by A J Waines
‘Yeah. All right.’
‘Right, then…this is my proposal,’ I said. ‘We would travel separately and find different guest houses. We wouldn’t be going as friends or companions. We’ll have two or three sessions while we’re there, over two days, at the scene itself. Otherwise we’ll be separate. It won’t be a holiday. No meals together, no chatting.’
She got to her feet and clasped her hand to her heart. ‘Thank you so much. You might just have saved my life.’ She took a half step forward and waited, as if she was hoping for an embrace. I stayed in my chair.
‘Then, after that, we will end our sessions. By then, we’ll have done a lot of work together.’
‘Yes. Yes. Of course. I understand.’
‘Are you happy to proceed under those circum-stances?’
‘I am. Yes. More than happy.’ She was clutching the bookcase now, wavering as if she didn’t know what had hit her.
‘Then we can go to the Lakes,’ I said.
Her chin began to wobble and she stared at the carpet, trying to hide the fact that her eyes were filling up.
‘I need to use the bathroom,’ she said suddenly and rushed off. Through the closed door, I could hear her sobs muffled by a towel. When she came back her eyes looked puffy and raw.
‘You okay?’
‘Yeah, I’m just a bit…overwhelmed.’ She gave me a half smile, trying to compose herself as she sat down again.
‘When can you get time off work?’ I said.
‘Any time. I’m due loads.’
‘Make enquiries and then leave a message for me on the hospital number, okay?’
‘Sure. I’ll pay for your train fare and room, of course,’ she said.
‘That won’t be necessary.’
The idea was already forming in my mind of staying on for a few days once we’d done the Exposure Therapy and Rosie had gone back to London. I could escape my own demons for a while – the silent phone calls, Con and Miranda, renewed remorse about Joanne. I could switch off for a bit and enjoy the bracing fresh air, peace and quiet. I hadn’t had a break in ages. The whole trip was starting to feel like the right thing to do.
She gave me a wink as she departed, calling out ‘See ya soon’, before she hurtled down the stairs – a stark reminder of what I was taking on. I squeezed my eyes shut with a shiver of dread.
Chapter 36
Sam
We agreed I’d catch the train from Euston at 12.30pm and Rosie would catch the next one. Shortly after I took my seat, I had a message from Professor Dean to say he would email over Erica’s therapy notes later that afternoon. At last…although I’d only brought my phone and didn’t fancy reading piles of pages on the small screen.
I got to Penrith just before 5pm and took a taxi to my guesthouse. Rosie was staying just over the hill in the same B&B they’d booked for the quartet reunion.
My room smelt of lavender and fresh linen. The single bed was high and squeaked like an old bicycle when I sat down on it, the floorboards sloped visibly from one side of the room to the other, but the place seemed comfortable enough. A radiator was gurgling to life under the sash window and the landlady had left a fan heater near the wardrobe. There was an old sampler framed on the wall and stems of fresh holly in a vase by the window. Cosy and quaint. It was a long time since I’d been this far away from London. Already the pace of life had slowed to a pleasant crawl.
I ate steak and chips on my own in the 1930’s-style dining room; it seemed no one else was straying this far off the beaten track at the end of January.
‘You’re lucky I was open,’ Mrs Waterman said when I’d rung to make the booking. ‘Most of the guest houses around here close down out of season.’
I rang Miranda from the landline before I went to bed, as I couldn’t get a consistent signal. It had suddenly occurred to me that she might have sent the note about Con and the baby in a roundabout way of setting my mind at rest.
The patchy connection probably also explained why no email had come through from Professor Dean.
‘Hi,’ I said, when Miranda answered. ‘I just wanted to touch base.’
‘Where are you? The hospital said you were on leave.’
‘You tried to reach me?’
‘Nothing urgent…’ she said, her voice cool.
I filled her in on the basics and asked about her work.
‘I’ve finished two new pieces since that exhibition we went to at the V&A. One of the tutors thinks I might be able to get an agent; he’s talking to a gallery, apparently.
‘That’s amazing…’ I was overjoyed for her, she deserved some success.
‘I sold that picture, by the way. To the woman from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home. She wants to see more.’
She was animated and sounded genuinely pleased I’d called.
‘We must make a date for that lunch,’ she said.
‘As soon as I get back,’ I assured her. I didn’t have the heart to bring up the note I’d received.
By morning, my hot-water bottle had found its way onto the floor, but I woke up feeling keen and alert, so I must have had a decent night’s sleep. I switched the fan heater on for an extra boost of warmth around my ankles and opened the curtains.
Outside the sky was cloudless and the window ledge twinkled with frost. I could see smoke rising from a chimney beyond the brow to the place where Rosie was staying. We’d agreed to meet at her B&B at 10am and follow the route the van had taken along the edge of Ullswater. She’d assured me it was only about a mile on foot.
At breakfast, over a warm crusty roll with homemade marmalade, I asked Mrs Waterman where I could get decent wifi access.
‘You need to get to the Post Office – down the lane and to the right.’
She poured coffee from a silver jug into my cup.
‘I read there was a terrible accident round here last October. The van that went into the lake?’ I said, hoping to pick up a local perspective.
‘Very nasty affair,’ she said, wiping her hands on her frilly apron. ‘They weren’t from this area. Something to do with the Hinds’ family up at the big Matterdale Estate. Musicians, I think.’
‘I saw it on the news at the time, too,’ I fibbed. ‘It looked like it wasn’t an accident, but beyond that, no one seemed any the wiser.’
She poked the fire and a few lumps of coal crunched into the flames.
‘The police came asking questions and there’s been all kinds of talk about it around here, but who’s to know the truth? Some reckon it was all connected to a priceless violin, others said it was a cover for a drugs’ deal. The Hinds have had trouble before. Cameron’s brother was sent down for money laundering a few years ago. But didn’t one of the musicians escape from the van? Maybe she’s got the answers.’
If only…
I nodded vaguely, picked a dried fig from a bowl with the word ‘Nuts’ glazed on the side and chewed on the gritty seeds.
Cameron Hinds’ brother. Interesting. Nobody else had mentioned him so far.
Rosie waved as she saw me coming. She was standing outside her B&B, slapping her gloved hands together and stamping her feet. In her denim mini skirt over stripy nylon tights she was hardly dressed for the weather, but I noticed again how different she looked these days from the person I’d met a few months earlier. She was slimmer, wore tighter-fitting trendier clothes, and her frizzy red hair was straight and nearly black.
‘Frickin’ freezing, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Sorry, are we allowed to talk?’
I smiled. ‘Good morning, Rosie. Good to see you.’ I turned towards the sun. ‘I suggest we wander along the road beside the lake and you tell me what you notice on the way. I’ll record, if that’s okay.’ She nodded, so I pressed the record button on my phone. ‘Try to set a little running commentary going of what you remember about the setting, the surroundings, anything that comes to mind about that day…’
‘Okay.’ We started walking, but Rosie didn’t say a word. Instead, like a child, she was goi
ng out of her way to find icy puddles on the rough track, and smash them with the heel of her boot. She looked up, jubilant, at the brittle splintering sound.
‘You need to focus, Rosie. Try to take yourself back.’
‘Yeah, yeah – I will.’ She swung her arms shaking off my rebuke.
Once we were on the road itself, she began to look around, watching and listening intently. A blackbird flew out of the hedgerow and made us both jump.
‘Nothing yet,’ she reported.
Rosie walked on ahead, looking lost, mystified. We turned round one bend and then another. A car passed us, followed by a small van coming in the opposite direction, then the road dropped down until we were about two metres from the edge of the water. It looked uninviting, a grey mass wrinkled with ripples beyond the prickly hedge.
‘It was here,’ she said. She stared at the road, across to the wide expanse of lake and back to me.
‘I remember the road being bumpy – look…’ She pointed to blisters and cracks in the tarmac.
She crouched down to study the surface. ‘I’ve got something,’ she called out.
She straightened up and looked one way, then the other. ‘Richard was saying something like “Bastard – what the hell is he playing at?”…’
‘As you came along this stretch?’
‘He was pulling at the wheel…looking in his mirror…’ Her hand went to her mouth. ‘Bloody hell, there was someone behind us…’
I asked her to look back the way we’d come and take in the whole scene. Then I suggested she closed her eyes for a second and tried to imagine herself inside the van. ‘Can you look out of the back window and tell me what you see?’
She dropped her head down and shielded her eyes. She was familiar with the process by now, but standing at the exact spot where the accident had happened felt different; far more intense. She was shaking.
I helped guide her through it.
‘I can’t see who it is, but I can hear a revving sound, the wheels behind us are squealing.’ Her voice became breathy. ‘It’s like someone’s trying to drive us off the road…’
‘A car, a motorbike, a truck, a minibus?’
‘I don’t know, sorry.’ She shook her head, opening her eyes. ‘I can’t see anything.’
I kept going; ‘“Bastard – what the hell is he playing at?” What does that say to you?’
She blinked fast. Her eyes were watering with the cold, but were wide and animated. ‘Oh my God – that Richard knew the person.’
Rosie picked up the pace and I went with her. We came to the next bend with a section of brand new fence on the left. Broken pieces from the old one were scattered underneath it.
‘This is it…’ she said, the wind carrying her words away.
There were several long-dead bunches of flowers strapped to a nearby telegraph post. Apart from that, there was no evidence of the incident at all. No skid marks in the road. No chunks of missing turf or ruts in the grass. Nature had healed its wounds during the intervening months.
‘Hold on,’ I said. She was about to climb over the fence. ‘Take your time. Just spend a moment or two taking this in.’ We kept close to the hedge. A red car sped past us, blasting us with cold air. Rosie looked up at the stretch of road the van never reached and back to the hedge.
‘This was all thick,’ she said, patting her gloved hand on the spikes. ‘Turning brown.’
‘Excellent. Now take a good look around.’
She paced off, on her own, her hand over her mouth, kicking aside piles of old leaves on the grass verge. Then she came to a halt.
‘You remember I told you I saw a number plate in the bushes?’ She was pointing into the undergrowth. ‘I must have seen it afterwards…when I’d got out…’
I recalled Rosie mentioning this memory in one of our earlier sessions. I also remembered that this was as far as we’d got.
‘It was L…E…’
She was remembering it!
I stayed perfectly still.
She screwed up her eyes against the sun. ‘Then…54, I think,’ she added.
This was all new. I could hear my pulse picking up speed; it was roaring in my ears. ‘LE54…anything else?’
‘That was the top line…but, I’d lost my glasses by then, so I can’t be certain.’
‘The top line?’ I wasn’t sure what she meant.
‘Yeah, it must have been a motorbike. A square number plate.’ She cast her eyes down. ‘I can’t see any more.’
‘Okay. You’re doing really well.’
The one lonely cloud in the sky found the sun and the temperature dropped. We clambered over the new fence and down the grassy slope that led to a stretch of pebbles at the water’s edge. The ripples were lapping at the shore, almost touching our feet.
‘Take your time, just let it all unfold slowly,’ I instructed.
She took a juddering breath and looked out across the lake.
‘It looks so tranquil,’ she whispered. ‘So harmless. Richard might still be out there…’
I gazed out at the flat sheet of water and tried to picture the man Rosie had described to me. The only one left. She snatched a breath and for one moment I thought she was going to call out for him. Instead, she covered her mouth with both her gloved hands and shook her head slowly.
‘The van must have gone in over there, that would match the police photos I’ve seen.’ She waved at a spot around five metres from the edge. The water looked deep and murky. I shuddered, imagining how cold it must have been. ‘I want to get to the spot where I came out of the water… it must be back this way…’
She turned and began pacing along the edge of the lake. I took my gaze back to the water; so calm and restful, yet deadly and unstoppable once it finds a way in.
When Rosie squatted down, I thought she was buckling under the emotional pressure, but she was looking up and back to the water, trying to judge the view, the distances.
‘I think it was about here where I came out,’ she said. ‘I must have put my viola down somewhere around there.’ She pointed to a clump of rocks forming a small ledge under the shrubbery. She bent down to stroke the spot, transported into a private reverie.
The hedge was denser along this stretch, the gravel shoreline petering out as the lake claimed the land. She kicked at the tufts of grass, cleared away twigs, bent branches aside in a desperate and futile search for the missing instrument. Then she climbed back up to the road and turned to wait for me to do the same.
She shook her head and shrugged with a loud sigh.
It was over.
That was as much as her memory could dredge up for now. She turned away as I joined her, but I saw tears glistening on her face. Distraught, frustrated, angry tears because she’d found nothing conclusive.
We headed back along the road. Since we’d arrived, more clouds had come from the distant hills and cluttered up the sky, so the sun didn’t come out again.
‘You can tell the police about the motorbike number plate.’ I said, trying to inject some enthusiasm.
‘It probably belonged to Teddy Spense,’ she said dismissively. ‘And it seems like he was just an opportunist thief.’
‘But the police haven’t picked him up, yet?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘So the number plate could help.’
She sounded dispirited. ‘But I can’t remember the rest of the number… No one can track him down from half the registration. Besides, Dawn said Teddy Spense isn’t even his real name.’
‘The rest might come back later…it could take a while to remember what Richard was saying…but if you think he knew the person who was behind him…that’s a breakthrough, it might jog something.’
‘It’s not enough.’ She shoved her hands roughly into her pockets.
To be honest, I agreed with her, but I didn’t want to admit it.
Neither of us spoke again until we reached her B&B.
‘By the way,’ I said, as I was about to leav
e her for lunch. ‘Did you ever meet Cameron Hinds’ brother?’
She pulled a face. ‘I didn’t know he had one. No one mentioned him. What’s his first name?’
‘I don’t know. It might be nothing, but the woman who runs my B&B says he was in prison a while ago for money laundering.’
‘That’s interesting.’ She pointed towards the guest house. ‘I brought the disc of the original party. I know we’ve watched it plenty of times already, but I thought it could be useful if anything new came up. He might be on there.’
‘Good thinking,’ I said. ‘Let’s take another look at it after we’ve had something to eat. I’ll come back here at two.’ She nodded, her energy climbing back up to all-is-not-lost levels again. She waved and watched me go.
After a round of corned-beef and pickle sandwiches care of Mrs Waterman, I joined Rosie in the sitting room of her guest house to watch the DVD again. The dying fire smouldered in the grate and there was no one else about at first, then a cleaner came in and asked what we were watching.
‘I’m really sorry, it’s personal,’ Rosie said, before I could open my mouth. She turned to me. ‘Let’s go to my room instead.’
I couldn’t think of an alternative so I followed her up the narrow twisty staircase to the single door at the top.
‘It’s a bit small,’ she said, ushering me inside.
She wasn’t kidding; the room was tiny. A rickety bed stood opposite a single chest of drawers with a TV and DVD player underneath. ‘Apparently the bigger rooms were being decorated,’ she said.
I perched awkwardly on the narrow bed as Rosie reached forward to slip in the disc. As she picked up the controls, I noticed an opened book facedown beside me on the lumpy pillow. It was called Soulmates and Blood Sisters and looked like a self-help book about finding meaningful relationships. I glanced at the leaflet she was using as a bookmark. It was a menu for a takeaway pizza chain in London, with a black scribbled shape filling in the logo. Rosie caught me looking.
‘It’s a good book,’ she said. ‘You can borrow it if you like.’
‘It’s okay, I’ll pass, thanks.’
I nodded at the screen, keen to carry on where we’d left off so we could get this over with. She started the footage. ‘Can you see anyone who could be Cameron’s brother?’ I said.
