an explosive vest?’
‘No.’
‘Take off your top.’
The gunman moves slowly, pulling the tracksuit from his shoulders and arms. The hood falls away, revealing the tangled grey hair and wrinkled face of Clayton Comber.
‘Get down on the ground,’ says the officer.
Comber struggles to get to his knees, using the bonnet of the car for support. Evie gasps and reaches for the screen, as though she’s trying to help him.
‘On your stomach,’ yells the officer.
Within moments, Comber is surrounded by people. One officer is sitting on his back and the other on his legs. Frisked and handcuffed, he is hauled to his feet. The camera footage stops and the reporter cuts back to the live coverage, showing the deserted street and forensic tent now shielding the car and body.
Sacha is talking to me on the phone. ‘The scarecrow.’
‘What?’
‘When we spoke to Clayton Comber at his allotment, the scarecrow was wearing a tracksuit top. It’s the same one.’
I remember it now.
‘He said he’d do anything,’ says Sacha.
‘But how did he know?’
Evie is no longer watching the TV. She is staring past me, as though the kitchen has disappeared and she can see into the distance, where she’s searching for someone; a child in a secret room, or crouching in the hull of a fishing trawler, or shivering in a bedroom above the stairs at a Scottish estate; a child who survived, but still watches the world like a mouse hiding in the walls.
‘Evie?’
She’s not listening. ‘We should talk about this.’
‘I have to water the seeds.’
I watch her leave and return to the garden, where Poppy follows her to the tap and drinks from the running water as she fills a watering can.
I’m not sure if I can save Evie. No amount of love or tenderness or passing time will erase the horrors of her past, but she’s still here, fighting like a demon, and a caged lion. Fighting like a girl with the face of an angel and a thousand invisible scars.
Everyone has an idea of what their perfect life is. For Agatha, it's Meghan Shaughnessy's . . .
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