by Sue Nicholls
‘Why would she be ringing you?’
‘Oh…’ Lucas thought Sam hesitated. ‘She was just being friendly. Asked how the wedding went. She was at the engagement party, so I suppose she’s taking an interest.’
Paul shook his head. ‘Nosy.’
Sam’s voice hardened. ‘Not nosy. I think you’ll find it’s called caring.’ He glanced at his watch then tiptoed to Kitty and whispered, ‘It’s late and I need to be somewhere.’ He kissed his fingers and touched them to her bruised, unconscious face, shook Lucas’s hand, and Paul’s, and left.
53 SAM
Sam lay on his bed and stared up at his painted ceiling, mulling over the possibilities presented by Liz’s information. It seemed Paul was carrying out improvements upstairs in Millie’s restaurant on the same afternoon that Max was eating there. Max was among the first people to dine, but would he have been early enough to coincide with Paul’s presence? If Paul saw Max, he would recognise him. Why, if this was the case, did he not mention it in court? Or was Max following Paul? Sam rubbed his fingers over his curls and wondered if the entire thing was a coincidence.
Kitty’s words came back to him. ‘I don’t believe in coincidences.’
‘In this case,’ he said to the ceiling, ‘Neither do I,’ and he swung his feet to the floor.
When Liz answered, Sam could hear flowing water in the background.
‘Hi Liz. Is this a good time to talk?’
‘Give me a moment.’ The phone clunked against something, and soon the hollow splashing faded, and Liz came back on the line. ‘I was running a bath.’
‘Sorry if I’m disturbing you,’ Sam said.
‘It’ll wait. How’s Kitty?’
Sam was not able to tell her much, but his anxiety must have transmitted across the ether to Liz because her voice grew emotional. ‘Poor, poor girl. I want to help, but it’s like last time. I imagine I’ll be in the way.’
‘I don’t think you’d be allowed in. They don’t want too many people round her bed. But I’m sure she’ll appreciate your company when she recovers a bit,’ he grinned, ‘And I venture the staff will be grateful to anyone prepared to distract her.’
Liz chuckled. ‘Poor Kitty. Will she be OK?’
‘I have to believe she will.’ Sam made his voice firm.
‘So,’ Liz sounded business-like, ‘Was there something else?’
‘If you have a moment, I have questions about what you told me.’
‘No problem.’ Her breathing became heavier and Sam guessed she was going down the stairs, ‘Anything to help,’ she said.
‘Thanks. I wondered how you knew Max was in the restaurant at the same time as Paul.’
‘It just came to me. No idea why. That sometimes happens when I’m drifting off to sleep. Paul offered to help Millie with upstairs. He took a week’s holiday to do it He didn’t finish, but he got rid of the racking and gave it a coat of paint. I think he might have done some electrical work, too.’
This seemed odd, considering all that had happened. ‘Why Paul?’ Sam asked.
‘I’m not sure. He must have offered. He was good at practical things, and Millie had already spent a lot of money on renovating downstairs.’
‘Did she pay him?’
‘Sorry, I don’t know.’
‘It’s OK. You’re being helpful. Do you think Paul and Max could have seen one another?’
Liz paused. ‘Possibly. Max was at the corner table. If Paul had stood in the right place...’ She hesitated, then said, ‘Yes. I imagine they could. It’s also possible that Paul saw Max without Max seeing him. If it was dark up there, say he turned out the lights, or maybe the electricity was turned off - would that be possible - to turn off the electricity upstairs and leave downstairs still working?’
‘Yes,’ Sam said. ‘If upstairs was on a separate ring main.’
‘So, if the restaurant was lit, it would have been easy for him to stand in the shadows and see Max at that table.’
After saying farewell to Liz, Sam returned to lie on his bed and crossed his ankles, then uncrossed them, remembering Nanny Gloria’s admonition that it was bad for his circulation. Nothing made sense. If Paul had seen Max in Millie’s restaurant, why did it not come up in his court evidence? Had Paul learned that Max was stalking the three women? If so, why not do something? Paul said he didn’t know that Max was the man dating Fee until Mick saw them at the airport on their way to Mauritius. If that were true, then it was probable he didn’t see Max in the restaurant. But did Max see Paul? And would that have been important?
Sam put this fresh information aside for now. He would bear it in mind should anything else crop up. First thing tomorrow, he would visit Kitty, then go on to Maurice’s. It was time to put pressure on his dad about that calendar.
54 SAM
The ghastly bruises on Kitty’s sleeping face had changed to a dramatic sunset of purple, red and ochre. A heart monitor accentuated her vulnerability, and Sam tracked its peaks and troughs on the screen and listened to the accompanying beeps in case they faltered into deadly continuity.
Out in the corridor cleaners and nurses called to one another over the roar of an electric floor polisher. Officially, he should not be here at this hour, but he had stalked past their disapproval, and now he was in Kitty’s room: A new room on a trauma ward. He lowered himself into a chair and slipped off his jacket, trying not to make a noise. Kitty’s eyeballs swivelled and jumped behind her eyelids. Dragging his attention away, Sam fumbled in his pocket for his phone and checked for messages. There was one from his bank and he glanced up at Kitty to check on her before reading it. With shock, he realized that she was staring at him, lifelessly, as if he were a stranger. His thumb froze on his screen. ‘Kitty?’
Still she stared, her eyebrows pulled down under her bandage.
‘Kitty, can you hear me?’
‘Ysss.’
‘How are you?’
‘Bad.’ Kitty closed her eyes and spoke again. ‘Who?’
‘Who did this to you?’
‘Nuh. Who you?’ The eyelids lifted a fraction so that the blue of her irises was just visible between her crusty lashes.
‘Who am I?’ Sam stared. ‘I’m Sam, your friend, who loves you and works with you. Remember?’
‘Nuh.’ The lids dropped.
Sam scurried to the foot of Kitty’s bed to look at her notes. They made no sense to him, apart from the recordings of her temperature, which seemed steady. He clung to that sliver of hope. She must know him soon when the swelling in her brain had gone down.
A lanky nurse with a straw-coloured frizz of hair jutting from the front of her cap, pushed through the door, towing a machine on a trolley. In a heavy Eastern European accent, she explained that she must check Kitty’s pulse and blood pressure. She slipped a cuff over Kitty’s listless arm and inflated it. Kitty groaned. ‘Sorry dear,’ the nurse said, making no effort to loosen the machine’s grip. ‘Eet must be done so the doctor knows how you are.’
‘How is she, actually?’ Sam asked. ‘Will she be OK?’
The nurse said, ‘Doctor ees pleased wiz her progress. She ees stable and zee operation to mend her pelvis was successful.’
‘But what about her brain? She doesn’t know me…’ Pain trapped further words in his throat.
The nurse’s expression softened, but her words were frank. ‘She has had serious trauma to her head, and we won’t know zee full extent until she is more alert. We have kept her morphine levels high for zee moment to combat her pain, but we cannot keep up that level of dosage much longer. Zair are uzzer forms of pain relief zat will help her stay awake for longer. Zen we will get more idea of her mental state.’
Sam gazed at his dear girl and prayed, silently. He sat and stared at Kitty’s unmoving form for an hour, then he left.
The wet car park was so packed it was hard to see how people had opened their doors. He struggled into his car and switched on the radio. When he reversed from his space, a waiting Mini slipped into his spot.
He joined the road, peering out at grey skies and the mist-laden surface. Inside the car, the female newsreader began to report on Kitty’s accident, saying that the police believed a hit-and-run driver caused the crash.
Coward.
The woman continued with an appeal for witnesses and announced that the road was open again following law enforcement and forensic investigations. Sam wondered what investigations. Skid marks measured perhaps, and tyre tracks examined. On impulse, he swung the car in a U turn on the empty road.
Passing the accident site, Sam slowed the car to snatch a look. Channels sliced across the muddy-grass verge and black and orange streamers of tape flapped in the hedge. A flash of headlights behind made him look in his mirror in time to see a Ford Focus veer into the centre of the road and roar past him on the wrong side of the bend. Sam held his breath, waiting for a squeal of rubber and a splinter of metal, but the high-pitched engine whined into the distance. Half a mile further on, Sam pulled into a lay-by opposite a row of terraced cottages. One other vehicle shared the narrow pull-in with him: a small Renault hatch-back, spattered with muck from the wet road. He craned his neck as he climbed out, to squint through the smeared rear window at its back seats, littered with sweet wrappers. If the haphazard collection of wellies and the hanging dog lead in the porch were anything to go by, the Renault belonged to cottage number three, over the road.
A lorry whooshed past, chucking sodden grit at Sam’s legs and peppering the two cars. Pulling up his collar, he hunched his head into its fleecy lining and crossed the road, hopping up onto the verge to head back to the corner. The surface under his feet was uneven and difficult to walk on, so he dropped back onto the tarmac, walking with his back to the traffic. Vehicles swooped up behind him making him tense, but they swept past. It was not long before rivulets of water were trickling down his legs into his shoes. As he squelched along, he imagined Kitty’s bike journey that night. With her love of speed, he guessed she would have cruised past the row of houses where he had parked, then put her foot down to enjoy the sweeping bends at full throttle. It was the type of country road Kitty loved. She would have leant the bike into the first curve, then leant the opposite way to straighten up. Many times, Sam had ridden pillion on such a road, gripping her slim waist, tense with fear, feeling her muscles flex under his palms as she controlled the Matchless.
He trudged on, and his feet inside his sodden socks rubbed against the backs of his shoes. Before long he would have a blister on his right heel, he thought, so it was with relief that he made out the red of the traffic cones. He jogged the remaining distance to reach a place of safety, where the grass margin widened to form the inside of a long curve in the road.
The ground at his feet was muddy, and tape on the hedge flapped and whipped in the wind whenever a vehicle burst past. Furrows in the grass and churned up mud told the story of a car mounting the curb, backing and filling by the hedge before its wheels spun and it skidded into the road. This, he realised in horror, was no accident. This car had been waiting for Kitty.
On the road surface, a deep V, the length of a javelin, gouged the tarmac and severed the centre white line. It was difficult to say which part of Kitty’s bike had inflicted this scar, but the scenario was easy to imagine: Kitty opening the throttle to enjoy the empty road, and the car plunging into her path from the darkness. The bike skidding onto its side, throwing Kitty into the path of oncoming cars. Kitty’s head slamming onto the road, and the car on the verge speeding away, leaving her limp body exposed to further danger as she lay, beyond the view of drivers approaching round the bend. Sam’s fury grew as he imagined what could have happened if the next driver had not been a careful one. He determined to seek the sensible motorist and thank him.
He had seen enough, and after trotting back to his car, he drove to his father’s terraced house. The garden gate now swung open with ease, thanks to Sam’s ministrations with a screwdriver and oil, but he did not stop to appreciate his handiwork, instead he threw it open and marched to the front door. Behind him, the little gate bounced shut with a loud click.
Maurice opened the door. ‘I thought I heard someone,’ he began, then faltered to a halt at the expression on Sam’s face. ‘Everything all right, boy?’
‘Not in the least.’ Sam pushed past his father. ‘I’ve got questions, and you’re not to fob me off with your silly vagueness.’ He marched to the kitchen drawer and Maurice trotted behind him, pulling at the shabby sleeves of his cardigan.
‘I don’t understand. Is something the matter?’ He grasped the handle of the kettle, ‘How about a cup of…’
‘Sit down, Dad,’ Sam said, dumping a heap of calendars and other papers onto the table. ‘I don’t want tea I want answers.’
Maurice sat and watched Sam slam pads and calendars into different piles.
Sam put his hands on the table and leaned towards Maurice with a determined look. ‘So… These are calendars going back years.’ Sam banged his palm on the top of a heap, and Maurice nodded.
‘Yeah. I need to sort that drawer out.’
‘You do, sometime, but for the moment I want to talk about this.’ Sam selected a calendar from the heap and flicked through the pages until he found the entry in question. His father reared up in his chair and faced Sam with a glare, but Sam was in no mood to mollify his dad, who no longer appeared in the least pathetic. ‘Sit down, Dad,’ he ordered again. ‘It doesn’t matter how I found these. What matters is that you tell me the truth.’ He dropped the open pad onto the table and jabbed his finger at the asterisk on the date Twitch went missing. ‘What does this mean?’
Maurice turned from Sam and strode round the kitchen, shouting, ‘This is too much. To be spied on, interrogated, by my own flesh and blood.’ He wheeled round and glared at Sam. ‘You’ve got no right to ask me questions about my life.’
Sam turned to face his father and spoke in distinct and emphatic words ‘You must tell me, Dad. Are you hiding something?’
‘Like what?’ Maurice shouted. ‘What could I be hiding. I can hardly remember yesterday, let alone some random date back then. If I’m hiding something, you’ve got more chance of remembering it than I have.’
‘It’s not a random date, Dad. It’s when my mum, your wife, disappeared.’
The energy seemed to leave Maurice, and he collapsed like an unstrung puppet into his chair. ‘Well, there you are then. That’s why I marked it; I suppose.’ He let his head drop into his palms. ‘I’m tired, Sam. I want you to go.’
This was not going well at all, and Sam took a deep breath. ‘Not yet Dad. Let’s calm down, shall we?’
His father’s fingers twisted and untwisted the cuff of his cardigan, and Sam stilled them with a gentle hand. ‘I need you to tell me the truth about this.’ He patted the calendar. ‘And please don’t tell me you don’t know.’
‘I don’t. I truly don’t,’ Maurice pleaded.
Sam looked hard at his father, who did not return his gaze. He decided to change the subject. ‘Tell me about the trolley.’
Maurice’s eyes snapped up. ‘What do you mean?’
‘How do you think it came to be buried in those woods?’
Maurice shrugged, his expression one of bafflement. ‘I was as surprised as you when I saw it. It was stolen years ago.’ He glanced at Sam. ‘What’s the problem, anyway? It was a toy. Paul made it for you children, and then it disappeared. Why are you so het up?’
Sam had no intention of sharing what he knew. ‘When did you last see it?’
Maurice half shut his eyes then shook his head in frustration at his failure to remember. ‘You know I struggle these days, but I think...’ his expression brightened. ‘Didn’t we use it that day on Little Callun Hill?’
Sam nodded. ‘That’s right. Well done. Do you remember what happened to it after that?’
Maurice puffed out his cheeks and blew a breath. ‘Now you’re asking… I think one of the others loaded it into a car. I don’t remember who, it c
ould have been Paul or Mick.’
Sam’s patience deserted him again. He leaned forward and yelled, ‘You must remember. Think. Was Mick there that day?’
His father cowered. ‘Leave me alone. I don’t know. Why are you shouting at me?’
He looked so frail and pathetic that the flames of Sam’s anger died in a moment. This was pointless. He touched Maurice’s pilled sleeve. ‘It’s OK, Dad. I’m sorry. I’ve been to visit Kitty in hospital and then to the site of her accident, and I think someone was waiting in their car for her. Someone wanted to do her harm.’
Maurice shook his head. ‘That’s terrible, Boy. Why would anyone want to do that?’
Sam rose. ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’ He smiled at Maurice, ‘Shall we have that drink.’ He held the spout of the kettle under the cold tap and the clean water splashed its polished surface. A thought occurred to him. ‘Did you know before I came here that Kitty was in hospital?’
Maurice nodded. ‘Yes. I should have asked. How is she?’
‘Who told you?’
‘It was Mick. He called in yesterday.’
‘He came to tell you?’
‘Not just for that. He came for a catch-up and he mentioned it.’
Sam poured water onto their tea bags. ‘That was nice. Does he often drop in?’
It’s the first time in ages…’
Sam glanced at his dad’s drooping face and Maurice caught his eye. ‘He rings me, but he’s busy, isn’t he?’
‘I suppose he is.’
~~~
Mythical creatures glared down at Sam from his ceiling, and he dropped into a chair, his thoughts racing and colliding like dodgems. Outside, the sky was black with the threat of storm, but sunlight shone from the left of the window in dramatic contrast. A flurry of doves from a neighbouring house swept and circled in the air like silver dancers. They were beautiful, and Sam allowed himself the distraction of wondering whether to add doves to his painting. He picked up a paintbrush, then threw it down again.
