Killing a Stranger

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘Ashamed of you?’

  ‘For having Rob. For not having married his father, regardless.’

  Regardless of what, Naomi wondered. ‘There are a lot of single parents,’ she protested. ‘It’s not such a big thing in this day and age.’

  ‘No? No, not to most people. Just to my bloody lot. I told my sister not to come,’ she admitted. ‘She wanted to, but I know what hell Mam would put her through if she did, she’s not been right since Dad passed on. Everything got worse after that. God, listen to me, giving you my life history, aren’t I?’ She tried to laugh and Naomi smiled in her direction. ‘I just can’t seem to think straight.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ Naomi told her.

  They paused, having reached the gates and the parked cars.

  ‘Nomi, we’re going back to Charlie’s place,’ Patrick told her. ‘Is Clara giving you a lift home?’

  ‘I said I would,’ Clara confirmed. ‘That is, if it’s OK with Naomi. I don’t want to seem to be organizing you.’

  ‘No, a lift would be welcome,’ Naomi told her. ‘If it’s not putting you out.’

  ‘Not at all and the truth is, I’ve got some things to ask. Patrick thought you might be able to help me out.’

  ‘I can try,’ Naomi told her cautiously. ‘But you’ve got to understand, I’m probably no more in the loop than you are.’

  ‘I know. I just need to know what will happen now,’ Clara said. She had helped Naomi into the front passenger seat. Napoleon sprawled happily in the back. ‘I mean, the police have said they aren’t looking for anyone else, but that the case is still open. Why?’

  She wants it all to be over, Naomi thought. Over, closed, put away so she can start to grieve for her boy and put out of her mind the reasons he jumped off that bridge.

  ‘I know they found that man’s blood all over Rob. Rob’s fingerprints were on the knife that killed him. He confessed. He’s dead. What further punishment … what more can they do? Can’t they just … What more do they want to know?’

  Naomi hesitated, caught between compassion for this woman and the need – Clara’s need too – for her to give a straight reply.

  ‘Why?’ she said softly. ‘We might know that Adam Hensel died and that in all probability Rob killed him, but Clara, what the police need to know now, is why. You need to know why. You’ll never be able to get over this unless you do. And,’ she added, gently, ‘don’t you think Adam Hensel’s family deserve to understand that just as much as you do?’

  Ten

  After a crisis, Naomi thought, you get to make a choice. You either cling to the old and the familiar as if it were moulded into some kind of clumsy, misshapen life preserver, or you draw a line, step over it and leave as much of the past as you feasibly can.

  She’d be the first to acknowledge that both the line and the leaving were largely symbolic. The same people – with a few additions – were important to her now as they had been before she went blind. In fact, many of those relationships had deepened. Conversely, others had been abandoned altogether.

  Similarly, after the bank siege, having dealt with the genuine fear that they would not get out alive, Naomi had drawn another line, crossed it and left behind any part of herself not determined to live life to the absolute max. Unfortunately, the Naomi that had moved on was also possessed of, or possessed by, a dissatisfaction that the old Naomi would never have given house room to. She was restless, irritated, unable to settle.

  Post traumatic stress, Alec called it. Mari wondered, tentatively, if she might be depressed, an irony that was not lost on Naomi. After all, she had no right, did she, to be depressed or self-indulgent; she was alive and safe and loved and it could all have been very different. Or perhaps that was the problem? Was she so conscious of the need to be grateful and for her every action to be life-affirming that she somehow felt she was cheating or cheapening the experience should she, even for a moment, forget to be either?

  She recognized a similar sense of confusion in Patrick. It had been present after the bank siege. It was heightened now. Patrick, though, was trying the opposite tack. While Naomi, to Alec’s horror, signed up to do a tandem charity skydive and wondered if she could find a salsa class that could cope with someone not only blind but totally lacking in that kind of co-ordination, Patrick immersed himself in the ordinary and the mundane. For the first time in his school career, he was up to date with his assignments and didn’t have to be nagged to get his homework done. Harry, while glad that Patrick’s grades were improving, nonetheless admitted his anxiety; it didn’t seem normal, at least, not for Patrick. And, while previously he’d been someone content with his own company, Patrick now hated to be alone in the house. After school, when not with his friends, Patrick inevitably showed up at Naomi’s flat. The third time she came back to find him sitting on the wall outside, she went and got him a key cut. He could, he said, cope with her flat. It was small, there was nothing upstairs. He could look out and see the sea if he cricked his neck sideways and, as if it were relevant, she had a filter coffee machine.

  His visits, always frequent, became so commonplace that Harry would now stop off on his way home to collect his son, knowing that their house would be empty.

  This was not normal either. Not for Patrick.

  ‘Do you still have bad dreams?’

  It was rare for Harry to accept her offer of coffee. Usually he just called in to say hello, check that she was all right, gather Patrick’s belongings and leave for home, eager to get a meal and a rest after a long day. Today, though, he had accepted the coffee and seated himself next to his son on the old blue sofa.

  Naomi heard Patrick shift, his feet scuffing the floor as he reacted in surprise to his dad’s question.

  ‘Bad dreams. You mean about the siege?’ she asked.

  ‘The siege, and other things.’

  Helen. He meant Helen, Naomi thought. She nodded slowly. ‘Yeah, sometimes. I find it harder to sleep. The smallest thing wakes me.’ She laughed. ‘Not that Alec notices; he sleeps like the dead.’ She regretted the simile even as it escaped. She heard Patrick stand up.

  ‘We ready then?’

  ‘Your dad hasn’t finished his coffee,’ Naomi said gently.

  Patrick sat back down.

  ‘What makes you ask?’ It wasn’t a Harry sort of question.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose, because I still do. I suppose I wanted to know if that was normal.’

  ‘I think it probably is.’ She paused. ‘Sometimes, I wake up and I’m back there, locked in, waiting … just waiting. I have to put the light on, check the time, make sure I’m back in my own bed in my own room.’

  ‘You put the light on?’ Harry was intrigued.

  ‘Old habits, I guess. It’s still the first thing I do when I come home. I can, just, tell the difference, if I stare straight at it.’

  ‘I dreamt about Rob last night,’ Patrick said and Naomi understood what this was all about.

  ‘You often dream about Rob,’ Harry said gently.

  Patrick sounded shocked. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Sometimes, you call out his name.’

  Naomi could feel Patrick’s shock at this exposure. She wondered what she should say.

  ‘Look, I think I’d like to go home now,’ Patrick got in first. ‘See you on Monday, Naomi. If that’s OK?’

  ‘Of course.’ She heard him get up again and cross the room to the corner where he’d dumped his bag and coat.

  Harry got up to follow his son. He bent down to kiss Naomi on the cheek.

  ‘Go slowly,’ she breathed. ‘Don’t push it, Harry.’

  She felt him nod, then the footsteps across the room, the door close, the front door slam.

  Did she still dream? Oh yes. Panicked dreams where she searched in vain for her friend Helen. Dreams in which she was a child again, lost and confused and very, very scared. Sometimes the dream child would wander into the armed siege. The child in Naomi crying with fear as the shots rang out and
the men’s voices were raised in threat and anger, and the worse thing was, she didn’t even need to be sleeping for the dreams to come.

  ‘You want to talk about it?’ Harry asked. He reached to switch on the radio. Experience had told him that distraction, such as listening to music, could make it easier for his son to relax.

  ‘Not really, thanks anyway.’ Patrick was trying hard to sound mature and off hand.

  ‘OK, then,’ Harry told him. Experience had also told him, and Naomi reminded him, that pushing too hard was likely to have the opposite to the desired effect. ‘Well, I’m here. Naomi’s always ready to listen too, you know that. And there’s your counsellor.’

  ‘Her,’ Patrick snorted. ‘Dad, I don’t know why you keep paying for her. All she does is sits me down and waits for me to “open up” to her. Like that’s going to happen.’

  ‘She seems pleased with your progress,’ Harry said mildly.

  ‘Oh, sure she is. She’s pleased with the money you keep paying her, whether she does any good or not.’

  ‘Or whether you turn up or not?’

  ‘Whether I …’ Patrick sighed and reached to change the channel on the radio.

  To Harry’s surprise, he settled on a station playing jazz. Harry listened, trying to place the piece. ‘What is that?’ the question was self-addressed, but his son answered.

  ‘It’s Miles Davis,’ he said. ‘“Angel Eyes”. It’s on that compilation Nan bought you for your birthday.’

  ‘Oh yes, so it is. I didn’t know you liked it.’ He turned to glance at his son.

  Patrick shrugged. He was staring hard out of the side window. Harry could see his reflection in the shadowed glass. The face, tight and pinched. Emotion dangerously close to the surface. ‘I like all sorts of stuff, you know that.’

  ‘Well, yes. I suppose you do.’

  They listened in a silence that was almost companionable, then when the last notes of ‘Angel Eyes’ tailed away Patrick asked, ‘Do you think you could kill someone?’

  Harry flinched at the question. Asked for a description of Harry, most people would use words like ‘mild mannered’ or ‘even tempered’, but … ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I believe I could. If someone threatened those I love, I believe I could take their life, or maim or injure and not even hesitate.’

  He half felt, half heard his son release the breath he had been holding and wondered at the cost of asking that question. It saddened him. He and Patrick had once been able to discuss anything, trade ideas and bad jokes, be peaceful and happy in one another’s company. Oh, Harry knew how to behave when Patrick was around his college friends. Then, if you were a sensible parent, you took a back seat and kept yourself just a little bit apart. He remembered his own embarrassments at the hand of his beloved mother, Mari, when he’d been Patrick’s age. He didn’t think he’d done too badly in comparison.

  ‘I know I could,’ he corrected himself. ‘Patrick, if I’d had a weapon during that siege … I know I would have used it. Believe me; I’m not comfortable with that little piece of self knowledge.’

  Patrick nodded. He was, Harry noted, now staring fixedly out of the front windscreen. They turned into their road and pulled on to the drive, though, by some tacit consent, made no move to get out of the car.

  ‘I know I could have then,’ Patrick said quietly. ‘And that kind of scared me, you know?’ He turned to look at his father, eyes fixed and intense, searching for confirmation, understanding.

  Harry nodded. ‘As I said, I’m not comfortable with that either, but Patrick, I think of all those ordinary men and women who have had that decision, that … acknowledgement thrust upon them. In war or in danger or … whatever. It’s kind of comforting, knowing that they must have found it just as hard. Just as revelatory and just as distasteful and uncomfortable. I can’t believe many people kill easily. I can’t believe many actually become immured to it. Maybe even get to enjoy it.’

  ‘You’ve thought about it a lot, then.’

  Harry nodded. ‘I don’t think there’s a day gone by I haven’t considered it. I’ve not tried to convince myself that I’m different.’

  ‘Different?’

  ‘From the man who murdered Helen. From the men who held us hostage.’ Harry shrugged. ‘Just different from …’

  ‘Rob was different from,’ Patrick said slowly. ‘Dad, I’ve thought about it so much and I’m certain now. Rob would never just go and kill someone he didn’t know. Not even as an accident, he, just wouldn’t.’

  ‘Accidents, by their very nature, aren’t preventable or predictable,’ Harry said cautiously, not really understanding where Patrick was going with this.

  ‘No, I know that,’ Patrick’s voice carried an edge of impatience and Harry, wisely, made no comment that might put him off further from getting his thoughts out. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot and I think … I know … that’s what Rob must have been doing. Protecting someone else. Someone he cared about.’

  Harry frowned. His first instinct was to tell Patrick he was clutching at straws; trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. He bit down on the impulse to voice this, knowing it was a sure fire way to stop Patrick in his tracks.

  ‘Who?’ he asked. ‘You don’t think Becky might have followed him? Been there …’

  Patrick was shaking his head vehemently. ‘No, not Becks,’ he said. ‘She wasn’t there. No, someone else, someone … we don’t know about and the police don’t know about.’

  Harry considered. ‘Alec would have said if there was evidence of a third person.’

  Patrick shook his head. ‘No one was looking, were they?’ he asked bleakly. ‘They’ve got a dead body and someone to blame for it. Not even Alec cares about anything more than that.’

  Eleven

  It seemed to Jennifer that the whole world had Christmas on the brain. She hadn’t attended college much in the past month; morning sickness that lasted all day and fear of the looks, the sly nudges now she was starting to show, had contrived to keep her at home. In the end, her mum had given up trying to make her go. Her form tutor had kept in touch, though and was still sending her work in the hope she’d change her mind and there had been talk, for the New Year, of placing her in a specialist unit set up for girls in her position.

  ‘In her position’, Jennifer thought. Seventeen, pregnant, disapproved of. The more so since her utter refusal to name the dad. Her own father had gone all macho on her and stormed round to the home of every boy he even suspected of looking the wrong way at her – behavior that had not exactly helped on the college front. But he had drawn a blank as she had known he would.

  After that, his fury had seemed to dissipate, transmuting, instead, into a grudgingly uncomfortable silence. He seemed, now, Jennifer thought, to be going out of his way to ignore her expanding belly, while her mother, ever the practical one, had been looking round for the best deals on baby paraphernalia. The spare room, destined to become the nursery, was already stacked with packs of nappies.

  Jennifer, hearing a car door slam, glanced out of the window, surprised she had not heard the engine. She saw her aunt get out of the car and her parents’ 4 × 4 pull round it and on to their drive.

  Jennifer sighed. She’d been spared the funeral, but the wake was going to be as bad, if not worse; relatives and friends no doubt dividing themselves into the two parental camps: ignore the fact that she was pregnant or offering unwelcome advice.

  Truthfully, Jennifer was unsure which was worse.

  The front door opened and her mother called up to her. Reluctantly, Jennifer left the sanctuary of her room. She paused on the landing, sitting for a moment on the top step to gaze down into the hall, remembering the many times she’d done that as a child, sent to bed while the family party still went on downstairs, sharing in the noise and laughter of the adults, though at one remove. As she’d got older and bedtimes been delayed, she had been allowed to share in the grown-up gossip and discovered that, in fact, it often got quite boring. Parents and relative
s getting slowly more inebriated – though never to the point of disgrace; her mother would never have countenanced that – and talk turning to politics or sport or long-dead strangers that Jennifer had never known. She had, almost, longed to be back on the stairs, catching the snatches of conversation and Uncle Adam’s shouts of raucous laughter. The little treats he’d sneak out to her, while her mother pretended not to notice.

  Once, when she’d been about ten, and he more sauced than usual, he had brought her a glass of cherry brandy. Liking the taste, she’d drunk it like pop and asked him for more. She tried to recall if he’d obliged, but couldn’t. She bit her lip and fought down the urge to cry.

  Here, at the head of the stairs, she was almost on a level with the tinsel star set atop the tall tree. December the twenty-first, time to begin the celebrations and the tree had been set up as usual, delivered by the friend of her dad’s who owned the Christmas-tree farm, and set carefully in its pot guided by her father’s instructions. Even her uncle’s death was not allowed to interfere with such a family tradition.

  She and her mother had trimmed it last night ready for the arrival of today’s guests, almost as if this were just another family celebration, the usual coming together of the generations. It was possible to forget … no, not quite, seeing her mother dressed in formal black and her father in the suit that came out only on such solemn occasions and Aunt Carol’s inappropriately bright red hair covered with a sober blue scarf. No, not really possible to forget that this was not some pre-Christmas ritual, but was instead the wake for a murdered man.

  ‘How was the funeral?’ Naomi asked.

  ‘It was a funeral.’ Alec pulled her close and planted a kiss on her nose.

  ‘Yeuk. Now a proper one.’ She wiped her face on his shirt. ‘Anything useful happen?’

  ‘Well,’ he released her and bent down to fuss Napoleon. ‘I don’t know that there was a lot useful left to expect. The family were glad to finally be able to bury their dead and, I think, were mollified by the fact we had sent representatives, but disappointed we were no further on.’