by Keith Dixon
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I WAS IN MY OFFICE early the next morning to map out a plan. I cleared my desk, took out a fresh writing pad, found a working biro … and then stared at the lined paper for fifteen minutes.
Since the first day on this case it felt as though I’d been working to everyone’s agenda but my own. My old feelings for Tara and the way I was beginning to feel about Laura were confusing me. I needed to take some control. Unfortunately, the universe wasn’t listening.
The phone rang at nine o’clock exactly, according to my Bendix wall clock with the red second hand.
A voice said, ‘It’s Carol from Brands.’
I remembered the receptionist with her sniffy attitude and catwalk model glide.
‘Another appointment?’
‘That’s right,’ she said.
‘When this time?’
‘Mrs Brand would like to see you as soon as possible.’
‘What a surprise. Where?’
‘At her home—she says you know where it is. Can I tell her you’ll be there this afternoon?’
I hesitated for a moment. This was probably going to be more bad news, given the relations between us. I wondered who had told her. Not Laura Marshall, obviously, but who else would know or would have found out between yesterday afternoon and first thing this morning? Brands’ office seemed to be a leaky environment in which to harbour secrets.
In the end I told the woman to go ahead and confirm the appointment. ‘Tell her I’ll be there for three thirty.’
This was a mistake on many levels.
I stopped to refill the car and bought a stale sandwich from the chill cabinet of the petrol station. I sat in the car and ate it, going over in my head the jumble of relationships in which I was caught up. It had briefly crossed my mind that Tara might have had a murky hand in her husband’s death. If he knew she was involved in plans to take over the company, did she in turn know he was suspicious? I didn’t like to think of her involved in anything more serious than a bit of light industrial espionage, but I had to be open to other possibilities.
I was also interested by the fact that although I hadn’t seen her in nearly twenty years, it seemed that I didn’t want her to be responsible for anything truly wicked.
It was getting dark by the time I passed between the blue vases at the entrance to the converted chapel. There were two lights burning in the main building, and past the house, in the distant fields, I could see a remote farm with a bright lamp glowing outside its barn as though acting as a beacon for wayward beasts. The aggressive punch that was the smell of manure told me someone had been spreading in the fields today. I realised how remote this place was when darkness fell.
I parked and walked past Tara’s Toyota up to the house and swung the heavy knocker on the door. Its sullen thud reverberated into the house and echoed back past me into the dim courtyard, rolling down the driveway and into the gathering darkness.
A scrabbling noise at the door, then it swung inwards and Tara was standing there, looking dour. She wore a polo-neck sweater the colour of plums, with the sleeves rolled up and set off by tight jeans. As usual these days, her mass of hair was pulled back and held in a pony-tail by a green ribbon. Almost immediately she reached back a hand, tugged on the ribbon and shook her hair free as though clearing her head of nasty thoughts. I wondered if she’d been doing something that required a tidy style but now that was finished with. I was here to add untidiness to her life again.
She hesitated for a second with her hand on the door as if not sure whether to let me in. Then she stood back reluctantly and let me walk past her. I caught the faintest, incongruously erotic swell of her perfume.
She led me further inside. The style of the house was Modern Rustic—clattering York tile floors softened by deep Persian rugs, plump terracotta sofas inviting your company while dark wood bookcases flattered your intelligence. Chopin drifted around us from an expensive sound system whose matchbox-sized speakers I glimpsed here and there as they peeked out from shelves and hidden corners. This was life as lived in a magazine photo-shoot—the romantic converted chapel lightly brushed and baked in a glaze of Italian style, French atmosphere, Moroccan colour and German utility. It seemed to me to be not a house to live in, but to show off—as artificial as the purple tulips that stood on the reproduction rosewood table in the centre of the living room.
‘I’d offer you a drink,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want to prolong this meeting any longer than I have to.’
‘Thanks anyway.’
She stood facing me, her arms crossed and wearing the expression of a parent disappointed by the latest exploits of an unruly child.
‘Last time we talked I thought I’d made it clear that I didn’t want you interfering any more with the police investigation. That’s why I sacked you. Now I find that not only have you ignored me, but that Laura is ignoring me too.’
‘Tricky, isn’t it?’ I said. I tried to hide my surprise at how much she knew.
‘What do you propose to do about it?’
‘My very best.’
I could see that she was angry by the way her lips became as thin as knife-blades and her cheeks lost all their blood. I was amused by how well I remembered the expression. But I wasn’t about to be bullied by her this time. I moved away and sat grandly on the edge of a sofa that yielded with a professional sigh.
‘Tara, I don’t want to go round the houses on this. I’m just going to say it straight: financially, you’re stuffed, aren’t you?’
She kept her temper under control, but at the expense of seeming to rise three inches above the ground. At last she managed to get her mouth to form speech. ‘You bastard,’ she said in a clipped voice, almost swallowing the words. ‘How dare you suggest that I had anything to do with Rory’s death.’
‘I’m not suggesting anything—’
‘You haven’t said the words, but I see where you’re going. You’re saying because we were losing money, I murdered Rory. That’s really sick.’
‘It’s the sort of connection that people pay me to make. I don’t have any evidence – ’
‘No, and you won’t find any.’
‘I was going to say yet. Others will see it too. The police will be knocking on your door before you know it.’
She threw her head back and looked at the ceiling. ‘You dimwit,’ she said. ‘I talked to Inspector Howard about this the day after Rory was found. The police know all about our financial situation.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you? Well it’s about bloody time. I don’t care if you were working for Rory, there’s a limit to my patience. Of course I have to honour his memory but I’m not sure I do that by condoning every paranoid half-baked theory he had.’
She was trying her hardest to intimidate me, and I began to wonder why. She didn’t have to go through this routine just to sack me again. She could have sent me an e-mail or refused to pay my invoice. There was something else fuelling her anger now.
‘Who told you I was still working on the case?’ I said.
‘None of your business,’ she said crossly. ‘I asked you to come out here because I thought we could talk in a sensible manner. Well that’s not going to happen, is it? In future, I think you’d best keep away from me. I’ll talk to Laura again and make sure she understands the situation. As a company we’ve got to act together on this and leave it to the police.’
‘Don’t blame her. She’s doing what she thinks is best.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that. Now go home and think long and hard about what I’ve said. And don’t contact us. I mean it. I put you out of my life once, Sam, and I want to do it again. You and me just can’t cut it together.’
‘What do you mean?’ I looked at her closely. ‘Is this about Rory or about us?’
‘Let it go, Sam.’
‘I wish I could,’ I said. I felt a pressure rising in my chest. ‘I still think you owe me. You went eighteen years without even a telephone call.’
> She took this like a blow, as if she weren’t expecting to be reminded of her own actions when she was supposed to have the moral high ground. She stared at me for a moment, then said, ‘OK, if you want to talk about that, we can. You remember the row we had the night I left for London?’
I nodded. I’d lived for years with the image of us shouting at each other across a kitchen table.
‘I never told you why I went, did I?’ she said.
‘As I remember, you described how you were fed up with nursing and fed up with me. It was a touching scene.’
‘You stood there with your sad cow eyes and just let me go, didn’t you? You didn’t want me to leave but you couldn’t say the words. You were so bloody passive.’
‘I’ve become a lot more active.’
‘Oh I daresay you’ve learned a lesson or two in, what, eighteen years? Doesn’t alter the facts of the case. When I look at you I see what you were eighteen years ago, and it drives me mad. Two and a half months we lived together and I don’t think you had an exciting thought or a fresh impulse once.’
‘Not true …’
‘That’s what I couldn’t tell you, Sam. You bored the pants off me. I wanted so much more, and you couldn’t give it to me. So I don’t want you around reminding me of what I nearly became. A Yorkshire housewife. You’re off the case. And this time I mean it.’
As she spoke, the room grew less and less substantial, less and less real. Everything seemed more dim and harder to grasp, while at the same time seeming more solid and practical. I suddenly felt like Peter Pan marooned in a world of hard facts, where before there’d been imagination and dreams. A hard knot began to form in my chest.
She was still looking at me, her eyes blazing and impassioned. ‘Nothing to say?’ she asked. ‘No snappy retort or cynical put-down?’
The words came up and out of me before I could stop them. ‘I really loved you,’ I said.
She was contemptuous. ‘No you didn’t,’ she spat. ‘You were infatuated with me, but it wasn’t love.’
‘How can you say that?’
‘Because you never showed it,’ she said. ‘You danced around me like a bloody courtier, but you didn’t understand me. You tried to fit me into your little world and never knew what I really wanted.’
‘And you did?’
‘I might have done, if you’d asked the right questions.’
Without realising it, I’d stepped closer to her. Now my hands rose and gripped the top of her arms, and I felt that I could take one more step and pull her towards me and kiss her and something would break between us and things would return to a sensible balance.
‘Go on, do it,’ she said hoarsely. Her eyes were vivid and scornful. I felt her breath on my cheeks. I held her arms, feeling their tautness, wanting to draw her to me in spite of everything.
Instead I let go of her and took a step back.
‘I’d better leave you alone,’ I said. ‘I don’t think this is the right time. You’re not in a mood to listen to common sense.’
‘You had your chance, Sam. Years ago. I could have stuck it out if you’d paid some attention.’
She looked down at her feet, her hair tumbling forward over her face. I thought she might be on the verge of tears, which would probably have destroyed me. I headed towards the front door, wanting to get out, and quickly. The York tiles rang under my heels again. I stood at the door and she came up beside me and I saw her reach round in front and turn the knurled knob of the lock. For a moment I thought I sensed her hesitate, as if she were reconsidering, remembering our past, not wanting it to end like this. I glanced quickly at her profile, so close I could see the lines under her eyes that eighteen years had put there. But then the door opened and I was faced with darkness, the yard and the countryside beyond made invisible by contrast with the bright wash of light from the house.
‘Goodbye, Sam.’ She’d hardened her tone again. ‘Don’t expect any calls from me.’
I smelled her perfume, a taut blend of fruit and acid, as I walked into the darkness towards my car. And going through my mind at that precise moment was how I was going to tell Laura that I was still in love with Tara. That eighteen years hadn’t killed the feeling—dimmed it and made it harder to understand, perhaps, but hadn’t lessened it one whit.
And then I heard the dull thump of something connecting with the base of my head, and sensed the spreading nimbus of pain, a physical hurt that quickly radiated through my skull and sent me hurtling downwards into an agony that was black, hollow and far beneath my feet.
