by Jo Allen
‘I reckon I could do it in a few days if I set my mind to it, but I’m in no hurry. I’ve given myself a couple of weeks to wander around. Communicate with nature. Look at the scenery. Smoke a bit of weed.’
Becca flinched. Somehow the conversation seemed to keep coming round to illegal substances. ‘Just don’t get caught.’
‘No-one’ll find me. England’s small compared to Oz, but it’s big enough.’
‘And busy enough, too. It’ll be heaving. Even if you’re wild camping you’ll hardly be alone.’
The caravan pulled in to a lay-by and she put her foot down, anxious about the time, keen to get to Glenridding while the outdoor shop they were heading for was still open so that she could get her cousin off her hands that evening rather than have to come back and try again the next day.
‘Trust me. I know how to disappear.’
The outdoor shop was still open when they arrived, and so was the local grocer. Armed with a list, Becca went in and stocked up on suitable foodstuffs to see Ryan through to the east coast while he went in to buy the camping kit. She was out before he was, and strayed over to the other side of the road to look over the lake. The lower slopes of Hallin Fell were bright with new ferns, the upper ones a more subtle shade of green, and the speeding clouds rolled over it, sending shadows rippling on the grass like waves. Nestled in a twist of the shoreline, the Neilsons’ home commanded the lake.
‘Okay?’ Ryan appeared beside her, his old, well-worn rucksack bulging with his purchases. A tent was strapped to the bottom, a carry-mat to the top, a water bottle each side. ‘I’ve got the lot. Maps, compass, water purifying tablets, everything.’
‘I remembered matches, though you’d better find something waterproof to put them in.’ Becca handed over the carrier bag of supplies and Ryan began to stow the contents meticulously in the rucksack. She really shouldn’t patronise him. He could probably light a fire from two sticks. ‘The folk in the shop must have thought it was Christmas, the amount you’ve bought.’
‘The guy thought I was a rookie. Told me I shouldn’t be going out there without help and support or I’d end up dead.’ Ryan laughed, and the laugh held contempt. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
‘Do you disappear for long in the outback on your army training?’
‘Weeks on end. Okay, it’s not the same as this, but I’ll take my chance on a fog here rather than the desert over there. At least you’ve got landmarks to steer by.’ He thrust the last item into the bag, pulled the flap down and clipped it shut.
‘You don’t want a lift anywhere else?’ Becca really couldn’t help herself. No wonder everyone thought she was a soft touch. She was relieved when he shook his head.
‘Nope. I’ll just start from here. I’ll head up Glenridding and camp for the night. Helvellyn tomorrow.’ He hoisted the pack up onto his shoulders. ‘At this time of year I’ll be up and back before breakfast.’
‘You’ll let me know where you are, though?’
He gave her an amused look, as though he was the one who’d lived in the Lakes all his life and she the newcomer. ‘I doubt it. Even if there’s anywhere I can get a signal I’m not planning to be anywhere where I’ll charge my phone. Or not often.’
‘We still have public phone boxes in this country. It would be nice to know you’re still alive. And anyway, someone might need to get in touch.’
‘I’ll be in touch when I’m back. Tell your mum I’ll bring all my washing.’ His laugh was, at least, self-effacing. ‘I’ll see you.’
He crossed the road and strode across the car park, pausing only to check the signpost, and swung out through the village with a wave. Her last sight of him was from the car, a solitary figure following the path across a field, heading into the hills.
She sighed, and set off back to what she hoped would be normality.
At ninety-five and a half George was feeling every moment of his near-century, and it manifested itself in discontent. Becca hadn’t been to see him since he’d hounded her and that brash Australian great-nephew off the premises, and while he didn’t give a damn about the boy, he missed Becca’s eternal patience and what seemed to be the genuine pleasure she took in his company. It was his fault and he knew it, but nevertheless he allowed himself to take offence. He was old, and people ought to make allowances for him.
It was a pleasant enough evening, and he was tired of being alone, so he shuffled out of the kitchen and into the garden. The sun was warm but declining. He rested a hand on the stone wall and looked down the lane to where a figure was striding towards him. George beamed with satisfaction. Luke Helmsley, on his way home from work, was always a figure to poke at, always one who would give you a rise if he was tired, as surly and ill-tempered as George himself, but without the excuse of age. ‘Evening Luke.’
‘George.’ Luke stopped and met him with a scowl, even before George had the chance to rub his natural irritability.
‘What’s up with you then, lad? You’re looking right sour tonight.’
‘You’d be looking sour if your neighbours were dishing the dirt on you to the police.’ Luke approached the wall and laid both hands on it, facing up to George in a way that challenged him.
To his chagrin, he found himself forced to step back. ‘No more than you deserve, I daresay.’
‘Oh, you do, do you? And were you one of them, granddad? Were you one of the bastards who’ve been telling the police I’m a violent sod who can’t keep his temper?’
There was a figure strolling along the lane towards them. Seeing it made George brave. ‘It’s no more than you are.’
‘Is it, aye? Well, now they’re asking me questions about Summer, and folk who call themselves my neighbours are saying I killed her. I bet you were one of them.’
George hadn’t specifically suggested to the police officer who’d interviewed him that Luke might be a killer, but nor had he held back his views on the boy’s bad temper. ‘And did you kill her?’
‘Did I hell! She does what she wants and I do what I want. If she wanted to hang around with the posh kids at Waterside Lodge, that’s up to her.’
‘What else is up with you, Luke?’ George goaded him. He could see, now, that the approaching figure was Miranda Neilson, which made the conversation potentially even more delicious. ‘Jealous, are you? Do you wish you’d been invited down there yourself?’
‘Nah, why would I? Can’t stand any of them. He calls himself a local boy and comes back with a pair of spoilt rich boys and a posh tart in tow. He’s not one of us.’
Rather to George’s disappointment, Miranda showed no signs of having heard herself described as a posh tart. ‘But that girl of yours. She got on all right with them. Not surprising, though. She was worth a dozen of you.’
‘Doesn’t matter, does it? She’s dead.’
George paused, waited until he was sure Miranda was within earshot, and carried on. ‘I bet I know why you were so keen on your girl hanging around down there. It was to see what you could get out of it. I’ve seen you hanging round the place. Casing the joint were you?’
Luke lost his temper, as George had known he would. He leaned over the wall, made a snatch at the old man’s jacket and missed by a whisker. ‘You shut your mouth, granddad, or I’ll shut it for you! You think I care anything about how much they’ve got down there? What I care about is them filling some innocent girl up with drink and drugs and leaving her to drown. And about my so-called neighbours grassing me up to the police for something I never done!’
‘And if anything goes missing from the Lodge, I bet we’ll know where to find it. The police won’t need me to tell them where to look for it, will they?’
‘The place is like a fortress. You can’t get through them gates without being seen.’
‘Sussed it out, have you?’ jeered George, then stepped back, dipped his head, and smiled. ‘Evening Mrs Neilson.’
‘You bastard!’ White with fury, Luke made another, futile swipe in George’s direction and gave the o
ld man the satisfaction of seeing Miranda Neilson step in to break it up. ‘Luke. It is Luke, isn’t it? Goodness, don’t be so angry.’ As he stepped back, she moved forwards, placing herself neatly between Luke and the wall. ‘Of course, I understand why you’re angry. Let me tell you. I’m just so sorry about what happened to Summer.’
There was silence.
‘I know it must have been very hard for you,’ Miranda continued, her brisk tone infused with just the right amount of sympathy. ‘Of course you’re upset.’
‘I’m upset because this old goat has been telling the police I done it.’ Luke flung another contemptuous gesture in George’s direction.
‘The police are so persistent. I’m sure nobody really thinks that. Everybody knows it was an accident.’ She held up a warning hand to prevent Luke getting any closer to the wall that separated him from the cottage garden. ‘It was just unfortunate. If the boys hadn’t fallen asleep they’d have made sure she got home safely. Or if I’d been there—’
‘If you’d been there?’
Fascinated, George picked up the very slight emphasis on the word if, the obvious sneer that accompanied it.
‘Yes.’ Miranda’s tone was light. ‘I didn’t get back until after she’d left.’
‘Is that right? Then it must have been someone else I saw driving your car along this road that afternoon.’
‘There are plenty of people in the dale on a Sunday afternoon.’ Miranda turned away from him. Her face was expressionless. ‘I expect it was someone driving a similar car.’
‘You can get on your way, now.’ George flapped a hand at Luke. Having a witness made him brave, and he was relieved to see Miranda could stand up to Luke’s bluster. ‘No doubt you’ll want to get down to the pub and fill yourself with drink, and be bold and brave like you always are when you’ve had a skinful.’
‘George.’ Miranda lifted an eyebrow at him. ‘This isn’t helping anyone. Is it?’
He liked Miranda. Yes she was rich, yes she was posh, yes when she came to the dale she’d approached everything with the wide-eyed nervousness of Johnny Town Mouse abandoned in the country, but she’d done her best to adapt. She’d been friendly to her neighbours — far more than Robert had ever bothered to be, even though he’d known some of them all his life — and done her best to settle in, and it wasn’t her fault people like Luke refused to accept her, deliberately and sneeringly reinforcing her perceived different status by steadfastly rejecting her invitation for them to call her by her Christian name. And there was something about her that appealed, that made him feel young again. Perhaps it was that she treated him with respect but not awe, and never patronised him. ‘Maybe not. But he can’t speak to me like that.’
Luke had resumed his place leaning on the wall, and he pushed himself off from it like a swimmer from the edge of the pool and gave himself a good five yards down the road before he turned. ‘If I hear anyone’s been spreading lies about me, George Barrett, I’ll know who it is and I’ll be back. One way or another you won’t do it again.’
He strode out, his shadow lingering behind him, reached the turn of the road and headed towards home, leaving George face to face with Miranda.
He missed company, and sometimes he thought she must be lonely too, with her husband so often away. ‘Come by and have a cup of tea.’
She paused for a moment, her expression pensive. ‘Oh, why not?’ she said, after a moment, and followed him up the path and into the cottage.
‘I do hope Luke didn’t upset you.’
They’d got through the formalities quickly and easily enough and now Miranda, cradling a china cup that was as frail and translucent as George’s own skin and was probably at least as old as he was, finally managed to bring the conversation round to where she wanted it without raising George’s suspicions. At least, she hoped so.
‘No.’ His cup trembled in his fingers, she noticed, and she suspected he wasn’t as robust as he wanted people to think. She’d stop by and visit more often in future, make sure he was okay.
‘It’s none of my business, of course, but it must be difficult for you living alone. If there’s ever anything I can do—’
‘I’m all right. Ruth — my niece — comes sometimes. My great niece comes more often. They make sure I’m looked after.’ George pushed the biscuit tin across the kitchen table. ‘Sometimes Ruth brings me her home baking. Becca brought these. Malted milk.’
It was evening and Miranda associated biscuits with the morning, but it would have been impolite to refuse, so she took one and turned it over in her fingers, looking at the raised image of contented cows. ‘Do you argue with Luke often?’
‘It’s not just me. He falls out with everyone. All the time. Trust me, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of him.’
Miranda bit into the biscuit and found it had the taste of her childhood, a flashback to a time when nothing could touch her and no-one could harm her. The comparison with now, with ten years of haunting, sent her heart hammering. ‘Surely you don’t really think he killed Summer?’
George put his head to one side, considering. ‘Could have done, I suppose. No question of that. But if he’d done it he’d have hit her straight out and not cared who seen him do it. He doesn’t have the wit to pretend.’
‘The police are saying it’s an accident.’
‘You don’t think that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. You see.’ She paused. ‘Do you know George, sometimes I’m scared.’ It was out, and she hadn’t intended to say it, but there was something about the cosy warmth of the cottage kitchen, the dimness of its enclosed walls, the dreamy strand of a climbing rose across the window, that made her feel secure. No wonder he loved it there. ‘Now you’ll think I’m ridiculous.’
‘The countryside can be a scary place,’ he agreed, setting the cup down and helping himself to a biscuit. ‘Owls. Sheep bleating. That kind of thing.’
‘When we first moved here I heard a fox crying at night and I thought it was a human being.’ That had upset her, so that even when she realised what it was she’d hardly slept for a week afterwards. At that point she’d almost told Robert the whole story but it had been too soon. Was now the right time? Or had she even left it too late, kept her secret so long the truth would damage her? ‘But that wasn’t what I meant.’ She couldn’t tell George the secret, either, but that was all right. There were plenty of other things that scared her. ‘Those boys of mine. Robert’s, of course. But I think of them as mine.’
‘They’ve fallen into bad company,’ he agreed, elongating the a in bad, until his voice mimicked the bleating of a sheep.
‘Yes. Not here, of course. But they have some friends I don’t approve of.’ And the friends would no doubt have found them whatever drugs they were taking, unless they’d done a deal with some disreputable Mancunian in a pub in Keswick or Penrith.
‘Their friends don’t come to the house, then.’
‘No. And obviously I can’t control what the boys do when they’re not here. At friends’ houses for example. Or when they were away.’ Their gap year would have been full of various sorts of exotica unfit for the ears of an older generation. ‘But for Robert’s sake I so want to make Waterside Lodge a refuge for them. Because the world can be a terrible place, a really tough one, and one day they’ll need it.’
‘Is it a refuge for you?’
She hesitated. ‘Yes.’
‘From terrible things?’
‘Not what you’d call terrible.’ George, she vaguely remembered, had fought in the War as a very young man. D-Day, the desert or the Western Front; it didn’t really matter. It was a safe bet he’d have seen worse things, and probably even done worse things, than she had. ‘I’m afraid I belong to a very spoiled generation. I increasingly find modern life very difficult and very challenging.’
‘You don’t work,’ he said, after a while.
‘I used to. I worked for a merchant bank. It was all about long hours, high expectations, and intense p
ressure. I suffered from burnout. A very modern problem, but it’s a problem nonetheless.’
‘And then a man came to rescue you.’ He was old enough not to regard that as in any way demeaning.
‘I wouldn’t say he rescued me. But marrying Robert meant I was able to do something different, more worthwhile, and take on the job of bringing up his boys. Which is why I’m so worried about them. That they might go off the rails.’ And so they’d got back to the point of the conversation. ‘I wanted to ask you. Your house is so wonderfully set, and you’re so acutely observant.’
‘I’ve an eagle’s eye.’ In Miranda’s experience all men responded well to flattery, and George proved himself no different.
‘Yes. So I wondered if you’d seen anyone strange in the dale recently.’
‘Strange!’ George laughed out loud so that the cup trembled in the saucer he was holding, and he slid it from his shaking hand onto the table. ‘Bloody place has been full of strangers, and you want me to tell you if I’ve seen any odd folk!’
She laughed at herself. ‘Oh, of course I don’t mean the police. Or even that poor girl’s family.’ She’d seen them, or the people she’d assumed to be them, getting out of a car at Howtown pier and heading with slow steps and bowed heads along the lake shore towards Kailpot Crag. ‘I meant anyone else. Anyone you wouldn’t expect to see.’
‘Apart from them carloads of tourists.’ George got up and shuffled over to the windowsill, retrieving a pipe, a tin of tobacco and matches. ‘Too old to give up,’ he said, as if a justification for not asking her if she minded.
‘Nor should you. It’s your life.’
He laughed, plucked shreds of tobacco out of the tin and began to stuff the bowl of the pipe as he thought about it. ‘There’s just one person you might be interested in.’
‘Oh?’ Miranda’s nerves tautened, as if they were the strings on a violin and a violinist was pulling them ever tighter, the pitch increasing. Any minute now and they’d start screeching, like the background music in Psycho. Plenty of tourists came to Martindale in a day but if George could pick one out as suspicious, she trusted his observation. ‘Who was that? And what were they doing?’
